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You mean Thomas Paine. See also The Declaration of Independence for a great example (which Paine very much inspired).

It's a very small minority of hot sauces that use habaneros.

The idea of ranking chiles on a scale of bad to good I find completely foreign. Like people, each one has its own character and something to appreciate. And that appreciation can scarcely be found in bottled hot sauces.

(I live in Mexico and I'm here for the food. Indeed I doubt I would be here were it not for the existence of chiles and the myriad ways in which they're exploited in Mexican cuisine.)

Actually Oracle only made two patent infringement claims against Google -- rangeCheck wasn't one of them -- and Google didn't argue prior art against either of them.

ETA: They argued non-infringement.

I wonder. I run a website that has ranked on Google page 1 for the relevant search terms just behind Wikipedia for years now. But it's been on the backburner for some time; I've basically been ignoring it. A couple months ago a server migration that escaped my notice took it completely offline. Totally dropped off Google. Well, I just updated the DNS record a few days ago and within a day or two it was back on page 1, right behind Wikipedia.

So in my experience Google is remarkably forgiving.

It varies. Tijuana is one of the more dangerous cities in Mexico with a murder rate of 107/100k from 2006-2010, but that's way behind Cd. Juarez with 485 over the same period. By comparison the national average was 30.8 and Mexico City was 7.36.

I couldn't find stats for Ensenada but Tijuana makes up over half of the population of the state of Baja California, which in 2010 had a murder rate of 28. I'd bet Ensenada is well below that. Baltimore by contrast was 34.8 and Oakland 22.

(FWIW the violence in TJ has abated considerably in 2011 as the Sinaloa cartel has effectively won the turf war that was raging.)

I've been using the free Instapaper iPhone app for some time, until it just completely stopped working. Trying to update, it would tell me that there was no network connection. Uh, wrong. Over and over. Eventually I logged out, wiped the local cache, and tried logging in fresh. And what did I get? A blank page with "403" at the top.

My impression of the app at this point was that either the developer is a fuck up or that I've been geo-locked out because I'm not in the U.S. Actually the second implies the first. I didn't care, I just stopped using Instapaper.

On the basis of this post, I took a leap of faith. Despite a complete failure of user experience with the free app, I bet $5 that maybe the paid app would, well, work. And so far it has.

Marco, if you're listening, you make some great points in this post, but your upselling in my experience is... as described.

Let's not mince words. Gruber wasn't insisting that no human being would ever line up for an Android phone.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash...

Nintendo revived the industry in part by exerting quality control over every game released for the NES, and this has been standard practice for console manufacturers ever since.

What exactly is this flawed argument of Rand's that you're rebutting, and where?

It sounds like you think that somewhere Rand said all hardworking, moral people would become rich and the rest are lazy or immoral.

I'm pretty sure she did not.

I don't recall how she treated the fundamental questions of ethics in Atlas Shrugged but you might find her 'The Objectivist Ethics' interesting (http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ari_ayn_rand...). Here she presents her ideas on ethics fairly systematically, starting with questions like why man needs a code of ethics, what are values, and why does man need them.

Your last statement is certainly true but it doesn't explain the vitriol. Most people don't have a positive bias towards, say, Plato. But you don't see at every single mention of his name this seeming compulsion to speak up and smear his image and spread misconceptions about his thought. By people who at times even confess that they haven't read his books.

Rand certainly regarded intelligence as important but I don't think she regarded it as volitional. Of course one can volitionally act unintelligently, but for instance Eddie Willers in Atlas did not have Dagny's intelligence and efficacy, but he was a moral character and would have to be listed among the novel's heroes. Mike the construction worker in The Fountainhead would be a similar example.

Rand actually said at one point (sorry I don't remember where) that striking was a legitimate way for workers to correct a situation where they're being paid below market rate -- as long as it was done voluntarily. What Rand opposed was pro-union legislation that coercively stacks the decks in the unions' favor.

It never ceases to amaze me the certitude with which people demonstrate their ignorance of Rand. This is complete nonsense. Rand never said making money is the highest value nor that it should be the sole standard of any value, dropping all other context.

A moments thought, if you know anything of Rands works, would demonstrate this to you. If you read The Foundtainhead, then you know that Roark gave up work for years because he had higher values in life than simply to maximize his income. And Atlas Shrugged was about a man who did the same, and took a bunch of others with him -- not because they thought this was the best way to optimize their long-term money making potential, but because the rest of the world had come to regard them, being creative and productive individuals, as chattel. (You might also recall that while there were a number of titans of industry, one was a composer, another was a professor, another an train engineer, etc.)

I don't know what it is about Rand that makes people think they're entitled to sling nonsense about her views around without the slightest effort at substantiation. You say Rand's is a "fairy tale land where everybody is always capable of making rational decisions with perfect information" and "Markets are always perfectly efficient". This is your fairy tale about Rand's views. I studied all of Rand's works quite extensively from about the age of 17 to 27, and I'm confident you cannot demonstrate that Rand held such views.

The article argues every step for a reality-based ethics. And the author has one in mind, not surprisingly. Advocacy is not a crime and arguments are not invalidated by conclusions.

Responding in the form "I agree that..." or "I disagree that..." could start an interesting discussion.

A person is not a conclusion. The article ends by advocating Ayn Rand's ideas and works, clearly. Whatever one's views might be of her doesn't invalidate everything that precedes.

If the variable is never used, why does it exist nonetheless? It's a valid question.

I hope it lives up to the potential. Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame went down that path and has barely been heard from since. OTOH he never got anywhere close to a $200m budget.

Pretty sure that would be the case regardless of language.

"because... they're lazy... they steal... they're incompetent"

What about being trapped in a political system and/or culture that makes it impossible to live the life they imagine?

Every one of her novels touches (EDIT: focuses) on this. Anthem, We The Living, and Atlas Shrugged dealt more with the political, exhibiting characters who were unable to achieve their potential because of the political systems they had to endure. In The Fountainhead Roark spent decades suffering professionally and personally for living in a culture that values subjugation of the self to the interests of the crowd.

Also, Rand never promised that in her ideal society every individual would necessarily achieve whatever life they might imagine. Consistent with America's Declaration of Independence, it was the right to pursue happiness that she argued for.

Are you saying this is just an exalted critique of unitaskers (a la Alton Brown)? It seems to me there's more going on here:

"Perhaps the majority of human activity can be reduced to a desire to make life more comfortable for ourselves, and has thus far led to being able to buy a toaster for £3.99 [among other achievements]. But looking at toasters in relation to global industry, at a moment in time when the effects of our industry are no longer trivial compared to the insignificant when our, they seem unreasonable. I think our position is ambiguous - the scale of industry involved in making a toaster [etc.] is ridiculous but at the same time the chain of discoveries and small technological developments that occurred along the way make it entirely reasonable."

As if "global industry" exists only to create "toasters [etc.]". In agreement with the essay, I think there's a whole lot of context that's being dropped by focusing on a device with relatively narrow purpose.

I can't say I've seen a link I disliked so much that I felt the need to hunt down something to help drive it off the front page. This incentive seems dubious, and if real, the benefits dubious.

The point is that recipes obscure the fundamental relationships of ingredients. I thought his explanation was clear that the essence of bread is 5:3 flour to water, and that with this simple ratio you can walk into a kitchen and make bread -- and improvise from there -- all without the need for a recipe.

He described in another post noticing new relationships between foods after reducing them to their essentials, that for instance "an angel food cake was simply meringue with flour folded in."

I hope I don't sound like I'm shilling for Ruhlman. I'm an enthusiastic follower of his blog but I have not bought, much less read this book.

You should try it. :-) Homemade mayonnaise is wonderful! You'll never get that flavor from a jar.

Ruhlman writes in today's post, "Cooks and bakers are distinctly different creatures. Cooks are the jazz musicians, bakers and pastry chefs are the classical pianists."

But certainly the importance of getting the proper ratio isn't limited to baking. Off the top of my head, mayonnaise, hollandaise, etc. are obvious examples. The "mother sauces", roux, custards, even certain stocks also come to mind. The 2:1:1 ratio for mirepoix isn't finicky but if it's mirepoix you want, you need to be in the ballpark.

I take the idea as, yes, of course there are a great many things you can cook by improvising and feeling your way. But armed with some basic, classic ratios, you can extend the same improvisational approach to riskier territory where you might otherwise want the guidance of a recipe. Whether it's successful at that I couldn't say.

To be clear, I made no reference to religion. And I agree with her too.

Where do you (and others) get the idea that Rand is responding to the Bible? She's speaking to/of those who say that money is evil, love of money is evil, and related thoughts. This seems clear from the very first sentence of the speech: "So you think that money is the root of all evil?" Later, "But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak?", "Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil?", etc.

I would challenge you to cite the part of the speech or anything else Rand ever wrote arguing that money should be the most important thing in one's life. The statement "Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit," indicates what's more explicit elsewhere in the book, namely Rand's conviction that the material and (secular) spiritual are both of great importance in life and that neither trumps the other. Rather, one should seek to integrate them.

Having read Rand extensively when I was younger, I can't imagine she'd consider your friend's approach to life, as described, anything but sad as well.

It's not a technical term to my knowledge and if it's a loaded term, I believe that would be by your choice ("wild"). This is not about the semantics of two words but about the proper approach to conversation about serious matters. Say what you mean and mean what you say. Be precise. Avoid exaggeration and equivocation. This matters far more than any particular subject under discussion.

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By my count you've used the term "wild fluctuations" or "wild market fluctuations" in four assertions / reassertions, and this started with my question to you based specifically on your use of this term. Its actual meaning and your intended meaning are certainly relevant to the conversation.

It doesn't require anything you name here except the absence of force. No libertarian thinks or assumes everyone must be nice and no libertarian thinker has ever predicated his argument on such.

You know, there actually have been some highly intelligent and thoughtful libertarian thinkers, far from whatever fantasy you may have.