People were begging to develop for the iPhone well before Apple even thought providing an SDK might be a good idea.

The lack of an SDK is unlikely to be the issue. The possibility that Metro won't last even a couple of years as a supported framework might though.

Quoting from the Massachusetts Driver's Manual, chapter 4 (which you may find here: http://www.mass.gov/rmv/dmanual/chapter4.pdf):

"Steady Red -- A steady red light means “stop.” Do not go until the light turns green. You may make a right turn on a red light only after coming to a complete stop, then yielding to pedestrians or other vehicles in your path. You may not turn on red if a NO TURN ON RED sign is posted."

"Steady Yellow -- A steady yellow light means the traffic signal is changing from green to red. You must stop if it is safe to do so. If you are already stopped at an intersection or a stop line, you may not proceed."

"Steady Green -- A steady green light means “go,” but only after you have yielded to other vehicles, bicycles, or pedestrians in the road. If you are crossing an intersection, make sure you have enough room to make it completely through. Never block an intersection. You may make a turn as long as you have enough space to complete the turn and avoid creating a hazard. Look out for drivers who are not obeying traffic signals or are racing through intersections."

In case you missed them, let me pull out two important sentences: "Never block an intersection." And: "You must stop [on yellow] if it is safe to do so." Pulling into the middle of an intersection and stopping is "blocking an intersection". Turning left on a yellow is running a yellow light. I live, work, and walk in Boston, and I wish to fuck that Boston and would implement a "$100 and 2 Points" rule for these violations like New York City so people like you would stop nearly killing me every damn day.

At least as it was explained to me at the community college I attended in highschool, some kinds of grants and financial aid (quite likely including the sort I was provided to go there) require the student to attend a certain number of classes per term. So, pretty much every class took attendance, even if the prof didn't care.

Um, all of them? That's how it was supposed to work, you know, when we put together The Law (that'd be the Constitution): The federal government gets a small, well-defined set of powers, and the states decide everything else individually. In practice, however, the Feds use the interstate commerce clause to lord over anything and everything you might toss over a border.

Stones!

Little ones.

> It is not the sort of thing that you require intense training to appreciate

In fact, your taste in music is based in very large part on the societal training you get as a child and young adult. Favors to rhythms, tonal quality, distance between the frequency of notes - all of that is determined by what you're exposed to during your life.

And as a counter example: I love baroque era music, but romantic era music makes me ill. It isn't that there are absolute reasons why baroque music is pleasing or romantic music is abhorrent - it's just a quirk of my musical upbringing.

It's previously been found by the supreme court that, when you're acting on behalf of a law enforcement agent, you need to follow the rules that law enforcement agents do. Moreover, a law enforcement agent cannot ask you to do things that they would be legally unable to do. However, in general, civilians are given significantly more latitude than law enforcement, so it's entirely possible that, regardless of infraGard edge-cases, a _non-member_ of infraGard could decide to provide the FBI with records without the FBI asking (or getting a warrant), but IANAL.

It's also worth remembering that the "red states" have been pretty evenly split the last three (presidential) elections, with republicans eaking out ahead of demacrats (as I recall, the reverse could be said about "blue states").

> If you like vi then I'd have to ask for you to just sit quitely in the back. To each his own and this conversation is for the GUI lovers :)

I love vi. It starts quickly, quits quickly, and is responsive during use, even while editing a file several megabytes in size. I do diff and svn merges with Vim's diff mode. My shell at home is setup to use vi emulation mode. My Visual Studio setup at work has a keypress to open the current file in GVim.

I agree with you.

I would go further however. GUIs should, if at all possible, be designed by usability experts and be guided by both user trials and user feedback. Those of us who make the machines go have no business deciding how people should interact with them. Seriously.

Dear god I loved discrete math classes. My university didn't have nearly enough of them.

I don't know about Richard Dawkins, but I personally don't think it is right or reasonable to kill _anything_ that has a brain. A brain allows a creature motivation, preference, and desire beyond the simple organization and replication of their DNA.

Is that still arbitrary? I suppose, but I can't bring myself to feel bad about it.

Back when I was an atheist, I did not consider that the universe is necessarily rational top-to-bottom. In fact, the lack of theistic belief does not rule out the "supernatural". Atheism does rule out a centrally directed supernatural, but there's no reason an atheist couldn't consider ghosts or karma or reincarnation a possibility.

Finally, using a continuing example throughout the book might be nice for readers, to give them a continuing context, but it greatly increases the risk of a lot of rework on your part if you change your mind about something halfway through writing.

Oh, dear god, I hate that. As a reader of technical books, there's nothing more frustrating than turning to the section I need only to discover that I have to understand the example threaded throughout the preceding ten chapters to begin to understand the topic material. Maybe I'm in the minority, but I don't often read a technical book begining to end. I might just pick out the good parts (ie. the stuff I don't know already), or maybe I read the book over a few months or even a year.

To the authors of all the awesome books I've read, I'm sorry, but I just don't have the time or need to read your book (no matter how awesome) from cover to cover. Please, please, use small, pointed examples that expose the topic at hand.

Maybe I'm in the minority on this, but I really don't want to understand somebody else's project just to learn the framework or language or whatever that I want to apply to my own.