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Now imagine if every single weld was a unique, custom job that had never been done before, and if any of them are imprefect, the car crashes.

This is an additional reason to learn proper (X)HTML, CSS et al. They have very interesting accessibility features which cannot be matched by ad-hoc MSIE HTML.

BTW, while I'm evangelizing standards, every web developer, *especially* framework developers (Rails guys, I'm looking at you), should be required by law to read the damn HTTP RFC. Content-negotiation is so underrated; it could be very useful for accessibility. HTTP rulez, it's a shame that so few reconize it.

Too late: ORA already reserved the right to use canine specimen in order to deal with Apple-related technologies.

I am learning C and wanting to seriously get into embedded systems (I searched Oreilly but its sparse), can someone knowledgeable point me into a series of books, and websites, give me some great advise to begin down the path of apprenticeship and onto expertise? Much obliged if you would; and if you would moderate this post up just till it starts getting replies.

The parent was written by Rich Lowry, an op/ed writer for the National Review magazine. The original article, published 22 Sep 03. Lowry appears several times on Spinsanity.

To be fair, I should mention that the National Review is not on my list of trusted news sources. But then, so are a lot of sources. Meh.

Snopes usually comes in handy when people are being difficult about believing hoaxes.

They have a few articles which may help you.

First, write everything down. Don't worry about organization at this point. Just get all of your thoughts down before you forget them. Next, determine the two or three keywords that categorize each tip and use those for the organizing things. Remember that things will fall into multiple categories. Use these categorizations to build up a comprehesive index into you tips. And there you have it.

The most important thing to remember is that you're writing this for someone else coming along, so tips need to be short and to the point and easily locatable. Basically, you're writing an O'Reilly "Cookbook" style document for your job.

• prefer non-IE web browsers
• prefer non-Intel computers
• use operating systems even less mainstream than Linux
• use a low-graphics environment like a text console or a PDA
• object on principle to installation of proprietary software
• object on principle to violation of W3C standards
• block certain media types that are used primarily for advertising

Darwin, Newton, Einstein & Co. all are worthwhile reading, mostly to see where in the past a field came from and how these people revolutionized science. They are not particularly useful for telling where a field is going today. For instance, my last paper had 61 references. To break them down by decade, 13 were from the 2000's, 26 from the 1990's, 11 1980's, 4 1970's, 5 1960's, and two all the way back from 1959. For the field, my paper had an extensive (perhaps overly so) review of the literature before delving into the issues at hand. I did not cite anything earlier because it simply wasn't relevant--reinventing the wheel, so to speak. As far as the field was concerned, earlier works laid the foundations but are compressed and sorted into textbooks. Similarly for the evolutionary biologists, they seldom cite Darwin. Why? Because the field has moved on--his work is no longer on the cutting edge but instead is a part of the foundation of the field. So if you want to attack current thinking in a field, you should do so by using references as current as possible. Fields move rapidly, and what was cutting edge twenty years ago is old hat today. Also when you quote something, it is improper and dishonest to take a reference's quotation and cite it as your own if you have not read the original quoted material youself. A more proper quote would be something like "X said Y, as quoted in Z." Or would you care to demonstrate you actually read those original sources? Just the sentence on either side of the quotes will do--and yes, I have access to the original sources to check up on you.

But maybe before you bother, you should know that "Scientific American" is a popular magazine, not a technical journal (and your quote has no impact on current thinking in either evolution or abiogenesis). Fred Hoyle was an astronomer, not a biochemist, so his views on protein structure and their probabilities of existing are no more informed than any other layman. Francis Hitching it turns out is a writer, mainly on the paranormal, with titles to his credit such as "Dowsing: the Psi Connection." As far as Behe goes he's regarded as a crackpot. Black Parrot's already pointed out talkorigins' thorough debunking of his ides, but if you don't trust the site try the National Center for Science Education and do a search for "Behe". I particularly like the first hit, a review of "Darwin's Black Box." In a nutshell, it's crap. 200 year old rehashed debunked crap, actually.

"Your" (actually Hoyle's, see above) statistical improbabilities: you could read Black Parrot's or barakn's posts, or for something more thorough go here to talkorigins and read. Why do I put trust in the site? Besides being in my own experience an excellent, factually correct, and largely up-to-date source on the topic, it is endorsed by Science, Scientific American, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Smithsonian Institute, and The Geological Society of America, among many others. In other words, the scientific mainstream: the people who work in labs and in the field, who write papers presenting their findings and their ideas, papers which must stand up to the criticism of their peers, persons whose careers are shaped by their abilities to form and support hypotheses and correct past errors of in their field, using evidence and reason. Your concept of "orginal thinkers" seems to be those who would ignore the vast body of know

The operator of the League site, Bill Bennetta, posted on the Skeptic list today on this subject. He said he was interviewed for the Washington Post piece, and gave the journo various straightforward examples of Hakim's deception in her previous books. This got edited down to "Even amid all the acclaim, one textbook group accused Hakim of writing in errors."

Actually, the League didn't "accuse" her of anything; they darn well proved it, so far as I can see. But who's ever going to be able to check for themselves, while the League is anonymised as "one textbook group"?

Well, here are the references the Post doesn't want you to see. Check 'em out here, here and here (a search reveals a few more, too).

Basically, Hakim gets stuff wrong, and just loves calling her own religious beliefs "history". Other people's don't get the same treatment.

Maybe she'll be just great at inspiring kids with the majesty and humanity of the scientific endeavour, tra la. Her past work doesn't bode well, though.

Sounds like you'll be saying that to AT&T/Comcast, depending on what kind of service you get from them; that bunch isnt any better than what you're left with now. Then again, broadband in my area (a ton of DSL providers in Ameritech territory and TW/AOHell for cable) has either the best or the worst. Next time you say "F*ck you" to an ISP, use a megaphone for added effect. Hopefully you dont have to say it to DirecTV/Hughes for their TV service ;)

I agree with your opinion of flash, though. It is pretty lame.

Pretty lame? It's kept the web alive; most sites profit solely off of advertisements, and flash capability makes companies consider the web to be a viable advertising media. GIFs are to Flash as Supermarket flyers are to Superbowl TV commercials.

Flash also has some great print capabilities, although they're underused.

You can make a much better web GUI with flash than with HTML, DHTML, etc. (or much worse if you suck at GUI :-) )

You might want to take a look at one of the ASP-style CM vendors. The advantage is that you have a solution right away, but since it is an ASP, you don't have to use any capital budget to get it. The costs are all expensed. The one company that I have direct experience with is ATOMZ. One of my clients is using them to rebuild their site of around 4000 pages. It's all web-based (which can be a double-edged sword) and includes workflow functionality, so that content creators can be assigned specific tasks. Their templating language is reasonably easy to learn but does have a few drawbacks such as a dearth of control logic.

The linked site leads with a story by the infamous John Markoff. Hopefully this story has some facts in it.