I don't disagree. I was not trying to accuse you of being a Christian, just arguing using a bit of hyperbole -- which was intended to be entertaining b/c in particular a lot of Christians don't care for Rand's ideas... :)
The idea of humans being "imperfect" is not in reference to a Webster's definition, but in comparison to the religious notion of the deity's perfection.
If one believes that Mankind is not some imperfect reflection of a perfect deity whom he must serve, then any notion of perfection must be realizable by humans. So in theory a man or woman could be perfect.
Rand writes about these larger than life types of people. Most of us only see shades of them in ourselves or people we know, but it sure beats the idea of guilt/imperfection as a birthright thanks to original sin!
I bring this up b/c western culture is so heavily influenced by Christianity that it pollutes even people's secular understanding of what perfection means.
As I recall someone got a 10 at the olympics this year.
The point of a novel of ideas is not that you agree with every single idea within, but that the novel presents the ideas in a way that brings out their power in a concrete way.
Ayn Rand didn't want people to form a religion, so please don't feel that you have to apologize for "agreeing" with some aspects of her fiction. Those who try to paint Rand's philosophy that way are looking at it through the timid, dark-ages lens of their religion, in which everything is black and white, the way George W. Bush's "good vs evil" nonsense is.
You have too much taste for Atlas Shrugged because of your illustrious bloodline?
If reading Atlas Shrugged is too much work for your taste, then I think the actual ideas contained in it would surely be quite distasteful to you, but I guess the world will never know.
But Catcher in the Rye is a great and captivating story in its own right and doesn't really need to be replaced... though it would be great if schools taught edgier fiction these days.
Fair enough, but the thing I like about REST is the consistent API and (ideally) proper handle of request types via mime type information in the header.
the URL is part of the UI, both to the user and to api consumers.
If you think of it that way, REST makes a lot of sense. Sure there can be other elegant approaches, but REST is one that has gathered steam b/c it addresses this in a logical, useful way.
This is a fun question. I don't, but I'm curious what you think are the most persuasive examples of services that don't fit.
One that comes to mind is a service with semantics that require a preview step. Sure you can use create/read/update via the REST verbs, but I think a lot of the confusion on this issue comes from wanting to embed the concept of events, so a read may be for the purpose of previewing an item, but it feels more natural to fire a "confirm" event than to do a post with a field called state=cofirmed.
At least that's my personal opinion. I agree that any service can be mapped given sufficient creativity, but it often seems like extra work in the context I described.
did you read the comments on his blog post? There are some excellent points made.
You could achieve all of those things w/o using the REST standard, but then it's your standard... and there ought to be at least some reason for rolling your own if one already exists.
If you bring some of the close parens down to new lines, then the lisp example is just as "squintable" as the java.
I know that's bad lisp style, so I guess you'd have to argue that lisp devs have bad taste or don't care about program structure, neither of which are true.
I think that's an example an evolutionary "just so story".
There may be some truth to it, but "genius" impacts such a small percentage of the population, that I think calling it genetic is quite a stretch.
Ambition, yes. Few people are ambitious enough to want anything more out of life than a 30+ inch TV.
But to take the leap into the territory of tremendous accomplishment, and to claim that it is a function of sex drive, cheapens it a bit in my opinion.
I think more likely there are just some people whose natural skills are called "genius" by society when they are young, and so they are society's "young geniuses". Who do we have today, Zuckerberg? Some kid who got into MIT?
Most of this is just hype. I think the true genius is someone who adapts over time and creates something tremendous that can't be credited to a social fad or a bubble.
I find a good ajax app to be far more usable than the other two.
Every time I start using Flash or Flex I run into annoying issues. The last one was that Firefox has a bug where it says "transferring data from yoursite.com" forever if your flash object does any network activity. Even after the network activity stops. The status bar doesn't return to normal again until a fresh page w/o flash network activity is loaded.
I have used a few 100% flash/flex apps and they are pretty annoying.
Even websites or blogs that load multiple youtube windows tend to crash Firefox way too frequently.