That "hairy" stuff is a straightforward use of GCD semaphores to signal when an animation has finished. I just spent 20 minutes reading up on GCD and dispatch_semaphore_wait(). This technique is elegant rather than hairy.
"The ethics of military robots is quickly marching ahead, judging by news coverage and academic research."
Perhaps the author means that the _use_ of military robots is quickly marching ahead, outpacing any consideration of the ethics of such action.
I think the article, and some of the articles linked therein, just illustrate that maybe it's time for the US to step back from the world stage...before we do something really stupid.
This patent describes a system for interactively polling users of a system about their preferences and/or opinions regarding that system's features. The stated intent is to enable users to provide feedback to potentially inform the creator of the system in making decisions on feature enhancements.
As with all of these stupid software patents, once you read the details (i.e. beyond the summary), it becomes more apparent that the patented "invention" has a distinctly specific application.
This Lodsys letter of solicitation for cash is not much different than a 419 email.
I just spent some time looking over PSFoundation and it's a great aggregation of useful classes from all over the place.
AND there's some great original code. E.g., PSActionSheet, that let's you assign a block to each button. I hate coding up the action sheet delegate and blocks make this typically ugly thing quite shiny.
Yeah, the last few episodes of Sarah Connor Chronicles were really exciting. The last episode is a twister, and you really want to know what happens next in the story.
Disclosure: I never saw Terminator 4, so my knowledge of the series is not complete. I'm told that I'm one of the lucky ones, though. :-)
This is one of the ideas put forward in Taleb's "Black Swan": by increasing your exposure to positive "Black Swan" events, you can improve your chances of being successful (with something).
One way to increase your exposure to positive Black Swans is to get out and mingle in a diverse environment; that fosters serendipitous encounters, which can lead to positive outcomes.
One of the things I really enjoyed about Taleb's book is his point about the role of luck in the general result of being successful.