I'm in the same boat - a colorblind engineer. I always browse kuler, and google stuff like "web design awards" to find examples. Also, if you can pick up a copy of Illustrator it has a cool color picker feature that allows you to look at different color options based on color theory (complimentary, analogous, etc.)
If you were to take away power from the government, who would be left to defend the interests of the powerless? While it's true that government usually turns out to be an instrument used by the powerful to control the powerless, it is undeniable that the rule of law has occasionally functioned well enough to protect a minority from a majority. It offers a framework with at least the possibility of protecting the powerless. Take away that framework, and the faction with the biggest guns will win. People forget that even in the US, in the early 20th century large corporations used lethal force wielded by their own private mercenaries to keep an oppressed worker population under control. If government had no power, these gatekeepers could do whatever they wanted without the hassle of approval and public debate.
You are arguing against a straw man. Cheez wasn't advocating taking all power from the government, just "most".
Applying the principle of charity ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity ) to cheez's remarks, one would assume that preventing violence is not one of the powers he advocated taking from the government.
Suppose the government only lost the power to regulate the telecom industry. In this case, the gatekeepers could do whatever they wanted regarding telecom policy without any fear of legal pushback, instead of having to at least consider their small and manageable fear. If you don't like what they do and there is no framework for making your voice heard on this particular issue, what options do you have? Try to start your own ISP?
I'd say it's incumbent on Cheez to make a less simplistic argument if he doesn't want to be subject to reductio ab adsurdum.
If his argument is a silly one-liner that's demonstrably refuted with a pointer to Somalia as an example of "less government", it's not javek's responsibility to fill in the blanks for him.
Similarly, if anyone advocates more test coverage, we should automatically assume they want 100% quickcheck-like coverage testing all possible occurrences including power outages, network cables being unplugged, etc. What nonsense! How could anyone get work done in a place like that?
Or, to use a political example, if anyone advocates more regulation of X, it's incumbent on them to explicitly explain they aren't actually advocating Stalism.
This gives us an easy way to dismiss all views we disagree with without even having to consider the actual proposal.
"More test coverage" isn't actionable, and if you try to act on it then you'll make stupid tests that don't help, waste effort, and hinder later refactoring efforts. "I'm worried about the foo module, do we have test coverage for this type of failure" is reasonable.
And I'd similarly pile on anyone who asked for quote "more regulation" without specifying so much as an industry and type of behavior to be regulated.
In the context of a conversation about module foo and all the KeyError exceptions it's raising, a charitable person would interpret "more test coverage" as "write tests that look for KeyError's in module foo." An uncharitable person would make the leap I described in my previous post.
Note to self: don't hire pedantic employees who interpret my statements in the most unreasonable way possible just to prove a point.
As a side note, in a way it's misleading to speak of Beethoven "overcoming" deafness. All of the master composers were so well-trained at their craft that they could hear the music in their head without "trying it out" on a piano or other instrument. By the time Beethoven was deaf being able to hear was superfluous as far as composing was concerned...
We know that Beethoven himself was tremendously depressed by the onset of deafness and thought of it as a terrible misfortune to be heroically struggled with:
But we also know that he gave himself excellent pep talks and then kept going for another thirty years, writing great stuff long after his deafness was far worse than it was in 1802. So, yes, it seems that Beethoven eventually came to agree with you!
And, come to think of it, as I remember Beethoven's biggest complaints about deafness centered on loneliness, and on his fear that nobody would want to hire a deaf composer. I don't actually recall him complaining that his work might suffer. So that's another point in favor of your argument.
Oops, too late to edit, but I forgot that when Beethoven wrote his Testament his fame up to that point had been largely as a pianist, with a healthy side order of composition. And I believe he might have expressed some worry that his piano playing might suffer... which in fact it did; history contains quite a few tragi-comic written descriptions of Beethoven's latter-day attempts to play and conduct.
But his composition just got better, so in fact his declining fame as a performer was balanced by his increasing fame as a composer.
Actually in a lot of his orchestral work, for example the 8th symphony, his arrangement was off. Stuff like trumpets being drowned out by other horns, etc. It's the kind of thing that would be hard to imagine without hearing it.
When you think long-term, to me you can't escape the fact that SC is a small suburban community when compared to a mega-city like NYC. SC started out with a big advantage due to Stanford, and NYC has had large disadvantages to overcome in the past 4 decades due to crime, the collapse of the manufacturing sector, etc. (I read somewhere that until the early 70's NYC had more manufacturing jobs than Detroit due to textiles, etc., which really puts the speed of the shift in NYC's economy in perspective.) NYC has largely solved these disadvantages - it is now a very safe place to live and has an economy based on services, which means it is stocked full of smart ambitious people.
When people are what's important, whether they are customers, engineers, or whatever else, how can a suburb compete? To me it seems analgous to the fact that the tiny island of England could never sustain dominance over the world in the face of competition with a much larger and more diverse America.
