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From the Law & Order première last week: “I don’t know if Spiro Agnew is who you want to be quoting right now.”

If there is one thing that academics are supposed to be better at than people from industry, it is writing about their work. If you have a good advisor, then during your formative years as a Ph.D. student he or she will teach you the rules of good paper writing. This is the general perception; reality is very, very different.

—Werner Vogel, Evaluating Systems Papers

Also recently from this author: Once
More: Polling does not scale. (RSS scalability is something I’m
thinking more and more about these days, but the hard part is that an RSS
is even harder to trust than an email. Its only inherent trust
property is that you went out and got it from the website
yourself. How do you allow peers to pass RSS information around
without some kind of signed content? Note that any viable solution
must have a clear and straightforward incremental adoption path for
current RSS users.

If John Kerry is elected, this is what he will be up against for the next four years. The country is facing some difficult, desperate challenges and he will have to disillusion the public and the press of the idea that these challenges have easy, simple solutions, all while trying to keep them from becoming wholly disillusioned.

Achieving the least bad outcome in Iraq will involve military and diplomatic miracles, but the end result will still be dissatisfying – not the sort of thing to be celebrated with ticker tape parades and aircraft carrier landings. Getting the country out of debt will involve paying the bills. (There’s no magical, 4-Point Plan for balancing the budget in six months either.)

Kerry has refrained from offering shallow, impossible promises that these tasks will be easy – even when the press has begged him to make such promises and chided him for not doing so. That’s part of why I’m proud to be voting for him.