What would sane people do? A simple alarm(1) would have sent a patrol car out to investigate. A wet tired man would have been brought to the airport infirmary where a few questions would have been asked verifying his story while he was checked for hypothermia. The truly paranoid might have sent a coast guard boat out to get the jet-ski, further confirming his story (and hooray, getting him his wallet back). He's home for dinner with a story to tell.

Honestly now, how many Americans think that this isn't the way this should have happened? How in the hell did we get this far off course? It sounds from the story that the thing they're most upset about is missing an opportunity to lock down the whole airport while they dressed up as storm troopers and traipsed about in their armored doohickeys pretending to save the world. I think we're voting on all the wrong stuff this November.

(1) ...That works because we've had that technology since 1947.

OK, I'll make a couple of general observations here.

First: It would be a big help for this discussion, if we could have the informal convention that people who were employed in an IT job before 1990 marked their post. I think it would show a quite clear divergence of attitude.

Second: It's very obivious, that a lot of you have never been anywhere near the kind of software project posited in the "cathedral" meme, instead you project into the word whatever you have heard or feel or particularly hate. That's not very helpful, given that there is an entire book defining the concept (I belive it's available online on ESR's homepage, how about you read it ?)

Third: No, I'm not of the "either you are with us, or you are against us" persuation. The bazaar is here to stay, but having everybody in need of transportation buy the necessary spareparts to build a car is insane.

Fourth: Related to point two really: A lot of you seem to have little actual ambition of making things better, I guess that is what happens if you grow up in a bazaar and never even experience a cathedral. I pity you.

With our new Bootstrap guidelines, we're trying to encourage activity in the upper-left, lower-left and lower right quadrants, and limit certain use cases that occupy the upper-right quadrant.

Nearly eighteen months ago, we gave developers guidance that they should not build form elements that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter Bootstrap experience. And to reiterate, that guidance continues to apply today.

An experience I had as a teenager really drove this lesson home for me, and is partly responsible for successes I’ve had since.

My Dad had copy of ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ by Betty Edwards lying around. I’d always been really bad at drawing - never progressed beyond the kids-drawing phase, got bad feedback on drawing at school, so stopped.

Anyway, Edwards’s theory is that ‘bad’ drawers don’t look at the thing itself and draw its shape, they translate reality into abstract concepts first and then draw what that concept visually looks like. So I’ll look at a face, then decide I’ll draw the ‘eye’ first, query my mind to see what an ‘eye’ looks like, then draw the generic 'eye' shape that everyone draws.

Whereas a skilled artist looks at the eye in front of them - which looks nothing like the standard symbol for ‘eye’ - and draws THAT.

Edwards has a bunch of exercises to prove this, and one of them triggered a massive epiphany for me.

She had a Picasso sketch in the book which was printed upside down on the page. Her instructions were to copy the drawing, keeping it upside down, and never naming the limb/whatever you’re drawing, and never turning your drawing right-side-up until it’s complete.

I was sceptical, but decided to test her theory. So I started copying this upside-down drawing, fully expecting it to turn out even worse than usual.

When I finished, I couldn't believe it. The drawing was AMAZING. It looked like someone else had done it. The figure I’d drawn looked alive.

I went on to learn to draw pretty well. So after that, my mind always looked back and thought - well, if I can learn to DRAW, and I was so BAD at drawing initially, I can pretty much learn to do anything.