Yes, they are too cheap for Oracle. Who the hell on their scale isn't?
Of course, you're joking. The cost of Oracle licenses for their infrastructure would in all probability be dwarfed by the cost of the person-hours they've put into developing and supporting Cassandra and their Heath Robinson MySQL setup.
No naming convention is necessary, but some are useful. I find it useful to differentiate interfaces from classes at a glance, you do not. We disagree, and that's fine, but my reasoning for my preference makes sense to me in C#. I don't do the same thing in other languages, because they don't have the same distinction. I'm highly unlikely to change my opinion on this, because I can identify the benefits I gain from the practice on a day-to-day basis.
Manned space exploration != Mars. Obama wants industry to handle LEO, and NASA instead to focus on solving the hard problems of manned deep space exploration (with the implication that he expects industry to ride their coat tails to the Asteroid Belt). This is perfectly consistent with his stated goals.
To put it another way, if we needed to leave the planet in a hurry, Mars is utterly impractical. It will take centuries to terraform it, if it's even feasible. On the other hand, if industry can be persuaded to work out how to knock the kinks out of ground to LEO travel, and to learn how to build safe long-term habitats (for instance, hotels) with materials gathered from deep space, then we might just stand a chance.
As a huge fan of fluent code, but also as someone who prefers to see the distinction between a promise and a concrete implementation to be at a glance of the class definition, I have to disagree. Of course you should be using a language derived from your problem domain, but if your problem domain contained all you needed for the solution, then it itself would be the computer program. At some level, you have to use the language of the solution domain, you can't wish it away. I would also say that, these days, having to chance the name from ISomething to plain Something is no big deal, due to built-in refactoring support. Finally, what are the deprecated constructs and styles in C#? Can't think of any of the top of my head.
I can only presume you haven't tried this. It's completely at odds with most shops' workflow, where designers produce graphical representations of how the site should look, which are then converted to HTML and CSS, which are then turned into templates by developers, which are then populated by values taken from your object model which is populated from a database. Dropping XSL into the mix adds the complications of converting the object model to XML and breaking the HTML up into sensibly-sized XSL templates (which additionally makes it impossible for anyone who doesn't understand XSL to maintain).
The security guard called the police, and the police told him they were entitled to confiscate his phone (under anti-terrorism legislation), but didn't actually do it.
"I hung it up. It is just a movie poster and not a threat to anyone can I have it back, so that I can put it back up on my door in accordance with my First Amendment rights?"
I usually don't pull this meme, but, there, fixed that for you.:)
I'm not saying anything about Christians in general. I'm merely saying that Aquinas was attempting (as many have) to present science as a mere subset of God's divinity, to diminish to peceived import of science and hence dodge having to reconcile it: if science is a subset of God, then when science contradicts God, God is obviously correct...
I'm not saying it does (I regard his statement as irrelevant, not wrong as such). I'm saying it was easy for Aquinas to say that, because he never had to perform any really tough reconciliations of science and his faith, and therefore he shouldn't be congratulated too much for his "first post".
This is the Christian equivalent of Embrace, Extend and Extinguish. "Aha! But who do you think created the laws of physics?" Aquinas also had the privilege of writing before the most troublesome and contradictory scientific discoveries had been made. He didn't have to reconcile Christian morality and the idea of man being God's greatest creation with neurology and evolution.
Did you get alarmed when it "spread" from the printed word to radio? From radio to television? This business goes back to at least 1833, and you just sound like an anonymous Chicken Little. Or maybe you're just late to the party.
Honestly, Flash is not a really good reason to pack a laptop. I spent 5 months travelling across 3 countries with a 1st gen eeePC, and I don't recall visiting a single Flash-requiring website. I was getting tired of the weight of the pack as it was, a laptop would've been murder.
What I probably would've missed is the ability to run OpenVPN, and a few things of that ilk. I would've had to go to the trouble of setting up a proper L2TP VPN, etc. I might have run into a few connection problems here and there. But I suspect an iPad would probably have worked out just fine.
If you're serious about packing light, don't take any kind of damn computer. Even the iPad weighs too much really, and you will be constantly worrying about someone stealing it, especially because, like me, you will have made it into your primary link back home. My advice is to organise your trip around locally-available means of communication. No, I wouldn't follow my advice either, but that's being a geek for you;)
Um, I love Farscape as much as the next geek, but are you referring to such grand, lofty ideals as intolerance, slavery, capital punishment, incest, sexism and infant mutilation? You know, good, solid Old Testament stuff?
No, you're right.
What I would say is that that was in the name of Communism rather than atheism itself. As Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, the problem is in dogmas rather than religions. Dogmas divide the world into black and white, good and evil, us and them. Inflexible, they demand obedience or extermination. Communism is a dogma that has atheism as one of its dictates, but (in general) atheism itself is not dogmatic, and cannot be used as a rallying call to war.
"Social Darwinism is a term used by those opposing various late nineteenth century ideologies predicated on the idea of survival of the fittest.[1] It especially refers to notions of struggle for existence being used to justify social policies which make no distinction between those able to support themselves and those unable to support themselves. The most prominent form of such views stressed competition between individuals in laissez-faire capitalism but it is also connected to the ideas of eugenics, scientific racism, imperialism,[2] Fascism, Nazism and struggle between national or racial groups.[3] "
It seems the theory of evolution can be used to justify evil things as well.
Social Darwinism is not the Darwinian Theory of Evolution, it is a poorly-thought-out misapplication of the Theory, grounded in a fundamental failure to understand "fitness" as a concept in context. And that's irrelevant, because atheism and evolution are not the same thing.
"The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity. Christianity is a prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilisation by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society."
Hitler's Table Talks (1941–1944)
But of course I could pick quotes that would prove that he was a Christian.
No, you couldn't. You don't seem to understand the meaning of the word "prove". You could, however, selectively quote with the intention of indicating he was an atheist, but that would be missing the point. The point, as demonstrated by a complete reading of that Wikipedia article, is that no-one is entirely sure what Hitler believed, because he said so many different things to so many different people. The indications are, however, that he believed in some kind of deity.
When a dictator chants, "these people are against God and must die", most people nodding in agreement are thinking about how much they can steal and enrich themselves or how to show sufficient enthusiasm so as not to be targeted for murder themselves. Again, I stand by my original comment that Greed is at the root of all evil. Humans are greedy, and taking religion out of the equation won't change anything.
Are humans inherently greedy? Consider the World Giving Index, as compiled by Charities' Aid: at the top of the chart, 83% of Maltese give to charity. If humans were as greedy as you suggest, that should be closer to zero.
I don't believe your statements are supported by empirical evidence. The evidence that I have seen is that people's level of charity depends on how comfortable they feel, and that the fewer excuses they can collate in their minds for cruelty, the less cruelty there is. So taking religion out of the equation won't solve everything, but it should provide an incremental improvement.
You also skirt round a key point: yes, religion is used to justify appalling acts, but as far as I know atheism never has been. Not once. No-one has ever said "We must kill these people because they believe in a god". Religion is harmful because it can be used in this way. It can be used as a propaganda tool in a way non-belief cannot. When a dictator says "These people are against God and must die"', there are people listening and nodding their heads in agreement. Enough people genuinely believe that such rationalisations are valid that it enables mass campaigns of murder and terror.
No-one has a working (energy-positive) controlled fusion design. Icarus in theory has an advantage in that it's powered by thermonuclear device detonation, but the technological and engineering challenges are still immense, and AFAIK no-one is anywhere close to solving them. Let alone how you'd solve the political problems inherent in building a 54000 tonne nuclear-engined missile. It strikes me as putting the cart before the horse in a big way to be worrying about fuel at this stage of the project. You might as well have started the article "When considering sources of gold to feed your dragon..."
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, they are too cheap for Oracle. Who the hell on their scale isn't?
Of course, you're joking. The cost of Oracle licenses for their infrastructure would in all probability be dwarfed by the cost of the person-hours they've put into developing and supporting Cassandra and their Heath Robinson MySQL setup.
No naming convention is necessary, but some are useful. I find it useful to differentiate interfaces from classes at a glance, you do not. We disagree, and that's fine, but my reasoning for my preference makes sense to me in C#. I don't do the same thing in other languages, because they don't have the same distinction. I'm highly unlikely to change my opinion on this, because I can identify the benefits I gain from the practice on a day-to-day basis.
Manned space exploration != Mars. Obama wants industry to handle LEO, and NASA instead to focus on solving the hard problems of manned deep space exploration (with the implication that he expects industry to ride their coat tails to the Asteroid Belt). This is perfectly consistent with his stated goals.
To put it another way, if we needed to leave the planet in a hurry, Mars is utterly impractical. It will take centuries to terraform it, if it's even feasible. On the other hand, if industry can be persuaded to work out how to knock the kinks out of ground to LEO travel, and to learn how to build safe long-term habitats (for instance, hotels) with materials gathered from deep space, then we might just stand a chance.
As a huge fan of fluent code, but also as someone who prefers to see the distinction between a promise and a concrete implementation to be at a glance of the class definition, I have to disagree. Of course you should be using a language derived from your problem domain, but if your problem domain contained all you needed for the solution, then it itself would be the computer program. At some level, you have to use the language of the solution domain, you can't wish it away. I would also say that, these days, having to chance the name from ISomething to plain Something is no big deal, due to built-in refactoring support. Finally, what are the deprecated constructs and styles in C#? Can't think of any of the top of my head.
Nice troll, but I can't decide whether you really don't know that it's Studio Ghibli, and that Hayao Miyazaki and John Lasseter are close friends.
I can only presume you haven't tried this. It's completely at odds with most shops' workflow, where designers produce graphical representations of how the site should look, which are then converted to HTML and CSS, which are then turned into templates by developers, which are then populated by values taken from your object model which is populated from a database. Dropping XSL into the mix adds the complications of converting the object model to XML and breaking the HTML up into sensibly-sized XSL templates (which additionally makes it impossible for anyone who doesn't understand XSL to maintain).
I'm, say, 80% in agreement with you, but...
When someone "invests" you end up owing them more money than you got out of them
Is it unreasonable for someone investing in a potentially profitable enterprise to ask to share in that profit?
Unfortunately the middle class can't afford to save in this economy
Are you referring to the USA? I'm middle class, live in the UK and save every month. That's a very strong, general statement you're making.
entrepreneurship has been steadily decreasing since the 80's
What about the .com boom?
The security guard called the police, and the police told him they were entitled to confiscate his phone (under anti-terrorism legislation), but didn't actually do it.
FIRE is of the legal opinion that he was entitled, backed to some degree by precedent, although obviously that would need to be tested in a court of law.
"I hung it up. It is just a movie poster and not a threat to anyone can I have it back, so that I can put it back up on my door in accordance with my First Amendment rights?"
I usually don't pull this meme, but, there, fixed that for you. :)
Wait, what I don't even
What are you saying here?
I'm not saying anything about Christians in general. I'm merely saying that Aquinas was attempting (as many have) to present science as a mere subset of God's divinity, to diminish to peceived import of science and hence dodge having to reconcile it: if science is a subset of God, then when science contradicts God, God is obviously correct...
I'm not saying it does (I regard his statement as irrelevant, not wrong as such). I'm saying it was easy for Aquinas to say that, because he never had to perform any really tough reconciliations of science and his faith, and therefore he shouldn't be congratulated too much for his "first post".
This is the Christian equivalent of Embrace, Extend and Extinguish. "Aha! But who do you think created the laws of physics?" Aquinas also had the privilege of writing before the most troublesome and contradictory scientific discoveries had been made. He didn't have to reconcile Christian morality and the idea of man being God's greatest creation with neurology and evolution.
That's clearly an over-interpretation. What's being said in that passage is those are the most important commandments. You are conveniently ignoring other parts of the New Testament which directly contradict you: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%205:17-19&version=NIV
Did you get alarmed when it "spread" from the printed word to radio? From radio to television? This business goes back to at least 1833, and you just sound like an anonymous Chicken Little. Or maybe you're just late to the party.
Honestly, Flash is not a really good reason to pack a laptop. I spent 5 months travelling across 3 countries with a 1st gen eeePC, and I don't recall visiting a single Flash-requiring website. I was getting tired of the weight of the pack as it was, a laptop would've been murder. What I probably would've missed is the ability to run OpenVPN, and a few things of that ilk. I would've had to go to the trouble of setting up a proper L2TP VPN, etc. I might have run into a few connection problems here and there. But I suspect an iPad would probably have worked out just fine. If you're serious about packing light, don't take any kind of damn computer. Even the iPad weighs too much really, and you will be constantly worrying about someone stealing it, especially because, like me, you will have made it into your primary link back home. My advice is to organise your trip around locally-available means of communication. No, I wouldn't follow my advice either, but that's being a geek for you ;)
The Dutch, in general, speak incredibly good English. I very much doubt that the anonymous commenter was Dutch.
Um, I love Farscape as much as the next geek, but are you referring to such grand, lofty ideals as intolerance, slavery, capital punishment, incest, sexism and infant mutilation? You know, good, solid Old Testament stuff?
No, you're right. What I would say is that that was in the name of Communism rather than atheism itself. As Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, the problem is in dogmas rather than religions. Dogmas divide the world into black and white, good and evil, us and them. Inflexible, they demand obedience or extermination. Communism is a dogma that has atheism as one of its dictates, but (in general) atheism itself is not dogmatic, and cannot be used as a rallying call to war.
"Social Darwinism is a term used by those opposing various late nineteenth century ideologies predicated on the idea of survival of the fittest.[1] It especially refers to notions of struggle for existence being used to justify social policies which make no distinction between those able to support themselves and those unable to support themselves. The most prominent form of such views stressed competition between individuals in laissez-faire capitalism but it is also connected to the ideas of eugenics, scientific racism, imperialism,[2] Fascism, Nazism and struggle between national or racial groups.[3] "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism
It seems the theory of evolution can be used to justify evil things as well.
Social Darwinism is not the Darwinian Theory of Evolution, it is a poorly-thought-out misapplication of the Theory, grounded in a fundamental failure to understand "fitness" as a concept in context. And that's irrelevant, because atheism and evolution are not the same thing.
"The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity. Christianity is a prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilisation by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society."
Hitler's Table Talks (1941–1944)
But of course I could pick quotes that would prove that he was a Christian.
No, you couldn't. You don't seem to understand the meaning of the word "prove". You could, however, selectively quote with the intention of indicating he was an atheist, but that would be missing the point. The point, as demonstrated by a complete reading of that Wikipedia article, is that no-one is entirely sure what Hitler believed, because he said so many different things to so many different people. The indications are, however, that he believed in some kind of deity.
When a dictator chants, "these people are against God and must die", most people nodding in agreement are thinking about how much they can steal and enrich themselves or how to show sufficient enthusiasm so as not to be targeted for murder themselves. Again, I stand by my original comment that Greed is at the root of all evil. Humans are greedy, and taking religion out of the equation won't change anything.
Are humans inherently greedy? Consider the World Giving Index, as compiled by Charities' Aid: at the top of the chart, 83% of Maltese give to charity. If humans were as greedy as you suggest, that should be closer to zero.
I don't believe your statements are supported by empirical evidence. The evidence that I have seen is that people's level of charity depends on how comfortable they feel, and that the fewer excuses they can collate in their minds for cruelty, the less cruelty there is. So taking religion out of the equation won't solve everything, but it should provide an incremental improvement.
Hitler was not an atheist. He himself may not have known what he really believed, but he wasn't an atheist. This is one of those things people should stop casually repeating :)
You also skirt round a key point: yes, religion is used to justify appalling acts, but as far as I know atheism never has been. Not once. No-one has ever said "We must kill these people because they believe in a god". Religion is harmful because it can be used in this way. It can be used as a propaganda tool in a way non-belief cannot. When a dictator says "These people are against God and must die"', there are people listening and nodding their heads in agreement. Enough people genuinely believe that such rationalisations are valid that it enables mass campaigns of murder and terror.
Governments will O
No-one has a working (energy-positive) controlled fusion design. Icarus in theory has an advantage in that it's powered by thermonuclear device detonation, but the technological and engineering challenges are still immense, and AFAIK no-one is anywhere close to solving them. Let alone how you'd solve the political problems inherent in building a 54000 tonne nuclear-engined missile. It strikes me as putting the cart before the horse in a big way to be worrying about fuel at this stage of the project. You might as well have started the article "When considering sources of gold to feed your dragon..."