Come on, how much better can minesweeper or solitaire be?
Well, the minesweeper's basically identical, but Aisleriot solitaire (the default Gnome solitaire game) comes with 80 different solitaire variants, which beats the 3 or so that come with windows by a good ways. I personally like Hopscotch.
Gnome also comes with something like 17 games by default, and you can install hundreds more if you want them without even opening a web browser. I will grant that the networked hearts/spades games in XP are something I would like to see an equivalent to in Ubuntu.
Considering that the RAND Corporation has done actual research -- and you have done nothing --I see no substantial reason to doubt their conclusions. Even the MPA connection is fine by me, despite the submitter's insinuations.
You're right that there's plenty of real money to be made from bootlegging, and in that respect the research is probably right, but the conclusions that they come to based on their research are completely wrong.
The fallacy here is that RAND is equating online piracy with bootlegging, and concluding that since bootlegging helps the terrorists, online piracy helps the terrorists. The reality is that online piracy and bootlegging are completely at odds. People who download torrents generally don't buy bootlegs because they can get better quality and cheaper online. If anything, online piracy hurts the bootlegging industry.
People respond irrationally when they're afraid, and the MPA is hoping to take advantage of this to get Americans to believe that torrents 'helps the terrorists' even though a rational look at the situation suggests exactly the opposite. This is a cynical and calculated PR move in the MPA's ongoing campaign against piracy.
It probably is true that buying bootleg dvds supports terrorism, so if you're a patriotic American, you should download torrents instead of buying bootlegged copies!
Sure, we all know how great linux is for certain tasks, but it has missed that spark that makes it catch on in a big way outside IT infrastructures and embedded systems.
Yes, and that spark is called a marketing budget and either lucrative anti-competitive agreements with computer makers, or its own computer making branch.
Well, Microsoft has a couple options, but clearly making a system with the half the inconvenience of the Vista UAC and none of the security is a bad choice.
The problem for Microsoft is backwards compatibility. If they want old programs to run natively in Windows 7, that pretty much makes security completely impossible. To support all the old programs, you also have to support all the old security holes that lazy programmers used.
So, Microsoft could just go back to the XP model, and abandon security altogether, or they could abandon backwards compatibility and build a secure system from scratch. There aren't any other options that I can think of. It may be the case that starting from scratch, and using some sort of seamless virtualization for old programs is the only way for Windows to achieve both security and backwards compatibility. With the power of modern computers, this isn't that far fetched a solution.
I know I'm just repeating what you think are unrealistic solutions, but that's because there aren't any more realistic solutions. Microsoft has backed itself into a corner, and its going to have to do something pretty dramatic if it wants to stay competetive.
So.. what is the benefit of separating the languages for a single project?
I've had several occasions to write programs using both C++ and Python. I find that developing in Python is much, much faster than developing in C++ since I can usually accomplish the same task in half as many lines of code and the code will be more legible and easier to maintain. For a large project this can add up to hundreds of hours of time saved. However, Python isn't always fast enough for a given task so it can be worthwhile to write computationally intensive code in C++. Also, there is a larger range of libraries available for C++ and it often makes sense to write wrappers for a library in C++ so that you can use it in Python.
I could have done these projects in C++ alone, but it would have taken me half as long again to complete them and my code would have been less maintainable. Basically, I find Python a more productive programming language, and can use C++ to shore up its shortcomings.
There will always be some people for whom absolute quality trumps all else. The REAL question is, is this group large enough to sustain an ongoing market of manufacturing and selling physical media?
Actually, this isn't likely to be a serious question a few years from now the way things are going. In the short term streaming media may be lower quality than physical media, but I would be surprised if 5 years from now your average internet connection weren't fast enough to handle streaming high def video.
At least unless all the FUD Comcast and the like are spreading about the internet collapsing is true, but I've never seen a shred of solid evidence for it.
To be fair, it is possible for one player's decisions to affect another's returns. If a player tended to hit more often with a good count, then he'd make periods of positive count shorter for the other players, which would hurt their expected return. Of course, that wouldn't be bad play; in fact, in some marginal cases it makes sense to hit on a high count when basic strategy says to fold, so it could be unusually good play.
That said, unless a player is specifically changing his betting strategy based on count, you're completely right that his effect on other players' expected returns should average out to nothing.
Well, I can't speak to your experiences, but I've installed Ubuntu on at least a half dozen machines, and have been using it continuously for about 3 years now (I was using XP before that). It's never taken me more than 2 hours to get a complete working install, I've never had a problem with the package manager, and in general I've had to spend almost no time to keep my machine working (certainly far less than when I used Windows).
There will always be problems with any OS, but in my experience Ubuntu is more reliable, and less trouble than XP. I will note that in the past when I've tried to use KDE I've had problems, so I run gnome - which is too bad since in principle at least I like the philosophy behind KDE better.
a lot of linux distros ship with everything and you choose what to install. Ubuntu is trying to cater to the non-techie so they strip out anything a desktop PC for the average user won't need without confusing them during the install process.
It's worth noting that with Ubuntu's repo system it's very easy to add software after install. Ubuntu may not have MySQL out of the box, but all I have to do is type "sudo apt-get install mysql-server". 5 minutes later it asks me for an admin password, and then I have a working MySQL server. I've done some web design work, and from a base Ubuntu install I can type a couple commands, go grab a cup of coffee, and when I get back(in 5-15 minutes depending on my internet connection) I'll have a fully functional LAMP setup.
Really, I think this is the best approach. Only provide the things everyone uses by default, and make it trivial to get commonly, but not universally used applications and services.
Off topic, I know I shouldn't call Ubuntu an operating system, but what word (instead of 'operating system') should I use that includes Windows, OS X, and all the various Linux distributions? I managed to avoid needing the word above, but it would be useful to know!
"It's asserting that bundling leads to market share. I don't know how you can make the claim with a straight face."
And if anyone falls for this, they need to look in the mirror and ask themselves, who they'll be suckered by next.
I interpreted the quote a little differently. I don't think he was saying the that bundling can't lead to market share; you're quite right that IE owes its market share primarily to bundling. Instead I think he meant that bundling doesn't necessarily lead to market share for other browsers. He's saying that even if Firefox or Opera were bundled with computers, they would still have to be "perceptibly better" than IE to gain any market share.
This is all out of context, but I would assume he was answering a claim that that market share was a direct and inevitable result of bundling. It's a fairly fine hair to split, and I'm not sure I agree with him, but it's still not quite as obviously silly as it might seem.
Let me give you a scenario, that should make what I mean clearer.
I think that it's a safe bet that there are at least 50 98/XP apps for every Vista app. Given how much longer we've had 98/XP than Vista this is a major underestimate. Wine has rather good support for older apps, it's always playing catch-up, but everyone agrees it does old stuff better than Vista does. Lets suppose Vista supports 80% of the old apps, and Wine supports 83% of them (the numbers are made up, but what matters is that Wine is a few points ahead). Then out of every 102 apps (100 98/XP and 2 Vista) Wine supports about 83, and Vista supports 82. I suspect that Wine has a much better than 3% edge for older app support though, and I've assumed that wine has absolutely no support for new Vista apps.
Numbers can be counterintuitive, and I'd suggest doing your own calculations before criticizing someone else's math.
Even so, he's probably exaggerating and/or overestimating. But the fact remains that there's a nasty degree of API incompatibility between Vista and previous versions of Windows. For example, if you have any version of Adobe Acrobat except the latest, you get a file system error if you try to write certain modifications out to disk. Basic I/O operations broken! That's pretty bad.
I'm not so sure he's overestimating! Given how many years Windows XP and Windows 98 were aroung for, it's a safe bet that there are hundreds of times more apps for those two platforms than for Vista. A rather large fraction of those work in Wine. If a decent fraction of them don't work in Vista (and my understanding is that they don't), then just by number of apps Wine probably runs a lot more windows apps than Vista does.
Of course, the vast majority of the apps Wine runs that Vista doesn't are outdated, or have been replaced by newer version that do run in Vista, but for sheer numbers, I think it's a safe bet that Wine wins!
At the time Roe v Wade was decided, it was not commonly known that a person's physical characteristics were uniquely determined at conception. The problem with science - from the perspective of the urban elite - is that it confirmed that, indeed, a person is fully human from the point of conception onward. Thus, for the first time, there existed a scientific basis for the opposition of abortion. This represents a *very real* problem for a demographic which, in their zeal to eliminate God's influence from public policy decisions, replaced Him with science. Now, it seems, science is the enemy of social progress.
I'm not sure how a fetus' physical characteristics being "uniquely determined at the time of conception" in any way implies that the fetus is "fully human." If a child's physical characteristics were uniquely determined by the parents' DNA would you argue that every man-woman pairing in the world should have a child so as to not deny all these potential children the chance to live? It seems based on this reasoning that you ought to.
Being uniquely determined really means nothing. The idea that a purely potential being deserves protection is patently ridiculous since it leads to the idea that everyone should produce the maximum number of babies possible. The real question is at what point you no longer consider the fetus merely a potential child, but consider it a real human being. The answer to that one isn't obvious, but arguments like yours don't seem terribly relevant to it.
People use liquid nitrogen to over clock a CPU, news at 11.
Well, really they used liquid helium. When you use liquid helium (which has a boiling point of about 4.2K at 1 atmosphere), you're using the liquid nitrogen (boiling point of 77K) just to keep the liquid Helium cold longer. Using liquid nitrogen is sort of boring - you can store it in an insulated jug for a good long while even, but using liquid helium is, well, pretty damned cool!
I'm a solid supporter of the theory of evolution, but in a way this is too bad.
Too many people are taught evolution as if it were incontrovertible fact, but the reality is that it really is only a theory. The core ideas of the theory are pretty much indisputable, but many of the details are open to debate, yet we go around teaching our students whatever details are currently most popular as if nothing else were possible.
For example, the standard theory taught in schools is that genes are the only mechanism for inheritance, yet this isn't necessarily true. I'm not proposing that we teach creationism in school, but it seems to me that focusing on the weaknesses of a theory can help students develop critical thinking skills, and can only be good for the theory in the long run.
Not sure about windows, but in Ubuntu you can ping using the gui. It's under System->Administration->Network Tools. Always seemed sort of silly to me since it's so much easier to use the terminal, and most users who know what ping is for are comfortable don't need the gui as a crutch.
On Ubuntu (and presumably other apt-based distros?) you can use apturl. It's in the ubuntu repo, though not installed by default. It's still pretty rare to run into an apturl link though (I ran into one on a forum somewhere once?).
Really, people who complain about copy/pasting command lines are just looking for something to complain about though, so I doubt this would satisfy them even if it were widespread. People use the command line because it's the easiest and fastest way to do things, even for a total beginner. Having started a bunch of people off on ubuntu, about half of them using synaptic, and the other half using apt-get, the ones using apt-get always had the easier time.
In any case, if you really want to, you can always try to hunt down the appropriate software online, and then pay for it just like you would for windows, so the whole argument is a little silly
But javascript is an awfully convoluted language. Why does it become easy when you put a language like that into the equation?
I don't know, I used to think javascript was a mess, but having learned a good bit more of it recently, it's really a much more elegant, flexible, and well designed language than a lot of people give it credit for. Personally, if I wanted scripting built into my Desktop I would choose python for the documentation, ease of coding and power, but you could do a lot worse than javascript.
Worse, it's state sponsored slavery where we don't even get much useful work out of the slaves. Not that I'm saying we should send convicts to labor camps, but it would be more consistent and honest.
Your personality is far more deeply ingrained than your religion. You should not be disqualified because of it unless you are severely psychologically impaired.
The fact that your personality is 'more deeply ingrained' really doesn't matter. Stupidity can also be deeply ingrained, yet it's perfectly fine to discriminate against stupidity for most jobs. The reason we don't allow religious discrimination is because it has no direct bearing on how well you do on the job.
Personality is a much stickier issue. It can be argued that personality has an impact on how you perform any job, especially in areas like customer service, but much like the case of religion, the effect of personality is indirect; an introvert can in fact act very outgoing and friendly when he wants to. Since personality tests just give you information about the group as a whole, but not necessarily about how the individual will perform, you're right that they shouldn't be used in hiring, but it's important to realize that discrimination itself isn't a bad thing.
Baseless, or poorly founded discrimination need to be rooted out, but someone completely without discrimination is a moron.
If he had said that it must be indented by exactly 1 tab or exactly 4 spaces or whatever other measure and everything else would throw a syntax error, it would have been fine. As it is I'd say about 15-20% of the time I spent doing Python was spent fixing these kinds of bugs.
I have to assume that most of your time doing python has been spent copy/pasting code off the web. I've been coding python nearly daily for a couple years now. I've rarely made indentation errors, none in the last few months, and only once have I ever had an indentation error that took more than 10 seconds to debug. The thing is, most indentation errors are so visibly clear that it's really quite hard to make them.
If you're actually having problems with multiple spaces looking like tabs, you can use the -t option to make it throw an error if you use a mixture of tabs and spaces, but it really shouldn't be that hard.
Note I said not *as* bad.
The poor old UK has Europe on one side trying to erode their rights and their own government on the other doing the same but having to be more careful about it as they, unlike most EU politicians, actually get elected by the UK voters.
My impression is that of all the European countries the UK has gone by far the farthest in stripping its citizens' rights and liberties. Countries like Sweden are generally regarded as some of the freest in the world, so the EU can't be all bad. The EU may want to reduce your freedoms somewhat, but I'm quite positive it's nothing compared to what you've done to yourselves.
Well, you're right that people are often more affected by advertising than they think, and probably I am too. That said, I buy all my clothes at Goodwill, choose my food and cleaning supplies based on convenience and the cheapest unit price (rarely getting brand names as a result), and really just don't buy much of anything else, so it's hard to see how the advertisers are making money off of me.
You are of course entirely right about the broken window fallacy. I was aiming for sarcasm, but apparently didn't telegraph it right.
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Come on, how much better can minesweeper or solitaire be?
Well, the minesweeper's basically identical, but Aisleriot solitaire (the default Gnome solitaire game) comes with 80 different solitaire variants, which beats the 3 or so that come with windows by a good ways. I personally like Hopscotch.
Gnome also comes with something like 17 games by default, and you can install hundreds more if you want them without even opening a web browser. I will grant that the networked hearts/spades games in XP are something I would like to see an equivalent to in Ubuntu.
Could you explain that again, but with a car analogy?
Considering that the RAND Corporation has done actual research -- and you have done nothing --I see no substantial reason to doubt their conclusions. Even the MPA connection is fine by me, despite the submitter's insinuations.
You're right that there's plenty of real money to be made from bootlegging, and in that respect the research is probably right, but the conclusions that they come to based on their research are completely wrong.
The fallacy here is that RAND is equating online piracy with bootlegging, and concluding that since bootlegging helps the terrorists, online piracy helps the terrorists. The reality is that online piracy and bootlegging are completely at odds. People who download torrents generally don't buy bootlegs because they can get better quality and cheaper online. If anything, online piracy hurts the bootlegging industry.
People respond irrationally when they're afraid, and the MPA is hoping to take advantage of this to get Americans to believe that torrents 'helps the terrorists' even though a rational look at the situation suggests exactly the opposite. This is a cynical and calculated PR move in the MPA's ongoing campaign against piracy.
It probably is true that buying bootleg dvds supports terrorism, so if you're a patriotic American, you should download torrents instead of buying bootlegged copies!
Sure, we all know how great linux is for certain tasks, but it has missed that spark that makes it catch on in a big way outside IT infrastructures and embedded systems.
Yes, and that spark is called a marketing budget and either lucrative anti-competitive agreements with computer makers, or its own computer making branch.
Well, Microsoft has a couple options, but clearly making a system with the half the inconvenience of the Vista UAC and none of the security is a bad choice.
The problem for Microsoft is backwards compatibility. If they want old programs to run natively in Windows 7, that pretty much makes security completely impossible. To support all the old programs, you also have to support all the old security holes that lazy programmers used.
So, Microsoft could just go back to the XP model, and abandon security altogether, or they could abandon backwards compatibility and build a secure system from scratch. There aren't any other options that I can think of. It may be the case that starting from scratch, and using some sort of seamless virtualization for old programs is the only way for Windows to achieve both security and backwards compatibility. With the power of modern computers, this isn't that far fetched a solution.
I know I'm just repeating what you think are unrealistic solutions, but that's because there aren't any more realistic solutions. Microsoft has backed itself into a corner, and its going to have to do something pretty dramatic if it wants to stay competetive.
So.. what is the benefit of separating the languages for a single project?
I've had several occasions to write programs using both C++ and Python. I find that developing in Python is much, much faster than developing in C++ since I can usually accomplish the same task in half as many lines of code and the code will be more legible and easier to maintain. For a large project this can add up to hundreds of hours of time saved. However, Python isn't always fast enough for a given task so it can be worthwhile to write computationally intensive code in C++. Also, there is a larger range of libraries available for C++ and it often makes sense to write wrappers for a library in C++ so that you can use it in Python.
I could have done these projects in C++ alone, but it would have taken me half as long again to complete them and my code would have been less maintainable. Basically, I find Python a more productive programming language, and can use C++ to shore up its shortcomings.
There will always be some people for whom absolute quality trumps all else. The REAL question is, is this group large enough to sustain an ongoing market of manufacturing and selling physical media?
Actually, this isn't likely to be a serious question a few years from now the way things are going. In the short term streaming media may be lower quality than physical media, but I would be surprised if 5 years from now your average internet connection weren't fast enough to handle streaming high def video.
At least unless all the FUD Comcast and the like are spreading about the internet collapsing is true, but I've never seen a shred of solid evidence for it.
To be fair, it is possible for one player's decisions to affect another's returns. If a player tended to hit more often with a good count, then he'd make periods of positive count shorter for the other players, which would hurt their expected return. Of course, that wouldn't be bad play; in fact, in some marginal cases it makes sense to hit on a high count when basic strategy says to fold, so it could be unusually good play.
That said, unless a player is specifically changing his betting strategy based on count, you're completely right that his effect on other players' expected returns should average out to nothing.
Well, I can't speak to your experiences, but I've installed Ubuntu on at least a half dozen machines, and have been using it continuously for about 3 years now (I was using XP before that). It's never taken me more than 2 hours to get a complete working install, I've never had a problem with the package manager, and in general I've had to spend almost no time to keep my machine working (certainly far less than when I used Windows).
There will always be problems with any OS, but in my experience Ubuntu is more reliable, and less trouble than XP. I will note that in the past when I've tried to use KDE I've had problems, so I run gnome - which is too bad since in principle at least I like the philosophy behind KDE better.
a lot of linux distros ship with everything and you choose what to install. Ubuntu is trying to cater to the non-techie so they strip out anything a desktop PC for the average user won't need without confusing them during the install process.
It's worth noting that with Ubuntu's repo system it's very easy to add software after install. Ubuntu may not have MySQL out of the box, but all I have to do is type "sudo apt-get install mysql-server". 5 minutes later it asks me for an admin password, and then I have a working MySQL server. I've done some web design work, and from a base Ubuntu install I can type a couple commands, go grab a cup of coffee, and when I get back(in 5-15 minutes depending on my internet connection) I'll have a fully functional LAMP setup.
Really, I think this is the best approach. Only provide the things everyone uses by default, and make it trivial to get commonly, but not universally used applications and services.
Off topic, I know I shouldn't call Ubuntu an operating system, but what word (instead of 'operating system') should I use that includes Windows, OS X, and all the various Linux distributions? I managed to avoid needing the word above, but it would be useful to know!
"It's asserting that bundling leads to market share. I don't know how you can make the claim with a straight face."
And if anyone falls for this, they need to look in the mirror and ask themselves, who they'll be suckered by next.
I interpreted the quote a little differently. I don't think he was saying the that bundling can't lead to market share; you're quite right that IE owes its market share primarily to bundling. Instead I think he meant that bundling doesn't necessarily lead to market share for other browsers. He's saying that even if Firefox or Opera were bundled with computers, they would still have to be "perceptibly better" than IE to gain any market share.
This is all out of context, but I would assume he was answering a claim that that market share was a direct and inevitable result of bundling. It's a fairly fine hair to split, and I'm not sure I agree with him, but it's still not quite as obviously silly as it might seem.
Let me give you a scenario, that should make what I mean clearer.
I think that it's a safe bet that there are at least 50 98/XP apps for every Vista app. Given how much longer we've had 98/XP than Vista this is a major underestimate. Wine has rather good support for older apps, it's always playing catch-up, but everyone agrees it does old stuff better than Vista does. Lets suppose Vista supports 80% of the old apps, and Wine supports 83% of them (the numbers are made up, but what matters is that Wine is a few points ahead). Then out of every 102 apps (100 98/XP and 2 Vista) Wine supports about 83, and Vista supports 82. I suspect that Wine has a much better than 3% edge for older app support though, and I've assumed that wine has absolutely no support for new Vista apps.
Numbers can be counterintuitive, and I'd suggest doing your own calculations before criticizing someone else's math.
Even so, he's probably exaggerating and/or overestimating. But the fact remains that there's a nasty degree of API incompatibility between Vista and previous versions of Windows. For example, if you have any version of Adobe Acrobat except the latest, you get a file system error if you try to write certain modifications out to disk. Basic I/O operations broken! That's pretty bad.
I'm not so sure he's overestimating! Given how many years Windows XP and Windows 98 were aroung for, it's a safe bet that there are hundreds of times more apps for those two platforms than for Vista. A rather large fraction of those work in Wine. If a decent fraction of them don't work in Vista (and my understanding is that they don't), then just by number of apps Wine probably runs a lot more windows apps than Vista does.
Of course, the vast majority of the apps Wine runs that Vista doesn't are outdated, or have been replaced by newer version that do run in Vista, but for sheer numbers, I think it's a safe bet that Wine wins!
At the time Roe v Wade was decided, it was not commonly known that a person's physical characteristics were uniquely determined at conception. The problem with science - from the perspective of the urban elite - is that it confirmed that, indeed, a person is fully human from the point of conception onward. Thus, for the first time, there existed a scientific basis for the opposition of abortion. This represents a *very real* problem for a demographic which, in their zeal to eliminate God's influence from public policy decisions, replaced Him with science. Now, it seems, science is the enemy of social progress.
I'm not sure how a fetus' physical characteristics being "uniquely determined at the time of conception" in any way implies that the fetus is "fully human." If a child's physical characteristics were uniquely determined by the parents' DNA would you argue that every man-woman pairing in the world should have a child so as to not deny all these potential children the chance to live? It seems based on this reasoning that you ought to.
Being uniquely determined really means nothing. The idea that a purely potential being deserves protection is patently ridiculous since it leads to the idea that everyone should produce the maximum number of babies possible. The real question is at what point you no longer consider the fetus merely a potential child, but consider it a real human being. The answer to that one isn't obvious, but arguments like yours don't seem terribly relevant to it.
Wow.
People use liquid nitrogen to over clock a CPU, news at 11.
Well, really they used liquid helium. When you use liquid helium (which has a boiling point of about 4.2K at 1 atmosphere), you're using the liquid nitrogen (boiling point of 77K) just to keep the liquid Helium cold longer. Using liquid nitrogen is sort of boring - you can store it in an insulated jug for a good long while even, but using liquid helium is, well, pretty damned cool!
I'm a solid supporter of the theory of evolution, but in a way this is too bad.
Too many people are taught evolution as if it were incontrovertible fact, but the reality is that it really is only a theory. The core ideas of the theory are pretty much indisputable, but many of the details are open to debate, yet we go around teaching our students whatever details are currently most popular as if nothing else were possible.
For example, the standard theory taught in schools is that genes are the only mechanism for inheritance, yet this isn't necessarily true. I'm not proposing that we teach creationism in school, but it seems to me that focusing on the weaknesses of a theory can help students develop critical thinking skills, and can only be good for the theory in the long run.
Have you tried Ubuntu 8.10? The wireless auto config is a lot more consistent in my experience.
Not sure about windows, but in Ubuntu you can ping using the gui. It's under System->Administration->Network Tools. Always seemed sort of silly to me since it's so much easier to use the terminal, and most users who know what ping is for are comfortable don't need the gui as a crutch.
On Ubuntu (and presumably other apt-based distros?) you can use apturl. It's in the ubuntu repo, though not installed by default. It's still pretty rare to run into an apturl link though (I ran into one on a forum somewhere once?).
Really, people who complain about copy/pasting command lines are just looking for something to complain about though, so I doubt this would satisfy them even if it were widespread. People use the command line because it's the easiest and fastest way to do things, even for a total beginner. Having started a bunch of people off on ubuntu, about half of them using synaptic, and the other half using apt-get, the ones using apt-get always had the easier time.
In any case, if you really want to, you can always try to hunt down the appropriate software online, and then pay for it just like you would for windows, so the whole argument is a little silly
But javascript is an awfully convoluted language. Why does it become easy when you put a language like that into the equation?
I don't know, I used to think javascript was a mess, but having learned a good bit more of it recently, it's really a much more elegant, flexible, and well designed language than a lot of people give it credit for. Personally, if I wanted scripting built into my Desktop I would choose python for the documentation, ease of coding and power, but you could do a lot worse than javascript.
This is nothing short of state-sponsored slavery.
Worse, it's state sponsored slavery where we don't even get much useful work out of the slaves. Not that I'm saying we should send convicts to labor camps, but it would be more consistent and honest.
Your personality is far more deeply ingrained than your religion. You should not be disqualified because of it unless you are severely psychologically impaired.
The fact that your personality is 'more deeply ingrained' really doesn't matter. Stupidity can also be deeply ingrained, yet it's perfectly fine to discriminate against stupidity for most jobs. The reason we don't allow religious discrimination is because it has no direct bearing on how well you do on the job.
Personality is a much stickier issue. It can be argued that personality has an impact on how you perform any job, especially in areas like customer service, but much like the case of religion, the effect of personality is indirect; an introvert can in fact act very outgoing and friendly when he wants to. Since personality tests just give you information about the group as a whole, but not necessarily about how the individual will perform, you're right that they shouldn't be used in hiring, but it's important to realize that discrimination itself isn't a bad thing.
Baseless, or poorly founded discrimination need to be rooted out, but someone completely without discrimination is a moron.
If he had said that it must be indented by exactly 1 tab or exactly 4 spaces or whatever other measure and everything else would throw a syntax error, it would have been fine. As it is I'd say about 15-20% of the time I spent doing Python was spent fixing these kinds of bugs.
I have to assume that most of your time doing python has been spent copy/pasting code off the web. I've been coding python nearly daily for a couple years now. I've rarely made indentation errors, none in the last few months, and only once have I ever had an indentation error that took more than 10 seconds to debug. The thing is, most indentation errors are so visibly clear that it's really quite hard to make them.
If you're actually having problems with multiple spaces looking like tabs, you can use the -t option to make it throw an error if you use a mixture of tabs and spaces, but it really shouldn't be that hard.
Note I said not *as* bad. The poor old UK has Europe on one side trying to erode their rights and their own government on the other doing the same but having to be more careful about it as they, unlike most EU politicians, actually get elected by the UK voters.
My impression is that of all the European countries the UK has gone by far the farthest in stripping its citizens' rights and liberties. Countries like Sweden are generally regarded as some of the freest in the world, so the EU can't be all bad. The EU may want to reduce your freedoms somewhat, but I'm quite positive it's nothing compared to what you've done to yourselves.
Well, you're right that people are often more affected by advertising than they think, and probably I am too. That said, I buy all my clothes at Goodwill, choose my food and cleaning supplies based on convenience and the cheapest unit price (rarely getting brand names as a result), and really just don't buy much of anything else, so it's hard to see how the advertisers are making money off of me.
You are of course entirely right about the broken window fallacy. I was aiming for sarcasm, but apparently didn't telegraph it right.