1% of human society are also psychopaths infallibly detectable at an early age by testing brain wave reactions
This is untrue -- there is no such thing as an infallible test of psychopathy. Not only is it known that children can "grow out of it" even when they show clear signs of psychopathy in childhood, it is also known that adults with "psychopathic brains" can be perfectly normally functioning. (Current thinking seems to be that a combination of genetic factors and environmental factors both need to be present for psychopathy to develop.)
Even a test which is 99.99% accurate can be extremely dangerous if applied to the general population when the condition is rare in the first place. See e.g. this TED talk for a good overview. This is why screening of the general population is a very bad idea in most cases.
I'd probably rather be programming in C# than Java, but Java is where the enterprise is (at least in my general vicinity), so that's what I use professionally. For me, it's actually not a lot of features which are deciders, but "no checked exceptions", "usable generics" and "lambda" are heavily in C#'s favor.
However, Haskell is light years ahead of both of those as a programming language. You don't actually need that IDE support when you're programming in Haskell since you don't have ridiculous numbers of classes to keep track of. A good editor is all you need. The ecosystem around Haskell is also pretty strong these days -- maybe you haven't looked at it recently? Is there anything in paritcular you're missing? (That's not to say that an IDE isn't useful, but it's definitely not necessary for coding in Haskell.)
(I can't speak specifically about F#, but I've also been very happy with O'Caml in the past whose bastard child F# is. That was a few years ago and the "ecosystem" was definitely poorer than Java at the time -- I don't know that the current status is.)
Dynamic/static and strict/weak are orthogonal in general. A dynamically typed language could just as easily verify that all necessary methods defined by an interface are implemented by an implementation -- it's just that the check would happen at run-time rather than compile time.
The term "beginning of time" may not make sense in any physical sense. It may be the case that time has no beginning, even if what we typically call the "universe" does have a beginning. (I'm not even a layman, but as far as I understand it, some current theories suggest that the universe is the result of the collision of eternal vibrating/fluctuating "branes" in higher-dimensional space.)
(Also AFAIUI:) "Singularity" simply means that the math of the currently known laws of nature breaks down or diverges -- it doesn't necessarily mean that time somehow didn't exist.
Agnosticism is a subset of atheism (theism requires an active belief).
Except is isn't really. Agnositicism is the postition that the existense or non-existence of god is unknowable. Philosophically that's much a much stronger claim than atheism.
Claiming that you have proof that there is no God because in your view there is no evidence of His existence goes beyond the strictly logical.
Who claimed that anyone had proof that there is no god? I claimed an absence of evidence of a god. Absence of evidence that should be there if this god posesses any of the properties attributed to him/her/it/them by Cristians/Muslims/Jews/etc. Empirically that is indiciative of a lack of god.
Agnostics acknowledge that there are things that cannot be disproved.
No, they're being cowards in refusing to take a position. They certainly have one (one way or the other), they just refuse to state it publically.
The more rigorously motivated place the null hypothesis squarely in the "there is no god" camp, waiting for evidence to the contrary.
"Atheist" simply means "not theist", i.e. does not believe. It does not imply logical proof that there is no god.
Without proof either way, agnosticism is the only rational position.
That's a nonsense. If god intervenes in the world (as all Christians must believe) there should be evidence -- there is absolutely none. This is consistent with the atheist view. It is not consistent with the Christian view.
Your taking offense means absolutely nothing for the validity or non-validity of an argument. You seem to be a sensible person, but please don't use the "that's offensive!" defense. It doesn't belong in any civilised debate.
What I can't accept is your assertion that my belief is false, when there is in fact no scientific evidence to support either viewpoint.
You say that as if you think that somehow makes it a fifty-fifty proposition.
Lack of evidence of a god when that evidence should be there is in fact evidence that there isn't a god. So I'd say it's overwhelmingly likely that your belief is false. (Of course there are no absolutes, but it seems strange to take the overwhelmingly unlikely position rather than the overwhelmingly likely one when living one's life.)
Unless of course you're worshipping a malicious or trickster god who deliberately hides from you and makes himself/herself/itself immune to evidence. In which case... I'm not sure anyone would wish to worship such a god.
There's also the inconvenient fact that lots of people believe just as fervently in a different god from yours. How do you know that they're wrong and you're not?
are exactly equivalent. If your RDBMS is so crappy that it can't see that, then that's not the user's problem. SQL was supposed to be an abstraction, right?
Investigate functional languages (O'Caml, F# or Haskell) and my comment may make sense:).
The larger point is that such details as indexes shouldn't matter -- you just want to solve your problem and shouldn't have to worry about irrelevant detail.
Since when is the indexing offset important? You should be using "zip", "map" (or even "parallel-prefix") and the like.
That's the thing that irks me most about Lua. It pretends to be "high-level", but it isn't really. (Well, that and weak typing. There really is not excuse for that -- other than ignorance.)
This is simple biased memory. You (or we, as a collective culture) remember the good stuff, not the bad.
If you did actual proper statistics on this stuff I'd bet you'd find just as many crappy movies in the 50's, 60's, 70's etc. as you do now. (Sturgeon's Law probably applies.)
Running RC1 on my Kubuntu and it seems that we've finally arrived at where 3.5 was... only kidding.
I realize that the 4.0-4.3 releases were "experimental" and should never have been pushed as defaults by distros, but...
I may still give up on KDE (weren't expecting that, were you?). Personally, I think tiling window managers are way more efficient once you get past the initial learning curve. Most of the KDE programs are great (Kate, Okteta, Gwenview, etc), but the whole desktop...? Not sold.
Blue background. Why? Are you trying to accomplish some artistic purpose we're not privy to?
Why are the pictures laid out vertically rather than horizontally? Why is there lots of text to the right of the second picture rather than to the right of both pictures. That means that your contact info is obscured/invisible to potential readers -- it's also out of context in that place.
Why do your anchors span multiple sentences rather than just a few semantically relevant key words?
In short: You fail web page design, so who the fuck cares if your page is 10K?
jQuery + jQuery UI (minified) is a lot smaller than the custom shit you're probably thinking about implementing.
(Yes, in an ideal world all the stuff that makes jQuery/jQuery-UI/whatever an attractive proposition would be folded into a standard, but so far it ain't happenin')
Slashdot Mirror
This is untrue -- there is no such thing as an infallible test of psychopathy. Not only is it known that children can "grow out of it" even when they show clear signs of psychopathy in childhood, it is also known that adults with "psychopathic brains" can be perfectly normally functioning. (Current thinking seems to be that a combination of genetic factors and environmental factors both need to be present for psychopathy to develop.)
Even a test which is 99.99% accurate can be extremely dangerous if applied to the general population when the condition is rare in the first place. See e.g. this TED talk for a good overview. This is why screening of the general population is a very bad idea in most cases.
"Microsoft Serves Self" wouldn't be controversial enough for New Slashdot.
I'd probably rather be programming in C# than Java, but Java is where the enterprise is (at least in my general vicinity), so that's what I use professionally. For me, it's actually not a lot of features which are deciders, but "no checked exceptions", "usable generics" and "lambda" are heavily in C#'s favor.
However, Haskell is light years ahead of both of those as a programming language. You don't actually need that IDE support when you're programming in Haskell since you don't have ridiculous numbers of classes to keep track of. A good editor is all you need. The ecosystem around Haskell is also pretty strong these days -- maybe you haven't looked at it recently? Is there anything in paritcular you're missing? (That's not to say that an IDE isn't useful, but it's definitely not necessary for coding in Haskell.)
(I can't speak specifically about F#, but I've also been very happy with O'Caml in the past whose bastard child F# is. That was a few years ago and the "ecosystem" was definitely poorer than Java at the time -- I don't know that the current status is.)
Dynamic/static and strict/weak are orthogonal in general. A dynamically typed language could just as easily verify that all necessary methods defined by an interface are implemented by an implementation -- it's just that the check would happen at run-time rather than compile time.
The term "beginning of time" may not make sense in any physical sense. It may be the case that time has no beginning, even if what we typically call the "universe" does have a beginning. (I'm not even a layman, but as far as I understand it, some current theories suggest that the universe is the result of the collision of eternal vibrating/fluctuating "branes" in higher-dimensional space.)
(Also AFAIUI:) "Singularity" simply means that the math of the currently known laws of nature breaks down or diverges -- it doesn't necessarily mean that time somehow didn't exist.
Except is isn't really. Agnositicism is the postition that the existense or non-existence of god is unknowable. Philosophically that's much a much stronger claim than atheism.
Who claimed that anyone had proof that there is no god? I claimed an absence of evidence of a god. Absence of evidence that should be there if this god posesses any of the properties attributed to him/her/it/them by Cristians/Muslims/Jews/etc. Empirically that is indiciative of a lack of god.
No, they're being cowards in refusing to take a position. They certainly have one (one way or the other), they just refuse to state it publically.
Welcome to atheism.
Kill yourself. There is no life after software development.
"Atheist" simply means "not theist", i.e. does not believe. It does not imply logical proof that there is no god.
That's a nonsense. If god intervenes in the world (as all Christians must believe) there should be evidence -- there is absolutely none. This is consistent with the atheist view. It is not consistent with the Christian view.
Your taking offense means absolutely nothing for the validity or non-validity of an argument. You seem to be a sensible person, but please don't use the "that's offensive!" defense. It doesn't belong in any civilised debate.
You say that as if you think that somehow makes it a fifty-fifty proposition.
Lack of evidence of a god when that evidence should be there is in fact evidence that there isn't a god. So I'd say it's overwhelmingly likely that your belief is false. (Of course there are no absolutes, but it seems strange to take the overwhelmingly unlikely position rather than the overwhelmingly likely one when living one's life.)
Unless of course you're worshipping a malicious or trickster god who deliberately hides from you and makes himself/herself/itself immune to evidence. In which case... I'm not sure anyone would wish to worship such a god.
There's also the inconvenient fact that lots of people believe just as fervently in a different god from yours. How do you know that they're wrong and you're not?
are exactly equivalent. If your RDBMS is so crappy that it can't see that, then that's not the user's problem. SQL was supposed to be an abstraction, right?
Politically motivated.
Does the silent update give me a link to that page?
Investigate functional languages (O'Caml, F# or Haskell) and my comment may make sense :).
The larger point is that such details as indexes shouldn't matter -- you just want to solve your problem and shouldn't have to worry about irrelevant detail.
Yes, beacuse silent updates let you know which security problems you may have been exposed to.
That's TeX for you! :)
Since when is the indexing offset important? You should be using "zip", "map" (or even "parallel-prefix") and the like.
That's the thing that irks me most about Lua. It pretends to be "high-level", but it isn't really. (Well, that and weak typing. There really is not excuse for that -- other than ignorance.)
Null inhabits every single (non-primitive) type in the C# language.
A special tag is not type-compatible with every other single value in the language.
type Maybe a = Just a
| Nothing
Simple and doesn't infect every fucking variable access with the possibility of null.
Not speaking up signals to these fuckheads that their behavior is acceptable. It's not.
That's just what the aliens want us to believe!
being the operative phrase.
This is simple biased memory. You (or we, as a collective culture) remember the good stuff, not the bad.
If you did actual proper statistics on this stuff I'd bet you'd find just as many crappy movies in the 50's, 60's, 70's etc. as you do now. (Sturgeon's Law probably applies.)
Running RC1 on my Kubuntu and it seems that we've finally arrived at where 3.5 was... only kidding.
I realize that the 4.0-4.3 releases were "experimental" and should never have been pushed as defaults by distros, but...
I may still give up on KDE (weren't expecting that, were you?). Personally, I think tiling window managers are way more efficient once you get past the initial learning curve. Most of the KDE programs are great (Kate, Okteta, Gwenview, etc), but the whole desktop...? Not sold.
From a usability perspective:
In short: You fail web page design, so who the fuck cares if your page is 10K?
jQuery + jQuery UI (minified) is a lot smaller than the custom shit you're probably thinking about implementing.
(Yes, in an ideal world all the stuff that makes jQuery/jQuery-UI/whatever an attractive proposition would be folded into a standard, but so far it ain't happenin')