Is this whole story a troll? The false dichotomy proposed between the (poorly-labelled) attributes of "talent" and "skill" is disingenuous. The comparison between acquired knowledge (what the author refers to as "skill") and inductive reasoning about a proposed new piece of functionality/infrastructure/etc (referred to by as "talent" in this bizarre example) is contrived, and somewhat arbitrary. I almost never read or discuss Slashdot stories anymore, and this s a great example of the underlying problem. Now, all you kids get off my lawn, and leave me in peace.
The Demon Princes (really, anything) by Jack Vance. Any short fiction by Cordwainer Smith and Avram Davidson. I also was greatly impressed by Peter S. Beagle's short story collections.
Once you do, you'll realize how correct my original post was. C# is essentially someone running find and replace over the Java language and claiming it's "new," "radically different," and "much, much complex and serious."
Ok, first of all, I am far from a "fan boi", unless your definition of such is "someone who disagrees with binarylarry". Secondly, C# and Java are both based on C++, so it is hardly surprising that they are similar.
In addition, designing a language so that it is familiar to those who use other, similar languages, is not a crime; if it is, then Java is equally guilty, as one of their original goals to speed adoption was to make the language similar enough that C++ programmers felt at home.
Please, stop holding back - how do you really feel?
Just because someone disagrees with you does not make them 'a disgrace to this country'. I doubt that the brainwashed old man and his religious zealot sidekick would have been a better choice for the country. I used to have respect for John McCain, but lost it all when he sold out to the extreme wing of his party. We see how well this country has done with ultra-conservative Republican leadership. Even if I don't agree 100% with Obama's policies, it was necessary to elect him, if only to shake the Republicans' tree and make them realize that this country doesn't want any more of the batshit crazy wing of their party. I am all about small government, low taxes, and personal responsibility, but that isn't what the Republican party is about anymore.
Until the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment to our constitution in 1804, after the Jefferson/Burr deadlock, this is exactly what happened. The winner was president, and the runner up was VP.
I fit into your description quite well, except no kids yet, and I am an atheist instead of an agnostic. Perhaps that's why I simply could not bring myself to vote for the man who bowed to the will of the extreme wing of his party and chose a religious zealot as his running mate. I could have voted for John McCain 2000, but John McCain 2008 lost my respect. His concession speech last night makes it clear that the "real" John McCain is still in there, but for whatever reason, was not allowed out into the open this election cycle. Pity.
There are plenty of ways to ensure readable code without enforcing it with a specific indentation scheme built into the language syntax. I am all about legible code, but I have a philosophical problem with enforcing it the way that Python does.
Though, you are forgetting Python. While Java is similar-ish to Python, Python fills a niche that is needed. A language that is easy to write, understand and is cross-platform something like a better VB.... Well if VB was easy to understand.
I should probably get over it, but as much as I've tried to warm up to Python, I have never been able to... I absolutely despise its use of whitespace/indentation to indicate scope. I'm sure it was a well-intentioned rule set forth to make everyone's code legible, but it has kept me away from any heavy use of the language.
As long as you're recommending Sagan material, you shouldn't forget "The Varieties of Scientific Experience", a set of his lectures published posthumously, assembled by Ann Druyan (his wife, if anyone was wondering).
I was happy to see "The Road" on the list, because it's an amazing book, even though I was unhappy as hell when it was chosen for Oprah's book club. I had to stop telling people about it, because every time I did, they said "Oh, that's the new Oprah book", and it made me throw up in my mouth a little bit.
In my mind, a lot of these are questionable at best, but any organization that places a poorly-written piece of garbage like "The DaVinci Code" on a list of the top 100 books in the past 25 years immediately loses my respect.
I may end up switching to Blockbuster, then - because that way, my wife could just take one of my mailed-in movies to the Blockbuster 5 minutes down the road and pick whatever movie she wants, and then I get my next queued movie in the mail without having to do anything at all; if she doesn't want to rent anything, I just mail it back directly. I hate to lose all my ratings and recommendations, which is something I really like about Netflix, but trying to manage one queue for people with completely different tastes and viewing habits is a nightmare. Thanks for the info!
This has been a life-saver for me; rather than having to remember what movies my wife wants to see, and having my movies held up when she takes a week to watch one, I can set her up with her on mini-queue and then not have to worry about it. What Netflix fails to realize is that there is no way in hell I will pay for a separate account for this, and I doubt many other people will, either. I was fairly upset when I got the email, and am considering looking at the Blockbuster service, since I can also use it locally... anyone know if Blockbuster provides something similar to the Profile feature?
I can confirm this - the Notes 8 client is leaps and bounds above 4/5/6/7. Integrated IM actually works well, the mail template has a lot more functionality, and the fact that it's built on Eclipse makes developing plugins for it a much simpler process. I have always disliked Notes (even though I work with it regularly), but I have to give Kudos to IBM on this one; Domino 8 is a huge leap in the right direction.
If you have had a chance to digest the information regarding the lineage of modern Equines, I would be happy to continue on with your questions and statements regarding primate transitional fossils and the evolution of modern homo sapiens sapiens. Hopefully the revelation that you were quoting century-old science combined with the information in the link has made you rethink that position somewhat. If you want to take this offline, let me know. I am truly not trying to be a jerk, but am interested in continuing this. It seems that you have been fed a lot of misinformation by someone, and I just want to make sure you have all the real facts on some of these things.
From what I remember of high school the flat earth "theory", the orbiting around the earth "theory" all still get mentioned at some point in the curriculum... how should ID be any different?
Ah, but here is where things fall down... flat earth, geocentrism, etc. are all mentioned in the context of "people believed this, but they were wrong, and here's why." If you want to teach ID the same way, then I am all for it!
I have several questions, but I would like to hear what you say about fossil chains for certain species increasing and decreasing the number of ribs they have as they evolve. It would seem that the smaller animals would have fewer ribs and gain more as their descendents became larger. It would seem even more plausible that they kept the exact same number of ribs, except that the ribs got larger in size to accommodate the larger size.
The first thing I will say is that by referring to "fossil chains" you are somewhat misinterpreting the use of the fossil record. Fossils are used to show a family tree of branching ancestries and development of a broad range of species, not just the successful one that ended up as today's horse. The evolutionary model of the descent of today's horse differs greatly from the theory to which you refer (Eohippus -> Mesohippus -> Equus), which was developed in the mid-19th century when very few fossils had been found. I refer you here for a more complete discussion of the matter.
I'm sorry, I don't believe I was clear - my issue was with the suggestion that we refer people to ridiculous pseudo-scientific ideas (ID) in a science classroom, regardless of whether or not they are teaching it. You can teach whatever you want in a Philosophy class; I just take issue with this whole "teach the controversy" crap, especially when there is no controversy. The "controversy" to which the ID crowd refers is a wholly-manufactured non-entity, and they are using it as yet another Trojan Horse to get their happy horseshit inserted into our classrooms.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this whole story a troll? The false dichotomy proposed between the (poorly-labelled) attributes of "talent" and "skill" is disingenuous. The comparison between acquired knowledge (what the author refers to as "skill") and inductive reasoning about a proposed new piece of functionality/infrastructure/etc (referred to by as "talent" in this bizarre example) is contrived, and somewhat arbitrary. I almost never read or discuss Slashdot stories anymore, and this s a great example of the underlying problem. Now, all you kids get off my lawn, and leave me in peace.
But if you're running Windows, you could actually do a lot worse than Microsoft Security Essentials...
The Demon Princes (really, anything) by Jack Vance. Any short fiction by Cordwainer Smith and Avram Davidson. I also was greatly impressed by Peter S. Beagle's short story collections.
Bridge of Birds.
why is there no comparisons to AltaVista...
AltaVista returns slightly more relevant results than Lycos.
Bah, just use metacrawler and search them all.
Had he been duped? Or was he using it as an excuse to talk his wife into the fancy LCD TV?
Ok, first of all, I am far from a "fan boi", unless your definition of such is "someone who disagrees with binarylarry". Secondly, C# and Java are both based on C++, so it is hardly surprising that they are similar. In addition, designing a language so that it is familiar to those who use other, similar languages, is not a crime; if it is, then Java is equally guilty, as one of their original goals to speed adoption was to make the language similar enough that C++ programmers felt at home.
Seeing as how you provided no actual facts or even examples in your post for someone to refute, I'd say the responder did just fine.
Please, stop holding back - how do you really feel?
Just because someone disagrees with you does not make them 'a disgrace to this country'. I doubt that the brainwashed old man and his religious zealot sidekick would have been a better choice for the country. I used to have respect for John McCain, but lost it all when he sold out to the extreme wing of his party. We see how well this country has done with ultra-conservative Republican leadership. Even if I don't agree 100% with Obama's policies, it was necessary to elect him, if only to shake the Republicans' tree and make them realize that this country doesn't want any more of the batshit crazy wing of their party. I am all about small government, low taxes, and personal responsibility, but that isn't what the Republican party is about anymore.
Until the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment to our constitution in 1804, after the Jefferson/Burr deadlock, this is exactly what happened. The winner was president, and the runner up was VP.
I fit into your description quite well, except no kids yet, and I am an atheist instead of an agnostic. Perhaps that's why I simply could not bring myself to vote for the man who bowed to the will of the extreme wing of his party and chose a religious zealot as his running mate. I could have voted for John McCain 2000, but John McCain 2008 lost my respect. His concession speech last night makes it clear that the "real" John McCain is still in there, but for whatever reason, was not allowed out into the open this election cycle. Pity.
There, fixed it for you.
There are plenty of ways to ensure readable code without enforcing it with a specific indentation scheme built into the language syntax. I am all about legible code, but I have a philosophical problem with enforcing it the way that Python does.
I should probably get over it, but as much as I've tried to warm up to Python, I have never been able to... I absolutely despise its use of whitespace/indentation to indicate scope. I'm sure it was a well-intentioned rule set forth to make everyone's code legible, but it has kept me away from any heavy use of the language.
As long as you're recommending Sagan material, you shouldn't forget "The Varieties of Scientific Experience", a set of his lectures published posthumously, assembled by Ann Druyan (his wife, if anyone was wondering).
I was happy to see "The Road" on the list, because it's an amazing book, even though I was unhappy as hell when it was chosen for Oprah's book club. I had to stop telling people about it, because every time I did, they said "Oh, that's the new Oprah book", and it made me throw up in my mouth a little bit.
In my mind, a lot of these are questionable at best, but any organization that places a poorly-written piece of garbage like "The DaVinci Code" on a list of the top 100 books in the past 25 years immediately loses my respect.
What about the compilations of Gould's essays for "Natural History" magazine? My two favorites are "The Panda's Thumb" and "Bully for Brontosaurus".
I may end up switching to Blockbuster, then - because that way, my wife could just take one of my mailed-in movies to the Blockbuster 5 minutes down the road and pick whatever movie she wants, and then I get my next queued movie in the mail without having to do anything at all; if she doesn't want to rent anything, I just mail it back directly. I hate to lose all my ratings and recommendations, which is something I really like about Netflix, but trying to manage one queue for people with completely different tastes and viewing habits is a nightmare. Thanks for the info!
This has been a life-saver for me; rather than having to remember what movies my wife wants to see, and having my movies held up when she takes a week to watch one, I can set her up with her on mini-queue and then not have to worry about it. What Netflix fails to realize is that there is no way in hell I will pay for a separate account for this, and I doubt many other people will, either. I was fairly upset when I got the email, and am considering looking at the Blockbuster service, since I can also use it locally... anyone know if Blockbuster provides something similar to the Profile feature?
I can confirm this - the Notes 8 client is leaps and bounds above 4/5/6/7. Integrated IM actually works well, the mail template has a lot more functionality, and the fact that it's built on Eclipse makes developing plugins for it a much simpler process. I have always disliked Notes (even though I work with it regularly), but I have to give Kudos to IBM on this one; Domino 8 is a huge leap in the right direction.
If you have had a chance to digest the information regarding the lineage of modern Equines, I would be happy to continue on with your questions and statements regarding primate transitional fossils and the evolution of modern homo sapiens sapiens. Hopefully the revelation that you were quoting century-old science combined with the information in the link has made you rethink that position somewhat. If you want to take this offline, let me know. I am truly not trying to be a jerk, but am interested in continuing this. It seems that you have been fed a lot of misinformation by someone, and I just want to make sure you have all the real facts on some of these things.
Ah, but here is where things fall down... flat earth, geocentrism, etc. are all mentioned in the context of "people believed this, but they were wrong, and here's why." If you want to teach ID the same way, then I am all for it!
The first thing I will say is that by referring to "fossil chains" you are somewhat misinterpreting the use of the fossil record. Fossils are used to show a family tree of branching ancestries and development of a broad range of species, not just the successful one that ended up as today's horse. The evolutionary model of the descent of today's horse differs greatly from the theory to which you refer (Eohippus -> Mesohippus -> Equus), which was developed in the mid-19th century when very few fossils had been found. I refer you here for a more complete discussion of the matter.
I'm sorry, I don't believe I was clear - my issue was with the suggestion that we refer people to ridiculous pseudo-scientific ideas (ID) in a science classroom, regardless of whether or not they are teaching it. You can teach whatever you want in a Philosophy class; I just take issue with this whole "teach the controversy" crap, especially when there is no controversy. The "controversy" to which the ID crowd refers is a wholly-manufactured non-entity, and they are using it as yet another Trojan Horse to get their happy horseshit inserted into our classrooms.