This is the same as having Perl and Python code and you to prove they implement the same functionality. Neither is a proof, it is bug free
A specification is not an implementation (or, at least, shouldn't be). I can write a specification for a square root function (that the result squared is within the error tolerance of the input) that is certainly not an implementation of finding a square root. The specification should be higher level describing what is supposed to happen, while the implementation is more detailed and low level, describing how to make that happen. This means the specification is simpler and easier to analyse. In the case of a formal specification you can use theorem provers to prove properties of the specification (for instance using CSP, a language for specifying concurrent systems, you can prove that the specification will not result in deadlock ever -- and than as long as your code is verfied against the spec, your code cannot deadlock). This is signficantly better than just having two implementations of the same functionality. It is not, as you suggest, a proof that it is bug free (at least not for any reasonable definition of bug), but it can certainly be a proof that certain bugs will not and cannot occur, which is quite a significant thing.
Actually the network transparency is what I really don't like in X. I don't get why it is in there. I would argue most people don't need it. Either because they are running servers without any X or simple desktops. While there certainly are cases where remote desktop access is useful, I really think other solutions like VNC are far superior to X there.
The network transparency costs practically nothing when running local apps (it uses shared memory) and, despite your apparent inability to have ever used X11's network transparency, a lot of us, do, all the time. I use it every single day. Right now I am sitting in front of a machine that has windows from applications running on four different machines, all of which seamlessly integrate into the desktop so that, unless you happen to know which applications are running where, you'd think they were all local apps. I've used VNC. It's not a good solution compared to X11's elegant network transparency. Just because you don't happen to use it doesn't mean there aren't a great many people who do use it regularly.
It is, however, more complicated than needs be for an embedded device type application as it's network centric and all that comes with being a client/server system.
Yes, the last thing I would want on a netbook that's internet focused and wanting to use applications over the network rather than entirely locally is some sort of network aware display system. That would just be stupid.
Now talk of slimming down the chattiness of X over networks (as seen in NX) I will listen to...
So really, even if MS adds the 2 standards to their Community Promise, that still doesn't mean you get anything useful - if you write a simple app that does nothing, you're fine. If you want DB access, or web serving, or a GUI.. you're still in the same problem as before.
I believe it means that if you want DB access, or web serving, or a GUI, you will have to use other libraries that Mono offers, such as GTK# for the GUI instead of WinForms etc. You don't have to use the windows libraries -- it's just convenient to have them available for Mono for cross-platform purposes.
So, over an extended period of time, I receieve emails that indicate that my penis is too small, and eventually, this harassment leads me to commit suicide. So now that spammer is guily of murder?
You're skipping the bit where the GP talked about specifically targetting one person for abuse with both intent to cause harm and knowledge of likely consequences. It's those latter two points that really count: intent to cause serious harm, and awareness of the likely consequences but going through with it anyway. The legal system already cares about such distinctions (see the difference between manslaughter and murder, for example, which hinges on intent; see also that not knowing or understanding the consequences can be used as a defence to show potential lack of intent).
Ok, if the healing tonics say that they work and they don't you can sue them for fraud. If the meat packing industries claim they are safe to eat (or insinuate it due to advertising or product placement) and they aren't you can sue them for fraud. If the investments aren't as secure as their ratings say they are, you can sue them for fraud.
You can sue them, but that doesn't mean you'll win. This is the legal system we're talking about here. Merely being right is not enough to guarantee victory. You have to admit that the side with the vastly vastly greater financial resources (be they spent on high priced lawyers who can parse the written law until it bleeds, digging dirt on the plantiff to discredit them in the eyes of the court, buying off the plantiff with a mixture of threats of money spent ruining them and a small cash settlement, or even buying off the judge and or the jury, or any number of other underhanded tactics I can't think of but some people certainly will) has a distinct advantage. Consider: the mafia certainly engages in force and fraud, but I don't recall ever seeing them being sued successfully, and even the government with its vast resources has a difficult time nailing them down.
Hmm, reminds me a bit of R, the plotting part of it, at least. There are a few examples of the kind of plotting you can achieve in R here.
There are a plot of quite good open source plotting tools out there. I would consider R useful in as much as it provides powerful data crunching tools to distill your data into something essential to plot, but for plotting alone it is merely adequate. GNUPlot is actually surprisinly powerful and flexible with professional output if you're willing to take the time to learn all it can really do (it's default output can be rather underwhelming). Going outside the box of what GNUplot does easily can be an exercise in extreme contortions of an already slightly arcane language however. matplotlib is one of the best straight plotting tools out there, with a good mix between simple high level plotting, and sane easy to manage low level drawing tools, and good looking default output. CairoPlot is nice for very pretty charts, but is not as flexible as one might like. I'm sure there are more, but I don't happen to know them offhand.
variation (standard deviation) is higher in males than in females across a number of different measurement categories, including (presumably) factors that lead to any posited mathematical ability.
Note that the study pointed to in TFA deals with this issue as well, and while they can't conclusively say it is not the case, they do have decent evidence to imply that the variance in mathematical ability at the extremes is potentially roughly the safe between men and women, but is strongly affected by sociocultural factors.
Documentation doesn't say "what" the code does, it says "why" it does so.
It's also woth noting that, at some point (usually around the function level in larger projects) it can be useful to say what the code is supposed to do. Being able to see what the code does is all well and good, but you can't tell whether something is a bug or not unless you know what the code is intended to do (so you can determine whether it is actually doing it correctly). For short functions, or small projects, it is often obvious what the code is supposed to be doing from context and function names (presuming we have good function names); as things scale larger, however, exactly what a particular complex function is exactly supposed to do becomes less clear, and a little documentation is a good idea.
It's closer to how people who have programmed in imperative/OO languages for many years think. Do you really think for example (python-ish metacode):
res = emptylist() for i in aList:
if (i.isFnord()):
res += i
is simpler than (haskell-ish):
filter isFnord aList
I find it tends to be a case of exactly what you are trying to do. Some problems, such as filtering a list, tend to get expressed functionally (though I like python's list comprehension syntax "[i for i in aList if i.isFnord()]"), and the procedural approach looks and feels clunky by comparison. On the other hand there are other problems that are expressed naturally in a more procedural way (often because we think of them in terms of a logical sequence of state based steps) that take some work to wrap up in a functional way. I don't think it is clear that one approach is the right one for all problems, and personally I find I prefer languages that provide expressiveness in both approaches so I can use whatever is more clear.
On top of the features you mentioned there are also other great features such as tabbing (:tabnew,:tabedit, gt to switch tabs, etc...), screen splitting (:split,:vsplit, ctrl+W,w to switch between screens, etc...), text markers that the user can jump into with only a couple of keypresses (m{a-Z} to create a mark and label it {a-Z], g'{a-Z} to jump to that mark, etc...) and even automating certain actions through macros.
I'm sure emacs also have these features but unfortunately we don't usually see them in those fancy text editors bundled with all sorts of crap (i.e., IDEs).
In fact Eclipse can do all of the things in the GPP and the things you list here fairly effortlessly. Which is not to say that it is better than Emacs or Vim, but rather that you seem unaware of all the capabilities some IDEs actually offer. Emacs, Vim, and IDEs like Eclipse have their pros and cons, and there are perfectly good reasons for wanting a person wanting to use any one of them. It is better, generally speaking, to have informed reasons however.
I think that if you think 10k lines even begins to stretch the capabilities of emacs (or vi), you don't know either editor very well.
To be somewhat fair to the OP, I believe his point was more that if you try a modern IDE for a decent amount of time (say 10k worth of code) instead of just dismissing it after opening it and fiddling for a bit, you'll come to appreciate the advantages it offers. Whether that's actually the case is debatable, but the thrust of his point -- that people often dismiss an editor/IDE without actually taking the time to fully appreciate what it can do -- is, indeed, exactly the same as yours. I've used both Emacs and Eclipse extensively, and they both have their pros and cons, not all of which are obvious without actually making good use of them.
I'm guessing the OP was doing it for aesthetic reasons so that the executable didn't have stupid unecessary extensions (like "jar" or "exe") hanging off it.
If you are into some staff like philosophy or history, you'll be just fine with MS.
Oddly enough the philosophy department was one of the other departments (beyond mathematics) where I saw TeX being used -- of course that was because there were a lot of logicians in that department, but hey, you might be surprised where TeX turns up.
Plus, unless they also improved the equation editor since whatever version shipped with Vista, that thing is not worth its weight in toilet paper (good luck drawing a commutative diagram with it, for example).
It's not really the quality of the equation editor that worries me, it's the quality of the output. Even more recent versions of Word, which improved significantly over older version (which were abysmal beyond words), still consistently get spacing, sizing, and alignment wrong in myriad subtle but frustrating ways. Equations, or mathematics in general, produced by Word just look wrong. It's like trying to read text where the kerning is all slightly wrong; an unpleasant experience if you have to read a lot of it.
...their[sic] built for a developer's notion of what is a logical interaction... Unfortunately, that often collides with real workflows in subtle but jarring ways. Look even at the desktop menu names ("Applications" "Places" and "System"). The reason that the Start menu has worked is because it gives users/one/ path to get to the things they want. Instead, using gnome/ubuntu, users are immediately faced with a choice
To the contrary, GNOME is interested in designing interfaces that are clear and easy to use (to the point where the interface designers, who aren't necessarily developers, take flack from other developers for messing with the interface). The issue you decide to highlight actually shows this well enough. At the first layer, yes, Windows simple "Start" is obvious. But what happens after that? The user is left with a bewildering array of options (including "Programs" and "Settings" if I recall correctly) that is actually more confusing and less clear than GNOMEs clear task oriented division into Applications, Places and System. Go a layer down in Ubuntu's menus and this remain quite clear: Applications is logically grouped by task (Graphics, Sound and Video, Internet, Office, etc.); Places tidily groups together the different ways of interacting with files and folders (bookmarks, remote shares, searching, recent files); and System does indeed have clear logical groups for preferences, and for system administration. Try going a layer down in Windows' start menu and all hell will break lose as you are left things grouped by software manufacturer, not task.
That ridiculous half-hour montage where Kelvin is being driven to meet with the council? What was that supposed to be, propaganda for great new clean beautiful Soviet Russian highway?
Presumably not, since it was shot in Tokyo. I recall reading about how Tarkovsky battled to be allowed to do some filming in Japan, but, for one reason or another, most of the shooting done there couldn't be used and the extended highway scene is all that he could get from it all (and hence presumably was as long as it was because he wanted to use as much material as he could).
While I agree with the notion that a soul seems unlikely (at least by the commonly accepted definition of soul), I also would hate to believe that I don't truely have free will, and instead I'm just a product of trillions of different causes in my environment.
To quote Dan Dennett "if you make yourself small enough you can externalise almost everything". The more you try to narrow down the precise thing that is "you" and isolate it from "external" causes, the more you will find that "you" don't seem to have any influence. The extreme result of this is the notion of the immaterial soul disconnected from all physical reality that is the "real you", but which then has no purchase on physical reality to be able to actually be a "cause" to let you exert you "will".
The other approach is to stop trying to make yourself smaller, but instead see "you" as something larger (as Whitman said "I am large, I contain multitudes"). Embrace all those trillions of tiny causes as potentially part of "you". One would like to believe that their experiences effect their decisions (and hence free will), else you cannot learn. So embrace that -- those experiences are part of "you" -- if they cause you to act a particular way then so what? That's just "you" causing you to act a particular way. After all, if "you" aren't at least the sum total of your experiences, memories, thoughts and ideas, then can you really call that "you" anyway?
How to deal with hardcore libertarians should they actually get their way:
1. Buy a 1 metre wide strip of land circumscribing their property or residence. 2. Engage the services of a private police force to shoot trespassers on sight. 3. ???* 4. Profit!
* Step 3 could take the form of charging exorbitantly high tolls to cross you land, but that's presuming you care about the cash.
Python's usually better for toy projects, and as a scripting language in the real world, but if you're actually engineering a system... Java (or C/C++, etc) has some serious advantages.
If you actually want to engineer a system then Eiffel or Ada have some serious advantages (certainly over C and C++; with Java you might use JML or similar to help).
Because, to the general public, global warming is confusing. "They're saying we're making the world warmer, so how come I just saw on TV that we're having the coldest winter on record?"
Climate Change more accurately reflects that it's going out of whack in both directions.
This is largely false: things are not going out of whack in both directions, but rather just in one direction -- things are getting warmer. The IPCC clearly states that they expect an increase in the number of extreme warm events and a decrease in the number and severity of extreme cold events. The reality is that climate is still variable, with both warm and cold extremes, especially on a regional scale. A decrease in extreme cold events doesn't mean they won't happen, nor that they won't be very cold, just that they will be less frequent, and less likely to be as extremely cold. Also some rare regional issues (such as the theoretical potential for the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation sutting down bringing colder weather to Europe) may provide other sources of cold spells.
In general however, global warming is not expected to cause more cold spells, or colder extremes, but rather to descrease them.
Yes it does speak for it self, possibly not in the way you think, though. The large scale graph shows that from -400000 to 0 carbon dioxide concentrations varied between ~190ppmv and ~300ppmv; changes occurred relatively slowly, the fastest up-ticks are on timescales of 1k-10k years (hard to be precise from this scale).
Note that we now in fact have data that gives the same result over a 800000 year timescale.
The client-server architecture of X is just overhead in most cases.
You do know that when you run both client and server locally it works over shared memory for practically no overhead right? You know that in benchmarks X11 demonstrates that it performs very well indeed (often better than Windows or Mac) at raw drawing speed (and raw drawing is all X11 really does). If you're worried about slowness then point the finger at GTK+ or Qt or Cairo or whatever other higher layer seems to be slow for you. It probably isn't X11.
Tell me, how many times did you attach to remote Xserver?
Every god damn day! It's great functionality that works well, and is incredibly useful if you actually get around to trying to use it. Of course it helps to actually work in a networked environment, but hey, don't most workplaces have huge internal networks these days?
and with fast internet lines this could be done via VNC easily
Not working on a per application basis and having those remote applications blend seamlessly into your local desktop to be managed (along with all the other windows) by your local window manager. It's just not comparable.
the gnome file manager also has an awesome bar like firefox now!
Since this was modded Interesting/Informative instead of funny, let's be clear: the GNOME web browser (Epiphany) now has an "awesome bar" like firefox -- which isn't a huge change since the old version of the epiphany address bar searched bookmarks etc., mostly it just means more advanced history searches. The GNOME file manager (Nautilus) does not have an "awesome bar".
Slashdot Mirror
This is the same as having Perl and Python code and you to prove they implement the same functionality. Neither is a proof, it is bug free
A specification is not an implementation (or, at least, shouldn't be). I can write a specification for a square root function (that the result squared is within the error tolerance of the input) that is certainly not an implementation of finding a square root. The specification should be higher level describing what is supposed to happen, while the implementation is more detailed and low level, describing how to make that happen. This means the specification is simpler and easier to analyse. In the case of a formal specification you can use theorem provers to prove properties of the specification (for instance using CSP, a language for specifying concurrent systems, you can prove that the specification will not result in deadlock ever -- and than as long as your code is verfied against the spec, your code cannot deadlock). This is signficantly better than just having two implementations of the same functionality. It is not, as you suggest, a proof that it is bug free (at least not for any reasonable definition of bug), but it can certainly be a proof that certain bugs will not and cannot occur, which is quite a significant thing.
Actually the network transparency is what I really don't like in X. I don't get why it is in there. I would argue most people don't need it. Either because they are running servers without any X or simple desktops. While there certainly are cases where remote desktop access is useful, I really think other solutions like VNC are far superior to X there.
The network transparency costs practically nothing when running local apps (it uses shared memory) and, despite your apparent inability to have ever used X11's network transparency, a lot of us, do, all the time. I use it every single day. Right now I am sitting in front of a machine that has windows from applications running on four different machines, all of which seamlessly integrate into the desktop so that, unless you happen to know which applications are running where, you'd think they were all local apps. I've used VNC. It's not a good solution compared to X11's elegant network transparency. Just because you don't happen to use it doesn't mean there aren't a great many people who do use it regularly.
It is, however, more complicated than needs be for an embedded device type application as it's network centric and all that comes with being a client/server system.
Yes, the last thing I would want on a netbook that's internet focused and wanting to use applications over the network rather than entirely locally is some sort of network aware display system. That would just be stupid.
Now talk of slimming down the chattiness of X over networks (as seen in NX) I will listen to ...
So really, even if MS adds the 2 standards to their Community Promise, that still doesn't mean you get anything useful - if you write a simple app that does nothing, you're fine. If you want DB access, or web serving, or a GUI.. you're still in the same problem as before.
I believe it means that if you want DB access, or web serving, or a GUI, you will have to use other libraries that Mono offers, such as GTK# for the GUI instead of WinForms etc. You don't have to use the windows libraries -- it's just convenient to have them available for Mono for cross-platform purposes.
So, over an extended period of time, I receieve emails that indicate that my penis is too small, and eventually, this harassment leads me to commit suicide. So now that spammer is guily of murder?
You're skipping the bit where the GP talked about specifically targetting one person for abuse with both intent to cause harm and knowledge of likely consequences. It's those latter two points that really count: intent to cause serious harm, and awareness of the likely consequences but going through with it anyway. The legal system already cares about such distinctions (see the difference between manslaughter and murder, for example, which hinges on intent; see also that not knowing or understanding the consequences can be used as a defence to show potential lack of intent).
Ok, if the healing tonics say that they work and they don't you can sue them for fraud. If the meat packing industries claim they are safe to eat (or insinuate it due to advertising or product placement) and they aren't you can sue them for fraud. If the investments aren't as secure as their ratings say they are, you can sue them for fraud.
You can sue them, but that doesn't mean you'll win. This is the legal system we're talking about here. Merely being right is not enough to guarantee victory. You have to admit that the side with the vastly vastly greater financial resources (be they spent on high priced lawyers who can parse the written law until it bleeds, digging dirt on the plantiff to discredit them in the eyes of the court, buying off the plantiff with a mixture of threats of money spent ruining them and a small cash settlement, or even buying off the judge and or the jury, or any number of other underhanded tactics I can't think of but some people certainly will) has a distinct advantage. Consider: the mafia certainly engages in force and fraud, but I don't recall ever seeing them being sued successfully, and even the government with its vast resources has a difficult time nailing them down.
Hmm, reminds me a bit of R, the plotting part of it, at least. There are a few examples of the kind of plotting you can achieve in R here.
There are a plot of quite good open source plotting tools out there. I would consider R useful in as much as it provides powerful data crunching tools to distill your data into something essential to plot, but for plotting alone it is merely adequate. GNUPlot is actually surprisinly powerful and flexible with professional output if you're willing to take the time to learn all it can really do (it's default output can be rather underwhelming). Going outside the box of what GNUplot does easily can be an exercise in extreme contortions of an already slightly arcane language however. matplotlib is one of the best straight plotting tools out there, with a good mix between simple high level plotting, and sane easy to manage low level drawing tools, and good looking default output. CairoPlot is nice for very pretty charts, but is not as flexible as one might like. I'm sure there are more, but I don't happen to know them offhand.
variation (standard deviation) is higher in males than in females across a number of different measurement categories, including (presumably) factors that lead to any posited mathematical ability.
Note that the study pointed to in TFA deals with this issue as well, and while they can't conclusively say it is not the case, they do have decent evidence to imply that the variance in mathematical ability at the extremes is potentially roughly the safe between men and women, but is strongly affected by sociocultural factors.
Documentation doesn't say "what" the code does, it says "why" it does so.
It's also woth noting that, at some point (usually around the function level in larger projects) it can be useful to say what the code is supposed to do. Being able to see what the code does is all well and good, but you can't tell whether something is a bug or not unless you know what the code is intended to do (so you can determine whether it is actually doing it correctly). For short functions, or small projects, it is often obvious what the code is supposed to be doing from context and function names (presuming we have good function names); as things scale larger, however, exactly what a particular complex function is exactly supposed to do becomes less clear, and a little documentation is a good idea.
It's closer to how people who have programmed in imperative/OO languages for many years think. Do you really think for example (python-ish metacode):
res = emptylist()
for i in aList:
if (i.isFnord()):
res += i
is simpler than (haskell-ish):
filter isFnord aList
I find it tends to be a case of exactly what you are trying to do. Some problems, such as filtering a list, tend to get expressed functionally (though I like python's list comprehension syntax "[i for i in aList if i.isFnord()]"), and the procedural approach looks and feels clunky by comparison. On the other hand there are other problems that are expressed naturally in a more procedural way (often because we think of them in terms of a logical sequence of state based steps) that take some work to wrap up in a functional way. I don't think it is clear that one approach is the right one for all problems, and personally I find I prefer languages that provide expressiveness in both approaches so I can use whatever is more clear.
On top of the features you mentioned there are also other great features such as tabbing (:tabnew, :tabedit, gt to switch tabs, etc...), screen splitting (:split, :vsplit, ctrl+W,w to switch between screens, etc...), text markers that the user can jump into with only a couple of keypresses (m{a-Z} to create a mark and label it {a-Z], g'{a-Z} to jump to that mark, etc...) and even automating certain actions through macros.
I'm sure emacs also have these features but unfortunately we don't usually see them in those fancy text editors bundled with all sorts of crap (i.e., IDEs).
In fact Eclipse can do all of the things in the GPP and the things you list here fairly effortlessly. Which is not to say that it is better than Emacs or Vim, but rather that you seem unaware of all the capabilities some IDEs actually offer. Emacs, Vim, and IDEs like Eclipse have their pros and cons, and there are perfectly good reasons for wanting a person wanting to use any one of them. It is better, generally speaking, to have informed reasons however.
I think that if you think 10k lines even begins to stretch the capabilities of emacs (or vi), you don't know either editor very well.
To be somewhat fair to the OP, I believe his point was more that if you try a modern IDE for a decent amount of time (say 10k worth of code) instead of just dismissing it after opening it and fiddling for a bit, you'll come to appreciate the advantages it offers. Whether that's actually the case is debatable, but the thrust of his point -- that people often dismiss an editor/IDE without actually taking the time to fully appreciate what it can do -- is, indeed, exactly the same as yours. I've used both Emacs and Eclipse extensively, and they both have their pros and cons, not all of which are obvious without actually making good use of them.
Why do you have to "mv hello.jar hello"?
I'm guessing the OP was doing it for aesthetic reasons so that the executable didn't have stupid unecessary extensions (like "jar" or "exe") hanging off it.
Can't you simply chmod the jar file and run it?
Why yes, yes you can.
If you are into some staff like philosophy or history, you'll be just fine with MS.
Oddly enough the philosophy department was one of the other departments (beyond mathematics) where I saw TeX being used -- of course that was because there were a lot of logicians in that department, but hey, you might be surprised where TeX turns up.
Plus, unless they also improved the equation editor since whatever version shipped with Vista, that thing is not worth its weight in toilet paper (good luck drawing a commutative diagram with it, for example).
It's not really the quality of the equation editor that worries me, it's the quality of the output. Even more recent versions of Word, which improved significantly over older version (which were abysmal beyond words), still consistently get spacing, sizing, and alignment wrong in myriad subtle but frustrating ways. Equations, or mathematics in general, produced by Word just look wrong. It's like trying to read text where the kerning is all slightly wrong; an unpleasant experience if you have to read a lot of it.
...their[sic] built for a developer's notion of what is a logical interaction ... Unfortunately, that often collides with real workflows in subtle but jarring ways. Look even at the desktop menu names ("Applications" "Places" and "System"). The reason that the Start menu has worked is because it gives users /one/ path to get to the things they want. Instead, using gnome/ubuntu, users are immediately faced with a choice
To the contrary, GNOME is interested in designing interfaces that are clear and easy to use (to the point where the interface designers, who aren't necessarily developers, take flack from other developers for messing with the interface). The issue you decide to highlight actually shows this well enough. At the first layer, yes, Windows simple "Start" is obvious. But what happens after that? The user is left with a bewildering array of options (including "Programs" and "Settings" if I recall correctly) that is actually more confusing and less clear than GNOMEs clear task oriented division into Applications, Places and System. Go a layer down in Ubuntu's menus and this remain quite clear: Applications is logically grouped by task (Graphics, Sound and Video, Internet, Office, etc.); Places tidily groups together the different ways of interacting with files and folders (bookmarks, remote shares, searching, recent files); and System does indeed have clear logical groups for preferences, and for system administration. Try going a layer down in Windows' start menu and all hell will break lose as you are left things grouped by software manufacturer, not task.
That ridiculous half-hour montage where Kelvin is being driven to meet with the council? What was that supposed to be, propaganda for great new clean beautiful Soviet Russian highway?
Presumably not, since it was shot in Tokyo. I recall reading about how Tarkovsky battled to be allowed to do some filming in Japan, but, for one reason or another, most of the shooting done there couldn't be used and the extended highway scene is all that he could get from it all (and hence presumably was as long as it was because he wanted to use as much material as he could).
While I agree with the notion that a soul seems unlikely (at least by the commonly accepted definition of soul), I also would hate to believe that I don't truely have free will, and instead I'm just a product of trillions of different causes in my environment.
To quote Dan Dennett "if you make yourself small enough you can externalise almost everything". The more you try to narrow down the precise thing that is "you" and isolate it from "external" causes, the more you will find that "you" don't seem to have any influence. The extreme result of this is the notion of the immaterial soul disconnected from all physical reality that is the "real you", but which then has no purchase on physical reality to be able to actually be a "cause" to let you exert you "will".
The other approach is to stop trying to make yourself smaller, but instead see "you" as something larger (as Whitman said "I am large, I contain multitudes"). Embrace all those trillions of tiny causes as potentially part of "you". One would like to believe that their experiences effect their decisions (and hence free will), else you cannot learn. So embrace that -- those experiences are part of "you" -- if they cause you to act a particular way then so what? That's just "you" causing you to act a particular way. After all, if "you" aren't at least the sum total of your experiences, memories, thoughts and ideas, then can you really call that "you" anyway?
How to deal with hardcore libertarians should they actually get their way:
1. Buy a 1 metre wide strip of land circumscribing their property or residence.
2. Engage the services of a private police force to shoot trespassers on sight.
3. ???*
4. Profit!
* Step 3 could take the form of charging exorbitantly high tolls to cross you land, but that's presuming you care about the cash.
Reason #2 is that OS X is the only OS on which I can run Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and a Unix shell.
Photoshop, Dreamweaver and a Unix shell all seem available on Windows.
Python's usually better for toy projects, and as a scripting language in the real world, but if you're actually engineering a system... Java (or C/C++, etc) has some serious advantages.
If you actually want to engineer a system then Eiffel or Ada have some serious advantages (certainly over C and C++; with Java you might use JML or similar to help).
Because, to the general public, global warming is confusing. "They're saying we're making the world warmer, so how come I just saw on TV that we're having the coldest winter on record?"
Climate Change more accurately reflects that it's going out of whack in both directions.
This is largely false: things are not going out of whack in both directions, but rather just in one direction -- things are getting warmer. The IPCC clearly states that they expect an increase in the number of extreme warm events and a decrease in the number and severity of extreme cold events. The reality is that climate is still variable, with both warm and cold extremes, especially on a regional scale. A decrease in extreme cold events doesn't mean they won't happen, nor that they won't be very cold, just that they will be less frequent, and less likely to be as extremely cold. Also some rare regional issues (such as the theoretical potential for the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation sutting down bringing colder weather to Europe) may provide other sources of cold spells.
In general however, global warming is not expected to cause more cold spells, or colder extremes, but rather to descrease them.
Yes it does speak for it self, possibly not in the way you think, though. The large scale graph shows that from -400000 to 0 carbon dioxide concentrations varied between ~190ppmv and ~300ppmv; changes occurred relatively slowly, the fastest up-ticks are on timescales of 1k-10k years (hard to be precise from this scale).
Note that we now in fact have data that gives the same result over a 800000 year timescale.
The client-server architecture of X is just overhead in most cases.
You do know that when you run both client and server locally it works over shared memory for practically no overhead right? You know that in benchmarks X11 demonstrates that it performs very well indeed (often better than Windows or Mac) at raw drawing speed (and raw drawing is all X11 really does). If you're worried about slowness then point the finger at GTK+ or Qt or Cairo or whatever other higher layer seems to be slow for you. It probably isn't X11.
Tell me, how many times did you attach to remote Xserver?
Every god damn day! It's great functionality that works well, and is incredibly useful if you actually get around to trying to use it. Of course it helps to actually work in a networked environment, but hey, don't most workplaces have huge internal networks these days?
and with fast internet lines this could be done via VNC easily
Not working on a per application basis and having those remote applications blend seamlessly into your local desktop to be managed (along with all the other windows) by your local window manager. It's just not comparable.
the gnome file manager also has an awesome bar like firefox now!
Since this was modded Interesting/Informative instead of funny, let's be clear: the GNOME web browser (Epiphany) now has an "awesome bar" like firefox -- which isn't a huge change since the old version of the epiphany address bar searched bookmarks etc., mostly it just means more advanced history searches. The GNOME file manager (Nautilus) does not have an "awesome bar".