I have met lots of J2EE experts at work, who would not be able to code a "Hello World" program,
Just for those who think he's kidding:
Having people do "Hello World" on the whiteboard is one of my standard interview questions. I'm pretty good at weeding out the enterprise 'tards by resume alone, but I'm still surprised how many people are unable to write a working "Hello World" program from scratch. Maybe a third of my first-round interviewees fail this.
I understand you might not need certification, but the knowledge described there gives a good idea what you need/can put on your CV.
I'd mostly agree, but I encourage young'uns to be very careful around certification programs. Certifications might be swell if you're looking for some sort of sucky junior programming job at a bank. But if I see a bunch of Java certifications on a resume, that's a big red flag to me. The best programmers I've hired don't have certifications, they have accomplishments.
So I think it's not really a matter of being a "jack of all trades", as you put it, but keeping up with the market demands.
Along those lines, I'd strongly suggest to houbou, who posted the original question, that he learn test-driven development. Given the list of languages he has specialized in, he may not know it yet. In the Java world it's becoming more and more important. I now don't hire people without at least a year of unit testing experience unless they're absolutely stellar in other regards.
A good book to start with for that is "Test-Driven Development by Example" by Beck, and for Java the "JUnit Recipes" book is handy.
Interesting! How does it compare with IntelliJ IDEA?
I've been using IntelliJ for years, and love it. Every year or so somebody talks me into trying the latest build of whatever, swearing (without haveing tried IntelliJ) that it's just as good. I've ended up disappointed so many times that I've kinda given up trying new Java tools.
However, I'd suggest you go pretty light on actually reading the books. Just get in there and build something.
Sure, you can use the books as references. I'd get O'Reilly's "Java in a Nutshell" reference, and also one or two of their Java cookbooks, so you can look at some reasonably clean example code.
But you should mainly pick a number of small projects and build them. Java is a mature platform with a lot of history and extensions for all sorts of circumstances. That can be interesting, but you'll need very little of that for a working knowledge. As you build things you'll discover which areas you really need to know more about.
I do notice a difference... between your description and reality.
You need to work on your reading skills. Let me try again with shorter words.
When scientists shatter old science ideas, they get big prizes.
When religious people challenge old religious ideas, they get kicked out of church or killed.
Clearer now? The difference is in the attitude to and rewards for new ideas that challenge old ones.
Now let's talk about the Nobel prize? Any examples of old theories being shattered?
Let's take a couple of examples I know off the top of my head.
First, physics. Send your mind back to 1900 or so, when Newtonian mechanics were the final word, and light propagated through the luminiferous aether. Everybody knew that physics was pretty much settled, and there were just a few niggling details that they were having trouble nailing down, as with the Michelson Morely experiments.
But those little niggling details actually turned out to be giant cracks. A young Swiss patent clerk published a few different papers in 1905, all with radical new explanations. He won his first Nobel prize in 1921 for one of those papers, which contained revolutionary notions on the nature of light. But today he is better known for the other papers, which overturned and extended Newtonian mechanics, discovering special and general relativity. His name is Albert Einstein. He's still held in awe today, precisely because he overturned so many old notions.
The tradition continues today. For decades, people thought stomach ulcers were due to stress and diet. It was obvious, received wisdom. Everybody knew it, and everybody was wrong. Except for one guy: Dr Barry Marshall. He suspected that they were caused by bacteria, and he later proved it, earning him the 2005 Nobel Prize.
Nowadays their awarded for "studies" not even "discoveries or inventions".
When you study something and come up with a new idea, that's called a discovery. One of the useful inventions from Marshall's work is a pill that you take to get rid of ulcers. He didn't personally invent the pill, as that takes a big team and a lot of work, and it's pretty straightforward. But Marshall showed them where to look, and the Nobel committee thinks that the breakthrough in understanding is the important part. As do scientists generally.
Scientists generally mind being wrong a lot. Who doesn't? Science, however, thrives on proving old ideas wrong. There's a big difference there.
I'd like to know why evolution isn't allowed to be countered
It's not that it isn't allowed to be countered; people are arguing about bits of it all the time. But if your counter smells like creationism, you'll indeed get short shrift.
Why? Because for decades crazy and confused people have tried to "prove" evolution wrong with bullshit, so most scientists are tired of the whole thing.
It's nothing personal. Psychics, astrologers, perpetual motion nuts, alien abductees, flat earthers, homeopaths, astral travelers, bigfoot hunters, telepaths, and homeopaths also get the contemptuous brush-off most of the time.
Perhaps you could get together with them and form a club?
I just have to sit there while people plot to destroy my city to make their political points and then once they have destroyed the city I can do what to them.
Conspiracy to commit a crime is in many cases a crime. When you have proof of that, you can arrest people. Until that point, they're just citizens.
It is the people like me, the ones you call enablers, who will have to pay the price for picking up all the garbage and repairing all the damages so the city can function again.
Your notion is that the financial costs of cleaning up after a protest are so high that it justifies preemptively arresting a wide variety of people who haven't committed crimes and most of whom won't?
By that logic, we should certainly arrest the VFW, as their memorial parade makes more of a mess than any three protests I've seen.
Cops over reacting to those couple of people and treating the entire crowd as IF they are those couple of people [...] DOES create a riot.
I don't know beans about what happened in Seattle, but I have seen cops do exactly this to crowds celebrating sports championships.
Both times, I was in big happy peaceful crowds. There were probably a few idiots up to no good, but the general mood was jubilant. But the cops kept getting edgier and pushier, until they brought out the tear gas.
I only saw my piece of it, naturally, but it seemed easily avoidable to me.
But I do want to take all controversial topics out of schools.
That somebody wants to argue about a topic shouldn't prevent students from learning about it. Evolution may be controversial among segments of the general public, but it's a cornerstone of modern biology and medicine, so it should be taught.
Also, some of the most interesting things to learn about are controversial. Some of my favorite high school classes covered current events, history, and literature. We even read the book of Job in the English Lit. class; that was certainly controversial, but even as an atheist and the child of atheists I thought it was fine.
Let's take a hot one like Sex Education.[...] "You're going to smoke crack anyway, so make sure it's safe crack."
Have you even read the curriculum of a reproductive health class? I think your understanding of what goes on has more to do with fevered imaginings than any actual knowledge.
I don't know where you live, but hereabouts parents can have their children skip that class. Wouldn't that solve your problem?
But if you have two people who love each other and marry each other as virgins, there's zero risk. So that's what I want to pass onto my children.
And by all means you should. However, from a public health perspective, that approach leads to a lot more teen pregnancies than a more thorough education.
Why can't we disagree on things like the beginning of the Universe, sexual behavior of children, etc...? Why must we try to use the school to fight our battles? You keep your secular ideas out of school, I'll keep my theistic ideas out of school. Everybody wins.
"Secular" just means "not religious". If we keep all religion out of schools and also keep anything not religious out, summer breaks are going to be pretty long.
One of the points of the first amendment is that our civil society is a secular society. You are welcome to believe whatever you want, but government may not support religion. Public education is a necessary part of democracy, so we have to have public schools, and they must stay firmly in the secular realm.
They are potential human forms which are terminated, they are aborted.
Technically, no. To abort something is to interrupt the normal sequence. If a woman is pregnant and you do nothing, you generally get a person. If you fertilize some eggs in a test tube and then do nothing, no person results.
To me, a fertilized egg doesn't really qualify as a potential new human. Or maybe it does very slightly, sort of like a prom night and a 12-pack of wine coolers does.
Fyi, there are many religious people (some who founded the USA) who are fine with opposition (aka believed strongly in religious freedom)
I'm not saying all religious people burn heretics. But to belong to a given church, there are certain dogmas you must accept or you'll be kicked out. The Catholics call this excommunication. Maybe protestants have another word for it, but at least the vast majority of them have a similar approach.
I find myself close to Voltaires position in that my belief in God is empirical.
Voltaire didn't say it was empirical, just obvious to his mind. For you, there should be a big difference: the 250 years of scientific and philosophical progress in between.
That's not to say that you're not welcome to your faith. You are. But if you're calling it empirical, you aren't very clear on how empiricism works.
Turns out that one of those branded a heretic was this guy called Jesus of Nazareth. Maybe you've heard of him?
Yeah, he would be the prince of peace whose followers spend hundreds of years burning and torturing people for disagreeing with their interpretations.
When you have industries becoming dependent on materials from abortions for research, you create a financial incentive to support abortion.
Aside from the absurdity of the notion that there are a lot of women who will suddenly decide to abort a baby based on a 10%-off coupon from Merck, I think you've got your facts wrong, too. The stem cell research I've read about harvests from IVF embryos. You have some evidence otherwise?
Religious views may be absurd to you, and the morality based on "just a book," but so is secular morality.
You're running behind on the science here. Humans have an innate moral sense, and at least some of our behaviors and judgments about "good" and "bad" are inborn. (See deWaal's "Good Natured" and Wrangham's "Demonic Males" for good intros, and there's a lot of more recent research.) An equally valid explanation is that theists and atheists are both building their moral structures on that biological foundation, which in turn is built on a few million years of experience of what works and what doesn't.
That doesn't say anything about the existence of God, naturally. He could have rigged evolution to give us a moral sense. Or he could not exist at all. But it does wreck the "you atheists are just one step away from killing babies with grapefruit spoons" arguments that you're using.
It's usually only the idiots who believe that science answers questions like "what ought we to do."
Here we mainly agree. Science tells us about what is, and to create "ought" from "is" is the naturalistic fallacy.
In the US, however, when dealing with questions of law and government policy, arguments rooted in scientific fact and secular ethics are indeed more valid than religious ones. For example, if your god tells you to kill witches (Exodus 22, I think) or that polygamy is ok (Islam, early Mormonism) then that's interesting, but not my problem as a citizen.
I doubt that would work. If you set things up so that there is an obvious and single top position, then the people who want power will keep trying to game the system.
Instead, you have to change the system so it doesn't look so much like a primate dominance hierarchy. Or at least so the parts that look like primate dominance hierarchies aren't particularly effective places to get things done.
Personally, I'd start by pushing a lot of the money and power out of the federal government and back to the states, so we have 50 high positions instead of 1. The feds can keep common defense, safeguarding rights and elections, and a lot of informational and coordinating roles. But a lot of what they now do can be done just as well by people more directly responsible to their voters.
Historically, people used to speak of "these united states" rather than "The United States". I'd love to see us get back to that.
That makes it clear why you're struggling with the topic.
The word "fact" does not mean "a notion I believe to be true". If you are having a hard time telling the difference between opinions and facts, then you will continue to have a hard time telling the difference between religion and science.
I think the left wing is being tricked by pharma into paying for something that the private sector can easily afford.
You have to think of this from two perspectives: the CEO of a pharma company, and society as a whole.
A marketable innovation in almost any field is preceded by a vast amount of basic research. Any given CEO wants to pay for marketable innovation, but isn't so interested in paying for basic research, which is expensive and a big gamble. And regardless of what research they're doing, they'll want to keep it secret, because they don't want their competitors to benefit from it.
Society on the whole, on the other hand, wants basic research to happen and to be shared. That's net cheaper, because there's less duplication. And the public research becomes the foundation for the useful products created by a much wider set of people than just those who could afford to duplicate the basic research. That means more innovation, less concentration of wealth, and product costs lowered through increased competition.
So as a society, we want to pay for just enough basic research to maximize involvement of private actors. Working out the stem-cell fundamentals seems like a great example of that, which is why I voted for the California biotech bond initiative.
Scientists put as much faith into many of their theories as do people of religion. What's wrong with the religious faith that makes you not like it but deem the scientific faith as okay?
What?
The biggest prizes in science are for people who shatter old theories and create new ones. They're called Nobel prizes. Maybe you've heard of them?
It turns out religious people have a special term for people who challenge established notions. They're called heretics. Special prizes for that? Excommunication, exile, burning, torture, and death.
Every woman dreams of the perfect "fairy princes" wedding.
You should get to know a greater variety of women. I know a number of brides who had free reign designing their weddings, and only one of them went for the fairy princess thing.
One of my favorites was a few years back. The bride loved the outdoors and had grown up near Yellowstone, but her work had kept her living in big cities during and since college. For the wedding, we all went to her parents' ranch, and from there hiked into a clearing by the river. At least for her, no cathedral could have been as glorious as that summer's day.
That's her, though. The only gift registry she and her husband used was REI. Fuck matching plates; she wanted an ice axe.
Many people defended him, because it was obvious that he wasn't getting a fair trial at first.
Many people defended OJ because it was obvious to them that he wasn't being treated fairly. The kind of "obvious" you're talking about is in the eye of the beholder.
Is it just me or does this sketch drawing for court trials seem a bit nostalgic and silly?
I kinda like it. I've never attended a trial, but I have been to a couple of federal hearings, and there is a solemnity about it that I think is important to preserve.
Our current media technologies are pretty intrusive. Cameramen jumping around for the best shot and shining lights on things are distracting. Once we can place a bunch of small, unobtrusive, fixed gear in a courtroom and get decent results, then I'm happy to get a video record of everything. But until then, I think a quiet sketch artist is just fine for most trials.
Civilised society is judged on how it treats it's prisoners and it's disabled.
Why? That sounds pretty stupid to me.
For the same reason I judge people by how they treat waitresses and secretaries. Everybody treats the powerful well; it's only when you look at how they treat the powerless that you find out what's inside of them.
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I have met lots of J2EE experts at work, who would not be able to code a "Hello World" program,
Just for those who think he's kidding:
Having people do "Hello World" on the whiteboard is one of my standard interview questions. I'm pretty good at weeding out the enterprise 'tards by resume alone, but I'm still surprised how many people are unable to write a working "Hello World" program from scratch. Maybe a third of my first-round interviewees fail this.
I understand you might not need certification, but the knowledge described there gives a good idea what you need/can put on your CV.
I'd mostly agree, but I encourage young'uns to be very careful around certification programs. Certifications might be swell if you're looking for some sort of sucky junior programming job at a bank. But if I see a bunch of Java certifications on a resume, that's a big red flag to me. The best programmers I've hired don't have certifications, they have accomplishments.
So I think it's not really a matter of being a "jack of all trades", as you put it, but keeping up with the market demands.
Along those lines, I'd strongly suggest to houbou, who posted the original question, that he learn test-driven development. Given the list of languages he has specialized in, he may not know it yet. In the Java world it's becoming more and more important. I now don't hire people without at least a year of unit testing experience unless they're absolutely stellar in other regards.
A good book to start with for that is "Test-Driven Development by Example" by Beck, and for Java the "JUnit Recipes" book is handy.
Interesting! How does it compare with IntelliJ IDEA?
I've been using IntelliJ for years, and love it. Every year or so somebody talks me into trying the latest build of whatever, swearing (without haveing tried IntelliJ) that it's just as good. I've ended up disappointed so many times that I've kinda given up trying new Java tools.
I second that recommendation.
However, I'd suggest you go pretty light on actually reading the books. Just get in there and build something.
Sure, you can use the books as references. I'd get O'Reilly's "Java in a Nutshell" reference, and also one or two of their Java cookbooks, so you can look at some reasonably clean example code.
But you should mainly pick a number of small projects and build them. Java is a mature platform with a lot of history and extensions for all sorts of circumstances. That can be interesting, but you'll need very little of that for a working knowledge. As you build things you'll discover which areas you really need to know more about.
I do notice a difference... between your description and reality.
You need to work on your reading skills. Let me try again with shorter words.
When scientists shatter old science ideas, they get big prizes.
When religious people challenge old religious ideas, they get kicked out of church or killed.
Clearer now? The difference is in the attitude to and rewards for new ideas that challenge old ones.
Now let's talk about the Nobel prize? Any examples of old theories being shattered?
Let's take a couple of examples I know off the top of my head.
First, physics. Send your mind back to 1900 or so, when Newtonian mechanics were the final word, and light propagated through the luminiferous aether. Everybody knew that physics was pretty much settled, and there were just a few niggling details that they were having trouble nailing down, as with the Michelson Morely experiments.
But those little niggling details actually turned out to be giant cracks. A young Swiss patent clerk published a few different papers in 1905, all with radical new explanations. He won his first Nobel prize in 1921 for one of those papers, which contained revolutionary notions on the nature of light. But today he is better known for the other papers, which overturned and extended Newtonian mechanics, discovering special and general relativity. His name is Albert Einstein. He's still held in awe today, precisely because he overturned so many old notions.
The tradition continues today. For decades, people thought stomach ulcers were due to stress and diet. It was obvious, received wisdom. Everybody knew it, and everybody was wrong. Except for one guy: Dr Barry Marshall. He suspected that they were caused by bacteria, and he later proved it, earning him the 2005 Nobel Prize.
Nowadays their awarded for "studies" not even "discoveries or inventions".
When you study something and come up with a new idea, that's called a discovery. One of the useful inventions from Marshall's work is a pill that you take to get rid of ulcers. He didn't personally invent the pill, as that takes a big team and a lot of work, and it's pretty straightforward. But Marshall showed them where to look, and the Nobel committee thinks that the breakthrough in understanding is the important part. As do scientists generally.
Scientists generally mind being wrong a lot. Who doesn't? Science, however, thrives on proving old ideas wrong. There's a big difference there.
I'd like to know why evolution isn't allowed to be countered
It's not that it isn't allowed to be countered; people are arguing about bits of it all the time. But if your counter smells like creationism, you'll indeed get short shrift.
Why? Because for decades crazy and confused people have tried to "prove" evolution wrong with bullshit, so most scientists are tired of the whole thing.
It's nothing personal. Psychics, astrologers, perpetual motion nuts, alien abductees, flat earthers, homeopaths, astral travelers, bigfoot hunters, telepaths, and homeopaths also get the contemptuous brush-off most of the time.
Perhaps you could get together with them and form a club?
I just have to sit there while people plot to destroy my city to make their political points and then once they have destroyed the city I can do what to them.
Conspiracy to commit a crime is in many cases a crime. When you have proof of that, you can arrest people. Until that point, they're just citizens.
It is the people like me, the ones you call enablers, who will have to pay the price for picking up all the garbage and repairing all the damages so the city can function again.
Your notion is that the financial costs of cleaning up after a protest are so high that it justifies preemptively arresting a wide variety of people who haven't committed crimes and most of whom won't?
By that logic, we should certainly arrest the VFW, as their memorial parade makes more of a mess than any three protests I've seen.
They DO NOT have the right to plant IEDs, spray urine on delegates, etc. Kudos to the police in Minnesota for busting these Stalinists.
Yes, hooray for their psychic ability to see crimes in the future and prevent them now!
Throwing urine on convention attendees is free speech?
The urine was taken from an illegal living space that had no toilet, and was occupied by people unrelated to the protesters.
Cops over reacting to those couple of people and treating the entire crowd as IF they are those couple of people [...] DOES create a riot.
I don't know beans about what happened in Seattle, but I have seen cops do exactly this to crowds celebrating sports championships.
Both times, I was in big happy peaceful crowds. There were probably a few idiots up to no good, but the general mood was jubilant. But the cops kept getting edgier and pushier, until they brought out the tear gas.
I only saw my piece of it, naturally, but it seemed easily avoidable to me.
But I do want to take all controversial topics out of schools.
That somebody wants to argue about a topic shouldn't prevent students from learning about it. Evolution may be controversial among segments of the general public, but it's a cornerstone of modern biology and medicine, so it should be taught.
Also, some of the most interesting things to learn about are controversial. Some of my favorite high school classes covered current events, history, and literature. We even read the book of Job in the English Lit. class; that was certainly controversial, but even as an atheist and the child of atheists I thought it was fine.
Let's take a hot one like Sex Education.[...] "You're going to smoke crack anyway, so make sure it's safe crack."
Have you even read the curriculum of a reproductive health class? I think your understanding of what goes on has more to do with fevered imaginings than any actual knowledge.
I don't know where you live, but hereabouts parents can have their children skip that class. Wouldn't that solve your problem?
But if you have two people who love each other and marry each other as virgins, there's zero risk. So that's what I want to pass onto my children.
And by all means you should. However, from a public health perspective, that approach leads to a lot more teen pregnancies than a more thorough education.
Why can't we disagree on things like the beginning of the Universe, sexual behavior of children, etc...? Why must we try to use the school to fight our battles? You keep your secular ideas out of school, I'll keep my theistic ideas out of school. Everybody wins.
"Secular" just means "not religious". If we keep all religion out of schools and also keep anything not religious out, summer breaks are going to be pretty long.
One of the points of the first amendment is that our civil society is a secular society. You are welcome to believe whatever you want, but government may not support religion. Public education is a necessary part of democracy, so we have to have public schools, and they must stay firmly in the secular realm.
They are potential human forms which are terminated, they are aborted.
Technically, no. To abort something is to interrupt the normal sequence. If a woman is pregnant and you do nothing, you generally get a person. If you fertilize some eggs in a test tube and then do nothing, no person results.
To me, a fertilized egg doesn't really qualify as a potential new human. Or maybe it does very slightly, sort of like a prom night and a 12-pack of wine coolers does.
If one follows that route of logic too far, pretty soon a woman's uterus becomes a crime scene if she has a miscarriage.
You're not thinking big enough. According to the Christian Coalition, life begins when the woman's bra strap is unhooked.
Fyi, there are many religious people (some who founded the USA) who are fine with opposition (aka believed strongly in religious freedom)
I'm not saying all religious people burn heretics. But to belong to a given church, there are certain dogmas you must accept or you'll be kicked out. The Catholics call this excommunication. Maybe protestants have another word for it, but at least the vast majority of them have a similar approach.
I find myself close to Voltaires position in that my belief in God is empirical.
Voltaire didn't say it was empirical, just obvious to his mind. For you, there should be a big difference: the 250 years of scientific and philosophical progress in between.
That's not to say that you're not welcome to your faith. You are. But if you're calling it empirical, you aren't very clear on how empiricism works.
Turns out that one of those branded a heretic was this guy called Jesus of Nazareth. Maybe you've heard of him?
Yeah, he would be the prince of peace whose followers spend hundreds of years burning and torturing people for disagreeing with their interpretations.
When you have industries becoming dependent on materials from abortions for research, you create a financial incentive to support abortion.
Aside from the absurdity of the notion that there are a lot of women who will suddenly decide to abort a baby based on a 10%-off coupon from Merck, I think you've got your facts wrong, too. The stem cell research I've read about harvests from IVF embryos. You have some evidence otherwise?
Religious views may be absurd to you, and the morality based on "just a book," but so is secular morality.
You're running behind on the science here. Humans have an innate moral sense, and at least some of our behaviors and judgments about "good" and "bad" are inborn. (See deWaal's "Good Natured" and Wrangham's "Demonic Males" for good intros, and there's a lot of more recent research.) An equally valid explanation is that theists and atheists are both building their moral structures on that biological foundation, which in turn is built on a few million years of experience of what works and what doesn't.
That doesn't say anything about the existence of God, naturally. He could have rigged evolution to give us a moral sense. Or he could not exist at all. But it does wreck the "you atheists are just one step away from killing babies with grapefruit spoons" arguments that you're using.
It's usually only the idiots who believe that science answers questions like "what ought we to do."
Here we mainly agree. Science tells us about what is, and to create "ought" from "is" is the naturalistic fallacy.
In the US, however, when dealing with questions of law and government policy, arguments rooted in scientific fact and secular ethics are indeed more valid than religious ones. For example, if your god tells you to kill witches (Exodus 22, I think) or that polygamy is ok (Islam, early Mormonism) then that's interesting, but not my problem as a citizen.
What we need is an electoral lottery.
I doubt that would work. If you set things up so that there is an obvious and single top position, then the people who want power will keep trying to game the system.
Instead, you have to change the system so it doesn't look so much like a primate dominance hierarchy. Or at least so the parts that look like primate dominance hierarchies aren't particularly effective places to get things done.
Personally, I'd start by pushing a lot of the money and power out of the federal government and back to the states, so we have 50 high positions instead of 1. The feds can keep common defense, safeguarding rights and elections, and a lot of informational and coordinating roles. But a lot of what they now do can be done just as well by people more directly responsible to their voters.
Historically, people used to speak of "these united states" rather than "The United States". I'd love to see us get back to that.
I stated a fact that someone didn't like.
That makes it clear why you're struggling with the topic.
The word "fact" does not mean "a notion I believe to be true". If you are having a hard time telling the difference between opinions and facts, then you will continue to have a hard time telling the difference between religion and science.
I think the left wing is being tricked by pharma into paying for something that the private sector can easily afford.
You have to think of this from two perspectives: the CEO of a pharma company, and society as a whole.
A marketable innovation in almost any field is preceded by a vast amount of basic research. Any given CEO wants to pay for marketable innovation, but isn't so interested in paying for basic research, which is expensive and a big gamble. And regardless of what research they're doing, they'll want to keep it secret, because they don't want their competitors to benefit from it.
Society on the whole, on the other hand, wants basic research to happen and to be shared. That's net cheaper, because there's less duplication. And the public research becomes the foundation for the useful products created by a much wider set of people than just those who could afford to duplicate the basic research. That means more innovation, less concentration of wealth, and product costs lowered through increased competition.
So as a society, we want to pay for just enough basic research to maximize involvement of private actors. Working out the stem-cell fundamentals seems like a great example of that, which is why I voted for the California biotech bond initiative.
Scientists put as much faith into many of their theories as do people of religion. What's wrong with the religious faith that makes you not like it but deem the scientific faith as okay?
What?
The biggest prizes in science are for people who shatter old theories and create new ones. They're called Nobel prizes. Maybe you've heard of them?
It turns out religious people have a special term for people who challenge established notions. They're called heretics. Special prizes for that? Excommunication, exile, burning, torture, and death.
Notice any difference here?
Every woman dreams of the perfect "fairy princes" wedding.
You should get to know a greater variety of women. I know a number of brides who had free reign designing their weddings, and only one of them went for the fairy princess thing.
One of my favorites was a few years back. The bride loved the outdoors and had grown up near Yellowstone, but her work had kept her living in big cities during and since college. For the wedding, we all went to her parents' ranch, and from there hiked into a clearing by the river. At least for her, no cathedral could have been as glorious as that summer's day.
That's her, though. The only gift registry she and her husband used was REI. Fuck matching plates; she wanted an ice axe.
Many people defended him, because it was obvious that he wasn't getting a fair trial at first.
Many people defended OJ because it was obvious to them that he wasn't being treated fairly. The kind of "obvious" you're talking about is in the eye of the beholder.
Is it just me or does this sketch drawing for court trials seem a bit nostalgic and silly?
I kinda like it. I've never attended a trial, but I have been to a couple of federal hearings, and there is a solemnity about it that I think is important to preserve.
Our current media technologies are pretty intrusive. Cameramen jumping around for the best shot and shining lights on things are distracting. Once we can place a bunch of small, unobtrusive, fixed gear in a courtroom and get decent results, then I'm happy to get a video record of everything. But until then, I think a quiet sketch artist is just fine for most trials.
Civilised society is judged on how it treats it's prisoners and it's disabled.
Why? That sounds pretty stupid to me.
For the same reason I judge people by how they treat waitresses and secretaries. Everybody treats the powerful well; it's only when you look at how they treat the powerless that you find out what's inside of them.