I'm sick and tired of paid agents who work for Apple Computer coming here and spreading LIES about Microsoft's API.
Me too. If you find any, you let me know.
While Windows 95 didn't implement copy-on-write, EVERY MICROSOFT OPERATING SYSTEM since then does, and Windows NT had it even earlier (1992). (IIRC, in 1995 Macintosh didn't even have virtual memory!)
Well, son of a gun. You're right that XP does have copy-on-write. You're wrong about everything other than 95, though, as 95, 98, and ME all lacked copy-on-write.
I guess it just took until two years ago for Cygwin to get copy-on-write fork(). [shrug]
For Windows XP, there are even more options. You can map ALL of Posix onto Win-32 with no problems.
No kidding? May I ask how you've convinced cygwin to handle mkfifo()?
This is called process migration. It's a common feature of distributed systems. A Beowulf cluster can do this.
What this guy means is that in 2007, Windows might be able to do something that has been done on Linux for years. Damned if I know why he chose to use this for an argument against Linux.
I ran Linux in the early days, and stopped because I couldn't get the performance I needed for high-end network tasks.
You're a bit behind the times, then.
When Windows XP came out, I discovered I could run nearly all of the Unix stuff I used to with cygwin
I've used cygwin. It's an amazing technical accomplishment, but frankly, using it sucks compared to being on an *IX box. It's quite slow (possibly because Windows lacks copy on write?)
Windows API had everything I needed.
Well, yeah, I'll buy that. What platform API lacks something that you need?
I really like the way Windows Update works (no kidding!); it's much easire than applying patches and recompiling.
Then you'll *love* any of the modern binary package distribution systems on Linux, like apt, yum, or yup, all of which don't require any recompiling to get updates, work across your *entire system* instead of just on Windows itself, actually have a concept of dependencies (Windows Update lets you break dependencies by installing things in the "improper" order), are fast and can be scripted or automated, and can be easily set up to run off local mirrors.
And, of course, there are tons of applications available.
There's an awful lot of software available for Linux, too. What functionality hole are you trying to fill?
But what really did it for me was the.NET architecture. Microsoft's C# and.NET, combined with Visual Studio are by far the best programming environment I've ever used.
I can't comment -- I haven't used C# or.NET, though I've used Visual Studio and was pretty underwhelmed -- I can't figure out why so many Windows developers rave about it.
Could you give any specifics as to why you like.NET so much?
Linux is here to stay, and in my opinion will be around 10 years from now, 50 and 100 years.
I dunno about Linux itself -- it's not impossible that someone, maybe a researcher, will redesign OSes from the ground up. Or that a move to closed platforms will allow control over the OS (say, WebTV or X-Box gradually replacing PCs in people's houses).
But operating systems on general purpose computers will be open source from now on. That's just how things will work. It's a one way door, and it has too much drive, is too hard to stop, and provides too many benefits for people to reject.
I help out with some of the college recruiting things and you wouldn't believe the number of people who want to come to a CS degree for game programming. Just because there isn't the big $$ involved all the time doesn't mean people are still coming to CS degrees for the wrong reasons.
Nothing wrong with game programming. People just need to realize that:
* The pay can suck.
* The hours can really suck.
* For many genres of game, you will *hate* playing your game after you're done making it because you know it inside and out. If you get on the next Final Fantasy team, that just means that you can never again enjoy a Final Fantasy game.
* You better like matrix math. A lot.
* You will be working in a field that generally does't have a whole lot of regard for maintainability, cleanliness, or neat design, because game code becomes obsolete in the blink of an eye.
* Most of your projects will be commercial failures, just because of the Hollywood-style hit-or-miss environment of game development (even more so with games, because they're so long and people don't have time to play many games a year).
* You will not design games right away. If you stay in the industry for a number of years, you may have increasing amount of influence over design and eventually become the guiding hand over younger people. You don't get to say "It would be cool to have a bunch of camel people attack the princess and you have to spend a level flying on a rug after her." No, somebody else will tell you what to make, and you will make it.
I think the "I want to develop games" thing is like the "I want to become an actress" meme. People look at some form of entertainment, say "gee, that's fun", and want to do it every day. Kinda like being a white-water rafting guide, it's not like being on vacation every day.
Those that do come into the program for this usually end up dropping out or switching to a non-engineering major because they want to PLAY games all the time and not do the stuff like algorithm design and analysis that the CS degree requires.
Well...I agree that too many people in the game industry spend lots of time playing games. However, Bungie probably added six months onto their release of Marathon by just playing network games of Marathon while it was in development, and they still came out okay (well, aside from becoming part of the Empire).
Although students need to realize that there's other ways to be successful than just by going to medical school and making six figures, etc. Today's undergrads also want the easy way out - they want a simple degree program that they graduate and start making money. Graduate school turns them off because they can't make money fast enough. Perhaps if we told them that if they went to graduate school in chemistry, they'd learn how to make their own beer, that might help (then again, beer brewing hardly requires a graduate education - it's rather trivial).
Did you ever consider that perhaps the flaw is not in the students, but in the system that forces them to grub for grants for the rest of their lives if they choose to stick with academia?
Perhaps if more money was earmarked for research, if we had a large national, centralized research program where researchers got a base income and then could get bonuses for work that has an impact, we'd see more people interested in going into research. As long as CEOs are the ones who are rewarded most highly, guess what people will idolize?
This is especially funny because Andrea Archangeli, the guy that wrote the current Linux virtual memory system and one of Linus's lieutenants, has no degree.
Could be the case for other people, but I just happened to look him up.
What's needed is something like a controversy metric that is the degree to which ratings conflict.
That's extremely interesting, and something that I hadn't thought of -- I've recently been working on various ideas for evaluating data. And this is new. A wide spread of evaluation may itself be useful data. Hmm.
One thing that I *would* like to see is the elimination of the absolute score, the "this is a good post and this is a bad post". We should try to approximate the "this is a good post from my point of view" measurement. Some people *like* reading GNAA posts, and others don't mind people being offtopic. We have very rudimentary tools (adjusting the score on offtopic or troll), but because of the expectation that people put on scores assigned, that often doesn't work -- people will mark something that is both troll and offtopic as offtopic or troll.
I'd rather see people with infinite moderation points, but a "trust" metric based on how frequently their moderations conincide with your own (and perhaps a few more factors -- like if they always mod one person up and you mod them down, to distrust them with respect to that one person).
American society does reward self-starters who have good ideas and are able to put them into practice. It also rewards average people who are willing to keep their heads down and their nose to the grindstone and work for the above mentioned people.
You know, I've read Paula Volsky's fantasy novels. The main thing she does is deal with trying to let you get inside the head of people with an aristocratic mindset. And I'm *damned* if what you're saying here doesn't sound a whole hell of a lot like the opinion of the nobles in her stories.
That doesn't mean that the person that you're criticizing is right, but it's not as easy to brush off as that.
If money helps get your children a degree, and a degree helps get you money, you *do* have a de facto aristocracy.
That doesn't mean that aristocracies are bad, that the Founding Fathers are always right, that we aren't just confusing two different definitions or being irrational. It just means that I don't think the fact that the grandparent is disturbing means that he's wrong.
I've always been a bit dubious about the value of a masters.
The people who are really, really into the science for the sake of it and just get swept along in academia generally get a PhD.
The people who care less about their job title run out and get a BS or nothing.
A masters will get you a better job title, and if you get the pleasure of working in a field that is covered by your thesis (I suspect that there were probably a lot of people that did a masters on, say, search engine technology and then ran off to go join.com startups), you know the area.
However, while the set is small, I've been stunningly unimpressed by many (though not all) of the masters students I've run into.
I think you'll do a better job of finding competent theory geeks by grabbing random people in the CS theory USENET newsgroups or similar forums than by judging them based on their degree, and when it comes to general purpose programming, the degree doesn't matter all that much. System design -- making a new distributed system or creating a new database design -- that might have some good degree correlation. For pure research positions, it makes sense to look for PhDs.
FWIW, there are a few computer scientists out there that can barely, if at all, program.
And there are plenty of programmers that have only the barest rudiments of computer science.
That being said, people that understand one field well often do well in the other, because their knowledge is handy.-
Deciding whether you like CS, IT, or programming/software development is easy. Read a bunch of research papers on topics that you've poked at -- routing algorithms, image recognition algorithms, that sort of thing. If you get excited about the algorithm design, and would like to write papers like that research paper for a living, computer science is the way to go. If you get a CS degree, it won't hurt you if you end up programming, but you'll spend time learning a lot of things that you'll never use (like formal proofs of correctness and the like).
If you like writing software, you probably like programming.
If you like setting up and maintaining computers, you probably like IT.
Frankly, I think that most people like some mix of the above, and that the field breakdown is very artificial, but that's the way life is.
I attended Carnegie Mellon University, which, when it comes to computer science, is fairly non-Bumfuck-State-College. And I pretty much with the guy that said that there are only five courses that you really need.
I'd say that the statement here is not far off -- if you've been interested and dicking around in computer science for well before your college years, there's only so much that you're going to pick up.
I'd say that the really useful stuff that I took was:
* 15-129 -- forget the name, the first time I'd ever run into the concept of dealing with software in a theoretically rigorous manner. Before I was made to do so in college, I pretty much thought in terms of applications.
* Prof. Steven Rudich's 15-251 class, "Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science". Prof. Rudich is big on giving you all the data that you need to figure out some fundamental, often famous discovery in computer science, and then giving you an assignment that requires that you make and understand that discovery yourself. It is probably the most mentally tasking course that you can take as a CS undergraduate at CMU. It really makes you learn to think differently, to sit down and methodically and logically break down a problem to its bare components. Until the day that they make him water this down, it will continue to be an excellent class.
* 15-212, forget the name. I wasn't a tremendous fan of the people teaching it, but the content was important. A lot of people probably take this kind of class in a LISP variant at some universities -- CMU does it in SML becasue of the invented here syndrom. This introduced me to the concept of functional programming and to the extent of what could be done with static type systems.
* 15-312 deals with building interpreters and virtual machines. More formal analysis of operations of languages, proof of correctness of optimizations and the like.
Aside from that, college may provide a pleasant environment that makes you keep to a rough schedule, which makes it easier to keep studying things, but there isn't that much that you couldn't pick up yourself by reading up on stuff. Other undergrad classes up there include 15-213, which is the introductory systems course, and is nothing that you won't pick up just from hacking around, Networks (whatever the number is, unfortunately was a complete joke, and mostly toned down to allow all the less-interested-in-CS-people that CMU had been allowing in to pass their project course requirement). Operating Systems is a lot of work because you have a fair amount of code to write, but it's not very theoretically difficult if you've been dicking around with operating systems and reading about them before and know paging and synchronization concepts. Same goes for Compilers -- there's nothing theoretically hard about the class, just implementation work to do. Databases -- same thing. You already learned the concepts you need and formed the mental structures required in lower level classes. Really, all of CMU's 400 level classes are pretty easy, just using what you've already learned. There were a bunch of other classes, but I think I mentioned the big ones.
"Liberal arts easy A stuff" may be a bit strong of a description, but there just is only so much tough theory that you'll have thrown at you, stuff that makes you remold your mind and thinking processes.
I can see only one title that will capture the dignity and honor of our scientific discipline. In honor of Alan Turing, one of the greatest luminaries of our discipline, I propose that the field of study now known as "Computer Science" be forever known as "Turism." Computer Scientists would be known, of course, as "Turists." We could call ourselves New Men, but this might be seen as discriminatory against our female colleagues. I think this will put a stop to the confusion whenever I explain my field of study. Proud Turist.
As enlightened as I find this, I think that if you're going to try to sell everyone renaming themselves after a gay man and calling themselves "New Men", you're going to have some difficulty convincing the public of the merit of your idea.
If your god is an indian who turns into a wolf and is coming for me with a razor, how it s/he planning to use it? Wouldn't they lack the opposible thumb to properly utilize the razor?
I think that the statement that he could turn into a wolf was more of an aside than a claim that he'd actually do so before whipping out his razor. Like, I can write software and out-arm-wrestle a lot of people, but it'd be really inconvenient to do both at once.
A good analogy might be a Special Forces guy who can shoot someone at 500 meters and kill someone with his bare hands, but not at the same time.
Oh, come on. Let him enjoy his glory. Scientists and engineers don't get nearly enough time to gloat -- you have people like Michael Jackson and Britney Spears and Princess Diana in the news, not the guy that just invented a new chemical process at DuPont. Let him live it up.
The most obvious question is whether the money spent doing whatever we do in space would do more good on earth. I'd bet AIDS research could use a few more billions. I'm glad NASA, and others, are starting to explore ways to encourage private investment in space technology.
And many, many years ago:
Tharg: "Ogg stop playing with rolly wheel-things! Come hunt mammoth! Do more with time!"
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sick and tired of paid agents who work for Apple Computer coming here and spreading LIES about Microsoft's API.
Me too. If you find any, you let me know.
While Windows 95 didn't implement copy-on-write, EVERY MICROSOFT OPERATING SYSTEM since then does, and Windows NT had it even earlier (1992). (IIRC, in 1995 Macintosh didn't even have virtual memory!)
Well, son of a gun. You're right that XP does have copy-on-write. You're wrong about everything other than 95, though, as 95, 98, and ME all lacked copy-on-write.
I guess it just took until two years ago for Cygwin to get copy-on-write fork(). [shrug]
For Windows XP, there are even more options. You can map ALL of Posix onto Win-32 with no problems.
No kidding? May I ask how you've convinced cygwin to handle mkfifo()?
This is called process migration. It's a common feature of distributed systems. A Beowulf cluster can do this.
What this guy means is that in 2007, Windows might be able to do something that has been done on Linux for years. Damned if I know why he chose to use this for an argument against Linux.
I ran Linux in the early days, and stopped because I couldn't get the performance I needed for high-end network tasks.
.NET architecture. Microsoft's C# and .NET, combined with Visual Studio are by far the best programming environment I've ever used.
.NET, though I've used Visual Studio and was pretty underwhelmed -- I can't figure out why so many Windows developers rave about it.
.NET so much?
You're a bit behind the times, then.
When Windows XP came out, I discovered I could run nearly all of the Unix stuff I used to with cygwin
I've used cygwin. It's an amazing technical accomplishment, but frankly, using it sucks compared to being on an *IX box. It's quite slow (possibly because Windows lacks copy on write?)
Windows API had everything I needed.
Well, yeah, I'll buy that. What platform API lacks something that you need?
I really like the way Windows Update works (no kidding!); it's much easire than applying patches and recompiling.
Then you'll *love* any of the modern binary package distribution systems on Linux, like apt, yum, or yup, all of which don't require any recompiling to get updates, work across your *entire system* instead of just on Windows itself, actually have a concept of dependencies (Windows Update lets you break dependencies by installing things in the "improper" order), are fast and can be scripted or automated, and can be easily set up to run off local mirrors.
And, of course, there are tons of applications available.
There's an awful lot of software available for Linux, too. What functionality hole are you trying to fill?
But what really did it for me was the
I can't comment -- I haven't used C# or
Could you give any specifics as to why you like
Linux is here to stay, and in my opinion will be around 10 years from now, 50 and 100 years.
I dunno about Linux itself -- it's not impossible that someone, maybe a researcher, will redesign OSes from the ground up. Or that a move to closed platforms will allow control over the OS (say, WebTV or X-Box gradually replacing PCs in people's houses).
But operating systems on general purpose computers will be open source from now on. That's just how things will work. It's a one way door, and it has too much drive, is too hard to stop, and provides too many benefits for people to reject.
I help out with some of the college recruiting things and you wouldn't believe the number of people who want to come to a CS degree for game programming. Just because there isn't the big $$ involved all the time doesn't mean people are still coming to CS degrees for the wrong reasons.
Nothing wrong with game programming. People just need to realize that:
* The pay can suck.
* The hours can really suck.
* For many genres of game, you will *hate* playing your game after you're done making it because you know it inside and out. If you get on the next Final Fantasy team, that just means that you can never again enjoy a Final Fantasy game.
* You better like matrix math. A lot.
* You will be working in a field that generally does't have a whole lot of regard for maintainability, cleanliness, or neat design, because game code becomes obsolete in the blink of an eye.
* Most of your projects will be commercial failures, just because of the Hollywood-style hit-or-miss environment of game development (even more so with games, because they're so long and people don't have time to play many games a year).
* You will not design games right away. If you stay in the industry for a number of years, you may have increasing amount of influence over design and eventually become the guiding hand over younger people. You don't get to say "It would be cool to have a bunch of camel people attack the princess and you have to spend a level flying on a rug after her." No, somebody else will tell you what to make, and you will make it.
I think the "I want to develop games" thing is like the "I want to become an actress" meme. People look at some form of entertainment, say "gee, that's fun", and want to do it every day. Kinda like being a white-water rafting guide, it's not like being on vacation every day.
Those that do come into the program for this usually end up dropping out or switching to a non-engineering major because they want to PLAY games all the time and not do the stuff like algorithm design and analysis that the CS degree requires.
Well...I agree that too many people in the game industry spend lots of time playing games. However, Bungie probably added six months onto their release of Marathon by just playing network games of Marathon while it was in development, and they still came out okay (well, aside from becoming part of the Empire).
Maybe you should think before you bash...
Think before you csh. Bash should be the default.
The US population is more productive. They achieve more with less.
For instance, being productive by trolling on Slashdot.
getting abused by out-of-work slashdotters
It's kind of like being Bill Gates, eh?
Although students need to realize that there's other ways to be successful than just by going to medical school and making six figures, etc. Today's undergrads also want the easy way out - they want a simple degree program that they graduate and start making money. Graduate school turns them off because they can't make money fast enough. Perhaps if we told them that if they went to graduate school in chemistry, they'd learn how to make their own beer, that might help (then again, beer brewing hardly requires a graduate education - it's rather trivial).
Did you ever consider that perhaps the flaw is not in the students, but in the system that forces them to grub for grants for the rest of their lives if they choose to stick with academia?
Perhaps if more money was earmarked for research, if we had a large national, centralized research program where researchers got a base income and then could get bonuses for work that has an impact, we'd see more people interested in going into research. As long as CEOs are the ones who are rewarded most highly, guess what people will idolize?
This is especially funny because Andrea Archangeli, the guy that wrote the current Linux virtual memory system and one of Linus's lieutenants, has no degree.
Could be the case for other people, but I just happened to look him up.
Went to a pricy college that's internationally known, eh?
What's needed is something like a controversy metric that is the degree to which ratings conflict.
That's extremely interesting, and something that I hadn't thought of -- I've recently been working on various ideas for evaluating data. And this is new. A wide spread of evaluation may itself be useful data. Hmm.
One thing that I *would* like to see is the elimination of the absolute score, the "this is a good post and this is a bad post". We should try to approximate the "this is a good post from my point of view" measurement. Some people *like* reading GNAA posts, and others don't mind people being offtopic. We have very rudimentary tools (adjusting the score on offtopic or troll), but because of the expectation that people put on scores assigned, that often doesn't work -- people will mark something that is both troll and offtopic as offtopic or troll.
I'd rather see people with infinite moderation points, but a "trust" metric based on how frequently their moderations conincide with your own (and perhaps a few more factors -- like if they always mod one person up and you mod them down, to distrust them with respect to that one person).
American society does reward self-starters who have good ideas and are able to put them into practice. It also rewards average people who are willing to keep their heads down and their nose to the grindstone and work for the above mentioned people.
You know, I've read Paula Volsky's fantasy novels. The main thing she does is deal with trying to let you get inside the head of people with an aristocratic mindset. And I'm *damned* if what you're saying here doesn't sound a whole hell of a lot like the opinion of the nobles in her stories.
That doesn't mean that the person that you're criticizing is right, but it's not as easy to brush off as that.
If money helps get your children a degree, and a degree helps get you money, you *do* have a de facto aristocracy.
That doesn't mean that aristocracies are bad, that the Founding Fathers are always right, that we aren't just confusing two different definitions or being irrational. It just means that I don't think the fact that the grandparent is disturbing means that he's wrong.
I may not agree with what you say, but at least it's thought-provoking and a fresh look at things. Thank you.
I've always been a bit dubious about the value of a masters.
.com startups), you know the area.
The people who are really, really into the science for the sake of it and just get swept along in academia generally get a PhD.
The people who care less about their job title run out and get a BS or nothing.
A masters will get you a better job title, and if you get the pleasure of working in a field that is covered by your thesis (I suspect that there were probably a lot of people that did a masters on, say, search engine technology and then ran off to go join
However, while the set is small, I've been stunningly unimpressed by many (though not all) of the masters students I've run into.
I think you'll do a better job of finding competent theory geeks by grabbing random people in the CS theory USENET newsgroups or similar forums than by judging them based on their degree, and when it comes to general purpose programming, the degree doesn't matter all that much. System design -- making a new distributed system or creating a new database design -- that might have some good degree correlation. For pure research positions, it makes sense to look for PhDs.
FWIW, there are a few computer scientists out there that can barely, if at all, program.
And there are plenty of programmers that have only the barest rudiments of computer science.
That being said, people that understand one field well often do well in the other, because their knowledge is handy.-
Deciding whether you like CS, IT, or programming/software development is easy. Read a bunch of research papers on topics that you've poked at -- routing algorithms, image recognition algorithms, that sort of thing. If you get excited about the algorithm design, and would like to write papers like that research paper for a living, computer science is the way to go. If you get a CS degree, it won't hurt you if you end up programming, but you'll spend time learning a lot of things that you'll never use (like formal proofs of correctness and the like).
If you like writing software, you probably like programming.
If you like setting up and maintaining computers, you probably like IT.
Frankly, I think that most people like some mix of the above, and that the field breakdown is very artificial, but that's the way life is.
I attended Carnegie Mellon University, which, when it comes to computer science, is fairly non-Bumfuck-State-College. And I pretty much with the guy that said that there are only five courses that you really need.
I'd say that the statement here is not far off -- if you've been interested and dicking around in computer science for well before your college years, there's only so much that you're going to pick up.
I'd say that the really useful stuff that I took was:
* 15-129 -- forget the name, the first time I'd ever run into the concept of dealing with software in a theoretically rigorous manner. Before I was made to do so in college, I pretty much thought in terms of applications.
* Prof. Steven Rudich's 15-251 class, "Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science". Prof. Rudich is big on giving you all the data that you need to figure out some fundamental, often famous discovery in computer science, and then giving you an assignment that requires that you make and understand that discovery yourself. It is probably the most mentally tasking course that you can take as a CS undergraduate at CMU. It really makes you learn to think differently, to sit down and methodically and logically break down a problem to its bare components. Until the day that they make him water this down, it will continue to be an excellent class.
* 15-212, forget the name. I wasn't a tremendous fan of the people teaching it, but the content was important. A lot of people probably take this kind of class in a LISP variant at some universities -- CMU does it in SML becasue of the invented here syndrom. This introduced me to the concept of functional programming and to the extent of what could be done with static type systems.
* 15-312 deals with building interpreters and virtual machines. More formal analysis of operations of languages, proof of correctness of optimizations and the like.
Aside from that, college may provide a pleasant environment that makes you keep to a rough schedule, which makes it easier to keep studying things, but there isn't that much that you couldn't pick up yourself by reading up on stuff. Other undergrad classes up there include 15-213, which is the introductory systems course, and is nothing that you won't pick up just from hacking around, Networks (whatever the number is, unfortunately was a complete joke, and mostly toned down to allow all the less-interested-in-CS-people that CMU had been allowing in to pass their project course requirement). Operating Systems is a lot of work because you have a fair amount of code to write, but it's not very theoretically difficult if you've been dicking around with operating systems and reading about them before and know paging and synchronization concepts. Same goes for Compilers -- there's nothing theoretically hard about the class, just implementation work to do. Databases -- same thing. You already learned the concepts you need and formed the mental structures required in lower level classes. Really, all of CMU's 400 level classes are pretty easy, just using what you've already learned. There were a bunch of other classes, but I think I mentioned the big ones.
"Liberal arts easy A stuff" may be a bit strong of a description, but there just is only so much tough theory that you'll have thrown at you, stuff that makes you remold your mind and thinking processes.
I can see only one title that will capture the dignity and honor of our scientific discipline. In honor of Alan Turing, one of the greatest luminaries of our discipline, I propose that the field of study now known as "Computer Science" be forever known as "Turism." Computer Scientists would be known, of course, as "Turists." We could call ourselves New Men, but this might be seen as discriminatory against our female colleagues. I think this will put a stop to the confusion whenever I explain my field of study. Proud Turist.
As enlightened as I find this, I think that if you're going to try to sell everyone renaming themselves after a gay man and calling themselves "New Men", you're going to have some difficulty convincing the public of the merit of your idea.
I'm 46 and been programming since I was 15 years old. Not once have I ever been bored or regretted being a computer programmer.
Every now and then, it's nice to get a little perspective and worldly wisdom from people. Thank you.
Damn drunken astrophysicists. Affeciandos of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy know how much trouble they are.
If your god is an indian who turns into a wolf and is coming for me with a razor, how it s/he planning to use it? Wouldn't they lack the opposible thumb to properly utilize the razor?
I think that the statement that he could turn into a wolf was more of an aside than a claim that he'd actually do so before whipping out his razor. Like, I can write software and out-arm-wrestle a lot of people, but it'd be really inconvenient to do both at once.
A good analogy might be a Special Forces guy who can shoot someone at 500 meters and kill someone with his bare hands, but not at the same time.
Oh, come on. Let him enjoy his glory. Scientists and engineers don't get nearly enough time to gloat -- you have people like Michael Jackson and Britney Spears and Princess Diana in the news, not the guy that just invented a new chemical process at DuPont. Let him live it up.
Uh, I doubt it. I don't think that there are a lot of hard-core Democratics on here, percentagewise.
There *are* a lot of people that don't like (a) religious conservativism squashing science and sanity and (b) Bush.
The Demms just enjoy a lot of "the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend".
"Such *a* device"?
The US has *lots* of spy satellites.
The most obvious question is whether the money spent doing whatever we do in space would do more good on earth. I'd bet AIDS research could use a few more billions. I'm glad NASA, and others, are starting to explore ways to encourage private investment in space technology.
And many, many years ago:
Tharg: "Ogg stop playing with rolly wheel-things! Come hunt mammoth! Do more with time!"