...and that is why I keep a strict "complex is wrong" policy when it comes to code. We all wrote nail-bitingly clever code in all-nighters. But we all also had our problems to understand the same code a year or so later.
I once had an argument with one of my coders when I replaced something complex and propably efficient with something simple and definitely not efficient. I told him that even though what I wrote was O(n^2) it didn't matter. Especially when n=10. I really hate it when people optimize the wrong bits of code and leave a mess in the process. Or if they read the wrong book and suddenly use every single design pattern for what would otherwise have been 50 lines of straight forward code. Or try to bypass our company framework in a case which is not covered by it. In most cases they simply wanted to try something unnessesary clever.
We only have overtime about once or twice per year and employee and I'd like to keep it that way.
I usually find that if the company in question doesn't think refactoring is part of the ongoing house keeping process then you will propably encounter bad code. If you explain that if you need a change or a new feature the best approach most likely is to refactor the code until it is easy to implement AND their reaction is to ask why to touch perfectly running code then you are screwed.
If running extensive unit tests are not part of the build process then you are propably screwed.
These cases don't mean you don't want the job. On the contrary. You want the job plus the stripes to change their development process for the better. And that, friends, neighbours and fellow geeks is how we formerly simple coders made the transition into management. Not to whine about something is bad but to offer a solution and take the responsibility(and the paycheck) how to make things better.
The only problem I have with.NET is that we find ourselves constantly in a situation where we have to buy libs and components that are absolutely Free for Java. .NET severely lacks organizations like the Apache group. And in some cases freedom of choice. There is 3rd party support. But not as much and under the same conditions as for Java.
But he didn't get shot "for buying iced tea." It's amazing that you can look at the facts and mis-interpret them deliberately in order to come up with what is easily proved to be a bald-faced lie.
Well,if you put words in my mouth and complain about what they mean just to call me a liar then imagination fails me as to what I should call you.
Here's what I said: ...a kid got shot buying ice tea.
And here is what you say I said: ...shot for buying icetea
Accusing me of dishonesty while acting like you just did is a bit rich.
Funny. I was under the impression it became national and international news because a kid got shot buying ice tea. And because there was no proper police investigation. There was a very belated public outcry, a belated investigation and a resignation.
Now a national shame is a cause celebrée and the shootist a modern day Alfred Drefus? Does that make right-wing pundits the equivalent of the intellectual circle which was rallied behind the words "J'accuse"?
Monsieur Zola, I presume?
Dawkins usually is snarky, humorous and witty. I never really have seen him scream, shout or froth from the mouth.
That seems to be the standard reaction of those on the opposite of the table. I would SERIOUSLY suggest that you look up his TED talks since they seem to be quite representative of the man.
Whatever the case we have in the past been non-confrontational and that got us into this ID mess. Science is NOT a democratic process. You do NOT get a vote on what we found. It simply doesn't work this way. The popular press also isn't very helpful since it tries to present both sides of the argument as having merit and the truth lies somewhere inbetween. Again, this is NOT a political process where this might apply.
From a scientific standpoint Creationism and ID has no merit whatsoever. And frankly the time we spend arguing about it could be better spent by drinking a pint, taking the dog for a walk or search for a cure fro cancer.
We argue about this because we just escaped the dark ages and we have no inclination to be dragged back again. Unfortunately this breed of lazy thinking seems to be a renewable resource.
Hm. So quite a lot of people AREN'T represented by the Repubmocrats. There's a shock.
Speaking as a German(who is not represented by the German Green Party; I only get 50% matches with them) I'm a bit surprised that these sort of matching sites aren't more common. Possibly one major obstacle is that it can be at times hard to pinpoint where parties stand on specific issues. The sheer amount of backpedalling we have seen over the last year or so makes that not easy at all. Parties aren't as homogenous as you'd hope they'd be.
We have had the "wahl-o-mat"(vote-o-mat) for over 10 years and I have used it extensively. It gets quite a lot of exposure in the media but should propably be used much more.
Actually it is infinite regress, circular reasoning and dogma. Those are the major obstacles on the way to absolute certainty.
The scientific method drudges down the arduous road of infinite regress until it happily stops at the principle of sufficient reason. Which is obviously a bit wooly. This is why you will never get ABSOLUTE and IRREFUTABLE certainty out of science and why theories get refined and refined and possibly overthrown time and time again. But that is a better option than simply stopping at dogma.
Otherwise we still would believe the sun orbits the earth.
Does he mindlessly cling onto islamic dogma or can he live with things that contradict it? If he doesn't have a problem with that then I'd say he is propably fine and doesn't need any help.
Those that mindlessly cling to dogma on the other hand propably are beyond help and need to be kept out of education so they don't spread their disease any further. Mind you, religion doesn't have a monopoly on that. So I'm not proposing to keep religious folk or religious teaching out of education. Just the bullet-headed kind.
I'll go with the illogical and irrational explanation, thank you. Which being both illogical and irrational is propably also wrong. Which makes me a filthy heretic and a model worshipper at the same time.
Newsflash:
People are either completely bang onto everything or completely wrong on everything. thusly if someone is right or wrong concerning something he is right or wrong on everything else.
I'd like to live in that world. It'd make everything a lot easier. Meanwhile on planet Earth we are actually supposed to use our brain(being the one evolutionary advantage we have) every once in a while.
Spitzer may or may not be a moron concerning some things. Dawkins MAY have been wrong in the past(I'd suggest that as a question if he has ever erred). They both work in fields that don't particularly interest me so I will in this instance rather use my awesome brain powers to obtain more coffee.
I am not required by law to have an opinion or even knowledge on everything. YMMV.
You are very insightful. The problem is indeed that many religious people confuse their religion with lazy thinking and dogma.
My favourite example from the Bible is the Marriage at Cana. The whole water to wine magical stuff which obviously is considered quite a feat. The way I interpret it is an even bigger feat.
In those days and in that culture the newlyweds and their family were expected to throw a world class kegger for anybody who showed up. If it wasn't the party of the century they'd be viewed as cheapskates until the rest of their life. So running out of grub was viewed as a Bad Thing.
So everybody was prepared to leave the party and harbour a grudge when booze dried up. But Jesus said: Party on. Look, we've settled here and we are having some good fun and running out of grub and booze is not a good reason to call the whole thing off. Let me fix that.
Now the Bible if you want to follow the literal meaning says that he turned water into wine which being the son of god presumably was a trivial trick.
OTOH my take on it is that he said: We could either break up the party which is kinda dumb. Or we could drink water as if it were wine and continue to enjoy ourselves.
Convincing a couple of moochers that their lifelong tradition is BS and that they should enjoy what they got is the bigger achievement.
The story is an ALLEGORY. You are supposed to interpret it and to think about it. Not to believe every single line of it. The whole New Testament was an effort to drag people out of antiquity. If you take that thought even further then you could say that the Old Testament is included into the Bible as a contrast to the New Testament. This is how bad it was and here is our counterproposal. Considering that it mainly is the Old Testament that is currently used to advocate a return to the dark ages I'd say screw it. People are too dumb to understand it and explain why there are contradicitons between New and Old. And when in doubt they choose old.
Somebody has already asked why religion and science are incompatible. They are not. Science and dogma and lazy thinking are.
The big downside ist that contrary to dogma, science doesn't give absolute 100% certainty. We've got the principle of sufficient reason and that's it.
It's going through exactly the same industrial revolution that "civilised" nations went through in the past, with the same winners and losers.
OHMIGOD! Has anybody told china about the perils the Spinning Jenny means for employment?
Employing 14yr olds in factory isn't as bad as it sounds. As long as they are neither forced, overly exploited and outright cheated and the limits of child labour are observed. Many of the reported labour conditions at Foxconn may indeed constitute a violation of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. There's no need to let China go through a prolonged Dickensian area. Especially if you have any means to apply some pressure on Foxconn.
I also wonder. Everybody seems to get the same results.
Either we all love trees(and what's not to love?) or this thing is a bit horribly rigged. Having a 90%+ match with a political party is unnatural. Even members of their own party don't match that highly since I don't think they argue about what kind of biscuits should be served with their tea. Digestives, presumably.
Holy reality-check, Batmann!
I never had a 97% match with any political party since the history of everything. Julie Stein it is. Wow! First woman to become prez. And I also managed to agee with Obama on 78% of the issues.
I've got a theory. Since there seem to be only two parties in the US who are allowed to provide a president those partisan types try to find flaws in the other guy so they feel like they can identify with their guy a little bit more. Given a real choice campaigning season shouldn't be such an atrocious mess.
I speak as someone who has actually lived in the US. And as great as it is in some aspects the hypocrisy and misconceptions about what free speach means in the US is mindboggling.
I still say pot/kettle. Black.
Shutting down a neo-nazi group and seizing their assets INCLUDING their Twitter account is a reasonable thing to do. As long as they haven't forgotten their MyBook and FacePage accounts.
The NPD repeatedly qualified for a ban. What got them off the hook was that they were so firmly watched that we never could be sure if we could make the allegations stick due to entrapment laws. Quite a lot of their higher echelons were paid informants of federal and state agencies.To add insult to injury popular rumor is that those security agencies indirectly helped to float the NPD which has spent the last couple of years pretty close to bankruptcy due to financial ineptitude.
They say they are not nazis when asked by people who might hang them to dry. But behind closed doors they speak quite differently.
Sneaky bastards. They don't wear swasticas in public. But you can still easily identify them by the mandatory pee stains, browned trousers, bad breath and lack of fashion sense. Unless they lay their hands on a Ceska and some courage they are quite pathetic.
Well. A scientist who challenges his previous dogma and is willing to adjust his world view is quite trustworthy. The oh so flexible Catholic church managed to accept things they previously quite vilently rejected. You can trust any scientist who follows the scientific method.
The Münchhausen Trilemma says that we will never ever achieve absolute certainty. Which is what makes the scientific method so utterly unattractive to people who live comfortably with dogma. Which offers certainty by default.
Lazy thinking and science are a bad match. Religion doesn't have to be all about lazy thinking. But proper research mixed with religion takes a unique mental flexibility. Which actually is quite a bit commendable.
Slashdot Mirror
We needed an Oracle driver for LINQ(granted, that should have come from Oracle) and stuff like POI funnily isn't provided by Microsoft out of the box.
...and that is why I keep a strict "complex is wrong" policy when it comes to code. We all wrote nail-bitingly clever code in all-nighters. But we all also had our problems to understand the same code a year or so later.
I once had an argument with one of my coders when I replaced something complex and propably efficient with something simple and definitely not efficient. I told him that even though what I wrote was O(n^2) it didn't matter. Especially when n=10. I really hate it when people optimize the wrong bits of code and leave a mess in the process. Or if they read the wrong book and suddenly use every single design pattern for what would otherwise have been 50 lines of straight forward code. Or try to bypass our company framework in a case which is not covered by it. In most cases they simply wanted to try something unnessesary clever.
We only have overtime about once or twice per year and employee and I'd like to keep it that way.
I usually find that if the company in question doesn't think refactoring is part of the ongoing house keeping process then you will propably encounter bad code.
If you explain that if you need a change or a new feature the best approach most likely is to refactor the code until it is easy to implement AND their reaction is to ask why to touch perfectly running code then you are screwed.
If running extensive unit tests are not part of the build process then you are propably screwed.
These cases don't mean you don't want the job. On the contrary. You want the job plus the stripes to change their development process for the better. And that, friends, neighbours and fellow geeks is how we formerly simple coders made the transition into management. Not to whine about something is bad but to offer a solution and take the responsibility(and the paycheck) how to make things better.
The only problem I have with .NET is that we find ourselves constantly in a situation where we have to buy libs and components that are absolutely Free for Java.
.NET severely lacks organizations like the Apache group. And in some cases freedom of choice. There is 3rd party support. But not as much and under the same conditions as for Java.
But he didn't get shot "for buying iced tea." It's amazing that you can look at the facts and mis-interpret them deliberately in order to come up with what is easily proved to be a bald-faced lie.
Well,if you put words in my mouth and complain about what they mean just to call me a liar then imagination fails me as to what I should call you.
...a kid got shot buying ice tea.
...shot for buying icetea
Here's what I said:
And here is what you say I said:
Accusing me of dishonesty while acting like you just did is a bit rich.
Funny. I was under the impression it became national and international news because a kid got shot buying ice tea. And because there was no proper police investigation. There was a very belated public outcry, a belated investigation and a resignation.
Now a national shame is a cause celebrée and the shootist a modern day Alfred Drefus? Does that make right-wing pundits the equivalent of the intellectual circle which was rallied behind the words "J'accuse"?
Monsieur Zola, I presume?
Dawkins usually is snarky, humorous and witty. I never really have seen him scream, shout or froth from the mouth.
That seems to be the standard reaction of those on the opposite of the table. I would SERIOUSLY suggest that you look up his TED talks since they seem to be quite representative of the man.
Whatever the case we have in the past been non-confrontational and that got us into this ID mess. Science is NOT a democratic process. You do NOT get a vote on what we found. It simply doesn't work this way. The popular press also isn't very helpful since it tries to present both sides of the argument as having merit and the truth lies somewhere inbetween. Again, this is NOT a political process where this might apply.
From a scientific standpoint Creationism and ID has no merit whatsoever. And frankly the time we spend arguing about it could be better spent by drinking a pint, taking the dog for a walk or search for a cure fro cancer.
We argue about this because we just escaped the dark ages and we have no inclination to be dragged back again. Unfortunately this breed of lazy thinking seems to be a renewable resource.
You know, we also have a variety of Sauerkraut that's prepared with Champagne. Quite tasty, too. Absolutely nobody peed into that!
Hm. So quite a lot of people AREN'T represented by the Repubmocrats. There's a shock.
Speaking as a German(who is not represented by the German Green Party; I only get 50% matches with them) I'm a bit surprised that these sort of matching sites aren't more common. Possibly one major obstacle is that it can be at times hard to pinpoint where parties stand on specific issues. The sheer amount of backpedalling we have seen over the last year or so makes that not easy at all. Parties aren't as homogenous as you'd hope they'd be.
We have had the "wahl-o-mat"(vote-o-mat) for over 10 years and I have used it extensively. It gets quite a lot of exposure in the media but should propably be used much more.
Actually it is infinite regress, circular reasoning and dogma. Those are the major obstacles on the way to absolute certainty.
The scientific method drudges down the arduous road of infinite regress until it happily stops at the principle of sufficient reason. Which is obviously a bit wooly. This is why you will never get ABSOLUTE and IRREFUTABLE certainty out of science and why theories get refined and refined and possibly overthrown time and time again. But that is a better option than simply stopping at dogma.
Otherwise we still would believe the sun orbits the earth.
Does he need help?
Does he mindlessly cling onto islamic dogma or can he live with things that contradict it? If he doesn't have a problem with that then I'd say he is propably fine and doesn't need any help.
Those that mindlessly cling to dogma on the other hand propably are beyond help and need to be kept out of education so they don't spread their disease any further. Mind you, religion doesn't have a monopoly on that. So I'm not proposing to keep religious folk or religious teaching out of education. Just the bullet-headed kind.
Dawkins once said in a TED talk that Christians don't believe in Thor, Odin, Vishnu, Isis and the rest of the lot. Atheists only go one god further.
I'll go with the illogical and irrational explanation, thank you. Which being both illogical and irrational is propably also wrong. Which makes me a filthy heretic and a model worshipper at the same time.
Hail Eris!
Newsflash:
People are either completely bang onto everything or completely wrong on everything. thusly if someone is right or wrong concerning something he is right or wrong on everything else.
I'd like to live in that world. It'd make everything a lot easier. Meanwhile on planet Earth we are actually supposed to use our brain(being the one evolutionary advantage we have) every once in a while.
Spitzer may or may not be a moron concerning some things. Dawkins MAY have been wrong in the past(I'd suggest that as a question if he has ever erred). They both work in fields that don't particularly interest me so I will in this instance rather use my awesome brain powers to obtain more coffee.
I am not required by law to have an opinion or even knowledge on everything. YMMV.
You are very insightful. The problem is indeed that many religious people confuse their religion with lazy thinking and dogma.
My favourite example from the Bible is the Marriage at Cana. The whole water to wine magical stuff which obviously is considered quite a feat. The way I interpret it is an even bigger feat.
In those days and in that culture the newlyweds and their family were expected to throw a world class kegger for anybody who showed up. If it wasn't the party of the century they'd be viewed as cheapskates until the rest of their life. So running out of grub was viewed as a Bad Thing.
So everybody was prepared to leave the party and harbour a grudge when booze dried up. But Jesus said: Party on. Look, we've settled here and we are having some good fun and running out of grub and booze is not a good reason to call the whole thing off. Let me fix that.
Now the Bible if you want to follow the literal meaning says that he turned water into wine which being the son of god presumably was a trivial trick.
OTOH my take on it is that he said: We could either break up the party which is kinda dumb. Or we could drink water as if it were wine and continue to enjoy ourselves.
Convincing a couple of moochers that their lifelong tradition is BS and that they should enjoy what they got is the bigger achievement.
The story is an ALLEGORY. You are supposed to interpret it and to think about it. Not to believe every single line of it. The whole New Testament was an effort to drag people out of antiquity. If you take that thought even further then you could say that the Old Testament is included into the Bible as a contrast to the New Testament. This is how bad it was and here is our counterproposal. Considering that it mainly is the Old Testament that is currently used to advocate a return to the dark ages I'd say screw it. People are too dumb to understand it and explain why there are contradicitons between New and Old. And when in doubt they choose old.
Somebody has already asked why religion and science are incompatible. They are not. Science and dogma and lazy thinking are.
The big downside ist that contrary to dogma, science doesn't give absolute 100% certainty. We've got the principle of sufficient reason and that's it.
Actually Foxconn just recently complained that the iPhone 5 is a bitch to assemble.
It's going through exactly the same industrial revolution that "civilised" nations went through in the past, with the same winners and losers.
OHMIGOD! Has anybody told china about the perils the Spinning Jenny means for employment?
Employing 14yr olds in factory isn't as bad as it sounds. As long as they are neither forced, overly exploited and outright cheated and the limits of child labour are observed. Many of the reported labour conditions at Foxconn may indeed constitute a violation of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. There's no need to let China go through a prolonged Dickensian area. Especially if you have any means to apply some pressure on Foxconn.
...and being a Japanese company I do fully expect that suit to have a world class sanitary solution.
None of this tube and plastic bag nonesense.
I'm sorry, Dave. I can't do that. I'm a bidet, you know.
Cthulhu doesn't have to throw himself into the court of public opinion. Whichever candidate gets elected, Cthulhu fhtagn!
I also wonder. Everybody seems to get the same results.
Either we all love trees(and what's not to love?) or this thing is a bit horribly rigged. Having a 90%+ match with a political party is unnatural. Even members of their own party don't match that highly since I don't think they argue about what kind of biscuits should be served with their tea. Digestives, presumably.
Holy reality-check, Batmann!
I never had a 97% match with any political party since the history of everything. Julie Stein it is. Wow! First woman to become prez. And I also managed to agee with Obama on 78% of the issues.
I've got a theory. Since there seem to be only two parties in the US who are allowed to provide a president those partisan types try to find flaws in the other guy so they feel like they can identify with their guy a little bit more. Given a real choice campaigning season shouldn't be such an atrocious mess.
Nope. Dallas is an urban center and actually a cultural hot spot. Their list of challenged books propably is as short as Seattle's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Challenge_(literature)
I speak as someone who has actually lived in the US. And as great as it is in some aspects the hypocrisy and misconceptions about what free speach means in the US is mindboggling.
I still say pot/kettle. Black.
Shutting down a neo-nazi group and seizing their assets INCLUDING their Twitter account is a reasonable thing to do. As long as they haven't forgotten their MyBook and FacePage accounts.
...and on the doormat they realized that quite a lot of politicians weren't lawyers and broke out in tears.
The NPD repeatedly qualified for a ban. What got them off the hook was that they were so firmly watched that we never could be sure if we could make the allegations stick due to entrapment laws. Quite a lot of their higher echelons were paid informants of federal and state agencies.To add insult to injury popular rumor is that those security agencies indirectly helped to float the NPD which has spent the last couple of years pretty close to bankruptcy due to financial ineptitude.
They say they are not nazis when asked by people who might hang them to dry. But behind closed doors they speak quite differently.
Sneaky bastards. They don't wear swasticas in public. But you can still easily identify them by the mandatory pee stains, browned trousers, bad breath and lack of fashion sense. Unless they lay their hands on a Ceska and some courage they are quite pathetic.
Well. A scientist who challenges his previous dogma and is willing to adjust his world view is quite trustworthy. The oh so flexible Catholic church managed to accept things they previously quite vilently rejected. You can trust any scientist who follows the scientific method.
The Münchhausen Trilemma says that we will never ever achieve absolute certainty. Which is what makes the scientific method so utterly unattractive to people who live comfortably with dogma. Which offers certainty by default.
Lazy thinking and science are a bad match. Religion doesn't have to be all about lazy thinking. But proper research mixed with religion takes a unique mental flexibility. Which actually is quite a bit commendable.