Perhaps, at least it was something that hadn't been tried before.
One of the advantages of sending someone like Bill Nye is that he's not primarily known as a working scientist, he's primarily known as an educator and entertainer. That is the appropriate level of gravitas for a debate like this. Letting someone like Francis Collins share the stage with Ken Ham would send the wrong message.
...except that the creationist "debate" is not about the existence of God, as evidenced by the majority of Christians worldwide who belong to denominations which either explicitly agree with evolution, or take the neutral "we don't know, go ask a scientist" line. (Incidentally, both of those positions seem reasonable to me.)
OK, it is about the existence of God in one sense. I was brought up a Christian in an extremely liberal denomination, and apart from one kid in high school who was going through a phase, I never met a real creationist until I discovered Usenet and started talking to people from the US regularly. One of the first questions I asked was to the effect of what they were actually trying to prove. The answer I got was telling: If evolution didn't happen, God must exist, so let's hope it's true.
I suspect that for many creationists on the ground, that's exactly their mentality.
Of course, that's not true of many of the funders. In the United States, creationism is part of the anti-science oligarchy movement. There are a number of corporations which have a financial interest in casting doubt on science, from tobacco companies, to fossil fuel companies, to arms manufacturers, and so on. Some of them are willing to fund any organisation whose mission is contrary to the scientific consensus, and that includes creationists. This is all fairly well documented.
So in that sense, the creationist "debate" isn't even philosophical. It's political.
We don't know that. It's possible that both are based on an earlier story, and it's also possible that this is a case of convergent evolution.
Joseph Campbell probably pointed this out the most convincingly, that there are strong parallels to be found in apparently unrelated mythology from around the world. The existence of similarities between two mythological traditions therefore does not constitute evidence that one borrowed from the other, or even that they both borrowed from another tradition. It's also possible that the two traditions evolved independently to fill the same psychological niche.
Sorry to get all theological for a moment, but most people don't realise that Yahweh's answer was actually pretty good. Job was written as a philosophical piece to address the question of whether or not bad things happen to good people because they or an ancestor did something wrong. Yahweh's answer was "no, I'm just arbitrary". If you replace "Yahweh" with "the universe", that answer is still more or less correct today.
It will be interesting to see reviews from all those people who spend most of their day running Pro Tools, Ableton, Final Cut Pro, etc. Anything which reduces screen real estate for those people will be an undeniable net loss.
Because most software patents don't go above the threshold of 'obvious.'
This.
I do concede that a key word is "most", though a slightly stronger phrase like "the vast majority of" would also be appropriate. There are a very small number of software patents which I would (grudgingly) agree are probably legitimate, like RSA. Software patents like that are remarkable precisely because they are extremely rare.
It's only a gender-specific issue because people like weev act in gender-specific ways. If people like him went after both genders equally, or all ethnicities equally, or all sexual orientations equally, then the conversation would be different (even if the most appropriate solution is completely identical).
I don't think that anyone doubts that there are real instances. Claiming that it's all of the most extreme proponents on all issues is quite a big claim, and I think it does need some proof.
Hell, I can't think of many more extreme nutcases than the Westboro Baptist Church, and they're apparently genuine.
Have you ever considered working for US law enforcement? You'd fit right in, with the "let's get him on something, anything" attitude.
We all should care about the difference. Weev is a first-class arsehole who is guilty of many things, both criminal and civil. He also has certain civil rights simply by virtue of being a human being. You have these rights too. Taking them away from him means taking them away from you too.
If it helps, think of "innocent" as a property of the act, not the person. He was innocent of hacking. He was guilty of stalking, harassment, and libel.
These days I'm baffled there are people who still don't use an IDE for real projects.
IDEs work if your language and toolchain are well-integrated with the IDE. If they aren't, you spend a significant proportion of your time fighting the IDE. Also, if you're the sort of software engineer who spends some of their time doing sysadmin-related stuff, moving between two types of text editor incurs a significant context switch.
Of course, what I really want is vim and/or Emacs embedded in the IDE. There are some projects for doing this with varying levels of success.
For any of us who have taken compiler classes, a context free grammar specifically ignores whitespace.
People have written whitespace-aware grammars because that is what the language specification requires. One of the more famous historical examples was Jon Levine's Fortran 77 parser written entirely in Yacc with no lexical analyser. Parser combinators have made the technique popular again in some circles.
Most compiler writers aren't happy with the current state of parsing tools, by the way. Almost all of the big production compilers use hand-written parsers because programming languages are complicated when you take into account language variants and extensions, and because error reporting from automatic parser generators is terrible.
From a theoretical point of view, once upon a time, people wrote recursive descent parsers to parse the block structure of a language and then switched to an operator precedence parser to do expressions. The distinction between lexical analysis and syntax analysis seems similarly artificial.
Nope, that's not duck typing. That's type inference.
Haskell does support a principled form of duck typing, in the sense that you can make any type a Duck:
class Duck d where
quack:: d -> IO ()
instance Duck BelittlingBird where
quack _ = putStrLn "I don't think so"
Unlike Simula-style OO languages, Haskell has a strict distinction between a type and a class (the same as the distinction between a set and a class in Goedel-von Neumann-Bernays set theory). The equivalent in Java would be if you could declare a class or even a built-in type to "inherit" from a superclass without having access to the source code for that class.
Slashdot Mirror
You're kidding, right? The guy was an aerospace engineer.
Perhaps, at least it was something that hadn't been tried before.
One of the advantages of sending someone like Bill Nye is that he's not primarily known as a working scientist, he's primarily known as an educator and entertainer. That is the appropriate level of gravitas for a debate like this. Letting someone like Francis Collins share the stage with Ken Ham would send the wrong message.
...except that the creationist "debate" is not about the existence of God, as evidenced by the majority of Christians worldwide who belong to denominations which either explicitly agree with evolution, or take the neutral "we don't know, go ask a scientist" line. (Incidentally, both of those positions seem reasonable to me.)
OK, it is about the existence of God in one sense. I was brought up a Christian in an extremely liberal denomination, and apart from one kid in high school who was going through a phase, I never met a real creationist until I discovered Usenet and started talking to people from the US regularly. One of the first questions I asked was to the effect of what they were actually trying to prove. The answer I got was telling: If evolution didn't happen, God must exist, so let's hope it's true.
I suspect that for many creationists on the ground, that's exactly their mentality.
Of course, that's not true of many of the funders. In the United States, creationism is part of the anti-science oligarchy movement. There are a number of corporations which have a financial interest in casting doubt on science, from tobacco companies, to fossil fuel companies, to arms manufacturers, and so on. Some of them are willing to fund any organisation whose mission is contrary to the scientific consensus, and that includes creationists. This is all fairly well documented.
So in that sense, the creationist "debate" isn't even philosophical. It's political.
I don't have a problem with that. Hell, I'm happy that fools and their money are parted.
Just as long as the taxpayer isn't giving it a subsidy. If they want a tax break, they should play by the rules.
We don't know that. It's possible that both are based on an earlier story, and it's also possible that this is a case of convergent evolution.
Joseph Campbell probably pointed this out the most convincingly, that there are strong parallels to be found in apparently unrelated mythology from around the world. The existence of similarities between two mythological traditions therefore does not constitute evidence that one borrowed from the other, or even that they both borrowed from another tradition. It's also possible that the two traditions evolved independently to fill the same psychological niche.
Sorry to get all theological for a moment, but most people don't realise that Yahweh's answer was actually pretty good. Job was written as a philosophical piece to address the question of whether or not bad things happen to good people because they or an ancestor did something wrong. Yahweh's answer was "no, I'm just arbitrary". If you replace "Yahweh" with "the universe", that answer is still more or less correct today.
I'm not American, and I certainly doubt that mall cops exist.
On the Internet, too many people think that "critical thinking" means memorising lots of Latin names for logical fallacies.
I was with you right up to the point where you demonstrated that you are okay with making rape jokes.
Because 99% of the time, that's also when the big external screen isn't connected. I quite like this feature.
It will be interesting to see reviews from all those people who spend most of their day running Pro Tools, Ableton, Final Cut Pro, etc. Anything which reduces screen real estate for those people will be an undeniable net loss.
In the mean time, you can still listen to this.
(Yes, Mike Oldfield is an Arthur C. Clarke fan in case you hadn't guessed.)
You will note that the censored phrase is "metric sh*#load". That's because the US still uses imperial f*$ktons.
Because most software patents don't go above the threshold of 'obvious.'
This.
I do concede that a key word is "most", though a slightly stronger phrase like "the vast majority of" would also be appropriate. There are a very small number of software patents which I would (grudgingly) agree are probably legitimate, like RSA. Software patents like that are remarkable precisely because they are extremely rare.
As a bonus, next time your AWS drops out, you could just blame it on boat people.
I dunno about weev specifically, but that's not a bad alternative name for the MRA movement.
This isn't a gender specific issue though.
It's only a gender-specific issue because people like weev act in gender-specific ways. If people like him went after both genders equally, or all ethnicities equally, or all sexual orientations equally, then the conversation would be different (even if the most appropriate solution is completely identical).
To be fair, she was also mocked for being a woman, just not by the liberal press.
There are many things I can think of which really should be done to Weev. None of them are fatal.
I don't think that anyone doubts that there are real instances. Claiming that it's all of the most extreme proponents on all issues is quite a big claim, and I think it does need some proof.
Hell, I can't think of many more extreme nutcases than the Westboro Baptist Church, and they're apparently genuine.
Have you ever considered working for US law enforcement? You'd fit right in, with the "let's get him on something, anything" attitude.
We all should care about the difference. Weev is a first-class arsehole who is guilty of many things, both criminal and civil. He also has certain civil rights simply by virtue of being a human being. You have these rights too. Taking them away from him means taking them away from you too.
If it helps, think of "innocent" as a property of the act, not the person. He was innocent of hacking. He was guilty of stalking, harassment, and libel.
It was the 70s. We didn't know as much about syntax as we do now.
These days I'm baffled there are people who still don't use an IDE for real projects.
IDEs work if your language and toolchain are well-integrated with the IDE. If they aren't, you spend a significant proportion of your time fighting the IDE. Also, if you're the sort of software engineer who spends some of their time doing sysadmin-related stuff, moving between two types of text editor incurs a significant context switch.
Of course, what I really want is vim and/or Emacs embedded in the IDE. There are some projects for doing this with varying levels of success.
For any of us who have taken compiler classes, a context free grammar specifically ignores whitespace.
People have written whitespace-aware grammars because that is what the language specification requires. One of the more famous historical examples was Jon Levine's Fortran 77 parser written entirely in Yacc with no lexical analyser. Parser combinators have made the technique popular again in some circles.
Most compiler writers aren't happy with the current state of parsing tools, by the way. Almost all of the big production compilers use hand-written parsers because programming languages are complicated when you take into account language variants and extensions, and because error reporting from automatic parser generators is terrible.
From a theoretical point of view, once upon a time, people wrote recursive descent parsers to parse the block structure of a language and then switched to an operator precedence parser to do expressions. The distinction between lexical analysis and syntax analysis seems similarly artificial.
Nope, that's not duck typing. That's type inference.
Haskell does support a principled form of duck typing, in the sense that you can make any type a Duck:
class Duck d where :: d -> IO ()
quack
instance Duck BelittlingBird where
quack _ = putStrLn "I don't think so"
Unlike Simula-style OO languages, Haskell has a strict distinction between a type and a class (the same as the distinction between a set and a class in Goedel-von Neumann-Bernays set theory). The equivalent in Java would be if you could declare a class or even a built-in type to "inherit" from a superclass without having access to the source code for that class.