I think it's a mistake to infer that he does think that, just based on him saying that.
It is also a mistake to believe that what he thinks matters in the least. He is the secretary of state. He has no authority to set policy for the NSA, CIA or DIA.
I'm not sure any of us thought he was speaking authoritatively. But he is a member of the administration, and is assumed to be parrotting the public position of Obama. And so we scream at him for his remarks' self-serving hypocrisy and self-contradiction, in effigy of screaming at Obama himself.
But, of course, your point extends to our screaming as well. Practically speaking, none of our protestations on a Slashdot comment system are at all likely to affect national policy or the general public's sentiment in any relevant way. We're feeling impotent rage, and it's a very unpleasant feeling.
To have trouble finding a job that pays you needn't be a foreigner... Germany sure is NOT the country to move TO, it's rather the one to flee from.
My plan is to have a job with a multi-national corporation that's okay with me working from Germany after starting out in the U.S. I've actually got a pretty good-looking lead for such a job, so I really hope it works out. I should also have my dual-citizenship (U.S. + one of the Schengen countries) in a few months, so no visa required.
What I wrote was mostly just trying to be funny. But not entirely.
The problem I have with C++ templates is that their resolution process can be very complex. But the compiler generally treats the resolution process as something that you the programmer cannot watch unfold. It can be just as complex as how the software you're writing is meant to behave at runtime, and yet we have almost no tools to trace the resolution process's execution.
And then, it's potentially interacting with other opaque C++ compile-time processes: operator overloading (including implicit type casting), overloaded functions, default arguments, and substitutions via typedef and/or #defines.
The net result is that you can have wildly complex set of rules coming into play at compile-time, and with only crypgraphic-quality error messages if something goes wrong. Or, if you're unlucky, no error messages, but you misunderstand what's going to happen at runtime.
Even if you're using its compile-time features (overloading, templates, typedefs, etc.) in a reaonable manner, wo be to anyone who writes code where those features significantly interact with each other.
This is why many of us long-time C++ programmers discipline ourselves to use the language in a fairly restricted manner. My normal rules of thumb are: - No operator overloading, especially type casts. - Templates are mostly used for container classes, or in rare cases algorithms. - Spare use of method/function overloading. - Try to use template parameters that are themselves of as simple of a type as is practical.
Also, given C++'s potential headaches, I'm leaning more towards using it only in performance-critical parts of my programs, preferring Python and/or Java for the parts that can be slower. And honestly, once you get to that point, the reasons for using C++ rather than C or Fortran start to melt away in many cases.
Who modded this Insightful? Not disputing parent's insight. But it's Funny. +5 Funny. Can't you people read, or did you not get the joke?
Hmmm... if only something (like a post) could have more than one attribute (like funniness and insightfulness) at the same time. Now that's a universe in which I'd want to live!
We will definitely be utilising variadic templates in our shop as we tend to be template meta-programming heavy. We avoid re-work like a plague.
There's a veritable chorus of people, me included, who would warn you away from Template Hell, based on personal experience.
Avoiding rework is nice, but not when your "extensible" solution relies on language / compile-time behavior that's so complex it takes you 10 times as long to get right in the first place, let alone maintain.
to destroy the evil empire! If we buy enough surface tablets, Microsoft will lose all of its money and go bankrupt!
After the shenanigans of recent years, I don't even know which companies / governments comprise the evil empire any more.
A small sample seems to include: Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM, Facebook, Oracle, Verizon, Comcast, Russia's government, Bush/Obama, the NSA, the CIA, and Andy Dick.
Ook and Brainfuck are also Turing complete. Turing completeness is not sufficient to imply that you can write beautiful code in a language.
I think we should be honest that regardless of Turing completeness or not, different languages are prone to differently prone to horrific code in different circumstances.
Regular expressions, and old-school SQL, are not Turing complete. I've seen them elegantly solve some problems, and be a real mess in some other cases.
Similarly, I've seen Turing-complete (* see comment below) languages like C++, C, FORTRAN, and Python be used in some cases to write very clear code, and in other cases to be incomprehensible. Same goes for Turing-complete functional languages like Haskell and Erlang, although I haven't seen many programs written in them, so I'm less clear on which problems they're well/ill suited for solving clearly.
* Modern computers aren't really Turing machines. They have finite storage, and they have I/O.
I think it might be done sometimes in animal husbandry.
I caught part of a documentary one time that was talking about needing to manually give female pigs an orgasm, but they didn't point that out to the workers doing that because it would be too horrifying. I suspect it was after the sows were injected with semen, to facilitate its passage to the right place.
If this were some public debate where form trumped substance, I'd agree. But what we're talking about here is a question that every person, including you and me, must decide for himself. If you're decided that God is made up and you're done with the topic, that's your business. Christians are charged with showing you love, and with humility giving you reasons for their hope. What you do with that is between you and God.
The fact is, our current scientific...
There's a lot of good literature on the relationship between the scientific method and supposed miracles. I'd suggest Googling, followed by one or to purchases from Amazon.
You don't have to be perfect. You just have to not believe in something that's completely fucking insane.
Well, that's the question isn't it: is Christianity completely insane? In my judgment the answer is no, but that's after I spent a lot of time and effort looking into it. YYML, obviously. I think your position might at least be a bit more nuanced if you get to know some real, intelligent Christians, and to find out why they believe what they do. Obviously no one is going to make you, but IMHO the stakes are pretty high for you to not at least look into this carefully.
But there are some evidences and arguments that many intelligent people judge to be persuasive.
Then those so-called "intelligent people" are irrational.
I disagree. I think if you're honest with yourself, you'll find that a lot of the evidence for and against Christianity is a judgment call. For example, since we don't have a time machine, none of us can go and see whether or not someone named Jesus really was crucified, and really was alive three days later. And so we're left trying to weigh the plausibility of the historical accounts, but in terms whether or not the authors seem believable, as well as whether or not the documents really are authentic.
The same thing goes for answered prayer, and/or hearing what might be God's voice. The theoretical problems with testing this empirically are widely known, and I'm not going to try covering them here. And so, without the assurance of our normal scientific / mathematical tools for looking into these things with certainty, we're left making a judgment call.
You may have also noticed that all of us, atheists not excepted, sometimes make mistakes in our reasoning. Even more frustrating is that our reasoning and our acceptance of what constitutes evidence can be biased by the conclusion we think will make us happiest to reach. I think it's safe to say that for most people, if they want to find a reason to believe or disbelieve Christianity, they'll find a way to make logical constructs to support their conclusion. You and I are probably no exception to that.
So getting back to your original claim that Christians are irrational. I agree. Because I think we all are cursed with a strong streak of irrationality. But we only have so many years on this earth, and so we're stuck with making our best guess and running with it, hopefully also being open to changing that belief if/when there's a good reason to.
I think we'd all agree that believing in imaginary things is foolish, and no leader should do that. But your characterization of Christian beliefs fails to mention the reasons that many thinking Christians have for holding them.
I doubt that there's any currently available evidence or argument that provides a slam-dunk case for Christianity being true. But there are some evidences and arguments that many intelligent people judge to be persuasive. Therefore I don't consider being Christian as a sure sign of irrationalism or stupidity such that it should disqualify one from office.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's a mistake to infer that he does think that, just based on him saying that.
It is also a mistake to believe that what he thinks matters in the least. He is the secretary of state. He has no authority to set policy for the NSA, CIA or DIA.
I'm not sure any of us thought he was speaking authoritatively. But he is a member of the administration, and is assumed to be parrotting the public position of Obama. And so we scream at him for his remarks' self-serving hypocrisy and self-contradiction, in effigy of screaming at Obama himself.
But, of course, your point extends to our screaming as well. Practically speaking, none of our protestations on a Slashdot comment system are at all likely to affect national policy or the general public's sentiment in any relevant way. We're feeling impotent rage, and it's a very unpleasant feeling.
I think it's a mistake to infer that he does think that, just based on him saying that.
To have trouble finding a job that pays you needn't be a foreigner... Germany sure is NOT the country to move TO, it's rather the one to flee from.
My plan is to have a job with a multi-national corporation that's okay with me working from Germany after starting out in the U.S. I've actually got a pretty good-looking lead for such a job, so I really hope it works out. I should also have my dual-citizenship (U.S. + one of the Schengen countries) in a few months, so no visa required.
Why do you say that?
Well, for me personally, Germany.
It is the way to fascism. Just look at historic precedents. Very, very alarming.
It also means the DoJ is not concerned with "the law" anymore, but just does what those in power want. Not that "the law" was worth a lot before.
Time to leave.
Not if you measure importance by salary, apparently.
Reference to (Babel, Tower Of).
The story is a biblical "explanation" of why humanity, despite ostensibly originating as a single tribe, uses multiple languages.
I could be wrong, but I think it's understood primarily as an allegory regarding man sinning(?) by aspiring to accomplish what only God can.
That's an interesting claim. I'd be curious to hear you make an argument to support it.
How is it better? (An honest question.)
What I wrote was mostly just trying to be funny. But not entirely.
The problem I have with C++ templates is that their resolution process can be very complex. But the compiler generally treats the resolution process as something that you the programmer cannot watch unfold. It can be just as complex as how the software you're writing is meant to behave at runtime, and yet we have almost no tools to trace the resolution process's execution.
And then, it's potentially interacting with other opaque C++ compile-time processes: operator overloading (including implicit type casting), overloaded functions, default arguments, and substitutions via typedef and/or #defines.
The net result is that you can have wildly complex set of rules coming into play at compile-time, and with only crypgraphic-quality error messages if something goes wrong. Or, if you're unlucky, no error messages, but you misunderstand what's going to happen at runtime.
Even if you're using its compile-time features (overloading, templates, typedefs, etc.) in a reaonable manner, wo be to anyone who writes code where those features significantly interact with each other.
This is why many of us long-time C++ programmers discipline ourselves to use the language in a fairly restricted manner. My normal rules of thumb are:
- No operator overloading, especially type casts.
- Templates are mostly used for container classes, or in rare cases algorithms.
- Spare use of method/function overloading.
- Try to use template parameters that are themselves of as simple of a type as is practical.
Also, given C++'s potential headaches, I'm leaning more towards using it only in performance-critical parts of my programs, preferring Python and/or Java for the parts that can be slower. And honestly, once you get to that point, the reasons for using C++ rather than C or Fortran start to melt away in many cases.
Right, my plea was against the overuse / misuse of templates, not against using them at all. Sorry that wasn't clear.
Who modded this Insightful?
Not disputing parent's insight. But it's Funny. +5 Funny. Can't you people read, or did you not get the joke?
Hmmm... if only something (like a post) could have more than one attribute (like funniness and insightfulness) at the same time. Now that's a universe in which I'd want to live!
There's a veritable chorus of people, me included, who would warn you away from Template Hell, based on personal experience.
Avoiding rework is nice, but not when your "extensible" solution relies on language / compile-time behavior that's so complex it takes you 10 times as long to get right in the first place, let alone maintain.
They did a lot of copy/paste back in the day.
And even that is a better implementation of Templates than C++'s.
I feel the same way I feel about having voted for Obama.
Simply tax profits on all equities held for less than 5 minutes at 100%. Problem solved.
No problem is "simply solved" within our tax system. GE would still find a way to get around rules like this.
When megacorps by the rule-making system, they will never lose.
to destroy the evil empire! If we buy enough surface tablets, Microsoft will lose all of its money and go bankrupt!
After the shenanigans of recent years, I don't even know which companies / governments comprise the evil empire any more.
A small sample seems to include: Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM, Facebook, Oracle, Verizon, Comcast, Russia's government, Bush/Obama, the NSA, the CIA, and Andy Dick.
Ook and Brainfuck are also Turing complete. Turing completeness is not sufficient to imply that you can write beautiful code in a language.
I think we should be honest that regardless of Turing completeness or not, different languages are prone to differently prone to horrific code in different circumstances.
Regular expressions, and old-school SQL, are not Turing complete. I've seen them elegantly solve some problems, and be a real mess in some other cases.
Similarly, I've seen Turing-complete (* see comment below) languages like C++, C, FORTRAN, and Python be used in some cases to write very clear code, and in other cases to be incomprehensible. Same goes for Turing-complete functional languages like Haskell and Erlang, although I haven't seen many programs written in them, so I'm less clear on which problems they're well/ill suited for solving clearly.
* Modern computers aren't really Turing machines. They have finite storage, and they have I/O.
I think it might be done sometimes in animal husbandry.
I caught part of a documentary one time that was talking about needing to manually give female pigs an orgasm, but they didn't point that out to the workers doing that because it would be too horrifying. I suspect it was after the sows were injected with semen, to facilitate its passage to the right place.
Shudder....
Sounds like your mind is made up.
If this were some public debate where form trumped substance, I'd agree. But what we're talking about here is a question that every person, including you and me, must decide for himself. If you're decided that God is made up and you're done with the topic, that's your business. Christians are charged with showing you love, and with humility giving you reasons for their hope. What you do with that is between you and God.
There's a lot of good literature on the relationship between the scientific method and supposed miracles. I'd suggest Googling, followed by one or to purchases from Amazon.
Well, that's the question isn't it: is Christianity completely insane? In my judgment the answer is no, but that's after I spent a lot of time and effort looking into it. YYML, obviously. I think your position might at least be a bit more nuanced if you get to know some real, intelligent Christians, and to find out why they believe what they do. Obviously no one is going to make you, but IMHO the stakes are pretty high for you to not at least look into this carefully.
I don't think there's much evidence that over time, humanity gets any wiser. Each generation seems doomed to re-learn the hard lessons of those past.
But there are some evidences and arguments that many intelligent people judge to be persuasive.
Then those so-called "intelligent people" are irrational.
I disagree. I think if you're honest with yourself, you'll find that a lot of the evidence for and against Christianity is a judgment call. For example, since we don't have a time machine, none of us can go and see whether or not someone named Jesus really was crucified, and really was alive three days later. And so we're left trying to weigh the plausibility of the historical accounts, but in terms whether or not the authors seem believable, as well as whether or not the documents really are authentic.
The same thing goes for answered prayer, and/or hearing what might be God's voice. The theoretical problems with testing this empirically are widely known, and I'm not going to try covering them here. And so, without the assurance of our normal scientific / mathematical tools for looking into these things with certainty, we're left making a judgment call.
You may have also noticed that all of us, atheists not excepted, sometimes make mistakes in our reasoning. Even more frustrating is that our reasoning and our acceptance of what constitutes evidence can be biased by the conclusion we think will make us happiest to reach. I think it's safe to say that for most people, if they want to find a reason to believe or disbelieve Christianity, they'll find a way to make logical constructs to support their conclusion. You and I are probably no exception to that.
So getting back to your original claim that Christians are irrational. I agree. Because I think we all are cursed with a strong streak of irrationality. But we only have so many years on this earth, and so we're stuck with making our best guess and running with it, hopefully also being open to changing that belief if/when there's a good reason to.
Why, are there not enough black kids attending 12 Step programs?
I think we'd all agree that believing in imaginary things is foolish, and no leader should do that. But your characterization of Christian beliefs fails to mention the reasons that many thinking Christians have for holding them.
I doubt that there's any currently available evidence or argument that provides a slam-dunk case for Christianity being true. But there are some evidences and arguments that many intelligent people judge to be persuasive. Therefore I don't consider being Christian as a sure sign of irrationalism or stupidity such that it should disqualify one from office.