That's only true if you define "sentient" as "human".
Animals have been described using tools, passing tool-use down to their children, giving their children names, engaging in economic activity (including prostitution), using rudimentary languages and all sorts of other, "sentient" behaviors. In fact, at least one African Gray Parrot was taught how to spell - the scientist studying him described an incident where he exclaimed "want nut! Enn you tee!" (there were also other, more rigorous tests done on Alex).
Basically, for every definition of sentience with even a little leeway for creatures that aren't human, we've found animals that achieve it - and we have many examples of humans who don't (if an adult dog isn't sentient, the clearly a newborn baby isn't either)
You can say the exact same thing about C. If we sit around waiting for the perfect language, it's going to be a looooong wait.
I would argue, though, that Javascript is significantly better suited to UI work than C is, much like C is better suited to systems work.
It's flexible so you don't have to write a bunch of code to encapsulate a data structure that only exists in one place in the UI, and powerful enough that you can easily write behavior-driven components.
Coincidentally, the PS3 and XBox 360 were both released in 2005/2006.
Since it's always been games that push the bounds of consumer hardware performance, and because almost all games are stuck with platforms from six years ago, it's really no wonder that a modern, low-end computer can easily run pretty much any game.
The only exceptions are PC exclusive games like Guild Wars 2 or Planetside 2, which can still bring a high-end computer to its knees.
By not making a decision, they believe they minimize the risk of making the wrong decision, never mind that doing nothing is rarely the right decision.
Choosing to do nothing is always the right decision when you are trying to minimize personal responsibility for failures. If you choose to do nothing, then nobody can blame you for anything besides inaction; on the other hand, if you choose to do something and it doesn't work out, then anyone who wants to take you out has concrete ammunition.
I personally like the exercise plan in the Hacker's Diet. It's just a basic minimum level of exercise you should get per day.
Honestly, any particular scaling exercise routine would work well - the important thing is that you have something structured, that you can easily do without equipment, and that you have scheduled a block of time for. It's significantly easier to keep up an exercise routine if you have no excuses for not doing it, and "but I'd have to go to the gym" or "but I can't find my running shoes" end up being a lot harder to ignore than you'd think.
You're misinterpreting the results in these papers.
The GP's paper showed that kids in states with lax gun safe laws are 20% more likely to be killed in gun accidents.
Your paper shows that people who don't have guns are 2% more likely to be murdered at home.
You can't compare these two statistics without knowing the rate of accidental gun violence among children, and the rate of homicide in the home.
However, I bet you anything that kids getting accidentally shot happens a lot more than people getting murdered in their own home.
This is the fundamental problem with gun discourse in the USA: the pro-gun side focuses on the benefits of guns in a vanishingly unlikely set of situations, while completely ignoring the wide societal impact that actually happens the majority of the time.
I bet that if you looked at the total numbe of gun injuries and fatalities among civilians, there would be way more instances of people getting shot by accident or mistake than there are instances of people engaged in criminal activity being shot to prevent that activity.
That's true, it's a bit weird that Javascript will implicitly put stuff in the global scope if you don't declare it with "var"; it's a legacy behavior, and I'm pretty sure the future "use strict" semantics will throw a warning when you create a variable like that.
The weird scope rules and lack of proper object/class support drive me up the wall when working on projects with ~40,000 lines of code.
I don't know, maybe I'm just weird myself but I don't think Javascript's scope rules are that hard to grasp, and the class support is workable but honestly most of the time you don't need to use classes at all.
I mean, the scope is easy - are you in a function? If so, the variable is scoped to the function. If not, the variable is globally scoped. That's about it. Just wrap something like
(function(){ // code goes here }())
around your script file, and everything will be local to that script file while still being able to see the global scope. There's some other funky stuff involving weird cases like using a locally scoped variable before it's defined, but as long as you're not writing crap on purpose it's not a huge deal.
And as for classes - well, honestly, a lot of the time when you think "I need a class for this", what you really mean is "I've got some data that needs to travel together". In Javascript, you can just do that - you can just say:
//here's a thing to hold my data var thing = {}; //here's data to put in the thing thing.item1 = "something"; //here's some more related data thing.item2 = {message: "I'm important!"};
And then tada! You've got a class that carries your data around. Hooray!
But if you really want classes, with methods and stuff like that, they're there too - but if you're writing a project large enough to actually need those sorts of tools, you really ought to be using a framework that'll handle the nitty-gritty of classes for you.
It just takes discipline- prepend your function names with the module name. If you're in namespace window and have a function getHeight, you write it as window_getHeight. It takes a little bit of discipline, but not that much.
Whaaaaat. Why are you putting all your shit in the global scope in the first place? Use the module pattern, and none of those functions leak out of the file you're in.
Yes, because despite the technological advances of modern society, the best we can expect from a first-world nation is merely parity with a hundred years ago, instead of setting higher standards for ourselves and our country.
Let us not forget that they are stupider, as well - the smartest men tend to be smarter than women on average, but the dumbest men are way stupider than the least intelligent women, on average. The thing is, men have a lot more variation in general because evolution can afford to fuck around with our genetics.
We're disposable and can be experimented upon and ultimately discarded; women can't.
I hope you don't really think parking fees are some sort of "forced attempt to get people to conform" - space in a metropolitan area is fucking expensive. The space you put your car has to compete, economically, with the value of putting in an office building that actually generates revenue and pays rent.
Expecting whoever owns that land to just let you put your shit there for free is a bit entitled, and bitching about the cost of municipal parking is just completely ignoring the realities of the situation: if it wasn't for the city stepping in and saying "no, there will not be another high-rent office building here, there will be a parking structure", you wouldn't have anywhere to park because private companies would be busy using that space to make money to the detriment of everyone else. (and don't even start on "we should privatize the municipal parking structures" - you don't want to know what they would have to charge in order to be competitive with office rents).
The "green agenda" is just a side-effect of the fact that cars are super inefficient in densely packed areas where nobody can afford to just let people park their cars for free.
(and you know how you can meet your friends at the restaurant? You can walk. That's probably how they got there, unless they're hiding some sort of secret "green" teleportation device.)
For the last decade (literally), people have been saying that the only reason why there's no games for Linux is because it's a chicken-and-egg problem - there's no games because there's no hardware support, and there's no hardware support because there's no games. Now Microsoft, with Windows 8 (and its built-in Steam competitor) has pissed off the Gaben, and I think things will change soon.
Valve throwing their weight behind it is probably going to make a lot of headway towards solving the problem within a few years; they have enough pull with both the chicken and the egg that they can encourage developers to support Linux, and hardware manufacturers to write proper drivers.
What's especially sad is that Elop's Nokia tried to fight Apple in that battleground - they essentially ditched all their low-end phones (which were essentially the lifeblood of third-world telecommunications) in order to try and imitate Apple except with Windows Phone.
It's so stupid. They were ahead of their time (my N900 is still a good phone, despite only having a single core 600 MHz CPU and no multi-touch), and they gave it all up because of an evil brain parasite.
"Quit being such a whiner. Oh, and the salary you asked for? Find someone for 60% of that. Revenues are down." "Didn't the CEO just get a huge bonus?" "Yes, because he cut personnel costs by 60%"
That's why it's so sad (and incredibly weird until you realize Elop came from MSFT) that Nokia dropped their next-gen smartphone OS; it would have been quite a bit ahead of Android, and their maps applications rival Google's (offline maps? hell yes).
I mean, my Nokia N900 (from which I'm writing this post in fact) is almost as good as any phone currently on the market; give it some modern phone hardware, and it would have rocked worlds.
Well see the thing is, there's an understanding mismatch between the West and the Middle East.
See, here, we have freedom of speech. We know we have freedom of speech, and we know everyone else has it too.
Therefore, when one jackass makes a hilaribad video calling Muhammed a pedophile (and tbh he had a 9 year old wife, that's a pretty strong argument), we know it's just this one jackass making waves.
Over there, they don't have freedom of speech (unless they're really rich and/or privileged, who incidentally aren't the people flipping out). All the media they see is official gov't crap, never just individual citizen's opinions.
Therefore, when they see that jackass's hilaribad video calling Muhammed (peace be upon him) a pedophile, they think it's official US Gov't propaganda. Why would the USA have allowed this video onto the internets if our government didn't endorse it's views?
So essentially, the reason why the population of these countries gets so upset at a crank's video is because they don't realize it's just a crank, they think it's an official statement by the USA.
Oh my god stop reading David Barton and maybe pick up an actual history book sometime - the people who founded this nation were as irreligious as a person could be before there was a naturalistic theory of how animals got to be the way they are.
Jefferson famiously cut out all the miracles in the Bible (including the Resurrection), and James Madison, the father of the Constitution, was integral in setting up the separation of Church and State (and I don't mean that the State can't interfere with the Church, which is how you guys somehow decide to interpret it, but that the Church can't interfere with the State).
And that's not even gtting in to the insanity that they "grounded all of those concepts in a God", because that is some serious, weapons grade historical revisionism right there.
Again, not arguing the case one way or the other here, but when you think about it from from their point of view (abortion == murder), at least their strong stance is understandable.
No it isn't, because the majority of the time these people who are anti-abortion are also pro-death penalty. Their stance is not internally consistent.
More than that, one thing that happens surprisingly often is that a lab will file a FOIA request for information from a competing public lab, and then have all their data and private notes if it goes through - essentially, stealing progress from the other lab in order to get a leg up on publishing.
The problem is that you get a crappy mountain bike with terrible fat high rolling resistance tires that roll to a stop in about 20 ft.
Not only that, but have you seen the brakes on those things? It's literally a pair of rubber bits tied to a wire, that clamp down because the wire is pulling them up - like this, except not as fancy.
Those brakes have so little stopping power they won't even keep you from pushing the bike!
Those things are death traps. I don't know why anyone would sell them, much less buy them.
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That's only true if you define "sentient" as "human".
Animals have been described using tools, passing tool-use down to their children, giving their children names, engaging in economic activity (including prostitution), using rudimentary languages and all sorts of other, "sentient" behaviors. In fact, at least one African Gray Parrot was taught how to spell - the scientist studying him described an incident where he exclaimed "want nut! Enn you tee!" (there were also other, more rigorous tests done on Alex).
Basically, for every definition of sentience with even a little leeway for creatures that aren't human, we've found animals that achieve it - and we have many examples of humans who don't (if an adult dog isn't sentient, the clearly a newborn baby isn't either)
You can say the exact same thing about C. If we sit around waiting for the perfect language, it's going to be a looooong wait.
I would argue, though, that Javascript is significantly better suited to UI work than C is, much like C is better suited to systems work.
It's flexible so you don't have to write a bunch of code to encapsulate a data structure that only exists in one place in the UI, and powerful enough that you can easily write behavior-driven components.
Coincidentally, the PS3 and XBox 360 were both released in 2005/2006.
Since it's always been games that push the bounds of consumer hardware performance, and because almost all games are stuck with platforms from six years ago, it's really no wonder that a modern, low-end computer can easily run pretty much any game.
The only exceptions are PC exclusive games like Guild Wars 2 or Planetside 2, which can still bring a high-end computer to its knees.
Choosing to do nothing is always the right decision when you are trying to minimize personal responsibility for failures. If you choose to do nothing, then nobody can blame you for anything besides inaction; on the other hand, if you choose to do something and it doesn't work out, then anyone who wants to take you out has concrete ammunition.
I personally like the exercise plan in the Hacker's Diet. It's just a basic minimum level of exercise you should get per day.
Honestly, any particular scaling exercise routine would work well - the important thing is that you have something structured, that you can easily do without equipment, and that you have scheduled a block of time for. It's significantly easier to keep up an exercise routine if you have no excuses for not doing it, and "but I'd have to go to the gym" or "but I can't find my running shoes" end up being a lot harder to ignore than you'd think.
You're misinterpreting the results in these papers.
The GP's paper showed that kids in states with lax gun safe laws are 20% more likely to be killed in gun accidents.
Your paper shows that people who don't have guns are 2% more likely to be murdered at home.
You can't compare these two statistics without knowing the rate of accidental gun violence among children, and the rate of homicide in the home.
However, I bet you anything that kids getting accidentally shot happens a lot more than people getting murdered in their own home.
This is the fundamental problem with gun discourse in the USA: the pro-gun side focuses on the benefits of guns in a vanishingly unlikely set of situations, while completely ignoring the wide societal impact that actually happens the majority of the time.
I bet that if you looked at the total numbe of gun injuries and fatalities among civilians, there would be way more instances of people getting shot by accident or mistake than there are instances of people engaged in criminal activity being shot to prevent that activity.
Honestly, you didn't even need the "without using the reverse() method" stipulation.
That's true, it's a bit weird that Javascript will implicitly put stuff in the global scope if you don't declare it with "var"; it's a legacy behavior, and I'm pretty sure the future "use strict" semantics will throw a warning when you create a variable like that.
I don't know, maybe I'm just weird myself but I don't think Javascript's scope rules are that hard to grasp, and the class support is workable but honestly most of the time you don't need to use classes at all.
I mean, the scope is easy - are you in a function? If so, the variable is scoped to the function. If not, the variable is globally scoped. That's about it. Just wrap something like
around your script file, and everything will be local to that script file while still being able to see the global scope. There's some other funky stuff involving weird cases like using a locally scoped variable before it's defined, but as long as you're not writing crap on purpose it's not a huge deal.
And as for classes - well, honestly, a lot of the time when you think "I need a class for this", what you really mean is "I've got some data that needs to travel together". In Javascript, you can just do that - you can just say:
And then tada! You've got a class that carries your data around. Hooray!
But if you really want classes, with methods and stuff like that, they're there too - but if you're writing a project large enough to actually need those sorts of tools, you really ought to be using a framework that'll handle the nitty-gritty of classes for you.
Whaaaaat. Why are you putting all your shit in the global scope in the first place? Use the module pattern, and none of those functions leak out of the file you're in.
Yes, because despite the technological advances of modern society, the best we can expect from a first-world nation is merely parity with a hundred years ago, instead of setting higher standards for ourselves and our country.
Let us not forget that they are stupider, as well - the smartest men tend to be smarter than women on average, but the dumbest men are way stupider than the least intelligent women, on average. The thing is, men have a lot more variation in general because evolution can afford to fuck around with our genetics.
We're disposable and can be experimented upon and ultimately discarded; women can't.
I hope you don't really think parking fees are some sort of "forced attempt to get people to conform" - space in a metropolitan area is fucking expensive. The space you put your car has to compete, economically, with the value of putting in an office building that actually generates revenue and pays rent.
Expecting whoever owns that land to just let you put your shit there for free is a bit entitled, and bitching about the cost of municipal parking is just completely ignoring the realities of the situation: if it wasn't for the city stepping in and saying "no, there will not be another high-rent office building here, there will be a parking structure", you wouldn't have anywhere to park because private companies would be busy using that space to make money to the detriment of everyone else. (and don't even start on "we should privatize the municipal parking structures" - you don't want to know what they would have to charge in order to be competitive with office rents).
The "green agenda" is just a side-effect of the fact that cars are super inefficient in densely packed areas where nobody can afford to just let people park their cars for free.
(and you know how you can meet your friends at the restaurant? You can walk. That's probably how they got there, unless they're hiding some sort of secret "green" teleportation device.)
Valve is working on this. The Linux version of Steam is in beta right now , and NVIDIA has been pumping out press releases about their partnership with Valve on Linux for the last few months.
For the last decade (literally), people have been saying that the only reason why there's no games for Linux is because it's a chicken-and-egg problem - there's no games because there's no hardware support, and there's no hardware support because there's no games. Now Microsoft, with Windows 8 (and its built-in Steam competitor) has pissed off the Gaben, and I think things will change soon.
Valve throwing their weight behind it is probably going to make a lot of headway towards solving the problem within a few years; they have enough pull with both the chicken and the egg that they can encourage developers to support Linux, and hardware manufacturers to write proper drivers.
What's especially sad is that Elop's Nokia tried to fight Apple in that battleground - they essentially ditched all their low-end phones (which were essentially the lifeblood of third-world telecommunications) in order to try and imitate Apple except with Windows Phone.
It's so stupid. They were ahead of their time (my N900 is still a good phone, despite only having a single core 600 MHz CPU and no multi-touch), and they gave it all up because of an evil brain parasite.
More true to life :(
I got the impression that it's a missile-drone - it flies by, zapinates the electronics, and continues on somehwere else.
That's why it's so sad (and incredibly weird until you realize Elop came from MSFT) that Nokia dropped their next-gen smartphone OS; it would have been quite a bit ahead of Android, and their maps applications rival Google's (offline maps? hell yes).
I mean, my Nokia N900 (from which I'm writing this post in fact) is almost as good as any phone currently on the market; give it some modern phone hardware, and it would have rocked worlds.
Well see the thing is, there's an understanding mismatch between the West and the Middle East.
See, here, we have freedom of speech. We know we have freedom of speech, and we know everyone else has it too.
Therefore, when one jackass makes a hilaribad video calling Muhammed a pedophile (and tbh he had a 9 year old wife, that's a pretty strong argument), we know it's just this one jackass making waves.
Over there, they don't have freedom of speech (unless they're really rich and/or privileged, who incidentally aren't the people flipping out). All the media they see is official gov't crap, never just individual citizen's opinions.
Therefore, when they see that jackass's hilaribad video calling Muhammed (peace be upon him) a pedophile, they think it's official US Gov't propaganda. Why would the USA have allowed this video onto the internets if our government didn't endorse it's views?
So essentially, the reason why the population of these countries gets so upset at a crank's video is because they don't realize it's just a crank, they think it's an official statement by the USA.
Oh my god stop reading David Barton and maybe pick up an actual history book sometime - the people who founded this nation were as irreligious as a person could be before there was a naturalistic theory of how animals got to be the way they are.
Jefferson famiously cut out all the miracles in the Bible (including the Resurrection), and James Madison, the father of the Constitution, was integral in setting up the separation of Church and State (and I don't mean that the State can't interfere with the Church, which is how you guys somehow decide to interpret it, but that the Church can't interfere with the State).
And that's not even gtting in to the insanity that they "grounded all of those concepts in a God", because that is some serious, weapons grade historical revisionism right there.
Yeah, because we'll all be retired like the baby boomers or still in school like their grandkids.
This is what happens when your workforce gets old, Japan's seen the same thing over the last decade.
No it isn't, because the majority of the time these people who are anti-abortion are also pro-death penalty. Their stance is not internally consistent.
More than that, one thing that happens surprisingly often is that a lab will file a FOIA request for information from a competing public lab, and then have all their data and private notes if it goes through - essentially, stealing progress from the other lab in order to get a leg up on publishing.
Not only that, but have you seen the brakes on those things? It's literally a pair of rubber bits tied to a wire, that clamp down because the wire is pulling them up - like this, except not as fancy.
Those brakes have so little stopping power they won't even keep you from pushing the bike!
Those things are death traps. I don't know why anyone would sell them, much less buy them.
And that's why he'd never make it as the Republican presidential candidate.