But that's not really the freemium model, though. That's is more of a "loss-leader" -- a bit like the old razor sales tactics of giving the handle away free then charging through the nose for the blades. The only reason you don't get free razor handles very often is that this sort of sales tactic has been considered illegal market manipulation for several decades.
You have just touched on what might be the biggest problem -- ebooks. Textbooks are increasingly going electronic, not least because there's a lot of wastage in textbooks (books not sold before the next version are often pulped). If the market goes electronic, someone who only makes money from printed editions is sunk. It may just be that the Flat World guys realise that this is a distinct possibility....
Yes we have. Open (anything) source has a history of being difficult to make a living off of.
In the case of software, it has proven difficult, but not impossible. But this is no Red Hat Linux -- it's not someone taking the voluntary effort of millions and wrapping it up in a managed test-and-support environment. Red Hat profits because Red Hat take free and add value. Flat World have taken value (their books) and added free. That's completely back-to-front.
The problem here is not "open", it's "freemium". It's the freemium that never seems to work. The original philosophy of freemium was the idea that on the internet, unit cost was so low that a minority of "serious" customers would pay enough to keep the servers running. A lot of the "freemium" camp has found that freeloaders are actually more demanding in terms of support than they expected, and you can't ignore the guys on the free plan as long as you're hoping that they might one day become paying customers...
If they're still talking about partnering with EdX, though, they may still end up producing free material anyway, but as it will be customised to the EdX courses, it may well become something of an advertising asset, rather than a money sink.
Perhaps this is the way forward for the freemium business model -- limit the "free" version to a part of a wider "free" system. So the free version is "closed", but the paid version is "open". That means turning a few of our assumptions about the word "open" on their head...
I think what we're really talking about is having a lightweight encryption scheme but changing the key frequently enough that by the time one cypher is broken, the next is in use.
I don't think you understand what a "passive receiver" is. It more or less means "an aerial". What you receive radio signals with. It isn't an "active" device because it doesn't emit anything and doesn't require any power (although you might have an active booster somewhere in the signal chain).
Dawkins does literally admit to the possibility, but his admission is hedged, bounded, supported, surrounded and smothered by so many patronising put-downs and statements of personal opinion that it's difficult to kid yourself on he's being sincere.
Because the "God" generally under debate is some variation of the Hebrew god from ancient mythology, one that dabbles in human affairs and has an associated creation myth that fundamentally conflicts with modern science. It's the product of primitive people with little understanding of the world, let alone the universe.
If all people did was speak philosophically about the possibility of an intelligent designer(s) for the universe, instead of taking mythology seriously to the point of battling evolution in schools or using it as a dogmatic basis for morality, then atheists like Dawkins wouldn't be so divisive in their ridicule.
Ah yes. Except that Dawkins doesn't just attack the biblical literalists, does he? The catholic church, for example, does not take the bible literally, but they are attacked by Dawkins (among others). Rome established the early universities to try to better understand the "mechanics of God's creation". The Vatican still retains important scientists, even if the Vatican observatory is now rendered obsolete by light pollution from Rome and the availability of much better telescopes in the form of radio arrays, orbital satellites and high-altitude optical scopes near the equator). Religion is not as intrinsically anti-science as people make out.
In fact, I recall one particular incident where Dawkins really showed his true colours. Talking about the catholic church's views on abortion, he stated quite baldly that the church's true wasn't even based on a "real morality" (or maybe "false morality"), and rather a "false morality". What the hell does that mean? Because it wasn't based on science. Science cannot define morality. Science defines what we physically can do, not whether we should or shouldn't do it. Just because you disagree with the basis for someone's moral decisions doesn't make it a "false" morality.
I might even go as far as accusing Dawkins of verbal terrorism.
So, you trot out the "terrorism" word, and accuse Dawkins of being divisive and using put-downs?
"Trot out"? Indeed no. I've given my argument based on an informed reading of the principles of manipulation of public opinion that underlie terrorism. It's not like making a frivolous comparison to the Nazis -- terrorist philosophy is one of the key sociological factors defining our modern world, and if we refuse to recognise it as such, and instead paint it as a bogeyman word, then we're all going to fall into the trap of being unable to properly handle it.
Terrorists seek to provoke a reaction from their enemies that they can point to and say "see? they're oppressing us!"
Except in this case there is a long history of religion seeking to oppress views dogmatically. When people push back, now all of a sudden they are being unfairly attacked, when they are merely being ridiculed for their dogmatic belief in mythology.
Ridiculing someone is what I would consider a personal attack.
Ridiculing someone is hardly enlightened rational behaviour.
Ridiculing someone does not educate them.
And this is my point; however much Dawkins claims to be promoting science, he refuses to present science as something that is unthreatening to religious belief. He promotes and packages science as being the opposite of religion. He actively discourages religious people from engaging in science. He is therefore promoting ignorance.
I'll call him a bitter, repulsive little man on a crusade for self-publicity and with an irrational hatred of anyone who does not agree with him wholeheartedly
My point is that if Noam Chomsky was the most powerful man on Earth, he would probably have done much, much worse. Chomsky is acting out of ego. Noam Chomsky can't even entertain the possibility that Noam Chomsky is wrong. Now imagine that Chomsky was the emperor of the western world. Do you believe he would have stopped at simply calling him names? The church as a political entity subjugated the western world -- as all empires do. Are we going to blame all the actions of the Roman Empire on the worship of Jupiter, or all the actions of the Greeks on the worship of Zeus?
If I only pick the good things, it's because you're only picking the bad things. I'm not trying to prove that the church was good -- far from it. I'm just trying to show that it's no worse than Any Other Human Institution.
Dawkins does literally admit to the possibility, but his admission is hedged, bounded, supported, surrounded and smothered by so many patronising put-downs and statements of personal opinion that it's difficult to kid yourself on he's being sincere.
Heck, on the "There's probably no God" bus campaigns, he's on record as saying he would have preferred "There is no God." Dawkins is irrationally atheist, and only uses a veneer of rationality to try to shield himself from attack.
I might even go as far as accusing Dawkins of verbal terrorism. Terrorists seek to provoke a reaction from their enemies that they can point to and say "see? they're oppressing us!" The invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq are extreme examples of reaction to terror, and they just happened to convince a heck of a lot of the Middle East that us white "Christian" guys are nasty pieces of work... terrorism succeeded, to a point. Dawkins insults and offends with specious arguments and snide comments, then when people react says that "I only said there's no evidence! I'm a scientist!" and "agreeing with someone isn't insulting them." His fans lap it up. The people he's talking down to get even more chronically pissed off. He tells his fans that it shows how irrational they are. His fans lap it up.
Dawkins is a poisonous, divisive piece of pond scum. If I was religious, I might even call him an agent of the devil. But I'm not, so I'll call him a bitter, repulsive little man on a crusade for self-publicity and with an irrational hatred of anyone who does not agree with him wholeheartedly (which he showed quite aptly even in his dealings with other scientists before he got this bee in his bonnet about religion).
In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that Dawkins's obsession with religion is an avoidance tactic: his "science" was always so thin and easily refutable that he's needed to find something else to be "right" about. Odious man.
How can you reason your way out of something which is inherently non-rational? That is "non-rational", not "irrational". Religion cannot be reasoned with, as it is not based on any logic. This doesn't make it right, and it doesn't make it wrong. It makes it beyond rational enquiry. Which is the basis of agnostic philosophy: you can't reason about it, so there's no point wasting time trying to. Get on with the stuff that you can reason with instead.
Science wouldn't have got far if the church hadn't spent much of those 1000 years creating the system we now call "universities". The catholic church was the centre of all learning in Europe during the Middle Ages. Granted, yes, they ignored or lost some old knowledge, but every civilisation in history did that. Granted, yes, they suppressed people they didn't agree with, but academics today often do the same thing -- consider that Noam Chomsky called Daniel Emmett a "charlatan" for claiming that Pirahã features no recursion. When Gallileo Gallilei was locked up for his heliocentric model, it was because the the pope was also an astronomer, and disagreed with his findings. Chomsky called Emmett a charlatan and has been accused of pulling various strings to stop him continuing with his research. Pope Urban VIII happened to have more powerful means of dealing with Gallileo when they had a clash of egos.
So yes, the church was corrupt, but it wasn't anything more than standard human nature.
One of the things I don't get about atheists is how they can demonise religion if they don't believe in demons. If there's nothing more than humans, then there is nothing more than human nature.
[Caveat: I'm an agnostic. I don't know, and I don't care. I can and will never know. At least as long as I'm alive. After which it's probably too late, one way or the other....]
I specifically made a distinction between a threat from the immoral (god) and a threat from the mortal (other human beings). If you don't believe in the religion, then logically, any coercive threats from their god are irrelevent to you!
That would be fine if no one with religious beliefs ever talked about them in public or allowed them to influence their politics. As soon as retards in Iran or the US start using holy books to justify wars or other idiocies, religion has lost its claim to be merely an innocent bystander.
Let's take religion out of it for a second...
That would be fine if no one with beliefs ever talked about them in public or allowed them to influence their politics.
Because even an agnostic can have irrational beliefs not based on religion. Much current legislation on drugs is belief-based, and not religiously so. Much economic theory is belief-based, and the economic crisis has already shown us how misjudged some of those beliefs are. And yet we allow legislators to force "austerity measures" based on a political/economic ideology, even though it flies in the face of all evidence, and we continue to ban recreational drugs on the grounds of various societal ill-effects that have no evidence, even though prohibition has immediately obvious ill-effects (from causing crime, to the availability of dangerous impurities in the supplied product).
So seriously, when people keep saying that religion is fine, but that anyone with a religious view should be banned from public office (or worse still, banned from voting), I feel compelled to point out that religion is no different from other societally-conditioned views. It's just conditioned by a particular mechanism.
Agnosticism says "I don't know if there's a god or not, and I'm not going to let it bother me or affect my life." Atheism says "there is no god," and unless the atheists have some killer evidence that they're refusing to share with me, that's an unproven assertion, hence a belief.
Come and join us agnostics. We're not on the fence, we're sunbathing by the pool while you guys are at each others' throats.
Well, there's multiple levels of abstraction in any applied science, and you've chosen your preferred "base" level. But remember that people like the guys behind from NAND to Tetris don't feel that your level of abstraction is the correct base either. But they've chosen a base level of their own that they define as "computer science" beyond which there is only "physics".
Lower levels of abstraction are good for building up background knowledge, but how deep you go really should depend on what your audience is expected to produce.
Although I would guess from your description that these aren't potential devs, just people "toying" with code, so they shouldn't be dealing in anything big enough to require an IDE anyway...
Doesn't need to set a property -- it can call a function or procedure that will change the internal state of the object such that it appears that property is a property.
eg object.length = 5 actually calls the hidden function object.length.assign()(or similar) which stores the length however it sees fit.
Getters and setters really annoyed me at uni (at the turn of the century), and I never understood why Java didn't work like C# does now. But I didn't know Python did that... must dig deeper into the docs....
I'm calling a method which is more expensive but worse the method's result is not deterministic.
Hold on, the whole point of using getters and setters in OO is that (theoretically) all properties should be private. This is so you can completely re-engineer the internals without negatively affecting the program that owns the object instance.
Methods are not necessarily non-deterministic, and getters and setters should be entirely deterministic.
HAL.getHeightInInches() should give the same result as HAL.getHeightInMetres(), except using a different scale. The programmer shouldn't need to know whether the internal representation is metric or imperial.
OK, so in the real world, we need to be able to optimise code, but that's actually another weakness in the language. No, not because the compiler should optimise it, but because languages don't enforce optimisation as the final stage. If you're chosing between properties and methods at the outset, you're optimising too early, and you're making your optimisations part of the fundamental architecture of the system, which doesn't help maintainability.
An integrated development system (not "environment") that folded away optimisations until the last stage would be a wonder indeed.
I've found the best way to deal with people insisting on taking your disgreement as an insult is to cut loose with a few choice obscenities. Then in the stunned silence afterwards smile sweetly and say "No, THAT was me being insulting. Now we've defined some boundaries can we get back to the discussion?"
I've had to deal with the "race to offence" types so many times I just have no patience for them. They look for anything that they can claim offence at so that they can lock down the field of discussion as a lazy way of controlling the verbal field of battle. It's childish ( I've had to deal with people who say that I "don't get to talk about that" because I'm not female/coloured/disabled etc...) and itself highly offensive. So I counterattack.
Yes, that's a real danger, but we're talking about Dawkins here, and Dawkins is insulting. He may not say "religious people are fscking idiots" explicitly, but his whole argument is wrapped in snide put-downs. I am no longer a religious man, although I was for a long time, having been brought up in a religious household.
I studied some linguistics and stylistics as part of my degree in foreign languages, though, and you could write an entire PhD (or two) on the underhand techniques that Dawkins uses to belittle his opponents.
One of Dawkins' favourite tactics is to use "assumption" rather than "assertion". "Assertions" are statements that are readily open to disagreement; "assumptions" take facts as true and do not open them to disagreement.
Assertion: "They say the world is square. This notion is preposterous."
Assumption: "They say the world is square. This preposterous notion comes from the...."
Dawkins' entire writing style is littered with this sort of thing. Analysed as formal logic, his argument opens with the predicate that he is right and that others are wrong. Dawkins therefore can and does only "preach to the converted" (if you'll pardon my choice of phrase).
The overall effect is that Dawkins actually damages the cause of reason and science, because he implies absolutely and unquestionably that it's synonymous with "agreeing with Dawkins".
People like Dawkins turn moderate religious people further towards the radical extremes of their religion -- I saw a marked shift towards fundamentalism in many before I left the Catholic church, and I have continued to see this happening since I stopped believing, and the people most fundamentalised are those who have read or been involved in these sorts of debates.
Please, somebody put a gag on Dawkins before he kills science.
Sounds like a worthwhile opt-in for the would-be terrorist though. Opt-in, find you've been sussed, board without the funny shoe or the lethal combination of a disposable razor and a can of shaving foam.
Profiling is the absolute last thing you need when dealing with terrorists. Profiling leads to discrimination based on social, -racial, religious or other demographics, and it marginalises the group that the terrorists draw their support from.
If you marginalise them, you risk radicalising them. Popular support for ETA in the Basque country reached its highest when the Frankist regime suppressed the use of Basque language and the expression of Basque culture. Support for the IRA was at its highest when being Irish in London meant being constantly harrassed by the police.
This is one of the basic tenets of terrorist philosophy: if you can provoke the authorities into suppressing your demographic, you gain popular support. Profiling means the terrorists win.
Aborting might set up a pattern detectable to data-mining, and might start making "has cancelled a flight in the past" be considered as a terrorist risk factor. Perhaps better to get on the flight without the weaponised 500ml Pepsi-Cola bottle (*derisive snort*) and leave it for another day to bring your own refreshments onto the flight....
Except that Google is big enough and important enough to hold you to ransom. Google does, and always has done, whatever Google wants, protecting itself with its sheer size and market dominance.
but I'm missing how Google is somehow responsible for it being hard, unless you're talking about the landscape being so amazingly competitive due to Google helping people find competitors.
Quite simply, Google is too good. It is easier to hang about on Google than to hang about on a news site. Google therefore draws people away from the sites.
Who says 80%? And 80% of what? All searches? Unique users? And that's before talking about the rise of Android and the forthcoming Chrome devices. It's all relative...
Buggy whip makers be damned. We're not talking about bloggers, or citizen journalists, or crowd-sourced reports of view-from-the-streets of the Arab Spring -- Google News sources its feed from reputable professional outfits, and builds an entire service out of them. Google News has no adverts: why? Because they know they'd get hammered for it -- the news outlets made that clear enough early on.
And yet no-one arguing against me (including those that modded me "flamebait" stopped to point that out -- it's the natural counterargument, but no-one made it.
However, lots of people don't go to Google News directly -- they go to the Google front page, search for something they know is in the news and the news results are embedded in the general results... along with adverts. There are less of them, and they're only at the bottom, but they're there.
Google already knows they're treading on thin ice -- they've positioned themselves very carefully in anticipation of something like this happening, because it was always going to happen sooner or later. They're going to argue they're not making any money from the service, because it's free and (nearly) ad-free. The French are going to argue indirect profit due to customer draw.
You're not making sense in this discussion at all.
That's rich coming from you, Mr Coward. One minute you're posting in favour of Google, the next you're declaring them evil, and then finally you start off on irrelevant rants about the US government.
</joke>
How about making users stick to your site by making it better[...].
Because you're asking them to make it better than Google. There isn't one website in the world that is better than Google, and you're asking every site to be better than Google. And Google is that good because it offers practically zero original content, so how the heck does a content provider compete with Google?
Slashdot Mirror
But that's not really the freemium model, though. That's is more of a "loss-leader" -- a bit like the old razor sales tactics of giving the handle away free then charging through the nose for the blades. The only reason you don't get free razor handles very often is that this sort of sales tactic has been considered illegal market manipulation for several decades.
You have just touched on what might be the biggest problem -- ebooks. Textbooks are increasingly going electronic, not least because there's a lot of wastage in textbooks (books not sold before the next version are often pulped). If the market goes electronic, someone who only makes money from printed editions is sunk. It may just be that the Flat World guys realise that this is a distinct possibility....
Yes we have. Open (anything) source has a history of being difficult to make a living off of.
In the case of software, it has proven difficult, but not impossible. But this is no Red Hat Linux -- it's not someone taking the voluntary effort of millions and wrapping it up in a managed test-and-support environment. Red Hat profits because Red Hat take free and add value. Flat World have taken value (their books) and added free. That's completely back-to-front.
The problem here is not "open", it's "freemium". It's the freemium that never seems to work. The original philosophy of freemium was the idea that on the internet, unit cost was so low that a minority of "serious" customers would pay enough to keep the servers running. A lot of the "freemium" camp has found that freeloaders are actually more demanding in terms of support than they expected, and you can't ignore the guys on the free plan as long as you're hoping that they might one day become paying customers...
If they're still talking about partnering with EdX, though, they may still end up producing free material anyway, but as it will be customised to the EdX courses, it may well become something of an advertising asset, rather than a money sink.
Perhaps this is the way forward for the freemium business model -- limit the "free" version to a part of a wider "free" system. So the free version is "closed", but the paid version is "open". That means turning a few of our assumptions about the word "open" on their head...
I think what we're really talking about is having a lightweight encryption scheme but changing the key frequently enough that by the time one cypher is broken, the next is in use.
I don't think you understand what a "passive receiver" is. It more or less means "an aerial". What you receive radio signals with. It isn't an "active" device because it doesn't emit anything and doesn't require any power (although you might have an active booster somewhere in the signal chain).
Dawkins does literally admit to the possibility, but his admission is hedged, bounded, supported, surrounded and smothered by so many patronising put-downs and statements of personal opinion that it's difficult to kid yourself on he's being sincere.
Because the "God" generally under debate is some variation of the Hebrew god from ancient mythology, one that dabbles in human affairs and has an associated creation myth that fundamentally conflicts with modern science. It's the product of primitive people with little understanding of the world, let alone the universe.
If all people did was speak philosophically about the possibility of an intelligent designer(s) for the universe, instead of taking mythology seriously to the point of battling evolution in schools or using it as a dogmatic basis for morality, then atheists like Dawkins wouldn't be so divisive in their ridicule.
Ah yes. Except that Dawkins doesn't just attack the biblical literalists, does he? The catholic church, for example, does not take the bible literally, but they are attacked by Dawkins (among others). Rome established the early universities to try to better understand the "mechanics of God's creation". The Vatican still retains important scientists, even if the Vatican observatory is now rendered obsolete by light pollution from Rome and the availability of much better telescopes in the form of radio arrays, orbital satellites and high-altitude optical scopes near the equator). Religion is not as intrinsically anti-science as people make out.
In fact, I recall one particular incident where Dawkins really showed his true colours. Talking about the catholic church's views on abortion, he stated quite baldly that the church's true wasn't even based on a "real morality" (or maybe "false morality"), and rather a "false morality". What the hell does that mean? Because it wasn't based on science. Science cannot define morality. Science defines what we physically can do, not whether we should or shouldn't do it. Just because you disagree with the basis for someone's moral decisions doesn't make it a "false" morality.
I might even go as far as accusing Dawkins of verbal terrorism.
So, you trot out the "terrorism" word, and accuse Dawkins of being divisive and using put-downs?
"Trot out"? Indeed no. I've given my argument based on an informed reading of the principles of manipulation of public opinion that underlie terrorism. It's not like making a frivolous comparison to the Nazis -- terrorist philosophy is one of the key sociological factors defining our modern world, and if we refuse to recognise it as such, and instead paint it as a bogeyman word, then we're all going to fall into the trap of being unable to properly handle it.
Terrorists seek to provoke a reaction from their enemies that they can point to and say "see? they're oppressing us!"
Except in this case there is a long history of religion seeking to oppress views dogmatically. When people push back, now all of a sudden they are being unfairly attacked, when they are merely being ridiculed for their dogmatic belief in mythology.
Ridiculing someone is what I would consider a personal attack.
Ridiculing someone is hardly enlightened rational behaviour.
Ridiculing someone does not educate them.
And this is my point; however much Dawkins claims to be promoting science, he refuses to present science as something that is unthreatening to religious belief. He promotes and packages science as being the opposite of religion. He actively discourages religious people from engaging in science. He is therefore promoting ignorance.
I'll call him a bitter, repulsive little man on a crusade for self-publicity and with an irrational hatred of anyone who does not agree with him wholeheartedly
My point is that if Noam Chomsky was the most powerful man on Earth, he would probably have done much, much worse. Chomsky is acting out of ego. Noam Chomsky can't even entertain the possibility that Noam Chomsky is wrong. Now imagine that Chomsky was the emperor of the western world. Do you believe he would have stopped at simply calling him names? The church as a political entity subjugated the western world -- as all empires do. Are we going to blame all the actions of the Roman Empire on the worship of Jupiter, or all the actions of the Greeks on the worship of Zeus?
If I only pick the good things, it's because you're only picking the bad things. I'm not trying to prove that the church was good -- far from it. I'm just trying to show that it's no worse than Any Other Human Institution.
Dawkins does literally admit to the possibility, but his admission is hedged, bounded, supported, surrounded and smothered by so many patronising put-downs and statements of personal opinion that it's difficult to kid yourself on he's being sincere.
Heck, on the "There's probably no God" bus campaigns, he's on record as saying he would have preferred "There is no God." Dawkins is irrationally atheist, and only uses a veneer of rationality to try to shield himself from attack.
I might even go as far as accusing Dawkins of verbal terrorism. Terrorists seek to provoke a reaction from their enemies that they can point to and say "see? they're oppressing us!" The invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq are extreme examples of reaction to terror, and they just happened to convince a heck of a lot of the Middle East that us white "Christian" guys are nasty pieces of work... terrorism succeeded, to a point. Dawkins insults and offends with specious arguments and snide comments, then when people react says that "I only said there's no evidence! I'm a scientist!" and "agreeing with someone isn't insulting them." His fans lap it up. The people he's talking down to get even more chronically pissed off. He tells his fans that it shows how irrational they are. His fans lap it up.
Dawkins is a poisonous, divisive piece of pond scum. If I was religious, I might even call him an agent of the devil. But I'm not, so I'll call him a bitter, repulsive little man on a crusade for self-publicity and with an irrational hatred of anyone who does not agree with him wholeheartedly (which he showed quite aptly even in his dealings with other scientists before he got this bee in his bonnet about religion).
In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that Dawkins's obsession with religion is an avoidance tactic: his "science" was always so thin and easily refutable that he's needed to find something else to be "right" about. Odious man.
How can you reason your way out of something which is inherently non-rational? That is "non-rational", not "irrational". Religion cannot be reasoned with, as it is not based on any logic. This doesn't make it right, and it doesn't make it wrong. It makes it beyond rational enquiry. Which is the basis of agnostic philosophy: you can't reason about it, so there's no point wasting time trying to. Get on with the stuff that you can reason with instead.
The church spent 1000 years shutting down science
Science wouldn't have got far if the church hadn't spent much of those 1000 years creating the system we now call "universities". The catholic church was the centre of all learning in Europe during the Middle Ages. Granted, yes, they ignored or lost some old knowledge, but every civilisation in history did that. Granted, yes, they suppressed people they didn't agree with, but academics today often do the same thing -- consider that Noam Chomsky called Daniel Emmett a "charlatan" for claiming that Pirahã features no recursion. When Gallileo Gallilei was locked up for his heliocentric model, it was because the the pope was also an astronomer, and disagreed with his findings. Chomsky called Emmett a charlatan and has been accused of pulling various strings to stop him continuing with his research. Pope Urban VIII happened to have more powerful means of dealing with Gallileo when they had a clash of egos.
So yes, the church was corrupt, but it wasn't anything more than standard human nature.
One of the things I don't get about atheists is how they can demonise religion if they don't believe in demons. If there's nothing more than humans, then there is nothing more than human nature.
[Caveat: I'm an agnostic. I don't know, and I don't care. I can and will never know. At least as long as I'm alive. After which it's probably too late, one way or the other....]
I specifically made a distinction between a threat from the immoral (god) and a threat from the mortal (other human beings). If you don't believe in the religion, then logically, any coercive threats from their god are irrelevent to you!
That would be fine if no one with religious beliefs ever talked about them in public or allowed them to influence their politics. As soon as retards in Iran or the US start using holy books to justify wars or other idiocies, religion has lost its claim to be merely an innocent bystander.
Let's take religion out of it for a second...
Because even an agnostic can have irrational beliefs not based on religion. Much current legislation on drugs is belief-based, and not religiously so. Much economic theory is belief-based, and the economic crisis has already shown us how misjudged some of those beliefs are. And yet we allow legislators to force "austerity measures" based on a political/economic ideology, even though it flies in the face of all evidence, and we continue to ban recreational drugs on the grounds of various societal ill-effects that have no evidence, even though prohibition has immediately obvious ill-effects (from causing crime, to the availability of dangerous impurities in the supplied product).
So seriously, when people keep saying that religion is fine, but that anyone with a religious view should be banned from public office (or worse still, banned from voting), I feel compelled to point out that religion is no different from other societally-conditioned views. It's just conditioned by a particular mechanism.
Nope. Agnosticism is lack of belief.
Agnosticism says "I don't know if there's a god or not, and I'm not going to let it bother me or affect my life." Atheism says "there is no god," and unless the atheists have some killer evidence that they're refusing to share with me, that's an unproven assertion, hence a belief.
Come and join us agnostics. We're not on the fence, we're sunbathing by the pool while you guys are at each others' throats.
Well, there's multiple levels of abstraction in any applied science, and you've chosen your preferred "base" level. But remember that people like the guys behind from NAND to Tetris don't feel that your level of abstraction is the correct base either. But they've chosen a base level of their own that they define as "computer science" beyond which there is only "physics".
Lower levels of abstraction are good for building up background knowledge, but how deep you go really should depend on what your audience is expected to produce.
Although I would guess from your description that these aren't potential devs, just people "toying" with code, so they shouldn't be dealing in anything big enough to require an IDE anyway...
object_instance.property = 1
Doesn't need to set a property -- it can call a function or procedure that will change the internal state of the object such that it appears that property is a property.
eg object.length = 5 actually calls the hidden function object.length.assign()(or similar) which stores the length however it sees fit.
Getters and setters really annoyed me at uni (at the turn of the century), and I never understood why Java didn't work like C# does now. But I didn't know Python did that... must dig deeper into the docs....
I'm calling a method which is more expensive but worse the method's result is not deterministic.
Hold on, the whole point of using getters and setters in OO is that (theoretically) all properties should be private. This is so you can completely re-engineer the internals without negatively affecting the program that owns the object instance.
Methods are not necessarily non-deterministic, and getters and setters should be entirely deterministic.
HAL.getHeightInInches() should give the same result as HAL.getHeightInMetres(), except using a different scale. The programmer shouldn't need to know whether the internal representation is metric or imperial.
OK, so in the real world, we need to be able to optimise code, but that's actually another weakness in the language. No, not because the compiler should optimise it, but because languages don't enforce optimisation as the final stage. If you're chosing between properties and methods at the outset, you're optimising too early, and you're making your optimisations part of the fundamental architecture of the system, which doesn't help maintainability.
An integrated development system (not "environment") that folded away optimisations until the last stage would be a wonder indeed.
I've found the best way to deal with people insisting on taking your disgreement as an insult is to cut loose with a few choice obscenities. Then in the stunned silence afterwards smile sweetly and say "No, THAT was me being insulting. Now we've defined some boundaries can we get back to the discussion?" I've had to deal with the "race to offence" types so many times I just have no patience for them. They look for anything that they can claim offence at so that they can lock down the field of discussion as a lazy way of controlling the verbal field of battle. It's childish ( I've had to deal with people who say that I "don't get to talk about that" because I'm not female/coloured/disabled etc...) and itself highly offensive. So I counterattack.
Yes, that's a real danger, but we're talking about Dawkins here, and Dawkins is insulting. He may not say "religious people are fscking idiots" explicitly, but his whole argument is wrapped in snide put-downs. I am no longer a religious man, although I was for a long time, having been brought up in a religious household.
I studied some linguistics and stylistics as part of my degree in foreign languages, though, and you could write an entire PhD (or two) on the underhand techniques that Dawkins uses to belittle his opponents.
One of Dawkins' favourite tactics is to use "assumption" rather than "assertion". "Assertions" are statements that are readily open to disagreement; "assumptions" take facts as true and do not open them to disagreement.
Assertion: "They say the world is square. This notion is preposterous."
Assumption: "They say the world is square. This preposterous notion comes from the ...."
Dawkins' entire writing style is littered with this sort of thing. Analysed as formal logic, his argument opens with the predicate that he is right and that others are wrong. Dawkins therefore can and does only "preach to the converted" (if you'll pardon my choice of phrase).
The overall effect is that Dawkins actually damages the cause of reason and science, because he implies absolutely and unquestionably that it's synonymous with "agreeing with Dawkins".
People like Dawkins turn moderate religious people further towards the radical extremes of their religion -- I saw a marked shift towards fundamentalism in many before I left the Catholic church, and I have continued to see this happening since I stopped believing, and the people most fundamentalised are those who have read or been involved in these sorts of debates.
Please, somebody put a gag on Dawkins before he kills science.
Sounds like a worthwhile opt-in for the would-be terrorist though. Opt-in, find you've been sussed, board without the funny shoe or the lethal combination of a disposable razor and a can of shaving foam.
Profiling is the absolute last thing you need when dealing with terrorists. Profiling leads to discrimination based on social, -racial, religious or other demographics, and it marginalises the group that the terrorists draw their support from.
If you marginalise them, you risk radicalising them. Popular support for ETA in the Basque country reached its highest when the Frankist regime suppressed the use of Basque language and the expression of Basque culture. Support for the IRA was at its highest when being Irish in London meant being constantly harrassed by the police.
This is one of the basic tenets of terrorist philosophy: if you can provoke the authorities into suppressing your demographic, you gain popular support. Profiling means the terrorists win.
Aborting might set up a pattern detectable to data-mining, and might start making "has cancelled a flight in the past" be considered as a terrorist risk factor. Perhaps better to get on the flight without the weaponised 500ml Pepsi-Cola bottle (*derisive snort*) and leave it for another day to bring your own refreshments onto the flight....
It means "even the Nazis were only half as thorough as us"....
Except that Google is big enough and important enough to hold you to ransom. Google does, and always has done, whatever Google wants, protecting itself with its sheer size and market dominance.
but I'm missing how Google is somehow responsible for it being hard, unless you're talking about the landscape being so amazingly competitive due to Google helping people find competitors.
Quite simply, Google is too good. It is easier to hang about on Google than to hang about on a news site. Google therefore draws people away from the sites.
Who says 80%? And 80% of what? All searches? Unique users? And that's before talking about the rise of Android and the forthcoming Chrome devices. It's all relative...
Buggy whip makers be damned. We're not talking about bloggers, or citizen journalists, or crowd-sourced reports of view-from-the-streets of the Arab Spring -- Google News sources its feed from reputable professional outfits, and builds an entire service out of them. Google News has no adverts: why? Because they know they'd get hammered for it -- the news outlets made that clear enough early on.
And yet no-one arguing against me (including those that modded me "flamebait" stopped to point that out -- it's the natural counterargument, but no-one made it.
However, lots of people don't go to Google News directly -- they go to the Google front page, search for something they know is in the news and the news results are embedded in the general results... along with adverts. There are less of them, and they're only at the bottom, but they're there.
Google already knows they're treading on thin ice -- they've positioned themselves very carefully in anticipation of something like this happening, because it was always going to happen sooner or later. They're going to argue they're not making any money from the service, because it's free and (nearly) ad-free. The French are going to argue indirect profit due to customer draw.
I can't really say who's right here.
You're not making sense in this discussion at all.
That's rich coming from you, Mr Coward. One minute you're posting in favour of Google, the next you're declaring them evil, and then finally you start off on irrelevant rants about the US government.
</joke>
How about making users stick to your site by making it better[...].
Because you're asking them to make it better than Google. There isn't one website in the world that is better than Google, and you're asking every site to be better than Google. And Google is that good because it offers practically zero original content, so how the heck does a content provider compete with Google?