Sure, I have internet at home, but I'm not guaranteed to have internet on a road trip, on a plane, at a random bookstore, on vacation, or one of a dozen other places where I'm liable to have plenty of free time and the desire to play a game.
I ran into this situation with StarCraft II recently. I had a 15 hour flight to Dubai a few weeks ago on a plane with power in the seats and was actually looking forward to the trip because it meant I could play through some of the challenge missions and against the AI. On the way back, though, something snapped -- I'm still not sure what happened -- and SCII refused to let me play offline at all, saying that I needed an active internet connection to access even the challenges.
Needless to say, I was a little annoyed. I'd like for that not to be the case with Diablo III, especially considering the game lends itself much better to single-player mode on planes than StarCraft II ever did. However, since it sounds like I'll not be able to play the game at all on plane rides, well, I'm serious reconsidering whether I should buy it or not.
I'm an Egyptian who had the great luck of being born and raised in the States and many, many opportunities to go back home and visit.
From what I've gathered, the Muslim Brotherhood is a shadow of their former selves; they were really big in the 80s and 90s, but they've lost direction and momentum. I think that they're currently just a specter straw-man that Mubarak and the Egyptian government likes to throw up to help keep the opposition in check.
In other words, they're Egypt's Al-Qaeda, a great excuse for a dictator to keep clenching his iron fist.
I went back there last December to see my cousin get married. Most Egyptians I spoke about politics -- there are elections coming up soon and it's a topic everyone wants to talk about -- seem to want very little to do with the Brotherhood; they blame them for a good number of terrorist and don't want them anywhere near positions of power.
I don't deny that there's a risk in open elections -- certainly, you run the risk of electing kooks and crazies in every election. I just don't think the Brotherhood is as terrifying a specter as we think they are. At least, not any more. Have a little faith in the Egyptian people.
Briefly, for the interested Slashdotter, he outlines five different ways people try to communicate affection -- words of affirmation, quality time, gift-giving, acts of servitude, and physical contact -- and then says that not "speaking" your partner's love language can cause a whole lot of strife because not only can you not communicate your affection, you can't understand when they're communicating theirs.
In other words, the ultimate programming languages of future will be known as English, Chinese, etc.
Isn't that the point? Why are we building these machines anyways if not to make our lives simpler and easier, and what is easier than giving instructions to something in one's own tongue?
I'm actually not certain it'll be a natural human language, though. I mean, perhaps in the really long term it might be, but in the shorter-long-term (uh... say, 1,000 years out?) programming languages -- and I'd be willing to bet there won't be one language, but many, and with just as many dialects, and the machines will understand all of them -- will at least resemble the languages we have now, if only because that's their heritage. In the same way that Spanish and Italian and, to an extent English, all resemble Latin, these future computer languages are going to resemble their parent tongues.
You're right, though. The distinction between "programmer" and "commander" is going to gradually fade. I'm ok with that, though; all that means is that I get to put "Commander" on my business card instead of "Programmer." Sounds much cooler, don't you think?;-)
Have you ever programmed in Smalltalk or Squeak? Neither are "text file" based in the sense that C and Java are. Instead, the language runtime is the IDE, and the IDE is the language runtime. It's actually really bloody cool when you play around with it.
As for comparing actual semantic differences vs. syntactic differences, well, I imagine it's really damn difficult, considering the syntactical construction of an expression determines its semantics. In other words, if you change the syntax, you've likely changed the semantics, at least at a low level.
I know what you're trying to say, though. I'm reminded of an exercise given to me in my intro to CS class. We have to convert a for loop to a while loop to do-while loop and back again. Syntactically, they're all different, but semantically, at least for that exercise, they all did the same thing. You'd like a language or an IDE or whatever that can tell you that those three loops are all doing the same thing, regardless of how I write them, and frankly, I think such a language/IDE/magic wand would be freakin' fantastic. (I mean, consider for a moment how often you've rewritten something and are certain it does the exact same thing as the previous incarnation and are shocked when you realize it doesn't?) I'm just not certain if you can achieve that with any ease at all. You'd essentially have to have code that understood any other code, which sounds remarkably similar to the halting problem.
There may be specific cases where this is doable, though... I can see a language like Haskell being able to provide this sort of analysis for loops or a few simple function calls or whatnot. The reason I pick Haskell is because it's, in general, a language free of side effects, which aspect of programming could increase the complexity of any compile-time semantic analysis by orders of magnitude. Runtime analysis is a different story, of course... but, again, that treads awfully close to no-general-purpose-solution worlds here.
Eventually it all comes around but for now we don't need the middle man anymore.
I'm actually not sure about this. We may not need middle-men for distribution anymore, but we may need them to separate the wheat from the chaff. The problem I foresee with direct distribution is that there's no easy way to know what's good or bad out there (where "good" and "bad" are, of course, defined by one's personal tastes). There's value in being able to say to a consumer "hey, you liked artist X a lot, why not try artist Y?", which function, among others, I think "middle-men" could perform admirably.
To use your albeit cliched (and ill-fiitting; you're comparing about a business model to a product; the product hasn't really changed, but the business model certainly will) analogy, it may force the "middle-men" (RIAA etc. here) to change from being buggy accessory manufacturers to information clearinghouses about "buggies" and their various capabilities and relationships. A sort of edmunds.com for music, if you will. There's still a role to be played at that level, but it's no longer the one of art distributor.
What's great about it: an excellent value for the money
What's not so great: haven't found one so far
Reviewer says: "These days, it's mostly about the Benjamins. These cables more than adequately fulfill their purpose albeit with a cheaper purchase price."
Jesus Christ man.... let me get this straight: you're telling me they're using post-modernist advertising techniques? That this is somehow the advertising analog of an e.e. cummings poem?
Just a bit of a nitpick: while I can't speak for Hebrew, Arabic has "waw" (a 'w'-like vowel) and "yah" (a 'y' like vowel) as well. They're the long forms of the "damma" and "kasra" diacritics.
I'm impressed you know about the two languages, though. Very cool.
Seconded, especially if it was one of the X series. Imagine Megaman X with system similar to Gears of War for jumping, clinging, and dashing. It'd be awesome!
Compare that with Uthman Ibn Affan, who decided which copy of the Qur'an would be canonical, then gathered together and burning all other copies that differed from the official version. Christianity has nothing like that.
You were doing great up until this point, friend. You make it sound like Uthman moved unilaterally and without consulting anyone, whereas nothing could be further from the truth. Even before Uthman, in the time of Abu Bakr's caliphate, there were complete copies of the Qur'an. The order of the chapters, however, differed from copy to copy. What Uthman did was gather those who'd learned the Qur'an from the Prophet himself into a committee and ask them to come up with a standardized order. The committee consulted with other people who'd memorized the Qur'an, as well as with other copies of the text, to make sure there was no discrepancy, and then created the authoritative text of the Qur'an.
You'll note that unlike the Bible, there are no alternate versions or editions of the Qur'an, and no amount of research has produced noteworthy differences between copies. In fact, most scholars, western and eastern, believe that the Qur'an contains the exact words as spoken by the Prophet with little variation at all. I doubt the same can be said for the Bible.
That's like saying "There's nothing wrong fundamentally wrong with Communism (or Monarchies, or Feudalism...) if done properly.
The problem is, who gets to define "proper?" Who gets to define what traits are acceptable, desirable, or even proper? You? "The Party?" The Societal Superstructure? What's ironic is that you mention that in the past it's been driven by arbitrary criteria, among which you include eye color, which is one of the very traits one can select.
No, my friend. Eugenics is dangerous territory for a whole truckload of reasons, not the least of which is that we run the risk of driving human genetic selection based on the arbitrary criteria you mentioned. The repercussions are not just that everyone will look the same or similar; it's quite likely that it will generate more powerful waves of discrimination ala Gattaca, and maybe even more so. I can imagine a eugenics-implementing society eventually devolving into a caste system very easily and very quickly.
(On the other hand, a controlled breeding program might be a good thing... Kwisatz Haderach, anyone? *grin*./sarcasm)
Lighting manufactures can create good lights that allow the light to shine down and not up into the sky
San Francisco's a pretty good example of this. Most of the lights in the city point downwards and seem not to destroy my night vision too badly. As a result, a lot of the constellations are visible from rooftops etc and are actually pretty easy to pick out. Contrast this with Atlanta, for example, where the light from the BoA building alone (not to mention the building itself...) blocks out half the night's sky.
I do wish more city planners would take proper lighting into consideration.
I have never seen anything quite as beautiful as being on a Navy ship about 2 degrees off the equator and under a new moon... as if you couldn't look at it and breath at the same time.
Here here.
In Saudi Arabia, I went with the Boy Scouts once to catch the Leonid meteor shower out in the desert, about two hundred miles away from anyone but the bedouins. Out there, it's just the sky, the sand, and you... and dozens of falling stars like tears from the cosmos. Truly awe inspiring. I think we said maybe four words to each other the entire time.
Sounds like Smalltalk or Squeak. The IDE is the language. Need to perform memory analysis? aClass allInstances. Want to see how many references there are to a given object? anObject allInstances. And I love being able to inspect an object, step through code, and see my inspected object change with the code. The whole language was such a completely different development paradigm that even now, some 30 years after its invention, I'm still marveling at it.
Going back from Smalltalk and Squeak to working in Java and C++ with XCode and Emacs was like stepping out of heaven (debugging pun most certainly intended) and into a trash heap, strange runtime issues notwithstanding. Sounds like I'll have to give SLIME a go.
I wish you'd read the rest of my sentence, though perhaps I was not clear. I meant that the ruling that people use as a reason for such actions is a holdover from a time where it sorta made sense (as I mentioned, conversion meant you were now working for the other side in a 300-year long war), and now that fundamentalists have run away with it, people have begun to question its validity as a religious edict in the first place.
Nowhere in the Qur'an will you find such a thing commanded. Tragically, it still does happen, but I assure you, it most certainly is not Islam.
I know I'm seriously off-topic, but I can't sit aside without weighing in on this conversation a bit. Allow me, a Muslim, to step in on this, if I may:
fair enough and Gengis han let you live and go about your relegion but slaughtered you if you opposed him.
Luckily for us, the Muslims were much more civilized that the Mongols. Citizens in cities taken over by Muslims were given three choices: leave, stay and become citizens and pay the tax (which I discuss below), or continue to fight. This as compared to your Mongols who gave no quarter regardless of the situation, or even as compared to what Christians did during the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades.
1. The Muslims regularily taxed Christians for their faith
Yes. However, people fail to realize that Muslims were "taxed" in the same fashion and at the same amount: 2.5% of one's earnings per year, except it's called Zakat for Muslims and Jizya for non-Muslims. This "tax" as you put it was obligatory on most people -- Christian, Muslim, Jew, etc. -- living in the Muslim State, save for a few exceptions (e.g., orphans, widows, the aged, etc. Anyone considered to be a ward of the State did not have to pay and instead received money). The tax went to help care and feed said wards of the State, including non-Muslims. Yes, that's right: if you were a non-Muslim in Muslim Spain, you could count on the State to support you if you were unable to work. There's even a famous Hadith about this.
2. Converting to the Christian faith (from a Mulsim) is punishable by death
The only basis for that ruling that I've found was a judicial ruling dating back to the 11th and 12th centuries, during the Crusades, you'll note. The premise was that yes, if a Muslim converted and was still on Muslim soil, he was guilty of treason to the state. Seeing as how Muslims and Christians were in the Until recently, no one has challenged that ruling. However, in the past few years, as Islam comes out of its religious lethargy, several graduates of Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo have insisted that, since there is no compulsion in religion, Muslims may freely convert.
3. Mulsim man marying a Christian Woman is OK so long as kids are Mulsim
4. Mulsim woman marying a Christian man is punishable by death...
I will not argue that what you point out in point 4 does not occur. However, you should realize it is not part of Islam at all. It's a tragic consequence of fundamentalism and a gross misinterpretation of the religion.
Throughout the life of the Prophet, Muslim women found themselves married to people who had yet to convert. This did not incur and immediate divorce or an immediate death sentence. Instead, the Prophet advised these women to have patience and to encourage their husbands to accept Islam for as long as they were able.
Any Muslim is free to marry whomever he or she wants. Muslims are heavily encouraged to marry other Muslims because it makes family life much easier to handle, but they are free to choose as they see fit. Indeed, there are two Muslim men in my mosque who have married non-Muslims, and there is one Muslim woman who married a non-Muslim man, though admittedly the man later converted.
Heck, Islam forbids money lending and so did Christianity up until recently.
Incorrect, and as a Muslim, I should know.
Islam forbids usury, which most of the time means interest, but which in general applies to any fee charged for the use of money. Sharia Law banks indeed do loans, but they give them without charging a fee for said loan or interest on the loan itself.
The wikipedia link above also notes that up until "recently," (as these things go, at any rate) Catholicism forbade usury as well, and Talmudic law prohibited a Jew from charging another Jew, but not a Gentile, for the use of money.
Furthermore, you said
if you take it from a religious point of view of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism then yes you are supposed to give all your things away you don't need a live in a shack.
I can't speak with authority on Christianity and Buddhism, but I can say for certain you've very easily straw-manned Islam's view of charity and wealth (and probably the others, too). Allow me to enlighten you: Islam asks that one be generous in gift-giving and charity, but not to the point of bankrupting oneself or even one's family. There's even a famous Hadith about this. If memory serves, it goes something like:
A old man came to the Prophet one day and asked if it would be acceptable to give half money to charity before he died. The Prophet asked him if he had any children, to which the man said, "Yes." The Prophet then said, "Half it too much; you leave too little for your family." The man then asked if a third was acceptable. Again, the Prophet said, "A third is also too much." Finally, when the man asked if a quarter would suffice, the Prophet made no reply. And so it was.
I think what has confused you is that though religions, including Islam, will occasionally hold actions or people up to be paragons of charity, the intent is not to get everyone to become paupers, but to help point out to us that it's only money, something of this world, and that the attachment to it -- called greed, which we Slashdotters love to fume about -- is the cause of a good number of problems.
It's all tied up in the concept of the Principle-Agent Problem, a problem which seems to pop up on a regular basis, especially in the financial sector.
The problem occurs when the interests of the principle (in this case, the typical home buyer) and the interests of the agent (in this case, the bank or mortgage holder) are misaligned, which often coincides with information asymmetry.
Portfolio managers (like Bernie Madoff) are excellent examples of this sort of thing.
Yup. And not just in the valley; Agilent up in Sonoma County does the same thing. In fact, they're in full view right now, and they're much better to look at than this Smalltalk code I'm going through...
No - Because the prosecution withheld evidence, that should be grounds for the defense to appeal for a new trial in which that evidence may be suppressed
No.
No Double Jeopardy. It may be frustrating to see him go, but one can't be tried twice for the same crime, even in cases where the prosecution screwed up. He's been legally declared "Not Guilty," which is what his defense sought to prove (albeit he achieved such a ruling because the prosecution screwed up) so there's no need for his defense to ask for a new trial
I had a Political Science professor once ask us to pretend we were earning minimum wage in an assigned state, and then calculate whether we could live on said wage. Costs had to include clothing, food, transportation, insurance, etc., down to the last detail, to the point where I ended up calling several grocery stores to ask about the running average of a few canned goods. The point of the assignment was to show how difficult it was to live on such a wage, and indeed it was difficult, though not impossible.
I took away something else from the assignment, though the idea isn't fully formed: I don't think minimum wage jobs were ever meant as professions. I think they were meant more as "trainer jobs," the sort you'd give someone who wants to get an idea of how a position works, or to a teenager who needs a job for the summer. I'm all for lowering the minimum wage, but I also don't think that paying an adult $6.50 and hour to pick fruit is at all just.
I guess the way I see it is that in a properly functioning society, instead of what you've suggested, no adult should ever have to be in a position where a minimum wage job -- regardless of the amount it earns -- is the only profession said adult can get. Instead, I see those jobs as stopgaps for people between positions, or for teenagers who want beginner's experience in a field. Perhaps that's what they started out as, but the real travesty of the situation is that somewhere along the line, a minimum wage job was the only job someone could get, and as you pointed out, the real travesty is that the person quickly becomes a slave to the position.
I'm not sure what to do about the whole mess, frankly. I'd like to drop the minimum wage to something really low myself, but I realize that it would put a lot of people in an impossible financial position because they'd still be stuck with the jobs they have, which would now pay that much less, and the cost to society in general would be too slow in trickling down (ha! It might not even happen at all!) to offset the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
I ran into this situation with StarCraft II recently. I had a 15 hour flight to Dubai a few weeks ago on a plane with power in the seats and was actually looking forward to the trip because it meant I could play through some of the challenge missions and against the AI. On the way back, though, something snapped -- I'm still not sure what happened -- and SCII refused to let me play offline at all, saying that I needed an active internet connection to access even the challenges.
Needless to say, I was a little annoyed. I'd like for that not to be the case with Diablo III, especially considering the game lends itself much better to single-player mode on planes than StarCraft II ever did. However, since it sounds like I'll not be able to play the game at all on plane rides, well, I'm serious reconsidering whether I should buy it or not.
From what I've gathered, the Muslim Brotherhood is a shadow of their former selves; they were really big in the 80s and 90s, but they've lost direction and momentum. I think that they're currently just a specter straw-man that Mubarak and the Egyptian government likes to throw up to help keep the opposition in check.
In other words, they're Egypt's Al-Qaeda, a great excuse for a dictator to keep clenching his iron fist.
I went back there last December to see my cousin get married. Most Egyptians I spoke about politics -- there are elections coming up soon and it's a topic everyone wants to talk about -- seem to want very little to do with the Brotherhood; they blame them for a good number of terrorist and don't want them anywhere near positions of power.
I don't deny that there's a risk in open elections -- certainly, you run the risk of electing kooks and crazies in every election. I just don't think the Brotherhood is as terrifying a specter as we think they are. At least, not any more. Have a little faith in the Egyptian people.
*grin*
Sadly I can't remember what book it was in that I read this
The book is called The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman, and it's an excellent read.
Briefly, for the interested Slashdotter, he outlines five different ways people try to communicate affection -- words of affirmation, quality time, gift-giving, acts of servitude, and physical contact -- and then says that not "speaking" your partner's love language can cause a whole lot of strife because not only can you not communicate your affection, you can't understand when they're communicating theirs.
Thanks for mentioning it.
In other words, the ultimate programming languages of future will be known as English, Chinese, etc.
Isn't that the point? Why are we building these machines anyways if not to make our lives simpler and easier, and what is easier than giving instructions to something in one's own tongue?
I'm actually not certain it'll be a natural human language, though. I mean, perhaps in the really long term it might be, but in the shorter-long-term (uh... say, 1,000 years out?) programming languages -- and I'd be willing to bet there won't be one language, but many, and with just as many dialects, and the machines will understand all of them -- will at least resemble the languages we have now, if only because that's their heritage. In the same way that Spanish and Italian and, to an extent English, all resemble Latin, these future computer languages are going to resemble their parent tongues.
You're right, though. The distinction between "programmer" and "commander" is going to gradually fade. I'm ok with that, though; all that means is that I get to put "Commander" on my business card instead of "Programmer." Sounds much cooler, don't you think? ;-)
As for comparing actual semantic differences vs. syntactic differences, well, I imagine it's really damn difficult, considering the syntactical construction of an expression determines its semantics. In other words, if you change the syntax, you've likely changed the semantics, at least at a low level.
I know what you're trying to say, though. I'm reminded of an exercise given to me in my intro to CS class. We have to convert a for loop to a while loop to do-while loop and back again. Syntactically, they're all different, but semantically, at least for that exercise, they all did the same thing. You'd like a language or an IDE or whatever that can tell you that those three loops are all doing the same thing, regardless of how I write them, and frankly, I think such a language/IDE/magic wand would be freakin' fantastic. (I mean, consider for a moment how often you've rewritten something and are certain it does the exact same thing as the previous incarnation and are shocked when you realize it doesn't?) I'm just not certain if you can achieve that with any ease at all. You'd essentially have to have code that understood any other code, which sounds remarkably similar to the halting problem.
There may be specific cases where this is doable, though... I can see a language like Haskell being able to provide this sort of analysis for loops or a few simple function calls or whatnot. The reason I pick Haskell is because it's, in general, a language free of side effects, which aspect of programming could increase the complexity of any compile-time semantic analysis by orders of magnitude. Runtime analysis is a different story, of course... but, again, that treads awfully close to no-general-purpose-solution worlds here.
Also, Emacs has Tetris, but not minesweeper: M-x tetris. ;-)
Eventually it all comes around but for now we don't need the middle man anymore.
I'm actually not sure about this. We may not need middle-men for distribution anymore, but we may need them to separate the wheat from the chaff. The problem I foresee with direct distribution is that there's no easy way to know what's good or bad out there (where "good" and "bad" are, of course, defined by one's personal tastes). There's value in being able to say to a consumer "hey, you liked artist X a lot, why not try artist Y?", which function, among others, I think "middle-men" could perform admirably.
To use your albeit cliched (and ill-fiitting; you're comparing about a business model to a product; the product hasn't really changed, but the business model certainly will) analogy, it may force the "middle-men" (RIAA etc. here) to change from being buggy accessory manufacturers to information clearinghouses about "buggies" and their various capabilities and relationships. A sort of edmunds.com for music, if you will. There's still a role to be played at that level, but it's no longer the one of art distributor.
What's great about it: an excellent value for the money
What's not so great: haven't found one so far
Reviewer says: "These days, it's mostly about the Benjamins. These cables more than adequately fulfill their purpose albeit with a cheaper purchase price."
Oh, I'm sure they do...
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Looks like we just found one, so I'd say yes!
Jesus Christ man.... let me get this straight: you're telling me they're using post-modernist advertising techniques? That this is somehow the advertising analog of an e.e. cummings poem?
Terrifying.
I'm impressed you know about the two languages, though. Very cool.
Seconded, especially if it was one of the X series. Imagine Megaman X with system similar to Gears of War for jumping, clinging, and dashing. It'd be awesome!
Compare that with Uthman Ibn Affan, who decided which copy of the Qur'an would be canonical, then gathered together and burning all other copies that differed from the official version. Christianity has nothing like that.
You were doing great up until this point, friend. You make it sound like Uthman moved unilaterally and without consulting anyone, whereas nothing could be further from the truth. Even before Uthman, in the time of Abu Bakr's caliphate, there were complete copies of the Qur'an. The order of the chapters, however, differed from copy to copy. What Uthman did was gather those who'd learned the Qur'an from the Prophet himself into a committee and ask them to come up with a standardized order. The committee consulted with other people who'd memorized the Qur'an, as well as with other copies of the text, to make sure there was no discrepancy, and then created the authoritative text of the Qur'an.
You'll note that unlike the Bible, there are no alternate versions or editions of the Qur'an, and no amount of research has produced noteworthy differences between copies. In fact, most scholars, western and eastern, believe that the Qur'an contains the exact words as spoken by the Prophet with little variation at all. I doubt the same can be said for the Bible.
That's like saying "There's nothing wrong fundamentally wrong with Communism (or Monarchies, or Feudalism...) if done properly.
/sarcasm)
The problem is, who gets to define "proper?" Who gets to define what traits are acceptable, desirable, or even proper? You? "The Party?" The Societal Superstructure? What's ironic is that you mention that in the past it's been driven by arbitrary criteria, among which you include eye color, which is one of the very traits one can select.
No, my friend. Eugenics is dangerous territory for a whole truckload of reasons, not the least of which is that we run the risk of driving human genetic selection based on the arbitrary criteria you mentioned. The repercussions are not just that everyone will look the same or similar; it's quite likely that it will generate more powerful waves of discrimination ala Gattaca, and maybe even more so. I can imagine a eugenics-implementing society eventually devolving into a caste system very easily and very quickly.
(On the other hand, a controlled breeding program might be a good thing... Kwisatz Haderach, anyone? *grin*.
Lighting manufactures can create good lights that allow the light to shine down and not up into the sky
San Francisco's a pretty good example of this. Most of the lights in the city point downwards and seem not to destroy my night vision too badly. As a result, a lot of the constellations are visible from rooftops etc and are actually pretty easy to pick out. Contrast this with Atlanta, for example, where the light from the BoA building alone (not to mention the building itself...) blocks out half the night's sky.
I do wish more city planners would take proper lighting into consideration.
I have never seen anything quite as beautiful as being on a Navy ship about 2 degrees off the equator and under a new moon... as if you couldn't look at it and breath at the same time.
Here here.
In Saudi Arabia, I went with the Boy Scouts once to catch the Leonid meteor shower out in the desert, about two hundred miles away from anyone but the bedouins. Out there, it's just the sky, the sand, and you... and dozens of falling stars like tears from the cosmos. Truly awe inspiring. I think we said maybe four words to each other the entire time.
Sounds like Smalltalk or Squeak. The IDE is the language. Need to perform memory analysis? aClass allInstances. Want to see how many references there are to a given object? anObject allInstances. And I love being able to inspect an object, step through code, and see my inspected object change with the code. The whole language was such a completely different development paradigm that even now, some 30 years after its invention, I'm still marveling at it.
Going back from Smalltalk and Squeak to working in Java and C++ with XCode and Emacs was like stepping out of heaven (debugging pun most certainly intended) and into a trash heap, strange runtime issues notwithstanding. Sounds like I'll have to give SLIME a go.
Nowhere in the Qur'an will you find such a thing commanded. Tragically, it still does happen, but I assure you, it most certainly is not Islam.
fair enough and Gengis han let you live and go about your relegion but slaughtered you if you opposed him.
Luckily for us, the Muslims were much more civilized that the Mongols. Citizens in cities taken over by Muslims were given three choices: leave, stay and become citizens and pay the tax (which I discuss below), or continue to fight. This as compared to your Mongols who gave no quarter regardless of the situation, or even as compared to what Christians did during the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades.
1. The Muslims regularily taxed Christians for their faith
Yes. However, people fail to realize that Muslims were "taxed" in the same fashion and at the same amount: 2.5% of one's earnings per year, except it's called Zakat for Muslims and Jizya for non-Muslims. This "tax" as you put it was obligatory on most people -- Christian, Muslim, Jew, etc. -- living in the Muslim State, save for a few exceptions (e.g., orphans, widows, the aged, etc. Anyone considered to be a ward of the State did not have to pay and instead received money). The tax went to help care and feed said wards of the State, including non-Muslims. Yes, that's right: if you were a non-Muslim in Muslim Spain, you could count on the State to support you if you were unable to work. There's even a famous Hadith about this.
2. Converting to the Christian faith (from a Mulsim) is punishable by death
The only basis for that ruling that I've found was a judicial ruling dating back to the 11th and 12th centuries, during the Crusades, you'll note. The premise was that yes, if a Muslim converted and was still on Muslim soil, he was guilty of treason to the state. Seeing as how Muslims and Christians were in the Until recently, no one has challenged that ruling. However, in the past few years, as Islam comes out of its religious lethargy, several graduates of Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo have insisted that, since there is no compulsion in religion, Muslims may freely convert.
3. Mulsim man marying a Christian Woman is OK so long as kids are Mulsim
4. Mulsim woman marying a Christian man is punishable by death ...
I will not argue that what you point out in point 4 does not occur. However, you should realize it is not part of Islam at all. It's a tragic consequence of fundamentalism and a gross misinterpretation of the religion.
Throughout the life of the Prophet, Muslim women found themselves married to people who had yet to convert. This did not incur and immediate divorce or an immediate death sentence. Instead, the Prophet advised these women to have patience and to encourage their husbands to accept Islam for as long as they were able.
Any Muslim is free to marry whomever he or she wants. Muslims are heavily encouraged to marry other Muslims because it makes family life much easier to handle, but they are free to choose as they see fit. Indeed, there are two Muslim men in my mosque who have married non-Muslims, and there is one Muslim woman who married a non-Muslim man, though admittedly the man later converted.
Heck, Islam forbids money lending and so did Christianity up until recently.
Incorrect, and as a Muslim, I should know.
Islam forbids usury, which most of the time means interest, but which in general applies to any fee charged for the use of money. Sharia Law banks indeed do loans, but they give them without charging a fee for said loan or interest on the loan itself.
The wikipedia link above also notes that up until "recently," (as these things go, at any rate) Catholicism forbade usury as well, and Talmudic law prohibited a Jew from charging another Jew, but not a Gentile, for the use of money.
Furthermore, you said
if you take it from a religious point of view of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism then yes you are supposed to give all your things away you don't need a live in a shack.
I can't speak with authority on Christianity and Buddhism, but I can say for certain you've very easily straw-manned Islam's view of charity and wealth (and probably the others, too). Allow me to enlighten you: Islam asks that one be generous in gift-giving and charity, but not to the point of bankrupting oneself or even one's family. There's even a famous Hadith about this. If memory serves, it goes something like:
A old man came to the Prophet one day and asked if it would be acceptable to give half money to charity before he died. The Prophet asked him if he had any children, to which the man said, "Yes." The Prophet then said, "Half it too much; you leave too little for your family." The man then asked if a third was acceptable. Again, the Prophet said, "A third is also too much." Finally, when the man asked if a quarter would suffice, the Prophet made no reply. And so it was.
I think what has confused you is that though religions, including Islam, will occasionally hold actions or people up to be paragons of charity, the intent is not to get everyone to become paupers, but to help point out to us that it's only money, something of this world, and that the attachment to it -- called greed, which we Slashdotters love to fume about -- is the cause of a good number of problems.
It's all tied up in the concept of the Principle-Agent Problem, a problem which seems to pop up on a regular basis, especially in the financial sector.
The problem occurs when the interests of the principle (in this case, the typical home buyer) and the interests of the agent (in this case, the bank or mortgage holder) are misaligned, which often coincides with information asymmetry.
Portfolio managers (like Bernie Madoff) are excellent examples of this sort of thing.
Yup. And not just in the valley; Agilent up in Sonoma County does the same thing. In fact, they're in full view right now, and they're much better to look at than this Smalltalk code I'm going through...
No - Because the prosecution withheld evidence, that should be grounds for the defense to appeal for a new trial in which that evidence may be suppressed
No.
No Double Jeopardy. It may be frustrating to see him go, but one can't be tried twice for the same crime, even in cases where the prosecution screwed up. He's been legally declared "Not Guilty," which is what his defense sought to prove (albeit he achieved such a ruling because the prosecution screwed up) so there's no need for his defense to ask for a new trial
I had a Political Science professor once ask us to pretend we were earning minimum wage in an assigned state, and then calculate whether we could live on said wage. Costs had to include clothing, food, transportation, insurance, etc., down to the last detail, to the point where I ended up calling several grocery stores to ask about the running average of a few canned goods. The point of the assignment was to show how difficult it was to live on such a wage, and indeed it was difficult, though not impossible.
I took away something else from the assignment, though the idea isn't fully formed: I don't think minimum wage jobs were ever meant as professions. I think they were meant more as "trainer jobs," the sort you'd give someone who wants to get an idea of how a position works, or to a teenager who needs a job for the summer. I'm all for lowering the minimum wage, but I also don't think that paying an adult $6.50 and hour to pick fruit is at all just.
I guess the way I see it is that in a properly functioning society, instead of what you've suggested, no adult should ever have to be in a position where a minimum wage job -- regardless of the amount it earns -- is the only profession said adult can get. Instead, I see those jobs as stopgaps for people between positions, or for teenagers who want beginner's experience in a field. Perhaps that's what they started out as, but the real travesty of the situation is that somewhere along the line, a minimum wage job was the only job someone could get, and as you pointed out, the real travesty is that the person quickly becomes a slave to the position.
I'm not sure what to do about the whole mess, frankly. I'd like to drop the minimum wage to something really low myself, but I realize that it would put a lot of people in an impossible financial position because they'd still be stuck with the jobs they have, which would now pay that much less, and the cost to society in general would be too slow in trickling down (ha! It might not even happen at all!) to offset the difference.