Well obviously Ruby does not have a compiler, but the code is parsed before it is executed. It may have some dynamic loading of modules which defers this to later in execution, but so do other interpreted languages.

No, you definitely get syntax errors at code load time. The interpreter needs to parse an AST from text as the first thing before it can interpret anything.

Glad the headline here calls them "tourists". It bothers me that in most media this gets called "first all-civilian flight". It is my understanding that the whole of NASA was very intentionally founded as a civilian organisation (versus a military one), as the Soviet Union had its space programme completely tied up with its armed forces. There haven't been that many outright military astronauts from the USA, have there?

One can legitimately question Bitcoin's intrinsic worth and whether it is in a bubble, but for me a "scam" implies something fraudulent. In Bitcoin it's all in the open about what you're getting, and it's your problem to value the token correctly, whatever that means. In comparison in pyramid schemes there are no actual investments from which profits are paid from.

It's actually not all that new. For example functional programming has been around almost since forever. Once you come up with a well-rounded enough education in all the things that have been around, the new stuff starts looking a lot like the old stuff.

First of all, Finland is not "Scandinavian", and as a Finn I absolutely love it how the Swedes' self-absorbedness is on display in the childish tantrums they're throwing and how the veiled threats about "Nordic co-operation being endangered" are so apparent now that even our most fanatical Nordists can't shut up people calling the behaviour for what it is.

Let's hope this keeps up for a while so we may actually be allowed to hang out with other kids in the yard too.

The thing with Finland is that if you don't care about "infrastructure" in a broad sense, the gifted people will just leave because they can (probably for Sweden) and you're never getting them back again. In the US it's different; it's unlikely that Americans would emigrate just because their local employer collapsed.

Since when are problem solving and critical thinking "soft skills" that you don't get from STEM? I attribute a lot of those skills of mine to a math/theory-leaning CS degree. Of course one should also get familiar with some philosophy so you are aware of the most common logical fallacies and rhetorical tricks... STEM is not just about "learning technologies".

I'm neither a woman nor an obgyn but I would be astonished if vaginal bacteria have much to do with gut bacteria. I thought it was common knowledge that the baby's microbiome does not gets its start from stuff from the birth canal, but stuff that is physically close and comes from, uh, the gut.

I wouldn't bet on "most people" knowing that CFCs are also greenhouse gases. I consider myself pretty well-read, and that was news to me -- to me the issue with CFCs was always ozone.

But now I know. If I had been a journalist writing the piece, I would have clarified the issue.

The joke was that there is no news in Truth and no truth in News.

At least here in Finland piping hot water into buildings is a common form of heating in the cities, and there are experiments in using the same system for cooling in the summer. There is nothing particularly special in the idea of plugging as server farm as a heat source.

Really, you have nothing but grandstanding.

Experimental physics existed before the LHC... However, you were dealing with experiments that were looking at indirect factors to again strengthen "theory". The Direct Observable particles, didn't come until the first particle accelerator came online. Then, and ONLY then, could we formulate experiments that allowed us to DIRECTLY observe the particles in nature we knew we should find in certain circumstances.

This is how it's always worked; you are just drawing an arbitrary line. Experimentalists have always been trying to come up with clever experimental setups to isolate and reveal the explaining factors that someone has theorized. For example, the luminiferous aether didn't show up no matter how hard they tried. With proper experimentation, it could also be shown that phlogiston was bullshit and the better idea was oxygen combining with other materials.

Greeks had the atomic theory already, but we didn't need particle accelerators to get to the "real observable" particles to demonstrate that indeed this is the way things work.

And once we got to the point of "seeing" atoms, we figured out that they are made of smaller components. With your limitless optimism for discovery, what makes you stop now and say that we've got to the "real observable" particles? The Standard Model was a very good theory with strong predictive power but we're going to need something new to get the warp drives you're expecting...

This seems to be an example of some kind of unbounded technological/scientific optimism that disregards the fact that during that history you're using as proof, we have also refined an understanding of physical limits that have not fundamentally changed. Think about laws of thermodynamics or the speed of light as a hard limit, among other things. We are not getting around those any time soon.

Of course if you're counting on a complete revolution of Physics, you're going to need "extraordinary evidence" to overturn a lot of what we already know. This is a tall order; even the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics do not do things like totally overturn Newton's ideas in our everyday life. You can't just expect these kinds of things to happen.

Then there is just some weirdness in the post...

The laws of physics used to be something we could ONLY theorize, as we believed there was no real tangible way to TEST those theories. The LHC and CERN have shown us that this is not so. Same goes for the Photon and Graviton

What? The laws of physics have always had to be testable, otherwise you're just doing math. This is the reason the LHC was built, to be an experimental instrument. I do not understand the point about photons and gravitons; the former is a well-known quantum, the latter is theoretical. So far we haven't been able to quantize gravity.

We simply start thinking in 3 dimensions or in radically new ways that the earth has never seen

Yeah, and time is a cube, eh?

The Limitations of Physics are only limitations, because we do not yet fully understand the forces that created this Universe

No, limitations probably still are limitations, even when you develop a better understanding of what is going on. Stuff will fall down even tomorrow, even if you could demonstrate that you can quantize gravity. Getting around strongly established phenomena by better explanations would mean there is some until now completely non-observed part of the world we could exploit. This rarely happens so that what didn't work today, magically starts working tomorrow.

Nokia had issues a long time before Elop; Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo was a bean counter, not a technology visionary. The Windows Phone gambit at least enabled Nokia to offload the phone business to Microsoft...