Got it :-p Thanks, I was kind of worried about that. Was still curious though :-)

Thanks for your answer!

Hi, This is a question I've been meaning to ask someone "in the know" for a while. I've been programming for years, but I never finished my CS degree. The last 3-4 years I've been doing website development full time, but I'm looking to... I'm looking to branch into new challenges. Biology has always fascinated me, but... I'm a cheap and lazy bastard who doesn't want to go back to school. Given those criteria :-p Do you think there is a need or place for someone willing to learn bioinformatics programming to help out with research? I have a fairly solid grasp of SQL, Unix principles, and I learn languages pretty fast. Is there a need for programmers who want to get in on almost a "wash beakers just to learn" kind of level, and if so could you recommend someone for me to contact? Thanks! Rob

I was having this "people are inherently good/bad" argument with a friend of mine... I took him to a casino. Despite the fact that the casinos are obviously making money (which means most of the people pulling handles on the machines are saps, and even willing dupes), enough people buy into it to make the casinos work.

If you want to follow Tit-for-Tat in the Prisoner's Dilemma that is our society, best of luck. I think people are inherently evil, and I know religion doesn't help (it's just more rules). The only solution I see is some kind of outside intervention (Jesus and His sacrificial death on the cross, and His resurrection from the dead).

Not all religions are meant to be opiates. The idea of the gospel of Christ is that you and your interests come last, after the interests of God and love for your fellow man. There's a reason they hung Him on a tree :-p

http://www.jslint.com/ or http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/ (with -v set) will pick up these types of bugs (in lieu of a compiler).

• You'll only have a problem with global variables conflicting if you treat Javascript as a procedural language. Variables created outside of any closure are created in the context of the global window object. However, in your example code, var "b" is never a global because it only exists inside function "a", and would never conflict with any other "b" variable in your code.
• No, but usually you can get away with a Javascript object just fine. Yes, it will be global, but you give it your unique name (just like you'd have to do for a namespace, except most languages that support namespaces will throw an error if some other code tries to write over an existing namespace). For example, all of the jQuery library functions are under the window.jQuery object. The variables and function names are all accessed from that object, e.g. "jQuery.map(...)".
• That's because you're not using a closure. Putting braces around something in Javascript does nothing, so essentially your example code just does "var b = ..." twice in a row. If you defined a function "c" inside function "a", and defined a separate value for variable "b" inside of that function, it would have a unique value. The cool thing is that Javascript does LISP-like passing down of the variables to called functions. If you defined function "c" inside of function "a", then called function "c", it would have access to read and modify the value of the variable "b". However, if you then define a new variable "b" inside of function "c", it becomes a different variable, which is then destroyed when function "c" ends. Just play with it man, it makes sense and allows for all manner of awesome things when you really, truly understand how it works.

http://geocities.yahoo.co.jp/ For some odd reason, Japanese Geocities sites are still up and running. I think it might have something to do with the Harajuku generation...

Actually, he's probably just running Firefox. I've noticed some weird delays when Flash video is downloading in Firefox. My current running theory is that it's the delay as Firefox caches the data to hard drive. The delay isn't there in Chrome... the video loads and plays smoothly.