Please re-read my comment. I asked for no such technical detail. I ask for basic knowledge of solution-space search approaches. An SQL developer, to use your example, who does not know that, won't surely be able to distinguish a b-tree index from a hash index and will tangle himself in an SQL knot in a heartbeat when facing non-trivial database tasks. I partially concur with you on UI developer skillsets. We're not yet at the point of being able to use non-techie types for UI development, but the toolset is evolving in that direction.

Frequently, software development isn't about what you know... it's about what you don't know and how quickly you can learn it.

That may be true, but not in Dijkstra's case. Dijkstra is quite simple. If, in an interview, I ask the candidate to design an algorithm for a shortest-path search in a graph, and he does not eventually arrive at a breadth first algorihm (Dijkstra) or a well design depth first, he's out. It's not about the formal knowledge, as much as it is about the thought process. A programmer who can't pass this test will surely design problematic software (in many fronts, like performance or security).

I'd serously doubt the technical ability of someone who could not describe Dijkstra's algorithm. Knowing it by name is not important, but after being asked for a shortest-path-in-a-graph algorithm, any good s/w engineer better come up with a breadth first search quick enough. It's not about memorizable knowledge, it's about mental models.

The vast majority of climate scientists disagree with the 16 non-climate scientists cited by the WSJ.

Please refrain from using democracy as a scientific metric. The "vast majority" of scientists were wrong throughout History many many times. A majority is no measure of scientific quality, otherwise we'd still study geocentric universe models.

I got 50/5 fibre, for 30eur/month. I downgraded from 100/100, which was 75eur/month, both including TV and phone services. Prices are for Portugal, but from what I gather on my travels around the EU, it's par for the course in the european union.

I'm not that much of a trekkie to know the workings of the transporter. However, if it'd somehow physically move all my atoms to another place, in the same configuration, I'd go in. If it copies and reproduces, then destroys the original, I concur with you. Thanks but no thanks.

Ok, let's assume you connect, allow consciousness to transfer, then sever the connection but *don't* destroy the biological part. Who am I? I'd wager I'd still be the biological one, albeit the sillicon part may be a perfect copy. Now, kill the biological part. I'm dead. Thanks, but no, thanks. Not until we pinpoint conscience beyond "I think therefore I am".

The J2EE model of web app execution is fundamentally flawed. The logic of keeping one instance of the app alive for each user steers you towards hitting a very fast bottleneck on memory usage. Yes, the model has been adapted, with state serialization and essentially paging out the app when the user is not executing requests, but the root problem is there, and it still shows: It's very very hard to serve a few thousand simultaneous logins.

... PHP under Apache (And really what serious professional would use anything else?) ...

Just about any serious professional. nginx + php-fpm is by far a better configuration. Configuration is simpler, the http daemon is a lot more efficient without having to deal with php processes, and you can separately scale static content servers and dynamic content servers horizontally.

My personal default setup for any medium-sized website is nowadays nginx (load balancer) => varnish => nginx (static content) => php-fpm

You must be german...

A mirror test for a dog is no easy feat. You are testing a non-dominant sense. Dogs rely a lot on smell, and there is no mirror for smell. So, on a mirror test, you either add a smell of another dog, or do nothing and let the "other dog" have no smell. One option induces the animal in error using its dominant sense, and the other creates a dissonance between senses. I wouldn't know how to interpret the result. If you go for the second option, you'll observe one of two results: either the animal reacts to the mirror, and he may as well be reacting to the sense dissonance and trying to solve it, or he does not, and it could mean that he passed the test or that he ignored the non-dominant sense. No valid result.

Obviously, I haven't read the mirror test studies on dogs, but I'd approach them with a grain of salt.

They also know the diff. between the TV and an image in a mirror, so you might want to rethink all that m- your so-called "science" is decades out of date.

Dogs have no cones in the retina, only rods, so: They see in black and white, as is widely known; and, more importantly, they see at a higher frequency. The result is that they see the flicker on the TV, making it definitely not lifelike. Oh, and the TV doesn't smell (thankfully), which for dogs is much more relevant than for us.

You can verify the higher operating frequency of rods, by looking at some fluorescent lamps from the corner of your eye. The center of the eye - the fovea - is very dense in cones, but the periphery is not, and rods are more common there. In many situations, you can't see a flicker of a device looking directly, but if you look using the vision edge it is very noticeable.

The funding effect is a hypothesis by climate sceptics who try to explain why there are no results that prove their point.

The climate is such a complex system that the mere fact that there so few hypothesis explaining global warming is itself a proof of hive-minded thinking processes.

Add this fact to your polarization of the subject using terms like "climate sceptics" (what the heck is a climate sceptic?), and you have just proven all my argumentation, without any help from me.

This is all irrelevant anyway because what you are doing is claiming that all these researchers are simply lying. Maybe the Nobel spurred some (a lot?) funding in research but from that to claiming that they are all lying or committing fraud is preposterous. And please don't mention the pathetic sham called "climategate".

I'm not proposing that all scientists are lying. I never stated that. I believe they act in good faith. Please don't put your words on my mouth.

The funding effect -- and the funding effect is undeniable, even if you request an argumentum ad autoritam -- is much more pernicious than plain old lying. Naturally, if you point every scientist towards proving a theory, and none towards disproving it, no one is finding faults in analysis, and everyone is reaching the same conclusion. Heck, it took two decades for the effects of civilization advance towards temperature measuring stations to be recognized and accounted for (even if in the end the conclusion is that warming is still happening).

My problem is not with number-tampering or such other accusations of the climategate. I ignore that. My problem is much more pervasive. Its with everyone stating that the sun orbits the earth, and anyone who is stating that the earth orbits the sun gets tarnished as lunatic.

This kind of scientific environment was as wrong five centuries ago as it is today.

On the other hand, when the warming models were seriously questioned, in the mid 00s, suddenly we weren't suffering from "Global Warming" anymore and started suffering from "Climate Change". See, your logic works both ways.

This is a serious issue, where opinions have become extreme, and where I really don't trust most participants (everyone is religious on the matter).

In the end, I think it's a shame that the global warming subject was hijacked by dumb^H^H^H^Hextremist ecologists, leading to good solutions being thrown out of the window [1], and stupid solutions being implemented (taxing carbon).

[1] No politician is discussing the possibility of mimicking the eruption at Mount Pinatubo which, because of being large and extremely recent, was very well studied. A global warming solution of this type costs 2.5Billion US$ (on a world scale, it's peanuts). Unfortunately, it's "messing with the planet" so it irks all kinds of ecologists. Newsflash: We mess with the planet from the day we're born. There's a decent article on the solution here http://www.livescience.com/901-scientist-inject-sulfur-air-battle-global-warming.html (shooting balloons with artillery is not the most efficient solution, the best one is a lightweight "hose", supported by balloons, which was already tested on a smaller scale, but the article gives the general idea).