It wouldn't have "seeped out", but you're on the right track. hydrogen + oxygen + energy = water. and water + energy = hydrogen + oxygen. We understand a lot of the surface chemical processes on this planet. We don't understand all the subterranean processes, but we have an idea.

Non-terrestrial bodies can carry water. Landing on a single comet and saying "no comets have Earth-like water" is like saying "We've only found life on Earth, therefore no other life exists."

I think some people have a very homogenous view of the universe. Once you've sampled a few, you've sampled them all.

Even on the Earth, there isn't a lot of water. This may give a better visualization.

http://water.usgs.gov/edu/earthhowmuch.html

How does it handle dynamic sites? If the answer is "not at all" as with previous projects of this kind, it's dead on arrival.

Most of the web is dynamic today, and almost all of the interesting sites are. How many of us would be reading /. if it didn't have comments and moderation?

There were ads on TPB? Fuck, now I can't even turn off ABE to check it out.

This. I can't remember the last time I downloaded music from a torrent site. It's more convenient these days to buy it on iTunes, and prices are fair.

When the same can be said for movies, and the MPAA stops this staggered release bullshit, I'll start buying movies again the same way I bought a lot of DVDs back when that was the most convenient way to get movies.

Which world is that you live in? Religion still carries much more credit than its performance record justifies. The pope is invited to parliaments and international diplomacy as if he was somehow especially smart or important. Even the Dalai Lama is given special respect for purely religious reasons. Churches enjoy special priviledges in many countries, with tax exemption being just the tip of the iceberg.

The simple fact is that the human brain and psychology has evolved little from tribal society and we believe or disbelieve a lot of things not due to facts or evidence, but due to group pressure, conformity, tales, authority as well as shortcuts in thinking, heuristical approaches and so on. Religion is just one example of that, superstition also still exists even though religion has already tried to root it out for a thousand years.

Which is why you should learn to write code that compiles and works correctly on the first try. We know how to do it, computer science wasn't invented yesterday. But thanks to dot-com and startup craze and the desire to churn out pseudo-programmers fast, fast, fast, programming isn't taught correctly.

If you want army style, I suggest this experiment: Teach students to code in a simple text editor and a special compiler that gives them one chance at compiling the program. If the compile fails, it deletes the code and they can start from scratch.

Only if you hire monkeys to do your programming for you.

This is a very famous article about how to do programming right. Note their error count. Compare it to pretty much everything else on the market.

But programming this way isn't sexy, or macho or whatever else you want to call it. It's real work.

It depends on the environment. If other people are good and willing to defend their values, the bad guys will be in trouble. But if they manage to convince the majority to be either lethargic or even respect them, then the good people are the dumb losers.

And we are in that situation. Wake up, man! We admire rich people simply because they are rich, not for the ways they became so. We increasingly believe the war-talk of neo-con propaganda that unemployed people just need to be forced more strongly to want to work, and that benefits need to be cut because the poor are parasites. There was no blood in the streets when our governments bailed out the finance sector with so much money that it's hard to visualize while at the same time cutting budgets in education, health care and practically everything else.

You forget that the unethical (actually, "differently ethical" is correct here, because they believe themselves to be ethical, I'm sure) people also have long-term strategies. And they're winning.

Are they still in business? If so, your rant is meaningless.

The rules exist in C as well, just the enforcement differs. In your average recently developed language, the IDE or the compiler will tell you that you're a bad boy and shouldn't be doing this shit. In C, the compiler will tell you to fuck off and come back when you understand what you did wrong or the system will just shoot your program and put it out of its misery.

Having to figure out what went wrong instead of this tinkerer approach of "let's compile and see what the errors tell us to fix" is a good lesson in writing it right the first time.

I've seen students who learn programming in Java very recently. Their approach has nothing of regular or army, it's amateurish "let's try this and see what happens". It's pathetic that they teach people programming like that, and it explains a lot about what's wrong with software.

If you write in the subset of C++ that has these cute features, you're effectively writing C with objects.

I doubt any C++ code compiles to "much faster" machine code than well-written C, but you're welcome to prove me wrong with an actual example.

All my life, yes. The crucial point a lot of us more idealistic people miss is that all those who run countries or corporations whom we think belong into jail do not see themselves as bad people, because ethics is also subjective and personal. Those who are successful in the shark tank of the business world are so, because they've been brought up or trained themselves to the right ethics, the one where screwing over someone is right because you can convince yourself that he's weak and can use the lesson and besides it's the right of the strong people (i.e. you) to lord above his kind.

What's destroying humanity is good people who are unable to pick up a weapon when the bad people attack. In this the sharks are right: If you can't bite, you are prey. Sadly, too many of us have taken a deep sip from the poison well and now our children will have to fight the same fights that our grandchildren already fought, because for example we destroyed the power of the unions by not joining and not creating an IT union.

Show me a single argument that's not from either an anarchist or an idiot that explains how to run a country with zero taxation (ignore the tiny minority of countries that can run entirely on oil exports or such, we're talking the general case).

No, I don't. That word is in the dictionary and its definition is in no way disputed.

So you're asking me to explain "lawful" only to say that it actually doesn't matter?

You need to get your head out of your ass and into a history book. The rule of law is at least 2000 years old and while governments have always had the option of force, its actual use is comparatively rare. Especially compared to mob rule. Today, 100 or 1000 years ago - you can clearly see that when the government breaks down, violence and crimes increase dramatically.

Firstly, you really need to study history. While ius primae noctis makes for a great legend, historians today are not convinced it ever actually existed, and even if it did there are no confirmed cases of it ever being actually used.

Secondly, you should explain whether you are ok with the general principle of a society or not. In this context, "society" means that a group of people can make rules for themselves and enforce them. The details (nobility, democracy, segregation of powers, etc.) are unimportant as long as you make a covert argument that basically calls anything except pure anarchy immoral. So please come out of hiding behind phrases and state your position clearly. Do you think that people should be able to form societies and enforce their rules on each other or not?

Humans are social animals by nature.
A society can only function if it can enforce its rules.
Laws are basically moral rules written down.
Therefore, I don't see a principal difference between legal and moral arguments.

The difference is that everyone thinks they understand moral, but few people understand law. And yes, not all laws are codified ethics, that's true. Many are of administrative nature, for example.

Morals differ, even from person to person. That's why a society needs a common set of values.

Look around you. What's happening in Syria and Iraq? What's happening in parts of Africa? Yes, my idealistic friend, this is exactly what happens when government breaks down and societies fail. Sure, it is morally wrong, but it happens.

So in fantasy lalaland, where everyone is perfectly moral and also shares the same morals, you don't need governments, taxation and all this shit. In the real world, where real humans with all their mistakes live, you do.

I won't ask you to describe how a world based purely on morals and without government "interference" would work. Greater minds have failed at that task.

This. Half of the newer high-level languages today are just the mental masturbations of someone who either thinks he can make the wheel more round or the result of a "not invented here" mindset. There's so much crap out there forking a perfectly good language because someone thinks it should be a =+ b; instead of a += b;

It's sickening, and a good reason to stay away from all this shit, because five years down the road someone will fork the fork and you can throw all your code away because support and development just stops as all the ADD kids jump at the new toy. That'll never happen with your C code.

I consider this its greatest strength. If you want a training wheels language, there are probably 200 to choose from. If you want a language for adults, there aren't all that many choices.

I thought the same and then I started to use OO a lot in PHP.

If you come from C, don't go the "OO is my religion, deliver me from functions" path. Write functional code and use objects in it where it makes sense. I've written computer games as a hobby for most of my life, and in that context you have a lot of natural objects. The player, the weapon, the level, the building, the city, etc. etc. you also encounter inheritance very fast.

I still write largely functional code and my objects are basically containers. It works great for me, even though some pure OO extremists would cringe at it.

I don't see OO as a paradigm. It's a tool, a method, and it mixes nicely with others if you do it right. I'm very thankful to PHP for their approach which offers you a full OO model, but doesn't force it on you.

Strawman argument.

The OP doesn't argue that people whose profession is different from programming should be able to program. He argues that a good butcher should be able to kill with a mechanical tool, not just the fancy bolt gun the slaughterhouses have now. That a good driver should be able to drive stick-shift even if his car has automatic.

And I agree. When I was in university, I tortured students with proper input handling in C until they got it, until they understood that unless they check their input conforms to whatever specification they make for it, instead of just checking the exceptions they can think of, I will always find a way to break their program by, say, keeping my finger on the "a" key for 3 seconds and overflowing their buffer. I'm pretty sure they're not the ones making web applications less secure today because lazy programmer doesn't do form validation.

Learning the basics of programming on a not-holding-your-hands platform makes you understand what's going on and what can go wrong. If you learn programming on a training wheels framework, your programs will almost certainly be subject to all kinds of injections, overflows and other attacks whenever the framework doesn't protect you 100%, or requires you to make an explicit call to get those benefits.

C is a great language to learn programming. Yes, you'll swear a lot and you'll hate the computer, your teacher and the world in general, but when you come out of that bootcamp, you're a marine and not some third-grade wannabe trooper with a 10 minute life expectancy once the shit hits the fan.