Actually, I don't think it's true that the religious part of the argument doesn't come in to play. These nurses aren't making an argument from science. They're making an argument from religion, and then (after that turned out to be controversial) trying to find science to provide justification for their religious stance. So, while I do think we should discuss and clarify the science, there is no justification for the nurse's position or action.

I think it's admirable to go commenting in a second language, so kudos, don't let your detractors get your goat. :) (another fun idiom for you). And I agree with some other people, "escape goat" is one of the best mistakes I've seen, really gave me a good laugh. Not at you either, I just think it's a great phrase, and there should definitely be something which is called an escape goat. Thanks!

I mean, sure, maybe they couldn't use it as a stinger, but that doesn't mean it couldn't still be used as a weapon against US interests. If it has explosives in it, how would this stop anyone from repurposing those explosives if the missile ceased functioning as desired?

Perhaps the amount is scandalous, I think any particular case is difficult to judge. My point is you can't take a single point in time and make that judgement. Maybe they replaced old Apple IIs with new computers the year before he made his offer, and they'll keep using them for 15 years. Maybe not (sure, probably not). At any rate, everything has to be new at some point, just because someone/district/etc has something new doesn't mean they always have new things.

So..."I had it rough, the school district should continue to suck and give future generations the shaft"? Were they supposed to chug along with Apple II's until you came riding to the rescue? Also, are they never supposed to buy any new computers? Bear in mind that if they ever do, any older computers someone tries to donate shortly afterward would, likely, be "too old".

Yeah, it's pretty bad. I kept suggesting to Nick Denton (when he deigned to join in the comments) that they should really take a look at the /. commenting system as a way of achieving what he said he wanted (greater inclusivity, good discussions). He never responded...and I'd get that, if he came up with something even remotely usable, but the commenting system there is insane, and not only is it insane, every time people start to get used to it, they completely change it yet again.

Gawker has standards?

Maybe arglebargle isn't understanding the purpose, maybe they are...I can't really say. I'm quite certain I do understand the purpose...but having a purpose and being the best way to achieve that purpose aren't synonymous. I think the "best way" would be the one which most reliably prevents the abuses you mention while best limiting collatoral damage from the policy. Returning to the OP, when talking about the author's motivation for writing a work, there can be no more authoritative source than the primary source. A secondary source would necessarily be *less accurate* than the primary source. A policy which fails to recognize those sorts of nuances is not doing a good job of limiting collatoral damage, regardless of how pure its purpose might be. To me, this whole issue with the "no original research" policy reminds me of the "Zero Tolerance" policies that you often see lambasted. The similarity being that in both cases, little to no leeway is given for discretion, there is no consideration of context or nuance. And so we see an author being unable to verify that their inspiration for writing something was X; and we see kindergarteners suspended for having GI-Joe sized miniature weapons in their knapsack. In neither case is the true purpose really being served. Instead, people are abdicating thought and debate to policy, attempting to absolve themselves of responsibility for dealing with a world that is not full of bright line distinctions.

To the latter point, that verifying people are who they say they are is difficult, I concur. Verifying that sources are reliable is difficult as well. Wikipedia editors seem to believe that the latter is at least worth a reasonable effort. If the case merits it, why would the former not also be worth a reasonable effort? For example, if you have a professor at a university who wishes to address some aspect of an article about them or their work (such as what inspired them)...would it really be that difficult to verify the source? Most, if not all universities seem to have public directories available, many professors have web pages on their departmental web sites. Wouldn't a quick email to the listed address for the professor suffice to ensure that the source has been reasonably verified? Certainly not conclusively...but Wikipedia can't possibly have "conclusive" as its standard. Even the standard you have for the article you refer to, "peer reviewed", doesn't "conclusively" establish anything, it just gives a good chance that the information is as accurate as our current understanding allows.

Scala does indeed have some of what I want...but some number of those features would require VM support to really properly put in place. Without VM support, you could perhaps emulate some of them at the language library level, but you're not going to get the true performance that you would have if the VM were intelligently doing many of the optimizations at a lower level. And I don't think many of those things will end up in the JVM b/c Java's too beholden to backwards compatibility...and since the primary language won't ever support those features there's little motivation to add extra complexity to the VM to support them. I do think the JVM would make a reasonable starting point...people have put a lot of work into developing a number of features which would continue to be very important for the next generation language, and if some of that work can be reused, it would certianly help jumpstart such a project. I do think there's not much point without VM support. A next generation language isn't going to be viable if it exposes nice features but they are slow/expensive. And that, I think, is one big reason why uptake on Scala hasn't been better than it has. I'd have dig around to find it again, but last I saw, there were several significant benchmarks for which Scala performed much slower than Java due to aspects to how the language is designed. Google's little paper notwithstanding, most benchmarks I could find in just looking around (such as the Computer Language Benchmarks Game http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ ) have Scala coming in a bit behind Java...but well behind it on the high end. I think the next paradigm...it will have to offer more than Scala does, and do it with top-flight performance. There needs to be a real clear benefit which goes beyond appealing to CSey types and which can be used to make a compelling argument to business folk why they should let their development team(s) run off and use something new. I think several of the features I lay out would really help the language get even closer to C++ performance for a variety of computational tasks...still not as good as tuned C++, but maybe close enough that for an even broader category of problems, the extra productivity made possible by the higher level nature of the language would make it the way to go.

This is something I struggle with. Lots of people would reply "python", but I think they're off their rocker. Yes, python is probably just fine for a lot of website development, and yes, I know some enterprises are using it heavily, but when you dig into it, it's really a hacked up POS that carries WAY too much of its evolutionary baggage. Java certainly has a bit of that as well, mostly in the bundled libraries, but they are much more consistently architected than the Python libraries. Plus, the lack of true multi-threading support is just...unconscionable for a modern language, I think. Yeah, it simplifies things for the hoi polloi, but that should hardly be the standard we aspire to.

Unfortunately, the only languages I know which have the features I expect from the next great modern language are all research languages at this point. What I'd really like: Start with Java (convenient syntax that is familiar to many people, and a VM with a lot of important concepts). Go through the standard library and rework it to make it consistent, ditch the older paradigms that still hang around to support backwards compatibility. Rework generics, also ditching compatibility but to improve usefulness. Add support for design-by-contract. Add in language level (not library level) features to support fork-join with support for some mechanism to declare affinity between work units and data so that the VM can optimize thread placement and data placement in memory. Add better built in support for both dynamic class creation and bytecode injection. Add a smart/flexible int/float/number types where the VM will take care of sizing depending on how big the number is, something which can flow up to the Big range without needing to keep track of sizes yourself...and crucially, where the math operations work regardless of number size, efficiently (i.e., under the covers, this would mean allowing for a mutable big integer/decimal). Also add support for primitive collections...but do it in such a way that it's made as transparent as possible. This would probably mean it would allow treating primitives as Objects from a parameter passing perspective, so, say, your Map put method would still be put(K,V), but if you used a map which supported primitives (which would be a lot easier to write with the smart-number facility), it would pass a primitive straight through without any boxing/unboxing.

I'm sure if I thought a bit longer, I could come up with some other features I'd like to see. Importantly, this language still has a VM...I think that becomes more important for the future, not less, as we move to higher core/processor counts and NUMA becomes a bigger and bigger issue. There will always be a place for lower level coding a-la C/C++; but I think that a higher level language really...you need a VM. And, as with the JVM/CLR, I would want the VM for this language to offer support for running bytecode which could be compiled from a multitude of languages. People who have done work developing those sorts of compilers would probably have suggestions on how that could be even better supported, and I certainly think that input would be important for ensuring that support is done right.

people worry much more about last year's incident at Fukushima than they should have. Who gets to say what the proper degree of worry is? People at papers like the Wall Street Journal like to claim that the free market is good at deciding what value things should have, both negative value and positive value. If you subscribe to that view, than whatever degree of worry people have about something reflects the importance they place on it, and is fundamentally correct, no matter how strongly or weakly they feel about the subject; and, furthermore, taken in agregate, that value reflects exactly the value that particular item/scenario has in the context of society. An alternate view would be that maximizing GDP is the fundamental good. In fact, I think that's what people usually mean to strive for when they claim that the free market should decide things...they make a tacit assumption that the free market would always choose that course of action. Using that rubric, yes, of course people worry too much about Fukushima. The true economic damage which would be caused by the radiation is much lower than the hit to GDP for ditching nuclear power, assuming you relax safety standards and put all but the hottest of hot-spots back into productive use.

Or business method patents for that matter. To the extent that we allow people to patent "concepts", any prior mention of that concept should qualify as prior art, as it would make any product based on the concept a logical realization of a concept previously conceived.

There are a lot of things that can go wrong in failover scenarios. Unless and until they are tested in real world situations, you can't be certain the system works. I happen to know of many systems which had failover processes which were "tested", and sounded fine on paper, but when it came to the real world, they had failed to account for this or that unexpected condition which ended up leading to far more downtime that was expected. If chaos monkey is their ONLY way of arriving at a resilient service, than sure, they have a deeper issue. But if they've spent time trying to design a solid system and then they're using Chaos Monkey to make sure it's as bullet-proof as they think it is, then it's good, solid engineering for the real world. I am reminded of the book "Inviting Disaster", on technology failures. All the systems described in the book which failed were well engineered systems. But due to a series of events working in concert, disaster happened. Any one link in the chain of failures wouldn't be enough; and it is not possible to fully engineer that out of your system; and certainly not possible to test for that in controlled testing environments. But if you can start causing failures in the real world (which is a luxury you have with systems that don't actually keep people alive), you have the opportunity to eliminate those sorts of weaknesses from the system. That's what I think is the value to something like this.

Conveniently accounts for walking on water too.

I think this is probably one of better explanations for why "could care less" is generally wrong. In short, all the fancy claims of sarcasm/irony are likely post hoc justifications, what's more important is looking at actual intent. In this case, I don't think tyrione was sarcastically saying anything, he was intending to very directly say Woz didn't give a damn about the aesthetics of the ICs. Also, just for fun, this post has a google ngrams graph for the two phrases showing how couldn't care less looks to have the earlier origin and greater historical weight, current usage notwithstanding.