Well that's exactly it. Isn't the argument that a person may feel as though their brain is a particular gender, and that the physical characteristics of their body represent the opposite gender. I can imagine, being quite comfortable with my own gender, that this would be something of a nightmare.

You're right, they cannot change their gender, for that is seated in their brain. And so they're changing their body, which certainly can be modified, to match.

Why is this a bad thing, if we accept the initial argument?

Sure. There are people like that, and no-one rational should prevent them from living their lives as they see fit. If someone wants to be a little bit girl and a little bit boy, then more power to them.

But that's not everyone is it? The fact is that there are people who feel trapped in the wrong-gendered body, and wish to change it. It's their body, and they should be free to modify it how they please. I don't believe that this is always the result of black-and-white girl-or-boy false dichotomies (if that's what they are, you get the idea). After all, gender modification is a serious undertaking, and takes years of surgery and medication. You're saying that everyone that undergoes that process is delusional, and should be happy with the bits that god gave them?

I'd love to look this one up, but I've no idea what to search for. I tried just googling what you wrote, and I found this:

Nutjob article

It's pretty great stuff - "THE HUMAN DNA IS A BIOLOGICAL INTERNET" - etc, but it doesn't seem to be related to the sun. It seems to be about the existence of telepathy, telekensis, and self-radiant balls of ionised gas that contain considerable amounts of energy and float around somewhere in Russia the entire time.

So. Er. I guess, citation needed?

Given they named their new language after her.

The thing is this, the answer to the question 1/0 = x, for instance, must satisfy the equation x * 0 = 1. But we know that for all numbers, a multiplication by zero will always equal zero. Therefore, the equation has no solution.

Additionally, infinity is not actually a number at all, so it can't be the solution to a polynomial of any sort, because the basic requirement of any solution is that it be a number.

Apologies for the slight sarcasm there - but this stuff does come up a lot. 1/0 is not infinity, positive or negative. Sorry.

I trust this wasn't in an aircraft that is ever likely to take people anywhere, right?

I'm actually pretty curious though, you're talking about a PID, and the only divisions in there that I can imagine are in a numerical derivative calculation, which must have meant that your dt went to zero... I'm probably on the wrong track, but I am interested.

Sorry no. The error is in your answer.

See. It can't be defined as one of two different things, especially since neither of those things are a number. Except that you're probably joking, right?

Look - I know this is the internet and everything - and being intolerably rude is apparently the norm. But you should really consider the way in which you speak to people about whom you know nothing but a few sentences written in an online form.

Seriously.

It's great that you have control over every computer that you ever do work on - including installing whatever your editor-of-choice is - but not everyone has that luxury. The fact remains that Python's choice of whitespace instead of delimiting characters causes a problem for me. That this fact makes it impossible for you to take me seriously is ok - you just don't need to be a dick about it.

I'm happy to have entertained you.

Of course I normally use a syntax-aware editor, but the fact is that you don't always have one to hand, and it seems that Python goes out of its way to make this a problem for you. If this makes me an idiot, then so be it.

Of course indenting is important. But it should have remained an orthogonal issue to the choice of block delimiters. By not using curly braces, unlike everything else (ok, matlab is different, and lua is different etc etc... but curly braces are the majority), I have additional unnecessary cognitive load when running around the C->Python->Javascript->Go racetrack like I do at work.

I hate cognitive load. It makes me irritable.

If I only wrote code in python, or like a prior poster, had only experience of badly written shell scripts, I might not mind so much. But as it is, it drives me up the wall.

And since I'm on slashdot moaning about weird language choices, what's with Go's 'Capital letters means public' thing. Grrrrr.

Many times. To write python, you cannot do without a python-aware editor. If you don't happen to have one to hand, then it's massively annoying.

It's just so un-necassary. It's such a weird design decision, when we've getting by with curly braces for so many decades in so many languages, that to just decide to do things differently to *everything* seems... Well.. Kind of pig-headed.

Fact is, python would be less irritating if they hadn't gone for the whitespace thing. Therefore it was a bad call.

Ok fine. But so what? What's the problem with crying at work exactly? It's not unheard of for guys either you know.

Or is it more that with girls it's weakness, and with men it's a sign of extra-ordinary pain and suffering? I've seen girls cry at work, but they were going through fairly serious emotional situations outside of work, and they're not robots, so what exactly is wrong with that?

Perhaps you're the one with the problem, if a display of emotion bothers you so.

That was 1918 - which to those who are counting - is almost a hundred years ago. Thus it's irrelevant to any discussion of the current sociological significance of particular colours.

And in any case, "pink politics" is supposed to mean semi-communist, isn't it? Or was that only in the 50's?

Xcode is free, and so a hobbyist writing code for their mac - and anyone else's too if they're willing to turn off the "store only" switch in their settings - is completely free to do whatever they will.

And as of this latest announcement, you can do the same with your iOS device too.

This seems pretty open to hobbyists to me. How much more open would you like it to be? Bearing in mind that the "store only" switch in OSX's settings is a fairly significant security win for non-hobbyists.

Well... I can now, but I did have to install an SSD to make that happen. It didn't happen very much though, and forever was normally less than a few seconds.

Yes it does. Perhaps you have a hardware issue on the disk? Might explain your spinning wheel on file open dialogs too.

Such as where? Left, bottom or right. That's about it.

Yes, if your hardware isn't broken or marginal. I suggest a trip to the store if you're having that problem.

Yes. Sounds more and more like some hardware issues..

In the early 90's we had Windows 3.1 - I remember that pretty well, and it didn't feel much like OSX.

No. Which is slightly annoying I suppose, but I do find I spend less time fiddling with it and more time getting work done.