Thank you :-p I was beginning to think no one else in this thread saw through the mudslinging to realize both parties are at fault. I recently read Thomas Sowell's opinion piece on the shutdown (copy at http://www.gosanangelo.com/news/2013/oct/06/thomas-sowell-who-shut-down-the-federal/ and elsewhere). He points out that the Republican controlled House passed the budget for everything but the health care legislation, and Democrat controlled Senate denied the entire budget because it didn't include health care funding. Everyone who says the blame lies with one party or another is perpetuating the deeper problem... A "stand on the sideline, cheer your team" tribalism. I don't know why the American people aren't calling out everyone involved. I like what the Australians and Canadians do, now that I've heard it. Dissolve both the House and Senate and hold a general election? Seems the only sensibly democratic thing to do at this juncture :-p

In terms of right-left being hardcoded biologically, there is a new study suggesting a link between upper body strength and political opinions on economic redistribution.

“Despite the fact that the United States, Denmark and Argentina have very different welfare systems, we still see that — at the psychological level — individuals reason about welfare redistribution in the same way,” says Petersen. “In all three countries, physically strong males consistently pursue the self-interested position on redistribution.”

However, I think there is a third rational option that eludes our current left-right political spectrum in the US. The Founding Fathers were philosophers, thinkers. They worked hard to examine the historical basis for the every choice they made, disagreed often, and concluded on a system that granted individuals rights and refused the government power. I think the psychological make-up of individuals makes it difficult to see the third option, but I believe that makes a reasoned approach to politics invaluable.

+1 VMs. Also, Wine has pretty decent support for Photoshop CS2.

This: http://youtu.be/1qWHDsjMCGo :-p

I've heard many of the problems with the public school administration aren't problems at private schools. The claim is that "at will employment" makes for a better relationship with the administration. I don't know how true that is, and I wish I could think of where I saw the original discussion I would ask some private school teachers their feelings on the matter and see what kinds of response you're able to get.

Alternatively, you could always look for work in Finland :-p

Just want to point out that the theory of evolution is constantly evolving itself, or should be: Scientists Late to Recognize Human and Giant Mammal Coexistence

80% will work fine if you:

• Support only IE9+, or
• Ignore CSS3 linear-gradients (the MS filters are too buggy and slow to be used in IE)
• Rely on jQuery or some other Javascript library for all your DOM manipulation needs
• Use a Javascript library or custom code for your JavaScript 1.6+ needs (did you realize Array.indexOf wasn't in JS until 1.6?)
• Don't try to use display: inline-block; without IE specific hacks
• Don't use :before or :after psuedo-elements, or :(first|last)-child selectors without ie7-js
• Don't use display: table-cell; (even though some developers still do, and for the life of me I haven't found a suitable analog or shim)

If you're skipping out on all that, then yeah, sure, 80% of what you do will work fine in IE, no problem. If you try to do more than that, you will be fighting an uphill battle to make your site work properly in IE.

I recently added LiveReload to my coding process (guard-livereload, LiveReload for Chrome), and it eliminates the second keystroke :-p It also has the added benefit of keeping any element styles you applied in the DOM inspector while reloading CSS or JS (which is kind of nifty).

The thing that concerns me is what I've seen happening to Obama the last few years... He played the social network to ride the election, and promised many things he should have been able to deliver. Instead, it seems that the relentless political tides have worn him down, and I see him reneging on his core values. I wish it weren’t so, but it seems to me that the only way to fix the system is by replacing much more of our government with political leaders in touch with their constituents needs.

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.