This. If you look at the bodies of men and women, nearly every organ has slight gender-based differences. Men usually have more muscle, bigger lungs. Women have less/no facial hair, more round faces, etc. This is normal. Evolution made us that way because in nature, males and females fulfill different roles, and we are adapted for these purposes. Why is it that people assume men and women's brains are identical for both genders when every other organ is not? Because this is a touchy topic. Because we're trying to be politically correct and not offend anyone.

If anything, the brain is one of the most crucial organ to differentiate between both genders, as it directly controls our behavior. The fact is, as StikyPad said, studies have shown that there ARE differences in the brains of men and women, which makes absolutely perfect sense. It also makes perfect sense that men and women would have different preferences for certain tasks. This doesn't make either inferior. It doesn't mean women have to be locked in the kitchen and men kept away from babies. It means maybe *on average* men prefer engineering and women prefer medicine and psychology. Note that I said *on average*. Every human being is different on more than one level.

Now, lots of people will say that if women aren't more in engineering, it's because of the mean evil misogynistic nerd men who are already there, and pushing them out. I beg to differ. Medicine used to be 100% controlled by men. It was a men's field. Women were perceived as incapable of doing it. It was a misogynistic field par excellence. Yet women MADE THEIR PLACE in medicine and now women almost dominate it! There are more female medicine students than male! Women seem to like medicine, and they proved they were capable of doing it. Soon, male doctors might well be the minority... And that's fine. Nobody complains about it.

Back to engineering. I studied computer science at McGill, in Montreal, a very liberal Canadian city. This university prides itself on acceptance. Women were the minority, as they had always been in the field, but the ones who were there seemed generally happy. The guys would have liked nothing more than additional female students. They just weren't joining the program. Furthermore, the women who were in CS, at least all the ones I met, were always more on the mathematical side of things. They all seemed to generally dislike coding and avoid it as much as possible. Could it be that there's something engineering-y about coding that women usually tend to like less? Could it be that the mathematical side of computer science tends to appeal to women more?

I think it's a shame we can't openly talk about these possibilities without being labelled sexist. Shoving our heads in the sand and pretending women and men are exactly the same on every level isn't scientific. It doesn't match everyone's daily life experience... And it isn't what feminism should be about either.

Google hasn't been trying to shoot down anything just yet. Someone leaked some internal memo. They haven't officially released anything.

I love to declare as I go and make early returns. I think it makes code more readable. The declarations appear when they become relevant, and the code doesn't have a billion indentation levels. You know the answer now? Return it now.

>> If you actively want function scoping then you and I are going to have very different ideas about what constitutes a good programming language. I'd say that you're probably in the minority on this one as well; C, C++, Java, Ruby, Python, none of them have function scope.

I think you misunderstood me. I don't think it's a good idea for blocks not to have their own scope. However, in C++, as in JavaScript, it's not a problem to declare variables at any point within a function (e.g: in the middle of the function body). I much prefer to declare variables when I need them rather than being forced to predeclare them at the top of the current block. Essentially, I with that, in Scheme, you could write a define anywhere in a function, and it would add a new variable to the current scope. I wouldn't be foolish enough to suggest removing the let forms, and the scoping would still be static.

>> Well, there are a bunch of Lisp and Scheme variants that target the JVM, such as ABCL. But yeah, until recently the speedy Lisps have been CMUCL and SBCL, which compile to native code rather than using a JIT in the VM. I think that's because it's pretty recent that VMs using JIT have started to be viewed as offering acceptable performance. (And on Slashdot, you'll still find a lot of people who dispute even that, and still believe in static native compilation as the only way to get fast code.)

I know that the JVM has been trying to add features to make it more suitable for dynamic languages, but I still don't believe it is. To get high performance, you need to be able to do code patching, on-stack replacement, run-time code generation and other low-level tricks that the JVM will never allow. I think that the best for LISP-like languages would be to use a JIT that compiles to machine code. What Chrome and Firefox does for JavaScript would be impossible with an ahead of time compiler.

>> Most languages lack convenient ways to create local variable declarations without nesting the whole thing in a code block. In fact, JavaScript lacks a convenient way to create local variable declarations without using an anonymous function.

What I meant is that in JS you can declare a new variable at any point in a function by writing "var foo = ...". In Scheme, the only way to do that without a let block is to write a bunch of defines at the beginning of a function, and initialize them to some bogus value, so that you can redefine them later. It's a small detail, but it already gets in the way of imperative programming a little.

>> Well, it's true that Guile has horrible performance [utah.edu], even compared to other Scheme implementations'; but then, JavaScript had pretty horrible performance until Google and Mozilla started putting serious effort into speeding it up.

I'm working on dynamic language optimization for my Ph.D. thesis (of JavaScript, more specifically). I can tell you that alot of the same techniques could be applied to Scheme and other LISPs. One unfortunate issue is that the functional community has been rather disconnected from the imperative programming world, and they seem to be unaware of much of the optimization techniques developed in the world of SELF, etc.. That, or nobody in the LISP world bothered to really put the work into a proper optimizing JIT.

I was writing some Scheme code recently for a personal project... I came to the same conclusion. I wrote alot of the code in a sequential form. That wasn't so bad. Function bodies have an implicit begin and end. It became annoying, however, because Scheme lacks convenient ways of creating local variable declarations without nesting the whole thing into a let form.

Another issue was the complete lack of a useful standard library. No hash maps, no sorting function. Even the most basic string functions were lacking. If I'm not mistaken, the Scheme spec doesn't even specify a way to get the numerical code for a character... And then the performance of the code I'd written (pretty straightforwardly) was abysmal.

Just like there's alot of heat all around us on earth, which is kinetic energy. Not a physicist, nor an engineer, but I think we have no way to harvest energy unless there is a potential difference between two nearby locations. To get power from a nuclear reactor, for example, you need to use the heat to turn water to steam... However, this would't work if the entire environment around the reactor was already at 2000 degrees, and the water was already superheated steam. Same with a stirling engine, you need a temperature difference, so that you can harvest the energy transfer that occurs between the different potentials.

It should be said though that solar cells are akin to harvesting radiation in space. It's just that the radiation you harvest happens to be in or near the visible spectrum. I don't think the wattage of the invisible radiation in space is anywhere near as "bright" as that of visible, UV and infrared light, though.

I think that the ideal compromise might be a combination of a VM (e.g.: Java, .NET or NaCl), some object sharing/serialization protocol (like CORBA or even just JSON), a distribution system (like an app store) and some low-level APIs.

Imagine if webpages were not made of HTML+CSS+JS+Images and a bunch of other files, but instead just code. You go to some URL, and each page is an app, that can run in its own window (or even spawn multiple windows). You wouldn't have to install anything, you just go to the URL, it gets downloaded and run. You could give some apps special privileges (e.g.: local file system access, webcam access) if you trust them enough.

The difference with the current web is that the apps wouldn't be constrained by HTML, HTTP, or any of those. Code wouldn't have to be written in some fixed language. It would just have to compile to the VM's low-level language. The VM could expose some low-level APIs for things like file-access, but, in my opinion, they should be kept simple (lowest common denominator) to ease portability. Right now, the JS APIs are way too complex because they're intertwined with the insane complexity of the HTML DOM, which seems unstandardizable.

What I describe sounds alot like Java applets I guess, but without being forced to be part of a browser, and with some low-level API to connect to the server, and perhaps faster loading times.

Um, let's see...You're talking about the company that:

1. Refused to adopt POSIX standards.
2. Has its own calling conventions for C/C++ incompatible with the GNU ones.
3. Released Direct3D to try and kill OpenGL.
4. Actually had people on the OpenGL board trying to actively stall its development.
5. Tried to release J++ to compete with Java.
6. Maintained its own Java VM for years, slightly incompatible with Sun's.
7. Released C#, to compete with Java.
8. Opposed open document formats.
9. Released it's own API to compete with both CUDA and OpenCL.
10. Has had the least standard compliant web browser for years.

Those are only the cases I know about, but yeah... Sure... Judging from their track record, they'll adopt these web APIs right away... Microsoft loves interoperability...

It's totally possible to build electric motors that use electromagnets for both the rotor and the stator... Could someone explain why permanent magnets are so much better?

People who believe in libertarianism are people who are already well off, and who think that letting capitalism run free without any regulation will somehow make the world fairer and better. The reality is that they just want to pay less taxes, because they think *they* can do without any government services. It's only slightly less stupid than people who believe in anarchy. My libertarian friends tell me how we'd be so much better protected if we all had to pay some corporation to be the police.

Let's give SecuriCorp a bunch of guns and all the power it wants. Let's pay this company to protect us, and let's let it grow as big as it can. They're so reliable, everyone buys their safety from SecuriCorp, until they've become a monopoly. Then they're all powerful, untouchable, and they can impose whatever law they want on you. They can prevent any smaller security company from ever coming into existence. Maybe the president of SecuriCorp has a taste for little girls too. He can take a few of his buddies with him into his big SUV and grab teenage girls from the street at night to gang rape them, and nobody will do anything about it.

You could of course speak with your wallet, and not pay them for safety, you smart libertarian, except then nobody's protecting you but yourself. You, of course, think you're so awesome, because you own an MP5 and a handgrenade. Too bad SecuriCorp has trained mercenaries who can make your death look like a gang-related crime. You're obviously dead because you failed to pay SecuriCorp to protect you, you unwise person.

I think that when people say "The PC is going away", they do include laptops in the definition. They honestly believe that tablets and smartphones are going to eliminate desktops and laptops... Not realizing that some of us want full-fledged keyboards to, you know, type messages longer than a few lines, do homework, write reports and other work documents, or even *gasp* programming code to run on all these devices.

I honestly think tablets are a fad, just like netbooks. Most people who use tablets would be better served by lightweight laptops, such as the MacBook Air or something along those lines... And they know it too. I mean, woah, you can watch movies on that thing, read webpages you say? You just can't tilt the screen in a convenient position without some kind of holder, using a tablet while sitting on the couch is uncomfortable, and typing on it is a pain, you need some kind of external keyboard.

Ah, yes, deemphasizes programming... Because existing CS degrees don't do enough of that already. I've done a B.Sc., a masters and am now doing a Ph.D. in CS... And the whole time, everybody's been pretending that programming is just not that important. That computer science should be something pure and somehow entirely detached from the practical realities of computing. The result? Lots of students can't code. Lots of students don't really understand how computers work, both in the concrete and in the theoretical sense.

I think if you hate coding, you should pick another field. Like it or not, unless you're doing purely theoretical CS, you're going to need to implement something on a computer at some point... And this is done with a programming language.

I think coding could be made more *fun* and less tedious, but I don't think we should try to hide it under a rug and pretend it's not there. If anything, learning to program is a great way to develop your logical/critical thinking.

Some people have a limited definition of what constitutes "science" or "progress".

At least we have the Turing Award.

I've always imagined that elementary particles must be point-like, without any actual volume. Does this study contradict that notion?

It just seems to me that it wouldn't make sense for electrons to have a volume, because that would imply some kind of structure. Nobody ever seemed to suggest that photons actually have a "shape", other than a point.