Yes, also: if some intern was fixing a problem with your code, and they were sitting next to you, what sort of things would you have to explain to them in order for them to understand and fix your code, and not just dis' it to their boss and tell their boss what a load of crap your code is?

I often imagine I'm explaining to an intern how the code works when I write my comments. I assume they understand the language, the libraries and stuff - they can just Google that stuff - but what does this class do? why? Target audience.

The other possible target audience is myself in a year's time.

To be honest, the longer I code, the more these target audiences converge on writing the same set of comments ;-) since I've learned how much one forgets when one comes back to the same code two years later.

If you wish to play with dictionaries, lets use your obviously infallible friend Webster (I'm British, I feel I must point out my use of sarcasm is because Webster is famous for re-writing the English language), and follow the path you have laid to one of its possible conclusions:

Atheism: 2a - a disbelief in the existence of deity.

Disbelief: the act of disbelieving.

Disbelieve: to hold not worthy of belief.

Therefore, you've just cherry-picked the definition to suit your argument. It isn't even a case of you cherry picking your source, your damn source contradicts you. If you'd bothered to widen your field of reference then you'd have found many references to atheism being a mere lack of belief in both dictionaries and encyclopaedias.

A fourth reason: if you use something like Sphinx to autogenerate documentation from your code, then you should probably include at least a one-liner saying what each function or method does, and maybe you want to describe the parameters and the return values. (If you're using a language like Python, then of course you don't have the types of the parameters or the return values in the function definition, so you should document them.)

(Disclaimer: I try to not be an asshole, but I couldn't resist. Moderators: try to keep your knees from jerking. There's no -1, "tl;dr but that other guy's dying and you're a vain, self-centered, mentally ill, delusional pervert.")

I'd be really happy if the medical community would follow up on studies that show the biological basis for transsexualism (such as brain imaging, which was mildly successful at predicting whether a person would be a transsexual or not). I have transsexualism, which, if treated before/at puberty costs approximately $10,000 for a genital surgery (mostly cosmetic, but required by law to get the documents correct) and $1 per day in artificial hormones. I met a fellow geek at a sci-fi/anime convention in Detriot a while back with a similar condition. She didn't even know that brain sex could be measured using existing brain imaging techniques.

I just wanted to point out that it's interesting that insurance will pay $120,000 per year to keep you alive and well, but insurance is completely unwilling to part with one of your monthly payments to give me a normal life as the gender my brain is wired for, thus curing me completely. But no, I'm not dying (although psychologists who believe that transsexualism is a mental illness to be cured with electroshock cost me my family, since I wasn't going to agree to have my brain fried just to prove myself right. My only present neurological issue is being a woman [which i understand is something that affects 50%-51% of the population]; I'd hate to get a few actual neurological problems that would affect my software development work such as long term/short term memory problems that electroshock can cause.)

Now, if there were some real science instead of pseudoscience in the treatment of transsexualism, I could have been diagnosed before puberty, I'd look and sound exactly like a normal girl, to the point where I probably wouldn't even care about "transgender issues" more than remembering to take a pill every morning and get a yearly checkup at an endocrinologist. (Of course, having an almost completely normal female body sans menstruation, there probably wouldn't be transgender issues to worry about as long as one steers clear of feminists and other bigots.)

C'est la vie. Didn't mean to say I've got it worse, quite the opposite really. I've got it pretty good for a transsexual, even. I probably won't be one of the 50% of transsexuals who turns to suicide.

Okay, I thought this was pretty obvious. Seriously, how many of you think typing "keygen" into google is going to find you anything but a bunch of spam sites linking to each other, and if you're lucky, a virus to download.
Type any word into Google, add "keygen", OH LOOK IT'S THE SAME WEBSITES!! Okay, not ANY word, but close enough.
Anyways, if you did happen to find a keygen for something to do with Avatar on any website, there's no way in hell it's anything to do with the movie. You think some hacker at the movie theater made one for the fun of it? A 3D movie is not small enough to be spread online, nor can it be played back on any equipment available to the general public. If there's no way or reason to copy the data, nobody is going to worry about breaking the DRM.

Some of us were kept alive, to work... loading diet pills into Nigerian officials. The... enlargement.... units ran night and day. We were that close to going out forever. But there was one man who taught us to fight, to storm the wire of the call centres, to smash those fat burning *****s into junk. He turned it around. He brought us back from the brink.

His name is Markov. Andrey Markov.

Everyone is basically saying "pretty pictures, but the story sucks"

The New York Times's hoity-toity film reviewer Manohla Dargis (who usually only likes stuff with subtitles) begs to differ.

You got the idea, while preaching means that are diametrically opposed to accomplishing it. Ideas are indeed the foundation of civilization, but it's the spread of ideas and their widespread application that induces civilization, not ideas locked up and caged and available only at arbitrary cost from their progenitor. Ownership is a fundamental aspect of individual freedom, but ownership of ideas damages societal freedom.

Copyrights and patents stifle progress and act as a brake against innovation that leads to further "upgrades" of civilization. When use of an idea that can improve my life requires a fee, I'm less likely to use it. Taken to its ultimate end, every idea that can improve my life requires a fee. How then do I live?

Sycraft,

That's remarkably insightful. For a posting on /. I'm impressed. You're already at 5, and I don't have any mod points anyway, so I can't mod you up.

It could be a generational thing, but I've never understood why so many folks using the internet (mostly younger generations) feel that everything should be free to them no matter what.

When it isn't free, they do the electronic equivalent of a "smash and grab" and just figure out a way to take it.

I'm not saying that the nook developer's network is a bad thing. It is, in fact, quite interesting. However, folks shouldn't scream bloody murder about how evil B&N is when they fix the device so that it can't be used for free general internet. As you noted, it costs B&N for the bandwidth over the cellular and B&N isn't a non-profit organization. If there stops being a profit in it for them, they will stop providing it.

No one should begrudge them that.

-JJS

Not to mention the analogy in the original article is kind of silly. How long did it take for electricity to become pervasive in rural areas? 30, 40 years? And yes, there are still places in the United States with no electrical service.

but mono has a value on it's own compatible with MS or not, frankly I don't care if my mono stuff runs on windows or not. it's the nicest way to do gtk apps at the moment, imho

But, as for man CAUSING global warming - BULLSHIT!!! How many ice ages has the earth had now? And, how many interglacial periods?

You seem to suggest that the history of ice ages disproves AGW. Are you saying that, because climate is known to change by itself, it must therefore be impossible to change it through external means?

Just for the sake of argument, assume that we really are changing the climate. What do you expect would be different today than how it is? Would there be nobody to question it? Would there be some definitive proof that could convince you of it? What would that proof be?

If you can't come up with an idea of something that, in the presence of actual AGW, would convince you of its existence, it is time to start reconsidering you logic. Because that means if it really is happening, you still wouldn't believe it or act on it.

Now, you may respond with a reference to Occam's razor and make some argument about absence of disproof not being proof or something like that, but before you do that I would like to point a few things out:

• We know that the Earth's climate depends on a greenhouse effect. (Basic physics -- radiation equilibrium with the Sun would otherwise make the Earth much cooler).
• We know that carbon dioxide absorbs a certain amount of heat in the atmosphere (by looking at the light spectrum from space).
• We know that we are emitting huge amounts of carbon previously bound in oil and coal, and that it forms carbon dioxide. (High school chemistry and math.)

Frankly, given those easily verifiable facts alone, the possibility of anthropogenic global warming being real is pretty far from unimaginable. We are not talking about a flying spaghetti monster here.

It is not the governments purpose to "save" or "fix" the economy, nor does it have the ability to do so. It never had that ability, and it never will

Of course it is, unless you live in some non-existent libertarian utopia. Governments continually bail out and stimulate economies, and their voters expect them to.

That's how modern society works, whether you like it or not.

No, as opposed to swarming for some other reason such as protection from predators, attacking Japanese fishermen, or as part of their agile software development process.