He's claiming women are poor at spatial relationships as measured by some (pretty arbitrary) objective standard. You're claiming they're just find in fields where success is a matter of fashion. Was that really the argument you wanted to make?

I don't think basketball has much to do with spatial relationships myself - I'd think athletic ability and hand-eye coordination would be the dominant factors (well, and height can't hurt). But then, what do I know about it?

Plus this ignores the upside. I'd expect several staff per wealthy occupant of the dome, and so many poor enjoy the nice environment for each rich person. For Dubai, that's a step forward.

It sure would be nice to have some standards there!

Because there were some firm standards for terminals, vendors could make clever ones, PCs had emulators, and you could make simplifying assumptions. And I guess if you stick to some basic HTML (which you would for non-AJAX anyhow), maybe we're already there with HTML5 (or XHTML, if you go that way).

Hmm, a modern server-side framework that sticks to the basic, non-AJAX world - does it exist? It would sure make all the geeks who use noscript religiously happy!

Most of what was written in COBOL looked very much like any non-AJAX web app. Sure, there were the batch programs you describe, but mostly it was apps for terminals. Send a form, the terminal posts a reply, hit the database, send the result fields. Same-old same-old. But it was all server-side code.

There are a few WYSIWYG web editors out there, but for some reason they were never that popular. People seem to want to muck around with JavaScript and frameworks and otherwise dick around with the client side code, as if the bit that paints the screen were the important bit. That was the difference in the COBOL years - you wrote the server side and let the client take care of itself, instead of trying to do that backwards.

BS. That's sophomoric laziness and extremism. The goal is to be able to make a solid argument, not philosophical certitude!

The relativity of wrong is unrelated. I love it that your argument for consensus is "see, the consensus of people disagree with you". Nice.

My argument is dead simple: you either have done the work to understand why something is right, or you are taking it on faith that the Wise Men are right. Sure, some Wise Men are more reliable than others, and that's great for them, but you are just lazily operating on faith until you do the work.

If you want to claim "but I put my faith in Wiser Wise Men than those guys do!" OK, fine, but so what? Everyone in history has always believed that!

It's not that all opinions are equal, but that blind faith is blind faith. Science is great because you can do the diligence and confirm the opinion, or at least understand the argument. But until you do that, the difference is as yet immaterial.

It amazes me how many people have strong opinions about issues they don't understand. I take a lot of things on faith: pretty much everything in my life that's both unimportant and uninteresting. But I don't have strong opinions on those things - I know I can't back up my beliefs. But for something I have a strong opinion on, say relativity or evolution, I can explain the science, qualitatively and with simple math. I understand the predictions made, and how they are confirmed, And, most importantly, I understand the arguments of the skeptics - I don't dismiss them out of arrogance, I understand where they're coming from and why they're wrong.

Similarly on issues like abortion, or normative ethics, I can explain in detail why anyone who's too certain about their stance just hasn't thought deeply enough about the issue, because those are areas where there's just no way to reach certainty except ignorance.

No, I make no such argument. My argument is that taking something on faith is the same regardless of which "wise men" you believe without diligence. Sure, it's often more practical to understand the argument and evidence for science than for religion - but that only matters when you actually do the work. Until you do, you're taking that belief on faith.

I don't get it. You're in fact taking what someone else said as the final word without questioning, but that's "hugely different" than taking what someone else said as the final word without questioning? Because you could do something you didn't? I'm not finding that argument coherent.

I'm skeptical by nature. Sure, there are many things I take on faith because they're just not interesting or important enough to question. I think that's true for everyone. But anything I have a strong opinion on, I've done some research myself, not just trusted the word of others. It seems from this thread that you don't work that way. You're arguing that you're not taking stuff on faith because it's possible for you to do the research, but you haven't? If that's your argument you're just wrong - you're still taking those things on faith.

You seem to have a very cynical view of religion, so extreme that you have your own personal definition of "on faith" that makes that phrase an insult? That's odd.

Sure, some religions are coupled with fables and creation stories and gods. Some aren't. Some have those things, but few think they're the important bit. Most world religions have lots of advice on how one should live - as an individual, as a member of a community, that their believers live by. You can look at whether those believers are happy and successful (did you know the average family income for Hindus in America is well into 6 figures?), or living in barbarous middle-age conditions. Some have an explicit focus on engineering the mind to make yourself happy - that seems neat, does it work, are they happy? These are very much testable philosophies of life.

Are you seriously arguing that it's rational to have strong opinions about X when you haven't done even the most basic diligence about X?

Sure, that's cool. Have you? Or are you taking it on faith?

BS. Most of religion centers on claims about the right way to live - perhaps to have a happy life, or a successful community, or so on. Very testable claims. It's only the crazies who focus on the overlap between religion and biology/cosmology. That was never the interesting part of most religions anyhow.

Really? I have. It's fun. Or maybe it was Jupiter's moons (it was decades ago), but in any case, I certainly did the most basic and shallow and easy tests, as a child, before I was willing to believe people in this area of science.

Many of the details I of course take on faith - after all, it won't affect my daily life if they're wrong, but I do try to follow the math and understand the more important experimental results in each area of science I care about. Only in quantum mechanics do I feel I'm still taking too much on faith, as the math there is just so much damn work to even understand the most basic results.

Again, you have a very narrow view of religion. I suspect you've spent as little time studying religion as you have studying science, yet you have these very strong opinions about both - opinions based, I guess, on taking "what smart people say" on faith!

There's absolutely no difference between "faith in scientists" and "faith in wise men". If you believe the conclusions of some area of science because you did some research and you understand, at least shallowly, the arguments and evidence, then you can claim a difference from religion. But anything you just believe because the "smart people" say it's so? That's religious faith, plain and simple.

(It's also quite silly to disbelieve something just because of its source, of course, though skepticism is often warranted.)

Dud, you just didn't have the right gear. Farm the Spear and Magic Helmet, and those wascally wabbits are no problem at all!

If it works. If it works. That's just it, this isn't a phone app, and there's no reason to believe it's reliable until it's been in service for many years and has proven that it's reliable. During that time, you make sure the old way is still there.

Apple is a fashion accessory company. Why would you think otherwise? Because their accessories are "on a portable device"? Watches were similarly high tech at one point, but there were fashion brands there too from nearly the beginning. They get markup due to design and exclusivity, much like Rolex (and one day I'm sure we'll see the Patek Philippe of electronics, as the market continues to mature - why not a $30k cell phone?). That's their market, and they're content to stay there.

Tesla gets a similar benefit today, but they aren't content with that. Their stated goal is to be mainstream, not only an upscale brand. You can't reason from Apple to future Tesla as far as customer base and what will succeed.

I really think you don't understand the rural market. While the Model E can do just fine just selling into cities, and Tesla's near-term expansion is well-served by that, that's just the next 4-5 years. Then what? It's unlikely batteries will be different in kind by then, so if Tesla want's to continue their journey to becoming a mainstream car company, they'll have to come to grips with non-dense environments.

Plus, they'll want a truck eventually. And while Land Rover has finally retired the mechanical PTO from their model line, there'd be real appeal to an electrical PTO (generator or no) on a truck, not to mention the ability to charge safely from ad-hoc electrical sources like a portable generator, no? Do you really think rural customers won't think to bring a portable generator "just in case", or as a range extender? Do you really think Tesla will stand of some bizarre principle and not accommodate that need, to sell into the rural market?

You never want to make landing harder than it needed to be. Sure, you can land completely blind, but it's more dangerous than when you can see the runway. Like any other cockpit automation, this is a cool idea that should replace (not merely augment) the existing systems after a couple of decades of data on how reliable it actually is.