Why is the Prime Minister of Singapore in Alaska after the zombie apocalypse?

Imagine a line between Redding and Yuma. Anything that happens West of there is "news for nerds" according to Slashdot.

Now where's the weekly Australia story?

Thank you! I'm relieved that you got it without me having to explain it.

And it looks like some of hoi polloi(or should that be hoi barbaroi?) appreciated it too.

I thought I was making a joke in Greek, since polites is the antonym of barbaros. Did I do it wrong?

O.K., keep it, it makes barbaric (excuse me, i meant English...) easier for us.

That's not polite.

As am I. My neckbeard is going grey.

Well, it does. I know about 60 programming languages to varying levels of fluency (if that sounds like a lot, it's because I used to research programming languages, and contrary to the Pragmatic Programmers advice, I tend to learn two a year), but I do most of my work in C++ and (sadly) node.js. I can tell which languages improve my "traditional" programming and which ones don't. The ones which do are the ones which force you to think in different ways, because they are the ones which open you up to new possibilities.

You can do Haskell in any language. But until you've done Haskell, you really can't grok what it means to do Haskell or what this buys you.

That's probably true of Lisp. It's certainly true of Paul Graham. However, exactly the opposite is true of Haskell.

Haskell's unofficial motto is "avoid success at all costs" (which may explain the thread-originating post). This means several things, but one corollary is that if there isn't a mathematically pure way to do provide some feature, Haskell does not get that feature until such a way is found. Haskell people do not only know how to use hammers. On the contrary, Haskellers firmly believe that for many problems, we don't know what the right tool for the job is because the right tool hasn't been invented yet.

If you don't understand why this is important, go watch Bret Victor's talk on The Future of Programming .

I count emacs-lisp, so that's at least a thousand more people who have each written two lines in the last ten years.

But you have to, since output has been demanded.

TL;DR America is the whole world.

Why did they seceed from India when India has millions of muslims?

There are generally two reasons why countries secede: either the previous regime is intolerable, or someone is on a power trip (or some combination of both).

I'll let historians debate which was the more dominating motive in the case of Pakistan.

How do you know that gtall is American? If he or she lives somewhere else in the developed world, US-style fundamentalist evangelicals probably are a tiny minority there, and worldwide they certainly are.

They aren't a problem because they are numerous (on a worldwide scale). They are a problem because they've been infiltrated by secular politicians (and only quite recently; we're talking the mid-to-late 70s) and their leaders are cashed-up at the moment. Comparisons to Saudi Wahhabism are not coincidental.

Jewish people do not generally define themselves culturally as the foundation for Christianity and Islam. This makes even more sense when you consider where antisemitism has historically come from: the majority culture wherever they happened to be.

The very term "Judeo-Christian" is a piece of modern revisionist history.

European culture made sure that they couldn't do anything else. Historically, Jews in Europe were not allowed to be members of a trade-guild, because doing so required making a Christian oath. For city dwellers (i.e. non-farmers), peddling and money-lending were two of the only jobs available until quite recently.

Neither Christians nor Jews are book-worshippers. Besides, both Christians and Jews agree that no Gentile is bound the civil/religious code of the ancient Hebrews. By the way, that is right there in the Bible too.

The statement that "neither Christians nor Jews do that" is not a universal quantification, and nobody who made it through the first week of any critical thinking course would ever mistake it for one. Finding some tiny subset of Christians in some cultish backwater of Christendom (such as, oh, the US Bible belt) does not negate the claim.

[...] spoke on multiple popular TV programs which are -undoubtedly- watched by judges.

There is a world of difference between being interviewed on a TV program which is probably seen by judges, and being invited to deliver a lecture to a conference of judges.