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Comment Re:Uh oh. (Score 1) 423

by DetriusXii (#38342438) Attached to: Juror's Tweets Overturn Trial Verdict

Nullification is a jury ignoring the law in favor of their personal preferences. That is not what a jury is there to do. They are not charged with weighing what the law says, only whether it applies and whether the defendant is guilty of it. If nullification is used, then the defendant goes free and nothing is changed. The next guy who breaks that unjust law might not be so lucky. That's not justice. "The system" has the appellate process for determining the rightness and wrongness of laws. The only way to change a wrong law from the jury box is to vote to convict so that the case can be appealed up the chain.

You know it was used as a last resort to prevent union strikers from going to jail merely for being union strikers. During the 1930s, police would harass and beat socialist protesters for expressing the view that the government needs to intervene in the economy. It's not justice to have the government arrest you for expressing a dissenting opinion and jury nullification was used as a form of judicial protest against overbearing states.

Comment Re:I have problems with this (Score 1) 1319

by DetriusXii (#38192514) Attached to: Muslim Medical Students Boycott Darwin Lectures
How is a multiverse intuitive over probability densities? Not every event is equally likely. If there's an eighty percent chance for an electron to tunnel through a barrier, it's not very intuitive to state that there were eight universes created where the electron tunneled over the two universes where the electron did not tunnel. Some quantum mechanical probabilities involve square roots so even fractions are tossed out the window when trying to describe quantum mechanics in a multiverse model. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but a multiverse explanation of quantum mechanics seems to take away from a full understanding of quantum mechanics.

Comment Re:The real problem.... (Score 1) 463

by DetriusXii (#38182738) Attached to: China To Cancel College Majors That Don't Pay
Bear in mind that the situation is bad for only the bad programmers. When I did computer science, there were people in computer science that could not write code and had no passion for the subject. My co-intern was terminated after three months because she couldn't install an OS from disk and the only language that she had worked with previously with Visual Basic. One of my friends was my group project partner and I cringed when I saw him write for loop increment counters as class member variables. These are the people I'm competing against and I feel somewhat safe knowing that the universities are producing CS holders that are garbage in the workplace.

Comment Re:Which speed of light (Score 1) 1088

by DetriusXii (#37492902) Attached to: CERN Experiment Indicates Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos

Einstein discovered relativity by using educated gut feeling, not experiments.

No. Einstein made use of Maxwell's equations to deduce that the speed of light was constant under all reference frames. The second order PDE equations relating the time variance of the electric field to the spatial variance of the magnetic field has the speed of light as a constant. He didn't have a gut feeling.

Comment Re:Progress (Score 1) 199

by DetriusXii (#37354952) Attached to: UK Joins Laser Nuclear Fusion Project
I have one criticism with the graph you were shown. Energy output to input is can be constantly rising, but the next data point may not also show more gains in energy production. Tokamak reactors are based off confining plasma in a magnetic field. And while fusion reactors will require higher magnetic fields to achieve stable fusion production, it's not generally known how to produce those higher magnetic fields. 40 T is the maximum so far for magnetic field strength, and it ends up collapsing the solenoid in a short amount of time. There doesn't seem to be any materials that can handle repeatedly such high magnetic field strengths.

Comment Re:I had a MSc in for an interview (Score 1) 349

by DetriusXii (#37344064) Attached to: British CS Majors Doing Badly In the Jobs Market

My experience with a guy who recently received a MSc from a London university is the following: On his CV he writes that he has a good knowledge in PHP, MySQL and CSS and also passed a Zend exam in PHP 5.0. Based on this he would be a good fit what we are looking for. His final project was a web-based library (as in book-lending) system making use of PHP and MySQL. My colleague and I (who both have ~20 years experience each in IT and software development) took him out and asked some related questions. But to our suprise he hardly knew fcukall. PHP questions: - "What is the difference between " (quotes) and ' (apostrophy) in string assignment?" (which should be quite basic an essential knowledge) Answer:"Uh, I don't know." - "In your library system, you say the username is unique. How do you prevent that two people sign up with the same name at the same time?" (should have a unique key on the username) Answer:"The front-end checks for this." - "Have you heard of SQL injection?" Answer after some seconds of thinking:"Yes, I have used it in my project!" - "In OO, what is inheritance and encapsulation?" (all this OO stuff is for sure part of a Zend PHP 5.0 exam) Answer:"I don't know"

Databases: - "What is a left outer join?" Answer:"Sorry, I don't know" - "What are unique keys and indices?" Answer:"I don't know" - "Do you have any knowledge about Stored Procs?" Answer:"no"

CSS: - "What is the difference between absolute and relative positioning?" Answer:"Sorry, I don't know"

Eventually we ran out if really simple and basic questions. And to us it seems nowadays those MScs fly off the shelf towards everyone who can pay the tuition fees.

I was an intern at a mobile development and web application company. I liked coding when I was in computer science and I can attest that there are people that simply suck with code. My boss was interviewing for a senior developer (I didn't want to be there in the long term as I felt the group was overvalued) and I gave them an interview question "State the difference between a GET request and a POST request" as one interview question. My supervisor liked it. He asked it. Two of the eight people interviewing for the position couldn't answer the question and this was for a internet based company.

Comment Re:Oracle? (Score 1) 192

by DetriusXii (#37263394) Attached to: James Gosling Leaves Google
They're also useful in creating Functors in statically typed code. Foldleft and map from the functional languages can be mimicked by using generics. I think the programmer complaining about generics should have his opinion discarded. It's quite clearly wrong.

Comment It's like you've made it a goal to not learn (Score 1) 772

by DetriusXii (#37068626) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Am I Too Old To Learn New Programming Languages?
What mythical force prevents you from reading and spending time on a new subject? It's like an obese person asking if they're too fat to lose weight. Having said that, C# and Java can be similar to C but they can also be different in large ways. C# has delegates. They're anonymous functions that can be passed around. Java has anonymous classes. They're classes that are defined at runtime that can be passed around. They both make use of generics. You'll need to know about polymorphism to understand that you can pass subclasses as arguments to functions and that you can return the subclass when the function had the return type of the parent class. They both borrow from the functional style and it may be alien from your perspective. But Ruby, Javascript, Python, and Scala are all functional and Python is becoming a fan favourite. The functional style makes for less lines of code to accomplish the same task as the procedural style.

Comment Re:Maybe a better candidate (Score 1) 594

by DetriusXii (#36974820) Attached to: The Most Expensive One-Byte Mistake

without null, I can't imagine what would have been the case for implementing so many programming constructs today. Most languages have some type of isempty() which can b seen as a continuation of null, and I for one wouldn't want to implement any sort of list without it. Programming in assembly, you don't get NULLs (at least not MIPS) and that's one of the difficulties (among many).

I like using the Scala's Option Monad (it's the Maybe Monad in Haskell). Nulls are bad because the compiler can't usually check against them, and sometimes you can't tell if a called function will return NULL as its return value. With the Maybe monad, defined as Maybe q = Just q | None, the compiler will check when Maybe is being passed around and give warnings saying that the None subtype should be handled. It works elegantly to handle issues where sometimes NULL has some semantic meaning but also catches NULL errors at compile time rather than catching NULL errors at run time.

Comment Re:Prefer gamepad (Score 1) 244

by DetriusXii (#36959808) Attached to: How To Ruin Your Game's PC Port

Meh, I prefer a gamepad.

I feel that mouse/keyboard is a hack that only works for certain types of games. Games aren't meant to be played with mouse/keyboard, it just happens to be what everyone had laying around. It's also less comfortable.

I can understand certain types of games converging to a mouse-like control. However the keyboard is a joke for gaming. At least drop the keyboard and give me a real gaming tool for my left hand.

You're wrong about the keyboard. It's necessary to have a lot of key buttons available for RTS games so that abilities, stances, formations, and moves can be executed efficiently. I haven't played a console RTS, but console RPS use the shoulder buttons on a gamepad to cycle through weapons usually. If I want weapon 9 and I'm at weapon 5, I should be able to jump to weapon 9 without going through weapon 6-8. The lack of competitive RTS on the consoles should indicate that a keyboard and mouse achieves something that's necessary for some genres to thrive.

Comment Re:More on the budget (Score 1) 932

Rural electrification happened only through government intervention. The free market never stepped up to the plate to provide that infrastructure. Firefighting was socialized as a service because the private for-profit firefighting was a terrible service that often times did not protect their clients against the fire. The socialized health care systems are simply more efficient that the United States health care system.

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