I wish I could mod you beyond the +5 you already got; you summarized the problem perfectly.

It's called faith for a reason. Yes, I see God's work in everything from the dance of electrons (and smaller!) to the dance of galaxies, but I am quite aware that is a subjective interpretation of the same evidence that others see as obvious proof God does not exist.

"An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah."

I am always embarrassed when scientists who are Christians claim that this or that archaeological or biological feature proves the existence of God, or young-earth creation, or whatever. There's so much confirmation bias it's a wonder any actual science ever gets done. We would achieve more good if we stop indulging in flawed arguments and simply let folks see God in the way we behave (hint: all you need is love).

I'm a conservative [read: slightly on the conservative side of dead center, with the added bonus of holding views that piss off my friends on both sides of the aisle] evangelical Christian, and I didn't see anything at all offensive about his posts. I've forwarded a couple of them on to my Christian and non-Christian friends. Really, I think this whole thing is an attempt by both Tyson and folks who make a career out of hating him to get media attention.

That's my whole problem with the "hour of code": It's a symbolic gesture. At no point do the students ever actually write code; they just drag command blocks into place, all the while being told what to drag and where to place it. Even if they use the "View code" button, they only see the LOGO-like commands without any of the program structure around it. When my daughter was 10, she was writing graphic games of her own design in QuickBASIC. Kids are capable of so much more than this walled garden assumes.

I wouldn't object so much if this exercise were just the introductory step ("Now that you've seen how the command blocks create actual programming instructions, let's learn about conditional branching!")

This lesson from The Zen of Programming is as relevant today as it was 30 years ago.

#FirstWorldProblems

Overall, I understand the point of the article and I agree with it... but there's still something faintly disturbing that it is even necessary to report that there is less genocide than there used to be.

Even allowing for the sake of argument the possibility that these SF authors masquerading as scientists are right, the existence of these superhuman robot overlords begs the question of what intelligent entity created them in the first place.

My hovercraft is full of eels.

I thought this article might be somewhat useful, since I've never heard of Haselton and my daughter and I are both geeks, but... I have to admit that is a lot of text to wade through. I think much of the hostility is still overreaction, but... yeah, poorly written and (as others have noted) poorly researched.

And even if the article were reasonable and well formatted and provided useful information... who on the planet is waiting until the last minute to get their Christmas shopping done? I could have used this information two months ago, not now!

Look that up in your Funk and Wagnall's.

sigh I know, only people over 50 will get that one. The rest of you, get off my lawn.

Yeah, I'll also be switching to a new service if they force me into some app that looks more like twitter than conventional email. Consider this garbage (from the Wikipedia entry):

I don't want bundles. I don't want them timed. I don't want Google to decide what is and isn't the "most important parts". I just want to see my email in the same format it was created.

This. That's how you stay in the business for more than a few years: do something well and keep doing it and getting better and learning new techniques rather than burn brightly and briefly. I started around age 25; now I'm 52 and in my second decade with the same company. Hotshots who can code circles around me come and go, but I'm dependable and I can maintain 20-year-old code as well as develop new code, and I won't disappear when it gets boring or a headhunter dangles something shiny in front of me.

Best of all, because I balanced work life and personal life, I still love what I do and had time to raise a family while I was doing it.

I did a little googling (har) and didn't find much in the way of environmental impact studies. How will all this affect air traffic? Bird migrations? The atmosphere, when releasing helium (or whatever) during a descent? Who is going to clean up the mess when, not if, the balloons get caught up in a storm and go down in the middle of the Pacific, or get strewn across the Himalayas?

If that's how you (and judging from your +5 Insightful rating, at least 5 others here) view the role of business analyst, my company must be using the term wrong. Where I work, BAs are an indispensable part of the design process; they don't get into that job until they know not only the product but the business needs of our users extremely well. A developer who changes a UI, report format, or so much as a calculation without first consulting with a BA doesn't last long. The BAs know every single one of the five bazillion federal regulations and industry standards so we developers don't have to worry our pretty little heads about it. We just write our code so it does all the number-crunchy things they tell us it needs to do.

Accounting is hard. Let's go shopping!

I use flashblock and noscript to protect against aggressive ads that take over my browsing experience, but I accept that TANSTAAFL and my payment for free content is the presentation of ads within that free content -- just as it was with radio and TV (don't get me started how the main selling point for cable TV in the early days was that paying for it meant you were no longer going to suffer through all those ads).

So... no, I don't use ad blocker per se, and won't until I am paying for that content.