Interestingly, checkers is a solved game. It turns out, with perfect play, that it's a draw every time. So not only should a human never win against a decent computer checkers program, it's provable that it would be impossible to win if the computer played perfectly.

Whoooosh

Wait...back when mixed race marriage was illegal there was an argument that being black was a choice? Because that's what you just said right now whether you realize it or not.

The fundamental divide is that the left believes that homosexuality is an inborn characteristic and as such should be protected the same as all of the other inborn characteristics. The right believes that it is a choice that the individual makes and as such may be restricted like any other choice people may make. There is no common ground here because you two are not debating the same issue until there can be agreement on a starting point.

So in the end, the left believe that the right is full of heartless monsters and bigots who hate people for who they cannot help being, and the right believes the left is full of free love hippies who want to destroy society and live in the perpetual anarchy of moral relativism where everything you want to do is always okay and no one can tell you otherwise.

I'll just kick back and grab me some popcorn.

I had a friend sensitive to that. He could perceive things at just fast enough of a framerate to notice the flicker in old style fluorescent bulbs and projector flicker in old films (before digital) that used low frame rates.

It sounds like your friend was demonstrably able to tell the difference between magnetic fields in what could have been set up as a double blind study which makes it a scientifically provable ability to distinguish magnetic field intensities. This does not sound unreasonable.

What we're talking about with "electro-sensitive" people is some folks who vaguely say that electromagnetism makes them "feel bad" or "fatigued" or some other hard to pin down ailment which is not reproducible in any scientific setting and has never been shown to be an actual thing. Also no matter how much science you throw at them they willfully ignore you and keep on about how your methods are flawed or you're part of the conspiracy.

These folks are nutjobs. Your friend doesn't sound like a nutjob.

I love the XKCD on that. Playing conspiracies off of each other. The steel melted in 9/11 because the chemtrail chemicals burn way hotter than just plain jet fuel!

Java/C# = Automatic Transmission
C/C++ = Manual Transmission
Assembly = smelting and casting metals to create your own custom designed gearbox

For many applications Automatic is fine. You just care about making it work and performance is "good enough" that you don't sweat it. For performance sensitive applications you need finer tuned control and yeah, the safeties are off, but they're not slowing you down either.

The superconducting magnets need to be installed in a controlled environment. A "hover park" if you will. Then you can sell some no moving parts basically slick looking steel boards that hover over the surfaces in your hover park, but don't work anywhere else. Then you control the hard moving parts that need constant liquid nitrogen cooling and special magnets, and you only have to worry about one time installations, not mass production.

This. If we used an IDE we were on our own. The professors didn't care, but the results damn well better compile on the command line because that was how they were going to grade us.

Because it's harder to tell if the cheating little bastards copied off of each other.

Only on Slashdot will you find the Linux sysadmin who is a blacksmith in his spare time. Great post btw =)

C# is just straight up easy to use. If you are already familiar with Java and C++ you basically already know C#. For whatever you're trying to do, just Google around for the .NET libraries that support it and it's ridiculously simple to bring them in and get a functional project up and running quickly. Multithreading and network I/O made me feel like I was cheating they were so easy compared to the old school methods. I can't see it going away anytime soon.

Why stop there? If I get a file exception it should just write to syslog by default! If I have a null pointer it should just write to the last array I referenced! Array out of bounds exceptions should cycle back around to the start of the array so I never see that error either! I'm sure nothing bad would ever happen ever from implementing all of these!

Seriously son, it's called an error for a reason. Correct your invariants so it can't happen or monitor for the exceptions and handle them gracefully. It's bad enough that incrementing an integer past its max wraps it back around to its min. Let's not make coding even more treacherous, m'kay?

There's a wonderful bio here that kind of expands on a lot of those points.

With the advent of multimedia webpages it's hard to lock down what exactly is meant by "browsing the web". For most modern sites to work correctly you need to be able to process and display: HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, HTML, JPEG,GIF, BMP, PNG, h.264, .wav, .mp3, .avi, Flash, SilverLight, Java, and so on. So many protocols/formats that may pop up and you have to handle them all. Is it any wonder browsers got so bloated over the years?