Back in 7th grade I was attending Catholic school. We had a teacher who was very, very religious but at the same time a good science teacher. How was this possible? She taught us a few memorable things: first off the creation in genesis took 7 days for god (7 th day was rest, chillin and having a beer hopefully). But who said a day for god is the same for us? In her words she said a day for god could be millions or billions of years to us. That made sense. Another thing that stuck out was that all of the physical processes we see are rules laid out by god. So basically, the laws of physics were created by god. Evolution? A natural process that god created. So here was a very godly woman who also was a firm believer in science because science is a gift from god. So the two can certainly coexist.

A while back I was talking to a religious guy I know from the local dive bar I used to frequent (religious guy at the bar, go figure. a regular hypocrite was more like it). We got in talking about science and during the course, he bought up the opinion that science is against god. But I bought up the counter of, why would god bestow such an awe inspiring field of study only to restrict us from pursuing it? He gave us a giant sandbox to play in and we refuse it? To me it would be rude to declining a gift from god. He started to see my point and said: "you know that makes sense. don't know if I like it but it makes sense". You could see he sorta understood the point.

So you can argue that all of science is merely a creation and gift from god. To deny it is to deny gods gift and possibly, god itself. Though there are some who will refuse any of those beliefs, if they are in a position of power be it a school board, politician or preacher, they have a self interest in that denial (control).

Disclaimer: I am agnostic. I doubt there is a god. Or perhaps there is a god but not in the way we traditionally think, a person. Perhaps the laws behind our universe are god. Or we are a 3d projection of a 2d hologram or inside a giant computer simulation. We don't know and perhaps, we never will know. And if there is a god as we picture, I am sure he/she is not the dick they are made out to be in various man made books. And to be honest, I really don't care either way. I just live my life and enjoy it :-)

* The reasonable recent human races (homo sapiens, neanderthalers, denisovan) might hint to a humanlike race already spreading accross the universe, and colonizing earth with astronauts from various planets.

One argument against this is that why would an advanced civilization land here and instantly forget where they are from? Where did their ship go? I somehow doubt they would erase their past and forget things like language, technology and civilization. That or we can again postulate a silly theory: They bred a group of dummies and dumped them off on earth as a survival experiment. And they are either still monitoring their experiment remotely through an automated system or periodic visits (UFO's).

I would guess that if you took a group of us and dumped us on a planet you can be damn sure we would be rebuilding civilization to the best of our ability. Even if we couldn't replicate the advanced technology of today we could at least work with simple machines and build things like aqueducts. That or we would all kill each other.

Are you's implyin that all dis hard earned protection ... er I mean, uh, insurance money aint legit?

So Paul, is this a plug for your book or yet another argument for functional programming?

Not much useful information or examples as to why or where "Worse is better" is harming the world of computing. There is always a better tool to help solve a problem. But for many reasons they may or may not be appropriate. You the programmer should know when and where to use them.

One of my favorite quotes (the bold text at the end is the good part):

Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough.

-Eric S. Raymond

That applies to not only Unix and operating systems but any tool that is made to solve a problem. Just replace the word codebase with the tool name of choice.

Now I download my fairy tales through some Swedish website

Bible stories?

So you are saying a person convicted of possessing drugs deserves to keep that criminal status for life? Even for a bit of pot? Absurd thinking.

The only reason the world tolerates the Middle East crazies is cuz of the oil.

The Russians are also proving they can be crazy as well.

I am not a number. I am a person!

Be seeing you.

if the US (and other countries) also kept all their own nuclear weapons near the seaside too.

What do you think nuclear subs are for?

I disable sigs.

I see. I am not a mobile developer nor a professional developer so I was curious how that worked.

I am a bit curious. How is the objective-c compiled and ran on Dalvik? Are you doing: objective-c -> LLVM -> dalvik bytecode?

Is the project you speak of Apportable?

If you really look at how schools piss money away on tech gadgets only to let them collect dust you will find incredible waste. For as long as I can remember, the AV equipment at the various schools I attended sat unused for 99.99% of the time. For an hour session there simply wasn't time to get the cart, set it up, show a video and break it down for the next class. Most schools don't have a dedicated AV department unless they specialize in AV production. So the teachers are left to retrieve and set up the systems and most of them can't even change a lightbulb.

In a high school shop class we has a pretty fancy and expensive AV cart with a pro level Sony Trinitron Monitor and VCR. It just sat in the tool cage year round collecting dust. One day another shop teacher wanted to use the cart to show a video to his class. Turns out some knucklehead destroyed the cart by cutting wires and jamming a metal rod into the VCR destroying the tape load mechanism. There was a huge shit storm and our class was blamed. And rightfully so because we had a surplus of knuckleheads. The quoted cost of that AV cart? $5000. And I believe it seeing how the equipment was top of the line Sony stuff. And this wasn't the only AV cart in the school, we had about a dozen of them. They did nothing year round until some teacher worked a video into a lesson. In fact the only time I ever watched a video in my four years of high school was in health class and English where we watched a film of The Tragedy of Macbeth.

And I not even going to get into the $250,000 robotics system that sat unused for years until my electrical installation shop teacher convinced the school to give us the system instead of the snobby ET department who didn't care if it was sold for scrap. I headed up that project and it was a wonderful experience working with that system.

The point he was trying to make is they charge you for a service call when the problem is with faulty equipment they own. It is then their responsibility to eat the labor and fuel costs to fix their problem.

Way too often do I see someone swerving around the Southern State Parkway playing with their little phone and trying to steer straight. I see at least one or two people per week doing their little "oh shit" swerve when they realize they are about to side swipe someone or run off the road. I say this is just as dangerous as drunk driving. Anyone caught swerving and texting should be arrested, car towed and impounded, and license suspended for no less than 6 months. Severe punishment but necessary to stop these jerks. But as with drunk driving, gook just catching them. So it's more of a gesture than actually solving anything.

The absolute worst driver I ever saw was so bad I almost popped a blood vessel with rage. This piece of shit prick was in the left lane swerving around to the point where he came close to side swiping three other cars. He kept clipping the curb that divides the pavement from the grassy shoulder and bouncing/swerving back to his lane, or the middle lane. At one point everyone around him stayed back and he happily swerved from the left lane to the middle lane and back again as if he were the only person on the road. He even rode the line for a few minutes blocking both lanes. It was such a gross demonstration of a complete disregard for others that I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Mind boggling. And it's not like this happened a few times. This went on continually for MILES. He didn't drive normally once from the time he got in front of me until he got off. I can't believe a state cop didn't see him as they are very thirsty on the SSP in Nassau County.

And this isn't the first time I have seen people swerve between two lanes while texting. I also saw the same thing in NJ coming back from Atlantic City. I was behind him and driving a van. I could clearly see him leaning over, looking down and tapping away while swerving around. His girlfriend appeared to yell at him but it didn't appear to do anything. He almost side swiped a pickup who then hung back not wanting to pass him. Someone behind me started beeping and he just stuck out his middle finger. I wanted to cut it off and feed it to him along with the phone. Talk about rage inducing behaviour.

I keep thinking I should buy a dash cam, record these knuckleheads and then post shame videos on youtube.