I think the post is believable and certainly comports with what I've seen,. Abusive, assholes in power positions ruin projects all the time. I don't think to screen swipe my exchanges with assholes because I don't feel the need to *prove* anything to someone else. People take me at my word and my word is good. You're trying to issue some requirement on everyone else for believability. Pics or it didn't happen is OK for nuclear arms verification treaties. People sharing their personal experiences in an online forum? Uh,... no./

Thinking on unit testing is dominated by a small group of gurus who have been effective at establishing a few articles of faith on the topic and most programmers reflexively agree with those opinions in order to make a public demonstration that they *understand* unit testing and can be taken seriously. Article of Faith #1 - don't write unit tests for private methods. It's ridiculous and wrongheaded to never test private methods. There is nothing about a private method that makes it any less complex, any less prone to error or any less worthy of being tested than the public API. It's not hard to see that SOME private methods will only be invoked in rare circumstances which you won't easily think to test for when viewing the program from the POV of /the public API . This is even more true if private methods call private methods. Five deep, throw in some case logic in each and you've got a combinatorial explosion of test cases at the API level one of which recommend themselves naturally. Sure, in theory it can be done, but in theory, you need not make mistakes in the first place and have no need for unit testing. Article of Faith #2: Another thing that makes unit testing an exercise in checkbox punching is the idea that you should never write a line of code before the unit test is written. The person who came up with this idea does not program things which are not already clear cut. I know my methods will be refactored, I know my classes will come and go. i know what I think is my driving use case will change utterly as I iterative discover what REALLY needs to be done. Writing millions of unit test cases that will ultimately be thrown away is a literal waste of time. There's more but it's enough. Unit tests are often useless because it's just an exercise in confirming your expected input, not *really* thinking about how things can go wrong.

Because economics which says wages rise when there is s shortage of labor and falls when their is a surplus is for the Little People ; when you're a multi-national, Special Reverse Economics are applied.

Yeah you fucking moron, not all papers in the fucking discipline of climatology are examining whether AGW is real. A lot of them are just doing the basic science in their field which is where the evidence that AGW is real. In fact, a lot of papers specfically set their research goals to prove or disprove some hypothesis directly related to AGW without actually saying IN THAT VERY PAPER that AGW is real. AGW is real the way evolution is real. All the papers that deal with some aspect of evolution don't come out and say "evolution is real!" because they're not writing for the army of fucktards who think it's not.

You're a fucking moron. The whole point of the article is that the people doing the scientific work in the area all have come to the same conclusion because of the evidence uncovered by them in the course of doing science. For the illiterate anti-scientific fucktard product of cousins on Slashdot , the scientific method == reality. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe you just don't know that doing science is as close as humans will ever come to making a truth machine which takes in data and spits on truth, reality. Science is not a popularity poll and surveying the opinions of scientists on the reality of a hypothesis within their domain of expertise is not the same as asking conservatives from South Carolina if we should reinstitute slavery.

Your point is misguided since the evidence and data you suggest we should use (instead of, what percentage of scientists believe in AGW) is EXACTLY what those 97% of scientists in this meta study have done their entire professional careers. That's where that 97% statistic comes from - from the people who did the research, ran the numbers developed the evidence which others failed to refute.

Incredible and somewhat depressing that you could read this story, miss the main and virtually only point of it, and still get a 5 star comment on slashdot.

... thank god

FTFY

Yeah, the marketplace has exactly nothing to do with Darwinian jackshit.

The marketplace only exists because we conscious and moral-values-driven humans have conceived of, passed and enforce laws which create a very artificial system of regulations which we call "the marketplace".

It starts with the man-made, very fictional concept of a corporate entity, goes on to regulate that entities conduct wrt to other such entities, assigns consumers protections, defines product safety, workplace safety and pollution standards all of which strongly effect a corporation's bottom line, disallows the monopolies which would naturally come to pass, determines tax schedules and expresses what's ball and what's foul through tons of pages of accounting regulations, exchange rates, banking regulations etc etc etc all of which creates this thing called a market place .

We live a large part of our lives in the service of, and as the beneficiaries of, commerce and the idea that it's somehow a natural product of Darwinian evolution processes instead of centuries -in-the-making conscious human intervention is a joke.

So Page is right. The problem has nothing to do with the inherently Darwinian nature of the marketplace, it has to do with the laws which enable the circular firing squad that is tech litigation in the first place. Take away the guns- the ability to patent software- and all parties will have to refocus their energies on value creation instead of wanton competitor destruction.

"The publication won't record any details about your visit, so even a government request to look at their records will fail to find any useful information. " Until Congress decides that all such communication must be logged by law.

>>First, I pointed out that Dyson has no scientific training in the highly technical subject matter from which he dramatically differs from consensus scientific view.

>. That's absurd. His "training" is irrelevant. The matter at hand is the area of his expertise.

Yeah you're playing word games. Expertise and training and mastery of a domain and ability to do productive research in a field and a million other noun phrases are all the same thing- do you comprehend the technical matter and the work of the researchers in the field and can you make contributions to advance that understanding ?

Dyson has none of this in this field, by his own direct admission, which you have attempted to dance around with your word play. Have some more, liar-

From Yale's website:

http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2151

Dyson about an interviewer:

"he wanted to write a piece about global warming and I was just the instrument for that, and I am not so much interested in global warming.

He portrayed me as sort of obsessed with the subject, which I am definitely not. To me it is a very small part of my life.

I don't claim to be an expert. I never did.

I simply find that a lot of these claims that experts are making are absurd. Not that I know better, but I know a few things.

My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it's rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have.

I think that's what upsets me."

That "not knowing much" fact he cites, that state of "not being an expert" that he mentions, that "not knowing better" has consequences. One of those consequences is he floats notions which the people who do know the field reject out of hand as impossible. That is not some badge of honor, that is just being wrong.

Only Sara Palin and her ilk take that as a sure sign you're right.

Only narcissists believe that, when faced with that situation, the thing to do is to throw away the accumulated knowledge and hard won agreement of technical experts who have spent their professional lives comparing their predictions to reality and submitted themselves to the rigours of peer review. People whose models' predicted results have been repeatedly borne out and whose work in effect constitutes humanity's deep knowledge of a field and go by gut.

Sara Palin and, oh yeah, Freeman Dyson.

Dyson can't "take issue with the way climate science is done" or "take issue with their techniques" or "find flaws in their methodology" or any other of a million ways to express the same idea because he doesn't understand them. That's what happens when you don't DO the work- you don't understand the work.

So, heh, I guess you actually didn't address any absurdity. But feel free to raise your own hand in victory *in exactly the same way Dyson declares his meanderings to be relevant*.

>>Oh, how foolish you are. That is sooo far from what he actually said.

I think the above disposes of that idea....let the reader be the judge.

The rest of your post consists of broad, baseless and meaningless screeching about *how environmentalists have destroyed science* etc etc which are just typical of your kind. You have the belief that by speaking words, you have the power to make the ideas in those words reality.

You also have the idea, with Dyson, that if facts disagree with you, it's all political and that you should be given the power to decide what facts are facts.

That and all that flows from it, in this case denial of an impending disaster which will put the blood of millions on yours and Dyson's hands , is the reason why conservatism has moved from being just weird and sad to dangerous and an existential threat to civilization.

We had this happen once last century. For a long time, America slept . Then it awoke to the danger- and over the objects of many conservatives- did what it needed to do.

The only difference this time is it's not just America who's going to awake to the danger and do what needs to be done. It's the entire world.

Let's review how this thread has gone, shall we?

First, I pointed out that Dyson has no scientific training in the highly technical subject matter from which he dramatically differs from consensus scientific view.

Then you claimed my rejection of Dyson's opinions and embrace of mainstream scientific opinion represented an argument from authority. You then proffered one of his more fanciful notions of how to mitigate carbon pollution, if that turned out to be necessary , something Dyson counts as unlikely.

I replied with analysis of Dyson's lunatical scheme and also a quote from Dyson in which he himself admitted he lacked the knowledge and training to hold forth upon the subject he is nevertheless holding forth on.

You then just replied to me that you don't care what the web page I excerpted says- even if it's merely quoting Dyson himself- because you don't trust "that thar libral webpage. " .

So what do we have? We have in your posts a perfect example of what conservatives are and what they do. They reject the processes and conclusions of legitimate science and the results that flow from therefrom and in its place substitute the unsupported theories of a crank and a fraud.

They insist that the conclusions of people who have submitted themselves to the rigors of science are some form of "argument by authority" even though in reality - a place they rarely visit - the entire process of science is dedicated to and results in the exclusion of conclusions based on fallacious reasoning including "argument by authority".

You live in a fantasy world based on the notion of self gratification where whoever tells you what you want to hear is right and everyone else is wrong, and a part of a conspiracy. Dyson lives there with you, and both of you have more in common with Joseph Stalin than anyone else.

Dyson is not qualified by his own admission. Scientists are not offering their personal opinions, they are revealing the conclusions of their studies. Those studies are the end product of the most rigorous falsehood exclusion process humankind has ever developed- the scientific method paired with the peer-review process. That falsehood exclusion process is the crowning achievement of all human history and has relieved more human suffering than any other human endeavor. It is nothing less than the basis of human civilization itself.

Of course conservatives hate it, because conservatives hate anything that interferes with their ability to maximize their own personal and immediate self-gratification . They call this proclivity a love of "freedom".

You're a study in denial,. You're not so mentally weak to understand what's going on with Dyson and his assault and contempt for science, but you don't decide things on the facts, you decide things on how well they dovetail with your preferred ideology.

You and people like you are exactly the reason that this little online war we've been waging for the past decade or so will ultimately go offline and end in a hot, real war; you simply refuse to treat facts as facts. You're incapable of it.

Something hangs in the balance here and that something is all future human civilization. So far, the tale of the tape says that groups who unilaterally attempt to destroy that future are ultimately and frankly brutally put down by the forces of civilization who prefer reality-based outcomes to ideological self-immolation.

I am pretty sure that preference is very deep inside the human psyche, you and your kind excepted, and will in time express itself with its usual ferocity and uncompromising attitude.

Until then, have fun playing your little self assigned role of science and reality denier . I can't say it's going to end well for you.

Those are some of the fears, and they only get worse from there.

Volkswagen is such a cool company. I wish they would turn their engineering attention to electric cars.

I hate M$ but their explanation sounds plausible. Not saying they don't have an unknown, secondary motivation also, just.,.. it sounds like something a programmer might think to do to combat the malware problem