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Exactly. The greatest moral progress of the western civilization happened when people stopped taking their religion too seriously.

I'm the AC who posted #48773735.

What makes you think that islamic terrorism is any different?

There is no perjury for false copyright claims. The penalty of perjury only applies to lying about your identity. If you state your true identity in the takedown request, the law allows you to claim copyright over absolutely anything.

Ah, yes, of course. Thanks for the correction.

Somebody who thought that adding unnecessary special cases to otherwise very simple and straightforward language was a bad idea. And he was absolutely right.

First of all, sizeof is a compile-time operator. The compiler replaces it with a fixed constant which indicates how many bytes are needed to store the argument (which is either a symbol or another constant) in memory. If you pass a pointer, you'll get the size of the pointer (4 bytes on x86). If you pass a statically allocated array, you'll get the total size of the array (int foo[9]; sizeof foo; will give you 36 on x86). If you pass a constant, you'll get the total size of the given constant in memory (sizeof "foo bar baz"; will give you 12). But all of that happens at compile time.

When foo is a variable of simple type or instance of structure, sizeof tells you the size of foo itself. But when foo is a pointer, you want sizeof to tell you the size of some completely unrelated block of memory? The fact that foo can point somewhere to the middle of the memory block makes the idea even more ridiculous. Now tell me, who the hell would ever think that making sizeof behave inconsistently like that is a good idea?

Somebody who realized that zero-terminated strings have the lowest possible overhead for the most common string operations. Both from the machine's point of view and from the programmer's point of view. And it also avoids artificial limits on string length (Pascal's 255-byte strings say hi!).

"Formal specification language" is "formal" because it's a formal language in the same sense that any of the many dialects of "regular expressions" or even PHP itself is a formal language. Nothing more, nothing less. The fact that you keep calling C/C++ standard specifications "informal" means that you're just parrotting buzzwords without actually understanding them. When you talk about formal specification languages or any formal languages at all, the word "informal" is inapplicable because it's a completely different kind of formality (syntactic formality) than the word "informal" implies (semantic formality). The word "informal" has meaning only when you want to make a distinction between formalised natural language and non-formalised natural language.

Just to make it clear, by "looking for markers" I meant developing a new test for the disease.

Whether or not those 10 proteins are markers for Alzheimer's is not the issue at all. When you look for markers, the search goes this way: disease => chemicals. But when you start testing patients for markers, you're actually using the inverse of that relationship: chemicals => disease. If the disease is rare, false positives will vastly outnumber the number of patients really afflicted by the disease even though you test for the right markers.

There are 3 important percentages for disease tests:
- How many people are afflicted by the disease in the general population?
- How many afflicted people get positive result?
- How many healthy people get positive result (false positive)?

I'll give you an example. Let's say we have some test with perfect accuracy (100% of people afflicted by the disease get positive test) but the test has 10% rate of false positives. We'll test 1000 people.

If the disease afflicts 50% of the population, about 550 people will get positive result but about 50 of them are healthy.

If the disease afflicts 10% of the population, about 190 people will get positive result but about 90 of them are healthy.

If the disease afflicts 1% of the population, about 109 people will get positive result but about 99 of them are healthy.

If the disease afflicts 0,1% of the population, about 101 people will get positive result but about 100 of them are healthy.

Is the problem clear now?

My distro does rolling updates so there's no "major upgrade" to do every year or so. The only big change since 2006 was the switch form KDE 3.5 to 4.x. Everything else installed in the background while I was doing something more interesting.

Allow me to brag a bit: I've switched to Linux in 2006. Since then, I've made a complete hardware replacement twice. Each hardware replacement meant only about 2 hours of downtime while I was installing the packages essential for work and copying the whole /home and most of /etc directories from the old machine. After that, I was back in business pretty much exactly as I've left the old machine (minus some less important packages that were still installing in the background for another couple of hours). It's really awesome when you don't need to spend a month manually reinstalling and reconfiguring all the software you had on the previous system.

Democracy is slow and it takes tons of work to agree on anything. That's not a bug, that's a feature.

When the people were marching right outside their front door wielding pitchforks and torches.

As long as any company holds such position, the Armageddon is just around the corner. Bailout was not a solution, it simply delayed the inevitable.

Who the hell cares about that? Last time I checked, the perpetrators of the 2008 financial crisis were helping FBI prosecute the victims! That's the real problem here.

The world is in uproar over NSA and the whole US Government STILL can't get themselves to rule those actions illegal and stop them. Why would you expect them to do so quietly when continuing business as usual seems to work fine for them despite all the outrage outside?