Wow. I don't know which Google you worked for.

Also speaking from experience, I work between 40 and 50 hours a week. I occasionally respond to an email in the evening, if I notice it and it's easily addressed. Otherwise I leave it until morning. Performance reviews are peer driven, and I've never even *heard* of anyone getting negative marks for taking vacation, let alone having it happen to me. I'm respected and trusted by my largely highly competent peers, and nobody expects me to kill myself working. Sure, sometimes there are emergencies and crunch times, and there are crappy parts of every job, but this is a *very* good place to work.

My perspective may be colored by too much science fiction.

I defined sentience as something like human-level self awareness and intelligence, and assumed that definition was more or less universal. However, at least according to Wikipedia, there's plenty of precedent for the way you're using it.

I think there's a philosophical (or at least semantic) argument buried in there, but it doesn't really matter in relation to your original point that animals can suffer, which is perfectly valid.

Please accept my apology for the derail. It wasn't really relevant and I tend toward the pedantic. ;)

Not that I disagree with your sentiment, but since when is the definition of sentience "can experience suffering"? Because an animal can feel pain and fear does not necessarily make them sentient. Sentience is not a prerequisite for the application of ethics.

You know, that may just indicate good sense.

Those are the best kind! (Haven't you ever searched through a stack of used textbooks searching for the one with good notes and highlighting?)

Offensive to pedants and grammar Nazis, too! "WE three skinny white guys." Seriously, my eyeballs are twitching after reading that.

Maybe you should have paid more attention to the basics ;)

Third variables, also called confounding variables, are variables in an experiment that are not accounted for.

HTH. HAND, you smug asshole.

Wow. I'm guessing you use Facebook a lot, too, right?. I encourage you to read up after you finish posting the status update about how uncomfortable that stick is.

'I'm just saying that there's some kind of relationship there, and there's many third variables that need to be studied.'

I think she's lying about not using Facebook.

That's fine for the vast majority of web applications, but you clearly don't understand the scale of the traffic a site like Twitter receives. What do you do when one database machine, no matter how fast, isn't enough? When your load balancer gets overloaded? How about handling that massive search index?

Even a site as simple as Twitter will present you with problems you never expected once it gets that popular. Starting off with something like you suggested is exactly what gets them in the mess they're in now. It must be designed for parallelism and scalability or it will fall over.

That said, if it's properly designed, you can probably make it work in any language, although you can dramatically reduce the number of production machines it takes if you have an efficient compiler/interpreter.

Funny how an argument makes sense in one context but not so much in another. I'm not stating anything about the existence or non-existence of aliens or God, but rather that the argument of "they might exist because you can't prove they don't" is not a very good one.