San Francisco's a pretty good example of this. Most of the lights in the city point downwards and seem not to destroy my night vision too badly. As a result, a lot of the constellations are visible from rooftops etc and are actually pretty easy to pick out. Contrast this with Atlanta, for example, where the light from the BoA building alone (not to mention the building itself...) blocks out half the night's sky.

I do wish more city planners would take proper lighting into consideration.

Here here.

In Saudi Arabia, I went with the Boy Scouts once to catch the Leonid meteor shower out in the desert, about two hundred miles away from anyone but the bedouins. Out there, it's just the sky, the sand, and you... and dozens of falling stars like tears from the cosmos. Truly awe inspiring. I think we said maybe four words to each other the entire time.

Heheh.

Sounds like Smalltalk or Squeak. The IDE is the language. Need to perform memory analysis? aClass allInstances. Want to see how many references there are to a given object? anObject allInstances. And I love being able to inspect an object, step through code, and see my inspected object change with the code. The whole language was such a completely different development paradigm that even now, some 30 years after its invention, I'm still marveling at it.

Going back from Smalltalk and Squeak to working in Java and C++ with XCode and Emacs was like stepping out of heaven (debugging pun most certainly intended) and into a trash heap, strange runtime issues notwithstanding. Sounds like I'll have to give SLIME a go.

I wish you'd read the rest of my sentence, though perhaps I was not clear. I meant that the ruling that people use as a reason for such actions is a holdover from a time where it sorta made sense (as I mentioned, conversion meant you were now working for the other side in a 300-year long war), and now that fundamentalists have run away with it, people have begun to question its validity as a religious edict in the first place.

Nowhere in the Qur'an will you find such a thing commanded. Tragically, it still does happen, but I assure you, it most certainly is not Islam.

I know I'm seriously off-topic, but I can't sit aside without weighing in on this conversation a bit. Allow me, a Muslim, to step in on this, if I may:

Luckily for us, the Muslims were much more civilized that the Mongols. Citizens in cities taken over by Muslims were given three choices: leave, stay and become citizens and pay the tax (which I discuss below), or continue to fight. This as compared to your Mongols who gave no quarter regardless of the situation, or even as compared to what Christians did during the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades.

Yes. However, people fail to realize that Muslims were "taxed" in the same fashion and at the same amount: 2.5% of one's earnings per year, except it's called Zakat for Muslims and Jizya for non-Muslims. This "tax" as you put it was obligatory on most people -- Christian, Muslim, Jew, etc. -- living in the Muslim State, save for a few exceptions (e.g., orphans, widows, the aged, etc. Anyone considered to be a ward of the State did not have to pay and instead received money). The tax went to help care and feed said wards of the State, including non-Muslims. Yes, that's right: if you were a non-Muslim in Muslim Spain, you could count on the State to support you if you were unable to work. There's even a famous Hadith about this.

The only basis for that ruling that I've found was a judicial ruling dating back to the 11th and 12th centuries, during the Crusades, you'll note. The premise was that yes, if a Muslim converted and was still on Muslim soil, he was guilty of treason to the state. Seeing as how Muslims and Christians were in the Until recently, no one has challenged that ruling. However, in the past few years, as Islam comes out of its religious lethargy, several graduates of Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo have insisted that, since there is no compulsion in religion, Muslims may freely convert.

I will not argue that what you point out in point 4 does not occur. However, you should realize it is not part of Islam at all. It's a tragic consequence of fundamentalism and a gross misinterpretation of the religion.

Throughout the life of the Prophet, Muslim women found themselves married to people who had yet to convert. This did not incur and immediate divorce or an immediate death sentence. Instead, the Prophet advised these women to have patience and to encourage their husbands to accept Islam for as long as they were able.

Any Muslim is free to marry whomever he or she wants. Muslims are heavily encouraged to marry other Muslims because it makes family life much easier to handle, but they are free to choose as they see fit. Indeed, there are two Muslim men in my mosque who have married non-Muslims, and there is one Muslim woman who married a non-Muslim man, though admittedly the man later converted.

Incorrect, and as a Muslim, I should know.

Islam forbids usury, which most of the time means interest, but which in general applies to any fee charged for the use of money. Sharia Law banks indeed do loans, but they give them without charging a fee for said loan or interest on the loan itself.

The wikipedia link above also notes that up until "recently," (as these things go, at any rate) Catholicism forbade usury as well, and Talmudic law prohibited a Jew from charging another Jew, but not a Gentile, for the use of money.

Furthermore, you said

I can't speak with authority on Christianity and Buddhism, but I can say for certain you've very easily straw-manned Islam's view of charity and wealth (and probably the others, too). Allow me to enlighten you: Islam asks that one be generous in gift-giving and charity, but not to the point of bankrupting oneself or even one's family. There's even a famous Hadith about this. If memory serves, it goes something like:

I think what has confused you is that though religions, including Islam, will occasionally hold actions or people up to be paragons of charity, the intent is not to get everyone to become paupers, but to help point out to us that it's only money, something of this world, and that the attachment to it -- called greed, which we Slashdotters love to fume about -- is the cause of a good number of problems.

GP indeed has a fantastic explanation.

It's all tied up in the concept of the Principle-Agent Problem, a problem which seems to pop up on a regular basis, especially in the financial sector.

The problem occurs when the interests of the principle (in this case, the typical home buyer) and the interests of the agent (in this case, the bank or mortgage holder) are misaligned, which often coincides with information asymmetry.

Portfolio managers (like Bernie Madoff) are excellent examples of this sort of thing.

Yup. And not just in the valley; Agilent up in Sonoma County does the same thing. In fact, they're in full view right now, and they're much better to look at than this Smalltalk code I'm going through...

No.

No Double Jeopardy. It may be frustrating to see him go, but one can't be tried twice for the same crime, even in cases where the prosecution screwed up. He's been legally declared "Not Guilty," which is what his defense sought to prove (albeit he achieved such a ruling because the prosecution screwed up) so there's no need for his defense to ask for a new trial

Interesting perspective.

I had a Political Science professor once ask us to pretend we were earning minimum wage in an assigned state, and then calculate whether we could live on said wage. Costs had to include clothing, food, transportation, insurance, etc., down to the last detail, to the point where I ended up calling several grocery stores to ask about the running average of a few canned goods. The point of the assignment was to show how difficult it was to live on such a wage, and indeed it was difficult, though not impossible.

I took away something else from the assignment, though the idea isn't fully formed: I don't think minimum wage jobs were ever meant as professions. I think they were meant more as "trainer jobs," the sort you'd give someone who wants to get an idea of how a position works, or to a teenager who needs a job for the summer. I'm all for lowering the minimum wage, but I also don't think that paying an adult $6.50 and hour to pick fruit is at all just.

I guess the way I see it is that in a properly functioning society, instead of what you've suggested, no adult should ever have to be in a position where a minimum wage job -- regardless of the amount it earns -- is the only profession said adult can get. Instead, I see those jobs as stopgaps for people between positions, or for teenagers who want beginner's experience in a field. Perhaps that's what they started out as, but the real travesty of the situation is that somewhere along the line, a minimum wage job was the only job someone could get, and as you pointed out, the real travesty is that the person quickly becomes a slave to the position.

I'm not sure what to do about the whole mess, frankly. I'd like to drop the minimum wage to something really low myself, but I realize that it would put a lot of people in an impossible financial position because they'd still be stuck with the jobs they have, which would now pay that much less, and the cost to society in general would be too slow in trickling down (ha! It might not even happen at all!) to offset the difference.

So what you're saying is, copyright should have been copyrighted?

Excuse me while I make a quit trip to the USPTO: "... a method for securing a method for securing the right of the original owner of an idea to reproduce said idea..."