Yeah...that's not a thing. Certainly not a thing worth capitalizing. He just wants to put seemingly supernatural or paranormal claims up to scrutiny, and he seems to wish people would admit they were pulling tricks once they've been proved out.

It would be fundamentalism if you laid out an exact list of what things qualify as materialism, and then out of hand rejected all other things. Randi very clearly doubts things that don't follow materialism, but he then sets up tests that both he and the true believer accept would be valid and fair tests, and then he asks them to take the test. He basically just gives these people enough rope to hang themselves. Don't blame Randi for that. Blame the people who are selling goods they can't deliver.

I actually think all the C# language features are starting to be a problem, and one that will only increase over time. First, let me say that I see C# as being too quick to adopt language features. They often seem to throw things in for no other reason than because one other language they saw does it, and they don't always fully think through the ramifications of the language feature.

Here's an example. Properties. I get why they are popular, after all if you've had it rammed into your skull a hundred times that you should not make member variables public (an overused trope in my mind) you'll love a one line statement that is both getter, setter, and member variable. Great. Except, Properties are neither methods nor member variables. I can't pass a property by reference into another function. I also can't pass a property around as a function pointer either. Sure, you can work around this using lambda expressions, but that doesn't change the fact that a property is actually disfunctional and worse in many ways than either of the two language features it's supposed to replace. Worse yet, as soon as you need to customize it, the resulting code ends up just as wordy as the getter/setter code would have been in the first place.

My rub with C# is that today all these poorly considered features are manageable. But I see a time maybe 10-15 years out when the language will just be bloated with features that no longer fit together well enough for anyone to want to use it. Which, is of course not an argument to avoid C# today. rather it's an argument that C#'s model of rapid adoption migh not be ideal for other languages out there.

I would say it differently. For all programs, Java has a memory overhead of tens of MB that a comparable C++ program would not have. It's got to run that JVM, and there's no way around that.

The difference is that a C++ program that's 2MB in memory might use 50MB in Java, but a 300MB C++ program might be a 350MB Java program. Java will always use more memory. It's just that overhead is fixed and becomes less meaningful on larger programs.

Boo hoo hoo.

Anyone who finds an incremental addition of a handful of new language features every 4 years to be too hard should honestly go into another profession. If you went into computer programming, you signed up for learning new things at least a couple times a decade. If you don't want to learn new things and you insist on programming, I guess teach yourself COBOL and you should be in good shape.

Though there are 7 major versions of Java, only two of them added any language features to the source code (5 and 7). The rest of the releases did nothing more than add standard libraries, garbage collector fixes, other jvm optimizations, etc. And every single change to date has been backwards compatible. You can take code you wrote in 1997, compile it today, and it will run at least as well as it did then

I'm sure to get modded down for this, but limiting resources is not a thing that old consoles do better. That's absurd! All that does is reduce the problem space that a developer can utilize. Perhaps less skilled game makers use the additional resources to churn out garbage games, but it certainly doesn't mean we were better off for not making that problem space available.

Put differently, you'd surely find some creative ways to feed yourself if I came over to your house and removed your refrigerator and oven. Would you be better off? Of course not.

For my money, it's much better to design a game in the artistic style of say the SNES, but run it on a PC. You can give yourself the same limitations, making it easy to design the game for a small team. But you can also benefit from all the hardware and library advances, making yourself more efficient at development.

Finally titanium that's cheaper than dirt.

In that case, might your best decision be to purchase a PS4 at launch and no games? They lose money on every box sold and only make it up on game licensing.

This is all true and completely irrelevant. The PC game industry spent about 30 years being a major pain. People have long memories. PC games will have to be "good citizens" for a decade before most people will be on board with your arguments. Even then, it might still not matter. Because all that proves is that you've brought the PC ease of use to parity with the console's ease of use. To really win market share, PCs will need to meet or beat consoles in several other areas.

Consoles run on giant screens which are already the center of most American living rooms. The box is conveniently transported to other living rooms if desired and games frequently may be played using only a DVD with no installation. They come equipped with 1 (or sometimes a couple) controllers, which are reused across literally hundreds of games.

The day I can take a 4 year old laptop over to my TV, plug it in with an HDMI cable, insert a game DVD, sit on my couch with a blutooth controller, and immediately start playing the latest AAA title (all with the lid closed!), is the day when PC gaming is as good (for the average user) as console gaming.

Not so much. Conservatives favor a certain subset of individual freedoms. Liberals another subset. And libertarians pretend that all freedom is individual freedom and that societal freedom is not a thing.

Do you want the freedom to not have health insurance, and force society to cover the bill when you go to the ER, that's conservative freedom. Do you want the freedom to have health insurance options available to you even if you leave your current job, that's liberal freedom. Do you want the freedom to not have health insurance and when you get sick, you die, that's libertarian freedom.

Or differently, do you want the freedom to own any handgun you'd like, that's conservative. Do you want the freedom to expect most people you meet are not carrying a gun, that's liberal. Do you want the freedom to own a tank if you very well please, that's libertarian.

None of these perspectives are wrong, per say, just each has it's own blind spots. You might say libertarians are "intellectually pure", but do we really wish everyone who wanted a tank owned a tank? Or that heroin were as legal as coffee? Or even that my neighbors individual freedom to run a 130 decibel disco at all hours of the night trumps the right of me and all my neighbors to force him not to through land use codes.

And on the topic of the article, I've seen it argued here that liberals are fearful because they don't like guns. But you can really argue that either way. 1) Liberals are so scared of guns they want all guns banned. 2) Liberals are so brave about guns they are willing to risk their lives by leaving home without one. The lens you look at each of these questions through shapes how you interpret the results, which I think we've already seen in many of the responses.

Yes. Shockingly, popular places to live have higher cost of living. Especially places near the ocean, limiting available land.

In other news, property is very cheap in most of Kansas.

It's a net win for US employment.

I know they live an ocean away, but the slave laborers in Foxcon are people too, and they need an income just as badly (perhaps more so) than the Americans who will be getting jobs. So, yes, moving jobs back to America is better for Americans, but if you look at a more global scale this isn't necessarily better for humanity at large.

How was this modded insightful? "Bad with science" or "intentionally dishonest" would be much more accurate.

It's well established that 1998 was an especially hot year. So, yes if you benchmark your metric to that one specific year, you can pretend that things are "staying the same". If you wiggle your start date just a little bit to the left (not 100 years, but say 5) then the warming trend emerges again.

Even in the middle of greater warming or cooling cycles, there will still be years that are outliers. Six of the ten hottest years on record may have occurred in the last decade, but that still means a couple of the hottest years occurred at other times.

What you are doing is EXACTLY the same as asking "is the world becoming a less violent place (for humans)" and ignoring the span of say 0-2012 in favor of measuring only 1935-1944. It's intellectually dishonest.

And, I say this as someone who doesn't really have a dog in this fight. I don't want to "take your freedoms" away just because the earth is warming. I don't necessarily buy the most extreme doomsday scenarios. But dishonesty like yours really just gets in the way of society holding an earnest discussion about the issue. Instead of fighting in make believe land, I wish we could come together and debate how much action is appropriate given predictions about the level of warming that will occur. We could decide the deniers are closer to the mark and end up not doing much of anything (except build levies I guess). We could go to the other extreme. At least we'd be honest with ourselves.

No, it actually didn't. I mean, sure from the Dwarf planet's perspective this happened when the Earth still had no sapient species, but from where we sit it happens in the future.

All news is biased. It must be, so long as it's presented by humans and not dispassionate robots (could Mitt Romney produce an unbiased news segment? I kid.).

The difference is that most news is biased in what they carry. E.g. typical liberal biased news will focus more attention on something that makes Romney look bad or Obama look good. Fox News is biased in that way, of course, but they are also just plain dishonest. As in, they make up stories.

Well, let me rephrase that. Fox News is usually just biased (like everyone else). But, the cable network also spends a lot of time broadcasting editorial shows (like say Hannity) which are dishonest.

Even the Lion King got this little fact right.

Sigh!