That seems extremely optimistic to me. The effects of electromagnetism have been observed by humans for thousands of years. It seems unlikely that we'll discover something capable of interstellar communication apparently without having a hint of that something currently, when we've had millennia of hints in the electromagnetism case.

P.S. I should mention that, if you think faster-than-light communication will be discovered, that would require such a radically different understanding of our universe as to be astonishing. In the framework of special relativity FTL communication enables one to break causality by communicating with the past. An example is the tachyonic antitelephone, which gives rise to a paradox:

This is why no physicists I know or am aware of really believed in the recent FTL neutrino experiment.

P.P.S. Also, your use of "postulate" should probably have been "hypothesize". A postulate is a basis for reasoning, like the principle of relativity. Your usage isn't technically incorrect, but your statement is clearly a guess rather than a fundamental principle of the universe.

A lot of modern languages have implicit line continuations, like Ruby where if you end the line with some sort of operator (or comma) it's implicitly continued. It seems to work very well. (Conversely, a lot of modern languages have an "end of statement" character allowing you to put multiple statements on a single line--in Ruby it's the semi-colon.)

It seems I should have been clearer. VB.NET's full syntax is "for [var] = [bound] to [bound] step [num]", which could easily be hijacked to replace the C "for" syntax without any loss of power. Many languages also offer "for [object] in [array/tree/iteratable thingee]" syntax built-in, like Ruby, Python, and C#. There's lots of good one can do with good "for" syntax.

I'm actually a mathematician with a CS background. In math functions are traditionally denoted by a single symbol (eg. the gamma, theta, or zeta functions; f(x), g(x), h(x), etc. for arbitrary functions in proofs); the only exceptions I can think of are the trig functions, though most likely that was because the names hint at their relationships (eg. csc vs. sec: "co" means you swap the legs in the definition, so eg. sin = opp/hyp, cos = adj/hyp; co is the substitution opp <=> adj). In any case, things are different in computers where full names are allowed. Beyond tradition, making an obvious distinction between bitwise and logical boolean operators is laudable (when I get back to C-style I'm always slightly unsure at first if I should | or ||, for instance).

For instance, "x & 1 == 0" is actually "x & (1 == 0)" while one almost surely means "(x & 1) == 0".

I agree it's useful. I just also say it causes bugs sometimes. I'm honestly not sure if there's an alternative I like; Python and Ruby both continue the C style. I maybe like "is" for "==" but I'm not sure....

I gave a more complete explanation at the end of this post.

Ok, here ya go:

Your "Because" is silly--merely being wrong (which I was not) does not make for flamebait. You have to try to get others to flame you. If anything you seem to be trolling, but if not...
  * Not always, and not in the case mentioned (which you didn't even discuss specifically).
  * VB.NET uses for ... to ... [step ...], which could easily serve the same purpose with the same flexibility, and it's incredibly easy to imagine similar syntax with the same power as the C version. You're just trying to contradict me here.
  * I disagree, and the example I referred to is +5 informative right now.
  * Whitespace is not invisible--it is visible in the spacing of other visible text. Your reasoning here is poor, though I know this issue is largely a matter of taste and I was only (and clearly) stating mine.
  * They take fewer characters, which is nice, but can you honestly tell me "not (a and b) or not c" is easier to read than "!(a && b) || !c"? [Note: I'm not sure if I got the precedence rules right and I won't look them up.]
  * No. There are honestly broken precedence rules, K and/or R has mentioned it; I can hunt for the reference if you want.
  * Again, no. It's an easy mistake to make once in a while. It's also easy to miss when debugging and can cause strange errors.
  * This was a minor point, but still, your reasoning is poor: "C used to be worse, so you should be happy about the current situation because it's not even worse!" I'm generally fine with it too, though I slightly prefer single comment "characters".
  * An example:

C-style:

Forgetting the break's results in completely wrong behavior, but the first two cases should be combined into one, which break is useful for:

And does one include "break" in the last case? Does it matter? (No.) Ruby offers similar functionality that's more intuitive and less error prone:

(The Ruby version is more powerful, actually, since i can be anything and the === methods are used for comparison.) The C version is another example of easy-to-compile-but-harder-to-read-and-potentially-bug-causing syntax, though it translates almost directly into assembly. The Ruby code is slightly (only slightly) more difficult to interpret yet is better in several ways--no clunky semicolons or colons, no break's, the multiple identical cases have one line instead of two keeping parallelism intact, there's no need to remember the "default" term (why wasn't "else" used originally anyway? another compiler hack?). Each individual issue is quite minor, but small things add up to make everything around us, and C is no different. Like I said, I dislike the clunky syntax. It was clearly made in the early years of programming and has been improved many times by many people in many ways. We seem to be stuck with it now though.

Uh, why did I get modded flamebait?

Then hopefully Zuckerberg won't Like it.

Those ignorant fools probably need to get off your lawn too, eh :)?

I've programmed in assembly and C. I lack the patience to build a computer out of logic chips, but I've at least designed some stuff in logic gates. I've also implemented hash tables. Yet I still don't particularly like C, mostly because I find the syntax clunky. Specifically...

  * Semi-colon line endings are stupid--they serve little purpose besides making compilers easier to write
  * for (...;...;...) syntax is less intuitive than eg. VB.NET's "for a = 1 to 10" or numerous alternatives
  * declarations are unintuitive (and complicated; see post above for example)
  * I'm not fond of curly braces--I like Python's indentation better
  * Why make logical operators symbols instead of words?
  * operator precedence can be unintuitive
  * = vs. == causes bugs (many languages have the same trouble though)
  * comments (//) use two characters instead of one
  * switch's use of break is worse than eg. Ruby's case statement with commas

(I have other issues, like disliking how many mundane details you have to specify in C compared to other languages, but you need a language like C for certain tasks and it'll need lots of mundane details to translate almost directly into assembly anyway.)

Ok, but it doesn't matter what you want, in the context of the GP. It talked about "adoption problems" with Linux. If you asked 100 random people to define "standard input" and "pipeline", how many would be able to? 1-2? If the problem is low general population adoption, catering to such a tiny market is insane. It'd be like making "HomOS" to target gay people--fine if you don't care about low general adoption.

That said I think the GP's point is kind of crappy. OS X most likely satisfies their GUI-as-primary-interface requirement yet also has adoption problems relative to Windows. Any problem must be much larger than this one issue. I imagine "inertia" is the biggest factor.

I have three problems with that plank and two with the bit you quoted.
(1) Before your quote, they singled out two particular theories out of all scientific theories, generalizing their statements to "theories such as" those two. There's no obvious pattern besides "theories that Christian fundamentalists don't like", considering the mound of evidence in favor of evolution.
(2) "challengeable scientific theories" is potentially dangerous if the challenges are given undue weight. For instance, you can present a huge amount of evidence against Newton's laws--"Newton's laws say this, but let's look at experiments A through Z that all contradict them." That's perfectly true, but Newton's laws are so "close" to true that in public school their faults should barely be mentioned.
(3) Everything is challengeable to some extent. What challenges should be presented? Some crackpot creationist's that no mainstream scientists agree with?

A strict, reasonable reading of that plank or the part you quoted is fine, but that's certainly not intended.

You never quite say where I went wrong, so I will.

I never actually referenced the content of the platform in question, since that would have required me to do some research I wasn't interested in doing. Instead, I opted for the old /. standby--a very general statement without specific evidence to back it up but which is nonetheless plausible, plays to the /. crowd's preconceptions, and points out someone else's flaws. And so, I got +5 insightful while (1) not knowing the first thing about HOTS, (2) not reading the article, and (3) certainly not looking up the actual Texas GOP platform to see if it had been misrepresented. That was where I was wrong, even though I'm almost certainly correct.

By contrast, my other post on this topic is well-informed, specific, and languishing unmodded.

And that is the problem with /. "insightful" moderation. You can just make shit up, and so long as it's appealing enough to other people, you'll win the game, regardless of how badly informed you might really be.

I've never understood why divorce gets so much less attention than gay marriage from these people. It's an order of magnitude more "threatening" to marriage, yet the platform gives divorce all of 2 lines. The gay bits total 26 lines--actually more than that if you include things like an oblique Boy Scouts reference.

Anyway, you some of the best parts (emphasis mine):

To be fair it's not universally awful; some of their positions are somewhat reasonable:

Still, there's sure a lot of crazy in there.

I doubt it. I imagine they very much want Muslim students to question their beliefs. What you probably mean is that they want students to believe whatever Christian and conservative doctrine they're told and never question it.

The actual idiom is "just as soon", not "just assume".

As for a use case, syncing between my home desktop and laptop might be nice. I'm not gonna switch to Chrome and jump through hoops to set it up though.

Well, I went on to say...

From Not Even Wrong,

This would be huge, but of course some caution is needed since it's all still rumor-y. Having two experiments with the same result is encouraging though.