Based on my experience as a professional software developer dealing with many other programmers, I have to say yes! Anyone can become a programmer. You don't even have to learn how to program!

This is funny because SleazyRidr is expressing exasperation with a phozz bare's and bkaul01's either failure to grasp or insistence on re-emphasizing the punchline of the joke originally made by wbr1. There is also a possibility that SleazyRidr intended some irony by commenting on jokes starting with "Seriously"

Natural selection is the most visible cause, evolution is the effect. There are other causes to evolution, such as mutation and genetic drift (evolution).

I'm not sure I would say that distinction is "huge". Comment history suggests GP is not just some kind of creationist-troll. Curious what he meant.

If you live anywhere in the states you should be aware that, unless you are fabulously wealthy or powerful, there are not limits on what the police can do. There may be limits on what the police are legally allowed to do, but attempting to stop a cop from doing an illegal thing they want to do is going to lead to conflict with a police officer, which will lead to a disorderly-conduct or similar arrest.

Treat a cop the same way you would treat a 12-foot gator in the backyard. Keep your distance if possible. Never anger it. Appease it until it is gone, and call in a greater power ASAP. For a croc you call animal control, for a cop you call the only higher power citizens have access to - a lawyer.

The actual gap between the power a cop has and the power you have in literally any interaction makes any other course of action untenably risky.

And from where exactly do they propose we get these girlfriends for the crackers? If we accept the supposition that these are all a bunch of young persistently-single men, then clearly these men are either a) not putting in the effort / participating in activities conducive to getting a mate, or b) insufficiently desirable to any potential mate met thus far.

The common thread in both cases - there is no woman (also, why all the heteronormativity?) interested in him. So do they propose that we kidnap some women from the street and tell them that they're taking one for the team?

Women are people too. Just because it would solve your problem if a woman were to screw this guy, doesn't create an obligation for any particular woman to screw him. I guess you could hire a bunch of escorts, but is it really worth the cost of a decent hooker providing a "girlfriend experience" for long enough to fool the guy into thinking he actually has a girlfriend?

Check out the WikiSpeed. It looks pretty sweet, and fits the open-source bill. http://www.wikispeed.com/

http://www.turnkeylinux.org/redmine Seriously. I had an issue tracker running in 5 minutes. By 15 minutes I had the settings the way I wanted it. They ship you a virtual machine image. You load it into VirtualBox and click start. The VM loads to a little screen that tells you what IP address the redmine is running at. It also has git i installed, and it was super quick to migrate my git repo into it. Since I use redmine with git, it's really handy because they are already integrated - when I put "refs #32" in my git commit message, it appears on ticket #32.

CanHasDIY, 2012

Hesiod, 8th century BC

Indeed. Someone went to a public forum and spoke unfairly ill of a demographic to which I belong, to which I have no choice about belonging, and which is fairly apparent to those around me, causing a personal effect on my life when people believe it is appropriate to generalize about that group and apply those generalizations to me. I see little difference between this and the reply "I see - you're a member of that particular race. Explains it all" to someone who accused you of racism.

While I did make a guess as to your age, none of my arguments were based on it - it was the conclusion, not the assumption. And I never did "lambast prior generations" for anything. If you care to read my comment, I make no claims about the behavior of those older than myself whatsoever.

Also "a three-paragraph rant" is a particularly dishonest way to characterize one paragraph summarizing a mathematical computation, one paragraph stating (but not arguing, as I do not agree) the views of others, and one paragraph of conclusion - the only one with any emotional content at all.

This quote is more insightful than expected. By using this group identifier ("you kids" indicating all of us, even though only I am talking) you are evoking stereotypes of my demographic against me, and simultaneously attempting to attribute my actions in this thread to all of "you kids". Suppose that my actions in this thread are inappropriate - where you crossed the line into ageism is where you assumed that this reflects on the rest of my age group.

Perhaps because you are ageist.

With the current life expectancy in the US (a hopefully appropriate assumption in a thread about minnesota) of 78.1 according to google and an assumption that nobody under the age of 13 has the patience or interest to hang out on a tech discussion site, you are guessing that a particular AC falls within (25-13) / (78-13) ~ 18% of the pool of candidate ages. To level that out to be a reasonable guess, we would need to assume that those under 25 are 50%/22% ~ 2.8 times more likely to fail to understand social responsibility. That's quite a gap, to assume we are almost 3 times as likely to eschew social responsibility.

While I certainly have no data, this seems to even be counter to largely accepted stereotypes of youth. I thought we were supposed to be bleeding-heart liberal hippies, letting our idealism prevent us from getting anything done? Stereotypically, the gray-haired investment banker in the fancy suit is the one who rejects social responsibility.

Why do I get the feeling you're in the "definitely over 25" age group? Hint: It's because paint us with such a broad stroke that clearly you have already dichotomized the world into "you all" (the "adults") and "us" (the "children" - many of whom have mortgages/rents, bills, responsibilities, retirement accounts, careers and credit histories by the way).

I used to feel this way. But far too often, the job I had to do was fixing what incompetent people had done. I've since switched jobs, and most people here are both competent *and* pleasant. That said, I like the smart assholes here better than I liked the lovable idiots at other places.

The resistor stuff solves an orthogonal problem to OTP. OTP gives you perfect secrecy when you share an unknown secret key with the other party you are communicating with. This "resistor stuff" is how you get an unknown shared secret key with the other party. OTP still requires key distribution, which is what this does. The two are complementary, neither replaces the other.

Tampering detection is all that is required for perfect security. The trick is that you do not transmit the message itself over this channel, you instead transmit a random stream of bits. Once both sides share a random stream of bits that they know has not been overheard, they can use that random stream as the key to a one-time-pad that can be transmitted over any traditional eavesdrop-able channel. You could just email the ciphertext over the public internet, since you know that you have an (unknown to any attacker) shared secret key, you have perfect secrecy.

The important point that people seem to be missing is that quantum encryption *is* one-time pad. The system of quantum encryption consists of using entangled particles to be the shared source of randomness. Because both parties would be aware if anyone besides the two of them were observing the shared randomness, they can't exactly communicate via entanglement, but they can reach an arbitrary (ie. not decided by either of them) consensus on the values in a random stream. This random stream is then used as the key of a one-time-pad where the ciphertext is transported over a traditional channel of communication.

For this reason, I consider the term "quantum encryption" to be a bit of a misnomer - nothing about the actual en/de cryption is quantum. A better name would be "quantum key distribution" or "quantum consensus generation"

Not really,

The atheistic point of view is to say that you believe there isn't a god. I understand the limits of epistemology, and I also recognize that many definitions of "god" are carefully constructed to be untested and non-falsifiable, thus making it obviously false to "know" its truth or falsity.

That said, I find the existence of God to be roughly as likely as the existence of dragons, unicorns, and flying reindeer and slightly less likely than the existence of the Chupacabra. I think that level of disbelief separates my point of view from those of the agnostics, justifying the use of a different term.