Elrac

My biggest problem with Europe's mandatory cookie warning is that the solution is worse than the problem.

I'm aware that once I enter somebody's site there's a gazillion ways for that somebody to get data about me. If cookies are blocked they'll find another way.

But thanks to Europe's feeling they need to nanny me, I get those obnoxious cookie warning popups on every site I visit. Worse, I can't opt out of the popups. Infuriatingly, Europe didn't ask me if I _want_ to be protected like this.

Of the many problems with the Internet and Web sites, I feel Europe has fixed the most trivial, in the most obnoxious possible way. Thanks for nothing, Europe!

I think there's just one lesson, a no-brainer, to be learned here: That any halfway competent author can make his character appear superior in whatever way he chooses, because he obviously and literally has complete control of the narrative.

Implying that the rational character of Sherlock Holmes is morally challenged when compared with a character acting predominantly on his gut feelings is, I think, a contemptible insult to rationality and those people who choose to act rationally. A decent argument can be crafted that rational behavior is moral behavior more often than not, but I doubt that Mr. Foster, as a fan of religious apologist (i.e. "Liar for Jesus") Chesterton, could be brought to understand it.

I'm in a corporation currently "upgrading" from Skype to Teams.

Let me put it this way: Since chatting with Teams, I no longer think quite as badly of Skype.

Yes, but that's irrelevant to your parent commenter's point. I'll explain that in simpler terms: If the object has the slightest bit of (linear) momentum then it also has a non-zero velocity, which will over time move it away from said Lagrange point.

I'll add that even with zero velocity, the Lagrange points are stable only in an ideal system where the only gravitational influence is from the two bodies between which the Lagrange points sit. An object sitting on a Lagrange point could still be perturbed by attraction from other planets or passing asteroids. Given enough time, no orbit stays stable.

Am I the only one who thought this article was about Apache Tomcat?

You're right, I missed that.

But that still leaves the ASCII tree diagram agreeing with the sentence "Phix has just five builtin data types:" while showing (and describing, in the following bullet point list) five data types that don't include "number" or a floating-point type.

So what's left is a minor but consistently repeated error in the doc, on the "Core Language" page.

Looking at "Core Language" I was dismayed not to find any builtin floating point data type.

In "Phix vs Conventional Languages" I'm told that "1/2 is always 0.5". And "Library Routines" / "Math" includes sin, cos and tan. What's going on here?

In the original article, the author claims that lots of repeated strings turn out to be beneficial insofar as they make compression (gzip or whatever) more effective. According to him, it doesn't make sense to manually de-redundantize code when the compressor will achieve the same gain or better.

The author's expressing a personal opinion, and not supporting it very well. That this low-value piece complains about disinformation reeks of unintended irony.

Here's my personal opinion: blaming technology for failures of humanity is something stupid people do.

Yes, people are angry on the Internet. That's not the Internet's fault, it's the fault of societies whose top products, recently, are profits and poverty. When simple people support a guy whose slogan was "Make America Great Again," they're acting on a legitimate gripe.

"America great" could mean a lot of things, but I think the simplest rendition of it could be a society where a single full-time job was enough to support a family, pay its medical bills and save up for college for the kids. Are people wrong to be angry that this scenario is increasingly out of reach?

What society desperately needs are smarter people. Or at least better informed people. Or better educated people who are able to make smarter choices about their sources of information.

This is a challenge to society, to the education system, and it's one that desperately needs to be met. Not by partitioning, walling and gating the Internet, because nothing assures us that the "new net" wouldn't quickly succumb to the same basic problems. The solution to bad information is not making less information accessible, but more.

People need to learn to distinguish fake news from the real McCoy; this is increasingly becoming a survival skill. That being so, pressed by necessity, people can and will learn. There are growing pains, but the Internet isn't making the sky fall any more than steam engines did in their day.

At the risk of seeming an ingrate: Does LibKtx also do 3D?

Yes. In the opening paragraph there's a reference to a companion paper from April 1, 1998. I'd say that's a strong hint.

For the past 2 years, most of my work has been in porting some fairly simple legacy message forwarding and conversion programs from C to Java. So on our test servers I can swap out the C programs for drop-in replacements in Java and watch them (via log files) working -- or not. If my programs fail I can either observe crashes and stack trace or the message receiving programs will crash or loudly object to bad data from me. Usually one day's worth of traffic will exercise enough of my program's logic that failure to fail for a day constitutes a successful end-to-end test.

Yes, this is kid stuff. My current work is about as sophisticated as typical undergrad Computer Science projects. We can't all be doing rocket science!

I used to write automated test setups for my programs, providing streams of pre-canned messages and such. That worked out OK. I suppose it's great to have test suites to avoid regression and such, but I ended up regretting all the effort I sunk into testing. So far it's been my experience that I would sink a lot of time into creating a test suite that could exercise my programs as thoroughly as simple exposure to real-world message traffic.

I hope my attempt to be brief didn't come across as derogatory when I wrote "strange." Here's an example: I like to make a lot of my fields and methods private. It's handy that my IDE warns me when fields and methods aren't used, or when final fields aren't initialized. Obviously, for "classic" unit tests I'd have to at least expose my methods at the package level to call them from out of class. Another example: my apps rely on a fair bit of configuration data and some embarrassingly tight coupling between my classes. A JUnit-friendly program would call for a lot of mockups, as well as a lot more coding to interfaces rather than concrete classes, probably a lot more reliance on design patterns. My coding style for these projects yields a small number of compact classes but is very hostile to unit testing.

To be clear: For many other projects, your mileage may vary dramatically. I've successfully done TDD in other projects where that made a lot more sense.

Almost never.

With the kind of software I mostly write these days, I'm fortunate to be able to incrementally develop my code and test it under real-world conditions or a subset thereof.

So my approach is exploratory coding -- I start with minimum workable implementations, make sure they work as needed, and then add more functionality, with further testing at each step.

The upside is that I don't have to write "strange" code to accommodate testing. The downside is that I'm forced to plan code growth with steps that take me from one testable partial-product to the next. A more serious downside, one I'm very aware of, is that not every project is amenable to this approach.

Underneath the eloquent prose and the many helpful examples and showcases, this is an anti-science hit piece.

How dare theoretical physicists develop ideas about the world around us that can't be quickly and obviously supported by real-world observations? It's apparent that science is in a crisis! We might as well just throw up our hands and place our faith in homeopathy and creationism, which are no better.

Sorry, Mr. Baggott, that's a shitty argument for a target audience of stupid people.

A counter-argument could be built on science stories like Ignatz Semmelweis' ideas about hand-washing before surgery. Semmelweis suspected that _something_ was transferred from cadavers to birthing mothers via the hands of unwashed surgeons, but he had no idea what that something was, and could certainly not provide empirical proof. He was later vindicated by the work of Pasteur and Koch. Too late for poor Dr. Semmelweis, who died in a nuthouse, but today hand washing is an essential practice in modern medicine.

Mr. Baggott is telling us that science talks about things that are obviously real, like bacteria, but also things that may or may not be, such as multiverses. He's trying to convince us that because multiverses aren't obviously real, science shouldn't be talking or even thinking about them. He's implying that science is dishonest because it claims that multiverses are real. Actually, he's the one who's being dishonest, not science.

Especially in fields where it's not feasible to stick the subject matter into a test tube, hypothesis and speculation are valid tools of science. Hypotheses are proposed with the expectation that science will later refute or substantiate them. Contrary to what Mr. Baggott brings across, this is part of science's process, a process that has proven wildly successful and valuable in the past.

Most scientists are honest; and if asked by someone interested in more than a catchy headline, they'll gladly tell you which theories are solidly supported by a wealth of evidence, which are just ideas being thrown at the wall, and which are in between. People who fail to understand this are poorly informed; people who intentionally paper over the differences are dishonest. Please, let's ignore and shame that kind of people.