bascule

It's somewhat popular in Europe, I guess. This list is including some of the most popular languages, and Prolog isn't one of them. Well, OCaml is (was) on the list Yeah, I asked an admin to switch OCaml to assembly

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080630173921.htm I don't even want to try to regurgitate this, but ScienceDaily is trumpeting claims of millimeter-sized atoms through some crazy laser excitation thing. In this state the electrons start to have classical instead of quantum properties and all start orbiting the electron like a planet. All I gotta say is... fo real?

I dunno, why hasn't Bush been impeached?

WTF? As a fan of the Establishment Clause this saddens me... It's unconstitutional to fund faith-based programs with tax money

What about knives? Hanging yourself? Driving a car off a cliff? Or just routing the exhaust into the passenger cabin? If someone wants to kill themself, taking away handguns isn't going to stop them.

Some mod should really change O'Caml to "Assembly Language" as I really doubt anyone's going to vote for it.

Was recently formed to prevent any sort of telcom immunity as part of the FISA bills: They've received over $325,000 in just a few weeks. I think I'll donate.

Given its limited shelf life, unless they're actively producing it we don't need to worry. In 20/20 hindsight they hadn't been producing it for a decade.

I think sarin might constitute a WMD when it isn't 10 years past its shelf life

Lately it seems like things have been drifting towards "carbon emissions," which is odd as there are non-carbon GHGs as well (e.g. nitrous oxide) I guess most of the big worrisome ones are carbon compounds (i.e. CO2, methane)

So long as you don't have iTMS purchases you should be able to copy the library over and drag and drop it back into iTunes. I suppose that's what you're already trying... carry on

Kazakhstan. What other nation's anthem trumpets all other nations having inferior potassium?

I don't forsee the description being simple. However, the overwhelming number of descriptions which are either of a symbolic or connectionist nature will be driven by discrete events and may therefore be considered causal / deterministic. There's no reason to assume quantum mechanical behavior is behind consciousness. For starters, consciousness is a metaphysical system whereas quantum mechanics describes physical behavior. To begin to link consciousness to quantum mechanics you must first demonstrate that the brain exhibits behavior inexplicable by classical mechanics. Then you must demonstrate how brain activity and the content of consciousness relate. So far there's little reason to believe the brain demonstrates expressly quantum mechanical behavior, short of Penrose's papers on the matter.

This is effectively an appeal to consequences though. The war in Iraq has paid a massive toll on the American economy, American morale, and America's role in the international community. These things seem minor when juxtaposed with a doomsday situation, ala Bush (and Condi's) "we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." However, the desirability of preventing Saddam from using WMDs has little to do with whether or not he had WMDs in the first place, or whether an all-out invasion was the best way to resolve the situation. The argument is effectively the same as Pascal's Wager: it's logically flawed because it really says nothing about the truth value of the premise, but instead makes an argument entirely from potential consequences.

There's not really that many physicists arguing for quantum consciousness, and to my knowledge the only ones who have published a paper on the matter are Penrose and Hameroff (and Hameroff is not a physicist). Their paper, which argues for microtubules in neurons exhibiting quantum mechanical behavior, has been roundly criticizes and effectively discredited by other physicists like Max Tegmark. To the best of our knowledge the brain is a classical system which does not exhibit behaviors which can only be explained by quantum mechanics. That said, modern cognitive science focuses on the mind as a symbolic, connectionist, or dynamical system. Only the latter leaves room for quantum mechanical behavior.

You can buy biodiesel at the pump. Check this map: http://biodiesel.org/buyingbiodiesel/retailfuelingsites/default.shtm

Languages where you don't do a lot of bit twiddling have found novel new uses for the operators. Ruby uses it for cases where you're adding one object to another but modifying the receiver, e.g.: String concatenation: >> foo = "foo"; foo << "bar"; foo => "foobar" Adding an element to an array: >> foo = [1,2,3]; foo << 4; foo => [1,2,3,4] That said, the way it's used by iostreams is far less straightforward and substantially uglier. Although if you want, Ruby will allow you to print things in a quasi-iostreams style with: STDOUT << "Hello," << "world\n" I can't say I know anyone who'd ever consider writing Ruby like that though.

Mea culpa You know, it's funny, I was just realizing how much better C++ would be if it had a garbage collector (even if it were just there so exceptions are sane) and got rid of the C legacy, then realized I was describing Java, which isn't exactly my language du jour (although it appears to be the most popular language around these parts)

These are the accusations of a United States Congressman who is presently pursuing the impeachment of President Bush. I think they're politically relevant. I applaud Kucinich's efforts to unravel what he and many others such as myself believe is an ulterior motive behind the Iraq War different from the case that was publicly presented.

To all of those asking for languages that were omitted, unfortunately there's a max of 15 slots on a poll... (also I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Fortran yet)

http://kucinich.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=95430 Kucinich has stated, in no uncertain terms, that the Iraq war was about oil, citing secret meetings between the Cheney Energy Task Force and executives from Exxon, Shell and BP:

The more languages you've used, particularly from different areas, the better programmer you'll be! The Pragmatic Programmers recommend learning a new language every year. I'm presently learning a language called Scala. What languages have you used?

Why? What do you suggest is responsible?

Do you work in scientific computing? Does this sound like your development process: You use a program / model maintained by a central group. They release new versions every now and then. Sometimes you make improvements directly to the central codebase and submit patches. You take their releases and start wiring in your own code or 3rd party modules. In the case of 3rd party modules, you're also making your own improvements, possibly to make the code easier to integrate into other projects, and maybe want to contribute that back. You may also have many scientists in your group who are working on specific modules. This may take the form of one or two scientists / programmers working on a specific module. Once the module has been integrated, you then want to tie two different branches, which each add one module, together so you end up with a new branch that incorporates both modules. This more or less describes the workflow at my previous scientific computing job. All of this was horrible pain too. Whenever a new version of the "main" model came out, people either 1) spent weeks trying to upgrade their code or 2) gave up and didn't bother upgrading. Tying two branches with two different modules back together was also pain, since there were often incompatible code changes to the main model that were hard to merge. Distributed version control systems, such as git, are perfect for this sort of development. Git makes branching and merging much, much easier that other source control systems like CVS or Subversion. Git perfectly fits the scientific computing workflow. It allows one person to make a branch which is their own, but that they can then share with other scientists, while still incorporating changes from the original model. It allows different groups to work on integrating different modules simultaneously, then makes it much easier to merge everything into a single codebase when everyone is ready. I'm using git on several projects (and actually use git as a Subversion client for projects I'm working on that use Subversion) and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Ego versio Latina sum. But that doesn't mean shit in terms of comprehending the construction of the second amendment. Apparently, so does English... I don't get it, and I don't think that's my fault...