fmota

> But lawmaking isn't fundamentally driven by logic, ever.

Fixed that for you.

On a global scale, a liberal arts curriculum is the exception, not the rule. I highly doubt that Chinese universities have liberal arts curricula.

Programming language design and implementation is awesome and terrifying. I did exactly this for my senior project, a language called [fuga](http://github.com/fmota/fuga) that is based on [Io](http://iolanguage.com/). I learned so much.

But beware. Language design is a bottomless pit from which you must climb if you wish to implement anything.

Allow me to be cynical but, if SOPA passes and breaks the Internet, these software companies would gain a lot. Especially Microsoft. Remember the "good old days" of Microsoft Everything? I hope you're as fond of them as these software companies seem to be.

You need more foreign testers.

This is way too complicated.

The average of your n<5 closest friends, and 5-n nobodies.

YouTube for me. Although I would have continued to stream Netflix if that was an option.

Sleep paralysis is terrifying.

It depends on your platform AND on your compiler, so just saying "Windows 64" isn't enough information. Conceivably, there are compilers for "Windows 64" such that sizeof(int) == 8.

Your point (that int isn't a qword on all 64bit architectures) still stands. But your statement is potentially incorrect.

In science there's a difference between "law" and "hypothesis" and "theory". A "law", in science, is typically a formula that fits the data. For example: Hubble's law states that the relative speed of some astral object is proportional to its distance. That is, objects that are far away seem to move faster than objects that are closer. Hubble's law is an observation that holds under scrutiny. It would be silly to say that Hubble's law explains why objects that are farther away seem to move faster. That's where theories come in (they go beyond describing the facts, and actually attempt to explain why the facts arise).

So, in the scientific sense, Moore's law IS a law. It doesn't explain why it holds, but it seems to hold.

A computer.

Yeah, the 10% figures are greatly exaggerated. More like 5%.

They volunteer their time anyway. They might as well do so for open access journals.

> ... but I have some questions.

There isn't a single question mark in your comment. There's a difference between questions and remarks.

Also, because regular expressions are not the right tool for the job sometimes.

("No one should ever use regular expressions" is hyperbolic and wrong.)

I knew it was going to come down to (fucking) Ayn Rand, when the author started discussing the primacy of senses.

Anyway, I think the author makes a bit of a straw man argument when saying that Dawkins' "moral Zeitgeist" doesn't determine a rational, consistent basis for morality. I don't believe that Dawkins was trying to show that.

I believe that Dawkins was trying to show that both religious and irreligious folks derive their morals from the same place for the most part: the moral Zeitgeist. This is a counter to the argument that religion is necessary for morality, because morality for most people is drawn from the Zeitgeist either way.

I haven't read Dawkins, so I may be wrong in my assertions of what Dawkins intended, but it feels like the author covertly (or accidentally) tried to shift the focus away from countering the "religion is necessary for morals" argument, onto a different topic (that of defining rational morals).