Not to pollute the thread, but I'm also really interested in this, I've worked at both the Clinton campaign and NGP VAN and it seems like a very worthwhile pursuit. If you're adding people, my email is in my profile.
Well, pure self-interest would probably fall outside of morality, but one could make an argument that many conscriped ISIS fighters, US soldiers, and perhaps US leaders are acting out of self-interest.
The bigger issue to my mind is that Congress has, and routinely skirts the issue by implementing through regulatory agency rule-making that has the effective force of law but without requiring such a law to be actually made
Why is this an issue? Agencies only get their mandates from laws enacted by congress, their rulings can still be challenged in court, and they often have been, though the FCC one is permissible because Congress is apparently allowed to restrict indecent material when there is a reasonable chance children could see it.
Agencies are a critical component of a functioning democracy, because there is no way Congress could have the time or the expertise to pass a new law for every decision an agency makes, of which there would be tens of thousands.
I was more addressing the implication that because it's racist, we shouldn't do it. And as to generalizing about entire continents, if your goal is to avoid getting mugged on a late night, and you know that on average black people commit more muggings than anyone else, is it not practical to walk to the other side of the street if you see a black man (and that's your only information?)
But there are plenty of things that we only know anecdotally -- that one restaurant has bad service, or that line cooks smoke more than usual -- that no one gets up in arms about when we generalize in those cases. Formal studies are great when they exist, but in the absence of them it's only practical to extrapolate from incomplete data.
Even if it makes sense for a single company not to hire an old developer, we are losing so much values as an industry if we invest all this money into teaching valuable lessons to devs, then throwing them away and letting newer kids make the same mistakes.
I really wouldn't -- there are orders of magnitude more facts in the world than I have time to digest, so it certainly helps having a basis of analysis, even if sometimes that analysis is misguided.
IS controls the territory, but they don't actually control the citizens on that territory.
However, the same could be said of the current, US recognized Iraqi government. In common parlance it essentially comes down to whether the Western powers that be recognize you as a state, and as Hollande has claimed France is at war with IS, there is certainly a case to be made.
So I guess the time to politicize these attacks has come already.
This complaint has never quite sat right with me. This was, fundamentally, a political action -- a foreign "nation" (entity?) attacking another nation's civilians. It seems a pertinent time to have the debate on what should be done in response, as well as what preventative measures should be taken in the future -- even if you are vehemently against certain preventative measures.
That's a feature, not a bug, I believe. Results that contradict the dominant theory are in general much less likely than one's that confirm it or extend it, and as such will have much lower odds. As a result, if you have significant evidence that such a result is true, then there is a large upside in betting on it, enough to outweigh the unlikelihood.
You're right, in an ideal world it would mean nothing, as country distinctions are mostly arbitrary. However, there doesn't exist, and most likely won't exist in the near future, a world government that can realitistically replace all of the country governments, which is why it's not worth calling for the imminent removal of 'country rights'.
However, in the case of states, there is a organizing body that can, and is increasingly governing in their stead -- the federal government. And as many people believe the federal government has on average done a better job, that is why there are calls for the retirement of the 'states rights' concept.
This is a nice post that mirrors a lot of the thoughts I had when learning Haskell. I especially agree about his point on position dependant partial functions -- I think the idea of a placeholder symbol (maybe _) that you can put in place of an argument to make it partial would make it a lot cleaner.
One quibble though -- he complains about the ugliness of infix functions, but misses that you can define your own infix operators, with their own precedence rules! Just put parentheses around the symbol(s) when defining the function, and it becomes infix by default.
What's their rationale for saying That Node is not ready? I've found it to be stable and performant, and if it doesn't have quite the volume of useful libraries Ruby/Rails does, it's certainly fast approaching.
The examples don't illustrate this very well, but the benefit of message passing is flexibility/decentralization of events. To use your example, if when you saved the profile you wanted to also pass it to an internal analytics database, makes more organizational sense to have that database just register a listener for a save profile event, rather than having to add a very auxiliary step within the saveProfile function. This gets more and more helpful the more listeners you have, and while I haven't looked at this library in depth, can also be a very natural way of writing async code.
According to my AP World textbook, at least, classical refers to a lot of geographically diverse civilizations, from the Byzantines to the Song Chinese to the Aztecs
One possible way of getting around that, stolen from machine learning, is to use colors to represent the fourth dimension, ie, make things darker (or change the hue/saturation) that are bigger in the fourth axis, and vice versa for smaller.