Ah, perhaps I was led astray by your "So something came from nothing?" question -- I've often heard this used by Christians to claim that the universe must have been created by the Christian god. Of course, not one of the gods invented by the thousands of other religions. Any rational person realizes it simply leads to an infinite regress, but the faithful will jump to the even more ludicrous idea of an uncreated creator that creates things so he can persecute and torture the vast majority of them for all eternity. Sounds reasonable. Of course, since we weren't around 13.7 billion or so years ago to observe anything, we don't know how far back the laws of physics hold; inside our universe, we don't often see things created out of nothing, but we don't know it to be impossible; I thought there were some quantum effects where particles (and their antiparticle counterparts) do spring into existence, but usually quickly collide with their counterpart and disappear.

Matt Gerrans

The correct answer to the question ("what existed before that?") is not "nothing;" it is "we don't know." As in I don't know, you don't know and even more, none of the religious nutjobs know. Being certain about your dogma doesn't make it true. The truth is the big bang is an extrapolation and our current best guess, not fact and subject to change as more data is found. So going even farther back, our knowledge (and ability to know) becomes even more murky. By the way, the old "creating something out of nothing" canard isn't a law of physics, unless you can prove it is. Moreover, if your answer is the even stupider proposition that some sky god invented by men is the only thing that is allowed to violate that "law" then you need to justify that with something more than self-contradictory nonsense from "holy" books written by primitive desert yokels.

Matt Gerrans

In that case, you must have been thinking "What a stupid system where everything has to be named Command[digit]_click"

Matt Gerrans

And we hope you have adopted more meaningful method naming habits. Not that "Command1_click" isn't a lovely name...

Matt Gerrans

The third one is especially sublime -- just return null no matter what. I think the compiler should detect the proportion of your methods that are static and if it is higher than say 2%, should issue an error "You are not fit to be programming. Please step away from the computer."

Matt Gerrans

Not a problem if the program was well written; for example robocopy has the /np option for exactly that purpose.

Matt Gerrans

\r can be nifty for updating status in place in a console tool; like showing a twirling bar, or updating percentage complete value. You can see it in something like pkzip or robocopy. Some of us are even old enough to have written code like this. :-D

Matt Gerrans

C++ in particular can look nice, but rarely does in the wild. Most of the C++ I've seen is way over cluttered with macros to the point that it doesn't even really look like C++. Essentially, C++ can look nice and very readable, but it also can look completely incomprehensible. Unfortunely too many people veer into the latter, in the mistaken belief that readers who cannot make sense of it will think the author is delivishly clever. It takes real work, effort and attention to make good readable code. Even in languages like Python, you will create incomprehensible junk, unless you already have very good habits or make a conscious effort not to.

Matt Gerrans

I'd like to take this opportunity to announce that I'm back. ...oops, wrong ettiquette. :~ I never even said I was going away.

Matt Gerrans

Yeah, the several hundred times I've heard it before were all with airplanes, too. :)

Matt Gerrans

:wtf: Maybe if you upgrade from Notepad, your code development won't be so painful. :-D

Matt Gerrans

Wow. At least they accept and even embrace the fact that their product sucks so badly that it is necessary to create a little automatic restart agent to revive it after frequent crashes. :doh: Brilliant. Actually, doesn't Outlook do something like this, too?

Matt Gerrans

Yup. The one thing Tolkien tried to get into the heads of all the idiot "analysts" was that the Lord of the Rings was not an allegory for anything. I think it even says that in the preface.

Matt Gerrans

Well in that case, there should be no tax rammifications of marriage and no shared jobs benefits, etc.

Matt Gerrans

God must get really befuddled at sporting events. With both teams having their before-game prayer for victory, how is God to choose? :confused: Especially when people are praying so fervently and for such an important thing. Or is there some suitable punishment for praying for frivolous things (kind of like frivolous lawsuits)? That would be cool.

Matt Gerrans

Paul Selormey wrote:

He heals me whenever I am sick

Funny. Why does he make you sick in the first place, if he is just going to turn around and heal you? Just for the hell of it? :omg: I think your god may be a sadist. ;)

Matt Gerrans

And now you're asking for free professional advice? :omg: :)

Matt Gerrans

Yeah, I had to pay $25.

Matt Gerrans

So, I got a ticket for not having my "tabs" up to date (the little sticker on your license plate that says you've shelled out yet another tax, this one for auto registration). The fee was $101 and officer said I could request a "mittigation hearing," go to court and the fee might be reduced. So I thought I'd go ahead and try that as my record is clean and this was the first violation I've had of any sort (and it wasn't even a traffic violation really). The fun part was listening the 5 or 6 people who went before me. One was a seventeen-year-old who had gotten cited for speeding in a school zone, but when the officer asked for his license he didn't even have one. And he was coming to ask to have his $100 fee reduced. Fee reduced? Why isn't this twit in the slammer? :confused: When the judge asked him if he had a driving license now, he said yes, he did. So she asked him to show it. He handed her an ID card. She had to explain to him (more than once) that it was not a license to drive (which he knew damned well already). He insisted he passed the written test (probably a lie) and was intending to take the actual driving test in a few months. As if that is somehow a resonable proxy for not having a license. After (far too much) discussion with (or at) him, the judge finally gave up and essentially told him to shut up and pay the fee. I still don't understand why the fee isn't an order of magnitude higher for something like that (moving violation + no license) and why there isn't even more severe punishment on top of the fee. :wtf: Okay, I was still shaking my head as a couple easy ones were processed. Then another guy, who showed up late and needed an interpreter was up. (Naturally, the court-appointed interperter was on time and thus collecting tax dollars from the start. :sigh:). This guy had run a red light while speeding. On top of that, he had five previous moving violations of similar eggregiousness in the year. Through the interpreter, he explained that he didn't know the rules for driving! :wtf: That was his defense and hope for some mittigation? :omg: The judge told him (a few times) that he need to learn how to drive. Why the heck didn't she take away his license right there? How did he get one in the first place? His only penalty was to pay the full fee. :mad: Anyhow, what's scary is these morons -- er -- guys both got very light penalties and drove away from the place. And now they are back out the

I always loved the thing (on TV as well as movies), where they query for some criminal suspect (based on ridiculous criteria, of couse, like "Smith, J.") on a green-on-black 25x80 text mode CTR, but when they select a name, the thing suddenly turns into a rotating 3D image (with cool high-tech sound effects to boot) of the guy that can be zoomed infinitely. How do they do that on a monochrome monitor?

Matt Gerrans