The Y Combinator Startup Library. Lot's of essays by Paul Graham here, as well as very good stuff from the community at large.

Contrary to popular opinion quantum mechanics doesn't actually answer the question of whether or not the universe is deterministic. Bell's Theorem shows that it cannot be both local and deterministic. Most physicists today elect to give up the deterministic part and keep the locality. However, there are interpretations which do just the opposite. The Bohm Interpretation is currently the most popular among these. This theory is an example of a Hidden Variable Theory. While these theories have fallen out of favor with the physics community the very first documented explanation of quantum phenomenon was of this kind. The Matter Wave interpretation, proposed by Louis de Broglie in his 1924 PhD thesis, preceded the currently fashionable Copenhagen Interpretation by several years. Interestingly enough the Copenhagen Interpretation denies physical meaning to the central construct in quantum mechanics, the Wave Function, while the nonlocal theories tend to embrace it.

I actually don't program in VB because I think it produces code that's harder to read. This makes it more difficult to understand and thus more difficult to maintain. This is especially true for projects of any complexity or size. I thought with C# that MS had finally learned an important lesson from Java: They need a clean language with a simple, clear syntax and straightforward semantics. It seems like their resolve has begun to waver. They've finally given in to the temptation to turn their most beautiful language to date into something more like it's "easy" sister. I am saddened by this turn of events.

I think most physicists would put both of those statements in the category of reasonably well supported assumptions. Astronomical observations of distant objects are the best evidence we have in support of both. If these observations aren't anomalous then it's likely that physical law is homogeneous throughout space-time. That being said there are some important points to keep in mind about observations of distant objects: 1) they are actually observations of the past. 2) they are necessarily more limited then observations made in local space-time.