No, most people are not basically good, not really. It is an illusion of goodnes that they give off, due to their indifference, and their going with the flow. If the flow is good, the illusion is maintained, and all is well. But when push come to shove, they will show how little they really care.
You're more pessimistic about people than their behavior in day-to-day reality warrants. We're not worried about intrinsic goodness, nor about goodness in extreme circumstances. We're only worried about effective goodness in normal circumstances. Can you ask someone to watch your stuff? Yes, you can. Whatever the reason, the vast majority of people can be trusted in the vast majority of circumstances. There are few that will simply let someone take your stuff when you ask them to watch it for you.
when push come to shove
Push doesn't come to shove. When someone threatens them, they may as well have threatened you. When there's a sudden flood, accident or any other unlikely incident, then you're often no worse off having someone else watch your stuff.
I basically agree with you, but don't think you should worry about someone else coming and taking the laptop. It's the person you asked to watch it that knows you are gone, if anyone, it's they that would get up, take the laptop, and go.
But I think that risk is fairly small if you pick the right person. Ideally someone else with a laptop. They're likely not going anywhere, and they clearly already have a laptop...
Yes, but whether it is an illusion is irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion. And to wander off into more philosophical territory: if you say it is an illusion, you suggest that there is an intrinsic, below-the-veil-of-illusion, goodness in people. That warrants a huge discussion in itself. I would argue there is no such thing: what we are talking about here is 'the' goodness of people. There is no illusion. That they don't behave equally good in different circumstances is not because they are intrinsically less-than-good: it's because the exact same human characteristics simply give rise to different behavior in different circumstances. The motivation/inclination of people to behave in a certain way is not due intrinsic 'goodness', but due to a variety of other intrinsic characteristics, such as 'fearfulness'.
Rails tips sure, but some of them were pretty interesting to me. Didn't know that irb had _ like in perl, and that error_messages_for took those nifty named parameters.
Some similar tips of my own:
Enumerable.each_with_object sort of like foldl/inject but without the explicit return of the memo is a pretty nice monkeypatch that exists in activesupport. Object.returning is pretty nice too. Creates an object to return and then yields to a block, very handy.
FYI: #returning is a hack that #tap supplants, and is supported in Ruby 1.8.7 natively, and is supported in Rails via ActiveSupport for older versions of Ruby.
Tap is also an incredibly nifty function, but they are slightly different, I hadn't thought of using tap in the same way as returning before you mentioned it.
Using returning with a local variable makes for superbly readable code imho:
def foo
returning values = [] do
values << 'bar'
values << 'baz' if @iffy
end
end
def foo
[].tap do |values|
values << 'bar'
values << 'baz' if @iffy
end
end
And this is the crux of it right here. The author is confusing the two goals of making a point, and having that point heard. Surely there are better ways to market yourself than by spewing ad hominems, which just go to diminish your supposedly more important goal of actually making a solid point.
Apophis is big enough to wipe out a large metropolitan area, but not much more than that, with plenty time to evacuate.
It could, however, excavate quite a crater that could become a very large water reservoir.
But I would prefer to do such major construction projects with nukes - the delivery time and positioning are much more controllable. Also, we have a whole lot of them sitting around and the freedom to use larger formats (they wouldn't have to ride on planes or missiles) could yield much cleaner ones too.
I suppose governments won't like the idea of civilians operating gigaton+ nukes, but that's something to be resolved between politicians and lobbyists.
You could do that with a lot of smaller impacts. Also, it would be advisable to hit all major plates equally, to reduce the risk of major quakes on fault lines. If we were going to try to do it in one impact, we'd better evacuate the planet before too.
And have no plans to return in less than a couple hundred years.
It's only 350 metres wide. That'd be enough to seriously fuck up any large country on Earth without causing much damage, relatively, to other parts of the world. Anyway, you could keep the equipment on the rock, keep Apophis skimming Earth nice and close every few years, and have a permanent very big deterrent.
You know they had a pretty good pitch until, that little slip. It's good to be young, energetic and exciting but when you venture into misspelling words on purpose, it becomes a little unprofessional. Then again, I am probably not their target market being > 35 and all. You know there are a few of us dinosaurs that keep up with the latest and greatest, hell some of us are even still changing the industry with the young bucks.
