Is Visual Basic a real programming language, and/or does using it exclusively lead to bad program design?
Steel-tip v. Plastic Tip.
There can be only ONE TRUE DART!
Actually, there really isn’t much of a debate at all. The bar owners tossed the steel boards long ago and they ain’t never coming back. Too bad, really. Oh well. I can just stay at home and play with myself! 
The only other thing I can think of is Formula One going to a single tire manufacturer next season. I don’t really care one way or the other.
Heh. No problem. And a little indeed. Believe me, that’s the uber-short version. I started composing what would have ended up paragraphs and paragraphs, but managed to stop myself and sum it up.
I’m sure you will. Have fun! 
Who would win in a fight - a bear, or a shark? And what kind of rules would you need to make it a fair fight? And how happy are cab drivers when three amazingly drunk people insist that they answer the question?
Well, truthfully, the rollkur debate sounds a LOT like the ballroom dancing debate.
Which is preferable, the muscular, athletic, but arguably unbalanced rollkur style, or the subtle, exquisitely balanced, but less visually exciting classical style?
The hidden costs of COTS (commercial off-the-shelf applications). For businesses with unique and diverse needs (and really, that’s just about everyone these days!), the money you save by buying a ready-made app will be spent twice over on work-arounds, wrappers, upgrades, and maintenance. In addition, COTS-based systems will have to be cajoled into interfacing with other existing systems, and all the add-ons and workarounds will be lost when you have to upgrade. And don’t think you can out-smart the vendor by not upgrading; they’ll just stop supporting your version.
It’s really, definitely worth it to spend a little more upfront, go through the proper requirements-gathering and get a system built to order. In the long run, it’s much easier to work with something that was made to fit the way you do business, rather than change the way you do business to fit what the software is capable of.
Narratology vs. Ludology
There’s a debate going on between videogame theorists about the best way to analyze videogames. The Narratologists want to treat games as “texts” so they can bring the full force of postmodern critical theory to bear. The Ludologists argue that narrative elements in games are mere window dressing and that games are essentially systems of interacting rule sets; while narratological insights may be tangentially interesting, they fundamentally miss the point of how games operate.
Me? I’m in the Ludologist camp … .
Earlier today myself and one of the guys in the IT department had a debate over whether we should convert our company’s website to a CSS based layout instead of a table-based design.
Serial commas or no serial commas?
Personally, I’m a proponent of the serial comma.
Ok, WordMan you got me. I was being idle.
I promise to have a serious think about putting together a coherent summary. That’s about the best I can offer at this time of night. :rolleyes:
Wonder Nine Crunchentickers, beloved by the spray and pray crowd vs The Flying Ashtray, as revealed by the True Prophet, Jeff Cooper.
I own both, so don’t ask me. 
After having done some marketing research, Lego introduced two new colors to it’s palette in 2004: light bluish grey and dark bluish grey. The colors were almost -but not quite- like the ‘old’ grey colors that lego had used, but with a tint of blue since this looked ‘more vivid’ and ‘fresher’ to the target audience. The old greys (in use since the sixties) were discontinued.
The fandom was not amused.
…
Ask me about the new, studless technic lego bricks some time. “Lego bricks? without studs? Have they gone completely insane? This looks like meccano!”
The implementation of NCLB. Well, maybe it’s not really a debate, it’s mostly us screaming at politicians to get out of our classrooms. (BTW, I work at a school that routinely overperforms (has always made AYP) and yet we are also getting mandated measures from our school district to change what we’re doing to the same things they’re requiring of the underperforming schools)
end rant.
I’m not sure, I think it’s probably verboten to mention other community websites here… but I bet you and I know each other from LUGNET. 
A dam breach analysis consists of computing a peak breach flow (from factors such as height of the water, time to breach, ultimate breach width, breach side slopes, cross-sectional area of the dam, and volume of water at the time of breach) then routing the resulting flood wave downstream until it becomes insignificant.
The “sunny-day” failure assumes that the dam breach is caused by some mechanism such as piping or earthquake. The water level and volume at the time of breach are considered as being at normal pool.
The “overtopping” failure assumes that a storm (or perhaps an upstream dam failure) occurs such that the spillways of the dam are overwhelmed, water overtops the dam, and material is eroded from the downstream face such that the levee breaks.
We are in the process of preparing dam breach analyses for about 30 dams in this state. There is an ongoing debate as to which of the two scenarios should be used to compute the breach peak flow and volume.
Proponents of the “sunny day” model suggest that it would be the more catastrophic because no one would be expecting it.
Proponents of the “overtopping” model opine that a dam breach during a 1% chance or less (100-year recurrence or rarer) storm would be catastrophic.
I am of the opinion that the “sunny day” failure should be used. In the case of a 1% chance event, or worse, a Probable Maximum Rainfall event, there will be so much water everywhere that (except for extremely large reservoirs) one would not be able to “see” the volume from behind the dam. Also, in the case of such a flood event, evacuation of the flood plain will be ongoing, so that separate notification to evacuate downstream of the dam would be unnecessary. Another problem is how to model that scenario - and what paramaters would be reasonable to use. Would you assume the peak breach to occur at the exact same time as that of the flood? On the climbing leg of the hydrograph, or the falling leg? Use the 1% chance storm? or the Probable Maximum?
This has been argued back and forth for decades. I expect that we will still be arguing about it decades from now, as well.
Snape’s a good guy/Snape’s a bad guy.
What the hell happened to Cassandra Cain?
As you can see, my area of geekery is somewhat shallow.
Oh god. My area of geekery is filled with raging debates because the stakes are so low.
Let’s see:
Flarf, prose v. poetry, free verse v. form, self-publishing, poetry contest nepotism, poetry blogging–is it publication?
You could probably start a fistfight with one of these questions in the right room.
Tabs vs. spaces in source code. When we write programming code, it’s almost always indented something like this:
int main(int argc, char ** argv)
{
if(someCondition) {
print("Hello");
} else if(somethingElse) {
print("Hi");
} else {
print("Nothing");
}
}
The controversial part is what character(s) to use to do the indentations. Some people like to use a single tab character for each level of indentation. Some people prefer to use a number of space characters. Four spaces is common, but others prefer 3, or 2, or even 8. It’s important to choose one indentation style for a single programming project, because mixing tabs with spaces leads to a horrific mess if the width of a tab is not the same as the number of spaces for each indentation level.
My opinion? Tabs are way better. If one programmer prefers an indentation of 8 spaces, while another prefers 2 spaces, they can just configure their editors to display the tabs differently. If you choose to use spaces, everybody has to use the same width. Proponents of spaces say that some editors can’t handle tabs, but so long as your editor isn’t from the 80s, you should be ok.
In my museum we have a marking stone with the name of a somewhat-obscure explorer engraved on it. We’ve had experts come in and examine it, but none of them were able to determine if it is real or a copy.
Copies of it were sold in the 1930s at some sort of large exhibition-- really good copies, actually. No records were kept by the company that made the copies of where they got the original and there’s no mention in our spotty records of our stone being copied. We’re not even sure when we acquired it. There’s no record the explorer got as far as our location, though it’s not impossible that he did.
I side with my curator: he took the stone off of exhibit because of the doubts surrounding its authenticity. Some people objected, but I think it’s the right decision. There’s just no way to be sure, and it’s best to err on the side of caution.