What is the Raging Debate in your area of geekery?

Giving up seats on the bus and holding doors open for women - antiquated sexism or not?

no, i don’t get out much…

The ongoing problems between the Walt Disney Company and Oriental Land Company, which owns, operates and maintains Tokyo Disney Resort.

Will the Car of Tomorrow really reduce costs, increase safety AND eliminate the “aero push?”

Are the “Buschwhackers” destroying the Busch Series?

Should the schedule include more road courses, and if so, at the expense of which tracks?

Do dog geeks get to play?

In my dog geek world- there are two major controversies…
My breed of choice are working Border Collies- so the first controversy is pro-AKC vs. pro-ABCA (the working registry). Most Border Collie folk, myself included, feel that trotting a border collie around a grassy ring and comparing it’s fluffiness (or lack thereof) to the other dogs trotting mindlessly is obscene and directly conflicts with everything a working dog should be.

The second controversy is among us working folks and it boils down to sheepdog vs. cowdog. Some sheepdog folk think that the cow dog folk favor overly aggressive, poorly trained dogs while some cow dog folk think that sheepdog people favor weak dogs that get by on training but no real courage or skill. Surprisingly, I’ve been in much nastier battles over this (I have dogs that are better on cows and dogs that are better on sheep but no weak or viscious dogs) than the AKC thing that I feel far more strongly about.

Whether psychotropic drugs do or do not have such specific effects, and must be or must not be so delicately calibrated for dosage, that jails do not meet the applicable legal standard of care if they swich mentally ill inmates over to generics.

Brand-name psych drugs = huge cost issue for corrections.

NOW we’re talking geekery with context! This is interesting stuff!

Pochacco - can you give us any more on this? I didn’t even know there was videogame theorists! What are the uses / implications of breaking down a game one way or the other?

NinetyWt - why can’t you do both?

Lissa - does the museum lose money by not exhibiting that piece?

**Rysto ** your argument makes sense - why would others argue otherwise?

Smokinjbc - interesting - makes sense that a utilitarian dog would have controversies about showing and and about its proper use…

MostlyClueless - so the fandom was not amused? How is that playing out (“playing out” with Legos - lordy am I not funny…)? What are the upset fans doing?

Interesting stuff…

Amongst the Star Wars fandom, EU vs. G-Canon seems to be a hot issue from time to time (I’m of the opinion that Kevin J Anderson is a talentless hack, and in any case, Star Wars is George Lucas’ universe, so whatever he says is correct, regardless of whether or not it conflicts with Crix Madine vs. the Space Weasels or Attack of the Black Hole Beaurocrats.)

Amongst Babylon 5 fans: Green or Purple? :wink:

Though I haven’t been very active in the Trek community for some years, I have seen many a heated debate online about relative size/power of ships (ie: Whether or not the USS Defiant is more powerful than the Enterprise E. Yes, they argue about that), and about various design classification minuate (Is the Enterprise A a Constitution Class starship, a Constitution Refit, a Yorktown Class Starship, or an Enterprise Class Starship? Along with numerous other variations).

And then you have the classic Star Trek vs. Star Wars debates.

Is that the issue of wheter or not to put a comma before the “and” in a list? For example: apples, pears, bannanas[,] and pineapples.

Tabs don’t work well when aligning arguments (after the first line) to functions with the opening parenthesis, or when aligning operators after the equal sign, or when aligning multiple conditions in an if-statement or while-statement.

The problem is that most editors will use an algorithm like this. If you want to align your function argument at the 23 character and your tab stop is 4, then it will insert 5 tabs and 3 spaces. Now, when someone with a tab stop of 8 opens the file, the arguments will be pushed all the way to the right.

The best method I’ve heard is to use tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment. For each level of indentation, e.g., the body of an if-statement or a loop, use a tab. Within that level, use spaces. For instance, if you want to align an argument 15 characters into the body of 2nd-level if-statement, use 2 tabs and 15 spaces. However, I have not seen any editor that supports this.

Another war of religion that is popular lately is “static vs dynamic typing”.

http://mindview.net/WebLog/log-0052

Well, there are plenty of lego fans with sizeable lego collections out there. The two biggest groups seem to be the castleheads and the space warriors*. Both use grey a lot, to simulate respectively stone and metal. Most fans have collected Lego bricks for decades. There have been petitions, people threatening to quit the lego hobby alltogether and a lot of nasty flamewars. An open letter to the CEO, signed by hundreds of fans, also didn’t yield much.
On bricklink (a kind of ebay-like site where lego fans can sell and buy individual bricks) the prices of old gray spiked, while new grey (being new and rare) also isn’t cheap.
But as it’s now 2006 it’s clear that Lego won’t be going back. They’ve issued a statement to the fans that they were wrong and they shouldn’t have done it, but they can’t undo what’s done. And every once in a while we hear that Lego still has warehouses of old grey bricks it doesn’t know what to do with… but we’re getting over it.

I believe it’s OK as long as one doesn’t start/continue a board war. Maybe I’ve seen you around, but usually I don’t post that often. If I might inquire, who are you? I’m this guy.

*no official terms, but you get the idea.

Er, yeah, so my World of Warcraft guild…

Should we or should we not discontinue the use of DKP for blues dropping in ZG?

Because we’re all the way through Molten Core and that gear is way better than ZG, so if we have newbie or alts that we wanna run through, we should be just be giving them the gear to get them up to the level to run MC. On the other hand, WE all gave up DKP (Dragon Kill Points, or a point system to divide up loot fairly) for the blues we got in ZG, even if we dusted them later, so…

Also, should rogues have precedence over warriors on daggers in the DKP system, or not?

Also…some of the strategies we want to try in Black Wing Lair…will they or won’t they work for us or will they wipe the raid? Cause we’re in Australia and have higher lags, and some of the strats will probably only work with low lag times, and so…

Yeah, I’m’a geek.

Cheers,
G

I was going to post the same thing.

Personally, I’m an anti-serialist by upbringing. However, I do recognize that serial commas can make complex lists (particularly listing groups of groups) much more readable, and have come to accept that not everyone who uses them is a prepubescent proto-hominid who, when not writing, is primarily occupied with the task of smearing feces over the walls of his cage. I have even, on rare occasion… used them myself…

But it makes me feel dirty and ashamed afterwards.

Well met! I don’t recognize your name, but I dropped off Lugnet about 4 or 5 years ago. I have a huge appreciation for your building style - I was one of the first people to advocate using Tom McDonald’s “SNOT” term (Studs Not On Top), and I was pretty involved with microscale building, especially with mecha and such.

I won’t link to my posts, but if you check out my email address it’s not too difficult to figure out who I am. :o

Oh, I almost forgot. Space. :slight_smile:

This debate is complicated by significant whitespace in the otherwise excellent language Python. (Actually, I really like significant whitespace now, but I still see how it bugs the crap out of people.)

I feel the situation would be simpler if tabs had been defined as an 8-character space. I know that 8-char intention plays hell with code that (a) has deeply-nested blocks and (b) is destined for the office printer, but if it weren’t variable in width then it’d be much easier to reliably pad out indentation that aren’t nice multiples of 8.

That said, I’ve given up on aligning my parameter lists with the opening parentheses. I do a variation of K&R-style indenting where the first parameter is indented twice on the next line, for example:


void *fubarSwapFile(
                HandleTypeA *param1,
                HandleTypeB *param2
        ) {
        for( i = 0; i < HandleTypeA->blahblahblah; i++ ) {
                doSomethingWithI(i);
        }
}


It’s not pretty, but it’s more readable to me.

Since you’re obviously talking Harry Potter, did you mean Cassandra Clare (once Cassandra Clair)? Because that is kind of a long story.

The old grey/bluish grey debate might be the geekiest dispute, but the one that burns most fiercely is surely the Lego/Legos one, isn’t it?

Not at all. I doubt if most people know that it’s missing. Anyone who wants to see it has only to ask-- we’ll bring it out of storage if anyone wants to study it.

Or, which is preferable, the muscular, athletic, but arguably unbalanced 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons rules, or the subtle, exquisitely balanced, but less visually exciting 4th edition rules??

There is no debate - “Legos” is an abomination, by company mandate.

My geekery doesn’t have much Raging Debate, other than a 1600 or 1650 cutoff (1650! and Milipitas can kiss my axe), and the “Is Heavy a real Martial Art?” one. I guess the “is Cut&Thrust going to kill Heavy” one has come up, but it’s not serious.