What is the Raging Debate in your area of geekery?

In My Humble Opinion
121

[QUOTE=WordMan]

Umm…am I being whooshed here? I don’t do Great Debates for a variety of reasons so have no clue if **Mayo Speaks ** is serious or attempting sarcasm…
[/QUOTE]

You’ve been whooshed. On The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert poses this question to his guests, who are almost all quite liberal. If the guest protests, he says that he’ll mark them down for “great” so that everyone will know that they didn’t vote for “greatest.” And while I’m not as vehemently liberal as many on this board, I’m still a Democrat and I think Bush has been the worst president since Warren Harding.

122

Mayo Speaks!: Boy - do I feel better!

And who’da thunk this little thread would stretch out to 120+ posts - guess we all have our share of raging debates!

123

[QUOTE=WordMan]
guess we all have our share of raging debates!
[/QUOTE]

Actually, it’s more like we all have our share of geekery. It is, after all, the SDMB…

124

What makes an arcitecture SOA vs just plain old J2EE…

Yeah, we are geeks…

125

[QUOTE=Raguleader]
He did make a point of mentioning how he wouldn’t NEED the extra bullets of the Beretta if the 9mm bullets would put the bad guy down like the Colt’s 45ACP could. :smiley:
[/QUOTE]
This is at the top of discussion at work with the ‘5.56 or 7.62x51’ and ‘how do you win an insurgency.’ I’ve got to go with: ‘always take the stoping power over more ammo’ and ‘give everyone a waterbuffalo.’ :slight_smile:

126

Oh, the audiophile/Home Theater community is just full of insane debates:

“Do expensive digital cables sound better?”
“Is Bose any good?”
Tube amps vs solid-state amps.
Biwiring speakers - does it do anything?
Do power conditioners make an audible difference?
SACD vs DVD-A
LCD vs DLP projector?
and the big one -

“Do LPs sound better than CDs?”

127

My contribution to the spacing/bracer wars:



int function1(int arg1, int arg2) {
	/* What we're going to do */

	if (arg1 == arg2) {	// comment
		arg1 += arg2;	// comment
	}
	else if (arg1 < arg2) {
		arg1 -= arg2;	// comment
	}
	else {	// arg1 > arg2
		arg1 *= arg2;	//comment
	}

	/* What we're going to do now */

	if (
		arg1 == arg2
		|| (
			global1 != global2
			&& g_bool
		)
	) {
		arg1 =
			arg2
			/ (
				10 * SOME_DEFINE
			)
			+ global1
			+ (g_bool ? 0 : 1)
		;
	}
#ifdef DEBUG	// comment
	else {
		printf(
			"%d %d %d %d %d
",
			arg1,
			arg2
			global1,
			global2,
			g_bool
		);
	}
#endif	//DEBUG
	return 0;
}

int function2(
	int arg1,
	int arg2,
	int arg3,
	int arg4,
	int arg5
) {
	...
}

Anything which has contents will either stay on it’s own line, or end at the same depth as it began on. And when the segment is broken down, everything inside is exactly one tab off.

Simple, and works for everything.

128

Is Jon actually the son of Rhaeger Targaryen and Lyanna Stark? (from the fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire)

When I used to be an active member of the Rurouni Kenshin fan community, there were always pitched wars over whether Kenshin was better off with Kaoru or Tomoe. Personally I like Kaoru until the latter part of the series, where I feel she turned into a sap. Tomoe was okay, but she’s already dead when the series starts, which makes it kind of a moot point for me.

Is Woman Warrior a work of genius or a sell-out? (And don’t even get me started on what Asian-American scholars have to say about The Joy Luck Club. Have you ever mentioned The Da Vinci Code to an English literature scholar? You’d get a similar reaction.)

129

PvP : is it destroying CoX ( City of Heros/City of Villains ) ? Are the people who like PvP immature jerks, or are the people who complain about it whining carebears ?

Gor, and the Draka. Genocide, mass torment then genocide, or reform ? If the former, what techniques, tactics, and forces would you use ?

Is Star Trek dead ?

Is the Culture paradise, or a dystopia where humans are nothing but the pets of the Minds ?

Is ICS perfectly good canon, or wanking by Star Wars partisans desperate to claim firepower superiority of Star Trek once and for all ?

Are mecha ever better than tanks ?

Do Star Wars shields stop 5th Imperium hypermissles ?

Can the Star Wars Empire stop a single 5th Imperium planetoid ? A 4th Empire one ? A 4th Imperium one ?

Can Dahak beat Petey, with prep time ?

Who wins with prep time, Batman or Reed Richards ?

130

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
PvP : is it destroying CoX ( City of Heros/City of Villains ) ? Are the people who like PvP immature jerks, or are the people who complain about it whining carebears ?
[/QUOTE]

What, it can’t be both? :smiley:

131

Is it more important to run lots of long miles at a slower pace, or do less miles at a faster pace? Which will get you going your fastest?

132

Reopen a zombie thread or start a new one?

133

I think I can come up with something close to what the OP asks. I collect Beatles recordings. I’m not too active in it anymore, because there hasn’t been anything new to collect in a number of years. Since The Beatles’ UK catalogue was issued on CD in 1987, and everybody said how dry and awful they sounded, enterprising collectors have been acquiring every vinyl issue, worldwide, cleaning them up on the computer, and pirating them on CD.

Some, apparently, are better than others. The debate is “which is better? Dr. Ebbetts, or Millennium Remasters?” Yeah, well, the Ebbetts 2006 Upgrades are better than the 2005 upgrades, which are better than the 2004 upgrades, which are better than the 2003 upgrades of the 2002 catalogue. But the Millennium Remasters are smoother-sounding and have more bass. Oh, that sucks, because the Ebbetts remasters are crisper and more detailed. You think so? Wait 'til you hear the 2007 Ebbetts upgrades.

This kind of thing goes on endlessly now, 24/7, in some quarters. I personally don’t care, and I don’t hang out with those people. But there are multitudes of anal-retentive collectors out there analyzing the differences between multiple transfers of different copies of the same records. The Beatles only made thirteen albums (12 1/2 if you want to discount the instrumental side of “Yellow Submarine”, or 12 if you want to discount it entirely). There were many, many variations in album content and mixing in different countries. Nearly everything that ever came out, anywhere, has been pirated. All the mono, all the stereo. All the box sets. All the colored vinyl and picture discs, which are exactly the same as any other pressing, but noisier.

If you think that’s strange, check this out: people who are tired of listening to the same old Beatles tracks are now dissecting them and making mash-ups with elements digitally extracted from the stereo images. It’s exactly like karaoke, or listening to the rear channels in surround, but not the front. This was all years before “Love” came out. You can hear parts of the songs that are buried or otherwise obscured when listening to the regular stereo mix. I have a couple of tapes I made in the '80s that are the same thing - there was a short in the wire and I got the L-R mix by electrical accident. So I made a couple of tapes, in a kind of “oh, that’s neat” way, and never listened to them again. Back when this practice was starting up, my help was solicited, but I declined on the basis of, “meh.”

This is what insatiable people do when they discover that there are no more bootlegs of actual unreleased material to collect. Fortunately, I’m satiable.

134

From my native Queendom:

The Kabbalah Centre: Purveyors of genuine spiritual enlightenment, or hucksters out to brainwash you while emptying your bank account?

We have the whole range. There are zealous converts, people who were into it “before it was cool”, skeptics and naysayers, people with almost encyclopedic knowledge of it, people who live it every day. It’s always a flame war and no one ever wins.

The other one is the newly-revived fur debate. There are so many animal rights activists on the boards, more than you might think. It’s heartening and lively though, it reminds us all that we still have brains, in between the threads about chart stats and yogalates.

135

Right now it seems to be whether total body training or splits are better. It’s only a raging debate because most of the participants don’t quite seem to get that it might be important to consider who the trainee is and what their particular needs are.

For those of you who aren’t weightlifting geeks, every day total body training includes a compound lower body movement, an upper body pressing movement, and an upper body pulling movement. A typical day might be squats, bench presses and rows. A split is any other training style. Common ones are body part splits (chest/arms, back, legs) or movement-oriented splits (lower body thigh-dominant, upper body horizontal, lower body hip-dominant, upper body vertical).

The general consensus among the top strength coaches is that full body training is ideal for beginners, and splits become more necessary as the trainee becomes more advanced. Why that hasn’t settled the debate is anyone’s guess.

[QUOTE=Sunshine and Smiles]
Is it more important to run lots of long miles at a slower pace, or do less miles at a faster pace? Which will get you going your fastest?
[/QUOTE]

This is a debate? Does no one know about the law of specific adaptation to imposed demand?

136

Is the phrase “Any traffic in the area, please advise” ever appropriately used in radio transmissions in the vicinity of an untowered airport?

(Answer: No)

137

[QUOTE=DianaG]
Seasons 6 & 7, The UPN Years: Simply misguided, or a blatant attempt to cause the apoplectic deaths of several thousand geeks?

Conversely, Marti Noxon: Satan incarnate, or merely his Spawn?
[/QUOTE]

I realize this is a zombie thread, but… pfffft!

The people who disparage the 6th season are just purists who can’t handle change. They are the same people that call their favorite band sellouts if their musical style evolves. I mean, c’mon, how can you not like OMWF?

But we can all rally around the fact that the 7th season sucked. :smiley:

138

[QUOTE=ultrafilter]
This is a debate? Does no one know about the law of specific adaptation to imposed demand?
[/QUOTE]

Which is fine and good, except that often times the imposed demand (i.e. running at or faster than race pace) can levy too great a toll upon the body, which can result in injury or stagnation in performance, not to mention not properly developing the aerobic system.

For the long slow distance runners, you’ve got guys like Peter Snell and Frank Shorter, who ran 100+ miles a week and achieved success.

For the quality over quantity guys, you have Seb Coe and Roger Bannister who focused primarily on faster paced track and interval workouts and achieved success.

139

[QUOTE=Richard Parker]
But we can all rally around the fact that the 7th season sucked. :smiley:
[/QUOTE]

HEATHEN!! attacks with a stick :smiley:

I liked season 7, for the most part. Tended not to get as drearily depressing as season 6 did, even at the darkest moments. Of course, it might have helped that, in my case, I started with Season 6 (the episode before OMWF, to be exact)

140

[QUOTE=Raguleader]
Of course, it might have helped that, in my case, I started with Season 6
[/QUOTE]

Yes, it definitely helped. People who literally grew along with the series (I was a teenager when I got into it and an adult when it ended) found it to be a very long distance between Mr Pointy and the Barbie Dream Axe.