timo

Perhaps you are right with your statement when seen from a global perspective. But as a somewhat experienced c++ programmer now mostly working on Java projects, I run into conceptual differences on almost a daily basis. Java's lack of nested namespaced, reference-only policy, lack of friend declarations, the differences between generics and templates, lack of destructors and most importantly Java's lack of const-correctness regularly make me bang my head on the keyboard. And that is after already having accepted the more-widely known differences like Java philosophy rejecting the concepts of operator overloading or multiple inheritance. And before you get me wrong: There are advantages of Java over c++, too. In fact, most Java programmers I meet actually consider the differences I listed as advantages. But there are also issues like "portability" that even I consider an advantage.

Wherever one doubts the existence of Zombies, he should be shown this thread.

I complain about the lack of a definition of "poor country" and you claim that Saudi Arabia is no exception from that undefined pool of prejudice? I can assure you that reports about poverty in the US are much more frequent in German TV than reports about poverty in the oil countries. I wouldn't call the US a poor country because of that. Would you? If "no": what's your point? I'm not going to waste time here with a discussion that is not at least based on quantitative statements (even if they are as shallow as the graph presented by DJBruce).

Assuming you are correct: what's your point?

Why move it to speculations? People in the speculations forum are usually expected to back up their premises, as far as I see.

Isn't it funny that when I think of "Muslim countries" all the countries coming to my mind spontaneously seem to be the "few exceptions"? Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Iran, Kuwait, and Qatar, for example. I doubt that the relative wealth (compared to world average) of these nations is related to or even due to the religion of the people there, of course. I checked the five countries with the lowest Human Development Index according to the German Wikipedia: 3/5 have a predominantly Christian population (Zimbabwe, Democratic Republic of Kongo, Burundi), 1/5 is almost exclusively Muslim (Niger), and 1/5 mainly some local religion with Christianity coming second (Mozambique). So what is the basis you foot your statement that "Muslim countries are poor and generally just doesn't compete that well in the global economy" on, and what is the definition of "poor and generally just don't compete that well in the global economy"? Or are you merely asking why the US, Europe, China, and Japan are not Muslim? @Fuzzwood: Yes, indeed: you do sound very racist (in lack of the word "religionist"). But you're not alone in there.

I have not looked at the questions. Neither do I know the sample size, nor the sample size that would be required to make accurate statements. The problem with distrusting statistics to deal with properties of large quantities of people is that there's no real other option to trust instead. Perhaps prejudice, since that's a fast and easy method. But prejudice is not very scientific. So in a scientific sense you've got to chose between statements you do not trust for whatever reason, or no statements at all. For the validity of these data: the results are pretty much stable over the years, so I believe the sample size is large enough for differences not being completely due to random fluctuations. Since even I can think of this possible problem, it's not too surprising that the experts seem to have done that correctly. If you are talking about the PISA test that the articles skyhook linked to talk about: it's not an IQ test at all. It's a test that evaluates the skills of 15 year-old pupils in the fields of reading comprehension, math, and natural sciences (and possibly others that I am not aware of).

Why would a test designed to test the average student not be an indication of the general population, but only of the top students? One possibility would be that a larger part of the general population already dropped out of school at the age of 15, but that's purely speculative. I think you should bother to add why you think so.

My old wishes: - (Option to have) Avatar back on the left. - Automatic ignoring of threads (full threads, not only the posts; and also on the forum search level) started by people on my ignore list (or whatever the current equivalent for people on my ignore list is).

I think all programming languages and environments keep their source codes as normal ASCII files. So you can program with notepad if you want, what you save is the source code. What you then do with the source code depends on you and the programming language. The two typical options are running it via an interpreter installed on your computer or compiling it into an executable file and then running the compiled executable. A compiled file does not need the compiler anymore so in theory you could copy it to another machine and run it there. However, the target machine and the machine you compiled on need to have similar architectures for this to work, making this type of spreading software more typical in the Windows world. I know it is cool having created an "independent" "real" program rather than just a script for some interpreter. But in practice the actual advantage is not really that great - I personally see having to compile as a disadvantage since at least c++ compilers can be somewhat slow (during my diploma thesis I could go for a 20 minute coffee break if I had to compile and had touched some core files since the last compilation - and that happened about once a day on average and not necessarily at coffee time).

It is an extension (admittedly the commonly-mentioned one, hence my guess).

My guess would be the gamma function.

Since free neutrons are unstable and decay with a lifetime of ~12 minutes, oldtrons do not exist. A similar reason goes for postrons: They are forbidden by stable protons but predicted in some exotic physics models where protons can decay. ------------------ A lawyer and a physicist sit next to each other in a plane and talk about the latest book by Steven Hawking (or any other author of popular science books you want): Physicist: "Well, it's a nice book but there's a few things I don't understand." Lawyer: "Really? Ok, let me explain ..."

That's amazing. I didn't know it's possible to stay in Kindergarden so long. Didn't it get boring after a few centuries?

1) Hi! 2) The forum structure to some extent reflects the topics that are discussed. If you manage to interest people in geo-science topics or get some discussions about it running otherways, then that would be great (and also most likely result in an appropriate forum being created).

For sending him a PM, klick on his name and select "Send a private message to Klaynos".

What had Louis XIV said had he been the leader of a basque seperatist organization rather than the king of france? "L´ETA, c´est moi !".

No, I was mostly joking. I don´t think your name is so prone to that as mine and it was actually only one or two PMs in the last 2.5 years.

You might regret using your tag from computer games here as soon as you start to get private messages telling you "hi, do you really like slaughtering? I like war, too" .

[math] \forall \, \epsilon<0 \dots [/math]

I do look here quite often and it´s especially nice to get a few more details about people I´ve already met in the physics section.