You missed the part where I said 95% of the time. Seriously, if you count all the times the normal person will run into metric units in a day compared to imperial, the metric percentage is quite low. And they certainly are in an extreme few instances when you're going to need to do conversions into larger/smaller units or imagine how much a given metric amount is.
As mattcoz has already pointed out, you missed the point. I was talking about consistency of which system you pick. The problem is in England where they aren't very consistent in their system, you still need to know the weird imperial measurements for a lot of things. That very example you gave is exactly on target. English people still talk about their weight in stones. So they need to know the metric system for some weights and the imperial for others. Americans (in general) need only know the imperial weights.
I'm not sure why Americans feel the need to stick to imperial
Because using a crappy system 95% of the time is better than using a good system 50% of the time and a crappy system 50% of the time?
I wish everyone in the US had switched to metric before I was born. But if they were only going to do it half-assed (0.196850394-assed for metric folks), I'd just as soon stick with the crappy system. If you're going to do something poorly, at least by consistent.
And you clearly didn't read my post very thoroughly. I made no mention whatsoever about stem cell therapies. Perhaps my phrasing was a bit sparse. Basically, we know for a FACT that embryonic stem cells are pluripotent. We also know for a FACT that no adult stem cell source has been shown to produce pluripotent stem cells. Right now, pluripotent stem cells == embryonic stem cells. My whole point is that there have been so many possible methods that have been touted as a replacement for embryonic stem cells. However, none of them have been shown to be pluripotent, thus limiting their uses and making them not really a replacement that will get us out from under the ethical problem.
That isn't to say multipotent stem cells have NO uses. You would never find me saying that. ESCR has only been around since about 1998, so it's a bit jumping the gun to start talking about all the successful stem cell therapies and putting down therapies that might be created using pluripotent stem cells. Right now, there are a lot of hurdles for them to be used. First, there is the giant mess with funding. Second, there is the problem with contamination in a lot of stem cell lines. Third, there is the giant ethical issue. Fourth, there is the largest problem - we haven't yet figured out all the buttons to push in a pluripotent stem cell to make it do what we want. The last is both the story of science and a results of the first three issues. But since you don't have issues 1-3, much more research has gone into using multipotent stem cells and hence more success. Personally, I think it's GREAT that there has been success. But to ignore the fact that a multipotent cell has less potential than a pluripotent one is to not only be ignorant of science but also grammar.
Long answer - It really sounds like you are trying to turn this political. I don't know why that has to be. Bad science reporting is something that is really independent of your political persuasion. Embryonic stem cells are not the only topic that gets bad science reporting. Just watch the AP/Reuters news feeds for about a month. There are plenty of apolitical but still sensational science stories.
I've seen so many announcements about some non-embryonic stem cell source that will solve all the ethics issues that I'm a bit skeptical. I know it's the nature of science "journalism" that the more sensational something is, the more likely it will be reported long before it's proven. But so far I haven't heard anything about the previous methods being the silver bullet that the initial press made them out to be.
Yes, COMPUTE is definitely the way I'd go, too. I'm fine with verbosity, when it actually makes things CLEARER. Both the COMPUTE way and the non-COBOL way are clearer than "SUBTRACT TOTAL-EXPENSES FROM GROSS-SALES GIVING NET-PROFIT."
I think that was (almost) the OP's point. The COBOL language had little to do with whether it was clear or not. Therefore, the COBOL language itself did not make it MORE clear than another language would have.
On the other hand, the syntax of COBOL can make it harder to read even when programmed right. If you compare the following two lines of code, do you really thing the first is easier to read and understand than the second?
SUBTRACT TOTAL-EXPENSES FROM GROSS-SALES GIVING NET-PROFIT.
NET_PROFIT = GROSS_SALES - TOTAL_EXPENSES;
This is especially true as you move out of "easy" stuff like in this example and move on to more complicated things that you don't already understand before seeing the code.
I've always wanted to try it, but one of the problems (other than being able to find the good stuff) is the chaperone. None of my friends are anywhere nearly big and strong enough to restrain me. I'd be the perfect chaperone for THEM, though. Oh well.
Wow. You do realize I was just making a snarky comment, right?
On the serious side, I find people predicting or claiming to know what aliens or their technologies will or won't do to be about as plausible as people telling us what human life will be like in 100 years. Hell, they'd be doing good to get correct predictions for 20 years down the road. And this is on a species that a) they know thousands of years of history on, b) they can observe every day and c) they are. And they're out there making predictions about aliens?
Or possibly because they all look like horrible winged demons with pointy tails...
Re:UFO vs. alien spacecraft
on
UFOs In the News
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
I don't know... maybe it's like when you drive through the national parks with the bears and you stay in the car. Maybe they really did pop by just to take a peek. And who says they came just to visit us and then went back home. Maybe we were just on the way to some other place they were going. Kind of like when you're on the road trip and just have to stop and have a look at the giant dinosaur sculpture in front of some random restaurant.
I agree, mostly. The thing of it is, I believe (and it's a belief since I've never seen any real studies) that local farmers and ranchers are more likely to take better precautions due to their reliance on brand loyalty and repeat business. However, like the mortuary company that just dumped people out in the field instead of cremating them like they were supposed to do, there are always going to be problems everywhere. And having enough relatives that think nothing of using pesticides that the govt bans if they can find them at the army surplus store, I know that you shouldn't always have that much confidence in a local operation. Oh, and btw, these relatives live in the country and tend to have gardens. Yay.
Yeah, but so what? BSE isn't what's killing meat-eaters 10 years before the veggies. It's cancer, heart disease, and stroke.
And cancer, heart disease and stroke aren't caused by a diet that includes meat. It's caused by a BAD diet. I know vegetarians, so I know you can eat just as unhealthily and still be a vegetarian.
As far as relevance, the comment is directed at the PP's opener of how vegetables are good because they are prion-free.
I'd be willing to bet more people have died from e. coli in their salad than have died from BSE.
According to wikipedia, 157 people worldwide are known to have contracted BSE. It says the following about the Sept spinach outbreak in the US: "It would lead to 199 infections, three deaths, and thirty-one kidney failures by October 6, 2006." And that's just a single outbreak in a single first world country that lasted a single month. You can say maybe we just don't know about a lot of people who died from BSE, but the same is true of e. coli.
Or how about the fact that at least 555 people contracted Hepatits A from green onions in a single outbreak in Pennsylvania in 2003? Or the 2000 outbreak of salmonella in brean sprouts? Or maybe the 3000 people who got sick from salmonella ice cream in a single outbreak in 1994? Or the 1985 outbreak of listeria in cheese in southern California that led to 47 deaths?
I pulled all of these from wikipedia. And yes, it's very true that there are plenty of outbreaks of the same thing in meat. Unlike you, I'm not posting this as a public display of smugness and condescension. I'm simply pointing out that the real danger lies in eating food that other people grow and prepare. Not that you'd be free of problems even if you ate only food that grew in your own garden.
The fact of the matter is this - living is dangerous. If you must worry, worry about getting hit by a drunk driver on your way home from a New Year's Eve party. It's several orders of magnitude more likely to happen than dying from any foodborne illness.
Well, I can speak for life in my university during the early-to-mid 90s. POPing was common for anyone with a person computer who had to dial in. It was also popular due to email quotas being very small. I worked networking tech support, so I fielded walk-up and phone calls to help people with it.
At that time, if you lived in a few dorms on campus, you could jockey for one of the half-dozen dumb terminals in your dorm. Other dorms simply didn't have them. Ethernet had not been installed outside of a very few (it took another 5 years or so for this to really turn around). Most who had their own PC and didn't want to tie up their phone line all the time (myself included), used POP.
Typically, Windows users do what the software tells them to. No logic is involved. I know I've never used a PST file and always kept my mail on the server.
In reality, the world is different today than it was back when POPing your messages down to your local machine was the norm. It was a world where bandwidth and server-side storage space was much more precious. I know even back then, my university account had a fairly tiny quota. If I wanted to keep many emails past a few months, downloading them via POP was the only option. And if I was on any other terminal than a direct line in a computer lab, I was sure going to want to download my emails and read them offline.
The only reason Windows (or Mac, which has the same history with offline mail) comes into it is that back then private non-Windows/Mac machines were practically non-existant. One guy in my dorm had his own linux box, but that was certainly not the norm.
The UK version gives prominence to the breadth and depth of BBC content in the UK including news, sport and weather along with UK radio and TV. You may prefer this version if you live in the UK.
The International version gives prominence to world news, sport and weather along with the BBC's international radio and TV services. You may prefer this version if you live outside the UK.
Playing with the site a bit (you can switch your version at the top), it appears that it just rearranges the same stories for the different versions. Just like Google News or something where you pick your topics. And the left bar navigation shows the continents, which you have to click on "World" on the regular UK page for.
So I wouldn't call the cost differences of building/maintaining the site significant due to two versions. It appears to just be a little bit of server-side scripting that had to be done anyway to allow you to click on different categories and get only those stories. As I said before, I will agree that there is probably a decent badwidth and hardware cost for making it available outside of the UK.
But again, I think the news is a special case. A lot of countries like the US and the UK have always funded programs to bring news into areas where they don't get a western viewpoint. The return on this investment is a lot harder to quanitify, but it is real.
Slashdot Mirror
You missed the part where I said 95% of the time. Seriously, if you count all the times the normal person will run into metric units in a day compared to imperial, the metric percentage is quite low. And they certainly are in an extreme few instances when you're going to need to do conversions into larger/smaller units or imagine how much a given metric amount is.
As mattcoz has already pointed out, you missed the point. I was talking about consistency of which system you pick. The problem is in England where they aren't very consistent in their system, you still need to know the weird imperial measurements for a lot of things. That very example you gave is exactly on target. English people still talk about their weight in stones. So they need to know the metric system for some weights and the imperial for others. Americans (in general) need only know the imperial weights.
"to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable"
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary
censoring:
"1 a : the institution, system, or practice of censoring"
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictio
Censorship can refer to goverment censorship, but doesn't have to. Anyone who has any power (including companies, contest judges, etc.) can censor.
As Carlin says "Try to pay attention to the language we've all agreed on."
I wish everyone in the US had switched to metric before I was born. But if they were only going to do it half-assed (0.196850394-assed for metric folks), I'd just as soon stick with the crappy system. If you're going to do something poorly, at least by consistent.
And you clearly didn't read my post very thoroughly. I made no mention whatsoever about stem cell therapies. Perhaps my phrasing was a bit sparse. Basically, we know for a FACT that embryonic stem cells are pluripotent. We also know for a FACT that no adult stem cell source has been shown to produce pluripotent stem cells. Right now, pluripotent stem cells == embryonic stem cells. My whole point is that there have been so many possible methods that have been touted as a replacement for embryonic stem cells. However, none of them have been shown to be pluripotent, thus limiting their uses and making them not really a replacement that will get us out from under the ethical problem.
That isn't to say multipotent stem cells have NO uses. You would never find me saying that. ESCR has only been around since about 1998, so it's a bit jumping the gun to start talking about all the successful stem cell therapies and putting down therapies that might be created using pluripotent stem cells. Right now, there are a lot of hurdles for them to be used. First, there is the giant mess with funding. Second, there is the problem with contamination in a lot of stem cell lines. Third, there is the giant ethical issue. Fourth, there is the largest problem - we haven't yet figured out all the buttons to push in a pluripotent stem cell to make it do what we want. The last is both the story of science and a results of the first three issues. But since you don't have issues 1-3, much more research has gone into using multipotent stem cells and hence more success. Personally, I think it's GREAT that there has been success. But to ignore the fact that a multipotent cell has less potential than a pluripotent one is to not only be ignorant of science but also grammar .
Long answer - It really sounds like you are trying to turn this political. I don't know why that has to be. Bad science reporting is something that is really independent of your political persuasion. Embryonic stem cells are not the only topic that gets bad science reporting. Just watch the AP/Reuters news feeds for about a month. There are plenty of apolitical but still sensational science stories.
I've seen so many announcements about some non-embryonic stem cell source that will solve all the ethics issues that I'm a bit skeptical. I know it's the nature of science "journalism" that the more sensational something is, the more likely it will be reported long before it's proven. But so far I haven't heard anything about the previous methods being the silver bullet that the initial press made them out to be.
Yes, COMPUTE is definitely the way I'd go, too. I'm fine with verbosity, when it actually makes things CLEARER. Both the COMPUTE way and the non-COBOL way are clearer than "SUBTRACT TOTAL-EXPENSES FROM GROSS-SALES GIVING NET-PROFIT."
I think that was (almost) the OP's point. The COBOL language had little to do with whether it was clear or not. Therefore, the COBOL language itself did not make it MORE clear than another language would have.
On the other hand, the syntax of COBOL can make it harder to read even when programmed right. If you compare the following two lines of code, do you really thing the first is easier to read and understand than the second?
SUBTRACT TOTAL-EXPENSES FROM GROSS-SALES GIVING NET-PROFIT.
NET_PROFIT = GROSS_SALES - TOTAL_EXPENSES;
This is especially true as you move out of "easy" stuff like in this example and move on to more complicated things that you don't already understand before seeing the code.
This "COBAL" sounds much better than COBOL! Sign me up!
..."hackers disagree".
I've always wanted to try it, but one of the problems (other than being able to find the good stuff) is the chaperone. None of my friends are anywhere nearly big and strong enough to restrain me. I'd be the perfect chaperone for THEM, though. Oh well.
Wow. You do realize I was just making a snarky comment, right?
On the serious side, I find people predicting or claiming to know what aliens or their technologies will or won't do to be about as plausible as people telling us what human life will be like in 100 years. Hell, they'd be doing good to get correct predictions for 20 years down the road. And this is on a species that a) they know thousands of years of history on, b) they can observe every day and c) they are. And they're out there making predictions about aliens?
Or possibly because they all look like horrible winged demons with pointy tails...
I don't know... maybe it's like when you drive through the national parks with the bears and you stay in the car. Maybe they really did pop by just to take a peek. And who says they came just to visit us and then went back home. Maybe we were just on the way to some other place they were going. Kind of like when you're on the road trip and just have to stop and have a look at the giant dinosaur sculpture in front of some random restaurant.
I agree, mostly. The thing of it is, I believe (and it's a belief since I've never seen any real studies) that local farmers and ranchers are more likely to take better precautions due to their reliance on brand loyalty and repeat business. However, like the mortuary company that just dumped people out in the field instead of cremating them like they were supposed to do, there are always going to be problems everywhere. And having enough relatives that think nothing of using pesticides that the govt bans if they can find them at the army surplus store, I know that you shouldn't always have that much confidence in a local operation. Oh, and btw, these relatives live in the country and tend to have gardens. Yay.
As far as relevance, the comment is directed at the PP's opener of how vegetables are good because they are prion-free.
I'd be willing to bet more people have died from e. coli in their salad than have died from BSE.
According to wikipedia, 157 people worldwide are known to have contracted BSE. It says the following about the Sept spinach outbreak in the US: "It would lead to 199 infections, three deaths, and thirty-one kidney failures by October 6, 2006." And that's just a single outbreak in a single first world country that lasted a single month. You can say maybe we just don't know about a lot of people who died from BSE, but the same is true of e. coli.
Or how about the fact that at least 555 people contracted Hepatits A from green onions in a single outbreak in Pennsylvania in 2003? Or the 2000 outbreak of salmonella in brean sprouts? Or maybe the 3000 people who got sick from salmonella ice cream in a single outbreak in 1994? Or the 1985 outbreak of listeria in cheese in southern California that led to 47 deaths?
I pulled all of these from wikipedia. And yes, it's very true that there are plenty of outbreaks of the same thing in meat. Unlike you, I'm not posting this as a public display of smugness and condescension. I'm simply pointing out that the real danger lies in eating food that other people grow and prepare. Not that you'd be free of problems even if you ate only food that grew in your own garden.
The fact of the matter is this - living is dangerous. If you must worry, worry about getting hit by a drunk driver on your way home from a New Year's Eve party. It's several orders of magnitude more likely to happen than dying from any foodborne illness.
Raaaaage dump.
Well, I can speak for life in my university during the early-to-mid 90s. POPing was common for anyone with a person computer who had to dial in. It was also popular due to email quotas being very small. I worked networking tech support, so I fielded walk-up and phone calls to help people with it.
At that time, if you lived in a few dorms on campus, you could jockey for one of the half-dozen dumb terminals in your dorm. Other dorms simply didn't have them. Ethernet had not been installed outside of a very few (it took another 5 years or so for this to really turn around). Most who had their own PC and didn't want to tie up their phone line all the time (myself included), used POP.
Typically, Windows users do what the software tells them to. No logic is involved. I know I've never used a PST file and always kept my mail on the server.
In reality, the world is different today than it was back when POPing your messages down to your local machine was the norm. It was a world where bandwidth and server-side storage space was much more precious. I know even back then, my university account had a fairly tiny quota. If I wanted to keep many emails past a few months, downloading them via POP was the only option. And if I was on any other terminal than a direct line in a computer lab, I was sure going to want to download my emails and read them offline.
The only reason Windows (or Mac, which has the same history with offline mail) comes into it is that back then private non-Windows/Mac machines were practically non-existant. One guy in my dorm had his own linux box, but that was certainly not the norm.
Playing with the site a bit (you can switch your version at the top), it appears that it just rearranges the same stories for the different versions. Just like Google News or something where you pick your topics. And the left bar navigation shows the continents, which you have to click on "World" on the regular UK page for.
So I wouldn't call the cost differences of building/maintaining the site significant due to two versions. It appears to just be a little bit of server-side scripting that had to be done anyway to allow you to click on different categories and get only those stories. As I said before, I will agree that there is probably a decent badwidth and hardware cost for making it available outside of the UK.
But again, I think the news is a special case. A lot of countries like the US and the UK have always funded programs to bring news into areas where they don't get a western viewpoint. The return on this investment is a lot harder to quanitify, but it is real.
Well, from the US I don't get any ads, even with all ad-blocking turned off. Maybe they're just planning to.