Heck, to prove it, just light up a bulb and touch it. Feel that heat on the incandescent? That's wasted energy that didn't go to light. Now touch an equivalently bright fluorescent bulb, it's only a little warm.
Indeed, sometimes I think a basic class in thermodynamics in high school would be a useful thing.
Light bulbs generate two things: Heat, and light.
It's not damn rocket science.
Of course, half the people I talk to seem to think there are more and less efficient electric heaters, which is just incomprehensible.
This wasn't decided by a trial. Please read the article. In fact, it was decided by something much like what you think would be ideal.
As for the reason that malpractice awards are getting worse, that's because the medical industry isn't getting any better. About 100,000 people each year are killed by medical mistakes. (At least, that's one estimate. Another doubles it.)
If we assume that only 1 out of 3 people each year are even in a situation where a medical mistake could kill them, (The other 2/3rd being people who are healthy that year, who have very minor problems that can't result in death, or are sick but who do not see a doctor because they can't afford it), then that means that the medical establishment is killing one out of every thousand people it sees.
Imagine if Walmart was killing one out of every thousand people who walked in the doors, by dropping boxes on them, or maybe by killer automatic doors. You think they'd get sued? A lot? A giant fuckload of lawsuits? Yeah.
And, please note I'm talking about death by medical mistake, not medical failure. And just deaths, not other things that don't result in death.
A lot of people seem to be operating on the assumption that malpractice lawsuits are for medical failures, that people are running around suing because a hospital did one thing and the person died, and an argument is made that something else would have been better. While I'm sure there such malpractice suits, most of them are for the medical establishment fucks up they themselves seriously injures someone, not simply failed to fix an existing problem.
And, while we're at it, these fuckups aren't 'scalpel slipped half and inch during delicate surgery and cut a nerve'. While I'm sure people sue over that also, most of the 'killing people' mistakes are stuff like 'forgot to sterilize something' or 'gave patient wrong medication'.
Doctors are actually pretty well protected, malpracticewise, from 'skilled fuckups' as long as they explained the possibilities to the patients. No one's going to win an payout when it was explained something was risky, and they rolled the dice and lost. They win payouts when the hospital forgets to change dressings and they get an infection and die from it.
There's an entire industry out there dedicated to pushing the idea that malpractice suits are somehow illegitimate. No...if you prescribe someone the wrong medication, and it doesn't get caught and it kills them, guess what? You're fucking liable for their death. You don't like it, either get out of the medical profession or, you know, actually have personal who can check those things.
This shit happens because the medical establishment has no money, and is constantly cutting back on resources that would actually catch those mistakes, like educated nurses. The industry trying to slice doctor's time thinner and thinner, where people with almost no medical training at all (Not even RNs, LPNs) get everything ready, the doctor swoops in, does doctor things for two minutes, and swoops out. Hey, it works 999/1000 times!
Well, the point is, people in Cuba, like people almost everywhere, can either go to work and get paid, or not go to work and get fired.
Yes, Cubans have to have permissions to 'change' jobs, as people confusing put it, which actually means they need the government's permission to get another government job (duh), which is about 75% of all jobs. And getting a business license is near impossible, so people can't really strike out on their own.
So, all told, it's not a very free society.
OTOH, a lot of the 'employment' is simple make-work, honestly. According to the Cuban government, as many as one in five people employed by it are probably useless.
So a lot of 'jobs' in Cuban operate, essentially, as unemployment insurance you collect by standing around all day. Part of the Revolution promised 'full employment', and by God, they have full employment. 'You need a job, comrade? Your job is to stand here holding this shovel until that guy needs it, then take it back when he doesn't.'
There is a Cuban joke: 'We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.'.
That's why they need 'government permission' to change jobs...because, frankly, if someone needs a job they just invent one for them to do. There aren't any unfilled jobs just floating around. It's a somewhat stupid way to run a society, but whatever.
And there are actual private businesses that operate like in the real world. Hiring workers, buying goods, selling them, etc. Not as many as there could be, the government is stingy with licenses, but certainly enough to create some trade basis, and create a class of people demanding more licenses.
What Cuban is not is is not slavery, which is what is going on North Korea, and you really will, honest to God, get shot if you quit your job.
Yet for some reason it's legal to 'trade' with North Korea for non-military stuff, despite the fact that all North Korea stuff is manufactured by forced labor, and every penny goes straight to North Korea (Because North Korea doesn't even use currency for the most part, or at least pretends it doesn't.), and yet not legal to purchase stuff from Cuban's private sector.
You're assuming C and not, for example, PHP, where there's no chance of that. (Not that I'm asserting that PHP is secure, it just doesn't have any buffer overflows with sprintf.)
Look, some restrictions on countries are stupid. Our Cuba restrictions are nonsensical.
About 25% of Cubans work in the private sector. If we legalized trade with them, and only them, soon more of them would be. The private sector would grow, or, alternately, people would soon be demanding it does and the government would get less support. No trade with the Cuban government, or the government's socialized industries (Which currently means no cigars, as none of that is private.), but no trade at all is stupid. We could use trade with Cuba's private sector as a wedge to loosen government control, but a bunch of Cuban expats think incoherently on the issue and Florida is a swing state.
It is socialism. People work, they get paid, they buy stuff. They just usually work for the government, and buy from it, but there's an actual functioning economy. It's one that's mostly designed by the government, but there's private hands that money can go.
Meanwhile, not only is there no private North Korea sector at all, except for the private small farming sector they had to quietly allow to keep people from staving. People don't actually get paid for working at all. You do what the government says, and in turn it feeds you. It's actual outright communism, not the socialism that most 'communist' countries quickly start working under. North Korea does not functionally have any monetary exchanges at all.
There's a difference between 'The government does not practice much justice or allow free speech and had a large thumb on the economy' vs. 'The government uses the population as slaves and there is no freedom at all'. In Cuba, if you do not show up at work, you get fired. In North Korea, you get shot.
Which means FOX IS PAYING MONEY TO THE NORTH KOREAN GOVERNMENT TO USE THEIR SLAVES.
Indeed. A lot of people here seem to thin North Korea is a Cuba- or Iran-type country, which the US has some huge problem with and the rest of the world is like, eh, whatever.
North Korea is run by a lunatic, not a pretend lunatic we like to claim all leaders of countries we don't like are, but an actual one. It's channeling almost all it's production into military, and, yes, it kidnaps people.
And, while it technically has 'diplomatic relations' with China and Russia, well, I urge everyone to go readabout them. Neither of those countries like North Korea at all, both are only trying to keep the region stable. China doesn't want a flood of refugees, and Russia doesn't think the problem is solvable except via invasion (Whereas the west and China thinks the regime might collapse) by itself, which they really don't want to do, so they're trying to force NK to stop the nuclear program by themselves proposing sanctions to the UN.
Anyone who thinks China and North Korea, or Russia and North Korea, are friends, is sadly mistaken. And while Russia does somewhat care what the US thinks, China doesn't give a damn. It's not acting under pressure from us. They're both actually worried about North Korea, it's just that they don't think 'withdrawing diplomatic relations' is a useful idea.
And, frankly, I agree with them. Although normal diplomatic relations with North Korea would be tricky for the US seeing as we're technically at war with them. (It was an armistice, not a peace treaty.)
North Korea is the kind of country the US pretends Cuba is, and pretended Iraq was. We didn't just invent those demonization out of nowhere, you know...this has happened before in history. It's right up there with Burma in fascism, except less people are starving in Burma, and the country does not threaten it's neighbors, as the military junta there is not actually crazy and actually does attempt to run the country.
I can't tell if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me at this point.
The point I am making is that low-level of red light keep your night vision, whereas low-level blue remove it.
I'd said they were both 'best' at that task, but you appeared to disagree and say that green would remove night vision better, whereas I looked it up and found it was more blue-green we're most sensitive, which I didn't know but it's easy to figure out why we don't use that in theatres, because blue-green light makes people look very sickly.
Now you're saying it is blue which causes people to adjust their eyes most. Which is back to my original point about how 'register how bright' and 'most sensitive' aren't the same thing.
People are most sensitive to green. During the day it's yellow-green, during the night it's more blue-green. People can distinguish more shades of green than other colors, probably due to evolution and seeing things in vegetation.
That doesn't have a lot to do with what causes our brain to think is brightest, though, and thus causes night vision to happen or not happen. From what I've always hear is that blue light makes us think it's bright, possibly because of evolution and the sky.
Well, how much independent action was allowed, and hence how much of the atrocities came from above, is, as always, debatable.
However, no matter how much they did or did not follow their laws, they weren't generally allowed to torture an any manner, and when they were, they were only allowed to do it after some sort of court determination (Granted, this determination could be something like 'You're homosexual', and not any actual crime), and using sleep deprivation and stress positions, not, for example, water torture at all, ever.
And, because such torture was illegal, and even the SS couldn't do it openly. They might have been the ultimate corrupt cops with no one to answer to, but that ultimately resulted in people getting beaten until they talked, not a systematized torture apparatus.
As opposed to the US, which made water torture legal and doesn't bother with the courts until forced. Which was the point I was making, in that, at the very least, Nazis pretended they weren't torturing people, and it was actually against the law, which restricted the people doing the torturing to the people doing law enforcement, and made it all under the table.
Incidentally, the mass murder was legal under German law in 1941, under the 'T-4 Euthanasia Program', although strictly speaking that was only for people 'unfit for labor', and a lot of Jews ended up in that list for no obvious reason. But all death camps were run in accordance with German law, even if the selection of some of the people seemed a bit biased.
I really hope you mean 'There is no way to write all code as self documenting'.
There's plenty of self documenting code out there. No one needs to document what a sprintf() is doing or that you're declaring a variable. If we don't know that 'int result_count;// declares an integer to store the count of the results', we probably shouldn't be programming there in the first place.
What needs documenting is the goal of stuff and why you're doing it the way you're doing it, along with exceptionally confusing lines of code by themselves. (For example, any regexp beyond the absolute basic needs documenting.)
You only need how when you do something that people might miss, such as a switch fall-through, or not understand, like some tricky Boolean operation.
Everything else should be about what the code is attempting to do, and why it's trying to do it that way. When that's obvious, you don't need any comments at all. (Although function headings are still a good idea.)
You can't say 'Only do X', allow the other person to do Y, and then whinge about consent. Consent is a real-time thing. You don't want something to happen, attempt to stop it. If you made no attempt to stop it, uh, you consented.(1)
I swear, some people seem to live in a universe where 'consent' literally means 'asking permission', which makes me seriously wonder how they think sex works. 'I'm going to move my hand up two inches, are you okay with that?'
What's even more absurd is that what people are talking about was apparently oral sex. That's right, she didn't consent to the blowjob she was giving. Figure that one out.
1) With, of course a full range of exceptions, like unconsciousness, extortion, drugged, whatever. None of which seem to apply here.
The allegation that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990 is entirely without any sort of merit at all, and I will not have it constantly repeated. Glenn Beck is innocent of this malicious rumor until, and if, proven guilty in a court of law.
In a lot of US states, it's rape if you pretend, to the person you're having sex with, to be married them, aka, if you trick them with a fake marriage. Apparently this has happened enough there's a law about it.(1)
I discovered this oddity while arguing online, correctly, that lying to, or even impersonating someone, does not make it rape.
Turns out, because of how the law is written, probably unintentionally, impersonating someone's spouse manages to fall under the law. 'Pretending to be a specific different person who is married to them' is a subset of 'pretending to be married to them', even if the law was actually aimed at the 'Being your actual self, but pretending to marry them' subset.
But impersonating anyone else is entirely legal, as is lying in general.
1) Strictly speaking, it's probably also fraud, if the tricked party paid for anything for the other person under the assumption they were married to that person. But it wouldn't always be fraud, and could easily be avoided by the scumbag.
What is this, some universe where she was giving him a blowjob while laying under him where she couldn't move?
If she wanted to fucking stop giving him a blowjob, why didn't she back the hell up?
I'm sorry, this is idiotic. It is not rape to not do exactly what your partner wants. Consent is not some sort of minute millisecond to millisecond direction of someone else. Consent is implicit for two adults who are conscious, and is withdrawn not, as people seem to think, by words, but by people trying to stop.
When I say that, it sounds like I'm some sort of creepy rapist-justifier, because 'No means no'....but, um, it really doesn't. What means 'no' is attempting to stop. If they attempt to stop, or attempt to make you stop, they have withdrawn consent.
Someone can't just say no but then continue to have sex, and then later claim rape. Or, more relevantly, can't set out some clearly defined boundaries beforehand, and then let their partner go right past them without any sort of attempt to stop them, and then claim rape. It's not some fucking oral (Neither pun intended) contract where, if you cross it, it's rape.
Consent simply does not work that way. People can argue it should, but it doesn't. Consent is 'Person A tries, person B allows that'. Non-consent is 'Person A tries, person B indicates in some manner they don't want that'.
And it's certainly not rape to not be able to stop an involuntary action like ejaculating when someone is, to be blunt, attempting to make you do so. I mean, that's the point of oral sex on a man. Technically, ejaculation couldn't ever be a crime, as you cannot have intent. And it certainly can't be a crime or even a tort against someone deliberately attempting to make you do so.
People do not need permission to have an orgasm during sex, and their partner does not get to cry rape because the partner did not want the other person to have one at that time. You start doing sexual things to someone, and, guess what? At some point they will orgasm, and, if it's a man, that has a rather obvious result. If you don't want that happening in your mouth, don't use your mouth.
Or do you think anyone the US labels as an enemy should be considered automatically guilty and get locked away indefinitely with no habeas corpus rights?
Please do not refer to what the US did that way.
The question is:
Or do you think anyone the US labels as an enemy should be considered automatically guilty and tortured to death?
For your analogy to work, the speeding law would have to average out the speeds on the road by requiring non-paying drivers to lower their speed below the posted maximum.
That wouldn't really work either, considering a major cause of accidents is speed difference between cars.
With carbon emissions, people are releasing something fungible, and if someone releases less, and someone releases more, it comes out the same.
Safety doesn't really work that way at all. There's not some amount of safety that people have that they can dial up or down, where we could 'average' things.
Most people in 'favor' of carbon credits would be a hell of a lot happier if no one had the right to pollute. Carbon credits is the right's crazy compromise on the issue. (Or it had a chance to work, so the right pretended it was so onerousness they attacked their own idea.)
In fact, 'We have restrictions for a reason, don't let people pay money to get around them', and 'We don't have any damn restrictions at all, let's at least make people pay taxes', are both arguing for more restrictions.
If I say 'Person A should not smoke 3 cigarettes a day, perhaps he could cut back to 1', and 'Person B, who does not smoke, should not start smoking 1 cigarette a day', I'm arguing for 'different things' under your logic...with one person, I say he should smoke 1 a day, and for another I say he shouldn't. But that's stupid, I'm arguing for less smoking from the position of the status quo. I'd probably, in fact, rather the smoker stop entirely, but have decided on an easier first step.
Meanwhile, everyone here seem to be taking exactly the same position 'The speed limit on the road should be whatever is safe, period.'. Everyone is agreeing with that position.
Some people think 90 MPH is safe, so they're arguing: This stupid, if that's safe, then everyone should go it. Other people think 90 MPH isn't safe, so they're arguing: This is stupid, no one should be able to pay money to endanger people's life. Both sides think it's clearly stupid to have a variable speed limit based on money, they're really just arguing from the POV of whether the current limit is too low or not.
'Most sensitive' and 'register how bright' aren't the same thing.
And you're looking at the wrong thing. In low light conditions, and I quote, 'peak luminance sensitivity of the human eye to shift toward the blue end of the color spectrum at low illumination levels'.
That is why people use red light to stay in night vision.
Now, as for getting out of night vision, the ideal color would be blueish-green, around 500nm. The problem is under that color, everything looks damn weird and no one can do their makeup. The light isn't just to adjust out night vision, people also have to see, and seeing people who look like they're going to throw up thanks to the greenish lighting is not very useful backstage.
Blueish green is the best to see overall in dim lighting. It's why everything 'turns that color' at sunset.
But blue is the best to see people. (Who already look slightly green anyway as we can see that color better.)
The grandparent is talking about how companies started, a few years ago, putting multiple blue LED as indicator lights on everything, simply because blue LEDs were the one color that no one used before because of cost.
Obviously, the ability to make LEDs in all colors cheaply is a good thing, but let's tally the LEDs I can see sitting here (Discounting the green LED on the monitor, which is required by the energy star standard):
Laptop: 4 blue
USB hub: 1 blue
Other USB hub of a different brand: 1 blue
USB sound: 1 blue
Desktop computer: 1 blue, 1 green
USB hard drives: 2 white
KVM: 1 green
The blue LEDs outnumber all other LEDs combined. Or, to count another way, I have four and a half device using blue, and three and a half devices using other colors.
And I'm not even counting the damn bluetooth USB dongles, which I can't see, but have one on each computer, which the protocol seem entirely named to demonstrate 'Hey, look, blue LEDs!', despite that having nothing to do with anything. People walking about with devices in their ears that flashed even when not on a call.
It doesn't help that blue is the color by which your eyes register how bright it is. You use red light to keep your night vision, because your eyes don't adjust much based on the red light level. Likewise you use blue light to remove your night vision, because your eyes do adjust based on that, and blue lights are used backstage in theatres all the time to adjust people's eyes before they walk on stage so they aren't blinded.
Which means, when you're in a dark room with blue LEDs, it's very noticeable and they appear very bright, brighter than red or green or even yellow LEDs of exactly the same brightness would appear.
What the GP probably meant is, yes, that idiot and others claiming they are generating power from zero-point energy, or what I guess could be called 'zero-point energy energy'.
For people here who don't want to spend any time reading up on stupidity, 'zero-point energy' has become the modern way to say 'perpetual motion machine'. "No, this system can't produce power forever with no outside energy, that's a violation of thermodynamics. It's using zero-point energy!"
Actually, what they're talking about is called 'vacuum energy', which is the energy difference between the energy level of 'nothing' in this universe, which is full of virtual particles and whatnot, compared actual nothing nothing. The Casimir effect demonstrates that if you remove (some) of the virtual particles, you can get to a lower density than vacuum. The universe itself, without anything in it, has a density, or at least a pressure.
To actually harness that could be incredibly dangerous, akin to living in a balloon and poking a hole in the wall to use the air rushing out as a power source. Luckily, to do such a thing would require...well, let's just say it starts with the ability to create wormholes, and put one end outside of space/time(1), so it seems unlikely that someone's magical car battery is doing it.
Zero-point energy is just the lowest possible energy state of a system, because even absolute zero system have some energy. But there's not any way, even hypothetical, to produce power from that fact. Because if you removed that energy, you would, ipso facto, demonstrate that wasn't the zero-point. (And there's no way you can make any net gain in usable energy by moving around minute amounts of heat at absolute zero anyway!)
'Vacuum energy' is the 'zero-point energy' of the universe, but as the universe isn't at the lowest energy state, it's sorta stupid to talk about it in that context. In the real world, we use the energy that actually exists in this universe compared to other places in this universe, not microscopic amounts of energy compared to some ideal 'no energy' state which we have no way to access and thus can't use for 'work', which is just moving energy around.
But it's not surprising that pseudoscientists use the wrong term for something, or pick something that actually can't be used to do work and claim it's powering their stuff.
1) Hilariously, it's so dangerous they can't even do it on Stargate...where they actually can create interdimensional transtemporal wormholes. They have 'zero-point modules' that create an artificial universe and use that for energy...the few times anyone tried to do it to the actual vacuum energy here, they've blown up solar systems. It's so dangerous you can't even do it in science fiction!;)
I agree he drags the joke out too long, but the actual Glenn Beck is just as tiresome, so I don't see how any could do a parody that remained funny for a few minutes.
Beck simply cannot talk. He sits there and repeats things, he goes in circles, he rants, he cries. It's near incoherent. Even ignoring the crazy ideas, someone who behaves like that shouldn't have a TV show. I could explain things better than he does, and I'm not any sort of public speaker at all. And, um...a chalkboard? Really? What the hell? Is this 1973? Did we deinvent computer graphics while I wasn't looking? We all switched to computer-generated images because it's clearer to read. (Where the hell do you even find a chalkboard anymore?)
Of course, those complaints assume the point is to explain something, but really the point is to get an emotion across. It's a new genre of TV, a 'monologue soap opera'. Ignore the plot holes and nonsense and bad effects, don't expect to get from point A to point B, and just let the overacting wash over you. Feel what they feel!
At some point, doing Glenn Beck just becomes uncomfortable. It's like making fun of the guy on the bus who sits there talking to himself. Okay, yes, he acts crazy, so, um, yeah. It's sorta sad.
I guess Stewart could do the crazy mannerisms and speech just for a short amount of time, and then switch to just mocking the ideas.
The problem is, most of the time Beck doesn't actually have any 'ideas' at all to mock...he really only gets parodied by Stewart when he makes some actual crazy claim, as opposed to speaking emotional gibberish and overacting.
And even then often the idea introduced is so absurd that Steward just does his 'lone straight man in a world of crazy people' routine, which works a lot better. Like "Yes, let's all return the pants-pissing terror of 9/12."
He just ignores Beck when Beck's incoherent, as usually, and then plays straight man when Beck is really really stupid. He only goes to a parody of Beck when Beck is saying 'slightly coherent but moderately stupid' stuff. It's a fine line.
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Heck, to prove it, just light up a bulb and touch it. Feel that heat on the incandescent? That's wasted energy that didn't go to light. Now touch an equivalently bright fluorescent bulb, it's only a little warm.
Indeed, sometimes I think a basic class in thermodynamics in high school would be a useful thing.
Light bulbs generate two things: Heat, and light.
It's not damn rocket science.
Of course, half the people I talk to seem to think there are more and less efficient electric heaters, which is just incomprehensible.
This wasn't decided by a trial. Please read the article. In fact, it was decided by something much like what you think would be ideal.
As for the reason that malpractice awards are getting worse, that's because the medical industry isn't getting any better. About 100,000 people each year are killed by medical mistakes. (At least, that's one estimate. Another doubles it.)
If we assume that only 1 out of 3 people each year are even in a situation where a medical mistake could kill them, (The other 2/3rd being people who are healthy that year, who have very minor problems that can't result in death, or are sick but who do not see a doctor because they can't afford it), then that means that the medical establishment is killing one out of every thousand people it sees.
Imagine if Walmart was killing one out of every thousand people who walked in the doors, by dropping boxes on them, or maybe by killer automatic doors. You think they'd get sued? A lot? A giant fuckload of lawsuits? Yeah.
And, please note I'm talking about death by medical mistake, not medical failure. And just deaths, not other things that don't result in death.
A lot of people seem to be operating on the assumption that malpractice lawsuits are for medical failures, that people are running around suing because a hospital did one thing and the person died, and an argument is made that something else would have been better. While I'm sure there such malpractice suits, most of them are for the medical establishment fucks up they themselves seriously injures someone, not simply failed to fix an existing problem.
And, while we're at it, these fuckups aren't 'scalpel slipped half and inch during delicate surgery and cut a nerve'. While I'm sure people sue over that also, most of the 'killing people' mistakes are stuff like 'forgot to sterilize something' or 'gave patient wrong medication'.
Doctors are actually pretty well protected, malpracticewise, from 'skilled fuckups' as long as they explained the possibilities to the patients. No one's going to win an payout when it was explained something was risky, and they rolled the dice and lost. They win payouts when the hospital forgets to change dressings and they get an infection and die from it.
There's an entire industry out there dedicated to pushing the idea that malpractice suits are somehow illegitimate. No...if you prescribe someone the wrong medication, and it doesn't get caught and it kills them, guess what? You're fucking liable for their death. You don't like it, either get out of the medical profession or, you know, actually have personal who can check those things.
This shit happens because the medical establishment has no money, and is constantly cutting back on resources that would actually catch those mistakes, like educated nurses. The industry trying to slice doctor's time thinner and thinner, where people with almost no medical training at all (Not even RNs, LPNs) get everything ready, the doctor swoops in, does doctor things for two minutes, and swoops out. Hey, it works 999/1000 times!
'the agency'?
I suspect the CIA has better things to do with our time than brainwash our children.
Well, the point is, people in Cuba, like people almost everywhere, can either go to work and get paid, or not go to work and get fired.
Yes, Cubans have to have permissions to 'change' jobs, as people confusing put it, which actually means they need the government's permission to get another government job (duh), which is about 75% of all jobs. And getting a business license is near impossible, so people can't really strike out on their own.
So, all told, it's not a very free society.
OTOH, a lot of the 'employment' is simple make-work, honestly. According to the Cuban government, as many as one in five people employed by it are probably useless.
So a lot of 'jobs' in Cuban operate, essentially, as unemployment insurance you collect by standing around all day. Part of the Revolution promised 'full employment', and by God, they have full employment. 'You need a job, comrade? Your job is to stand here holding this shovel until that guy needs it, then take it back when he doesn't.'
There is a Cuban joke: 'We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.'.
That's why they need 'government permission' to change jobs...because, frankly, if someone needs a job they just invent one for them to do. There aren't any unfilled jobs just floating around. It's a somewhat stupid way to run a society, but whatever.
And there are actual private businesses that operate like in the real world. Hiring workers, buying goods, selling them, etc. Not as many as there could be, the government is stingy with licenses, but certainly enough to create some trade basis, and create a class of people demanding more licenses.
What Cuban is not is is not slavery, which is what is going on North Korea, and you really will, honest to God, get shot if you quit your job.
Yet for some reason it's legal to 'trade' with North Korea for non-military stuff, despite the fact that all North Korea stuff is manufactured by forced labor, and every penny goes straight to North Korea (Because North Korea doesn't even use currency for the most part, or at least pretends it doesn't.), and yet not legal to purchase stuff from Cuban's private sector.
I think we should be clear here. There's no evidence that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990, whether or not he denies it.
The lack of denial, however, certainly is amazing.
Well, it's good to know that not all manufacturers of bluetooth stuff are idiots...just the licensers.
You're assuming C and not, for example, PHP, where there's no chance of that. (Not that I'm asserting that PHP is secure, it just doesn't have any buffer overflows with sprintf.)
Indeed.
Look, some restrictions on countries are stupid. Our Cuba restrictions are nonsensical.
About 25% of Cubans work in the private sector. If we legalized trade with them, and only them, soon more of them would be. The private sector would grow, or, alternately, people would soon be demanding it does and the government would get less support. No trade with the Cuban government, or the government's socialized industries (Which currently means no cigars, as none of that is private.), but no trade at all is stupid. We could use trade with Cuba's private sector as a wedge to loosen government control, but a bunch of Cuban expats think incoherently on the issue and Florida is a swing state.
It is socialism. People work, they get paid, they buy stuff. They just usually work for the government, and buy from it, but there's an actual functioning economy. It's one that's mostly designed by the government, but there's private hands that money can go.
Meanwhile, not only is there no private North Korea sector at all, except for the private small farming sector they had to quietly allow to keep people from staving. People don't actually get paid for working at all. You do what the government says, and in turn it feeds you. It's actual outright communism, not the socialism that most 'communist' countries quickly start working under. North Korea does not functionally have any monetary exchanges at all.
There's a difference between 'The government does not practice much justice or allow free speech and had a large thumb on the economy' vs. 'The government uses the population as slaves and there is no freedom at all'. In Cuba, if you do not show up at work, you get fired. In North Korea, you get shot.
Which means FOX IS PAYING MONEY TO THE NORTH KOREAN GOVERNMENT TO USE THEIR SLAVES.
Indeed. A lot of people here seem to thin North Korea is a Cuba- or Iran-type country, which the US has some huge problem with and the rest of the world is like, eh, whatever.
North Korea is run by a lunatic, not a pretend lunatic we like to claim all leaders of countries we don't like are, but an actual one. It's channeling almost all it's production into military, and, yes, it kidnaps people.
And, while it technically has 'diplomatic relations' with China and Russia, well, I urge everyone to go read about them. Neither of those countries like North Korea at all, both are only trying to keep the region stable. China doesn't want a flood of refugees, and Russia doesn't think the problem is solvable except via invasion (Whereas the west and China thinks the regime might collapse) by itself, which they really don't want to do, so they're trying to force NK to stop the nuclear program by themselves proposing sanctions to the UN.
Anyone who thinks China and North Korea, or Russia and North Korea, are friends, is sadly mistaken. And while Russia does somewhat care what the US thinks, China doesn't give a damn. It's not acting under pressure from us. They're both actually worried about North Korea, it's just that they don't think 'withdrawing diplomatic relations' is a useful idea.
And, frankly, I agree with them. Although normal diplomatic relations with North Korea would be tricky for the US seeing as we're technically at war with them. (It was an armistice, not a peace treaty.)
North Korea is the kind of country the US pretends Cuba is, and pretended Iraq was. We didn't just invent those demonization out of nowhere, you know...this has happened before in history. It's right up there with Burma in fascism, except less people are starving in Burma, and the country does not threaten it's neighbors, as the military junta there is not actually crazy and actually does attempt to run the country.
I can't tell if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me at this point.
The point I am making is that low-level of red light keep your night vision, whereas low-level blue remove it.
I'd said they were both 'best' at that task, but you appeared to disagree and say that green would remove night vision better, whereas I looked it up and found it was more blue-green we're most sensitive, which I didn't know but it's easy to figure out why we don't use that in theatres, because blue-green light makes people look very sickly.
Now you're saying it is blue which causes people to adjust their eyes most. Which is back to my original point about how 'register how bright' and 'most sensitive' aren't the same thing.
People are most sensitive to green. During the day it's yellow-green, during the night it's more blue-green. People can distinguish more shades of green than other colors, probably due to evolution and seeing things in vegetation.
That doesn't have a lot to do with what causes our brain to think is brightest, though, and thus causes night vision to happen or not happen. From what I've always hear is that blue light makes us think it's bright, possibly because of evolution and the sky.
Well, how much independent action was allowed, and hence how much of the atrocities came from above, is, as always, debatable.
However, no matter how much they did or did not follow their laws, they weren't generally allowed to torture an any manner, and when they were, they were only allowed to do it after some sort of court determination (Granted, this determination could be something like 'You're homosexual', and not any actual crime), and using sleep deprivation and stress positions, not, for example, water torture at all, ever.
And, because such torture was illegal, and even the SS couldn't do it openly. They might have been the ultimate corrupt cops with no one to answer to, but that ultimately resulted in people getting beaten until they talked, not a systematized torture apparatus.
As opposed to the US, which made water torture legal and doesn't bother with the courts until forced. Which was the point I was making, in that, at the very least, Nazis pretended they weren't torturing people, and it was actually against the law, which restricted the people doing the torturing to the people doing law enforcement, and made it all under the table.
Incidentally, the mass murder was legal under German law in 1941, under the 'T-4 Euthanasia Program', although strictly speaking that was only for people 'unfit for labor', and a lot of Jews ended up in that list for no obvious reason. But all death camps were run in accordance with German law, even if the selection of some of the people seemed a bit biased.
There is no such thing as self documenting code.
I really hope you mean 'There is no way to write all code as self documenting'.
There's plenty of self documenting code out there. No one needs to document what a sprintf() is doing or that you're declaring a variable. If we don't know that 'int result_count; // declares an integer to store the count of the results', we probably shouldn't be programming there in the first place.
What needs documenting is the goal of stuff and why you're doing it the way you're doing it, along with exceptionally confusing lines of code by themselves. (For example, any regexp beyond the absolute basic needs documenting.)
That's what the GP meant. Comment why, not how.
You only need how when you do something that people might miss, such as a switch fall-through, or not understand, like some tricky Boolean operation.
Everything else should be about what the code is attempting to do, and why it's trying to do it that way. When that's obvious, you don't need any comments at all. (Although function headings are still a good idea.)
I'm glad someone is showing some sense here.
Consent is not a contract you enter into.
You can't say 'Only do X', allow the other person to do Y, and then whinge about consent. Consent is a real-time thing. You don't want something to happen, attempt to stop it. If you made no attempt to stop it, uh, you consented.(1)
I swear, some people seem to live in a universe where 'consent' literally means 'asking permission', which makes me seriously wonder how they think sex works. 'I'm going to move my hand up two inches, are you okay with that?'
What's even more absurd is that what people are talking about was apparently oral sex. That's right, she didn't consent to the blowjob she was giving. Figure that one out.
1) With, of course a full range of exceptions, like unconsciousness, extortion, drugged, whatever. None of which seem to apply here.
The allegation that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990 is entirely without any sort of merit at all, and I will not have it constantly repeated. Glenn Beck is innocent of this malicious rumor until, and if, proven guilty in a court of law.
In a lot of US states, it's rape if you pretend, to the person you're having sex with, to be married them, aka, if you trick them with a fake marriage. Apparently this has happened enough there's a law about it.(1)
I discovered this oddity while arguing online, correctly, that lying to, or even impersonating someone, does not make it rape.
Turns out, because of how the law is written, probably unintentionally, impersonating someone's spouse manages to fall under the law. 'Pretending to be a specific different person who is married to them' is a subset of 'pretending to be married to them', even if the law was actually aimed at the 'Being your actual self, but pretending to marry them' subset.
But impersonating anyone else is entirely legal, as is lying in general.
1) Strictly speaking, it's probably also fraud, if the tricked party paid for anything for the other person under the assumption they were married to that person. But it wouldn't always be fraud, and could easily be avoided by the scumbag.
What is this, some universe where she was giving him a blowjob while laying under him where she couldn't move?
If she wanted to fucking stop giving him a blowjob, why didn't she back the hell up?
I'm sorry, this is idiotic. It is not rape to not do exactly what your partner wants. Consent is not some sort of minute millisecond to millisecond direction of someone else. Consent is implicit for two adults who are conscious, and is withdrawn not, as people seem to think, by words, but by people trying to stop.
When I say that, it sounds like I'm some sort of creepy rapist-justifier, because 'No means no'....but, um, it really doesn't. What means 'no' is attempting to stop. If they attempt to stop, or attempt to make you stop, they have withdrawn consent.
Someone can't just say no but then continue to have sex, and then later claim rape. Or, more relevantly, can't set out some clearly defined boundaries beforehand, and then let their partner go right past them without any sort of attempt to stop them, and then claim rape. It's not some fucking oral (Neither pun intended) contract where, if you cross it, it's rape.
Consent simply does not work that way. People can argue it should, but it doesn't. Consent is 'Person A tries, person B allows that'. Non-consent is 'Person A tries, person B indicates in some manner they don't want that'.
And it's certainly not rape to not be able to stop an involuntary action like ejaculating when someone is, to be blunt, attempting to make you do so. I mean, that's the point of oral sex on a man. Technically, ejaculation couldn't ever be a crime, as you cannot have intent. And it certainly can't be a crime or even a tort against someone deliberately attempting to make you do so.
People do not need permission to have an orgasm during sex, and their partner does not get to cry rape because the partner did not want the other person to have one at that time. You start doing sexual things to someone, and, guess what? At some point they will orgasm, and, if it's a man, that has a rather obvious result. If you don't want that happening in your mouth, don't use your mouth.
Or do you think anyone the US labels as an enemy should be considered automatically guilty and get locked away indefinitely with no habeas corpus rights?
Please do not refer to what the US did that way.
The question is:
Or do you think anyone the US labels as an enemy should be considered automatically guilty and tortured to death?
Actually, Nazi Germany at least had some principles, at least at the start. There's a lot of torture they wouldn't do, like waterboarding, at least not in any authorized manner. (And, no, they didn't look the other way. they were fascists, they cared if their soldiers followed their laws. At least until a ways into the war, when their citizenry stopped looking.)
For your analogy to work, the speeding law would have to average out the speeds on the road by requiring non-paying drivers to lower their speed below the posted maximum.
That wouldn't really work either, considering a major cause of accidents is speed difference between cars.
With carbon emissions, people are releasing something fungible, and if someone releases less, and someone releases more, it comes out the same.
Safety doesn't really work that way at all. There's not some amount of safety that people have that they can dial up or down, where we could 'average' things.
You're arguing in the wrong direction, dude.
Most people in 'favor' of carbon credits would be a hell of a lot happier if no one had the right to pollute. Carbon credits is the right's crazy compromise on the issue. (Or it had a chance to work, so the right pretended it was so onerousness they attacked their own idea.)
In fact, 'We have restrictions for a reason, don't let people pay money to get around them', and 'We don't have any damn restrictions at all, let's at least make people pay taxes', are both arguing for more restrictions.
If I say 'Person A should not smoke 3 cigarettes a day, perhaps he could cut back to 1', and 'Person B, who does not smoke, should not start smoking 1 cigarette a day', I'm arguing for 'different things' under your logic...with one person, I say he should smoke 1 a day, and for another I say he shouldn't. But that's stupid, I'm arguing for less smoking from the position of the status quo. I'd probably, in fact, rather the smoker stop entirely, but have decided on an easier first step.
Meanwhile, everyone here seem to be taking exactly the same position 'The speed limit on the road should be whatever is safe, period.'. Everyone is agreeing with that position.
Some people think 90 MPH is safe, so they're arguing: This stupid, if that's safe, then everyone should go it. Other people think 90 MPH isn't safe, so they're arguing: This is stupid, no one should be able to pay money to endanger people's life. Both sides think it's clearly stupid to have a variable speed limit based on money, they're really just arguing from the POV of whether the current limit is too low or not.
'Most sensitive' and 'register how bright' aren't the same thing.
And you're looking at the wrong thing. In low light conditions, and I quote, 'peak luminance sensitivity of the human eye to shift toward the blue end of the color spectrum at low illumination levels'.
That is why people use red light to stay in night vision.
Now, as for getting out of night vision, the ideal color would be blueish-green, around 500nm. The problem is under that color, everything looks damn weird and no one can do their makeup. The light isn't just to adjust out night vision, people also have to see, and seeing people who look like they're going to throw up thanks to the greenish lighting is not very useful backstage.
Blueish green is the best to see overall in dim lighting. It's why everything 'turns that color' at sunset.
But blue is the best to see people. (Who already look slightly green anyway as we can see that color better.)
The grandparent is talking about how companies started, a few years ago, putting multiple blue LED as indicator lights on everything, simply because blue LEDs were the one color that no one used before because of cost.
Obviously, the ability to make LEDs in all colors cheaply is a good thing, but let's tally the LEDs I can see sitting here (Discounting the green LED on the monitor, which is required by the energy star standard):
Laptop: 4 blue
USB hub: 1 blue
Other USB hub of a different brand: 1 blue
USB sound: 1 blue
Desktop computer: 1 blue, 1 green
USB hard drives: 2 white
KVM: 1 green
The blue LEDs outnumber all other LEDs combined. Or, to count another way, I have four and a half device using blue, and three and a half devices using other colors.
And I'm not even counting the damn bluetooth USB dongles, which I can't see, but have one on each computer, which the protocol seem entirely named to demonstrate 'Hey, look, blue LEDs!', despite that having nothing to do with anything. People walking about with devices in their ears that flashed even when not on a call.
It doesn't help that blue is the color by which your eyes register how bright it is. You use red light to keep your night vision, because your eyes don't adjust much based on the red light level. Likewise you use blue light to remove your night vision, because your eyes do adjust based on that, and blue lights are used backstage in theatres all the time to adjust people's eyes before they walk on stage so they aren't blinded.
Which means, when you're in a dark room with blue LEDs, it's very noticeable and they appear very bright, brighter than red or green or even yellow LEDs of exactly the same brightness would appear.
'Zero-point energy' is a confusing term.
What the GP probably meant is, yes, that idiot and others claiming they are generating power from zero-point energy, or what I guess could be called 'zero-point energy energy'.
For people here who don't want to spend any time reading up on stupidity, 'zero-point energy' has become the modern way to say 'perpetual motion machine'. "No, this system can't produce power forever with no outside energy, that's a violation of thermodynamics. It's using zero-point energy!"
Actually, what they're talking about is called 'vacuum energy', which is the energy difference between the energy level of 'nothing' in this universe, which is full of virtual particles and whatnot, compared actual nothing nothing. The Casimir effect demonstrates that if you remove (some) of the virtual particles, you can get to a lower density than vacuum. The universe itself, without anything in it, has a density, or at least a pressure.
To actually harness that could be incredibly dangerous, akin to living in a balloon and poking a hole in the wall to use the air rushing out as a power source. Luckily, to do such a thing would require...well, let's just say it starts with the ability to create wormholes, and put one end outside of space/time(1), so it seems unlikely that someone's magical car battery is doing it.
Zero-point energy is just the lowest possible energy state of a system, because even absolute zero system have some energy. But there's not any way, even hypothetical, to produce power from that fact. Because if you removed that energy, you would, ipso facto, demonstrate that wasn't the zero-point. (And there's no way you can make any net gain in usable energy by moving around minute amounts of heat at absolute zero anyway!)
'Vacuum energy' is the 'zero-point energy' of the universe, but as the universe isn't at the lowest energy state, it's sorta stupid to talk about it in that context. In the real world, we use the energy that actually exists in this universe compared to other places in this universe, not microscopic amounts of energy compared to some ideal 'no energy' state which we have no way to access and thus can't use for 'work', which is just moving energy around.
But it's not surprising that pseudoscientists use the wrong term for something, or pick something that actually can't be used to do work and claim it's powering their stuff.
1) Hilariously, it's so dangerous they can't even do it on Stargate...where they actually can create interdimensional transtemporal wormholes. They have 'zero-point modules' that create an artificial universe and use that for energy...the few times anyone tried to do it to the actual vacuum energy here, they've blown up solar systems. It's so dangerous you can't even do it in science fiction! ;)
I agree he drags the joke out too long, but the actual Glenn Beck is just as tiresome, so I don't see how any could do a parody that remained funny for a few minutes.
Beck simply cannot talk. He sits there and repeats things, he goes in circles, he rants, he cries. It's near incoherent. Even ignoring the crazy ideas, someone who behaves like that shouldn't have a TV show. I could explain things better than he does, and I'm not any sort of public speaker at all. And, um...a chalkboard? Really? What the hell? Is this 1973? Did we deinvent computer graphics while I wasn't looking? We all switched to computer-generated images because it's clearer to read. (Where the hell do you even find a chalkboard anymore?)
Of course, those complaints assume the point is to explain something, but really the point is to get an emotion across. It's a new genre of TV, a 'monologue soap opera'. Ignore the plot holes and nonsense and bad effects, don't expect to get from point A to point B, and just let the overacting wash over you. Feel what they feel!
At some point, doing Glenn Beck just becomes uncomfortable. It's like making fun of the guy on the bus who sits there talking to himself. Okay, yes, he acts crazy, so, um, yeah. It's sorta sad.
I guess Stewart could do the crazy mannerisms and speech just for a short amount of time, and then switch to just mocking the ideas.
The problem is, most of the time Beck doesn't actually have any 'ideas' at all to mock...he really only gets parodied by Stewart when he makes some actual crazy claim, as opposed to speaking emotional gibberish and overacting.
And even then often the idea introduced is so absurd that Steward just does his 'lone straight man in a world of crazy people' routine, which works a lot better. Like "Yes, let's all return the pants-pissing terror of 9/12."
He just ignores Beck when Beck's incoherent, as usually, and then plays straight man when Beck is really really stupid. He only goes to a parody of Beck when Beck is saying 'slightly coherent but moderately stupid' stuff. It's a fine line.