What the fuck is a natural death, anyway? If a human kills you, it isn't "natural". If you're mauled by an animal, well, maybe it's natural? Maybe not? It probably depends on the animal, like maybe an ape could murder you but if a mountain lion did it it would just be manslaughter. If you're shredded apart at the molecular level by microbes then yeah, that's totally natural and nobody takes issue.
The only difference between the human and the microbes is that the human has a choice, and it should not be a crime to do choose to do to a person of sound mind what they themselves have wholeheartedly and freely asked of you.
I can see where they can worry that such a system could be abused against a rather vulnerable population.
I see it too. They think that people will get away with murder by claiming (falsely) that the victim wanted to die. That's why suicide must remain illegal - forbidding vulnerable populations the right to choose their own death protects them from this fate in the same way that forbidding people to have accidents makes it impossible for murderers to (falsely) claim that their victim just happened to have a bout of fatally bad luck. If we didn't have laws against being in an accident, then nobody would investigate deaths which look like accidents, and countless murderers would remain at large.
The suffering of clearly terminally ill patients is a small price to pay for the safety of all other elderly, ill, and disabled persons, just as prosecuting everyone who suffers an accident is worth the protection we enjoy from being killed by people who would try to cover up the deed.
And as for the talk of torture, if he truly was as far gone as the article claims it's unlikely that he was actually experiencing any of that pain.
I have close friends who lost family members to cancer. I got to hear all about the way they suffered, and I saw it myself a few times. People dying slow, lingering deaths often aren't all there, I'll grant you that. But what's left of their minds is often thoroughly capable of suffering, even right at the end. And no non-lethal dose of anything can block that sort of pain.
It's difficult to describe just how profoundly offensive your statement is to anyone who's stared into the eyes of a terminally ill friend or relative with multiple failed organs and two impossibly long weeks to live.
It does not mean low carb per se, it means: low sugar combined with low fat!
That right there is absolutely key. Complex carbohydrates and small amounts of sugar consumed with lots of fiber are perfectly healthy. Starchy low-fiber foods are almost as bad as sugar (they're broken down into sugar very rapidly by the digestive system) for you, and sugar is outright terrible if it isn't properly moderated.
If you eat carbs that can easy be converted into sugar *plus* a lot of fat, the fat is not digested but stored in your fat cells.
It's worse than that. If your insulin levels spike high enough your fat cells will happily draw in sugar and make it into fat for long-term storage. Eat all sugar all the time and you'll get just as fat as if you eat a mix of fats and sugars.
You're actually better off eating more fats than carbs (all things in balance, of course, carbohydrate-rich foods are great sources of the nutrients we need) since our bodies have evolved better regulatory systems to deal with fats than starches. And if you're going to eat a lot of carbs, make sure they're in a form that comes with a good amount of fiber, since it slows down digestion and reduces the sock of sugar your system would otherwise receive.
That is a simple matter of insulin level in your blood.
Insulin is probably the most important hormone when it comes to regulating hunger (I've heard this extended to mood in general, though I think that's reaching), metabolism, fat production and storage, and some stages of digestion. Fuck up your insulin levels bad enough for long enough and you'll become fat, lethargic, and eventually diabetic.
Avoid foods which are high in sugar (or starch) and low in fiber. That combination is very common in modern cuisine, but it's been exceedingly rare for the bulk of our species' history, and we're not equipped to gracefully handle it. The digestive system processes the carbs too quickly, and that makes the pancreas overreact with insulin production. The hour or so following the sugar rush gets spent in a state of mild starvation since blood sugar has dropped faster than the body can remove the absurd amount of insulin it had to make (which means that the fat cells spend that time hoarding energy instead of releasing it for consumption) to deal with the sugar spike. The brain notices the low level of energy available in the bloodstream and response by switching hunger back on, despite the fact that the body's energy reserves would soon be released for consumption as insulin levels fall off.
Desserts are awesome, of course, and not much is going to go wrong with you if you indulge in moderation. But if you do this constantly (constantly eating lots white breads, pastas, cookies, drinking sweetened drinks, etc), then you'd better be getting a ridiculous amount of exercise to offset the damage you're doing yourself.
(Of course, people get fats for lots of other reasons besides sugar consumption. I'm not your doctor, I'm just some guy who's had to take care of diabetic friends and family members. If this advice doesn't work for you, see an actual doctor or dietitian. Imagine some other standard disclaimers here.)
The alternative (well, the complement) to low carb is high fiber. Carbs mainly do their damage by spiking up your blood sugar, which causes your body to overreact with the insulin. This puts your fat cells in storage mode, where they'll stay until insulin levels drop (which can take hours), even if the rest of your body has burned through what's available in the blood and is dying for some calories to burn. Eating your carbs with lots of fiber slows down their absorption, preventing the nasty sugar spike and subsequent hormonal insanity.
So, you don't need to give up bread entirely. The stuff you need to give up is anything that's been sweetened with any kind of sugar (which actually includes some bread - particularly fast food burger buns) or anything that's had the fiber removed (so stick with whole grains). The rest is all fine in moderate amounts.
Sorry, I wasn't entirely clear (should have had more coffee).
I wrote "port" when I meant "rewrite in another language with a fundamentally different memory model and performance profile", which is what I'd have to do with my engine to get it running on WP7. It'd be bad enough rewriting the core engine code which I wrote and understand, but then having to also rewrite Lua, LZMA, and the WebP libraries (not an exhaustive list) on top of that? Yikes...
C & C++ will be there, but I wouldn't hold your breath over OpenGL.
That's not much of an issue, so long as the 3D API they expose is available in C/C++.
Porting one isolated subsystem isn't that big of a deal (already have to do it with audio when going between iOS and Android). Porting an entire engine (including embedded libraries like Lua) is another matter entirely. And that's doubly true when you'd be forced to convert between a language that compiles to native code and one that runs in a VM.
Personally, I do not understand how someone who is an atheist lives believing that nothing has any meaning and will inevitably end in the heat death of the universe.
The word "meaning" describes a sort of mental state, so of course nothing intrinsically "has" any of it - not, that is, until I make some and attach it to its object. And even then that meaning still only actually exists within me.
Personally, I don't understand how those who do believe that there is some intrinsic or higher meaning manage the strain of living in a universe so apparently intent on proving them wrong.
The only possible way this had anything to do with the drawdown would be if Obama had been planning to keep the troops there despite the Bush agreement, but decided not to after this got out.
The current Status of Force Agreement had called for U.S. troops to leave by the end of 2011. But lengthy negotiations in recent months had led some to expect that American troops -- roughly 40,000 of which are in Iraq -- would remain there into next year.
These talks, however, broke down over the prickly issue of legal immunity for U.S. troops in Iraq, a senior U.S. military official with direct knowledge of the discussions told CNN this month.
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other top brass have repeatedly said any deal to keep U.S. troops in Iraq beyond the withdrawal deadline would require a guarantee of legal protection for American soldiers.
But the Iraqis refused to agree to that, opening up the prospect of Americans being tried in Iraqi courts and subjected to Iraqi punishment.
The negotiations were strained following WikiLeaks' release of a diplomatic cable that alleged Iraqi civilians, including children, were killed in a 2006 raid by American troops rather than in an airstrike as the U.S. military initially reported.
What issue is that? That a bunch of idiots are having a street party calling it a 'movement' when all they really need to do is actually fucking vote rather than being whiney little bitches?
Vote? You still believe in voting? Where the fuck have you been living these past ten years, and what's the immigration process like?
Our government has been eavesdropping on us since the telegraph. Accept it, get over it. I don't worry because I am a "good ole boy". If they watch the likes of me with an iota of interest, the world must indeed be safe and boring. 99.99999999% of us are boring as hell.
We may all be safe from official government sanction, but that data isn't just being thrown away, and you don't know who has (or will have) access to it. The people who work at the NSA are people like all others, subject to corruption and incompetence like everybody else. That can, in the absence of proper oversight (which doesn't exist for the NSA) situations like the following:
I have (well, had) a friend who grew up in the USSR. She told all sorts of lovely stories about how the guys running the archives where the secret police dumped the files of people they weren't interested in any more would skim through the data and then go around blackmailing people (including stuff like having young teens rob their own families for them if they didn't want all their embarrassing secrets told to all their peers - you can imagine what that did to some families), or selling blackmail material to neighbors with a grudge. They got so notorious for the actual secrets they'd revealed that they could walk up to people they had nothing on and get money out of them with remarks like, "Say, that's a lovely reputation you have there, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it..."
Wikileaks (which you reference in your sig) has already shed light on some of the modern-day shenanigans our public "servants" are getting up to, as has the UK tabloid fiasco, and those are just two very recent examples. Do you seriously trust those people with all that data, even if you aren't breaking any laws? Could you trust your friends, family, and neighbors if all that data were to suddenly start "leaking" and it became trivial for others to blackmail them?
This is all external, and nothing is an internal. Your privacy? Who cares...the problem is that you think someone does care.
Seriously? You honestly believe that people's emotional responses are on handy little switches? That anyone who has a problem with losing privacy or freedom is just needlessly torturing themselves or a compulsive whiner? If that's the case then let's teach people to like being robbed as well - I mean who cares...the problem is that you think that you and you alone should get to enjoy having your grandfather's wedding ring. Stop worrying about who's that property is and just go take someone else's dead relative's wedding ring if you absolutely need to have one. And just think of all the misery and anxiety we could eliminate!
The gov't is corrupt? The gov't has always been corrupt.
Diseases kill people? Diseases have always killed people. Nothing can, has, or will ever be done about this, so stop getting all worked up about it...
How are you defining success? Money? Power over others? These shouldn't determine your success. You are allowing it to determine your success and you have defined success in a way that allows the unjust to get the upper hand in your world.
So when salaries go disproportionately to idiots who proceed to collapse my once-thriving industry, putting me out of work, I'm supposed to react by changing my life goals to "slowly starve as student loan repayments eat up all my revenue while the price of food continues rising" so that I can consider myself a success?
I get that attitude plays a huge role in personal happiness, but there are some pretty basic limits on what normal people can happily accept - a fact to which you seem oblivious. It must be nice living on a world where you could never conceivably run into them. Or where it's rational to ignore problems so as to not get upset when you can't seem to solve them. You'll have to let us know what color the sky is there.
When Microsoft told everyone for years that they shouldn't keep user settings in C:\Program Files back in the Win9x days, because of roaming user profiles and due to expected security enhancements down the road, and developers ignored them (despite how ridiculously easy it is to simply put that data in a different folder), it was Microsoft's fault that apps broke on XP's non-admin accounts, right? And when Microsoft published tons of advice on how to make software work in limited accounts during the XP days, it was still their fault that apps which should have nothing to do with UAC would trigger UAC prompts under Vista, even though all they had to do to avoid that is follow the rules as laid down since the days of Windows 95? To keep things on topic: the only time I've heard of a VB to VB.NET port being anything but trivial is when the automated upgrade tool chokes on exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about here.
If the reason you got screwed over is that you avoided best-practices or used undocumented "features" against explicit advice to the contrary for no good reason, then yeah, you're a fool. Microsoft didn't force you to write the code that they told you not to write. And you should be glad that MS goes as farout of its wayas it doesto support your shit when you do it anyway, despite the fact that they warned you and offered free examples on how to do whatever you want done without being an idiot.
I'm Canadian too, but apparently I pay more attention to US politics than you do. If your measure of a leader's success is whether he lives up to his campaign promises, then Obama should strike you as worse than Bush.
Are you a troll, or do you genuinely fail to realize that a good half of the problems on your list are best solved using techniques based in calculus? I mean seriously, physics is a waste of your time, but you'd like to program robots. That's...that's just dumb.
An alcoholic father begs his son to never drink, because he fears his son is at risk of becoming like him and wants better. The son, having watched him struggle with finances and go in and out of rehab for years on end gets the point, despite the fact that his father is hung over as he gives his lecture.
A politician speaks of the dangers of alcohol to society. He takes a hardline stance against it, supporting zero-tolerance measures, and campaigns for prohibition. He declares these things to be his deeply held personal beliefs. When asked about the martini in his hand, he dodges the question and waits for his supporters to drown out the interviewer with calls to "keep the candidate's personal life out of the debate."
One of these men is clearly and self-evidently speaking what they truly believe, and holds himself up as a warning to others at cost to himself. The other one is lying for his own benefit. Can you tell which is which?
It's been ages since I worked with Java, but even if I hadn't been hearing for years how far Java's come since the bad old days, I'd feel compelled to call you on some of this bullshit...
A note before I start: I mostly work on video games, and I use a mix of C++ (engine), C# (custom build tools, editors, etc), various scripting languages (Lua, Python, etc: some embedded in the engine, others for automating aspects of the build). I've also written the odd business app in C# and, way back when, Delphi.
it just results in having to write a bunch more classes because the language is lacking in basic flexibility
On the contrary, one often wants simple values to behave like objects, such as when one wishes to declare groups of arbitrary values for serialization or the like. Having the compiler or runtime autogenerate an object version of your value types and provide a simple syntax for converting between the two forms is a huge time saver and spares one from writing a lot of tedious code.
it just results in having to write a bunch more classes because the language is lacking in basic flexibility
It also lacks the diamond problem. I mean, yeah, a competent programmer can work around that, sure. A competent programmer can also structure his code such that it doesn't require MI, without needlessly complicating anything.
no preprocessor
Nothing stops you from using C's (or any other) preprocessor with Java (or any other compiler that takes text files as input). That's where C++'s preprocessor (which most good C++ programmers recommend avoiding) came from, you know. Actually, in the bad old days, C++ itself was a preprocessor...
because the programmer "can't be trusted."
Because a programmer writing business apps has more interesting things to think about than making sure that his colleague remembers that foo() returns an object out of a memory pool which shouldn't be deleted or referenced beyond the end of the current transaction, whereas bar()'s return needs to be freed by returning it to a free list, and whether he can afford to pay the extra allocations and cache misses necessitated by returning shared_ptr wrappers that remember that for his colleague, or whether it's time to sit down and write two whole new pointer-wrapping classes (and if those wrappers use a reference count, should we put it in the object or allocate that from some special pool...), or whether he should return raw pointers and make a note to spend a few minutes during every future code review checking that they're not being misused...
Wait, where did shared_ptr come from? Why am I thinking of writing classes to wrap pointers? I just want to return a dynamically allocated object! What happened to not writing extra classes?
Throw in a non-deterministic garbage collector
The GC is, like all other software, entirely deterministic - in exactly the same way that malloc/free and new/delete's continue to behave deterministially when the heap becomes fragmented. The phrase you're looking for is "as strictly defined as my arbitrarily chosen reference point". Millisecond stalls at unspecified intervals to transparently collect garbage are entirely within the definition of well-behaved for a very large class of software.
At least in c++, you're guaranteed that when the stack frame is popped as your object goes out of scope, your destructor is called immediately.
And a language in which 95% of objects don't hold non-garbage-collected resources doesn't need destructors, let alone deterministic ones. The other 5% have a method called something synonymous with "close" on them, and competent programmers remember to call those functions, just as you remember to call (or write/use a class which will call) delete or free on the 95% of objects whic
When I spent time overseas, what I noticed about the food was this: the portions were smaller and people ate less. Is that because of controls on corn products? No, it seems to be because smaller portions are the norm for those cultures. What I noticed about the people was this: they were by and large more active and less likely to take cars absolutely everywhere, and more likely to walk up a flight of stairs (or just walk on an escalator) rather than be inactive. Is that because of controls on corn? No, it seems to be a cultural thing, once more.
I agree with everything except the portion regarding portions. What we eat is largely determined by culture, but how much of it we eat is a function of human biochemistry, applied to said cuisine. Replacing things like fats and fiber (which trigger the body's satiety response) with things like processed sugars (which don't, despite their high calorie content) is going to lead to an increase in the size of servings as, given the choice, people don't stop eating until they're full. So yes, controlling food content, particularly the use of processed sugars (HFCS and table sugar are the same thing to your body - I mean for that term to include both), could be expected to have an effect on both average portion size and obesity.
Other than that, though, I couldn't agree more, especially the comment about exercise, which is massive factor, as exercise not only burns calories, but has been shown to increase the effectiveness of the systems that regulate hunger, countering the tendency to over-consume in the first place.
However, I really must take exception to your tedious argument-from-cliche and your extraordinarily optimistic take on the level of persistence shown by bullies. Again, in my(admittedly anecdotal) experience, such behavior is far from transient and is, in fact, extremely stable over the 4 or so year horizon that a given school has to deal with. Bullies are sadistic animals and they do not respond to being ignored, or appeals to reason. Violence, however, surgically but intensely applied, had a 100% success rate. You have to speak to them in a language that they understand.
It depends on your definition of bullying - specifically how malicious someone needs to be before they go from asshole to bully.
There's a lot of low-grade petty bullshit which really does go away if you ignore it properly. That's mostly coming from the mass of kids who are insensitive but not particularly enthusiastic about their cruelty. They want a quick laugh if they can get one, they know there's a chance some kid will get upset, they'll use the opportunity to do some little thing when they see him in the hall, but they're not gonna do fuck all beyond that because their attention spans frankly aren't that long. If you don't react to them, you're not worth their while, and they'll move on to another target.
From the victim's point of view, well...that's about as bad as the sociopathic fucks can be. The sociopaths, at least, aren't everywhere at once - in every hall, bathroom, buss, and classroom - and you can often see them coming and prepare. It also engenders a sense of alienation that leaves the victim especially vulnerable to the real sociopaths, who's victims tend to be a subset of the kids the student body designates to be the outsiders.
I imagine most people who say "oh just ignore them and it'll be better - worked great for me!" were either only suffering from the general low-grade shit or they suffered from both but became less attractive targets for the bullies once they'd stopped being everyone else's target and moved a step or two up the social ladder.
That said, GP needs to work on his tone and stop conflating cliches or his personal experience with the whole of reality.
In my school experience, adult authority figures were, without exception, useless or worse in dealing with bullies.
Your experience roughly matches mine.
The only way they were useful is if you could trick them into monitoring the situation without actually reporting it (even indirectly). Shit like, if someone's harassing you at your locker, you keep requesting a new lock every other month (at a time when other students are in the office close enough to overhear) because maybe you forgot your locker open (though you swear you remember locking it up), but you think someone might have seen your combo (no, nobody in particular, and you certainly wouldn't make an accusation without evidence), and now some of your stuff's gone missing, again...
But that's only going to work for a very small subset of the bullied and only in schools where the administration hasn't completely detached itself from the spirit of its responsibilities.
So you read the first half of my first sentence and, well, what did you do after that? It didn't involve any reading or comprehension that I can tell.
I dare you to point out where I supported coal mining and power generation?
I won't, because I didn't say you did.
You expressed concern over, of all things, terrorists doing (presumably evil) things with nuclear waste. My point is that, beyond how ridiculous it is to fear terrorists in general, it's ridiculous to be in particular fear of nuclear waste which is far easier to deal with (contain, reprocess, secure) than the byproducts of mining and chemical refineries.
It would, in fact, be easier for terrorists to use a perfectly ordinary bomb to crack open a high-pressure storage tank at a chemical plant (the sort of plants we'll need more of if we wanna ramp up solar cell production) on a day when the wind is blowing right. Blowing up the chemical plant requires building a normal bomb and sneaking it through a largely outdoor security perimeter. Making a dirty bomb requires, on top of building the same bomb and sneaking it to its target site, breaking into a secured building with thick, shielded walls, operating the heavy machinery it takes to manipulate the (monitored) waste, getting out with said waste (past all sorts of radiation sensors), and then living long enough in the presence of such radiation to build and detonate their bomb, all without alerting anyone to what they're doing until the bomb goes off...
If terrorism is a good argument against any industrial pursuit (and it's not), then it's an even better argument against your preferred energy technologies...so why are you bringing it up, again?
Yeah. Better to have all the shit coal mining and power generation throws into the environment slowly poison us every day of our lives than live in fear of a death statistically as likely as being struck by lightning. Heaven forbid that waste be in a form that's compact, easily contained, at a location of our choosing (so we can find it if we think of better ways to contain/dispose of it)...
I mean you do know what chemical plants, fuel storage facilities, and tailings dams are, right? You've surely seen what happens when one of those fails catastrophically. Do you oppose any expansion of mining or heavy industry in general because you're scared of terrorists?
Well, maybe you do. Terrorists really are that scary, after all...
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Suicide is illegal, as well.
Which is such a ridiculous situation...
You suffer until you die naturally.
What the fuck is a natural death, anyway? If a human kills you, it isn't "natural". If you're mauled by an animal, well, maybe it's natural? Maybe not? It probably depends on the animal, like maybe an ape could murder you but if a mountain lion did it it would just be manslaughter. If you're shredded apart at the molecular level by microbes then yeah, that's totally natural and nobody takes issue.
The only difference between the human and the microbes is that the human has a choice, and it should not be a crime to do choose to do to a person of sound mind what they themselves have wholeheartedly and freely asked of you.
I can see where they can worry that such a system could be abused against a rather vulnerable population.
I see it too. They think that people will get away with murder by claiming (falsely) that the victim wanted to die. That's why suicide must remain illegal - forbidding vulnerable populations the right to choose their own death protects them from this fate in the same way that forbidding people to have accidents makes it impossible for murderers to (falsely) claim that their victim just happened to have a bout of fatally bad luck. If we didn't have laws against being in an accident, then nobody would investigate deaths which look like accidents, and countless murderers would remain at large.
The suffering of clearly terminally ill patients is a small price to pay for the safety of all other elderly, ill, and disabled persons, just as prosecuting everyone who suffers an accident is worth the protection we enjoy from being killed by people who would try to cover up the deed.
And as for the talk of torture, if he truly was as far gone as the article claims it's unlikely that he was actually experiencing any of that pain.
I have close friends who lost family members to cancer. I got to hear all about the way they suffered, and I saw it myself a few times. People dying slow, lingering deaths often aren't all there, I'll grant you that. But what's left of their minds is often thoroughly capable of suffering, even right at the end. And no non-lethal dose of anything can block that sort of pain.
It's difficult to describe just how profoundly offensive your statement is to anyone who's stared into the eyes of a terminally ill friend or relative with multiple failed organs and two impossibly long weeks to live.
It does not mean low carb per se, it means: low sugar combined with low fat!
That right there is absolutely key. Complex carbohydrates and small amounts of sugar consumed with lots of fiber are perfectly healthy. Starchy low-fiber foods are almost as bad as sugar (they're broken down into sugar very rapidly by the digestive system) for you, and sugar is outright terrible if it isn't properly moderated.
If you eat carbs that can easy be converted into sugar *plus* a lot of fat, the fat is not digested but stored in your fat cells.
It's worse than that. If your insulin levels spike high enough your fat cells will happily draw in sugar and make it into fat for long-term storage. Eat all sugar all the time and you'll get just as fat as if you eat a mix of fats and sugars.
You're actually better off eating more fats than carbs (all things in balance, of course, carbohydrate-rich foods are great sources of the nutrients we need) since our bodies have evolved better regulatory systems to deal with fats than starches. And if you're going to eat a lot of carbs, make sure they're in a form that comes with a good amount of fiber, since it slows down digestion and reduces the sock of sugar your system would otherwise receive.
That is a simple matter of insulin level in your blood.
Insulin is probably the most important hormone when it comes to regulating hunger (I've heard this extended to mood in general, though I think that's reaching), metabolism, fat production and storage, and some stages of digestion. Fuck up your insulin levels bad enough for long enough and you'll become fat, lethargic, and eventually diabetic.
Avoid foods which are high in sugar (or starch) and low in fiber. That combination is very common in modern cuisine, but it's been exceedingly rare for the bulk of our species' history, and we're not equipped to gracefully handle it. The digestive system processes the carbs too quickly, and that makes the pancreas overreact with insulin production. The hour or so following the sugar rush gets spent in a state of mild starvation since blood sugar has dropped faster than the body can remove the absurd amount of insulin it had to make (which means that the fat cells spend that time hoarding energy instead of releasing it for consumption) to deal with the sugar spike. The brain notices the low level of energy available in the bloodstream and response by switching hunger back on, despite the fact that the body's energy reserves would soon be released for consumption as insulin levels fall off.
Desserts are awesome, of course, and not much is going to go wrong with you if you indulge in moderation. But if you do this constantly (constantly eating lots white breads, pastas, cookies, drinking sweetened drinks, etc), then you'd better be getting a ridiculous amount of exercise to offset the damage you're doing yourself.
(Of course, people get fats for lots of other reasons besides sugar consumption. I'm not your doctor, I'm just some guy who's had to take care of diabetic friends and family members. If this advice doesn't work for you, see an actual doctor or dietitian. Imagine some other standard disclaimers here.)
The alternative (well, the complement) to low carb is high fiber. Carbs mainly do their damage by spiking up your blood sugar, which causes your body to overreact with the insulin. This puts your fat cells in storage mode, where they'll stay until insulin levels drop (which can take hours), even if the rest of your body has burned through what's available in the blood and is dying for some calories to burn. Eating your carbs with lots of fiber slows down their absorption, preventing the nasty sugar spike and subsequent hormonal insanity.
So, you don't need to give up bread entirely. The stuff you need to give up is anything that's been sweetened with any kind of sugar (which actually includes some bread - particularly fast food burger buns) or anything that's had the fiber removed (so stick with whole grains). The rest is all fine in moderate amounts.
Sorry, I wasn't entirely clear (should have had more coffee).
I wrote "port" when I meant "rewrite in another language with a fundamentally different memory model and performance profile", which is what I'd have to do with my engine to get it running on WP7. It'd be bad enough rewriting the core engine code which I wrote and understand, but then having to also rewrite Lua, LZMA, and the WebP libraries (not an exhaustive list) on top of that? Yikes...
C & C++ will be there, but I wouldn't hold your breath over OpenGL.
That's not much of an issue, so long as the 3D API they expose is available in C/C++.
Porting one isolated subsystem isn't that big of a deal (already have to do it with audio when going between iOS and Android). Porting an entire engine (including embedded libraries like Lua) is another matter entirely. And that's doubly true when you'd be forced to convert between a language that compiles to native code and one that runs in a VM.
Ah. So then there's no true Christian.
Personally, I do not understand how someone who is an atheist lives believing that nothing has any meaning and will inevitably end in the heat death of the universe.
The word "meaning" describes a sort of mental state, so of course nothing intrinsically "has" any of it - not, that is, until I make some and attach it to its object. And even then that meaning still only actually exists within me.
Personally, I don't understand how those who do believe that there is some intrinsic or higher meaning manage the strain of living in a universe so apparently intent on proving them wrong.
The only possible way this had anything to do with the drawdown would be if Obama had been planning to keep the troops there despite the Bush agreement, but decided not to after this got out.
That or if Obama had been trying to amend the Bush agreement in order to keep the troops there longer, but failed to do so because leaked information convinced the Iraqis to refuse Obama the terms he wanted:
The current Status of Force Agreement had called for U.S. troops to leave by the end of 2011. But lengthy negotiations in recent months had led some to expect that American troops -- roughly 40,000 of which are in Iraq -- would remain there into next year.
These talks, however, broke down over the prickly issue of legal immunity for U.S. troops in Iraq, a senior U.S. military official with direct knowledge of the discussions told CNN this month.
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other top brass have repeatedly said any deal to keep U.S. troops in Iraq beyond the withdrawal deadline would require a guarantee of legal protection for American soldiers.
But the Iraqis refused to agree to that, opening up the prospect of Americans being tried in Iraqi courts and subjected to Iraqi punishment.
The negotiations were strained following WikiLeaks' release of a diplomatic cable that alleged Iraqi civilians, including children, were killed in a 2006 raid by American troops rather than in an airstrike as the U.S. military initially reported.
What issue is that? That a bunch of idiots are having a street party calling it a 'movement' when all they really need to do is actually fucking vote rather than being whiney little bitches?
Vote? You still believe in voting? Where the fuck have you been living these past ten years, and what's the immigration process like?
Our government has been eavesdropping on us since the telegraph. Accept it, get over it. I don't worry because I am a "good ole boy". If they watch the likes of me with an iota of interest, the world must indeed be safe and boring. 99.99999999% of us are boring as hell.
We may all be safe from official government sanction, but that data isn't just being thrown away, and you don't know who has (or will have) access to it. The people who work at the NSA are people like all others, subject to corruption and incompetence like everybody else. That can, in the absence of proper oversight (which doesn't exist for the NSA) situations like the following:
I have (well, had) a friend who grew up in the USSR. She told all sorts of lovely stories about how the guys running the archives where the secret police dumped the files of people they weren't interested in any more would skim through the data and then go around blackmailing people (including stuff like having young teens rob their own families for them if they didn't want all their embarrassing secrets told to all their peers - you can imagine what that did to some families), or selling blackmail material to neighbors with a grudge. They got so notorious for the actual secrets they'd revealed that they could walk up to people they had nothing on and get money out of them with remarks like, "Say, that's a lovely reputation you have there, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it..."
Wikileaks (which you reference in your sig) has already shed light on some of the modern-day shenanigans our public "servants" are getting up to, as has the UK tabloid fiasco, and those are just two very recent examples. Do you seriously trust those people with all that data, even if you aren't breaking any laws? Could you trust your friends, family, and neighbors if all that data were to suddenly start "leaking" and it became trivial for others to blackmail them?
This is all external, and nothing is an internal. Your privacy? Who cares...the problem is that you think someone does care.
Seriously? You honestly believe that people's emotional responses are on handy little switches? That anyone who has a problem with losing privacy or freedom is just needlessly torturing themselves or a compulsive whiner? If that's the case then let's teach people to like being robbed as well - I mean who cares...the problem is that you think that you and you alone should get to enjoy having your grandfather's wedding ring. Stop worrying about who's that property is and just go take someone else's dead relative's wedding ring if you absolutely need to have one. And just think of all the misery and anxiety we could eliminate!
The gov't is corrupt? The gov't has always been corrupt.
Diseases kill people? Diseases have always killed people. Nothing can, has, or will ever be done about this, so stop getting all worked up about it...
How are you defining success? Money? Power over others? These shouldn't determine your success. You are allowing it to determine your success and you have defined success in a way that allows the unjust to get the upper hand in your world.
So when salaries go disproportionately to idiots who proceed to collapse my once-thriving industry, putting me out of work, I'm supposed to react by changing my life goals to "slowly starve as student loan repayments eat up all my revenue while the price of food continues rising" so that I can consider myself a success?
I get that attitude plays a huge role in personal happiness, but there are some pretty basic limits on what normal people can happily accept - a fact to which you seem oblivious. It must be nice living on a world where you could never conceivably run into them. Or where it's rational to ignore problems so as to not get upset when you can't seem to solve them. You'll have to let us know what color the sky is there.
When Microsoft told everyone for years that they shouldn't keep user settings in C:\Program Files back in the Win9x days, because of roaming user profiles and due to expected security enhancements down the road, and developers ignored them (despite how ridiculously easy it is to simply put that data in a different folder), it was Microsoft's fault that apps broke on XP's non-admin accounts, right? And when Microsoft published tons of advice on how to make software work in limited accounts during the XP days, it was still their fault that apps which should have nothing to do with UAC would trigger UAC prompts under Vista, even though all they had to do to avoid that is follow the rules as laid down since the days of Windows 95? To keep things on topic: the only time I've heard of a VB to VB.NET port being anything but trivial is when the automated upgrade tool chokes on exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about here.
If the reason you got screwed over is that you avoided best-practices or used undocumented "features" against explicit advice to the contrary for no good reason, then yeah, you're a fool. Microsoft didn't force you to write the code that they told you not to write. And you should be glad that MS goes as far out of its way as it does to support your shit when you do it anyway, despite the fact that they warned you and offered free examples on how to do whatever you want done without being an idiot.
I'm Canadian too, but apparently I pay more attention to US politics than you do. If your measure of a leader's success is whether he lives up to his campaign promises, then Obama should strike you as worse than Bush.
Define you.
Are you a troll, or do you genuinely fail to realize that a good half of the problems on your list are best solved using techniques based in calculus? I mean seriously, physics is a waste of your time, but you'd like to program robots. That's...that's just dumb.
drinkers who tell their kids not to drink
An alcoholic father begs his son to never drink, because he fears his son is at risk of becoming like him and wants better. The son, having watched him struggle with finances and go in and out of rehab for years on end gets the point, despite the fact that his father is hung over as he gives his lecture.
A politician speaks of the dangers of alcohol to society. He takes a hardline stance against it, supporting zero-tolerance measures, and campaigns for prohibition. He declares these things to be his deeply held personal beliefs. When asked about the martini in his hand, he dodges the question and waits for his supporters to drown out the interviewer with calls to "keep the candidate's personal life out of the debate."
One of these men is clearly and self-evidently speaking what they truly believe, and holds himself up as a warning to others at cost to himself. The other one is lying for his own benefit. Can you tell which is which?
(and I doubt anyone uses it now that C# has a generic feature)
It's still incredibly handy for things like reflection and dynamic dispatch systems.
It's been ages since I worked with Java, but even if I hadn't been hearing for years how far Java's come since the bad old days, I'd feel compelled to call you on some of this bullshit...
A note before I start: I mostly work on video games, and I use a mix of C++ (engine), C# (custom build tools, editors, etc), various scripting languages (Lua, Python, etc: some embedded in the engine, others for automating aspects of the build). I've also written the odd business app in C# and, way back when, Delphi.
it just results in having to write a bunch more classes because the language is lacking in basic flexibility
On the contrary, one often wants simple values to behave like objects, such as when one wishes to declare groups of arbitrary values for serialization or the like. Having the compiler or runtime autogenerate an object version of your value types and provide a simple syntax for converting between the two forms is a huge time saver and spares one from writing a lot of tedious code.
it just results in having to write a bunch more classes because the language is lacking in basic flexibility
It also lacks the diamond problem. I mean, yeah, a competent programmer can work around that, sure. A competent programmer can also structure his code such that it doesn't require MI, without needlessly complicating anything.
no preprocessor
Nothing stops you from using C's (or any other) preprocessor with Java (or any other compiler that takes text files as input). That's where C++'s preprocessor (which most good C++ programmers recommend avoiding) came from, you know. Actually, in the bad old days, C++ itself was a preprocessor...
because the programmer "can't be trusted."
Because a programmer writing business apps has more interesting things to think about than making sure that his colleague remembers that foo() returns an object out of a memory pool which shouldn't be deleted or referenced beyond the end of the current transaction, whereas bar()'s return needs to be freed by returning it to a free list, and whether he can afford to pay the extra allocations and cache misses necessitated by returning shared_ptr wrappers that remember that for his colleague, or whether it's time to sit down and write two whole new pointer-wrapping classes (and if those wrappers use a reference count, should we put it in the object or allocate that from some special pool...), or whether he should return raw pointers and make a note to spend a few minutes during every future code review checking that they're not being misused...
Wait, where did shared_ptr come from? Why am I thinking of writing classes to wrap pointers? I just want to return a dynamically allocated object! What happened to not writing extra classes?
Throw in a non-deterministic garbage collector
The GC is, like all other software, entirely deterministic - in exactly the same way that malloc/free and new/delete's continue to behave deterministially when the heap becomes fragmented. The phrase you're looking for is "as strictly defined as my arbitrarily chosen reference point". Millisecond stalls at unspecified intervals to transparently collect garbage are entirely within the definition of well-behaved for a very large class of software.
At least in c++, you're guaranteed that when the stack frame is popped as your object goes out of scope, your destructor is called immediately.
And a language in which 95% of objects don't hold non-garbage-collected resources doesn't need destructors, let alone deterministic ones. The other 5% have a method called something synonymous with "close" on them, and competent programmers remember to call those functions, just as you remember to call (or write/use a class which will call) delete or free on the 95% of objects whic
When I spent time overseas, what I noticed about the food was this: the portions were smaller and people ate less. Is that because of controls on corn products? No, it seems to be because smaller portions are the norm for those cultures. What I noticed about the people was this: they were by and large more active and less likely to take cars absolutely everywhere, and more likely to walk up a flight of stairs (or just walk on an escalator) rather than be inactive. Is that because of controls on corn? No, it seems to be a cultural thing, once more.
I agree with everything except the portion regarding portions. What we eat is largely determined by culture, but how much of it we eat is a function of human biochemistry, applied to said cuisine. Replacing things like fats and fiber (which trigger the body's satiety response) with things like processed sugars (which don't, despite their high calorie content) is going to lead to an increase in the size of servings as, given the choice, people don't stop eating until they're full. So yes, controlling food content, particularly the use of processed sugars (HFCS and table sugar are the same thing to your body - I mean for that term to include both), could be expected to have an effect on both average portion size and obesity.
Other than that, though, I couldn't agree more, especially the comment about exercise, which is massive factor, as exercise not only burns calories, but has been shown to increase the effectiveness of the systems that regulate hunger, countering the tendency to over-consume in the first place.
I guess all the people of slashdot would rather stifle any differing opinion--that's rather sad.
Ignorance is not a point of view.
However, I really must take exception to your tedious argument-from-cliche and your extraordinarily optimistic take on the level of persistence shown by bullies. Again, in my(admittedly anecdotal) experience, such behavior is far from transient and is, in fact, extremely stable over the 4 or so year horizon that a given school has to deal with. Bullies are sadistic animals and they do not respond to being ignored, or appeals to reason. Violence, however, surgically but intensely applied, had a 100% success rate. You have to speak to them in a language that they understand.
It depends on your definition of bullying - specifically how malicious someone needs to be before they go from asshole to bully.
There's a lot of low-grade petty bullshit which really does go away if you ignore it properly. That's mostly coming from the mass of kids who are insensitive but not particularly enthusiastic about their cruelty. They want a quick laugh if they can get one, they know there's a chance some kid will get upset, they'll use the opportunity to do some little thing when they see him in the hall, but they're not gonna do fuck all beyond that because their attention spans frankly aren't that long. If you don't react to them, you're not worth their while, and they'll move on to another target.
From the victim's point of view, well...that's about as bad as the sociopathic fucks can be. The sociopaths, at least, aren't everywhere at once - in every hall, bathroom, buss, and classroom - and you can often see them coming and prepare. It also engenders a sense of alienation that leaves the victim especially vulnerable to the real sociopaths, who's victims tend to be a subset of the kids the student body designates to be the outsiders.
I imagine most people who say "oh just ignore them and it'll be better - worked great for me!" were either only suffering from the general low-grade shit or they suffered from both but became less attractive targets for the bullies once they'd stopped being everyone else's target and moved a step or two up the social ladder.
That said, GP needs to work on his tone and stop conflating cliches or his personal experience with the whole of reality.
In my school experience, adult authority figures were, without exception, useless or worse in dealing with bullies.
Your experience roughly matches mine.
The only way they were useful is if you could trick them into monitoring the situation without actually reporting it (even indirectly). Shit like, if someone's harassing you at your locker, you keep requesting a new lock every other month (at a time when other students are in the office close enough to overhear) because maybe you forgot your locker open (though you swear you remember locking it up), but you think someone might have seen your combo (no, nobody in particular, and you certainly wouldn't make an accusation without evidence), and now some of your stuff's gone missing, again...
But that's only going to work for a very small subset of the bullied and only in schools where the administration hasn't completely detached itself from the spirit of its responsibilities.
So you read the first half of my first sentence and, well, what did you do after that? It didn't involve any reading or comprehension that I can tell.
I dare you to point out where I supported coal mining and power generation?
I won't, because I didn't say you did.
You expressed concern over, of all things, terrorists doing (presumably evil) things with nuclear waste. My point is that, beyond how ridiculous it is to fear terrorists in general, it's ridiculous to be in particular fear of nuclear waste which is far easier to deal with (contain, reprocess, secure) than the byproducts of mining and chemical refineries.
It would, in fact, be easier for terrorists to use a perfectly ordinary bomb to crack open a high-pressure storage tank at a chemical plant (the sort of plants we'll need more of if we wanna ramp up solar cell production) on a day when the wind is blowing right. Blowing up the chemical plant requires building a normal bomb and sneaking it through a largely outdoor security perimeter. Making a dirty bomb requires, on top of building the same bomb and sneaking it to its target site, breaking into a secured building with thick, shielded walls, operating the heavy machinery it takes to manipulate the (monitored) waste, getting out with said waste (past all sorts of radiation sensors), and then living long enough in the presence of such radiation to build and detonate their bomb, all without alerting anyone to what they're doing until the bomb goes off...
If terrorism is a good argument against any industrial pursuit (and it's not), then it's an even better argument against your preferred energy technologies...so why are you bringing it up, again?
Yeah. Better to have all the shit coal mining and power generation throws into the environment slowly poison us every day of our lives than live in fear of a death statistically as likely as being struck by lightning. Heaven forbid that waste be in a form that's compact, easily contained, at a location of our choosing (so we can find it if we think of better ways to contain/dispose of it)...
I mean you do know what chemical plants, fuel storage facilities, and tailings dams are, right? You've surely seen what happens when one of those fails catastrophically. Do you oppose any expansion of mining or heavy industry in general because you're scared of terrorists?
Well, maybe you do. Terrorists really are that scary, after all...