Breaking bonds isn't the only way cancer could be caused. Microwaves heat water (or rather, anything with an O-H bond with a similar dipole or equivalent). Heat denatures proteins, that is it can cause irreversible changes in the conformation (folding) of protein molecules. Think in terms of boiling egg white. It changes irreversibly from soluble to insoluble on heating. Every cell is full of proteins which control cell death, proliferation, stasis, and other critical functions. Denaturing some of them could shift the balance over towards uncontrolled proliferation, or it could compromise DNA damage detection and repair, predisposing to cancer in the future. There are a myriad of effects which could cause a cell to become cancerous either immediately, or in the future, as a result.
At a population level, do mobile phones have a statistically significant effect upon brain cancer? Not according to this study. But at an individual level, can prolonged exposure to microwave radiation cause cancers? Absolutely, though the chances are small. The fact that some very heavy mobile users have had growths on or in the ear (and this might avoid the "brain cancer" classification since it's cutaneous), implies a possible correlation. It might be below the threshold for statistical significance, and not worth worrying about, but that doesn't mean that microwaves weren't the primary cause of these cancers.
Another factor might be genetic. Maybe the few individuals unlucky to get cancer from microwave radiation have defects in their heat shock proteins, and so can't control the damage as effectively? Or have defects in their protein degradation pathways so the damaged proteins don't get recycled effectively? These would be very difficult to prove, but there may be some underlying predisposition we don't know about which is currently lost in the noise.
It does make me wonder how many new AGRs could have been built for the same money. While their construction cost is one of the criticisms of the design (it requires high precision down to the millimetre when doing the continuous pouring of the concrete for the reactor housing, or so I've read) I don't think they were anything like that price to build, and they have proven to be very reliable over many decades of operation and there is plenty of expertise in their building and operation. And they are a passively safe design with a lower power density that PWRs; there's less that can go horribly wrong with them and if they do fail they can self cool by convection alone.
This. Looking at this as a pure end user, who has used Mozilla since the very first milestones and then Firefox/Iceweasel, I have over 15 years of use of the browser. Now it's been several years of change after change which detract from its usability, while at the same time fundamental long standing problems like memory leaks and blocking the whole UI due to lack of per-process tabs have gone unaddressed. At this point, looking over to the Chrome/Chromium side, and seeing Mozilla as an inferior copy of this, what reasons do I have to stick with Firefox other than habit? If it so desperately wants to be like Chrome, even though I don't want this, I might as well be using Chrome since it'll be less painful than sticking with Firefox. The current UI of both Firefox and Chrome is awful, but Firefox could very easily undo this to restore the traditional interface.
I've stuck with it out of habit and to support them, but recently I'm increasingly fed up with it locking up on certain web pages due to the lack of per-process separation, and I'm also sick of the absolutely terrible memory leaks. They are so egregious I'm surprised they have not been seriously tackled. Have they not discovered smart pointers? This week I installed the new Vivaldi browser as an alternative to both Firefox and Chrome; I'm writing this reply with it right now. So far it's fine; a few minor niggles but nothing major. I may finally start to replace Firefox on all my home and work systems, and that's a shame since it's so unnecessary. Ultimately, it all comes down to a long series of strategic mistakes by the Mozilla management, which is a bit sad given that their core remit was to deliver a web browser and they got sidetracked with irrelevant projects and other nonsense which made their browser increasingly unusable to the point most people eventually jumped ship.
Definitely agreed on being thankful on having a helmet on! I'm not sure about it being the greatest feeling--it's certainly a very strange (and brief!) state to be in, kind of a detached hyper-alertness maybe?
After the wheel slides out from under and you start to fall, you eventually react to it by sticking your hand out to catch the fall. But after that point there's no concious or unconcious action you can take to prevent the inevitable consequence of the fall, so I kind of experienced it in a kind of detached third-person sense. You know your head is going to thump the road, and you watch it happen in slow motion. Your hand touches down and gets whipped back by the forward motion, your shoulder hits the road, and your body is by now rotating forward so you see the road come up to meet you, and *bang*, slide. Head meets road and the unprotected chin takes a nasty deep graze. Probably less than two seconds between slipping and being stopped on the floor, but it seems to take longer. I really hate to think about what would be the outcome would have been without a helmet.
For the poster who was implying that there's some conspiracy with helmet manufacturers, get some perspective. They aren't a gimmick. They are safety equipment. You don't go out expecting to get into an accident, but there's a nonzero likelihood that you will, and that some of those times they will be serious. Wearing a helmet reduces the chance that the serious accidents will be fatal or life changing. It is literally the difference between being able to get up off the ground, dust yourself off, knock the twisted brake levers back into position and carry on to your destination to get cleaned up, and being carted off in an ambulance as a mangled wreck. It's no different than wearing a seat belt in a car, to prevent you being hurled through the windscreen or into parts of your car during rapid deceleration on impact. You don't expect to get into an accident every time you drive your car, but you still wear a seat belt. The cost of not wearing one if you *do* get into an accident makes it worth it. That's not a conspiracy on the part of seat belt manufacturers, it's common sense. I'll agree that making cycle helmets a legal requirement is a bit different and not totally black and white, but I will also say that after having had my life saved on two, probably three occasions by wearing a helmet, choosing not to wear one is not a rational choice, and that's being polite. I've been cycling almost every day for over 20 years, including commuting to work on busy roads. You encounter bad drivers, bad road conditions, but these can be anticipated and accounted for with experience. But you can't protect yourself against the random and unexpected, and to not wear a helmet is to invite disaster when such things occur.
A small anecdote: one of my work colleagues is an adamant "no helmet" cyclist. While cycling in the city, a car suddenly pulled out in front of him, and his head hit the rear window and went into and through it. He got some serious lacerations requiring stitches and nearly lost his eyesight in one eye from the glass cuts. If he had been wearing a helmet, it would likely have taken the impact and deflected most of the glass shards. You can't prevent other people doing stupid things, but you can definitely mitigate their consequences.
It's happened to me twice. Diesel spill on a wet road. You can't see it, and if you're cornering or changing lanes when you encounter it, you've lost all traction and are down before you realise. Slamming into the tarmac at 30+mph isn't fun. Your arms instinctively go out, but the forward momentum means your head will make hard contact with the road. Both times, I walked away with a dented helmet (and a fractured finger once), and a little road rash down the face. If I hadn't had a helmet on, I might have had a fractured skull, or been killed outright.
It's not the height of the fall, and it's not about the ability of the rider. A fall while stationary will likely be injury free; you fall sideways and your head won't even hit the ground before the rest of your body does. But a sudden and unexpected loss of control at speed is a different story. It could equally be caused by sand or gravel on a sharp bend; that happened to me once, but without any head impact. Or a sudden sidewind. It could possibly also be caused by a car e.g. if one pulls out in front of you, and you hit it. Never happened to me personally, but I've seen it. Imagine your bare face being slammed down onto a road while you are also moving forward at speed; it's not pretty. Your forehead will take the full force of the initial impact, and then your face will get scraped along the road as you slide to a stop. With a helmet, the polystyrene absorbs and distributes the force of the impact, and the plastic casing will slide along due to sticking out, in preference to your skin. That makes the difference between a few scratches and major hospitalisation or worse.
I wear a helmet all the time. I know the consequences of not wearing one, and I know people who died as a result of not wearing one who would most likely have lived if they had. While being in a road collision is nasty, in my experience most cycling injuries happen without any other traffic being involved. You can adjust your speed and riding style based on the type of road, weather conditions etc., but there are factors which are totally out of your control which can't be fully accounted for. Idiots brimming their tanks and then spilling slippery liquid over the road is one I've seen far too much. If the conditions are dry, you can see it; but if it's raining you can be screwed. Whatever the reason, a helmet keeps you from getting brain damage if your head hits the road; and after seeing that happen to a friend who wasn't wearing one, the benefits of wearing one vastly outweigh the costs.
Honestly, I think he should be in prison for manslaughter, though it's obviously hard to prove given the circumstances. His actions have likely resulted in the deaths of many, and who knows what the total count will be when it's all told. While he has thankfully been struck off the medical register, he broke his oaths, fabricated results and brought his profession into disrepute. Look at how many people choose to believe his lies and distrust the medical profession and science, despite there being zero evidence that any of his claims are remotely true.
While I'm not a virologist, I did do my PhD in an immunology lab and am fairly well grounded in how the immune system works. So it's not really "opinion", it's current scientific understanding (well, reasonably current, I've been working in another field the last four years). And it's not like the facts are not readily available. You can read about all this stuff with minimal effort. The basics are high school science (second year for me...); the more advanced stuff is in any immunology text, you can get a second hand copy of one for almost nothing, or you can look it all up online.
Regarding the outbreak, I'll defer to the other comment here regarding the numbers. However, I'll just add this: being vaccinated *does not mean you won't get infected*. It *does* mean that the body is prepared to mount a rapid secondary immune response when infection does occur. Unlike a primary immune response, which occurs on the first infection (or when mimicked with a vaccine) and takes days or weeks to elicit a response, the secondary response is much quicker since you already have the necessary memory cells waiting to be called into action, and it's also much more effective for various reasons (e.g. affinity maturation and isotype switching). You'll get over the infection quickly, and you'll likely not be as infectious to others, but you'll still have an infection for a brief period and you're still at risk of complications, though significantly reduced from an unvaccinated individual. Example: I had measles twice as a child, despite being vaccinated; the difference was it was a few days with spots feeling slightly miserable, rather than spending a fortnight seriously ill getting long term organ damage. Seriously, look up and read about herd immunity. Loss of that is a risk to the entire population, but most especially to the children of uninformed idiots who opted out of getting vaccinated. Vaccination prevents the spread of serious diseases through the population, and the stuff we vaccinate against *is* serious; don't forget that before vaccination programmes, these were routinely killing and maiming hundreds of thousands every year and child mortality was common, rather than an exception. I.e. worrying about a one in a million chance of autism when there's a one in a thousand chance of death or an even higher chance of brain or other organ damage is totally illogical.
Immunology is a fascinating field; there's a huge amount being discovered all the time, but this stuff has been well understood for many decades. There's not any doubt about any of the above, it's been studied extensively by many hundreds of thousands of researchers and medics around the world. We continue to discover new cell subsets which add extra details to the picture, and which expand our understanding of specific diseases and autoimmune conditions, but the basics were nailed down comprehensively a long while back. It's not like vaccines are new or that the way they work isn't understood. We understand how the whole lots works at the molecular level, from all the components of a virus, to how it controls the cellular machinery, to antigen presentation and detection and the selection and expansion of the immune cells to counter it, including how T and B cells vary at the genetic level, even by single base pairs, to do the affinity maturation and isotype switching I mentioned above.
What I do find incredible is that people are totally uninformed about what vaccines are, how they work, and why they are important. Not only because it's taught to everyone (it certainly is in the UK), so you don't have an excuse not to know, but also because it's trivial to *get* informed. As the comment I originally replied to showed, there's a lot of misinformed opinions flying around, partly due to irrational fear, partly due to media attention despite there being zero evidence for any problems, and partly due to irrational nutjobs. Whatever the reasons, it's takes very little effort to educate yourself about the *reality* of how this stuff works should you choose to do so, and given that the "debate" over this stuff is without any merit whatsoever, it's clear that education to get people informed is definitely needed.
Vaccines contain adjuvants and preservatives. The preservatives prevent bacterial growth, since you wouldn't want to inject a toxic bacterial culture (which happened before stuff like thimerosal was used). Adjuvants induce a localised inflammatory response to increase the effect of the immune system against the virus you're innoculating against. Without it, it would have reduced efficacy, or maybe no effect at all. So the reason for their presence is absolutely logical, and was determined by empirical testing to quantify exactly how much was needed, after it was determined that they *were* needed.
You're right that these aren't "nice" things. But they *are* necessary. Like everything there's a tradeoff. In this case, the toxicity of the preservatives and adjuvant against toxic bacterial growth and then benefit of the immunity to viral infection, respectively. Given the tiny amounts used, the negative effect is absolutely minor, and it will mostly get flushed out of the body within a short time. Note that they have not been shown to be harmful. Given that the tradeoff for some of these vaccines is chosing not to have brain damage, die, or suffer other long-term debilitating consequences, any negatives from the preservatives and adjuvants are greatly outweighed. Put it this way: if vaccines did cause autism as claimed by this fraud (which they don't, but let's pretend it's true), then it would *still be worth vaccinating everyone*. Why? Because the tiny chance you would get autism pales in comparison with the ~1/1000 chance of death from measles, and the still higher chance of long-term disability or serious complications. The numbers don't lie. Even if these charlatans were correct, vaccination would still be the correct choice every single time.
Do you really think that the people developing the vaccines would add this stuff for the hell of it, or not be fully aware of the risks involved? Thimerosal usage has been greatly reduced or dropped entirely in response to public hysteria. But it can only be done in the first world where you can manufacture and distribute the vaccine in bulk for immediate usage, since it can no longer be stored. In the third world, or for less commonly-used vaccines, it's still used. And that's still absolutely fine.
As for flu vaccines, like all vaccines they use dead or attenuated virus. Of course it makes you "sick"; having a mild infection (or at least the effects of an infection without actually being infected) and consequently developing an immune response to it is the *entire point* of the vaccine. The attenuation means it's not going to spread significantly in your body or to others, but it *is* sufficient to develop an immune response. Then you'll be protected when a real infection hits you.
Have you tried the new kms driver in FreeBSD 10.1 and 10.2? It was functional but had outstanding problems in 10.1, but by 10.2 it was working very well for me; that was with an HD6850. Unfortunately I upgraded to an R9 390, putting me firmly back into the "unsupported" category. Hopefully it will get support sometime in the future.
With regard to carrying capacity, it's possible to use a bus with a different capacity at different times of day. For example, for one of the services where I live, in the very early morning or late at night (6-7 am, >9pm) it's a small bus, the rest of the time it's a coach, and at peak commuting times it's a double-decker. Another service is almost the same but omits the double-decker due to being a lower demand route. An even busier route is a double decker except at early morning or night, and has a conductor during the daytime. So I think that the bus companies do monitor usage and provide capacity to meet the demand with some extra margin.
Does the exact cost matter though? They are a fixed cost for running a railway which must be paid in order to operate it safely. I'm shocked that it's not a requirement of their operating licence and/or enshrined in the law.
Depends entirely on where you live and what the options are. For my 3 mile commute, I can
- walk (~50 mins) - cycle (~20 mins) - get the bus (20 mins) - drive (40 mins)
Driving is the most stressful and annoying of all the options; I've done it twice in four years! I have to drive there and back in rush hour, leave early to find a parking space a few blocks from work, then walk to work from where I left the car. Massively more inconvenient! As it is, I cycle 2/3 of the time, get the bus 1/3 of the time, and occasionally walk it for variety. On the bus, I get a brief 2 min walk from the bus stop at each end, and 20 mins to read a book or whatever while I relax on the bus. Stress free! And if I fancy a walk I can get on or off at any point between the two places. I could pay for a parking permit at work, but it costs more than it would to use the bus every day, and I would *still* have to fight for a space! Interestingly, cycling and the bus are almost exactly equivalent, simply due to the bus stops, but driving is still longer due to the traffic and the awfulness of finding a parking spot, and then having to walk as well.
They use regenerative braking when they stop, and then use that to get back up to speed before you hear the diesel engine kick back in. They are pretty smooth and comfortable to ride in, and even give you free wifi!
Isn't the biggest WTF here that the signals at the crossing aren't working properly and aren't being fixed?!!!! How come they didn't pass a law that mandated the train company maintain their crossings to an acceptable standard instead?
Where I live (Scotland) that happening on a single crossing would be major news and cause a public safety outcry, and to have it as a routine expectation would be unthinkable. I often cycle over level crossings out in the countryside between Perth and Dundee. Every single one works (lights, sound, automatic barriers), and you'd risk death if they were faulty. The trains are nearly silent and have no stops between the two cities except for one, so they are cruising at a fair speed, probably around 80+mph for most of it (it's not a high speed line), so if the crossing failed you'd not know what hit you.
Yep, it definitely makes things much faster. One service I get (73 in Dundee), has a conductor on board during peak hours, and it's moving as soon as you're in. I can head upstairs, find a seat, get out a book and relax, and the conductor will come and get payment as and when, and it all works just fine.
It strikes me as unusual as well. Almost every developer I've met has used PostgreSQL or MySQL at some point, and many of them knew it well. SQL server, maybe the odd one or two who worked on MS stuff. May be biased by working mainly with open source developers of course, but my experience is that there are plenty of people with PostgreSQL expertise around.
The other question I have from this, is why it was moved all the way over into the right lane if it saw a sandbag there?
If it was me, I'd have kept centred in the lane until after the sandbag, then moved fully over once past it. That would preclude any risky overtaking by any traffic wanting to go in the left lane, and any side collisions since I'm changing lane only once rather than effectively three times. Is the google algorithm a bit over-eager on lane changes?
Both of the two big companies I worked for were all IBM.
The first was a manufacturing site. Every stage of production, process monitoring, lab qc, raw materials ordering and handling, etc. was all run from a single IBM AS/400 system. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that were still the case 17 years later. It worked. This company was also part of a big conglomerate, and the entire set of businesses were all running on big IBM kit. The only change I saw was that they had started to migrate to Compaq and Dell for user-facing systems, which were mainly used for 3720 terminal emulation (replacing the real terminals on token ring) and other tools.
The second was a big pharma company. They were all IBM from servers to desktops and laptops. I liked the ThinkPad. I thought having to make a support call to India (from the UK) for every little (and large) support issue was a bit of a joke though.
Ext4 hasn't let me down either. It's a solid filesystem. But it's also true that ZFS does a lot more checking and can pick up single bit errors which ext4 wouldn't (and can't) notice.
And yes, you can run ext4 on big md arrays, but at that scale you then have the issue of sanely managing the storage, and that ext4 has size and scalability limitations which are going to make it perform badly and put your data at risk. While I could (and have) layered ext4 on LVM on md, ZFS is much better from all sorts of angles. Having a unified set of tools (zfs, zpool, zdb) to manage everything, having the one system manage the disks, volumes, pools, datasets, and being able to snapshot the lot at will, with all those extra data integrity guarantees. I've used both extensively, and after having done that I'm vastly happier with ZFS than anything that I used before. As for the complexity of ZFS being its undoing, and that it did have bugs in its distant past, I've yet to encounter a single issue in ~2.5 years of using it heavily on Linux and FreeBSD.
Well, the reason for that is that the filesystems make different tradeoffs. ext4 has journalling, but no means to detect corruption of data blocks. It's faster because it's simple and less safe. ZFS is slower because it provides additional features, such as block-level checksumming or hashing, including transparent repair when the volume type allows it, and can also compress blocks. It does a whole lot more as well, and while those features are really nice, they don't come for free--there's a performance cost attached.
I use both filesystems. I use ZFS, for example at home with a RAID10 setup, for storing important data that I care about not losing. Here, I have the integrity guarantees, plus on-line snapshotting, separate datasets for different things, and the ability to zfs send my backups elsewhere. Where I care about performance but with reduced data integrity guarantees, for example scratch space for builds or large amounts of temporary data, I'll go with ext4 or ufs.
ZFS can however scale to be vastly faster than ext4 as you add more disks. Since it can stripe writes over multiple volumes (RAID sets), its performance scales up as you add more disks. While you can run LVM on RAID to approximate this, ZFS does a much more intelligent job of managing this, since unlike conventional RAID, it knows exactly which parts of the disk are used or unused, and can resilver (rebuild) an array much faster that you could with RAID.
I've tried them all many times, and thrashed them all. Btrfs trashed its filesystems on more than one occasion. How many times do I get seriously burned by it before I say "enough is enough", and turn my back on it. Well, about four times to date. Then I discovered ZFS.
ZFS rules. I've used it on Linux and now for the last two and a bit years on FreeBSD as well. It's everything Btrfs should have been, and much more. It works. It's robust. It has actual documentation and tools that work as documented. On the type of systems I use, it's slower than ext4 (the robustness doesn't come for free and I don't have huge striped arrays to make it super fast), but still faster than Btrfs by a good margin. It hasn't eaten any of my data, unlike Btrfs. In my book, it's doing everything I want from a filesystem. I can trust my data to it, and I can be confident in my ability to administer it safely.
I won't be trusting Btrfs again anytime soon. I'll leave that "experience" to the masochists who want to get their fingers burned.
This. I've worked at various businesses, from a small family run one, to a big megacorp. At both ends of the scale, the management have been totally OK with me submitting code to open source projects, despite it not being a core part of the business but using open source code for various parts of our work. They have often even allocated time to do the work, and when necessary signed off on copyright assignment when required. And in the case of abandoned projects where the company no longer sees any commercial value, it should be even easier, especially when the work was already done and is just sitting around. It sounds like they are familiar with open source stuff, given that you were working on it as part of the project, so it really can't hurt to ask if it's OK to contribute back those changes. Chances are they'll say yes, and if not at least you tried.
Yes, same for us, though the nature of our "support" will likely be "client libraries and programs tested to run on Windows 10" in addition to 7 and 8. I would seriously doubt we would use any Windows 10-specific features. For us, we're already supporting Linux, MacOS X and BSD, so Windows is already a major additional cost. In fact, we're already dropping Windows support entirely in certain areas (currently server side) due to that (and the fact that it's a complete nightmare compared with the rest). I'll have to wait until our enterprise site licence is updated before I can even start testing though.
No business is going to *choose* to target Windows 10 as a rational business decision. You eliminate all your potential Windows 7 and 8 customers, and they are the majority of Windows users right now.
It's not many months since XP was the baseline to target for most people. Now it's 7 (or Vista, but the market share is sufficiently low to ignore it).
At least where I work, we support 7 and to a lesser extent 8. 10 is totally off the radar, at least for the present. It's not worth our time to support.
And in these books (yes, I still have them!) you often found a page or two at the back with a set of corrections to make the program work with the BASIC dialects of different machines (Spectrum, TIMEX, ZX80/81, Commodore 64, Commodore Pet, BBC, TRS-80, Apricot, Dragon, Oric, etc.). The sheer diversity is something I miss now it's all generic Intel.
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Breaking bonds isn't the only way cancer could be caused. Microwaves heat water (or rather, anything with an O-H bond with a similar dipole or equivalent). Heat denatures proteins, that is it can cause irreversible changes in the conformation (folding) of protein molecules. Think in terms of boiling egg white. It changes irreversibly from soluble to insoluble on heating. Every cell is full of proteins which control cell death, proliferation, stasis, and other critical functions. Denaturing some of them could shift the balance over towards uncontrolled proliferation, or it could compromise DNA damage detection and repair, predisposing to cancer in the future. There are a myriad of effects which could cause a cell to become cancerous either immediately, or in the future, as a result.
At a population level, do mobile phones have a statistically significant effect upon brain cancer? Not according to this study. But at an individual level, can prolonged exposure to microwave radiation cause cancers? Absolutely, though the chances are small. The fact that some very heavy mobile users have had growths on or in the ear (and this might avoid the "brain cancer" classification since it's cutaneous), implies a possible correlation. It might be below the threshold for statistical significance, and not worth worrying about, but that doesn't mean that microwaves weren't the primary cause of these cancers.
Another factor might be genetic. Maybe the few individuals unlucky to get cancer from microwave radiation have defects in their heat shock proteins, and so can't control the damage as effectively? Or have defects in their protein degradation pathways so the damaged proteins don't get recycled effectively? These would be very difficult to prove, but there may be some underlying predisposition we don't know about which is currently lost in the noise.
It does make me wonder how many new AGRs could have been built for the same money. While their construction cost is one of the criticisms of the design (it requires high precision down to the millimetre when doing the continuous pouring of the concrete for the reactor housing, or so I've read) I don't think they were anything like that price to build, and they have proven to be very reliable over many decades of operation and there is plenty of expertise in their building and operation. And they are a passively safe design with a lower power density that PWRs; there's less that can go horribly wrong with them and if they do fail they can self cool by convection alone.
This. Looking at this as a pure end user, who has used Mozilla since the very first milestones and then Firefox/Iceweasel, I have over 15 years of use of the browser. Now it's been several years of change after change which detract from its usability, while at the same time fundamental long standing problems like memory leaks and blocking the whole UI due to lack of per-process tabs have gone unaddressed. At this point, looking over to the Chrome/Chromium side, and seeing Mozilla as an inferior copy of this, what reasons do I have to stick with Firefox other than habit? If it so desperately wants to be like Chrome, even though I don't want this, I might as well be using Chrome since it'll be less painful than sticking with Firefox. The current UI of both Firefox and Chrome is awful, but Firefox could very easily undo this to restore the traditional interface.
I've stuck with it out of habit and to support them, but recently I'm increasingly fed up with it locking up on certain web pages due to the lack of per-process separation, and I'm also sick of the absolutely terrible memory leaks. They are so egregious I'm surprised they have not been seriously tackled. Have they not discovered smart pointers? This week I installed the new Vivaldi browser as an alternative to both Firefox and Chrome; I'm writing this reply with it right now. So far it's fine; a few minor niggles but nothing major. I may finally start to replace Firefox on all my home and work systems, and that's a shame since it's so unnecessary. Ultimately, it all comes down to a long series of strategic mistakes by the Mozilla management, which is a bit sad given that their core remit was to deliver a web browser and they got sidetracked with irrelevant projects and other nonsense which made their browser increasingly unusable to the point most people eventually jumped ship.
Definitely agreed on being thankful on having a helmet on! I'm not sure about it being the greatest feeling--it's certainly a very strange (and brief!) state to be in, kind of a detached hyper-alertness maybe?
After the wheel slides out from under and you start to fall, you eventually react to it by sticking your hand out to catch the fall. But after that point there's no concious or unconcious action you can take to prevent the inevitable consequence of the fall, so I kind of experienced it in a kind of detached third-person sense. You know your head is going to thump the road, and you watch it happen in slow motion. Your hand touches down and gets whipped back by the forward motion, your shoulder hits the road, and your body is by now rotating forward so you see the road come up to meet you, and *bang*, slide. Head meets road and the unprotected chin takes a nasty deep graze. Probably less than two seconds between slipping and being stopped on the floor, but it seems to take longer. I really hate to think about what would be the outcome would have been without a helmet.
For the poster who was implying that there's some conspiracy with helmet manufacturers, get some perspective. They aren't a gimmick. They are safety equipment. You don't go out expecting to get into an accident, but there's a nonzero likelihood that you will, and that some of those times they will be serious. Wearing a helmet reduces the chance that the serious accidents will be fatal or life changing. It is literally the difference between being able to get up off the ground, dust yourself off, knock the twisted brake levers back into position and carry on to your destination to get cleaned up, and being carted off in an ambulance as a mangled wreck. It's no different than wearing a seat belt in a car, to prevent you being hurled through the windscreen or into parts of your car during rapid deceleration on impact. You don't expect to get into an accident every time you drive your car, but you still wear a seat belt. The cost of not wearing one if you *do* get into an accident makes it worth it. That's not a conspiracy on the part of seat belt manufacturers, it's common sense. I'll agree that making cycle helmets a legal requirement is a bit different and not totally black and white, but I will also say that after having had my life saved on two, probably three occasions by wearing a helmet, choosing not to wear one is not a rational choice, and that's being polite. I've been cycling almost every day for over 20 years, including commuting to work on busy roads. You encounter bad drivers, bad road conditions, but these can be anticipated and accounted for with experience. But you can't protect yourself against the random and unexpected, and to not wear a helmet is to invite disaster when such things occur.
A small anecdote: one of my work colleagues is an adamant "no helmet" cyclist. While cycling in the city, a car suddenly pulled out in front of him, and his head hit the rear window and went into and through it. He got some serious lacerations requiring stitches and nearly lost his eyesight in one eye from the glass cuts. If he had been wearing a helmet, it would likely have taken the impact and deflected most of the glass shards. You can't prevent other people doing stupid things, but you can definitely mitigate their consequences.
It's happened to me twice. Diesel spill on a wet road. You can't see it, and if you're cornering or changing lanes when you encounter it, you've lost all traction and are down before you realise. Slamming into the tarmac at 30+mph isn't fun. Your arms instinctively go out, but the forward momentum means your head will make hard contact with the road. Both times, I walked away with a dented helmet (and a fractured finger once), and a little road rash down the face. If I hadn't had a helmet on, I might have had a fractured skull, or been killed outright.
It's not the height of the fall, and it's not about the ability of the rider. A fall while stationary will likely be injury free; you fall sideways and your head won't even hit the ground before the rest of your body does. But a sudden and unexpected loss of control at speed is a different story. It could equally be caused by sand or gravel on a sharp bend; that happened to me once, but without any head impact. Or a sudden sidewind. It could possibly also be caused by a car e.g. if one pulls out in front of you, and you hit it. Never happened to me personally, but I've seen it. Imagine your bare face being slammed down onto a road while you are also moving forward at speed; it's not pretty. Your forehead will take the full force of the initial impact, and then your face will get scraped along the road as you slide to a stop. With a helmet, the polystyrene absorbs and distributes the force of the impact, and the plastic casing will slide along due to sticking out, in preference to your skin. That makes the difference between a few scratches and major hospitalisation or worse.
I wear a helmet all the time. I know the consequences of not wearing one, and I know people who died as a result of not wearing one who would most likely have lived if they had. While being in a road collision is nasty, in my experience most cycling injuries happen without any other traffic being involved. You can adjust your speed and riding style based on the type of road, weather conditions etc., but there are factors which are totally out of your control which can't be fully accounted for. Idiots brimming their tanks and then spilling slippery liquid over the road is one I've seen far too much. If the conditions are dry, you can see it; but if it's raining you can be screwed. Whatever the reason, a helmet keeps you from getting brain damage if your head hits the road; and after seeing that happen to a friend who wasn't wearing one, the benefits of wearing one vastly outweigh the costs.
Honestly, I think he should be in prison for manslaughter, though it's obviously hard to prove given the circumstances. His actions have likely resulted in the deaths of many, and who knows what the total count will be when it's all told. While he has thankfully been struck off the medical register, he broke his oaths, fabricated results and brought his profession into disrepute. Look at how many people choose to believe his lies and distrust the medical profession and science, despite there being zero evidence that any of his claims are remotely true.
While I'm not a virologist, I did do my PhD in an immunology lab and am fairly well grounded in how the immune system works. So it's not really "opinion", it's current scientific understanding (well, reasonably current, I've been working in another field the last four years). And it's not like the facts are not readily available. You can read about all this stuff with minimal effort. The basics are high school science (second year for me...); the more advanced stuff is in any immunology text, you can get a second hand copy of one for almost nothing, or you can look it all up online.
Regarding the outbreak, I'll defer to the other comment here regarding the numbers. However, I'll just add this: being vaccinated *does not mean you won't get infected*. It *does* mean that the body is prepared to mount a rapid secondary immune response when infection does occur. Unlike a primary immune response, which occurs on the first infection (or when mimicked with a vaccine) and takes days or weeks to elicit a response, the secondary response is much quicker since you already have the necessary memory cells waiting to be called into action, and it's also much more effective for various reasons (e.g. affinity maturation and isotype switching). You'll get over the infection quickly, and you'll likely not be as infectious to others, but you'll still have an infection for a brief period and you're still at risk of complications, though significantly reduced from an unvaccinated individual. Example: I had measles twice as a child, despite being vaccinated; the difference was it was a few days with spots feeling slightly miserable, rather than spending a fortnight seriously ill getting long term organ damage. Seriously, look up and read about herd immunity. Loss of that is a risk to the entire population, but most especially to the children of uninformed idiots who opted out of getting vaccinated. Vaccination prevents the spread of serious diseases through the population, and the stuff we vaccinate against *is* serious; don't forget that before vaccination programmes, these were routinely killing and maiming hundreds of thousands every year and child mortality was common, rather than an exception. I.e. worrying about a one in a million chance of autism when there's a one in a thousand chance of death or an even higher chance of brain or other organ damage is totally illogical.
Immunology is a fascinating field; there's a huge amount being discovered all the time, but this stuff has been well understood for many decades. There's not any doubt about any of the above, it's been studied extensively by many hundreds of thousands of researchers and medics around the world. We continue to discover new cell subsets which add extra details to the picture, and which expand our understanding of specific diseases and autoimmune conditions, but the basics were nailed down comprehensively a long while back. It's not like vaccines are new or that the way they work isn't understood. We understand how the whole lots works at the molecular level, from all the components of a virus, to how it controls the cellular machinery, to antigen presentation and detection and the selection and expansion of the immune cells to counter it, including how T and B cells vary at the genetic level, even by single base pairs, to do the affinity maturation and isotype switching I mentioned above.
What I do find incredible is that people are totally uninformed about what vaccines are, how they work, and why they are important. Not only because it's taught to everyone (it certainly is in the UK), so you don't have an excuse not to know, but also because it's trivial to *get* informed. As the comment I originally replied to showed, there's a lot of misinformed opinions flying around, partly due to irrational fear, partly due to media attention despite there being zero evidence for any problems, and partly due to irrational nutjobs. Whatever the reasons, it's takes very little effort to educate yourself about the *reality* of how this stuff works should you choose to do so, and given that the "debate" over this stuff is without any merit whatsoever, it's clear that education to get people informed is definitely needed.
Vaccines contain adjuvants and preservatives. The preservatives prevent bacterial growth, since you wouldn't want to inject a toxic bacterial culture (which happened before stuff like thimerosal was used). Adjuvants induce a localised inflammatory response to increase the effect of the immune system against the virus you're innoculating against. Without it, it would have reduced efficacy, or maybe no effect at all. So the reason for their presence is absolutely logical, and was determined by empirical testing to quantify exactly how much was needed, after it was determined that they *were* needed.
You're right that these aren't "nice" things. But they *are* necessary. Like everything there's a tradeoff. In this case, the toxicity of the preservatives and adjuvant against toxic bacterial growth and then benefit of the immunity to viral infection, respectively. Given the tiny amounts used, the negative effect is absolutely minor, and it will mostly get flushed out of the body within a short time. Note that they have not been shown to be harmful. Given that the tradeoff for some of these vaccines is chosing not to have brain damage, die, or suffer other long-term debilitating consequences, any negatives from the preservatives and adjuvants are greatly outweighed. Put it this way: if vaccines did cause autism as claimed by this fraud (which they don't, but let's pretend it's true), then it would *still be worth vaccinating everyone*. Why? Because the tiny chance you would get autism pales in comparison with the ~1/1000 chance of death from measles, and the still higher chance of long-term disability or serious complications. The numbers don't lie. Even if these charlatans were correct, vaccination would still be the correct choice every single time.
Do you really think that the people developing the vaccines would add this stuff for the hell of it, or not be fully aware of the risks involved? Thimerosal usage has been greatly reduced or dropped entirely in response to public hysteria. But it can only be done in the first world where you can manufacture and distribute the vaccine in bulk for immediate usage, since it can no longer be stored. In the third world, or for less commonly-used vaccines, it's still used. And that's still absolutely fine.
As for flu vaccines, like all vaccines they use dead or attenuated virus. Of course it makes you "sick"; having a mild infection (or at least the effects of an infection without actually being infected) and consequently developing an immune response to it is the *entire point* of the vaccine. The attenuation means it's not going to spread significantly in your body or to others, but it *is* sufficient to develop an immune response. Then you'll be protected when a real infection hits you.
Have you tried the new kms driver in FreeBSD 10.1 and 10.2? It was functional but had outstanding problems in 10.1, but by 10.2 it was working very well for me; that was with an HD6850. Unfortunately I upgraded to an R9 390, putting me firmly back into the "unsupported" category. Hopefully it will get support sometime in the future.
With regard to carrying capacity, it's possible to use a bus with a different capacity at different times of day. For example, for one of the services where I live, in the very early morning or late at night (6-7 am, >9pm) it's a small bus, the rest of the time it's a coach, and at peak commuting times it's a double-decker. Another service is almost the same but omits the double-decker due to being a lower demand route. An even busier route is a double decker except at early morning or night, and has a conductor during the daytime. So I think that the bus companies do monitor usage and provide capacity to meet the demand with some extra margin.
Does the exact cost matter though? They are a fixed cost for running a railway which must be paid in order to operate it safely. I'm shocked that it's not a requirement of their operating licence and/or enshrined in the law.
Depends entirely on where you live and what the options are. For my 3 mile commute, I can
- walk (~50 mins)
- cycle (~20 mins)
- get the bus (20 mins)
- drive (40 mins)
Driving is the most stressful and annoying of all the options; I've done it twice in four years! I have to drive there and back in rush hour, leave early to find a parking space a few blocks from work, then walk to work from where I left the car. Massively more inconvenient! As it is, I cycle 2/3 of the time, get the bus 1/3 of the time, and occasionally walk it for variety. On the bus, I get a brief 2 min walk from the bus stop at each end, and 20 mins to read a book or whatever while I relax on the bus. Stress free! And if I fancy a walk I can get on or off at any point between the two places. I could pay for a parking permit at work, but it costs more than it would to use the bus every day, and I would *still* have to fight for a space! Interestingly, cycling and the bus are almost exactly equivalent, simply due to the bus stops, but driving is still longer due to the traffic and the awfulness of finding a parking spot, and then having to walk as well.
They already exist. Here's some which I use regularly:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-s... and http://www.nationalexpressgrou...
http://www.dundeewestend.com/2... and http://www.stagecoach.com/medi...
They use regenerative braking when they stop, and then use that to get back up to speed before you hear the diesel engine kick back in. They are pretty smooth and comfortable to ride in, and even give you free wifi!
Isn't the biggest WTF here that the signals at the crossing aren't working properly and aren't being fixed?!!!! How come they didn't pass a law that mandated the train company maintain their crossings to an acceptable standard instead?
Where I live (Scotland) that happening on a single crossing would be major news and cause a public safety outcry, and to have it as a routine expectation would be unthinkable. I often cycle over level crossings out in the countryside between Perth and Dundee. Every single one works (lights, sound, automatic barriers), and you'd risk death if they were faulty. The trains are nearly silent and have no stops between the two cities except for one, so they are cruising at a fair speed, probably around 80+mph for most of it (it's not a high speed line), so if the crossing failed you'd not know what hit you.
Yep, it definitely makes things much faster. One service I get (73 in Dundee), has a conductor on board during peak hours, and it's moving as soon as you're in. I can head upstairs, find a seat, get out a book and relax, and the conductor will come and get payment as and when, and it all works just fine.
It strikes me as unusual as well. Almost every developer I've met has used PostgreSQL or MySQL at some point, and many of them knew it well. SQL server, maybe the odd one or two who worked on MS stuff. May be biased by working mainly with open source developers of course, but my experience is that there are plenty of people with PostgreSQL expertise around.
The other question I have from this, is why it was moved all the way over into the right lane if it saw a sandbag there?
If it was me, I'd have kept centred in the lane until after the sandbag, then moved fully over once past it. That would preclude any risky overtaking by any traffic wanting to go in the left lane, and any side collisions since I'm changing lane only once rather than effectively three times. Is the google algorithm a bit over-eager on lane changes?
Both of the two big companies I worked for were all IBM.
The first was a manufacturing site. Every stage of production, process monitoring, lab qc, raw materials ordering and handling, etc. was all run from a single IBM AS/400 system. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that were still the case 17 years later. It worked. This company was also part of a big conglomerate, and the entire set of businesses were all running on big IBM kit. The only change I saw was that they had started to migrate to Compaq and Dell for user-facing systems, which were mainly used for 3720 terminal emulation (replacing the real terminals on token ring) and other tools.
The second was a big pharma company. They were all IBM from servers to desktops and laptops. I liked the ThinkPad. I thought having to make a support call to India (from the UK) for every little (and large) support issue was a bit of a joke though.
Ext4 hasn't let me down either. It's a solid filesystem. But it's also true that ZFS does a lot more checking and can pick up single bit errors which ext4 wouldn't (and can't) notice.
And yes, you can run ext4 on big md arrays, but at that scale you then have the issue of sanely managing the storage, and that ext4 has size and scalability limitations which are going to make it perform badly and put your data at risk. While I could (and have) layered ext4 on LVM on md, ZFS is much better from all sorts of angles. Having a unified set of tools (zfs, zpool, zdb) to manage everything, having the one system manage the disks, volumes, pools, datasets, and being able to snapshot the lot at will, with all those extra data integrity guarantees. I've used both extensively, and after having done that I'm vastly happier with ZFS than anything that I used before. As for the complexity of ZFS being its undoing, and that it did have bugs in its distant past, I've yet to encounter a single issue in ~2.5 years of using it heavily on Linux and FreeBSD.
Well, the reason for that is that the filesystems make different tradeoffs. ext4 has journalling, but no means to detect corruption of data blocks. It's faster because it's simple and less safe. ZFS is slower because it provides additional features, such as block-level checksumming or hashing, including transparent repair when the volume type allows it, and can also compress blocks. It does a whole lot more as well, and while those features are really nice, they don't come for free--there's a performance cost attached.
I use both filesystems. I use ZFS, for example at home with a RAID10 setup, for storing important data that I care about not losing. Here, I have the integrity guarantees, plus on-line snapshotting, separate datasets for different things, and the ability to zfs send my backups elsewhere. Where I care about performance but with reduced data integrity guarantees, for example scratch space for builds or large amounts of temporary data, I'll go with ext4 or ufs.
ZFS can however scale to be vastly faster than ext4 as you add more disks. Since it can stripe writes over multiple volumes (RAID sets), its performance scales up as you add more disks. While you can run LVM on RAID to approximate this, ZFS does a much more intelligent job of managing this, since unlike conventional RAID, it knows exactly which parts of the disk are used or unused, and can resilver (rebuild) an array much faster that you could with RAID.
I've tried them all many times, and thrashed them all. Btrfs trashed its filesystems on more than one occasion. How many times do I get seriously burned by it before I say "enough is enough", and turn my back on it. Well, about four times to date. Then I discovered ZFS.
ZFS rules. I've used it on Linux and now for the last two and a bit years on FreeBSD as well. It's everything Btrfs should have been, and much more. It works. It's robust. It has actual documentation and tools that work as documented. On the type of systems I use, it's slower than ext4 (the robustness doesn't come for free and I don't have huge striped arrays to make it super fast), but still faster than Btrfs by a good margin. It hasn't eaten any of my data, unlike Btrfs. In my book, it's doing everything I want from a filesystem. I can trust my data to it, and I can be confident in my ability to administer it safely.
I won't be trusting Btrfs again anytime soon. I'll leave that "experience" to the masochists who want to get their fingers burned.
This. I've worked at various businesses, from a small family run one, to a big megacorp. At both ends of the scale, the management have been totally OK with me submitting code to open source projects, despite it not being a core part of the business but using open source code for various parts of our work. They have often even allocated time to do the work, and when necessary signed off on copyright assignment when required. And in the case of abandoned projects where the company no longer sees any commercial value, it should be even easier, especially when the work was already done and is just sitting around. It sounds like they are familiar with open source stuff, given that you were working on it as part of the project, so it really can't hurt to ask if it's OK to contribute back those changes. Chances are they'll say yes, and if not at least you tried.
Yes, same for us, though the nature of our "support" will likely be "client libraries and programs tested to run on Windows 10" in addition to 7 and 8. I would seriously doubt we would use any Windows 10-specific features. For us, we're already supporting Linux, MacOS X and BSD, so Windows is already a major additional cost. In fact, we're already dropping Windows support entirely in certain areas (currently server side) due to that (and the fact that it's a complete nightmare compared with the rest). I'll have to wait until our enterprise site licence is updated before I can even start testing though.
No business is going to *choose* to target Windows 10 as a rational business decision. You eliminate all your potential Windows 7 and 8 customers, and they are the majority of Windows users right now.
It's not many months since XP was the baseline to target for most people. Now it's 7 (or Vista, but the market share is sufficiently low to ignore it).
At least where I work, we support 7 and to a lesser extent 8. 10 is totally off the radar, at least for the present. It's not worth our time to support.
And in these books (yes, I still have them!) you often found a page or two at the back with a set of corrections to make the program work with the BASIC dialects of different machines (Spectrum, TIMEX, ZX80/81, Commodore 64, Commodore Pet, BBC, TRS-80, Apricot, Dragon, Oric, etc.). The sheer diversity is something I miss now it's all generic Intel.