>And that is fine, but do the other 19 homeowners get a day?
No, and they shouldn't either. Where there are pre-existing contractual requirements as with HOA's people should respect what they signed, but other than that the only two words I have for them is: fuck you. It's not their home, it's not their business, look the other way if it bothers you.
>What could be more democratic than the 19 voting to tell the 20th that he can't paint it pink? That's not democracy, that's tyranny of the majority.
>At the end of the day, what he does effects everyone near him, No. It doesn't. Not even slightly. Seeing something does not count as "being affected" by it. It's none of their damn business.
>so it is reasonable and fair to have such rules if the majority want them. No, it really isn't.
>You don't have to like it, but you should respect it. Sorry but I will never do either - it goes fundamentally against everything I believe in. People should let other people do whatever the fuck they want unless it hurts somebody else. Nobody can be hurt by somebody else's sense of aesthetics ergo ALL senses of aesthetics should be respected, nobody should get to tell others how their property should look. In fact I would go so far as to argue that painting your house - especially if it's painted in a way that isn't "normal" is an act of free speech, constitutionally protected in every free country on earth.
Actually almost all new properties in South Africa DOES have rooftop solar geysers. The numbers will probably go down a bit in the near future because until recently there was a major tax rebate for installing them but that law has just expired so the price will be somewhat higher. Older properties mostly have electrical geysers, my new house has one for example, but once that reaches end of life I'll definitely look at solar as possibility. In Cape Town in particular it should work very well - in Summer we have 10 hours or more of sunlight every day.
See, that's what pisses me off. While I would never argue that you can't have that opinion, or that neighbourhoods which cater for it can't exist - the very idea that you so much as has an opinion about it annoys the hell out of me. I'm not taking away your right to that opinion - I'm merely excersing my right to tell you it's obnoxious.
You do what you want with your house, your body and your life and STFU about what anybody else does unless it actually impacts on your rights.
When my hair is one of it's more extravagant dye jobs most people compliment me, now and then I come across some judgemental asshole who makes a derogatory comment. Who makes it clear that he feels somehow personally offended by my lack of conformity. That he wished he never saw it, that he would prefer to have done something to avoid it. I have never had any qualms about telling those assholes where to get off.
I take the exact same approach to my home. In a neighbourhood where those rules are stated upfront I couldn't actually act on a sudden urge to paint a dragon mural on my front wall without breaching a contract, so I choose never to live there -and I have nothing but scorn for those who do because people who make such choices tend to be controlling and judgemental of every OTHER choice anybody ever makes that isn't the exact same choice THEY would have made.
People like that piss me off.
Please note - I never campaigned to take anybody's rights away, I never suggested it shouldn't exist - all I said was it pisses me off so I choose to never buy there. The worst you could say is that my making that decision reduces the value of homes in such neighbourhoods - by a tiny amount perhaps but now multiply it by everybody who shares my love for the exotic and esoteric - and I actually think that neighbourhoods like that end up much more underpriced than they ever realized because of the large number of people who would never willingly buy there. How large that is varies of course, in Cape Town it's a very large percentage - part of why I moved here is the vibrant and large alternative subculture here, in the US you'll find something similar in places like Portland and San Francisco, in Dallas it's probably a tiny minority - so the reduction in value is probably offset by the gains from people who think like you do.
But in the end that's the only possible impact my opinion has on you. I expressed my annoyance, that is all, I never tried to force you to share it.
>If you have 20 homes in a row that all more or less look the same, and 1 of them is painted pink, it stands out like a sore thumb.
There are plenty of examples of that as well - and I always loved them. I would often slow down when I drive past a house that stands out like that to appreciate it. To me, that's beautiful. To me - I look at that and basically assume that's where the most interesting and probably the most intelligent person in the street lives.
I respect him for having the balls to be different. Indiviualist self expression is a quality I admire above all.
Saying something pisses me off does not qualify as "wanting to take away your rights". That's just me saying why I choose NOT to live in neighbourhoods like that. I never said YOU couldn't, I just think it's stupid to want to.
>It can be annoying, but it protects the value of the home against the idiot who would paint their house pink.
Now that sort of thinking pisses me off. I recently bought a second property, a home now that I have a child since I wanted her to have a yard to play in (the old apartment is to be rented out). I live in Cape Town, South Africa, when I started house-hunting I carefully found all the neighbourhoods where somebody had contractual rules about things like what colour I can paint my house and excluded them from the search. Even though they included some of the most sought after neighbourhoods - I refuse to live somewhere like that, this is why I can never live among conservatives. Seriously - their desire to control over people's self expression is just insane to me. If I want to die my hair pink I do (and have done) and if I want to paint my house pink - then fuck anybody else's opinion.
To me -it ADDS value to a neighbourhood when every house looks different and unique. Expressing something of the owner's personality. It gives the neighbourhood character. One of the most beautiful suburbs in Cape Town is Bo-kaap just outside CBD. Where EVERY house is a different bright colour. Pinks and blues and yellows and reds - and most houses are several of those. Has this harmed property values ? Hell no ! On the contrary, photographers go there to do photoshoots because it provides such awesome backdrops and landscape photography opportunities.
I bought in a different area in the end, mostly due to wanting to be closer to work - but I made sure that nobody will get to tell me what I can and cannot do with my house, ESPECIALLY aesthetically.
Conservatives always talk of how liberals want to control people's lives when liberals care about waste and the environment... but to me, wanting to control how people dress, how they express their gender identity, their sexual orientation, whether they get married or not, whether they are monogamous or polyamorous or swingers or whatever else you can think off, what colour they paint their house, what art they display in the garden... THAT is so much more insidious. Liberals only want to ask you nicely not to do things that harm others. Conservatives want to control your very identity.
I guess it just confirms once again why I will die still a liberal.
>As for the water heater - 'On Demand' means that when the customer/home owner asks for hot water,
There's another version. In Brazil nobody has a water heater. What they do have is a small heater attached directly to the shower-head that heats the water as it comes out of the tap. It's cheap, efficient (since it only heats the water you're actually using) and reaches a passably acceptable temperature.
It's not as hot as the showers I normally like but in Brazil that's not a problem because the country itself is bleeding hot as hell already.
I'm not sure exactly what the temperature was (I would guess between 25 and 30 celcius) since the heater has only a short while to heat the water as it flows over it, but it was certainly "good enough". It may even have been much hotter than that, despite coming from a hot country (South Africa) I was not acclimatized to Brazil which is MUCH hotter, so the higher ambient temperature could have thrown me off.
Every single claim in that post is just plain false. What has been responsibile for humanity's recent improvements in quality of life has been science: a blatantly socialist system.
There is nothing libertarian about contracts, profit-seeking or voluntary trade, these are found in ALL variations of capitalism AND in many variations of socialism as well.
Nowhere in my speech did I once speak in favour of the state, but the reality is that there is a LOT of very wealthy countries with big governments and not a single rich country WITHOUT one. Small governments are only found where poverty is at it's worst. The sole EXCEPTION was Andalusia - no government and high quality of life, but THAT was socialist.
Libertarianism has NEVER been tried - you're just trying to shoehorn a bunch of stuff and claim it's libertarianism while ignoring the most IMPORTANT parts of what DEFINES libertarianism. You don't know what libertarianism actually IS - you just like the sound of the word it seems and apply it to everything you approve of regardless of whether that is a particularly or exclusively libertarian thing, and ignoring that the things that ARE particularly and exclusively libertarian have NOT in fact ever been tried.
Only one variation of socialism has been a failure, there are thousands of others - and at least one has been a remarkable success, I gave you the example right there in my post. The kind of capitalism practiced in the Rhineland countries, and Scandinavian welfare-state concepts are considered socialist by American standards and THEY are MORE successful than America has ever been. Maybe not in the way America likes to measure (total wealth in the country) but in the way that MATTERS: actual quality of life of most citizens. They have very few poor people, and the few they have live much better lives than the poor in the USA - now THAT is success.
How about the anarcho-socialist brand, or council-communism or part-econ - all of which basically do socialism without any state or government at all. Unlike, say, libertarianism at least one of those HAS actually been tried. Andalusia in Spain was anarcho socialist for about 20 years at the start of the 20th century, they were simultaneously at war with capitalists from the north and communists from the South. The capitalists hated their working socialism, the communists hated their working anarchism.
But despite the costs of those wars they were extremely successful. George Orwell visited Andalusia and described it as "the most egalitarian society I have ever seen -as close to perfection as civilization has gotten". In many ways, it was Star Trek Next Generation without the science fiction - just done with the technology of a century ago, imagine what we could do with TODAY's technology ?
It wasn't perfect and there were some problems though they were making good progress towards solving them and, had they not ultimately lost the wars after 20 years, they probably would have since their track record strongly suggests it.
A key component was that the only kind of business they had were worker-owned cooperatives, but these cooperatives still competed in an open market. Worker-owned is all you need for the definition of "socialism" to apply, there is nothing that requires a state, or a government, or even the absence of markets.
That model works surprisingly well - right now worker owned cooperatives in the USA include one of the biggest industrial bakeries in California, one of the leading manufacturers of robotics in Texas (yes, high-tech companies work well this way too) and the largest carpet-maker on earth.
True the one group of charlatans who are NOT lying when they claim their "treatments" have no side effects are homeopaths - you can't have side effects when you have no effects.
Your soul evidence for your anti-science insanity is anecdotal, and the worst kind of anecdote - an anonymous one (since you posted as AC).
The only SANE reaction here is to assume you ARE in fact an acupuncturist and this is your way of trying to advertise and drum up some business in a desperate attempt to avoid competing with actual science.
Google should partner with github to let them replicate the projects including giving htem the public keys so that if any devs want access after the fact it can be already-working.
Let me regale you my favorite version of this. It must have been 12 or 13 years ago now, I was maintaining an educational linux distribution called OpenLab (we did some awesome stuff - look it up) when one of our big customers bought a large consignment of P3 machines to use as thin-client class-room servers. The things just wouldn't work... they would start booting the live CD and halfway through the bootup just reboot again, over and over and over.
So they sent us one to figure out what was going wrong. I spent ages trying to figure out what on earth could be causing it, eventually resorting to disabling drivers one by one until it booted up to track down the issue. It turns out it was a watchdog card driver causing the problem. Which is odd because the machines did not HAVE watchdog cards. Now having a starting point I dug further. It turns out the cheap motherboard manufacturers had added an onboard sound card, but hadn't bothered to get a unique PCI-ID for it, they just used one from an intel watchdog card assuming nobody would install one. Running windows this would not be a major issue since nobody would load the driver for one.
On Linux though the plugnplay layer picked up the device ID and loaded the watchdog card driver thinking there is one. The driver fires up, waits for the scheduled watchdog ping - and when it didn't get one (because the card wasn't really there) after 60 seconds (Back then booting up in 90seconds got us lots of praise, below one minute was unheard of) it would reboot the machine -exactly as it's supposed to.
Never underestimate the level of stupid that hardware companies can come up with. I had to build a hotpatch version of the distribution which would disable the watchdog card driver if it detected that motherboard (which by the way is not that simple to do in very early-boot init scripts that have to run before drivers start loading).
You're absolutely right. And that's before we even consider the truly tragic cases where the alternative lot expressed their negative sentiments about medicine so harshly that patients end up forgoing them - and now they have ONLY placebo effects.
Whenever I have to open a computer case I dress in nothing but a large overcoat. Then when the case is opened I yank the coat open and "flash" the BIOS !
begin
if we were pascal programmers we would argue about when to end a joke on a semi-colon
and when to end it on a fullstop. end;
If we were cobol programmers the joke would span 4 pages, look like something an accountant wrote and nobody could find the punchline.
If we were object pascal programmers we'd be making jokes about classnames starting with T (a relic from pascal days and the way OP treats classes and Types as the same thing).
If we were Ruby programmers all our jokes would be about how the language is better than python but everybody else is too stupid to know it.
If we were C programmers we'd still think the "long johns" joke was funny.
If we were assembler programmers we'd be making knock-knock jokes... sorry make that knk-knk jokes.
>The software author has the power to control the licence
Except when, like here, it's not the original author. Stenn is maintaining the code and has been for a long time, but NTP was originally written by David Mills. Mills didn't have the associated costs that Stenn has to deal with - he could do it as a hobby, Stenn can't - that's not viable for NTP today anymore.
Mills is long retired, but HE holds the original copyright and only HE could change the license.
Now of course Stenn could just walk away and go do something more lucrative and, indeed, if funding doesn't pick up that's exactly what he will have to do but he can't change the license of NTP and if he could the entire internet would pretty much collapse (indeed if Mills had not used a free license - the internet probably wouldn't EXIST).
Most rational people agree that placebos have their place, the effect is a valuable part of treatment and current medical establishment ought to be adjusted to maximise it's benefits.
But charlatans selling nothing else and claiming to be selling medicine end up killing LOTS of people every year.
The thing is - real medicine gets you the placebo effect ANYWAY - and ALSO gets you actual TREATMENT. We can possibly increase the placebo effect if we copy a few things from the charlatan's playbook - like making appointments one-hour and actually connecting with patients, getting to know them, helping them feel emotionally better. They are experts at that, the trouble is - that's ALL they are experts at and they LIE about offering anything more - which kills people, lots of people, every year.
I read an article recently by an oncologist about the serious difficulties they face because so many cancer patients are ALSO on supposedly alternative treatments which has no medical value but CAN severely interact with the treatments they ARE on (like chemo) and make those less effective. Interestingly she points out how those alternative providers never request files from them, never contact them to discuss a patient - never talk to them. Any real medical professional you go see while on something like chemo would PHONE your oncologist and discuss his planned treatments whatever they may be to make sure there is no unintended cross reaction. A real doctor wouldn't remove an ingrown toenail from a cancer patient without first talking to the oncologist in case the local anaesthetic can cross-react with the chemo.
The alternative lot never do that, because they know the real doctors will tell them NOT to do anything. So instead of not doing something potentially VERY harmful or even deadly, they do it in secret and leave the oncologists to clean up the mess.
True, passing the Type name as a parameter when you're already assigning the output of the function to a class with the same name is less elegant than I would like. Though I suppose to avoid that would require a lot of introspection which, while perfectly possible in python should be avoided unless it's absolutely required because introspection is dangerous and can introduce very hard-to-fix bugs.
>Are there many ways to skin a cat? Sure, but they're all going to involve cats and skin.
Except that in C++ there are at least three ways where the cat is replaced with a badger and skinning it involves clipping it's toenails while brushing it's teeth.
And this version has the massive advantage that if compute is very expensive and safe to parallelize then you can do a simple drop in replacement of map with Multiprocess.Pool.Map and get it powerfully done in parallel with very little effort or risk of introducing bugs.
This is generally one of the things I love about python. The pythonic way of coding really does encourage simple, readable code. That said occasionally you can run into annoyances. I had a case a few months ago where two code reviewers couldn't stop arguing about one of my classes.
One insisted that getters and setters are not pythonic and should be removed. The other insisted that this class had special case considerations and not only should it use getters and setters but the attributes they get and set should be private so that anybody who does want direct access will be forced to use the private path to them and have to justify doing so in a comment. (Personally I agreed with the former reviewer - I did not believe the case was special enough to justify coding it in such an unpythonic way)
After three days of watching them argue I finally resolved the issue by dropping a few convenience methods and replacing the class with a NamedTuple. Which they both passed, ironically of course, the guy who was insisting on getters and setters never considered that using a NamedTuple removed the possibility of them and enforced direct attribute access as the only way (which is, in fact, the pythonic way). Generally these days I work on the basis that any class which does not need other methods should be a NamedTuple unless there is a good reason for it not be. A one-line implementation that is well understood just reduces the potential for bugs by too much not to use it when you can.
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>And that is fine, but do the other 19 homeowners get a day?
No, and they shouldn't either. Where there are pre-existing contractual requirements as with HOA's people should respect what they signed, but other than that the only two words I have for them is: fuck you.
It's not their home, it's not their business, look the other way if it bothers you.
>What could be more democratic than the 19 voting to tell the 20th that he can't paint it pink?
That's not democracy, that's tyranny of the majority.
>At the end of the day, what he does effects everyone near him,
No. It doesn't. Not even slightly. Seeing something does not count as "being affected" by it. It's none of their damn business.
>so it is reasonable and fair to have such rules if the majority want them.
No, it really isn't.
>You don't have to like it, but you should respect it.
Sorry but I will never do either - it goes fundamentally against everything I believe in. People should let other people do whatever the fuck they want unless it hurts somebody else. Nobody can be hurt by somebody else's sense of aesthetics ergo ALL senses of aesthetics should be respected, nobody should get to tell others how their property should look.
In fact I would go so far as to argue that painting your house - especially if it's painted in a way that isn't "normal" is an act of free speech, constitutionally protected in every free country on earth.
Actually almost all new properties in South Africa DOES have rooftop solar geysers. The numbers will probably go down a bit in the near future because until recently there was a major tax rebate for installing them but that law has just expired so the price will be somewhat higher.
Older properties mostly have electrical geysers, my new house has one for example, but once that reaches end of life I'll definitely look at solar as possibility. In Cape Town in particular it should work very well - in Summer we have 10 hours or more of sunlight every day.
>because I don't want to see it.
See, that's what pisses me off. While I would never argue that you can't have that opinion, or that neighbourhoods which cater for it can't exist - the very idea that you so much as has an opinion about it annoys the hell out of me.
I'm not taking away your right to that opinion - I'm merely excersing my right to tell you it's obnoxious.
You do what you want with your house, your body and your life and STFU about what anybody else does unless it actually impacts on your rights.
When my hair is one of it's more extravagant dye jobs most people compliment me, now and then I come across some judgemental asshole who makes a derogatory comment. Who makes it clear that he feels somehow personally offended by my lack of conformity. That he wished he never saw it, that he would prefer to have done something to avoid it.
I have never had any qualms about telling those assholes where to get off.
I take the exact same approach to my home. In a neighbourhood where those rules are stated upfront I couldn't actually act on a sudden urge to paint a dragon mural on my front wall without breaching a contract, so I choose never to live there -and I have nothing but scorn for those who do because people who make such choices tend to be controlling and judgemental of every OTHER choice anybody ever makes that isn't the exact same choice THEY would have made.
People like that piss me off.
Please note - I never campaigned to take anybody's rights away, I never suggested it shouldn't exist - all I said was it pisses me off so I choose to never buy there.
The worst you could say is that my making that decision reduces the value of homes in such neighbourhoods - by a tiny amount perhaps but now multiply it by everybody who shares my love for the exotic and esoteric - and I actually think that neighbourhoods like that end up much more underpriced than they ever realized because of the large number of people who would never willingly buy there.
How large that is varies of course, in Cape Town it's a very large percentage - part of why I moved here is the vibrant and large alternative subculture here, in the US you'll find something similar in places like Portland and San Francisco, in Dallas it's probably a tiny minority - so the reduction in value is probably offset by the gains from people who think like you do.
But in the end that's the only possible impact my opinion has on you. I expressed my annoyance, that is all, I never tried to force you to share it.
>If you have 20 homes in a row that all more or less look the same, and 1 of them is painted pink, it stands out like a sore thumb.
There are plenty of examples of that as well - and I always loved them. I would often slow down when I drive past a house that stands out like that to appreciate it.
To me, that's beautiful. To me - I look at that and basically assume that's where the most interesting and probably the most intelligent person in the street lives.
I respect him for having the balls to be different. Indiviualist self expression is a quality I admire above all.
Saying something pisses me off does not qualify as "wanting to take away your rights". That's just me saying why I choose NOT to live in neighbourhoods like that.
I never said YOU couldn't, I just think it's stupid to want to.
There is nothing oppressive about that opinion.
>It can be annoying, but it protects the value of the home against the idiot who would paint their house pink.
Now that sort of thinking pisses me off. I recently bought a second property, a home now that I have a child since I wanted her to have a yard to play in (the old apartment is to be rented out). I live in Cape Town, South Africa, when I started house-hunting I carefully found all the neighbourhoods where somebody had contractual rules about things like what colour I can paint my house and excluded them from the search.
Even though they included some of the most sought after neighbourhoods - I refuse to live somewhere like that, this is why I can never live among conservatives. Seriously - their desire to control over people's self expression is just insane to me. If I want to die my hair pink I do (and have done) and if I want to paint my house pink - then fuck anybody else's opinion.
To me -it ADDS value to a neighbourhood when every house looks different and unique. Expressing something of the owner's personality. It gives the neighbourhood character.
One of the most beautiful suburbs in Cape Town is Bo-kaap just outside CBD. Where EVERY house is a different bright colour. Pinks and blues and yellows and reds - and most houses are several of those.
Has this harmed property values ? Hell no ! On the contrary, photographers go there to do photoshoots because it provides such awesome backdrops and landscape photography opportunities.
I bought in a different area in the end, mostly due to wanting to be closer to work - but I made sure that nobody will get to tell me what I can and cannot do with my house, ESPECIALLY aesthetically.
Conservatives always talk of how liberals want to control people's lives when liberals care about waste and the environment... but to me, wanting to control how people dress, how they express their gender identity, their sexual orientation, whether they get married or not, whether they are monogamous or polyamorous or swingers or whatever else you can think off, what colour they paint their house, what art they display in the garden... THAT is so much more insidious.
Liberals only want to ask you nicely not to do things that harm others.
Conservatives want to control your very identity.
I guess it just confirms once again why I will die still a liberal.
>As for the water heater - 'On Demand' means that when the customer/home owner asks for hot water,
There's another version. In Brazil nobody has a water heater. What they do have is a small heater attached directly to the shower-head that heats the water as it comes out of the tap.
It's cheap, efficient (since it only heats the water you're actually using) and reaches a passably acceptable temperature.
It's not as hot as the showers I normally like but in Brazil that's not a problem because the country itself is bleeding hot as hell already.
I'm not sure exactly what the temperature was (I would guess between 25 and 30 celcius) since the heater has only a short while to heat the water as it flows over it, but it was certainly "good enough".
It may even have been much hotter than that, despite coming from a hot country (South Africa) I was not acclimatized to Brazil which is MUCH hotter, so the higher ambient temperature could have thrown me off.
Every single claim in that post is just plain false.
What has been responsibile for humanity's recent improvements in quality of life has been science: a blatantly socialist system.
There is nothing libertarian about contracts, profit-seeking or voluntary trade, these are found in ALL variations of capitalism AND in many variations of socialism as well.
Nowhere in my speech did I once speak in favour of the state, but the reality is that there is a LOT of very wealthy countries with big governments and not a single rich country WITHOUT one. Small governments are only found where poverty is at it's worst. The sole EXCEPTION was Andalusia - no government and high quality of life, but THAT was socialist.
Libertarianism has NEVER been tried - you're just trying to shoehorn a bunch of stuff and claim it's libertarianism while ignoring the most IMPORTANT parts of what DEFINES libertarianism. You don't know what libertarianism actually IS - you just like the sound of the word it seems and apply it to everything you approve of regardless of whether that is a particularly or exclusively libertarian thing, and ignoring that the things that ARE particularly and exclusively libertarian have NOT in fact ever been tried.
Only one variation of socialism has been a failure, there are thousands of others - and at least one has been a remarkable success, I gave you the example right there in my post. The kind of capitalism practiced in the Rhineland countries, and Scandinavian welfare-state concepts are considered socialist by American standards and THEY are MORE successful than America has ever been.
Maybe not in the way America likes to measure (total wealth in the country) but in the way that MATTERS: actual quality of life of most citizens.
They have very few poor people, and the few they have live much better lives than the poor in the USA - now THAT is success.
How about the anarcho-socialist brand, or council-communism or part-econ - all of which basically do socialism without any state or government at all.
Unlike, say, libertarianism at least one of those HAS actually been tried. Andalusia in Spain was anarcho socialist for about 20 years at the start of the 20th century, they were simultaneously at war with capitalists from the north and communists from the South. The capitalists hated their working socialism, the communists hated their working anarchism.
But despite the costs of those wars they were extremely successful. George Orwell visited Andalusia and described it as "the most egalitarian society I have ever seen -as close to perfection as civilization has gotten".
In many ways, it was Star Trek Next Generation without the science fiction - just done with the technology of a century ago, imagine what we could do with TODAY's technology ?
It wasn't perfect and there were some problems though they were making good progress towards solving them and, had they not ultimately lost the wars after 20 years, they probably would have since their track record strongly suggests it.
A key component was that the only kind of business they had were worker-owned cooperatives, but these cooperatives still competed in an open market. Worker-owned is all you need for the definition of "socialism" to apply, there is nothing that requires a state, or a government, or even the absence of markets.
That model works surprisingly well - right now worker owned cooperatives in the USA include one of the biggest industrial bakeries in California, one of the leading manufacturers of robotics in Texas (yes, high-tech companies work well this way too) and the largest carpet-maker on earth.
True the one group of charlatans who are NOT lying when they claim their "treatments" have no side effects are homeopaths - you can't have side effects when you have no effects.
Your soul evidence for your anti-science insanity is anecdotal, and the worst kind of anecdote - an anonymous one (since you posted as AC).
The only SANE reaction here is to assume you ARE in fact an acupuncturist and this is your way of trying to advertise and drum up some business in a desperate attempt to avoid competing with actual science.
Google should partner with github to let them replicate the projects including giving htem the public keys so that if any devs want access after the fact it can be already-working.
A java developer tried to make a joke once but he ran out of memory before he could remember the punchline.
>essentially ignoring the standard altogether.
Let me regale you my favorite version of this. It must have been 12 or 13 years ago now, I was maintaining an educational linux distribution called OpenLab (we did some awesome stuff - look it up) when one of our big customers bought a large consignment of P3 machines to use as thin-client class-room servers.
The things just wouldn't work... they would start booting the live CD and halfway through the bootup just reboot again, over and over and over.
So they sent us one to figure out what was going wrong. I spent ages trying to figure out what on earth could be causing it, eventually resorting to disabling drivers one by one until it booted up to track down the issue.
It turns out it was a watchdog card driver causing the problem. Which is odd because the machines did not HAVE watchdog cards. Now having a starting point I dug further. It turns out the cheap motherboard manufacturers had added an onboard sound card, but hadn't bothered to get a unique PCI-ID for it, they just used one from an intel watchdog card assuming nobody would install one. Running windows this would not be a major issue since nobody would load the driver for one.
On Linux though the plugnplay layer picked up the device ID and loaded the watchdog card driver thinking there is one. The driver fires up, waits for the scheduled watchdog ping - and when it didn't get one (because the card wasn't really there) after 60 seconds (Back then booting up in 90seconds got us lots of praise, below one minute was unheard of) it would reboot the machine -exactly as it's supposed to.
Never underestimate the level of stupid that hardware companies can come up with. I had to build a hotpatch version of the distribution which would disable the watchdog card driver if it detected that motherboard (which by the way is not that simple to do in very early-boot init scripts that have to run before drivers start loading).
You're absolutely right.
And that's before we even consider the truly tragic cases where the alternative lot expressed their negative sentiments about medicine so harshly that patients end up forgoing them - and now they have ONLY placebo effects.
Whenever I have to open a computer case I dress in nothing but a large overcoat.
Then when the case is opened I yank the coat open and "flash" the BIOS !
begin
if we were pascal programmers we would argue about when to end a joke on a semi-colon
and when to end it on a fullstop.
end;
If we were cobol programmers the joke would span 4 pages, look like something an accountant wrote and nobody could find the punchline.
If we were object pascal programmers we'd be making jokes about classnames starting with T (a relic from pascal days and the way OP treats classes and Types as the same thing).
If we were Ruby programmers all our jokes would be about how the language is better than python but everybody else is too stupid to know it.
If we were C programmers we'd still think the "long johns" joke was funny.
If we were assembler programmers we'd be making knock-knock jokes... sorry make that knk-knk jokes.
(and (if (we (were (lisp (programmers (nobody (could (read (the (jokes)))))))))))
>The software author has the power to control the licence
Except when, like here, it's not the original author. Stenn is maintaining the code and has been for a long time, but NTP was originally written by David Mills.
Mills didn't have the associated costs that Stenn has to deal with - he could do it as a hobby, Stenn can't - that's not viable for NTP today anymore.
Mills is long retired, but HE holds the original copyright and only HE could change the license.
Now of course Stenn could just walk away and go do something more lucrative and, indeed, if funding doesn't pick up that's exactly what he will have to do but he can't change the license of NTP and if he could the entire internet would pretty much collapse (indeed if Mills had not used a free license - the internet probably wouldn't EXIST).
Most rational people agree that placebos have their place, the effect is a valuable part of treatment and current medical establishment ought to be adjusted to maximise it's benefits.
But charlatans selling nothing else and claiming to be selling medicine end up killing LOTS of people every year.
The thing is - real medicine gets you the placebo effect ANYWAY - and ALSO gets you actual TREATMENT.
We can possibly increase the placebo effect if we copy a few things from the charlatan's playbook - like making appointments one-hour and actually connecting with patients, getting to know them, helping them feel emotionally better.
They are experts at that, the trouble is - that's ALL they are experts at and they LIE about offering anything more - which kills people, lots of people, every year.
I read an article recently by an oncologist about the serious difficulties they face because so many cancer patients are ALSO on supposedly alternative treatments which has no medical value but CAN severely interact with the treatments they ARE on (like chemo) and make those less effective. Interestingly she points out how those alternative providers never request files from them, never contact them to discuss a patient - never talk to them.
Any real medical professional you go see while on something like chemo would PHONE your oncologist and discuss his planned treatments whatever they may be to make sure there is no unintended cross reaction. A real doctor wouldn't remove an ingrown toenail from a cancer patient without first talking to the oncologist in case the local anaesthetic can cross-react with the chemo.
The alternative lot never do that, because they know the real doctors will tell them NOT to do anything. So instead of not doing something potentially VERY harmful or even deadly, they do it in secret and leave the oncologists to clean up the mess.
I think we've officially pushed this joke past breaking point...
...I am so hard right now...
True, passing the Type name as a parameter when you're already assigning the output of the function to a class with the same name is less elegant than I would like.
Though I suppose to avoid that would require a lot of introspection which, while perfectly possible in python should be avoided unless it's absolutely required because introspection is dangerous and can introduce very hard-to-fix bugs.
>Are there many ways to skin a cat? Sure, but they're all going to involve cats and skin.
Except that in C++ there are at least three ways where the cat is replaced with a badger and skinning it involves clipping it's toenails while brushing it's teeth.
And this version has the massive advantage that if compute is very expensive and safe to parallelize then you can do a simple drop in replacement of map with Multiprocess.Pool.Map and get it powerfully done in parallel with very little effort or risk of introducing bugs.
This is generally one of the things I love about python. The pythonic way of coding really does encourage simple, readable code.
That said occasionally you can run into annoyances.
I had a case a few months ago where two code reviewers couldn't stop arguing about one of my classes.
One insisted that getters and setters are not pythonic and should be removed. The other insisted that this class had special case considerations and not only should it use getters and setters but the attributes they get and set should be private so that anybody who does want direct access will be forced to use the private path to them and have to justify doing so in a comment. (Personally I agreed with the former reviewer - I did not believe the case was special enough to justify coding it in such an unpythonic way)
After three days of watching them argue I finally resolved the issue by dropping a few convenience methods and replacing the class with a NamedTuple. Which they both passed, ironically of course, the guy who was insisting on getters and setters never considered that using a NamedTuple removed the possibility of them and enforced direct attribute access as the only way (which is, in fact, the pythonic way).
Generally these days I work on the basis that any class which does not need other methods should be a NamedTuple unless there is a good reason for it not be. A one-line implementation that is well understood just reduces the potential for bugs by too much not to use it when you can.