I'm a fan of GC, but I worry when I read most of the comments about it. It's a great tool for ensuring memory correctness of your program. The fact that when something goes haywire in my java program, I can immediately skip the "dangling pointer/orphan pointer/buffer overrun" angles to debug the program is fantastic. Equally great is that when I read someone else's junky code, I don't have to verify they are releasing memory correct.
That said, the assumption that it's appropriate to completely ignore those problems now is galling. This isn't like the move from assembly to C where you can trust the compiler unless you really really really care about performance (is this loop taking 18 cycles or 17?). Ignoring resource allocation and deallocation can cause true execution errors, even when the memory itself is not being corrupted.
And that means a few changes to game design, like making your enemies scale somewhat so that they remain a challenge to a high "level" character while not being unbeatable for someone who hasn't spent 50 hours grinding in the side areas of the game (looking right at you, Final Fantasy series).
I actually hate it when the enemies "scale". It doesn't make any sense. If I run off and level up, why should a goblin suddenly get 1000 times stronger?
The main problem is with the leveling mechanism itself. Leveling up has too much of an impact in most games. In a typical game, a level 1 character can barely survive fighting a blob, but a level 30 character can stomp on the throat of death knights without breaking a sweat. Make leveling up less significant, and make the gamer develop skill at the game instead, and you won't have the kind of problem you're talking about.
I've seen games get increasingly shorter for two decades now, but I'm just not seeing that awesome stuff emerging. I'm not seeing many people actually cut out the parts that make a game boring, and leaving the juicy meat intact.
No you haven't. Two decades would mean roughly 1991.
The biggest game of 1991 was Street Fighter II. That could be beaten in single player mode in about an hour.
Another highlight was Sonic The Hedgehog. I never had a Genesis, so I don't know how long Sonic took to complete, but it couldn't have been more than two hours.
The first Civilization came out that year. I didn't play until Civ II, but unless Civilization was more epic, a single game would have taken ten hours or less from start to finish.
Nintendo had a bumper year with Super Mario World and The Legend of Zelda a Link to the Past. If you warped, Mario could be beaten in under three hours, and perhaps 20 hours to 100% it. Though you could take forever on Zelda, if you played it more or less linearly you could complete the game at nearly 100% in about 15-20 hours.
The epic game of the year would have been Final Fantasy IV (or in the States FFII). It's a shorter game than you probably remember. For someone familiar with the genre, it should take somewhere between 20 and 30 hours.
Good games from two decades ago rarely exceeded 20 hours of game play and frequently had less than 5 hours of content. What you've witnessed is a decline in game length (and not as much as you seem to think) over the last decade. This, BTW was inevitable. Gamers insist on increasingly lifelike games. It takes more work to make an hour of gameplay today than it did in years past. And the total size of the market for serious games has not increased enough to make up for that complexity. At the same token, game prices themselves have remained essentially static despite inflation.
Agreed. If the kids abuse what you are giving them, then don't give them a second. Calmly explain that this is why they cannot have nice things. Then give them a book to read on long car rides instead. When they complain, be the adult in the room and tell them that life is unfair and it's too bad.
Re:It'll never make it through FDA trials
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
·
· Score: 1
You got to the right result, but for the wrong reasons. If any big pharma had a cure for cancer, they would be shouting it from the rooftops because it would harm cashflow to their competitors. This would give them an opportunity to greatly expand market share.
Getting good buzz out of it is bonus, but pharma doesn't advertise the company by name when they sell drugs, they advertise the drug. That way, when some miracle cure turns out to kill people, they can just end that drug without it destroying the public perception of the brand.
It's worth pointing out, however, that the relative value for a cure for cancer to corporations is much less than it is for the population at large. So, we shouldn't depend on them to be doing any of this basic research, because they probably won't.
I always felt people misunderstood this quote. Actually, I've had times where I suggested something be done way X instead of way Y because of 5 different reasons and only one of those was efficiency of execution. The other developers would literally respond, "oh well I'm not ready to optimize this yet". And I felt like screaming, "it's not optimizing if the other design is also safer, uses less code, and provides a cleaner interface!?!?!?!?!"
What people seem to miss is that there is a level of optimization that is appropriate at early phases of a project and then there are things that should be pushed off until/unless absolutely necessary. Writing a tight loop in assembly? Hold off. Modifying loops for compiler specific gains? Not unless it must be done. Notice you're doing some IO and it's taking significantly longer than it seems like it ought to? That I would investigate immediately and try to determine if a simple algorithm change (like using a better IO library or choosing a better buffer size) can make a large difference.
You forgot that they will move its air time around between 7pm on Saturday night to 11pm Tuesday night, then back, then Sunday afternoon, and that's when they'll announce that the expected viewers just didn't tune in.
Oh yeah, then Hannity will point out that Fox had to cancel the show because it didn't properly attribute gravity to God pushing people down so they don't become too uppity, which will be a ratings boon for Fox News.
No, it's still the halting problem. The GP was correct. They can't actually know if the program is in an infinite loop (halting problem) so they guess. Then, because they might be wrong they ask the user if they want to take an action to stop what "may" be an infinite loop. They've offloaded the real decision to a human and used a simple heuristic to help inform the human.
Well, most of this is quite exaggerated. If a movie is terrible from the start, and you walk out in the first half hour or so, most theatres will offer you a refund (or more likely a free pass). If you like only one song a band performs (are you listening to rap?) you can buy just that song on iTunes or Amazon. And if you aren't sure about a book, there's this place called the library which will lend it to you for free.
Or, maybe kids should get off your lawn and go make some good entertainment like they did between 1978 and 1994??
Even if your analysis is accurate, it doesn't mean what you think it means. Assume both sides actually believe they are right (and aren't trying to alter reality for financial gain either by selling solar panels or by selling coal). What names might you give to a proponent of the position that AGW exists and is dangerous? You might use AGW alarmist, which is a tight phrase. But you also might use AGW proponent, AGW advocate, AGW disciple, AGW etc. Basically any term that argues the for side of an argument can be used in conjecture with AGW to get a reasonable label. In a discussion which is clearly about AGW, you drop the AGW part and you get alarmist, proponent, evangelist, etc.
But, the English language does not provide the same wealth of terms for people who argue that a position is not just false, but doesn't actually exist. It's similar to how atheists get labeled as "believing in no god" (affirmation in the no god theology) when they in fact "do not believe in any gods" (rejection of all god theologies). So, what terms can you have on the negative side? AGW denialist and AGW skeptic are the only two that come to my mind which are succinct. You might call them AGW opponents, but they don't actually oppose it so much as they believe it's a hoax. You could say they are AGW hoaxists, but that's making up a word. And really, even the term "skeptic" should probably be dropped in this case, because these people don't appear to be waiting for sufficient evidence so much as simply rejecting the evidence that exists.
Sorry, but I don't buy it. I posted something similar above, but please explain how pushing transaction speed from 50 microseconds to 44 microseconds actually benefits any normal person. I honestly don't believe it does. But, the HFT who has that faster algorithm becomes tremendously wealthy while the 10% slower algorithm is put out of business.
You can state that you are providing liquidity to the world, which you are, but compared to the liquidity we had perhaps 10 years ago, I really don't see how you're work makes anyone's life better except perhaps your own. And it all brings with it the risk that my own stock holdings may be decimated in literally the blink of an eye. The fact is, your line of work is looked down on because you are essentially gaming a system. Comparing it to cars used in traffic is not accurate. HFT is more similar to the people who used their credit cards to buy $1 coins for the frequent flier miles, and then deposited them in the bank.
Liquidity is a commodity of diminishing returns. If I put in a sell bid on stocks and you say it will take one month, the team than can sell in a day instead is indeed providing a valuable service. And going from taking a day to trade down to an hour or say five minutes is quite valuable too (though not nearly as much so). But the moment your liquidity is faster than my ability to be informed about it, additional liquidity has ZERO value. It takes me several seconds to click sell on a website, and watch as the site refreshes to inform me the transaction has occurred.
In the 1990s, these people were creating value. Today, they are exclusively leeching money from the rest of us.
Actually, the old adage is false. You don't get what you pay for. You pay what the market will bear for a given product. Perhaps, a car analogy will help.
If you bought a new car in 1993, perhaps you decided between a Chevy and a Toyota. On average, the Toyota was of higher quality, and cheaper. But, perceptions take a long time to change, and you might have been basing your perceptions on the quality of a Toyota built in 1978, rather than one built in 1993. So, you may have purchased the more expensive Chevy because "it's better, after all it's more expensive", and you would be wrong.
Or, what if I offered to sell you one of two identical paintings. One, I told you was painted by Van Gogh, the other is a knock-off I produced. Which would you pay more for? Keep in mind, these are identical paintings on identical canvases.
There have been many studies done on the wine thing, and while your perceptions convince you there is a difference, it mostly doesn't exist. The expensive wine tastes better to you because it is expensive, not the other way around.
So, yes if you insist that between two essentially equivolent products, the spendier is obviously better, it is probably the result of snobbery.
Even if you can, it doesn't matter. The enjoyment people get from drinking wine is strongly influenced the label. People like expensive wine better, and it has nothing to do with what's inside the bottle.
No, the actual issue was that a group of people with ulterior motives spotted a chink in the armor of legitimate scientists and they exploited it to reaffirm for some collection of the masses that climate scientists are untrustworthy. Of course, when the real facts came out some time later, they didn't have time on talk radio to admit their witch trial was erroneous, because they were too busy riling people up over the imminent danger of sharia law.
It is an essential part of democracy to debate issues even when they seem obvious. You have the right to be heard even when no one wants to listen, not because of haughty idealism but because people turn obnoxious or even violent when they are ignored.
No, you have the right to be heard because even if we as a society have a hard time believing in darwinism for ecology we are strong proponents of it for philosophy. You should be heard because, if your idea has any merits we believe those merits will influence others to join your side, and we believe in general that the best ideas will win out.
That entire concept is what politics and democracy are about. Though, I worry that our scientific understanding of how to influence people along with the personification of corporations is rewriting this contract in such a way that money will determine which ideas win out in most cases rather than the competition of ideas.
The problem is that species have evolved with what they have over time, so that problematic and crippling mutations are rapidly selected out.
I've got no qualms with most of your post (if we are to be ethical we must take suffering into account), but the logic of this sentence needs to be stopped. Whether a mutation is caused by natural processes or by human intervention, has no bearing on whether or not the change is good.
Imagine, for an instance, Darwin's finches. They needed longer beaks to thrive. Nature's approach was that for hundreds of generations, those with longer beaks did well and those with shorter beaks starved. What if someone had come along and noticed this and said, I can help these buggers along. I'll just change a few bits of DNA and they'll get long enough beaks to survive. Even if the person who made the change didn't really know what they were doing, even if they go it wrong 99 times (in crippling painful ways) before getting it right once, they would reduce the total suffering of finches. The fact is, nature is cruel indeed and nothing about natural selection is ethical unless you consider "nature" or "creative destruction" to be quintessentially ethical.
Also, with regards to testing on animals. The only proper way to handle those ethical concerns is to assign a value to suffering of different beings (maybe we value a baby suffering as higher than an adult male and that's greater than the suffering of a mouse, which is more significant than a fruit fly). That part will be highly subject and if done properly should be contentious. Once you've assigned relative value though, it's quite simple to figure out whether or not causing suffering is at least rationally ethical. Let's say I value a mouse's suffering at approximately 1/10th that of a humans. If I torture 1000 mice with mutations to determine a cure to some extremely rare human disease (only a couple cases in the US each year), then per my value system that action is ethical over a period of about 30 years (30 years to cure 100 people during which time I am no longer torturing mice).
All of you are wrong on this. The main reason retirement age has to go up is because people are living longer. During the great depression, 65 was chosen as a reasonable age because that was about average life expectancy. Comparable today would be a retirement age of around 77, which could easily be afforded.
None of that means it isn't a travesty that older works are devalued and that once you reach the age of 50 your social value begins to plummet. But that's a problem with our society which has nothing to do with the government. FWIW, I am only 30, so it's not like I'm some grumpy old guy complaining about kids these days.
This is by far the best comment on this topic. It's far more interesting than the AGW name calling that usually occurs. What if there is plantlife there that only sprouts every hundred years or so (on average). That could be something useful for terraforming Mars...
Insightful? Yes, a single event does not verify climate change. But the GP is right to point out that climate change theory makes a verifiable hypothesis, which is that warmer temperatures will cause more extreme weather. This could mean either more frequency of events (we had 15 hurricanes on average per year from 1900-1970 and 18 per year from 1970-2000 to make a hypothetical "fact" up) or that the events themselves become more extreme (15 hurricanes a year, but frequency of category 5 storms has increased 3 fold to make up another "fact").
I agree that climate change realists look foolish when they prance around after every exceptional weather event, but it's not unreasonable for them to say "these events seem to be more extreme or frequent and we think that's evidence that regular people can look at to understand how our world is changing.
FWIW, the denialist side often takes events that might actually be proof of climate change and uses them as disproof. See, major snowstorms through the NE US last year. The most snow fall will occur at a temperature closer to 0C than at a colder temperature (you need freezing for snow but colder air holds less moisture). So at least on a cursory glance, global warming suggests that areas where temperatures are regularly well below freezing should see more snow (though perhaps a few less days of snow a year) while areas like the pacific northwest, which are rarely cold enough for snow, would see even less. Of course, the variables are more complicated than this one # (local temperature) so I can't make specific predictions.
My point is that often when the realists frolic they look foolish for being overeager whereas when the denialists do the same they look foolish for being ignorant. To pretend there is no difference is the same nonsensical political correctness that the conservative block usually rails against.
Actually it doesn't. Scorching people with fire is far different then an average temperature increase of 2 degrees. There are far greater differences between Bern and Rome on a typical day and the Roman's aren't gnashing their teeth and cursing god.
Slashdot Mirror
CLR == Common Language Runtime ~= Common Language Virtual Machine
I'm a fan of GC, but I worry when I read most of the comments about it. It's a great tool for ensuring memory correctness of your program. The fact that when something goes haywire in my java program, I can immediately skip the "dangling pointer/orphan pointer/buffer overrun" angles to debug the program is fantastic. Equally great is that when I read someone else's junky code, I don't have to verify they are releasing memory correct.
That said, the assumption that it's appropriate to completely ignore those problems now is galling. This isn't like the move from assembly to C where you can trust the compiler unless you really really really care about performance (is this loop taking 18 cycles or 17?). Ignoring resource allocation and deallocation can cause true execution errors, even when the memory itself is not being corrupted.
And that means a few changes to game design, like making your enemies scale somewhat so that they remain a challenge to a high "level" character while not being unbeatable for someone who hasn't spent 50 hours grinding in the side areas of the game (looking right at you, Final Fantasy series).
I actually hate it when the enemies "scale". It doesn't make any sense. If I run off and level up, why should a goblin suddenly get 1000 times stronger?
The main problem is with the leveling mechanism itself. Leveling up has too much of an impact in most games. In a typical game, a level 1 character can barely survive fighting a blob, but a level 30 character can stomp on the throat of death knights without breaking a sweat. Make leveling up less significant, and make the gamer develop skill at the game instead, and you won't have the kind of problem you're talking about.
I've seen games get increasingly shorter for two decades now, but I'm just not seeing that awesome stuff emerging. I'm not seeing many people actually cut out the parts that make a game boring, and leaving the juicy meat intact.
No you haven't. Two decades would mean roughly 1991.
The biggest game of 1991 was Street Fighter II. That could be beaten in single player mode in about an hour.
Another highlight was Sonic The Hedgehog. I never had a Genesis, so I don't know how long Sonic took to complete, but it couldn't have been more than two hours.
The first Civilization came out that year. I didn't play until Civ II, but unless Civilization was more epic, a single game would have taken ten hours or less from start to finish.
Nintendo had a bumper year with Super Mario World and The Legend of Zelda a Link to the Past. If you warped, Mario could be beaten in under three hours, and perhaps 20 hours to 100% it. Though you could take forever on Zelda, if you played it more or less linearly you could complete the game at nearly 100% in about 15-20 hours.
The epic game of the year would have been Final Fantasy IV (or in the States FFII). It's a shorter game than you probably remember. For someone familiar with the genre, it should take somewhere between 20 and 30 hours.
Good games from two decades ago rarely exceeded 20 hours of game play and frequently had less than 5 hours of content. What you've witnessed is a decline in game length (and not as much as you seem to think) over the last decade. This, BTW was inevitable. Gamers insist on increasingly lifelike games. It takes more work to make an hour of gameplay today than it did in years past. And the total size of the market for serious games has not increased enough to make up for that complexity. At the same token, game prices themselves have remained essentially static despite inflation.
Agreed. If the kids abuse what you are giving them, then don't give them a second. Calmly explain that this is why they cannot have nice things. Then give them a book to read on long car rides instead. When they complain, be the adult in the room and tell them that life is unfair and it's too bad.
You got to the right result, but for the wrong reasons. If any big pharma had a cure for cancer, they would be shouting it from the rooftops because it would harm cashflow to their competitors. This would give them an opportunity to greatly expand market share.
Getting good buzz out of it is bonus, but pharma doesn't advertise the company by name when they sell drugs, they advertise the drug. That way, when some miracle cure turns out to kill people, they can just end that drug without it destroying the public perception of the brand.
It's worth pointing out, however, that the relative value for a cure for cancer to corporations is much less than it is for the population at large. So, we shouldn't depend on them to be doing any of this basic research, because they probably won't.
Does Boeing pay their interns (although in this case life insurance might be the more important bit)?
Generally speaking, yes Boeing does pay it's interns. Actually, they are paid a fair wage.
I always felt people misunderstood this quote. Actually, I've had times where I suggested something be done way X instead of way Y because of 5 different reasons and only one of those was efficiency of execution. The other developers would literally respond, "oh well I'm not ready to optimize this yet". And I felt like screaming, "it's not optimizing if the other design is also safer, uses less code, and provides a cleaner interface!?!?!?!?!"
What people seem to miss is that there is a level of optimization that is appropriate at early phases of a project and then there are things that should be pushed off until/unless absolutely necessary. Writing a tight loop in assembly? Hold off. Modifying loops for compiler specific gains? Not unless it must be done. Notice you're doing some IO and it's taking significantly longer than it seems like it ought to? That I would investigate immediately and try to determine if a simple algorithm change (like using a better IO library or choosing a better buffer size) can make a large difference.
You forgot that they will move its air time around between 7pm on Saturday night to 11pm Tuesday night, then back, then Sunday afternoon, and that's when they'll announce that the expected viewers just didn't tune in.
Oh yeah, then Hannity will point out that Fox had to cancel the show because it didn't properly attribute gravity to God pushing people down so they don't become too uppity, which will be a ratings boon for Fox News.
You are kind of leaving out just how little total atmosphere Mars has. No?
No, it's still the halting problem. The GP was correct. They can't actually know if the program is in an infinite loop (halting problem) so they guess. Then, because they might be wrong they ask the user if they want to take an action to stop what "may" be an infinite loop. They've offloaded the real decision to a human and used a simple heuristic to help inform the human.
Well, most of this is quite exaggerated. If a movie is terrible from the start, and you walk out in the first half hour or so, most theatres will offer you a refund (or more likely a free pass). If you like only one song a band performs (are you listening to rap?) you can buy just that song on iTunes or Amazon. And if you aren't sure about a book, there's this place called the library which will lend it to you for free.
Or, maybe kids should get off your lawn and go make some good entertainment like they did between 1978 and 1994??
Huh?
Even if your analysis is accurate, it doesn't mean what you think it means. Assume both sides actually believe they are right (and aren't trying to alter reality for financial gain either by selling solar panels or by selling coal). What names might you give to a proponent of the position that AGW exists and is dangerous? You might use AGW alarmist, which is a tight phrase. But you also might use AGW proponent, AGW advocate, AGW disciple, AGW etc. Basically any term that argues the for side of an argument can be used in conjecture with AGW to get a reasonable label. In a discussion which is clearly about AGW, you drop the AGW part and you get alarmist, proponent, evangelist, etc.
But, the English language does not provide the same wealth of terms for people who argue that a position is not just false, but doesn't actually exist. It's similar to how atheists get labeled as "believing in no god" (affirmation in the no god theology) when they in fact "do not believe in any gods" (rejection of all god theologies). So, what terms can you have on the negative side? AGW denialist and AGW skeptic are the only two that come to my mind which are succinct. You might call them AGW opponents, but they don't actually oppose it so much as they believe it's a hoax. You could say they are AGW hoaxists, but that's making up a word. And really, even the term "skeptic" should probably be dropped in this case, because these people don't appear to be waiting for sufficient evidence so much as simply rejecting the evidence that exists.
Maybe AGW rejectionists is better?
Sorry, but I don't buy it. I posted something similar above, but please explain how pushing transaction speed from 50 microseconds to 44 microseconds actually benefits any normal person. I honestly don't believe it does. But, the HFT who has that faster algorithm becomes tremendously wealthy while the 10% slower algorithm is put out of business.
You can state that you are providing liquidity to the world, which you are, but compared to the liquidity we had perhaps 10 years ago, I really don't see how you're work makes anyone's life better except perhaps your own. And it all brings with it the risk that my own stock holdings may be decimated in literally the blink of an eye. The fact is, your line of work is looked down on because you are essentially gaming a system. Comparing it to cars used in traffic is not accurate. HFT is more similar to the people who used their credit cards to buy $1 coins for the frequent flier miles, and then deposited them in the bank.
http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/mint-closes-loophole-ends-credit-card-coin-sales-frequent-flyer-flier-miles-1263.php
Liquidity is a commodity of diminishing returns. If I put in a sell bid on stocks and you say it will take one month, the team than can sell in a day instead is indeed providing a valuable service. And going from taking a day to trade down to an hour or say five minutes is quite valuable too (though not nearly as much so). But the moment your liquidity is faster than my ability to be informed about it, additional liquidity has ZERO value. It takes me several seconds to click sell on a website, and watch as the site refreshes to inform me the transaction has occurred.
In the 1990s, these people were creating value. Today, they are exclusively leeching money from the rest of us.
Actually, the old adage is false. You don't get what you pay for. You pay what the market will bear for a given product. Perhaps, a car analogy will help.
If you bought a new car in 1993, perhaps you decided between a Chevy and a Toyota. On average, the Toyota was of higher quality, and cheaper. But, perceptions take a long time to change, and you might have been basing your perceptions on the quality of a Toyota built in 1978, rather than one built in 1993. So, you may have purchased the more expensive Chevy because "it's better, after all it's more expensive", and you would be wrong.
Or, what if I offered to sell you one of two identical paintings. One, I told you was painted by Van Gogh, the other is a knock-off I produced. Which would you pay more for? Keep in mind, these are identical paintings on identical canvases.
There have been many studies done on the wine thing, and while your perceptions convince you there is a difference, it mostly doesn't exist. The expensive wine tastes better to you because it is expensive, not the other way around.
So, yes if you insist that between two essentially equivolent products, the spendier is obviously better, it is probably the result of snobbery.
Even if you can, it doesn't matter. The enjoyment people get from drinking wine is strongly influenced the label. People like expensive wine better, and it has nothing to do with what's inside the bottle.
No, the actual issue was that a group of people with ulterior motives spotted a chink in the armor of legitimate scientists and they exploited it to reaffirm for some collection of the masses that climate scientists are untrustworthy. Of course, when the real facts came out some time later, they didn't have time on talk radio to admit their witch trial was erroneous, because they were too busy riling people up over the imminent danger of sharia law.
It is an essential part of democracy to debate issues even when they seem obvious. You have the right to be heard even when no one wants to listen, not because of haughty idealism but because people turn obnoxious or even violent when they are ignored.
No, you have the right to be heard because even if we as a society have a hard time believing in darwinism for ecology we are strong proponents of it for philosophy. You should be heard because, if your idea has any merits we believe those merits will influence others to join your side, and we believe in general that the best ideas will win out.
That entire concept is what politics and democracy are about. Though, I worry that our scientific understanding of how to influence people along with the personification of corporations is rewriting this contract in such a way that money will determine which ideas win out in most cases rather than the competition of ideas.
The problem is that species have evolved with what they have over time, so that problematic and crippling mutations are rapidly selected out.
I've got no qualms with most of your post (if we are to be ethical we must take suffering into account), but the logic of this sentence needs to be stopped. Whether a mutation is caused by natural processes or by human intervention, has no bearing on whether or not the change is good.
Imagine, for an instance, Darwin's finches. They needed longer beaks to thrive. Nature's approach was that for hundreds of generations, those with longer beaks did well and those with shorter beaks starved. What if someone had come along and noticed this and said, I can help these buggers along. I'll just change a few bits of DNA and they'll get long enough beaks to survive. Even if the person who made the change didn't really know what they were doing, even if they go it wrong 99 times (in crippling painful ways) before getting it right once, they would reduce the total suffering of finches. The fact is, nature is cruel indeed and nothing about natural selection is ethical unless you consider "nature" or "creative destruction" to be quintessentially ethical.
Also, with regards to testing on animals. The only proper way to handle those ethical concerns is to assign a value to suffering of different beings (maybe we value a baby suffering as higher than an adult male and that's greater than the suffering of a mouse, which is more significant than a fruit fly). That part will be highly subject and if done properly should be contentious. Once you've assigned relative value though, it's quite simple to figure out whether or not causing suffering is at least rationally ethical. Let's say I value a mouse's suffering at approximately 1/10th that of a humans. If I torture 1000 mice with mutations to determine a cure to some extremely rare human disease (only a couple cases in the US each year), then per my value system that action is ethical over a period of about 30 years (30 years to cure 100 people during which time I am no longer torturing mice).
All of you are wrong on this. The main reason retirement age has to go up is because people are living longer. During the great depression, 65 was chosen as a reasonable age because that was about average life expectancy. Comparable today would be a retirement age of around 77, which could easily be afforded.
None of that means it isn't a travesty that older works are devalued and that once you reach the age of 50 your social value begins to plummet. But that's a problem with our society which has nothing to do with the government. FWIW, I am only 30, so it's not like I'm some grumpy old guy complaining about kids these days.
This is by far the best comment on this topic. It's far more interesting than the AGW name calling that usually occurs. What if there is plantlife there that only sprouts every hundred years or so (on average). That could be something useful for terraforming Mars...
Insightful? Yes, a single event does not verify climate change. But the GP is right to point out that climate change theory makes a verifiable hypothesis, which is that warmer temperatures will cause more extreme weather. This could mean either more frequency of events (we had 15 hurricanes on average per year from 1900-1970 and 18 per year from 1970-2000 to make a hypothetical "fact" up) or that the events themselves become more extreme (15 hurricanes a year, but frequency of category 5 storms has increased 3 fold to make up another "fact").
I agree that climate change realists look foolish when they prance around after every exceptional weather event, but it's not unreasonable for them to say "these events seem to be more extreme or frequent and we think that's evidence that regular people can look at to understand how our world is changing.
FWIW, the denialist side often takes events that might actually be proof of climate change and uses them as disproof. See, major snowstorms through the NE US last year. The most snow fall will occur at a temperature closer to 0C than at a colder temperature (you need freezing for snow but colder air holds less moisture). So at least on a cursory glance, global warming suggests that areas where temperatures are regularly well below freezing should see more snow (though perhaps a few less days of snow a year) while areas like the pacific northwest, which are rarely cold enough for snow, would see even less. Of course, the variables are more complicated than this one # (local temperature) so I can't make specific predictions.
My point is that often when the realists frolic they look foolish for being overeager whereas when the denialists do the same they look foolish for being ignorant. To pretend there is no difference is the same nonsensical political correctness that the conservative block usually rails against.
Don't you mean terrified? If gas ever reached $5 a gallon, the news would officially label it Oilageddon.
Actually it doesn't. Scorching people with fire is far different then an average temperature increase of 2 degrees. There are far greater differences between Bern and Rome on a typical day and the Roman's aren't gnashing their teeth and cursing god.