By "alternative medical folk" do you mean quacks, or were you just misrepresenting their positions? Cancer as host cells gone awry (possibly due to an initial external influence, with the external influence not necessary for continued growth) is incontrovertible. If certain anti-fungals work on them, it's because it happens to work as an anti-cancer drug, it doesn't mean the cancer is fungus.
Actually, it isn't to slow down the typist, it's to prevent commonly used pairs from being too close together (which arguably speeds typing anyway since each hand can hit one key in the pair). Most of the anti-QWERTY and pro-DVORAK stuff is FUD, pure and simple, made up by Dvorak to sell his design. See the "mea culpa" here: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/221/was-the-qwerty-keyboard-purposely-designed-to-slow-typists
Minor correction: In Minnesota and Vermont the Good Samaritan laws do require token aid to those in need (though calling 911 is enough, you need not do anything else). Violation is a petty misdemeanor in Minnesota, and a $100 fine in Vermont. There is no federal law, nor do other states have this version of the law (they only have the type I mentioned in my previous post). Not the sort of bite you were looking for I'm guessing.
Good Samaritan laws protect the Good Samaritan, they don't force you to help. A Good Samaritan law usually states that you can't be sued for attempting to help in an emergency situation. Other laws may apply in the situation in question, but not Good Samaritan laws.
Get over myself? I'm not spouting an elitist view here, or claiming my taste in movies is superior. Watch the second Matrix again. It's 5 minutes of slow paced plot progression, followed by 15 minutes of (usually) unrelated, excessively bullet-timed fight scenes. Lather, rinse, repeat. The fight scenes in the original Matrix occupied far less of the movie, and actually fit into the plot.
Give me more films with the same level of quality as the Matrix (the first one, and to a lesser extent the second)
You lost me there. I never went to see the third on the basis of how bad the second one was. If you're actually asking for more movies like the second Matrix, I'd prefer the suits to be in charge.
It's not just safety. 20 year old Civics aren't even comparable with the modern Civic on size. The old Civics basically ran on go-kart engines and had half the cabin size (yes, hyperbole. The actual engine was 58 HP). This particular model was only a two seater, and small one at that. And as your own link notes, the old 57 MPG was under the old ratings system. Under the new system (which you are using for the new model cars) it would only get 51 MPG. And of course, AC was optional and the top MPG would only be obtained without it.
Actually, what that study showed is that if you get 200,000 miles out of a Prius and a Hummer, they'll have similar energy costs.
Wrong. The study made a number of flawed assumptions, as highlighted in the link, such as that the lifetime mileage of a Prius is 109,000 miles, while the Hummer H3 gets 207,000 and the H1 379,000 miles. So yes, if your Prius craps out in 1/3 the time of the H1, you're going to get a worse overall energy cost. On the other hand, Vancouver cab companies have already clocked over 200,000 miles on Priuses without even replacing the batteries, so they don't seem particularly fragile. And there's no particular evidence that any brand of Hummer is going to last that long either. So yes, if you start with biased assumptions, you will find the Prius has similar energy costs.
I think this sort of thing is quite amazing. That and how my senses can map onto the controls of a car so I can accelerate, brake and turn in a manner that works in no way like my body, without even thinking about it.
It's more than that. While I can't find the link, there have been studies that show that people use their car's body (and virtually any handheld tool used frequently) like an extension of their arm. When faced with a head-on collision with no time for conscious thought, people still automatically turned the car to try and make sure the impact hit the passenger side of the vehicle, just as you would raise an arm to ward off a punch. Never mind that the car is actually better designed to take the collision in the front, your body isn't aware of that. The cerebellum's function is to make commonly repeated actions, whether with your body or tools, become second nature. Learning to walk and learning to drive are really the same. You're just repeating an action consciously until the patterns are mapped to the cerebellum, which makes them "automatic".
Thirst and hunger are basically the same sense, mediated by conscious thought. This is why one of the first things anyone should do when dieting is to remember to drink more water; oftentimes they overeat because no amount of food will turn off the body's combined "hunger/thirst" system if the problem is dehydration. Pain is just a specific form of touch, as is the bladder full feeling. Sleepiness isn't really a sense; it doesn't detect any environmental information, being based on a combination of input from vision (is it dark?) and your circadian rhythm (which is simply a low accuracy internal clock constantly synchronized by vision).
If you're going to be pedantic, they both use a capital 'G'. GB vs. Gb, not GB vs. gb. So the use of "gb" is ambiguous. Of course, since storage is traditionally measured in bytes, it's obviously GB. I'd only consider Gb as a possibility when talking about network bandwidth or the like.
Constant exposure to environmental mercury for ones entire childhood increase the risk of autism by a small amount
Therefore any amount of mercury, no matter how small, in intermittent injections, must be a cause of autism
Despite no correlation being found in any study, it must be the vaccines
Even though we have been progressively removing mercury from all vaccines but the flu shot for the past decade or so, and autism rates continued to rise, it's still the vaccines
Why latch on to vaccines? There are a number of things we could be doing to reduce mercury exposure, in far more significant ways (e.g. better capture of mercury from the industrial processes and power plants that your own study shows to increase autism). Lowering mercury emissions would have a twofold effect: it would reduce exposure in the immediate vicinity, and it would reduce the level of mercury in the food chain, and therefore in our diet. Given that we've already removed mercury from every vaccine but the flu shot (which isn't mandatory), you'd think you'd move on to other causes. What fixates you on the vaccines so much?
Well, look at it this way. Even though it doesn't directly protect you, you kill the mosquito that gave it to you, and any others that try to feed off you. Heck, I'd get this vaccine in Maine (where no such diseases circulate) just to get even with the little bloodsuckers. *Insert Evil Laugh Here*
Take the current type, up it to the next, and you can make ever more precise calculation conversions. If the storage type is too small, converting, say, a million miles to micrometers is going to come out wrong.
Yes, they do add features in between, but the development work for each Windows version is reused by the Mac team. Most Microsoft products separate view from control; the control is under constant development, with stabilized branches being spun off for release. The view is developed independently for different OSes. I oversimplified, but it's not wrong either.
You misread my post with regard to point 3. "it's justifiable" refers to the decision to release for Windows first. That decision is justifiable on 1 and 2 alone. I wasn't saying points 1 and 2 justify 3.
A bit of a logical fallacy there. Even if we assume that the switch to x86 was the trigger for more exploits (increased popularity of the OS being another possibility), it doesn't necessarily mean x86 is more vulnerable. The vast majority of exploits don't need to rely on processor specific characteristics after all.
What it means is that virus writers have limited time and experience. Ignoring trivial Trojans and the like that any script kiddie can bang out, an effective virus (e.g. worms) requires a lot of skill in the assembly language for the CPU, in order to write code that can fit in the available exploit "space". Writing worms for the Power PC architecture was a losing proposition since you didn't have a lot of targets. Now, if you have knowledge of x86 assembly, you can transfer your skills to Macs more easily.
Of course, porting programs to run in 64 bit mode *is* an effective security obstacle; one example is that since 64 bit addresses (in the current implementation) always contain nulls, buffer overruns are much harder to exploit. So yes, Power PC 64 bit is more secure, but if you wrote for an x86-64 target, you'd have roughly the same benefits.
I suspect there were two reasons for the delay in a Mac patch (I base this on previous experience as an MS programmer):
Macs in general have a slightly lower priority for development, and less developers. Note the release years; each version of Office for the Mac is released a year behind the Windows equivalent. If they held off until the Mac team was ready to release, they'd leave Windows vulnerable longer.
Pre-Vista versions of Windows are more vulnerable to the exploits than a Mac is. Both Macs and Vista don't grant programs admin privileges by default, so the damage is limited. On XP and earlier OSes, the exploits could root the system on a default home user installation. So leaving Windows vulnerable longer would mean disproportionate damage to pre-Vista Windows users.
Of course, there may be a small bit of reason 3: "Windows customers are more important" in there, but it's a justifiable decision on points 1 and 2 alone.
Catalytic converters require the platinum to act as a catalyst. As long as you keep the reactive element in the vicinity of the platinum long enough, you can make do with very little platinum. By contrast, fuel cells use it as a storage medium. Storing more hydrogen requires a linearly increasing amount of platinum, and we can't store all that much hydrogen per unit of platinum.
Virtually every field of specialization has its own jargon. Usually, the idea is to use a specific word for a narrow definition to speed communication and reduce the chance of misinterpretation. Beyond specialty jargon, every software company has some unique jargon, but unless you work there, you're unlikely to see it. Microsoft is just higher profile.
Of course, sometimes the jargon goes wrong. You can see some appalling examples at Raymond Chen's blog. Just search for "Microspeak" posts.
One last thing I'd like to bitch about is that this download is an MSI. Really? You really need to do that? For the love of christ, I'm a developer. Could you please just give me a standalone zipped up SDK directory that I could add to my path if I want to? I'm not even going to install this because it's going to get all up in my registry n' shit.
While I realize that bitching about MS products is a common hobby, you could just extract the files directly and avoid any installation.
msiexec ships with Vista (and possibly earlier versions of Windows, I haven't checked). There are a number of third party programs that could do it as well, just look around.
+1 Awesome. That's the primary reason I use it too. Hell, it plays better in DOSBox than it ever did in DOS, since DOSBox can fake EMS and XMS memory while still pretending to have the full 640KB of lower memory available. I remember having to learn memory packing tricks to get everything I could into upper memory and disable half the peripherals, just so I could play the game with sound.
Slashdot Mirror
By "alternative medical folk" do you mean quacks, or were you just misrepresenting their positions? Cancer as host cells gone awry (possibly due to an initial external influence, with the external influence not necessary for continued growth) is incontrovertible. If certain anti-fungals work on them, it's because it happens to work as an anti-cancer drug, it doesn't mean the cancer is fungus.
Actually, it isn't to slow down the typist, it's to prevent commonly used pairs from being too close together (which arguably speeds typing anyway since each hand can hit one key in the pair). Most of the anti-QWERTY and pro-DVORAK stuff is FUD, pure and simple, made up by Dvorak to sell his design. See the "mea culpa" here: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/221/was-the-qwerty-keyboard-purposely-designed-to-slow-typists
Minor correction: In Minnesota and Vermont the Good Samaritan laws do require token aid to those in need (though calling 911 is enough, you need not do anything else). Violation is a petty misdemeanor in Minnesota, and a $100 fine in Vermont. There is no federal law, nor do other states have this version of the law (they only have the type I mentioned in my previous post). Not the sort of bite you were looking for I'm guessing.
Good Samaritan laws protect the Good Samaritan, they don't force you to help. A Good Samaritan law usually states that you can't be sued for attempting to help in an emergency situation. Other laws may apply in the situation in question, but not Good Samaritan laws.
Get over myself? I'm not spouting an elitist view here, or claiming my taste in movies is superior. Watch the second Matrix again. It's 5 minutes of slow paced plot progression, followed by 15 minutes of (usually) unrelated, excessively bullet-timed fight scenes. Lather, rinse, repeat. The fight scenes in the original Matrix occupied far less of the movie, and actually fit into the plot.
Give me more films with the same level of quality as the Matrix (the first one, and to a lesser extent the second)
You lost me there. I never went to see the third on the basis of how bad the second one was. If you're actually asking for more movies like the second Matrix, I'd prefer the suits to be in charge.
perhaps Ubuntu will gain some (damned) soles.
The last thing Linux needs is cursed footwear!
Sorry...
But I'm from D.C., and live in NYC. So both Alabama and Tennessee sound like hick country to me! Can I get a different analogy?
I'm half joking.
It's not just safety. 20 year old Civics aren't even comparable with the modern Civic on size. The old Civics basically ran on go-kart engines and had half the cabin size (yes, hyperbole. The actual engine was 58 HP). This particular model was only a two seater, and small one at that. And as your own link notes, the old 57 MPG was under the old ratings system. Under the new system (which you are using for the new model cars) it would only get 51 MPG. And of course, AC was optional and the top MPG would only be obtained without it.
Actually, what that study showed is that if you get 200,000 miles out of a Prius and a Hummer, they'll have similar energy costs.
Wrong. The study made a number of flawed assumptions, as highlighted in the link, such as that the lifetime mileage of a Prius is 109,000 miles, while the Hummer H3 gets 207,000 and the H1 379,000 miles. So yes, if your Prius craps out in 1/3 the time of the H1, you're going to get a worse overall energy cost. On the other hand, Vancouver cab companies have already clocked over 200,000 miles on Priuses without even replacing the batteries, so they don't seem particularly fragile. And there's no particular evidence that any brand of Hummer is going to last that long either. So yes, if you start with biased assumptions, you will find the Prius has similar energy costs.
I think this sort of thing is quite amazing. That and how my senses can map onto the controls of a car so I can accelerate, brake and turn in a manner that works in no way like my body, without even thinking about it.
It's more than that. While I can't find the link, there have been studies that show that people use their car's body (and virtually any handheld tool used frequently) like an extension of their arm. When faced with a head-on collision with no time for conscious thought, people still automatically turned the car to try and make sure the impact hit the passenger side of the vehicle, just as you would raise an arm to ward off a punch. Never mind that the car is actually better designed to take the collision in the front, your body isn't aware of that. The cerebellum's function is to make commonly repeated actions, whether with your body or tools, become second nature. Learning to walk and learning to drive are really the same. You're just repeating an action consciously until the patterns are mapped to the cerebellum, which makes them "automatic".
Thirst and hunger are basically the same sense, mediated by conscious thought. This is why one of the first things anyone should do when dieting is to remember to drink more water; oftentimes they overeat because no amount of food will turn off the body's combined "hunger/thirst" system if the problem is dehydration. Pain is just a specific form of touch, as is the bladder full feeling. Sleepiness isn't really a sense; it doesn't detect any environmental information, being based on a combination of input from vision (is it dark?) and your circadian rhythm (which is simply a low accuracy internal clock constantly synchronized by vision).
I think 23 is really pushing it.
If you're going to be pedantic, they both use a capital 'G'. GB vs. Gb, not GB vs. gb. So the use of "gb" is ambiguous. Of course, since storage is traditionally measured in bytes, it's obviously GB. I'd only consider Gb as a possibility when talking about network bandwidth or the like.
Why latch on to vaccines? There are a number of things we could be doing to reduce mercury exposure, in far more significant ways (e.g. better capture of mercury from the industrial processes and power plants that your own study shows to increase autism). Lowering mercury emissions would have a twofold effect: it would reduce exposure in the immediate vicinity, and it would reduce the level of mercury in the food chain, and therefore in our diet. Given that we've already removed mercury from every vaccine but the flu shot (which isn't mandatory), you'd think you'd move on to other causes. What fixates you on the vaccines so much?
Well, look at it this way. Even though it doesn't directly protect you, you kill the mosquito that gave it to you, and any others that try to feed off you. Heck, I'd get this vaccine in Maine (where no such diseases circulate) just to get even with the little bloodsuckers. *Insert Evil Laugh Here*
float->double->long doubles->infinite precision decimals
Take the current type, up it to the next, and you can make ever more precise calculation conversions. If the storage type is too small, converting, say, a million miles to micrometers is going to come out wrong.
If anything deserves a +1 Funny, it's unnecessary use of Latin for satiric purposes.
Yes, they do add features in between, but the development work for each Windows version is reused by the Mac team. Most Microsoft products separate view from control; the control is under constant development, with stabilized branches being spun off for release. The view is developed independently for different OSes. I oversimplified, but it's not wrong either.
You misread my post with regard to point 3. "it's justifiable" refers to the decision to release for Windows first. That decision is justifiable on 1 and 2 alone. I wasn't saying points 1 and 2 justify 3.
But it wasn't a bad analogy! There were no analogies at all! If I were responding to "LogicalFallacyGuy" I'd feel stupid, but as is, I feel justified.
Of course, if he's a frequent troll I hadn't picked up on before, mea culpa.
A bit of a logical fallacy there. Even if we assume that the switch to x86 was the trigger for more exploits (increased popularity of the OS being another possibility), it doesn't necessarily mean x86 is more vulnerable. The vast majority of exploits don't need to rely on processor specific characteristics after all.
What it means is that virus writers have limited time and experience. Ignoring trivial Trojans and the like that any script kiddie can bang out, an effective virus (e.g. worms) requires a lot of skill in the assembly language for the CPU, in order to write code that can fit in the available exploit "space". Writing worms for the Power PC architecture was a losing proposition since you didn't have a lot of targets. Now, if you have knowledge of x86 assembly, you can transfer your skills to Macs more easily.
Of course, porting programs to run in 64 bit mode *is* an effective security obstacle; one example is that since 64 bit addresses (in the current implementation) always contain nulls, buffer overruns are much harder to exploit. So yes, Power PC 64 bit is more secure, but if you wrote for an x86-64 target, you'd have roughly the same benefits.
Of course, there may be a small bit of reason 3: "Windows customers are more important" in there, but it's a justifiable decision on points 1 and 2 alone.
Catalytic converters require the platinum to act as a catalyst. As long as you keep the reactive element in the vicinity of the platinum long enough, you can make do with very little platinum. By contrast, fuel cells use it as a storage medium. Storing more hydrogen requires a linearly increasing amount of platinum, and we can't store all that much hydrogen per unit of platinum.
Virtually every field of specialization has its own jargon. Usually, the idea is to use a specific word for a narrow definition to speed communication and reduce the chance of misinterpretation. Beyond specialty jargon, every software company has some unique jargon, but unless you work there, you're unlikely to see it. Microsoft is just higher profile.
Of course, sometimes the jargon goes wrong. You can see some appalling examples at Raymond Chen's blog. Just search for "Microspeak" posts.
One last thing I'd like to bitch about is that this download is an MSI. Really? You really need to do that? For the love of christ, I'm a developer. Could you please just give me a standalone zipped up SDK directory that I could add to my path if I want to? I'm not even going to install this because it's going to get all up in my registry n' shit.
While I realize that bitching about MS products is a common hobby, you could just extract the files directly and avoid any installation.
msiexec ships with Vista (and possibly earlier versions of Windows, I haven't checked). There are a number of third party programs that could do it as well, just look around.
+1 Awesome. That's the primary reason I use it too. Hell, it plays better in DOSBox than it ever did in DOS, since DOSBox can fake EMS and XMS memory while still pretending to have the full 640KB of lower memory available. I remember having to learn memory packing tricks to get everything I could into upper memory and disable half the peripherals, just so I could play the game with sound.