A 100% ban on DDT isn't tenable I'll grant. In areas where there are unusually severe outbreaks, it's one of the only options right now. The problem is blanket, preemptive application. It leads to resistance in the mosquito population, but still poisons the predators that keep the numbers in the semi-manageable range. So in the areas of the world so suited to mosquitoes that total elimination is a pipe dream, what you get is a temporary reduction in the mosquito population, as well as extinction in their predators. When the DDT stops working, the mosquitoes numbers rebound rapidly, and without natural predators, you end up worse off than before. Unlike some diseases, malaria can live in a large number of hosts, so even if every disease carrying mosquito in a two hundred mile radius dies, the survivors still have carrier people and animals to reintroduce it.
This isn't about "mythical ecological balance", this is about practical concerns. You can't drain every swamp in Africa without rendering larger and larger sections of the continent a lifeless desert. And you can't stop the mosquitoes permanently. Extensive use of DDT makes it worse for everyone in the long run, and encouraging people to use short term solutions with long term consequences is madness. Keep in mind, I'm ignoring theoretical global implications which, while even longer term, are potentially dire.
Brilliant. So as long as we all destroy the ecological balance of the planet equally, it's fine. Who cares if we sicken and kill off all the animals at the top of the food chain, leading to a massive overpopulation of grazers and further destruction of nature, as long as it reduced the incidence of half a dozen diseases. While we're at it, let's solve the food/energy crisis by burning all the forests for fuel and planting wheat and corn everywhere. I'm sure there will be no long term consequences to the homogenization of life on the planet.
We have a climate less friendly to the disease carrying mosquitoes in the first place
We discourage the use of DDT because of the side-effects (on birds for instance), despite the fact that we could not have eliminated malaria without extensive use of DDT
We discourage the draining of swamps, once again despite the fact that it was the only way we kept the mosquitoes from returning
If we want people to listen to us when we say "Don't drain swamps and don't use DDT", which are the only cheap and effective ways to control malaria, we need to help find and fund other solutions that they can't afford.
So if I invent a whole new replacement for the transistor that can reduce the scale in the same way the original transistor improved on the vacuum tube, but I have no capacity to fabricate it in any useful way, I should derive no benefit? Bit harsh, don't you think?
Personally, I think a lot of the problem is simply that we have no clear way to identify obvious patents. Patents on trivial things (like the patent on Elliptic Curve implementations that basically boils down to representing sign with a bit, rather than transmitting the whole number which could be easily calculated if you know the sign) break the system, but patents on the larger things are important.
That was the point of my post. There is a test that can confirm if you are currently drunk. There is no test that can confirm if you are currently high. Employment agreements are limited in their ability to control what you do in your own time. If you test positive for THC, you have a built-in excuse, "I was smoking over the weekend," that couldn't be easily disproven. If they fired you on the basis of using a legal intoxicant on your own time, you'd have grounds for a wrongful dismissal suit.
There is actually a clause that would make it illegal for Hillary Clinton (and many of the congressmen joining Obama's cabinet) to take office without a change to the pay. There is a prohibition against "self-dealing" in the Constitution that means members of Congress cannot accept a job which was created or had the pay raised by a bill which was passed under their watch. The solution is a Saxbe fix, which resets the pay of a position to undo any increases enacted under the congressman's current term. Strict literalists believe the Saxbe fix is unconstitutional (since the text of the Constitution states that the pay cannot be raised at all, not that it must be the same, so they claim that lowering it back down does not fix the problem), but reasonable people tend to think it completely satisfies the intent of the rule.
Because while under the influence, it impairs coordination and judgment. But unlike alcohol (which is discouraged in a number of workplaces for similar reasons), there is no test for whether someone is *currently* high, only if they were high in the past few days. If marijuana were legalized, and someone showed up to work with heavy machinery while high, they couldn't actually prove he was high and fire him easily (because he could claim he smoked last night or over the weekend). Despite all the conspiracy theories, this is the strongest reason: Auto manufacturers, shipping concerns, etc., don't want employees showing up baked without having an easy way to fire them.
I believe that is another source of problems. Sometimes NPCs' pathfinding goes awry and they end up sitting in the radiated water surrounding the bomb until they die of rad poisoning. Really sad.
One I've experienced: NPCs wandering off into the ether or just dying due to a pathfinding glitch. The character Walter (Megaton Water Purification guy) for instance is known to either wander off through a clipping error, or to kill himself by falling off the *top* of Lucas Simms's house. I've personally experienced him disappearing (if I teleported to him with the console, he'd obviously wandered through a clipping error and couldn't get back), and I brought him back through a cheat using the in game console, but it's a really shitty thing to run into in the Xbox/PS3 version, where it can kill off whole plotlines with no recourse. Apparently this is a common error for Walter, along with a number of much more plot critical characters in Megaton (Megaton is particularly bad, due to the level variations; the bad path finding means the characters often kill themselves wandering off a cliff).
I've also had a single crash, but considering how unstable most games are, I'm not complaining too much about that.
You're honestly claiming that Linux and Windows are as similar as two competing guitar brands? I'd think a lot of enthusiasts on both sides would express umbrage at that statement (to be clear, I mean in the OS camp, though some guitarists might disagree as well).
While I'm fairly familiar with both OSes, and I'm a CS theory guy who likes to look at the underlying basis of computing, a middle school class is not going to be operating so abstractly with computers that Windows and Linux could be taught in one curriculum without both sides suffering.
Bad analogy. This is a totally different issue. Memory fragmentation means you leave little gaps in the allocated blocks which are too small to reuse, effectively wasting memory. It has very little impact on performance, aside from the minor effect of spreading the "used" memory a bit more thinly, leading to more page faults during operation. The speed cost is due to needing to make more reads, not due to the fragmentation itself; there is no seek latency (though the larger allocation could lead to more paging, and if it goes to disk, then seek latency comes in when it needs to read in a page from swap; again, this is not due to fragmentation, just the wasted space).
Disks, which have fixed size blocks and no compunctions about splitting a file into multiple non-contiguous blocks don't waste space (aside from the final block of any file which is partially unused, but that's unrelated to SSD vs. HD). Keep in mind, the block leveling algorithm will be abstracting the actual disk organization; defragmenting wouldn't accomplish anything on an SSD since the view of the drive provided to the OS will have nothing to do with the actual organization of the data. Even if the file is shown as contiguous, it will actually be spread however the drive chooses.
Insightful is the standard replacement for the Funny mod. Funny doesn't give karma, but Insightful does, so Funny posts are often modded Insightful by generous mods.
Russia never actively supported Germany, they just acted in self-interest on Poland and signed a non-aggression pact. While Allied relationships with Russia were frosty, they were not considered an enemy during the war. The closest we came to being enemies during WW2 was in competition for land and scientists as the war drew to a close.
Oh, and as long as everyone else is posting scores, 96.97%. I missed #4, having guessed wrong between the two answers I considered possible given my flaky memory of elementary school Civil War history.
I worked for DoD. I ran Solaris Unix, and every other machine in the office ran that or Linux. Every machine is vulnerable to someone with physical access; blaming this on Windows is stupid and pointless.
You can't get a Core 2 CPU to run at 5Ghz no matter how hard you try.
Given that the Nehalem is reaching the same speeds or higher on air-cooling, I wouldn't be surprised if Intel could match 6 GHz under liquid nitrogen cooled conditions.
If you need liquid nitrogen to boost it to 6 GHz, it's not all that interesting. Nehalem 2.66 GHz offering has also been shown to overclock to 4 GHz on air cooling, and some people have got the 3.2 GHz offering up to 4.5 GHz on air. On GHz they're roughly the same, possibly with a slight Intel edge.
I thought both companies were ditching the GHz war and fighting for actual performance supremacy? What's with the silly "my GHz is bigger than yours" competition? Do we have PPW numbers, or just press releases that mean nothing?
The con works by making you *trust* the con man. Very different from feeling good about helping. So if the conman makes you believe he trusts you, offers an easy opportunity to rip him off (buy a diamond at a massive discount), you may trust the premise of his offer (e.g. the diamond is real). If he makes you feel good about "helping" him in any substantial way (he needs money for a train ticket), it helps the more honest marks justify it to themselves (I'm making a profit, but I'm also helping the poor man).
I have to say, I just moved to Manhattan a few months ago, and in general I haven't noticed a lot of meanness/bastardliness (though presumably *someone* is peeing in the subway entrances). People are in fact generally helpful when it doesn't benefit them at all (providing street and subway directions). Of course, you can't trust me saying this, since now that I'm living here, I'm obviously a conman.
You do realize that your statements against the need for formal CS education apply to virtually every field of scientific or engineering endeavor out there, right? Extended slightly, all education is worthless since everyone can be an autodidact.
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A 100% ban on DDT isn't tenable I'll grant. In areas where there are unusually severe outbreaks, it's one of the only options right now. The problem is blanket, preemptive application. It leads to resistance in the mosquito population, but still poisons the predators that keep the numbers in the semi-manageable range. So in the areas of the world so suited to mosquitoes that total elimination is a pipe dream, what you get is a temporary reduction in the mosquito population, as well as extinction in their predators. When the DDT stops working, the mosquitoes numbers rebound rapidly, and without natural predators, you end up worse off than before. Unlike some diseases, malaria can live in a large number of hosts, so even if every disease carrying mosquito in a two hundred mile radius dies, the survivors still have carrier people and animals to reintroduce it.
This isn't about "mythical ecological balance", this is about practical concerns. You can't drain every swamp in Africa without rendering larger and larger sections of the continent a lifeless desert. And you can't stop the mosquitoes permanently. Extensive use of DDT makes it worse for everyone in the long run, and encouraging people to use short term solutions with long term consequences is madness. Keep in mind, I'm ignoring theoretical global implications which, while even longer term, are potentially dire.
Brilliant. So as long as we all destroy the ecological balance of the planet equally, it's fine. Who cares if we sicken and kill off all the animals at the top of the food chain, leading to a massive overpopulation of grazers and further destruction of nature, as long as it reduced the incidence of half a dozen diseases. While we're at it, let's solve the food/energy crisis by burning all the forests for fuel and planting wheat and corn everywhere. I'm sure there will be no long term consequences to the homogenization of life on the planet.
That's so dumb, I'm not even sure if it's a "whoosh" or an intentional joke...
To be clear, I meant "fund other solutions that they can't *otherwise* afford".
If we want people to listen to us when we say "Don't drain swamps and don't use DDT", which are the only cheap and effective ways to control malaria, we need to help find and fund other solutions that they can't afford.
So if I invent a whole new replacement for the transistor that can reduce the scale in the same way the original transistor improved on the vacuum tube, but I have no capacity to fabricate it in any useful way, I should derive no benefit? Bit harsh, don't you think?
Personally, I think a lot of the problem is simply that we have no clear way to identify obvious patents. Patents on trivial things (like the patent on Elliptic Curve implementations that basically boils down to representing sign with a bit, rather than transmitting the whole number which could be easily calculated if you know the sign) break the system, but patents on the larger things are important.
That was the point of my post. There is a test that can confirm if you are currently drunk. There is no test that can confirm if you are currently high. Employment agreements are limited in their ability to control what you do in your own time. If you test positive for THC, you have a built-in excuse, "I was smoking over the weekend," that couldn't be easily disproven. If they fired you on the basis of using a legal intoxicant on your own time, you'd have grounds for a wrongful dismissal suit.
More likely you signed out (accidentally, or due to cookie expiration) and didn't notice before you posted.
There is actually a clause that would make it illegal for Hillary Clinton (and many of the congressmen joining Obama's cabinet) to take office without a change to the pay. There is a prohibition against "self-dealing" in the Constitution that means members of Congress cannot accept a job which was created or had the pay raised by a bill which was passed under their watch. The solution is a Saxbe fix, which resets the pay of a position to undo any increases enacted under the congressman's current term. Strict literalists believe the Saxbe fix is unconstitutional (since the text of the Constitution states that the pay cannot be raised at all, not that it must be the same, so they claim that lowering it back down does not fix the problem), but reasonable people tend to think it completely satisfies the intent of the rule.
Because while under the influence, it impairs coordination and judgment. But unlike alcohol (which is discouraged in a number of workplaces for similar reasons), there is no test for whether someone is *currently* high, only if they were high in the past few days. If marijuana were legalized, and someone showed up to work with heavy machinery while high, they couldn't actually prove he was high and fire him easily (because he could claim he smoked last night or over the weekend). Despite all the conspiracy theories, this is the strongest reason: Auto manufacturers, shipping concerns, etc., don't want employees showing up baked without having an easy way to fire them.
I believe that is another source of problems. Sometimes NPCs' pathfinding goes awry and they end up sitting in the radiated water surrounding the bomb until they die of rad poisoning. Really sad.
One I've experienced: NPCs wandering off into the ether or just dying due to a pathfinding glitch. The character Walter (Megaton Water Purification guy) for instance is known to either wander off through a clipping error, or to kill himself by falling off the *top* of Lucas Simms's house. I've personally experienced him disappearing (if I teleported to him with the console, he'd obviously wandered through a clipping error and couldn't get back), and I brought him back through a cheat using the in game console, but it's a really shitty thing to run into in the Xbox/PS3 version, where it can kill off whole plotlines with no recourse. Apparently this is a common error for Walter, along with a number of much more plot critical characters in Megaton (Megaton is particularly bad, due to the level variations; the bad path finding means the characters often kill themselves wandering off a cliff).
I've also had a single crash, but considering how unstable most games are, I'm not complaining too much about that.
At time of posting we have:
Either the taggers got up on the wrong side of bed today, or my general impression of Ruby is horribly wrong.
You're honestly claiming that Linux and Windows are as similar as two competing guitar brands? I'd think a lot of enthusiasts on both sides would express umbrage at that statement (to be clear, I mean in the OS camp, though some guitarists might disagree as well).
While I'm fairly familiar with both OSes, and I'm a CS theory guy who likes to look at the underlying basis of computing, a middle school class is not going to be operating so abstractly with computers that Windows and Linux could be taught in one curriculum without both sides suffering.
Bad analogy. This is a totally different issue. Memory fragmentation means you leave little gaps in the allocated blocks which are too small to reuse, effectively wasting memory. It has very little impact on performance, aside from the minor effect of spreading the "used" memory a bit more thinly, leading to more page faults during operation. The speed cost is due to needing to make more reads, not due to the fragmentation itself; there is no seek latency (though the larger allocation could lead to more paging, and if it goes to disk, then seek latency comes in when it needs to read in a page from swap; again, this is not due to fragmentation, just the wasted space).
Disks, which have fixed size blocks and no compunctions about splitting a file into multiple non-contiguous blocks don't waste space (aside from the final block of any file which is partially unused, but that's unrelated to SSD vs. HD). Keep in mind, the block leveling algorithm will be abstracting the actual disk organization; defragmenting wouldn't accomplish anything on an SSD since the view of the drive provided to the OS will have nothing to do with the actual organization of the data. Even if the file is shown as contiguous, it will actually be spread however the drive chooses.
He probably mean N64. They take a lot more memory than the SNES and earlier games.
Insightful is the standard replacement for the Funny mod. Funny doesn't give karma, but Insightful does, so Funny posts are often modded Insightful by generous mods.
Of course, if the bartender scrubs the glass you get a drink full of silicon nano-filaments. Decisions, decisions...
Russia never actively supported Germany, they just acted in self-interest on Poland and signed a non-aggression pact. While Allied relationships with Russia were frosty, they were not considered an enemy during the war. The closest we came to being enemies during WW2 was in competition for land and scientists as the war drew to a close.
Oh, and as long as everyone else is posting scores, 96.97%. I missed #4, having guessed wrong between the two answers I considered possible given my flaky memory of elementary school Civil War history.
I worked for DoD. I ran Solaris Unix, and every other machine in the office ran that or Linux. Every machine is vulnerable to someone with physical access; blaming this on Windows is stupid and pointless.
You can't get a Core 2 CPU to run at 5Ghz no matter how hard you try.
Given that the Nehalem is reaching the same speeds or higher on air-cooling, I wouldn't be surprised if Intel could match 6 GHz under liquid nitrogen cooled conditions.
If you need liquid nitrogen to boost it to 6 GHz, it's not all that interesting. Nehalem 2.66 GHz offering has also been shown to overclock to 4 GHz on air cooling, and some people have got the 3.2 GHz offering up to 4.5 GHz on air. On GHz they're roughly the same, possibly with a slight Intel edge.
I thought both companies were ditching the GHz war and fighting for actual performance supremacy? What's with the silly "my GHz is bigger than yours" competition? Do we have PPW numbers, or just press releases that mean nothing?
The con works by making you *trust* the con man. Very different from feeling good about helping. So if the conman makes you believe he trusts you, offers an easy opportunity to rip him off (buy a diamond at a massive discount), you may trust the premise of his offer (e.g. the diamond is real). If he makes you feel good about "helping" him in any substantial way (he needs money for a train ticket), it helps the more honest marks justify it to themselves (I'm making a profit, but I'm also helping the poor man).
I have to say, I just moved to Manhattan a few months ago, and in general I haven't noticed a lot of meanness/bastardliness (though presumably *someone* is peeing in the subway entrances). People are in fact generally helpful when it doesn't benefit them at all (providing street and subway directions). Of course, you can't trust me saying this, since now that I'm living here, I'm obviously a conman.
You do realize that your statements against the need for formal CS education apply to virtually every field of scientific or engineering endeavor out there, right? Extended slightly, all education is worthless since everyone can be an autodidact.