This. When I was about that age (actually 8), my parents bought a second-hand ZX Spectrum with a box of software (mostly games). They hid most of the games, and my father started writing simple BASIC programs that created fun visual effects, simple mathematical riddles,... This showed me that one could make the machine perform arbitrary tasks. From visiting friends that had an early console (possibly a NES), I learned that a lot of fun could be had with computers when giving them the right "arbitrary task" to perform. So I started writing games (typically rip-offs of stuff I saw elsewhere) in BASIC on the Spectrum. Before long, I found the basic manuals we had in my mother's tongue (not English) insufficiently detailed, and I started deciphering the English-language reference manuals. My games themselves rarely were very good; I was mostly trying to write action games on a very slow machine running an inefficient interpreted language (at one occasion I even hit the code size ceiling), and it took many years before I came up with the concept of code optimization. But I didn't care, I had as much fun playing my clunky slow-response games as writing them. And more importantly, I'm still reaping the benefits of having done all this.
That's not to say that a Spectrum would be a good machine to give to a 7-years-old in 2012. The world has changed. But I think the closest present-day equivalent of my spectrum would be the Raspberry Pi - limitations spur creativity, if they're not too severe. Also see this comment.
Organic food has plentyofpesticidestoo. Most of them are worse than the synthetic ones.
So far, you have a good point...
Pesticide free...? Nature has its own pesticides. Many plants, especially fruit trees, produce their own pesticides when attacked by insects.
Yes, this also has been well-studied and documented.
These pesticides are *inside* the fruit and can be very toxic.
Holy {citation needed}, batman! There's nothing indicating that the natural pesticides (lectins etc) in commonly eaten fruits exhibit significant oral toxicity to humans in the concentrations encountered in these fruits. It would be unlikely too, given that we evolved for millions of years to effectively deal with these compounds.
Two studies reported significantly lower urinary pesticide levels among children consuming organic versus conventional diets, but studies of biomarker and nutrient levels in serum, urine, breast milk, and semen in adults did not identify clinically meaningful differences.
(emph mine)
The thing is, current analytical techniques are so incredibly sensitive that they can accurately measure mindbogglingly small concentrations. Of course someone consuming vegetables that were grown without pesticides will have lower pesticide concentrations in their urine - duh! The question to be asked is: are these pesticide concentrations in a range that is harmful to humans? I'd argue that nothing is harmful as long as the dos is low enough (just as everything is harmful if the dose is high enough). In the odd case that hormesis is a generalizable, it might even be beneficial. (Fun tip: the smarter end of the homeopathy crowd attributes its alleged beneficial effects to Hormesis. It's always a blast to argue with these people that they should stop eating organic so that they can reap the beneficial effects of the small pesticide concentrations.)
Disclaimer: nothing in my post provides evidence that the pesticide concentrations are not harmful, so I do sympathize with those who buy organic vegetables on the ground of the precautionary principle. I just don't consider the case against conventionally grown vegetables strong enough to warrant doing it myself. For meat and dairy, however, it's an entirely different story: I don't agree with the FDA's criteria for harmful levels of growth hormones (and neither does its European counterpart, the EFSA). As for the antibiotics, they may not be harmful to human health as such, but they promote the development of a natural reserve of resistance genes. Finally, it happens to be easier to find meat that was grown with a minimal respect for animal welfare (again, I'm siding with the EU on this one) in stores that stock organic food. Anyhow, the title of this/. story is appalling.
s/Organic Food/Organic Vegetables/
It's an important distinction!
That's why it was a joke, as the mods successfully recognized. But in all seriousness, I'm not sure how they measured that 0.189 Hz figure, but any pulsation in the body in that frequency range would actually be breathing. It's extremely worrisome to see this appearing on, of all things, a medical news site, on any other day than April 1st. If someone is really serious about this guy being able to vocalize 0.189 Hz, then that someone just doesn't understand the concepts "frequency" and "measurement" (as in: your measurement equipment might be picking up something different than what you think you're measuring, which would qualify as "noise" in that context).
You gotta be trolling. I'm running dual-boot too, and just about everything I do goes so much smoother in Linux than in Windows. From my usability point of view, it feels like windows is just squandering resources. GP's numbers do seem about right to me.
That said, I've always felt uneasy about "comparing the numbers" between Linux and Windows. The way windows' Task Manager reports memory usage is different form the default "top" view, and they're both somewhat nontransparent to the uninitiated because virtual memory management is complicated business. To make an apples-to-apples comparison, one has to precisely analyze how much memory is cached, buffered, swapped, committed and allocated. To make matters more difficult, Linux distros and users have a strong inclination to customize how the kernel manages memory and what software is being loaded, so there will be huge differences between different Linux measurements. And even windows can be leaned out or fattened up to a great extent by users and OEMs.
And you are the one claiming that the truth is unpalatable to me?
Yeah I know you mean culture, society and power structures, but I'm not buying it. One could just as well say that the US hasn't changed since 1842. All it takes is the right color of glasses.
You have a funny definition of "truth". One could put the historical facts together a bit differently, apply different but equally valid logic to them, and come to exactly the opposite conclusion. People change, cultures evolve, backwards regions become forerunners, forerunners become backwards, and then the pendulum swings back again. Japan went from a ridiculously outdated society to an undeniable modern superpower in the time span of about 50 years (I'm thinking 1853-1905). In 1895, you probably would have been among the people saying "no big deal, they can't possibly keep this up". The Islamic world had its cultural, scientific and technological heyday in early medieval times, and now appears to be somewhere at the opposite end of the oscillation. China and India had their cultural, scientific and technological heydays in ancient times, and seem to be poised for a comeback. It may or may not happen; I don't claim to know for sure. Neither should you; the truth value your link (or any speculation about the future of nations, for that matter) is very soft at best.
Oh by the way, I never even thought about dropping the term "racist". I just profoundly disagree with the kind of fallacious logic being applied, that's all. And I'm sure the same goes for a lot of my Chinese friends.
Exactly. And even in the hypothetical case you'd manage to find it for $399 with no strings attached ("truth in advertising" has a different meaning in the US than in Europe), I dare "oelewapperke" to find a plane ticket to the US and back for EUR 75. The cheapest return flight I ever got was more than EUR 500; I'd love to know what kind of "decent laptop" he's planning to buy. Of course, he might be scheming to bring stuff for his family and friends too. Then he'd have to be very careful; the customs officers in Europe are keeping an eye out for people coming from the US loaded with apple products (which, in all fairness, have been cheaper in the US at times). Bottom line is that I can imagine more profitable businesses than running electronics from the US to the EU. And as I said, the price differences are getting less and less.
It's a massive rambling wall of text with horrible cultural stereotyping and unwarranted historical extrapolation. If you follow the author's logic, Europe would never have become technologically advanced because it was feudal, backward and stuck with a debilitating belief system during large parts of the middle ages. Pretty much the only thing good about the text is that it contains a crash course in (certain parts of) Chinese history, although if that's what you're in for, Wikipedia is a much more enjoyable read.
yes, they are simply going to print more money. no problem involved...they are doing it from a long time now...
But still...so far, we're still doing better than much of the EU which is going down the tubes...
Funny, that's exactly what my European friends say: (paraphrasing) "Yeah, the Eurozone is having a bit of a rough time, but politicians haven't even brought out the big guns yet. So far, we're still doing better than the US which is going down the tubes..."
And I forgot about a pet peeve of mine: vacation. I'd just love to see your face when you discover you get 10 days of vacation a year. Yes it's really that little for a lot of jobs in the US. Unless you're a full employee of a university, you'll rarely come close to the 20-30 days you can reasonably expect in your home country.
I call bullshit. The price differences are getting less and less. Except for the simlocked sponsored phones for which you have to sign a 2-year plan at rates that would give Europeans a heartattack.
Perhaps, but health insurance is included in the tax. When I moved to the US, I was like "cool, so much less taxes", but now that I discovered just how much money my employer pays for my health insurance (instead of giving it to me), it's more like "lame, more of my wage ends up being withheld than in my home country". And don't give me that "you're still free to not get Health Insurance" shit because it's purely hypothetical - I do want health insurance and I pity you if you don't, thank you very much. It's about as helpful as saying: "instead of complaining about the risk of being mugged at gunpoint, just stay in your house all day, you're free to do so" (but not to have a beer outside).
And then we haven't factored in the other things yet, such as cheap and ubiquitous public transport, clean and relatively safe cities, yummy and healthy food that in the grocery stores that is actually affordable (unlike Whole Foods) + all the thing GP mentioned.
In this we disagree. Because the goal of the politician is power, not capital.
I'd say both; desiring capital is as much part of human nature as desiring power, and politicians need to be actively dissuaded from pursuing it by efficient and strict anti-corruption laws and the enforcement thereof. You know you're really in deep shit if the system instead incentivizes the pursuit of money, like, say, if politicians need to raise mountains of cash to afford brainwashing an apathetic population into voting for them.
Assuming that what you say is true, I'd still counter that releasing an operating system that is by itself too heavy for a majority of computers is an epic fail.
I'm talking perceived stability here. I've seen many more BSODs on windows 95, and have been reinstalling many more windows 95 machines than windows 3.1. I suspect there may be underlying cause(s) to this other than the OS itself, like the proliferation in hardware diversity and the Internet's loss of innocence (security-wise). All I know is that I don't have the kind of nightmares about 3.1 than I'm having about 95. (And then I wake up and sigh: "thank goodness that I eventually saw the light and switched to Linux").
Slashdot Mirror
https://plus.google.com/107120186043045385763/about?gl=us&hl=en
Oops. Should have posted my pet peeves someplace else ;)
This. When I was about that age (actually 8), my parents bought a second-hand ZX Spectrum with a box of software (mostly games). They hid most of the games, and my father started writing simple BASIC programs that created fun visual effects, simple mathematical riddles,... This showed me that one could make the machine perform arbitrary tasks. From visiting friends that had an early console (possibly a NES), I learned that a lot of fun could be had with computers when giving them the right "arbitrary task" to perform. So I started writing games (typically rip-offs of stuff I saw elsewhere) in BASIC on the Spectrum. Before long, I found the basic manuals we had in my mother's tongue (not English) insufficiently detailed, and I started deciphering the English-language reference manuals. My games themselves rarely were very good; I was mostly trying to write action games on a very slow machine running an inefficient interpreted language (at one occasion I even hit the code size ceiling), and it took many years before I came up with the concept of code optimization. But I didn't care, I had as much fun playing my clunky slow-response games as writing them. And more importantly, I'm still reaping the benefits of having done all this.
That's not to say that a Spectrum would be a good machine to give to a 7-years-old in 2012. The world has changed. But I think the closest present-day equivalent of my spectrum would be the Raspberry Pi - limitations spur creativity, if they're not too severe. Also see this comment.
Organic food has plenty of pesticides too. Most of them are worse than the synthetic ones.
So far, you have a good point...
Pesticide free...? Nature has its own pesticides. Many plants, especially fruit trees, produce their own pesticides when attacked by insects.
Yes, this also has been well-studied and documented.
These pesticides are *inside* the fruit and can be very toxic.
Holy {citation needed}, batman! There's nothing indicating that the natural pesticides (lectins etc) in commonly eaten fruits exhibit significant oral toxicity to humans in the concentrations encountered in these fruits. It would be unlikely too, given that we evolved for millions of years to effectively deal with these compounds.
Two studies reported significantly lower urinary pesticide levels among children consuming organic versus conventional diets, but studies of biomarker and nutrient levels in serum, urine, breast milk, and semen in adults did not identify clinically meaningful differences.
(emph mine)
/. story is appalling.
The thing is, current analytical techniques are so incredibly sensitive that they can accurately measure mindbogglingly small concentrations. Of course someone consuming vegetables that were grown without pesticides will have lower pesticide concentrations in their urine - duh! The question to be asked is: are these pesticide concentrations in a range that is harmful to humans? I'd argue that nothing is harmful as long as the dos is low enough (just as everything is harmful if the dose is high enough). In the odd case that hormesis is a generalizable, it might even be beneficial. (Fun tip: the smarter end of the homeopathy crowd attributes its alleged beneficial effects to Hormesis. It's always a blast to argue with these people that they should stop eating organic so that they can reap the beneficial effects of the small pesticide concentrations.)
Disclaimer: nothing in my post provides evidence that the pesticide concentrations are not harmful, so I do sympathize with those who buy organic vegetables on the ground of the precautionary principle. I just don't consider the case against conventionally grown vegetables strong enough to warrant doing it myself. For meat and dairy, however, it's an entirely different story: I don't agree with the FDA's criteria for harmful levels of growth hormones (and neither does its European counterpart, the EFSA). As for the antibiotics, they may not be harmful to human health as such, but they promote the development of a natural reserve of resistance genes. Finally, it happens to be easier to find meat that was grown with a minimal respect for animal welfare (again, I'm siding with the EU on this one) in stores that stock organic food. Anyhow, the title of this
s/Organic Food/Organic Vegetables/
It's an important distinction!
Here's another one for Photoshop Disasters. Look at that psychedelic halo around that tree in the lower left!
Also, is it me, or is there something wrong with the general color balance of the picture?
That's why it was a joke, as the mods successfully recognized. But in all seriousness, I'm not sure how they measured that 0.189 Hz figure, but any pulsation in the body in that frequency range would actually be breathing. It's extremely worrisome to see this appearing on, of all things, a medical news site, on any other day than April 1st. If someone is really serious about this guy being able to vocalize 0.189 Hz, then that someone just doesn't understand the concepts "frequency" and "measurement" (as in: your measurement equipment might be picking up something different than what you think you're measuring, which would qualify as "noise" in that context).
You gotta be trolling. I'm running dual-boot too, and just about everything I do goes so much smoother in Linux than in Windows. From my usability point of view, it feels like windows is just squandering resources. GP's numbers do seem about right to me.
That said, I've always felt uneasy about "comparing the numbers" between Linux and Windows. The way windows' Task Manager reports memory usage is different form the default "top" view, and they're both somewhat nontransparent to the uninitiated because virtual memory management is complicated business. To make an apples-to-apples comparison, one has to precisely analyze how much memory is cached, buffered, swapped, committed and allocated. To make matters more difficult, Linux distros and users have a strong inclination to customize how the kernel manages memory and what software is being loaded, so there will be huge differences between different Linux measurements. And even windows can be leaned out or fattened up to a great extent by users and OEMs.
Maybe they mistook his breathing for infrasonic sound?
The mods who have sense of humor seem to be out of town today.
Hey why didn't anyone tell me Fox went into the business of providing internet connections?
China just DOESN'T change though.
And you are the one claiming that the truth is unpalatable to me?
Yeah I know you mean culture, society and power structures, but I'm not buying it. One could just as well say that the US hasn't changed since 1842. All it takes is the right color of glasses.
You have a funny definition of "truth". One could put the historical facts together a bit differently, apply different but equally valid logic to them, and come to exactly the opposite conclusion. People change, cultures evolve, backwards regions become forerunners, forerunners become backwards, and then the pendulum swings back again. Japan went from a ridiculously outdated society to an undeniable modern superpower in the time span of about 50 years (I'm thinking 1853-1905). In 1895, you probably would have been among the people saying "no big deal, they can't possibly keep this up". The Islamic world had its cultural, scientific and technological heyday in early medieval times, and now appears to be somewhere at the opposite end of the oscillation. China and India had their cultural, scientific and technological heydays in ancient times, and seem to be poised for a comeback. It may or may not happen; I don't claim to know for sure. Neither should you; the truth value your link (or any speculation about the future of nations, for that matter) is very soft at best.
Oh by the way, I never even thought about dropping the term "racist". I just profoundly disagree with the kind of fallacious logic being applied, that's all. And I'm sure the same goes for a lot of my Chinese friends.
Exactly. And even in the hypothetical case you'd manage to find it for $399 with no strings attached ("truth in advertising" has a different meaning in the US than in Europe), I dare "oelewapperke" to find a plane ticket to the US and back for EUR 75. The cheapest return flight I ever got was more than EUR 500; I'd love to know what kind of "decent laptop" he's planning to buy. Of course, he might be scheming to bring stuff for his family and friends too. Then he'd have to be very careful; the customs officers in Europe are keeping an eye out for people coming from the US loaded with apple products (which, in all fairness, have been cheaper in the US at times). Bottom line is that I can imagine more profitable businesses than running electronics from the US to the EU. And as I said, the price differences are getting less and less.
It's a massive rambling wall of text with horrible cultural stereotyping and unwarranted historical extrapolation. If you follow the author's logic, Europe would never have become technologically advanced because it was feudal, backward and stuck with a debilitating belief system during large parts of the middle ages. Pretty much the only thing good about the text is that it contains a crash course in (certain parts of) Chinese history, although if that's what you're in for, Wikipedia is a much more enjoyable read.
Go ahead, don't say I didn't warn you.
But still...so far, we're still doing better than much of the EU which is going down the tubes...
Funny, that's exactly what my European friends say: (paraphrasing) "Yeah, the Eurozone is having a bit of a rough time, but politicians haven't even brought out the big guns yet. So far, we're still doing better than the US which is going down the tubes..."
Mitt, is that you?
Well, it's hard to make objective comparisons, but when attempts are made to do so, the US usually is nowhere to be found in the top 10
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Poverty_Index#For_selected_high-income_OECD_countries_.28HPI-2.29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_inequality-adjusted_HDI#List
And I forgot about a pet peeve of mine: vacation. I'd just love to see your face when you discover you get 10 days of vacation a year. Yes it's really that little for a lot of jobs in the US. Unless you're a full employee of a university, you'll rarely come close to the 20-30 days you can reasonably expect in your home country.
Funny you should say that; I've always been saying the same thing but with "Europe" and "USA" swapped. Guess it's a cultural thing.
I call bullshit. The price differences are getting less and less. Except for the simlocked sponsored phones for which you have to sign a 2-year plan at rates that would give Europeans a heartattack.
Perhaps, but health insurance is included in the tax. When I moved to the US, I was like "cool, so much less taxes", but now that I discovered just how much money my employer pays for my health insurance (instead of giving it to me), it's more like "lame, more of my wage ends up being withheld than in my home country". And don't give me that "you're still free to not get Health Insurance" shit because it's purely hypothetical - I do want health insurance and I pity you if you don't, thank you very much. It's about as helpful as saying: "instead of complaining about the risk of being mugged at gunpoint, just stay in your house all day, you're free to do so" (but not to have a beer outside).
And then we haven't factored in the other things yet, such as cheap and ubiquitous public transport, clean and relatively safe cities, yummy and healthy food that in the grocery stores that is actually affordable (unlike Whole Foods) + all the thing GP mentioned.
In this we disagree. Because the goal of the politician is power, not capital.
I'd say both; desiring capital is as much part of human nature as desiring power, and politicians need to be actively dissuaded from pursuing it by efficient and strict anti-corruption laws and the enforcement thereof. You know you're really in deep shit if the system instead incentivizes the pursuit of money, like, say, if politicians need to raise mountains of cash to afford brainwashing an apathetic population into voting for them.
Assuming that what you say is true, I'd still counter that releasing an operating system that is by itself too heavy for a majority of computers is an epic fail.
I'm talking perceived stability here. I've seen many more BSODs on windows 95, and have been reinstalling many more windows 95 machines than windows 3.1. I suspect there may be underlying cause(s) to this other than the OS itself, like the proliferation in hardware diversity and the Internet's loss of innocence (security-wise). All I know is that I don't have the kind of nightmares about 3.1 than I'm having about 95. (And then I wake up and sigh: "thank goodness that I eventually saw the light and switched to Linux").