As a.NET developer, I wish to God MS would just make the little error box that tells you the thing you're trying to run can't run without version X of the.NET framework have a button that says, "Click here to download and install it" instead of just failing. So every.NET program you make has to have its own bootstrapper in native code to make sure they have it or include a 22 meg installer for it in your own installer (assuming you're using an MSI [Which I'm not very good with, so maybe there's a way to download and run a second install from inside an MSI. If someone could tell me how to do that, if it's possible, I'd be grateful]).
And ginger tea works very well on my nausia and my virtigo when I travel.
For every ginger tea, there's 400 "Fat Sucker 6000"s made from secret ancient rainforest vegetables the manufacturer found growing under the workbench in the garage. And every time you find out Fat Sucker 6000 with Blippidydooinol doesn't work, there's absolutely no barrier to releasing Fat Sucker 6001 with Kerflufferine that does exactly the same nothing. So ginger tea is just going to have to eat it and do some studies if it wants to claim to be a medicine.
Secondly, do you really have that little faith in the invisible hand of the free market? You think there really won't be enough people buying good chocolate to make it profitable for companies to manufacture, in the event that all chocolate really does turn to shit in the absence of regulation?
First, I have no "faith" in the free market. It's not a damn religion. Second, the concern isn't the macro scale, though that will obviously move toward producing the cheapest thing it can get away with, which I have no problem with. The concern is the micro scale. The two or three thousand asswipes screwing people and getting away with it.
Thirdly, accurate labeling is already enforced. Is the government responsible for you not reading the "ingredients" on the back of your candy bar and finding that it says only "dog shit, preservatives"?
Unless it's served in a restaurant, or has a line that just says "milk chocolate" as an ingredient in something larger.
And, fourthly, do you really think this and similar activities are worth 2 billion dollars a year
I think we could scrape by on 1.7.
Even if you do happen to eat 3/4 of a bar of dog shit, that's, what, 50 cents? Average citizen pays almost 10 bucks a year for the FDA... Let me repeat what you just said one more time.
Even if you do happen to eat 3/4 of a bar of dog shit, that's, what, 50 cents?
For those who haven't read the book, the message is: WHO FUCKING CARES? IS THIS REALLY WHAT YOU IMAGINE YOUR TAX MONEY SHOULD BE PAYING FOR?
Abso-fricking-lutely. When I buy chocolate, I want to know that if someone wraps dog feces in aluminum foil, they can't say, "No, that's what we call chocolate. No refunds, you already ate three-quarters of it." Enforced accurate labeling and definitions is absolutely what I want the government to be doing.
This is very important. The Big Pharmaceutical corporations have been trying to get natural medicine banned for years. Instead of taking herbs, vitamins, minerals, and other natural and very inexpensive remedies, Big Pharma wants to drug everyone.
You can mix dandelions and dog spit in a jar and sell it as a cure for baldness and impotence as long as you put a tiny thing on the bottom of the screen that says it's not intended to treat or diagnose anything. 95% of the herbal medicine market is an obvious scam. Thank God they're finally trying to do something about it. It drives me crazy watching those damn commercials. If I want a placebo for my erectile dysfunction, I'll eat a bull penis like anyone sensible would.
Why not focus on something like... no license requirements? PC and Mac both dig into their wallets... Linux invites all her friends along.
See, that's why I'm not in advertising. I would have had guys in top hats and monocles paying Mac and PC for sex and then Linux doing like nine homeless guys.
I know this will be blasphemy on this site, but Mountain Dew contains "brominated vegetable oil"
I'm not that afraid of bromine or vegetables. But a can of the stuff is 170 Calories. That's about 1/12th of what most people need in a day to not gain weight. 2 cans of the stuff, and an adult is well on its way to gaining a couple ounces that day.
But mostly I blame fruit juice for kid obesity. It's just as fattening as soda, which is hugely fattening, but somebody convinced parents it's good for you. 160 Calories per cup of a liquid (that barely satisfies any kind of hunger in most people) is not at all good for you. I was a fatty-fat as a kid, and my parents took me off soda and put me on juice. Not a lot of results from that one. I know a girl that is worried about her kid's weight but feeds him 100 Calorie juice boxes at every meal because it's healthy and won't grasp that the Vitamin C won't help him when he dies of a heart attack at 38. Switch that with water, your kid will lose a pound every 12 days. Absolutely guaranteed. Drop 1 juice box a day, and he'll lose a pound a month. Or at least gain a pound less. That stuff is evil.
Not that I think it should be illegal to sell the stuff or anything, but if the government spent a few of those research bucks on running commercials with graphs of how (Calorie input - Calorie output) / 3500 ALWAYS* equals weight change (get the guy from the Oxy-Clean commercials to yell the "ALWAYS" part), we'd be a lot better off. Of course, it would put all the many profitable, tax-paying voodoo diets out of business. Not that I think there's a conspiracy, I don't, but a lot of people would get mad if we were all skinny.
* Plus or minus a tiny, tiny bit that evens out to 0 over the long term and discounting (the very small) changes in metabolism resulting from lowered food intake. Metabolic conditions also (possibly) excepted. This part doesn't need to go in the commercial. This is just hear to discourage nitpicking on the obvious stuff.
I'm not as confident that there's not a supernaturalness gene, but I don't see a need for one.
I've done some tinkering with AI. Try getting an AI to NOT develop superstition. It's very hard, at least with the kind I was working on. Humans, like most animals, are pretty well designed to recognize that A follows B follows C. If B happens to be standing on one foot and humming, then C + one foot and humming = A. Get the same result twice, and you're well on your way to a superstition.
Now make B = praying, and you've got one with consequences; somebody's hearing your prayers. Ergo, there's something out there you can't see. "How's that work?" And poof, you've got yourself a religion.
Watch an atheist sit at a roulette wheel for more than five minutes, and you've probably watched someone invent their own religion. The mechanism is pretty well explained by the ability to find patterns and then look for causes.
Where consumer activism would have given us corporations which realized they must act in socially acceptable ways
I'm not sure how much power you think the five guys in the world with the both the time and interest to be consumer activists have, but it's not that much.
government only gives us corporations which can be extreme sociopaths as long as everything they are doing is legal.
Whereas not regulating means being an extreme sociopath is legal. I'm not seeing a lot of good either way, here.
If you're saying there are loopholes and that's bad, you're right. Why not spend your time railing against loopholes instead of against the government in general? You're infinitely more likely to accomplish something, especially if you pick a specific loophole to work on and go from there. It's boring, not nearly as much fun as complaining about the existence of government, but it might actually help something.
Basically these newer phones contained the ability to automatically connect you to the correct 911 call center when you dial 911 to make sure the emergency services get to you in time. (without this you may as well be calling Delouth Minnesota's call center from New York City).
While the reason for requiring the newer phones is correct, I hope to God you're wrong about needing it to find your city. Cell phones only work because the provider can find which cell tower you're next to at any given time so they can tell it to make your phone ring. If they said they need it to find the nearest 911 operator, then they lied.
But it is my understanding that new phones have GPS in them that is activated when you dial 911. Which is somewhat more reasonable. Though that information came from a $6/hour guy at a Verizon store, so it may not be accurate.
Could the break point be when it's less expensive to pay someone to clean up bad acting versus shelling out uber-bucks for a good actor?
You think Lindsay Lohan is actually the best actor the people that cast her can find? And Paris Hilton's got an acting job now because of her talent? 90% of people going to a movie are people that have a crush, sexual or otherwise, on one of the actors. The other 10% are going because they have nothing to do, but will come back to the actor in it's next movie once they get to like them.
If you don't have a really, really, really fantastic movie idea that can be summed up in a 30 second commercial, which happens once a year, absolute maximum, you need people to come in to see the actors they like. So they'll never go away.
Unless CG studios start making extremely convincing, likable CG characters and re-using them across different movies, treating them like actors. But then you'll just have to pay the same $20 million to get the CG guys to let you use their popular fake actor, and you'd gain nothing over paying Lindsay Lohan. The animators, I'm sure, would be just as coked-up as she is. Allegedly.
That, of course, is totally ignoring the fact that the guy conducting the research was a hardcore anti-GM activist before the research. It is like asking activist creationists to do an impartial study on evolution.
Pretty much every scientist has a side on GM. If you're going to ignore research by people with biases, you're going to ignore all research.
If you're capable (I'm not), take a look at his methods, rip them apart, or if they're sound, repeat them and see if the result is the same. Good science should work regardless of pre-existing notions. That's why there's experiments in the first place.
I say this as someone who really, really hopes this guy is full of it, 'cause GM is cool, and potatoes are delicious.
I think I speak for all of us Bush-disliking, world-loving, cooperation-endorsing Americans when I say please stop saying that stupid crap.
That may be so, but it encourages this idea that the USA is the only important American contry.
No, it doesn't. What does that is partly the fact that it's a 2000 mile drive from the midwest to our closest southern neighbor, and that's not the far end of the country. They don't care what anyone farther south thinks because they'll never have any chance to meet them.
It's partly due to the media not mentioning the rest of the world, ever, unless we're bombing it.
But mostly it's because the rest of the world hates us. What incentive could we possibly have to be friendly when the only thing most of us hear out of you is smug criticism and demands that we stop calling ourselves the last word in our name? And please note that this is coming from someone that agrees with the criticism.
Outsiders constantly call us fat, stupid, self-involved, polluting assholes, usually to our faces, and then they wonder why we don't ask their opinion more often.
The US government has done some awful shit. There are Americans that have no clue what's going on, and a lot of them are just as jerky to the outside world as they are toward us. We even actually do have a lot of fat fucks that want to bomb everyone with a tan. But if you want us to be friendly with the rest of the world, you're going to have to give us a carrot. The stick won't work because, as a nation, we will cut off our nose to spite our face, and then we'll gouge our eye out as a warning to our chins.
"America" is short for "The United States of America." If picking the word "America" offends you so, at least pick a better alternative. I recommend "USAsies" or "Statians" (prounounced "stations"). But trust me, the word has nothing to do with why we're insulated.
Also, we do not care about world cup competitions. Just so you know.
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As a .NET developer, I wish to God MS would just make the little error box that tells you the thing you're trying to run can't run without version X of the .NET framework have a button that says, "Click here to download and install it" instead of just failing. So every .NET program you make has to have its own bootstrapper in native code to make sure they have it or include a 22 meg installer for it in your own installer (assuming you're using an MSI [Which I'm not very good with, so maybe there's a way to download and run a second install from inside an MSI. If someone could tell me how to do that, if it's possible, I'd be grateful]).
Annoying.
And ginger tea works very well on my nausia and my virtigo when I travel.
For every ginger tea, there's 400 "Fat Sucker 6000"s made from secret ancient rainforest vegetables the manufacturer found growing under the workbench in the garage. And every time you find out Fat Sucker 6000 with Blippidydooinol doesn't work, there's absolutely no barrier to releasing Fat Sucker 6001 with Kerflufferine that does exactly the same nothing. So ginger tea is just going to have to eat it and do some studies if it wants to claim to be a medicine.
Secondly, do you really have that little faith in the invisible hand of the free market? You think there really won't be enough people buying good chocolate to make it profitable for companies to manufacture, in the event that all chocolate really does turn to shit in the absence of regulation?
... Let me repeat what you just said one more time.
First, I have no "faith" in the free market. It's not a damn religion. Second, the concern isn't the macro scale, though that will obviously move toward producing the cheapest thing it can get away with, which I have no problem with. The concern is the micro scale. The two or three thousand asswipes screwing people and getting away with it.
Thirdly, accurate labeling is already enforced. Is the government responsible for you not reading the "ingredients" on the back of your candy bar and finding that it says only "dog shit, preservatives"?
Unless it's served in a restaurant, or has a line that just says "milk chocolate" as an ingredient in something larger.
And, fourthly, do you really think this and similar activities are worth 2 billion dollars a year
I think we could scrape by on 1.7.
Even if you do happen to eat 3/4 of a bar of dog shit, that's, what, 50 cents? Average citizen pays almost 10 bucks a year for the FDA
Even if you do happen to eat 3/4 of a bar of dog shit, that's, what, 50 cents?
For those who haven't read the book, the message is: WHO FUCKING CARES? IS THIS REALLY WHAT YOU IMAGINE YOUR TAX MONEY SHOULD BE PAYING FOR?
Abso-fricking-lutely. When I buy chocolate, I want to know that if someone wraps dog feces in aluminum foil, they can't say, "No, that's what we call chocolate. No refunds, you already ate three-quarters of it." Enforced accurate labeling and definitions is absolutely what I want the government to be doing.
Just remember the next time you rinse with Listerine Citrus Burst that you're swishing crushed dead pregnant beetles in your mouth.
And every time you eat beef, that comes from cows! Those cute, fat horses!
This is very important. The Big Pharmaceutical corporations have been trying to get natural medicine banned for years. Instead of taking herbs, vitamins, minerals, and other natural and very inexpensive remedies, Big Pharma wants to drug everyone.
You can mix dandelions and dog spit in a jar and sell it as a cure for baldness and impotence as long as you put a tiny thing on the bottom of the screen that says it's not intended to treat or diagnose anything. 95% of the herbal medicine market is an obvious scam. Thank God they're finally trying to do something about it. It drives me crazy watching those damn commercials. If I want a placebo for my erectile dysfunction, I'll eat a bull penis like anyone sensible would.
I'm a chocoholic. A fucking serious chocoholic.
Yeah, I feel ya, man. I'm like a chocoholic, but for booze.
Grape wins!
So it would seem. I was a fetus when I made the account. It seemed hilarious at the time. But not only is it not funny, it's spelled wrong. Oh well.
I won't take it unless it comes with mint frosting.
Why not focus on something like ... no license requirements? PC and Mac both dig into their wallets ... Linux invites all her friends along.
See, that's why I'm not in advertising. I would have had guys in top hats and monocles paying Mac and PC for sex and then Linux doing like nine homeless guys.
For good programmers, yes.
Touché, sir.
I know this will be blasphemy on this site, but Mountain Dew contains "brominated vegetable oil"
I'm not that afraid of bromine or vegetables. But a can of the stuff is 170 Calories. That's about 1/12th of what most people need in a day to not gain weight. 2 cans of the stuff, and an adult is well on its way to gaining a couple ounces that day.
But mostly I blame fruit juice for kid obesity. It's just as fattening as soda, which is hugely fattening, but somebody convinced parents it's good for you. 160 Calories per cup of a liquid (that barely satisfies any kind of hunger in most people) is not at all good for you. I was a fatty-fat as a kid, and my parents took me off soda and put me on juice. Not a lot of results from that one. I know a girl that is worried about her kid's weight but feeds him 100 Calorie juice boxes at every meal because it's healthy and won't grasp that the Vitamin C won't help him when he dies of a heart attack at 38. Switch that with water, your kid will lose a pound every 12 days. Absolutely guaranteed. Drop 1 juice box a day, and he'll lose a pound a month. Or at least gain a pound less. That stuff is evil.
Not that I think it should be illegal to sell the stuff or anything, but if the government spent a few of those research bucks on running commercials with graphs of how (Calorie input - Calorie output) / 3500 ALWAYS* equals weight change (get the guy from the Oxy-Clean commercials to yell the "ALWAYS" part), we'd be a lot better off. Of course, it would put all the many profitable, tax-paying voodoo diets out of business. Not that I think there's a conspiracy, I don't, but a lot of people would get mad if we were all skinny.
* Plus or minus a tiny, tiny bit that evens out to 0 over the long term and discounting (the very small) changes in metabolism resulting from lowered food intake. Metabolic conditions also (possibly) excepted. This part doesn't need to go in the commercial. This is just hear to discourage nitpicking on the obvious stuff.
I'm not as confident that there's not a supernaturalness gene, but I don't see a need for one.
I've done some tinkering with AI. Try getting an AI to NOT develop superstition. It's very hard, at least with the kind I was working on. Humans, like most animals, are pretty well designed to recognize that A follows B follows C. If B happens to be standing on one foot and humming, then C + one foot and humming = A. Get the same result twice, and you're well on your way to a superstition.
Now make B = praying, and you've got one with consequences; somebody's hearing your prayers. Ergo, there's something out there you can't see. "How's that work?" And poof, you've got yourself a religion.
Watch an atheist sit at a roulette wheel for more than five minutes, and you've probably watched someone invent their own religion. The mechanism is pretty well explained by the ability to find patterns and then look for causes.
Afterlife belief may be another matter.
the cost of keeping bees has tripled over the last several years
It's true. I read it on Wikipedia.
Where consumer activism would have given us corporations which realized they must act in socially acceptable ways
I'm not sure how much power you think the five guys in the world with the both the time and interest to be consumer activists have, but it's not that much.
government only gives us corporations which can be extreme sociopaths as long as everything they are doing is legal.
Whereas not regulating means being an extreme sociopath is legal. I'm not seeing a lot of good either way, here.
If you're saying there are loopholes and that's bad, you're right. Why not spend your time railing against loopholes instead of against the government in general? You're infinitely more likely to accomplish something, especially if you pick a specific loophole to work on and go from there. It's boring, not nearly as much fun as complaining about the existence of government, but it might actually help something.
Basically these newer phones contained the ability to automatically connect you to the correct 911 call center when you dial 911 to make sure the emergency services get to you in time. (without this you may as well be calling Delouth Minnesota's call center from New York City).
While the reason for requiring the newer phones is correct, I hope to God you're wrong about needing it to find your city. Cell phones only work because the provider can find which cell tower you're next to at any given time so they can tell it to make your phone ring. If they said they need it to find the nearest 911 operator, then they lied.
But it is my understanding that new phones have GPS in them that is activated when you dial 911. Which is somewhat more reasonable. Though that information came from a $6/hour guy at a Verizon store, so it may not be accurate.
Could the break point be when it's less expensive to pay someone to clean up bad acting versus shelling out uber-bucks for a good actor?
You think Lindsay Lohan is actually the best actor the people that cast her can find? And Paris Hilton's got an acting job now because of her talent? 90% of people going to a movie are people that have a crush, sexual or otherwise, on one of the actors. The other 10% are going because they have nothing to do, but will come back to the actor in it's next movie once they get to like them.
If you don't have a really, really, really fantastic movie idea that can be summed up in a 30 second commercial, which happens once a year, absolute maximum, you need people to come in to see the actors they like. So they'll never go away.
Unless CG studios start making extremely convincing, likable CG characters and re-using them across different movies, treating them like actors. But then you'll just have to pay the same $20 million to get the CG guys to let you use their popular fake actor, and you'd gain nothing over paying Lindsay Lohan. The animators, I'm sure, would be just as coked-up as she is. Allegedly.
Tax high wattage bulbs like 100W and up.
Since you can now get 100W performance (give or take) out of 37W, high wattage is like 50W and up.
But other than that, I'll back you.
That, of course, is totally ignoring the fact that the guy conducting the research was a hardcore anti-GM activist before the research. It is like asking activist creationists to do an impartial study on evolution.
Pretty much every scientist has a side on GM. If you're going to ignore research by people with biases, you're going to ignore all research.
If you're capable (I'm not), take a look at his methods, rip them apart, or if they're sound, repeat them and see if the result is the same. Good science should work regardless of pre-existing notions. That's why there's experiments in the first place.
I say this as someone who really, really hopes this guy is full of it, 'cause GM is cool, and potatoes are delicious.
so let's say al qaeda uses a linux infrastructure. Does that mean you would boycott linux for that?
No. But you'd be a pretty big jackass to be claiming a victory for convincing Al Qaeda to use it.
Then we are doing something wrong. The human brain provides compelling evidence that massive parallelization works. So: what are we missing?
Brain scalability is just not that great. Trust me, putting more than four brains in one head is just asking for locking problems out the yin-yang.
I don't know how to break this to you but I am a united states citizen writing this from Chicago.
Oh. Well then I take back all that stuff I said. Instead, I'll substitute, "We're 'Americans.' Don't be dumb."
I think I speak for all of us Bush-disliking, world-loving, cooperation-endorsing Americans when I say please stop saying that stupid crap.
That may be so, but it encourages this idea that the USA is the only important American contry.
No, it doesn't. What does that is partly the fact that it's a 2000 mile drive from the midwest to our closest southern neighbor, and that's not the far end of the country. They don't care what anyone farther south thinks because they'll never have any chance to meet them.
It's partly due to the media not mentioning the rest of the world, ever, unless we're bombing it.
But mostly it's because the rest of the world hates us. What incentive could we possibly have to be friendly when the only thing most of us hear out of you is smug criticism and demands that we stop calling ourselves the last word in our name? And please note that this is coming from someone that agrees with the criticism.
Outsiders constantly call us fat, stupid, self-involved, polluting assholes, usually to our faces, and then they wonder why we don't ask their opinion more often.
The US government has done some awful shit. There are Americans that have no clue what's going on, and a lot of them are just as jerky to the outside world as they are toward us. We even actually do have a lot of fat fucks that want to bomb everyone with a tan. But if you want us to be friendly with the rest of the world, you're going to have to give us a carrot. The stick won't work because, as a nation, we will cut off our nose to spite our face, and then we'll gouge our eye out as a warning to our chins.
"America" is short for "The United States of America." If picking the word "America" offends you so, at least pick a better alternative. I recommend "USAsies" or "Statians" (prounounced "stations"). But trust me, the word has nothing to do with why we're insulated.
Also, we do not care about world cup competitions. Just so you know.