Bots aren't terribly good at psychology, which plays a large role in Poker. So that kind of fully-automated playing-bot has a hard time beating really good players.
But, it's trivial to write a program that for example:
Remembers precisely every game that was played, so knows exactly which cards are left in the deck. (good players do this too, more or less anyways)
Instantly calculates all relevant odds; With the cards that are now remaining in the deck, your odds of getting that straigth is 1:72. Precise information is valuable and will help, allthough a good player will approximate this too.
And that is ignoring outrigth cheating, such as playing 2 people in a team on one table, without letting the other players know you're a team. That's an advantage because a) it doubles your available information and b) your chances of having the best hand is double, but your losses won't be, because you can make sure that only the one with the best hand bets high. (should be done in moderation lest it be suspicious)
Not really. A lot of people produce nothing but information in some form, true. For example this is true of programmers.
But the overwhelming majority of this is custom and/or shortlived information. Upwards of 90% of programming, for example, is custom jobs for one, or a very small group of, customers.
To this, copyrigth is largely irrelevant. We do programming, for example. Customers order, we agree on a price for the job, we perform the job, and deliver the program. Fine. None of this depends on copyrigth though. We've got something like 1500 different companies as customers. If they could copy eachothers programs, this wouldn't make much difference -- they've got *different* programs, which is the pretty much the entire value we're selling anyway.
Shortlived information is similar. Dozens of people earn their living by writing articles and taking photos and so on for the local paper here, Aftenbladet. Most of them are available online with no protection whatsoever. People *could* copy them largescale and publish them elsewhere. But it'd be a hassle for little benefit -- there's no real drawback to the official site anyway other than a few ads. And most of the articles are quite shortlived, I'd say 90% of the articles are only of real interest in the first month, often in the first few days.
You also ignore something else: You say rock-bottom prices for digital stuff is negative. But infact, that's an *advantage* of the simple copying and distribution possible with modern tech.
It's a bit like a monk making a living by hand-copying bibles complaining that the rock-bottom book-prices made possible by the printing-press will put him out of a job. It's *true*, but it doesn't imply that the printing-press (and the lower book-prices) harmed society as a whole. To the contrary it was among the most beneficial inventions ever.
True. Making new information (of various kinds) is still useful, and still needs to be financed *somehow*. But very large portions of the traditional publishing-machinery is now de-facto obsolete. It performs no useful function and should/will be dismantled.
The size of the number don't matter. What matters is it's published in a way that makes it part of a circumversion.
It's sorta like, if you are privy to the secret code for say the alarm at work, and it happens to be 50318, then your boss likely *would* have a problem with you posting that as the code for the alarm on a webpage.
Yet, he'd have no reason to complain at all (and wouldn't) if your zip-number was infact 50318 and you posted your complete adress at some website or other.
Yes, the *number* as such is the same in both cases. That's not the point.
Actually, 287,539 if you believe Google, and growing by ~20K/hour.
I think its safe to say that this particular cat is, firmly, out of the bag. Attempts at pushing it back in will yield little more than scratchmarks for whomever attempts it.
Perhaps, but one problem is that its the same people who are "suspicious" every time, so what may seem reasonable to all outsiders, because whatever behaviour looks fishy, may be a constant nuisance of having to defend ones own perfectly legal actions over and over and over to cops.
I know a guy, originally from Pakistan, wears typical street-kid clothing, is passionate about biking and have a $10K bike.
He *literally* has to "explain himself" once a week or more.
By the 20th time a cop pulls you over and demand that you explain how the hell you're allowed to ride a bike that you, infact, own, you tend to stop thinking that its all that reasonable.
The problem offcourse is that each individual cop doesn't know that X other cops *also* pulled the guy over this year, so to them it seems reasonable and so its hard for them to see why he can be annoyed and impatient about it.
Oh, and incase you still don't get what all the "fuzz" is about, here's one more property to make you drool over nanotubes;
They conduct heat along their length *insanely* well.
If you take a square-meter of meter-thick copper and heat one side of the block so that it is 1 degree C (or K, same thing in this case) warmer than the other side, then 385W of power leaks through. A lot. Copper is a good thermal conductor. (as any overclocker would know.)
The same number for a block of tigthly compressed, perfectly aligned nanotubes ? 6000W - 15 times the thermal conductivity of copper (which is already pretty good !)
There's more. Lot's more. Even if just 5% of the potential is unlocked and come into practical use over the next few decades, this is still likely to be one of the most amazing new materials discovered since plastics.
True, a carbon nanotube only breaks when the actual molecule breaks. True, this give humongous tensile strength.
Strengths in the 60 - 100 GPa-range have been measured, which is fairly impressive when you consider that high-tensile steel tops out around 1.2 so basically, a carbon nanotube-rope of a given thickness should be able to hold 50-90 times the load that a similarily thick steel-cable can hold.
But it gets better; carbon nanotubes are (unlike steel) ligthweigth. Often, strength in relation to thickness ain't what counts, but instead strength in relation to weight. Carbon nanotubes have been measured at around 50000 kNm/kg Which mean that if you make a carbon nanotube-rope that is 1m long, and weighs 1kg, then it will be capable of withstanding a force of around 50.000kN. This number is to large to grasp. So, let me scale it for you. It means that a carbon nanotube-rope that is 1 mile long and weighs a single kilo will hold a hummer. (aproximately)
This compares *rather* favourably to high-tensile steel at 155kN m/kg infact it is 300 times stronger.
I guess its no overstatement to say that this is, indeed, "rather good"
Doesn't matter much. Once the tubes are long enough that they can be weaved or epoxied and they'll break before they slip, there's little added advantage from having the things be even longer.
If a weave of 10cm long fibres of some material is already failing by fibres breaking rather than fibres slipping, there's not much to be had from the fibres being instead 1 meter or 10 meter long individually.
I'm certain that 18mm long nanotubes are already long enough that a rope made of such would have 90%+ of the strength of a rope made of infinitely long nanotubes.
1000m/s vertical speed on the lowest part is a *lot* too much for anything that pulls itself along by the help of friction and electric motors. Perhaps achievable longer-term by some sort of vertical maglev-technology or similar.
In any case, that's not required. It's a long way (36000km) to geosynch, but gravity falls of very rapidly.
If we ignore the contributions of the centripetal force, then gravity scales with the square of the distance. When starting at equator you're about 6500km from the core of the earth. Which means that you need to climb about 2500km before gravity will be half what it was at the start. That'd happen in 20 minutes at your stated speed.
You'd need that speed -- if you wanted to launch once an hour, but that's a ridicolously high launch-rate for a first system.
Don't think so. They've got the upper hand by being the manufacturer.
If other people can profitably make and sell ink-catridges for their printer for say $5, then Kodak can still probably sell theirs for $7.99 because, well the original ink is perceived as better than copies. Sometimes this perception is justified, sometimes not, but in any case, it's there.
Currently it's more like, the non-original ink is $7.99 and the original is like $39.99 at *those* price-differentials people balk and go for the cheap route. I doubt many would go for refills or non-original ink if the savings where small to moderate.
Lucky me, I don't need to live with it. I've got a single-mode fibre directly into my living-room, said fibre is ridicolously *undersubscribed*.
It is artificially limited at 25Mbps (symetrically) for the fairly simple reason that I don't care paying for 50. Said fibre terminates in a local concentrator, along with 170 others from my neighbourhood, total bandwith subscribed about 2Gbps. (most go for the lowest speed, 6Mbps since that's sufficient for many) The link from there to the isp-central ? 10Gbps currently, but the only limit is the tranceivers on the ends of the fibre, the fibre itself can handle an order of magnitude more.
So, all parts of the line from me to my ISP can handle atleast 5 times the traffic currently subscribed (and probably 100 times the bandwith ever actually used -- people don't typically max out 6Mbps connections 24/7), remind me again, why is a T1 worth 5 times the price that I currently pay ?
You don't oversubscrbe the physical T1. (neither do you oversubscribe the physical ADSL by the way!)
But you do most certainly oversubscribe the connection onwards from wherever the lines (be they t1 or adsl) terminate.
Put differently, if you've got 10.000 subscribers for 1Mbps ADSL, you most certainly don't hook these into the Internet using a 10Gbit link. If you did, you'd be having 95% overcapacity on average, and probably 80% overcapacity at the peaks. (i.e. you'd literally *never* use more than 20% of your bandwith)
Same applies if your customers come in over T1-lines.
Now, there's still differences. Typical el-cheapo consumer-isps tend to simply accept that their lines spike for 10% or more of the time. In other words, if their actual load is 100Mbps average, 500Mbps peak, they'll buy perhaps 200Mbps, and simply accept that nobody gets more than half their rated speed if surfing at peak times.
ISPs with a higher service-level try to keep their capacity around peak. Which means that if they calculated correctly, you'll "always" get your rated speed. You *may* on occasion experience sligthly less if they miscalculated.
Insane ISPs, like Uninett has a target bandwith of 150% of the highest experienced former peak. In other words, aslong as *now* doesn't have 1.5 times the highest load experienced in the past, you'll get your rated speed. Notice that this too is probably an order of magnitude less bandwith than you'd need if you did not overprovision.
Not overprovitioning is a lot like building roads as if everyone who owns a car would be driving it 24/7/365. If you did, you'd be spending 10 times the money on roads from whats really required.
Not very likely I'll get the chance -- and remember it. It doesnt look as if they have any branch close to western Norway. And I ain't gonna go fly transatlantic for a burger, even if its good.
The strange thing about burgers is, McD is poorer than literally 90% of the offerings, but still the largest chain. Which I never grasped. I mean, in Stavanger alone there's literally a dozen or more superior offerings. (granted, that doesn't take much) Ostehuset, Onkel Klaus, even Patriot.
No, that's not it. The market-dominating ones are seldom the el-cheapo ones. Idun in Norway for example is sligthly more expensive than Heinz, meanwhile there's Ketchup available for a third the price, but that simply doesn't matter to most people since Ketchup is going to be a tiny fraction of your food-budget anyway.
Just because theres differences does not mean that it can't have the same label. That is like saying that Texan and the dialect they speak in Fargo can't possibly both be American -- since they're not the same thing. This doesn't follow. Sure they're different, they're still both American though.
Similarily, a Hummer and a Porsche are both cars -- despite significant differences between them and the languages spoken in USA and England are both variants of english. I never claimed english isn't english. I claime that *both* American (all 3000 variants of it) and British (all 7000 variants of that!) are all variants of english.
Chinese medicine (herbs, acupuncture, etc.) has been around for thousands of years. People have been curing themselves long before Big Pharma pushed all of their drugs on us.
And for thousands of years:
Life-expectancy hovered in the 30-45 region.
20% of all women died in childbirth.
30% of all children died before they turned 5.
People died like flies from diseases which are trivially cured today.
Seriously. There's *NO* law against "natural medicine", what there is is laws that say for something to be sold as a medicine it needs to a) demonstrate that it is unharmful and b) demonstrate, in a proper double-blind study that it actually has the claimed effect.
That's it. Any treatment that can manage this deserves to be called medicine, any which can't, doesn't.
What's your alternative ? Let's let anyone sell anything as medicine, and leave to guesswork what works and what doesn't ?
Modern medicine has achieved MUCH more in the last 100 years than traditional chinese medicine has in several thousand years. And it's done so by insisting on verifiable, tested, properties rather than random guesswork.
Well, atleast the "Chocolate Manufacturers of America" are leading a figth to be allowed to sell a clearly inferior product under the name Chocolate, in the hopes, consumers won't notice. This doesn't really sound like a quality-mark to me.
Ironically, it's a pretty common US hobby to argue which, of a set of options is *the* real X, *the* best X etc.
In reality, The language spoken in USA and England are both variants of english. Neither is 100% identical to the english that used to be, both have evolved, which is as it should be. Only dead languages (aka latin) are static.
The thing with the ketchup is entirely a matter of taste. The tendency is that you'll prefer the first ketchup that you use, as that one will sort of fasten itself in your memory as "The" ketchup. Subsequently other ketchups tend to get measured on similarity to the first rather than on own merit.
If Heinz was really superior, we'd expect it to take over in new markets where it becomes introduced. This fails to be the case. For example, it's been available in Norway and Germany for the last decade or two, but has single-digit marketshare.
Germany has a huge variety of very good Ketchups, many of them are particularily fond of curry-ketchup, which sounds odd, but is actually really good for some food.
I think your definition is somewhat strange. Yes, believing that there is no God is still a "belief", but I don't think it makes any sense to label anything fundamental that a group of humans believe a "religion".
With that definition, the US constitution is a religion. The human rights are a religion. Hell, even "if I drop this stone, it'll probably fall down" is a religion with that definition.
I don't think it make sense to label something a religion unless it atleast either tries to give answers to all the central philosophical questions in life, or includes some supernatural entity.
You mean dynamically typed, surely ? "type-unsafe" is just about as neutral a word as "pirating" is for copying copyrigthed works.
I'm personally of the opinion that one can write good and bad code in any language. Besides, if you *do* want type-testing in python, it's not exactly rocket-science to insert:
if arg.__class__ blablah:
raise TypeError
Re:Social hack - use "bullfight" for "speed trap".
on
Is Your GPS Naive?
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· Score: 1
The 4 accidents I've been in
You don't think that the fact that you where involved in 4 accidents, by itself, is indication enough that your driving is poor ? How many years did you drive to accumulate 4 accidents ?
3 of which were driver or vehicle failure ahead of me. The only other one was at about 20mph, with a poorly designed, poorly lit road, that I was unfamiliar with.1) Bumper tag between 4 cars ahead of me. Unable to stop for the suddenly stopped vehicle ahead of me.
This is YOUR fault. Being able to stop if the vehicle in front of you unexpectedly stops is an absolute requirement for safe driving. The vehicle in front of you may, at any time, suddenly slam on the brakes. A kid running into the road. A blown tire. A wasp stinging the driver. Driver error. Whatever. Driving in such a way that you're unable to stop if the driver ahead of you does is reckless.
3) Truck, no brake lights, locked up tires rear-ended stopped vehicle ahead of him. Unable to stop.
This too. The lacking brake-lights makes you less to blame. But does not absolve you. You could've seen the vehicle ahead of him, hell, you could've noticed that he was braking, even without seeing brakelights. Lots of things that may suddenly appear in the road ahead of you lack brake-lights....
I once drew up a plan, which I thought could be enacted nationally. Both vehicles and drivers should be tested not only for basic ability, but maximum ability. If you've shown proficiency in being able to safely handle a vehicle at over 100mph AND your vehicle is safely capable of handling those same speeds, the license plates should indicate the same.
There are several problems with this:
Your capabilities vary a *LOT*. Sometimes tired ? Sometimes stressed ? Sometimes drive for 4 hours continously ? Sometimes sick ?
Your capabilites isn't that important. Yes, the driver is responsible for like 75% of all accidents, but the thing is, lots of people crash not because they are *unable* to drive safely, but rather because they are *UNWILLING*.
Your skills also does not magically transfer to everyone around you.
Your skills don't change physics. You can only change the risk that you will crash, there is little or no change at all to the consequences when you *do* crash. At 30 you're probably unharmed and really unlucky to die. At 50 you're almost certainly harmed and may be dead. If you crash in 120, it'd take an act of God basically to let you survive.
I know my car can easily cruise at 150.... Maybe I looked a little tired. I had already been driving 22 hours and 1,500 miles (shh, I took a 1 hour nap in Louisana, don't ruin my story)
I'm not sure I want you on any road near where I live at *any* speed after 22 hours without adequate rest. I think you just demonstrated again why you most *certainly* should not be trusted with more than you already are. To the contrary -- you basically crash all the time, so it seems to me even handling the responsibility you have today is more than enough.
Being technically good is not the most important thing in traffic. Having good judgement and being precautious is.
You know, if you do something wrong, it's not really very convincing to point out that there's worse things in the world.
One of the things that separate civilization from barbary is that we, generally, try to play fair -EVEN- with those people who would not extend the same courtesy to us.
Yeah, the human-rigths situation is (much) worse in Pakistan than it is USA, and on US-run detention-centres. That make you particularily proud ? Your ambition is to beat Pakistan, so aslong as you're ahead of them, you're a happy camper ?
Slashdot Mirror
There are poor people in the world. Yes, some of them are poor partly or only because of stupid decisions of their own.
Not all though. If you believe that you're deluded.
So, the question remains open: How do you get government out of healthcare, yet ensure that the poor sick/wounded are not left to die ?
But, it's trivial to write a program that for example:
And that is ignoring outrigth cheating, such as playing 2 people in a team on one table, without letting the other players know you're a team. That's an advantage because a) it doubles your available information and b) your chances of having the best hand is double, but your losses won't be, because you can make sure that only the one with the best hand bets high. (should be done in moderation lest it be suspicious)
But the overwhelming majority of this is custom and/or shortlived information. Upwards of 90% of programming, for example, is custom jobs for one, or a very small group of, customers.
To this, copyrigth is largely irrelevant. We do programming, for example. Customers order, we agree on a price for the job, we perform the job, and deliver the program. Fine. None of this depends on copyrigth though. We've got something like 1500 different companies as customers. If they could copy eachothers programs, this wouldn't make much difference -- they've got *different* programs, which is the pretty much the entire value we're selling anyway.
Shortlived information is similar. Dozens of people earn their living by writing articles and taking photos and so on for the local paper here, Aftenbladet. Most of them are available online with no protection whatsoever. People *could* copy them largescale and publish them elsewhere. But it'd be a hassle for little benefit -- there's no real drawback to the official site anyway other than a few ads. And most of the articles are quite shortlived, I'd say 90% of the articles are only of real interest in the first month, often in the first few days.
You also ignore something else: You say rock-bottom prices for digital stuff is negative. But infact, that's an *advantage* of the simple copying and distribution possible with modern tech.
It's a bit like a monk making a living by hand-copying bibles complaining that the rock-bottom book-prices made possible by the printing-press will put him out of a job. It's *true*, but it doesn't imply that the printing-press (and the lower book-prices) harmed society as a whole. To the contrary it was among the most beneficial inventions ever.
True. Making new information (of various kinds) is still useful, and still needs to be financed *somehow*. But very large portions of the traditional publishing-machinery is now de-facto obsolete. It performs no useful function and should/will be dismantled.
It's sorta like, if you are privy to the secret code for say the alarm at work, and it happens to be 50318, then your boss likely *would* have a problem with you posting that as the code for the alarm on a webpage.
Yet, he'd have no reason to complain at all (and wouldn't) if your zip-number was infact 50318 and you posted your complete adress at some website or other.
Yes, the *number* as such is the same in both cases. That's not the point.
I think its safe to say that this particular cat is, firmly, out of the bag. Attempts at pushing it back in will yield little more than scratchmarks for whomever attempts it.
I know a guy, originally from Pakistan, wears typical street-kid clothing, is passionate about biking and have a $10K bike.
He *literally* has to "explain himself" once a week or more.
By the 20th time a cop pulls you over and demand that you explain how the hell you're allowed to ride a bike that you, infact, own, you tend to stop thinking that its all that reasonable.
The problem offcourse is that each individual cop doesn't know that X other cops *also* pulled the guy over this year, so to them it seems reasonable and so its hard for them to see why he can be annoyed and impatient about it.
They conduct heat along their length *insanely* well.
If you take a square-meter of meter-thick copper and heat one side of the block so that it is 1 degree C (or K, same thing in this case) warmer than the other side, then 385W of power leaks through. A lot. Copper is a good thermal conductor. (as any overclocker would know.)
The same number for a block of tigthly compressed, perfectly aligned nanotubes ? 6000W - 15 times the thermal conductivity of copper (which is already pretty good !)
There's more. Lot's more. Even if just 5% of the potential is unlocked and come into practical use over the next few decades, this is still likely to be one of the most amazing new materials discovered since plastics.
Strengths in the 60 - 100 GPa-range have been measured, which is fairly impressive when you consider that high-tensile steel tops out around 1.2 so basically, a carbon nanotube-rope of a given thickness should be able to hold 50-90 times the load that a similarily thick steel-cable can hold.
But it gets better; carbon nanotubes are (unlike steel) ligthweigth. Often, strength in relation to thickness ain't what counts, but instead strength in relation to weight. Carbon nanotubes have been measured at around 50000 kNm/kg Which mean that if you make a carbon nanotube-rope that is 1m long, and weighs 1kg, then it will be capable of withstanding a force of around 50.000kN. This number is to large to grasp. So, let me scale it for you. It means that a carbon nanotube-rope that is 1 mile long and weighs a single kilo will hold a hummer. (aproximately)
This compares *rather* favourably to high-tensile steel at 155kN m/kg infact it is 300 times stronger.
I guess its no overstatement to say that this is, indeed, "rather good"
If a weave of 10cm long fibres of some material is already failing by fibres breaking rather than fibres slipping, there's not much to be had from the fibres being instead 1 meter or 10 meter long individually.
I'm certain that 18mm long nanotubes are already long enough that a rope made of such would have 90%+ of the strength of a rope made of infinitely long nanotubes.
In any case, that's not required. It's a long way (36000km) to geosynch, but gravity falls of very rapidly.
If we ignore the contributions of the centripetal force, then gravity scales with the square of the distance. When starting at equator you're about 6500km from the core of the earth. Which means that you need to climb about 2500km before gravity will be half what it was at the start. That'd happen in 20 minutes at your stated speed. You'd need that speed -- if you wanted to launch once an hour, but that's a ridicolously high launch-rate for a first system.
If other people can profitably make and sell ink-catridges for their printer for say $5, then Kodak can still probably sell theirs for $7.99 because, well the original ink is perceived as better than copies. Sometimes this perception is justified, sometimes not, but in any case, it's there.
Currently it's more like, the non-original ink is $7.99 and the original is like $39.99 at *those* price-differentials people balk and go for the cheap route. I doubt many would go for refills or non-original ink if the savings where small to moderate.
It is artificially limited at 25Mbps (symetrically) for the fairly simple reason that I don't care paying for 50. Said fibre terminates in a local concentrator, along with 170 others from my neighbourhood, total bandwith subscribed about 2Gbps. (most go for the lowest speed, 6Mbps since that's sufficient for many) The link from there to the isp-central ? 10Gbps currently, but the only limit is the tranceivers on the ends of the fibre, the fibre itself can handle an order of magnitude more.
So, all parts of the line from me to my ISP can handle atleast 5 times the traffic currently subscribed (and probably 100 times the bandwith ever actually used -- people don't typically max out 6Mbps connections 24/7), remind me again, why is a T1 worth 5 times the price that I currently pay ?
But you do most certainly oversubscribe the connection onwards from wherever the lines (be they t1 or adsl) terminate.
Put differently, if you've got 10.000 subscribers for 1Mbps ADSL, you most certainly don't hook these into the Internet using a 10Gbit link. If you did, you'd be having 95% overcapacity on average, and probably 80% overcapacity at the peaks. (i.e. you'd literally *never* use more than 20% of your bandwith)
Same applies if your customers come in over T1-lines.
Now, there's still differences. Typical el-cheapo consumer-isps tend to simply accept that their lines spike for 10% or more of the time. In other words, if their actual load is 100Mbps average, 500Mbps peak, they'll buy perhaps 200Mbps, and simply accept that nobody gets more than half their rated speed if surfing at peak times.
ISPs with a higher service-level try to keep their capacity around peak. Which means that if they calculated correctly, you'll "always" get your rated speed. You *may* on occasion experience sligthly less if they miscalculated.
Insane ISPs, like Uninett has a target bandwith of 150% of the highest experienced former peak. In other words, aslong as *now* doesn't have 1.5 times the highest load experienced in the past, you'll get your rated speed. Notice that this too is probably an order of magnitude less bandwith than you'd need if you did not overprovision.
Not overprovitioning is a lot like building roads as if everyone who owns a car would be driving it 24/7/365. If you did, you'd be spending 10 times the money on roads from whats really required.
The strange thing about burgers is, McD is poorer than literally 90% of the offerings, but still the largest chain. Which I never grasped. I mean, in Stavanger alone there's literally a dozen or more superior offerings. (granted, that doesn't take much) Ostehuset, Onkel Klaus, even Patriot.
No, that's not it. The market-dominating ones are seldom the el-cheapo ones. Idun in Norway for example is sligthly more expensive than Heinz, meanwhile there's Ketchup available for a third the price, but that simply doesn't matter to most people since Ketchup is going to be a tiny fraction of your food-budget anyway.
Similarily, a Hummer and a Porsche are both cars -- despite significant differences between them and the languages spoken in USA and England are both variants of english. I never claimed english isn't english. I claime that *both* American (all 3000 variants of it) and British (all 7000 variants of that!) are all variants of english.
And for thousands of years:
Seriously. There's *NO* law against "natural medicine", what there is is laws that say for something to be sold as a medicine it needs to a) demonstrate that it is unharmful and b) demonstrate, in a proper double-blind study that it actually has the claimed effect.
That's it. Any treatment that can manage this deserves to be called medicine, any which can't, doesn't.
What's your alternative ? Let's let anyone sell anything as medicine, and leave to guesswork what works and what doesn't ?
Modern medicine has achieved MUCH more in the last 100 years than traditional chinese medicine has in several thousand years. And it's done so by insisting on verifiable, tested, properties rather than random guesswork.
In reality, The language spoken in USA and England are both variants of english. Neither is 100% identical to the english that used to be, both have evolved, which is as it should be. Only dead languages (aka latin) are static.
If Heinz was really superior, we'd expect it to take over in new markets where it becomes introduced. This fails to be the case. For example, it's been available in Norway and Germany for the last decade or two, but has single-digit marketshare.
Germany has a huge variety of very good Ketchups, many of them are particularily fond of curry-ketchup, which sounds odd, but is actually really good for some food.
There's actually good American wines. I'd even say, American wine on the average is no worse than say that from Chile.
With that definition, the US constitution is a religion. The human rights are a religion. Hell, even "if I drop this stone, it'll probably fall down" is a religion with that definition.
I don't think it make sense to label something a religion unless it atleast either tries to give answers to all the central philosophical questions in life, or includes some supernatural entity.
I'm personally of the opinion that one can write good and bad code in any language. Besides, if you *do* want type-testing in python, it's not exactly rocket-science to insert:
if arg.__class__ blablah: raise TypeError
You don't think that the fact that you where involved in 4 accidents, by itself, is indication enough that your driving is poor ? How many years did you drive to accumulate 4 accidents ?
3 of which were driver or vehicle failure ahead of me. The only other one was at about 20mph, with a poorly designed, poorly lit road, that I was unfamiliar with. 1) Bumper tag between 4 cars ahead of me. Unable to stop for the suddenly stopped vehicle ahead of me.
This is YOUR fault. Being able to stop if the vehicle in front of you unexpectedly stops is an absolute requirement for safe driving. The vehicle in front of you may, at any time, suddenly slam on the brakes. A kid running into the road. A blown tire. A wasp stinging the driver. Driver error. Whatever. Driving in such a way that you're unable to stop if the driver ahead of you does is reckless.
3) Truck, no brake lights, locked up tires rear-ended stopped vehicle ahead of him. Unable to stop.
This too. The lacking brake-lights makes you less to blame. But does not absolve you. You could've seen the vehicle ahead of him, hell, you could've noticed that he was braking, even without seeing brakelights. Lots of things that may suddenly appear in the road ahead of you lack brake-lights....
I once drew up a plan, which I thought could be enacted nationally. Both vehicles and drivers should be tested not only for basic ability, but maximum ability. If you've shown proficiency in being able to safely handle a vehicle at over 100mph AND your vehicle is safely capable of handling those same speeds, the license plates should indicate the same.
There are several problems with this:
- Your capabilities vary a *LOT*. Sometimes tired ? Sometimes stressed ? Sometimes drive for 4 hours continously ? Sometimes sick ?
- Your capabilites isn't that important. Yes, the driver is responsible for like 75% of all accidents, but the thing is, lots of people crash not because they are *unable* to drive safely, but rather because they are *UNWILLING*.
- Your skills also does not magically transfer to everyone around you.
- Your skills don't change physics. You can only change the risk that you will crash, there is little or no change at all to the consequences when you *do* crash. At 30 you're probably unharmed and really unlucky to die. At 50 you're almost certainly harmed and may be dead. If you crash in 120, it'd take an act of God basically to let you survive.
I know my car can easily cruise at 150.I'm not sure I want you on any road near where I live at *any* speed after 22 hours without adequate rest. I think you just demonstrated again why you most *certainly* should not be trusted with more than you already are. To the contrary -- you basically crash all the time, so it seems to me even handling the responsibility you have today is more than enough.
Being technically good is not the most important thing in traffic. Having good judgement and being precautious is.
One of the things that separate civilization from barbary is that we, generally, try to play fair -EVEN- with those people who would not extend the same courtesy to us.
Yeah, the human-rigths situation is (much) worse in Pakistan than it is USA, and on US-run detention-centres. That make you particularily proud ? Your ambition is to beat Pakistan, so aslong as you're ahead of them, you're a happy camper ?