Lol, you use Amazon's stats for rich people instead of just looking at political donations like I did? If that's the level of rigor to bring to all of your thought processes, no wonder you feel the way you do.
They also don't define rich on that page, so it's essentially meaningless.
>>How exactly did John Kerry do that?
Besides voting for it? John Kerry ran on a platform of cutting capital gains taxes. (Do you need me to Google that for you?) The rich loved him. They could continue with their pretend tactic of sticking-it-to-the-rich while lowering their overall tax burden.
>>Most of the money from Bush's tax-cuts went directly to the rich.
You can't cut taxes to the poor, because they don't pay taxes. The top 1% of income earners pay 40% of the taxes. If you cut taxes for everyone (which is what he did), people like you will spin it as a tax cut for the rich. Please think before posting.
And again, it's not like tax cuts are a bad thing anyway. We pay enough as it is.
>>I didn't vote for a third party candidate because not voting is just as effective.
Not true. I voted Libertarian in the last election because, like you, I didn't like McCain and Obama, and Bob Barr was one of the few politicians to speak out in favor of civil liberties (amazing, ain't it?) in the post 9/11 world, and I wanted to support that.
He had no chance of winning, but if enough people start refusing to buy into the two-bad-options system, then we might someday see reform.
Do you mean "the right" in the European sense of the word, or the American sense of the word? To Europeans, all of America is "right wing". If you mean it in the American sense of the world, you should spend some time looking through Open Secrets.org to see how corporations actually give. Goldman Sachs gave nearly a million to Obama, and around two hundred thousand to McCain, for example.
>>After all, corporations exist for the purpose of realizing profits, so why would a corporation ever support a political party or movement that works against the system that has allowed corporations to become as big, powerful, and profitable as they are today?
Big businesses often trend Democrat because Democrats believe in protectionism, whereas Republicans believe in competition and small businesses. Small businesses represent threats to big businesses, but regulation and red tape (Democrat tools) can impose severe barriers to entry for small businesses. For an insightful lesson, look at the difference in how many big businesses failed in post-war France versus America in the same time period. Off the top of my head, something like 90% of France's large businesses in 1950 were still around in 1980, whereas only 10% of America's were. Competition vs. Protectionism. Too big to fail, and all that.
Contrary to popular perception, the ultra-rich also like Democrats. If you believed the media, you'd think that Republicans were all about giving tax breaks to the ultra-rich. But we pay taxes in two different ways here in America - 1) income tax, and 2) capital gains. A reduction on income tax doesn't make the slightest difference to the ultra-rich, who get most of their money from capital gains. But all you hear about in the media is "Republicans pose tax break for the ultra-rich" and you don't hear anything about how John Kerry reduced capital gains taxes, or how Democrats recently killed the carried interest exemption (one of their 2008 campaign promises) after they had a lot of money thrown at them by lobbyists. Not that tax cuts aren't good things, but the carried interest exemption is just a bone thrown to Goldman Sachs.
>>That said, you just have to pick your games: Assassin's Creed 2, Red Dead Redemption, GTA4 and many others offer extensive single player content.
I'm really liking Fallout New Vegas.
In regards to TFA's opinion that games are getting too easy, New Vegas implemented something I really wished they'd had for Fallout 3: Hardcore mode. It's actually not as crazy as it sounds, it just turns stimpacks into DOTs instead of instant heals (which means you're no longer invincible, which means the game is no longer trivially easy) and food and water actually mean something. The difficulty is otherwise the same.
It turns the game from trivial into interesting. Highly highly recommended.
>>The dog is a living organism, but I presume (?) it's not considered an Officer of the Peace
And you'd be wrong. =) At least, around here, police dogs are considered officers, so kicking them even if they're attacking you, is a fast track to going to jail.
>>It's definitely a dumb idea to have these things just roaming the streets, and that's without even considering the privacy concerns
Actually, the privacy issues are the only things that worry me. Supposedly we have a 4th Amendment here in the US that protects us against unreasonable search and seizure, and I can't help but think that getting invisibly search every time I wander around a marina area is unconstitutional.
Well, it IS dumb to think it's the only thing stopping us from terrorist attacks, but Customs uses a variety of tools to stop smuggling, which, if you read TFA, you'd see these devices have been successful at. The fact they can detect radioactive substances is just icing on the cake. Radioactive sensors are a good thing, and we have a lot of them in our harbors and major cities. Even without terrorists, you probably don't want someone driving around with something highly radioactive.
>>Of course, but this was about whether it can be done by a C programmer in less than 1 hour.
Sure, and I give you kudos for it. But it does serve very nicely to show why I prefer to do things in shell script for things that shell script is good for. =)
>>They're a useful extra tool, but for most people on normal internet connections they're too slow to backup everything.
You don't need to do it all at once. Just let it run in the background at nighttime. Even on the crappiest of crap DSL connections, I had about 500GB stored online from this computer. If I wanted a faster restore if it died, I could pay for DVDs to be burned and fedexed to me.
I'm on a 24/2.5 connection now, which makes it a lot more palatable.
You're right, though, that it probably wouldn't be feasible over dialup.
Show me a new grad who is good at programming and I'll bet they didn't learn programming at university. A lot of new grads *think* they are good at programming. But apart from a handful here and there that cut their teeth on other projects, a new grad writing good code out of the gate is virtually unheard of. Hell, most people with 5 years working experience are crap.
Most "real" CS people have been playing around with writing code since a young age. I'd written motion prediction code for a robot, an Axis and Allies simulator, a full AI suite, and a bunch of other stuff before I started college, but I think the university classes really polished my skills. Finite math taught me how to think about structuring loops so they always run correctly, my Theory class let me think about FSMs, CFGs, and Turing machines in a more logical manner, my programming languages and compilers classes really made me understand what was really happening when I hit cc (and also helped explain some of the bizarre compiler errors I'd seen over the years when my own compiler did the same thing), and most importantly, the UCSD CS TAs were absolute Nazis about proper coding technique. Not arbitrarily so, but if you've ever seen some code that made you want to punch someone, that's the sort of thing they knock 25% of your grade off for. Honestly, it really helped.
You're right, though - Computer Science is a very weird mismash of different stuff all jumbled together.
>>And even given the complete failure to actually learn anything that could be called science in their computer science degree 95% of the graduating class hasn't written more than 10K lines of code in their entire life.
Mmm, just looking at my class assignments (that I saved) across 16 classes (quarters, not semesters), I wc at 20k lines of code. This doesn't count stuff that I wrote for fun, for work, or stuff that I deleted because it doesn't matter any more. The actual number should be several times that, that I wrote for school.
IMO, if you're not writing software as a CS student, you're doing something wrong.
>>Like most people on/. I carry a phone that has a handy-dandy built-in notes app and a calendar.
Androids are nice because the built in calendar app integrates right into the Google calendar that pops up every time I launch a new web browser. It's good for doing what's-up-next type stuff, but I find it doesn't encapsulate the sort of year-at-a-glance that I need when planning events with my friends - monthly view shows little ribbons for *everything* including national holidays, trash pickups, and workout times.
So... I keep a giant laminated wet-erase wall calendar by my computer. All major events (I fly out of state once or twice per month for work) and deadlines (ugh, two reports due tomorrow) go up there. Costs about $15 every 18 months from Office Depot to keep one of those things up, and I save all of them in case I need to remember what was going on at any point in the past. Helps a lot when doing receipts and taxes and such. Not that you can't do it with Google Calendar, but it just seems to work for me a lot better.
>>No'. All those HDs on the shelf and CD/DVD backups that I never look at from one year to the next have been heaved out.
I know I've got a few external HDs lying around here with backups on them, but I could never bother to burn the TB or so of data on my machine to DVD. Seemed like it would take too long.
Online backups are the way to go nowadays, if you can spare a little bit of money to pay for a real service. My mother lost all of her books (she's a published author) when her machine was killed by incompetent PC repairmen trying to remove a virus (I'd have done it but I was out of town). So I just VNCed into her new machine (ran her through installing it), and pulled her data right back down from the service.
You can talk a lot about freeing yourself from the past, and all that, but I think my mother would have been pretty bummed if she'd lost 20 years worth of her writing (both professional and for fun).
>>A skilled C programmer also needs less than 1 hour for something like that.
Hmm, well if you want to time yourself, here's a common enough task that I automate with shell scripts. I just timed myself. Including logging in, doing a detour into man and a 'locate access_log' to find the file, it took a bit less than 4 minutes.
Grabs the end of the access_log and shows you the last few ip addresses that have connected to your site. I do something like this occasionally. Optionally pipe it into xargs host to do DNS lookups on them, if that's how you prefer to roll.
I'm honestly curious how long it will take you to do it in C, with/without the DNS lookup. Post source if you don't mind.
You prolly should pipe through uniq before sort. You'll get the same results, but sort will be passed less ata leading to faster execution and smaller memory footprint.
IIRC, uniq only collapses adjacent lines that are identical. So hence sort|uniq.
Maybe there's a flag or something that will change that behavior? It'd probably have to do something on the order of sort anyway, though.
>>because the programming language has so much to do with CS?
In an engineering discipline, you always want to be hands-on, so yeah. My first two quarters with Savitch at UCSD were a combination of learning theory (data structures, algorithms), programming languages (I had him for C++ before he wrote his Java textbook) and abstract models of a machine.
>>I asked him which programming language was his favorite, expecting it to be something like Lisp or Forth, but he said, "shell script."
Shell script is awesome for a large number of tasks. It can't do everything (otherwise we'd just teach scripting and be done with a CS degree in a quarter), but there's a lot of times when someone thinks they're going to have to write this long program involving a lot of text parsing and you just go, "Well, just Cut out everything except the field you want, pipe it through sort|uniq, and then run an xargs on the result." You get done in an hour (including writing, args checking, and debugging) what another person might spend a week doing in C (which is spectacularly unsuited for such tasks anyway).
>>Delays of up to 45 milliseconds were reported and they were fixed to be as low as 29 milliseconds. >>Sometimes, if you are really sensitive to smooth scheduling, can see those kinds of effects visually via 'game smoothness' or perhaps 'Firefox scrolling smoothness' - but anything on the 'several seconds' timescale on a typical Linux desktop has to have some connection with IO.
Ingo, I find delays of 29-45ms to be pretty noticeable. To put it another way, if you had a delay of 10ms before, and you're now getting a delay of 50ms due to some background copy, all of your applications went from running at 100fps to 20fps, which I think even non-sensitive people can pick up on, even outside of games and smooth scrolling. VIM feels different over a 10ms LAN connection vs. a 45ms connection from my home.
But hasn't Linux supported temporary priority boosting for applications getting key presses since the 90s, though? How hard would it be to do something similar for GUI apps and renice foreground processes?
Poor people pay negative taxes. Google "EIC" some time. We actually pay them to work.
Rich people use a variety of loopholes, like real estate swaps, to avoid paying taxes. However, they still pay a very large and disproportionate share of taxes.
It's really the middle class who don't have the slightest bit of freedom in paying their taxes. They can't take their corporate profits and reinvest them in order to avoid paying taxes on them - they just get their wages deducted and are told to like it.
Reason #1 should be: you can't fucking drive anywhere in the Bay Area. Horrible traffic, and if you try to live in San Francisco itself, you'll find it's quite possibly the most car-unfriendly city in existence.
No, I didn't read TFA, I've just lived in the Bay Area before.
>>Have you looked at the studies done about vaccinations, particularly on autism?
I have, which is why I was talking about vaccine safety in general. I had a high school friend whose baby seized after being given a vaccine but the doctor refused to report it as a potential side effect of the vaccination. My scientific brain chewed on that for a bit, and realized that if doctors think they know a priori that vaccines are safe, they can be creating the illusion that vaccines are safe by not reporting possible side effects.
Her other kid has autism (which is one of the reasons why I've researched it), and there's quite obviously something going on with autism (there was a sudden spike in the mid 90s, IIRC) but nobody knows exactly what.
Growing trees is carbon negative. Burning trees releases the trapped carbon. This isn't rocket science.
When I get back from my trip I'll dig up my references. A 50% CO2 reduction won't stabilize temperatures at the current level (no reasonable scenario will), but it will stabilize below the Really Bad zones in the temperature prediction forecasts.
It is possible to reduce our CO2 by 50%, maily because we can attack the problem in a centralized way at the power plant level. 0 CO2 emission is simply not on the table, but the fact that climatologists think it is doable is yet another bit of evidence for the fact that being good at science doesn't make you good at policy.
Eh, FF7 is the same linear crap that made FF13 so horrid. I recall looking at a long path I had to run back along and realized it was going to eat the next hour of my life.
I actually liked how FF1 gave a better illusion of freedom than FF7. Make a new FF1 style game and they have a winner. People only like FF7 because of their bishonen slash fantasies.
>>I was thinking along the same lines - stuff like this only gives the anti-immunozation people more ammunition.
How do you know a priori that vaccinations don't cause problems? I'm not saying it does, but pretending you know the answer to how a very non-linear system (the human body) responds to a certain stress, across a wide range of people, seems to be a bit hasty. I'll get my hypothetical kids immunized, but I won't pretend that it's entirely safe.
Before you say the science is settled, you should realize that pediatric medicine, in particular, has a lot of gaps in its knowledge, especially due to the fact that you can't ethically put babies into experimental/control groups as you can with adults. For a number of drugs (mainly rare drugs) ped dosages have to be extrapolated from the adult dosages, and you just have to cross your fingers and hope you don't kill the baby.
We're honestly in the dark ages when it comes to medical science.
Slashdot Mirror
>>See http://redbluerichpoor.com/blog/2008/10/amazon-usa/
Lol, you use Amazon's stats for rich people instead of just looking at political donations like I did? If that's the level of rigor to bring to all of your thought processes, no wonder you feel the way you do.
They also don't define rich on that page, so it's essentially meaningless.
>>How exactly did John Kerry do that?
Besides voting for it? John Kerry ran on a platform of cutting capital gains taxes. (Do you need me to Google that for you?) The rich loved him. They could continue with their pretend tactic of sticking-it-to-the-rich while lowering their overall tax burden.
>>Most of the money from Bush's tax-cuts went directly to the rich.
You can't cut taxes to the poor, because they don't pay taxes. The top 1% of income earners pay 40% of the taxes. If you cut taxes for everyone (which is what he did), people like you will spin it as a tax cut for the rich. Please think before posting.
And again, it's not like tax cuts are a bad thing anyway. We pay enough as it is.
>>I didn't vote for a third party candidate because not voting is just as effective.
Not true. I voted Libertarian in the last election because, like you, I didn't like McCain and Obama, and Bob Barr was one of the few politicians to speak out in favor of civil liberties (amazing, ain't it?) in the post 9/11 world, and I wanted to support that.
He had no chance of winning, but if enough people start refusing to buy into the two-bad-options system, then we might someday see reform.
>>All corporations lean to the right
Do you mean "the right" in the European sense of the word, or the American sense of the word? To Europeans, all of America is "right wing". If you mean it in the American sense of the world, you should spend some time looking through Open Secrets.org to see how corporations actually give. Goldman Sachs gave nearly a million to Obama, and around two hundred thousand to McCain, for example.
>>After all, corporations exist for the purpose of realizing profits, so why would a corporation ever support a political party or movement that works against the system that has allowed corporations to become as big, powerful, and profitable as they are today?
Big businesses often trend Democrat because Democrats believe in protectionism, whereas Republicans believe in competition and small businesses. Small businesses represent threats to big businesses, but regulation and red tape (Democrat tools) can impose severe barriers to entry for small businesses. For an insightful lesson, look at the difference in how many big businesses failed in post-war France versus America in the same time period. Off the top of my head, something like 90% of France's large businesses in 1950 were still around in 1980, whereas only 10% of America's were. Competition vs. Protectionism. Too big to fail, and all that.
Contrary to popular perception, the ultra-rich also like Democrats. If you believed the media, you'd think that Republicans were all about giving tax breaks to the ultra-rich. But we pay taxes in two different ways here in America - 1) income tax, and 2) capital gains. A reduction on income tax doesn't make the slightest difference to the ultra-rich, who get most of their money from capital gains. But all you hear about in the media is "Republicans pose tax break for the ultra-rich" and you don't hear anything about how John Kerry reduced capital gains taxes, or how Democrats recently killed the carried interest exemption (one of their 2008 campaign promises) after they had a lot of money thrown at them by lobbyists. Not that tax cuts aren't good things, but the carried interest exemption is just a bone thrown to Goldman Sachs.
It's interesting reading to see how Billionaires actually donate to political causes:
http://www.newsmeat.com/billionaire_political_donations
>>That said, you just have to pick your games: Assassin's Creed 2, Red Dead Redemption, GTA4 and many others offer extensive single player content.
I'm really liking Fallout New Vegas.
In regards to TFA's opinion that games are getting too easy, New Vegas implemented something I really wished they'd had for Fallout 3: Hardcore mode. It's actually not as crazy as it sounds, it just turns stimpacks into DOTs instead of instant heals (which means you're no longer invincible, which means the game is no longer trivially easy) and food and water actually mean something. The difficulty is otherwise the same.
It turns the game from trivial into interesting. Highly highly recommended.
>>The dog is a living organism, but I presume (?) it's not considered an Officer of the Peace
And you'd be wrong. =) At least, around here, police dogs are considered officers, so kicking them even if they're attacking you, is a fast track to going to jail.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_dog
>>It's definitely a dumb idea to have these things just roaming the streets, and that's without even considering the privacy concerns
Actually, the privacy issues are the only things that worry me. Supposedly we have a 4th Amendment here in the US that protects us against unreasonable search and seizure, and I can't help but think that getting invisibly search every time I wander around a marina area is unconstitutional.
Well, it IS dumb to think it's the only thing stopping us from terrorist attacks, but Customs uses a variety of tools to stop smuggling, which, if you read TFA, you'd see these devices have been successful at. The fact they can detect radioactive substances is just icing on the cake. Radioactive sensors are a good thing, and we have a lot of them in our harbors and major cities. Even without terrorists, you probably don't want someone driving around with something highly radioactive.
>>Of course, but this was about whether it can be done by a C programmer in less than 1 hour.
Sure, and I give you kudos for it. But it does serve very nicely to show why I prefer to do things in shell script for things that shell script is good for. =)
>>They're a useful extra tool, but for most people on normal internet connections they're too slow to backup everything.
You don't need to do it all at once. Just let it run in the background at nighttime. Even on the crappiest of crap DSL connections, I had about 500GB stored online from this computer. If I wanted a faster restore if it died, I could pay for DVDs to be burned and fedexed to me.
I'm on a 24/2.5 connection now, which makes it a lot more palatable.
You're right, though, that it probably wouldn't be feasible over dialup.
Most "real" CS people have been playing around with writing code since a young age. I'd written motion prediction code for a robot, an Axis and Allies simulator, a full AI suite, and a bunch of other stuff before I started college, but I think the university classes really polished my skills. Finite math taught me how to think about structuring loops so they always run correctly, my Theory class let me think about FSMs, CFGs, and Turing machines in a more logical manner, my programming languages and compilers classes really made me understand what was really happening when I hit cc (and also helped explain some of the bizarre compiler errors I'd seen over the years when my own compiler did the same thing), and most importantly, the UCSD CS TAs were absolute Nazis about proper coding technique. Not arbitrarily so, but if you've ever seen some code that made you want to punch someone, that's the sort of thing they knock 25% of your grade off for. Honestly, it really helped.
You're right, though - Computer Science is a very weird mismash of different stuff all jumbled together.
>>And even given the complete failure to actually learn anything that could be called science in their computer science degree 95% of the graduating class hasn't written more than 10K lines of code in their entire life.
Mmm, just looking at my class assignments (that I saved) across 16 classes (quarters, not semesters), I wc at 20k lines of code. This doesn't count stuff that I wrote for fun, for work, or stuff that I deleted because it doesn't matter any more. The actual number should be several times that, that I wrote for school.
IMO, if you're not writing software as a CS student, you're doing something wrong.
>>Why not just `sort -u`?
Functionally equivalent. Doesn't change the fact that you can't uniq before the sort, AFAIK.
Yeah, that's about what I thought it would look like. =)
>>Like most people on /. I carry a phone that has a handy-dandy built-in notes app and a calendar.
Androids are nice because the built in calendar app integrates right into the Google calendar that pops up every time I launch a new web browser. It's good for doing what's-up-next type stuff, but I find it doesn't encapsulate the sort of year-at-a-glance that I need when planning events with my friends - monthly view shows little ribbons for *everything* including national holidays, trash pickups, and workout times.
So... I keep a giant laminated wet-erase wall calendar by my computer. All major events (I fly out of state once or twice per month for work) and deadlines (ugh, two reports due tomorrow) go up there. Costs about $15 every 18 months from Office Depot to keep one of those things up, and I save all of them in case I need to remember what was going on at any point in the past. Helps a lot when doing receipts and taxes and such. Not that you can't do it with Google Calendar, but it just seems to work for me a lot better.
>>No'. All those HDs on the shelf and CD/DVD backups that I never look at from one year to the next have been heaved out.
I know I've got a few external HDs lying around here with backups on them, but I could never bother to burn the TB or so of data on my machine to DVD. Seemed like it would take too long.
Online backups are the way to go nowadays, if you can spare a little bit of money to pay for a real service. My mother lost all of her books (she's a published author) when her machine was killed by incompetent PC repairmen trying to remove a virus (I'd have done it but I was out of town). So I just VNCed into her new machine (ran her through installing it), and pulled her data right back down from the service.
You can talk a lot about freeing yourself from the past, and all that, but I think my mother would have been pretty bummed if she'd lost 20 years worth of her writing (both professional and for fun).
>>A skilled C programmer also needs less than 1 hour for something like that.
Hmm, well if you want to time yourself, here's a common enough task that I automate with shell scripts. I just timed myself. Including logging in, doing a detour into man and a 'locate access_log' to find the file, it took a bit less than 4 minutes.
tail -n 100 /var/log/apache2/access_log | cut -f1 -d" " | sort | uniq
Grabs the end of the access_log and shows you the last few ip addresses that have connected to your site. I do something like this occasionally. Optionally pipe it into xargs host to do DNS lookups on them, if that's how you prefer to roll.
I'm honestly curious how long it will take you to do it in C, with/without the DNS lookup. Post source if you don't mind.
IIRC, uniq only collapses adjacent lines that are identical. So hence sort|uniq.
Maybe there's a flag or something that will change that behavior? It'd probably have to do something on the order of sort anyway, though.
>>because the programming language has so much to do with CS?
In an engineering discipline, you always want to be hands-on, so yeah. My first two quarters with Savitch at UCSD were a combination of learning theory (data structures, algorithms), programming languages (I had him for C++ before he wrote his Java textbook) and abstract models of a machine.
>>I asked him which programming language was his favorite, expecting it to be something like Lisp or Forth, but he said, "shell script."
Shell script is awesome for a large number of tasks. It can't do everything (otherwise we'd just teach scripting and be done with a CS degree in a quarter), but there's a lot of times when someone thinks they're going to have to write this long program involving a lot of text parsing and you just go, "Well, just Cut out everything except the field you want, pipe it through sort|uniq, and then run an xargs on the result." You get done in an hour (including writing, args checking, and debugging) what another person might spend a week doing in C (which is spectacularly unsuited for such tasks anyway).
>>Delays of up to 45 milliseconds were reported and they were fixed to be as low as 29 milliseconds.
>>Sometimes, if you are really sensitive to smooth scheduling, can see those kinds of effects visually via 'game smoothness' or perhaps 'Firefox scrolling smoothness' - but anything on the 'several seconds' timescale on a typical Linux desktop has to have some connection with IO.
Ingo, I find delays of 29-45ms to be pretty noticeable. To put it another way, if you had a delay of 10ms before, and you're now getting a delay of 50ms due to some background copy, all of your applications went from running at 100fps to 20fps, which I think even non-sensitive people can pick up on, even outside of games and smooth scrolling. VIM feels different over a 10ms LAN connection vs. a 45ms connection from my home.
But hasn't Linux supported temporary priority boosting for applications getting key presses since the 90s, though? How hard would it be to do something similar for GUI apps and renice foreground processes?
Only poor people pay taxes.
Poor people pay negative taxes. Google "EIC" some time. We actually pay them to work.
Rich people use a variety of loopholes, like real estate swaps, to avoid paying taxes. However, they still pay a very large and disproportionate share of taxes.
It's really the middle class who don't have the slightest bit of freedom in paying their taxes. They can't take their corporate profits and reinvest them in order to avoid paying taxes on them - they just get their wages deducted and are told to like it.
>>That's reason number one
Reason #1 should be: you can't fucking drive anywhere in the Bay Area. Horrible traffic, and if you try to live in San Francisco itself, you'll find it's quite possibly the most car-unfriendly city in existence.
No, I didn't read TFA, I've just lived in the Bay Area before.
>>Yeah it sucks.
Yep.
>>Have you looked at the studies done about vaccinations, particularly on autism?
I have, which is why I was talking about vaccine safety in general. I had a high school friend whose baby seized after being given a vaccine but the doctor refused to report it as a potential side effect of the vaccination. My scientific brain chewed on that for a bit, and realized that if doctors think they know a priori that vaccines are safe, they can be creating the illusion that vaccines are safe by not reporting possible side effects.
Her other kid has autism (which is one of the reasons why I've researched it), and there's quite obviously something going on with autism (there was a sudden spike in the mid 90s, IIRC) but nobody knows exactly what.
Growing trees is carbon negative. Burning trees releases the trapped carbon. This isn't rocket science.
When I get back from my trip I'll dig up my references. A 50% CO2 reduction won't stabilize temperatures at the current level (no reasonable scenario will), but it will stabilize below the Really Bad zones in the temperature prediction forecasts.
It is possible to reduce our CO2 by 50%, maily because we can attack the problem in a centralized way at the power plant level. 0 CO2 emission is simply not on the table, but the fact that climatologists think it is doable is yet another bit of evidence for the fact that being good at science doesn't make you good at policy.
Eh, FF7 is the same linear crap that made FF13 so horrid. I recall looking at a long path I had to run back along and realized it was going to eat the next hour of my life.
I actually liked how FF1 gave a better illusion of freedom than FF7. Make a new FF1 style game and they have a winner. People only like FF7 because of their bishonen slash fantasies.
>>I was thinking along the same lines - stuff like this only gives the anti-immunozation people more ammunition.
How do you know a priori that vaccinations don't cause problems? I'm not saying it does, but pretending you know the answer to how a very non-linear system (the human body) responds to a certain stress, across a wide range of people, seems to be a bit hasty. I'll get my hypothetical kids immunized, but I won't pretend that it's entirely safe.
Before you say the science is settled, you should realize that pediatric medicine, in particular, has a lot of gaps in its knowledge, especially due to the fact that you can't ethically put babies into experimental/control groups as you can with adults. For a number of drugs (mainly rare drugs) ped dosages have to be extrapolated from the adult dosages, and you just have to cross your fingers and hope you don't kill the baby.
We're honestly in the dark ages when it comes to medical science.
>>Hell, if The Old Republic is anything like KoTOR, I could never run into a player character and I wouldn't care.
I used to feel the same way, until I read this article and realized it was by the same guys that did WAR.
It's not that WAR was bad, but rather that WAR really told me the developers had no idea what they were really doing.