Everything is secondary when the economy is crashing down and people are unemployed. Every high ideal you can think of will be put on hold and forgotten when people are feeling economic pain.
You know what is worse than being poor and/or jobless? Literally dying because the temperature and humidity are so high that human life (actually, mammalian life) becomes impossible: You need to sweat to bring your temperature down to something that won't kill you, but the humidity is so high that sweating doesn't work to cool you. So you die. This will happen in MAJOR POPULATED AREAS in the 2070's range. Lack of air conditioning (or a power failure due to everybody trying to use their air conditioners at once) will become a death sentence: Thousands will die.
How do you think the people affected by THAT kind of problem will feel about the fact that some poor, middle-class, and wealthy Americans decided that it was inconvenient to save their lives because doing so might have involved making some sacrifices to their lifestyles (which are already far, far above the global average)?
Do you think that people whose lives are literally threatened from this kind of problem will consider the comfort and very lives of Americans more valuable than their own? What do you think they will do about the situation? (What would Americans do if the roles were reversed?)
There's no real evidence that nitrate cause cancer, if anything it's useful to prevent foodborn illness like botulism. Most studies that link nitrate to cancer have been disproved by other studies.
A number of consensus studies recently, such as those cited in the paper that the article is about, claim that there IS substantial evidence that nitrates cause cancer.
What is your evidence for your claim that "There's no real evidence that nitrate causes cancer."? Are you an expert in the field?
It appears to me that the experts claiming that there IS evidence have so far provided substantially more evidence for their point of view than you have.
Saying there's "no real evidence" sounds a lot like the No true scotsman fallacy.
Disregarding the consensus view of experts in a scientific field is something that should be done with great caution, and preferably with strong evidence of some kind, not just skepticism.
It is a bit disingenuous not to mention that a big part of the US's recent reduction in emissions have been due to the 2008 financial crisis, and the temporary losses in production that resulted from it, and were not necessarily due to any particular nobility of purpose or deliberate action of the US government. When China suffers a big recession or depression (which seems likely in the near future, from what I have been reading), the same thing will happen to them.
Also, the Trump administration has repeatedly been opposing attempts to deal with, or even recognize the existence of, global warming and its consequent climate change. For instance, one of its first actions was to essentially tell NASA that it was no longer in their purview to point their satellite telescopes down at earth, and that they should exclusively be focused on outer space exploration (despite the fact that NASA had been the expert in earth monitoring up to that point). Apparently the Trump administration is so certain of the nonexistence of climate change that there's no longer any need to actually measure its status or get objective temperature measurements and other data. They've also been repeatedly weakening EPA regulations, claiming climate change is a "Chinese Hoax" etc., all without supporting evidence. I'm sure that the fact that the fossil fuel industry heavily disproportionately funds Republicans has nothing to do with all of that./s
Regardless, when the government is doing virtually everything it can to fight any attempt at controlling climate change, and individual states like California are instead forced to take action (such as launching their own satellites) due to the fact that the federal government has basically completely failed to do anything (and states must then fight the federal government to do it!), I think it's shows a fair amount of chutzpah to attribute the credit for the U.S. carbon emission reduction at the hands of the federal government as if Trump deserves credit for the reductions that have gone on. (Definition of Chutzpah: A child that kills his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he's an orphan.)
You do not appear to have considered the possibility that the point of the Paris accords was to get countries to agree, in principle, that there was a problem and that something needed to be done about it, and that it was never intended to be the final agreement between countries: it was only a first step, with additional steps added as needed when it became evident how effective it was, and to what degree countries were actually complying with it. The fact that the US is now trying to pull out of the Paris agreement completely means that we now have no credibility when it comes to the later steps in which we might have pressed for a stronger agreement or could have pressured other countries to comply more fully with their informal commitments. By characterizing the Paris agreement as "virtue signalling" you are missing the entire point of it.
Personally, I think the best solution to the problem is probably some sort of market-based solution such as a carbon tax, thus turning the market externality of greenhouse gas pollution into an internality that can be handled by competition within a free market. That's a very "conservative" approach to the problem (at least according to the old definition of "conservative" as opposed to whatever is going on now) but we won't ever get there as long as the party who is historically the one to advance such solutions instead finds it's in their financial and political best interests to pretend that the problem doesn't exist at all, and thus fight any attempt to solve it.
Characterizing the left as SJW's damages your credibility, by the way. That kind of labeling of opponents only shows that you think you know what they're going to say before they say it, and blinds you to nuances in their opinons that you may not be familiar with. This is not a "my tribe" vs. "your tribe" battle: It's a fight
I have noticed that the people who complain loudest about "witch hunts" with regards to Trump were strangely silent when it came to investigations on issues such as Obama's birth certificate, the multiple Benghazi investigations, Hillary's emails, Whitewater, etc. It seems that only Democrats are capable of witch hunts, and Republican investigations are only done with the purest of motives.
Regardless, the best way to protect yourself from witch hunts, is to not be a witch, and to not associate with those who are. When numerous people around you start pleading guilty to felonies ("I'm a witch and I admit it!") your case for being a blameless pious churchgoer that never had an impure thought in your life starts to look shaky, and the case for you being the head of the local coven starts seeming more plausible.
So far, the rate of admitted criminality among Trump's friends and associates is starting to make the crime rate among the immigrants he is always complaining about seem paltry by comparison, and yet Trump steadfastly maintains that he has never done anything illegal. I find that very hard to believe, given the evidence that has come out so far, and given Trump's own behavior (e.g. the glowing way he talks about Putin and Russia in general, and seems to consider them no threat whatsoever, while our allies (Europe, NATO, etc.) somehow he sees as a major problem). He seems to have a massive blind spot when it comes to Russia specifically, and I think that one can reasonably ask why that is. His repeated threats to fire Mueller, Sessions, and others, and threats to pull other nasty tricks (threatening to withhold security clearances from those who criticize him, etc.) do not make him seem to be acting like someone who is innocent.
As for "The Russians" and "collusion" being irrelevant to Cohen, a very small amount of research turns up articles like the following. It's not hard to find information on this stuff. If you're actually interested in knowing. Not likely to be covered on Fox News, though.
But to never moderate those things would mean that everything becomes rhetoric - all noise and no signal. It defeats the purpose of having having a channel of communication... which is kind of the point of this modern form of trolling, isn't it?
I often read Slashdot using Safari on my iPhone 6+. The mobile site has several very intrusive problems. Really, it's the most broken website I regularly browse. Many features that I can take for granted as working on other websites due to the nature of web browsers (e.g. the browser "back" button) simply don't work. I often resort to using the iPhone's features to bypass the mobile site to go to the desktop site instead. (If anybody is wondering how to do this: Hold down the "reload" button, and then choose "Request Desktop Site"). Specific problems with the mobile site include:
1) The 'back' button is broken. If I am on the home page, and I click on an article title, and then click some sort of option (e.g. "Outstanding") to filter down the returned articles, and then want to go back to the home page, the browser's 'back' button does not work. (Clicking it typically takes me to the site I was browsing before I started browsing Slashdot.) This is hugely irritating. If I want to go back to the home page and pick another story, I typically have to use the on-screen keyboard to type slashdot.org into the URL control again. Please Don't Break The Back Button!
2) In a situation such as described in 1), the "Stories" button at the top of the page doesn't work either. Clicking the "Stories" link to go back to the homepage only seems to work if no other links have been clicked since the story was clicked on from the homepage. If other options (e.g. "Outstanding") have been clicked, the Stories button either does nothing, or my click goes "through" it to whatever was under the button (which may be a random link from within the story comments, resulting in some surprising destinations.) The fact that the Stories button doesn't work is actually kind of ironic, since a simple link to "slashdot.org" would be trivial to implement, work just fine, and not have the problems that the current implementation does. Instead, it seems to be trying to keep some sort of memory as to what the previous page was, but whatever it's doing doesn't work.
3) The set of default filtering options when I enter a story page, even without logging in, should be such that I see a small but reasonable number (say, 20-30) of top-rated comments. As things currently stand, I usually have to click something like "Outstanding" to get to a resonable filtering state, which triggers problem #2 that I mentioned above.
4) When I attempt to use filtering on a story's comments, the site attempts to filter out comments that are too low for the currently set threshold. However, the header of the filtered-out comments are displayed quite large, and the text "Filtered due to preferences" is also displayed quite large, with excess whitespace around it. The net effect is that the filtered-out comments take up almost as much space as they would have if they hadn't been filtered out, which defeats the purpose of filtering them out in the first place. I think filtered out comments should have their headers displayed in font large enough to be (barely) legible, but otherwise use minimal space, and preferably be displayed completely on one line. They should not try to draw attention to themselves: They should be unobtrusive so I can focus on the comments that haven't been filtered out, and click on the filtered-out ones only if I want to get more details on a particular thread.
There was a study about five years ago done by a bunch of physical therapists which concluded that stretching before warming up was actually likely to cause the same injuries that it was supposedly being done to prevent, and did not actually prevent injuries in the ways that is commonly believed to.
They claimed that warming up was what really prevented injuries -- stretching after warming up was OK, and could increase flexibility (since the warming up prevented the injuries that would otherwise be caused by stretching).
Unfortunately, I don't remember any identifying details of the study anymore. Perhaps some googling will turn it up.
If you think Eclipse is clunky (and I agree) you should try giving IntelliJ Idea a try. Not free, but totally worth the money, IMHO. So many things in Idea are just more intuitive and streamlined than in Eclipse, that I find it a much more productive environment to work in. (If you buy a personal license between approximately December and January each year, you can get it for half price, by the way.)
No, I don't work for JetBrains. I'm just a satisfied customer, who has to use Eclipse for my day job, and misses Idea very much...
"Also, Eddie the shipboard computer in one part of the books mentions, 'Pick a number, guys!' when Arthur wonders aloud what the Question is, but is ignored by the human inhabitants of the Heart of Gold."
Just because this is true (that program correctness proofs are themselves very complex) doesn't mean that the technique is without value. If you have such a formal specification for a program, you now have supposedly identically operating code written in two different languages, which can be checked against each other for errors, hopefully automatically.
Having a fully provable program like this is like having a test suite that checks 100% of the branches in your program. It can substantially reduce errors that otherwise might slip by due to having failed to write a test for various conditions.
Yes, every time you find a mismatch, you have to consider whether it is the program or the specification that is wrong. Still, the errors that you miss will be those for which the specification and the program are wrong in THE SAME WAY, which should be very uncommon.
Not enough people understand this about the Many Worlds interpretation. It really is a slightly different theory, with (in principle) testable consequences.
I've tried this both ways over the years, and in my experience, separating large functions into small, well-named ones with clearly delineated inputs and outputs is a big net win for maintainability. It makes it much easier to see what is going on, because it doesn't force someone reading the code to have to confront the whole mess at once. They can dig deeper into only the subfunctions that are relevant to the problem that they are trying to solve, without worrying that some non-local effect of a prior block of code will confuse the issue.
There is a huge difference between an old-growth forest and the ones that the forest industry plants to replace them. Basically, the forest industry removes almost all of the plants and wildlife that are not the single tree species that they are trying to harvest, not to mention the many species that rely on living in or around dead and rotting trees (which are, of course, unprofitable to keep around since they make logging more difficult). What they forest industry leaves behind when it clearcuts an area is more like a park -- as close to antiseptic as a forest can be, with uniform trees of the same species, relatively evenly spaced, and with nearly all of the underbrush cleared out. The "normal" ecosystem of most of these areas has been effectively destroyed and replaced with a monoculture.
As a result, one disease, predator species or parasite that targets that single species of tree can wreak amazing amount of havoc. I vividly remember the Pine Bark Beetle infestation of lodgepole pines in central Oregon about twenty years ago -- there were dead and dying trees as far as the eye could see, and in many areas, about one tree in ten survived. You can imagine how much of a fire risk all of those dead pines were, in the middle of a high, dry desert that was somewhat known for frequent thunderstorms. Even today, there are still huge areas that were formerly heavily forested where there is now approximately one tree left standing every hundred feet as a result of this massive infestation.
The grandparent post seems to be implying that the forests maintained by the forest industry are in some way an equivalent replacement for the ones that grow naturally. This is very much not the case.
I've seen this over and over again -- most programmers have no idea what DBC is. If the language they used supported it natively, they would probably have learned it, but otherwise they will have no idea what it offers.
Of _course_ dedicated heaters are more efficient heaters than light bulbs -- light bulbs generate lots of "waste light" when you attempt to use them as heaters.:-)
More to the point, if you were planning to heat your home using light bulbs, then inefficiency of this sort would be a concern. Since in the case the grandparent post was discussing, the heat is simply an unnecessary (but useful) byproduct of lighting your home, the fact that there are other ways to heat it more efficiently are simply not an issue. The point is that the "waste" heat from the light bulb is not really "wasted" since it reduces the work that your heat pump would otherwise have had to do to raise the room temperature by the same amount, and the light bulb does it "for free" since heat generation is not the reason that you are using a light bulb in the first place.
If you are using light bulbs in a house in which you have to run an air conditioner, on the other hand, you have a problem because in this case the waste heat from the bulb makes the air conditioner do more work, not less.
I once beat the fourth-highest ranked high-school chess player in the country, on the first game I had ever played with him. The game that started out like the traditional "four move checkmate" (not exactly the strongest opening, but certainly one he had seen before, albeit not in any sort of competitive match...), and progressed further in some odd directions and then ended with an unexpected checkmate that he didn't see coming. His brother, sitting next to me, was shocked. I didn't really understand why, at the time.
However, after that, I joined the chess team, on which the aforementioned player played first board. After his first (embarrassing) loss to me, he took me seriously. I never beat him again. Although I played him dozens of time after then, only once did I ever come close to winning, and even then, he barely managed to turn the situation around and fought it to a draw. I'm much prouder of that second attempt than I am of the first one, because it was done when his full attention was on the game, and that time, I achieved what I did more by skill than by luck.
I play D&D too, and I can tell you... how much damage they do depends a great deal on what you choose to launch with them. (Suggestions: ink, flour, glue, oil, holy water, acid, caltrops, alchemist's fire, thunderstones, poison darts, scorpions, etc.) Add rapid shot and multishot, and it starts to get to be some serious damage. The weapon requires a bit of creativity, but I think hearing the GM say "you're launching WHAT at the monster?!?" makes it totally worth it.:-)
Re:Where's the market force? Where's technology?
on
The Engine of US Jobs
·
· Score: 1
You are right in that individuals rarely exert market pressure on healthcare providers now. However, medical insurance companies and HMOs most definitely do. Having patients given expensive treatments costs their insurance companies significant money, so they try to steer their patients towards cheaper sources (aka "primary care physicians" and the like). So there is still significant market pressure to keep costs down. The real problem is that patients have little choice in their insurance providers, since that is usually determined by their employer, so individuals have little power in this system, and the quality of care can decline as a result of the insurance companies seeking lower-cost medicine.
Hmm. You are right, but not in the way you think you are.:-) You are conflating the frequency of the carrier particle itself with the frequency of the (much, much, MUCH slower) carrier wave that is transmitted using large numbers of carrier particles. From a physics point of view, these are two totally different things, although from an information-theory point of view they behave in a similar manner.
Consider this: You can do the same kind of frequency multiplexing that you described for copper cables for EACH different frequency of light. There is an extra "degree of freedom" here for light that electrons don't have.
An analogy with normal electronics would be if there were multiple kinds of electrons that could be passed along a wire, with each kind of electron not interacting (well, minimally interacting anyway) with the others. You could send one signal using electron type #1, the second signal using electron type #2, and so forth, and each signal could carry multiple carrier waves, upon each of which was a message.
If you buy between (usually) December and January, they offer it as a SUBSTANTIAL discount to individual users. Usually around $250 or less. This is called a "Personal" subscription or somesuch.
Personally, I think it's well worth the money. I've tried Eclipse, and Idea seems a lot more streamlined and less awkward.
As another non-fan of the Copenhagen Interpretation, I suggest that you try looking at the Many Worlds Interpretation. It has an elegant explanation of the observer problem: Different versions of the observer observe different results. The results seem random to these observers because they all occur, and different observers see different things. This interpretation is beautifully elegant once you really understand it.
Basically, the Many Worlds interpretation simplifies to the Copenhagen interpretation if you decide that you are not interested in which worlds the observer occupies (and thus treat them as if they were a single world), which means that you then have to treat the set of worlds containing the results of the experiment as if they were nondeterministic (because they are really correlated with the worlds containing the observer, but you're treating the observers as if they were one world).
As an analogy, you could consider the Copenhagen Interpretation as sort of like what happens in Special Relativity when you pick a reference frame and measure everything else relative to it. The Many Worlds Interpretation is then more like trying to treat all reference frames as equivalent.
Slashdot Mirror
Everything is secondary when the economy is crashing down and people are unemployed. Every high ideal you can think of will be put on hold and forgotten when people are feeling economic pain.
You know what is worse than being poor and/or jobless? Literally dying because the temperature and humidity are so high that human life (actually, mammalian life) becomes impossible: You need to sweat to bring your temperature down to something that won't kill you, but the humidity is so high that sweating doesn't work to cool you. So you die. This will happen in MAJOR POPULATED AREAS in the 2070's range. Lack of air conditioning (or a power failure due to everybody trying to use their air conditioners at once) will become a death sentence: Thousands will die.
How do you think the people affected by THAT kind of problem will feel about the fact that some poor, middle-class, and wealthy Americans decided that it was inconvenient to save their lives because doing so might have involved making some sacrifices to their lifestyles (which are already far, far above the global average)?
Do you think that people whose lives are literally threatened from this kind of problem will consider the comfort and very lives of Americans more valuable than their own? What do you think they will do about the situation? (What would Americans do if the roles were reversed?)
Think on that for a bit.
There's no real evidence that nitrate cause cancer, if anything it's useful to prevent foodborn illness like botulism.
Most studies that link nitrate to cancer have been disproved by other studies.
A number of consensus studies recently, such as those cited in the paper that the article is about, claim that there IS substantial evidence that nitrates cause cancer.
What is your evidence for your claim that "There's no real evidence that nitrate causes cancer."? Are you an expert in the field?
It appears to me that the experts claiming that there IS evidence have so far provided substantially more evidence for their point of view than you have.
Saying there's "no real evidence" sounds a lot like the No true scotsman fallacy.
Disregarding the consensus view of experts in a scientific field is something that should be done with great caution, and preferably with strong evidence of some kind, not just skepticism.
It is a bit disingenuous not to mention that a big part of the US's recent reduction in emissions have been due to the 2008 financial crisis, and the temporary losses in production that resulted from it, and were not necessarily due to any particular nobility of purpose or deliberate action of the US government. When China suffers a big recession or depression (which seems likely in the near future, from what I have been reading), the same thing will happen to them.
Also, the Trump administration has repeatedly been opposing attempts to deal with, or even recognize the existence of, global warming and its consequent climate change. For instance, one of its first actions was to essentially tell NASA that it was no longer in their purview to point their satellite telescopes down at earth, and that they should exclusively be focused on outer space exploration (despite the fact that NASA had been the expert in earth monitoring up to that point). Apparently the Trump administration is so certain of the nonexistence of climate change that there's no longer any need to actually measure its status or get objective temperature measurements and other data. They've also been repeatedly weakening EPA regulations, claiming climate change is a "Chinese Hoax" etc., all without supporting evidence. I'm sure that the fact that the fossil fuel industry heavily disproportionately funds Republicans has nothing to do with all of that. /s
Regardless, when the government is doing virtually everything it can to fight any attempt at controlling climate change, and individual states like California are instead forced to take action (such as launching their own satellites) due to the fact that the federal government has basically completely failed to do anything (and states must then fight the federal government to do it!), I think it's shows a fair amount of chutzpah to attribute the credit for the U.S. carbon emission reduction at the hands of the federal government as if Trump deserves credit for the reductions that have gone on. (Definition of Chutzpah: A child that kills his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he's an orphan.)
You do not appear to have considered the possibility that the point of the Paris accords was to get countries to agree, in principle, that there was a problem and that something needed to be done about it, and that it was never intended to be the final agreement between countries: it was only a first step, with additional steps added as needed when it became evident how effective it was, and to what degree countries were actually complying with it. The fact that the US is now trying to pull out of the Paris agreement completely means that we now have no credibility when it comes to the later steps in which we might have pressed for a stronger agreement or could have pressured other countries to comply more fully with their informal commitments. By characterizing the Paris agreement as "virtue signalling" you are missing the entire point of it.
Personally, I think the best solution to the problem is probably some sort of market-based solution such as a carbon tax, thus turning the market externality of greenhouse gas pollution into an internality that can be handled by competition within a free market. That's a very "conservative" approach to the problem (at least according to the old definition of "conservative" as opposed to whatever is going on now) but we won't ever get there as long as the party who is historically the one to advance such solutions instead finds it's in their financial and political best interests to pretend that the problem doesn't exist at all, and thus fight any attempt to solve it.
Characterizing the left as SJW's damages your credibility, by the way. That kind of labeling of opponents only shows that you think you know what they're going to say before they say it, and blinds you to nuances in their opinons that you may not be familiar with. This is not a "my tribe" vs. "your tribe" battle: It's a fight
I have noticed that the people who complain loudest about "witch hunts" with regards to Trump were strangely silent when it came to investigations on issues such as Obama's birth certificate, the multiple Benghazi investigations, Hillary's emails, Whitewater, etc. It seems that only Democrats are capable of witch hunts, and Republican investigations are only done with the purest of motives.
Some discussion here:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/29...
Regardless, the best way to protect yourself from witch hunts, is to not be a witch, and to not associate with those who are. When numerous people around you start pleading guilty to felonies ("I'm a witch and I admit it!") your case for being a blameless pious churchgoer that never had an impure thought in your life starts to look shaky, and the case for you being the head of the local coven starts seeming more plausible.
So far, the rate of admitted criminality among Trump's friends and associates is starting to make the crime rate among the immigrants he is always complaining about seem paltry by comparison, and yet Trump steadfastly maintains that he has never done anything illegal. I find that very hard to believe, given the evidence that has come out so far, and given Trump's own behavior (e.g. the glowing way he talks about Putin and Russia in general, and seems to consider them no threat whatsoever, while our allies (Europe, NATO, etc.) somehow he sees as a major problem). He seems to have a massive blind spot when it comes to Russia specifically, and I think that one can reasonably ask why that is. His repeated threats to fire Mueller, Sessions, and others, and threats to pull other nasty tricks (threatening to withhold security clearances from those who criticize him, etc.) do not make him seem to be acting like someone who is innocent.
As for "The Russians" and "collusion" being irrelevant to Cohen, a very small amount of research turns up articles like the following. It's not hard to find information on this stuff. If you're actually interested in knowing. Not likely to be covered on Fox News, though.
Some examples:
https://www.reddit.com/r/polit...
http://thehill.com/homenews/ad...
But to never moderate those things would mean that everything becomes rhetoric - all noise and no signal. It defeats the purpose of having having a channel of communication... which is kind of the point of this modern form of trolling, isn't it?
It seems that you are basically describing the Paradox of Tolerance.
I often read Slashdot using Safari on my iPhone 6+. The mobile site has several very intrusive problems. Really, it's the most broken website I regularly browse. Many features that I can take for granted as working on other websites due to the nature of web browsers (e.g. the browser "back" button) simply don't work. I often resort to using the iPhone's features to bypass the mobile site to go to the desktop site instead. (If anybody is wondering how to do this: Hold down the "reload" button, and then choose "Request Desktop Site"). Specific problems with the mobile site include:
1) The 'back' button is broken. If I am on the home page, and I click on an article title, and then click some sort of option (e.g. "Outstanding") to filter down the returned articles, and then want to go back to the home page, the browser's 'back' button does not work. (Clicking it typically takes me to the site I was browsing before I started browsing Slashdot.) This is hugely irritating. If I want to go back to the home page and pick another story, I typically have to use the on-screen keyboard to type slashdot.org into the URL control again. Please Don't Break The Back Button!
2) In a situation such as described in 1), the "Stories" button at the top of the page doesn't work either. Clicking the "Stories" link to go back to the homepage only seems to work if no other links have been clicked since the story was clicked on from the homepage. If other options (e.g. "Outstanding") have been clicked, the Stories button either does nothing, or my click goes "through" it to whatever was under the button (which may be a random link from within the story comments, resulting in some surprising destinations.) The fact that the Stories button doesn't work is actually kind of ironic, since a simple link to "slashdot.org" would be trivial to implement, work just fine, and not have the problems that the current implementation does. Instead, it seems to be trying to keep some sort of memory as to what the previous page was, but whatever it's doing doesn't work.
3) The set of default filtering options when I enter a story page, even without logging in, should be such that I see a small but reasonable number (say, 20-30) of top-rated comments. As things currently stand, I usually have to click something like "Outstanding" to get to a resonable filtering state, which triggers problem #2 that I mentioned above.
4) When I attempt to use filtering on a story's comments, the site attempts to filter out comments that are too low for the currently set threshold. However, the header of the filtered-out comments are displayed quite large, and the text "Filtered due to preferences" is also displayed quite large, with excess whitespace around it. The net effect is that the filtered-out comments take up almost as much space as they would have if they hadn't been filtered out, which defeats the purpose of filtering them out in the first place. I think filtered out comments should have their headers displayed in font large enough to be (barely) legible, but otherwise use minimal space, and preferably be displayed completely on one line. They should not try to draw attention to themselves: They should be unobtrusive so I can focus on the comments that haven't been filtered out, and click on the filtered-out ones only if I want to get more details on a particular thread.
There was a study about five years ago done by a bunch of physical therapists which concluded that stretching before warming up was actually likely to cause the same injuries that it was supposedly being done to prevent, and did not actually prevent injuries in the ways that is commonly believed to.
They claimed that warming up was what really prevented injuries -- stretching after warming up was OK, and could increase flexibility (since the warming up prevented the injuries that would otherwise be caused by stretching).
Unfortunately, I don't remember any identifying details of the study anymore. Perhaps some googling will turn it up.
If you think Eclipse is clunky (and I agree) you should try giving IntelliJ Idea a try. Not free, but totally worth the money, IMHO. So many things in Idea are just more intuitive and streamlined than in Eclipse, that I find it a much more productive environment to work in. (If you buy a personal license between approximately December and January each year, you can get it for half price, by the way.)
No, I don't work for JetBrains. I'm just a satisfied customer, who has to use Eclipse for my day job, and misses Idea very much...
From here:
"Also, Eddie the shipboard computer in one part of the books mentions, 'Pick a number, guys!' when Arthur wonders aloud what the Question is, but is ignored by the human inhabitants of the Heart of Gold."
Just because this is true (that program correctness proofs are themselves very complex) doesn't mean that the technique is without value. If you have such a formal specification for a program, you now have supposedly identically operating code written in two different languages, which can be checked against each other for errors, hopefully automatically.
Having a fully provable program like this is like having a test suite that checks 100% of the branches in your program. It can substantially reduce errors that otherwise might slip by due to having failed to write a test for various conditions.
Yes, every time you find a mismatch, you have to consider whether it is the program or the specification that is wrong. Still, the errors that you miss will be those for which the specification and the program are wrong in THE SAME WAY, which should be very uncommon.
Not enough people understand this about the Many Worlds interpretation. It really is a slightly different theory, with (in principle) testable consequences.
I've tried this both ways over the years, and in my experience, separating large functions into small, well-named ones with clearly delineated inputs and outputs is a big net win for maintainability. It makes it much easier to see what is going on, because it doesn't force someone reading the code to have to confront the whole mess at once. They can dig deeper into only the subfunctions that are relevant to the problem that they are trying to solve, without worrying that some non-local effect of a prior block of code will confuse the issue.
There is a huge difference between an old-growth forest and the ones that the forest industry plants to replace them. Basically, the forest industry removes almost all of the plants and wildlife that are not the single tree species that they are trying to harvest, not to mention the many species that rely on living in or around dead and rotting trees (which are, of course, unprofitable to keep around since they make logging more difficult). What they forest industry leaves behind when it clearcuts an area is more like a park -- as close to antiseptic as a forest can be, with uniform trees of the same species, relatively evenly spaced, and with nearly all of the underbrush cleared out. The "normal" ecosystem of most of these areas has been effectively destroyed and replaced with a monoculture.
As a result, one disease, predator species or parasite that targets that single species of tree can wreak amazing amount of havoc. I vividly remember the Pine Bark Beetle infestation of lodgepole pines in central Oregon about twenty years ago -- there were dead and dying trees as far as the eye could see, and in many areas, about one tree in ten survived. You can imagine how much of a fire risk all of those dead pines were, in the middle of a high, dry desert that was somewhat known for frequent thunderstorms. Even today, there are still huge areas that were formerly heavily forested where there is now approximately one tree left standing every hundred feet as a result of this massive infestation.
The grandparent post seems to be implying that the forests maintained by the forest industry are in some way an equivalent replacement for the ones that grow naturally. This is very much not the case.
I've seen this over and over again -- most programmers have no idea what DBC is. If the language they used supported it natively, they would probably have learned it, but otherwise they will have no idea what it offers.
Good info on the AVR series. I have had similar positive experiences with the AVR microcontrollers and community.
Of _course_ dedicated heaters are more efficient heaters than light bulbs -- light bulbs generate lots of "waste light" when you attempt to use them as heaters. :-)
More to the point, if you were planning to heat your home using light bulbs, then inefficiency of this sort would be a concern. Since in the case the grandparent post was discussing, the heat is simply an unnecessary (but useful) byproduct of lighting your home, the fact that there are other ways to heat it more efficiently are simply not an issue. The point is that the "waste" heat from the light bulb is not really "wasted" since it reduces the work that your heat pump would otherwise have had to do to raise the room temperature by the same amount, and the light bulb does it "for free" since heat generation is not the reason that you are using a light bulb in the first place.
If you are using light bulbs in a house in which you have to run an air conditioner, on the other hand, you have a problem because in this case the waste heat from the bulb makes the air conditioner do more work, not less.
I once beat the fourth-highest ranked high-school chess player in the country, on the first game I had ever played with him. The game that started out like the traditional "four move checkmate" (not exactly the strongest opening, but certainly one he had seen before, albeit not in any sort of competitive match...), and progressed further in some odd directions and then ended with an unexpected checkmate that he didn't see coming. His brother, sitting next to me, was shocked. I didn't really understand why, at the time.
However, after that, I joined the chess team, on which the aforementioned player played first board. After his first (embarrassing) loss to me, he took me seriously. I never beat him again. Although I played him dozens of time after then, only once did I ever come close to winning, and even then, he barely managed to turn the situation around and fought it to a draw. I'm much prouder of that second attempt than I am of the first one, because it was done when his full attention was on the game, and that time, I achieved what I did more by skill than by luck.
I play D&D too, and I can tell you... how much damage they do depends a great deal on what you choose to launch with them. (Suggestions: ink, flour, glue, oil, holy water, acid, caltrops, alchemist's fire, thunderstones, poison darts, scorpions, etc.) Add rapid shot and multishot, and it starts to get to be some serious damage. The weapon requires a bit of creativity, but I think hearing the GM say "you're launching WHAT at the monster?!?" makes it totally worth it. :-)
You are right in that individuals rarely exert market pressure on healthcare providers now. However, medical insurance companies and HMOs most definitely do. Having patients given expensive treatments costs their insurance companies significant money, so they try to steer their patients towards cheaper sources (aka "primary care physicians" and the like). So there is still significant market pressure to keep costs down. The real problem is that patients have little choice in their insurance providers, since that is usually determined by their employer, so individuals have little power in this system, and the quality of care can decline as a result of the insurance companies seeking lower-cost medicine.
Hmm. You are right, but not in the way you think you are. :-) You are conflating the frequency of the carrier particle itself with the frequency of the (much, much, MUCH slower) carrier wave that is transmitted using large numbers of carrier particles. From a physics point of view, these are two totally different things, although from an information-theory point of view they behave in a similar manner.
Consider this: You can do the same kind of frequency multiplexing that you described for copper cables for EACH different frequency of light. There is an extra "degree of freedom" here for light that electrons don't have.
An analogy with normal electronics would be if there were multiple kinds of electrons that could be passed along a wire, with each kind of electron not interacting (well, minimally interacting anyway) with the others. You could send one signal using electron type #1, the second signal using electron type #2, and so forth, and each signal could carry multiple carrier waves, upon each of which was a message.
I sometimes do this:
i fier})-{number}");
Pattern foo = Pattern.compile("c:/foo/bar".replace('/','\\'));
or just put the above in a library method that does it automatically:
Pattern foo = PatternUtils.compile("c:/foo/bar");
which is handy if other replacements are made by that library method also:
Pattern foo = PatternUtils.compile("({number}):{number}:({ident
MOD PARENT UP
You are both mistaken. There is only one Zathras. Time travel can get confusing sometimes. :-)
If you buy between (usually) December and January, they offer it as a SUBSTANTIAL discount to individual users. Usually around $250 or less. This is called a "Personal" subscription or somesuch.
Personally, I think it's well worth the money. I've tried Eclipse, and Idea seems a lot more streamlined and less awkward.
As another non-fan of the Copenhagen Interpretation, I suggest that you try looking at the Many Worlds Interpretation. It has an elegant explanation of the observer problem: Different versions of the observer observe different results. The results seem random to these observers because they all occur, and different observers see different things. This interpretation is beautifully elegant once you really understand it.
Basically, the Many Worlds interpretation simplifies to the Copenhagen interpretation if you decide that you are not interested in which worlds the observer occupies (and thus treat them as if they were a single world), which means that you then have to treat the set of worlds containing the results of the experiment as if they were nondeterministic (because they are really correlated with the worlds containing the observer, but you're treating the observers as if they were one world).
As an analogy, you could consider the Copenhagen Interpretation as sort of like what happens in Special Relativity when you pick a reference frame and measure everything else relative to it. The Many Worlds Interpretation is then more like trying to treat all reference frames as equivalent.