I usually ignore requests and spend a few minutes talking with my patients and explaining to them why "Expensiva" is not the best choice based on side effects, costs, or available randomized controlled trials.
Translation: you're actually a good doctor who realizes that patients shouldn't be the ones prescribing the drugs? It saddens me that you may very be among the minority...
Please explain to me how millions of tons of black soot caused by burning coal to produce electricity to charge all the batteries is cleaner than cars burning gasoline with 95% emmissions-free standards?
This is just retarded. If you centralize power generation, it makes it far easier to upgrade existing generation infrastructure, or migrate to new technologies as they become available. After all, gasoline cars burn gasoline for energy. Period. There are no alternatives. And it's awfully hard to retrofit millions of cars with new exhaust-scrubbing hardware or more efficient engines.
An electric car, however, can be run on wind, solar, nuclear, hydroelectric, coal gassification, geothermal, tidal... you name it. And existing generation can be improved as technology progresses (eg, enhanced scrubbers on coal plant stacks).
Honestly, did you spend any time thinking this through at all?
The guy who predicted the worst hurricane on record for 2006...
It's funny how, whenever this guy is brought up, you conservatives never mention that the scientific community quickly distanced themselves from his claims. But, hey, don't let that stop you from painting the entire community based on the actions of one man. After all, I'm sure he's the spokesman for the entire climatology community, right?
Umm, Iraq was never a threat to the US (any fictional WMDs they had would have made them a regional threat, not a danger to the US), unless you buy the idea that it was supporting terror. Problem is, if you accept that definition, then Iraq, today, is a *far* bigger threat, as it's a virtual safehouse for terrorist groups (the chaos there makes it virtually impossible for the US to do anything but fight insurgents...), and provides them with a perfect source of new recruits.
So, explain to me again how post-war Iraq is less of a threat to the US than pre-war Iraq?
I am sure that my govt will happily deport him if the **AA asks them to.
Umm, no offense, but that's one of the dumbest things I've ever read. The only way that US *law enforcement* (not the *AA, which is not a law enforcement agency) could ever swing deportation is if a crime was commited in the United States. Since that clearly wouldn't be the case here, there's no way in hell such a thing would occur.
The fact is, the worst possible situation for this guy would be that he wouldn't be able to enter the United States, for fear of being arrested, and even then, I don't that's likely.
Honestly, this kind of partisan fearmongering and rhetoric is useless, and the worst kind of deception (speaking as a liberal).
Anyone, who owns a computer, can get a significant amount freely through the internet
Unless they don't want to run the risk of their children or spouse finding said material, or evidence of it (such as browser histories, etc). Computers in families do tend to be used by more than just one person, you know...
Anyway, what kind of mentality do thse people have needing porn on their phones.
Did it occur to you that a cell phone is a fairly personal item, whereas computers are often used by a whole family? Thus, for some, it makes more sense to put porn on their phone, rather than place it on a machine where it (or other things, such as browser histories) may be found accidentally by, say, children?
So will you bitch and complain when people refer to China, Taiwan, and other countries as "Asia", even though that also includes countries such as India? I mean, who will think of those poor, excluded Indians??
Oh, BTW, I'm Canadian. I just happen not to give a damn if US citizens call themselves "Americans" (and neither does most of the rest of the world, BTW).
Eh, it's not so bad. Without that, the only check on legislative power would be the judiciary, which is a far more heavy-weight and circuitous process. On the flipside, it's on the onus of the president to cooperate with congress as they control the purse strings for the military and other branches controlled by the executive.
Incidentally, I'm Canadian and rather like my system, but the US system is an interesting design in theory. Unfortunately, things like the (virtual) two-party system, partly as a result of the electoral college system, institutionalized bribary (special interests have *far* too much power), the rider system, and so forth, result in what I perceive as a fundamentally broken implementation of what was a seemingly good idea (you know what they say about the difference between theory and practice...).
What the hell are you talking about? The GGP said "Presidents don't pass laws, therefore they aren't that important". The GP provided a counterpoint. How on earth is that off-topic?
Actually, he's advocating for a better educated child by having them taught in the private system, which, historically, is better.
Only because the American public system is so incredibly shitty.
The fact is, education in the US is the first successful application of the PNAC public policy: cut taxes until you backrupt public services, and then cut them in order to reduce the resulting deficit. In this case, the public education system languishes due to lack of funding and proper standards, and all the free market zealots cry out about how much better the private system is... for those rich enough to be able to afford it.
Otherwise, how can you explain why public education is quite successful in other countries (such as Canada)?
I'd also warn everyone that the founder of Hillarycare - the mandatory socialized medicine boondoggle that would have banned private payer insurance - doesn't sound all that right-to-privacy to me (the right to privacy, not enumerated in the Constitution, was based on liberty)
Funny, that. See, I live in Canada, and I'd argue that my freedoms are in far less danger than yours. So, tell me again how public healthcare is dangerous to liberty?
And let's remember that it was her hubby who authorized Echelon and searching Aldrich Ames without a warrant.
You get a first hand account of newly reported news items but without the lame over-processed and practiced "Live Eyewitness News Reporter" feel.
Yeah. You also get rank amateurs with no journalistic experience, no accountability, and consequently, no integrity. Thanks, but I'll take an experienced, seasoned journalist over some podcaster any day.
People keep saying this and it makes me wonder if they're blind or they just haven't seen a properly configured HDTV setup in a good environment.
You've just described precisely what most people *won't* have in their home, which is precisely why HDTV is a big "meh" for many. If, in order to really appreciate it, HD requires much more work than plugging the TV in and turning it on, then, for a not insignificant percentage of the population, it's simply *not worth it*.
Or, to put it another way, sure, you "videophiles" will love HD, nut you forget, your average consumer isn't a videophile.
Funny, I find downloading movies to be way more work than it's worth. Trying to find a functional torrent, alone, is a huge pain, and then you have to wait hours for the damn thing to arrive. And all so you can get a crappy Xvid transcode of something I could've gone to Futureshop and bought for $15, or gone to the video store and rented for $5.
Yeah, it's pretty obvious you aren't Canadian, as you have no idea how healthcare works here.
So, to enlighten you, no, Canada's healthcare is not nationalized. Healthcare here is managed by the provinces, with funding provided by the federal government, as Transfer Payments in the form of the Canada Health Transfer. This funding is provided with the condition that the provinces must implement a system which is compatible with the Canada Health Act.
So, yes, Quebec has it's own, independant healthcare system, as do all of the other provinces. Of course, many or most of those systems would be unable to function without federal funding, and so aren't financially independant, but there is no organizational connection between these systems and the federal government.
Actually, it's worse than that. HDCP runs over DVI just fine. After all, HDMI is just DVI + Audio. Using an HDMI->DVI cable does absolutely nothing to bypass the real problem, the friggin' HDCP protocol.
And the same is true of Quantum Mechanics, and that's a *massively* successful theory, almost as successful as SR or GR. The fact is, we've entered a realm of theoretical physics where only the specialists will *truly* understand the theory in full (and even then, there are those who believe that if you claim to understand Quantum Mechanics, you probably don't).
Hell, I would argue that there are large portions of GR and SR that are difficult to explain to your average man on the street. Just try to explain relativistic effects like time dilation to someone and watch their head spin. Even the idea of the constancy of the speed of light can be confusing (certainly unintuitive, when considering observers moving at relativistic speeds).
Wow, dude, sounds to me like you just had a shitty car. We've neglected to plug ours in on occasion (a '94 Honda Accord), and it'll start all the way down to at least -20C/-4F. And plugged in, we've *never* had a problem, and it's not unusual for a cold snap to drop us below -30C/-22F.
I'm not saying that I'm perfect or always right, the thing about using 3rd party libraries taken off the net is that they could have lots of bugs, just be inefficient
Well, if it's any kind of common library (like Boost for C++, or glib for C), it'll have far FAR more mileage on it than any code you've written, so odds are, it's less buggy than anything you (or I) could spit out. As for efficiency, you're making the classic mistake of prematurely optimizing. That kind of micro-optimization is rarely beneficial. 99% of the time, performance enhancements come in the form of higher-level algorithm modifications, not low-level library changes. And either way, you should be using a profiler to determine where the hotspots are, and then fixing those specific cases.
string/date/whatever manipulation I'd rather do my own to gain the experience
Heh, you know, it's really funny you should pick those examples. In the first case, there's *so many* string implementations out there that writing one yourself is pretty silly. That's like writing your own linked list implementation. An interesting educational exercise, yes, but a waste of any decent programmer's time. The basic C library has most of what anyone would need (although I'll grant that string composition is a pain in C, though that can be fixed by some clever using of vsnprintf and it's cousins). And every other decent (and not-so-decent) language that's higher-level than C has it's own string type.
And as for dates, you've just picked what is probably one of the most painful problems is normal application programming. Handling Gregorian dates is a *massive* pain in the ass. The entire problem space is one huge corner case. Time zones, daylight savings time, leap years... In fact, it's been said that if you were to try and design a system of times and dates that would be as difficult as possible to work with, it'd probably look a lot like what we have right now. Consequently, writing your own date code is absolute insanity! Why recreate bugs that someone else already fixed?
I was under the impression that it was simply for programmers who adopt poor coding practices
No, it's for programmers who don't want to waste their time handling memory allocation when a GC can do it better. It's also for programmers who realize they aren't perfect, and hate having to track down Yet Another Memory Stomper/Leak, when a GC could have eliminated the problem entirely. Or for programmers who value software security and stability over their ability to (poorly) hand optimize.
To me it sounded like a waste of processor cycles
Wrong. There have been many studies which show that GC's are as fast, if not faster than traditional malloc/free, as you can amortize costs over time. There's plenty of literature covering this, if you take the time to look.
I was under the impression that the GC was one of the main reasons for Java being slower than C
Also wrong. a) Java isn't that much slower, these days, thanks to hotspot JVMs doing runtime profiling and optimization. b) Even back in the old days, Java was slow primarily because of the VM. Yes, occasionally the GC would kick in and grind things to a halt briefly, but a modern generational GC is quite efficient.
but I guess I'm just elitist and would rather than people learn proper coding practices rather than have everything done for them
And this is just ridiculous. You might as well tell people to go back to using assembler. High-level languages and tools exist for two reasons: 1) they're faster, and 2) they're safer. And the latter is particularly important because *no* programmer is perfect, no matter how good they are.
though really I'd prefer to code everything myself to make sure that it's done right
Wow, that's quite a statement. It presumes that a) you know how to do everything the "right" way, and b) no one else can. So while you're wasting your time implementing Algorithm X for the nth time, I'll be busy actually doing something constructive, rather than reinventing the wheel over and over and over again.
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I usually ignore requests and spend a few minutes talking with my patients and explaining to them why "Expensiva" is not the best choice based on side effects, costs, or available randomized controlled trials.
Translation: you're actually a good doctor who realizes that patients shouldn't be the ones prescribing the drugs? It saddens me that you may very be among the minority...
Please explain to me how millions of tons of black soot caused by burning coal to produce electricity to charge all the batteries is cleaner than cars burning gasoline with 95% emmissions-free standards?
...
This is just retarded. If you centralize power generation, it makes it far easier to upgrade existing generation infrastructure, or migrate to new technologies as they become available. After all, gasoline cars burn gasoline for energy. Period. There are no alternatives. And it's awfully hard to retrofit millions of cars with new exhaust-scrubbing hardware or more efficient engines.
An electric car, however, can be run on wind, solar, nuclear, hydroelectric, coal gassification, geothermal, tidal... you name it. And existing generation can be improved as technology progresses (eg, enhanced scrubbers on coal plant stacks).
Honestly, did you spend any time thinking this through at all?
The guy who predicted the worst hurricane on record for 2006
It's funny how, whenever this guy is brought up, you conservatives never mention that the scientific community quickly distanced themselves from his claims. But, hey, don't let that stop you from painting the entire community based on the actions of one man. After all, I'm sure he's the spokesman for the entire climatology community, right?
And Iraq is no longer a threat to US indeed...
Umm, Iraq was never a threat to the US (any fictional WMDs they had would have made them a regional threat, not a danger to the US), unless you buy the idea that it was supporting terror. Problem is, if you accept that definition, then Iraq, today, is a *far* bigger threat, as it's a virtual safehouse for terrorist groups (the chaos there makes it virtually impossible for the US to do anything but fight insurgents...), and provides them with a perfect source of new recruits.
So, explain to me again how post-war Iraq is less of a threat to the US than pre-war Iraq?
I am sure that my govt will happily deport him if the **AA asks them to.
Umm, no offense, but that's one of the dumbest things I've ever read. The only way that US *law enforcement* (not the *AA, which is not a law enforcement agency) could ever swing deportation is if a crime was commited in the United States. Since that clearly wouldn't be the case here, there's no way in hell such a thing would occur.
The fact is, the worst possible situation for this guy would be that he wouldn't be able to enter the United States, for fear of being arrested, and even then, I don't that's likely.
Honestly, this kind of partisan fearmongering and rhetoric is useless, and the worst kind of deception (speaking as a liberal).
Anyone, who owns a computer, can get a significant amount freely through the internet
Unless they don't want to run the risk of their children or spouse finding said material, or evidence of it (such as browser histories, etc). Computers in families do tend to be used by more than just one person, you know...
Anyway, what kind of mentality do thse people have needing porn on their phones.
Did it occur to you that a cell phone is a fairly personal item, whereas computers are often used by a whole family? Thus, for some, it makes more sense to put porn on their phone, rather than place it on a machine where it (or other things, such as browser histories) may be found accidentally by, say, children?
So will you bitch and complain when people refer to China, Taiwan, and other countries as "Asia", even though that also includes countries such as India? I mean, who will think of those poor, excluded Indians??
Oh, BTW, I'm Canadian. I just happen not to give a damn if US citizens call themselves "Americans" (and neither does most of the rest of the world, BTW).
Eh, it's not so bad. Without that, the only check on legislative power would be the judiciary, which is a far more heavy-weight and circuitous process. On the flipside, it's on the onus of the president to cooperate with congress as they control the purse strings for the military and other branches controlled by the executive.
Incidentally, I'm Canadian and rather like my system, but the US system is an interesting design in theory. Unfortunately, things like the (virtual) two-party system, partly as a result of the electoral college system, institutionalized bribary (special interests have *far* too much power), the rider system, and so forth, result in what I perceive as a fundamentally broken implementation of what was a seemingly good idea (you know what they say about the difference between theory and practice...).
Your parent post is off-topic in this discussion
What the hell are you talking about? The GGP said "Presidents don't pass laws, therefore they aren't that important". The GP provided a counterpoint. How on earth is that off-topic?
Actually, he's advocating for a better educated child by having them taught in the private system, which, historically, is better.
Only because the American public system is so incredibly shitty.
The fact is, education in the US is the first successful application of the PNAC public policy: cut taxes until you backrupt public services, and then cut them in order to reduce the resulting deficit. In this case, the public education system languishes due to lack of funding and proper standards, and all the free market zealots cry out about how much better the private system is... for those rich enough to be able to afford it.
Otherwise, how can you explain why public education is quite successful in other countries (such as Canada)?
I'd also warn everyone that the founder of Hillarycare - the mandatory socialized medicine boondoggle that would have banned private payer insurance - doesn't sound all that right-to-privacy to me (the right to privacy, not enumerated in the Constitution, was based on liberty)
Funny, that. See, I live in Canada, and I'd argue that my freedoms are in far less danger than yours. So, tell me again how public healthcare is dangerous to liberty?
And let's remember that it was her hubby who authorized Echelon and searching Aldrich Ames without a warrant.
So?
You get a first hand account of newly reported news items but without the lame over-processed and practiced "Live Eyewitness News Reporter" feel.
Yeah. You also get rank amateurs with no journalistic experience, no accountability, and consequently, no integrity. Thanks, but I'll take an experienced, seasoned journalist over some podcaster any day.
Even if you find parks, the temperature in winter is usually in the -10C or thereabouts.
:) I've lived nearly my whole life in Edmonton, and we used to build snow forts and go tobogganing when it was in the -20s.
You *must* be joking.
Brett.
The kids watch Nickelodeon, Disney, and Cartoon Network about 8 hours a day
For the love of god, send your kids *outside*! 8 hours a day???
People keep saying this and it makes me wonder if they're blind or they just haven't seen a properly configured HDTV setup in a good environment.
You've just described precisely what most people *won't* have in their home, which is precisely why HDTV is a big "meh" for many. If, in order to really appreciate it, HD requires much more work than plugging the TV in and turning it on, then, for a not insignificant percentage of the population, it's simply *not worth it*.
Or, to put it another way, sure, you "videophiles" will love HD, nut you forget, your average consumer isn't a videophile.
Funny, I find downloading movies to be way more work than it's worth. Trying to find a functional torrent, alone, is a huge pain, and then you have to wait hours for the damn thing to arrive. And all so you can get a crappy Xvid transcode of something I could've gone to Futureshop and bought for $15, or gone to the video store and rented for $5.
Yeah, it's pretty obvious you aren't Canadian, as you have no idea how healthcare works here.
So, to enlighten you, no, Canada's healthcare is not nationalized. Healthcare here is managed by the provinces, with funding provided by the federal government, as Transfer Payments in the form of the Canada Health Transfer. This funding is provided with the condition that the provinces must implement a system which is compatible with the Canada Health Act.
So, yes, Quebec has it's own, independant healthcare system, as do all of the other provinces. Of course, many or most of those systems would be unable to function without federal funding, and so aren't financially independant, but there is no organizational connection between these systems and the federal government.
Actually, it's worse than that. HDCP runs over DVI just fine. After all, HDMI is just DVI + Audio. Using an HDMI->DVI cable does absolutely nothing to bypass the real problem, the friggin' HDCP protocol.
I can't understand this theory.
And the same is true of Quantum Mechanics, and that's a *massively* successful theory, almost as successful as SR or GR. The fact is, we've entered a realm of theoretical physics where only the specialists will *truly* understand the theory in full (and even then, there are those who believe that if you claim to understand Quantum Mechanics, you probably don't).
Hell, I would argue that there are large portions of GR and SR that are difficult to explain to your average man on the street. Just try to explain relativistic effects like time dilation to someone and watch their head spin. Even the idea of the constancy of the speed of light can be confusing (certainly unintuitive, when considering observers moving at relativistic speeds).
Wow, dude, sounds to me like you just had a shitty car. We've neglected to plug ours in on occasion (a '94 Honda Accord), and it'll start all the way down to at least -20C/-4F. And plugged in, we've *never* had a problem, and it's not unusual for a cold snap to drop us below -30C/-22F.
As an extremely minor grammatical nit to your otherwise excellent post, the term is "powder keg".
I'm not saying that I'm perfect or always right, the thing about using 3rd party libraries taken off the net is that they could have lots of bugs, just be inefficient
Well, if it's any kind of common library (like Boost for C++, or glib for C), it'll have far FAR more mileage on it than any code you've written, so odds are, it's less buggy than anything you (or I) could spit out. As for efficiency, you're making the classic mistake of prematurely optimizing. That kind of micro-optimization is rarely beneficial. 99% of the time, performance enhancements come in the form of higher-level algorithm modifications, not low-level library changes. And either way, you should be using a profiler to determine where the hotspots are, and then fixing those specific cases.
string/date/whatever manipulation I'd rather do my own to gain the experience
Heh, you know, it's really funny you should pick those examples. In the first case, there's *so many* string implementations out there that writing one yourself is pretty silly. That's like writing your own linked list implementation. An interesting educational exercise, yes, but a waste of any decent programmer's time. The basic C library has most of what anyone would need (although I'll grant that string composition is a pain in C, though that can be fixed by some clever using of vsnprintf and it's cousins). And every other decent (and not-so-decent) language that's higher-level than C has it's own string type.
And as for dates, you've just picked what is probably one of the most painful problems is normal application programming. Handling Gregorian dates is a *massive* pain in the ass. The entire problem space is one huge corner case. Time zones, daylight savings time, leap years... In fact, it's been said that if you were to try and design a system of times and dates that would be as difficult as possible to work with, it'd probably look a lot like what we have right now. Consequently, writing your own date code is absolute insanity! Why recreate bugs that someone else already fixed?
Cripes, someone is misinformed...
I was under the impression that it was simply for programmers who adopt poor coding practices
No, it's for programmers who don't want to waste their time handling memory allocation when a GC can do it better. It's also for programmers who realize they aren't perfect, and hate having to track down Yet Another Memory Stomper/Leak, when a GC could have eliminated the problem entirely. Or for programmers who value software security and stability over their ability to (poorly) hand optimize.
To me it sounded like a waste of processor cycles
Wrong. There have been many studies which show that GC's are as fast, if not faster than traditional malloc/free, as you can amortize costs over time. There's plenty of literature covering this, if you take the time to look.
I was under the impression that the GC was one of the main reasons for Java being slower than C
Also wrong. a) Java isn't that much slower, these days, thanks to hotspot JVMs doing runtime profiling and optimization. b) Even back in the old days, Java was slow primarily because of the VM. Yes, occasionally the GC would kick in and grind things to a halt briefly, but a modern generational GC is quite efficient.
but I guess I'm just elitist and would rather than people learn proper coding practices rather than have everything done for them
And this is just ridiculous. You might as well tell people to go back to using assembler. High-level languages and tools exist for two reasons: 1) they're faster, and 2) they're safer. And the latter is particularly important because *no* programmer is perfect, no matter how good they are.
though really I'd prefer to code everything myself to make sure that it's done right
Wow, that's quite a statement. It presumes that a) you know how to do everything the "right" way, and b) no one else can. So while you're wasting your time implementing Algorithm X for the nth time, I'll be busy actually doing something constructive, rather than reinventing the wheel over and over and over again.
"Management position"? You didn't read the GP post at all, did you? :)
You, sir, should be ashamed of yourself!