These people are then arrested regardless of whether or not they show signs of actual impairment.
Good, they should be. Why? Because *they're breaking the fucking law*.
Now, you may not like the limits that have been put in place. That's fine. Maybe.08 is too low. Who knows. Although some level *must* be set ("actual impairment" is *far* too wishy-washy a definition, and IMHO would simply leave the law open to *more* abuse by law enforcement, not less). But if you drive with a BAC over the legal limit, whatever that limit is, then you're breaking the law and you deserve to be thrown in jail. Period.
... so our government can keep being at 'war' with us.
Umm, quite the contrary, actually. One of the excuses I've heard for refusing to decriminalize or flat out legalize various drugs is because they can't be easily detected in a roadside test. See, if you're trying to nail a drunk driver, you've got the breathalizer. It's easy, then, to tell if a person is intoxicated while driving, and it provides solid evidence in a court case. But with recreational drugs, no such test has existed, up until this point. Instead, they had to drag you down to the station and you had to submit to a blood test, at which point the drug may have metabolized, rendering the results useless.
But with this release, suddenly that objection no longer exists. Now, the police have a reliable method for determining if an individual is driving while intoxicated on these other substances.
Frankly, I can't see how this can be anything but a *good* thing. Driving while intoxicated, no matter what the substance, is a dangerous, and frankly really *stupid* fucking thing to do. If the cops have tools to catch the morons who do it, then maybe people will become less concerned with the spectre of people driving stoned and running down their dear old granny down the street.
The real irony is that, without that sarcasm tag, you probably would've had plenty of Slashdotters cheering right along with you... AFAICT, you accidentally described what is effectively a Libertarian's wet dream.
Why do you think lumping everyone not working as unemployed is useful?
Because it's a more realistic number.
You must understand, unemployment rates are most interesting when you're trying to understand the relative health of the economy. During an extended recession, if you use the straight U-3 number, discouraged workers will start to fall off the map, while more and more people will be forced to go part time. All this means that, in a time of economic troubles, the U-3 number hides the real extent of economic turmoil, and if that number is used as a driver in the public policy debate, it'll cause the government to react insufficiently to the changes in the economy.
Basically, by including discouraged and marginally attached workers in the statistics, you see a more realistic picture of employment in the nation. Does that mean that the average number, even on good years, will appear higher (because of stay-at-home moms and so forth)? Yes, of course. But who cares? Just recalibrate your expectations.
Another commenter posted an excellent link, showing the various U measures. U-3 is the official unemployment rate, and does not include discouraged or marginally attached workers.
Those Western news reports still show much militancy in the civilian population who buy very heavily into their government's propaganda.
Of course they do. Those "Western news reports" would be pretty boring if they showed a bored, suppressed populace. After all, when was the last time you saw video of average, bored Arabs hanging out in coffee shops? That's right, you don't, you see the screaming nutjobs, because the nutjobs get ratings.
Well, last I checked, the US unemployment rate was substantially higher than the 3% of Norway or the 5% of Denmark, both of which are "socialist" countries. And if you use uncooked numbers, it's higher than the 9% of Sweden, too.
The former government loved the term "open unemployment rate", because that number was always substantially lower than the true unemployment rate.
So, at best, I think it's safe to say that at least the US and Sweden are probably about on par as far as unemployment goes (at least, they were... who knows, these days).
Glad to see I was right about the cooked numbers, though. I'm amazed anyone even bothers to look at government unemployment numbers, these days. They're nothing more than propaganda.
Good luck. Seriously, I wish you all the best, but never forget that small businesses regularly drop like flies, and the economic climate isn't exactly ideal for starting a business. And those hours sound like absolute *murder*!
In short: a pipeline is great if you can get people to buy the stuff you're shipping. But for security, peace of mind, and a reasonable lifestyle, sometimes it's better to just schlep those buckets.
'course, who knows what the actual numbers are. The US government is notorious for cooking the unemployment numbers (not counting people who've given up on finding a job, not tracking people who move from full- to part-time jobs, etc), and I can't imagine any other country is any different.
17-18 mph isn't anywhere near the 25 mph range. Nice try, though.
Hell, the winning average speed on the Tour de France is 40 kph/24 mph! Whoever those riders are that you're referring to should be on the competition circuit, because they sure as hell aren't typical.
What I tried to point out is that further consideration is needed on whether the environment needs to prepared/sterilized, i.e. made noncompetitive in ecological sense for the bacteria to do their job. It's not naive, it's biotechnology 101.
The bacteria are never put in the "environment" at large. They're stored and cultured in their own little specialized environment designed specifically for them. As I already mentioned it's called a "fuel cell".
Honestly, your complaint is akin to someone claiming that bacteria can't possibly be used to produce insulin because the insulin would get all diluted in the ocean when they're released. ie, it's a gross misunderstanding of how the technology is meant to be used.
As it comes to wastewater, it may be good idea, technology for doing that already exists. Mud is dense so mass transport would be extremely energy consuming.
Transport? What? You use the mud that's nearby, in a local river or streambed. Remember, the idea is to use this in places like the third world. They aren't going to be piping mud around like crude oil.
Absolutely correct. The idea that your typical commuter is averaging any more than 10-15mph on their bike is absolutely absurd. And, TBH, I think those "serious bikers" are probably full of shit, too.:)
Your entire post is based on one very stupid assumption: That their plan is to just dump the bacteria in local mud and have it generate electricity. Of course, that's absurd. What they'll do is place the bacteria in a controlled environment, aka a fuel cell, and then pass the mud/waste water/etc through the fuel cell to produce electricity.
But, hey, don't let common sense stop you from coming to silly conclusions.
the worst a private company can do is to piss away their own money (and that of their clients who have hopefully done their risk-management homework)
And given how many people got fucked out of their retirement savings, I'd say the percentage of those "clients" that you describe is decidedly low, because the market got waaaay too fucking complicated, and the experts had their heads too far up each other's asses to see what was really going on.
Seriously, if *really* believe that "the worst a private company can do is piss away their own money", you're too fucking stupid to take part in this conversation.
Students should be -encouraged- to collaborate because the real world is built on collaboration and research.
Yes, because I'm sure the problem is that students are just *dying* to collaborate over their cell phones, and those nasty teachers are too backwards to understand it.:rollseyes:
Sorry buddy, this is the kind of thing that's being communicated between students during times when they should be working:
"OMG did u c wat ashleys waring 2day???" "OMG I no wat a hore!" "LOL!!!"
Micronutrients aren't some woogidy-magical idea, they're well accepted science:
Yeah, except the OP explicitly said:
The other thing authors like Michael Pollan have been busy pointing out is that we don't know all the micro-nutrients in whole foods, so we actually can't know whether the contents of, say, organic lettuce, actually matches the contents of a conventionally grown lettuce because we simply don't know what all to look for.
(emphasis mine)
He then goes on to claim that organic foods are better. Even though he flat out stated that we don't have the ability to tell one way or the other.
The problem with that is that you're now limiting the maximum length of your string to whatever the witdth of the number at the beginning is.
Don't be ridiculous. It's trivial to implement Pascal strings that have all but arbitrary length. Just start the string with a length-of-length indicator, followed by a series of bytes which indicate the length in some encoding, followed by the string data itself. Or is 2048 bits of length not enough for you?:)
Of course, there's overhead, and it's complicated. I'm not saying it's a good idea. I'm just saying that an end-of-string marker is *not* required to implement strings.
The solution here isn't to switch all certificate reading code over to Pascal-style strings
But this I violently disagree with. While I don't advocate Pascal-style strings in general, no encoded data structure should use C-style strings. They should either use length indicators (2 or 4 bytes would be more than enough in this case), or fixed width fields. But C-style strings is a stupid *stupid* idea.
That said, I have no idea if that's what the spec *actually* requires. The spec may very well define strings as I've described above, but the implementations are simply b0rked.
Pigs are raised in the wild, they only eat natural food and they receive no antibiotics or hormones. Their meat tastes a lot better than the supermarket one, and I keep both in the freezer.
It tastes better, not because of the absence of hormones and antibiotics, but because of the consumption of different foods. Furthermore, which "tastes a lot better" depends a great deal on preference (I know a lot of people don't like wild meat because it tastes "gamey").
And still, they taste better than the supermarket ones.
a) Organic vegetables may be boutique varieties that provide lower yields but taste better. b) Supermarket vegetables often aren't picked at their proper ripeness. c) Without a double-blind study, your claims could just as easily be placebo effect.
That justifies baseless claims about the benefits of substances that have yet to be discovered? Or claims that organic farming somehow performs better at providing these hypothesized nutrients?
No. No, it doesn't. Those claims are still just as unfounded and hypothetical as they ever were.
don't you need an end-of-string indicator of some type?
Nope. The alternative would be to carry around the length at the start of the string. This would be known as a Pascal-style string (in contrast to what we're discussing here, which is a C-style string).
I have been buying organic food for 30 years or so and it is not because I believe it has higher levels of nutrients, but largely because of the lower levels of pesticide nutrients.
Some supporters of organic growing claim that the danger of non-organic food lies in the residues of chemical pesticides. This claim is even more ridiculous: Since the organic pesticides and fungicides are less efficient than their modern synthetic counterparts, up to seven times as much of it must be used. Organic pesticides include rotenone, which has been shown to cause the symptoms of Parkinson's Disease and is a natural poison used in hunting by some native tribes; pyrethrum, which is carcinogenic; sabadilla, which is highly toxic to honeybees; and fermented urine, which I don't want on my food whether it causes any diseases or not.
In short: organic farmers absolutely use pesticides, and a lot of them, some of which are pretty darn nasty.
The organic farming industry uses plenty of pesticides. In fact, because they use "organic" pesticides which are less effective, they're actually forced to use *far more*.
The "organic == no pesticides" meme is a myth, plain and simple.
No, they are trying to limit the use... (or they should, at least)
Except they don't. They use 7 times as much because the chemicals they use aren't as effective, remember?
Look, you can think wishfully all you want about that *should* be happening. But then there's reality, and you're gonna have to cope with the fact that it doesn't match your expectations.
Slashdot Mirror
These people are then arrested regardless of whether or not they show signs of actual impairment.
Good, they should be. Why? Because *they're breaking the fucking law*.
Now, you may not like the limits that have been put in place. That's fine. Maybe .08 is too low. Who knows. Although some level *must* be set ("actual impairment" is *far* too wishy-washy a definition, and IMHO would simply leave the law open to *more* abuse by law enforcement, not less). But if you drive with a BAC over the legal limit, whatever that limit is, then you're breaking the law and you deserve to be thrown in jail. Period.
... so our government can keep being at 'war' with us.
Umm, quite the contrary, actually. One of the excuses I've heard for refusing to decriminalize or flat out legalize various drugs is because they can't be easily detected in a roadside test. See, if you're trying to nail a drunk driver, you've got the breathalizer. It's easy, then, to tell if a person is intoxicated while driving, and it provides solid evidence in a court case. But with recreational drugs, no such test has existed, up until this point. Instead, they had to drag you down to the station and you had to submit to a blood test, at which point the drug may have metabolized, rendering the results useless.
But with this release, suddenly that objection no longer exists. Now, the police have a reliable method for determining if an individual is driving while intoxicated on these other substances.
Frankly, I can't see how this can be anything but a *good* thing. Driving while intoxicated, no matter what the substance, is a dangerous, and frankly really *stupid* fucking thing to do. If the cops have tools to catch the morons who do it, then maybe people will become less concerned with the spectre of people driving stoned and running down their dear old granny down the street.
The real irony is that, without that sarcasm tag, you probably would've had plenty of Slashdotters cheering right along with you... AFAICT, you accidentally described what is effectively a Libertarian's wet dream.
Why do you think lumping everyone not working as unemployed is useful?
Because it's a more realistic number.
You must understand, unemployment rates are most interesting when you're trying to understand the relative health of the economy. During an extended recession, if you use the straight U-3 number, discouraged workers will start to fall off the map, while more and more people will be forced to go part time. All this means that, in a time of economic troubles, the U-3 number hides the real extent of economic turmoil, and if that number is used as a driver in the public policy debate, it'll cause the government to react insufficiently to the changes in the economy.
Basically, by including discouraged and marginally attached workers in the statistics, you see a more realistic picture of employment in the nation. Does that mean that the average number, even on good years, will appear higher (because of stay-at-home moms and so forth)? Yes, of course. But who cares? Just recalibrate your expectations.
Another commenter posted an excellent link, showing the various U measures. U-3 is the official unemployment rate, and does not include discouraged or marginally attached workers.
Those Western news reports still show much militancy in the civilian population who buy very heavily into their government's propaganda.
Of course they do. Those "Western news reports" would be pretty boring if they showed a bored, suppressed populace. After all, when was the last time you saw video of average, bored Arabs hanging out in coffee shops? That's right, you don't, you see the screaming nutjobs, because the nutjobs get ratings.
That point would be which one?
Well, last I checked, the US unemployment rate was substantially higher than the 3% of Norway or the 5% of Denmark, both of which are "socialist" countries. And if you use uncooked numbers, it's higher than the 9% of Sweden, too.
The former government loved the term "open unemployment rate", because that number was always substantially lower than the true unemployment rate.
So, at best, I think it's safe to say that at least the US and Sweden are probably about on par as far as unemployment goes (at least, they were... who knows, these days).
Glad to see I was right about the cooked numbers, though. I'm amazed anyone even bothers to look at government unemployment numbers, these days. They're nothing more than propaganda.
Good luck. Seriously, I wish you all the best, but never forget that small businesses regularly drop like flies, and the economic climate isn't exactly ideal for starting a business. And those hours sound like absolute *murder*!
In short: a pipeline is great if you can get people to buy the stuff you're shipping. But for security, peace of mind, and a reasonable lifestyle, sometimes it's better to just schlep those buckets.
And yet, his point remains... :)
'course, who knows what the actual numbers are. The US government is notorious for cooking the unemployment numbers (not counting people who've given up on finding a job, not tracking people who move from full- to part-time jobs, etc), and I can't imagine any other country is any different.
17-18 mph isn't anywhere near the 25 mph range. Nice try, though.
Hell, the winning average speed on the Tour de France is 40 kph/24 mph! Whoever those riders are that you're referring to should be on the competition circuit, because they sure as hell aren't typical.
What I tried to point out is that further consideration is needed on whether the environment needs to prepared/sterilized, i.e. made noncompetitive in ecological sense for the bacteria to do their job. It's not naive, it's biotechnology 101.
The bacteria are never put in the "environment" at large. They're stored and cultured in their own little specialized environment designed specifically for them. As I already mentioned it's called a "fuel cell".
Honestly, your complaint is akin to someone claiming that bacteria can't possibly be used to produce insulin because the insulin would get all diluted in the ocean when they're released. ie, it's a gross misunderstanding of how the technology is meant to be used.
As it comes to wastewater, it may be good idea, technology for doing that already exists. Mud is dense so mass transport would be extremely energy consuming.
Transport? What? You use the mud that's nearby, in a local river or streambed. Remember, the idea is to use this in places like the third world. They aren't going to be piping mud around like crude oil.
Absolutely correct. The idea that your typical commuter is averaging any more than 10-15mph on their bike is absolutely absurd. And, TBH, I think those "serious bikers" are probably full of shit, too. :)
Your entire post is based on one very stupid assumption: That their plan is to just dump the bacteria in local mud and have it generate electricity. Of course, that's absurd. What they'll do is place the bacteria in a controlled environment, aka a fuel cell, and then pass the mud/waste water/etc through the fuel cell to produce electricity.
But, hey, don't let common sense stop you from coming to silly conclusions.
the worst a private company can do is to piss away their own money (and that of their clients who have hopefully done their risk-management homework)
And given how many people got fucked out of their retirement savings, I'd say the percentage of those "clients" that you describe is decidedly low, because the market got waaaay too fucking complicated, and the experts had their heads too far up each other's asses to see what was really going on.
Seriously, if *really* believe that "the worst a private company can do is piss away their own money", you're too fucking stupid to take part in this conversation.
Students should be -encouraged- to collaborate because the real world is built on collaboration and research.
Yes, because I'm sure the problem is that students are just *dying* to collaborate over their cell phones, and those nasty teachers are too backwards to understand it. :rollseyes:
Sorry buddy, this is the kind of thing that's being communicated between students during times when they should be working:
"OMG did u c wat ashleys waring 2day???"
"OMG I no wat a hore!"
"LOL!!!"
The guy who turns around and punches you in the face for coming up with a really stupid analogy.
Micronutrients aren't some woogidy-magical idea, they're well accepted science:
Yeah, except the OP explicitly said:
(emphasis mine)
He then goes on to claim that organic foods are better. Even though he flat out stated that we don't have the ability to tell one way or the other.
The problem with that is that you're now limiting the maximum length of your string to whatever the witdth of the number at the beginning is.
Don't be ridiculous. It's trivial to implement Pascal strings that have all but arbitrary length. Just start the string with a length-of-length indicator, followed by a series of bytes which indicate the length in some encoding, followed by the string data itself. Or is 2048 bits of length not enough for you? :)
Of course, there's overhead, and it's complicated. I'm not saying it's a good idea. I'm just saying that an end-of-string marker is *not* required to implement strings.
The solution here isn't to switch all certificate reading code over to Pascal-style strings
But this I violently disagree with. While I don't advocate Pascal-style strings in general, no encoded data structure should use C-style strings. They should either use length indicators (2 or 4 bytes would be more than enough in this case), or fixed width fields. But C-style strings is a stupid *stupid* idea.
That said, I have no idea if that's what the spec *actually* requires. The spec may very well define strings as I've described above, but the implementations are simply b0rked.
Pigs are raised in the wild, they only eat natural food and they receive no antibiotics or hormones. Their meat tastes a lot better than the supermarket one, and I keep both in the freezer.
It tastes better, not because of the absence of hormones and antibiotics, but because of the consumption of different foods. Furthermore, which "tastes a lot better" depends a great deal on preference (I know a lot of people don't like wild meat because it tastes "gamey").
And still, they taste better than the supermarket ones.
a) Organic vegetables may be boutique varieties that provide lower yields but taste better.
b) Supermarket vegetables often aren't picked at their proper ripeness.
c) Without a double-blind study, your claims could just as easily be placebo effect.
I approve locally grown food, too.
Well, be careful, as it's not necessarily a good thing for the environment.
Obviously, by traditional, I mean farming as performed today, throughout most (all?) of the developed world.
Honestly, did I really need to spell that out?
That justifies baseless claims about the benefits of substances that have yet to be discovered? Or claims that organic farming somehow performs better at providing these hypothesized nutrients?
No. No, it doesn't. Those claims are still just as unfounded and hypothetical as they ever were.
don't you need an end-of-string indicator of some type?
Nope. The alternative would be to carry around the length at the start of the string. This would be known as a Pascal-style string (in contrast to what we're discussing here, which is a C-style string).
I have been buying organic food for 30 years or so and it is not because I believe it has higher levels of nutrients, but largely because of the lower levels of pesticide nutrients.
You might want to try rethinking those assumptions. To quote:
In short: organic farmers absolutely use pesticides, and a lot of them, some of which are pretty darn nasty.
The organic farming industry uses plenty of pesticides. In fact, because they use "organic" pesticides which are less effective, they're actually forced to use *far more*.
The "organic == no pesticides" meme is a myth, plain and simple.
No, they are trying to limit the use ... (or they should, at least)
Except they don't. They use 7 times as much because the chemicals they use aren't as effective, remember?
Look, you can think wishfully all you want about that *should* be happening. But then there's reality, and you're gonna have to cope with the fact that it doesn't match your expectations.