Determining temperatures from millions of years ago is complex, but irrelevant here.
This article references the holocene; the last 10,000 years or so. "Historical" data readings properly refer to cases where someone looked at a thermometer and wrote it down, and only go back only as far as the thermometer, about 150 years. Beyond that, we must look at "proxy" records, chiefly tree-ring sizes and the molecular composition of ice-cores, which go back 2000 and 8000 years respectively. As far as the range of error, that varies by sample and estimate obviously. If you want all the details, you should do some research. But the short answer is, it's more than good enough to support this articles conclusions: The earth is now at least as warm as it ever has been since the last ice age.
Re:The problem with guis is they don't work
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I didn't mean to come off as defensive. We disagree. I think some current guis are pretty good. I think even mediocre guis are better than anything else in existence. While I'd say all software more or less sucks in relation to some platonic ideal, in the context of a discussion comparing different interface types I wouldn't say guis suck because they are the best thing going by a long shot.
Just out of curiosity, did you post that with Lynx? Given the superiority of text-based interfaces, you wouldn't use a graphical browser would you?
Re:The problem with guis is they don't work
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Whatever. There are better GUIs and worse guis. In my opinion, the better guis are vastly superior to CLIs for any task I'm going to do "by hand". If I'm not goin gto use a gui, it's because I'm going to write a script to do it. It has been many years since there was any task I would prefer to do from a command line. Certainly there are lame, hard to use GUIs out there. The worst, lamest ones I still use are perhaps no better than a command line, but they aren't any worse.
Your mileage may vary. Many smart people I know like command lines, and I'm not on any mission to convert them. But they amuse me, because whenever they've got a way-cool command-line-fu thing they think is cool, it's either something that is just as easy in a gui (and far less obscure) or something that shouldn't require a human at all.
I mean, seriously, are you posting to slashdot from a CLI, or are maybe GUIs good for something?
Re:The problem with guis is they don't work
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Am I the only geek in the world who thinks good GUIs are the best thing since the transistor? By way of cred-establishment, I have in the past been an utter wizard on at least 4 different command-line interfaces. I'll take a decent gui over any of them. I had to start fresh on each one, looking stuff up in a manual every time I wanted to do something new. And that's not even touching discovering stuff I didn't think to look for. I can do stuff via a shell if I have to, but if I have to it's because some GUI designer failed. In my experience, if the command line is a faster way to do it, I may as well open an editor and write an automated script.
"If property rights are just artifical constructs of the government, why don't I just stop by and take your computer?"
Duh. Because the police will arrest you for violating our artificial societal construct.
"Of course there might be a good argumet behind the conclusion that man has an inherent right to life, liberty, and property."
If there is, I'd like to hear it. The sugestion that property, or any "right", exists independent of society seems pretty obviously ridiculous to me. I mean, "property", "liberty": these are not physical things, they are ideas. Ideas I'm fond of, to be sure, but they are not real without reference to society to make them so.
"It might also help to note that you can draw a direct correlation between the strength of property rights and prosperity."
Ah, now a correlation with a real societal benefit, like prosperity, would be an excellent reason to adopt an artificial construct like property. Best to keep straight which is which though; if you start thinking of property as somehow sacred beyond it's benefit to the society whithin which it exists, there's no end to the crazy conclusions you might reach.
They have marketing savy to know X kilowatts doesn't mean as much to people as $9, but exactly what kWh to dollar ratio they are using doesn't strike me as the biggest problem with their claims.
They propose to increase the performance of electric cars by several orders of magnitude. They reference technologies that have barely reached the lab demonstration phase, to which they propose to make vaugely described radical improvements, and deliver as a product next year. There is no prototype to be seen. I mean, that really sums it up: They say they'll be selling a car next year, but have no prototype today.
Those who consider anyone else using their code in a comercial product "rape" should indeed avoid BSD. But I highly reccomend BSD to those who just want others to use and improve their software.
Let's say you make a nice charting library, and BSD license it. Then I need a charting library for my closed source app, so I use it. Now I make some improvements to it. Am I going to hoard these improvements like the evil proprietary developer I am, so I can capture the lucrative charting-library-market away from you? Let's not be silly; I'm not in the charting-library business, even if there was such a thing. Charting is a nice add-on to my product. For reasons I'd hopew I don't need to enumerate here, it's better for me if my improvements are added to the main project, and merged with everyone elses.
This is not hypothetical. The company I work for has paid it's own developers to make improvements to BSD code that we've submitted back to the maintainers. We've paid both original developers and third parties to make BSD licensed improvements to BSD licensed code.
I should note that I have nothing against people who release their code GPL. We won't use it because we want the right to mix it freely with code we intend to keep closed and to sell the result. If you don't want us to do that, by all means use the GPL. I just want to encourage people to consider the fact that while the BSD doesn't garauntee you'll get any improvements others make to your code, it may in practical terms mean that more improvements are made in the first place.
The constitution says only that there must be an enumeration every ten years "in such manner as [Congress] shall by law direct.", and there's certainly no prohibition on asking other stuff at the same time. So congress has by law (specifically, US Code Title 13) directed that the Beareau should collect a eclectic stew of information. Some of which is obviously essential to making good public policy and some of which apparently sounded good to someone at the time. The latter tends to get repealed. But in any case, at any given time, what information to collect is spelled out in law. The census beareau asks what that law tells it to ask.
They got rid of Napster, and while some may now use BitTorrent, a lot more use iTunes. Official commercial video distribution sites are going to get organized, and you can bet the big media companies are going to try to disrupt unofficial, unlicensed distribution. Note the analogy with Napster: it's not a matter of killing off the technical ability to download stuff free, what's important is killing off the brand. It's about what site the kids think of when they think of downloading stuff. That used to be Napster, now it's iTunes. For YouTube to be successfull, it's got to be the next iTunes, but it's looking a lot like the next Napster.
Bandwidth cost has plummeted lately, but only declined modestly through the nineties; I'm not sure I'd count on more than linear decline much into the future. Regardless, I'd say the main barrier to entry is YouTubes existing name recognition. But since it looks like their competitors are going to be named "Google" and "iTunes", I think they are doomed.
All that said, a business model based on advertising some time in the future, they hope, and then maybe they'll think about making actual profits sometime... and they want $1.5 billion? Why exactly do they think the value of their company is positive?
Yeah, imagine, adjusting ones opinions based on the facts of the debate. They oppose the government doing things they think are bad, then the next thing you know, they want the government to do things they think are good. How can one respect oneself if one changes one's answer just because it's a different question? "Yes" or "No", just pick one and stick with it already!
Out of curiosity, which ballot spot do you vote for? I'm strictly a second- candidate-from-the-top voter myself. Can't wait to see what order they put them in this time so I'll know who I support.
"Your argument is that people used to inhale more cigeratte smoke than mechanics do now?"
My argument is that whether car exaust is bad for you is entirely irrelevant to whether smoking is bad for you.
"So, you used the word 'extremely' in an attempt to make smoking sound worse than it is"
No, I would still say smoking is extremely bad for you, because based on my understanding of how bad for you smoking is, it is beyond my threshold for using the word "extremely". You said "extremely" bad for you things kill you in a couple years. That's a perfectly reasonable threshold for using that word, but it is obviously different than mine. It is silly to argue whether "extremely" is the right word if we mean different things when we say it. In an attempt to be more precise, I will say this:
I think in terms of long term health risk, smoking is worse for people who do it than anything else large numbers of people choose to do.
This includes working as a professional mechanic, or living in a city.
"'Going by rates of heart & lung disease it's orders of magnitude worse for you than breathing inner-city levels of car exaust every day.'
It sure would seem that way when all the people that die from inner-city levels of car exaust get counted as 'Smoking related deaths'."
No. I'm not talking about counting 'Smoking related deaths' here. We count deaths from lung and heart disease. Then we compare the rate of those deaths amongst smokers to the rate in the general population; And we compare the rate of those deaths amongst city dwellers to the general population; and every other group someone thinks to look at. Smokers die of lung and heart disease at a far higher rate than city dwellers, or the general population. This analysis does not require ever knowing or assuming that any particular death was caused by smoking, car exaust, dumb luck, or whatever. Rates of death from lung and heart disease are much higher amongst smokers. This does not prove, in a mathematical sense, that smoking causes lung and heart disease, but given the number of deaths in the sample size, it strains credultiy to imagine any other explanation.
"So, your saying that the statistics your claiming do not come from paid studies. That the numbers are collected and analysed entirely by volenteers."
When I've looked at them, they've come from the NIH, whose nefarious connection to your anti-smoking industry I fail to see. In any case, others have tallied up the data too; you could even do so yourself. The "analysis" is not complex, just add up the number of deaths from lung and heart disease amongst smokers and non-smokers, and divide by the total. How exactly people are supposedly skewing this, I don't know.
"The anti-smoking industry must be telling the truth because they don't make as many billions of dollars as the tabacco industry? That makes absolutly no sense."
I understood your argument for not trusting the 'anti-smoking industry' to be that they had a financial interest in convincing people smoking is dangerous. To whatever extent that is true, the pro-smoking industry has a greater interest in convincing them otherwise. I agree it makes no sense to judge others statements exclusively on their motivations; so I would prefer to base my judgements on other peoples opinions as little as possible. My judgement that smoking is dangerous relies on others in three ways I can see:
It relies on patients to accurtately report whether they are smokers. The only way to make smoking seem more dangerous here is if non-smokers lied and claimed to be smokers in large numbers. I can't see that happening.
It relies on doctors to accurately report causes of death. Again, I can't see massive fraud here; besides, they'd never get away with it. I've known people dying of lung cancer; it ain't subtle.
It relies on the NIH to accurately do basic addition and division. I think they can, and it would be trivial to call them on it in any case.
You can certainly have fun your entire life, and I reccomend trying to do so. But even if you could have the same sort of fun you had at 20 your whole life, would you want to? The fun of being young is that everything is a new experience, all the posibilities are open. But at some point you actually learn some stuff, and pursue some particular possibilities, so the sort of fun you are likely to want at 35 is different than sort you had at 20. I certainly know know some people whose interests have not changed; who are still doing the same stuff at 40 they were at 20, but I wouldn't exactly say I envy them.
"Now excuse me while I go put some Twisted Sister on...."
Dude! Rock on! (actually, my only remaining impression of Twisted Sister is their way-cool logo that I doodled on all my notebooks. Memories of their actual music seem to have been systematically erradicated by my subconcious; I can only assume for good reason)
"Who are these "people" you talk about that sit in poorly ventelated rooms with smokers. Neither I, nor anyone I know falls into that category."
Not anymore, because we figured out cigarette smoke was bad for you. But not so long ago, flight attendants, bartenders, and spouses of smokers spent a lot of time in under ventilated spaces with cigarrette smoke. And all had distinctly elevated cancer risk.
"many mechanics, both amature and professional, inhale large quantities of car exaust."
If professional mechanics are inhaling significant quantities of car exaust, their employers are in serious violation of OSHA rules, and are in danger of serious fines.
"You have to be kidding when you imply that the general public is exposed to more cigerette smoke than car exaust."
I did not mean to imply that. I meant to state that the general public is not in remotely as much danger from car exaust as smokers are from cigarrette smoke.
"Just" and "extremely" are not technical terms; arguing which one is correct is obviously stupid. Smoking is not as bad for you as bullets in the head. Going by rates of heart & lung disease it's orders of magnitude worse for you than breathing inner-city levels of car exaust every day.
"If you are unwilling to even question an industry that is bringing in billions of dollars a year, your arguments simply carry no wieght."
My arguments are not based on any industry; they are based on rates of disease in smokers versus non-smokers. But note that the cigarrette industry brings in a heck of a lot more than you're so-called anti-smoking industry.
There's plenty of those tasks. There's just not a heck of a lot to be done about it. The apparent recent focus on paralel tasks is partly because chip makers are running out of easy ways to make non-parralel tasks any faster. But it's relatively easy to do the same task more times in parralel at the same speed. Which probably doesn't help until the software gets re-written to take advantage of that, assuming it can be.
On the other hand, my impression is that a lot of tasks that seem like they can't benefit from parralelization actually can, if you're willing to put vast amounts of effort into figuring out how. Which nobody has been before, but which they might be as performance improvements become steadily more reliant on parralelization.
People don't spend significant fractions of their lives in poorly ventilated rooms with cars. They do spend signifcant fractions of their lives in poorly ventilated rooms with smokers.
Are there more dangerous things to inhale than tobacco smoke? Sure! There are plenty of things you can inhale that will kill you right then and there.
But you cannot list "dozens" of things that remotely similar numbers of people inhale with remotely similar frequency that are anywhere near as bad for you as cigarrette smoke.
I'm trying to figure out what you're on about with the "anti-smoking industry" stuff. Apparently you think someone nefarious has a big financial stake in convincing people to stop smoking, but I'm not clear who that is. Since I stopped smoking, I have a lot more money to spend that I used to spend on cigarrettes. I'm also much more athleticly active now that my lungs work so much better, so I spend a fair fraction of that money on bike parts. Perhaps you're suggesting Shimano is paying off cancer researchers to skew their findings? Maybe they could be in a big conspiracy with gyms and athletic shoe companies. No, that only works if smoking is actually bad for you. Sorry, I can't figure out who else gets any money from my not smoking.
Well anyway, regardless of the long term health effects you bizzarrely dispute, in the very short term, my lungs unquestionably work radically better. I'm not being "duped" into thinking I can now run distances that would have winded me to jog as a smoker; I can actually do it.
Um, dude, learn some statistics. Smokers have insanely higher rates of lung and heart disease than non smokers. The sample size establishing this has reached the "enormous" level. Smoking is extremely bad for you. Yes, inhaling anything but air is probably bad for you, but nothing anyone inhales with any frequency is close to as bad as tobbaco smoke.
"'Oil' companies are really 'energy fuel' companies."
So their propaganda says, but it's hogwash. They are oil companies. They have masssive investments in oil production, transportation and refinement. A rediculous fraction of their worth is their development contracts with oil rich nations. If the world moves to other energy sources, they'll be hurting bad. Sure, of course they'll try to be prepared and to adapt, but it's worth vast amounts to them to keep oil going strong, because they have massive unrecoverable investments in it. It may be to their advantage to appear as if they don't care what energy sources are dominant to investors, regulators, or the public but you don't have to swallow that line. If they don't care they are idiots, because today they are oil companies, and if they have to change into something else tommorow, it will suck for them.
I'm unclear what ADM has to do with any of this. Sure, they're evil; they make tons of political donations to whoever is in power to keep their unjustified agriculture subsidies flowing. But they are pragmatic bribers. I find it hard to imagine they've given Al Gore a dime recently, what can he do for them? Republicans, on the other hand...
Yes, I did assume you were trying to make a rational argument. I apologize for that unfounded assumption. But I did not misunderstand you.
You said: "The US is already investing trillions in foreign aid."
This is plainly false, regardless of what time period you meant. Taking 2 trillion as a minimum to be called "trillions", and giving you the ultimate benefit of the doubt by assuming you meant the entire 230 year history of the United States (in which case your tense is wrong; "investing" implies a rate per time period) foriegn aid spending would have to average 8.7 billion yearly over the whole 230 years. Only the last few years have gotten that high at all. None of the 20th century is that high, not even the Marshall plan, never mind the 19th century.
Total US Foriegn Aid spending ever is not anywhere close to trillions. "The US is already investing trillions in foreign aid." is a flatly false statement, obviously ridiculous to anyone who has the slightest idea what they are talking about.
Senior + Senior can be good too, when you need it.
It definitely depends on the pair. My office mate and I have worked together a long time, and have similar styles. We've found pair programing highly effective when something needs to go out the door very fast and correct. With me looking over his shoulder (he types faster), we can generate complete, shippable code considerably more than twice as fast as either of us working alone. But if we did it all the time, I think we'd go insane.
Wow, that's a pretty desperate defense of your made up numbers. I assumed you were quoting figures for some rational purpose; to support an argument perhaps. Obviously, spending levels are utterly meaningless without specifying a time period. I'm sure you disagree, but you're full of it in any case:
The United States has not spent trillions on foriegn aid in the course of it's entire history.
No doubt you'll now point out that you never said you meant dollars...
"Can you imagine what one billion dollars would achieve if spent for FOSS?"
Yes. I imagine it would achieve far less than you think.
"Can you imagine a world where any standard software is free of charge for any kind of computer."
Yes, I live in such a world. Well, maybe not the "any kind of computer" part, but all the kinds I have, so same difference. It seldom even occurs to me to pay for software I consider at all "standard".
"Can you imagine a world where even specialised software doesn't cost more a $100?"
No. I write very specialized software for a living. Given a small number of potential users, there is a minimum price per user that will pay me enough to write that software. There certainly exists software specialized enough that that minimum price is above $100.
"Can you picture how one billion dollars could change the world if spent for FOSS?"
I'd imagine many, many times this is spent yearly on FOSS development in any case. A billion is a lot of money, but not as much as you seem to think.
I installed XP on a RAID on my home machine that doesn't have a floppy drive. I just booted from CD.
Certainly the rack mount/blade servers the IT guys down the hall don't waste sppace for a floppy drive, and they certainly do all the "interesting" stuff with hard drives.
Slashdot Mirror
Determining temperatures from millions of years ago is complex, but irrelevant here.
This article references the holocene; the last 10,000 years or so. "Historical" data readings properly refer to cases where someone looked at a thermometer and wrote it down, and only go back only as far as the thermometer, about 150 years. Beyond that, we must look at "proxy" records, chiefly tree-ring sizes and the molecular composition of ice-cores, which go back 2000 and 8000 years respectively. As far as the range of error, that varies by sample and estimate obviously. If you want all the details, you should do some research. But the short answer is, it's more than good enough to support this articles conclusions: The earth is now at least as warm as it ever has been since the last ice age.
I didn't mean to come off as defensive. We disagree. I think some current guis are pretty good. I think even mediocre guis are better than anything else in existence. While I'd say all software more or less sucks in relation to some platonic ideal, in the context of a discussion comparing different interface types I wouldn't say guis suck because they are the best thing going by a long shot.
Just out of curiosity, did you post that with Lynx? Given the superiority of text-based interfaces, you wouldn't use a graphical browser would you?
Whatever. There are better GUIs and worse guis. In my opinion, the better guis are vastly superior to CLIs for any task I'm going to do "by hand". If I'm not goin gto use a gui, it's because I'm going to write a script to do it. It has been many years since there was any task I would prefer to do from a command line. Certainly there are lame, hard to use GUIs out there. The worst, lamest ones I still use are perhaps no better than a command line, but they aren't any worse.
Your mileage may vary. Many smart people I know like command lines, and I'm not on any mission to convert them. But they amuse me, because whenever they've got a way-cool command-line-fu thing they think is cool, it's either something that is just as easy in a gui (and far less obscure) or something that shouldn't require a human at all.
I mean, seriously, are you posting to slashdot from a CLI, or are maybe GUIs good for something?
Am I the only geek in the world who thinks good GUIs are the best thing since the transistor? By way of cred-establishment, I have in the past been an utter wizard on at least 4 different command-line interfaces. I'll take a decent gui over any of them. I had to start fresh on each one, looking stuff up in a manual every time I wanted to do something new. And that's not even touching discovering stuff I didn't think to look for. I can do stuff via a shell if I have to, but if I have to it's because some GUI designer failed. In my experience, if the command line is a faster way to do it, I may as well open an editor and write an automated script.
"If property rights are just artifical constructs of the government, why don't I just stop by and take your computer?"
Duh. Because the police will arrest you for violating our artificial societal construct.
"Of course there might be a good argumet behind the conclusion that man has an inherent right to life, liberty, and property."
If there is, I'd like to hear it. The sugestion that property, or any "right", exists independent of society seems pretty obviously ridiculous to me. I mean, "property", "liberty": these are not physical things, they are ideas. Ideas I'm fond of, to be sure, but they are not real without reference to society to make them so.
"It might also help to note that you can draw a direct correlation between the strength of property rights and prosperity."
Ah, now a correlation with a real societal benefit, like prosperity, would be an excellent reason to adopt an artificial construct like property. Best to keep straight which is which though; if you start thinking of property as somehow sacred beyond it's benefit to the society whithin which it exists, there's no end to the crazy conclusions you might reach.
They have marketing savy to know X kilowatts doesn't mean as much to people as $9, but exactly what kWh to dollar ratio they are using doesn't strike me as the biggest problem with their claims.
They propose to increase the performance of electric cars by several orders of magnitude. They reference technologies that have barely reached the lab demonstration phase, to which they propose to make vaugely described radical improvements, and deliver as a product next year. There is no prototype to be seen. I mean, that really sums it up: They say they'll be selling a car next year, but have no prototype today.
Those who consider anyone else using their code in a comercial product "rape" should indeed avoid BSD. But I highly reccomend BSD to those who just want others to use and improve their software.
Let's say you make a nice charting library, and BSD license it. Then I need a charting library for my closed source app, so I use it. Now I make some improvements to it. Am I going to hoard these improvements like the evil proprietary developer I am, so I can capture the lucrative charting-library-market away from you? Let's not be silly; I'm not in the charting-library business, even if there was such a thing. Charting is a nice add-on to my product. For reasons I'd hopew I don't need to enumerate here, it's better for me if my improvements are added to the main project, and merged with everyone elses.
This is not hypothetical. The company I work for has paid it's own developers to make improvements to BSD code that we've submitted back to the maintainers. We've paid both original developers and third parties to make BSD licensed improvements to BSD licensed code.
I should note that I have nothing against people who release their code GPL. We won't use it because we want the right to mix it freely with code we intend to keep closed and to sell the result. If you don't want us to do that, by all means use the GPL. I just want to encourage people to consider the fact that while the BSD doesn't garauntee you'll get any improvements others make to your code, it may in practical terms mean that more improvements are made in the first place.
Where does this meme come from?
The constitution says only that there must be an enumeration every ten years "in such manner as [Congress] shall by law direct.", and there's certainly no prohibition on asking other stuff at the same time. So congress has by law (specifically, US Code Title 13) directed that the Beareau should collect a eclectic stew of information. Some of which is obviously essential to making good public policy and some of which apparently sounded good to someone at the time. The latter tends to get repealed. But in any case, at any given time, what information to collect is spelled out in law. The census beareau asks what that law tells it to ask.
They got rid of Napster, and while some may now use BitTorrent, a lot more use iTunes. Official commercial video distribution sites are going to get organized, and you can bet the big media companies are going to try to disrupt unofficial, unlicensed distribution. Note the analogy with Napster: it's not a matter of killing off the technical ability to download stuff free, what's important is killing off the brand. It's about what site the kids think of when they think of downloading stuff. That used to be Napster, now it's iTunes. For YouTube to be successfull, it's got to be the next iTunes, but it's looking a lot like the next Napster.
Bandwidth cost has plummeted lately, but only declined modestly through the nineties; I'm not sure I'd count on more than linear decline much into the future. Regardless, I'd say the main barrier to entry is YouTubes existing name recognition. But since it looks like their competitors are going to be named "Google" and "iTunes", I think they are doomed.
All that said, a business model based on advertising some time in the future, they hope, and then maybe they'll think about making actual profits sometime... and they want $1.5 billion? Why exactly do they think the value of their company is positive?
Yeah, imagine, adjusting ones opinions based on the facts of the debate. They oppose the government doing things they think are bad, then the next thing you know, they want the government to do things they think are good. How can one respect oneself if one changes one's answer just because it's a different question? "Yes" or "No", just pick one and stick with it already!
Out of curiosity, which ballot spot do you vote for? I'm strictly a second- candidate-from-the-top voter myself. Can't wait to see what order they put them in this time so I'll know who I support.
"Your argument is that people used to inhale more cigeratte smoke than mechanics do now?"
My argument is that whether car exaust is bad for you is entirely irrelevant to whether smoking is bad for you.
"So, you used the word 'extremely' in an attempt to make smoking sound worse than it is"
No, I would still say smoking is extremely bad for you, because based on my understanding of how bad for you smoking is, it is beyond my threshold for using the word "extremely". You said "extremely" bad for you things kill you in a couple years. That's a perfectly reasonable threshold for using that word, but it is obviously different than mine. It is silly to argue whether "extremely" is the right word if we mean different things when we say it. In an attempt to be more precise, I will say this:
I think in terms of long term health risk, smoking is worse for people who do it than anything else large numbers of people choose to do.
This includes working as a professional mechanic, or living in a city.
"'Going by rates of heart & lung disease it's orders of magnitude worse for you than breathing inner-city levels of car exaust every day.'
It sure would seem that way when all the people that die from inner-city levels of car exaust get counted as 'Smoking related deaths'."
No. I'm not talking about counting 'Smoking related deaths' here. We count deaths from lung and heart disease. Then we compare the rate of those deaths amongst smokers to the rate in the general population; And we compare the rate of those deaths amongst city dwellers to the general population; and every other group someone thinks to look at. Smokers die of lung and heart disease at a far higher rate than city dwellers, or the general population. This analysis does not require ever knowing or assuming that any particular death was caused by smoking, car exaust, dumb luck, or whatever. Rates of death from lung and heart disease are much higher amongst smokers. This does not prove, in a mathematical sense, that smoking causes lung and heart disease, but given the number of deaths in the sample size, it strains credultiy to imagine any other explanation.
"So, your saying that the statistics your claiming do not come from paid studies. That the numbers are collected and analysed entirely by volenteers."
When I've looked at them, they've come from the NIH, whose nefarious connection to your anti-smoking industry I fail to see. In any case, others have tallied up the data too; you could even do so yourself. The "analysis" is not complex, just add up the number of deaths from lung and heart disease amongst smokers and non-smokers, and divide by the total. How exactly people are supposedly skewing this, I don't know.
"The anti-smoking industry must be telling the truth because they don't make as many billions of dollars as the tabacco industry? That makes absolutly no sense."
I understood your argument for not trusting the 'anti-smoking industry' to be that they had a financial interest in convincing people smoking is dangerous. To whatever extent that is true, the pro-smoking industry has a greater interest in convincing them otherwise. I agree it makes no sense to judge others statements exclusively on their motivations; so I would prefer to base my judgements on other peoples opinions as little as possible. My judgement that smoking is dangerous relies on others in three ways I can see:
It relies on patients to accurtately report whether they are smokers. The only way to make smoking seem more dangerous here is if non-smokers lied and claimed to be smokers in large numbers. I can't see that happening.
It relies on doctors to accurately report causes of death. Again, I can't see massive fraud here; besides, they'd never get away with it. I've known people dying of lung cancer; it ain't subtle.
It relies on the NIH to accurately do basic addition and division. I think they can, and it would be trivial to call them on it in any case.
You can certainly have fun your entire life, and I reccomend trying to do so. But even if you could have the same sort of fun you had at 20 your whole life, would you want to? The fun of being young is that everything is a new experience, all the posibilities are open. But at some point you actually learn some stuff, and pursue some particular possibilities, so the sort of fun you are likely to want at 35 is different than sort you had at 20. I certainly know know some people whose interests have not changed; who are still doing the same stuff at 40 they were at 20, but I wouldn't exactly say I envy them.
"Now excuse me while I go put some Twisted Sister on...."
Dude! Rock on! (actually, my only remaining impression of Twisted Sister is their way-cool logo that I doodled on all my notebooks. Memories of their actual music seem to have been systematically erradicated by my subconcious; I can only assume for good reason)
"Who are these "people" you talk about that sit in poorly ventelated rooms with smokers. Neither I, nor anyone I know falls into that category."
Not anymore, because we figured out cigarette smoke was bad for you. But not so long ago, flight attendants, bartenders, and spouses of smokers spent a lot of time in under ventilated spaces with cigarrette smoke. And all had distinctly elevated cancer risk.
"many mechanics, both amature and professional, inhale large quantities of car exaust."
If professional mechanics are inhaling significant quantities of car exaust, their employers are in serious violation of OSHA rules, and are in danger of serious fines.
"You have to be kidding when you imply that the general public is exposed to more cigerette smoke than car exaust."
I did not mean to imply that. I meant to state that the general public is not in remotely as much danger from car exaust as smokers are from cigarrette smoke.
"Just" and "extremely" are not technical terms; arguing which one is correct is obviously stupid. Smoking is not as bad for you as bullets in the head. Going by rates of heart & lung disease it's orders of magnitude worse for you than breathing inner-city levels of car exaust every day.
"If you are unwilling to even question an industry that is bringing in billions of dollars a year, your arguments simply carry no wieght."
My arguments are not based on any industry; they are based on rates of disease in smokers versus non-smokers. But note that the cigarrette industry brings in a heck of a lot more than you're so-called anti-smoking industry.
There's plenty of those tasks. There's just not a heck of a lot to be done about it. The apparent recent focus on paralel tasks is partly because chip makers are running out of easy ways to make non-parralel tasks any faster. But it's relatively easy to do the same task more times in parralel at the same speed. Which probably doesn't help until the software gets re-written to take advantage of that, assuming it can be.
On the other hand, my impression is that a lot of tasks that seem like they can't benefit from parralelization actually can, if you're willing to put vast amounts of effort into figuring out how. Which nobody has been before, but which they might be as performance improvements become steadily more reliant on parralelization.
People don't spend significant fractions of their lives in poorly ventilated rooms with cars. They do spend signifcant fractions of their lives in poorly ventilated rooms with smokers.
Are there more dangerous things to inhale than tobacco smoke? Sure! There are plenty of things you can inhale that will kill you right then and there.
But you cannot list "dozens" of things that remotely similar numbers of people inhale with remotely similar frequency that are anywhere near as bad for you as cigarrette smoke.
I'm trying to figure out what you're on about with the "anti-smoking industry" stuff. Apparently you think someone nefarious has a big financial stake in convincing people to stop smoking, but I'm not clear who that is. Since I stopped smoking, I have a lot more money to spend that I used to spend on cigarrettes. I'm also much more athleticly active now that my lungs work so much better, so I spend a fair fraction of that money on bike parts. Perhaps you're suggesting Shimano is paying off cancer researchers to skew their findings? Maybe they could be in a big conspiracy with gyms and athletic shoe companies. No, that only works if smoking is actually bad for you. Sorry, I can't figure out who else gets any money from my not smoking.
Well anyway, regardless of the long term health effects you bizzarrely dispute, in the very short term, my lungs unquestionably work radically better. I'm not being "duped" into thinking I can now run distances that would have winded me to jog as a smoker; I can actually do it.
Um, dude, learn some statistics. Smokers have insanely higher rates of lung and heart disease than non smokers. The sample size establishing this has reached the "enormous" level. Smoking is extremely bad for you. Yes, inhaling anything but air is probably bad for you, but nothing anyone inhales with any frequency is close to as bad as tobbaco smoke.
"'Oil' companies are really 'energy fuel' companies."
So their propaganda says, but it's hogwash. They are oil companies. They have masssive investments in oil production, transportation and refinement. A rediculous fraction of their worth is their development contracts with oil rich nations. If the world moves to other energy sources, they'll be hurting bad. Sure, of course they'll try to be prepared and to adapt, but it's worth vast amounts to them to keep oil going strong, because they have massive unrecoverable investments in it. It may be to their advantage to appear as if they don't care what energy sources are dominant to investors, regulators, or the public but you don't have to swallow that line. If they don't care they are idiots, because today they are oil companies, and if they have to change into something else tommorow, it will suck for them.
I'm unclear what ADM has to do with any of this. Sure, they're evil; they make tons of political donations to whoever is in power to keep their unjustified agriculture subsidies flowing. But they are pragmatic bribers. I find it hard to imagine they've given Al Gore a dime recently, what can he do for them? Republicans, on the other hand...
Yes, I did assume you were trying to make a rational argument. I apologize for that unfounded assumption. But I did not misunderstand you.
You said: "The US is already investing trillions in foreign aid."
This is plainly false, regardless of what time period you meant. Taking 2 trillion as a minimum to be called "trillions", and giving you the ultimate benefit of the doubt by assuming you meant the entire 230 year history of the United States (in which case your tense is wrong; "investing" implies a rate per time period) foriegn aid spending would have to average 8.7 billion yearly over the whole 230 years. Only the last few years have gotten that high at all. None of the 20th century is that high, not even the Marshall plan, never mind the 19th century.
Total US Foriegn Aid spending ever is not anywhere close to trillions. "The US is already investing trillions in foreign aid." is a flatly false statement, obviously ridiculous to anyone who has the slightest idea what they are talking about.
"If you say so."
I do say so, and I am correct.
Senior + Senior can be good too, when you need it.
It definitely depends on the pair. My office mate and I have worked together a long time, and have similar styles. We've found pair programing highly effective when something needs to go out the door very fast and correct. With me looking over his shoulder (he types faster), we can generate complete, shippable code considerably more than twice as fast as either of us working alone. But if we did it all the time, I think we'd go insane.
Please tell us what time period you meant, since the US hasn't invested trillions in foriegng aid all-together-ever.
Well? We're waiting!
Wow, that's a pretty desperate defense of your made up numbers. I assumed you were quoting figures for some rational purpose; to support an argument perhaps. Obviously, spending levels are utterly meaningless without specifying a time period. I'm sure you disagree, but you're full of it in any case:
The United States has not spent trillions on foriegn aid in the course of it's entire history.
No doubt you'll now point out that you never said you meant dollars...
"The US is already investing trillions in foreign aid."
Well, at least your positions are based on careful consideration of accurate information.</sarcasm>
"Can you imagine what one billion dollars would achieve if spent for FOSS?"
Yes. I imagine it would achieve far less than you think.
"Can you imagine a world where any standard software is free of charge for any kind of computer."
Yes, I live in such a world. Well, maybe not the "any kind of computer" part, but all the kinds I have, so same difference. It seldom even occurs to me to pay for software I consider at all "standard".
"Can you imagine a world where even specialised software doesn't cost more a $100?"
No. I write very specialized software for a living. Given a small number of potential users, there is a minimum price per user that will pay me enough to write that software. There certainly exists software specialized enough that that minimum price is above $100.
"Can you picture how one billion dollars could change the world if spent for FOSS?"
I'd imagine many, many times this is spent yearly on FOSS development in any case. A billion is a lot of money, but not as much as you seem to think.
I installed XP on a RAID on my home machine that doesn't have a floppy drive. I just booted from CD.
Certainly the rack mount/blade servers the IT guys down the hall don't waste sppace for a floppy drive, and they certainly do all the "interesting" stuff with hard drives.