Sorry, but this is nonsense. Again, I don't deny that some depression subtypes are not affected by money but it's pretty damn insulting to insist that a poor depressed person will simply find something else to be depressed about if they do get money. I don't want to get into too many specifics, but in no particular order these are a few of the things that most depress me at the moment:
-Inability to afford medical treatment for several physical medical conditions that myself, my wife and my son suffer (most of them not very serious, all of them annoying, all of them ultimately treatable)
-driving around in an extremely, extremely shitty car for hours on end without air conditioning in Florida during the summer. Anxiety over what will happen when said car eventually breaks down for good.
- living with my parents. Again. Not having enough space to store my stuff, not being able to find anything at all in chaotically packed boxes after several necessary spur of the moment moves. Not having a yard to enjoy or work in. Not having any privacy whatsoever. Having to listen to and deal with my parents' issues. etc.
-7+ years after I went back to school, realizing my net worth has dropped hugely with nothing to show for it and pretty much no long term career prospects
-realizing that my son is going to end up in some very shitty public schools in a couple years unless things magically get better
-trying to deal with friends and family in a society that demands significant expenditures of money (most notably eating out all the goddamn time) to be considered properly socializing
-inability to enjoy virtually any leisure activity because of the knowledge that I am in horribly dire straights financially and have no path out. This is worth highlighting--I could rattle off a list of a thousand things I could be doing right now that would have me interested and engaged and happy, except it would require tremendous effort (and possibly no small amount of booze) to be able to forget my current situation long enough to enjoy doing them for even an hour, and then I look up and remember where I am again and it all comes crashing down.
I disagree. Depression is not a monolithic thing, and while there can sometimes be clear-cut medical causes, other times there are rather clear-cut external causes. Perceptions of the outside world, in other words, affect brain chemistry. Money won't always give you the perceptions you need to be happy, but it's foolish and (I must say) slightly insulting to imply that it can't be a major factor, or even a primary factor.
I'm dealing with fairly severe dysphoric atypical depression at the moment (which is more common than typical depression. Which is typical of the hackneyed insanity that is modern psychiatry, but I digress) and while I'm sure there are a number of factors in my personality and my brain chemistry, I fucking promise you that it is nothing a large infusion of cash could not solve. My depression stems largely from my persistent inability to solve the problems around me (which of course becomes self-reenforcing as the bullshit piles up and the depression saps my energy), but 95% of those problems would be trivially solved if I could throw buckets of money at them. It would still take time and effort, but believe me I would be tremendously happy while heaving those buckets of money around and waiting. Indeed, during those periods in my life where it looked like my career was going places and I mistakenly believed I would soon have, if not bucketloads, then at least a reasonable amount of money, my depression was at an all time low.
Depression isn't monolithic in its causes or its effects. The DSM V doesn't even begin to scratch the surface, and it should be noted that psychiatry in general is tailored towards people who visit psychiatrists, i.e. people who at least have enough money to afford transportation and health insurance. That excludes me, and it excludes the majority of humanity who are living in the third world right now. So, instead of relying on the DSM or whatever pop psychology definition is trendy these days, let's consider how they define depression in animal models: giving up, not seeking out food, not trying to avoid an unpleasant stimulus... apparently because they have lost the will or belief that they can improve their situation. Translated to human terms in modern society, this positively screams "money." And anyone who disagrees has almost certainly never been poor.
Those laws are equally wrong and should be challenged (in the case of WIC, it could be easily rewritten to refer to people who are or were recently pregnant, which given the current state of medical science does not absolutely exclude men.) Whether this actually happens or not... well, you take the victories where you can get them. Just because society is hopelessly wrong on X (polygamous marriage, for instance) doesn't mean that we should also give up the fight on Y if it's possible to win that fight.
That's just what I said. The op was saying that AMD has always played second fiddle, including (his words) 10 and 15 years ago. The developments I outlined (Athlon/Opteron/Duron beating the crap out of P4&PD/Xeon/Celeron) took place precisely during that era. I guess ~10 years of domination is a long time in the computing world but it's sad that slashdot's collective memory seems to be that short, particularly since it appears (as I've said) that we are fast approaching another fork in the road with fab resolution nearly maxed out and Intel busy uddying the waters like crazy between their different processor lines.
Err, I think that buying a truck because you like how it looks and not because you need a truck is one of the clearest cases of conspicuous consumption I've ever seen. It's a free country and all of that, but do you really think this sort of thing should pass uncommented on? It's a goddamn truck. It has shit mileage, shit road handling, and shit passenger space. If you buy a truck but you don't need any of its cargo/towing/offroad capabilities then I think people are entitled to shake their heads a little. And you're entitled to console yourself by... I don't know, doing whatever it is in your new truck that makes you smile. Everybody wins.
The P4 was in development 15 years ago, and the OP said "10 years" as well, so I think my point stands. Incidentally I had a K6-II as well and it was fairly awful... then again, we never upgraded from Windows 98 SE.
Um, your "15 years" bit is off the mark. 15 years ago Intel was so busy chasing the mhz marketing dollar with the Pentium 4 (and the derived Pentium D) that AMD was able to dethrone them at the top end, and for an encore they then turned around and demolished Intel's 64-bit Itanium server architecture with the backwards compatible AMD-64 (which Intel quickly licensed from them. And renamed.) For the hat trick, they absolutely destroyed low end Celeron with their AMD Duron. For several years there, Intel was the worse (and most expensive) option in every major market segment.
Of course at this point Intel pulled their heads out of their asses, reached a little deeper into their pocketbooks and used the Pentium M's design as the way forward instead of the hz-obese Pentium 4 / Pentium D, and AMD (which simply cannot compete on a research dollar level) has been playing catchup ever since. But they absolutely deserve credit for keeping Intel on their toes. Even VIA (formerly Cyrix, remember them?) deserves some credit for taking some important first steps towards x86 low power design and motherboard miniaturization, and being the first company to introduce hardware cryptography instruction sets (which to this day remain superior to AES-NI, though it was under-supported and it's now stuck in a very badly aging and overpriced processor lineup.)
Has Intel been the undisputed CPU performance king for the past few years? Of course. But this can easily change, particularly since we're so close to hitting the transistor quantum size barrier. In 5-10 years there is not going to be a single clear path forward any more, and it remains to be seen whether Intel will choose the correct path, particularly in light of their increasingly befuddling market segmentation tactics.
I just have to say that speaking as a Common Lisp fan, this sort of thing makes me choke a bit. C++ templates are a very hobbled, messy version of what you can do with a Lisp macro and/or a CLOS generic function. While it's true that optimized C will be 2x-3x faster than fully optimized Common Lisp (most people think it's orders of magnitudes, but it's not. CL is a very mature, fully compiled language with plenty of ways to optimize, including turning on static typing), I very much question whether the messy, verbose, and quite limited 'expressiveness' of C++ is worth it.
C++ and its bastard child Java are responsible for infecting the minds of countless computer programmers with all manner of horrible square-peg-round-hole paradigms, which are triumphantly proclaimed as "design patterns" instead of "hacky verbosity that makes self-documenting code much more difficult to write".
But your thread of logic is incomplete/broken here. The point isn't that marriage is an constitutional / inalienable right. The point is that equality before the law is an inalienable right.
So if some people want to ban state recognition of marriage, so be it. If you want to expand the legal benefits granted by marriage, so be it. The issue is when the government tries to grant privileges to only some people and not others. This is unconstitutional under the 14th amendment and (as I've argued elsewhere), also under the 9th for anyone with a shred of respect for what the founding fathers were trying to accomplish.
Look, I know it's not fashionable (several high profile justices have outright said that the ninth amendment cannot be used for anything, and almost everyone else relies almost exclusively on the equal protection clause in the 14th amendment), but the founding fathers anticipated this bullshit argument. There was, in fact, a huge debate over having a bill of rights at all because they did not want to provide ammunition to people like you who would argue, again and again, that people do not have any inalienable rights at all unless they are explicitly granted by the constitution.
So, in order to address this concern, they crafted a specific amendment--the ninth--which says "hey look, this isn't an exhaustive list!"
And then everyone decides to ignore it and keep using the exact argument it was designed to address. Your argument.
If they can make up rights out of thin air
THEN THE COUNTRY WILL BE A MUCH BETTER PLACE. The right to privacy (ANY privacy, other than a physical search of papers) isn't in the constitution, either. I think the right for the government to keeps its nose out of my chromosomes and out of my crotch is also a pretty obvious, fundamental right. The ability to "make up" rights doesn't give the SCOTUS unlimited power; it only gives them the ability to limit the power of government, which is an ability that many people on both the right and the left greatly value.
and scalia calls the court egotistical..with an overreaching hubris...
Scalia is a hypocritical hyperreligious twat. Hubris is the quality exhibited by lawmakers (and their supporters) who think that the state should have the power to examine the chromosomes/genitals of its citizens in order to decide what rights they are entitled to.
High Fructose Corn Syrup has turned us into a nation too fat for everything from coffins to military service. numerous studies concur this isnt sugar.
Links please. And please analyze the language of those studies to see how they are damning HFCS while rendering other sources of fructose-apples, grapes, etc.-- as harmless.
among other things we could cut down on are processed foods in general.
Ah nevermind, no need to bother. You are clearly just one of the neo-luddite brigade. Transfats are of course bad and the health officials responsible for pushing it should be taken to task, but the danger of "processed" foods is nothing compared to the danger posed by the marketing- and luddite-driven pro-"organic" movement.
Quick, I've noticed you've left aspartame off of your list! You'd better put it on there because it causes brain cancer! Wait no, that one was always bullshit. You'd better put it on there because it causes kidney damage! Wait, crap, also bullshit. You'd better put it on there because a recent small-scale preliminary animal study implied it might cause a gut flora alteration resulting in some weight gain! *Whew*, that was a close one. That one isn't conclusively disproven yet, so the organic stevia industry should be safe at least for another year or two.
How does this neoluddite shit keep getting modded up? If you're against sugar then fine, but the anti-HFCS movement is mostly completely fine with table sugar used as a substitute, and it appears that absolutely none of these blowhards are advocating treating the fructose in fruits the same as the fructose in corn.
If you're against HFCS but pro-grape juice (increasingly being used as a sweetener in some products that want to avoid HFCS cooties), you are either a Dr. Oz-loving neo-Luddite moron who needs to turn in his geek card immediately or you are sitting on some earthshaking unpublished scientific studies.
Even if you don't understand the biochemistry, the two basic rules still work well - don't buy stuff in the middle of the grocery store and don't eat anything your Grandmother wouldn't recognize as food from her childhood.
Really? This is really the shit that gets modded up to +5 these days, again and again? Do I even have to spell out what's wrong with it?
On your fructose rantings: your explanation, if true, vilifies almost all fruits just as much as it does HFCS. No doubt you'll come up with some anecdotal, pulled-out-of-your-ass justification for treating HFCS differently, though.
Also, let's just keep completely ignoring the fact that heart disease and stroke are top killers worldwide, even in countries where they have never heard of HFCS.
He didn't say C++ was worthless. He said it would be a pretty bad thing if it was "the best tool" or "the best we can do", and going by the rest of your comment I'm not sure if you'd completely disagree.
Take away its heritage advantages (libraries and compilers--
"it's popular for being popular"), and you are left with what exactly?
Let's see, you have almost-foolproof C compatibility... except most other languages can link to C code. Annnnnd... hmm. I can't really think of anything else. High performance OO maybe, but other languages can do that in more powerful ways (including Objective C).
I wasn't talking about the performance in one single instant in time'; I was talking about using the same piece of proprietary software (remember, this is FREE proprietary, not $$$-proprietary) over the course of several years. Do you have any examples of this working out for you? Because my experience is that free proprietary software does not say free, does not stay updated, does not stay malware-free and/or does not stay usable for very long.
And while we're doing that... how about raise the standard human IQ to something less obnoxiously pitiful. Because boy oh boy are there are a lot of morons.
I agree, although unfortunately a good chunk of your post exemplifies this. Corn and "starches" are bad, but fruit is good.... because the fructose in fruit is magically awesome but the fructose in corn is somehow tainted. And everyone knows that white rice is the most fatten of all foods, just ask the 3+ billion asians. Oh, wait.
There is certainly evidence that carbs were pushed way too hard in the 80s and 90s, but that doesn't mean that everything that comes out of the mouths of neo-Atkins/paleo/anti-corn/anti-gluten/anti-aspartame nutjobs should be believed. At the end of the day, it's about too many calories. While it's possible to alter one's metabolism a bit and/or feel fuller by eating different sorts of foods, any argument re: obesity that doesn't mention calories can be safely ignored as faddish nonsense.
We don't know exactly how rare solar flare EMPs are, but we know that they can be bad and we managed to miss another one bad one a few years ago. I would say this should be the primary reason for securing the power grid; resistance to nuclear EMPs is just a desirable side effect.
Further since an EMP is extremely unlikely to happen, they can spend endless amounts 'protecting' the grid and we'll never know whether it actually works.
What are you talking about? This isn't astrology here; this is well-understood science. We have some EMP data from old atmospheric nuclear tests, and if need be we can create low level (non-nuclear) EMPs for further modeling. This is just electrical engineering. Of course we can make sound predictions about whether or not specific types of protection will work
If they said they are concerned about someone using a nuclear weapon to take out the power grid, everyone would quickly point out that the problem is not protecting the power grid, but that someone has a nuclear weapon.
North Korea has nuclear weapons and will soon have the ability to deliver one to the west coast of the USA. What we going to do about it? Mostly nothing, because China will be very annoyed if we invade and we know that Seoul could be utterly destroyed even by conventional weapons if the North Koreans tried.
Despite widespread mockery, nuclear disaster mitigation (yes, including duck and cover) can work, and if we're talking about realistic measures we can take to limit collateral damage I can think of nothing more important than preserving the power grid.
I'm not commenting on the costs involved or where this should be on our national priority list, but it's a sound idea.
I don't think that's a settled debate. The Parthenon is seeing some fairly major restorations, not a total rebuild but you can see in the photos that new marble is definitely being laid on top of old. It's understandable that people are nostalgic for what they know, but there's also a pretty clear argument for seeing something as it was and as it was intended by those of the culture that created it, as opposed to merely seeing the ruins of a building that was blown-up by barbarians in a relatively paltry and uninteresting battle centuries later. Just think about the implications of your argument here--if an earthquake damages a monument, that damage should be left there to remind us of the earthquake? Should the Elgin marbles be permanently left out of the Parthenon to remind us of their theft? Should the damage to the Mona Lisa not been repaired, so as to remind us of the vandals? I feel the bias here must always be on the side of restoration, provided such restoration does not damage any of the original work.
Of course, some people like ruins for their own sake, including Hilter. So, I mean, I totally understand if you still disagree with me. It just means you're some kind of Nazi.
This may or may not be the attitude of the majority of users going in, but if you are clear upfront about which programs are proprietary and which are open source then people will learn on their own that open source programs are simply more reliable in a future-proof sense. (Much less likely to stagnate without a fork, or to be overhauled with a crappy new interface, or suddenly modified to include malware/crapware features.) It might take them a few years to figure this out, but you can assist in the learning experience by clearly labeling what is and is not open source.
I'm pretty sure these objections are pretty easy to defend against. No compensation for dead or comatose donors, for instance. Ideally you would allow a way around this with a detailed written directive, but if you're so positive that this could be abused then it can be disallowed--there are billions of healthy, mentally sound people walking around with a spare. With a properly regulated incentive system and public education about the relative safety of kidney donation, it seems pretty clear that everyone on the waiting list could be taken care of.
"During the operation we had to remove a kidney, sorry, but thanks that you signed that form that indemnifies us." ==> that's nonsense. They aren't doing that now, are they? They would be sued into oblivion if they tried. And when you amend the law, you can simply stipulate that the donor (alive and conscious and lucid) must be the one who receives the money, and this is not transferable to any third party.
A laughably worthless statement. Legalizing compensation for kidney donation in no way implies that someone who walks into a hospital with a bloody baggie refusing to tell them where the kidney came from must be served. The transplant team would obviously be working on both patients and do an assessment beforehand. This isn't Tor for kidneys; this is just compensation.
If the black market for kidneys really does exist (isn't an urban legend), then increasing the supply of legal kidneys can only shrink the black market, not enlarge it. The demand for kidneys is, in other words, rather inelastic. People don't get addicted to them. They don't grind them up and inject them into a vein for a high. At least, I am assuming they don't.
I'll say it again, the average Ubuntu user might not be tremendously technically proficient but they do tend to understand the difference between proprietary-free and open source-free. Many of them probably don't grasp all of the ramifications of that distinction, but I will say most of them are at least aware that there is a distinction. So, just show it to them and let them decide. It would take up a miniscule amount of screen real estate. Just because you can't imagine people caring doesn't mean none of them will.
The distinction between proprietary and open source is absolutely massive on Windows at the moment. Example: Free proprietary PDF readers (Adobe, Foxit, etc.) are a friggin nightmare, crammed with all kinds of stupid unnecessary features and malware / crapware and then unnecessary functionality changes between releases and perhaps nagware to get a premium version. The solution is simple: install Evince and forget about it. If anything bad ever happens to it (although I doubt there will), it will be forked. I don't have to worry about "creative monetizing" shenanigans and I will never have to waste one minute re-learning anything. Same goes for 7-zip over winzip or winrar, and for VLC player vs. proprietary third party media players, etc. The best advice you can give to anyone looking for a free Windows program for regular use is to try to see if there's an open source project that does what they want.
The situation is generally not quite this dire on Linux at the moment, but this can easily change. The fact is the long-term prospects of any project massively, massively depend on whether or not a for-profit company has total control of it. If it is true that most Ubuntu users don't grasp this, well, the easiest way to educate them is to put a little [Proprietary] stamp on stuff and over the course of 5+ years let them watch as half of their proprietary programs die off or get crapped up, while 90%+ of their [Open Source] stamped programs survive (possibly in forked form.)
Self-described libertarians can say some pretty stupid stuff sometimes, but this isn't one of them. If person to person monetary incentives are allowed (within certain guidelines), then there are more kidneys available period. Structured the right away, this could easily mean more kidneys and shorter waiting lists for poor people as well.
You do the Ubuntu crowd a disservice (and yes, I was a user back in the Hoary Hedgehog days, and these days I find Ubuntu-based Mint to be a fairly handy go-to distro when I want a desktop that just works.) Ubuntu users are not synonymous with the Windows or OS X user.
That doesn't mean they are all literate on the command line or that they understand a lot of the stuff that goes on behind the scenes, but I daresay most of them understand the difference between open source vs. proprietary.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but this is nonsense. Again, I don't deny that some depression subtypes are not affected by money but it's pretty damn insulting to insist that a poor depressed person will simply find something else to be depressed about if they do get money. I don't want to get into too many specifics, but in no particular order these are a few of the things that most depress me at the moment:
-Inability to afford medical treatment for several physical medical conditions that myself, my wife and my son suffer (most of them not very serious, all of them annoying, all of them ultimately treatable)
-driving around in an extremely, extremely shitty car for hours on end without air conditioning in Florida during the summer. Anxiety over what will happen when said car eventually breaks down for good.
- living with my parents. Again. Not having enough space to store my stuff, not being able to find anything at all in chaotically packed boxes after several necessary spur of the moment moves. Not having a yard to enjoy or work in. Not having any privacy whatsoever. Having to listen to and deal with my parents' issues. etc.
-7+ years after I went back to school, realizing my net worth has dropped hugely with nothing to show for it and pretty much no long term career prospects
-realizing that my son is going to end up in some very shitty public schools in a couple years unless things magically get better
-trying to deal with friends and family in a society that demands significant expenditures of money (most notably eating out all the goddamn time) to be considered properly socializing
-inability to enjoy virtually any leisure activity because of the knowledge that I am in horribly dire straights financially and have no path out. This is worth highlighting--I could rattle off a list of a thousand things I could be doing right now that would have me interested and engaged and happy, except it would require tremendous effort (and possibly no small amount of booze) to be able to forget my current situation long enough to enjoy doing them for even an hour, and then I look up and remember where I am again and it all comes crashing down.
I disagree. Depression is not a monolithic thing, and while there can sometimes be clear-cut medical causes, other times there are rather clear-cut external causes. Perceptions of the outside world, in other words, affect brain chemistry. Money won't always give you the perceptions you need to be happy, but it's foolish and (I must say) slightly insulting to imply that it can't be a major factor, or even a primary factor.
I'm dealing with fairly severe dysphoric atypical depression at the moment (which is more common than typical depression. Which is typical of the hackneyed insanity that is modern psychiatry, but I digress) and while I'm sure there are a number of factors in my personality and my brain chemistry, I fucking promise you that it is nothing a large infusion of cash could not solve. My depression stems largely from my persistent inability to solve the problems around me (which of course becomes self-reenforcing as the bullshit piles up and the depression saps my energy), but 95% of those problems would be trivially solved if I could throw buckets of money at them. It would still take time and effort, but believe me I would be tremendously happy while heaving those buckets of money around and waiting. Indeed, during those periods in my life where it looked like my career was going places and I mistakenly believed I would soon have, if not bucketloads, then at least a reasonable amount of money, my depression was at an all time low.
Depression isn't monolithic in its causes or its effects. The DSM V doesn't even begin to scratch the surface, and it should be noted that psychiatry in general is tailored towards people who visit psychiatrists, i.e. people who at least have enough money to afford transportation and health insurance. That excludes me, and it excludes the majority of humanity who are living in the third world right now. So, instead of relying on the DSM or whatever pop psychology definition is trendy these days, let's consider how they define depression in animal models: giving up, not seeking out food, not trying to avoid an unpleasant stimulus... apparently because they have lost the will or belief that they can improve their situation. Translated to human terms in modern society, this positively screams "money." And anyone who disagrees has almost certainly never been poor.
Those laws are equally wrong and should be challenged (in the case of WIC, it could be easily rewritten to refer to people who are or were recently pregnant, which given the current state of medical science does not absolutely exclude men.) Whether this actually happens or not... well, you take the victories where you can get them. Just because society is hopelessly wrong on X (polygamous marriage, for instance) doesn't mean that we should also give up the fight on Y if it's possible to win that fight.
I had thought it was still in development then.
That's just what I said. The op was saying that AMD has always played second fiddle, including (his words) 10 and 15 years ago. The developments I outlined (Athlon/Opteron/Duron beating the crap out of P4&PD/Xeon/Celeron) took place precisely during that era. I guess ~10 years of domination is a long time in the computing world but it's sad that slashdot's collective memory seems to be that short, particularly since it appears (as I've said) that we are fast approaching another fork in the road with fab resolution nearly maxed out and Intel busy uddying the waters like crazy between their different processor lines.
Err, I think that buying a truck because you like how it looks and not because you need a truck is one of the clearest cases of conspicuous consumption I've ever seen. It's a free country and all of that, but do you really think this sort of thing should pass uncommented on? It's a goddamn truck. It has shit mileage, shit road handling, and shit passenger space. If you buy a truck but you don't need any of its cargo/towing/offroad capabilities then I think people are entitled to shake their heads a little. And you're entitled to console yourself by... I don't know, doing whatever it is in your new truck that makes you smile. Everybody wins.
The P4 was in development 15 years ago, and the OP said "10 years" as well, so I think my point stands. Incidentally I had a K6-II as well and it was fairly awful... then again, we never upgraded from Windows 98 SE.
Um, your "15 years" bit is off the mark. 15 years ago Intel was so busy chasing the mhz marketing dollar with the Pentium 4 (and the derived Pentium D) that AMD was able to dethrone them at the top end, and for an encore they then turned around and demolished Intel's 64-bit Itanium server architecture with the backwards compatible AMD-64 (which Intel quickly licensed from them. And renamed.) For the hat trick, they absolutely destroyed low end Celeron with their AMD Duron. For several years there, Intel was the worse (and most expensive) option in every major market segment.
Of course at this point Intel pulled their heads out of their asses, reached a little deeper into their pocketbooks and used the Pentium M's design as the way forward instead of the hz-obese Pentium 4 / Pentium D, and AMD (which simply cannot compete on a research dollar level) has been playing catchup ever since. But they absolutely deserve credit for keeping Intel on their toes. Even VIA (formerly Cyrix, remember them?) deserves some credit for taking some important first steps towards x86 low power design and motherboard miniaturization, and being the first company to introduce hardware cryptography instruction sets (which to this day remain superior to AES-NI, though it was under-supported and it's now stuck in a very badly aging and overpriced processor lineup.)
Has Intel been the undisputed CPU performance king for the past few years? Of course. But this can easily change, particularly since we're so close to hitting the transistor quantum size barrier. In 5-10 years there is not going to be a single clear path forward any more, and it remains to be seen whether Intel will choose the correct path, particularly in light of their increasingly befuddling market segmentation tactics.
An immensely expressive language
I just have to say that speaking as a Common Lisp fan, this sort of thing makes me choke a bit. C++ templates are a very hobbled, messy version of what you can do with a Lisp macro and/or a CLOS generic function. While it's true that optimized C will be 2x-3x faster than fully optimized Common Lisp (most people think it's orders of magnitudes, but it's not. CL is a very mature, fully compiled language with plenty of ways to optimize, including turning on static typing), I very much question whether the messy, verbose, and quite limited 'expressiveness' of C++ is worth it.
C++ and its bastard child Java are responsible for infecting the minds of countless computer programmers with all manner of horrible square-peg-round-hole paradigms, which are triumphantly proclaimed as "design patterns" instead of "hacky verbosity that makes self-documenting code much more difficult to write".
But your thread of logic is incomplete/broken here. The point isn't that marriage is an constitutional / inalienable right. The point is that equality before the law is an inalienable right.
So if some people want to ban state recognition of marriage, so be it. If you want to expand the legal benefits granted by marriage, so be it. The issue is when the government tries to grant privileges to only some people and not others. This is unconstitutional under the 14th amendment and (as I've argued elsewhere), also under the 9th for anyone with a shred of respect for what the founding fathers were trying to accomplish.
So, in order to address this concern, they crafted a specific amendment--the ninth--which says "hey look, this isn't an exhaustive list!"
And then everyone decides to ignore it and keep using the exact argument it was designed to address. Your argument.
If they can make up rights out of thin air
THEN THE COUNTRY WILL BE A MUCH BETTER PLACE. The right to privacy (ANY privacy, other than a physical search of papers) isn't in the constitution, either. I think the right for the government to keeps its nose out of my chromosomes and out of my crotch is also a pretty obvious, fundamental right. The ability to "make up" rights doesn't give the SCOTUS unlimited power; it only gives them the ability to limit the power of government, which is an ability that many people on both the right and the left greatly value.
and scalia calls the court egotistical..with an overreaching hubris...
Scalia is a hypocritical hyperreligious twat. Hubris is the quality exhibited by lawmakers (and their supporters) who think that the state should have the power to examine the chromosomes/genitals of its citizens in order to decide what rights they are entitled to.
among other things we could cut down on are processed foods in general.
Ah nevermind, no need to bother. You are clearly just one of the neo-luddite brigade. Transfats are of course bad and the health officials responsible for pushing it should be taken to task, but the danger of "processed" foods is nothing compared to the danger posed by the marketing- and luddite-driven pro-"organic" movement.
Quick, I've noticed you've left aspartame off of your list! You'd better put it on there because it causes brain cancer! Wait no, that one was always bullshit. You'd better put it on there because it causes kidney damage! Wait, crap, also bullshit. You'd better put it on there because a recent small-scale preliminary animal study implied it might cause a gut flora alteration resulting in some weight gain! *Whew*, that was a close one. That one isn't conclusively disproven yet, so the organic stevia industry should be safe at least for another year or two.
How does this neoluddite shit keep getting modded up? If you're against sugar then fine, but the anti-HFCS movement is mostly completely fine with table sugar used as a substitute, and it appears that absolutely none of these blowhards are advocating treating the fructose in fruits the same as the fructose in corn.
If you're against HFCS but pro-grape juice (increasingly being used as a sweetener in some products that want to avoid HFCS cooties), you are either a Dr. Oz-loving neo-Luddite moron who needs to turn in his geek card immediately or you are sitting on some earthshaking unpublished scientific studies.
Even if you don't understand the biochemistry, the two basic rules still work well - don't buy stuff in the middle of the grocery store and don't eat anything your Grandmother wouldn't recognize as food from her childhood.
Really? This is really the shit that gets modded up to +5 these days, again and again? Do I even have to spell out what's wrong with it?
On your fructose rantings: your explanation, if true, vilifies almost all fruits just as much as it does HFCS. No doubt you'll come up with some anecdotal, pulled-out-of-your-ass justification for treating HFCS differently, though.
Also, let's just keep completely ignoring the fact that heart disease and stroke are top killers worldwide, even in countries where they have never heard of HFCS.
He didn't say C++ was worthless. He said it would be a pretty bad thing if it was "the best tool" or "the best we can do", and going by the rest of your comment I'm not sure if you'd completely disagree.
Take away its heritage advantages (libraries and compilers-- "it's popular for being popular"), and you are left with what exactly?
Let's see, you have almost-foolproof C compatibility... except most other languages can link to C code. Annnnnd... hmm. I can't really think of anything else. High performance OO maybe, but other languages can do that in more powerful ways (including Objective C).
I wasn't talking about the performance in one single instant in time'; I was talking about using the same piece of proprietary software (remember, this is FREE proprietary, not $$$-proprietary) over the course of several years. Do you have any examples of this working out for you? Because my experience is that free proprietary software does not say free, does not stay updated, does not stay malware-free and/or does not stay usable for very long.
And while we're doing that... how about raise the standard human IQ to something less obnoxiously pitiful. Because boy oh boy are there are a lot of morons.
I agree, although unfortunately a good chunk of your post exemplifies this. Corn and "starches" are bad, but fruit is good.... because the fructose in fruit is magically awesome but the fructose in corn is somehow tainted. And everyone knows that white rice is the most fatten of all foods, just ask the 3+ billion asians. Oh, wait.
There is certainly evidence that carbs were pushed way too hard in the 80s and 90s, but that doesn't mean that everything that comes out of the mouths of neo-Atkins/paleo/anti-corn/anti-gluten/anti-aspartame nutjobs should be believed. At the end of the day, it's about too many calories. While it's possible to alter one's metabolism a bit and/or feel fuller by eating different sorts of foods, any argument re: obesity that doesn't mention calories can be safely ignored as faddish nonsense.
Further since an EMP is extremely unlikely to happen, they can spend endless amounts 'protecting' the grid and we'll never know whether it actually works.
What are you talking about? This isn't astrology here; this is well-understood science. We have some EMP data from old atmospheric nuclear tests, and if need be we can create low level (non-nuclear) EMPs for further modeling. This is just electrical engineering. Of course we can make sound predictions about whether or not specific types of protection will work
If they said they are concerned about someone using a nuclear weapon to take out the power grid, everyone would quickly point out that the problem is not protecting the power grid, but that someone has a nuclear weapon.
North Korea has nuclear weapons and will soon have the ability to deliver one to the west coast of the USA. What we going to do about it? Mostly nothing, because China will be very annoyed if we invade and we know that Seoul could be utterly destroyed even by conventional weapons if the North Koreans tried.
Despite widespread mockery, nuclear disaster mitigation (yes, including duck and cover) can work, and if we're talking about realistic measures we can take to limit collateral damage I can think of nothing more important than preserving the power grid.
I'm not commenting on the costs involved or where this should be on our national priority list, but it's a sound idea.
I don't think that's a settled debate. The Parthenon is seeing some fairly major restorations, not a total rebuild but you can see in the photos that new marble is definitely being laid on top of old. It's understandable that people are nostalgic for what they know, but there's also a pretty clear argument for seeing something as it was and as it was intended by those of the culture that created it, as opposed to merely seeing the ruins of a building that was blown-up by barbarians in a relatively paltry and uninteresting battle centuries later. Just think about the implications of your argument here--if an earthquake damages a monument, that damage should be left there to remind us of the earthquake? Should the Elgin marbles be permanently left out of the Parthenon to remind us of their theft? Should the damage to the Mona Lisa not been repaired, so as to remind us of the vandals? I feel the bias here must always be on the side of restoration, provided such restoration does not damage any of the original work.
/Godwin
Of course, some people like ruins for their own sake, including Hilter. So, I mean, I totally understand if you still disagree with me. It just means you're some kind of Nazi.
This may or may not be the attitude of the majority of users going in, but if you are clear upfront about which programs are proprietary and which are open source then people will learn on their own that open source programs are simply more reliable in a future-proof sense. (Much less likely to stagnate without a fork, or to be overhauled with a crappy new interface, or suddenly modified to include malware/crapware features.) It might take them a few years to figure this out, but you can assist in the learning experience by clearly labeling what is and is not open source.
See the examples I give in this post: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
I'm pretty sure these objections are pretty easy to defend against. No compensation for dead or comatose donors, for instance. Ideally you would allow a way around this with a detailed written directive, but if you're so positive that this could be abused then it can be disallowed--there are billions of healthy, mentally sound people walking around with a spare. With a properly regulated incentive system and public education about the relative safety of kidney donation, it seems pretty clear that everyone on the waiting list could be taken care of.
"During the operation we had to remove a kidney, sorry, but thanks that you signed that form that indemnifies us." ==> that's nonsense. They aren't doing that now, are they? They would be sued into oblivion if they tried. And when you amend the law, you can simply stipulate that the donor (alive and conscious and lucid) must be the one who receives the money, and this is not transferable to any third party.
A laughably worthless statement. Legalizing compensation for kidney donation in no way implies that someone who walks into a hospital with a bloody baggie refusing to tell them where the kidney came from must be served. The transplant team would obviously be working on both patients and do an assessment beforehand. This isn't Tor for kidneys; this is just compensation.
If the black market for kidneys really does exist (isn't an urban legend), then increasing the supply of legal kidneys can only shrink the black market, not enlarge it. The demand for kidneys is, in other words, rather inelastic. People don't get addicted to them. They don't grind them up and inject them into a vein for a high. At least, I am assuming they don't.
I'll say it again, the average Ubuntu user might not be tremendously technically proficient but they do tend to understand the difference between proprietary-free and open source-free. Many of them probably don't grasp all of the ramifications of that distinction, but I will say most of them are at least aware that there is a distinction. So, just show it to them and let them decide. It would take up a miniscule amount of screen real estate. Just because you can't imagine people caring doesn't mean none of them will.
The distinction between proprietary and open source is absolutely massive on Windows at the moment. Example: Free proprietary PDF readers (Adobe, Foxit, etc.) are a friggin nightmare, crammed with all kinds of stupid unnecessary features and malware / crapware and then unnecessary functionality changes between releases and perhaps nagware to get a premium version. The solution is simple: install Evince and forget about it. If anything bad ever happens to it (although I doubt there will), it will be forked. I don't have to worry about "creative monetizing" shenanigans and I will never have to waste one minute re-learning anything. Same goes for 7-zip over winzip or winrar, and for VLC player vs. proprietary third party media players, etc. The best advice you can give to anyone looking for a free Windows program for regular use is to try to see if there's an open source project that does what they want.
The situation is generally not quite this dire on Linux at the moment, but this can easily change. The fact is the long-term prospects of any project massively, massively depend on whether or not a for-profit company has total control of it. If it is true that most Ubuntu users don't grasp this, well, the easiest way to educate them is to put a little [Proprietary] stamp on stuff and over the course of 5+ years let them watch as half of their proprietary programs die off or get crapped up, while 90%+ of their [Open Source] stamped programs survive (possibly in forked form.)
Self-described libertarians can say some pretty stupid stuff sometimes, but this isn't one of them. If person to person monetary incentives are allowed (within certain guidelines), then there are more kidneys available period. Structured the right away, this could easily mean more kidneys and shorter waiting lists for poor people as well.
You do the Ubuntu crowd a disservice (and yes, I was a user back in the Hoary Hedgehog days, and these days I find Ubuntu-based Mint to be a fairly handy go-to distro when I want a desktop that just works.) Ubuntu users are not synonymous with the Windows or OS X user.
That doesn't mean they are all literate on the command line or that they understand a lot of the stuff that goes on behind the scenes, but I daresay most of them understand the difference between open source vs. proprietary.
This seems like an almost reasonable definition until you encounter the millions of people who seem to insist that golf is a sport. Or bowling.