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User: patabongo

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  1. Re:The future of dosage? on Refrigerator-Sized Machine Can Print Pills on Demand (dailymail.co.uk) · · Score: 2

    For that matter, the machine would not be producing the drugs, it would just be packaging them. The drugs go in to the machine in some sort of loose form and the machine prints them into pills. Manufacturing is serious chemistry that would be hard to do in a fully automated manner in the field.

    The third sentence is correct, but the first is wrong. This new machine does actually do complex chemical synthesis; for an overview of what's impressive about it (as well as which of the researchers' claims are not feasible) see this post: http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pi....

  2. Re:Nothing says "SCIENCE!" like "STFU!!!!" on Scientists Urge American Geophysical Union To Cut Ties With Exxon (insideclimatenews.org) · · Score: 3, Funny

    The Inquisition didn't deal with Galileo by refusing to let him sponsor their conference.

  3. Evolution of R on Interviews: Ask Author and Programmer Andy Nicholls About R · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How has the way you use R changed over time? For myself, I don't think I've gone through an entire R session in the past six months without loading dplyr. Combine that with the pipeline operator and I think if you'd shown the R code I wrote yesterday to me of two years ago, I wouldn't have believed it was the same language.

  4. Re:The source of troubles is usually in humans on Criticizing the Rust Language, and Why C/C++ Will Never Die · · Score: 1

    Humans are just as good at programming as pigeons are good at flying into space

    It seems clear that when you talk about 'programming' you mean programming a computer to achieve some currently unattainable goal, otherwise this comment makes no sense. If you genuinely believe that computer programmers are as rare as orbiting pigeons you're simply looking in the wrong places.

    It might be helpful if in future you actually articulate the goal you have in mind, for example "Humans are terrible at programming computers to achieve independent consciousness." I don't think that statement is going to be much use in an argument about which programming language is better, but see where it takes you.

  5. Re:The source of troubles is usually in humans on Criticizing the Rust Language, and Why C/C++ Will Never Die · · Score: 1

    'Amazing' and 'terrible' are equally meaningless in this case. Our abilities are at the top of the range of possibilities we are aware of. We simply have no way to objectively judge them.

  6. Re:The source of troubles is usually in humans on Criticizing the Rust Language, and Why C/C++ Will Never Die · · Score: 1

    Humans are terrible at programming. This isn't an insult to anyone and it's not me trying to say "no one is as good a coder as I am." It's a statement of fact, and everyone - including you and me - is terrible at programming.

    I've seen this line of argument in a number of /. threads recents (maybe even from the same commenter). Story about self-driving cars: "humans are terrible at driving". Story comparing programming languages: "humans are terrible at programming".

    But terrible compared to what? It's a totally meaningless statement on its own. Humans may well be terrible at programming compared to inhabitants of the planet Vulcan, but at this moment human beings are better at programming than every single entity we know of that exists. I would love it if the next version of Windows was written from scratch by some being whose programming abilities puts humans in the shade, but outside of fiction that simply doesn't exist.

  7. Secretaries on Ask Slashdot: IT Personnel As Ostriches? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If a secretary with no professional qualifications can take minutes in a senior management meeting and maintain confidentiality about what was said there's no reason you, as a theoretically highly-educated IT worker, can't do the same about the content of emails you happen to read in the course of doing your job.