No, it's not bullshit. Even if Webkit were actively attempting to defeat compatibility, they can't exactly just change how -webkit-border-radius or other such extensions work without breaking existing markup, which would hurt themselves more than it would hurt their competitors (rendering would break in their engine while it remained compatible in competing products).
Sure, maybe a toolkit-specific extension would have to be reverse engineered so you can provide a proper compatibility layer, but that's not the case with Webkit. Not only does Webkit submit official recommendations which are extremely detailed descriptions of their extensions, but even if they didn't, it's open source, worst case scenario you could read it for yourself.
Which is exactly Firefox and other browsers did. The problem was that IE's broken rendering was failure to adhere to standards (rendering standards-based markup in a manner different from the standard), while Microsoft's current complaint is that other browsers implemented standards deviations in the manner that standards provided for, but which apparently MS can't be arsed to provided a compatibility layer for.
And nothing says that Microsoft can't translate -webkit- specific prefixes in a compatible manner. Just because it's -webkit-something doesn't mean only Webkit is allowed to use it, but rather that it should be compatible with the Webkit implementation.
A lot of these -webkit- prefixes exist because these are CSS 2 or CSS 3 properties that predated finalization of these standards, and most of them are largely compatible with the final standard if the prefix is removed. Webkit was complying with standards by adding features not yet finalized and prefixing them so there would be no conflict with the final standard. MS is essentially upset that Webkit's presence is sufficiently strong that developers for the first time in many years, don't feel the need to test against Microsoft's platform.
Depending on what the exercises are, they might not leave much room for slight differences. "Construct a rounded rect button with 12 px radius corners with a vertical gradient from #RRGGBB to #RRGGBB and a 15% drop-shadow with radius of 7px offset by 14px at 120."
A better solution is to digitally watermark the solution files, or if the students have access to the solution files independently (i.e. they came with the book on a CD), watermark the source files and require students to start with those rather than the ones from the CD. Honestly the book ought to have watermarked the solution files already.
Alternatively alter the exercise enough that the students can't depend on the provided solution. On the whole, this is not different from any other course where you're given problems to solve, and also given the solutions. You're going to by-and-large be depending on the students for honesty, if you don't feel you can do so (and that's probably safest), alter the parameters so the provided solution and the correct solution do not agree.
Do you mean the TARP program? The same one that earned the government $19.6 billion more than they put into it? Seems like a good investment to me, it both rescued the economy and turned a profit.
They are a useful tool, but not a replacement for human Q/A since tests inhrently depend on a programmer's guess on what might go wrong.
All testing depends on what a human guesses might go wrong, automated or otherwise. The advantage of automated testing is that you can perform those tests thousands of times faster than a human can.
It depends on the nature of your application, and how strong your test suites are, and how damaging it is to your customer or company if your product fails.
If your application has very strong and clear determinism along with few or no cross-interactions, then test cases can be fairly easy to write and can also (importantly) provide a comprehensive quality analysis. With good test cases, you can provide a full regression test multiple times per day. With sufficient confidence in your automated tests, some companies even deploy to production automatically upon successful test execution, this is called Continuous Deployment.
Not too many big shops can realistically provide sufficient test coverage for continuous deployment to be reliable, but small shops can get away with it much more easily. In part this is because their product is probably simpler and easier to test in an automated manner, plus the engineering staff probably understands every aspect of it extremely well (also a side effect of the simpler product).
Finally you can do continuous deployment if your product is a version controlled API. Your customers bind and test against a specific version, and the features of that version are locked, only bug fixes are deployed to that version, while new versions can safely be deployed because customers only use the newer version if they go out of their way to do so, and they presumably will provide test coverage of their own when they increment api versions.
This is a fairly common criticism of Flash, and it's also an invalid one. Flash is an open format, you can download the specification here on Adobe's website. There are even open source players available, see Gnash, Swfdec, and Lightspark. Unfortunately none of them are feature complete, and most are lacking some major features.
What Flash is not is an open standard. Meaning only Adobe gets to advance the standard, and I don't believe the licensing allows for there to be a fork of their standard. They'll tell you how to interoperate, but only they get to guide the technology and decide what to include.
But then, no sane coder uses a light background for coding, right?
Actually a light background is (somewhat counter-intuitively) easier on the eyes, especially in dim lighting scenarios. The reason comes down to the optical properties of your eyes, which we can talk about in camera terms. A narrow aperture creates a broad depth of field, while a narrow aperture creates a very shallow depth of field. Bright scenery requires a narrow aperture and a broad depth of field, while dark scenery (is certainly moodier) requires a wide open aperture and a very shallow depth of field.
That means that the brighter things are, the smaller your iris is, the more movement you can have in your head without your screen really going out of focus. Very dark setups with dark code (the stereotypical coding setup, it certainly looks cool) actually lead to more eye strain than a bright working environment and white background on your code. Eye strain is caused by constantly shifting focus, and that is alleviated by bright environs and bright code. Dark setups can require only a few millimeters of movement before your eyes are having to refocus. Bright setups can give you several centimeters of movement.
[Neon] is commercially extracted by the fractional distillation of liquid air. It is considerably more expensive than helium, since air is its only source. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon
And that's at more than 3.5x the concentration too.
Nevermind that the boiling point of Ne is 27K, while the boiling point of He is 4.2K (roughly 1/7 the absolute temperature). That makes fractional distillation dramatically more efficient for Neon than Helium even if they were at similar concentrations. Fractional distillation is also the process used to separate radiogenic He from natural gas reserves, but with much higher concentrations, yield per energy investment is much higher. Fractional distillation of He from atmosphere is expensive.
It's the patent office that has absolutely fucked up for awarding lame patents such as that rectangle with rounded corners patent to Apple.
There's a difference between being granted a bad patent, and litigating that bad patent. Apple doesn't get a free pass to generate lawsuits just because they were granted them.
They should be made to cough up at least 3 times the total revenue they've received that is linked to the clock design they have so blatantly stolen.
So it's ok to steal as long as you don't directly make any money off the theft?
What's the per-device profit margin, and how many apps are shipped on the default firmware? Your recommended damages are probably a lot higher than the Swiss Railway would seek in terms of licensing costs.
Your article states that twice an Exxon Valdez seeps into the gulf naturally each year. Their methodology is pretty suspect - measuring the thickness of naturally occurring oil on the surface, extrapolating the expected bacterial consumption rate and natural churn rate, and multiplying this by the surface area of the gulf. But I'll accept their figures for the sake of argument. So that's 84,000 m^3. Deepwater Horizon was 780,000 m^3, 18.6 times larger.
You're saying that releasing 18 times that volume over the course of only a few months in a single location about 40 miles from a coast probably doesn't have much if any measurable ecological impact? Maybe Exxon Valdez was no big deal either, I mean that's the Pacific Ocean, I'm sure there are hundreds of times that much oil seeping naturally into the ocean, right?
The money quote from that article regarding whether there is a corresponding explosion of population of life that feeds on this bacteria:
In late 2012 local fishermen report that crab, shrimp, and oyster fishing operations have not yet recovered from the oil spill and many fear that the Gulf seafood industry will never recover. One Mississippi shrimper who was interviewed said he used to get 8,000 pounds of shrimp in four days, but this year he got only 800 pounds a week. Mississippi's oyster reefs have been closed since the spill started. A Louisanna fisherman said the local oyster industry might do 35 per cent this year, "If we're very lucky." Dr Ed Cake, a biological oceanographer and a marine and oyster biologist, said that many of the Gulf fisheries have collapsed and "If it takes too long for them to come back, the fishing industry won't survive".[314]
So... no. If I had to speculate, the bacteria is most effective in high concentrations of dispersant. That dispersant is likely detrimental to higher lifeforms, so it's probably a smorgasbord of poisoned food. A shrimper who pulls in around 6% of his pre-disaster haul, that sounds like a completely devastated ecology. Also from the above article, they used dispersants right as tuna were spawning, and it takes a tuna fish 5-15 years to mature, so the effects of that might not hit the tuna fishing industry for 3 more years.
I, and others here, have given you several opportunities to corroborate your story with substantiating details, including offering specific questions you could answer to strengthen your case. Each time you ignore, redirect, or outright refuse to answer the questions. You have something to hide here, and the most likely thing that you're hiding is that your story is a lie. You have given me and others no reason to think otherwise.
If you refuse to corroborate, then yes, the only reasonable assumption is that you're a liar. I've welcomed you to demonstrate otherwise and you won't even make a superficial effort but once again take the offensive - attacking the questions rather than defending the premise.
The cop didn't speak to me until he told me, "You are free to go"... Gee! Thanks officer Obie! You're such a nobleman
What was his badge number, what city were you in and what was the date? Did you ask any questions of him while he was searching you and he refused to answer them? If the very first words he spoke were "you are free to go," how did he communicate to you that he was detaining you for search?
From the new 15 words of information you were so graciously willing to part with, you describe a single event, while earlier you said:
I was stopped more than once while walking down the street.
Or did both incidents played out exactly the same?
There are bad cops who overstep their authority and deserve to get called out for it, for example, read Carlos Miller's blog. I'm not convinced you were ever truly wronged by a cop though, your story is too light on details, too heavily peppered with unsubstantiated criticisms and insults, and even what little detail you're willing to part with is internally inconsistent.
What else did the cop say? Did you, at the very least, get his information?
<snip sarcasm> What the hell is the matter with you?
So are you refusing to answer the question? You claim to have been stopped for no reason, searched for no reason, and had your civil liberties violated for no reason on multiple occasions. I don't think it's unreasonable for others to be curious about additional details, particularly since from your descriptions of the events, you have good cause for a formal complaint against these officers.
You got a badge number, right? Did you file a complaint? Were there extenuating circumstances (eg, you matched the description of the perpetrator of a recently committed crime)? What you're saying is so incredibly at odds with most people's experience, and you claim it happened multiple times (discounting the fluke aspect), but refuse to corroborate your story even far enough to describe any aspect of it in greater detail.
To be honest, it makes the story sound made up. It sounds like you have some beef with law enforcement in general, and are trying to make up a story to support your cynical view, but you overstepped, and realize that you can't reveal additional details without either taking your story farther into the realm of implausibility or exposing your story as a farce.
If you legitimately had your rights violated, then you should want to see the perpetrators of that crime punished, both for your own sake, as well as the sake of any potential future victims of theirs. Which means you should be providing as accurate, truthful, and thorough a description of the events as possible, including the location, date, time, officer's badge number, and as much additional detail as you can reasonably recall, such as the nature of the verbal interactions. Unless and until you're willing to do that, your story just sounds like you got caught out on a bullshit response, and are taking the offensive to protect your pride.
I'd love to be proven wrong. Note, I'm taking this path of confronting you over the other path available to me of spending all 5 of my mod points marking you as a troll, which I believe you most likely are. However I'll foe you for now so that I'm not baited into believing an uncorroborated story of yours some time in the future.
So do you see the failure of your reasoning? Should we only require Hep B vaccines for the children of bad parents? Or maybe policy needs to consider more than all the happy scenarios and concern itself with the troubling scenarios as well. I'd go one farther and say that it should primarily concern itself with the troubling scenarios.
This exposure mechanism isn't even mentioned in the cdc documents
But it is mentioned several ways in the NIH document I provided earlier.
So we are doing something detrimental to kids health
Wait, what? How is a vaccine detrimental? I think you misunderstand the fundamental premise here.
Not if it leads to the death or disability of a larger portion of the population than the vaccination saves.
Do you have some figures to suggest that the net damage is greater pre-vaccination than post-vaccination? Keep in mind you can't compare rates between a country with frequent vaccination against a country with infrequent vaccination because of herd immunity. Do you even have figures about death or disability related to HepB vaccines? You're making a lot of unsupported claims here.
Actually, I was quoting the numbers from before the vaccine became recommended for infants.
I showed my sources, where are yours?
My kid has his own fingernail clippers. I thought most kids do.
Oh ok, so a common vector for Hep B according to the NIH should not be a consideration in vaccine policy because you personally aren't affected by it. Cool.
Given enough threats at one time, the immune system will be overwhelmed
I mentioned that. I also mentioned how vaccines do not overwhelm the immune system, and that immunocompromised patients are given higher doses than other patients - vaccines are inactivated or attenuated. They are enough for your immune system to learn from, but do not represent any significant strain on the immune system. Doses are carefully considered with that in mind.
Which of my arguments was debunked?
All of them, I addressed them point by point by citing an authority.
I believe all medical intervention involves some risk.
Without question. And particularly for diseases which have strong herd immunity due to significant vaccination rates, the individual risk of receiving a vaccine may in fact outweigh the risk of not receiving the vaccine. However the collective risk is substantially less because you benefit from the vaccinations received by others. In fact, that's what this whole article is about, by weakening members of the herd, we weaken the whole herd.
I know my wife and I don't have the virus, so I didn't include that in my risk analysis.
And should vaccination policy include clauses such as "Unless you're good parents, and promise to remain disease free"?
* Direct contact with blood in health care settings Seems like kids might be at roughly the same exposure risk as most adults who don't work in health care. Also I wonder if kids with HepB positive parents are at any risk of exposure to their parents' blood. Probably not, right?
* Sexual contact with an infected person Sure, infants aren't having sex. Well, unless there's an abusive situation for them, but those kids deserve to get Hepatitis, right?
* Shared personal items (such as toothbrushes, razors, and nail clippers) with an infected person I wonder if kids ever have their nails clipped. Only if they've given up their dream of having the world record for longest fingernails!
A couple more for good measure: * The hepatitis B virus can be passed to an infant during childbirth if the mother is infected. Risk factors for hepatitis B infection include: Being born, or having parents who were born in regions with high infection rates
According to the CDC there were only a few thousand incidences of it per year in the entire U.S. for minors
Right there is a few thousand reasons to try harder to increase the vaccination rate. Also quoting infection rates of a commonly vaccinated against disease is a terrible argument against the need for that vaccination. Tetanus infection rates are pretty low, maybe that vaccination should be deprecated as well?
However, delaying this as long as possible so we can indentify his allergies and allow him immune system to grow
You realize, of course, that immune systems actually get stronger in response to threats. Vaccines don't leave you weaker, they leave you stronger. It's certainly possible to overwhelm an immune system - particularly a young one - but the tiny amount of virus in a vaccine does not introduce any significant immunostress in even a young or immunocompromised patient. In fact, standard treatment for all but incredibly ill patients (patients who are so ill they need to remain in quarantine) is to give a LARGER dose of a vaccine if their immune system is weak.
You have not helped this issue at all by just dismissing me as stupid.
Sarcasm notwithstanding, I have not dismissed you as stupid, I've dismissed you as ill-informed. Your stupidity lies not in your lack of knowledge, but rather in how you attempt to spread your ignorance as fact and represent it as being highly informed when the very first response in a Google search for the disease name thoroughly debunks your entire position.
I don't like this line of thought. This massive cross-licensing nonsense is what keeps the little guys and potential entrepreneurs from entering markets. Why is the solution to obvious and likely invalid patents to create some mega-consortium of tech giants who all have a patent cross-licence agreement? So unless a company has a huge battlechest of obvious and likely invalid patents they can't even consider competing with these guys. Sounds kind of like an oligarchy to me.
This is not different regardless of cross-licensing deals. The little guy with no patent warchest still faces a gauntlet of patents. Their biggest enemies are not megacorporations, they are various little patent trolls trying to score enough settlements to get a stronger legal team to go after increasingly large opponents. Megacorps don't pursue guys making $1M gross, any potential payout is dwarfed by the legal fees.
Anyway none of the startup ecosystem is dramatically influenced by the patent ecosystem at the high end, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the existence or not of cross-licensing.
I wanted that to be awesome, but the highest rated game is 3.5 stars and is composed exclusively of 30x30 colored squares? And still somehow the framerate is terrible? The next highest at just a pixel above 3 stars looks nicer, but only gets 4-5 fps.
Honestly, HTML5 is the right solution - eventually, but it's not ready to stand up against Flash just yet. These are the kinds of games a Commodore64 would have run, and faster.
Battery charge / discharge rate is not constant over the charge level of the battery. The percentage reported by the battery to the OS is just the voltage reading, which is not truly linear to the actual charge level. It even depends on the load being placed on the battery. See this image (from here).
So sure, you can do a bad job of reporting remaining battery time that way. Or you can do a good job by involving some more advanced mathematics. This is a good example of why math is useful, even if most jobs don't fundamentally require it. Most programmers I know would look at the above chart and declare they have no idea how to deal with that, but it is pretty close to linear, and they know how to write that math, so that's what they'd write, then call it good enough.
You can be a programmer without higher math. But you can be a better programmer with it.
The one that does all this for me, without my having to write, maintain, and police my payment system.
PayPal and its ilk have existed for a few years now.
The one that has the store that markets my apps for me across most of the planet.
Wait, there's an app store that markets more than the top 0.01% of apps?
The one that builds devices specifically for the purpose of running apps like mine, devices that work correctly and aren't fragmented all to hell, saving me thousands in equipment purchases, and hundreds of hours of support and chasing down odd bugs.
I thought we were talking about payment processing, and whether 30% fees are reasonable.
The one that has some shred of piracy protection.
You're talking platform in a thread about the justness of Apple excluding all other payment processing options.
The one that has a userbase that is generally appreciative of what I make, instead of constantly bitching that the product isn't free, or doesn't work their their knockoff $99 tablet that can't run an OS newer than 3 years old, and using that as a justification to pirate.
I get it, red herrings and straw men.
I make games for a living. I have no interest in fucking around with fulfillment and accounting systems.
Sweet, back on topic. You are happy to pay a premium for convenience. Not everyone feels that way, but that option is taken away from them under Apple's rule.
I'd like to see that come down as more competition enters the market, but I make good money the way it stands. If there's a better alternative, I'll be all over it. Until then 30% is fair, and helluva lot lower than the 70-80% publishers want to put your game in a box and ship it around the country.
Wait, you mean distributors charge more more to package, stock, and ship a physical good than an electronic download?
Maybe there should be a 3 strikes rule for infringement. The third time you infringe someone's rights by posting a bogus takedown request, you lose your right to request any additional takedowns.
Some apps have that and handle that just fine. Other apps do not. It's not in the developer's best interests to let you replay IAP's, they get absolutely nothing from a replayed IAP. Some IAP's are for transients ("100 bonus turns today" or "one month with ads disabled" kind of thing), so it doesn't make sense that all IAP's are necessarily replayable. It's totally up to the developer, and most do not choose to spend much if any effort on that.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's not bullshit. Even if Webkit were actively attempting to defeat compatibility, they can't exactly just change how -webkit-border-radius or other such extensions work without breaking existing markup, which would hurt themselves more than it would hurt their competitors (rendering would break in their engine while it remained compatible in competing products).
Sure, maybe a toolkit-specific extension would have to be reverse engineered so you can provide a proper compatibility layer, but that's not the case with Webkit. Not only does Webkit submit official recommendations which are extremely detailed descriptions of their extensions, but even if they didn't, it's open source, worst case scenario you could read it for yourself.
Which is exactly Firefox and other browsers did. The problem was that IE's broken rendering was failure to adhere to standards (rendering standards-based markup in a manner different from the standard), while Microsoft's current complaint is that other browsers implemented standards deviations in the manner that standards provided for, but which apparently MS can't be arsed to provided a compatibility layer for.
And nothing says that Microsoft can't translate -webkit- specific prefixes in a compatible manner. Just because it's -webkit-something doesn't mean only Webkit is allowed to use it, but rather that it should be compatible with the Webkit implementation.
A lot of these -webkit- prefixes exist because these are CSS 2 or CSS 3 properties that predated finalization of these standards, and most of them are largely compatible with the final standard if the prefix is removed. Webkit was complying with standards by adding features not yet finalized and prefixing them so there would be no conflict with the final standard. MS is essentially upset that Webkit's presence is sufficiently strong that developers for the first time in many years, don't feel the need to test against Microsoft's platform.
Depending on what the exercises are, they might not leave much room for slight differences. "Construct a rounded rect button with 12 px radius corners with a vertical gradient from #RRGGBB to #RRGGBB and a 15% drop-shadow with radius of 7px offset by 14px at 120."
A better solution is to digitally watermark the solution files, or if the students have access to the solution files independently (i.e. they came with the book on a CD), watermark the source files and require students to start with those rather than the ones from the CD. Honestly the book ought to have watermarked the solution files already.
Alternatively alter the exercise enough that the students can't depend on the provided solution. On the whole, this is not different from any other course where you're given problems to solve, and also given the solutions. You're going to by-and-large be depending on the students for honesty, if you don't feel you can do so (and that's probably safest), alter the parameters so the provided solution and the correct solution do not agree.
Do you mean the TARP program? The same one that earned the government $19.6 billion more than they put into it? Seems like a good investment to me, it both rescued the economy and turned a profit.
They are a useful tool, but not a replacement for human Q/A since tests inhrently depend on a programmer's guess on what might go wrong.
All testing depends on what a human guesses might go wrong, automated or otherwise. The advantage of automated testing is that you can perform those tests thousands of times faster than a human can.
It depends on the nature of your application, and how strong your test suites are, and how damaging it is to your customer or company if your product fails.
If your application has very strong and clear determinism along with few or no cross-interactions, then test cases can be fairly easy to write and can also (importantly) provide a comprehensive quality analysis. With good test cases, you can provide a full regression test multiple times per day. With sufficient confidence in your automated tests, some companies even deploy to production automatically upon successful test execution, this is called Continuous Deployment.
Not too many big shops can realistically provide sufficient test coverage for continuous deployment to be reliable, but small shops can get away with it much more easily. In part this is because their product is probably simpler and easier to test in an automated manner, plus the engineering staff probably understands every aspect of it extremely well (also a side effect of the simpler product).
Finally you can do continuous deployment if your product is a version controlled API. Your customers bind and test against a specific version, and the features of that version are locked, only bug fixes are deployed to that version, while new versions can safely be deployed because customers only use the newer version if they go out of their way to do so, and they presumably will provide test coverage of their own when they increment api versions.
if we pushed Adobe to open the format
This is a fairly common criticism of Flash, and it's also an invalid one. Flash is an open format, you can download the specification here on Adobe's website. There are even open source players available, see Gnash, Swfdec, and Lightspark. Unfortunately none of them are feature complete, and most are lacking some major features.
What Flash is not is an open standard. Meaning only Adobe gets to advance the standard, and I don't believe the licensing allows for there to be a fork of their standard. They'll tell you how to interoperate, but only they get to guide the technology and decide what to include.
But then, no sane coder uses a light background for coding, right?
Actually a light background is (somewhat counter-intuitively) easier on the eyes, especially in dim lighting scenarios. The reason comes down to the optical properties of your eyes, which we can talk about in camera terms. A narrow aperture creates a broad depth of field, while a narrow aperture creates a very shallow depth of field. Bright scenery requires a narrow aperture and a broad depth of field, while dark scenery (is certainly moodier) requires a wide open aperture and a very shallow depth of field.
That means that the brighter things are, the smaller your iris is, the more movement you can have in your head without your screen really going out of focus. Very dark setups with dark code (the stereotypical coding setup, it certainly looks cool) actually lead to more eye strain than a bright working environment and white background on your code. Eye strain is caused by constantly shifting focus, and that is alleviated by bright environs and bright code. Dark setups can require only a few millimeters of movement before your eyes are having to refocus. Bright setups can give you several centimeters of movement.
[Neon] is commercially extracted by the fractional distillation of liquid air. It is considerably more expensive than helium, since air is its only source.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon
And that's at more than 3.5x the concentration too.
Nevermind that the boiling point of Ne is 27K, while the boiling point of He is 4.2K (roughly 1/7 the absolute temperature). That makes fractional distillation dramatically more efficient for Neon than Helium even if they were at similar concentrations. Fractional distillation is also the process used to separate radiogenic He from natural gas reserves, but with much higher concentrations, yield per energy investment is much higher. Fractional distillation of He from atmosphere is expensive.
It's the patent office that has absolutely fucked up for awarding lame patents such as that rectangle with rounded corners patent to Apple.
There's a difference between being granted a bad patent, and litigating that bad patent. Apple doesn't get a free pass to generate lawsuits just because they were granted them.
They should be made to cough up at least 3 times the total revenue they've received that is linked to the clock design they have so blatantly stolen.
So it's ok to steal as long as you don't directly make any money off the theft?
What's the per-device profit margin, and how many apps are shipped on the default firmware? Your recommended damages are probably a lot higher than the Swiss Railway would seek in terms of licensing costs.
Your article states that twice an Exxon Valdez seeps into the gulf naturally each year. Their methodology is pretty suspect - measuring the thickness of naturally occurring oil on the surface, extrapolating the expected bacterial consumption rate and natural churn rate, and multiplying this by the surface area of the gulf. But I'll accept their figures for the sake of argument. So that's 84,000 m^3. Deepwater Horizon was 780,000 m^3, 18.6 times larger.
You're saying that releasing 18 times that volume over the course of only a few months in a single location about 40 miles from a coast probably doesn't have much if any measurable ecological impact? Maybe Exxon Valdez was no big deal either, I mean that's the Pacific Ocean, I'm sure there are hundreds of times that much oil seeping naturally into the ocean, right?
The money quote from that article regarding whether there is a corresponding explosion of population of life that feeds on this bacteria:
In late 2012 local fishermen report that crab, shrimp, and oyster fishing operations have not yet recovered from the oil spill and many fear that the Gulf seafood industry will never recover. One Mississippi shrimper who was interviewed said he used to get 8,000 pounds of shrimp in four days, but this year he got only 800 pounds a week. Mississippi's oyster reefs have been closed since the spill started. A Louisanna fisherman said the local oyster industry might do 35 per cent this year, "If we're very lucky." Dr Ed Cake, a biological oceanographer and a marine and oyster biologist, said that many of the Gulf fisheries have collapsed and "If it takes too long for them to come back, the fishing industry won't survive".[314]
So... no. If I had to speculate, the bacteria is most effective in high concentrations of dispersant. That dispersant is likely detrimental to higher lifeforms, so it's probably a smorgasbord of poisoned food. A shrimper who pulls in around 6% of his pre-disaster haul, that sounds like a completely devastated ecology. Also from the above article, they used dispersants right as tuna were spawning, and it takes a tuna fish 5-15 years to mature, so the effects of that might not hit the tuna fishing industry for 3 more years.
I, and others here, have given you several opportunities to corroborate your story with substantiating details, including offering specific questions you could answer to strengthen your case. Each time you ignore, redirect, or outright refuse to answer the questions. You have something to hide here, and the most likely thing that you're hiding is that your story is a lie. You have given me and others no reason to think otherwise.
If you refuse to corroborate, then yes, the only reasonable assumption is that you're a liar. I've welcomed you to demonstrate otherwise and you won't even make a superficial effort but once again take the offensive - attacking the questions rather than defending the premise.
The cop didn't speak to me until he told me, "You are free to go"... Gee! Thanks officer Obie! You're such a nobleman
What was his badge number, what city were you in and what was the date? Did you ask any questions of him while he was searching you and he refused to answer them? If the very first words he spoke were "you are free to go," how did he communicate to you that he was detaining you for search?
From the new 15 words of information you were so graciously willing to part with, you describe a single event, while earlier you said:
I was stopped more than once while walking down the street.
Or did both incidents played out exactly the same?
There are bad cops who overstep their authority and deserve to get called out for it, for example, read Carlos Miller's blog. I'm not convinced you were ever truly wronged by a cop though, your story is too light on details, too heavily peppered with unsubstantiated criticisms and insults, and even what little detail you're willing to part with is internally inconsistent.
What else did the cop say? Did you, at the very least, get his information?
<snip sarcasm> What the hell is the matter with you?
So are you refusing to answer the question? You claim to have been stopped for no reason, searched for no reason, and had your civil liberties violated for no reason on multiple occasions. I don't think it's unreasonable for others to be curious about additional details, particularly since from your descriptions of the events, you have good cause for a formal complaint against these officers.
You got a badge number, right? Did you file a complaint? Were there extenuating circumstances (eg, you matched the description of the perpetrator of a recently committed crime)? What you're saying is so incredibly at odds with most people's experience, and you claim it happened multiple times (discounting the fluke aspect), but refuse to corroborate your story even far enough to describe any aspect of it in greater detail.
To be honest, it makes the story sound made up. It sounds like you have some beef with law enforcement in general, and are trying to make up a story to support your cynical view, but you overstepped, and realize that you can't reveal additional details without either taking your story farther into the realm of implausibility or exposing your story as a farce.
If you legitimately had your rights violated, then you should want to see the perpetrators of that crime punished, both for your own sake, as well as the sake of any potential future victims of theirs. Which means you should be providing as accurate, truthful, and thorough a description of the events as possible, including the location, date, time, officer's badge number, and as much additional detail as you can reasonably recall, such as the nature of the verbal interactions. Unless and until you're willing to do that, your story just sounds like you got caught out on a bullshit response, and are taking the offensive to protect your pride.
I'd love to be proven wrong. Note, I'm taking this path of confronting you over the other path available to me of spending all 5 of my mod points marking you as a troll, which I believe you most likely are. However I'll foe you for now so that I'm not baited into believing an uncorroborated story of yours some time in the future.
if the parent is doing their job
Most parents can and do get tested
So do you see the failure of your reasoning? Should we only require Hep B vaccines for the children of bad parents? Or maybe policy needs to consider more than all the happy scenarios and concern itself with the troubling scenarios as well. I'd go one farther and say that it should primarily concern itself with the troubling scenarios.
This exposure mechanism isn't even mentioned in the cdc documents
But it is mentioned several ways in the NIH document I provided earlier.
So we are doing something detrimental to kids health
Wait, what? How is a vaccine detrimental? I think you misunderstand the fundamental premise here.
Not if it leads to the death or disability of a larger portion of the population than the vaccination saves.
Do you have some figures to suggest that the net damage is greater pre-vaccination than post-vaccination? Keep in mind you can't compare rates between a country with frequent vaccination against a country with infrequent vaccination because of herd immunity. Do you even have figures about death or disability related to HepB vaccines? You're making a lot of unsupported claims here.
Actually, I was quoting the numbers from before the vaccine became recommended for infants.
I showed my sources, where are yours?
My kid has his own fingernail clippers. I thought most kids do.
Oh ok, so a common vector for Hep B according to the NIH should not be a consideration in vaccine policy because you personally aren't affected by it. Cool.
Given enough threats at one time, the immune system will be overwhelmed
I mentioned that. I also mentioned how vaccines do not overwhelm the immune system, and that immunocompromised patients are given higher doses than other patients - vaccines are inactivated or attenuated. They are enough for your immune system to learn from, but do not represent any significant strain on the immune system. Doses are carefully considered with that in mind.
Which of my arguments was debunked?
All of them, I addressed them point by point by citing an authority.
I believe all medical intervention involves some risk.
Without question. And particularly for diseases which have strong herd immunity due to significant vaccination rates, the individual risk of receiving a vaccine may in fact outweigh the risk of not receiving the vaccine. However the collective risk is substantially less because you benefit from the vaccinations received by others. In fact, that's what this whole article is about, by weakening members of the herd, we weaken the whole herd.
I know my wife and I don't have the virus, so I didn't include that in my risk analysis.
And should vaccination policy include clauses such as "Unless you're good parents, and promise to remain disease free"?
Go ahead call me stupid when I've done the research.
Have you now? Maybe you should research a little farther, might I suggest the National Institute of Health's article on HepB. Let me quote a couple of entries from there:
* Direct contact with blood in health care settings
Seems like kids might be at roughly the same exposure risk as most adults who don't work in health care. Also I wonder if kids with HepB positive parents are at any risk of exposure to their parents' blood. Probably not, right?
* Sexual contact with an infected person
Sure, infants aren't having sex. Well, unless there's an abusive situation for them, but those kids deserve to get Hepatitis, right?
* Shared personal items (such as toothbrushes, razors, and nail clippers) with an infected person
I wonder if kids ever have their nails clipped. Only if they've given up their dream of having the world record for longest fingernails!
A couple more for good measure:
* The hepatitis B virus can be passed to an infant during childbirth if the mother is infected.
Risk factors for hepatitis B infection include: Being born, or having parents who were born in regions with high infection rates
According to the CDC there were only a few thousand incidences of it per year in the entire U.S. for minors
Right there is a few thousand reasons to try harder to increase the vaccination rate. Also quoting infection rates of a commonly vaccinated against disease is a terrible argument against the need for that vaccination. Tetanus infection rates are pretty low, maybe that vaccination should be deprecated as well?
However, delaying this as long as possible so we can indentify his allergies and allow him immune system to grow
You realize, of course, that immune systems actually get stronger in response to threats. Vaccines don't leave you weaker, they leave you stronger. It's certainly possible to overwhelm an immune system - particularly a young one - but the tiny amount of virus in a vaccine does not introduce any significant immunostress in even a young or immunocompromised patient. In fact, standard treatment for all but incredibly ill patients (patients who are so ill they need to remain in quarantine) is to give a LARGER dose of a vaccine if their immune system is weak.
You have not helped this issue at all by just dismissing me as stupid.
Sarcasm notwithstanding, I have not dismissed you as stupid, I've dismissed you as ill-informed. Your stupidity lies not in your lack of knowledge, but rather in how you attempt to spread your ignorance as fact and represent it as being highly informed when the very first response in a Google search for the disease name thoroughly debunks your entire position.
I don't like this line of thought. This massive cross-licensing nonsense is what keeps the little guys and potential entrepreneurs from entering markets. Why is the solution to obvious and likely invalid patents to create some mega-consortium of tech giants who all have a patent cross-licence agreement? So unless a company has a huge battlechest of obvious and likely invalid patents they can't even consider competing with these guys. Sounds kind of like an oligarchy to me.
This is not different regardless of cross-licensing deals. The little guy with no patent warchest still faces a gauntlet of patents. Their biggest enemies are not megacorporations, they are various little patent trolls trying to score enough settlements to get a stronger legal team to go after increasingly large opponents. Megacorps don't pursue guys making $1M gross, any potential payout is dwarfed by the legal fees.
Anyway none of the startup ecosystem is dramatically influenced by the patent ecosystem at the high end, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the existence or not of cross-licensing.
I wanted that to be awesome, but the highest rated game is 3.5 stars and is composed exclusively of 30x30 colored squares? And still somehow the framerate is terrible? The next highest at just a pixel above 3 stars looks nicer, but only gets 4-5 fps.
Honestly, HTML5 is the right solution - eventually, but it's not ready to stand up against Flash just yet. These are the kinds of games a Commodore64 would have run, and faster.
Diamonds are a terrible investment for everyone but the original seller.
Battery charge / discharge rate is not constant over the charge level of the battery. The percentage reported by the battery to the OS is just the voltage reading, which is not truly linear to the actual charge level. It even depends on the load being placed on the battery. See this image (from here).
So sure, you can do a bad job of reporting remaining battery time that way. Or you can do a good job by involving some more advanced mathematics. This is a good example of why math is useful, even if most jobs don't fundamentally require it. Most programmers I know would look at the above chart and declare they have no idea how to deal with that, but it is pretty close to linear, and they know how to write that math, so that's what they'd write, then call it good enough.
You can be a programmer without higher math. But you can be a better programmer with it.
The one that does all this for me, without my having to write, maintain, and police my payment system.
PayPal and its ilk have existed for a few years now.
The one that has the store that markets my apps for me across most of the planet.
Wait, there's an app store that markets more than the top 0.01% of apps?
The one that builds devices specifically for the purpose of running apps like mine, devices that work correctly and aren't fragmented all to hell, saving me thousands in equipment purchases, and hundreds of hours of support and chasing down odd bugs.
I thought we were talking about payment processing, and whether 30% fees are reasonable.
The one that has some shred of piracy protection.
You're talking platform in a thread about the justness of Apple excluding all other payment processing options.
The one that has a userbase that is generally appreciative of what I make, instead of constantly bitching that the product isn't free, or doesn't work their their knockoff $99 tablet that can't run an OS newer than 3 years old, and using that as a justification to pirate.
I get it, red herrings and straw men.
I make games for a living. I have no interest in fucking around with fulfillment and accounting systems.
Sweet, back on topic. You are happy to pay a premium for convenience. Not everyone feels that way, but that option is taken away from them under Apple's rule.
I'd like to see that come down as more competition enters the market, but I make good money the way it stands. If there's a better alternative, I'll be all over it. Until then 30% is fair, and helluva lot lower than the 70-80% publishers want to put your game in a box and ship it around the country.
Wait, you mean distributors charge more more to package, stock, and ship a physical good than an electronic download?
Maybe there should be a 3 strikes rule for infringement. The third time you infringe someone's rights by posting a bogus takedown request, you lose your right to request any additional takedowns.
just use "restore In App Purchases" button
Some apps have that and handle that just fine. Other apps do not. It's not in the developer's best interests to let you replay IAP's, they get absolutely nothing from a replayed IAP. Some IAP's are for transients ("100 bonus turns today" or "one month with ads disabled" kind of thing), so it doesn't make sense that all IAP's are necessarily replayable. It's totally up to the developer, and most do not choose to spend much if any effort on that.