I've been to alot of the world. I'm guessing you haven't, because if you had, you'd find that this is generally a universal invariant among humans.
Maybe not everyone is as thick (literally) as the average American, but they're gaining ground rapidly, because it's generally only through economic inability to be "thick" that they are. Make everyone as rich as Americans, and everyone becomes fat. Seriously.
And in terms of mental "thickness", well I can assure you, that's the same absolutely everywhere, already.
On the other hand, keep in mind that any and all of these "surveys" showing people being dumb will keep going until they've managed to cherrypick enough dumb answers to make the casual observer believe that this represents the norm. Maybe they asked 500 astronomy grads and 5 of them were dumb, and those are the only 5 they showed. Since those kinds of articles/videos/exposees tend to be looking to titillate, not inform, it is entirely believable that it's all just cherrypicking for the purposes of supporting a false pretense.
I have to say, I get very confused by terminology used in physics discussions. I feel like words are borrowed from normal English usage that imply things about the models that are not being implied, and this causes me to conclude that there are illogical aspects to physics that probably aren't there.
In this case, the word is "expand" when applied to the universe. The concept of an "expanding" universe seems nonsensical to me, when expand is considered in its normal English meaning.
"Expand" means to grow larger in size over time. But the concept of "size" implies a relationship between two entities, that being existing win the same physical reality, both being measurable via the same means, and those measurements then being directly comparable, the one producing the larger measurement being called "larger".
The concept of "size", in other words, implies an unchanging, fixed coordinate system of measurement, applied equally to two objects whose size is to be compared.
And thus something can only "expand" relative to something else; that is to say, can only change its size relative to something else that can be measured and likewise has a size to be measured against.
Now of course the universe, by definition being "the entirety of measurable reality", cannot be measured. It *is* the coordinate system, in effect, and you can't measure the coordinate system. So the "size" of the universe cannot be measured, and even if it could, saying that it were "expanding" in the English sense of the word would imply that there was something *else* that it was expanding within; but that seems like nonsense.
And so I have to conclude that the concept of an "expanding universe" is just a very bad way to describe what's actually going on.
I have, by thinking about what kinds of meanings physicists may be trying to impart by using the term "expanding universe", and with my very rudimentary knowledge of the experimental evidence by which this idea of an "expanding universe" is based (i.e. red shift in all directions implying that everything is moving away from everything else, with things that are 'further away' redshifting more), concluded that the important fact is that "measured distances are becoming longer over time".
I realize that this last sentence itself is fraught with loaded terms; but I think that this way of describing things at least avoids the unfortunate implication that the word "expanding" has of there being things outside of the universe into which the universe is "expanding".
I feel like there's some kind of intrinsic connection between what we call 'distance' and what we call 'time', and that the speed of light is a fundamental connection between the two; like the speed of light is the constant that comes out of the aspects of reality at the boundaries where time and spatial dimensions are equivalent somehow. Almost kind of like how the number "Pi" is an artifact of the relationship between two dimensions (in which a curve can be described) and one dimension (in which a line can be described) when is expressed in the realm of symbolic thought (i.e. mathematics). So we have the speed of light which is in the same way the symbolic expression of a relationship between the dimension of time and the dimensions of space.
Anyway I'm getting off course here. The point is that physicists often use terms that make it difficult for me to ascertain the aspects of the model for which the term was really implied, and those aspects which are just baggage carried along by natural interpretations of the meaning of the term but that aren't actually mean to be part of the model.
I'll give another example: we've all heard about this concept of "curved space" that is used as a component of a theory of gravity. The term "curved space" to me seems to me to be an oxymoron: space cannot curve because space is the coordinate system; and the coordinate system does not curve; curves are things that can exist within coordinate systems, not features of the coordinate system
Yes, that's what I'm saying, and it does make sense.
The whole point of alot of the features of these languages is that they allow eliding the structure and type information that makes code readable.
C doesn't allow you to elide type information or structure.
Yeah, it has shortcuts for some frequently used operations that can be abused, for sure. And it's certainly possible to write unmaintainable code in any language.
All I'm saying is that there is a crowed of language developers who seem to think that eliding details is the holy grail of language features. And the proof is usually how small and "elegant" something like Fibonacci can be implemented.
OCaML is the only language I have ever experienced where I was told by other developers that I cannot expect to understand the program by reading the code - I have to run it in a development environment where the IDE can tell me type information and other stuff not obvious from the source.
Where do you work? I think I'd like to work there. Around here we can't gid rid of useless people, too much silicon valley nicey-niceness gets in the way. I'd like to work somewhere that people can be shitcanned quickly when they so obviously fuck up. I say this sincerely.
There is a crowd of people who think that being able to write a Fibonacci function is fewer characters is the ultimate goal of computer languages. ML and its derivatives are basically this.
That's a pretty insulting statement, I know, but I've suffered through having to read through enough ML code in my day to know that it and its derivatives are not languages that encourage accessible code. They encourage a certain economy of expression that's actually antithetical to maintainable code.
Now I am left wondering why such a stupid turn of events would ever be construed as something interesting to the Slashdot readership. Or, at least, me.
Agreed. I gave up after the first paragraph, and came to the Slashdot comments to see if comments here would allow me to extract the facts of what happened, or at least make some semblance of sense over what the awful editorial summary here and incomprehensible article there were supposed to be telling me.
Adding instructions is another way to take advantage of the (up until recently) ever increasing density of integrated circuits.
The intel instruction set may not be ideal in many ways, but intel has done a pretty good job advancing the state of microprocessor design and execution for 40 years now, don't you think? I mean they've driven desktop processors all the way to their end game, all the way to the end of Moore's Law. And you act like they've hamstrung the computer industry or something.
Also your notion that slavishly adhering to some 30 year old RISC principles is somehow the only or best way to make processors is ill informed.
"Most humans cannot 'grok' the entire Intel instruction set" is patently false - anyone can understand it, it's well documented; but most people, most coders even, don't *need* to understand it and therefore spend their mental energy acquiring information that is more useful to them.
The embedded environment in which we've deployed haxe over Flash would like to have a word with you about whether or not "JITed code is good enough"...
Admittedly, my company does not represent the average Haxe development environment; Haxe is very much targeted towards small scale developers working on mobile apps.
But my point is that Native vs. interpreted vs. JITed is not moot in all circumstances, and can be quite relevant depending upon the context.
And for what it's worth, Haxe generated native binaries have very few dependencies on the runtime, and generally only depend upon runtime facilities which are either guaranteed, or virtually guaranteed, to be a part of the target runtime.
"legal scammer" is an oxymoron, but I suspect you know that.
I also suspect that you know there is a real difference between legal forms of investment, with which you will find associated every kind of good and bad person in the world, but predominantly "normal" people availing themselves of opportunities to invest their money as they see fit, and generally with protections and expectations of security that are in the vast majority of cases respected.
Then you have bitcoin, where you have an extremely high chance that the person on the other end of your transaction is a scammer, unless you know them personally. And where, almost any discussion in any forum invites the participation of every kind of greedy do-nothing imaginable, along with the aforementioned outright thieves and scum.
I say this from experience. There is almost no aspect to my involvement in bitcoin that wasn't flavored to some degree, usually to a large degree, by the scumminess of the average bitcoin participant.
Almost every aspect of Bitcoin is just seeping with get rich quick scammers, schemers, and thieves and just general disgusting lowlifes. Whatever money I might have made by holding onto my bitcoins, it was worth to lose just to get out of Bitcoin and not have to associate myself with that den of scum and villianry anymore.
"As comedian Chris Rock once said: Shaq is rich. The guy who pays Shaq is wealthy."
Can you explain what that statement means to you? Because you clearly are interpreting something that I don't see. That statement looks mostly meaningless to me.
"So yes, it sucks ass that the US invaded Iraq, but do you seriously want the US to sit in the corner and refuse to come out when Russia starts enlarging itself with trumped up referendums, because a decade ago it did a naughty thing?"
Speaking for myself, I'd say it's a "case by case basis" sort of a thing. I don't believe in absolutes; there is no single policy that we should always employ regardless of situation.
And in this case, I'd say we should do nothing. It's a complex enough situation in which there is a majority of people making a collective decision, and it can be carried out on peaceful terms, so let it be so.
Sorry, shows how ignorant I am of how things have progressed in the bitcoin world after having stopped participating a couple of years ago. I was under the impression that turning bitcoins into anything else was difficult, but obviously I am not well informed. I tried selling a couple of fractional bitcoins on eBay and just got scammed (losing about $200 worth to thieves with stolen accounts). That's all I've done to try to liquidate them. I'll investigate the options you mentioned, thanks.
A couple of years ago when I first read the bitcoin whitepaper and was very impressed and excited (how can you read that and *not* be impressed and excited?) I proposed a slight change to the bitcoin protocol to add support for messages querying for "elided" blocks, i.e. a means for querying a peer for blocks only relevant to a given transaction (the history of all addresses relevant to and leading up to that transaction). The elided blocks would just be the full details necessary to allow a client to validate a transaction, with the Merkel tree being used to elide most of the data.
With a feature like this, a client would not need to download the entire block chain, they'd just need a) enough of the block chain to be able to validate elided blocks which wouldn't be much, and b) a peer willing to answer elided block queries for them. Since answering an elided block query takes real work (you have to have the entire block chain indexed in such a way as to make answering such a query efficient, which means storing alot of data, with proper indexes, and proper software, and connecting to the bitcoin transaction firehose, with the cost associated with that), I included a mechanism that would facilitate allowing the peer to 'charge' you for this service, using the same pseudo-anonymity of regular bitcoin.
The idea being that a client should not have to trust a third party to handle their transactions for them, which is the only feasable way to do bitcoin transactions now unless you want to download 15 GB - not really feasable in most circumstances - and connect to the firehose - also not feasable in most circumstances, and would be much less so were bitcoin to actually become used with any real transaction volume on a global scale. For a small fee (probably cents per transaction I would guess) you could use a system that didn't require you to trust any peers (unlike the current "we'll hold your wallet for you and do your transactions on your behalf" services that seem to have proliferated to make bitcoin actually feasable for clients).
I started to write it, but then gave up on it because I lost interest. All I got out of it was a couple of bitcoins I bought for fun, that made me about 2 grand (on paper of course, I never sold them and I don't really think it's possible to actually liquidate bitcoins into real money without serious work and headache).
While I agree that the only reason to put acetominophen into opiates is to ensure that the drug cannot be taken beyond a certain dosage without damaging the patient's liver, I do wonder if the reason really is just a vindictive desire to harm addicts as others are stating.
More logical to me is the conclusion that the authorities just want doctors to have to be careful with their prescriptions. If there were no acetominophen doctors could be pretty liberal in how they prescribe dosages with little consequence. But add some acetophinophen, and now doctors have to be very aware that there is a certain maximum dosage built into the drug, and they cannot prescribe at a higher dosage without risking being fined or jailed or sued or whatever it is that happens to doctors that mis-prescribe dangerous drugs.
I suspect that the powers that be have decided that the maximum reasonably beneficial dosage of an opiate is X mg per day, and so they require that enough acetominophen be added so that X mg per day is also the maximum safe dosage. In doing so they limit the ability of any doctor to prescribe more than what they had believed was the maximum beneficial dose. Likely they chose X mg per day because studies shows that it was the dosage that would be beneficial in the majority of cases, and don't see the need for anyone to go above X mg per day and unnecessarily take a larger risk of addiction.
That sounds more reasonable to me than just wanting to hurt addicts.
I don't use illegal drugs and have no interest in doing so but... right on. I fully support your right to use whatever substance you want on yourself in whatever way you choose. I agree that the language surrounding the drug debate is heavily skewed towards the presumption of a certain anti-drug viewpoint, and I think it's unfortunate that most people are incapable of the strength of resolve necessary to put their own personal fears aside and engage in the discussion on drugs in a logical, open minded manner.
Lucky dog. I took a business trip to the U.K. and developed an abscess on the airplane. By the time I landed I was in excruciating, nearly panic inducing pain. And I had a week long business trip to attend to. I went to a public dentist and they wouldn't do anything for the pain - they gave me some antibiotic pills that they said should take care of the abscess in two or three days. And in the meantime? Just deal with the pain.
I maxed out on ibuprofin and acetominophen, alternating taking about 50% above maximum dose of each every two hours. I would get a slight relief, bringing the pain to almost bearable for about half an hour, and then it would go back up to full pain level. I would sit and rock back and forth in front of the computer in unbearable pain and focus enough energy to concentrate on my job for a few minutes at a time.
I didn't sleep for nearly two days (was badly jetlagged anyway) and not a morsel of food entered my mouth for about 50 hours.
This all started on Wednesday. On Friday night I started to feel a little better, was able to even fall asleep and then on Saturday I woke up and... the pain was gone. Hallelujah! Coincidentally the two days of rainy crappy weather were over and the sun was out. Just in time for me to enjoy the driving trip to Cardiff I had planned for myself.
When I got back to CA my doctor did a root canal. This was on a tooth that had already had a root canal 7 years earlier but his conclusion was "I guess I missed some nerve endings the first time around".
Alls well that ends well I suppose but... I would have *killed* for some real painkillers at the time. I've never taken vicodin or any kind of opiate at all, and generally would never want to, but in this case... I would have made the exception.
I used to think all programming languages were more or less the same, and this opinion was based on having programmed in a variety of languages, and noted how easy it was to understand the gist of a new language pretty much immediately upon seeing it, and coming to understand any nuances involved without too much further study.
Then I ran up against OCaml. And I was humbled. I didn't really realize that there could ever be a computer language as hard to approach as learning a new spoken language, but OCaml showed me the error of my preconceptions.
My favorite moment was when trying to read and understand some gnarly OCaml code (is there *any* OCaml that isn't gnarly to some degree?) and asking on an IRC channel how I would go about figuring out what the "types" were of variables I was seeing as inputs to procedures and used as local variables within procedures. I was surprised by the answer: you can't. It was recommended that I install an OCaml IDE environment and then have the IDE tell me the types. Why? Because it is more or less impossible to know, from inspection, what the type of anything is. I guess the concept of 'type' is a little to gauche for the OCaml crowd.
I never thought I'd run into a language where, in order to read and understand the code, you literally have to *implement a virtual machine in your head and run the code*, but then I ran across OCaml.
I wonder what the brain of someone reading OCaml code would look like under an MRI...
Oh and to your point... I don't know where you work, but I think your view is a reflection of your particular experience and not necessarily true across the software development profession. I've been in the industry nearly as long as you have and I haven't noticed any correlation between fluency in multiple spoken languages and programming skill.
When I first came out of college and was young and naive, I thought a great software developer was someone who was really smart, really able to solve complex algorithmic problems. But years in the industry have proven to me that while such talents are important, and people like that are needed, those talents are vastly overshadowed by the more important skill of being able to coordinate with other developers, and to manage detail. The hard part of software development is not on the scale of problems that a single developer faces in daily coding tasks; the hard part is taking 100 developers and figuring out how to produce software that is even 50x as large or complex as that which would normally be written by a single programmer.
A single developer will never be able to compete with an entire software development company in building large or complex software. Competitiveness between large groups of developers is where it's at, and the skills and experience needed for that is an entirely different thing than individual programming genius.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been to alot of the world. I'm guessing you haven't, because if you had, you'd find that this is generally a universal invariant among humans.
Maybe not everyone is as thick (literally) as the average American, but they're gaining ground rapidly, because it's generally only through economic inability to be "thick" that they are. Make everyone as rich as Americans, and everyone becomes fat. Seriously.
And in terms of mental "thickness", well I can assure you, that's the same absolutely everywhere, already.
On the other hand, keep in mind that any and all of these "surveys" showing people being dumb will keep going until they've managed to cherrypick enough dumb answers to make the casual observer believe that this represents the norm. Maybe they asked 500 astronomy grads and 5 of them were dumb, and those are the only 5 they showed. Since those kinds of articles/videos/exposees tend to be looking to titillate, not inform, it is entirely believable that it's all just cherrypicking for the purposes of supporting a false pretense.
I have to say, I get very confused by terminology used in physics discussions. I feel like words are borrowed from normal English usage that imply things about the models that are not being implied, and this causes me to conclude that there are illogical aspects to physics that probably aren't there.
In this case, the word is "expand" when applied to the universe. The concept of an "expanding" universe seems nonsensical to me, when expand is considered in its normal English meaning.
"Expand" means to grow larger in size over time. But the concept of "size" implies a relationship between two entities, that being existing win the same physical reality, both being measurable via the same means, and those measurements then being directly comparable, the one producing the larger measurement being called "larger".
The concept of "size", in other words, implies an unchanging, fixed coordinate system of measurement, applied equally to two objects whose size is to be compared.
And thus something can only "expand" relative to something else; that is to say, can only change its size relative to something else that can be measured and likewise has a size to be measured against.
Now of course the universe, by definition being "the entirety of measurable reality", cannot be measured. It *is* the coordinate system, in effect, and you can't measure the coordinate system. So the "size" of the universe cannot be measured, and even if it could, saying that it were "expanding" in the English sense of the word would imply that there was something *else* that it was expanding within; but that seems like nonsense.
And so I have to conclude that the concept of an "expanding universe" is just a very bad way to describe what's actually going on.
I have, by thinking about what kinds of meanings physicists may be trying to impart by using the term "expanding universe", and with my very rudimentary knowledge of the experimental evidence by which this idea of an "expanding universe" is based (i.e. red shift in all directions implying that everything is moving away from everything else, with things that are 'further away' redshifting more), concluded that the important fact is that "measured distances are becoming longer over time".
I realize that this last sentence itself is fraught with loaded terms; but I think that this way of describing things at least avoids the unfortunate implication that the word "expanding" has of there being things outside of the universe into which the universe is "expanding".
I feel like there's some kind of intrinsic connection between what we call 'distance' and what we call 'time', and that the speed of light is a fundamental connection between the two; like the speed of light is the constant that comes out of the aspects of reality at the boundaries where time and spatial dimensions are equivalent somehow. Almost kind of like how the number "Pi" is an artifact of the relationship between two dimensions (in which a curve can be described) and one dimension (in which a line can be described) when is expressed in the realm of symbolic thought (i.e. mathematics). So we have the speed of light which is in the same way the symbolic expression of a relationship between the dimension of time and the dimensions of space.
Anyway I'm getting off course here. The point is that physicists often use terms that make it difficult for me to ascertain the aspects of the model for which the term was really implied, and those aspects which are just baggage carried along by natural interpretations of the meaning of the term but that aren't actually mean to be part of the model.
I'll give another example: we've all heard about this concept of "curved space" that is used as a component of a theory of gravity. The term "curved space" to me seems to me to be an oxymoron: space cannot curve because space is the coordinate system; and the coordinate system does not curve; curves are things that can exist within coordinate systems, not features of the coordinate system
Yes, that's what I'm saying, and it does make sense.
The whole point of alot of the features of these languages is that they allow eliding the structure and type information that makes code readable.
C doesn't allow you to elide type information or structure.
Yeah, it has shortcuts for some frequently used operations that can be abused, for sure. And it's certainly possible to write unmaintainable code in any language.
All I'm saying is that there is a crowed of language developers who seem to think that eliding details is the holy grail of language features. And the proof is usually how small and "elegant" something like Fibonacci can be implemented.
OCaML is the only language I have ever experienced where I was told by other developers that I cannot expect to understand the program by reading the code - I have to run it in a development environment where the IDE can tell me type information and other stuff not obvious from the source.
Where do you work? I think I'd like to work there. Around here we can't gid rid of useless people, too much silicon valley nicey-niceness gets in the way. I'd like to work somewhere that people can be shitcanned quickly when they so obviously fuck up. I say this sincerely.
There is a crowd of people who think that being able to write a Fibonacci function is fewer characters is the ultimate goal of computer languages. ML and its derivatives are basically this.
That's a pretty insulting statement, I know, but I've suffered through having to read through enough ML code in my day to know that it and its derivatives are not languages that encourage accessible code. They encourage a certain economy of expression that's actually antithetical to maintainable code.
That's my opinion anyway.
Thank you, that was very helpful.
Now I am left wondering why such a stupid turn of events would ever be construed as something interesting to the Slashdot readership. Or, at least, me.
Agreed. I gave up after the first paragraph, and came to the Slashdot comments to see if comments here would allow me to extract the facts of what happened, or at least make some semblance of sense over what the awful editorial summary here and incomprehensible article there were supposed to be telling me.
So far, no luck though ...
Hi troll, have a sandwich.
Linux *is* better, faster, and more reliable.
Adding instructions is another way to take advantage of the (up until recently) ever increasing density of integrated circuits.
The intel instruction set may not be ideal in many ways, but intel has done a pretty good job advancing the state of microprocessor design and execution for 40 years now, don't you think? I mean they've driven desktop processors all the way to their end game, all the way to the end of Moore's Law. And you act like they've hamstrung the computer industry or something.
Also your notion that slavishly adhering to some 30 year old RISC principles is somehow the only or best way to make processors is ill informed.
"Most humans cannot 'grok' the entire Intel instruction set" is patently false - anyone can understand it, it's well documented; but most people, most coders even, don't *need* to understand it and therefore spend their mental energy acquiring information that is more useful to them.
You have not provided every possible rationale for your statement, nor all of the supporting references.
I accuse you of not providing all of the info, and therefore attempting to manipulate people.
You are therefore, by your own logic, anti-democratic, simply wrong, and a fraud.
The embedded environment in which we've deployed haxe over Flash would like to have a word with you about whether or not "JITed code is good enough" ...
Admittedly, my company does not represent the average Haxe development environment; Haxe is very much targeted towards small scale developers working on mobile apps.
But my point is that Native vs. interpreted vs. JITed is not moot in all circumstances, and can be quite relevant depending upon the context.
And for what it's worth, Haxe generated native binaries have very few dependencies on the runtime, and generally only depend upon runtime facilities which are either guaranteed, or virtually guaranteed, to be a part of the target runtime.
"legal scammer" is an oxymoron, but I suspect you know that.
I also suspect that you know there is a real difference between legal forms of investment, with which you will find associated every kind of good and bad person in the world, but predominantly "normal" people availing themselves of opportunities to invest their money as they see fit, and generally with protections and expectations of security that are in the vast majority of cases respected.
Then you have bitcoin, where you have an extremely high chance that the person on the other end of your transaction is a scammer, unless you know them personally. And where, almost any discussion in any forum invites the participation of every kind of greedy do-nothing imaginable, along with the aforementioned outright thieves and scum.
I say this from experience. There is almost no aspect to my involvement in bitcoin that wasn't flavored to some degree, usually to a large degree, by the scumminess of the average bitcoin participant.
It cannot skip the native C++ step. The cpp target of haxe always generates C++ code and always compiles it to produce a native binary.
Almost every aspect of Bitcoin is just seeping with get rich quick scammers, schemers, and thieves and just general disgusting lowlifes. Whatever money I might have made by holding onto my bitcoins, it was worth to lose just to get out of Bitcoin and not have to associate myself with that den of scum and villianry anymore.
Enslave? The people voted. They want to become part of Russia. Let them.
If other states voted that they wanted to be part of Russia, I'd think that was fine too.
If Russia started invading countries to annex them, well that would be different.
But I thought I already said it was a case by case basis sort of thing??? Were you expecting some kind of absolutism answer after I already said that?
"As comedian Chris Rock once said: Shaq is rich. The guy who pays Shaq is wealthy."
Can you explain what that statement means to you? Because you clearly are interpreting something that I don't see. That statement looks mostly meaningless to me.
"So yes, it sucks ass that the US invaded Iraq, but do you seriously want the US to sit in the corner and refuse to come out when Russia starts enlarging itself with trumped up referendums, because a decade ago it did a naughty thing?"
Speaking for myself, I'd say it's a "case by case basis" sort of a thing. I don't believe in absolutes; there is no single policy that we should always employ regardless of situation.
And in this case, I'd say we should do nothing. It's a complex enough situation in which there is a majority of people making a collective decision, and it can be carried out on peaceful terms, so let it be so.
Sorry, shows how ignorant I am of how things have progressed in the bitcoin world after having stopped participating a couple of years ago. I was under the impression that turning bitcoins into anything else was difficult, but obviously I am not well informed. I tried selling a couple of fractional bitcoins on eBay and just got scammed (losing about $200 worth to thieves with stolen accounts). That's all I've done to try to liquidate them. I'll investigate the options you mentioned, thanks.
A couple of years ago when I first read the bitcoin whitepaper and was very impressed and excited (how can you read that and *not* be impressed and excited?) I proposed a slight change to the bitcoin protocol to add support for messages querying for "elided" blocks, i.e. a means for querying a peer for blocks only relevant to a given transaction (the history of all addresses relevant to and leading up to that transaction). The elided blocks would just be the full details necessary to allow a client to validate a transaction, with the Merkel tree being used to elide most of the data.
With a feature like this, a client would not need to download the entire block chain, they'd just need a) enough of the block chain to be able to validate elided blocks which wouldn't be much, and b) a peer willing to answer elided block queries for them. Since answering an elided block query takes real work (you have to have the entire block chain indexed in such a way as to make answering such a query efficient, which means storing alot of data, with proper indexes, and proper software, and connecting to the bitcoin transaction firehose, with the cost associated with that), I included a mechanism that would facilitate allowing the peer to 'charge' you for this service, using the same pseudo-anonymity of regular bitcoin.
The idea being that a client should not have to trust a third party to handle their transactions for them, which is the only feasable way to do bitcoin transactions now unless you want to download 15 GB - not really feasable in most circumstances - and connect to the firehose - also not feasable in most circumstances, and would be much less so were bitcoin to actually become used with any real transaction volume on a global scale. For a small fee (probably cents per transaction I would guess) you could use a system that didn't require you to trust any peers (unlike the current "we'll hold your wallet for you and do your transactions on your behalf" services that seem to have proliferated to make bitcoin actually feasable for clients).
I started to write it, but then gave up on it because I lost interest. All I got out of it was a couple of bitcoins I bought for fun, that made me about 2 grand (on paper of course, I never sold them and I don't really think it's possible to actually liquidate bitcoins into real money without serious work and headache).
While I agree that the only reason to put acetominophen into opiates is to ensure that the drug cannot be taken beyond a certain dosage without damaging the patient's liver, I do wonder if the reason really is just a vindictive desire to harm addicts as others are stating.
More logical to me is the conclusion that the authorities just want doctors to have to be careful with their prescriptions. If there were no acetominophen doctors could be pretty liberal in how they prescribe dosages with little consequence. But add some acetophinophen, and now doctors have to be very aware that there is a certain maximum dosage built into the drug, and they cannot prescribe at a higher dosage without risking being fined or jailed or sued or whatever it is that happens to doctors that mis-prescribe dangerous drugs.
I suspect that the powers that be have decided that the maximum reasonably beneficial dosage of an opiate is X mg per day, and so they require that enough acetominophen be added so that X mg per day is also the maximum safe dosage. In doing so they limit the ability of any doctor to prescribe more than what they had believed was the maximum beneficial dose. Likely they chose X mg per day because studies shows that it was the dosage that would be beneficial in the majority of cases, and don't see the need for anyone to go above X mg per day and unnecessarily take a larger risk of addiction.
That sounds more reasonable to me than just wanting to hurt addicts.
I don't use illegal drugs and have no interest in doing so but ... right on. I fully support your right to use whatever substance you want on yourself in whatever way you choose. I agree that the language surrounding the drug debate is heavily skewed towards the presumption of a certain anti-drug viewpoint, and I think it's unfortunate that most people are incapable of the strength of resolve necessary to put their own personal fears aside and engage in the discussion on drugs in a logical, open minded manner.
Lucky dog. I took a business trip to the U.K. and developed an abscess on the airplane. By the time I landed I was in excruciating, nearly panic inducing pain. And I had a week long business trip to attend to. I went to a public dentist and they wouldn't do anything for the pain - they gave me some antibiotic pills that they said should take care of the abscess in two or three days. And in the meantime? Just deal with the pain.
I maxed out on ibuprofin and acetominophen, alternating taking about 50% above maximum dose of each every two hours. I would get a slight relief, bringing the pain to almost bearable for about half an hour, and then it would go back up to full pain level. I would sit and rock back and forth in front of the computer in unbearable pain and focus enough energy to concentrate on my job for a few minutes at a time.
I didn't sleep for nearly two days (was badly jetlagged anyway) and not a morsel of food entered my mouth for about 50 hours.
This all started on Wednesday. On Friday night I started to feel a little better, was able to even fall asleep and then on Saturday I woke up and ... the pain was gone. Hallelujah! Coincidentally the two days of rainy crappy weather were over and the sun was out. Just in time for me to enjoy the driving trip to Cardiff I had planned for myself.
When I got back to CA my doctor did a root canal. This was on a tooth that had already had a root canal 7 years earlier but his conclusion was "I guess I missed some nerve endings the first time around".
Alls well that ends well I suppose but ... I would have *killed* for some real painkillers at the time. I've never taken vicodin or any kind of opiate at all, and generally would never want to, but in this case ... I would have made the exception.
I used to think all programming languages were more or less the same, and this opinion was based on having programmed in a variety of languages, and noted how easy it was to understand the gist of a new language pretty much immediately upon seeing it, and coming to understand any nuances involved without too much further study.
Then I ran up against OCaml. And I was humbled. I didn't really realize that there could ever be a computer language as hard to approach as learning a new spoken language, but OCaml showed me the error of my preconceptions.
My favorite moment was when trying to read and understand some gnarly OCaml code (is there *any* OCaml that isn't gnarly to some degree?) and asking on an IRC channel how I would go about figuring out what the "types" were of variables I was seeing as inputs to procedures and used as local variables within procedures. I was surprised by the answer: you can't. It was recommended that I install an OCaml IDE environment and then have the IDE tell me the types. Why? Because it is more or less impossible to know, from inspection, what the type of anything is. I guess the concept of 'type' is a little to gauche for the OCaml crowd.
I never thought I'd run into a language where, in order to read and understand the code, you literally have to *implement a virtual machine in your head and run the code*, but then I ran across OCaml.
I wonder what the brain of someone reading OCaml code would look like under an MRI ...
Oh and to your point ... I don't know where you work, but I think your view is a reflection of your particular experience and not necessarily true across the software development profession. I've been in the industry nearly as long as you have and I haven't noticed any correlation between fluency in multiple spoken languages and programming skill.
When I first came out of college and was young and naive, I thought a great software developer was someone who was really smart, really able to solve complex algorithmic problems. But years in the industry have proven to me that while such talents are important, and people like that are needed, those talents are vastly overshadowed by the more important skill of being able to coordinate with other developers, and to manage detail. The hard part of software development is not on the scale of problems that a single developer faces in daily coding tasks; the hard part is taking 100 developers and figuring out how to produce software that is even 50x as large or complex as that which would normally be written by a single programmer.
A single developer will never be able to compete with an entire software development company in building large or complex software. Competitiveness between large groups of developers is where it's at, and the skills and experience needed for that is an entirely different thing than individual programming genius.
Too true. Although, honestly, in most cases the criticism is justified.
Of course when you go back and look at your own code a few years later and think the same thing ... then you have problems!