That’s MY point. Plus, if the .NET JIT is anything like the JVM, only hotspots get compiled, while the rest are interpreted. (If you only run a piece of code once, it may be faster to interpret it than to compile and then run it.)

THIS is the kind of scientific data I want to hear about. In the US, we have lots of pollutants in our air and water and questionable things our food. In the EU, many things are more strictly regulated. If it’s healthier to live there, but ASD rates are higher, then although that doesn’t necessarily rule out contaminants entirely, it points to other things being the dominant cause. (Like genetics, epigenetics, diagnosis rates, etc.)

I skimmed over the links, but I probably just missed it. So apps take 60% less time to start, and they use 15% less memory. What about run-time performance? How much faster are they when executing?

Well, see, there are the normal gay people who just regular people with interesting or boring personalities that live normal lives, except they happen to be gay, like some people happen to have red hair. When someone is a jackass and says something bigoted (like calling you “fagot” or “ginger”), their response is take a moment to say “fuck you” and then go back to being normal people. Those are the sorts of people I’d hang out with (or not, but sexuality doesn’t enter into my decision).

Then there are the gay people who dress like sluts and engage in NSFW acts during gay pride parades that make all gay people look bad to anyone that might be on the fence. I’m all for gay pride parades, but could they try to dress and behave with some class? I can see how marginalized people would understandably want to lash out, but some behaviors don’t necessarily have the effect you want. I don’t care what your sexuality is, I think it’s reasonable to not approve of sex acts (gay or straight, real or implied) being done in public. Shouldn’t people try to make these family-friendly events?

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100719132218AARakwK

The people who hounded Eich may share some similarities with the latter group.

That being said, if I were on the board of directors of Mozilla, I would not have voted to hire him as CEO, if I had known of his political leanings, because bigotry makes me angry and I would be concerned about the indirect effects of his beliefs on the policies of the company.

Sure, but some things are more poisonous than others, no? Or do you like to eat sodium cyanide for fun?

BTW, I looked at that article you linked to. By no means was I suggesting that it would be a good idea to have a kid drink a whole bottle of lugol’s. That would be insane. On the other hand, the occasional drop in their fruit juice is probably a good idea. Unless you’re treating a diagnosed defficiency (which people suffering from thyroid diseases often have), it’s a safe bet to keep the dosage below the average Japanese diet, which is 1 to 3 milligrams per day. My kids get substantially less than that.

See “http://www.mastersofdentistry.net/why-choose-mod/health-prevention/“ for a suggestion about use of iodine in place of flouride for tooth hardening.

I haven’t vetted this web page for accuracy against other sources, but the general themes jive with what I know: http://drsircus.com/medicine/iodine/iodine-dosages

Unless you’ve displaced iodine too much with other halides (which happens), the body doesn’t need much iodine intake, because it gets stored. If you’re low, then you might need high doses for a while. http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/06/29/iodine-deficiency-risk.aspx

I can’t address all of your misinformation. However, it is well known, for instance, that bromine displaces iodine in the thyroid. They’re both halides, and bromine acts therefore as an endocrine disruptor, inhibiting proper thyroid function. It’s also linked with thyroid cancer (indirectly at least, because low iodine is linked with thyroid cancer). SO, if you want to keep your thyroid healthy, don’t consume bromides.

Fluorides have a similar effect, actually. It too is a halide and displaces iodine. What about chlorine, you say? Chlorine (or several chloride compounds anyway; we’re talking about bound forms of all of these chemicals) is another essential element used by the body, so there is no conflict there (although I can’t say what happens if you get them out of balance).

If you don’t care about your thyroid function, that’s fine. But people with Grave’s, Hashimoto’s, auto-immune thyroiditis, and various other such diseases DO care about that and DON’T appreciate these contaminants exascerbating and/or causing their trouble. But maybe you only give a crap about your own health (or maybe not even that?).

You didn’t address the mercury in fish or arsenic in rice. Convenient that you left those out? Oh, and the carcinogenic flame retardant.

As for BPA, allow me to quote wikipedia (which you should have looked at before responding): Bisphenol A is an endocrine disruptor that can mimic estrogen and has been shown to cause negative health effects in animal studies.

High doses: For iodone, a high dose would be MANY times the RDA, but well within safe limits. See "http://www.thyroid.org/iodine-deficiency/“. The RDA depends on your condition (e.g. pregnant) and ranges from 150 to about 300 micrograms. However, regular doses of 12.5 milligrams are completely safe, and some people with thyroid diseases are recommended to take up to 50 milligrams/day for a while to treat a defficiency. The average Japanese diet brings in 1 to 3 milligrams per day from edible seaweed. Extreme doses *much higher than I’m talking about) are at risk primarily of disrupting thyroid function (differently from a deficiency, of course).

As for teeth, instead of getting fluoroapatite (Ca5(PO4)3F), you get iodoapatite (Ca5(PO4)3I). Basic chemistry. Go learn some.

Of course, you’re one of those conspiracy people, but like backwards or something. You think some people just want to make things more expensive or inconvenient. Are the commies trying to disrupt our economy by suggesting we don’t use chemicals with known health effects? There’s also not a conspiracy the other way either. These contaminants are not in our food and water because some people are conspiring to hurt us. Free-market factors have given rise to cost-effective solutions to problems, some of which we have subsequenty determined to be unhealthy. The main problem is that people are cheap and ignorant.

Clarification: You can safely consume iodone in dosages several times the RDA with no negative effect. Instead of “high”, perhaps I should have said “a few times normal.”

You’re kidding right? Instead of fluoroapatite (Ca5(PO4)3F), you get iodoapatite (Ca5(PO4)3I).

Let’s see rising levels of mercury in fish, arsenic in rice, methylbromide in bread, adding fluoride [*] to drinking water ON PURPOSE, BPA in plastic food containers, volatile PBDE flame retardant in yout furniture, VCOs in your paint and building materials, trans fats. I can go on and on and on.

Besides eating a diet excessively high in carbs and low in other nutrients, we’re poisoning the shit out of ourselves. And you’re surprised that some people aren’t handling it well?

[*] Fluoridation is controvercial, the target of commie conspiracy theories, etc. In reality, it’s shown to have a substantial positive impact on tooth development in children, it’s dirt cheap, and kills many pathogens in water. However, it’s also strongly linked with lowered IQs and thyroid disease. It’s basically poison. If you’re smart, you’ll get a fluoride filter for your water and give your kids high doses of iodine instead, which has the same effect on teeth, the same disinfectant properties, and is an essential mineral.

If Russia are not doing anything nefarious, why should they worry about what spies might discover? :)

In all seriousness, while it’s nice that NSA spying on US citizens has been exposed, it’s NOT good that so many US state secrets were revealed in the process. Contrary to what some lunatics would like to tell you, there ARE external threats that face America and the American people. You can’t run proper defensive operations if all of your strategies are visible to the enemy. I’m not sure that Edward Snowden realized just how much damage he was going to cause. And I’m not sure that the benefits necessarily outweigh the costs in this case. That being said, if the whistle-blower laws had provided contractors with a safe avenue for reporting legal violations, Snowden may have had the option to blow the whistle WITHOUT fucking with US national security.

Someone should mod up the AC’s comment.

The fly’s brain is not doing calculus (or rather, differential equations). It’s a neural net that has evolved to respond to stimulus in a way that appears like what we’d use diff-eq for. Within certain bounds of range and accuracy, we can make artificial neural nets do this. So why is it surprising that meatware that evolved over millions of years can do the same thing?

In fact, there are so many O(N**2) algorithms that they can parallelize that there’s really no excuse for continuing to use the ones that have O(n log n) versions. Yet they keep doing it! Why does everybody keep using O(n**2) n-body and shortest path algorithms? That you can parallelize those teaches us nothing about parallelizing algorithms unless all you care to do is benchmark the supercomputer (in which case there should be an appropriate footnote). This is just laziness.

It’s wrong to publish fabricated or falsified results, and people who do that should be slammed. There are other situations where people are being neglegent or hoping you don’t catch their slight of hand. For instance, there are the innumerable parallel computing papers that use O(N^2) algorithms to show a speedup on a GPU or supercomputer where there exists a serial O(log N) algorithm that runs faster on a PC. (No joke.) All of those sorts of things should be actively retracted.

However, what we don’t want to do is discourage publication of preliminary results that MIGHT be wrong. Honest, legitimate work that gets superceded should not be subject to retraction, and a wrong theory published can often inspire others to do a better job. When a researcher can say, “That was our best hypothesis at the time, and this was the most accurately we could represent the data,” then it should stand as a legitimate publication. Relativity and quantum mechanics supercede Newtonian physics, but that doesn’t mean we should retract everything Newton said.

Now, most people reading this will say “duh!” Because that’s obvious. All I’m saying is that we need to be careful to not create an environment where publication of preliminary work is discouraged in any way or where honest mistakes can hurt the career of an honest researcher. That would put a damper on science in general. The bar for retraction should be very high and require solid evidence of intentional wrongdoing.