Brace yourself, but most people who consume packaged food products have little concern over any chemicals in them.

The corollary to this is most people who consume packges chemicals have very little concern if there is any actual food products in them.

I recently saw "imitation American-style cheese food slices". Now, "American" "cheese" isn't legally cheese in most of the world. So what the fsck is imitation artificial cheese?

I'm not even sure it had any dairy in it.

You're thinking about it all wrong.

You turn it over, half the bottle dumps onto your food. You have to buy twice as much. Effectively they can increase food waste, and therefore sales, under the guise of environmentalism. Sure, we'll help you get every last drop ... just all at once.

I know the last thing my wife wants is for me to have the mustard come out of the bottle any faster. I always end up with far too much as it is. ;-)

If the ketchup came out faster we'd be doomed.

So, if you could do this on the outside of condoms you'd put Wet and Astroglide out of business. ;-)

Introducing, everslide ... our slipperiest condoms evar.

Yes, that was 20 years ago.

And America is doing, what, exactly, in Africa now besides insisting foreign aid be tied to no contraception?

The US has never, not once, invaded a country for oil and minerals. The idea that we have started a war for oil is just plain stupid.

No, but the reality was before you went into Iraq in 2003, against any sensible facts, and despite evidence that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 ... your own government had people talking about how the oil you'd get from Iraq would pay for the war because they'd be so grateful. How did that work out for you?

And, further, how many places has America utterly failed to act when there was no oil?

America ignores what's happening in Africa because there's no oil for the most part. And yet claims loudly they must intercede in the middle east out of principle and on humanitarian grounds.

Has it occurred to you that the much vaunted "principles" America claims before going to war are entirely dependent on oil and/or your own economic benefit, and that your claims to do this out of a sense of right and wrong is bullshit?

Because it certainly has to the rest of the world.

How on earth does increased accuracy increase the temptation to use one?

Usually the ridiculous belief you could do a small scale strike to disable your opponent, or that there is a scenario in which nuclear war is "winnable".

Those of us who remember when M.A.D (mutually assured destruction) as the awesome way we kept nuclear bombs in check have long since stopped expecting rational thought to play into the calculus of nukes.

The assumption that nobody would ever be idiotic enough to use them has always struck me as entirely unfounded.

I realize that global politics is a lot more subtle and complex than most folks realize, and maybe I'm wrong, but on this subject, it seems pretty damned cut and dried.

I'm not disagreeing with you. I do disagree that world leaders can be counted upon to act rationally, or make decisions supported by logic.

Or that they wouldn't simply do this crap out of ego or spite.

Look around at some of the piss-pot despots and ask yourself ... would you trust this person to not be an idiot? Now, look at the leaders of some Western countries and ask yourself ... my god, do we let this idiot control nukes?

LOL, thanks ... that's actually somewhat reassuring. :-P

As would I which is why I never used that phrase. Your quote is not my words.

"Except any half-decent Java developer uses Stringbuilder not + concat because everyone knows the latter is slower and causes more to be objects created"

Oh? Really? So you did not use the words "everyone knows"?

Exactly whose words were they inside of your post?

You know, I would argue that saying "everyone knows" is overly optimistic, bordering on naive.

Because I've seen many programmers who simply don't know, and just assume they're all equal and magic.

This was true in C 25 years ago, Java 15 years ago, and probably every other language now.

Do not underestimate the capacity of humans to be clueless and assume they know what they are doing.

My guess, audit a sufficiently large amount of code, and you'll quickly realize people simple do NOT actually know what you think everyone does.

I'm betting there's a lot of crappy code in the world which neither knows nor cares what actually happens.

My personal experience tells me there are more mediocre coders than actual good ones.

No, but suddenly I'm intrigued.

Sometime's it's tough to explain to the kids these days why they take too damned much for granted with their languages.

I knew a guy with a Masters in CS who loudly proclaimed optimizing was a pointless exercise.

He wrote some of the shittiest, slowest, and un-maintainable code I've ever seen because he was confusing "clever" with "smart" and often "clevered" himself into corners he couldn't get back out of.

Often he couldn't make minor changes to his own code because it was so "elegant" as to be brittle and impossible to change.

Very often the attitude of "the library does everything, let it deal with it" means you have no idea of how bad the code you're writing actually is.

Sorry, but when it lies to Congress about what it's doing ... it's really out of control.

When it spies on the people who oversee it to influence the oversight, it's out of control.

When it formalizes a mechanism of perjury by law enforcement, it's out of control.

When it hides how it uses technologies to perform warrantless wiretaps, it's out of control.

I see no evidence that any has control over these clowns. And if anybody does, nobody knows who that is to have control over them.

So, to you I say, bullshit. The spying apparatus does whatever the fuck it wants, arbitrarily decides when/if the law applies, and keeps doing what they want no matter what they're told.

These people are now quite dangerous to our freedoms and our societies.

I think what they've proven is that there are so many layers in modern programming languages that most of what programmers do because it seems like a good idea probably generates terrible outcomes.

This actually explains a lot about modern programs, and how 5 years later a machine with twice the resources takes the same amount of time to do something as 5 year old software.

Because the bloat and inefficiencies added in those five years offset any other improvements. :-P

Somewhat off-topic, but somewhat related:

Many years ago, when I was doing my degree and computers were still steam powered, a friend and I were writing the same assignment.

He worked for the university, and had a privileged account on the VAX. I had the loan of a 286 from a prof who no longer needed it and took pity on me.

I, being constrained by physical memory, had to write a new kind of sparse array to hold my data. He, having access to lots more virtual memory heap than I, wrote a huge array which wasn't sparse to just brute force it, even though most of the array was useless.

At the end of the day, we both got the same results from our programs. The difference was, I got an A+, because the prof decided he'd steal my sparse array for his own research. My friend got an A, because he got the right outcome, but used a slightly less elegant solution.

Optimizing memory is a dying skill, and in the case of most high level languages, there's too many layers between you and the hardware to know what is actually happening.

But some of us still think back nostalgically to when having a 1MB string was simply not possible, and when we used to have to use our own voodoo to cram into the small amounts of memory we did have. :-P

Now get off my damned lawn with your big fancy strings. ;-)

*sigh* The more people try to explain it to me, the more it sounds like voodoo.

I understand the whole "measuring it changes it" thing ... but the rest of it? The whole "simultanously everything" thing just hurts my head.

It just sounds barking mad to a layman.

Will someone please tell me this gives us a basis for Heisenberg compensator?

Because that would be awesome.

I'm also hoping this whole thing "that, when unobserved, the photons exist in all possible states simultaneously" eventually goes away.

It has to be that we can't know what state it's in, not that it's actually in all of them. Can't it? Please? At some point, this quantum stuff should stop being magic.