It implies that even if they make decent machines, you don't want to buy from them because they will use their legal rights to make your life more difficult.

Thanks, but if there's a less hostile option, I'll take it.

Rounded corners have practical utility: you don't hurt yourself on them, and they slide into pockets and covers more easily. It is obvious and there is prior art, but it is not merely aesthetic.

You think Gore would have gone into Iraq? We've spent in the neighborhood of $3 trillion there. Thats about $10,000 per capita in the U.S.. That's rather a lot of money. Maybe you think it's money well spent, or maybe you think it's a waste, but it almost certainly would have been spent dramatically different under Gore.

You think McCain would have passed Obamacare (which might be a pretty big deal to the ~5% of the people who will be covered who weren't before, and to the people who have to pay for it)? Despite presidents failing to pass health care reform for decades (and mostly it being a Democratic initiative)?

Or, to play cynicism against cynicism--you don't think that each party wants to do something to fire up its base and stick it to the other guys so they'll win the *next* election?

There are a lot of ways that it doesn't matter. But to say it doesn't matter at all sounds like a rationalization for not paying attention or getting involved--or it deserves a really robust argument.

Yeah, it can matter, because even if 90% of what two candidates will do is identical (and you believe it's all a bad idea), the remaining 10% can have an impact. People were saying "Bush vs. Gore, does it really matter?" back in 2000. In retrospect, don't you think that certain things would have turned out rather differently--enough so to matter?

You can't really win the "it is substantial!" argument because the information is mostly fluff--general statements of approach on how to tackle difficult problems, without actually specifying how to resolve any difficult bits.

It's much more supportable to compare Romney 2012 with Obama 2008--how much detail did Obama have?--and then play the "details are for Congress, vision is for the President" card.

*blink*...awful for international relations? Compared to what?

I mean, I can understand if one is less than thrilled by the economic record, if one thinks that Obamacare was really not the top priority given the state of the economy, etc. etc., but our international relations have--by the accounts of other nations--improved tremendously since Bush, and Romney's overseas trip didn't exactly go smoothly. And in the third debate, Romney seemed to agree with Obama far more than he agreed with himself (his previous statements on foreign policy). Awful? How?

You do know that you can not want to vote for someone, and yet not hate _everything_ about them, right?

The placebo effect works, and homeopathy should be a tremendously inexpensive way to induce it. The placebo effect does not mean that people do not get better--it is that people get better even when you give them something inert! How better to generate something inert that feels like it should help than to take something that should help and dilute it? Granted, the effects of placebo are limited, but if you only need something limited anyway, why not give them a microcent's worth of water in a 20-cent vial, sold for $2, to make the patient feel as much relief as they can generate from their own beliefs? (How different is this from bottled water, anyway? The tap water in most places affluent enough to afford bottled water is perfectly safe.)

I'm only partly joking.

(Blasted democracies, requiring informed citizenry and spoiling all our plans to dupe them into thinking they're fine!)

Caffeine?

I meant "that is, whether it is of sufficient value that we can convince people to trade that stuff for tokens that can be used in arbitrary exchanges, thus indicating that it is of general worth". If you have stuff and you cannot get people to give you money for it, it's a pretty clear indication that it's worthless or nearly so. I didn't make clear that I was using this to tackle the measurement problem of whether something is wealth, not equating all wealth with money.

But he's talking about algebra, not about category theory or partial differential equations. Algebra, taught well, is no more than firstly, the ability to solve problems in general using abstract thinking, instead of muddling through the specifics every time; and secondly, to map numerical concepts onto the world and use them to solve problems. These reasoning skills are incredibly basic and incredibly important in today's society to function as a competent and responsible individual. If some people manage to learn the same skills through another circuitous route, that's okay, but if a HS diploma is supposed to mean that an individual has reached some minimal level of education, and they cannot manage to read and decipher texts of the level of complexity necessary to understand the world, cannot manage to think abstractly about problems quantitative and otherwise so as to act wisely on the basis of experience, and so on, then what is it that the diploma signifies aside from reaching a certain age? What is it that a B.A. from Harvard is supposed to signify--that the person is intellectually accomplished, or merely that they do one thing that they like well?

Democratic societies ultimately depend upon the intellectual sophistication of their members. Measures that increase the pressure to be intellectually sophisticated are therefore advisable.

Now, if we're doing a lousy job teaching algebra--and I think we are--then we should be alarmed and try to find ways to improve dramatically. Then most everyone will be able to learn that basic skill, and devote the rest of their time (after covering the other basics) to whatever it is that they're particularly good at and/or passionate about. (I think that the thought-patterns required for applying calculus to physical problems are also so fundamental that they should be required in high school, but let's try to get algebra under control first.)

Stuff is created by the poor and middle class. Whether or not that turns into wealth (i.e. tokens that we can exchange for different stuff) depends on whether the created stuff is useful. A properly functioning boardroom will make sure that it is.

(There are plenty of improperly functioning boardrooms, boardrooms which are redundant because everyone already knows what the useful stuff is, and boardrooms which make the right call on what is useful but demand far too much compensation for the task.)

Exactly. If you can't afford two new drives from different vendors large enough to hold your data, then you cannot afford to keep your data safe.

Don't bother fiddling with RAIDs unless you have many terabytes of data. Single drives are a lot faster to get and use.

Agreed--you need to use libraries written in C/C++ for audio/video. But you can certainly call them from Java, as long as they handle the streaming side of things on their own. Whether or not it's suitable for GUI work depends on what you want your GUI to look like; if platform integration is your top priority (default widget sets, color schemes, etc.) then no, it doesn't work so well. Otherwise, it's not fantastic but it's servicable (again assuming blistering performance isn't necessary).

There is a _big_ difference between clumsily optimized (or unoptimized) Java and carefully-optimized Java--more, in my experience, than the difference between clumsily optimized Java and clumsily optimized C or C++. So if you are already using Java for some reason (robustness to faults, ease of parallelism of certain kinds (w.r.t. C), library that does exactly what you need, etc.), you should figure out how to optimize it before bailing out and using a different language.

Only if you absolutely must get as much out of your hardware as physically possible should you start using C/C++, and at that point, don't expect to be using ANSI C; you should be issuing SSE4 instructions and such (basically writing targeted assembly, even if you are doing so in a way that looks like C functions) that have been cleverly crafted to do exactly what you need.

(And don't forget that while you are taking extra time to write all this low-level high-performance code, your computers _could_ have been running using the slower code, making progress towards a solution, or serving customers albeit with delays, etc..)

Did you miss the part where neither Pfizer nor anyone else had a particularly solid understanding of what HDL and LDL actually do? The problem isn't that science is failing, it's that proper science isn't being done. It's not that reductionism is failing, it's that people aren't patient enough to wait until things are understood. So, when heart disease kills tens of thousands of people per year in the U.S. alone, companies are wiling to gamble a billion dollars on a drug that will affect something that is somehow related to the process. If they and/or doctors tell themselves it's a sure thing, to cover up their actual lack of detailed knowledge while making themselves feel better about the scale of the bet, then this only indicates something about human psychology.

Maybe this provided a convenient excuse to rant against reductionism, but all the examples were in fact examples of people trying to bypass reductionism and replace educated guesses based upon insufficient information.