OK, sounds like fun! Lets see... google "effectiveness of st john's wort"... pick the first NIH or WebMD link. Got it, that'd be this one:

Hmm. So, according to the first link (that you recommended) St John's wort is about as effective (or ineffective) as conventional drugs. Only cheaper and with far fewer side effects (Source: ask anyone who's taken a conventional antidepressant)

Meanwhile, Wikipedia (with references) says:

And what about side effects?

Follow through with the references at your leisure.

Sorry, I think you fail this one.

If there is no evidence for or against a claim, then there is no reason to assume anything about it. Assuming it is not true is not a valid conclusion from no evidence.

Come on, people, this is too simple to fuck up. Here's a simple technique to avoid this stupid mistake: You are not required to update your beliefs whenever someone makes a claim. Assuming they are wrong is just as stupid as assuming they are right. If there's no evidence for or against, then the claim should have no effect on your belief.

Herbal supplements fall under the FDA anyway. You are aware what the F in FDA stands for, right?

Whether the FDA makes the cost of prescription drugs unnecessarily high is up for debate. Given some of the recently approved drugs that turned out to be deadly, it doesn't seem obvious that they do. But their track record on food safety is excellent, in my opinion. Unless you eat a ridiculous amount, there isn't any food you can buy in the supermarket (including herbal supplements) that is an immediate safety risk. What foods are healthy for you in the long run is an entirely different issue.

It's not the FDAs job to prove the effectiveness of herbal supplements. Never has been.

At least if you don't like the accommodations, you can pay a little extra for an upgrade.

How is this a Troll? Because it goes against the groupthink?

This is a perfectly reasonable point of view. It is objectively true that GMO is different from traditional breeding methods. How many generations of selective breeding would it take to breed a glow-in-the dark strawberry plant? I have no idea, but I bet if you started at the dawn of agriculture you still wouldn't have one. What would you even select for? But now we can do that directly with genetic engineering, in one generation. Genetic engineering of crops is a second agricultural revolution, except with even more potential impact both to human health and the health of ecosystems.

And what effect did the first agricultural revolution have on human health? It was good, right? Not necessarily:

Sound familiar?

People have become healthier because of agriculture, but not because the food is healthier--it probably isn't healthier. Rather, we've become healthier in the long run because agriculture allowed us to produce enough food to have doctors and clean water and sanitation. In the short term, agricultural food made us less healthy.

In principle, a genetically engineered food supply could be overall better, maybe even incredibly better. But in practice it isn't clear we're getting that, or even if that's what we're trying to get. Instead, we're just continuing to make food even cheaper, not necessarily healthier, with even more dependence on particular crops.

Agriculture freed enough people from the burden feeding themselves to create modern civilization. But today almost nobody is a farmer--we're just making agriculture more profitable, but at what cost? Genetic engineering so far has mostly been used to maximize crop yield over nutrition and diversity, just like we've always done.

Which is to say nothing about the potential ecological implications. "The picture is much more complex than that" is an understatement. This won't be the first time we've forged ahead with some technology completely oblivious to the ecological impacts.

Style guidelines should be about avoiding pitfalls of the language, using appropriate idioms, and not making life miserable for maintainers, not about where you put spaces and braces.

Use a diff tool that can ignore formatting changes. I'm a fan of Beyond Compare, but there are plenty of others.

What use is a screensaver with a password that isn't designed for security? Why is the password even there? So it looks secure? Lets just admit it was poorly designed from a security standpoint. That's fine, most stuff designed at that time was not secure. MS-DOS had no security at all. Pointing out that NT occasionally has some good ideas is not an indictment against Unix.

Fallacy Fallacy

It would help if they mentioned what the hell these benchmarks are supposed to measure. Out of Sunspider, Octane 2.0, Kraken 1.1, WebXPRT, Oort Online, and HTML5Test, only HTML5Test has a name that means anything to me. Most of them are easy enough to google, but I didn't find anything searching for oort online benchmark. Isn't this supposed to be the author's job?
 

That's just it, products aren't supposed to be released with code names, that's the whole damn point. For decades code names were used just to give the people working on a project something to call it, because coming up with a real product name takes time (market research, trademark search, considering how it sounds in other languages, etc.) Ridiculous names were chosen on purpose so that they wouldn't be mistaken for actual product names. I guess some marketing genius didn't get the memo.

My favorite example of that is the Circle-ellipse problem. It seems so natural that a circle is-an ellipse, but it doesn't map to OO heirarchies the way we expect it to. The ontologies offered by OOP languages are always presented as if they were perfectly natural and universal without a hint of the lurking problems. It's not until you come up against some of these problems (hopefully early, before you've drank the coolaid) that you start to realize something's wrong.

Ok, fine, but I'd settle for less inadequate.

I think power consumption has brought back an emphasis on performance. With desktop software we were at a point where even the most inefficient languages wouldn't make a noticeable difference, except maybe in memory usage. Inefficient software won't necessarily seem slower to the user, but they will notice the power consumption. Mobile chips are narcoleptic. The faster you can get stuff done, the faster the chip can go back into lower power mode.

And on the data center side, it is kind of surprising when you see the massive amount of power consumed. Energy is already a big chunk of the costs of running data centers, and energy is probably just going to get more expensive in the future. More efficient means fewer servers. Facebook is doing a lot of stuff in C++ nowadays, and I believe power consumption is one of the driving factors there.