...he says, quoting a malpractice lawyer of all things. By that ludicrous number, one in 680 Americans are killed by doctors each year. If you live to the age of 75, your odds of dying this way would be 1 in 9.

Plenty of people get bad treatment, sure, but you can't make me believe that one in 9 will actually die of it. That would make malpractice nearly as deadly as cancer, and that's just not plausible.

That's an excellent point. Yeah, I think we can cross that off as busted.

The people you're describing drive me insane. We have a pediatrician who said what you did: either you trust her to recommend vaccinations, or you find someone else to work with. She doesn't want patients who continually argue against everything she says.

Here's a test. You know all those godless communist governments that want to take over America and sap our precious bodily fluids? They don't have profits, right, because they hate our freedoms. They also don't care about their disposable citizens. Right? OK. So why is it that those countries vaccinate their citizens? It's not for the profit motive of drug companies, because those are owned by the evil socialists. It's because they cheap out and practice preventative medicine so that they can keep working the proles 112 hours a week, and you can't do that when they're sick.

But tossing aside the Fox-news-watcher-ready wrapper, it's true: absent a profit motive, every organized country in the world immunizes their citizens so that they don't get sick as much. Do you really think China gives a crap about GlaxoSmithKline's margins? Hell no. They use vaccines because it's far and away the best possible investment into keeping people healthy.

There is literally no valid greed-based explanation for vaccinations. It's dumb when you consider the American health system, and utterly braindead when you look at the other 95% of the world's population.

You're so full of shit. According to The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, in 1989 the CDC recommended 8 vaccines for kids (the same 7 it recommended through the 70s, plus Hib). The 2010 schedule includes the 8 from 1989 plus hep A (dangerous in kids, lethal in adults), hep B (40% lifetime risk of liver cancer in 95% of newborns who contract it), flu, varicella (not the innocent, cute little illness antivax wingnuts claim it is), pneumococcus (lethal), and rotavirus (potentially lethal).

The evil drug companies took the 8 vaccines from 1989 and added 6 more potentially lethal or crippling diseases, for a total of 14. One-four. Maybe the 72 number is an innocent mistake reflecting the total number of shots, although I sincerely doubt it's that high as DTaP and MMR are each 3 vaccines combined into 1 (as they have been since the early 80s). That narrows it down from 14 to 10 unique vaccinations, and they simply don't take an average of 7 shots each per vaccine.

Yes, I get testy about this. As many times as antivaxers tell me to "do my research!", it seems that none of them can be bothered to.

How much time do you spend waiting on your "slow" SATA SSDs to answer requests, and how much would migrating to PCIe SSDs lower those waits? That's the subject of the article and what I was discussing. :-)

Darn it, people! I loved SSDs. I use them everywhere. I think they're great. But we're discussing the subject of PCIe SSDs versus SATA SSDs, and I still contend that SATA SSDs are so freaking fast (compared to HDDs) that desktop users are highly unlikely to ever bump up against that interface's limits.

I'm not sure how any of what I said led you to believe that I don't think SSD is an improvement over HDD. I was specifically responding to the guy talking about needing IOPS for IRC, web browsing, and email. I've personally upgraded every computer in my care to use SSDs for local storage (but I keep huge HDDs in the family NAS, because file services over Wi-Fi aren't going to be disk-bound anyway).

Yeah, I exaggerated that for contrast. Most servers are pretty bored, too. But if a build or database server isn't IO constrained, then someone running Photoshop would never notice the difference between PCIe and SATA.

An off-the-shelf SATA 840 EVO SDD hits 98,000 read IOPS, and all those tasks you mention added together wouldn't hit more than 1% of that. They're the very definition of network bound operations. The average email in my IMAP spool right now is 43KB and would take 11 4KB operations to completely read from or write to storage. Browsers site there idle 99.9% of the time. IRC? Not that I've ever seen.

I haven't bothered to look at their methodology but I tentatively agree with their conclusion: almost no desktop users would be able to tell the difference. I mean, even a HDD benching at 103 read IOPS seems spritely for most use cases. A SATA SSD working 950 times faster is as close to instantaneous as most desktop uses could ever hope for.

A guy named Amdahl had something to say on the subject. SSDs excel at IOPS, but that buys you little if you're not IOPS-constrained.

Examples of things that eat operations as fast as you can throw them at 'em: databases, compilation, most server daemons.

Examples of things that couldn't care less: streaming large assets that are decompressed in realtime, like audio or video files. Loading a word processing document. Downloading a game patch. Encoding a DVD. Playing RAM-resident video games.

It should be a shock to roughly no one that buffing an underused part won't make the whole system faster. I couldn't mow my lawn any faster if the push mower had a big block V8, nor would overclocking my laptop make it show movies any faster.

TL;DR non-IO-bound things don't benefit from more IO.

You're correct, and also irrelevant to the fact that this thread was talking about CO2 buildup causing the urge to breathe, even if the article is about what you bring up.

...unless you're a smoker and have highly depressed CO2 overload sensations due to your constant saturation.

That's true, but I see it as a matter of degree. Windows does a lot more, sure, but FreeBSD is still doing some HTTP parsing in a kernel module.

Exactly this. I'd like to think that there's an air gap (ahem) between the avionics and passenger networks, and that it's impossible to access the avionics system from the passenger compartment. I'd also like to think it doesn't rely on security through obscurity, like "we run our API server on port 81 instead of port 80, ha-HA!". Come on, Slashdot: we have to have at least one aerospace engineer in here, don't we?

FWIW, I think those are perfectly plausible explanations. I mainly meant wanted to frame the GP's own opinion as a formal test case; that's a copy-and-paste of what he wrote.