How about Argon, or one of the other noble/inert gases?

Does xenon or argon suffer from that problem too?

You're absolutely right. We HAVE found a humane way, and nitrogen (or argon) asphyxiation is not just just painless, but also maybe even pleasant. Here is the proof (you only need to view the first 5 mins, but the whole 10 are fascinating):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I think the death penalty's quite barbaric, but if we must have it, then that is the way to go.

A few years ago I was exactly like you. Even now, I still very much agree with you in 'spirit', and perhaps in the VERY long term (1000-10000+ years) evolution may fix the 'bug' which stops your argument from making perfect sense.

This 'bug' is that blue light affects melatonin production (decreases it, so it's harder to get to sleep). This isn't something you can get around. Subjectively, it could also be said that orangey hues (even more red than incandescent!) look 'cosier' and are a nice contrast to the day's blue light. Due to the nature of qualia, that's almost impossible to disprove. Heck, even green and blue illumination is a nice change occasionally.

Yours though is the first comment I've read in my life that even goes in this direction though, so I think that's awesome in itself. You might be interested in my post at CandlePowerForums which tried to find out what colour temperature is subjectively closest to pure white: http://www.candlepowerforums.c...

"Bloated" as in so many different ways to do things that only the person who wrote the code can understand it. Too much redundancy basically.

Decent languages? Try D. C# is bloated too, but at least it offers managed memory and you can fall back to non-managed code at any stage.

I'd the this 'real language' to get rid of those god-awful headers and support ^ as exponentiation - something so commonly used. Less bloat would be nice too.

Except that it did work at some point, and then Slashdot cut it down arbitrarily. Also the number of characters (including html and link) is less than in your sig, so explain that.

Yeah that's a bug with Slashdot and not my fault. I tried ages ago several to edit the sig, and Slashdot always cut it off.

Anyway, I can see you're just trolling and don't really want to discuss things on their own merit so there we go.

Can you elaborate on that?

Well not with that attitude we won't. It would have been easy to say that before the switch to metric. Oh I forgot, that's only in sensible countries, because most (not all) of the US public is too indifferent to care.

Kludges breed more kludges which may even need a degree of maintenance forever. On the other hand, it's relatively easy for everyone if we just switch to 24 time zones, or even better in the long run, UTC. The latter is too much too quickly, so I'm not so idealistic that I think we should go that far just yet.

Try "as busy as I am". Or how much benefit it would gain for my user base, relative to working on other features which may take priority.

Because that's the topic of discussion. I get annoyed about lots of things including, just a few of which include latency/lag, many poor standards (computer and non-computer), under-funding of scientific research, and loss of productivity due to the fixation on the 8 hour workday, noise pollution (gas cars, buses and trucks mainly), air pollution, lack of automation in every-day work environments, the lack of good taste in music/art/aesthetics from most people, the false notion that more jobs = better when in reality the reverse is true as we free up time, etc. etc.

And yes, global warming and social injustice are giant issues. But those issues are much harder to solve, so weighting should be adjusted accordingly. But for example, I particularly love Tesla Motors, and how Elon is trying to save the world from potential disaster (in his words: "We are running the most dangerous experiment in history"). SpaceX's mission to get humans on Mars is a GREAT thing too along those lines. And as capitalist as I am, I believe a Universal Basic Income (starting off at a small amount) is the best way to tackle poverty, yet not many seem to see the obvious.

In case you still think I'm a shitty programmer by the way, I invite you to try the Opalcalc software in my link. There's nothing else like it, and it's not hard to see why.

I don't think you realize also how much confusion it generates for ordinary people, including administrators and the general public who has to worry that their clocks are set right. If mistakes are made by admins, then the knock-on effects can be even worse.

Heck even taking a couple of minutes to change the clocks multiplied by a billion people equals a LOT of time lost. Not to mention that DST often affects sleep cycles in a bad way, or at least in a mildly bad way for perhaps most people.

I'm going to be a bit harsh now, and I may even be at least partially wrong, but you really don't seem to care about unification, consolidation, standards, or simplifying things as much as you should. Exaggerating to illustrate a point, I suppose you like to see hundreds of incompatible competing standards, just so you can go through the effort and 'fun' of trying to support them all. For example, you may not care about the elegant 'hack' of UTF-8. After all, who cares if we have hundreds of different text formats floating around - let's build ugly kludge after kludge in software to support them all!

I have no doubt your programming skills are capable of taking on such tasks, but the fact you're not even SLIGHTLY bitter about the mess that is time zones indicates that for better or for worse, elegant design and unification is not your first priority. And I think that's where you're mistaken.

Did you deal with all the arbitrary intricacies that the aforementioned video showed? And if you did (good for you), did you think it was a productive use of time? Do you think tens or hundreds of thousands of programmers multiplied by that waste of time is a net benefit to society generally?

It's not even for me, as C# handles most of the crap anyway, so things are (relatively) trivial, just time consuming and long-winded. It's how appalling the system is and how much time it wastes for everyone involved.

Actually you know what?

Just see this (very humourous) Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

NOTHING will show you better how idiotic the whole system is, and how much time it has wasted (and will continue to waste due to the ongoing changes governments worldwide make on a whim).

Spoken like someone who has never really had to deal with the subtleties of time zones. Just read this message here: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskSci...