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Comment Re:Just release a special edition Bluray (Score 1) 133

Detaching boosters does not provide boost.

They ran out of fuel, and then just barely escaped the falling into the black hole in the slingshot maneuver by disconnecting the dead weight, which magically accelerated backwards propelling the spacecraft it detached from magically into Mars orbit.

There's artistic license (like the drawing of the wormhole, which is whatever, it doesn't bother me), and then there's a landing shuttle which can magically boost in and out of a .99999C gravity well without ill effect or expending much any fuel at all, and yet magically has to expend all of its fuel supplies to slingshot around the black hole, and then accelerates further by detaching boosters, and all sorts of dumb shit like that.

Comment Re:Just release a special edition Bluray (Score 1) 133

>It's a movie. Most people don't care but for those sticklers, all they have to do is release a special edition that contains a "director's cut" of the film as well as a "science advisor's cut."

There wouldn't be much left, then.

As much as Kip Thorne and NDT have touted the science of it, anyone with even a basic understanding of physics would develop a severe allergic reaction from watching the movie.

No, Nolan, disconnecting an object travelling with you doesn't magically boost you out of a gravity well.

No, Nolan, there is no way to have enough delta-V to boost out of a .99C gravity well.

Kip Thorne has defended the notion of a stable planet right next to the event horizon of a black hole, and maybe he's right, but horrid mistakes like this are scattered throughout the movie.

Comment Re:Not sure why this is on Slashdot (Score 1) 327

>Pro-tip: When posting to Slashdot, or any other website, write your post in an off-line text editor, then cut-and-paste it into the textarea. That way if their buggy JavaScript, or you fat fingers, delete it, you can just re-paste.

OR you could just install Lazarus and let technology handle the grunt work for you.

http://getlazarus.com/

Comment Paul (Score 1) 25

As of right now, I would like to vote for Rand Paul. Only person who believes in the Constitution.

His foreign policy isn't as nutty as the media has made it out to be.

Comment Re:Money to be made (Score 1) 412

>>You know what they call "alternative medicine" that is proven to actually work? MEDICINE.

Do you know what they call people who quote memes without knowing that they're actually wrong?

Urban legend spreaders.

Ok, I guess that's not as pithy.

But seriously, that's not the difference between alt med and medicine. Even though peppermint oil has a strong research base showing its effectiveness for IBS, it will never be medicine, even though it works, because it's something you can pick up at any supermarket or GNC.

And that's not splitting a hair, either. It is not regulated by the FDA as a drug, so it is not "medicine", even though it is highly effective.

The official definition of alt medicine (from the FDA, WHO, NHS, NIH, etc.) is any medical practice not typically performed in usual practice of medicine.

Comment Homeschooling works as well as you make it work (Score 1) 700

I'm biased, having homeschooled our 3 children and have seen the results first hand. That said, nearly 100% of the benefit of home schooling can be summed up in 2 words -- "parental involvement". I never look down on those who choose to utilize the public school system, or any system. The reason our kids "turned out well" is because we worked very hard to make it so. It's certainly no guarantee, but if you spend time looking at options and choose the option that seems best for your kids (and by extension, best for you, you are heavily invested in them), you will be doing the right thing.

Like many things in life, you will get out of your kids schooling, what you put into it. Don't abandon your kids to the school system, that guarantees a bad outcome. Take control and be an active, involved parent, and whatever option you choose will be great for them.

Comment Re:Claims without evidence (Score 1) 412

>I'm disappointed that even the geeks of /. are so easily persuaded by pharmaceutical industry propaganda.

Even though Peppermint Oil had the highest ratings in both quality of research and effect size, of any of the studied IBS treatments in the paper, I'm sure there are a number of people reading this on Slashdot right now secretly suspecting that it must be bullshit because it sounds too "alt meddy" to them.

>Meanwhile, a lot of prescription medication is clearly dangerous. How many herbal supplements have been taken off the market recently because of health risks? Ephedra is the only one that comes to mind, and it isn't even all that dangerous by pharmaceutical standards. How many FDA-approved drugs have been taken off the market recently? Dozens.

In the IBS paper alone, there were several drugs that were pulled from the market for being too dangerous.

But it works the other way as well. Just because something is all hippie and natural doesn't mean it's inherently safer or doesn't have side effects. St. John's Wort has drug-drug interactions with many many drugs due to its effect on CYP3A4. Grapefruit juice, incidentally, is dangerous as well if you're on a lot of drugs due to its opposite effect on it.

Just because the FDA doesn't ban them doesn't mean they aren't going to be bad for you. In general, the FDA does not regulate herbs unless they can no longer be generally regarded as safe (GRAS).

Comment Re:Claims without evidence (Score 4, Interesting) 412

While you are right that there are a lot of studies showing no effect or a negative effect from alt med drugs, there are also peer-reviewed and high-evidence studies showing that some of them do work and are effective.

My wife is a member of ASPEN, and so I get to read through a lot of their journals with her. In a paper on treatments for IBS, the "drug" that had the highest strength of evidence, and effect size was... peppermint oil. The research shows pretty conclusively that it is better than a lot of IBS-specific medicines that have come out in recent years, several of which got pulled from the market for being dangerous, and now can only be prescribed in limited situations.

Peppermint oil will never be a medicine, because you can buy it at the grocery store. But it *is* highly effective at treating a very serious disease.

Comment Re:Money to be made (Score 1) 412

>Why? People buy it anyway and the studies cost many millions of dollars. They have NO interest in proving (or disproving) anything about these supplements. In fact they had congress pass laws explicitly preventing the FDA from regulating them so that they wouldn't have to prove their claims.

Fun fact. There are actually peer-reviewed scientific journals, for reporting these kinds of results. Some common "alternative medicines", like tea (boring, I know), have had literally hundreds of studies on their effectiveness at doing various things, with well understood results.

This does not mean they're effective. I skimmed numerous studies on milk thistle that all agreed it didn't have any of the reputed health benefits for the liver.

You can learn more about all the data the NIH tracks on alt med here: https://nccih.nih.gov/health/p...

Or read through a peer-reviewed journal here: http://www.alternative-therapi...

Comment Re:Gov't contractors are not paid by the hour (Score 1) 253

>Forcing long hours on contractors and saying "well, we pay your company hourly" is an immoral load of bullshit. This is nothing less than government-sanctioned overtime fraud.

The federal government is the worst offender against labor laws in the country.

It's nice being part of the same organization that investigates and prosecutes offenses, isn't it?

Comment Re:Problems in C++ (Score 1) 386

>1) No, that's not the case. The difference between .at and operator[] is that .at() has a const overload and operator[] is not.

Are you sure about that?

http://www.cplusplus.com/refer...

>2) Most high performance apps (eg. games) turn off bounds checking in any case for performance reasons.

Which is fine.

Personally, I'd have preferred it if I could simply enable or disable bounds checking on [], so I could test my code to make sure I'm not going to fry memory, and then disable bounds checking on performance critical code for release.

>Uh, stringstreams? http://stackoverflow.com/quest...

I'm not saying that you can't write your own functions, just that the STL string class is not a drop-in replacement in functionality in string.h

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