Most of the time, American pilots are also assassins, cowards hiding behind thousands of feet of air and dropping bombs on ground targets, or firing missiles at aircraft so far away they cannot even bring them up on radar because we have superior technology. And they spend a whole bunch of time behind a desk. Are they heroes on the rare occasion that they engage a modern aircraft, and cowards during the remainder?

I suspect he knows very well what the results of such an action would be, and either doesn't care that anyone who actually followed his advice could be seriously harmed, or assumed that I'm not actually as stupid as he makes me out to be, which makes him a hyperbolic asshole in my book.

Fortunately, I do know the practical difference (I'm not going to be able to do the math or anything, but I wasn't born yesterday either) so no harm done. Also, I don't follow instructions written by some random jackoff on Slashdot.

Small minority? Citation needed. In my experience, most physicians are party line parrots who are only too happy to overprescribe anything and everything, and yet who do their damndest not to listen to patients. If I get prescribed vicoden one more time after explaining that it doesn't do anything to me even if I take it with alcohol, my head may explode.

It's a bummer for you that you get a shitty deal practicing medicine in the USA. I suggest you go somewhere that you will be better rewarded, which is probably someplace with a lot less influence from the insurance companies. Unfortunately, last time I had insurer-provided health insurance, I couldn't find anyone accepting it within a hundred miles.

You can still get inhalers with CFCs from Canada. They cost an order of magnitude less than the new non-CFC inhalers we have to buy here in the USA.

No reflections, no lobes from the gain antennas, no blockage from green trees. It's 100% art with 5% reality.

No, it's not like an actual transaction. In an actual transaction, there's an agreement. This is just a gift. A gift is when one party gives something to the other party without anything expected in return. Do you really not know this...?

Oh, there's no question *life* can adapt to these changes. The question is whether certain economies with enormous assets located in coastal regions can survive. 39% of Americans, for example, live in coastal counties. Although for political reasons that figure includes counties bordering the Great Lakes (America's "North Coast"), nonetheless the assets the US economy has enormous assets on the coast.

Of course *rate* makes a big difference. The extreme upper level IPCC estimate for sea level rise by 2100 is 2m; that would be an economic disaster. We'd probably abandon much of the Gulf Coast, and most East Coast cities would require massive flood control projects. The same rise over two hundred years would have the same results, but it would happen over many more generations and would probably feel a lot less like a disaster.

Life is adaptable, and humanity is among the most adaptable species on the planet. There is no prospect of human extinction under any conceivable climate change scenario, what we are looking at is human misery and economic dislocation. The Great Depression and WW2 combined weren't even a blip on the species survival radar, but they packed an enormous load of human suffering. The difference between 75cm and 2m sea level rise over a century is the difference between a serious ongoing economic concern and a long-running disaster.

It's not the magnitude of change we have to worry about, it's the *rate*.

The 16K cartridge was a standard extra piece on the ZX-81 system, along with your tape cassette recorder and your TV. People assumed if you didn't have the 16K cartridge, you must be a little kid or an initial customer still getting a good feedback from the keyboard. (Or a later customer, wanting to feel the keyboard feedback from his raw device again.) The cartridges were so standard that anyone with 1K or a third party 32K or 64K RAM pack was beset with incompatibility issues.

And Sinclair's 16K was a piece of garbage. The connection to the ZX-81 didn't have any gold plating and once the computer got blazingly hot, the contacts started developing oxide layers and getting fussy. The board was expanding, and the merest, briefest decoupling from the cartridge filled the screen with garbage. The ZX-81 did have a thin aluminum heat sink layer lining the outer black case, but its only connection to the board was a single thin aluminum prong sticking up to it.

Sinclair's reputation got cratered from its standard user experience. By the time you had typed in a thousand lines of strange BASIC out of a magazine, the RAM pack started wiggling around with every keypress. It always nailed you at your most vulnerable moment. It made everyone scream at least once.

Everyone was always swearing or lecturing: you should keep two casette tapes around, and every 100 lines, swap tapes, rewind fully, start recording, wait ten seconds, enter a SAVE command, wait a few minutes for the different-looking cassette-associated screen garbage to disappear, and then continue typing. If the permanent garbage appeared, you had to turn it off, let it cool for about fifteen minutes, rewind the correct tape, and then LOAD it once or twice or thrice until you could get the BASIC lines back off the tape.

Cheap no-name blank cartridges never worked for saving anything; you ended up starting over unless you bought (and kept buying) the sleekest, most expensive blanks. They had to take abuse well, which cassettes don't. I remember some insane procedures... always doing two or three SAVE sequences in a row, for later desperate moments when screen garbage come up the end, LOAD after LOAD after LOAD. I sometimes twirled tapes through with my fingers looking for any stretch that might have gotten crumpled or scratched, so I could dab krazy-glue on it, twirl the glue backwards into the cassette, make a new leader, and rewind to that from then on. Otherwise I quickly ran out of cassettes. My parents gave me a separate wastebasket just for them. When I did run out, I had to fish the garbage, and failing that, I would then pick out my crappiest albums and defeat their write-protects with a little scotch tape.

One trick that worked really well on the ZX-81 was the cooling system I developed. I was in seventh grade, so I fixed the problem recklessly. I filled a plastic bag with ice cubes, and left it on top of the case, at the spot where the aluminum prong "heat sink" came up to it inside. That greatly increased the temperature gradient up and down their cheap little 5 mm prong, and actually hardened the system a lot. You could type in much more code before the ice melted. (It yet crashed sometimes- this was still the eighties.) I still swapped cassettes in and out, but now I had two bags of water that I was also swapping in and out of the freezer, basically whenever that cartridge was plugged in. This system really upset my parents one day when they came into my bedroom and found a transparent plastic bag of hot melted water sitting on top of my Sinclair. I kept saying, "it keeps it from crashing!" but they never took me seriously. "Nothing keeps this thing from crashing."

In fact, it is not known if methylmercury is produced in the human body; there is evidence of this sort of activity in rats, but as we know, rats are not humans.

So you're arguing that eating salt is tantamount to self-poisoning?

I want you to address the fucking statement, and not just to prevaricate. I want a preservative made without mercury, and there are alternatives today which are just as good which meet that description. I want you to not be a disingenuous douchebag, which illustrates that I don't get everything I want.

oh. I like this one a lot.

  David Marcus: Lieutenant Saavik was right: You never have faced death.

Kirk: No. Not like this. I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I've tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing.

David Marcus: You knew enough to tell Saavik that how we face death is at least as important as how we face life.

Kirk: Just words.

David Marcus: But good words. That's where ideas begin. Maybe you should listen to them. I was wrong about you. And I'm sorry.

Kirk: Is that what you came here to say?

David Marcus: Mainly. And also that I'm proud - very proud - to be your son.

---

"I know nothing".

Be nice to see that from Mr. Pine some day.

And an amazing performance by the regulars.

And some excellent writing

And an existing history between the regulars and Khan.

And it had Ricardo Montalban's chest.

And of course... Melville (Moby Dick)

---

Saavik: On the test, sir... will you tell me what you did? I would really like to know.

McCoy: Lieutenant, you are looking at the only Starfleet cadet who ever beat the no-win scenario.

Saavik: How?

Kirk: I reprogrammed the simulation so it was possible to rescue the ship.

Saavik: What?

David Marcus: He cheated.

Kirk: I changed the conditions of the test; got a commendation for original thinking. I don't like to lose.

Saavik: Then you never faced that situation... faced death.

Kirk: I don't believe in the no-win scenario.

---

Saavik: You lied!

Spock: I exaggerated.

Kirk: Hours instead of days! Now we have minutes instead of hours!

---

It had loads of character interaction. The IMDB quotes page has half the movie.

Overpriced death-trap it may be, but the F-22 is an elegant tool designed to do a single thing well: wrest control of European airspace from the Soviet Union.

Actually, the "curvature" of space-time really is a case of better precision in astronomical measurement turning up an anomaly that didn't match Newton's equations. The main ("textbook") example was, of course, the orbit of Mercury, whose anomalous precession was published by Le Verrier in 1859, more than a century after Newton's death in 1727. Newton and his colleagues couldn't have dealt with this anomaly, because their equipment couldn't measure it accurately. They actually did measure an anomaly in Mercury's orbital precession, and explained it as an effect of the other planets, primarily Jupiter and Saturn.

Einstein's new (improved!) equations successfully explained Le Verrier's anomaly. But this really does qualify as a refinement of Newton's mechanics, since most of the data that demonstrated the anomaly was collected after Newton died.

Actually, it has long seemed to me that someone back in Newton's time, or even Galileo's, could have observed the deflection of stars' positions near the sun during total eclipses. That would have been a good hint that something funny was going on near the surface of the sun. It seems that Newton's mechanics do predict light curving near the sun, but predict only half the actual deflection. I've never read of anyone mentioning this before the 19th century. Anyone know about this?

(One of my favorite bits of astronomical history is that Newton actually "disproved" Copernicus claim that the Earth orbits the sun. He showed that the Earth doesn't orbit the sun at all; both of them actually orbit what we now call the barycenter of the solar system, i.e., the center of mass of the entire solar system, and that barycenter is usually outside the sun. This is mostly fun because, while technically true, it's basically silly, since the barycenter is rather close to the sun, and there's no other massive body anywhere near it. But the observational error here is in the third decimal place, so it's reasonable that Copernicus would see the sun as the center of it all back in the early 1500s. So Newton didn't really show that Copernicus was wrong; he showed that Copernicus's data didn't have enough precision to pinpoint what the Earth actually orbited.)

Sigh, are you retarded? Are you saying you have only worked on projects where a class is instantiated only once, or where every time the class is instantiated you use the same instance (variable) name?

Instances of a particular class may riddle the code base with thousands of instances, each with adifferent name. Please explain how you would do this? If you think there is only one instance of a class, or the instantiation of a class always happens with the same instance name, you have never developed software of more advanced complexity than "hello world".

Some things you may have to deal with
var inst = new JoeClass();
...
var someOtherInst = new JoeClass();
var aList = new List() {

1. new JoeClass(someInitializer),
2. new JoeClass(someOtherInitializer),
3. new JoeClass(aThirdInitializer)

};

So, now you have do deal with:

inst.joe_method();
someOtherInst.joe_method();
foreach( var j in aLIst ) {

1. j.joe_method();

}

You also need to make sure you skip

var inst = new AnotherClass()
inst.joe_method();

So you are going to do that using regular expression? How do you change inst.joe_method in the first example, and not in the second, in the same code base. What would the expression be? How do you know that the first inst.joe_method() is a call on the class JoeClass, and that the second, identical line, is on another class that is not being refactored? When did regular expressions develop syntax awareness?

You "purchased" an item. By giving them money for the laptop, they have a legal obligation to give you a laptop. Crowdsourcing is not "purchasing" anything. It's a donation, in the hopes that whoever you donated the money to will give you something in return.

I find it shocking that a web site (this one) with so many smart people having discussions can, at the same time, also be host to so many people who don't understand the basics about how money works. We've got crowdsourcing, bitcoin...