I'll disagree with this. Perl lets you write beautiful code: clear, efficient, and about as close to bug-free as we can achieve with current technology. I was responsible for a suite of 600 tools written in about 160,000 lines of Perl. We had a release of new and improved code every three weeks, typically with no known bugs. The principal documentation writer told us to stop providing release documentation because the code was so clear that she (a non-programmer!) could just read it. The tools produced log files that let us fix about 95% of bugs without having to reproduce the, because the logs showed precisely what had gone wrong and where. If there's another programming language that supports this kind of work and productivity I'd like to hear about it.

This much larger study reported in the British Medical Journal reported that "Higher consumption of eggs (up to one egg per day) is not associated with increased risk of coronary heart disease or stroke." The data in the study reported on here don't appear to change this overall result.

I'm not as surprised as other people making comments about this article. In 1993, I ported Raima Data Manager (at the time, a network-model DMBS running 12,000 different commercial applications (you never heard of it, because it simply worked) to Stratus VOS. The manager of the Stratus office in Bellevue, WA gave me a tour. In the glass-walled machine room, he opened up the Stratus machine running the office - the center of the company's northwest US sales operation - and pulled out a board. I looked out of the glass walls in horror. After a few seconds, the manager pushed the board back in and said, "Look at this." So I looked at the console. The messages, to the best I can remember, said, "Board 9: CPU. Removed." "Board 9: CPU: inserted... testing... OK... Online." The salesmen in their offices never even looked up.

Two other things struck me at the time as being radically different from what I was used to. First, during the port I accidentally used the debugger command to step *into* a low-level C-language routine. The message that came back let me know that the source code lived on development disk 1 of XXX machine in the Los Angeles office, and because I didn't have permissions allowing me to see that code it wasn't going to show it to me. Wow - seamless wide-area networking in 1993. Second, I learned that Stratus VOS only supported a (highly-capable) Stratus terminal, an that my programs had to work with that and nothing else. I asked, what if I'm running a Wyse 50 Whizbang 7? The manager said that I'd simply register that terminal and its characteristics with the operating system - there was an easy way to do that - and the operating system would take care of any necessary translations. Wow again: something Unix got wrong: of course the operating system should take care of supporting different kinds of terminals! (Just like disk drives: my programs should not know or care about low-level details like how to write to a disk or terminal.) Finding something Unix got wrong is rare indeed.

Stratus VOS (a descendant of Multics, cf. Unix) got a surprising number of things right. Having a server actually running "next to forever" doesn't surprise me.

Obamacare does a lot more good than you're giving it credit for.

Insurance company "administrative overhead" is capped at 15% of premium dollars; before Obamacare, it was typically over 30%. That money is non-productive. (By comparison, the VA's administrative overhead is astoundingly low, at 2%, and a recent study showed the VA and private US hospitals getting comparable outcomes for three major medical problems. I.e., the VA got equivalent outcomes at much lower overhead cost. Just saying.)

People with pre-existing conditions are no longer excluded from insurance. Sometimes retroactively, long after an insurance company has agreed to insure them and has been using their money.

Insurance premium annual increases before Obamacare were quite a bit faster than under Obamacare.

The most valuable benefit from having insurance - even if you have an effectively infinite deductible! - is that you pay rates the insurance company negotiated with the healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies, not the list prices you'd pay otherwise. The difference between these can be enormous.

I've personally written half a million lines of high quality code. Not to create code, nor to reinvent wheels; rather, I regard each line of code as something I have spent to get a job done, and which adds to debugging and long-term maintenance loads. And I've supported/debugged/maintained a lot more software. Much of this was done working with a few other hot programmers. We used a mix of pair programming and code reviews, and you'd have had to pry these tools from our cold, dead fingers before we would have stopped using them. Why? We were deeply and personally committed to being as productive as possible, and getting more than one set of eyes on the code sped us up.

We thought about it like this: the stuff you understand how to do is fast and easy, and takes just a few percent of your time at the computer. It's the other things, the ones you have to think about, that slow you down. Empirically, the chances are strong that your partner will see a way how to get past something that stumps you. and vice versa; the likelihood of you both being stuck on the same problem is small. So pair programming resulted in much greater productivity than the same programmers working apart could achieve. The same benefits accrued to the overall design of the software, not just its implementation: we produced not just a lot more, but a lot better code.

Your mileage may vary - but having seen pair programming and code reviews work over and over, it's hard to give much credit to people who haven't tried these techniques talk about how they can't work.

Or even better, this

Water usage in California is a bit higher than 7 billion gallons per year. Per the USGS, usage was 38 billion gallons per day (i.e., nearly 13 trillion gallons per year) in 2010. Nestle's usage appears to be a drop in the bucket.

A credible citation is indeed called for. Physicians appear to disagree with you; see, for example, an NBC News article in July, 2014 debunking the idea that immigrants are diseased. With respect to measles - the subject of the parent comment - Mexico vaccinates 99% of children, and the U.S. 92%.

The old dogma that the body is sterile (with respect to microbes) if it is healthy seems more and more likely to be just an old dogma, not to be confused with truth. Here's a recent article in Nature about the unexpected discovery that a healthy placenta has an associated microbial population: http://www.nature.com/news/bac...

Eh? Dubai's leadership has been doing exactly the things you say you would like to see. Well, except militarizing their economy - and this is arguably a good thing. Progress since independence from the British in 1971 has been astounding: when the British left in 1971, illiteracy was >70%, life expectancy a bit over 50 years, and there were no universities. Illiteracy is now 7.5%, life expectancy is 76.7 years, and Dubai has between 50 and 60 colleges and universities. Oil revenues now contribute less than 7% of GDP, and the country has become a huge international financial and transshipping center. Development of luxury (and non-luxury) skyscrapers, hotels, and vast artificial islands, etc., is almost unbelievable. There are about 25 free trade "innovation zones", where the government is working to get critical masses of private companies - they are in fact highly capitalistic - to work together to create the same magic that we saw in the US in Silicon Valley and the Route 128 areas. The government is one of the most stable in the region, and it is showing remarkable and sustained insight in how to drive progress. Plus there is a lot of tolerance for Western ideas - in fact, Western civil law is used in the innovation zones, not Sharia law. There are, I am sure, things to criticize about Dubai, just as there are about many other countries. But they are getting far more things right, and in a big way, than most other places. The best reason to visit is that it will blow away your preconceptions; I recommend this highly.

Quoting George Santayana, "Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it." It has been known since the late 18th century that transitivity is not rational, however much economists and others would like to think otherwise. See Condorcet's paradox for details.

The number of doctors per 100,000 people in the US is a bit higher than this. Per the Kaiser Family Foundation, there were 834,769 professionally active physicians in the US in November, 2012. The US population at the time was 314.8 million (per the US Census Bureau's Population Clock), making the number of doctors per 100,000 people a more reasonable 265. Here's a graph showing the number of physicians per 10,000 (note - not 100,000) people in the US.

It is a sad commentary on programmers as a group that statements like this are posted, and worse that they garner so much support from the chattering masses. Excellent programmers always strive to write code with few bugs; and sometimes they succeed. I personally wrote a package of high-precision arithmetic calculations that was used for many years by a prominent Wall Street firm, and am quite sure (for a variety of sound reasons, not just "belief") that this software (about 4,000 lines of C) is bug-free. For examples that are more publicly known, consider the 420,000 lines of code in the space shuttle, which had a total of 17 detected bugs in 11 major releases (see Good Question – How does NASA write perfect code for the space shuttle computers? by Marshall Brain, May 27, 2009); the whole system is not perfect, but major subsystems are.

[Sorry - I just accidantally posted the text above as Anonymous Coward - not my intention.]

And just after Veteran's Day, how could one forget the G.I. Bill, which helped 7.8 U.S. veterans of World War II with their post-war education? Things like this are worth remembering, most especially when someone asserts that the government never does anything good.