Oh great, now we have software packages for counting files.

HA! You're lying! Java doesn't have unsigned integers. Therefore, there are no prime numbers greater than ~2 billion.

Just to be sure, try again using BigInteger. We'll wait.

So am I wrong to think that what is more fundamental than what is a matter of perspective?

The biggest difference I see is that people aren't flocking to buy the veterinarian version of this drug, it isn't being touted on Fox News, et al, and people aren't suing their doctors to demand they give it to their comatose relatives (yet.)

Cautious optimism is the appropriate response here, and would have been the appropriate response for ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, too, but some idiots had go straight to "the miracle cure the government doesn't want you to know about" without waiting for real evidence. That is the fraud.

Can you give me an example of a long-term side effect of any drug that you take once or twice (or three times), where the side effect doesn't appear until a year or more has passed?

Just one example?

"Long term effects" is not a thing for a drug you take a handful of times. It's not even a thing for drugs you take every day for weeks or months.

If you take a drug, and a year or more goes by (like millions have with Covid vaccines) without any adverse reactions, and then suddenly something happens, would it even occur to anyone that it might be the drug you took years earlier? Of course not, because it doesn't fucking work like that.

I don't think antidepressants are making people suicidal who weren't already.

Some depressed people are suicidal but don't have the motivation, energy or ability to make and follow through with a plan. In other words, depression makes it difficult for the affected person to do anything about it, even suicide.

Once the antidepressant starts working they may finally have the gumption to finally go through with a suicide that they long ago convinced themselves was the only answer but haven't had the "confidence" to do.

They may have had unrealistic expectations about what the antidepressant would do (life sucks even for the un-depressed) and so impulsively go through with it at the first normal life setback.

It's important for a prescriber to regularly monitor the patient for some time until they adjust and not just send them on their way with a perscription.

It's not entirely wrong to mock people for taking "horse paste." Yes, ivermectin is a drug that is approved for treating humans (although not for Covid), but that's not what's happening here. People are going to the feed store and buying OTC ivermectin meant to treat livestock and self administering it. In other words, they're taking horse paste at the advice of Tucker Carlson, and should be mocked for it.

But the distribution is absolutely not random as suggested by "geologically unstable events". The fossils that we do find are all clustered in space and time as suggested by "snapshot in time."

I doubt it came from a lab, but it is possible. It's interesting that so many are eager to believe it did though, because, even if it did, it would make little difference. Gain of function research isn't able to test anything approaching the number of variations that nature can test. It's not like the evil geniuses at the lab cooked this up from scratch. No, it still started as a naturally occurring virus that already had the potential to cause this pandemic.

As long as we have people in close proximity to wild animals, there will be this risk.

Wishing it leaked is just a way to ignore the fact that we continue to face the risk of potentially catastrophic pandemics.

Exactly.

I bet "Google" is also the number one search on Google.

I don't know how many times I've seen people type "google" in the address bar, hit enter and then click on the first result, google.com.

This doesn't imply what they think it implies.

So the conditions are fake and the drugs don't work??

I'm curious.... how would you know if the drugs were working?

I don't think it will, at least not daily. That would result in a weird game of musical cars. You could drive somewhere one day and then have to wait a day to drive back. Annoying as it is if you have the wrong plate, it makes more sense not to alternate (at least not often, and hopefully the ban won't be around that long anyway.)

I wonder if they are banning electric cars with even numbered plates. I'd love to see the reactions to that.

I agree, but there's nothing in the article to suggest that it'll be half the vehicles today and the other half tomorrow. Instead it says "Only vehicles with numberplates ending in an odd number will be allowed to drive... for a few days" You'd think it'd be odd numbered plates on odd numbered days and even plates on even days, but that's not what it says.

But come to think of it, that'd be a little weird: you'd be able to drive your car into the city on one day, but wouldn't be able to drive it out the next. You wouldn't be able to go anywhere overnight, you'd have to wait a day for the return trip. They're using check points to stop cars from entering the city, but presumably they won't stop anyone leaving.

If you're already in the city, just plead ignorance; who watches the news anyway? :)

I agree overall with your comment, but I think UTF-8's backwards compatibility with ASCII was genius and is the reason we have as much Unicode support as we do today. I consider UTF-8 to be one of the best hacks of all time. Without it, the software that existed at the time would have had to be thrown out or re-written. The fact that software can (often) process UTF-8 without even being aware that it isn't ASCII was exactly what was needed to get Unicode off the ground. UTF-8 allowed Unicode to be adopted incrementally (especially by Unixes, which were much slower to adopt any (universal) international character set than Windows was).

Sadly, not everyone is as brilliant as Ken Thompson, so the UTF-8 encoding didn't exist when Unicode and ISO 10646 were first created. If someone had thought of it just a few years earlier we probably would have used that for nearly everything, and your second point would be irrelevant.

But by the time Unicode was even a thing, a lot of the software industry was already invested in ISO 10646, specifically UCS-2 (notably Microsoft and IBM, but plenty of others) so unless you think excluding IBM and Microsoft (in 1990!) would have been good for the widespread adoption of Unicode, the designers had no choice but to have multiple encodings.

Ironically, Linux and Apple were able to chose the (arguably much better) UTF-8 encoding only because they got serious about adopting an international character set several years later than Microsoft and IBM did (call it second mover advantage.)

So I couldn't call those mistakes. More like "historical accidents", just like most other bad designs we have to live with.

Your third point is just a face-palm, I agree.

The GP was right; for a right-wing nutjob he makes a lot of sense. I've been saying the same thing for years, nobody listens.

You're never really "locked in". All that is really meant by that is that there is a cost to moving away from some external dependency, and there is always a cost. Every external dependency a project takes on is "lock in." That includes the operating system, programming language, third party libraries, and everything else that isn't part of the project itself. You can try to minimize it with abstraction layers, but that has a cost too, and it is often paid unnecessarily when the dependency never needs to be removed or changed. Or you can also try to minimize it by using the good old advice to avoid nonstandard/non-portable extensions. But that has a cost too when the nonstandard extension does exactly what you need and it's expensive to do yourself. That's just wasted effort if you never actually end up needing to switch.

The only good advice is to choose your dependencies carefully and if necessary have an escape plan. (But don't spend too much effort on the escape plan unless there's a high likelihood you'll actually use it.)