strainer

I wrote 3Kloc of C++ for a dwarf fortress plugin while convalescing with very poor eyesight, and did not ever get around to figuring out how to start gdb, so crashes could involve alot of pondering or compiling in logging to track down simply where in the source it occurred.

A couple of months ago I finally had a go at using gdb to help fix a reported crash, and found that with a debug built executable, just type "gdb progname" and then at gdb's prompt "run" - hey presto if the program crashes it gives the source line. No problem that the entry executable wasnt built with symbols. It was hugely useful for a tiny learning step.

Gotta love the Linux release team for not disabling this ability.

And how does that or the vaguely introduced link justify accusations of outrageous rhetorical trickery ?

You are claiming that the accuracy of Telsas language is outrageously deceptive, using an outrageously made up example of deception: "six seconds prior to the collision = It is any six seconds before the crash"

"This is the kind of sketchiness that makes people wary of Tesla."

Its the kind of sketchiness that make me wary of the stuff people post about Tesla. If the driver had multiple warnings - about anything, any car company will mention that, there is nothing exceptionally sketchy about Tesla doing so. And that is all on which you based your incredible interpretation of "six seconds prior to". Its just an entirely made up accusation.

In common UK parlance carbohydrates don't include sugars although chemically speaking they should. I think metabolically speaking there is a useful distinction to be made, in fact people are making it here. In dietary context schools have categorised potatoes, rice, pasta, even bread as sources of "carbohydrates" and sweets as sugar sources.

If its not hidden, its not a threat to national security kind of "backdoor". A hidden backdoor will only respond to a secret token, you cant just knock on it and get asked "whats the hardcoded password?"

A telnet service responds to a plain port scan. So it was categorically not hidden. Vodaphone explain this themselves in the linked register article:

>It added the Telnet service was found during an audit, which means it can't have been that secret or hidden: "The issues were identified by independent security testing, initiated by Vodafone as part of our routine security measures, and fixed at the time by Huawei.

> is the amount of research done per capita in Europe more than the amount done in the US ...

Actually I asked you for that info to support your idea that others freeload on US bought R&D. Now you are asking for the data that would show your supposition is incorrect, instead of having some to indicate that it may be valid.

But a true assessment of the situation wouldnt just look at cash spent anyway. Humans are complex, cash doesn't fully account for their motivation and achievements. Many people do great work for lesser remuneration.

> In principle this is just a measure of how important something is to people.

In principal sure; like the profits from crack cocaine, cutting down ancient forests, making nuclear arsenals... Great principle that.

Short range electric planes are being manufactured presently.

This wont be able to decarbonize anything until surplus carbon free energy is generated for it use - that need not take decades with proper governmental policies, but it means this technology will not lead the way.

It can be very useful for energy storage and keeping existing combustion plant usable. But the op does not seem to bear in mind the fact that it requires more energy input than it outputs in the form of a carbon neutral fuel, or that renewable technologies have by this date clearly demonstrated affordable solutions to carbon neutral power generation.

>The first is that it's an international market, so any given country is better off to underpay and free ride on the R&D paid for by other countries.

By "free ride on the R&D paid for by other countries" the US market bought R&D is a especial fit for this outlook, but without any hard figures to hand, it is perhaps easier to flatteringly assume its stability. Others can do R&D in their own ways, including very significantly University research besides Nationally funded research. Pure commercial health research is problematically burdened by interest in profitability of potential treatments. Its unfortunate that in this age we are to assume international competitiveness in health and all important technologies as given and unavoidable, over cooperation. Cooperation is what we do with people we care enough for.

> The government is then put in the position of choosing who to make unhappy.

In UKs free health service practice most of the treatment decision is made by the treating doctors, who select the best treatment available to them for the patient. The doctors quite rarely don't have most expensive treatment option available and can advise that one is available for private purchase occasionally. This is unfortunate but such is the nature of illness. Overall, the selection of treatment to patients is overwhelmingly worked out by doctors, not the government. There is a certain delay and compromise involved in the government selecting and making treatments available to the doctors, thats a matter contested between doctors and government, not patients and government.

I think its valid but difficult to argue that military arms procurement is not by and large a reasonable example of monopsistic negotiation (I hope thats a word :). But that it is debatable goes to show how its not valid to treat an abstract model like monopsony as though it is a factual encapsulation of certain business or issue, which is dishonest to avoid, as the parent comment put it.

Absolute monopsony might be a very threatening thing to absolutely profit orientated business, but in practice here nationalised public services like Health need have no interest in forcing their commercial suppliers slowly out of business with unsustainable deals. The position could be abused if it was arranged as such but if a Nation were to choose that outcome, it would make more sense to nationalize the suppliers promptly rather than slowly degrade their value.

> How can you have an entire article on .... without using the word "monopsony?"[1] Is it simple ignorance or deliberate deception?

There is no call to denigrate the author for not finding a discussion on broad economic categories as central as you do.

Would you feel this way about an article discussing military arms procurement that failed to characterize the situation as a monopsony ?

That it is such a cursory and flawed note posted under the brand of "Enlightenment Through Understanding".

Their argument declares an inevitable consolidation in amount of farms - so briefly explained it amounts to an article of faith. And a plain error encoded in two simple tables, where larger farms magically produce less waste products (pollution).

The links to decent writeups with example code ( excellent to have) are a nice surprise when a row is expanded.

On my firefox browser the paragraphs and elements in the table and writeups are somewhat excessively spaced vertically.

It might be notable that on very small lists (up to around 50, maybe 100 depending on cpu/cache) insertion sort is fastest of all, even on difficult input distributions. Its so simple that cpu can skip through it rapidly. I noticed this myself and have also read other developers mention it in sort design discussions. A popular general purpose sort called 'Timsort' defaults to it for small sequences. Its possible to tweak the insert algorithm to sum distance of elements moved so far and escape to a more substantial algorithm when it gets excessive. If little rearrangement is required insertion sort is about as fast as scanning through memory can be.

I think in practice the answer to the question "which should I use" (rather than "which should ideally be used") is the best developed hybrid sort library for the platform. Beyond the suitable case for insertion sort, its a really substantial job for an individual to develop, test and optimize a high performance sort library that can handle a range of distribution types.

> "On the cancer cluster question, ATSDR cites data from the Georgia Comprehensive Cancer Registry to make the case that there isn’t one. GCCR data from the past decade shows childhood cancer incidence has been below the state average here. GCCR’s Waycross-area data, however, "doesn’t include people who are diagnosed at hospitals in other cities", as Lexi, Harris, Gage, and Raylee all were."

Charitably, I guess the researchers just don't have resources to locate patients more accurately than by their diagnosing hospitals location. It's a huge amount of noise on top of patients actual location history, which would seem to make their survey only capable of detecting persistent hotspots that span the location of many hospitals.

That is a valid argument, but FOE campaining doesnt just mention GM - it centers itself on it. Omitting that is CLEARLY not valid reporting of their campaign, its partial gossip.

The final paragraphs of the article launch unexpectedly into a cursory attack on a Friends Of Earth campaign which is centered on the GMO aspect of new vanillin synthesis and the marketting of GMO products as natural. The author takes the opportunity to characterise FOEs position roughly without mentioning GMOs at all, introducing it as "downright dumb".

Friends of the Earth are quite fanatical about actual natural food and conditions, whether that be a good or bad approach in these times. National geographic under ownership of the Murdochs seems free to pick and omit information for its advertisers fanaticisms.

Bio-degradability can not be under-rated. The big problem with plastic is that it degrades extremely slowly, practically speaking it is not bio-degradable.

You clearly care about the environment, so do understand that plain paper is as biodegradable as tree leaves. Little bugs of all sizes happily eat it like leaves. It will never accumulate in the oceans.

There are problems with how it can be produced, but it can be one of the most ecologically advantageous and sustainable materials possible.

> Has large scale energy storage been solved?

There are numerous technologies which can currently provide large scale energy storage at cost which is currently competitive in many situations and due to drop rapidly once they are actually required and built in quantity. To mention a few: flow batteries, hydrogen production and generation, carbon neutral biomass fuel, heat storage and conversion batteries including molten salt, enhancement of existing hydro schemes, online EV fleet, active geothermal... besides you know if pushed, even the occasional emergency fossil fuel burn if unprepared. Nuclear plants are not known for their uptime during storms either.

Current prices are detailed here, been dropping every year : https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

UK has relatively high livestock and animal welfare basic regulation, and in addition it has a certification scheme (that works out about 25% more expensive), run by the "Royal Society for Protection of Cruelty towards Animals". They base their standards as much as possible on academic measurements of stress and natural behaviors. One thing to note is that animals tend to get ill the more 'unhappy' their existence is - and this is argued as one of the reasons there is no need to chlorinate chickens from UK and very little food poisoning risk from fresh produce. Anyway, the RSPCA will actually certify chickens that are not able to 'free range' (these days it means ability to go outside occasionally) Their advice is it doesn't seem to be of great importance to chickens, unlike stocking density, temperature and conditions inside the barn, and even the introduction of 'toys' like beachballs which some are observed to play with. RSPCA workers are commonly regarded as genuine and professionally experienced their charge of, preventing cruelty towards animals.

Any comparison will be spurious because the candidates are different in so many respects. Renewable generation is a much more broad and varied category than Nuclear power. All nuclear power plants boil water to spin turbines and options of how to do that efficiently and safely with nuclear reactors has been hugely globally researched for about 70 years making the situation today stagnant in comparison to renewables.

There are a range of renewable generation and storage options only seriously industrially developed for just a couple of decades yet already wind and solar products are the cheapest form of new generation (without subsidies).

So in depth comparative analysis is moot now, current renewable options are cheaper even including current storage options to make them dispatch-able, and they will continue to get cheaper. Nuclear will not catch up without some game changing invention which would practically amount to a new technology that we cant debate yet.

Only lingering passionate argument from the years when there was some uncertainty about renewables potential maintains any vision of nuclear competing with them to provide carbon neutral and environmentally friendly power, at the present and into the foreseeable future.

https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

"I can't help but notice the lack of specific examples or explanations of any kind"

Because its so simple as saying, "the wind COULD have blown the fukushima fallout southwards over Tokyo instead of relatively promptly into the Pacific." A nuclear accident COULD deliver fallout to a highly populated area that cant be evacuated in time. A nuclear accident COULD generate much more fallout than Fukushima or Chernobyl. How can one understand the technology, and challenge the reality of such risks of nuclear power plants? Pretending that its been as bad as it might have been and as it could be - like a dangerous driver saying "its fine - I've only ever hit a tree!"

re: desalination - fine then, add the cost of desalinating salt water to replace the increasingly scarce resource that nuclear plants evaporate, to their already uncompetitive cost.

"What are you proposing is going to happen that would be worse?"

No offense but if you can't see how Chernobyl or Fukushima could have turned out worse, or that unexpected accidents in other locations could happen and could be worse, you don't understand nuclear power. Its problematic because I expect you have read plenty on it in order to want to defend it in a topic about aforestation.

"Water isn't consumed"

Water resource is consumed, sure it rains again - often far away and into the sea. Fresh water resources are scarce and under pressure in many places, ancient aquifers are drying out, particularly in the US.

For all the stretched comparisons about how safe nuclear can be, the technology is a liability which requires great care and expense to keep secure and safe.

Its promotion was competing with and obstructing the promotion of renewables for over a decade past, but its moot now that in the past couple of years the price performance of renewables has become unassailable. There's no point promoting nuclear anymore and arguing about how safe nuclear has been or could be - its more expensive already than wind and solar, materially, environmentally, security-wise and economically. Wind and solar are still on a rapid improvement curve. Nuclear powered heat plants are not futuristic generation options, they're relics from the nuclear arms race.

That's just comparing them with coal to sound great. The three major nuclear accidents do not represent the worst which nuclear plants are capable of. For example we have yet to see what can happen if a nuclear plant is sabotaged - that's not FUD its a real vulnerably of the technology and is a reason why they incur constant exceptional security as well as safety costs. They consume alot of water resource as well, for cooling.

Thankfully its an academic debate now anyway, because solar and wind prices are already much cheaper with no end to their continued improvement in sight.

I once worked for a short spell in a tree-planting squad in the highlands of Scotland. The seasoned planters were olympically fit and each planted around 100 saplings an hour across rough mountainside.

You mean running a permanent experiment on the genetic diversity and interplay of forest species across the globe?

Luckily such recklessness is unnecessary.

Studies on this are very valuable. The IPCC's AR5 advises this kind of action to be funded and analyzes different policy approaches to enable action.

There is no justification at skepticism and entertaining back-of-the-envelope gotchas about the climactic and environmental value of tree planting and enhanced forestry at this late stage. It needs to be supported !

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

" Reducing emissions from deforestation; reducing emissions from forest degradation; conservation of forest carbon stocks; sustainable management of forests; and enhancement of forest carbon stocks (REDD) consists of forest-related activities implemented voluntarily by developing countries that may, in isolation or jointly lead to significant climate change mitigation. REDD was introduced in the agenda of the UNFCCC in 2005, and has since evolved to an improved understanding of the potential positive and negative impacts, methodological issues, safeguards, and financial aspects associated with REDD implementation. " (page 865)