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Messages - while1

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16
General Discussion / Re: Bradley Manning
« on: August 24, 2013, 09:22:12 am »
Not sure if sex changes should be covered in general.  I suppose sex changes could, in exceptional cases, be argued absolutely critical to mental well-being, in which case I would tentatively be in favour of having the operation covered in those cases only.  In general, I think elective procedures should not be covered in a social healthcare system.

It is my limited understanding that a MtF sex change where the testes are removed, would require a dependency on hormone therapy (i.e. estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, etc.) for the rest of their lives because it would result in a significant imbalance in hormones.  They would not be able to naturally produce enough estrogen and testosterone since both males and females naturally produce both, just differs in amount... So something like a male menopause would occur.

I agree with the elective point of view.  To me, a sex change could result in far too many possible complications for an elective operation, and should not to be covered.

Whereas just hormone therapy is much more reversible and less risky.  It'd be different if Manning already had a sex change before all of this WL stuff.

17
General Discussion / Re: Bradley Manning
« on: August 23, 2013, 07:27:56 am »
This is a difficult question, exacerbated by the fact I don't believe she should be locked away for 35 years, however if I were to disregard the crime and reasons why she's in prison and just go by the 35-year sentence... I'd say giving her therapy is the right thing to do morally speaking.  Economically, it's not.

For me, what I'd hate the most about prison is the lack of freedom.  I'd rather commit suicide than be imprisoned for 35 years of my life.  If the point of a 35-year sentence is to have them live out their sentence, then mental health is important and if she indeed feels like she was born a woman trapped in a man's body, then I can only imagine feeling even more depressed and mentally unstable when compounded with another layer of imprisonment.

Now, I do not believe that gender reassignment surgery should be covered.

18
General Programming / Re: Let's talk IDEs
« on: August 14, 2013, 07:05:39 am »
I can't stand Eclipse.  Sure it's free, but it has one of the most horrible menu systems out of all IDEs I've ever used... and the way it saves/ stores projects and workspaces makes team development a pain sometimes.  I'll take IntelliJ over Eclipse any day of the week.  JetBrains ranks probably #1 in my book in terms of a company that makes outstanding dev tools/ IDEs.

I agree that Visual Studio is goddamn slow at times.  I've had to kill the devenv.exe countless times and expect to do so countless more.

19
General Discussion / Re: Let's hear it!
« on: August 11, 2013, 02:05:43 pm »
lol. 

Saturday's date went meh, but I kind of knew that we weren't a match going in to it... Just because we had little in common.

Today's date went well IMO, for along the lines of what you said... When I can incorporate the Kuiper Belt into a generic first date question and not have my date go WTF, my mind was automatically put at ease.

20
General Discussion / Re: Let's hear it!
« on: August 08, 2013, 07:29:45 pm »
After having been dateless for longer than I care to admit... I have to say it's nice to finally live someplace where I actually have prospects... I have first dates with two different women this weekend.  I figure I should gain a level or two in experience.  The additional Charisma and Wisdom points are much needed.

21
General Programming / Re: Let's talk IDEs
« on: August 02, 2013, 07:12:45 am »
My new job is much better in this regard- smaller team and much smaller company means less room for dinosaurs not carrying their weight.

I always raise my eyebrows when someone I have to work with isn't a "power user"- meaning they don't customize their workspace, tools, desktop environment, or whatever to be the most efficient and productive (i.e. minimize the amount of repetitive things they have to do).

22
[x86] Announcements / Re: Moved to a new ip address
« on: July 31, 2013, 09:29:23 pm »
Nice, how much do you pay for your connection?

23
General Programming / Re: Let's talk IDEs
« on: July 31, 2013, 07:31:02 pm »
I don't disagree, but it seems you've obviously never had to work with dinosaurs stuck in their ways, resistant to learning new tools, or on a team where the technical leads use questionable coding standards.

24
General Discussion / Re: Let's update!
« on: July 30, 2013, 09:58:44 pm »
I think those kinds of standards are a little goofy when an IDE can just reformat code to your liking.

We have "standards", but it's really only to avoid conflicts due to formatting.

Depends on the IDE, but yeah, tools are the best way to enforce coding standards.  However, this only works if you have such tools, the tools are configured properly across the entire team, and everyone is using them.

25
General Discussion / Re: Let's update!
« on: July 29, 2013, 10:13:38 pm »
Finally have internet, but not FiOS, unfortunately.  Verizon has incompetent installation engineers or something.  It should not take over 3 weeks to install FiOS in a FiOS ready apartment.

Started my new job- I can say I hate dead code and large blocks of commented out code that will likely never be uncommented/ used again.  While my previous job had some stupid coding standards (i.e. max 80 characters per line), they did have a lot of good ones that made readability and maintainability easier.


26
General Discussion / Re: Let's update!
« on: July 06, 2013, 07:12:19 am »
A couple months back, I released my first full-length album and built a website for us (with the ecommerce solution suggested by while1 - thanks!).
http://vaydenmusic.com/music/04.html

Wow, that looks really slick and professional!  Glad it worked out.

27
General Discussion / Re: Let's update!
« on: July 05, 2013, 08:07:34 pm »
Software engineer soon to be working in Northern VA for a small medical device company.  Glad to be getting out of the defense industry and not be indirectly working for the man.

28
General Discussion / Re: Let's hear it!
« on: June 27, 2013, 05:46:48 am »
Congrats!

29
General Discussion / Re: NSA Leaks
« on: June 12, 2013, 10:20:02 pm »
His actions were highly illegal, yes, but treason?  I'm leaning towards no... Unlike Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden tried to minimize the amount of classified information he needed to leak in order to whistle blow.  Whereas Bradley Manning showed no such restraint or carefulness, releasing hundreds of thousands of classified documents without reading every single document to consider its impact on our national security and foreign relations.

30
General Discussion / Re: Let's hear it!
« on: March 18, 2013, 10:23:08 pm »
For what it's worth, I can't recommend staying away from MS Access (et al.) strongly enough. I've heard horror stories of legacy access DBs morphing into hideous monstrosities over years. However simple it seems now, I can nearly guarantee that it'll become more complicated, and it'll probably evolve to the point that it exceeds what access is capable of.

I've had to work with a legacy Access monstrosity before and I concur, stay away from MS Access.  You'd be better of using MS SQL Server even though it would probably have more of a learning curve than MS Access.


VB6 and VB.NET are vastly different, there's some syntax similarities but for the most part .NET made VB much improved.

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