There’s surgical interventions that cure a lot of things, like certain kinds of blindness, or pretty much anything that requires a transplant.

With two prospective diabetes cures moving towards human trials, I hope there will be a more compelling answer in 10 years or so, but that’s TBD.

Good news, everyone. 314159 is not evenly divisible by 17, just as you’d expect.

Wait, I know this guy! He’s super into wine. Like… SUPER into it.

Wrong: I had a 1% chance, and I doubled my chances. Now my chances are 101%.

Right: I had a 1% chance, and I doubled my chances. Now my chances are 2%.

Wrighongt: I had a 1% chance, and I doubled my chances. Now my chances are 3%, because I’m a lucky person.

Won’t someone think of the children('s rights)?

I think part of what has happened is a group of people has identified that a lot of modern writing is garbage, but doesn’t know exactly what’s wrong with it. The issue gets blamed on whatever seems like the most obvious change to them. There are some stories with better writing that have a diverse set of characters, and while there are still weirdos on the internet that complain about it, the general market response suggests people are most interested in good media, and good media can represent a diverse range of people.

As for my take on modern writing, I think “design by committee”, by means of publishers and marketing specialists grasping more control over the creative process is the major culprit in its declining quality.

In my geometry class, there are no angles. In my geometry class, everything is straight lines, parallel to the line between the center of the sun, and the middle of the flat Earth, just like God intended.

I agree with some of the other answers you’ve received, but I want to add one.

I think there’s a kind of impulsive confidence, and unmitigated determination that lets me put on shorts when it’s 20 degrees Fahrenheit out, then tells me to stay the course, and accept that I have entirely become cold, rather than merely passing by it.

As for what other people can do to help me feel that feeling, I have no idea. I do those things because of the way that I am. People have already tried encouraging or discouraging me, and it hasn’t changed how I prefer to dress (for example).

Military specifications are often designed around specific manufacturing processes. When the commercial state of the art changes, this leaves the military as the weirdo insisting they be allowed to buy a 1970s toilet seat made out of 1970s plastic. Those can be redesigned to allow purchase of commercially available goods that pass some kind of suitability testing. This is small potatoes, under a billion dollars per year.

The use and prevalence of IDIQ could be reviewed systemically. Some of those contracts are wildly disproportionate in cost to the value they deliver. This could be a few billion dollars per year kind of stuff.

Almost all T&M contracts could be replaced with FFP, or FPLOE. The T&M contract style promotes (very obviously) inefficiency at every level of the delivery process, and this actually gets even worse with growing contract scope. This is tens to maybe a hundred billion dollars per year.

Congress, holistically, should embrace the notion that unspent money should not be deallocated in a future year. The “use it or lose it” approach to budgeting causes everyone subject to Congressional review to find a way (even a silly way) to consume every dollar they are handed. If, instead, authorized money were allowed to accrue for large expenses (the replacement of a technology system, refurbishing an office, expanding a field site - whatever that agency needs) it could reduce the mindset that unspent money means losing power among the thousands of beaurocrats that make purchasing decisions on behalf of our country. I genuinely have no idea how much money is burned unnecessarily this way.

The government should hire its own experts to deliver services to itself. The entire mantra of minimizing costs known up front has produced some of the most massive wastes in history. Almost everything a contractor can do for the government that’s a total cost of more than one person’s salary would be better achieved by hiring a person to do that work directly. This is most obvious (to me) in personal computers, where the government regularly buys what should be powerful, capable machines, but then forgot to specify some requirement, and is forced to purchase a machine with a spinning disk drive, or only 2GB of RAM, or a 720p display, or… Just something obviously wrong, that no one is empowered and knowledgeable to say “This is going to critically hamper the performance of every human handed one of these computers, we need to fix it”. This is done (theoretically) to save sometimes just a few dollars, and adds to the general malaise of “The government doesn’t care about whether its workers are productive” that’s one more push for people with better options to leave government. I won’t even begin to guess at the value lost through having people think of government jobs as paid daycare for those that couldn’t cut it in the commercial world, let alone the way government contractors really are, or are perceived.

There’s probably more, but… Wait, what’s that? They’re not going to be trying to remove the stranglehold of the MIC on the government purchasing apparatus? Well, maybe they can still fix that toilet seat thing.

Face to face, this is definitely possible. I’ve convinced more than a dozen people that climate change is real, and humans are the primary cause of it in face to face conversation. Online, where tone is easily misinterpreted, everyone is a stranger, and people are more able to rapidly retreat into a bubble of others that agree with them, I think it does a lot less good - but every once in a while, something works a little bit for someone.

More importantly, if we decide that we should all exist in our isolated bubbles of (non)social acceptance, it leads to the rise of extremism in some of those groups, and even the most terrible ideas can be allowed to fester and grow. Pretty much regardless of who you are, or what you believe, you probably have an example or two of such beliefs.

Actually, debate between hostile strangers online serves an important role in churning up internet drama. This is vital to the continued survival of the popcorn industry.

The Affordable Care Act passed, and addressed some of the most glaring, campaigning worthy issues. It’s only been 14 years, and already support for the ACA is rising, and opposition is falling off.

Support for more fracking has risen slightly in the last 4 years, but it lags behind the growth in support for solar, wind, and even nuclear. I suspect (caveat emptor) that as renewables bring energy costs back into check, support for fracking will follow the drop in support of coal production. It should not be a surprise that any shelter is popular in a storm.

Both parties used to be strongly against illegal immigration, now one campaigns against it, but did most of the things they were allowed to do to encourage and allow it, including publicly declaring their support for illegal immigrants, and passing sanctuary city laws.

I don’t have a strong grounding in how much open support there is for genocide, but I think the American population is more aware of it happening than they were in the past. Hopefully that means we care more now.

It, uhh… It looks like your double peen is made of plastic. Are you sure this is something to brag about?

They just had sex, too.

Thanks!

Guys (et al), please don’t make fun of the dim fool’s name. It’s rude and frankly immature.

Edited: spelling

The belt and belt loops go all along the top row. If there’s only one row, the matrix can only wear a short-shorts version. There’s a crotch in each space between columns, and a leg on every column of length greater than 1.

Sparse matrices have their own special pants that are more efficient, of course.

With 17, I understand that you’re referring to how 299,999 is also divisible by 17. What is the 51 reference, though? I know there’s 3,999,999,999,999 but that starts with a 3. Not the same at all.

You can just bitwise AND those with …000000001 (for however many bits are in your number). If the result is 0, then the number is even, and if it’s 1, then the number is odd. This works for negative numbers because it discards the negative signing bit.

Then you should return false, unless the remainder is also greater than or equal to the twenty second root of 4194304. Note, that I’ve only checked up to 4194304 to make sure this works, so if you need bigger numbers, you’ll have to validate on your own.