If you have cheap enough nuclear power even if the total efficiency isn't that good initially, you may not care if the oil prices go up and up.
Better batteries are an important problem to solve, but so is the hydrocarbon problem. While better batteries are likely to be invented in the near future, it is unlikely that in the near future we will have battery powered planes with 950kph cruising speeds and >10 hour flight times. Even less likely they'd be able to fly at mach 2.
Those students are nowhere doing anything like landing on the moon. Yes it's an impressive student project but it is mostly useless from a scientific and technical POV. Good for promoting awareness of EVs I guess[1].
Nissan and friends are the ones improving the technology.
[1] But you wouldn't want your friends to be buying EVs till the tech improves a lot more, unless they are really rich and can afford to "donate to progress" or the cars really suit their requirements.
Most medical drugs and treatments don't work 100% of the time. That does not mean they don't work. And they are not the same as "no treatment".
Similarly placebos don't work 100% of the time. That does not mean they don't work. And they are not the same as "no treatment".
If you look at many proper studies of drugs and treatments you can see there are differences in outcome of the drug, the placebo and "no treatment".
> If the drugs aren't doing better than placebo's, they are placebo's!
Not necessarily. In theory you could have a treatment/drug that works in say 20% of the cases, worse than placebo, but it still works about the same even if you tell the patient it's a sham treatment, or the patient is unaware/unconscious when you apply the treatment/drug.
> I would think that being alive was not the only requisite for being an actor.
Even if he dies it's not a technical problem if you have a big enough budget. Just scan him or reconstruct his likeness from existing images and have an actor play his part using the Avatar movie making tech.
The problems will be legal ( again:) ) - whether his estate will allow his likeness to be used etc, how much $$$$ etc.
> What you need are some good actuarial tables that tell you the average death age of a person who's managed to reach 71. > It'll be higher.
It's significantly higher if you reach that age and are still reasonably healthy. Not so much higher if most of your organs are in poor condition already...
I guess Ian McKellen has still a fair number of years left, unless "stuff happens".
> You can't have a placebo-effect unless you claim that the therapy actually works in itself. > You can't claim that a non-working therapy works unless you a a liar.
You miss the point. For many conditions a placebo is not a nonworking therapy. So if it works you're not a liar. And placebo treatments do work 30-40% of the time for certain problems. You're only a liar if you make claims about the treatment that aren't true.
Many drugs/procedures only work well for some people and some cases.
So for a noncritical condition where a placebo has 30-40% chance of working with a low chance of side effects, vs a drug that has 50% chance of working and a higher chance of bad side effects, a doctor might choose to prescribe a placebo and ask the patient to come back after a few days to see how well it works. The doctor does not have to lie. Of course if the patient asks for the name of the drug the doctor might then have a problem. Many religious people may not even need to see a doctor to tap the placebo effect. The atheists on the other hand might find it hard to ask and get help from the FSM;).
The drug companies probably hate the placebo effect - a fair number of their candidate drugs can barely beat it in trials:).
It proves there are lots of people/companies willing to give students money for doing stuff that's rather useless from a scientific and practical viewpoint.
I'd like to see how they handle practical stuff like "air conditioning". If they think that's not important, then that's yet another reason why their car is not important. A college student might put up with 35C or higher temperatures on that "cool trip", most car buyers won't. A 3-4 kilowatt car air conditioner is going to hurt an EV's range a lot more than a fossil fuel powered one.
I'm sure you'd be able to get a "normal car" to travel the same journey for cheaper, faster and in better comfort.
What Nissan is doing is far more useful than a bunch of students going from Alaska to Argentina. Computer analogy (instead of car analogy;): the former are like Intel/AMD - actually pushing the tech, the latter are just a bunch of case modders.
It can't be killing everything it infects quickly. Otherwise it would be extinct. What happens is it doesn't kill some animals/victims, they might get sick or be asymptomatic, and these carry it around. Current theory is fruit bats are one of the carriers.
The same unmutated strain could keep on killing say 80% of humans who are exposed, so there is no pressure to mutate from there. Whether it mutates fast or not thus would depend more on the main carriers.
> How wealth is distributed has an enormous effect on a society's ability to produce new wealth
Yes it does. But when something sucks way more blood than it helps, it starts being viewed as a parasite.
> Learn a tiny bit of economic theory and--far more importantly--economic history before making up lame analogies, please.
Maybe you should learn a bit of what those finance guys are actually doing (and have done) and not just economic theory.
You really think Wall Street needs so many logicians and math wizards to create an efficient market that benefits society? I guess my ignorance of economics is so profound that I find that hard to believe:).
Perhaps Wall Street and friends should pay a bailout tax/fee. This money then goes to a bailout fund, so _when_ stuff blows up, the Government can sack+punish everyone involved, and then use the money to help fix the mess, rather than get all the money from elsewhere/guesswho. Firms that don't blow stuff up after 20 years or so get some of their paid out money back. Those learned genius economists can go figure out what the details should be (20 years or not, how much to charge, when to charge, etc).
I picked 20 years because it seems that ever since those very intelligent chaps came up with clever ways of reducing risk, stuff seems to be blowing up every 10 years or so;).
The fact that the casino allows such stuff tells me that they and their friends are crooked. I don't really see how allowing this provides any advantage to the market or makes it more efficient.
[1] I am not a fast trader but I think something similar to this happens: the mutual fund's program will fail to buy at $21 and so reissues another buy for 21.01, the "fast trader" program will then offer to sell at 21.50, if it sees no order from the mutual fund program after X milliseconds, it will try to sell at 21.45 and so on, meanwhile it buys all other stuff - hopefully before the other fast traders beat it. Alternatively it could offer to sell a few shares at 21.02, (check to see if the mutual fund sends an order to buy, then cancel, repeat till there are no buy orders, then go back down a bit and sell everything at that price, thus extracting as much from the mutual fund as you can). If the few shares are sold before you cancel it's probably a fast trader buying them. The tricky bit is countering the other pesky fast trader programs;).
It's also about marketing, bullshit and "plausible deniability".
This is so the gamblers can give better excuses/bullshit for gambling with other people's money. This way everyone can say it's some sophisticated stuff that few people understand, so they get to keep their bonuses and profits when it all blows up.
Here's an analogy: the financial system is a casino. The casino doesn't produce any "real" wealth - it just distributes it. The Federal Reserve produces the casino chips (trillions of them if necessary). The casino operators take their cuts+fees. The players gamble with OTHER people's money (pension funds etc), and when they win they get pay raises and bonuses. If a single gambler loses big, he loses his job. If a huge bunch of gamblers lose big, they say "bail us out". How can a huge bunch of gamblers lose at the same time? They can if they play a "let's create fake wealth" game.
Here's a popular version: you start with a "parcel". You sell it for a profit to the next person. And the next person may do the same thing and so on. Whoever currently holding the parcel is allowed to declare that they are richer by the current "outside" value of the parcel. When the "music stops" the parcel is opened and the holder gets whatever is inside (which may be a bunch of IOUs).
It doesn't really need very much sophistication to play such games.
Here's another game: this is a trading/auction game: a few players pay the casino a special amount and they then get to see other people's bids 30 milliseconds[1] before everyone else does and they also get to make bids and cancel their bids rapidly. Naturally this is very profitable for those few players, unless there is a bug in their software, and they make a big loss in which case they ask the casino to rollback the trades, or change the rules so their losses are limited.
This needs a bit more sophistication if you are aiming for maximum profit since your program has to "battle" the other programs. But the few with the 30 millisecond advantage should make money from the rest.
Lastly, the gamblers who get sacked for losing will often get rehired since even if their companies lose big and maybe even go bankrupt, they make their _bosses_ rich.
She says, "Tom, it's the Permitted Murder section of the Suicide Act. They're going to invoke it...I'm talking about the section of the Suicide Act that makes host-taking legal. Rex has guaranteed the survival of your mind after death, and you've accepted it. Now they can legally take your body for any purpose they desire. They own it. They can kill your body, Tom."
1) Whether she's a hypocrite or not depends on the situation. She's not a hypocrite if she's protesting from a law POV and the laws don't prohibit her from doing what she did and keep her job, just because she works for an institution that enforces the laws. She may not regard "rights" not protected/enshrined by the laws as highly as you do.
2) Are those really fundamental rights? e.g. buying sex from a consenting adult? Even if that's allowed you'd still need laws and courts to determine what is "buying sex from a consenting adult". After all the laws determine what is an adult, consent and sex. These differ from country to country. And maybe even from courtroom to courtroom.
The last I checked adultery is still a crime in Michigan and a few other states. One may think it shouldn't be considered a crime at all, but it would be hard to claim that the wronged parties lose/suffer nothing. From an evolutionary/"selfish gene" POV, adultery is indeed a serious act.
Many societies consider adultery as damaging to society. So just because you and the other adult consent doesn't mean that society must view it as legal. There are very few cultures and societies that are still thriving that think that adultery is AOK.
FWIW I'm single and I don't think I'm the very jealous sort, but from what I've seen, there are very many who would consider being robbed at gunpoint to not be as painful as having their spouse cheat on them. So to consider the former a serious crime and the latter not is actually rather strange if those people turn out to be the majority.
> But she wants to go back to work for an institution that doesn't respect the right of people to manage their own biochemistry as they see fit, or to buy sex from a consenting adult.
If you're talking about the cops: 0) The laws that "don't respect" the rights you claim weren't written by them. 1) They're not in charge of writing the laws, they're in charge of enforcing them. 2) While they do have a lot of say in which laws to enforce, in general the People at the Top set the "big picture" priorities - e.g. "War on Drugs". It's not like the antiadultery laws are top of their list (you can be breaking those laws even if you are having sex with a consenting adult).
And who votes for the People at the Top? The voters. The voters based on their own priorities decide who to vote for. What you find so important is probably not important to them, or perhaps they actually like the way things are. Or the candidate looks good on TV...
I've got one browser for my banking, running as a different user, and it makes the "click noise" when I click on stuff (unlike my other browsers) - this browser has javascript etc disabled for everything else except the bank sites.
I've got another browser for "normal stuff" running as a different user.
FWIW, chrome doesn't allow me to run it as a different user on Windows.
On the subject of tabnapping - one problem with chrome and the latest firefox is they make it hard to figure out where the latest "new tab" will be. No, it is not strictly adjacent to the source tab. Where the new tab is placed depends on a number of things (whether you've opened other new tabs from the source tab, or whether you've just created a new blank tab) and is rather hard to predict unless you remember the browser state. This does make it easier to fool people with tabnapped tabs.
I actually wondered if unionfs would support it well- combine SSD with HDD.
As for the OS giving the cache hints, it would be nice if the OS would do that but often the OS doesn't know either - it is also guessing what the Applications and Users are up to.
If a hybrid drive was aware of popular filesystems, there's a fair bit it can do to make things faster, especially if it was for "single user desktop use". 1) You'd have a small nonvolatile write buffer that'll cache all writes, so that you can more easily figure out whether stuff is sequential or not. Only write to disk when buffer is full. 2) You'd not cache sequential writes if you just wrote something that looked like a new big/huge file was being created (from the metadata) - those writes go to disk. 3) You'd try to figure out which sequences of block/file accesses are popular and have sequences of blocks that are fragmented - cache the blocks that would cause big seeks, then cache the entire sequence of blocks if they turn out to be really popular. 4) You might want to cache file system metadata and stuff like the registry (which tends to be fragmented) - this helps when you haven't figured out 3) yet.
Decades ago I wrote disk caching software for the Apple IIGS that just cached metadata and the current track the head had read. It actually was aware of the file system format and conventions. It worked reasonably well for the time - files were smaller back then so less fragmented, the big slow seeks were mainly due to reading metadata. Also on the Apple IIGS a lot of the drive reading was done by the CPU+OS. So if you were looking for one sector in a track, you'd have to move the drive head to the track and keep reading till you get to the sector you want. The cache software I wrote would also cache the "unwanted sectors" that went past the head - might as well since the IIGS had a lot more free RAM than the older Apple IIs (a 48K RAM or smaller computer does not have spare RAM to "waste" on a track cache). Back then there was stuff like sector interleaving because some OSes were too slow to keep up with processing the sectors, so if you wanted sector 1 then 2, having them consecutive would mean you'd have to wait for the disk to spin around again... Track caching reduces the impact of that.
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> Thus the most interesting part of making a better electric car isn't making a better car, it is making a better battery.
Or making a better hydrocarbon fuel cell and better ways of converting hydrogen + CO2 to hydrocarbons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process#Carbon_dioxide_reuse
If you have cheap enough nuclear power even if the total efficiency isn't that good initially, you may not care if the oil prices go up and up.
Better batteries are an important problem to solve, but so is the hydrocarbon problem. While better batteries are likely to be invented in the near future, it is unlikely that in the near future we will have battery powered planes with 950kph cruising speeds and >10 hour flight times. Even less likely they'd be able to fly at mach 2.
FWIW, I find it rather impressive that some birds can fly nonstop for 9 days and travel a total of 7100 miles: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/25/science/25migrate.html?pagewanted=all
It's not very fast, but it does show our technology is still inferior in many ways. Yes we had that flying fuel tank fly around the world, but try to build an autonomous UAV as small as one of those birds with a 7100 mile range (so far there's rather big one that crossed the Atlantic: http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20031217/Feature1.asp ). Even more challenging would be something as small as a dragonfly: http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8149000/8149714.stm
Upgrade to IIS7.0 and: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/460/using-the-url-rewrite-module/
> Alas my humor remains too subtle...
No matter. Give it some time and things might change.
If you don't use a helmet when you should, you do not really have brains important enough to protect.
Corollary: if you don't really have brains, using a helmet would be a waste of valuable resources.
> I've caught onto that too late while living on grad student salary:
:).
Sue someone for not telling you when they should have
Those students are nowhere doing anything like landing on the moon. Yes it's an impressive student project but it is mostly useless from a scientific and technical POV. Good for promoting awareness of EVs I guess[1].
The previous Tesla models already HAD a 53kWh battery pack, 90% battery-to-wheel efficiency and > 248 mile range (under good conditions). The newer models might do better. Tesla even did a road trip too ( http://detroit.about.com/b/2010/01/19/detroit-auto-show-tesla-roadster-road-trip.htm ).
Nissan and friends are the ones improving the technology.
[1] But you wouldn't want your friends to be buying EVs till the tech improves a lot more, unless they are really rich and can afford to "donate to progress" or the cars really suit their requirements.
> I am sorry but if you think an English car will need air conditioning then you think far to highly of global worming.
The last I checked the "Pan American Highway"; Prudhoe Bay, Alaska and Tierra Del Fuego are not in England.
No. You really don't get it.
Most medical drugs and treatments don't work 100% of the time. That does not mean they don't work. And they are not the same as "no treatment".
Similarly placebos don't work 100% of the time. That does not mean they don't work. And they are not the same as "no treatment".
If you look at many proper studies of drugs and treatments you can see there are differences in outcome of the drug, the placebo and "no treatment".
> If the drugs aren't doing better than placebo's, they are placebo's!
Not necessarily. In theory you could have a treatment/drug that works in say 20% of the cases, worse than placebo, but it still works about the same even if you tell the patient it's a sham treatment, or the patient is unaware/unconscious when you apply the treatment/drug.
> I would think that being alive was not the only requisite for being an actor.
:) ) - whether his estate will allow his likeness to be used etc, how much $$$$ etc.
Even if he dies it's not a technical problem if you have a big enough budget. Just scan him or reconstruct his likeness from existing images and have an actor play his part using the Avatar movie making tech.
The problems will be legal ( again
> What you need are some good actuarial tables that tell you the average death age of a person who's managed to reach 71.
> It'll be higher.
It's significantly higher if you reach that age and are still reasonably healthy. Not so much higher if most of your organs are in poor condition already...
I guess Ian McKellen has still a fair number of years left, unless "stuff happens".
> You can't have a placebo-effect unless you claim that the therapy actually works in itself.
;).
:).
> You can't claim that a non-working therapy works unless you a a liar.
You miss the point. For many conditions a placebo is not a nonworking therapy. So if it works you're not a liar. And placebo treatments do work 30-40% of the time for certain problems. You're only a liar if you make claims about the treatment that aren't true.
Many drugs/procedures only work well for some people and some cases.
So for a noncritical condition where a placebo has 30-40% chance of working with a low chance of side effects, vs a drug that has 50% chance of working and a higher chance of bad side effects, a doctor might choose to prescribe a placebo and ask the patient to come back after a few days to see how well it works. The doctor does not have to lie. Of course if the patient asks for the name of the drug the doctor might then have a problem. Many religious people may not even need to see a doctor to tap the placebo effect. The atheists on the other hand might find it hard to ask and get help from the FSM
The drug companies probably hate the placebo effect - a fair number of their candidate drugs can barely beat it in trials
It proves there are lots of people/companies willing to give students money for doing stuff that's rather useless from a scientific and practical viewpoint.
I'd like to see how they handle practical stuff like "air conditioning". If they think that's not important, then that's yet another reason why their car is not important. A college student might put up with 35C or higher temperatures on that "cool trip", most car buyers won't. A 3-4 kilowatt car air conditioner is going to hurt an EV's range a lot more than a fossil fuel powered one.
I'm sure you'd be able to get a "normal car" to travel the same journey for cheaper, faster and in better comfort.
Anyway if the battery costs drop and capacities increase, we'd see more electric cars. To me, Nissan is the one that's doing useful stuff - apparently they've got battery costs down to USD375 per kWh: http://gas2.org/2010/05/05/report-nissan-leafs-battery-costs-a-staggeringly-cheap-375kwh-to-produce/
What Nissan is doing is far more useful than a bunch of students going from Alaska to Argentina. Computer analogy (instead of car analogy ;): the former are like Intel/AMD - actually pushing the tech, the latter are just a bunch of case modders.
It can't be killing everything it infects quickly. Otherwise it would be extinct. What happens is it doesn't kill some animals/victims, they might get sick or be asymptomatic, and these carry it around. Current theory is fruit bats are one of the carriers.
The same unmutated strain could keep on killing say 80% of humans who are exposed, so there is no pressure to mutate from there. Whether it mutates fast or not thus would depend more on the main carriers.
Because ebola is not a huge problem (yet)? It doesn't appear very contagious, kills rapidly - so may self-quarantine.
> How wealth is distributed has an enormous effect on a society's ability to produce new wealth
:).
;).
Yes it does. But when something sucks way more blood than it helps, it starts being viewed as a parasite.
> Learn a tiny bit of economic theory and--far more importantly--economic history before making up lame analogies, please.
Maybe you should learn a bit of what those finance guys are actually doing (and have done) and not just economic theory.
You really think Wall Street needs so many logicians and math wizards to create an efficient market that benefits society? I guess my ignorance of economics is so profound that I find that hard to believe
Perhaps Wall Street and friends should pay a bailout tax/fee. This money then goes to a bailout fund, so _when_ stuff blows up, the Government can sack+punish everyone involved, and then use the money to help fix the mess, rather than get all the money from elsewhere/guesswho. Firms that don't blow stuff up after 20 years or so get some of their paid out money back. Those learned genius economists can go figure out what the details should be (20 years or not, how much to charge, when to charge, etc).
I picked 20 years because it seems that ever since those very intelligent chaps came up with clever ways of reducing risk, stuff seems to be blowing up every 10 years or so
I'm fine with high frequency trading. I'm not fine with "30 millisecond advantage" trading:
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/07/24/business/0724-webBIZ-trading.ready.html
(it's probably a simplified description[1])
The fact that the casino allows such stuff tells me that they and their friends are crooked. I don't really see how allowing this provides any advantage to the market or makes it more efficient.
[1] I am not a fast trader but I think something similar to this happens: the mutual fund's program will fail to buy at $21 and so reissues another buy for 21.01, the "fast trader" program will then offer to sell at 21.50, if it sees no order from the mutual fund program after X milliseconds, it will try to sell at 21.45 and so on, meanwhile it buys all other stuff - hopefully before the other fast traders beat it. Alternatively it could offer to sell a few shares at 21.02, (check to see if the mutual fund sends an order to buy, then cancel, repeat till there are no buy orders, then go back down a bit and sell everything at that price, thus extracting as much from the mutual fund as you can). If the few shares are sold before you cancel it's probably a fast trader buying them. The tricky bit is countering the other pesky fast trader programs ;).
It's also about marketing, bullshit and "plausible deniability".
This is so the gamblers can give better excuses/bullshit for gambling with other people's money. This way everyone can say it's some sophisticated stuff that few people understand, so they get to keep their bonuses and profits when it all blows up.
Here's an analogy: the financial system is a casino. The casino doesn't produce any "real" wealth - it just distributes it. The Federal Reserve produces the casino chips (trillions of them if necessary). The casino operators take their cuts+fees. The players gamble with OTHER people's money (pension funds etc), and when they win they get pay raises and bonuses. If a single gambler loses big, he loses his job. If a huge bunch of gamblers lose big, they say "bail us out". How can a huge bunch of gamblers lose at the same time? They can if they play a "let's create fake wealth" game.
Here's a popular version: you start with a "parcel". You sell it for a profit to the next person. And the next person may do the same thing and so on. Whoever currently holding the parcel is allowed to declare that they are richer by the current "outside" value of the parcel. When the "music stops" the parcel is opened and the holder gets whatever is inside (which may be a bunch of IOUs).
It doesn't really need very much sophistication to play such games.
Here's another game: this is a trading/auction game: a few players pay the casino a special amount and they then get to see other people's bids 30 milliseconds[1] before everyone else does and they also get to make bids and cancel their bids rapidly. Naturally this is very profitable for those few players, unless there is a bug in their software, and they make a big loss in which case they ask the casino to rollback the trades, or change the rules so their losses are limited.
This needs a bit more sophistication if you are aiming for maximum profit since your program has to "battle" the other programs. But the few with the 30 millisecond advantage should make money from the rest.
Lastly, the gamblers who get sacked for losing will often get rehired since even if their companies lose big and maybe even go bankrupt, they make their _bosses_ rich.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html
Simplified version of how it works:
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2009/07/24/business/0724-webBIZ-trading.ready.html
There was some sort of "repo" thingy in this old sci-fi story:
http://www.sciencefictionmuseum.com/stories/reviews/snop008.html
e.g.
She says, "Tom, it's the Permitted Murder section of the Suicide Act. They're going to invoke it...I'm talking about the section of the Suicide Act that makes host-taking legal. Rex has guaranteed the survival of your mind after death, and you've accepted it. Now they can legally take your body for any purpose they desire. They own it. They can kill your body, Tom."
But other than that I guess it's different :).
No, you missed your payments, and the MPAA repossessed _their_ memory you rented from them.
In the future won't be "a penny for your thoughts".
1) Whether she's a hypocrite or not depends on the situation. She's not a hypocrite if she's protesting from a law POV and the laws don't prohibit her from doing what she did and keep her job, just because she works for an institution that enforces the laws. She may not regard "rights" not protected/enshrined by the laws as highly as you do.
2) Are those really fundamental rights? e.g. buying sex from a consenting adult? Even if that's allowed you'd still need laws and courts to determine what is "buying sex from a consenting adult". After all the laws determine what is an adult, consent and sex. These differ from country to country. And maybe even from courtroom to courtroom.
The last I checked adultery is still a crime in Michigan and a few other states. One may think it shouldn't be considered a crime at all, but it would be hard to claim that the wronged parties lose/suffer nothing. From an evolutionary/"selfish gene" POV, adultery is indeed a serious act.
Many societies consider adultery as damaging to society. So just because you and the other adult consent doesn't mean that society must view it as legal. There are very few cultures and societies that are still thriving that think that adultery is AOK.
FWIW I'm single and I don't think I'm the very jealous sort, but from what I've seen, there are very many who would consider being robbed at gunpoint to not be as painful as having their spouse cheat on them. So to consider the former a serious crime and the latter not is actually rather strange if those people turn out to be the majority.
Hmm, is that a perl one-liner? ;)
> But she wants to go back to work for an institution that doesn't respect the right of people to manage their own biochemistry as they see fit, or to buy sex from a consenting adult.
If you're talking about the cops:
0) The laws that "don't respect" the rights you claim weren't written by them.
1) They're not in charge of writing the laws, they're in charge of enforcing them.
2) While they do have a lot of say in which laws to enforce, in general the People at the Top set the "big picture" priorities - e.g. "War on Drugs". It's not like the antiadultery laws are top of their list (you can be breaking those laws even if you are having sex with a consenting adult).
And who votes for the People at the Top? The voters. The voters based on their own priorities decide who to vote for. What you find so important is probably not important to them, or perhaps they actually like the way things are. Or the candidate looks good on TV...
Use different browsers for your banking?
I've got one browser for my banking, running as a different user, and it makes the "click noise" when I click on stuff (unlike my other browsers) - this browser has javascript etc disabled for everything else except the bank sites.
I've got another browser for "normal stuff" running as a different user.
FWIW, chrome doesn't allow me to run it as a different user on Windows.
On the subject of tabnapping - one problem with chrome and the latest firefox is they make it hard to figure out where the latest "new tab" will be. No, it is not strictly adjacent to the source tab. Where the new tab is placed depends on a number of things (whether you've opened other new tabs from the source tab, or whether you've just created a new blank tab) and is rather hard to predict unless you remember the browser state. This does make it easier to fool people with tabnapped tabs.
I actually wondered if unionfs would support it well- combine SSD with HDD.
As for the OS giving the cache hints, it would be nice if the OS would do that but often the OS doesn't know either - it is also guessing what the Applications and Users are up to.
If a hybrid drive was aware of popular filesystems, there's a fair bit it can do to make things faster, especially if it was for "single user desktop use".
1) You'd have a small nonvolatile write buffer that'll cache all writes, so that you can more easily figure out whether stuff is sequential or not. Only write to disk when buffer is full.
2) You'd not cache sequential writes if you just wrote something that looked like a new big/huge file was being created (from the metadata) - those writes go to disk.
3) You'd try to figure out which sequences of block/file accesses are popular and have sequences of blocks that are fragmented - cache the blocks that would cause big seeks, then cache the entire sequence of blocks if they turn out to be really popular.
4) You might want to cache file system metadata and stuff like the registry (which tends to be fragmented) - this helps when you haven't figured out 3) yet.
Decades ago I wrote disk caching software for the Apple IIGS that just cached metadata and the current track the head had read. It actually was aware of the file system format and conventions. It worked reasonably well for the time - files were smaller back then so less fragmented, the big slow seeks were mainly due to reading metadata. Also on the Apple IIGS a lot of the drive reading was done by the CPU+OS. So if you were looking for one sector in a track, you'd have to move the drive head to the track and keep reading till you get to the sector you want. The cache software I wrote would also cache the "unwanted sectors" that went past the head - might as well since the IIGS had a lot more free RAM than the older Apple IIs (a 48K RAM or smaller computer does not have spare RAM to "waste" on a track cache). Back then there was stuff like sector interleaving because some OSes were too slow to keep up with processing the sectors, so if you wanted sector 1 then 2, having them consecutive would mean you'd have to wait for the disk to spin around again... Track caching reduces the impact of that.
Does it really burn up all the oxygen? I thought it disrupts the reaction similar to the way blowing out a candle disrupts the flame.