In practice when a lithium battery goes off it is more of an explosion than a mere conflagration, and in enclosed device it would be explosive.
Lithium battery boom: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3o_2mwRPdw
Let me say this, idiots that don't take care of the new lithium batteries will spur the need for more idiot proof batteries.
The article mentions that you should not introduce any amount of water near these types of batteries. Since water is very common, do not put both an idiot and this battery near each other.
At ten times the energy output, it may be 10x more dangerous.
Build something idiot proof and someone will find a better idiot.
There are a few good reasons why passwords are masked, more than just the over-your-shoulder password spying. It is possible to capture a monitor signal either from interfering with the cabling, or special equipment capturing reflected light (suprisingly effective with CRTs). I've heard of information being stolen by a VGA splitter installed on a machine - but they didn't get any sensitive passwords.
Next, a technician may be remotely supporting a user, be viewing their desktop session and require the user to enter a password that the technician does not have clearance to know. Or even in a screen sharing session during collaboration. One can access and demonstrate systems without giving away passwords, this is especially good when one has their laptop plugged into a projector in a meeting room.
(I once had to do this, giving a presentation on a software package, and the password entry for this package as not masked... as I was about to type I suddenly remembered my password was something really rude)
There are many scenarios where password masking is useful and there are little compelling reason to have clear text password entry. In terms of cost to business for support, allowing more than 3 password attempts, ie 5 or 6, would solve more problems with less security risk. If this was what Jakob Nielsen was talking about I would bother reading past the first few lines of the Slashdot post.
Indulge me, for a moment, please close your eyes and imagine if you were a lunar colonist standing on the moon, watching the earth rise over the horizon. You raise your arm, and place the Earth's crescent between your gloved finger and thumb. Ponder that all of human history, every human that has ever taken a breath, and everything we have lived and fought and died for, has taken place between your fingers on the the little blue orb that hangs in the sky.
And marvel, at the foresight of the leaders that lifted humanity to where it is now. Because if we didn't make it to the moon, if we didn't succeed in prospering in space, it could all be for nothing.
Much better to spend the colossal amount of money on fixing this world.
But that isn't happening, is it? It won't happen. It doesn't happen. That's the key problem here. I guess that's the thinking from congress and other governments from the mid-80s to now is: "Isn't the money better spent on the ground fixing real problems?". Well that's the primary excuse to not fund space exploration. What really happens is the money ends up going down all the usual bottomless holes of the government, and dare I say it: this world is possibly too broke to fix.
IMHO, directing public funds to specific, dedicated, scientific endeavors is the single best thing that can be done with government money. Sure roads need fixing and schools need resources, but discretionary government spending should not be diverted to the endless bottomless pits of public resources, because they are always needing more money. The money just disappears. A dollar spent on space exploration eventually generates a hell of a lot of useful science and engineering.
By one famous quote every dollar spent on the Apollo program generated seven dollars for the US economy.
This is what governments don't get about science, even if the LHC never fires up, and never turns out anything useful, it actually would have been terrifically useful, since it has already generated a lot of scientific just to figure out how to build it. Not to mention all the Internet 2.0 infrastructure put in place by universities etc to handle all the data it will output. So this is why we need to get on with the job of going back to the moon, and to mars, to stay.
There's almost no such thing as useless science, and on the most useful level of all, space exploration is species-saving level stuff.
Spending up on aerospace tech usually trickles down to the private sector. A lot of political leaders do not understand what the billions of dollars the US poured into science and engineering during the cold war have done to the world today: Basically pretty much everything we have, and take utterly for granted as a technological civilization now can be traced back to the space race in the cold war. Even the beginnings of silicon valley goes back to cold war funded roots.
Right now, dollar for dollar putting a human in space to do science is much better value than the equivalent robot.
So other than making lots of money from selling a low-methane breed, I really don't see the point, we already have the solution to the methane problem, we were just feeding them wrong.
Rumor has it he is 99.999999% empty space, is full of charged particles, some moving at relativistic speeds, and is largely comprised of matter from a ancient supernova. Clearly then, he can't be human.
Where I used to work there was nod32, and scheduled clamAV scans was the 1-2 combo. Techs would again use a further package for troubleshooting only (I will decline to name, the EULA didn't allow this use). Most AV packages seem to let some infections through, it's a given in the security world, but it spooked me how prevalent it was. The solution was to use two, thus what defeats a major package will be picked up on by the alternative.
confirm nod32 sucks balls in real work (Y/N): Y
ClamAV was good at catching things that slipped past the goalie. Where multiple scans were used, I don't recall any incident that wasn't satisfactorily cleaned up.
We also had a proprietary recovery tool that could basically rebuild a system with fresh md5-checked binaries, thus a reasonable guarantee of virus-free executables.
As for the unix and open systems floating about, not a single virus of course, however they would get hacked directly by meat popsicles. The assumption of security leads to serious pwnage when root is obtained on a major box.
Aside from big holes nod32 has good usability and didn't blow system performance back to 2002, two essential things in enterprise equipment.
Anyway, my kingdom for a freakin open-source realtime scanner.
Seriously any alien species than can traverse interstellar space is not going to be interested in talking to schizophrenic monkeys. If they exist, they certainly have the capability and the reasons, to stay hidden from us. You see, TFA answers it's own question. We're not ready to greet aliens until we can present a unified front with a single message that speaks for the consensus of humanity.
A better idea is to install on a normal HDD, then copy all the files from program files into a SSD and mount it in an empty folder and point windows to that for its program files directory, not the neatest solution, but stops the drive dieing too young and gives a marked speed boost.
YABI (Yet A Better Idea) is to use the oh-so-sensible Linux strategy of separate partitions for data type.
Put your windows and program files folders on the SSD, and link the \users\ folder to a seperate HDD NTFS parition. Locate your page file on the first NTFS partition of a nice fast HDD. Have it as a fixed size so it does not become fragmented.
This has the advantage of temporary files under user profiles being written to a HDD. This is not necessarily slower as the extra drive is *additional* bandwidth to your system accessed in parallel.
Another performance method that goes hand in hand with this method is short stroking, basicly have your system in the first 10% or 100gb of a hard drive - whichever is smaller and ensure only seldom accessed media files etc are using up the space. This stops your operating system rotting over time with scattered file placement. This can boost your access times massively.
My strategy is
SATA0 - 32GB OCZ SSD - Windows 7 and Linux root partitions
SATA2 - \users\ on a 1TB 7.2krpm drive, linux home parition
SATA4 - 150gb 10krpm Raptor 6gb page file in a 10gb NTFS partition, linux swap2 partition and some other seldom used linux system partitions.
Thus I don't really experience a substantial delay for anything, and re-imaging and backing up is much less painless. I also seldom need to defragment.
You can also use a SSD drive as readyboost cache. Windows 7 allows you to put a ReadyBoost cache file on any drive in the system that passes the performance test.
I rely on my dark roof for forced air solar heating/heat recover, which incidentally saves me quite a lot on winter energy bills, and thus contributes just the same.
I do recall a paper suggesting that the experiment itself will interfere with itself back through time and prevent the machine from ever powering up.
I can't find the paper on Google though, I really need to read it it'll help me figure out why the time machine I'm building doesn't work.
Oh please, come back with something new
on
Build an $800 Gaming PC
·
· Score: 4, Informative
When I saw a quad core recommended for a bargain gaming PC I knew I would read about an nvidia card not too far down the list followed by 'gamer/overclocker' ram. Yep it's YAFBBS (Yet Another Fan-Boy Build Story) with no actual useful advice for anyone on a budget.
At the moment a Radeon 4770 would be a better choice, if the not the #1 on bang for buck, as touted by most reputable sources. Highly clockable e7xxx or e8xxx range core 2 duo still kicks quad core ass for less money (easy stable 4ghz), less power draw and subsequent heat problems. What really gets my gall with these kind of websites, is the ram recommendations. That quad core has a 1333mhz bus, thus DDR2 faster than 667mhz gains almost no improvement in memory bandwidth and latency, yet somehow there is a huge market for this kind of crap.
I hate to sound like a greybeard but back in the day it was all about making dirt cheap parts outperform four-figure parts. Now overclocking parts cost more and are much less challenging to work with. If anything overclocking is boring now, it's all about bling. Remember the Celeron 300A?
Yep, CL5 800 is just fine. If you want another 5% in benchmarks you can blow your dosh on CL4 1066mhz. Even if you overclock your FSB speed, you'll watch your bandwidth scores scale up, even holding ram speed at a fixed 800mhz! Even if your FSB is stepping up faster than your ram speed, your memory benchmark scores will continue to go up. It only really makes more sense to come down in latency, 667 CL3 is lower *realtime* latency than 1066mhz CL5, and even reasonable 'value ram' will reach those timings with a voltage boost. Yep the socket 775 platform is that crappy. Spend your money on other areas please.
No IT professional worth their salt recommends anything above reasonably priced and reliable 800/1066 ram, unless you really are going to push high FSB speeds on a core 2 duo, maybe worth paying a whisker more. You don't really need heat spreaders either, and a strip of aluminum and 3M thermal tape will do the job better than $20 set of aftermarket spreaders.
Honestly, you could blow this thing away in benchmarks for less money.
It was remarkable not only that it was exceedingly cool, and perhaps the ultimate DIY hack ever, but that it flew right in a legal sh1tstorm before it even took off. This, in a country (NZ) with relatively deregulated airspace.
The result is the government really did not like this, and moved to stop him actually testing this, including some pretty underhand ways of shutting him down (threatening to call in all his Tax debt all at once). As a result he got some very high profile prime time publicity in this country at least. Basically his point was, anyone could do this, and he set out to prove just that. Rather successfully. But this fellow is not exactly your average terrorist but a rather a patent-holding backyard engineer. I still don't think even highly resourced terrorists would go down this route, so perhaps he wasn't right after all, and was just asking for trouble.
Multivitamins are no different to having a diet that consists of fresh fruit, vegetables and meats. While not the best substitute for a decent diet, to say that vitamins aren't natural is just stupid.
No. No. Yes to the the stupid bit.
IAAAHN (i AM actually a health nut):
There are a multitude of beneficial micro-nutrients, anti-oxidants and other compounds in fruits and vegetable, legumes and meats, that you simply don't these get through a popping a multi-vitamin, thus even a comprehensive vitamin and mineral supplement can never replace a good diet.
Plants contain beneficial phytochemicals, flavinoids, anti-inflamiatory compounds, fatty-acids, amino acids, etc, etc. even the soluble fibre and insoluble roughage are highly beneficial to the essential life-supporting colony of bacteria that you are a host to. It's important not to ignore them either, your are a walking colony of your single-celled ancestors descendants, and guess what, a lot of them are along for the ride in your guts - there are 10 times as many cells in your body that are not you as human cells are more than 100 times larger than the bacteria in your gut.
Put simply a full spectrum multi-vitamin would not replace vegetables without about 100-150 different compounds.
Not eating your greens and eating too much processed foods seriously fraks with your internal biota, there's plenty of thought that suggests this is the cause or at least implicated in many modern ills.
You won't develop deficiency and/or die if you don't have these compounds, you can live without them. However the human body has actually evolved ingesting all these fringe nutrients, it stands to reason this is why our health benefits from these compounds. Some would argue they might as well be considered essential based on the benefit to our longevity and physical function.
Their really aren't any shortcuts to good health. Its a no-brainer that the key to good health is following the lifestyle that our bodies and minds evolved in. Exercise and wholefoods and time outdoors, you can't escape, ditch the cola and go for a jog.
I can smell it, when reading about the nine dead soldiers in South Africa. Conventional programming is not up to the task of battlefield AI. Considering how bugs get out of hand with increasing complexity of software, such that past a point, your software will never be even safe to hold a gun. Current software only needs a single bit flipped out of countless trillions to get bad data into the software, and if in the wrong place, there is a possibility of unpredictable behavior or outright failure.
That is before we start talking about bugs in code.
This is fine for desktop software, your app just does something weird, or crashes outright, and you reboot, your fine. This is not adequate when your computer is pointing a shotgun or a mortar at you.
Now what I imagine here, is that these robots aren't controlled by minimal hardened micro controllers, such as those that keep a Airbus A380 from falling out of the sky, but far too high-level processing, using commodity parts. Thus, just like your leaking Firefox browser with too many tabs open it all goes weird then crashes, popping off a few rounds before it goes down.
10. Compiz. It's just too cool not to be mentioned, and AFAIK it predates the Windows and Mac equivalents.:D
No that is not true. It is a misconception that Linux had 3D desktops first. I saw desktop composting and Aero desktop effects demonstrated in a longhorn build in early 2003 (look for screenshots on the web), long before any such feature was a working demo in Linux. I believe Compiz started development later (2005?), although working code was out in 2006, before Vista hit the market. Linux beat Win/Mac to the punch, yes, but this does_not_equal Vista/7/OSX copied Linux.
(unless anyone can clarify these dates?)
The opposite assumption, that Linux copied things that were long in development and demonstrated to the public would also be fair if you were ignoring all other facts. One could also suggest these were logical GUI development path with the ubiquity of discrete GPU silicon. Thus we have a problem, the assumption that Linux Is Better(tm) without much regard for Show Your Working.
My pet gripe is people who refer to the Case as the 'CPU'. Even technicians and retail stores do this.
The worst one I've encountered a user pointed to the box and said "is that the Hardware?", "uhh yes" I replied, "So is that the software on top?"... pointing to the monitor. *facepalm*
Could someone please explain why we don't ever correct users on their miss-use of jargon?
This is why kids don't eat enough vegetables as adults, they remember being forced to eat all their greens under threat of punishment. This psychological association is a stark contrast to the strong reward from tasty sugary fatty treats with bright colours, oh and these are given to kids as rewards, when the parent was in a good mood. So kids learn to hate vegetables and love junk food, and when they become adults junk food becomes a comfort.
Thus, the obesity epidemic.
The same applies to education, co-erce your kid into working and they run the risk of becoming a learning-alergic adult. Now we've all encountered those.
Brother Cavil: "I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way!"
Slashdot Mirror
Downloading Windows 7 for free, burning to a DVD and installing was a surreal enough experience already!
Not explosive -- just flammable.
In practice when a lithium battery goes off it is more of an explosion than a mere conflagration, and in enclosed device it would be explosive.
Lithium battery boom: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3o_2mwRPdw
Let me say this, idiots that don't take care of the new lithium batteries will spur the need for more idiot proof batteries. The article mentions that you should not introduce any amount of water near these types of batteries. Since water is very common, do not put both an idiot and this battery near each other. At ten times the energy output, it may be 10x more dangerous.
Build something idiot proof and someone will find a better idiot.
There are a few good reasons why passwords are masked, more than just the over-your-shoulder password spying. It is possible to capture a monitor signal either from interfering with the cabling, or special equipment capturing reflected light (suprisingly effective with CRTs). I've heard of information being stolen by a VGA splitter installed on a machine - but they didn't get any sensitive passwords.
Next, a technician may be remotely supporting a user, be viewing their desktop session and require the user to enter a password that the technician does not have clearance to know. Or even in a screen sharing session during collaboration. One can access and demonstrate systems without giving away passwords, this is especially good when one has their laptop plugged into a projector in a meeting room.
(I once had to do this, giving a presentation on a software package, and the password entry for this package as not masked... as I was about to type I suddenly remembered my password was something really rude)
There are many scenarios where password masking is useful and there are little compelling reason to have clear text password entry. In terms of cost to business for support, allowing more than 3 password attempts, ie 5 or 6, would solve more problems with less security risk. If this was what Jakob Nielsen was talking about I would bother reading past the first few lines of the Slashdot post.
Please address the Augustine Commission thus:
Indulge me, for a moment, please close your eyes and imagine if you were a lunar colonist standing on the moon, watching the earth rise over the horizon. You raise your arm, and place the Earth's crescent between your gloved finger and thumb. Ponder that all of human history, every human that has ever taken a breath, and everything we have lived and fought and died for, has taken place between your fingers on the the little blue orb that hangs in the sky.
And marvel, at the foresight of the leaders that lifted humanity to where it is now. Because if we didn't make it to the moon, if we didn't succeed in prospering in space, it could all be for nothing.
Much better to spend the colossal amount of money on fixing this world.
But that isn't happening, is it? It won't happen. It doesn't happen. That's the key problem here. I guess that's the thinking from congress and other governments from the mid-80s to now is: "Isn't the money better spent on the ground fixing real problems?". Well that's the primary excuse to not fund space exploration. What really happens is the money ends up going down all the usual bottomless holes of the government, and dare I say it: this world is possibly too broke to fix.
IMHO, directing public funds to specific, dedicated, scientific endeavors is the single best thing that can be done with government money. Sure roads need fixing and schools need resources, but discretionary government spending should not be diverted to the endless bottomless pits of public resources, because they are always needing more money. The money just disappears. A dollar spent on space exploration eventually generates a hell of a lot of useful science and engineering.
By one famous quote every dollar spent on the Apollo program generated seven dollars for the US economy.
This is what governments don't get about science, even if the LHC never fires up, and never turns out anything useful, it actually would have been terrifically useful, since it has already generated a lot of scientific just to figure out how to build it. Not to mention all the Internet 2.0 infrastructure put in place by universities etc to handle all the data it will output. So this is why we need to get on with the job of going back to the moon, and to mars, to stay.
There's almost no such thing as useless science, and on the most useful level of all, space exploration is species-saving level stuff.
Spending up on aerospace tech usually trickles down to the private sector. A lot of political leaders do not understand what the billions of dollars the US poured into science and engineering during the cold war have done to the world today: Basically pretty much everything we have, and take utterly for granted as a technological civilization now can be traced back to the space race in the cold war. Even the beginnings of silicon valley goes back to cold war funded roots.
Right now, dollar for dollar putting a human in space to do science is much better value than the equivalent robot.
Feeding cattle different grass, ie something similar to what they evolved to eat, solves the methane problem.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/06/08/omega-3s-in-a-cows-diet-provide-a-health-boost%E2%80%94to-the-atmosphere/
So other than making lots of money from selling a low-methane breed, I really don't see the point, we already have the solution to the methane problem, we were just feeding them wrong.
Rumor has it he is 99.999999% empty space, is full of charged particles, some moving at relativistic speeds, and is largely comprised of matter from a ancient supernova. Clearly then, he can't be human.
Where I used to work there was nod32, and scheduled clamAV scans was the 1-2 combo. Techs would again use a further package for troubleshooting only (I will decline to name, the EULA didn't allow this use). Most AV packages seem to let some infections through, it's a given in the security world, but it spooked me how prevalent it was. The solution was to use two, thus what defeats a major package will be picked up on by the alternative.
confirm nod32 sucks balls in real work (Y/N): Y
ClamAV was good at catching things that slipped past the goalie. Where multiple scans were used, I don't recall any incident that wasn't satisfactorily cleaned up.
We also had a proprietary recovery tool that could basically rebuild a system with fresh md5-checked binaries, thus a reasonable guarantee of virus-free executables.
As for the unix and open systems floating about, not a single virus of course, however they would get hacked directly by meat popsicles. The assumption of security leads to serious pwnage when root is obtained on a major box.
Aside from big holes nod32 has good usability and didn't blow system performance back to 2002, two essential things in enterprise equipment.
Anyway, my kingdom for a freakin open-source realtime scanner.
No, sorry, not likely to be a in death throes, TFA states it is a potato shaped star that rotates every 18 years, thus it's likely an illusion.
... is it??
Not big enough and close enough to be a hazard to us?
Seriously any alien species than can traverse interstellar space is not going to be interested in talking to schizophrenic monkeys. If they exist, they certainly have the capability and the reasons, to stay hidden from us. You see, TFA answers it's own question. We're not ready to greet aliens until we can present a unified front with a single message that speaks for the consensus of humanity.
A better idea is to install on a normal HDD, then copy all the files from program files into a SSD and mount it in an empty folder and point windows to that for its program files directory, not the neatest solution, but stops the drive dieing too young and gives a marked speed boost.
YABI (Yet A Better Idea) is to use the oh-so-sensible Linux strategy of separate partitions for data type.
Put your windows and program files folders on the SSD, and link the \users\ folder to a seperate HDD NTFS parition. Locate your page file on the first NTFS partition of a nice fast HDD. Have it as a fixed size so it does not become fragmented.
This has the advantage of temporary files under user profiles being written to a HDD. This is not necessarily slower as the extra drive is *additional* bandwidth to your system accessed in parallel.
Another performance method that goes hand in hand with this method is short stroking, basicly have your system in the first 10% or 100gb of a hard drive - whichever is smaller and ensure only seldom accessed media files etc are using up the space. This stops your operating system rotting over time with scattered file placement. This can boost your access times massively.
My strategy is SATA0 - 32GB OCZ SSD - Windows 7 and Linux root partitions SATA2 - \users\ on a 1TB 7.2krpm drive, linux home parition SATA4 - 150gb 10krpm Raptor 6gb page file in a 10gb NTFS partition, linux swap2 partition and some other seldom used linux system partitions.
Thus I don't really experience a substantial delay for anything, and re-imaging and backing up is much less painless. I also seldom need to defragment.
You can also use a SSD drive as readyboost cache. Windows 7 allows you to put a ReadyBoost cache file on any drive in the system that passes the performance test.
I rely on my dark roof for forced air solar heating/heat recover, which incidentally saves me quite a lot on winter energy bills, and thus contributes just the same.
I do recall a paper suggesting that the experiment itself will interfere with itself back through time and prevent the machine from ever powering up.
I can't find the paper on Google though, I really need to read it it'll help me figure out why the time machine I'm building doesn't work.
When I saw a quad core recommended for a bargain gaming PC I knew I would read about an nvidia card not too far down the list followed by 'gamer/overclocker' ram. Yep it's YAFBBS (Yet Another Fan-Boy Build Story) with no actual useful advice for anyone on a budget.
At the moment a Radeon 4770 would be a better choice, if the not the #1 on bang for buck, as touted by most reputable sources. Highly clockable e7xxx or e8xxx range core 2 duo still kicks quad core ass for less money (easy stable 4ghz), less power draw and subsequent heat problems. What really gets my gall with these kind of websites, is the ram recommendations. That quad core has a 1333mhz bus, thus DDR2 faster than 667mhz gains almost no improvement in memory bandwidth and latency, yet somehow there is a huge market for this kind of crap.
I hate to sound like a greybeard but back in the day it was all about making dirt cheap parts outperform four-figure parts. Now overclocking parts cost more and are much less challenging to work with. If anything overclocking is boring now, it's all about bling. Remember the Celeron 300A?
Yep, CL5 800 is just fine. If you want another 5% in benchmarks you can blow your dosh on CL4 1066mhz. Even if you overclock your FSB speed, you'll watch your bandwidth scores scale up, even holding ram speed at a fixed 800mhz! Even if your FSB is stepping up faster than your ram speed, your memory benchmark scores will continue to go up. It only really makes more sense to come down in latency, 667 CL3 is lower *realtime* latency than 1066mhz CL5, and even reasonable 'value ram' will reach those timings with a voltage boost. Yep the socket 775 platform is that crappy. Spend your money on other areas please.
No IT professional worth their salt recommends anything above reasonably priced and reliable 800/1066 ram, unless you really are going to push high FSB speeds on a core 2 duo, maybe worth paying a whisker more. You don't really need heat spreaders either, and a strip of aluminum and 3M thermal tape will do the job better than $20 set of aftermarket spreaders.
Honestly, you could blow this thing away in benchmarks for less money.
Someone has already tried a DIY payload carrying cruise missle powered by pulsejets and GPS + RC components, to try and prove exactly that point.
http://www.interestingprojects.com/cruisemissile/
It was remarkable not only that it was exceedingly cool, and perhaps the ultimate DIY hack ever, but that it flew right in a legal sh1tstorm before it even took off. This, in a country (NZ) with relatively deregulated airspace.
The result is the government really did not like this, and moved to stop him actually testing this, including some pretty underhand ways of shutting him down (threatening to call in all his Tax debt all at once). As a result he got some very high profile prime time publicity in this country at least. Basically his point was, anyone could do this, and he set out to prove just that. Rather successfully. But this fellow is not exactly your average terrorist but a rather a patent-holding backyard engineer. I still don't think even highly resourced terrorists would go down this route, so perhaps he wasn't right after all, and was just asking for trouble.
I was going to make some joke about how Microsoft is hiring stooges to sabotage Wine, then I realised how plausible it is sounding.
Watch Waking Life on acid. Now that's 'crazy shit'.
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=waking+life&emb=0&aq=-1&oq=waking+lif#
Or would that be like encoding twice with ROT13?
Multivitamins are no different to having a diet that consists of fresh fruit, vegetables and meats. While not the best substitute for a decent diet, to say that vitamins aren't natural is just stupid.
No. No. Yes to the the stupid bit.
IAAAHN (i AM actually a health nut): There are a multitude of beneficial micro-nutrients, anti-oxidants and other compounds in fruits and vegetable, legumes and meats, that you simply don't these get through a popping a multi-vitamin, thus even a comprehensive vitamin and mineral supplement can never replace a good diet.
Plants contain beneficial phytochemicals, flavinoids, anti-inflamiatory compounds, fatty-acids, amino acids, etc, etc. even the soluble fibre and insoluble roughage are highly beneficial to the essential life-supporting colony of bacteria that you are a host to. It's important not to ignore them either, your are a walking colony of your single-celled ancestors descendants, and guess what, a lot of them are along for the ride in your guts - there are 10 times as many cells in your body that are not you as human cells are more than 100 times larger than the bacteria in your gut.
Put simply a full spectrum multi-vitamin would not replace vegetables without about 100-150 different compounds.
Not eating your greens and eating too much processed foods seriously fraks with your internal biota, there's plenty of thought that suggests this is the cause or at least implicated in many modern ills.
You won't develop deficiency and/or die if you don't have these compounds, you can live without them. However the human body has actually evolved ingesting all these fringe nutrients, it stands to reason this is why our health benefits from these compounds. Some would argue they might as well be considered essential based on the benefit to our longevity and physical function.
Their really aren't any shortcuts to good health. Its a no-brainer that the key to good health is following the lifestyle that our bodies and minds evolved in. Exercise and wholefoods and time outdoors, you can't escape, ditch the cola and go for a jog.
I can smell it, when reading about the nine dead soldiers in South Africa. Conventional programming is not up to the task of battlefield AI. Considering how bugs get out of hand with increasing complexity of software, such that past a point, your software will never be even safe to hold a gun. Current software only needs a single bit flipped out of countless trillions to get bad data into the software, and if in the wrong place, there is a possibility of unpredictable behavior or outright failure.
That is before we start talking about bugs in code.
This is fine for desktop software, your app just does something weird, or crashes outright, and you reboot, your fine. This is not adequate when your computer is pointing a shotgun or a mortar at you.
Now what I imagine here, is that these robots aren't controlled by minimal hardened micro controllers, such as those that keep a Airbus A380 from falling out of the sky, but far too high-level processing, using commodity parts. Thus, just like your leaking Firefox browser with too many tabs open it all goes weird then crashes, popping off a few rounds before it goes down.
Either that or the killbots are finally here...
Pardon me, but isn't a GPS signal rather easy to jam?
10. Compiz. It's just too cool not to be mentioned, and AFAIK it predates the Windows and Mac equivalents. :D
No that is not true. It is a misconception that Linux had 3D desktops first. I saw desktop composting and Aero desktop effects demonstrated in a longhorn build in early 2003 (look for screenshots on the web), long before any such feature was a working demo in Linux. I believe Compiz started development later (2005?), although working code was out in 2006, before Vista hit the market. Linux beat Win/Mac to the punch, yes, but this does_not_equal Vista/7/OSX copied Linux.
(unless anyone can clarify these dates?)
The opposite assumption, that Linux copied things that were long in development and demonstrated to the public would also be fair if you were ignoring all other facts. One could also suggest these were logical GUI development path with the ubiquity of discrete GPU silicon. Thus we have a problem, the assumption that Linux Is Better(tm) without much regard for Show Your Working.
My pet gripe is people who refer to the Case as the 'CPU'. Even technicians and retail stores do this.
The worst one I've encountered a user pointed to the box and said "is that the Hardware?", "uhh yes" I replied, "So is that the software on top?"... pointing to the monitor. *facepalm*
Could someone please explain why we don't ever correct users on their miss-use of jargon?
This is why kids don't eat enough vegetables as adults, they remember being forced to eat all their greens under threat of punishment. This psychological association is a stark contrast to the strong reward from tasty sugary fatty treats with bright colours, oh and these are given to kids as rewards, when the parent was in a good mood. So kids learn to hate vegetables and love junk food, and when they become adults junk food becomes a comfort.
Thus, the obesity epidemic.
The same applies to education, co-erce your kid into working and they run the risk of becoming a learning-alergic adult. Now we've all encountered those.
Brother Cavil: "I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way!"