Unless OP's father's memories of "like I used to use" were being stuck in AOL's or Prodigy's walled gardens, why would anybody recommend a "married to Jeff Bezos" Kindle Fire tablet?
Crippled Android fork of a very old version, no access to Google Play or other app stores, nor sideloading (you rooters go away, we're talking about normals here).
If you must recommend a bookstore-based Android-derived tablet, a Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet or, my choice which I own, a Kobo Arc family tablet, are now essentially open Android. Sure, they have their own launchers, own look-and-feel, and work auto-magically with their own bookstores. But they have full access to Google Play right out of the box. I love my Kobo Arc tablet - Android Jellybean, open access to sideloading, other than Kobo's home screen it looks and feels mostly like Android. My Kobo is my Nook eReader, my Google Play Books eReader, my general-EPUB Aldiko eReader, and one of my Kindle eReaders.
A Kindle Fire is a Kindle eReader. Other competing book apps are blocked. Same with many other competing content marketplaces and apps.
Walled garden paradigms are particularly well suited to giving small children and very old people a safer, simpler environment in which to learn and explore. Your objection is nonsensical in regard to this particular use case.
Being an Apple and iDevice fan for several years I would not hesitate to recommend an iPad 2 if cost is an issue. An iPad Air is advisable if only because it's so much lighter and thus more comfortable to hold for long periods. But people also seem to be saying very good things about the latest Kindle Fire HDX 8.9". Good screen, good speakers and very light, just like the iPad Air. For the life of me I can't imagine how it would be a bad thing to provide an elderly person who doesn't "get" the Internet with a simplified, safer app store choice and brain-dead easy access to millions of books.
Between the Kindle Fire HDX and an iPad with the Kindle app installed, it's a toss-up. Either would probably be excellent for this use case.
However, a weight-loss pill would at least address all those issues caused by simply being overweight alone, such as joint issues, high blood pressure, and some fraction of diabetes incidence.
What's more, the less you weigh, the easier it is to exercise. Just imagine a 300 pounder trying to huff away on a hike or something. Losing the weight might be the springboard to a healthier lifestyle overall--something that perhaps would be unachievable with the extra 150lbs that are now gone.
And as you point out, obesity is partly due to consumption of low quality food. Low quality food is cheap--it costs maybe $2k more a year for a family to eat healther, I see in the news today. $2k isn't exactly peanuts to someone on minimum wage, and it could be "$2k and a lot of time" for someone who lives in a food desert.
Safe & effective "diet pills" might mitigate the damage and cost of a low-cost, low quality cheap diet--which is a win for everyone who pays into the medical system.
I agree that pills like "Pen Fen" or whatever it was called, that cause heart issues, need to be treated with caution. However, the premise of the article was that pills that are safer and still effective have come out, but they're not being used.
While it would be better for everyone to eat quality food and get appropriate amounts of exercise, a pill that mitigates the damage of NOT doing those things is just a big win for everyone.
The perfect should not be the enemy of the good, and we shouldn't leave an 80% solution on the table just because it isn't a 99% solution.
--PM
You've completely missed the point of my post. Yes, diet pills may successfully cause fat loss, but they will fail to cause an increase in "health" because all the health problems you talk about are NOT strongly linked to having excess body fat. It's not that it's only an 80% solution, it isn't a solution AT ALL and does nothing to address the problem of living off a high fructose, high sodium, low fiber type of diet.
In other words, if we use this "solution" you're advocating, you'll just end up with a few somewhat skinnier people that still have diabetes, high blood pressure, joint inflammation, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, etc. This is what nobody seems to get yet. All the medical evidence is telling us that all these health issues that the common person assumes are caused by obesity are really just loosely co-incidental. Depending on what method you use to lose the excess body fat you can easily end up making the co-incidental conditions, and thus health outcomes, far worse instead of better.
So no, your insistence that "diet pills" will help make people "healthier" and thus end up reducing health insurance costs is still wrong. Your viewpoint is far too simplistic and essentially does just what everyone else does; incorrectly blaming obesity as being the source of all the major health issues that are actually killing us, rather than just a loosely related symptom. And continuing to try to pin our increasing healthcare costs on the obese is completely and utterly missing the truth of what all current medical evidence is telling us.
Opt out of Obamacare entirely. Don't apply for it and don't pay the fine and set up your taxation such that there's no refund for them to snag.
I don't suppose you're ever actually going to realize that you don't apply for "ObamaCare" at healthcare.gov. You apply for... shoot, what was that phrase, now I can't remember...
Oh, yeah. It's called "health insurance".
It's the same goddamn magical PRIVATE SECTOR health insurance we had before. The only real difference being that now, due to the law called the Affordable Care Act, the insurance companies aren't allowed to refuse to provide health insurance to people with pre-existing conditions. Pre-existing conditions such as the horribly expensive "disease" we refer to as "being a female human who is pregnant or plans to become pregnant in the next twelve months".
The "gubmint" hasn't taken over the health care system. There is no "ObamaCare" that we are all being forced to sign up for. Get a grip. If you choose not to get health insurance coverage, well, that's your choice. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act. But don't act like you're some kind of hero for "fighting the tyranny of ObamaCare". Because that doesn't exist.
I'm a weight loss and weight long term control success story, more or less. But having done it, I know exactly how hard it is.
I'd love it if the US population could dump their extra pounds by taking a pill. It'd just be a win for everyone, and the only people who'd "lose" are those who feel superior because they've managed to do it without the pill.
And even THOSE people will be paying lower health insurance premiums because the population is healthier in general.
If the pills really work, BRING 'EM ON! Who knows, if I can't exercise some day (I'm currently taking a few weeks off because I got rear-ended in my car!), then I'll need them myself!
--PeterM
Health is something that isn't nearly as simple as almost everyone seems to love to believe. The truth, based on current medical evidence, is that something like 60% of "obese" people are by all metrics besides BMI perfectly "healthy", while something like 60% of the people who are part of the epidemic of diabetes and afflicted with massive amounts of cardiovascular disease are people of normal body weight who everyone assumes are "healthy" solely due to their "normal" BMI. It just plain isn't that simple.
Obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease have been proven in recent decades to not be nearly as well linked as almost everyone still believes. Getting the obese to lose weight with pills therefore will not necessarily result in a strict increase in overall "health" of our society. In fact most of the pills that help promote weight loss have been shown to cause rather extreme negative side effects. Such as fatal heart attacks.
Everyone still believes that you must stay away from saturated fats and cholesterol, even though it's been shown over and over again that increasing or decreasing "dietary" fats and cholesterols has almost no link whatsoever to increasing or decreasing levels of fats and cholesterol in the body and blood, most of which is created by your own liver. In fact, if I'm quoting Dr. Lustig correctly, the link between the ingestion of the fructose molecule and bad blood glucose, fat, cholesterol and triglyceride levels is about 50 times better than the link between those things and the ingestion of any kind of dietary fats. Yes, fructose. According to Dr. Lustig's research, fructose, and its close relative ethanol, may be the root cause of metabolic syndrome, obesity, diabetes and the explosion of cardiovascular disease. Not starches or dietary fats.
Also quoting Dr. Lustig, evidence indicates that approximately 99% of human beings cannot maintain any form of weight loss for more than a few years, if they even succeed in losing any weight the first place, which most people don't. Thus, no matter how long everyone continues to insist that obesity is a personal willpower problem that should be solved by the individual... THIS. WILL. NEVER. SOLVE. THE. PROBLEM.
EVER.
If we really want to solve the societal pandemic of obesity we need to completely discard the idea that it's caused by some personal moral failing (of the lower classes, no less). We went from 10% to 60% obesity over the last 40 years. If we keep relying on the magic pixie dust of "personal responsibility", 90% of our grandchildren's generation will be obese and 90% will have diabetes starting from early childhood regardless of body weight. There is a systemic problem in the modern diet that is causing this explosion of obesity and diabetes, and we need to find PRACTICAL solutions that fix it on a society-wide basis.
Yesterday I was not allowed to take a single photograph of my daughter who was in a dance competition, to quote "in case it ends up on the internet". This memory (dance competition) will be lost now, because it was not recorded. There was even an announcement, make sure all Phones and iPads are kept in your pocket / bag, something seems very wrong with this endless search for the boogeyman.
That. Is. Certifiably. Insane.
I believe there is a step coming up shortly in this descent into madness where we will all be forced to pluck out our eyes, cut out our tongues, puncture our eardrums, surgically remove our genitalia and chop off our hands.
Realize, however, that the modern day puts high demands on people to stay connected and respond quickly (both from work and from social lives). The world moves ever more quickly, so people need to scramble to keep up, and staying offline for an entire car drive can be problematic.
I've said it before and I'll say it forever: If you're important enough to be talking on the phone while driving, you're important enough to have a chauffeur to drive you so you don't have to talk on the phone while driving.
Unless you're making some kind of emergency call there is no valid excuse for driving one-handed with your cellphone glued to your ear. NO VALID EXCUSE.
Robots.txt should be respected at the time of retrieval. It should not be retroactively respected to censor or remove old data. That is a shame. I've used the Archive before on a site of a gaming company that I loved, which nearly went bankrupt (or perhaps did) but managed to eke its way through. Part of their relaunch nuked the Internet Archive's archives and I definitely felt a sense of loss.
Yeah, I had the silly impression all this time that the entire purpose of the Internet Archive was to archive the goddamn Internet precisely so that people couldn't pull this kind of retroactive erasure "cleansing of history" bullshit and get away with it.
What a dope I am. It's amazing how inadequately we are protecting our freedoms and our history these days. If we don't do something much more drastic our grandchildren will end up being slaves to some theocratic corporatocracy and they'll have no idea that the world was ever any different.
Ha ha funny, but no. Get with the times. Google doesn't allow Safe Search to be disabled anymore. It's always on. They changed the policy like a year ago. You will only see NSFW search results now for search terms that are obviously adult-related. Vague innuendo doesn't qualify, apparently.
What exactly is a "three-pronged trailer hitch"? Google Images doesn't seem to have a clue, and it doesn't sound very functional. How does a trailer hitch with more than one "prong"/fulcrum do anything useful?
The driver was probably referring to a multi-ball trailer hitch that has all three trailer ball sizes (1-7/8", 2", 2-5/16") attached. You pull it out of the hitch receiver and rotate it to use a different ball, so you don't have to carry around 75 lbs of separate single-ball trailer hitches. It's quite handy if you have multiple trailers with different hitch sizes, or you want to be able to borrow a trailer without needing to know what size hitch it takes. There are also hitches with interchangeable balls, but they typically quickly become useless from rust making it impossible to remove the ball, so hitches with separate balls are popular due to being more reliable.
Google "three ball trailer hitch" or "triple ball trailer hitch" to get a better idea what I'm referring to. You'll notice some are quite bulky and elaborate height-adjustable affairs and many also have a nasty sharp hook on the fourth side, I guess for use with a tow line. I wouldn't want to run over even the most benign model in a low-clearance sports car at highway speeds. A multi-ball hitch will always have something sticking up maybe as much as 5" to 8" off the road surface, where a single-ball hitch will usually be laying on its side and be at most 2-1/2" high. I can easily see a multi-ball hitch catching on something, popping up and doing major damage to the underside of pretty much any vehicle with less than 8" of road clearance. Which includes nearly all non-lifted passenger vehicles with normal sized tires on the road today.
Source: Recently bought a boat trailer and spent a lot of time learning about trailer hitches.
Yeah, I love a good warm fire as much as anyone. Spent my fair share of my childhood years throwing wood in the back of a pickup or stacking wood in the shed and warming up by a hot fireplace on cold winter mornings and evenings. It's a very efficient and inexpensive way to heat a home. There is a lot of emotion attached to it, and for good reason. But there are a ton of people out there who are still using stupidly inefficient wood fireplaces that were already outclassed by fireplaces invented over a hundred years ago, including completely open fireplaces which waste ridiculous amounts of heat and burn too cool to properly burn wood cleanly.
My father became a dealer for a line of fireplaces back in the mid-80s. These things were amazing. You start it, let it get hot for a few minutes then seal the door, damp the flu and turn down the incoming air and then you could watch the smoke recirculate and reburn inside. It put out massive amounts of heat for several hours on just two quarters of a log, and when you walked outside the only thing that gave away that the fireplace was in operation were the telltale heat waves coming out of the chimney. No visible smoke whatsoever after it got started. And these highly efficient and clean-burning stoves were available in the 80s and probably much earlier.
Contrast that with walking around the neighborhood or driving around my small town in Alaska on a cool morning or evening. The whole place is full of wood smoke from obviously inefficient wood-burning fireplaces. And because of downdrafts and inversions it tends to stay very low and hang around. We often have smoke coming in our house from houses blocks away whenever we open the window for some "fresh" air. There's really no excuse for this when I could have a stove decades ago that basically had zero detectable particulate output when it was running properly. Plus it made the wood last a lot longer.
Burning wood is air pollution no matter how you slice it, and people need to be strongly encouraged to do it as efficiently as possible. Just like vehicle regulations this only applies to newly manufactured stoves, and all those rural conspiracy theory fruit loops ranting about EPA SWAT teams coming to break down their door and take away their fireplace are just that; fruit loops. This is really much ado about not very much.
It's used as marketing, but it's still true. But you're missing the point which is that sucrose and HFCS are both EQUALLY BAD. Replacing HFCS with sucrose has no measurable benefit, so talking about banning HFCS is pointless and distracts from the primary health issue which is the presence of the fructose molecule. Far better to replace both HFCS and sucrose with some non-nutritive sweetener like sucralose or stevia which contain no fructose. The link you gave supports this fact. Sucrose is quickly separated into glucose and fructose, becoming identical to HFCS.
And it's called "high-fructose" only because it has more fructose than unprocessed corn syrup, which is about 95% glucose. Enzymes are used to create different concentrations of fructose. The HFCS that is usually used to replace sucrose is 45% glucose, 55% fructose, but there are other concentrations used in the food industry, some of which have lower fructose concentrations than the 50/50 glucose/fructose concentrations in sucrose. It is not called "high-fructose" corn syrup due to any relationship with sucrose.
You would do well to step back and refine your understanding of this issue. Look for Dr. Lustig's lectures on sugar on YouTube. They're even more illuminating than (and represent a refinement on) Gary Taubes' theories.
Here is a relevant portion FTA on what the helium actually DOES (unfortunately not mentioned in the summary):
At one-seventh the density of air, helium produces less drag on the moving components of a drive - the spinning disk platters and actuator arms -- which translates into less friction and lower operating temperatures.
The helium-drives run at four to five degrees cooler than today's 7200rpm drives, HGST stated.
Huh. I'm usually the dummy in the room*, but this particular time I thought the purpose of the helium was patently obvious. Lower density molecules = less drag. At the speeds and sizes of the components involved, it's like replacing 30-weight oil with 5-weight oil.
I must have retained that bit of knowledge from back when they were writing articles years ago about the future possibility of doing this. Pretty cool that it's finally happening.
If you have any problem whatsoever, use the warranty! Now you have two problems.
Honestly, I just can't get worked up about this justified censorship. Until Apple releases some kind of official solution (which might very well be "send it in for repair"), giving out wrong solutions just increases the amount of trouble involved. Having managed a help desk before, I've seen how often we had to waste time undoing users' community-given fixes for problems, like adding RAM to remove a virus (thanks, Geek Squad!). By resorting to the warranty's options, Apple's operational cost rises, and the user still doesn't have wi-fi on their phone.
I have been a satisfied Apple user for over a decade now, but I came in here to say that Apple's discussion forum censorship is for reals one of the worst things about the company. But then I read a few posts like yours. Your post is a prime example of why I keep coming back to Slashdot despite the dupes and terrible editing and clickbait content. Instead of having my biases reinforced, I often have my mind expanded and my thoughts provoked by reading interesting alternative viewpoints here.
There's always some Apple fanboys (jo_ham, where you at?), who insist the machines are higher quality etc etc, but this is mainly nonsense.
They use almost the exact same components for PC's, and are ridiculous overpriced.
Not to mention the barriers to self-repair, amping up the cost over the lifetime of the machine.
The only value they have is in the aesthetics, or if you need OS X for some reason. Generally not worth the cost except to people who like to burn money.
The same people who buy a $100 burger in a restaurant that costs $12 to make, cause it costs $100.
Wow. Full of yourself much? You just called tens of millions of people retards for daring to buy a computer brand you don't approve of.
It is an oversimplification to simply state that Apple uses many of the same components as PCs. They do, but they also have a lot of custom engineering that goes into their products, good quality control, and their demonstrably lower incidence of returns and repairs puts the lie to your idea that there is no measureable difference between Macs and PCs just because they contain some of the same components. Apple has not been at the top of all the consumer satisfaction and quality surveys for the last decade merely because people like the company logo.
You are welcome to your own opinion about the relative worth of any particular brand of computers, but get your facts straight or you just make yourself look silly and hateful. Just because other people have different criteria for buying computers does not make them all idiots buying $100 burgers. Apple's machines are more like the $18 burger from a local restaurant with great ambiance versus a $8 burger from a national chain restaurant with fluorescent lighting and plastic bench seating. Priced higher, perhaps even overpriced, but it all depends on your criteria and what you're looking for. But pretending there is no value in paying a bit more for nice ambiance is idiocy. The burger and the dining experience are both part of the price.
If you the TFA you will see at the bottom an interesting note: "In an unexpected finding, the cells of children with progeria, a genetic disorder that causes premature aging, appeared normal and reflected their true chronological age" Doesn't this make the results inconclusive at that point? Since children with this disease age faster than anyone else? If his "clock" was accurate wouldn't these children display clocks point to a much older person?
Maybe. If progeria were literally "premature temporal aging". But it isn't. It's just a genetic disorder that causes certain symptoms that appear similar to premature temporal aging. Nobody on Earth has ever actually "aged" faster or slower than anyone else. A 35-year-old person with a full head of prematurely gray hair is still the same actual age as all other 35-year-old people. He or she just has premature graying; a specific symptom of a very specific biological system, which resembles a symptom of general aging. But the gray hair does not mean the person has actually aged 90 years while the rest of us have aged 35 years. It just means that some metabolic process has reacted differently at a different time on the biological clock. Now we have to figure out what triggers all of the other independent metabolic systems to react in certain ways when they read certain timestamps from the biological clock.
What the result regarding progeria cells tells us is that this biological clock quite literally tells time, i.e. the actual temporal age of the organism. Like tree rings. Which is interesting in and of itself. If this clock is accurate enough we might finally have a way to test whether those people who are supposedly 120 or 130 or 140 years old are really as old as they think they are or whether they're just misremembering what decade they were born.
Since when has charcoal been something to bury instead of burn? Plants get carbon out of the air, they don't need to absorb it through their roots.
-jcr
Uh... Since the dawn of time itself? Plants eat each other's bio-nutrients in an endless cycle. The decay of carbon-rich plant matter creates fertilized soil for new plants.
This post is a good example of how disconnected humanity has become to the way nature actually works.
Better yet, outfit these places with urine-diverting toilets and combine the urine with the pure carbon charcoal, maybe mixed with the fully composted solid waste and you'll end up with not just plant crack but plant super-crack. It creates a carbon-nitrogen-phosphorus fertilizer that's just as good if not better than the most expensive commercially-produced fertilizers, for a tiny fraction of the cost. Essentially, free.
If you think I'm just making things up you'll find if you do some research that many places are already using this process both to reduce dependence on commercial fertilizers and to reduce the energy and money required to process waste. Not just on small scales or undeveloped countries either. I'm now wondering how well this gasification process can scale up.
The Tea Party appeared after Obama was elected because Obama is of the far-left and the Republican Party doesn't give a shit about ordinary Americans. Obama's mentor - the man who had the most influence on his life - should have gone to prison for bombing the US Capitol building. Yes, that's right, domestic terrorism of the Boston Bomber sort.
After the NSA revelations, who can really say that martial law is out of the question? The NSA stuff confirmed what a lot of "nutters" had been saying for a long time.
You're a prime example of why nobody besides the Tea Party is taking the Tea Party seriously. According to the standard political spectrum that the entire world has used for decades (at least), Obama is near-right and moving further to the right every year. If you ever met an actual "lefty" I have a feeling your brain would literally implode from an inability to comprehend what you're seeing. They're still around in Canada and Europe, if you want to observe some in the wild.
Also, you seem to be confused about what the term "martial law" means. Martial law is declared by the government, but you seem to be implying that private citizens should be declaring martial law on the government. I believe that's referred to as a "revolution" or a "civil war".
Having an upside-down and inside-out understanding of common political and legal definitions makes it really difficult for anyone to take you seriously. Even if we are fully in agreement about the NSA overreach and many other things.
Children can hurt themselves on the Internet... Quite badly...
No, seriously.
I have never seen any credible evidence whatsoever that children can be harmed by any particular nasty bits they see or read online. If they aren't interested in something they simply laugh or say, "Ewwww, gross," and move on. But they can nevertheless get themselves in a world of trouble online in various, and I don't think that age 8 is anywhere near mature enough to even begin to understand how they can destroy their own lives by making certain mistakes online.
Let's just take for instance the batshit insane prosecution of young people who take naughty pics or videos of themselves or a "friend" while they are underage. The way things are going there are many people who probably want to start branding people even those still under the age of consent as sex offenders for this kind of thing, but rest assured that as soon as you turn 18 you WILL be branded a sex offender for LIFE if some so-called "adult" or law enforcement somehow finds out you are in possession of such things, even if it's a picture of YOURSELF that you took yesterday, just before you turned 18.
Yeah, that shit happens in this country. Look it up. And once you are branded a "witch"--oh, sorry, a "sex offender", that shit is with you FOREVER, no matter how ridiculous or even false is the reason the label was originally applied. Oh, and you think this only applies to you if you live in an insane puritanical country like the US? Think again. This is really becoming a global society now. Something you do that's perfectly legal in your own country could land you in prison in another country, even decades later.
You're American and go drinking under age 21 in Europe and post the evidence on Facebook? Come back to the US and bam!, "We see you've been underage drinking while you were away. It was legal there but you're an American citizen, so we're still going to prosecute you and make you go through a drinking program. Since you're over 18 now this will of course be on your permanent legal record. You're welcome." I don't know if that specifically can happen right now (i.e. prosecution for underage drinking), but there's no reason it can't. I know for a fact that Americans are being prosecuted for things like sex offenses that happened completely outside the jurisdiction of the United States that weren't necessarily offenses at the time or location where they took place, so why not other offenses? Every nation on Earth is on track to extend their concept of "jurisdiction" to the entire planet. The US government sure feels like they already have jurisdiction over everyone, everywhere.
You'll notice I am very busy in this post NOT insulting the monarchy of Thailand. I may wish to go back there for a visit again someday. No matter where I am physically located, if I post an insult to the King of Thailand online and their immigration department finds it, I could be barred from ever entering Thailand again or imprisoned if they find out after they let me in. God forbid you're a citizen of some even more insane country like Saudi Arabia. "Oh, we see you are a female Saudi citizen and were photographed behind the wheel of an automobile while on vacation in America. Also, you were unsupervised by a male at the time. Now that you're back, here are your 2,000 lashes and/or death by stoning. You're welcome."
So, what used to be a youthful indiscretions that didn't really matter can easily put a serious crimp on a child's life, wherever you're from. It is not the content of the Internet that will damage a child directly, as the moral-panicking parents always believe. It is that which the child creates that can leave them without possible job prospects or life choices decades later, because of how OTHER PEOPLE react to what the child leaves behind in their wake. The Internet truly does not forget, and even if privacy laws are strongly enhanced in any specific country that fact will never change.
We're all well down the road to making a ton of sil
I was wondering about the lack of concern and so I started asking friends and family about their views on the NSA scandal. None of my non-techie friends/family had heard of it. The local news doesn't carry it, many main stream outlets don't pay it more than a passing mention and they don't visit tech websites, so they were all in the dark about the issue. The fact of the matter is that unless you're a tech-minded person you probably either do not know about the NSA controversy or you don't understand the implications.
This is really the heart of the matter. Social change requires that a certain percentage of a population directly feel the impact of something, along with a further percentage feeling indirect impact (such as personally knowing someone who is directly impacted). Once the percentage climbs past the tipping point, the entire herd suddenly begins to move. I believe the rule is 10% of a given population. Before this threshold is reached it seems as if nothing will ever happen and as if no force can make the herd move. On the flip side, after the threshold is passed the movement is unstoppable until the herd reaches a new resting state.
These "implications" of loss of civil liberties and violations of the Constitution are simply not enough to penetrate the herd-mind gestalt, much less get it moving. Yet. Things have to get much, much worse before the herd-mind will even look up from grazing to notice that something is wrong. There have to actually be real, widespread and blindingly obvious violations of the Constitutional rights of everyday Americans, and LOTS of them, before anything will happen. This is simply the way of things. What we have so far are basically just inconveniences in absolute terms. No one is being sent to gulags or executed in mass numbers. The herd-mind sees "Free-Speech Zones" and mass collection of data and says, "Pfft, big deal." Because nothing truly bad has come of it. Yet.
This is why I was of half a mind to vote Republican in the last election, precisely because of how ridiculously extreme their views have become. At the current stage of things the most winning move would actually be to hasten the rise of the extremists, thus hastening both their period of oppressive rule over things and the rapidity and finality of their eventual rejection and defeat, and the height of the enlightenment period that would follow. Until then good luck getting the herd to wake up and move in any specific direction. Ain't gonna happen except at a nearly imperceptible glacial pace, one person at a time. It's simply the mathematical laws of human nature and population dynamics at work.
Reason for Lightning: see this hideous microUSB 3.0 cable what sort of shitty design is this? I know it's backwards compatible, but the USB standard was not future-proof as one can see from the picture, so it deserves to die.
As you can see from the cable, the backwards compatibility will only work in one direction. Clearly, because of the larger connector, USB 3.0 cables (regular, mini or micro) are not compatible with non-USB 3.0 devices. Newer devices will still work with the older micro-USB cables that don't have the wider connector, but that's as far as "backwards compatibility" goes. The new USB 3.0 connectors are essentially completely different connectors, and ridiculously larger.
Seems to me the EU is being very premature in standardizing on a version of micro-USB that is already obsolete. Surely industry can work together and create a new standard that has all the awesomeness of the Lightning connector and the openness of USB, combined with some well thought out features to make the standard future-resistant for at least a couple of decades.
When the initial rumors of Apple's new connector started appearing I was at one point convinced that Apple was going to do something truly awesome and introduce a contact-only magnetic connector like the MagSafe connector they've been using on laptops for several years. Not only would such a connector completely negate the possibility of damaging your device internally by twisting or yanking on the cable, but it would also make it easy to keep both sides of the connector clean and functioning in dirty environments. It would also be possible to make the device-side connector waterproof so that devices could be charged while they are otherwise sealed and protected in waterproof cases.
Sadly I was mistaken and they introduced yet another insertable connector that just provides an ingress point for moisture and debris and a way to possibly easily damage a device costing hundreds of dollars. And with the incredible hue and cry there has been when they left the 30-pin connector behind you know they'll have to do everything in their power to stick with Lightning as a standard for at least a decade, as they did with the 30-pin. They have no choice but to fight tooth and nail against being forced to switch to some other connector so soon after introducing Lightning.
Bottom line is I love my iPhone's Lightning connection, like most actual users seem to, but neither the Lightning connector nor any current USB connector qualifies to be a standardized, future-resistant, worldwide personal-device connector in my mind. There has to be a better standard that we can come up with.
I worked for a Federal Government Contractor. I administered a number of servers--the one with financial information and one with Classified information. I found another employee trying to break into my servers on a few occasions and reported this security breach to management. The CIO said "Good catch" but did nothing to the employee. (Well the CIO did give a promotion to the offending employee.) As a manager, this person set up a rogue server between Security Audits and continued his attempts to break into my servers on a regular basis. I continued to tell management and added notifications to Cyber-Security. Nothing was ever done about these attempted breaches.
That's... very odd.
The way you tell this little anecdote makes it sound remarkably like this other employee was doing precisely what he was actually supposed to be doing. How else do you explain the fact that not only was nothing done about his attempts to breach security but apparently he was rewarded for these ongoing activities. Maybe he was actually the penetration tester assigned to make sure you were competently doing your job and you just weren't in the loop on what his real job assignment was. Eh? Seems a far more likely explanation than management both completely ignoring and promoting someone reported as repeatedly and continuously trying to break into classified data.
I note you say "trying" and "attempts" and "regular basis" rather than "succeeded" and "stole classified data" and "once". To me the whole thing seems to describe someone whose job it is to go around rattling office doors at night to make sure they're locked, rather than someone trying to sneak in and crack the safe and steal the office payroll. When the night watchman tries to open locked doors he's doing exactly what he's paid to do. On the other hand, those bent on actual thievery do not typically go around drawing attention to themselves in such a way.
> I'm also one of those weirdos who thinks the most recent few seasons of the show are boot-licking, Doctor-worshiping, ultra-melodramatic, vomit-inducing crap that caused Doctor Who to go from one of my favorite shows of all time to something I cannot physically stomach watching anymore.
Are you mad!?!?!?!?
You forgot "human-lauding".
There were more "brilliant"s (or synonyms) in every Tennant-era program than in a whole series of The Fast Show. Barf!
Give me Sylvester McCoy any day over that, with his "Your species has the most amazing capacity for self-deception, matched by only its ingenuity when trying to destroy itself".
I'd have to agree they did lay it on a bit thick during the Tennant era, especially with the "normal looking humans surviving at the end of the universe 100 trillion years from now" BS they pulled when they revived the Master character. That was far beyond ridiculous. There aren't words for how ridiculously improbable that was.
But I was mostly talking about everything post-Tennant.
So, to paraphrase quite a few comments on this article:
"Duh, Los alamos are so stupid - less material in contact, less force, just like friction. I can't believe they only just worked that out. I mean DUH, they could've asked me THAT. Oh, and they make nukes. Eurgh, I hate them!"
Really? You seriously think that's all there is to it? I only read the abstract, and it states that the decrease in the Casimir force is far beyond theoretical predictions. But pffth, they probably got that wrong too, right?
I dunno, the misplaced arrogance I read on here sometimes really depresses me.
There's arrogance, but then there's also the fact that this really does seem perfectly intuitive. If your surfaces have a tendency to stick to one another due to some kind of oddball "force" not quite the same as but similar to the static friction force, how is it not obvious that it might be helpful to reduce the amount of surface area that comes together between the two surfaces? After all, it works well with static friction.
I'm thinking this came out because A) they found a good way to create a micro- or nano-scale surface with sufficiently reduced area, and B) the positive result seems to significantly exceed the predicted effect, and they don't know why. That's why it's interesting. Not because the underlying concept is an amazing new idea. I'll bet the idea has been around for a long time, which is what prompted them to try to take the steps that created this result.
I don't think there's any need to be so offended by peoples' intuitive response in this particular case. They're just reacting to an article and summary that makes it seem like the simple part if the story (the idea of reducing surface area in contact) is a new, breakthrough idea when it really isn't, instead of emphasizing the parts of the story that are actually new and interesting (the actual results that exceed predictions).
Slashdot Mirror
Unless OP's father's memories of "like I used to use" were being stuck in AOL's or Prodigy's walled gardens, why would anybody recommend a "married to Jeff Bezos" Kindle Fire tablet?
Crippled Android fork of a very old version, no access to Google Play or other app stores, nor sideloading (you rooters go away, we're talking about normals here).
If you must recommend a bookstore-based Android-derived tablet, a Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet or, my choice which I own, a Kobo Arc family tablet, are now essentially open Android. Sure, they have their own launchers, own look-and-feel, and work auto-magically with their own bookstores. But they have full access to Google Play right out of the box. I love my Kobo Arc tablet - Android Jellybean, open access to sideloading, other than Kobo's home screen it looks and feels mostly like Android. My Kobo is my Nook eReader, my Google Play Books eReader, my general-EPUB Aldiko eReader, and one of my Kindle eReaders.
A Kindle Fire is a Kindle eReader. Other competing book apps are blocked. Same with many other competing content marketplaces and apps.
Walled garden paradigms are particularly well suited to giving small children and very old people a safer, simpler environment in which to learn and explore. Your objection is nonsensical in regard to this particular use case.
Being an Apple and iDevice fan for several years I would not hesitate to recommend an iPad 2 if cost is an issue. An iPad Air is advisable if only because it's so much lighter and thus more comfortable to hold for long periods. But people also seem to be saying very good things about the latest Kindle Fire HDX 8.9". Good screen, good speakers and very light, just like the iPad Air. For the life of me I can't imagine how it would be a bad thing to provide an elderly person who doesn't "get" the Internet with a simplified, safer app store choice and brain-dead easy access to millions of books.
Between the Kindle Fire HDX and an iPad with the Kindle app installed, it's a toss-up. Either would probably be excellent for this use case.
However, a weight-loss pill would at least address all those issues caused by simply being overweight alone, such as joint issues, high blood pressure, and some fraction of diabetes incidence.
What's more, the less you weigh, the easier it is to exercise. Just imagine a 300 pounder trying to huff away on a hike or something. Losing the weight might be the springboard to a healthier lifestyle overall--something that perhaps would be unachievable with the extra 150lbs that are now gone.
And as you point out, obesity is partly due to consumption of low quality food. Low quality food is cheap--it costs maybe $2k more a year for a family to eat healther, I see in the news today. $2k isn't exactly peanuts to someone on minimum wage, and it could be "$2k and a lot of time" for someone who lives in a food desert.
Safe & effective "diet pills" might mitigate the damage and cost of a low-cost, low quality cheap diet--which is a win for everyone who pays into the medical system.
I agree that pills like "Pen Fen" or whatever it was called, that cause heart issues, need to be treated with caution. However, the premise of the article was that pills that are safer and still effective have come out, but they're not being used.
While it would be better for everyone to eat quality food and get appropriate amounts of exercise, a pill that mitigates the damage of NOT doing those things is just a big win for everyone.
The perfect should not be the enemy of the good, and we shouldn't leave an 80% solution on the table just because it isn't a 99% solution.
--PM
You've completely missed the point of my post. Yes, diet pills may successfully cause fat loss, but they will fail to cause an increase in "health" because all the health problems you talk about are NOT strongly linked to having excess body fat. It's not that it's only an 80% solution, it isn't a solution AT ALL and does nothing to address the problem of living off a high fructose, high sodium, low fiber type of diet.
In other words, if we use this "solution" you're advocating, you'll just end up with a few somewhat skinnier people that still have diabetes, high blood pressure, joint inflammation, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, etc. This is what nobody seems to get yet. All the medical evidence is telling us that all these health issues that the common person assumes are caused by obesity are really just loosely co-incidental. Depending on what method you use to lose the excess body fat you can easily end up making the co-incidental conditions, and thus health outcomes, far worse instead of better.
So no, your insistence that "diet pills" will help make people "healthier" and thus end up reducing health insurance costs is still wrong. Your viewpoint is far too simplistic and essentially does just what everyone else does; incorrectly blaming obesity as being the source of all the major health issues that are actually killing us, rather than just a loosely related symptom. And continuing to try to pin our increasing healthcare costs on the obese is completely and utterly missing the truth of what all current medical evidence is telling us.
Opt out of Obamacare entirely. Don't apply for it and don't pay the fine and set up your taxation such that there's no refund for them to snag.
I don't suppose you're ever actually going to realize that you don't apply for "ObamaCare" at healthcare.gov. You apply for... shoot, what was that phrase, now I can't remember...
Oh, yeah. It's called "health insurance".
It's the same goddamn magical PRIVATE SECTOR health insurance we had before. The only real difference being that now, due to the law called the Affordable Care Act, the insurance companies aren't allowed to refuse to provide health insurance to people with pre-existing conditions. Pre-existing conditions such as the horribly expensive "disease" we refer to as "being a female human who is pregnant or plans to become pregnant in the next twelve months".
The "gubmint" hasn't taken over the health care system. There is no "ObamaCare" that we are all being forced to sign up for. Get a grip. If you choose not to get health insurance coverage, well, that's your choice. Thanks to the Affordable Care Act. But don't act like you're some kind of hero for "fighting the tyranny of ObamaCare". Because that doesn't exist.
Hello,
I'm a weight loss and weight long term control success story, more or less. But having done it, I know exactly how hard it is.
I'd love it if the US population could dump their extra pounds by taking a pill. It'd just be a win for everyone, and the only people who'd "lose" are those who feel superior because they've managed to do it without the pill.
And even THOSE people will be paying lower health insurance premiums because the population is healthier in general.
If the pills really work, BRING 'EM ON! Who knows, if I can't exercise some day (I'm currently taking a few weeks off because I got rear-ended in my car!), then I'll need them myself!
--PeterM
Health is something that isn't nearly as simple as almost everyone seems to love to believe. The truth, based on current medical evidence, is that something like 60% of "obese" people are by all metrics besides BMI perfectly "healthy", while something like 60% of the people who are part of the epidemic of diabetes and afflicted with massive amounts of cardiovascular disease are people of normal body weight who everyone assumes are "healthy" solely due to their "normal" BMI. It just plain isn't that simple.
Obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease have been proven in recent decades to not be nearly as well linked as almost everyone still believes. Getting the obese to lose weight with pills therefore will not necessarily result in a strict increase in overall "health" of our society. In fact most of the pills that help promote weight loss have been shown to cause rather extreme negative side effects. Such as fatal heart attacks.
Everyone still believes that you must stay away from saturated fats and cholesterol, even though it's been shown over and over again that increasing or decreasing "dietary" fats and cholesterols has almost no link whatsoever to increasing or decreasing levels of fats and cholesterol in the body and blood, most of which is created by your own liver. In fact, if I'm quoting Dr. Lustig correctly, the link between the ingestion of the fructose molecule and bad blood glucose, fat, cholesterol and triglyceride levels is about 50 times better than the link between those things and the ingestion of any kind of dietary fats. Yes, fructose. According to Dr. Lustig's research, fructose, and its close relative ethanol, may be the root cause of metabolic syndrome, obesity, diabetes and the explosion of cardiovascular disease. Not starches or dietary fats.
Also quoting Dr. Lustig, evidence indicates that approximately 99% of human beings cannot maintain any form of weight loss for more than a few years, if they even succeed in losing any weight the first place, which most people don't. Thus, no matter how long everyone continues to insist that obesity is a personal willpower problem that should be solved by the individual... THIS. WILL. NEVER. SOLVE. THE. PROBLEM.
EVER.
If we really want to solve the societal pandemic of obesity we need to completely discard the idea that it's caused by some personal moral failing (of the lower classes, no less). We went from 10% to 60% obesity over the last 40 years. If we keep relying on the magic pixie dust of "personal responsibility", 90% of our grandchildren's generation will be obese and 90% will have diabetes starting from early childhood regardless of body weight. There is a systemic problem in the modern diet that is causing this explosion of obesity and diabetes, and we need to find PRACTICAL solutions that fix it on a society-wide basis.
Linky:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=lustig+sugar&sm=3
Yesterday I was not allowed to take a single photograph of my daughter who was in a dance competition, to quote "in case it ends up on the internet". This memory (dance competition) will be lost now, because it was not recorded. There was even an announcement, make sure all Phones and iPads are kept in your pocket / bag, something seems very wrong with this endless search for the boogeyman.
That. Is. Certifiably. Insane.
I believe there is a step coming up shortly in this descent into madness where we will all be forced to pluck out our eyes, cut out our tongues, puncture our eardrums, surgically remove our genitalia and chop off our hands.
You know, to make the world safe.
For the children.
I think you meant to say, "Really, Internet?"
See, the Internet can be very helpful.
I think there's something wrong... with my head.
I read the tag as "SuperMangoTit" and was going to look it up on KnowYourMeme.com.
Don't worry, I figured it out before it went that far.
Side note: I like the way other sites use underscores to replace spaces in tags. Makes tags much more readable.
Realize, however, that the modern day puts high demands on people to stay connected and respond quickly (both from work and from social lives). The world moves ever more quickly, so people need to scramble to keep up, and staying offline for an entire car drive can be problematic.
I've said it before and I'll say it forever: If you're important enough to be talking on the phone while driving, you're important enough to have a chauffeur to drive you so you don't have to talk on the phone while driving.
Unless you're making some kind of emergency call there is no valid excuse for driving one-handed with your cellphone glued to your ear. NO VALID EXCUSE.
Robots.txt should be respected at the time of retrieval. It should not be retroactively respected to censor or remove old data. That is a shame. I've used the Archive before on a site of a gaming company that I loved, which nearly went bankrupt (or perhaps did) but managed to eke its way through. Part of their relaunch nuked the Internet Archive's archives and I definitely felt a sense of loss.
Yeah, I had the silly impression all this time that the entire purpose of the Internet Archive was to archive the goddamn Internet precisely so that people couldn't pull this kind of retroactive erasure "cleansing of history" bullshit and get away with it.
What a dope I am. It's amazing how inadequately we are protecting our freedoms and our history these days. If we don't do something much more drastic our grandchildren will end up being slaves to some theocratic corporatocracy and they'll have no idea that the world was ever any different.
Lately I think Orwell was overly optimistic.
Google "three ball trailer hitch"
With Safe Search turned on, of course.
Ha ha funny, but no. Get with the times. Google doesn't allow Safe Search to be disabled anymore. It's always on. They changed the policy like a year ago. You will only see NSFW search results now for search terms that are obviously adult-related. Vague innuendo doesn't qualify, apparently.
What exactly is a "three-pronged trailer hitch"? Google Images doesn't seem to have a clue, and it doesn't sound very functional. How does a trailer hitch with more than one "prong"/fulcrum do anything useful?
The driver was probably referring to a multi-ball trailer hitch that has all three trailer ball sizes (1-7/8", 2", 2-5/16") attached. You pull it out of the hitch receiver and rotate it to use a different ball, so you don't have to carry around 75 lbs of separate single-ball trailer hitches. It's quite handy if you have multiple trailers with different hitch sizes, or you want to be able to borrow a trailer without needing to know what size hitch it takes. There are also hitches with interchangeable balls, but they typically quickly become useless from rust making it impossible to remove the ball, so hitches with separate balls are popular due to being more reliable.
Google "three ball trailer hitch" or "triple ball trailer hitch" to get a better idea what I'm referring to. You'll notice some are quite bulky and elaborate height-adjustable affairs and many also have a nasty sharp hook on the fourth side, I guess for use with a tow line. I wouldn't want to run over even the most benign model in a low-clearance sports car at highway speeds. A multi-ball hitch will always have something sticking up maybe as much as 5" to 8" off the road surface, where a single-ball hitch will usually be laying on its side and be at most 2-1/2" high. I can easily see a multi-ball hitch catching on something, popping up and doing major damage to the underside of pretty much any vehicle with less than 8" of road clearance. Which includes nearly all non-lifted passenger vehicles with normal sized tires on the road today.
Source: Recently bought a boat trailer and spent a lot of time learning about trailer hitches.
Yeah, I love a good warm fire as much as anyone. Spent my fair share of my childhood years throwing wood in the back of a pickup or stacking wood in the shed and warming up by a hot fireplace on cold winter mornings and evenings. It's a very efficient and inexpensive way to heat a home. There is a lot of emotion attached to it, and for good reason. But there are a ton of people out there who are still using stupidly inefficient wood fireplaces that were already outclassed by fireplaces invented over a hundred years ago, including completely open fireplaces which waste ridiculous amounts of heat and burn too cool to properly burn wood cleanly.
My father became a dealer for a line of fireplaces back in the mid-80s. These things were amazing. You start it, let it get hot for a few minutes then seal the door, damp the flu and turn down the incoming air and then you could watch the smoke recirculate and reburn inside. It put out massive amounts of heat for several hours on just two quarters of a log, and when you walked outside the only thing that gave away that the fireplace was in operation were the telltale heat waves coming out of the chimney. No visible smoke whatsoever after it got started. And these highly efficient and clean-burning stoves were available in the 80s and probably much earlier.
Contrast that with walking around the neighborhood or driving around my small town in Alaska on a cool morning or evening. The whole place is full of wood smoke from obviously inefficient wood-burning fireplaces. And because of downdrafts and inversions it tends to stay very low and hang around. We often have smoke coming in our house from houses blocks away whenever we open the window for some "fresh" air. There's really no excuse for this when I could have a stove decades ago that basically had zero detectable particulate output when it was running properly. Plus it made the wood last a lot longer.
Burning wood is air pollution no matter how you slice it, and people need to be strongly encouraged to do it as efficiently as possible. Just like vehicle regulations this only applies to newly manufactured stoves, and all those rural conspiracy theory fruit loops ranting about EPA SWAT teams coming to break down their door and take away their fireplace are just that; fruit loops. This is really much ado about not very much.
It's used as marketing, but it's still true. But you're missing the point which is that sucrose and HFCS are both EQUALLY BAD. Replacing HFCS with sucrose has no measurable benefit, so talking about banning HFCS is pointless and distracts from the primary health issue which is the presence of the fructose molecule. Far better to replace both HFCS and sucrose with some non-nutritive sweetener like sucralose or stevia which contain no fructose. The link you gave supports this fact. Sucrose is quickly separated into glucose and fructose, becoming identical to HFCS.
And it's called "high-fructose" only because it has more fructose than unprocessed corn syrup, which is about 95% glucose. Enzymes are used to create different concentrations of fructose. The HFCS that is usually used to replace sucrose is 45% glucose, 55% fructose, but there are other concentrations used in the food industry, some of which have lower fructose concentrations than the 50/50 glucose/fructose concentrations in sucrose. It is not called "high-fructose" corn syrup due to any relationship with sucrose.
You would do well to step back and refine your understanding of this issue. Look for Dr. Lustig's lectures on sugar on YouTube. They're even more illuminating than (and represent a refinement on) Gary Taubes' theories.
Here is a relevant portion FTA on what the helium actually DOES (unfortunately not mentioned in the summary):
At one-seventh the density of air, helium produces less drag on the moving components of a drive - the spinning disk platters and actuator arms -- which translates into less friction and lower operating temperatures.
The helium-drives run at four to five degrees cooler than today's 7200rpm drives, HGST stated.
Huh. I'm usually the dummy in the room*, but this particular time I thought the purpose of the helium was patently obvious. Lower density molecules = less drag. At the speeds and sizes of the components involved, it's like replacing 30-weight oil with 5-weight oil.
I must have retained that bit of knowledge from back when they were writing articles years ago about the future possibility of doing this. Pretty cool that it's finally happening.
* At least here on /..
User error? Use the warranty!
Software bug? Use the warranty!
Scratched display? Use the warranty!
Just don't like it any more? Use the warranty!
If you have any problem whatsoever, use the warranty! Now you have two problems.
Honestly, I just can't get worked up about this justified censorship. Until Apple releases some kind of official solution (which might very well be "send it in for repair"), giving out wrong solutions just increases the amount of trouble involved. Having managed a help desk before, I've seen how often we had to waste time undoing users' community-given fixes for problems, like adding RAM to remove a virus (thanks, Geek Squad!). By resorting to the warranty's options, Apple's operational cost rises, and the user still doesn't have wi-fi on their phone.
I have been a satisfied Apple user for over a decade now, but I came in here to say that Apple's discussion forum censorship is for reals one of the worst things about the company. But then I read a few posts like yours. Your post is a prime example of why I keep coming back to Slashdot despite the dupes and terrible editing and clickbait content. Instead of having my biases reinforced, I often have my mind expanded and my thoughts provoked by reading interesting alternative viewpoints here.
Thanks, man. *brofist*
Let's let that dominate the discussion.
There's always some Apple fanboys (jo_ham, where you at?), who insist the machines are higher quality etc etc, but this is mainly nonsense.
They use almost the exact same components for PC's, and are ridiculous overpriced.
Not to mention the barriers to self-repair, amping up the cost over the lifetime of the machine.
The only value they have is in the aesthetics, or if you need OS X for some reason. Generally not worth the cost except to people who like to burn money.
The same people who buy a $100 burger in a restaurant that costs $12 to make, cause it costs $100.
Wow. Full of yourself much? You just called tens of millions of people retards for daring to buy a computer brand you don't approve of.
It is an oversimplification to simply state that Apple uses many of the same components as PCs. They do, but they also have a lot of custom engineering that goes into their products, good quality control, and their demonstrably lower incidence of returns and repairs puts the lie to your idea that there is no measureable difference between Macs and PCs just because they contain some of the same components. Apple has not been at the top of all the consumer satisfaction and quality surveys for the last decade merely because people like the company logo.
You are welcome to your own opinion about the relative worth of any particular brand of computers, but get your facts straight or you just make yourself look silly and hateful. Just because other people have different criteria for buying computers does not make them all idiots buying $100 burgers. Apple's machines are more like the $18 burger from a local restaurant with great ambiance versus a $8 burger from a national chain restaurant with fluorescent lighting and plastic bench seating. Priced higher, perhaps even overpriced, but it all depends on your criteria and what you're looking for. But pretending there is no value in paying a bit more for nice ambiance is idiocy. The burger and the dining experience are both part of the price.
If you the TFA you will see at the bottom an interesting note: "In an unexpected finding, the cells of children with progeria, a genetic disorder that causes premature aging, appeared normal and reflected their true chronological age" Doesn't this make the results inconclusive at that point? Since children with this disease age faster than anyone else? If his "clock" was accurate wouldn't these children display clocks point to a much older person?
Maybe. If progeria were literally "premature temporal aging". But it isn't. It's just a genetic disorder that causes certain symptoms that appear similar to premature temporal aging. Nobody on Earth has ever actually "aged" faster or slower than anyone else. A 35-year-old person with a full head of prematurely gray hair is still the same actual age as all other 35-year-old people. He or she just has premature graying; a specific symptom of a very specific biological system, which resembles a symptom of general aging. But the gray hair does not mean the person has actually aged 90 years while the rest of us have aged 35 years. It just means that some metabolic process has reacted differently at a different time on the biological clock. Now we have to figure out what triggers all of the other independent metabolic systems to react in certain ways when they read certain timestamps from the biological clock.
What the result regarding progeria cells tells us is that this biological clock quite literally tells time, i.e. the actual temporal age of the organism. Like tree rings. Which is interesting in and of itself. If this clock is accurate enough we might finally have a way to test whether those people who are supposedly 120 or 130 or 140 years old are really as old as they think they are or whether they're just misremembering what decade they were born.
Since when has charcoal been something to bury instead of burn? Plants get carbon out of the air, they don't need to absorb it through their roots.
-jcr
Uh... Since the dawn of time itself? Plants eat each other's bio-nutrients in an endless cycle. The decay of carbon-rich plant matter creates fertilized soil for new plants.
This post is a good example of how disconnected humanity has become to the way nature actually works.
Better yet, outfit these places with urine-diverting toilets and combine the urine with the pure carbon charcoal, maybe mixed with the fully composted solid waste and you'll end up with not just plant crack but plant super-crack. It creates a carbon-nitrogen-phosphorus fertilizer that's just as good if not better than the most expensive commercially-produced fertilizers, for a tiny fraction of the cost. Essentially, free.
If you think I'm just making things up you'll find if you do some research that many places are already using this process both to reduce dependence on commercial fertilizers and to reduce the energy and money required to process waste. Not just on small scales or undeveloped countries either. I'm now wondering how well this gasification process can scale up.
The Tea Party appeared after Obama was elected because Obama is of the far-left and the Republican Party doesn't give a shit about ordinary Americans. Obama's mentor - the man who had the most influence on his life - should have gone to prison for bombing the US Capitol building. Yes, that's right, domestic terrorism of the Boston Bomber sort.
After the NSA revelations, who can really say that martial law is out of the question? The NSA stuff confirmed what a lot of "nutters" had been saying for a long time.
You're a prime example of why nobody besides the Tea Party is taking the Tea Party seriously. According to the standard political spectrum that the entire world has used for decades (at least), Obama is near-right and moving further to the right every year. If you ever met an actual "lefty" I have a feeling your brain would literally implode from an inability to comprehend what you're seeing. They're still around in Canada and Europe, if you want to observe some in the wild.
Also, you seem to be confused about what the term "martial law" means. Martial law is declared by the government, but you seem to be implying that private citizens should be declaring martial law on the government. I believe that's referred to as a "revolution" or a "civil war".
Having an upside-down and inside-out understanding of common political and legal definitions makes it really difficult for anyone to take you seriously. Even if we are fully in agreement about the NSA overreach and many other things.
Children can hurt themselves on the Internet... Quite badly...
No, seriously.
I have never seen any credible evidence whatsoever that children can be harmed by any particular nasty bits they see or read online. If they aren't interested in something they simply laugh or say, "Ewwww, gross," and move on. But they can nevertheless get themselves in a world of trouble online in various, and I don't think that age 8 is anywhere near mature enough to even begin to understand how they can destroy their own lives by making certain mistakes online.
Let's just take for instance the batshit insane prosecution of young people who take naughty pics or videos of themselves or a "friend" while they are underage. The way things are going there are many people who probably want to start branding people even those still under the age of consent as sex offenders for this kind of thing, but rest assured that as soon as you turn 18 you WILL be branded a sex offender for LIFE if some so-called "adult" or law enforcement somehow finds out you are in possession of such things, even if it's a picture of YOURSELF that you took yesterday, just before you turned 18.
Yeah, that shit happens in this country. Look it up. And once you are branded a "witch"--oh, sorry, a "sex offender", that shit is with you FOREVER, no matter how ridiculous or even false is the reason the label was originally applied. Oh, and you think this only applies to you if you live in an insane puritanical country like the US? Think again. This is really becoming a global society now. Something you do that's perfectly legal in your own country could land you in prison in another country, even decades later.
You're American and go drinking under age 21 in Europe and post the evidence on Facebook? Come back to the US and bam!, "We see you've been underage drinking while you were away. It was legal there but you're an American citizen, so we're still going to prosecute you and make you go through a drinking program. Since you're over 18 now this will of course be on your permanent legal record. You're welcome." I don't know if that specifically can happen right now (i.e. prosecution for underage drinking), but there's no reason it can't. I know for a fact that Americans are being prosecuted for things like sex offenses that happened completely outside the jurisdiction of the United States that weren't necessarily offenses at the time or location where they took place, so why not other offenses? Every nation on Earth is on track to extend their concept of "jurisdiction" to the entire planet. The US government sure feels like they already have jurisdiction over everyone, everywhere.
You'll notice I am very busy in this post NOT insulting the monarchy of Thailand. I may wish to go back there for a visit again someday. No matter where I am physically located, if I post an insult to the King of Thailand online and their immigration department finds it, I could be barred from ever entering Thailand again or imprisoned if they find out after they let me in. God forbid you're a citizen of some even more insane country like Saudi Arabia. "Oh, we see you are a female Saudi citizen and were photographed behind the wheel of an automobile while on vacation in America. Also, you were unsupervised by a male at the time. Now that you're back, here are your 2,000 lashes and/or death by stoning. You're welcome."
So, what used to be a youthful indiscretions that didn't really matter can easily put a serious crimp on a child's life, wherever you're from. It is not the content of the Internet that will damage a child directly, as the moral-panicking parents always believe. It is that which the child creates that can leave them without possible job prospects or life choices decades later, because of how OTHER PEOPLE react to what the child leaves behind in their wake. The Internet truly does not forget, and even if privacy laws are strongly enhanced in any specific country that fact will never change.
We're all well down the road to making a ton of sil
I was wondering about the lack of concern and so I started asking friends and family about their views on the NSA scandal. None of my non-techie friends/family had heard of it. The local news doesn't carry it, many main stream outlets don't pay it more than a passing mention and they don't visit tech websites, so they were all in the dark about the issue. The fact of the matter is that unless you're a tech-minded person you probably either do not know about the NSA controversy or you don't understand the implications.
This is really the heart of the matter. Social change requires that a certain percentage of a population directly feel the impact of something, along with a further percentage feeling indirect impact (such as personally knowing someone who is directly impacted). Once the percentage climbs past the tipping point, the entire herd suddenly begins to move. I believe the rule is 10% of a given population. Before this threshold is reached it seems as if nothing will ever happen and as if no force can make the herd move. On the flip side, after the threshold is passed the movement is unstoppable until the herd reaches a new resting state.
These "implications" of loss of civil liberties and violations of the Constitution are simply not enough to penetrate the herd-mind gestalt, much less get it moving. Yet. Things have to get much, much worse before the herd-mind will even look up from grazing to notice that something is wrong. There have to actually be real, widespread and blindingly obvious violations of the Constitutional rights of everyday Americans, and LOTS of them, before anything will happen. This is simply the way of things. What we have so far are basically just inconveniences in absolute terms. No one is being sent to gulags or executed in mass numbers. The herd-mind sees "Free-Speech Zones" and mass collection of data and says, "Pfft, big deal." Because nothing truly bad has come of it. Yet.
This is why I was of half a mind to vote Republican in the last election, precisely because of how ridiculously extreme their views have become. At the current stage of things the most winning move would actually be to hasten the rise of the extremists, thus hastening both their period of oppressive rule over things and the rapidity and finality of their eventual rejection and defeat, and the height of the enlightenment period that would follow. Until then good luck getting the herd to wake up and move in any specific direction. Ain't gonna happen except at a nearly imperceptible glacial pace, one person at a time. It's simply the mathematical laws of human nature and population dynamics at work.
Reason for Lightning: see this hideous microUSB 3.0 cable what sort of shitty design is this? I know it's backwards compatible, but the USB standard was not future-proof as one can see from the picture, so it deserves to die.
As you can see from the cable, the backwards compatibility will only work in one direction. Clearly, because of the larger connector, USB 3.0 cables (regular, mini or micro) are not compatible with non-USB 3.0 devices. Newer devices will still work with the older micro-USB cables that don't have the wider connector, but that's as far as "backwards compatibility" goes. The new USB 3.0 connectors are essentially completely different connectors, and ridiculously larger.
Seems to me the EU is being very premature in standardizing on a version of micro-USB that is already obsolete. Surely industry can work together and create a new standard that has all the awesomeness of the Lightning connector and the openness of USB, combined with some well thought out features to make the standard future-resistant for at least a couple of decades.
When the initial rumors of Apple's new connector started appearing I was at one point convinced that Apple was going to do something truly awesome and introduce a contact-only magnetic connector like the MagSafe connector they've been using on laptops for several years. Not only would such a connector completely negate the possibility of damaging your device internally by twisting or yanking on the cable, but it would also make it easy to keep both sides of the connector clean and functioning in dirty environments. It would also be possible to make the device-side connector waterproof so that devices could be charged while they are otherwise sealed and protected in waterproof cases.
Sadly I was mistaken and they introduced yet another insertable connector that just provides an ingress point for moisture and debris and a way to possibly easily damage a device costing hundreds of dollars. And with the incredible hue and cry there has been when they left the 30-pin connector behind you know they'll have to do everything in their power to stick with Lightning as a standard for at least a decade, as they did with the 30-pin. They have no choice but to fight tooth and nail against being forced to switch to some other connector so soon after introducing Lightning.
Bottom line is I love my iPhone's Lightning connection, like most actual users seem to, but neither the Lightning connector nor any current USB connector qualifies to be a standardized, future-resistant, worldwide personal-device connector in my mind. There has to be a better standard that we can come up with.
I worked for a Federal Government Contractor. I administered a number of servers--the one with financial information and one with Classified information. I found another employee trying to break into my servers on a few occasions and reported this security breach to management. The CIO said "Good catch" but did nothing to the employee. (Well the CIO did give a promotion to the offending employee.) As a manager, this person set up a rogue server between Security Audits and continued his attempts to break into my servers on a regular basis. I continued to tell management and added notifications to Cyber-Security. Nothing was ever done about these attempted breaches.
That's... very odd.
The way you tell this little anecdote makes it sound remarkably like this other employee was doing precisely what he was actually supposed to be doing. How else do you explain the fact that not only was nothing done about his attempts to breach security but apparently he was rewarded for these ongoing activities. Maybe he was actually the penetration tester assigned to make sure you were competently doing your job and you just weren't in the loop on what his real job assignment was. Eh? Seems a far more likely explanation than management both completely ignoring and promoting someone reported as repeatedly and continuously trying to break into classified data.
I note you say "trying" and "attempts" and "regular basis" rather than "succeeded" and "stole classified data" and "once". To me the whole thing seems to describe someone whose job it is to go around rattling office doors at night to make sure they're locked, rather than someone trying to sneak in and crack the safe and steal the office payroll. When the night watchman tries to open locked doors he's doing exactly what he's paid to do. On the other hand, those bent on actual thievery do not typically go around drawing attention to themselves in such a way.
Very odd indeed.
> I'm also one of those weirdos who thinks the most recent few seasons of the show are boot-licking, Doctor-worshiping, ultra-melodramatic, vomit-inducing crap that caused Doctor Who to go from one of my favorite shows of all time to something I cannot physically stomach watching anymore.
Are you mad!?!?!?!?
You forgot "human-lauding".
There were more "brilliant"s (or synonyms) in every Tennant-era program than in a whole series of The Fast Show. Barf!
Give me Sylvester McCoy any day over that, with his "Your species has the most amazing capacity for self-deception, matched by only its ingenuity when trying to destroy itself".
I'd have to agree they did lay it on a bit thick during the Tennant era, especially with the "normal looking humans surviving at the end of the universe 100 trillion years from now" BS they pulled when they revived the Master character. That was far beyond ridiculous. There aren't words for how ridiculously improbable that was.
But I was mostly talking about everything post-Tennant.
So, to paraphrase quite a few comments on this article:
"Duh, Los alamos are so stupid - less material in contact, less force, just like friction. I can't believe they only just worked that out. I mean DUH, they could've asked me THAT. Oh, and they make nukes. Eurgh, I hate them!"
Really? You seriously think that's all there is to it? I only read the abstract, and it states that the decrease in the Casimir force is far beyond theoretical predictions. But pffth, they probably got that wrong too, right?
I dunno, the misplaced arrogance I read on here sometimes really depresses me.
There's arrogance, but then there's also the fact that this really does seem perfectly intuitive. If your surfaces have a tendency to stick to one another due to some kind of oddball "force" not quite the same as but similar to the static friction force, how is it not obvious that it might be helpful to reduce the amount of surface area that comes together between the two surfaces? After all, it works well with static friction.
I'm thinking this came out because A) they found a good way to create a micro- or nano-scale surface with sufficiently reduced area, and B) the positive result seems to significantly exceed the predicted effect, and they don't know why. That's why it's interesting. Not because the underlying concept is an amazing new idea. I'll bet the idea has been around for a long time, which is what prompted them to try to take the steps that created this result.
I don't think there's any need to be so offended by peoples' intuitive response in this particular case. They're just reacting to an article and summary that makes it seem like the simple part if the story (the idea of reducing surface area in contact) is a new, breakthrough idea when it really isn't, instead of emphasizing the parts of the story that are actually new and interesting (the actual results that exceed predictions).