Think about coal waste. Orders of magnitude more coal waste are produced by coal plants. This stuff is exceedingly toxic, loaded with heavy metals and thorium and other chemicals such as arsenic. These pollute the water supply. And they never decay. They are there forever. Oh yeah, and then there's the air pollution too.
Nuclear waste on the other hand can be contained in an absolutely secure underground storage area until it decays to safe levels.
decades ? look back to your periodic table. Uranium 235 has a half-life of 700 millions years. For a ton of it today, there will still be half a ton of it in 700 million years. Worst, uranium passes throught a lot of stages in it's decaying before becomming stable lead including a gas stage ( radon ) which makes it very difficult to contain.
Uh, U 235 is barely radioactive at all. Uranium is less radioactive than it's ore, which happens to be exceedingly common. Uranium is one of the most common elements in the crust. There's lots of it in the soil you're standing above right now. It's radioactivity is unconsequential unless you eat it or something.
To demonstrate the durability of CD-R media, my ex-roommate once licked the active side. I hope neither the dye nor the plastic is toxic. But since I was always suspicious my roomie may have had a few screws loose, that may not matter too much.
Hell, I do that all the time to clean the dried coffee/dirt/gunk off of my music CDs that I've burned. It's just plastic. Plastic sure as hell isn't toxic. And the dye layer is sandwiched.
I always teach new computer users google. It does just as much for you as the other search engines and it has a simple, non-confusing layout unlike Yahoo or MSN that beginning users like.
My initial statement was about in general that the price we pay at the register is not what the real price of the product is.
Sounds like just a misunderstanding then. You are right. Depending on what products you are talking about, always some part of the cost of the product will come from the government, whether from subsidies, roads, grants, or what ever. With most products, it is a rather small percentage of the cost, although some products (i.e. wheat) are exceedingly subsidized. But, while the price at the supermarket does not accurately reflect the price of the product, you are still paying the full price for it, and then some. It's called taxes of course. I don't see it as a particularly bad thing, as long as government spending and taxes don't get out of hand. In fact, you need some government spending to even out the ups and downs of the business cycle with fiscal policy.
Um... You are aware that most agriculture is very heavily subsidized by the government? Both locally, state and federal?
It's not only the Highways, but other things as well. It's not only the roads, but production as well. Read up a bit.
Of course agriculture is subsidized heavily but we were talking about shipping costs and why it is cheaper to get things like fresh fruits from elsewhere.
What is wrong is simply the cost, I am sure there is more spent on fuel to truck the apples to the store than I pay for it.
Someone has to subsidize it, I wonder who.
Of course the highways are subsidized. But shipment, especially in bulk, is very cheap. We are talking cents per kilogram. A truck or a train isn't going to burn very much fuel to ship your apple. It's an insignificant cost. There isn't much subsidizing going on. There's no need for it. This is a free market economy at work. Cheap shipment means goods produced elsewhere can undercut local competition. (Of course, this frees up the local resources to produce goods they are more suited to producing, which is better for the economy in the long run)
Not to mention the burn in problems. If I had a plasma, I'd never have it display pictures. You might get burn in problems, and at the very least a great reduction in brightness and contrast in the long term due to such constant usage. The thing that sucks about plasma compared to LCDs is that they lose their brightness fast and have burn in problems. The new line of bigscreen LCDs by Samsung that have 12 ms response times are far better choices than plasmas these days.
Spending $500 for this is beyond dumb. Hi-definition largescreen plasmas or LCDs almost universally have VGA connectors. For the love of god, just get a second cheap PCI video card and hook it up to your computer to display Rembrant or Mapplethorpe or whatever you want with a slideshow program.
Or let's go with fresh fruits, I live in Toronto and guess what, most of my apples come from California.
There is something horrificly wrong in the way the market works I'd say.
Just like the AC said, read up on comparative advantage. It's called free trade. I live in a temperate area. I can't get pineapples from my region because you can't grow pineapples in temperate zones. Thus the Thai produce it for me. My regional economy is better suited to producing apples and grapes, so these products are produced in leiu of other products.
It's not horrifically wrong at all. It makes perfect sense and it is the way the world economy should work. That is, unless you'd like to go back to preindustrial conditions and live by the mercy of the harvest.
Try a Zalman silent CPU cooler. They cool very well with only a tiny, low RPM fan due to the immense surface area of the heatsink. I bet you can pick one up somewhere else for less money than Thinkgeek.
Sure it's huge, but I could get just as big of a difference between two runs using the EXACT same hard drive.
The tester didn't even bother to check and see if the files are fragmented, let alone checking to see if the files are on the same part of the disk. The original poster was right, this was NOT in any way a "good" comparison.
Exactly. If only I had my mod points. This qualifies as one of the worst tests I have ever seen. Yes, he didn't bother to check file fragmentation, which really can lower speed, especially since the the WD IDE drive had an 8.9 ms seek time, much longer than the SCSI.
The IDE was a much poorer drive. Longer seek times, 2mb instead of 4mb cache. God what a crappy test.
Re:Been saying it for years
on
CNet on WinFS
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· Score: 1
Case in point: Windows 2000 and above has no problem reading FAT32 partitions greater than 32GB in size. But it refuses to create FAT32 partitions > 32GB in size. Why? Because at that size, Microsoft knows better, Microsoft knows you should be uses NTFS and get the benefits of meta-data and journaling.
Except, I don't want the overhead for my MP3 collection. The meta-data's already present in the ID3 tags, and I don't need journaling -- once the ID3 tags are written, they're essential read-only. I want low overhead storage for very large (several MB) files.
In this case, Microsoft does know better. NTFS has less overhead than FAT32. Sure, it has more meta-data, such as the file level security (not that that would EVER be noticable). But NTFS has smaller cluster sizes than FAT32, so at more than makes up for the meta data. Just use NTFS.
And in another FOURTY years (good morning UK:) they're predicted to be well ahead of the pack economically. Kind of pointless to belittle their achievements.
It irritates me that people constantly say that "China is forty years behind the U.S. and the U.S.S.R." Well, actually, our best manned spaceflight technology is over twenty years old. (The space shuttle. Actually, the Soyuz is a overall better craft.) The Chinese vehicle, with a possible crew of three, is very close in design to the Soyuz, which is much more advanced that what Gagarin flew up in.
China is a fast rising economic and technological power. Their economy is growing three to four times as fast as the U.S. economy, their government is liberalizing, and they have nowhere to go but up.
The US is fine as long as you're white, xtian, straight and male. I wonder how long a gay pagan goth would survive in much of the country. As a nation th US is paranoid, isolationist and egotistical.
I suppose you'd know being from the UK. Well, we are one of the most diverse countries in the world. We have very open immigration policies and are much more foreigner-friendly compared to Germany (guest workers treated like shit) or Japan.
I had two Western Digital drives (100 and 120 gigs), one IBM drive (45 gigs), and one Maxtor drive (20 gigs) fail on me in the last year or two. That's out of maybe 10 hard drives installed in my home machines. All except the Maxtor were still under warranty. The two WD drives were fairly new. I usually have one small fan for each hard disk -- they run very cool.
I'm afraid you seem to have a case of bad luck. My drives don't have fans of their own. Heck, except for my newest machine, there isn't even what I'd call adequate case cooling. Your other drives probably won't fail, although, like I said, you may want to try enterprise SCSI or RAID if you have money to burn.
Yes it is. RAID 1 writes data to two disks simultaneosly. Thus you have complete and total fault tolerance. Anyway, probably the best way of backing up data is the obvious choice: Go buy really cheap high capacity hard drives. They are so cheap now it is ridiculous. You can get medium-high end IBM 120 gig 7200 RPM 2MB hard drives for only $80. That's far cheaper than DVDs, and you won't have 25 DVDs to sift through to find your data.
Just wait till your hard drive crashes one day. CDs and DVDs are HELL of a lot more reliable than a 40+GB hard drive. I've never seen a CD or DVD disintegrate unless it was abused, but the life of a hard drive is measured in months. Most fail after 2-4 years. If carried around - much, much sooner.
Either you have terrible luck with hard drives, you buy cruddy brands, or you have some kind of problem like inadequate case cooling. I've had excellent luck. I have two old Compaqs with Quantum drives that have been humming away for many years. My main computer has a 40 and 120 gig WD Caviars. Those have had absolutely zero bad sectors or other problems.
My advice, if you have persistant problems with bad hard drives: Be sure to get a good brand. Preferably Western Digital or IBM or one of the main ones. Make sure you have adequate case cooling. High case temperatures with inadequate air circulation by the hard drives may cause unreliability. You might want to think about installing an intake fan or two. Also, just be sure to scandisk and defrag regularly if you are using Windows 9x. Actually, you are better off switching to an NT or Linux using a journalling FS like XFS or Ext3 rather than Ext2.
If you're really paranoid, get an enterprise hard drive. Like maybe a SCSI or a SATA 10,000 RPM WD raptor drive. Those things won't fail.
Try a USB 2.0 external hard drive - you can't even tell the difference between it and an internal drive if you've got USB 2.0.
I disagree. Real world transfer rates for USB 2.0 are about 12 mBps (90 mbps), compared to upwards of 36 mBps for sustained data tranfer with ATA/100. Only ATA/100, Firewire, SCSI, and SATA can keep up with today's fast hard drives.
Anyway, EIDE drives are really cheap. You can get a decent 7200 RPM 120 gig IBM w/2mb cache for only $80 on Pricewatch, which works out to 66 cents/gigabyte. USB drives start at $110 and are much slower.
You're missing the whole point of the ion drive. Yes, it's slow and not really very effective at this point, but that's not so much a problem with the drive itself as it is with their fuel source: crappy, marginally effective solar panels.
Wrong. The ion engine is exceedingly low thrust but very efficient. Ion drives, with specific impulses (efficiency measures) in the thousands rather than the 450 that the O2/H2 shuttle main engine gets, is many times more efficient than conventional chemical rockets. It is very fast. It just needs time to accelerate, but after months of acceleration, its final velocity is much greater than a chemical rocket could ever hope to achieve. Thus, ion engines are ideally suited to mission to the outer solar system and the Kuiper Belt.
And the fuel source is not solar cells. That is it's power source. Ion drives use a variety of fuels such as xenon (like on the Deep Space 1) that are electrostatically accelerated.
I remember that book but, like you, can't remember the title (involved a pair of twins and relativity). Problem with turning round is that you increase the journey time by gradually deaccelerating. Best to get there at fast speed and jam on the brakes. Is there enough atmosphere on Mars to aerobrake?
Everyone here needs a primer on how orbital trajectories work. Say I want to get to Saturn. Saturn is in a further out orbit from the Sun, thus it travels much faster than the Earth. So, to get there I do not point the nose of my rocket towards Saturn and accelerate. That will get me no where at all. I'd fall back down to my original orbit. What I'd do instead is accelerate almost parallel to the Earth's orbit. This would gain orbital speed and send me out to an elliptical orbit intersecting with Saturn. Done correctly, there would be no need to slow down at all. How do you think probes such as Galileo can get into the orbits of outer planets like Jupiter without the use of thrusters?
Huh. Then how would they slow down once they got to Mars? Would they have much more powerfull thrusters for landing?
Uh. I'd assume that the ion engines would accelerate from Earth orbit and gain orbital speed in order to enter a transfer orbit which intersects with Mars. There would be no need to slow down other than for slight orbital trajectory corrections. And of course you would have conventional chemical retro-rockets and/or parachutes to land on Mars.
Magnetic alignment is caused by spin, of course. But these are spin polarized currents that are blocked or allowed to pass by certain magnetic configurations. Mind bogglingly complicated compared to vanilla magnetic storage.
my cousin died of cancer when she was only 17. Likewise you can get Alzheimer's before 60.
That doesn't prove much though. People still got cancer in the early 1900's and 1800's. It was just more rare because they didn't live as long. Senility was not unknown either.
For starters I would look at how much more chemicals are in our air, and some of the things we use; cleaning products, spray deodorant, etc.
The levels of smog and air pollutants during the Industrial Revolution were far higher than today, with loads of heavy industry and no pollution controls. Far higher. As in, thousands of people died in London directly from it's effects. So how exactly does the lower air pollution rates of today cause such high cancer rates?
In the 1800s, if you got to age 60 you were doing pretty good. Very few people get cancer or senility before age 60. Very few. Now most people live well into their 70s or 80s, hence the higher rates of diseases that strike at these ages, such as cancer and Alzheimer's.
I didn't believe him at the time, thought he was winding me up (as usual). But then, as a result of a trip to eastern europe, I switched to drinking bottled water. After 3 weeks or so, my mind was very much clearer. Yes, I became more agressive and generally nastier, but definitely quicker on the uptake and less prone to unthinking action.
That's why I only drink rainwater and pure grain alcohol.
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Think about coal waste. Orders of magnitude more coal waste are produced by coal plants. This stuff is exceedingly toxic, loaded with heavy metals and thorium and other chemicals such as arsenic. These pollute the water supply. And they never decay. They are there forever. Oh yeah, and then there's the air pollution too.
Nuclear waste on the other hand can be contained in an absolutely secure underground storage area until it decays to safe levels.
decades ? look back to your periodic table. Uranium 235 has a half-life of 700 millions years. For a ton of it today, there will still be half a ton of it in 700 million years. Worst, uranium passes throught a lot of stages in it's decaying before becomming stable lead including a gas stage ( radon ) which makes it very difficult to contain.
Uh, U 235 is barely radioactive at all. Uranium is less radioactive than it's ore, which happens to be exceedingly common. Uranium is one of the most common elements in the crust. There's lots of it in the soil you're standing above right now. It's radioactivity is unconsequential unless you eat it or something.
To demonstrate the durability of CD-R media, my ex-roommate once licked the active side. I hope neither the dye nor the plastic is toxic. But since I was always suspicious my roomie may have had a few screws loose, that may not matter too much.
Hell, I do that all the time to clean the dried coffee/dirt/gunk off of my music CDs that I've burned. It's just plastic. Plastic sure as hell isn't toxic. And the dye layer is sandwiched.
I always teach new computer users google. It does just as much for you as the other search engines and it has a simple, non-confusing layout unlike Yahoo or MSN that beginning users like.
My initial statement was about in general that the price we pay at the register is not what the real price of the product is.
Sounds like just a misunderstanding then. You are right. Depending on what products you are talking about, always some part of the cost of the product will come from the government, whether from subsidies, roads, grants, or what ever. With most products, it is a rather small percentage of the cost, although some products (i.e. wheat) are exceedingly subsidized. But, while the price at the supermarket does not accurately reflect the price of the product, you are still paying the full price for it, and then some. It's called taxes of course. I don't see it as a particularly bad thing, as long as government spending and taxes don't get out of hand. In fact, you need some government spending to even out the ups and downs of the business cycle with fiscal policy.
Um... You are aware that most agriculture is very heavily subsidized by the government? Both locally, state and federal?
It's not only the Highways, but other things as well. It's not only the roads, but production as well. Read up a bit.
Of course agriculture is subsidized heavily but we were talking about shipping costs and why it is cheaper to get things like fresh fruits from elsewhere.
What is wrong is simply the cost, I am sure there is more spent on fuel to truck the apples to the store than I pay for it.
Someone has to subsidize it, I wonder who.
Of course the highways are subsidized. But shipment, especially in bulk, is very cheap. We are talking cents per kilogram. A truck or a train isn't going to burn very much fuel to ship your apple. It's an insignificant cost. There isn't much subsidizing going on. There's no need for it. This is a free market economy at work. Cheap shipment means goods produced elsewhere can undercut local competition. (Of course, this frees up the local resources to produce goods they are more suited to producing, which is better for the economy in the long run)
Not to mention the burn in problems. If I had a plasma, I'd never have it display pictures. You might get burn in problems, and at the very least a great reduction in brightness and contrast in the long term due to such constant usage. The thing that sucks about plasma compared to LCDs is that they lose their brightness fast and have burn in problems. The new line of bigscreen LCDs by Samsung that have 12 ms response times are far better choices than plasmas these days.
Spending $500 for this is beyond dumb. Hi-definition largescreen plasmas or LCDs almost universally have VGA connectors. For the love of god, just get a second cheap PCI video card and hook it up to your computer to display Rembrant or Mapplethorpe or whatever you want with a slideshow program.
Or let's go with fresh fruits, I live in Toronto and guess what, most of my apples come from California.
There is something horrificly wrong in the way the market works I'd say.
Just like the AC said, read up on comparative advantage. It's called free trade. I live in a temperate area. I can't get pineapples from my region because you can't grow pineapples in temperate zones. Thus the Thai produce it for me. My regional economy is better suited to producing apples and grapes, so these products are produced in leiu of other products.
It's not horrifically wrong at all. It makes perfect sense and it is the way the world economy should work. That is, unless you'd like to go back to preindustrial conditions and live by the mercy of the harvest.
Try a Zalman silent CPU cooler. They cool very well with only a tiny, low RPM fan due to the immense surface area of the heatsink. I bet you can pick one up somewhere else for less money than Thinkgeek.
Sure it's huge, but I could get just as big of a difference between two runs using the EXACT same hard drive.
The tester didn't even bother to check and see if the files are fragmented, let alone checking to see if the files are on the same part of the disk. The original poster was right, this was NOT in any way a "good" comparison.
Exactly. If only I had my mod points. This qualifies as one of the worst tests I have ever seen. Yes, he didn't bother to check file fragmentation, which really can lower speed, especially since the the WD IDE drive had an 8.9 ms seek time, much longer than the SCSI.
The IDE was a much poorer drive. Longer seek times, 2mb instead of 4mb cache. God what a crappy test.
Case in point: Windows 2000 and above has no problem reading FAT32 partitions greater than 32GB in size. But it refuses to create FAT32 partitions > 32GB in size. Why? Because at that size, Microsoft knows better, Microsoft knows you should be uses NTFS and get the benefits of meta-data and journaling.
Except, I don't want the overhead for my MP3 collection. The meta-data's already present in the ID3 tags, and I don't need journaling -- once the ID3 tags are written, they're essential read-only. I want low overhead storage for very large (several MB) files.
In this case, Microsoft does know better. NTFS has less overhead than FAT32. Sure, it has more meta-data, such as the file level security (not that that would EVER be noticable). But NTFS has smaller cluster sizes than FAT32, so at more than makes up for the meta data. Just use NTFS.
And in another FOURTY years (good morning UK:) they're predicted to be well ahead of the pack economically. Kind of pointless to belittle their achievements.
It irritates me that people constantly say that "China is forty years behind the U.S. and the U.S.S.R." Well, actually, our best manned spaceflight technology is over twenty years old. (The space shuttle. Actually, the Soyuz is a overall better craft.) The Chinese vehicle, with a possible crew of three, is very close in design to the Soyuz, which is much more advanced that what Gagarin flew up in.
China is a fast rising economic and technological power. Their economy is growing three to four times as fast as the U.S. economy, their government is liberalizing, and they have nowhere to go but up.
The US is fine as long as you're white, xtian, straight and male. I wonder how long a gay pagan goth would survive in much of the country. As a nation th US is paranoid, isolationist and egotistical.
I suppose you'd know being from the UK. Well, we are one of the most diverse countries in the world. We have very open immigration policies and are much more foreigner-friendly compared to Germany (guest workers treated like shit) or Japan.
I had two Western Digital drives (100 and 120 gigs), one IBM drive (45 gigs), and one Maxtor drive (20 gigs) fail on me in the last year or two. That's out of maybe 10 hard drives installed in my home machines. All except the Maxtor were still under warranty. The two WD drives were fairly new. I usually have one small fan for each hard disk -- they run very cool.
I'm afraid you seem to have a case of bad luck. My drives don't have fans of their own. Heck, except for my newest machine, there isn't even what I'd call adequate case cooling. Your other drives probably won't fail, although, like I said, you may want to try enterprise SCSI or RAID if you have money to burn.
RAIDing is not a backup method.
Yes it is. RAID 1 writes data to two disks simultaneosly. Thus you have complete and total fault tolerance. Anyway, probably the best way of backing up data is the obvious choice: Go buy really cheap high capacity hard drives. They are so cheap now it is ridiculous. You can get medium-high end IBM 120 gig 7200 RPM 2MB hard drives for only $80. That's far cheaper than DVDs, and you won't have 25 DVDs to sift through to find your data.
Just wait till your hard drive crashes one day. CDs and DVDs are HELL of a lot more reliable than a 40+GB hard drive. I've never seen a CD or DVD disintegrate unless it was abused, but the life of a hard drive is measured in months. Most fail after 2-4 years. If carried around - much, much sooner.
Either you have terrible luck with hard drives, you buy cruddy brands, or you have some kind of problem like inadequate case cooling. I've had excellent luck. I have two old Compaqs with Quantum drives that have been humming away for many years. My main computer has a 40 and 120 gig WD Caviars. Those have had absolutely zero bad sectors or other problems.
My advice, if you have persistant problems with bad hard drives: Be sure to get a good brand. Preferably Western Digital or IBM or one of the main ones. Make sure you have adequate case cooling. High case temperatures with inadequate air circulation by the hard drives may cause unreliability. You might want to think about installing an intake fan or two. Also, just be sure to scandisk and defrag regularly if you are using Windows 9x. Actually, you are better off switching to an NT or Linux using a journalling FS like XFS or Ext3 rather than Ext2.
If you're really paranoid, get an enterprise hard drive. Like maybe a SCSI or a SATA 10,000 RPM WD raptor drive. Those things won't fail.
Try a USB 2.0 external hard drive - you can't even tell the difference between it and an internal drive if you've got USB 2.0.
I disagree. Real world transfer rates for USB 2.0 are about 12 mBps (90 mbps), compared to upwards of 36 mBps for sustained data tranfer with ATA/100. Only ATA/100, Firewire, SCSI, and SATA can keep up with today's fast hard drives.
Anyway, EIDE drives are really cheap. You can get a decent 7200 RPM 120 gig IBM w/2mb cache for only
$80 on Pricewatch, which works out to 66 cents/gigabyte. USB drives start at $110 and are much slower.
You're missing the whole point of the ion drive. Yes, it's slow and not really very effective at this point, but that's not so much a problem with the drive itself as it is with their fuel source: crappy, marginally effective solar panels.
Wrong. The ion engine is exceedingly low thrust but very efficient. Ion drives, with specific impulses (efficiency measures) in the thousands rather than the 450 that the O2/H2 shuttle main engine gets, is many times more efficient than conventional chemical rockets. It is very fast. It just needs time to accelerate, but after months of acceleration, its final velocity is much greater than a chemical rocket could ever hope to achieve. Thus, ion engines are ideally suited to mission to the outer solar system and the Kuiper Belt.
And the fuel source is not solar cells. That is it's power source. Ion drives use a variety of fuels such as xenon (like on the Deep Space 1) that are electrostatically accelerated.
I remember that book but, like you, can't remember the title (involved a pair of twins and relativity). Problem with turning round is that you increase the journey time by gradually deaccelerating. Best to get there at fast speed and jam on the brakes. Is there enough atmosphere on Mars to aerobrake?
Everyone here needs a primer on how orbital trajectories work. Say I want to get to Saturn. Saturn is in a further out orbit from the Sun, thus it travels much faster than the Earth. So, to get there I do not point the nose of my rocket towards Saturn and accelerate. That will get me no where at all. I'd fall back down to my original orbit. What I'd do instead is accelerate almost parallel to the Earth's orbit. This would gain orbital speed and send me out to an elliptical orbit intersecting with Saturn. Done correctly, there would be no need to slow down at all. How do you think probes such as Galileo can get into the orbits of outer planets like Jupiter without the use of thrusters?
Huh. Then how would they slow down once they got to Mars? Would they have much more powerfull thrusters for landing?
Uh. I'd assume that the ion engines would accelerate from Earth orbit and gain orbital speed in order to enter a transfer orbit which intersects with Mars. There would be no need to slow down other than for slight orbital trajectory corrections. And of course you would have conventional chemical retro-rockets and/or parachutes to land on Mars.
Magnetic alignment is caused by spin, of course. But these are spin polarized currents that are blocked or allowed to pass by certain magnetic configurations. Mind bogglingly complicated compared to vanilla magnetic storage.
my cousin died of cancer when she was only 17. Likewise you can get Alzheimer's before 60.
That doesn't prove much though. People still got cancer in the early 1900's and 1800's. It was just more rare because they didn't live as long. Senility was not unknown either.
For starters I would look at how much more chemicals are in our air, and some of the things we use; cleaning products, spray deodorant, etc.
The levels of smog and air pollutants during the Industrial Revolution were far higher than today, with loads of heavy industry and no pollution controls. Far higher. As in, thousands of people died in London directly from it's effects. So how exactly does the lower air pollution rates of today cause such high cancer rates?
In the 1800s, if you got to age 60 you were doing pretty good. Very few people get cancer or senility before age 60. Very few. Now most people live well into their 70s or 80s, hence the higher rates of diseases that strike at these ages, such as cancer and Alzheimer's.
I didn't believe him at the time, thought he was winding me up (as usual). But then, as a result of a trip to eastern europe, I switched to drinking bottled water. After 3 weeks or so, my mind was very much clearer. Yes, I became more agressive and generally nastier, but definitely quicker on the uptake and less prone to unthinking action.
That's why I only drink rainwater and pure grain alcohol.