Hmmm, why would I have an internet-enabled and feature-rich computer that easily fits in my pocket, that can also make phone calls, when I could be dragging a laptop *and* a phone around? Nope, I'm drawing a blank. You got me there.
Doctors should diagnose based on full spectrum data collection. Not simply based on what they see and think at first glance. That's like a climatologist looking at a clear blue sky on a good day and saying "look, no smog. Clearly climate change is not caused by man made pollutants!!! No need to look any further into this."
On second though, perhaps a car analogy would work better. Can somebody help me out here?:)
Sorry - no car analogy [they usually suck in any case:) Yes, a thorough examination should of course be done, that goes without saying. To be fair, only "A small percentage" (I've read that the real number is slightly above 1%) *actually* has any physiological excuses, but a doctor should be on the look-out for those, and additionally be able to work with attitudes and mental "disorders" affecting the patient's weight control. In the end, except for those 1%, it comes down to eat less, move more. Even though actually doing that could prove somewhat hard, it's the only way weight loss is going to happen.
With respect Runaway, that thinking right there is exactly the problem.
Obese != unhealthy life choices (at least not in all cases)
Take for example the 250lb person who eats right, jogs, and works out every day vs the 145lb person who never exercises, eats cookies, and pounds beer and soda but for some reason never gains a pound.
I used to know a guy of the former variety, except he weighed about 250 kg. His body mass was a lot of fat, but his personal best bench press was 243 kg. In a Norwegian strength thest where you lie on your back and use your feet to push weights straight upwards on rails, he piled on all the weights he could find (about 600kg), and subsequently asked me and a buddy to perch on top, and he nailed it. I've also seen him on the ski slope. He's quick and agile, because he has almost superhuman strenght, ample to support his large bulk. Working as a door man a trick of his was famous; he grabbed two ~100kg sacks of food waste in *each hand* and carried them two flights of stairs down and then 100m to the container. In another situation, written up in the local paper, he restrained a huge body-building type by lifting him up, putting him gently face down on the ground, and placing his hand on the guys back. He couldn't move.
He started losing weight after being told to do so by his doctor to (his body is *hard* on his heart and other organs), but he dropped it because "I couldn't maintain my strenght, and suddenly everything was wearying". He obviously was comfortable being enormous. In most cases, though, I agree with Runaway that obesity stems from unfortunate life style choices.
Even though yes, you are simply eating too much in the thermodynamic sense, it rapidly becomes a stigma where the patient is 'at fault', rather than the underlying medical condition. In this way, victimisation of obese patients is counter-productive.
Sure some people simply have no self-control - but is that because they are bad people, or because there is some factor at work that makes it hard for them? The blame game for obesity is a bit like accusing people with a birth mark of being in league with the devil and burning them - we should know better by now.
I'm very lucky that I stay relatively thin and somewhat athletic without significant excercise, despite eating whatever I want. But I can imagine how hard it would be to accept that I'd have to change my food- and exercise habits in order to lose weight, knowing that I basically have to keep doing it for life. I am not sure I would be able to do so myself, if the need should arise down the line. I did gain about 7 kgs over the past 6-7 years (I'm 37), so I might have to start considering it:)
However, your AC parent is correct, although he stated it in a somewhat aggressive manner. "A small percentage" of overweight people (I've read about 1% cited from an MD in a news article which I can't find at the moment) have some physiological condition which makes it impossible or extremely difficult to lose weight. Thus the cold, hard reality is that the vast majority simply eats too much and moves too little. To be flippant, "being too fond of cake" is usually not a medical condition. Of course there are also various mental "disorders" of different severities, often connected with the overweight itself, which can make it very hard to focus on a healthy lifestyle.
This still indicates that the vast majority of overweight people need to be aware of the fact that yes, they are responsible for their weight, and that they themselves are ultimately the only ones that can do something about it, even though it can be damned hard. There is no need to go it alone, there are a lot of programs one can join, I imagine that is also the case in the US, but you need to instigate the change *yourself*.
On a side note, there are some loud people who skew the public opinion against obese people. A notable example in Norway is Jørgen Foss, the spokesman for the Norwegian National Association of Overweight People, who is a complete clown. He might possibly be the worst spokesman for any organisation ever, as he keeps harping on about how he's completely innocent and unable to to anything about his weight, that some people prefer to be huge, and stuff like that. He dismisses lifestyle changes as a measure (claiming it's impossible), and frowns on programs which could actually help people (there's supposedly no reason for him to even try, as a program wouldn't help him anyway; he would just continue overeating). That doesn't exactly tend to instill any sympathy in me.
Another spokesperson for the same organisation famously complained that "Not even the chairs at McDonald's are big enough. Some of us have experienced that the chairs are stuck to us when we get up." This is not a satirical article, nor did the statement seem to be uttered in jest. In the QA session she very aggressively dismisses any suggestion that laying off the snacks and junk food (of which she consumes a substantial amount) is a viable course of action.
Shit like this seriously harms their cause, and is very much the wrong message to send to people in that situation IMO.
Overtime? What the F**K is that? I am a salary engineer and I don't get overtime, and the company can say oh we need you to finish this project by yesterday or ELSE. We management are off to a wonderful weekend of hookers, champagne, and blow.
So, your contract says nothing about work hours or compensation for working in your spare time? I hope your salary is high:)
What took away the three day weekends is having unreasonable deadlines... and wanting to keep a job.
Has nothing to do with a smartphone.
My wage is low enough that I can respond to my employer "Oh, you want me to work in the weekend? Double time, then?" The answer is invariably that "We don't pay overtime". So, I'll have a look at it Monday morning:)
Where I live the norm is that if you earn above about USD 105k a year, all your time belongs to the company, depending on your contract. The concept of overtime is not applicable, as you're expected to contribute your time if necessary. This is normally specified in your contract.
If your wage is below that, you're free to demand overtime for work outside of office hours. At my place of employment, they customarily don't pay that at all, so I'm not "allowed" to do it except when ordered to by a superior.
I also declined the offer of a company phone, because that came with the expectation of me being always available. I don't even get work mail delivered to my personal device, because they demand complete control over my phone to do that. Two chances of that: fat and slim. Of course I could use the web-mail interface, and I occasionally do in emergencies, but all over I'm fine with not having to deal with work stuff in my spare time:)
I think that the amount of bandwidth he was using was massively unreasonable, but seriously, if you're going to terminate someone, AT LEAST CALL IT WHAT IT IS. Just put a clause into the residential ToS that states that anything beyond 25-50TB in a month is unreasonable and grounds for termination. Ugh.
They did have "generate excessive amounts of email or other Internet traffic" as grounds for termination in their acceptable use policy. I know that the stance around here is that all companies are evil (and I frequently agree with that), but in this case Verizon was entirely reasonable in their response. It's common sense that you're not supposed to run a relatively heavy load content hosting service out of your apartment on a consumer line. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't stop you if you hosted a networked game or accessed your vacation photos over sftp, even though that is per definition "running a server" for your own use.
> Hello Alice -- encrypts with pad[0..11] < Hello Bob -- encrypts with pad[12..21]... and so on.
Using two pads: > Hello Alice -- encrypts with pad[0][0..11] < Hello Bob -- encrypts with pad[1][0.9]... and so on.
This is completely irrelevant to your point, but you have some zero-indexing errors and a fencepost one in your examples:) -- Your friendly neighbourhood pedant
The captivate I had, you could change the battery in well under 5 seconds. Bootup time was longer but not really any issue since typical use case was not to be using it immediately after.
Now I have a Razr Maxx. I was concerned about not being able to change the battery easily at first but it really typically has enough capacity that it's rarely an issue. It has been a pain how long it takes to charge on a couple of occasions though.
If you need endurance, you could also get an external power pack which can charge your phone off of usb ports. 6A packs can fully charge your phone at least two times, and are not too large to keep in a pocket along with a ridiculously short micro-USB cable you probably already got bundled with some device or another. Using a replacement battery turned out to be a bit cumbersome for me, as you effectively need a separate bulky battery charger for your surplus batteries, which you will not want to bring along on travels (been there).
And have they actually explained publically what the "Mint Search Enhancer" extension for Firefox does? You know, the one that you can't remove without also removing your desktop's meta-package in Mint, ensuring that it's reinstalled on every UI upgrade?
This is a bit old, but they have explained it several times. I actually wouldn't mind it if it didn't stupidly break functionality like the Google calculator and cached pages. Someone benefits from your searches anyway. I don't remember exactly how I did it, but I got rid of it, and it didn't come back.
Sorry Mint, but if you destroy basic functionality in the process of earning money off of my browsing, your hacks go away just as other annoyances such as online ads. I kept the default home page, though, I have several default tabs in any case.
When half or more of the people you know have a DUI, it's only a hassle, it's not embarrassing and carries no social stigma causing you to be less likely to avoid it in the future.
That's only a problem if the penalty for DUI is "only a hassle".
With the deterrence effect of stigmatizing DUIs diluted, all they can turn to are draconian laws -- soon we'd probably have a 3 strikes law for driving. Then we'd have a new problem of people driving without licenses, insurance, an increase in stolen plates (because you can't get your tabs without a license...).
First: I very much enjoy a beer or six, some wine or a single malt, and have absolutely no problem with people getting drunk. That said, I'll chime in with how we have reduced the problem in Norway: there are sensible campaigns to teach people to avoid driving when they have drunk alcohol, and conversely, avoid drinking when they are planning to drive afterwards (feel free to enjoy a few when you get home). Back it up with laws and *real* consequences. If this actually is a problem for you in your everyday life, maybe you should examine your drinking habits. The default state of most people most of the time is not "tipsy".
It's perfectly possible to have such campaigns without preaching, and without acting like some of the more irrational elements of MADD. But yes, the law should be harsh. If you turn out to be generally unfit to drive, you shouldn't have a licence, no matter what the cause. In Norway, where getting caught drunk driving have very real consequences, it has greatly decreased drunk driving and connected accidents. Not even the most populistic of our political parties argue that the current situation should be changed. The follow-up problems you mention (people driving without a licence and similar), while rare, are treated as any other criminal activity: fines/jail, and confiscation of property used to perpetrate the crime. I don't even know what to say about your "standing up to the man" parallel, but I did get a chuckle out of the vision of an entire drunk neighbourhood "standing up to the man" while driving:)
Now I'm quite looking forward to trying some if the opportunity arises.
I once tried fried mopane worms in Botswana, bought from a street vendor in a village who sold them as snacks. They're delicious, the taste is somewhat reminiscent of bacon crisps. Recommended if you can get them:)
A lot of them do. For instance, the russian Topol-M achieves 7320 m/s, which is a lot more than 7 Machs no matter how you measure it. Missiles such as that one are hardened and probably impermeable to energy weapons for the foreseeable future, though, and they are not the intended target for this (or any) laser. Direct kinetic hits are likely the only way, short of nuclear weapons, to stop them in their tracks.
Because many email providers -- such as gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc -- want to read your email to serve you ads. Encryption runs counter to the profit motive.
Of course they don't want it -- I suspect that EULA measures against it might surface if usage were widespread -- but it's also a user issue. I have my GPG/PGP public key readily available, and tried to encourage my friends to use it.
Setting up GPG is less complicated than configuring XBMC, which lots of people do, and plugin integration with Gmail is trivial. The perceived benefit is probably too low, however, as even my techie friends never used it beyond the first test email.
Yup, seems you are right - my apologies. My original source for that information was an MD student, who'd heard this question ("can three cigarettes be lethal?") asked and answered in the negative at a lecture. Apparently his lecturer made the same mistake of mixing up absorbed dosage from a cigarette with actual nicotine content. You learn something new every day.
...extracting the nicotine from 10 cigarettes using isopropyl alcohol and then evaporating the alcohol so you are left with a nicotine paste. 10 cigarettes are enough to kill 3 people.
Wrong. A regular cigarette contains something like 0.7-1 mg of nicotine. LD-50 for humans is about 30-60 mg. A minuscule application of common sense would also indicate that 3 1/3 cigarettes are not enough to kill anyone outright. Sorry to deprive you of your amusing little party anecdote, but cigarettes are not *that* lethal:)
Now that's a blast from the past..in the 80s these were quite popular
I don't think they were popular back then. While I saw them on late night television commercials all the time, I never met anyone who actually owned one.
I did:)
My dad bought a bunch of these for next to nothing in the late eighties, and I gave a few to friends. After the novelty factor wore off, however, no-one used them. People don't really mislay their keys a lot, and they were somewhat bulky on the keychain.
Actually, while the mean voltage is 230V, there's a tolerance interval of 10%, so the actual voltage at any time may be anywhere between 207V and 253V (actually, in the UK the lower tolerance level is at 216V, to avoid problems with old devices). In other words, you might measure 234.9V elsewhere in Europe (actually, it also was already inside the tolerance interval in Germany even when the German voltage was just 220V).
This is probably to compensate for voltage drops on long stretches of power lines. My family used to live in a house in the countryside, on the start of a several km long circuit. The voltage was boosted so that the folks at the end of the circuit should get around 220V, and we had about 248V from the wall (I believe 242V was the upper limit, which is 10% as you mention). This was enough that light bulbs burned out very quickly. We reported it to the utility company, and they installed resistors or something (I was very young at the time, I'm not sure exactly how this worked) in the few first houses on the circuit, this mitigated the problem.
I find that show pretty offensive so I refuse to watch it. If it stereotyped other groups that way it would already be off the air.
Offensive? Non-funny I could understand, but offensive? Yes, the show's making fun of a stereotype, that's par of the course for sit-coms (of course, you might find them all offensive). Reacting that way to such a show gives me the impression that you are somewhat... uptight. People have been subjected to offensive treatment in popular entertainment (minstrel shows and country music (since I appreciate actual music) come to mind), but Big Bang Theory is not it.
I am considered a major nerd amongst my friends, and they joke about it all the time. To be fair, I do have some hang-ups, which are not perpetuated solely in jest. I don't find their jokes "offensive", and if I did and complained about it, people would probably (rightly) stop inviting me to social happenings. If your reaction is representative of your general approach to social interaction, do yourself a favour and lighten up a little:)
I don't know too much about this, but wouldn't steganography happen *during* encoding? If you could hack an encoder to control the lsb in the *decoded* stream, you could add another layer of obfuscation by uploading two completely different videos, one with random lsb, and the other with your signal xor'ed with the lsb of the first. I'm no expert, but to me, that doesn't seem vulnerable even to statistical attacks (assuming there is a significant amount of candidate videos to start with), especially if you encrypt your signal prior to encoding. I'd be happy if a crypto expert slashdotter would comment on this:)
I recall a program I found once that gave you a folder on your computer, and anything you put in it was split into appropriate sized.rar files, and attached to emails, and sent to your gmail account and stashed in a folder. Think Dropbox, only using gmail as storage. It was ugly, but it worked. Don't know if its still around.
Behold GmailFS. I tried it out with a throwaway account, it was amusing, but not very practical.
Other examples of quirky abuse of online services for filesystems are the various url shortener file systems, such as BitlyFS, as url shortener services can store fairly long strings accessible through a short key. Haven't tried any of those, but the principle should work as long as the service don't block you for anomalous access patterns.
Then quit your job, or ask your boss to let you have some unpaid time off. I am no Republican nor a capitalist but it is not the government's job to raise your child.
Who's talking about "the gubbinment raising them kids" in this story? This is about paid paternity/maternity leave. Your government does not ensure paid leave at all, as the only country on that page AFAICT.
A few years ago, when I was as inclined to become a father as I was to swimming the Atlantic Ocean, I still gladly paid the Norwegian taxes supporting this (amongst a host of other societal boons). As a recent father of twins, I am immensely glad that I live in a society which provides us with paid leave to care for our kids.
Slashdot Mirror
You stupid fools and your 'smart' phones.
Hmmm, why would I have an internet-enabled and feature-rich computer that easily fits in my pocket, that can also make phone calls, when I could be dragging a laptop *and* a phone around? Nope, I'm drawing a blank. You got me there.
Doctors should diagnose based on full spectrum data collection. Not simply based on what they see and think at first glance. That's like a climatologist looking at a clear blue sky on a good day and saying "look, no smog. Clearly climate change is not caused by man made pollutants!!! No need to look any further into this."
On second though, perhaps a car analogy would work better. Can somebody help me out here? :)
Sorry - no car analogy [they usually suck in any case :) Yes, a thorough examination should of course be done, that goes without saying. To be fair, only "A small percentage" (I've read that the real number is slightly above 1%) *actually* has any physiological excuses, but a doctor should be on the look-out for those, and additionally be able to work with attitudes and mental "disorders" affecting the patient's weight control. In the end, except for those 1%, it comes down to eat less, move more. Even though actually doing that could prove somewhat hard, it's the only way weight loss is going to happen.
With respect Runaway, that thinking right there is exactly the problem.
Obese != unhealthy life choices (at least not in all cases)
Take for example the 250lb person who eats right, jogs, and works out every day vs the 145lb person who never exercises, eats cookies, and pounds beer and soda but for some reason never gains a pound.
I used to know a guy of the former variety, except he weighed about 250 kg. His body mass was a lot of fat, but his personal best bench press was 243 kg. In a Norwegian strength thest where you lie on your back and use your feet to push weights straight upwards on rails, he piled on all the weights he could find (about 600kg), and subsequently asked me and a buddy to perch on top, and he nailed it. I've also seen him on the ski slope. He's quick and agile, because he has almost superhuman strenght, ample to support his large bulk. Working as a door man a trick of his was famous; he grabbed two ~100kg sacks of food waste in *each hand* and carried them two flights of stairs down and then 100m to the container. In another situation, written up in the local paper, he restrained a huge body-building type by lifting him up, putting him gently face down on the ground, and placing his hand on the guys back. He couldn't move.
He started losing weight after being told to do so by his doctor to (his body is *hard* on his heart and other organs), but he dropped it because "I couldn't maintain my strenght, and suddenly everything was wearying". He obviously was comfortable being enormous. In most cases, though, I agree with Runaway that obesity stems from unfortunate life style choices.
Even though yes, you are simply eating too much in the thermodynamic sense, it rapidly becomes a stigma where the patient is 'at fault', rather than the underlying medical condition. In this way, victimisation of obese patients is counter-productive.
Sure some people simply have no self-control - but is that because they are bad people, or because there is some factor at work that makes it hard for them? The blame game for obesity is a bit like accusing people with a birth mark of being in league with the devil and burning them - we should know better by now.
I'm very lucky that I stay relatively thin and somewhat athletic without significant excercise, despite eating whatever I want. But I can imagine how hard it would be to accept that I'd have to change my food- and exercise habits in order to lose weight, knowing that I basically have to keep doing it for life. I am not sure I would be able to do so myself, if the need should arise down the line. I did gain about 7 kgs over the past 6-7 years (I'm 37), so I might have to start considering it :)
However, your AC parent is correct, although he stated it in a somewhat aggressive manner. "A small percentage" of overweight people (I've read about 1% cited from an MD in a news article which I can't find at the moment) have some physiological condition which makes it impossible or extremely difficult to lose weight. Thus the cold, hard reality is that the vast majority simply eats too much and moves too little. To be flippant, "being too fond of cake" is usually not a medical condition. Of course there are also various mental "disorders" of different severities, often connected with the overweight itself, which can make it very hard to focus on a healthy lifestyle.
This still indicates that the vast majority of overweight people need to be aware of the fact that yes, they are responsible for their weight, and that they themselves are ultimately the only ones that can do something about it, even though it can be damned hard. There is no need to go it alone, there are a lot of programs one can join, I imagine that is also the case in the US, but you need to instigate the change *yourself*.
On a side note, there are some loud people who skew the public opinion against obese people. A notable example in Norway is Jørgen Foss, the spokesman for the Norwegian National Association of Overweight People, who is a complete clown. He might possibly be the worst spokesman for any organisation ever, as he keeps harping on about how he's completely innocent and unable to to anything about his weight, that some people prefer to be huge, and stuff like that. He dismisses lifestyle changes as a measure (claiming it's impossible), and frowns on programs which could actually help people (there's supposedly no reason for him to even try, as a program wouldn't help him anyway; he would just continue overeating). That doesn't exactly tend to instill any sympathy in me.
Another spokesperson for the same organisation famously complained that "Not even the chairs at McDonald's are big enough. Some of us have experienced that the chairs are stuck to us when we get up." This is not a satirical article, nor did the statement seem to be uttered in jest. In the QA session she very aggressively dismisses any suggestion that laying off the snacks and junk food (of which she consumes a substantial amount) is a viable course of action.
Shit like this seriously harms their cause, and is very much the wrong message to send to people in that situation IMO.
Overtime? What the F**K is that? I am a salary engineer and I don't get overtime, and the company can say oh we need you to finish this project by yesterday or ELSE. We management are off to a wonderful weekend of hookers, champagne, and blow.
So, your contract says nothing about work hours or compensation for working in your spare time? I hope your salary is high :)
What took away the three day weekends is having unreasonable deadlines... and wanting to keep a job.
Has nothing to do with a smartphone.
My wage is low enough that I can respond to my employer "Oh, you want me to work in the weekend? Double time, then?" The answer is invariably that "We don't pay overtime". So, I'll have a look at it Monday morning :)
Where I live the norm is that if you earn above about USD 105k a year, all your time belongs to the company, depending on your contract. The concept of overtime is not applicable, as you're expected to contribute your time if necessary. This is normally specified in your contract.
If your wage is below that, you're free to demand overtime for work outside of office hours. At my place of employment, they customarily don't pay that at all, so I'm not "allowed" to do it except when ordered to by a superior.
I also declined the offer of a company phone, because that came with the expectation of me being always available. I don't even get work mail delivered to my personal device, because they demand complete control over my phone to do that. Two chances of that: fat and slim. Of course I could use the web-mail interface, and I occasionally do in emergencies, but all over I'm fine with not having to deal with work stuff in my spare time :)
I think that the amount of bandwidth he was using was massively unreasonable, but seriously, if you're going to terminate someone, AT LEAST CALL IT WHAT IT IS. Just put a clause into the residential ToS that states that anything beyond 25-50TB in a month is unreasonable and grounds for termination. Ugh.
They did have "generate excessive amounts of email or other Internet traffic" as grounds for termination in their acceptable use policy. I know that the stance around here is that all companies are evil (and I frequently agree with that), but in this case Verizon was entirely reasonable in their response. It's common sense that you're not supposed to run a relatively heavy load content hosting service out of your apartment on a consumer line. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't stop you if you hosted a networked game or accessed your vacation photos over sftp, even though that is per definition "running a server" for your own use.
> Hello Alice -- encrypts with pad[0..11] ... and so on.
< Hello Bob -- encrypts with pad[12..21]
Using two pads: ... and so on.
> Hello Alice -- encrypts with pad[0][0..11]
< Hello Bob -- encrypts with pad[1][0.9]
This is completely irrelevant to your point, but you have some zero-indexing errors and a fencepost one in your examples :)
--
Your friendly neighbourhood pedant
Having not purchased a large selection of axes recently I can't <foo>
It suddenly struck me how amazingly versatile a statement that was :)
Now, carry on.
The captivate I had, you could change the battery in well under 5 seconds. Bootup time was longer but not really any issue since typical use case was not to be using it immediately after.
Now I have a Razr Maxx. I was concerned about not being able to change the battery easily at first but it really typically has enough capacity that it's rarely an issue. It has been a pain how long it takes to charge on a couple of occasions though.
If you need endurance, you could also get an external power pack which can charge your phone off of usb ports. 6A packs can fully charge your phone at least two times, and are not too large to keep in a pocket along with a ridiculously short micro-USB cable you probably already got bundled with some device or another. Using a replacement battery turned out to be a bit cumbersome for me, as you effectively need a separate bulky battery charger for your surplus batteries, which you will not want to bring along on travels (been there).
And have they actually explained publically what the "Mint Search Enhancer" extension for Firefox does? You know, the one that you can't remove without also removing your desktop's meta-package in Mint, ensuring that it's reinstalled on every UI upgrade?
This is a bit old, but they have explained it several times. I actually wouldn't mind it if it didn't stupidly break functionality like the Google calculator and cached pages. Someone benefits from your searches anyway. I don't remember exactly how I did it, but I got rid of it, and it didn't come back.
Sorry Mint, but if you destroy basic functionality in the process of earning money off of my browsing, your hacks go away just as other annoyances such as online ads. I kept the default home page, though, I have several default tabs in any case.
When half or more of the people you know have a DUI, it's only a hassle, it's not embarrassing and carries no social stigma causing you to be less likely to avoid it in the future.
That's only a problem if the penalty for DUI is "only a hassle".
With the deterrence effect of stigmatizing DUIs diluted, all they can turn to are draconian laws -- soon we'd probably have a 3 strikes law for driving. Then we'd have a new problem of people driving without licenses, insurance, an increase in stolen plates (because you can't get your tabs without a license...).
First: I very much enjoy a beer or six, some wine or a single malt, and have absolutely no problem with people getting drunk. That said, I'll chime in with how we have reduced the problem in Norway: there are sensible campaigns to teach people to avoid driving when they have drunk alcohol, and conversely, avoid drinking when they are planning to drive afterwards (feel free to enjoy a few when you get home). Back it up with laws and *real* consequences. If this actually is a problem for you in your everyday life, maybe you should examine your drinking habits. The default state of most people most of the time is not "tipsy".
It's perfectly possible to have such campaigns without preaching, and without acting like some of the more irrational elements of MADD. But yes, the law should be harsh. If you turn out to be generally unfit to drive, you shouldn't have a licence, no matter what the cause. In Norway, where getting caught drunk driving have very real consequences, it has greatly decreased drunk driving and connected accidents. Not even the most populistic of our political parties argue that the current situation should be changed. The follow-up problems you mention (people driving without a licence and similar), while rare, are treated as any other criminal activity: fines/jail, and confiscation of property used to perpetrate the crime. I don't even know what to say about your "standing up to the man" parallel, but I did get a chuckle out of the vision of an entire drunk neighbourhood "standing up to the man" while driving :)
Now I'm quite looking forward to trying some if the opportunity arises.
I once tried fried mopane worms in Botswana, bought from a street vendor in a village who sold them as snacks. They're delicious, the taste is somewhat reminiscent of bacon crisps. Recommended if you can get them :)
And what missiles go mach 7+??
A lot of them do. For instance, the russian Topol-M achieves 7320 m/s, which is a lot more than 7 Machs no matter how you measure it. Missiles such as that one are hardened and probably impermeable to energy weapons for the foreseeable future, though, and they are not the intended target for this (or any) laser. Direct kinetic hits are likely the only way, short of nuclear weapons, to stop them in their tracks.
Because many email providers -- such as gmail, hotmail, yahoo, etc -- want to read your email to serve you ads. Encryption runs counter to the profit motive.
Of course they don't want it -- I suspect that EULA measures against it might surface if usage were widespread -- but it's also a user issue. I have my GPG/PGP public key readily available, and tried to encourage my friends to use it.
Setting up GPG is less complicated than configuring XBMC, which lots of people do, and plugin integration with Gmail is trivial. The perceived benefit is probably too low, however, as even my techie friends never used it beyond the first test email.
Yup, seems you are right - my apologies. My original source for that information was an MD student, who'd heard this question ("can three cigarettes be lethal?") asked and answered in the negative at a lecture. Apparently his lecturer made the same mistake of mixing up absorbed dosage from a cigarette with actual nicotine content. You learn something new every day.
...extracting the nicotine from 10 cigarettes using isopropyl alcohol and then evaporating the alcohol so you are left with a nicotine paste. 10 cigarettes are enough to kill 3 people.
Wrong. A regular cigarette contains something like 0.7-1 mg of nicotine. LD-50 for humans is about 30-60 mg. A minuscule application of common sense would also indicate that 3 1/3 cigarettes are not enough to kill anyone outright. Sorry to deprive you of your amusing little party anecdote, but cigarettes are not *that* lethal :)
Now that's a blast from the past..in the 80s these were quite popular
I don't think they were popular back then. While I saw them on late night television commercials all the time, I never met anyone who actually owned one.
I did :)
My dad bought a bunch of these for next to nothing in the late eighties, and I gave a few to friends. After the novelty factor wore off, however, no-one used them. People don't really mislay their keys a lot, and they were somewhat bulky on the keychain.
Actually, while the mean voltage is 230V, there's a tolerance interval of 10%, so the actual voltage at any time may be anywhere between 207V and 253V (actually, in the UK the lower tolerance level is at 216V, to avoid problems with old devices). In other words, you might measure 234.9V elsewhere in Europe (actually, it also was already inside the tolerance interval in Germany even when the German voltage was just 220V).
This is probably to compensate for voltage drops on long stretches of power lines. My family used to live in a house in the countryside, on the start of a several km long circuit. The voltage was boosted so that the folks at the end of the circuit should get around 220V, and we had about 248V from the wall (I believe 242V was the upper limit, which is 10% as you mention). This was enough that light bulbs burned out very quickly. We reported it to the utility company, and they installed resistors or something (I was very young at the time, I'm not sure exactly how this worked) in the few first houses on the circuit, this mitigated the problem.
I think your on to something! =)
His what? Forgive me, I'm tired :)
I find that show pretty offensive so I refuse to watch it. If it stereotyped other groups that way it would already be off the air.
Offensive? Non-funny I could understand, but offensive? Yes, the show's making fun of a stereotype, that's par of the course for sit-coms (of course, you might find them all offensive). Reacting that way to such a show gives me the impression that you are somewhat... uptight. People have been subjected to offensive treatment in popular entertainment (minstrel shows and country music (since I appreciate actual music) come to mind), but Big Bang Theory is not it.
I am considered a major nerd amongst my friends, and they joke about it all the time. To be fair, I do have some hang-ups, which are not perpetuated solely in jest. I don't find their jokes "offensive", and if I did and complained about it, people would probably (rightly) stop inviting me to social happenings. If your reaction is representative of your general approach to social interaction, do yourself a favour and lighten up a little :)
Stenography would happen after encoding.
I don't know too much about this, but wouldn't steganography happen *during* encoding? If you could hack an encoder to control the lsb in the *decoded* stream, you could add another layer of obfuscation by uploading two completely different videos, one with random lsb, and the other with your signal xor'ed with the lsb of the first. I'm no expert, but to me, that doesn't seem vulnerable even to statistical attacks (assuming there is a significant amount of candidate videos to start with), especially if you encrypt your signal prior to encoding. I'd be happy if a crypto expert slashdotter would comment on this :)
I recall a program I found once that gave you a folder on your computer, and anything you put in it was split into appropriate sized .rar files, and attached to emails, and sent to your gmail account and stashed in a folder. Think Dropbox, only using gmail as storage. It was ugly, but it worked. Don't know if its still around.
Behold GmailFS. I tried it out with a throwaway account, it was amusing, but not very practical.
Other examples of quirky abuse of online services for filesystems are the various url shortener file systems, such as BitlyFS, as url shortener services can store fairly long strings accessible through a short key. Haven't tried any of those, but the principle should work as long as the service don't block you for anomalous access patterns.
Then quit your job, or ask your boss to let you have some unpaid time off. I am no Republican nor a capitalist but it is not the government's job to raise your child.
Who's talking about "the gubbinment raising them kids" in this story? This is about paid paternity/maternity leave. Your government does not ensure paid leave at all, as the only country on that page AFAICT.
A few years ago, when I was as inclined to become a father as I was to swimming the Atlantic Ocean, I still gladly paid the Norwegian taxes supporting this (amongst a host of other societal boons). As a recent father of twins, I am immensely glad that I live in a society which provides us with paid leave to care for our kids.
Perl or Bash? Make up your mind!
Server-side Bash? Don't give people ideas...