> I'd be willing to bet that Ohio is below the national average in terms of traffic accidents per capita
That's because ODOT knows what the heck they're doing. I've yet to find another state where the department of transportation does a similarly good job. Indiana uses sand in the winter, instead of salt. Yeah, that'll work. Not. Pennsylvania twists and winds the roads up and down and around and around and around the mountains so you're always on a steep, narrow curve with poor visibility, and half the time there's no shoulder. New York has traffic circles up the royal wazootie and does not appear to hand out speeding tickets at all, near as I can tell. Kentucky and West Virginia just plain don't bother to maintain most of the roads (in fairness, that's probably because they can't afford to). Michigan doesn't bother to put up deer crossing signs, even where the road passes between a bend in the river and a woods with more deer per acre than a petting zoo. (You think I am exaggerating. I am not. I lived up there for three years. Also, if you hit a deer in Michigan, standard automobile insurance does not cover it; you have to specifically pay extra for a "deer clause". I highly recommend that you do so.)
> According to RJMetrics, 30 percent of first-time Google+ public posters don't > post again. Of those who make five public posts, only 15 percent post again.
Oh, no, whatever shall I do if people who don't have anything to say don't say it?
> The average time lapse between posts is 12 days,
How will I know what they had for breakfast?
What happened during their daily commute?
Did they score points in Bejewled Blitz?
What will I do without this vital information?
> The average post receives fewer than one reply, fewer than one '+1' > (the equivalent to Facebook's 'Like'), and fewer than one re-share
Do people at least requote the whole thing and say "Me too"?
No? Really?
Huh. And here I'd been ignoring Google+ on the theory that it was probably just like Facebook. Looks like maybe I should have a look at it after all. It could have a signal-to-noise ratio almost as good as usenet, or slashdot comments. If so, that would be a huge improvement over other social networking sites.
In practical, brass-tack terms, IE6 should be considered completely unsupported at this point and a grave security risk if you use it to access the actual internet.
Using it for intranet-only stuff (presumably, because there's something proprietary in there that would cost a lot of money to upgrade or replace) does not present the same level of risk, provided you set it up so that IE6 can *only* access the intranet stuff, not the outside-world internet. (This can be done with judicious use of IE6's security zone policies.)
But this is mostly a big so-what, because It's not like IE6 is useful for browsing the internet these days anyway: fewer than half of the websites on the internet will render successfully, and that percentage is falling rapidly now, mostly due to the lack of any significant amount of CSS support. Some sites also run into problems with IE6 because of the way it handled XMLHttpRequest, which is slightly different from how modern browsers do it. Sites that care about supporting IE6 can easily work around that, though. (IE6 *has* XMLHttpRequest; it's just accessed slightly differently. A simple wrapper function that tries both makes the problem go away.) The lack of CSS support is the larger problem, as it takes a lot of effort to work around, and most web content developers stopped bothering when IE6 usage share fell below 1% a couple of years back.
Just for example, if IE6 is your only browser, you can forget about using any of Google's web-based services beyond the basic web search. YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Groups, you name it, they all don't work in browsers that old. Google is far from alone in this.
Ironicially, it's so painfully hard to keep more than one version of IE installed at once, that organizations that still need IE6 will necessarily find themselves using a different browser altogether for accessing the actual internet, which is presumably not exactly what Microsoft had in mind when they worked so hard to get companies locked in to IE6.
IE7 will not be far behind, I imagine. A couple more years, maybe. Currently my numbers say its usage share has already fallen below 5%, about _half_ of what it was one year previous. That's a very rough figure (based on usage of one site), but when you graph it over time the trend is absolutely impossible to miss: the IE6 share line is merging into the positive X axis, and the IE7 line looks like it's getting ready to follow. New version uptake for IE is faster than it used to be (probably due in large part to Automatic Updates being turned on by default since XP SP2). It still makes new version uptake for the webkit browsers look virtually instantaneous, mind you. But it's faster than it used to be.
> So it's only $30M they've been paying one guy to post once a day under their login.
Well, obviously, it's more than one guy. The "advertising on Facebook" departement at GM probably has a staff of over a hundred markedly overpaid people doing ISO-9000 reviews and Six Sigma and whatever else it takes to get something as simple as posting to a Facebook profile done in an organization as large and lethargic and poorly run and restricted by out-of-control union regulations as GM.
In other words, Facebook is not in any way related to the problem that GM is having. The eventual bankruptcy and liquidation of GM by their creditors has been a foregone conclusion since the forties. It was only a matter of time.
I'm not saying Facebook isn't a problem. I'm saying they're not GM's problem. GM's problems go WAY beyond the question of whether any specific advertising venue is "worth it".
You want to know if advertising on Facebook is worth it or not? Don't ask GM. Ask McDonald's. *They* know how to do advertising in a way that results in profit. If they can't make Facebook advertising pay off, no one can.
> The Mozilla Suite was a bloated piece of complete and utter crap.
Perhaps, but it had all of the major features that a browser needs to have. Firefox did not become similarly feature-complete until... ever, actually: you still have to install at least half a dozen extensions to get a Firefox up to where the suite's browser was in 2000. This isn't such a big problem now that your extensions are retained across upgrades and automatically updated as necessary, but Firefox didn't get that until well after the fork in question was a done deal.
The larger issue, though, is one of direction: Firefox has always, since it was called Phoenix, been too concerned updating the look and feel and not concerned enough about far more important things like quality control and whether the browser actually works correctly. There have been a handful of relatively decent Firefox releases (mostly: a couple of releases after the aforementioned retain-and-update-your-extensions changes went in, when the bugs therein were starting to get mostly sorted out; SessionSaver went in right around the same time), but on the whole Firefox has a long history of systemic issues in terms of how development decisions are made. Poorly-considered changes are dictated from on high. Important features are discontinued on one developer's whim. Data-loss bugs go unfixed for years while the developers fiddle around pointlessly redesigning the toolbars for the fourth or fifth time. Important security issues like how https is handled are approached in entirely the wrong way, adding more of what has already been clearly demonstrated to be inadequate (namely, getting somebody on an official list of trusted certificate authorities to sign off on every site -- now the CA can sign off on your site in an extended way, which costs sites more and provides exactly zero additional security) and completely ignoring the obvious need to rework the basic model, taking into account what has worked and not worked for other kinds of services (e.g., ssh).
Is it any wonder Firefox usage share plateaued around 20% once Microsoft started actually working on IE again and a couple of vendors released additional real competitors?
Does anyone who doesn't get paychecks from Mozilla think this web-app support is what Firefox needs, even if it were properly cross-platform?
> Seamonkey is what remains of the old Mozilla suite. > I'm surprised it's under active development.
I suppose that depends on how you define "active development". It's not getting its UI needlessly rearranged every six weeks, for example. In terms of that sort of thing, Seamonkey is mature, stable software. It needs (and gets) periodic Gecko updates, but those changes are being made anyway (for Firefox and other things) and just have to be integrated.
Pick up a five-year-old used desktop for cheap. Unplug the keyboard and mouse during the call. Even cheap LCDs often have the ability to be wall-mounted, and you can probably get one used because somebody's replacing it with a better model. Sorted.
But you should limit the baby's total screen time (including television as well as Skype and anything else) to ideally an hour a week or so, *certainly* not more than half an hour a da. The child needs *real* human contact, with living breathing people in the same room, making eye contact and reaching out with fingers and all that good stuff babies like to do. If grandma and grandpa don't like that, tell them to get over it. The baby is a person, not an entertainment device for their personal pleasure.
Indeed. I have some difficulty imagining that an online petition signed by a bunch of physics students and professors -- most of whom are foreigners -- could convince an elected, first-world government to take (or not take) any particular action. The idea that it might matter to the government of Iran is patently absurd.
Absolutely. I wear my watch on a heavy iron chain hanging in a big loop from my eyelid piercing to my tongue ring. Sometimes it bangs against the screen of my personal webserver (a PowerEdge T620, maxed out at 768GB of RAM, and yes, it runs Linux), which is mounted on the I-beam that hangs from my nosering cables, but that's a minor inconvenience, easily offset by how handy it is to have both the watch and the web server with me at all times. I also keep seven brass caltrops in my left shoe, house my pet Cardassian vole inside my clothes, shave with an industrial grinding machine, and fight a kickboxing match against Chuck Norris every morning before breakfast. The server runs off a 72000VA online UPS that hangs between my legs, held up by the razor-wire loop cinched around my gonads. The UPS is continuously recharged by the generator I carry balanced on my head, which is powered by my farts.
Actually, you know what? I don't really do any of that. In fact, I haven't used a watch in over a decade, because there are computers at home and at work and wall clocks pretty much everywhere else I ever go.
Do you have to be careful with matches around water, because it contains hydrogen, which is dangerously flammable? If you put a lump of table salt in water, will it make sparks and loud noises? For that matter, why isn't table salt a toxic green gas at room temperature? Why don't people put lumps of charcoal on gold bands and wear them on their fingers? Why do toothpaste and mouthwash have fluoride in them, if fluorine is so dangerous that many chemists refuse to work with it? If bananas are good for you because they contain potassium, why can't you just eat lye?
If compounds consistently inherited all the physical properties of their constituent elements, the world would be a rather different place.
If you have metals (note I did not say "compounds containing elements that would be metallic in elemental form"; I said "metals", which is not even remotely the same thing) in your veins, you're going to have very serious medical problems (death, for example, seems rather likely), totally irrespective of any magnetic field.
Compounds do not share all the physical properties of their component elements. Blood, for example, is not magnetic any more than water is flammable or table salt is a room temperature gas (due to the iron or hydrogen or chlorine they contain, respectively). If you had little hunks of metal in your blood, magnetic fields would be the least of your worries.
> he would have said that the strong magnetic [fields] caused a subspace > anomaly that attracts interphasic lifeforms which make human cells devolve
No, no, no. Interphasic life forms are attraced by the new interphasic fusion process. Sheesh. Don't you understand science at all?
Strong magnetic fields are much more likely to cause "interference", which makes it harder to use communicators (you get a lot of static, for which you have to compensate) and transporters (you have to install custom filters or narrow the annular confinement beam or something) and sensors (at minimum, you have to reroute auxiliary power to the lateral sensor array).
Magnetic fields can also be harnessed and used, e.g., as a confinement field (such as one might use to keep antimatter in its storage tank -- an important fuel source for starships; your warp reactor core wouldn't work without antimatter).
Magnets don't do anything to hemoglobin. Anybody who says otherwise is either trying to sell you magnetic bracelets for WAY more than they're worth or never figured out high-school level chemistry or physics. Likely both.
(Metallic elemental iron is ferromagnetic. Most other iron compounds are not ferromagnetic. Similarly, elemental diatomic hydrogen is explosive, but water is not generally labeled as explosive, even though it has two hydrogen atoms per molecule. See how that works?)
> Given that it is not illegal to own or purchase or transport > radioactive materials (within limits for hobbyist use),
Yes, but if they're sufficiently radioactive to be detected from across the street, and you didn't bother to put them in a shielded container for transport, I don't think getting pulled over and asked a couple of questions is necessarily entirely out of line. It is worth noting that the radiation was leaving the vehicle and having an impact on the external surroundings, which is how the police knew about it in the first place. Now, in the case of the dude who'd just had a medical scan with radioactive dye, that was fundamentally unavoidable (unless he wanted to stay at the hospital until it wore off, which could be rather expensive). Nonetheless, the police didn't stop him out of randomness, or because they were busybodies, or because they had something against him personally, etc. They became interested in him because of radiation that was emanating from his vehicle. That's not (or at least not entirely) a private effect. It's a public effect.
If you're transporting radioactive materials for hobbyist use, and you want them to be private (so that they will not get police attention without a warrant, for example), you could always just keep them in a shielded container, so that the radiation remains private. Frankly, that's probably a good idea even at home (whenever you're not actively working with your hobby). Think of it in the same way as keeping your dog on a leash.
> That assumes that the population is evenly distributed throughout the whole country
Americans in general tend to make that assumption, on account of the fact that it's that way here. It's not completely even, of course, but the population is spread out to a MUCH greater extent than in Europe. For example, about 13% of the population of Ohio lives in one of the three largest cities, and the rest of us don't. If you expand the cities to their respective greater metropolitan areas (which encompass a rather larger geographical area, perhaps up to a quarter of the state's land area, depending on exactly where you draw the edges; Greater Cleveland is particularly difficult to define precisely: you can drive from Youngstown to Toledo on city streets pretty much the whole way, if you plan your route to do that on purpose -- admittedly, that's not the usual way to go), it's still only about half the population of the state (maybe up to 60%, again, depending on exactly where you draw the edges). Meanwhile there are hundreds of small-to-medium cities containing a few thousand people each, many smaller communities, and a substantial rural population.
It has to, in order to be attractive to the reading audience.
In any case, the underlying idea that immigrants are more likely to start businesses is true as far as it goes, but it's not specific to the US. It's true in general: most of the people in any given population are insufficiently motivated to do things like immigrate to a different country or start a business and work hard enough to make it a success. That's true worldwide.
In other words, when you're looking for how many people are sufficiently driven to start a business and make it fly, looking among people who are already known to be motivated enough to immigrate to a foreign country is disingenuous. Basically, to quote xkcd, that's the mother of all sampling biases.
Indeed. The practical minimum screen resolution for development is at least 1600x1200 on the primary display, with the ability to plug in at least one additional monitor (of similar size) when you're at your desk.
Also, a full-sized keyboard with decent key switches (ideally, the kind that provide actual tactile feedback) is essential.
The quality of the pointing device matters a lot less, because in practice these days everyone's going to plug in a USB pointing device anyway (unless you're using the laptop while rock climbing or riding a unicycle or something), so as long as the built-in pointing device doesn't get in the way of the keyboard I guess it doesn't matter much.
The ability to run additional operating system setups in a virtual machine would be kind of nice, so you can test on any platform you're supposed to support.
Other than that, I can install whatever software I need.
> That being said, there are not really too many advanced ruby programmers around.
It seems most of the really advanced programmers use Perl. (The reverse is NOT true, however; there are plenty of Perl programmers who are not particularly advanced. Hence, Matt's Script Archive.)
3mm, huh? So a couple of comets could do 6mm, right? Is that enough to put Florida under water, or do we need three or four comets?
(I jest. Florida isn't really the geographical area I'd most want to put under water. Unfortunately, California is too mountainous for it to be practical, and redirecting comets would be ridiculously expensive anyhow. We'll just have to wait for the San Andreas fault to do its thing.)
Well I'm sure as everliving [bad word] not going to eat *raw* meat. Do I *look* Japanese to you? Are blue-grey eyes and light brown hair and skin approximately the same color as Cool Whip the usual signs of being Japanese? No? Well, there you are, then. I don't eat raw meat.
I've bitten into undercooked meat by mistake a handful of times in my life. Undercooked chicken is merely tasteless and poorly textured. Undercooked fish is actively disgusting. Undercooked eggs are worse yet. Undercooked beef will throw your gastro-intestinal tract into reverse gear really, really fast. I consider myself fortunate not to have ever inadvertently bitten into undercooked pork, but I have a hard time imagining it would be very good.
> A good cut of meat tastes just fine with a > touch of salt and course ground black pepper.
Admittedly, black pepper isn't something we use very often around here. The standing joke people from other parts of the country tell is that Ohioans only use three spices: salt, pepper, and ketchup. The joke doesn't work so well *in* Ohio. In practice, we use onion powder, sometimes garlic, and of course desert spices (cinnamon especially, but also nutmeg, cloves, and from time to time even ginger) but very few Ohioans ever eat pepper. More people around here eat sauerkraut than black pepper. Black pepper is "hot", don't you know.
Nonetheless, I *do* know what pepper tastes like (I've lived in two other states besides Ohio; I also use cayenne), and of course everyone uses too much salt, yet there's no way that's enough to fix beef. Chicken or fish *maybe* (although fish could really do with some lemon), but pork has got to have ketchup or barbecue sauce on it, and as for beef... beef with just salt and pepper would be completely inedible, as far as I'm concerned. Add some worchestershire sauce, ketchup, brown sugar, cheddar, ketchup, pickle, a slice of provalone, lettuce, tomato, ketchup, maybe some mushrooms, a couple of slices of nice multi-grain bread, and now you've got something I'll eat. Did I mention ketchup? Red meat isn't ready to eat until it has ketchup on it -- or barbecue sauce.
Historically, there were other examples as well. I distinctly recall a period of about six months during the 32-bit era (back before x64 existed, when Intel still thought Itanium might eventually take off) when AMD CPUs were absolutely slaughtering Intel ones on the price/performance ratio.
Slashdot Mirror
> I'd be willing to bet that Ohio is below the national average in terms of traffic accidents per capita
That's because ODOT knows what the heck they're doing. I've yet to find another state where the department of transportation does a similarly good job. Indiana uses sand in the winter, instead of salt. Yeah, that'll work. Not. Pennsylvania twists and winds the roads up and down and around and around and around the mountains so you're always on a steep, narrow curve with poor visibility, and half the time there's no shoulder. New York has traffic circles up the royal wazootie and does not appear to hand out speeding tickets at all, near as I can tell. Kentucky and West Virginia just plain don't bother to maintain most of the roads (in fairness, that's probably because they can't afford to). Michigan doesn't bother to put up deer crossing signs, even where the road passes between a bend in the river and a woods with more deer per acre than a petting zoo. (You think I am exaggerating. I am not. I lived up there for three years. Also, if you hit a deer in Michigan, standard automobile insurance does not cover it; you have to specifically pay extra for a "deer clause". I highly recommend that you do so.)
> According to RJMetrics, 30 percent of first-time Google+ public posters don't
> post again. Of those who make five public posts, only 15 percent post again.
Oh, no, whatever shall I do if people who don't have anything to say don't say it?
> The average time lapse between posts is 12 days,
How will I know what they had for breakfast?
What happened during their daily commute?
Did they score points in Bejewled Blitz?
What will I do without this vital information?
> The average post receives fewer than one reply, fewer than one '+1'
> (the equivalent to Facebook's 'Like'), and fewer than one re-share
Do people at least requote the whole thing and say "Me too"?
No? Really?
Huh. And here I'd been ignoring Google+ on the theory that it was
probably just like Facebook. Looks like maybe I should have a
look at it after all. It could have a signal-to-noise ratio almost
as good as usenet, or slashdot comments. If so, that would be
a huge improvement over other social networking sites.
In practical, brass-tack terms, IE6 should be considered completely unsupported at this point and a grave security risk if you use it to access the actual internet.
Using it for intranet-only stuff (presumably, because there's something proprietary in there that would cost a lot of money to upgrade or replace) does not present the same level of risk, provided you set it up so that IE6 can *only* access the intranet stuff, not the outside-world internet. (This can be done with judicious use of IE6's security zone policies.)
But this is mostly a big so-what, because It's not like IE6 is useful for browsing the internet these days anyway: fewer than half of the websites on the internet will render successfully, and that percentage is falling rapidly now, mostly due to the lack of any significant amount of CSS support. Some sites also run into problems with IE6 because of the way it handled XMLHttpRequest, which is slightly different from how modern browsers do it. Sites that care about supporting IE6 can easily work around that, though. (IE6 *has* XMLHttpRequest; it's just accessed slightly differently. A simple wrapper function that tries both makes the problem go away.) The lack of CSS support is the larger problem, as it takes a lot of effort to work around, and most web content developers stopped bothering when IE6 usage share fell below 1% a couple of years back.
Just for example, if IE6 is your only browser, you can forget about using any of Google's web-based services beyond the basic web search. YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Groups, you name it, they all don't work in browsers that old. Google is far from alone in this.
Ironicially, it's so painfully hard to keep more than one version of IE installed at once, that organizations that still need IE6 will necessarily find themselves using a different browser altogether for accessing the actual internet, which is presumably not exactly what Microsoft had in mind when they worked so hard to get companies locked in to IE6.
IE7 will not be far behind, I imagine. A couple more years, maybe. Currently my numbers say its usage share has already fallen below 5%, about _half_ of what it was one year previous. That's a very rough figure (based on usage of one site), but when you graph it over time the trend is absolutely impossible to miss: the IE6 share line is merging into the positive X axis, and the IE7 line looks like it's getting ready to follow. New version uptake for IE is faster than it used to be (probably due in large part to Automatic Updates being turned on by default since XP SP2). It still makes new version uptake for the webkit browsers look virtually instantaneous, mind you. But it's faster than it used to be.
> So it's only $30M they've been paying one guy to post once a day under their login.
Well, obviously, it's more than one guy. The "advertising on Facebook" departement at GM probably has a staff of over a hundred markedly overpaid people doing ISO-9000 reviews and Six Sigma and whatever else it takes to get something as simple as posting to a Facebook profile done in an organization as large and lethargic and poorly run and restricted by out-of-control union regulations as GM.
In other words, Facebook is not in any way related to the problem that GM is having. The eventual bankruptcy and liquidation of GM by their creditors has been a foregone conclusion since the forties. It was only a matter of time.
I'm not saying Facebook isn't a problem. I'm saying they're not GM's problem. GM's problems go WAY beyond the question of whether any specific advertising venue is "worth it".
You want to know if advertising on Facebook is worth it or not? Don't ask GM. Ask McDonald's. *They* know how to do advertising in a way that results in profit. If they can't make Facebook advertising pay off, no one can.
> The existence or lack thereof of unpaired electrons in the metal ion.
Which, like a lot of things, is different in a compound as compared to the pure element.
> The Mozilla Suite was a bloated piece of complete and utter crap.
Perhaps, but it had all of the major features that a browser needs to have. Firefox did not become similarly feature-complete until... ever, actually: you still have to install at least half a dozen extensions to get a Firefox up to where the suite's browser was in 2000. This isn't such a big problem now that your extensions are retained across upgrades and automatically updated as necessary, but Firefox didn't get that until well after the fork in question was a done deal.
The larger issue, though, is one of direction: Firefox has always, since it was called Phoenix, been too concerned updating the look and feel and not concerned enough about far more important things like quality control and whether the browser actually works correctly. There have been a handful of relatively decent Firefox releases (mostly: a couple of releases after the aforementioned retain-and-update-your-extensions changes went in, when the bugs therein were starting to get mostly sorted out; SessionSaver went in right around the same time), but on the whole Firefox has a long history of systemic issues in terms of how development decisions are made. Poorly-considered changes are dictated from on high. Important features are discontinued on one developer's whim. Data-loss bugs go unfixed for years while the developers fiddle around pointlessly redesigning the toolbars for the fourth or fifth time. Important security issues like how https is handled are approached in entirely the wrong way, adding more of what has already been clearly demonstrated to be inadequate (namely, getting somebody on an official list of trusted certificate authorities to sign off on every site -- now the CA can sign off on your site in an extended way, which costs sites more and provides exactly zero additional security) and completely ignoring the obvious need to rework the basic model, taking into account what has worked and not worked for other kinds of services (e.g., ssh).
Is it any wonder Firefox usage share plateaued around 20% once Microsoft started actually working on IE again and a couple of vendors released additional real competitors?
Does anyone who doesn't get paychecks from Mozilla think this web-app support is what Firefox needs, even if it were properly cross-platform?
> Seamonkey is what remains of the old Mozilla suite.
> I'm surprised it's under active development.
I suppose that depends on how you define "active development". It's not getting its UI needlessly rearranged every six weeks, for example. In terms of that sort of thing, Seamonkey is mature, stable software. It needs (and gets) periodic Gecko updates, but those changes are being made anyway (for Firefox and other things) and just have to be integrated.
Pick up a five-year-old used desktop for cheap. Unplug the keyboard and mouse during the call. Even cheap LCDs often have the ability to be wall-mounted, and you can probably get one used because somebody's replacing it with a better model. Sorted.
But you should limit the baby's total screen time (including television as well as Skype and anything else) to ideally an hour a week or so, *certainly* not more than half an hour a da. The child needs *real* human contact, with living breathing people in the same room, making eye contact and reaching out with fingers and all that good stuff babies like to do. If grandma and grandpa don't like that, tell them to get over it. The baby is a person, not an entertainment device for their personal pleasure.
Indeed. I have some difficulty imagining that an online petition signed by a bunch of physics students and professors -- most of whom are foreigners -- could convince an elected, first-world government to take (or not take) any particular action. The idea that it might matter to the government of Iran is patently absurd.
> You mean there are other ways to wear a watch?
Absolutely. I wear my watch on a heavy iron chain hanging in a big loop from my eyelid piercing to my tongue ring. Sometimes it bangs against the screen of my personal webserver (a PowerEdge T620, maxed out at 768GB of RAM, and yes, it runs Linux), which is mounted on the I-beam that hangs from my nosering cables, but that's a minor inconvenience, easily offset by how handy it is to have both the watch and the web server with me at all times. I also keep seven brass caltrops in my left shoe, house my pet Cardassian vole inside my clothes, shave with an industrial grinding machine, and fight a kickboxing match against Chuck Norris every morning before breakfast. The server runs off a 72000VA online UPS that hangs between my legs, held up by the razor-wire loop cinched around my gonads. The UPS is continuously recharged by the generator I carry balanced on my head, which is powered by my farts.
Actually, you know what? I don't really do any of that. In fact, I haven't used a watch in over a decade, because there are computers at home and at work and wall clocks pretty much everywhere else I ever go.
Do you have to be careful with matches around water, because it contains hydrogen, which is dangerously flammable? If you put a lump of table salt in water, will it make sparks and loud noises? For that matter, why isn't table salt a toxic green gas at room temperature? Why don't people put lumps of charcoal on gold bands and wear them on their fingers? Why do toothpaste and mouthwash have fluoride in them, if fluorine is so dangerous that many chemists refuse to work with it? If bananas are good for you because they contain potassium, why can't you just eat lye?
If compounds consistently inherited all the physical properties of their constituent elements, the world would be a rather different place.
If you have metals (note I did not say "compounds containing elements that would be metallic in elemental form"; I said "metals", which is not even remotely the same thing) in your veins, you're going to have very serious medical problems (death, for example, seems rather likely), totally irrespective of any magnetic field.
Compounds do not share all the physical properties of their component elements. Blood, for example, is not magnetic any more than water is flammable or table salt is a room temperature gas (due to the iron or hydrogen or chlorine they contain, respectively). If you had little hunks of metal in your blood, magnetic fields would be the least of your worries.
> Anyway, the words "really" "bad" and "idea" come to mind here.
He's a "body modification artist". Really bad ideas are a key aspect of his lifestyle.
> he would have said that the strong magnetic [fields] caused a subspace
> anomaly that attracts interphasic lifeforms which make human cells devolve
No, no, no. Interphasic life forms are attraced by the new interphasic fusion process. Sheesh. Don't you understand science at all?
Strong magnetic fields are much more likely to cause "interference", which makes it harder to use communicators (you get a lot of static, for which you have to compensate) and transporters (you have to install custom filters or narrow the annular confinement beam or something) and sensors (at minimum, you have to reroute auxiliary power to the lateral sensor array).
Magnetic fields can also be harnessed and used, e.g., as a confinement field (such as one might use to keep antimatter in its storage tank -- an important fuel source for starships; your warp reactor core wouldn't work without antimatter).
Magnets don't do anything to hemoglobin. Anybody who says otherwise is either trying to sell you magnetic bracelets for WAY more than they're worth or never figured out high-school level chemistry or physics. Likely both.
(Metallic elemental iron is ferromagnetic. Most other iron compounds are not ferromagnetic. Similarly, elemental diatomic hydrogen is explosive, but water is not generally labeled as explosive, even though it has two hydrogen atoms per molecule. See how that works?)
> Given that it is not illegal to own or purchase or transport
> radioactive materials (within limits for hobbyist use),
Yes, but if they're sufficiently radioactive to be detected from across the street, and you didn't bother to put them in a shielded container for transport, I don't think getting pulled over and asked a couple of questions is necessarily entirely out of line. It is worth noting that the radiation was leaving the vehicle and having an impact on the external surroundings, which is how the police knew about it in the first place. Now, in the case of the dude who'd just had a medical scan with radioactive dye, that was fundamentally unavoidable (unless he wanted to stay at the hospital until it wore off, which could be rather expensive). Nonetheless, the police didn't stop him out of randomness, or because they were busybodies, or because they had something against him personally, etc. They became interested in him because of radiation that was emanating from his vehicle. That's not (or at least not entirely) a private effect. It's a public effect.
If you're transporting radioactive materials for hobbyist use, and you want them to be private (so that they will not get police attention without a warrant, for example), you could always just keep them in a shielded container, so that the radiation remains private. Frankly, that's probably a good idea even at home (whenever you're not actively working with your hobby). Think of it in the same way as keeping your dog on a leash.
> That assumes that the population is evenly distributed throughout the whole country
Americans in general tend to make that assumption, on account of the fact that it's that way here. It's not completely even, of course, but the population is spread out to a MUCH greater extent than in Europe. For example, about 13% of the population of Ohio lives in one of the three largest cities, and the rest of us don't. If you expand the cities to their respective greater metropolitan areas (which encompass a rather larger geographical area, perhaps up to a quarter of the state's land area, depending on exactly where you draw the edges; Greater Cleveland is particularly difficult to define precisely: you can drive from Youngstown to Toledo on city streets pretty much the whole way, if you plan your route to do that on purpose -- admittedly, that's not the usual way to go), it's still only about half the population of the state (maybe up to 60%, again, depending on exactly where you draw the edges). Meanwhile there are hundreds of small-to-medium cities containing a few thousand people each, many smaller communities, and a substantial rural population.
> The story dwells on one person's story.
It has to, in order to be attractive to the reading audience.
In any case, the underlying idea that immigrants are more likely to start businesses is true as far as it goes, but it's not specific to the US. It's true in general: most of the people in any given population are insufficiently motivated to do things like immigrate to a different country or start a business and work hard enough to make it a success. That's true worldwide.
In other words, when you're looking for how many people are sufficiently driven to start a business and make it fly, looking among people who are already known to be motivated enough to immigrate to a foreign country is disingenuous. Basically, to quote xkcd, that's the mother of all sampling biases.
Indeed. The practical minimum screen resolution for development is at least 1600x1200 on the primary display, with the ability to plug in at least one additional monitor (of similar size) when you're at your desk.
Also, a full-sized keyboard with decent key switches (ideally, the kind that provide actual tactile feedback) is essential.
The quality of the pointing device matters a lot less, because in practice these days everyone's going to plug in a USB pointing device anyway (unless you're using the laptop while rock climbing or riding a unicycle or something), so as long as the built-in pointing device doesn't get in the way of the keyboard I guess it doesn't matter much.
The ability to run additional operating system setups in a virtual machine would be kind of nice, so you can test on any platform you're supposed to support.
Other than that, I can install whatever software I need.
> That being said, there are not really too many advanced ruby programmers around.
It seems most of the really advanced programmers use Perl. (The reverse is NOT true, however; there are plenty of Perl programmers who are not particularly advanced. Hence, Matt's Script Archive.)
3mm, huh? So a couple of comets could do 6mm, right? Is that enough to put Florida under water, or do we need three or four comets?
(I jest. Florida isn't really the geographical area I'd most want to put under water. Unfortunately, California is too mountainous for it to be practical, and redirecting comets would be ridiculously expensive anyhow. We'll just have to wait for the San Andreas fault to do its thing.)
Well I'm sure as everliving [bad word] not going to eat *raw* meat. Do I *look* Japanese to you? Are blue-grey eyes and light brown hair and skin approximately the same color as Cool Whip the usual signs of being Japanese? No? Well, there you are, then. I don't eat raw meat.
I've bitten into undercooked meat by mistake a handful of times in my life. Undercooked chicken is merely tasteless and poorly textured. Undercooked fish is actively disgusting. Undercooked eggs are worse yet. Undercooked beef will throw your gastro-intestinal tract into reverse gear really, really fast. I consider myself fortunate not to have ever inadvertently bitten into undercooked pork, but I have a hard time imagining it would be very good.
I'm from Ohio.
> A good cut of meat tastes just fine with a
> touch of salt and course ground black pepper.
Admittedly, black pepper isn't something we use very often around here.
The standing joke people from other parts of the country tell is that Ohioans
only use three spices: salt, pepper, and ketchup. The joke doesn't work
so well *in* Ohio. In practice, we use onion powder, sometimes garlic,
and of course desert spices (cinnamon especially, but also nutmeg,
cloves, and from time to time even ginger) but very few Ohioans ever
eat pepper. More people around here eat sauerkraut than black pepper.
Black pepper is "hot", don't you know.
Nonetheless, I *do* know what pepper tastes like (I've lived in two
other states besides Ohio; I also use cayenne), and of course
everyone uses too much salt, yet there's no way that's enough to
fix beef. Chicken or fish *maybe* (although fish could really do
with some lemon), but pork has got to have ketchup or barbecue
sauce on it, and as for beef... beef with just salt and pepper would
be completely inedible, as far as I'm concerned. Add some
worchestershire sauce, ketchup, brown sugar, cheddar, ketchup,
pickle, a slice of provalone, lettuce, tomato, ketchup, maybe some
mushrooms, a couple of slices of nice multi-grain bread, and now
you've got something I'll eat. Did I mention ketchup? Red meat
isn't ready to eat until it has ketchup on it -- or barbecue sauce.
Historically, there were other examples as well. I distinctly recall a period of about six months during the 32-bit era (back before x64 existed, when Intel still thought Itanium might eventually take off) when AMD CPUs were absolutely slaughtering Intel ones on the price/performance ratio.
Can they make it look just like the UI in Firefox 2.0?
That would be a massive improvement.