Even if it's cheating to alter dominoes, it's not cheating to use the same tactic in nanomachines. It will increase complexity to have one piece completely different from all the others, but it's not cheating to use all the options you are given.
Now instead of wrapping someone's toilet in plastic wrap, you can wrap someone's robot in plastic wrap and watch the look on his face when the robot won't reassemble itself to his orders. Or wrap one segment only, and watch as it tries to assemble itself. Hilarity ensues.
It seems to me a two-wavelength laser pointer could serve as both "pen" and "eraser", so that you could mark up documents without damaging the paper. Many times I have to print a draft of a letter or presentation and run it by the executive, who will probably mark it up with handwritten corrections and send it back to me. They have every right to edit something they have to sign or say until they're happy with it, but it does waste a lot of paper. If I could substitute erasable paper for each proofing stage, it would probably cut out 2/3 or 3/4 of my paper use, but in order to do so, it needs to be human-writable and not just printable.
Hopefully this erasable paper can be photocopied without making it fade. That would solve a lot of the problems caused by fading over time. If you find you want to keep something you wrote on erasable paper, just pop it in the copy machine and it's now on permanent paper.
If Xerox does get it to work in color, it could be a great way to proof document formatting as well. There are things I just can't spot without actually printing a document, such as whether a shading makes text within it illegible. If the document is important enough for me to polish up and proof thoroughly, it's probably going to be in color. It doesn't have to be perfect color, just "business color".
True, but MCGA could not (it did only the 320x200x256 mode) and that formed sort of a "lowest common denominator" for games. It was a massive improvement over the 320x200x4 CGA modes (there were two -- ugly and butt-ugly) that it evolved out of, and (since it used palettized color like VGA) was even a big improvement over the 320x200x16 mode EGA provided. It also worked on 64k of video RAM, which was a significant cost factor in those days.
This is why some old extended-VGA cards (most based on Paradise chipsets) supported 640x400 at 256 colors -- it fits nicely in a 256k memory space. If you ran 640x480x256 on cards that supported (but did not have) 512k, the bottom of the screen was garbage.
The reason games ran at 320x200x256 was because that was what the low-end PS/2 machines came with standard, and it was the PS/2 that pretty much defined where IBM wanted "beyond EGA" to go.
Most property/casualty policies have subrogation clauses. That is, if they pay you for a claim, it is they who get to go after the manufacturer, or the drunk that hit you, or the owner of the dog that bit you. This is the right of subrogation. There is typically (perhaps "damn near always") a corresponding clause that says the policyholder will not do anything to hamper their ability to subrogate. (This is why you are not supposed to discuss fault after an accident.)
Many times companies demand waivers of subrogation in their contracts. Fight it if you can -- your insurance carrier may not even allow you to do it, but resist it even if they do allow it. This would basically mean that if your insurer pays out a claim, they can't sue the company you signed that contract with -- you have waived the right of subrogation, so by extension, you have waived the insurance carrier's right of subrogation as well! This means that your insurance carrier may well take the hit for something that was someone else's fault, and you signed away their right to collect. (There are cases where these waivers have been deemed invalid or fraudulently obtained, but do you want to play that particular game of Russian Roulette?) Guess who pays for that, come renewal time? You, of course.
I highly doubt the article poster signed away his right of subrogation to Dell. If it was buried in a shrinkwrap "agreement" somewhere, I doubt that will stand -- though many dumber things have happened in legal history. But if he has accepted a settlement from his property insurance, he may have already given the insurance carrier the right to subrogate. It may be out of his hands now. This is not necessarily bad, as an insurance carrier can afford to throw lawyers at a problem (when it's worth it), in a way that ordinary mortals cannot.
Wouldn't your habitat have plenty of air? I didn't mean go outside and fly -- I meant fly right there in the base (thus the reference to "half a city block", which has no real meaning on the naked lunar surface).
If the enclosure is even the size of a football stadium, flight is entirely reasonable at low speeds, and it wouldn't take a lot of speed to stay airborne. Add some trips over the updraft from a recirculating fan, and you could glide all day.
I would imagine one of the most fun things to do it 1/6 gee would be to fly, or at least to glide long distances. Get a good running start, open your coat like a flying squirrel and glide for half a city block. Imagine the possibilities -- now flashers could flash an entire lunar block at one time, by gliding with a trenchcoat. CowboyNeal would probably not fly all that far, much to everyone's relief.
What if that impact had never occurred? The Earths surface would be level, like the other terrestrial planets, and instead of the water settling into the lower basins (the oceans), it would cover the entire surface of the planet to a depth of several kilometers. Only a few of today's highest peaks would extend above that water level. Those peaks, in all likelihood, wouldn't exist either. Not only would the tectonics needed for their formation be absent, but a world without continents would have monster surface waves and erosion would scrub them below the waterline in a few million years.
Let's grant all of that, but it still doesn't lead to this conclusion:
If there were ANY life here, it would be no more advanced than the fish which exist today.
Why? Sure there would be no whales, dolphins, and the like (no opportunity to leave the ocean, make mammals, then make ocean mammals that return to the ocean), but that is not the only form of intelligence in the ocean that could lead to -- or already possess -- sentience.
Cephalopods may either be smart and short-lived, or not-so-smart and longer lived, but why is a smart and long-lived variety not possible, especially in a world lacking whales? Just because it isn't on our particular branch of the animal tree doesn't mean it can't be more advanced than fish.
I fear the "NOT" joke comeback (thanks to "Borat") has led to anything similar making a comeback as well. Like "Psych!" I hope it is short-lived, it will not be forgivable for long.
Every dollar spent building a bomb is one that cannot be spent on science. Money is going toward destroying wealth, rather than something that is acquiring it? (Knowledge is wealth, and all that.) NASA has to compete with the poorly managed and incompetently used military, when all the incompetents can think to do is throw more money and manpower at the problem. Science goes without, unless it has to do with making better toys for the military.
This is not a slam on the troops, they are a valiant and necessary fighting force. Yes they deserve better gear and I wish the money had been spent on that a long time ago. If it had, a significant number of them would still be alive or more nearly in one piece. It is the people pulling the strings that I have the problems with.
The LS-120 drive (and its successor, the 250) had the potential to supplant floppy drives, though they sadly did not. First, they could read and write ordinary 1.44 MB disks (though formatting them was always a bit dicey) in addition to their own media, and if you had a dedicated "floppy slot" in your case, you could easily adapt the drive, sans faceplate, to masquerade as the floppy drive it was replacing. If you didn't tell anyone it wasn't just a floppy drive, then the seek noise and powered eject were about the only signs something was unusual. I think I bought a 10-pack of LS-120 disks when I bought the drive and never bought any again, but it was very nice for making backups on the fly, considering I only had a 1.2 GB hard drive. The only drawback was that it was ATAPI and did not use the floppy controller, meaning after a CD-ROM I was down to two spots for hard drives. Somewhat ironically, this is now a major advantage as floppy controllers are often lacking and ATA-to-USB converters are plentiful. I still have my old LS-120 in a drawer, and it was working when I put it there. If I desperately had to read an old floppy disk, I'd probably toss the LS-120 into an external USB case and try that before tearing a machine open. I wouldn't trust the two Zip drives in the same drawer to be anything but paperweights.
The 250 drives went even further, by allowing you to format regular floppies to some ungodly (and ultimately unreliable) capacity in the range of 30 MB. This typically left them readable only by the original drive, even other LS-250s tended not to be able to read them. Also, they had just a wee problem with bit rot. But they could still use 1.44 MB disks in the conventional manner as well, and the older 120 MB disks, and their own 250 MB disks. They were just too little too late -- by then, CD-RW had far surpassed them in the bang-for-the-buck department, as well as the raw space department. CD-RW discs (why the spelling change? I don't know) had dropped below $1 apiece by then, and the 250 MB media were still in the $12-15 range. If you didn't think the disc was ever coming back, CD-R blanks were about 35 cents.
I had a friend from South Africa bring me his laptop to diagnose a sound problem, some time around when the floppy disk died the first time (1998). The fix was pretty trivial, but it involved reinstalling some drivers. When I asked him for the install floppies, he stared at me and said "This computer doesn't take floppies." Eventually we worked out that while in the U.S. we call all generations of floppies, well, "floppies", in South Africa (and apparently other places as well) they call the 3.5" variety "stiffies". While this is logical, it was still rather humorous when I explained what a "stiffy" was in American slang.
It seems to me that the addition of pharmaceutical grade caffeine to food items that ordinarily have none is one step down the slippery slope toward its eventual demonization and illegality. I am surprised it didn't happen a lot sooner, considering that cola drinks are likewise "spiked" unnecessarily. I have to imagine this is an historical artifact of the Coca-Cola switch from cocaine to caffeine. The dangers are not so overt, so it was ignored for so long as to become entrenched.
Of course, cannabis also is fairly short on dangers, but you can thank Reefer Madness and yellow journalism for that one. Opium was likewise entrenched, but the dangers of addiction and overdose have been known for almost as long.
I think you misunderstood -- I want to take the key (32 bytes or whatever) and produce plaintext that hashes into that key. Then publish the plaintext, and (if necessary) the algorithm to use. This way you are not distributing the encryption key, just word salad. If it uses an existing hashing algorithm, such as MD5, then the genie has long since left the bottle and you will not be able to eliminate the software that converts word salad into encryption keys. I do not think it feasible to create realistic content files that hash into (smaller) copyrighted works. Certainly it is logically possible, I just don't think it is computationally feasible. Plus, you'd have to distribute the larger work and the end user would have to generate a smaller output file, which is not particularly bandwidth-friendly. How big would a text have to be to hash into the content of a HD-DVD? Probably bigger than most of our hard drives, not to mention the CPU cycles to throw at the problem.
The parent (of my first post) was worried about the keys themselves being copyrighted, or laws used in some other manner to halt the distribution of keys extracted from HD-DVD/Blu-Ray discs. I was trying to get around that potential problem by enabling individuals to create keys easily from something that resembles human-readable text. Since there will be more than one text that will hash to the same value (especially if you are using only part of the hashed output), trying to stop this would be worse than whack-a-mole.
Could someone instead publish a text that, when run through a hashing algorithm, produces the key in question? The text does not have to make a hell of a lot of sense, "word salad" would do fine. But this would be a copyrightable work of its own, one for which there exists a piece of software that will convert it into a key to something else.
It would be really nice if this could be done with existing hashing algorithms (let's put MD5 to good use, not out to pasture!) simply by using the first 32 bytes of the output, or the last 32, or some other selection.
I wouldn't be so annoyed if the spam haiku was literally that -- a spam message in the form of a haiku. Certainly it would not be so bandwidth taxing to receive: --- Buy our Viagra! Your mojo is on the rise from little blue pills.
The point is that if e-mail advertising were even remotely as entertaining as television advertising can be, we might be willing to read it. Even if we aren't immediate buyers, it still plants the idea. Most of the entertaining TV commercials barely even address the product or brand until the very end, but they work because they keep you hooked that long.
Of course there are products I will not buy no matter how I become aware of them. Bud Light commercials can be moderately funny, but the product is awful. It must be working on someone though, as it's still one of the most popular beers in the country (maybe even #1).
Plenty more out there, these are just what pop into my head:
GOMER - Get Outta My Emergency Room (usually old and hypochondriac) FLK - Funny Looking Kid CTD - Circling The Drain
And of course an acronym that is well-recognized outside the medical profession:
FUBAR - Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition
I would imagine a doctor or nurse would expect the last one to be understood by the general populace. Even if they don't know the exact expansion, most people know "fubar" stands for "fucked up something something" and have heard it in context enough to figure it out.
Would you allow your pregnant daughter to go through this procedure of donating amniotic fluid?
Yes, especially if some of it was set aside for the benefit of her own child in later years. Of course it would matter how much needs to be taken and how much of a risk this poses to both mother and embryo (I would guess by the time you get to "fetus" it's too late).
No matter what these cells turn out to be good for, it stands to reason that the person for whom they would do the most good is the person they match precisely -- the one that created them in the first place. So I say: Sample safely but save some for my grandkid!
I had a Mustang with a gauge that always read 1/8 tank more than I actually had. This is entirely manageable, but finding out for the first time really sucked. I don't know if it had a warning light or not because it never got that far. I ended up replacing the tank (which fixed the gauge problem) because it was rusting inside and crapping up the engine but that was the least of the engine problems as it turned out.:( For some reason, engines don't like an exhaust valve stuck shut (push rod was left out by previous owner) and it first started smoking, then eventually quit entirely before I could puzzle out the problem. It was only at "autopsy" that I figured it out.
With the current car, the gauge goes from pegged-beyond-F to 1/2 in about 140 miles, and from 1/2 to E in about 120, but I think it was designed that way. You don't want "E" to really mean empty anyhow, with a fuel-injection system. It's much simpler to trick clueless drivers into filling up before their injectors clog up with tank sludge.
That 260 miles will take anywhere from 12.7 to 13.5 gallons, depending on the traffic conditions I've had to drive in. This week, with a lot of people and students not on the roads in the morning, I will probably do considerably better than 20 mpg. Next week, when traffic goes back to normal, probably back under 20.
"Looks like another perfect day. I love L.A." -- Randy Newman
When they asked the laptop connected to the engine, it said "windows down" was worse than "A/C on", but when they did the actual "who runs out of gas first" test, windows down went considerably further than A/C on with the same amount of fuel -- proving that (as any Prius owner will tell you) the computer is often wrong when it comes to mileage. It was a statistically significant difference too -- I recall that the vehicles used got about 13 mpg, and out of a single tank there was a difference of about 12 miles traveled before running out. (Later mileage tests use a much more sane 5 gallon fill-up so they don't have to drive all day, but on this one they filled them completely.)
I seem to recall they established that on the particular make and model of SUV that they tested with, A/C on would cut about half a mile per gallon off your mileage figures. This is not enough to justify driving a sauna, but it is a real difference. However, improperly inflated tires can cause as much or more loss of efficiency, and most people don't even think about that.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if it's cheating to alter dominoes, it's not cheating to use the same tactic in nanomachines. It will increase complexity to have one piece completely different from all the others, but it's not cheating to use all the options you are given.
Mal-2
Interplanetary Internet perhaps?
Mal-2
Now instead of wrapping someone's toilet in plastic wrap, you can wrap someone's robot in plastic wrap and watch the look on his face when the robot won't reassemble itself to his orders. Or wrap one segment only, and watch as it tries to assemble itself. Hilarity ensues.
Mal-2
It seems to me a two-wavelength laser pointer could serve as both "pen" and "eraser", so that you could mark up documents without damaging the paper. Many times I have to print a draft of a letter or presentation and run it by the executive, who will probably mark it up with handwritten corrections and send it back to me. They have every right to edit something they have to sign or say until they're happy with it, but it does waste a lot of paper. If I could substitute erasable paper for each proofing stage, it would probably cut out 2/3 or 3/4 of my paper use, but in order to do so, it needs to be human-writable and not just printable.
Hopefully this erasable paper can be photocopied without making it fade. That would solve a lot of the problems caused by fading over time. If you find you want to keep something you wrote on erasable paper, just pop it in the copy machine and it's now on permanent paper.
If Xerox does get it to work in color, it could be a great way to proof document formatting as well. There are things I just can't spot without actually printing a document, such as whether a shading makes text within it illegible. If the document is important enough for me to polish up and proof thoroughly, it's probably going to be in color. It doesn't have to be perfect color, just "business color".
Mal-2
True, but MCGA could not (it did only the 320x200x256 mode) and that formed sort of a "lowest common denominator" for games. It was a massive improvement over the 320x200x4 CGA modes (there were two -- ugly and butt-ugly) that it evolved out of, and (since it used palettized color like VGA) was even a big improvement over the 320x200x16 mode EGA provided. It also worked on 64k of video RAM, which was a significant cost factor in those days.
Mal-2
This is why some old extended-VGA cards (most based on Paradise chipsets) supported 640x400 at 256 colors -- it fits nicely in a 256k memory space. If you ran 640x480x256 on cards that supported (but did not have) 512k, the bottom of the screen was garbage.
The reason games ran at 320x200x256 was because that was what the low-end PS/2 machines came with standard, and it was the PS/2 that pretty much defined where IBM wanted "beyond EGA" to go.
Mal-2
Most property/casualty policies have subrogation clauses. That is, if they pay you for a claim, it is they who get to go after the manufacturer, or the drunk that hit you, or the owner of the dog that bit you. This is the right of subrogation. There is typically (perhaps "damn near always") a corresponding clause that says the policyholder will not do anything to hamper their ability to subrogate. (This is why you are not supposed to discuss fault after an accident.)
Many times companies demand waivers of subrogation in their contracts. Fight it if you can -- your insurance carrier may not even allow you to do it, but resist it even if they do allow it. This would basically mean that if your insurer pays out a claim, they can't sue the company you signed that contract with -- you have waived the right of subrogation, so by extension, you have waived the insurance carrier's right of subrogation as well! This means that your insurance carrier may well take the hit for something that was someone else's fault, and you signed away their right to collect. (There are cases where these waivers have been deemed invalid or fraudulently obtained, but do you want to play that particular game of Russian Roulette?) Guess who pays for that, come renewal time? You, of course.
I highly doubt the article poster signed away his right of subrogation to Dell. If it was buried in a shrinkwrap "agreement" somewhere, I doubt that will stand -- though many dumber things have happened in legal history. But if he has accepted a settlement from his property insurance, he may have already given the insurance carrier the right to subrogate. It may be out of his hands now. This is not necessarily bad, as an insurance carrier can afford to throw lawyers at a problem (when it's worth it), in a way that ordinary mortals cannot.
Mal-2
Wouldn't your habitat have plenty of air? I didn't mean go outside and fly -- I meant fly right there in the base (thus the reference to "half a city block", which has no real meaning on the naked lunar surface).
If the enclosure is even the size of a football stadium, flight is entirely reasonable at low speeds, and it wouldn't take a lot of speed to stay airborne. Add some trips over the updraft from a recirculating fan, and you could glide all day.
Mal-2
I would imagine one of the most fun things to do it 1/6 gee would be to fly, or at least to glide long distances. Get a good running start, open your coat like a flying squirrel and glide for half a city block. Imagine the possibilities -- now flashers could flash an entire lunar block at one time, by gliding with a trenchcoat. CowboyNeal would probably not fly all that far, much to everyone's relief.
Mal-2
What if that impact had never occurred? The Earths surface would be level, like the other terrestrial planets, and instead of the water settling into the lower basins (the oceans), it would cover the entire surface of the planet to a depth of several kilometers. Only a few of today's highest peaks would extend above that water level. Those peaks, in all likelihood, wouldn't exist either. Not only would the tectonics needed for their formation be absent, but a world without continents would have monster surface waves and erosion would scrub them below the waterline in a few million years.
Let's grant all of that, but it still doesn't lead to this conclusion:
If there were ANY life here, it would be no more advanced than the fish which exist today.
Why? Sure there would be no whales, dolphins, and the like (no opportunity to leave the ocean, make mammals, then make ocean mammals that return to the ocean), but that is not the only form of intelligence in the ocean that could lead to -- or already possess -- sentience.
Cephalopods may either be smart and short-lived, or not-so-smart and longer lived, but why is a smart and long-lived variety not possible, especially in a world lacking whales? Just because it isn't on our particular branch of the animal tree doesn't mean it can't be more advanced than fish.
Mal-2
I fear the "NOT" joke comeback (thanks to "Borat") has led to anything similar making a comeback as well. Like "Psych!" I hope it is short-lived, it will not be forgivable for long.
Mal-2
Every dollar spent building a bomb is one that cannot be spent on science. Money is going toward destroying wealth, rather than something that is acquiring it? (Knowledge is wealth, and all that.) NASA has to compete with the poorly managed and incompetently used military, when all the incompetents can think to do is throw more money and manpower at the problem. Science goes without, unless it has to do with making better toys for the military.
This is not a slam on the troops, they are a valiant and necessary fighting force. Yes they deserve better gear and I wish the money had been spent on that a long time ago. If it had, a significant number of them would still be alive or more nearly in one piece. It is the people pulling the strings that I have the problems with.
Mal-2
Everyone knows midgits are made by the Flying Spaghetti Monster! This particular midgit may be the first one, the progenitor of all midgitkind!
I demand that this theory receive equal time in a Kansas biology class.
Mal-2
The LS-120 drive (and its successor, the 250) had the potential to supplant floppy drives, though they sadly did not. First, they could read and write ordinary 1.44 MB disks (though formatting them was always a bit dicey) in addition to their own media, and if you had a dedicated "floppy slot" in your case, you could easily adapt the drive, sans faceplate, to masquerade as the floppy drive it was replacing. If you didn't tell anyone it wasn't just a floppy drive, then the seek noise and powered eject were about the only signs something was unusual. I think I bought a 10-pack of LS-120 disks when I bought the drive and never bought any again, but it was very nice for making backups on the fly, considering I only had a 1.2 GB hard drive. The only drawback was that it was ATAPI and did not use the floppy controller, meaning after a CD-ROM I was down to two spots for hard drives. Somewhat ironically, this is now a major advantage as floppy controllers are often lacking and ATA-to-USB converters are plentiful. I still have my old LS-120 in a drawer, and it was working when I put it there. If I desperately had to read an old floppy disk, I'd probably toss the LS-120 into an external USB case and try that before tearing a machine open. I wouldn't trust the two Zip drives in the same drawer to be anything but paperweights.
The 250 drives went even further, by allowing you to format regular floppies to some ungodly (and ultimately unreliable) capacity in the range of 30 MB. This typically left them readable only by the original drive, even other LS-250s tended not to be able to read them. Also, they had just a wee problem with bit rot. But they could still use 1.44 MB disks in the conventional manner as well, and the older 120 MB disks, and their own 250 MB disks. They were just too little too late -- by then, CD-RW had far surpassed them in the bang-for-the-buck department, as well as the raw space department. CD-RW discs (why the spelling change? I don't know) had dropped below $1 apiece by then, and the 250 MB media were still in the $12-15 range. If you didn't think the disc was ever coming back, CD-R blanks were about 35 cents.
Mal-2
...or are you just happy to see me?
I had a friend from South Africa bring me his laptop to diagnose a sound problem, some time around when the floppy disk died the first time (1998). The fix was pretty trivial, but it involved reinstalling some drivers. When I asked him for the install floppies, he stared at me and said "This computer doesn't take floppies." Eventually we worked out that while in the U.S. we call all generations of floppies, well, "floppies", in South Africa (and apparently other places as well) they call the 3.5" variety "stiffies". While this is logical, it was still rather humorous when I explained what a "stiffy" was in American slang.
Mal-2
Visit the Korova Milkbar for your supply of Moloko Vellocet.
It seems to me that the addition of pharmaceutical grade caffeine to food items that ordinarily have none is one step down the slippery slope toward its eventual demonization and illegality. I am surprised it didn't happen a lot sooner, considering that cola drinks are likewise "spiked" unnecessarily. I have to imagine this is an historical artifact of the Coca-Cola switch from cocaine to caffeine. The dangers are not so overt, so it was ignored for so long as to become entrenched.
Of course, cannabis also is fairly short on dangers, but you can thank Reefer Madness and yellow journalism for that one. Opium was likewise entrenched, but the dangers of addiction and overdose have been known for almost as long.
Mal-2
Or they could take a page from the Republican Handbook and have him declare that he is an alcoholic and disappear into rehab... forever.
Mal-2
I think you misunderstood -- I want to take the key (32 bytes or whatever) and produce plaintext that hashes into that key. Then publish the plaintext, and (if necessary) the algorithm to use. This way you are not distributing the encryption key, just word salad. If it uses an existing hashing algorithm, such as MD5, then the genie has long since left the bottle and you will not be able to eliminate the software that converts word salad into encryption keys. I do not think it feasible to create realistic content files that hash into (smaller) copyrighted works. Certainly it is logically possible, I just don't think it is computationally feasible. Plus, you'd have to distribute the larger work and the end user would have to generate a smaller output file, which is not particularly bandwidth-friendly. How big would a text have to be to hash into the content of a HD-DVD? Probably bigger than most of our hard drives, not to mention the CPU cycles to throw at the problem.
The parent (of my first post) was worried about the keys themselves being copyrighted, or laws used in some other manner to halt the distribution of keys extracted from HD-DVD/Blu-Ray discs. I was trying to get around that potential problem by enabling individuals to create keys easily from something that resembles human-readable text. Since there will be more than one text that will hash to the same value (especially if you are using only part of the hashed output), trying to stop this would be worse than whack-a-mole.
Mal-2
Could someone instead publish a text that, when run through a hashing algorithm, produces the key in question? The text does not have to make a hell of a lot of sense, "word salad" would do fine. But this would be a copyrightable work of its own, one for which there exists a piece of software that will convert it into a key to something else.
It would be really nice if this could be done with existing hashing algorithms (let's put MD5 to good use, not out to pasture!) simply by using the first 32 bytes of the output, or the last 32, or some other selection.
Mal-2
I wouldn't be so annoyed if the spam haiku was literally that -- a spam message in the form of a haiku. Certainly it would not be so bandwidth taxing to receive:
---
Buy our Viagra!
Your mojo is on the rise
from little blue pills.
http://blahblahblah.xxx/
---
Easy to filter though, which is why it would not be attempted now.
The point is that if e-mail advertising were even remotely as entertaining as television advertising can be, we might be willing to read it. Even if we aren't immediate buyers, it still plants the idea. Most of the entertaining TV commercials barely even address the product or brand until the very end, but they work because they keep you hooked that long.
Of course there are products I will not buy no matter how I become aware of them. Bud Light commercials can be moderately funny, but the product is awful. It must be working on someone though, as it's still one of the most popular beers in the country (maybe even #1).
Mal-2
Plenty more out there, these are just what pop into my head:
GOMER - Get Outta My Emergency Room (usually old and hypochondriac)
FLK - Funny Looking Kid
CTD - Circling The Drain
And of course an acronym that is well-recognized outside the medical profession:
FUBAR - Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition
I would imagine a doctor or nurse would expect the last one to be understood by the general populace. Even if they don't know the exact expansion, most people know "fubar" stands for "fucked up something something" and have heard it in context enough to figure it out.
Mal-2
But do you know they haven't placed a rootkit on the preinstalled Linux?
You don't. But at least when you wipe the drive for your favorite distro, you aren't nuking something you paid the Microsoft tax for.
Mal-2
Would you allow your pregnant daughter to go through this procedure of donating amniotic fluid?
Yes, especially if some of it was set aside for the benefit of her own child in later years. Of course it would matter how much needs to be taken and how much of a risk this poses to both mother and embryo (I would guess by the time you get to "fetus" it's too late).
No matter what these cells turn out to be good for, it stands to reason that the person for whom they would do the most good is the person they match precisely -- the one that created them in the first place. So I say: Sample safely but save some for my grandkid!
Mal-2
I had a Mustang with a gauge that always read 1/8 tank more than I actually had. This is entirely manageable, but finding out for the first time really sucked. I don't know if it had a warning light or not because it never got that far. I ended up replacing the tank (which fixed the gauge problem) because it was rusting inside and crapping up the engine but that was the least of the engine problems as it turned out. :( For some reason, engines don't like an exhaust valve stuck shut (push rod was left out by previous owner) and it first started smoking, then eventually quit entirely before I could puzzle out the problem. It was only at "autopsy" that I figured it out.
With the current car, the gauge goes from pegged-beyond-F to 1/2 in about 140 miles, and from 1/2 to E in about 120, but I think it was designed that way. You don't want "E" to really mean empty anyhow, with a fuel-injection system. It's much simpler to trick clueless drivers into filling up before their injectors clog up with tank sludge.
That 260 miles will take anywhere from 12.7 to 13.5 gallons, depending on the traffic conditions I've had to drive in. This week, with a lot of people and students not on the roads in the morning, I will probably do considerably better than 20 mpg. Next week, when traffic goes back to normal, probably back under 20.
"Looks like another perfect day. I love L.A." -- Randy Newman
Mal-2
When they asked the laptop connected to the engine, it said "windows down" was worse than "A/C on", but when they did the actual "who runs out of gas first" test, windows down went considerably further than A/C on with the same amount of fuel -- proving that (as any Prius owner will tell you) the computer is often wrong when it comes to mileage. It was a statistically significant difference too -- I recall that the vehicles used got about 13 mpg, and out of a single tank there was a difference of about 12 miles traveled before running out. (Later mileage tests use a much more sane 5 gallon fill-up so they don't have to drive all day, but on this one they filled them completely.)
I seem to recall they established that on the particular make and model of SUV that they tested with, A/C on would cut about half a mile per gallon off your mileage figures. This is not enough to justify driving a sauna, but it is a real difference. However, improperly inflated tires can cause as much or more loss of efficiency, and most people don't even think about that.
Mal-2