Eventually, the manufacturers will get the message.
Yes, nothing sends a message like 3% of your least-profitable customers banding together to found an organic juniper berry & desert reclamation profit-sharing co-operative.
Older used smartphones will be on the market for a very, very long time. There's a store 500 yards away from me right now that does nothing but sell such phones.
Complete with the latest and greatest vendor-supported security patches?
Don't you mean flip phones? Because many of those are just fine running factory firmware forever and ever.
It's Intel's R&D investment; they can sell it or sit on it as they see fit. They are a for-profit corporation, not a public service, and are under no obligation to anyone to sell their technology on any set schedule.
If we replace "Intel R&D" with "Mylan", does your comment still stand? If not, why not?
I'm almost libertarian enough to agree with you if the company in question operates on trade secrets and claims no patent protection.
Patent protection, however, is a two-way street: you're granted a right to call upon the government's power of coercion to prevent other people from pursuing ideas—ideas they might very well have come up with independently—with the purpose of fostering competition for the public good.
At that point, being an ass with your business methods intersects with the public interest, too, because you swallowed the patent pill and traded your pure and independent "for profit" status in exchange for public-interest coercive power-ups.
The only large parameter I've ever cared about here is whether sharp story submissions encourage sharp dialogue.
Why so often—during various epochs—story submissions tapering off into a woolly final sentence? Is it an actually goal here (by some) to unleash an obligatory pocket-protector Olympics of beat-the-buzzer geek stereotypy?
Trolls, consider yourself trolled—for the extremely predictable lolz.
No, true nerd-hood is about going through life in the spirit that no consequential detail is ever too small to hold up to the tomographic megaphone—for as long as it takes. Wool is what other people like to pull over the fine technical fine print. I continue to celebrate every wool-free story submission that/. has ever run.
Blessed be the pinprick lightsaber that shears sheep.
I'm no more productive with 8 hours of sleep than I am with 6.
You're so underslept that you didn't even notice (or feel the need to respond to) the first claim:
Underslept employees tend to create fewer novel solutions to problems, they're less productive in their work and they take on easier challenges at work...
Any of these would be a blow to the economy of shuteye short shrift.
Another possibility, which you probably didn't consider in your blind drift, is that you actually need nine hours.
The IEA expects about 1,000 gigawatts of renewables will be installed in the next five years, a milestone that coal only accomplished after 80 years.
Perhaps people don't realize this, but a sentence like this actively kills brain cells. Stupidity, you're soaking in it.
To be fair, it doesn't outfight kill brain cells, but it does actively repurpose them away from gainful employment (which might, in fact, be worse).
First off, you'd want to be comparing per capita growth rates, and confine yourself to developed countries. Exponential population growth, it's a thing.
Then you might consider that coal was mainly used for generation only where hydro wasn't convenient, because hydro was the big story of the day for electrical generation, while coal's glory was steam and steel production.
What an incredibly stupid sentence, precisely sculpted to serve as yet another nail in the ignorance coffin.
I'm writing this for Kjella, who can skip to the bottom if TL;DR concerning his entire future life.
It's long, detailed, and lucid for a good cause.
I free ran with a 25.5 hour period not so long ago—for three years straight, like a metronome. During the year I recorded most assiduously, I didn't deviate from my period by more than +/- 4 hours.
Note that my cycle was somewhat elliptical. I advanced more slowly during the day portion of my cycle, and more quickly during the night portion of my cycle, but over any 16.5 day interval (calendar days), my daily period averaged out to 25h25m. I couldn't even detect seasonal drift with a Canadian change in solar day length.
Before I free-ran, I had partially treated my condition with a small dose of melatonin taken mid-afternoon. This reduced my period to around 24h10m, which means I was drifting over an hour a week. Every fourth or fifth week I would cease taking the melatonin, put in a week of night mode, and in so doing, reset myself to a very early rise time, which would then inexorably advance until it became too much to bear (if I started the cycle rising at 0500, a month later I'm rising at 0900, and I'm rolling into the office at 09:45, which was as far as I could reasonably push things).
I guess I was a bit in denial about the 10 minute/day drift residue. I tinkering with every variable over a two year period: dose, time of day, coffee consumption, light exposure level, bedtime strategy (fixed or adaptive), etc. Mostly I kept my dose time in a fairly narrow window around 15:30. I suspect, in retrospect, that as my internal clock drifted my melatonin became less effective, because the dosing time became less optimal, and so there was an acceleration effect near the end of each three- or four-week compliance interval, because it was usually a day when I woke up around noon where I finally said "oh, fuck it" and suspended melatonin for a week.
This lifestyle gradually became unbearable because of a second straw: the three zombie hours every day an hour or two after taking the melatonin. Work—putting in longer hours than anyone else, because I seriously needed the social credit, return home—vegetate on couch, regain mind for one good hour before bedtime, then head punctually to bed (this period of my life was highly compliance oriented), to battle with ever-ramping insomnia, until it all fell apart again.
I put up with it while I retained hope that I was maybe one inspiring fiddle away from breaking either of the two straws. But I never did.
The free-running period was not gainfully employed, but by this point, my quality of life was near zero, so what the hell? I didn't really expect it to last more than six months and my theory was that I would be productive free-running, and that the whole thing would be massively inconvenient, but I'd finally have time for both a working life and a personal life. All I needed was some kind of work I could do during my long nights in the night phase of my cycle, and then pack my social life into the other half.
It didn't work out that way, because N24 was only half the diagnosis. This was the most important thing I've learned about my condition in thirty years.
My "formal" personal diagnosis now has the august title: disordered circadian rhythm—induced split-cognitive-modality syndrome.
What I learned was that I was in full possession of my mental apparatus for three or four days out of every sixteen, the days when I was best aligned with day mode. This shocked the hell out of me, because over thirty years, I'd never observed my period having any connection to the solar day. This included a three-week bicycle trip in my twenties through Washington and Oregon—in the month of June, during which we never once saw a cloud after rising at the crack of dawn every day—yet we finally had to cancel the California leg, because I simply couldn't get up before noon under any coercion for even one more day. I
Ten years? We're talking legacy here. How about 100 years?
Here's one that's already dying, and should continue to wither: the monologue-centric academic lecture hall.
Here's another one that will take more than ten years but is already happening: the death of cooking (esp. baking) in U.S. volumetric units.
No-one in the younger generation thinks accurate digital scales are exotic any longer. And what if you want to make 50% more? And the original recipe calls for 1 1/2 tsp? Oh, dear. So what, apart from inertia, keeps us locked into this weirdly discrete measurement system?
Answer: whole chicken eggs sold in the shell.
That could change, too, but I'm not counting this as an official answer.
All these old printed cookbooks call for one onion. Seen an onion lately? I've picked up 10 lb bags from Costo, where every onion was 450–500 g. Seen a mushroom lately? Where I live, back in the 1980s, a mushroom was one inch across. A quarter cut was almost diced. Now I'm usually doing an 8-cut, and sometimes doing a 12-cut.
Everything in grams. It's more durable. Please and thank you.
Consistently high cortisol levels and an overactive amygdala turns people into joiners. It's a safety reflex to run with your own crowd.
My politics are the politics of less cortisol, and I'm not especially keen to sign up to anyone else's mindless, group-thinking base.
Fear is a weird thing. Having your gun taken away: soul destroying. Trump negotiating with North Korea: mild anxiety. Not only do you have to whip up fear to mobilize your base, but it also has to be fear of something puny, yet personal.
When Google came along there was a huge difference in quality between its results and what you got from Yahoo or AltaVista.
I don't recall the results being all that much better than AltaVista.
The problem with AV is that it wasn't designed to scale and the size of its index stagnated at what they could fit into memory on a single box (even if it was such a nice box by the standards of the day that Lisa Simpson was forced to invent "cromulent").
I also think Google spidered faster, so it's larger index was also fresher.
But I recall getting nearly as much done with AV before making the switch, because its filter was good enough for -pop -culture. Clearly, though, you could see its days were soon numbered.
Additionally—if you were a power user—AV had this killer feature where you could put a simple "+" sign in front of a search term to make it mandatory. There isn't much about the nineties that makes me misty, but I sure miss that one thing.
How much longer until you can do CAD on a device the size of a phone. 2 years, 5 years, 10?
Never, until the non-volatile memory manages to come up with something that combines endurance with density with DDR access latencies, all at a commodity price point.
Some of these technologies are presently planning to embed a power-hungry FPGA into the NVRAM module to handle bit-error correction. The carbon nanotubes looks great, but at 32 MB per chip, you're not packing 16 GB into anything smaller than the original Motorola brick phone, with a sticker price to rival Iridium.
While the ARM processor may be a killer application, background DRAM refresh on 16 GB of working memory remains an application killer, for any mobile device.
Due to physics, charge storage cells are unlikely to ever improve from the present level (brought to you by the sexy Kate MOS insulation deficit).
The best NAND flash, with error correction code, can withstand about 100,000 erase-write cycles. According to Nantero, NRAM can withstand 10^12 write cycles and 10^15 read cycles — an almost infinite number.
Next stop, coming to a decade near you: volume arrays in volume production with volume endurance.
Bathroom sinks used to have separate taps for hold and cold.
Now we have single-lever controls that combine rate with temperature, by interpolating uniformly between hot and cold. Gasoline pumps do something similar to deliver various octane levels from a small number of distinct feed stocks.
There's no reason, therefore, that a bathroom can't have three different feed stocks: hot (guaranteed no Ebola), cold (guaranteed no Ebola), and fountain of youth (no safety standard mandated).
Of course, you wouldn't want people rinsing their toothbrush with FoY without their consent, seeing as there might just be a tiny health risk.
So, for end-user safety, when you crank the level hard to the left, a red light flashes, there's a momentary buzz, and a few ounces of extra lever resistance which the user must deliberately overcome.
Good design?
You be the judge.
Another approach would be to never allow any byte stream into a page with the execute bit set that hasn't been scanned beforehand. This would be like not piping suspect FoY into the bathroom in the first place. I know, I know. Too dull for words.
According to, ahem, Wikipedia, private prisons house about 8% of the prison population.
And according to the 80-20 power law, 20% of your prisoners experience 80% of the total injustice and punitive "piling on" and we have already identified nearly half of that group.
(You think when you are already underneath two 300-lb linemen, well "what's one more?" and "ooooof" you had no idea a ruptured spleen could hurt that much—especially two days later, while the whistle-toting coach continues to prevent you from consulting with a qualified team doctor.)
Sheesh, even the most myopic libertarian knows that coercion is properly the power of the state, to be exercised by the state, with responsibility to the state (and not the bottom line).
In the middle of the morning, Miss Price tells us to shake down the common areas. I follow one of the two COs into a tier and we do perfunctory searches of the TV room and tables, feeling under the ledges, flipping through a few books. I bend over and feel around under a water fountain. My hand lands on something loose. I get on my knees to look. It's a smartphone. I don't know what to do—do I take it or leave it? My job, of course, is to take it, but by now I know that being a guard is only partially about enforcing the rules. Mostly, it's about learning how to get through the day safely, which requires decisions like these to be weighed carefully.
A prisoner is watching me. If I leave the phone, everyone on the tier will know. I will win inmates' respect. But if I take it, I will show my superiors I am doing my job. I will alleviate some of the suspicion they have of every new hire. "Those ones who gets along with 'em—those ones are the ones I really have to watch," SORT commander Tucker told us in class. "There is five of y'all. Two and a half are gonna be dirty."
I take the phone.
Miss Price is thrilled. The captain calls the unit to congratulate me. The other COs couldn't care less. When I do count later, each inmate on that tier stares at me with his meanest look. Some step toward me threateningly as I pass.
The worker "safety" margin in the shareholder-first privatized system is about an order of magnitude more "intimidating" to the work force than a properly run prison, and the average hire is about half as well equipped to manage these decisions.
That's not the only phone story. This "article" is about a half-day read, and still I recommend the whole thing.
Real journalism. A great fit alongside your collection of tubes and vinyl for any retro hipsters out there with a sixties conscience. (If you've been freshly fished from the Juicer section of the cryogenic deep freeze, here's a carrot tip: a modern cellphone is like Kirk's communicator, but with less flip action, and it also comes with a tiny screen on which you can play Breakout or Dig Dug for as long as your thumb will bend.)
There are many things to criticize about Equifax, and their handling of this breach. This is not one of them.
No, he's so wrong.
What he's trying to do here is add "loss of privacy" to the once-exclusive fraternity of "death and taxes".
In medicine, if you come up with a dumb, risky implant don't do it in America. You will get sued. Leaky boob bags are not a good long-term business model.
But this guy thinks that the credit rating industry doesn't need to think long and hard about their business model, because "all implants fail".
Here's another point of view: if you know up front that you can't secure the information, perhaps your business model should not depend upon amassing all this information in the first place, get out of the way, and allow the vaunted creativity of American free enterprise find a different solution to the credit-worthiness problem.
Because your solution sucks in a way that can't ever be fixed, by your own admission.
Never believed it the first time, nor any of the times thereafter.
Olbermann shtick is to become so repetitive as to render himself completely unlistenable to anyone with access to a supplemental news source. I think he regards this grinding hatchet job as a form of insistent emphasis. It's perhaps also why the sound bite on his media channel features a heavy drum. Case in point, I didn't even finish the above clip. But the passage I quoted is excellent, which is why I keep going back, for the brief moments when Olbermann punches through this endless brow beating.
Olbermann is right about this. Trump successfully reads off a teleprompter for an entire thirty minutes, and five minutes later many in the media proclaim a shotgun marriage to an elf princess, and the reclamation of Elendil's throne consummated. True, Aragorn did put his hand on the same Saudi orb, but then again he also killed some living, breathing Uruk-hai. Advantage, Aragorn.
The year of Linux on the desktop is a turtle race with Trump becoming presidential. Always has been, always will be.
Same media dunce caps, to a mortal certainty.
"The race of Minix is failing. The blood of Numenor is all but spent, its pride and dignity forgotten. It is only because of Tmux and Docker that Ring 0 survives. I was there Gandalf. I was there three thousand years ago..."
Indeed, Elrond, we've now had megapixel screen buffers for an age of men.
The original Let's Pretend MegaPixel Display was a monochrome 17" monitor displaying 4 brightness levels (black, dark gray, light gray and white) in a fixed resolution of 1120 x 832 at 92 DPI (931,840 total pixels) at 68 Hz.
It integrated a mono microphone, mono speaker, stereo RCA sockets, a 3.5 mm headphone socket and a socket for the keyboard/mouse. A unique feature was that the monitor was connected to the computer by a single ultra-proprietary 6-foot cable which provided power, video signals, and all the rest.
A severe problem with this setup was that the monitor could not be switched off completely while the computer was powered on. The screen could be switched to black but the cathode heater always remained on. This led to extreme screen dimming after some years of use, especially when the computer was not turned off overnight as in a server setup or in a busy software lab.
Man, can't imagine what mystic wandering in the wilderness might have invented that bodge. Yes, and he was also subject to an endless litany of premature coronation (one suspects trigger-happy journalism interns vying for first post), until finally breaking through with the iPhone.
2007: official year of Apple finally kicking everyone's ass, after thirty years of overblown self-aggrandizement.
There's the rub: once in a long while, a princess finally does kiss the right frog.
Estate taxes are good at collecting what amounts to a wealth tax from actual real estate holdings located in (or near to) any major OECD metropolitan area, or associated fly-over country.
I'd actually like to see the estate tax scaled by age difference between the goner golden cuff links and the grinning silver spoon.
For a long time, you could make a real return (without even scamming the IRS) of about 4% per year on equity.
So scale back the size of the lump bequeathed to each recipient by -4% (or -3% per year, if you're just too libertarian verklempt) based on the age difference. Basically, under this formula this generational stake invested in a mutual fund will maintain constant value forever, if not consumed.
If the recipients want to live a lavish lifestyle without depleting their unearned nest egg, they they have to flex their aptitude and try to beat default market return (opportunities for the enterprising young man of wealth and any smidgen of competence abound).
If the age difference is 40 years, the formula is 0.97^40 = 29.6% passed along (using the lower, verklempt rate), with 70% owed to Uncle Sam.
Now I'm a generous man, and I'd actually allow this entire 70% to be eligible for deferred collection upon demise of the recipient, out of any inheritance passed along (before making this calculation again). And of course there would also be a full exemption at the bottom for estates worth less than $5 million.
Say, in scenario A, silver spoon inherits $1 billion, with 70% earn marked for collection upon silver spoon leveling up to golden cuff links.
He invests it at market par, with a 4% real rate of return (after income taxes, inflation, yada yada) and spends (not invests) $200 million on a lavish lifestyle.
He then dies with a pile worth $2 billion dollars (inflation normalized) of which $700 million is now owed to Uncle Sam on deferred collection, with the remaining $1.3 billion subject to the original formula (since his equity return beat Uncle Sam's taxation rate by 1%, despite squandering $10 million/year on hookers and blow, he still dies in possession of an even larger fortune—inflation normalized).
Scenario B: Britney inherits $1 billion, with $700 million flagged for deferred collection. She promptly invests in a wild scheme (e.g. Target Canada), shaves her head, has children by two different men, yada yada, before waking up one morning, wiping away the last tear of self pity, and discovering that she is only worth $500 million. Awwww.
She then proceeds to invest wisely and makes $100 million back again, but her $600 million estate actually owes $700 in deferred collection to Uncle Sam, so it takes $595 million, and calls it settled (Uncle Sam lost $100 million in this debacle, as compared to the first story, as well). Thus, she passes along only her meagre $5 million basic exemption post-demise (a huge loophole in practice) to her many offspring, who must now navigate life with only the silver spoon of their elite childhood (and some token dosh) to help them through it. Awwww.
Indeed, this whole scheme is almost too brutal to contemplate—is it not?— throwing the rich to the vagaries of free enterprise within but two short generations of what formerly could have been eternal endowment. ("Hush, Marie, the less said in public the better," chides Louis, who is equally forlorn, but stiffer of lip.)
Footnote:
Target Canada racked up losses of $2.1 billion in its lifespan, and was widely viewed as a failure, termed a "spectacular failure" by Amanda Lang of CBC News, "an unmitigated disaster" by Maclean's and "a gold standard case study in what retailers should not do when they enter a new market" by the Financial Post.
What crazy people moderated this post +5 interesting?
The Internet Research Agency trades in weaponized speech.
This is a new road, on a new technology, for a new era.
New. And bad.
ET is not going to send a spaceship to demolish our planet. They are merely going to transmit a Breitbart 3K feed (this particular alien 'K' has four zeros) and we're going to do it ourselves.
We won't all fall for it, but the signal will be extremely powerful, and any boy scout with half a dish will be able to pick it up, to try out the "Amazing" science experiments, as described by the very model of lucid science exposition (brought to you by extensive A/B trials conducted throughout the galaxy).
Also keep in mind you are not just leaving money on the table not doing this, you are actually having your pocket picked. Retailers all pay merchant fees to the card processors and issuing banks. That is where those rewards payouts come from; they pass those fees right on back to the customers in terms of higher prices.
Can't see the forest for the trees, can you? The entire CC system raises prices unnecessarily, in direct proportion to how much credits cards are actually used.
You've got your eyes fixated on your tiny little bathtub, I've got my eyes on the whole ocean.
Ever hear of low aim steering, where you only look at the tail lights directly in front of you? My preference is to look all the way up the road. I basically never use a CC, and I haven't had a single charge on my debit card I've ever needed to dispute. I also tend to shop at smaller, local businesses who appreciate my extra patronage.
I'm rewarded for every debit card purchase with a nicer smile.
Last night I breezed through the whole of Lustig's new book, The Hacking of the American Mind.
Spoiler alert: he's talking about you and your kind in every chapter.
You're on the dopamine-driven consumption treadmill and you're losing your shit over a tiny spiff with strings attached at every level (what these encourage you to further consume, and how often, what this takes away from the productive economy, and what it takes away from responsible society by allowing the CC companies to lawfully and systematically discriminate against cash purchases—VISA vendors get their left hands amputated if caught discounting cash).
I put way more weight on the happy smile than the stupid spiff.
Doubtful Lustig will gain much notice outside the choir, though. I'm choir central so for me this book was 70% review with only smatterings to truly new material.
One thing I will say about the book is that it has an uneven tone. This is finally explained in the acknowledgements section, where Lustig reveals that his pop-culture savvy SME editor provided all the colour, and effectively functioned as a co-author with a distinct prose style.
Also, he could have used a second editor who was subject matter blind. One or two charts are garishly incomprehensible in a way that only true insiders could possibly miss.
"Many eyes make all bugs shallow" was pretty much debunked when OpenSSH was breached a few years ago.
It any maxim this pithy, language is being used in a special register where the "modulo" term is user supplied—if the user has the wits and can ass himself to do so.
There are so many things you got wrong here, do I need to strip gold stars off your chest on both sides of this equation?
First off, the OpenSSH bug was shallow, right from the get go, to any competent pair of eyes.
Second, cryptographic software is notorious for having failure modes that require exotic instrumentation and extreme wonk vigilance to so much as notice, from any perspective outside the black box.
The cryptographic PRNG is Exhibit A in defying external validation checks. If the cryptographic protocol exchanges random values, is your randomness compromised? Somebody else's cipher, enciphering with a key you don't know, actively leaking vital state from your most precious host (though at a fairly low bit rate) is indistinguishable from true pseudo-randomness, by GRAS convention, in anything under 2^128 operations.
Third, any discovered ability to debug cryptographic software from the black box end-user perspective is almost universally regarded as itself being a bug, not a feature.
The truly ridiculous thing about the OpenSSH story is that everyone competent already knew that changes to this part of the system required explicit eyeball recruitment.
I'm a more competent driver than many other drivers in the parameters I personally care about (they might say the same, and also be correct). They say in chess that experts only see the good moves. Well, on the road, this "good move" filter should be considered hazardous. Most of my worst driving errors—the ones I've learned to notice—are where I simply fail to see that another driver might choose to push the lynchpin pawn of his or her king protection fortress. In chess, that leads to certain victory for the other side. On the road, that leads to exchanging paint or a fender bender, and contentious litigation over cause, a state of heated affairs one would rarely list under "certain victory". Therefore the wary driver should make a serious effort to tamp down any presumption of competence from anyone else. This is the hardest of driving skills to master. You're basically telling your mirror neurons to go to hell (there goes any presumption of multitasking), because the other side of the mirror is a certifiably crazy place.
I assume this is what happened in the OpenSSH saga. The original competent developers failed to put flags in the comments in all the right places to mandate extra eyeball review, because they simply couldn't comprehend that anyone would gain a commit bit to edit such a module and not already know this.
If my view is true, then one could say that OpenSSH was in fact hoist by the extreme shallowness of the risk posed, to the degree that the competent eyeballs failed to even imagine a dunce whose eyeballs who couldn't see it (they should, however, be roundly slapped for failing to conceive of a dunce whose vision was perfectly fine until impaired by a copious application of NSA grease, but with less than full decapitation mustard, as this threat vector remained mildly hypothetical prior to the horrific Snowden dump).
Overall score—way to not understand how maxims work.
I do grant that this maxim is far from perfect. Even on day one, it was properly understood as somewhat aspirational in tone, and as having a legitimate counter-propaganda mandate, because the reverse opinion (widely held) was even more wrong.
If you take all the bug-prevention technologies, then add up all the "bugs not prevented" by this methodology, you'd surely account for all bugs at 3000% of totality, along the same lines that medical technologies have "prevented" more deaths than the total number of patients studied.
Furthermore, can you really count every memory management bug in C/C++ style languages as a "bug prevented" had automatic memory management been employed (ignoring that the translated applications would certainly not have met any original hard-performance criteria?)
What if one moved all software to the hardest of the hard languages (nominally Haskell)?
Well, we'd have a 99% reduction in bug production per unit of function, and a 99% reduction in total units of function delivered (far fewer employed programmers, working far more methodically)—for a whopping 99.99% reduction in total bughood.
Over the course of a few decades, the apparent age difference of the earlybirds vs the night owls has really started to stand out. With the 'sundowners' (to borrow a term from dementia studies) aging about 10 to 20 years more in appearance than the early risers.
The only way you could possibly get this impression is if your "sundowners" group was highly correlated with smokers, alcoholics and unwise drug use (of the kind further correlated with pre-existing neurological imbalance).
I had N24 for thirty years (recently conquered), and the only reason I presently look my age is the copious amount of albino hair infiltrating an even more copious mop of same-old hair. (Being awake all night for five out of every fifteen days certainly helped to keep me out of the sun.)
The systematically grizzled-before-their-time "sundowner" groups I have known either gathered together in dialysis clinics (member of extended family, who was the only athlete among them), hung out in smoky rooms all day, or retired at age fifty from owning a hectic restaurant to a semi-affluent lifestyle of sailboats, golf, and steadily escalating post yard-arm inebriation.
Stop all this bullshit about 'Muh biologies' as an excuse to stay up later.
If I were you, I'd return both your bullshit detector and your dialect coach from whence they came and demand a full refund (if a $5 Starbucks gift card is the best you can wrangle, I'd still colour your situation improved—should you manage to spend it wisely).
The funny sensation you're now feeling? That's 'muh biologies' putting it's boot up your ass. _____
On another note, the group of people who sleep less than they ought to also includes a disproportionate fraction of those who abuse fructose (somebody out there is drinking two Starbucks Mocha Frappuccinos per day).
Caffe Vanilla Frappuccino Blended Beverage Serving size: 16 fl oz Sugar: 69 g (4.91 tbsp)
RAZ: So what is the — what is a daily recommended limit for, like, an adult human for maximum amount of sugar we should be having every day?
LUSTIG: Well, depends on who you ask. The World Health Organization originally said six teaspoons of added sugar per day.
RAZ: Sounds reasonable.
LUSTIG: Well, it is actually reasonable. It's 25 grams. It's not, you know, an enormous amount, but it should be enough. But — but they were lobbied so severely by the industry. So they actually ended up liberalizing it from 6 to 12 teaspoons of added sugar per day.
Sleep deprivation leads to a) caffeine-seeking behaviour, and b) sugary-snack–seeking behaviour, and c) the aforementioned base-clearing (and liver clogging) home run.
If it doesn't have 100% coverage that means escape mutations are feasible and therefore it will be useless. Basically the antibody needs to be effective against any 6 simultaneous SNPs in the viral genome.
You're advancing a fallacy that all mutations are cost free to the resultant super bug.
Back in reality, the non-mutated forms where chosen by a selective pressure, and it stands to reason that many of these conveyed a selective advantage (which is sacrificed when a new selection pressure causes it to flip in a different direction).
There are thus two ways to win the war: either by the spannering the Infinite Improbability Drive (the story everyone loves to tell the foolish children), or by a gradual process of nickel and diming the aspiring super bug to clad itself in Mad Max bandoliers filled with hollow-point bullets whose helium cores do not fully counteract their depleted uranium sheathings.
Moral of the story: The quick way to take out Mad Max in Thunderdome would have involved just a few wags of a simple garden hose to loosen the hardened soil beneath his 400 lb loaded-for-bear curb mass.
Adding a hard drive would also void the warranty because "why would you want to add a hard drive". This attitude actually drove away a lot of Apple fans from Apple forever, and led to the disenchantment which drove Jobs away from Apple.
I was one of those people with enough dosh in my foolish youth to spring for the original fat Mac (something just shy of CDN $4000 with printer and external floppy as I dimly recall), which within less than two years became a decorative boat anchor after I priced an internal hard drive upgrade at CDN $1500, which instead I spent, as I now recall it, on an entire crappy 80286 clone, which was ugly and clunky, but far more useful to me as a software developer.
What first drove me absolutely ape-shit about my double-floppy fat Mac was that whenever it needed something from an unmounted floppy, it would by (some inscrutable logic) pop one of the two mounted floppies—almost always the disk it would seconds later request that I reinsert.
I knew my workflow, the machine didn't, yet it figured it should choose which disk to auto-eject, and I shouldn't even have my own button. I never had a development workflow that required less than three floppies.
Soon I had installed permanent paperclips in both floppies so I could override this outrageously unhelpful behaviour, whose mother was a sentient elevator servicing a hamster high rise, and whose father was a talking toaster who smelled of elderberries.
It drove me APE FUCKING SHIT.
And you're quite right. I've never gone back to the Apple fold.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, nothing sends a message like 3% of your least-profitable customers banding together to found an organic juniper berry & desert reclamation profit-sharing co-operative.
Complete with the latest and greatest vendor-supported security patches?
Don't you mean flip phones? Because many of those are just fine running factory firmware forever and ever.
If we replace "Intel R&D" with "Mylan", does your comment still stand? If not, why not?
I'm almost libertarian enough to agree with you if the company in question operates on trade secrets and claims no patent protection.
Patent protection, however, is a two-way street: you're granted a right to call upon the government's power of coercion to prevent other people from pursuing ideas—ideas they might very well have come up with independently—with the purpose of fostering competition for the public good.
At that point, being an ass with your business methods intersects with the public interest, too, because you swallowed the patent pill and traded your pure and independent "for profit" status in exchange for public-interest coercive power-ups.
Nostalgia? Pass the Gravol.
The only large parameter I've ever cared about here is whether sharp story submissions encourage sharp dialogue.
Why so often—during various epochs—story submissions tapering off into a woolly final sentence? Is it an actually goal here (by some) to unleash an obligatory pocket-protector Olympics of beat-the-buzzer geek stereotypy?
Trolls, consider yourself trolled—for the extremely predictable lolz.
No, true nerd-hood is about going through life in the spirit that no consequential detail is ever too small to hold up to the tomographic megaphone—for as long as it takes. Wool is what other people like to pull over the fine technical fine print. I continue to celebrate every wool-free story submission that /. has ever run.
Blessed be the pinprick lightsaber that shears sheep.
You're so underslept that you didn't even notice (or feel the need to respond to) the first claim:
Any of these would be a blow to the economy of shuteye short shrift.
Another possibility, which you probably didn't consider in your blind drift, is that you actually need nine hours.
Perhaps people don't realize this, but a sentence like this actively kills brain cells. Stupidity, you're soaking in it.
To be fair, it doesn't outfight kill brain cells, but it does actively repurpose them away from gainful employment (which might, in fact, be worse).
First off, you'd want to be comparing per capita growth rates, and confine yourself to developed countries. Exponential population growth, it's a thing.
Then you might consider that coal was mainly used for generation only where hydro wasn't convenient, because hydro was the big story of the day for electrical generation, while coal's glory was steam and steel production.
What an incredibly stupid sentence, precisely sculpted to serve as yet another nail in the ignorance coffin.
I'm writing this for Kjella, who can skip to the bottom if TL;DR concerning his entire future life.
It's long, detailed, and lucid for a good cause.
I free ran with a 25.5 hour period not so long ago—for three years straight, like a metronome. During the year I recorded most assiduously, I didn't deviate from my period by more than +/- 4 hours.
Note that my cycle was somewhat elliptical. I advanced more slowly during the day portion of my cycle, and more quickly during the night portion of my cycle, but over any 16.5 day interval (calendar days), my daily period averaged out to 25h25m. I couldn't even detect seasonal drift with a Canadian change in solar day length.
Before I free-ran, I had partially treated my condition with a small dose of melatonin taken mid-afternoon. This reduced my period to around 24h10m, which means I was drifting over an hour a week. Every fourth or fifth week I would cease taking the melatonin, put in a week of night mode, and in so doing, reset myself to a very early rise time, which would then inexorably advance until it became too much to bear (if I started the cycle rising at 0500, a month later I'm rising at 0900, and I'm rolling into the office at 09:45, which was as far as I could reasonably push things).
I guess I was a bit in denial about the 10 minute/day drift residue. I tinkering with every variable over a two year period: dose, time of day, coffee consumption, light exposure level, bedtime strategy (fixed or adaptive), etc. Mostly I kept my dose time in a fairly narrow window around 15:30. I suspect, in retrospect, that as my internal clock drifted my melatonin became less effective, because the dosing time became less optimal, and so there was an acceleration effect near the end of each three- or four-week compliance interval, because it was usually a day when I woke up around noon where I finally said "oh, fuck it" and suspended melatonin for a week.
This lifestyle gradually became unbearable because of a second straw: the three zombie hours every day an hour or two after taking the melatonin. Work—putting in longer hours than anyone else, because I seriously needed the social credit, return home—vegetate on couch, regain mind for one good hour before bedtime, then head punctually to bed (this period of my life was highly compliance oriented), to battle with ever-ramping insomnia, until it all fell apart again.
I put up with it while I retained hope that I was maybe one inspiring fiddle away from breaking either of the two straws. But I never did.
The free-running period was not gainfully employed, but by this point, my quality of life was near zero, so what the hell? I didn't really expect it to last more than six months and my theory was that I would be productive free-running, and that the whole thing would be massively inconvenient, but I'd finally have time for both a working life and a personal life. All I needed was some kind of work I could do during my long nights in the night phase of my cycle, and then pack my social life into the other half.
It didn't work out that way, because N24 was only half the diagnosis. This was the most important thing I've learned about my condition in thirty years.
My "formal" personal diagnosis now has the august title: disordered circadian rhythm—induced split-cognitive-modality syndrome.
What I learned was that I was in full possession of my mental apparatus for three or four days out of every sixteen, the days when I was best aligned with day mode. This shocked the hell out of me, because over thirty years, I'd never observed my period having any connection to the solar day. This included a three-week bicycle trip in my twenties through Washington and Oregon—in the month of June, during which we never once saw a cloud after rising at the crack of dawn every day—yet we finally had to cancel the California leg, because I simply couldn't get up before noon under any coercion for even one more day. I
Ten years? We're talking legacy here. How about 100 years?
Here's one that's already dying, and should continue to wither: the monologue-centric academic lecture hall.
Here's another one that will take more than ten years but is already happening: the death of cooking (esp. baking) in U.S. volumetric units.
No-one in the younger generation thinks accurate digital scales are exotic any longer. And what if you want to make 50% more? And the original recipe calls for 1 1/2 tsp? Oh, dear. So what, apart from inertia, keeps us locked into this weirdly discrete measurement system?
Answer: whole chicken eggs sold in the shell.
That could change, too, but I'm not counting this as an official answer.
All these old printed cookbooks call for one onion. Seen an onion lately? I've picked up 10 lb bags from Costo, where every onion was 450–500 g. Seen a mushroom lately? Where I live, back in the 1980s, a mushroom was one inch across. A quarter cut was almost diced. Now I'm usually doing an 8-cut, and sometimes doing a 12-cut.
Everything in grams. It's more durable. Please and thank you.
Consistently high cortisol levels and an overactive amygdala turns people into joiners. It's a safety reflex to run with your own crowd.
My politics are the politics of less cortisol, and I'm not especially keen to sign up to anyone else's mindless, group-thinking base.
Fear is a weird thing. Having your gun taken away: soul destroying. Trump negotiating with North Korea: mild anxiety. Not only do you have to whip up fear to mobilize your base, but it also has to be fear of something puny, yet personal.
I don't recall the results being all that much better than AltaVista.
The problem with AV is that it wasn't designed to scale and the size of its index stagnated at what they could fit into memory on a single box (even if it was such a nice box by the standards of the day that Lisa Simpson was forced to invent "cromulent").
I also think Google spidered faster, so it's larger index was also fresher.
But I recall getting nearly as much done with AV before making the switch, because its filter was good enough for -pop -culture. Clearly, though, you could see its days were soon numbered.
Additionally—if you were a power user—AV had this killer feature where you could put a simple "+" sign in front of a search term to make it mandatory. There isn't much about the nineties that makes me misty, but I sure miss that one thing.
Never, until the non-volatile memory manages to come up with something that combines endurance with density with DDR access latencies, all at a commodity price point.
Some of these technologies are presently planning to embed a power-hungry FPGA into the NVRAM module to handle bit-error correction. The carbon nanotubes looks great, but at 32 MB per chip, you're not packing 16 GB into anything smaller than the original Motorola brick phone, with a sticker price to rival Iridium.
While the ARM processor may be a killer application, background DRAM refresh on 16 GB of working memory remains an application killer, for any mobile device.
Due to physics, charge storage cells are unlikely to ever improve from the present level (brought to you by the sexy Kate MOS insulation deficit).
NRAM set to spark a 'holy war' among memory technologies — 12 January 2017
Next stop, coming to a decade near you: volume arrays in volume production with volume endurance.
Bathroom sinks used to have separate taps for hold and cold.
Now we have single-lever controls that combine rate with temperature, by interpolating uniformly between hot and cold. Gasoline pumps do something similar to deliver various octane levels from a small number of distinct feed stocks.
There's no reason, therefore, that a bathroom can't have three different feed stocks: hot (guaranteed no Ebola), cold (guaranteed no Ebola), and fountain of youth (no safety standard mandated).
Of course, you wouldn't want people rinsing their toothbrush with FoY without their consent, seeing as there might just be a tiny health risk.
So, for end-user safety, when you crank the level hard to the left, a red light flashes, there's a momentary buzz, and a few ounces of extra lever resistance which the user must deliberately overcome.
Good design?
You be the judge.
Another approach would be to never allow any byte stream into a page with the execute bit set that hasn't been scanned beforehand. This would be like not piping suspect FoY into the bathroom in the first place. I know, I know. Too dull for words.
And according to the 80-20 power law, 20% of your prisoners experience 80% of the total injustice and punitive "piling on" and we have already identified nearly half of that group.
(You think when you are already underneath two 300-lb linemen, well "what's one more?" and "ooooof" you had no idea a ruptured spleen could hurt that much—especially two days later, while the whistle-toting coach continues to prevent you from consulting with a qualified team doctor.)
Sheesh, even the most myopic libertarian knows that coercion is properly the power of the state, to be exercised by the state, with responsibility to the state (and not the bottom line).
Chapter 1: "Inmates Run This Bitch" — June 2016
The worker "safety" margin in the shareholder-first privatized system is about an order of magnitude more "intimidating" to the work force than a properly run prison, and the average hire is about half as well equipped to manage these decisions.
That's not the only phone story. This "article" is about a half-day read, and still I recommend the whole thing.
Real journalism. A great fit alongside your collection of tubes and vinyl for any retro hipsters out there with a sixties conscience. (If you've been freshly fished from the Juicer section of the cryogenic deep freeze, here's a carrot tip: a modern cellphone is like Kirk's communicator, but with less flip action, and it also comes with a tiny screen on which you can play Breakout or Dig Dug for as long as your thumb will bend.)
No, he's so wrong.
What he's trying to do here is add "loss of privacy" to the once-exclusive fraternity of "death and taxes".
In medicine, if you come up with a dumb, risky implant don't do it in America. You will get sued. Leaky boob bags are not a good long-term business model.
But this guy thinks that the credit rating industry doesn't need to think long and hard about their business model, because "all implants fail".
Here's another point of view: if you know up front that you can't secure the information, perhaps your business model should not depend upon amassing all this information in the first place, get out of the way, and allow the vaunted creativity of American free enterprise find a different solution to the credit-worthiness problem.
Because your solution sucks in a way that can't ever be fixed, by your own admission.
I was there the first time the "year of Linux on the desktop" was run up a jury-rigged flag pole.
It puts me in mind of Olbermann's fifty phrases of Trump "becoming" presidential.
Never believed it the first time, nor any of the times thereafter.
Olbermann shtick is to become so repetitive as to render himself completely unlistenable to anyone with access to a supplemental news source. I think he regards this grinding hatchet job as a form of insistent emphasis. It's perhaps also why the sound bite on his media channel features a heavy drum. Case in point, I didn't even finish the above clip. But the passage I quoted is excellent, which is why I keep going back, for the brief moments when Olbermann punches through this endless brow beating.
Olbermann is right about this. Trump successfully reads off a teleprompter for an entire thirty minutes, and five minutes later many in the media proclaim a shotgun marriage to an elf princess, and the reclamation of Elendil's throne consummated. True, Aragorn did put his hand on the same Saudi orb, but then again he also killed some living, breathing Uruk-hai. Advantage, Aragorn.
The year of Linux on the desktop is a turtle race with Trump becoming presidential. Always has been, always will be.
Same media dunce caps, to a mortal certainty.
Indeed, Elrond, we've now had megapixel screen buffers for an age of men.
Man, can't imagine what mystic wandering in the wilderness might have invented that bodge. Yes, and he was also subject to an endless litany of premature coronation (one suspects trigger-happy journalism interns vying for first post), until finally breaking through with the iPhone.
2007: official year of Apple finally kicking everyone's ass, after thirty years of overblown self-aggrandizement.
There's the rub: once in a long while, a princess finally does kiss the right frog.
Estate taxes are good at collecting what amounts to a wealth tax from actual real estate holdings located in (or near to) any major OECD metropolitan area, or associated fly-over country.
I'd actually like to see the estate tax scaled by age difference between the goner golden cuff links and the grinning silver spoon.
For a long time, you could make a real return (without even scamming the IRS) of about 4% per year on equity.
So scale back the size of the lump bequeathed to each recipient by -4% (or -3% per year, if you're just too libertarian verklempt) based on the age difference. Basically, under this formula this generational stake invested in a mutual fund will maintain constant value forever, if not consumed.
If the recipients want to live a lavish lifestyle without depleting their unearned nest egg, they they have to flex their aptitude and try to beat default market return (opportunities for the enterprising young man of wealth and any smidgen of competence abound).
If the age difference is 40 years, the formula is 0.97^40 = 29.6% passed along (using the lower, verklempt rate), with 70% owed to Uncle Sam.
Now I'm a generous man, and I'd actually allow this entire 70% to be eligible for deferred collection upon demise of the recipient, out of any inheritance passed along (before making this calculation again). And of course there would also be a full exemption at the bottom for estates worth less than $5 million.
Say, in scenario A, silver spoon inherits $1 billion, with 70% earn marked for collection upon silver spoon leveling up to golden cuff links.
He invests it at market par, with a 4% real rate of return (after income taxes, inflation, yada yada) and spends (not invests) $200 million on a lavish lifestyle.
He then dies with a pile worth $2 billion dollars (inflation normalized) of which $700 million is now owed to Uncle Sam on deferred collection, with the remaining $1.3 billion subject to the original formula (since his equity return beat Uncle Sam's taxation rate by 1%, despite squandering $10 million/year on hookers and blow, he still dies in possession of an even larger fortune—inflation normalized).
Scenario B: Britney inherits $1 billion, with $700 million flagged for deferred collection. She promptly invests in a wild scheme (e.g. Target Canada), shaves her head, has children by two different men, yada yada, before waking up one morning, wiping away the last tear of self pity, and discovering that she is only worth $500 million. Awwww.
She then proceeds to invest wisely and makes $100 million back again, but her $600 million estate actually owes $700 in deferred collection to Uncle Sam, so it takes $595 million, and calls it settled (Uncle Sam lost $100 million in this debacle, as compared to the first story, as well). Thus, she passes along only her meagre $5 million basic exemption post-demise (a huge loophole in practice) to her many offspring, who must now navigate life with only the silver spoon of their elite childhood (and some token dosh) to help them through it. Awwww.
Indeed, this whole scheme is almost too brutal to contemplate—is it not?— throwing the rich to the vagaries of free enterprise within but two short generations of what formerly could have been eternal endowment. ("Hush, Marie, the less said in public the better," chides Louis, who is equally forlorn, but stiffer of lip.)
Footnote:
What crazy people moderated this post +5 interesting?
The Internet Research Agency trades in weaponized speech.
This is a new road, on a new technology, for a new era.
New. And bad.
ET is not going to send a spaceship to demolish our planet. They are merely going to transmit a Breitbart 3K feed (this particular alien 'K' has four zeros) and we're going to do it ourselves.
We won't all fall for it, but the signal will be extremely powerful, and any boy scout with half a dish will be able to pick it up, to try out the "Amazing" science experiments, as described by the very model of lucid science exposition (brought to you by extensive A/B trials conducted throughout the galaxy).
Buh bye, harmless words.
I predict there will be a rash of unplanned pregnancies by device-centric teenagers going "oh, so that's what you meant by 'put a sock on it'".
Boy scout planning way ahead: "Echo, instructions for putting on a sock before sex."
Echo: "On me? Or you?"
Boy scout: "Pretend you've got your own sock already."
Echo: "Okay, stick out your foot."
Boy scout: "What?"
Echo: "Consider your foot a model for your future manhood."
Boy scout: "What's wrong with my present manhood?"
Echo: "Can't tell you, cheap camera, no zoom."
Can't see the forest for the trees, can you? The entire CC system raises prices unnecessarily, in direct proportion to how much credits cards are actually used.
You've got your eyes fixated on your tiny little bathtub, I've got my eyes on the whole ocean.
Ever hear of low aim steering, where you only look at the tail lights directly in front of you? My preference is to look all the way up the road. I basically never use a CC, and I haven't had a single charge on my debit card I've ever needed to dispute. I also tend to shop at smaller, local businesses who appreciate my extra patronage.
I'm rewarded for every debit card purchase with a nicer smile.
Last night I breezed through the whole of Lustig's new book, The Hacking of the American Mind.
Spoiler alert: he's talking about you and your kind in every chapter.
You're on the dopamine-driven consumption treadmill and you're losing your shit over a tiny spiff with strings attached at every level (what these encourage you to further consume, and how often, what this takes away from the productive economy, and what it takes away from responsible society by allowing the CC companies to lawfully and systematically discriminate against cash purchases—VISA vendors get their left hands amputated if caught discounting cash).
I put way more weight on the happy smile than the stupid spiff.
Doubtful Lustig will gain much notice outside the choir, though. I'm choir central so for me this book was 70% review with only smatterings to truly new material.
One thing I will say about the book is that it has an uneven tone. This is finally explained in the acknowledgements section, where Lustig reveals that his pop-culture savvy SME editor provided all the colour, and effectively functioned as a co-author with a distinct prose style.
Also, he could have used a second editor who was subject matter blind. One or two charts are garishly incomprehensible in a way that only true insiders could possibly miss.
SME = subject matter expert
It any maxim this pithy, language is being used in a special register where the "modulo" term is user supplied—if the user has the wits and can ass himself to do so.
There are so many things you got wrong here, do I need to strip gold stars off your chest on both sides of this equation?
First off, the OpenSSH bug was shallow, right from the get go, to any competent pair of eyes.
Second, cryptographic software is notorious for having failure modes that require exotic instrumentation and extreme wonk vigilance to so much as notice, from any perspective outside the black box.
The cryptographic PRNG is Exhibit A in defying external validation checks. If the cryptographic protocol exchanges random values, is your randomness compromised? Somebody else's cipher, enciphering with a key you don't know, actively leaking vital state from your most precious host (though at a fairly low bit rate) is indistinguishable from true pseudo-randomness, by GRAS convention, in anything under 2^128 operations.
Third, any discovered ability to debug cryptographic software from the black box end-user perspective is almost universally regarded as itself being a bug, not a feature.
The truly ridiculous thing about the OpenSSH story is that everyone competent already knew that changes to this part of the system required explicit eyeball recruitment.
I'm a more competent driver than many other drivers in the parameters I personally care about (they might say the same, and also be correct). They say in chess that experts only see the good moves. Well, on the road, this "good move" filter should be considered hazardous. Most of my worst driving errors—the ones I've learned to notice—are where I simply fail to see that another driver might choose to push the lynchpin pawn of his or her king protection fortress. In chess, that leads to certain victory for the other side. On the road, that leads to exchanging paint or a fender bender, and contentious litigation over cause, a state of heated affairs one would rarely list under "certain victory". Therefore the wary driver should make a serious effort to tamp down any presumption of competence from anyone else. This is the hardest of driving skills to master. You're basically telling your mirror neurons to go to hell (there goes any presumption of multitasking), because the other side of the mirror is a certifiably crazy place.
I assume this is what happened in the OpenSSH saga. The original competent developers failed to put flags in the comments in all the right places to mandate extra eyeball review, because they simply couldn't comprehend that anyone would gain a commit bit to edit such a module and not already know this.
If my view is true, then one could say that OpenSSH was in fact hoist by the extreme shallowness of the risk posed, to the degree that the competent eyeballs failed to even imagine a dunce whose eyeballs who couldn't see it (they should, however, be roundly slapped for failing to conceive of a dunce whose vision was perfectly fine until impaired by a copious application of NSA grease, but with less than full decapitation mustard, as this threat vector remained mildly hypothetical prior to the horrific Snowden dump).
Overall score—way to not understand how maxims work.
I do grant that this maxim is far from perfect. Even on day one, it was properly understood as somewhat aspirational in tone, and as having a legitimate counter-propaganda mandate, because the reverse opinion (widely held) was even more wrong.
If you take all the bug-prevention technologies, then add up all the "bugs not prevented" by this methodology, you'd surely account for all bugs at 3000% of totality, along the same lines that medical technologies have "prevented" more deaths than the total number of patients studied.
Furthermore, can you really count every memory management bug in C/C++ style languages as a "bug prevented" had automatic memory management been employed (ignoring that the translated applications would certainly not have met any original hard-performance criteria?)
What if one moved all software to the hardest of the hard languages (nominally Haskell)?
Well, we'd have a 99% reduction in bug production per unit of function, and a 99% reduction in total units of function delivered (far fewer employed programmers, working far more methodically)—for a whopping 99.99% reduction in total bughood.
"Explain" is not a word that belongs in front of Ray Kurzweil.
"Espouse" barely suffices.
Kurzweil truly inhabits a realm beyond human apprehension, properly described only by words that haven't even been invented yet.
"Exposensify"?
Dang, it would almost have worked—until I named it.
The only way you could possibly get this impression is if your "sundowners" group was highly correlated with smokers, alcoholics and unwise drug use (of the kind further correlated with pre-existing neurological imbalance).
I had N24 for thirty years (recently conquered), and the only reason I presently look my age is the copious amount of albino hair infiltrating an even more copious mop of same-old hair. (Being awake all night for five out of every fifteen days certainly helped to keep me out of the sun.)
The systematically grizzled-before-their-time "sundowner" groups I have known either gathered together in dialysis clinics (member of extended family, who was the only athlete among them), hung out in smoky rooms all day, or retired at age fifty from owning a hectic restaurant to a semi-affluent lifestyle of sailboats, golf, and steadily escalating post yard-arm inebriation.
If I were you, I'd return both your bullshit detector and your dialect coach from whence they came and demand a full refund (if a $5 Starbucks gift card is the best you can wrangle, I'd still colour your situation improved—should you manage to spend it wisely).
The funny sensation you're now feeling? That's 'muh biologies' putting it's boot up your ass.
_____
On another note, the group of people who sleep less than they ought to also includes a disproportionate fraction of those who abuse fructose (somebody out there is drinking two Starbucks Mocha Frappuccinos per day).
Caffe Vanilla Frappuccino Blended Beverage
Serving size: 16 fl oz
Sugar: 69 g (4.91 tbsp)
How Worried Should We Be About Sugar? — 2016
Sleep deprivation leads to a) caffeine-seeking behaviour, and b) sugary-snack–seeking behaviour, and c) the aforementioned base-clearing (and liver clogging) home run.
You're advancing a fallacy that all mutations are cost free to the resultant super bug.
Back in reality, the non-mutated forms where chosen by a selective pressure, and it stands to reason that many of these conveyed a selective advantage (which is sacrificed when a new selection pressure causes it to flip in a different direction).
There are thus two ways to win the war: either by the spannering the Infinite Improbability Drive (the story everyone loves to tell the foolish children), or by a gradual process of nickel and diming the aspiring super bug to clad itself in Mad Max bandoliers filled with hollow-point bullets whose helium cores do not fully counteract their depleted uranium sheathings.
Moral of the story: The quick way to take out Mad Max in Thunderdome would have involved just a few wags of a simple garden hose to loosen the hardened soil beneath his 400 lb loaded-for-bear curb mass.
I was one of those people with enough dosh in my foolish youth to spring for the original fat Mac (something just shy of CDN $4000 with printer and external floppy as I dimly recall), which within less than two years became a decorative boat anchor after I priced an internal hard drive upgrade at CDN $1500, which instead I spent, as I now recall it, on an entire crappy 80286 clone, which was ugly and clunky, but far more useful to me as a software developer.
What first drove me absolutely ape-shit about my double-floppy fat Mac was that whenever it needed something from an unmounted floppy, it would by (some inscrutable logic) pop one of the two mounted floppies—almost always the disk it would seconds later request that I reinsert.
I knew my workflow, the machine didn't, yet it figured it should choose which disk to auto-eject, and I shouldn't even have my own button. I never had a development workflow that required less than three floppies.
Soon I had installed permanent paperclips in both floppies so I could override this outrageously unhelpful behaviour, whose mother was a sentient elevator servicing a hamster high rise, and whose father was a talking toaster who smelled of elderberries.
It drove me APE FUCKING SHIT.
And you're quite right. I've never gone back to the Apple fold.