I've come to notice* that there is a large segment of the population that simply can't ignore what people say or do, and are unskilled at thinking abstractly. They hear/see something and treat it as though it were said to them, about them.
There are even quite a few that visit Slashdot. Try speaking in general and wait for someone to respond to you, personally, describing their specific situation.
* Yeah, yeah, I'm unobservant. It took me a while to notice that as well.
IIRC neural activity starts when it's an eymbro, so before becoming a fetus. Brain development is completed around the 25th year. So your distinction can't really be used. There are no good cut-offs, language is learned before birth, but infants aren't all that intelligent (less than many animals).
The difference is that the legislator has the power to make laws, whereas the police officer is given the power to enforce them.
In the former case, the legislator's experience gave him an idea for a necessary law, so he fulfilled his duty by introducing a bill into the proper channels, his colleges decided that it was valid, and it was voted into law by elected officials. Of course, that's not to say that the legislator didn't pull a few favors and get an unjust law passed, but at least it's an open process in public view.
In the latter case, the police officer is guilty of selective enforcement at best, and acting with complete disregard for the law at worse. Either way, he's acting illegally and covertly.
I also don't think it's likely, but it's easily possible. Some bacteria have a doubling time less than 30 minutes, so if they found a suitable environment without competition they'd reproduce at nearly their maximal rate for quite some time.
OTOH, the whole natural selection thing comes into play since otherwise, in 15 years, they'd weight a lot more than Mars itself. I'd give a number, but didn't have a calculator handy that could handle 2^(15*365.25*24*2), which is how many descendants a single bacteria on the last non-sterile probe could now have if resources were infinite.
Furthermore, it only took ~2,000 years to oxygenate Earth. Mars has ~1/200th of the atmosphere that Earth does, so, theoretically, in 10 years bacteria could completely alter the atmosphere of Mars. Plus that's just from the slight imbalance between energy production by photosynthesis and energy use by oxidative respiration. An actual waste product could accumulate much more quickly.
Verizon requires a $30/month unlimited data plan with (some?) smartphones. This is distinct from the 5 GB/month data plan that you can buy separately. I would assume that so few smartphone users exceed 5 GB that they figure it's more profitable to advertise it as unlimited. Especially since people tend to greatly overestimate their data usage. OTOH, all tethering plans are limited.
Interestingly enough, that's a test for autism. When the kid encounters a simulated "cliff" he'll look at his mother. If she looks scared, he stops. If she looks unfazed, he proceeds. If he's autistic he has no idea what her expression is so he proceeds regardless.
So it seems more learned than innate. OTOH, bonking your head a few times should serve just as well to teach you about gravity. Of course, later you can "unlearn" it. Just look at the cliff climbers, sky divers, window washers, astronauts, and acrobats. If they claim to not fear heights, and their actions suggest they don't fear heights, I think it's a safe assumption that, from all practical perspectives, they don't fear heights. Perhaps, subconsciously, there's some lingering fear that nobody can detect, but who cares?
IMHO, a good target would be ReadyBoost on a flash drive. That data is already kinda random, then compressed and encrypted with AES128. It's common and not meant to be decryptable by really anyone. Just have the crypto product stealthily disable that feature while it's running without leaving a trace. As an added benefit, the data is probably destroyed if someone plugs it into a stock Windows computer (I'm not sure on the specifics).
Chemically identical substances are treated the same biochemically for virtually everything (perhaps literally, I can't think of a counterexample off the top of my head, unless you mean "identical" like glucose and fructose being isomers of each other). D-Fructose is the isomer that is common in biology. You're right that artificially produced HFCS could create L-Fructose, but the devil is in the details. HFCS is produced by enzymatic conversion of glucose to fructose, which yields the D isomer. Purely chemical processes would result in both the D & L isomers in a ~1:1 ratio, but enzymes are highly specific.
You're also right that the location of processing matters. For sucrose, this is before it is absorbed. Gastric acid cleaves a lot of sucrose into glucose and fructose when it enters your stomach. The enzyme sucrase gets the rest, and it's secreted by your small intestine, so it's an extracellular protein. From a quick googling, it appears that humans don't even have a cellular sucrose transmitter (plants and yeast do, but I couldn't find any articles describing them in animals), so it essentially can't be absorbed without being broken down first.
Of course, that's not to say that the extra fructose isn't bad, or even that cane sugar is good. We only have 10,000 years of evolution to deal with either (cane sugar and over-sized domesticated fruits), so eating either plant component in such high quantities could very well have undesirable effects. OTOH, if you have two couch potatos, one who eats HFCS and the other who eats cane sugar, both will die of a complication from obesity (due to simple thermodynamics) long before the very subtle difference between the two sweeteners could be detected. Don't misplace your concerns for your health, get lots of exercise, don't smoke, and don't drink much alcohol; your choice of sweetener is insignificant in comparison. Think of it like optimizing a program, spend your effort on the bottlenecks first.
I'm a medical student and spend a good part of my day referencing textbooks and Google on random diseases that come up while I'm rotating through the hospital. I can assure you that, unless it's something very rare or clinically trivial, a few minutes with Google will not teach you more than what an experienced doctor knows unless it's outside of their specialty. It'd be nice if it were that easy, but sadly it isn't.
OTOH, do research first so you don't have to blindly follow doctor's orders. That way you have the background knowledge to facilitate a more meaningful discussion.
It was even easier in my schools growing up. In grade school the teacher would ask who brought their lunch for the day and send the list to the cashier. In middle school there were choices on food (a la carte stuff, the standard meals were a fixed price) so the cashier looked students up by name and class until they remembered everyone. In high school it was buffet style where you had open access to the cafeteria (I can't recall anyone bringing food from home since there was enough selection to accommodate allergies and such, and high-schoolers love to conform; visitors had to find someone so they could pay).
The healthy person is willing to speak their mind, but caters their statements to their audience, and doesn't bother if they aren't receptive. A narcissist focuses on the former part and doesn't give a damn about the latter, while an insecure person is the opposite. There's a spectrum, and the behavior you describe sounds like it's right in the middle.
I think that's more related to achievements being automatically posted to facebook or what not which advertises the game. From there, it artificially extends gameplay by nagging at your sense of completion. I know before I could finish a game once and be satisfied, but now that they remind me about all the stuff I didn't do, that sense of satisfaction is diminished. OTOH, if I replay a couple times for the achievements I feel like I've wasted my time... It's an annoying Catch-22.
Yes, and the first layer of ionized atoms will scatter the rest of the laser energy, and push on the object... Sigh, you Space Loons are a big, fat ZERO when it comes to reality. Again. THIS AIN'T STAR TREK.
Assuming iron, so M = 55.845, Vaporization point: 3134K, Melting point: 1811 K, Heat of fusion: 13.81 KJ/mol, Heat of vaporization: 340 KJ/mol, Specific heat capacity: 25.10 J/mol/K
v(rms) = (3RT/M)^.5
v(rms) = 37.4 m/s
Assuming you want the laser focused over 4 cm for a 3 cm object:
t = x/v =.5 cm / 3740 cm/s = 134 us
For a 3 cm sphere:
V = 4/3*pi*r^3 = 113 cm^3
m = Vd = 113 cm^3 * 7.874 g/cm^3 = 890 g
890 g / 55.845 g/mol = 16 mol
16 mol * (25.10 J/mol/K * 3134 K + 13810 J/mol + 340000 J/mol) = 7 MJ
So, a 7 MJ burst in 134 us, or 52 GW (roughly, I didn't deal with liquid heat capacity/expansion properly). The most powerful lasers currently in existence are measured in the petawatt range, and an exawatt laser is in the works. That puts us 5 - 8 orders of magnitude higher than what we'd need to fully vaporize a 3 cm ball of iron before the gas had a chance to disperse. While there might be some scatter, you'd still be heating up the ~4 cm ball of gas (the highest energy gas molecules would be > 1 cm away, but that's the point of the whole exercise). I've taken some liberties with the math, but nothing you can't hand-wave away with up to 5 orders of magnitude above the calculated need.
In other words, the "first layer of ionized atoms" don't form a deflector shield that completely scatters laser energy. The center of mass isn't going to warp away faster than the gas can even expand, and it would still just be pushing the object away in the direct path of the laser. This isn't a spaceship battle, you don't fire the laser for 3 seconds at a time.
On the other hand, on of Discover's pages was about blowing up the debris...this makes sense, until you really think about it. The problem is that when you blow up something, it makes a huge number of new pieces, with all sorts of different velocities and orbits.
Most problems with lasers can be solved by higher power lasers. Just increase the power output and decrease the delivery time until you can turn any debris you target completely into gas or plasma. For larger objects, target a non-rotating point so it'll turn to gas and push the object out of orbit.
Alcohol is too deeply ingrained into our culture to separate it from all the confounding factors. Non-drinkers might be very poor, non-sociable, not have time to drink due to a stressful job, drive a lot, or participate in different risky activities. So I generally take such findings with a grain of salt.
OTOH, alcohol is the reason our ancestors gave up the 15 hour work week (hunter-gatherers) for the 100 hour work week (farming) 10,000 years ago. Seriously, you can't generate significant quantities of alcohol without agriculture, so that's a leading theory as to why humans would bother with the harder lifestyle with reduced lifespan. In the time since, our metabolism has probably adapted to ethanol consumption. This is especially apparent since other alcohols generally give us problems (methanol causes blindness, isopropanol is a CNS depressant, ethylene glycol causes an anion gap acidosis), and are potentially fatal once you drink half a liter or so. Ethanol can be chronically drunk by the gallon (BTW, you know someone has a problem if that's their unit of measurement).
There's huge individual variation though. Some women will develop alcoholic liver disease (3 month mortality of up to 75%) with as little as 1.3 beers/day. That's why many physicians refuse to recommend alcohol to patients who don't drink despite the studies. The people with exceptionally low tolerance are too rare to really affect the statistics, but common enough that most physicians would wind up killing someone with a recommendation of "moderate" alcohol consumption. Plus the fact that you never want people to overshoot and become alcoholics.
I have a laptop so I use keyboard scrolling quite a bit (Home, Page Up, Page Down, and End are in a nice column on the right side, something Sony did well IMHO). Unfortunately, most webpages aren't keyboard scrolling friendly.
If you interact with flash then you need to defocus it to scroll. If you click a random area of the page without adblock, you've probably just clicked an ad (seriously, the 200px solid color borders on a lot of pages do this). Then you have the webpages that auto-focus the search box, and I've yet to figure out a good greasemonkey hack to stop this (document.activeElement.blur() fixes scrolling, but doesn't stop the focus stealing).
Re:Nothings confirmed...
on
UVB-76 Explained
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The spacing between beeps is variable (1.0 - 1.3 seconds). I just assumed that the information was encoded in the intervals between beeps. A rudimentary form of steganography.
The problem with accidents is that everyone loses an hour of sleep on the same night. If businesses changed their own hours they wouldn't get together and decided to all switch on the same day.
As for it getting dark about 5:00, that happens near the winter solstice, which is during standard time. The reason I blame DST is because it encourages businesses to make their hours set in stone (literally in some cases, carved on the side of the building), rather than adjust according to the season.
If we're redefining standards, then it'd be a lot simpler to change the second rather than the minute (via leap seconds). Redefine a second to be 1/86,400th of a day (or 1/604,800th of a week). For scientific measurements that require a more consistent time interval, refer to the actual measurement, like n vibrations of a particular atom. There aren't a whole lot of applications (any?) where ultra-precise time needs to be measured over years (i.e. where leap seconds would significantly reduce error), and synchronized with the Earth's orbit. Even if they exist, you can just have the specialized software do the conversion.
And I find it a little depressing to walk home and eat dinner in the dark during certain times of the year (I live in a Southern US state). Wouldn't it be simpler to adjust business hours according to local conditions rather than change everything nationally? Heck, what about the people that die each year from the increased number of traffic accidents caused by everybody losing an hour of sleep all at once? That's not the kind of thing you want to synchronize...
It reminds me a lot of how you'll hear about someone getting kicked out of an all-you-can-eat buffet for eating too much every now and then. Here in the US the trend is that if you're wasting food (e.g. kids) then the restaurant can do that, but if you're really eating it then they can't. It seems like broadband could be treated similarly.
This is starting to get ridiculous. The term "free" means "no cost". A demo or "lite version" is only free if you don't advertise the features of the paid version, similarly, a time limited trial isn't free anymore than something with no payments for 90 days. Adware isn't free, nor is anything that you need to exchange valuable personal information for. And "buy one, get one free" is just plain nonsensical.
Lately, commercial software providers have been really abusing the word "free". These F2P MMORPGs are an excellent example. Some MMORPGs actually are completely free, but they're next to impossible to find because of all the P2P MMORPGs that call themselves free. The Android application market is another good example of how demos, trials, adware, spyware, "free program only usable with paid service" and "mandatory donation of a fixed price" software makes truly free (gratis or libre) software hard to locate.
IMHO, we need a new word to differentiate "FREE!!!!! *" from literally "free". I would say "non-commercial", but many businesses generate profit from open source software, and a free sample is most certainly commercial. Unfortunately, there are too many people that can't wrap their head around non-monetary costs to reclaim the proper word that describes this concept.
I concur. It has been my long-held assumption that "sloppy grammar/spelling == sloppy thinking". If you don't take the time to correct any obvious errors, there is little evidence that you took the time to actually think through what it is you're saying. While a smart person might be ignorant of grammatical rules, smart people make an effort to correct their ignorance, so grammar is a decent proxy for detecting worthwhile comments. Foreigners confound this, but their mistakes are of a different sort, which becomes recognizable.
Everything has its limits though. Some people care more about the form of language than the function. So you can't let the form hinder the function (i.e. poor grammar), nor prioritize the form over the function (e.g. a grammar nazi, or going out of your way to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition).
Having recently gotten an android phone, I have to wonder why nobody has written a locker that simply tracks phone orientation changes through some movement pattern rather than the touchscreen. There'd be no smudges (so better security and a cleaner screen), and it should be quicker. Kinda like using a secret handshake to unlock your phone. Example passcode: +x, -y, -z, +y (750 possibilities for a four movement code, more if you get fancier in movement tracking).
While I've got a fair bit of disdain for Apple, the iPhone 4 antenna seems novel and effective, albeit critically flawed. IMHO, the designers should be praised for generating a new and potentially useful idea, while the testers should be fired for not finding this flaw before release. Given Apple's strange punitive actions, I predict the next iPhone will have a very conventional antenna design, which keeps it from pulling ahead of the competition, while the same poor quality control allows some other issue to creep in.
Slashdot Mirror
I've come to notice* that there is a large segment of the population that simply can't ignore what people say or do, and are unskilled at thinking abstractly. They hear/see something and treat it as though it were said to them, about them.
There are even quite a few that visit Slashdot. Try speaking in general and wait for someone to respond to you, personally, describing their specific situation.
* Yeah, yeah, I'm unobservant. It took me a while to notice that as well.
IIRC neural activity starts when it's an eymbro, so before becoming a fetus. Brain development is completed around the 25th year. So your distinction can't really be used. There are no good cut-offs, language is learned before birth, but infants aren't all that intelligent (less than many animals).
The difference is that the legislator has the power to make laws, whereas the police officer is given the power to enforce them.
In the former case, the legislator's experience gave him an idea for a necessary law, so he fulfilled his duty by introducing a bill into the proper channels, his colleges decided that it was valid, and it was voted into law by elected officials. Of course, that's not to say that the legislator didn't pull a few favors and get an unjust law passed, but at least it's an open process in public view.
In the latter case, the police officer is guilty of selective enforcement at best, and acting with complete disregard for the law at worse. Either way, he's acting illegally and covertly.
I also don't think it's likely, but it's easily possible. Some bacteria have a doubling time less than 30 minutes, so if they found a suitable environment without competition they'd reproduce at nearly their maximal rate for quite some time.
OTOH, the whole natural selection thing comes into play since otherwise, in 15 years, they'd weight a lot more than Mars itself. I'd give a number, but didn't have a calculator handy that could handle 2^(15*365.25*24*2), which is how many descendants a single bacteria on the last non-sterile probe could now have if resources were infinite.
Furthermore, it only took ~2,000 years to oxygenate Earth. Mars has ~1/200th of the atmosphere that Earth does, so, theoretically, in 10 years bacteria could completely alter the atmosphere of Mars. Plus that's just from the slight imbalance between energy production by photosynthesis and energy use by oxidative respiration. An actual waste product could accumulate much more quickly.
Verizon requires a $30/month unlimited data plan with (some?) smartphones. This is distinct from the 5 GB/month data plan that you can buy separately. I would assume that so few smartphone users exceed 5 GB that they figure it's more profitable to advertise it as unlimited. Especially since people tend to greatly overestimate their data usage. OTOH, all tethering plans are limited.
Interestingly enough, that's a test for autism. When the kid encounters a simulated "cliff" he'll look at his mother. If she looks scared, he stops. If she looks unfazed, he proceeds. If he's autistic he has no idea what her expression is so he proceeds regardless.
So it seems more learned than innate. OTOH, bonking your head a few times should serve just as well to teach you about gravity. Of course, later you can "unlearn" it. Just look at the cliff climbers, sky divers, window washers, astronauts, and acrobats. If they claim to not fear heights, and their actions suggest they don't fear heights, I think it's a safe assumption that, from all practical perspectives, they don't fear heights. Perhaps, subconsciously, there's some lingering fear that nobody can detect, but who cares?
IMHO, a good target would be ReadyBoost on a flash drive. That data is already kinda random, then compressed and encrypted with AES128. It's common and not meant to be decryptable by really anyone. Just have the crypto product stealthily disable that feature while it's running without leaving a trace. As an added benefit, the data is probably destroyed if someone plugs it into a stock Windows computer (I'm not sure on the specifics).
Chemically identical substances are treated the same biochemically for virtually everything (perhaps literally, I can't think of a counterexample off the top of my head, unless you mean "identical" like glucose and fructose being isomers of each other). D-Fructose is the isomer that is common in biology. You're right that artificially produced HFCS could create L-Fructose, but the devil is in the details. HFCS is produced by enzymatic conversion of glucose to fructose, which yields the D isomer. Purely chemical processes would result in both the D & L isomers in a ~1:1 ratio, but enzymes are highly specific.
You're also right that the location of processing matters. For sucrose, this is before it is absorbed. Gastric acid cleaves a lot of sucrose into glucose and fructose when it enters your stomach. The enzyme sucrase gets the rest, and it's secreted by your small intestine, so it's an extracellular protein. From a quick googling, it appears that humans don't even have a cellular sucrose transmitter (plants and yeast do, but I couldn't find any articles describing them in animals), so it essentially can't be absorbed without being broken down first.
Of course, that's not to say that the extra fructose isn't bad, or even that cane sugar is good. We only have 10,000 years of evolution to deal with either (cane sugar and over-sized domesticated fruits), so eating either plant component in such high quantities could very well have undesirable effects. OTOH, if you have two couch potatos, one who eats HFCS and the other who eats cane sugar, both will die of a complication from obesity (due to simple thermodynamics) long before the very subtle difference between the two sweeteners could be detected. Don't misplace your concerns for your health, get lots of exercise, don't smoke, and don't drink much alcohol; your choice of sweetener is insignificant in comparison. Think of it like optimizing a program, spend your effort on the bottlenecks first.
I'm a medical student and spend a good part of my day referencing textbooks and Google on random diseases that come up while I'm rotating through the hospital. I can assure you that, unless it's something very rare or clinically trivial, a few minutes with Google will not teach you more than what an experienced doctor knows unless it's outside of their specialty. It'd be nice if it were that easy, but sadly it isn't.
OTOH, do research first so you don't have to blindly follow doctor's orders. That way you have the background knowledge to facilitate a more meaningful discussion.
It was even easier in my schools growing up. In grade school the teacher would ask who brought their lunch for the day and send the list to the cashier. In middle school there were choices on food (a la carte stuff, the standard meals were a fixed price) so the cashier looked students up by name and class until they remembered everyone. In high school it was buffet style where you had open access to the cafeteria (I can't recall anyone bringing food from home since there was enough selection to accommodate allergies and such, and high-schoolers love to conform; visitors had to find someone so they could pay).
The healthy person is willing to speak their mind, but caters their statements to their audience, and doesn't bother if they aren't receptive. A narcissist focuses on the former part and doesn't give a damn about the latter, while an insecure person is the opposite. There's a spectrum, and the behavior you describe sounds like it's right in the middle.
I think that's more related to achievements being automatically posted to facebook or what not which advertises the game. From there, it artificially extends gameplay by nagging at your sense of completion. I know before I could finish a game once and be satisfied, but now that they remind me about all the stuff I didn't do, that sense of satisfaction is diminished. OTOH, if I replay a couple times for the achievements I feel like I've wasted my time... It's an annoying Catch-22.
Yes, and the first layer of ionized atoms will scatter the rest of the laser energy, and push on the object... Sigh, you Space Loons are a big, fat ZERO when it comes to reality. Again. THIS AIN'T STAR TREK.
Assuming iron, so M = 55.845, Vaporization point: 3134K, Melting point: 1811 K, Heat of fusion: 13.81 KJ/mol, Heat of vaporization: 340 KJ/mol, Specific heat capacity: 25.10 J/mol/K
.5 cm / 3740 cm/s = 134 us
v(rms) = (3RT/M)^.5
v(rms) = 37.4 m/s
Assuming you want the laser focused over 4 cm for a 3 cm object:
t = x/v =
For a 3 cm sphere:
V = 4/3*pi*r^3 = 113 cm^3
m = Vd = 113 cm^3 * 7.874 g/cm^3 = 890 g
890 g / 55.845 g/mol = 16 mol
16 mol * (25.10 J/mol/K * 3134 K + 13810 J/mol + 340000 J/mol) = 7 MJ
So, a 7 MJ burst in 134 us, or 52 GW (roughly, I didn't deal with liquid heat capacity/expansion properly). The most powerful lasers currently in existence are measured in the petawatt range, and an exawatt laser is in the works. That puts us 5 - 8 orders of magnitude higher than what we'd need to fully vaporize a 3 cm ball of iron before the gas had a chance to disperse. While there might be some scatter, you'd still be heating up the ~4 cm ball of gas (the highest energy gas molecules would be > 1 cm away, but that's the point of the whole exercise). I've taken some liberties with the math, but nothing you can't hand-wave away with up to 5 orders of magnitude above the calculated need.
In other words, the "first layer of ionized atoms" don't form a deflector shield that completely scatters laser energy. The center of mass isn't going to warp away faster than the gas can even expand, and it would still just be pushing the object away in the direct path of the laser. This isn't a spaceship battle, you don't fire the laser for 3 seconds at a time.
On the other hand, on of Discover's pages was about blowing up the debris...this makes sense, until you really think about it. The problem is that when you blow up something, it makes a huge number of new pieces, with all sorts of different velocities and orbits.
Most problems with lasers can be solved by higher power lasers. Just increase the power output and decrease the delivery time until you can turn any debris you target completely into gas or plasma. For larger objects, target a non-rotating point so it'll turn to gas and push the object out of orbit.
Alcohol is too deeply ingrained into our culture to separate it from all the confounding factors. Non-drinkers might be very poor, non-sociable, not have time to drink due to a stressful job, drive a lot, or participate in different risky activities. So I generally take such findings with a grain of salt.
OTOH, alcohol is the reason our ancestors gave up the 15 hour work week (hunter-gatherers) for the 100 hour work week (farming) 10,000 years ago. Seriously, you can't generate significant quantities of alcohol without agriculture, so that's a leading theory as to why humans would bother with the harder lifestyle with reduced lifespan. In the time since, our metabolism has probably adapted to ethanol consumption. This is especially apparent since other alcohols generally give us problems (methanol causes blindness, isopropanol is a CNS depressant, ethylene glycol causes an anion gap acidosis), and are potentially fatal once you drink half a liter or so. Ethanol can be chronically drunk by the gallon (BTW, you know someone has a problem if that's their unit of measurement).
There's huge individual variation though. Some women will develop alcoholic liver disease (3 month mortality of up to 75%) with as little as 1.3 beers/day. That's why many physicians refuse to recommend alcohol to patients who don't drink despite the studies. The people with exceptionally low tolerance are too rare to really affect the statistics, but common enough that most physicians would wind up killing someone with a recommendation of "moderate" alcohol consumption. Plus the fact that you never want people to overshoot and become alcoholics.
I have a laptop so I use keyboard scrolling quite a bit (Home, Page Up, Page Down, and End are in a nice column on the right side, something Sony did well IMHO). Unfortunately, most webpages aren't keyboard scrolling friendly.
If you interact with flash then you need to defocus it to scroll. If you click a random area of the page without adblock, you've probably just clicked an ad (seriously, the 200px solid color borders on a lot of pages do this). Then you have the webpages that auto-focus the search box, and I've yet to figure out a good greasemonkey hack to stop this (document.activeElement.blur() fixes scrolling, but doesn't stop the focus stealing).
The spacing between beeps is variable (1.0 - 1.3 seconds). I just assumed that the information was encoded in the intervals between beeps. A rudimentary form of steganography.
The problem with accidents is that everyone loses an hour of sleep on the same night. If businesses changed their own hours they wouldn't get together and decided to all switch on the same day.
As for it getting dark about 5:00, that happens near the winter solstice, which is during standard time. The reason I blame DST is because it encourages businesses to make their hours set in stone (literally in some cases, carved on the side of the building), rather than adjust according to the season.
If we're redefining standards, then it'd be a lot simpler to change the second rather than the minute (via leap seconds). Redefine a second to be 1/86,400th of a day (or 1/604,800th of a week). For scientific measurements that require a more consistent time interval, refer to the actual measurement, like n vibrations of a particular atom. There aren't a whole lot of applications (any?) where ultra-precise time needs to be measured over years (i.e. where leap seconds would significantly reduce error), and synchronized with the Earth's orbit. Even if they exist, you can just have the specialized software do the conversion.
And I find it a little depressing to walk home and eat dinner in the dark during certain times of the year (I live in a Southern US state). Wouldn't it be simpler to adjust business hours according to local conditions rather than change everything nationally? Heck, what about the people that die each year from the increased number of traffic accidents caused by everybody losing an hour of sleep all at once? That's not the kind of thing you want to synchronize...
It reminds me a lot of how you'll hear about someone getting kicked out of an all-you-can-eat buffet for eating too much every now and then. Here in the US the trend is that if you're wasting food (e.g. kids) then the restaurant can do that, but if you're really eating it then they can't. It seems like broadband could be treated similarly.
This is starting to get ridiculous. The term "free" means "no cost". A demo or "lite version" is only free if you don't advertise the features of the paid version, similarly, a time limited trial isn't free anymore than something with no payments for 90 days. Adware isn't free, nor is anything that you need to exchange valuable personal information for. And "buy one, get one free" is just plain nonsensical.
Lately, commercial software providers have been really abusing the word "free". These F2P MMORPGs are an excellent example. Some MMORPGs actually are completely free, but they're next to impossible to find because of all the P2P MMORPGs that call themselves free. The Android application market is another good example of how demos, trials, adware, spyware, "free program only usable with paid service" and "mandatory donation of a fixed price" software makes truly free (gratis or libre) software hard to locate.
IMHO, we need a new word to differentiate "FREE!!!!! *" from literally "free". I would say "non-commercial", but many businesses generate profit from open source software, and a free sample is most certainly commercial. Unfortunately, there are too many people that can't wrap their head around non-monetary costs to reclaim the proper word that describes this concept.
I concur. It has been my long-held assumption that "sloppy grammar/spelling == sloppy thinking". If you don't take the time to correct any obvious errors, there is little evidence that you took the time to actually think through what it is you're saying. While a smart person might be ignorant of grammatical rules, smart people make an effort to correct their ignorance, so grammar is a decent proxy for detecting worthwhile comments. Foreigners confound this, but their mistakes are of a different sort, which becomes recognizable.
Everything has its limits though. Some people care more about the form of language than the function. So you can't let the form hinder the function (i.e. poor grammar), nor prioritize the form over the function (e.g. a grammar nazi, or going out of your way to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition).
Having recently gotten an android phone, I have to wonder why nobody has written a locker that simply tracks phone orientation changes through some movement pattern rather than the touchscreen. There'd be no smudges (so better security and a cleaner screen), and it should be quicker. Kinda like using a secret handshake to unlock your phone. Example passcode: +x, -y, -z, +y (750 possibilities for a four movement code, more if you get fancier in movement tracking).
While I've got a fair bit of disdain for Apple, the iPhone 4 antenna seems novel and effective, albeit critically flawed. IMHO, the designers should be praised for generating a new and potentially useful idea, while the testers should be fired for not finding this flaw before release. Given Apple's strange punitive actions, I predict the next iPhone will have a very conventional antenna design, which keeps it from pulling ahead of the competition, while the same poor quality control allows some other issue to creep in.