Well, it seems like it'd be easy enough to link the two cell phones that are always at the same location at the same time...
Or if you're slightly more paranoid, frequently share a location, and alternate on which is moving and which is stationary. It gets more complicated if they're not turned on at the same time in the same location, so that's for the true paranoids that don't expect the erratic phone behavior to get them flagged for closer monitoring. The true solution probably lies in long-range walkie talkies and RC toy planes.
Out of curiosity, why not do a variable sleep based on your distance from home? Perhaps something like:
Find position latitude & longitude
Compare to home position to determine the (straight line) distance
Subtract the trigger radius
If the phone isn't in the trigger radius (i.e. positive distance):
Divide the remaining distance by a maximum travel speed of ~70 mph
Sleep for that period of time, with some minimum/maximum
So long as you don't hang out around your trigger radius your battery life should be excellent, and you should get nearly instant response times.
IIRC, most of the criticisms follow two types. The first is that it's not a causative relationship, which the popular media implies the article proves. The second are criticisms of the study methodology by people familiar with the subject. I don't think Slashdotters are claiming that science isn't capable of elucidating the truth of this matter.
Accepting second-hand information about the "truth" without skepticism isn't scientific thinking. OTOH, the summary is talking about denying large amounts of scientific data with the rationale that science can't answer the question. Slashdot's consensus might not always agree with science, but it tends not to suffer too greatly from this particular issue AFAICT.
While I think you have a point, scientific metaphors are frequently used and they aren't terribly effective with most concepts. Scientists tend not to be English majors, and for many, English is a second language. What's worse is that the media will use them as out of context sound bites that confuse the heck out of everyone.
Good metaphors are rare. Usually, a scientist will pick a metaphor based on a very superficial similarity that is completely reliant on seeing the object the same way the scientist does. So if you have a deeper (or just a different) understanding of the object (e.g. computers) then the metaphor rarely makes sense. For the times that the metaphor does apply in more than a superficial manner, people are prone to horribly conflating the two concepts, such as electrical circuits and water pipes. (Or the internet and tubes...)
Cause wear leveling only picks another sector to write to from among the unused sectors. Simplified, if your drive is 80% full, you write to the same sectors five times as often.
Especially because once blocks start failing, other blocks start failing too, at an accellerating rate, and they rapidly reach a state of being completely unusable.
That's a contradiction. If the wear-leveling algorithm was ineffective then you'd have a relatively constant rate of block failure. A good wear-leveling algorithm ensures you won't get a significant number of block failures until almost every block has been worn out. Then you get a bunch. So the behavior described is failing exactly as intended, and indicates the wear-leveling algorithm worked almost perfectly.
But you're right in that a wear algorithm that only uses free space would be terrible. That's one reason no device uses one like that. The primary reason though, is because the SSD has no idea which blocks are empty and which are free, unless it is told via the TRIM command (later generation SSDs with newer OSes). The filesystem knows, but an SSD is filesystem agnostic. Moving data is the cause behind the performance drop-off when the drive runs out of unused/un-TRIM'd blocks.
Personally, I have the cheapest, buggiest SSD in common knowledge (the one that can get bogged down to 4 IOPS), and it has worked beautifully for me. Just checking a diagnostic tool, in the past two years I've power cycled it 5,666 times (which probably explains why I kill HDDs so quickly), the average block has been erased 7,333 times, and no block has been erased more than 7,442 times. I've got zero ECC failures. Honestly, I'm a little surprised I've written 234 TB of data to my poor 32 GB drive, but my usage is a bit heavy (~10 complete Gentoo compiles with countless updating, ~5 DISM'd Windows 7 installs, ~5 DISM'd Vista installs, ~30 Haiku installs, ~20 SVNs of 10 GB projects, and a good amount of downloading).
But, in my experience, the wear leveling algorithm is only ~3% away from being "perfect".
Malaria kills a lot of people, so there's a lot of interest in providing the impoverished equatorial nations with anti-malarial drugs. Because it tends to only be endemic in poorer nations (poverty and malaria contribute to each other) there's not much profit in developing anti-malarials. Obviously they anticipate no cheap but effective drugs, so Glaxo Smith Klein can generate some good will by giving away a non-profitable potential product line.
Additionally, I'm sure that pharmaceuticals get asked to help fight malaria all the time. The executive staff is human enough to see the need for these drugs. If they're not going to actively research/develop antimalarials then it's not exactly ethical to just sit on this information while millions die. Plus, by giving away the designs, other people will researching them without Glaxo Smith Klein pumping money into it. Who knows, maybe someone will make a breakthrough and give something for Glaxo Smith Klein to run with it.
So, IMHO, it's a combination of buying goodwill, killing an unprofitable product line, and a long-shot investment in something they haven't tried before. I'm optimistic enough to think there's also some sincere ethical behavior sprinkled in as well.
Why in the world would anyone do that? An insurance company isn't responsible for your medical care, your doctor is. They exert indirect control, but their motive is to reduce costs. A kidney running at 90% of the minimum GFR will cause other medical problems which costs them money (e.g. increasing the half-lives of all drugs the patient is on, leading to overdoses). It also doesn't reduce immediate costs in running the kidney. And a sick person isn't going to be able to work and pay premiums. There is absolutely no benefit to doing something like that.
Furthermore, that would be assault, which is illegal. It's also altering medical treatment against a doctor's orders, which is also illegal (IIRC there are certain legal exceptions, but not too many). I can't imagine any pharmaceutical making a medical implant with that feature, nor any doctor implanting such a flawed device. Plus elderly congressmen are quite self-serving when it comes to health care, so I cannot see them permitting that kind of thing. And while businesses are amoral, and thus occasionally act in a way we'd call "evil" if they were sentient, they are composed of people, which do have some ethics. Unless, of course, you get your health insurance through the mafia, but I think one would call that "natural selection".
While child mortality is rather high for hunter-gatherers, adult life expectancy is 72 (Range: 68-78), although it obvious varies quite a bit. That figure shouldn't really surprise anyone, menopause is an adaptation so clearly a lot of women were living into their 60s and 70s. Accidental deaths are fairly common (20%), but infectious diseases are less common due to lowered exposure. Carbohydrate intake is also responsible for the timing of puberty. A farmer will go through puberty in their early teens, while someone who eats almost exclusively animal products will go through puberty closer to their twenties. So the cave-man living to age 30 is kind of a myth.
Now, an early farmer's life isn't as easy as you're portraying it. For one, relying on a small number of crops puts them at risk of crop failure and subsequent starvation. The limited number of crops also all-but ensures they have a vitamin deficiency in something (conversely, animal entrails have a complete set of vitamins & minerals, and hunter-gathers ate ~200 types of plants). Hunter-gathers didn't really suffer from food shortages like you describe. A human can kill basically anything with endurance hunting, and plants are abundant in most places.
Now, you're probably wondering why people would switch to farming at all. It turns out farming is the only way to get enough hops to brew beer in any significant quantities, so our ancestors were likely the drunks. (Which probably explains why we adapted to low beer consumption being optimal for life-expectancy, rather than drinking no alcohol at all.) The other advantage of farming is that it supports much larger (albeit less healthy) populations, and grants higher reproductive rates, so guess who got kicked out of the fertile lands... From there, the high population density worsened infectious diseases, so when a farmer happened to encounter a hunter-gatherer, and you can imagine what the hunter-gatherer took home.
Now I'm not saying that we should go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, nor do I advocate a paleolithic diet or similar. But I think it is important to understand that high population density comes at a great cost (which technology can reduce), and to separate fact from stereotype. Our ancestors were the farmers, so obviously they painted a rosy picture of agriculture and branded the hunter-gatherers as primitives living a harsh life. OTOH, there are competing theories where that view is supported, but realistically our species hunted and gathered easily ten times longer than we've had agriculture, so evolutionarily it makes more sense for us to be better adapted to that lifestyle. Ten thousand years allows for some adaptation to farming, but it's very far from complete.
Well, I happen to be the latter, and I browse Slashdot when I'm incapable of studying anymore in a sitting. The ability to do more is due to three reasons. First, graduate and medical students are not a random group, so generalizations might not apply. Second, a lot of people include time spend staring out the window in their study time, it's not really possible to study all-day everyday, albeit they probably aren't doing things they enjoy either. Third, medical/graduate students generally like what they're studying, and it's self-directed.
All that said, and as another poster pointed out, burnout and mental illness are tragically common.
Never in the course of human history, outside of the industrial revolution, has a human being been expected to produce "something" for 8 straight hours a day, 5 days a week (and for some more than that).
The human body just isn't built for it either. Hunter-gathers that were able to survive to the modern era (i.e. in infertile lands where agriculture isn't possible) only spent about 15 - 25 hours per week gathering food. That's what our ancestors did for probably 100,000 years, and a contributing factor to why life expectancy dropped with agriculture (~100 hours per week). Unsurprisingly, it turns out we're almost all deficient in Vitamin D (lack of sunlight), get sub-optimal sleep (ditto sunlight), and even if you go home and exercise like a maniac, sitting for 8 hours a day is still bad for your health. It wouldn't really surprise me if the average office worker's 40 hours per week is really only 20 hours of real work. (At least for the average worker, if you stress yourself out, do mindless work, or really love your job I could see doing more.)
I could see how it wouldn't let you get away with silly stuff like "this element should be 32 pixels high", but DPI is so variable that it'd be insane to do that in the first place. Aspect ratio might be harder to account for, but that's solvable with scroll bars and text wrapping if you need the space, or whitespace if you don't. Where is the problem? I could see issues with running a high DPI application on a low DPI screen, but the converse shouldn't present any issues...
Umm, I've have a few harddrives die on me. They're probably the least reliable thing I own. When a HDD dies you've pretty much lost everything on it, and I certainly wouldn't trust one past a few years... So, why do you expect an SSD to be worse? Electronic failures can happen on either (should be identical risk), but there's no wear and tear on an SSD. If you reach the 100,000 write cycle limit (most pessimistic estimate I've ever seen) on a (tiny) 32 GB drive after a year of writing at maximum speed (?!?!?), then it's read-only. Performance loss IMHO, it sounds like you're suffering from the zero-risk bias, or you're not migrating for other (probably valid) reasons.
Performance-wise, that could happen. You can fix it easily enough with SATA secure delete or TRIM (HDDs aren't maintenance-free either, hence why they need defragmentation). It doesn't always happen, my two-year-old $50 30 GB SSD has been through a couple dozen OS installations and a fair amount of SVN downloading of large projects, and it's still as fast as advertised (I just double checked).
But, more importantly, WTF are you doing not backing up your valuable data?!?!?! Drive failures are all but inevitable with conventional HDDs, and I'm certainly not even going to risk my data on SSDs being infallible.
Well, 100 development boards were sent to a handful of the most prolific developers (2.5% of the total user base), so several developers have been tinkering with it for quite some time. Most others have just been using stock Linux to develop, keeping in mind the constraints that the Pandora will have. The community began with the GP32, continued with the GP2X & Wiz, and the Pandora can only be expected to inherit that. Furthermore, the development process was very open, and many of the 4,000 preorderers played a small part in it, hence why a 1.5 year delay was tolerated.
A single developer can make high quality software in isolation. In a community, though, everyone tends to put out better stuff due to more helpful feedback and the desire to not embarrass yourself. I suppose it's akin to Windows freeware & shareware VS open source software.
Well, it should run Android, and perhaps Android applications on Angstrom, so I suppose it'll always have more applications available. But what I was getting at is that there's an avid community around the Pandora. Judging from the GP2X, they seem pretty skilled and aren't out to just make a quick buck. It's a different environment, that I rather like, although you certainly won't see anywhere near the quantity of applications. The developer to user ratio is higher, as is the ratio of high quality to low quality applications.
A high number of developers is different from a tight community of developers. I'm sure there are such communities for Android, but their work is diluted by fart soundboards and programmers putting out junk to see if it sells for $1.
Emulators, home-brew games, and Linux games/software are what you can expect. There will probably be a few commercial games as well, from smaller developers. Here is a list of projects under development, and here are the ones you can download. On the latter link, check the software for the GP2X and other consoles for an idea of what "home-brew games" entails.
The Pandora is unlikely to ever have big, commercial 3D games from well-known developers. You'll almost certainly be able to run Android applications eventually, so it might get a few games that way. Of course, there's also the sub-netbook functionality as well. How many gaming consoles support USB, SD Card, Serial, or NAND boot, and are expected to run OSes ranging from Angstrom & Android to Gentoo & Ubuntu, or even AROS, Haiku, or RISC OS? It's kind of a geek toy, not so much a competitor for the PSP or DS.
Half the battery life and twice the cost as well. But, for small devices, form factor is as important as raw specs. An external game controller plus a USB adapter connected to the phone is going to be a lot less manageable unless you have more hands than I do (and a lot less portable). Throw in the open nature, developer community, and the different design goals (phone VS tiny netbook/open gaming console), and you've got a very different product than the Droid Incredible.
It seems odd to me how "don't try this at home" has beaten out DIY. While one could easily blame politics (a society of otherwise ignorant specialists is more controllable than polymaths), I'm tempted to attribute the shift to exponential growth of technology. Most hobbies, like chemistry or astronomy, have existed for long enough that the whole process has been simplified to the point that only a minimal set of tools is required.
Newer technologies, like semiconductors, have had little reason to simplify their techniques. Sure, you can make transistors at home, but it's very difficult to adapt techniques designed for use in labs to ones safe/cheap enough to do at home. It's kind of a Catch-22 with accessibility, not too many people are working on it since it's not accessible, and it's not accessible since not too many people are working on it.
There's also the issue of error. Home-labs have much higher rates of error both due to the economics of scale, and the use of non-ideal, but simple & cheap techniques. If the experts doing highly controlled experiments have to do something a hundred times before finding something that works, then a hobbyist might not ever see a success. So, I'd imagine that you'd need to approach the matter from the ground up, rather than try to replicate something done in a lab.
An example might be genetics. Starting your own home lab would be fairly expensive. You'd need some type of centrifuge, a device to do gel electrophoresis, something to visualize DNA on a gel with, a PCR machine, a micropipette, and several enzymes. The trick is that you can make most of that stuff on your own. A centrifuge can be made out of a drill, a gel electrophoresis tank is simple enough to make, UV lights are coming down in price, and a DIY PCR machine can be made with a Peltier plate and a microcontroller. It'd take a few months to build all that, but that's half the fun. Micropipettes are relatively cheap, and enzymes can be home grown if you're willing to spend the time/space growing cultures. None of that would be very precise (or pure), so your sucess rate would be abysmal, but it's cheap and I'd imagine a pretty fun hobby both in building all that and after you got everything setup. The beauty of genetics is that you can get DNA sequences online, and design your own experiments taking into account your equipment's limitations. I just wouldn't try anything too big (e.g. sequencing a genome), or something that requires a lot of precision. And accept that the failure rate will be frustratingly high.
If you want to make a discovery, then I'd imagine you'd need to find some poorly researched area and spend a decade or two on it. By that time you'll be an expert in that area. Take advantage of the fact you're in it for the long haul (and aren't scrambling to publish in order to justify your funding), and do a long-term experiment. Or do something in a field that doesn't have much grant money available (e.g. a local plant or animal, rather than something like cancer).
You can sorta get iGoogle via SSL via NoScript, but it doesn't work for everything (still a mixed page at best, a broken one at worst). I still can't really see the point of not working on this... obviously encrypting the gadgets that display my e-mail, calendar, and to-do list is as or more important than my web queries.
Well, Google happens to be under a lot of scrutiny and has a minimal history of privacy abuses, and seems to be aware of what is, and isn't appropriate. The same cannot be said for that shady looking guy with the laptop in the coffee shop. Heck, I'm not even sure if my ISP is more or less trustworthy than that. I just assume anything sent unencrypted over the air or outside my apartment is being sniffed.
For the same reason one might go to a social gathering at a restaurant that you're not particularly fond of. It's a cost/benefit calculation. If you want privacy at the expense of everything else, go live in the forest or on a deserted island. OTOH, basically everyone values privacy (albeit to differing extents), so it's all optimization. Personally, I'd like it if Facebook didn't have such a high privacy cost.
Anonymous Coward does have a good point though. If you've incurred a debt by pumping the gas then I don't see how the station could refuse to settle that debt using legal tender. Maybe they are able to siphon off the gas and therefore claim that you aren't in possession of it yet. But, if they can't stop the transaction then it sounds like a debt. Ditto for eating a meal and paying afterwards.
OTOH, gas stations are notorious for having prices ending in 9/10ths of a cent, so it wouldn't surprise me if they aren't exactly adhering to the law regarding currency. Perhaps someone with infinite time and nothing to lose could test this in court. Of course, you can most certainly pay legal settlements in cash, so I suppose it wouldn't matter much if they won or lost.
It'd never work. A bacteria has enough redundancy so that DNA polymerase's error rate usually won't cause any issues. Linux is built with the assumption that data replication is flawless. Therefore, the two differ dramatically in regulatory strategies.
(Even though you jest, there is some debate as to whether DNA and its enzymes are Turning-complete or not. Obviously, at one extreme, a human can function as a Turing machine, but at the other, DNA & protein synthesis don't quite work that way.)
Well, I, for one, think having a dark sense of humor is a lot better than ignoring an issue entirely. Nobody really wants to dwell on such things, so if it weren't for humor they likely wouldn't be brought to public attention much at all.
I looked for one, and found some tools to modify headers, but nothing comprehensive enough overall. IMHO, what we need is something that'll strip the headers to the bare minimum. You can do that with a proxy server (e.g. Privoxy) easily enough, but you'd still be transmitting a unique header. What we need is for a popular Firefox add-on to do this for a large number of people.
It'd be even better if the major browser makers decided to stop catering to poorly designed websites, and do this automatically. Don't send the referrer, nor the user agent, or even a list of plugins. Just send the minimum the HTTP/1.1 (maybe 1.2) specification allows. While they're at it, the similar Javascript methods could also be trimmed. After all, there's little reason for knowing the exact user agent, just test for the methods you need, and don't design websites down to the pixel. It'd be a boon for smaller browsers, mobile browsers, and people who adjust DPI or accessibility options.
That seems rather low, was the estimate based on just neurons? Synapses are more important, and even they vary by the micro-environment around the cell membrane. I'd imagine that, to represent all of the information contained in the brain you'd need to map the following:
The position of each molecule of neurotransmitter
The position, state, and substrate of each membrane receptor
The voltage potential across the membrane at each point along its 2D surface (to map the location of action potentials, IPSPs, and EPSPs)
The voltage potential around the membrane as it diminishes to the baseline (the action potential is confined to a few micrometers around the membrane, and wire effects are important)
The metabolic profile of the brain and its structures (emergent properties of higher organization and their interaction with the body)
The map of synapses (the neural network)
The state of the second messenger systems in the neurons
The mRNA gene expression profile in the neuron (snapshot of protein synthesis)
The superstructure of the DNA in the neuron (DNA packing & gene regulation)
The genome for each neuron (DNA replication isn't 100% accurate, so each copy is different)
There'd be a ton of entropy if you wanted to express that as a series of bits... Heck, there're probably several mol of neurotransmitters alone. With positional information that becomes a ridiculous amount of information. But to be truely accurate you'd also need to take into account stuff like hydration shells, which just makes the whole thing impossibly complex. I'm not sure the number is really knowable unless you make massive simplifications (not that we could actually verify if they're safe assumptions or not). Unlike computers, biology doesn't use too many layers of abstraction, so low-level processes matter quite a bit.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it seems like it'd be easy enough to link the two cell phones that are always at the same location at the same time...
Or if you're slightly more paranoid, frequently share a location, and alternate on which is moving and which is stationary. It gets more complicated if they're not turned on at the same time in the same location, so that's for the true paranoids that don't expect the erratic phone behavior to get them flagged for closer monitoring. The true solution probably lies in long-range walkie talkies and RC toy planes.
Out of curiosity, why not do a variable sleep based on your distance from home? Perhaps something like:
Find position latitude & longitude
Compare to home position to determine the (straight line) distance
Subtract the trigger radius
If the phone isn't in the trigger radius (i.e. positive distance):
Divide the remaining distance by a maximum travel speed of ~70 mph
Sleep for that period of time, with some minimum/maximum
So long as you don't hang out around your trigger radius your battery life should be excellent, and you should get nearly instant response times.
IIRC, most of the criticisms follow two types. The first is that it's not a causative relationship, which the popular media implies the article proves. The second are criticisms of the study methodology by people familiar with the subject. I don't think Slashdotters are claiming that science isn't capable of elucidating the truth of this matter.
Accepting second-hand information about the "truth" without skepticism isn't scientific thinking. OTOH, the summary is talking about denying large amounts of scientific data with the rationale that science can't answer the question. Slashdot's consensus might not always agree with science, but it tends not to suffer too greatly from this particular issue AFAICT.
While I think you have a point, scientific metaphors are frequently used and they aren't terribly effective with most concepts. Scientists tend not to be English majors, and for many, English is a second language. What's worse is that the media will use them as out of context sound bites that confuse the heck out of everyone.
Good metaphors are rare. Usually, a scientist will pick a metaphor based on a very superficial similarity that is completely reliant on seeing the object the same way the scientist does. So if you have a deeper (or just a different) understanding of the object (e.g. computers) then the metaphor rarely makes sense. For the times that the metaphor does apply in more than a superficial manner, people are prone to horribly conflating the two concepts, such as electrical circuits and water pipes. (Or the internet and tubes...)
Personally, I lost my faith in scientific metaphors after listening to pathologists describe, well, anything.
Cause wear leveling only picks another sector to write to from among the unused sectors. Simplified, if your drive is 80% full, you write to the same sectors five times as often.
Especially because once blocks start failing, other blocks start failing too, at an accellerating rate, and they rapidly reach a state of being completely unusable.
That's a contradiction. If the wear-leveling algorithm was ineffective then you'd have a relatively constant rate of block failure. A good wear-leveling algorithm ensures you won't get a significant number of block failures until almost every block has been worn out. Then you get a bunch. So the behavior described is failing exactly as intended, and indicates the wear-leveling algorithm worked almost perfectly.
But you're right in that a wear algorithm that only uses free space would be terrible. That's one reason no device uses one like that. The primary reason though, is because the SSD has no idea which blocks are empty and which are free, unless it is told via the TRIM command (later generation SSDs with newer OSes). The filesystem knows, but an SSD is filesystem agnostic. Moving data is the cause behind the performance drop-off when the drive runs out of unused/un-TRIM'd blocks.
Personally, I have the cheapest, buggiest SSD in common knowledge (the one that can get bogged down to 4 IOPS), and it has worked beautifully for me. Just checking a diagnostic tool, in the past two years I've power cycled it 5,666 times (which probably explains why I kill HDDs so quickly), the average block has been erased 7,333 times, and no block has been erased more than 7,442 times. I've got zero ECC failures. Honestly, I'm a little surprised I've written 234 TB of data to my poor 32 GB drive, but my usage is a bit heavy (~10 complete Gentoo compiles with countless updating, ~5 DISM'd Windows 7 installs, ~5 DISM'd Vista installs, ~30 Haiku installs, ~20 SVNs of 10 GB projects, and a good amount of downloading).
But, in my experience, the wear leveling algorithm is only ~3% away from being "perfect".
Malaria kills a lot of people, so there's a lot of interest in providing the impoverished equatorial nations with anti-malarial drugs. Because it tends to only be endemic in poorer nations (poverty and malaria contribute to each other) there's not much profit in developing anti-malarials. Obviously they anticipate no cheap but effective drugs, so Glaxo Smith Klein can generate some good will by giving away a non-profitable potential product line.
Additionally, I'm sure that pharmaceuticals get asked to help fight malaria all the time. The executive staff is human enough to see the need for these drugs. If they're not going to actively research/develop antimalarials then it's not exactly ethical to just sit on this information while millions die. Plus, by giving away the designs, other people will researching them without Glaxo Smith Klein pumping money into it. Who knows, maybe someone will make a breakthrough and give something for Glaxo Smith Klein to run with it.
So, IMHO, it's a combination of buying goodwill, killing an unprofitable product line, and a long-shot investment in something they haven't tried before. I'm optimistic enough to think there's also some sincere ethical behavior sprinkled in as well.
Why in the world would anyone do that? An insurance company isn't responsible for your medical care, your doctor is. They exert indirect control, but their motive is to reduce costs. A kidney running at 90% of the minimum GFR will cause other medical problems which costs them money (e.g. increasing the half-lives of all drugs the patient is on, leading to overdoses). It also doesn't reduce immediate costs in running the kidney. And a sick person isn't going to be able to work and pay premiums. There is absolutely no benefit to doing something like that.
Furthermore, that would be assault, which is illegal. It's also altering medical treatment against a doctor's orders, which is also illegal (IIRC there are certain legal exceptions, but not too many). I can't imagine any pharmaceutical making a medical implant with that feature, nor any doctor implanting such a flawed device. Plus elderly congressmen are quite self-serving when it comes to health care, so I cannot see them permitting that kind of thing. And while businesses are amoral, and thus occasionally act in a way we'd call "evil" if they were sentient, they are composed of people, which do have some ethics. Unless, of course, you get your health insurance through the mafia, but I think one would call that "natural selection".
While child mortality is rather high for hunter-gatherers, adult life expectancy is 72 (Range: 68-78), although it obvious varies quite a bit. That figure shouldn't really surprise anyone, menopause is an adaptation so clearly a lot of women were living into their 60s and 70s. Accidental deaths are fairly common (20%), but infectious diseases are less common due to lowered exposure. Carbohydrate intake is also responsible for the timing of puberty. A farmer will go through puberty in their early teens, while someone who eats almost exclusively animal products will go through puberty closer to their twenties. So the cave-man living to age 30 is kind of a myth.
Now, an early farmer's life isn't as easy as you're portraying it. For one, relying on a small number of crops puts them at risk of crop failure and subsequent starvation. The limited number of crops also all-but ensures they have a vitamin deficiency in something (conversely, animal entrails have a complete set of vitamins & minerals, and hunter-gathers ate ~200 types of plants). Hunter-gathers didn't really suffer from food shortages like you describe. A human can kill basically anything with endurance hunting, and plants are abundant in most places.
Now, you're probably wondering why people would switch to farming at all. It turns out farming is the only way to get enough hops to brew beer in any significant quantities, so our ancestors were likely the drunks. (Which probably explains why we adapted to low beer consumption being optimal for life-expectancy, rather than drinking no alcohol at all.) The other advantage of farming is that it supports much larger (albeit less healthy) populations, and grants higher reproductive rates, so guess who got kicked out of the fertile lands... From there, the high population density worsened infectious diseases, so when a farmer happened to encounter a hunter-gatherer, and you can imagine what the hunter-gatherer took home.
Now I'm not saying that we should go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, nor do I advocate a paleolithic diet or similar. But I think it is important to understand that high population density comes at a great cost (which technology can reduce), and to separate fact from stereotype. Our ancestors were the farmers, so obviously they painted a rosy picture of agriculture and branded the hunter-gatherers as primitives living a harsh life. OTOH, there are competing theories where that view is supported, but realistically our species hunted and gathered easily ten times longer than we've had agriculture, so evolutionarily it makes more sense for us to be better adapted to that lifestyle. Ten thousand years allows for some adaptation to farming, but it's very far from complete.
Well, I happen to be the latter, and I browse Slashdot when I'm incapable of studying anymore in a sitting. The ability to do more is due to three reasons. First, graduate and medical students are not a random group, so generalizations might not apply. Second, a lot of people include time spend staring out the window in their study time, it's not really possible to study all-day everyday, albeit they probably aren't doing things they enjoy either. Third, medical/graduate students generally like what they're studying, and it's self-directed.
All that said, and as another poster pointed out, burnout and mental illness are tragically common.
Never in the course of human history, outside of the industrial revolution, has a human being been expected to produce "something" for 8 straight hours a day, 5 days a week (and for some more than that).
The human body just isn't built for it either. Hunter-gathers that were able to survive to the modern era (i.e. in infertile lands where agriculture isn't possible) only spent about 15 - 25 hours per week gathering food. That's what our ancestors did for probably 100,000 years, and a contributing factor to why life expectancy dropped with agriculture (~100 hours per week). Unsurprisingly, it turns out we're almost all deficient in Vitamin D (lack of sunlight), get sub-optimal sleep (ditto sunlight), and even if you go home and exercise like a maniac, sitting for 8 hours a day is still bad for your health. It wouldn't really surprise me if the average office worker's 40 hours per week is really only 20 hours of real work. (At least for the average worker, if you stress yourself out, do mindless work, or really love your job I could see doing more.)
I could see how it wouldn't let you get away with silly stuff like "this element should be 32 pixels high", but DPI is so variable that it'd be insane to do that in the first place. Aspect ratio might be harder to account for, but that's solvable with scroll bars and text wrapping if you need the space, or whitespace if you don't. Where is the problem? I could see issues with running a high DPI application on a low DPI screen, but the converse shouldn't present any issues...
Umm, I've have a few harddrives die on me. They're probably the least reliable thing I own. When a HDD dies you've pretty much lost everything on it, and I certainly wouldn't trust one past a few years... So, why do you expect an SSD to be worse? Electronic failures can happen on either (should be identical risk), but there's no wear and tear on an SSD. If you reach the 100,000 write cycle limit (most pessimistic estimate I've ever seen) on a (tiny) 32 GB drive after a year of writing at maximum speed (?!?!?), then it's read-only. Performance loss IMHO, it sounds like you're suffering from the zero-risk bias, or you're not migrating for other (probably valid) reasons.
Performance-wise, that could happen. You can fix it easily enough with SATA secure delete or TRIM (HDDs aren't maintenance-free either, hence why they need defragmentation). It doesn't always happen, my two-year-old $50 30 GB SSD has been through a couple dozen OS installations and a fair amount of SVN downloading of large projects, and it's still as fast as advertised (I just double checked).
But, more importantly, WTF are you doing not backing up your valuable data?!?!?! Drive failures are all but inevitable with conventional HDDs, and I'm certainly not even going to risk my data on SSDs being infallible.
Well, 100 development boards were sent to a handful of the most prolific developers (2.5% of the total user base), so several developers have been tinkering with it for quite some time. Most others have just been using stock Linux to develop, keeping in mind the constraints that the Pandora will have. The community began with the GP32, continued with the GP2X & Wiz, and the Pandora can only be expected to inherit that. Furthermore, the development process was very open, and many of the 4,000 preorderers played a small part in it, hence why a 1.5 year delay was tolerated.
A single developer can make high quality software in isolation. In a community, though, everyone tends to put out better stuff due to more helpful feedback and the desire to not embarrass yourself. I suppose it's akin to Windows freeware & shareware VS open source software.
Well, it should run Android, and perhaps Android applications on Angstrom, so I suppose it'll always have more applications available. But what I was getting at is that there's an avid community around the Pandora. Judging from the GP2X, they seem pretty skilled and aren't out to just make a quick buck. It's a different environment, that I rather like, although you certainly won't see anywhere near the quantity of applications. The developer to user ratio is higher, as is the ratio of high quality to low quality applications.
A high number of developers is different from a tight community of developers. I'm sure there are such communities for Android, but their work is diluted by fart soundboards and programmers putting out junk to see if it sells for $1.
Emulators, home-brew games, and Linux games/software are what you can expect. There will probably be a few commercial games as well, from smaller developers. Here is a list of projects under development, and here are the ones you can download. On the latter link, check the software for the GP2X and other consoles for an idea of what "home-brew games" entails.
The Pandora is unlikely to ever have big, commercial 3D games from well-known developers. You'll almost certainly be able to run Android applications eventually, so it might get a few games that way. Of course, there's also the sub-netbook functionality as well. How many gaming consoles support USB, SD Card, Serial, or NAND boot, and are expected to run OSes ranging from Angstrom & Android to Gentoo & Ubuntu, or even AROS, Haiku, or RISC OS? It's kind of a geek toy, not so much a competitor for the PSP or DS.
Half the battery life and twice the cost as well. But, for small devices, form factor is as important as raw specs. An external game controller plus a USB adapter connected to the phone is going to be a lot less manageable unless you have more hands than I do (and a lot less portable). Throw in the open nature, developer community, and the different design goals (phone VS tiny netbook/open gaming console), and you've got a very different product than the Droid Incredible.
It seems odd to me how "don't try this at home" has beaten out DIY. While one could easily blame politics (a society of otherwise ignorant specialists is more controllable than polymaths), I'm tempted to attribute the shift to exponential growth of technology. Most hobbies, like chemistry or astronomy, have existed for long enough that the whole process has been simplified to the point that only a minimal set of tools is required.
Newer technologies, like semiconductors, have had little reason to simplify their techniques. Sure, you can make transistors at home, but it's very difficult to adapt techniques designed for use in labs to ones safe/cheap enough to do at home. It's kind of a Catch-22 with accessibility, not too many people are working on it since it's not accessible, and it's not accessible since not too many people are working on it.
There's also the issue of error. Home-labs have much higher rates of error both due to the economics of scale, and the use of non-ideal, but simple & cheap techniques. If the experts doing highly controlled experiments have to do something a hundred times before finding something that works, then a hobbyist might not ever see a success. So, I'd imagine that you'd need to approach the matter from the ground up, rather than try to replicate something done in a lab.
An example might be genetics. Starting your own home lab would be fairly expensive. You'd need some type of centrifuge, a device to do gel electrophoresis, something to visualize DNA on a gel with, a PCR machine, a micropipette, and several enzymes. The trick is that you can make most of that stuff on your own. A centrifuge can be made out of a drill, a gel electrophoresis tank is simple enough to make, UV lights are coming down in price, and a DIY PCR machine can be made with a Peltier plate and a microcontroller. It'd take a few months to build all that, but that's half the fun. Micropipettes are relatively cheap, and enzymes can be home grown if you're willing to spend the time/space growing cultures. None of that would be very precise (or pure), so your sucess rate would be abysmal, but it's cheap and I'd imagine a pretty fun hobby both in building all that and after you got everything setup. The beauty of genetics is that you can get DNA sequences online, and design your own experiments taking into account your equipment's limitations. I just wouldn't try anything too big (e.g. sequencing a genome), or something that requires a lot of precision. And accept that the failure rate will be frustratingly high.
If you want to make a discovery, then I'd imagine you'd need to find some poorly researched area and spend a decade or two on it. By that time you'll be an expert in that area. Take advantage of the fact you're in it for the long haul (and aren't scrambling to publish in order to justify your funding), and do a long-term experiment. Or do something in a field that doesn't have much grant money available (e.g. a local plant or animal, rather than something like cancer).
You can sorta get iGoogle via SSL via NoScript, but it doesn't work for everything (still a mixed page at best, a broken one at worst). I still can't really see the point of not working on this... obviously encrypting the gadgets that display my e-mail, calendar, and to-do list is as or more important than my web queries.
Well, Google happens to be under a lot of scrutiny and has a minimal history of privacy abuses, and seems to be aware of what is, and isn't appropriate. The same cannot be said for that shady looking guy with the laptop in the coffee shop. Heck, I'm not even sure if my ISP is more or less trustworthy than that. I just assume anything sent unencrypted over the air or outside my apartment is being sniffed.
For the same reason one might go to a social gathering at a restaurant that you're not particularly fond of. It's a cost/benefit calculation. If you want privacy at the expense of everything else, go live in the forest or on a deserted island. OTOH, basically everyone values privacy (albeit to differing extents), so it's all optimization. Personally, I'd like it if Facebook didn't have such a high privacy cost.
Anonymous Coward does have a good point though. If you've incurred a debt by pumping the gas then I don't see how the station could refuse to settle that debt using legal tender. Maybe they are able to siphon off the gas and therefore claim that you aren't in possession of it yet. But, if they can't stop the transaction then it sounds like a debt. Ditto for eating a meal and paying afterwards.
OTOH, gas stations are notorious for having prices ending in 9/10ths of a cent, so it wouldn't surprise me if they aren't exactly adhering to the law regarding currency. Perhaps someone with infinite time and nothing to lose could test this in court. Of course, you can most certainly pay legal settlements in cash, so I suppose it wouldn't matter much if they won or lost.
It'd never work. A bacteria has enough redundancy so that DNA polymerase's error rate usually won't cause any issues. Linux is built with the assumption that data replication is flawless. Therefore, the two differ dramatically in regulatory strategies.
(Even though you jest, there is some debate as to whether DNA and its enzymes are Turning-complete or not. Obviously, at one extreme, a human can function as a Turing machine, but at the other, DNA & protein synthesis don't quite work that way.)
Well, I, for one, think having a dark sense of humor is a lot better than ignoring an issue entirely. Nobody really wants to dwell on such things, so if it weren't for humor they likely wouldn't be brought to public attention much at all.
I looked for one, and found some tools to modify headers, but nothing comprehensive enough overall. IMHO, what we need is something that'll strip the headers to the bare minimum. You can do that with a proxy server (e.g. Privoxy) easily enough, but you'd still be transmitting a unique header. What we need is for a popular Firefox add-on to do this for a large number of people.
It'd be even better if the major browser makers decided to stop catering to poorly designed websites, and do this automatically. Don't send the referrer, nor the user agent, or even a list of plugins. Just send the minimum the HTTP/1.1 (maybe 1.2) specification allows. While they're at it, the similar Javascript methods could also be trimmed. After all, there's little reason for knowing the exact user agent, just test for the methods you need, and don't design websites down to the pixel. It'd be a boon for smaller browsers, mobile browsers, and people who adjust DPI or accessibility options.
There'd be a ton of entropy if you wanted to express that as a series of bits... Heck, there're probably several mol of neurotransmitters alone. With positional information that becomes a ridiculous amount of information. But to be truely accurate you'd also need to take into account stuff like hydration shells, which just makes the whole thing impossibly complex. I'm not sure the number is really knowable unless you make massive simplifications (not that we could actually verify if they're safe assumptions or not). Unlike computers, biology doesn't use too many layers of abstraction, so low-level processes matter quite a bit.