My girlfriend has seriously bad ADHD and takes Wellbutrin for it. It levels her our without turning her into a Ritalin zombie. Give it a try. It's not a cheap drug and I don't think there's a generic, but it seems to work.
New York state law says you must be paid for a minimum of 4 hours if you put in any work time. That's why on-call people never get anything but salary. (To be fair, my last employer in NY paid an extra $100 for the week you're on call and gave comp time if you were unduly disturbed from a human sleep schedule)
I wouldn't go as far to say that techies are on the same level as grocery store clerks. I'd categorize us with car mechanics, plumbers, electricians and the like. It's specialized knowledge, but it certainly doesn't require an advanced degree to be competent at it. However, keep in mind that plumbers and mechanics still command a fairly decent wage...there's no reason that network administrators, desktop support, or even helpdesk goons should be making minimum wage just because you deem it to be "easy." I think plumbing is pretty fucking easy, but I'm willing to shell out $50 / hr because I don't have the time or the desire to do it myself.
I use MS Word to view scientific documents (chemistry, physics, and mathematics) and the equation editor in Star Office never opens them correctly. It always looks like crap if it even renders the symbols at all.
Why the hell would they offer to buy your phone from you when you could just turn it off and eliminate the EMI? I've never heard of this...are you sure you're not just talking out of an orifice that contains no tongue?
You want to get spammers to change jobs in a heartbeat? Start penalizing business owners for paying spammers to advertise for them. Fines up the wazoo. Offer then relief of the fines if they turn over the person who they hired to do the spamming. Problem solved in less than a year.
The only problem I can see with this is someone using spam as a way of striking back at a company that has pissed them off, or is competition. Still haven't thought of a good way around this, but I'd like to think that it wouldn't happen very often.
Wind resistance on the piece of foam would have slowed it down greatly when it broke off. The shuttle itself, still moving at over 500 MPH slams into the now relatively stationary piece of foam. The kinetic energy is from the foam/shuttle system, not just the foam.
Re:Open Relays
on
C&W Bails Out
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Having sat on the receiving end of an abuse mailbox, I can tell you it's not THAT expensive to police.
I worked for Inflow a few years ago as part of the team that does firewall and VPN services for their clients. They had 2 of us alternating coverage of the abuse box. It resulting in a couple extra hours a week of work for the both of us, but there was really no added cost for Inflow. Customers were made to sign a contract when they came in stating that they would not spam, run illegal web sites, etc. If they were found to be in violation, they started with a warning from us. If they didn't correct their action within 3 days, their internet service was turned off. (And by contract they were still compelled to pay for it)
A well written term of service contract and a couple nerdy security guys is really all it takes to manage abuse.
1. School is bullshit. You can learn anything you need to without the help of a school. Anyone who says otherwise is not educated; they are either fooled or helplessly gullible.
For some professions, IT and CS being the main ones, yes, school doesn't mean a fucking thing. I hope that's what you were referring to. Some other careers don't lend themselves very well to self-education. Hard sciences, for example. Try getting a job that pays more than $7/hour as a chemist, a physicist, or a biologist without a graduate degree. If you have a BS, you MIGHT get a $13-$15 an hour job as a lab tech.
For that matter, try even teaching yourself chemistry without being a student. Reading books is all well and good, but it's lab experience that makes you marketable. Try buying some chemicals to play with in your garage some time and watch about 15 local, state, and federal agencies insert themselves directly into your rectum.
Try getting a job in upper management without a business degree. Try getting an accounting job (and I don't mean doing taxes at H&R Block) without an Associates at the VERY least. Would you go to a psychiatrist that taught himself out of the self-help section of the bookstore?
I assure you, college education is very important for careers outside of the IT world. It's easy to be blinded by the corporate drudgery and forget that anything else exists. To a degree (no pun) IT is on par with blue collar trades like electrical and plumping work. It's a bit more intricate and changes more frequently, and you sit in a cubicle instead of a shop, but unless you're a hardcore coder, you're deluding yourself if you think you're any better or any smarter than the guy that fixes your toilet. Do you think the janitor at your company makes less money than the guy answering the phone at the help desk or installing Windows on 5000 machines?
Yeah, it's a damn shame that colleges are turning into money whores. There's a reason it's becoming that way though....colleges, even private ones, rely on gifts of money from private donors, alumni, and the government. With the economy in the shitter, no one has any money to give right now, and the schools are suffering. At a state school, your tuition pays about 15% of what it costs to educate you. At a private school, it pays maybe 75%. Of course they get run like a business...businesses need to earn money or at the very least break even...why should a college be any different?
Yeah, I actually thought about that like 2 seconds after I hit submit. (Being a chemistry major I shoulda thought of it before any others)
I was thinking that a player is given a set amount of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms and a random list of reactions, then proceeds to try and fit all the atoms together into one piece using the reactions given. Someone needs to make this game! =)
That is honestly one of the best ideas I've ever heard. If someone could find a good way to incorporate useful learned skills into a game, we might just start actually producing citizens that can read and write beyond a 9th grade level and have math skills beyond basic algebra.
The possibilities are astounding:
-A puzzle game that teaches advanced geometry and calculus concepts. Or an adduct to a game like The Incredible Machine that can teach many physics concepts. -A city simulation game (i.e. simcity) that lets you incorporate network infrastructure, everything from global satellite WANs to 10 node small business LANs, with configurations on every router, switch, bridge, mux, etc in between. -Something like Parappa The Rapper but using actual music theory incorporating keys, modes, chords, maybe even different instruments. (Hell maybe an electronic interface for keyboards, guitars, and other things....this may even already exist) -As you said, an RPG type game that teaches language skills to ineract with the different players.
Man, I could think about this shit all day. Like you, I'm a terribly addicted gamer, and I'd love to spend time gaming where it might actually improve my intellectual pursuits. I'm in school now, how cool would it be to walk into a class already knowing the techniques to solving problems in the subject and just learning the theory behind it?
Well...easier yes...more bandwidth efficient, no. The entire album's worth of MP3s would be about 75-100MB at 192kb rate. I can download that much faster than the whole cd.
I'm also not one of the audiophile crowd who think they can hear lossy compression, so I'm easier to please in that regard. 192kb rips sound exactly the same as CDs to me. Anything less than 192 and it's definately noticeable, but not annoying until you get down around 64kb.
Because most people are just looking for a song or two, not an entire album. If I had to download and entire 640MB ISO of Aenema just to listen to Hooker With a Penis, I'd be awfully fucking pissed.
I think the movie industry's big problem is not with people not seeing it in the theater, but rather that they believe less people will buy the DVD when it is released if they have a decent copy they snagged off of P2P. (Much like the RIAA thinking that mp3 distribution hurts cd sales rather than concert ticket sales)
While I don't think their fears are founded, this is most likely their reasoning as box office sales are obviously not dropping.
Ever try and ride a bike with 10 bags of groceries? I agree that people waste fuel and cause more pollution by taking cars for short trips but sometimes you just need the carrying capacity.
I'm guessing that the failure rates of more modern hard drives have to do with the increase in data transfer rates. You need to spin the platters faster to read data from it faster. Increasing the rotational velocity of the system increases the kinetic energy of the system. With more and more kinetic energy, you have more things like friction, vibration, sound waves, heat, etc. It's quite an engineering feat to keep something like that spinning without destroying its housing, considering it's just a few centimeters of metal and plastic holding it together.
So how do they make it spin faster without changing the kinetic energy? The only way is to reduce the rotational inertia, which is a function of mass and velocity that varies with the exact dimensions of the platter. Using less dense materials and trying to keep the radius of the disk small help, but since it's a square root of half those values, it's not that much of a return. Since housing the platters in a bigger, more sturdy compartment is not an option considering it still needs to fit in a 3.5" slot, you can see why there has not been as dramatic of an increase in drive speeds and why they fail more often. (though it has improved considerably because of increased data density....at the same speed, more data is read per unit of distance across the platter)
As I understand it, hallucinogens give you an overwhelming sense of the realness of the hallucinations
No, that is not correct. When you're on most hallucinogens (speaking for lsd, mescaline, and mushrooms, by far the most common) you are quite aware that the weird shit you're seeing is drug-induced and it's quite easy to deal with, once you're used to it. As someone else mentioned, visual hallucinations on these drugs are most often not of the sort that make you see an object that isn't there but more of the sort that distort objects and images that ARE there, making them wavy, melty, pattered or particulated. i.e. you're not going to be sitting there trying to ignore the demon sitting on the couch that's staring at you. What you might be trying to ignore is the couch melting or sliding, but such things are so transient that by the time it starts to annoy you, it's done. Most of the visual hallucinations are internal anyway...you don't see anything different with your eyes open, but when they're closed you get a cool shifting pattern effect on the back of your eyelids. It's usually a fractal image of some sort that undergoes various shift, sliding, and melting transformations.
But yes, you usually can't "turn off" the hallucinations when you're tripping,which is why people have bad trips...because of the lack of ability to stop the trip...kind of like a 12-hour roller coaster that you can't get off of. But you CAN get into a better state of mind and change your perception of the environment. It's kind of like trying to fall asleep when you have insomnia...the more you think about it, the worse you are. When you let go and stop obsessing about it, next thing you know it's over. You can't fight your way out of a trip any more that you can fight your way to sleep. This is as near as I can figure why people who have taken hallucinogens tend to be laid back and easy going. It's also why many social trippers get together take something, they have a "babysitter" stay sober. It's kind of like the designated driver for a night at the bar...the sober one will make sure the environment stays "trip-friendly", keeps the newbies from freaking out, and deals with the situations that require straight thinking. (it's 3am and the cops show up because someone called in a noise complaint)
All in all, it's a very eye opening and life changing experience...it's not for everyone, but it's for more people than you'd think.
(note to authorities, all of the above information is something I've read in books and on the internet. I'm a nice guy, don't arrest me please)
You actually can get a DEA waiver to do drug research, but you have to play the game and imply that you're trying to demonstrate the harm in taking a particular drug, not that you're trying to show that it has benefits that can outweigh the risks. (or has little risk for that matter..*cough* THC *cough*) We actually have a DEA license at my school for possession of narcotics, but it's mostly just so the criminalistics students can screw around with identification techniques so that they too can show the world a little jackbooted state compassion when they graduate. I offered to undertake a research project to synthesize various drugs for them to practice with, but that idea was not received very warmly.
However, it's often difficult to get funding because of the touchy subject matter. Marijuana research is well funded because of groups like NORML that are well established, staffed, and funded. Research on psychedelics is by and large done by individuals who have their own equipment and labs and can operate autonomously. Check out the work of Alexander Shulgin...by and large one of the most brilliant psychedelic chemical researchers to exist. (read his book online at http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/ pihkal.shtml) He's synthesised almost 200 different psychedelics (mostly derivatives from the same family but varying in effect quite largely) and has some amazing insights on the nature of psychedelia and the unfortunate state of affairs in the US regarding drug laws.
With drugs like speed, crack, coke, heroin, etc, yes that's an issue. WIth acid though, the active dose is like 5-15 micrograms. It's typically taken on a very small piece of blotter paper or a tiny flake of gelatin. Even if the urban legend of LSD being cut with strychnine were true (check out www.erowid.org's LSD section to debunk that) the LD50 (dose at which 50% of subjects experience fatality) of strychnine is around 50mg. that's around 50,000 times as much lsd as you just took. There's just no way to get an even remotely dangerous dose of a contaminant in a hit of acid unless it's sarin or VX or something else that your typical hippie acid-chemist would certainly NOT make.
Bad trips and recurring mental anxiety later in life are about the only risk associated with LSD. (arguably worth the risk considering the spiritually eye-opening experience of tripping)
Ask the casinos in Nevada how they used to catch thieves and cheaters (and probably still do). They use cheaters themselves. The cheaters know all the little tricks of the trade and understand the mentality of other cheaters, why they do what they do and what they will probably do next, as well as probable future cheats.
Now replace the word 'cheat' above with 'hack' and you'll see just why government and coporations that are serious about security should hire at least a few former hackers. Of course, you WILL need trustworthy folks watching them closely. (Just the same way the anti-cheaters in vegas are heavily scrutinized by the casino owners to make sure they're not in on a scam)
All you really need for for is to supply fuel to build ADP back to ATP, which is in turn broken down to provide energy for the cells of the body. Food is merely a way of carrying the energy of those tasty chemical bonds to be converted to energy for the body.
Since we're speaking purely hypothetically of this story, perhaps the nanobots would create something alone the lines of a photochemical cell membrane to convert UV and visible light radiation to usable energy. (kinda like photosynthesis) *shrug* It's fiction, there's always a deus ex machina if you want there to be.
And you bitch about Mac elitism? Listen to yourself dude.
"I've never used a mac except for a few times in passing, blah blah, it's only for the computer illiterate, blah blah, I obviously know everything about computers because I know a couple coding techniques so I'm right and you're wrong, blah blah blah"
I'm sorry that you didn't feel included when the editor said that computer literate people know the Happy Mac icon, but damn, lay off the hostility...there's no need to call for jihad. If you don't like macs and never have, good for you, that's your choice. If you can reminesce about your Commodore PET, then let the other 95% of the people on/. think back to the old macs they owned or used in school.
As far as arrogance derived from coding or system administration skill goes, it is unfounded. You're not cool and you're not making a difference. Any reasonably intelligent person can perform these tasks given the time and desire. You are not a unique and beautiful snowflake.
Now hopefully we'll both be modded down as trolls and we can go on with our lives.
Slashdot Mirror
My girlfriend has seriously bad ADHD and takes Wellbutrin for it. It levels her our without turning her into a Ritalin zombie. Give it a try.
It's not a cheap drug and I don't think there's a generic, but it seems to work.
New York state law says you must be paid for a minimum of 4 hours if you put in any work time. That's why on-call people never get anything but salary. (To be fair, my last employer in NY paid an extra $100 for the week you're on call and gave comp time if you were unduly disturbed from a human sleep schedule)
I wouldn't go as far to say that techies are on the same level as grocery store clerks. I'd categorize us with car mechanics, plumbers, electricians and the like. It's specialized knowledge, but it certainly doesn't require an advanced degree to be competent at it. However, keep in mind that plumbers and mechanics still command a fairly decent wage...there's no reason that network administrators, desktop support, or even helpdesk goons should be making minimum wage just because you deem it to be "easy." I think plumbing is pretty fucking easy, but I'm willing to shell out $50 / hr because I don't have the time or the desire to do it myself.
I use MS Word to view scientific documents (chemistry, physics, and mathematics) and the equation editor in Star Office never opens them correctly. It always looks like crap if it even renders the symbols at all.
This was about a year ago, maybe it's better now.
Why the hell would they offer to buy your phone from you when you could just turn it off and eliminate the EMI? I've never heard of this...are you sure you're not just talking out of an orifice that contains no tongue?
You want to get spammers to change jobs in a heartbeat? Start penalizing business owners for paying spammers to advertise for them. Fines up the wazoo. Offer then relief of the fines if they turn over the person who they hired to do the spamming. Problem solved in less than a year.
The only problem I can see with this is someone using spam as a way of striking back at a company that has pissed them off, or is competition. Still haven't thought of a good way around this, but I'd like to think that it wouldn't happen very often.
Wind resistance on the piece of foam would have slowed it down greatly when it broke off. The shuttle itself, still moving at over 500 MPH slams into the now relatively stationary piece of foam. The kinetic energy is from the foam/shuttle system, not just the foam.
Having sat on the receiving end of an abuse mailbox, I can tell you it's not THAT expensive to police.
I worked for Inflow a few years ago as part of the team that does firewall and VPN services for their clients. They had 2 of us alternating coverage of the abuse box. It resulting in a couple extra hours a week of work for the both of us, but there was really no added cost for Inflow. Customers were made to sign a contract when they came in stating that they would not spam, run illegal web sites, etc. If they were found to be in violation, they started with a warning from us. If they didn't correct their action within 3 days, their internet service was turned off. (And by contract they were still compelled to pay for it)
A well written term of service contract and a couple nerdy security guys is really all it takes to manage abuse.
You had me agreeing with you up intil this point:
1. School is bullshit. You can learn anything you need to without the help of a school. Anyone who says otherwise is not educated; they are either fooled or helplessly gullible.
For some professions, IT and CS being the main ones, yes, school doesn't mean a fucking thing. I hope that's what you were referring to. Some other careers don't lend themselves very well to self-education. Hard sciences, for example. Try getting a job that pays more than $7/hour as a chemist, a physicist, or a biologist without a graduate degree. If you have a BS, you MIGHT get a $13-$15 an hour job as a lab tech.
For that matter, try even teaching yourself chemistry without being a student. Reading books is all well and good, but it's lab experience that makes you marketable. Try buying some chemicals to play with in your garage some time and watch about 15 local, state, and federal agencies insert themselves directly into your rectum.
Try getting a job in upper management without a business degree. Try getting an accounting job (and I don't mean doing taxes at H&R Block) without an Associates at the VERY least. Would you go to a psychiatrist that taught himself out of the self-help section of the bookstore?
I assure you, college education is very important for careers outside of the IT world. It's easy to be blinded by the corporate drudgery and forget that anything else exists. To a degree (no pun) IT is on par with blue collar trades like electrical and plumping work. It's a bit more intricate and changes more frequently, and you sit in a cubicle instead of a shop, but unless you're a hardcore coder, you're deluding yourself if you think you're any better or any smarter than the guy that fixes your toilet. Do you think the janitor at your company makes less money than the guy answering the phone at the help desk or installing Windows on 5000 machines?
Yeah, it's a damn shame that colleges are turning into money whores. There's a reason it's becoming that way though....colleges, even private ones, rely on gifts of money from private donors, alumni, and the government. With the economy in the shitter, no one has any money to give right now, and the schools are suffering. At a state school, your tuition pays about 15% of what it costs to educate you. At a private school, it pays maybe 75%. Of course they get run like a business...businesses need to earn money or at the very least break even...why should a college be any different?
And yes, many Italian-Americans do say it. You can't make shit like that up.
It's most commonly heard in the NY/NJ area.
Researchers discover that television improves valuable looking skills.
Because exploits like that can cost them money in the form of lost customers. Lost revenue as a result on a computer intrusion is a federal offense.
On a personal level, I think it's hysterical. But from a legal standpoint, they have a valid case.
Yeah, I actually thought about that like 2 seconds after I hit submit. (Being a chemistry major I shoulda thought of it before any others)
I was thinking that a player is given a set amount of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms and a random list of reactions, then proceeds to try and fit all the atoms together into one piece using the reactions given. Someone needs to make this game! =)
That is honestly one of the best ideas I've ever heard. If someone could find a good way to incorporate useful learned skills into a game, we might just start actually producing citizens that can read and write beyond a 9th grade level and have math skills beyond basic algebra.
The possibilities are astounding:
-A puzzle game that teaches advanced geometry and calculus concepts. Or an adduct to a game like The Incredible Machine that can teach many physics concepts.
-A city simulation game (i.e. simcity) that lets you incorporate network infrastructure, everything from global satellite WANs to 10 node small business LANs, with configurations on every router, switch, bridge, mux, etc in between.
-Something like Parappa The Rapper but using actual music theory incorporating keys, modes, chords, maybe even different instruments. (Hell maybe an electronic interface for keyboards, guitars, and other things....this may even already exist)
-As you said, an RPG type game that teaches language skills to ineract with the different players.
Man, I could think about this shit all day. Like you, I'm a terribly addicted gamer, and I'd love to spend time gaming where it might actually improve my intellectual pursuits. I'm in school now, how cool would it be to walk into a class already knowing the techniques to solving problems in the subject and just learning the theory behind it?
Well...easier yes...more bandwidth efficient, no. The entire album's worth of MP3s would be about 75-100MB at 192kb rate. I can download that much faster than the whole cd.
I'm also not one of the audiophile crowd who think they can hear lossy compression, so I'm easier to please in that regard. 192kb rips sound exactly the same as CDs to me. Anything less than 192 and it's definately noticeable, but not annoying until you get down around 64kb.
Because most people are just looking for a song or two, not an entire album. If I had to download and entire 640MB ISO of Aenema just to listen to Hooker With a Penis, I'd be awfully fucking pissed.
I think the movie industry's big problem is not with people not seeing it in the theater, but rather that they believe less people will buy the DVD when it is released if they have a decent copy they snagged off of P2P. (Much like the RIAA thinking that mp3 distribution hurts cd sales rather than concert ticket sales)
While I don't think their fears are founded, this is most likely their reasoning as box office sales are obviously not dropping.
Ever try and ride a bike with 10 bags of groceries? I agree that people waste fuel and cause more pollution by taking cars for short trips but sometimes you just need the carrying capacity.
I'm guessing that the failure rates of more modern hard drives have to do with the increase in data transfer rates. You need to spin the platters faster to read data from it faster. Increasing the rotational velocity of the system increases the kinetic energy of the system. With more and more kinetic energy, you have more things like friction, vibration, sound waves, heat, etc. It's quite an engineering feat to keep something like that spinning without destroying its housing, considering it's just a few centimeters of metal and plastic holding it together.
Some equations to satisfy the inner geek
Rotational Kinetic Energy = 1/2 * Rotational Inertia * Angular Velocity^2
Angular Velocity = Sqrt(2*Kinetic Energy/Rotational Inertia)
So how do they make it spin faster without changing the kinetic energy? The only way is to reduce the rotational inertia, which is a function of mass and velocity that varies with the exact dimensions of the platter. Using less dense materials and trying to keep the radius of the disk small help, but since it's a square root of half those values, it's not that much of a return. Since housing the platters in a bigger, more sturdy compartment is not an option considering it still needs to fit in a 3.5" slot, you can see why there has not been as dramatic of an increase in drive speeds and why they fail more often. (though it has improved considerably because of increased data density....at the same speed, more data is read per unit of distance across the platter)
As I understand it, hallucinogens give you an overwhelming sense of the realness of the hallucinations
,which is why people have bad trips...because of the lack of ability to stop the trip...kind of like a 12-hour roller coaster that you can't get off of. But you CAN get into a better state of mind and change your perception of the environment. It's kind of like trying to fall asleep when you have insomnia...the more you think about it, the worse you are. When you let go and stop obsessing about it, next thing you know it's over. You can't fight your way out of a trip any more that you can fight your way to sleep. This is as near as I can figure why people who have taken hallucinogens tend to be laid back and easy going.
No, that is not correct. When you're on most hallucinogens (speaking for lsd, mescaline, and mushrooms, by far the most common) you are quite aware that the weird shit you're seeing is drug-induced and it's quite easy to deal with, once you're used to it. As someone else mentioned, visual hallucinations on these drugs are most often not of the sort that make you see an object that isn't there but more of the sort that distort objects and images that ARE there, making them wavy, melty, pattered or particulated. i.e. you're not going to be sitting there trying to ignore the demon sitting on the couch that's staring at you. What you might be trying to ignore is the couch melting or sliding, but such things are so transient that by the time it starts to annoy you, it's done. Most of the visual hallucinations are internal anyway...you don't see anything different with your eyes open, but when they're closed you get a cool shifting pattern effect on the back of your eyelids. It's usually a fractal image of some sort that undergoes various shift, sliding, and melting transformations.
But yes, you usually can't "turn off" the hallucinations when you're tripping
It's also why many social trippers get together take something, they have a "babysitter" stay sober. It's kind of like the designated driver for a night at the bar...the sober one will make sure the environment stays "trip-friendly", keeps the newbies from freaking out, and deals with the situations that require straight thinking. (it's 3am and the cops show up because someone called in a noise complaint)
All in all, it's a very eye opening and life changing experience...it's not for everyone, but it's for more people than you'd think.
(note to authorities, all of the above information is something I've read in books and on the internet. I'm a nice guy, don't arrest me please)
You actually can get a DEA waiver to do drug research, but you have to play the game and imply that you're trying to demonstrate the harm in taking a particular drug, not that you're trying to show that it has benefits that can outweigh the risks. (or has little risk for that matter..*cough* THC *cough*) We actually have a DEA license at my school for possession of narcotics, but it's mostly just so the criminalistics students can screw around with identification techniques so that they too can show the world a little jackbooted state compassion when they graduate. I offered to undertake a research project to synthesize various drugs for them to practice with, but that idea was not received very warmly.
/ pihkal.shtml) He's synthesised almost 200 different psychedelics (mostly derivatives from the same family but varying in effect quite largely) and has some amazing insights on the nature of psychedelia and the unfortunate state of affairs in the US regarding drug laws.
However, it's often difficult to get funding because of the touchy subject matter. Marijuana research is well funded because of groups like NORML that are well established, staffed, and funded. Research on psychedelics is by and large done by individuals who have their own equipment and labs and can operate autonomously. Check out the work of Alexander Shulgin...by and large one of the most brilliant psychedelic chemical researchers to exist. (read his book online at http://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal
With drugs like speed, crack, coke, heroin, etc, yes that's an issue. WIth acid though, the active dose is like 5-15 micrograms. It's typically taken on a very small piece of blotter paper or a tiny flake of gelatin. Even if the urban legend of LSD being cut with strychnine were true (check out www.erowid.org's LSD section to debunk that) the LD50 (dose at which 50% of subjects experience fatality) of strychnine is around 50mg. that's around 50,000 times as much lsd as you just took. There's just no way to get an even remotely dangerous dose of a contaminant in a hit of acid unless it's sarin or VX or something else that your typical hippie acid-chemist would certainly NOT make.
Bad trips and recurring mental anxiety later in life are about the only risk associated with LSD. (arguably worth the risk considering the spiritually eye-opening experience of tripping)
Ask the casinos in Nevada how they used to catch thieves and cheaters (and probably still do). They use cheaters themselves. The cheaters know all the little tricks of the trade and understand the mentality of other cheaters, why they do what they do and what they will probably do next, as well as probable future cheats.
Now replace the word 'cheat' above with 'hack' and you'll see just why government and coporations that are serious about security should hire at least a few former hackers. Of course, you WILL need trustworthy folks watching them closely. (Just the same way the anti-cheaters in vegas are heavily scrutinized by the casino owners to make sure they're not in on a scam)
All you really need for for is to supply fuel to build ADP back to ATP, which is in turn broken down to provide energy for the cells of the body. Food is merely a way of carrying the energy of those tasty chemical bonds to be converted to energy for the body.
Since we're speaking purely hypothetically of this story, perhaps the nanobots would create something alone the lines of a photochemical cell membrane to convert UV and visible light radiation to usable energy. (kinda like photosynthesis) *shrug* It's fiction, there's always a deus ex machina if you want there to be.
And you bitch about Mac elitism? Listen to yourself dude.
/. think back to the old macs they owned or used in school.
"I've never used a mac except for a few times in passing, blah blah, it's only for the computer illiterate, blah blah, I obviously know everything about computers because I know a couple coding techniques so I'm right and you're wrong, blah blah blah"
I'm sorry that you didn't feel included when the editor said that computer literate people know the Happy Mac icon, but damn, lay off the hostility...there's no need to call for jihad. If you don't like macs and never have, good for you, that's your choice. If you can reminesce about your Commodore PET, then let the other 95% of the people on
As far as arrogance derived from coding or system administration skill goes, it is unfounded. You're not cool and you're not making a difference. Any reasonably intelligent person can perform these tasks given the time and desire. You are not a unique and beautiful snowflake.
Now hopefully we'll both be modded down as trolls and we can go on with our lives.