Grishnakh

A way of using nuclear power to directly generate electricity, without going through a thermal cycle first. Similar to how photovoltaics work: instead of capturing heat from sunlight and going through a Carnot cycle engine to generate electricity, PV directly converts photons to electricity. Something like this with nuclear power would be revolutionary I think.

Perhaps it could be turned on and off as needed: lose a finger in an accident, and take a drug to turn regeneration on. Grow your finger back in a week, and then take another drug (or stop taking the first drug) to go back to normal.

I don't know of any languages that don't have a Latinized written form: Russian, Japanese, Mandarin, Arabic, etc. all have Latinized forms.

I wonder if part of the deal was house-arrest for the surgeon. Lots of (usually lesser) crimes these days are being punished with house arrest to save money because prisons are so expensive (and also do absolutely nothing to rehabilitate people, in fact quite the opposite). Forcing the surgeon to have house arrest (which includes being able to go to work, but not much else), and still go to work to pay for a big-ass settlement, is still punishment.

That's the same thing. There is no OS I'm aware of that has separate versions for "laptops" and "desktops"; a laptop IS a "desktop" these days, as opposed to a "mobile device" running a mobile OS (Android/iOS).

>That's not a negative, especially for anyone who makes their living selling software.

So you think free things should be banned so that leaches who want to make money selling things can do so? How idiotic.

If I'd like to make a living selling air for breathing, is it wrong for people to breathe the air that's freely available? I guess so, in your world.

>And there's nothing special about Linux that saves it from that; if it became popular, commercial software would be written for it as well, and you'd have the same problem.

Here you completely miss the point. I'm not talking about special niche software, just basic stuff. I can't even edit a fucking text file in Windows without installing some special third-party software, because Windows doesn't come with a usable text editor. Luckily there's free stuff available on the web for some things like that, but it's a big PITA to go find some website, find a download link, and install the program. On Linux, this kind of basic software is part of a standard install, and at the very worst, all I have to do is something like "sudo apt-get install vim".

So are dildos, but that doesn't mean they need to be made safe for children. These toys were clearly advertised as being for adults only.

When I get into a conversation about Free software being better than proprietary software, I focus on real problems with modern proprietary software that average users have these days, mainly with operating systems. For instance, lots of people don't like Windows 10's interface, but there's also the spyware and advertising issues, and various other annoyances with it, plus the forced-update problem and the fact that you have to separately purchase so much software for it to make it useful. With desktop Linux, you don't have these problems: lots of software is easily installed from the repos and you wind up with a fully-functional system very easily, updates are ridiculously simple and fast and don't prevent you from using your computer, updates aren't forced on you breaking your software, your OS won't be forcibly "upgraded" to a new version you don't want, performance-crippling anti-virus software isn't needed, etc. On the Apple side, the OS is tied to very expensive and now-crippled hardware (see the new MBP which lacks ports, requiring you to carry around a whole bunch of dongles) and still has the problem of not having useful software by default. For people who insist on using some kind of proprietary software like Photoshop, I just don't bother, but for people who just want something to surf the web, write simple documents, watch videos, etc., desktop Linux works great so this is how I pitch it.

What your dad got is an IOL: intraocular lens. These things are pretty amazing these days; they can correct myopia and astigmatism, eliminate cataracts, and eliminate the need for reading glasses too because the new lens is focus-able (in the ones that are "accommodating"). I'm thinking of getting these in 5-10 years, since I'm just starting to have problems with reading now; by that time, new artificial lenses will be a perfect solution to my eyesight problems I can expect to have at that age.

Your dad sounds like one of these annoying non-technical people who hears one technical term (e.g. LASIK) and then applies that in blanket fashion to anything remotely related. He probably calls Android phones "iPhones", and he probably calls laptop computers "iPads", and he probably calls the Internet "AOL".

Those risk numbers aren't really valid for everyone, for all activities. The steps thing, for instance, is BS for most people; steps are a serious danger, of course, to elderly people, which is why the mortality number is so high for them. For healthy adults under retirement age, the risk isn't remotely as high.

Similarly, your risk of dying from getting hit by an asteroid are actually pretty significant according to some sources. Do you know how many people in history have actually died from an asteroid strike? Probably zero, at least in the last couple millenia, and almost certainly zero in the last century. But the risk is still pretty high because if a giant earth-killer asteroid hits the planet, we're all dead, or a city-killer asteroid could cause massive devastation. A small one hit a Russian city a few years ago and 1000 people were injured.

According to Wired, your risk of dying from an asteroid is higher than by lightning strike: https://www.wired.com/2013/02/asteroid-odds/

So you have to take some of these with a grain of salt. Car accidents, like the steps thing, probably also affect different places differently. Cars are much more deadly in some 3rd-world nations, for instance; does that 1/606 statistic include those? And death rates per mile traveled are probably higher in some places than others (rural vs. urban). And they're also probably higher for drunk drivers (though obviously the drunks do kill innocent people too), and possibly lower for small children (because they're better protected in car seats).

My vision is only slightly nearsighted, so I'm certainly not a candidate for LASIK (or PRK).

But I did try getting married; definitely one of the worst decisions I ever made in my life.

Luckily there weren't any kids involved.

According to statistics, you're significantly less than 50% likely to have a happy marriage, so it's not a very good gamble.

It sounds like a totally hipster thing to do. Completely pointless and idiotic.

That's why they invented "safety glasses". They're specifically designed to protect against stuff like that, probably better than your expensive corrective lenses, and they're dirt cheap. They're required wear in any hazardous environment (factory, workshop, etc.).

Depends on the glasses. These days, I always ride with glasses, but they're cheap safety glasses, not corrective lenses of any kind. Safety glasses are made specifically to protect your eyes from flying debris, so theoretically they're safer if a big rock flies into your eye or something. But they also are shaped to fit closer to your face, so I don't have any problems with the wind-tunnel effect you complain about. Best of all, they keep the wind out of my eyes, which is a problem at speed.

Now if I could just find something comfortable to block out all the wind noise.

Not specifically, just shopping.google.com. I try to check there if I don't think the prices at my normal outlets are good enough. For instance, I needed some bags for my vacuum cleaner a while ago, and they were too high at both the manufacturer's site (Bissell) and at Amazon. There were off-brand bags at Amazon for less, but the reviews were terrible. So I think I looked on Google shopping, and ended up finding a great price for the OEM bags at target.com. While I was there, I got some dental floss that works well for me, because it was also really cheap there.

In another example, my now-ex wife wanted some specific sea salt from Italy that she likes a lot for some reason. Amazon's price was very high, so again I used Google (I think, this was probably a year ago) and found a site that specialized in Italian food imports. They had dirt-cheap prices for the stuff if you bought it by the case, so that's what we did, plus a bunch of other pasta stuff that was really cheap.

There's tons of specialty stores out there like that that you just have to look for, depending on what you're looking for. shopping.google.com frequently points me to good places, but also just a regular Google search, or a search on DDG will frequently be productive. Even other big-name retailers will frequently have good deals, better than Amazon: walmart.com, target.com, etc. But it all fluctuates and varies a lot, so it is a bit of work to find good deals. But generally, once I've found a good supplier for something I repurchase at some interval, it usually works out best to keep buying from them, so it's frequently worth the time investment to find a good supplier. Then I just keep all my email receipts tagged "Purchases", and then do a search through those when I need to re-order something.

No, it wouldn't. At least it wouldn't be any more stupid and ridiculous than a patent for exercising a cat with a laser pointer.

http://www.google.com/patents/US5443036 http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=H...

Here in the US, "Italian X" or "French Y" just means that's the style. There's plenty of space on most labels to indicate a country of origin, and that's exactly what they do: foods made in Italy clearly state on them "Product of Italy" or similar. In fact, some food being made in Italy or France or anywhere in Europe is generally a plus over here, so they're not shy about putting that on the label.

In short, we don't need laws limiting what you can call things, with regard to country of origin, as long as product labels clearly indicate the country of origin. I know full well the $1.00 Chobani "Greek yogurt" isn't actually made in Greece, but some Greek-named expensive yogurt at the fancy grocery store I can guess probably is, and then after checking the label a bit more closely and seeing "Product of Greece" or "Made in Greece", I know it is.

Now, if some lotion says "Aloe Vera Lotion", I expect it to be made with real aloe. I really shouldn't have to check the ingredients list (if it even has one; it's not a food so I'm not sure that's required).

Yep, that's why for a lot of things like that, I try to buy it in bulk from Costco or someplace online.

I'll also add that with an electric guitar, it's totally normal to practice without amplification. If you're playing non-distorted parts, and your room is quiet, and you're not totally deaf, an unamplified electric guitar is loud enough to be heard well, while not being loud enough to be heard outside the room. Playing distorted parts doesn't work so well, however, because you can't really hear all the harmonics very well without the amplifier, and the distortion changes the sound so much.

(I typed a reply to this but it doesn't seem to have been saved....)

What the heck are you doing with your WiFi gear to have these problems? I've used all kinds of cheap-o routers over the years, and never had problems with them overheating. Are you living in the desert without A/C or something? My current router is just a cheap TP-Link dual-band I got used on Ebay; it runs DD-WRT and has been working fine for 1.5 years hiding behind my sofa. Before that, I had a cheap Cisco/Linksys e1000 I got used and ran DD-WRT on for probably 3 years. I gave it away to someone, and last I heard it still works just fine. Before that I had some D-Link I think, which I replaced because a firmware update prevented my network print jobs from going through (obviously not a hardware problem). I've also had (about 4 years ago, for work) a Cisco/Linksys dual-band which worked great, and a Cisco enterprise AP which was very reliable though the IOS UI was the worst thing I've ever seen in my life. Honestly, your post is the first time I've heard anyone complain about WiFi routers having overheating problems.

Maybe I'm luckier because I usually run DD-WRT and set the transmit strength a bit lower, but I've only done that with the last couple of routers.

Yeah, that's it, sorry. I don't normally access it at work and my web browser at home just auto-completes the name for me.

A guitar doesn't take up much physical space, but if you want to play with amplification, the noise issue does become a big factor. It is possible, however, to play with headphones, so that your neighbors won't hear you at all.

I have the answer for you:

songsster.com

It's free, it's like Wikipedia in that anyone can edit it (so crappy transcriptions get replaced eventually by better ones), it even plays the song for you. The only bad thing is that it uses Flash.

>That's the bean-counter mindset that ruins companies.

I was laid off from a semiconductor company years ago because the product we were supporting was aging, and their projections for the successor product did not show a 40+% profit margin, so they decided to simply exit the market altogether and dump their customers, who were really pissed.

You're doing it wrong. Apple wants you to just sync with iCloud; if you want to do things differently than how Apple wants you to do things, then you're not a very good Apple customer. You need to stop trying to think different.

>Apple can charge outrageous prices for their products, and people love them despite/because of that. Can't understand why they'd stop making monitors.

My guess is that there's just not enough profit in it. Monitors last a really long time, and while people like your friend will ooh and ahh over them, that doesn't necessarily translate into sales, and since they don't need to be replaced every year, they won't have the built-in profit that their phones have. It's probably the same with their WiFi access points.

>but I really wonder what Apple's strategy is going forward, because its clear that they've slowed down or stopped development on everything other than their phones/pads and the occasional laptop.

Their strategy is simple and obvious, and straight out of a modern American business school textbook: reduce or eliminate product lines that aren't making big profits, and continue milking the product lines that are making big profits. This means bigger profits company-wide.

>What is the use of having hundreds of billions in the bank if you're not investing it in growing or creating product lines?

Why bother doing that when you can just continue milking your cash cow product lines when you have hordes of cultish buyers happy to give you all their money for your overpriced products? Obviously, they've found that this works great with some products (phones, tablets), and not too well with other products (WiFi APs), so it's perfectly sensible for them to drop the latter.

Will this bite them in the ass later? Looking at Apple customers, I seriously doubt it.

To expand on this a bit, I also find these Meetup hikes great for learning about trails in my area I otherwise probably wouldn't know about, so I can go back to them on my own later or with a friend or date. Also there's a lot of singles in some of these hiking groups so it can be a good way of finding new dates.

This "left vs right" stuff is all a distraction and wrong anyway. The major media outlets definitely are not right-wing biased: just look at Washington Post, NYTimes, etc. What they are is biased towards the establishment. This was especially obvious in the recent election, with things like WaPo posting dozens of editorials trashing Bernie and extolling Hillary, and the coverage of such outlets working to get Hillary elected at all costs. Of course, this is painted as "left wing" in the US because the Democrats are associated with "left", but Hillary was the Wall Street candidate, so unless you think that "left wing" equals "in bed with big corporate finance", the media outlets aren't really left-wing, they're pro-establishment.

I don't see how that's convincing at all. To you and me who actually know a little bit about how science is supposed to work, sure. But to some Jane Doe who never took any science classes in college and has no idea what "peer review" is, and is taken in by the fluffy New-Age BS marketing on the product's label, that phrase isn't going to mean squat.

The fundamental problem I think is that much of society simply doesn't understand what science is, and why it's important, or why they should care about scientific studies in regard to allegedly medicinal products they may use.