SNI is universal, unless you're running Windows XP

That's a pretty huge unless!

This article isn't for actual software engineers, but "idea guys" who think making games is easy and don't actually understand what goes into real game design.

I know a ton of people like that - they have an idea for some awesome next level stuff, but it's only a very vague idea with a few neat things in there, without any of the actual work that is needed to turn it into a game design, let alone a spec, let alone a game. Seriously, everyone I know who is a gamer and not an engineer is constantly babbling about how games should do X or Y or Z or whatever, but when you ask them questions about how any of it would actually work, they wave their hands and say it isn't important because the IDEA that they took a whole 30 seconds coming up with and articulating is somehow the hard part.

The idea is the easy part - I can toss out hundreds of ideas for games that would be amazing. Turning that amazing idea into anything resembling a useful thing is another kettle of fish entirely.

I would guess that there is a big difference between "guaranteed to survive a 1.2m drop onto concrete" or even "99% chance of surviving the drop" (which is probably what they offer) and the anecdotal "I dropped shit from longer distances and they were fine".

My S3 was seriously damaged by a much smaller drop. You can be lucky or unlucky with such devices. Military doesn't like that :)

I'm a scientist, but not in astrophysics or a (remotely) related discipline.

At some deep level, I "doubt" the big bang theory because it seems to me that it is not something that can really ever be tested, simulated, experimented with, so we have n=1 observational data at best, and building causal theories on n=1 observational data is tricky; and on another level I "doubt" the theory because I don't know the literature or even really understand the phenomenon and I have no clue what the scientific evidence for and against it are. "They" say that it is the currently accepted theory, but what does that even mean? Why would I not doubt it?

All that said, I don't believe that the theory is false, I just accept that "other scientists" know what they are doing so as a body they are probably right if they accept a model. But I don't like accepting things on authority, I like understanding why something would be the case, and I don't have that understanding for big bang theory.

[at least with other "grand theories" like tectonics or evolution I have some understanding of the process involved and the evidence that lead the scientific community to accept it (e.g. the magnetism 'bar code' for tectonics) and it can be observed somewhat in real life (the functioning of current species, the shape of continents. And let's not even talk about flat earth, young earth, intelligent design and other complete hogwash]

Enteral (oral/GI administration) ingestion of a chemical is radically different then parenteral administration (through the skin or means other than through the GI tract). There are drugs that are safe one way, and deadly the other, and vice-versa. The human body is very fickle in that regards. Silica is very dangerous if inhaled.

It may initiate a wild, but localize inflammatory reaction. A concern then would be is it really _limited_? Widespread inflammation can be deadly.

Yes.

My problem is not with sterility. My problem is that most industrial chemical processes use heavy metals and other toxic substances as catalysts or intermediates....or that the intermediate steps that are difficult to eliminate may be toxic. This is why a pharmaceutical plant is vastly different from an industrial plant. The tolerance level is _much_ lower for pharmaceuticals. I tried looking up their analysis of LUDOX, but couldn't find it, the MSDS sheet did not list any minor components, but did list the silica as "chemically produced". I think you get my point.

Naturally.

We're fast moving into a post-scarcity economy with practially finished software doing all the work nowadays, running on hardware that has a cost approaching near-zero as we speak. A computer that can be bought for 20 hours of work at a fast-food joint today is the size of a book, can run on solar power and has enough processing power to do all the billing and taxes for an entire city. What's left to do for suits beside sitting in parlaments and passing stupid laws or selling the customers we service bloated shit that no one can operate with the sole purpose of producing more pointless work and billable hours?

Social contacts, knowledge and information are increasing in value, simple manual work beyond a certain threshold is decreasing in value, repetetive "knowledgework" is bascially disappearing entirely, unless required due to bad human planing (hence IT experts jobs are becoming increasingly tedious and boring).

That's all basically a Good thing(TM) I'd say. The problem is getting there will be a pain and yield the one or other new great depression along the way.

I personally rather would have a cheap all-in-one computer sitting in the corner of my room doing all the work for me my clients while I cook for friends, dance tango all night, sleep late and help the occasional customer update their content on a Joomla installation for 50$ and hour because they couldn't be bothered clickling their way through that luxurious web interface than build yet another Web CMS or hassling with other stuff that can be done orders of magnitudes cheaper by computers or service providers. Point in case:I recently set up the entire IT infrastructure for a client using only Google Drive, GMail and Squarespace in roughly 7 hours, 3 of which were taking photos and talking strategy and workflow. Even with potential downtime of the Intarweb and/or Google, that environment is orders of magnitude more productive than any MS PC, with all her shit automatically backed up and available from any PC around the world hooked to the internet. I don't expect her to get back to me until she wants to update her portfolio in a year or two and needs some handholding when clicking through squarespaces gallery options. Which I will gladly provide and ask 35 Euros per hour for.

With "knowledgeworkers" being put out of business by Google, Huawei and Co., no wonder they're working longer hours than the guy at the filling-station down the street. He's actually doing something usefull - until Teslas battery replacing robots come that is.

Our job as IT and software people is to make ourselves superflous. And we're getting good at it.

My 2 cents.

OTOH, power in the West is rotated between two different bands of crooks (or at least two factions of the same band of crooks).

I think if the Snowden affair has taught us anything, it's that real power in the west is not held by politicians but rather the executive branch (US) and civil service (UK). The bureaucrats appear to be able to do whatever they like, then repeatedly lie about it (USA) or simply refuse to turn up at all (UK) and politicians let them get away with it. What's more, the bureaucracy is now routinely blacklisting and even assassinating people based on no kind of formal process whatsoever, with no democratic oversight, and the people doing it are career government employees who are certainly not elected and in many cases their identities are themselves secret.

For background, in my former job I worked on one of the systems at Google that was compromised by GCHQ (they wrote wire sniffers to decode the login traffic). The root cause of this failure was the incorrect idea that western governments are "good" and the nasty Chinese/Russians/Iranians are "bad" thus internal encryption was only worth the cost when traffic transited wires controlled by "bad guys". But it turned out that they're all bad and the degree of badness appears limited only by their budget, so now Google all wire traffic all the time.

So please get out of this idea that the west is better than Russia. Democracy in the anglosphere has become so weak that lots of people simply refuse to vote at all, or are (at best) single issue voters for things like immigration. Anything national security related is uncontrollable by voting at this point.

Why? In the USA Facebook and Google+ are both run by people who could be described as "oligarchs" with strong ties to the White House.

By the way, if you believe this story is true then you should also believe that Putin's answer to Snowden was correct, given that it says:

Earlier this month, Durov claimed that Russia's intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB), had pressured him to hand over personal data on VK users involved in anti-government protests in Ukraine. Durov said he refused to do so, though he's gradually ceded control of the company in recent months and has long butted heads with government authorities. Experts have speculated that the Kremlin is looking to tighten its grip over VK and other social networks in the same way it controls print and TV media. Many Russians used VK to organize widespread anti-Putin demonstrations in 2011 and 2012, when thousands took to the streets to protest allegedly rigged elections

i.e. they are/were not able to simply access that data in the same way the USA and UK were slurping internal Google/Facebook db replication traffic right off the wire. In which case Putin's assertion that the FSB doesn't monitor "millions of users" might be correct, though of course the rationale given is highly suspect.

Really. You're going to hand-pump fuel for hundreds of thousands of trucks, trains, and aircraft feeding hundreds of millions of people? That will effectively shut down transportation, at least at the pace it's needed to feed cities full of people who keep nothing beyond their next couple of meals' worth of food in stores, let alone in their own kitchens.

Right. We only refrigerate meats, fruits, vegetables, dairy, bread, medicines, that sort of thing.

So you're saying that trucks and planes that have had ignition and control systems destroyed by an EMP can continue to operate? How does that work, exactly?

Which is what starts happening within short days of food shortages. Witness food/water drop-offs in New Orleans getting violently mobbed, with people throwing shots at helicopters.

And because the entire chain is rigged around JIT, the high level of efficiency is the only way it can work. It would take weeks or months to alter that, and that presumes that everything that goes into production behind the scenes can be ramped UP in the middle of a situation where logistics are compromised.

Only the ones you're cherry picking. Are "survivalist types" that bother to keep a couple weeks of food and water around more, or less clueless than their neighbors who do not?

Which is what - your lame way of wishing away the fact that it didn't happen? That thousands of people were wandering to places like the dome in NO without so much as a gallon of water for their kids? Is my "interesting narrative" interesting because it lines up with photos of lots full of school busses parked under water? What's your point?

We're not talking about a passing snow storm, here. We're talking about weeks of no electricity and lots damaged infrastructure. Your couple of days estimate is ridiculous on the face of it.

He doesn't have to go anywhere. All he had to do was not break the law in the first place.

And people still assert this is in spite of decades of the Flynn Effect.

Here's the thing: the Flynn effect seems to be a real thing, but the Flynn effect seems to have stopped in the past decade or two in developed countries. "Recent research suggests that the Flynn effect may have ended in at least a few developed nations, possibly allowing national differences in IQ scores[4] to diminish if the Flynn effect continues in nations with lower average national IQs." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

There's even been some reports that IQs have begun declining in developed countries. (I wouldn't put too much stock in this just yet, but it might be a good indicator that the Flynn Effect is a relic of the 20th century.)

Scores on cognitive tests have been very widely reported to have increased through the decades of the last century, a generational phenomenon termed the ‘Flynn Effect’since it was most comprehensively documented by James Flynn in the 1980's. There has, however, been very little evidence concerning any continuity of the effect specifically into the present century. We here report data from a population, namely young adult males in Denmark, showing that whereas there were modest increases between 1988 and 1998 in scores on a battery of four cognitive tests–these constituting a diminishing continuation of a trend documented back to the late 1950's–scores on all four tests declined between 1998 and 2003/2004. For two of the tests, levels fell to below those of 1988. Across all tests, the decrease in the 5/6 year period corresponds to approximately 1.5 IQ points, very close to the net gain between 1988 and 1998. The declines between 1998 and 2003/4 appeared amongst both men pursuing higher academic education and those not doing so.

http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe...

There's an important genetic component to intelligence, but everything we've see recently suggests fetal development, nutrition, and education make such tremendously larger difference that the "idiocricy effect" could at most be considered a momentary blip.

Or maybe we should treat the Flynn Effect as a momentary blip.

So, what's going on? One possibility is that, in poorer countries, a substantial portion of the population is failing to get sufficient nutrition and stimulation to their children. This would have the effect of creating a portion of the population which is cognitively harmed - thus reducing the average intelligence of the population as a whole. As you get better nutrition across the entire population, you see the average IQ increase - but only because the bottom segments of society are improving (not because everyone is improving).

This would explain why poorer countries are continuing to see Flynn-effect improvements, but developed countries saw it's effect in the mid-20th century but isn't seeing any improvements lately (because the poverty that was harming childrens' brain development isn't happening anymore in developed countries).

Whatever the case, it's time to stop relying on the "Flynn Effect" as some kind of prediction that our future will continue to be bright. Here's an analogy: in the 20th century, we saw the average height of Japanese people increase significantly. This was due to better nutrition (protein, in particular, during childhood is important). We can also say that height is a strongly heritable trait. At this point, I think we should just accept that the Flynn Effect has topped-out in developed countries.

I don't think questions about declining IQs based on genetics is a bad question to ask, and I don't think 'trust the flynn effect' should be treated like it's an adequate answer. I realize I could be opening a whole can of worms, though, with this comment, because nobody wants to see a return of early 20th century style eugenics (which, by the way, was not only used by the Nazis, but was embraced in places like the United States). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

.

Footnote regarding the heritability of height and IQ, which seem to be in the same ballpark, as far as heritability is concerned:

"Estimates in the academic research of the heritability of IQ have varied from below 0.5[2] to a high of 0.8 (where 1.0 indicates that monozygotic twins have no variance in IQ and 0 indicates that their IQs are completely uncorrelated)" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

"How much variation (difference between individuals) in height is attributable to genetic effects and how much to nutritional effects?" The short answer to this question is that about 60 to 80 percent of the difference in height between individuals is determined by genetic factors, whereas 20 to 40 percent can be attributed to environmental effects, mainly nutrition." http://www.scientificamerican....

You added your own addendum, but it's worth repeating: the idea that plate tectonics is important to life is not new.

The detailed model as to how and why plate tectonics got going on Earth and that also explains why it didn't get going on Venus is both new and interesting, which is pretty much the definition of "news for nerds, stuff that matters", eh?

Repeat after me: "Data is not the plural of anecdote."

Your post, while I'm sure is sincere and heartfelt, actually takes away from the data-driven policy debate that the US needs on health-care. Anecdotes like your wife's informal observations are anti-scientific, although they can be used to motivate science, which is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference.

Anecdotes feed into nice, neat, narrative accounts of human behaviours that rarely stand up to scientific scrutiny. We have long-since rejected them as the basis for the physical sciences.

Aristotle's physics was based on exactly the kind of informal observation and narrative reasoning you are deploying here. If you reject the utility of Aristotelian physics, you need to explain why you do not reject your own reasoning in this case. It's a serious question, and there is no doubt the discipline of science is really, really hard.

Most people can't practice the discipline of science: their anecdotal, narrative cloaking of reality is too powerful and comfortable, and stripping it away makes them feel vulnerable and uncomfortable. But for those few of us who can, in the end it's worth it, because it allows us to create solutions to problems that actually work, rather than pursuing policies that have failed before and will fail again.

The data with regard to health care shows that single-payer, even when rather badly run (as it is in Canada) is much more economically efficient and socially effective than anything remotely resembling the US system, either before or after Obamacare.