ya know I loved it when they first invented this whole new bright LED technology back 5 or so years ago... I was so impressed by the street lights, and anything else that used them - I could easily tell the new LEDs from the old ones. But when my old clock radio died, i went to wal mart and bought a cheapo 20 buck LED lit digital alarm clock with cool looking blue light. But the fucking thing is Soooo bright that at night it's like having the sun in my bedroom with me. I was thinking about sticking some semi transparent plastic over it, but I couldn't really find anything suitable. so, i just throw clothes on top of it and it becomes useless unless i care enough about the time to dig it up.

About explanation 2... I thought I remember reading sometime in the past that something like 10% of human beings are immune to HIV. Is that real - or not? If it's real, than that gives another boost to explanation 2...

I had bought a digital video camera long ago when they first started recording digitally. I felt compelled to rip the videos to hard drive for "permanent storage"... But sooner or later I realized that the best way to store this stuff for long term chance of success is actually back on the tapes. I suggest you now take your digitized videos, borrow a camera (if you don't have one) from a buddy that has a camera that stores miniDV, and store those videos on tape. Then put em in the closet - so if your hard drives ever fail (which they will some day), you'll have the tapes with which to recover the memories from the good 'old days. I had thought about going to DVD, bluray, or whatever, but when you think about it - it's really cold storage - the best device suited to the task is tape.

I was trying to do some robotics... I could not find ANYTHING that would help me put together the mechanical aspect of the whole thing. As far as I got was buying the (I think it was 10 bucks) USB board from radio shack that you solder together. It lets you control pretty much anything from simple PC software. Actually, even with an EE degree (which I haven't used in 23 years), there was a bit of a learning curve with wiring up the output pins to relays in order to get anything to actually work, but when it did - man was that a blast (for a geek type). I took the kids' old battery controlled car that they used to drive around the driveway in and turned it into a robot... well, OK, it could only go forward and backwards at full speed - but it was cool!

Just to back up my credentials here - I wrote VirtuoCD, an early CDROM emulator, a whole suite of WDM drivers for a PCI device with NDIS devices hanging off of the WDM bus, the Oracle VMAPI - a driver while lets you communicate to applications in a guest operating system from the host OS. Various NDIS miniports and intermediate driver (WinPCap type stuff), StorPort Virtual miniports that represent file backed storage that look like disks but are really just files on a disk. ANd a few other things. Not bragging, just saying that I know kernel development. And you know what? I could be off, and you could be right. I'll admit. There could be no case that you could be assured that it'd be safe enough to continue the OS long enough to save files. I still say you could find your unsaved work somewhere in the memory image. I know that Microsoft would never release that kind of power because 99% of the users would fuck up their systems worse, but I still think that I could use that kind of power to mitigate the damage that is inherent when you BSoD and are forced to power cycle.

I don't know where you're going with that. Not saying it's not possible. What if - instead of the bsod, you were brought to the equivalent of a WinDBG output of the crash? You could diagnose the cause of the crash while everything was halted, figure out what's in a corrupted state and what isn't - unload modules, stop threads, change memory values, do whatever you want to do. Then if you felt comfortable enough, you could allow the operating system to "resume". Look, I'm not saying that this is an end-user thing to do, and lots of time you'd probably be better off letting the machine crash. But if I had that kind of power in the halted state - I could even find my unsaved documents in memory and store them in some way without even allowing the OS to continue. And I wouldn't just have the backtrace available to me, I'd have the entire contents of memory such that I could !process 0 7 and look at every thread in the system. Hey, I could be wrong - since this kind of power doesn't exist - but like I said, I have been able to reanimate a crashed dev studio by messing around while it was in it's halted state. I'd think it'd be possible to do the same in the kernel in certain cases. Are you saying with certainty that there is never a case where this is possible? it is true though, that lots of corruption could have happened before some trap actually caught the bad state and KeBugChecked. Maybe you're right. I just don't think that you are. With all due respect.

No. You'd be foolish to continue if you knew that the corruption was within the storage stack. But as an advanced user, I can assure you that there would be times that I would know it would be safe to proceed, simply because of what caused the BSoD. It's not always memory corruption. Back when MS first came out with intellisense for Visual Studio, I'd (about once a day) get a crash in dev studio that would usually come at a time that I was going to lose unsaved code. One time, I decided to hit 'cancel' - the option to debug the crashing application. Another instance of dev studio opened and I saw that it was the intellisense thread that was crashing. I'd suspend that thread and hit F5, then save my work. This saved me a lot of headache. I'm fully aware that there are significant differences in usermode crashes and kernel crashes. I'm simply saying, that as an experienced kernel developer, I personally could (upon occasion) benefit from the ability to suspend and continue. If that thread in the usb stack tried to write to NULL or 0x70000000, I'm pretty sure that it's not writing on my storage stack.

I've done a lot of work in windows kernel development, and some linux kernel too. I understand that the system is in a bad state when the BSoD happens, but I've always thought that instead of the only option being to 'reboot' and lose what you're working on, things should be a little more choice based. Instead of just the BSoD, perhaps we could be given some information about the thread, call stack and call that initiated the KeBugCheck - then we could decide if we wanted to risk trying to go back in and save our work. Like - if the bugcheck occurs in the USB stack somewhere, maybe I'd elect to just suspend that thread and device stack, go back in and see if I could save my work. I'm tempted to think, "What's worse than a forced immediate reboot" - though I know that if some thread starts scribbling on memory in an out of control fashion that - yes - things could get a lot worse. But maybe not if that thread were immediately suspended.

So, artists who create music get paid because they created something... But engineers who create the software don't deserve anything because software shouldn't have a monetary value associated with it? With all due respect, I still don't get it.

I actually have always thought that vehicles should all have a protocol such that they talk to other vehicles within a certain range - so I'm all for this technology as long as it isn't server based. That is, i'll be pissed if all the cars communicate to some server that is a go-between. It should work as a direct link to whatever the signal range is, and then i have no privacy concerns, as anyone around you already knows that you're there.

If I were going to write a universe simulator, It would probably start at the big bang - then as the universe spread out, it would only do real calculations on certain "frames" of the universe that mattered. The real way to test that would be to send an object outside the frame... The simulation would GPF I suppose.

Why is this groundbreaking - when the government can just force the cell phone company to hand over this information at will? And it's free that way. I found it amusing during the Aaron Hernandez case, when they came up with detailed information of his whereabouts - to the second - after the fact that he was suspected of murdering someone.

I'm surprised no one said it... I think they've just run out of Myths! A lot of the new shows - it really seems like they're reaching. And as other people did mention, they have about 15 minutes of content in an hour of show with the commercial->recap->brief content->preview->commercial->repeat format. Yeah, I just really don't think they can make another season of shows without halving the number of myths that they have to come up with..

Generally, for a given operating system you try to make your software so that it functions in similar ways to other software. That way, in order to use an app a lot of the fundamental things are trivial. Whenever I've written apps in Windows, for any particular function, I look at how another app accomplished the same task and made mine work like that. A user should be able to perform basic functions of an application without going to the documentation.

If they already have it archived, doesn't that make them guilty of possession of child porn?