Do you have any idea how much carbon I've sequestered in fat? Get off my roly poly back.

"Nontechnical people -- for example marketers or small business owners -- increasingly get the feeling they should know more about technology. And they're right. If you can throw up a small website or do some real number-crunching, chances are those skills will help you feed your family. But how should they get started?"

Every application will have tools that are more or less appropriate for the task at hand. Even just the two you listed -- throwing up a small web site and doing serious number crunching, are very different tasks, and there is no one tool that would be ideal for both (for some definitions of 'serious' number crunching).

It sounds like you're focusing on people who have no desire to become techies down the road -- people who don't want to invest a lot of time in learning the nuances of different programming tools. The most widely applicable tool available right now is probably Java, but I wouldn't recommend it to people who aren't interested in software development for its own sake.

Marketers and small business owners would be best served by farming out things like web site development -- good web development requires a very broad skill set that is rarely found in any one person anyway. If you want to learn some basic programming to automate repetitive administrative tasks like manipulating Excel spreadsheets on Windows systems, learn C# (...I feel so dirty). Visual Basic would be a good choice too.

Personally, I'm a Perl guy. I LOVE Perl. I deal with lots of text files, often on non-Windows machines. Perl is easy to learn, it can run on lots of different operating systems, and it has an AMAZING collection of modules that let it do just about anything. But... I can't really recommend it to someone who's probably never going to need to interface with anything but Microsoft applications on Microsoft operating systems.

Huh, I just found more detailed specs for the 2.4v single cell and the 24v pack, and both of those list max charge rates at 50A. So the 8.4A max charge rate for the 12v pack must have something to do with the pack itself, rather than the cells. Cheap-o BMS, maybe?

Am I the only one who noticed that at the max charge rate listed in the specs (8.4A), it's probably gonna take more like 20 minutes to charge a 48Wh battery to 90%?

• Nominal Voltage 12V
• Nominal Capacity 4.0Ah
• Max. Charging Current 8.4A
• Max. Discharging Current 8.0A (continuous) 25A (within0.3s)
• Size Approx. 145 x 109 x 48mm
• Weight Approx. 1.0kg

He went on to say that only 0.55% of all iPhone 4 users have called in to complain about reception problems

Yet there's a suspiciously high number of calls on that line where the caller mumbles something incomprehensible and then hangs up.

Maybe even to the dark side of the moon.

Were these European swallows, or African swallows?

Maybe I am reading too much into it, but my experience show that this would be typical double meaning often used by covert operations.

That and the fact that they chose MD5 (which seems odd... unless they're trying for a collision) would seem to suggest that there might be another, possibly more naturally worded, phrase with the same MD5 sum. This phrase could have been carefully crafted as 'cover.'

for example, what do they mean when they say that the only macroscopic force is electromagnetic? In fact, all the forces you do experience in everyday life actually are electromagnetic in nature...

With the exception of gravity, of course

Perhaps they could stop assuming that different viewpoints imply "lower standards".

So far all I see are strawman arguments. Maybe you could be a little more specific?

Many scientists need to realize that their goals, ideals, and ethical standards may not be universal.

Is that insightful? I think most scientists are acutely aware that their perspectives are not universal. I don't know what you expect them to do about it. Lower their standards?

I could be wrong about this, but I think the fast neutrons generated by Farnsworth-type devices will go right through anything this guy is likely to have in his apartment. They won't hang around long enough to create significant amounts of heavy (i.e. radioactive) isotopes,

I would agree with this part.

and the flux won't be intense enough to do any damage while the machine is turned on.

This part might be an unwarranted assumption. Neutron radiation can cause adverse biological effects at much lower levels than alpha or beta radiation.

I don't see the vendor lock in, care to clue me in?

That wasn't an actual person you were responding to, it was one of the mindless "commercial software BAAAD" bots that inhabits Slashdot.

"What I'd do if I had 2.5 million dollars"
-Lawrence, Office Space

I remember the ones that start with a BASIC one-liner that loaded the rest of the code into RAM.

10 FOR A = 828 TO 2249 : READ B : POKE A, B : NEXT
20 DATA 32, 155, 220, 165, 100, 133, 252, 165
30 DATA 101, 133, 251, 160, 0, 177, 251, 168

And I remember making a typo at about line 345. And line 502... then after hours of mind-numbing data entry and error hunting, the sweet reward of playing... Snake.

This taught me attention to detail, stubbornness, and being satisfied with low expectations, all of which have served me well in the field of system administration.