I once read an explanation of the dual slit experiment that made a hell of a lot of sense to me. Granted, I don't know much about this shit and so how much sense it makes to me isn't a terribly useful metric, but here it is:

Basically, IIRC, the experiment was set up so that they could allow single electrons through the slits at once and they observed that if they recorded their positions over time, they still obtained the diffraction pattern that was seen when many electrons were present, and so the electrons must be traveling as waves and interfering with themselves, but they assumed that because what they recorded on their film was individual points, that the electrons must also be points as well, and that the electrons were mysteriously turning into whatever they set their experiment up to observe.

Anyway, the page I was reading at the time proposed that the simple explanation of this is that electrons simply are waves, and that the result of a wave collapsing just happens to be a point despite the fact that everyone wants to imagine that it would be something far more mushy. Thus, it isn't that the particle is a wave or a point simultaneously, or that it chooses which to be depending on how it feels or what form we choose to set up our experiment to detect. It simply always is a wave, and when that wave collapses because it hits something, the end result of that collapse is that only a single point is affected.

No idea where the web site is unfortunately. I found it by searching for "physics bullshit" about ten years ago. It may have even been on Geocities.

In any event, I get the feeling that most advanced physics is bullshit, if not simply because it is, then because by the time it reaches an average person like me, it's been filtered through so many douches that are only interested in the magical properties of it that all factual knowledge has been mutilated. So I just end up with nonsense, like people telling me about something they call a "hypersphere" which they explain is like a hypercube, where each end of the cube is connected to another end, and so if you're inside the cube you can go on forever in any direction and not leave the cube. ...except it's a sphere so it doesn't have those pesky corners. Then I try to imagine this, and fail to come to any conclusion other than that the person talking to me has never tried to imagine how such a thing might fit together geometrically and simply made it up because they believe anything is possible and a sphere sounds much more elegant than a cube.

Too many people are willing to throw out logic when thinking about advanced physics. Yes, I get that it doesn't work the way we might assume, but there's a difference between "works like I think it works" and "is logical," the latter meaning something like "what I'm proposing isn't inconsistent with itself."

Like the twin paradox. People say it's solved because one twin accelerates and the other doesn't, but since when do the equations about space and time dilation give a fuck who accelerates and who doesn't? I only see variables for speed, none for acceleration. For that matter, what if we make them both accelerate in opposite directions? Which twin is older than which then? One must be older than the other because there is speed between them. I suppose there must be some truth to relativity if we can put a bunch of scientists on a plane with an atomic clock and have them calculate how far off it will be when it lands, but by the time that truth gets to me in the form of anything I might read about the twin paradox, it's a pile of nonsense.

This is kind of a new version of auto-run, one implemented by all operating systems.

The problem with auto-run is that a CD might tell the computer to do anything, not just what the user would like it to do.

The same problem exists with keyboards. They'll likely just send the keystrokes you type to the computer, much like the vast majority of CDs will only tell your computer to run the game that they contain that you want to play. However, a few will do something else, and the computer will happily do whatever that keyboard tells it to do. Even if it doesn't look like a keyboard, much like those flash drives that don't at all look like CD drives.

I think he meant "physical keyboard" when he said "virtual keyboard." In other words, if you don't already have an input device connected that you've approved, if the new device is a keyboard, the OS displays a code for you to type on that keyboard in order to verify that it is a real keyboard and not a phony device in a flash drive, and ignores other input from that device until the code is typed correctly. Similarly, for a mouse you could display some buttons on the screen and ask the user to click them, and ignore any other input from that device until it is able to complete that task successfully.

It would be annoying, but once the first device is verified, all of the rest can just be "If you wish to allow this second mouse to work, click this OK button with your first mouse." ...and the annoyance of that first device could be reduced by letting the user configure certain USB ports to be the mouse and keyboard ports, thus automatically trusting any mouse or keyboard attached to them and perhaps providing greater security by denying the use of those ports for any other type of device in case the user's keyboard or mouse become compromised.

Kind of the problem here is that USB is a "connect anything" port, but if you want to connect some storage you found in the parking lot, you really need a "connect storage" port. It'd be useful as hell if our operating systems made it possible to assign certain USB ports to certain functions. Even when not finding devices in a parking lot, it's quite convenient to be able to accept flash drives from people you should be able to trust without actually having to trust them. Of course, this working is dependent upon having an OS that isn't going to automatically use the device just because you attached it, whether "use" means "auto-run some executable files" or "accept typed commands from the device and execute them."

When you think about it, automatically accepting typed commands from anything that claims to be a keyboard is a lot like how auto-run would automatically run executables from anything claiming to be a CD. In both cases the OS is allowing a new device to tell it what to do, assuming that the user's decision to connect that device is sufficient indication that the user wants to do whatever that device is going to tell the computer to do.

Oh, that reminds me of another thing that pissed me off about AdWords: All their little success stories. They're quite obnoxious, and all have the sound of being made-up bullshit, much like your own post. Pretty much all of them amounted to different wordings of "it's totally possible to remain profitable while paying us $1 per click." I recall one story of a yoga studio in some particular city. It at least sounded plausible, but only because I can easily imagine just how over-priced such a thing might be as it likely only caters to the wealthy, and as such can afford $1 per click. ...but still, you have to imagine that a great many of the people who clicked such an ad didn't buy the services, be it because they ultimately decided to join a different gym, because they simply decided to do yoga at home, or because they were already a paying member and simply saw the ad as a quick way to return to the web site. So in all they probably paid Google $100 for each new customer, but if you're raping them on the order of $600/year, you can probably afford to do that. ...but still, there has to be a cheaper way to find your victims.

Clicks are an equally worthless metric.

A friend wasted some $75 on Google Adsense trying to expose a free game we've made to more potential players.

As it's similar (but not too much) to Minecraft Classic, we figured we'd just try to get Google to show an ad to the side of searches for stuff about Minecraft Classic, and some people might decide they're interested and check it out.

As Google presently showed no ads whatsoever for searches for "minecraft classic" and a few other search terms we wanted to display ads next to, we assumed this would cost us almost nothing, that they'd be willing to display them for a penny as we didn't have to out-bid anyone. That couldn't have been further from the truth. The minimum we could get any advertising for was $0.25/click, and none of that was on Google's search results.

Half of the clicks came from random web sites with the most horrible games (as in, there was sound and graphics (ripped off from other games), but no playability whatsoever) which displayed a dozen ads on each page with one of these games. Thus, those clicks were completely worthless to us as they were likely all coming from three year olds who simply didn't know what they were doing. Chances of a three year old downloading a game, installing it, and running it aren't that high, and we weren't interested in three year old players anyway.

The other half came from paid search result placement on altavista.com. These clicks were also completely worthless. Just think about it: You're searching for something related to a game you like, and you get sent to a web site about a completely different game, so what do you do? Do you say "yay, I'll download and play this instead" or do you just immediately click the back button and look for a search result that's related to what you searched for? We specifically wanted ads to the side of people's search results because then they'd know that what's over there isn't necessarily exactly what they're looking for and so they would only click on the ad if they were interested in finding a new game. Paid search placement may increase the number of clicks we get, but it ensures that those additional clicks are as close to worthless as can be imagined. Think about it again: How long would you stick with a search engine that does this? Only morons and five year olds use Altavista. Not our target audience, and if you're trying to sell a legitimate product or service, probably not your target audience either. On the other hand, if you're trying to scam people out of money, paid search result placement might be exactly what you're looking for.

After going through $20 on these worthless clicks, I looked up the statistics of how many of the IP addresses ultimately ended up playing the game. Normally about 50% of the IPs that visit the web site end up downloading our game and 30% (60% of those who download) connect to the game's servers, but not one of the people who clicked these links even downloaded the game.

This is the kind of bullshit you end up with when you consider that clicks are the only important thing: a system optimized to give you clicks at the expense of any sort of quality placement.

Anyway, it seems that if you want results displayed on google.com, you have to pay at least $1 per click. The adsense interface gives you all sorts of BS reasons about why your page won't display ads if you offer less money than that, but it's all designed to make you think there's some legitimate reason you can't figure out until you ultimately give up and just decide to give them more money and see if that fixes the problem. In particular, the supposed metric of the quality of your landing page is almost a random number generator -- just wait a while and it changes, as it's apparently chosen by monkeys. Eventually my friend paid the $1 per click, despite my objections that the whole deal was a huge scam, and as far as I know we got nothing for that either.

The one thing my friend did that did help was to list our game on www.indiedb.com as the people who showed up from there, while only about a dozen each time he's updated our information, were honestly interested in our game, downloaded it, tried it, said it was great, and never played again. (Our game's main issue is that it's just not that interesting.) That didn't cost us a penny and it was the best advertising of all. Needless to say, if our game ever does become interesting and we want a few more people to look at it, we won't bother with Google Adsense again, we'll just go to Indie DB.

Unfortunately I think the problem is entirely inside my nose. I don't know what's going on in there, but it's incredibly prone to being congested, especially when I'm lying down. It isn't allergies, as antihistamines (even those prescription nasal sprays) and decongestants have no effect, and it doesn't seem to be caused by anything, it's just always present. The only relief I've found is the breathe right nasal strips and a saline nasal spray, which are only a half-working solutions, but anymore I can barely sleep at all without them, especially the nasal strips. I keep several in my wallet just in case I want to take a nap while I'm not at home because napping without them is so hopeless that there's almost no point in even trying. If I can't breathe through my nose, I simply wake up each and every time I attempt to enter REM sleep, presumably because holding the airway to the mouth open requires muscle tone that disappears in REM sleep.

Can you tell me who is over-diagnosing it? I've seen two sleep specialists, and had three sleep studies between them, but can't get a diagnosis. At this point I'd be quite happy with a quack who has only made the diagnosis because he's an idiot since at least that would open up some treatment options.

I know I have it because it isn't that hard to diagnose. Just strap a mask to your face with a nice one centimeter hole for breathing and a pressure sensor to detect the minor changes in pressure under the mask as you're breathing. Combined with a home-built EEG, it's pretty simple to see what happens when I'm asleep: During every period of REM sleep, my airway becomes restricted, then I awaken, breathing returns to normal, then I fall right back into REM sleep, and it repeats. Can't get a diagnosis for it because, for some dumb-fuck reason, the criteria for diagnosis of sleep apnea has fuck-all to do with whether you sleep well and everything to do with whether you breathe well. Thus, as long as I keep waking up in order to continue to breathe, the doctors don't see a problem. SpO2 never drops more than 2 or 3 percentage points, they like to see it drop at least 4. Occasionally there's a period where respiration will stop long enough for their "it must be 10 seconds or it doesn't count" rule, but usually in response to that I wake up completely and can't fall asleep again for an hour. However, even if I did, its unlikely I'd meet their "five apneas per hour" criteria since they count total sleep time buy my problem only occurs during REM sleep.

For me, it's the same reason a nasal mask doesn't work: Air comes out my mouth. I looked this up on the internet, and apparently people either let their tongue touch the top of their mouth, or use some chin strap thing to keep their mouth shut. In any event, the impression I get is that it simply isn't a serious issue for other people. I'm not talking about a little bit of leakage. As soon as I fall asleep and stop consciously keeping the air from escaping my mouth, it all escapes from my mouth. ...but I don't know, maybe there's some undocumented solution to this problem that I don't know about since I can't seem to find a sleep doctor who isn't a quack and therefore insists that because I never remain asleep for a full ten seconds of not breathing before waking up that my sleep issues must be psychological. Who knows what they might tell me if they'd just decide they could help me.

I have a full face mask which is useless as all hell. I suspect a lot of the reason is that probably much of how the therapy is supposed to help is by forcing the tongue and lower jaw forward, but if you have the mask covering that area, there's no pressure differential, and indeed, the mask is just pushing the jaw further back.

Out of desperation I wasted some $70 on a cheap nasal "pillows" mask which, if I could name it, I'd call it a nasal rocks mask. Bits of slightly rubbery plastic with a few replaceable pieces of different sizes, but none of which address the fact that the center of my nose sticks down further than the sides. So once I have them in there and holding pressure, I have to carefully not move my head for fear of upsetting the delicate balance, and then I still get to wake up two hours later feeling like I've had a clothespin on that center part of my nose that sticks down. ...but by that point usually the duct tape preventing air from escaping my mouth is wearing off, so it's time to give up anyway.

Anyway, if a nasal mask could work for me, having one that is custom-designed from a 3D scan would likely solve my problems with the fit. I'm actually surprised people think this isn't a big deal. Noses vary in shape a lot, and so a nasal pillows mask is going to benefit from a 3D scan and 3D printing far more than other mask types would.

...or, it's a 50% effective treatment, and the 50% who it doesn't help just aren't willing to continue to use it for months like their doctor would like them to, despite their doctor's claim that "it's a highly effective treatment, it'll work if you just stick with it long enough." If you believe that, you should know that sending me $20 a month is a highly effective way to become rich. Those who fail to become rich simply fail because they don't stick with the plan.

...and if you're thinking "those doctors aren't that dumb" then you clearly haven't been to see one of them. Sleep researchers are some of the most retarded people on the planet. First of all, they discovered sleep apnea not because anyone noticed anyone wasn't breathing in their sleep, but rather, because they noticed spikes in blood pressure during sleep. Then, when studying the condition, they defined it around whether and for how long a person ceases to breathe, and to this day continue to largely ignore whether or not the person wakes up and the quality of their sleep. Sure, they look at those things, but they're not part of the diagnostic criteria. Now the doctors looking into UARS (upper airway restriction syndrome) are forced to be a little more intelligent about things since their patients never stop breathing, they just wake up, but unfortunately your local sleep doctor may have heard of UARS but doesn't really know anything about it and definitely doesn't test for it. So he'll just tell you that you slept only 50% of the night and woke up 50 times when you were sleeping for no reason whatsoever, then refer you to a psychologist.

...and the psychologist is just as retarded. Their whole profession started with some doctor who discovered a cure for a disease that cured only half of the patients. Did he think that his cure wasn't 100% effective? Did he think that maybe those other patients had a different disease with identical symptons? No, he thought it was just all in their heads. To this day, psychology continues to be where doctors send patients when they can't diagnose them, which makes the doctors feel good since, by blaming the patient's symptoms on their brain, they're able to achieve a 100% diagnosis rate, making them a perfect doctor.

Same thing with CPAP. Blame the patients for the failures and it's a 100% effective treatment.

The difference is like this:

With NAT, say you want to open port 22 so that you can SSH to a machine on your LAN from the internet. So you forward that port to that machine. Next month you find you need to do the same for a second machine on your LAN. Your choices are to either forward the port to the new machine, which means it is no longer forwarded to the old one, or to forward some other random port and tell whomever wants to access that machine "OK, it's open, but you have to use port 122 instead."

With a real firewall, the firewall by default blocks any connections to any ports on any of the machines on your LAN. However, you can tell it to allow any of those connections that you want to allow. So if you want to allow two machines on your LAN to accept SSH connections, you just tell the firewall to do so. There's no conflict because each of those machines is accessible via its own address.

Personally, rather than having a dedicated firewall, I find it much easier if each machine simply has its own firewall. It's pretty trivial to simply firewall all of IPv6 and leave IPv4 completely open, which is all that you have to do since the machines on your LAN don't have IPv4 addresses. Just because IPv6 exists doesn't mean you have to start using it on your LAN. Use those nice short IPv4 addresses to communicate with machines on your LAN and save the hassle of IPv6 for when you're communicating with machines on the internet.

The so-called "privacy extensions" address this, though seemingly not by design, but simply because the dumb fucks behind "privacy extensions" provided something useful. Basically, in Linux for example, the kernel will choose a new random IPv6 address every day, and keep old ones for seven days. It always uses the newest one for outgoing connections, but will accept incoming connections on any.

The supposed benefit of this is that you no longer have one static address and so you're harder to identify, but that's bullshit since anyone looking to identify you is only going to look at the first 64 bits of the address. Where it actually helps is that, because of the random addresses, someone from the outside can't count how many machines are on your internal network, or even know if they're talking to the same one as the day before. They know they're talking to a machine on your network, because the first 64 bits of the address are the same, but they knew that with IPv4 too.

Of course, it kind of ruins the fun of having a static IP address if the address keeps changing all of the fucking time, which is why I think the people behind "privacy extensions" are morons. The problem wasn't the static IP. People have had static IPs with IPv4 and no one cared before. The problem was that the IPv6 addresses were based on the interface's MAC address. If they'd simply made the machine choose a random address and stick with it, that would have been fine.

Anyway, the solution is DNS. I have a script that each machine runs that keeps the DNS server updated when it chooses a new IPv6 address. Since each address is good for seven days, it doesn't require a short expiration time on the DNS server. However, if you reboot the machine, it'll choose a new address immediately. So the script also has to detect this and manually assign the last few address it updated the DNS server with to the interface as well.

Also, you have to be sure to set up an ip6tables rule to block connections to the MAC-based address, since even with privacy extensions enabled the kernel will still accept packets to that address, which reveals the machine's presence to anyone on the outside who happens to find out its MAC address. Personally, I think it's a bug that the kernel accepts packets on the MAC-based address at all. That anyone thought that IP addresses should ever reveal any fact about the hardware is insane. Must have been someone working for the NSA I guess.

...and now that I see it has taken me six paragraphs to explain why IPv6 isn't so bad, you know what? Fuck it, stick with IPv4. Wait until IPv6 has been in wide use for a decade and maybe they'll have worked all of the bullshit out of it by then.

You should probably include yourself... I certainly include myself. None of us know as much as we think we know.

To really understand how useful such manipulation is, you have to think about it philosophically. How do you really know anything? You can do scientific experiments, and then calculate the statistical probability that bad luck gave you incorrect results (and so even then we still don't really know anything), but we don't have that luxury for most of what we know. Most of the time we're limited to simply accepting what other people tell us, and filtering it according to how plausible it sounds and how well it fits what we already know.

For example, you probably believe in the theory of relativity. Have you seen anything moving at near the speed of light, thus that you've witnessed that it doesn't work like Newtonian physics? Do you even know anyone who claims they have? Do you truly understand relativity, or do you just have a rough idea of how it works due to some examples of pool balls on a rubber sheet, and some explanations about time and space contraction that at least sound plausible? Do you understand those formulas and all of their implications, or do you just trust them because they're math? Do you even personally know anyone who truly understands relativity whom you know from experience wouldn't lie to you about it? ...or do you just trust intelligent scientists and so you're willing to believe anything they tell you? ...or, since you don't really know who is telling you about relativity, I guess you're actually trusting random book and web site publishers when they tell you that intelligent scientists have told them about relativity and it's 100% totally for real. Is it real? Probably, but I'll be damned if I'm going to say I know for sure.

This is where most people, even intelligent people, are at when it comes to most issues. You may be quite intelligent, but what do you really know about some random political issue other than what you've heard on random news shows, read on Wikipedia, and perhaps found via a random web search? You may think you've studied an issue, but there are people who've spent decades studying economics. Have you learned something in your hour of web searching that they didn't learn in that decade? ...and yet your vote counts as much as theirs, because we wouldn't want to be elitist.

We couldn't be elitist even if we wanted to. How do we know that those economics experts are really economics experts. They could just be some douche on Wikipedia linking to made-up articles written by made-up people with made-up credentials. Without some means to verify that our elites are actually elite, elitism can't work. So what do we do? Build up a web of trust, where we trust a friend who trusts one of his friends who trusts one of his friends who trusts that this economics expert is really an economics expert? Then wait for some clever person to find a way to subvert that?

The end result is that every issue has to be dumbed-down so that everyone can understand it, but in doing so, it's possible to make any side of an issue sound like the correct side of the issue simply by choosing what information to include and what information to exclude. The obvious solution to that is for the opposition to publish a rebuttal, explaining what was omitted in order to better inform the voters. ...but what if their rebuttal cannot be found because search results are being manipulated?

It may not be possible to fool everyone, but they only have to fool 50%, and since 50% are of below-average intelligence, a little manipulation of search results can go a long way.

They're actually hidden in the screw base. The screw is hollow and the top half of a giant capacitor fills it.

CFL bulbs have power supplies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Anyway, this whole argument is just ridiculous. Some people say the bulbs last seemingly forever, others say they go bad all the time, and each group thinks the other group is lying because, well, apparently no one anywhere can possibly have a different experience.

Here's one that'll fuck with you all: I've had both experiences.

When CFLs were new, I bought a four-pack of them, hoping to save myself from changing bulbs so often. They were expensive (long time ago) but they would pay for themselves if they lasted. A few months later, they were all dead. Being nothing but wasted money, I obviously went back to traditional bulbs.

Several years later, I noticed the Wal-Mart brand had a warranty, and knowing that Wal-Mart will accept returns for essentially any reason (it's the only reason I don't stop shopping there, as so much of what they sell is garbage) and so I probably could just return them to the store, I bought three 4-packs to change all of the bulbs in the house, kept the boxes and receipt, and wrote the installation date on the base of the bulb in sharpie marker. Over the next year I think two of them went bad. As for the rest, about once a year I find a bulb has gone bad at my mother's house, and upon removing it I find something like "2009-04-12" written on the base. I moved out a few years ago and so far all of the bulbs I bought for my own house are still working.

Some products are shit and some aren't. That's all there is to it.

I once bought two fixtures for the newer 48 inch fluorescent bulbs, which produce more light from less electricity, due to being designed like CFL bulbs and rectifying the AC to DC and boosting the frequency (and maybe voltage, I'm not sure) to get more light out of the bulb. They were nice while they lasted, but after a few months, one day I heard a loud pop from behind me, followed by a hissing sound, and turned around to see the fixture in a cloud of white smoke. Needless to say, I quit using the other fixture as well. I took them both apart and it was obvious that something on the circuit boards was becoming very hot due to a lot of discoloration, so the other one likely would have done the same thing eventually. I replaced them with the traditional less-efficient types that don't have capacitors that can explode.

Some years later I needed more fixtures, and after a friend taught me to avoid Chinese garbage by looking for "Made in the USA" on everything I buy (which, interestingly, doesn't seem to ever mean paying more for a product), I decided to give the more efficient fixtures another try, and bought six of the newer fixtures from Lowes, hoping that being made in the USA would mean they don't explode in a cloud of toxic smoke. After three years of heavy use, none of them have exploded, and they're all still using the first bulbs I ever put in them.

I bought this lead-free solder (which appears to be nothing special) a few years ago. It's 99.3% tin and 0.7% copper, no silver. I'm quite happy with it. When I first got it, I found it so much easier to work with than the lead solder I had been using that I quit using lead solder. I haven't seen any tin whiskers, but I only solder electronics as a hobby. I've only used about 100 grams of that 250 gram roll in the years I've had it.

Something else I've found helps a lot is to not stay to the right side of the lane. You might think that moving closer to the middle puts you closer to traffic that is passing you, but I've found that it makes people realize they have to use the other lane to pass you, and so most of them go entirely into the other lane, putting them farther away from you than they otherwise would have been. I usually stay between 1/3 and 1/2 way into the lane, close enough to the right that I could argue I was on the right if any police decided to give me any shit about it, but far enough into the lane that it's obvious to drivers that they can't squeeze themselves into the remaining space in the lane, which forces them to decide to use the other lane to pass.