I agree with you in part, but stigmatised != outlawed. It isn't outlawed to drink. It is outlawed to drink and drive. Smoking is slowly outlawed - in most civilised countries it is illegal to smoke in public places, illegal to smoke in restaurants, cafes, bars, you name it. In some countries it is outlawed to drink in certain areas, but not a lot. Soon, it'll be illegal to smoke in one's own home or on its balcony/in the garden, which to me spells complete bollocks. And the worst part of this is that it's extended to electronic cigarettes extremely fast. Which is completely dumb.

Smoking makes people look down on you. At least it does in the last 15 years or so. Drinking - not so much. At all I'd say. I do make a difference between binge drinking, regular drinking and casual drinking, obviously. I also know for a fact that alcohol tolerances vary a lot and I also know that regular alcohol consumption sometimes leads to alcohol problems. You don't need to get drunk for that, not every time anyway. But then some people notice their hands are shaking without a drink and they're irritable without a drink and they can't go to sleep at night without a drink.

What I'm trying to say is that at the end of the day the sum of all vices is equal in all of us. Some prefer smoking, some prefer a drink, some both, others are serial daters, etc. But vices can do damage, damage that we've yet to quantify. It isn't easy, because studies are inherently flawed by the way they're conducted, low participants' numbers, etc. But overall, the media is blowing stuff out of proportion and instead of publishing neutral articles and let people draw some conclusions, they spoon feed sensational titles and conclusions that aren't always correct.

A balanced approach to life is key, so not being disgusted by somebody who smokes should be as common as not being disgusted by somebody who has a glass of scotch with their evening meal or (should they prefer) their tea time cigar. Bans against alcohol and tobacco aren't going to be efficient, what would be efficient is educating the consumers, the people - to think for themselves and be able to make an informed decision when deciding whether to have another drink, another cigarette or another jaegerbomb.

I meant driving under the "influence" of tobacco products. There is no cure for stupidity, unfortunately.

I wish the media would stop amplifying everybody's state of fear.

I wish people would do studies as to how many of those diseases are caused by tobacco itself and how many by the additives pumped into the cigarettes and commercial tobacco and how many by the sheer pollution of our environment.

I wish people would have the wisdom in differentiating between the above and stop fearing every single thing.

I would also wish alcohol would be just half as stigmatised as tobacco is, although I consider it a lot more dangerous and harmful. Nobody killed people by driving and smoking, for example.

I have used the Dell M6600 to death (literally, they had to change it for an M6700 towards the end of the second year), but I've ran renders and other intensive photo and video editing jobs on it and it took everything like a champ.

What they do best, though, is the next business day support thingie - you have a problem, you phone it in and the next business day a Dell engineer shows up with all the tools and replacement parts needed and the laptop is back on track.

I've given up on using the Precision, though, because I require less 3D rendering and more lighter equipment so I've switched to a Macbook Pro retina 15 and never looked back. I do, however, miss my old buddy, it took me out of some sticky situations simply by working properly under pressure.

But be advised, all workhorses break down, the difference is how the producers of the equipment deal with these situations. So far, I've been thoroughly unimpressed by the Apple Store where I took my Mac for poor performance issues, but the Dell dudes have always been 110% helpful and always came through.

I don't know which country you work in, but to be perfectly honest, it doesn't really matter, because as a doctor, regardless of country, I have encountered a lot of cocks on both sides - nurses and doctors _and_ I.T., especially since I know a lot about the latter and hates being looked down upon by I.T. who always knows best. Except they don't or we wouldn't have a mess of a computer system in the first place. I know you haven't programmed it, but for heaven's sake go with the flow if you see the person across the room from you actually knows what you're talking about, so exit your IT baby talk and use proper words.

I am 30 years old and I wear a watch. It is a mechanical, self winding one, with perpetual calendar. Tells the time and date and is imho the pinnacle of time keeping.

I also have an iPhone and a Nexus for my mobile phone needs. Recently I've acquired an old Nokia 6310i and I'm genuinely considering using it as my main and only phone, trading in the various (mostly useless) features of the smartphones for the 2 week battery life on one charge. It has bluetooth to connect to my car handsfree system, it has a metric ton of names capacity, it can make and receive calls and text messages, sincerely, do we really need more from a phone? I can text 10 times faster (literally) without looking at the keyboard or the screen of the 6310i whilst I need to give all my attention to typing on a touchscreen. Yes, we all need satnav and stuff, but that can be literally had with any recent pda or inexpensive smartphone.

I think information technology evolved a lot faster than battery tech. It did so back when Nokia produced the first colour screen phones who used the quite powerful batteries from back then in less than a couple of days. It's still nasty today. Imagine a phone like the 6310i featuring a 3000mAh battery instead of the measly 1100mAh the BPS-2 had. One could realistically use their phone for a month without charging it more than once.

And let's be honest, do we really need to be located and tracked everywhere with the purpose of "improving our lives" (read: get sold adds and stuff we don't really need) and lose countless hours browsing social media?

Obviously this is a question to which each and everyone will respond in their own way and it's good because each and everyone is entitled to their own opinion.

But consider we went from watches that were passed from generation to generation, sometimes even as rites of passage to something that looks cheap, feels cheap, does a lot of stuff but won't survive for more than 5 years (and I mean the watch here). I'll gladly pass my favourite watch to my son and hopefully he will see it as a memento, something that will remind him of me and the values I instilled in him for years to come. Now try to do that with an iWatch.

... as opposed to ripping your customers off, of course you're not a real business. Ballmer is the best person to attest to that. Not that Amazon doesn't ocasionally rip people off, then again they invest a lot in new stuff, which is quite nice.

I like it how people realise that human experimentation means that people are going to die only when it concerns aggressive diseases that make the headlines in popular press (be it online or offline). Let me shed some light on this - a lot of people died of heart disease whilst heart medication was tested simply because the studies needed to be "double-blind" to ensure statistics' accuracy - thus medication that otherwise would've saved their lives was withheld. You can dress it anyway you like, but dying from Ebola during trials is the same as dying of heart disease during a heart drug trial, it's only slower and more painful in the latter case. Death is death, no matter how you look at it. And let's not go into details of other diseases, I picked heart disease since it's one of the most common killers in nowadays' society. And this is what makes drug development in itself a noble endeavour, but trials are always walking a dark grey line. And this is coming from someone who is a doctor and realises that trials are mandatory since we can't (at least nowadays) quantify the efficiency of a drug.

I can't understand why this made /. since it shouldn't have made the (nonexistent) school physics paper. Oh, if you look through this little thing, there are things that automagically disappear. Doesn't matter if you look at the object from another angle and not through a lens, it isn't cloaked anymore. I think people need to understand that is not cloaking, it's just a very complicated explanation for a phenomena that's well known. So unless they have a lens that can surround an object from all sides that could cloak said object... then again it might just be easier to develop the theory behind just using energy waves, then inertia dampeners.

I'm using Windows 7 and I was affected by this. I can't fathom the depths of ineptitude required to release such an update, to be perfectly honest.

... that can be given that Elon Musk isn't one of the best humans out there? Let me elaborate a bit. In an age of chasing profits and cut-throat competition and where the most ruthless are getting rich, there are some people chasing another type of enrichment. And this comes after giving up on patents. I don't know this man, but it'd be an honour to shake his hand. I simply got nothing that could do justice. Nikola Tesla would indeed be proud.

I got nothing :\

You can't wish radioactive particles to "be gone". They do have a half-life, but for example the Ce-137 that's depicted in my link has a half-life of ~30 years. And it's spewed continuously into the ocean and spread around the world. The Bikini Atoll experiments resulted in sea-life in general being hundreds of times more radioactive than the norm because those elements, and guess where that radioactivity ended up - on people's tables. Saying it's safe to swim around the sunken ships is interesting to say the least. My point is that radioactive particles don't just "go away" and their generation can overwhelm the moderating capabilities (i.e. dilution) of the sea water. And it isn't reasonable to think that having radioactive material being spewed into the ocean like that is all-right.

...as I'm worrying right now about Fukushima. At least in Ukraine they aren't pumping sea water to cool it, which afterwards gets dumped in the ocean for further spread via currents - http://borderlessnewsandviews....

It isn't debatable that humankind lacks the enforcement agencies to deal with this kind of stuff. IT&C isn't a particular new field, but stuff happens a lot faster here and in the last 20 or so years we've witnessed terrible abuse and incompetence when dealing with IT-related stuff - and yes, this includes jailing/fining 10 year olds for one song downloaded from the internet. For example, in this particular case - and the case of leaving a text file with "dude, your security lacks" - a specialized agency would clearly investigate and conclude that the person was meaning well and didn't access any sensitive files, nor did he copy them - thus calming the hysterical and re-assuring people. Maybe issue a communique stating this, this and that and why securing your wi-fi network is really a good idea. Stuff that getting people arrested for nothing doesn't really solve, the Police should have better things to do than investigate why there's an anonymous text file in an unsecured location over a network. But then again, why invest in something that actually makes sense.