Millennials know who Snowden is because they watch the Daily Show.

Except polling data from shortly after Snowden blew the cover disagrees. Millennials were least likely to be following news reports of government monitoring people's private communications. Heck, the very first sentence in TFS eliminates what you're saying as a factor: "according to KRC Research about 64 percent of Americans familiar with Snowden hold a negative opinion of him."

Here's the 2014 polling data on the same issue. Interestingly, the biggest shift from 2006-2014 was along Republican and Democrat lines. Republicans wildly supported government monitoring programs in 2006 while Democrats opposed it. But in 2013/2014 this was reversed. Kinda sad that people's stance on such an important issue appears to be based so much on whether or not "their guy" is in office.

(Incidentally, I'm in my 40s and think Snowden's revelations were important enough to warrant a pardon. I'm uncomfortable at times with how much info he has revealed about our capabilities, but assign blame for that mostly on the people who decided to mis-use those capabilities to monitor the population at large. We're supposed to be the country of innocent until proven guilty, where the government keeps its nose out of what we're doing until it suspects we're doing something illegal.)

The "young people don't vote!" thing is a red herring.

Statistics would disagree. It's always been this way - younger people tend to care less about voting. My theory is at that age you're still so engrossed with exploring your environment, that you put little thought into shaping your environment.

For the pre-Internet generation (probably most of the CEOs at these ad companies), Adblock is equivalent to switching channels or muting the TV when a commercial comes on. It's my house, my TV, I can change channels or mute it if I want.

If the commercial looks or sounds interesting, I'll actually watch it. Except the web advertising companies burned that bridge back in the 1990s when they realized the web gave them a lot more control over how their ads were presented, and they got into a contest with each other to see how annoying they could make their ads to force people to view them. That resulted in people developing tools which blocked all ads. If they'd kept their ads low-key like they are in most magazines, I probably wouldn't be running an ad blocker today.

There's another reason. There are a lot more hybrid, diesel, and efficient trucks and SUVs becoming available. Most Americans' sense of the fuel efficiency of vehicles is distorted because it's measured in MPG. MPG is actually the inverse of fuel economy. Consequently the amount of fuel saved by vehicles like the Prius is exaggerated.

Here are the EPA figures for a 2004 3L 4WD Toyota Highlander, a 2015 3L 4WD Toyota Highlander Hybrid, and a 2015 Prius. Say you'd previously owned the 2004 Highlander and were looking to replace it. If you looked only at MPG, you'd think the Prius saves you a lot more gas than the Highlander Hybrid. The Prius gets 31 more MPG while the Highlander Hybrid only gets 9 more MPG.

But MPG is the inverse of fuel economy. Scroll down to "Annual Fuel Cost". The 2004 Highlander is estimated to cost $1900/yr in fuel. The Highlander Hybrid $1300/yr. The Prius $700/yr. In other words, switching to the Highlander Hybrid saves you $600/yr. Switching to the Prius saves you $1200/yr. The Highlander Hybrid gives you 50% the fuel savings of a Prius despite "only" getting a 9 MPG improvement vs 31 MPG improvement. How can this be? Because MPG is the inverse of fuel economy. Every time you double MPG, you save half the fuel you did in the previous doubling.

A lot of people laughed when hybrid trucks and SUVs first came out. If you want to save gas with a hybrid, why are you buying a big truck instead of an econobox like the Prius? But they were being deceived by MPG being the inverse of fuel consumption. If we as a country want to reduce fuel consumption, it's actually the low MPG vehicles like trucks and SUVs whose fuel economy you want to improve first by hybrid-izing them. They're the ones burning a disproportionately large amount of fuel, so improving their mileage first will save more fuel. Economy cars already burn so little fuel that making them a hybrid gets you little improvement. e.g. Dropping a hybrid in a 35 MPG economy car to get 50 MPG only saves you $350/yr by EPA estimates. While dropping the hybrid in a 19 MPG SUV to get 28 MPG saves you $600/yr. In other words, each SUV-buyer you can convince to buy a hybrid SUV instead saves nearly twice as much fuel as each environmentalist you convince to switch from their already-efficient car to a Prius.

If we really want to save gas, we should be concentrating on ways to improve the mileage of pickup trucks, SUVs, minivans, and tractor trailers (actually most of their cargo should be shifted to trains, but that's another argument). The rest of the world uses liters/100 km to avoid this misconception about fuel economy.

The SUV loophole was that 'light sport utility vehicles' were exempt from the fleet average calculation, so the manufacturers sold the hell out of them.

SUVs aren't exempt. They're classified as light trucks by CAFE, instead of as cars. The 2011 CAFE standard was 24.1 MPG for light trucks, 30.2 MPG for cars. (Which if you search for another post I'm about to make, isn't as big a difference as you'd think.)

If you eliminated SUVs, most people who really want SUVs would probably just buy minivans or pickup trucks. They're classified as light trucks too. And there'd be no overall reduction in fuel consumption despite your social engineering. If people want to buy a big car that gets crappy gas mileage, they're going to figure out a way to buy one.

Slashdot has covered a bunch of new PCI Express SSDs over the past month, and for good reason. The latest crop offers much higher sequential and random I/O rates than predecessors based on old-school Serial ATA interfaces.

That's just it. Their speeds are not "much higher." They're only slightly faster. The speed increase is mostly an illusion created by measuring these things in MB/s. Our perception of disk speed is not MB/s, which is what you'd want to use if you only had x seconds of computing time and wanted to know how many MB of data you could read.

Our perception of disk speed is wait time, or sec/MB. If I have y MB of data I need read, how many seconds will it take? This is the inverse of MB/s. Consequently, the bigger MB/s figures actually represent progressively smaller reductions in wait times. I posted the explanation a few months ago, the same one I post to multiple tech sites. And oddly enough Slashdot was the only site where it was ridiculed.

If you measure these disks in terms of wait time to read 1 GB, and define the change in wait time from a 100 MB/s HDD to a 2 GB/s NVMe SSD as 100%, then:

A 100 MB/s HDD has a 10 sec wait time.
A 250 MB/s SATA2 SSD gives you 63% of the reduction in wait time (6 sec).
A 500 MB/s SATA3 SSD gives you 84% of the reduction in wait time (8 sec).
A 1 GB/s PCIe SSD gives you 95% of the reduction in wait time (9 sec).
The 2 GB/s NVMe SSD gives you 100% of the reduction in wait time (9.5 sec).

Or put another way:

The first 150 MB/s speedup results in a 6 sec reduction in wait time.
The next 250 MB/s speedup results in an extra 2 sec reduction in wait time.
The next 500 MB/s speedup results in an extra 1 sec reduction in wait time.
The next 1000 MB/s speedup results in an extra 0.5 sec reduction in wait time.

Each doubling of MB/s results in half the reduction in wait time of the previous step. Manufacturers love waving around huge MB/s figures, but the bigger those numbers get the less difference it makes in terms of wait times.

(The same problem crops up with car gas mileage. MPG is the inverse of fuel consumption. So those high MPG vehicles like the Prius actually make very little difference despite the impressively large MPG figures. Most of the rest of the world measures fuel economy in liters/100 km for this reason. If we weren't so misguidedly obsessed with achieving high MPG, we'd be correctly attempting to reduce fuel consumption by making changes where it matters the most - by first improving the efficiency of low-MPG vehicles like trucks and SUVs even though this results in tiny improvements in MPG.)

Yeah $900,000 per unit is pretty steep nationally, but it's average for the area.

No it's not. In areas where real estate is priced sky-high, most of the cost is for the land. Since he already owns the land, it sounds like the $900,000 per residence is purely construction costs, which is an insanely huge amount. Location doesn't matter as much for construction costs since you can just ship in materials and labor if they're overpriced in an area. A typical home costs about $100/sqft to build. So $900k per unit is enough to build a 9000 sqft mansion.

Unless he's planning to use this as a tax deduction and the $200 million cost of the "project" includes estimated value of the land, the numbers just don't add up for low-income housing.

But, the macho men and the big kids were still crushing their empty cans to demonstrate how many muscles they had between their ears.

The can-crushing scene from Jaws was actually a fairly significant event in the relationship between Quint and Hooper when the movie came out (only strong men could crush steel beer cans with one hand, and Hooper is showing he's not intimidated by Quint's physical strength). To modern audiences who've lived with nothing but aluminum cans, it seems pointless and almost comical.

Most of the major genocides aside from the Holocaust happened in states where the media was and still is tightly controlled by the state. The Holodomor under Stalin (U.S.S.R.), the Killing Fields under the Pol Pot (Cambodia), and the Cultural Revolution under Mao (mainland China) all happened under Communist regimes which had no interest in publicizing the deaths then, and still resist efforts to shed light on them today.

The well-publicized nature of the Holocaust is nothing more than a consequence of Democracy and the concept of the free press being the winner in that particular conflict. Had the Nazis won, it would've been buried in history as well.

But germans on average just use a tenth of the power an american uses, so bottom line we pay less than you.

The average German uses a bit more than half the electricity of the average American. So your power bill is on average roughly 1.5x that of an American. That cost may not be entirely in your electricity bill. It could be hidden in the cost of goods which require electricity to produce.

Also note that as a percentage, Germany's energy production (not just electricity generated) is skewed more towards oil than the U.S (roughly 1/3 vs 1/4). That energy for home heating has to come from somewhere. In raw joules (or kWh), it's still less than the average American though. Germans are notoriously efficient in their energy use (nearly 1/4th that of the typical American - this includes industrial use, not just residential). Living in a relatively cold climate with few natural energy resources and high energy prices forces you to be efficient. The Japanese are in a similar position and use less than half the energy per capita of Germans.

The carrier itself was clearly "hot" when it went down and and it was packed full of fresh fission products and other radiological waste at the time it sank. The Independence was scuttled in what is now the Gulf of the Farallones sanctuary, a haven for wildlife, from white sharks to elephant seals and whales.

Better tell the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to flee their homes. Those locations were also exposed to fresh fission products and other radiological waste just like this carrier.

The referenced source from the wiki lists all the countries by their forested area (in thousand hectares), and in a handy spreadsheet no less. Add in the square km of the countries and you can calculate the percentages:

Country - percent - forested - total
Canada - 31.1% - 3,101,340 - 9,984,670
United States - 33.1% - 3,030,890 - 9,147,593
EU - 36.0% - 1,577,190 - 4,381,376

Austria - 46.1% - 38,620 - 83,855
Belgium - 21.8% - 6,670 - 30,528
Bulgaria - 32.7% - 36,250 - 110,994
Croatia - 37.7% - 21,350 - 56,594
Cyprus - 18.8% - 1,740 - 9,251
Czech Rep - 33.6% - 26,480 - 78,866
Denmark - 11.6% - 5,000 - 43,075
Estonia - 50.5% - 22,840 - 45,227
Finland - 66.5% - 225,000 - 338,424
France - 23.0% - 155,540 - 674,843
Germany - 31.0% - 110,760 - 357,021
Greece - 28.4% - 37,520 - 131,990
Hungary - 21.2% - 19,760 - 93,030
Ireland - 9.5% - 6,690 - 70,273
Italy - 33.1% - 99,790 - 301,338
Latvia - 45.5% - 29,410 - 64,589
Lithuania - 32.2% - 20,990 - 65,200 -
Luxembourg - 33.6% - 870 - 2,586
Malta - 0% - 0 - 316
Netherlands - 8.8% - 3,650 - 41,543
Poland - 29.4% - 91,920 - 312,685
Portugal - 40.9% - 37,830 - 92,390
Romania - 26.7% - 63,700 - 238,391
Slovakia - 39.3% - 19,290 - 49,035
Slovenia - 62.3% - 12,640 - 20,273
Spain - 35.5% - 179,150 - 504,030
Sweden - 61.2% - 275,280 - 449,964
United Kingdom - 11.7% - 28,450 - 243,610

The EU's percentage is skewed up by the Scandinavian, Baltic, and Slovakian countries. Though Germany, Spain, Portugul, Italy, and Austria are right around the EU average. Anyway, can we just drop this stupid penis measuring contest? It's close enough to call it a tie.

microsoft is eternal evil , it always does wrong, and google is eternal good, it can never do wrong

this might have made sense 15 years ago, but google has immense power ripe for abuse

While I agree Google has immense power ripe for abuse, they are nothing like Microsoft was. If Microsoft in the 1990s were behaving like Google is today:

• They would've released Windows as open source. If you wanted to roll your own version of Windows that competed with Microsoft, you could. The only restriction would've been that Office would only run on Microsoft's version of Windows.
• Windows would be free. So would Office. They'd make money by charging Windows program developers, and selling information to marketers about how Windows and Office were being used.
• When you first tried to run a web browser, it would list every web browser in existence in order of popularity for you to choose. Internet Explorer may or may not have been placed near the top of that list regardless of its true popularity.
• Same for every Windows program made by Microsoft. Office, Publisher, etc.
• If you had your data in the format for Microsoft programs, and decided to switch to a competitor, you could use the Microsoft-provided tools to convert your data into a generic format which could easily be imported into the 3rd party app.
• They would've made subtle changes to Windows to make sure DR-DOS couldn't run it, like Google is making it hard for Bing to index YouTube. Oh wait, Microsoft did do that.
• When an internal audit revealed that they had accidentally collected user information beyond what their user agreement allowed, they would've reported themselves to the regulatory agencies for the privaacy violation.

Maybe you weren't using computers back when Microsoft was pulling their shenanigans in the 1990s. Those of us who were see Google as good because despite a few problems here and there, they've been behaving a helluva lot better than just about any predecessor who was in similar positions of market power.

Stiction and hysteresis are well-known terms in engineering and physics. I think that's part of the allure of Musk. He's not some MBA CEO who has no clue about the minutia of what his company does. He's a scientist/engineer at heart who could with a little training reasonably step in at any grunt-level position at his companies.

If you post something and later find out it's wrong, the responsible thing to do is to either correct it, or retract it. AFAIK Twitter does not allow you to edit a tweet, so the only responsible choice is to delete it. Leaving it up just allows the wrong info to continue spreading with the air of authority.