You beat me.

I was about to post:

All the music I listen to is binary files. How else would I keep them on digital storage?

Of course, I don't listen to them by having a voice read the ones and zeroes, but interpreted to analog via the proper codec.

Still, I don't know that listening to a computer voice reading source code is much more useful or pleasant than a computer voice repeating ones and zeroes.

I'm sorry, who?

I second that. I've got an internet connection that usually runs about 15 megabits with a 30 millisecond ping - plenty of speed to stream a youtube video. I can play two 1080p Quicktime videos simultaneously on my two monitors without any apparent frame dropping.

But a tiny 320 x 240 flash video, fully buffered, still drops frames whenever there's a lot of motion. It floors one processor core to 100% and then gets choppy. This is absurd - in 1991 my Macintosh IIsi with a 20mhz 68030 could play 320 x 240 quicktime videos off my 1x external CD-ROM drive without dropping frames. The idea that my 2 core 2GHZ machine is brought to its knees and still can't handle a tiny flash video makes Microsoft look good at optimizing Word. Did Intel pay off Adobe to create a new reason for people to need faster processors, or what?

If the internet is secularizing the Finnish, it isn't through this website, except for by some bureaucratic technical definition. This website is allowing those who had already been secular to easily make an official declaration of such, but it's not like devoted god-fearing true believers are finding this site and saying "you know, this internet form makes a good point. I guess since it's easy to unsubscribe from the church now, I don't believe in God anymore."

Previous stories along these lines have shown things like that most bank employees surveyed would trade their passwords to secure financial systems for a twinky or a chance to win an iPhone, serious idiocy. But almost nothing this showed is actually a big deal. I end up in the "stupid" category on almost every question according to him, and I don't for a minute believe it's a security problem.

Shared passwords?
Absolutely, I share passwords to things with my girlfriend all the time. If she needs to order from a company I usually order from and doesn't want to set up a new account, if she needs to log into the home router, use a forum I'm a member of... whatever. Am I concerned at all about this? No. She lives in my home, she has continuous access to all my stuff, my wallett, my checkbook. Of course we both know the logons to all of each other's computers. If I didn't trust her, having my password to crutchfield.com is the least of my worries.

Same password for multiple sites?
You've got to be kidding me. I use a password management program, and it says I have 199 password files right now. You think I'm going to use unique, strong passwords for every forum I want to post in? If someone gets my password and goes around trying to guess every site I have an account at and what my common username/password combos are, what are they going to do, post a bunch of stuff that makes me sound like a jerk or something? Whole ton of work, practically no payoff.

Special characters?
Again, you do not need special characters for a strong password. A password does not need to get very complex before the chances of anyone guessing it or running an attack against it become almost nil. Unless you're a billionaire or it's a nuclear launch code or something, if you have a 10-digit password that's not susceptible to dictionary attack or really common guessing (kids birthdays or such), no one's going to "guess" it anyway. I do things like pick two dictionary words I can remember and intersperse the characters, and then intersperse a number I can remember with extra characters to match the longer word. For example, say you go to the random word generator and get "coloring" and "rash." Then throw in a number you remember, like the age you were when you first rode a ten-speed, in my case, 11. password:
croalsohr1i1ng
Incidentally, that's not actually what I do, my point is, a simply system like that will allow you to generate a bunch of somewhat memorable (if you can remember the root words and system) passwords that are arbitrarily strong for the average user. And if you never tell anyone what system you actually do use, the chances of anyone ever "guessing" a single password are so close to nil...

Using a significant date or pet's name?
Well, using one alone is not so great, but again, if it's a discussion forum where someone would have to know you use it to begin with, then guess both a username and password combination, and then the result is they get... nothing of value, then I still don't see it as a big deal. And even if you use the most obvious and important signifiers to plug into a "create a password" system like the above, but that you generate yourself, unless you're the president of a country, it's probably more secure than anyone would ever break.

sharing a password in a text message?
Again, he's not distinguishing between the importance of passwords. Doing that with a bank account password? Insane. Doing that with your password to break.com? Who cares?

password over public WiFi?
Same as above. Plus, what is the specific danger here? I usually assume anything online could be intercepted, and that that's what the encryption on secure sitesis for. I guess public wifi is especially vulnerable to man in the middle attacks? I wouldn't use public wifi for banking, but again, lots of things use passwords. I've certainly used Slashdot over public wifi, and have yet to have my account stolen. How much does a hacked Slashdot account go for on the black market?

check for a secure connection when accessing sensitive information when using unfamiliar computers?
OK, that's a real problem.

never change their banking password?
What's the theory on that, anyway? That between the time your password gets compromised and the time they exploit it, that you'll happen to change it? How exactly does changing your password improve security?

writing down passwords and hiding them somewhere like a desk drawer?
If the enemy has physical access to your home, computer, filing cabinets - honestly, you're pretty *$@!'ed. It's not ideal for high security passwords, but also not that insecure of a thing to do. Educating people about not downloading and installing malware is about 10,000 times more important than stopping people from writing down their passwords somewhere where the potential miscreant needs to physically break into your home to get them. If they can look through your desk drawer, they can probably install a keystroke logger.

passwords with more than 10 characters in length?
Again, for low security passwords for forums, etc, who cares? And even for more important passwords - how many people's accounts are being attacked by brute force? Most important accounts stop letting you try after a few failed attempts. As long as you password isn't really easily guessable or, again, a nuclear launch code, nobody is going to assume it's short and launch a successful brute force attack against your credit card login because it's 6 characters instead of 10.

In answer to this and numerous similar comments; no, I did not forget. For the heck of it, I decided to hazard a rough estimate at comparing the ENERGY efficiency of shipping water from Alaska to the middle east with desalination in the middle east.

Comparing the economic efficiency would actually be much easier, except that it would involve bothering other people. Contact shipping companies for price quotes. Call a contractor who builds and runs desalination plants for a quote. Choose a discount rate for money so you can compare the different distribution of cost across time for the two methods, and compare the total cost per liter for the amount of water you anticipate needing.

If you're a leader in the middle east trying to get water for a good price, that's a way to compare those two options. Along with political considerations, like can you fund the upfront money for the desalination plant, will you benefit from the construction project and jobs, etc. The energy costs of either aren't really relevant to the buyer, they'd just get factored into the prices quoted by the suppliers.

That all makes sense, thanks. I used the Emma Maersk because, as a famous ship, information on it was readily available, and I didn't know enough about cargo shipping to understand its disadvantages for this kind of freight.

Although a 5x increase in shipping efficiency still leaves us with desalination being 2x more energy efficient. Anyone else got anything else I missed?

To plug in a little napkin math on your hypothesis (which I expect will be confirmed):

The Emma Maersk can haul 11,000 14-ton containers, or 154,000 metric tons, or 154,000,000 KG of water, which is the same as liters.

It consumes 1,660 gallons of fuel oil per hour.

Of course, the Emma Maersk doesn't sail Alaska to Saudi Arabia, but we can extrapolate from another long-distance trip.

The sailing distance from Alaska to the middle east is 10,428 nautical miles.

When the Emma Maersk sails from Yantian to Suez, that's 6,370 miles and it takes 353 hours. So it might be around ((10428/6370) x 353) = 575 hours sailing time, x 1,660 gallons of fuel per hour = 954,500 gallons of fuel. Divided by 154 million liters of water is .0062 gallons of fuel consumed per liter transported. Heavy fuel oil like the Emma Maersk burns contains about 41,805,000 joules per gallon of energy. So that's (.0062 x 41,805,000) = 259,191 Joules of energy consumed per liter of water transported. Of course, I'm not accounting for loading and unloading, but then there's some transportation involoved in getting water to and back from a desalination plant that I'm also not going to account for.

Desalination plants consume about 5 watt hours of electricity per liter. But note that for the Emma Maersk, I used the energy of fuel consumed, not power output of the diesel engine, which only runs at 50% efficiency. So the proper comparison here would also take into account the loss at the power plant. The 2,000 MegaWatt power plant that runs the Jebel Ali desalination plant in Dubai is a gas turbine plant. Modern gas turbine generators can run at about 60% efficiency, so that 5 watt hours of electric energy took about 8.3 watt hours of fuel energy to produce. 8.3 watt hours is about 30,000 joules.

So unless I've got a big mistake in my napkin math, desalination is actually about 10x more energy efficient that shipping water from Alaska to the Middle East.

But this just tracks US sex offenders.

It will be no time before the fear mongers on the evening news are bandying about the new statistic,
600% of the population of the US are sex offenders.

I think we should sometimes say "never."

While you can certainly still buy monitors in all sorts of aspect ratios, including lots of 5:4 monitors, the trend has certainly been to higher and higher aspect ratios.
What I haven't seen anyone else pointing out is this:

The cost of manufacturing a monitor (other things being equal) is roughly proportional to the area of the screen. But monitors are marketed by the diagonal of the screen.

This means that to the average non-technical consumer, the greater the aspect ratio, the greater the ratio of perceived value to manufacturing cost.

That is:
a 24" 16:9 monitor has sides of 20.9 x 11.8, an area of 246 square inches
a 24" 5:4 monitor has sides of 18.7 x 15.0, an area of 281 square inches

So that's 14% more monitor for a 5:4 that's sold at the same "size" as a 16:9.

Soon they'll probably sell 24" monitors in a 24:1 aspect ratio, saving them gobs. Just get them by mail order. No returns.

They never argued that driving at 100 mph was safe or that people could handle it. Just because the design of the road doesn't prohibit it, that doesn't mean it's OK.

Maybe technology will still make driving at 100 MPH safe. If everything on the roads were computer driven with awareness and coordination between them, maybe sports cars could go 100 mph safely. I'm still glad they left a little leeway in the design of the roads, because rebuilding them all to accommodate higher speeds would be such a monumental project that it probably wouldn't happen. If we otherwise had cars that could handle 100 MPH safely, their speed would have been arbitrarily capped by freeway design.

When I occasionally pop by Facebook, the messages that come up are all minor variations on "Yay, my sports team did well," "Boo, my sports team did poorly," "I just ate..." "I just bought..." "I just got back from..."

I would really like a website for keeping up with my friends, but Facebook is a perpetual avalanche of inanity. What I think they needs to salvage it, without alienating their "core audience" fans of the 24-hour vapidity cycle, is an "importance rating" for messages. It should be very simple, maybe 3 levels.

1. I got married/got pregnant/gave birth/moved to another part of the world/died. Life changing events.
2. I got a new job, big promotion, bought a new house, won a national award, moved in with someone, graduated, maybe even just "here are pictures of my 50th birthday party"
3. It's raining outside/I hate mondays/I just ate a Big Mac/I'm hungover/I'm desperately trying to out-inane everyone else here, but it's impossible.

Just self rate when posting. Yes, different people will have different opinions of the importance of things, and some idiots will make "I need chocolate!" a "1," but at that point I'd block them. Yes, I could block everyone who ever posts anything inane, but that's half the people I know, and I actually would like to check into Facebook every now and then and see when they got married and moved and whatever. But right now, to find the information I consider actually "keeping up" with my friends would require hours and hours of digging through infinite variations on the theme of "Bob Jones planted a Carrot in Farmville!"

Facebook is probably against this, because they think people would check in less often if they could screen out all the crap. But for people who want to see all the crap, it would still be there for them, and for a large number of users like me, the site would suddenly become insanely more useful if we could actually use a social networking site to keep track of our friends.

I have a book (but it's in a box in my Mom's attic and I can't remember its name, so I can't link to it or anything) which includes an interview with one of the engineers who designed the interstate highway system. In the 1950's when they were considering it, standard consumer automobiles had routinely gotten faster and more powerful ever since they were invented, and the designers didn't know where that trend would end. There was much discussion about what the ultimate speed of cars would be. In the end, they set standards for curves, banking, etc. based on an assumption of travel at 100 MPH, hoping it wouldn't go significantly over that, and not wanting to have engineered the largest public works project in history only to find out it was significantly deficient twenty years later if they'd designed it for 75 MPH and everyone wanted to go 95.

I remember that interview also had the information that at least back then, they determined the speed limits for entrance and exit ramps not with measurement of the radius of curves, slopes of embankments, and equations, but by driving a mid-level Ford sedan to every single ramp and driving around it in circles over and over, slightly faster each time. On the first pass where the tires slipped, they'd halve the speed they were traveling, round to the nearest 5 MPH and post that as the speed limit.

I wish I had the source to point you all to. I think it was from a collection of some "answer person's" newspaper column from the 70's and 80', but I don't recall.