female norse offspring of a bad metal guitarist?

(In my humble opinion) I think the key difference between response to a game and response to reality is the fact that the player knows one is make-believe before they engage in it. This fore-knowledge that you're in a simulation coupled with a desire to be there goes a long way to blunt the response your mind has to the input.

If it's possible for games to cause PTSD, then I imagine it would be possible to get PTSD from film and books as well. I'm not suggesting that this isn't the case however; But I do think it likely that people who are prone to being overly stressed by experiencing traumatic events would be more likely to try to avoid them. This leads me to suppose that someone avoiding violent games/books/films etc won't be traumatised by them in a PTSD sort of way because erm... they're avoiding them. If on the other hand we force everyone to experience all the hard core violent games/films/books out there then maybe we would be able to traumatise a few of them. We probably shouldn't do this :)

um... no I think they meant deprecate. The term works well when describing parts of a system that are still their but not worthy of praise in light of the new shiny version that is better.

Deprecate from Latin deprecari de (expressing reversal) and precari (to pray for or praise)

So to deprecate is to literally anti-praise something. I don't think that deprecated APIs 'lose value over time' in the sense of depreciate, I think a point is reached beyond which the advice from the language writers is to not use the deprecated thing any more, they advise instead to use the new version that has replaced it. They literally advise people to stop using/teaching the old deprecated way by writing deprecated across the top of the manual pages, their is nothing gradual about this, this is not depreciation, this is immediate instruction to no longer favour this way of working.

Of course, deprecated bits of languages hang around in the system for years to come in order to provide compatibility for old code bases running on new JVMs, and to the users of these deprecated parts of the system they clearly hold great, sustained value over time, the opposite of depreciation

You should step down from your presidency, worthy of deprecation as you are due to your inappropriate promotion to depreciate that which is clearly deprecated.

You only get rapid heat build up in Li-ion cells if they are gaining or losing charge RAPIDLY. The current safety systems work quite well except where they are not fitted by the battery manufacturer (as is often the case for fast discharge protection) or where the battery is physically damaged (causing a massive short and a circumvention of the safety systems). It is arguably reasonable for a battery manufacturer to leave limiting the discharge rate to the hardware developer because they can't be expected to know in advance what the discharge requirements in the final application will be and it's in the hardware developers interest to limit the current draw with adequate resistance in order to prolong battery life between recharges.

In the 40000 real world missions our battery powered devices have undertaken in conditions ranging from Arctic to tropical, we haven't had a single incidence of Li-ion battery fire even when our devices have been battered by idiots with sledge hammers, over charged, under charged, badly charged etc

Thermistors for the win!

That said though, if these thing come to market and they're cheaper with equivalent or better performance then of course I'm interested :) until then however I'm a bit meh...

The trouble is how to define "full" it's a moving target that changes with ambient temperature, battery age etc. You can count coulombs as you put them into the battery (which costs you some of them of course) and you can report on how many of them depart as you discharge, but no system is 100% efficient and the charge and discharge rates are also non-linear so you always "seems" to put in more than you get out and during continuous current draw by the system the output voltage of the battery fluctuates in response to use, temperature. You also have to calibrate these coulomb counting "fuel gauges" by fully discharging and recharging the battery from time to time.

Not wanting to waste power where we can help it; The approach we take in our lithium-ion powered systems (that operate for many months at a time in the field in a wide range of harsh conditions -40C to +40C) is to measure output voltage from the battery and to stop charging when we hit a safe peak. We also use thermistors in charging to control the input voltage and we have a fail safe timer that gives up after a fixed period of charging irrespective of output voltage from the battery, we also slow charge batteries that are on very low output voltages or very high output voltages as this is when they are most likely to go bang (low output voltage has a risk of charging too quickly, high output voltage has a risk of overcharging, both of these make things get uncomfortably warm at worst and lower your battery life at best). We built all of this smart into our devices themselves so that you don't have to care about the charger being brainy, just that it's brawny enough to provide enough voltage at the current load you need.

The cheap chargers I've had the misfortune to use ONLY use a timer at best as a fail-safe, this can cause a fire if you inadvertently over-charge a battery with it.

I was thinking the same thing. A passive film won't do a damn thing to stop a short involving a "puncture wound". As pointed out by an earlier poster, most (if not all these days) lithium-ion packs come with one or more a built-in thermistors that inhibits current flow as the battery picks up heat during charging and discharge operations.

Why are you so intent on dictating how others should live and who they should be with? Can you not afford others the very courtesy you are demanding? Just get on with your life and stop worrying about these inconsequential things. If the guy next door is black and his wife is white IT'S NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. Also, where did your ancestors come from? Did they magically arise from the ground right where you live? No, they didn't, your ancestors migrated to where you live, and no-one is telling you to "go back to where you came from" are they? Typically migration is good for economies and gene pools alike, it's the idle lay-abouts that sit at home moaning about how people are taking away their privileges, demanding that the universe give them their due that present the largest burden to society. Migrants are largely risk-taking and adventurous, the less-adventurous ones in their societies are typically still at home (or dead because they didn't move fast enough). These adventurous spirits make excellent small business owners and they build nations with their efforts (look at the US, a nation literally built by immigrants).

who mentioned elves, dwarves and halflings?

GDP even...

The sentiment is great, I agree with spending more on the things you mention and a little as possible on military. But your figures are way off, the US military budget is between 3 and 4 percent of GDB (depending on who's figures you believe) http://www.sipri.org/research/... which is fairly high I suppose (around 1.5 to 3 times higher than other NATO members).

Yes! Absolutely! Why don't our politicians get behind this technology? Well... I can't imagine it has anything to do with Thorium reactors being crap at making weapons grade fuel yet fantastically safe and cheap for making electricity. :P

I just read the draft bill... they don't seem to be demanding back-doors to anything, in fact they seem to be saying that they are interested in understanding connection logs rather than communication content. i.e. they want to see something like an itemized phone bill showing who called who, when and for how long. This applies to email and IM as well and also they want to see a big list of sites you visited and when.

I personally object to any information like this being gathered in bulk. I'm less bothered by having this sort of probing done on a case by case basis where a warrant is issued.

Firstly I'd like to go on record and say, I value my privacy and I advocate against the government having the power to bulk-snoop on the country because their bound to upload their findings to a notebook and leave it on a train or something equally stupid. I also appreciate that being able to conduct warranted surveillance of known (or at least reasonably suspected) criminals in order to bring them to justice is a useful tool for our law enforcement agency.

However, regarding your assertion that the law "seems to be banning end-to-end encryption", I would say, go read the draft bill. They actually explicitly rule out looking at communication data content, they are explicitly interested in the point-to-point connection data i.e. who spoke/typed/mailed who and when, not what was actually communicated. They also go as far to state that this should only be possible if you have a warrant issued by an non-political, vetted, transparent, independent authority who's job it is to thwart those who overstep the bounds.

While I agree with the sentiment of your post and I certainly don't want to live in a society where the privacy of it's citizens is routinely invaded. I don't think you're helping the debate by posting spurious assertions

It is indeed a good and very fair idea to have a rule that applies equally to all people on Earth, but we don't have any sensible way of making this happen quickly enough to make a difference. We can however lead by example and stop our own bad habits and at least begin to reduce the parts of the problem we can do something about. Waiting for global consensus is a cop-out and a stalling tactic more worthy of the playground than parliament. I don't think it's a problem we can solve over night and their are no easy fixes given the scale of the change required in our economic dependency on fossil fuels for energy. I actually think our best hope is to come up with something cheaper for most of our domestic and industrial energy supply.

No actually, in the numbers I was looking at, suicide was listed separately from homicide. Even Wikipedia has a page on this topic... here take a peek, they have references to their information sources and they broadly agree with my ballpark figure. 0.06 gun homicides per 100000 population in the UK (2011) compared to 3.55 gun homicides per 100000 population in the US (2013). Considering violent crime has been generally falling in both countries, the two year difference in the measurements should bias in favour of your argument and it still shows nearly a 60:1 ratio.

List of countries by firearm related death

Even allowing for crap in the stats, bad data the gap is still very large for two civilized countries. Do you really honestly believe that the ready availability of guns in the US has no contributing effect here?