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Comment Re:Why not go back to the sleep schedule (Score 3, Interesting) 71

of the middle ages? They lacked bright artificial light so they would naturally fall asleep early, not blasting their eyes with 100 watt incandescent or equivalent or computer screens with blue light. Then they'd sleep for about four hours, wake up for a few hours and spend that time praying, reading, helping bring in another brother or sister for their children, keeping watch over the fort, invading the neighbors, etc. Then they'd fall asleep again for another four or so hours.

Natural. Healthy. Refreshing. What happened to it? Are we losing our culture and history?

I question your logic. Wasn't the average life expectancy during that period about 30 years?

Edit: No, I was wrong. 31.3 years.

This plan sounds neither healthy or refreshing!

Comment Re:Not a Big Deal (Score 2) 210

There has been some controversy surrounding the use of the term "garbage patch" and photos taken off the coast of Manila in the Philippines in attempts to portray the patch in the media often misrepresenting the true scope of the problem and what could be done to solve it. Angelicque White, Associate Professor at Oregon State University, who has studied the "garbage patch" in depth, warns that "the use of the phrase 'garbage patch' is misleading. ... It is not visible from space; there are no islands of trash; it is more akin to a diffuse soup of plastic floating in our oceans." In the article Dr. White and Professor Tamara Galloway, from the University of Exeter, call for regulation and cleanup and state that the focus should be on stemming the flow of plastic into the ocean from coastal sources.[49]

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) agrees, saying:

        While "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" is a term often used by the media, it does not paint an accurate picture of the marine debris problem in the North Pacific Ocean. The name "Pacific Garbage Patch" has led many to believe that this area is a large and continuous patch of easily visible marine debris items such as bottles and other litter—akin to a literal island of trash that should be visible with satellite or aerial photographs. This is not the case.
        —Ocean Facts, National Ocean Service[50]

from Wikipedia.

Also, when you say "pacific plastic mire", I think you mean North Pacific Gyre.

Comment Blue light isn't the issue, getting old is... (Score 5, Insightful) 144

The blurb (and even the article) is jaded and implies that blue light causes blindness to ride the anti-screen wave.

If you read it, you find that the issue is actually that the body makes alpha Tocopherol, a Vitamin E derivative, which keeps the photoreceptor cells from dying. Some people lose the ability to make that alpha Tocopherol as they age, leading to blindness.

So the issue isn't to avoid blue light and buy crazy glasses... (how are you really going to avoid blue light if you ever want to see white again anyway? Are you going to stop looking at white paper?) Rather it's to find a way to keep supplying alpha Tocopherol to the eye as people age.

Comment Re:You can't always eject first on Mac (Score 1) 521

I can't count the number of times I've tried to eject a USB drive, and Mac OS tells me it's "unable to eject the drive because it's in use."

Usually it's because Preview.app held onto some file descriptor for its stupid thumbnail of recent documents - not the list in the file menu, the one that pops up when you right-click on Preview in the Dock.

Apple used to promote the idea that the user is in charge. When I click "eject," the damn thing should eject!

You can generally solve this issue by killing the Finder app, as well.

Comment Re:He's getting pilfered. (Score 1) 52

You have to either be naive or stupid to not understand the long term strip mining game China is playing.

The poor guy is clearly naive and in giving him the benefit of the doubt. Scientists are good souls, but sometimes the, "For the sake of knowledge" types get used and abused in this cold world.

Do you really think scientists are "naive" and "good souls? Or do you think that the ones mentioned in the article are just playing both sides to increase their research budget?

If you have ever met an untenured or ambitious professor, you would choose the latter. Funding is tight; exploit all available sources.

Comment Re:Nature finds a way (Score 5, Informative) 177

So this year the population is down 80%, the next year it'll be down another 60%... but the following year 100% of the mosquito population will be immune, and there will be 10000% more of them because the bird population decreased 80% from starvation. To challenge nature on it's own terms is generally futile in the long run.

There are lots of other things for birds to eat. Also, bats eat many more mosquitoes than birds and there are many other insects for bats to eat.

Also, the mosquitoes they are eradicating were not a native species in Australia. So presumably the birds were fine eating native insects before this particular breed was introduced.

Comment Re:Comfortable keyboards are for chumps (Score 0) 114

How long until the keyboard is just a giant touch pad with courageous gestures to enter text?

All text entry will be done with swiping. You'll thank us later.

Never.

They are going to jump straight to the anal probe. You have to squeeze it in different ways to get different gestures and keystrokes. Emphasis on strokes.

I know it seems scary, but courage.

Comment This is all part of their grand master plan. (Score 5, Insightful) 147

I believe this is all part of their grand plan to mitigate their large loss of third-party content which started several years ago.

They redesigned their website to be more graphical and less text based several years ago, making it hard to simply sort highly rate titles and scan though them quickly. I thought this was so that the user could not tell how limited their third party movie content was.

Then they introduced their "thumbs up/down" rating system supposedly because their users did not understand how their 5 star rating system was being used differently than the convention that the rest of the world follows. At that time, they also moved the reviews for each show to a separate (last) tab under each show's view.

This latest change completes the transformation. You can now only see what shows Netflix wants you to see unless you do a direct text search. No more sorting and no more reading reviews.

Personally, I am amazed that this is working for them, but I appear to be in the minority. Prior to their website redesign, I was a strong proponent of their service. After the redesign, I was convinced that they would tank and sold my stock in their company. However, their stock price has only gone up from there.

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