I started my hobby at the other end of the fabric spectrum. I can weave bobbin lace, make nets, and crochet and tat lace (knitting eludes me), Basic metallurgy and small foundry construction, and low power electronics (if it can be powered by a lemon and metal, or a chain->magnet+wire) for data storage (picture wiki on a raspi, pedal a bike until you are done with your research!). And growing spices, as well as preserving them. We might need an economy to get started, but we could team up and kick ass.

As for reproduction issues that you bring up, rubber trees. Synthetic latex may not be available (i don't know how easy it is to make) but natural rubber (and the rubbers one could make with it) would still be around. But with out modern medicine, and the inherent increase in infant mortality rates, I don't foresee that being an issue for many people. To protect a woman, sure. To prevent the chance of becoming pregnant before safe, sure. But after they are safe and want to have kids, I'm not sure that birth control would be an issue. After all, each couple should have 3 or 4 kids (childhood and young adult mortality rates) just to keep populations stable, and to do that a woman might need to give birth to 10 babies. Scary, but I came from families that had that problem not even 70 years ago; without antibiotics and an OB-GYN and sterile tools, we'd be looking at rates similar to the worst periods that we humans have survived.

Seriously, it starts with "checks to individuals" and makes the firsts 38% of those Medicare/caid and ACA. Those checks aren't going to individuals! I never see a check from Medicaid, the doctors I go to might but it will be made out to their billing service. The check never goes to the hand of a single person! 21% is 'poverty programs' which, again, other than SSI/SSA don't go to individuals. Food stamp funding goes to the state, and the state disperses it; same as Medicaid actually.

So that's a chuck that doesn't make their numbers add up. Now they don't explain how they get that 0.5% of the budget goes to the top 1% of wealth. Could be as . . . . anything given the games they are playing with the other numbers. Sure, 10 billion is upsetting, but that's just a small chuck of the budget. Does it go to them as Medicare? Is it part of the various subsidies (farm, corn, ethanol, solar) that happen to be run by those people? What's the math? This is important since they blow so many other details.

Some are meal replacements (like high protein and fiber ones) while others are meal supplements. Check the calories and protein and all the rest, if it's not about 30% of the DV then it isn't a 'meal'. I've lived off a few of them for a few days (intestinal surgery sucks: liquid only for a few days, clear liquid for 2 days with the nastiest antibiotics...) but I really don't recommend it. I suppose that with the right gelatin & oil based multivitamin you could get by on them. But it's cheaper, if you don't worry about sodium, to grab a $0.99 microwaveable meat+starch+vegi frozen food (pot pie, sandwich, pizza, whatever) and then use the meal replacement shakes as a supplement to round out what the other food doesn't get you.

Mania, or the manic phase of bipolar disorders, are completely different from straight depression. The drugs used to treat "just depression" can trigger severe manic episodes. Additionally, mania and manic phases are often accompanied by the psychosis views that I disclaimed. That makes the rationality of the medication harder for the person to understand.

I haven't had an internship in several years (unrelated illnesses) but when I was still working while doing my undergrad CS degree, I was very forward about suffering depression and anxiety/panic disorders. Not a single person cared in a negative way, and if I missed a meeting because of a panic attack I'd get help from coworkers (programming some stuff for a tai-chi exercise game, seifu was working with us on that one). The other students understood, mostly, and even opened up about their issues.

Part of that is setting, I'm sure. The university undergrad scene is much younger than the "old guard industry programmers". But staying silent just means that the "old guard" never have to learn or accept; they can just go on being ignorant of these issues. And that doesn't help anyone.

It's still a very personal choice. You have to make the decision that fits you best.

I could almost believe that. Most of the drugs are still in the "we think this is how they work" category. You have a psychological disturbance that results in paranoia (which can and does happen to people even with no diagnosed illness or even on medication), and the medication is an easy thing to lash out at. Or you experience tons of the listed side effects (either real or imagined, it wouldn't matter) and can't convince a doctor to change the medicine. The latter happened to me, real side effect was losing memory; found notes that I had told the doctor several times over a year, and he did nothing. I called their 'emergency assist' phone, left a message that I would stop unless I heard back from them. Never did, so I went cold turkey and switched doctors after the weekend was over.

Had mine been for anything other than pain and depression and insomnia, that withdrawal could have been hilariously amusing; instead I just sat up reading a book for over 48 hours til I passed out.

But my depression is a strange one; mild sufferers (by the DSM meaning of mild depression or any other illness or axis) of illnesses with no Axis 1 or 2 components who doesn't suffer from delusions aren't likely to stop taking meds that work. Additionally, barring a massive incident, most non-psychosis and non-paranoia disorder sufferers are very likely to stay on a med that works; without something that alters perception of reality, they have no reason to go back to the pain and suffering of before. Incidents like moving (the wait list for a psychiatrist here was over a year!), insurance covering a different doctor, losing a job/house/etc, that are outside the individuals' control shouldn't be counted.

Cache misses

Let's see, the tiny amount of L1/2/3 cache currently is dictated by the energy budget of the CPU. Looking at the energy budget of the 4900MQ and the 4960HQ chips, you can take some wild arse guessing to get that the 2 megs of L3 cache sacrificed got back enough to power the 128 megs of L4. Then consider that there is only 64K (yes, kilobytes) of L1 or 256K L2 per core on the Haswell chips, and at 3.9GHz desktop chips you are looking at 84 watts of power dissipated . . . you can start to work out how much of that is due to leakage current from the 6 transistor L1/2/3 cache design.

Let's face it, SRAM isn't tiny, it leaks amps like a sieve at the tiny process size that everything is done at now days, and it's main advantage is that it doesn't take a controller to access and it's bloody fast and the bandwidth can be pretty sizable. A gig of SRAM on die would, I suspect, heat a small room; that much DRAM per core would slow the cores down due to the inherent latency of accessing DRAM.

So, sure, DRAM chips may be cheap, but putting them on the CPU die would be horrid. And SRAM still isn't cheap; either in die space, energy budget, or dollars!

If you are writing the OS and your code is down at the machine level, you do know what's going on in the different cache pools. You can abstract it away and trust your compiler to get it right, or you can fiddle the bits yourself; it isn't magic contained in the blue smoke of ICs.

Photoshop? Considering that the adobe rgb or other color spaces combined with the file sizes of some of the larger images coming out of cameras, your gains in latency would really depend on Photoshop and the OS being able to handle the L4 cache and keep the right part of the image in the cache. Video editing, with file sizes into the gigabyte range would probably see no gains at all. Video conversion, with a program that keeps a reasonably sized buffer, should see a good performance gain; but it would require code that knows the L4 is available or the OS to predict that L4 is a good place to put a 10-50-100MB buffer. The real gain will be in common things: playing a video, browsing the web (seen how much memory a bit of javascript or the JRE can eat up lately? Or Silverlight/Flash?) and email clients (cache all your email in L4 for faster searching).

As for battery life, I have no idea. It might use more power, since DRAM requires constant power to refresh data where SRAM is pretty stable; but the lower leakage of using a single transistor instead of 6 might prove to be a benefit. It would take a good bit of time and some pretty good test code to figure the difference, I suspect.

And yet if you are sitting on a jury in a trial, they can and have made laws requiring you not to talk about what you've learned til after the trial. Is that not also a law abridging freedom of speech? Gag orders on the press covering a trial also exist; same question.

With the number of counter-top vacuum preserver devices, doing sous vide in home is not that hard. It's not as perfect as a full industrial vacu-sealer, but it works. Additionally, LN isn't too hard to get in small amounts as an engineer; and for in-house use you could use dry ice or LCO2 from a fire extinguisher.

But I'm one of those home cooks who likes trying crazy chemistry shit, and has the gear and respect for the chemicals to do it safely. Might have gone to the cooking industry if I had gotten into cooking sooner. So the big set of books is still something I want, but couldn't justify the $500 for. Bet they'd look pretty in PDF format, even if the pictures were lower resolution.

Unless a userland process has a ton of OS level locks on the I/O devices (disk read/writes, managing it's own cache in files, other strange behavior) that all result in OS API calls. If the userland process does all of that, than the OS is going to grind along trying to manage all of the coder's stupidity.

Which probably explains both Adobe and the early JREs, in fact.

And it's a function that is in every graphics library, textbook, and so on. The goal is to not copy code (copyright infringement). The math for finding a normal isn't in and of itself copyrighted, though.

Posting from my phone is an awful way to try and teach about the legal side of reverse engineering code, or re-licensing, or any other legal topic. It can be, and is, done. It is one of the arguments made when talking about copyrights on algorithm. Hit google, find some articles about it, look for things like math formula copyrights and similar, and clean room reverse engineering. There are lots of articles and explanations out there.

Not at all, in fact I recall the usenet discussions regarding how to avoid just copying code. It was just a fact that they wanted to re-license under a floss license, and they wanted to migrate the code; so both were done at the same time. Some functions, it is as easy as "chinese room" coding, one person reads the old code and writes a plain English description of what it does: casts a ray along vector V, or finds normal of surface S. Another person who doesn't look at the old code writes these new functions. Considering how long the POV-Ray team have kept lawyers around, they made sure to do it right. And more recent additions, like SSLT, were written under duel license; one for the old codecode, and one giving the team permission to open it under another license.

As a disclaimer, I was lurking in their developers group on Usenet at the time (trying to contribute til life got in the way). So I got to see the hoops they jumped through to keep it clean. Lots of work contacting old devs, finding out who was legally responsible for what code and who could change the license. I think thethe archive is still readable, makes very interesting legal reading on how to reverse engineer code without breaking EULAs or licenses.