I'm in that camp too. But :
I tried to put an incandescent light bulb close to my screen, took 3 steps back and squinted a little.
The dress still doesn't look clearly blue/black to me, but the blueish tone is now much more saturated and dark, and the gold is dark enough that it could be black with some orange highlights.
The effect is gone when I walk back to the screen, but at least I can understand that it can look blue/black to some people (=morons). :)

Thank you. GP is just a guy with a camera who thinks he understands it all just because he was lucky to process the dress as black and blue.
I've also seen enough pixels in my youth to think that I got it right : unfortunately, there's just not enough context, and I cannot see any other color than white and gold.

The USB interface is probably faster than the old drive anyway...

I assume the drive in that laptop is IDE, so get a USB to IDE adapter and connect the drive directly to a newer machine.

I'm not sure about the 2 first questions.
http://www.sr.bham.ac.uk/~tjp/... seems to suggest that apparent magnitude is based on flux (=total amount of light), and not on intensity (=light density).
It means that the light density of Betelgeuse supernova would be much higher than the light density of the quarter moon. The total amount would be approximately the same. If I'm not mistaken, since the sun (32.7 arcminutes) is much bigger than Betelgeuse (0.056 arcseconds), Betelgeuse supernova would also have a much higer intensity than the Sun.

For the last one :
https://what-if.xkcd.com/129/
http://home.earthlink.net/~kit...
During a quarter moon, you only get sunlight reflected at weird angles off the moon.

A bit more than "a little brighter".
It would go from 0.5 (now) to -10 apparent magnitude. That's about 15000 times brighter.
It would be much brighter than Venus/Jupiter/Sirius, and be visible during daytime.
It would be about as bright as a quarter moon.

Wait, what?
When was alcohol considered really good for your health?
When was marijuana considered really bad for your health?
The worst side effects for marijuana have always been those linked to prohibition :
* landing in jail
* supporting mafia

As far as marijuana being possibly linked to mental illness, I think it's more of a correlation than causation.
The same goes for those studies about heavy marijuana use at a young age. If you can smoke pot all day long at 14, I think you're life isn't screwed solely because of weed.

Some geniuses don't even need to stand on shoulders of giants:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

If you're going to implement any kind of technical filtering it needs to be done at the network layer, and not on the physical machine that the kids have access to. If you do it on the physical machine then they will inevitably find a way around it, even as simple as booting a livecd.

Ofcourse the key is education, this content is out there and kids will inevitably get access to it sooner or later. Whatever controls you implement on your own network or devices, the kids will either find a way to bypass them, or have access to an unfiltered network/device somewhere else. And if something is blocked, it becomes more interesting to the kids and they will actively seek out ways to get at the blocked content, whereas if it was unblocked the kids may not even have any interest in it...

A good example is alcohol, when i was in school many of the other kids in my class were forbidden from touching alcohol and that made them seek out ways to obtain alcohol... Myself and a few others were never forbidden, our parents allowed us to try alcohol if we wanted... I found alcoholic drinks tasted quite disgusting, and lost interest in them.

Would you say sociology, psychology,etc are not science just because your narrow definition of science is exact science, those fields like physics, chemistry and mathematics which are leading to one single unambiguous answer?

Yes.
It's actually pretty easy to prove that economics is flawed.
Just take one of the many bullshit predictions (e.g. possibility of infinite growth) that is in direct contradiction with physical laws.
Economics isn't even on http://xkcd.com/435/.

EROEI is only relevant when looked at as an entire system perspective.

And that's exactly what we do : We consider the system Earth + Mankind.

To each his own. It might come later.
It took me a while to enjoy wines and olives.
Anyway, weed, guitar, anal sex and skateboarding are my great pleasures in life right now, and I don't feel like I'm missing anything :D

The primitive coal to liquids technology they used was very inefficient tech consuming way more energy of coal than it produced jet fuel (highly negative EROEI).

You're right. But then you're back to problem 1 on the list : extreme climate change.
We have too much oil/coal/gas (see climate change) but not enough oil/gas (see oil peak).

+5 Insightful?
No :
-5 for bullshit, willful ignorance and not reading the article you link to :

However, economists later showed that Ehrlich would have won in the majority of 10-year periods over the last century,[2][3] and if the wager was extended by 30 years to 2011, he would have won on four out of the five metals.[3]

You might want to take a look at this article about the energy trap : http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
You're talking about extraction price, you should talk about the energy return on investment : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Once it costs more energy to retrieve oil than to leave it in the ground, we'll have a big problem, and that hasn't been mentioned one bit by TFA.

+1
WTF Oxford University?
Our society is so dependent on oil that I cannot believe either they didn't include it.