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Comment Don't get a hangover in the first place (Score 1) 105

I am not going to say that people shouldn't drink, but if you drink responsibly then you shouldn't get a hangover in the first place.

I can imagine that hangovers were more common in earlier times because alcoholic drinks could have been of lower quality - with more of the chemicals that would worsen hangover. Production and quality control these days are done using scientific methods.
One of those chemicals is methanol, which I would expect there to be more of in moonshine than in store-bought vodka.
Another cause of hangover is dehydration.

So... Know your limit and stick to it, drink high-quality drinks and let every other glass contain a non-alcoholic drink, and then you should avoid the hangover.

Comment Re:Cancer vs common cold (Score 5, Informative) 52

The problem is that neither cancer nor cold are of "common" types: there are quite a few types of each.
One man's cancer could be quite different from another man's, even if they are both found at the same place in the body. The pancreatic cancer mentioned in the article is only one type of pancreatic cancer, although it is the most common form that would originally form there. Cancer in the pancreas could also be another type of cancer that was formed elsewhere and metastasized.
Similarly, there are many different viruses that can cause "cold".

Comment Being able to be more precise (Score 3, Interesting) 276

Search features I depend on:
* Non-English characters. Handle multiple encodings of web pages and URL-encoded characters in search queries.
* site: to search only within a domain. This is often a national domain, such as "site:co.uk" to search only British sites.
* Minus: Begin able to block certain words, or sites.
* Plus: A word prefixed with a plus is required.
* Quotes/hyphen: Searching for exact phrases. "Java class file" is different from "Java File class".

Where current search engines are lacking:
* If there is a period between the words then they do not belong to the same phrase. (A search for "Hello Google" should not return "Say Hello. Google for it." as its top result)
* Use word order in search query to weigh how important a search term is. Rank pages higher wihen those words are closer together.
* Don't correct my spelling by default, assuming that my search query is in US-English. (I am speaking to you Duck-Duck Goo!). I can spell, and I do not always write English. If I misspell then that is my mistake, and sometimes I search for a brand name that was misspelled intentionally.
* When indexing a web page, identify what is the important text on the page and ignore the rest. For instance, on an internet news site, the text in the articles is most important. On a forum text inside the comments. On this forum, articles followed by comments. What people have written in their signatures is not important. Slashboxes are not and ads are definitely not.
It is aggravating when you use Google on a collecting site and you get every other page on that site in every search result because members have listed their collections in their signatures.
If I search for the word "review", I don't want every page on every web store that has a Reviews tab.
Pages on a site often follow a certain pattern - find that pattern to find which text on each page that is the most unique.

Comment Re:About half (Score 1) 293

"56 per cent of radio listeners use digital radio every day."

I wonder... Would there be more radio listeners overall if stations hadn't closed down on FM already as part of the transition to DAB?
How many stations worth listening to are still on FM? How many radio listeners are there now in total compared to a decade ago?

Displays

Sharp Announces 4K Smartphone Display 152

An anonymous reader writes: Japanese electronics giant Sharp has announced production of 5.5" displays with 4K (3840 x 2160) resolution. They'll hit the market next year. The display will have a pixel density of 806 PPI. It's not known yet which smartphone makers will build devices with these screens. The displays cost significantly more than a more typical 1080p or 1440p display, so they'll probably only make it into high-end phones. On the other hand, this will help to drive down prices for lower-resolution displays, so it could indirectly benefit everybody.

Comment Re:Or a simple solution. (Score 5, Interesting) 95

Shared libraries are shared also so that you would be able to update the library without updating all applications that use it.

By the way, when virtualizing servers you could also create file system instances using a copy-on-write filesystem, in which case you would be able to get self-contained instances with the least amount of copying necessary.
Under Linux, you could use FUSE to get CoW on top of a underlying filesystem that doesn't support it.

Comment Cool hack, but not very useful (Score 2) 113

The cool things are that he used a 8-bit AVR microcontroller to emulate the 6502, and that he used a USB chip on the prototyping board to create video...
Unfortunately, it runs much slower than a 1MHz 6502.

It appears that he did his own reverse-engineering of the 6502. One peculiarity that he may have missed is that it has undocumented op-codes, and those do show up in some programs.
Other people have done much more reverse engineering of the chip, down to the gate level even.

Comment Space debris (Score 3, Interesting) 226

I think a large problem is going to be space debris - debris from previous launches and defunct satellites.
When the idea of an orbital power station was first formed in the early days of space exploration, space debris was not a problem. These days there is a huge number of tiny objects circling the Earth at high speeds - like bullets being shot at random.
The larger the orbital mirrors are, the more surface area there would be for collecting space debris.

Sure, you could place them in higher orbit, but then the mirrors would not get as much protection from solar wind from the Earth's magnetic field.

China

Chinese Scientists Plan Solar Power Station In Space 226

knwny points out this lofty proposed power plan in China. "The battle to dispel smog, cut greenhouse gases and solve the energy crisis is moving to space. If news reports are to be believed, Chinese scientists are mulling the construction of a solar power station in a geosynchronous orbit 36,000 kilometres above ground. The electricity generated would be converted to microwaves or lasers and transmitted to a collector on Earth. If realized, it will surpass the scale of the Apollo project and the International Space Station and be the largest-ever space project."

Comment TLC NAND = unstable? (Score 1) 42

Right now, I would more interested in 48-layer MLC NAND from Toshiba than 32-layer TLC NAND if I can get it for the same price.

Samsung's TLC NAND in their "840 EVO" SSDs have had problems with performance dropping significantly after a couple of months of use. Samsung issued a "fix" with a firmware update, but after a couple of months more many users of the drives experienced choppy performance. Apparently the problem would be inherent in the TLC NAND that they use.

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