The methodology may not have been trivial, but the GP was saying how the conclusion that breathing in opaque air decreases life expectancy is trivial. It is true that people do not gain much insight from learning about such a conclusion.

However, the thing that GP and P miss is that the silver lining to all this is the "2.72 years longer". You are given a number that makes a very solid connection between two previously weakly connected ideas.

Before, the weak connection was that breathing opaque air is bad for you. Now, the strong connection is that breathing opaque air shortens your life by 2.72 years.

Bullets hurt people because of human blood circulation (loss of blood) and the size of our organs (heh). If robots were built differently or little green men evolved differently, bullets would most likely be ineffective. There is no reason that there is only one wire connecting processor to leg and opening one loop should not hurt the other parts of the circuit. Also, there is almost no reason why the processor needs to be 15 cm big, or the leg motor has to take up the whole length of the leg. There is also no reason why the robots or green guys have to be human size.

However, as long as they are still made of molecules, high amounts of energy should still be able to separate the molecules that they are composed of, and hopefully eliminate them.

I heard that some phishing sites tell you that you entered the wrong password and redirect you to the correct site so you wouldn't know something wrong happened. You'd just end up thinking you entered the password wrong the first time.

Your method would skip the phishing step so you'll get to the correct site anyways.

Your explanation for why your method works actually doesn't make sense. If the site accepts the true one, then you're okay, but if the site doesn't accept the true one, then you're in just as much trouble as if you entered the true one the first time. Maybe it's supposed to be a joke but the Insightful modding confused me.

One of the boundary conditions of internet speed is the size of the material being sent over the wireless network. If all you have is small sound files, then you'll need to be sending over years of music to fully use the 12.5 Gbps. The usefulness of internet speed increases only logarithmically. There is almost as much use for 1000000 Gbps as 100 Gbps. Only a small portion of the people actually using the internet would see any difference between the 1000000 and 100 Gbps. Once you hit the critical value, which is like a few Gbps, most of the people on the world would be satisfied.

Humans are the ultimate boundary conditions. We can only read so much and listen to so much in so much detail and see so many pixels. The best that the data can do is accurately represent these. Once the representation becomes so accurate that adding a few more Gb's of information would not allow a human to see the improvement of the file, then we hit the limit.

Another major limit is time. We can only hope to live up to around 100 years old. Downloading 120 years worth of music would be meaningless then. There is a limit to everything and just increasing the wireless speed past the critical limit is almost useless.

That begs the question, can you wink with one eye?

Google has constants for pi, e, q, etc. It even does units for you.

Extremely useful when doing ece homework.

The moon is lost mass, I believe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDnYB61o1EU

Chappelle's skit.

Excellent explanations. It is completely understandable if the student puts in the time to understand it. It requires almost no outside knowledge.

I would have loved it if someone showed me this book earlier.

Well, try proving to me why I can't use my hairdryer in the bathtub without assuming I have had classes in electrical engineering. You'll have a hard time. These warning stickers work by brainwashing us into thinking it is obvious that hairdryers and bathtubs don't go well together. These warning labels exist for the newbies in this world, like the people who use hairdryers for the first time. Once these labels are seen a couple of times, they have served their purpose, but there are still more newbies along the way. Just because someone hasn't seen as many hairdryer stickers than you does not make them 'tards.

Anyways, that said, I'll agree with you on some warning stickers, like those on knives and such.

I've always heard about these but I've never encountered one myself. I usually stay in the more technical areas like board games, science, math, etc. and I do not see any of these.

I guess it is only when you want to go to the big controversial issues that no one, even in the real world, would agree on, that I suppose you get these troubles. Deep down, I feel that these controversial things like abortion, scientology, religion, etc. aren't really issues. There is no clear right/wrong so don't waste your time arguing them.

Instead, go to the science/technology/etc. and provide information there. Lots of them need information and those information won't be controversial. There is only one right answer. Let the English and Philosophy people argue out which of their taste buds are more accurate. Go for truths, go for technical.

Probability only works with stupidity and virus makers are far from stupid. Probability only works when viruses are made randomly by churning out combinations of syntax and variables. Only then do you the 90%/10% virus market.

Instead, virus makers try to get the biggest bang for the buck. Why spend a year writing code that affects only 10% of the population when you can write code that affects 90% of the population? Thus, almost 100% of reasonable virus makers choose to infect Windows.

OS X and Linux do not necessarily have to be more secure than Windows to not be infected. They just have to be secure enough so that to infect it, hackers need to work more than 9 times as hard to write a similar virus for Windows.

The above is for personal computers people run at home.

Servers are a different playing field. I believe there are very few viruses. Servers are run by people who know what they are doing. I don't know my statistics but I find it unlikely that even Microsoft servers are infected with viruses.

Water is not designed to flow out of it at a constant rate. Instead, it is the height of the water left in the water clock that is designed to decrease at a constant rate.

In fact, it is impossible for the water to flow out at a constant rate (without keeping the water level constant by adding more water).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toricelli's_law

When the water tank is y=x^4, x=y^1/4. The change in volume for each change in y is the Area lost=pi*(y^1/4)^2=pi*y^1/2

Toricelli's law says that the flow rate is proportional to y^1/2 so it works out nicely.

Why is Windows 7 not a service pack for Vista?

"Unlike its predecessor, Windows 7 is intended to be an incremental upgrade with the goal of being fully compatible with existing device drivers, applications, and hardware." - Wikipedia

It seems Vista users should be given these incremental upgrades for free. I mean, when people bought Vista, they bought 1, 2, and 3, not 1, 2, and 3 with some bugs and incompatibilities. Is it reasonable to assume that the buyers expected Microsoft to fix the bugs and incompatibilities?

It seems now, Microsoft comes out with Windows 7 that has the same 1, 2, and 3 as Vista but with fewer bugs and better compatibility. It isn't fair that Vista users have to pay money again just to use the same 1, 2, and 3 that they were promised in Vista.

How much should a piece of software change before a company is justified to charge users hundreds of dollars again to upgrade?