Hehe. Well, lightning strike deaths are directly proportional to both population and "atmospheric energy" or average heat I guess. I hope you stay right, and we could accurately restate the same facts next year (perhaps 16 to 1) - would be fine with me!

Bird flu, swine flu - I was never afraid of these things. My attitude was perhaps a bit on the "I'll believe it when I see it" side of things. But something about Ebola scares me... I saw the "Frontline", where they went to pick people up in remote villages that were exhibiting symptoms (in a hearse no less - for lack of an ambulance). I guess what scared me was - the fact that their population density is so sparse and yet it was still spreading. Also, the sheer terrifying nature in which the victims die - painfully and helplessly (more or less)... I realize that they have customs and rituals (along with a lack of education) that simplify the virus' job of transmitting itself - but I can't help but wonder if our more germ conscious society would be better defended, with the increase in travel and population density.

I would agree... But in practice, every UI that I've used that isn't built from native code works like total crap. I don't understand why, but it just always seems slow, sluggish, and the components just don't work exactly like their native counterparts (like you'd expect them to function). Also, in reality every implementation is a bit different. Finally, we add an entire additional layer of security holes (all of the problems that I fix these days on my friends computers seem to result from unpatched java or adobe products).

This is why I don't waste my time with Python. There will always be a latest and greatest scripting language to come along and replace the previous one. We all know that real code is written in C/C++, but it seems that in the corporate world this has been deemed too difficult to understand. The recent trend that I've noticed is to create your system from piles of scripted modules. Also, part of the complexity in C++ is self inflicted. Years ago, C++ code was like a more flexible C - but with cool objects that you could use to create flexible, inheritable objects. More recently, people have taken the whole template aspect to an extreme and it (in my opinion) has really screwed the whole thing up.

No one _really_ understands it. This has to do with the "duality" of a particle to behave like a wave and a particle at the same time. The famous "dual slit" experiment demonstrates it, and it's more or less the foundation of what quantum physics is based on. Sure, people would answer you and pretend they understand it. But the truth is, no one really does. I saw a scientist on a documentary before admit that - sure everyone understands at some level how magnetism works and what it is. But at the root of it, no one really understands that either - what is physically going on to actually push two magnets away or pull them towards each other.

I thought about this. If someday, we had space vehicles that could travel really fast - call it speed:V. We'd send out the vehicle, travelling toward the destination planet at speed V. We'd also send out a comm vehicle at speed V/2. This comm vehicle would always be mid way between the vehicle and the planet. At some time, the comm vehicle would start transmitting entangled photons in both directions. It would take time for the initial connection to be established, but then theoretically, we'd have photon pairs at both ends - which perhaps we could use for communications... I dunno.

Teleportation of pork fried rice directly into my stomach

LEDs don't really emit much heat. The thing throws off a lot of light, but it's not a nuke.

Very interesting... Thanks!

ya know I loved it when they first invented this whole new bright LED technology back 5 or so years ago... I was so impressed by the street lights, and anything else that used them - I could easily tell the new LEDs from the old ones. But when my old clock radio died, i went to wal mart and bought a cheapo 20 buck LED lit digital alarm clock with cool looking blue light. But the fucking thing is Soooo bright that at night it's like having the sun in my bedroom with me. I was thinking about sticking some semi transparent plastic over it, but I couldn't really find anything suitable. so, i just throw clothes on top of it and it becomes useless unless i care enough about the time to dig it up.

About explanation 2... I thought I remember reading sometime in the past that something like 10% of human beings are immune to HIV. Is that real - or not? If it's real, than that gives another boost to explanation 2...

I had bought a digital video camera long ago when they first started recording digitally. I felt compelled to rip the videos to hard drive for "permanent storage"... But sooner or later I realized that the best way to store this stuff for long term chance of success is actually back on the tapes. I suggest you now take your digitized videos, borrow a camera (if you don't have one) from a buddy that has a camera that stores miniDV, and store those videos on tape. Then put em in the closet - so if your hard drives ever fail (which they will some day), you'll have the tapes with which to recover the memories from the good 'old days. I had thought about going to DVD, bluray, or whatever, but when you think about it - it's really cold storage - the best device suited to the task is tape.

I was trying to do some robotics... I could not find ANYTHING that would help me put together the mechanical aspect of the whole thing. As far as I got was buying the (I think it was 10 bucks) USB board from radio shack that you solder together. It lets you control pretty much anything from simple PC software. Actually, even with an EE degree (which I haven't used in 23 years), there was a bit of a learning curve with wiring up the output pins to relays in order to get anything to actually work, but when it did - man was that a blast (for a geek type). I took the kids' old battery controlled car that they used to drive around the driveway in and turned it into a robot... well, OK, it could only go forward and backwards at full speed - but it was cool!

Just to back up my credentials here - I wrote VirtuoCD, an early CDROM emulator, a whole suite of WDM drivers for a PCI device with NDIS devices hanging off of the WDM bus, the Oracle VMAPI - a driver while lets you communicate to applications in a guest operating system from the host OS. Various NDIS miniports and intermediate driver (WinPCap type stuff), StorPort Virtual miniports that represent file backed storage that look like disks but are really just files on a disk. ANd a few other things. Not bragging, just saying that I know kernel development. And you know what? I could be off, and you could be right. I'll admit. There could be no case that you could be assured that it'd be safe enough to continue the OS long enough to save files. I still say you could find your unsaved work somewhere in the memory image. I know that Microsoft would never release that kind of power because 99% of the users would fuck up their systems worse, but I still think that I could use that kind of power to mitigate the damage that is inherent when you BSoD and are forced to power cycle.

I don't know where you're going with that. Not saying it's not possible. What if - instead of the bsod, you were brought to the equivalent of a WinDBG output of the crash? You could diagnose the cause of the crash while everything was halted, figure out what's in a corrupted state and what isn't - unload modules, stop threads, change memory values, do whatever you want to do. Then if you felt comfortable enough, you could allow the operating system to "resume". Look, I'm not saying that this is an end-user thing to do, and lots of time you'd probably be better off letting the machine crash. But if I had that kind of power in the halted state - I could even find my unsaved documents in memory and store them in some way without even allowing the OS to continue. And I wouldn't just have the backtrace available to me, I'd have the entire contents of memory such that I could !process 0 7 and look at every thread in the system. Hey, I could be wrong - since this kind of power doesn't exist - but like I said, I have been able to reanimate a crashed dev studio by messing around while it was in it's halted state. I'd think it'd be possible to do the same in the kernel in certain cases. Are you saying with certainty that there is never a case where this is possible? it is true though, that lots of corruption could have happened before some trap actually caught the bad state and KeBugChecked. Maybe you're right. I just don't think that you are. With all due respect.