"Make this drug on a chip" is kind of awesome, but the next step is the "FPGA" equivilent where novel compounds can be downloaded to it and have it assemble them from base compounds up. What might be implausible industrially due to having too many steps becomes plausible on the very small scale. From here we have the ability to have standard chemical inputs generate any given chemical output and we're on the way to 3D printers that can print almost anything. Thinking futuristically here, but thats your first step to a genuine star trek replicator without having to resort to imaginary quantum woo

Yeah I think your right actually. Its nearly 30 years ago, so in my defence my memory is somewhat hazy on the exact details of how the "poke of doom" worked.

Beware the Doom floppies you found "left behind" at school. GET U PWND LLAMA!

There used to be a series of commands you could send to a C64 to get the motor to do some fairly unnatural moves(such as slam down the write head and then eject, if I remember rightly. Its been a *long* time).

We used to leave "game" floppies around the classroom (This was back in the 80s) and then wait for the high pitch whine , and if we where lucky , even a whiff of blue smoke.

Kids are little terrorists, and I wasn't much better lol.

Well if we're taking inspiration from a 2000yo book of philosophy, we can solve the problem of god killing the tower of babylon by taking inspiration from a 100year old book of philosophy (Niztche's "The gay science") and just kill god before he kills us!

One of the problems of Psychiatry is that because the brain has been bit of a black box to us for so long (We can see the input, we can see the output, but the gears and cogs inside remain a bit of a mystery) disorder classification has been mostly about symptomology rather than causes, most of the time. Docs have long suspected that "schizophrenia" was a collection of disorders with similar-ish results. This finding appears to confirm it.

See also: ADHD and Autism.

*rimshot*. I do realise your just making a joke, however it is worth noting that multiple personalities is not considered part of the schizophrenia spectrum, but rather part of the disasociative disorders spectrum. Its a ketamine disease rather than an Acid disease, to make a metaphor.

The new inhalers that don't use CFCs are 10x the cost... $30 to $80 an inhaler, up from $5 to $10. There might not be new hospitalizations from people using the new inhalers, but there may be more deaths from people not buying the inhaler they need.

..... or $0 if you live in a country with a healthcare system thats evolved past the 1800s "fuck the poor" model.

Seriously speaking though, I just googled the price of a Ventolin puffer in the US. $23!!!! What the hell america? Thats over half an hour pay for most people!

How many asthma patients have died as a result of this plan, because they can't use CFC propellants for their medication?

The precise number is --> Zero.

The change in propellants is completely transparent to the puffers efficacy.

Speak for yourself. If its someone elses kit, I really couldn't give a damn. Whatever works for yo.

Some folks love their surfaces. Some folks love their droids, and I kinda like my iPad. And we're all right, they are all the best device for whoever has it and thinks its right for them.

while the intent of this law is good, it might have unintended consequences for contracts requiring NDA's that now allows customers to review secret details of products or company practices on public forums.

If it ends oppressive NDAs I'll pop a cork. Any gain in freedoms should be celebrated. Protecting corporate secrets just isn't as important as protecting free speech.

Go's an awesome game, but try convincing an 11 year old to pick up a board game.

Right - so if hackers can just sniff this protocol, and with NFC cards being quite common nowadays here in Europe, why aren't we hearing about the widespread abuses? I know there haven't been any erroneous payments on my NFC-enabled card for the ~2 years I've had mine (unless the hackers have also managed to hack my bank statements, those bastards).

Its happening all over the place dude. Theres a damn good reason I hacked the rfid chip thingo out of my card.

To some degree it has already happened. With no further updates to bukkit my 6yo is in hell. He has been playing Minecraft since he wasn't even 2yo, his entire youth has been focused on it.

If it was any other game I'd say "...and thats a good thing", but minecraft is a phenomena not like any other. A friend of mine has a deeply autistic son who's never had friends due to the toll autism takes, and he's had deep troubles with school and the like. Until minecraft. On minecraft he's just another kid on a server making castles with his buddies and being part of a gang of kids creating and playing. Its really brought him out of his shell and if I come over to visit his mom he'll even come out and say hello and want to talk (about minecraft... always about minecraft. Its a hobby), and thats a fucking achievement.

He's now interested in school and maths finally because he wants to be jeb (the main 9-5 developer on minecraft these days) one day. He's got a hero.

Basically minecraft is turning him into a normal kid, and I'd hate to see anything ruin that.

SRS is awesome, and making fun of racists and sexist knuckledraggers is a pretty important service to the community. If we cant make klansman womenbeaters leave of their own voltiion, then maybe reddit isn't actually banning enough.

Heres a better proposal: Give SRS mods global admin rights.

I think your misunderstanding the scope of POSIX. Posix handles a number of unix type contingencies but its somewhat mute on a lot of I/O. For instance there isn't any standard for Audio. There ALSA, AudioKit (on macs, its a unix too!) , Jack, OSS, FFADO, Pulse, GStreamer and so on.

Then for graphics you've got framebuffers, GL, X windows, Mir and so on.

And pretty much no standards for driving Phone hardware, and no your favorite open source "One day a phone will use this" impleentation doesnt count.

Most of which are somewhat unsuitable and overbloated anyway.

You are right in some sense in that Androids weak point has been traditionally situating drivers in the davlik core making C/C++ coding have to loop back into java to access it , although as time goes on Google has gotten wise to this. I worked on a project maybe 4-5 years ago porting SIP software to the android and it was nearly impossible to get any sensible latency due to the fact there was no native audio driver we could find and the JNI davlik ones where just terrible. Apparently this isn't the case anymore, and newer android doesnt really have this problem.

The problem for App developers though, is that unlike iPhone where apple has tight control over loadout and has made it silky smooth to upgrade (Well compared to reflashing most droid models) Androids tend to end up stuck on the OS revision it shipped with meaning theres a hell of a lot of Android 2.x phones out there that are next to useless for cutting edge development.