I have a 600mAh battery pack that has Apple, USB and mini USB connectors on it. I paid about $60 for it, and it'll hold 4 full charges for an iPhone or two for an iPad. It'll charge the phone from zero to full in about 10 minutes.

Not a perfect solution, but it might help. It's just a really handy thing to have in my backpack.

No, they'll just hack off your thumb, too.

Cashiers never notice the old "dismembered bloody thumb authentication" trick.

You don't have to be the biggest company around to make quality TV people actually want to watch. The BBC is on this one tiny island yet they produce a dozen shows Americans (and others) gobble up. Top Gear alone is the most-watched "informative" show in the world. Hundreds of millions of people watch it. Doctor Who, Sherlock, etc etc.

Canada can make fewer, higher quality shows if they're able. But they don't seem to want to try.

"Consensus," yes. Scientific consensus, no.

That's not what scientific consensus means. "Consensus" is what happens when scientists are out of reasonable questions to ask about a theory because they have been tested and verified.

To be honest, if magic existed we wouldn't call it magic, we'd call it "physics" or "chemistry."

Skeptical Science does a good job of explaining the science behind climate change and answering about every objection there is with cited sources. It also answers each question at three different levels of scientific fluency.

The thing with "consensus" is that consensus is what happens when scientists are out of (reasonable) questions to ask and answer. You put forth your measurements and say "we believe this is caused by X." And somebody else says "Ah, but it could be caused by Y!" So you devise an experiment (or set of observations) to test whether the results are from X or Y. Once that's established and no one has any other questions on the X-Y issue, then consensus has been achieved.

That's what happened with climate science. All the objections have been raised, further study has been conducted, and the questions have been laid to rest. If after all the questions have been asked and answered and you're still not satisfied, you are no longer a skeptic, you're just a denier, and there's not much that can be done about that. But it doesn't matter, because the beautiful (and terrible) thing about science is it's true whether you want to believe it or not.

Not only that, but understanding what's going on close to (or at) the metal gives you a much better intuitive understanding of what a high level language is doing. You can't really understand what an abstraction layer is doing unless you understand what it's abstracting away.

I've got a MS in Electrical Engineering, and my course track was computer architecture. So actually designing instruction set architectures, building the logical architecture to implement them and then laying out the transistors in Cadence. Once I understood that, programming really clicked for me and "made sense."

Of course today the only code I wrote (for a living) is SQL, which is about as abstract as you can get.

I was a little surprised at how butthurt redditors got over this issue. First, the reddit admins made the decisions they did to ban the things they did for legal, not moral reasons. It's illegal to distribute somebody else's copyrighted pictures, some of which qualify as CP. They must honor DMCA takedown notices, which they were receiving from the celebs' lawyers or else they lose safe harbor protection and open themselves up to being sued by said celebs' lawyers. This is a no-brainer.

Morally, it is wrong to break into somebody's account, to copy their private photos, to distribute them, posses, or look at them. Using the word "morally" is usually tricky because different people have different moral standards. That said, I don't know of any moral framework that permits such behavior. Golden rule? Nope. Any religious moral standard? Nope. Kant's categorical imperative? Nope. Not even utilitarianism because it doesn't maximize the good for all involved. There's basically no way to say that it's not wrong to distribute these pictures.

Yet, the reddit groupthink is completely butthurt over the reddit admins refusal to let them use reddit as a platform to conduct illegal and immoral acts. And it's easy to see this is the predominate view on reddit. Just go to the threads the admins made about their decisions. All the top rated comments are opposed to the admins' stance. I posted in agreement with the admins and was downvoted into oblivion. And yet redditors pretend to be these enlightened liberals. They love wagging their fingers at racists or sexists or capitalists or hypocritical Christians or US foreign policy or the NSA scandals. Hell, they're opposed to the NSA's activities because of privacy concerns, yet they gleefully invade the privacy of the victims of these break-ins.

And you would think when told "no you can't do this," they might say "aww shucks" and be chagrined at being called out for their shiteous behavior, or at least shut their traps and slink away to trade the photos on bittorrent instead. But no, they're vocally butthurt, angry at the reddit admins, that their "free speech" is being infringed upon, because they're not free to invade someone else's privacy. What the fuck? It's like a peeping Tom, busted, screaming at the cops because "I have every right to hide in the bushes and peep through somebody else's windows!" No. Not only is it morally wrong to peep on somebody else, but it's illegal to be in their bushes! There's no legal or moral justification for their behavior and they're angry at being called out about it! What the hell?!

I'm just kind of stunned. While I didn't think redditors would be paragons of virtue, I thought they at least had some common decency. Apparently not.

If your nudes were illegally posted to reddit and you sent them a DMCA take down request, I imagine they would honor it.

While it is morally wrong to, without permission, take, distribute, posses or look at someone else's private photos without their permission, reddit corporate made their decisions on the subreddits to ban because of legal reasons, not moral reasons.

They banned the Fappening subreddits not because they were "morally bad" but because people were continuously posting illegal copyrighted content and, since some of the celeb nudes were taken before they were 18, CP. It's not a moral issue, it's a legal issue.

That said, I think it's pretty disgusting the way redditors have gotten their panties in a twist over this. They feel like the spirit of "free speech" has been infringed because the website won't let them illegally post somebody else's private photographs. The reddit groupthink rails against the NSA and these terrible invasions of privacy but without irony thinks it's perfectly acceptable to invade the privacy of the celebrity victims of this cracking incident. The fuck?

I would love to see Jennifer Lawrence's boobs. If she wants to post them for free, or pose for Playboy, great, I'm there. But I have not and will not look at the leaked photos because it's morally wrong to invade someone's privacy like that. It'd be wrong for somebody to take and look at my private photos, and it's wrong to take and look at her private photos.

This is the first smart watch I've seen that doesn't look terrible. For me, a watch is primarily a piece of jewelry. I'll stick with my Ebel, thank you.

Exactly. And her defenders who are crying sexism and misogyny do so while they, completely without irony, take the actions of ONE individual and extrapolate from that that men who play video games are ALL like that.

Sexism absolutely exists. There is a segment of the population who, upon hearing that Steve is bad at math will say "Wow Steve, you suck at math," but when hearing that Amy is bad at math will say "Girls suck at math."

However, if a woman (or man!) threatens a man with sexual violence and death ("I'm going to cut off your penis and murder you"), we say the attacker is a deranged psychopath. But if a man threatens a woman, it's because MEN are deranged psychopaths.

Fuck that shit.

What are you talking about? Threatening someone with rape and murder is illegal. It's called "assault." Look it up. Please calmly rethink your post and point of view on the subject.

She could also call it "harassment" and get a restraining order.

But none of these things will happen because there is no financial incentive to seek justice.

If Quinn were a developer for, say, Blizzard, and someone made credible threats against her, do you know what would happen? She'd report it to her boss who would say "well shit, we make money off her work! Can't have someone interfering with that!" and he'd call their security people and the cops, they'd talk to Twitter, get the IP address of the perp, talk to the ISP, find this person and prosecute him, and it would never be a story.

But no, the people who make money off Quinn are the SJW blogs and game "journalists" who can write clickbait articles about how, because ONE supposed troll wrote mean things to her "the gaming community" has a misogyny problem.