I was always under the impression that taking paracetamol and other similar drugs along with alcohol was rather unhealthy to the liver and whatnot...

Drinking lots of water is always good though!

I guess in the end I fail to see what the big deal is.

As long as Google isn't selling my financial data to unscrupulous persons and having me get billed all kinds of money for things I don't want, or creating a dossier on all the weird shit I've searched for and forwarding it to my boss, what's the big deal?

So what if some marketers know everything about what I like to buy or look for? How, in the end, does that really affect my life? Yes, it's a bit creepy sometimes, but it makes no impact on my quality of life.

What *does* freak me out is how my credit card company can ask me to confirm my height and weight when I talk to them on the phone, and when I ask them how the f**k they found out how much I weigh, they tell me that by law they're allowed to download all the information from the Department of Transit and so they know everything that's on my drivers license. THAT's the kind of stuff that I find extremely scary, and that's the kind of thing you can't do anything at all to prevent other than living in a shack in the mountains somewhere.

Wouldn't the real conspiracy be for the government to tell everyone about all the things they screw up, and keep all the successes on the down-low, so as to make everyone think that they simply are incapable of doing anything right?

The question then is, how exactly are you supposed to breathe? If you're out of flux with everything else, where's your air supply gonna come from, unless you wore some kind of rebreather too...

I've always wondered that in Star Trek episodes for example; a crew member gets sent into some slightly out of phase dimension but can still breathe. Where is all this out of phase oxygen coming from?!

I think what I love most about the LHC and whatnot is that, despite all the incredible and amazing science and technology and innovation and potential for learning behind it, what it really comes down to is just us banging rocks together and watching what happens, just like humans have been doing throughout history. It just happens that this time, the rocks are incredibly tiny and incredibly fast.

Kinda puts it all in perspective, in kind of a cool way, IMO.

From what I've gleaned from various Microsoft blogs, they DO release nightly builds, internally to all their own testers and employees.

That way, as far as I can tell, they get all the benefit of nightly builds, with absolutely zero of the downsides in terms of company image and dealing with buggy software in the wild.

I was under the impression that the whole point of a corporation IS that it is technically an individual, just a really big, rich one.

"The definition of a corporation is "An artificial person or legal entity created by or under the authority of the laws of a state" (Blacks Law Dictionary)""

So, tell me again why the corporation shouldn't get taxed as an individual too?

It may be anecdotal, but the linux that came pre-installed on my hp mini 1000 was so slow and shitty and useless that it was pretty much unusable. I love linux and I was really psyched to havee a real linux setup for once. But, it was TERRIBLE.

So.. i installed Windows 7 RC1 on the device and it was amazing. Fast, slick, easier to use, and *FAST*.

So, if you're trying to insinuate that Microsoft actively killed Linux on netbooks, I'd say that's somewhat naive.

Man, where are my mod points when I need them.. your post is spot on. It reminds me of trying to find an open source replacement for Visio, so I could throw together some really simple circuit diagrams.

  I found a good half dozen programs that had the basic functionality I needed, except that they all sucked, really, really, really hard. A lot of them had amazing feature sets and could do some incredible stuff, but when it came to the basic nitty gritty of .. clicking on an object ... rotating it ... scaling it... moving it from here to there... they all failed *miserably*. Half of them didn't let you scale objects, half didn't let you rotate them at all, the others only did 90 degree increments, etc. The most basic, raw surface of the interface of all these programs were simply unusable.

It doesn't matter if all the open-source apps were loaded to the brim with extremely powerful features, which indeed many of them were, if it's like pulling teeth to drop some objects on the screen and move them and point them where I want them to.

I eventually found a circuit drawing program a friend of mine was writing for fun, that actually did what I wanted pretty much, but then I realized I could get Visio for free from school through the academic alliance, so I switched to that, and the joy of having a gigantic company's worth of resources to make sure every little tiny piece of the interface works great became apparent. (except autoconnect. that feature sucks.) It makes it so much easier to just Do Work, and not Work at doing work.

Maybe you make that in a month, but for someone making minimum wage, 5k is half a years worth of after-tax pay. Heck, even after a healthy raise, 5k is almost 3 months after-tax wages for me too...

$5k is an awful lot of money when you're earning less than $8 an hour. I don't ever want to risk going to jail, but I can completely understand why the equation might go the other way for someone. Especially in a situation like this where unless another security camera caught an image of their getaway car, or somehow someone catches them fencing the merchandise, the risk level is pretty darn low overall.

Yeah, the first time I ever tried texting while driving I came within about 4 inches of rear ending someone at a red light. Learned that lesson EXTREMELY quickly. Thank goodness for 4 wheel disc brakes!

Maybe it's a small percentage point, but twice the size of texas is still pretty damn big!

Not to be a killjoy, but don't forget about the wholesale destruction of whole civilizations, and blatant abuse and rape of other civilizations as a result of the european expansion.

I hope there really aren't any aliens, at least none of them nearby! Get a bunch of earthlings down on them and they'd be fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked.....

Regular beat cops in the UK don't have guns, but if you think they're more than one radio call for backup away from a fully armed squad, you'd be sorely mistaken!

agreed, try driving with the iphone navigation in a city..
my friend and I were driving around a city, and we used the iphone nav to find the nearest Subway for food (which it did), but then the lack of realtime updates on the iphone as to your current location, combined with the fact that the city was seriously lacking in signs that actually told you the name of the streets, meant that the directions were 100% useless, because there was no way to match up the 'turn-by-turn' directions on screen, with what you're actually driving yourself into.

After getting lost for 10 minutes, I ended up pulling out my trusty Tomtom (possibly the single best gadget i've ever owned in terms of how much it has directly benefitted my life) and we got there in no time.

So, unless the iPhone's navigation gives you real time updates of your location (which the new version might, I don't know), it is a complete non-feature to me.