I didn't know you, but I felt I did.

Yes, my son has an Android tablet, and we use the restricted account for him. He can't install software, pay for things in apps, or access youtube or a web browser. It's safe for him to play the games I've set up for him - many of which require internet access. And he can't run up a huge bill accidentally.

Before Restricted accounts existed, I used a thing called Kids Mode for a while. This also worked quite well, but the interface was much less usable than vanilla Android.

First actually helpful post!

As a parent of a 5 year old who currently has no unsupervised web access, I'm painfully aware that this will not last. He can currently access curated content from the internet in some games without my supervision. He will need web access in the not too distant future. Trust, showing them how to be safe, and how to find things that actually interest them, is clearly the way forward.

(As an aside to those who think parenting equals full time supervision... I don't think any of you actually have kids.)

I actually spent quite some time recently looking for non-smart TVs... and couldn't find any at all I wanted. So I bought an LG smart TV.

During the install, I had to agree to the Terms and Conditions and the Privacy Policy. There was also a Viewing agreement that says I agree to them monitoring what I watch, what buttons I push, and so on. I didn't agree to that one. There was also another one I can't recall, which I also didn't agree to. I think that one was about letting them insert advertising.

The TV itself is lovely, and the smart features are actually nicely designed, responsive, and worth having. But not worth giving up my privacy for and certainly not to let them foist more adverts on me.

So I disconnected it from the internet, and so it shall remain.

I still use Adblock Plus. I actually don't mind seeing non-intrusive ads, and so far it seems to be working OK.

Just out of interest, what is the problem with just unticking the "allow some non-intrusive advertising" check box? Does Adblock Edge offer some additional features too? Or do you have some reason to suspect that Adblock Plus wouldn't honour your config?

So if a minute comes off, it's just fear mongering. And if one or two goes on? We pat ourselves on the back and ignore it? Seems like we get to ignore it in both cases!

Good point about climate change though. I also noticed they had moved beyond just the nuclear threat. I suppose it is called the Domesday clock, not the "Nuclear Threat Clock", but I kind of agree it should stick with what it was established for.

(btw: I think climate change is a real threat, but there are lots of existential threats other than nuclear weapons and climate change.)

The clock has actually moved back and forth over the years. Why do *you* think a minute will come off this year?

No idea who the researchers are, and I don't have an agenda. I linked to Wikipedia!

I have read about some of these studies before, on the web, and in fairly lay publications like New Scientist. I have no idea if they are wrong, true, or just some vast liberal conspiracy by left-leaning scientists to irritate their conservative colleagues!

I was only prompted to reply because the original poster saw it as political "fear" propoganda from "the left", and I saw it quite differently. Which made me think of these studies... make of them what you will!

It's interesting reading your response to this. I saw it as "clever people try to assess big problems facing us, and communicate it in a way most people can easily understand". You saw it as fear mongering by the left.

Interestingly, there have been several studies that link political ideologies with fear-response. For example, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

Conservative people tend to have a higher disgust response, be more aggressive, and more resistant to change or things that appear threatening. Liberals tend to be not as frightened by apparent danger and more accepting of possibly disruptive change.

Of course, this may be completely wrong, but it does tally with my (entirely unscientific) experience.

IANAP, but my admittedly also very shallow understanding, is that when we're talking about the energy of the "vaccuum", we mean "energy associated with space itself".

A vaccuum is typically defined by the absence of matter in a volume of space (but not necessarily light or other energy). But let's exclude those too - there is no matter or electromagnetic radiation at all.

Even with those exclusions, at a fundamental level space appears to be a seething maelstrom of quantum particles popping in and out of existence. There seems to be some energy associated with "empty" space.

  Some people posit that the vaccuum (i.e. space as we know it) may be "unstable" - that the particular energy it possesses could be lower than it is - and that we're just caught on a local bump in the energy landscape. If the vaccuum ever "fell off" that bump to a lower level, it would apparently spread at the speed of light across the entire universe from wherever it started, destroying everything that currently exists, and leaving behind... I don't know what. More vaccuum, but with a much lower energy associated with it, and with lots of new matter and energy created by the release of the vaccuum energy. Probably.

Anway, happy for a real physicist to correct me on some or all of the above - that's just my very lay understanding of what is meant by vaccuum energy.

Interesting thesis, but I don't buy it. Audience were not discovering technology for the first time, and it was not the first time cinema explored it. One of the most classic sci fi films ever was Metropolis, made in the 1920s. There were some very good sci fi films made in that era (and some very bad ones too).

In fact, Blade runner didn't appeal to audiences much when it was released. It has become a classic afterwards, probably because it's based on a quality story and the acting, direction, music and atmosphere of the film are great. And because Ridley got rid of the annoying voice over, which the movie execs mandated so the dumb audience could understand it. Not a passionate audience, note, or at least, that's not how the movie industry saw the audience and the films they were creating for them.

I put it in quotes because it is not a genuine paradox.

Wrong, nothing to do with being modulo some number. It's the permutations of pairs that gives rise to it.

Mod parent up, wish I had mod points.

This is exactly right. It's the number of permutations of pairs that gives rise to the birthday "paradox". Nothing to do with being modulo some number.

Hmmm... I got my performance stats from a different web site. But the performance table on oclHashcat's fron page says 11231M c/s for SHA256. That's eleven billion a second, admittedly using 8 GPUs, but in the ballpark of my original post.

If crypt is iterating SHA256 110,000 times, that sounds fairly good. I've been looking at scrypt, which is explicitly designed to resist hardware based attacks.