Please see: http://www.science20.com/a_qua...

Not quite as clean a confirmation as one would like: " It would be like if I asked you to believe that by putting a dollar bill in a special laundry machine and spinning it for half an hour with some special detergent the dollar turns into a $1000 note. You are allowed to watch the machine as it does its work, but it is me who opens it and extracts the bill when it has finished its magic conversion. I doubt you would buy it."

If it sounds too good to be true...

Seems to be an exclusive or. "Ron Paul" or "somebody sane", which implies Ron Paul isn't in the sane set.

Why, do you have research to indicate that mental toughness is such an important factor, and that amateur high school kids have more of it than professional runners ?

amateur high school kids who are raised in a culture which, from birth, will punish them for outwardly showing any sign of weakness or intolerance for pain.

Do you understand just how severe their passage-to-adulthood rituals are?

What's truly amazing is how people try so hard to find any excuse to deny the genetic evidence. "Eugenics deniers" are far worse than "climate change deniers" in that the scientific evidence for eugenics is far greater than even that for anthropomorphic global warming.

It was nice of you to completely ignore the argument for "mental toughness" AKA "I had my penis mutilated as a grown-ass man and would have lost everything had I shown any sign of discomfort during the process".

If you've never competed in serious athletics (where there are a thousand people younger, stronger, and hungry waiting for you to fail so they can take your job) breathing down your neck you might not understand just how important a skill swallowing pain is.

My work laptop has 4GB of RAM on it and Windows 7 and it runs just fine. The only thing that slows it down is when the corporate-mandated management scripts run and start pegging the hard drive with virus scans, audits and the like. More RAM wouldn't help that. Switching to an SSD did.

According to Resource Monitor, I'm using about 3GB, with 850MB of that used as cache. A bit over 1GB of that is Firefox.

So, yeah, I could see 1GB really sucking when used with a modern web browser and many tabs open (like I do). 4GB, though, hasn't really held me back much.

Apparently, at least part of Vista's memory woes stemmed from the poorly tuned "SuperCache" feature, that would aggressively try to pre-cache data in RAM. Its appetite was apparently too large. It apparently also didn't manage its disk buffers very well. (This is all third or fourth hand knowledge and so could be shaky. I've never run Vista myself. If someone has more details, pipe up!)

Thank you for the detailed, thoughtful reply, including all the numbers.

Ah yes. I knew there was a term for it. It's been a while since I took my thermo class. Specific heat is normalized to mass, though, and both granite and basalt are more dense than seawater. Granite is ~2700 kg/m^3, basalt is ~3000kg/m^3, while seawater at high depths is around 1050kg/m^3.

When you factor that in, water still wins, but only by a factor of 1.5 to 2.

Allow my naivete to shine: What's the temperature of all of the rock that water is in contact with, and what's its thermal capacity relative to the water? Could it be that it's slow to warm as you need to warm all the rock it's in contact with?

Belkin has been making defective routers for nearly 11 years now. I can't believe people still buy their products after the 2003 HTTP hijacking fiasco. Did everyone seriously believe them when they said "we won't do it again"?

At least, in the case of Windows, you can forcibly disable this "feature" with registry edits...or you can just block Microsoft IP's at your router. Routers have no way to disable stuff like this other than flashing custom firmware which is not always available depending on model.

I use a custom built mini-ITX Linux machine as a router, running Gentoo.

Imagine having enough money to buy a small aircraft (and time to get a license to fly it) OR a new luxury car, but not really feeling rich enough to justify buying both

Except for the fact this car has the performance characteristics not of a private jet, but of a $40,000 used Cessna with half the seats removed and rocks in one of the fuel tanks. Anybody who can afford this can afford a comparable fixed-wing aircraft easily.

It was implemented against the Win16 API, and required a Windows runtime to operate. It was no less a Windows program than any other Windows program at the time. You could launch it from DOS, sure, but if that's your criteria, there wasn't a Windows program before Win95, the first Windows version to boot directly to Windows rather than launching from DOS.

Oh, yeah, I definitely remember the pain of bank-switching vs. segmented memory. I was there and programmed both. It stunk.

At least the Apple ][gs could directly address 16MB, although the 65816's addressing modes I hear were less than awesome. I must admit I never wrote any native 65816 code.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I definitely prefer a more style-sheet oriented way of declaring how a document should look, and then writing my document tagged in the elements of that style. Something style-sheet oriented is vastly superior to something more formatting-oriented at a lower level.

The problem is that most GUIs, in an effort to reduce clutter, make it at best cumbersome and at worst impossible to determine if your cursor is inside or outside of a formatting tag. (And then there's Word and Outlook, who add a bunch of heuristic behaviors on top of that that just make it worse. I've had to nuke whole paragraphs just because there's some weird 'hot point' in the middle of a line somewhere that keeps making the editor go gonzo. FrameMaker is not as bad, but it gets weird in other ways, especially with figures, tables, their anchors and their captions. And then there's the brokenness of nearly every browser-based rich-text editing widget ever.)

I would much rather have a WYSIWYG preview and a separate, less WYSIWYG editing mode that was more tag oriented. Heck, I'd write my specifications in TeX or LaTeX if they let me. But, alas, I'm stuck with FrameMaker and Word. At least with FM, they force us to never use local formatting overrides and stick to the style sheet. They strip all formatting overrides when compiling a book.