I guess since it conducts heat well it won't go poof like this earlier material:
http://www.scientificamerican....

Thanks for the useful advice AC, but having being burned by distros in the past that are cutting edge and that I do love in many ways (looking at you Gentoo) you tend to end up favouring ones that when things get b0rked you can easily reformat and reinstall with minimum hassle. The Ubuntu forums are also great. I'll stay on the mainstream bandwagon for now.

Phillip.

Excuse late reply but yes I have been plugging it in over the past few years every time I reformat my machine. Am on the latest Ubuntu at the moment, running Gnome Shell. It does not work. I've tried reading the forums but no apparent easy fix. I'm not going to bother doing kernel dumps etc as it simply isn't important enough for me. Like many others, if SB can't be bothered with me as a user then onboard sound is "good enough" and I'm not buying any more sounds cards.

Phillip.

1) Make a reality TV show: Vote Them Off The Planet
2) Vote people off the planet with one way and return categories. whether for real or not doesn't matter, but if for real you can have the option for people to only do the one way when they want to pay for the return leg.
3) Profit!

Daikatana was about as Japanese as the Teenage Mutant Turtles.

I have several X-Fi cards at home. It would be nice to know what they sound like. Unfortunately I use Linux.

Phillip.

Or Ubuntu and other popular distro to do something like this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/148440

Then it's normal for people to have encrypted stuff on their drives that they can't decrypt. And thus a "reasonable man" could not be expected to be able to decrypt such stuff even if he cooperated fully. They could be using full disk crypto with an encrypted container file that they can't decrypt. They can decrypt the first but not the second (or maybe they can - it becomes harder to tell :) ).

But once a popular OS has stuff like this by default, it's much easier for the defence to argue that you can't do it.

Of course in this case - the guy has been supplying wrong passwords, so unless you can show it was out of desperation and/or due to duress, he'd still be in trouble.

Sometimes people take turns driving the same car - maybe even on the same day as part of the same journey (road trip).

Not always easy to remember who was driving at the time in question especially if they only send the stuff months later.

So I expect to see:
* reduction of the term of copyright to 14 years
* ISPs granted common carrier status, and absolved of responsibility
* clarification that linking to copyrighted content is not illegal, hosting the content is
etc

Though I doubt Jean-Claude Juncker, with his reputation as a beaurocrat, will help the EU in any way. Let's see if David Cameron was right about him or not.

Phillip.

It's the wrong approach if you just want a prosthetic memory to help people remember stuff.

To have a prosthetic memory what you need is a computer that can remember stuff - video, audio, photos, text etc. Preferably wearable. Then what you need is to attach a device to appropriate parts of your brain that reads thought patterns that are distinctive depending on what you are thinking (elephants, purple etc). The device does NOT have to decipher or understand what you are thinking. All it needs to do is associate the stuff to be stored/recalled or even _commands_ with the thought pattern(s) you choose for it. I call these thought macros. See also: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3478821&cid=42956909

So you capture a video/audio/picture then you assign it a thought, or "current state" of mind. If you even have difficulty rethinking[1] a thought pattern, you could search by context and time (what I stored some time ago while at home).

There may need to be training phases like in speech recognition, and it's likely to work better with some people than others.

[1] The approach the military is taking would still have problems if people can't even remember that they are supposed to remember something- so whichever approach you'd need the ability to set up "prompts" based on time and context (and brain patterns).

I believe our technology is very very far from the state where you can drop in a memory device with memories already preloaded in, and which people can use to "remember that they are to remember something" (and even if we did, it would be scary and I won't want to have it).

Because there's evidence that memories are stored differently on different people's brains - some people have a halle berry neuron: http://www.caltech.edu/content/single-cell-recognition-halle-berry-brain-cell
http://phys.org/news4703.html
Seems to me to be a bit like a Bingo hall where a neuron yells bingo when it recognizes what the "announcer reads out". And the thing is those neurons aren't in the same place for everyone, they might not even be present for everyone, and one neuron might yell bingo for slightly different things (in one person they might have a neuron that goes bingo for Jennifer Aniston when it sees Jennifer Aniston + Brad Pitt, in another person it might not go bingo for the couple).

Which is also why I think that it's delusional for people to believe we'd soon be able to transfer our minds to other machines. You can transfer something, but it'll be far from everything.

I don't see anything new or interesting in the articles to consider it a "discovery of a way" (e.g. http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmpr/?Pag... )

In contrast this is a better article with more detail on how whales could _actually_ affect ecosystems significantly: http://www.newscientist.com/ar...
And that's a 4 year old article.

This might be one of those many flawed studies.

How many times did they shock themselves? If it was just once and then they sat there without doing it again then perhaps it was more of curiosity than not being able to be alone and deprived of stimuli.

Many people are very curious about stuff.

And some are stupid or rebellious - if you tell them don't push a button many of them will push the button without trying to find out why not e.g. they might ask "You mean this button?" and then push it...

Why does everyone assume gull-wing doors are somehow particularly bad at this?

Here's a video of a guy opening one next to some truck or a wall. If it does require any more space than a regular door, it's not significantly so, but I doubt even that is the case. Remember that a door is maybe 10-15 cm thick, so that's the minimum you'll need to have for a single mm of clearance with a regular door, not to mention all the inches for your fat ass.

But that's why this "vulnerability" should be fixed:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubu...

Imagine if by default if you don't uncheck a checkbox a popular distro has full disk encryption enabled and/or creates an encrypted container.

Then they can't use the "wrench" on everyone that happens to have that distro, because it really is very plausible that the person doesn't have the keys to the container.

As for the arguments against it - if you're in a country where they are still willing to use the "wrench" on someone who is likely to not have the keys, you're screwed already. In such countries if they're not happy with you, you're in big trouble whether you use crypto or not.

That's why the "bug" I submitted should be fixed: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubu... ;)