I call bullshit on your statistics, for reference i fall into the 2-3 per day camp, averaged over a week. The WHO lists the US at 8.6 liters per capita per year of pure alcohol consumption. Since alcohol is so heavily controlled in this country, i'll tend to believe this data more than what people say they drink as sales figures are more reliable. Especially considering the stigma around alcohol in this country which will certainly impact what people say they consume. That figure comes out to ~363, 5% 16oz beers per person, per year. Or ~605 watered down crappy beers. If 35% are abstaining and only 10% have more than 1, those 10% are seriously killing it, to the tune of 5 - 8 drinks a day. Probably more as i imagine many who answered as 1 a day probably drink only a couple a week. I seriously don't believe 10% of the population is throwing back ~8 beers a day on average, thats creeping up on hammering down a fifth of booze a day, an area reserved for those with real alcohol problems.

while i realize this is slashdot, chatting and e-mail covers the data entry requirements for 99% of smart phone users. just turn off swype for data entry for your ssh app, at least on the nexus one it remembers your preferred keyboard per app.

clearly you've never used swype

good job on the photography but these are pretty standard anechoic RF testing chambers. The only news worthy thing is that Apple is main-steam enough that people actually looked at these photos.

Any company doing serious RF development will either have their own and rent time in a dedicated testing facility.

Search google for "anechoic chamber" and you'll find hundreds of photos of such facilities.

The US Air Force has one big enough to park a C-130 in :)

Beyond all the 'states of consciousness' debates and how stupid it is that anyone is worried about this (people have used it to meditate for years) this is very scientific.

What they are really doing is just building a poor mans sensory deprivation tank.

Your mind generally keeps track of where your body is by a few things, effects of gravity, vision, and most importantly your body's 'gyroscope' is the inner ear.

By laying down on something soft and not moving you partially remove gravity (true sensory deprivation tanks suspend you in a liquid to do this and thus are far more effective).

By covering your eyes completely you remove vision as a positional reference.

Bi-aural sound effects can induce certain types of brain waves, but they also throw your inner ear gyroscope all out of wack.

Combine the 3 and you've removed your brain's ability to understand where your body is and in what position its in.

This is where the 'out of body' feeling comes from, without a grounding reference the rest of your brain is free to introduce sensations of movement. If you imagine your flying like a bird your brain no longer has a grounding point saying 'you know man, your not REALLY flying'.

The rest of the audio in these tracks in there to 'guide' you into a mental state, induce certain types of brain wave usually with the goal of inducing a lucid dreaming type of state.

Some people tweak out because of this, generally people that hate feeling out of control. Sensory Deprivation tanks have even been used a form of torture. You can also purchase time in them commercially to relax, some spa's have them.

Some people love it, and the people that love it probably are more likely the ones who are also into other forms of mind altering (drugs or whatever). Not that i'm saying its a 'gateway' to anything, if your the type of person that loves this type of experience you don't need a gateway, your already wired to enjoy these things, which is good in my opinion. Everyone needs to let go sometimes.

hate to break it to you, but using a common approach in one industry, on a new industry, is, indeed, patentable.

I don't agree with this practice, but again, lets argue that point, not sit about and bitch about software patents when that is not the issue at hand.

I hope someone else gets the irony in this line.

A subjectively measured number of people have problem X and "thats a fact"

Really? I had no idea.

Did anyone actually read the patent?

The summary author is an idiot and clearly doesn't understand the patent or simply didn't read it.

They didn't patent measuring and charging for computer resources.

They patented predicting resource utilization at a particular point in the future and varying charging at that time.

They basically patented the ability to charge users hosting services with them based on response time and performance, they implemented this capability by predicting loads at a point in the future.

Sounds like they don't want to charge by the RAM/disk usage/CPU time etc anymore but would rather charge based on guaranteed performance.

Also this isn't a software patent at all. They effectively patented a business model.

If you want to argue the merits of that, fine, lets at least stick to the real issue.

your history of the bible is slightly misleading. The original Greek manuscripts that, some of which, would eventually be known as the new testament were written in the first century AD.

It wasn't till 315AD till the was really decided which of the manuscripts written would be part of 'The New Testament' so in many ways what picture the new testament paints wasn't created till several hundred years after the supposed events and the picture wasn't chosen by the original writers.

The king james bible wasn't printed until 1611AD and still included the Apocrypha. Even this version has some rather comical changes made in the process of translation compared to the original greek manuscripts.

TL;DR your right that the original manuscripts were written in the first century AD, your very wrong if you think the modern, common translations are accurate to the original and have not been tainted by thousands of years of corrupt church influence.

(i'm an atheist for the record btw)

More like this:

*Poly Sci Degree from USC
*Intelligence Specialist in Air force
*Unit Supply Specialist in Army (how do you get busted out of an intelligence job in the air force to being a lowly 'supply specialist' in the army?)
*Gets kicked out of the Army (involuntary honorable discharge)
*Guy with a poly sci degree and experience as a 'intelligence specialist' remains unemployed for 9 months and lives with daddy.
*Randomly writes a $10,000 check to run for seat.
*Raises 0 money, runs word of mouth campaign driving around in his '03 automobile.
*Gets hit with a felony pornography, gets public defender because hes broke.
*Wins Primary when polls indicated hardly anyone knew who he was.

How, on earth, is this entire situation NOT suspect to you?

The ultimate way to get 2 idiots who agree with each other to argue.

last 3 windows machines i've seen friends come home with had multiple partitions. The users never notice.

i don't think you quite understand the complexity of modern device drivers.

hard drive firmware where the code is just implementing a very well defined communication standard like ATA is an incredibly different beast from communicating with a programmable graphics card that supports multiple standards (opengl, directx, 2d accel, open cl) all at the same time. Especially when those API's have additional non-standard extensions. Similar complexity exists with other devices.

As for the last time i had to update my hard drive firmware. I haven't but a few million seagate customers have fairly recently :)

yea sounds great. Flashing my BIOS/EFI every time theres a driver update, can't wait.

GPT is part of the EFI standard.

It is used on some BIOS based system.

The problem with the standard MBR is that it does not support _partitions_ (note partitions, not disks) greater than 2 TB.

It also doesn't allow the start address to be higher than 2TB. This means your boot partition has to start in the first 2TB of the disk and be smaller than 2TB. The disk can actually be larger than 2TB.