This is completely irrelevant to your point, but you have some zero-indexing errors and a fencepost one in your examples :)
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Your friendly neighbourhood pedant

It suddenly struck me how amazingly versatile a statement that was :)

Now, carry on.

If you need endurance, you could also get an external power pack which can charge your phone off of usb ports. 6A packs can fully charge your phone at least two times, and are not too large to keep in a pocket along with a ridiculously short micro-USB cable you probably already got bundled with some device or another. Using a replacement battery turned out to be a bit cumbersome for me, as you effectively need a separate bulky battery charger for your surplus batteries, which you will not want to bring along on travels (been there).

This is a bit old, but they have explained it several times. I actually wouldn't mind it if it didn't stupidly break functionality like the Google calculator and cached pages. Someone benefits from your searches anyway. I don't remember exactly how I did it, but I got rid of it, and it didn't come back.

Sorry Mint, but if you destroy basic functionality in the process of earning money off of my browsing, your hacks go away just as other annoyances such as online ads. I kept the default home page, though, I have several default tabs in any case.

That's only a problem if the penalty for DUI is "only a hassle".

First: I very much enjoy a beer or six, some wine or a single malt, and have absolutely no problem with people getting drunk. That said, I'll chime in with how we have reduced the problem in Norway: there are sensible campaigns to teach people to avoid driving when they have drunk alcohol, and conversely, avoid drinking when they are planning to drive afterwards (feel free to enjoy a few when you get home). Back it up with laws and *real* consequences. If this actually is a problem for you in your everyday life, maybe you should examine your drinking habits. The default state of most people most of the time is not "tipsy".

It's perfectly possible to have such campaigns without preaching, and without acting like some of the more irrational elements of MADD. But yes, the law should be harsh. If you turn out to be generally unfit to drive, you shouldn't have a licence, no matter what the cause. In Norway, where getting caught drunk driving have very real consequences, it has greatly decreased drunk driving and connected accidents. Not even the most populistic of our political parties argue that the current situation should be changed. The follow-up problems you mention (people driving without a licence and similar), while rare, are treated as any other criminal activity: fines/jail, and confiscation of property used to perpetrate the crime. I don't even know what to say about your "standing up to the man" parallel, but I did get a chuckle out of the vision of an entire drunk neighbourhood "standing up to the man" while driving :)

I once tried fried mopane worms in Botswana, bought from a street vendor in a village who sold them as snacks. They're delicious, the taste is somewhat reminiscent of bacon crisps. Recommended if you can get them :)

A lot of them do. For instance, the russian Topol-M achieves 7320 m/s, which is a lot more than 7 Machs no matter how you measure it. Missiles such as that one are hardened and probably impermeable to energy weapons for the foreseeable future, though, and they are not the intended target for this (or any) laser. Direct kinetic hits are likely the only way, short of nuclear weapons, to stop them in their tracks.

Of course they don't want it -- I suspect that EULA measures against it might surface if usage were widespread -- but it's also a user issue. I have my GPG/PGP public key readily available, and tried to encourage my friends to use it.

Setting up GPG is less complicated than configuring XBMC, which lots of people do, and plugin integration with Gmail is trivial. The perceived benefit is probably too low, however, as even my techie friends never used it beyond the first test email.

Yup, seems you are right - my apologies. My original source for that information was an MD student, who'd heard this question ("can three cigarettes be lethal?") asked and answered in the negative at a lecture. Apparently his lecturer made the same mistake of mixing up absorbed dosage from a cigarette with actual nicotine content. You learn something new every day.

Wrong. A regular cigarette contains something like 0.7-1 mg of nicotine. LD-50 for humans is about 30-60 mg. A minuscule application of common sense would also indicate that 3 1/3 cigarettes are not enough to kill anyone outright. Sorry to deprive you of your amusing little party anecdote, but cigarettes are not *that* lethal :)

I did :)

My dad bought a bunch of these for next to nothing in the late eighties, and I gave a few to friends. After the novelty factor wore off, however, no-one used them. People don't really mislay their keys a lot, and they were somewhat bulky on the keychain.

This is probably to compensate for voltage drops on long stretches of power lines. My family used to live in a house in the countryside, on the start of a several km long circuit. The voltage was boosted so that the folks at the end of the circuit should get around 220V, and we had about 248V from the wall (I believe 242V was the upper limit, which is 10% as you mention). This was enough that light bulbs burned out very quickly. We reported it to the utility company, and they installed resistors or something (I was very young at the time, I'm not sure exactly how this worked) in the few first houses on the circuit, this mitigated the problem.

His what? Forgive me, I'm tired :)

Offensive? Non-funny I could understand, but offensive? Yes, the show's making fun of a stereotype, that's par of the course for sit-coms (of course, you might find them all offensive). Reacting that way to such a show gives me the impression that you are somewhat... uptight. People have been subjected to offensive treatment in popular entertainment (minstrel shows and country music (since I appreciate actual music) come to mind), but Big Bang Theory is not it.

I am considered a major nerd amongst my friends, and they joke about it all the time. To be fair, I do have some hang-ups, which are not perpetuated solely in jest. I don't find their jokes "offensive", and if I did and complained about it, people would probably (rightly) stop inviting me to social happenings. If your reaction is representative of your general approach to social interaction, do yourself a favour and lighten up a little :)

I don't know too much about this, but wouldn't steganography happen *during* encoding? If you could hack an encoder to control the lsb in the *decoded* stream, you could add another layer of obfuscation by uploading two completely different videos, one with random lsb, and the other with your signal xor'ed with the lsb of the first. I'm no expert, but to me, that doesn't seem vulnerable even to statistical attacks (assuming there is a significant amount of candidate videos to start with), especially if you encrypt your signal prior to encoding. I'd be happy if a crypto expert slashdotter would comment on this :)