Yeah, that's a good question actually. I wondered the same thing about the Boeshield T9 product, but I've been assured by several people that it doesn't interfere with physical contacts.

Maybe these coatings provide just enough electrical isolation to keep voltage from shorting through liquids between physically separated components while still allowing current to flow between metal contacts that are physically touching. That would be my best guess. But I really don't know for sure.

Hate to reply to myself, but I'd like to point out to everyone who seems flabbergasted by this concept that it isn't really a new idea, the idea of allowing water into a device but protecting the internal surfaces, contacts and circuit boards from actually coming in contact with the water molecules.

Case in point, Boeshield T9. Invented by engineers at Boeing for coating internal areas of airplanes where it is difficult to get physical access. It's basically a wax suspended in a solvent solution. You spray it on something, for instance a circuit board, the solvent evaporates and leaves the wax which acts as an electrical insulator and water repellent, to prevent corrosion damage. Works pretty well, too.

How well? A work acquaintance of mine tells a story about a welding machine he treated by immersing it in a barrel of T9. It somehow went overboard from his fishing boat. You know, in the ocean. Saltwater. The electronics would have normally been irreparable from corrosion the moment it entered the water. He's a diver, so a couple weeks later he goes down (it's in about thirty feet of water) and brings it back up. Cleans it out and plugs it in. It works, and he still uses it today.

So yeah, not a new idea, making something waterproof even when it's full of water. But T9 is just wax, so not physically very durable, and I think immersing things like LCD panels in T9 in liquid form probably wouldn't work out well. So really the only exciting thing about these coatings is that they are supposedly quite durable and are compatible with the whole device, including the delicate parts like the LCD panels.

You've been somehow modded +5, Informative while being entirely incorrect.

These "nanocoating" waterproofing products, and Liquipel specifically, absolutely do not keep any liquids from penetrating into the device. The very idea that a coating could keep water out of speaker grills and docking/USB ports or even a micro SIM slot is patently ridiculous anyway. We're not talking about Gore-Tex or something where the holes are only a few thousand times the size of a water molecule. That's the scale where your pressure argument might start to make sense.

You have to realize the reason they are touting these treatments as "nanocoatings" is because they (allegedly) coat every internal nook and cranny inside the device with a permanent layer of highly water-repellent stuff that is only a few molecules thick.

Oh yes, you can be assured that your iPad will be full of water as soon as you jump in the pool, but the point of the coating (allegedly) is that the water molecules can never actually come into contact with anything inside the device. So nothing shorts out, the device keeps working normally, and you just let the water drain out when you leave the pool/beach/shower/whatever. Supposedly. The demo videos on their website are fairly impressive though. They even imply that treated devices will survive going through the laundry. But you can clearly see that the devices get filled with water when submerged, and have to be drained when taken out of the water. The job of the coating is simply to keep the liquid from damaging anything, not to keep liquids out.

As to how they manage to really coat everything perfectly enough at the molecular level to make it reliable, I'm sure that's a big part of their proprietary process. I'm guessing it has to be done while the device is at least partially disassembled. There is a competitor to Liquipel that has been advertising a service to waterproof an iPod Shuffle, for a cost of something like $175. I doubt that the process would be that expensive if it didn't involve the labor cost of disassembling and reassembling the Shuffle.

This article about Liquipel is of course just astroturfing, but if these coatings in general are really as durable as implied it will completely change the way we treat personal electronics around liquids. Someday it may confuse your children when you absent-mindedly admonish them to stop playing with their supersoakers around you while you read a book in the backyard on your seventh-generation iPad. Your iPad by that point may be far more resistant to water than you are. Spill coffee on your laptop again? Go rinse it off (with soapy water) in the sink, while it's still running!

Something to think about.

Off topic but very important: It is dangerous to be recommending that anyone put a "pair" of winter tires on any vehicle. Winter tires need to be installed on all wheels, not just the drive wheels. If the winter tires are on the rear wheels, you will lose control when cornering or attempting to avoid road hazards (such as pedestrians) since the steering tires will have poor traction. If the winter tires are on the front, the back end will have a strong tendency to want to flip around in front whenever you come to a hard stop. In other words, the car will either keep going straight ahead when you need it to turn, or it will go sideways or worse when you need it to stay straight. Neither is a good situation.

You will also lose at least one or two car lengths in stopping ability with only two winter tires. That could mean the difference between you or someone else living or dying in a lot of driving situations. Getting T-boned by a garbage truck or having it whiz by six inches from your front end.

Here is a great YouTube video that demonstrates a couple of these issues:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzB7hpWhqIA

Having said all that, yes it is shocking how effective a set of good winter tires are at improving the ability to get around safely in the winter. It's scary watching all the people who still drive around with "all-season" tires in snow and ice, slipping and sliding all over the road. I think winter tires are even required by law in parts of Europe. Unfortunately, I'd estimate another 30-45 years before the US catches on to the fact that thousands of vehicular deaths and accidents and probably tens of millions in property damages could be avoided each year just by making winter tires mandatory in cold areas.

P.S. For those too lazy to do their own research, just get a set of the latest Bridgestone Blizzaks that fit your vehicle. They seem to be best overall performers in the tests I found while doing my own research.

You know, I recently finally read "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" by Robert Kiyosaki, and it really helped crystallize some things that I've long understood only intuitively. Namely, that spending several decades of my life navigating an increasingly unstable, career-antagonistic world economy while attempting to save up enough on an average salary to buy houses, cars, send kids to college and live on during an all-too-brief retirement period far off in the unknown future... is a really fucked up way to live.

The way most of us live our lives is called the Rat Race for a reason, and it's even more of a dead end proposition today than it was when Kiyosaki first published the book a decade ago. The days of stable life-long careers and pleasant retirement on guaranteed company retirement accounts are long gone (if they ever really existed). Many of the new generation of workers, the so-called Millennials, have already realized that if you can't enjoy life along the way, there isn't much point wasting most of your life helping someone at the top of the pyramid get obscenely rich while you and everyone around you struggle to make ends meet. So companies are already learning to make concessions in terms of flexibility about time off, quality of work facilities and many other things, in order to attract and retain enough employees to stay in business. Sooner or later I think the whole human race will begin to wise up in a similar fashion. Human beings are not just born to be money-making machines.

How does this apply to longer lifespans? Well, right now this situation really only applies to a few areas of business where the main workforce required are young, creative people. But I think the end result of continued worldwide industrial automation, increased Internet access, increased personal health and increased human longevity will mean that eventually, if you want a human being to work for you, then you'll need to do whatever it takes to provide an environment where that human being feels like they aren't wasting their lives by giving you their time. For many people that will mean more vacation time. Eventually, a _lot_ more vacation time. Maybe flexible schedules like two weeks on, two weeks off, or six months on, six months off, instead of today's typical 50 weeks on, 2 weeks off(!). A lot of people already live like this in various ways today. They take temporary or seasonal jobs and then enjoy life for a few months out of each year. For other people it may mean that they will demand to be part-owner of whatever company they work for. Either way the whole landscape of economies and employment will have to change over the next century or two until some kind of equilibrium is reached between the need to produce things and the desire to simply enjoy being alive.

Already there are a great many people in this world who can easily work for a few years, then buy themselves a small boat or an RV or build a small house and then basically live off the land and spend most of the rest of their lives doing nothing that pure capitalistic society would ever consider "productive". Yet, are they a burden on anyone simply by virtue of not having a 9-to-5 job for 50 weeks a year? Not really. This will only become more and more true in the future as the cost of producing things like solar panels and other technology decreases. In the future, either hundreds of millions of people will starve for lack of work as everything becomes automated, or we will have to come up with a new way of living life that doesn't place such a ridiculous emphasis on the necessity of having "gainful employment" during the best part of our lives. The only possible way to continue living our lives as employees the way we are now will require completely outlawing most forms of automation, and I don't see that ever happening.

You're a little late. You have to hand it to Apple yet again, their new iCloud service is mainly used not to _store_ but to _sync_ your apps, music, photos, contacts, calendar events and documents between your devices, where almost everything is then stored locally on each device or computer. Gee whiz, how about that. What a concept, huh? An iCloud outage will just mean you temporarily won't be able to sync things between devices. Most people probably won't even notice if it doesn't last more than a day.

I don't know if their iMessage service requires iCloud, but even if it does it would fall back to SMS if iCloud is down. So all in all they seem to have really thought things through with their implementation of cloud services.

Wow. I am rather disturbed by the amount of ignorance being displayed over this article simply because the word "magnet" was mentioned. These are not refrigerator magnets or Q-Ray bracelets we're talking about here. With TMS we're talking something like a one TESLA electromagnetic coil placed right next to your skull that goes snap-snap-snap every time it goes off, momentarily creating an intensely powerful magnetic field that can either stimulate or supress the electrical activity in the targeted part of the brain. The effects are mild and temporary, but very real.

It's one thing to be skeptical of a product someone is trying to sell you, and quite another to ignorantly dismiss perfectly sound basic scientific research just because they used a word that has been misappropriated by snake oil salesmen.

The idea that stimulating or supressing a certain part of the brain can induce behavior modification is not new either. Any sort of damage to the left temporal prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain right under your left temple) is strongly correlated with having dark, intensely homicidal and/or suicidal thoughts. Many doctors have noted immediate positive post-operation personality shifts in patients who have had large tumors or cysts removed that were pressing on this area of the brain. It should not be much of a stretch to imagine that other behaviors can be modified by manipulating other parts of the brain.

I also find it bizarre that people keep commenting that they don't believe the brain can be "forced" to lie. I think a number of pathological liars who have had their lives ruined by having the constant overpowering urge to lie all the time would beg to differ.

I think the main thing we are learning these days is that the human brain is both more complex than we ever imagined and, in some very disturbing ways, far LESS complex than we would like it to be. But if we freely embrace the new knowledge we are gaining we may be close to learning how to actually repair many of the "broken" human beings that we now just keep in cages because we don't know what else to do with them. Not lobotomize or brainwash, but actually repair, back to what the rest of us consider "normal". To me, what is going on in neuroscience these days is very exciting. Ripe for abuse, of course, but still exciting because of the positive possibilities.

I live in a small town (pop. about 9,000) where they recently replaced a busy round-robin type of four-way stop with a small roundabout. Before the change it was a rather nasty affair getting through the center of town, even in low traffic times. People were constantly losing their place in the queue and there were many near-accidents every day. Morning and evening there were cars lined up for a block or more and it would take several minutes to get through the queue, and then once you got to the intersection you'd have to decide whether you or the other cars stopped first. It was unpleasant.

The new roundabout was hotly debated for a long time. Many people did not want it. I think in the end the state DoT just basically said "we're building it whether you like it or not". I was unsure myself whether it would actually be an improvement. The circle is quite small, so there isn't much room to get in before cars enter the circle from your left. Each entrance is only a couple of car lengths apart. Nevertheless, it was built, and it works surprisingly well. Even at busy times of day the lines are much smaller and move much faster. When there are no lines there are some asshats who can't be bothered to slow down to the posted 15mph when they zip through, but even so it ends up being pretty easy to get through, and even if someone is close behind you or jumps into the circle in front of you the traffic is at least flowing in the same direction, so it is relatively easy to avoid collisions by just slowing down a bit. Much safer than when one person at the four-way is driving straight through and somebody across from them decides to come out and turn left into their path at the same time. There were a lot of almost head-on collisions when it was a four-way.

All-in-all, a vast improvement, and as soon as American drivers see roundabouts more often I'm sure they will work even better. As long as they are properly implemented, I think they should be welcomed.

There are tons of libraries and frameworks for the current version of OS X as well as for past versions of OS X (for cross-compiling projects) and now for different versions of iOS, since the iOS SDK is included. There are also sample projects and an interface builder and debuggers and probably lots of other neat things that I'm not even aware of.

What you install to your hard drive may not end up being that big since there is a lot of optional stuff included in the main XCode download. So no, it's not just an IDE and a compiler. And it would be quite silly of Apple to include something so huge and unnecessary with every download of Lion. Anyone who wants it can just download it separately.

XCode is a 4GB download all by itself and is only used by a tiny fraction of Mac users. Why on Earth would Apple want to add that to the already 4GB Lion download? That would be a ludicrous waste of bandwidth, time, and disk space.