http://www.threefeloniesaday.com/Youtoo/tabid/86/Default.aspx

Conversely I've found the best bait to attract ants is -- dead ants. Squish a few and pretty soon you've got lots of ants. (I use this trick when I find some of the tasty kind and feel a yen for fried ants. Our cold-climate American ants are too puny to be worth the bother unless you've got a whole lot of 'em.)

My method of killing fire ants:

Put two tablespoons of diazinon granules on top of the hill.

Next day the entire colony is dead.

I was astonished.

[And people wonder why I went around buying up all the diazinon I could find when it was taken off the market.]

So is the right to own and drive a car worth some 35,000 lives every year?

How about the right to see a doctor, which results in, by some estimates, over 100,000 deaths a year from doctors' mistakes?

Good points. Might be boiled down to "Laws exist to punish everyone for the sins of a few."

Hard to say. When I read 1984 as an adult, it feels more like a dissertation about the rules of language, than a plausible future that could actually happen. I mean, he goes into some incredible depth about the way language works, what it's used for, and why the people in power wish to control it. As far as the playbook... the playbook is as old as time. The reason why 1984 is so jarring is because this is the way governments behave.

Thought crime is an interesting angle though, granted, but it's not that much of a leap from the things that are happening now. We have it now in the Western World, but nobody seems to have a problem with it. We live in an age where saying the wrong thing on the internet at all can land the cops at your door, even if what you said online isn't illegal. I've seen this first hand. It's happened to me.
 
The argument I always hear is that communication on the internet is an act of speech. But it's clearly not. It's an act of thought. Speech is a very specific thing.
 
Everything that happens on the internet is a thought. If it were speech, people would treat it differently. And if you want to skew it that way, you could make a fairly convincing argument that thought crime is already here, and that the government is actively monitoring the thoughts of billions of people right now. Not only that, but they're seeking even more power to monitor your devices. And, as you know, those devices are heading inward. Literal thought crime might only be a few years away.

Maybe.

Fast charging + wireless charging + ubiquitous charging stations might make it very practical. For my lifestyle a two-hour battery life with 20-second recharges from just putting my phone on a certain region of my desk, nightstand, car console, etc. would work just fine.

As I recall, the paper from Google said something slightly different. It said they found no increase in failure rate. As a result, Google data centers do run warm: 80F. The employees in data centers wear shorts and t-shirts all the time.

http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/internal/#temperature

Change, or just that our sample size (er, length) is too small to know what the variances normally are?

Did we get it down to 29%?

You know, that was my first thought. But you know, it seems to me that the Borg is kind of a short sighted vision. Gene Roddenberry was never very good at going more than 40 years into the future with any of his technology detail predictions. After all, we are now, further along than he thought we would be in the 23rd century, minus holy grail technologies like warp drive, which he knew would take more than a century to figure out. If we ever do see the Borg happen, it'll be with technology so small, that something like glass would be rendered totally unnecessary. In fact, even without a borg singularity, glass is a rough prototype at this point. Five iterations in, you won't even know it's there.

It beats tattoos.

And banning them will do exactly nothing to address that problem.

A person who would make a gun with the intention of committing murder with it isn't likely to be deterred by a law banning his gun. Actually, that law already exists... the Defense Distributed guy was careful to epoxy a six ounce block of metal to his before fully assembling it into an operable gun, because it's a federal felony to manufacture an undetectable gun.

Is that irresponsible? Depends on the kid. There are many examples of kids using guns to defend themselves and their siblings against home intruders.

I agree that a distro using Debian packages and APT really ought to be dist-upgradeable. It's lame that it's not.

But the Mint guys are the ones working hardest to let me have the kind of desktop I prefer, so I'm willing to cut them some slack.

You can avoid some pain if you set your computer up properly. Put /home and / on separate partitions. Then, you can upgrade just by running the new installer! The installer always wants to clean-wipe the / partition, but it doesn't care whether you wipe /home or leave it in place. (I always back up the /etc directory, just by copying it somewhere on the /home partition. I also back up a complete list of all the currently installed packages.)