I agree with you that this is "the way it is" but I really think it's just an example of the monumental waste that goes on in most companies.

A lot of the office programs are wide open for disruption for this reason. As a software engineer I find it fascinating that people willingly put "business critical" code in anything that can't be tested and can't be source controlled. (I'm sure you can do that in VB script if you really put your mind to it. But it's not something that will be done.)

The only reason it's considered economically viable is because all the time and money that is wasted is invisible.

But yeah, today these features are required for corporate use. Hopefully we can fix that for the future.

Yeah, MTP support in Linux is not really good enough. Hopefully more devices requiring it will push that through faster through.

I work with developing for mobile phones and having to support a storage location which can at any time be removed (ie if the user plugs their phone into the computer and it takes over the SD card) is a big pain. Having a global storage pool makes life a lot simpler. (A decent compromise is perhaps to have a micro-sd in a slot so it's not possible to remove without removing the battery. That makes it easier to handle.)

And while the micro sd card slot in and of itself doesn't really cost that much it does become more expensive when you figure in extra testing, more complex hardware design and new software requirements. (Although some of those only need to be done once, it does typically mean that some other feature is removed.)

I definitely agree with that. Although I found out that it was easy to just reflash the device with a "region free" firmware and get updates quickly. I have no idea what the hell Samsung Sweden were doing during the 2 months it took them to "verify" the Jelly Bean update. Someone claimed that they were working on a Swedish dictionary for spell check, but there was one included in the generic version as well so I'm doubtful.

I looked into that article and the guy who wrote it. The quote you're quoting comes from a book he wrote himself (although the quote is from a chapter written by some other guy.)

Unfortunately I couldn't find an online reference however, so it's impossible to know just how the measurements "Dr Van Voorheis" mentions were made. So far I've had a hard time to find any examples of people who have actually reproduced the large scale effects that Tesla claimed to achieve.

If you look for the author of the article (Thomas F. Valone) you find some YouTube clips where he's presenting a talk about UFO power sources. And he seems to be part of a MUFON which is apparently a group of UFO hunter enthusiasts. Now there's nothing really wrong with that, but it does mean that I'm not likely to take his claims at face value. And even he doesn't claim that the Tesla stuff is real, he only quotes other people (mostly Tesla himself).

Meanwhile you have an article at IEEE (http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/mass-transit/a-critical-look-at-wireless-power/0) which seems to support the common understanding of wireless transmission of power. Basically that you can transmit power on roughly the same distance as the diameter of your coils. So a "charging pad" works, but powering a ship on the other side of the Earth doesn't.

To summarize I have to say that I'm quite convinced that if Telsas "World Wireless System" would have worked the results would have been reproduced today. The economic benefits are way to large for it not to. I'm sure the military would have loved to have remote powered drones and stuff like that if it was possible.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your point, but the idea of the salt is not to keep it secret. The idea is that each users password is combined with a unique string (the salt) so that if you try to attack the password database with a dictionary attack you have to process each password individually.

It can be frustrating, but it's really not that complicated and it is for a good reason.

You can't alter things directly on Wikipedia (ie you can't do "original research") because there is no way for anyone else to check the references. If people just added stuff to wikipedia pages without supporting it with references then that would quickly mean that articles became a mish-mash of "facts" with no way to check them.

That's why everything on Wikipedia should have a reference to it. That way it's possible for other people to verify that the referenced article actually state what is claimed in the Wiki article. Furthermore it also means that if the referenced article is amended, corrected or disputed it is possible to track this in the Wikipedia article.

He was being off-topic and obviously a bit of a flame-bait. But I don't really see it as being trolling. IMHO it seems more like the RPi people banning people who are a bit uncomfortable.

In Sweden almost 15% of the population are "foreign born". The same number for the US is almost 13%. In the UK almost 12%.

Information about immigration in Sweden (in Swedish only unfortunately): http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/2279/a/181576
US Census information: http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/acs-19.pdf
UK information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-born_population_of_the_United_Kingdom

Looking over his wiki page and other stuff it seems like he never argued that global warming wasn't happening nor that humans were not the culprit. His point was that some of the climate scientists were not understanding the math and statistics they were using and that caused them to interpret global warming data incorrectly. (Naturally the same is true for "climate change deniers", but in that case even more so.)

He was criticizing the data they used and he was criticizing the way they used it. That's what scientists do.

That article is talking about hotspots, not the general increase of radiation. One of the hotspots they mention (the one in Tokyo) wasn't even caused by Fukushima, it was caused by abandoned radioactive materials once used in self luminous ink. (This is mentioned in the article as well.)

The article ends by concluding that "No matter where you go in the world, if you take a radiation instrument with you and look around, you'll eventually stumble across something that's above what the background for that area normally is" (the quote in the article is attributed to "Christopher Clement, the scientific secretary of the International Commission on Radiation Protection in Ottawa, Canada, an independent international organization that provides guidance on safe levels of radiation").

(I'm no nuclear scientist so the following is what I've found after googling for a bit.)

That map is measuring in milli-roengen per hour which is a unit of Exposure, the nature article is talking about micro-sieverts which is a Equivalent Absorbed Radiation Dose measurement. The difference is basically that roengen is measuring how much energy something is beaming out, the Absorbed Dose is how much energy (of that type) human tissue absorbs, and equivalent dose is a normalized measurement of how much damage an absorbed dose does to living tissue.

To rephrase, the chart you linked is talking about how much light is given out at a specific point. The absorbed dose is how much of that light is converted to heat as it interacts with your skin. And the Equivalent dose is talking about what that heat is doing to your body.

There are ways to convert between these units but I'm guessing it depends on what type of radiation you're talking about.

It's also worth mentioning that Google has done some work to help developers with compatability. There was a talk about it on IO this year as well: Google I/O 2012 - Multi-Versioning Android User Interfaces (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amZM8oZBgfk).

I own a Drobo FS and would recommend that you get something else. (I've read good things about Synology, but haven't tried it myself nor do I personally know anyone who has tried it.)

It's pretty slow (I rarely get over 20MB/s read or write over gigabit ethernet) and the way they handle "applications" is pretty scetchy and seems a bit problematic. A few times applications have stopped responding and I've had to reboot the Drobo.

You also need a Windows or OSX machine to get started. At least when I got it it was impossible to do the first configuration without the special software. After that you can do most of the work (but not all) over the web interface (which runs as one of the previously mentioned rather scetchy applications).

It has noticed and warned me when a drive failed though. So that was nice. I'm not entirely sure that the "self healing" did the work properly though as some videos have seemed a bit wonky afterwards. (The entire point of self healing is to avoid bit rot.) Really I'd rather use a good established system for that (like ZFS or perhaps Btrfs) than something "home grown" where they keep the details secret.

There is quite a lot of material he's made on YouTube (and one of his records is on Spotify).

Eg his interview on Conan is often linked online regarding entitlement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk (Everything is amazing and nobody is happy).

For anyone interested in this I recommend taking a look at Shut Up & Sit Down (http://www.shutupshow.com/). It's a pretty funny show where they review a couple of board games with a specific theme ever episode. Well worth watching and they tend to be pretty funny as well.