Indeed, the effort to blacklist homeopathy is entirely thanks to Marsh and the rest of the Good Thinking Society. Please consider donating to them so they can continue their fight against wasteful and dangerous pseudoscience. Homeopathic owl isn't cheap you know.

This, unfortunately. Scaling and dpi setting both fail due to an unholy mess of percent, point and pixel based measurements in both apps and web pages, and lazy web developers who assume everyone has the same MacBook they do. Get a large, low-res display (TVs around 32-50 inches would be ideal), run it at native resolution and make your OS believe it has the dpi of a smaller one.

This is /. so nobody is expecting you to read the article. But could you perhaps try to read all the way to the end of the one paragraph summary?

22.04% is not one percent better than SunPower's 21.5%, it's 2.5% better. Alternatively, it's 0.54 percentage points better. It's not the same thing.

As is, nobody cares about your list. Use an adaptive blacklist and join Project Honey Pot.

A zoom into a fractal stored as a 16-minute YouTube video must be the least efficient way to store an equation. If only there was some sort of a 'fractal compression' method.

[citation needed]

You make a very specific claim: hitchhiking is dangerous, and it's more dangerous than it was in the past. Is that claim based on actual numbers or anally extracted ones?

This claims the chances of being killed or raped while hitchhiking in the United States are 0.0000089%.

Fine, I should've been more careful with my wording. The article you linked to doesn't break down the number but implies heavily that the high fataility rate is due to car accidents. We're talking about the risk of violence here, which the article implies has been decreasing: "There aren't so many potential felons in the backseat as there used to be".

But ignoring all that, let's look at the numbers. 19.7 fatalities per 100,000 workers (per year, I assume). Let's say a cab driver takes 20 customers per shift, 250 days a year. That's 19.7 fatalities per 500,000,000 trips, or one death per twenty five million rides. I can live with those odds.

I'll leave the conversion to micromorts to someone else.

This is a fair counterargument I guess. But I would posit that the number of people willing to pick up a hitchhiker is massive compared to the number of people with bad intentions.

What kind of a criminal would think it a good idea to target hitchhikers? Almost by definition they are both penniless and streetwise. And there really are not enough crazies on a random kiling spree to worry about it, no matter how hard Fox News is trying to convince us otherwise.

Publc opinion is a terrible way to measure risk. That's why people are afraid of terrorists and sharks and paedos and snakes rather than cigarettes and driving and tea cosies.

Ok, I'll bite.

And do what? As a hitchhiker you're asking a random person for a lift, which is statistically very safe indeed. The probability that a randomly selected person stopping his/her car is not only a criminal but a criminal who would target you is very small indeed.

It's like asking someone to watch your laptop for a while in Starbucks while you go to the toilet. If you ask a random person, chances are you're ok. If someone offers to do it, be wary.

If this were true, cab driver would be a seriously dangerous job. In most countries, it isn't. I concede that in countries where hitchhiking has become less common, there's probably some cause to exercise caution regarding whom you might pick up. Common sense goes a long way.

Please, enough of the fearmongering. The western world is a safe place. You'll be fine, and so will your kids.

I would've thought the main reason CD drives are still available is that there's no reason to deprecate them while Blu-Ray and DVD drives can read them. (Also, lots of things are still delivered on CD media. Because Blu-Ray and DVD drives can read them.)

As soon as Blu-Ray goes away as a media, probably driven by cloud, streaming and other non-physical data delivery, CD goes away too. I don't think any of my computers bought in the past five or so years have had optical drives.

I am not aware of any word processor that would insert an actual minus glyph when the 'minus' key is pressed. In this instance, the author explicitly specified a minus codepoint.

You're probably right. As soon as I hit 'Submit' I regretted having used the term 'sign'. It's better to distinguish between keycaps, scancodes, character codes and glyphs.

It's a hyphen. A standard keyboard layout has no minus sign, not even in the keypad. The author of the book explicitly specified a Unicode minus sign wherever a hyphen should've been because "I try to avoid using direct ascii hash codes because some ereaders can misinterpret them"