You do realize DSLRs don't capture 8 bits per color channel, right? Normally the RAW files store 12 or 14 bits per color channel.

Yet if you tell people that you actually need those eight hours of sleep to function properly you get ridiculed. Everyone expects you to function just fine on 5-6 hours per night, any more is seen by a lot of people as being a bit "lazy" (either going to bed "too early" or "sleeping in").

I'm not ashamed to say that anything less than seven hours per night on average completely messes me up, I can feel it the moment I wake up, I need more sleep or I will function poorly (a few months ago I wound up only getting 4-5 hours per night for a full week, by Friday I was completely useless at work, just staring at my monitor trying to force my brain to do work).

Except that these fluctuations are just that, fluctuations. And they get smaller as bitcoin use grows (and thus the possibility for a single person to disrupt the entire economy decreases).

The lowest value I'm seeing in the last year (for mtgoxUSD) is just over $4/bc, the highest value I'm seeing is the current price of approximately $14/bc.

Now, you could call that a fluctuation but honestly, ever since the "Great crash" (that one that caused all the bitcoin-haters to scream that bitcoin was now totally and completely worthless and useless forever and would never recover (price spiked to over $30/bc or so, dropped back down to under $20/bc and slowly dropped to around $4/bc over the following couple of months)) the value of bitcoins on the various exchanges has been somewhat steadily rising.

Generally speaking the problem isn't with bitcoin, most major fluctuations in the currency's value have been fairly early on when big exchanges and mining pools have been robbed (a fitting description). As the use of the currency grows so does the stability. At the time of the "Great crash" the market was much more easily gamed than it is now, just a year and a half later (mtgox is no longer The(tm) exchange used by everyone and the economy is larger).

My point was that in my experience a lot of women set the bar higher online, a lot higher. When they're actually meeting people face to face they can't afford to just walk away the moment a guy says something which isn't perfect (well, I suppose if they are willing to settle for only meeting people online they could).

Basically, the way online dating works messes with their perception of reality (well, offline dating still expects men to "prove" themselves to women, just to a much lesser degree and on that environment women tend to be aware of the fact that there are other women available to the man in question).

Yeah, I didn't have much exposure to the BBS scene but what little I saw definitely indicated to me that it was a lot more social than the internet is, on a local level.

IRC in the 90s though, in my area that was huge with lots of people, especially teens and the early 20s crowd. Every little town seemed to have its own channel on some network and every channel would have at least ten or so regulars who idled there all the time and by Thursday night you could easily find 30 people in the channel for my hometown, and not just "nerds" either, lots of regular 15-to-30-year-olds chatting about what would be happening on Friday or Saturday. Found quite a few parties and acquaintances that way. If there was no one there who knew about a party that seemed like fun you'd just /join a neighboring town's channel and check there.

Last time I checked my old hometown's channel was maybe five or six years ago, a couple of people still there but no one I recognized. All that was missing was tumbleweed blowing by. Facebook just isn't the same, there people mostly talk to people they already know, the common factor on those IRC channels was location, not who you already knew IRL.

I've actually found that it's much easier for me to approach women IRL than online.

Mainly this is because I've noticed that online a lot of women have insanely high standards, even an average (in terms of both looks and personality) woman gets used to being contacted by multiple men every day so they tend to not even reply to messages unless you're in the top n% (for small values of n) by their standards.

It can be quite annoying browsing women's profiles on sites like OkCupid, lots of them list qualities you must have and qualities you absolutely shouldn't have if you wish to get a reply.

They still have forums, they just don't link to them from anywhere on the site for some reason.

Here in Sweden cellphones became "wildly popular" in the 1990s. I got my first one in my early teens, my dad's old NMT Motorola MicroTAC (one of the earlier models before they made the "lid" on it thin).

So, I answered 13-15 but I was a fairly early adopter (my dad had a cellphone because he traveled from work site to work site and had to be available while working and a cellphone was a much better solution than a com radio considering the distances involved).

And I exercise quite a lot as well (weight lifting). I weigh myself every day at the same time (right after I wake up). Now I'm not too concerned with day-to-day fluctuations but by having data points for every day I can more accurately adjust my calorie intake to match my current exercise goals (if I'm trying to bulk and I'm losing weight then I need to up my energy intake, if I'm trying to cut and I'm gaining weight then most likely I need to eat less).

I also keep track of my daily energy and nutrient intake because hey, I'm a nerd so I like statistics and it's actually helpful.

It's been a while since Perl was The language used by sysadmins. It's still around, sure. But shell scripts never really went away and Python has been growing steadily as well.

How is Python "pedantic"? Because you can just dump out unreadable gibberish without bother to format your code in any sensible way? Because that seems to be the main complaint from those who dislike Python. This is also why I think it's a good language for beginners, better to have them learn right away how to use indentation and proper code formatting than have to deal with their unreadable code several years down the line (and boy have I seen some unreadable code by developers who, for some reason, never got around to learning when to indent. It should be so simple, instead they manage to just insert a random number of spaces and/or tabs at the beginning of each line).

In Sweden he's called "Jultomten". Oh, and we don't call the holiday Christmas, we call it Jul.

As for it being a religious holiday, yeah the christians try to make it into that, for most people it has very little to do with religion.

While every standard has its issues I'm really hoping your hatred of XML/XHTML isn't the usual one. That is, that the "problem" with XHTML and XML is that parsers simply refuse to deal with broken XML/XHTML*, as far as I'm concerned that's a feature, not a bug.

* I've heard complaints about this many times, the core complaint seems to be "well, now I have to write markup that's actually standards-compliant and that's just too hard! I want HTML that will render even if it's horribly broken!"

I'm going to say I don't really need a 10 foot UI but it would be nice with something a bit more like it than ordinary desktop UIs. Slightly larger widgets, text that defaults to a slightly larger size, just enough to make it easy to use from the couch. It's not that I can't see what's on the screen, it's that when I'm on the couch and I leave XBMC to check out some website or whatever I don't want to have to be as precise with the mouse as I am when I'm at my desktop machine.