From your linked article:

This was what we wanted as well. Then the Taliban told us to go fuck ourselves. Then we blew the shit out of them. Every country in the world either got behind us or was at least smart enough to get out of the way of the injured, rabid, bulldog that Afghanistan had just poked with a stick.

I'm with you in that Iraq was unjustified and stupid and nobody had any business in that mess (least of all the U.S.), and you can argue that Afghanistan has been poorly managed, but that initial invasion was inevitable and pretty thoroughly justified.

To connect up with a more current possibility - if North Korea were to do something as thoroughly boneheaded as the launch and detonate a nuclear weapon at the western seaboard of the United States I am absolutely certain that Britain, Israel, and probably the majority of the free world would jump on board with an invasion. Heck, if NK was that utterly stupid, China would probably bitch slap them for it.

It's like when Iran got upset about the way the movie "300" portrayed Persians as bloodthirsty psychos. I said it then and I'll say it now: Americans are too ignorant to make that connection. Hell, few Americans realize that Iranians are not Arabs. Even fewer will know enough about Turkish architecture to figure out that maybe Jabba's Lego palace looks vaguely like a real palace in Turkey. It really is a silly thing to be upset about.

Eclipse is the emacs of the IDE world. It tries to be everything to everyone - infinite customizability, plugins, addons, tweaks you can make...it is at the point where for a new user it is really difficult to get a starting point to go from, and finding simple commands can be a PITA to find since they're in non-obvious (unless you've been using Eclipse for years) places.

NetBeans does a better job of exposing the functionality you need, though the extensibility is more limited (like vi or nano).

Which makes sense. If your buddy walked over into a bush and a saber-toothed tiger ate him, you would probably want to avoid that bush forever. The problem is that our wiring is fundamentally unchanged since our caveman days, and technology has introduced a host of problems that we are ill-equipped to deal with. As much as we like to think of ourselves as "enlightened" our fundamental reactions to base stimuli (food, sex, violence, fear) have not and likely will not change in any appreciable degree.

I think it would be way more interesting (and revealing) to ask them to do FizzBuzz *without* using the mod function. See how many different approaches and answers you get, and challenge them on their decision, making them defend their chosen method.

The 50% improvement is supposed to be over and above what h.264 gets. I.E. it will take a Blu-ray from 34GB compressed down to 17GB compressed. Although, I'm a bit skeptical that you can get that much of an improvement without sacrificing something of image quality.

Incidentally, your numbers are not horribly far off if you are considering lossless compression - ratios from 2:1 - 4:1 are about as good as it gets. But then you're preserving CCD noise and other digital artifacts that really have no bearing on the scene and aren't noticeable to the eye. That's why, for the foreseeable future, videos will be compressed with lossy compression.

I think it's intentional. They make Win8's interface as utterly horrid as possible, and then when Win9 comes out with a more streamlined (but still heavily locked-in) interface it will look like the second coming by comparison.

It's like you're still being beaten and whipped, but now it's only half as bad so it's kind of a relief.

Oh, I'm sure what the kids did was stupid, dangerous, and put the parents at risk. I was merely making the point that not all drugs that knock you out have a lethal side effect at much beyond the therapeutic dose.

The original article didn't state where they got the drugs from. Ketamine is used fairly extensively in animal medicine (especially as a horse tranquilizer) and may or may not be readily accessible to teens if they have close contact with a country vet, for instance.

And finally, you are correct that ketamine has been indirectly responsible for deaths because people are paralyzed and they burn/drown/freeze/whatever, but there were no cases (that I know of) where death was a direct result of ketamine overdose. In any case I'm sure these kids don't know jack about pharmacology or common sense and I am glad that the law slapped 'em down.

Well, it does depend on the drug. Ketamine for instance will knock people out (welcome to the K-hole!) but the risk of overdosing is minimal since it actually increases blood pressure and doesn't depress breathing. For that reason it's a preferred anesthetic for less than ideal situations (battlefield, triage center, disaster areas) because it is damn hard to accidentally kill someone with it, but damn easy to knock them out reliably.

Obvious troll is obvious.

The 1 petabyte is going to include rough cuts, edits, deleted scenes, CGI models, textures, concept art, storyboards, and basically a crapton of supporting files and datasets. Your realistic data-->project throughput is more likely on the order of 200-300MB/s for raw HD 3D display. Still a lot, but decidedly feasible.

And what goes to your local theater is more than likely compressed in some fashion, at least down to Blue-Ray (or maybe slightly higher). I would be surprised if the final cut delivered to the theater was much over 100GB.

Except that they're probably storing it with some kind of RGBA (32-bit) uncompressed standard, which brings you to ~2.6TB/hour. And then if you decide to shoot it in 4K (4096x2160) that brings you to 11.2TB/hour or a bit over 30TB for the raw version of The Hobbit (48fps, 3-D). Now add in all of the rough cuts, editing revisions, unused footage, CGI, and everything else and you could see it *very* easily getting up over a petabyte. That's just for the studio though. What goes out the door, even in its rawest form, wouldn't get anywhere close to that.

As an aside, even ridiculously oversampled audio, running at 192k, 96-bit, 8 channels, and uncompressed is only going to run you ~62GB / hour.

Incidentally, a 12 gauge shotgun makes an excellent tree trimmer for high and hard to reach branches, at least, out in the country =)

I'm fond of saying: the second your are sure a gun isn't loaded is the same second the magic ammo fairies loaded it without you knowing.

Presumably when you're cleaning a firearm you have rendered it inoperable before point the muzzle all over the place. Rule I becomes irrelevant (okay it's loaded but it's not going to fire so BFD), and Rule II...so if it magically fired while you were cleaning it, you would be willing to take the responsibility for that (and it would also be assumed that you're not being a dick and pointing the gun at a kid or your spouse as you're cleaning it).