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Comment Re:What it could help with... (Score 1) 408

First and last step of advice: go out in the real world instead of playing games all the time.

Not trolling, I'm serious. One of my friends used to play WoW every waking hour he wasn't working, and used to complain he didn't have a girlfriend. I guess he just expected one to knock on the door and jump him? He already made the choice to not have a girlfriend by avoiding the circumstances for getting one, but that didn't occour to him.

Comment Re:In 5 years (Score 1) 646

My newest hard drive is 3 years old (7200RPM, 750GB). All others are older, and are on almost 24/7. For example, a 40GB Maxtor drive reports that it has been spinning for ~58k hours, so that's ~6.6 years. Here's a report from speedfan. Oh, and the UDMA error count has been like that for a few years now.

And here's another report. This 120GB hard drive has been spinning for ~39k hours.

The drives are much older than the hours they have been spinning because a few years ago I used to turn off my computer at night, so the "Power on hours" number is lower than the age of the drive. Now, both these drives are on almost 24/7, I also have some newer and bigger drives, but none are younger than 3 years old, becasue 3 years ago I stopped buying new hard drives. I use LTO1 and 2 tapes for stuff I don't access frequently so I don't need more hard drives.

Comment Re:Silly scientists.... (Score 3, Interesting) 264

This does not show that the basic building blocks of life were made by entirely natural processes. This shows that a component of one of the building blocks of life can be made by natural processes. I don't think we can use induction, in this case, to try to say that since we uracil can be formed with natural processes, all building blocks of life can be, too. Not to mention the difficulty in getting "building blocks" or "components" to end up forming the actual thing that they are components/building-blocks of.

I'm glad they at least included this part, eventually:

Nobody really understands how life got started on Earth.

Comment Re:But other states could block... (Score 1) 1088

Under this idea the votes in Wyoming would be worth just as much as the votes in Florida.

Yes and no. One vote in Wyoming would be worth exactly as much as a vote in Florida in the sense that they both get you one step closer to being elected. But one vote in Wyoming would also be much more expensive because the cost of reaching people in an area that is so sparsely populated is so much higher.

I don't see an elimination of extra attention paid to some states/areas, but a shift from what are now the swing states to the population centers, where the density makes it much easier to reach people.

Red Hat Vows To Stand Up To Patent Intimidation 168

mrcgran writes "Eweek is reporting on Red Hat's assurances that can continue to deploy Linux without fear of legal retribution from Microsoft. This, despite the increasingly vocal threats emanating from Redmond. 'In a scathing response to Ballmer's remarks, Red Hat's IP team said the reality is that the community development approach of free and open-source code represents a healthy development paradigm, which, when viewed from the perspective of pending lawsuits related to intellectual property, is at least as safe as proprietary software. "We are also aware of no patent lawsuit against Linux. Ever. Anywhere," the team said in a blog posting.'"
Space

Submission + - Orion Nebula Gets New Milepost Marker, Now Closer

twilight30 writes: Discovery News is reporting that 'One of the most famous and scrutinized heavenly objects is 10 to 20 percent closer than we thought, say two teams of radio astronomers who have made some of the most precise cosmic distance measurements ever, with a telescope nearly as big as Earth. The Orion Nebula is the closest major stellar nursery to Earth, so it has been heavily studied to learn about the lives of stars. Its distance from Earth, however, has long been a matter of uncertainty, with an estimate made about 25 years ago in need of revision.'
Enlightenment

Submission + - Low-tech inventions that help change lives (popularmechanics.com)

angelaelle writes: "The current issue of Popular Mechanics features their Breakthrough Awards program for inventors. Some of the winning inventions help improve the living conditions for people in third world countries using low-tech materials and assembly methods like this cookstove for people in Darfur, and in the case of this Windbelt developed by Shawn Frayne, could be used to provide cheap, clean energy alternatives here. On their web site they have videos of each winner. These videos are really fascinating and inspiring because they talk about the inventor's eureka moment, instead of just talking about their inventions. Here the link to all the winners: http://www.popularmechanics.com/breakthrough07"

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