decatron

When I was 14 or so, my mom got a dial up internet connection with AOL in the little business that she owned. At the time, almost no one had an internet connection at home, and I was extremely curious about this new internet thing. Every Sunday I'd get down there and browse the net for hours, trying out URLs I've seen somewhere over the week.

I read the usenet and tried out tools for FTP or gopher, not really understanding what they did. I also experimented with some hacking software like back orifice. I wanted to be a hacker. The movie "Hackers" with Angelina Jolie also impressed the hell out of me.

At some point, I read this howto on how to become a hacker. It's [still online](http://ko

On Debian:

apt-cache --no-all-versions show texlive* | grep '^Size: ' | sed 's/Size: //' | paste -sd+ | bc
1544727168

That's 1.5 GB. I know it's everything including all the docs, but how can it be so much? Docs are just text.

I'm reading this statement:

At sufficiently high energies, all particles of the standard models are massless. Only after the electroweak phase transition do particles receive their masses through the Higgs mechanism.

I should probably know this, but I can't wrap my head around an elementary particle having anything other than constant mass. How should I think of this, either formally or intuitively?

I need a suit. Searched this sub, read the suit guide, all good info. But most of the brands I've never heard of. I'm located in Germany and I'm willing to spend 400-500 Euros for a good jacket, pants, shirt and tie. These are, as far as I know, decent department stores around here: Engelhorn, Peek&Cloppenburg

For the lazy: The brands I see there are Sir Oliver, Lagerfeld, McNeal, Strellson, Boss, Cinque, Drykorn, Club of Gents, Joop, Hugo (is that different than Boss?), ....

Anything you'd recommend or avoid?

Update in case anyone uses the search engin

I have an external harddrive. If I put my computer to sleep with s2ram, it spins down and only spins up when I want to access it, which is fine. However, if I haven't used it by the time I'm done, when I run the sleep command the HD first spins up just to spin back down two seconds later. I'd like the HD to do nothing if it's already on standby.

I'm using Debian jessie. Any ideas?

I bought a usb bluray drive to rip all my legally purchased blurays into my harddrive. Everything was going fine at first, except Robin Hood (Men in tights) only played with serious artefacts for some reason and The Dark Knight Rises wouldn't play at all. I just kept going with the rest of my movies. Then I put in Gravity and now none of my other blurays will play - I get the message "Host key revoked". I tried one of the blurays that used to play (300) and it still played. So I take it the Gravity bluray somehow revoked some key on my drive. Is there anything I can do? Is the drive useless now? Is there hope that I can update the key database at some point and if yes, how often does that ha

Hi, I hope this is the right place to ask this question.

I wrote this program that runs in parallel. It's Fortran, but that shouldn't be relevant. The loop that is parallelized looks something like this:

do i=1,500
     x(i,2) = f(x(i,1))
end do

where f is an expensive function and x a 2D array. So I measured the runtime for different number of cores and up until core 12 the runtime goes down proportionally with the number of cores. But at core 13 there is a bump, and then it goes down proportionally again.

See this plot: red is the wall time, blue is user time, black is system time, and green is average cpu load in percent. Solid is using the

Alright, since even one of the scientists on the BICEP2 team falls victim to this apparently incredibly common misconception, I think it's a good time to point out why this statement is not necessarily false, but misleading, as it implies that the Universe stopped expanding faster than the speed of light at some point or that it has a speed at all.

First of all, the expansion rate is not a speed. The further two objects are apart, the faster they are receding. This is Hubble's law. So it doesn't make sense to compare the expansion rate to a speed in the first place.

Second, two objects

I love LaTeX, and as a physicist I use it a lot. But it's now over 30 years old and sometimes feels a bit crufty (especially BibTeX). I'm no computer scientist, but surely we developed a lot of techniques meanwhile, and the author of pandoc, John MacFarlane, mentioned that he dreams of a modern version of LaTeX. What would that look like? What would you improve?

On my laptop I'm using Crunchbang, but my window manager is awesomewm. I'm getting a new PC soon and I'm wondering if I should bother with Crunchbang, since I'm not using any of the desktop environment. I could just get the Debian netinstall image and pull only what I need. The only issues are that I want nonfree packages (Flash, Skype, Opera, ...) and the stable branch is a little too outdated. It's just my desktop, not a server, so I think I'd rather go with testing. Can I set up Debian like that or should I just go with Crunchbang then? I used to use Gentoo at some point, so I don't mind a little hacking.

Here the article

They imply whey and creatine are only one step away from steroids, talk about the boys eating a lot of eggs, quark, whole grain bread and chicken breast like it's a bad thing, and compare working out to having body dis-morphia.

God forbid young people exercise and watch what they eat. Those dudes don't even look swole.

The comments are even worse for the most part.

First, I'm not American, so feel free to correct me if I get some details wrong.

Let's just take the president of the US as an example. It must be so extremely stressful I can't even imagine. Every single minute of his days must be planned out. I imagine the president gets briefed on the most recent shit that happened in the world 5 minutes after he wakes up. I wonder how often he gets woken up in the middle of the night when some sort of crisis happens. Even when on vacation I'm sure they'll call him when his presence is required. When does he get to see his family? Can he just hang out on a Thursday night watching Jay Leno or whatever the fuck without preparing a speech or reading over so