What happens when the radiation mutates the bacteria? Single-celled organisms mutate very easily
Bacteria do a pretty good job of mutating all by themselves. Just because some mutations were induced by radiation doesn't make them any more (or less) likely to result in something dangerous to us.
and we could easily have a serious problem on our hands if the bacteria turn into something that is dangerous to us and then multiply out of control.
You acknowledge that Yahoo! may or may not pre-screen Content, but that Yahoo! and its designees shall have the right (but not the obligation) in their sole discretion to pre-screen, refuse, or remove any Content that is available via the Yahoo! Services. Without limiting the foregoing, Yahoo! and its designees shall have the right to remove any Content that violates the TOS or is otherwise objectionable.
Sure sounds to me like they say they can remove anything they want.
Telemarketers calling cell phones using autodialers is supposed to be illegal. And all are legally required to stop calling if you tell them to take you off their list.
And unless you want to go to the effort of suing them, the laws do absolutely nothing. And, of course, you're still stuck with political calls, charities, and fake surveys.
I'm not too inclined to use my time and money to go after these people. That's why I pay taxes -- the government's supposed to be enforcing its laws. Unfortunately, everyone (me included) finds it easier to just put up with the low-level annoyance of telemarketers, and so the government's never going to do anything about it.
So you obviously get a lot of utility out of Windows -- enough to make up for its problems.
I really don't care if you pay for Windows or not. But trying to pretend that using it without paying for it is some kind of moral stand is ridiculous.
To be honest, it would be more polite to just say "no." The people who won't graciously accept a simple no are not going to act any better if you tell them you want a few hundred dollars first, so that idea really doesn't solve this guy's problem.
Searching through their web site, I do not see anywhere where they claim to be able to recover data from files overwritten on a hard drive. For instance, the information available here seems to suggest that they correct mechanical problems with the drive, and then copy the drive image and work from the data there. That procedure will work for damaged drives or non-overwritten data, but it is not going to help if the data on the drive was overwritten.
Their part in recovering data from the hard drive from the Columbia is impressive -- there is a description here -- but it did not involve recovering overwritten data, and thus is no evidence in support of them being able to do so.
If this company is really capable of recovering data that was overwritten, then why don't they seem to advertise the fact anywhere?
Just because it's "legal tender" doesn't mean they have to accept payment in that form. The notion that businesses have to accept cash in any form is a persistent urban legend.
There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise.
Because in free societies, it isn't illegal to not understand technology.
It may, however, be a legal requirement to have the necessary understanding to avoid harming other people with technology before being allowed to use it.
The one thing that imaginary property mongers won't touch is religious organizations - the undisputed kings of imaginary things.
Mormon crickets are not, as far as I am aware, members of any religious organization.
I seem to recall there was some religious organization (maybe even the Mormons again) where some guy was ripping off Nintendo games and turning out "clean" rebranded versions and selling them for profit. Despite blatant and obvious copyright infringements, they never touched the guy. It may have even been on slashdot.
This sounds like a garbled account of the CleanFlicks story, where the company (not run by the Mormon church but mostly catering to Mormons) was selling movies with the "bad bits" edited out. They were sued and lost, and had to stop doing that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CleanFlicks
So now I'm forced to start a rant: why the hell is there a lameness filter? Doesn't the moderation system take care of the problem the filter is trying to solve, placing all the otherwise offtopic posts at -1 where no reasonable person will ever see them?
You obviously haven't been reading Slashdot long enough. Long, long ago, the slashdot comments were full of lameness. When the filter was implemented, all of the lameness disappeared overnight.
My country (Uruguay) was the one that invested the heaviest in OLPC (all the school-age kids are getting it), and the main problem is not the computers themselves, or Sugar OS or whatever... it is that there wasn't a plan in place to actually use them for something worthwile (textbooks, etc..).
Teachers are NOT happy about that.
Gee, it's almost like all those people who said that just throwing a bunch of laptops at kids isn't going to magically help them actually knew what they were talking about.
The thing about these lawsuits is that I hope the FSF tried to resolve the violations outside of court before litigating. Remember: court is supposed to be a last resort, not first recourse.
According to the blog post linked in the summary, the FSF has been working with Cisco since 2003 to resolve the issue of GPL compliance, and has received only halfhearted attempts on their part to come into compliance. We're only seeing the FSF's side of the story here, of course, but assuming that they're telling it like it is, the FSF tried many other avenues before deciding to file the lawsuit.
Oh, how about this one ? In fairness, this measures the effect of watching TV news and Fox in particular, not their content.
Actually, if you read the page you linked to, it measured how many people had mistaken beliefs on a particular topic, and then correlated it with their viewing habits. The only claim about the effect of watching TV news (and it didn't single out Fox) was speculation based on a single anecdote.
And those are the people who don't understand tort law in this country.
I fail to see how an understanding or a lack of understanding of tort law has anything to do with someone's opinion that it is nonsensical for a company to be responsible for all of the poor decisions of its customers. Do you agree with every single law your country has?
Therefore, by definition, the issue of possible burns was foreseeable. One could even argue that not fixing it was negligence.
Certainly it was foreseeable that some idiot would dump hot coffee on themselves. People are constantly doing all manner of stupid things. It's only negligence if you accept that McDonald's should have reduced the temperature of its coffee in order to prevent stupid people from injuring themselves. You can argue that, but don't be surprised when some people don't agree with you.
Offtopic, but that "old-lady vs McDonalds" lawsuit was actually valid...
Not really. A rather substantial number of people tend to think that it's a person's own responsibility to avoid dumping boiling liquids on themselves, and if you do it, it's your own damn fault.
Of course, this would not be a problem if we generated electricity without burning fossil fules.
Not to say that the Wii's energy use (or waste) is a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but wasted electricity is still wasted, no matter how it was generated. It's just that the consequences of such problems are reduced if you don't use fossil fuels.
why is that? by rights you will pay a bit more when your young, and when your old and need a hip replacement your fund will pay out and you won't get stuck with huge medical bills while you are on a fixed income.
You're describing a medical payment plan, not insurance. If you are paying into a medical plan in order to have it pay for expected medical costs down the road, you would get a much better rate of return by investing the money yourself and paying for those medical costs when they happen.
It's a death sentence to the 5% with the disease. That seems to be OK with you, but most people wouldn't call a system like that civilized.
If society doesn't believe that it's ethical to allow people with diseases that they cannot afford to treat to die, then society needs to foot the bill for treating the disease. In this case, that means through taxes that are fairly passed on to all citizens, rather than forcing a private organization to pay for it.
Whenever anyone claims that society should be responsible for something, what they really mean is "somebody besides me should pay for it."
Your comment illustrates exactly what is wrong with the medical insurance system we have today: the idea that the purpose of insurance is to save everyone money.
With a properly functioning insurance system, you would expect to probably pay a bit more for your premiums than you would for the medical care that you actually receive. In return, you would be protected from having to foot the bill for an unlikely catastrophe.
Instead, modern medical insurance has degenerated into a sort of payment plan for routine medical expenses.
He reversed engineered the program, that would probably be banned under the DMCA.
No, it wouldn't, and I really wish that the Slashdotters who spend so much time badmouthing the DMCA would actually learn what it does. The law has some serious problems, yes, but it is irrelevant here.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis#Electrolysis_of_water, electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen has an efficiency of more than fifty percent, at least theoretically. If that's true, then you might be better off using the 40% efficient cell to generate hydrogen at 20% efficiency, rather than using this new cell to generate hydrogen directly at 15% efficiency.
Of course, there are lots of other factors which might make using the new one more attractive. In particular, it certainly seems possible (based on nothing but the information in the summary) that these cells might be cheaper, more reliable, or better suited for small-scale use than the combination of solar cells + electrolysis equipment. If so, then they might be a better choice for installation in remote locations or in people's homes.
Slashdot Mirror
Any proposal that relies on any group of people to not be idiots is doomed to failure.
Bacteria do a pretty good job of mutating all by themselves. Just because some mutations were induced by radiation doesn't make them any more (or less) likely to result in something dangerous to us.
You've seen too many bad science fiction movies.
Um ... why would they do that if their 12-page version gets slashdotted anyway? The whole point of the splitting it up is to get page views.
Sure sounds to me like they say they can remove anything they want.
And unless you want to go to the effort of suing them, the laws do absolutely nothing. And, of course, you're still stuck with political calls, charities, and fake surveys.
I'm not too inclined to use my time and money to go after these people. That's why I pay taxes -- the government's supposed to be enforcing its laws. Unfortunately, everyone (me included) finds it easier to just put up with the low-level annoyance of telemarketers, and so the government's never going to do anything about it.
So you obviously get a lot of utility out of Windows -- enough to make up for its problems.
I really don't care if you pay for Windows or not. But trying to pretend that using it without paying for it is some kind of moral stand is ridiculous.
So you're willing to use Windows (despite the problems), but you're not willing to pay for it?
Yeah, that's really a great stand against shoddy software you're making there. Either that or you're just cheap.
To be honest, it would be more polite to just say "no." The people who won't graciously accept a simple no are not going to act any better if you tell them you want a few hundred dollars first, so that idea really doesn't solve this guy's problem.
Searching through their web site, I do not see anywhere where they claim to be able to recover data from files overwritten on a hard drive. For instance, the information available here seems to suggest that they correct mechanical problems with the drive, and then copy the drive image and work from the data there. That procedure will work for damaged drives or non-overwritten data, but it is not going to help if the data on the drive was overwritten.
Their part in recovering data from the hard drive from the Columbia is impressive -- there is a description here -- but it did not involve recovering overwritten data, and thus is no evidence in support of them being able to do so.
If this company is really capable of recovering data that was overwritten, then why don't they seem to advertise the fact anywhere?
Just because it's "legal tender" doesn't mean they have to accept payment in that form. The notion that businesses have to accept cash in any form is a persistent urban legend.
See http://www.ustreas.gov/education/faq/currency/legal-tender.htm for a long explanation. A relevant quote:
It may, however, be a legal requirement to have the necessary understanding to avoid harming other people with technology before being allowed to use it.
Mormon crickets are not, as far as I am aware, members of any religious organization.
This sounds like a garbled account of the CleanFlicks story, where the company (not run by the Mormon church but mostly catering to Mormons) was selling movies with the "bad bits" edited out. They were sued and lost, and had to stop doing that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CleanFlicks
You obviously haven't been reading Slashdot long enough. Long, long ago, the slashdot comments were full of lameness. When the filter was implemented, all of the lameness disappeared overnight.
Gee, it's almost like all those people who said that just throwing a bunch of laptops at kids isn't going to magically help them actually knew what they were talking about.
According to the blog post linked in the summary, the FSF has been working with Cisco since 2003 to resolve the issue of GPL compliance, and has received only halfhearted attempts on their part to come into compliance. We're only seeing the FSF's side of the story here, of course, but assuming that they're telling it like it is, the FSF tried many other avenues before deciding to file the lawsuit.
Actually, if you read the page you linked to, it measured how many people had mistaken beliefs on a particular topic, and then correlated it with their viewing habits. The only claim about the effect of watching TV news (and it didn't single out Fox) was speculation based on a single anecdote.
So much for critical thinking.
If society doesn't believe that it's ethical to allow people with diseases that they cannot afford to treat to die, then society needs to foot the bill for treating the disease. In this case, that means through taxes that are fairly passed on to all citizens, rather than forcing a private organization to pay for it.
Whenever anyone claims that society should be responsible for something, what they really mean is "somebody besides me should pay for it."
Your comment illustrates exactly what is wrong with the medical insurance system we have today: the idea that the purpose of insurance is to save everyone money.
With a properly functioning insurance system, you would expect to probably pay a bit more for your premiums than you would for the medical care that you actually receive. In return, you would be protected from having to foot the bill for an unlikely catastrophe.
Instead, modern medical insurance has degenerated into a sort of payment plan for routine medical expenses.
Lazy Americans. Who needs a supercomputer when you have pens, paper, and an endless supply of cheap labor?
No, it wouldn't, and I really wish that the Slashdotters who spend so much time badmouthing the DMCA would actually learn what it does. The law has some serious problems, yes, but it is irrelevant here.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolysis#Electrolysis_of_water, electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen has an efficiency of more than fifty percent, at least theoretically. If that's true, then you might be better off using the 40% efficient cell to generate hydrogen at 20% efficiency, rather than using this new cell to generate hydrogen directly at 15% efficiency.
Of course, there are lots of other factors which might make using the new one more attractive. In particular, it certainly seems possible (based on nothing but the information in the summary) that these cells might be cheaper, more reliable, or better suited for small-scale use than the combination of solar cells + electrolysis equipment. If so, then they might be a better choice for installation in remote locations or in people's homes.