Use cash. I also alluded to that issue where I said "Check for security cameras first".
The whole point of my post was to eliminate the original distinguishing marks which are more traceable to you, by using high volume public photocopiers which broadens the possible user group into the thousands. While I meant photocopier, I imagine that since laser copiers scan and print at around 600-1200 DPI, they would lose most of the marks after a few generations as well.
For sensitive documents you do not want traced to you:
Print the original on your home / work printer. Take it to a copy shop to make a second generation. Take it to another copy shop to make a third generation copy. Repeat until your personal level of paranoia is satisfied. Copy the finals semi-anonymously at a high volume, self service location in a large city. Check for security cameras first.
Somehow, when I saw the first four letters in a row, the word "prostate" came to mind.
Which is rather fitting. I imagine that Darl's putting on the rubber gloves right now for visitors to the site. Prosco - the only site on the web that offers a free rectal exam before they completely screw you over.
For political reasons (like those of a gnocatan developer who fanatically and laughably claimed "even if we find we have no need for the Gnome-specific libs, we should depend on them anyway to try to keep anybody who uses a non-Free Software platform like Win32 from being able to use the program")?
You should have linked to the actual message rather than the gnocatan site, as the developer in question does not appear to be representative of the project. The gnocatan sourceforge page to which you linked contained the following text:
Gnocatan is a clone of the board game The Settlers of Catan. Currently there is only a Linux+Gnome version. We would like to add a Windows client at some time (If you are a Windows developer, please help us!)
They contribute changes to the upstream Debian package. Some of their developers overlap. They have a page clarifying their relationship to Debian, and they recognize that they are a subset. It would take a profound level of arrogance to imagine replacing a distro as broad as Debian, and arrogance appears to be absent from Ubuntu, from the name on down.
You seem pretty hung up on the potential for a fork - odds are, we define the word "fork" differently. I view Ubuntu as a short-term, temporary fork, similar to the branches in the Mozilla project, where every new release is effectively a short-term departure from a frozen snapshot of the trunk, which returns to the trunk to refresh and renew on a regular basis. I also do not view it as the end of the world. Unlike rpm based distros, most Debian-based ones (or at least those that lasted, anyway, progeny, etc) do not appear to fork to the same degree as RedHat / Mandrake / ten thousand others.
You might find the following blog entries from Jeff Licquia (a Progeny developer) interesting. He's got a lot better perspective on the issue than most:
Ubuntu universe is a snapshot taken twice a year, without any security fixes or updates. I have run sid for several years now, and quite like living on the bleeding edge - I do not plan on updating only every six months, and I also don't worry too much if anything breaks beyond my repair skills - that is why/home and/var live on their own partitions. But Ubuntu fills a gap for someone who is not ready to deal with sid on a regular basis - who wants a different compromise of stability and freshness than the regular Debian release cycle.
Funny, I installed the 040925 nightly build on the weekend, and then added a nearby Debian mirror (unstable, of course) to the package list in Synaptic. The (20? 30?) packages I installed from sid all appear to work just fine in Ubuntu. You appear to be incorrect, please look around for some of the interviews with the Ubuntu developers (relevant section quoted in this comment). I understand that most of the Ubuntu developers are existing Debian developers, who can now work on Debian full time - this will help Debian rather than draw resources away. Based on what little I know about the people involved with Debian, I doubt that they would be likely to do anything that would mess up the distro which they love.
There are usually some Indian locks in the Lee Valley Christmas catalog. One is a puzzle lock, which has no apparent keyholes, and requires three keys and four sequential operations to open. Another is the trick lock, which has a visible fake keyhole, with a hidden real keyhole.
Generally, the people you reference who care deeply about statistics are not too worried about their bandwidth costs. I presume you recall how this thread started: the guy who runs the site is being crushed by the bandwidth demands, and a slashdotting was the last thing he wanted or needed.
A coral cache isn't for use for every link you post - it is a perfect tool for links from sites which act as a lens, focusing a ton of traffic (such as slashdot, memepool, etc), much like the flash crowds in Niven novels. Low traffic sites such as my personal sites will never need to reference third party sites via a coral link, but then I get so little traffic that a link from my site is not going to even be noticed, let alone cause problems to any third party. Such is not the case with slashdot.
Fine, don't use coral for a link to Amazon, or IBM. But use some judgement - it would be nice to be able to still visit the smaller (personal) sites and actually read the stories more than 1 minute after the site hits the main page. The smaller tech company site announcements about new products would likely appreciate avoiding a slashdotting.
Also, Coral lists the IPs and hostnames of all of their servers, and updates a page every five minutes - if you were really obsessive about your stats, you could flag coral servers, and write a script to pull them from your Apache logs. If you saw them every five minutes, you could then safely assume that someone was saving your site from a hammering.
You are truly paranoid, though. Coral is a university research project, hosted by volunteer mirrors. Apart from the fact that there are no hidden agendas or nefarious motives behind Coral, I doubt that the traffic stats for a flash crowd are very meaningful or marketable given the breadth of content covered over a month (mile wide, inch deep). For the revenues from the type of info Coral could collect, I doubt that it would even be worth the costs of setting up the hardware for caching servers, let alone writing the software and paying the bandwidth charges and staff time.
I am neither a cad designer, nor an aerospace engineer, and cannot help build the DaVinci project (almost entirely volunteer driven). But I'm considering taking a few days off work*, and driving for 14 hours to go to Kindersley, and, if they need volunteers for traffic control or whatever, helping out.
*depending on whether I can finish writing the 3 overdue reports sitting on my desk first
> Did you miss the point that the cookingguy was monitoring his own content statistics?
Sure he was monitoring them, so that he can track when he is totally screwed because his bandwidth costs exceed his net income. Did you miss the point that he was on a 1GB plan (with presumably expensive bandwidth overage charges), and then switched to the highest bandwidth plan available from his hosting provider?
>Can you do that with Coral, or is it 'proprietary info' that only belongs to them, once its on their net?
Don't know, don't care - stats are nice, but I would suggest that avoiding a server meltdown is much nicer. Why ask me anyways? Based on your UID, you should be well aware of the existence of Google. And as far as 'proprietary info', take off the tinfoil hat, will ya?
Sorry, realized that I forgot to mention that Shirley Corriher is a biochemist - according to this site, she started out as a research biochemist at the Vanderbilt Medical School, and has consulted for food companies for several decades. The amazon page has a lot more reviews than the chapters page I linked to above.
I wouldn't look to a physicist for cooking advice - while they could explain how to best crack an egg, I'd much rather follow a chemist's advice about somthing that is, after all, entirely about chemistry.
>Use coral. In the articles I've submitted (0/2 posted) my links were coralized.
The real question is, why don't the editors do it? Would it take too much time out of his busy, busy day for Michael to add nydu.net:8090 to a posting? If Perl is such a kickin' language, why doesn't Taco make links default to Coral if they are not submitted with it in the first place? That's largely what Coral was set up for - they even mention the/. effect by name on their site.
There are a couple out there. I got one for Christmas a few years back, called CookWise by Shrley O. Corriher. I haven't used it much (I tend to use Extending the Table more often). Most of CookWise is about the how and why - the science behind cooking.
Yeah, now's the time to indulge in complaining about/. "editors" not even bothering to look at the sites they post. Either Michael is stupid, or he is a heartless bast**d. Or both.
Hope the site is still up in a month, and that I'll still remember to look at it by then.
I'm not a limnologist, and didn't claim to be. In the end, you appear to agree that the original post by budgenator (3-4 levels up the thread) was wrong, at least in terms of "bogus physics and limnology", and the actual lack of any significant environmental impacts that this system will cause.
Unfortunately, I have no mod points at the moment, and as I have already posted in this discussion, I would be unable to mod anyways.
If you really want me to though, I can track you down later and mod down another comment of yours in compensation:) Just let me know!!
In reality, most of my mod points expire unused, because moderating takes a lot of time. The sig is aimed raising moderator awareness about the karma whores who oh so bravely post a comment which runs counter to the prevailing sentiment on SCO | Microsoft | warez | DeCSS | whatever, without actually adding to the discussion. Almost an underpants gnomes kind of thing (which I hope someone else mods me down for using) -
Write comment which supports MS / RIAA / whatever the slashbots hate. Include vague generalizations, wishy-washy liberal sentiments, and no actual facts, supporting links, or insightful analysis. Preface comment with phrase "I know I'll get modded down for this"
???? (in reality, count on crack-addled slashbot moderators)
enjoy karma profits
This type of thing reduces the value of slashdot moderation. I read at +4 or +5 to save time (who can read 300 comments in each of 20 different stories a day?), and only sink down into lower ratings when I moderate. I get sick of seeing these "I'll get modded down for this" comments getting mod points which could have been better spent raising a low rated, insightful post. I would rather spend my time reading comments by people with functioning brains, who happen to work, study, or research in an area, than someone spouting drivel that appeals to the usual groupthinker.
Read this post. Lake Ontario (like most lakes in Canada) mixes once a year in the autumn (turnover, or overturn - I've heard both terms used), usually in the late fall prior to freezeup. The lake is only stratified in the summer, and the only special property held by water at the bottom is a lower temperature in the summer.
Inter-cellular diffusion is the primary vector for the majority of HDHs.
So I am to infer from your statement that upon ingestion, uptake of HDH will occur only through diffusion, starting with the stomach lining, and ending at the colon?
Not all risks are trivial
Actually, the reason I went to the trouble of finding out the actual amounts detected was to put the risk in persepctive. This one is trivial. There are bigger problems on which to spend money. Given the amounts released, it is quite possible that these materials would save more lives due to their fire-retardant properties than they would cost.
You allude to cumulative risks. I doubt that those will be understood within my lifetime. I agree with you - minimize risks by minimizing exposure, but there's a point where it gets silly. North Americans obsess about their health well beyond the point of silliness.
Judge every comment fairly, i.e. in its entirety, or expect to be negatively meta-moderated!
I find it amusing to see such a viewpoint from an AC - that I should offend the very sanctity of slashdot through the mere possibility of improper moderation. Make that statement while logged in and I might care a little more. BTW, I don't think that metamod has much effect on "overrated" and "underrated".
Halogenated hydrocarbons do not stay or travel in blood; they have an extremely high affinity for adipose tissue.
And they travel to the adipose issue via what alternative mechanism? Osmosis? Carried by pixies? They may not be resident in blood, but they are soluble enough to travel in the bloodstream.
Remember powerful mutagens like PAHs do their silent invisible damage to cells in the here and now, reserving their lethal consequences for the whole organism years later...
Yes, and my point is that I'm going to die anyways, why worry over trivial risks. Even plants have toxins - every bite of food I ingest and every breath of air has something that can kill me (oxygen is a rather good oxidizer, I hear and is likely responsible for countless genetic defects. Maybe we should ban it too?). Dosage is all that matters, and I could care less if you can detect picograms of something dangerous - detection limits will keep dropping, and we'll find more and more chemicals at ever-lower concentrations everywhere we look. A recent study found pesticide residues on BC glaciers, carried by dust from China. If you look hard enough, you will find just about any chemical on any surface / in any substance. The real question is, is it a meaningful amount? I don't believe so, in this case (note use of word "believe". This commonly denotes an opinion, rather than a statement of fact).
My next 10 meta-moderations will be spent giving -1 ratings to moderations (and, indirectly, moderators too) who inappropriately negatively moderate posts which begin with "I know I'll get modded down for this"
Glad you noticed. I'm sick of karma whores who add nothing to a discussion other than an opinion, prefacing it with that statement. Do you have a reason for your decision on meta-modding?
'Cuz they're probably also in the plastic in your motherboard, cables, and everything else. Better leave your computer outside, and run the cables through a sealed hole in your wall. Oh, and get rid of all plastic products in your house, from carpet to cookware, painted or stained wood materials (ya never can be too safe), and just about anything else developed in the past 200 years. Oh, and avoid some types of wood - cedar is a potent allergen for some, so who knows what kinds of effects that can cause. And stone products increase the background radioactivity. Looks like it is time to turn the clock back a few millenia - back to living in a grass hut in the tropics, boys!
"Alle Ding sind Gift und nichts ohn Gift; alein die Dosis macht das ein Ding kein Gift ist" [all things are poison and notwithout poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison"]
Paracelsus (1493-1541), Father of Toxicology
The scientists in the studies reported their results in units of picograms per cm2. So they found from basicaly nothing, to slightly more than nothing - their maximim combined concentration of the brominated flame retardants was about 300 picograms, or 300 x 10e-12 g/cm2, or 3x10e-10 gram/cm2.That's an awful lot of zeros - even if you scale it up to a dustfall area of 10 m2 (5m by 2m), you would have a grand total of up to 3x10e-5 grams over the entire area of 10 m2, or (I always screw the number of zeroes up when converting from scientific notation) 0.00003 grams.
Based on these truly insignificant quantities, I'm wouldn't worry about licking your keyboard. I would be more interested to know what percentage leaves the computer attached to particulates (thus settling as dust) as opposed to the amount that leaves as a vapour. Even better would be to see a typical mass balance - to know that if you had 50 grams of these materials in new electronics which you purchased them, whether it is 0.05 grams or 0.0005 grams which has been released in your house over the past five years of daily use.
I cannot really imagine circumstances where you would ingest even a noticable fraction of the amount, and even if you did, so what? Humanity knows very little about dose-response relationships (just as we know very little about most things), and the methods used to extrapolate from high dosage animal studies to humans are sketchy at best - sure, they are peer reviewed and widely accepted, but that is mostly for lack of a better alternative. You have to define a risk somehow, but I doubt that most studies claiming a 1 in 10e5 lifetime cancer risk (1 in 100,000 people will die of cancer due to typical exposure) are actually even within an order of magnitude of reality. Oh, and I forgot to mention that your body may only absorb and/or retain a tiny fraction of the total amount of brominated flame retardants which you ingest. I don't know what the actual numbers are, but even if you did ingest 0.00003 grams over the course of a month or year, you might only absorb 50%, or 30% , or 5% or 1% of that into your bloodstream.Risk assessment looks at a lot of things - the pathway (did you breathe it as vapour or particulate, did you get it on your skin, or did you ingest it), the dose, the (extrapolated from high dosage animal studies) dose-response curve, and so on.
As I say routinely to my colleagues at work (environmental consulting) whenever I see an overly restrictive rule which doesn't add much safety: nobody's gonna die. Rest easy, all of the other environmental contaminants to which you are exposed every day will likely kill you long before this does. I'll even go so far as to guarantee that it is less risky to lick your keyboard than to eat anything which is barbequed - there are all sorts of nasty compounds in charred food, ranging from PAHs such as benzo[a]pyrene, a well-known carcinogen, to ultra-trace levels of dioxins and furans. Doesn't stop me from grilling a steak, and it shouldn't stop you either (or vegetables, if that be your preference).
Sure there was. Perhaps you just weren't around yet way back when the option to post as an Anonymous Hero was removed. I think the option is still in the Scoop code (see warchalking.org as an example of another site powered by Scoop), but I think Rusty turned it off at k5 ages ago - a harbringer of things to come, I guess.
But to bass ackward U.S. conservatives all they see is 'abortion' when they hear family planning.
Hmm, perhaps that is something to do with the abortionists whitewashing their murderous agenda behind gentler, friendlier names - ones like "Planned Parenthood", and "Pro-Choice Movement". I would say that it is less a function of "bass ackward"-ness, and more to do with the inherent deception in the above names. Their branding worked - small wonder that people associate "family planning" with "Planned Parenthood".
Also, I believe you misunderstand the difference between conservative support for "family planning" prior to conception (which is generally strong, apart from Catholics), with conservative disgust with "Planned Parenthood" after conception.
"This means a new class Operating system derived from Solaris and Windows with quite possibly a small piece of the pie to SCO."
All the agreement means is that Sun drops the antitrust suit, and MS pays to use Sun patents. They also won't sue each other. For now. Then in ten years, they might cross-license their patent portfolios.
I cannot imagine Scott McNealy giving MS a single line of Solaris source, apart from that necessary to enhance interoperability (which is another component of the deal). And why did you add SCO to the mix - looking for karma from brain-dead moderators, or what?
Slashdot Mirror
The whole point of my post was to eliminate the original distinguishing marks which are more traceable to you, by using high volume public photocopiers which broadens the possible user group into the thousands. While I meant photocopier, I imagine that since laser copiers scan and print at around 600-1200 DPI, they would lose most of the marks after a few generations as well.
Print the original on your home / work printer. Take it to a copy shop to make a second generation. Take it to another copy shop to make a third generation copy. Repeat until your personal level of paranoia is satisfied. Copy the finals semi-anonymously at a high volume, self service location in a large city. Check for security cameras first.
Which is rather fitting. I imagine that Darl's putting on the rubber gloves right now for visitors to the site. Prosco - the only site on the web that offers a free rectal exam before they completely screw you over.
You seem pretty hung up on the potential for a fork - odds are, we define the word "fork" differently. I view Ubuntu as a short-term, temporary fork, similar to the branches in the Mozilla project, where every new release is effectively a short-term departure from a frozen snapshot of the trunk, which returns to the trunk to refresh and renew on a regular basis. I also do not view it as the end of the world. Unlike rpm based distros, most Debian-based ones (or at least those that lasted, anyway, progeny, etc) do not appear to fork to the same degree as RedHat / Mandrake / ten thousand others.
You might find the following blog entries from Jeff Licquia (a Progeny developer) interesting. He's got a lot better perspective on the issue than most:
Ubuntu universe is a snapshot taken twice a year, without any security fixes or updates. I have run sid for several years now, and quite like living on the bleeding edge - I do not plan on updating only every six months, and I also don't worry too much if anything breaks beyond my repair skills - that is why /home and /var live on their own partitions. But Ubuntu fills a gap for someone who is not ready to deal with sid on a regular basis - who wants a different compromise of stability and freshness than the regular Debian release cycle.
Oh, and your analogy sucks, too.
There are usually some Indian locks in the Lee Valley Christmas catalog. One is a puzzle lock, which has no apparent keyholes, and requires three keys and four sequential operations to open. Another is the trick lock, which has a visible fake keyhole, with a hidden real keyhole.
A coral cache isn't for use for every link you post - it is a perfect tool for links from sites which act as a lens, focusing a ton of traffic (such as slashdot, memepool, etc), much like the flash crowds in Niven novels. Low traffic sites such as my personal sites will never need to reference third party sites via a coral link, but then I get so little traffic that a link from my site is not going to even be noticed, let alone cause problems to any third party. Such is not the case with slashdot.
Fine, don't use coral for a link to Amazon, or IBM. But use some judgement - it would be nice to be able to still visit the smaller (personal) sites and actually read the stories more than 1 minute after the site hits the main page. The smaller tech company site announcements about new products would likely appreciate avoiding a slashdotting.
Also, Coral lists the IPs and hostnames of all of their servers, and updates a page every five minutes - if you were really obsessive about your stats, you could flag coral servers, and write a script to pull them from your Apache logs. If you saw them every five minutes, you could then safely assume that someone was saving your site from a hammering.
You are truly paranoid, though. Coral is a university research project, hosted by volunteer mirrors. Apart from the fact that there are no hidden agendas or nefarious motives behind Coral, I doubt that the traffic stats for a flash crowd are very meaningful or marketable given the breadth of content covered over a month (mile wide, inch deep). For the revenues from the type of info Coral could collect, I doubt that it would even be worth the costs of setting up the hardware for caching servers, let alone writing the software and paying the bandwidth charges and staff time.
I am neither a cad designer, nor an aerospace engineer, and cannot help build the DaVinci project (almost entirely volunteer driven). But I'm considering taking a few days off work*, and driving for 14 hours to go to Kindersley, and, if they need volunteers for traffic control or whatever, helping out.
*depending on whether I can finish writing the 3 overdue reports sitting on my desk first
Sure he was monitoring them, so that he can track when he is totally screwed because his bandwidth costs exceed his net income. Did you miss the point that he was on a 1GB plan (with presumably expensive bandwidth overage charges), and then switched to the highest bandwidth plan available from his hosting provider?
>Can you do that with Coral, or is it 'proprietary info' that only belongs to them, once its on their net?
Don't know, don't care - stats are nice, but I would suggest that avoiding a server meltdown is much nicer. Why ask me anyways? Based on your UID, you should be well aware of the existence of Google. And as far as 'proprietary info', take off the tinfoil hat, will ya?
I always laboured under the impression that physics was a mere subset of mathematics. Cooking is an art, and so is chemistry.
I wouldn't look to a physicist for cooking advice - while they could explain how to best crack an egg, I'd much rather follow a chemist's advice about somthing that is, after all, entirely about chemistry.
The real question is, why don't the editors do it? Would it take too much time out of his busy, busy day for Michael to add nydu.net:8090 to a posting? If Perl is such a kickin' language, why doesn't Taco make links default to Coral if they are not submitted with it in the first place? That's largely what Coral was set up for - they even mention the /. effect by name on their site.
There are a couple out there. I got one for Christmas a few years back, called CookWise by Shrley O. Corriher. I haven't used it much (I tend to use Extending the Table more often). Most of CookWise is about the how and why - the science behind cooking.
Hope the site is still up in a month, and that I'll still remember to look at it by then.
I'm not a limnologist, and didn't claim to be. In the end, you appear to agree that the original post by budgenator (3-4 levels up the thread) was wrong, at least in terms of "bogus physics and limnology", and the actual lack of any significant environmental impacts that this system will cause.
If you really want me to though, I can track you down later and mod down another comment of yours in compensation :) Just let me know!!
In reality, most of my mod points expire unused, because moderating takes a lot of time. The sig is aimed raising moderator awareness about the karma whores who oh so bravely post a comment which runs counter to the prevailing sentiment on SCO | Microsoft | warez | DeCSS | whatever, without actually adding to the discussion. Almost an underpants gnomes kind of thing (which I hope someone else mods me down for using) -
- Write comment which supports MS / RIAA / whatever the slashbots hate. Include vague generalizations, wishy-washy liberal sentiments, and no actual facts, supporting links, or insightful analysis. Preface comment with phrase "I know I'll get modded down for this"
- ???? (in reality, count on crack-addled slashbot moderators)
- enjoy karma profits
This type of thing reduces the value of slashdot moderation. I read at +4 or +5 to save time (who can read 300 comments in each of 20 different stories a day?), and only sink down into lower ratings when I moderate. I get sick of seeing these "I'll get modded down for this" comments getting mod points which could have been better spent raising a low rated, insightful post. I would rather spend my time reading comments by people with functioning brains, who happen to work, study, or research in an area, than someone spouting drivel that appeals to the usual groupthinker.Read this post. Lake Ontario (like most lakes in Canada) mixes once a year in the autumn (turnover, or overturn - I've heard both terms used), usually in the late fall prior to freezeup. The lake is only stratified in the summer, and the only special property held by water at the bottom is a lower temperature in the summer.
You allude to cumulative risks. I doubt that those will be understood within my lifetime. I agree with you - minimize risks by minimizing exposure, but there's a point where it gets silly. North Americans obsess about their health well beyond the point of silliness.
I find it amusing to see such a viewpoint from an AC - that I should offend the very sanctity of slashdot through the mere possibility of improper moderation. Make that statement while logged in and I might care a little more. BTW, I don't think that metamod has much effect on "overrated" and "underrated".'Cuz they're probably also in the plastic in your motherboard, cables, and everything else. Better leave your computer outside, and run the cables through a sealed hole in your wall. Oh, and get rid of all plastic products in your house, from carpet to cookware, painted or stained wood materials (ya never can be too safe), and just about anything else developed in the past 200 years. Oh, and avoid some types of wood - cedar is a potent allergen for some, so who knows what kinds of effects that can cause. And stone products increase the background radioactivity. Looks like it is time to turn the clock back a few millenia - back to living in a grass hut in the tropics, boys!
The scientists in the studies reported their results in units of picograms per cm2. So they found from basicaly nothing, to slightly more than nothing - their maximim combined concentration of the brominated flame retardants was about 300 picograms, or 300 x 10e-12 g/cm2, or 3x10e-10 gram/cm2.That's an awful lot of zeros - even if you scale it up to a dustfall area of 10 m2 (5m by 2m), you would have a grand total of up to 3x10e-5 grams over the entire area of 10 m2, or (I always screw the number of zeroes up when converting from scientific notation) 0.00003 grams.
Based on these truly insignificant quantities, I'm wouldn't worry about licking your keyboard. I would be more interested to know what percentage leaves the computer attached to particulates (thus settling as dust) as opposed to the amount that leaves as a vapour. Even better would be to see a typical mass balance - to know that if you had 50 grams of these materials in new electronics which you purchased them, whether it is 0.05 grams or 0.0005 grams which has been released in your house over the past five years of daily use.
I cannot really imagine circumstances where you would ingest even a noticable fraction of the amount, and even if you did, so what? Humanity knows very little about dose-response relationships (just as we know very little about most things), and the methods used to extrapolate from high dosage animal studies to humans are sketchy at best - sure, they are peer reviewed and widely accepted, but that is mostly for lack of a better alternative. You have to define a risk somehow, but I doubt that most studies claiming a 1 in 10e5 lifetime cancer risk (1 in 100,000 people will die of cancer due to typical exposure) are actually even within an order of magnitude of reality. Oh, and I forgot to mention that your body may only absorb and/or retain a tiny fraction of the total amount of brominated flame retardants which you ingest. I don't know what the actual numbers are, but even if you did ingest 0.00003 grams over the course of a month or year, you might only absorb 50%, or 30% , or 5% or 1% of that into your bloodstream.Risk assessment looks at a lot of things - the pathway (did you breathe it as vapour or particulate, did you get it on your skin, or did you ingest it), the dose, the (extrapolated from high dosage animal studies) dose-response curve, and so on.
As I say routinely to my colleagues at work (environmental consulting) whenever I see an overly restrictive rule which doesn't add much safety: nobody's gonna die. Rest easy, all of the other environmental contaminants to which you are exposed every day will likely kill you long before this does. I'll even go so far as to guarantee that it is less risky to lick your keyboard than to eat anything which is barbequed - there are all sorts of nasty compounds in charred food, ranging from PAHs such as benzo[a]pyrene, a well-known carcinogen, to ultra-trace levels of dioxins and furans. Doesn't stop me from grilling a steak, and it shouldn't stop you either (or vegetables, if that be your preference).
Also, I believe you misunderstand the difference between conservative support for "family planning" prior to conception (which is generally strong, apart from Catholics), with conservative disgust with "Planned Parenthood" after conception.
I cannot imagine Scott McNealy giving MS a single line of Solaris source, apart from that necessary to enhance interoperability (which is another component of the deal). And why did you add SCO to the mix - looking for karma from brain-dead moderators, or what?