The solution is to come up with drugs and distribution methods that don't rely on patients' ability to follow difficult regimes. Eg, why not implant all the doses at once with some sort of metering device that insures that the course is followed? Otherwise, you eventually will have to enforce treatment by withholding treatment from those who can't follow the schedule.
The problem is that "take one pill every twelve hours for the next ten days" is not a difficult regime. Antibiotics are not generally taken on complicated schedules. Antibiotic 'abuse' generally is a problem for people taking short courses of antibiotics as their only medication. For example, someone is prescribed antibiotics to deal with an infected bee sting, or a sinus infection, or to clear up a case of strep throat.
These people don't need the hassle, expense, and risk(!) of an implanted medical device. They need to follow the instructions on the bottle and take the damn pills when they're supposed to. What might be useful would be to provide people with a little timer that beeps at eight, twelve, or twenty-four hour intervals to remind them to take their medications.
Most people that have to follow a complicated, multidrug dosing schedule are in a doctor's care in a hospital, hooked up to a carefully metered IV. Either that, or they have a chronic illness, and most such individuals actually tend to manage their condition and meds quite well. (There are studies to suggest that adherence to the complicated regimens for AIDS treatment is actually quite good, even in the Third World.)
The big problem with antibiotic misuse is not people who can't follow a dosing schedule--the mentally ill, the developmentally challenged, those with senile dementia--the problem is the people who won't. The people who say, "can't you just implant something so I don't have to take responsibility for my own health care twice a day?" or "I'm feeling better so I'll save the rest of these pills for the next time I'm under the weather" or "Gimme some pills doc, this cold is driving me nuts!"
The contemporary cell phone is designed to be as small as they can make it, to win cool-points. But engineering will eventually triumph over decoration when people settle down and *use* these artifacts. I think that more people are beginning to realize that machines should first of all be fit for their function.
Small phones aren't just for 'cool-points'. For a lot of people, the cell phone spends twelve hours per day in one's pocket, and five or ten minutes in actual use ("Can you pick up some milk on the way home?") A small phone is ideal if it's going to be stuffed in a pocket most of the time and used primarily for short calls.
Granted, there is room for more ergonomic designs for the segment of the cellular market that makes frequent, lengthy calls. Then again, their needs can also be largely satisfied by a headset, while having to sacrifice less in the way of weight and portability....
Of course, if we do see a wave of retro-look analog handset-style phones come on the market, are people going to be buying them for ease of use? Mostly not--they'll be in it for the 'cool-points'.
...Google is asking some questions unrelated to my potential performance as an employee...
Perhaps Google has found that a sense of humour and a life outside of draconian regulations are important traits in an employee?
In the real world, when employees are terminated (excluding the case of mass layoffs), it's not usually due to their incompetence. When an employee is fired (sacked, let go, 'dehired'), it's usually due to interpersonal conflicts. An important part of any interview (whether explicitly stated or not) is an evaluation of whether or not an employee will get along with the rest of the team. A highly qualified asshole might be very productive on his own, but might also result in a drop in productivity from everyone he works with. It makes sense for Google to try to see if people will respond well to their unusual corporate culture.
Obviously their screening works, since the parent doesn't want to work there.
Better the death of ten thousand soldiers than the nuking of an entire civilian population. The nuking of babies, old folk, pregnant women, children at school, nurses in the hospital. The list goes on. Innocent life for the lives of the military; the American military (primarily).
"Those who live by the gun should damn well die by the gun. But those that live by the nuke would take everyone else down with them."
Invading the Japanese mainland likely would have killed more than ten thousand Allied soldiers--not to mention more than a few Japanese soldiers and civilians. Americans had at that point already firebombed Tokyo, killing more civilians than either bomb by itself. If you think that limiting U.S. forces to conventional weapons would have limited the toll to nonmilitary personnel, you're sadly mistaken.
It should also be noted that those soldiers you would so casually put to death in an invasion of Japan...would likely be in many cases draftees. Conscripted and compelled to die on foreign beaches, with little more choice in the matter than the civilians you hope to protect. (Why is it ethically acceptable for the U.S. government and the Emperor of Japan to press young, healthy males into service and force them to kill one another, but not appropriate to risk old men, or children, or women? Why did the line get drawn there?)
From six decades on, it's very easy to second-guess history's political and military decisions. It's also much easier to overlook all the civilians that got the short end of the stick in the 'conventional' warfare of the twentieth century.
Visiting the site that's supposed to provide serious legal background, Groklaw, is like visiting a very learned religious site inquiring about the existense of God: long, incomprehensible, philosophical discussions invariably concluding that God indeed exists based on incontrovertible evidence, that all doubters' motives are suspect, and that they'll probably all burn in Hell anyway.
But...Groklaw doesn't just provide slanted analysis. The legal documents--filings, affidavits, memos, motions, as many as they can get their hands on--are all scanned and available online.
I'm probably in the minority here, but I have read many of the legal filings. By and large, the comments of PJ are on the money, and don't misrepresent the contents of the documents. The comments are laced with heavy doses of schadenfreude, but I think they are factually correct.
If you want entirely unbiased coverage of the trial, then you can't rely on anybody's analysis and coverage. You have to read the documents for yourself. PJ has, bless her heart, actually provided them on Groklaw. Providing access to primary sources is a damn sight more open and honest than what most other news commentators give....
The money spent on political campaigns doesn't simply vanish. It has to be spent on something. Someone gets paid to make those advertisements. The TV stations get paid to air them. Real people who work for a living get paid to do these things. Would you rather the candidates just hoarded all that money?
No, we'd rather they spent the money on something useful, rather than on signs that become so much solid waste at the end of the campaign. We'd rather their campaign staff were volunteering with the Red Cross.
This is a variant of the ever popular broken window fallacy. The money spent on the campaign could have been spent doing something economically useful.
It may well just be a typo. It's possible that the comment was supposed to be "...as a source of electricity from hydrogen." Alternately, other posters have noted that energy from fusion power could be used to liberate hydrogen from water (or elsewhere) to drive a hydrogen economy. Bush may be stupid, but his fact-checkers (and the ghostwriter who actually drafted his answers) aren't all that stupid. We don't even know for certain that an error wasn't inadvertently inserted by Nature during typesetting (less likely, but still possible.)
...is "fissile materials" really a word?
No. It's two words. 'Fissile' is a synonym for fissionable, and it is regularly used. Again, I have doubts that Bush would know or use it without professional assistance, but it is entirely legitimate and appropriate within its context.
Look, Bush is enough of an idiot that we don't need to take cheap shots at his real or imagined typos.
The positive effects attributed to wine are certainly not due to the alcohol content. Alcohol is a poison and the grandparent is correct in saying that. The positive effects you are seeing are due to different enzymes which come from grapes, not from ethanol.
True, the earliest studies finding beneficial effects of alcohol consumption did note those effects in drinkers of (predominantly red) wine. This link was drawn due to the so-called "French Paradox", where despite regular consumption of foods associated with cardiovascular problems the French people had a low incidence of heart disease.
Hypothesizing that antioxidants in red wine might provide some cardioprotective effect, researchers indeed found a link between red wine consumption and reduced risk of heart disease. However, since virtually all consumers of alcohol in France are exposed to at least some red wine as part of that alcohol consumption, it wasn't possible to separate out the effects of different types of alcohol.
More recent large-scale, prospective studies have broken down their results by type. Both the Rotterdam study of dementia and the PRIME study of coronary heart disease found no statistically significant difference between the effects of beer, wine, and spirits. (The Rotterdam study also broke out fortified wines--ports and sherries--as an additional separate category, also with no significant difference.)
To my knowledge, nobody has done any sort of large-scale, controlled human study of the effects of the consumption of pure ethanol. This is because nobody drinks straight ethanol, so it's hard to get a good study group. I would argue that the 'spirits' category in the above studies might come close.
I quite agree that in large doses alcohol is an acute poision, and that drinking to excess can lead to chronic liver problems, coronary illness, and neurological disoders. On the other hand, I suspect that moderate consumption of ethanol is harmless and probably beneficial for most people since the studies cited above (among others, PubMed is your friend) found benefits across all types of beverages. A little cod liver oil can eliminate vitamin deficiencies and provide beneficial fatty acids. An excess of cod liver oil can severely harm you through vitamin A or D poisoning. The dose makes the poison, as they say.
The positive effects attributed to wine are certainly not due to the alcohol content. Alcohol is a poison and the grandparent is correct in saying that. The positive effects you are seeing are due to different enzymes which come from grapes, not from ethanol.
The Rotterdam prospective study of 5395 individuals (6 year study, 99.7% participant followup) found that incidence of dementia was significantly reduced in moderate drinkers, even after controlling for "age, sex, systolic blood pressure, education, smoking, and body-mass index". There was "no evidence that the relation between alcohol and dementia varied by type of alcoholic beverage."
Link is to the abstract on PubMed, the original citation is Ruitenberg A et al. "Alcohol consumption and risk of dementia: the Rotterdam Study." Lancet359(9303):281-6 (2002). The full text is here.
Actually, the whole title of beer or wine being "healthy" is rediculous. Alcohol is the most damaging food product you can put in your body.
Actually, there are several "good" studies--published in reputable journals, with good methodology and solid statistical methods--that show an association between moderate alcohol consumption and appreciably reduced risk of a number of diseases. (Here, moderate is a range from approximately 1 to 3 drinks per day, depending on the study.)
Reduced risks include cardiovascular diseases (heart attack, stroke) and neurological disorders (Alzheimers, other dementias, Parkinson's). There is a correlation with an overall reduced risk of mortality, even after controlling for income and education.
Consumption of alcohol to excess definitely does systemic damage to quite a bit of the body, but there is no evidence that moderate consumption is harmful. Sure, the benefits aren't huge, but for most people there's definitely no reason to describe alcohol as the 'most damaging' food product they can consume*. Only half in jest, I would recommend the Big Mac for that title, or maybe a Krispy Kreme doughnut. Alcohol would definitely be waaaay down the list. Quite right--most reputable physicians and researchers wouldn't recommend taking up drinking solely for health reasons, but no reputable scientist will tell you to drop drinking entirely, either.
*Exceptions include individuals who have a genetic inability to digest alcohol (defects in aldehyde dehydrogenase or another enzyme), or a predisposition towards alcoholism, or a liver or kidney disorder.
Does that take into account the amount of energy lost when transporting electricity from the point of generation (farmland) to the point of use (everywhere except farmland)? Also what would the monetary cost of doing this be?
It's not as bad as it looks. Most people don't (and don't want to) live next to a coal-fired or nuclear station. Hydroelectric generating stations are also usually not located in--or necessarily even near--major cities.
Plus, because of privatization of power generation and transmission to varying degrees in North America, electricity is already being moved farther and in greater quantity than ever before. (Instead of operating the generating stations closest to demand, we operate plants that are at the lowest cost per kWh, and push millions of amps across the country. This is one of the reasons why last August's blackout occurred--the power grid isn't designed with that type of use and abuse in mind.)
In other words, yes--there will be transmission losses...but no--to a first approximation they won't be any better or worse than things are now.
The cost of a service (or lack there of) doesn't/shouldn't define that service. Besides, telegrams are sent electronically, just like email! So really, how is it different?
The difference is that 100% of the cost of sending a telegram is (and was) borne by the sender.
With email, yes there are some initial hardware and bandwidth costs (which are often reduced through the use of zombies), but the bulk of the cost of distribution is paid by folks downstream--including the end user. If I had to pay half the cost of every direct mail advertising letter I received, I'd agree that there wasn't a distinction between advertising snail mail and spam.
By that definition, a customer has never walked into a store.
Except that the great grandparent poster said that these people were claiming to have purchased copies of the software. If they were honest and straightforward--"I've tried your software, but I'm not comfortable with buying a copy because it's missing features A, B, and C, and features X and Y don't work properly"--that would be one thing.
Claiming to have purchased the software in order to demand support voids their claim to the title 'customer'. If I steal a DVD player from the store* and then demand that Sony replace the remote for me because one of the buttons doesn't work...well, am I a customer? Should Sony be grateful because I've drawn a manufacturing flaw to their attention?
*Yes, I recognize the difference between intellectual property and physical property. But even if information wants to be free (still debatable), software support still wants to charge by the hour. Ask IBM.
A young girl can get abortion counseling without a notice to parents, but the same counselor wouldn't be allowed to give her an aspirin...
So the point of this story is that we treat the dispensing of information and the dispensing of physical objects (drugs, in this case) differently.
Information (intellectual property--public domain or private) and physical property are two different things that should be treated differently in law and in practice. This shouldn't be a novel idea on Slashdot.
A librarian can show you books about abortion (or drug use, or hunting, or safecracking), but isn't allowed to give out drugs, perform surgery, or hand out rifles. So?
If the Universe is closed, then they might be able to steal energy from the future, and not the past.
If you are willing to subscribe to a multiple-Universes model, then the folks way uptime from us in the dregs of our Universe are actually snarfing Big Bang heat from another Universe. If there's just one timeline, then they may wipe themselves out by altering the early structure of the Universe so that life doesn't happen to evolve on their home planet. Actually, what if this is what happened--species develop to the point where they gain access to time travel, but are then wiped out in a flash of paradox when they start tapping the early Universe for energy? Maybe we've been over this treadmill before?
The humans in our future develop time travel and heat their Universe with piped in warmth from the Big Bang...but manage to kill themselves off before they critically cool the early Universe. Say, a war or something, or even a time travel malfunction that wipes out their entire galaxy. (Oops--unforeseen failure mode.)
If it's not too much hard work, then take them apart and wash them, hot soapy water should do, perhaps with a mild bleach.
As long as all the parts are *throughly* dry before reassemble, the water is no danger.
I'd agree with the parent poster. Be careful with the bleach--it will attack some more sensitive bits at higher concentrations. It's also a good idea to remove the battery from the mainboard if possible, and be careful not to bang things about too much. It's easy to inadvertently knock off surface mount components or scratch a trace on the board.
The other thing I would recommend is following the cleaning steps above with a good rinse with distilled water. (You want distilled, not spring water or anything else.) Otherwise--particularly if your local water is harder than usual--you'll end up with mineral residue wherever a water droplet dries, particularly in and around various sockets and slots. Usually there aren't conductivity problems--the dissolved salts in water won't carry current when dry--but the residue can be a pain in the neck when you go to add or remove cards or chips.
We got our German Shepherd from a rescue and she started barking at people walking in front of our house the same night.
Damn you and your dog. The barking keeps us up all night, and our toddler is afraid to go out in the yard. We had to move.
Sincerely,
Your Neighbours
In all seriousness, people considering a dog for home defense should remember that like any other weapon, there are responsibilities attached. Keep your animal well-trained--at least teach them only to bark at people on your property--and think very carefully about encouraging any sort of actual aggressive behaviour beyond barking. This is not to say that dogs aren't also great pets, and most tend to be well-adjusted, family-friendly creatures.
Man in the moon, my ass! What about the "womyn on the spec?!"
For anyone who is interested, there actually is a Woman in the Moon. A prim and proper Victorian lady, in fact. She's quite clear in binoculars, and actually looks a lot more lifelike than the Man.
If you want to see some sillier figures in the Moon, here's another link.
Slashdot Mirror
I see you're trying to to win at Texas Hold'em. Would you like to
a) bluff,
b) fold,
c) write a letter.
That's not marketing jargon; that's a stutter.
The problem is that "take one pill every twelve hours for the next ten days" is not a difficult regime. Antibiotics are not generally taken on complicated schedules. Antibiotic 'abuse' generally is a problem for people taking short courses of antibiotics as their only medication. For example, someone is prescribed antibiotics to deal with an infected bee sting, or a sinus infection, or to clear up a case of strep throat.
These people don't need the hassle, expense, and risk(!) of an implanted medical device. They need to follow the instructions on the bottle and take the damn pills when they're supposed to. What might be useful would be to provide people with a little timer that beeps at eight, twelve, or twenty-four hour intervals to remind them to take their medications.
Most people that have to follow a complicated, multidrug dosing schedule are in a doctor's care in a hospital, hooked up to a carefully metered IV. Either that, or they have a chronic illness, and most such individuals actually tend to manage their condition and meds quite well. (There are studies to suggest that adherence to the complicated regimens for AIDS treatment is actually quite good, even in the Third World.)
The big problem with antibiotic misuse is not people who can't follow a dosing schedule--the mentally ill, the developmentally challenged, those with senile dementia--the problem is the people who won't. The people who say, "can't you just implant something so I don't have to take responsibility for my own health care twice a day?" or "I'm feeling better so I'll save the rest of these pills for the next time I'm under the weather" or "Gimme some pills doc, this cold is driving me nuts!"
Small phones aren't just for 'cool-points'. For a lot of people, the cell phone spends twelve hours per day in one's pocket, and five or ten minutes in actual use ("Can you pick up some milk on the way home?") A small phone is ideal if it's going to be stuffed in a pocket most of the time and used primarily for short calls.
Granted, there is room for more ergonomic designs for the segment of the cellular market that makes frequent, lengthy calls. Then again, their needs can also be largely satisfied by a headset, while having to sacrifice less in the way of weight and portability....
Of course, if we do see a wave of retro-look analog handset-style phones come on the market, are people going to be buying them for ease of use? Mostly not--they'll be in it for the 'cool-points'.
Perhaps Google has found that a sense of humour and a life outside of draconian regulations are important traits in an employee?
In the real world, when employees are terminated (excluding the case of mass layoffs), it's not usually due to their incompetence. When an employee is fired (sacked, let go, 'dehired'), it's usually due to interpersonal conflicts. An important part of any interview (whether explicitly stated or not) is an evaluation of whether or not an employee will get along with the rest of the team. A highly qualified asshole might be very productive on his own, but might also result in a drop in productivity from everyone he works with. It makes sense for Google to try to see if people will respond well to their unusual corporate culture.
Obviously their screening works, since the parent doesn't want to work there.
Let me guess--the margin's too damn small, too, right?
"Those who live by the gun should damn well die by the gun. But those that live by the nuke would take everyone else down with them."
Invading the Japanese mainland likely would have killed more than ten thousand Allied soldiers--not to mention more than a few Japanese soldiers and civilians. Americans had at that point already firebombed Tokyo, killing more civilians than either bomb by itself. If you think that limiting U.S. forces to conventional weapons would have limited the toll to nonmilitary personnel, you're sadly mistaken.
It should also be noted that those soldiers you would so casually put to death in an invasion of Japan...would likely be in many cases draftees. Conscripted and compelled to die on foreign beaches, with little more choice in the matter than the civilians you hope to protect. (Why is it ethically acceptable for the U.S. government and the Emperor of Japan to press young, healthy males into service and force them to kill one another, but not appropriate to risk old men, or children, or women? Why did the line get drawn there?)
From six decades on, it's very easy to second-guess history's political and military decisions. It's also much easier to overlook all the civilians that got the short end of the stick in the 'conventional' warfare of the twentieth century.
But...Groklaw doesn't just provide slanted analysis. The legal documents--filings, affidavits, memos, motions, as many as they can get their hands on--are all scanned and available online.
I'm probably in the minority here, but I have read many of the legal filings. By and large, the comments of PJ are on the money, and don't misrepresent the contents of the documents. The comments are laced with heavy doses of schadenfreude, but I think they are factually correct.
If you want entirely unbiased coverage of the trial, then you can't rely on anybody's analysis and coverage. You have to read the documents for yourself. PJ has, bless her heart, actually provided them on Groklaw. Providing access to primary sources is a damn sight more open and honest than what most other news commentators give....
No, we'd rather they spent the money on something useful, rather than on signs that become so much solid waste at the end of the campaign. We'd rather their campaign staff were volunteering with the Red Cross.
This is a variant of the ever popular broken window fallacy. The money spent on the campaign could have been spent doing something economically useful.
I'm pretty sure this is some sort of militant feminist code for 'go bash a man with a pipe'.
It may well just be a typo. It's possible that the comment was supposed to be "...as a source of electricity from hydrogen." Alternately, other posters have noted that energy from fusion power could be used to liberate hydrogen from water (or elsewhere) to drive a hydrogen economy. Bush may be stupid, but his fact-checkers (and the ghostwriter who actually drafted his answers) aren't all that stupid. We don't even know for certain that an error wasn't inadvertently inserted by Nature during typesetting (less likely, but still possible.)
No. It's two words. 'Fissile' is a synonym for fissionable, and it is regularly used. Again, I have doubts that Bush would know or use it without professional assistance, but it is entirely legitimate and appropriate within its context.
Look, Bush is enough of an idiot that we don't need to take cheap shots at his real or imagined typos.
I'm pretty sure I'd be uncomfortable with the foreign policy of a national leader who was really familiar with fallout shelter design....
True, the earliest studies finding beneficial effects of alcohol consumption did note those effects in drinkers of (predominantly red) wine. This link was drawn due to the so-called "French Paradox", where despite regular consumption of foods associated with cardiovascular problems the French people had a low incidence of heart disease.
Hypothesizing that antioxidants in red wine might provide some cardioprotective effect, researchers indeed found a link between red wine consumption and reduced risk of heart disease. However, since virtually all consumers of alcohol in France are exposed to at least some red wine as part of that alcohol consumption, it wasn't possible to separate out the effects of different types of alcohol.
More recent large-scale, prospective studies have broken down their results by type. Both the Rotterdam study of dementia and the PRIME study of coronary heart disease found no statistically significant difference between the effects of beer, wine, and spirits. (The Rotterdam study also broke out fortified wines--ports and sherries--as an additional separate category, also with no significant difference.)
To my knowledge, nobody has done any sort of large-scale, controlled human study of the effects of the consumption of pure ethanol. This is because nobody drinks straight ethanol, so it's hard to get a good study group. I would argue that the 'spirits' category in the above studies might come close.
I quite agree that in large doses alcohol is an acute poision, and that drinking to excess can lead to chronic liver problems, coronary illness, and neurological disoders. On the other hand, I suspect that moderate consumption of ethanol is harmless and probably beneficial for most people since the studies cited above (among others, PubMed is your friend) found benefits across all types of beverages. A little cod liver oil can eliminate vitamin deficiencies and provide beneficial fatty acids. An excess of cod liver oil can severely harm you through vitamin A or D poisoning. The dose makes the poison, as they say.
The Rotterdam prospective study of 5395 individuals (6 year study, 99.7% participant followup) found that incidence of dementia was significantly reduced in moderate drinkers, even after controlling for "age, sex, systolic blood pressure, education, smoking, and body-mass index". There was "no evidence that the relation between alcohol and dementia varied by type of alcoholic beverage."
Link is to the abstract on PubMed, the original citation is Ruitenberg A et al. "Alcohol consumption and risk of dementia: the Rotterdam Study." Lancet 359(9303):281-6 (2002). The full text is here.
Actually, there are several "good" studies--published in reputable journals, with good methodology and solid statistical methods--that show an association between moderate alcohol consumption and appreciably reduced risk of a number of diseases. (Here, moderate is a range from approximately 1 to 3 drinks per day, depending on the study.)
Reduced risks include cardiovascular diseases (heart attack, stroke) and neurological disorders (Alzheimers, other dementias, Parkinson's). There is a correlation with an overall reduced risk of mortality, even after controlling for income and education.
Consumption of alcohol to excess definitely does systemic damage to quite a bit of the body, but there is no evidence that moderate consumption is harmful. Sure, the benefits aren't huge, but for most people there's definitely no reason to describe alcohol as the 'most damaging' food product they can consume*. Only half in jest, I would recommend the Big Mac for that title, or maybe a Krispy Kreme doughnut. Alcohol would definitely be waaaay down the list. Quite right--most reputable physicians and researchers wouldn't recommend taking up drinking solely for health reasons, but no reputable scientist will tell you to drop drinking entirely, either.
*Exceptions include individuals who have a genetic inability to digest alcohol (defects in aldehyde dehydrogenase or another enzyme), or a predisposition towards alcoholism, or a liver or kidney disorder.
It's not as bad as it looks. Most people don't (and don't want to) live next to a coal-fired or nuclear station. Hydroelectric generating stations are also usually not located in--or necessarily even near--major cities.
Plus, because of privatization of power generation and transmission to varying degrees in North America, electricity is already being moved farther and in greater quantity than ever before. (Instead of operating the generating stations closest to demand, we operate plants that are at the lowest cost per kWh, and push millions of amps across the country. This is one of the reasons why last August's blackout occurred--the power grid isn't designed with that type of use and abuse in mind.)
In other words, yes--there will be transmission losses...but no--to a first approximation they won't be any better or worse than things are now.
I am amused to note that the comment that immediately follows contains a reference to using GnuPG on a USB drive....
The difference is that 100% of the cost of sending a telegram is (and was) borne by the sender.
With email, yes there are some initial hardware and bandwidth costs (which are often reduced through the use of zombies), but the bulk of the cost of distribution is paid by folks downstream--including the end user. If I had to pay half the cost of every direct mail advertising letter I received, I'd agree that there wasn't a distinction between advertising snail mail and spam.
Claiming to have purchased the software in order to demand support voids their claim to the title 'customer'. If I steal a DVD player from the store* and then demand that Sony replace the remote for me because one of the buttons doesn't work...well, am I a customer? Should Sony be grateful because I've drawn a manufacturing flaw to their attention?
*Yes, I recognize the difference between intellectual property and physical property. But even if information wants to be free (still debatable), software support still wants to charge by the hour. Ask IBM.
So the point of this story is that we treat the dispensing of information and the dispensing of physical objects (drugs, in this case) differently.
Information (intellectual property--public domain or private) and physical property are two different things that should be treated differently in law and in practice. This shouldn't be a novel idea on Slashdot.
A librarian can show you books about abortion (or drug use, or hunting, or safecracking), but isn't allowed to give out drugs, perform surgery, or hand out rifles. So?
If the Universe is closed, then they might be able to steal energy from the future, and not the past.
If you are willing to subscribe to a multiple-Universes model, then the folks way uptime from us in the dregs of our Universe are actually snarfing Big Bang heat from another Universe. If there's just one timeline, then they may wipe themselves out by altering the early structure of the Universe so that life doesn't happen to evolve on their home planet. Actually, what if this is what happened--species develop to the point where they gain access to time travel, but are then wiped out in a flash of paradox when they start tapping the early Universe for energy? Maybe we've been over this treadmill before?
The humans in our future develop time travel and heat their Universe with piped in warmth from the Big Bang...but manage to kill themselves off before they critically cool the early Universe. Say, a war or something, or even a time travel malfunction that wipes out their entire galaxy. (Oops--unforeseen failure mode.)
Okay, that's enough thinking about this topic....
I'd agree with the parent poster. Be careful with the bleach--it will attack some more sensitive bits at higher concentrations. It's also a good idea to remove the battery from the mainboard if possible, and be careful not to bang things about too much. It's easy to inadvertently knock off surface mount components or scratch a trace on the board.
The other thing I would recommend is following the cleaning steps above with a good rinse with distilled water. (You want distilled, not spring water or anything else.) Otherwise--particularly if your local water is harder than usual--you'll end up with mineral residue wherever a water droplet dries, particularly in and around various sockets and slots. Usually there aren't conductivity problems--the dissolved salts in water won't carry current when dry--but the residue can be a pain in the neck when you go to add or remove cards or chips.
Damn you and your dog. The barking keeps us up all night, and our toddler is afraid to go out in the yard. We had to move.
Sincerely,
Your Neighbours
In all seriousness, people considering a dog for home defense should remember that like any other weapon, there are responsibilities attached. Keep your animal well-trained--at least teach them only to bark at people on your property--and think very carefully about encouraging any sort of actual aggressive behaviour beyond barking. This is not to say that dogs aren't also great pets, and most tend to be well-adjusted, family-friendly creatures.
For anyone who is interested, there actually is a Woman in the Moon. A prim and proper Victorian lady, in fact. She's quite clear in binoculars, and actually looks a lot more lifelike than the Man.
If you want to see some sillier figures in the Moon, here's another link.
They can vote as long as they remember to fax in their absentee ballots...