At least one of the robots mentioned in the summary isn't remote controlled. It's an automatic anti aircraft cannon. Apparently the software crashed or something, and instead of failing safe, it failed live, causing it to spin in a circle with the cannons firing at their maximum ROF.
A drug-related shooting is one where somebody shot somebody over drugs, not with drugs. Therefore, a gun-related shooting is where you tried to short change somebody when buying a gun, so they shot you with it. Shooting somebody while robbing them would then be a wallet-related shooting, not a gun related shooting;)
You've never used one that runs on Windows CE then. My dad has one that needs frequent rebooting because sometimes it will just freak out and the coordinates will jump due east or north or something, by several hundred yards, and it stays there unless you reboot it. In fact, when we were driving down a 5 lane freeway, it suddenly thought we were drying along a dirt country road and wouldn't shut up about how much we were speeding by...had to pull the plug!
My dad has a GPS. I've seen its "accuracy" sometimes. This is exactly what will happen. You're driving along at 110 Kph in the middle of a 6 lane highway. Suddenly the GPS has a brain fart and its coordinates shift a few hundred meters to the right (a semi-daily occurrence for the model I've seen), and it thinks you're on the country road that runs parallel to the highway. BEEP BEEP BEEP YOU ARE GOING 60 Kph over the limit, killing the engine! Enjoy your massive pileup. Good thing for Sovereign Immunity, that would be one heck of a lawsuit.
Well, my bank has ~10% chance of asking me one of my security questions every time I log in. Mind you, they aren't used for password recovery, so they aren't a security risk in the first place. But I can imagine some overeager website "enhancing security" by randomly asking you your recovery question when you try to log in.
I'm pretty sure I can turn to some channel and see every last second on their childish name calling. And if anybody says anything particularly racist and ignorant, they'll repeat the clips on the news. Not a second of it is secret, it's all on tape, that's where the youtube clips came from. They apparently are worried about clips being taken out of context by people other than journalists, I dunno, seems like a legitimate concern, but an over reaction to it;) That is, after all, what the "Respond to this" button is for...
It's also very much an about face. Rick Mercer uses photos and clips of Parliament for parody and general mockery just about every episode of the Mercer Report...but I guess the government can't sue itself?
The flies, which are USDA -approved, do not attack native ants or species and have been introduced in other Gulf Coast states, Plowes said.
If only Slashdot provided some way to get more details, so you could read more about the plan instead of just assuming they did no kind of study and are totally winging it with no thought or planning whatsoever.
Then Monsanto all infected plants, and its highly illegal for somebody unlicensed by Monsanto to harvest and sell them. It's well decided and set in precedent.
Even if this one isn't, scientists ARE creating lethal strains of H1N1 (aka Spanish Flu/Swine Flu) in the lab. In fact, in 2007, they succeeded in creating an H1N1 variant that kills monkeys in the same way Spanish Flu killed humans. They hope to study how to fight it off, so they will be prepared for another major pandemic. Now, I doubt very much that this is one of them. But don't assume they aren't making them, because they are, and it's not even a secret.
Don't worry, it's just a scam. It's in the summary;) This "corporation" is two guys asking the cities involved for $35K each to do a "feasibility study" that will almost certainly end in a result of "not feasible, sorry";)
The bigger difference is that when you download Counter-Strike, you aren't also downloading the full stand alone HL engine and all of the audio and visual content that comes with it. Even if SE released their own ROM tools for making Crono Trigger mods, you would still only be allowed to distribute the mods, not the entire game engine and all the music and sprites...Even though there were no official tools, iD didn't care at all about people distributing custom map packs for DOOM, or even complete mods like Alien. But they didn't let you distribute the doom binaries and original content, that's an entirely different issue.
Hardly. If he called for the total, world encompassing genocide of all Muslims, he could in theory get 14 years maximum. In theory. As it stands, he was not calling for genocide, of Muslims, or even the deportation of Muslims, simply limiting the time they can stay in the country legally. So, baring calling for genocide, you'll have to settle on the lesser charge of inciting hatred. Since in Canada, truth is a defense, you cannot complain about his statement about the proportionality of Saudis involved in terror attacks, unless of course he's lying. Further, discussions about public policy or religious doctrine are also exempt. Since he's calling for a discussion on how to deal with the issue, he'd be immune even if he were more hard line.
I'll summarize for you. In Canada, you cannot make speech that is "incites hatred". What does that mean? It's up to the courts to decide what inciting hatred means exactly. The courts have held that saying "The jews are a disease and Hitler was just trying to clean up the world" is "revolting, disgusting, and untrue" but not inciting hatred, and therefore overturned the $1000 fine against the journalist who wrote that.
People love to rail against the hate crimes laws in Canada. The worst are the provincial ones. Saskatchewan's law is notoriously encompassing, and basically says you can't even say something that makes another group "uncomfortable" or feel "undignified". Fortunately, their provincial courts don't care about that bit, and tend to overturn anything that makes it to their desks. The only real issue is that you're not entitled to council during the tribunal, though of course you are if you want to appeal it to the courts, which is highly recommended.
Never the less, in 32 years of Human Rights tribunals, there are perhaps a handful cases of them making a ruling against somebody for hate speech, and only 1 has held on appeal to the courts. People make a big hubbub about various Muslim groups filing complaints. Yes, the filed the complaints. Yes, the Human Rights Commission looked at the complaints. But they always dismiss it. Always! Besides that one neo-nazi who didn't even have to pay his fine, a few religious groups have been fined and had their fines overturned as well, all also in Sask. And the only hate speech conviction to ever be upheld, also in Sask, for distributing fliers showing various gruesome diseases saying they were God's punishment for homosexuality, and calling for the deaths or imprisonment of all gays. He also had fliers showing decapitated corpses saying "Islam is a religion of murder and Muhammad was a man of violence" and calling for preemptive violence against them, as well. I think he made it on the Daily Show after he finished 4th of 8 in a run for Mayor of Regina? Whenever people file complaints about magazine articles etc, the magazine doesn't care, the author doesn't care, and the Commission throws it out before it reaches the Tribunal. Despite the obnoxiously broad wording, the courts have always held the law to a much more reasonable standard of hatred. You'd be hard pressed to get in trouble over less than calling for actual violence and murder. Yes, if the OP had put his post in a magazine, then maybe the Muslim Council would file a complaint, just like if he said we should kick all the Jews out the ADL would file a complaint. But if history is any indication, the Human Rights Commission would dismiss the complaint before it ever got to the point where the magazine or author had to show up anywhere. And if for some reason they thought his post was MORE hateful than "Hitler was a hero and a saint!" the courts would certainly toss out the ensuing fine.
SOP in that case would be to evacuate the block, surround your vehicle with sandbags, and then bring in enough high explosives of their own to ensure that the suspect device is completely detonated in the ensuing explosion. Then when you sue, you have to claim you honestly thought a device the size of a quarter could be a bomb. If any moron was inclined you believe you were that stupid, I'm sure their mind will be changed when they read your/. posts and find you planned this out ahead of time to purposefully waste their time. So now not only do you have a blown up car that insurance won't cover, but you're in trouble for filling a false police claim, too. That sure is clever of you.
Nobody said anything about coders. Sellers. In the EU, just like in the USA, you have an implied warranty whenever you buy a product. First is the warranty of fitness for a particular purpose. This means that if a seller knows or reasonably should know a particular reason for purchasing the product, that it must be guaranteed to work for that purpose. There's about one reason to buy a fridge, to keep food from spoiling. The seller of the fridge guarantees that it can do this when they sell it. You could use a fridge to keep medical samples cool, but that's not its intended purpose, and if the fridge dial cannot be set cool enough for that purpose, tough titties for the buyer. But if it cannot be set cool enough to keep food from spoiling, expect at a bare minimum to refund the customer and compensate them for any food that spoiled! This also means that if you ask a salesman "Can I do this?" or "Find me something that does ___" then whatever they sold you is guaranteed by them to do whatever it is you asked.
Related is the warranty of merchantability. Basically it says that the goods are good. In particular, the goods must be usable for the purpose that such goods are typically used for. They must conform to the relevant laws governing such goods. Finally, it must be of quality "as passes ordinary within the trade"
What does this have to do with software? Well, EULAs have a boilerplate and quite illegal phrase that the product you purchased was sold without particular purpose, or implied warranty of any kind. Few places can you disclaim an implied warranty, unless the product was explicitly and unavoidable labeled "As is", and even then some jurisdictions do not allow "As is" sales. No places can you disclaim the terms of a sale AFTER THE SALE. I guess the EU just wants this point hammered home forcefully.
So what's this mean? If you go to Best Buy and say "I wanna fix the redeye on my pictures" and they sell you some software, they can get a refund if it doesn't do that. If some harm comes from being mislead, they can go after Best Buy for it, but that's unlikely to happen, because what the hell are you doing with software that causes harm due to missing features? This isn't talking about doing something poorly, it's about not being able to do it. The software you buy would also match the law for all non-software purchases in that it would have to conform to standards of quality. I dunno about the EU, but in most commonlaw countries, the standard is "as passes ordinary within the trade". That is, if you buy software that's full of bugs, you can get a refund, and compensation for any damages caused by the bugs, just as if you had bought a fridge that doesn't work and spoiled your food. But Windows? No. You'd have to prove in court that Windows is of quality substantially lower than passes as normal within the software industry. Sorry, but I've crashed Linux and OSX just as much as I've crashed Windows 2000 and onwards. (Which is to say, hardly ever for any of them, but it still happens). In the days of Windows 95, it was highly unstable, but I never managed to get earlier versions of Slackware working without Kernel Panics back then, either...It's gotten much much better recently, but even a few years ago, OO.o used to crash on me at least 10x as often as I've ever seen MS Office crash, even in the days of MS Office 95. I would say that for all the screaming about MS Products, they have quality as would pass for ordinary within the software industry. Perhaps that's sad, but it's true. Also, ordinary quality is a moving target. And that's how it should be. When you buy something, you should have reason to expect it to be at least of ordinary quality. If in 50 years everything works better, then you should reasonably expect that when you buy something, it works as well as most competing products work! That doesn't mean you can go sue if your program crashes. Only if it's so bad that it's notable worse than most other similar software.
Hmmm, well, most people would accept the phrase "This CD contains music." More precisely it contains a binary encoding of sound wave samples, which, when put together with the proper device, will form music. And more precisely for DNA, it contains base4 encodings of amino acids, which, when put together with the proper device, will form a protein. But, I still don't like saying that DNA contains amino acids or proteins. Since music isn't a physical thing, it's not the same thing. Amino acids are real things, so saying 20 of them are contained in DNA implies that they're physically in there! A more apt analogy than my music CD would be a data CD with car blueprints. Nobody would ever say the CD contains a car, though theoretically if put in the proper machine it would create a car. It's extra-inexcusable from somebody being critical over a perceived imprecise wording!
And as for the moaning about imprecise language: "Firefox just said it downloaded 57 Kb, but that's impossible, there are only 256 values a byte can hold, how could it download 57 (binary)thousand of them??"
Tumor != Cancer. Fetal stem cells have caused tumors to grow. Benign, non-cancerous tumors. Bad, but not cancer. Could they become cancerous? Probably. Is the risk significantly elevated compared to developing cancer normally? Completely unknown, and worth looking into. Adult Stem Cells, kind of like the ones mentioned in the headline, have had no such negative side effects apparent. Unlike embryonic stem cells, they suicide in short order. Could they maybe cause tumors? That's not known, but it hasn't happened. And not even embryonic stem cells have caused actual CANCER yet, just benign tumors. But in general, you're right, why the HELL shouldn't they test these things?
Better not eat any dairy or vegetables when pregnant then, those are loaded with high levels of lithium. Sea salt and kelp are right out. Actually, all drinking water at all anywhere contains lithium, so better get those pregnant women a supply of distilled water. I bet that's why those areas of Japan and the USA with above average levels of lithium have such high rates of birth defects, it's outrageous, we're essentially murdering babies by not evacuating those areas or piping in lithium free water (Except there's pretty much no such thing). This seems to be lost on you, but there is such a thing as different amounts of things. It's not binary. You're either taking none, or taking a lethal dose, right? Therapeutic doses of Lithium are only slightly below the lethal levels. They are very careful. You have to have rigorous kidney tests to be sure you can filter it. You have to drink plenty of water. You can't be pregnant. You can't take ibuprofen. Can't several other things. Contrast this with LOW LEVELS. Nobody needs kidney tests before you allow them to eat the kelp in sushi, or have french fries, both high sources of lithium relative to other foods.
Lets look at another element. In a survival kit, you may have tincture of iodine to sanitize drinking water. A few drops should kill a lot of nasty bacteria. Oh but don't let a child or pregnant woman drink that, it can be severely harmful, as can putting just a few too many drops in! That means iodized salt is the worst idea in history, and we needed a separate salt supply for children and pregnant women, correct? Incorrect. Somehow, low level doses and therapeutic doses are not equal. You need iodine to live.
You need lithium to live, too. It's in almost every vegetable, very high in potatoes, it's in dairy because CALVES need it. It's in a human mother's milk, too, which is why breastfeeding mothers shouldn't be taking therapeutic doses, either. If you don't get any in your diet, you will suffer from joint pains, irritability, and eventually paranoid schizophrenia. All drinking water contains trace amounts of sodium, potassium, lithium, calcium, and potentially other electrolytes. This study is only saying that places with higher naturally occurring levels have lower suicide rates compared to places with low lithium levels in the water. Note that there are no places with ZERO lithium levels in the water. It's everywhere in soil, absolutely everywhere. You'd have to drink rain water or something. (And don't collect it in a barrel, there's trace lithium in wood. Especially don't collect it in a terracotta pot, that's made from earth, it's loaded with lithium salts!) This may indicate that the rising rates of depression are a symptom of pandemic lithium deficiency. As in, the body needs some. Clearly not nearly a therapeutic dose, but perhaps a small dose. Kind of like we dose everybody with iodine to prevent nasty diseases since there are so few dietary sources (pretty much just seafood and some plants grown in iodine rich soil). Along that note, imagine a new study that shows a much lower breast cancer rate in Japan, linked with increased iodine consumption due to seafood and kelp. Would you then bang your fearmonger drum and decry how they will be killing babies by adding iodine to water, even though nobody suggested such a thing? (That study is real by the way, but correlation is not causation). The FDA recommends a minimum of 150 ug (damn/.s lack of unicode!) of iodine per day, and a maximum upper limit of 1,100 ug per day. The average is around 300 ug. It may be that 400 is closer to the dose they should recommend. Most minimums are computed based on the idea of "What's the lowest dose where there are no obvious and immediate symptoms of deficiency". It could very well be that Lithium is incorrectly classified, and should be considered an essential trace element, like iodine and selenium. It's certainly impossible to avoid consuming some. There is no recommended minimum amount of li
Not in Finland. There is no first sale doctrine there. Libraries have to pay fees to the publishers for every book loaned. DVD rentals are illegal if you don't pay a fee to the publishers there, too. This isn't the USA. They should have put that in bold in the summary! In Finland this is quite illegal, you cannot lend or borrow anything, even from a friend!
Idiot. Try reading even the summary before going off on a self-contradicting rant. They look at the neurons which work just like that boiler over there. There are a lot of them, in case you didn't know. Many more than 6, even! As you probably don't know, the math for gravity and acceleration is very simple. If I give you 3 spheres in deep space, of equal size, all orbiting each other, the math is nigh-impossible to solve. You can approximate, you can simulate with very tiny time slices. You cannot solve it with conventional math. What hope do you think there is for a trillion at once? You have to approximate. These guys have found that the same approximation equations used in quantum physics, can be used to model human cognition. This is not a comment on their belief that neurons are quantum computers. This is just mathematical approximations. Oh and by the way, proteins in the human body are shaped by quantum effects that are likewise hard to model, so even if you were right about what they are suggesting, you are wrong, because biology works on quantum effects, not classical effects. Also, your conclusion of "We are simply flawed creatures" is a statement only on why we work how we work, not HOW. I don't see how your suggestion of "We can never understand how brains function so don't try" is anything other than treating the brain as special and unknowable.
It's not even for backbones. The independent ISPs still have to pay for their own internet access. This $1/GB charge, plus the packet filtering, is done on the DSL connections themselves! TekSavvy does not get to use Bell's backbone connection, they must pay to run their own to Bell. This is just for the copper line and the DSLAM that's placed on it.
Slashdot Mirror
At least one of the robots mentioned in the summary isn't remote controlled. It's an automatic anti aircraft cannon. Apparently the software crashed or something, and instead of failing safe, it failed live, causing it to spin in a circle with the cannons firing at their maximum ROF.
They've actually already taken 6 months and not fixed it, so they're already half way there ;)
A drug-related shooting is one where somebody shot somebody over drugs, not with drugs. Therefore, a gun-related shooting is where you tried to short change somebody when buying a gun, so they shot you with it. Shooting somebody while robbing them would then be a wallet-related shooting, not a gun related shooting ;)
You've never used one that runs on Windows CE then. My dad has one that needs frequent rebooting because sometimes it will just freak out and the coordinates will jump due east or north or something, by several hundred yards, and it stays there unless you reboot it. In fact, when we were driving down a 5 lane freeway, it suddenly thought we were drying along a dirt country road and wouldn't shut up about how much we were speeding by...had to pull the plug!
My dad has a GPS. I've seen its "accuracy" sometimes. This is exactly what will happen. You're driving along at 110 Kph in the middle of a 6 lane highway. Suddenly the GPS has a brain fart and its coordinates shift a few hundred meters to the right (a semi-daily occurrence for the model I've seen), and it thinks you're on the country road that runs parallel to the highway. BEEP BEEP BEEP YOU ARE GOING 60 Kph over the limit, killing the engine! Enjoy your massive pileup. Good thing for Sovereign Immunity, that would be one heck of a lawsuit.
Well, my bank has ~10% chance of asking me one of my security questions every time I log in. Mind you, they aren't used for password recovery, so they aren't a security risk in the first place. But I can imagine some overeager website "enhancing security" by randomly asking you your recovery question when you try to log in.
I'm pretty sure I can turn to some channel and see every last second on their childish name calling. And if anybody says anything particularly racist and ignorant, they'll repeat the clips on the news. Not a second of it is secret, it's all on tape, that's where the youtube clips came from. They apparently are worried about clips being taken out of context by people other than journalists, I dunno, seems like a legitimate concern, but an over reaction to it ;) That is, after all, what the "Respond to this" button is for...
It's also very much an about face. Rick Mercer uses photos and clips of Parliament for parody and general mockery just about every episode of the Mercer Report...but I guess the government can't sue itself?
If only Slashdot provided some way to get more details, so you could read more about the plan instead of just assuming they did no kind of study and are totally winging it with no thought or planning whatsoever.
Then Monsanto all infected plants, and its highly illegal for somebody unlicensed by Monsanto to harvest and sell them. It's well decided and set in precedent.
Even if this one isn't, scientists ARE creating lethal strains of H1N1 (aka Spanish Flu/Swine Flu) in the lab. In fact, in 2007, they succeeded in creating an H1N1 variant that kills monkeys in the same way Spanish Flu killed humans. They hope to study how to fight it off, so they will be prepared for another major pandemic. Now, I doubt very much that this is one of them. But don't assume they aren't making them, because they are, and it's not even a secret.
It's so dense that a single pound of it weighs over 10,000 pounds!
Deuterium + Deuterium = Tritium + Proton (50%) or Helium 3 + Neutron (50%). Must be an unusual definition of "not involving".
Don't worry, it's just a scam. It's in the summary ;) This "corporation" is two guys asking the cities involved for $35K each to do a "feasibility study" that will almost certainly end in a result of "not feasible, sorry" ;)
The bigger difference is that when you download Counter-Strike, you aren't also downloading the full stand alone HL engine and all of the audio and visual content that comes with it. Even if SE released their own ROM tools for making Crono Trigger mods, you would still only be allowed to distribute the mods, not the entire game engine and all the music and sprites...Even though there were no official tools, iD didn't care at all about people distributing custom map packs for DOOM, or even complete mods like Alien. But they didn't let you distribute the doom binaries and original content, that's an entirely different issue.
Hardly. If he called for the total, world encompassing genocide of all Muslims, he could in theory get 14 years maximum. In theory. As it stands, he was not calling for genocide, of Muslims, or even the deportation of Muslims, simply limiting the time they can stay in the country legally. So, baring calling for genocide, you'll have to settle on the lesser charge of inciting hatred. Since in Canada, truth is a defense, you cannot complain about his statement about the proportionality of Saudis involved in terror attacks, unless of course he's lying. Further, discussions about public policy or religious doctrine are also exempt. Since he's calling for a discussion on how to deal with the issue, he'd be immune even if he were more hard line.
I'll summarize for you. In Canada, you cannot make speech that is "incites hatred". What does that mean? It's up to the courts to decide what inciting hatred means exactly. The courts have held that saying "The jews are a disease and Hitler was just trying to clean up the world" is "revolting, disgusting, and untrue" but not inciting hatred, and therefore overturned the $1000 fine against the journalist who wrote that.
People love to rail against the hate crimes laws in Canada. The worst are the provincial ones. Saskatchewan's law is notoriously encompassing, and basically says you can't even say something that makes another group "uncomfortable" or feel "undignified". Fortunately, their provincial courts don't care about that bit, and tend to overturn anything that makes it to their desks. The only real issue is that you're not entitled to council during the tribunal, though of course you are if you want to appeal it to the courts, which is highly recommended.
Never the less, in 32 years of Human Rights tribunals, there are perhaps a handful cases of them making a ruling against somebody for hate speech, and only 1 has held on appeal to the courts. People make a big hubbub about various Muslim groups filing complaints. Yes, the filed the complaints. Yes, the Human Rights Commission looked at the complaints. But they always dismiss it. Always! Besides that one neo-nazi who didn't even have to pay his fine, a few religious groups have been fined and had their fines overturned as well, all also in Sask. And the only hate speech conviction to ever be upheld, also in Sask, for distributing fliers showing various gruesome diseases saying they were God's punishment for homosexuality, and calling for the deaths or imprisonment of all gays. He also had fliers showing decapitated corpses saying "Islam is a religion of murder and Muhammad was a man of violence" and calling for preemptive violence against them, as well. I think he made it on the Daily Show after he finished 4th of 8 in a run for Mayor of Regina? Whenever people file complaints about magazine articles etc, the magazine doesn't care, the author doesn't care, and the Commission throws it out before it reaches the Tribunal. Despite the obnoxiously broad wording, the courts have always held the law to a much more reasonable standard of hatred. You'd be hard pressed to get in trouble over less than calling for actual violence and murder. Yes, if the OP had put his post in a magazine, then maybe the Muslim Council would file a complaint, just like if he said we should kick all the Jews out the ADL would file a complaint. But if history is any indication, the Human Rights Commission would dismiss the complaint before it ever got to the point where the magazine or author had to show up anywhere. And if for some reason they thought his post was MORE hateful than "Hitler was a hero and a saint!" the courts would certainly toss out the ensuing fine.
SOP in that case would be to evacuate the block, surround your vehicle with sandbags, and then bring in enough high explosives of their own to ensure that the suspect device is completely detonated in the ensuing explosion. Then when you sue, you have to claim you honestly thought a device the size of a quarter could be a bomb. If any moron was inclined you believe you were that stupid, I'm sure their mind will be changed when they read your /. posts and find you planned this out ahead of time to purposefully waste their time. So now not only do you have a blown up car that insurance won't cover, but you're in trouble for filling a false police claim, too. That sure is clever of you.
Nobody said anything about coders. Sellers. In the EU, just like in the USA, you have an implied warranty whenever you buy a product. First is the warranty of fitness for a particular purpose. This means that if a seller knows or reasonably should know a particular reason for purchasing the product, that it must be guaranteed to work for that purpose. There's about one reason to buy a fridge, to keep food from spoiling. The seller of the fridge guarantees that it can do this when they sell it. You could use a fridge to keep medical samples cool, but that's not its intended purpose, and if the fridge dial cannot be set cool enough for that purpose, tough titties for the buyer. But if it cannot be set cool enough to keep food from spoiling, expect at a bare minimum to refund the customer and compensate them for any food that spoiled! This also means that if you ask a salesman "Can I do this?" or "Find me something that does ___" then whatever they sold you is guaranteed by them to do whatever it is you asked.
Related is the warranty of merchantability. Basically it says that the goods are good. In particular, the goods must be usable for the purpose that such goods are typically used for. They must conform to the relevant laws governing such goods. Finally, it must be of quality "as passes ordinary within the trade"
What does this have to do with software? Well, EULAs have a boilerplate and quite illegal phrase that the product you purchased was sold without particular purpose, or implied warranty of any kind. Few places can you disclaim an implied warranty, unless the product was explicitly and unavoidable labeled "As is", and even then some jurisdictions do not allow "As is" sales. No places can you disclaim the terms of a sale AFTER THE SALE. I guess the EU just wants this point hammered home forcefully.
So what's this mean? If you go to Best Buy and say "I wanna fix the redeye on my pictures" and they sell you some software, they can get a refund if it doesn't do that. If some harm comes from being mislead, they can go after Best Buy for it, but that's unlikely to happen, because what the hell are you doing with software that causes harm due to missing features? This isn't talking about doing something poorly, it's about not being able to do it. The software you buy would also match the law for all non-software purchases in that it would have to conform to standards of quality. I dunno about the EU, but in most commonlaw countries, the standard is "as passes ordinary within the trade". That is, if you buy software that's full of bugs, you can get a refund, and compensation for any damages caused by the bugs, just as if you had bought a fridge that doesn't work and spoiled your food. But Windows? No. You'd have to prove in court that Windows is of quality substantially lower than passes as normal within the software industry. Sorry, but I've crashed Linux and OSX just as much as I've crashed Windows 2000 and onwards. (Which is to say, hardly ever for any of them, but it still happens). In the days of Windows 95, it was highly unstable, but I never managed to get earlier versions of Slackware working without Kernel Panics back then, either...It's gotten much much better recently, but even a few years ago, OO.o used to crash on me at least 10x as often as I've ever seen MS Office crash, even in the days of MS Office 95. I would say that for all the screaming about MS Products, they have quality as would pass for ordinary within the software industry. Perhaps that's sad, but it's true. Also, ordinary quality is a moving target. And that's how it should be. When you buy something, you should have reason to expect it to be at least of ordinary quality. If in 50 years everything works better, then you should reasonably expect that when you buy something, it works as well as most competing products work! That doesn't mean you can go sue if your program crashes. Only if it's so bad that it's notable worse than most other similar software.
And once again, i
Hmmm, well, most people would accept the phrase "This CD contains music." More precisely it contains a binary encoding of sound wave samples, which, when put together with the proper device, will form music. And more precisely for DNA, it contains base4 encodings of amino acids, which, when put together with the proper device, will form a protein. But, I still don't like saying that DNA contains amino acids or proteins. Since music isn't a physical thing, it's not the same thing. Amino acids are real things, so saying 20 of them are contained in DNA implies that they're physically in there! A more apt analogy than my music CD would be a data CD with car blueprints. Nobody would ever say the CD contains a car, though theoretically if put in the proper machine it would create a car. It's extra-inexcusable from somebody being critical over a perceived imprecise wording!
And as for the moaning about imprecise language: "Firefox just said it downloaded 57 Kb, but that's impossible, there are only 256 values a byte can hold, how could it download 57 (binary)thousand of them??"
Tumor != Cancer. Fetal stem cells have caused tumors to grow. Benign, non-cancerous tumors. Bad, but not cancer. Could they become cancerous? Probably. Is the risk significantly elevated compared to developing cancer normally? Completely unknown, and worth looking into. Adult Stem Cells, kind of like the ones mentioned in the headline, have had no such negative side effects apparent. Unlike embryonic stem cells, they suicide in short order. Could they maybe cause tumors? That's not known, but it hasn't happened. And not even embryonic stem cells have caused actual CANCER yet, just benign tumors. But in general, you're right, why the HELL shouldn't they test these things?
Better not eat any dairy or vegetables when pregnant then, those are loaded with high levels of lithium. Sea salt and kelp are right out. Actually, all drinking water at all anywhere contains lithium, so better get those pregnant women a supply of distilled water. I bet that's why those areas of Japan and the USA with above average levels of lithium have such high rates of birth defects, it's outrageous, we're essentially murdering babies by not evacuating those areas or piping in lithium free water (Except there's pretty much no such thing). This seems to be lost on you, but there is such a thing as different amounts of things. It's not binary. You're either taking none, or taking a lethal dose, right? Therapeutic doses of Lithium are only slightly below the lethal levels. They are very careful. You have to have rigorous kidney tests to be sure you can filter it. You have to drink plenty of water. You can't be pregnant. You can't take ibuprofen. Can't several other things. Contrast this with LOW LEVELS. Nobody needs kidney tests before you allow them to eat the kelp in sushi, or have french fries, both high sources of lithium relative to other foods.
Lets look at another element. In a survival kit, you may have tincture of iodine to sanitize drinking water. A few drops should kill a lot of nasty bacteria. Oh but don't let a child or pregnant woman drink that, it can be severely harmful, as can putting just a few too many drops in! That means iodized salt is the worst idea in history, and we needed a separate salt supply for children and pregnant women, correct? Incorrect. Somehow, low level doses and therapeutic doses are not equal. You need iodine to live.
You need lithium to live, too. It's in almost every vegetable, very high in potatoes, it's in dairy because CALVES need it. It's in a human mother's milk, too, which is why breastfeeding mothers shouldn't be taking therapeutic doses, either. If you don't get any in your diet, you will suffer from joint pains, irritability, and eventually paranoid schizophrenia. All drinking water contains trace amounts of sodium, potassium, lithium, calcium, and potentially other electrolytes. This study is only saying that places with higher naturally occurring levels have lower suicide rates compared to places with low lithium levels in the water. Note that there are no places with ZERO lithium levels in the water. It's everywhere in soil, absolutely everywhere. You'd have to drink rain water or something. (And don't collect it in a barrel, there's trace lithium in wood. Especially don't collect it in a terracotta pot, that's made from earth, it's loaded with lithium salts!) This may indicate that the rising rates of depression are a symptom of pandemic lithium deficiency. As in, the body needs some. Clearly not nearly a therapeutic dose, but perhaps a small dose. Kind of like we dose everybody with iodine to prevent nasty diseases since there are so few dietary sources (pretty much just seafood and some plants grown in iodine rich soil). Along that note, imagine a new study that shows a much lower breast cancer rate in Japan, linked with increased iodine consumption due to seafood and kelp. Would you then bang your fearmonger drum and decry how they will be killing babies by adding iodine to water, even though nobody suggested such a thing? (That study is real by the way, but correlation is not causation). The FDA recommends a minimum of 150 ug (damn /.s lack of unicode!) of iodine per day, and a maximum upper limit of 1,100 ug per day. The average is around 300 ug. It may be that 400 is closer to the dose they should recommend. Most minimums are computed based on the idea of "What's the lowest dose where there are no obvious and immediate symptoms of deficiency". It could very well be that Lithium is incorrectly classified, and should be considered an essential trace element, like iodine and selenium. It's certainly impossible to avoid consuming some. There is no recommended minimum amount of li
Not in Finland. There is no first sale doctrine there. Libraries have to pay fees to the publishers for every book loaned. DVD rentals are illegal if you don't pay a fee to the publishers there, too. This isn't the USA. They should have put that in bold in the summary! In Finland this is quite illegal, you cannot lend or borrow anything, even from a friend!
Idiot. Try reading even the summary before going off on a self-contradicting rant. They look at the neurons which work just like that boiler over there. There are a lot of them, in case you didn't know. Many more than 6, even! As you probably don't know, the math for gravity and acceleration is very simple. If I give you 3 spheres in deep space, of equal size, all orbiting each other, the math is nigh-impossible to solve. You can approximate, you can simulate with very tiny time slices. You cannot solve it with conventional math. What hope do you think there is for a trillion at once? You have to approximate. These guys have found that the same approximation equations used in quantum physics, can be used to model human cognition. This is not a comment on their belief that neurons are quantum computers. This is just mathematical approximations. Oh and by the way, proteins in the human body are shaped by quantum effects that are likewise hard to model, so even if you were right about what they are suggesting, you are wrong, because biology works on quantum effects, not classical effects. Also, your conclusion of "We are simply flawed creatures" is a statement only on why we work how we work, not HOW. I don't see how your suggestion of "We can never understand how brains function so don't try" is anything other than treating the brain as special and unknowable.
It's not even for backbones. The independent ISPs still have to pay for their own internet access. This $1/GB charge, plus the packet filtering, is done on the DSL connections themselves! TekSavvy does not get to use Bell's backbone connection, they must pay to run their own to Bell. This is just for the copper line and the DSLAM that's placed on it.
"The room is filled with pirates. Some of whom are very old"