IMHO, the problem is the sharp demarcation that has been created between user and developer. Early computers typically included a programming environment or you could easily install one. Nowadays, I doubt many people develop Android or iPhone apps on their phones or tablets, games are not as easily modded, and software has become so bloated and complex it'd take more than a lifetime to fully understand all parts of a large project. Computers have turned into something akin to television, where you have consumers and producers that are worlds apart. The natural transition that most of us underwent from Newbie to User to Power User to Developer no longer seems possible.
The US does such things because it benefits the US. Having the strongest military and being a keystone of the world economy affords one the ability to do so with near impunity. Historically, the US has never been subservient to a supernational organization, and the US serves itself, not the world.
IOW, it's difficult to compare the US to other countries. Economically, the GDP of the US sits at $14.5 trillion, compared to China's $5.9, Japan's $5.5, and Germany's $3.3. The whole European Union is comparable, at $16.2. Militarily, the US spends $687 billion, compared to China's $114, and France's $61, to speak nothing of the huge historic benefit accumulating from WWI, WWII, and the Cold War. The European Union lacks a unified military, but for the sake of argument spends $300 billion total per year. So, while the US is a "country", it's much closer to being a hegemony than being "just one of the ~200 countries of the world". Another way to look at it is that North America, Europe, and Asia are comparable, but the US dominates the former, whereas the latter two are divided into varying numbers of big players.
Umm... as of a couple weeks ago Firefox was still able to hit ~3.5 GB of memory on my system and crash (since I don't use page files). This was with 1-2 tabs open. Now, to their credit, the Nightlies have started to release memory that was used by closed tabs, which helps a lot. I also was able to crash Firefox with such regularity because I was using some bookmarklets to preload images. That said, 300 MB of images displayed cumulatively over a browser session should not take 3 GB of RAM; it's like they store them as uncompressed bitmaps or something... (Since I was curious, a ~700 kb PNG added to a page via javascript increased Firefox's memory usage by ~15 MB, this was probably a few months ago.)
Plastic surgery can get you a combination of features that cannot naturally coexist, like perky DD cup breasts on an anorexic body. Even gynomastia or high output lactation won't do that, as body fat is burned in a first-in-last-out system. An undersized pelvis, as in the ad, is probably possible with some degree of caudal agenesis, but such a person would never be able to stand because their femoral heads are twice the size of their acetabulum.
With these images, you start with an attractive model. She has generally maximized her natural beauty (for the sake of argument, in reality, they're quite underweight) and usually enhanced it further through plastic surgery. This is already an unrealistic standard, since most women don't devote their entire lives to their appearance, and aren't in the gifted few that have the potential to be models. But photoshop takes this to an entirely new level.
Symmetry is a universally attractive trait, as it indicates a healthy upbringing, but obviously everyone has some variation. No longer so with photoshop! One side can be mirrored and copied so they're pixel-for-pixel identical. Similarly, airbrushing generates a complexion that is absolutely impossible outside of porcelain dolls. Fat can be redistributed in a way nature would never allow (i.e. beyond plastic surgery), and anthropomorphics are completely lost when body parts are resized. No longer are girls aspiring to overcome mother nature, they're aspiring to something that can never exist in reality!
Why yes, we should trust CarrierIQ at their word for what their software does and does not do. Being closed source makes it quite difficult to verify their claims, and just recently they were caught trying to silence a researcher, then lying about key-logging. Doing the latter is probably a direct violation of federal law and several state laws. So, clearly, they are a bastion of trustworthiness.
It seems like simple diffusion should provide enough oxygen to feed a fire. Oxygen should flow from an area of higher partial pressure to an area of lower, as should the CO2 flow away from the fire. The gases shouldn't be forming bubbles, that goes against entropy and would make it impossible for humans to breath (we're effectively slow burning fires ourselves). In a swimming pool, water will form a hydration shell and interact with our skin, so that's a bit different.
There's a difference between being "unpopular" and "wrong." I disagree with you and find that well written -- though unpopular -- posts will be moderated highly.
IMHO, the main reason for that is because most slashdotters have the intellectual honesty to not mod-down a well written post they just don't like or don't agree with. Also, a geek's tenancy is to explain why they don't like/agree with a comment rather than anonymously mod it down. Such posts aren't modded up as often, but the beauty of Slashdot's system is that it only takes a net moderation of +5 for maximum visibility, rather than prioritizing the posts with 2,000 "Thumbs up".
The flaw with Slashdot is the sheer amount of signal. If there are ~20 posts scored >=4 per article and 26.4 articles per day (of which I may read 5), I don't take the time to read every +1-2 comment, and I suspect that's true of most people. So good comments get overlooked, and popular ones get a disproportionate amount of attention. I'd personally prefer a "daily reader" approach rather than an "hourly reader" one, with fewer articles per day with better editing. (So fewer ad impressions, fewer new users, more in depth topics that may be incomprehensible for someone Googling "iPhone", and more expense with editing... obviously something very likely to happen.)
They reported 4.95 to 9.2 hours with the various models of iPhones, more if they disabled a radio (a favor not performed for any other phone aside from the Nexus One, at least in the first 8 pages). That's within 15% of the stated amount, and still lackluster for their list. Of course, cell phones are notoriously difficult to compare battery life with, as one of the biggest determinants is signal strength, which varies by spot to spot within the same building.
In the real world, most of the newer Android phones are 4G, so I'm not surprised that users report less than advertised battery life using 4G, as those networks are still under construction. I wasn't aware the iPhone lacked 4G so I hadn't realized that the talk times weren't directly comparable. In other words, the iPhone 4 S should be head and shoulders above the older 3G android smartphones since it has newer technology and generally gets better signal strength (sadly, it isn't). The newer Androids should improve as more towers go up, and one could always disable 4G to level the playing field.
As far as I know even treatments prescribed by you MD does assert to cure cancer, but is only measured in 5 year survival rates, and if a treatment can get an extra few people out of a hundred to live past five years it is considered a success.
5 year survival rates are common in studies because it's a decent trade-off between relevance and time. That said, there are long term studies, like this one, and many look at all-cause mortality so if, by statistical fluke, 10 patients on a drug get struck by lightning (above the control group), that would probably be listed as a known side effect. And that sort low percent risk reduction of 5-year mortality is only acceptable in third or fourth line treatments. By the time you get to your third or fourth chemotherapy drug your cancer has proven itself to be treatment resistant, so it's more of an act of desperation in terminal patients rather than a truly ineffective drug (i.e. it would work in most cases, but has too many side effects so people only get it after normal therapy fails). But these issues were addressed by the palliative care movement (i.e. why shorten people's lives for an insignificant hope of cure), which was well before my time. IIRC, only a nominal percentage of doctors still recommend such drugs, although most will let people know the option exists.
Then we have Avastin, a drug that actually can kill the patient without provided any proven benefit for those diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. Are the doctors following the science?
Yes. Avastin lost its indication for metastatic breast cancer. I'm sure this was preceded by doctors not prescribing it after the studies came out, since otherwise there'd be a lot more conflict about it. The FDA can't move instantly so that's why doctors keep up on studies (they'd also fail their 10 year re-certification if they didn't keep adapting). And any drug can kill a patient, (someone has probably managed to die from a placebo, truth be known). We tolerate more risk with anti-cancer drugs since it's a trade-off between too risky and not effective enough, but catastrophic complications can proceed in a Rube Goldberg fashion from even minor treatments.
Wow, for one integer to be picked is infinitely rare, but two?!?! And both positive primes near zero... Wait a tic... those have all the markings of a psychologically random number! Sadly, it's impossible to say that's how they were selected, as they're just as likely to occur as anything else from a uniformly distributed random number generator over all possible numbers. Only Laplace's demon knows for sure...
Umm... I tried to do a comparison of manufacturer rated battery life, but no Apple product ranks in the top twenty phones currently available. Fourteen of the twenty are android phones. The iPhones range from 5-8 hours of talk time, which is pretty mediocre. (I'm assuming you're contrasting Android phones and the iPhone, but RIM's and Nokia's smartphones aren't in that list either.)
Of course, "shitty battery life" aside, no smartphone can bear active use all day (or for the entirety of a long flight). For example, the last 30 hour (on-site) call I did I simply charged my extra battery and swapped once, whereas my fellow sufferers with iPhones had to leave them plugged into USB ports over half the night. One minute of downtime for a reboot is better than several hours of the phone being left unattended, IMHO. Plus, at $5 each with free shipping from the phone manufacturer, why wouldn't you want a spare or two?
We were neutral until they got caught trying to negotiate (over telegram lines America allowed them to use) for a proxy war using Mexico, as well as planning to sink American ships. At the time, America was happy making money off the war, didn't want to be involved in it, and somewhat disliked Germany for killing Americans on British passenger ships. Germany was the aggressor even if America was the one to declare war (at least according to history, as written by the winners).
The reason we freak out about flu is because is because it's common, rapidly mutating, deadly, and difficult to treat. The seasonal flu kills 3,000 - 49,000 people in the US each year. It also mutates at such a rate that our immune system isn't that great at stopping it (hence the yearly vaccine). By its nature, it creates yearly epidemics.
Avian flu, OTOH, has a mortality rate of 60%. Right now, it doesn't spread well between humans, so it's a minor concern. The scary part is that it could easily cross with the yearly influenza type and you could get a highly contagious strain with a high mortality rate, like the 1918 variant.
Umm... with computers it does, as they were named by their creators. IBM called them hard disks, so everyone uses that terminology, including the British. Similarly, Philips (Dutch) and Sony (Japanese) called their products compact discs. Before that, the BBC used the different spellings to refer to different types of audio media, so it appears the two terms were always subtly different words rather than just a difference in the spelling of the same word.
Technically, any form of dehydration can be treated by simple rehydration, but that's not always in a patient's best interest since you can dilute blood electrolytes to dangerously low levels. That said, oral water for dehydration probably has a response rate greater than appendectomy for appendicitis, since the milder forms are just so much more prevalent than the more severe forms.
As for marketing, increasing water intake would certainly help the elderly as they often present to clinics with othostatic hypotension from poor intake of fluids. OTOH, a common medical myth is that a person needs 8 glasses (12 - 16 oz) of water in addition to all other fluid intake, which I'm sure bottled water manufacturers would love for people to think.
How Brussels was able to argue about this for years is starting to become clear to me. Two people can agree on all of the facts but come to difference conclusions based on their approach to that information. I'm a hyperliteral, common-sense type so I favor the "rehydration treats dehydration" approach. But I can see why someone else may disagree with such a blanket statement. It also depends on what's included in 'dehydration', whether it's any form of water deficiency, just serious clinical forms, or even just non-hemorrhagic clinical forms.
Ok dude, take a step back and realize that, contrary to the average internal medicine census, everyone does not have renal disease. Subclinical dehydration ("mild" or 1-2% total body water loss) is extraordinarily common and is generally caused by water loss from sweating ("hyponatremic" dehydration -- though technically still isotonic as it's so mild) or the diminished sense of thirst in the elderly (a pure water deprivation). Both can be treated with oral rehydration using pure water since most people's kidneys have absolutely no problem handling it. Nobody cares if their sodium falls from 143 to 140 because they didn't drink a prescription oral rehydration solution. Heck, even hospitalized patients would do fine with pure water IV if it didn't lyse blood cells (hence using cheap normal saline VS lactated ringer's) because most daily water loss is insensible, i.e. evaporation of pure water during respiration.
With moderate (~5-10% water loss, diagnosis varies by age; most commonly due to diarrheal illness in children) or severe (~15% fluid loss, usually near-fatal and due to bleeding) dehydration, potomanias may develop with pure water rehydration, but central pontine myelinolysis, refeeding syndrome, or Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome can occur if electrolytes/glucose are replenished too quickly. That's the reason anyone who's moderately dehydrated should be managed by a doctor.
BTW, I'm not sure what dictionary you're using. Dehydration is "dryness resulting from the removal of water" and hypovolemia is the intravascular depletion of fluids. "Not having enough sodium" is called hyponatremia. "Homeostasis imbalance" could refer to just about anything in medicine, as people develop symptoms of disease when the disease process can no longer be compensated for. "Dehydration" in everyday layperson use corresponds to mild dehydration (verified by studies), and isn't hyperbole at all.
IMHO, the difference is that SSID broadcast is your router saying "Look at me! I'm here!" whereas cell phone tracking requires the interception of communication that was meant to be private between the phone and the tower. Also, Google got into trouble when they accidentally captured active communication rather than just the broadcast. It's the technological equivalent of looking when someone shouts "Hey!" VS eavesdropping on a conversation between two people (plus the location tracking... which kinda makes it stalking).
The “six degrees” concept dates to a 1929 short story, “Chains,” in which Frigyes Karinthy, the Hungarian author, suggested that no one is more than a string of six friends away from any other person.
Six isn't the average, it's the maximum. I'd be more interested to know the 95% upper limit. The median would also be interesting, as that's how far you are away from 50% of the internet connected world (roughly). I'm not quite sure what the mean really means in this situation, as the distribution is likely skewed toward people that barely use Facebook, thus a higher distance from everyone.
Each successive generation of a species contains fewer "bugs" than its predecessor, as disadvantageous traits are selected against. This is the sole responsibility of mate selection by individuals. In software, a new module generally contains the useful feature set of the older one, so it's not whole inaccurate to say the newer module consumed the older one. User complaints are one of the major selective pressures that drive these processes.
Ecology is an emergent property of evolution, which is an emergent property arising from mathematics. There are a few rules (e.g. selection must occur, descendants must inherit traits, etc.), but it happens in many areas outside of biology (e.g. chemical species, expressions in language, consumer products). Now, that said, I personally don't see much insight being offered by the comparison, but it's an interesting phenomenon.
Well, biometric identification is probabilistic and every system has false positives, especially when applied to a large population. If you're in the database then you may well be one of the false positives. Heck, even a true positive could be inaccurate, since you leave fingerprints and such everywhere... including future crime scenes. Plus, given how things seem to go, this system, if implemented, would supplant traditional methods and lead to: "Well, the computer says you did it, so that's good enough for me.".
A more accurate method of determining one's optimal sport is to do a muscle biopsy. It takes an insignificant amount of muscle and compares the ratio of fast, intermediate, and slow twitch muscle fibers. I highly doubt that a single gene can be used to reliably predict that ratio.
OTOH, most people figure this out in childhood. Either you excel at sprinting, distance, or are mediocre at both. Plus, factors like body habitus play a greater effect than raw muscle composition, and practical experience is the only thing that factors everything in. But that's kinda irrelevant. Let the kid do what they like rather than push them into something they're most likely to win at. They'll probably wind-up picking their optimal sport anyway, and if their parents think the lost year or two of grade school training is a problem then there are some serious issues at hand.
Aside from having a sketchy history regarding enforcability, EULAs only apply to software. The warranty applies to the physical item sold. Plus, state (perhaps federal) anti-lemon laws ensure that if they don't provide a warranty then they're still responsible for fixing defects and such. Why do you think every el-cheapo manufacturer offers one? (Hint: it's not to give you more rights.)
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, the problem is the sharp demarcation that has been created between user and developer. Early computers typically included a programming environment or you could easily install one. Nowadays, I doubt many people develop Android or iPhone apps on their phones or tablets, games are not as easily modded, and software has become so bloated and complex it'd take more than a lifetime to fully understand all parts of a large project. Computers have turned into something akin to television, where you have consumers and producers that are worlds apart. The natural transition that most of us underwent from Newbie to User to Power User to Developer no longer seems possible.
The US does such things because it benefits the US. Having the strongest military and being a keystone of the world economy affords one the ability to do so with near impunity. Historically, the US has never been subservient to a supernational organization, and the US serves itself, not the world.
IOW, it's difficult to compare the US to other countries. Economically, the GDP of the US sits at $14.5 trillion, compared to China's $5.9, Japan's $5.5, and Germany's $3.3. The whole European Union is comparable, at $16.2. Militarily, the US spends $687 billion, compared to China's $114, and France's $61, to speak nothing of the huge historic benefit accumulating from WWI, WWII, and the Cold War. The European Union lacks a unified military, but for the sake of argument spends $300 billion total per year. So, while the US is a "country", it's much closer to being a hegemony than being "just one of the ~200 countries of the world". Another way to look at it is that North America, Europe, and Asia are comparable, but the US dominates the former, whereas the latter two are divided into varying numbers of big players.
Umm... as of a couple weeks ago Firefox was still able to hit ~3.5 GB of memory on my system and crash (since I don't use page files). This was with 1-2 tabs open. Now, to their credit, the Nightlies have started to release memory that was used by closed tabs, which helps a lot. I also was able to crash Firefox with such regularity because I was using some bookmarklets to preload images. That said, 300 MB of images displayed cumulatively over a browser session should not take 3 GB of RAM; it's like they store them as uncompressed bitmaps or something... (Since I was curious, a ~700 kb PNG added to a page via javascript increased Firefox's memory usage by ~15 MB, this was probably a few months ago.)
Plastic surgery can get you a combination of features that cannot naturally coexist, like perky DD cup breasts on an anorexic body. Even gynomastia or high output lactation won't do that, as body fat is burned in a first-in-last-out system. An undersized pelvis, as in the ad, is probably possible with some degree of caudal agenesis, but such a person would never be able to stand because their femoral heads are twice the size of their acetabulum.
With these images, you start with an attractive model. She has generally maximized her natural beauty (for the sake of argument, in reality, they're quite underweight) and usually enhanced it further through plastic surgery. This is already an unrealistic standard, since most women don't devote their entire lives to their appearance, and aren't in the gifted few that have the potential to be models. But photoshop takes this to an entirely new level.
Symmetry is a universally attractive trait, as it indicates a healthy upbringing, but obviously everyone has some variation. No longer so with photoshop! One side can be mirrored and copied so they're pixel-for-pixel identical. Similarly, airbrushing generates a complexion that is absolutely impossible outside of porcelain dolls. Fat can be redistributed in a way nature would never allow (i.e. beyond plastic surgery), and anthropomorphics are completely lost when body parts are resized. No longer are girls aspiring to overcome mother nature, they're aspiring to something that can never exist in reality!
If you think such things are 'anatomically impossible' I rather doubt you're a medical doctor.
Which pelvis type do you think this lady has?
Why yes, we should trust CarrierIQ at their word for what their software does and does not do. Being closed source makes it quite difficult to verify their claims, and just recently they were caught trying to silence a researcher, then lying about key-logging. Doing the latter is probably a direct violation of federal law and several state laws. So, clearly, they are a bastion of trustworthiness.
It seems like simple diffusion should provide enough oxygen to feed a fire. Oxygen should flow from an area of higher partial pressure to an area of lower, as should the CO2 flow away from the fire. The gases shouldn't be forming bubbles, that goes against entropy and would make it impossible for humans to breath (we're effectively slow burning fires ourselves). In a swimming pool, water will form a hydration shell and interact with our skin, so that's a bit different.
There's a difference between being "unpopular" and "wrong." I disagree with you and find that well written -- though unpopular -- posts will be moderated highly.
IMHO, the main reason for that is because most slashdotters have the intellectual honesty to not mod-down a well written post they just don't like or don't agree with. Also, a geek's tenancy is to explain why they don't like/agree with a comment rather than anonymously mod it down. Such posts aren't modded up as often, but the beauty of Slashdot's system is that it only takes a net moderation of +5 for maximum visibility, rather than prioritizing the posts with 2,000 "Thumbs up".
The flaw with Slashdot is the sheer amount of signal. If there are ~20 posts scored >=4 per article and 26.4 articles per day (of which I may read 5), I don't take the time to read every +1-2 comment, and I suspect that's true of most people. So good comments get overlooked, and popular ones get a disproportionate amount of attention. I'd personally prefer a "daily reader" approach rather than an "hourly reader" one, with fewer articles per day with better editing. (So fewer ad impressions, fewer new users, more in depth topics that may be incomprehensible for someone Googling "iPhone", and more expense with editing... obviously something very likely to happen.)
They reported 4.95 to 9.2 hours with the various models of iPhones, more if they disabled a radio (a favor not performed for any other phone aside from the Nexus One, at least in the first 8 pages). That's within 15% of the stated amount, and still lackluster for their list. Of course, cell phones are notoriously difficult to compare battery life with, as one of the biggest determinants is signal strength, which varies by spot to spot within the same building.
In the real world, most of the newer Android phones are 4G, so I'm not surprised that users report less than advertised battery life using 4G, as those networks are still under construction. I wasn't aware the iPhone lacked 4G so I hadn't realized that the talk times weren't directly comparable. In other words, the iPhone 4 S should be head and shoulders above the older 3G android smartphones since it has newer technology and generally gets better signal strength (sadly, it isn't). The newer Androids should improve as more towers go up, and one could always disable 4G to level the playing field.
As far as I know even treatments prescribed by you MD does assert to cure cancer, but is only measured in 5 year survival rates, and if a treatment can get an extra few people out of a hundred to live past five years it is considered a success.
5 year survival rates are common in studies because it's a decent trade-off between relevance and time. That said, there are long term studies, like this one, and many look at all-cause mortality so if, by statistical fluke, 10 patients on a drug get struck by lightning (above the control group), that would probably be listed as a known side effect. And that sort low percent risk reduction of 5-year mortality is only acceptable in third or fourth line treatments. By the time you get to your third or fourth chemotherapy drug your cancer has proven itself to be treatment resistant, so it's more of an act of desperation in terminal patients rather than a truly ineffective drug (i.e. it would work in most cases, but has too many side effects so people only get it after normal therapy fails). But these issues were addressed by the palliative care movement (i.e. why shorten people's lives for an insignificant hope of cure), which was well before my time. IIRC, only a nominal percentage of doctors still recommend such drugs, although most will let people know the option exists.
Then we have Avastin, a drug that actually can kill the patient without provided any proven benefit for those diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. Are the doctors following the science?
Yes. Avastin lost its indication for metastatic breast cancer. I'm sure this was preceded by doctors not prescribing it after the studies came out, since otherwise there'd be a lot more conflict about it. The FDA can't move instantly so that's why doctors keep up on studies (they'd also fail their 10 year re-certification if they didn't keep adapting). And any drug can kill a patient, (someone has probably managed to die from a placebo, truth be known). We tolerate more risk with anti-cancer drugs since it's a trade-off between too risky and not effective enough, but catastrophic complications can proceed in a Rube Goldberg fashion from even minor treatments.
Wow, for one integer to be picked is infinitely rare, but two?!?! And both positive primes near zero... Wait a tic... those have all the markings of a psychologically random number! Sadly, it's impossible to say that's how they were selected, as they're just as likely to occur as anything else from a uniformly distributed random number generator over all possible numbers. Only Laplace's demon knows for sure...
Umm... I tried to do a comparison of manufacturer rated battery life, but no Apple product ranks in the top twenty phones currently available. Fourteen of the twenty are android phones. The iPhones range from 5-8 hours of talk time, which is pretty mediocre. (I'm assuming you're contrasting Android phones and the iPhone, but RIM's and Nokia's smartphones aren't in that list either.)
Of course, "shitty battery life" aside, no smartphone can bear active use all day (or for the entirety of a long flight). For example, the last 30 hour (on-site) call I did I simply charged my extra battery and swapped once, whereas my fellow sufferers with iPhones had to leave them plugged into USB ports over half the night. One minute of downtime for a reboot is better than several hours of the phone being left unattended, IMHO. Plus, at $5 each with free shipping from the phone manufacturer, why wouldn't you want a spare or two?
We were neutral until they got caught trying to negotiate (over telegram lines America allowed them to use) for a proxy war using Mexico, as well as planning to sink American ships. At the time, America was happy making money off the war, didn't want to be involved in it, and somewhat disliked Germany for killing Americans on British passenger ships. Germany was the aggressor even if America was the one to declare war (at least according to history, as written by the winners).
The reason we freak out about flu is because is because it's common, rapidly mutating, deadly, and difficult to treat. The seasonal flu kills 3,000 - 49,000 people in the US each year. It also mutates at such a rate that our immune system isn't that great at stopping it (hence the yearly vaccine). By its nature, it creates yearly epidemics.
Avian flu, OTOH, has a mortality rate of 60%. Right now, it doesn't spread well between humans, so it's a minor concern. The scary part is that it could easily cross with the yearly influenza type and you could get a highly contagious strain with a high mortality rate, like the 1918 variant.
Umm... with computers it does, as they were named by their creators. IBM called them hard disks, so everyone uses that terminology, including the British. Similarly, Philips (Dutch) and Sony (Japanese) called their products compact discs. Before that, the BBC used the different spellings to refer to different types of audio media, so it appears the two terms were always subtly different words rather than just a difference in the spelling of the same word.
:: Quick and Dirty Tips
First four hits on Google:
What's the difference between a "disc" and a "disk?"
Grammar Girl : Disc or Disk?
Spelling of disc - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
disc/disk (From the book: Common Errors in English Usage)
And if that isn't enough, skim the article comments. It seems ~90% of slashdotters are using the spellings in this manner.
Technically, any form of dehydration can be treated by simple rehydration, but that's not always in a patient's best interest since you can dilute blood electrolytes to dangerously low levels. That said, oral water for dehydration probably has a response rate greater than appendectomy for appendicitis, since the milder forms are just so much more prevalent than the more severe forms.
As for marketing, increasing water intake would certainly help the elderly as they often present to clinics with othostatic hypotension from poor intake of fluids. OTOH, a common medical myth is that a person needs 8 glasses (12 - 16 oz) of water in addition to all other fluid intake, which I'm sure bottled water manufacturers would love for people to think.
How Brussels was able to argue about this for years is starting to become clear to me. Two people can agree on all of the facts but come to difference conclusions based on their approach to that information. I'm a hyperliteral, common-sense type so I favor the "rehydration treats dehydration" approach. But I can see why someone else may disagree with such a blanket statement. It also depends on what's included in 'dehydration', whether it's any form of water deficiency, just serious clinical forms, or even just non-hemorrhagic clinical forms.
Ok dude, take a step back and realize that, contrary to the average internal medicine census, everyone does not have renal disease. Subclinical dehydration ("mild" or 1-2% total body water loss) is extraordinarily common and is generally caused by water loss from sweating ("hyponatremic" dehydration -- though technically still isotonic as it's so mild) or the diminished sense of thirst in the elderly (a pure water deprivation). Both can be treated with oral rehydration using pure water since most people's kidneys have absolutely no problem handling it. Nobody cares if their sodium falls from 143 to 140 because they didn't drink a prescription oral rehydration solution. Heck, even hospitalized patients would do fine with pure water IV if it didn't lyse blood cells (hence using cheap normal saline VS lactated ringer's) because most daily water loss is insensible, i.e. evaporation of pure water during respiration.
With moderate (~5-10% water loss, diagnosis varies by age; most commonly due to diarrheal illness in children) or severe (~15% fluid loss, usually near-fatal and due to bleeding) dehydration, potomanias may develop with pure water rehydration, but central pontine myelinolysis, refeeding syndrome, or Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome can occur if electrolytes/glucose are replenished too quickly. That's the reason anyone who's moderately dehydrated should be managed by a doctor.
BTW, I'm not sure what dictionary you're using. Dehydration is "dryness resulting from the removal of water" and hypovolemia is the intravascular depletion of fluids. "Not having enough sodium" is called hyponatremia. "Homeostasis imbalance" could refer to just about anything in medicine, as people develop symptoms of disease when the disease process can no longer be compensated for. "Dehydration" in everyday layperson use corresponds to mild dehydration (verified by studies), and isn't hyperbole at all.
IMHO, the difference is that SSID broadcast is your router saying "Look at me! I'm here!" whereas cell phone tracking requires the interception of communication that was meant to be private between the phone and the tower. Also, Google got into trouble when they accidentally captured active communication rather than just the broadcast. It's the technological equivalent of looking when someone shouts "Hey!" VS eavesdropping on a conversation between two people (plus the location tracking... which kinda makes it stalking).
I wonder how it flies with wiretapping laws. They're intercepting a signal that wasn't meant for them and retrieving data from it.
The “six degrees” concept dates to a 1929 short story, “Chains,” in which Frigyes Karinthy, the Hungarian author, suggested that no one is more than a string of six friends away from any other person.
Six isn't the average, it's the maximum. I'd be more interested to know the 95% upper limit. The median would also be interesting, as that's how far you are away from 50% of the internet connected world (roughly). I'm not quite sure what the mean really means in this situation, as the distribution is likely skewed toward people that barely use Facebook, thus a higher distance from everyone.
Each successive generation of a species contains fewer "bugs" than its predecessor, as disadvantageous traits are selected against. This is the sole responsibility of mate selection by individuals. In software, a new module generally contains the useful feature set of the older one, so it's not whole inaccurate to say the newer module consumed the older one. User complaints are one of the major selective pressures that drive these processes.
Ecology is an emergent property of evolution, which is an emergent property arising from mathematics. There are a few rules (e.g. selection must occur, descendants must inherit traits, etc.), but it happens in many areas outside of biology (e.g. chemical species, expressions in language, consumer products). Now, that said, I personally don't see much insight being offered by the comparison, but it's an interesting phenomenon.
Was the world really that much better during feudal times, where only the elite were educated and therefore the only opinions that counted?
Well, biometric identification is probabilistic and every system has false positives, especially when applied to a large population. If you're in the database then you may well be one of the false positives. Heck, even a true positive could be inaccurate, since you leave fingerprints and such everywhere... including future crime scenes. Plus, given how things seem to go, this system, if implemented, would supplant traditional methods and lead to: "Well, the computer says you did it, so that's good enough for me.".
A more accurate method of determining one's optimal sport is to do a muscle biopsy. It takes an insignificant amount of muscle and compares the ratio of fast, intermediate, and slow twitch muscle fibers. I highly doubt that a single gene can be used to reliably predict that ratio.
OTOH, most people figure this out in childhood. Either you excel at sprinting, distance, or are mediocre at both. Plus, factors like body habitus play a greater effect than raw muscle composition, and practical experience is the only thing that factors everything in. But that's kinda irrelevant. Let the kid do what they like rather than push them into something they're most likely to win at. They'll probably wind-up picking their optimal sport anyway, and if their parents think the lost year or two of grade school training is a problem then there are some serious issues at hand.
Aside from having a sketchy history regarding enforcability, EULAs only apply to software. The warranty applies to the physical item sold. Plus, state (perhaps federal) anti-lemon laws ensure that if they don't provide a warranty then they're still responsible for fixing defects and such. Why do you think every el-cheapo manufacturer offers one? (Hint: it's not to give you more rights.)