It might be a child safety thing. An airbag can kill someone below a certain size, especially if they are not wearing a seat belt, so it's likely programmed to disable itself if there is less than e.g. 80 lbs in the passenger seat, or if the belt is not buckled. In those scenarios an airbag deploying would do more harm than good by turning an otherwise low risk slow speed crash into potentially fatal one.

I'm someone who would like to see a whole lot less weaponry in our society, but I'm still on the side of the "gun nuts" because as much as I am not a fan of the proliferation of firearms, I'm even less of a fan of abridging the constitution. If people are serious about gun control, lobby to have the 2nd amendment stricken or altered, but don't try to weasel around it legislatively.

I personally feel that the 2nd amendment is somewhat of an anachronism, but part of living in a democratic society means putting up with laws you don't agree with. If we don't defend the 2nd so long as it is the law of the land, we can hardly complain when the 1st or 4th amendments are weakened as well.

The graphics drivers for OSX are crap, at least for ATI. I get about double the framerate for the same game if I boot into Windows using the vendor's drivers vs running it in OSX where I'm stuck with Apple's.

Damage done to the road rises exponentially with the load. The rule of thumb is damage to the road is proportional to (gross weight / # axles)^4. A single fully loaded tractor trailer can do as much damage to a road as 1000 passenger cars. So I don't know if the higher fuel tax trucks pay completely offsets the additional wear they put on the roads.

See http://www.pavementinteractive...

Revive http://www.kuro5hin.org/ maybe?

I'm from Massachusetts and we call those things sand fleas as we'll. the ones we have are pretty small though, maybe pinkie nail size.

Self assembling alien nano-robots. I did a book report on it in middle school in 1989.

You are severely underestimating 2 year olds. My daughter figured out how to unlock the iPad, page around until she found netflicks, open it, find Curios George in the recently watched list, and start it playing. And this was when she was 18 months old. And yes we had to sharply curtail her iPad time. She's supposed to be learning to explore her world physically at this age, not zone out in front of a screen.

We do still let her play for a few minutes a day because it is good for her to learn the tech, but too much screen time is IMHO counterproductive at her age. Besides after an iPad session she's always a huge grump.

That's great if you live in the suburbs and have a garage where you can plug the car in in overnight. Until municipalities start installing metered outlets in on-street overnight parking spaces, electric is unfortunately impractical for millions of people.

That and the fact that the model S was 4x the price of my bottom-of-the-line Hyundai made it a non-starter for me.

They call it dub step now, gramps.

People charged with a crime often have a their movements restricted as a condition of their bail.

Are all firefighters paramedics? This is a legitimate question, I really don't know, but we were discussing videos made by a firefighter, not a paramedic per se.

Regardless, does the video of a guy kicking down your front door and dragging you out of a burning building constitute PHI? Is removing you from immediate proximity to physical danger a medical encounter?

IANAL, but I did work work as an SE in the medical world for 15 years at organizations that both acted as PHI clearinghouses for claims and clinical records as well as creating practice management software. In my experience the scope of HIPAA's privacy protections are a lot narrower than what slashdotters like to think.

This is one of those corner cases that raises some interesting questions, but like I said it's making a lot of assumptions to claim unequivocally that such a video would automatically run afoul of HIPAA. If there is anyone with first hand institutional experience in this arena, I'd be curious to hear of any similar cases. For example, where do security tapes recorded by hospital security land?

You are making the assumption that the firefighter is a HIPAA covered entity, and that the video of them performing their duty constitutes a medical record. Both of those are pretty big assumptions.

It depends. Some nail guns for use on concrete use an explosive cartridge to drive the fastener. I think that might qualify them under (a) above.

select a.* from table a where rownum >= 20 and rownum < 30

It's a little more complex in practice, but not too difficult once you know the idiom.