They can start with the CEO's, who are the most globally uncompetitive. ... go to Canada and get a CEO for about 5% the cost of a US one.

With US CDOs you're not paying for work. You're paying for being politically connected. This is mainly connections to financing sources - the closer to the FED, the more financing you can get and the less you pay for it. But it's also about being able to influence governnent policy and lawmaking. There's also being able to recruit people for other executive suite positions. Then there's managing news coverage: Setting stock market expectations so you can continually exceed them, not getting smeared, getting publicity that encoruages people to buy the product rather than trash the company, and so on.

Actually running the company comes in maybe fourth or lower.

It's been a basic human right for probably longer than you've been alive.

It goes back much farther than that. Even in the modern United States, gay marriage is an old idea -- again, probably older than you are.

There are many possible answers to that:

1. It was always a basic human right.
2. Around the same time freedom of association became a basic human right.
3. Around the same time the idea of basic human rights developed.

As a matter of American law, it goes back at least as far as 1967 with the unanimous Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia. The UN's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights also mentions marriage:

By law and custom, marriage is a special relationship. It involves things like formalized joint property ownership, inheritance rights, power of attorney, and responsibility for and authority over children. Historically, marriage sometimes involved a legal union of two people into one person, with the woman's identity disappearing. (This is a bad thing and is no longer done in the U.S., but it was there.)

It may be possible to create a form of marriage that works for three people, but it's not necessarily straightforward. One example is automatic power of attorney when one partner is in the hospital and unable to make decisions. With a bilateral marriage, their spouse has full decision-making power. With a multilateral marriage, what do you do if two spouses disagree about treatment? I don't know if that's showstopping problem, but it doesn't exist in the context of gay marriage, which is functionally identical to straight marriage.

More to the point, I wonder if a more spherical shape isn't more efficient in micro gravity and this is what drives the change. The heart no longer has to pump blood uphill, so it would stand to reason that a shape which generates less force while using less energy would be optimum, and out bodies tend to be pretty good at finding the most energy efficient way of adapting to the environment they are in.

Nobody forgets that, it's just that the scientists involved don't actually work for the UN. I don't think they even get paid for their (volunteer) work on the IPCC report. There are some UN-paid staffers, but I only see about a dozen listed on the IPCC site. They're all part of the World Meteorological Organization. If you want to call the WMO a hotbed of corruption, you can try, but I'm pretty sure you don't have any reason to do so.

Well, a worldwide council with maybe five nations in it wouldn't be much use... Joking aside, you're about eight years out of date on that one. Regardless, I don't see how it follows that one bad organization in the UN implies the whole thing is worthless. The UN is a forum where the nations of the world get together to talk. It works about as well as the participants do. There are few (if any) nations that consistently value human rights over convenience, safety, and prejudice. There are a lot more with an interest in accurate weather and climate forecasting.

If you place it in front of the eye lens - contact lenses count - then you need the output visible light to be going in the same direction as the input IR light.
There are no common physical processes that can do this.

Frequency-doubling crystals do this - combining two photons going in the same direction into one of twice the frequency. (That's how some green laser diodes work - bumping up infrared.) Not practical for a sensor, since you need a LOT of infrared that's IN PHASE to pull this off.

I, too, had seen the "contact lens" claim and read TFA to see if they had found some stimulated-emission phenomenon (say, one where they pumped the graphine to an excited state and got infrared photons to trigger the emission of a visible photon moving the same way). So I was very disappointed to find it was a FET with the gate stimulated by a graphene infrared-to-E-field transducer, suitable for a retina but not to convert flying photons.

Infrared is too long a wavelength for something like paving a contact lens with a fly's eye of micro-camera-display converters. So I don't see infra-vision contact lenses coming out of THIS breakthrough. Maybe a google-glass analog, or a two-way variant of the Israeli regular-glasses heads-up display with the imbedded refractive-index-change partial mirror that projects the little display near the hinge as if it were a screen in front of you at infinity or task-distance.

Actual clinical depression is a serious disorder and of course has existed throughout history. However, currently about a quarter of women in the US between 40 and 50 are on antidepressant drugs at any one time, and about 10% of all Americans over 12.

In particular, (I've heard that) more than 50% of adult women in the US have been treated for depression at least once in their lives.

This is a source of one of the major pushbacks against gun control proposals that ban people who have seen a shrink from ever having guns: It would disarm the bulk of women (including especially those who are being stalked or attacked, who are likely to have a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder label hung on them.)

Interestingly, while severely clinically depressed patients may be suicide risks and thus a "danger to themselves", the depressed in general are much LESS likely to be a danger to others than the average of the population - even when treated with antidepressant drugs.

(The occasional person who goes on a crime spree when on antidepressants is the result of another phenomenon: People can be both psychopaths and clinically depressed. The depression debilitates them so they don't act out. Treat the depression and you have a fully-functional psychopath. There is some discussion in the psychiatric community, as a result, over whether it might be ethical to refuse to treat the depression of severe, uncompemsated, psychopaths/)

as we get better at diagnosing conditions like this, naturally there will be a rise in the number of positive diagnoses.

With ADHD the educational system has several incentives - both administrative and financial - to hang the label on kids. The percentage diagnosed with this condition has also experienced substantial growth (and there is a substantial controversey of whether this is the result of the incentives rather than a rise in the condition). Perhaps a similar situation is present with the Autisim-Spectrum diagnosis.

If the school systems labeling nerdy kids with "autism sufferer" leads to them reducing the amount they try to force them to be standardized jocks, defending them more from bullies, and giving them a quiet environment to learn, I'd applaud and promote the increase in the practice. B-)

it renders most afflicted persons unsociable and awkward and therefore highly unlikely to pass on their genes?

What makes you think it meakes them any less likely to pass on their genes - on the average? Autism spectrum is virtually synonomous with "nerd". Recent studies (referenced in at least one recent slashdot discussion) have shown that "nerds" are nearly as likely to marry as the average, and MUCH more likely to have a stable, long-lasting, marriage.

While I didn't see anything about their reproduction rate, stable marriages tend to lead, not just to children, but to an upbringing that produces SUCCESSFUL children. (In particular, a male role model is virtually required for the male offspring to avoid mis-socialization that leads to a tendency to violent crime and prison time.)

Add to that the observation that some of the best paying jobs tend to be performed very well by, and dominated by, people with various Ausbergers-spectrum "disorders" and you have obvious advantages for both attracting a mate to a stable relationship and providing children with competitive advantages (especially health care and education).

So far 13 posts, and most of them are unhelpful drivel. Way to prove Linux is superior.

This thread shows a lot of what is wrong in the Linux community.

This thread does nothing of the sort.

The problem was posted to Slashdot. The bulk of the ENORMOUS Slashdot community is NOT the tiny subset of the Linux community that actually hacks Xorg. So the bulk of the comments are by people TALKNIG ABOUT IT but not actually involved with a fix.

But a FEW of the people who are either involved, or know how to do this stuff, DID dig right in. Above here you find posts describing work that isolated the patch that broke the feature and makig a start on identifying a fix. Near by is another set of posts showing that the actual developers were already on it, had already made a fix, and were discussing the schedule of the fix's release.

So it looks to me like the posting DID do EXACTLY what RMS says such things do:
  - It got someone to start working on a fix - and make substantial progress in a matter of hours. If there wasn't already a fix in the pipe this would have put it there.
  - It identified that the maintainers are already on it and the fix is probably coming out in a future release Real Soon Now (TM).
  - It may, very shortly (if it hasn't already) make a patch (or several) available for those who can't wait.
  - It has probably lit a fire under the regular maintainers.
And, of course, because it's Slashdot:
  - It has created a LOT of talk about it - much of it uninformed, much of it griping, with a few jems of pure-quill information.

If you focus on the large volume of cabbaging and meta-discussion by interested but uninvolved parties, it's easy to miss that EXACTLY what was desired HAS occurred and IS occurring.

And let's see any commercial provider of proprietary and closed-source software react this quickly, now that the poster has found a forum where submitting a bug report gets attention and feedback.

Ah, the arguments of the willfully ignorant. I wish I were still a conservative. No nuances, no questions. Everything had a trite simple answer.

Reality does not so neatly fit into a box.

House fires happen rapidly. They are also largely preventable. And even though one person's house fire may be a tragedy, pouring water on it puts out the fire. (Remember kids: the fire department exists to prevent your house fire from burning down the rest of the city, not to save your house)

Mudslides, like earthquakes, are triggered by complex conditions that are not knowable by humans in advance (with any degree of certainty). They also cannot be prevented or controlled. There is no "Mudslide Department" because there is no response. By the time you find out about it, the mudslide is over and the damage is done.

This case is very simple to explain: no one wants to be the person who "wastes" taxpayer dollars buying out homeowners and tearing down houses when the potential disaster can strike anywhere between tomorrow and 50 years from now. So county officials, housing developers, and maybe to some degree homeowners all chose to ignore the report and get on with their lives. That works great, right up until the moment when everyone died.

But again, what about the OS needs to change to accommodate that? WinXP can handle 2 TB hard drives just fine. And 16 GB of RAM is neither common nor a necessity for most users. Best Buy still sells plenty of computers with 4 GB of RAM.

Now what we do (and did) need is a good 64-bit operating system, and XP-64 never fit the bill. But what are the alternatives? Vista was a mess. Win7 is good on newer hardware, but only the OEM versions are sold anymore. Today there's a choice between sticking with XP, buying Win8, or taking a chance on an eBay copy of Win7. I did the latter for my wife's computer, but it's hard to recommend for the general public.

I'm not disagreeing that we need to move on. But Microsoft has spent most of the last decade screwing up their upgrade path. Maybe if they stopped wildly redesigning the UI every time they put out a new OS, more people would have upgraded by now.

Leaving out the 2nd is not some grand conspiracy. It illustrates what the ACLU fights hardest for, and everyone knows the ACLU doesn't bother with the 2nd amendment.

I wouldn't mind if they just ignored it - and left it for other groups (like the Secon Amendment Foundation or the Cato Institute.) But they don't restrict themselves to that.

For instance: A guy had a gun locked in a safe in his office. The crooks cracked the safe, stealing the valuables and the gun. Then the stoen gun was used in a later crime where someone died. The ACLU financed a wrongful death suit against the guy whose gun was stolen from the locked safe.

Now this WAS a few decades ago. It was about the same time another office of the ACLU was defending the rights of the American Socialist Party (i.e. the American neo-NAZIs) to march in a Chicago suburb with a substantial population of Jewish NAZI death-camp survivors.

Since then they've even allied with the NRA when their interests coincided. (Notably: when Chicago instituted warrantless searches of the south-side low-income housing projects for legal pistolsk, which they'd purported to ban by a housing authority rule. The NRA didn't like house-to-house gun sweeps and government landlords banning guns with unconstitutional, non-law, rules (giving the poor the choice of being homeless or gunless), while the ACLU didn't like warrantless searches. But I still don't trust them anywhere near a gun-rights issue, and haven't donated since that wrongful death suit.

What I'd rather know about that ad, is that him walking along the beach with the girl in the blue bikini with the really nice ass?

The girl doesn't come across well on the radio.

On what station(s) have you seen the TV version? B-)

Computers in 2004 weren't all that different from today's computers, though. The AMD64 instruction set was out and consumer-level 64-bit CPUs were available. PCI Express and Serial ATA were standardized the previous year. DDR2 was in use, and you can still buy that today! The biggest changes in PC hardware since 2004 have been multi-core CPUs (which XP handles just fine) and solid state disks, which aren't exactly a compatibility killer. There have been a lot of huge changes in the mobile space, but that has nothing to do with XP. Virtualization is a big deal for servers now, but there are plenty of applications where it's irrelevant.

As a gamer, I upgraded to Win7 for hardware support and newer versions of DirectX. Aside from that, I didn't see a compelling reason to do so. It's not like I could suddenly do anything new with my computer. I can understand why people wouldn't want to shell out tons of money to upgrade. And then there are embedded applications. Where I work we have a ~$20k oscilloscope that runs XP. We're certainly not going to throw *that* out.