This is one of the most ass-hat illogical arguments I have ever heard.

There is no logical contradiction to someone being anti-abortion and being pro-capital punishment.

The anti-abortion folks think that abortion is murder- initiation of violence against an innocent person. The anti-abortion position is NOT that "it's always 100% wrong ever to take a human life". Anti-abortion folks are instead saying that it is never right to take a human life in this circumstance.

The pro-capital punishment folks think that accountability for one's actions might include forfeiture of one's life if one is proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, to have committed certain egregious crimes that involve the initiation of violence against innocent persons.

I am not advocating for or against either position. Certainly reasonable people can disagree with either position or both, and both have many contentious side issues. But they are not logically incompatible.

Only intellectually lazy ideologues would imply that these positions are inconsistent.

No, YOU don't get it, do you? Any application can corrupt its own memory space. There is no evidence in the post that anything outside the application process was affected.

The above message is the first one I saw on the entire post that is worth reading. What the OP doesn't get is that he's asking the wrong question.

Your users aren't programmers. They don't care about "General file i/o error reading drive 0". WFT does that mean to your mom?

First, you need to think about AVOIDANCE. You can't write to the file? Couldn't you figure that out at the time the user opened the document, and tell the user unobtrusively that they can't edit? For example, Microsoft Word attempts to detect whether a file is writable at open. If not (for example, due to permissions or sharing), then Word will open the document in "Read-Only" mode and disable editing functionality. You have to "save as" successfully before it will enable editing.

Next, all of your error messages must be actionable. Users will forgive badly worded error messages that tell them how to fix the problem. They will ignore error messages that don't tell them how to resolve the problem, and might even get annoyed if you keep "nagging" them.

Think about the error condition from the user's point of view. Does your program's average user have any prayer of solving the problem themselves? If not, then your action is "call support": "Serious error #1234 has occurred. Please contact EXAMPLECOMPANY tech support to resolve this error at 555-1212 or techsupport@example.com [Email] [Exit Program]"

If the user is likely to be able to solve the problem themself, then present them with instructions on how to do so:

          "Error #1234 has occurred. You will need this code if you call tech support.

          This error occurs when you put a coffee cup on your CD-ROM tray instead of the program CD.

          To resolve this problem, please put the program CD into your CD-ROM drive and close the drive, then restart the program."

The user action is the key to getting your users to fix their own problems. But be aware of who your user is, it's easy to present instructions which your users will be unable to complete:

        "Error 0xDEADBEEF occurred in module obtuse.c
        "This occurs because the memory value at location 0x80123456 should have been 0xA2, but was actually 0xA9.
        "To fix this problem, please attach a software debugger such as GDB to this process and change the memory value to 0xA9. Then modify initializememory.cfg to set the value correctly on startup. The man page for initializememory.cfg can be found on www.somerandomdudessiteinlatinamerica.biz".

IP addresses (even IPv6) are addresses, not phone numbers. The address identifies the place where the packets are supposed to go, not the person to whom they're supposed to go.

IPv6 was designed to be hierarchical to address some of the shortcomings of the IPv4 allocation process, which requires backbone routers to maintain and exchange large routing lists.

Personal subnets won't be implemented because people move around; it's not to change the global routing infrastructure every time you go to work.

Now it might be the case that broadband ISPs assign networks to their customers; this would not happen with wireless or dial-up though. It's a reasonable assumption that the customer end of a broadband connection won't move geographically.

Misdiagnosis.

It's not because people underestimate noise cancellation. It's because cell phones lack sidetone.

Telephone manufacturers have known for a century that sidetone is necessary for people to regulate their voice volume effectively.

Why is Gmail any more "professional" than Hotmail?

All either address says about you is, "I got a free email address with a web interface".

Your anti-Microsoft bias is showing through.

It's clear that most of the posters on this thread have not read it. I highly suggest that you do so regardless of your position on the issue.

The author (a lawyer, not a physicist) does not attempt to judge the science of the issue. He also specifically considers and discusses many of the arguments that have been set up as straw men elsewhere in the thread, e.g. "the earth has been subjected to cosmic rays for millions of years", "the objections are just the paranoid rantings of luddites and uneducated lunatics", etc.

Before I read the article I was of the opinion that opposition to LHC was simply paranoiac raving; after all the physicists at CERN understand the underlying physics, right? After I read the article I am actually moderately concerned and I hope that a court does hear a request for an injunction (I have no opinion whether an injunction is warranted but I want someone OUTSIDE the physics community to review the risk analysis done by CERN).

The author first does a really thorough job of describing the scientific literature around the proposed risks of the LHC and CERN's responses.

The second half of the paper addresses the issue of "if a request for an injunction against the LHC comes before a court, how is a judge to decide"?

The author considers and rejects both the testimony of expert witnesses (he discusses US Supreme Court criteria for judging the testimony of expert witnesses and notes that in this case there are two difficult (perhaps insurmountable) problems with expert witness testimony in this case- personal bias and testability of theories- pp55-58). The author also considers and rejects use of cost-benefit analysis which evidently is a common tool courts use to decide whether to grant an injunction (pp58-65). Instead the author poses 4 frameworks that courts could use to decide the matter - analyzing the theoretical grounding that the scientists involved used to assess risk (e.g. are the scientists basing risk on known knowns, known unknowns or unknown unknowns), analyzing for faulty scientific work (e.g. mathematical errors in calculating risk), analyzing for mistakes in risk assessment due to "credulity"- e.g. predisposition and/or groupthink (you can see that all over this thread), and analyzing for bias or negligence.

I found the table on p71 of the pdf (and the associated discussion) to be pretty damning for the dismissive position taking by LHC proponents. The bottom line is that CERN made its risk assessments and arguments for the safety of LHC, but that every time one of these arguments has been challenged, the argument was not defended, but rather a new argument was made. If it's safe, then the arguments that it's safe should be able to withstand some scrutiny- this is the empirical nature of science, right?

I am not saying that LHC is unsafe but rather that CERN hasn't reasonably proven that it is and that their behavior has raised my suspicious rather than lowering them.

Given the undesirability of the worst case scenario (destruction of the planet), it seems that there should be plausible arguments for the safety of the device that withstand moderately intense scrutiny. I'm not claiming that every nut job with a wacky theory should be able to derail such endeavors. However in this specific instance I believe that there are plausible concerns that have not been adequately addressed.

I'm not going to drill into further details of the paper but as of this writing, the author of the paper had addressed the arguments proposed in every concern (or dismissal) that I've read in this /. thread at +3 or higher moderation.

There. Fixed that for you.

A good old wired POTS phone will work even if the power is out at your house. No UPS necessary.

Which is a free download from Microsoft:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/bb980924.aspx?wt.svl=more_downloads

Your comment is a non sequitur.

The link you provided might show that it's cheaper to build your own Mac than to buy one from Apple. However, since the same PC you built would run Windows, then it is necessarily the case that it cannot be less expensive to build a Mac; at best it costs the same.

Now the point that you are missing is that the Mac supports far less hardware than Windows supports. If there exists at least one component that is not supported by MacOS but is supported by Windows, and that component is cheaper than any comparable component suppored by MacOS, then it must be the case that it is cheaper to build a PC.