From TFA

the entire site--designed in Flash--is practically inaccessible. After just a cursory browsing, here are some of the usability and data accessibility issues we observed. You can't select, copy, or paste any text. Your browser's font override features won't work, so you can't adjust the font or its size to be more readable. Your browser's built-in in-page search won't work, and you can't use the keyboard to scroll through the text. You can't parse or scrape the data in any way; the design is fixed-width, so it's not going to work well on different screen sizes; and browser plugins, like Greasemonkey, can't adjust anything. Basically when it comes to text at all, if you don't like the style or are visually impaired, you're screwed.

Way to go to convince government and its constituents that Flash and PDF will help them put together open websites and follow "ADA Guidelines for the Web" aimed at ensuring accessibility...

...is just another form of traffic analysis. Good for them that they thought about applying it for this particular purpuse, though.

They've hired Bruce Willis and Kurt Russell? They need to bolster the team with Clint Eastwood and Gene Hackman (and throw in Robert Loggia to deal with the politicians...)

"For the rest of the world, who don't quite grok our quaint pronunciation here in the good ole South, the word ya'll is pronounced like [yawl] similar to [yawn]."

For the rest of the world, even the English speaking world, "ya'll" isn't even a word.

...this is a case of a Reverse Polish "Soul Man".

If you don't see the difference between your example and a religious promise, it's going to be difficult to continue the discussion.

There are many who prey on peoples fear of poverty, but those who pay programmers $100k a year are not among them.

Definitely agree -- the corporate world has changed a lot to where companies think that by working for them, they own you completely.

The problem is using biometrics RAW, and as the only authenticator. Sending raw (const) data as part of an authenticator is always very unsafe. So people who do stuff like this are idiots!

If you use the biometric, after Diffie Hellman key exchange as a salt in the challenge that is fine, and helps to defend against replay attacks, BUT all this stuff is in the literature, so there is no excuse for getting it wrong.

People who do, and loose valuable data need their ass sued off!

From the Ars Technica article:

Down the road, of course, the AP might go to Congress and ask that whatever tracking and rights system it settles on be given the force of law. It's not as crazy as it sounds; European publishers already hope to get a law enforcing the Automated Content Access Protocol.

If content providers get the ability to enforce moronic schemes like this one, many people may find themselves in the receiving end of lawsuits--even some who just followed older fair-use provisions.

I'm not familiar with the concrete capabilities of the Kindles, but I seem to recall that it's possible to annotate the ebooks. If Amazon deletes the ebook, do all its annotations get deleted as well? Annotations are the property of the person who wrote them (presumably, the device owner), so Amazon can't pissibly have a right to delete them.

Right on the money. Add to the list of advantages: - Screen perfectly readable outdoors, even under direct, bright sunlight.

Sandbags (964742), if you were replying to my post, then you did a great job at coming up with a rant full of caps that is as long as it is irrelevant. If you were not, disregard what follows.

Your statements, which I quoted in my post, were that (a) a bottle has a fixed amount of BPA to leach (fairly obvious), and (b) that after several uses and cleanings in a dishwasher, the BPA present (i.e., remaining) in the bottle should become negligible.

The study I cited found that a regular bottle has the capacity to generate big amounts of BPA during a long lifetime. So your point (a) is obvious and your point (b) is false. QED.

Regarding the separate and orthogonal discussion about whether realistic household usage would result in the release of significant multiples of the BPA released when the bottle gets used at standard room temperatures: the evidence we have is that exposure to high-temperature liquids is positively correlated with BPA release. You have any evidence that lower, but still high, temperatures such as the ones applied to dishwasher loads do not result in significant increases in BPA release? Let's see it.

You'll be drinking a lot of BPA until the bottle runs out of it, and it's not clear that the bottle will be usable as such by the time BPA release drops to a reasonable level. See this paper for the effects of repeated cleanings in a dishwasher: the bottles released an average of 31 times the amount of BPA released by a new, unwashed bottle during the first 169 washes--and that's when the scientists stopped measuring, so there's no reason to believe that concentrations would plummet after any known, higher number of washes.

True, but...

that depends on your definition of "several". This study showed that bottles exposed to a normal dishwasher process leaked an average of 36 times the amount of BPA released by new bottles during the first 51 washes, which went down slightly to an average of 29 times the baseline for the subsequent 118 wash cycles.

Those don't seem acceptable levels of leakage to me.

You don't seem to have understood TFA. A cytokine storm consists of an excess of cytokines, and study participants were indeed found to have elevated cytokine levels, presumably as a the response to the flu virus--although not at the point of actual storms occurring. Concentrations of toll-like receptors were found to be lower than normal, therefore indicating an immune system less resilient to other opportunistic pathogens (e.g., bacteria) that might ultimately cause the death of the patient.