It would have to extend downward to the bottom of the window, or sunlight would enter at dawn or dusk.  In which case it would have to overhang the pool or the pool would have to be at the bottom of a hole.

            \|/
            -O-  (noon)
            /|\

     I\
Idiot  \               \|/
        \              -O- (dawn)
  o      \             /|\
/|\       \
/\   I
     I
     I
     I- ~ ~ ~ ~ ~-----

France? Have you ever been there? If anything GP's comments are an understatement.

While I do not know for certain that they were going at 200 mph it was certainly not much below that.

As I understand it there's a gentlemen's agreement among German car manufacturers to limit it to 155mph. While it's probably possible to mod the car to override it I'd be surprised if it's as common as you suggest.

"Now, more than half of us can't be above the median, but half of us can be better than the mean."

Fixed that for you.

1) You list China as a country with "ideal" healthcare?

No, the *map* showed China as country with *universal* healthcare.

A country where they inject formaldehyde into a baby if it's a second pregnancy?

I suspect they aren't trying to cure it of anything, so that'd be a social/political problem rather than a problem with the medical system.

if you're gonna hire someone, would you rather have one of your employees vouch for them, or have to rely solely on the impression you've gotten by chatting for an hour or two?

Probably depends on the employee. I've worked with utter assholes that were recommended by people already in the company.

Do you have a brother called Bobby?

My point is that if talking on cellphones is such a serious impact on driving safety, we would see a change in the steady downward trend of driving fatalities when cellphones were introduced.

No. As pointed out by someone who has apparently read and understood the studies, there are confounding variables - other factors pulling in the opposite direction.

That might work in your perfect world. But you're forgetting something:

This.
Is.
Earth.

And does anybody want to see this sort of thing in the hands of a patent troll? I'd rather not that risk.

Also, this isn't an invention - they can't "reveal how it works", in your words. If that was the case, they'd be patenting breast cancer instead of the genes that cause it.

And to think that the EU had taken such a great stand with the ACTA. Then this has to happen.

Obviously, you don't know what it's like to be poor. Actual poor people don't have cable tv, cellphones, internet, computers, and in some cases even a landline phone at all. My family used to live like that (boy was I naive back then). Scraping together $100 was ... well, impossible.

You mentioned you had cellphones and hubcaps. Well, guess what. That means you weren't poor at all. You just plain sucked at budgeting.

I believe the town hall meetings were after the suicide.

The first rule of Slashdot. We do not talk about the Slashdot.

But in Soviet Russia [correction - Corporatist America], slashdot talks about YOU!!!!

I learned this the hard way, since people called Archimedius Thrublepants-Kopovski aren't exactly common

P.S. Oh buggering bastard fuck a la mode, that's torn it.

The market always works. It can take its own sweet time to correct itself

This broken watch always works. It only works once every twelve hours.