Unfortunately, accoring to the Wikipedia entry, RISUG is an experimental method going through trials in India and struggling with the number of volunteers. As much as I'd love this method to be available, currently it is not and there have not been many news about it in the last couple of years.

I was in a small cottage in snowy Slovak mountains for a skiing holiday with my brother and Dad, twenty minutes walk from the ski lift and from the nearest houses and a small grocery shop. In the evening, Dad cooked some pudding and added canned strawberries, then we sat down and he explained about the importance of having the right programming tools - a sharp pencil and a really good eraser. There, next to the fireplace, he taught me Pascal.

My first program printed out numbers from one to ten. It was written on large sheet of paper but had to have correct indentation, and the role of compiler, processor and screen was left to my Dad who patiently wrote the numbers next to each other without spaces - just like he should. Thanks, Dad!

That, and also two more things. First, when I bookmark I tend to add keywords that will help me find the content when I cannot rely on Google keywords (e.g. I read an interesting article about flying robots somewhere but I would not be able to find it using Google - too many false positives). Second, I'd really like to preserve the bookmarked pages as they are today, since they tend to disappear after a time. However, I cannot seem to find a suitable Firefox plugin that is going to save my bookmarks as either HTML archives or PDF files... has anyone had the same problem?

It's interesting to see how we IT people think that others should really understand the technical details of what we do. Have you considered that finance people have their important details as well (e.g. debenture covenant conditions), sales people have important details (leads and pipeline management), manufacturing people have important details (inventory levels management)? One of the arts of running a company is having people on the board who know when to talk detail and when to talk the big picture. And just because we like and know the IT detail does not mean that everyone on the board should. I do a lot of work with both IT and corporate strategies, and trust me - just because someone doesn't understand Six Sigma, activity-based management, balanced scorecards, PESTLE analysis or the concept of value, and just because at the top level of the company many factors are hard to define and manage, does not mean that they are not important.

Just confirming this for Central Europe, Firefox, 10am CET :)

I have a related question - would anyone know about a set od programming challenges/tasks/problems (possibly funny, interesting or connected by a story) to solve, for kids? Whether it is Scratch or anything else I find it much easier to teach my kids when we have something to sink our teeth into...

Putting aside the other comments and objections, "ethics" is quite a broad field. While scientifically inclined people seem to be more sensitive towards judging "date rape", it would be interesting to see how sensitive they are in judging other "ethical" concepts, such as "pride", "greed", or even "tolerance".

I never trusted "cloud" backups but recently I looked into Amazon Glacier - and now my personal backups are stored with "eleven nines" reliability, encrypted, and with price roughly 10 times lower than services such as Dropbox or Google Drive. No affiliation with Amazon... but the question was "how do you do it" so this is my answer.

Call me skeptical, but I am not so sure that a) SWAT teams have round leather shields, b) all members of the team raise their shields int the very same moment, c) they all wear gas masks but no firearms, but hold batons in their hands although nobody is in sight, d) a camera from within the bunker is so nicely positioned to take a picture of the team. Could it be a nice publicity gimmick instead?

"Reflection upon these edge cases" is not necessarily a good way to reason about the basic assumption. It's wrong to kill others, but the edge case is defending your family. It's wrong to lie, but the edge case is when to tell a child he's been adopted. It's wrong to steal but what if you're dying of hunger? I am not sure about the letter of American law but I don't think the spirit of the idea that "marriage is to a member of opposite sex" is invalidated by a natural hermafrodite.

Yes, I really do not like to read advertisements disguised as stories.

I know a lot of people from different churches who are connected to church "private networks" here in Europe. The idea is that the church gets a lot of SIMs for their employees, and also for people that the pastors trust and can vouch for - that work quite well in many smaller churches. The more SIMs you have the bigger discounts you have, so the plans that I know have free communication between all the members of the network, plus half price plans with double the free minutes and SMS than normal retail plans. The only issue is the one of trust - when someone ends up not paying their invoice the pastor has to deal with it :)

I wonder what was the cost of building the robot balanced against the scientific utility. If the main finding is that it can vomit up to 3 meters far, how certain can they be that the distance is simulated effectively? Perhaps by comparing to "live" vomiters, but that would defeat the purpose of building the robot in the first place...? Also, I would assume that there is some probability distribution for the distance the vomit flies from different mouths (writing this sentence, yes I can see the IG Nobel nomination). Other than that, I guess the most significant other finding from the robot may be a model of the exact shape of vomit on the floor but I cannot imagine how it would help with finding out more about the spread of the norovirus... Would anyone know more?

Or better yet - ask them about a mistake or accomplishment that you think might happen to you a year or two down the line. If/when it comes to that situation, if that person is your boss they will have a clear guideline for how to react... and probably one that you will like.