"Coke Bottle" is a pejorative term referring to the lensing effect on the persons eyes in order to correct their vision. The most common reason, historically, for "Coke Bottle" lenses was cataract surgery to remove the lens of the eye, before we had the ability to replace the lens. Mostly they are provided to very small children these days, when cataracts occur earlier, and general replacement of the lens is contraindicated.

The generic professional term for all non-vanity based glasses is "corrective lenses".

There are various lenses for various conditions:

- "myopia" is near-sghtedness

- "presbyopia" is far-sightedness, and if age related, is usually corrected by over the counter "readers" or "reading glasses"

- "macular degeneration" can be age related, or caused by a number of other conditions, such as diabetes, and results in damage from the center of the retina outwards; special glasses can "work around" the problem by focussing all light as a ring around the retina outside the area of damage, and depend on the ability of the brain to reintegrate it into a normal field of view.

- "Keratoconus" is a cone shaped cornea that will prevent a full field of view, since light no longer focusses un the retina; unlike macular degeneration, there is no retina damage, and this is fully correctable with special lenses.

Generally, if you care about thee things, or just find them interesting, you can always stop by a not-very-busy Len Crafters or other similar store, and chat up their optometrist or opthamologist, or just read about them on the net.

How does watermarking a vinyl record identify who bought it, when they find the MP3 all over the Internet, again?

This is like the idiots who wantGPS in everything, not understand that GPS only allows the *thing* to *know where it is*; it does nothing for allow *you* to *know where the thing is*, unless it gets on a communications networks and *tells you*.

Good luck finding whoever ripped that MP3 from the vinyl record, and then sent it to his cousin in New Jersey, where it ends up in a used record store.

That's correlation, not causation. It's bad science.

Answering Linus' "Where the hell..." question:

"Where the hell do you envision that those magical parallel algorithms would be used?"

When you have millions of robots running around your body, repairing your telomere length and resetting the cells Hayflick limit, and repairing other aging related damage, so you can live another 200+ years of healthy, relatively physiologically young.

You know, unless you actually *want* to be old and decrepit, and die centuries before you actually have to...

Usually this type of decision is based on a couple of things, and all of them really such with MicroSD:

(1) Power management; with the card it, it's hard/impossible to drive down battery usage/drive up battery life
(2) It's another hole in the case to let in water/dirt/etc.
(3) Speed/quality of MicroSD cards is highly variable
(4) As hardware which talks directly to the driver, not through an intermediary, and effectively on the memory bus, it's an attack vector
(5) They're easy to lose, compared to, say, a power brick or a laptop, where you should be crossloading your media in the first place
(6) It's easy to make a mistake on insertion and damage the slot (this is the same reason it's so hard to insert/remove the SIMs)
(7) Electrical damage, should someone put a metal object, such as a screwdriver or paperclip in the slot (including possible battery fire)

And the biggie:

(8) If people want an Android device, then they should buy an Android device instead

The problem with sophistry is that Aristotle himself arrived at the following "facts" through strict reasoning (as opposed to, you know counting or measuring:

(1) Women have fewer teeth than men
(2) Men have a higher blood temperature than women
(3) Men have fewer ribs than women
(4) Eels don't reproduce, they are spontaneously generated from mud
(5) The same for flies, lice, oysters, clams... all from inanimate matter. Ruined a lot of science for years.

An empiricist, he was not. If I am to have an oncologist, I prefer that he or she be an empiricist.

I think you are perhaps unfamiliar with the early history of the state of Utah, when it was called Deseret, and subsumed most of Nevada and part of Colorado and a corner of Wyoming. The early Mormon/LDS settlers practiced early Communism (early, because it predated Marx et. al., so obviously it wasn't called that yet).

One of the problems was when the kids wanted new pair of dungarees (which is what they were called at the time), they would tend to use a knife sharpening grinding wheel to "age" the cloth past the point of being patched.

It depends on whether the emails constitute work product or not. Certainly some of the emails which I've seen would not qualify, as they were personal emails. In fact, most of the significantly inflammatory ones were personal emails to business partners and colleagues, rather than business related, other than tangentially. And these are the ones Sony would most want quashed.

For attorney/client communications, it's possible that privilege would attach. Under U.S. law, the attorney would need to be acting as such in connection with the communication in question, and the communication would have had to have been engaged for the purpose of the client seeking legal advice.

Ironically, it would probably take a court to decide whether or not the disclosure of the information to someone who was neither the attorney nor the client would qualify as an exception to privilege. This in turn would likely come down to a matter of due diligence. Even so, if the intent was to commit a crime or a tort (and it's pretty clear some of these emails qualify), then privilege does not attach.

I think the most they can do at this point is assert ownership or get a grant of agency, and issue the DMCA notices, mostly for the scripts and other material, if any, which falls under HIPPA or attorney/client privilege. This will most likely not be very satisfying to Sony, as it will most likely cover material which is being largely withheld anyway.

Yersinia pestis is a bacteria, not a virus. But yes, identifying patient zero is quite important to fighting any disease.

The other thing you should probably have corrected the GP about is that we are not in a position to start any kind of wide-scale immunization program against Ebola, since we don't have a proven vaccine for it yet. It's not like scientists are holding out: we just don't have one.

Very incorrect, on two counts:

(1) Copyright registration is merely a verifiable record of the date and content, in case of some future claim of plagarism or Copyright infringement by another party. Registration is only required on claims of statutory damages for an infringement suit, and that's valid as long as it occurs within 3 months of publication. For that to be useful to Sony, however, they would have to also establish value for the Copyright work. Since they were able to do this for the "Spectre" script, Twitter took the excerpts down. Email is a different matter.

(2) AT&T USL attempted to pull the "Trade Secret" trick of having their cake and eating it to in the AT&T USL v. The Regents of the University of California at Berkeley. The problem with Trade Secret disclosure is once a secret is disclosed, it's no longer secret. You can Patent something (requires disclosure) or you can Copyright something (also requires disclosure). In exchange for that disclosure, you are then granted certain legal protections, but those protections do not attach to Trade Secrets. For a Trade Secret, in order to collect damages, you, again, have to establish a value for the Secret. But - and this is a big one - you can only collect those damages against the original discloser - you are not permitted to seek out deep pockets. So Sony can take it up with North Korea (or whoever we've decided was responsible this week), but they can't take it up with this Twitter user, unless they can prove he was the disclosing party. So again: any trade secrets in to emails is *gone*.

The other problem is the use of the DMCA in this case: unless you are the Copyright holder, or you are a designated agent acting on behalf of the Copyright holder, you do not have standing, under the law, to assert a DMCA claim on behalf of someone else. This was the problem that a number of the DMCA takedown companies had with their third party takedown notices. This was actually precisely what occurred in the Righthaven v. Wayne Hoehn case.

It won't get much love, but... There's always Chromebooks.

Why do "people" have a special place in existence again? I'm not really sure I get your argument?

And Earth is different HOW?

Best comment comeback to anti-space I have ever seen.

Except, you know, being made out of flimsy printed plastic without even a T-bar for additional strength, and having one less degree of freedom than the uARM, and being smaller than the uARM, yeah, it's just like it...