OK, as long as they *selectively* kill birds.

I mean, if all they killed were pigeons, that'd be fine, right? We might even build more of them, even without the subsidies...

I think you're confusing the US with China, the latter of which did increase its defense budget by 12% (and has for about the last 12 years), and is on track to exceed US defense spending by 2020-2025.

Yes, this is definitely a "WTF?" moment in the history of Slashdot. I suggest that you all just move on to the next story and refuse to feed the troll by asking him questions.

Slashdot, obviously, has to innovate in order to stay current. Thus, they are now taking the next step after "Anonymous Cowards". The new "Identified Troll" feature will include interviews of people who have prostituted their personal credibility to some company's calculated disinformation campaign.

Yes, it's dependent on carrier certification if there is a new version of the baseband software that runs the Software Defined Radio. A lot of Android phones run the baseband on the same CPU as the rest of the smart Phone; Apple phones have a separate processor for the baseband, so it's not an issue for Apple, but if, for example, you are running a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, the baseband typically runs in a separate hypervisor.

As of the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4, the architecture has changes to run as aSMP, so this is less of a problem, but it still requires certification of the baseband, if there's a baseband update as part of the BOM update. Many so-called smart phones, however, are still running the baseband on a partition of the application processor - meaning you certify with the carriers.

Carrier certification in general is a PITA, because you have to do it separately with each carrier that maintains its own communications infrastructure (meaning that as long as you certify on all the carriers which are selling services to a given VNO, you can get the VNO certification for free, but you have to do it on *ALL* the carriers they use. So it's also a separate step for each country, as well.

Also, you should be aware from the rest of my posting that carriers have absolutely zero interest in you obtaining the most recent version of Android so that you can run out your contract with the most recent version, instead of having to re-up your contract, and get a new phone to get a more recent version of Android. In addition, a lot of the productization changes, including any last minute device support improvements, and so on, are not given back to Google for future use - meaning that it's effectively a new port of Android to the platform, to get an updated version.

ChromeOS: A better Android.

Android has never really been productized by Google. ChromeOS has been; it's a finished product, unlike Android.

One of the major problems with Android is that companies shipping products based on it do not pre-announce. The upshot of that fact is that you end up with every Android version being a snapshot of the Android development tree, which carries the same version numbers/names as other Android products from other vendors, but which have incompatibilities. The one saving grace is that the devices are *mostly* running Dalvik, which is *mostly* binary compatible between the same major version of Android, when *mostly* the vendor partner didn't happen to stub its toes on a major library change for an important and commonly used library.

What drives this incompatibility is not only that the Android running hardware is not specified uniformly in terms of capability, screen resolution, input methods, and so on - ChromeBooks *are*, BTW, and so are Apple devices, for the most part - but the business model for the cell phone industry actively discourages manufacturers from pursuing upgraded versions of the OS on existing cell phone hardware. Because it doesn't sell more cell phone hardware, and it doesn't sell more cell phone contracts, and there's no real App ecosystem like there is in the Apple world.

So upgrades are a net negative to the manufacturers, like Samsung, who wants to sell widgets, and they're a net negative to AT&T and Verizon, etc., who want you to have a reason to want new hardware in order to get the new version of Android so that can catch you up in a new contract for the next 18 months until the next widget comes out. And while Google would like everyone to update the OS whenever Google releases a new version, the company rivalry between the licensees will keep their development from ever being open enough that Google will be able to control the productization to the point of being able to drive an App marketplace on the order of the iTunes App store, because they aren't building it themselves. So there's no money in it to drive Google's desires to reality.

So what's point of ChromeOS? It gives Google Apple-like control over the user experience on a platform where they control the update interval and frequency, and specify the hardware closely enough that, while it's not an iPad or an iPhone, it's a close enough analog.

And that's IMO why Android was moved under the same people who ran ChromeOS, rather than the other way around, and why the Android folks are reporting to Sundar Pichai, rather than his organization reporting to Andy Rubin.

I think the hope was that Android would be able to be productized by the only other organization within Google that's been able to successfully productize a hardware product (well, I guess now there's ChromeCast, but Rishi Chandra reports into Sundar's organization, too).

Personally, I don't think this is going to work out for Android, unless there's a delay built into the version releases for supported hardware, and then given the difficulty of carrier certification and getting the specific version on, and the carriers and the widget makers get on board with the idea, which is a lot of ducks to line up in a row. Plus the carrier and manufacturer buy-in would likely come at the cost of any potential profit off an App marketplace for the first few years, unless the plan was to allow third party marketplaces (which I think would be a mistake).

So ChromeOS is a model for what Google would have liked Android to be, but failed to achieve with it.

Totally disagree. I took 5 AP classes in High School in ~1980. I was the first person in my High School to achieve this number of AP classes, and I was able to skip my freshman year of college and immediately begin taking more advanced math, physics, chemistry, honors English, and when I discovered them, CS courses. I was well on my way to multiple degrees, while most of the people I went to High School with were still deciding what to major in.

Testing out of a class is a more iffy proposition. I found that CLEP testing, at least for information learned as an autodidact, rather than in a classroom and labs, as the AP credit was, tends to give you spotty coverage of a subject, unless you are going to read the textbook for the course you intend to CLEP out of from cover to cover, and do the exercises. It also can somewhat rob you of a year in college; it's actually quite easy, by combining CLEP and AP testing, to drop your distance to a Bachelor's degree to two years. Less, if your college/university administration allows you to carry ~20 credit hours, rather than the "normal" 12-14 (admittedly, this can still be a deal, if you are there on academic scholarship, and your parents wouldn't be able to pay your tuition for you otherwise). This will generally translate to one fewer internship, and one fewer year of college social life, such as it is.

Practically speaking, I'd say that piling on the AP classes is a great way of saving money in the long term by front-loading the costs of college credit onto the state, rather than having it come out of your, or your parents, pockets, especially if you can't afford it. Assuming you apply yourself and do well on the tests, it's also exactly the thing that a college or university is going to want to see, should you apply for an academic scholarship, and between that, and a Pell Grant (now called BEOGs), it can cover your tuition, books, and living in the dorms, which is, for a poor person from a poor family, your entire opportunity for a higher education.

Typically, you trust the people you are working with the first one or two times, with the expectation that they will also trust you. Then your trust gets violated, and you either learn caution (e.g. "Get everything in writing"), or you continue to get screwed. If you've ever read the book "The Evolution of Cooperation" by Robert Axelrod, a perfectly logical player in the mutual security game will operate for mutual long term overall benefit, rather than short term benefit for themselves. Sadly, not everyone is entirely logical, and for many of those persons, it's not enough that they have more as a result of your mutual efforts, for them to feel good about it, *you* must have less.

Why don't you read the study for yourself, or look into the veracity and quality of the journal.

What twenty years of research on cannabis use has taught us

Read the full study in the journal Addiction

What twenty years of research on cannabis use has taught us

In the past 20 years recreational cannabis use has grown tremendously, becoming almost as common as tobacco use among adolescents and young adults, and so has the research evidence. A major new review in the scientific journal Addiction sets out the latest information on the effects of cannabis use on mental and physical health.

The key conclusions are:

Adverse effects of acute cannabis use
- Cannabis does not produce fatal overdoses.
- Driving while cannabis-intoxicated doubles the risk of a car crash; this risk increases substantially if users are also alcohol-intoxicated.
- Cannabis use during pregnancy slightly reduces birth weight of the baby.

Adverse effects of chronic cannabis use
- Regular cannabis users can develop a dependence syndrome, the risks of which are around 1 in 10 of all cannabis users and 1 in 6 among those who start in adolescence.
- Regular cannabis users double their risks of experiencing psychotic symptoms and disorders, especially if they have a personal or family history of psychotic disorders, and if they start using cannabis in their mid-teens.
- Regular adolescent cannabis users have lower educational attainment than non-using peers but we donâ(TM)t know whether the link is causal.
- Regular adolescent cannabis users are more likely to use other illicit drugs, but we donâ(TM)t know whether the link is causal.
- Regular cannabis use that begins in adolescence and continues throughout young adulthood appears to produce intellectual impairment, but the mechanism and reversibility of the impairment is unclear.
- Regular cannabis use in adolescence approximately doubles the risk of being diagnosed with schizophrenia or reporting psychotic symptoms in adulthood.
- Regular cannabis smokers have a higher risk of developing chronic bronchitis.
- Cannabis smoking by middle aged adults probably increases the risk of myocardial infarction.

Professor Hallâ(TM)s report is published online today in the scientific journal Addition.

The problem was (and remains, despite vortex-based and similar proposals), "ash removal", which is to say, getting rid of the He generated as a fusion by-product to keep it from damping the fusion reaction. It was a problem with the TFTR Ttkamak in 1982, and was a problem with the NSTX, and it's a problem with this follow-on device, the spheromak (of which this article is reporting an example, dynomak).

The problem was never containment (and this dynomak, as all spheromak's, has some really clever mechanisms for containment), the problem is *still* He ash removal from the reaction plasma mixture.

So when you are ready to talk to "grown ups", leave your graduate student class projects, and address the ash removal problem, please.

Wrong. Different strain, VERY bad source, did not happen through ventilation system. It happened to monkeys in adjacent cages without direct contact, through "some sort" of aerosolized transmission in very close quarters. I.e., droplets.

Fearmongers or people who think "the government" is "lying to stem panic" always trot out this story. It does NOT mean "Ebola is airborne".

It took Africa, with some of the worst healthcare, sanitation, and infrastructure in the world, 10 MONTHS to get to the ~7400 cases there are now. If it were airborne, it would be much, much worse. Ebola is not airborne; stop spreading your bullshit.

Thank you.

...when trying to use the carat symbol. Fix here:

Airborne transmission occurs when an droplet nuclei containing a virus (or bacteria) is small enough (under 5 um) to travel on dust particles, and can invisibly hang in the air or travel on air currents in large spaces long after someone has sneezed or coughed, and travel great distances, and can infect when breathed in.

There is NO EVIDENCE that Ebola is, or has been, spread in this way. In fact, the evidence is that Ebola is almost exclusively spread via direct contact with bodily fluids.

Droplet transmission (over 10 um) occurs when droplets of saliva or mucous (or even blood) containing the virus are projected during a sneeze or cough and and projected directly onto someone's eyes, mouth, or mucous membranes. This kind of transmission is usually within 3', and is NOT considered "airborne" transmission.

"Droplet" transmission can certainly occur with Ebola -- or any disease that spreads via bodily fluids and is present in saliva or mucous. VHFs are not airborne diseases, and a study of one strain where monkeys in adjacent cages sneezed on each other and passed the disease does not make it "airborne".

Being able to get something from having someone sneeze or cough droplets onto you and airborne transmission are very different things.

Whether he lied or not, some accounts say that he believed the woman he aided had malaria, not Ebola. And the woman's family themselves may have lied to the people aiding them.

Ultimately, the biggest breakdown occured with the hospital, which was told twice that he had just traveled from Liberia on the first visit, and has since admitted this information was available to all providers. This has caused the tilt to the other extreme, with even the most innocuous cases of fever, adominal distress, and similar, with no travel or other history that would point to Ebola, being handled as such "out of an abundance of caution".

Keep in mind that viral hemorrhagic fevers (VHFs) are nothing new in the US. what happens in the United States with other fatal VHFs, that, like Ebola, are only spread via direct contact with bodily fluids and can be easily addressed in first world nations:

Hanta: http://www.cdc.gov/hantavirus/...

Marburg: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/previe...

Lassa: http://www.cdc.gov/media/relea...

Hanta is especially on point, as the US typically has dozens of cases -- and dozens of deaths -- each year, all of which are rapidly contained. The cases of "imported" VHFs, like has occurred with Marburg and Lassa, result in identification, isolation, and either the recovery or death of that person -- and that's the end of it.

Also, Ebola is NOT airborne. Ebola researchers will AT MOST say things like:

Peters, whose CDC team studied cases from 27 households that emerged during a 1995 Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo, said that while most could be attributed to contact with infected late-stage patients or their bodily fluids, "some" infections may have occurred via "aerosol transmission."

"Those monkeys were dying in a pattern that was certainly suggestive of coughing and sneezing â" some sort of aerosol movement."

"May". "Suggestive". "Some sort".

Even if we change all of these statements to absolute certainty, it still does not translate to, "Ebola is airborne," in the meaning of "airborne" in the context of disease transmission.

Airborne transmission occurs when a droplet nuclei containing a virus (or bacteria) is small enough (10 μm) occurs when droplets of saliva or mucous (or even blood) containing the virus are projected during a sneeze or cough and and projected directly onto someone's eyes, mouth, or mucous membranes. This kind of transmission is usually within 3', and is NOT considered "airborne" transmission.

"Droplet" transmission can certainly occur with Ebola -- or any disease that spreads via bodily fluids and is present in saliva or mucous. VHFs are not airborne diseases, and a study of one strain where monkeys in adjacent cages sneezed on each other and passed the disease does not make it "airborne".

Being able to get something from having someone sneeze or cough droplets onto you and airborne transmission are very different things.

The quickest way to have a threat of possible airborne transmission of Ebola via mutation would be to not aid Africa in this fight, and let Africa fend for itself, creating an environment where the cases could skyrocket into the millions (due to Africa's infrastructure and inability to deal with the onslaught), thereby increasing the statistical likelihood of the feared airborne mutation -- which, if a foothold were to be gotten in the West as an airborne disease, would truly be a catastrophe worthy of fear and panic.

In reading much of the news coverage, online commentary, and this thread, this article struck me as very relevant:

http://www.nationaljournal.com...

Indeed, with the increasing numbers of Americans likely to believe that any major threat requiring government action is a result of at best government lies/failures, or at worse, an active plot to weaken America and/or strip rights from Americans, fighting any truly existential threat at home becomes almost impossible.

Future relationship?!?

So they can buy *more* products with bugs an unresponsive support in the future? I can see why you'd want to protect *that* relationship...