In short, yes. It's a problem mostly in places where the mother's milk doesn't have enough of pretty much anything, but salt's the one that kills first.

Consider a place where an average salary is $40 a month. Unfortunately, there are millions of people (infants and mothers included) who live where half of that would be considered a wealthy income. Surely you've seen the desolate scenes on TV where they ask for some number of cents per day to buy little Mary a pair of shoes to walk over the rocky debris to school... We're talking about those places, and worse.

These are places where having clean water isn't as great a concern as having any water. Most of the local population is undernourished, including the mothers. Without proper nutrition, they produce too little milk, and what they do produce is too poor in nutrients to support the infant.

From a biological perspective, salt is fascinating*. In the body, it serves to provide many of the ions needed to control molecules, and it holds water in various places. That's why eating salty food makes you feel dehydrated - your salty blood pulls water from the other tissue. Similarly, when that salt makes its way to your urine, more water is pulled with it, making you urinate more (spawning many myths (and some facts) about salty drinks cleansing the body).

In an infant with a salt deficiency, the lack of salt prevents the intestines from working properly, as the cellular channels lack the energy to open. That prevents nutrients (including salt) from being absorbed into the blood. The blood's low salt level stops the absorption of water, leaving the feces liquid, which will quickly be released, carrying the vital salt with it. Where an adult would be able to hold their stool in longer or try to eat more food to compensate for the lower absorption rate, an infant can't do that of its own will, and the mother can't just produce more milk on demand, especially if she's also undernourished.

The cure is a solution - one of "clean" water with salt and sugar (as fuzzyfuzzyfungus noted above), that can easily be absorbed, raising the blood's salt level, allowing more nutrients and water to be absorbed.

Unfortunately, it's also not as easy as telling people on the Internet about the condition. People with access to the Internet aren't likely to be affected by it. It is pretty common knowledge among related volunteer organizations, but there is a severe lack of knowledge in the local communities where the problem is deadly. There are many medical volunteer groups, and they do great work... but the problem is bigger than their limited resources can cover.

* My biochemistry knowledge is remembered from five years ago. The facts presented may or may not be entirely true.

Salt is the cure for the medical condition. The underlying problem is abysmal access to even that minimal amount of medical care, and that doesn't have such an easy solution.

I'm going to go with "none in the foreseeable future".

How about the Bath School disaster, where 45 people died, mostly children? Or perhaps looking away from human causes, we could consider infant diarrhoea, which kills a couple million children per year and can be cured with a few pennies' worth of salt? How about political violence and genocides, which kill thousands of civilian children?

The simple answer is that there is no simple answer. The Bath School disaster was done with explosives. Infant diarrhoea is mostly a problem because parents don't have access to medical care, or realize that they need it. Political conflict is never so simple as having the good guys fight the bad guys - all sides think their righteous virtues are worth dying for, and worth having innocent people die for.

The reality of life is that it's trivial to kill someone. A human body is an incredibly complex machine, with billions of interacting parts, and it's just so easy to screw it up fatally. Sure, you could ban guns with fancy sights, but it's still just as easy to build a bomb, grab a knife, or slip a bit of poison into a meal.

Let's say "no" to pithy slogans and short-sighted politically-convenient campaigns.

Yeah, that seems to be the case.

It's just a regular gun that waits to fire until you've lined up with where you tried to shoot initially.

Nothing too new on the image processing front... but it runs Linux and pisses off the peaceniks, so Slashdot runs the story.

At this point, each news story about Yahoo primarily serves to let me know the company isn't quite dead yet.

As a fellow Slashdotter once said, "the best union is the one you're threatening to form".

Once you actually have a union, you also have a bureaucracy, and rules, and obligations. Sure, they're there to help you, but it still means headaches. On the other hand, if there's just a lot of complaints, the informal process is more flexible and can more easily reach an agreement, as long as the company in question is willing to compromise.

Of course. I don't mean to suggest that programmers are always blameless. Short tempers are found everywhere.

That's the problem, in a general form. One person offends the other, who retaliates with something to offend the first, and the partnership is doomed.

My point, which I believe still stands, is that from the demonstrated linguistic preference of the writer, it seems likely that he's the sort of person to take offense most easily, and return it in an amplified form, rather than the kind of person to put aside such minor transgressions for the sake of the project.

The dying industry tried to hide their biases. Thanks to this new and vibrant community of "editors" who don't care about silly things like journalistic integrity, it's easier than ever for me to just accept whatever outrage the media hands me.

Thanks, Slashdot, for enabling me to be the lazy American we all make fun of!

Including the foul language makes it very clear that the poster is biased, and can't (or won't) set aside that bias long enough to have a discussion.

My impression is that the writer sees his contributions as an altruistic gift that the programmers should be absolutely grateful to receive. Meanwhile, the programmer sees the documentation as just another aspect of the project, conveniently being handled by someone else.

Consider, then, a scenario where the programmer has implemented a function only enough to suit his needs, as for a library, but the writer wants to document every behavior of the function, as a writer should. At this point the writer asks the programmer to describe the complete behavior, but the programmer like can't, sa he hasn't defined or cared about behavior outside his necessary subset. This scenario, one of many with the same result, starts a disagreement where the writer expects more support from the programmer than the programmer is willing or able to provide.

Given the verbiage used in this post, we can infer how quickly a discussion about such a disparity of priority would heat up. I would not be surprised to learn that the writer had been dismissed from projects because of his attitude toward the programmers.

...So what's your point?

Should Google just hold on to billions of dollars in cash reserves? Should it play safe, only buying up established projects after someone else has paid the initial investment? Should it fall back on its established market share and produce nothing notable for a few decades?

Or perhaps, should Google take its gratuitous amounts of money and throw it at silly projects, hoping that one might take off and become the next step in the evolution of mankind's technology?

Xorploxina, for one. The extensive military capability of the Xorplo race is well documented in any sufficiently-funded library.

However, your concern about the grammatical structure of the sentence is well-founded, as the Xorplo ambassadors have not attended any interplanetary events in recent memory.

The problem with that is the question of what's considered a "use".

Is the use of a small backpack nuke enough to justify an all-out assault? What about a dirty bomb set off by a state-sponsored terrorist? If a country starts a campaign using thousands of conventional explosive bombs against Chinese targets, is that enough for China to retaliate with a nuke?

It is a fallacy to assume that we will always fall down the slippery slope, but it is also a fallacy to assume that we can't.

The madness doesn't end there.

Every song is a copyrighted work. The CD is a derivative work containing an encapsulation and encoding of the original works*. You don't actually get a license to anything, so you're not allowed to copy the works in any part, beyond the bare-minimum on-the-fly temporary copies made for decoding, and even those are debatable**. In essence, storing any part of a CD at any stage of decoding is prohibited without a license, even for personal or educational use***.

...Or so it was until the DMCA.

Under the DMCA, the Librarian of Congress periodically receives comments from the public and declares what is or is not exempt from the DMCA's restrictions. During the most recent review process, the argument in favor of medium-shifting was rejected, because it basically boiled down to the commenters saying they didn't want to pay separately for both a CD form and a downloaded form, while the industry groups put forth a long argument citing legal precedent regarding the derivative-work perspective.

In short, what you buy when you buy a CD is the physical copy. You are not buying the information contained on that copy, so you aren't permitted to copy or transform**** it in any way. This is the key detail that so many Internet users seem to have trouble understanding. Just because you have access to information does not give you the legal basis to do anything you want with it.

* Several notable music groups have fought their albums being sold as individual tracks, because they don't see their music as just songs. They view the album as the whole creative work, and argue that the artistic message is lost when it's broken up.

** I recall arguments over whether anti-skip buffering counted as copying. I don't recall much about them other than being a bad omen.

*** "Fair use" does not actually make copying legal. Rather, it's a defense to the accusation of copyright infringement. You still infringed the copyright and did something prohibited, but there's no punishment for it.

**** By "transform", I mean an actual change to the work. Decoding (as a CD player) and understanding (as in reading a book) are not considered transformative.

Nobody's claiming that it's more efficient. Insurance carries overhead.

However, your alternative options are missing a far more common situation: Unexpectedly requiring extensive services that cost more than one can pay off "on time".

I've worked in the medical industry. It's hard for an outsider to understand just how expensive modern health care is. The days of a lone doctor with his trusty medical bag are long gone, replaced by million-dollar machines and wholly-disposable sterile tools. Of course, we can't forget the army of nurses, assistants, and aides all helping the doctors, and those doctors all have malpractice insurance to cover the inevitable lawsuits. Every patient visit costs the hospital hundreds of dollars, even if they're in perfect health. If the doctors actually have to do anything, the costs climb into the thousands. For a complicated case, a cost in the millions is not unheard of.

I'm not talking about fraud, or unnecessary tests. This is just the cost of doing business.

For a middle-class American, keeping a few hundred dollars around for emergencies isn't unreasonable. A few thousand dollars in a safety fund is acceptable for many who've had decent fortune, but is it reasonable to demand that people pay off a million-dollar medical bill "on time"? Is it reasonable to demand that the medical staff work for free to make sure they're not putting someone in debt?

Very few people will ever have a million-dollar disease, and most will never come out ahead by buying insurance. That's not the point, though. For a small portion of our society, insurance is the only reason they aren't in (deeper) debt. It's a small and manageable expense spread out over time, but ensuring that a larger amount of money is available from the start of coverage, to pay for those rare-but-devastating disastrous cases. Having insurance means that expenses are more predictable, at the cost of the overhead. For most Americans, that's a trivial opportunity cost in the long run.

Naturally.

Sales of Office lead to sales of Windows which leads to sales of Windows Server which leads to sales of Exchange which leads to sales of Office... Vendor lock-in has been Microsoft's core business model for decades. Why should it be different with phones?