At least quote the whole paragraph, if nothing else it makes discussion *here* a whole lot easier.

“The agreement is seeking to address a number of very different issues of which some are serious problems of public health and public safety, for example trade in fake medicine,” Ms. Schaake said. “But that issue doesn’t compare to the alleged cost to society of online piracy. It seeks to kill 20 birds with one stone. It risks not solving the legitimate concerns but causing incredible collateral damage.”

I read this as indicating that both issues are simply in different leagues when it comes to importance. The phrasing "alleged cost [...] of online privacy" seems to indicate she sees the fake meds as much much more important and that she's worried that the inclusion of anti-piracy stuff is harming these legitimate concerns.

The thing is, it really should be Android. I mean, under Android you're free to develop and distribute an app designed just for crashing the phone. I'm sure such a thing would never get past the Apple censors.

Did you read that article you linked to?

"Cancer survival in black men and women was systematically and substantially lower than in white men and women in all 16 states and six metropolitan areas included."

Tell me that doesn't show that the more money you have in the US, the better your chances of survival.

Because disasters that have passed are no longer newsworthy, and disasters scheduled for a hundred years from now aren't newsworthy yet.

In other words, if it isn't about "more or less now", noone would care and you wouldn't hear anything about it.

Women have testosterone, just not as much as men.

Your post is mixing two different points: open vs. closed source, and projects done by a whole team vs. a single guy. You can't compare closed source software developped by a big company that's staking its survival on the commercial success of said software with an open source hobby project of a single guy, and then make a general conclusion that closed source is better...

Tried and busted: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_(2005_season)#Episode_35_.E2.80.93_.22Border_Slingshot.22

No, 0.999... IS exactly equal to 1.

Which is why floor(0.999...) should be exactly equal to floor(1), ie. 1

Except that my Touch needs to be recharged maybe once a week, depending on exactly how much I use it for gaming on the subway. My ordinary cell phone also lasts about a week on a charge. Yet if I were to combine both, I'd end up needing to recharge it every day. And I'd better have my charger around 'cause it might not last through the entire day.

Maybe it's just the fact that English isn't my native tongue, but... Is this 5 year thing a requirement for the project? Or is it just that Boeing estimates such a plane could conceivably fly for 5 years?

Because I just can't imagine any sort of scenario where something like this absolutely has to stay in the air for 5 straight years and could not be replaced by 2 or 3 of these things doing one-year rotations.

Nonono, all you reall need is to create a black hole in the right spot so you can use its gravity to bend your light beam in such a way that it hits the object you'll be 'pulling' from behind and hey presto, you're pushing!

How about the other way round? Define one year as 365 days. Sure, in (365/2)*4 = 730 years we'll have winters in august in the northern hemisphere, but that's not gonna matter to any computer...

Except that we're talking about food allergies here (yes, celiac's isn't an allergy, but the discussion drifted away from that).

I don't think you can deny that the typical diet of the modern western world has become very different from what it was 100 years ago. Better transportation has allowed us access to more and more 'foreign' foods and keeps making them cheaper and thus available to more families.

By your logic, the fact that people have become exposed to more and more different food allergens should mean food allergies should be declining. Which I doubt they are...

Do it with actual numbers and not percentages, because you're getting tripped up by the fact that your total population changes.

Take 1000 families, with two children. Assuming a perfect distribution, every possible combination of boy/girl for both children results is represented 250 times. Note that the actual order of the children is largely irrelevant, but if you ignore order you still have 250 families with two boys, 250 with two girls and 500 with one of each.

Now you take the next step. You reveal that at least one child must be a boy. This means you eliminate 250 families from your population, namely those with 2 girls. You're left with a population of 750, 500 of which have a girl as well and 250 who have another boy.

Now, pick one family at random from those 750. The odds of getting one with two boys is 250/750 or 1/3.

Yes, 1/4 of (all families with 2 children) has 2 boys, but 1/3 of (all families with 2 children AND at least one boy) has two boys.

I fail to see how you could ever achieve this without also proving your identity. Let's say you walk into a high-security area. You produce all the documents needed to prove that Jim Bobbins has the right to be there. Should you be allowed in? No, because you've given no proof at all that you are, in fact, Jim Bobbins.