Here's an alternative interpretation of what the "social contract" is -- civilized society is an example of Emergent Behavior.

It's not a legal rule, where paradoxes of consent or capacity are questions that must be answered. It is simply the rule-set from which the emergent behavior of human society arises, like some cellular automata system. What behavior comes out of the system -- be it a civil society or Lord of the Flies -- is a judgement-free result that depends on the proportion of adherents, versus dysfunctional units and cheaters.

Hatsune Miku sings 1000 digits of Pi! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

There's also a drug that can turn blue eyes brown:
http://io9.com/why-does-this-e...

If ignition actually happened, my bet is on a triboelectric spark. All that soil and ice getting tossed up will generate a charge, just like you see in thunderstorms and volcanic eruptions.

I think I understand what you're trying to say, but let me make it a bit more clear using a car analogy. Yes, you get less ATP out at the end, but that's not really the point of the drug.

DNP is an oxidative phosphorylation decoupler. What this means, it that it does the equivalent of popping your clutch into neutral, and then stomping on the gas. Your mitochondria will rev-up furiously, but no ATP is produced as you have just decoupled the connection between the engine and the wheels. In the meantime, you burn a lot of gas.

Yeah, these scammers tried hitting my grandmother before, fortunately she's still pretty sharp and recognized it immediately.

That being said, with social media, these kinds of scams have the capability to become a lot worse. The scammer that called my grandmother did a generic "grandmom it's me", which didn't work because my Chinese is pretty accented as an American-born speaker -- instant giveaway from the first word out of his mouth.

But with a little research they could have loaded it up with a lot more detail.

The low end has been sitting at a couple hundred for a while now -- and during that time, the quality of the CPU and GPU you can get have just gotten better and better, to the point that even net-top CPUs can get the job done. I'm amazed at how good even low-end netbook processors are these days.

Funny thing was the response of Indian politicians was that naming of the NDM-1 resistance factor was "malicious slander". The acronym of course standing for New Delhi Metallo-beta-lactamase. I happen to agree that geographic and ethnic names should no longer be used for disease entities, but nationalistic outrage is not a useful response to a problem.

Don't be so sure of that, when antibiotics are (or maybe were until recently) common non-prescription OTC products in India and other parts of south and south-east Asia, and often much cheaper than in the West.

So in other words, the river itself might have a few tenths or hundredths of a percent of a concentration below the therapeutic MIC (potentially of multiple different antibiotics, depending on what factories happen to be located on that river).

Your interpretation of this is doesn't-matter, therefore FUD. My interpretation of this is enough to exert influence on relative competitiveness within a microbial community, and exert selection for antibiotic resistance.

Long before you reach lethal anti-microbial concentrations, you get subtle changes in growth rate and microbial gene expression. In agriculture, farms routinely use antibiotics at just a few percent of therapeutic dosing, and that is already enough to cause massive changes in the microbial community (with the side-effect of improving the growth rate of the host animal). You don't need to directly kill the microbes themselves, you just need enough to skew the balance of power between the various micro-organisms that are busy competing with each other.

The concentrations in the river may be a fraction below even that, but even slight pressures are enough to alter the course of evolution, when administered over a long enough time period. And "long enough" in this situation is in the context of an organism with 20-minute generation times.

So in other words, Nintendo's legitimate subsidiary cannot compete with gray-market smugglers who evade the tariff to bring in consoles and games from the neighboring countries.

So they're just going to pull out and let the smugglers be their de-facto distribution channel.

There are little repair places in China and Hong Kong that will do exactly that. I've heard it's amazing the kind of repairs and mods you can get done in little hole-in-the-wall shops over there.

So how do I go about setting up a home router with a VPN exit point, for my own personal use while traveling? I've seen some of the various *WRT and other router firmware packages with VPN servers, but I have never managed to get one to work. Couldn't tell if I was messing something up on the router, or on my laptop / mobile phone client, or it was some firewall I was hitting at my hotel or hotspot I was connected to (although my university's VPN usually would usually function properly, so I don't think that was it).

Any cookbook instructions out there that will let me get something working?

They do, if they want to have plausible deniability.

Is it? I'm really surprised that Airbus had the chutzpah (or political naivete).

You see, Airbus gets quite a bit of help from the governments of Europe -- subsidies, contracts; I wouldn't be surprised if they had a major hand in the mergers that formed the company in the first place. Most likely, the lawmaker is thinking of Airbus as being little different from some wayward administrative division in his own bureaucracy, now in need of a rebuke for not supporting the government's agenda.

Hey, you know what else won't be the same? Language!

The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi would be a good example of a story that pushes that boundary (within the constraints of being able to still communicate with the reader). Not just choosing to invent silly terms for familiar things, but creating a culture-shock effect, where new slang is invented to reflect a new culture.