"But this is a fundamental change in the data model and means touching nearly our entire code base"

Red flag. Badly designed system.

"if we treat animals in inhumane ways, we become inhumane persons. This logically extends to the treatment of robotic companions"

Non sequitur, surely.

Clearly they were so overwhelmed by their success with OpenOffice they want to replicate it with MySQL.

Most people I see on Slashdot, whether they think piracy is great, terrible or anywhere in between don't think the damage it does warrants special laws or draconian civil penalties. Reading anecdotes like this makes economic arguments for additional copyright legislation harder to swallow.

Saying piracy is theft confuses it with a completely different thing. Only good to call it that if you are looking to confuse people.

You (I guess?) live in a country where your copyright on what you create outlasts anyone alive when you publish it. Madness to think this is a good thing.

Generally, for those who don't get it: don't explain.

Is this the same as asking if their genetic makeup influences a person's chances of having kids?

I've thought of myself as a kind of series discrete moments of conciousness. Every instant I'm alive, I'm sitting on the top of a whole history of these long since finished moments. Moreover - this moment now, will be gone in an instant, and they'll be another moment of conciousness which claims it as part of it's history.

Here today, I think I'd consider myself to be still alive at any point in the future where someone exists who claims to be sitting on the top of my entire history of moments of conciousness, and this current moment of conciousness that I'm experiencing.

Are you thinking of RSA SecurID? That is something quite different.

If you want to log in to my SSH server, then in practice you need a private counterpart to a public key which you have added to your authorized_keys file.

The story is real, the Slashdot summary is utterly incorrect. For example, from the article:

"A new law ... would not allow GCHQ to access the content of emails, calls or messages without a warrant"

Also it doesn't say anything about trawling stored data, or proposing a requirement to stored data, rather that with a a warrant, GCHQ must be able to access data in real time.

If you wanted to get an idea about why accupunture is so popular, you'd do well to join in on their conversation. Maybe you'd plant some seeds of the value of evidence based medicine, and you could hope to get an insight into how their minds work.

http://www.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab003281.html

Pah! Ask around, solicit conversation, stimulate though. Everyone's the richer.

Like the sceptics who 'claim' that they knew subsequent tests will show neutrinos don't travel faster than light!

You use past results and experience to predict the future. That a single study showing positive results for ESP was flawed in some way, is a natural starting position. If this study had backed it up, then I'd still assume both are flawed in some way, just with a little less confidence.

If Alice says "I reused a carburetor from a wrecked car" it means she took a carburetor from a wrecked car and used it, as a carburetor, in another car.

If Bob says "I recycled a carburetor from a wrecked car" it means he took a carburetor from a wrecked car, destroyed it, and used the raw materials to make something new.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=reuse+vs+recycle
www.care2.com/greenliving/why-reuse-beats-recycling.html

Yeah I'd agree with this, made it all the more impressive when I saw this web summarising app on the BBC the other day.

iPhone only, so I haven't been able to play with it.