Yes. That's why no one carries around internet-connected, handheld computers in their pockets today, and Google's pie in the sky ultra-tech glasses have never made it outside of lab demos. Because muggers will descend like a plague of locusts to consume them all.

Putting a knife to someone's throat for money has always been profitable job -- just a high risk one. The reason most cyberpunk scenarios include advances in self-defense is because they are worlds in which the fabric of society has been rent asunder, and human life is much cheaper. Not because the toys are so shiny that otherwise normal, law-abiding people just can't resist robbing people for them.

Please explain. I'd like an explanation of how the fear of being sued for saying anything overly critical has improved the UK's resilience to just putting out what people want said about them instead of things they don't want said about them.

Actually, yes they are in this context. The original exchange that started this whole thread was someone saying that we should sell info on "the 1%," obviously meaning the phrase as coined by the Occupy movement in the context of the wealthiest members of American society who the original poster conflated with those in control of selling this information.

Then someone responded that everyone on Slashdot was part of "the 1%" by changing the definition of what "the 1%" meant to something different that suited his argument. Of course, in the process he committed a few math errors, which is what I was addressing in the bulk of my post, but that attempt to argue by definition was intellectually dishonest, and I stand by my statement to that effect.

The total population of the US, Canada, and the EU, as of 2008 is 550 million people out of a total global population of about 6.7 billion. 8% > 1%.

Of course, this is an irrelevant distraction, because the phrase "the 1%" was coined to cover the top 1% of Americans, not the world.

Just how much do you think a direct metal laser sintering printer costs?

Well, it depends. Is that food actually safe to eat? In this case, probably, but that hasn't been vetted and proven by the Chinese government, so they're quite sane in erring on the side of safety. Especially considering all the product recalls involving tainted food from their local producers. Plus, it's not like the US or China are strapped for food at the national level.

The problem with starvation has been one of distribution for much of the past century. If this food IS being thrown away (and that's a big "if"), then it's because there's no good way of getting it to someone who could pay some price for it before it spoils. (And food aid is generally not done for completely free.)

In this case, it isn't really so much about "keeping the genie in the bottle," since they're quite alright with the genie in general. This is just about double-checking safety of a product and one country's industries not doing enough to respect another country's approval process by keeping the supply-chain neatly segregated.

Of course, the irony is that this sort of story usually happens the other way with China. e.g. Honey containing traces of pesticides of antibiotics approved for general use in China but not approved in the US.

How would spending the time to look through the source code themselves have been more of a waste than spending a year fighting with a recalcitrant vendor?

The best solution is to have access to the source code AND a dev team that is actively developing it that you can submit bugs to. If they are willing to spend the time to fix it, then that's great. If they aren't, then at least you have recourse. Also, you have greater ability to prove it IS their fault and that they do need to fix it themselves.

It's not like having access to the code is mutually exclusive with having support.

Make up your own mind and stop looking for / trolling the groupthink.

Similar, but almost certainly not the same diet their parents had growing up. Heights is up across the Western world across population due to increases in available calories. The Dustbowl and the Great Depression were the last times in America that large swathes of the population suffered famine. Despite all the unhealthy effects of too many calories in the American diet, we generally have far more access to protein and to vitamins & minerals than our ancestors from about a century ago and than people in most of China even today.

Ironically though, too much nutrition (i.e. obesity) in childhood can retard the adolescent growth spurt. This is part of why America is no longer the tallest nation.

Haha. Mine is entangled with yours. Gives a whole new meaning to spooky action at a distance.

Same here. Most of my files are on the machines used to access them. However, very large files, like video is stored on my roommate's SAN. He has music that he can stream via his phone to his car. Is that local or not?

Plasmid transfer.

It may be worse than that. I found this last night while doing some reading related to the triclosan article but hesitated to bring it up, but it seems that chlorination itself may provide selection pressure that favors bacteria resistant to certain beta-lactam antibiotics..

We don't actually know the exact mechanism by which chlorine kills or damages bacteria, but we do know that increased permeability of the cell membrane enhances its lethality (but is not mechanism of lethality in and of itself). Beta-lactam drugs work by monkeywrenching the process of building the peptidoglycan layer of bacterial cell walls, so it may be that some forms of resistance to cell wall wrecking drugs also help resist chlorination, which would make chlorination in turn select for that trait.

At this point, I'm in pure speculation territory, though. I am not a molecular biologist.

It's also the category which includes carbapenems like Imipenem and Meropenem which are last resort drugs. In particular, the production of metallo-beta-lactamases like NDM-1 is a key adaptation to resist them, and the article highlights the risk specifically to neutralizing carbapenems as the main cause of concern.

You might want to consider that there might be a significant risk of harm too.

Slight negative effect on lung cancer survival for high doses of Vitamin A.
Increase risk of all-cause mortality for high doses of Vitamin E.
Significant increase in mortality from gastrointestinal cancers from high doses of antioxidants, A & E in particular.