Well, who cares what Samsung does? ICS *IS* already available for the Galaxy S (http://www.theandroidsoul.com/android-4-0-update-for-galaxy-s-i9000-custom-rom/). That's actually the beauty and major difference compared to iOS: even if the original manufacturer proves to be a dickhead, you are free to upgrade your phone from other sources, and that often proves to be a major improvement over the original software too..

The big difference would be that the makers of Chrome and Firefox appear at least halfway competent in matters security and standards compliance, and few would distrust them implicitly in that regard

I am quite familiar with "SA". I wonder what the "T" in "TSA" stands for though.
I am a bit surprised to find out that the USA lags some 80 years behind Germany in political developments - only discovering totalitarianism now? What took you so long?
At that pace, it might take the USA at least another 3 years or so before they have proper concentration camps on the mainland, and not just their trials of one at Guantanamo .....

oops, meant of course freedom FROM war - English is my 5th language and I am still struggling with it.
The UN should protect people from the shenanigans of various governments that would lead to war (I'd be all for putting the politicians into a cage and let them slug it out to their hearts content) or step in immediately once war breaks out

I think this just illustrates one thing - there is no such thing as a "good government". Regardless of political colour or country, politicians remain politicians - ruthless people drunk on power with the single objective of staying in power no matter at what human cost. I acknowledge that there are some major benefits in having a good administration and an independent arbitrator, but the way governments of all colours are usurping "total power" nowadays is not acceptable and should be fought by all means. I'd like to see the UN enforce freedom of war, freedom of speech, and freedom to move - if needs must with military power (but not to have any power in any other regard).

Going faster than the wind is an old hat - has been done in sailboats for millenia, and I have been doing it in my youth (some 35 years ago) in small lightweight go-carts using a similar sail rig as nowadays windsurfers do.
The only problem is when you want to go against the wind which is not possible (other than zig-zagging), or with the wind straight from behind (when you will always be slightly slower than the wind) - and that's where smart engineering solutions set in.

Not true. For Glucose (and sucrose (cane sugar) is broken into Glucose) there is a limiting mechanism for uptake into cells - it depends on Insulin mediated transport. Too much, and Insulin receptors wil be downregulated, and the cell will stop stuffing itself with glucose for a while. Not so with Fructose - it can be taken up by the cell without requiring active Insulin mediated transport, non know downregulaton of uptake in oversupply scenarios, and hence quite toxic when eaten too much (and about a couple of spoons a day are certainly too much for the vast majority of people - less than a can of coke worth)

I have a similar problem with backups in my paper less medical practice - I always need a working system off-site for emergency replacement, and here in rural Australia doing it via Internet is impossible due to lack of networking infrastructure and ridiculous bandwidth costs
I use a QNAP NAS (TS659). They also come as tiny handy cubes with 2.5" disks instead of the 3.5"
That makes the question of the file system irrelevant, since it communicates with just about any operating system through standard protocols (eg NFS, AFP, SMB). Internally they use ext3 or ext4 file system depending on user preferences. Whenever I want to transfer files, I simply take one disk drawer out and simply shove it into the QNAP at the second location, where it will immediately start to replicate it. I use a spare disk for the original system, where the RAID1 configuration will immediately rebuild it, to be ready when I come again for the disk next day.

Horst

My experience from the past 25 years (degrees in both natural sciences and medicine, nowadays both practising and teaching mediicine) suggests that for the purpose of just using applications, the choice of platform doesn't matter much as long as long as the applications that you need will run on it.

However, most people serious in science are curious minds, want to understand how things work even if it is outside their main research domain - and that occasionally extends to IT even if the primary domain is outside IT. To facilitate this, I think the open sourced platforms such as the various BSD or Linux clones will fit the bill far better than the closed alternatives - provided the software you need will run on it without problems.

Don't need to imagine that. It's called being a man. Starts at puberty, ends with death. Enjoy the time between.

Well, the jury obviously didn't think before their verdict.

A car with ABS, EPS, and airbags all around is obviously a safer choice than one with less of such features. I'd say that my VW Touareg is a lot safer than a Toyoya Echo, I doubt anybody would argue there. I'd say this is s because of all the additional safety features built in to the Touareg, which are pretty much "state of the art" for mass produced cars.
Does that entitle me for a lottery payout if I hit a tree in the Echo and come to harm? If we follow the Jury's argument, we'd have to.

If we followed the Jury's argument, we'd soon be left without the choice of buying something cheap that fits the purpose for us, or always having to spend through the nose in order to buy state of the art. The verdict destroys both choice and competition.

The article is incorrect in many points. Firstly it is not just the two antibiotics mentioned that are effective against gram negatives, but quite a large range of Aminoglycosides, Quinolones, and even some Cephalosporines for example. Resistance against these happns too, of course.
Furthermore, damage to the kidneys (or hearing nerve) and other severe adverse effetcs can happen, but are rather the exception than the rule. The patient's choice is thus not "to lose his kidneys or die with intact kidneys" but to accept a reasonably small risk of potentially serious adverse effects in exchange for a treatment that is most likely life saving.

Of course it is sad if we gradually lose more and more powerful antibiotics because some reckless idiots overuse them in clinical practice (the USA is one of the worst offenders in that aspect within the "ciilized" realm, especially when it comes to misuse and overuse of Fluoroquinolones) or, even worse, just in order to make cruel intensive meat farming viable.

Well, how about thisone? http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/03/18/transportation-tuesday-8923-miles-per-gallon/
Makes that CalPoly car look like the traditional US gas guzzler, not?

While the rest of your response is correct, you are wrong with your statements about prohibition of political parties in Germany. It is just that they don't call it party prohibition ("Parteiverbot"). It is usually a two step process - first the government in power kickstarts a legal process to determine that the unwanted competition shouldn't have the legal status of a political party but is merely a "Verein" ("club"), and then terminates the club via simple legal procedures. This was done for example against the FAP (sort of a modern successor to the NSDAP) in the 1980s - and even that was only neccessary because the FAP somehow slipped unnoticed through the first and biggest hurdle - namely in order to get status as a political party that party has to formally conform with the "Grundgesetz", the surrogate constitution that was implemented by the allied powers after WW2 (Germany is still lacking a formal constitution endorsed by the German population, you know?) - else it will not be accepted as political party. This has been done against a range of political organizations from both the right and left spectrum as well as anarchistic organizations and ethnic organizations (eg Kurds) that wanted to form political parties in order to participate in elections.

Theoretically you could have 99.9% of the population signing up for a newly founded "party" that for example disagrees with a single subsection of the Grundgesetz - but they could be instantly prohibited without any need for parliamentary discussion (and it would not even count as party prohibition (Parteiverbot) because it would be impossible for them to obtain status as a political party. So FACTUALLY, prohibition of political parties is well alive and kicking hard in Germany, even it it goes by other names. It's a bit like freedom of religion in the Spain of the Grand Inquisition - you could belong to any religious group as long as it recognized the superiority and exclusivity of the catholic church.