Why not give diseases numbers, and refer to emerging infections people who don't know by name using the number? You could have a system where each number prefix tells you more or less the family of diseases you're dealing with.
I know it sounds bizarre, but people seemed to be OK with H1N1 for "Swine Flu", so why not extend that to any kind of infectious (flu, malaria) or environmental (Minamata disease) etc.?
Porn doesn't invent tests to see if you really love them. Porn doesn't create drama.
Clearly we are living in a post-irony world.
I was reading an essay the other day by a woman who was against Mother's Day. She raised her kids not to observe Mother's Day because she didn't want to be one of those Moms dragging screaming toddlers into restaurants to have dinner with Grandma. My reaction to her was the same as my reaction to you, which is get a grip, for chrissakes.
Let me give you some genuine old-fart perspective. Everyone thinks they're more special than they really are, especially when they're young. This extends to having troubles. Everyone thinks they got a raw break; that their generation got a raw break. Hell, my generation thought so; I went to college in an era after The Pill and when there were no STDs that couldn't be cured with penicillin; the minimal standard of "do-ability" was at a historic low. And still people were miserable. And the funny thing was our parents had to pull themselves out of the Great Depression then go over the Europe to kick Hitler's ass and they thought of themselves as lucky.
Not getting goodies handed you you gratis does not make you special. Life costs you, just like it has costed every generation of humans since Olduvai Gorge.
It seems kind of dumb to on the one hand think you'll get everyone to help populate your data for free, and on the other hand that you'll get perfectly valid data in all cases.
I consider this Rule #1 in any kind of development project: Never trust the user's input.
It doesn't matter if you told the user to select 1 to 10 and gave them a drop down box to choose the appropriate number. Don't trust that only numbers from 1 to 10 will be coming to your application. Check to make sure that the input is indeed a number and not "1; Delete from Users". Make sure that the number is within your 1 - 10 integer boundaries and not -1, 13, or 3.14159265. Only once the input has been fully vetted/sanitized should it be used.
Obviously, things get more complicated when you get up to Map Maker levels of complexity. You can't simply run IsNewDataValid(x). However, this is where you should have someone review the data for any obvious issues. It won't remove all abuses (people might sneak in graffiti using many small, innocuous-looking updates instead of one big one), but it can help stop major abuses. It also can slow down approvals of user data, but sometimes slow posting of data is preferable to letting everything through and then looking foolish when someone posts something inappropriate.
I believe the summary said that that humans were in control of the cars during at least 2 of the 4 incidents. You can't blame the self-driving car if the self-driving feature is disabled and the human takes over. That would be like blaming Google Maps for bad directions if you turn it off, take a left turn when Google had said to turn right, and wind up lost.
With a 2 out of 48 accident rate, that's 4%. Of course, that's a very small sample size. It would be interesting to see how the accident rate changes with many more autonomous cars on the road.
Except, as delt0r pointed out, there's a difference between liability for "Office crashed and destroyed my resume" and "My car's air bags deployed when we weren't involved in a crash." The former is an inconvenience so a click-wrap agreement absolving the company from any damages due to their software might be annoying but isn't life threatening. The latter involves actual lives. Car manufacturers have already been held accountable for faulty automotive systems. Self-driving will be another feature of the car like ABS and air bags. If the self-driving mechanism decides that the two lane road actually has three lanes, the car manufacturer will face a recall at best and lawsuits at worst. I don't see the courts treating a car feature like software instead of like other car features. To quote delt0r: If car makers could have had "click-wrap agreement" equivalents, they definitely would have and you'd never see any recalls. ("Thousands of our cars' ABS doesn't work when it is raining? Must be a faulty system. Oh well, they all agreed not to sue us. Those folks better pay to get that fixed.")
I'm all for reducing the penalties for copyright infringement when there's no profit motive involved. For example, someone downloads a movie via BitTorrent and shares that movie out. Mind you, I still think there should be penalties, but the $750 - $150,000 per infringement seems too high.
This case, however, is one where people are intentionally selling books that they don't own the rights to sell and not paying the legitimate author. This is piracy purely for profit and can snag people who think these are legitimate listings. THESE kinds of pirates are the ones that the original copyright infringement fees were designed for and I will feel no sorrow for them if they are fined exorbitant amounts of money.
If an ISP wants to throttle video, as long as they do it equally among all providers, that seems fair. Or to give preference to online gaming, that's fair too. As long as the ISP isn't picking and choosing, or asking for money to give a higher preference.
Network Neutrality doesn't mean that an ISP can't provide QoS and say "All video streaming packets get bumped ahead of e-mail packets." What it means is that an ISP can't say "Video packet A gets bumped ahead of video packet B because provider A paid us for 'fast lane access.'" Even more, it says that ISPs can't say "All video packets get slowed down so that our service's video packets can seem faster and so we can use our local Internet access monopoly to get people to sign up for our video services." (Look at the Comcast-Netflix speed graphs for an example of this. Netflix's speed tanked until right when Netflix decided to pay Comcast for faster access.)
With your bare hands?!?
