I am not a medical doctor or any kind of doctor for that matter, but my understanding is many antibiotics are readily passed into urine even in patients with mostly normal kidney and liver function.

The ones that FreeBSD de-emphasized due to security concerns?

Yeah, I'm not keen on relying on a proprietary overlay to a proprietary OS. What happens when backward-incompatible service pack X arrives and breaks the overlay, and then you have to decide between learning the defaults or not upgrading? I'm not a fan of such things on general principle: if the OS really wants me to do things a certain way, I try to either adapt to it or not use that OS at all. Continually fighting against the current makes me tired.

DS9 in general wins. While the Ferengi in general were always a bit over the top in terms being obviously ridiculous the show was excellent.

The serial rather than episode format was a brave choice for a hour long prime time show at the time, but let them tell much richer stories.

The show tackled much less tired subjects with much larger grey areas. Rather than just beat us over the head about racism and xenophobia as its two predecessors did. DS9 actually tackled much more complex issues like, who is a terrorist and who isn't and from whose perspective. Is there a difference between a 'war criminal' and terrorist, the role of religions extremism, propaganda, if the good guys are doing is it bad? Plus so much more!

DS9 is far and away the most relevant Star Trek for the 21st century.

Alternatively you could look at it as vertical integration. The premium cable group is really the only segment trying to 'bypass the middle man' the Studio's etc are doing just about anything they can to protect their old distribution model:

1) Sell it to the theaters (period of exclusivity)
2) Sell it to the second run theaters (shorter period of exclusivity)
3) Home video release
4) Streaming (new and constantly tinkered with)

Netflix and Amazon have both discovered the existing content industry merely tolerates them, if anything as way to scape a little more revenue in from folks who otherwise would have just gone the piratebay.{whatever it is this week}. They are not really interesting in offering licensing terms that given the streaming guys much of a "piece of the action" on any valuable properties. So rather than wait around for Studios to 'cut out the middle man' Netflix and Amazon are getting into the content business, makes sense.

The next logical step is for Amazon (who has more capital than Netflix) to go after the other distribution channels, why leave money on the table. Maybe you can get $20 worth of theater ticket sales once in a while outa somebody that otherwise won't subscribe to prime.

It is all BS. Think for 15 seconds and its plain as day it has to be BS. If the NSA had a persistent backdoor into the DPRK's systems why would they admit it now? If I had access to my enemies networks, why in heavens name would I reveal that to them AFTER they demonstrated capability and willingness to conduct attacks of their own? Nope does not hold water now more than ever I would be concerned about protecting my secret access so I could be continue to monitor for future attacks, and have a path to stop them or retaliate.

No if anything they would have intervened before the attacks to prevent them, if they knew. They would never sensibly admit to having access afterward. Now just having access does not mean that you can do enough monitoring and ex-filtrating to just go fishing for what they might be up to without getting busted. You can't hide disk IO if you run constant searches will notice eventually in alot of cases. So I find it plausible they did not know about the attack but could verify it was DPRK after the fact but there is no way they'd admit that is how they knew publicly.

That would be trashing an intelligence asset for no gain. Its like chess sometimes you sacrifice a man, but you make damn sure you get something for it.

The vast vast majority of municipalities and vehicles are not subject to emissions testing. So for most people it won't be an issue, except when if diagnostics are needed.

Most mechanics are already pretty used to applying stickers etc, where states/counties require safety inspections, if customers want the convenience I am sure the major insurers can mail these folks a roll of stickers they can reapply; under threat of not being able to obtain additional stickers and inconveniencing their customers if they don't handle the stickers properly.

Everyone else just gets a weeks grace period or whatever to swing by their local branch office and get their agent to apply a new sticker.

I am not saying its a great solution but probably more workable than you think.

Finally maybe the devices could be designed to offer a pass through so you can connect an additional ODBII devices, the device could just proxy the commands and responses, maybe the state would not allow if for emissions tests, but your mechanic could still get his diagnostic info.

Yes but we are the good guys remember, so it okay. Also remember we are supposed to judge people by their actions, not their nationality or ethnicity unless they are Americans than obviously they are good.

See the trouble with that is unless he can be sure, that in the event of an accident he is able to remove the device and conceal any evidence of tampering, at the scene he will be awful unhappy when they deny his claim and prosecute him for fraud.

All the fancy computer security aside, they could probably just use one of those stickers that leaves 'void' behind when you pull it off applied by the agent across the device where it meets the ODBII/III connector.

Impossible no, but there is always going to be risk in a free society. I suspect there are not that many engineering students that take the 72 virgins stuff literally, and more than there are those who fear going into the woods because Satan might be waiting. They are engineering students because they have talent, aspirations, and opportunity. Could they use that opportunity to be a suicide terrorist, yes they could, but most of them certainly feel they worked hard to get where they are and want something better for it than to die young. Long story short they are like you or I.

The use their family as leverage part is probably more realistic. Hard to say what someone will do if you tell them you are holding their sister who you will rape to death if they don't follow instructions, but that is still unlikely. That would require these guys have operatives to identify Arab students who they can trace family back to a home country where they can grab them and hold them. Conditions must be such that the victim would need to believe going to the authorities won't work. If its Saudi Arabia or something where the state department can make a few phone calls and get someone picked up, that is probably how that will go.

I am all for tightening up our boarders and strictly enforcing our immigration laws. We should close the tourism visa loop hole. We should make sure everyone who comes here from abroad gets background check and people with criminal backgrounds including things that we consider felonies should be denied; as should those who have known militant associations. We should locate and deport people who let visa's expire quickly; no excuses. Being out of immigration compliance should result in being permeately bared from entry to all US territories in the future.

What we don't need/want to do is get all twitchy and suspicious about folks here. If they came here legal and are obeying the same laws you and I obey we should treat them like we treat each other. This is important for our society, its kinda what America is supposed to mean.

Probably because most of the terrorists are not thinkers. These guys are still trying to set off some m80s in the back of a car next to a propane cylinder and expecting something exiting to happen. Essentially they are not smart enough to put something like that together that actually works without help. They are not smart enough to solicit help without getting caught either.

It will happen eventually but its going to have to be some relatively intelligent person who has gone of the deep end for one reason or another. Probably it will be Timothy McVeigh type who does it in a 'western' nation first. The Islamists might do it in Iraq/Yemen/Syria/*istan where their infrastructure is but so far 9/11 and the Subway bombing has been only cases where they recruited actors who are not some combination of overly stupid or overly deranged to successfully pull off something more complex than 'run and gun'.

The other thing is the smarter Islamists know they have a large enough pool of the stupid and deranged that they need only get a handful of AKs into their hands and some ammo and they have a reliable suicide attack. There will be much higher probability of failure trying to deliver IEDs from drones and given current constraints on the tech available at your local hobby shops and hardware store little chance of doing damage that is much greater. So in a sense its 'smarter' to put some AKs into the hands of some baffoon you have convinced is on his way to 72 virgins.

There is a difference between being an intellectual and what the pols and media mean when they say intellectual. As the GP points out G.W. Bush was plenty well educated as has just about every president we have ever elected has been, even early on when that education was less formal.

What the media and the people who state they want an intellectual mean is something very much the opposite. They want insular academics, who regardless of their party membership have 100% confidence in their untested leftist theories, and 100% belief in their excuses for all the failures of those they have tested, and finally and most importantly an ability to maintain enough cogitative dissonance to hold instance ideas like the financial crisis had something to do with inadequate regulation rather than being the logical and eventual consequence of moving to a money system not tied to a commodity but based solely on: regulation.

In short they want a bunch of guys that can earn degrees and look down on the rest of us. I am come on folks these guys are saying things like "lack of transparency is a feature" and lets take advantage of the "public's ignorance of economics to get this done."

We should not be voting for these people...they don't represent us...

Slashdot needs a "-1: Generalising and dismissing others on irrelevant physical attributes" modifier.

Of course there is. One powerful negative feedback is that CO2 lets less and less infrared radiation escape, so every new added CO2 atom in the atmosphere has less effect than the previous one -- it cannot block radiation which was already blocked by other CO2 atoms.

This is part of the reason why doubling of CO2 levels "only" causes a linear temperature rise. CO2 only has a logarithmic effect on the temperature.

Which is lucky. Anything more complex than bacteria would have trouble surviving the wild temperature swings that a linear correlation between CO2 and temperature would cause.