The problem is that there's no definition for what is a member of Homo Sapiens. Was your mother? Her mother? Her mother? When exactly did that change? Back when you and the chimp has the same great-great-N-greatgrandmother?

I have around 5% Neanderthal genes. Yet chimpanzees are 98% similar to humans. Who's the human?

Sure, we can come up with a definition of human. But how do we make it so it includes people with an extra chromosome, people who due to genetic differences cannot reproduce with others, or our own descendants down the line?

It sure is. Too bad you'll never know.

But see, i dowant to be resuscitated in ways that will not cripple me or make my final days unbearable. Defibrillator? Bring it on. Adrenaline? Jab it in.
CPR? No thanks.

You get just under 3kbytes on a QRCode - so there would still be sharp limits on what could be stored there - but certainly it could contain a tiny URL *and* a bunch of other data. Also, there is an issue with very small items in that a max-resolution QRcode would be too small to print cheaply. a QR code that only has to contain a URL could be smaller than the current bar code (because it's 2D).

What it would take is for government to step in and require it. That's how come we have food labeling at all. They could specify the rules for what has to be recorded and how - just like they do now.

All I'm proposing is that the argument that there isn't enough room on the label for any more information is kinda silly. You only need a pointer to the information to be printed onto the label - not the information itself.

No, he understands correctly, at least for some systems.

I ran into this, in the form of what looked like a fairly serious battery self-discharge problem on a low-end Windows 8 (upgraded IMMEDIATELY to 8.1) laptop.

I queried the vendor about it. They checked into it, and came back with "That's by design. The computer never actually really shuts off, so it is ALWAYS sucking at least a small amount of current, either out of the wall or out of the battery."

HORRIBLE design on SOMEBODY'S part.

In more than one way....

Four out of five elderly people given CPR end up dying within days. Many of them with prolonged and intense suffering due to CPR prolonging the inevitable.
And in some cases CPR is given when it's not warranted, breaking ribs, collapsing lungs or otherwise causing serious and sometimes fatal damage.

It's a useful tool for saving lives when not used indiscriminately. But that's how we use it. If I keel over, please don't resuscitate unless there is at least a 50% chance of long-term success, and less than a 50% chance of causing long-term damage. It's just a life.

Like I said, I'm not arguing with you about the fairness of the law.

No, I recognize that. You're just restating your premise over and over again and not engaging any responses or questions about your position. We've established that your definition of a "fair trial" is one that follows any set of written laws and is held in America (yay!) regardless of what actually happens in that trial. By that definition, I fully acknowledge that Mr. Snowden would receive a fair trial. It's a wonder that he doesn't rush back to avail himself of one. Or maybe two!

What you NEED to be doing is to stop yammering about how unfair all this is and start working to change the law you think is so unfair.

Ah, the argument from incomplete civic engagement. My favorite! You start by pretending that you're on Slashdot to educate the uneducated masses while the person you're arguing with is a hopeless idiot who genuinely believes that arguing with random yahoos on Slashdot is how you change laws and who never actually engages in any political activity. Once that's established, you can change the subject, extricate yourself from the conversation, condescend to your interlocutor (Really, Thunder? There are people you vote for who make laws? Tell me more!), all while pretending to somehow be above the fray even after you just spent a bunch of posts arguing with random yahoos on Slashdot. It's a quality gambit every time I see it, even if it's not very original.

With that, I don't look forward to your likely reply.

Why? It's so little effort to simply restate your priors, ignore every line of argumentation presented and skirt any questions asking you to defend your definitions. It's not like you spend a lot of time on this stuff. I suppose you're too busy running Senate campaigns and reviewing constitutional law journals to engage with little people who don't even understand how voting works.

All I can say to you on that front is, good luck, you are going to need it because I get the feeling the majority of people who vote in this country don't support a change in law big enough to get Snowden off the hook.

You're assuming that I want him "off the hook." I think that with a fair trial, he'd likely do some time, albeit not the same amount of time as a genuine spy who acted against our interests with no justification. What I don't accept is the notion that in a country that supposedly values due process and freedom of speech, we think a trial that doesn't allow the defendant to speak in his own defense is "fair," much less good enough to live up to the standards we supposedly set when we defined what due process meant to a democracy.

I think I said that in my last paragraph.

Shesh.. Look, the trial would be "fair" as in done by the rules. Let it go...

I can't help but notice that you didn't answer the question. If the rules stated that he wasn't allowed to speak in his own defense, is the trial still fair just because that's how the rules are written? If your definition of "fair trial" means that honest people apply ridiculous rules equally to all, then yes, it's fair. But that definition of "fair" would apply to a system that simply executed every defendant without hearing any evidence either way. As long as it's done by the book and nobody gets special treatment one way or the other, why not?

Again, if you want to claim the LAW is not fair, fine, but don't confuse the LAW with the trial.

The law and the trial are not separable in this case. The law determines what arguments can be made at the trial, so treating them as two totally unrelated things is nonsense. I'll clarify that I'm not impugning the motives of the jurors or the judge. But the "trial" is more than just people. It's people and rules, and those rules are a mix of written law, tradition and precedent. Unfortunately in this case, those rules come together in such a way that one of the basic principles of a fair trial, the ability to speak in one's own defense, is missing.

He is innocent until proven guilty, will be afforded an attorney, will be given a trial before his peers, face his accusers and present evidence at his trial. This is NOT a kangaroo court.

This is where we disagree. If he's not allowed to present the best evidence in his defense, then he's not by any reasonable standard being allowed to "present evidence" at his trial. "You can present evidence, but not the evidence that might convince a jury," is a meaningless guarantee. Without the ability to present true, relevant statements in your own defense, it is a kangaroo court. The fact that it was set up that way by law and the fact that it's offensive to call it so doesn't make it any less of a kangaroo court.

That's not how we've done criminal justice for centuries. It's a mess that we've slowly allowed our courts to evolve into by steadily adding rules for excluding evidence and arguments. For example, strict liability in criminal cases only really started in the late 19th century, and its liberal application to serious crimes (as opposed to regulatory violations) is much more recent.

Just like the slow stripping away of due process for suspected drug offenders, all branches of government have been complicit including the courts. New laws were written, new court precedents were set, and before we knew it, we had a system that allowed asset forfeiture without a trial and prevented criminal defendants from presenting true evidence in their defense. This is just another example of exactly how far we've drifted from those traditions you reference. Those are traditions that we should be proud of, and we should be screaming bloody murder at every step away from them.

There is plenty of room on the label for a tinyurl.

If you were to accept that you needed a smartphone in order to read food labels (a big "IF") - then the entire label could be replaced by a QRCode which links to a page with *ALL* of the information. The actual label could then be simplified to a really simple "UNHEALTHY/HEALTH" number going from 1..10 as proposed previously to simplify things for the 95% of people who aren't going to read anything more detailed than that anyway.

For people like you - I'd imagine that using a phone to get vitally important data that would never fit on a label is less of an imposition. Furthermore, it would be easy to have software provided for you that would allow you to scan the product and get a personalized "OK TO EAT"/"DO NOT EAT!" indicator as set by your doctor.

Come to think of it - you wouldn't even need any extra printing at all...pretty much all labelled food already has a bar-code on it - it would be simple enough to prepend a standard URL onto that number to turn it into something that a special app could use to pull all of the necessary information. Legislation to make product vendors add this information would then be simple enough.

We're collectively producing more rice than we eat. Japan is stockpiling unused rice every year, and the world markets are flooded with cheap rice. Food insufficiency (starvation, malnutrition) is currently a problem of resource allocation, not production.

At the same time, the consumers in the big rice consuming countries aren't eating just "rice". You can typically find many dozens of very specific breeds of rice with differences in flavour, texture, firmness, size and so on. And that's within a single type (Japonica, say).

I suspect this would only be useful for rice grown for feed or as an industrial crop. But for feed, source of starch and so on there are already other, well entrenched crops available, so I don't see much of a practical impact of this development.