Interesting rumour. I'm slightly interested to know what your basis for this assertion is

Half a dozen of my friends figured this out the hard way. Their doctors all traced it back to drug interactions between antibiotics in the -cycline family (minocycline, tetracycline, etc.) and their low-dose oral contraceptive pills. But since anecdotes aren't proof, I spent about five minutes Googling:

Reference 1
Reference 2
Reference 3 (about 3/4 down the page)
Reference 4
Reference 5

Many sources I found note that it is difficult to conduct formal research in this area because women don't want to take antibiotics as part of a study and risk getting pregnant. It is difficult to prove what happens, but my friends have traced it back and told me what their doctors said. I hope sexually active readers hear this and protect themselves.

Just think about it: who bears most of the risk in case of pregnancy? Women.

That's the commonly held belief. However, in modern society, men are held accountable for their actions, and many women are perfectly willing to do nefarious things to keep a man around. Read: missing pills, poking holes in condoms, fishing used condoms out of trash, etc. Also, be aware that female birth control pills fail for the entire month if the woman takes any kind of antibiotic that month.

FEMALE BIRTH CONTROL PILLS FAIL FOR THE ENTIRE MONTH IF THE WOMAN TAKES ANY KIND OF ANTIBIOTIC THAT MONTH.

Repeated for emphasis. I can't count on two hands the amount of friends of mine that have accidentally impregnated a woman who took an antibiotic and didn't know about this side effect. And when accidental pregnancies occur, the man must defer to the woman's beliefs on whether abortion is wrong.

It might be unjust, but in most societies, men can walk away and abandon women they've gotten pregnant easily without serious social stigma or financial repercussions.

This is a modern society of hair-trigger lawsuits. Most women won't put up with that. Also, most men actually have at least minimal moral standards for themselves and won't abandon their child and its mother to fend for themselves.

We need more male contraceptive methods. Hell, we need as many contraceptive methods as we can get. If it were up to me, everyone would be required to use at least three methods before having sex. Unintended pregnancies destroy lives, so let's be smart about this.

In short, it would take a lot more than this one paper to overturn the consensus that has resulted from one hundred years of scientific research. I mean, if someone published an experiment tomorrow saying that Einstein was wrong, what would your reaction be? To reject Einstein? Or to think that the experimenter might have screwed up?

- Albert Einstein

But as mentioned above, the vast majority of Windows-only programs are proprietary. Most of the open-source Windows applications are natively available on Linux already. So this won't work for most Wine users.

If Microsoft wanted to compile its software for the ARM architecture, it would. The market must demonstrate that long-battery-life netbooks are in high-demand first. Remember, Apple switched from PPC to Intel because of the improved performance-per-watt ratio. Once these major companies see a benefit to running their code on efficient RISC architectures, it will happen. It's just a matter of time.

I think you're being cowardly and small by trying to ignore the other side of the issue. Do you know anyone who's seen the inside of a federal prison? People start fights, and kill each other. Considering that our prisons are imperfect, I'd reconsider your policy of "put the terrible convicts somewhere where I don't have to worry about it" because someday you might find yourself on the wrong side of the law.

Think about it - you're driving to work, a child jumps into the street to run after something, you're sending a text message on your phone, you run into the child and the child dies. You're looking at vehicular manslaughter with a plea bargain of 5-10 years in a federal prison. Think carefully about whether you'd want that 6'8" serial killer in the same yard with you when you leave your cell each day.

I respect you for having the courage to say that.

I got it done at age 16. It is definitely better after. Also, in the U.S., nobody really cares one way or the other. Both ways are socially accepted. I know this is a topic of debate but I thought I'd add a data point since it's rare to find people who have had it both ways.

That's the power consumption while playing HD video. Even the Little Rokubox is supposed to peak over 5W and ALL it does is play video and it has no storage to speak of, no GPU to speak of (but it does have a dedicated video decoder.) Running the LCD backlight is probably one of the big loads, but using a general purpose GPU (it's not just for pushing pixels any more, after all) in this application is necessarily going to hurt power consumption.

Can't we get a dedicated chip for the pipeline of network packets-encoded video data-pixels-screen yet? There's a reason that some solutions are implemented in hardware rather than software. If my ipod can play music for 14 hours with a tiny battery, I should be able to stream video off Hulu without murdering my netbook battery life. I feel like this is a common enough application where we could have the CPU offload the work to a specialized chip or something. Now that we're in the age of open source browsers, we could even have web sites tell Firefox or Opera about streaming video somehow to signal the process.

P.S. Some background - I'm a software engineer (just graduated actually!) but I have a tremendous amount of respect for EE people who can whip up a DSP chip. I just bought an EEE 1000HA and I use it at least four hours a day. It's my only computer at home, and I hook it up to my car to play music. Maybe I should get out more.

But can we please have the damn measurement in libraries of Congress already. Sometimes I just don't understand slashdot anymore

Thai people are quiet conservative but their religion (Bhuddism) teaches them to be open and accepting of others even when they do something rude.

Have you ever traveled to Thailand? I dare you to walk down the main street of Pattaya Beach at night. You'll see wilder shit than you've ever imagined in the craziest college town you've ever visited in the U.S. It will blow your mind.

All the stereotypes about Thailand are true.

It has been adopted and is maintained by huge, huge companies, some bigger than Microsoft.

Name one. Microsoft is the #1 biggest software company in the world.

I currently live in San Diego, CA, USA, but I spent my entire last summer in Hsinchu, Taiwan, which has similar weather conditions to those you mentioned. I took an air-conditioned bus to work, and the walk from the bus to the entrance of my workplace was about 3min. It was always a race against time to avoid starting to sweat before getting inside. Usually I would make it. Walking slower increased the heat exposure time, but worked better. If I had to run for even a couple seconds, it was game over.

Which subtropical climate do you live in?

That's a good option for those who have enough money and are beautiful enough. Furthermore, you already have to have some degree of social power to be even considered. People who are ugly, inept, and poor are not welcome to join the "real" greek system.

That's true to some degree, but I wouldn't qualify the necessary ingredient as social "power." Rather, most chapters seek those who are not afraid to carry a conversation with people they don't know. Also, chapters vary widely. Some are more homogeneous, emphasizing characteristics like sports abilities or good fashion sense. Others, including the one I eventually joined, are more diverse. In sum, most college freshmen appeal to the majority of fraternity or sorority chapters; what usually matters most is the particular match of the student to the group.

PS. Also, note that going Greek is only an option if one lives in the United States. I apologize for forgetting that Slashdot enjoys an international readership.