Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

Not unless your geneticist is stupid enough to give them hands along with the bigger brain.

It's based on the concept that a doctor should first 'Do no harm.' Let's say there are two people experiencing organ failure, one paralyzed, one not. In such a case, the probable outcome for the able-bodied person is worse than the paralyzed person. It would even be a net benefit for the paralyzed person if some limb function is restored, whereas for the able-bodied person it would inevitably result in decreased motor function at best.

If the surgery on a paralyzed person is successful, with respect to limb function, they can be no worse off even if no nerve function is preserved.

When it comes to infrastructure, the frontrunner rapidly becomes the laggard. Someone building up their infrastructure from nothing can look at the forerunners and avoid their mistakes and include the latest technology while the forerunner has become dependent on the existing infrastructure so it must be maintained while the new system is built.

Consider a 'modern' road built in 1790. It would be wide enough for two carriages to pass, it would be paved in cobblestone, and would have amazing drainage that let the water flow off to the side rather than puddle up. Imagine you built out this road system for your entire city. Now Mr. McAdam comes along with his new paving system and your neighboring town that didn't get around to 'modernizing' their roads when you did now starts their own project. Their roads will be better in many respects. Do you tear up your old cobblestones and repave your roads? Or do you live with your system until it becomes a problem?

Fast forward 200 years. The amazing two lane carriageway is barely wide enough for a single modern car, the rights of way/easements have been established so houses are built up to the edge, and any upgrade to this road system is going to require not just regarding, but purchasing/condemning hundreds of properties. Compare that to a third world nation putting in their highway system. Lots of open space to utilize, no underground utilities to worry about rerouting or damaging, No overhead bridges built 60 years ago that require replacing (since they were only wide enough to span a 2 lane road not a 4 lane divided highway.

So something as simple as adding a new lane to an existing highway for 10 miles can end up costing more than putting in an entire 4 lane expressway for 50 miles if one was in a developed country and the latter was in an undeveloped country.

It's great to get new technology, but trailblazing is always more difficult than following the trailblazer.

No it does not. All artificial means in this case is that it was not 'built and designed' by natural processes.

You can build something to test a concept fairly easily. However, it will not be designed with economic operation in mind. When you build an operational prototype, you are going to spend a lot more time developing the design into one that can easily be developed into a production system. That means a LOT more engineering effort is expended into 'mundane' things like ensuring that you aren't using components which fail in an unreasonable amount of time, or that your design is maintainable. Imagine if they designed a prototype, only to discover that some aspect of it was a maintenance nightmare that couldn't be fixed without a redesign of the system. That would be expensive.

In short, the 1 year version proves that it can be built, the 5 year version proves that it can be built in a manner for real world use.

Maybe he meant a battery in the classical sense of energy storage. By that token a hydroelectric dam could be considered a giant battery with the capability to output 100kW/hr...

(Or I have a bad habit of trying to see the silver lining in thunderheads)

With physical products, it's tricky, but understandable. I buy a pair of headphones made in the UK and have them shipped to me in the US. The taxes I pay are numerous, local, state, national, international. Is sales tax the responsibility of the buyer or the seller? It should be obvious, until you get into the topic of use tax. If I buy a car in Delaware, there is 0% sales tax, but Pennsylvania will want me to pay a use tax (that just happens to be exactly the same as PA sales tax). I leased a car in Virginia, and VA requires that you pre-pay the sales tax for the totality of the lease. But when I moved up to Pennsylvania, they charge sales tax incrementally on each lease payment. So, does VA owe me a refund on my sales tax for VA? or should I be exempt from the PA incremental taxes? Or is the leasing company responsible for figuring out just where the tax money from this sale/lease should go? (These are rhetorical, I've already dealt with all the tax issues described)

OK. So you figured out physical products. Now lets get down to software. If we go by 'Where your customer pays you", you end up in a situation like my lease tax situation. Let's say I want to sell you some software for your company. $100,000 is what it would cost to buy a 10 year license under normal conditions. In location A there is a 10% sales tax, in location B there is a 3% sales tax. I require initial purchase of the software to take place in location A, with installment payments over 10 years. First installment is $10,000 where you purchase the token in 10% sales tax location. Subsequent payments are 9 payments of $10,000k in later years, which just so happen to be in lower tax areas.

Did the purchase happen in the 3% tax location, or the 10% tax location?

But was it wrong? I don't have one either. I always make sure to plan my reststops carefully.

It doesn't work like that. You would still have your certification. But it would be the old certification. What Oracle will do is issue their new improved updated latest whizbang certification 2.0.

So you would have your DBA certification, and it would still be exactly what it always was, but you would not have the DBA 2.0 certification.

One of the biggest problems I faced with my old gmail account was that because I used it for everything, eventually everything was sending me emails. As it came from what looks like legitimate sources, gmail had a huge challenge sorting out the good from the bad. It did a great job, but eventually I had to consider that email compromised.

Initially I planned to setup my own mail server for my own domain and aggressively manage the spam, but the last time I did that was in 2000, and I was rustier than a garden gate. The amount of relearning and work I would have to do to set it up properly and securely was going to be more than I could handle. However, I stumbled upon a solution which works well for me:

I registered a domain, and let GOOGLE manage it for me. The only thing different to me is that my 'google' email uses my domain name. As it's my last name, I get the convient forms of Firstname@lastname.com for my personal email. But how does this solve the spam problem if google isn't already solving it for you? On it's own it doesn't, but I decided to take what works with google and add some quirks (and let's face it, google knows a lot more about hosting email servers than I do).

1. Use a non traditional extension. No .COM, .NET, .ORG. Spammers can catch 90% of all email addresses by bulk spamming incremental names. *@gmail.com is going to get spam no matter what, but *@obscuredomain.it is not likely worth the computational effort, even for a botnet.

2. Do NOT give out your primary email address. If you want to give ABCBusiness your email address, give them the address ABCBusiness@yourdomain.com. There is nothing to setup other than having unassigned email addresses redirect to a single mailbox. What does this do? Well, let's say you start getting spam. Take a look at the 'TO:' field and if it says plumberbob@yourdomain.com then you know it was Plumber Bob that was patient zero for your spam problem. Simply blacklist incoming mail sent to the plumberbob@yourdomain.com email address and your spam is GONE. Give a new email to Plumber Bob and tell him to be more careful with this one.

I've been using this system for over a year and there have been a total of 10-20 spam messages that google caught and sent directly to my spamfolder, and one annoying company that kept sending me advertisements until I blacklisted the email 'thenoisycompany@mydomain.com'. There was also a period of time when a bunch of spam messages came through a to address from the person I assume was the previous owner of the domain. Blaclisted that address and all was quiet again.

The basic premise is that I realized that my email address will eventually get compromised, but at least this way I can compartmentalize the damage.

I'd suggest starting at 50 million to start, once they meet certain milestones, then release 150 million. After that, you can define certain other milestones to release that extra billion or so.

Lack of funds can be a problem. However, a perception of excess or unlimited funds can be just as deadly to a project.

I hate to say I had a box of about a dozen of them that I sent off to a recycling center. They sat in that box for about 7 years before I got fed up with having them gather dust in my garage. I still feel a bit bad about it, but I didn't want to deal with the hassle of selling them in days when ebay was just getting started. Craigslist didn't exist back then as far as I know.

The US Constitution applies anywhere that the US Government is involved. The authority of the government to act is directly derived from the US Constitution. It doesn't matter if it is acting in in Iowa, Japan, or Jupiter, if the US government is doing something, the Constitution applies.

The US government is bound by the Constitution even you were discussing it's authority to perform an action in the next galaxy. As the US Constitution defines the powers granted to the government, any attempt to declare that the Constitution does not apply will also invalidate any authority that the government has as the authority is derived from the Constitution.

Also, don't confuse laws with rights. The laws of the US may or may not apply in certain conditions, but the Constitution ALWAYS applies if it is an action by the US Government.

Guilt is retroactive. Yes you are innocent, but that is until you are proven guilty. It means that you WERE guilty even during the time we presumed you to be innocent.