What's weird is that Intel was in the ARM business for a while, before selling XScale to Marvell in 2006, just as it was taking off. Maybe the prices were getting too competitive.

That's a good idea, because the least accountable branch of government is surely on your side! /s

The judicial branch and the supreme court serve much the same purpose as the Tsar in old Russia. No matter how bad it gets, it's not the Tsar's fault. It's the noblemen's fault. The Tsar just has bad advisers. If only we could get past them and talk to him and make him understand, it'd all be OK.

Xubuntu at home (Windows-free), XP at work :c

MySQL's had a strict mode since 2004 to reject invalid data. They didn't make it default until late 2012 though in 5.6.8, and I couldn't find what the MariaDB default is (short of downloading the source and looking). Even then, they only it in the default config file, so manual or distro-specific configs that omit the setting will fall back to the old truncation mode.

Frankly, you're not impressing anyone with your tough-nose naturalism. Mosquito bites me because that's it's nature. I murder mosquito with prejudice as often as I can because that's my nature.

Not an entomologist, but it seems you have some awfully mammalian assumptions here.

publishers pay the people who fronted money for the study

If only they did.

Funds paid to scientific publishers pay for editing, not for the original studies. Moreover, peer review -- the most important part of the process -- is almost universally done for free by other scientists in the field; the publishers are just mediators in that process, adding minimal value.

Someone's got to pay to fund the research.

...but that someone isn't generally the publishers running the paywalls, so how is that relevant?

The problem with early detection is that many diseases are actually benign in their early stages, and, when detected, their detection can actually cause more harm for the patient. For instance, early cancer detection increases the likelihood that the patient will start chemo. Some cancers wind up being handled by the body, but *all* chemo treatments harm patients. So, early detection sometimes leads to more harm than benefit (plus an unfortunate issue with "success" rates - the cancer treatments get to include in their "success" count cancers that the body would have cleaned up anyway).

I may be wrong on this, but in the US, HIPAA would rule the day on such a case, no? That would mean that 200k Pounds Sterling would be a wee drop in the bucket compared to the fine such an organization would face here should it face a data leak of that magnitude.

You're making substantial assumptions about what kind of teeth HIPAA has. When I worked at a medical software company -- wherein I was directly responsible for systems handling patient data, went through HIPAA training, and worked directly with our HIPAA compliance officer to determine technical measures -- it was damned near toothless; what we spent hiring said officer and taking said measures was much more than we would have been fined for a single breach. (We wouldn't have been able to sell the system or satisfy investors unless we could pass an audit, so it was the right business decision to make, but much of what our compliance officer told us was how much work we didn't have to do; the actual compliance requirements often fell far short of what I considered best practices).

"Or are those contracts written so horribly that the company gets paid for a nonfunctional product?"

The problem is that a lot of these types of contracts are written with a clause such that launching them publicly is an implicit acceptance of the project as a finished product. So, since they at least tried to launch it, that means that the project is "finished", and everything else is billed hourly on top of it.

It has been over a decade since I last worked with Oracle, so things may have changed. But when I worked on an Oracle project, it cost a huge amount of money, took way too long, didn't work well, and required double the number of staff to manage the application. After Oracle left, a second company came along behind who specializes in fixing stuff that Oracle broke. This company, I don't remember its name, literally does its business as cleaning up Oracle's trash. They didn't even promise good results, only "I know how much pain you are in, we'll make it not hurt quite so much." Interestingly, this particular project wound up as a "success story" on Oracle's website.

Must be nice to be able to fail at a project such that they owed you $69 million, but you don't actually have to make it work.

Perhaps states should make a rule stating that large projects must be broken up into deliverables of $1 million increments.

which viewpoint prevailed (if any)?

Nobody won -- the developer is holding the property, which remains zoned industrial, until market conditions (financing availability) and political considerations give them more leeway in its use.

I understand the plain meaning of the words. I objected to their subtext. This, too, should be fairly straightforward English language comprehension.