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Comment No you won't (at least not for childhood vaccines) (Score 1) 737

Some of the happy ingredients you'll find in common vaccines are formaldehyde (poison) and thimerosal (poison) which breaks down into ethylmercury (poison) and also raw mercury (poison).

No you won't ...

Since 2001, with the exception of some influenza (flu) vaccines, thimerosal is not used as a preservative in routinely recommended childhood vaccines.

Mercury and Vaccines (Thimerosal)

Comment Popular literature is "Prior Art" (Score 1) 75

While it's not an obvious source of comedy, internationally-recognized patent law is actually a rather funny thing. Just ask Danish engineer and inventor Karl Kroyer, whose method of raising sunken vessels from the ocean floor failed to obtain a patent because of a comic strip.

The German patent office denied Kroyer's claim based on the patent law concept of "prior art," which essentially means you can't patent an idea that someone has publicly described in the past, even if that idea wasn't patented.

Geek Trivia

Comment Re:The spam solution... (Score 1) 335

It is like prostitution... Prostitution doesn't exist for the sake of existing. It exists because people will pay for sex. If everyone, everywhere stopped visiting prostitutes then there wouldn't be prostitutes for very much longer. They would have to get other jobs to survive.

Nonsense. Washington would organize a $700 billion bailout.

Comment Re:ID card with no ID (Score 1) 143

It has also been revealed the National Identity Register Number (Nirno) will now not appear on the card or its embedded chip.

This sounds like having a credit card without putting the account number on the card ... I can't see how it would work.

Simple, the cards will include a unique code that can be used to look up the Nirno. But most importantly it will not be the Nirno, so everyone can stop worrying.

The Internet

The Internet Is 'Built Wrong' 452

An anonymous reader writes "API Lead at Twitter, Alex Payne, writes today that the Internet was 'built wrong,' and continues to be accepted as an inferior system, due to a software engineering philosophy called Worse Is Better. 'We now know, for example, that IPv4 won't scale to the projected size of the future Internet. We know too that near-universal deployment of technologies with inadequate security and trust models, like SMTP, can mean millions if not billions lost to electronic crime, defensive measures, and reduced productivity,' says Payne, who calls for a 'content-centric approach to networking.' Payne doesn't mention, however, that his own system, Twitter, was built wrong and is consistently down."
Patents

Submission + - UK patent damages not refunded if patent cancelled

giafly writes: Damages for patent infringement awarded by a UK court must not be paid back even if the patent is later declared invalid by the European Patent Office (EPO), the Court of Appeal has ruled ... "Now a purist may say: it is a nonsense, and moreover an unjust nonsense, for a man to have to pay for doing what, with hindsight, we know to have been lawful," said Lord Justice Jacob. "But I think there are good and pragmatic reasons why the purist approach makes bad business sense. You cannot unravel everything without creating uncertainty." — Out-Law

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