How would spending the time to look through the source code themselves have been more of a waste than spending a year fighting with a recalcitrant vendor?

The best solution is to have access to the source code AND a dev team that is actively developing it that you can submit bugs to. If they are willing to spend the time to fix it, then that's great. If they aren't, then at least you have recourse. Also, you have greater ability to prove it IS their fault and that they do need to fix it themselves.

It's not like having access to the code is mutually exclusive with having support.

Make up your own mind and stop looking for / trolling the groupthink.

Similar, but almost certainly not the same diet their parents had growing up. Heights is up across the Western world across population due to increases in available calories. The Dustbowl and the Great Depression were the last times in America that large swathes of the population suffered famine. Despite all the unhealthy effects of too many calories in the American diet, we generally have far more access to protein and to vitamins & minerals than our ancestors from about a century ago and than people in most of China even today.

Ironically though, too much nutrition (i.e. obesity) in childhood can retard the adolescent growth spurt. This is part of why America is no longer the tallest nation.

Haha. Mine is entangled with yours. Gives a whole new meaning to spooky action at a distance.

Same here. Most of my files are on the machines used to access them. However, very large files, like video is stored on my roommate's SAN. He has music that he can stream via his phone to his car. Is that local or not?

Plasmid transfer.

It may be worse than that. I found this last night while doing some reading related to the triclosan article but hesitated to bring it up, but it seems that chlorination itself may provide selection pressure that favors bacteria resistant to certain beta-lactam antibiotics..

We don't actually know the exact mechanism by which chlorine kills or damages bacteria, but we do know that increased permeability of the cell membrane enhances its lethality (but is not mechanism of lethality in and of itself). Beta-lactam drugs work by monkeywrenching the process of building the peptidoglycan layer of bacterial cell walls, so it may be that some forms of resistance to cell wall wrecking drugs also help resist chlorination, which would make chlorination in turn select for that trait.

At this point, I'm in pure speculation territory, though. I am not a molecular biologist.

It's also the category which includes carbapenems like Imipenem and Meropenem which are last resort drugs. In particular, the production of metallo-beta-lactamases like NDM-1 is a key adaptation to resist them, and the article highlights the risk specifically to neutralizing carbapenems as the main cause of concern.

You might want to consider that there might be a significant risk of harm too.

Slight negative effect on lung cancer survival for high doses of Vitamin A.
Increase risk of all-cause mortality for high doses of Vitamin E.
Significant increase in mortality from gastrointestinal cancers from high doses of antioxidants, A & E in particular.

Better yet, maybe land can be set aside or used for other things than corn again.

Same here, and the last time I can recall a mechanical ball mouse failing was in the early 90s. I only replace mice because I've replaced the computer it was attached to. Sometimes not even then.

All antibiotics poison bacteria in some way, and several are chlorinated hydrocarbons, e.g. vancomycin, clindamycin, clofazimine, chloramphenicol, thiamphenicol, etc. Antibiotics are widely varied category of chemicals, and while triclosan isn't directly related to any families I'm aware of, that doesn't mean that resistance to it would be useless against antibiotics that operate on the same system.

A mutation capable of resisting the effects of one class of chemicals can often be useful for resisting very different chemicals that have the same effect. Triclosan works at higher, lethal concentrations by disrupting bacterial cell membranes. At lower concentrations it also suppresses fatty acid formation necessary for cell membrane creation by binding up two enzymes necessary for the process: ENR and NAD+. (This prevents reproduction but doesn't kill.)

Isoniazid is one of our first-line treatments for tuberculosis. Interestingly, it also works by binding to NADH and then binding to ENR and blocking fatty acid synthesis. Studies have shown that some strains of isoniazid-resistant mycobacteria are also pretty resistant to triclosan as a result. Others aren't, because they developed mutations that affected other parts of the process of the drug's interaction. These are unrelated compounds, but a mutation that affects an enzyme they both act on can promote resistance to both.

There is also evidence that evolution of triclosan resistance can increase resistance to ciprofloxacin. In that case, the mutation was to increase the expression of certain efflux pumps, used to pump toxic chemicals out of the cell. Turns out in that case that the same pump was used as part of the processes to eliminate both toxins.

So, in summary, while there isn't any evidence that triclosan is responsible for anywhere near the damage that usage in livestock has done, it's probably not a good idea to keep using a chemical that has risks in a situation where it has little benefit because it can aid in the development of resistance for some antibiotics.

You may have heard of locusts before. All a locust is is a grasshopper in its migratory phase. Many species of grasshopper can fly quite well.

Several problems with this.

First, the NSA has swept up plenty of information about US citizens, e.g. in requesting phone records in bulk, and we only have their word that they're only interested in foreigners. Not that that legally justifies sweeping up people you're not allowed to look at without a warrant.

Second, James Sensenbrenner, the Republican main sponsor of the PATRIOT Act, has said that the NSA is far overreaching its authorization under the Act. It's very possible that the agency's interpretation of the Act is far out of bounds with its congressional intent (or possibly even its language).

Third, even if they did not go beyond the bounds of the law, the question of whether the law itself is constitutional isn't a settled one. Many of the provisions have been untested due to difficulty in claiming standing due to government secrecy about what they do with the information they've collected.

Fourth, the question of legality isn't the only one. There's also the question of morality, of hypocrisy, and of the dangers inherent to information asymmetry between the government and the people.

Fifth, absolving the actions of an agency (or any individual) who uses a lack of clear guidelines as an excuse to go as far into bad behavior as they think they can get away with is a terrible idea. It's the same sort of mentality that says, "Well, it wasn't illegal back then to rape your wife, so how could it have been wrong?" You wouldn't raise kids that way, and you shouldn't expect your government to behave responsibly if they know they can get away with anything as long as it hasn't been written down that they shouldn't.

The title is "California Man Arrested for Running 'Revenge Porn' Website." What is the meaningful semantic distinction that makes the use of "for it" improper here? He was arrested for activities core to the running of the site: privacy violations (the images hosted on the site) and blackmail (a major revenue source for the site). Just because he wasn't arrested for using the site doesn't mean that we wasn't arrested for running the site.

If he's going to bargain, he should probably offer something the police doesn't already have.

Plus, unless those people are mostly in California, it's far better to go with the big fish you already have than a widely spread trove of hard to reach minnows.