That's not all they put in their database.

Really exceptional that they managed to measure the weight to 11 significant figures -- 12 if that last zero wasn't from rounding. A tribute to CNET's diligence.

The H1N1 virus does not represent "the grave" for me.

Spoken like a true Darwin Award contender. H1N1 has presented a strain that is very virulent and that has been fatal for young healthy individuals. Of course, you can argue the finer points, weigh up the overall risks for yourself by understanding the disease better (recommended) and come to a decision, but should you chose not to vaccinate yourself against it, you should keep in mind the possibility that you may carry the disease on to people you care about whom may or may not be adversely impacted.

The Ocean is not becomming "more acidic". It's still very alkaline. You should say "over the very brief period of time we've been testing the PH of the ocean with any degree of accuracy, it's alkalinity has decreased by a very small amount. We have no way of knowing whether or not this is a natural cycle, or whether or not the measurements we take today, with different instruments from yester-year, account for the difference; in any case, we're pretty sure life in the Ocean will adapt to such a small change with relative ease, although this would mean our research grants to study it being severely curtailed, hence we need lots of alarming headlines in the mainstream media".

"The flu shot is not about preventing you from dying. It's to avoid you from getting sick and infecting other people who may have weaker immune systems and have higher risk of dying if they get sick." ...
Even if I'm immunized, can't I be a carrier?

Correct: you CANNOT be a carrier if you are immune.

Note that the immunization, where we (try to) render you immune, may not be successful (I think it's a 1% failure rate for the flu vaccine or something), so in that sense you might still be a carrier even if you've been immunized, if the immunization failed. But if you are immune, you will not be a carrier.

A fellow poster replied saying something like, you can't be a carrier and not get sick. This is not right; you certainly can be a carrier, and not feel sick. The virus is still in your body and you are still infectious. Now, if this falls within your definition of "sick", then it's true that "you can't be a carrier and not get sick" because, as a carrier, you'd be by (this) definition sick. But you certainly can be a carrier and not have any symptoms. But then you're not immune, and the point is that some 98-99% of people who get vaccinated for flu successfully become immune to the influenza virus (at least, those strains in the vaccine). Takes about 2 weeks to take full effect.

Anyway, this herd immunity effect is certainly beneficial, although I wouldn't say that it's the only reason we ask young healthy "I never get the flu" type people to get the flu shot; there's also the fact that flu can lay you low pretty significantly. You may not die from it, but you might have to take a week off work or something. Wouldn't you rather be playing WOW or reading Slashdot or something?

Your metaphor is a perfect description of the last week for me. I found out the guy had been clicking the "virus scanner expired" warnings away for weeks on his computer, spent half a day correcting all the issues and explained the importance of patching, firewalls, and antivirus. There was much head-nodding and apparent understanding, then today I find out he installed SecurityTool and I have to remove that.

I guess my fish metaphor is more along the lines of teaching a guy to fish, giving him the fish I caught during the lesson, then finding out he stuck the fish up his ass, pierced his nose with the hook, and now wants to know why he wasn't able to catch more fish.

After today, I have to change my answer to "No. They don't like it when I yell."

You're missing something here.

Let's say Scholastic publishes a book. Scholastic's book goes up for sale on Google's new thing.

Scholastic is the publisher, what retailer is involved and why should they be paid anything?

Insightful post, which scared the heck out of me. However, TFA clearly indicates that any browser will do, and you'll be able to read off-line. Unless they're developing a custom plug-in for every browser everywhere that encrypts data on your disk, it's probably just plain old HTML. I suspect you'll be able to simply use file/save to save your book. However, you could be right.

The hard sell here is for Google to convince book publishers that it's OK to sell their books without DRM. It's one of those things where you know what's good for a whole freaking industry, but you can't easily get them to help themselves. Alternatively, book publishers are going to become slaves to a Amazon, with no bargaining power.

My wife self-published a nice book, which actually managed to make a little money. She listed it on Amazon for a while, until she realised that she lost money for every book sold!

Orggre znlor vs lbh hfrq vt-cnl ngva-ynl svefg?

Good point, I was thinking about reviews, but ended up writing about everything. My point is that full disclosure is generally a worthless charade. Even though this is specifically about investments it's the best explanation of the sham of full disclosure I've seen.

In another replay I posted,

so I'd like to know, How would you support yourself indefinitely?

Versions X and Y of a DLL will be flat-out incompatible if that DLL is written in C++ and the author has changed the number of attributes in an interface class ....

Why would any developer do that? Why not create a new class with the added bits, and make the old class use the new one, passing in default values for the additions. That is backwards compatibility.

And the fact that Microsoft is so good at preserving application backward compatibility

Not for 3rd-party application code (which is nothing to do with them), but for the Windows OS code used by applications. And, from what I've heard, a lot of the "difficulties" here have been because Microsoft has lots of undocumented calls (so that MS products can do things that others "can't") which then non-MS applications start to use in other ways. If MS did have a fully-documented OS interface there might be fewer "poor practices". So it's self-inflicted, I fear.