You can test that the drive works pretty easily, put it in a PC, copy a bunch of files to it (perhaps enough to fill it up), then run MD5 on those files vs the originals. That would be the "pedantic" way to test it, for "turbo-pedantic" (a bit like running memtest for 72 hours) you can test this way for your entire MP3 collection, then test again for your entire Quantum Leap upscaled 720p dvdrips collection.
For more practical testing, most drive manufacturers offer "validation" software tools for RMA purposes to test low-level operations and performance, and most of them are generic to the extent that you can actually test any make of drive the same way. It's free and it works, what more could you ask for?
Patent that and sell it NOW and make a lot of money off the gullible idiots. Homeopathy makes my eyes roll, but it's not my place to tell a moron they can't Darwin themselves while spending ridiculous amounts of cash on purified water.
Let's be honest, placebos are effective (to a certain extent) so long as they are believed in. In that regard, what is the exact harm in a "medicine" that works as long as you believe in it, and a belief system around it sufficient to maintain that reality? Are Big Pharma and blockbuster prescriptions really that appealing that they should be our only choice? Consider that wine tastes better the more you spend on it, and depression is almost entirely curable with a placebo (to the extent that medication will work at all). Are you saying that there is something wrong with using this sort of science to our benefit? Belief is a hell of a drug.
No no. I thought Homeopathy dilution (delusion) makes it more potent. So that means we are all going to die of radiation poisoning if we even breathe the ocean air.
But just think, after that you will be completely immune to radiation poisoning... Ah, the miracles of ancient medicine!
It is interesting to see that even with all of current scaremongering about nuclear power, the oil spills still were orders of magnitude MORE dangerous to oceanic wildlife than the Fukushima radioactive leak. This should be something to think about..
They aren't done cleaning up (and disposing of) all the square miles of land that was contaminated though, let alone the facility itself as it is pretty unusable as a power plant so the whole thing needs to be chopped up and processed as hazardous waste. Unless, of course, you think we are safe to just pitch it in the ocean since "its not as bad as an oil spill..."
Nice trick. However, let me point out that in 1990 Geoworks GEOS was capable of running a preemptive multitasking GUI looking much like QT but with better automatic widget layout, on an 8 MHz 8088. I will just heave a great sigh in the name of the lost art of tight coding. No, Linux is not tightly coded. I should know. The best you can say about it is, the other guys are worse.
"better automatic widget layout" - this made my day. I remember using GEOS as a boy, on a C64. It was a lot of fun going from text menus to an actual mouse-relevant UI, but sophisticated it was NOT. Automatic widget layout? There were 8 icons per window and if you didn't like where they were you could (a)bort, (r)etry, (i)gnore.
What do health care costs, housing costs (pre-bubble bursting), and college tuition costs all have in common?
1) They all have risen much faster than inflation. 2) They are all subsidized by government.
If you hide the cost of a good from people via the tax code and you subsidize the good, you will get no mechanism to control costs. The tax code hides the cost of insurance since employees don't see or feel the employer's payment.
Oddly enough Lasik surgeries haven't gone up in price. It isn't covered by insurance.
Granted, there's a lot more nuance and information to bear on this topic. But it is a dynamic that can't be ignored. If you hide the price from someone, costs will go up. Unless you want to ration. Which when the HMOs tried to do it in the 1990s was about as popular as a skunk crashing a party.
People get that health insurance is expensive (especially the 40 million or so Americans with little/no access to government or employer subsidized purchasing options.) Furthermore, your insurance company or government bureaucracy of choice could issue reimbursements in stacks of 1 dollar bills and require all expenses to be submitted with hand-written tabulations and guess what, even if every customer was excruciatingly aware of the exact cost of their care, under the current model there isn't a single fucking thing they can do to reduce it short of "choosing" not to get sick and even then it only impacts out of pocket expense totals. The vast majority of those who are eligible for some sort of sponsored care get one meaningful choice: in or out. Until there are options that go beyond things like "would you like your deductible to be high or excruciatingly high?" and actually allow patients to get themselves into more appropriate risk pools and care/payment plans that better reflect their needs, nothing will change.
I've yet to see empirical numbers myself, but assuming that your numbers are correct; why is it that those that can afford the very best fly across the world to get their care in the U.S.
Yes, there are many cases of U.S. citizens going elsewhere for care, but these are for treatments that are not available or banned in the U.S. But, when Sheik XYZ needs quadruple bypass surgery and can get it anywhere, he typically goes to the U.S. Not the U.K. not Germany, not Canada, not Cuba, not Switzerland, the U.S. Why?
Because those nations determine care primarily based on need and not based on size of bank account (and lavish comfort to the patient), whereas the US basically only cares about the latter? You are basically trying to argue that the US has the "best health care that only money can buy" and not many will disagree with you. The problem is, very few people have the money required to buy it, regardless of their particular need.
The question is, are you as rich and powerful as an oil Sheik, an international banking mogul or a head of State? No? Well then, good luck getting "the very best care, worth flying across the world to get" in the USA. You (like 99.9% of the first world population) are statistically better off going elsewhere.
I've never understood why this gets thrown around as a measure of the quality of health care received, when there are tons of other factors that have much more of an affect on this (exercise, smoking, eating right, etc.).
Because it's laughable to think that the very modest overall difference in exercise, smoking, eating habits, etc. of first world nations would result in the need for one to spend *twice as much* on "open market" care, without at least some workable risk pool that would offer certain parts of the population access to that reduced cost product if they demonstrate they live a lifestyle that costs, again, HALF AS MUCH to keep healthy (as other first world nations have demonstrated is possible). Instead, EVERYONE is forced to pay pretty much the national maximum (since many don't pay in at all) and if you do manage to get flagged as part of a high risk group (i.e. no-exercise, smoker, bad diet, etc.) you pay significantly MORE for your insurance.
You really can't see something inherently fucked up with this?
What do you expect when the parties that can best improve security (banks, VISA, Mastercard) have made sure that merchants (who can do very little about security) carry most of the liability from security failures?
Banks, VISA, and Mastercard make tons of money from transaction fees, so they want to make transactions as easy as possible. They don't have to pay much for security breaches, so they are willing to sacrifice security for more transactions and more fees.
If a buyer goes into a store with a stolen card, there is practically nothing a merchant can do to detect the fraud and stop the buyer from walking out the door with merchandise. Who pays for the fraud? The merchant.
Until banks are on the hook for this fraud, nothing will change.
Never mind that the merchant can utter the words "can I see your ID?" and then, in one brilliant move, authenticate AND authorize the user of said card... But how many do that?
On the other hand, pretty much any card can be used in debit/PIN mode but it affects how the transaction is processed and how much it will cost the merchant (why, exactly?) so thanks to the banks, there is a "Stigma" against using debit mode (and when its used against credit cards it often appears as a cash advance) and the merchants will try to steer you away from it on small purchases and steer you toward it on large purchases. Until all that is sorted out, no one wins.
There have been enough multi-day outages of BIS for most everyone to take notice. If you haven't, consider yourself lucky that you weren't in some critical situation and found your smartphone barely capable of making a simple phone call.
i wouldn't count RIM's system as a "cloud computing solution" from everything i've ever read on the many many many outages they have had, their systems do not scale well at all.
i wouldn't count RIM's system as a "cloud computing solution" from everything i've ever read on the many many many outages they have had, their systems do not scale well at all.
Who said they weren't full of thunderstorms? Yes RIM was in the cloud before it was cool, the outages were a regular and inevitable byproduct of a system that was only mildly redundant (basically just like all cloud solutions now) and since they will probably be gone to dust before the new cloud wave hits full speed, expect the same lessons to be re-learned all over again.
Having only recently gotten into the smartphone game (July 2011), I didn't really know anything about the industry back when RIM/Blackberry was king.
But now, having read some about it... wow, what a waste. They basically had huge, fat, margins, essentially no competition in the smartphone arena, for almost five years - and freaking sat on it and did almost nothing. Meanwhile Apple and Google were in the lab inventing the future. Unbelievable.
Like most Canadians the story concerns me because what does it say about the country?
Go back and read about the NTP settlement. RIM was brutalized in a way that's hard to compare. And those fat margins? Every penny went to paying the patent troll under the bridge so they could take their phones to market.
RIM's failure is attributable, in no small part, to flat-out engineering laziness.
You try taking a $612M hit directly to your bottom line and see how much free time you have left to be "industrious". RIMs mistake was in rolling over to NTP and expecting that they wouldn't be the only one that NTP brutally dominated in court (despite the technology on other platforms being pretty much identical). NTP had $615 million in the bank, why would they bother with any more time in court instead of just settle for some low-ball licensing deals? After that, competitors had such a huge advantage on RIM even just from a R&D spending standpoint that the death of RIM was inevitable.
either you innovate or you are out of business really soon
Or you innovate really well and run headlong into a ridiculous patent infringement lawsuit that soaks you for 2-3 years worth of your R&D budget, and then you have no choice but to stop innovating... The NTP shake-down of RIM pretty much directly marked the beginning of the end for them. It's a cautionary tale, really.
You would be better off buying lottery tickets for your kids with the money that you're spending. At least there is a chance it could be used for something.
Consider that the cost of harvesting cord blood is about $1,500 and storing it per year is about $100. For 18 years you spend $3,300 or 1,100 powerball tickets.
Odds of winning the powerball are 1,100 to 195,249,054 (0.0000056%)
Odds of being afflicted with type 1 diabetes and being a part of a case study: 8 in 100,000 (0.00008%)
So actually, you have better odds of actually needing and using your cord blood. Although, as many have suggested, donating is a noble option too.
You forgot to roll in there the odds of successful cord blood treatment of your type 1 diabetes...
If we knew we could have donated at no cost and someone could have used it, my wife and I most likely would have done so. To me the whole thing seemed sort of like a big rip off, or something I'd do if I had excess money laying around. They like to gouge you for a lot of stuff involving your kids, its easy to whip people up into a panic about doing EVERYTHING YOU POSSIBLY CAN TO PREVENT EVERYTHING.
Either way it feels a shame that it could have been used to help someone instead of it ending up as a puddle on the floor. I guess part of the reason I didn't save it is that there wasn't an urge to collect it if we weren't going to ourselves. If it was that precious hospitals would most likely not let it go to waste.
Lord why did my modpoints expire yesterday... This a thousand times! Unless you have a family history of diseases that could *possibly* have a cord-blood style treatment then you are better off just putting all that money into getting more life insurance, odds are better that you and/or your wife will die before your kid hits 18 and I bet they would much rather have a safety cushion to get through college than some frozen blob of bloody tissue that is both unlikely to be needed and if needed unlikely to work.
for mummification and/or embalming, is to make sure the person is actually, really, dead. This isn't mothballing. It's making sure Discovery doesn't fly again.
-- BMO
Because of what, NASA is worried that there will be an imminent global disaster whose aversion can only be achieved by dusting off retired old spaceships and sending them off on a last-ditch mission to save humanity, and wants to be sure their precious shuttles aren't sacrificed in such a way? I think you're right, NASA clearly isn't watching the right sci-fi movies.
Damn that river straight to hell! Seriously, your point about hydro dams is kind of worthless since hydro projects have obviously been executed with great success and minimal effective backlash, all across the US. Salmon is important (and tasty) but your assertion that endangered salmon is stopping big hydro is baseless (there are many ways for hydro projects to be nature-neutral). The big thing stopping more hydro projects is the fact that river-adjacent land in the US is pretty much already occupied by high-dollar assets that aren't worth scrapping or moving, like oh a town or city or two.
So the two big claims are one of uncovering a bribery ring (hard to say that it is nefarious to report a crime) and one of passing along secrets about wind power despite the company in question filing a patent for said technology some two years before they were "gifted" this information?
Sounds *just like* the endless parade of reports about china-based attackers specifically breaking in to US and international firms in search of IP./sarcasm
The high profile journals weed out sensationalist claims more often than not (part of being high-profile is having a finely tuned bullshit meter). The number of retractions are also a sign of strength, as the mechanisms forcing people to correct their errors are getting better. This isn't to claim that the process doesn't have room for improvement, but the cited examples are rubbish.
In my head the summary read "Modern science is dysfuctional, claims several modern scientists. See attached scientific statistics for details."
Well sadly enough the same people that bemoan use of fossil fuels the loudest are also often the biggest obstacle to alternatives. No dams, think of the fish! No solar arrays, think of the horned toads and gila monsters you will displace! No wind farms, chopped birds are bad! No nuclear, radiation is the devil's work! For every proposal they either have a list of reasons why it can't happen or a list of restrictions that make it damn near impossible. They always seem to want a perfect solution. News flash! There is none. If you want to get off fossil fuels, you need to learn to compromise. I don't think that word exists in America anymore. "We the people" is more like "Me the people" these days...
Wow, straw man much? The case to be made against those projects is not "think of the fish" or "radiation is the devils work", it's "recognize the externality". It just so happens that it's a little harder to ignore a million missing salmon or some nuclear fallout than it is to ignore the science behind climate change.
External costs, go read an economics textbook and stop making every argument about how you wish *other people* would be open to compromise. It comes off a tad hypocritical.
You mean that out of the 7 billion people on this planet, there might be one with the same name? And he might be a criminal? GASP.
No, what am I saying? That's crazy talk. Only one person can have that name, so clearly he did all those terrible things.
Secretary? Go fire that guy in cubicle 3. Google said he's a criminal.
Just because his name is Brutal Killingspree doesn't mean he should instantly and permanently be associated with heinous crimes on the internet. Come on, talk about unreasonable.
Note: I don't agree with most of Ms. Rand's sentiments, but this is proving increasingly true.
She was wrong on a number of things, but she occasionally knocked one out of the park. This statement by her mirrors current reality closely enough to actually be a little disturbing.
You know what they say... A broken clock is right as long as you can get someone to pay you for it. Or wait, I think I have my Ayn Rand maxims mixed up here. A high priced clock is right as long as someone else saw you pay good money for it? Oh what was it...
For flights up to about 5 hours, most do indeed go without as these flights only offer a drink and your choice of overpriced candy bars. After that, people start to get antsy for some free meal of some sort (more so if they have some form of diabetes which you can be sure makes up a good sized contingent on any flight these days.) Why the airlines don't just offer meals that are intended to be cold (a nice chicken salad, a cold-cut sub sandwich, wrap, etc.) is beyond me.
When I travel, I just buy one of these from the dozen or so places in any airport that vends them and don't worry about what (if anything) is going to be served in flight. The airlines really should just forgo any hot meal kind of options completely and just give food vouchers at the gate for any flight that included a meal, and the passengers can just go get the food they actually want and bring it with them.
Slashdot Mirror
You can test that the drive works pretty easily, put it in a PC, copy a bunch of files to it (perhaps enough to fill it up), then run MD5 on those files vs the originals. That would be the "pedantic" way to test it, for "turbo-pedantic" (a bit like running memtest for 72 hours) you can test this way for your entire MP3 collection, then test again for your entire Quantum Leap upscaled 720p dvdrips collection.
For more practical testing, most drive manufacturers offer "validation" software tools for RMA purposes to test low-level operations and performance, and most of them are generic to the extent that you can actually test any make of drive the same way. It's free and it works, what more could you ask for?
Patent that and sell it NOW and make a lot of money off the gullible idiots. Homeopathy makes my eyes roll, but it's not my place to tell a moron they can't Darwin themselves while spending ridiculous amounts of cash on purified water.
Let's be honest, placebos are effective (to a certain extent) so long as they are believed in. In that regard, what is the exact harm in a "medicine" that works as long as you believe in it, and a belief system around it sufficient to maintain that reality? Are Big Pharma and blockbuster prescriptions really that appealing that they should be our only choice? Consider that wine tastes better the more you spend on it, and depression is almost entirely curable with a placebo (to the extent that medication will work at all). Are you saying that there is something wrong with using this sort of science to our benefit? Belief is a hell of a drug.
No no. I thought Homeopathy dilution (delusion) makes it more potent. So that means we are all going to die of radiation poisoning if we even breathe the ocean air.
But just think, after that you will be completely immune to radiation poisoning... Ah, the miracles of ancient medicine!
It is interesting to see that even with all of current scaremongering about nuclear power, the oil spills still were orders of magnitude MORE dangerous to oceanic wildlife than the Fukushima radioactive leak. This should be something to think about..
They aren't done cleaning up (and disposing of) all the square miles of land that was contaminated though, let alone the facility itself as it is pretty unusable as a power plant so the whole thing needs to be chopped up and processed as hazardous waste. Unless, of course, you think we are safe to just pitch it in the ocean since "its not as bad as an oil spill..."
Nice trick. However, let me point out that in 1990 Geoworks GEOS was capable of running a preemptive multitasking GUI looking much like QT but with better automatic widget layout, on an 8 MHz 8088. I will just heave a great sigh in the name of the lost art of tight coding. No, Linux is not tightly coded. I should know. The best you can say about it is, the other guys are worse.
"better automatic widget layout" - this made my day. I remember using GEOS as a boy, on a C64. It was a lot of fun going from text menus to an actual mouse-relevant UI, but sophisticated it was NOT. Automatic widget layout? There were 8 icons per window and if you didn't like where they were you could (a)bort, (r)etry, (i)gnore.
What do health care costs, housing costs (pre-bubble bursting), and college tuition costs all have in common?
1) They all have risen much faster than inflation.
2) They are all subsidized by government.
If you hide the cost of a good from people via the tax code and you subsidize the good, you will get no mechanism to control costs. The tax code hides the cost of insurance since employees don't see or feel the employer's payment.
Oddly enough Lasik surgeries haven't gone up in price. It isn't covered by insurance.
Granted, there's a lot more nuance and information to bear on this topic. But it is a dynamic that can't be ignored. If you hide the price from someone, costs will go up. Unless you want to ration. Which when the HMOs tried to do it in the 1990s was about as popular as a skunk crashing a party.
People get that health insurance is expensive (especially the 40 million or so Americans with little/no access to government or employer subsidized purchasing options.) Furthermore, your insurance company or government bureaucracy of choice could issue reimbursements in stacks of 1 dollar bills and require all expenses to be submitted with hand-written tabulations and guess what, even if every customer was excruciatingly aware of the exact cost of their care, under the current model there isn't a single fucking thing they can do to reduce it short of "choosing" not to get sick and even then it only impacts out of pocket expense totals. The vast majority of those who are eligible for some sort of sponsored care get one meaningful choice: in or out. Until there are options that go beyond things like "would you like your deductible to be high or excruciatingly high?" and actually allow patients to get themselves into more appropriate risk pools and care/payment plans that better reflect their needs, nothing will change.
I've yet to see empirical numbers myself, but assuming that your numbers are correct; why is it that those that can afford the very best fly across the world to get their care in the U.S.
Yes, there are many cases of U.S. citizens going elsewhere for care, but these are for treatments that are not available or banned in the U.S. But, when Sheik XYZ needs quadruple bypass surgery and can get it anywhere, he typically goes to the U.S. Not the U.K. not Germany, not Canada, not Cuba, not Switzerland, the U.S. Why?
Because those nations determine care primarily based on need and not based on size of bank account (and lavish comfort to the patient), whereas the US basically only cares about the latter? You are basically trying to argue that the US has the "best health care that only money can buy" and not many will disagree with you. The problem is, very few people have the money required to buy it, regardless of their particular need.
The question is, are you as rich and powerful as an oil Sheik, an international banking mogul or a head of State? No? Well then, good luck getting "the very best care, worth flying across the world to get" in the USA. You (like 99.9% of the first world population) are statistically better off going elsewhere.
...as measured by things like life expectancy...
I've never understood why this gets thrown around as a measure of the quality of health care received, when there are tons of other factors that have much more of an affect on this (exercise, smoking, eating right, etc.).
Because it's laughable to think that the very modest overall difference in exercise, smoking, eating habits, etc. of first world nations would result in the need for one to spend *twice as much* on "open market" care, without at least some workable risk pool that would offer certain parts of the population access to that reduced cost product if they demonstrate they live a lifestyle that costs, again, HALF AS MUCH to keep healthy (as other first world nations have demonstrated is possible). Instead, EVERYONE is forced to pay pretty much the national maximum (since many don't pay in at all) and if you do manage to get flagged as part of a high risk group (i.e. no-exercise, smoker, bad diet, etc.) you pay significantly MORE for your insurance.
You really can't see something inherently fucked up with this?
What do you expect when the parties that can best improve security (banks, VISA, Mastercard) have made sure that merchants (who can do very little about security) carry most of the liability from security failures?
Banks, VISA, and Mastercard make tons of money from transaction fees, so they want to make transactions as easy as possible. They don't have to pay much for security breaches, so they are willing to sacrifice security for more transactions and more fees.
If a buyer goes into a store with a stolen card, there is practically nothing a merchant can do to detect the fraud and stop the buyer from walking out the door with merchandise. Who pays for the fraud? The merchant.
Until banks are on the hook for this fraud, nothing will change.
Never mind that the merchant can utter the words "can I see your ID?" and then, in one brilliant move, authenticate AND authorize the user of said card... But how many do that?
On the other hand, pretty much any card can be used in debit/PIN mode but it affects how the transaction is processed and how much it will cost the merchant (why, exactly?) so thanks to the banks, there is a "Stigma" against using debit mode (and when its used against credit cards it often appears as a cash advance) and the merchants will try to steer you away from it on small purchases and steer you toward it on large purchases. Until all that is sorted out, no one wins.
There have been enough multi-day outages of BIS for most everyone to take notice. If you haven't, consider yourself lucky that you weren't in some critical situation and found your smartphone barely capable of making a simple phone call.
It had nothing to do with idiots like these: http://serverfault.com/questions/293217/our-security-auditor-is-an-idiot-how-do-i-give-him-the-information-he-wants
Good read... From the story:
PCI SSC have responded and are investigating him and the company. Our software has now moved on[...]
Phew!
[...]to PayPal so we know it's safe,
ah FUCK
i wouldn't count RIM's system as a "cloud computing solution" from everything i've ever read on the many many many outages they have had, their systems do not scale well at all.
i wouldn't count RIM's system as a "cloud computing solution" from everything i've ever read on the many many many outages they have had, their systems do not scale well at all.
Who said they weren't full of thunderstorms? Yes RIM was in the cloud before it was cool, the outages were a regular and inevitable byproduct of a system that was only mildly redundant (basically just like all cloud solutions now) and since they will probably be gone to dust before the new cloud wave hits full speed, expect the same lessons to be re-learned all over again.
Having only recently gotten into the smartphone game (July 2011), I didn't really know anything about the industry back when RIM/Blackberry was king.
But now, having read some about it... wow, what a waste. They basically had huge, fat, margins, essentially no competition in the smartphone arena, for almost five years - and freaking sat on it and did almost nothing. Meanwhile Apple and Google were in the lab inventing the future. Unbelievable.
Like most Canadians the story concerns me because what does it say about the country?
Go back and read about the NTP settlement. RIM was brutalized in a way that's hard to compare. And those fat margins? Every penny went to paying the patent troll under the bridge so they could take their phones to market.
RIM's failure is attributable, in no small part, to flat-out engineering laziness.
You try taking a $612M hit directly to your bottom line and see how much free time you have left to be "industrious". RIMs mistake was in rolling over to NTP and expecting that they wouldn't be the only one that NTP brutally dominated in court (despite the technology on other platforms being pretty much identical). NTP had $615 million in the bank, why would they bother with any more time in court instead of just settle for some low-ball licensing deals? After that, competitors had such a huge advantage on RIM even just from a R&D spending standpoint that the death of RIM was inevitable.
either you innovate or you are out of business really soon
Or you innovate really well and run headlong into a ridiculous patent infringement lawsuit that soaks you for 2-3 years worth of your R&D budget, and then you have no choice but to stop innovating... The NTP shake-down of RIM pretty much directly marked the beginning of the end for them. It's a cautionary tale, really.
You would be better off buying lottery tickets for your kids with the money that you're spending. At least there is a chance it could be used for something.
Consider that the cost of harvesting cord blood is about $1,500 and storing it per year is about $100. For 18 years you spend $3,300 or 1,100 powerball tickets.
Odds of winning the powerball are 1,100 to 195,249,054 (0.0000056%)
Odds of being afflicted with type 1 diabetes and being a part of a case study: 8 in 100,000 (0.00008%)
So actually, you have better odds of actually needing and using your cord blood. Although, as many have suggested, donating is a noble option too.
You forgot to roll in there the odds of successful cord blood treatment of your type 1 diabetes...
If we knew we could have donated at no cost and someone could have used it, my wife and I most likely would have done so. To me the whole thing seemed sort of like a big rip off, or something I'd do if I had excess money laying around. They like to gouge you for a lot of stuff involving your kids, its easy to whip people up into a panic about doing EVERYTHING YOU POSSIBLY CAN TO PREVENT EVERYTHING.
Either way it feels a shame that it could have been used to help someone instead of it ending up as a puddle on the floor. I guess part of the reason I didn't save it is that there wasn't an urge to collect it if we weren't going to ourselves. If it was that precious hospitals would most likely not let it go to waste.
Lord why did my modpoints expire yesterday... This a thousand times! Unless you have a family history of diseases that could *possibly* have a cord-blood style treatment then you are better off just putting all that money into getting more life insurance, odds are better that you and/or your wife will die before your kid hits 18 and I bet they would much rather have a safety cushion to get through college than some frozen blob of bloody tissue that is both unlikely to be needed and if needed unlikely to work.
for mummification and/or embalming, is to make sure the person is actually, really, dead. This isn't mothballing. It's making sure Discovery doesn't fly again.
--
BMO
Because of what, NASA is worried that there will be an imminent global disaster whose aversion can only be achieved by dusting off retired old spaceships and sending them off on a last-ditch mission to save humanity, and wants to be sure their precious shuttles aren't sacrificed in such a way? I think you're right, NASA clearly isn't watching the right sci-fi movies.
Damn that river straight to hell! Seriously, your point about hydro dams is kind of worthless since hydro projects have obviously been executed with great success and minimal effective backlash, all across the US. Salmon is important (and tasty) but your assertion that endangered salmon is stopping big hydro is baseless (there are many ways for hydro projects to be nature-neutral). The big thing stopping more hydro projects is the fact that river-adjacent land in the US is pretty much already occupied by high-dollar assets that aren't worth scrapping or moving, like oh a town or city or two.
Yeah, it is not as though the US uses its own signals intelligence agency to spy on foreign businesses and pass R&D secrets to domestic firms...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Controversy
So the two big claims are one of uncovering a bribery ring (hard to say that it is nefarious to report a crime) and one of passing along secrets about wind power despite the company in question filing a patent for said technology some two years before they were "gifted" this information?
Sounds *just like* the endless parade of reports about china-based attackers specifically breaking in to US and international firms in search of IP. /sarcasm
The high profile journals weed out sensationalist claims more often than not (part of being high-profile is having a finely tuned bullshit meter). The number of retractions are also a sign of strength, as the mechanisms forcing people to correct their errors are getting better. This isn't to claim that the process doesn't have room for improvement, but the cited examples are rubbish.
In my head the summary read "Modern science is dysfuctional, claims several modern scientists. See attached scientific statistics for details."
Well sadly enough the same people that bemoan use of fossil fuels the loudest are also often the biggest obstacle to alternatives. No dams, think of the fish! No solar arrays, think of the horned toads and gila monsters you will displace! No wind farms, chopped birds are bad! No nuclear, radiation is the devil's work! For every proposal they either have a list of reasons why it can't happen or a list of restrictions that make it damn near impossible. They always seem to want a perfect solution. News flash! There is none. If you want to get off fossil fuels, you need to learn to compromise. I don't think that word exists in America anymore. "We the people" is more like "Me the people" these days...
Wow, straw man much? The case to be made against those projects is not "think of the fish" or "radiation is the devils work", it's "recognize the externality". It just so happens that it's a little harder to ignore a million missing salmon or some nuclear fallout than it is to ignore the science behind climate change.
External costs, go read an economics textbook and stop making every argument about how you wish *other people* would be open to compromise. It comes off a tad hypocritical.
You mean that out of the 7 billion people on this planet, there might be one with the same name? And he might be a criminal? GASP.
No, what am I saying? That's crazy talk. Only one person can have that name, so clearly he did all those terrible things.
Secretary? Go fire that guy in cubicle 3. Google said he's a criminal.
Just because his name is Brutal Killingspree doesn't mean he should instantly and permanently be associated with heinous crimes on the internet. Come on, talk about unreasonable.
Note: I don't agree with most of Ms. Rand's sentiments, but this is proving increasingly true.
She was wrong on a number of things, but she occasionally knocked one out of the park. This statement by her mirrors current reality closely enough to actually be a little disturbing.
You know what they say... A broken clock is right as long as you can get someone to pay you for it. Or wait, I think I have my Ayn Rand maxims mixed up here. A high priced clock is right as long as someone else saw you pay good money for it? Oh what was it...
For flights up to about 5 hours, most do indeed go without as these flights only offer a drink and your choice of overpriced candy bars. After that, people start to get antsy for some free meal of some sort (more so if they have some form of diabetes which you can be sure makes up a good sized contingent on any flight these days.) Why the airlines don't just offer meals that are intended to be cold (a nice chicken salad, a cold-cut sub sandwich, wrap, etc.) is beyond me.
When I travel, I just buy one of these from the dozen or so places in any airport that vends them and don't worry about what (if anything) is going to be served in flight. The airlines really should just forgo any hot meal kind of options completely and just give food vouchers at the gate for any flight that included a meal, and the passengers can just go get the food they actually want and bring it with them.