I wish I could live in Keith Lofstrom's responsibility free world where losing the personal data of thousands of people, exposing them to identity theft is A-OK and you just get a slap on the wrist for it. It sounds like a nice place, with rivers of chocolate and lollipop trees. Unfortunately I live in the real world, and so do all of those people whose personal information is now at risk. I'm an IT professional, we're a good 30 years into the IT revolution, we're a good 15 years into the ubiquitous computing that laptops have bought about, and there's no excuse for this kind of shit any more. Leaving a laptop out like this, with sensitive data on it is no different than leaving unsecured paper documents containing classified information, which can be easily photocopied, unsecured. It's really, really, really fucking stupid.
I have to wonder how Keith would feel, if one of his employees lost a company laptop containing proprietary data and that data was used by his competitors to put his company out of business. Would he say "Well, thanks for telling me about this, we'll do better next time. Let's use this as an opportunity to educate everyone about data security and formulate some really good policies! Yay Team!". Somehow I doubt that Keith would be so forgiving.
Keith's utterly stupid attitude towards this is kind of like someone saying "Gee, punishing people for getting drunk and running someone over is a bad idea because it gives them incentive to flee the scene. We should get rid of the penalties so that people will come forward and correct their behavior." These people fucked up. Management fucked up because they didn't educate their employees about the importance of data security. Their IT department fucked up because they didn't exercise due diligence to make sure that if people were going to store sensitive data on laptops that that data would not be accessible to unauthorized users. Laptops are fucking portable, the portability that makes it easy for you to pick them up and walk off with them also makes it easy for someone else to pick them up and walk off with them. Again, this is not a new problem, this shit wasn't invented yesterday and Keith's "let's all have a nice cup of chamomile tea and see what we can learn from this experience" isn't going to do a damned thing to keep people from making mistakes like this. Firing them will. Firing feckless idiots, which is what these people are, does two things, it gets the feckless idiots out of your organization so they can go into careers that better suit them, such as giving blowjobs for crack in the dumpster behind the local Baskin Robbins, and it serves as a deterrent to other people so that they don't do fecklessly stupid things (unless of course they find the concept of dumpster fellatio appealing).
Above knee (trans femoral) amputees have a harder time of walking with most prosthetic knee joints because they have to learn to modulate the swing of their leg using the muscles in their thigh, glutes and lower back. Eventually many of them learn to do this well enough so that you can't tell that they are wearing a prostheses. However this is very fatiguing. The Ossur C-leg was a major advance for AK amputees because the microprocessors could modulate the swing of the lower portion of the leg, making it swing farther for a faster gait and not so far for a slower gait.
However for climbing up and down stairs AK amputees have a harder time, even with a smart knee such as that in the C-leg because they don't have the muscles to modulate their gait and the muscles through the knee that help you go up and down slopes and stairs. Going up and down stairs with a BK amputation (trans-tibial) is also difficult due to the loss of the muscles and joints in the foot but is manageable, for an AK amputee all of the work in going up and down stairs has to be done by the remaining leg, which gets tiring very quickly.
I've met a lot of AK amputees (I'm a BK amputee) and this leg will be a huge advance for them, now we just need to get their insurance companies to pay for them, which isn't easy because a sophisticated AK prostheses can end up costing 50 or 60k when all is said and done.
Whenever some thoughtless person lets sensitive information get copied, a chorus of twits call for blood. This is stupid.
Copied information leaves no trace. The only clue we have that something like this has happened is when the person responsible for that data makes a public admission of their error. If the punishment for disclosure is high, they will simply not say anything, and we will not find out until the secure data is abused.
This is a training and management problem, and it goes up the UC administration to the top. From the chancellor on down, it should be made a primary job function that any information gathered for any purpose receives the appropriate amount of protection, and those with access are properly trained. Otherwise, the information is simply not allowed to be collected.
So what do we do then? Do we just let incompetent fuckups get away with this sort of thing? "Whoops, guess I left a bunch of personal data on a laptop which was then stolen. Sorry, I feel really bad about it. I'll try not to be so thoughtless next time, hope your identity doesn't get stolen."
What should be done in this case is that everyone involved should be fired. The idiot who put data on a laptop should lose his job, the IT morons who failed to secure the data properly should be fired as well, the people who are in charge of these idiots should be fired for not having policies in place to protect sensitive data. Then, after you fire these dumbshits you hire a new group of people, charge them with developing the appropriate SOPs to protect sensitive data, charge them with implementing them, make sure that everyone who has access to that data has read, understood and signed off on the SOP and if anyone fucks up after that you fire their asses and you make them legally liable.
Of course none of this will happen since these are all state government employees of the state of California and let's face it, it's easier to get rid of a bad dose of the clap than it is to get rid of a government employee, regardless of how incompetent they were.
Yes, thank you, thank you, thank you. And let us not forget the shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves and shelves full of bad Star Trek, ST:TNG, Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek DS9 and Star Trek: Enterprise novelizations (which is pretty much every single one of them when it comes down to it). Jesus H. God, won't they think of the trees. What about the trees!
projectors, who's going to use that? But a death ray! That would
be cool! Of course I also want to be the only person allowed to have a cell phone with a built in death ray because the rest of you can't be trusted.
Exsqueeze me? How am I locked into "one online store". I have two iPods, a shuffle and a 40Gb 3G, I have yet to have Steve Jobs show up at my house, put a shotgun in my mouth like a big black cock of death and say "Thou shalt only populate your iPod with tunes downloaded from my music store. I'm Steve Jobs, Bitch!". I've bought three songs from the iTunes music store to try them out, then I went and ordered the CDs from Amazon, ripped them to iTunes and put them on my iPod. It is perfectly possible to use an iPod and be very happy with it without ever going to iTMS.
after I press the snooze button, and I guess that after that I'll just have to grab my Taurus.44 Magnum out of the left hand nightstand and pop Clocky with a 240 grain wad cutter.
The whole POINT of the term "dark energy" is to say "there's something funny here and we don't know what it is". I'd say that's one regulation shitload less arrogant than camel pilot's claim.
Yeah, but calling it "dark energy" implies that we have some sort of understanding about it, which we don't, other than something is apparently causing the universe to expand. Perhaps scientists should start calling this force/material "whatthefuckoverium?", or if a particle interaction is involved describe the particles as "whoknowsitrons?"
AFP is big in France. Who gives a shit? France is an insignificant piss ant country, not so much a nation as a rabble united by a variety of cheeses. AFP is nothing compared to the Beeb. I'm surprised that as a Brit you even compare the two of them? How many AFP programs are syndicated on public radio in the United States? How many shortwave programs does AFP broadcast? And in what languages? Let's see, the answer would be none and none.
Hell, the Beeb broadcasts in multiple languages. AFP is nothing like the Beeb. The Beeb could get along quite well without Google News and to their credit they have a pretty good internet strategy (the one exception being their use of RealPlayer, whose dick got sucked in that deal anyways?). I say this as an American who pays 16 bucks a month for XM satellite radio pretty much for the sole purpose of being able to listen to BBC World Service in my car and at home. AFP is going to do as well in the internet age as Minitel did, and they're going to get their asses handed to them by services such as Reuters which don't get their panties in a twist about being linked to from Google news.
You still haven't said anything about the Mac though. The guy set up an unsecured AirPort base station, he's a fucking idiot, this is like plugging a 100 foot CAT 5 cable into an active network jack and then throwing the other end out the window onto a busy street. I've got some news for you sunshine, if he was a PC user and had purchased a Linksys or Netgear WAP you would have had exactly the same problem. Out of the box Linksys gear ships with SSID broadcast on, the admin password set to admin and the SSID name set to Linksys. From what I've heard Netgear isn't any better. This wasn't a Mac problem, it was a networking problem.
bomb in the future to obscure evidence. You get some blood plasma, or some other fluid that contains a lot of DNA, get samples from different people, mix it up, put it in a bottle with an M-80 taped to it and set it off at the crime scene. Voila, the police end up with so many DNA fragments that there's no way they can tell who did the crime.
If you don't want to use an M80 just get a spritzer bottle full of some DNA containing fluid and spray it everywhere all over a crime scene. I wonder if you could extract DNA sequences from barber shop cuttings and do this?
I have read the Hurt report, and taken a defensive motorcycle saftey class. I try to ride as safe as I can. I wear a helmet and armored riding gear. I like to think that that stuff will help, but I know that my helmet and all the armor in my jacket will not save me from a head on collision with a car turning in front of my motorcycle.
I had a full facial helmet and an armored jacket and they were worth every penny I paid for them. I don't want to think of how badly I would have been banged up if I hadn't had them (I'd be dead without the helmet). As it was the only thing that was injured on my body besides my leg (which was crushed between the bumper of the truck and the frame of my bike) was the ring finger on my left hand (I jammed it when I hit the ground, it felt like it does when you catch a ball wrong) and my nuts which got banged up going over the handlebars. Amazingly enough my leg hurt so bad that I wasn't even concerned about my testicles until I found out that I couldn't pee. A catheter and a nice large dose of painkillers took care of that. But I had no damage to my torso even though I had bounced down the street after being hit.
You no longer ride and not because it can not be done, but because of the idoits on the road. I don't think anyone here would question your decision (and I am certainly not questioning it). You have an injury that many of us can not begin to imagine which gives you a unquie point of view.
I also don't ride because it would make my mom cry (she's cried enough over this) and because I'm afraid that I might freak out if I were on a bike in traffic.
I wonder what your advice is to those of us who still ride motorcycles? Are we taking an unreasonable risk of serious injury by riding motorcycles?
My advice is "ride, be safe and enjoy the Hell out of yourself". Motorcycles are beautiful pieces of machinery and riding a bike is fantastic, it's not just fun, it's exhiliarating in a way that driving a car can never be. If I win the big lotto and set up my own private road system on a ranch in Eastern Washington I'll invite you up. Don't let what happened to me fuck it up for you.
You know what? Safety belts won't protect you 100% of the time, but they're still a good idea.
Sorry to hear you lost a limb. I know it can happen to me too, but it's something ya gotta do, y'know?
Having a noisy bike is roughly as effective in preventing multiple vehicle motorcycle accidents as having a glow-in-the-dark dashboard Jesus is in preventing multiple vehicle automobile accidents. The thing that keeps me from riding again isn't my leg (you can get electric shift kits) it's the fact that there are too many idiots in cars out there. I've met people who like to tell me, when they hear about what happened to me, how unsafe motorcycles are. But as someone who was in a bad accident and who has met a lot of other people who were in bad accidents (I define bad accident as anything involving a visit to regional level 1 trauma center, an extensive hospital stay, or things being cut off of your body) I can say that 70 percent of those accidents were the fault of someone in a car. This really pisses me off because I love motorcycles and riding, if you're walking down the street and some old fart drives down the sidewalk and runs you and nine other people over (like that horrible accident in California a couple of years ago) no one says "See, being a pedestrian is dangerous!" But there are a lot of people who seem to think that if you were in a motorcycle accdient that it's your own damned fault, regardless of how negligent the other driver was, an attitude that really pisses me the fuck off.
When I win the big lottery I'm going to buy a couple hundred acres of land in Eastern Washington and pave a bunch of roads on it, build my own sleazy biker bar and start riding again. If it happens I'll let you know so you can come up and join me.
Having a loud bike will protect you because motorists will be able to hear you.
I hate to bum the high of all of the Harley riders out there but I've met quite a few guys who have been in serious motorcycle accidents (i.e., they ended up having a leg cut off) and quite a few of them had big, noisy cruiser style bikes. The Hurt report (yes, that's what it is called) didn't find any correlation between how much noise a motorcycle makes and its likelihood of being involved in an accident with another vehicle.
Thank you. I now have the image of Angela Lansbury in a Wonder Woman costume reverberating through my head. I think I'll go over to the machine room and chew through a couple of three-phase power cables to see if I can burn it out of my neurons.
My company has a similar policy. Online snapshots, local tape duplication in our libraries and off-site vaulting for six months. And we keep enough spare tapes on hand so that if our company is ever sued we can do a full backup of every system as it existed at the time of the lawsuit and send that offsite. I could understand if MIcrosoft had no e-mail backups, at one of my old jobs we very deliberately did not back up our mail spool, this was to give people the incentive to move things out of their inboxes and into local folders and was also because it would have reduced our exposure in case we were sued. But this was a deliberate and documented policy, it wasn't as if we said "oh yeah, we didn't back up our mail system for a few weeks and then started again." Microsoft fucked up big time here.
Loss of a Shuttle during a Hubble repair mission would have political repercussions that woujld likely kill the Shuttle program and, possibly, kill any further crewed spaceflight of any kind. The Hubble is a nice tool, but the purpose of space travel is to put people there, not to do science. Fixing it isn't worth the risk.
And how would losing a shuttle during any other kind of mission not have political repercussions? Also if the purpose of space travel is to put people there then what the fuck has NASA done lately? They've put people into low earth orbit, big fucking deal, whoo hoo, low earth orbit. Yeah, we're going to learn a lot orbiting 250 miles above our home planet. Yeah, that's exploration, boldly orbiting where lots of men have orbited before.
You are so full of shit as to boggle the mind. How do you do it? Let's start off
from the top. Your claim about scientists supporting ISS, let's look at your
first cite:
Dr Felicia Cosman, clinical director at the National Osteoporosis
Foundation in the United States, and a specialist in the bone-thinning disease,said the weightlessness of space provides a perfect laboratory.
"It is a great model for what happens with immobilisation due to any disease," she said."I think we can use the information to try and figure out how to use mechanical devices to actually build bone and to better design agents for future osteoporosis treatment."
OK, your source is one sentence from a two year old popular science article on a general news website. That's a crap citation, and the fact that it's the best you can do shows how pathetic you are.
I would also say that Dr. Cosman is a moron if she thinks that we need to observe astronauts on ISS to develop a model of how immobilisation affects the body. We have years of data from Mir, data from
Apollo, data from Gemini, data from Skylab and data from the Soviet program. For that matter we also have tons and tons of data from hospitals and rest homes all over the world, and we get more every day. I think it's time for Dr. Cosman to go back to medical school or perhaps give up her job as "clinical director" and go back to treating real patients every day.
Your next set of lies is:
All anti-viral drugs were produced - after decades of failure on earth - by
the Gamma-interferon and Neuraminidase protein growth conducted on the shuttle (most of the ISS protein growth experiments are too recent). Rough protein shapes had been determined before, but it took the large space-grown crystals to make them effective. All anti-influenza drugs are descended from these.
Drugsfor hepatitis B and C, hairy cell leukemia, Karposi's sarcoma, multiple myeloma, and melanoma are almost all designed related to alpha-interferon, which was grown on the shuttle. The same goes for Factor D concerning certain aspects of heart disease, stroke, and cardiovascular surgery complications (there's already one
drug on the market); recombinant insulin was developed by Eli Lilly and Hauptman Woodard based on the crystals grown on the shuttle (crystals grown on Earth were not high quality enough); there's research on emphysema ongoing because of the elastase crystals; modern antiparasitic drugs are generally involved with malic enzyme, while antifungal are with isocitrate lyase. Drug delivery research is now a lot more successful thanks to the growth of human serum albumin (a protein that delivers most drugs, even aspirin). There are several projects ongoing for genetically engineering more nutricious plants using the DNA sequence identified
once the protein structure of canavalin was determined. Drugs used to prevent rejection on transplant are designed around their effect on proline isomerase; and one of the most widely used virii in virus and genetic engineering research (tobacco mosaic virus) had crystals grown *of the entire virus*.
Well let's look at some of your lies here. Such as
recombinant insulin was developed by Eli Lilly and Hauptman Woodard based on the crystals grown on the shuttle (crystals grown on Earth were not high quality enough);
No, human recombinant insulin was first developed in the late 1970s and approved by the FDA in 1982. It was developed by Genentech and was the first product of recombinant DNA research approved for human therapeutic use. Claiming that the Shuttle and ISS had anything to do with it is like claiming that NASA invented Velcro (they didn't). It's a lie.
You also don't answer the question as to
what the names of these drugs are? Are any of them in clinical trials, have anydrug companies filed a 21 C
Says someone who probably has never even looked at an experiment listing. Says someone who probably doesn't even know that about half of the experiments conducted on ISS are paid for by industry. Says someone who probably has never read any statements from the scientific organizations commissioning the various studies.
I'll get around to reading the statements from those scientific organizations right after I wade through all of the statements from the scientific organizations who claim that smoking cigarettes has nothing to do with lung cancer. Let's look at some facts, according to NASA it takes 2.5 people just to maintain ISS. Right now there are only two crewmembers on the station, how much science are they getting done? Somehow I don't think that they're working on any cancer cures or new energy sources up there, although they do apparently have enough food now.
My favorite is probably the protein crystallization studies. For the expense of shipping up the basic equipment and samples of various diseases, they've grown several dozen crystals of pathogen surface proteins that notably higher purity and size than we have ever been able to do on Earth. What does this mean? It means that we've been able to identify a number of surface proteins that we weren't able to on Earth (via x-ray crystallography), consequently allowing us to produce drugs to target those diseases.
Really, name them. Which stage are the clinical trials in? What is the efficacy of these drugs? What is their efficacy compared to other compounds that were developed in terrestrial labs? Tell me and anyone on this forum that the scientific return from ISS is as great as that from Hubble, Galileo, Cassini/Huygens or the Mars Rovers.
ISS is a joke, and it's not very funny. We had a comparable space station 30 years ago, it was called Skylab, we launched it in an afternoon and the incompetent dickheads at NASA let it fall out of the sky one day back in 1979 because they couldn't be bothered to get off their asses and develop a salvage plan.
How much are you getting paid by NASA Rei? Jesus, you have not only drank the cyanide laced purple Kool-Aid, you've licked your Dixie cup clean and gone back for seconds.
Not in inflation-adjusted dollars. Not to mention, it was Congress who pushed for ISS. NASA, if you'll recall, doesn't operate with a free hand on large-scale budget decisions.
This is disingenious at best. NASA isn't just handed a budget by Congress and told to do things without having any input as to what the agency's focus will be. If you believe this then you're more of an idiot than I thought and need to take some basic civics courses.
Yeah, destroy the organization that developed almost all of the tech that private companies involved in rocketry are using (you are aware, are you not, that the majority of NASA's funding goes to research, right? They're not some big space-cargo company). The organization with the best safety record in space among all of the world's space agencies. Etc. Great plan there. And replace it with what, persay?
I think you meant per se, which is strange because that's Latin for "by itself". Perhaps you meant "pray tell".
Joyrides from Scaled?
I find it interesting that the success of Scaled Composites with their X prize entry has driven a certain kind of NASA fanboy completely and totally apeshit. Bert Rutan launched a sub-orbital vehicle that cost 20 million dollars. 20 million dollars is what NASA spends supplying ISS with bottled water for six weeks.
(source).
Should we launch our cargo on Ariane-V, with its 15-20% failure rate? Should we send craft to Mars with the Russian space agency, who had a 2% are standard. If Boeing or Lockheed (or about a dozen other companies in the US, Europe, and Russia) could, they would, and everyone would flock to them.
Slashdot Mirror
One uninformed, irrelevant and gratuitous knock against Slashdot - check
One uninformed (+$2k cables are common), irrelevant and gratuitous knock against audiophiles - check
Let me finish off with "teh gimp sux 'case it's not like Photoshop!" Now we have closure.
You fool. Don't you know that there's no closure on a /. topic until we have the following:
An "In Soviet Russia" post. In this case "In Soviet Russia carbon nanotubes conduct you"
An "I for one welcome our new overlords post". In this case "I for one welcome our new carbon nanotube superconducting overlords
A "Netcraft confirms, BSD is still dying" post.
And a link to either tubgirl or goatse guy (although I think that this little video might become a classic to replace tubgirl and goatse guy.)
I have to wonder how Keith would feel, if one of his employees lost a company laptop containing proprietary data and that data was used by his competitors to put his company out of business. Would he say "Well, thanks for telling me about this, we'll do better next time. Let's use this as an opportunity to educate everyone about data security and formulate some really good policies! Yay Team!". Somehow I doubt that Keith would be so forgiving.
Keith's utterly stupid attitude towards this is kind of like someone saying "Gee, punishing people for getting drunk and running someone over is a bad idea because it gives them incentive to flee the scene. We should get rid of the penalties so that people will come forward and correct their behavior." These people fucked up. Management fucked up because they didn't educate their employees about the importance of data security. Their IT department fucked up because they didn't exercise due diligence to make sure that if people were going to store sensitive data on laptops that that data would not be accessible to unauthorized users. Laptops are fucking portable, the portability that makes it easy for you to pick them up and walk off with them also makes it easy for someone else to pick them up and walk off with them. Again, this is not a new problem, this shit wasn't invented yesterday and Keith's "let's all have a nice cup of chamomile tea and see what we can learn from this experience" isn't going to do a damned thing to keep people from making mistakes like this. Firing them will. Firing feckless idiots, which is what these people are, does two things, it gets the feckless idiots out of your organization so they can go into careers that better suit them, such as giving blowjobs for crack in the dumpster behind the local Baskin Robbins, and it serves as a deterrent to other people so that they don't do fecklessly stupid things (unless of course they find the concept of dumpster fellatio appealing).
However for climbing up and down stairs AK amputees have a harder time, even with a smart knee such as that in the C-leg because they don't have the muscles to modulate their gait and the muscles through the knee that help you go up and down slopes and stairs. Going up and down stairs with a BK amputation (trans-tibial) is also difficult due to the loss of the muscles and joints in the foot but is manageable, for an AK amputee all of the work in going up and down stairs has to be done by the remaining leg, which gets tiring very quickly.
I've met a lot of AK amputees (I'm a BK amputee) and this leg will be a huge advance for them, now we just need to get their insurance companies to pay for them, which isn't easy because a sophisticated AK prostheses can end up costing 50 or 60k when all is said and done.
Copied information leaves no trace. The only clue we have that something like this has happened is when the person responsible for that data makes a public admission of their error. If the punishment for disclosure is high, they will simply not say anything, and we will not find out until the secure data is abused.
This is a training and management problem, and it goes up the UC administration to the top. From the chancellor on down, it should be made a primary job function that any information gathered for any purpose receives the appropriate amount of protection, and those with access are properly trained. Otherwise, the information is simply not allowed to be collected.
So what do we do then? Do we just let incompetent fuckups get away with this sort of thing? "Whoops, guess I left a bunch of personal data on a laptop which was then stolen. Sorry, I feel really bad about it. I'll try not to be so thoughtless next time, hope your identity doesn't get stolen."
What should be done in this case is that everyone involved should be fired. The idiot who put data on a laptop should lose his job, the IT morons who failed to secure the data properly should be fired as well, the people who are in charge of these idiots should be fired for not having policies in place to protect sensitive data. Then, after you fire these dumbshits you hire a new group of people, charge them with developing the appropriate SOPs to protect sensitive data, charge them with implementing them, make sure that everyone who has access to that data has read, understood and signed off on the SOP and if anyone fucks up after that you fire their asses and you make them legally liable.
Of course none of this will happen since these are all state government employees of the state of California and let's face it, it's easier to get rid of a bad dose of the clap than it is to get rid of a government employee, regardless of how incompetent they were.
Yeah, but calling it "dark energy" implies that we have some sort of understanding about it, which we don't, other than something is apparently causing the universe to expand. Perhaps scientists should start calling this force/material "whatthefuckoverium?", or if a particle interaction is involved describe the particles as "whoknowsitrons?"
Hell, the Beeb broadcasts in multiple languages. AFP is nothing like the Beeb. The Beeb could get along quite well without Google News and to their credit they have a pretty good internet strategy (the one exception being their use of RealPlayer, whose dick got sucked in that deal anyways?). I say this as an American who pays 16 bucks a month for XM satellite radio pretty much for the sole purpose of being able to listen to BBC World Service in my car and at home. AFP is going to do as well in the internet age as Minitel did, and they're going to get their asses handed to them by services such as Reuters which don't get their panties in a twist about being linked to from Google news.
If you don't want to use an M80 just get a spritzer bottle full of some DNA containing fluid and spray it everywhere all over a crime scene. I wonder if you could extract DNA sequences from barber shop cuttings and do this?
I had a full facial helmet and an armored jacket and they were worth every penny I paid for them. I don't want to think of how badly I would have been banged up if I hadn't had them (I'd be dead without the helmet). As it was the only thing that was injured on my body besides my leg (which was crushed between the bumper of the truck and the frame of my bike) was the ring finger on my left hand (I jammed it when I hit the ground, it felt like it does when you catch a ball wrong) and my nuts which got banged up going over the handlebars. Amazingly enough my leg hurt so bad that I wasn't even concerned about my testicles until I found out that I couldn't pee. A catheter and a nice large dose of painkillers took care of that. But I had no damage to my torso even though I had bounced down the street after being hit.
You no longer ride and not because it can not be done, but because of the idoits on the road. I don't think anyone here would question your decision (and I am certainly not questioning it). You have an injury that many of us can not begin to imagine which gives you a unquie point of view.
I also don't ride because it would make my mom cry (she's cried enough over this) and because I'm afraid that I might freak out if I were on a bike in traffic.
I wonder what your advice is to those of us who still ride motorcycles? Are we taking an unreasonable risk of serious injury by riding motorcycles?
My advice is "ride, be safe and enjoy the Hell out of yourself". Motorcycles are beautiful pieces of machinery and riding a bike is fantastic, it's not just fun, it's exhiliarating in a way that driving a car can never be. If I win the big lotto and set up my own private road system on a ranch in Eastern Washington I'll invite you up. Don't let what happened to me fuck it up for you.
Sorry to hear you lost a limb. I know it can happen to me too, but it's something ya gotta do, y'know?
Having a noisy bike is roughly as effective in preventing multiple vehicle motorcycle accidents as having a glow-in-the-dark dashboard Jesus is in preventing multiple vehicle automobile accidents. The thing that keeps me from riding again isn't my leg (you can get electric shift kits) it's the fact that there are too many idiots in cars out there. I've met people who like to tell me, when they hear about what happened to me, how unsafe motorcycles are. But as someone who was in a bad accident and who has met a lot of other people who were in bad accidents (I define bad accident as anything involving a visit to regional level 1 trauma center, an extensive hospital stay, or things being cut off of your body) I can say that 70 percent of those accidents were the fault of someone in a car. This really pisses me off because I love motorcycles and riding, if you're walking down the street and some old fart drives down the sidewalk and runs you and nine other people over (like that horrible accident in California a couple of years ago) no one says "See, being a pedestrian is dangerous!" But there are a lot of people who seem to think that if you were in a motorcycle accdient that it's your own damned fault, regardless of how negligent the other driver was, an attitude that really pisses me the fuck off.
When I win the big lottery I'm going to buy a couple hundred acres of land in Eastern Washington and pave a bunch of roads on it, build my own sleazy biker bar and start riding again. If it happens I'll let you know so you can come up and join me.
Having a loud bike will protect you because motorists will be able to hear you.
I hate to bum the high of all of the Harley riders out there but I've met quite a few guys who have been in serious motorcycle accidents (i.e., they ended up having a leg cut off) and quite a few of them had big, noisy cruiser style bikes. The Hurt report (yes, that's what it is called) didn't find any correlation between how much noise a motorcycle makes and its likelihood of being involved in an accident with another vehicle.
Jamie - former motorcylist, current amputee
Don't you mean "cheeze" products?
And how would losing a shuttle during any other kind of mission not have political repercussions? Also if the purpose of space travel is to put people there then what the fuck has NASA done lately? They've put people into low earth orbit, big fucking deal, whoo hoo, low earth orbit. Yeah, we're going to learn a lot orbiting 250 miles above our home planet. Yeah, that's exploration, boldly orbiting where lots of men have orbited before.
Dr Felicia Cosman, clinical director at the National Osteoporosis Foundation in the United States, and a specialist in the bone-thinning disease,said the weightlessness of space provides a perfect laboratory.
"It is a great model for what happens with immobilisation due to any disease," she said."I think we can use the information to try and figure out how to use mechanical devices to actually build bone and to better design agents for future osteoporosis treatment."
http://abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s777168.htm
OK, your source is one sentence from a two year old popular science article on a general news website. That's a crap citation, and the fact that it's the best you can do shows how pathetic you are.
I would also say that Dr. Cosman is a moron if she thinks that we need to observe astronauts on ISS to develop a model of how immobilisation affects the body. We have years of data from Mir, data from Apollo, data from Gemini, data from Skylab and data from the Soviet program. For that matter we also have tons and tons of data from hospitals and rest homes all over the world, and we get more every day. I think it's time for Dr. Cosman to go back to medical school or perhaps give up her job as "clinical director" and go back to treating real patients every day.
Your next set of lies is:
All anti-viral drugs were produced - after decades of failure on earth - by the Gamma-interferon and Neuraminidase protein growth conducted on the shuttle (most of the ISS protein growth experiments are too recent). Rough protein shapes had been determined before, but it took the large space-grown crystals to make them effective. All anti-influenza drugs are descended from these.
Drugsfor hepatitis B and C, hairy cell leukemia, Karposi's sarcoma, multiple myeloma, and melanoma are almost all designed related to alpha-interferon, which was grown on the shuttle. The same goes for Factor D concerning certain aspects of heart disease, stroke, and cardiovascular surgery complications (there's already one drug on the market); recombinant insulin was developed by Eli Lilly and Hauptman Woodard based on the crystals grown on the shuttle (crystals grown on Earth were not high quality enough); there's research on emphysema ongoing because of the elastase crystals; modern antiparasitic drugs are generally involved with malic enzyme, while antifungal are with isocitrate lyase. Drug delivery research is now a lot more successful thanks to the growth of human serum albumin (a protein that delivers most drugs, even aspirin). There are several projects ongoing for genetically engineering more nutricious plants using the DNA sequence identified once the protein structure of canavalin was determined. Drugs used to prevent rejection on transplant are designed around their effect on proline isomerase; and one of the most widely used virii in virus and genetic engineering research (tobacco mosaic virus) had crystals grown *of the entire virus*.
Well let's look at some of your lies here. Such as
recombinant insulin was developed by Eli Lilly and Hauptman Woodard based on the crystals grown on the shuttle (crystals grown on Earth were not high quality enough);
No, human recombinant insulin was first developed in the late 1970s and approved by the FDA in 1982. It was developed by Genentech and was the first product of recombinant DNA research approved for human therapeutic use. Claiming that the Shuttle and ISS had anything to do with it is like claiming that NASA invented Velcro (they didn't). It's a lie.
You also don't answer the question as to what the names of these drugs are? Are any of them in clinical trials, have anydrug companies filed a 21 C
I'll get around to reading the statements from those scientific organizations right after I wade through all of the statements from the scientific organizations who claim that smoking cigarettes has nothing to do with lung cancer. Let's look at some facts, according to NASA it takes 2.5 people just to maintain ISS. Right now there are only two crewmembers on the station, how much science are they getting done? Somehow I don't think that they're working on any cancer cures or new energy sources up there, although they do apparently have enough food now.
My favorite is probably the protein crystallization studies. For the expense of shipping up the basic equipment and samples of various diseases, they've grown several dozen crystals of pathogen surface proteins that notably higher purity and size than we have ever been able to do on Earth. What does this mean? It means that we've been able to identify a number of surface proteins that we weren't able to on Earth (via x-ray crystallography), consequently allowing us to produce drugs to target those diseases.
Really, name them. Which stage are the clinical trials in? What is the efficacy of these drugs? What is their efficacy compared to other compounds that were developed in terrestrial labs? Tell me and anyone on this forum that the scientific return from ISS is as great as that from Hubble, Galileo, Cassini/Huygens or the Mars Rovers.
ISS is a joke, and it's not very funny. We had a comparable space station 30 years ago, it was called Skylab, we launched it in an afternoon and the incompetent dickheads at NASA let it fall out of the sky one day back in 1979 because they couldn't be bothered to get off their asses and develop a salvage plan.
How much are you getting paid by NASA Rei? Jesus, you have not only drank the cyanide laced purple Kool-Aid, you've licked your Dixie cup clean and gone back for seconds.
Not in inflation-adjusted dollars. Not to mention, it was Congress who pushed for ISS. NASA, if you'll recall, doesn't operate with a free hand on large-scale budget decisions.
This is disingenious at best. NASA isn't just handed a budget by Congress and told to do things without having any input as to what the agency's focus will be. If you believe this then you're more of an idiot than I thought and need to take some basic civics courses.
Yeah, destroy the organization that developed almost all of the tech that private companies involved in rocketry are using (you are aware, are you not, that the majority of NASA's funding goes to research, right? They're not some big space-cargo company). The organization with the best safety record in space among all of the world's space agencies. Etc. Great plan there. And replace it with what, persay?
I think you meant per se, which is strange because that's Latin for "by itself". Perhaps you meant "pray tell".
Joyrides from Scaled?
I find it interesting that the success of Scaled Composites with their X prize entry has driven a certain kind of NASA fanboy completely and totally apeshit. Bert Rutan launched a sub-orbital vehicle that cost 20 million dollars. 20 million dollars is what NASA spends supplying ISS with bottled water for six weeks. (source).
Should we launch our cargo on Ariane-V, with its 15-20% failure rate? Should we send craft to Mars with the Russian space agency, who had a 2% are standard. If Boeing or Lockheed (or about a dozen other companies in the US, Europe, and Russia) could, they would, and everyone would flock to them.
More lying, dishonest disingenuity