The issue isn't about the reception the Treo 650 users get, it's about the reception the other party gets, and, from all the evidence provided, it's the default sensitivity of the Treo 650's microphone that's the problem. Drop the microphone's volume level (so it becomes less sensitive) and the problems that the people at the other end of the call are receiving disappear.
From the forum, posted by bael (post number 18 in the thread linked to):
First call I made I was told that it sounded choppy like y'all are describing. I turned the volume down on the phone and that seemed to help.
So, turn the mike down a bit and problem solved. By the way, this story summary is a joke. "From the other end, it sounds like I'm inside a cardboard box"? Would it really be that much of a stretch for the editors to edit this sentence (or add one of their own) to explain that the people at the other end are experiencing choppy reception because of a microphone issue?
Any more off-topic than, say, the anniversaries of events such as the Apollo 11 lunar landing or the attacks of September 11th?
Man, Slashdot is run by the editors for the editors. A member of a rock group dying of a drug overdose made the front page simply because he happened to be in CmdrTaco favourite band. There's no rhyme or reason to this shit, they just make it up as they go along. Always have and always will.
And, no, I don't like the latter any more than you do.
1. It's news. It's the 20th anniversary of the event if you hadn't noticed.
2. It's relevant to all of us. It speaks volumes about corporate responsibility, or rather the lack of it, in a time when corporations wield more power than ever. Worse, elected politicians whose pockets are lined directly and indirectly by these corporations are constantly giving them more protection and less responsibility.
3. Corporations should be wholly accountable for their actions and brought to book when they screw up. I think the world's biggest industrial disaster, which killed and maimed tens of thousands of people, falls into the category of actions for which someone should squarely take responsibility: don't you?
I have to ask: if you don't think that killing 15,000 people without even coming close to properly paying for the crime, or even poisoning a city without even coming close to properly putting things right, is something to question corporations about then when is it to OK to do so?
I don't know what the hell your statistics prove,or even if they're right, but I do know that, wherever he or she is, your high school mathematics teacher would be proud of you.
Have you given serious thought to a career in marketing or PR? With that kind of commitment to mumbo jumbo and ridiculous statistics you'd be a natural.
My nephew learned that he could get what he wanted from the fridge by opening the freezer compartment first, pulling out its draws one -by-one and using them as stairs so he could reach his goal. His age at the time? Barely more than two years old.
Don't ever assume that because they can't reach it from the ground that they can't reach it at all. Kids aren't stupid and they learn damn fast.
Oh my God. You're bitching about paying fractionally more than the Canadians are?
1. Well boo fucking hoo. Do you see dozens of Brits and Europeans complaining about the price of downloads from Apple's UK and EU stores? I'm not sure what the EU store pricing is set at but I know it's far more than the US one. And the UK one is more expensive still: 79p per track, which at current exchange rates (almost £1.00=$2.00) is equivalent to $1.50+.
2. The Canadian iTMS might be a little cheaper than the US one right now but you haven't taken into account the direction that the US dollar is heading, which is down, down, down. Give it six months and instead of one US dollar being worth more than one Canadian dollar it most probably be the other way around. So, those tracks that you're bitching about being cheaper in Canada will have become more expensive in Canada.
3. Find something more important than the price of music downloads to be pissed off about. Try the environment, civil rights or something else that suggests that you're capable of thinking about someone other than yourself for a change.
What would be the point? Gee, well, I think at the very least that some sort of rescue mission would have been attempted. Remember Apollo 13? Most people wrote those guys off as dead but they still got back home in one piece, didn't they? Are you really suggesting that if Columbia's crippled heatshield had been discovered by an HST inspection that the full force of the US wouldn't have been put behind a bold rescue attempt? I don't know about you, but I'm pretty certain that it would have.
And, if nothing else, early discovery of the problem would have given those on board Columbia the chance to talk to their loved ones one last time with that knowledge, or prepare appropriate messages for them in the event of a negative outcome.
No one nipping at NASA's heels, eh? Well, no one apart from China, India, Japan... Granted, they've got a lot of ground to make up but it's far easier to overtake a stationary target than a moving one.
1. If you're not moving forward then you're at least standing still. You do understand that, right? And if NASA is standing still (ie, you're inactive) while Russia and others aren't (ie, they're at least doing something to move forward) it's not unreasonable to say that, "relatively speaking, given the inactivity of NASA, this Russian programme is flourishing". QED.
2. The seven people on a shuttle mission include a pilot and commander that, frankly, do nothing of scientific value. And, dollar for dollar, you can get more done (more people or more cargo launched) with Soyuz and/or other delivery systems. Even NASA's other launch vehicles are far more cost-effective than the STS, which is why they were put back into service.
3. When you're talking about space flight, safety should be paramount. Certainly, politics should be way down the list. In the case of Columbia, there were specific checks that the engineers wanted to perform once Columbia was in orbit - for example, they wanted to re-align the HST to look at the damage done to the orbiter's heat shield, which would have told NASA straight away that any re-entry attempt was doomed - but were dismissed by management that didn't want to concede even the slightest hint of weakness.
Because they didn't want to risk the bad publicity that they were sure would accompany such checks those managers were willing to gamble the lives of seven astronauts, as well as the future of NASA's manned programme and perhaps even NASA itself. Now, I don't know what you call that, but I sure as hell don't call it good management let alone good science.
As I said, I'm as much a realist now as I am a dreamer. From my point of view, NASA's heyday was the 60s and 70s, but in the 80s, 90s and in this decade it's done next to nothing to fulfill its potential. Does it not irk you that it's been 35 years since man first stepped on the moon and 32 years since he was last there? We haven't been to the moon in over a generation. Please, tell me that's not what you call progress.
Re-read my post. I didn't say that NASA is lagging behind anyone, what I said was that NASA doesn't seem to be moving forward in any clear direction.
It's clear from your post that you think that the STS really is the best thing out there. Well, as others have pointed out in other posts, the STS is neither truly reusable (because after every mission everything gets stripped down and replaced) nor cost-effective (because, per kilogram of payload, it's far more expensive than any of its major competitors).
When the STS was first proposed, NASA talked about multiple launches a week and seven day turnaround times for orbiters. The reality of the situation is completely different. The STS, which was always a compromise, has never come close to delivering on its potential, and poor management at NASA hasn't helped that situation.
Believe me, I want NASA to succeed as much as anyone else. I've bought into the dream. I've taken a transatlantic trip to see a shuttle launch. I've visited the Kennedy Space Center. I've spent far more than I should have in the gift shop. But, as I've grown older, I'm not the dreamer I once was. The dreamer in me is still there, but so now is the realist, and the realist says that NASA hasn't lived up to its promise for a very, very long time.
As to whether the Challenger and Columbia disasters could have been avoided, well there's no doubt that the first should have been and the second could have been. In both cases, NASA's internal politics played a big part in ignoring the advice of NASA's own engineers, whose cautionary notes went unheeded. You might dismiss such things with a "shit happens" but, in both cases, shit didn't have to happen.
You can gloss over these things all you want, and make "glass houses" comments all you like, but the bottom line is that NASA doesn't seem to be doing more than standing still and living off its past glories. And to all of us - dreamers and realists alike - who want to see the boundaries of space pushed further and further, that standstill is disappointing.
There was one a couple of weeks back that appeared on the front page less than two hours after the orignal story did, and with only one other story separating them. I can't remember the exact time differential, but it was something like one hour and 47 minutes - that's got to be some kind of record.
All the comments made to the second story (apart from the usual trolls) pointed out the ridiculousness of the situation. Eventually, the whole dupe and all the attached comments were erased, as if it never existed.
Whereas in the past all such dupes would have been left alone, now it looks like some of them are being deleted after the fact. So, rather than cure the disease - by actually vetting stories properly, doing basic fact checking, etc, like all proper news outlets would - it seems that the Slashdot "editors" have chosen to treat the symptoms - by covering up their mistakes after they've been made.
I swear, in 99.99 percent of businesses, if people ran things this way then heads would roll pretty damn fast.
Hmmm, I believe the standard response to such a comment is "You're new around here, aren't you?"
Seriously, spelling errors in story summaries are so damn common that they're practically part of the Slasdot experience, together with dupes, occasional fakes, "news" stories that are days, weeks or even months old, and editorial comments appended to summaries that are entirely inappropriate for what claims to be a news site (but is closer to a news-related meta-blog).
I imagine that that "odd collection of football helmets" is related to a NFL- or college football-related game that they worked on at some time. Pretty simple explanation really. "43,000 video game 'cartridges'" does seem like an awful lot though.
Lacking any real commitment, and it has done since the days when Blue Streak, the only launch vehicle in history to have a 100 percent record, was shelved. Margaret Thatcher scaled back Britain's participation in ESA and successive governments have done little more than make half-hearted gestures.
Britain's space programme is virtually non-existant beyond satellites, ground-based observatories and the occassional extra-planetary mission to passing comets. Beagle 2 was hobbled together on a shoestring and at next to no time. Anyone who has serious aspirations about becoming an astronaut is virtually forced to take up a second nationality, as Michael Foale did. Having said that, the National Space Centre, which was delayed for years because of a lack of proper funding, is now up and running, so perhaps we're finally starting to make progress.
However, I've no doubt that if Britain had a space agency level of political and financial commitment that NASA has had for over 40 years then we would have something more concrete to show for it. Whether that something would have been anything more than a token effort is a hypothetical debate for another time. Certainly, something like the Hubble Space Telescope wouldn't have been out of the question, but why waste time speculating about what ifs?
But let's talk about the thinly-veiled reasoning behind your question. If you're suggesting that I'm in no position to comment because my own nation's space programme is pathetic, well, Frankly I find that just sad. It's unfortunate that the only way you can think to reply to comments about how rudderless NASA seems right now is to come back with a pithy comment that fails to address any of the points that I've made. Certainly you haven't added to the debate, have you?
It's this sort of shit - refusing to acknowledge facts that are staring you in the face, ignoring any problems that appear and just hoping that things will work out for the best in the end - that killed the crew of Columbia in the first place.
Come back to me when you have something constructive to say.
Well, it's a bit hard to build something as complex as a spacecraft before you've designed it first, and that's the step that's just been taken with Kliper.
Your retort would be more valid if NASA was actually making similar progress: ie, designing possible STS replacements and giving its own manned programme some sort of direction. As it is, NASA seems to be (if you'll pardon the pun) in a terminally decaying orbit.
Whereas NASA's manned programme once had a clear vision and message - using the STS in conjunction with the ISS as a stepping stone to more orbitally-based research and then on to bigger and better things - now it's unclear where exactly NASA is heading.
Manned missions to the Moon? To Mars? Well, sure, those have been mentioned in "rallying the troops" kind of fashion after the Columbia disaster but where's the substance?
The reality of the situation is that the STS is grounded, and even when (if) it returns to flight status it's going to be a lame duck. And I don't even want to contemplate how disasterous another shuttle loss would be.
So, relatively speaking, given the inactivity of NASA, this Russian programme is flourishing. I don't know about you, but I'm glad that people with as much experience of manned spaceflight as the Russians haven't cashed out of this game just yet and are still willing, scientifically if not politically, to develop the technologies to further our exploration of space.
Can you imagine the amount of doublethink that would be going on in the head of the average Slashdotter if it turned out that he's a VB programmer?
Picture the conclusion of the Darth Vader vs Luke Skywalker lightsabre battle in Empire Strikes Back with Ken Jennings in the role of Vader and the Slashdotter in the role of Luke, but instead of Vader telling Luke that he's his father, Jennings is telling the Slashdotter that he's a VB-only coder.
I don't know about you but I can practically hear the "No. No. That's not true! That's impossible!", etc, right now.
Try telling anyone who's from Northern Ireland (and who isn't a republican) that they're not British. See how far you get before they mention some sort of violent reprisal.
Technically, you're correct, but when British is mentioned as a nationality then it includes Northern Ireland.
They would have bought them earlier but a bunch of Americans were first in line.
Oh, and by the way British and English aren't interchangeable terms. For example, people from Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands are British too.
Well, I guess I do, because even credit cards can be used in ATMs nowadays, but I've not used any card in any ATM for a good six years now and there's no way I could tell you what my PIN was even in my life depended on it.
There should be something like the NIH in every country if not a global equivalent. But the most important part of the equation is having impartial, experienced scientists rather than partisan, uninformed politicians decide what should and shouldn't be studied.
I think we all know that it's scientific research and not politics or religion that we have to thank for things like penicillin, etc.
Unless, of course, you're a Jehovah's Witness, or a member of any other faith (Christian and non-Christian) that has strict rules about what's right and what's wrong when it comes to medical procedures...
What's the betting that the Christian right still uses this as an excuse to preach from the pulpit? These people are the modern-day descendents of the morality police that retarded medical science for centuries. If they had prevailed throughout then the most advanced medicinal procedures around today would still be boring into skulls to release demons or a course of leeches to suck out evil.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue isn't about the reception the Treo 650 users get, it's about the reception the other party gets, and, from all the evidence provided, it's the default sensitivity of the Treo 650's microphone that's the problem. Drop the microphone's volume level (so it becomes less sensitive) and the problems that the people at the other end of the call are receiving disappear.
From the forum, posted by bael (post number 18 in the thread linked to):
First call I made I was told that it sounded choppy like y'all are describing. I turned the volume down on the phone and that seemed to help.
So, turn the mike down a bit and problem solved. By the way, this story summary is a joke. "From the other end, it sounds like I'm inside a cardboard box"? Would it really be that much of a stretch for the editors to edit this sentence (or add one of their own) to explain that the people at the other end are experiencing choppy reception because of a microphone issue?
They are hoping to have prizes worth as much as one billion dollars. The only hitch? Congress won't let them.
I'm hoping to blow a billion dollars on stuff too. The only hitch? My bank manager won't let me.
The Who's John Entwistle Dead. Front page article. Go figure.
Any more off-topic than, say, the anniversaries of events such as the Apollo 11 lunar landing or the attacks of September 11th?
Man, Slashdot is run by the editors for the editors. A member of a rock group dying of a drug overdose made the front page simply because he happened to be in CmdrTaco favourite band. There's no rhyme or reason to this shit, they just make it up as they go along. Always have and always will.
And, no, I don't like the latter any more than you do.
1. It's news. It's the 20th anniversary of the event if you hadn't noticed.
2. It's relevant to all of us. It speaks volumes about corporate responsibility, or rather the lack of it, in a time when corporations wield more power than ever. Worse, elected politicians whose pockets are lined directly and indirectly by these corporations are constantly giving them more protection and less responsibility.
3. Corporations should be wholly accountable for their actions and brought to book when they screw up. I think the world's biggest industrial disaster, which killed and maimed tens of thousands of people, falls into the category of actions for which someone should squarely take responsibility: don't you?
I have to ask: if you don't think that killing 15,000 people without even coming close to properly paying for the crime, or even poisoning a city without even coming close to properly putting things right, is something to question corporations about then when is it to OK to do so?
I don't know what the hell your statistics prove,or even if they're right, but I do know that, wherever he or she is, your high school mathematics teacher would be proud of you.
Have you given serious thought to a career in marketing or PR? With that kind of commitment to mumbo jumbo and ridiculous statistics you'd be a natural.
My nephew learned that he could get what he wanted from the fridge by opening the freezer compartment first, pulling out its draws one -by-one and using them as stairs so he could reach his goal. His age at the time? Barely more than two years old.
Don't ever assume that because they can't reach it from the ground that they can't reach it at all. Kids aren't stupid and they learn damn fast.
Oh my God. You're bitching about paying fractionally more than the Canadians are?
1. Well boo fucking hoo. Do you see dozens of Brits and Europeans complaining about the price of downloads from Apple's UK and EU stores? I'm not sure what the EU store pricing is set at but I know it's far more than the US one. And the UK one is more expensive still: 79p per track, which at current exchange rates (almost £1.00=$2.00) is equivalent to $1.50+.
2. The Canadian iTMS might be a little cheaper than the US one right now but you haven't taken into account the direction that the US dollar is heading, which is down, down, down. Give it six months and instead of one US dollar being worth more than one Canadian dollar it most probably be the other way around. So, those tracks that you're bitching about being cheaper in Canada will have become more expensive in Canada.
3. Find something more important than the price of music downloads to be pissed off about. Try the environment, civil rights or something else that suggests that you're capable of thinking about someone other than yourself for a change.
What would be the point? Gee, well, I think at the very least that some sort of rescue mission would have been attempted. Remember Apollo 13? Most people wrote those guys off as dead but they still got back home in one piece, didn't they? Are you really suggesting that if Columbia's crippled heatshield had been discovered by an HST inspection that the full force of the US wouldn't have been put behind a bold rescue attempt? I don't know about you, but I'm pretty certain that it would have.
And, if nothing else, early discovery of the problem would have given those on board Columbia the chance to talk to their loved ones one last time with that knowledge, or prepare appropriate messages for them in the event of a negative outcome.
No one nipping at NASA's heels, eh? Well, no one apart from China, India, Japan... Granted, they've got a lot of ground to make up but it's far easier to overtake a stationary target than a moving one.
1. If you're not moving forward then you're at least standing still. You do understand that, right? And if NASA is standing still (ie, you're inactive) while Russia and others aren't (ie, they're at least doing something to move forward) it's not unreasonable to say that, "relatively speaking, given the inactivity of NASA, this Russian programme is flourishing". QED.
2. The seven people on a shuttle mission include a pilot and commander that, frankly, do nothing of scientific value. And, dollar for dollar, you can get more done (more people or more cargo launched) with Soyuz and/or other delivery systems. Even NASA's other launch vehicles are far more cost-effective than the STS, which is why they were put back into service.
3. When you're talking about space flight, safety should be paramount. Certainly, politics should be way down the list. In the case of Columbia, there were specific checks that the engineers wanted to perform once Columbia was in orbit - for example, they wanted to re-align the HST to look at the damage done to the orbiter's heat shield, which would have told NASA straight away that any re-entry attempt was doomed - but were dismissed by management that didn't want to concede even the slightest hint of weakness.
Because they didn't want to risk the bad publicity that they were sure would accompany such checks those managers were willing to gamble the lives of seven astronauts, as well as the future of NASA's manned programme and perhaps even NASA itself. Now, I don't know what you call that, but I sure as hell don't call it good management let alone good science.
As I said, I'm as much a realist now as I am a dreamer. From my point of view, NASA's heyday was the 60s and 70s, but in the 80s, 90s and in this decade it's done next to nothing to fulfill its potential. Does it not irk you that it's been 35 years since man first stepped on the moon and 32 years since he was last there? We haven't been to the moon in over a generation. Please, tell me that's not what you call progress.
Re-read my post. I didn't say that NASA is lagging behind anyone, what I said was that NASA doesn't seem to be moving forward in any clear direction.
It's clear from your post that you think that the STS really is the best thing out there. Well, as others have pointed out in other posts, the STS is neither truly reusable (because after every mission everything gets stripped down and replaced) nor cost-effective (because, per kilogram of payload, it's far more expensive than any of its major competitors).
When the STS was first proposed, NASA talked about multiple launches a week and seven day turnaround times for orbiters. The reality of the situation is completely different. The STS, which was always a compromise, has never come close to delivering on its potential, and poor management at NASA hasn't helped that situation.
Believe me, I want NASA to succeed as much as anyone else. I've bought into the dream. I've taken a transatlantic trip to see a shuttle launch. I've visited the Kennedy Space Center. I've spent far more than I should have in the gift shop. But, as I've grown older, I'm not the dreamer I once was. The dreamer in me is still there, but so now is the realist, and the realist says that NASA hasn't lived up to its promise for a very, very long time.
As to whether the Challenger and Columbia disasters could have been avoided, well there's no doubt that the first should have been and the second could have been. In both cases, NASA's internal politics played a big part in ignoring the advice of NASA's own engineers, whose cautionary notes went unheeded. You might dismiss such things with a "shit happens" but, in both cases, shit didn't have to happen.
You can gloss over these things all you want, and make "glass houses" comments all you like, but the bottom line is that NASA doesn't seem to be doing more than standing still and living off its past glories. And to all of us - dreamers and realists alike - who want to see the boundaries of space pushed further and further, that standstill is disappointing.
1. At 4.30am in the morning, with my head about to hit the keyboard, my typing's not perfect. Is yours?
2. I don't get paid for this gig. The Slashdot editors do.
There was one a couple of weeks back that appeared on the front page less than two hours after the orignal story did, and with only one other story separating them. I can't remember the exact time differential, but it was something like one hour and 47 minutes - that's got to be some kind of record.
All the comments made to the second story (apart from the usual trolls) pointed out the ridiculousness of the situation. Eventually, the whole dupe and all the attached comments were erased, as if it never existed.
Whereas in the past all such dupes would have been left alone, now it looks like some of them are being deleted after the fact. So, rather than cure the disease - by actually vetting stories properly, doing basic fact checking, etc, like all proper news outlets would - it seems that the Slashdot "editors" have chosen to treat the symptoms - by covering up their mistakes after they've been made.
I swear, in 99.99 percent of businesses, if people ran things this way then heads would roll pretty damn fast.
Hmmm, I believe the standard response to such a comment is "You're new around here, aren't you?"
Seriously, spelling errors in story summaries are so damn common that they're practically part of the Slasdot experience, together with dupes, occasional fakes, "news" stories that are days, weeks or even months old, and editorial comments appended to summaries that are entirely inappropriate for what claims to be a news site (but is closer to a news-related meta-blog).
I imagine that that "odd collection of football helmets" is related to a NFL- or college football-related game that they worked on at some time. Pretty simple explanation really. "43,000 video game 'cartridges'" does seem like an awful lot though.
Lacking any real commitment, and it has done since the days when Blue Streak, the only launch vehicle in history to have a 100 percent record, was shelved. Margaret Thatcher scaled back Britain's participation in ESA and successive governments have done little more than make half-hearted gestures.
Britain's space programme is virtually non-existant beyond satellites, ground-based observatories and the occassional extra-planetary mission to passing comets. Beagle 2 was hobbled together on a shoestring and at next to no time. Anyone who has serious aspirations about becoming an astronaut is virtually forced to take up a second nationality, as Michael Foale did. Having said that, the National Space Centre, which was delayed for years because of a lack of proper funding, is now up and running, so perhaps we're finally starting to make progress.
However, I've no doubt that if Britain had a space agency level of political and financial commitment that NASA has had for over 40 years then we would have something more concrete to show for it. Whether that something would have been anything more than a token effort is a hypothetical debate for another time. Certainly, something like the Hubble Space Telescope wouldn't have been out of the question, but why waste time speculating about what ifs?
But let's talk about the thinly-veiled reasoning behind your question. If you're suggesting that I'm in no position to comment because my own nation's space programme is pathetic, well, Frankly I find that just sad. It's unfortunate that the only way you can think to reply to comments about how rudderless NASA seems right now is to come back with a pithy comment that fails to address any of the points that I've made. Certainly you haven't added to the debate, have you?
It's this sort of shit - refusing to acknowledge facts that are staring you in the face, ignoring any problems that appear and just hoping that things will work out for the best in the end - that killed the crew of Columbia in the first place.
Come back to me when you have something constructive to say.
Well, it's a bit hard to build something as complex as a spacecraft before you've designed it first, and that's the step that's just been taken with Kliper.
Your retort would be more valid if NASA was actually making similar progress: ie, designing possible STS replacements and giving its own manned programme some sort of direction. As it is, NASA seems to be (if you'll pardon the pun) in a terminally decaying orbit.
Whereas NASA's manned programme once had a clear vision and message - using the STS in conjunction with the ISS as a stepping stone to more orbitally-based research and then on to bigger and better things - now it's unclear where exactly NASA is heading.
Manned missions to the Moon? To Mars? Well, sure, those have been mentioned in "rallying the troops" kind of fashion after the Columbia disaster but where's the substance?
The reality of the situation is that the STS is grounded, and even when (if) it returns to flight status it's going to be a lame duck. And I don't even want to contemplate how disasterous another shuttle loss would be.
So, relatively speaking, given the inactivity of NASA, this Russian programme is flourishing. I don't know about you, but I'm glad that people with as much experience of manned spaceflight as the Russians haven't cashed out of this game just yet and are still willing, scientifically if not politically, to develop the technologies to further our exploration of space.
Can you imagine the amount of doublethink that would be going on in the head of the average Slashdotter if it turned out that he's a VB programmer?
Picture the conclusion of the Darth Vader vs Luke Skywalker lightsabre battle in Empire Strikes Back with Ken Jennings in the role of Vader and the Slashdotter in the role of Luke, but instead of Vader telling Luke that he's his father, Jennings is telling the Slashdotter that he's a VB-only coder.
I don't know about you but I can practically hear the "No. No. That's not true! That's impossible!", etc, right now.
Try telling anyone who's from Northern Ireland (and who isn't a republican) that they're not British. See how far you get before they mention some sort of violent reprisal.
Technically, you're correct, but when British is mentioned as a nationality then it includes Northern Ireland.
They would have bought them earlier but a bunch of Americans were first in line.
Oh, and by the way British and English aren't interchangeable terms. For example, people from Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands are British too.
Well, I guess I do, because even credit cards can be used in ATMs nowadays, but I've not used any card in any ATM for a good six years now and there's no way I could tell you what my PIN was even in my life depended on it.
Yes, but not as cure-alls for every possible ailment, which is what they were for centuries.
There should be something like the NIH in every country if not a global equivalent. But the most important part of the equation is having impartial, experienced scientists rather than partisan, uninformed politicians decide what should and shouldn't be studied.
I think we all know that it's scientific research and not politics or religion that we have to thank for things like penicillin, etc.
Results without the ethical issues.
Unless, of course, you're a Jehovah's Witness, or a member of any other faith (Christian and non-Christian) that has strict rules about what's right and what's wrong when it comes to medical procedures...
What's the betting that the Christian right still uses this as an excuse to preach from the pulpit? These people are the modern-day descendents of the morality police that retarded medical science for centuries. If they had prevailed throughout then the most advanced medicinal procedures around today would still be boring into skulls to release demons or a course of leeches to suck out evil.