What the heck does abortion have to do with using frozen IVF embryos that are never going to become babies and will be destroyed in any case? They're separate issues.
I would much rather give any embryos that I might generate from IVF (if I ever needed it) to research than simply flush em. I'd rather my dead body was used for research or transplantation (and then I'd rather it rot and feed other things) rather than being embalmed.
It's one's choice not to allow transplantation, or to allow these therapies to be used. However, I don't understand how one could possibly call it more respectful of life. Hey, the fetal cell lines are STILL ALIVE, and discarded IVF embryos are not. Can they feel pain? No. Can they help pain? Yes.
So bow your head and thank them for their sacrifice, just as some people thank the plants and animals that become our food. Avoid them, if you choose. But don't fool yourself into thinking you're protecting life.
Err... generally, if you have a proof of security of an algorithm, you prove that there exists no polynomial-time adversary who can do whatever bad thing x you are trying to prevent. (which is generally a complete overkill kind of x)
This proof is subject to some assumptions that you lay out to begin with. Factorization of safe primes of "sufficient length" is one of them, sure. If someone can break the assumption, they can generally break the algorithm.
This is/still/ not equivalent to saying "x is not vulnerable to these kinds of attacks". It's saying "there does not exist an attack on x that does not break these well-defined assumptions".
Cryptography without assumptions has unconditional security. An example of this is OTP, but it's far from the only one. But yes, all public-key encryption is based on trapdoors, which imply one-way functions, which require complexity assumptions at this point.
I'm professionally nit-picky, as well as professionally paranoid:)
It depends on what part of computer science you're talking about. By and large theorists, cryptographers, and type theorists are slightly more practical mathemeticians.
However, systems researchers are doing something far closer to science than I. They take a complex system and attempt to model and study it, so that they can improve it. They run experiments and get data with weird noise and signals they don't expect. The system may be man-made, but it's still a complex system, whose behavour is sufficiently unpredictable so as to require a deductive approach.
(At least this is what the systems people tell me when I ask them to explain to me why what they're doing is research, when to me it looks like making software.)
It's very likely (s)he's not being exploited, that that's just how they are, or they're very driven to publish. To a large extent, they filter for such people in grad school. If you love what you're doing so much you forget to eat and sleep, you've got a big step up.
Pay still sucks for grad students, though.;)
Lea
Re:Sounds like Arthur Anderson...
on
NYT on EA Games
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, pet peeve:
cache' is the french past participle for "hidden"
cachet is a mark of distinction
Now you know, and knowing is half the battle. Grammar nazi up, up, and away. (I do realize I am using the Oxford comma.)
I have several friends who don't have citizenship. Several were citizens of the USSR (they could have claimed Russian passports, along with mandatory service, and were trying to get US passports).
Most countries don't base citizenship on where you were born, but what country your parents are from. The US is rather unusual in having both forms of citizenship.
>Is it really so hard to believe that 2 people in separate countries can be interested in each other without some hidden motive?
A rather common case of this is in graduate schools. You have large population of students from all over the world, who tend, on average, to have problems dating non-grad students. (Not a dig against either population. There are simply a lot of people who don't understand why you really do want/need to go back to work on Friday night.) I'm engaged to a Canadian, myself. We would very much like to live in the same country, so that means someone's moving countries.
On that note, I'd like to point out a rather sad fact of current immigration policy. My fiance and I are rather lucky insofar as we're attracted to persons of the opposite gender. I know other people who are unlucky enough not to have the rights we enjoy insofar as visa considerations and so forth. To be denied the ability to live with your committed lover is a travesty, in my opinion.
My point is that generics often have a lot of random things in em that people avoid. There is no "vegetarian" mark in the U.S., and a lot of random things have meat (or meat derivitives) in them. For example: twinkies may or may not be vegetarian, but it doesn't say in the ingredients. (It actually says this in the ingredients.) I've found food in the EU to be a lot easier for me to eat, as on average it has fewer irrelevent ingredients in it.
Ugliripe is a variety, not a brand. They're a type of heirloom tomatoes that aren't often grown noawadays because they look funny, but taste wonderful. Similarly, organic isn't a brand, it's a growing style.
>But groceries are cheap and experimentation is fun.
Groceries are cheap. Some people have certain dietary resstrictions that keep them from eating J. Random Generic whatever. For example, I can't eat generic vegetable soup. Why? It has meat in it. (It also tastes shitty, and I make my own, but that's not the issue.) Baked beans are another area where buying Heinz actually pays off, in my experience. (Normal canned beans, no, and I'm restricted to vegetarian fare here.)
In any case. I at least buy almost all organic food. I find that, on average, generic organic doesn't suck nearly as much as generic generic. Organic growers also tend to grow veggies and fruits which might not be as pretty, but taste absolutely wonderful. (Ugliripe tomatoes are stunning if you're used to the normal stuff.) Apples taste like... apples. (Nonorganic granny smiths tend to have a bitter skin, for some reason.) You can actually use the lemon peel to cook with! (Peels on nonorganic lemons taste downright disgusting, to the point where you really don't want to put a slice of lemon even in your cold water.)
>You should hang out with undergrads or community college students and ask them "hey anyone here want to dedicate thousands of hours to a cool open source project, take flames from asshats, compliments from users and not get paid a dime for it?"....;-o
Be careful about tarring "academics" with a brush like that, that's all I'm saying. At least in the definition of the word I'm used to, you're talking about people who have chosen to spend their lives making and giving away cool and interesting things, and explaining those things to others.
I personally believe that it's very important to help students find a passion. Most won't be the same as mine, but the more I say "look! isn't this cool and interesting", the more people I might inspire to put that sort of dedication into something.
>It's because of people like you that I sit in a college where "easy tests" is a good thing.
*cough*
I thought "easy tests" were a good thing. on the other hand, that was becasue I thought preparing for tests wa a waste of time. if I can't walk in an do very well, I don't know the material well enough, or the test is badly written.
example: multivariate calculus. 6-problem exams, where each problem was quite trivial if you knew the material and pretty much impossible if you didn't. now that is a good test. it's also an easy test, assuming you're where you need to be on the material.
> Hardly anyone does anything [particularly in academia] for the simple pleasure of doing a good job, learning something new and giving back to the community.
well, I am in academia, but I'd have to say that pretty much anyone in academia does it because they're highly motivated, since grad school can be pretty miserable and demanding. (perhaps we have different definitions of academia. I'm thinking grad students and profs, basically) what you're citing as a rate event I'd have to say is the norm. sure, publishing a paper helps me out, since it makes getting a job easier, and I want to get people to pay me. however, the reason I want people to pay me is so I can do interesting things, learn interesting things, and teach interesting things. it's incredibly fun to go to someone with something new and interesting you did and say "look! cool!"
Oh, and I wouldn't be using MD5 anymore, if I were you. SHA-1 has only been cracked to ~36 rounds (without IV quite a bit more), so it's currently considered secure, though people are looking at replacing it quite quickly, based on the results presented at Crypto this year.
If you want to do this really "right" in a way that's probably massive overkill for your application, I wrote a paper on doing this. http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~reiter/papers/2004/ACNS.pd f
Someone's using this paper for a class, so there are slides for it: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q= +site:www1.cs.columbia.edu+private+keyword-based+p ush+and+pull
If you're really interested in search over encrypted data, email me what you need to do, and I'd be happy to take a look at it for you.
Lea
Re:I realized something while reading the article.
on
Intro to Encryption
·
· Score: 1
Different cryptosystems have different properties, some of which are incredibly useful. These examples are somewhat lame; I just pulled an all-nighter for the eurocrypt deadline.
Example 1: Partially homomorphic cryptosystems. Want to be able to add (or multiply, but not both) encrypted numbers? Now you can!
Example 2: What if you need the set of numbers that your cryptosystem encrypts to have some sort of mathematical structure? (a ring or a field or so on) For example, if you have polynomials where each coefficient is taken from a field, you can factor the polynomial. Trust me, it's useful. I would kill for this particular property right now. You can do incredibly cool things with polynomials. If anyone's interested, I have a brand-shiny-new paper.
Example 3: Key privacy. If I have two ciphertexts, I can still tell whose keys they're encrypted under, unless the cryptosystem is key-private. So evesdroppers might not be able to tell what you're sending to that anonymous remailer, but they can tell who you're sending it to.
Example 4: Faster encryption/decryption and shorter key-length. Randomness can be expensive to generate and transmit. OTP is only practical if you have a reliable offline method of sending key material (and a lot of it). What if your courier is killed? Does that mean an undercover agent can't tell his home base about a terrorist threat? A Paillier ciphertext is twice as long as the contents, but there's a pretty large minimum size there (related to security), and it's only going up.
Example 5: Cryptographers and algebreists won't give up. As of last year, the dollar figure associated with factoring the product of two primes (up to a certain size, which is larger than what most people are using for keys) dropped by something like an order of magnatude. If you're sending information that's very expensive and needs to secret for a long time, you'd better be using a heck of a key. Even so, it's possible that someone might construct a better factoring algorithm. What then? People keep looking at and breaking cryptosystems.
Plus, it's interesting math and fun to play with. We use cryptosystems in new and exciting ways, to make interesting interactions between people possible. (Another cryptographer here has a paper on bribing cops, formenting revolution, and hitting on women.)
Be careful about using anything out of that book (or any, really, but specifically that one), as it has some rather intersting known bugs. It's an entertaining read, and good for background.
(And thanks for the comment about protocols; I work mainly on privacy-preserving protocols that deal with large bodies of data. The notions of what constitute security are rather strict, because very subtle corrolations and bugs can be a real problem.)
>Not to defend the professor, but this statement can be said about virtually ANY "successful" (however you want to term this) professor with graduate students. Graduate students tend to be driven already. Couple that with a driven professor....
Errr... no. In the CS Department at CMU, which I have to say is quite a decent school, there are several extremely sucessful professors who don't drive their students; if you're one of their students, you will have to drive yourself. For some of us, this isn't an issue, but not all. Everyone has a different working style, and how much driving you get depends on the advisor's personality.
And as for the reasonable person policy, it is very much a real policy. In fact, it's pretty much the only rule in the department. The department is, in general, very focused on making students' lives easier, and letting them do research. I won't name names, but quite a few people I know have gone to the department and said "I don't believe this is reasonable". The department will give a talking-to to the advisor, if this is in fact the case. They also have a several-day-long meeting every semester called "black friday" where they talk about every student, and how they are progressing and what they can do to help out students with problems. I hear tell (students do not attend) about certain professors that have gotten pretty reamed. I haven't heard of any retaliation at all for using these resources; the department wants happy, productive students.
I am going to boycott them. I was going to go right out on Tuesday (after my deadline) and buy several games of theirs, since I haven't really done anything but work for quite a while.
I'm very, very pissed off at them. I really wanted the Urbz, more than anything, and I can't in good conscience buy it. Instead of buying it, I'm going to have to send them a letter telling them why I'm not going to buy it, or anything else they make, until they make a good effort to fix these sorts of things.
You simply cannot sign away your legal rights in a contract. For example, you cannot be held to a contract you signed to kill someone, or kill yourself. Agreeing to do something illegal is unenforcable.
If their labour practices are illegal, that is true whether someone complains about it or not, and whether they agreed to it or not. Otherwise, there wouldn't be such a stir about assisted suicide, no?
It all comes down to responsibility in some cases. In others, it comes down to really bad luck. For example, my fiance had an officemate in grad school a few years back who was diagnosed with brain cancer. He had health insurance, but you lose student health insurance when you stop being a student, and it's a little difficult to keep a PhD slot when you're undergoing some of the radical things he was. In many situations, he'd be in serious financial trouble. In reality, he went back home, where he happened to have universal health care.
I have another friend who graduated from college about a year ago. He got good health insurance, and has been saving money. He was just diagnosed with metasticised osteosarcoma. I'm not sure what's going to happen to him, but I could somehow see his credit rating getting pretty bad (I'm not sure his mom can pay his bills either, after his dad died a while ago.).
Sometimes, things happen that we have no control over, and that can really screw us over. Medical things fall in that category.
Salon.com has been quite overtly biased in their reporting (but it's easy to take into account and correct for, depending on where you fall), but they cover a lot of things you won't see in major media (or quite a bit before).
In any case, I've seen them present evidence of most of those served vs. non-served statements over the last year or so. I believe they link to copies of the military documents in many cases.
>You'll find very few fundamentalist christians get upset about discussions of subatomic particles because discoveries in subatomic theory are never used by anti-christians as the foundation for a "see, you stupid christians were wrong!"
I read a Jack T. Chick "scripture tract" thing, where one of the characters is trying to prove evolution is wrong. This character claims that there is no such thing as the strong force, and nuclei are held together BY JESUS.
My cat resented the spray of tea resulting from this panel.
I'm 5'9". I'm very, very cold in my 68 degree office, and very unhappy, and often very unproductive. I'm currently wearing pants, socks, shoes, and two sweaters, one with a hood. I'm not sure what else I could do about this one... growing isn't going to help, I don't think:P
It's not that easy to get warmer. My hands, for example, get so terribly cold that I can't type well when I'm in my office. I think typing is a reasonable activity, and I'm already wearing quite a bit of clothing...
Slashdot Mirror
What the heck does abortion have to do with using frozen IVF embryos that are never going to become babies and will be destroyed in any case? They're separate issues.
I would much rather give any embryos that I might generate from IVF (if I ever needed it) to research than simply flush em. I'd rather my dead body was used for research or transplantation (and then I'd rather it rot and feed other things) rather than being embalmed.
It's one's choice not to allow transplantation, or to allow these therapies to be used. However, I don't understand how one could possibly call it more respectful of life. Hey, the fetal cell lines are STILL ALIVE, and discarded IVF embryos are not. Can they feel pain? No. Can they help pain? Yes.
So bow your head and thank them for their sacrifice, just as some people thank the plants and animals that become our food. Avoid them, if you choose. But don't fool yourself into thinking you're protecting life.
Lea
*cough*
BROTHERhood?
hmmmm?
Err... generally, if you have a proof of security of an algorithm, you prove that there exists no polynomial-time adversary who can do whatever bad thing x you are trying to prevent. (which is generally a complete overkill kind of x)
/still/ not equivalent to saying "x is not vulnerable to these kinds of attacks". It's saying "there does not exist an attack on x that does not break these well-defined assumptions".
:)
This proof is subject to some assumptions that you lay out to begin with. Factorization of safe primes of "sufficient length" is one of them, sure. If someone can break the assumption, they can generally break the algorithm.
This is
Cryptography without assumptions has unconditional security. An example of this is OTP, but it's far from the only one. But yes, all public-key encryption is based on trapdoors, which imply one-way functions, which require complexity assumptions at this point.
I'm professionally nit-picky, as well as professionally paranoid
Lea
I did this to a finger (yes, not as exciting), and it wasn't hard tp diagnose from the rather exotic shape my finger took on.
It did cause my primary care physician to sqeal and say "never bring me one of those again!" (and send me down the hall to the orthopedist)
Lea
>Nope. Anything named 'science' isn't.
It depends on what part of computer science you're talking about. By and large theorists, cryptographers, and type theorists are slightly more practical mathemeticians.
However, systems researchers are doing something far closer to science than I. They take a complex system and attempt to model and study it, so that they can improve it. They run experiments and get data with weird noise and signals they don't expect. The system may be man-made, but it's still a complex system, whose behavour is sufficiently unpredictable so as to require a deductive approach.
(At least this is what the systems people tell me when I ask them to explain to me why what they're doing is research, when to me it looks like making software.)
Lea
It's very likely (s)he's not being exploited, that that's just how they are, or they're very driven to publish. To a large extent, they filter for such people in grad school. If you love what you're doing so much you forget to eat and sleep, you've got a big step up.
;)
Pay still sucks for grad students, though.
Lea
Sorry, pet peeve:
cache' is the french past participle for "hidden"
cachet is a mark of distinction
Now you know, and knowing is half the battle. Grammar nazi up, up, and away. (I do realize I am using the Oxford comma.)
Lea
I have several friends who don't have citizenship. Several were citizens of the USSR (they could have claimed Russian passports, along with mandatory service, and were trying to get US passports).
Most countries don't base citizenship on where you were born, but what country your parents are from. The US is rather unusual in having both forms of citizenship.
Lea
>Is it really so hard to believe that 2 people in separate countries can be interested in each other without some hidden motive?
A rather common case of this is in graduate schools. You have large population of students from all over the world, who tend, on average, to have problems dating non-grad students. (Not a dig against either population. There are simply a lot of people who don't understand why you really do want/need to go back to work on Friday night.) I'm engaged to a Canadian, myself. We would very much like to live in the same country, so that means someone's moving countries.
On that note, I'd like to point out a rather sad fact of current immigration policy. My fiance and I are rather lucky insofar as we're attracted to persons of the opposite gender. I know other people who are unlucky enough not to have the rights we enjoy insofar as visa considerations and so forth. To be denied the ability to live with your committed lover is a travesty, in my opinion.
Lea
My point is that generics often have a lot of random things in em that people avoid. There is no "vegetarian" mark in the U.S., and a lot of random things have meat (or meat derivitives) in them. For example: twinkies may or may not be vegetarian, but it doesn't say in the ingredients. (It actually says this in the ingredients.) I've found food in the EU to be a lot easier for me to eat, as on average it has fewer irrelevent ingredients in it.
Ugliripe is a variety, not a brand. They're a type of heirloom tomatoes that aren't often grown noawadays because they look funny, but taste wonderful. Similarly, organic isn't a brand, it's a growing style.
Lea
>But groceries are cheap and experimentation is fun.
:)
Groceries are cheap. Some people have certain dietary resstrictions that keep them from eating J. Random Generic whatever. For example, I can't eat generic vegetable soup. Why? It has meat in it. (It also tastes shitty, and I make my own, but that's not the issue.) Baked beans are another area where buying Heinz actually pays off, in my experience. (Normal canned beans, no, and I'm restricted to vegetarian fare here.)
In any case. I at least buy almost all organic food. I find that, on average, generic organic doesn't suck nearly as much as generic generic. Organic growers also tend to grow veggies and fruits which might not be as pretty, but taste absolutely wonderful. (Ugliripe tomatoes are stunning if you're used to the normal stuff.) Apples taste like... apples. (Nonorganic granny smiths tend to have a bitter skin, for some reason.) You can actually use the lemon peel to cook with! (Peels on nonorganic lemons taste downright disgusting, to the point where you really don't want to put a slice of lemon even in your cold water.)
Anyway, experiment with those
Lea
>You should hang out with undergrads or community college students and ask them "hey anyone here want to dedicate thousands of hours to a cool open source project, take flames from asshats, compliments from users and not get paid a dime for it?". ... ;-o
Be careful about tarring "academics" with a brush like that, that's all I'm saying. At least in the definition of the word I'm used to, you're talking about people who have chosen to spend their lives making and giving away cool and interesting things, and explaining those things to others.
I personally believe that it's very important to help students find a passion. Most won't be the same as mine, but the more I say "look! isn't this cool and interesting", the more people I might inspire to put that sort of dedication into something.
Lea
>It's because of people like you that I sit in a college where "easy tests" is a good thing.
*cough*
I thought "easy tests" were a good thing. on the other hand, that was becasue I thought preparing for tests wa a waste of time. if I can't walk in an do very well, I don't know the material well enough, or the test is badly written.
example: multivariate calculus. 6-problem exams, where each problem was quite trivial if you knew the material and pretty much impossible if you didn't. now that is a good test. it's also an easy test, assuming you're where you need to be on the material.
> Hardly anyone does anything [particularly in academia] for the simple pleasure of doing a good job, learning something new and giving back to the community.
well, I am in academia, but I'd have to say that pretty much anyone in academia does it because they're highly motivated, since grad school can be pretty miserable and demanding. (perhaps we have different definitions of academia. I'm thinking grad students and profs, basically) what you're citing as a rate event I'd have to say is the norm. sure, publishing a paper helps me out, since it makes getting a job easier, and I want to get people to pay me. however, the reason I want people to pay me is so I can do interesting things, learn interesting things, and teach interesting things. it's incredibly fun to go to someone with something new and interesting you did and say "look! cool!"
Lea
Oh, and I wouldn't be using MD5 anymore, if I were you. SHA-1 has only been cracked to ~36 rounds (without IV quite a bit more), so it's currently considered secure, though people are looking at replacing it quite quickly, based on the results presented at Crypto this year.
Lea
If you want to do this really "right" in a way that's probably massive overkill for your application, I wrote a paper on doing this. http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~reiter/papers/2004/ACNS.pd f
= +site:www1.cs.columbia.edu+private+keyword-based+p ush+and+pull
Someone's using this paper for a class, so there are slides for it: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q
If you're really interested in search over encrypted data, email me what you need to do, and I'd be happy to take a look at it for you.
Lea
Different cryptosystems have different properties, some of which are incredibly useful. These examples are somewhat lame; I just pulled an all-nighter for the eurocrypt deadline.
Example 1: Partially homomorphic cryptosystems. Want to be able to add (or multiply, but not both) encrypted numbers? Now you can!
Example 2: What if you need the set of numbers that your cryptosystem encrypts to have some sort of mathematical structure? (a ring or a field or so on) For example, if you have polynomials where each coefficient is taken from a field, you can factor the polynomial. Trust me, it's useful. I would kill for this particular property right now. You can do incredibly cool things with polynomials. If anyone's interested, I have a brand-shiny-new paper.
Example 3: Key privacy. If I have two ciphertexts, I can still tell whose keys they're encrypted under, unless the cryptosystem is key-private. So evesdroppers might not be able to tell what you're sending to that anonymous remailer, but they can tell who you're sending it to.
Example 4: Faster encryption/decryption and shorter key-length. Randomness can be expensive to generate and transmit. OTP is only practical if you have a reliable offline method of sending key material (and a lot of it). What if your courier is killed? Does that mean an undercover agent can't tell his home base about a terrorist threat? A Paillier ciphertext is twice as long as the contents, but there's a pretty large minimum size there (related to security), and it's only going up.
Example 5: Cryptographers and algebreists won't give up. As of last year, the dollar figure associated with factoring the product of two primes (up to a certain size, which is larger than what most people are using for keys) dropped by something like an order of magnatude. If you're sending information that's very expensive and needs to secret for a long time, you'd better be using a heck of a key. Even so, it's possible that someone might construct a better factoring algorithm. What then? People keep looking at and breaking cryptosystems.
Plus, it's interesting math and fun to play with. We use cryptosystems in new and exciting ways, to make interesting interactions between people possible. (Another cryptographer here has a paper on bribing cops, formenting revolution, and hitting on women.)
Lea
Be careful about using anything out of that book (or any, really, but specifically that one), as it has some rather intersting known bugs. It's an entertaining read, and good for background.
(And thanks for the comment about protocols; I work mainly on privacy-preserving protocols that deal with large bodies of data. The notions of what constitute security are rather strict, because very subtle corrolations and bugs can be a real problem.)
Lea
>Not to defend the professor, but this statement can be said about virtually ANY "successful" (however you want to term this) professor with graduate students. Graduate students tend to be driven already. Couple that with a driven professor....
Errr... no. In the CS Department at CMU, which I have to say is quite a decent school, there are several extremely sucessful professors who don't drive their students; if you're one of their students, you will have to drive yourself. For some of us, this isn't an issue, but not all. Everyone has a different working style, and how much driving you get depends on the advisor's personality.
And as for the reasonable person policy, it is very much a real policy. In fact, it's pretty much the only rule in the department. The department is, in general, very focused on making students' lives easier, and letting them do research. I won't name names, but quite a few people I know have gone to the department and said "I don't believe this is reasonable". The department will give a talking-to to the advisor, if this is in fact the case. They also have a several-day-long meeting every semester called "black friday" where they talk about every student, and how they are progressing and what they can do to help out students with problems. I hear tell (students do not attend) about certain professors that have gotten pretty reamed. I haven't heard of any retaliation at all for using these resources; the department wants happy, productive students.
Lea
I am going to boycott them. I was going to go right out on Tuesday (after my deadline) and buy several games of theirs, since I haven't really done anything but work for quite a while.
I'm very, very pissed off at them. I really wanted the Urbz, more than anything, and I can't in good conscience buy it. Instead of buying it, I'm going to have to send them a letter telling them why I'm not going to buy it, or anything else they make, until they make a good effort to fix these sorts of things.
Lea
You simply cannot sign away your legal rights in a contract. For example, you cannot be held to a contract you signed to kill someone, or kill yourself. Agreeing to do something illegal is unenforcable.
If their labour practices are illegal, that is true whether someone complains about it or not, and whether they agreed to it or not. Otherwise, there wouldn't be such a stir about assisted suicide, no?
Lea
It all comes down to responsibility in some cases. In others, it comes down to really bad luck. For example, my fiance had an officemate in grad school a few years back who was diagnosed with brain cancer. He had health insurance, but you lose student health insurance when you stop being a student, and it's a little difficult to keep a PhD slot when you're undergoing some of the radical things he was. In many situations, he'd be in serious financial trouble. In reality, he went back home, where he happened to have universal health care.
I have another friend who graduated from college about a year ago. He got good health insurance, and has been saving money. He was just diagnosed with metasticised osteosarcoma. I'm not sure what's going to happen to him, but I could somehow see his credit rating getting pretty bad (I'm not sure his mom can pay his bills either, after his dad died a while ago.).
Sometimes, things happen that we have no control over, and that can really screw us over. Medical things fall in that category.
Salon.com has been quite overtly biased in their reporting (but it's easy to take into account and correct for, depending on where you fall), but they cover a lot of things you won't see in major media (or quite a bit before).
In any case, I've seen them present evidence of most of those served vs. non-served statements over the last year or so. I believe they link to copies of the military documents in many cases.
Lea
>You'll find very few fundamentalist christians get upset about discussions of subatomic particles because discoveries in subatomic theory are never used by anti-christians as the foundation for a "see, you stupid christians were wrong!"
I read a Jack T. Chick "scripture tract" thing, where one of the characters is trying to prove evolution is wrong. This character claims that there is no such thing as the strong force, and nuclei are held together BY JESUS.
My cat resented the spray of tea resulting from this panel.
Lea
I'm 5'9". I'm very, very cold in my 68 degree office, and very unhappy, and often very unproductive. I'm currently wearing pants, socks, shoes, and two sweaters, one with a hood. I'm not sure what else I could do about this one... growing isn't going to help, I don't think :P
Lea
It's not that easy to get warmer. My hands, for example, get so terribly cold that I can't type well when I'm in my office. I think typing is a reasonable activity, and I'm already wearing quite a bit of clothing...