There are 17/50 states in the US that have such a system at last count, and amusingly, most of them are in the south and the mountain west (see also: accretions of religious fundamentalists not otherwise specified, and the leftovers of the temperance movement). Even states that don't have state-run ABC stores will frequently have a state monopoly on liquor - the state sells wholesale booze to a distributor, who sells it to your local package store. States like this system because it prints money for the state budget, both directly in liquor taxes and indirectly in campaign contributions from distributors (who also like the system because it guarantees them a defined, low cost, a defined, controlled market, and very low competition - there might only be three or four distributors in any given state).
This also doesn't get into dry counties (where the local government has banned booze entirely) or so-called "moist" counties (where the local teetotalers are noisy enough to want a booze ban, but the government and/or business owners don't want to miss out on revenue, so perhaps you can buy beer and wine but not liquor, or you can order drinks in a bar but there are no package stores, or there's one package store in town but no restaurant licenses, or whatever).
True. Moreover, even if you do have some company-provided means of contact for your non-desk job, that number may not remain the same from day to day, or even throughout your day. Case in point: as a staff nurse in a large, busy emergency department, I might be issued any one of twenty-four SpectraLink phones at the start of my shift. Each phone, ideally, goes with a job assignment (e.g. "RN #2, Blue Team"). Thus, if you change assignments in mid-shift, as frequently happens (and frequently with little or no notice), you turn in the phone associated with your old assignment and pick up a new. In any given twelve hours, I might switch between team service (we run four teams), Ambulance Bay, Float, Triage, and/or Resuscitation. Overhead page only works if you're in the department (not a given, particularly if you're on float service, as that means you're usually assigned to transport the real sickies to whatever flavor of Critical Care they'll be occupying next). Moreover, we are routinely admonished by Admin not to use the overhead paging system, as it's considered a noise hazard and detrimental to patient well-being. (See also: Press Ganey happy horsepuckey, but I digress.) Call forwarding isn't an option since, as previously mentioned, the phones are tied to jobs - you need to know you'll always be talking to the Ambulance Bay if you call that number, for example.
Given a system like that, the likelihood of an outside party being able to successfully get hold of you at work, without the assistance of multiple operators and several failed attempts, is pretty slim. Somehow, I don't see the staff at Sometown Elementary being able to reason their way through a parent contact sheet that says "On Mondays from 11A-3P, call 555-1212. From 3-7, call 555-1222. On alternate Tuesdays between 7A and 11A, call 555-1223, unless it's the third Tuesday of the month, in which case I'll be at 555-1335 until 1P," etc.
To that end, our administration runs a fairly benevolent policy on personal cell phones: they have to be silenced while you're on the unit, you can't make calls or use text-based communication in patient care areas, and the phone has to be completely off and stowed (i.e. even "airplane mode" doesn't count) if you work in a no-electronics unit (i.e. Electrophysiology, Interventional Radiology, Critical Care). Phone cameras, and any other form of recording device, are all lumped under the existing regulations on patient and visitor privacy. Luckily we don't have too many issues with phone impairment of productivity, as the nature of the job makes it quite evident when someone isn't working...
Sorry, no. You're thinking of a PCA (patient controlled analgesia) pump, which has very rigorously programmed lockout settings to prevent accidental overdose. PCAs, in most hospitals, also require the use of a two-person physical lock to change the settings, neither of whom can be the prescribing physician - so now your hypothetical doctor has to have at least two nurses employed at that hospital and on that unit who are willing to be complicit in his/her scheme, and who will also be willing to risk their jobs, licenses and felony jail time by reprogramming the PCA, which may or may not also involve falsifying medication administration records. Finally, a PCA can only be used by a patient who is awake, alert and has sufficient dexterity to push the dosage button. (We routinely catch family members of patients on PCAs pushing the button for their sick relatives, in the well-intended but misguided belief that they are relieving the patient's pain. First-time offenders are escorted from the premises by Security and barred from the patient's room unsupervised. Do it again and the police get involved. That kind of incident is also quite likely to earn the hospital a visit from the "friendly" local DEA field office, with hordes of federal agents crawling over every flat surface in search of even a nanogram of potentially unaccounted-for drugs. Hence, hospitals have ZERO sense of tolerance for PCA follies.)
Incidentally, Jack Kevorkian's original suicide machine was largely based on the PCA pump concept. The problem was, most of his patients were so far gone that they couldn't push the button themselves, so he had to do it for them... which neatly hopped over the border from "assisted suicide" to "homicide." Oops.
That said, there are scores if not hundreds of ways you can die in a health care setting. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them A) take an extended period of time, B) are acutely painful or distressing to the patient or those around him/her, and/or C) involve the use of life support systems with built-in alarms, the tampering of which would be rapidly caught by staff, who are then duty bound to resuscitate the patient. Those that are rapid, painless and effective (for example, most hospital staff would tell you they'd pick IV insulin for their hypothetical final exits - you lose consciousness within minutes and go into PEA/asystole shortly thereafter) also require the cooperation of a medically trained and licensed outside party to effect - for which, see also "homicide." Back to square one...
That's because surgical steel (316L) is non-magnetic and poorly conductive. The same material is used for sternal wires, joint implants and orthopedic stabilization hardware (pins, plates, screws, et al). Titanium is another common, non-magnetic material for implantables.
We do scan people with implanted items, but the catch is that we need to know exactly what the implant is, what it's made of, and to what extent it'll react under a magnetic field. (Say for example you had your knee replaced in some developing country with a "DePew" or "Striker" * joint implant, then later require an MRI for diagnosis of head pain or back pain. Cue a very messy trip to the MR room and us writing your lawyer a very large check.) Hence the radiologist review if anything on your safety form pops up positive. Being as we know when your wire was installed and what it's made of, this would not pose a problem - but for the patient in the example, we're not scanning until we get the records from wherever and figure out what exactly is in that knee.
* cf. DePuy or Stryker, internationally known makers of orthopedic hardware - implying that the example joint is a counterfeit made of common, magnetic steel.
For MRI, anything that might be even remotely magnetic is a no-go. Medical MRI systems start at 1.5 T and go up to 3 T, so anything in, on or near your body that can be affected by a magnetic field, will be. We have a two-page-long MRI safety form that we walk patients through prior to an MRI - if anything on the form is positive, you're not getting your scan until a radiologist reviews precisely what the offending item is and approves or denies the scan. (This includes tattoos, BTW - some tattoo pigments are ferrous, and the pigment particles can heat up enough under the MRI field to cause burns.)
In the surgical environment, we're usually not dealing with magnets, but electrosurgery (i.e. Bovie pen) is ubiquitous, and implanted metal can do unpleasant things within the return circuit. Hence, if it isn't a known surgical implant (i.e. if we don't know precisely what its electrical and thermal conductive properties are), you're not going to the OR with it.
Long answer: In medical-surgical units (your basic, low-acuity "floor nursing" kind of places), nobody much cares because none of those patients have any kind of fancy monitoring going on, and most of them are stable enough to go home within a day or so anyway. Hence, everybody and their brother has mobile phones, netbooks and the like, and some hospitals even go so far as to provide free WiFi on those floors. That isn't the case in critical care. In ICU and its sub-variants (medical, surgical, neonatal and so forth), since every patient has a pile of invasive care systems (ventilators, arterial lines, Swan-Ganz catheters, Vigileos, CRRT, IABP, ECMO, etc) and half a dozen pumped drips, you will see signage EVERYWHERE warning you not to bring in any active electronics, and the staff will hunt you down if they suspect you might be "carrying." I very nearly got kicked out of a PICU a year and a half ago for having a Palm m515 (!) with my copies of Lexi-Comp, Harriet Lane and Mosby's Critical Care Nursing, and we wrote up a doctor who brought an iPhone to the CV-SICU in my preceptorship.
Emergency is kind of a mixed bag. Some places ban electronics entirely in the fear of compromising critical patients' monitoring and treatment systems, others realize it's a losing endeavor and just try to separate the critical from the walkie-talkies as much as physically possible. (I dare you to walk into a room full of combative drunks and tell them you're confiscating their mobile phones because they're interfering with the Vigileo on the sepsis patient two doors down. Let me know how many stitches you require afterward.)
Does all that rigmarole actually save lives? Probably not. I think a lot of it is throwback to the days of bag phones, when doctors and other big shots routinely walked around with what amounted to unlicensed nuclear accelerators on their shoulders, and the electronics really WERE that sensitive to interference. On the other hand, I've seen monitoring equipment go haywire when patients' family members attempted to make cellular calls, and return to normal function once the offenders were escorted off the unit. In any case, we'll always err on the side of caution - better safe than sued.
In certain environments, such as hospitals and healthcare facilities, ANY wireless functionality can interfere with patient equipment. Doesn't matter if your smartphone uses 3G, WiFi or sub-etheric holowave - either your hospital's Biomedical Engineering department will have to take it apart and certify it for use (good luck with that), or you can't have it. This is why we still use one-way pagers when 99.44% of the world has moved on to SMS, and why the only mobile phone you can have on a unit is a $600 SpectraLink that looks and acts like a throwback to 1995. There are also lots of workplaces that restrict wireless connectivity for security purposes, in which just disabling the functionality isn't good enough.
Niche market, to be sure, but there still is a market for non-wireless PDAs.
You're right - for a product to be considered "absorbable" or "degradable" in patient care, the product has to eventually break down to compounds that the body naturally metabolizes. Classic example: Vicryl (tm), polyglactin 910 (90% glycolide/10% lactide polymer) suture. Water causes it to break down into glycolic acid and lactic acid, usually over the course of 56 days in tissue (unless it's placed in a wet environment, in which case it breaks down faster.) Both compounds are things your body generates and metabolizes on a daily basis, and no trace of the suture remains in the body once it's been broken down, hence the suture is "absorbable." Absorbable products can be made of synthetic compounds (Vicryl and other synthetic absorbable sutures, hyaluronic acid preparations) or of naturally occurring substances (plain and chromic gut sutures, various preparations of collagen).
Back to TFA, this stuff doesn't look a whole lot different from demineralized bone matrix, which is already fairly common (although expensive as hell). DBX doesn't really provide any immediate structural strength to compromised bone, since it's only bone protein with no mineral structure. It just provides a scaffold for the body's own osteoblasts to build on - it allows them to skip a step in fracture repair, in other words. Calling it "injectable bone" might be a bit of a stretch.
(Full disclosure: The author is a former surgical rep turned nursing student.)
1) Educating and qualifying mechanics to work on the car. Your average Joe at the gas station isn't going to be able to service this thing right off the bat, nor will he be able to open the hood and figure it out after a few minutes' inspection. At least for the first two or three years this car is on the market, you'll be forced to rely on dealer service, simply because there won't be trained mechanics anywhere else. And if you break down someplace where there isn't a dealer handy, you're hosed. A hobbyist owner might be able to repair the car, to a greater or lesser extent, but those repairs might void the warranty, or in some states may disqualify the car from street service entirely.
2) Availability of parts. There is lots and lots more that goes into an electric car, or indeed any car, besides a few hundred feet of wire, an electric motor and a few batteries. If your alternator dies, if you have to replace a transmission or some other drivetrain component, if your windshield cracks, all of those require many more parts to complete beyond the obvious part that's malfunctioning. The problem is compounded if you have multiple systems damaged at once, as in the context of an accident. You'll have to have some mechanism in place to get those parts from their Chinese manufacturers to a U.S. dealer service department, quickly and efficiently. (This is harder than it sounds; as a personal example, I can confirm that for a certain well-known German luxury manufacturer, a replacement front bumper fascia took three weeks to ship from Stuttgart, where replacing the same part on an American vehicle took two days.)
On a related note, you also have to worry about the general lack of infrastructure. Right or wrong, as it stands right now the entire transportation infrastructure in the US is set up to deal with internal combustion vehicles. Changing over to an electric infrastructure is going to take time, at least two or three years and probably more like five or seven, during which time the drivers of electric vehicles are going to be at a major disadvantage. You won't be able to charge most places, won't be able to get service most places, might not be able to drive on freeways or other limited access roads (at least here, freeways are restricted to internal combustion vehicles with engines greater than 125 CC displacement, which can't be powered farm equipment, and must be able to maintain a minimum speed of 55 MPH). Those restrictions might be enough to put people off electrics entirely, or at the very least slow their adoption. It'd be a damned shame if that happened, but it's a very real risk. In the meanwhile, everyone who bought these electric cars will be in the lurch, and if the manufacturer folds, the vehicles will be little more than hobby pieces.
I'll go you one better: we have a major surface street here in Metro Detroit named Big Beaver Road (also known as 16 Mile Road). To make matters worse, Big Beaver has an exit off I-75... Exit #69. Email filtering systems have been flagging and deleting that for years. Considering that 16 Mile runs through most of Troy, Birmingham and West Bloomfield (three major business and residential suburbs), you'd think that someone would have fixed it by now.
I have fond memories of Pitfall on an Apple 2E (PR#6, Baby!)
Oh yes, the old disk access command. Apple IIe FTW.
On our school computers, the command for gaming was CATALOG S2 D2 E17 - that gave you Moon Buggy, Horse Race, Pitfall and one other game I'm forgetting. (I loved that old Corvus network. 1 Mbps over twisted-pair when the Ethernet world was still in garden hose.)
You forgot to scrub down your body with a high-level disinfectant (potentially traceable commensal bacteria on your skin). After that, you'll have to spend the rest of your life in a full-body skin garment (DNA from shed skin cells). And you'll have to wear a full-helmet respirator (exhaled trace chemicals from your bloodstream, potentially traceable). And your suit will have to contain and reprocess all your wastes (DNA from epithelial cells in your urine/feces). And you can never speak a word (identification through voice analysis).
...And now that you look like Hollywood's best guess at an extraterrestrial, other paranoids can use you as evidence that "They" have been concealing the existence of sentient alien life. Awesome!
(Full disclosure: This post contains high levels of sarcasm, which may be traceable in readers' thought patterns. Do not read if you're worried about "Them" detecting your brainwaves or some other such B.S.)
Being a fellow detroit commuter I have seen a nice big escalade SUV hit at 85 with a semi truck. there was nothing left for the EMT's to scrape up. so your example means nothing. ANYTHING versus a semi truck = death.
Two different crash mechanisms at work. What's going to kill someone in an Escalade or any other big SUV is rolling over and/or being ejected; what's going to kill someone in a compact/subcompact is deceleration. All else being equal, the vehicle with more mass wins every time in a crash; the risk factor in the case of an SUV is the fact that the mass sits high, increasing the risk of a fatal roll. In the case of the 'Slade vs. the semi, you get a double whammy.
And you are missing the fact that the mixing bowl every morning is filled with itty bitty cars that have far worse crash ratings. Honda insight.. There are a ton of them on 96/696 on the way in the morning. Those beer cans crumple and fold in really easily when you look at a crashed one. hell the rearending on them are pretty nasty and that happens all the time in detroit.
And they make a lovely mess for us when they get to the hospital, too....Seriously, subcompacts are great for city driving. People can get a Smart or an Aveo or whatever and zip around whatever suburb they like all day long. However, I don't think ANY of them are safe on American interstates, and certainly not in the demolition derbies we call Detroit freeways. They get away with it in other countries because cars overall are smaller, you don't see the SUV overload you do here, and people pay attention to the road and drive defensively. Here, what you see even more than the little cars (see below for my thoughts on those) is some doofus in an SUV or a minivan, chatting on the phone, yelling at the kids and fiddling with the rear-seat DVD player all while trying to control a 4,000-lb hunk of steel at 80 MPH. I wouldn't like my chances against that numbskull if I were driving an Abrams tank. Why anyone would want to chance it in a Campbell's soup can of a car (and yes, I see scads of them out there on 696 too) is beyond me.
Please don't misunderstand, I'd be the absolute last person to tell someone to drive an SUV. I haven't driven one since 1999, and I'm forever telling those in my family who do to get rid of them. Even with ESP packages and center-of-gravity manipulation, they roll far too often (far more fatal than any other form of crash), and the high bumpers make them a hazard to smaller vehicles. As you might have noticed from my previous disclosure line, I drive a small-midsize sedan, and I'd far rather see people in sedans and station wagons than SUVs. The fuel economy issue doesn't concern me so much, though it certainly doesn't help; it's what happens to a crash victim, and from that standpoint, SUVs are at a massive disadvantage. Always have been, always will be.
What concerns me about the Smart cars, and concerns me even more after watching the second responder's YouTube video, is the fact that the car appears to be preserving its own structure at the expense of the passengers, when it should be the other way around. It's absolutely wonderful that the "steel safety cell" survived a 70 MPH impact into concrete intact. A triumph of engineering, that. My concern is that if the frame isn't absorbing impact energies, and the crumple zone is too small to impart more than a trivial reduction in crash force (I'll SWAG it and say 5 MPH, 10 at the outside), all that energy is going straight to the passengers. In ANY small car (again, as shown by the video), that's generally not survivable. Thus, I'd have to wonder why someone would ever want to put themselves at that kind of risk by driving such a vehicle in an environment where it's at a potentially fatal disadvantage.
Commentary over - we now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion.
While you're right that old GM was a steaming pile of freshly squeezed lemon peels, new GM is actually pretty good these days. Hell of a lot better than the other two Midsized Three, in terms of initial quality and reliability.
Although I'm aware that anecdote and data have little to do with each other, we've owned vehicles from all of the American manufacturers and three foreign (Mercedes, Toyota and Jaguar). The basement was squarely occupied by... Mercedes. Yes, the kings of German engineering, gave us not one but two vehicles that were in the shop more days than not (a 2004 CLK320 Cabrio and a 2007 E350 4Matic), due to failures including a faulty fuel tank sensor that resulted in a fuel-out failure, faulty alternator and battery resulting in undrivable car, faulty radiator hose that blew coolant all over Woodward Avenue, multiple broken tire pressure sensors, and a squeaky/leaking convertible top. Also, normal driving resulted in loss of front end alignment, and God help you if you hit a pothole - you'd be fighting a 15-degree list all the way to the dealer.
After that, from worst to best:
Ford (cruise control failure caused uncontrollable acceleration when on, CC had to be disabled; electrical harness failure blew fuses when windshield wipers were turned on, eventually caused fire in headliner; bad idle programming in engine control module caused intermittent stall)
Jaguar (repeated failures of engine interlock module resulted in undrivable car if left parked in temperatures outside a window of 55-70 deg F for more than 10 minutes)
Jeep (replaced three sets of brake rotors due to warping; lack of cover over air intakes resulted in ingested road debris and FOD to air filtration systems)
Toyota (few "stupid stuff" recalls, no major maintenance issues)
GMC (no recalls, one TPMS error - five-minute dealer fix) Saab (no recalls, no maintenance issues)
5-star, as in NHTSA 5-star? That doesn't exactly make me feel warm and fuzzy. The NHTSA test only applies to two types of crash: a controlled head-on crash at 35 MPH, and a controlled perpendicular side-impact (T-bone) crash at 35 MPH. Neither of those have any bearing at all on crashes in the real world, which tend to be either offset or rollover (or both, when a car flips as the result of a lateral impact). IIHS, who actually issues crash test results that have some real world validity, said the Smart did well against cars of similar size and weight (ha!), but threw up some major red flags in the lack of a front crumple zone, reliance on restraints to decelerate passengers in a crash, and poor door engineering (read: the doors popped open during the crash test, and if the dummies hadn't been belted in they would've been ejected). None of that, to my mind, tracks with "one of the safest cars on the planet."
That, of course, does not take into account my knee-jerk reaction: You're going to take a Smart through the Mixing Bowl on a daily basis? Just let one semi hit you at 85 MPH and there won't be enough left of you for the EMTs to scrape off the pavement. I wouldn't want to take my chances against a deer either. I'm sure the Smarts are okay for city driving (I know one person who owns one, and that's exactly what they use it for, zipping between Troy, Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills), but on the freeway... not on my life.
(Full disclosure: The author is a Detroiter, and drives a Saab 9-3. Don't look at me like that, GM owns them...)
Expensive and good are not if-->then conditions. There are plenty of bottles of $150 plonk out there, and I've had the misfortune to drink a few of them - thank God none of them were mine. You do feel bad for someone who buys said $150 plonk, though.
Rather, expense usually, but not always, assures you of a certain degree of quality in fruit sourcing and wine production. For example, the grapes might have been sorted beforehand to remove green, bruised/broken or otherwise defective fruit; the grapes might have been pressed more gently, decreasing extraction of bitter tannins and alkaloids at the expense of lesser yield; the fermented grape juice might have been aged in an actual oak cask rather than a stainless steel tank with oak chips floating at the top. That's not to say that cheap wine is bad; in fact, probably about 80% of our cellar is comprised of bottles costing $25/per or less, and of that 20%, probably only 5% cost more than $50/per. Beyond the $50-$80 range, you really hit a point of diminishing returns anyway, as there's only so much that can be done to the vines, the grapes or the wine to make it taste any better. From my own experience, the super-expensive vintages rarely if ever have anything to recommend them over their cheaper counterparts, and even when they do taste better, it's not better enough to justify the price.
Back to the topic, I'd be highly skeptical of this device's claims. About the only way I could imagine it affecting the wine at all would be through accelerating the breakdown of tannins, and that's just apt to give you a rotten, "turned" tasting bottle. I suspect there's more than a little Barnum Effect* at work here.
* Barnum Effect: There's a sucker born every minute...
Which isn't such a bad idea, now that we think about it - we get jobs and healthcare, Canada gets a world-class hockey team...
Kidding, kidding.
(Full disclosure: The author is a native Detroiter who frequently gets mistaken for Canadian, and wouldn't mind being annexed if it would stop the "No, really, what country are you from?" comments from fellow Americans.)
Not only that, but women are better psychologically suited to endurance missions: we're biased toward consensus, flexibility and efficient group dynamics, where men are biased toward rigid hierarchies and a "winner-take-all" mentality at the expense of the group. There were even a set of studies done by the US Navy (can't remember the citation off the top of my head) that recommended that all SSBNs be crewed by female sailors for just that reason - given the tours assigned to ballistic missile submarines, in which sailors must spend several months submerged and completely cut off from the surface world, all-female crews were thought to be less prone to psychological "breakage" under those conditions.
...Not to mention the fact that we're bound to get lost at least once as we move from Luna and Mars to outer-system and extrasolar planets, and you'd much rather have astronauts who know how to ask for directions...:-P
Actually, there are a pile of ways to measure IOP, but all of them rely on applying some known force to the cornea and seeing how much effect that force has upon the surface. The old-school device was called a Schiotz tonometer, and it used a plunger with weights. The patient had to be supine (flat on their back) and lay perfectly still while the doctor placed the plunger in the middle of the cornea and fiddled with the weights to get the plunger to drop a certain distance. The "gold standard" today is the Goldmann tonometer, a little truncated cone-shaped device that clips to the front of a slit-lamp. When the cone touches your eye, the doctor or tech who does the measurement sees a pair of interlocking half-rings in the slit-lamp's optics. A dial on a little pager-sized box between the two gives you the IOP. The noncontact tonometer is a variant on the same concept, with compressed air taking the place of the tonometer head. In the hospital or any other place that doesn't have a slit-lamp handy, nowadays you're apt to see Tono-Pens, little handheld gizmos that have a silicone transducer dome at one end and an LCD at the other.
Normal intraocular pressure (IOP) is between 8-21 mmHg. Anything above that is considered ocular hypertension. When ocular hypertension occurs along with loss of peripheral vision, that's glaucoma. Lots of people, including lots of optometrists and ophthalmologists, tend to conflate the two. However, there are plenty of things that cause high IOP that aren't glaucoma, such as post-operative iatrogenic IOP spikes (what you had), steroid medications, hyperglycemic conditions and so forth. You can also have so-called normal tension glaucoma, where glaucomatous vision loss occurs in an eye with normal IOP.
About the only PO med for ocular hypertension is acetazolamide (Diamox and a bunch of generic equivalents in the US). It is a large capsule-type medication, but it shouldn't be all that expensive.
Both Arthur and AW are right - the family name went from Saxe-Cobourg and Gotha to Windsor, likewise the house name from Wettin to Windsor. Meanwhile, Prince Phillip changed his name from Battenburg to Mountbatten (same meaning, just English). As a result, the HRH-styled descendants of Elizabeth II are Windsors, and all the others go by Mountbatten-Windsor.
Interesting. Our old Bialetti moka pot (ca. 1990) is plain aluminum, but almost all the new ones I've seen at the kitchen shops and coffee places around here have been stainless or rarely, anodized aluminum. Perhaps it IS an American thing.
I'd have to respectfully disagree with that one. On a cheap aluminum moka pot, you might run into flavor issues from too-frequent scrubbing (aluminum + acid = yuk). If your pot is stainless, though (and these days, any decent pot will be), leaving that caked-on stuff in there will degrade the flavor of any coffee you make in it, as the coffee oils do tend to go rancid rather quickly post-brewing. The effect rapidly worsens if you use lower-grade coffee.
Then again, given my background and profession, I'd be heavily biased toward "clinically clean" even if it did throw the flavor off.;-)
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There are 17/50 states in the US that have such a system at last count, and amusingly, most of them are in the south and the mountain west (see also: accretions of religious fundamentalists not otherwise specified, and the leftovers of the temperance movement). Even states that don't have state-run ABC stores will frequently have a state monopoly on liquor - the state sells wholesale booze to a distributor, who sells it to your local package store. States like this system because it prints money for the state budget, both directly in liquor taxes and indirectly in campaign contributions from distributors (who also like the system because it guarantees them a defined, low cost, a defined, controlled market, and very low competition - there might only be three or four distributors in any given state).
This also doesn't get into dry counties (where the local government has banned booze entirely) or so-called "moist" counties (where the local teetotalers are noisy enough to want a booze ban, but the government and/or business owners don't want to miss out on revenue, so perhaps you can buy beer and wine but not liquor, or you can order drinks in a bar but there are no package stores, or there's one package store in town but no restaurant licenses, or whatever).
Not everyone works at a desk.
True. Moreover, even if you do have some company-provided means of contact for your non-desk job, that number may not remain the same from day to day, or even throughout your day. Case in point: as a staff nurse in a large, busy emergency department, I might be issued any one of twenty-four SpectraLink phones at the start of my shift. Each phone, ideally, goes with a job assignment (e.g. "RN #2, Blue Team"). Thus, if you change assignments in mid-shift, as frequently happens (and frequently with little or no notice), you turn in the phone associated with your old assignment and pick up a new. In any given twelve hours, I might switch between team service (we run four teams), Ambulance Bay, Float, Triage, and/or Resuscitation. Overhead page only works if you're in the department (not a given, particularly if you're on float service, as that means you're usually assigned to transport the real sickies to whatever flavor of Critical Care they'll be occupying next). Moreover, we are routinely admonished by Admin not to use the overhead paging system, as it's considered a noise hazard and detrimental to patient well-being. (See also: Press Ganey happy horsepuckey, but I digress.) Call forwarding isn't an option since, as previously mentioned, the phones are tied to jobs - you need to know you'll always be talking to the Ambulance Bay if you call that number, for example.
Given a system like that, the likelihood of an outside party being able to successfully get hold of you at work, without the assistance of multiple operators and several failed attempts, is pretty slim. Somehow, I don't see the staff at Sometown Elementary being able to reason their way through a parent contact sheet that says "On Mondays from 11A-3P, call 555-1212. From 3-7, call 555-1222. On alternate Tuesdays between 7A and 11A, call 555-1223, unless it's the third Tuesday of the month, in which case I'll be at 555-1335 until 1P," etc.
To that end, our administration runs a fairly benevolent policy on personal cell phones: they have to be silenced while you're on the unit, you can't make calls or use text-based communication in patient care areas, and the phone has to be completely off and stowed (i.e. even "airplane mode" doesn't count) if you work in a no-electronics unit (i.e. Electrophysiology, Interventional Radiology, Critical Care). Phone cameras, and any other form of recording device, are all lumped under the existing regulations on patient and visitor privacy. Luckily we don't have too many issues with phone impairment of productivity, as the nature of the job makes it quite evident when someone isn't working...
Sorry, no. You're thinking of a PCA (patient controlled analgesia) pump, which has very rigorously programmed lockout settings to prevent accidental overdose. PCAs, in most hospitals, also require the use of a two-person physical lock to change the settings, neither of whom can be the prescribing physician - so now your hypothetical doctor has to have at least two nurses employed at that hospital and on that unit who are willing to be complicit in his/her scheme, and who will also be willing to risk their jobs, licenses and felony jail time by reprogramming the PCA, which may or may not also involve falsifying medication administration records. Finally, a PCA can only be used by a patient who is awake, alert and has sufficient dexterity to push the dosage button. (We routinely catch family members of patients on PCAs pushing the button for their sick relatives, in the well-intended but misguided belief that they are relieving the patient's pain. First-time offenders are escorted from the premises by Security and barred from the patient's room unsupervised. Do it again and the police get involved. That kind of incident is also quite likely to earn the hospital a visit from the "friendly" local DEA field office, with hordes of federal agents crawling over every flat surface in search of even a nanogram of potentially unaccounted-for drugs. Hence, hospitals have ZERO sense of tolerance for PCA follies.)
Incidentally, Jack Kevorkian's original suicide machine was largely based on the PCA pump concept. The problem was, most of his patients were so far gone that they couldn't push the button themselves, so he had to do it for them... which neatly hopped over the border from "assisted suicide" to "homicide." Oops.
That said, there are scores if not hundreds of ways you can die in a health care setting. Unfortunately, the vast majority of them A) take an extended period of time, B) are acutely painful or distressing to the patient or those around him/her, and/or C) involve the use of life support systems with built-in alarms, the tampering of which would be rapidly caught by staff, who are then duty bound to resuscitate the patient. Those that are rapid, painless and effective (for example, most hospital staff would tell you they'd pick IV insulin for their hypothetical final exits - you lose consciousness within minutes and go into PEA/asystole shortly thereafter) also require the cooperation of a medically trained and licensed outside party to effect - for which, see also "homicide." Back to square one...
That's because surgical steel (316L) is non-magnetic and poorly conductive. The same material is used for sternal wires, joint implants and orthopedic stabilization hardware (pins, plates, screws, et al). Titanium is another common, non-magnetic material for implantables.
We do scan people with implanted items, but the catch is that we need to know exactly what the implant is, what it's made of, and to what extent it'll react under a magnetic field. (Say for example you had your knee replaced in some developing country with a "DePew" or "Striker" * joint implant, then later require an MRI for diagnosis of head pain or back pain. Cue a very messy trip to the MR room and us writing your lawyer a very large check.) Hence the radiologist review if anything on your safety form pops up positive. Being as we know when your wire was installed and what it's made of, this would not pose a problem - but for the patient in the example, we're not scanning until we get the records from wherever and figure out what exactly is in that knee.
* cf. DePuy or Stryker, internationally known makers of orthopedic hardware - implying that the example joint is a counterfeit made of common, magnetic steel.
For MRI, anything that might be even remotely magnetic is a no-go. Medical MRI systems start at 1.5 T and go up to 3 T, so anything in, on or near your body that can be affected by a magnetic field, will be. We have a two-page-long MRI safety form that we walk patients through prior to an MRI - if anything on the form is positive, you're not getting your scan until a radiologist reviews precisely what the offending item is and approves or denies the scan. (This includes tattoos, BTW - some tattoo pigments are ferrous, and the pigment particles can heat up enough under the MRI field to cause burns.)
In the surgical environment, we're usually not dealing with magnets, but electrosurgery (i.e. Bovie pen) is ubiquitous, and implanted metal can do unpleasant things within the return circuit. Hence, if it isn't a known surgical implant (i.e. if we don't know precisely what its electrical and thermal conductive properties are), you're not going to the OR with it.
Hope this helps!
Short answer: It depends on what unit you're in.
Long answer: In medical-surgical units (your basic, low-acuity "floor nursing" kind of places), nobody much cares because none of those patients have any kind of fancy monitoring going on, and most of them are stable enough to go home within a day or so anyway. Hence, everybody and their brother has mobile phones, netbooks and the like, and some hospitals even go so far as to provide free WiFi on those floors. That isn't the case in critical care. In ICU and its sub-variants (medical, surgical, neonatal and so forth), since every patient has a pile of invasive care systems (ventilators, arterial lines, Swan-Ganz catheters, Vigileos, CRRT, IABP, ECMO, etc) and half a dozen pumped drips, you will see signage EVERYWHERE warning you not to bring in any active electronics, and the staff will hunt you down if they suspect you might be "carrying." I very nearly got kicked out of a PICU a year and a half ago for having a Palm m515 (!) with my copies of Lexi-Comp, Harriet Lane and Mosby's Critical Care Nursing, and we wrote up a doctor who brought an iPhone to the CV-SICU in my preceptorship.
Emergency is kind of a mixed bag. Some places ban electronics entirely in the fear of compromising critical patients' monitoring and treatment systems, others realize it's a losing endeavor and just try to separate the critical from the walkie-talkies as much as physically possible. (I dare you to walk into a room full of combative drunks and tell them you're confiscating their mobile phones because they're interfering with the Vigileo on the sepsis patient two doors down. Let me know how many stitches you require afterward.)
Does all that rigmarole actually save lives? Probably not. I think a lot of it is throwback to the days of bag phones, when doctors and other big shots routinely walked around with what amounted to unlicensed nuclear accelerators on their shoulders, and the electronics really WERE that sensitive to interference. On the other hand, I've seen monitoring equipment go haywire when patients' family members attempted to make cellular calls, and return to normal function once the offenders were escorted off the unit. In any case, we'll always err on the side of caution - better safe than sued.
In certain environments, such as hospitals and healthcare facilities, ANY wireless functionality can interfere with patient equipment. Doesn't matter if your smartphone uses 3G, WiFi or sub-etheric holowave - either your hospital's Biomedical Engineering department will have to take it apart and certify it for use (good luck with that), or you can't have it. This is why we still use one-way pagers when 99.44% of the world has moved on to SMS, and why the only mobile phone you can have on a unit is a $600 SpectraLink that looks and acts like a throwback to 1995. There are also lots of workplaces that restrict wireless connectivity for security purposes, in which just disabling the functionality isn't good enough.
Niche market, to be sure, but there still is a market for non-wireless PDAs.
You're right - for a product to be considered "absorbable" or "degradable" in patient care, the product has to eventually break down to compounds that the body naturally metabolizes. Classic example: Vicryl (tm), polyglactin 910 (90% glycolide/10% lactide polymer) suture. Water causes it to break down into glycolic acid and lactic acid, usually over the course of 56 days in tissue (unless it's placed in a wet environment, in which case it breaks down faster.) Both compounds are things your body generates and metabolizes on a daily basis, and no trace of the suture remains in the body once it's been broken down, hence the suture is "absorbable." Absorbable products can be made of synthetic compounds (Vicryl and other synthetic absorbable sutures, hyaluronic acid preparations) or of naturally occurring substances (plain and chromic gut sutures, various preparations of collagen).
Back to TFA, this stuff doesn't look a whole lot different from demineralized bone matrix, which is already fairly common (although expensive as hell). DBX doesn't really provide any immediate structural strength to compromised bone, since it's only bone protein with no mineral structure. It just provides a scaffold for the body's own osteoblasts to build on - it allows them to skip a step in fracture repair, in other words. Calling it "injectable bone" might be a bit of a stretch.
(Full disclosure: The author is a former surgical rep turned nursing student.)
What's so hard about supporting an electric car?
Quite a bit, if you think about it:
1) Educating and qualifying mechanics to work on the car. Your average Joe at the gas station isn't going to be able to service this thing right off the bat, nor will he be able to open the hood and figure it out after a few minutes' inspection. At least for the first two or three years this car is on the market, you'll be forced to rely on dealer service, simply because there won't be trained mechanics anywhere else. And if you break down someplace where there isn't a dealer handy, you're hosed. A hobbyist owner might be able to repair the car, to a greater or lesser extent, but those repairs might void the warranty, or in some states may disqualify the car from street service entirely.
2) Availability of parts. There is lots and lots more that goes into an electric car, or indeed any car, besides a few hundred feet of wire, an electric motor and a few batteries. If your alternator dies, if you have to replace a transmission or some other drivetrain component, if your windshield cracks, all of those require many more parts to complete beyond the obvious part that's malfunctioning. The problem is compounded if you have multiple systems damaged at once, as in the context of an accident. You'll have to have some mechanism in place to get those parts from their Chinese manufacturers to a U.S. dealer service department, quickly and efficiently. (This is harder than it sounds; as a personal example, I can confirm that for a certain well-known German luxury manufacturer, a replacement front bumper fascia took three weeks to ship from Stuttgart, where replacing the same part on an American vehicle took two days.)
On a related note, you also have to worry about the general lack of infrastructure. Right or wrong, as it stands right now the entire transportation infrastructure in the US is set up to deal with internal combustion vehicles. Changing over to an electric infrastructure is going to take time, at least two or three years and probably more like five or seven, during which time the drivers of electric vehicles are going to be at a major disadvantage. You won't be able to charge most places, won't be able to get service most places, might not be able to drive on freeways or other limited access roads (at least here, freeways are restricted to internal combustion vehicles with engines greater than 125 CC displacement, which can't be powered farm equipment, and must be able to maintain a minimum speed of 55 MPH). Those restrictions might be enough to put people off electrics entirely, or at the very least slow their adoption. It'd be a damned shame if that happened, but it's a very real risk. In the meanwhile, everyone who bought these electric cars will be in the lurch, and if the manufacturer folds, the vehicles will be little more than hobby pieces.
I'll go you one better: we have a major surface street here in Metro Detroit named Big Beaver Road (also known as 16 Mile Road). To make matters worse, Big Beaver has an exit off I-75... Exit #69. Email filtering systems have been flagging and deleting that for years. Considering that 16 Mile runs through most of Troy, Birmingham and West Bloomfield (three major business and residential suburbs), you'd think that someone would have fixed it by now.
I have fond memories of Pitfall on an Apple 2E (PR#6, Baby!)
Oh yes, the old disk access command. Apple IIe FTW.
On our school computers, the command for gaming was CATALOG S2 D2 E17 - that gave you Moon Buggy, Horse Race, Pitfall and one other game I'm forgetting. (I loved that old Corvus network. 1 Mbps over twisted-pair when the Ethernet world was still in garden hose.)
You forgot to scrub down your body with a high-level disinfectant (potentially traceable commensal bacteria on your skin). After that, you'll have to spend the rest of your life in a full-body skin garment (DNA from shed skin cells). And you'll have to wear a full-helmet respirator (exhaled trace chemicals from your bloodstream, potentially traceable). And your suit will have to contain and reprocess all your wastes (DNA from epithelial cells in your urine/feces). And you can never speak a word (identification through voice analysis).
(Full disclosure: This post contains high levels of sarcasm, which may be traceable in readers' thought patterns. Do not read if you're worried about "Them" detecting your brainwaves or some other such B.S.)
Being a fellow detroit commuter I have seen a nice big escalade SUV hit at 85 with a semi truck. there was nothing left for the EMT's to scrape up. so your example means nothing. ANYTHING versus a semi truck = death.
Two different crash mechanisms at work. What's going to kill someone in an Escalade or any other big SUV is rolling over and/or being ejected; what's going to kill someone in a compact/subcompact is deceleration. All else being equal, the vehicle with more mass wins every time in a crash; the risk factor in the case of an SUV is the fact that the mass sits high, increasing the risk of a fatal roll. In the case of the 'Slade vs. the semi, you get a double whammy.
And you are missing the fact that the mixing bowl every morning is filled with itty bitty cars that have far worse crash ratings. Honda insight.. There are a ton of them on 96/696 on the way in the morning. Those beer cans crumple and fold in really easily when you look at a crashed one. hell the rearending on them are pretty nasty and that happens all the time in detroit.
And they make a lovely mess for us when they get to the hospital, too. ...Seriously, subcompacts are great for city driving. People can get a Smart or an Aveo or whatever and zip around whatever suburb they like all day long. However, I don't think ANY of them are safe on American interstates, and certainly not in the demolition derbies we call Detroit freeways. They get away with it in other countries because cars overall are smaller, you don't see the SUV overload you do here, and people pay attention to the road and drive defensively. Here, what you see even more than the little cars (see below for my thoughts on those) is some doofus in an SUV or a minivan, chatting on the phone, yelling at the kids and fiddling with the rear-seat DVD player all while trying to control a 4,000-lb hunk of steel at 80 MPH. I wouldn't like my chances against that numbskull if I were driving an Abrams tank. Why anyone would want to chance it in a Campbell's soup can of a car (and yes, I see scads of them out there on 696 too) is beyond me.
Please don't misunderstand, I'd be the absolute last person to tell someone to drive an SUV. I haven't driven one since 1999, and I'm forever telling those in my family who do to get rid of them. Even with ESP packages and center-of-gravity manipulation, they roll far too often (far more fatal than any other form of crash), and the high bumpers make them a hazard to smaller vehicles. As you might have noticed from my previous disclosure line, I drive a small-midsize sedan, and I'd far rather see people in sedans and station wagons than SUVs. The fuel economy issue doesn't concern me so much, though it certainly doesn't help; it's what happens to a crash victim, and from that standpoint, SUVs are at a massive disadvantage. Always have been, always will be.
What concerns me about the Smart cars, and concerns me even more after watching the second responder's YouTube video, is the fact that the car appears to be preserving its own structure at the expense of the passengers, when it should be the other way around. It's absolutely wonderful that the "steel safety cell" survived a 70 MPH impact into concrete intact. A triumph of engineering, that. My concern is that if the frame isn't absorbing impact energies, and the crumple zone is too small to impart more than a trivial reduction in crash force (I'll SWAG it and say 5 MPH, 10 at the outside), all that energy is going straight to the passengers. In ANY small car (again, as shown by the video), that's generally not survivable. Thus, I'd have to wonder why someone would ever want to put themselves at that kind of risk by driving such a vehicle in an environment where it's at a potentially fatal disadvantage.
Commentary over - we now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion.
Or, better yet: offer drivers a modest break on parking rates if they pay for the charging service. The old "bundle and save" approach.
Places like Birmingham and Ann Arbor would make a fortune off those things...
While you're right that old GM was a steaming pile of freshly squeezed lemon peels, new GM is actually pretty good these days. Hell of a lot better than the other two Midsized Three, in terms of initial quality and reliability.
Although I'm aware that anecdote and data have little to do with each other, we've owned vehicles from all of the American manufacturers and three foreign (Mercedes, Toyota and Jaguar). The basement was squarely occupied by... Mercedes. Yes, the kings of German engineering, gave us not one but two vehicles that were in the shop more days than not (a 2004 CLK320 Cabrio and a 2007 E350 4Matic), due to failures including a faulty fuel tank sensor that resulted in a fuel-out failure, faulty alternator and battery resulting in undrivable car, faulty radiator hose that blew coolant all over Woodward Avenue, multiple broken tire pressure sensors, and a squeaky/leaking convertible top. Also, normal driving resulted in loss of front end alignment, and God help you if you hit a pothole - you'd be fighting a 15-degree list all the way to the dealer.
After that, from worst to best:
Ford (cruise control failure caused uncontrollable acceleration when on, CC had to be disabled; electrical harness failure blew fuses when windshield wipers were turned on, eventually caused fire in headliner; bad idle programming in engine control module caused intermittent stall)
Jaguar (repeated failures of engine interlock module resulted in undrivable car if left parked in temperatures outside a window of 55-70 deg F for more than 10 minutes)
Jeep (replaced three sets of brake rotors due to warping; lack of cover over air intakes resulted in ingested road debris and FOD to air filtration systems)
Toyota (few "stupid stuff" recalls, no major maintenance issues)
GMC (no recalls, one TPMS error - five-minute dealer fix)
Saab (no recalls, no maintenance issues)
5-star, as in NHTSA 5-star? That doesn't exactly make me feel warm and fuzzy. The NHTSA test only applies to two types of crash: a controlled head-on crash at 35 MPH, and a controlled perpendicular side-impact (T-bone) crash at 35 MPH. Neither of those have any bearing at all on crashes in the real world, which tend to be either offset or rollover (or both, when a car flips as the result of a lateral impact). IIHS, who actually issues crash test results that have some real world validity, said the Smart did well against cars of similar size and weight (ha!), but threw up some major red flags in the lack of a front crumple zone, reliance on restraints to decelerate passengers in a crash, and poor door engineering (read: the doors popped open during the crash test, and if the dummies hadn't been belted in they would've been ejected). None of that, to my mind, tracks with "one of the safest cars on the planet."
That, of course, does not take into account my knee-jerk reaction: You're going to take a Smart through the Mixing Bowl on a daily basis? Just let one semi hit you at 85 MPH and there won't be enough left of you for the EMTs to scrape off the pavement. I wouldn't want to take my chances against a deer either. I'm sure the Smarts are okay for city driving (I know one person who owns one, and that's exactly what they use it for, zipping between Troy, Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills), but on the freeway... not on my life.
(Full disclosure: The author is a Detroiter, and drives a Saab 9-3. Don't look at me like that, GM owns them...)
Expensive and good are not if-->then conditions. There are plenty of bottles of $150 plonk out there, and I've had the misfortune to drink a few of them - thank God none of them were mine. You do feel bad for someone who buys said $150 plonk, though.
Rather, expense usually, but not always, assures you of a certain degree of quality in fruit sourcing and wine production. For example, the grapes might have been sorted beforehand to remove green, bruised/broken or otherwise defective fruit; the grapes might have been pressed more gently, decreasing extraction of bitter tannins and alkaloids at the expense of lesser yield; the fermented grape juice might have been aged in an actual oak cask rather than a stainless steel tank with oak chips floating at the top. That's not to say that cheap wine is bad; in fact, probably about 80% of our cellar is comprised of bottles costing $25/per or less, and of that 20%, probably only 5% cost more than $50/per. Beyond the $50-$80 range, you really hit a point of diminishing returns anyway, as there's only so much that can be done to the vines, the grapes or the wine to make it taste any better. From my own experience, the super-expensive vintages rarely if ever have anything to recommend them over their cheaper counterparts, and even when they do taste better, it's not better enough to justify the price.
Back to the topic, I'd be highly skeptical of this device's claims. About the only way I could imagine it affecting the wine at all would be through accelerating the breakdown of tannins, and that's just apt to give you a rotten, "turned" tasting bottle. I suspect there's more than a little Barnum Effect* at work here.
* Barnum Effect: There's a sucker born every minute...
Which isn't such a bad idea, now that we think about it - we get jobs and healthcare, Canada gets a world-class hockey team...
Kidding, kidding.
(Full disclosure: The author is a native Detroiter who frequently gets mistaken for Canadian, and wouldn't mind being annexed if it would stop the "No, really, what country are you from?" comments from fellow Americans.)
Not only that, but women are better psychologically suited to endurance missions: we're biased toward consensus, flexibility and efficient group dynamics, where men are biased toward rigid hierarchies and a "winner-take-all" mentality at the expense of the group. There were even a set of studies done by the US Navy (can't remember the citation off the top of my head) that recommended that all SSBNs be crewed by female sailors for just that reason - given the tours assigned to ballistic missile submarines, in which sailors must spend several months submerged and completely cut off from the surface world, all-female crews were thought to be less prone to psychological "breakage" under those conditions.
It's decided. We need more OMG PWNIES.
Fixed that for you.
Actually, there are a pile of ways to measure IOP, but all of them rely on applying some known force to the cornea and seeing how much effect that force has upon the surface. The old-school device was called a Schiotz tonometer, and it used a plunger with weights. The patient had to be supine (flat on their back) and lay perfectly still while the doctor placed the plunger in the middle of the cornea and fiddled with the weights to get the plunger to drop a certain distance. The "gold standard" today is the Goldmann tonometer, a little truncated cone-shaped device that clips to the front of a slit-lamp. When the cone touches your eye, the doctor or tech who does the measurement sees a pair of interlocking half-rings in the slit-lamp's optics. A dial on a little pager-sized box between the two gives you the IOP. The noncontact tonometer is a variant on the same concept, with compressed air taking the place of the tonometer head. In the hospital or any other place that doesn't have a slit-lamp handy, nowadays you're apt to see Tono-Pens, little handheld gizmos that have a silicone transducer dome at one end and an LCD at the other.
Normal intraocular pressure (IOP) is between 8-21 mmHg. Anything above that is considered ocular hypertension. When ocular hypertension occurs along with loss of peripheral vision, that's glaucoma. Lots of people, including lots of optometrists and ophthalmologists, tend to conflate the two. However, there are plenty of things that cause high IOP that aren't glaucoma, such as post-operative iatrogenic IOP spikes (what you had), steroid medications, hyperglycemic conditions and so forth. You can also have so-called normal tension glaucoma, where glaucomatous vision loss occurs in an eye with normal IOP.
About the only PO med for ocular hypertension is acetazolamide (Diamox and a bunch of generic equivalents in the US). It is a large capsule-type medication, but it shouldn't be all that expensive.
Both Arthur and AW are right - the family name went from Saxe-Cobourg and Gotha to Windsor, likewise the house name from Wettin to Windsor. Meanwhile, Prince Phillip changed his name from Battenburg to Mountbatten (same meaning, just English). As a result, the HRH-styled descendants of Elizabeth II are Windsors, and all the others go by Mountbatten-Windsor.
Interesting. Our old Bialetti moka pot (ca. 1990) is plain aluminum, but almost all the new ones I've seen at the kitchen shops and coffee places around here have been stainless or rarely, anodized aluminum. Perhaps it IS an American thing.
They did a long time ago. Coke servers, anyone?
Screwing with the pop machine, the snacks machine and the coffee pot all at once probably qualifies as a terror attack these days, though.
I'd have to respectfully disagree with that one. On a cheap aluminum moka pot, you might run into flavor issues from too-frequent scrubbing (aluminum + acid = yuk). If your pot is stainless, though (and these days, any decent pot will be), leaving that caked-on stuff in there will degrade the flavor of any coffee you make in it, as the coffee oils do tend to go rancid rather quickly post-brewing. The effect rapidly worsens if you use lower-grade coffee.
;-)
Then again, given my background and profession, I'd be heavily biased toward "clinically clean" even if it did throw the flavor off.