It's not about the individual conflicts. The world has seen what modern wars of conquest look like, last time we had one tens of millions of people were killed. Wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, while undeniably terrible, don't escalate to the world stage the way wars of conquest do. The fact that relations are currently described as being as poor as they have been since the cold war is a bad thing, we were supposed to have gotten paste the specter of world powers directly clashing against each other. I understand that we did it by proxy anyway for the past 30 years, but proxy is a lot less messy than outright conflict which has become a serious possibility over the past couple of months.

As for Crimea being "part of Russia for 200 years prior to 1964", I bet one could find numerous areas where the same would hold true, I'd rather not have everyone running around annexing land simply because they held it half a century ago.

Sorry dude, it's not 2008 any more, people can and do have quality productions on YouTube with tens of thousands of regular viewers. Day9 caters almost exclusively to the niche Starcraft 2 crowd and pulls in 8k views for his daily one our program. Something slightly more mainstream like "Nerdy Nummies" regularly gets more than a quarter of a million views. It's not numbers that a major broadcast network would be proud of, but it's often enough to make a living.

That's not what the article is really talking about though, they're talking more about whole genome sequencing. Besides that, I imagine there are already people who decline X-Rays for one reason or another, just like there are people who decline blood transfusions or major surgeries.

This might be nitpicking, but Google does not sell your data, they sell access to you based on the data. Google selling your data would be like selling a gold mine, making a quick buck but totally unsustainable. They're far better off to keep the data in house and be able to sell ads targeted based upon it.

Alternatively, the ethanol subsidies (not to mention all the other subsidies in general) keep a lot of farmers farming (or at least maintaining the farmland) when they otherwise would have parceled out their land to the suburb developers decades ago. I've always suspected the millions we throw at farmers in subsidies was less about supporting the "great American farming family" and more about "making sure that if the world wide shit goes down the US still has enough to eat". It's worth noting that food is one of the few things that the US exports vastely more than it imports, even with 30% of the corn going into our gas tanks.

Drop in replacements will frequently not have a different part number. If they did, every auto part supplier would have to update their information every time an updated part comes out.

Automated fast food cooking is a trivial problem to solve, enough so that I've wondered why it hasn't been done already. You're imagining a robot standing there with a flipper waiting for the burger to be done, that's not how you go about automation. You'd have a conveyor drop burgers onto a griddle and a top griddle come down. Temperatures would be constantly monitored and adjusted so all you have to do is time how long the burger needs to cook. High volume restaurants would have continuous process kitchens, where food is constantly moving through the line added to the front of the queue as soon as someone orders (or more likely before). The only thing preventing this is the cost.

Why the implication that dry needling is a "fake therapy"? You're sticking a needle into the very skin and muscle that is often experiencing the discomfort being treated. That causes acute pain, inflammation, clotting and probably many other responses that your body has to getting poked with a needle. Any or all of of those could help relieve chronic pain, looses stiff muscles, etc. There's absolutely no reason to call it a "fake treatment" when there are researchable and verifiable mechanisms that haven't been fully investigated yet.

Can't it be both?

Donning O2 masks in the event of an unknown fire is what would widely be considered a "bad idea", that is why pilots have smoke hoods in the cockpit but those are only effective for 10-15 minutes or so. Pulling all non-essential breakers is step #2 (after turning to the nearest safe airport) in the event of a possible electrical fire, meaning no transponder, no ACARS, no radio. Nothing is important until the fire is contained, not "clearing the air lanes" when you're in the middle of the ocean (it's a big sky after all), not radioing the destination airport, and certainly not sending out a mayday that will do absolutely nothing to help the situation. It simply doesn't take that much. Finally, keep in mind that an airplane is an enclosed tube that doesn't actually let much air into and out of the cabin; it simply doesn't take much smoke or much fire to full the cabin and flight deck with incapacitating amounts of smoke.

Altitude changes are pretty trivial to justify in such a situation. The fire could have caused a decompression forcing the plane lower, the 12,000 ft level is pretty much the textbook height for such a maneuver. Even a climb to 42,000 could have been a desperate, last ditch effort to extinguish the fire. Also, keep in mind that those altitude readings were on the outer edges of the radar tracking the plane, without the transponders altitude readings simply aren't guaranteed to be accurate at 220 miles. If the altitude changes were less extreme they, and the bearing changes, can be explained by the 777 flying trimmed for cruise speed with autopilot off and a dead stick. As fuel is consumed the weight of the plane decreases causing it to enter a climb to maintain the speed set by the flight crew. Small instabilities lead to heading changes before the fly by wire system levels out the banks automatically.

To summarize:

Fire on board the plane.
Pilot diverts to the nearest safe airport (which is approximately line with the sudden course change to the west).
Flight crew runs through the fire checklist, which includes pulling all the breakers in case it's an electrical fire (Transponder and communications lost).
Fire causes decompression, pilots bring the plane down to 12,000 ft to remain conscious and keep the passengers alive.
Crew is overcome by smoke and/or decompression, plane flies on under auto-pilot until it runs out of gas.

Incredibly simple explanation for everything that is known at this point, even some of the sketchier details that are 100% for sure at this point.

Well... relatively. It would still take processing hundreds of tons of lunar rock to get useful amounts of He3, which in turn means hundreds of tons of equipment, fuel, etc, especially since you're going to want lots and lots of the stuff, not just a sample.

Easily? You know we do have He3 here on Earth right and we still aren't at the point of firing up a fusion reactor with it. Granted, if there were a large and steady supply it would certainly lead to more research into He3 reactors (right now He3 reactors simply can't be economically feasible), but you're still talking a few decades of research and development for a reactor on the ground, let alone putting one in space which would require miniaturizing and automating the first generation by orders of magnitude.

There's reasons for this that go beyond fuel, VASMIR engines combined with orbital refueling with more run of the mill propellents and energy sources for example. We don't do it though, not because it's impossible, but because it's expensive and high risk. Not nearly as expensive and high risk as trying to jump start a He3 economy based on the moon.

Lets say hypothetically, just pulling numbers out of no where, that Watson is 1/10th the price of a specialized team but only half as accurate. I think those numbers are probably a bit on the pessimistic side... yes Watson is an expensive system but each query will be completed in minutes or at most hours, the marginal cost of each additional patient just isn't very high when compared to a multidisciplinary team of geneticists, oncologists, toxicologists, and general practitioners. As for accuracy, well to put it simply this kind of network analysis is what Watson was designed from the ground up to do and it does it shockingly well.

But I digress, back to the example. Lets say there are enough specialized teams to treat 1,000 glioblastoma patients per year and they successfully treat 80% of patients. 800 saved hurray! But, for the same price, Watson could develop treatments for 10,000 patients, saving 4,000 of them. The of course there is the fact that Watson is not a build once and done kind of system. Every year there'd be 10,000 new pieces of information to be entered into the system, refining the probabilities further and further. Sooner or later, Watson will be not just equal to the human team, but will far surpass it.

Many countries with what I could consider "pure" rehabilitation programs spend a fraction what the US does on incarceration and have lower recidivism rates. These systems are generally run on the basic philosophy that criminal behavior that can't be fixed is a mental illness and should be treated as such, often meaning they are in fact removed from society longer than they would have been if they had simply thrown in prison. Everyone else goes through counseling, education, etc during their prison sentence. And again, at a lower cost and lower recidivism rate than we see with our punishment centered systems.

I think you're underestimating what that kind of subjective time would do to a person. Bear in mind, with the straight "time dilation" drug solution that she proposes (begging the question that such a thing is even possible) the time would by definition be spent in solitary. No one can accompany you on your 1000 year drug induced stupor. We know what extended periods of solitary confinement does to a person, the human mind simply isn't designed to be without social stimulation for long lengths of time.

Now, the hypothetical of a virtual reality prison, where prisoners could spend hundreds of years getting actually rehabilitation... that I could get behind. But then, there are so many better, more interesting uses for a such a technology that using it to imprison (even for rehabilitation) seems like it would be an afterthought.