Patton told his troops they were strictly forbidden from dying gloriously for their country, but were instead expected to make the other poor bastard die gloriously for his.

When we send soldiers off to battle we expect them to win and come home alive. We accept that reality will not always permit this, but that's the nature of the beast. If we send people on a one-way trip to Mars, we are demanding that they die gloriously for us -- which is exactly what Patton forbade his soldiers to do.

Your comparison, not to put too fine a point on it, is crazy.

Nowhere is it written that your critique can only be taken seriously if you fix the problem you discover, propose an alternate model, or solve the problem outright. By your logic, all the people from the 1800s on into the early 20th century who said, "You know, Newtonian mechanics has a serious problem: it cannot correctly describe the precession of Mercury" were doing a poor job of critiquing Newtonian physics.

Rubbish. They were doing a superb job of critiquing Newtonian physics by pointing to something in the Newtonian model that was clearly, unambiguously, wrong. They may not have been able to realize why it was wrong or able to construct a better model, but they pointed out an important anomaly. Later on, Einstein came along and proposed General Relativity, and one of GR's greatest initial successes was its ability to correctly model the precession of Mercury.

If John Christy's reading of the facts is in error, then that's ample grounds to say he's made a poor critique. But to say that he's made a poor critique just because he hasn't fixed the models, put forward a new model, or explained the differences between model and observation, betrays you as a very poor scientist.

If you yell "fire" in a crowded theater where there is no fire, you have taken a safe situation and turned it into an immensely dangerous one.

If you yell "fire" in a crowded theater where there is a fire, you are attempting -- as best you can -- to mitigate the risk of an immensely dangerous situation.

The law prohibits shouting "fire" in a crowded theater where there is no fire present. There is no law against alerting your fellow patrons to the fact the building is on fire.

I agree with you. I get quite irritated when people in the UK tell me we should emulate them in gun control laws, healthcare laws, or their habit of dropping random 'u's in words where they clearly don't belong. Courtesy requires I refrain from telling the UK how they ought pattern their free speech laws on our First Amendment.

It is enough to say that I am pleased to live where I do, and that I believe the evils of generally-unregulated free speech are far far outweighed by the good.

Thank you for being a physician. Seriously. It's appreciated.

(-- would've been dead in the '90s except for someone like you)

The reason why progress has been so slow is because there is no one single disease, "cancer." Instead we have a few thousand different diseases which we collectively call cancer. Many of them look extremely similar, even to professional oncologists. First we have to identify all of these different cancers, and then we have to discover effective treatments against them. Some cancers will have common weaknesses; many (most?) do not.

There's a reason why cancer is called "the Emperor of Maladies". Cancer is probably the hardest scientific problem the human race has ever wrestled with. It makes the moon shot and the internet look like pikers by comparison.

Cancer is hard, and every day we don't have a cure more people are going to die in horrible ways. The first part makes us want to give up on cancer research, or to say that it's too hard, or to say that we haven't made any progress... but the second part will always keep us coming back to do more research and make another attempt.

My dream is that cancer might be cured in 100 years. I think it's a dream worth working for.

I'm reminded that when President Truman had his heart attack in 1956, the official prescription from his physician was bed rest accompanied by Mrs. Truman to keep him warm.

That was the whole, complete prescription.

Anyone who says medicine hasn't improved since 1952 simply isn't paying attention.

"If you're tagged in a photo, you can exercise your privacy controls over it."

I take exception to this. Why should I ever have to interact with Facebook in the first place? It is entirely possible to tag someone's name into a photo that does not have a Facebook account.

My heart is warmed by the fact that kids are now moving away from Facebook and going back to private messaging like iMessage, Whatsapp, etc., to get away from compromising situations.

Lest we forget that all firearms legislation has its roots in oppressing minorities. The problem is that the oppression has become democratized. Listen to the lyrics of rap groups like Public Enemy. 20 years ago they were speaking to a very specific audience; now their words have more universal appeal.

If you have to download 100 PDFs from a trusted source at one time, then you shouldn't be using a web browser. That's a job for perhaps a WebDAV setup or any one of a zillion syncing solutions.

"My wife was born in Taiwan. She and anyone in her family gets extremely angry if you refer to them as "Chinese," despite being ethnically Chinese, speaking Mandarin, etc."

My dad's wife is from Taiwan and is exactly the opposite. Although I never asked what she thought about Taiwan being a part of China.

Does anyone else remember being a child and playing "snakes in the grass"? That game always dug up what I would describe as a very primal fear that lives deep down in all of us.

You actually made a good point, and I've even said it myself before in other forums. This might be one of the worst times since the population is incredibly uninformed and the whole thing would be bought by big companies and cartels.

This is why we need a new Continental Congress to basically "overwrite" the current one. All of these assholes should be up against the wall for a cleansing ritual.

Not only am I from the United States (born in Iowa, currently live in Virginia), but I've spent enough time in emergency rooms (pursuant to EMT work) to know this is the law. Sorry, kid. :)