States Rights has always been nothing more than a tool used by people who want something. Usually what they want is to take something from other people. They would just as easily use religion, economics, erroneous statistics, philosophy, or any other intellectual tool they could find.

IMHO, ultimately states don't have rights any more than corporations do. PEOPLE have rights. The PEOPLE should have the right to freely associate and provide broadband. If they want to do that through their city government, fine. There's no need to appeal to "states rights" which has quite a checkered past.

Even the District of Columbia DMV was pretty good, and DC is not known for efficiency. When I got rid of my car, it didn't take very long to hand the plate to the guy, who marked it invalid. That was that. Comcast? I got charged after disconnecting, and the dispute is unresolved after two months.

In other words, "disconnecting" from the DC DMV was easier than disconnecting from Comcast.

The drug war is bad enough, but when the DEA waits until just before harvest to destroy fields they know about... really gripes my cookies. They let it consume all that water, *then* they destroy it. And of course they'll destroy small backyard grows that don't even push people into the next water usage tier. When Joe Sixplant's grow is pushed over, where does he buy weed? From big growers illegally diverting.

Someone who shall remain nameless once told me I looked so much better without glasses, I should get the surgery.

I place LASIK in the same category as nose-jobs, breast augmentation, etc. Unless you are truly freakish (e.g., Golf-ball shaped nose or something) I have a hard time justifying it. If you're normative in appearance, IMHO any ethical plastic surgeon should refer you to a psychiatrist but they generally don't because MONEY.

Anyway, totally not going to get a laser in my eye. Those ads for dry eye medicine you see? It's because of one of the most common complications. No thanks.

Glasses. Hundreds of years, reasonable outcomes. LASIK? Maybe it'll be proven as risk-free as glasses some day, but probably not until I'm long dead and buried. Vanity isn't worth the risk to me; but I understand others think differently.

I should retract that. After finding my old forum post about this, I realized that it's been quite some time. I've since got new hardware, moved on to Windows 8, etc... and possibly they have updated their build too.

In any case, the freaking thing ran fine out of the box. I am absurdly happy right now!

Sometimes all that crashing happens anyway. Try to play IWAR on anything build in the last 10 years... good luck! If you manage it, do let me know because I REALLY would love to play that.

I think this is appropriate.

You don't need to know why, because what they were measuring is what steers the reasoning. You either have the emotional response or you don't.

True, but this isn't the case. In the case of the dead fish, they didn't filter the results (google "multiple comparisons correction") and got bullshit data because of it.

All that proves is why multiple comparisons correction is so important, and why everyone uses it.

You didn't actually read the article you linked to, did you?

Hell, even if traffic laws didn't, running out into the highway (or just stopping your car on it) is not exactly safe. The nice thing to do would be to rescue the thing, but not at significant risk to your own health/life.

Even if that were true (not going to beat a dead horse there) all it takes is one (unfortunate for us, fortunate for the virus) mutation to throw that out the window.

Not these days. You can be infected without symptoms for almost a fucking month, and the damn things remains viable for two! Hell, even if you survive, it's still in you and can still be transmitted via fluid exchange for a week.

You go ahead and trust that the mortality rate will stop it. We'll see how well that works out...

It is?