I am pretty sure our leaders have been ignoring the constitution for over 100 years. Just because you did not notice that it was corrupted and ignored when you came here in the 1970s does not change that.

Warrant-less wiretaps is certainly a very old thing.

I don't think that Obama has been any better or worse than previous presidents at following the constitution.

They will be held accountable to shareholders where they will be given a huge bonus for doing this. :(

As for being accountable to us or to the laws they broke? Not a chance. I give better odds on Santa Claus existing than these guys being actually held accountable to a court.

For drug companies this is actually extremely bad. Amgen and Bayer have spent billions trying to replicate drugs that just don't work.

For a long time I just blamed the pharmaceutical companies for why so many "cures" reported in research never made it to production. I thought they were just out for a profit and had no interest in cures. However based on some recent experience this is definitely not true for all of these companies. Some of them have tried very hard to bring these cures to market and spent billions of dollars trying to do it. The problem is that it turns out nearly all of these "cures" are just false. They can not be replicated to any degree.

This kind of behavior by scientists is also driving up the costs of healthcare. These companies continue to try to bring promising research to market but the success is so low that it drives up the costs of the drugs they do manage to make.

I have even worked with some researchers that just had no idea about statistical methods. They had never had any education on the subject. As a result their conclusions were worth as much as the paper they printed it on. The problem is that at least some of them really thought their data was good and showed what they wanted to show. Far too many scientists do NOT have the statistical training required of engineers and while it would help the field a lot I doubt they will do it because that level of math would cut out far too many people for the schools to allow that.

I don't really see a way to fix this unfortunately. If you change the incentive system to reward checking other peoples results you will get a bunch of simple and obvious papers that check something else. If there is a solution to this I don't really know what it looks like but we need to find it because this is seriously hurting the rest of the society and it makes it very hard for the actual legitimate scientists to spread real research that helps us all.

I like identifying this stuff, quantifying it and maybe even finding temporary ways to control how it works. However I would not recommend actually permanently changing it.

It is strange because some of this research I don't really want reported to the general public because they don't have the scientific understanding for it but they are willing to leap to an idea and demand it be done. There are some genes that seem likely to be tied to male homosexuality however those same genes are also tied to female fertility. I have seen some people talking about how we should "cure" homosexuals by fixing that gene. What I worry about is that a group could get enough power to try and actually do that. The problem is that we could also end up sterilizing people treated which could be catastrophically bad.

I just see so many people as misusing research to further their own ideological ends. We need to do this research, we need to understand why stuff happens. We need to know why as a mother has more male children epigenetic markers get set on further male children to change gene expression. There is a LOT we can learn from that. I just don't want to see that research abused. I wish we could get rid of this idiotic idea of XX=female, XY = male. Gender and sex are NOT even close to that simple.

On the plus side Toronto is a much nicer city that Chicago.

McDonalds should have been nailed to the wall even worse for what they had done. The coffee was not just hot. It was hot enough to cause 3rd degree burns within a few seconds. They had dealt with a lot of complaints from it for quite a while before that.

You should probably read up a bit more on the hot coffee incident before just taking McDonalds side. They had some very good PR companies do a lot of work to blame the victim on that one.

Everyone is aware that hot coffee is hot but if you spilled coffee from any other store on yourself you would not have 3rd or even 2nd degree burns. That is the difference.

I wish more people would stop at crosswalks for pedestrians. A few days ago I had to jump back from a crosswalk because a guy in his truck just went roaring through the crosswalk. He did not even slow down and he was easily going over the speed limit.

I would love it if there was a better method to deal with that. It doesn't matter that the law says he was clearly in the wrong for that. If he had hit me the law would do me no good at all. I want self driving cars because too many people are aholes and cops can't deal with all of them by a long shot.

I have had far too many people that I had to dodge out of the way of because while they where driving through an intersection to turn they picked up their cell phone to look at something on it as they drove through the crosswalk.

Humans make too many mistakes to allow them to drive when we have better technology available. We did not used to have that choice and now we do. If you think you are truly a much better driver than average and don't make any of these mistakes then you should be able to take tests and prove it and then could drive a car under your primary control but an AI as backup so that in the event of a failure it would override your control. That way if you fall asleep at the wheel, don't pay attention etc you still can't run over a person walking or on a bike.

Of course sometimes you have a coworker and you would definitely save a robot or even a pencil before you saved them. It has nothing to do with the robot ....

Some people are just really nasty to be around. I have been around adults that would actually cry and pitch a tantrum whenever they did not get their way ....

These events also seem to happen about every hundred years and that is about how long it has been since the last one.

I live in Boulder and overall I think we did extremely well. We had very few fatalities. Boulder itself managed to keep power, water, sewer etc working. People where give 30 minutes warning on flash floods due to sensors. These events happen and so far they are rare and I think we did as good as anyplace could have done in a similar situation.

At one point we had a warning about a 30 foot wall of water coming down a creek that normally comes up to your ankles. We had new temporary rivers formed during flash floods and there was no real way to avoid those but we still managed to do well. Our governor, the national guard, emergency workers, etc all deserve a lot of credit for working hard to deal with the problem. Instead of spending time on press conferences our governor let other people do that while he worked on getting help.

I live in Boulder. What you should also remember is that only 3-4 people actually died during this event and 2 of them where in the same vehicle at the very beginning. We had VERY good early warning systems that gave 30 minutes advanced notice of flash floods.

Some of the large amounts of damage did not come from any of the creeks/rivers. Much of the rain fell on the mountains which are mostly bare rock and managed to make some NEW rivers. It is hard to avoid that kind of stuff.

I would say that Boulder did a very good job of dealing with these storms and we will fix the damage and move on. The early warning systems will be upgraded and some further work will be done to make it do a little better next time. However look at how many other places have had flash floods on this scale and most of them lost FAR more lives than we did here.

There is just only so much you can do to prepare for events on this scale. The boulder creek is normally a few feet deep and you can easily just walk through it. At one point we got a warning that a 30 ft wall of water was coming down it.Even with that the damage in the area was fairly minimal.

How would you deal with mega corps then? If someone took an actual invention you made and then used it themselves the odds of you winning against a megacorp is close to nil. So you could attack them and then wind up with all their billions in legal costs.

I am not saying that loser pays is entirely bad but there do need to be protections in it so that it does not simply end up bigger is immune to anything.

Galaxy Note 8 has this feature. I have been using it for taking notes in engineering classes and it has been extremely useful.

I understand what you are saying but the kinetics just don't favor that. The odds of you being able to accelerate out of a situation with a multi ton vehicle is very unlikely and very rare. People like to think it works but in the tiny moments you have before a crash there is not enough time to move one of these large vehicles by very much and the engines do not have the kind of power required to change their velocity by much at high speeds.

From what I have read from national highway safety studies and from the insurance industry based on crash reports trying to accelerate out of an accident is a MAJOR cause of increasing the damage in accidents.

Humans are used to moving at a few files per hour and that is what our instincts are wired for. They are not wired for cars and how heavy they are and how long they take to accelerate.

A bike also has a FAR higher power to weight ratio than a car and it takes far less energy to accelerate it. I can see this working on a bike just not a multi ton car.

If the system had allowed the elevators to respond would the plane have stalled and made the problem even worse?

From what I have read on this it looks like the pilots put the plane into essentially a non-win situation. Sometimes you end up in a situation in which there is no way out and it looks like the pilots put the plane into a situation in which it was not possible for the plane to get out of it. The computers enforced rules to keep the aircraft airborne since stalling at that altitude is pretty much catastrophically bad also.