The experiment shows that these octopi lost their ability to respond to touch. It does not mean they lost the ability to feel the touch. It is very much possible their brains felt the touch, sent frantic signals for the muscles and cells to respond, and it would not respond.

Something similar happened to me a couple of times. When one falls asleep the brain to muscle control parts shut down. When it does not shut down properly people sleep walk and actually do things during REM. The order in which you this part shuts down, and the part that gets stimuli-response module shuts down seems to be a little muddled for me, it looks like. Long story short, just as I was drifting to sleep, the phone would ring or something, and I would try to reach over to pick the phone, but my arms and legs would not respond. The sheer terror I felt when I could not move my arms and legs was just incredible. But terror would immediately jolt the adrenal glands and adrenaline would flood the body, wake me up fully with racing heart and profuse sweat. Eventually I went through sleep studies and was diagnosed with very mild apnea and got a CPAP machine that kept my airways inflated with above atmospheric pressure (just 6mm of water, 1 atm= 10.24 meters of water). Then those episodes stopped.

But I will never ever forget the terror I felt when I my muscles would not respond to the commands I was giving them.

It is all right and great for Microsoft to support all these additional devices. But does it have a "strict compliance" mode where it supports the features exactly to spec, and no "new, exciting and enhanced features" in it.

In Windows world, they could add non standard features to the software and support it in the OS making a mockery of standard compliance, lock the developers into their platforms, and force the cost of working with/around the "de factor" standard. It would not be as easy to do in Android and Linux, since they are not under Microsoft's control. But since Android and Linux are open source, they might try to pull a fast one and come up with "extended" linux/android, and probably try to pay other vendors to use it. But I don't think it would as easy to kill the standards as it used to be.

Alright, time for some back of the envelope calculations!

A maglev line between Chicago and Atlanta through Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Louisville, Nashville, would stretch about 1200 km.

Assuming a top speed of 500 km/h and a time penalty of about 10 minutes per station along the route and a 5 minute penalty for the departure and destination stations, the ride would take 1200/500 - (5+10+10+10+10+5)/60 = 3.23 hours, which would be quite competitive with air travel, based on travel time alone.

I'm afraid the numbers would get rather bleak once we start to talk about the financial viability of the project. Generally, you get the most societal benefit from infrastructure projects that offer attractive options for day commuting, so any tax subsidies ought to be focused on such projects and not on projects that merely offer attractive options for weekly commutes or one-off journeys.

Of course you need to undergo gate rape by the blue gloved angels to get the privilege of flying to Atlanta from Chicago in two hours.

Anyway Salad Express delivers fresh produce from California to New York in under 48 hours. In the hey days, Chicago to Miami was 33 hours. Chicago - Atlanta would have been some 18 hours. Instead of hating and decrying America's love for automobiles, if only the trains take advantage of them they could once again compete with the airlines.

Everyone knows by now, trains move a ton of freight 450 miles on a gallon of fuel. If they deliver you and your car from Chicago to Atlanta in 18 hours for a comparable price to airline, they would be very attractive. Don't use the old downtown terminals. Build a terminal where people drive their cars onto flatbed railcars at the I95-I80-I84 interchange south of Chicago and drop off people at a similar interchange near Atlanta. People drive their cars on to the flatbed railcars, and walk over to the passenger cars. Then drive off in the end. The weight of passengers is so small compared to the weight of the train, and the trains so damned fuel efficient, they should be able to do this efficiently. But the only auto-train from Washington DC to Florida is so damned expensive. It is a chicken-egg problem. It can become cheaper only with a good market and a good market will happen only when it is cheap.

America is no longer one nation indivisible any more. Red states have been trying to secede for quite some time now. Only thing stopping it is, some of them realize that it is the taxes paid by the blue states and the large urban pockets that are keeping the red states afloat. So they are threading the needle of "yeah, yeah, it would be great if we could secede" and at the same time sabotaging the secession behind the scenes.

I don't think ESA would ever be cleared to handle plutonium, let alone launch it into space. For starters, I don't know who would have the authority to clear ESA to use plutonium.

For not predicting when and where the lightning is going to strike. 10 year jail sentence if no one dies. Manslaughter otherwise.

One of the biggest scams and the worst type of leeches are the companies that make these medically necessary equipment and sell to the government. Heard annoying commercials about scooters "no paperwork, we bill medicare directly, no cost to you" ads? They are the ones. They are still selling hearing aids at 2000$ apop. Granted, these are not run of the beats head phone or bose noise cancelling ear phones. But do they have to be three times the cost of a iPhone 6? Scooters at 6000$. A sonar for visually impaired people would be a gold mine to these companies. They would easily bilk us the taxpayers out of thousands of dollars for these devices.

Making them non patentable by releasing it, and making them for 60$? Surely they will find a way to add something or patent some critical part and back in the business. Some of the heart devices run into half a million dollars. If they make the money in the free market competing with other companies it is one thing. It is an entirely different thing to lobby AMA and the congress and get a competition free ride.

You are right. i am wrong. I misread the wage.

That would work out to less than 34000$ a year of full time work. Even with a 10 hr/week overtime, double time for over time it will be around 50K a year. With words like "could" and "as much as" thrown in, it is probably the maximum pay. This is not high pay by NYC standards. It just shows lots of poor people are willing to risk their life and limb for a relatively low salary.

Any pay increase to these low end workers will almost immediately be spent creating economic activity in this country, boosting GDP. Pay increases and/or tax cuts to the top end will add to the two or trillion dollars sitting in the corporate coffers uninvested because there is no good investing opportunities.

When lack of capital was limiting the economic growth it probably made sense to cut cap gains taxes and encourage investing. Now what limits economic growth is the lack of demand. Both capital and labor are abundant.

It is time to treat all income the same way, earned income, interest/dividend income, capital gains, rents ... all should be treated the same to reduce the loop holes. One concession to be given to the really long term (more than 5 years) capital gains is to allow for inflation adjustment for their cost basis.

I thought Wikipedia was spreading just misinformation and biased information. Now they are spreading actual biological diseases using Wikipedia? I'm not surprised. Internet is a lawless frontier and anything goes there.

What?

But it has a handy little write new email to no specific person button in the bottom right, where your thumb is. I start writing emails to no-one in particular all the time! Okay, maybe not...

But at least all the other features have been optimized to be as far away from your thumb as possible (assuming you're right-handed), in the top left corner. But you can also swipe right from the left edge to open the menu, and this will only sometimes cause you to delete emails from your inbox...

Actually, maybe you have a point. But the old version of the Gmail app was only slightly better.

I don't think Microsoft can help interoperability even if it wanted it, even its existence depended on it.

Microsoft is not able to ensure interoperability with its own product. Despite all that claims about backward compatibility, OpenOffice opens older microsoft files better than microsoft itself can. Microsoft had better backward compatibility when it still had the old 16 bit subsystem, and it was able to feed the incoming file stream into the old binaries through some hacked up emulator. Microsoft office files are not simple files. They are entire filesystems, its driver undocumented, unplanned, written by newbies hacking their way through. So they would just treat the old binary as a black box. Another huge wrinkle they have is munging the printer driver into their renderer. What you see is what you get, in the printer. The old file rendering will change if you change the printer. All those cruft is all encased deep inside the inscrutable binaries. But when they lost the 16 bit subsystem, they lost the ability to use old binaries as black boxes. They must have had a project to support the 16 bit subsystem itself in a hacked up emulator just for Ms-Office. Wonder what happened to it.

File formats being obscure was considered a feature and a protection against reverse engineering. So they never discouraged it and never realized it had gone so bad even they can't understand their own file formats.

So even its very existence depended on it, and they really really sincerely wanted to, still they won't be able to deliver interoperability.

I am very good at this. So good, someone is actually paying me real good money, actual money with which you could buy other stuff, for this obscure skill. This is a great country, or what!

So you would not use your second amendment rights to stand up and protect my right to free speech? However vile and detestable it is, if you believe in the Constitution you should stand up for my rights. You know who talk the talk and walk the walk?

ACLU! They defend the right of Aryan Nation to hold marches, they file suites allowing KKK to hold rallies, they file suit to protect the privacy rights of Rush Limbaugh.