OMFG, who the hell would want to work in IT for less than $42K a year? Because if $42K/year is the median that would suggest half of all IT technicians are getting paid peanuts. Unless you live in a low-cost, rural small city or town, less than $42K/year is very goddamned low nowadays.

It's never been about driving skill, it's been about attitude. When skill is called for, so far, I have done well for myself. When attitude has been in question, it has sometimes been questionable. Maintaining a positive attitude in the face of others' actions has sometimes been a challenge for me. Luckily, I seem to be mellowing with age somewhat.

Right in line with my sig, I guess. How far do you have to drive to "save an hour" by going 85 mph instead of 75 mph? I get 637.5 miles (8.5 hours at 75, 7.5 at 85). That's about the distance from Helena (Montana's capital) to Bismarck, ND, purely on interstate highways. Bozeman is less than a hundred miles from Helena; that's over three round-trips a day to save an hour.

Perhaps two quotes got conflated, though; a round-trip out to the northeast of the state, where there might be Bakken shale work sites, could save an hour. Of course, that means you drove all day just to get back to Helena. No wonder we need that frackin' shale oil so badly.

I don't quite agree. There's a mistake in your viewpoint, I think, which is to assume that the progress of science consist in the development of a final theory which bears no modification, and then people disproving that theory because it's wrong, and using evidence to develop the correct theory which also bears no modification, and then you're done. Like, well... we've developed relativity, and that's working really well, so there's nothing else to do there.

It's a very common idea, but it's not quite how things have traditionally worked. People talk about "the theory of evolution" and "the theory of relativity", but in reality there are a lot of sub-theories which continue to develop. We know that somehow life forms evolve and change, and Darwin had a theory about exactly how that happened, and there have been many additions and modifications since that time. We now have a set of currently accepted theories about how various mechanisms in evolution work, and many of those may well be shown to be false, and many more may need modification. But more than that, sometimes there are other ways of looking at things which result in subtly different theories, which are neither quite "true" or "false", but just different ways of looking at things. You can look at a person as an individual organism, or you can look at it as a colony of cells, or you can look at it as a component of a "pack" or a "gene pool". These are all modifications and sub-theories of "evolution". And this is why I object when people argue with creationists by claiming that "the theory of evolution has been proven to be true, and there's no more arguing to be done." No, that's not quite right. We can say with a very high level of certainty that life began as simple forms a very long time ago and evolved to provide the diversity and complexity that we see today, but the exact path and timing is still disputable, and the theory for exactly how that happened is constantly being revised. The exact scientific "theory of evolution" is not set in stone, but the overall concept of evolution is undoubtedly true.

Now that may seem like a tangent, and I'm sorry for that, but I found it easier to describe the idea using evolution rather than physics. It's important, though, since the theory of General Relativity is similar. When Newton developed his theories about the motion of celestial bodies, people saw how clearly this lined up with what we see, and said, "Yes, this is obviously true. No doubting it." And essentially, Newton was right. Unless you have read prior writings on the subject, it might be difficult to understand just how groundbreaking his ideas were, but now we take his physics for granted because they're so fundamental to our current understanding of the world. However, in the time since his work, we've found that his model of the universe doesn't quite work. Einstein seized on one of the ways that it doesn't work, and he made some major changes in the way we view space and time. Those changes, again, made us say, "Yes, this is obviously true. No doubting it." because of how clearly they lined up with the discrepancies with Newton's theories, but ultimately the discrepancies are so mild that we rarely calculate things using Einstein's work. It overturned our Newtonian theory about how and why things work the way that they do, but it didn't quite overturn Newton's work. Most of Newtonian physics still work under most of the circumstances we encounter, and we only bother with relativity when dealing with specialized circumstances.

And so the same might happen with Einstein's work. Someone might pick apart some discrepancy and provide a different explanation for time and space in a way that allows Newton's and Einstein's work to continue under a new umbrella which incorporates new ideas. I can't imagine what that would be, but I couldn't have imagined Einstein's work before I read it. I'm sure people a few hundred years before Newton couldn't have imagined his work.

Now, having said all that, I do agree that there's a distinction between saying "flight is impossible" in 1850 and saying "faster-than-light travel is impossible" today. In 1850, people knew that flight was possible. There were birds and bats who did it, so obviously it was possible. People didn't understand how they did it, so they didn't see any way that we could make flight possible for people (ignoring hot air balloons for the moment). However, our current understanding of physics says that FTL travel simply isn't possible. It's not like we have birds that sometimes travel faster than light, where we can say, "Maybe if we can just figure out what they do..."

You're right in that it makes no sense to spend money trying to develop this technology. It'd make more sense to spend money on various kinds of scientific research, and see where the scientific advancements take us. If it's possible to travel through wormholes, studying physics should eventually lead us to the groundwork for doing that, but it makes no sense to spend money on trying to advance a particular scifi technology when the groundwork isn't there.

But was anyone (other than some AC) actually suggesting that we spend money on wormhole technology? That's the part that confuses me. You have a science fiction movie where people discover an existing wormhole, a scientists with his panties in a bunch because he feels like that's unrealistic, and then the scientific adviser on the script agreeing that it's not realistic.

Not completely scientifically accurate-- certainly not completely within the bounds of what we currently know about science-- but more than it would have otherwise been. It's not clear to me that he failed at all, especially since scientific accuracy doesn't seem to be Nolan's general goal in film-making. Or are we to believe that you can invade people's dreams, and that Tesla invented an electrical matter duplication machine?

That's precisely what you just did. You believed that the word "belief" automatically means "unfounded" when if you owned a dictionary, you'd know that's not true. You'd also know more about the word "faith", which can also be founded in logic. People like you make agnostics like me who know their way around a dictionary look bad, so please consult a dictionary.

Citation needed. It may well be that the influence of marijuana is to have less accidents overall. We don't know, because the studies have focused on the people who have had accidents, so we only know what percentage of them were under the influence. We don't know what percentage of them would have crashed sober, so the information is not useful.

Not typically a problem with smoking. However, this is also true of alcohol, especially while buying mixed drinks.

Ah yes, the good old argument from ignorance. Congratulations, you just made it.

Yes, the Prison Industrial Complex in the USA is institutionalized slavery.

What? No, teams of ministers would just be more torture. How about some societal reform, where we're not imprisoning people for victimless crimes? That would make a substantive difference. But we do that to maintain the status quo, in fact to keep those jails full for profit. Sadly for our corporate masters, crime is waning. They don't like to report that, though. We have jails going empty and corporate masters going begging for profit, THIS WILL NOT STAND! I suppose the answer is to start imprisoning people for driving after smoking weed, even if we can't show that they're actually impaired.

If you're going to kick the alert stoned driver off the road, you MUST kick the old and unaware driver off of the road, because THEY are CLEARLY more dangerous. If we even ARE going to take THIS step, we should do THAT FIRST. If we don't, we're proving that this is solely about revenue generation, and has nothing to do with road safety.

The study doesn't show what you want it to show because it deals only with people who had accidents. It doesn't deal with the drivers who didn't have them.

That's because it's stupid.

This test doesn't do that, so keep waiting.

First, you should have to prove that the driver deserves to be classified the same as the drunks, and the available evidence strongly indicates the opposite. That's why both pro- and anti-pot advocates think you're an idiot: the pro-pot people know that what you want doesn't make any sense, and you're making the other anti-pot people look like idiots by association with your argument.

Go get another neurologist, then. Go troll fora to find out who's got one that is on board, and then contact them, repeat until one accepts you.

Yes, ignorance. Marjuana actually promotes the production of brain cells in adults. Perhaps you should give it a go, it looks like some of yours have gone AWOL.