I don't get why they'd think New Zealand would be safe from protests. If they really want to be safe they should be thinking places like, say, Heard Island, like a true billionaire supervillain would.

Um, you do realize that Canada is a commonwealth state and the queen is the head of state, right?

It's a two-step process. The first is a chemical that dissolves the proteins (still in their "cooked" folding), and the second is some sort of centrifuge or similar (they don't go into details on the device in the article) that subjects the proteins to very high sheer strain, effectively mechanically unfolding them so that they can then relax back into their natural state.

Not exactly a spice you can sprinkle onto your steak, but still pretty neat. :)

That just raises another issue - why are you services and utilities so unreliable in the US? Here in Iceland we get hurricane-force winds several times a year on average - I've had gusts over Cat 5 on my land. Winter isn't incredibly cold but is super wet (all precipitation forms), windy, and lasts a long time. Up at higher altitudes you get stuff like this (yes, those are guy wires... somewhere in that mass). I lived in the US for a long time and had an average of maybe two power outages a year from downed lines and such - sometimes lasting for long periods of time. I've never once had a power outage here that was anything more than a blown breaker in my place.

It's really amazing what you all put up with - your infrastructure standards are really low.

Yeah, here in freaking Iceland most people have 50 or 100 Mbps fiber for a lot cheaper than that. And not just in the capitol region, it even runs out to Vestfirðir now where the largest city is under 3k people.

It makes no sense whatsoever that a hunk of rock just under the arctic circle, 3 1/2 hours plane flight to the nearest land mass with any sort of half-decent manufacturing infrastructure, consisting often unstable ground constantly bombarded by intense winds, ice, landslides, avalanches, volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, etc, with the world's 2nd or 3rd lowest population density and heavy taxes on all imported goods, can do this while the US can't. What the heck, America? You've got half of the world's servers sitting right there, why the heck can't you manage to connect people to them?

I'd fully support removing any barriers to that. They'll surely get charged out the nose, but it's a reasonable proposal. What's not reasonable is having regular drivers subsidize Uber drivers by letting Uber drivers do commercial work on non-commercial insurance.

Haha, yeah, I remember back when all that was on fark.com was a picture of that squirrel with the oversized genitals. Heck, I knew him before Fark.com, when he was the wizard Cletus on the mud Three Kingdoms.

God I feel old...

That falls into statistically normal usage. Being a commercial driver absolutely does not. Statistically, a commercial driver drives way more than a noncommercial driver, and they're much more likely to be sued, and for more money. It's absurd to argue that they should be able to drive on insurance rates calculated for statistical norms of noncommercial drivers. If you allow that sort of ignoring of statistics then you might as well get rid of all statistical tables period and charge every last person the same rate for all types of insurance.

Why, exactly, should Uber drivers get to drive passengers using regular non-commercial drivers' insurance? Commercial insurance costs more because people who drive people around for a living are much more likely to cost the insurance companies more money. If you're letting them drive on non-commercial licenses than that means that regular drivers are subsidizing Uber-drivers.

Fuck that, I've been trying to install FreeBSD on my Commodore 64. Crapping Commodore 1541 disk drive keeps mangling my installation CD.

That's pretty much how I remember it. There would be all those awkward asides referring to events in the films, as if anybody who hadn't seen the movies would actually be reading the book. I found it fairly distracting.

Get back in your box, Richard Stallman!

Another one of my favorite films. David Niven and Peter Falk were also a riot.

So you see nothing wrong with a professor using his status to obtain sexual favors?

I think The Empire Strikes Back still stands up very well. I agree the other two don't have the same magic they once held, but Episode V, which, ironically, had the least involvement from Lucas of the original six films, is extremely well plotted, with better dialog and much more convincing acting. The only thing that comes close to Episode V is the final confrontation between Luke, Vader and the Emperor in RotJ. Unfortunately, that's only a handful of scenes in an otherwise mediocre film.