Oh come on moderators! That is false, false, false false. It does not deserve the +5 informative.

As many other posts here have correctly pointed out, there is no such requirement for a signed a waiver. According to HIPAA patient data can be published if it is stripped of personal identifying information such as names and soc. numbers. The falsehood that the Democrats are pushing is that research data must be either kept secret from the public or that, impractically, the personal identifying information must be publicly released with signed waivers.

This is about government officials trying to avoid public accountability by keeping secrets. Please stop enabling that by modding up propaganda.

So does this ruling apply to the public or only to government?

For example, could I legally collect Elizabeth Warren's "inadvertently shed" DNA and have it tested to find out if she really has a Native American ancestor?

If this is something only the government can do legally, then what law gives them but not me the right to collect other people's DNA and have it analyzed without their permission?

More to the point, is there any law preventing me or anyone else from doing this right now? I can see James O'Keefe with a cotton swab and vial chasing Elizabeth Warren across the Harvard campus.

from the summary:

"There are just so many places where Wi-Fi doesn't reach," says Jan Dawson "and the quality of Wi-Fi that you can find is often subpar."

I bought the Republic first-generation Android Moto X phone about a year ago and have used their 4G/$40.00 a month plan since. The only wireless networks which I connect to are my home network, work network, and free networks in airports and hotels when I travel. Republic will throttle the data rate if I exceed 5GB of cell data usage in one billing period, about a month.

So now for the million dollar question: Does that work? With only those connection, do I break the caps because too much of my data travels over cell towers instead of wifi? Ya, it works. I never get even close to the caps. Partly this is because the phone is smart about deferring low-priority high-bandwidth tasks until it picks up a wifi network. The big one here is auto synching photo and video to my google photo account. The other thing is my usage pattern is normally not to gobble up a lot of data while in transit because I commute to work by driving. If I were streaming Netflix or Amazon Prime video daily on an Amtrak commute then I might have a problem, depending on how severely they throttle.

There is more to Republic than just their wifi/cell tower technology: They work really hard not to be assholes about billing. There are no lock-in contracts and amazingly, you can conveniently change your cell plan up to twice a month, from $5.00 wifi-only policy to higher data rates at $10, $25 and $40 per month plans. The amount you are billed never exceeds those limits, regardless of your usage, they just throttle data rates instead of adding more to your bill.

I have only one gripe: I use my Republic phone with Google Voice and mostly the voice lag was insanely long. Seems to have improved a lot recently though. Not sure if that is attributable to the phone, to Google Voice, or to the two in combination.

Local Motors is an investment of Bre Petis, of Makerbot fame, as noted on his web page.

I don't know if it is deliberate viral marketing strategy of his or just good investment instinct, but I have noticed that products which make headlines on tech sites trace back to his investments. Another example is the new LIDAR offered at SparkFun from PulsedLight, which, according to this YouTube video, is linked to DragonInnovation.com, another Petis investment.

Because the world is perfect and none of our code ever had bugs or design flaws? And people never hype their crap, actively mislead and deceive us?

The term for this is soft despotism.

It was coined by Alexis de Tocqueville and first described by him in the second volume of De la démocratie en Amérique, first published in 1840.

Wikipedia has a list of games based on ASCII art graphics, hope it helps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

And why would Journal Peer... review her? ;)

Let me guess, you're also a cage fighter, 6'6" tall, and have a 10 inch wang?

And all the other *Kits - for making things fancy and GUI and creating a generation of Linux admins who don't actually know how things work.

Actually, what really reduced crime was legalized abortion.

From "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime," by John J. Donohue III and Steven D. Levitt, appearing in the The Quarterly Journal of Economics:

We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed signiZcantly to
recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly eighteen years after abortion
legalization. The Zve states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines
earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade.
States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime
reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after
abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears
to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime.

If that is correct, still either the Cosby Show or banning leaded gasoline could have accounted for up to a 50% of the drop in crime.

There is a great interview with Elon Musk on youtube here. He is remarkably transparent about his reasoning. One key to his success is that he works very hard to understand motive and purpose when making decisions.

Musk makes that point that it costs about as much to fuel a rocket as it does to fuel a 747. Space launches are mostly so expensive because the vehicle is sacrificed with each launch, not because of the energy requirements for a space launch. The other big component of the expense is that rocket manufacturers charge a lot. According to Musk the value of the raw materials from which they are formed is reasonably inexpensive. Those were two hugely important realizations because they meant that space launches were not inherently expensive and therefore there is enormous potential for reducing launch costs.

By being Space X instead of Boeing the cost of launch is reduced to about 25% of conventional launches because Space X can assemble a rocket from raw materials for that much less. A re-usable vehicle, Musk predicts, would reduce launch costs by an order of magnitude.

So those are the motives and reasoning underlying the X-wing grid fins and re-entry discussed in the Slashdot summary.

"The soldiers most likely to take their own lives were men with past suicidal behavior and a history of psychiatric disorders and criminal offenses, including weapons possession and verbal assaults."

Thanks, Watson.