Smoking, drinking, drugging should be all placed under the same legal-but-taxed regime. They are a tax on idiots, dimwits and self-loathers, economically and Darwinistically. This should not make any law abiding, taxpaying non-smoker, rarely-drinker, non-drugger nervous.

Yes, they could try a non-violent approach, but only if the law is changed. That will happen after the voting majority changes their minds on that and I doubt this will happen anytime soon. Until then, it is against the law - and law enforcement should do whatever it needs to uphold that law.

I see the opportunities for well-regulated legalization of dangerous items, especially if it is about dangerous substances that people themselves take and do willingly in the privacy of their own living and bedrooms. But as long as the law is on the books, it will generate income for the cartels and violence around them. This is harming the American public much much more than either legalization or foreign terrorism and should therefore be placed on much higher importance.

Legalize it or stomp it out with full force. There's no middle ground, since that fuels the cartels. Why are the drones still circling Afghan skies then?

So the label MAFIAA is not just for jokes anymore?

Has someone already looked into the "spontaneous fatal accident" rate for filesharers vs. the non-filesharing public?

Declaring him in breach of a contract means publicly announcing that they GPS-tracked their employees and confirm it on file.

With this info public and confirmed, thousands of current and ex-employees will sue them for truckloads of money.

Thousands of employees filing claims is several orders of magnitude more expensive than reclaiming the settlement money of one single contract. Adding to that, the reputation damage of Cisco is incredible - in the eyes of the general public, their customers and, most importantly, their potential new employees.

In the very sensitive market for a) network security equipment and b) rare specialist tech employees, confirming underhanded practices and snugging in hidden software in equipment is not only heavily frowned upon, but tantamount to corporate suicide. Who would buy firewall technology from a company known to sneak hidden software into their equipment? Which heavily sought-after techie - who are usually very keen on privacy and do-not-track policies - would apply for a job with a company known to bug their *private* phones?

Cisco would essentially be dead in the water, soon joining Nortel.

So no, they will never call an anonymous source out on a non-disclosure contract. They can dismiss this now as "just rumors and FUD", which it actually is. Confirming it with a lawsuit would cost them billions, so they will remain perfectly quiet, even if these rumors were true.

Bone marrow constantly builds new immune cells. Patients kept in total quarantine will survive when no other diseases can reach them until their immune system is built up again. Problem solved.

Procedure is used for a Leukemia and other diseases, so there exists medical experience on it.

Vaccines exist for HVA, HVB, some HPC.
Both herpes are rather harmless.
Vaccines are in clinical test phase for HVC.
Syphilis is curable.

Among STDs, there's only one 400kg Gorilla left. If they cure that, it's probably time for a 60s revival.

I don't know where and when the "it feels good, so it must be bad" meme entered the Western hive mind. Have we come to a point where a harmless, but very satisfying activity is frowned upon because of it's harmlessness? Have we come to a point, where every action, every pleasure, every thought must have some rational meaning or be an indispensable element of some great planet-saving master plan?

There's almost no product, no advertisement, no activity, no pleasure, no part of life that is not overloaded with pro- or anti-guilt messages about saving or destroying the entire planet. Everything we do is increasingly put into a worldwide context of a global ecological theory of everything. When the prospect of harmless but gratifying sexual relations to return after AIDS is cured, I find this very unsettling, to say the least, to call this "uneducated". Can't educated and smart people, too, just like everyone else, have some fun even if that's not related to saving the planet this time, please?

Right on the spot.

A 500-dollar amp from 1980 can't possibly compare to a 500-dollar amp from 2011, since the 500 dollars themselves are worth much much less than before. Counting only the officially admitted inflation and all, you'd probably need at least 1,300 dollars to buy for the same value of goods than 20 years ago.*

They should've compared a 2011's $2000 amp with a $500 amp from the 1980s. But thinking about inflation got unpopular since the Big O.

*) source: http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi

The Indians laughed about selling things like "land" as "property", a mechanism without the economy would never function, lest all available land is squandered and destroyed.

So if marked areas of land, water, emissions can be auctioned, why shouldn't the same apply marked areas of electromagnetic spectrum? Where's the difference? Finite resource: check.
Profit possibility by using it: check.
Easy abuse by others: check.
Need for some protection to enable any use of the resource: check.
Law enforcement costs (public costs) with profit (private benefit): check.

We want that spectrum put to use. It can't be used without policing (one crappy transmitter is enough to ruin the party for everyone). Using a properly policed spectrum brings a huge profit. Ergo the profiteers need to pay for policing. End of story.

Which is better than "of the state, by the state, for the state".

There's hardly a middle ground, since either middle will soon gravitate to one end of the spectrum.

And I prefer corporatism, since there's still a lot of corporations out there and when they fail, their place is taken by better, faster, efficient players. When states fail, on the other hand, it get's messy as they refuse to change and put on an ever increasing grip on everyone.

And what's wrong with auctioning off the spectrum to the highest bidder, using the revenue to salvage a tiny bit of our national debt and then watch services get provided or the spectrum auctioned off again. Public resources shouldn't be given away for free, since free is usually squandered. Remember why there's so many cows and so few whales?

It didn't.

But We, The People, decided to not give finite resources (like land, airwaves etc.) away for free to people that may or may not use that resource properly. We could of course make obligations, check proposals on their merits and then heavily regulate and monitor that finite usage. Or we just auction it off to the highest bidder, use the revenue to pay for the national debt and then let the bidder work out their business plan. That business plan either succeeds, bringing more money in following auctions as other bidders see that success - or it fails, and the resource is auctioned off to the next bidder during liquidation.

Make fair and transparent rules and then let the market - which is nothing more than public need expressed in monetary values - work. Just like that invisible hand.

A service that is not paid for with money is not synonymous with "free". Money is not the only value that can be used to pay for something.

In its original form, people exchanged 1 cow for let's say 5 sheep. Not for free.
Slightly different form: computer repair service for quality whiskey. Not for free.
Mow my lawn 10 times and I'll fix your roof. Not free.

Almost the same with Facebook: share some (or all) of your personal info, I'll provide a convenient way to keep in touch with friends. Except for the fact that you cannot really take back information, you cannot reverse the trade or un-share the info.

Personal info has a tangible value, If not for you, then for others. IIR about 3 Dollars per mail address, 15 Dollars for full name and credit rating. If you don't mind giving it away, it's good. That's part of all trades: I have a used car I don't want anymore and need money, you have 5000 bucks and want a used car like mine. We trade, and we're both happier than before. If you value your privacy nothing and Facebook access a lot, Facebook has a sweet deal for you. But not everyone has the same priorities.

A is friend of B, B is friend of C, so A and C must be friends, too, lest A cannot be friends with B? And all can be alienated by that?

This is only true for "brothers", not "friends". Ask any Marine. They've got some hundred thousands of brothers. Ask if they everyone of them is their friend.

You could not be any more wrong than that.

Asses sometimes succeed. Spineless people never do.

- Pitot tubes are heated. Weather conditions on FL 30 and up are pretty stable, so pitot tubes either freeze over daily or never.
- The misaligned speed indications lasted less than a minute, after which all three speed indications returned the same approximate value again.
- The pilots noticed they were in alternate law (see voice recorder transcripts), so they should've been trained to input perfect steering commands from then on.
- Trained pilots must have noticed a hard stall, after temporarily climbing up to FL35 (see recorded data)
- Whatever feeling the pilots may had after they've been falling like a rock for 2 consecutive minutes, they are trained to rely on instruments, not gut feelings. The altitude meter has a backup that is not dependent on the pitot tubes. Radar altimeters? Barometers? Inner ear pressure? Squeaks in cabin panels from rapid pressure changes? GPS-inferred altitude, no matter how imprecise they may be? A sustained, rapid descent that doesn't resolve through a nose-up attitude with full power applied must, to a trained pilot, seem like a true stall or a control surface wreaking havoc.

"Luck" should have no place in modern aviation. This is not a lottery. It's either design flaws, failed procedures or pilot error.

And we don't managed to rule out PAX-induced cellphone EMI as a confounding factor in this case. We know the speed indicators were unreliable for a minute and *think* it was the pitot tubes. I'm not saying it was, but it *could* have been interference.

There's still some unclear points:

- Automatically and silently disabling a stall warning at low speeds is a decision that can't naively be understood, since low speeds are a major potential reason for stalling the plane. What's the reason behind that?
- Airbus procedures that command a full nose up in response to a stall seem even more cryptic, especially when conducted at FL30 with plenty of room to turn the nose down to regain speed. A Nose-up, speed-up close to coffin-corner airspace seems very counter-intuitive. I can't think of a compelling reason for that, so there's a [citation needed].

Correction: we still *think* AF447 crashed because of an iced pitot tube. We still don't know for sure.

On the recorder, we saw a constant nose-up input from the pilot, with the plane stalled and falling fast.

It could've been an electronics failure or a crazy pilot's error...