You'd better put that paragraph back when you're done, and hope nobody notices that you stole it.

Generally, in cases such as these, people are really mean to badmouth the government, and they accidentally sound like they're badmouthing everyday [insert nationality here] citizens.

This is the exact same reason that, in articles about the Chinese and their government, indignant natives post nearly the same kind of posts. We really aren't talking about you, personally. We know the average Chinese, Russian, American, Brit, whatever probably isn't the problem. We are nearly always talking about your government.

Perhaps the IMAX version is more expensive, thus limiting the movie's message to the people presumably less receptive to it?

Maybe the real problem with modern MMOs is that they either encourage or cultivate a player culture obsessed with maximum statistical performance?

A factor of 8 is almost a factor of ten, and that's a whole order of magnitude.

There's a pretty big difference between a dose of 1 Sv and 0.1 Sv. Even ten doses of 0.1 Sv and one 1 Sv dose aren't the same thing, depending on how long you wait between the split doses.

Still, even 100 mSv is a lot of radiation for one CT scan. This wasn't really a typical CT. Typical head CT should give more like 1 mSv, I think.

Doctors are woefully unaware or unwilling to admit that CT scans do involve some risk because they very well can give appreciable radiation dose, often far more than that of standard radiography. They are largely viewed as harmless given the excellent volume of anatomical information they provide, and while they do offer immense benefit, it is vital that the radiation hazard be comprehended. I hope that doctors and technologists will take away from this the lesson that they do need to be aware of radiation safety and radiation risk (and some basic medical physics) even if radiation is not their primary specialty. It's not just the health or medical physicist's problem.

what

If you already have cancer, then developing another type of it one or two decades down the road is the least of your worries.

However, if the cancer is well controlled by current treatments, this could give someone the idea that they can control it even better. For young patients, this could lead to irresponsible treatments as oncologists try to balance out remission and recurrence/radiologically-induced cancers.

Thankfully, medical doctors are notoriously conservative. I worry about radiation workers (e.g. power plant operators) who might be administered this drug to allow more routine high doses; health physicists do not have a thorough understanding of quantitative risks of inducing cancer. Physics and medicine lack robust models for predicting cancer risk for low and moderate radiation doses--political and commercial pressure to throw a "miracle drug" like this one into this poorly-understood mix could well result in a health disaster.

If it's the end of the world, then it's really more of a Grey Goose scenario.

TF2 is a strange case. There's a lot of voice material in the game that you rarely or never hear. If you open the .gcf container files, you can see that--even in the early days of the game--there were a number of taunts recorded that, even now, you never seem to hear. One example off the top of my head is the Sniper's line about "fruit-shop owners". There are some that you hear only very rarely.

The "problem" (if you call it a problem) has gotten worse in recent days since Valve adds more situational jokes--but you only hear them rarely, if ever. For instance, if a spy dominates a scout, he has a few lines that he can say. Problem is, that doesn't happen every day, and the randomness of which line is chosen means that most people may not even hear his "well, time to visit your mother!" jab--which is really very funny if you've watched Meet The Spy. But you might never hear it in-game.

This seems to kinda be an endemic problem with the game at the moment. If the payload cart starts to reverse course, it always seems to be a heavy or sniper or scout that says something about it. Maybe only those classes have those lines recorded, but it seems like the kind of thing that would be an improvement, if they were to record those lines for each class. Then again, voice acting costs money--and Valve is wasting quite a bit of that acting by locking it up behind rare game conditions.

I understand that Valve is trying to keep the humor from wearing thin, and think that it is a worthwhile goal. However, I think they haven't reached a proper balance yet: you get really sick of the Heavy whining about the cart going backwards, and you hardly ever hear the domination lines.

Optical devices show up in all kinds of places (bridges, cars, spectrometers, printers, linear accelerators, computer monitors, bombs, storage tanks, communications lines, and so on), and light does all kinds of strange things if you know how to use it. Besides electrical engineers, optics is probably the field with the most stuff-that-you-look-at-it-and-have-absolutely-no-idea-what-it-does. Your average interferometer might look like pieces of glass screwed into a box. Most engineers know what a capacitor or integrated circuit looks like and does, but very few know what a beamsplitter or electro-optic modulator looks like or does.