I get migraines, but I'm lucky in that they're very occasional and very mild. I would have a hard time telling them from a regular bad headache but for the fact that I get textbook visual auras about an hour before they hit. So, when crazy glowing stairsteps start oozing across my field of vision, I just take a few Advil with a 20oz Coke chaser and lie down with the blinds closed for a few hours.

As anybody who's an old hand at EVE probably realized: This stuff is Protein Delicacies!

In a conference room, somewhere deep underground at CERN's Top Secret Command Center:

"Those bastards at Fermilab have discovered the Higgs Boson before we did! It's time to initiate... Plan Z."

"Sir, you't seriously mean to--!"

"Oh, but I do. PREPARE THE ANTIMATTER BOMB!"

[Disclaimer for the perdantic: I know the 150GeV bump is probably not the Higgs boson.]

I know, but I figure that since the whole reason this debate is happening int he first place is because the economy sucks, and everybody wants to point fingers, it's a valid point for comparison :)

That's the way I try to look at, at least. *Nobody* is hiring in my field, because when you provide design services for expensive, bespoke structures meant to last for 20-100 years, your product is the first thing people forgo when the budget is tight and their needs aren't growing. Depending on who you talk to, something like 80% of new and recent grads in my field can't find work, since we had the ill fortune of going into school when it was booming with the rest of the bubble and exiting in the middle of its deepest low in the last 50 years. Just having a relevant job at all makes me one of the lucky ones. A friend of mine who just graduated from the same school is working as a barista and signing up for the National Guard, and most of the rest are all going back for grad school rather than face the job market. I'm hoping the work experience will put me at the head of the line once hiring starts again, but in the meantime I'm living with my parents and hoping better times are on the way.

Five years, but that's how long the program was. That's also five years that I wasn't working, except for early on when there were still summer internships to be had. By the end of my third year those were drying up pretty quickly.

Here's my anecdote/data point: I graduated last August from with a professional degree from a respected state university. Immediately thereafter, I was unemployed for six moths, and as of right now, I'm doing contract work and earning less take-home pay (after you figure in self-employment taxes) than I did the summer after I graduated from high school. So for me, figuring expenses, lost wages, etc., college works out be worth about -$200,000.

This economy sucks.

To add another data open-world datapoint, I've got 90 hours in Just Cause 2 and 60 in New Vegas. As for Oblivion, well, I think since 2006 I've done a complete playthrough about once per year. One of these days I may even finish the Fighter's Guild quests and play through Shivering Isles!

Easily mis-parsed sentence is easily mis-parsed!

See, the diefference is that in both of those situations you're aware of the limits of your car, and have some idea of the effects of the electronic systems involved. It's the general attitude of "stability control makes me invincible in spite of myself" that's dangerous.

For my part, it's a rare thing that I ever drive something that even has anti-lock brakes, so I make a point of being acutely aware of where the limits of adhesion are, and knowing how my car behaves when it's near to them. I know that safe control of my car is entirely in my hands, and take that a serious responsibility.

Correlation does not imply causation, but it it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively. The Toyota unintended acceleration problem has all the hallmarks of a self-perpetuating media feeding frenzy, and none of the empirical evidence that's come to light suggests that, beyond a few mismatched floor mats or a very rare mechanical defect in the gas pedal, the real problem is that most of the American driving public would rather have a convenient scapegoat rather than own up to the fact that they can barely distinguish the gas from the brake.

No, no, a thousand times no. Traction control and stability control are intended, basically, to modify control input when the driver does something that puts the vehicle outside the envelope of safe control. If you're going to drive as though the TCS/ESC systems magically make it safe to drive that way, you're essentially saying "I'm incapable of controlling my vehicle, but that's OK because these computers will save me from myself!" The end result is like what was observed when anti-lock brakes first came on the scene -- at best, no net gain in safety. If you're going to trust a electronic system to protect you from your own mistakes, it's only a matter of time before you find yourself in a situation that exceeds the capabilities of that system.

The summary is reasonably accurate: the NHTSA noted that while those are known problems, the "vast majority" of reports were most probably caused by driver error. NASA even noted that the frequency of reports was most directly correlated to the amount of media attention the issue had received, and not at all with design changes.

In short, this was the Audi 5000 all over again, and people need to learn how to drive instead of blaming their mistakes on their cars.

So... what's the Dominion's policy towards inter-universal immigration?