I'm been writing avionic software for the military for over 15yrs, and I've never had to been with firewire. Ethernet, MIL-STD-1553, ARINC-429, RS-422, RS-232, Fibre Channel, PCI, VME, and, ...USB. Nope, no firewire.

So what you're saying is that either:

1. you haven't been given the opportunity to work on the latest and greatest
2. the software you write doesn't interface directly with the avionics hardware, so it doesn't need to know the specifics

The F-22, the F35, the A380, the 747-8 - they all use firewire. Even unmanned military aircraft now use it http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=mcT&q=related:www.moog.com/media/1/LOA_08_News.pdf

If you can test "in utero", you can have your cake and eat it too. If the fetus is going to result in a disaster, a quick D&C is preferable to a lifetime of crap.

Of course, this has social implications - the biggest one being that, over time, the average "genetic quality" of "true believers" - fundies who are against abortion, will trend lower than the population at large. Considering some of the mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging moronics displayed in the last election, we've already gotten to the point where the effect is visible.

3-4 more generations ... it'll sort itself out. Just keep telling yourselves that God really wants you to breed kids that will live a shortened, painful, and meainingless life. Stupidity, like intelligence, is partly genetic.

"A reasonable model of health insurance would deal with catastrophic costs only, say in excess of $10,000 per hospital stay as indicated by these data."

That wouldn't work, because it takes away the motivation to reduce risk to everyone for the lower-cost events. Less reason for the "insurer/halth care system" to encourage people to do preventative care that has a low risk of falling into the "catastrophic" category.

As we're seeing with the GM bankruptcy, a single health-care system has unforeseen side benefits, one being that GM wouldn't be in its' current position if it didn't have $110 billion of unfunded health-care liabilities.

Your math skills might need some work ... "As per your test of 1/3 false positives, we'll use that test for the over-the-counter el cheapo test so you come to a doctor for a better test/scan. After all, if you dont have it, there's a 67% chance it will not alert you.",/i>

If 1/4 of the tested subjects actually have cancer, and the test yields 3 false positives for every true positive, there is a 100% chance it will alert you.

Now let's consider something more prosaic - a test for drunk driving. Would you like to be convicted of drunk driving when you were stone sober, by a test that "only" has a 1% false positive rate?

Or death row inmates - where we now see that there's a 20% false positive rate there, AFTER all the "safeguards".

How about a marital fidelity detector? Is 1% false positives on supposedly-cheating spouses "acceptable?"

Or lie detectors in general. After all, "if you have nothing to hide, citizen ...", which completely ignores the false positive problem.

False positives are a real, and serious, problem, and it will be at least a generation before we can make any of the claims in the article. It's like artificial intelligence - 20 years ago, it was 20 years in the future. Now it's STILL 20 years in the future.

Gee, don't say that to the aviation industry - they've standardized on Firewire because it saves weight in cabling.

The F-22 Raptor, the A380 Airbus, etc use firewire and gigabit ethernet to save weight. With over 300 miles of wiring an each A380, cutting the weight even in half makes a big difference with an A380.

http://74.125.77.132/search?q=cache:L96bOxSv3V8J:www.critical-embedded-systems.com/meecc/2005/presentations/Keller.pdf+army+tank+firewire+combat+electronics&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=6&gl=ca&client=firefox-a " JSF Avionics snapshot

Distributed avionics: display- management computers, integrated core processing, and flight subsystems

IEEE 1394 FireWire network links core processor and display processors

Fibre Channel links core processor modules and sensor subsystems "

The military will be saying "You can have my Firewire when you pry it from my cold, dead hands." They have the bigger guns, so I think they'll win any argument.

It gives plenty of outward clues as to "what makes a person tick", which we internalize over a lifetime as "rules."

An example FTFA:

Millions of people are exposed to cognitive psychology in college but have no interest in making a career of it. What made it so attractive to me?

As I stared blankly, the interviewer suggested that perhaps it was because I grew up in Quebec in the 1970s when language, our pre-eminent cognitive capacity, figured so prominently in debates about the future of the province. I quickly agreed -- and silently vowed to come up with something better for the next time.

Stick him in a room with 9 non-Quebecers, and a native Quebecer will pick him out immediately. He "looks" like a michigan-hotdog+poutine-looer

So this gives a quick insight into his formative culture (since it gives information about BOTH nature and nuture - genes have regional variations), despite his rejection of the interviewers' observation.

That he rejected something so obvious just goes to show that we're all human, and want to believe that we're more complex than we really are.

For example, what good would "normal" cancer test be if it detected 100% of cancer cases, but also, for every one detected, falsely marked 3 others as having cancer when they didn't.

Now apply it to this.

For those who want a quick fix, just send me your money along with a description of the problem.

I guarantee your problem will be fixed, or I'll refund 100% of your money, less handling fees.

Chiropractic is the same bullshit writ large, except they don't do refunds when they cause permanent damage.

But seriously, send me your money. What have you got to lose if it works? And if it doesn't it's obvious you aren't sincere enough - you need to double down on your efforts - send me even MORE money.

Me: "100% satisfaction or your money refunded."
You: "I want my money back."
Me: "Sorry, but I found your money to be 100% satisfactory. Therefore, you're not eligible for a refund."

"You wouldn't go to a neurosurgeon for a broken arm would you?"

If it was a choice between a chiropractor and a real doctor, you're damn right I'd pick the real doctor.

So, what's next - a car analogy?

Also "So much for the open minded people here."

Your insistence that your anecdotal "evidence" trumps science shows your lack of an open mind. Kind of like religion. Why not join the scientologists? They'd also be happy to relieve you of your burden of excess $$$ in exchange for helping you believe in horse-puckey.

"Sounds like you've been burned."

Nope, just been following these scammers since before they were approved for insurance coverage. For example, they said that you couldn't see the type of "subluxations" they were "trating" on an x-ray. Insurance companies said "We won't pay without an x-ray!" All of a sudden "See this x-ray - it shows a "subluxation" - even when it doesn't show anything abnormal.

The only person I wasn't able to dissuade from seeing one of the con artists paid for it with years of neck pain from an "adjustment."

They're frauds. Same as scientologists and astrologers. Problem is, they both cater to the same urge for people to "want to believe", or "the easy fix." The only way they'll relieve back pain is by lightening the load you carry in your purse or wallet. Placebos are cheaper and certainly less risky.

"Norberg, who has a day job designing furniture, had no complaints about his medical care - only how much he was billed for it. In his original review, he wrote, "I don't think good business means charging people whatever you feel like hoping they'll pay without a fuss."

It's certainly no worse than what we see lawyers try to pull every day, padding their billing hours.

God greeted the lawyer at the pearly gates.

God: "Come on in, you're the oldest person up here."

Lawyer: "How's that? I'm only 43?"

God: "Not according to your hours billed records ..."

... though a more apt comparison might be between chiropractors and scientologists ... birds of a feather.

Your 3 possibilities are a lot more logical than the *true believers* who go on and on about how, if we please god, maybe he'll listen to us, or that we somehow have some sort of obligation to a god (if we were to posit the existence of a god) who either is doing a crappy job of it, or hss ethics and morals on a par with Atilla the Hun and Hitler.

Sorry to disagree about terms, but to an atheist, "firmly agnostic" () means you acknowledge the possibility of god, since you refuse to say that there is no god. That's about the same as "maybe a little bit pregnant."

As for the 10-week-old fetus, the brain structures just aren't there. If an adult were to have the same lack of brain structure, we would say that whatever made them "them" is gone, and all that's left is a shell, a husk.

An arm or a leg is not a human person, and cannot house a person. Only a functioning human brain of a certain complexity can do that, and the fetus in the example doesn't qualify. It's not opinion - it's easily measurable fact.

Since it seems to be about a certain specific place, maybe the best option is to contaminate it and relocate everyone - half on one side of the world, and half on the other.

In the end, of course, even that wouldn't work.

To the one possessed by hate, their sense of hate justifies anything.

A Solomonesque solution - let one side say "Enough - it's just not worth it. Take it all and be damned." Like in a nasty divorce, where eventually one side has to say "You want it so bad, take it. I have a life to start living."

In the end, like petty fighting in a divorce, or domestic violence, it's not about the "stuff" - it's about power. The other side only continues to have power over you if you let them continue to drive the agenda. Walking away from a fight, or abandoning everything because your ideals are worth more than any piece of land, is the right thing to do, and the rest of the world would respect that.