and its only eight fucking dollars.

In this context, wouldn't eight frelling dollars be more appropriate?

It's been decades since I read that book, but unless my memory's worse that I think, he didn't define it at all.

What's worst is a teacher who defines a new term in a way that only makes sense if you already understand the concepts behind it. As an example, Rudy Rucker once defined a cardinal number (in a book) as, "A number is a cardinal number if it doesn't share its cardinality with any other number." Now, if you know what a cardinal number is, and what "cardinality" means, that's true. If you don't, as most of the readers of that book wouldn't, it's useless.

Admittedly that may open up a can of worms as those fraudulent researchers sue to get their names off billboards, but that's another issue.

Go ahead; let them sue. Refuse to settle and insist on your day in court. Then, you can prove to the jury that everything on those billboards is true, and with luck, the plaintiff's legal fees will bankrupt them.

IANAL, but I don't think so. Perjury is lying under oath, not taking the oath while intending to violate it. Probably, what happened is that the prosecutor was very careful not to ask any questions that would force the cops to mention the device, and the defense can only cross-examine a witness about things that were brought up during the direct examination.

I live in the city of Camarillo, in Ventura County, California. There are enough coyotes around here that nobody in their right mind lets their cats out at night because they'll get eaten.

I'm a vet with a minor, service related disability. (Hearing loss; it's bad enough that the VA will pay for my hearing aids and batteries, but not enough that I'm getting any money for it.) I also get all of my medical care from the VA because I'm retired and on a very limited income. Yes, there can be long waits at the VA, if you don't have an appointment, but that's just as true at private hospitals. And, I can't see where anybody benefits from increasing the number of people applying for a disability rating when there's already a two-year backlog. What the VA really needs right now is more people processing those claims, and the money to pay them. Then, once that's cleared up, we can worry about adding new reasons for vets to get disability. It's not a matter of not caring because I've got mine, it's a matter of first things first.

Building factories (and especially power plants) that don't pollute costs considerably more, and takes longer. If the Chinese want to industrialize as fast as possible, they may not be willing to accept the extra costs, both in time and money, that it would take to do it the clean way. Think of it as a form of instant gratification.

I'm sorry that you had a very bad experience. However, you need to remember that any government department with over 280,000 people in it is going to have a few that don't belong there. I don't want to start an argument, but do you have any evidence that this was more than an isolated case? If so, I'm sure that the people running the department would want to know about it.

I've used the same technique when editing /etc/fstab. In one shell, I make may changes and save, without exiting, then use mount -a in the other to see what happens. If there's no output, fine; if there is, I simply go back to the other shell, correct whatever I did wrong, save and try again. Works great for editing any config file that can be easily tested.

No. I was referring to the fact that most of the veterans using the VA either aren't disabled or are getting treated for conditions that have nothing to do with the service, and if it weren't for us, 90% of the people working for the VA would be out of work.

Somewhere else in this thread I mentioned that I had cataract surgery done by the VA. There's a very small chance that I developed cataracts because I worked on CW radar in the Navy, but if so, there's no way of proving it. I never set foot ashore in 'Nam, so there's very little chance that my Type II diabetes has anything to do with Agent Orange. And yet, I get medical care for these and other conditions from the VA, and because I'm on a very limited income, I'm not charged. If the VA didn't provide that kind of care and only dealt with conditions that were directly related to the service, it would be far, far smaller, and that's what I was talking about.

Agreed, and that's why I've been careful to make it clear that it's my own personal experience, and that of my friends. I only know what the quality of service is here in the Los Angeles area, because that's where I live and where I get my care. Yes, there are some bad apples, and possibly the management at some facilities encourages that attitude, but I can't testify to that because I haven't seen it. And, I still find it hard to believe that people are being blocked from getting proper care in this case because of malice, because I've not seen the slightest suggestion as to what reason there'd be for VA management to have such an attitude toward total strangers.

No, or at least that's not why I need hearing aids. I have what's called an artillery notch: a loss of hearing acuity at certain frequencies caused by mechanical damage, but the loss isn't high enough for compensation. I get my hearing tested every two years, but it hasn't degraded enough as yet to change my rating.

I don't know if they've invented the microwave equivalent of a laser...

As it so happens, the maser was invented several years before the laser, and the laser was originally called an "optical maser."

Ah. I'm now priority six: broke as hell, but with a zero-percent service connected disability. I have hearing problems that can be traced back to being exposed to too much outgoing shore support back on the Gun Line in '72. It's not enough for compensation, but I do get my hearing aids and batteries for free, and get pushed ahead of people like you when I need access to a limited resource. I'm not sure, but I may have gotten a benefit from this once. After I had my first cataract surgery, I was told that they couldn't schedule my second for six months, so they put me on a waiting list. My second eye was taken care of only six weeks later. I can't be sure, of course, that I bumped somebody else, but I've always wondered about it.