Sadly, this is the kind of thing you usually only see in countries where government officials are corrupt. It is a warning sign of the direction the U.S. government is headed.

I'm perplexed at the motive behind such shennanigans. What is to be gained? Grant money? But surely that's too short-lived to be worth it. Does it just boil down to laziness on the part of someone seeking a PhD?

I guess it's like embezzlement. You have to know, you're going to get caught eventually. There is no escaping it. But people do it anyway.

True, but their world view is mostly about being angry at someone or something. The shows on those channels, and the way stories are presented, are specifically designed to get people angry and upset. The viewers are comfortable in their anger. They embrace it, and look forward to more of it. It's a kind of madness, I think.

Fox News would go out of business.

A solution in search of a problem. With driverless cars on the verge of being a reality, road rage will become a thing of the past.

I am reminded of the scene from the movie Brazil, where the protagonist is drving this tiny little one-person vehicle on the freeway, surrounded by huge trucks on all sides.

With a dead extinct animal? No. The closest thing is an extinct ibex cloned in 2009 (hardly "a decade"), and it only lived for a few minutes --- not exactly a success in my book.

I didn't mean literally the size of the animal. What I meant is that there is only going to be so much 43,000-year-old DNA to go around. You wouldn't want to waste it on a process that didn't work. You'd want to start out small, with a dead, frozen chicken that had been on ice for a year or so. Extract its DNA, and then see if you could get a live chicken out of it.

I know they have cloned live sheep. Has anyone cloned a frozen, dead animal yet? That I haven't heard about.

I suppose the idea of cloning a 43,000-year-old mammoth would be the kind of thing that would attract funding, but from a purely scientific standpoint, wouldn't you start out small and try to clone, say, a dead chicken first, just to see if the process actually worked?

I didn't know dire wolves were real. I just thought it was some BS that George R. R. Martin came up with.

Anyone who thinks that robots will be smarter than humans by 2029 has not really thought things through. I can step out on my back patio, take one look at the pergola, and tell you that it's going to need to be replaced in the next couple of years. I can look at the grass and tell whether I need to cut it this weekend or let it go for another week. I can sniff the air and tell you that the guy in the next cubicle has farted. Of course a robot might come to the same conclusions, but it would have to take samples from the pergola for testing; measure the grass over a period of several days, test the humidity of the soil, and check the weather forecast; and it could tell that a mildly noxious gas has entered the air from the cubicle next door; but would it know, absolutely KNOW, that the guy in the next cubicle farted?

And will they ever build a robot that can truly understand a woman? Hah!

How about if you lose your job because you can't get to work because your car was erroneously towed.
How about if you get frostbite because it's 7 degrees outside with a wind chill factor of -18 and you cannot drive home because your car is gone.
How about if your car is damaged during the towing process because the tow truck driver, who took your car when he shouldn't, is an idiot.

You've obviously never had invalid information about you in a database somewhere. It can be impossible to get rid of, and nobody accepts responsibility for the bad information.

I don't trust the tow truck drivers to have that many scruples, especially if they are paid by the tow. I think they'll take whatever vehicle they've been told to take.