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Comment Re:So - who's in love with the government again? (Score 2) 397

by sjames (#46797307) Attached to: Beer Price Crisis On the Horizon

Grain products cannot carry mad cow. That comes from feeding beef byproducts to cows. You won't find e-coli there either, if there had been any, it would be killed in the process of making the wort.

As for the fungal issue, that actually was a problem and it killed hundreds, you apparently know about it, yet you deny it was an issue?!?

So perhaps they should focus on something that is PROVEN to be a problem rather than something that has never been over several decades. They were free to inspect the compounding pharmacies at any time, they just didn't do it. NECC was already in violation of existing law, there was no need for ex post facto anything to punish them, just enforcement of existing law.

Comment Re:So - who's in love with the government again? (Score 1) 397

by sjames (#46797253) Attached to: Beer Price Crisis On the Horizon

*I* am? *MY* guy?

Obama was better than Romney mostly because if I'm on the road to hell, I'd like to go slowly. Unfortunately, he hasn't managed to accomplish what he was supposed to, but it's still better than if Romney had achieved what he was supposed to.

But as a whole, the Democrats are more a moderate right than they are left, and both parties are too high on the authoritarian axis for my tastes (and the R's BTW are more authoritarian than the Ds, just about different things).

In some cases, we need less regulation, in others more. Most of all we need better and more sensible regulation that wasn't bought by the regulated.

Feel free to queue up the DOD and NSA for curbing. DOJ and FBI just need paddling.

Comment Re:So - who's in love with the government again? (Score 5, Informative) 397

by sjames (#46796197) Attached to: Beer Price Crisis On the Horizon

What contamination? The grain is heated to 170F long enough to kill anything harmful in it. There has never been a case of this causing a single problem anywhere. Even the FDA admits it doesn't know of any incident that would have been prevented by this proposal. It's like mandatory testing for antimatter contamination in coffee. It never happens.

Perhaps the FDA should focus it's resources on things that have been a problem like fungal contamination in drugs.

Submission + - The Design Flaw That Almost Wiped Out an NYC Skyscraper 1

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Joel Werner writes in Slate that when Citicorp Center was built in 1977 it was, at 59 stories, the seventh-tallest building in the world but no one figured out until after it was built that although the chief structural engineer, William LeMessurier, had properly accounted for perpendicular winds, the building was particularly vulnerable to quartering winds — in part due to cost-saving changes made to the original plan by the contractor. "According to LeMessurier, in 1978 an undergraduate architecture student contacted him with a bold claim about LeMessurier’s building: that Citicorp Center could blow over in the wind," writes Werner. "LeMessurier realized that a major storm could cause a blackout and render the tuned mass damper inoperable. Without the tuned mass damper, LeMessurier calculated that a storm powerful enough to take out the building hit New York every 16 years." In other words, for every year Citicorp Center was standing, there was about a 1-in-16 chance that it would collapse.

LeMessurier and his team worked with Citicorp to coordinate emergency repairs. With the help of the NYPD, they worked out an evacuation plan spanning a 10-block radius. They had 2,500 Red Cross volunteers on standby, and three different weather services employed 24/7 to keep an eye on potential windstorms. Work began immediately, and continued around the clock for three months. Welders worked all night and quit at daybreak, just as the building occupants returned to work. But all of this happened in secret, even as Hurricane Ella, the strongest hurricane on record in Canadian waters, was racing up the eastern seaboard. The hurricane became stationary for about 24 hours, and later turned to the northeast away from the coast. Hurricane Ella never made landfall. And so the public—including the building’s occupants—were never notified.

Until his death in 2007, LeMessurier talked about the summer of 1978 to his classes at Harvard. The tale, as he told it, is by turns painful, self-deprecating, and self-dramatizing--an engineer who did the right thing. But it also speaks to the larger question of how professional people should behave. "You have a social obligation," LeMessurier reminded his students. "In return for getting a license and being regarded with respect, you're supposed to be self-sacrificing and look beyond the interests of yourself and your client to society as a whole."

Submission + - Is there a place for me in this world?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I'm mildly autistic and in my mid 30s. I know I'm not the smartest person ever — not even close — but I'm pretty smart: perfect scores on SAT, etc., way back in high school and a PhD from a private research university you've heard of. I don't consider intelligence a virtue (in contrast to, say, ethical living); it's just what I have, and that's that. There are plenty of things I lack. Anyway, I've made myself very good at applied math and scientific computing. For years, without ever tiring, I've worked approximately 6.5 days a week all but approximately 4 of my waking hours per day. I work at a research university as research staff, and my focus is on producing high-quality, efficient, relevant scientific software. But funding is tough. I'm terrible at selling myself. I have a hard time writing proposals because when I work on mushy tasks, I become depressed and generally bent out of shape. My question: Is it possible to find a place where I can do exactly what I do best and keeps me stable — analyze and develop mathematical algorithms and software — without ever having to do other stuff and, in particular, without being good at presenting myself? I don't care about salary beyond keeping up my frugal lifestyle and saving a sufficient amount to maintain that frugal lifestyle until I die. Ideas? Or do we simply live in a world where we all have to sell what we do no matter what? Thanks for your thoughts.

Comment Re:Depends on if it is in aggregate. (Score 2) 93

by sjames (#46791627) Attached to: How Nest and FitBit Might Spy On You For Cash

I don't trust any device that insists on reporting to 'the cloud' rather than to a machine of my choosing. Even if it says it only reports to the machine of my choosing, I don't really trust that it doesn't also report to 'the cloud'.

The cloud has no legitimate need to know. That's why my 'smart tv' is a laptop loaded with Linux connected to a not so smart TV.

Submission + - There's got to be more than the Standard Model

Submitted by StartsWithABang
StartsWithABang writes: The Standard Model of particle physics is perhaps the most successful physical theory of our Universe, and with the discovery and measurement of the Higgs boson, may be all there is as far as fundamental particles accessible through terrestrial accelerator physics. But there are at least five verified observations we've made, many in a variety of ways, that demonstrably show that the Standard Model cannot be all there is to the Universe. Here are the top 5 signs of new physics.

Comment Re:Shame this happened (Score 1) 136

by sjames (#46790869) Attached to: Plant Breeders Release 'Open Source Seeds'

The problem is, to make that suit go, they claimed (and the court accepted) that there was no way to breed resistance without using their patented gene. That has been disproved. There are a number of weeds that evolved their own independent resistance and at least one researcher bread a food plant that has resistance without using Monsanto's gene or GM techniques.

Comment Re:Not in agreement (Score 1) 258

by sjames (#46790813) Attached to: Criminals Using Drones To Find Cannabis Farms and Steal Crops

I am not OK with 12 year olds having babies, that's for sure. That is what your lamp analogy would suggest.

Life begins at birth. That's when the brain becomes active. Before that it's just in a dream state but has nothing to dream about. Arguably, that suggests a growing ethical problem at the point that a fetus could be viable if birth is induced (that suggests the 2nd trimester as the cutoff).

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