Where do get me some of this! Can they deliver it to my house via Webvan?

I think you mean for nearly-dead patients.

I know a few people who have had pacemakers for many, many, years, and one forty-something fellow who had a heart transplant over 20 years ago and is alive and well. They were all people who would have died at a young age otherwise.

The urge to keep someone alive is also heavily weighted for age. Responders will do everything reasonable to keep someone under 50 alive, someone over 80, not so much. The circumstances are highly subject to case by case judgment, which is usually correct.

The model cover about a 3000 sq mile area. The Golden Gate Bridge is about 6 inches long IIRC.

You have to see the Bay Model if you visit the Bay Area. There is a fully restored Nike missile silo nearby that is also a must-see of Bay Area nerdy sights.

How are you going to deal with half the population living within a 10 mile range suing you for blowing out their home electronics, and when every ham radio operator within a 1000 mile radius complains to the FCC about you ruining their radio reception?

I think you are confusing this with the strong interaction of RF wavelengths with the dipole moment of the water molecule, which strongly increases at some frequencies (like in microwave ovens) and, above 30 Mhz, is the model for limits on RF exposure.

The RF simply generates an electric and magnetic field, with interacts (or not) equally with all matter regardless of size. Down to a point, and I'll let the physicists take over from there.

- but since when have incoming freshmen been required to declare their majors before being accepted at most engineering schools?

I'm a not-so-recent alum of a fairly decent school (Rice) and as far as I know as recently as 10 years ago it was normal for many students to wait until well into their sophomore years to declare a major as long as the prerequisite courses were passed. And Rice, being a smallish school, has a lot of collaboration between departments. The exceptions were "professional" schools like music and architecture, where worst case, it might take an extra year to make up the entry year prerequisites.

It may be cool, but I'm a ham radio operator and if you build this thing anywhere within 10 miles of my house, I will come over and burn it down.

This is just a toy for rich techies. There are plenty of places where lightning is frequent enough that if you build a structure to attract it, you will get lots of hits from the real thing:

http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/images/map.jpg

I've heard that both of the people who use WebOS are very happy. Keep it alive!

Heated up during ascent?

Any accident related to this will result in a huge fishing expedition for deep pockets. Even an unsuccessful fishing expedition will bankrupt all the graduate students in the crosshairs.

I wonder how it kills you - I ate an unusually hot, very fresh pepper once and my airway closed up. For a minute or two I thought I was going to need a ballpoint pen tracheotomy. After a few minutes of difficulty breathing and slobbering uncontrollably I was OK. I am fairly used to hot, but not too hot, peppers; too hot and the sensation is indistinguishable from being maced (which I have experienced also.)

Speaking as a civil engineer, a 750 km tunnel is no problem. Doing it for $45 million is probably harder than getting an elephant to travel faster than the speed of light, however.

I'm just going to assume HP is some kind of fraudulent enterprise at this point. Although I doubt there is any left there who is clever enough to pull off another Enron or Lehman Brothers.

The refusers in question were academic researchers not government employees. Just because you receive a federal grant does not mean you are obligated to make all of your unpublished data, emails, and records available to extremist crackpots. The FOIA does apply "to data produced with federal support that are cited publicly and officially by a federal agency in support of an action that has the force and effect of law. "

Citation: http://www.csrees.usda.gov/business/awards/foia.html

There was another case involving a NASA scientist who was simply being harassed by climate-change deniers. NASA has much less leeway since it's a federal agency.

In fact, the old SX-70 film used amazingly stable dyes. They should look as good now as the day they were shot. Sharpness was not so good. The stuff was expensive, I remember a magazine costing somewhere in the $10 neighborhood even in the early 80s.

As opposed to my E-4 and E-6 process stuff from those days which is already starting to fade.

I have one of these cameras around the house somewhere .... sheesh $350 if it works and I put it in a fancy box??