How expensive it really is? or how much they've decided each procedure can net?

The list of charges if you pay cash-in-advance on the wall at the Los Angeles County clinic in Lancaster CA. The most expensive item is:

Any surgery: $400.

Yep, four hundred dollars. Someone else the counter asked the desk nurse how they could do surgery for that price, and she said that's what it actually costs the clinic, and that pay-later get billed at a rate 3x higher, to make up for the large number of deadbeats and the difficulty collecting at all.

This. A 1000 times this!

Considering that wild mice who live in proximity to humans markedly prefer to eat stuff humans have touched ... I imagine you'd have to find wilderness mice to study!

Zoo primates could be 'contaminated' as well.

Looks like some future researcher is in for a long tramp through the back of beyond. :)

These are things that 3D printing doesn't do maybe. But most certaintly it is feasible. And once that's achieved, you will be able to create metals with a la carte properties.

Obviously the time is right for someone to invent a little portable keyboard (possibly with its own battery) that plugs into the phone's USB port and lets you type like a normal person, instead of like a demented monkey chasing termites.

(Which is what I feel like when I use a stylus, but it's still better than fat-finger syndrome.)

Have you looked at animal samples too? Seems to me it would be easier to get those upper gut samples...

Is it human-host only, or opportunistic wherever its favored bacteria thrive?

Has any of this virus been incorporated in our DNA?

Completely OT, having been preconditioned by the crAss cracks, my brain decided to parse your username as "robed wards" which made no sense. :)

Please do so.

So, if the a copy of SecuRom installed on my machine does any of the things that the FAQ specifically claims it does not, can I bring charges against the company under the unlawful computer access act (or however it is called)?

Is this how you define signed peace agreements?

No need; I'll just park out in this handy Montana hailstorm. Free dimples!

Actually, that happened to my old truck -- got hailed on pretty good and had small dimples pretty uniformly over its entire upper surface. Didn't do shit for its MPG. And after a few years the dimples went away (let's hear it for Ford steel!) and you couldn't tell it had ever happened.

It helps considerably when that state legislature is a part-time avocation, not a full-time career. Frex, here in Montana it's 90 days every other year -- not enough time to pass bullshit and certainly not enough income to make a living. So the nimrods who are unhireable except as politicians don't thrive here; you can't live off being a politician in MT. (And a lot of local positions, like some county commissioners, are volunteer.)

Conversely, look at California where the legislature is a fulltime job, and observe what a crowd of Peter Principles it's attracted...

And yes, I have considered it, because common sense has to start somewhere. Hell, there's a opening on the local mosquito abatement board... not every job has to be ruling the world. Fixing your little corner is most of it.

I don't know about other stuff or what's current, but back in the 1980s Southern California had basically two telcos: Pacific Bell (good service and reasonable rates), and GTE (horrible service and much higher rates). GTE, being the poor little put-upon underdog company, was given protected monopoly areas where PacBell was not *allowed* to offer telco service.

Fast-forward to the massive restructuring that eventually turned GTE into Verizon, and now Verizon enjoys the legacy of GTE's protected monopoly areas.... which they remained even tho Verizon was now the 800 pound gorilla.

Okay, since the effect is apparently speed-related -- your thought about channels underneath made me wonder if an air intake feeding a channel system could be designed to regulate that airflow according to forward speed, and therefore regulate dimpling, without the tedium and moving parts of yet another pump.

So you do it on the sides (which naturally drain), but not on the roof (which doesn't), and possibly on the undersurface (if practical). The sides are about 2/3rds of the surface area of a big truck box anyway. But per this interesting comment from an AC:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
the benefit is speed-related, and "always drives at the same speed" is an absurd assumption for a car, let alone for a big truck.

Occurs to me to wonder, tho, what happens with drag if you reverse the dimples (as one would to prevent water accumulating). Someone who actually knows, pipe up!

I'm wondering if it's more efficient only in limited speed ranges, and at other ranges actually increases drag.

But nominally-identical vehicles often get different MPG (my truck gets almost double what other supposedly identical trucks get!), and that MPG can change over time as well, so given how small the differences reported are, in this case it may be individual vehicle variance.