We don't actually know the chance of cancer, because the machines have not been properly assessed by the FDA, nor has their calibration schedule been assessed or published. It is safe to assert, however, that given the complete lack of shielding, the cancer risk for TSA employees is well beyond what it is for travellers.

My grandma's cousin was a nun and also a research biologist. The Catholic church paid for her to get a PhD and then gave her a tenure-track position in a Catholic university as soon as she finished. She discovered the existence of pheromones in ticks and invented something called the pheromones petri plate method.

At a time when most women were housewives, she was active on panles with World Health Organisation. She got to travel the world.

I used to wonder about her motivations. She really, truly and deeply believed in God and was very deeply religious. When she died, the other nuns seemed convinced that she was a saint.

A lot of people assert that those who have religious faith are stupid or don't understand science, but that clearly wasn't the case for her. She didn't have to pick between intellectual reason and faith.

If this actually works and students learn more / better, then certainly it would be a worthwhile experiment. God knows, California seems to have money for prisons. You'd think they could spare a bit for schools.

Yeah, if you have one of those cards that automatically deducts fare (like a London Oyster card or those new transit cards in the San Francisco area), you are still being tracked.

My n900 has never gotten me laid, but it did once incite phone envy in a geek with a very hot girlfriend. I might have offered a trade, except I might have gotten stuck with his andrioid.

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We could also expend a lot of energy inventing technologies that are less likely to screw up the earth. Renewable energy, for example.

Colonising another planet is a dream. We'd do better to fix this one.

Even if it did somehow work, a trip through space and starting out on another planet would create a large selection bias. Those who got off Earth wouldn't be properly human for very long.

A friend of mine is a lesbian and a high school teacher. She's not out to her students, but it's easy enough to guess. She gets false accusations a few times a year from homophobic students. It's stressful, but the school administration understands the source of it and is as supportive as they can be, almost. They don't go so far as to try to educate the kids about homophobia.

Meaning that they launched it before it was ready and thought they could use it's alpha status as hype in the form of invites. That's marketing fail.

They're damaging to the previous administration, not to the current one. However, if they let it go, they won't look tough. And, of course, there are proably a bunch of documents, not yet leaked, that are plenty damaging to the current administration.

Vegans object to exploiting animals. A human woman who consents to share her milk with an infant is not an exploited animal! Moreover, they would argue that a cow feeding it's calf is similarly not exploited. They would say that a cow is forced to share it's milk. I don't know if this is the best way to look at it, but a cow certainly can't give meaningful consent.

I think their invitation model was also a huge mistake. It was a great way to build hype for Gmail, but you can use Gmail to interact with anybody who has email. A gmail invite was thus really cool because it was immediately useful. You could email all your contacts, but with a very hip/hyped interface. Slowly trickling invites into Wave did build some hype, but when I got on it, I only had 2 or 3 contacts on it, which did not make it useful. It was also slow as hell. Google launched it before it was ready to actually deal with public usage and tried to cover for that by letting people on it very slowly, thus making it pretty useless to early adopters. I haven't even looked at it for months and probably neither have any of my contacts. Their slow rollout effectively prevented it from reaching critical mass.

I really don't want anybody peering at my genitals. I doubt very much that anybody dealing with these machines has received any training regarding transgender issues. I suspect it won't be long before there's a publicised incident of a trans person being publicly humiliated. These scanners are intrusion just for the sake of it.

That's what she said?

The data costs in the US are astounding. Do you have no infrastructure or is this just what the market will bear?