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Comment Re:Oxidative damage. (Score 2, Informative) 193

some scientist, in Boston I believe, has successfully frozen beagles, and brought them back to life.

[Citation needed]. Sorry, that's just too interesting a claim to go uncommented.

I believe that dogs have been cooled to near-freezing temperatures, cardiovascular function temporarily halted, and revived after a few hours. But their tissues remained unfrozen and their blood remained liquid the entire time.

Nobody, AFAIK, has successfully frozen and revived a mammal.

Comment Re:Backfire on PETA (Score 1) 820

I simply wonder why PETA still thinks being stuck in the farm is worse than what we've (historically) done to animals that don't serve as useful a purpose.

If animals were just "stuck on the farm", I frankly wouldn't have a problem with it. CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) are a whole different story entirely. The suffering those animals go through is unfathomably immense, and that's where the vast majority of our meat and eggs come from. Including essentially all of that marked "organic" and/or "free range".

The suffering is immense enough, frankly, that I think not creating the animal in the first place is far more the compassionate thing to do.

For the record, though I am a vegetarian myself I am fully in favor of (1) responsible hunting (2) responsible raising of animals for food and (3) eating of meat from either of the above sources. I am fully opposed to contemporary CAFO sytems, however, and won't eat meat myself until they are abolished, which probably won't happen in my lifetime unless synthetic meat really does take off in popularity.

Comment Exactly (Score 1) 551

Exactly.

I was always considered one of those "promising" science students. I have undergraduate degrees in both biology and engineering, and a Ph.D. in "Computation and Neural Systems". My best stay-in-science career path was a low-paying postdoctoral fellowship that would have required me to move to a very flat and uninteresting city in the Midwest.

As much as I loved science, I stayed in Los Angeles, became a freelance software developer, and am making more than twice a postdoc's salary working roughly half a week's hours freelance. I even do a little science in my spare time. I could have made a similar amount working in engineering or science for a company, but then I'd be working 50-60 hour weeks on someone else's projects.

  TFA's conclusion - at least the part about science jobs being overpaid and underworked - is certainly no surprise to me.

Comment Re:DVD vs. BluRay (Score 1) 545

Personal philosophy: some day, all TVs will be HD, including the cheap ones. And then if you want your videos to take advantage of your hardware, you'd have to go back and buy them again.

I've always acquired media in the highest quality format I could. I ripped all my CDs to 240kb/sec VBR MP3s in the late 90's, even though it meant buying a larger hard drive back then, just so that I wouldn't have to rip them all in the future if I wanted them higher quality later on.

As soon as the HD format war started, I stopped buying DVDs until BD won and I could afford a BD player, because I wanted the longest time possible before my media was obsolete.

(Though admittedly, I don't even buy very many discs. I find I don't frequently watch them more than once or twice anyway.)

Comment There is a difference... (Score 4, Insightful) 622

I'm no fan of mainstream or historical religions either, and agree with nearly all of what you said. But:

So what draws this clear line for you between Scientology and "actual religion"? I'd really like to know.

Scientology refuses to even tell you what they believe without you spending large amounts of money. If you "convert", you do so without any knowledge or even opportunity to examine their beliefs. The beliefs, such as they are, are not revealed until after you've emptied your bank account for them.

Pretty much all "actual religions" are happy -- overeager, even -- to tell you what they believe. Their holy books are publicly available. Only this one charges you many thousands of dollars to learn what your own religion's beliefs are if you convert.

Comment I agree with both of you (Score 2, Informative) 429

Using the same base across all measurements is really convenient - parent is correct about that.

But GP is also correct in that it is super convenient for your measurement base to have many factors. A unit comprising 10 smaller units can be smoothly divided in half, but not in thirds or fourths. For that purpose, 12 is a much more useful number than 10. You guys are debating the orthogonal advantages of two different systems: both are correct.

So the ideal would be a base 12 metric system, with all units scaling by twelves and grosses, ideally paired with a base-12 arithmetic system.

Sadly, that's a pipe dream. The cultural inertia of base 10 is so strong we don't even think about it --- it makes the "strong" US attachment to imperial units look weak.

Comment Easy to buy the wrong thing, too (Score 1) 107

Several times I've come close to buying PSP games, because they're not so clearly marked - and once I actually screwed up and did it. I now own $14.99 worth of software I don't even own the hardware to play.

Would be really nice if I could have a "Just turn off all the PSP content, ok?" setting.

Comment Flawed logic (Score 4, Insightful) 638

While I'm no fan of nukes, your logic is seriously flawed: it assumes that the little, ongoing conflicts didn't exist before nukes made world wars obsolete. But of course they did.

There are hardly fewer of the small, regional wars going on now (and since WWII) than there were in the centuries and millennia before. That problem is as old as civilization, MAD certainly did not create it.

Comment And traffic jams? (Score 1) 484

Oil drippings and tire residue occluding the glass was my first thought.

And my second thought, given that I live in Los Angeles, is that during the best-sunlight parts of the day, bumper-to-bumper traffic covers a lot of the road surface a lot of the time.

That said, if it DID work, this would be an awesome technology, since it means not paving over *another* huge fraction of the countryside to lay solar panels. But I fear the efficiency won't be what the theorists hope.

Comment He's asking the wrong question (Score 1) 1146

I think this is right, plus I'd add one more: ask HER. And, ask *yourself*. Making a relationship work is a collaboration between two people, and those two people know how they work better than anyone else does. Books - particularly self-help books - are sold to fearful people who hope that a simple recipe will make everything work for them.

In any case, OP is asking the wrong question. You're in a relationship NOW. What makes that relationship work? The same things that make it work - and that would continue to keep it working - are the things that will make a marriage work. Getting married doesn't change the people, all it does is add a paper contract to a pre-existing relationship.

People who expect marriage to change themselves and/or their partner are destined for grief.

Comment Re:Rankings (Score 1) 112

Anyway, I'm assuming/hoping it's a sort of ladder system and that the size of wagers is capped at each level.

Their FAQ page makes it clear that it's a ladder system. Win enough times, and you automatically go up a rank.

Doesn't say anything about wager sizes, however (that I could see in an admittedly shallow read-through).

Comment Unison and encryption? (Score 1) 421

I am looking at Unison, and it looks interesting ... I may end up using it.

However, I'm also considering setting up FileVault on my laptop, because I don't want client data compromised if my laptop gets stolen.

What's the chance of getting a sync tool like unison working while one (or both) of the computers in questions uses FileVault?

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