well, they look good in part because they poached about half of Lotus' design team, but thanks for the compliment?

also curious, I don't see anything blatant.

I loved donating, and am also O+ but I tend toward vasovagal syncope (ie, I faint when my blood pressure changes rapidly) and after passing out in the recovery room a few times they moved me to half units and then a couple of times after that they started subtly encouraging me not to donate. I guess I was too much paperwork. :-(

former lab sample processor here - not CLT, but pre-test prep. For most tests you need serum, which is only about half the blood volume after centrifugation. Then it's poured off- by hand- into plastic sample vials. You lose some down the side of the tube, the tubes are wider than they need to be because human pour accuracy is bad which is more surplus, and the company always wants to keep at least one test's worth of serum as a backup in case a tube gets dropped or exposed to a contaminant or gets overheated or something, and because more often than you'd think doctors call up and say oh hey add these 40 tests to Bob's sample. Oh, and sample processors are expected to split well over 120 patient's orders an hour, usually into four or five tubes, sometimes a lot more.

A funny aside: some people have triglyceride levels so high that their blood serum is actually strawberry milkshake pink. Always impressive to see that.

same here, no hangovers thanks to generations of alcoholics pruning the family tree. Fortunately I find the feeling of being too-drunk an adequate deterrent.

I am _not_ offering samples as the process would be significantly more challenging and unpleasant for me than for fatphil here. :-)

Somehow she managed to win the 1996 Bram Stoker Prize for a "2009 novel". But the "(P.S.)" was removed by the time machine, and the protagonist was renamed from Zombie to Quentin P.

I believe Babcox and Wilcox (the security contractor at Y-12) did in fact have their contract terminated and were replaced. I do not know who the replacement is.

Perry says:

And what is the interesting part of the auction? A backup CD full of AWA intellectual property. If someone sues him over selling that CD and infringing upon their IP, then he knows who currently owns the IP, and he can in discovery find out how they obtained it—providing the evidence needed to file his own lawsuit.

It sounds like a bit of a gamble, though: What if, say, the customer lists and the patents went to different places? Then the owners of the former could sue him, but he would not get the information he's looking for.

Here's a choropleth map based on the first table. Unfortunately the map generator doesn't seem to handle non-integers, so "1" really means "1.0 to 1.999" and so on.

Take a look at the last two columns of table 1. I would hardly call 1.7% of the workforce in Mississippi versus 6.4% of the workforce in Massachusetts (and nearly 11% in DC) "no concentration". The hotspots aren't the three most populous states, though: Map

I found the answer oddly specific, particularly given that I was answering about my native dialect, not the common dialect in the place I live. Trying again with completely different answers, followed by looking at the page source, confirmed my suspicions: it uses GeoIP, completely ignoring your responses.

I freely admit that I am average at best when driving.

Thanks, but no thanks. Honeywell (and others) have put a lot of R&D and solid engineering into their sensors (door, window, motion, glass-break, running water, etc) and there are already "convenient" standards like z-wave for home automation.
Honeywell systems like the L5100 are dead easy install, and very easy.
http://www.security.honeywell.com/hsc/products/control/wi/ly/329673.html

BUT they suffer from this cloud service business. Ulgh? No. Cloud functionality is fine, but not when used for lock in. The honeywell system has a great mobile phone app? But You Must Subscribe to their service at $10-$20/mo. No thanks.

What I would fund on kickstarter would be some kind of open interface or open firmware for these. Ideally the low level stuff we leave alone, because it works well, and just dress up the front-end. It needs to be open source.

No need to reinvent the wheel with modules and sensors at this stage. That comes later so we can have free hardware, also.

Anyone know of any open firmware replacements for anything like the L5100?

It appears I was wrong, anyway, with regards to US law. IP licensees are specifically allowed to retain their rights to the IP even if the contract is rejected: 11 USC 365(n). It may still be a problem in other jurisdictions.

Unless a bankruptcy court or the receiver can terminate the license (as a contract entered into by a non-bankrupt entity). Apparently this is an issue in Germany at least; there have been some attempts to make an exception for open source licenses, but I don't believe those have been successful yet.

As I understand it (I am not a lawyer), under US bankruptcy law the same holds: IP licenses are typically "executory contracts" (there are continuing obligations on both sides) and can be either assumed or rejected (terminated) by the trustee with court approval. A licensee would be able to sue for monetary damages, but not to continue the license. It might be possible to argue that a particular free software license doesn't meet the criteria to be an executory contract, but I have no idea how likely it would be for a court to accept such an argument.