Terabeam Networks, c. 1999. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabeam
And they weren't the first.

Me too, except Charter and not free.

I miss the good old days of hosting my domain, but I don't miss configuring sendmail.

George W. Bush, 2001
United States v. Microsoft Corp.

Your own link hardly supports this. This action was initiated under the Clinton DOJ. On June 7, 2000, the court ordered a breakup of Microsoft as its remedy.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.#Judgment

In November 2001, the Bush DOJ settled with Microsoft in what was widely considered to be a slap on the wrist, and opposed by nine states and the District of Columbia as inadequate.

So given that at least one of the examples is hardly a shining example of recent Republican opposition to monopolies, forgive me if I don't spend a lot of time looking up the others.

And climate change doesn't destroy climate globally anyway, it just changes it around. We'll likely end up with more arable land overall long term under the most severe climate change scenarios, even if the transition is more disruptive.

Aside from any consideration of the geological time scales it takes to turn tundra into topsoil, climate change is not going to change the length of growing seasons or daily sunlight. Stupid plants, insisting on not growing in the dark.

Why should a company ignore self-serve kiosks - which get cheaper with time - when confronted with employees who demand to get more expensive with time?

Because someone has to buy your product.

Of course, then you have their "1 size fit all, basically random depending on who does the interview" interview process to go through, so it may not be worth the trouble, unless you're feeling lucky.

I see what you did there. Well played, sir.

No wonder they have such a small sample. After the informed consent form I'm sure lots of people told the researchers to gtfo.

If you had C. diff, you'd be doing everything including licking doorknobs at a urgent care clinic to try to get some healthy gut bacteria back.

I'm guessing they had people lined up and turned away for the study. Except they'd have to have their friends line up, because if you have C. diff, you can't wait in a line. For anything. Including the toilet.

Also, could an MD please provide the usual time frame in which diarrhea runs its course? 8 weeks being an improvement sounds just weird.

C. diff doesn't go away by itself. Antibiotics, if they work, work by killing everything off in your gut (again - because lots of times, you're going to have to do multiple rounds of ABs), then just hoping that other bacteria get back in there before the C. diff re-establishes itself. Else repeat, until the subject dies.

IAAD, BNTKOD*, but for some reason I know way more about this than I ever wanted to.

*I am a doctor, but not that kind of doctor

Most science professors don't know what is involved in commercial work, don't know the relevant skills for commercial work, and don't have a network for landing jobs for students in industry. There are far too many professors who don't know how to train their students for anything other than academic work, and some who are adamantly against training their students for jobs outside of academia.

And they shouldn't. I'm a scientist too. When I came out of school, into industry (not that long ago! I worked in industry before going back to get my graduate degrees, and after), there was an expectation that industry was going to spend a couple of years training one how to work in industry. Industry doesn't do that anymore. Expecting professors to both train people to work in industry, and do cutting-edge research is unrealistic. Especially since they likely haven't themselves - you don't get tenure by going off and working in industry.

The model is broken, but it's broken on both sides. Too many people get accepted into grad school, and industry is no longer willing to train people to be useful. Which is not the job of university either. It can't be all on one side.

ONE scientist can be right and every single other one on earth can be wrong. Science is not a popularity contest and it is not a democracy.

But that's not the way to bet.

Especially if you're not an expert in the field.

The funniest thing is that you posted as AC.

Is that you, ghost of Henny Youngman?

Or rather lack thereof.

It's law enforcement that's pushing so hard for these kill switches.

Right now I can walk into a T-Mobile store, buy an iPhone with cash, pay the first month with cash, and get a burner smartphone with a data plan. No ID, no name, no address, no credit check.

If this law is implemented, the ability to buy a smartphone anonymously goes away. You'll have to show an ID. For this law. How else will they know whether you're the person who can request that that phone be bricked?

This isn't about theft, the police don't give a shit about theft. If you don't believe that, try reporting one. This is about removing the anonymity of burner phones.

If a doctor recommended surgery, and the mortality rate was 1 in 4000, I'd make damn sure the benefits outweighed the risk. And I'd update my will.

That's right in the ballpark for general anesthesia by itself. When I signed the release form, it said 1 in 2000, but then they knocked me out (yay, propofol), so my memory might be faulty :)

Relative risks of common events is something people are just not good at estimating.

But outside the big cities, which comprise less than 2% of the land area of the US, there are lots of use cases for a flying car.

Unfortunately for flying car manufacturers, big cities are where most of the population lives, and where most of the wealth is concentrated. If most people in the US can't use them, and the rest can't afford them, market forces work against a flying car being affordable.

When the "get random nonsense published" prank war hit physics, it's no surprise it was a string theory journal that fell for it.

Are you referring to Sokal? http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html/

That wasn't published in a string theory journal.

While I'm not the biggest fan of ST, I'm not aware of any prank publications in a refereed physics journal, and neither are the first three pages of a search.

I have heard of this first hand. Plug in a USB device to see who to return it to, and not long after, security (computer and otherwise) pay you a visit to personally demonstrate the computer security policies you were supposed to learn from the online video training.