Get a job as a contracter/sysadmin, and store encrypted copies of all your stuff on the servers in your client's offices around the country.
I would also suggest their desktop computers. The executives desktop computers always have extra space, but they get upgrades too often. I suggest low-level management's and receptionist's desktops. They never get anything new.

The actual survey question is:
  “Do you support or oppose the following government policies?”
  with several cases, one of which is:
"Mandatory labels on foods containing DNA"

The first thing you should notice is that the word "warning" does not appear. Kudos to the reporters and slashdot poster who either did not read the survey or did not understand what they read.

Almost all foods already have labels, and for most foods (presently) anything more processed than a raw banana must have a label.
So, the question is, should all foods (containing DNA) be required to have a label?
For example, "This is a banana" would meet the definition of the question.
or, "You're looking at a steak"

I can support that, especially for processed foods, and we already have that law, so, yeah, I support mandated labels.

especially for those weird roots that appear in the bin at the grocery store.
WTF is that I ask? I dunno, there's no label.

Keeping with your analogy ... In order to exactly determine the location of each single starling, you need a shotgun(s). Then it no longer is part of the flock now that it has been observed.

As an aside, I am aware that you can shoot at a flock of starlings all day and not hit a one.

This thing only duplicates items that were originally made by a 3D printer that uses that same material.
That is to say, I don't want a teleported camshaft that is printed with a 3D printer that uses chocolate for the printing material.
Well actually I do want that, but I would not put it in an engine.

Nor do I see how something made of materials that aren't available as 3D printer matrix materials could be teleported.

The other problem in India and similar places is that the dosage wasn't what the label said. The doctor may have prescribed 500 mg of amoxicillin, and the patient bought capsules in a bottle labeled 500mg amoxicillin, but what was in those capsules was a fraction of the prescribed dosage.

Case in point is Ranbaxy who sold millions of doses of what they knew was non-performing anti-retroviral drugs.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/...
And more like this:
http://fortune.com/2013/05/15/...
http://fortune.com/2013/01/10/...

The bad part is Ranbaxy only got caught because one of their executives was an American who ratted them out.
Ranbaxy only got into trouble because they tried to sell their crap in the USA, otherwise nothing would have happened to them.
There are numerous other drug companies with the same ethics, but they don't try to sell in the USA or Europe, so they'll never get caught.

Another thing I did not know is that the FDA almost never test drugs for efficacy.
What happens is the drug company does the tests and the FDA looks at the drug companies documentation and procedures and signs off on that. This is why cheaters don't get caught - they are grading their own papers, so to speak.

BTW, Ranbaxy was bought by Sun Pharma, so Who Knows where their drugs are going now.

There's a saying that the credit for a discovery goes to the last person who finds it. This is a variation of Stigler's law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

A whole corpse? That would be awesome, especially when some alien culture opens up the probe and realizes what it is.

Alien Corporal realizes what he's looking at: WTF! WTF! It's some dead guy!
Alien Sarge: A corpse? Is this some kind of joke? Why would they do that? Find the Captain and tell him.
Alien Captain: I bet it's a threat. They're saying this is what they'll do to us.
Alien Captain: We need to hit them first and hit them hard.
Alien Captain: Unlock the weapons cabinets, and make sure every man has his sword and shield.

++, that is the crux of the matter and the answer

Quoting Buckaroo Banzai:
No on one, yes on two

I'm old enough to remember. My families phone number was two letters and 5 digits, and I was a small child when the first direct-dial long distance call was made. I had relatives that were still on party lines.

You are correct in that phone service was expensive compared to today. Long distance calls back then cost far more per hour than almost anyone's hourly pay. However local land-line service was cheap and included in-home service for phones and wiring. Some people went for decades between outages. The primary cause was someone knocking down a pole and breaking the wires.

But today's lower costs are almost entirely due to technological advances and not to de-regularization.

When de-regularization happened, home phone rates went up as telco businesses sprang to to cherry-pick businesses to serve.
(home phone rates in the regulated days were subsidized by higher rates charged to businesses, much like electric rates are set)

However, the good thing about de-regularization was that those new telco businesses now competed on the basis of features, and business phone service competition drove innovation. After that, then home service rates went down (that is, down in inflation adjusted dollars)

But look at the things invented during the regulated phase by Bell Labs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... in the 50's, 60's 70's That is a list of eveyrthing. transisters, lasers, MOSFET, molecular beam epitaxy, Ritchie and Kernigan worked at Bell Labs.


As for "service was even worse than you can get from Comcast today", I do not think that is correct.
My only service requests (and my parents) had been establishing new service when moving, and it was always excellent.
My experience with Comcast (and my neighbors) was shockingly bad. Bad as in refusing to take service requests, bad as in not showing up at all for service requests that had been accepted.and worst of all bad as in having service failures at all.
I have never met anyone whose experience was the opposite of mine regarding telco vs Comcast service, or even modern AT&T vs old AT&T. Service was one thing they did right in the old days..

It drive me nuts when someone makes the argument that something is not free because somebody paid for it somewhere.
It's free to the person who got it and did not pay for it, otherwise the word "free" has no meaning.

Sure, Peachnet is funded ultimately by the State of Georgia taxes and lottery players, and all money ultimately comes from the labor of the proletariat or something like that. The thing is that various entities have their own budgets, whether it's my bank account, schools, or the fire department. And this is not in the budgets of the school systems that are receiving the service.

The fiber rollout to these schools is happening outside their budgets - it's not an item to them.
Nor can they choose to spend the money on something else that they might think is a better use because they never see any money.

The thing is that many, if not most of the schools that are getting the fiber have no money for such things because they have little tax base.
There are 159 counties in Ga, and of those about half have less than 25,000 population. 30 counties have less than 10,000 people. Their tax base is not enough to fund getting fiber, network infrastructure, and support run to anywhere especially for the few students they have. Their contribution to the tax base is a fraction of what they get back.

If the state did not provide the fiber at no cost to them, those schools would have no fiber.
It is irrelevant that there may have been a wiser use of the money because they never had the money.


If you asked me if it was free to the people of the State of Georgia, then no it isn't. The money came out of our pockets.
But it's free to the school systems.

sigh.
It should be obvious to anyone that read the article that what he meant was free at the endpoint - free to the school that receives the bandwidth.

How can I explain it?
My next door neighbor was working in his garden, and I told him him could take a break and offered him a beer.
I handed him a beer over the fence. He did not give me any money.
He got a free beer.
I know that I had to earn the money to buy the beer,
He got a free beer because he didn't give me any money.
I know that the brewery had to purchase the materials and plant to brew the beer and buy bottles.
But he got a free beer because he didn't have to pay for any of that.
It was a free beer.
That beer was transported on public roads that had been paid for with taxes, and my neighbor pays taxes. but there was no cost to my neighbor for transporting that beer.
It was a still free beer to him.

He got a free beer.

If the word "free" has any meaning at all, then somebody gets something they did not have to give extra money for.
In this case, it's free bandwidth to schools.

If you want to argue that "the money could have been used to buy books instead", I'll tell you that the cost of that beer could have been used to give my neighbor a book. But nonetheless he still got a beer. And it was free.

True, but the point is that it's free to the end point user, who would have nothing otherwise.
Instead of having each of the 6,000 plus schools and colleges run their own network department, each rent bandwidth, and each run a budget item for it, the University System of Georgia pays for it and maintains it. In other words, just like any large corporation would do. Schools in rural areas an't get high-speed bandwidth through the commercial carriers for anything affordable, and in some rural areas you can't get it at all. And, once the capital cost of laying the fiber and equipment is done, then it costs a fraction of what the monthly rent from ISPs would be.

I see where you are coming from, but I think this is what they are saying.
When some people mean "store value", they are thinking that if one hours work gets me money that will buy me 7 gallons of gasoline, or 10 cans of Dinty Moore beef stew, and today I earn $20 for that hour, then that value (of my work) is stored in the money, and I can always get that much goods for that $20.
If a few years later, that $20 can only buy 4 gallons of gas or 5 cans of stew, then the value of one hours work was not stored, but rather lost by converting it into $20 when it was earned.
But the 7 gallons of gasoline will always be worth approximately 10 cans of Dinty Moore regardless of the dollar price. What people want is a "store of value" that will always get you the 10 cans of Dinty Moore for the hour of work you did some years ago. There have been currencies that have lost all their value - 1920's German marks, whatever they used in Mozambique for example. Some people believe that a certain weight of gold will always get you the same (within reason) amount of beef stew over the decades, and although that isn't true, but it is closer than most other things that pass for money.