You can buy liquor 24/7 in Louisiana, at any kind of store - convenience store, Walgreens, grocery store, etc. Check out the first exit in LA on any interstate highway, you're going to find a gas station/liquor store. Back in the early nineties, their legal alcohol age was still 18; I smuggled $400 of booze back from Christmas break my freshman year.

Maybe in the Northeast, but not generally true across the country, and especially not so out West, where 75 is normal on freeways. In Texas, the speed limit tends to be 70 even on two-lane roads.

Christ, some people have no sense of humor.

That's not how it works. Not at all. I'm an anesthesiologist, and my job basically consists of being cool when the world goes crazy. Just like a pilot. Unlike him, I haven't decided that the world needs to go down with me.

Absence seizures don't really work like that, and they don't really show up as a new diagnosis in someone that age. A prior diagnosis would have disqualified him from getting a commercial (and probably a private) pilot's license. And automatisms won't don't that. My wife is an epileptologist, I know far more than I want to about these things.

Murder-suicide is when you decide to kill that lying bitch you've been living with all these years, and then realize you'd rather be dead than spend the rest of your life in prison. If you just feel the need to end it between the two of you, there's no reason over a hundred other people need to go too.

Speed governors are not going to ruin a generation. When I learned to drive, my speed governor was called a "crappy engine". My first car did 0-60 mph (~0-100 km/h) in a blistering 16 seconds if the air conditioning was off - much longer if it was on. It wouldn't do 75 mph unless it was headed down a mountain. But it had four wheels, it ran, and it was mine, and that was enough.

Seriously. Check out the competition, to be sure, but my Synology? It Just Works. And It Just Works Really Well. And it's the size of a large toaster, which means it can fit on a shelf in a closet, or behind some audio devices in your media center. Buy, insert hard drives, install OS, it does the rest - automatically. Hard drive dies? Shut it off, replace drive, turn it on, it does the rest with minimal intervention. If you want to be paranoid, you can even set it up to be able to survive two disk failures.

Do you even read Wikipedia?

I'd be quite good at designing execution systems, as well as pain-based torture systems, if I were so inclined. (I'm not.)

"Put to the sword"? Jesus H. Christ on a popsicle stick, that's an overwrought fantasy. "Choir receives sermon enthusiastically" is more like it.

The Hippocratic Oath is purely symbolic in modern medicine. It is not a requirement for medical licensure, and does not have any force of law.

Xenon has anesthetic properties, so possibly not. Argon probably would.

See my reply to Jeremi above.

The problem with nitrogen asphyxiation is the optics suck. One critical insight into the three-drug death penalty method was the paralytic. As neurons die, they "wave goodbye" by triggering muscle contractions. So even though they're utterly unconscious, they will still have seizure-like activity if you don't paralyze them.

It's called anesthesiology. Oh, sure, I learned how to keep people alive in a medically-induced coma while they're being cut open, but that also means that I learned a whole lot of different ways to flip the switch to the "off" position. Two sides of the same coin.