Look, I'm all for getting as much Zmapp to patients as is possible. I think a lot of people are agreement on this.

But we also need to do something about the effed up process of the approval of drugs and vaccines for these deadly diseases.

I'm thinking specifically about the malaria vaccine that has been known to be effective since '96/'97, but which has been held up for extended testing trials by (IIRC) the British drug regulators, who again put a hold on it this spring because it might not be entirely effective in newborn infants.

Meanwhile two million children are dying every year from malaria. This is a really, really, really, screwed up situation, and we have an ethical obligation to do what we can to put an end to these processes.

Even if the latest delay is "only" three months, that's a half million kids or so. It's unconscionable how poor the risk management analysis is - the perfect can be the very, very deadly enemy of the good. And so can drug-agency bureaucrats.

The old technology I am giving up are the wringers on top of washing machines.

They're dangerous (you can get your fingers caught) and they mess up more delicate fabrics. Also, the newer washing machines with the agitators that churn the wash around do just as good a job.

Also, zippers. Velcro is much easier to work with and it never gets stuck and it doesn't hurt as much to snag your dick on velcro.

Similar technology was used to look for undiscovered chambers in Egyptian pyramids in the 80's, if memory serves

Of course. Where do you think The Mummy came from?

I love science.

Dr Manhattan is unlikely to come into being from energetic mouons interacting with fissile reactor fuel rods.

I'm sure they said a spider-man was unlikely to come into being from being bitten by a radioactive spider, too. But guess what happened.

Either way, as someone who doesn't know from nothing, I'm completely in favor of bombarding nuclear rods with muons. Because I like saying "muons". "Muons...muons..." If you watch yourself in the mirror when you say "muon" your mouth makes a little kissyface. Fun!

Now please excuse me. This bottle of single-malt isn't going to drink itself.

Weird as it sounds with all the electronic label printers you can get today, there's just something about the old style "punch the label as a 3D letter into tape" approach that I prefer. Especially when the tape punch is a serious tool, not those cheap plastic versions:

http://makezine.com/review/too...

Perfection in engineering... it not only solves the problem of creating the perfect typing experience, it's also tough enough to use as your own personal Hammer of Thor when your office mates storm your cubicle trying to stop the noise.

Let me guess - are you a Cubs fan?

IRC is still used as a major form of (semi) real time collaborative tool in free software development. Freenode remains hard to beat for this purpose, and I don't really see it changing anytime soon. It's not so much a question of not giving it up as seeing no compelling reason to replace a (very nicely) working solution to the problem.

What's truly scary, is that in the US some people consider Public Integrity (both the nonprofit and the concept) to be "far left."

From the site's "about" page:

Our mission: To serve democracy by revealing abuses of power, corruption and betrayal of public trust by powerful public and private institutions, using the tools of investigative journalism.

Yep. Anarcho-communist FUDmongers, the lot of 'em.

I get the feeling there's a superhero origin story somewhere in all this "Let's bombard active nuclear fuel rods with muons and see what happens".

I have an HP inkjet and it usually spits sheets of paper clear across the tray and into the air. Mine is on a shelf so that my printouts can rain down onto my desk.

But if I'm trying to game on an old i5-750, wouldn't this be a good time to upgrade to one of the cheaper 4-core Haswells that are running 3.8mhz instead of 2.7? Maybe a Haswell i5 (I guess, I'd need a new mobo then, right?) And the latest PCI-E for a new graphics card.

I don't like to buy the newest and best, but when the second newest becomes cheap. I've got a really nice case, but I'm not sure if I could put a new processor into my old motherboard or if it would even be worth it.

I'd like to do something before the fall games come out. Would I be better off just upgrading my old Radeon HD6850 to a nvidia 760 or a Radeon R9 285 or something?

And did I fall through a wormhole and end up at Tom's Hardware?

Only a fool thinks that Nukes are dead, or for that matter, wants them dead. Heck, with JUST the nuke waste ( both from nuke plants and from rare earth mining) that we have, if we use transatomic and flibe reactors, we would have enough ENERGY (not just electricity, but full energy) to do 100% of America's Energy for over 100 years.

And note that we got into the mess that we are, because we took coal to over 60% of our electrical usage.

And yet, silicon valley is now funding Transatomic who can burn up 'waste' in a far simpler reactor. This makes them DIRT CHEAP.

It is easy enough to change the law that allows for reactors that can USES waste, instead of creating new waste.