Speaking as someone who has actually moved personal items from the northern to the southern hemisphere, depending on where you go, the single biggest threat to you property may well be theft. It can happen anywhere along the route and no one will be willing to say they received the goods intact.

Sounds like a Kindle to me ;-)

Or that wonderful scene in Annie Hall when they are in the queue at the theatre, the loudmouth ass in front of them is spouting off about his knowledge of Marshall McLuhan, and Woody Allen brings out Marshall McLuhan in person to refute the ass.

I see, you think you are cute, but you misunderstand the point of double blind. The point of doing double blind is if there is a possibility that the clinician might know which drug is the test and which is the placebo and then if that knowledge could have even an unintended effect on the subject during the course of the treatment. Since the surgical patient is usually unconscious this can't happen, but if a person were being extremely careful they could have one physician interact with the patient while they were awake (before and after the surgery) and have a separate doctor do the actually surgery (or not) but lie to the "awake" doctors so they always thought the surgery was done. You are probably right that no one has been confused enough to do something like this, for ethical reasons if nothing else, but in addition to not understanding when double blinds are appropriate, you also fail to understand a ruptured appendix. Roughly speaking, the mortality rate from having the surgery is about 1 in 1,000,000 while having no surgery after the appendix ruptures is almost a death sentence. Which pretty much makes your cuteness irrelevant.

I have to call BS on this one. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but from what you said, it sounds like that you are claiming something like: Take two people each with an acute appendix. For one, do an appendectomy, for the other, put him out, wake him up, and tell him he had an appendectomy. And the surgery is no more effective than lying to the guy. Sorry, but there is no way in hell that can be true.

except that I don't want WA to know my FB login and pswd. That's what it kept asking for, even after I logged in to my (mostly bogus) FB account and gave it permissions. Smells fishy to me.

Didn't work. Had me log in to FB, give it permissions, then it kept begging me to create a WA account. I call BS on it.

So you are sitting in your kitchen eating some food you just purchased at a store. Suddenly some guys in black suits burst through the window, knock you to the floor, and take the food, leaving behind a message stating that someone else claimed it looked just like the food they bought, so it must have been theirs. And you are claiming it's all OK because you can go down town to an office, fill out a report, and in a couple of weeks they will return your supper to you. Sheesh

I screwed up and read TFA. What a waste of electronic ink. Talk about lack of substance, analysis, or depth. I feel dumber afterwards than I did before I read it. This is probably a real topic, but you'd never know if from that article.

I have degrees in math and have taught Math at the university level. The biggest problem is that many of the people we send to college in the US should be in tech school instead. They probably won't benefit much from Algebra, but then they are most likely flunking many other courses as well. History, Literature, Biology, the list goes on. For the ones who should be in college, and who will benefit from a college education, they absolutely need the skills that a good mathematics education will help them acquire. For the ones who should be in tech school, they often can't even do basic whole number arithmetic so naturally they don't benefit from Algebra at all.

Sounds to me what he's really worried about is them finding all the porn he's downloaded to the computer over the years.

So they will not be paid to teach as much as they will be paid to lead meetings... just what we need in the education system is less teaching and more meetings -not-

with Texas in the throws of a multi-year drought, it's not so much efficiency as it is possibility

what the environmentalists will use for an excuse for why this is evil... maybe compressed air is bad for subterranean cave bats?

Wouldn't life be wonderful if everyone who made speeches knew what they were talking about? What part of dancing bunnies is eluding you? Sure some users are morons, but the rest will do about anything to see those bunnies.