I'm not sure how GPS can fail? There are like 26 or so satellites over the earth. I can't imagine all 26 of them going down all at once?

For starters you need to be able to receive from at LEAST three of them simultaneously or they might as well not be up there.

There are 26 because some will be on the wrong side of the Earth, or below the horizon, or behind a building, mountain, or thick cloud. Lose a few and you have times when you can't hear at least three that well separated from your viewpoint, so you GPS doesn't work then. Lose a lot and you can almost never hear three or more at once.

So don't tell me "voter fraud is nearly non-existent". We have plenty of existence proofs

And that's ONE reason why the Electorial College, rather than at-large election of the president, is important: It provides a firewall that limits the amount of voting power a single corrupt political machine can deliver in the presidential election. (The other elected officials are by region, which limits the number of them one corrupt machine can deliver.) With popular vote one big state with a corrupted election process can swamp the rest of the country and control the White House.

Remember the Florida recount? Imagine a close presidential election if the office were by popular vote. You'd have to recount the WHOLE COUNTRY.

They check citizenship before adding the name to the voter roll.

What makes you think that?

What state are you living in? In what alternate universe?

In many states they don't check. You fill out the form, send it in, and that's that. The fine print says claimed "under penalty of perjury" (that's never applied)" that you're a citizen. No I.D. required.

This is especially since the federal "motor-voter law" requires sates to provide (piles of) mail-in voter registration at many places people otherwise interact with the government, including the places they get their drivers licenses. Grab a handfull of 'em - or ask for a couple boxes. "We're running a voter registration drive." Perfectly legal. What you do with them afterward is a separate issue. (That's how ACORN - for which Obama once worked - ran voter registration drives among immigrants - illegal and freshly arrived - (using federal funding), and eventually got dropped by the Fed when some of their people just started making up obviously fake names and got caught.)

Or register (sometimes on voting day) at the polls. Commute from polling place to polling place on election day. (Your party will often provide convenient transport for you...)

My wife encountered one "undocumented immigrant" on our block who proudly showed her his more-than-twenty voting cards. When told that was illegal he said that if the officials thought it was important they'd be doing something about it.

The registrars of voters don't have the time, manpower, budget, (and often claim not to have the authority), to check all those applications. If they're Democrat appointees, they don't have the will, either: Those phantom votes are probably for their side. If they're Republican appointees, they're subject to lawsuits for "voter intimidation" if they try to actually purge ineligible voters from the rolls.

Once a voter is on the rolls, just TRY to get them off. We've had someone who never lived at our address voting absentee for years now. He was still doing so as of the last election. We get his election materials. We've tried to get him removed but the registrar won't do it. We've tried to find out where the absentee ballots are sent but they refuse to tell us: "He might be a policeman or a stalking victim..."

Our former next-door neighbor died when her second liver transplant was rejected. Her daughter reported her death to the registrar - repeatedly. Even took the death certificate to the registrar's office. She was taken off - repeatedly - and repeatedly put back on. Finally they refused to take her off, because she was still voting by mail. (I'd LOVE to know how the post office delivers the ballots and gets her votes returned, or at least how to address mail properly to reach "the other side". I have a number of deceased friends and family members with whom I'd like to correspond. B-b )

That's about twenty five fake votes that we personally KNOW about in ONE BLOCK of ONE TOWN. Most of them by ONE illegal immigrant whose citizenship obviously wasn't checked - repeatedly.

Now combine motor-voter with automatic absentee voting upon request (sometimes a check box on the original registration form). With a few (or even one) mailing addresses you can create phantom voters as fast as you can make up names and fill out one or two forms apiece, for the cost of a couple stamps. There was only a minor news blip, and no prosecutions, when it was discovered that several thousand "absentee voters" were having their ballots delivered to the same address in Berkeley.

So don't tell me "voter fraud is nearly non-existent". We have plenty of existence proofs. What we lack is substantial effort, on the part of officials (who have an interest in maintaining the status quo, which includes them being in power) to measure its extent or cure the problem

How much mass would be involved in this population of planets wandering between the stars?

Is it enough to provide an explanation for the orbital mechanics of the galaxy that doesn't require "dark matter"?

We should have an amendment that every ballot must contain the choice "none of the above".

With teeth:

If "none of the above" wins, the office is empty until filled by another election, and none of the candidates who lost to "none of the above" may run for that office in the next election for it.

This may backfire this time around.

It tells the voters that whether they voted can be checked - by ANYONE.

Whether they're citizens can ALSO be checked - by anyone.

If they voted and are not citizens, they've just committed a felony. ANYONE can create a database of that, and use it to bring pressure on law enforcement, employers, and so on.

This should be REALLY USEFUL - for gene therapy and stem cell therapy.

One of the big problems with such therapies is how to deliver the modified genes or regulators to the target cells, without converting them to something that would be rejected or otherwise have unintended markers or modifications.

One approach is to deliver genes or regulatory chemicals via a modified virius or using viral capsid proteins to construct an "injector". (A family of methods for turning harvested somatic cells into toti/pluri/multi/unipotent stem cells consists of inserting four regulatory proteins - by inserting about four GENES THAT CODE FOR THEM via a modified virus.)

Now here we have a a method, already used by the body, to transport RNA signalling snippets and other factors from one cell into another, by a sending cell creating virus-like carrier particles that destination cells readily accept and absorb.

THAT looks like an IDEAL basis for building a carrier for regulatory factors to switch cell modes on and off, or to tote new genetic material into a target cell for incorporation, to correct genetic errors or supply lost genes:

  1) Make fake exosomes carrying the message you want to deliver.
  2) Inject them into the tissue you want to affect.
  3) Rewrite the state or code of the target cells.
  4) Cure disease (or otherwise augment the patient's health).
  5) PROFIT!

Viruses by definition contain genetic code from outside the host organism.

On the other hand, just as some organelles (i.e. mitochondria, chloroplasts) are apparently the remnant of a microbial infection or ancient symbiosis that became integrated, there are several cellular mechanisms that are apparently remnants of an ancient retrovirus infection, where the bulk of the viral genome was lost but one of its mechanisms was retained and adapted to perform some useful new function.

I'd be willing to bet this is another example of such an

No, you'd have to be inbred with the cancer 'donor' to not reject their cancer as readily as you'd reject an organ transplant from them.

Not necessarily.

These things aren't carrying the full-blown genome. They're carrying little bits of it - like regulatory switches (or something that functions like that). They ought to be able, occasionally, to covert another person's cells JUST FINE without also marking them as any more foreign than an equivalent cancer naturally arising in that person.

This seems like circular logic. First one has to define what a "Neanderthal" is before answering that question.

Yep. A lot of taxonomy is like that.

In the process of classifying things they're trying to find or define sharp boundaries on a subject matter that is actually a continuum.

I recall, in my first encounters with the subject, trying to get a coherent definition of the distinctions between species, genus, family etc.. The instructor was utterly uanble to provide one. (Of course this WAS at the junior-high level.)

DNA technology is also substantially revamping the whole field. Previously they had to infer what genes various organisms had by observing their expressions in morphology - which makes it hard to track genes that are there but "turned off". Now that they can actually sequence the DNA (or the expressed protiens when the sample is too old for DNA and RNA to survive) a lot of the classifications are getting rearranged.

Was Neanderthal a species, or something more akin to a colorform? What constitutes extinction when a branch that once interbred with another dies out, but leaves behind a substantial amount of its DNA? Did the two branches actually "speciate", i.e. separate to the point where the COULDN'T interbreed, or at least couldn't produce viable crossbreed offspring that could produce offspring of their own in turn? Or was it just that they mostly DIDN'T interbreed? Were they like the races of the current human species (clusters of different traits but one big gene pool), like horses and donkeys (where crossbreeds are easy but mostly infertile), or like fully-speciated organisms that might try but just can't produce offspring? Did they go extinct, or did most of their traits just gradually (or suddenly, as in a near-extinction event where all the copies of a gene were in the places where everybody died off) get lost from the geneome of the one big human family?

Seems to me it's mostly a matter of definition and partly a subject for more research.

Don't ask me for an authoritative definition. I'm just another observer, not a taxonimist. B-)

So by what metric are Neanderthals extinct, if there are Neanderthals who have living descendants with a measurable amount of their genetic makeup?

There is no living population, large enough to produce additional generations of viable offspring, with a full, or substantial, Neanderthal genome.

No. In the U.S. cartoon images ARE protected by the First Amendment. This was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2002. (Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234 (2002)). Sometimes our Supreme court DOES get it right!

Thanks for the cite!

I'm really happy to be proven wrong on this one.

Yeah, this is stupid. You can't sentence people for drawing and using a paper and pen, whatever the content of their drawing, ...

Sure "you" can. This was in the UK. They don't have First Amendment protections, so the law is what's passed and enforced.

Last I heard, some jurisdictions in the US have some similar anti-pornography laws, banning drawn images. In the US the anti-pornography laws are justified against the clear prohibition on such laws in the First Amendment by claiming the purveyors of pornography are part of a conspiracy with the pornographer who abused an underage child by photographing her.

Obviously this justification is bogus when the image is drawn. So while the prohibition is on the books, I understand the authorities are reluctant to actually enforce it against anyone who has enough money to appeal it. So they tend to use such laws only when they can't find (or plant) any actual child pictures on a target(s) they've raided, but still really want to jail them and seize their assets, or as a "pour on the counts" measure when knocking the law down wouldn't do much for the accused.

(I think the underage are underripe and have no personal interest in such fare. So I don't follow the issue closely, except when someone threatens to post such stuff on a system I administer. Maybe somebody else, with more reliable and/or up-to-date knowledge, can comment?)

Even if the Nevada health department DID have an objection, what's wrong with having some ice bags in an insulated box at the counter and calling THAT a "cooler" or "icebox"? It wouldn't need to be powered, because it would be kept cold by the steady flow of fresh bags from the supply truck.

You'd have to run it as a FIFO, to avoid having bags sitting there for hours. (Bag porters put 'em in one end, clerks pull them out at the other - or put a moving partition in and run it as a circular buffer, so you don't have to slide them down. No additional communication between counter workers and bag-porters is necessary, because the available open space signals when more bags need to be toted. Only downside I see is that if/when the counter is about to close, you need to signal the porters to stop, to avoid having unsold bags in the cooler that need to be ported back to the truck to keep them from melting during the break.)

Such a local buffer would do all you want, without leaving the ice bags sitting on a counter in the desert. Also: The ice would be seen by the customers to be fresh, rather than partially melted while waiting to be picked up.

So nothing has made it through the Chunnel yet?