Why is this an "ask slashdot" rather than a "slashdot survey"?

I would love to see the opposite, there is way too much daylight in the summer, but very little night sky for someone trapped in first shift like I. In the winter it would be nice to have at least an hour of sunlight when you get home for snowblowing.

Hear hear! In the summer we have more light and less darkness, so why do things to make awake-while-dark time even more scarce? (How much of the demise of drive-in theatres can be laid at the feet of the government-mandated imposition, and increases in the period of, Daylight Savings Time?)

I have for years been proposing Nightlife Savings Time as a fix: If the government MUST muck with the clocks, set them BACK in the spring, so those of us who want some dark time don't have to wait until the ground is covered with snow to get it.

Oddly, however, the Hopi have a reservation completely surrounded by the Navajo reservation, and they don't follow DST.

The Hopi and Navajo are historic blood enemies. (I understand the Navajo word for "Hopi" means "Dead man".)

That the Hopi would do something opposite from the Navajo does not surprise me at all.

Stop making shit up.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Stop believing everything you read in the corporate/establishment/mainstream media without testing it - against your own experience and other sources.

Learn "critical thinking".

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.

Positive people are dangerous. Because they assume everything is going to be fine, they fail to plan for things to go wrong, and then after you're stuck cleaning up the mess they caused, they sweep it all under the rug and act like everything went smoothly - so not only do you get no recognition for your heroic efforts to fix everything, but they're fully confident in their ability to handle the next situation just as well as the last.

But nobody wants to listen to the pessimists, because they're so negative.

Thanks for upgrading Adobe Flash Player to fix this week's gaping security hole! You'd like to also install this FREE version of McAfee VirusScan too, right?

I think they can figure out how to upsell.

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.