unless they're standing in the same line as the dead people at the polls.

The lack of accidents and crime are more likely related to a general trend in crime going down from before they started turning off the lights. ... Give me at least one full year worth of data so I can compare it to the prior year, and have half of the country keep their lights on so It can be compared to the same time frame as well.

Hear, hear!

There's lots of room for methodology errors. Here's another:

Comparing murder rates between Great Britain and the US is complicated by differences in reporting. The US bumps the murder stat when there is a body and evidence of foul play. G.B. bumps it when they have a conviction.

Do they do that with other crime? If so, stable stats in the absence of street lighting might mean that any rise in crime is compensated for by a fall in identifying, apprehending, and convicting the criminals responsible. (Indeed, turning off the lights might easily result in LOWERED crime statistics at the same time it was causing a drastic increase in actual crime.)

The existence of a rival product does not make another product useless.

Unless of course it's a social network or something.

I'm an anesthesiologist. I put people to sleep for cardiac surgery. My hospital does around 400-500 hearts a year... and we don't kill any dogs.

What hospital is that? I'll want to avoid it if I ever need heart surgery.

Seriously: How does your cardiac unit's mortality and morbidity rate stack up against those of hospitals where practice surgery on live animal, models, at least where the surgeon is new to the procedure, is more common?

I'm an anesthesiologist. I put people to sleep for cardiac surgery. My hospital does around 400-500 hearts a year... and we don't kill any dogs.

So maybe I'm not up to date, or things are/were different in research hospitals.

My personal info was based on stories told by my mother, in about the '60s, when she was a special duty RN at the University of Michigan hospital, often handling cardiac recovery.

My favorite was the one where the UofMich hospital cafeteria, which had been purely open seating, established separate rooms for the staff to eat after an incident where patients' families overheard, and were traumatized by, a cardiac surgeon's response to a question. Asked how his operations the previous day had gone (referring to his experimental and/or practice surgery on a collie and another dog), he said "The blonde lived but the old bitch died."

The kids and adopted dogs story was from my wife. The surgeon in question was Dr. Albert Starr in (at least) the '60s through '80s. He was at St. Vincent's and also flew, with his team, to operate at a number of other west coast hospitals, university and otherwise.

A possible solution would be better simulations so that a student can learn by doing. I think it is a very different than working on a cadaver or simulated patient using conventional methods.

You obviously aren't familiar with surgical departments or you wouldn't have missed practice surgeries on live animals.

For instance: a typical cardiac surgeon, shortly before EACH operation on a human patient, does a practice operation of the same procedure on a live dog.

One pediatric cardiac surgeon was much beloved by his patents and their families, because (with parental permission) he would let the kid adopt the practice dog, rather than sending it to be destroyed. The kid would wake up from surgery with the new puppy beside him, with the same bandages, etc. (and a day or so farther along in recovery). The dog having been through the same procedure and having helped save the kid's life even before they met made for very strong owner/pet bonds. (There's always a live, healthy, practice dog. If the dog dies (or is severely damaged) the assumption is that the procedure failed. You DON'T do a procedure on a human if it just killed a dog. You analyze, adjust the procedure, and repeat until success.)

Getting skills up does NOT require, or usually involve, a lot of practice on JUST advanced simulations, cadavers or, live patients. The live patients are just the last step, when the skills are already finely honed, and the animal models provide immediate feedback, real situations, and automatically correct modelling of mammalian life processes.

Not natively anyway. My preferred app for playing media on my iPad, including mkv files, is nplayer. Not free, but worth every penny. I'm assuming it works on an iPhone, my personal phone is an android and I'm not paying to put nplayer on the iPhone my employer makes me carry.

I've gotten lots of games from the Humble Bundle you can run natively without telemetry software. I use Steam anyways most of the time, but most of them can be downloaded and played directly.

Why not? Vary the density and even the shape of the construction to simulate a spherical gravitational force with the hole in place. The basics of the idea aren't exactly new. It's sort of like the "stepped" starting line on an elliptical race track.

I've never had a keyboard phone fail

A beer spilled on my Treo 650, killing a couple of keys. I was able to buy a replacement keyboard off a random eBay seller and swap it in without much trouble (after which the phone was as good as new), but it was an annoyance all the same.

I suspect a newer touchscreen phone would've been less vulnerable to that kind of failure. Can't say that I've tested the theory yet, even though I usually have a beer in one hand and my phone in the other (to log the beer) whenever a beerfest is on.

Why don't publishers put the ads in a section of the page that can allow the rest of the page to load and render before the ad loads and renders?

Because you could stop the loading once the content you wanted was rendered, thus skipping the ad.

So the pages are set up so the ad loads and renders first.

Now THIS would be interesting.

Think about it, complete a Dyson's Sphere of this stuff around the sun, in time it is likely to melt a hole in it or blow out a side. When the side blows out the sun is doing what? Creating pressure in the remainder of the cylinder. Assuming we have the technology to pull this off I'm going to assume we have the technology to position the hole as we desire - a rocket propelled steerable solar system. Sure there would be planets freezing during the covered times, until they're cooked in the jet's exhaust wake during that part of their orbit, assuming they could remain in orbit, but it would be cool none the less.

I want to make a boiling chamber out of this stuff for electrical generation.....

It's almost like Slashdot, after helping to fight them off initially, is helping to sneak SOPA and PIPA in the back door....

Slashdot has just enough of the old Slashdot in it for me to stick around, it's still the definitive tech site. I have to say however the latest sale/purchase has really disappointed me. Any and all stories of a controversial nature are not by default slanted to a pro-globalist narrative wording. It was incredibly obvious with gamer gate, the repeated beating it into my head I should feel guilty that more women don't even want my job, and now pro TPP (which basically includes SOPA and PIPA in the text) and related treaties disguised as trade agreements.

I'm all for less taxes in nearly every instance, but these treaties are incredibly dangerous.