It especially explains why many colleges (at least before the US drinking age was raised to 21) have bars called "The Rathskeller", pronounced "Rat Cellar".

"Original Series. But Picard."

My local cable company didn't carry The Sci-Fi Channel until just about when Farscape went off the air (idiots! This is Silicon Valley, what did they *think* we wanted to watch? ESPN?) so I never saw enough episodes to really catch on, but it was kind of fun. And ST:TNG happened during the years I didn't have TV, so the few times I saw it were always the same annoying episode with Q in it for some reason.

This was back before the World Wide Web, when call centers were primarily toll-free numbers that you called to get information from companies, make airline reservations, etc. It was either people you wanted to talk to, or people you had to call anyway like the electric company.

Babylon 5 vs. Star Trek ver N+1? Easy choice, Bab5 wins hands down.

But X-Files was why I had a TV in the first place. We'd had an old Amiga monitor and VCR to watch movies, which eventually got replaced by a TV/VCR combo, but my wife saw X-Files when she was staying at a hotel for a conference, came home and rented all the available videos at the video store (remember video stores?), and then one day I came home and there was a coax stretched down the stairs from the cable jack, and I was told that if I didn't like it I could move the cabinet that was in front of the living-room cable jack.

There are those who say we should not be responsible for seeing to it that the least-earners among us have health care, sick days, etc. But that whole petri dish thing... that's the result.

Joe the McDonald's window guy has flu/whatever, but he can't take a day (or 3 days) off (might not be allowed to, but can't afford to anyway so, the former is moot.) So Larry goes for lunch, and comes away with whatever Joe had as a bonus. And that goes on all day, for several days. While everyone else in the McDonald's catches it too, thereby extending the event even further, basically until every employee's immune system have handled the problem. And of course, there will be the occasional person who can't manage it -- for whatever reason... compromised immune system, preexisting disease process that complicates matters, old age, whatever. For them, matters can be much worse.

Either we admit that we need to take care of everyone, for everyone's sake, or we'll just keep running into situations where transmissible diseases have far more chance to spread than would otherwise be the case.

Odds are excellent that the only thing unique about the Disney event is that someone noticed it. Most people have probably been on the receiving end of such "petri dish events" many times. Anywhere you have a person with a transmissible disease in a condition suitable for transmission (usually not the entire course) that faces the public, the potential exists.

Anyone in that state should be in bed, properly isolated and medicated. Every time that doesn't happen, we're just shooting ourselves in the foot.

If the car is really dirty, the heck with washing it. Just turn it in and have it reprinted. :) Ok, maybe not. But:

Reprint if you have a fender-bender. Hailstorm. Cat climbed in an open window and sprayed your seats.

Just reprint the car. Love the idea of having it melted down and re-using the material(s.)

I suspect the feds will have something to say about safety issues, though.

95-99% of the calls to my home phone are from robots. Some are friendly robots ("Your prescription is ready at CVS"), most are spammer robots. I finally got fed up and put the number on the Do Not Call List, and the main change has been that more robots call me and either don't play a recording at all, or else play a recording but if I press "1" to talk to their human, never connect me to a human. (And I almost always tell them I want to; usually I'll put the phone down, sometimes I'll chew them out, often I'll put the phone down and if somebody answers, I'll say "hello" and then put the phone down.)

Back when I used to design call center equipment, in the 80s, phone calls cost more per minute than operators. These days that's totally changed, so it doesn't cost them much to make calls and abandon them if they don't have a spare operator within a few seconds; it's not like they're worried about losing repeat business.

My assumption, since the entire country has been annoyed at Rachel and her ilk for years, and since the FBI could easily get warrants to search for her even if the NSA didn't pwn the phone companies, is that either

• - It's really a Russian scam, out of their jurisdiction, or
• - They're a distributed scam, run by lots and lots of people who can buy a "Rachel from Cardholder Services" audio recording kit, hire work-at-home telemarketers, and run their own cottage industry, so if they do get caught, the scam keeps going, or (like old-fashioned spammers in trailer parks) maybe they don't make as much money as the folks selling the kit promised them, so they go out of business and other scammers take up the slack.

Fuck us or not, the situation is what it is. Either we address it, or we don't. Reality is like that, kiddo.

Cool. Our research folks at $DAYJOB have been building GPU-computing clouds, and have found that for many workloads, the GTX 750i was extremely cost-effective (that's the predecessor to this card, and costs include the server you plug it into and electricity as well as the graphics card), compared to much higher-end computation-focused systems. But they bought their lab hardware months ago; this looks to be about 50% faster, for a slightly higher price, so that's a win.

Lemme look... on the vortex container (you know, where all the dirt swirls around), it says "US Mobius Glass, 4th dimension containment division. Certified for virtual particles only."

That help any?

You have not refuted any point I made.

What is the energy level of a cubic foot of space exactly 1 light year past the furthest star on a line directly away from us that is still technically in Andromeda? Presuming you could supply that information (you can't) can you assure me that said cubic foot is in no way contributing to the particular flux of a cubic foot of space one light year the other way? (you can't.)

So the delusion you're carrying around that you know what's going on and are able to definitively say so in such a way as to pooh-pooh my questions is unmasked, and all your complaints resolve to nothing.

I'll be blunt: There are NO "biggest results" in astrophysics that can answer those questions. Consequently, any answers you claim to have in that regard are, at best, evidence-free supposition.

In theory, an H-1B worker is someone who has specialized knowledge not available among US citizens.

A few more years of tech people being unemployable, no one will prepare for tech work here (Why study for an unemployable specialty? Why hire instructors for a course with no students? For that matter, see any courses on buggy whip manufacture?), and the above will go from theory to actuality. If we're going to fix it, we're going to have to fix it now. Otherwise... catastrophe.

And I'm pretty sure that actually means "catastrophe."