Has anyone ever taken Randi up on his challenge? Or are they all chicken?

I enjoy his contributions to the field of skepticism, along with his fan Brian Dunning from skeptoid.com.

It stands to reason: Fairies flying out of the engineer's butt would more likely apply 50 micro-newtons of force to the engineer, not the experiment.

First of all, this is the link that the story should have included. It includes updates of the scoreboard, etc. On it you will see that even though the brains are collectively beating Claudico, the computer is actually over $100,000 ahead against Jason Les, a feat that almost no human could match. Yes, Claudico is down against the other three, but these are the top players in the world, and most human pros would get clobbered much worse by these guys. Are we really so hard to impress? This is the first time that something like this has been tried, and already, the computer is performing on a level that most poker pros would love to reach.

It's a radio transmitter in a can. It would take an even larger departure from known physics to make it go boom. We have a good deal of experience with radio transmitters in space.

OK, I will try to restate in my baby talk since I don't remember this correctly.

Given that you are accelerating, the appearance to you is that you are doing so linearly, and time dilation is happening to you. It could appear to you that you reach your destination in a very short time, much shorter than light would allow. To the outside observer, however, time passes at a different rate and you never achieve light speed.

I am having an equally hard time thinking of how Earth is more habitable than Mars while atomic bombs are going off or impactors are impacting. If you wait a while, sure it's more habitable than Mars. But for that moment, no.

"Geoengineering is a bad idea." "Why?"
"Because it hasn't been tested and could have unpredictable consequences."
"So let's do some testing and improve our models of how it works."
"No way, we can't be doing research on geoengineering!" "Why not?"
"Because geoengineering is such a bad idea!" "Why?"
"Because it hasn't been tested and could have unpredictable consequences."
...

To an outside observer. I don't think it's the same in the inertial frame.

Before we call this real, we need to put one on some object in orbit, leave it in continuous operation, and use it to raise the orbit by a measurable amount large enough that there would not be argument regarding where it came from. The Space Station would be just fine. It has power for experiments that is probably sufficient and it has a continuing problem of needing to raise its orbit.

And believe me, if this raises the orbit of the Space Station they aren't going to want to disconnect it after the experiment. We spend a tremendous amount of money to get additional Delta-V to that thing, and it comes down if we don't.

There are tens of millions of people that get to make the following choice:
1. Dial up.
2. High latency capped satellite.

If they're "lucky" they one or two more choices:
3. Slow and asymmetric ADSL
4. Fast but capped LTE.

I have no desire to hold back the future but if you ask me to rate my frustrations with the residential internet marketplace in the United States a lack of gigabit+ speeds doesn't make the list.

Incidentally, the sentence that you quoted had the word "residential" in bold. You listed a bunch of potential business and academic applications to refute my assertion that connections like these are useless in the residential setting.

If you're working from home on a regular basis you can spring for a business class connection with the money you're not spending on transportation. Better yet, your employer should be paying for it. This thread is about residential use. I know that's a blurry line for a lot of people (myself included) but let's at least acknowledge that residential service is not intended for business proposes.

I guess the point that I was trying to make is why is the H-1B program any different than agriculture, taxi driving, or any other position that's stereotypically filled by immigrants? You can tout out the, "They're just doing the jobs that Americans don't want to do." line if you wish but it rings hollow with me.

The hostility here towards H-1B feels hypocritical to me. You're either in favor of the free movement of people, goods, and labor, or you're not. You can't cheer on immigration so long as they're limited to grunt work.

First World Problems. I feel for you. I really do.

It's one more reason to escape this dying area; I plan on moving to New Orleans in the next few months. If you think the state of our internet is sad try the dating or job pools in this part of Appalachia/the Rest Belt. :D

In fairness, a screwed up insulin level won't immediately kill you and the symptoms are recognizable by anyone with an understanding of diabetes or basic first aid training. Your link says that blood tests are still needed and it sounds like that pump exists not to save life but to make it easier. When they're using iOS to run a pacemaker we can talk..... :)