I also forgot to mention the extreme irony of the nickle

I see what you did there.

...once a project forks, it never goes back...

This happened to Christianity in 1054, with another major fork happening in the 16th century. I guess it had a lot to do with questions regarding the disagreements with management of the code base and who is best able to do that (or something like that).

Now it seems like there is a fork every week or so. Who can keep up with the versions? No wonder we had to develop distributed version control, since everyone seems to want their own local branch to work with. Merging it all back to the tip (or trunk) it pretty much impossible -- the devil is in the details!

FYI - egoless programming is talked about in the book Code Complete (Amazon link). This is a great book for beginning programmers (and heck, even those whose neck beards are getting longer...) I read it early on in my career and it left quite an impression, the concept of egoless programming being one of the more lasting ones.

I did the same thing. Scholarships and such helped with about 10-15% of the total, but the interest rates changed from 4-something to 6.75% (thanks to GWB) when I started. I had money saved that I was going to use for a house, but ended up using it for tuition (thank goodness, as the housing market tanked soon after I made that decision!). My debt burden is much better than most of my classmates, but still not insignificant.

But yes, I agree with you -- in terms of risk, med/student/nursing loans are pretty low risk. Yeah you get some people you drop out, but that is a small minority. Financially speaking, it probably cost me around 1E6 dollars to quit my job, take out loans, interest on them, lose income/investments/etc...But I enjoy what I do a heckuva lot better and there are great opportunities for docs who know software, so we'll see how it goes.

Reminds me of my days writing PERL...which must be the closest thing to simulating coding-while-under-chemical-influence:

When writing everything seems so clear, understandable, and simple. A regexp here, bless something there. Then come back 2 weeks later and BAM! What they hell was I thinking when I wrote that??? What does that regexp even do? (cue jwz regexp quote here).

I had a similar story, except that I was 32 when I left my full time software job to go medical school. I did part-time consulting for the first two 2.5 years of school until political events at my client had a changing of the guard, so a part time guy coming in for 10 hours a month to do the odd-optimization/requirements review/troubleshooting wasn't really desired.

I had an easy job (tech lead, analyst, occasional hands on work), but just couldn't see myself sitting in management or sitting in long meetings talking about font -sizes and what icons to use for the rest of my life. Add to that the age discrimination that I saw in the industry and while I enjoyed contract work, thought that wasn't the direction I wanted to go (or the position I wanted to be in) when I was in my 50s.

Fast forward 5 years and I am done with med school and doing a residency. It's long hours and intense but great. I do autopsies right now, which is perfect for someone who just loves to take things apart (but is not so good at putting them back together). It cost a lot of money to make the move out of the job, but has been worth it.

The kicker is with my software background, I've been doing more straight-up development in my free time than I did in months of work at my old job. Having the background in software makes an extremely powerful combination when combined with another traditionally non-software job.

What's missing: 'Get off my lawn!'

Of course, some bacteriophages actually produce virulence factors when they infect bacteria (e.g. Diptheria: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diptheria#Mechanism)

If there is one thing the FSM has taught us humans is that beer volcanoes are awesome. If there are two things the FSM has taught us, it is that nature finds a way. Or maybe that was Jurassic Park. Hmmm...

LEAKED SCENE

In the remote jungles of a distant planet, the companion and her mother run through the dense growth. As they glance fearfully behind them they can barely detect the shimmer of Daleks with camouflage metal skins -- upgrades skilled at seeking, locating, exterminating, and now...climbing stairs. In front of them a muscled man with a long scarf appears. In his hands is a small device. He waves them forward, anxiously, and says:

"Run! Go! Get to the chopper!"

I'll second that -- been with them for twenty years or so. Banking is good - free checking, they cover ATM usage fees (up to $10 a month) and you can use your scanner at home to deposit checks, which saves loads of time. Bill pay is good too.

As an added bonus, my wife says that police seem nicer to her when she gets pulled over and shows her USAA proof of insurance :)

Agreed. This is slashdot. It should have been a car analogy. Acceptable alternatives would involve Natalie Portman, statuary, and/or hot grits.

First, no doctor is going to volunteer "this is cancer, but it doesn't look dangerous so we'll just monitor the situation"

This is not universally correct. For a run-of-the-mill prostatic adenocarcinoma (your garden variety prostate cancer) there is actually the concept of active surveillance, where the patient gets yearly biopsies to track any progression. If the biopsies show cancer involving more than it should (where should is defined by a variety of factors) then treatment becomes more aggressive (read: prostatectomy).

In your defense however, AFAIK this is one of the only types of cancers were this is true, as the lifetime chance of a male getting prostate cancer verges on 100% (if they live long enough). Certain brain tumors may take a watch-and-see approach as well since their progression is not as well understood and the morbidity associated with various brain surgeries can be pretty high.

Agreed though in that not all cancers are created equal. Knowing which is which though is, as they say, the rub

FYI - skin is an organ (as the liver, brain, etc... are organs) so you don't really say that cervix or urethra has skin. For these areas you would talk about their mucosa or alternatively epithelia. The cervix has (in part) non-keratinizing stratified squamous (skin has keratinizing stratified squamous epithelium). The urethra is lined by a different kind of epithelium -- namely urothelium (or transitional epithelium, both terms are used).

HPV infects keratinocytes -- the cells that make up the squamous epithelium. For the record, HPV likes keratinocytes everywhere on the body -- skin, throat, cervix, etc... and you get HPV infections in all these areas (on the hands, you would just call them warts or verruca vulgaris, if you want to sound fancy). Different strains of HPV are linked to cancer -- common warts (HPV types 4, 6, 8) are not known to cause cancer while other types (HPV 11, 16, 31, 33, etc...) are. The vaccine targets these high risk types.

The mechanism for oncogenesis is very interesting and has to do with the viral inclusion into the genome that interferes with tumor suppressor genes expression, ubiquitin mediated proteolysis, and disruption in cell cycle (the Nobel prize in chemistry a while back was given to research into ubuiqitin mediated proteolytic pathways and is quite a fascinating subject). These disruptions lead to squamous cell carcinomas.

As far as the difference between penile and cervical cancer, if they are both squamous cell carcinomas (which is what HPV causes -- but you can get different kinds of non-HPV cancer in both places) then it doesn't make much sense to talk about the differences between the two cancers, in and of themselves. Treatments, prognosis, morbidity, and mortality may of course vary due to the different sites of the tumor.

However, non-ionizing radiation could conceivably cause inflammation due to localized increase in heat.

Except that increased heat by itself does not cause inflammation. Rather - it is the reverse. Namely, inflammation causes increase in heat (through a variety of different mechanisms including cytokines, changes in vascular permeability, etc...). True, if you get heat high enough then you can destroy cells which in turn will induce an inflammatory response to clean things up. But those temperatures required would be ones that would be able to essentially burn cells to death, which is not a micro-increase in heat. In any event, your body does have heat shock proteins (HSP) which helps protect against thermal changes (and do a variety of other things as well, including some aspects of cell signalling (such as testosterone localization to the nucleus, IIRC)).

Now, if your hypothesis is that micro variations in heat can cause fluctuations in cellular signalling that could make oncogenic changes, well that is testable and may or may not be true. Apply for a grant for that and see where it goes.

Perhaps they would have invested more in floating cars that could cross rivers without bridges.

I'm a little hazy on your car analogy. Could you put it in terms of text editors or perhaps operating systems?