We don't know chemical composition of a drop of saliva or blood or snake venom or spider saliva. In otherwords, if I put the best scientist in a lab and give all the elements on the periodic table, will he/she be able to produce a drop of blood! We sure know one basic organic number system - dna but we still don't know 100s of other fundamental concepts involved in make a drop of blood. Human body has adapted to the environment over a course of millions of years. Food is part of that environment, manipulating it without understanding is like a kid playing with a blow torch. We think we are the most intelligent, think again, we don't know how a plant converts the inorganic materials into food. We don't even know how stomach digests meat but not itself(when it too is made of meat). Stingray genes were mixed with tomatos to prolong the shelf life. It means tomatos cells won't break down easily. Stomach breaks the food and then absorbs, so as a lay man I would think stomach must be struggling with breaking down a GM tomato. Sure I ate GM tomatos and I am fine, human body is extremely adaptable too but will it be the case past my prime, say age 35, where my body has started decaying and I put the additional burden on it to cope with the modified food. I eat GM food because I don't care how long I will live. But dismissing the others as freaks is probably a bad idea. In software analogy you are closed source :-)

I agree with this Anonymous Coward. I too paid for pregnancy total 6k including taxi etc.. Surgeries etc are 99% of the time planned, so for these visit another country like Mexico or India. Even a heart surgery would cost around 8-15k including hotel, tickets etc. For infectious diseases etc there is no cure anyways(unless vaccinated), also by the time you get a diagnosis you are dead anyways. Eat home cooked(anything packaged is junk food), go to a gym and keep hydrated. Sleeping with open windows keep the flu/cold away(open early morning or 10-5 or 1 hour in winter). Stay away from caffine, caffine is the root cause of anxiety/depression in many. Try quitting coffee it is more difficult to give up than smoking.

Please get your facts right - h1b workers are way more expensive than local workers, in some cases almost double. L1 are cheaper(almost half) but not h1b. During recession L1s replace both h1b and local workers, h1bs first. And there is no cap on L1, green card for L1 requires no Labor approval. Want the jobs back then focus on L1. When h1bs are squeezed, Corporations look more towards outsourcing via L1 route. H1bs add money back into the economy. In the middle class, H1bs are the biggest contributors to Social Security and Tax.

oops brake

Mandatory stick shift, the old clutch systems. Will prevent the accidents resulting from use of gas pedal(instead of break) by old people while stopping. Not that it is not possible in manual but you have to make two mistakes to crash into a store. Advantages in terms of accident prevention: 1. On a manual your clutch is depressed while coming to a complete stop. 2. Also even if you let the clutch go by mistake while stopping then it would be a sudden release and engine would stall. 3. If you can't co-ordinate clutch and gear then you are either too old or unfit(mentally) to drive and save others the misery.

Medicine is not science, it is a practice.

Doctors may be right but parent's concern is right too, because complications do happen, say 1 in 10000. It may be 0.01% for the doctor. Who knows which perfectly healthy child would not be there next day because he/she got a vaccine yesterday and 0.01% mathematical probability got to him/her. When it is your own child that 0.001% becomes 100% devastating. I vaccinated my kids but did worry and it was a tough decision, left it to fate and proceeded to vaccinate. Considering the outcome from parent's perspective doctors denying care seem arrogant to me. But that is nothing, compared to other corruption in medical industry. 70% paediatricians malpractice and more alarming is that the malpracticing doctors are more famous than regular doctors. Think imaging labs and doctors tie up here. I was almost scammed when I took my 3 days old baby for a regular after birth check up. The best clue is ask the clinic if they will see non-insured patient, if they say no then they exist only to scam. I have no insurance yet the doctor I got was a scammer. His clinic is rated 4/5 too because he makes more money and thus is able to afford more good looking attendants and patients give high rating because there was less wait.

Depends on perspective. If movement is life then electrons move inside an atom and septillions+ of complex combinations of these movements gives rise to the so called life from human perspective. From non-human universal perspective it appears that the whole universe is alive.

H1b candidate may be getting paid less but most of them work via a vendor. Cost to the end company is much higher than for an local employee, H1b employee costs at least 60 per hour. To qualify for h1b visa 60000 is the minimum pay on application paper. Visa fee itself is 5000 approx.

Go to countries like India. For example, you will get a 60k heart surgery done for 3 to 10 k in the best of the best hospitals, add 1.5 k tickets + some for hotel. Success rate for heart is 98.5 % but if your surgery goes the other 1.5% way then you can't sue. Medicine is a practice, not a science, so risk is yours.

I am on h1b and my company got 62 per hour for my work at a client site and they kept 21 and gave me 41 per hour. Am I cheap?

It is opensource. If you are not able to support yourself then I am afraid you are not adventurous enough to use Linux. Stay in proprietery OS world.

If performance is number one priority then I would say, you should compile your own kernel. The standard distros have a lot of fat in the kernel. I have not tried many distros, so let other slashdotters pick a distro. Take the base distro and then begin kernel compilation, cut out all the drivers for which you don't have the hardware. For example, cd writer driver, tape drive, network card drivers except for the one you use and many many other stuff.. It will take few iterations to get the desired kernel. Enterprise versions are outdated by years, for example compare RHEL kernel with Fedora 15 kernel version. From my experience "enterprise" means crippled distro yet 10+ times expensive.

So is it evolution or devolution in IT age(historical prespective)- Linux users have to pay for Windows users who ignorantly choose a stupid OS. I did quit one of the biggest city's IT department in disgust because they wanted to put antivirus on Linux servers. Call me biased - I immediately loose respect for a person who chooses to implement a solution based on Windows and also for the persons who put a proprietery app on Linux and give root privileges to it. For me it becomes a parasite infested Linux system.

You are bang on the point. Wish to add that malpractice suites are the reason our medicine prices are so high. Get the facts, we know only 0.00001% about how our body works. Medicine is not a science but a practice, similar to religion, there will be failures and success in treatment where how and why part are unknown. Life is entertainment, enjoy it :-)