So it's actually smoking women that cause autism?

That's just joking. I agree with you otherwise. This is like those creepy commercials that shows some dude that claims he lost his legs because of smoking.

Smoking is just plain bad, which is why I gave it up in 1976. All of this FUD is becoming cruel.

Nothing like suggesting to a pregnant woman that being around cigarette smoke is yet one more thing that she has to fear she'll harm her child with. She feels a tremendous weight of responsibility in the first place - who wouldn't. Let's just amp that up some, eh?

Both of my parents smoked. And aside from the webbed fingers, and the nictating membrane on my eyes, I'm pretty normal.....

That is not only sad, but really disturbing. Well, I guess if you would love an adopted child more than one you home-brewed, you did the right thing

If you look at military spending as a percentage of GDP, the U.S. in 1952 spent 2.5x as much as Israel does today: http://i.cfr.org/content/publi...

And in 1952, the threat of the U.S. homeland being invaded was much less than the current threat of the Israeli homeland being invaded.

There is a bit of a conumdrum here. As a smoker, you are supposed to die young, and suddenly from a massive heart attack or stroke. Stick with me here, I wish you good health.

Okay, so lets see what happens, the fate of the evil smoker, as compared to "healthy" people. I've told this story before, but here goes again. My mother in law who was a strict teetotaler, a non smoking person who did everything the healthy way, including drugs that kept all the "danger" readings in line, spent the last ten years of her life as a dementia patient, really hitting the Medicare trough. The last two years of her life ,which is when most healthy people really start racking up the bills, she cost around 600 thousand dollars in hospital bills. Pretty impressive.

Now let us take the example of my mother. She smoked, and on weekends, we'd enjoy a few beers. She did die of a massive heart attack, and it was over essentially immediately. So even though this is a sample of two, who cost the system more? My Mother in law, who was probably well over a million dollars during her dementia riddled last ten years, or my Mother who lived healthy up to the end of her days, then went out not costing that asshole anything (and she did die several years older than my mother in law anyway.

Smug people and their ideas on health care are probably the same people that buy high and sell low on the stock market. Using their logic, you would think they would encourage people to smoke. Nope, I've often thought that you could just exchange "smoker" with say the N-word, and see what they got. Just hate.

But we all do die, regardless of wht way too many people think.. I hope I go out the way my mother did, and my worst nightmare is my smart mother in law's protracted death.

Much better if she was provided free birth control, don't you think?

THIS! A million times this.

The smokers as legal (insert n-word here) being blamed for every ill, every problem of society, and now apparently smelling cigarette smoke will immediately cause any woman in the vicinity to bear screwed up children, just reminds me of the various child based witch hunts we engage in every so often, from facilitated writing, to the world's most expensive trial where psychologists manipulated children into making up stories about people who molested them, and on and on.

So, here we are in 2014, and where are all these defective people? And with all the other things that have been found to be actually responsible for babies with big problems, like BPA and excessive phytoestrogen consumption.

Humans have so much chemical exposure today, even from foods considered the best stuff you can ever eat, that we have a pretty rough time determining what does what.

Now keep in mind that smoking tobacco is abysmally stupid, and chewing tobacco resmbles nothing more than stooping down, picking up a piece of week old dog shit, and puting a pinch twixt cheek and gum. It will kill you, and will kill you in a bad way. I had two immediate family members die from it, nothing like spitting blood into a handkerchief and drowning of the course of a few years.

But this study just seems like a way to make expectant mothers feel even more guilty than they already do.

She's carrying a new person inside, and worried that at any time, she might do something to damage or kill the kid. Let's just make her even more nervous.

Oh, I didn't realize that Israel was systematically exterminating other ethnic groups, by the millions, in gas chambers. Thanks for enlightening me.

I too would be interested in know if there are legitimate BitCoin banks out there. I suspect not for 2 ½ reasons.

First, I don't think anybody is audacious enough to do that. At the very least it implies one has a solid back office. It also implies that one has a government issued charter (with the regulation, fees, and oversight that goes with that). If a loan goes south, how do I collect? These are not unsolvable issues. I suspect that some of the ponzi sachems out there that promised a fat return or interest rates pretended to have some type of fractional reserve going.

Second, you can break banking down into 2 parts. One is the “cash handling” aspect. I have a negative opinion on BitCoin but this it does well. The second part, the fractional banking part, is to allocate capital by transmuting short term deposits into long term loans. I have a hard time imagining anybody needing a long term loan in BitCoins. Because the price is volatile, we would need to find a business that needed a big upfront loan in BitCoins for capital and was expecting to do business in BitCoins for the future.

Which takes me to my ½ reason. BitCoin users tend to be hard money types who hate loans. While I look aghast at the amount of leverage in the current system, I do think some lending (or to be more precise, some time aspect of investment) is necessary. I personally don't think BitCoin will be a real currency until we start seeing loans being made.

Come on - mod this guy up!. The insistence on a monoculture by some folks is the source of a lot of problems, and th epursuit ok knowledge is almost always a very good thing.

Just watch me get modded as troll for saying knowledge is good.

"congrats you effectively "experimented" on your users."

That's not experimenting. generic research on overall performance is not the same as selecting a sample of users, and conducting tests on them specifically to change their response.

You're definition is so loose it's useless.
Now, I need to experiment ans see if I can get home from work.

Since douching is harmful and not needed, I would disagree with your statement.

Yes.
I know a physicist who is ethical, but when he speaks outside his expertise, he becomes a douche. Really irritating.

Yes, pork-barrel spending is a huge problem; see http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

But you can't say that money spent on SpaceX contracts won't go to SpaceX. By definition, it does.

they have so-far demonstrated no ability to either reliably launch on-schedule, or leaunch at any sustained rate

The amazing thing about SpaceX is that even while their costs are at least an order of magnitude lower than ULA's, their development cycle is far more rapid and the capabilities they are adding are far more advanced. Fixing the things you are complaining about, if indeed they are a genuine problem, seems trivial compared to what they've already accomplished.

ON smokers, and the industry that keeps paying money to prevent their cancer causing products to be regulated by the FDA so they can keep the chemicals they use under wraps.

The private contractor has a track record of delivering far more bang for the buck than the government agency. Yes, I do have an ideology -- because I have observed time and time again that private enterprises operate far more efficiently than the government -- but it is a true ideology with a foundation of factual, objective observations. What is the foundation of your ideology?

Sorry for using a round number. I don't know why you'd be happier if I had said "apply the other 78.57% toward deficit reduction." Nobody has done a rigorous analysis of what the optimal percentage should be, so why pretend they have?

Uhm, do you really think that something as important as assessing the performance of compression algorithms wouldn't have attracted the attention of thousands (or, more likely, hundreds of thousands) of computer scientists over the years? Open up any academic journal that deals with this stuff even tangentially and you find many examples of different metrics for assessing compression performance. And there's nothing new about this 'score'. Dividing ratio by the logarithm of the compression time is a very widely-used theoretical scoring function; I can find references to it from the 90's. This particular form of that score may be new, but gweihir is right; such a score doesn't give much information and has very little use.