Calm down, no one's trying to insult middle America. You've completely missed the parent's point.

Yes, there are very remote areas in the US, and it's very hard to get services to these locaations. But comparativly few people live in these areas. (By the 2000 census, only 20% of the population lives in "rural" areas.) Even when you look at Appalachia, you still have cites: Chattanooga, Charleston, and Pittsburgh are a few. So when someone says "oh, 60% of America's internet access sucks because America is too spread out" it's crap. America may be spread out, but Americans by and large arn't.

I know, right? Next week when Assange dies in a car crash, they'll probably blame that on a conspiracy too.

After all our advances in technology and thousands of years of hard work towards our dreams, we finally cross the gulfs of space to settle upon our new homes; and end up back where we started, living in caves.

...Is okay in Canada? They can acquit you then just decide "eh, that's not what we wanted. Let's have another trial"?

Intelligence is a tool to be used toward a goal, and goals are not always chosen intelligently. -Larry Niven

Someone mod this guy up. What kind of bizzaro thinking leads a person to say, "It would be best for my child's medical conditions to remain a deep, dark secret, unknown even to me." Yes. That way, they can get good insurance, with reasonable rates, to fall back on when they pass out in the street with a sudden "mystery" ailment - that is actually a treatable condition they've had since they were a child. Maybe I'm crazy, but I'd want to know if my child had a condition as early as possible, when they were still on my insurance, and then have something proactive done about it. Much better than just hoping for them to make it to adulthood in order to receive medical care.

Umm, what does the Flu, a VIRUS, have to do with antibiotics, which are treatment for BACTERIAL infections?

It has to do with using the said antibiotics to keep pig density at unhealthy levels, so that when a virus breaks out it has a maximum number of animals to infect and an incredibly easy time infecting them. More hosts, more chances for mutation, more opportunities to jump to humans. None of which antibiotics can stop, as you pointed out. Keeping pigs in clean, sanitary conditions has the effect of reducing the spread of both bacteria and viruses, rather than just treating one and hoping the other won't happen.

Maybe he was thinking about "Strength of Stones"

The idea that being "great" at something is a result of a lot of hard work put into it as early as possible reminds me of something my father used to say about military strategy. As he put it, the basic formula for victory was "Be there firstest with the mostest." If you've already honed your skills when your peers are just starting out, it's easy to see how you might develop an unshakable lead.

My question would be what stops the process of reinvention, by which I mean accumulating the skills later and still making a mark? is it internal or external? Is is peer group, societal pressure, lack of motivation, time allocation, or something else? Or does it happen all the time without us taking much note of it?

It absolutely is, because you had to skim, at most, a paragraph of something useless to you. I had to sift through pages and pages of comments that were useless to everyone.

This argument has nothing to do with religion, I'm sorry if the header convinced you otherwise. So I'm not going to touch your argument about "souls waiting in line", as far as my argument is concerned, the OP is a walking protoplasmic mass with a certain genetic sequence and a set of conditioning. That is what never would have occurred. I have zero interest in the religious side of the argument. My point was that this is not about "improving" any single organism, it's all about amplifying natural selection. The problem is you are arbitrarily skewing your fitness factors. As cruel as nature can be, she lets the majority of the contestants play, and sometimes we have surprising winners. Is there any worth to nearsighted people? You wouldn't know if you aborted them all.

So you just skimmed the title and the summary, inadvertently failing to notice the idle tag, then clicked the link even though the story was clearly related to belly button lint. Moreover, having done so by what I can only assume is the purest accident, you read through the comments, and picked one to respond to? Now we're supposed to believe that idle somehow is wasting your time? Actually it's the mindless groupthink of the idle haters that is wasting my time, because I for one am curious about belly button lint, and rather than see comments relating to that topic, I have to suffer through the same stale rants about how someone saw idle and it hurt their little eyes and wasted their precious, precious time.

As a person born with near-sightedness and a couple of other issues (which we all have), I would not mind having my genes a bit altered.

The salient point of this that you seem to be missing is that you would never have had your genes altered. Based on your genetics, you simply never would have been born.

The human body doesn't come with a vaccine for anything. What the human body did come with was antibodies that were effective against smallpox. All the vaccine did, all any vaccine does, was encourage production of the cells that made these antibodies. So when your body came in contact with smallpox, or whatever else you were vaccinated against, it was already primed for the fight.

What the article seems to be implying is that in this case, there are no naturally occurring antibodies to be produced. If that's the case, you can vaccinate all you want, it's not going to do anything.

Aren't you paying attention? He's not sharing because he's a republican.