The unicorn dream is obviously the strongest bit of evidence that Deckard is a replicant.

There's also the little hint when Rachael asks him if he's ever taken the VK test himself.

When the police first hire him, he's told that SIX replicants hijacked the shuttle and one got fried running through a force field. He then gets info about Leon, Roy, Pris and Zora ... so where's #6?

Deckard always seems to be physically out-classed by the replicants, which is evidence that he's not one of them, but he also takes a hell of a beating, which indicates that he might be.

Gaff tells Deckard "You've done a man's job."

I know that there are hints all over the place that he is, but notice that in every scene where he has to fight one of the replicants, he's outclassed. Leon is depicted as being way faster and stronger and Roy seems almost impervious to pain by comparison. Even Pris was giving Deckard a good thrashing before he got his gun. Those encounters always undermined the "Deckard is a replicant" theory IMO.

I suppose you could argue that the Nexus 7 replicants are designed to be more like humans in their frailties.

Well, at least as far as the film plots are concerned, we now know he's not a Nexus 6 replicant. Four year lifespan.

The original film dropped many hints that he was, but every time he got near one of the replicants he got his ass kicked, so I never assumed it.

IIRC, the book is ambiguous on the point.

Are they afraid of losing eyeballs/revenue if they simply serve up some targeted ads for suicide prevention resources?
This seems a little weird. It depends on the implementation of course, but suppose you're expressing general despair about the future? Say because of environmental destruction, the burgeoning police state, disease, famine or the ignorance and violent tendencies of the human race? Might that rhetoric of hopelessness and despair be misinterpreted?
I don't mind being in a database of known political dissidents or with companies knowing enough about me to serve me targeted ads. It would be really bad to have "potentially suicidal" as a flag in one of the databases however. What happens if "potentially suicidal" & "political dissident" & "firearms enthusiast" lands you on the terrorism watch list or in the NICS database or something?
I sympathize with people who are depressed, but this sort of gives me the creeps.

You might not use it as a source of scientific information, but it's a good place to learn that what's being passed off as "scientific information" is in fact a fraud. I'm sure that if the OP cited some sort of academic paper, you'd complain that the authors are being funded by the evil Koch brothers or the fossil fuel industry too.

Global warming is the new religion and questioning it is the new heresy.

This isn't the only instance.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

Exactly.

"Climate Change" is to the political left as "Terrorism" is to the political right. Frighten the public into demanding that the government do more to allay their fears. Government is always happy to grant itself all sorts of new powers in order to oblige.
Funny. I thought that the left might not be so gullible, especially after the government so recently completed such a major power grab in the wake of 9/11.
Before this "climate change" nonsense is over, we'll all be limited in the number of cubic feet of living space we're allowed to inhabit and our food, gasoline, home heating fuel and electricity will be stringently rationed. To protect us from "climate change" of course.

Yeah, that's why the EPA just implemented new standards which would ban the production and sale of almost all of the current wood burning stoves in the U.S.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/la...

All this environmental alarmist nonsense is just being used as an excuse for more government control.

"We should uncover funding sources of people and organizations that are using that money to lie to us."

The biggest liars are getting their funding by confiscating the income and profits from working people and businesses.

Once again government is the disease masquerading as its own cure. The free market is not the problem here because there is no free market.

The USA federal government sets price controls on any drugs sold to its big welfare programs creating a major market distortion. Government imposes a ridiculously arduous approval process that must be navigated before a drug can even be sold in the USA market. Government also erects trade barriers so that drugs cannot be imported or re-imported into the USA.

Now, consider the people in the USA who actually buy their own drugs, either through private insurance or (unfortunately for them) via direct retail sale. Basically, the working middle class. People with enough income so that they don't qualify for Medicaid and aren't yet eligible for Medicare. As a direct result of US federal government policy, this fraction of the population is forced to subsidize drug R&D for everyone else in the world! Now you're talking about levying taxes to further increase the burden on the people who are already paying most of the costs?

Get rid of all the price controls and trade barriers and you can spread the costs over hundreds of millions of additional people instead of dumping them entirely on the American middle class. As long as these distortions exist, the market cannot possibly work.

Tort reform is absolutely essential for cases like this. Vioxx was one of the most useful drugs ever developed for the treatment of arthritis pain. Vioxx does not cause strokes and heart attacks. It increases the RISK of strokes and heart attacks. Taking such an excellent drug off the market for this reason was a stroke of pure idiocy. If Rand Paul wants to repeal the ban, good for him.

Suppose you're a morbidly obese chain smoker whose knees and hips are shot from carrying your fat ass around. Maybe taking Vioxx increases your risk of heart attack from 30% to 60%. That's bad. Now, suppose that you're at a healthy body weight, eating a good diet and have joint pain as a result of all the years you spent doing distance running. Maybe taking Vioxx doubles your risk of a heart attack ... from 1% to 2%.

Tort should only come into play if there is fraud, like making false claims about the risks and/or benefits of the drug. As long as the facts are fully disclosed, it should be up to the individual and their doctor to make the tradeoff between pain relief and increased risk of stroke or heart attack.

Are you being facetious?

The USA government bans importation or re-importation of prescription drugs. After all the R&D and regulatory stuff, the marginal cost of producing one extra pill is almost negligible. Therefore, a place like Canada can impose price controls without a US-based drug company refusing to sell them the product. At the margin, it's all profit, so they don't care. However, those drugs can't come back into the US, so prices remain artificially inflated in the US market.
Why should any country with socialized medicine develop drugs when the USA federal government is willing to force its citizens to subsidize the drug development for the rest of the world?

It's not "hard" in the sense that I couldn't read books before the e-readers, but still an unnecessary annoyance now that e-readers are available.
When I'm eating breakfast for instance, It's nice to not be using one hand to hold the book open.

Interesting. I do the exact opposite. Don't you find illustrations and diagrams a pain when using an e-reader? I find it really hard to read charts, tables or what not in the e-book format. At least on my Kindle that is. And if I'm doing a project where there's dust, dirt, or solder around, I'd rather not have my laptop in the vicinity.

For anything that has pictures, charts, graphs or formulas, I definitely want the dead tree version. I can't imagine using a Kindle for my college textbooks or any technical manuals The zoom features aren't great and you're sometimes reading text on one page pertinent to a graphic on another page. I already regret having bought 'Capital in the 21st Century" as an e-book precisely for that reason.

For pure text, like a novel, the Kindle is awesome. Portable, comfortable to hold, long battery life. If you've ever read a really fat paperback (Mark Bowden's "Blackhawk Down" comes to mind), just holding the damned thing open is a pain. I love the fact that you can read the Kindle, say at breakfast, without having to use hands to hold the book open. Same with a stationary exercise machine. It's also nice that you can zoom on the text in case the motion of your head is making the print hard to read.
I think the best and most invaluable feature of having an e-reader is Project Gutenberg (gutenberg.org). Want to read or reference Nietzsche, Dante, Shakespeare, or go back and read Moby Dick, The Count of Monte Cristo or many other old classics? All free (and legal) via the web site.

Of course there's always the zombie apocalypse scenario where electricity would be hard to come by, but until then, the e-reader provides a lot of utility .