Your surgical procedure will continue in 60 seconds. Meanwhile please enjoy this brief in-stream advertisement.

Wha?! Where's the "Skip This Ad" button? Wha?!

The hospitals won't want to schedule just one surgery at a time, they have lots of operating theatres. So the link goes dead with a whole bunch of patients open on the tables. "One general doctor .. on call for one or more operating theatres"? Ha ha. That doctor is going to be called "Marathon Man" if he survives that scene, let alone the patients.

Sure they do. A fresh out of school resident who has been awake and running scut work for 48 hours. No point paying a surgeon big bucks to stand around when the money can go to the hospital's CEOs.

From The Fine Article's Summary (FTFAS): "Just weeks before the regulations were dropped there had been a barrage of lobbying from big European firms such as Dupont, Bayer and BASF over EDCs. The chemical industry association Cefic warned that the endocrines issue 'could become an issue that impairs the forthcoming EU-US trade negotiations.'"

So it was the European chemical corporations that lit the fuse to blow up the new regulations.

They said it was about EU-US trade relations but they may have had their own reasons for this too you know. After all, who do you think produces the crap that was about to get banned?

One other (probably the major) problem with your suggestions:

Scenario #1: The pimp won't show up to threaten the cop (playing a deadbeat john). What will happen is that the pimp will beat up or kill the prostitute for not bringing home the money.

Scenario #2: The same as in #1. The sucker who sells the cop the drugs and doesn't get paid will be tortured and/or murdered as payback for "stealing" the money.

While this sounds like a terrific idea, I don't think it will work.

Your first scenario is not permissible (the "Do it" part is proscribed); a cop can't have sex to make an arrest, nor could the department legally require officers to have sex as part of their job.

The second scenario is plausible except that you assume that the LEOs have as much or more "firepower" than the gangs. In fact some kinds of crime pay so well that law enforcement is way over their heads trying to fight back. Maybe not so bad as what's going on in Mexico but bad enough. For example, http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9770.html suggests that the combined spending on the four drugs {marijuana, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine} is about $100 billion USD per year; more than half that figure remains even if you remove marijuana from the list. Compare that to the total federal law enforcement budget of about $28 billion https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2012/assets/justice.pdf which covers the whole gamut of criminality, not just drug sales. OK, stop the "war on drugs" and the cost will drop to zero. Organized crime (gangs) will just move on to a different lucrative area, whatever brings in the cash.

New York City's police budget, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_Department is $4.8 billion and it covers everything from jaywalking to terrorist bombers. Police Commissioner Bratton can't even get the mayor to hire an additional 1,000 cops because the money just isn't in the budget.

Furthermore, LEO has to "play by the rules" when going after criminals; the gangs don't have to play fair, so they don't have to waste their resources doing things that don't benefit their illegal activities.

It would make a cool movie though :-)

The standard mantra you are chanting is correct. But given the human propensity for failing to do something that they planned to do (regular fine-grained backups), a redundant array (pretty much anything except RAID 0) can mean the difference between losing some valuable data or development work and not losing it if a disk fails.

An African or European swallow?

On what grounds? Not including every accomplishment on his resume? The problem you refer to generally occurs when someone claims credentials that they don't really own, not when they fail to list everything they do.

"Little 1000 sqft apartments", boy are you a hick from the sticks:

Home Shrunken Home
New York’s First Micro-Apartments, Prefabricated in Brooklyn

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/realestate/micro-apartments-tiny-homes-prefabricated-in-brooklyn.html

the city’s first micro-apartment complex, at 335 East 27th Street, with 55 units ranging from 260 to 360 square feet. The building will begin leasing studios this summer for around $2,000 to $3,000 a month.

He spoke with some sales reps told him that he'll get better streaming performance if he buys more bandwidth.

This is in the same class as:

1. You'll see blazing speed if you add more RAM (but only if you are already using what you already have)

2. Get a bigger engine and your commute time will be slashed (but only if you aren't already limited by speed limits and bumper to bumper traffic)

etc. Sounds to me more like folks who don't understand the problem offering what they think is a real solution. If the customer believes the sales rep, buys more bandwidth, and notices that Netflix performance isn't getting any better he can demand a refund. If more customers did this then Verizon might just educate their sales reps properly.

What I find more annoying is that at least in NYC Verizon no longer offers home DSL greater than about 1 Mbps and no more "naked DSL" installations either, even in areas where FiOS is not available.

So you're recommending that we use a buffer fish overflow to get elevated?

Your choice of how the United States saved Jews from the Nazi holocaust by allowing them to immigrate is a poor example:

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007652

Beginning in 1940, the United States further restricted immigration by ordering US consuls to delay visa approvals on national security grounds. After the United States entered the World War II in December 1941, the trickle of immigration virtually dried up, just as the Nazi regime began systematically to murder the Jews of Europe. Despite many obstacles, however, more than 200,000 Jews found refuge in the United States from 1933 to 1945, most of them before the end of 1941.

But, yes, we have a massive statue. The words on it may have to be updated though: "Give us your tired, your poor, your low-wage workers."

I take it that Appy was not 'appy with your request?

Thank you, that's a very interesting article. The letter of reply is also informative. Lest readers believe that the fact that nicotine is present in some vegetables may somehow compare to the serious dangers of smoking, he indicates that the calculations presented regarding an "environment with minimal smoke" described by the author of the article actually amounts to "the equivalent of 1 percent of the smoke from one puff of a cigarette", hardly what most of us would consider "low amounts of smoke in a room":

Finally, it has been well confirmed that the exposure to tobacco smoke indicated by a plasma concentration of 5 to 10 ng of cotinine per milliliter is of clear toxicologic importance,3 whereas there is no evidence that daily exposure to the equivalent of 1 percent of the smoke from one puff of a cigarette would be of toxicologic importance or could possibly confound assessment of environmental exposure.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199308053290619#t=letters