That's an interesting take on the idea. There may be, almost certainly is an "optimal" point of view where the balance of future carrying cost, productive potential, experience and future work expectancy.

If you value experience the highest, then older people are the most valuable. Children have highest carrying cost, least experience, but the highest adaptability and future earning potential.

Now you could take a *market* approach to valuing lives by holding an auction to see how much people will contribute to save a life. In that case I have no doubt that children would win hands down. In a sense we do this already; charities which rescue children have a distinct advantage over those that target adults or the elderly.

It's got to be better than New Jersey.

I didn't say it wasn't a big deal. I said it isn't enough to cause noticeable disruption or bankruptcy of a government, because that's what plopez seemed so concerned about.

For what it's worth, getting the price up to 1% is also unrealistic, but it was an easy calculation to make to show that it's not a threat. Really, the $400 billion price tag is an estimate for the entire program, extending slightly past final delivery in 2037. That works out to only about $10 billion per year (not accounting for inflation), which is roughly 0.3% of a year's federal budget. That's less than the amount the government loses due to the home sale capital gains tax credit, but nobody whines about those stability-threatening home sellers, do they?

I believe you, but I don't understand what result they got from the blood test that led to your getting convicted of drunken driving. Blood tests are supposed to be more accurate.

My doctor prescribed Ambien to me. I tried it for a month and it didn't work. Nobody warned me about the "sleep walking" or any of the other exotic side effects.

A friend of mine was taking gabapentin (Neurontin). A co-worker at work started a fight, he fought back, and they both got fired (from their non-union job). It was in the depths of the recession and he couldn't get another job; he wound up in bad shape. I called the FDA to find out if this could be due to the gabapentin, and a doctor looked it up their database and said yes, they had a few reports of gabapentin associated with aggression. I don't think it was in the patient information then, but it (sometimes) is now. The warning isn't prominent http://www.drugs.com/cons/gaba... http://www.fda.gov/downloads/D... and they emphasize the effect in children, not adults.

It's not possible for a patient to be aware of these things in a country where doctors' appointments are 15 minutes or less, they don't get paid for phone advice, and primary care practitioners are prescribing these drugs.

Something I wonder: what's the real role of the Air Force? It has a valid strategic role, but its other roles on the battlefield look like they should be subordinate to the Army. The Navy has its own air forces, and that seems to work well.

Only in the US.

Paying to receive is RIDICULOUS. Just because it's the norm for you, doesn't mean it's not still ridiculous.

Why do people think FTL allows for backwards time travel? It's called Special Relativity, and is much more convincing than people's general ideas. p> Suppose you're in a spaceship traveling at a speed relative to another spaceship such that time dilation is 2, meaning that for each of you time appears to pass at half speed for the other one. When you meet, you exchange ansible (instantaneous communicator) settings. An hour after, you put your coffee cup on the edge of the console, and it falls and breaks. You send a message to the other guy. You observe him getting it when, from his point of view, it's half an hour after meeting. He relays the message back, and observes you getting it when you are fifteen minutes from the meeting, and the message has therefore returned forty-five minutes before you sent it.

In order to argue with this, you need to at least understand it. You need to understand that "forward" and "back" are not determinate with any FTL phenomenon. (There is an objective forward and back as long as things stay under the speed of light. FTL is "sideways", using this classification, and has no "forward" or "back".)

Dark matter, as observed, seems to hang around galaxies. This suggests that it travels fairly slowly, and can't normally easily escape a galactic gravitational well, suggesting that it isn't tachyons.

That's one idea, sure, but whenever we start talking about modern physics I really distrust "it makes more sense". There's plenty in modern physics that doesn't actually make sense that I can see.

Got any evidence for monotonic time? There are legitimate scientific theories that mean some forms of time travel are consistent with the laws of physics as we understand them.

Special relativity (a very well-tested theory) also shows that faster-than-light travel or information transfer allows travel or information transfer back in time. (The converse is obviously true: if you take five years to go to Alpha Centauri, and then go back four years, you've traveled FTL.)

Lots of people are rather attached to the idea of one-way time and having non-paradoxical causality, which means they don't want it to be possible to send information faster than light.

The wording in TFS implies that adults don't matter at all. If it had said something like "5 crew and 116 passengers, including sixteen children and a baby", that'd be cool. It would acknowledge all lives lost, with some additional description for human interest.

I haven't looked at news reports, so I don't know if TFS is unusually egregious here (not unusual for /., really).

There are children starving in Africa.

There are still forced marriages around the globe.

There are female circumcisions taking place this isn't.

Unless you want to be a "ANY NEWS!" site, this isn't the place for those stories. It doesn't mean they aren't important, or don't matter. It means that it's not appropriate for a tech-news site unless, specifically, there is tech involved in a non-trivial way.

The tech side of this story is "a plane". That's about it.

You want the non-tech stories, go elsewhere, or tell us where a PURELY tech news site is.

Try watching it on the news.

In Italy: "There were no Italians on board" x 5 within the space of a 2 minute news article.

In England: Even BBC News has a headline "Only one Brit onboard".

The crash isn't news if they're foreign or old. Same as everything else they portray on the news. War in the Middle East that involves no European/American countries? Barely mentioned. The US says something about a war in the Middle East? News article. The US is IN the Middle East, can't move for "news" of it, down to deaths of individual soldiers (an unprecedented coverage of a war).

TV News doesn't care about the news. They care about making you go "Oh my God!" when you see it, so you keep watching through the adverts.