Some replacement heart systems have a hand-operated backup pump. If the battery dies, the user can pump a lever to keep hydraulic pressure up and keep the heart working - long enough to get to a hospital.

I couldn't tell from the Carmat website whether their system has this type of backup, but medical device manufacturers tend to do "failure analysis" and make efforts to avoid the obvious problems.

You mean like Republicans?

I'm not sure it was due to political orientation so much as the more basic "There's more people in these here hills, and we ought to have representatives for them to talk to less than a week away by horse."

That isn't to say your premise is invalid -- those people's interests are going unrepresented and splitting them off may better address those needs. But to be honest, New York and California both need to be punched in the face repeatedly by the feds, then bent over and hammered in the ass until they stop trying to force the rest of the country to acceed to their fucked up laws.

How about c) you're using a false dichotomy after already having your pants dropped over the use of circular logic. Don't double down on stupid -- there's more than two ways to approach the problem. Pop open your wallet. Flip over the dollar you got in there. What does it say on the back?

E Pluribus Unum.

That is not latin for "Roll over and play dead."

There's a simpler explanation than bribery: What's the average age of a US Senator? 57 years old. Average. Google to them is like space aged rocket science. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. A lot of the government's actions can be explained by simple senility -- these people aren't just out of touch with society, in many cases they're in a phase of life marked by significant decline in cognitive reasoning, and studies have been done suggesting that the elderly are far more trusting than they should be due to biochemical changes in the brain. Put another way: They're easily suckered.

This is an exceedingly obvious thing to have to point out, but it seems to be forgotten all the time by people who, were they to just divorce themselves from their own political views for a minute and contemplate the problem objectively, they'd realize that there is an organic element to the problem which far better explains the current circumstances than the radical ideas of conspiracies, bribery, and back room deals. I'm sure those happen, but they are far into the minority...

Of course not. Then we'd both be wrong.

Circular logic works because circular logic works because...

Sigh. If only there were some historical document written, perhaps by the author I quoted that explained other remedies available to citizens... maybe then I wouldn't have to spoon feed the truth to people and they could infer from the quote the course of action needed. Or, I don't know, maybe just not falling asleep in civics class...

Replace "tech guru" with "cotton plantation owner" and suddenly it all makes sense.

Wrong. Thomas Jefferson, please excuse me waking you from your long nap, but I need an opinion. "When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty." Thank you Mr. Jefferson. You can now go lay down again. "Brrraaaaiiinnnss...." Yeah, I know. I miss 'em too, sir.

I can make damn sure he doesn't leave without military and/or police assistance. Give me ten people dedicated to the cause of bottling Sir Richy McDouchebag in his castle, and a blatant disregard of the law, and I can stuff him in his mansion for a good month before they catch my team and put the fear of God permanently into his self-entitled ass and make him shell out hundreds of millions for body guards, armed escorts, and bullet proof everythings.

But that's neither here nor there, and I don't feel terrorism is an effective deterrent anyway. You don't have to do any of that to get your point across; Simply dropping leaflets all over the neighborhood in bulk so everyone's lawn and mailbox is covered with and stuffed in them like it's election season is sufficiently effective and doesn't require any gross transgression of the law.

The point is to be persistent, patient, and on target. Don't go after the people who are just working there because it's a job. Recruit them, don't pull a Gandalf on their morning ride. Democracy works, but it takes persistence and a strength of will, not taking out your sexual frustrations on the 9 into downtown.

Starting to? The revolution came, and its high water mark was about a year ago when Homeland Security's jack-booted thugs coordinated a nationwide crackdown, arresting and imprisoning over six thousand protesters in a single day. Anyone remember Occupy? Nope. The police came and erected giant tarps and then moved in tanks, troops, and industrial equipment, and did a clean sweep of every protester on Wall St. in just a few hours, then took down the temporary walls, shined up the signs a little, and buffed out the dents where the protesters were thrown into walls, the ground, etc. And nary a word was spoken about it in our press.

Dude, look at China -- how often do you hear of protests there? You don't. Because the people there get rounded up and are never heard from again. And now in America, we have the highest per capita imprisonment rate of any country on Earth. Put two and two together.

There was a revolution... We lost.

You'd be surprised to learn that there's even dumber reasons people call -- the most common call a 911 dispatcher gets is not shots fired, debris in road, or any of that... it's what the current score is for whatever game is currently on in town. I shit you not, people call by the thousands.

People are dumb, stupid animals... but they occasionally get hurt, and need help. Even if 99% of the time, when they yell help it's over something utterly retarded, sooner or later, everyone is the 1% that really does need it. And that's why we have 911.

Apparently people have already forgotten this has been done before. Before there were smart phones, there were just plain cell phones... tiny little indestructible bricks with flip-open LCDs. And it was thought that having a fast way to call 911, a panic button if you will, would be a useful feature. So pressing and holding '9' on these phones would connect you to emergency services.

This feature was redacted from all phones, everywhere, within a couple years, because it innundated emergency services with so-called "butt dials" and wrong numbers. You do not want '911' to be a one-button push on a mobile device. It ends badly.

I thought we were talking about San Francisco, not Mumbai. But on a different note, why do people live in New York when it costs so much to live there? Answer: Because that's where all the jobs are. And the infrastructure. It's a hundred square miles of urban superstructure built up over a hundred years. Duh. Why is it any kind of a surprise that tech businesses congregate together? Did we forget that human beings are social creatures? We are tribalistic. We naturally and instinctively seek out both social and physical environments most compatible with our disposition. And big surprise, we build our cities the same way -- there's the "young adult" sections, the "old people" sections, the jewish, chinese... drive around ANY city, anywhere, and you'll see clear signs of cultural delineation. Hell, the effect is so pronounced that researchers can calculate the socioeconomic prosperty of a given neighborhood down to the street level... by measuring the number of trees per square foot present. Yes: You can see culture from fucking space.

And yet, we're pissing and moaning about tech companies getting together? If you're in tech, you go where other techies are. Duh!

Which is really more of a failure of imagination on their part than anything. You wanna find The Man? Find a woman, tell her she's being cheated on by The Man... then just follow the sound of sirens to his house. But more seriously: These people have homes. They do not live in the Googleplex Borg Cube. Find out where they are, and then go protest *there*. And if you're going to engage in acts of criminal mischief, what better and thrilling place to do it than a gated community filled with rent-a-cops and self-important pricks? -_-

Careful there, Sir Social Darwinist. Everybody is equally important. They have every right to protest. Peacefully. On the sidewalk. Just like the KKK, neo-nazis, and people who want Sarah Palin for President in 2016. Anyone who interferes with that's getting my American Free Speech Boot up their self-entitled ass.

But they didn't do that. They became violent. And 99%, 1%, or Percentile-agnostic, that's wrong. There is a time and a place for protesting, and it's not in front of the bus during the morning commute. That place is reserved for self-entitled bicyclists, angry motorists, and pedestrians on their cell phone wandering into traffic, thank you very much.