And poison the majority of the population with Salmonella. Now, that wasn't all that hard. Just watch and learn from US Business - the folks who have created the fast-food nation diet that kills.

What, this was supposed to be faster?

Given your /. number is way lower than mine, perhaps you are remembering the ancient Lexis dedicated terminal?

I used dial-up to access both services and used capture programs under MS DOS 3.1 to avoid print-out fees.

Most of his subjects had much longer lifespans. Why couldn't astronomers have lifespans on parity with a few near-space objects ...

RIP, Jack.

FWIW:
Methane,
    H
H C H
    H

Carbon dioxide

O=C=O

The energy necessary to sever 2Oxygen from Carbon is orders of magnitude greater than breaking Methane into 4H2-O + C-O2

Killing trees is our business.

40 months inside, eh? Looks as though the law protected us from you for those months.....

You might not have read that bill, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, now codified at Pub.L. 111-148, 124 Stat. 119; and, that goes into effect in stages from July 1, 2010 through 2014.

A genetic predisposition is not a preexisting condition - it is a predisposition that may or may not result in the manifestation of the disease (you might get hit by a car, die in a war or avoid a BMI over 1.2 and prevent the predisposition to type II Diabetes from manifesting itself despite the genetic predisposition).

As a result I suggested that the insurance industry could (and, I'd bet money on this) determine that a pre-pre-existing condition - the genetic predisposition of a healthy individual - would be grounds to deny coverage.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is silent as to genetic predisposition - and as such, there is nothing precluding the industry from implementing this pattern of exclusion from coverage. RTFL

Vexatious refusal - a class of actions that annoy insurance companies and don't pay very much when you win the lawsuit.

Laws are things that are a nuisance where you have a stock insurance company - dedicated to making a profit for the shareholders by collecting as much in premiums as possible and paying claims only when trivial.

Mutual insurance companies are owned by their insureds and benefit by spreading the risk pool to the largest number of insureds - damn shame that they are an endangered species....

Contemplate the insurance industry that presently wants to cover the "worried well" and facing a bar against dropping coverage for pre-existing conditions empowered with DNA data that proves your genetic predisposition to disease and dropping coverage on a pre-pre-existing condition.

The silver in old film is too valuable - the film is sent to a recycler who recovers the Ag. Also, radiology records rooms with tons and tons of film have to be specially designed to hold that mass and are, obviously, limited in space.

Radiographs are not simple to read and many require the radiologist to highlight, magnify or compress (yep - dual convex lens) to get an accurate read - making scanning the film an inadequate solution.

My spouse has her own set of baseline films - because an odd structure showed up and was determined to be benign - and we still have those films 30 years out....

Private Legal Counsel.

More than 23 years ago I took a Toshiba T-1000 to law school. I'm a fairly good typist, but gave up trying to keep up contemporaneous note taking within the first two weeks. I found that the best thing to do was to condense and rewrite my hand-written notes on the laptop after class.

Yes, I was the first student to bring a laptop to any class in my law school.

Synthetic instruments are unregulated and exceed the value of the planet's GNP. Just because people are willing to posit a value in something doesn't mean that it actually has value. Take the Tulip mania of the 1800's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania for example.

The problem with the jerks marketing the derivatives again is that they were bailed out once and expect to be bailed out as many times as they can get away with it.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if today's little "accident" wasn't just a few program traders making a killing under the guise of a typo. I trust nobody in any of the Wall Street Arbitrage / Hedge Fund business. We would all be better off repealing the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and imprisoning the top 20% of every investment house.

Well, Italy didn't do much where a massive engineering firm created a dam that failed. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam

"Tort Reform" has capped the liability for physicians in many states - despite criminals like Michael Swango, M.D. poisoning patients and co-workers. http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=96548&page=1

The number of crooked lawyers (my own profession) is burgeoning and many are directly involved in the economic meltdown. http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/04/21/92637/goldmans-connections-to-white.html

Time to take a had line approach to a class of criminal that would actually BE deterred if they knew that they would certainly be executed. Hell, make the next of kin push the button. Add a real fear of retaliation from a disgruntled spouse and those "masters of the universe" would dot every "i" and cross every "t."

Well, you have a point - but the risk associated with developing real property is substantial and not necessarily foreseeable or controllable by the developer (e.g. September 2008).

Moreover, the risk is spread - typically a bank makes a construction loan that is paid off very quickly after the completion of construction - and that, in turn, means that the developer has a major incentive to line up buyers for the condo units so that they pay the developer and the construction loan issuing bank at the closing. Once the construction loan has been retired, the rest is profit.

Of course, the potential for default - or a chain of defaults - is always present where a prime contractor or a sub creates the first default in the domino chain that takes the project south. Liens, breach and litigation are the stuff of a construction project gone bad.