Umm... since when are comfort and freedom the same thing? Freedom is picking where you live and not being awoken in the middle of the night by your boss to do an extra shift. Comfort and security are the most common promises made by those seeking to take one's freedoms.

10 NASA cuts projects laypeople can relate to in favor of obscure ones that only astronomers care about
20 Come budget review time, constituents aren't asking their representatives to fund NASA, corporations aren't lobbying for it either
30 NASA's budget is again cut
40 GOTO 10

Now, to be fair, NASA is favoring more cost effective programs. Discovering planets lightyears away is of great use to fields outside of astronomy and causes advancement in human-usable technologies I'm sure. But garnering funding requires appealing to the masses, and I doubt many laypeople would be able to name even one of NASA's currently planned projects.

Is it? Can someone buy some wire, string it up, pick a frequency, download some free software that speaks CDMA or GSM and run a tower? AFAIK, every single step is heavily regulated (FCC, patent system, industry groups, land use, network connectivity etc.).

I'm not saying these are bad regulations (esp. frequency allotment), but they do stifle competition by eliminating small players. In a free market it may be profitable for a one-person business to build a tower to service their local community, but in our regulated market they can't afford the artificial start-up costs nor have time for all the bureaucracy involved. Heck, they wouldn't even be able to afford to legally defend themself from their first "radio allergy" lawsuit.

The best criminals are smart enough to make it look like a crime never occurred, and there are probably a fair number of these (not an extraordinary number, there are lucrative "honest" lines of work for smart people). This guy probably though he could pull that off.

The article isn't too explicit on the details, but it sounds like he used his position and expertise to identify 29 people who were [dumber: weren't] eligible but didn't file [dumber: yet] for substantial tax returns. Then, he used the data he had (e.g. name, social security number, finances, etc.) to file those returns, with the refunds going to accounts under his control. (Smart: setup accounts in the proper recipient's name and state, Dumb: setup the accounts in his own state/name.)

This was an all-or-nothing crime. Either it's never discovered or he's caught. Who knows if he's the first to have tried? And, for those wanting his head, it wasn't a horrible crime. It's stealing, since it's not his money, but the victim is hard to identify (the people not claiming refunds? the government for relying on ignorance/apathy to not refund extra taxes inadvertently paid?). The stiff punishment is likely related to how close he was to getting away with it and how much he almost got (i.e. to make the risk greater than the reward).

That's what I was referring to in my third sentence. Apple likes worker dorms and such. Americans have moved pass that stage and look upon it with distain. It affords more flexibility but is highly exploitive.

As for Chinese being out of work, the sad reality is that they prefer these conditions to other factories and far prefer it to farming. OTOH, by raising awareness and making exploitive factories less profitable, perhaps we can change conditions in China for the better. That's likely too optimistic, but almost anything is better than supporting it.

How do we know it's the vast majority? The opposite way of looking at it is that people probably fall on a bell curve for how much they value their privacy, and to generate a statistically meaningful sample size Google had to offer $25. IOW, probably 99.5% of internet users capable of installing a Chrome plugin value their privacy at more than $25.

We also tend to lose perspective as geeks. Looking at our browsing history is essentially like following us around everywhere. It's a much smaller part of a "normal" person's life. It would take a lot more than $25 to convince most people to wear an all-seeing Google watch, just as it'd cost far more than $25 to convince a hardcore internet user to part with their complete browsing history. Attention-whores in either group non-withstanding.

I think this is an important point that is often forgotten. Personally, I don't consider myself to be in either camp, so I suppose I default to being a "denier". I absolutely agree that increasing atmospheric CO2 will have negative effects on humans at some level. Determining that level is a scientific question that's difficult to determine with a sample size of one and no way to do randomized trials. Plus it's been overly politicized.

From there, the next logical point is how to reduce CO2 production (or geoengineering or what-have-you). That's an economic and political question. Both camps seem to forget that they have a common eventual goal and are quibbling about the method to achieve it that minimizes human suffering. High energy costs kill poor people, just as crop failure kills poor people. Hopefully we can reach the nadir without arguing ourselves into inaction.

Part of the reason people are going after Apple is because Apple isn't one of them. Their profit margins could easily support the somewhat higher manufacturing costs. Plus, Apple publicly praised the factory for their slave-like working conditions that facilitate rapid design changes at the CEO's whim.

Not being the worst doesn't make you immune to criticism. Also, none of the other manufacturers have as much name recognition or as much influence over Foxconn. The former is necessary to garner enough support to influence the western company, and the latter is necessary for actual change to occur.

I think that's the only viable solution really. There is a reason that a general surgeon receives 9 years of education after college involving one of the most intense residencies. Anatomy is highly variable and computers have not been able to approach an acceptable level of judgement (e.g. 12 lead EKGs are read by the machine first, and are right maybe half the time if it's abnormal).

With surgery, bleeding the the most common complication, and it's easy for the surgical field to become filled with blood, and for the source of bleeding to slip away. Ultrasound isn't going to identify a small bleeding blood vessel, especially with air blocking the signal. Furthermore, bleeding often involves such a tiny perforation that you cannot even see the hole. If ultrasound used such a high frequency sound to have that kind of resolution and powerful enough for the necessary level of penetration it would literally cook the tissue in between. (That's actually one way to cauterize a bleeding vessel in laproscopic surgery, high-frequency sound.)

IMHO, there are three options for handling medical emergencies in space. The first is letting non-medical personnel handle it. Computer guidance may help, but these things are hard. A specialist with a decade of training and twice that in experience in a highly controlled environment runs into problems probably in the single digit percent range across most specialties. For emergencies, I'd expect the complication rate to be in the double digit percents. So, I do not believe letting pilots play doctor (or even nurse) is a good idea. The second option is to do tele-medicine, where a doctor controls a robot. For emergencies or surgery, the minute or longer time lag makes this impossible. The third option is to take physicians into space, which presents logistic problems, but is the best idea if you can't med-evac someone quickly.

Well, in that case we aren't really arguing. If you are covering subscribers, then GSM VS CDMA isn't as big of an issue. If you're covering area (i.e. a more uniformly distributed population) then the extra range lets the telcos get away with fewer towers.

Obviously, a tower 40 km away doesn't provide great service. It does work though, and the US telcos are more than happy to call it a day with that rather than invest more into infrastructure. As for my example, it's not economical for each community of 50 people to have its own cell phone tower, nor the individual houses dotting the landscape. The telcos could certainly afford to put up a lot more towers, but, given comparably pitiful investments, CDMA works better.