You're half right. When I started my Ph. D. in Chemistry in 1993, there was no more formal language requirement, and for a number of years prior to that grad students had to show working proficiency in one of (IIRC) German, Russian, French, or Japanese.

OTOH, there are still German chemistry journals. Angewandte Chemie publishes in both German and English, or did last time I bothered to look at the non-international version. AFAIK, several other journals such as Zeitschrift Naturforschung are still published. I think some of the journals require that the abstract appear in both languages.

Of course, many of our German colleagues speak English as well as if not better than most Americans speak English.

Our current large-ish contract price for liquid helium is about $12/L, and Praxair has been adding a nice $.50/L "contingency" fee to all orders for the past year or so. Cheapest I know of anyone getting it for is about $10/L, I know of places paying as much as $300/liter, it really depends on your contract (or lack thereof), location, usage, etc. There is regular talk of rationing, and for the most part new customers can't get liquid helium period. There's only one grade of liquid helium, BTW. Gas comes in several grades but the price isn't that different except at the really low end (balloon grade which is only about 70-80%) and really high end (99.9999+%).

Helium recapture is becoming more common, and a lot of newer imagers have re-liquefaction systems built it, but for older instruments it really only makes financial sense to recover if you use a lot. I've priced recovery systems for the NMR facility I work in and if we could capture nearly all of the ~3000 L/year that we put into our magnets I calculated a ROI period of about 12 years when helium cost more like $10/L. That excluded costs for routine maintenance of the recovery equipment, BTW.

Grim Reefer's 1500-3000 L is about right for how much it takes to cool down and energize a new system. After that, I think 20-60 L/year is about right for maintaining a newer system with built in recovery, a smaller bore imager I helped fill for about a decade used about 500 L/year.

One AC already posted part of the answer. The Supreme Court is the only court than can overturn the federal circuit courts. They get to decide which cases they hear, which are pretty limited in number. So they usually only choose to take cases that are likely to be overturned, are particularly controversial, or are of questionable Constitutionality. If it's fairly clear that they'll agree with the lower court, they refuse to hear the appeal and the lower ruling stands (and therefore doesn't bring down the overturn rate). They can also ask the lower court to reconsider a case, possibly in light of some other ruling, before deciding to hear it.

TL;DR version: the Supreme Court generally only hears cases with a reasonable chance of being overturned, the overturn rate is high.

We mostly do. But assume the phone costs $480 to make the math easier and you can:

1. Buy from VZ and pay over 24 months, adds exactly $20/month to the bill
2. Put on plastic, then either pay the entire $480 at the end of the first month OR pay usurious interest until you've paid it off. It will take way longer than 2 years to pay off if you only pay $20/month toward the credit card bill.

I also don't usually need more than about 8 GB, but there are many ways the extra RAM could be useful,. Others have already mentioned CAD or VMs, AR/VR, better/faster caching, etc. I also don't doubt people will come up with new and clever ways to exploit the extra memory.

My real concern with this, though, is that in the next year or two we'll wind up with software like Windows 11, Office 2021, and the next versions of Adobe CC applications being released and requiring so much memory that 32 GB will quickly become the minimum needed for a smoothly functioning PC. It's happened over and over and I have no reason to believe things will be different this time around.

Personally, I'd love to see devs and beta testers work on 5-10 year old hardware (feel free to compile or render on a server) so they know how their stuff will behave on what "normal" users have. It'll never happen.

I might use stronger language than merely despicable. But apparently the law to get a permit in Iowa allows any local "competitors" to challenge your application on just about any grounds. The story is almost certainly up on kcrg.com (local ABC affiliate) and/or thegazette.com (their partner newspaper).

I'm not sure where exactly the line should be drawn, but almost every other country in the world spends SIGNIFICANTLY less on healthcare and has better overall outcomes *queue unsubstantiated anecdotes about long waits for emergency care*

I would think though that moving the line somewhere so that health is more important than profits...

As a small example, last night on the local news there was a story about someone trying to open a discount surgical clinic, his permit has been denied by the state at least 4 times, at least partially on grounds that if he opens it won't be profitable for the local hospitals to do that surgery any more. I wish I was kidding.

s/Congress/lobbyists/

IIRC, the original period of copyright in the US was 14 years, which was later allowed to be renewed once. It stayed that way for some time. Then the increasing lengths started. There were a few increases beyond that, I think up to about 50 years total which is probably too long but still semi-sane. Once the copyright on Steamboat Willie was about to expire, the Sonny Bono copyright act came along and extended that signifcantly, and it's been extended a couple more times since.

The Constitutional purpose of copyright is to "promote progress in the useful arts and sciences" by protecting things for a "limited time". Sadly, the courts have ruled more than once that life of the author plus 70 years counts as limited, and I wouldn't be surprised if they applied the same standard to "forever minus a day".

If I had mod points today, you'd get one. I grew up one town over, and if each kid has a separate bedroom, there's no probably about the million+ price tag; my parents' much smaller house is valued at well over $700k now. And I wonder whether Neptune is considered a "commuter town" for NYC yet.

As far as I know, that mall is still there - due to work, kids, etc. I only visit NJ where I grew up about once a year, but my parents live about 20 minutes from there. I also believe Edison's workshop is still there and is a national historic site, I know we visited it in middle school

Great, thanks for the updated info. I didn't know, but it's probably why they stopped nagging me to enable visual voicemail.