The United States hasn't included the smallpox vaccine in routine immunizations since the 70s. I don't think you could get it if you asked for it. Most doctors and pharmacies don't even carry it. You might be able to get it if you're in the military and are being deployed to certain regions known to be iffy about chemical/biological weapons.

This.

From the article (emphasis mine):

Sound familiar?

One of the first areas in the US hit by a modern pertussis outbreak was here in California. It wasn't among poor people who couldn't afford the vaccine, like you might expect in emergent epidemics. Instead, it was in Marin County, home of highly affluent post-hippy folks like (say) George Lucas. These folks have been reading all of the holistic alternative medicine literature for years and have convinced themselves that every single article is another threat to the precious, precious unborn babies that they plan to have spring from their middle-aged wombs, and so huge numbers of them have decided to stop vaccinating altogether. Shock, horror, when the result is a resurgence of a disease that had been all but unseen in the area for decades, and a couple of those precious babies actually die.

You see the same thing all over the world. In France, there's some kind of conspiracy theory going around that the measles vaccine is bad. Measles is one of the most contagious diseases around. In 2011, there were 118 cases of measles in the entire United States in the first five months; in France, which has only about twice the population of California, there were 17,000.

On the positive side, people, including childless adults, can help to stop the spread of pertussis by getting a booster vaccination, which helps to increase herd immunity. If you catch whooping cough as an adult, you won't die, you'll get a very lousy respiratory illness for a while. But if you don't catch pertussis, you can't spread it to people who are more vulnerable, like children and the elderly. Right now, doctors believe you need a booster about once in your adult life. It's easy to get -- you can get it bundled with your tetanus vaccine, which if you're smart, you're getting every 10 years or so anyway. Last time I got a tetanus shot, I got the pertussis booster with it, and there was no change in price (i.e. both were fully covered by insurance).

Man, I guess you just don't like Star Trek.

Spock's Brain had its laughable qualities, but it was also a perfectly acceptable cautionary sci-fi story about a society that had stagnated under the control of a machine intelligence. If they had resolved the story some other way than by piloting Spock around like a robot, it would have been pretty good.

Operation: Annihilate! is one of my all-time favorites! Those creepy jelly creatures are creepy. The shots of the seemingly abandoned city are spooky. They killed Kirk's brother in that episode -- BOOM, dead. And the idea that an alien, thoroughly inhuman lifeform can inject cells into your body that grow up your spinal cord and control you, AND that although the aliens look like brainless jellyfish, they are actually a malevolent force that wants to use humans piloting starships to carry them across the galaxy, is a compelling science fiction concept.

Catspaw is another favorite of mine, but why argue the point? It's ludicrous.

The Enterprise Incident was kinda just a Mission Impossible episode set in space ... TV was full of episodes like that at the time. Nothing particularly great about it, but nothing exceptionally bad, either.

As for the Omega Glory, while the whole "alternate, identical Earth" idea was way overused in TOS scripts, it's actually a pretty decent take on the whole Cold War scenario, flipped on its head so that the Federation guy was actually a crazy bastard in league with the Commie Chinese and the guys he was killing off were actually the good guys -- only the good guys had become so debased and ignorant that you couldn't recognize them. The Chinese were the ones that seemed intelligent and sophisticated. And remember, this aired during the Vietnam War, six months after the Tet Offensive.

Bread and Circuses? That was about a world where the Roman Empire survived into the 20th Century technology, with 20th Century technology. They watched gladiator fights ON TELEVISION -- don't you see how that might have resonated with TV audiences in the 1960s? Marshal "The Medium is the Message" McLuhan was publishing his books on media theory around this time. Again, totally valid sci-fi speculation ... really, the lamest thing about it was that they had to shoehorn Kirk, Spock, and the Enterprise into it, instead of letting it stand on its own.

Honestly, I'll argue that ANY episode of TOS has its charms and intelligence ... even something like Spectre of the Gun, which has its farcical elements, wouldn't really be out of place on a show like The Twilight Zone or the Outer Limits, and if it weren't for the fact that they had to have Chekhov and Scotty in it, it would be fondly remembered.

But anyway, with a list of "hated its" that long, I repeat: I guess you just don't like Star Trek.

I totally disagree. It declined in quality over the three seasons, and there are a few real howlers, but "terrible"? I don't think so. That's the kind of criticism people are always leveling at the old Doctor Who, with the cardboard sets and rubber monsters, but that was a clever, endearing show, too. I think it's Star Wars that ruined it for everybody ... all of a sudden, a sci-fi story meant "visual spectacle" instead of just telling a compelling story.

Not so fast, bunkie... http://io9.com/5230278/jj-abrams-admits-star-trek-lens-flares-are-ridiculous

Actually, I remember seeing some kind of making-of short around the time the first one came out and they were talking about how the cinematographer managed to capture all the lens flares "to get this great look." I could be wrong, but they may not have been fake.

What about the episode of TOS where the Enterprise was transporting Spock's father and a bunch of other alien ambassadors to a peace conference?

What about the episode of TOS where the Enterprise was transporting a bitchy alien leader to some planet where she was supposed to secure peace by marrying some guy?

Kirk and crew were constantly going on diplomatic missions, securing trade rights and the like. There were ambassadors all over the place. Granted, they usually managed to stumble into some sort of intergalactic punch-up as a result, but the point of what the Enterprise was actually supposed to be doing wasn't so different from what it was in TNG.

You might want to investigate the serials "The Three Doctors," "The Five Doctors," and "The Two Doctors."

Couldn't disagree more. Stephen Moffat seems to have decided that the best way to write Doctor Who is as a series of fairy stories for young girls. Thus, you have a very young actor playing the Doctor as Harry Potter, the Sonic Screwdriver is his magic wand (just what does it do, anyway? everything?) and nearly every episode ends with a deus ex machina, where the Doctor claps his hands together and everything going back to normal, the whole thing explained away with some timey-wimey gibberish. It's almost nothing like Star Trek and it's barely anything to do with Doctor Who. As a fan of the original series, the current one has gotten so bad that it's nigh unwatchable.

I'm going to guess he's going to look back on his life and realize that he was dumb to think he'd seen it all at age 24. He talks as though the Third Age of Middle Earth is ending -- and you wanna know why? Think about it. When the original iPhone came out, he was 18 years old. For his entire adult life, there have been iPhones, and the iPhone was the first real major technology shift he'd ever seen. For those of us who have been through all sorts of booms and busts and cycles and trends in the computing industry, things look a lot different -- as they will for him, when he really gets old.

His whole submission reminds me of those things that pop up on Buzzfeed every now and again -- "Twenty things that will make you feel old" -- and half of them are photos of the all-grown-up-now former child actor from some kids' show on Nickelodeon that you've never heard of because the first episode aired in 1994.

I don't agree with that. I enjoy change -- sometimes even for its own sake.

Want proof? On this computer, right now, I am running Windows 8 and the "streaming" version of Office 2013 from an Office 365 subscription. If that's not change for change's own sake, I dunno what is.

Now, part of this is because it's my job to be familiar with the new stuff. But in general, unless something actively hinders what I used to be able to do with the old stuff, I go along with the new stuff just fine. Generally speaking, new stuff is built by people who genuinely wanted to improve on the old stuff, and often they get that right, if only in minor ways. I say bring it on.

But bring it on for everybody? Obviously not. If you don't feel the way I do then don't do as I do. Simple as that.

For as much as the media likes to say that the world is changing forever every five minutes, I honestly don't see it. I run headlong into just about every new thing that comes along, if only just to check it out, and I honestly don't think I have lost anything worthwhile in the process.

Yes, there are Windows 8 laptops on the market that are more or less locked down. Others aren't. Yes, to do anything worthwhile with an iPad you pretty much have to play by Apple's rules. So if you want a tablet, get an Android one and root it. And if you don't want a tablet, don't get one! The submitter seems to be looking for a problem where none exists.

How? Same as everything else: with a great sales pitch.

The idea that "the only thing preventing scientists from understanding the human brain in its entirety ... is a lack of ambition" is utterly ludicrous. That's like saying the "only thing" that's keeping human beings from walking on Mars is a lack of ambition.

Really? How did we test this hypothesis -- watch and see if any of the mice tried to take over the world?

I buy books from B&N (and occasionally Google, when their prices are better) because I believe in supporting authors and the publishers that put out their books.

I also immediately crack the books I buy and store copies of them locally and on cloud storage, so I'll never lose them just because the Nook store shuts down. Removing the DRM takes less than a second.

I think what the GP was implying is that Microsoft had no chance of growing a market in e-books, couldn't grow one if it tried, and that once it owns Nook it will still be completely incapable of growing the market it just bought -- in fact it will shrink. Sometimes the best business decision is to stay out of markets where your company has no competency.