I'm a little curious about the medical uses for the technology. Terahertz EM radiation should have similar wavelengths to Ultrasound, which only penetrates a few inches and lacks resolution. It's very useful, don't get me wrong, but no replacement for X-rays, CT, or MRI (click for images of kidney stones using each modality). Plus, ultrasound is becoming even less reliable due to the obesity epidemic, as it can't penetrate a foot of fat very well. Per Wikipedia THz can penetrate low-water tissue several millimeters, which is similar to visible light seen by the unaided eye.

Dermatologists and Dentists may find it useful, but I'm having trouble seeing the application into other medical fields. (Someone can chime in if there's something, I haven't been keeping up on it.) IMHO, it's premature to consider installing these in the clinic. Before that happens there needs to be some unique and significant benefit, which outweighs the risks, and is cost effective. Until then, keep it in the research labs where portability and miniaturization is less of an issue. We don't need technology in the clinic for technology's sake, it just drives up costs and increases wait times.

Hence why I said lives in cities. NYC has 8.2M people, then it's 3.8M, 2.7M, 2.1M, and 1.5M for the top five cities in the US. There's a long tail, but the population of the US is about 400M, which indicates the vast majority do not live in any of the major cities.

Now, people often say they live in [closest city] for simplicity sake, so it's easy to assume everyone lives in a city. Overall population density has also increased , which makes the US census's "urban" classification kinda useless. So I said "city" to express a concept of places with a population density so high as include dozens or hundreds of people within GPS's margin of error.

For some paper napkin math, the US has an average (and roughly median) population density of 88 people per square mile, with most states around 50 - 300. High-balling that with 500 people per square mile (top five states), that's one person per 55,757 square feet. Most people cluster into families, with an average household size of 2.5, so that's a 373 ft x 373 ft area. Worst case GPS accuracy is within 2000 square feet 95% of the time.

I can't speak for the rest of the world, but the vast majority of Americans don't live in cities. In a rural, or likely even suburban setting the phone's location is probably precise enough to identify a single-family dwelling. For apartments, the police could ask the tenants: "Have you seen anyone with a new [phone model] lately?" or "Who works at [other place the phone has been]?". They have alternatives to ransacking 120 apartments.

Not that this is likely to matter much outside of NYC. I live in a downtown apartment in a major US city and my phone easily pinpoints my location to one half of my small apartment, as-are the wonders of WiFi triangulation.

"Unlimited" has a simple meaning -- not limited. Selling a limited plan as unlimited is fraud. Your work internet analogy, while being a decent tragedy of the commons, doesn't really apply since employees aren't buying/promised limitless service. A better analogy (IMHO) would be getting cut-off without refund at an all-you-can-eat buffet, which is sacrilege in the US. Setting limits is fine, e.g. 2 GB or 12 plates of food, but if you sell something without limits then you have to hope you set the price where you make money on average, despite the occasional heavy consumer.

Exploration has always been an affair of the state. The civilizations that maximized short-term gains and didn't "waste" money adventuring were conquered or died out. Human migration is a defining aspect of our species.

I feel your pain, but this is the reason everyone recommends FAT32. I've used NTFS and ext2 for shared volumes before, but the filesystem invariably gets corrupted since you're stuck using hacked-on filesystem drivers with OSes that aren't designed for them (e.g. corruption upon crashing).

exFAT might be an option in the future, but right now FAT32 is your best bet. Personally, I keep my larger files on my Samba server, and media files in a partition created for the OS I plan to use them with. If you really need >4 GB file support, then make a "small" partition for transferring files only, don't store anything on there long-term and don't delete the old OS's files until you've verified they were successfully copied from the shared partition to the new OS's partition.

Alcohol, cocaine, and heroin are all dangerous. Cocaine especially, as it's prone to causing coronary vasospasm, which causes 10% of illicit drug related deaths. Heroin and opioid-based pain killers stop your breathing, although many of those overdoses tend to be intentional (or are least likely so... it's hard to tell given how depressed most heavy users are). Both of these cause all manner of psychological impairments with regular use. Obviously the users rarely notice, but their families or (potential) employers tend to.

Stimulants, like Adderall or Bath Salts are becoming a big problem because they cause psychosis. Some of the synthetic canniboids (e.g. Spice) do this as well. Just last week I was talking with a network engineer who was crawling in the middle of the street screaming that he was "going to the desert to find Jesus". While that's not particularly unusual (about 2-3/day in my city), he was unique in that he only drank a reasonable amount of alcohol (3-4 drinks/month), used nothing else, and had no psych history. The most likely explanation is that he got his drink spiked when he went to a bar (last thing he remembered), and given the negative toxicology screen and other labwork, it was definitely one of the newer synthetic drugs (probably bath salts).

Last night I tried to post a photograph of the supermoon using an image hosting service and discovered Facebook does the same for cjb.net. Which probably explains why my e-mail forwarding address (CJB subdomain) is in a state of limbo (primary contact address, but not valid for logging in).

Speaking of the constitution, I suspect the federal power to pass such a law would stem from the interstate commerce clause. Therefore, a completely non-commercial entity should be exempt.

That is, if the federal government actually cared about its constitutional limitations.

OTOH, perhaps sowing paranoia in the ranks of would-be terrorists is an effective deterrent. That would be an alternative explanation for why the FBI hasn't caught any hardened terrorists -- they're not dumb enough to attempt it. To pull off a successful attack they'd likely need to work alone, which is much more difficult practically and psychologically.

I'm fine with the FBI nabbing these people, for the same reason that others have stated. If someone keeps pestering you to participate in mass murder, the correct response is to report them to the authorities, not go along with it saying: "well, if you insist". You're probably right about this being a poor allocation of the FBI's resources though.

Most people in a bad situation (e.g. financially) realize that having another kid rarely, if ever, improves it, hence it's not an intelligent thing to do. Furthermore, while bad luck can put anybody in a bad situation, intelligence is a major factor in getting out of it.

That said, "bad situation" is relative and we're far better off than people were historically, and high intelligence isn't strongly linked to genetics. Low intelligence can be, but higher intelligence is more a function of derived epigentic effects (thus a step or three away from direct natural selection) and upbringing (not the binary "good" or "bad", more how your environment affects you -- some people thrive in adversity and become dull with privilege).

Exactly. If I'm looking for something using Google, it's quite rare for a single webpage to completely answer my question. It's also intellectually lazy to quit your research after reading a single source.

IMHO, this comic illustrates this point nicely. (That's assuming a perfect Question -> Answer AI, which probably won't be possible for decades.)

You seem to be thinking of mild depression or even subclinical sadness. This is quite common, as psychiatric disorders tend to be an exaggeration of normal things that everyone feels, so it's easy to underestimate them. You also rarely see them, as holding a job and going out requires a fair degree of psychological health. The last hundred years or so of medical research specifically tests for effectiveness VS a placebo, so it's not like people are just shooting in the dark here. (To throw you a bone, medications don't seem to be very effective against mild depression.) Most of the people I've talked to keep struggling with depression throughout their life and getting treatment means getting better in weeks/months rather than years.

Also, stop getting your medical knowledge from TV, it's wrong. The vast majority of psychologists don't do the couch thing anymore. Plus, CBT (the most common type) isn't really talking about one's feelings at length. If I remember my history right, that sort of therapy died out as psychology progressed beyond Freud. There are likely a few psychologists that still do it, but they cater to rich people with similar misconceptions (it requires almost weekly visits for years before you see significant results -- assuming the psychologist doesn't incorporate newer forms of therapy).

OTOH, we would probably fire a safe designer if a 15 year old could easily open it without the combination. Similar to how someone in charge of physical security would be terminated if 15 year olds could non-destructively enter the building as they pleased.

The grandparent didn't say we eat meat because we evolved to, he said we eat meat because our body is configured to eat meat. To make an absurd analogy, just because we evolved to breath oxygen doesn't mean we have to breath oxygen, or even that we should.

In other words, a naturalistic argument would be that we should eat meat because we evolved to and have always done so. The GP argued that we should eat meat because that's what our bodies are built to do. Such an argument implies it's healthier to do so, but it's not incontrovertible (supported - yes, proven - no).

If you want a more formal example, look at our lipoprotein enzymes. They work much better with saturated ("animal") fats, leading to larger LDL sizes. Unsaturated fats lead to smaller LDL sizes. High levels of either are bad, but the smaller ones get stuck in blood vessels more easily, counteracting the benefit of lower absolute levels. Hence the probable reason why traditional Eskimo diets (99% meat) lead to lower cardiovascular disease than modern diets, and why the Atkins diet works. (Meat-derived omega fats, and such also have an effect.)

Saturated Fat is an interesting topic to compare to AGW. There's a lot more scientific controversy (e.g. the last big meta-analysis) but public consensus. The science behind the two is similarly difficult to study. In nutrition, you can't do randomized controlled clinical trials in humans for 30-40 years to measure the health effects, just as you can't do direct RCTs in climatology. So, the science isn't terribly strong behind either, hence why there's controversy. Plus they're both overly-politicized.