Amen, bro.

Your continuing guesswork is close.

I'm actually one of the ones who has an ulcer with an unknown cause, I take pantoprazole every day and I'm fine.

I was diagnosed using the standard urea breath test, which is around 97% accurate.

I have no A. Pylori, but if I did, I would be off the meds right now, instead having to take them indefinitely.

"I always find it funny that people who risk jail time for a drug claim they haven't got a problem. "No sirree, I am not a drunk. Yes I am drinking industrial alcohol laced with rat poison for flavor sold to me by outragous prices and I could go to jail for it, but really, I got it all under control."

Apparently we haha when someone offs them self doing something stupid like swimming with sharks with a bloody cut, but when someone does something Darwin like drinking poisoned alcohol, bust out the sympathy cards. Stupid is stupid and it's not going to get any smarter by justifying it.

I agree with many of the posters here that say most of the current slums are horrific. Also, I live in a poor part of London and have just returned from Bangkok where I visited and walked through some of their slums.

However, I believe the key word here is 'teach'. There are many things that I admire in Bangkok that I'd like to introduce to the East End. Good street food at an affordable price rather than look-alike hamburger chains (as part of the informal economy), re-use of anything reusable, (often) better levels of respect for property and people, ingenuity that doesn't exist in the gadget-heavy west. Yes, there are rats and open-sewers as well, but that doesn't invalidate the rest.

Walkability is also a big factor. I live near a canal but many of my female neighbours won't use the towpath because no-one else does, of course, this is a downward spiral, so I'm trying to get it to be a little more attractive, then more people walk it.

I used to work for NASA. You are totally wrong about the need for "gee whiz flashy programs". NASA lives or dies by its ability to deliver jobs and contract $ to states and Congressional districts. Furthermore, NASA and the space industry (the big guys like LockMar etc.) are joined at the hip. I remember procurement-sensitive meetings at NASA where NASA managers with lots of responsibility would say, "can I bring so-and-so (their pet contractor) to the meeting?" The reason is that the contractors, at least in the human exploration side of NASA, do most of the hard technical work. They will close out these contractors and it will also be the end of career for many NASA people who don't have the right stuff for whatever comes next. These changes in NASA are really at heart a local jobs issue. Regarding "placate various legislators": no, you are definitely not paranoid! Look where the NASA Centers are located. They were deliberately place in southern states during Apollo to woo those states to the Democrat side. It didn't work all that well. But now you have these government centers in places where they provide a disproportionate amount of state revenue and jobs for the region. OF COURSE THIS IS POLITICAL. Any change to the work that NASA does, and which NASA Center gets the work, directly affects the fortunes of one state versus another, which affects the direction of NASA as a whole. Expect to see a lot of high and mighty words from Senators and Representatives about what is right for NASA, but what they are really talking about is jobs and total contract $ for their political domain. That's all it is. That is their motivation. Its plain as daylight. Nobody is Congress plans for the long term of NASA unless it is spelled out in terms for jobs and $.

Leaving that conspiracy theory far aside my point about TMI being an example of complacency stands because there were so many things wrong with it which were later fixed in other reactors.
What I'm writing about is the reaction to the accident and the change from a lax attitude to a return to better standards and a closer scrutiny of risks. The "next TMI only without the dumb luck saving us" became effectively a non-event like the Y2K bug as a lot of work was put in to stop it from happening. The USSR of course was not so lucky when they had their wake up call - they had written TMI off as "those dumb Americans" just as idiots now write of Chenobyl as "those dumb Russians".

The logic for the dataset should be in the database where it belongs.

Crazy trigger/Crazy procedure problems are the same as every where else, if it's undocumented the code is hard to maintain.

Not sure what your problem with debugging a procedure is, most databases has interfaces for tracing procedures, I actually find SolidDb procedure trace to be preferred over normal print statements in .

... here is a positive: Colin McRae's Dirt2: the game feels so polished on the PC that I'd think it was designed for it.

Another negative: NFS shift: there's no way to avoid watching the 10 second or so video clip at the start and re-start of every race if you don't press the 'A' button... which it seems cannot be mapped to the keyboard or to a button on a non-xbox controller... very annoying when trying and re-trying to get a race right.

Tip: With the pinnacle game profiler program and enough patience you can customize your controller to cover for the lack of attention the game developers put on the port to the PC.

Assuming you're close enough to the exchange for ADSL to not suck, switch to O2. They've been the best ADSL provider I've had here in the UK.

No caps, no "peak-time" and the speeds are close to as advertised (I pay for a 20Mb line and get 18Mb, with BT it was down at 12Mb, on the same telephone line as well, so figure that one out)

I think you might be overreacting a bit.

Fair point, but what if Bob is accessing his own, personal bank account from home?

Read the article a little more closely; it specifies an infection via cross-site scripting, not a download. I don't think he can be considered an "idiot" for not researching every search engine listing for reliability before visiting the site.

See point 2

Again, I don't think it qualifies someone as an "idiot" if they don't do a complete system security review every time their browser crashes.

That's not necessarily a red flag, maybe his bank rechecks this periodically; I doubt, in that case, that most people would keep the schedule of these checks handy to sniff out any suspicious deviations.

Again see point 2; Companies aren't the only ones with bank accounts.

The COBRA premiums reflect the true cost of the coverage. They are the same as the full premium that was being paid jointly by you and your employer. Most employees are blissfully unaware what the true cost of their insurance is -- they think the amounts deducted from their checks are the insurance premium. Actually, that payroll deduction represents only approximately 20% to 40% of the true cost.

The real pain isn't the premium cost -- you already take that into account when setting the rates you will charge as an independent. The real pain is that when you apply for medical insurance and aren't part of an employer group (which includes plenty of young healthies), the insurance companies will assume that you have cancer and AIDS (at least!), and that the only reason you are applying for coverage is to trick them into paying for your expensive bills. They will scrutinize your health experience with a fine tooth comb -- expect even minor nicks in your health to be grounds for them to say no.

It would be interesting to note though, when your brother requests a complete reinstallation of his Microsoft Windows 7 machine to factory settings due to an immense slowness to boot, popups and other obscene paraphernalia associated with the everyday use of Microsoft Windows . I assume, that at that time he will still be able to quickly boot his Linux laptop and check his emails/browse without delay. And not run the risk of a BSOD within five minutes due to some sound card driver update installing.

Which is why you "trust" the certifying authority. Any of your CAs could make a cert for any popular site. There needs to be some sort of PGP style web of trust, where people you personally trust sign SSL certs that they trust. Eventually, when you have 4 good friends who have signed/trust a specific Gmail SSL cert, then you could be sure it was OK. If it ever changed, well, then all bets are off.

Some other facts:

1. The US Department of Energy statistics are that the US burns 2 trillion pounds (just under 1 billion metric tons) of coal per year.
2. Solar and wind power is cost competitive with nuclear and coal when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. To generate renewable energy around the clock, you have two choices:
2a. Add a power storage system to your solar or wind power plant that captures most of the energy and stores it for night time, cloudy days, or calm winds. This increases your costs by at least a factor of five, blowing your cost parity with nuclear and coal to hell.
2b. Supplement your renewable energy source with another power source to fill in the gaps in renewable energy generation. This is what is usually done, and the favored backup is natural gas. This also ends your cost parity with nuclear and coal, and guarantees your continued reliance on non-renewable energy sources or nuclear.

We could bury all of the nuclear waste we generated in the history of the human race in the underground space the United States clears with one year of mining coal.

Why can't we just have everything? Why does it have to be multitasking OR multitouch? clearly the tech is capable of both, why can't we just have it? is multitasking too complex for the average user to get their head around? that's been part of both mac and pc computing from the word "OS", why is it suddenly a new concept? multitouch and gestures are new, and a revolution if they could be used for computing and not just dicking around. can you imagine? a multitouch interface with final cut pro, moving video clips around a timeline and synching sound effects with gesture? hot damn, that's a sweet concept! but it's not yet! and it so totally could be now! why can't we have nice things?!