"Good! Now maybe people will begin to see the others as stupid too!"

The odds are stacked against you - about 47% of the human population lacks a paracingulate sulcus, the brain structure most responsible for differentiating reality from imagined reality (as a consequence of memory processing). Somewhere over 90% of schizophrenics lack this structure, which lends credence to the theory of an evolution of consciousness and a natural origin of religions.

There appears to be a moderate evolutionary advantage to having the sulcus - we'd expect the presence of one to be lower in antiquity, but if we figure a halving in 10,000 years, you're going to be waiting a long time until it's a tiny minority.

You scoundrel! You can do pipes in Perl! Tsk, tsk, tsk!

it's not too bad if you don't care about getting the result back. I recently implemented an actual pipe-based system in perl where the results did need to be bidirectional, with open3, and ... well, it ain't pretty.

It's a real shame perl doesn't have the capability integrated into the core language with nice syntactic sugar.

That theory that was published last month says it has to do more with gravity, with a pure superconductor being equivalent to a miniature black hole.

Who knows - not too long ago the idea that matter and energy were equivalent was wildly speculative.

If they could do that without long (or short) term complications, I'd be all for sedated flying.

Or the guy wheeled in unconscious after a wreck.

Why would you want to let Dell define you're api?

Seriously, though... Call me paranoid, but I think plugging any of my USB devices into the PC equivalent of a Korean War-era B-girl is even *less* desirable to putting my username/password into one.

Or when the death panel decides that you aren't worth treating?

Death panel? Don't you call that an HMO?

Laser Eye surgery is a luxury, try applying free market models to treatment for a flu epidemic.

With something like a Flu epidemic if treatment is not free then loads of people will try and make do without. That means the epidemic goes untreated amongst large parts of the population and spreads much more easily and damages productivity as more people call in sick.

The reason we in Britain came up with an NHS was not solely out of some do gooder nature, it was to make sure people were able to get their arse to work in factories and produce stuff without infecting all their co-workers with a disease that made even more people sick the next day.

Ideally, sure.

In a world where the ravages of entropy are bringing you ever closer to the end of your finite lifespan, you just end up pissing away a whole lot of time.