You've heard of course that the NIH is considering recommending using lawyers rather than laboratory rats as subjects in future medical/behavioral testing. There are three reasons for this:

1 - There are now more surplus lawyers in the USA than lab rats
2 - Some of the lab personnel were becoming too emotionally attached to the rats, and
3 - There are some things a rat just won't do.

"some new gadget interfered with the plane on takeoff, the most dangerous part of any flight" Fair enough. I don't have any problem at all with the pilot announcing, "We are now #3 for takeoff. At this time, all PED's need to be switched off." But is there a need for them to be off during the 40 minutes it took to get from #27 to #3??

Along with a couple of posters at the linked site, I thought of him first before starting to read the article....

when it was realized that "Igpay Atinlay" might be incompatible with the Muslim prohibition of pork.

And I mean literally. The hinges of hell are located about twelve miles from my town. Every afternoon, the roads are full of people driving over there to cool off.

n/t

I think that cartoons to help the user deal with errors are great, just like many of the SD'ers on this thread.

Your friend,

Clippy

"I also want you to tell me that my family doesn't deserve to eat."

It sounds to me as if -you- are earning your family's keep - your family deserves to eat.

However, the battalions of lawyers that get involved in the process (on your side, and on the government side) are doing nothing but adding cost to the system. They provide not one iota of patient care. Their families don't deserve to eat the fruits of this parasitism.

And I would hazard a guess that the CEO and board of your employer are more than willing to go along with all the FDA bullshit because it provides a very high barrier against the entry of competitors into the field. This is called "rent seeking" - look it up. Their families don't deserve to eat either.

Two words: CmdrTaco. Ipod.

#3 and #15, sort of OK, the rest - forget it.

Take a look at the Apollo 8 patch if you want to see a good design.

Most electronica, techno, and similar genres actually sound better to me at 0 kbps than at higher bitrates.

......than it was, say, in the '60s or '70s.

All that lovely vinyl with its great warmth was in fact listened to, by most people, on $79 fold-down "stereos" from Sears with $2 ceramic styli. Or on car radios with a single 4-inch speaker in the dash.

I find it totally plausible that "the kids" today are hearing better sound, even at 192 kbps and after the loudness wars, than my big sister was when she listened to her copy of "Meet The Beatles" for the eightieth time on her tabletop "Hi-Fi".

but the ex-wife got to keep it after the mitosis.

I'd ride a spacecraft with a 20% chance of catastrophic failure if I could get an in-person view of Valles Marineris. No doubt about it. But to fly into low earth orbit so that I can press a button which starts an automated experiment....it better be close to 747-level reliability.

It's the Greek word for "Eleven".....