I can't recall the last time I ate a burger at McDonald's that tasted better than the wrapper it was served in. A while ago I tried the McRib as well and was left wishing it had stayed in the 90s.

A Quebec diver was attacked by a great white shark recently. C'est tres etrange.

I can't disagree with you. Up here in Canada we have the CBC, which to some extent tries to keep things honest. Even they have been compromised to some extent, though, by politically driven appointments and funding decisions, and the outrageously powerful Israeli propaganda machine.

This is a bit of a twist on what's gone on in journalism for the last hundred years, but it isn't entirely a new invention.

When I was a teenager and working for a small town weekly newspaper, the editor spelled it out for me: "If something arrives all nicely written in CP style, easy to cut from the bottom up, ready to drop into any unexpected hole you might have on a page, you should remember somebody paid good money to get it onto your desk".

It's possible that this article is less than honest on the matter, but it certainly appears that Trump had a license in NY issued at least as recently as 2012 .

He would only ask it for things that result in an improved situation for him, personally. There is nothing at all for him to gain by seeing lower gas prices. He hasn't bought gas himself in many years - and will never have a reason to buy gas again for the rest of his life - so the price is completely irrelevant to him. If the price fell and the MAGA party lost part of congress he would still blame it on other people. If the price stays the same and the MAGA party loses part of congress he'll blame that on other people as well.

It's easy to reach that conclusion if you have never been active in a party. The democratic party does have a good local ground game that is run by volunteers who actually have beliefs and principles. The problem is that at the end of the day the candidate who wins in the one who can pull in the most money, and that's true no matter what. Where do you see a situation where an independent candidate can pull in enough money to win an election? The message is important, but getting the message out is what brings in votes. Just as the democrats need a more coherent message than just "we're not Trump", an independent needs a better message than just "I'm not a democrat or a republican" - and they need backing in order to get that message out.

There have been some democratic candidates who have been able to get some local traction without taking special interest money, but that's only possible if they had a large war chest of money ready before they announced their candidacy. An independent would face the same challenge.

Some people seem surprised by the glasses and how they can be used in perverse ways. These people seem to have forgotten what the original aim of facebook was. The website itself started as a way for "bros" - who would have been called incels had the term existed then - to trade pics of women from their campus. How many of those pictures do we think were taken with consent? Even if they were taken in public they still could have been creepy. This is just the same mindset, applied to technology that didn't exist at this scale in the early 2000s.

I was restricting my comment to the North American market, which was as I described. I agree 100% about Blake's 7. British television was far in advance of what we had over here. All in the Family and Sanford & Son, for example, were less edgy adaptations of English TV comedies.

Biochemist here. I've done genomics, I've done proteomics, I have customers in diagnostic medicine currently. My PhD was on protein-protein interactions, which is a big part of how our immune system works.

A lot of people are quick to jump on the fact that the Theranos system didn't work, and many others claim that it was impossible and never could have worked. While indeed their system didn't work, that doesn't at all disqualify the principle.

For one case study of how far we've come in recent times I point to genomics. The first draft of the human genome took more than a decade start to finish and cost over $1B. Now we can sequence full human genomes on a commercial scale for $500 or less, and it's done in less than a week with far better resolution than the first draft.

From genomics we went to proteomics; classifying proteins in a organism instead of just genes. This tells us more about what cells are doing (although transcriptomics can bridge the gap to a certain extent). Proteins are often better disease markers than genes as well for a similar reason. When proteomics started getting off the ground we were cataloging proteins from large amounts of cellular extract. Now we can catalog and in some cases quantify proteins from individual cells. We can also use protein staining and imaging mass spec to show which cells from a biopsy are expressing aberrant proteins (again as disease markers); we've reached a point where we can do this in real time on live tissue.

One of the biggest faults in the Theranos system was in the fact that blood is not the best serum for disease markers. Yes there are markers in there but not everything goes in there, and not always in quantities that are easy to observe. Blood is great because of how much is in there but lots is missed there as well.

Buddy...when the original Star Trek ran, it was a different world, especially in the case of what was allowed on television. The bedrooms of married couples showed twin beds. The first interracial kiss in US television history occurred on Star Trek, and that episode was banned across much of the South. Women were not considered worthy of positions of authority, especially if it included having authority over men. It was literally a different world. Until the advent of Star Trek, "science fiction" on television consisted of simple-minded fantasy series like Lost In Space, Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants, etc. Tropes such as faster-than-light travel and interstellar conflict, which Babylon 5 relied upon, barely existed before Star Trek. Even sub-plots that carried on for whole seasons were rare. Episodes were expected to stand alone.

Let me put it this way: The original Star Trek swam in very different waters than Babylon 5, and it changed the rules in ways that allowed Babylon 5 to be what it was (which was excellent, by the way).

I think you two are both correct here. The company was mostly funded by very wealthy investors, those folks lost money and are getting their pounds of flesh back by way of seeing her rot in jail. As you point out there were also actual patients who had tests ran (uncertain now what tests, where, by whom) and received crap results; those people of course are getting nothing back because they don't have enough money to be considered worth anything in the courts - even if they died as a result.

You're not wrong that the democrats are run by a bunch of cowards. They propose a plan, and reliably fold on it as soon as the MAGA party comes up with a (not at all) clever insult that invariably tears the plan down to a single word bite. The democrats do have ideas, they just have no spine to actually push them through.

I wonder if a better answer to the lack of organs suitable for transplant might be to direct more resources toward research into cloning a patient's heart or liver or kidney for subsequent transplant. I realize there's a huge difference between sausages made from vat-grown meat and growing somebody a new kidney, but I just can't get past the advantages at the other end if we figured it out. I'm talking about growing an individual organ, by the way, not cloning a human to be looted for replacement organs.