I don't want to make light of your other points about the disadvantages of the flu shot, but it is important to point out that no vaccine is 100% effective, and that "rely[ing] on those that can be vaccinated to be immune" is not necessary for herd immunity.

In the simplest analysis, if the average flu patient infects 1.5 further contacts (R0 = 1.5), then the population proportion needed to be immune to prevent self-sustaining pandemic is 1 - 1/R0 = 33%. If only 70% of vaccinated people are immune, that means a population vaccination rate of about 50% is required for the broadest definition of herd immunity.

In short, "vaccine X isn't very effective" doesn't tell you whether or not it's useful for herd immunity unless you know something about how aggressively the disease spreads. Even with 100% vaccination rate, a 70%-effective vaccine will not provide effective herd immunity for pathogens with an R0 much greater than 3 (including most of the big bad bugs of old), even though it would still probably be a good idea to get the vaccine from a personal-risk standpoint.

Won't get into the legality here (because I don't know it), but in the UK part of the reason drivers are ready to start moving immediately is that a green light is preceded by a flash of the yellow light (while the red light is still on). So it's Green -> Yellow -> Red -> Red/Yellow -> Green. This is partly (I assume) because manual transmissions are more common in the UK than not, so giving everybody a half-second warning to shift into gear and get ready to go is helpful.

A re-vered reconstructive plastic surgeon and his re-eared patient...

I think that's exactly what the parent was referring to. Feeling sad for people who had such unfortunate situations that they have (possibly very good) reason to want to cut parents out of their lives.

Maybe you missed it, but he's not officially inspirational anymore. (Last paragraph.)

More often than every day, I move from my Thinkpad running Ubuntu to my Modbook running OS X, and less often than that I boot up XP in VirtualBox full-screen on the Thinkpad. Sometimes, for shits and giggles, I'll ctrl-alt-f2 to the command line on the Thinkpad and play around on a server I administered back in high school. I change my desktop environment (that is, the one my eyes are looking at) more often than every day. I'm surprised there weren't more of us.

I believe you mean: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. The caps matters. In other words, Buffalo from the city of Buffalo that are pushed around by (other) buffalo from the city of Buffalo in turn push around (still more) buffalo from the city of Buffalo. And you thought this was unrelated to the recursive dupe comment.

Much simpler. Better systems might even be had by nixing the base-10 and going with something else.

You mean like base 60?

"Dude, I don't."