vger

Yep, this is the kind of conflict this conjured up in my head. I've been wondering for a while if there might be a value to belief systems regardless of how accurate they are. I hadn't even thought of the medical implications. This doesn't just apply to placebo meds either. It can impact natural healing. If someone's odds of survival aren't good, informing of that can make those odds even worse, just by eroding away at hope. Mind-over-matter is real, at least to a degree, especially when it comes to how the brain interacts with the body. In cases like this, opening the box can almost literally kill the cat. "Never tell me the odds." - Han Solo

...relatively speaking.

A car thief firing beams at a helicopter in attempt to evade capture... is not "a stupid kid with a laser."

Still betting on Venus. Doesn't matter if we can't land. The "Cloud City" concept is just too interesting. I don't mean for long-term habitation either - just something comparable to a lunar landing. - - - Updated - - - Moon... poles... ice.... H3? Someone needs to check that out. Kind of amazing that we haven't even put a rover there yet.

I would think blasting a pilot in the eyes with a laser counts as assault, and perhaps attempted murder?

Have you seen modern media? Every day is April Fools Day.

DVD release is today, folks!

Even the idea of flying cars (IF we had the tech) seems unlikely now. We've got too many idiots wanting to turn flying machines into death missiles.

Huh. Well this is a discussion I never expected to come up. I've wondered on and off whether or not certain ways of thinking (won't mention any specific names) actually have relevance regardless of whether or not those ways of thinking have any bearing on reality. What if it doesn't even MATTER if it's real? What if the only thing that matters is that it accomplishes something? Is truth more important than relief/happiness/contentment? That's a loaded question. So here's a question. Is truth so important that it's worth going into hospitals full of terminally-ill children and saying, "Cheer up, kid. There's no afterlife. All you get is what you have right now with your innards turning to liquid, and then you become worm food. Have a nice day." At what point does the fight against delusion become over-the-top? I would say that alternative medicine is ANY kind of treatment that isn't "mainstream." In the case of "take two and call me in the morning" medicine, that's the unpatentable natural solutions to problems that we currently solve with complex bio/chemical formulas. I have no doubt that there are much simpler answers to some of those problems. But if it can't be patented, it's not worth developing/manufacturing/marketing. But it IS worth being panned as 'hokum.' This isn't to say that voodoo will cure anything, but there's a lot of gray between Big Pharma and con artists. And it's very easy now to say, "I'm a scientist, so my cure works, and that other cure is just a psychic trying to sell you something." Very easy to do in an age where it takes a PhD to understand freaking bar soap. Health is WAY too commercialized to assume that there aren't just as many lies coming from the so-called "science side" of things, and that includes mudslinging for the sake of creating doubt about alternatives. The modern secular movement has simply made creating that doubt all too disgustingly easy. Probably not quite the kind of thing you were expecting, but this just came up on my feed earlier. https://www.yahoo.com/health/1-000-year-old-medical-remedy-shows-promise-115121260667.html?bcmt=comments-postbox If further testing of this proves to be successful, dang that's pretty impressive. To think that something 1000 years old might be more efficient than everything being tried now... that's freaking incredible. Just because people from the long past were into a lot of superstitious nonsense, doesn't mean they weren't doing science. I think we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater here. That's great news for Big Pharma though. As much as they like to claim otherwise, Capitalists HATE competition.

Space Station... running on low power... Xenomorph hive was somewhere in the bowels of the place. This was decades ago but I can still vividly remember looking down this one passageway made of cheap metal, at a square opening in the floor and thinking, "They could come out at any second." *shudder*

Minus tons of food/water storage, and tons of breathable air... And a lander, if you actually want to put people there.

.... hail Elsa?

I'm also at a loss as to how exactly they plan on picking a boulder. There won't be enough gravity to "land" a probe on, which means it's going to have to snap photos from an insanely low altitude to find something that might be worth picking. Can they keep the probe's path stable enough that they won't lose track of where the boulder is by the time they've decided photo-X is the one they want to try for? This isn't a Mars rover that can just sit next to a rock for days while NASA debates if it's one worth drilling. And then what happens if it's not as loose as they thought? Can they detach and then go after another one? This all seems like it's actually MORE complicated that the original plan. Especially after what happened to Philae.

Likely true. Though some of this may technically be self-inflicted too. It's simply one of the side-effects of being that successful. Nearly everyone refers to invisible tape as "Scotch Tape," even though Scotch is simply ONE brand that makes invisible tape. They were just so successful at it that the two phrases are now synonymous.

Do you at least agree that sending patients to hospitals in multiple states reduces the odds of successful containment in the event of a leak? I had thought of suggesting the threads be merged (almost certain that thread was inspired by this one) but merging threads this big just ends up confusing everyone.

Roundup is a product. A plant that resists Roundup isn't. They could have earned a killing on Roundup alone just by providing seeds for plants that can resist it. But no, they had to go and be jerks about it and monopolize the whole industry. Anyone could've made a Roundup resistant plant, and that includes through traditional methods of cross-breeding. Just because it was done through gene-splicing instead shouldn't magically turn it into a product.

http://time.com/3761053/monsanto-weed-killer-drink-patrick-moore-lobbyist/

In America we have corporations paying farmers to NOT grow food, to raise food prices. The end result is increased poverty, but businesses don't give a darn. And these are the same kind of businesses who are gene-splicing what we eat. What could possibly go wrong?

I shudder to think what might happen next year. We currently have a President who is pro-space, and the sub-penny budget is the best they have.

Agreed, it is not. But all it takes is for one person to do something incredibly stupid. What makes it so dangerous is if something gets contaminated, we could end up not finding out for weeks... AFTER who knows how many have touched it.

Don't worry, Monsanto can engineer a Roundup resistant bee, and after all other species die, they can become a hybrid government entity and institute a "pollination tax."

I've heard it said that one should never assume evil in the place of stupidity. Spreading the Ebola patients around at different hospitals (especially in the wake of what happened in Dallas) certainly seems EXTREMELY STUPID. These patients should be someplace with a huge barb-wire electric fence that spans miles, and insane security measures to make sure nobody walks out of the building with anything they shouldn't have. All that has to happen is for one fool to check their cellphone at the wrong time in a secure area, and this whole thing will go down like dominoes.

Isn't what we commonly refer to as supernatural actually para-natural/paranormal?

The last two posts are practically reason enough to let the myth survive. If only to kill revenue enough that the lobbyists can't prevent the idea of "patentable life" from being repealed. Most people only know how to react to direct threats to their life.

I dunno... I once heard a Pug singing along to "I Will Survive." These shenanigans have gotta be stopped.