If I can't measure it well enough to copy it, I can't measure it well enough to verify it, either. And if the verification is fuzzy, then I just need to copy it well enough to pass the verification. Which is always step 1 in the counterfeiting handbook.

I think El Paso would go to Mexico or New Mexico, in case of a subdivision. No reason at all to keep it in Texas, and, other than the easy route through the mountains (it's called "el paso" for a reason), no reason to keep it in America. It's really East Juarez.

They do understand that if Apple wanted to, Apple could run iOS on Intel chips, right?

It sounds like Apple has told them they won't do that, and Intel is trying to change their minds by mounting a seemingly concerted competitive effort.

At the least, Intel's new chips, which have surprised even ARM's CEO with their speed and economy, are going to make Intel rich yet again.

The question is whether Apple wants to be in full-frontal competition with them, or do what it did with the PowerPC/x86 decision and go with the one that has taken the technological lead.

That doesn't take balls. It takes brains. Kinda the point.

It probably takes as much energy to distill petroleum as it does to distill alcohol.

When you distill alcohol, you get a little alcohol in one tank and a lot of of water in another.

You can sell the alcohol for the price of gasoline, but you're dumping the water in most places.

But when you distill petroleum, you get gasoline in one tank and jet fuel in another tank and motor oil in another tank and axle grease in another tank and road tar in another tank and candle wax in another tank...

And you can sell all of those, some for more than the price of gasoline.

Depends on the car and whether you run AC in the summer.

Texas isn't going anywhere, either.

People who want to get elected in Texas use that to cadge votes, because it works, but once they find out you can't defend a nation with a posse carrying six-guns any more and the amount it will raise their taxes to become a real military power with a full Army, Air Force, Coast Guard (370 miles of coastline in the smugglingest water in America), and Border Patrol (1250 miles of border with Mexico, over 60% of the whole border; plus 1400 miles with New Mexico, Okalahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana). Duplicating the rest of the functions of the federal government won't be a cakewalk, either, and don't pretend they'll just let that all fall flat. Economies of scale mean that being a part of the entire nation is cheaper than going it alone. And Texas' physical scale makes it more expensive to administer, not less. Throw in the added expense of commerce across borders, and no protections against tarriffs from the commerce clause, and businesses in the state doing any business out of state will be crippled.

And Texas is hardly monolithic. Split it off from the U.S. and the next thing that happens is that West Texas will insist on separating entirely from East Texas, and East Texas would be just fine with that. So there's only so far the political fixers in the state are willing to take the issue beyond claptrap at campaign rallies.

It's theater, nothing more.

Let me see everything written by any Politico employee, published or private. You can anonymize them if you like.

...and they said the "Anonymous Coward" option was the Worst Idea Ever.

I don't think it was an insult. If she goes to the next doctor and doesn't ask a lot of questions, the doctor should suspect depression or neuropathy and start looking into it, if only to rule it out. That's his job.

Ever read your tab at a restaurant? Same deal, but you probably know more about food than you do about medicine, so it just seems less cryptic. Still, you know that you didn't order the clafoutie, so you can tell them to take that off the bill and bring you a fresh one.

An X-ray is a picture taken with photons in a certain range of energies.

It is a medical record when it is made to gain medical information.

Chiropractors are not doctors, and the services they sell are not medical, even though they gussy themselves up in white coats and hang diplomas and charts of body parts on the walls and hand out pills with dead-language-sounding names just like the people at your doctor's office do.

So an X-ray taking by a chiropractor is not, then, part of medical records. At least, not unless your actual doctor asks for them to help him fix what your chiropractor broke.

>use it to jump to the wrong conclusions, imagining all kinds of ailments that they just don't have.

Part of a doctor's job is to manage that, and it's simple to tell a patient that looking at parts of the information or looking at it wrong can lead to different diagnoses or diagnoses for things you just don't have. And a doctor that isn't checking for the unusual explanation while at least starting treatment for the common explanation is not actually doing his job either.

All of a patient's job is to second-guess the doctor until both doctor and patient are sure they have the right diagnosis and treatment.

If you're not doing that job, some doctors will take you around the horn on the testing tour, racking up fees all the way. Others will take your co-pay and hustle you out the door with a prescription for ibuprofen hoping your immune system will do their job for them.

Don't know why that's funny.

It's the way it should be.

The doctor can do a hundred tests to know what's happened to me in the past, or, he can wave an RFID reader over my wrist and populate his database with my history since birth and the interpretations of his predecessors and data on what did and didn't work.

Anything that speeds up the doctoring process and reduces error in information retrieval is the goal.