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I never implied Monsanto had a good rep. What I said is that there can be both benefits and consequences of genetic modification, as exemplified in a single company which does a ton of bad things and even a couple of good ones (like providing royalty-free licenses for golden rice). The issue is more complicated than "frankenfood will either save us all or spell our doom"

sources: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/08/04/world/main221973.shtml http://www.monsanto.co.uk/news/2000/august2000/040800monsanto.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/865946.stm

Negative Source (Denounces Monsanto): http://www.purefood.org/corp/gericetoofar.cfm
Note that in the above, the benefits of the rice are marginalized, but it doesn't dispute that Monsanto is freely licensing the product.

I listen to American 60 minutes through the podcast audio edition, a quick Search brought up this clip http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6503436n&tag=contentMain;contentBody

What an absolutely harrowing experience. The mention of light bulbs brightened before popping, computer screens blowing out, and then 3 inch thick steel "fire proof" door being blown off its SIX hinges by the sudden explosion...pinning one of the survivors. To escape from this situation, to jump into the water, and risk being burnt by burning oil on the surface...just awful.

It sounds like there were failures on multiple levels, but perhaps all caused by drilling through a rubber seal?

I wish the people working to fix this the best of luck

Has BP got the goons to cover all the beach?
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6496749n&tag=related;photovideo

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/19/tech/main1727208.shtml

The US has labor laws to protect workers.

Where the heck do you think those labor laws came from? What do you think is keeping them there? Unions are responsible for OSHA, the NLRB, minimum wage, overtime rules, and a host of other protections that you and most other Americans take for granted these days. And without unions applying steady pressure, you can be sure that a good portion of Congress would in fact quite happily vote to repeal those very same laws.

Unions are incredibly useful to the people who are in them. And for people who aren't in them, the threat of unionizing tends to keep management from walking all over their employees. Unions (or the threat thereof) give workers important protections against employer crimes such as unpaid overtime, wage theft, and dangerous working conditions, all of which are occurring regularly in non-union shops but are unheard of in union shops.

Regarding your experience of paying a guy $200 to watch you set up a booth - was he an IBEW electrician? If so, think about who you would have turned to the moment something went wrong with your power strips (e.g. all the booth electrical stuff overloaded a circuit). And also think about how expensive $200 was in comparison to the rest of the cost of that booth.

There is more than one Mike in them there links.
Mike Mason, the guy in the photo there and Mike Williams, the guy in the CBS' 60 Minutes". The "electrical engineer".
BTW, those two Mikes talk about different cases of negligence by BP.

Also, the first link in the GPP is an analysis report by another guy called Glenn Stehle, an engineer with "extensive experience in drilling operations".

Then there is Bob Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California, who got the job to analyze the Deepwater Horizon accident.
That is like.. four guys and a couple of cases of "cutting corners when it came to oil rig safety" already.
Then there are couple of more guys in that second link.

So like... Do I now get my +5 Informative or a +5 Insightful?

There is more than one Mike in them there links.
Mike Mason, the guy in the photo there and Mike Williams, the guy in the CBS' 60 Minutes". The "electrical engineer".
BTW, those two Mikes talk about different cases of negligence by BP.

Also, the first link in the GPP is an analysis report by another guy called Glenn Stehle, an engineer with "extensive experience in drilling operations".

Then there is Bob Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California, who got the job to analyze the Deepwater Horizon accident.
That is like.. four guys and a couple of cases of "cutting corners when it came to oil rig safety" already.
Then there are couple of more guys in that second link.

So like... Do I now get my +5 Informative or a +5 Insightful?

Neither of us, I'm pretty sure, are qualified to say whether it was within tolerances to put two plugs instead of three down, or what pieces of rubber coming out might mean. And nobody who is qualified to make those claims has stepped forward to make the conclusion the media has made. The reason is because there aren't enough facts yet to form a professional conclusion -- and all of this is speculation. The media is great at speculation, jumping to conclusions, and reporting only half the facts, then over-analyzing and saying "what if".

But Dr. Bob Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, is qualified to answer that question. He investigated the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster for NASA and the Hurricane Katrina disaster for the National Science Foundation. Last week, the White House asked him to investigate the accident. His assessment was the removal of the mud was more of a contributing factor.

"If the 'mud' had been left in the column, would there have been a blowout?" Pelley asked.

"It doesn't look like it," Bea replied.

There was no single point of failure, but a series of failures and mistakes that led to the disaster, and nobody at the time had all the facts to realize "oh shit, it's a perfect storm!"

True most accidents of this magnitude are not the result of one action or step but a cascading failure. But not all accidents are out of the control of the participants nor unanticipated. In this case it appears Transocean and BP's actions led to this accident. Transocean didn't ensure the BOP and the modules were properly functioning. BP bypassed using the mud in the finishing. If both companies were going for maximum safety, these two steps would been different. In this case both were more concerned with project timelines than safety.

BP is getting the shorter end of the stick because they've had major safety violations as recent as 2005. See Texas City Refinery Explosion. In 2009, BP was fined a record $87million by OSHA for not correcting conditions related to the 2005 explosion.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/05/16/60minutes/main6490197.shtml?tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel

(a) this is an unprecidented engineering failure, (b) there were multiple safeguards, (c) it's an economic necessity that we drill for oil, and (d) Murphy's law -- no matter how hard you try, eventually mistakes will be mad

It appears from the initial investigation that some of the safeguards were bypassed because the project was way behind schedule. Read for yourself.

According to this 60 minutes report, the BOP was possibly damaged weeks before the incident but not fixed and one of the two control modules of the BOP wasn't functioning properly but this condition was not investigated fully and corrected.

Also Transocean wanted to finish the well by inserting 3 concrete plugs with finishing mud in between them to close off the pipe. BP didn't want the mud. This would sped up the next phase of production but it removed some of the effectiveness of the plugs to seal the pipe. BP got it's way.

Actually, he did eventually listen. I noticed he started talking about it after he started talking about dependence on foreign oil. I think he saw it as a convenient way to help us get off oil. He also created a plan to stop CO2 emissions from increasing by 2025, which included building more nuclear power plants, but Democrats opposed the plan vocally. Too bad.

You must be kidding me. Robert Mullins article is not worthy of publication, just because it is has a catchy byline regarding smelly duck eggs. The content is vague and overstated in many places. The content nothing more than bits of fluff without any kind of supporting detail. It has nothing it in that is new or inspiring and is so dry and boring, I simply began to fall asleep halfway through it. Robert Mullins should be slapped with a wet noodle for writing such drivel.

The only saving grace to the whole thing, was in the comments submitted by readers. Inside this is a gem of links supplied by one such anonymous reader. If you want the tip of the iceberg on hundreds of Chinese Government espionage cases, then follow these links.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/02/AR2008040203952.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/25/60minutes/main6242498.shtml
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military/3319656
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/KG31Ad01.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/world/europe/01spy.html?src=sch&pagewanted=all
http://www.intelligencesearch.com/ia068.html

However to dig deeper. The Chinese are not the only ones targeting Government and other high tech companies in the US. There are many others, but China is going much further than just the US. It would seem that the Chinese officials, are casting a huge net to capture just about anything they can get and only later throwing away what they don't need. No wonder China is advancing so fast in all the major technologies, including space, military and civilian.

"From Rice Paddies to Rocket Ships". In only a few short years has China advanced or simply stolen it's future? Followed by actual case studies and methods, would have made an article worth reading and a far better byline. I can't believe I wasted 10 minutes of my time reading that piece of crap. Thank the gods for an enlightened and intelligent reader that offered a few links and with just that small effort did far more than Robert Mullins did in a whole page.

If you see sardines in a grocery, do you jump to the conclusion that it's operated by the Mafia?

Well, maybe not the Mafia, but spies are, theoretically, a potential factor, there... It seems that sardines are no longer made in the U.S.A. Perhaps our security consultant has a new possibility for manufactur^W finding information about spies?

That being said, it is still a truism that correlation != causation.

The author didn't state it elegantly, but he still made the point -- Chinese industrial espionage is very real, is here now, and it is state-sponsored. China views hacking not only as a fast-track to becoming an industrial superpower, but they view it as a method of becoming a military superpower, too. A good part of China's military buildup involves locating and training talented young people, as well as hiring the already established hacker-underground folk for military purposes. They figure (probably correctly) that they are nowhere near capable of competing with the US military on a technological front, but if they can shut down our command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) networks (not coincidentally, this is also why they developed the satellite-killing missile), then they have essentially shut us down, especially for any military response to an attack on Taiwan.

Here are just a few examples of the many, many already known about cases of Chinese espionage.
- The infamous Cox Report (regarding the PRC stealing our most advanced nuclear weapon designs)
- The well-known Google attacks
- A Boeing engineer was sentenced to 15 years for espionage, selling rocket technology to the PRC
- The FBI caught an American with very high security clearance and a Taiwanese-American selling classified information about weapon-sales to Taiwan to the PRC.
- The British MI5 released a report detailing all kinds of Chinese espionage. For example, high-profile UK businessmen have been approached by PRC spies with lavish gifts which include USB flash drives infected with trojans to steal information, and in 2008, an aide to Gordon Brown had his Blackberry stolen after a sexy Chinese woman approached him in Beijing -- a classic, almost too classic to be true, Soviet-style tactic. Other diplomats, too, have been sexually blackmailed by the PRC to divulge information.
- Here is a research paper by Northrop Grumman regarding China's cyber-warfare abilities, 88 pages filled with the stuff. Turn to page 67 for a "Timeline of Significant Chinese Related Cyber Events 1999-Present," let alone the details of the rest of the paper which shows the large effort by the PRC to improve their cyber-warfare and espionage abilities.

Here are some more excerpts:

MI5 Report

The MI5 report described how China’s computer hacking campaign had attacked British defense, energy, communications and manufacturing companies, as well as public relations companies and international law firms. The document explicitly warned British executives dealing with China against so-called honey trap methods in which it said the Chinese tried to cultivate personal relationships, “often using lavish hospitality and flattery,” either within China or abroad.

“Chinese intelligence services have also been known to exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships and illegal activities to pressurize individuals to cooperate with them,” it warned. “Hotel rooms in major Chinese cities such as Beijing and Shanghai which have been frequented by foreigners are likely to be bugged. Hotel rooms have been searched while the occupants are out of the room.”

Buzz Aldrin disagrees

Neil Armstrong Vs. Buzz Aldrin Over Obama's Space Plans
CBSNews URL: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20002451-503544.html

Who do you think would win in a fight, Buzz Ald(I won't even finish the question)

I don't remember anyone criticizing Bush about golf.

I remember criticizing him for spending 487 days of his presidency at Camp David, and ANOTHER 490 days at his "ranch" in Texas.

That's 33.46% of his ENTIRE PRESIDENCY (2920 days), for those of you keeping score.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-4728085-503544.html

Palin's foreign policy experience remark regarding the proximity of Russia was a humorous rebuttal and counterattack on Obama's lack of foreign policy experience. Neither of them had any. Palin was saying, humorously, that she has slightly more foreign policy experience than Obama because Russia is right next door to Alaska. This remark was twisted by the liberal mainstream media, as usual, to make a Republican candidate look bad. If you have seen the video of that rally, it is abundantly clear she was poking fun at the opposition, _not_ making a serious statement about her foreign affairs experienc

If you really thought it were a joke, why did you feel the need to first validate her claim that Russia and Alaska are within visual distance? If it was just a joke, such a detail wouldn't matter... right?

Here's a video of Palin explaining her remark. She seems serious to me. Interestingly, she even expressed disappointment that her comment was "mocked" by the press. Was she just joking then too?

Regardless, how do you explain the rest of the interview or the rest of the campaign? Was she just role-playing an idiot that whole time?

-Grym

1.Freenet style "you dont know what you are sharing" plausible deniability so when the RIAA come after you for file sharing, you can prove in court that you had no clue that you were sharing that content.

Here's how well plausible deniability works:

File-Sharing Mom Fined 1.9 Million

Here's how it works:

You: But I had no idea people were downloading those files, it could have been anything!

Jury: But you were sharing everything, it is in fact a stated feature on the website when you download, so you obviously intended to share those files too. Since you intended to share them, and you did actually share them, you are guilty.

You: Damn! I woulda gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids!

That your defense is plausible isn't good enough. It can be plausible yet still be unreasonable to think that is the case given the circumstances. You've got to remember, with criminal law, since there is no way to prove anything beyond all doubt, the threshold is it needs to be unreasonable to think that anything else occurred. That it is technically possible for something else to have happened is not good enough for a defense. It needs to be reasonable to think that is what happened. When you've got an obscure program who's primary feature is to try to obscure exactly what you are sharing, you'd better have one hell of a good reason for it.

However, these cases rarely end up in criminal court, they end up in civil court. In civil court, the threshold is lower - the plaintiff only has to show it is more likely than not that you did it. 51% sure you did it as opposed to the 95% sure of a criminal case.

A reasonable defense would be to say that your nephew must have installed it, you had no idea it was on there and you've never used it. This works as long as you can provide the following: Testimony that your nephew does in fact like to come over and use your computer occasionally, and a download record from your ISP that correlates with your nephew's visits. I.e. an unusually high upload/download rate begins at the same time as one of your nephew's visits, the upload rate remains high after he leaves but does not spike up again until another visit from your nephew.

A jury will look at that and say "Given the pattern, what he says is probably true; he should have known better he's not guilty of distributing the music."

However if your case is any weaker than what I described, you will probably lose. If the ISP shows spikes of high bandwidth over the bittorrent protocol during periods when your nephew was not around, you're fucked.

Your piddly defense of "plausible deniability" wouldn't get you off in criminal court, let alone civil court. Say good bye to everything you own, son.

I have another concern, too...the profit motive.

Take, for instance, the recent oil and ongoing oil spill in the gulf...in 2003, an oil industry-friendly White House scrapped plans to make the oil companies tighten up their spill prevention act; a requirement to use the acoustic BOP was tossed because the oil industry argued that it was too expensive and "might not work anyway".

Now we have an oil spill that is going to cost...a lot...to clean up, perhaps because of a desire to avoid spending $500K. I find that to be irksome, when I know that the CEO of BP took home $6.15 million in 2009 even though profits were way down from the year before.

And I find the thought of that same drive to make as much profit as possible being at the intersection of the planet and space to be worrisome...you can do a lot of damage if you ram big things loaded with rocket fuel into other things - or the planet - while going multiples of the speed of sound.

That would be nice if it were true. It's not. Abuse rates are much higher in public schools.

The church is held (as it should be) to a higher standard. I blame the celibacy rule for the priesthood which creates a cadre of leadership that is totally insensitive to the needs of families to protect their children and which creates an inviting environment for pedophiles giving them access and cover.

There are a couple key points here that are missed without context that essentially everyone is missing it.
Maricopa Counties Sheriff has been on a 'arrest all the mexicans!' bender for some time; he's currently under investigation by DOJ for a variety of things, including civil rights violations, racial profiling, using department resources to wage war on political rivals/basically anyone who disagrees with him and this in turn caused ICE to strip him of his authority to arrest illegal immigrants (By federal law, only ICE has this authority).

So the response? Okay we'll make a state law and make it sufficiently vague that we are essentially legitimizing his practices (a prior quote of his was telling AZ citizens to arrest any mexican they saw driving with a cracked windshield [horrible advice, citizens arrests are just asking for lawsuits/charges]).
Some interesting reading:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/01/08/politics/main6071928.shtml - Sherrif Joe Arpaio Facing Investigation

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/16/AR2008071602636.html - Ariz. Sheriff Accused Of Racial Profiling

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2009/03/15/20090315arpaio-politics0315.html - Feds' new tone puts Arpaio in hot seat

http://www.aclu.org/immigrants-rights/sheriff-arpaio-sued-over-racial-profiling-latinos-maricopa-county - Sheriff Arpaio Sued Over Racial Profiling Of Latinos In Maricopa County

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/arpaio - series of articles concerning the sheriff's activities .. like 15 years worth.

http://crooksandliars.com/logan-murphy/ice-strips-sheriff-joe-arpaio-immigra - ICE Strips Sheriff Joe Arpaio Of Immigration Enforcement Powers

et cetera, just hit google.

Also, while you're correct that the feds have the ability to throw up checkpoints, its *supposed* to only be legal within 100 miles of an international border; although in practice they just do what they want anyways. (i.e. on a bus trip from Seattle to Phoenix the bus was stopped by ICE in far northern Utah, everyone white was allowed off without much of a question, everyone who appeared mexican was in turn given the 'royal treatment')

I never said they were "evil" (whatever that means), I only said that we should put them out of our collective misery. One can feel sorry for a dog with rabies while still acknowledging that the best course of action is to shoot the poor thing.

"Evil" is a banal term, sure. But, it should, to most people, conjure up images of people actively perpetrating harm to others for no other reason than that person's amusement. Your argument seemed to be that rapists, pedophiles and serial killers "choose" to do harm to people and therefore are of no value. It's easy to justify such a flawed argument if you rationalize it by labeling the people as "evil", which you're doing even if you're not using that specific term.

And when that "first fellow" just happens to have a 1 in a billion DNA match to the semen we found inside her?

Very few posses actually take the time to do a DNA test. But, if there wasn't any DNA as appears to be the case in about 20% of rape cases?

No institution created by man has been or ever will be perfect.

I'm sure that brings great comfort to those put to death who were later exhonorated due to DNA or other evidence.

I don't buy the argument that past errors on the part of the criminal justice system should exclude current criminals from forfeiting their lives for crimes committed.

Hmmm...and, what is "past" for you? Five years ago? Under your form of "justice", this fellow would've been put to death. You've put your faith in a system that relies on useless eyewitness testimony, and reasonably imperfect technologies to make convictions. Given the level of CURRENT imperfection, I reiterate: we're not mature enough as a society to be putting people to death. Period.

Within Seattle it is popular knowledge that Seattle cops are abusive and corrupt. [1] [2] [3] There will be no charges because this is business as usual.

" Now, copying a variable number of pages, then erasing them immediately is extra wear and tear on the HD."

Sure that makes sense, but why the long-term storage? Why does it store the copies from 6 months ago? Shouldn't it go through every week wipe anything over a week old?

Of course that's not perfect, there's still going to be that final week on there, but at least no one will be "downloading tens of thousands of documents" from a photocopy machine like they did.

Also shouldn't the manufacture's be responsible for this somewhat? It's obvious when you save a document to a computer that the drive needs to be wiped, not so obvious when it's a copy machine. Shouldn't there be big warning labels and a "wipe all" button on the back somewhere? Sharp apparently offers a product to wipe copy machine hard drives.... for $500:
"One product from Sharp automatically erases an image from the hard drive. It costs $500. "

WTF Sharp? You couldn't just put a button on the back that does a DoD wipe?

Animal production farms are always associated with crop production farms where the manure is spread on fields as fertilizer.

False. Pig and dairy farms in particular often run their shit into a pond and hold it for weeks to months, where it sits digesting and emitting methane, one of the most powerful greenhouse gases. And often, the ponds break or flood, and the shit ends up running into streams and rivers. So the truth is that a percentage of the manure is spread on fields as fertilizer. On the way, it does ridiculous levels of economic damage. These ponds could be tented over and used to produce methane, and some farmers are in fact doing that; most of them are thus producing more electricity than they can consume on their operation, and selling the remainder at a profit after a sub-decade payback.

The Chinese have no interest in going to the Moon

...Except for a manned lunar mission by 2024.

Machines with classified information are not connected to any network containing unclassified machines, and definitely not the internet.

About that...

In which case, using e-mail or other electronic means to leak classified information still wouldn't work. It would be caught by the CDS.

...the spy can be easily identified.

About that...

I don't see how that's relevent. We're talking about secure systems that require physical access and login credentials. Also, security cameras, possible card swipe access or keys, and other security measures. It's possible (in theory) to get in and steal something without leaving a trace, but it's highly unlikely.

USB drives are the most likely way to get info off a classified machine, which is precisely why they're forbidden.

About that...

Let me clarify, they're banned on classified machines.

Machines with classified information are not connected to any network containing unclassified machines, and definitely not the internet.

About that...

...the spy can be easily identified.

About that...

USB drives are the most likely way to get info off a classified machine, which is precisely why they're forbidden.

About that...

or this one?

"Bill Gates gives me money, but that does not make me a Microsoft apologist," Issa said"

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-6236239-503544.html

So they pulled the questions at the last minute because they said that it conflated knowledge of scientific facts and the acceptance of scientific facts, and that the study should only talk about knowledge of, not acceptance of scientific facts. As the redacted section pointed out, "correct" responses to the questions about evolution and the Big Bang increased when prefaced with phrases as "according to the theory of evolution..." and "according to astronomers...".

That reasoning is flawed. It's the acceptance of scientific facts that is paramount for a modern and educated society. Just because I can correctly say, "Psychics cast magic spells and consort with the devil," doesn't mean I believe it. In fact, if a society that does believe that, that's deeply troubling and backwards. If a society does not accept scientific facts, it is an superstitious and backwards society, and deserves all the derision it gets.

But no. The religious right didn't want these findings published because they want to perpetuate the idea that religious beliefs (specifically, their beliefs) are sacrosanct. This is a country where people want science books banned, because they contain *gasp* science!

Times like this I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' take on criticizing religion. "You can't talk bad about religion. Why not? You MUST not. That's why."

Fuck that shit.

Upton Sinclair was a socialist who wanted a socialist movement in America, and wrote the book to those ends.

Hey, you read something! Too bad it was after the fact.

It's said that there is even a report by the Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Animal Husbandry that offered a point-by-point refutation of Sinclair's more outrageous claims... though it seems to have been buried by history, probably for political incorrectness

Speaking of propaganda...

The abolition of slavery and freedom of speech were won with war - Civil and Revolutionary.

So, the principles the army fought for had no prior history as popular movements? I guess the abolitionists and tea partiers and revolutionaries demanding the right to self-rule were just coincidental precursors.

Now try to use your vote to change the shitty treatment you get at the DMV, or remedy the essential seizure of your property because some "endangered" microscopic shrimp were found in a mud puddle. I wonder how voting is working out for Krister Evertson.

The federal government oversteps its bounds all the time. It's a flawed human institution, and will always be so. Krister had ten metric tons of sodium metal stored improperly, according to the government. It looks like he got the book thrown at him, and that is unjust, especially since there was no damage to the environment - just the potential. However, it's not unique to governments. Abuses of power occur in the Catholic Church, in corporations, and anywhere humans are. I personally don't like centralized federal governments, but I recognize their necessity for keeping state and local justice systems in line.

Of course, if your health insurance provider does deny a claim, you can pay for the procedure yourself without being shot, unlike in Canada.

Using data culled from California's Department of Managed Care’s Web site, the CNA said it found that the state's five largest insurers rejected 31.2 million claims for care from 2002 through June of this year. According to the nurses’ union, PacificCare denied the largest percentage of claims (40 percent), followed by Cigna (33 percent), HealthNet (30 percent) and Kaiser (29 percent).

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=33655d70ff9cd7509f16bfd2bfbafa9f

The freedom to pay $100,000 to save your newborn infant's life, due to BCBS denying coverage due to preexisting conditions - even though one of the parents had BCBS - is not something I'd be proud of.

I was unable to find any news articles on Canadians getting shot for paying for medical procedures.

Over what?

Over anything they want which you possess.

Damaging private property is already covered by common law.

And if a company sucks the aquifer dry that used to supply your farm with water, how are you going to pursue legal recourse? Is the court local and regularly bribed by the company?

Ordinary people don't receive services from Blackwater. Blackwater caters to governments, and is therefore responsive to their needs, not the needs of ordinary people. Why don't you try giving us a relevant example?

The answer is in a question: How much are you willing to pay for electricity? How much are you willing to pay for running water? How much are you willing to pay to access the roads you use in order to get to work?

If those services were privatized, please explain how the prices would go down.

or, lets put it another way...

who cloned the first living animal?

if you mean the first mammal cloned: British scientists?

if an AIDs vaccine is found, where will that most likely be?

NOT in the US. Big Pharma makes loads of money treating AIDS. A vaccine would destroy that lucrative market.

Where was the Human Genome Project?

In the US. And while the HGP (funded by taxpayer money) did not patent the resulting data, other people (Celera) did. After a short bubble, progress in the field of Biotechnology is now at a standstill due blanket patenting. (well, if you listen to the other side, it is at a standstill because patent profits are in danger)

Apropos "patenting genes": ACLU: Breast Cancer gene patents ruled invalid covered on 60 minutes
One thing not mentioned in the CBS coverage is the fact that Myriad's monopoly on BRCA testing also blocks any independent verification of their results. Given that their testing method is based on genetic data from (a few?) white caucasian females, how can they be sure the results also apply to women from other gentic origins? What if -after the patents have expired- new research shows that the results were wrong? Will the women whose breasts and ovaries were needlessly removed get their missing organs back?

Where every newest generation phone designed (even the ones we don't have access to)?

The iPhone is a nice product, but there is ZERO new technology in it (Apple's patent portfolio notwithstanding).

Where was every major operating system in use on the planet designed?

OS have been relegated to commodity by now. (and, contrary to Microsoft Advertising, there has been actually very litte technological advance in that field.)

(even Linus came here to make Linux go from pet project to something real)

SCO called. They want their #1 FUD meme back.

Where was almost every major computer hardware component originally designed and conceived (NICs, math processors, video processors, storage tech, etc etc).

"originally designed and conceived": ages ago. Today most of that stuff is imported.

Again...who is it you think is leading us?

if by "us" you mean "the USA":

• automobile: Japan & Europe (GM could not afford to lose the european R&D labs)
• consumer electronics: Japan,Korea
• commodity hardware: Taiwan,Korea
• space technology: Russia,China,India,....
• nuclear power: Europe,Japan

The US might have the lead on atomic bombs, stealth fighters and Aircraft carriers, but -given the geopolitical situation- all of these are white elephants.

...snip...

Source or I call BS.

Concerning "Teachers are not even allowed to fail students", here are three examples:

• http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/31/48hours/main510772.shtml
• http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2002/07/12/parents_rule/index.html and http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_3_sndgs06.html
• http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:nf2oy6XkOdkJ:bigbadboss.com/uploads/S13_Teacher_Forced_to_Pass_Failing_Students.pdf+teachers+failing+students&hl=en&sig=AHIEtbReyva8kUpt3YiVDo4OgBZYlKtfNw

These don't illustrate parents disrupting class but two of them illustrate parents forcing the school to let their child pass.

The teabaggers would go ballistic, these are people ready to shoot at the census takers.

The incident you're referring to was in fact a suicide, not an attack by anyone, and certainly not by Tea Party activists.

The fact that you can run this reactor from depleted uranium should give pause to those who think it's okay for the U.S military to be using DU weapons in combat.

Harmful aftereffects of DU do exist contrary to what the Pentagon says. It poisons the land and poisons the people. It's a slow burning WMD and it's use should be declared the war crime that it is.

Here is what happened in Fallujah:
Birth defects rise reported by Fallujah doctors
Docs Blame U.S. Weapons for Fallujah Birth Defects

"Medicare is already guaranteed to be unable to pay its obligations in just a short time and this bill guarantees it will run out of money even sooner."

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That is not true. The bill actually extend's the expected life-span of Medicare by 9 years. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20000691-503544.html.

Come on, man, how naive are you? "The CBO also expects the bill to reduce the annual growth in Medicare expenditures by 1.4 percentage points per year, Democrats say, and extend Medicare's solvency by at least 9 years."

That's based on NO "doc fix", which drops Medicare's payments by 20%, which means doctors STOP taking Medicare payments. Of course they are going to pass the "doc fix", expanding costs. There will be *some* new money because the have added new Medicare taxes and payroll deductions, no way it will last 9 years, not when they are adding 3-6 million NEW medicaid people.

" It then takes that $500 billion and spends it on subsidies while claiming the $500 billion as debt reduction."

Also untrue. This is a tired claim that has been debunked again and again. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/paul_ryan_and_the_true_cost_of.html goes through this step by step.

"According to Ryan, there's about $124 billion in double-counted money in the bill. Assuming his math is correct (and no one I talked to said it wasn't), that's a fair critique. What isn't fair is to suggest that this is about the health-care bill. This is how the government does its accounting."

How is that a "debunking"? It's still an accounting trick that means they are hiding the costs.

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That is not true. The bill actually extend's the expected life-span of Medicare by 9 years. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20000691-503544.html. " It then takes that $500 billion and spends it on subsidies while claiming the $500 billion as debt reduction."

Also untrue. This is a tired claim that has been debunked again and again. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/paul_ryan_and_the_true_cost_of.html goes through this step by step.

"This bill also offloads a bunch of the medical costs it claims to cover on the individual states without funding them. "

Also untrue. The "Cornhusker kickback" was extended to the other 49 states in the reconciliation bill. The federal government picks up pretty much all of the tab on the Medicaid expansion.

Found this. Decent quick summary of what's in the final bill going to the presidents desk: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20000846-503544.html

You really need to read the entire bill, looking at a summary does in no way give you any of the good or evils of it. If the majority of the congress people can't be bothered to read the entire bill they are voting on they shouldn't be voting on it period.

Found this. Decent quick summary of what's in the final bill going to the presidents desk: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20000846-503544.html

Are you freaking kidding me? Link to the updated version. At the VERY LEAST, link to the reconciliation package. Jeez.

http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/House_reconciliation_package_031810.pdf

Which is why you can receive a subsidy to purchase insurance if you can not afford it or "opt out" by paying a fine. Moving on...

You can't just breach the constitution and say "moving on..." it does not work like that. The fact that you total ignore the rule of law speaks volumes of your ideology.

Unless you are simultaneously reducing costs for Medicare by similar amounts or funding the proposals in other ways .

I actually did read the CBO report. They claim that they will save money by cutting reimbursements for medicare by %20 and add that into the bill as a savings, but there is already legislation in place that will reimburse medicare doctors that %20, canceling out any savings (300b they estimate for that line alone) made from the cut. Then they say that they will use 500b from medicare to fiance the new plan, and write that up as a savings, as if taking money from medicare is somehow magically saving money. Maybe you should read the CBO report.

Really? Your example truly shows the lack of understanding and confusion perpetrated about this bill. Please cite to me the section within either bill that states a government panel will hear cases on liver transplants and decide their validity, expediency, etc.

It's called the "Medicare Advisory Panel" And it's in the Senate bill
From one of the Doctors on the MAP:

Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years.
-Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel

*(not professional governmental accountants or the CBO) Your point? Long distance forecasts are entirely less than accurate. Which is why they call them "official estimates." There are also provisions within the bill to take steps to meet the necessary reductions should the plan not work as intended. Next?

Your trust that the government will manage this system effectively are not only unsupported by evidence, but is actually contradicted by hundreds of years of the government being totally infective in doing just about anything. Not only did they get the estimate wrong, they also blew all the medicare and social security trust fund money on... well not social security or medicare to say the least. You're told that the government is running a total 9 trillion dollar deficit. But that's not counting the over 100 trillion in unfunded medicare and social security liabilities. What on earth makes you think that the government can now be trusted with this third trust fund that dwarfs the other two? Isn't the definition of stupid doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result? If they couldn't be trusted then, and obviously they could not be, what makes you think that the situation has changed for the better?

Your trust in the government scares the crap out of me. Maybe it should scare you a little too.

I would continue but I need to get some sleep sooner or later. I look forward to your response.

4. Looks like US is one of the backwards countries that will try to limit women's access to health care they need. You going to get the 'reform' that will prevent any private insurance coverage for women that includes abortion. This is no joke, even for those who have coverage today, looks like they will actually lose it with this 'reform'. Does not look good.

Highly inaccurate. Not sure where you are getting this information, but as far as I can tell, there is nothing in the bill mandating a removal of abortion access for people who have insurance that covers abortion. Care to cite that?

You forgot cadmium http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/01/11/health/main6080353.shtml http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=chinese+toys+cadmium&btnG=Google+Search.

We now get MRSA from foliage? Thats a new one to me. Would you mind showing your work?

They'll do more good to ban the doctors' neckties than this load of rubbish.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/25/health/main619496.shtml

why wouldn't you take the $3, apply $2 yourself to your renewal, and spend the other $1 on a hamburger or something

Is the average person that pays for a Classmates.com subscription smart enough to figure that out?

I don't know about that, but I'll take the two bucks and get some good cheap wine.

That reminds me of a bit from BtVS: Spike "You won. All right? You came in and you killed them and you took their land. That's what conquering nations do. It's what Caesar did, and he's not going around saying, "I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it." The history of the world isn't people making friends. You had better weapons, and you massacred them. End of story."

As far as TFA, anything that will help China deal with the incredible smog they generate that is so bad it can be detected in California is a good thing. IIRC China has a whole lot of smog cranking coal fired power plants, and hopefully this will allow them to shut some of those down. Meanwhile we could use the tech GE has developed and start using the energy from chicken manure which is mostly methane IIRC, to generate power while providing heat to the chicken coops.

Yay!!! The destruction of a whole culture might manage to alleviate some air pollution in California, good for them! Besides, it might be true that they had the power to impose their will on the Tibetans but I hope you're not asking us to applaud them for exercising it against a peaceful nation.

Or use a Canadian quarter like in this story, nobody will suspect it.

That reminds me of a bit from BtVS: Spike "You won. All right? You came in and you killed them and you took their land. That's what conquering nations do. It's what Caesar did, and he's not going around saying, "I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it." The history of the world isn't people making friends. You had better weapons, and you massacred them. End of story."

As far as TFA, anything that will help China deal with the incredible smog they generate that is so bad it can be detected in California is a good thing. IIRC China has a whole lot of smog cranking coal fired power plants, and hopefully this will allow them to shut some of those down. Meanwhile we could use the tech GE has developed and start using the energy from chicken manure which is mostly methane IIRC, to generate power while providing heat to the chicken coops.

They're pumping air into the ground. it's not really all that bad.

Of course, if they fracture the roof of the salt dome, and it caves in and a sink hole swallows up whatever town is above them on the surface, that could be considered to be bad.