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There has not been one study that shows vaccinations are actually effective.

I don't even know what to say to that.

Let's take the example of chicken pox.

Pre-Varicella vaccine, there were more then 15,000 hospitalizations due to Varicella from 1993-1995. Between 1990-1994, it was the cause of death for 145 people per year.

Post-vaccine, the number of varicella hospitalizations decreased by 75-88%, and decreased by 100% for infants! Only 16 deaths from Varicella were reported in 2003.

I don't know what your definition of effective is, but that certainly qualifies as effective to me.

SOURCE: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr5604a1.htm [cdc.gov]

Pre-Varicella vaccine, there were more then 15,000 hospitalizations due to Varicella from 1993-1995. Between 1990-1994, it was the cause of death for 145 people per year.

Post-vaccine, the number of varicella hospitalizations decreased by 75-88%, and decreased by 100% for infants! Only 16 deaths from Varicella were reported in 2003.

You might think Chicken Pox is not dangerous, but you are wrong because, like most parents, you are basing your decision on YOUR experience instead of studies done my medical professionals.

MY experience as a child was that I didn't need a bike helmet because I never got hurt. Does that mean I am not going make my kid where a helmet? I hope not.

SOURCE: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr5604a1.htm

There's no need to "Ask Slashdot" about this. A simple trip to the CDC's website provides everything one needs to know.

Anyone who takes medical advice from Jenny McCarthy deserves to have their lineage ended.

It would be nice if it worked that way. Unfortunately the way it actually works is better demonstrated by the 2008 measles outbreak in San Diego. Some of the victims were too young to have gotten their measles vaccination.

The idiot parents who took their unvaccinated child to Switzerland and brought him back with the measles should feel free to stick to their beliefs.

They should also be forced to compensate their victims for any medical care, including lost time at work, and any costs incurred by the city, state, medical facilities, and the airlines because of their beliefs put a lot people at risk and cost the rest of us a lot of money.

I agreed it was a bad analogy.. but I'm also not going to overlook your push for national healthcare.

And yes, the reason health care costs are rising so rapidly is obesity, which is a lifestyle choice:

"Since 1987, diseases associated with obesity account for 27% of the increases in medical costs."
http://www.cdc.gov/NCCdphp/publications/AAG/obesity.htm

Clearly obesity is a huge, driving force in healthcare costs, and those costs are rising everyday.

My employment isn't, because I can't force local companies to hire me, or I may not be able to afford to live where the work actually is.

19 cross-sectional studies, 5 case-control studies, 3 cohort studies, and 1 partner study showed that the relative risk for HIV infection was 44% lower in circumcised men. Where's your evidence?

Nobody likes walking away from a fight they're tired of dealing with, so when they try to, they often try to assert their themselves on their way out, as you did with a self-congratulatory assertion of my argument's invalidity. If you don't start off your presence in the discussion by flaming people you disagree with, such things won't be necessary to do in the future.

My original argument (on post #26661837) was that mercury in CFL's are a real problem, as thogard originally pointed out. Just because he's wrong about what type they put into the CFL-blub doesn't change that microorganisms turn elemental mercury into methylmercury and it eventually gets into the fish.

Nobody likes it when their cherry-picked, industry-funded citation gets rebutted, so you reacted by playing it off as a change of subject. Please realize that criticizing a citation used as a supporting evidence is nothing unordinary, and in fact, should be expected if the citation is from a questionable source. Don't pretend like you wouldn't have called me out if I had cited a questionable study written by a bunch of wannabe researchers from greenpeace. You would have, and you'd have been right for it too.

Now if you're continue to react as predictably as you have thus far, you'll respond with yet another angry last word. Go ahead, I won't respond again. I can lace my arguments with angry disrespectful indignation just as easily as you can, but it doesn't actually further the collective understanding of the risks associated with mercury contamination.

Here's is a source I'm posting for you to read. I'm offering this document to you because I found it genuinely informative, interesting, and appears to be a pretty comprehensive read on the entire subject of mercury toxicity. I'm not "throwing" this document at you to assert who's right/wrong (and to prove it I'm not going to quote its contents publicly).
http://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp46.pdf
It's a huge document (sorry), so I suggest text-searching for keywords to navigate it, like stuff we've been talking about (sources, toxicity, fluorescent, etc) but text-searches won't work on some of the data tables (i.e. pg 393, table 5-4) which are some of the most informative parts. The parts that aren't actually text-searchable are best located via the table of contents.

One or two things a year? Screw that. I want them working to solve these problems:

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/FASTATS/lcod.htm

Number of deaths for leading causes of death

Heart disease: 652,091
Cancer: 559,312
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 143,579
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 130,933
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 117,809
Diabetes: 75,119
Alzheimer's disease: 71,599
Influenza/Pneumonia: 63,001
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 43,901
Septicemia: 34,136

I say screw Iraq and military R&D toys. Yes I love Darpa toys too, but playing by the numbers I'm much more likely to get heart disease, cancer, or a stroke than have any foreigner try to kill me. Those numbers are generally yearly numbers! We loose more to heart disease, cancer, and a stroke per year than in any military conflict. If they want a forever war, I don't want a war on mythical enemies. I'd be happy if the government declared forever war on known proven mass killers US citizens. We need a War on Disease and ill/poor health. The top ten statistical killers will always change over time, but it gives us a real solid enemy to aim at.

Results from the latest National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) published in the Journal of the American Medical Association show that mean blood lead levels in people 1 to 74 years of age declined by 78 percent between 1978 and 1991.

1973 was the year they began to phase out lead in gasoline.

One of the important factors that was overlooked other than the inefficiency of DC over large distances is the risk of electric shock. DC is unforgiving and anyone who receives a shock at the higher voltage levels will have very little to no chance of survival as DC current polarizes the blood and there is no way to reverse that effect in time to save that person.

See the following for a basic description of what this is about.

http://www.cdc.gov/eLCOSH/docs/d0500/d000543/section2.html

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/shock.html

The difference between direct and alternating voltages and currents is that one swings negative to positive thereby reversing the polarity of the potential while with dc everything is a constant supply and thus more harmful.

=Smidge=

part of me wonders how much of this data could be used for diagnostic analysis by looking at symptoms, vital signs, treatments and outcomes over a very large population.

My sister works in infectious disease control. She told me that pharmacies are already wired up like this and they can spot things like flu outbreaks even if people aren't seeing doctors for treatment. Example: Bio-ALIRT (third Google hit for "pharmacy data mining disease outbreaks").

Some of the happy ingredients you'll find in common vaccines are formaldehyde (poison) and thimerosal (poison) which breaks down into ethylmercury (poison) and also raw mercury (poison).

No you won't ...

Since 2001, with the exception of some influenza (flu) vaccines, thimerosal is not used as a preservative in routinely recommended childhood vaccines.

Mercury and Vaccines (Thimerosal)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lifexpec.htm http://www.efmoody.com/estate/lifeexpectancy.html

That's not to say that I completely agree with the grandparent poster. Medical science has progressed a lot during the past 100 years as well and medical screenings and diagnosis have improved to the point where we may be seeing more cases because we are simply better at screening and diagnosing illnesses where as a hundred years ago, many people may have died from illnesses that went unnoticed and their deaths were decided to be because of old age. Also misdiagnosis was likely common because so many diseases have similar symptoms and without today's medical labs to do testing, it's quite possible many patients were misdiagnosed before modern analysis was prevalent.

Unvaccinated, breastfed kids don't generally get sick. (very rarely)

This is untrue in the 1900 hundreds in the USA for every 1000 birth's 100 children would die before they reached 1 years old. All these children would have been breast fed. - http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4838a2.htm Its also not just about kids these same diseases cause death in adults and all these diseases are PREVENTABLE !!!. - http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00056803.htm

Unvaccinated, breastfed kids don't generally get sick. (very rarely)

This is untrue in the 1900 hundreds in the USA for every 1000 birth's 100 children would die before they reached 1 years old. All these children would have been breast fed. - http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4838a2.htm Its also not just about kids these same diseases cause death in adults and all these diseases are PREVENTABLE !!!. - http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00056803.htm

Dog bite fatalities in the US in 2007: 35. Total number of coyote-attack fatalities in recorded history: 1, 27 years ago. Compare to 800-900 accidental shooting deaths in 2001, and I'll take my chances.

In other news, the United States has been officially canine rabies free for over a year.

Guns aren't known as equalizers for no reason. I would rather have everybody equally able to inflict harm rather than "might makes right".

All you gun grabbers -- did you know that doctors' bad handwriting kills more people every year than gun accidents? Did you know that most gun murders are gang wars caused by the War On Some Drugs? There are more deaths in the US from car accidents (45,520) than guns (30,694) in 2005.

Go here to find out for yourself.

So much for guns being dangerous. What is your next argument?

You do know that it is impossible to get third degree burns from boiling coffee. Once the coffee leaves the dispenser it is now in a state of cooling off from ~212F. The worst you could burn yourself is second degree. A third degree burn tends to require an active flame or strong acid, neither of which are available in a cup of McDonalds coffee.

The government says you're full of crap:

It takes 2 seconds for a child to receive third degree burns from water at 150 degrees. It takes 5 seconds if the water is at 140 degrees, and 30 seconds at 130 degrees.

Apparently, people who know more about this than you do think it's possible to get a 3rd degree burn from boiling water.

wouldn't you need a lot of sand for that to be safe? and the coffee filter seems a little pointless if you have something that can filter germs and bacteria beneath it. it's like putting a pasta strainer above a sieve. with conventional filters you would use a sediment filter to prevent clogging, but if you're using sand and charcoal as your primary filter rather than a microporous membrane you won't need to worry about clogging. though you'll need a lot of sand/charcoal.

seems like a better solution is just to use:

• a sediment filter like a piece of cloth that you can easily replace/clean to reuse the filter. you could use a coffee filter, but that wouldn't give any advantage over a more porous material, and it would greatly increase the filtration time.
• activated (or impregnated) charcoal for filtering out organic molecules. silver impregnated charcoal also has an added antibacterial function, but it's probably not necessary with the next component.
• a disposable micron filter--a 1 micron filter will remove cryptosporidium, which causes diarrhea and is one of the most common pathogens found in water. however, a micron filter rated for .20 micron or less is recommended. though since the smallest known bacteria measure about .3 micron, you can probably get by with a .22 micron filter, which is what's usually used for medical IV applications.
• another layer of activated charcoal to capture remaining chemicals.
• optional UV lamp to disinfect any microbes that manage to slip through

however, even the best micron filter will not remove soluble pollutants like salt ions. so distillation is still the best way to have guaranteed safe drinking water. another option that is perhaps more portable is a Reverse Osmosis filter, which is what is most often used for drinking water filtration.

The stuff does look to be very corrosive, but that might be a little exaggerated:

http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/ipcsneng/neng1233.html

Sure, it would be corrosive to skin, most flooring (especially stone), and glassware. But the image you give is pouring the stuff into a glass, having it melt through the glass, your hand, and the floor, and whatever is below you. xD

But you are right about chemical reactions of relatively innocuous chemicals causing serious hazards. The most common example I can think of is bleach + ammonia.

The CDC actually has a working system that they've used to field test some of their ideas, BioSense. And there are several state and lower level systems doing this sort of thing: New Mexico, North Carolina, DC area, New York, NY, others I can't recall. In fact, there is an entire professional society for people in the syndromic surveillance field (btw, buzzword update! the cool kids now say "situational awareness").

The flu isn't exactly a major killer, it just makes people be a little ill for a few days, even the CDC says that only about 250 people died from it in 2001 in the USA, not the 36,000 that is promoted.

you enjoy driving your car. good for you. i don't enjoy thousands of unnecessary traffic deaths in this country. and for that reason, i have no problem taking away your toys. deal with it, child

~43.6k deaths from traffic accidents in 2005.
~30.6k deaths from firearms in 2005.
Cite: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr56/nvsr56_10.pdf

What? 9/11, 7/7 and the Nadrid train bombings did actually happen. It absolutely is a real threat and there was even analysis of it as an emerging threat long before current governments started using it to push their agenda.

The threat is real, but the risk is negligible. How many people died due to terrorism in the US or UK in the past 10 years? How many people s died because they couldn't get health insurance? For that matter, how many people died because they slipped in the shower, or because they got food poisoning? Apparently 9000people per year die because of food poisoning. Why haven't we surrendered all our rights in a war on salmonella?

So you see, the threat may not be entirely made up, but it *is* entirely overblown. They have been using fear to manipulate people into surrendering their rights. The Patriot act was written well before 9/11/2001, they just waited for a convenient moment to push it through Congress. There's no way to describe this other than a complete power grab.

The cause of worldwide amphibian population declines is the Chytrid Fungus. However many do think that global warming is making the situation happen faster and to a more serious degree. Here is some quick links if you want to read more on the subject ...

From Nat Geo:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080401-frog-fungus.html

The NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/science/04frog.html

The CDC:

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol10no12/03-0804.htm

Sorry, bad numbers.

~3000 dead in WTC. ~40,000 dead per year in motor vehicles, approximately 50% are "alcohol-involved" (so, maybe 40% alcohol-caused - doncha love government spin!). 40K/365 = ~110 per day. *.4 gives us perhaps 44 people per day killed by drunk drivers. Or, throw out the DUIs and we still have 3000 > 110, by an order of magnitude. You need a couple months for DUI to match WTC.

http://wonder.cdc.gov/wonder/PrevGuid/m0023655/m0023655.asp

Your point is still valid though, we are way to worked up over 3K dead than should be warranted. Little kids losing their daddys don't care about WTC or DUI, they are out a father either way. The excess attention lavished on WTC victims (in some cases at the expense of other victims) is a little disturbing.

Your Second Amendment is nice in theory. In practice, it is a paper tiger.

I respectfully disagree, strongly. The second amendment does in fact have teeth, it kills over 12,000 Americans annually - enter "homicide" for option 1 and "firearm" for option 2.

Think about that. The number of combat deaths in the civil war was approximately 205,000 (most others died of disease). The right to bear arms in case a rebellion against the government is necessary results in the same number of fatal shootings as the civil war every 17 years! Right in people's homes and in the streets! What kind of sense is that supposed to make?!

And to the immediate north, Canada's gun deaths have been cut in half since imposing tough gun restrictions. Wouldn't it be nice if American kids could at least graduate college before a civil war's worth of murder occurs in their country?

Actually it may be that we've learned our lesson. Even though nanotechnology is still a very nascent field, serious efforts are already underway to measure the health effects and safety concerns for these kinds of materials. For instance, in the United States, NIOSH (a branch of the CDC tasked with evaluating work-related risks) has an effort underway to quantify the effects of nano-materials on people (link). There are similar efforts worldwide for this "NanoEHS" issue (e.g. this).

Only time will tell, of course. But as someone working in the broad field of "nano", I can say that health, safety, and environmental impact are already a part of our research plans. There are considerable efforts to make sure we understand the impact of these materials before sending them to market. Also, since we are the ones working with these materials daily, we are certainly concerned with any possible toxicity.

Mistakes may still be made (e.g. a product released ends up having an unforeseen interaction with some other material/drug/etc.), but presently it seems that agencies are being appropriately proactive in terms of assessing risk before commercialization is even a serious consideration.

Tao apparently really is the head of the Temple University physics department. He is the author of "Electrorheological Fluids: Mechanisms, Properties, Technology, and Applications", which is relevant, because electrorheological fluids are ones where the viscosity and shear stress change when an electric field is applied. This effect is sometimes used for specialized clutches; attempts to make robot muscles using it have been tried, which is why I know about it. So he ought to know something about viscosity changes in an electric field.

This is his second attempt to come up with a mainstream application for this marginally useful physical effect. The last one, in 2006, was a scheme for treating crude oil to reduce viscosity for pumping. Tests indicated it required more energy to reduce the viscosity than it saved in pumping.

This effect only works on liquids which carry along particles of a different substance; it won't do anything for a homogeneous pure liquid. So it's unlikely to do anything for gasoline. Diesel, maybe; #2 diesel fuel is a mixture of a broad range of hydrocarbons.

There's a whole industry selling Diesel fuel treatment additives. Unlike gasoline additives, which are mostly bogus, Diesel additives sometimes have some value, because there are various impurities which can appear in Diesel fuel and cause trouble. Also, since many large Diesel fuel users store fuel for long periods, deterioration in storage is a problem, and so there's a real role for additives there.

Because Diesel fuel is so variable, any tests involving it have to be coupled with lab tests to find out what was in the batch of fuel being tested. Was that done here?

Well, to some extent, that's like saying that Indium showed up in 1863 and Francium in 1939 -- it's likely that many of those diseases have existed forever and we didn't know enough or have enough observational data to give them specific names. CJD is known to occur spontaneously in about 1 in a million people and probably has been doing so for thousands of years, but previously looked like other senile dementias.
The issue is that until the advent of large-scale agricultural farming of animals, there wasn't a lot of used animal brain tissue going into food stock. To really get a good amplification of CJD-like diseases, you need to be consistently acting like zombies and dumping lots of brain tissue from each generation into the next generation.

Consider that if ~ 50% of married people are adulterous, then there's a huge fraction (~ 50%) who are monogamous.

Only if those all of those ~50% of married people are on their first marriage, and never had pre-marital sex. Even then, we can only say they've been monogamous so far.

We're not counting "serial monogamy" as a genuine form of monogamy here. After all, screwing your mistress tonight, your wife tomorrow, and your mistress again on Friday is just a very rapid form of serial monogamy...

Despite the perversions introduced by religion, the number of people who are truly life-long monogamous is rather small. According to the CDC, men 30-44 years of age report a median of about 7 sexual partners in their lifetimes; women, about four.

Now, how many people die of food poisoning every year?

Take a look at this. That paper estimates 5000 deaths from food poisoning in the US every year.

WHO claims 1 vCJD case in the US in the period 1996 to 2002 when the BSE scare was at it's worst.

Furthermore, there are other suspected vectors for vCJD than cattle (brains and offal from other animals, for example).

How come there's no similar outcry for massive increases in precautions against Toxoplasma, Listeria and Salmonella, the three of which alone account for 1500 deaths in the US?

The focus on vCJD is causing people to worry about the wrong things, and that is a much greater health concern than vCJD is.

Gosh, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) disagrees with you:
"There is now strong scientific evidence that the agent responsible for the outbreak of prion disease in cows, BSE, is the same agent responsible for the outbreak of vCJD in humans."

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvrd/vcjd/index.htm

According to multiple sources, the average life expectancy in the USA is 77 years (different sources differ by less than a year).

According to the National Center for Health Statistics's data from 2002, you have roughly a 75% chance of surviving to age 70, 65% chance of surviving to 75 and 52% chance of surviving to 80. In other words, between 75 and 80, your odds of surviving drop by between 2 and 3% per year. Not to be ignored. On the other hand, McCain would still have a slightly better than average chance of making it through his presidency, which could not be described as "vanishingly small". However, if you like McCain, but you don't like the idea of Palin being President, and you vote for McCain you are kind of, well, tossing a coin...

Of course, what stands in his favour is that he's a wealthy white man who, if he became Commander-in-Chief of the world's most powerful nation, would have a lot of people interested in keeping him healthy. What stands against him is he's had Stage II Malignant Melanoma. This doesn't doom him, by any measure, but he stands something like a 14% chance of recurrence, and a 9% chance of death, just going by the numbers.

According to multiple sources, the average life expectancy in the USA is 77 years (different sources differ by less than a year).

According to the National Center for Health Statistics's data from 2002, you have roughly a 75% chance of surviving to age 70, 65% chance of surviving to 75 and 52% chance of surviving to 80. In other words, between 75 and 80, your odds of surviving drop by between 2 and 3% per year. Not to be ignored. On the other hand, McCain would still have a slightly better than average chance of making it through his presidency, which could not be described as "vanishingly small". However, if you like McCain, but you don't like the idea of Palin being President, and you vote for McCain you are kind of, well, tossing a coin...

Of course, what stands in his favour is that he's a wealthy white man who, if he became Commander-in-Chief of the world's most powerful nation, would have a lot of people interested in keeping him healthy. What stands against him is he's had Stage II Malignant Melanoma. This doesn't doom him, by any measure, but he stands something like a 14% chance of recurrence, and a 9% chance of death, just going by the numbers.

May 31, 1790 First copyright law enacted under the new U.S. Constitution. Term of 14 years with privilege of renewal for term of 14 years. Books, maps, and charts protected. Copyright registration made in the U.S. District Court where the author or proprietor resided.

February 3, 1831 First general revision of the copyright law. Music added to works protected against unauthorized printing and vending. First term of copyright extended to 28 years with privilege of renewal for term of 14 years.

ref: http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1a.html

The average life expectancy in 1900 was 47.3 years

ref: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr54/nvsr54_14.pdf

Given the fact that: A: The original copyright in 1790 was for 14-28 years B: The likelihood that the person would be a least a young adult for their creative endeavor C: Just over 40 years after it's creation, one generation, copyright duration was increased to 28-42 years in the 1800's when the life expectancy was most likely under 47 years (Even less when first enacted and duration was up to 28 years)

It is apparent that the intent of copyright law in the US was, from the beginning, to protect ownership for the majority if not the entire life of the creator.

It seems all the John Birchers who read Slashdot can't resist the opportunity to criticize the people of Fruit and Nut Land, but did it ever occur to them that gallium arsenide actually could be dangerous? It seems that Ronald Reagan's NIOSH/CDC was worried about it. Of course Reagan was a Californian too, so...

Biologic results also identified tungsten as a potentially unique exposure within Churchill County. We are working with NSHD to further define tungsten exposure in Nevada and to evaluate potential routes of exposure. Because of our study findings, the National Institutes of Health is considering tungsten as a priority chemical for toxicologic research.

From: CDC.

To be fair, it says that this needs more study, but there is a weak link to leukemia. The bottom line is that just about everything can cause cancer if applied to the correct body part in the correct dosage. If gallium arsenide doesn't leach out of LEDs, it seems that the production and disposal are critical, but consumers may be relatively safe.

The CDC provides some good statistics to at least help inform yourself of whether you're high-risk.

Here are the data.

Of course I am a proponent of education being the best way to eradicate AIDS or bring it to a manageable level. There will always be people who will contract it in a truly unpreventable manner. However, in most cases a little caution or healthy set of habits will reduce this dramatically. Reduction in anal sex (2/3 male aids cases are homosexual), prolific unprotected sex, and sharing needles are just some off the top of my head. We arent telling people who they can be partners with and we aren't saying they are wrong.

Of course how do we bring education of this matter to countries were literacy is a luxury?

There are about a thousand gun deaths in America every year

Not exactly. In 2005 there were over 30,000 firearms related deaths.

180 days * 8 hours = 1440 hours. $24,000 / 1440 hours = $16.66666.... dollars per hour. 180 days * 8 hours = 1440 hours. $45,000 / 1440 hours = $31.25.... dollars per hour. Perhaps if you had a better education you would be able to handle simple math problems.

My education is fine. If you had read before, their pay is garnished so that they are paid year round, with a forced 3-month 'sabbatical'. They may not be around kids during the summer or billing hours, but they certainly aren't unemployed. They aren't pulling unemployment during the summer, and it's not like they can find employment elsewhere since all the schools are closed.

Vaccine price list

You just proved my point. If you bothered to look at that page you'd see those were bulk prices. Most of those cost a buck or two each. These aren't cancer drugs - someone is making money but not a killing. If you can't scrounge up $20 to get your kid vaccinated then the state will take care of it. As I said, once again:

... because I don't want your precious little snowflake giving my kid whooping cough doesn't make it a conspiracy.

• They conveniently omit that the coffee was stored and served at the temperature recommended by the National Coffee Association and is also the default temperature setting used by the largest manufacturer of commercial coffee making machines (scroll down to the bottom).
• Their suggestion that coffee should be served at 135-140 F contradicts recommendations by coffee connoisseurs and the industry (Bunn recomments 155-175 F at serving).
• Dunkin Donuts and Starbucks served coffee at the same temperature as McDonalds. The lawyers used slick wording to mislead people into thinking the lowest temperature in a survey was the standard coffee serving temperature.
• Contrary to your claims, the cups were safe. There were 700 complaints about hot coffee in a decade, but that was across billions of cups served. It works out to a complaint rate of 1 in 24 million. For comparison, the rate of being hit by lighting in the U.S. is 1 in 600,000. The mortality rate in the U.S. from motor vehicles (PDF warning) was 1 in 6580 in 2002. She was 6500x more likely to die from riding in a car than being burned by the coffee. Are cars an unsafe product?
• If you read the court documents, you'll see the lawyers concentrated on the severity of the woman's burns, not the circumstances that led to those burns. This was an appeal to emotion, not a dissemination of facts. Anyone who's boiled water has handled (presumably safely) a substance capable of much more severe burns.

Read the case as told by the lawyers who brought the suit. Then read an alternate viewpoint. Then decide for yourself which side is more in line with the facts.

Not $17 to $31 per hour ($34k-$62k per year), you need to do some math because those are WAY over what I said before.

Are you seriously trying to tell me that teachers make $100k or more? And we are talking about teachers here right, not professors at colleges? And part time work? Teachers work 8 hours a day, 180 days a year (in WA). A normal year is 250 but they aren't getting any pay for the other 70 days, contrary to popular belief. They get paid during that time but only because their paychecks were garnished during the year to pay them during the summer. No teacher in Washington or Oregon is making more than 45k per year and that's after 25 years of work. They start out just above the poverty line at 24k per year, and that's after 4 years of college.

180 days * 8 hours = 1440 hours. $24,000 / 1440 hours = $16.66666.... dollars per hour.
180 days * 8 hours = 1440 hours. $45,000 / 1440 hours = $31.25.... dollars per hour.

Perhaps if you had a better education you would be able to handle simple math problems.

Personally I agree with vaccines including the controversial HPV vaccine, but that doesn't mean that I am unaware that people are making money off of it.

Please, because I don't want your precious little snowflake giving my kid whooping cough doesn't make it a conspiracy.

The HPV one should not be required since that is not communicable in groups, that does seem like corruption.

Really?

You purposely inflated numbers to make your point

Vaccines cost pennies

Vaccine price list

Last I read there was some supporting evidence for this position. In fact, IIRC, the official position is that while vaccinations may cause other health risks, any associated side effects effect a much small population than an unvaccinated population. Simple fact is, there isn't enough information to disprove such positions. And, like cell phones, some studies do indicate their use may have negative side effects.

Now then, I'm not saying he's right. What I am saying, your statement seems to imply he's crazy for taking such a position while in reality, you taking such a position seems to imply the same about you. It's probably best to simply accept, while unlikely, it's still possible. The jury is still out.

Just some food for thought.

The jury is not still out, and you must have last read about it in 1998, before that study was retracted and corrected. Larger studies since have found zero link between MMR vaccinations and autism. Here's what the CDC has to say on the matter.

Also, study after study has found no statistical link between cell phone use and cancer. Additionally, the output of a typical cell phone is about 100 milliwatts; this is so small as to be insignificant.

So yes, continuing to espouse such theories when they have been consistently shown to be false and relying on irrational fear instead of a discussion of facts can be considered crazy. By all means keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out.

There are a number of efforts around the county to do similar things. These include things like RODS Real-time Outbreak and Disease Surveillance http://rods.health.pitt.edu/, and the Environmental Public Health Tracking Program http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/tracking/.

Actually, recent studies have found that higher humidity speeds up decay of influenza virus particles. Here's one article at the CDC. Quote: In all these studies, the decay of virus infectivity increased rapidly at relative humidity >40%. The increased survival of influenza virus in aerosols at low relative humidity has been suggested as a factor that accounts for the seasonality of influenza

That was one particularly bad portion of the IPCC report. Mosquitoes carrying malaria tend to be contained by the fact that they contract the disease themselves as well as anyone they bite. Therefore, they tend not to be very competitive with other mosquito species. If given the chance, they can thrive in much colder climates. Malaria outbreaks were reported in Canada back in 1929, though most modern cases are imported by people traveling out of country.

This particular point has been a source of criticism for the recent IPCC reports as a political document rather than a scientific one. Previous reports stated that it's unlikely that malaria would spread northward.

(Well, I guess it has to do with history. Historically, the genocide on native Americans wouldn't have been possible without personal firearms, but this doesn't really make a good argument for personal weapons possession nowadays, does it.)

The Internet is not a lethal weapon.

Arizona had 696 gunshot deaths in 1991 (the latest data I could quickly find, but I see no contrary evidence since), and only 14% more vehicle deaths. Yet many more people use cars than guns, many more hours a year. Guns are clearly a lot more dangerous than cars. Which isn't surprising, since guns are designed to kill people, and cars are designed to protect people from being killed. Oh, and Arizona, mostly desert, isn't Washington DC, entirely dense city.

But why should a gun fetishist stick to reason when arguing about how to control guns? What counts is whether you like guns, not whether lots of people are killed with them.