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I've been following the case and the speculation around it on Swedish forums and blogs. A story in English that seems to have what is known / believed to have happened without any obvious errors can be found here.

In addition, it's known the police officer interrogating the younger woman has filed a complaint about not being allowed to give her view on what offenses if any were described to the first prosecutor and that her colleague who contacted the prosecutor refused to communicate. The colleague says she has contacted superiors and others and everyone agreed the charge would be rape. The initial prosecutor is under investigation for possibly issuing an arrest warrant without enough cause to do so and, in addition, for confirming Assange's name to a journalist.

The lawyer of the women says the published story is missing crucial details. He also says he's gone through material used in the preparation of the current law on rape in Sweden. To the question of why the older woman filed harassment charges instead of reporting a rape, he replied "She's not a lawyer".

Given that the chief prosecutor dismissed the charge of rape saying there's no reason to disbelieve the younger woman's story, but no crime has been committed, but the organization supervising the work of prosecutors think otherwise, it would seem to me there's disagreement on whether there was consent or not. If it was an issue of whether a sex act is rape vs molestation vs harassment etc, they wouldn't be flipping between rape and no crime like this.

What's absolutely clear is that much of the speculation on what Assange could have done is completely and utterly wrong since the chief prosecutor would never have simply dropped a case where he's accused of strangleholds, forcing himself on a sleeping woman, etcetc.

"The two women are said to know each other and to have met Mr Assange at a rally organised by Sweden's Pirate Party, which campaigns for freedom of information and has agreed to host some of WikiLeaks's new computer servers.

Despite insisting early yesterday that Mr Assange was wanted, Sweden's chief prosecutor Eva Finne said later: 'I have come to the decision that he is not suspected of rape. Considering that, Assange is no longer arrested in his absence.'" link

What makes you think that flight 447 fell apart in the sky? Reports I read suggest that the crash investigators believe the plane was in tact and flying in a normal attitude when it hit the water: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1282367/Air-France-crash-The-truth-disaster-killed-228-people.html

Even the wiki article suggests the reason for the crash is still unknown but the following facts are known:

On 2 July 2009, the BEA released an intermediate report, which described all known facts, and a summary of the visual examination of the rudder and the other parts of the aircraft that had been recovered at that time.[7] According to the BEA, this examination showed that:

• the aircraft was likely to have struck the surface of the sea in a normal flight attitude, with a high rate of descent;[Note 3][7][106]
• there were no signs of fire or explosion;
• the aircraft did not break up in flight. The report also stresses that the BEA had not had access to the post-mortem reports at the time of its production, some of which suggest differently.[7][107]

The current working theory is that a thunderstorm in the area reached as high as 50,000 feet and could have disrupted the plane. Normally a pilot would fly around such a system but a smaller storm in front might have obscured the thunder storm from the flight's radar system and the crew didn't see it.

Go read about net present value and try that again. The value of any investment is measured as the (say it with me) the "present value of all FUTURE free cash flows". Welcome to Finance 101.

The OP mentioned gold which is perhaps to be treated differently because gold is held because it is gold and known to be rare and (therefore) worth hanging onto. If a metric shed-load of gold suddenly arrived, and this also indicates another shed-load can be similarly obtained as required, the "worth hanging onto"-ness of gold will be substantially dented. This will likely have a two-fold effect: 1) The Governments who like to hold gold will decide that something else will likely be a better bet for the foreseeable future and dump their gold reserves for whatever the something else is - and - 2) The price of Gold will -double- plummet as there's a shed-load of space gold just arrived and all the Governments just dumped their stock 'cos it's no longer a sufficient rarity to gamble their country's wealth on!
The Result: The gold brought back will be worth considerably less.

I bet Brown would be happy though, 'cos then he won't have sold our bloody gold for a record low price - the muppet!

But swap that for something we're short of that we use for something other than fiscal stability and there's definitely an advantage to be garnered.

Go Get It Kids!

as for accuracy of science star trek doesn't have the implausible light saber

Well, "the force" is simply a scientific principle we haven't discovered yet. Would we have discovered electricity if we had no ferric metals? There are no mitichlorians in our galaxy that we know of, after all...

They do have teleporters, shape shifters, and travel through time on a regular basis though.

The teleporter is explained; matter is converted to energy on a quantum basis, beamed down and reassembled ito its original quanta. Star Wars had a shape shifter in EP 1. And Stephen Hawking says time travel is possible.

Yes, but sadly part the reason we have such a fucked up libel system though is because we have a press that's historically been allowed to get away with basically just outright lying about people in their publications and never having to post a retractment, hence why we got tough libel laws to counter that.

I want the libel laws reformed as much as anyone, but they better come with stronger accountability for false press stories, so that we don't go back to a situation where papers can perform character assassinations freely or cheaply (i.e. for much less than it earns them in profit).

On one hand you've got retarded libel laws, and on the other you've got papers like Murdoch's Daily Mail just gagging to be able to write stories about how Richard Dawkins raped 20 children in a drug fuelled satanic orgy that immigrants and muslim terrorists supported whilst all simultaneously saluting an effigy of Hitler. The scary thing is, knowing the Daily Mail that's probably not a far fetched story for them at all. See her for example:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-550109/Formula-One-boss-Max-Mosley-exposed-sadomasochist-Nazi-orgy-prostitutes.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-553408/Under-fathers-shadow-The-truth-disgraced-Max-Mosley-son-Nazi-sympathiser-Oswald.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1032803/Bizarre-sex-life-F1-boss-Max-Mosley-revealed-court-insists-Its-perfectly-harmless-private.html

How did it turn out? Well, the whole event actually had fuck all to do with "Nazis", that was entirely made up by Murdoch's papers (Daily Mail, News of the World etc.). The courts ruled in Mosley's favour.

Whilst we don't want to muzzle the press, or prevent it writing controversal, but factual stories, we clearly do need massive penalties for papers like this, that just make extremely over the top shit up to try and grossly defame people. S&M may not be to many people's taste, but at the end of the day what he did was in his own time, in a private place, with his own money, with the consent of the people involved, and importantly- without any kind of fascist theme to it, it was that, that libelous part that had to be added to make it a story, and libel for the case of making a story is just wrong.

Again, I really hate libel laws, and I'm cautious of the danger of any extra accountability for the press being used to muzzle them when they tell the truth. But clearly libel reform can't allow papers to get away with this shit even more easily than they do now either. The court system seems the right place to decide these cases, and libel seems the right tool to deal with them, so it's a tough problem to solve- you could just add extra penalties when the press are guilty of libel as opposed to private individuals, but then are web pages classed as press and so on? I don't know what the solution is, and I'm concerned the politicians don't either such that any changes to libel laws may cause other problems. This is something that needs to be thought through and done properly.

Yes, but sadly part the reason we have such a fucked up libel system though is because we have a press that's historically been allowed to get away with basically just outright lying about people in their publications and never having to post a retractment, hence why we got tough libel laws to counter that.

I want the libel laws reformed as much as anyone, but they better come with stronger accountability for false press stories, so that we don't go back to a situation where papers can perform character assassinations freely or cheaply (i.e. for much less than it earns them in profit).

On one hand you've got retarded libel laws, and on the other you've got papers like Murdoch's Daily Mail just gagging to be able to write stories about how Richard Dawkins raped 20 children in a drug fuelled satanic orgy that immigrants and muslim terrorists supported whilst all simultaneously saluting an effigy of Hitler. The scary thing is, knowing the Daily Mail that's probably not a far fetched story for them at all. See her for example:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-550109/Formula-One-boss-Max-Mosley-exposed-sadomasochist-Nazi-orgy-prostitutes.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-553408/Under-fathers-shadow-The-truth-disgraced-Max-Mosley-son-Nazi-sympathiser-Oswald.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1032803/Bizarre-sex-life-F1-boss-Max-Mosley-revealed-court-insists-Its-perfectly-harmless-private.html

How did it turn out? Well, the whole event actually had fuck all to do with "Nazis", that was entirely made up by Murdoch's papers (Daily Mail, News of the World etc.). The courts ruled in Mosley's favour.

Whilst we don't want to muzzle the press, or prevent it writing controversal, but factual stories, we clearly do need massive penalties for papers like this, that just make extremely over the top shit up to try and grossly defame people. S&M may not be to many people's taste, but at the end of the day what he did was in his own time, in a private place, with his own money, with the consent of the people involved, and importantly- without any kind of fascist theme to it, it was that, that libelous part that had to be added to make it a story, and libel for the case of making a story is just wrong.

Again, I really hate libel laws, and I'm cautious of the danger of any extra accountability for the press being used to muzzle them when they tell the truth. But clearly libel reform can't allow papers to get away with this shit even more easily than they do now either. The court system seems the right place to decide these cases, and libel seems the right tool to deal with them, so it's a tough problem to solve- you could just add extra penalties when the press are guilty of libel as opposed to private individuals, but then are web pages classed as press and so on? I don't know what the solution is, and I'm concerned the politicians don't either such that any changes to libel laws may cause other problems. This is something that needs to be thought through and done properly.

Yes, but sadly part the reason we have such a fucked up libel system though is because we have a press that's historically been allowed to get away with basically just outright lying about people in their publications and never having to post a retractment, hence why we got tough libel laws to counter that.

I want the libel laws reformed as much as anyone, but they better come with stronger accountability for false press stories, so that we don't go back to a situation where papers can perform character assassinations freely or cheaply (i.e. for much less than it earns them in profit).

On one hand you've got retarded libel laws, and on the other you've got papers like Murdoch's Daily Mail just gagging to be able to write stories about how Richard Dawkins raped 20 children in a drug fuelled satanic orgy that immigrants and muslim terrorists supported whilst all simultaneously saluting an effigy of Hitler. The scary thing is, knowing the Daily Mail that's probably not a far fetched story for them at all. See her for example:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-550109/Formula-One-boss-Max-Mosley-exposed-sadomasochist-Nazi-orgy-prostitutes.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-553408/Under-fathers-shadow-The-truth-disgraced-Max-Mosley-son-Nazi-sympathiser-Oswald.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1032803/Bizarre-sex-life-F1-boss-Max-Mosley-revealed-court-insists-Its-perfectly-harmless-private.html

How did it turn out? Well, the whole event actually had fuck all to do with "Nazis", that was entirely made up by Murdoch's papers (Daily Mail, News of the World etc.). The courts ruled in Mosley's favour.

Whilst we don't want to muzzle the press, or prevent it writing controversal, but factual stories, we clearly do need massive penalties for papers like this, that just make extremely over the top shit up to try and grossly defame people. S&M may not be to many people's taste, but at the end of the day what he did was in his own time, in a private place, with his own money, with the consent of the people involved, and importantly- without any kind of fascist theme to it, it was that, that libelous part that had to be added to make it a story, and libel for the case of making a story is just wrong.

Again, I really hate libel laws, and I'm cautious of the danger of any extra accountability for the press being used to muzzle them when they tell the truth. But clearly libel reform can't allow papers to get away with this shit even more easily than they do now either. The court system seems the right place to decide these cases, and libel seems the right tool to deal with them, so it's a tough problem to solve- you could just add extra penalties when the press are guilty of libel as opposed to private individuals, but then are web pages classed as press and so on? I don't know what the solution is, and I'm concerned the politicians don't either such that any changes to libel laws may cause other problems. This is something that needs to be thought through and done properly.

Hitler's Jewish ancestry

You could be on to somethng!

That's why there are no homosexuals in Iran, they've all been treated with honour and human generosity.

In the UK when anyone questioned immigration policy they were publically branded "racist" by the Labour party and prevented it from being debated. It was a legitimate concern

Citation?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/columnists/article-464355/It-extremist-fascist-illiberal-demand-stringent-immigration-controls.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/3642549/Door-opens-for-migration-debate.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1280705/Labour-tried-stifle-debate-immigration.html
http://www.cadaad.org/2010_volume_4_issue_1/63-45
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2010/04/the_politics_of_race.html
http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/gordons-gaffe-sinks-labour-in-heat/

In the UK when anyone questioned immigration policy they were publically branded "racist" by the Labour party and prevented it from being debated. It was a legitimate concern

Citation?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/columnists/article-464355/It-extremist-fascist-illiberal-demand-stringent-immigration-controls.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/3642549/Door-opens-for-migration-debate.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1280705/Labour-tried-stifle-debate-immigration.html
http://www.cadaad.org/2010_volume_4_issue_1/63-45
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2010/04/the_politics_of_race.html
http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/gordons-gaffe-sinks-labour-in-heat/

An interesting effect of this is that your "left wing" president is in complete lock step with the UK Conservative party which has been accused of being the most right-wing mainstream political party in Europe.

Really? Because Brits think that our President hates their guts. One of the first things he did was to diss the sitting Labour Prime Minister. So you're honestly going to argue that Barack Obama has warm feelings for the Tories?

And just who is it that's "accusing" the UK Conservative Party of being the most right-wing of the mainstream parties in Europe? Would that be, oh.... Labour? I mean, that would be a shock now, wouldn't it?

I thought nationalized health care was supposed to eliminate greedy doctors working for profit? How can this be true?

I don't know about that, I do know that if the patient isn't directly at the receiving end of the medication bill the drug companies can get away with things like this http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1295610/NHS-doesnt-care-cost-medicine-Drugs-firms-accused-profiteering-raising-prices-ONE-THOUSAND-cent.html
As to whether the doctors receive kickbacks for prescribing these drugs is largely what I was trying to ask in my original post.

Golfers spend considerable money on things which are supposed to improve their game. It's usually mediocre players buying stuff that won't help them. There's a lot of that in running shoes, too. (Much to the annoyance of Nike, their sponsor, the Stanford University track team trains running barefoot.)

By some estimates, anyway: Peaceful Demonstration.

It got pretty much 0 press and had pretty much no effect. When the government owns the schools, the press, and most of the private sector, your country start to look uncomfortably like Soviet Russia.

The Islamic world wasn't the whole of his examples, just an afterthought thrown in there.

Look at any Digg story about rape. Or any article that drifts into whether abortion should be legal in cases of rape.

Then there are stories like this http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10211/1076338-455.stm where every mention of rape is assumed to actually be consensual sex (in other words, she asked for it).

Or these pamphlets that aim to spread the message everywhere http://jezebel.com/5482688/you-make-men-want-to-be-sinful-blaming-the-victim-religious-pamphlet-edition

Or http://jezebel.com/5478360/she-knew-what-would-happen-if-she-started-drinking-blaming-the-victim-princeton-edition

This shows that it isn't just a small nutball collective: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1251040/Rape-Its-fault-victims-say-50-women.html?ITO=1490&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+dailymail/home+(Home+|+Mail+Online)

The boys aren't to blame because she drank a bit: http://current.com/1db6i4c

Here's what rapists think about it: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/2010/04/15/why-dont-we-accept-victim-blaming-from-rapists/

There are a whole host of weirder cases, too, that imply that rape victims actually gave consent. Remember how Whoopi Goldberg ranting about how Roman Polanski's drugging and raping an unconscious child wasn't really rape? I'm not sure what she was getting at, but if it wasn't rape then it stands to reason that Whoopi thought something about the unconscious, drugged girl gave consent to Polanski.

But if you can produce mainstream commentators...

You are moving goalposts and putting them someplace strange and unnecessary. This isn't about political commentators blaming the victim, it's about members of the public blaming the victim, all the time. Fair enough that you can find a lone person with an insane definition of anything, but this is hardly a rare viewpoint.

The reason you pay such high fuel prices in the U.K. is because your government is gouging the bloody hell out of its citizens with taxes. The U.S. has historically had significantly lower taxes on fuel than the rest of the free world. That being said, crude oil and wholesale gasoline prices in the U.S. are inching their way back up despite record high inventory levels and reduced demand due to the prolonged recession. Those of you who are paying less than $3.00 USD per gallon here in the U.S. should consider yourselves fortunate.
The pundits in the financial press attribute much of the recent run-up in prices to the falling value of the U.S. dollar against foreign currencies such as the Euro. While this may account for some of the upward price pressure, much of the gains are due to hedging of currency risk by large firms such as Morgan Stanley -the same bastards that were responsible for bidding the price of crude to record highs in the summer of 2008 while that squint Bush was telling the world it was the Chinese and their demand that was responsible for the high prices.

this thing will be great for watching Gumby (don't ask) at home and Sesame Street in the car.'"

Loose items such as portable dvd-players, laptops and phones are potentially fatal in a car crash and can kill a child in crash at just 18mph

There are devices out there designed to withstand a car crash. I'd buy one of those instead of a loose cannon OLPC.

Nor are plant patents. People have had those for years, and they occasionally have controversies. I don't think it unreasonable to allow people to make a profit off their work, be it writing a book or breeding a plant. It took 20 years for some guy to breed the Redlove apple, is the time and effort of horticulturalists so meaningless that they should not be allowed to have a patent, for a reasonable time, on their work? And GM tech is no different. Now, suing someone because they were cross pollinated, there needs to be a better way worked out (although in the most famous case of that there was more to the story).

Perhaps the sentence was jumbled, but he was referring to the investigation of Bradley Manning's mother.

IIRCC you don't have a choice in the UK, its scan or you don't fly.

From an AC:

Depends where you are apparently:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1247715/Passengers-refuse-body-scan-Heathrow-Manchester-airports-barred-flights.html [dailymail.co.uk]N/blockquote>

Ah well. Glad I went to England already. Guess I'll have to cross it off my future Travel list.

Depends where you are apparently:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1247715/Passengers-refuse-body-scan-Heathrow-Manchester-airports-barred-flights.html

Like in the UK, when they used anti-terrorism law to fine people that were putting their rubbish in the wrong bin or people with noisy children..
(OK not the best source in the world but worrying regardless)

Come on, mods, that was more insightful than funny. Even Dr. Asimov's humor carried insight. You may not know that Asimov wasn't just a science fiction writer, but was a scientist who wrote science books geared to people of average intelligence, as well as research papers in his field, biochemistry (which of course would have been written at a postdoctoral reading level). Asimov did cancer research at Boston University, as well as some teaching. His nonfiction science books garnered him the title of "The Great educator". I learned quite a lot from Dr. Asimov's nonfiction.

Now this is funny -

Asimov wrote the article on 8 June 1947, but he was uncertain as to whether the resulting work of fiction was publishable. He finally offered it to John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, his preferred publication outlet. Campbell was delighted with the piece, and accepted it for publication, agreeing to Asimov's request that it appear under a pseudonym in deference to Asimov's concern that he might alienate potential doctoral examiners at Columbia University if he were revealed as the author.

Some months later Asimov was shocked to see the piece appear in the March 1948 issue of Astounding under his own name. In later years Campbell insisted that this was an oversight, though Asimov maintained a suspicion that Campbell had acted deliberately out of greater worldliness, for, in Asimov's words, "The Columbia Chemistry Department proved far less stuffy than I had feared" and his examiners effectively delivered their favorable verdict on his dissertation by good-naturedly asking him a final question about thiotimoline. In Opus 100 (1969) Asimov called the thiotimoline article "an utter success", and noted that the New York Public Library "was pestered for days by eager youngsters trying to find the nonexistent journals so they could read more on the subject".

As to these graphene nanobubbles, I doubt they disolve in water before the water is added, but sheesh, the advances I've seen in my lifetime make me think anything is possible.

When Stieg Larsson died suddenly, and after writing just 3 of the planned 10 books about Blomquist and Salander, he left behind Eva Gabrielsson, his common-law wife of 30+ years.

Unfortunately, with no explicit will and no legal acceptance of common-law marriage in Sweden, she inherited absolutely nothing.

See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1240159/Stieg-Larssons-widow-seen-penny-20m-fortune-earned-together.html

Terje
PS. I loved the books, read them all in Swedish instead of waiting for the Norwegian translation.

I guess you didn't bother to READ the link so here it is again: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html Professor Jones has been in the spotlight since he stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit after the leaking of emails that skeptics claim show scientists were manipulating data This isn't about debunking, it is him talking about how he doesn't keep up with data very well. His data was used by the IPCC. Any chance you can get beyond name calling and actually provide links for what you are talking about?

You can start with this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html

Headline: Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995

and some quotes: * Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing * There has been no global warming since 1995 * Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes

And on Amazon: The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud**And those who are too fearful to do so by Lawrence Solomon

At this point, the only way you DON'T know that there are scientific issues with some of the "facts" is if you choose not to.

Keep in mind I am not saying that the earth hasn't gotten warmer, nor am I saying that it isn't man-made warming, just that it isn't as scientifically proven as some seem to want to believe.

I know this was intended as a joke, but it does prove something about the 'heat ray' that is rather important: the military-industrial PR machine is operational and effective. This weapon is not a 'heat ray' at all; it is a _pain_ ray. The microwaves emitted by this device may cause some incidental heating of the skin, but that is not the intent at all. The microwaves emitted are of the precise frequency used by pain-emitting neurons. The goal is to have to pain neuron fire at full capacity regardless of the actual level of damage being caused. An article from 2007 ( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-482560/Run-away-ray-gun-coming--We-test-US-armys-new-secret-weapon.html ) describes this and introduces the idea of a pain ray... 3 years later the military is celebrating its 'heat ray,' a term which is less associated with the evils that can be caused by a 'pain ray.'

I thought on some current thinking there is no such thing as "time"; like money, it is just a representation of something more fundamental - change in entropy perhaps.

Stephen Hawking says you're wrong.

STEPHEN HAWKING: How to build a time machine. The linked article was written by Stephen Hawking.

"All you need is a wormhole, the Large Hadron Collider or a rocket that goes really, really fast."

Hawking has an elegant solution to the grandfather paradox. He hypothesizes that the grandfather paradox is impossible because of feedback. His analogy is with sound amplification, where sound from the speaker is fed back through the microphone intil it shrieks. His answer is a time travel feedback loop would generate enough energy to destroy the time machine itself.

It's an interesting article, here's a snippet:

Time travel was once considered scientific heresy. I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a crank. But these days I'm not so cautious. In fact, I'm more like the people who built Stonehenge. I'm obsessed by time. If I had a time machine I'd visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens. Perhaps I'd even travel to the end of the universe to find out how our whole cosmic story ends.

There's lots and lots of rare (and less rare) metals, it's the saudi arabia of lithium. According to wikipedia = "[Lithium is used in] high strength-to-weight alloys used in aircraft, and lithium batteries. Lithium also has important links to nuclear physics." They discovered this right before the war by the way, but I'm sure that's all coincidental.

Actually - researchers in 2008 uncovered that there were weapons on the Lusitania: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1098904/Secret-Lusitania-Arms-challenges-Allied-claims-solely-passenger-ship.html

Really doesn't say anything to the discussion here or the point your making. But I just read this the other day and thought it was interesting.

This is not the first disaster for BP that ended in the loss of life.

What's it got to do with BP? The rig was owned and operated by a company called Transocean. BP (and others) just leased it off them to do the drilling (and no BP employee was involved in the actual work).

Incidentally, the company working on the well head was a company called Halliburton. They were pumping cement into the well to prepare it when things went bad.

and at the end, its a group of companies, all blaming each other and each one trying desperately to avoid paying out. BP, to its credit, has accepted responsibility even though its almost certainly not to blame. Perhaps the US government won't be able to blame the Swiss-located Transocean (for tax reasons, 50 Transocean people work in the Swiss HQ, whereas the rest work in the USA - all 26,000 of them).

Since NASA's new mission under the Obama administration is to make Muslims feel better about themselves thanks to the alphabet that they stole from the Hindus, I wonder if Obama could spend some focused time helping this man to feel better about his superstitions:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1296856/Saudi-man-chains-son-basement-years-possessed-evil-female-genie.html

Yay Islam!

Don't mock the guy, he probably has dementia http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1096165/Its-joke-sarcasm-help-detect-dementia.html

You sound like the kind of person who'd be content having the police go through every packet you send or receive from your Internet connection, because you think that it's keeping the children safer.

Which is OK, 'cuz I guess you don't have anything to hide, and the police would never do anything even slightly outside the law with your personal information.

Because cars are not driven by computer, any driver that is remotely conscious of his surroundings would be able to spot the difficulty with trying to utilize paths that are clearly not intended for anyone to utilize.

I thought so too, and then saw this. There is always a bigger idiot.

Glad to see it's still around for those who hate needles.

A needle sortof awares you if some foreign agent is introduced in your body.

Imagine this scenario: you create patches of some sort, or bandaids or somehow "inject" people unknowingly to themselves and repeat a the story at Pont-Saint-Esprit, but very subtle?

I'm not a "oh noes the mercury in vaccins"-nut, but I sortof like the fact that there's a bit of a barriere before introducing chemicals or organic compounds directly into my bloodstream of which I have little to know knowledge about content and result.p>

Joanna Lumley on Graham Norton:

Now we are sending two machines out at the request of BP to spread this mattressing along the coast and not only does it help clean the water, it gives the wildlife something to step on to.

2010-07-21
BP's secret weapon in the great oil mop-up? Joanna Lumley and a giant straw mattress

1993
FROGMAT USED TO COMBAT HUGE OIL SPILL IN THE SHETLANDS

Yes they do. [ksl.com] But I agree, it is extremely rare. More importantly, if you point a socket wrench at someone, or accidentally touch the trigger of a drill, there's virtually no chance that you or someone you love can immediately die.

The linked article specifically states that this was likely an old gun, which the poster mentioned can rarely go off.

Most guns, especially handguns, have no other purpose than to kill human beings.

Really? I own just under 40 guns, 7 of which are handguns. I've fired all of them, and most of them quite a bit. I've never killed a human. I wonder what I could have possibly been doing with them given that that's apparently their only purpose . . . (I'll give you a hint: quite a few deer, a lot of ducks, and countless sheets of paper have felt my sting).

Oh really?

America's level of gun violence cannot be attributed to urbanization alone as international comparisons show. Singapore has the second highest population density in the world (almost 6,814 people per square kilometer, or about 50% more densely populated than Chicago, Illinois) but has the lowest level of gun violence of all the countries in the table above. Its rate of gun violence is 99 times lower than that of the United States which is 200 times less densely populated. The only way for a civilian to own a firearm in Singapore is to acquire an Arm & Explosives license.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence [wikipedia.org]

America's level of gun violence also cannot be blamed solely on the presence of guns, as culture in general plays a huge role. While we - as a country - have a fairly high rate of gun violence, WITHIN the country, areas with higher gun ownership rates, and with concealed carry available, typically has LOWER crime rates than areas of the country with the strictest gun laws. Indeed, virtually every location that has passed concealed carry laws has witness a corresponding drop in crime. Also, countries that have passed strict gun laws, have typically seen a rise in violent crime follow. For instance, England all but completely banned the private ownership of firearms (yes it's still technically possible but it's a mountain or red tape), but gun crime still has managed to nearly DOUBLE in the last decade http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1223193/Culture-violence-Gun-crime-goes-89-decade.html. Now go to http://bjsdata.ojp.usdoj.gov/dataonline/Search/Crime/State/StatebyState.cfm?NoVariables=Y&CFID=9212893&CFTOKEN=77729842 and run the violent crime rates for the US from 1961 to 2008. We've been trending downwards ever since a peak in the 1970's. From 1998 to 2008 our violent crime rate has seen a roughly 20% reduction. Our homicide rate is at it's lowest point since 1965. We're buying guns at record rates. You'd think that if guns were the problem we'd be seeing crime rates soar, but that's not the case. Simply comparing our crime rates directly to other countries isn't comparing apples to apples.

If living in the wild west where everyone is armed to the teeth, constantly pulling out their handguns, and in the process, killin each other and anyone unfortunate enough to be nearby, might I recommend taking up residence in Venezuela or Colombia?

Might I recommend that given that guns are a rich part of the history and culture of this country, to the point that the right to possess them is coded into our highest law, that YOU move your butt somewhere else if you don't like it?

According to Dailymail, it should be around £143 million ($214 million for those too lazy to google it yourself).

If you read the article (and others), you will also see that this was a technology demonstrator, and £143 million was the cost to build it. If it went into production it would likely cost significantly less, certainly less than a $191 million JSF. Getting the pilot out of there cuts down a hell of a lot on the cost, as all of a sudden you can replace all sorts of expensive weight, volume, and logistics with relatively cheap computers (theoretically, anyway).

According to Dailymail, it should be around £143 million ($214 million for those too lazy to google it yourself).

Well, apparently McDonalds and Starbucks are both being sued right now for burns caused by tea. The McDonalds suit doesn't look very serious though.

But, really, anything that can cause third degree burns shouldn't be served. Most people have never seen worse than a mild second degree burn. Third degree means that the skin was burned all the way though and you can see the fat or bone that's underneath. If you drank something that hot, it'd literally burn a hole in your stomach or esophagus.

BTW, for the McDonalds hot coffee suit, it was her thighs and genitalia that got burned. If the femoral artery was hit, she'd have bled to death within minutes. I'm trying not to picture what a third degree burn on the genitalia looks like, though fortunately they're relatively painless since the nerves have been destroyed.

Well, apparently McDonalds and Starbucks are both being sued right now for burns caused by tea. The McDonalds suit doesn't look very serious though.

But, really, anything that can cause third degree burns shouldn't be served. Most people have never seen worse than a mild second degree burn. Third degree means that the skin was burned all the way though and you can see the fat or bone that's underneath. If you drank something that hot, it'd literally burn a hole in your stomach or esophagus.

BTW, for the McDonalds hot coffee suit, it was her thighs and genitalia that got burned. If the femoral artery was hit, she'd have bled to death within minutes. I'm trying not to picture what a third degree burn on the genitalia looks like, though fortunately they're relatively painless since the nerves have been destroyed.

The Telegraph - 2nd March
New Scientist - 2nd March
Fox News - 2nd March
Popsci - 3rd March
Huffington Post - 2nd March
The Economist - 22nd April
The Daily Mail - 2nd March
Time - 10th March

Etc etc.

Sure you're not talking about the Daily Fail?

"...No non-Christians running nonsensical attack ads."

really? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1106924/Theres-probably-God--stop-worrying-enjoy-life-Atheist-group-launches-billboard-campaign.html

tl;dr http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/07/02/article-1196941-05900DF7000005DC-677_468x636.jpg

Really? Those areas must be very bad since the country average is worse than Detroit. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196941/The-violent-country-Europe-Britain-worse-South-Africa-U-S.html UK: 2034/100K http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Detroit,_Michigan Detroit: 1924/100K.