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In actuality, we need BOTH things. There's actually enough resources for maintaining low gravity manufacturing, etc. on the Moon (which we actually need to start getting to if you're going to travel to the stars in the first place...) and we need those experiments on the ISS (Which isn't zero gravity (If it was, you wouldn't need to constantly push it back into orbit...), but close enough to count for what we're needing right now...) for the reasons you give.

The brutal truth of the matter is that we're pouring money into "social" programs that are hopelessly mis-managed and we keep trimming the budgets for doing this stuff because "it's unnecessary" (Never mind that we're where we are mainly because of the space and defense budgets of the world...). Something we need to realise isn't a useful utilisation of our collective resources as a species.

We spend $1100+ Billion on some of those social programs ($500 Billion on Medicare, $620 Billion on Social Security, and let's not count all the others).

We spend $19 Billion on NASA (which, incidentally, works out to the amount we spend every 14 months on SS vs the duration of NASA). It's like cutting one vending-machine Coke from your budget when you have have payments on a pair of brand-new cars.

Medicare for all. Like the rest of the civilized world. Or bust. Literally.

Medicare costs are ballooning; 9.1% in 2009, 9.6% in 2010. The HHS admits their 'error rate' (fraudulent payments) is above 10%. The real rate is higher yet.

There is still a little time left before the Chinese pull the plug on our spending. Enjoy it while it lasts.

I don't advocate data manipulation, but I don't think "raw data" exists anymore either. There's ALWAYS some kind of manipulation you can do pre- or post- image capture. You can't show everything in a paper, often due to space requirements. Digital image capture of microscopic images are all pseudo-colored anyway. As long as you're not obscuring contradictory data, it's probably OK.

I still keep original images just in case I'm ever audited. You know, the images that are as raw as raw data can be, in this day and age.

SWEDEN HAS the highest disease and pregnancy(aborted mostly) statistics in the world. And they have been rising. google for sweden national health std pregnancy.

Yeah right... Heard of Africa? Anyway, I tried googling for it. Couldn't find anything saying the rates are high, what I did find however was this:
Although Canada's teen pregnancy rate has declined since the 1970s, other Western industrialized countries such as France and Sweden have much lower teen pregnancy rates than Canada. These countries also have lower rates of both teen births and abortions.

So Sweden is here used as an example where the numbers are LOW.

Source: here

Numbers from that site:
Teen pregnancies per 1000, Sweden: 25.0
Teen pregnancies per 1000, US: 83.6
Teen abortions per 1000, Sweden: 17.2
Teen abortions per 1000, US: 29.2

Sure, a much higher percent of the teen pregnancies end with abortion (which I personally consider a good thing, you may disagree), but both abortion numbers and pregnancy numbers are no where near the US. Numbers from mid-90s. So please check your facts before comming with accusations.

I also found this:
The U. S. leads industrialized countries in rates of STDs. For example, in 1996, the reported gonorrhea rate for the U.S. was 50 times that of Sweden, and the primary and secondary syphillis rate was 30 times that of Canada.

Again, Sweden is used as an example where the numbers are low...
Source: here

Thank you for playing.

um, http://cb1.acf.dhhs.gov/news/stats/hsfacts98.htm says otherwise, there are more if you search "head start" budget @ http://www.firstgov.gov/

Its more of a state by state issue. Foster Records. It seems pretty random even year by year. But having more choices would only benefit the children.

Couples may be going to Korea to adopt babies(because its cheaper, and easier to get allowence, dont have to go through our gov'ts process). But there are plenty of grown children who need adoption here.

Head Start is a federal program.
Head start is still alive and kicking (my mom works for head start)
Microsoft has not bankrupted the federal govenment (at least not yet)... :-)

yep, the us anti-age discrimination law itself discriminates against age by not protecting people younger than 40. Gov Factsheet. Like they say, most age bias is subtle. Of course, I don't know you well enough to see if that's what's at play here.

I may sound weird, but leisure world sounds like it has some nice benefits... but I can't live there, and it's perfectly legal to keep me out. They don't want "my type" to buy a house in the neighborhood. Yeah, just because I'm young means I'll throw screaming parties every night and that this old guy doesn't. If they want a noise ordinence, then that's ok. Just don't prejudge me.

The newest revisions included in the USA act awaiting passage this very moment blur the lines considerably, reducing all citizens to potential victims of secret FISA warrants, black bag jobs, and surveillance of their communications and financial transactions as detailed in this write-up of the bill at ACLU.ORG

More troubling by far are the sentiments echoed in this story at the Washington Post, which contain speculations by government officials about the need to apply torture to material witnesses and the justification for this torture due to the urgent nature of the investigation. Mind you, these are material witnesses, not indicted criminal suspects. The fact that they have not been indicted removes all Miranda rights protections from them, including right to counsel. The fact that they are not citizens removes any protections against unlimited detention. There are persistent but unconfirmed reports of the detainees in Manhattan being subjected to sleep and sensory deprivation, and reports that doctors are being called in to determine exactly the levels of "pressure" they can be subjected to, as well as recommending drugs to be used to assist in interrogation. These reports seem to indicate that the torture has already started, and is not merely being discussed. The participation of doctors in this kind of torture, even in a monitoring capacity, is directly against the Nuremberg Code, the UN Principles of Medical Ethics, and the UN Convention against Torture.

As a nation, we are perilously close to returning to the days of the Cold War and before when unwitting human experimentation in mind-control and behavior modification was conducted in secret, when U.S. soldiers were drugged and in some cases driven to suicide in order to try out the very "truth serums" being discussed in the Post article, and when conscientious objectors were used as guinea pigs for starvation and cold weather exposure experiments not so very different from those that Nazi doctors were hung for at the end of WWII.

Looking at things from a legal point of view, we are either at war with someone, or we are not. If we are at war, then aren't the people being held in Manhattan Prisoners of War, and subject to the protections of the Geneva Convention? If we are not at war, then this all devolves into a pure criminal proceeding where coerced testimony, "assisted interrogation" and the like are clearly unconstitutional and will poison any cases ever brought against these people.

The corrupting influence at work here is the mixing of Intelligence activities and criminal proceedings, which are anathema to each other. Intelligence is the world of innuendo, hunches, and threads of circumstance where decisions to attack aspirin factories with cruise missiles can be made on the slimmest of evidence, or none at all. Criminal prosecution depends on rigorously documented chains of evidence, sworn testimony and eye-witnesses. Phrases like "beyond a reasonable doubt" seemed to appear frequently the two times I was a juror, once in a murder trial. Due to this difference, the FBI is not institutionally equipped to operate in the Intelligence community, and the CIA is psychologically unable to grasp the difference between rumor and evidence. Mixing the two as the USA act does will forever damage the integrity of our nation's government and reduce the United States to a totalitarian state the likes of which the world has never seen before:

Every totalitarian distopia ever envisioned in literature (or occurring in real life, over time) has one attribute in common: the crushing lack of personal luxury for the masses. This has been at least a partial stimulus to any resistance against these regimes. The levels of affluence in most of the US, combined with the public's ability to have their attention monopolized by the most recent media craze, whether the Gary Condit affair, or the current Anthrax scare, makes us most susceptible to a gradual erosion of our rights. The frogs are being not so gently boiled right now and no one is complaining too much.

Write to your Congress-Critters today!

"I fear for the Republic"

Tom Porter

http://www.os.dhhs.gov/news/press/2001pres/01fsste mcell.html

The University of Wisconsin provides us with a good example of how the Bayh-Dole Act is implemented. Early work by Dr. Thomson on non-human primates, such as Rhesus monkeys, was federally funded and therefore, the patent obtained on stem cells arising from this work is governed by this Act. In accordance with the law, the invention was disclosed to the NIH, a patent application was filed by the University, through the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), and WARF licensed the technology to a small company (Geron). Because federal funds were used for this non-human primate work, the government has a non-exclusive, royalty-free right to use the patented cells by or on behalf of the government. This would allow the government laboratories and contractors the right to use the patented cells for further research. In addition, in handling this invention the University must ensure that the goals of the Bayh-Dole Act -- utilization, commercialization, and public availability -- are implemented.

Wisconsin... now why does that ring a bell... oh yes, that's where Thommy Tompson - the strongly pro-life, yet strangely pro-stem-cell research Secretary of Health and Human Services, used to be governor. Surely it's not about the money?

An interesting note from one of the sites below: "With the 1996 passage of HIPAA, Congress was granted 36 months to pass privacy legislation. In the event Congress failed to meet this deadline, HIPAA authorized DHHS to promulgate final regulations to protect patient privacy. DHHS published a NPRM for individually identifiable health information on November 3, 1999. After reviewing more than 50,000 comments, DHHS published the final regulations on December 28, 2000." The regulations are on hold because the Bush Administration put a stay on all regulations from the last two months of the Clinton Administration.

Good resources for more information include http://www.smed.com/hipaa/ from Siemens and http://www.hipaa-iq.com/ from QuadraMed.

If you want to read the final regulations themselves or get information from the Department of Health and Human Services, you can go to http://aspe.os.dhhs.gov/admnsimp/.

-- fencepost

While this isn't directly on topic, it might be a good idea to check out some of the legislation dealing with subscriber privacy going into effect soon. While may or may not affect you, it's probably worth a skim, especially if you're going to be sending user-identifiable information out of the organization. I know there are some hefty fines for non-compliance. At least you could maybe back up some of your paranoia with some legal documents. 8^)