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Because competition only works for consumers when it's paired with consumer choice, and as I've explained, consumer choice doesn't exist in a free insurance market.

Do you know what a free market is? If competition and consumers do not have a choice a market in is not free. A free market requires voluntary exchanges. How hard is that to understand? People blame failures on the markets, when those markets are not free. "Health insurance does not work so the market has failed." Duh, government interfered in the insurance market. That's not a market failure.

Quite simply a free market in health care and insurance had never been tried. And until a free market has been tried nobody can say it is a failure. And I'm not just talking about health insurance. I'm also talking about being able to open a walk-in health clinic. There are so many laws and regulations so that even if I had $10 million dollars to build and open a walk-in clinic on a street corner I may never get the government permission to open the clinic. It's like when Mother Teresa tried to open a homeless shelter in New York City, the city put so many obstacles in the way she eventually dropped the plan.

At least up until now, I've assumed you're discussing the topic in good faith

I have but you have not offered one piece of evidence a free market can not solve any health care crisis. I mentioned the socialist ideology because nothing was working to get you, and others, to understand a free market has not been given a chance. I get so sick and tired when people blame failures on markets when those markets are interfered with by the government.

Falcon

As another poster mentioned, life expectancy is skewed by infant mortality. If a lot of infants die in the first year, then the life expectancy number plummets. Discounting infant mortality, the age a person could hope to live to was younger than today's but not by such a huge amount.

From http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O119-LifeExpectancy.html :

"Genealogical data yield an expectation of life at age ten of almost fiftyseven years for white males in 1790-1794"

So if 1790 had an average age of 57 years and 1990 (which was the most recent data on that page) is 76, we're looking at a 33% increase in life span. Meanwhile, copyright went from 28 years to 95 years *AFTER* the death of the creator. Even in the "best case" (work published as author dies), this is a 240% increase in copyright terms. A 33% increase in copyright terms would give us a copyright length of 38 years. This would mean that works created before 1971 would be Public Domain. Coincidentally, the Beatles broke up in 1970 so all of their works would be Public Domain.

Already done; but there is a downside

"Excluding immigration"

In case you haven't noticed, if you're not a Native American Indian, you're an immigrant, or the descendant of an immigrant. Excluding immigrants, the population of the US is well under 5 million.

The US won't achieve ZPG before 2050. A big reason for that is the under-18 set, the kids who have kids because their fundy Sarah Pailin-type parents don't believe in teaching proper birth control.

there is a reason you are not allowed to withdraw your 401k dollars and that the government gives you a tax advantage to invest via 401k instead of your own trading account. It increases the amount of money in mutual funds and thus gives a greater liquidity to the market.

Seriously, you don't know much about 401ks or mutual funds. In a 401k investors are not restricted to just investing in mutual funds. Perhaps you don't recall it but many Enron workers lost money because they had their 401ks invested in Enron stocks. But even if people have money in mutual funds, the funds are not of a single mind. There are aggressive growth, growth, income, and value funds. Aggressive growth funds invest in businesses that growing fast whereas income funds invest in corporations that pay dividends for income. Funds may invest in stocks, bonds, or both. Then there are also SRI, Socially Responsible Investing, funds. These funds use various screens to decide what to invest in. Some screen for companies that they feel treat their employees and or the locations they are located in well. Some focus on the environment, and others will not invest is so called sin industries. Such as military contractors or weapons makers, alcohol businesses, or tobacco companies.

All that 401k money (and the proxy votes) are controlled by an elite class of money managers who then wield enormous leverage over corporate boards.

Every one who owns stocks can decide for themselves who will vote as their their proxy, or can vote for themselves. There is such a thing as activist shareholders. Apartheid in South Africa very well may of ended in part because of shareholder activism, shareholders in the US as well as around the world pressured their companies to not invest in or pull out from South Africa in efforts to end apartheid. Now activist shareholders are pressuring their corporations to oppose Israel's construction of the Apartheid, er Separation, Wall. Chief among them are funds and groups that invest on a religious basis.

The owners of companies are changing so rapidly that it is nearly impossible to tell who actually owns what.

After more than 10 years Steve Jobsis still a member of Walt Disney's board. Ted Turner spent years on Time Warner's board. And as of 2001 and 2002 the Packard and Hewlett families still had seats on the HP board.

Falcon

Most of the temperature data is seriously flawed in that there is a great influence of the urban heat island effect on the overall data.

Yea the urban island heat effect can affect measured temperatures, how does thet explain the rising temperatures in Antartcia. How does it explain shrinking glaciers all over the world. What large urban areas are close enough in Kashmir to explain to shrinking glaciers in the Himalayas? What large urban areas are near Mount Kilimanjaro to explain the shrinking glaciers there? Or in the Andes of South America?

Falcon

The image in the article isn't really good. If you want to see a demonstration of what they did in real time, it's here.

Bullshit. Show me one citation that says that natural fertilizers such as animal dung have any connection to acid rain. I dare you.

How about this?:

14 Million Tons of Pig Manure No Hogwash for the Dutch

The Washington Post, August 6, 1987, Edward Cody

The trouble with the Netherlands is pig manure, tons of it. Pig manure is overflowing storage vats. It is seeping into canals. It is polluting underground drinking water. It is even falling from the sky in acid rain. "Pig manure is very aggressive, you might say," remarked Theodore Bruins, a member of the six-man Manure Problem Steering Committee in the Netherlands' southern Brabant Province. The nation has 14.5 million human inhabitants in 16,484 square miles, making it the most densely populated country in Europe. It also has a pig for every person, giving it the world's most ...

Here, read a whole book about it, manure lover.

Beware. Taking a statement that's worded as if it were a fact (such as `Austin cops routinely have orgies in the backroom with arrested hookers!') and prefacing it with `It is my opinion that ...' does not automatically mean it's can't be libel.

More details ... More ...

"organic" stuff attracts hippies, hippies smoke pot, pot is dealt by drug-dealers, or grown organically on the garlic-farm, exponentially reinforcing the vicious cycle of bong-headedness and drug-war through the positive feedback mechanism as pot attracts both hippies and drug-dealers.

That is not proof! Organic also attracts big business, but according to you that's proof. Walmart sells organics so it must be evil.

The United States is evil too. After all it allowed slavery, it massacred the native population, and it performed medical experiments on unsuspecting citizens infecting them with syphilis. It was also the only nation to use nuclear weapons. Evil, pure evil.

Falcon

Oh, I have? Where's your proof?

The fact that you're posting to /. rather than in the hospital, fighting smallpox.

That's the sum of your proof? That's no proof, at most it's evidence. Let's see... First, while the US government, specifically the military developed the internet it was not the first widely or generally used computer network. Throughout the 1970s people used bulletin board systems or BBSes that were setup and run by people doing it for themselves. Fidonet was developed to link the various BBSes up together in 1984, it was as the internet is now a network of networks. A year before the commercial Quantum Computer Services network, now called AOL, was founded. AOL eventually acquired CompuServe, which I used to be a member of, and which was started in 1969 as the Compu-Serv Network, Inc subsidiary of an insurance company. Starting in 1985 General Electric ran the GEnie network. There were other services like these also. It was just a matter of tyme before a network of networks as big as the internet was developed.

Next the Smallpox vaccine was Edward Jenner, an English scientist who did not work for government.

There have been innumerable nearly-free markets, and even today, in nearly-lawless countries like Somalia, there is nothing to stop the market from being free. Immigrate and enjoy!

As you say, Somalia is law-less. Therefore a free market does not exist there. What you and every other freemarket opponent do not or refuse to acknowledge is that free markets require voluntary exchanges. Nobody holds a firearm to another's head, threatens, or robs them. I can hear you saying next that laws are anti-freemarkets, that public law enforcement is needed to uphold those laws or some such. You're partially right but not one free market advocate I know of opposes these. Many proponents will actually tell you that that is a legitimate function of government. As is contract law enforcement.

Natural market forces, like economies of scale, do VASTLY MORE to restrict small players from entering the market than any regulations you can name.

BS. If natural market forces did as you say, I would not be a member of 2 of the dozens of co-ops in the upper midwest. Within the greater Minneapolis, St Paul, Twin Cities area there are more than a dozen. One of those co-ops I'm a member of has just one location, it's a few blocks away from me and in weather like today I can walk there in about 5 minutes. The other co-op has 3 stores now though when I joined it there was only one. With some members driving some distances to get to the store they asked that another store be opened close to them, so one was. The other store was a separate co-op that wanted to be acquired by mine, so it was put to a vote of member-owners and we approved. While those co-ops I'm a member of and others are member owned some are worker owned.

Also even co-ops can be big businesses, Horizon Organic is a nationwide co-op owned by farmers. In Spain some businesses are big worker owned co-ops. The Mondragón Cooperative Corporation in northern Spain, the Basque region, "employ more than 100,000 worker/owners and in 2007 generated revenues of more than $24 billion."

In fact it's the government PREVENTING those established players from becomming monop

Sorry, but the myth about the ozone layer in Antarctica being caused by a volcano is just that, a myth.

The original idea was a what-if hypothesis that was hatched by a geologist. A different right wing nut job named R.A. Maduro with a bachelors degree in geology wrote a book about it, claiming the whole CFC causing the ozone layer was a plot by the DuPont company to make money on CFC replacements, conveniently forgetting that DuPont was the world leader in creating CFC's in the first place.

When you claim to debunk science, please have your facts in order and don't spread right wing fantasy bunk as scientific truth.

My source for claiming that CFC's depleted the ozone layer is F. Sherwood Rowland, an atmospheric chemist and winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Who do you have on your side?

It's going back a bit (late 80's), but I remember the uproar at the time as it got (as usual) the support of the US. Arabs were required to wear white badges. Not so far removed from a yellow star, agreed ?

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1S1-9198906010671189.html

The more that companies have moved Western production (American, EU, Japan, Canada, etc) to Chinese manufacturing, the more injuries there has been occurring. I wonder if the price saved is worth the lawsuits?

Yes.One mention of GM's cost benefit analysis. Saving just $2.40 per vehicle was worth having a couple of folks get killed. The Apple stuff won't kill anyone. The suits are chump change compared to what they're saving.

Face it fanboys, Apple is just like any other big corporation.

The latter are, in most cases, just doing a job as they would for any other employer, they have little individual power or discretion to apply those vast resources, and I don't see why they should be any less entitled to legal protection of their rights (including privacy) than anyone else.

If I as a private citizen make a citizens arrest, I better I be sure the person I arrest did commit a crime I can prove. Otherwise they can sue me. An off duty office does not have to worry about that though. An officer can get an out of jail free card for shooting someone, but I'll have charges brought against me if I shoot at someone, even if I can prove my or other people's lives were in danger in some places. Shoot a mugger in NYC and see if you're not arrested. Yet a bunch of officers can shoot an unarmed teen and not face any punishment.

Falcon

Our Government already has! In the some odd 30+ years of my life, I've never experienced just how bad it has gotten. The unemployment, crime, corruption, incompetence, hubris: It's just nuts!

It has been much worse in my life tyme than it is now. In the 1970s we had staqflation, high inflation and unemployment. We had lines blocks long just to get gas, the lines in the southeast after Hurricane Katrina offered a taste of it. Crime was higher then too, crime rates have been falling since the 1990s.

Good thing our politicians have premo health care. I suspect they're going to need it after the angry mobs get done with them.

Especially if politicians try to socialize medicine.

Falcon

Its pretty common that civilian shelters/bunkers are bombed. In fact it happened multiple times in the iraq war. Thats what this bomb will be used for amongst other fine things. Its pretty hard to know how a bunker is used if you dont have people on the ground that can confirm a bunker is used for military purpouses and not as a shelter.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P2-1049327.html

Not that I believe this particular conspiracy theory, but if this was an elected judge rather than an appointed one, it may be possible.

A note on impeachment in the federal system:

Since 1797 the House of Representatives has impeached sixteen federal officials. These include two presidents, a cabinet member, a senator, a justice of the Supreme Court, and eleven federal judges. Of those, the Senate has convicted and removed seven, all of them judges. Not included in this list are the office holders who have resigned rather than face impeachment, most notably, President Richard M. Nixon. Of thirty-five attempts at impeachment, only nine have come to trial. Because it cripples Congress with a lengthy trial, impeachment is infrequent. Many officials, seeing the writing on the wall, resign rather than face the ignominy of a public trial. A Short History of Impeachment

Impeachments of Federal Judges

The first - and I think the only - federal judge to be convicted of bribery was District Judge Robert F. Collins in 1991. Federal judge is first ever convicted of taking bribe

Silly rabbit... didn't you know that the laws only apply to OTHER people, not the movie studios and the elite?

There is no evil cabal of cackling minions that stop people making decent music.

Perhaps not from making, but certainly from becoming popular. The record industry has been finedfor these abuses in several states.

Exactly and this is a prof of that evolution in the common understanding never happend.
Don't missundertand me. Mutations do happen, we only belive too much of what is possible trough mutation.

HIV mutates activily still it continues to be HIV.
All experimental mutations (Labrotory test) has never resulted in a different specimen, but mutants of it.
Learn about the Drosophila http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3406500107.html and follow lind in end of article to.

Allow me to explain (b). The government made those loans interesting for tax reasons for large banks. (read the CRA)

So there we have it. Lots of loans, who are, in the long term, extremely unprofitable BUT having them in your possession on Jan. 1 of any year is unbelievably profitable.

So you've created a game of "hot potato". You have a package that blows up & you pass it around.

That's because I disagree with your premises. If you they were correct, we would not have seen government policy working with other emissions as it has. You didn't answer my questions about CFCs and sulfur dioxide

Sulphur dioxide emissions have reduced by a little under 50% in the US. World-wide, however, they have risen. The net result was, obviously, a large rise in these emissions. Especially China has emissions that can only really be described as "off the scale", though India is certainly no saint in this department either. Perhaps that is why, even though US production went down significantly, there is only a tiny little bit better air in the US today versus 1970. Unless the rest of the world stops using electricity forthwith, the air is about to get more polluted every year with SO2. The reason for the localized and temporary drop is the near-total immobility of electricity creation. However, the policy only bought some time, it did not solve the problem.

I can't find any CFC numbers. However, CFC's cause the expansion of the gap in the ozone layer. I wonder if it has shrunk ? Since if your claims are right, then we'd see a massive shrinking of the hole in the ozone layer ... I'm sure you've checked that beforehand ... heh ... I forgot ... democrat ...

Let's see you add comments to this one

You might as well say, "Ice is not cold. Why the hell would you put it in your drink to cool it off? It is because you're a STATIST COMMUNIST??"

You're right. I suppose the better explanation is that you're delusional. But you are most defineately willfully delusional.

Why accuse me of not being realistic after making 2 factually wrong claims ? Do you think you're convincing anyone ? Otoh, if you are indeed delusional, you probably think you're convincing me. I hate to break the news, but you're doing the exact opposite.

Given the clear observation that established, empirical facts do not seem to affect your "truth", one might wonder what your idea of truth is based upon. Because, clearly, it is not based on empirical facts. And frankly, yes, my answer to that question would be that you're a socialist (that's what communists like to call themselves). Does that mean that you're going to start wars and famines and kill people ? Obviously not, you'll do what the soviets did : push your illusions on the economy "for more fairness", ignoring the real world, until the "fair/shackled" economy just can't support keeping all people alive anymore. Instead of recalling the illusion-based rules and laws you'll turn to rationing, to avoid having to admit you're wrong. And then you'll demand the right to decide how food rationing is to be done "to protect the poor" (not that you actually will protect the poor, obviously, you'll protect yourself from starvation, as anyone would do), but those actions which will be equivalent to massacring at that point.

I wonder though, given that the CFC emission reduction laws, and the price associated with those is still being paid, and it's obviously not helping ... what should we do ? I doubt that dropping those laws would result in a big increase of emissions, but I'm sure it would give many companies new options and materials for research.

Close. It actually comes from the Old French word "defaute", or latin "defalta" or "defallere", meaning a deficiency or failure: de (completely) + fallere (to fault or fail).
      http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=default
      http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O27-default.html

      -dZ.

I beg to differ:

http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/internat.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-118736013.html

Meanwhile wolfram alpha doesn't know WTF the metric system is, never mind who uses it.
http://www79.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=metric+system

This rookie kid might just as well land the RIAA a win. The odds may look good for Kiwi right now but if the rookie screws up he may end up handing the RIAA a free ticket to tyranny.

This "Rookie" is teamed up with a Harvard law professor who's called the "Billion Dollar Charlie" and has a 1998 movie, "A Civil Action", about a case of his about a toxic polluter.

Falcon

How do you guarantee that steel is the best material or that the iron won't suddenly turn liquid at room temperature?

Better analogy would be, how do you guarantee carbonated steel doesn't turn brittle in icy waters or how do you guarantee that the wind doesn't induce fatal vibrations matching the resonant frequency of the bridge.

Indeed, bugs do exist at the time of inspection, they are just not (yet) known. No change of laws of physics is required, only discovery of yet unknown (or underestimated) effects.

Jonathan Jay Pollard
Ben-Ami Kadish
Long list of incidents here.

you'll find that BMS was given exclusive rights for marketing only.

No, BMS was give more than that, from wiki the NCI offered "its current stock and supply from current bark stocks, together with proprietary access to the data so far collected".

Neither the government nor BMS owned ANY data

The NCI owned the date it acquired in testing Taxol. Now they may of, should have, released that data so anyone could use it but instead they gave BMS exclusive rights to use the data.

The NCI did this to accomplish exactly what you said: reduce the production costs. That is important.

No, what is important is to lower the costs to patients who need whatever. If the dose could be lowered to less than a dollar, which BMS did, then it shouldn't cost thousands of dollars to be treated.

This is why you buy aspirin from Bayer instead of making it yourself.

No, I don't use aspirin, but if I wanted something like it I'd use wintergreen which contains a chemical related to salicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin. Here' I even found a lab experiment for a college class to synthesize Aspirin and Oil of Wintergreen [pdf warning], we made aspirin in one of my chemistry classes. I could eat the berries or make tea.

If you don't like the drugs being cheaper because the wrong people make money

The drug is not cheaper, it's expensive and BMS is keeping it that way. Now if BMS were to make Taxol cheap I'd have no problem. If it cost $1 to make treatment shouldn't cost more than $10, maybe $100, but it cost thousands. Not only that but BMS tried to stop generic makers of Taxol, " BMS to pay $670 million to settle suits."

Falcon

Actually, one of the theories about the great die-off after the dinosaurs involves just such a world-wide inversion as part of the mechanism for killing off more life than should have died just from a meteor strike and global winter..

There's evidence for another one 55,000,000 years ago http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1P3-30005525.html

I wasn't there for either one, but it would be nice to have a time machine to find out ...

Actually, protectionism in the USA worked extremely well in the period from 1820s up through the Wilson administration.

Okay, I learned something today, there was protectionism in the US in the 1820s.

In short, protectionism does work really well, but ultimately, it can cause wars if countries perceive that they are being starved of raw materials.

Protectionism works well for some but not all. However I believe free trade can raise more people's standard of living than protectionism does. The years since World War II shows this. Though there isn't true free trade international trade has opened up since the war and though there's a larger population less people are at or below the poverty line.

Falcon

"IN the mid 1970s, the first laws were passed that said it was illegal. First amendment concerns surfaced but those were beaten back with the argument that producing it required that a crime be committed by an adult against a child. You couldn't produce child porn without actually raping a child."

Before we could use the rape argument, we had to increase the age of consent to make sex with children rape.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-ageconse.html

and in Europe we still find ages of consent below 18:

http://flickr.com/photos/11438926@N00/2091874900/sizes/o/

I can sell my tin foil hat then

Perhaps you need to learn some chemistry, because what you wrote is total garbage.

I have an idea, why don't you just retake your chemistry course and pay attention this time. You had me questioning what I wrote so I looked it up and found that I am right. Maybe you should show some links to your restrictive theory on the subject, I am going to post a couple that completely disagree with you.

By definition a catalyst remains unchanged; if it's used up, then it's a reactant.

No, a separate reaction can be a catalyst in itself. But more importantly, that wasn't what I was talking about. I'm talking about the destruction of the specific arangment of the catalyst that causes it to lose it's effectiveness. Take the etching process in hydrolysis or even a lead acid battery, It doesn't actually convert the metals but it separates them from the electrode and you often have to reverse the energy to cause them to recombine. The electrode is basically destroyed in the process because it becomes the metal/material gets separated from the electrode itself and floats inside the solution and needs to be recombined later.

Because it's faster. But (again) it doesn't change the net energy balance. If you can't wait until you get to high school to ask the science teacher, look it up; google's over there somewhere.

OK, perhaps there is something wrong with your reading comprehension and you can't understand me or the science behind it. Both this encyclopedia page and this separate page parrot what I said. Hmmm... Must be because I learned about them from google searches.. That would mean that either you are right and everyone else is wrong or that I somehow confused everyone into ignoring what is right and believe what I say that is wrong. I think the likelihood of the second is pretty much nil, If I had that power, I would be a politician looking for payouts instead of sitting here talking to you. So that leaves us to the reality that your just wrong. There could be a lot of reasons why your wrong, we won't get into that right now, but your wrong. I can find other links backing my statements up and I doubt you can find a general link that doesn't deal with a specific reaction making your case.

In fact, I see how you avoided the entire why would you use a catalyst in hydrolysis if the input energy to cause the reaction process is already directly tied to how fast the process can work. If you would have attempted to answer that, you would have been painted into the corner of reality and had to admit that the "Catalysts work by changing the activation energy for a reaction, i.e., the minimum energy needed for the reaction to occur." and that reduced the amount of energy needed.

Although what the Rosenbergs did was more spying than public speech, if atom bomb details had been published in the NYT they still would have gotten the death penalty, and again properly so. It was treason.

Citation needed. The Rosenbergs were railroaded*. They weren't even charged with, or convicted of treason. And furthermore, the case shows why we should not allow grand jury testimony to be withheld from the public.

*During the trial the prosecutor announced in a national news conference that he had secured sworn affidavits from an old friend of the Rosenbergs's, William Perl, which conclusively proved the conspiracy. Saypol decided against putting Perl on the stand, however, when Perl admitted to lying in his affidavits.

Dear mods: The parent post isn't a troll.

Sheldon Glashow shared the 1979 Nobel prize in physics for his work on electroweak interactions. He's also the (co)predictor of the "charm" flavour of quark. He is affiliated with Boston University (or at least, was in the 1970s).

Additionally, the fact that neutrons decay into protons (which requires a flavour change) is proof that neutrinos can interact with regular matter, via the weak nuclear force that the GP deliberately didn't mention. Doing so emits a W-boson, which decays into an electron (beta decay) and an electron antineutrino.

Okay... so decided I would do a little digging.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-diving-d.html
Shows that 130' is the max normal depth for scuba diving- with 300' considered "recordsetting".
And apparently anything over 200' is tricky even for people in those old fashioned diving suits.

You would need a bigger more noticable boat to get to depts 300' to 2300'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_diving_suit

http://www.sub-find.com/newt_suit.htm
These cost $400k

ADS Spider Submersible Hulls #1 and #2 are now available for sale at USD$399,995. Exceptional depth rating. Only 2 left. Compare with other ADS suits at $1-2 million.

The government should probably track sales of these-- however the old diving suits should be easy to make

I wasn't able to get a hard price on the old style suits but I imagine they could be made for $20k or less.

Yeah, because there haven't been 386, 486, and other systems on a chip and Via doesn't have a 1-watt processor anywhere to be found. This is not the first 1-chip chipset for all of the x86 line. That's bullshit. An SoC is even more integrated than just having the chipset as one chip. Somebody never read the old Computer Shopper before it slimmed down. SoC solutions for x86-compatible systems have been around more than a decade. The summary is bad, because TFA does not say this is a first for the x86 line.

You're right that even low-powered x86 chips like the C7 and the Geode line are generally no match for ARM and XScale. MIPS I'm not as familiar with for power usage purposes. It'd be nice if that question was answered, but I'm afraid it'd be summarized incorrectly too.

2005 article on anx86 SoC
another 2005 article about a different x86 SoC
2004 product page for an already obsolete x86 SoC
Linux Devices list of x86 SoC solutions, some dated to 2000
2000 Register article about the year since Cyrix released an x86 SoC
Chipslist page showing availability of AMD processor with 80188 features plus DMA, watchdog timer, serial ports, and I/O pins in 1995
article on the National Semiconductor Geode (the owners of that line before AMD bought it) thin client system-on-chip

And the best proof of all: an archive of a 1996 story on the AMD Elan,which featured a 386, ISA bus, serial UART, memory controller, power management, and PLL hardware ON ONE CHIP

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAOMGTOOFUNNNY!!!!!11!!!!!!!!one!

May I remind you of Walter Reed Medical Hospital travesty that *recently* made headlines?

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-161076682.html

http://akaka.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=newsarticles.home&month=3&year=2007&release_id=1570

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-03-21-va-review_N.htm

Because the sources I have seen call bullshit.

http://wais.stanford.edu/Iraq/iraq_deathsundersaddamhussein42503.html

"Along with other human rights organizations, The Documental Centre for Human Rights in Iraq has compiled documentation on over 600,000 civilian executions in Iraq. Human Rights Watch reports that in one operation alone, the Anfal, Saddam killed 100,000 Kurdish Iraqis. Another 500,000 are estimated to have died in Saddam's needless war with Iran. Coldly taken as a daily average for the 24 years of Saddam's reign, these numbers give us a horrifying picture of between 70 and 125 civilian deaths per day for every one of Saddam's 8,000-odd days in power"

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=392881

"During the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88), 730,000 Iranians died. You will
recall that Hussein was the aggressor in this war, because he wanted
full control of the Arvand/Shatt al-Arab waterway at the head of the
Persian Gulf. (For more information on the war, see "Iran-Iraq War,"
at Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/i/irani1raq.asp
) Approximately 1,000 Kuwaiti nationals were killed in the Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait. It's estimated there were 1,500,000 refugees from
this war, displaced by Iraq's occupation of Kuwait. 750,000 "endured
brutalities, oppression, and torture." Although the date for the end
of the war is usually given as 1988, the struggle continued, and
500,000 Iranians were late killed (the Iranians say it was closer to 1
million), 100,000 by Hussein's chemical weapons. In one day, 5,000
men, women, and children were gassed. ("Sadaam's Other Crime," In The
National Interest: http://www.inthenationalinterest.com/Articles/Vol3Issue29/Vol3Issue29Askari.html
  and "Charges Facing Saddam Hussein," BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3320293.stm )"

So, we have to make a decision about what you did here. Either the numbers, as a whole, are so unreliable that they fail to be useful, or you're cherrypicking numbers you like and ignoring the ones you don't.

In either case, your opinion is worthless.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-73845616.html

You are completely incorrect, sir

Sabal palms are also occur naturally in (at least) south Texas and Louisiana, and of course there is the much-propagated California Fan Palm. And those are just the species I can think of off the top of my head.

Gee, that's the exact opposite of every single definition of "defamation" available to check online.

This isn't legal advice, but while in a strict dictionary sense "defamation" might be anything said that hurts a reputation, truth is an affirmative defense. The articles linked above state that no action is called for and no damages occur when someone states a truth. The person whose reputation is tarnished by the truth earned that reputation. Speaking or printing the truth therefore does no damage to the rightful reputation. That seems to this non-attorney to mean you can call the speech or publication by any name you want, but you're not going to get money by suing someone for telling the truth.

Again, I am not a lawyer, but grade-school Social Studies teachers in the U.S. teach their students about John Peter Zenger and the case of New York v. Zenger. That case set forth truth as a defense for slander and libel in the common law of the North American colonies of England.

BTW, where are "defamiation" and "plaese" on any of the above sites? Do I need the latest edition of Black's? I can't find those definitions at all, oh careful and detail-oriented A. Coward. Without resolving those two issues, I'm having trouble following your carefully stated premise and well-reasoned arguments to your no doubt brilliant conclusion.

Besides, if you want to hear "fuck" on TV, get cable.

No, not just cable. Usually, you have to buy premium channels to get your profanity fix.

Just remember, nudity and profanity are considered vices, and you pay extra for your vices. Getting profanity for free just reduces the value proposition of HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax.

And you're right about Tipper. People forget that she was in lockstep with Jack Thompson, trying to censor music in the 80's with the PMRC. Of course, that doesn't excuse the censorship currently going on.

Just remember, Anglo-Saxon words == BAD :: Norman words == ACCEPTABLE

SHIT == BAD :: FECES == ACCEPTABLE

ARSE == BAD :: DERRIERE == ACCEPTABLE

COCK == BAD :: PENIS == ACCEPTABLE

Nope...not just a guess. I learned it in a college course some time back, and so I don't have the original citation, however, I did some digging and did find at least one reference to prove I didn't pull this out of thin air:

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O29-APOSTROPHE.ht ml

It's rather poorly formated, but here's the relevant passage:
Scholars have generally regarded this use of the apostrophe as arising from the omission of the letter e in Old and Middle English -es GENITIVE singular endings (such as mannes man's, scipes ship's), spreading in due course to all genitives, with or without an e and plural as well as singular. Others have cited a noun-and-pronoun pattern of possession common in the 16-17c, as in Charles his name, where noun and pronoun came together as Charles's name and then spread to all possessives, male or female, singular or plural. However, it is the Old English inflection that more directly accounts for the use of the apostrophe in Modern English.

According to that, the more direct origin was the omission of the letter e in old and middle english, but my explanation *is* another possible contributing factor. So no, I wasn't just guessing or making shit up.

The only reference I found in the first couple google pages for "petr beckmann relativity" that wasn't a total fluff piece was this old 1990 article from National Review: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-9046912.html

So if I'm reading this right, one consequence of his assertion is that the time dilation predicted by relativity is a bunch of bunk that doesn't really happen. Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't time dilation been verified experimentally?

So, fill me in. What's happened in the last 17 years to confirm or refute Beckmann's claim? And why isn't it the first link on Google?

Disclaimer: IAACP (I Am A Computer Person), but:

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-70872766.html

"Plasmodium, the world's most lethal parasite, causes malaria. The parasite enters the bloodstream through a mosquito bite, hiding in the human liver before invading red blood cells. Ultimately, millions of infected blood cells explode at once, causing fever and death in 3 million people a year worldwide. "

Wouldn't it be a potential idea to give people with Malaria a large dose of whatever signal chemical the infected blood cells use to tell each other when to trigger? I assume they have a way of communicating that it's trigger time, and that one of two things would happen:

1) The (smaller) number of blood cells would explode prematurely, before the infection is at an advanced stage, and whatever bad things happen and methods of survival people have would be easier,

2) The parasites would become insensitive to the signal chemical, causing all sorts of weird results.

Nutria already gave some examples, but I've got more for you.

Tandy 1000, HP's 95LX (and 200LX) palmtop PC with DOS (the 200 had MS-DOS 5.0), the HP 1000CX DOS palmtop, some of the early IBM Aptivas, the HP model 110 line of desktops, the rather famous GRiDLite (my GRiD laptops all loaded DOS from hardrive -- always wanted a GRiDLite too though), the IBM EduQuest Model 30 and Model 40 (I have a few model 40s, but only one still boots -- into OS/2 Warp because I'm not using the on-chip DOS), the Sharp PC-5000 portable, the IBM PCJr, certain IBM PS/1 machines, the Tandy 2500 XL, and some others.

Also, Franklin, Commodore, TI, and Atari had systems with some form of OS in the ROM. Some Franklin systems had something called F-DOS in ROM which I think was mostly a ripoff of AppleDOS.

Notice that these examples are not modern hacks to try it out at home, but all commercially shipped systems from the late 1970s to early 1990s.

AMD and Intel still have documentation on DOS in ROM for embedded systems on their websites, and AMD even recommends Datalight's solution.

http://www.acs.org.au/president/1996/atm/npc/im961 009.htm

National Press Club - IM Forum
Speaker: Mr Scott McNealy
President Sun Microsystems
Wednesday, 9 October 1996

"The second big investment is to upgrade your PC. I don't have any reason why we would want to do that, but, think about it - do we really need more spreadsheets? Do we really need more word processors? I just S we did a survey at Sun. We had 12.9 gigabytes of Powerpoint slides in storage on our disk drives. Ha ha ha. It freaks me out just to think about. Do you how many person sentries that is? Of clip-art manipulations? I banned Powerpoint from our company - I just edicted it."

Earlier in that article, he mentions how he's only ever used word processors with four features: "backspace, delete, cut and paste and print"

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-19294279.html
Chief Executive Magazine
Date: 3/1/1997
Computing's second Punic war.
(interview with Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy)

"Personally, I got so frustrated with clip art and presentation graphics that I banned Power Point from our company 10 months ago. Our earnings have skyrocketed and our stock price has nearly doubled since that time. I have seen absolutely nothing but productivity gained by banning word processors with more than four features and Power Point-like graphics, or presentations graphics programs."

This is new? In the late 1990's, I used a technical publishing system which had the features you are asking for:
automated Index, automated Table of Contents, Font selection, Graphics capability, Mathmatical Formulas, etc.

Basic use of the product took very little training, yet advanced features were available.
And in 1999, it began storing documents in XML ...

See: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-55614156.html