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Too right. If Coca Cola can get away with re-selling tap water with added carcinogens Dasani, yet continue to sell their products, then I think consumers have a very short memory. Either that or don't care.

The average consumer probably won't even hear about this ruling before they go to PC World to pick-up their new Lexmark.

Interesting definition of a weak candidate. Some how the fact that Bush did not complete his duty in the Texas National Guard seems to evade you and the fact that you bought into the RNC spin and Swift Boat baloney really is quite telling about your ability to make clear reasoned judgments. Its amazing that as a U.S.M.C you're more impressed with a man who's family had political connections to get him out of Vietnam tour of duty versus a man who volunteered to go to Vietnam to serve.

I am a Libertarian
That explains so much. Libertarians are the polar opposites of communists, both however share quixotic notions of their utopian societies.

Let me lay the facts down for you buddy, since you're highly confused watching your Fox News propaganda. We went into Iraq because we had incorrect intelligence that Saddam had WMDs. Are you with me so far? Then after looking like a bunch of morons to the rest of the world who we gave the finger to (e.g. "Old Europe") for starting a preemptive war that was clearly unjustified. The administration puts the spin on it that it was all about promoting freedom in the middle east. Okay ... now for the bad news.

You many come down on democracy all you want. However, democracy is truly the most peaceful system around. Most nations that deal with one another in a democratic fashion will almost never resort to war
Lets talk about freedom and democracy for a second since thats what both you and I can agree that is a good thing. Why is it that we support and ally with a military dictator who over threw the democratically elected leader in a coup d'etat on one side of the world and who's country has been selling nukes to all the pariah nations. Then using questionable intelligence invade another country that didn't have nukes and then put the spin on it by declaring the promotion of "freedom" and "democracy" in the middle east. I fail to see how the public don't see this glaring irony. By the way has anyone see Bin Laden around?

The Man Who Sold the Bomb

Khan's Dangerous Game

Musharraf Named in Nuclear ProbeFebruary 3, 2004

Pakistan Ended Aid to Taliban Only Hesitantly December 8, 2001

Musharraf: Bin Laden may be dead23 December, 2001

Pakistan's leader thinks bin Laden deadJanuary 18, 2002

Bin Laden trail is cold, Musharraf admitsDecember 6, 2004

A Hostile Land Foils the Quest for bin LadenDecember 13, 2004

Protest at Musharraf's army role 19 December, 2004
So much for us supporting "democracy" and "freedom"

With North Korea's recent declaration of possessing nuclear weapons. One should stop to ask Pakistan's military or ISI (Intra Service Intelligence) how the hell N. Korea, Libya and Iran all got their nuclear weapons. How Pakistan traded their nuclear know how for N. Korea's medium range missiles.

The best part of all this is that A.Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistan atomic bomb is consider to be a "hero" in his home country and is

This is pretty ghoulish and a bit disturbing, even though there is every indication that this kind of stuff probably happens every day.

It got me thinking, why are we doing this? Why is it alright to saw the skull off an ape but not a human? As far as I can tell this question can be answered in three ways.

The first answer is that there is some huge insurmountable difference in kind between apes and humans, which makes it alright to subject apes to torture for the purpose of research, but not humans. This is basically the religious argument, because so far nobody has succeeded in providing a measure of this difference, much less in quantifying it. Meanwhile all the differences which can be measured, such as genetic difference, seem to point overwhelmingly in the other direction, namely that the difference is small and quite surmountable. Note that all the answers of the form "apes don't really suffer" or "it would violate the integrity of the human" and "it is against the law" all belong in this class.

The second answer tries to qualify the conditions under which it is alright to saw a monkey's skull off. We know the apes suffer, we may try to minimize their suffering, but ultimately we judge that the benefits from research warrant whatever suffering we subject the monkeys to. But there are two huge problems with this answer. First, if the research is really so important, then why don't we sacrifice a few humans instead? We can answer this question qualitatively by saying that there is a fundamental qualitative difference between humans and monkeys (which brings us very close to the first answer), or we can answer this question quantitively by saying that although monkeys and humans are both part of the same continuum, monkeys are simply worth less than humans, since they lack the mental acuity or dexterity of humans, or some such. But if mental acuity or dexterity are the criteria, then why not use retarded or disabled humans? Second, who determines the value of the research and on what grounds? And does this mean that some research might turn out to be so vital that it requires human guinea pigs?

Finally the third answer just posits that it's alright because we can. This is the position that might makes right. This is the most logically consistent position, even though it is ethically bankrupt (since all ethics are the ethics of the weak -- the strong need no ethics).

While none of these answers is entirely satisfying, generally the second answer seems to be the most palatable as well as the most common, since at least it tries to address what many people feel are legitimate issues. The catch is that it enshrines often questionable research on the backs and skulls of living, breathing monkeys. Although research for the sake of research has frequently enhanced our lives in unexpected ways, it has also frequently been a dead end. And while modern medical science can pull some amazing rabbits out of its high tech hat, the significance of these accomplishments can sometimes seem shallow when compared to that of mundane technology such as penicillin, antibacterial soap, and tap water.

I just hope this isn't another oversold "breakthrough" which turns out to have little practical use other than to funnel more funds into the departmental cash register.

"Iraq Massacre of kurds"

http://www.wanniski.com/showarticle.asp?articleid= 2434
http://www.wanniski.com/showarticle.asp?ArticleID= 1920
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,140124 8,00.html
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_ page/0,5744,12076716%255E1702,00.html

It seems Iraq's guilt re: the gassing of the Kurds isn't as much of an open & shut case as people think it is. There is evidence that the gas was from Iran. Also, the case against the chemical supplier fell apart.

I'm not saying Saddam was the best person ever, just that the above links are interesting reading and might get you thinking a bit more.

Lab monkeys 'scream with fear' in tests

Sandra Laville
Tuesday February 8, 2005
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,140 7818,00.html/

Here is a reference to an article on CNN about this. Also, check out the article in the St. Petersburg Times. Last, but not least, check out this article in The Guardian. My favorite quote from the last article: "The controversy [regarding the Bush DoJ paying ChoicePoint $11 million for names, addresses, occupations, DoB, passport numbers, "physical descriptions," tax records, and blood groups of Latin Americans] is not the first to engulf ChoicePoint." Nor, apparently, the last. This was written on May 5, 2003, over a year before this fiasco. How many chances should one company get before they're shut down?

So yeah, this company scares the shit out of me, as does its parent, Equifax. Personal opinion o' me is that they all need to be immediately shut down. If you don't like YOUR personal information being given to anyone with a few bucks, PLEASE write to your government representatives and demand that something real be done NOW to protect our privacy!

P. S. I live about 10 minutes away from Alpharetta, GA, where this company is located. I'm thinking of posting a link to where you can donate pitchforks and torches...

If only we could produce hotties like Madeleine Albright, Condaleeza Rice, and Barbara Bush.

Yeah, then perhaps you'd get to torture innocents as well! Oh wait, you did that already

British Nuclear Fuels, which runs the Sellafield nuclear complex in Cumbria, claimed yesterday that no nuclear material had gone missing from the site ... a spokesman for BNFL said similar discrepancies have been recorded in audits since 1977, and do not represent real losses of radioactive material ... it is impossible to know precisely how much plutonium is at a nuclear site. Plutonium is created inside nuclear fuel rods while reactors are running, so scientists can only estimate how much plutonium is in them. Only when spent fuel rods are reprocessed, by dissolving them in acid to separate out the plutonium, uranium and other materials, can the true quantities be measured...

You're distracted by the movies, which have nothing to do with the science of global climate change. It's like sending a guy to Washington because he played a killer robot from the future convincingly. The chaos starting to become evident in our atmosphere is the subject of lots of increasingly alarming science from not only reputable scientists, but from the overwhelming consensus of their community. As well as the head of oil giant Shell. And the head of insurance giant Lloyd's. Some serious predictions show the Antarctic is melting at a rate now that will raise the seas 15' in the next 100 years. That means a 50% chance the Gulf Stream change, dropping temperature by 5'C - which itself means a 70% chance that the Gulf Stream will stop completely by 2200. Those probabilities are very high - well beyond the threats we otherwise take deadly seriously. Denying it as some kind of Hollywood stunt wouldn't even rate a grade B movie plot.

I don't care if Douglas Adams himself penned the screenplay Is that what we call a 'ghost writer'? I mean Douglas Adams 1952-2001is dead.

Bloody Sunday

The first thing I thought of when I heard the Apple story is how trivial it is in comparison to the above link. These people were risking jailtime to protect their sources. There has to be a right to anonimity. Just look at what happened to Dr. David Kelly for another example.

The main problems come from when journalists hide behind this as an excuse to print whatever they want.

I was in China not too long ago (2003 - beginning of 2004) and teaching English. One thing that was interesting was the stuff that I heard about Falun Gong. How supposedly people from Falun Gong had poisoned local beggars, it was a cult.

In the states, you never hear these rationales for the crackdowns against Falun Gong. They're not even brough up to be discredited, which makes me wonder if they're true or not?

More to the point, is the American gov't not explaining China's good reasons for cracking down on Falun Gong so that it keeps their citizens feeling superior to the Chineese? "Oh, we have religious freedom and they don't" etc. When the worst abuses against religion happened during the Cultural revolution, or currently against those religious groups with separatist ambitions (or who just don't want their land exploited by the influx of the ethnic Han majority) such as some Muslims in Xinjiang, Buddists in Tibet, etc.

A while ago, there was the whole issue of the Chinese embassy bombing in Belgrade by accident.

The Chinese line was that it was deliberate and pointless. The American line was that it was an accident. The London guardian at one point ran a piece on how the Chinese embassy had been quite likely rebroadcasting radio signals from Serb forces in violation of the laws governing embassies (neutrality) and how the bombing run that hit the embassy was the only one which didn't go through the NATO chain of command, but came directly from the CIA.

And how much did we in the states hear about this second, more likely explanation?

There were a few internet sites blocked in China. And it was hard to tell which ones were deliberate and which ones were accidental since there seemed to be very little set policy on the matter. China may censor, but it seems to lack the rigid efficiency and formality that one imagines when they think of the USSR or Nazi Germany. The place is anarchy and clannish with an authoritarian frosting. Things like the status and power of your family, and which powerful people you have pissed off and how respectfully you criticize power have a huge amount to do with what you can get away with.

The cultural revolution is over. The boys in power in China are mainly concerned with protecting their power and sometimes increasing it.

And despite the attempt at censorship, there was a lot of information about government corruption which managed to leak out anyways. (Chinese gov't billionaires, Political elite getting away with murder, etc. )

If there's one thing I learned in China, it was how deftly the US government manages to control the information which reaches the majority of its citizens, despite the existance of a 'free press.'

According to the news, the Ice Ages next week so far are hypothesized only:

Scientists are to drill the deepest hole yet under the Arctic Ocean to investigate whether global warming would plunge Europe into an ice age.

;)

The low tech problems have made migrating to a moving block system like used in TGV networks in France impossible.

France have had it right for a long time, if only we British could swallow our pride and use their system.

Believe me, they tried. They just botched it horribly.

The problem was, Railtrack took a gamble and put millions of pounds on a promised moving block system that had never before been implemented. They were a newly privatised company and under pressure to make money, so they looked to moving block to save costs, instead of to increase facilities. As problems arose and the costs skyrocketed, they hid crucial details from the government.

Steve Jobs, the Prince Charles of the tabloid computer industry

Steve Jobs is marrying Camilla Parker-Bowls???

The 100,000 figure does not come from them however, it is from a study led by Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health which was released last October. It was covered in the media, more in the international media of course.

Guardian
NYT
International Herald Tribune
Washington Post

As the AC says:They arent interested in doing you any favors.

Thats not to say they arent bothered about you at all! Long term control of Middle east oil has been on the US/UK/WEurope Govet agenda for the past several decades. This manipulation is what keeps developed countries' economies running.( Your high paying job is because of this economy.) And thats what pulls Saudi per capita income from 25K$ in 1980 to 5K$ in 2000... and all the while Saudi princes buy bigger jets and build bigger palaces.

Countries who toe the Western Line like Saudi, Kuwait can get away with tyranny.Just for starters, Saudi women cant drive, vote, get decent jobs.. thats half the total population.For all its oil, Saudi has intense poverty.. with great discrimination between Shias/Sunnis. How bout giving them some Freedom fries ?
Bush kept bitching about how Saddam did not disarm for 15 years after Gulf war 1, yet Kuwait took no stpes to get closer to democracy in that time. Dosent THAT matter at all?

Please stop bitching about high oil prices. You're still a LONG way from not affording it. Think about the fact that people in Developing countries ,who earn 100$ a month(for example) pay SIMILAR prices in $ as the US/others for oil . For them, even the slightest increase means great difficulty. Difficulties brought upon by Western meddling in the Middle east.

Did you see Camp 22? Or did they leave that part of their "way of life" out of the tour?

Juche is their way of life. They have no real wish to expand, they just want to be left alone. For now, at any rate.

Growing drugs and selling them on the international market is part of North Korea's effort to stay afloat. It's also exported missile technology to anyone with the cash. Given NK's penchant for selling anything to the highest bidder, one of the largest fears about NK having nuclear weapons is the possibility that they will sell one -- which some third-party will set off in London, Paris, Tel Aviv, Los Angeles or Washington. NK will retain some degree of plausible deniability. The world will suffer with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of casualities, and the catastrophic economic consequences that would result.

Also, keep in mind that it was NK that invaded the South suddenly in 1950.

I'm answering the "Why not just live your life?" part of the OP's comment. I can't just live my life because some idiot has passed some stupid law making something that harms nobody illegal, like that wanker in Virginia who decided that he didn't like the way those hip-n-happenin' kids dressed, so he made it illegal:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,140959 0,00.html?=rss

Pakistan Ended Aid to Taliban Only Hesitantly December 8, 2001
Pakistan spy service 'aiding Bin Laden' 30 December, 2001
Musharraf: Bin Laden may be dead 23 December, 2001
Pakistan's leader thinks bin Laden dead January 18, 2002
Bin Laden trail is cold, Musharraf admits December 6, 2004
A Hostile Land Foils the Quest for bin Laden December 13, 2004
Protest at Musharraf's army role 19 December, 2004 So much for us supporting democracy and "freedom"
Musharraf Scorns Nuclear Probe

> > Nazi means "Nationalsozialistische" ("National Socialist") historically referring to NSDAP

> To be perfectly pedantic, 'Nazi' is not an adjective at all (at least not in the orginal German) and refers to an NSDAP member.

Thank you, I didn't now that.

> I do, however applaud your taking to task the unfortunate tendency of using the appellation in so trivial a context.

I just hate it when people use words that they don't understand--this is just so ironic! ;)

Cheers.

In Scotland the Liberal Democrats (heirs to the Liberal Party of yore) are in coalition with Labour, for example, and the main opposition is the Scottish National Party.

In Scotland, the Conservatives are mainly supported by voters who have good earnings and wish to keep their money (company directors, property owners). Labour are mainly supported by those with poor earnings (the benefits culture located in the inner cities). The Liberal Democrats are supported by professionals (educated to degree and above level, but not on a good salary yet) in the outer suburbs of the main cities. The SNP are supported by the rural population in the North and West of Scotland because they get fed of MP's imposing solutions on the inner-cities on the rest of the country (taxes on gasoline might be good way to reduce pollution in the inner city, but a complete vote loser where the nearest post office is 10 miles away).
There are also various Independent MP's, who are distributed all across the country.

Nobody has really forgiven the Conservatives for the Poll Tax, the merging of Scottish regiments to save English votes, and the teachers strike back in the mid 1980's. Not forgetting the way they covered up various disasters (Marchioness and Camelford).
This only leaves the Liberal-Democrats to oppose Labour, but since neither would get enough votes for a majority, they have actually formed an alliance. So there is massive voter apathy.

I have no idea why you are blaming the Catholic Church on this. For one thing, the Cathol Church LIKES Harry Potter. As for whoever this minister is, I have no idea why they are giving a sermon. And I can not even be sure that he is Catholic from what you say. The only ones who I have ever heard give a sermon in a Catholic Church are priests.

Well, my bet's on the robot with a soul.
But what's the (end result) difference between a human whose parts are substituted by technology and a robot that thinks and acts like a human (I'm assuming that's what you mean by soul)? Surely they're exactly the same thing.

This is totally irresponsible work by NASA.

Erm...perhaps this is "totally irresponsible" commenting by you. The article doesn't say anything about a proposal (unlike the bad /. summary) to terraform anything (you read it, right?). All that they mentioned was theoritical research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Planets. If there's another article about this somewhere else where NASA has proposed this and asked for funding, please, post a link. Until then, there's a difference between saying "we could" and "we should". One could even objectively discuss benefits and drawbacks without actually planning for anything.

Let me ask you, should your feelings about global warming (and you've made those opinions clear) dictate what scientists are allowed to study, theorize, or report? Personally, I prefer that we not stifle a clever idea just because you're pissed off about a global warming trend, which some have speculated is caused by humans. Furthermore, I don't find it at all important that scientific research/findings/hypothesis be congruent with popular ideals. If this were the case, scientists would simply be yesmen for the clergy "Our great scientists have consulted the Great Bible and confirmed that the Earth is indeed 3000 years old".

As a disclaimer, I only read the popular press report of the paper (TFA), not the journal itself.

This article has an unusually frank account of why the famous Cambridge lab that developed these phones got closed down. It also has an interesting discussion of the phone itself.

The article suggests that in the end it was easier for AT&T to shut the lab down than for its lawyers and those of a willing purchaser to reach an agreement on intellectual property.

Here's a history of the phone project.

That's interesting reasoning. But sure, I could see how you might think Latvia is a model of honesty, considering it only spends 2% of its annual revenue on bribes.

http://www.allaboutlatvia.com/article/24/corrupt-g overnment
"Political corruption is one of the aspects of the Latvian politics most criticized in different researches and surveys."

http://www.transparency.org/pressreleases_archive/ 2001/2001.12.03.eu.html
In Latvia, the perception of corruption remains high, and corruption poses a serious obstacle to the proper and efficient functioning of the public administration.

http://www.eumap.org/pressinfo/ipc/timesofchange
Experts feel, however, that the best candidate countries are less corrupt than the worst member countries. As the study shows, Latvia is not among the best.

Prove it. The only proven vote fraud is being done by Democrats (remember "Votes for Cigarettes 2000" for homeless people and tire slashing by Democrat-paid thugs in 2004 in Wisconsin?).

Let's not even talk about Catherine Harris, who outright stole the election by selectively obeying the intent of the law.

Prove it. (And its spelled "Katherine". Try to keep up.)

This is now a one party dictatorship, using the law as window dressing to get anything it wants and destroy whomever it hates.

Prove it.

accepted by the Katie Courics of the news media almost immediately.

You honestly believe that Katie "... they haven't been able to confirm reports [Saddam] was taken to Tikrit, and then Mosul, and then hopefully Syria" Couric is right wing? ROFL!!!!

Snip remainder of Michael Moore-inspired paranoia. That by the way would be the corpulent propagandist Michael Moore:

- Who sends his own daughter to private school .

- Who unsuccessfully pressured the writing staff of his 'TV Nation' not to join the Writer's Guild.

- Whose bodyguard got arrested for carrying an unlicensed firearm at JFK airport. A FIREARM? For the writer/author of "Bowling for Columbine"? No more tinfoil for you - you've obviously ODed on the stuff.

- Whose own hometown high school refuses to induct him into its Hall of Fame.

YOU grow up and stop whining. Bush won, Kerry lost. Get over it.

It has absolutely nothing to do with people eating when they aren't hungry. It has to do with economics and lifestyle. Unhealthy food is simply the cheapest and easiest thing available to people. Other nations are catching up. You appear to simply have an axe to grind with the US.

It's curious that in the art world, 'provenance' is so important. Not just because it might determine whether a (very good) fake is a fake but because, for some reason, humans do not associate art with anything but humans doing the creating.

This is a species-ist attitude. There's actually a continuum. Autistic people can (and do) produce art, people otherwise denoted as 'vegetables' produce art. But elephants, apes, chimps, donkeys and ravens have created paintings. Birds can actually recognise a genre such as cubism. Art generated by computers has been considered 'real' art unless its provenance is known when it is dismissed as much as a good fake.

The arrogance of (human) artists (and art experts) is quite breath-taking. If a human artist hangs an orange sheet over a rock, then, for some reason emotions are evoked: it is "art". But if a chimp dumps the same piece of cloth on the same rock, creating the same effect and runs off, it is no longer "art".

Art is only considered "art" by those arrogant enough to say: "it's because I say so."

The poster made the point that the WTC was not attack because it was a shining example of freedom. I'd like to know on what basis you're disagreeing - hopefully not the simplistic "They hate us for our freedoms". (And yes, I think a lot of the poster's point involved the choice of target - otherwise, why attack the Pentagon and not the National Cathedral?)

Bin Laden has listed his demands, and none of them involve freedom in the US. (Bush has already fulfilled one and is working on a second, by the way.)

BTW, Wahhabi Muslims consider 99% of Muslims to be infidels as well. Sunni muslims pray to Allah and ask for favors in the name of a prophet or a saint (similar to Catholics praying to saints as intermediaries). Wahhabis consider this idolatory, and its practictioners heathens.

To the extent that there's a war, it's not against Islam. It's a war between rationality and blind ideology - and in that war, Bush and Bin Laden are on the same side.

You mean upspeak

This is how we got the widespread misuse of words/phrases like "irony", "it begs the question", ...

Strict meanings of both irony and begging the question have been used for millennia--literally, for they both originated in ancient Greece--so I wouldn't exactly call them gray areas. But while the (re)definition of "irony" one is more familiar with might indeed be a question of whether one prefers texts written by Plato or Alanis Morissette, copyright infringement is a completely different matter. Copyright infringement is by definition a violation of copyright law which is not a property law. Violating copyright is not theft because duplicating data is not appropriation of any property, much less a dishonest appropriation of property belonging to someone else with the intention of permanently depriving the other of said property. The key word here is "depriving," for theft is wrong not because the thief gets something without paying (the real goal of any theft), but because the victim no longer has that something (a side effect of every theft)--this is crucial. Furthermore, the copyright law was meant to protect authors from publishers, not from readers so reading a book without paying for the right to read or listening to music without paying for the right to listen is not only not theft, but not even a copyright infringment. The "copy-" in "copyright" is rather unfortunate, and should it have been called "publishing rights" there would be much less confusion today when "copying" is something we must do in order to play any kind of digital media. So, copyright infringement is not theft by any stretch of imagination. Nor is it piracy, for that matter, because it has very little to do with robbing or plundering at sea without a commission from a recognised sovereign nation, and quite frankly I have no idea why has that word been chosen in the first place. I know that in the "Don't Copy That Floppy" era, writing "piracy is a crime"--which is true, even if copying floppies is not--on BSA propaganda posters must have had a strong influence on people, but why using piracy and not just theft? My point is that--unlike irony--copyright infringment, theft and piracy, as well as trade secrets and patents, are all very strictly defined by law in any given jurisdiction and it is impossible to confuse them without clear malicious intents. This is not a question of definition or preference, but a matter of fact. So I fully agree with your point, but I wouldn't use the same examples.

You get what you vote for.

Stop blaming voters for their government's actions. The last two elections proved that you do not get what you vote for.

Israel is our shining star in the mideast: a sliver of democracy and freedom

They've recently been exercising the democratic prinicple of "eminent domain"... but without paying people for the land they're seizing. These people, of course, happen to be Palestinian:

Israelis use barrier and 55-year-old law to quietly seize Palestinians' land

Maybe they believe it because he was.

Saddam Hussein's regime has opened talks with Osama bin Laden, bringing closer the threat of a terrorist attack using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, according to US intelligence sources and Iraqi opposition officials. The key meeting took place in the Afghan mountains near Kandahar in late December. - Saddam link to Bin Laden

Oh, and check out what Janet Reno has to say about the threat of WMD.

Most disturbing is the prospect of ethnic profiling. After the September 11 attacks, reports Albrecht, "Federal agents reviewed the shopper card records of the men involved to create a profile of ethnic tastes and supermarket shopping patterns associated with terrorism." So anyone who likes hummus, say, may well be developing the shopper profile of a terrorist. While there is an assumption that, in the UK, there exists an invisible line that would not get crossed in this manner, the concern in any data protection context is over "function creep": "An information system set up for one reason can end up being used for other things," says Simon Davies of Privacy International, a human rights group set up to monitor surveillance by governments and corporations.

One person who is a quadriplegic recently (this past year) had a chip implanted. He can now control things by thinking about it.

Here are some other articles from a google and some things I have marked...

• Electric dreams
• Brain chip offers hope for paralyzed
• A company with a potential product
• Clubbers choose chip implants to jump queues
• A collectino of references to articles on Neural interfaces
• A display in thin air.
• Some people who do not see some things as good.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4 434963,00.html

Monday June 17, 2002

Italy hailed the redress of a historic injustice yesterday after the US Congress recognised an impoverished Florentine immigrant as the inventor of the telephone rather than Alexander Graham Bell.

Historians and Italian-Americans won their battle to persuade Washington to recognise a little-known mechanical genius, Antonio Meucci, as a father of modern communications, 113 years after his death.

The vote by the House of Representatives prompted joyous claims in Meucci's homeland that finally Bell had been outed as a perfidious Scot who found fortune and fame by stealing another man's work.

Calling the Italian's career extraordinary and tragic, the resolution said his "teletrofono", demonstrated in New York in 1860, made him the inventor of the telephone in the place of Bell, who had access to Meucci's materials and who took out a patent 16 years later.

He sent a model and technical details to the Western Union telegraph company but failed to win a meeting with executives. When he asked for his materials to be returned, in 1874, he was told they had been lost. Two years later Bell, who shared a laboratory with Meucci, filed a patent for a telephone, became a celebrity and made a lucrative deal with Western Union.

Meucci sued and was nearing victory - the supreme court agreed to hear the case and fraud charges were initiated against Bell - when the Florentine died in 1889. The legal action died with him.

This is a great form of marketing and has been for a long time for corps with an image issue. Mr Gates has an image issue. MS has a bigger image issue. It may be out of the goodness of his heart, as many peoples' hearts turn from stone as they get older, but IIRC, these donations started shortly after consulting a firm about the image problem. Try here, here, and a more positive spin here.

Reviewed in the Guardian. See:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/insideit/story/0, 13270,1394031,00.html

The abKey site is:

http://www.abkey.biz/

No idea if it is any good. Looks better than the New Standard Keyboard though!

Sesostris III

Well, I think a mass of cells is a "child" when it's able to survive outside of it's womb--ie with no direct support from the body that grew it..

Okay.

The same people flailing about global warming are also flailing that our oil reserves will be gone in a week. If they're right about both things, who cares, right? If fossil fuels go away, global warming won't be a problem, right?

Also, you are totally wrong about "every shred of evidence...". Well, not totally wrong -- because I'm assuming that you're saying that every shred of evidence points to global warming...caused by humans. You made this statement without actually objectively looking at the data.

The fact is that if you look at climate changes over geologic time, the climate change that we have witnessed is not even a blip on the radar screen. In fact, the climate change we've seen doesn't look like anything that falls outside of normal long-term climate trending.

Freedom
begins at home, you criminel de guerre

Patriotiocally as always,
Kilgore Trout, CTO

There are many frowzy shirkers who want to make closed-minded roustabouts out to be something they're not. One -- Dr. James Dobson -- is so conniving, he deserves special mention. To get immediately to the point, if Dobson is going to talk about higher standards, then he needs to live by those higher standards. Anyone with an IQ two points higher than a wet sponge's knows that his myrmidons are brown-nosing witlings (literally!). But, even so, if you're interested in the finagling, double-dealing, chicanery, cheating, cajolery, cunning, rascality, and abject villainy by which he may expose and neutralize his enemies rather than sit at the same table and negotiate before long, then you'll want to consider the following very carefully. You'll especially want to consider that Dobson is entirely gung-ho about mercantalism because he lacks more pressing soapbox issues. If you look soberly and carefully at the evidence all around you, you will indisputably find that power-hungry Huns often take earthworms or similar small animals and impale them on a pin to enjoy watching them twist and writhe as they slowly die. Similarly, Dobson enjoys watching respectable people twist and writhe whenever he threatens to leave us in the lurch. You know, it strikes me that he would have us believe that it's okay to cause pesky subversion to gather momentum on college campuses. Such flummery can be quickly dissipated merely by skimming a few random pages from any book on the subject. Dobson's methods are much subtler now than ever before. Dobson is more adept at hidden mind control and his techniques of social brainwash are much more appealingly streamlined and homogenized.

Might I suggest that he search for a hobby? It seems Dobson has entirely too much time on his hands, given how often he tries to shrink the so-called marketplace of ideas down to convenience-store size. When I'm through with him, he'll think twice before attempting to till the callow side of the antipluralism garden. An ancient Greek once wrote something to the effect of, "He has shown he's not afraid to be contentious." Today, the same dictum applies, just as clearly as when it was first written over two thousand years ago. Dobson's perceptions of a vast conspiracy lead him to inappropriate assessments of even the most innocent interactions with frightful fiends, but given the way things are these days, we must remember that Dobson says that his tracts are all sweetness and light. This is at best wrong. At worst, it is a lie.

In other words, even his horoscope says he's nerdy. Or, to express that sentiment without all of the emotionally charged lingo, he honestly gives me the heebie-jeebies. Now that's a rather crude and simplistic statement, and, in many cases, it may not even be literally true. But there is a sense in which it is generally true, a sense in which it undeniably expresses how classism doesn't work. So why does Dobson cling to it? I once asked Dobson that question -- I am still waiting for an answer. In the meantime, let me point out that this is not the first time I've wanted to lift the fog from Dobson's thinking. But it is the first time I realized that it's easy enough to hate him any day of the week on general principles. But now I'll tell you about some very specific things that he is up to, things that ought to make a real Dobson-hater out of you. First off, I once overheard him say something quite astonishing. Are you strapped in? He said that negativism is the key to world peace. Can you believe that? At least his statement made me realize that in order to convince us that every featherless biped, regardless of intelligence, personal achievement, moral character, sense of responsibility, or sanity, should be given the power to rule with an iron fist, Dobson often turns to the old propagandist tr

Yeah, nobody reputable is reporting success in any of these areas. I'm just glad that poor people can't afford a trip halfway around the world for treatment. Fortunately though, if Jenna Bush needs an abortion or brain surgery, she can drop the whole moral authority thing and fly to the appropriate country. I'm also thankful that a nation like China can still hand America its ass on a platter. I really like having my country upstaged in front of the world.

His patients - foreign and Chinese - and their families appear to adore him, and to accept what he does with foetuses. Huang has already operated on 500 people. Every month, at least a dozen more fly in. He gets hundreds of new inquiries a week and his waiting list for foreigners now stretches until next December. So many Chinese patients have asked for treatment that he says he could be busy for 10 years, even though he has trained at least five other doctors in the procedure.

"We need 100 more Dr Huangs," says Laura Jackson's father Daryl. "And we need more cells. It's a different government over here. They have to trim the population. There are 15 to 20 million abortions in China a year. If everyone who was aborted could save a life, there would be no sick people left in the world." Golden's Christian wife, Debbie, also sees Huang as an idealist - particularly in comparison to the US doctors who charged her husband almost $1m, but were able only to make him more comfortable in his wheelchair.

"In the US it's totally about money, but China is more ethical," she says. "They work harder. I'm American, so that is very hard to say.

"I don't agree with abortion, but it will happen anyway. In the US, we do abortions but don't use the cells. In China, they don't just take life and destroy it - they give something back. It's like lemonade out of lemons. You take something bad and you make it good." Such reasoning requires a moral somersault, but it is one that can be done easily in China. That is enough to generate hope.

Yes, maybe it is just a natural occurrence. It's quite hard to imagine that all the correlations are just coincidence, but you may be right. On the other hand, this response (and all the others like it) may just be another form of adaptive belief formation, on the lines of the fox and the sour grapes. http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianweekly/story/0,, 1078313,00.html is quite interesting.

If this were in fact true, (and it's not), there would be massive evidence of this, and it would have been brought out years ago, or at the very least this last election cycle. There is no proof of what you say because it didn't happen that way.

Oh, look, here's the review of the CBS investigation (PDF).

Oh, look, here's an article from 1999 about Dubya dodging the draft.

Oh, look, here's another one.

... so which part of what I wrote isn't true?

If this were in fact true, (and it's not), there would be massive evidence of this, and it would have been brought out years ago, or at the very least this last election cycle. There is no proof of what you say because it didn't happen that way.

Oh, look, here's the review of the CBS investigation (PDF).

Oh, look, here's an article from 1999 about Dubya dodging the draft.

Oh, look, here's another one.

... so which part of what I wrote isn't true?

To be honest, speaking to people from both sides of the pond, it does seem that while UK (Europe in general) now have a number of procedures and checks in place, the US system can be incredibly difficult and unpredictable.

E.g. http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,123 0539,00.html

I also had a friend, who - pre-9/11 - was going to visit her father (who, as a senior member of staff at a UK university, was at a number of conferences in the US). She was 18 at the time. Once in the US, she and her brother was stopped at just about every oppotunity (there was a connecting flight one reaching the US). Okay, they might be worried this might be a case of illegal immigration, hence the questionning. However, they had their bags searched 3 times in the same number of hours (totally emptied over the floor and left each time to pack themseleves), they had written information as to where they were meeting and contact information for the Universities their father was currently in meetings, detained at one point. All this time, not one person ever explained what was happening, why, how long, instead they constantly shouted at and treated badly. All this (and you will have to take my word I know) to two of the quietest, polite people I know.

There's a few more stories like this, a guy going on business - making the same trip to the US headquarters of his company from the UK - same trip many times in the past, one time detained without reason, again, never told why or given a clue why he was being held. Again, had full contact details of the company he worked for and if they had called (he has no idea if they did) the company would have confirmed why he was there.