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What you seem to be missing is a moderate left party. Where is the American party that isn't aiming for communism, but would increase taxes on the rich, using the money to pay for improved infrastructure and social services (e.g. public transport, more money/help for the unemployed or low income people, single-parent families, investment in bad bits of cities, etc)?

That sort of thing is pretty much the platform of the Democratic party in the US. However, in fairness, there is very little legislation that passes in the United States at the national level, or in most states, that doesn't have at least some degree of support from both parties. The Republican party is also for improving infrastructure, and social services - when necessary. There are disagreements as to how to pay for things, how long they last, etc. One thing that many Europeans have a hard time with is that American political parties, at least the Democrats and Republicans, tend to be "big tent" parties that have a fairly wide range of political views - the parties both have their conservative and liberal wings. This is somewhat less true than in the past, say 30 years ago.

The Republicans aren't far right, they are center-center right. I don't think even in a European context they would be truly far right. There is one notable difference between the American and European right. The American right rejected the far right in the 50s and 60s, so it has withered. The Left in America hasn't done that fully.

The Republicans reject authoritarianism, racism (despite the nonsense you read on Slashdot), and are not anti-immigrant. They do want all immigration to be legal, however. As things stand now, approximately 10% of the population of Mexico has crossed into the United States, almost all illegally. That really can't be a good thing for all the things it implies.

As to your other questions -

I don't believe that the National Socialists have won any elections ever, although they do run for office from time to time. The various Communist parties put people on the ballot, but I doubt they've won much unless it was unopposed. Communists have been appointed to high government positions, however - Van Jones, for example. The Socialists have won office here and there. There is a US Senator who is a socialist, and the city of Milwaukee (a major city) has elected a socialist party mayor in years past. The state of Minnesota also elected a Reform Party governor several years ago - Jesse Ventura, the actor and former wrestler. I believe Green Party members have won local office as well.

So the United States truly does have the full range of political parties in it, but the American electorate is drawn more towards the center. The national election system helps reinforce that tendency. I don't think that is a bad thing.

Or third option: he did try to close it but Congress vetoed the plan to close Gitmo without letting the terrorist loose.

There are three branches in our government and one can often estop the other, Commander-in-Chief or not.

Yeah congress vetoed and then the prez signs the NDAA... allowing American citizens to be placed into GITMO without due process..... the whole system is broken.

Or third option: he did try to close it but Congress vetoed the plan to close Gitmo without letting the terrorist loose.

There are three branches in our government and one can often estop the other, Commander-in-Chief or not.

The financial system in the U.S. is corrupt, in my opinion. There are many arrangements that help those in control steal from the average person.

Sooner or later, people will realize that Facebook promotes fake relationships. Unfortunately, that realization will apparently come after investors have lost billions in Facebook's IPO.

Facebook's reputation with the mainstream media is rapidly getting worse. Facebook is getting a bad reputation partly because of articles in the mainstream media like these:

Worst company: Facebook was a semi-finalist in the competition to be voted the worst company in the United States.

Facebook follows its business rules? Not always. The April 7, 2012 Wall Street Journal story, Selling You on Facebook, says:

"Facebook requires apps [mobile phone software applications] to ask permission before accessing a user's personal details. However, a user's friends aren't notified if information about them is used by a friend's app. An examination of the apps' activities also suggests that Facebook occasionally isn't enforcing its own rules on data privacy."

There's more like that in the article.

Facebook tracks every web page you visit that has a Facebook button (using Javascript). For example, if you visit the Oregonian Newspaper web site, Facebook tracks every story you visit, even if you don't click on the "Like" button. There are ways to prevent that (using Firefox with the NoScript add-on), but most people don't know about them.

Companies pay people to click on Facebook "Like" buttons. The number of Facebook "Likes" doesn't give any indication of popularity.

On December 9, 2011 it was necessary to click on a Facebook "Like" button to be allowed to see Fry's Electronics ads.

Do 86,688 people (on April 9, 2012) really like Firestone Complete Auto Care, or did the company offer something to be "liked"?

A few problems with Facebook: Richard Stallman wrote a short list of things wrong with Facebook.

How much information does Facebook keep? Read the December 13, 2011 article, Twenty Something Asks Facebook For His File And Gets It - All 1,200 Pages.

What do people in other countries think? The May 14, 2010 article, Facebook is not your friend gives one idea.

The June 15, 2011 article, The End of Facebook, and the June 14, 2011 article, Is this the beginning of the end for Facebook? give others.

Most people don't understand the problems that may occur. For example, consider the March 28, 2012 article, Teacher's aide says 'no access' to her Facebook; now legal battle with school.

This April 4, 2012 article would be funny if it weren't so sad: Woman arrested for assault based on Facebook photo. Quotes:

"Aston ... was charged ... based solely on a Facebook

Yes, this is serious infrastructure we're talking. However, science journals cost many times more to publish in than open journals (roughly, $8,000 an article less, assuming the typical conversion rates). You don't need to hand that many papers being published before the cost of all the infrastructure needed matches the amount saved. The money then saved from eliminating the bad science then becomes pure profit, which can be ploughed into new work.

I am not sure you have a good sense of how much scientific research costs, how much the changes you're proposing will increase those costs. The cost of publication is almost trivial compared to the costs of actually doing the research. The increased cost of validating the research in the way you suggest will probably be an order of magnitude(or more) larger than the cost of publication.

To pick the suggestion that stands out the most:

A paper should NOT be considered as having been refereed until the work has been reproduced. But what constitutes reproduction of a result? At least some forgeries have involved people taking prior published papers and doing a cut-and-paste on the tables of results. The values now necessarily agree. Is that reproduction of results? No. Conclusion - a copy of the lab notes during the experiments should be placed in escrow with the journal. Once the peer reviewers have also submitted their lab notes, the complete collection is released to a second-stage peer review to determine if the collection suggests anyone "cooked the books". Only when a paper passes second-stage review is it published.

This sounds great, but there are several reasons why this is unworkable.
1) For one, the amount of time that a scientist spends peer reviewing will balloon to be most of their time (and resources).
2) This assumes it is straightforward for another scientist to reproduce the work. In many cases, especially for cutting edge experiments, the paper under review will discuss a very difficult experiment to perform, or even an entirely new experiment. The reviewers will have to learn how to perform the experiment, and acquire or even build new equipment. Without close interaction with the people who wrote the original paper, the exercise will be next to impossible. There are many reasons why they might fail to reproduce the results that do not mean the results are irreproducible.
3) The referees, having performed this, now have a huge head start on everyone else reading the paper, who, if they wish to perform follow up studies or use the method, have to wait for the paper to come out before they can start learning about what was done and begin their own ramp up (which will necessarily involve reproducing the initial results anyway). Even if they only want to do a complementary study, the referee team has had a substantial amount of time to digest the results, and figure out what to do, and even start doing it. This is actually already somewhat of a problem with the referee process already - the difference is that instead of maybe months of a head start they'll have years. You might argue that the use of preprint servers will mitigate this, but then you'll have cases where, before the referee process finishes, someone else will have read the preprint, learned how to do the experiment, validated it, and generated new results, essentially making the whole thing moot.
 

This is why I would argue for a shake-up of how science is funded and how papers are refereed, published and post-publish reviewed.

Science should NOT be corporate-funded, it should be grant-funded -- directly from a scientific organization like NIST, or indirectly via university (or other educational) departments. Corporations should be entitled to push money into a grant pool and should also be entitled to suggest problems to study, but there should be absolutely NO link between the providers of the money and the providers of the science. Scientists MUST be free to say a claim is wrong, obtain negative results or otherwise get results corporations aren't going to like. Sorry, the universe doesn't give a flying what your CEO says.

A paper should NOT be considered as having been refereed until the work has been reproduced. But what constitutes reproduction of a result? At least some forgeries have involved people taking prior published papers and doing a cut-and-paste on the tables of results. The values now necessarily agree. Is that reproduction of results? No. Conclusion - a copy of the lab notes during the experiments should be placed in escrow with the journal. Once the peer reviewers have also submitted their lab notes, the complete collection is released to a second-stage peer review to determine if the collection suggests anyone "cooked the books". Only when a paper passes second-stage review is it published.

Next, there need to be central scientific libraries that collect ALL journals (regardless of obscurity), ALL reviewed lab notes, etc, making that information available to absolutely anyone, with PROPER linkage between research (Semantic Web has nothing on this!). Journals will claim they need to make a profit -- fine, embargo new publications for N months after pay-per-view publication. Since I'm arguing for quality indexing, and given that takes time, such a library can't publish instantly anyway.

What to do with negative results, though? Journals hate publishing those. So, have the central funding agencies ALSO fund an "open journal" that ONLY publishes negative results. Journals can't complain that it's competing, since there's no overlap.

Ok, but even with all of that, nobody has time to read every paper and certainly nobody has time to go back and correlate current science with past papers even if all this information was available. Doesn't matter. If there's a central store of everything, and that everything is properly linked up, the reasoners that have already been written for Semantic Web logic will work on those links to determine if the data is internally consistent. That information can be passed back to the funding agencies to determine what experiments are needed (if any) to identify what results are good, what ones are fraud and what ones are merely incompetent.

This sort of framework is relatively open (anyone can join as a publisher, anyone can join as a researcher, anyone can throw money into the pool), but more importantly the information is open and the information lifecycle is a closed loop. Even if the majority of past data is bad in any given field, this system would make bad data unsustainable because it can't pass through a two-stage review anything like as easily as it can a one-stage because the criteria differ, and even if it did get through, it then has to handle an automated consistency check.

Yes, this is serious infrastructure we're talking. However, science journals cost many times more to publish in than open journals (roughly, $8,000 an article less, assuming the typical conversion rates). You don't need to hand that many papers being published before the cost of all the infrastructure needed matches the amount saved. The money then saved from eliminating the bad science then becomes pure profit, which can be ploughed into new work.

I don't see how simply being a theocracy automatically makes it "better", and death penalty for adultery and stoning may seem grotesque to a Western mind, but to a society that accepts and considers that to be just, well, that's their choice. Having spoken to Iranians, they don't have a problem with either punishment, as they consider those "crimes" to be undermining of the social fabric.

Don't even attempt to claim the moral high ground when it comes to justice as delivered from the state. Modern legal systems are no better (arguably worse) than the systems that went before them. Theyshoot people with no cause, blatantly imprison people for no valid reason and deliberately frames its own people for military ends. Not to mention such famous institutions as Guantanamo and those black op torture programs carried out by the CIA.

But wait, we have democracy I hear you say? If you call the circus that is the two party system "democracy", then I'm a flee on a baboon's arse. There's no meaningful difference between the parties, and on those occasions where they promise to fix the mistakes of the previous administration ("I'll close Guantanamo" said Barak), if the people actually give them the chance to carry out the promise, they simply renege when the time comes.

I think it's time the so-called "Free World" got off its moral high horse and recognised that it is no better than the barbaric hordes it's fighting against. Indeed, when viewed from the Other Side, we're the barbaric hordes.

Perhaps it was a play on that commercial which claimed SUVs support terrorism because gas profits in part go towards terrorists?

I think Bush started that meme in 2002.

If you quit drugs, you join the fight against terror in America.

Seriously.. has democracy been redefined to mean "corporate state"?

Have you seen the laws that the UK has passed about the London olympics at the behest of the IOC? Criminalizing "unauthorized association" with the games? That's right, actually making it a criminal offense that the police will try to track down. All to protect the "sponsors", who pay about $800 million of the multi-billion-dollar price tag.

The modern Olympics are a cesspool of corruption hiding under the auspices of Sport.

In return we Euros will get an extra helping of Credit Default Swaps (e.g. I hear Narvik could do with some more "money")

And we keep the right to pay for our petrol in US$ instead of .. erhm.. sending € s to Iran.

A man was convicted of a minor offence for refusing to obey a police instruction to leave a green space on which an olympic practice pitch was to be built. He was then served a further order banning him from going anywhere near anything connected with the Olympics.

"The asbo, which will be either confirmed or overturned by magistrates at the start of May, prohibits Moore from going within 100 yards of any Olympic-related venue, "route" or the home of participants, officials or spectators, or approaching any road where the Olympic torch will pass that day."

That means a pretty large area. Since he lives in London and cannot possibly know where the homes of all these numerous people are, it seems to mean that he can be arrested for leaving his house.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/apr/17/protester-receives-olympic-asbo

Except it most definitely is a term used in the UK - from the Guardian.

http://www.speedcam.co.uk/gatso2.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/sep/07/transport.ukcrime

Has either copied or inspired brin

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/17/tim-berners-lee-monitoring-internet

While certain Christian idiots have done things like bomb abortion clinics (thereby killing both doctors and those seeking abortions), I ask if you've ever seen one try to poison a school full of children for being taught evolution? I thought not.

How about a Christian who shot and killed 77 people, mostly children, at a summer school, in what he calls a Knights Templar operation carried out to defend Christians, and who has today in court said that the deliberate killing of children was justified because they were not 'non-political children' ?

It is known that some areas have been better surveyed and thus have a better accuracy. Compared to the area beside it will show as lines.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2009/feb/20/sun-atlantis-google-ocean

/C

The drug dealers still need to pay their rent and buy their groceries, and they cannot do that with Bitcoin.

The big boys just use stuff like Wachovia/Wells Fargo and Bank of America: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-06-29/banks-financing-mexico-s-drug-cartels-admitted-in-wells-fargo-s-u-s-deal.html
A few more details here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs

Wachovia admitted it didn't do enough to spot illicit funds in handling $378.4 billion for Mexican-currency-exchange houses from 2004 to 2007. That's the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money-laundering law, in U.S. history -- a sum equal to one-third of Mexico's current gross domestic product.

Must have been really difficult to notice the flow of 378 billion over 3 years?

Or maybe not:

"It's the banks laundering money for the cartels that finances the tragedy," says Martin Woods, director of Wachovia's anti-money-laundering unit in London from 2006 to 2009. Woods says he quit the bank in disgust after executives ignored his documentation that drug dealers were funneling money through Wachovia's branch network.

If you're going to make those drugs illegal you should make the money laundering illegal AND enforce those laws. No wrist-slaps. You see the Feds doing anything that would make the Banks change?

"There's no capacity to regulate or punish them because they're too big to be threatened with failure," Blum says. "They seem to be willing to do anything that improves their bottom line, until they're caught."

That's complete bullshit. All you have to do is throw those involved into prison. Keep the bank running and let others take over the jobs. I'm sure the bank can figure out who was involved in the 300 billion. If the bank can't then the people responsible for keeping track should go to prison, just for criminal negligence.

They seem able to throw the small fry into prison:

All three Oropezas pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Brownsville to drug and money-laundering charges in March and April 2008. Oscar Oropeza was sentenced to 15 years in prison; his wife was ordered to serve 10 months and his daughter got 6 months.

So in my opinion this shutting down of narcotics stores is just an expensive and pointless show.

As long as there exists a concept of privacy, that in itself is a form of intellectual property.

No, it's not. The concepts and reasons for its existence are completely different. You can have privacy and not have intellectual property, and vice versa. You've set up a false dilemma here.

Even though the reasons for their existence are different, the concepts are not completely independent - for a different aspect of closely related issues, see:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/mar/02/censorship-inseperable-from-surveillance

The world may change to one in which non-DRMed/IP work is more valuable to society as a whole, and the author, than DRMed/IP work, but I think DRM/IP will continue to be valuable to society as a whole for some time in many areas, including arts and entertainment.

Sure, why can't you host your notes at something like http://www.guardian.co.uk/JGeary/CookieStudy.html?

Then just keep uploading new iterations of the page.

And I figured out part of what was bothering me. You're asking for "data for research" but your initial article is "shadowed" - it reads like "give us data and we'll figure out what we want to write about".

Write two versions of your story: the Mass Market one "Look, it's 2012, we found all these cookies! They're evil!" and the other with a FAR More rigorous approach. (I'll let you off for not being a PHD academic, but tell us something we don't know - but remember your audience! I'm in the LOWER 50% and I already run Adblock and Ghostery and Collusion (from 2 months ago!) with screen shots of who Ghostery blocks. Chops that you said you want to do some "old time journalism" - then dig into the meat! "Obfuscated flash objects, zombie cookies, Firefox's Do Not Track vs it actually being followed, etc."

Regards,

--Tao

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/15/web-freedom-threat-google-brin

Note that he was talking less about "government" in general than about those of China, Iran, and Saudia Arabia.

Let's put it this way.

Ai Weiwei, freedom activist in China who's been detained for challenging the communist government, says the iPhone is the product of a free country:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2012/apr/16/china-censorship-internet-freedom?newsfeed=true

Now, that's not to say that closed source actually makes you more free (the paradox would be a bit too much), but it does underscore that there's actually a political schism that's the opposite of what the Americans shrieking "Android is ffffffffreedom!" are all on about. In China, the iPhone isn't just the esteemed brand, the equivalent of a Givenchy or Mercedes-Benz, it represents the new and better life, the real economic and social freedoms the people want. Android isn't inherently oppressive, but it's the only mobile OS an oppressive government would choose right now.

As I like to tell fellow geeks: stop pretending that you're taking a political stand by choosing Android. It's just code. Real freedom is seeking out better living conditions, demanding your civil liberties, protesting, even starting revolutions. Richard Stallman is actually the most enslaved, limited geek on Earth, because he refuses to use so many things on the principle of "free" software that he's useless in real life and trapped by his own ideology.

"The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of (1) governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, (2) the entertainment industry's attempts to crack down on piracy, and (3) the rise of "restrictive" walled gardens (such as Facebook and Apple), which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms". link

There, fixed that for you.

"The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of (1) governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, (2) the entertainment industry's attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of "restrictive" walled gardens such as (3) Facebook and (4) Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms". link

As to your compaint about the denalists... that is valid. However, what happens when both involve themselves in politics is that they become equal and thus cancel each other out.

How does that help your cause if you're nullified? You can't claim a position of superiority to a biased entity when you're biased yourself. You have to be objective if you want to claim that. And the price of objectivity is cutting all ties with all political groups and standing on principle alone.

If you can't do that then you can't claim to be with science. Science doesn't care who wins the next election. The republicans and democrats do care. If you take sides then you're not objective.

As to your request for a citation regarding the IPCC... This was common knowledge and all over the main press.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/20/ipcc-himalayan-glaciers-mistake

That is the Guardian, one of the most left wing papers in England reporting that the IPCC is admitting the error.

If you blindly dismiss what everyone else says then you're no longer a rational player. You're just a foaming at the mouth zealot.

Listen. I am being exceedingly reasonable and patient with you.

As to your reference to anyone that doesn't agree on AGW as a denier which is a reference to holocaust deniers... you label yourself with that rather then insult me. You say for all the world you're a tool. A mindless implement for the use of another's hand.

Use your own words or it will be obvious that not only are you parroting the words of another but that you're not even expressing your own thoughts. That someone else's opinions have been grafted into your mind without consideration. THINK FOR YOURSELF.

is to accept the fact that terrorism is extremely effective even if it fails. it builds police states and makes everyday things like travel difficult at the expense of the target nation. it forces them to divert energy and resources into possibilities and not actualities.

a better solution is to stop this "war on terror" crap and pay closer attention to what it is exactly we do that leaves a group of people so determined with nothing left to lose that they will kill thousands of your innocent civillians.
should you consider Osama Bin Laden the cause of the terrorist attacks against america, here are his demands: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver
now, while some of them are outlandish so are some promises from a politician seeking to gain or maintain an elected office. and so to have our demands on the middle eastern region been for the past 30 years. regime change, cia government overthrow, perpetually cheap oil, proxy wars, military bases at the expense of the indigenous citizens, propping up dictatorial regimes and the list goes on. But Bin Laden asked for some rather reasonable things as well that we could have done.
1. stop treating israel like some sort of king among theives. if their only justification for their city is rooted in religious text, thats fine for them. They should not have the right to force that opinion on other nations however and by virtue of their creation should at least attempt to get along with them instead of bombing the hell out of them semi-annually. the bombs, helicopters, and american artillery are what hes complaining about. our complicit enforcement of the palestinian 'warsaw ghetto' could probably be eliminated and save the tax payers a few billion dollars a year.

another quote, "You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of you international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world." Well, yeah. The carter doctrine sort of mandates we do that. our free market policy at the hands of the plutocracy has become more reliant on war as a revenue source and as a big stick lately, and we could probably reign that in.

he complains about our sanctions against iraq, how we support countries like egypt and syria despite the fact they routinely murder their own people. the most contentious place in the middle east for alot of muslims is jerusalem, and we stuck a goddamn embassy there.
im not saying the guys a doctoral scholar here; the rest of his argument is based largely on the same religious crap our evangelicals push. Im just saying we could have done maybe 25 things in the middle east differently after the 9/11 attacks that would have negated the strip searches, pat downs, border searches, and other security theater that are killing the "land of the free."

Since you probably won't believe a US source. Here's proof that the US gives lots of aid everywhere.

World's most charitable countries. US is #1

The North Korean dictatorship pursues nuclear and missile weapons while its people starve. It maintains order with torture, arbitrary executions and a network of prison/slave labour camps. It sells nuclear and missile weapons technology to anyone who'll buy, making the world a more dangerous place. It is a very, very nasty regime. It blackmails countries into sending food aid by making promises to change, and then breaking them --- and aid is diverted to the military anyway. So yeah, anyone in their right mind doesn't like them.

Here's some light reading:
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/24/us/north-korean-refugees/index.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/north-koreas-hidden-gulag/2012/04/12/gIQASJP3CT_story.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/16/escape-north-korea-prison-camp

Certainly true in the uk, and its own hierarchy is well used. Companies tend to sit on .co.uk ie. The Guardian (although companies are the ones most likely to go elsewhere if needed), universities sit on .ac.uk i.e. University Of Manchester, health related sit on .nhs.uk i.e. NHS Direct, charities seem to sit on .org.uk i.e. The Mens Health Forum, and government websites sit on .gov.uk i.e.HRMC

True there are people who abuse it, but generally you can be assured that if you are on for example ac.uk, it really is an academic institute you are on and not some fraudulent university.

Thats primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa not the Arab world.

wrong, wrong, wrong.

Slightly OT, but you know how Iran complained how the London 2012 Olympics logo spells the word "Zion", and you know how Iran has just recently blocked the London 2012 Olympic website... well, I'm wondering if using a company called Interxion might just be taking the piss out of Iran a little bit?!

Apple tries to produce good products (even though they fail a lot at that), but generally honors the warranty.

They also try to produce products that are extremely difficult for a consumer to service or repair themselves.

Apple was the first to fully adopt industry standards like USB and Thunderbolt, while creating their own industry standards like IEEE1394 (FireWire) and OpenCL.

Show me an iPhone with micro-USB connector. Apple actually voluntarily agreed to conform to the new EU standard that all phones should be chargeable by micro-USB, then "conformed" by releasing a micro-USB to 30-pin adapter (available as a separate purchase, of course).

They were the first cellphone maker to use the 3.5mm audio connector.

See Motorola ROKR, released 2006 - and I don't cite that as the first phone to use a 3.5mm connector, just one example which pre-dates the iPhone by over a year. I'm quite sure there are earlier examples.

I've often drawn parallels between Sony and Apple, and as others have already said here, I think what Sony is going through now is only foreshadowing what will happen to Apple.

There is no genuine meaningful support for any theocratic movement in the United States except in the fever swamps of the imagination on the left and among some deluded atheists.

I respectfully disagree. A plurality of the voting populace wanted a man who literally said he spoke to God and believed he was divinely inspired or on a mission from God in the office of President, and to lead the country in a fashion after that ideal. Theocracy is a form of government in which the official policy is to be governed by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided. We elected such a person... twice... into the role of President. Therefore, there is meaningful support for a theocracy in the United States. Q.E.D.

Okay...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/11/genetically-modified-glowing-cats

Fluorescent cats. Designed, no?

There are many other such examples. I suspect you'll have some sort of reply such as "yeah but that was recently". That would again give is a debates as to "when", not "if".

The whole idea of Android is provide Google with access to a market from which it would otherwise be excluded. So what Google makes on Android is still a whole lot more than what it makes on iPhones.

With Android now looking to expand across the whole computer spectrum including, shock horror, the desktop. That gives Google access to the whole market, regardless of the efforts of Apple and of course M$.

I am not sure which hole you have been burrowed under over the last few weeks, but the statement that "...what Google makes on Android is still a whole lot more than what it makes on iPhones." is completely false... On the contrary. Google makes 4 time more revenue on iOS than it does on Android (Google's Android has generated just $550m since 2008) and that is before one even takes into account the cost of developing, maintaining and supporting Android.

If it bleeds, it leads. The media is a bunch of ghouls when it comes right down to it.

A proud few choose to rise above mere feeding on the already dead...

Are you surprised? Look back at the Texas textbook controversy from a couple of years back. The most interesting bit of information to come out of that for me was that Texas somehow supposedly has in their laws that they are required to promote "free enterprise", among other conservative ideals. Now, I don't have a citation for any such law, but check this article for a quick review: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/16/texas-schools-rewrites-us-history

The relevant quote:

The board is to vote on a sweeping purge of alleged liberal bias in Texas school textbooks in favour of what Dunbar says really matters: a belief in America as a nation chosen by God as a beacon to the world, and free enterprise as the cornerstone of liberty and democracy.

"We are fighting for our children's education and our nation's future," Dunbar said. "In Texas we have certain statutory obligations to promote patriotism and to promote the free enterprise system. [Emphasis mine] There seems to have been a move away from a patriotic ideology. There seems to be a denial that this was a nation founded under God. We had to go back and make some corrections."

You must know that recycling and anthropogenic global warming are anti-god, anti-patriotic, and anti-free enterprise, right?

So, while you may have been indoctrinated in one direction in Minnesota, a direction motivated a real practical reason (we're quickly running out of resources), your friends in Texas were indoctrinated in the opposite direction, motivated by an ideology of "we don't wanna be no godless commies".

They learnt from the best: Topshop, Boots, HSBC (UK)...

My interpretation is that Christianity never really made its peace with sexuality, like more natural religions, from the strange inheretence path of the greek cult of virginity into what was originally a Jewish sect.

There are many scaremongering documentaries and news articles being spewed out about the dangers of porn to teenagers such as this. While I cant argue if there is truth to their claims or not, the real issue seems to be a lack of sex education at school, I certainly don't remember any. Perhaps there is something to your theory about religion, over the years, continually interfering with this process.

Look at theocratic tendencies in the US, and you'll see a similar dynamic, the younger you go, the less likely you are to see Americans who want to unify Church and State.

This is, of course, utter nonsense. There is no genuine meaningful support for any theocratic movement in the United States except in the fever swamps of the imagination on the left and among some deluded atheists. Unlike Christianity, unifying church and state is a central tenet of Islam. That is what the Caliphate was, until it was disestablished 90 years ago, and what Islamist extremists want to reestablish today.

Read Bin Laden's Letter to America. He demanded that Americans convert to Islam, and substitute Sharia law for the Constitution, or he would continue his war on America.

I hope you're joking, but "display in there [sic] offices" suggests you're not, so I'll give you a link: Apple computer sales grow faster than PC sales for five years - but why?" and a number: Q4 2010 Unit Shipments by Product
Desktops: 1.24 million units, up 58 percent from 787,000 units a year earlier. That's five million computers a year.

I'd buy a mac if I could afford one.

How many things actually happened in the entire history of commercial flights before the TSA existed? And why do they still exist in light of that? Sheesh.

Highjackings became a significant problem in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, although they still occur from time to time. Various militant groups, including Palestinian and Communist terrorist organizations, we commonly involved. The rate slowly considerably as airports put in metal detectors, started searching bags, sky marshals took to the air, and police forces with automatic weapons started patrolling the airports. (Sound familiar?) The occasional commando force storming a plane and killing the hijackers also helped dampen the enthusiasm for it, not the mention the famous Operation Thunderbolt - the raid on Entebbe.

That is why you don't keep seeing headlines like these so often:

Mexico Police Storm Hijacked Airplane, Free Crew

17 Killed in Airport Raids by Terrorists at Rome, Vienna : 116 Wounded in Attacks Apparently Aimed at El Al; Palestinians Blamed
December 28, 1985

ROME — Two terrorist teams firing assault rifles and throwing grenades struck minutes apart at the international airports in Rome and Vienna early Friday, leaving 17 dead, including an 11-year-old American girl and three other Americans. At least 116 people were wounded in the bloody attacks.

Officials and eyewitnesses said the attacks appeared aimed at facilities of El Al, the Israeli national airline. Meir Rosenne, Israel's ambassador to the United States, blamed the Palestine Liberation Organization for the slaughter. PLO officials in Vienna, Rome and at PLO headquarters in Tunis, Tunisia, denied responsibility and condemned the attacks.

In Spain, a caller claiming to belong to the "Abu Nidal group," a breakaway faction of the PLO blamed for many earlier terrorist assaults in Europe, telephoned a radio station in Malaga, claiming responsibility for the attacks in the name of his group. There was no way to confirm the claim.

Abu Nidal has been described as a bitter opponent of PLO leader Yasser Arafat, who he is said to consider to be overly moderate in the Arab-Israeli conflict. . . . more

The terrorist I knew - Christopher Hitchens sheds no tears for Abu Nidal, but admits to a small twinge of nostalgia.

The official story - that he had shot himself several times in the head . . .

Abu Nidal Organization (ANO), aka Fatah Revolutionary Council, the Arab Revolutionary Brigades, or the Revolutionary Organization of Socialist Muslims

Belgium: Murders committed for Abu Nidal

Hmm... my preferred paper reported that hardly anyone turned up to the "all Europe" fascist meeting in Copenhagen last week: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/01/english-defence-league-european-summit-aarhus

Anyway, I was born and live in Europe anyway, and I'm not considering moving to the US.

For every person actively cheering this shit on, there are 10 people sitting there watching them do it and not saying a fucking word.

Look at how much power the ultra-religious whackjobs wield in the modern-day GOP right now. They're busily working on rolling back abortion, worker's rights, sex-ed, and the moderate conservatives are just sitting there happily going along, too afraid of the evangelicals to dare standing against them. Shit is fucked up at almost level of government in this country, even down to the municipal level, and our legislators are more worried about making sure that a woman has to go through "counseling" to make sure she wasn't "coerced" into getting an abortion. Planned Parenthood offices are now getting firebombed right here in Wisconsin. Where are all the moderate Republicans going on record decrying this shit? Where are all the moderates saying "Hey, crazy religious nuts, knock it the fuck off!"

Few and far between. Better to tacitly support this idiocy and "beat that 'Muslim' Barack HUSSEIN Obama!!" than to have the courage to actually call out the fucking crazies, right? Why the hell else is someone like Rick Santorum even still in the race? The guy thinks women should be grateful for a pregnancy, even if it is the result of a rape. Where is all the outrage on the right for that bullshit? In the right-wing media? Yeah, nowhere, because again, better to stand united with the crazies than be branded a "soshulist" or "librul" , God Forbid, a "Dumbocrat"...

Political parties in Germany got funding to stop the "Communists" - US funds did flow into Germany.
Small German political parties got funds for new trucks, rallies -
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar
The US invests in people - Latin America, Asia, Africa - the cold war was full of strong friendly dictators, keep going back a few more years...

Oh, no, you're NOT trying THATagain!

It's not the body of the communications that can be trawled, but the headers. The government want to be able to see who is communicating with who, and when. The plan was written about in The Telegraph last monthbut the plans are much older than that. The last Labour government, lover of all things authoritarian, came up with the Interception Modernisation Programme which in its original form would have had details of all electronic communications sent to a central government database. When the government eventually realised that this would be completely impractical they shifted the work to the service providers, who would all have to keep the details of the communications travelling through their networks and give the government access to their database at all times. The service providers realised just how much this would cost and so the government committed £2 billion to cover those costs over ten years. The plan was heavily criticised by the Conservatives, who published a paper titled Reversing the rise of the surveillance state. (Which is still on their website.) It was also criticised backthen by the London School of Economics.The plan was shelved in 2009 after opposition from communications service providers and a realisation that it would not be popular with the public.

After the election, though, the Conservatives decided to resurrect the plan, giving it a new name, theCommunications Capabilities Development Programme. (CCDP) Questions were raised in 2010 bythe Information Commissioner's Officeand it was mentioned in The New Statesman. Now the government are pushing ahead with the CCDP and the queen's speech will say that they intend to introduce legislation to implement the programme as soon as possible.

There are many things wrong with this programme of spying. It is impractical, expensive, a huge violation of our privacy, it places too much power in the hands of government, a government who we cannot trust. Making the full details of who talks to who available will allow security personnel to trawl through our data on fishing trips instead of requiring some basis for suspicion. Combined with the database for Universal Credit, which will be almost as comprehensive as the National IdentityRegisterthat was criticised so much by the Conservatives, and the centralisation of medical records, this provides private information about us all to the government on anunprecedentedscale with huge scope for abuse and for life-destroying mistakes.

If these plans scare you, please write to your MP to tell them your objection to the Communications Capabilities Development Programme. You can use WriteToThem.com to send it if you don't have their details. Pleasesign theOpen Rights Group's petition against government snooping and maybe consider joining the group too.

In addition, an eyewitness, 13-year-old Austin Brown, told police he saw a man fitting Zimmerman's description lying on the grass moaning and crying for help just seconds before he heard the gunshot that killed Martin.

http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/28/10909475-witness-mom-says-police-told-her-trayvon-martin-shooting-wasnt-self-defense

Do you have a link for me?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/30/trayvon-martin-lawyers-evidence-leaks-zimmerman
http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/20/neighbor-trayvon-martin-shooting-wasnt-self-defense/

Like I said, the witness story is inconsistent; the problem is that either side cherry picks the lines that support their case. Which, to me, is a clear indication that this should go to trial, where they can properly examine the evidence, question the witnesses etc

My wife is a musician and we are quite ok without locking the internet down.

Cool. Since you're so pro-sharing... post a link to the mp3s once she releases her music. I'll make sure everyone gets access to it and when she makes $0.0 we'll see how she likes "sharing".

Recording artists from major labels now put their songs on youtube for free and still sell copies.

Wow.. so someone got robbed and he _STILL_ has some money left in his wallet ! What the fuck? See ! He still has money ! Wow ! Isn't that a miracle ! Stealing is good !

You people are so full of shit.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/22/author-raises-1m-self-publish-webcomic

Producers of the fun little web comic known as Order of the Stick have the entire series available for free on their web site, effectively giving it away to anyone who wants to download the individual pages to their computers. But despite this, they still managed to raise $1,000,000 from fans who liked their work enough to support them so they can self publish a collected volume of their series.

Ebay did that with a pop-up store in London. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/dec/01/ebay-pop-up-london-store

CONCLUSIONS. Delayed cord clamping at birth increases neonatal mean venous hematocrit within a physiologic range. Neither significant differences nor harmful effects were observed among groups. Furthermore, this intervention seems to reduce the rate of neonatal anemia. This practice has been shown to be safe and should be implemented to increase neonatal iron storage at birth.

source: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/117/4/e779

For our son we picked "Lotus Birth": don't cut the cord at all but keep the child + placenta together for the time it takes. As for jaundice: it's common (as far as I know) for children to be a little "yellow" after birth. Exposure to a little sun light helps to break this down. Don't let your personal experience cloud your judgement, nor don't Google selectively.

Also, co-sleeping is not as deadly as you tried to make out in your other reply: SIDS happens as often in a cot, and I don't see you panic about a cot. Also, don't mistake co-sleeping for falling drunk or drugged in bed on top of your child, or sleeping on the sofa. See also: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/oct/16/sudden-infant-death-syndrome-children?INTCMP=SRCH