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Every single poll I've seen has more than 95% of iraqis wanting this.

Cite, please. This might pass the Slashdot majority who agrees with your overall point, but some of us have standards.

Why should we be there fighting the desires of the Iraqi people?

Are we? 85% of them are planning to vote in the elections in January. The Bush administration and the military is working hard to make sure it happens.

If our goal was to get rid of Sadam, we've already done that, so why stick around?

Our goal is to bring democracy to the Middle East. It's the only long-term solution to terrorism.

It's not hospitals and food banks that rid the world of terrorism. It's deposing dictators and tyrants that does it.

Oh, the real reason is so we can steal their oil. And I do mean steal.

How much oil have we "stolen" so far? Got numbers?

Plus, most iraqis I've heard interviewed prefer Sadaam to the US. They say things like "at least Sadaam was an Iraqi."

Antecdotal evidence based on "news" reporting from Reuters, no doubt, or possibly Al Jazeera. Every poll I've seen has a large majority of Iraqis glad Saddam is gone, with mixed responses about the future of the country and American occupation. Terrorists (some still insist on calling them "insurgents" even after the discovery of torture chambers in Fallujah) are giving Iraq a very hard time right now, trying to change the minds of the people. And this is the fault of the US?

You know what reporters do? They like to provide "balance" and "conflict" so they go hunt down crusty old former Ba'athists to make statements like, "at least Saddam was an Iraqi." Despite what opinion polls show on that subject, they still think they need 50/50 in the news. (Or worse, given the anti-war attitude amongst the majority of them.)

You really need to get out more. Find out who doesn't like what Kos is saying and read them as well.

I don't watch the show. However, I have read some of the literature on eyewitness testimony and am convinced that eyewitness testimony can be easily manipulated by the manner in which the lawyer phrases the questions or other, subtler prompts. It doesn't matter how certain the witness is that their memory is accurate.

The biggest name in this niche is Elizabeth Loftus, who has written at least one book on the topic: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LOFEYE.html

If a show like this can help to chance the public perception of the value of eyewitness testimony, so much the better.

Did you even RTFA?

Not all of it, no. But it doesn't matter. If the ER he's gone to doesn't admit him and he thinks they're wrong, he needs to go to the ER of a hospital where they're not going to brush him off if he's not a run-of-the-mill disease. And if a place like that doesn't exist in Podunk North Dakota, he needs to go to a real hospital.

I don't know any doctors who would implicitly trust someone's internet self-diagnosis.

Surely someone from the hordes of Ximian or other people in Boston can spot him a bed so he can go to Mass General or something similar in New York.

Prescribing any medication for someone over the phone - especially for an infection refractory to initial medical care is wrong and will do more to hurt Patrick than help him. Believe me. There are proper protocols for this and they work well. Get him to a hospital where weird stuff is regularly seen (any large medical center) and get him into the ER.

Did you even RTFA?

Not all of it, no. But it doesn't matter. If the ER he's gone to doesn't admit him and he thinks they're wrong, he needs to go to the ER of a hospital where they're not going to brush him off if he's not a run-of-the-mill disease. And if a place like that doesn't exist in Podunk North Dakota, he needs to go to a real hospital.

I don't know any doctors who would implicitly trust someone's internet self-diagnosis.

Surely someone from the hordes of Ximian or other people in Boston can spot him a bed so he can go to Mass General or something similar in New York.

Prescribing any medication for someone over the phone - especially for an infection refractory to initial medical care is wrong and will do more to hurt Patrick than help him. Believe me. There are proper protocols for this and they work well. Get him to a hospital where weird stuff is regularly seen (any large medical center) and get him into the ER.

That is why some are looking for lasers

main(a){while(a=~getchar())putchar(~a-1/(~(a|32)/1 3*2-11)*13);}

It seems that a good idea in principle may have resulted in legislation that is not working in practice because of a flawed framework / companies taking advantage (your choice). Not that I agree with the idea of business-method patents in the first place, but this may make the idea behind them clearer.

You can see a picture of the Trojan asteroids here. Jupiter is on the left of the page and revolves counter-clockwise. The trailing Trojans at L5 are 60 degrees behind Jupiter, near the top of the picture and the leading Trojans are, of course, 60 degrees ahead, near the bottom of the page. There are also a smattering of bodies around the L3 point. The Solar-Jovian L3 is closer to Jupiter's orbit than the diagram in the parent post would indicate.

Sometimes, the L4 and L5 Lagrange points of a system are called Trojan points.

This site mentions how the prominent asteroids at the Trojan points are named after characters from the Iliad. One group is named after Greeks, the other after Trojans. Each group also has a "spy" in its midst.

According to this article, my car goes nearly 3c in certain situations:
Physicists Slow Speed of Light

Imagine this: What if the speed of light could be changed surrounding an object? Would moving this field require enough energy to keep the object from moving faster than the slowed speed of light? FTL may be possible by just bending the rules a bit.

From a link off Dr. Faustman's webpage: "The source of the funding for the clinical research activities in the MGH Diabetes Center has come almost entirely from NIH and foundation grants. This funding is ear-marked for specific projects and protocols, allowing little flexibility or opportunity to fund the type of innovative clinical research that the Diabetes Center aims to conduct and provide hope of significant advances. Flexible funds to foster new initiatives, to support researchers who need the funds to pursue innovative approaches and research, are critically needed. Many of the exciting breakthroughs that occur in clinical research and lead to the development of new therapies require this type of initial backing, which is almost never available from government, corporate or foundation sources. Your support can make the difference."

It appears that some of her funding does come from the NIH, although she may want it to be more flexible or something.

From a link off Dr. Faustman's webpage: "The source of the funding for the clinical research activities in the MGH Diabetes Center has come almost entirely from NIH and foundation grants. This funding is ear-marked for specific projects and protocols, allowing little flexibility or opportunity to fund the type of innovative clinical research that the Diabetes Center aims to conduct and provide hope of significant advances. Flexible funds to foster new initiatives, to support researchers who need the funds to pursue innovative approaches and research, are critically needed. Many of the exciting breakthroughs that occur in clinical research and lead to the development of new therapies require this type of initial backing, which is almost never available from government, corporate or foundation sources. Your support can make the difference."

It appears that some of her funding does come from the NIH, although she may want it to be more flexible or something.

That's very true with me. I will buy a CD for one or two songs, then over the course of listening to it, I will grow to love other tracks on the CD that I didn't pay much attention to at first.

That's why when I hear something new that I like, I will download a few tracks by the artist, and if I like him/her, I will buy their CD. I will first look at my used store for it though. I'd happily buy it new from Streetside if the RIAA weren't being such assholes about suing people who share music. If the RIAA would just leave file sharers alone they'd see their sales increase rather than decrease.

Spoilage Rates Are Most Prevalent In Counties With High Concentrations Of Minority Voters. Of the 100 counties with the highest spoilage rates, 67 have black populations above 12%. Of the top 100 counties with the lowest spoilage rates, the reverse is true - only 10 had sizeable black populations, while the population of 70 of the counties was over 75% white. There is also a strong correlation between uncounted ballots and black population; specifically, as the black population in a county increases, the uncounted ballot rate correspondingly increases.

---Full Story here

The ballots aren't counted until after Election Day so officials can confirm the voter's registration and make sure the voter didn't cast a ballot elsewhere. [. . .] Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, the state's chief elections official, told county boards to adhere to a rule that provisional ballots cast by voters in the wrong precincts aren't to be counted - and legions of Republican lawyers were ready to make sure the order was heeded.

---Full Story here

-FL

When you throw something in the garbage, it's still yours. It's not free for the taking.

Not in the USA. Trash is considered 'abandonded property' and is up for grabs.

This program takes current state polling data, calculates the probabilities of the candidates winning each state, and runs through a large number of simulated elections randomly awarding each state to Kerry or Bush in proportion to their state probabilities. What's cool is that I've made it so that you can put in your own polling data and see how it effects the results. If you think there's a national polling bias one way or the other, you can model that, too. At any rate, check it out and pass it along if you like.

2. Atom vs RSS cannot be seen as an evolution, since atom is not backward compatible. If it had been then it would have been the clear successor to RSS. This was a huge mistake of atom's creators. It should have been backwards compatible.

Atom's main goal is to have a well specified unambigious specification. The problem behind RSS is that it is ambigious - so leads to silent data loss - and it took the rather public failure at Reuters for the point to sink in. As such, it is close to impossible for a specification to be both unambigious and backwards compatible with RSS. A clean break results in a cleaner and more implementable specification, especially since we are not loaded with the baggage of previous unreversable mistakes in RSS. Notwithstanding, the "solution" to the Reuters problem now breaks RSS2.0's backward compatibility with RSS0.91.

Even the motivation behind Atom is clear:

Well, let's extend RSS into a new spec then. To keep any backwards-compatibility, we'd have to keep the top-level element as so people would think the format is actually RSS, and this would be really confusing.

Forget about backwards-compatibility. If we're not worried about backwards-compatibility, why are we bothering to keep around the old mistakes of RSS? Why not take this opportunity to fix them so that the future doesn't have to deal with all the kludges necessary to parse RSS today?

2. Atom vs RSS cannot be seen as an evolution, since atom is not backward compatible. If it had been then it would have been the clear successor to RSS. This was a huge mistake of atom's creators. It should have been backwards compatible.

Atom's main goal is to have a well specified unambigious specification. The problem behind RSS is that it is ambigious - so leads to silent data loss - and it took the rather public failure at Reuters for the point to sink in. As such, it is close to impossible for a specification to be both unambigious and backwards compatible with RSS. A clean break results in a cleaner and more implementable specification, especially since we are not loaded with the baggage of previous unreversable mistakes in RSS. Notwithstanding, the "solution" to the Reuters problem now breaks RSS2.0's backward compatibility with RSS0.91.

Even the motivation behind Atom is clear:

Well, let's extend RSS into a new spec then. To keep any backwards-compatibility, we'd have to keep the top-level element as so people would think the format is actually RSS, and this would be really confusing.

Forget about backwards-compatibility. If we're not worried about backwards-compatibility, why are we bothering to keep around the old mistakes of RSS? Why not take this opportunity to fix them so that the future doesn't have to deal with all the kludges necessary to parse RSS today?

(I forgot to log in last time so I'm reposting this under my account this time... D'oh!)

You forgot Spitzer (Link), which is up there today. There have already been more than a few collaborative projects between this space telescope and Hubble.

And on the subject of space telescopes that can see places Earth-based telescopes will never be able to see because of the blocking effects of the atmosphere: Chandra (Link), which can see X-ray sources. This one is my favorite Chandra picture.

(I forgot to log in last time so I'm reposting this under my account this time... D'oh!)

You forgot Spitzer (Link), which is up there today. There have already been more than a few collaborative projects between this space telescope and Hubble.

And on the subject of space telescopes that can see places Earth-based telescopes will never be able to see because of the blocking effects of the atmosphere: Chandra (Link), which can see X-ray sources. This one is my favorite Chandra picture.

You forgot Spitzer (Link), which is up there today. There have already been more than a few collaborative projects between this space telescope and Hubble.

And on the subject of space telescopes that can see places Earth-based telescopes will never be able to see because of the blocking effects of the atmosphere: Chandra (Link), which can see X-ray sources. This one is my favorite Chandra picture.

You forgot Spitzer (Link), which is up there today. There have already been more than a few collaborative projects between this space telescope and Hubble.

And on the subject of space telescopes that can see places Earth-based telescopes will never be able to see because of the blocking effects of the atmosphere: Chandra (Link), which can see X-ray sources. This one is my favorite Chandra picture.

This was the notion behind P3P. Also see Agent: I dont think it means, what you think it means.

Abstract

As the deployment of computer agents that act on behalf of users grow, so do questions regarding the legitimacy and legal standing of computer based agreements. I note the use of the terms "agents" and "proxy" in the technical discipline and argue that a more explicit understanding of these terms is necessary to properly address the convergence of technical and legal issues related to electronic commerce. Unfortunately, much of the legal literature on the question of computer agency is preoccupied with concepts of intelligence, consideration, and intention within a computer program; this is because these concepts are found in law. However, these concepts are premature in a technical context -- regardless of hand-waiving about artificial intelligence. I provide a simple technical explanation of computer agents and proxies, as well as a brief etymology of those terms in the technical context. I conclude by pointing out some problems of making automated agreements on the Web in hopes that this small contribution will permit legal analysis to focus on pressing issues of the day.

Professor Melton, the person asking Harvard's permission to make embryonic stem cells, is not trying to clone humans. His research is focused on curing juvenile diabetes.

Previous research in his lab has demonstrated conclusively that there are no adult (by which I mean post-embryonic) stem cells in the pancreas which can be used to make replacement beta cells (the cells in the pancreas which produce insulin). Therefore the notion of using the approved stem cell lines to cure juvenile diabetes is a non-starter. During a talk during this year's Whitehead Symposium Melton suggested the Bush administration's policy on stem cell research would have him work using stem cells that do not exist.

Because Melton is a HHMI Investigator, he is able to do some embryonic stem cell research using entirely private funds in a lab separate from Harvard, if I remember correctly. I assume that this recent request is an attempt to expand this existing research.

Lest anyone question Melton's motives in this research, he has at least one child with juvenile diabetes, which is the reason he switched his lab's focus from straight embyonic development research to finding specific cures for juvenile diabetes.

Harvard likely doesn't need it - they've got a fairly big endowment.

Sorry, but I can't find anything credible with that argument. I think the vast majority of people download for one of two reasons. They either already like the song and won't pay money for the single (or the CD it comes on), or they are trying out new music for the first time that they wouldn't hear otherwise.

Whenever I've downloaded new music, and found it worth listening to, I've *always* bought the CD. Maybe I'm in the minority, but online sharing of music in my experience always leads to more purchases, not fewer.

Harvard University will back me up on this.

More seriously, I'm not sure what they might do with this, but their recent Mickey Mouse decision doesn't make it look very encouraging.

A couple of years ago the Harvard University Centre for Astronomy had one of it's collections of technical publications scanned in order to be put online. But to make the material actually usable they had to launch a program over the net for volunteers (predominantly amateur astronomers) to view the scanned pages and enter, by hand, the necessary bibligraphical information (authors, paper titles, etc), as well as to QC things (look for duplicated pages, missing pages, work out which of several scans of fold-out drawings is the best image, etc).

The scanning step was trivial (probably lots of bored students on minimum wages, getting brownie points from their professors); the INDEXING process has been going on for over 2 years now and is not yet finished.
NASA ADS at SAO: Historical scans currently in the ADS

I agree with Dave Winer, the author of the RSS format. ....

It seems that Netscape was also involved.

CC.

Because it has already occured to a few different folks. :)

About a week ago Lawrence Lessig mentioned a new book called Promises to Keep . The book, written by Prof. William Fisher, chronicles a bit of entertainment industry history and the various "alternatives we face for protecting copyright in a digital age" (to use Lessig's phrase).

Chapter Six is freely available (66-page PDF), and in that chapter an alternative compensation system proposed by Fisher (not entirely unlike Von Lohmann's from the main article) is outlined in excruciating detail. This detail includes specific cost and savings estimates.

What makes Fisher's proposal interesting is that he also includes a mechanism to allow derivative works to be created, and for both deriving and derived authors to be compensated.

- Neil Wehneman

Can you provide a reference on this? In the U.S., Section 107 of the Copyright Act states:

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include-- (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

This refers to "a copyrighted work" and doesn't differentiate between software and "artistic" works. (Though one might argue about how to even define the difference.) The "notwithstanding" of sections 106 and 106A refers to the protections that copyright gives. So, unless there's something I missed, fair use applies equally to software as to any other copyrighted work. If there is another section or law that negates this, I'd be interested in a reference.

'Gorillas in Our Midst,' Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris, vol. 28, Perception, 1999, pages 1059-74.

It was even mentioned on CSI Season 2 Show 32, the one were the three woman rob the casino:

Gil Grissom : A Harvard professor conducted an experiment. Asked a bunch of students to watch a basketball game - count the number of times the ball was passed.

Captain Jim Brass : Yeah? Groundbreaking.

Gil Grissom : During the game a person dressed in a gorilla suit ran across the court. Afterward, the professor asked the students if they noticed the gorilla. Fifty percent responded, "what gorilla?"

Captain Jim Brass : That's wonderful, Gil. If I see a gorilla, I'll arrest it.

is there a version of google local for PDA's? that would be more than a little useful for people with wireless enabled pda's like blackberry etc. also, i am really disturbed by the inability of the american slashdotters to use the term "eh" in a sentence. for information on how to properly use "eh", see this article at harvard.edu

Check out this page. He says the biggest factor is rolling resistance due to uneven terrain, even on the road. However, the gearing may be part of the answer: a smaller wheel requires a higher gear ration, and higher gear ratios are less efficient.

You know, it might be worthwhile to write things like libjpeg in safe languages.

Ocaml is pretty fast, but I realize that not everyone wants the runtime. How about cyclone? It's an extended version of C that's backwards compatible with C, but can pick up unsafe errors at compile time -- sounds pretty much like what folks might want.

I am sorry but your story is more myth than fact.

I would actually be inclined to give the grandparent the benefit of the doubt for his story. Sure, 'modern' rotary dial phones are good at mechanically limiting how fast the dial returns to its starting position, but I wouldn't be surprised if there existed older phones that weren't quite as resistant to the described abuses. Even though it would generate the appropriate number of pulses on the line, it's possible that more closely-spaced pulses would come too fast for the telphone company's equipment to handle.

Remember, the switches were electromechanical beasts--Strowger switches--that could only tick through digits so quickly. Some neat pictures here, and an explanatory note here. So slightly erratic spacing of pulses is well-tolerated--the switch still advanced one digit per pulse. Pulses too close together will fail, because the mechanical components of the switch won't keep up.

Modern switches convert the current pulses to digital signals, which obviously can be parsed and routed at effectively unlimited speeds (compared to the rate at which they can be dialled).

I wouldn't be surprised if the person in the story had actually physically damaged the phone components through forcing the dial that way, too.

And before anyone asks about evidence for young people's concern over the Iraq war, here's a recent survey

• Babson College Wellesley
• Bentley College Waltham
• Berklee College of Music Boston
• Boston Architectural Center Boston
• Boston College Newton
• Boston Conservatory, The Boston
• Boston University Boston
• Brandeis University Waltham
• Bunker Hill Community College Boston
• Cambridge College Cambridge
• Emerson College Boston
• Emmanuel College Boston
• Fisher College Boston
• Harvard University Cambridge
• Hellenic College Brookline
• Lesley College Cambridge
• MIT Cambridge
• Massachusetts College of Art Boston
• Massachusetts College of Pharmacy
  and Allied Health Sciences Boston
• Mount Ida College Newton
• New England Conservatory of Music Boston
• New England School of Law Boston
• Northeastern University Boston
• Pine Manor College Chestnut Hill
• Radcliffe College Cambridge
• Simmons College Boston
• Suffolk University Boston
• Tufts University Medford
• Wellesley College Wellesley
• Wentworth Institute of Technology Boston
• Wheelock College Boston

And I hope you never get it. Yeah, it doesn't kill you right away, it just lowers your standard of living the rest of your shortened lifespan. Then you add the fact that there may already be a cure for Type 1 diabetes that may take year reach anyone because of the billions of dollars being made from the disease and it's just a ton of laughs. Ha ha.

I used to get the combinations for Masterlock combo locks in college all the time.

This site has the full details:
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~hillson/master_ lock.html

Well, he did. The only thing is it wasn't a Master lock but some crap no-name lock made in Taiwan or someplace. The Master method didn't work on it but I decided to see if I could do it by touch (never tried before).

Two minutes later he went back to his office and found his coffee cup padlocked to his chair.

I got some strange looks after that...

The safest and best thing is to use a real VM, like the JVM. Another alternative is to use something like Cyclone which also doesn't allow unsafe memory operations.

To all the ditto-heads who keep on saying "if it's not in C, it's too slow", wasn't there just an article on Slashdot a few days ago about full-motion video players written in pure Java? Surely a jpeg here and there shouldn't be too much of a problem?

I haven't heard of any lensing based on filament structures, but the folks who do what is called "weak lensing" might have some statistical arguments that can correlate their results with the likely (or unlikely) presence of filaments.

It seems to me there is a freedom in programming that is like the freedom in art and that arises from the fact that the full range of abstract mathematics is available to the programmer, rather than just that which will work in the real world and because there is an immediacy of implementation and an intimacy between idea and expression like that which there is between composer and piano keyboard. Software patents are generally directed toward the utilitarian aspects of programming - it's fundamental techniques and ideas, yet strangely it is obvious to everyone that such kinds of patents if applied to literature or cinematography or music would have only a detrimental effect.

It is interesting to wonder if one day artists (or publishers of art) might foolishly decide to embark on a patent land grab as is occurring in the software world. If you think that is not possible because of the technicity/usefulness requirements of patents, consider the Pollock techniques of splatter painting at a certain constant average fractal dimension, or the Da Vinci low frequency technique of causing a sense of elusivity and enigma. (Check out Semir Zeki's book; "Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain" and much other work on the science of perception). Recent work in analysis of music too has resulted in (among other things) researchers claiming to have found techniques for generating 'hit songs' automatically. It can only be a matter of time before one cannot engage in any activity at all without infringing someone else's exclusive right to use the techniques associated with it. :)

Tha printer isn't actually 3D, it only has 2 axis and the chocolate is only one layer thick.

Although there are plenty of actual 3D printers.

w00t, my first post using DVORAK.

If you're interested into this kind of things (how IP is a temporary monopoly designed to reward authors without inhibiting innovation) do yourself a favor and go read on some of the amicus briefs sent in support of the Eldred V. Ashcroft case (the infamous Mickey Mouse Amendment). Yes, enlight me!.

Here is a peak

The main economic benefit from copyright protection is to give an author an incentive to create new works. The size of this economic incentive depends upon the present value of compensation, as anticipated by the author at the time of creation. [...] By reducing the set of building-block materials freely available for new works, the [extension of the copyright term for existing and future works] raises the cost of producing new works and reduces the number created.

1. There were other formats like CDF, but right from the start, Dave promoted syndication where it mattered, in the nascent Blogosphere, not as part of the doomed "Push" bubble.
2. Dave and the W3C differ greatly in their vision of what syndication formats should look like. Dave favors simplicity, whereas W3C wants a powerful format to build the entire "semantic web".
3. Both Dave and the W3C people are interested in exercising control over the leading syndication format. That is, we are talking about a power struggle.

I for one prefer to applaud the achievements these groups have made to dwelling on their mistakes, and personally prefer Dave's vision of simplicity to RDF. While I like the expressiveness of RDF, I find it too complex to communicate to the average web developer. I prefer simple, standardized, application-specific XML schemas.

Dave has proposed to merge Atom and RSS and make them an IETF-controlled standard. This sounds like a good idea, so we would end up with two formats (W3C's RSS and Dave/Atom's RSS-Atom-merge) that are so different as to be irreconcilable.

Before Netscape developed RSS, Dave created the scriptingNews format. Dave/Userland also took up RSS development after Netscape stopped working on it. See RSS history.

2. Well there is still the medical aspect and the plant animal growth experiments to run. I want my new pharms :p if the drug companies what to be in LEO (once they know what can be done - why the agencies need to do it first) then suddenly we'll have space elevators and hotels and all sorts of things up there. Pharms is the most likely high profit commercial application for near space in our life times.

3. Now null/void.

4. Shuttle was built long before ISS saw the light of day. The original plans for shuttle were to dock with a station (not the ISS no one thought the American and Russians could share a station back then) in LEO which would then have a trasfer vehicle to lunar orbit which would dock with a station in low lunar orbit there would then be LEMs down to the surface. This was generally all based around harvesting He3. It was presented at the 1984 Public Symposium. a collection of the papers presented can now be read here.

5. Only minor ones, and Linux can't run on my workstation without minor alterations but it doesn't stop me doing it if I really want to :)

6. Yep got that one, perhaps I didn't explain what I was trying to get at clearly enough, sorry. I was trying to say that while it's all very well saying what we need, it is much harder to actually do it. Its really difficult to get funding for space activies, and if you screw up once you don't get funded again. So people are loathed to take big risks. Sad but true.

7. We agree on this. :) I think we shouldn't stop going to LEO in order to go other places tho - we should do both! :)

I strongly suggest you take a moment to read Salon, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, or The Washington Post.

Ah, yes. Salon is a great source of unbiased news. The others aren't nearly as biased as Salon, but they aren't exactly fair and impartial either. Incidentally, I've read most of the articles in the Washington Post and New York Times and their "debunking" of the Swift Boat Veterans claims isn't exactly convincing.

Indeed, Thurlow won a Bronze Star for his actions in rescuing a comrade under enemy fire.

Why don't you go to the source on this one and check out Thurlow's response. In all likelihood the language from his citation came directly from John Kerry's after action report since Kerry seems to be the only one that filed a report describing the incident.

Also, Kerry's citation claims that they were under constant small arms and automatic weapons fire for 5000 meters while they fled the scene. I'm sorry, but if that were true they would probably all be dead. Also, how did they rescue and repair the damaged PCF-3 boat if they were under constant fire?

-- Why won't he (kerry) release all his medical and other service records?

He has. The only records he has not released are his review papers.

Um, no he hasn't. Look for "Standard Form 180" and "FOIA"; the Washington Post only received six of about 100 pages. And "review papers" seem to be pretty important if we're trying to figure out if this guy deserves to be President.

Was Kerry in Cambodia? Almost certainly - Larry Thurlow, one of his chief accusers, was recorded telling Nixon that he (Thurlow) had been in Cambodia.

It was actually John O'Neill, not Thurlow, that was recorded speaking to Nixon. Also, O'Neill, unlike Kerry, does a pretty good job of clarifying the recording. Keep in mind that we don't get to hear the entire conversation from the recording.

Also, the statements you provided are both 1) nothing like what Kerry has said about Cambodia, and 2) don't address Kerry's lies about Cambodia. This isn't just a small, little claim. This is something that Kerry says was "seared -- seared -- in [him]." He has repeated this story many times for over 15 years at least, and now that it has been proven to be a total fabrication, he has been forced to change it.

First, you are stretching the term "served with him". You mean "were also in Vietnam during the war".

No, I mean served WITH him. Like on his boat, next to his boat during combat, and as his commanding officers. While not all of the Swift Boat Veterans served as closely with Kerry, I'm addressing and talking about those that did. These guys (the vocal ones of the SBVT) were eye witnesses to Kerry and their accounts should be heard.

Kerry's campaign has been forced to backtrack on his fraudulent Christmas in Cambodia story and they have now been forced to backtrack on his first Purple Heart, admitting that his wound may have been self-inflicted. From what I've seen the Swift Boat Vets have been solid in their claims and have forced Kerry to backtrack. This goes to show that there is at least some tr