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What do you call a hockey Mom that preaches 'Abstinence only'? ... A grandma!

If the grandma you're thinking of is the former Governor of Alaska, you're thinking wrong:

"I'm pro-contraception, and I think kids who may not hear about it at home should hear about it in other avenues," she said during a debate in Juneau. . . . Palin spokeswoman Maria Comella said the governor stands by her 2006 statement, supporting sex education that covers both abstinence and contraception.

But don't let the facts get in the way of The Narrative.

Microsoft is a bad company, but MICROSOFT IS IN NO WAY part of the same group of guys as Blackwater.

Microsoft is the engine by which Gates built his fortune through illegal means, which was excused by John Ashcroft. The money is now controlled by the Gates foundation, which is in turn controlled by Bill Gates. The Gates Foundation is not there to help people. It is an engine by which Western IP law is being spread; in order to receive vaccinations you must provide patent and other IP protection, especially to pharmaceutical companies. If you don't see how this is just part of the agenda of spreading false market capitalism across the world By Any Means Necessary, then it's you that's "seriously mental". Of course, you're just a small Part Of The Problem; nearly everyone else thinks the way you do, too. That's a big part of how we got where we are today; a lack of critical thinking.

I4I said they would have sued sooner but were having financial problems.

I checked out the i4i web site. My impression is that i4i had financial problems because they were a dinky little company with almost no significant products. I suspect they had no more than one software developer, and were probably lucky to stay in business all this time. I doubt MS even bothered to ever meet with them. Their business, so far as I can tell, doesn't even significantly benefit from the patented idea, and in no way competes with Microsoft. I don't see how Microsoft's patent infringement hurt them in the least.

In other words, i4i is simply patent-trolling. A lot of tiny companies do this when they have hard times.

Would it be MS who said "well, we had a business meeting with them, lets implement their plan without them and run them out of business"?

Yes, this is the traditional Microsoft business strategy. There are lots of cases where they did this:

- These guys were the disk-compression company MS drove under. They won $120M in a lawsuit considered one of the best examples ever of how software patents can protect innovation.
- Casualties include WordPerfect, and QuattroPro

There are also a lot of patent trolls sucking the life out of Microsoft:

- They were ordered to pay $521M to the "inventor" of browser plug-ins
- They were ordered to pay $367M to Alcatel/Lucent in some sort of user interface patent nonsense.
- They were ordered to pay $388M to Uniloc, for a patent about registering software during installation.
- Korea is one of the few other countries to jump on the patent-troll suck-life-out-of-MS bandwagon.

All I can say is Microsoft made their bed, and now they have to sleep in it. No other company did more to force software patents through congress. D'oh!

Consider this as an amusing game scenario, "You're resting in a bed, at a Hospice Home. Your Heart is dieing, 5 of your Major Arteries are clogged up. The amount of time before your Heart stops, or you split an Artery can be measured in Mayfly years." The only rule is, "You can't win if you're dead."

And to just add some contemporary spice to the game setting, Your are surrounded by a group of smiling Chinese Business Men, they joke and talk about their future. What's even more amusing is that next to your bed is President Bush Jr., being told that his third Stem Cell Grown Replacement Heart will be ready in 7 hours, the smiling nurse says that a nice Iron Horse Wine has arrived and would complement his Smoked Sockeye Salmon nicely.

In the old days, the cable-cos would monitor for "signal leakage" which helps to indicate approximately how many cable tuners are on that particular line. (See http://articles.latimes.com/1992-10-06/business/fi-524_1_cable-operators ). So, basically, the cable tech visits the line into your house, and can "see" how many devices are connected. These days, this isn't enough information, but I think they can even detect how much "load" is on a particular "band" of the spectrum, and then determine what channels you're tuned to? Seems possible, from an electrical standpoint... but then again, I'm a Mech-E... so I could be full of crap.

in this case, we have some low level help desk/support forum person making the claim that a DMCA take down notice was filed with them

Being as the only source I have seen for this so far is a discussion forum hosted on flickr.com, I see a couple assumptions that need to be made for this statement to be credible:

• The person actually works for flickr.com (I haven't seen any statements to support or refute the claim yet)
• If so, the employee either
  • Has direct access to legal documents (such as DMCA notices served), or
  • Has a reliable source who does have that access

My guess is that someone at the company didn't like it and removed it for their own personal or political justifications

It seems odd that someone would have suddenly had a personal or political problem with a file that was almost 8 months old. And if someone removed it for personal (rather than corporate) reasons, then it would seem that person for some reason believed that getting rid of the flickr copy would make all other copies go away - and I don't think many reasonable people would argue against that being a stupid assumption.

However, I find this extremely troubling because they have sought to protect these actions as if it was sanctioned or something

Sanctioned by flickr? I stated before, and I continue to believe, that this action was indeed sanctioned by flickr, just not for the reasons that some suggest. The initial statement given from flickr to the artist was that there were "copyright concerns", which from my vantage point is a reasonable concern for a company like flickr to have regarding a piece of artwork that so rapidly went viral.

We saw in last week's story that Flickr removed it "due to copyright concerns". It was well explained last week for those who didn't care to RTFA.

But now someone is claiming DMCA - and only providing a link to a discussion forum to back it up? If there is no acknowledgment from Flickr of a DMCA notice having been issued, then why are we speculating on this? Last week they cited "copyright concerns" (read the LA Times article that actually interviewed the artist to see what they told him) and never mentioned DMCA - why is it there suddenly?

For the first time in 6 years the Iraq war is INCLUDED in the budget. Part of that 1.8 trillion dollars is the war that George Bush kept off the books the whole time he was in office.

TRY AGAIN

Do you have a citation? I do. It's the same site listed above, which is an anti-war site, btw.

To date, $915.1 billion dollars have been allocated to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The national, state, and local numbers we provide are based on the total approved amounts through the end of Fiscal Year 2009.

In addition to this approved amount, the FY2010 budget shows a $130 billion request for more war spending. This would bring total war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan to more than $1 trillion. When all FY2010 war-related amounts are approved, we will adjust the counter so that it reaches the new total at the end of FY2010.

If you should compare the amount displayed on the numbers in our information sheets with the Cost of War counter, please note that the information sheets include all war spending approved to date, the same number that the counter will reach at the end of the 2009 fiscal year.

Looks like they are including what was in the budget.

Here's another one from the LA Times:

If Congress approves a request for another $87 billion, the Iraq war will have cost about $694 billion.

Here is a quote from another anti-war site. The title is Iraq War: The Cost of Bush Lies and His Influence of Not Being Accountable :

$800 billion through mid-2009 in U.S. taxpayer money

Sorry. Either you're wrong or everyone else is.

You've obviously got Joss Whedon confused with Ryan O'Neal.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedishrag/2009/08/ryan-oneal-hit-on-his-daughter-at-farrah-fawcetts-funeral-.html

"Unfortunately for him, the cartel has tremendous firepower (smuggled from the United States)"

Much of the firepower is outright military equipment bought internationally or "leaked" from US aid to spectacularly corrupt Mexican law enforcement. The Mexican government should turn over ALL serial numbers of confiscated weapons to the US, but instead they scapegoat US arms dealers for their failure to control their country.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-arms-race15-2009mar15,0,229992.story

Mexico is nothing more than a failed narco-state, and considering the variety of ethnic groups (ignored by Yanquis who think "beaners is beaners") it is doubtful it should even be a single country. Like Iraq, Mexico is an artifact of colonial policy.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-runner-side21-2009aug21,0,3926576.story

I am unsure how much MS wants this crackdown. I think the government wants to clean up the piracy, because they can see clearly how invasive and pervasive Windows is. Red Flag Linux is the official operating system of Red Flagged China.

And, the crackdown WILL benefit China. No money being sent to the western Capitalist Pigs, for starters - not even for legal copies. People who are forced away from MS holding their hands (Hail, Clippy!) will be forced to learn how an operating system works - thereby creating more potential hackers to attack the Pentagon. China gains in their own security - there just aren't a lot of virus and trojan infections running on Linux.

Gates is on record, favoring piracy of MS Products over legal acquisitions of *nix: http://articles.latimes.com/2006/apr/09/business/fi-micropiracy9

But white trash people in the south need new cars!!!!!

Really? So white trash people are traveling to New York City in order to buy cars in the cash for clunkers deal? No. Apparently most of them are traveling all the way to California since that's where the largest number of cash for clunkers sales transactions are. (According to that article "In California, which tops the list of states in terms of clunker transactions, most dealerships appear to be sticking with the program")

Those white trash people in the south must have more money on them than I thought. The "recession" must not be hurting them at all.

Wrong. It doesn't cost phone companies anything to transfer text messages, as it's done using a separate control link that previously was only used to communicate things like signal strength and other control data between the phone and the tower.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/05/invented-text-messaging.html

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/12/text-messages-c/

This channel is used whether or not anyone sends any text messages on it, so there's absolutely no cost to the carrier to handle the SMS data.

So when the carrier charges you $0.25 to send or receive a text message, you're REALLY being gouged.

Now, for wire transfer fees: to my knowledge, people wire money to each others' accounts all the time in Europe, and it doesn't cost anything (or there might be a very, very small sending fee, I can't recall exactly). These silly $35 wire transfer fees in the USA are another crazy thing that's "only in America". Why is it this way? I dunno; I guess because the banks like it that way because it makes them more money, and banks are completely unregulated in the USA unlike in Europe. Only in America do the banks get giant bail-outs when they have financial problems.

cameron even says so himself:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2009/08/james-cameron-the-new-trek-rocks-but-transformers-is-gimcrackery.html

GB: There's also maybe some heritage linking it to "Dances With Wolves," considering your story here of a battered military man who finds something pure in an endangered tribal culture.

JC: Yes, exactly, it is very much like that. You see the same theme in "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" and also "The Emerald Forest," which maybe thematically isn't that connected but it did have that clash of civilizations or of cultures. That was another reference point for me. There was some beautiful stuff in that film. I just gathered all this stuff in and then you look at it through the lens of science fiction and it comes out looking very different but is still recognizable in a universal story way. It's almost comfortable for the audience - "I know what kind of tale this is." They're not just sitting there scratching their heads, they're enjoying it and being taken along. And we still have turns and surprises in it, too, things you don't see coming. But the idea that you feel like you are in a classic story, a story that could have been shaped by Rudyard Kipling or Edgar Rice Burroughs.

GB: Or Joseph Conrad...?

JC: Yes, exactly. And I think returning to classic tales is a powerful thing. Look, right now is a special time because we can basically do anything we imagine. I mean you have to work hard at it, and you've got to have the technique and you have to be willing to throw money at the problem. Sometimes you have to be a little bold and go out on a limb. But if you can imagine it, you can do it. That's why we're seeing this renaissance of visual imagination. It's just a growth. Films look better now than they've ever looked. Sometimes they get a little lost in it though. I'll go to a "Transformers" film for the fun of seeing the spectacle but, personally, my soul craves a little more story, a little more meat on the bone and characters and that sort of thing. Look, I think it's about finding a balance between story and all of this gimmickry. I think I veer toward classicism, being solidly rooted in the classic stuff. I mean really old-school science fiction. This is a movie I would have loved to have seen when I was a 14-year-old kid in 1968.

avatar looks amazing though, a must see

the bit with the blue guys riding flying dragons reminded me a bit of "the dragonriders of pern" too

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonriders_of_Pern

now someone should make THAT into a movie

Google owns Youtube which is into providing specific government content and the first place to receive some of the content. Google is also directly involved with the government as a company as well as Google's founder had given extreme amounts of money and support to Obama. The pay off, well that's somewhat of a question but Obama put Google for government together, here is the US site and is expected to endorse quit a few laws that Google favors. There was even a pay off attempt.

Some people even believe that Google manipulated search results and canceled account of blogs critical of Obama. I'm not sure how accurate that is but here is something should be noted. I found in other blogs (which I can't seem to find right now) that at least with the accounts being canceled, the official Google reason is that people are filing complaints about them being spam blogs or racist speech and somehow no one at google is checking it before deleting the accounts, information, or posts.

The author of the flickr photo didn't put the socialism on it. Someone else removed the "TIME" word and labeled it with socialism. That wasn't the picture on Flickr, the one mentioning time was.

The author said he wasn't really making any political statement, he was learning to use photoshop and followed a tutorial on how to "jokerize" any photo. A couple hours later, he liked what he saw and posted it to his Flickr account. The author also said that he believes he needs to keep low because he lives in Chicago "Alkhateeb says he wasn't actively trying to cover his tracks, but he did want to lay low. He initially had concerns about connecting his name with anything critical of the president -- especially living in Chicago, where people are "very, very liberal," he said." But he also has a photo of Rahm Emanuel with criticisms of him. His lack of willingness to show a point may be because of where he is and how he is now associated to the photo.

The author did state "After Obama was elected, you had all of these people who basically saw him as the second coming of Christ," Alkhateeb said. "From my perspective, there wasn't much substance to him." which might play into your discussion concerning the character of the joker being used. You know, lack of substance "at worst completely insane with no real political views whatsoever".

I suspect there was probably a political motive behind posting the original picture and perhaps the author is afraid to disclose it.

The author of the flickr photo didn't put the socialism on it. Someone else removed the "TIME" word and labeled it with socialism. That wasn't the picture on Flickr, the one mentioning time was.

The author said he wasn't really making any political statement, he was learning to use photoshop and followed a tutorial on how to "jokerize" any photo. A couple hours later, he liked what he saw and posted it to his Flickr account. The author also said that he believes he needs to keep low because he lives in Chicago "Alkhateeb says he wasn't actively trying to cover his tracks, but he did want to lay low. He initially had concerns about connecting his name with anything critical of the president -- especially living in Chicago, where people are "very, very liberal," he said." But he also has a photo of Rahm Emanuel with criticisms of him. His lack of willingness to show a point may be because of where he is and how he is now associated to the photo.

The author did state "After Obama was elected, you had all of these people who basically saw him as the second coming of Christ," Alkhateeb said. "From my perspective, there wasn't much substance to him." which might play into your discussion concerning the character of the joker being used. You know, lack of substance "at worst completely insane with no real political views whatsoever".

I suspect there was probably a political motive behind posting the original picture and perhaps the author is afraid to disclose it.

Dude! The guy who made the original image, and the guy who took that image, removed the Time Magazine parts and slapped the "Socialism" caption on it then hung them up around LA were two different people and the GP was referring to the latter.

No, I didn't read TFA. I read other articles on the subject. I was not aware that there were to different people involved here (the artist and the hanger(s)).

You think a Kucinich supporter is going to use the word "Socialism" in a way that equates it to the anarchic socio- and psychopathic evil of The Joker? HUH?!

Here is the quote from the article I read:

Regardless, Alkhateeb does agree with the Obama "Hope" artist about "socialism" being the wrong caption for the Joker image. "It really doesn't make any sense to me at all," he said. "To accuse him of being a socialist is really ... immature. First of all, who said being a socialist is evil?"

Have you actually seen the parody in question? It's not the "Socialism" picture that you're probably thinking of. It is, quite obviously, a parody of a Time magazine cover.

The "Socialism" picture was a derivative of the magazine cover parody.

It is quite clearly not a parody. In fact, it quite clearly claims to be a cover of Time magazine. If I showed this image to someone who wasn't familiar with the magazine, they could quite easily mistake it for the real thing. Maybe if he had changed the title to "O-Time", or "Crime" or something it would be a parody, but by leaving the trademarked "Time" in place it is clearly taken out of the realm of parody, even if that was the intention - there is absolutely no indication that this is not the work of Time Magazine.

• The originator did not include the word socialism
• The originator was not attempting to make a statement about disliking Obama himself
• The originator feels the label of "socialism" doesn't even make sense

And of course, anyone who knows anything about the Joker himself knows that he was really more of an anarchist.

So anyone who thinks that there is some great political conspiracy behind this needs to pay at least a little attention to what is actually happening here regarding the image and its author. And then after that they should hopefully stop hyperventilating enough to realize that even if Flickr pulls an image it doesn't just disappear from the internet - it is still out there for people to see and Flickr knows that too.

Have you actually seen the parody in question? It's not the "Socialism" picture that you're probably thinking of. It is, quite obviously, a parody of a Time magazine cover.

The "Socialism" picture was a derivative of the magazine cover parody.

For the first century of use as evidence, there were no statistically significant studies whowing finger print evidence was valid. It was just the expert witness of police investigators saying so. I see articles periodically mentioning this. Only a defense lawyer with immense resources can challenge the overall science of fingerprint evidence due to its use for a century.

The police. Not even China is immune to CCTV. "Houston's police chief on Wednesday proposed placing surveillance cameras in apartment complexes, downtown streets, shopping malls and even private homes to fight crime during a shortage of police officers."

If you have a shortage of money to hire police officers then you don't have enough money to install CCTV, unless of course you're going to force those who's property the cameras are installed on to pay for them. Even then though you still need to pay people to monitor the output.

Falcon

Umm, CPUs *themselves* turn off sections that aren't being used (to save power).

Your argument might only hold a TINY bit of truth if you left everything running full blast 100% of the time (e.g. the light bulb running for 109 years http://articles.latimes.com/2008/may/05/local/me-lightbulb5). But for practical purposes, TURN OFF YOUR COMPUTER TO SAVE POWER (/money/the earth/etc.)

What does physical human presence on a spacecraft do that can't be done by remotely controlled or autonomous robotics?

Clean solar panels. http://articles.latimes.com/2008/nov/12/science/sci-rover12

Enjoy,

yea clearly did not follow the link. We actually have a SERIOUS problem in this country PREVENTING further rollout of Wind energy, and it's called off-peak losses.

Wind power companies are litterally PAYING people to take the energy they produce during off-peak hours. Until we finish deploying an interconencted national grid, and until we depoloy a storage system for overproduced energy, local wind farms are suffering when they're actually producing more than the local markets can bear in energy. The electrolysis sysyems actually run closer to 80% efficient now btw, when used symbiotically with other systems, including advances in recouperative heat use (also indicated in extremely detailed and complex disagrams on the site, and available in further complete data if you pay for it), but that part of the system also only needs to run a few hours a day to keep the rest of the plant supplied with enough H2 tobe making fuels 24x7.

We're not standing up MORE wind power, we're doing something with the wind power we're having trouble finding a use for...

Battery powered vehicles can NOT replace fuel cars for 30-50 year until we build YET MORE power sources, and figure out how to handle the MASSIVE swings in usage that would come with 100million cars sucking from the grid at odd hours... and it can't be done until we can shift power coast to coast instead of locally. This will require the 30 Trillion Dollar grid expansion and overhaul that already started in Maine and Long Island NY, and really will take 30 years to complete, if not longer. A fraction of percent of cars, on tricle charges at night, we can handle, but if even 5% of us started driving electric cars, we'd brown out whole cities, especially in california which can barely keep up with current damands!

Solar power in residential areas is simply non effective. Without huge government subidies, (like we lack in SC), payoff costs for solar greatly exceed 20+ years, and that does NOT include maintenance, degredation of cells, additional insurance costs (we have a LOT of hail here), and the fact that SC power companies (and many others) do not buy your overproduced solar power (the new digital home meters don't run backwards here, you're giving them the excess power for free, but buying it back later at market rates to boot) means breaking even is even harder. I looked at home solar 3 years ago when i built a house near the coast, and again last year building one in central SC, even getting to just 50% power from solar would have taken 25-30 years to recoup, assuming I never paid out a hail damage deductible... A single hail storm and it would have become impossible to recoup.

In 10-15 years when solar is MUCH cheaper, and when it's MUCH more efficient, and when it competes with other systems in terms of $/KW generated, then central solar collectors could easily replace or augment wind. Also any other green power source could easily be used, but power system like wave generators, waterfalls, etc, are CORE power systems, and the economy of making H2 with them simply is not as good as it is with wind (today). However, solar has an even BIGGER off-peak issue... to deploy full solar use in place of wind, we'd need 4 times the energy storage capacity even of wind, and you'd have whole power plants turning off in the moring and on in the evening, and that's EXPENSIVE!

We really don't care WHAT the end efficiency rating of the vehicle is. 20% in the tank? no big deal if 100% of that energy came mostly for free, as a side effect of another industry...

Also, a recent study confirmed there IS enough land in the USA not only to power all our energy needs, but actually that of all of North America, and that was only using class 6 and higher wind zones, reasonable off-shore locations, and locations considered suitible for construction (aka, not on the rock faces of mountains).
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/apr/03/nation/na-energy3

Where the definition of 'terrorist cell' is up to the authorities, and in this case means 'animal rights activist'. It could mean anything according to this corrupt, overbearing government.

Some animal rights activists do use terror tactics, including bombing campaigns, so in this case it might not just mean 'animal rights activist', it could mean everything you normally mean by 'terrorist'. Yes, there are huge problems with the law, but its being used against animal rights campaigners is not de facto one of them.

This reminds me of the following self-videotaped paintball drive-by attack "pranks" for which the perpetrators were rightfully given jail sentences and in some cases mandatory psychiatric treatment:

3 Teens (Anthony Skoblar, Javier Perez and Malcolm Boyd) Face Prison in Paintball Attacks committed in 1996(some of you might remember watching this on TV as it got a lot of coverage)

The Anchorage paintball attacks committed in 2001 by Charles Deane Wiseman and two juveniles whose names were not released

Apple has a monopoly on selling supported software for the iPhone. Not all monopolies are anticompetitive; it has yet to be decided if this is one which is. There has certainly been some grumbling, but going after Apple for it would almost certainly mean they'd have to reopen antitrust proceedings against Microsoft. If you haven't noticed, Microsoft got totally let off on the whole antitrust thing by Ashcroft himself; there is certainly some sort of collusion there. It is unimaginable that Bill Gates would have been permitted to simply be in control of those big stacks of money over at the Gates Foundation, though, which are invested for profit in the industries of those same players. Ashcroft claimed the settlement "[...]fully and completely addressed the anti-competitive conduct outlined by the Court of Appeals against Microsoft". That's his job, though; the guy running the process on behalf of the USDOJ was appointed by Bush just months earlier, and "it's certain that Bush and his aides questioned [him] in detail about his future intentions in the Microsoft litigation." The DOJ/Microsoft deal "...breaks a longstanding cooperative relationship that began during the Ford Administration in the mid-1970s" — clearly, the decision to essentially abort antitrust proceedings against Microsoft, which had been caught dead to rights and found guilty of anticompetitive behavior in nearly every market in which they were involved, was not made lightly. It was made deliberately.

Even if Apple has nine illegal monopolies, the DOJ cannot call them on their behavior unless they go back after Microsoft, and that is clearly not on their agenda.

most of the CEOs have the brain structure abnormality? http://articles.latimes.com/2005/jul/08/entertainment/et-boss8

I hadn't actually heard of model rockets setting off brushfires, but apparently it happens.

However, first up in the google search results was the exact opposite, a brushfire setting off model rockets.

For those who hadn't kept up with it (myself included), in 2000, the Tripoli Rocketry Association and the National Association of Rocketry (rocket hobbyist associations) sued the BATF about their having classified model rocket engines above a certain size as "explosives". Fairly recently, they received a favorable judgement in court, vacating the regulation. It is apparently still up for appeal, so in effect, no change for now. (After all, the government can't admit it was WRONG, now can it? That would undermine Faith In The Goverment.)

I'm surprised no one has pointed this out: this story is very out of date. It is true that on July 30, the plan was to suspend the program. But, between then and this story's appearance on /. three days later (!), $2 billion more has been injected into the program: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-clunkers-deal1-2009aug01,0,4715226.story.

The UK government article to which the Slashdot summary links says at the end, "Our review indicates that there is currently no evidence to support the selection of organically over conventionally produced foods on the basis of nutritional superiority."

There is no claim that organic foods are more nutritious. Organic foods are intended to be free of poisons like insecticides.

The idea is not that eating foods with traces of insecticides and other poisons would cause immediate sickness. The idea has been that, over time, avoiding poisons would be good for health. Testing that theory would take many years.

This is a comment posted to this Los Angeles Times article, Organic food no more nutritious than conventionally grown, review finds: "I don't buy organic because I believe it has "extra" nutrients! I buy it because of the things it DOESN"T contain!!! Look at all the food recalls just this year."

Another comment: "I have a friend who lives near several farms. He and his wife are both dying of cancer. The health department checked their well water and found it with high levels of farm pesticides. THAT is the cost of conventional farming in addition to the pesticide residue that you consume each time you eat conventionally grown produce."

4) Store the dry casks on site until Yucca opens, or they can be re-processed.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-yucca30-2009jul30,0,2377820.story

Yucca isn't going to open. All these years and dollars later they are shutting it down. Just another example of how our government is quite efficient at wasting money.

Doctor who was on presidential commission that pushed to raise drinking age to 21 regrets change, believes it did more harm than good.

Doctor Who was on the presidential commission to raise the drinking age? I bet it was the Doctor with the stupid celery stock on his lapel... I never did like him; it doesn't surprise me that a more recent regeneration would recant - he seems to be getting more easy going.

Where do you live that it's 'rarely criticized'?

This even just came out recently: Doctor who was on presidential commission that pushed to raise drinking age to 21 regrets change, believes it did more harm than good.

I think a consumer has a right to know about all safetey hazards.

I agree to a certain extent. Everything has risks. Too many warning labels and you start to ignore the real hazards. There is a lawsuit against hot dog makers wanting them to put warning labels on hot dogs and other processed meats stating to the effect that eating processed meats raises your risk of colon cancer. It's stupid. If you put warning stickers on everything that could possibly cause problems, you wouldn't be able to see the actual product.

Then I got a hands free device. Holding the phone is WAY more distracting.

You realize that when you are distracted you are fundamentally incapable of evaluating how distracted you are, kinda by definition.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-he-cells30-2008jun30,0,2119996.story

How is talking on the phone wearing earpiece any more distracting then talking to someone who is sitting in the passenger seat? Should that be forbidden as well?

Again, as stated in my original post, the passenger knows when to shut up because they can see everything the driver sees.

One of the radio stations I depend on for traffic reports is already fighting this. They run several advertisements predicting the free music you listen to is at risk of being eliminated by congress with new fees on the music they play. Call your congressman right away to stop this legislation that will end free music on radio.

The NAB, National Association of Broadcasters is leading the charge to oppose the bill.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-radio3-2009jul03,0,6937549.story/

By contrast, fruits and vegetables are considered "specialty crops" by Congress and ineligible for subsidies. The price of produce has continued to rise.

"We need to create an environment where it's easy to eat healthy. Right now, if price is your chief concern, the rational choice is to eat crappy food," says Dr. David Wallinga, director of the food and health program for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis.

http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/blogs/paging.dr.gupta/2007/07/farm-bill-will-shape-what-we-eat.html

=====================

And as Michael Pollan, author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," has written, farm subsidies contribute to obesity, rising healthcare costs and early death by subsidizing corn and soy (from which sugars and fats are derived) rather than healthier fruits and vegetables.

http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jul/24/opinion/oe-riedl24?pg=1

Our mayor (yes, I live in the AV) would indeed outlaw roofs if he could. This is the same guy who said that he would seize and kill law-abiding citizens' pets if doing so would discourage gang members from owning dogs.

Think I'm making this up??
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jan/26/local/me-dogordinance26?pg=1
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"What happens when these gang members that you're trying to target move on to Dobermans or German shepherds? You going to restrict them too?" Listman asked the council.

"If they move on to cats," Parris responded, "I'm going to take their cats."
======

He's an ambulance chaser by profession, which means in his worldview, there is only one solution for every social ill: SOMEONE MUST PAY!!

The man is a menace to the Constitution.

The LA Times has more info.

It appears this new agreement functions as an additional option. Anyone using this new deal have a $25,000 minimum payment, but webcasters can still stay with the old deal with the $500 minimum.

The reason for the new deal is that under the old deal webcasters had to pay a certain fee per song times the number of listeners, and that the figure was so high it would have exterminated both small and large webcasters.

So small webcasters do not have to pay this $25,000 minimum, they can stick with the old crushingly high per-song-per-listener figures. All of the webcasters were united in bringing a legal challenge against those impossibly high royalty rates, rates that would exterminate small webcasters and bankrupt large webcasters. This deal permits large webcasters to survive under a completely different and much better payment system, while locking small webcasters out of the lower cost deal with the $25,000 entrance fee.

By giving the large webcasters - and only large webcasters - a special deal with reasonable rates, the RIAA in now likely to be able to keep the old impossibly high royalty rates in place to kill off small webcasters. Without the "big muscle" of the large webcasters on their side opposing those impossibly high rates, small webcasters are unlikely to be able to afford lobbyists to represent their interests in Washington and before the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel or in court.

-

Can I ask why this article is tagged "republicans"? Bernard Madoff isn't one, since he gave 88% of his political spending to the Democratic party (source). Nor is Judge Denny Chin a definite Republican (his affiliation is unknown). Alright, so some of the victims were, and probably some of the conspirators, but there's no reason this should be tagged the way it is.

If you don't like the price, then don't buy it.

Don't pirate it either. Use something else.

But don't pirate it. If you do, you're doing what Microsoft considers "the next best thing" - ignoring alternatives. Alternatives scare the piss out of Microsoft. Back when Microsoft didn't have a stranglehold on the market, people were happy enough pirating 95 and 98, while ignoring things like BeOS and OS/2 (both competitively priced and more powerful) and it suited Microsoft and Bill Gates just fine.^1 Both OS/2 and BeOS are gone from the market because of piracy's market distortion.

Hopefully Windows 7 will come with an even more strict WGA and OGA to extract more pain from consumers. Maybe they'll wake up.

--
BMO

1. Of course, Microsoft executives prefer that people buy, but theft can build market share more quickly, as company co-founder and Chairman Bill Gates acknowledged in an unguarded moment in 1998.

"Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though," Gates told an audience at the University of Washington. "And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade." http://articles.latimes.com/2006/apr/09/business/fi-micropiracy9

Signed an agreement reaffirming the sovereignty of Iraq

Have we abandoned our permanent military bases in Iraq?

Asserted Iraqi ownership over *every* military installation in use by US forces

That's absolute horseshit.

At withdrawal, the U.S. will return all the installations and the agreed upon areas allocated for the use of the U.S. combat forces according to two lists (of inventory) to the Iraqi government.

Translation: we keep our permanent military bases.

Handed control of many of the US Operated facilities over to the Iraqis for control (here, here, and here, for example)

Have we abandoned our permanent military bases in Iraq?

Handed security of the "Green Zone" over to Iraqi control

Have we abandoned our permanent military bases in Iraq?

Removed the vast majority of all combat forces outside of the limits of all major cities

Another lie.

In addition, there are no plans to close the Americans' Camp Victory base complex, which houses more than 20,000 soldiers, many of them combat troops, even though Camp Victory is only a 15-minute drive from the center of Baghdad and sprawls over both sides of the city's boundary. Iraqi officials, who are nervous about maintaining security as the Americans depart, have agreed to consider Camp Victory as outside the city.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/09/world/middleeast/09military.html

Additionally, your assertion that "we own" the oil fields now points to an article explaining how the Iraqi Ministry of Oil is negotiating contracts from companies that lost to nationalization when Saddam was in power. I'm not sure how that means "we own" anything. The Iraqi government is contracting with corporations to extract the oil resources. Sounds like Iraq exercising its own sovereignty to me.

Why were they no bid contracts to American oil companies in 2008? And furthermore, if we have no colonial interest in their resources, why haven't we abandoned our permanent military bases in Iraq? This is the central question. Everything else is political theater.

The globalsecurity article you link has no information later than 2005. In the intervening 4 years - the US Government has:

1. Signed an agreement reaffirming the sovereignty of Iraq
2. Asserted Iraqi ownership over *every* military installation in use by US forces
3. Handed control of many of the US Operated facilities over to the Iraqis for control (here, here, and here, for example)
4. Handed security of the "Green Zone" over to Iraqi control
5. Removed the vast majority of all combat forces outside of the limits of all major cities

Additionally, your assertion that "we own" the oil fields now points to an article explaining how the Iraqi Ministry of Oil is negotiating contracts from companies that lost to nationalization when Saddam was in power. I'm not sure how that means "we own" anything. The Iraqi government is contracting with corporations to extract the oil resources. Sounds like Iraq exercising its own sovereignty to me.

I linked to page 2, which had the bit about the longest-lived counties. Page 1 is here, from whence the quote.

In the US, out of some 20,000 counties, eight of the top ten counties for longest lifespan are along the Continental Divide in Colorado, which makes no sense at all from a families-sticking-together mindset -- indeed, the lowest lifespans are seen in counties that have old American Indian reservations where family and community life is both important and preserved.

I think the Japanese do well because they score better on (from the link) "tobacco, alcohol, obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diet and physical inactivity" scale.

But I would like to think that family/community tradition is a part of it.

A yield of 5% on a 10-year tax-exempt municipal bond would be very generous indeed, especially if you're in a high tax bracket. California 10-year notes are currently yielding a bit under 5% -- and I'd be pretty darn cautious about buying California's debt at this point.