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In case you don't remember, stuff traveling at orbital velocities is positively lethal to spacecraft. The extreme energies involved in these kinds of impacts is enough to send very high velocity fragments in all directions. Sure, some of it will de-orbit, but most will end up in fairly stable orbits that will EVENTUALLY intersect all the other satellites up there. So blowing up one rogue satellite makes one very annoying but eminently predictable problem into a thousand lethal and unpredictable problems.

Last February, a Russian satellite hit a commercial Iridium satellite, and the resulting debris cloud (estimated near 600 pieces in various orbits) has been a HUGE headache for everyone in similar orbital altitudes.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123438921888374497.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29147679/

In 2008, the US got criticized around the world for blowing up a falling satellite because of the health threats of hydrazine if it landed in a populated area. Aside from complaints about military showboating, there were many scientists who complained about the resulting orbital debris; however, in reality it was a very low-altitude explosion and the debris cloud did de-orbit very quickly (unlike a geosynchronous orbit explosion, which would leave practically permanent debris due to the orbit well above any appreciable atmospheric drag).
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_6712/is_35_237/ai_n29417848/

Read here for some details on the general problems with orbital debris.
http://illuminations.nctm.org/LessonDetail.aspx?id=L376

So no more helpful suggestions like this, please.

For Pete's sake, the guy was saying we should stop oil production to force people to use non-existent renewable energy.

Ever hear of geothermal? Solar? Wind? They all exist. And if they were given as much in subsidies as coal, nuclear power, and petroleum they would be producing a lot more energy.

Falcon

Um... no. No they would not.
Geothermal, while prevalent in some parts of the world, is not that big of a resource here. And most of the places where geothermal is available are national parks. Could you imagine the uproar if you tried to build a power plant at Yellowstone?
Solar is nowhere near efficient enough to power the country. It can be a nice boost, hardly economic, and government subsidies are not enough to help. For starters, government subsidies exist. There are also several tax breaks you can receive for "greening" your home, but it will never be enough to make it cost effective:

He found the cost for an installation ranges from nearly $86,000 to $91,000, while the value of the power produced ranges from $19,000 to $51,000.

I don't know about you, but I don't have an extra $91,000 sitting around to spend on something that will save me $51,000 over the next 20 years. Also, this study fails to consider the sunk costs. In other words, if I were wisely invest that $90 G's instead of blowing it on solar panels, it would grow. Take whatever money it would have made and add that to the loss. I'm not alone here. A very small percentage of Americans have $900.00 to spend, much less $90,000.00. Oh, and then there are cloudy days, night, snow covered roof tops, hail, shadows from when the sun crosses to the other side of your house and so on that make solar an even less economic proposition.
Now, if you are talking about massive power plants located in the desert, when then you have other issues. See, you green buddies at the Sierra Club tend to block most of these programs because, even though they could save the earth, they may endanger a turtle that lives in the sand. That pretty much stands for any of these green projects. Someone, somewhere is going to get their feelings hurt. And these someones tend to have lawyers. So, don't bitch at me. Call the Sierra Club!
Finally, Wind! Wow! This is a fun one. I'll start with this quote:

Another interesting point with wind systems is that fossil fuel plants normally run on standby to support the wind fluctuations that occur. So, not only do we see only 8 to 10% of a rated power output, but this is offset by the fossil fuel consumed an not delivered to the grid. The net result is that most wind packages deliver less then zero power, when you consider the wasted fuel at the fossil fuel plant.

Of course, as the Kennedys showed us, some people don't like the way they look. You remember Ted Kennedy, right? That big green liberal that BLOCKED wind power because it might disrupt the view from some of his mansions?

So, in to put it more succinctly, renewable energy does not exist, at least not to the point where it can completely replace fossil fuels. While all these other ideas do produce energy and will reduce our fossil fuel dependence for producing electricity, I believe the only viable solution is nuclear. Oh, your green buddies blocked that too!
Now the elephant in the room that I've ignored until now is that all the proposals yo

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37046990/ns/us_news-security/
Happy?

The problem doesn't stem from giving kids nutritional guidelines. When I was growing up we learned about the food groups, etc, and nobody got disciplined for eating junk food.

The problem stems from an unchecked authoritarian mindset among school administrators. Since the 80s, the easy solution to social problems has been to criminalize bad behavior and institute harsh penalties across the board. Now when a child brings utensils for his lunch, he gets hit with weapons violations. A girl rumored to posses OTC medication is strip searched by the principal and could have faced expulsion for drug charges. Some kid gets a cell phone picture from a partially undressed peer, and he's hit with child pornography. These are just a few examples. We routinely classify innocuous behavior as the most extreme and vile crimes. So now are public schools are microchasms of a police state, with TSA security screenings, strip searches, a huge police presence, and criminal sentences for routine disciplinary problems. Institutionally, we see our children as equally capable of evil as Al Queda.

What we're seeing is the inevitable result of that process, where effective discipline has simply given way entirely to arbitrary enforcement of state power. But the process didn't begin when they started talking about the four food groups. The process started when we decided we needed to "get tough on crime" and we culturally embraced zero-tolerance. The problem started when politicians started to convince people that law enforcement was the best answer for all our social ills.

If global temperatures went down significantly over a period of many years, it would certainly be fantastic evidence against anthropogenic global warming. But the fact is that past decade is the warmest on record. Ice in the Arctic, the Antarctic, and Greenland has been melting as a result of this warming.

There are lines that you cannot legally cross, and Apple very well may have done so.

They do it indiscriminately; who cares? They even have their own iPolice to raid into blogger's homes.

Now awaiting for the john gruber wannabe acolyte zombies (see above) to mod me

unfortunate how most anti-nuclear arguments use Chernobyl as an example - we can build them so much safer today. Looks like the oil drilling technology hasn't come as far, while still capable of producing devastating effects for years to come.

Unfortunate how most pro-drilling advocates used the slogan "we can build them much safer today".1 2 3 4, etc etc.

These are the same old arguments businesses constantly give to get around regulation. Call the laws "outdated", "old", and talk about how progress has made them unnecessary.

We saw the same "mining is much safer today" from coal companies skirting regulations. And it's the same line of argument that was used to remove regulations from the financial industry. And it's used pretty much everywhere that "stifling" government regulation stands in the way of "economic progress and freedom".

At 5:00 in this video you can learn how the oil companies lobbied successfully to NOT have to use modern safety backup systems:

"BP didn't want to spend the money for a system- a fail-safe system... used all over the world... except the United States because we give them a free pass. ...it's called the "acoustic switch" system.. it's a relay system that... stops the oil exactly from the source... If BP has to do business in Norway, they have to use the switch. When they do it in the US, they don't have to use it... During the Bush deregulation years, you had the mineral management service that told companies like BP that "gee whiz we have a new policy- it's the closed-door Dick Cheney policy..." that allowed the industry to bypass safe systems like the acoustic switch, and there was no need to spend $500,000 with a company that was making $40 billion dollars. It was a complete bypass of safety."

Hey Bill Gates is trying his hardest to show everyone he is trying to change. Why else would he spend so much money to make cows that don't fart and helping to spread awareness for malaria?

and the continued survival of the worlds vegan population indicates that there are no major health problems with such a diet.

And they only do so from being able to take supplements for things they can't get reliably get from plant sources such as B12. One couple got a life sentence because a vegan diet they imposed on their baby ended up killing it due to their ignorance on such nutritional deficiencies that can happen from such a lifestyle.

No, the video game industry is not bigger than the film industry.

Film Industry in the US employs 361,000

http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs038.htm

All software publishing in the US employs 263,700

http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs051.htm

Globally video games are worth 40 billion

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/Extra/VideoGameSalesOvertakingMusic.aspx

US film revenue is 42 billion, total box office gross is 10-11 billion, but that's only a piece of the US film industry.

http://www.allbusiness.com/media-telecommunications/movies-sound-recording/10512814-1.html

Really? Heard of priest-scientists? ( http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/nyregion/13jaki.html?_r=2&hpw , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23640170/, http://www.aolnews.com/science/article/priest-turned-scientist-francisco-ayala-wins-153-million-prize/19414671)

Hoping over a border illegally is slavery??

Good grief get some perspective.

There's not a country on earth that doesn't have tight immigration laws, not even the western European "utopias" that the American left seems to think every country should aspire to.

In France you can be arrested for even helping an illegal immigrant http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29899231/

In the Netherlands:
"Who can ask for ID?
The police, immigration and customs officials, tax officials, forest rangers, labour and environmental inspectors have the authority to ask to see your identification documents."

Looks an awful like the law that Arizona just passed. Where was the condemnation and international outcry against the Dutch?

Where is the faux outrage directed at Western Europes "Nazi" attitudes towards illegal immigrants?

Arizonas laws are on balance about the same as most western countries regarding immigrants. Most western countries won't let *half* the people that the US lets in. Germany won't even let you in unless you have a "purpose" for being there, just wanting to live there isn't even *nearly* enough reason for them to give you a visa. Unless you already hold a job there and are being sponsored (hmm sounds familiar) or have family there don't even apply.

Just like everywhere else on the planet.

The Mexican government condemns Arizona, when Mexicos laws state:

#A penalty of up to two years in prison and a fine of three hundred to five thousand pesos will be imposed on the foreigner who enters the country illegally." (Article 123)"

And they want to talk about "Nazi" attitudes towards illegal immigrants?

It's all nothing but the most absurd and disgusting two minutes of hate toward a traditionally conservative state for doing something that even the most left wing European states also do.

The double think is breathtaking in it's depth.

Can we get some perspective on this insanity?

Tortoises don't live in the desert?

Well, hell, man. You should have told the Sierra club this before they shut the plant down

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34659369/ns/us_news-environment/

... and it has nothing to do with the complexity of the STRATEGY.... it's meant to give commanders an indication of the insanely-complex interrelations between various factors/actions. It's actually designed to represent the SITUATION in Afghanistan and to illustrate that simple notions of cause and effect aren't quite as simple as you'd like to believe. The slide is nothing more than a model of a very complex situation.... and it's actually a damned good one too.

Check out the larger version of the picture and take a look at some of the headings.

Look at the top right of the dark blue portion, where it says "targeted strikes", if you start following some of the arrows, you see (as you should expect) that targeted strikes will have an effect on "Insurgent Damages and Casualties" and that such an effect will also have an effect on "Fear of ANSF/Coalition Repercussions", which will also have an effect on "Insurgent recruiting/manpower".

There's no description of strategy there, and if you sat down and tried to think about the repercussions of specific actions taken in an area filled with insurgents and a populace that is sometimes sympathetic and sometimes not sympathetic to both the coalition and insurgents, a lot of the interrelations would seem pretty obvious - ie. if you spend too much effort killing insurgents, you run the risk of increasing their ability to recruit, because the population will begin to fear and resent you.

Don't look at the slide as a whole... just look for an entry on the slide that represents an action, and follow the arrows which show what the effects of that action are.

That spaghetti slide has a copyright notice at the bottom, "PA Knowledge Limited 2009"

There must be a joke about oxymorons and military intelligence in here somewhere.

I've changed over deh years. No moah voilence or machinegun or liquid robots for me, only Abadah and deh econamy and the govuhment and so on.

I don't think data security would have gotten the traction it did here in MA if it hadn't been for the THX breach.

What does the donor look like now, and what are they going to do about not having a face?

Most likely something like this woman.

Fecal transplants are illegal in the US, but in certain rare circumstances (such as an otherwise untreatable C. diff infection) they can be life saving.

-Peter

They are perfectly legal. Have been for years. In fact, this is the first person in the US to have a face transplant.

are you talking about the oil industry which makes 7-10% profit per year

That's right - the poor, impoverished oil companies, which only make hundreds of billions of dollars each year - how can they ever survive on such meager earnings?

5-8% less than what the federal government taxes their product at, plus the additional state taxes upon their product.

And as we all know, all of that tax money goes directly to the evil climate scientists, right?

Yea, I read about that. And this one, I lived in Anacortes last summer, the refineries at night remind me of Blade Runner

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36146392/ns/us_news-life/

    It's a bit early in the morning for research, but here's one. I'm not familiar enough with searching California's laws to come up with a quick answer with a statute number.

Apple's gross margin is 41%, the average for their industry segment is 37.9% - nothing very startling (or monopolistic) there at all. http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/invsub/results/compare.asp?Page=ProfitMargins&symbol=AAPL

Being female, I already get dinged with the "female tax" for goods and services - haircuts, clothes, dry-cleaning, cars, car repairs, etc. I have no wish to see this extend to all products http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/SavingandDebt/ConsumerActionGuide/dunleavey-why-it-costs-more-to-be-a-woman.aspx

As for this information helping target advertising, I can't say I'm inspired by what marketing departments think women want, or interested in having information that comes to me filtered through a gender-refractive lens ground in the 50s. Had enough of that from career counselors and other 'advisers' when I was younger.

Drawings of schoolgirls getting raped.
There's quite a difference.

You might want to tell a few more people about that.

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Taxes/AvoidAnAudit/5waysToAvoidAnAudit.aspx?page=2 "On the other hand, if you are concerned about a potential audit, never file until the last minute. It won't hurt and can only decrease your chances of being selected."

... if it were simpler. Why is the Federal Tax Code 3.7 million words? If the tax code were simpler, then those servers would have a much easier time of it.

      Scanning today's news turns up a lot of good examples for how the code could be simplified.

The five dumbest parts of the U.S. tax code

1) Ethanol credits increase the price of food, and give paper manufacturers more money in credits than they make from selling paper.
2) Exemption for inherited stock-gains.
3) Mortgage-interest deduction encourages people to buy as much house as they can afford, and encourages owning over renting to the detriment of other investments.
4) Exemption on employer-provided health insurance encourages employers to give more health insurance instead of wage increases, and discourages health insurers from competing on price.
5) Municipal-bond-interest exclusion gives more benefit to rich bond owners than it does to the municipalities that issue the bonds.

Congressman Wyden leads effort to simplify tax code

Taxes: There is a Better Way by U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg

Why can't we do the same thing with China because of working conditions?

Because that would be hipocritical since it's our (Western) companies doing it.

What we *could* do is sanction our own companies for violating our laws, even in foreign countries, as we did to Shell.

Yes in Chicago, many dead people are registered and vote "Mayor Daley of Chicago "found" tens of thousands of dead people to "vote" for John F. Kennedy in the 1960 election," .

No reputable source holds that there was enough fraud in the 1960 election to alter the results:

Completed Dec. 9, the recount of 863 precincts showed that the original tally had undercounted Nixon's (and Adamowski's) votes, but only by 943, far from the 4,500 needed to alter the results. In fact, in 40 percent of the rechecked precincts, Nixon's vote was overcounted. Displeased, the Republicans took the case to federal court, only to have a judge dismiss the suits. Still undeterred, they turned to the State Board of Elections, which was composed of four Republicans, including the governor, and one Democrat. Yet the state board, too, unanimously rejected the petition, citing the GOP's failure to provide even a single affidavit on its behalf.

Yes, Nixon believed he was robbed, but Nixon was fscking crazy.

Well read this article to get a sense of what the judges are thinking: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28319199
"it is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exists."

Here is a better article with a bit more meat than the original posted in TFA.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36216614/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/

The specific piece about guardianship is mentioned at the bottom:

"Denise New said Lane moved in with his grandmother about five years ago, after she went through a difficult divorce, was having mental health problems and didn't feel she could provide her son with the supervision he needed."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36193558/ns/technology_and_science-security/
--------------------
The FCC now defines broadband as a lightly regulated information service. That means it is not subject to the obligations traditional telecommunications services have to share their networks with competitors and treat all traffic equally. But the agency argues that existing law gives it authority to set rules for information services, including Net neutrality rules.

Tuesday's court decision rejected that reasoning, concluding that Congress has not given the FCC "untrammeled freedom to regulate activities over which the statute fails to confer ... commission authority."

With so much at stake, the FCC now has several options. It could ask Congress to give it explicit authority to regulate broadband. Or it could appeal Tuesday's decision to the Supreme Court.

But both of those steps could take too long because the agency "has too many important things they have to do right away," said Ben Scott, policy director for the public interest group Free Press. Free Press was among the groups that alerted the FCC to Comcast's behavior after The Associated Press ran tests and reported that the cable company was interfering with attempts by some subscribers to share files online.

The more likely scenario, Scott believes, is that the agency will simply reclassify broadband as a more heavily regulated telecommuniciations service. And that, ironically, could be the worst-case outcome from the perspective of the phone and cable companies, he noted.

"Comcast swung an ax at the FCC to protest the BitTorrent order," Scott said. "And they sliced right through the FCC's arm and plunged the ax into their own back."

That one I don't know about, plausibly. I guess at that point of you have to think about your data retention laws and your requirements for keeping that data secure and whether putting it into the cloud is actually the right thing. Perhaps put it into the cloud encrypted?

While looking for another link earlier, the city of Los Angeles ran into similar problems with their police dept and they didn't move. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31967328/

Whether Google is working with them on this one, or whether LAPD is keeping it internal is the question I guess.

threatening a guy who was reporting and pelting the charter buses with eggs

Impressive multitasking! Reporting AND pelting charter buses with eggs! So intentionally causing damage to property whilst recording license plates and such ISN'T threatening, only verbally threatening is? I'm confused! My head spins!

I did search for Kenneth Gladney... I was kinda curious about your description, since most reports I read stated that he is a Democrat-leaning supporter, who happened to be selling merchandise outside a rally. Thugs? Sure. Not sure there was much proof of SEIU involvement, or that it happened "for supporting the Tea Party".

There's a big difference between "a Red Bull can" and "a can of Red Bull". One implies it's just the can, the other implies it's a can of something. Can you guess which is which?

Using your example, consider these two phrases:

1. a gasoline can
2. a can of gasoline

Which implies that it contains gasoline? Yeah, same for the Red Bull. Here's some homework you can take to your English tutor:

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=54975&dict=CALD (definition: "containing")
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/of (definition 4: "substance or contents")
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/dictionary/DictionaryResults.aspx?lextype=3&search=of (definition 4: "containing a particular substance")
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/of

You get the picture. Maybe if you're in deep redneck country, words have a different meaning. But the majority of the world parses "a can of Red Bull" as it being a can which contains Red Bull. Otherwise, it'd be a Red Bull can, wouldn't it?

It's simpler than that. Bing offers nothing that makes users want to use their search engine instead of Google's. Google is a verb in the English language. When people think of finding something on the web, they think of Google.

Bing doesn't even look like Google when one reaches their landing page; this, accompanied with worries about malware search engines and such, would make people who aren't as in-the-know wonder why that isn't Google. Intelligently, Google protected their landing page to prevent Microsoft from doing exactly that. (This mitigates the argument that making Bing the default search page would steal Google's market share.)

I love their photography, but I'm an amateur photographer, so I'm biased. I would bet dollars to donuts (who came up with that saying? It's stupid!) that most people don't care about the photos or necessarily want them in the first place.

Notice that none of these points address differences in search technology. I think that Bing isn't getting the market share they want because they waited WAY too long to make a dent, just like they waited too long to release the Zune (which, like Bing, has few features that would make people want to not get a household name, especially since the inception of the iPod Touch). Worse, Yahoo! was the place for searching the web before Google stole their thunder, and MSN Search was bloated and unmoving even THEN. (Reference: http://www.msn.com/ NOW hasn't changed much from then in terms of bloat.) Hotmail (now Live! Mail) is a good proof to this. Hotmail was LEADING THE WAY in terms of free e-mail services, with Yahoo going head-to-head with them. Their service was pretty good and definitely reliable (I've never had problems with my msn.com or hotmail.com e-mail addresses when I've used them). Even though Google Mail has been released to the public for years, there are still PLENTY of people who use Hotmail (as shown here , as Hotmail ranks higher than gmail).

In regards to their technology, I think it's actually quite good, especially when compared to MSN Search (which was useless 90% of the time). It does suffer a bit on the tail end, though. Example: my school gives every student a MSDN Academic Alliance account upon request, but I always forget the site. (Yes, I can use bookmarks. NO, I will not make one.) Using the search terms 'stevens msdnaa' on Google gives me my IT department's wiki article on it right off the bat as well as many articles below it that also contain the link. (I know the person who runs that blog, as he's also a Stevens student.) Bing, on the other hand, also gives me the link right from the get go, but wanders into irrelevance after the second hit. When I searched that term in Bing for the first time, I didn't even get the link.

A lot of human genetics is actually based around some people being designated more as caretakers for their relatives and other community members than sources of future offspring themselves. Take menopause, for example. Menopause extends the life of women by stopping them from risking their health with childbirth. This preserves women to live on as reservoirs of community knowledge and experience to teach to children. (If you'd like to read more about that, I recommend Jared Diamond's book "The Third Chimpanzee.")

Homosexuality (in men, at least) is most frequently found in later born sons. Past a certain point, extra sons are not really needed to pass on the genes of both parents and could fulfill similar societal roles as old people in assisting in the care-taking of the first-born's children. I think I remember reading somewhere that a study in Samoa showed that gay men were likely to dote over their nieces and nephews. Here's an article on that.

In tight-knit communities (i.e. the kind of hunter-gather tribes that dominated thousands of years of human evolution), having additional hunters & gatherers to provide for your grandkids in the forms of sons and daughter that provide for your firstborn's children may be of greater advantage than just another source of mouths to feed. In many hunter-gatherer societies, infanticide was used as a means of "birth control" to keep the task of feeding ones children manageable. This became less frequent with the dawn of agriculture, but having additional relatives around to provide the children of others is a survival strategy for yourself and for your first-born (and best provided for) children because it means that you have less need to limit the children you do have. (You can think of homosexuality as a "parasitic" trait for latter born children to aid the earlier born ones.)

Additionally, cultural norms in many pre-modern societies either forced homosexuals to adopt heterosexual lifestyles or allowed for homosexuals to engage in sex with their own gender for pleasure while being required to perform their "spousal duties" with a wife. (Think of ancient Greek pederasty for example.) Bisexual practices allow for homosexual preferences to survive and even flourish, as in bonobos who use lesbian sex for social bonding.

Another study has suggested that homosexual men tend to have more fertile female siblings and more homosexual relatives on their mothers' side meaning that homosexual genes could be passed down through unaffected maternal lines. This jives well with the theory of homosexuality as a tool for putting more of your eggs in the best basket and designating other children to a support role.

Lastly, as the order of birth examples above hint, homosexuality is only partially genetic. Environmental pressures both before and after birth can influence sexual orientation. Genes that increase sensitivity to these pressures can exist in heterosexuals and be passed on with no ill effect on survivability (or increased effect on survivability by assuring extra care for children with a homosexual uncle).

All of the above factors provide a rationale for homosexuality as a positively adaptive trait and one that has a clear mechanism for being passed on.

The median percent of home value in property tax in WA is 0.81%, which puts it right around the median for all states (~25 states have lower median percent property tax).

(according to
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Taxes/Advice/PropertyTaxesWhereDoesYourStateRank.aspx)

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/SavingandDebt/LearnToBudget/how-much-jobless-pay-would-you-get.aspx shows New Jersey $584, Massachusetts $628 and Minnesota $566. This is for a single person... most states also have kickers if you have kids and/or a non working spouse.

I know my state enables more than 2k a month
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/SavingandDebt/LearnToBudget/how-much-jobless-pay-would-you-get.aspx

apparently MA is highest, 628 per week possible

Nowadays there's a standard bargain in place that should make it easier to get something like this through.

The school administrators will give the students gaming machines, and in return will get to look at the students naked.

The DS comes with a camera, so there should be no problems pitching this problem to school perverts^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hadministrators.

I wouldn't worry about Blockbuster much longer. According to MSNBC http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35910863/ns/business-us_business/ I'd be surprised if they've got a year left in the movie rental business.

Grats, an early christmas present! http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35886780/ns/business-world_business

This is just the kind of thing I can put my faith in.

"I think you’re a little bit mistaken on this one. Churches have to be careful about their political stance or they do risk losing non-profit status."

No he isn't. Churches have deliberately violated this law to force the issue. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/story?id=5198068&page=1
It has not been enforced. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30391105/
So on paper it is a rule. In real life, not so much.

"Of course, if there is only one pro-life candidate and the church is staunchly pro-life, we both know which candidate they’ll want you to vote for, but they still have to emphasize the issue, not the candidate."

And the actually practical difference is what exactly? Sure they obeyed the letter of the law. But they sure as hell violated the intent.

I read another article on this that says most of Google's $300m Chinese revenue comes from companies that by their AdWords in order to drive exports--that is, the ads are targeted at us and not at China. They expect most of those customers to stick around, buying from google.com instead of google.cn.

If Google pulls out, it's expected to be more problematic for Chinese businesses who depend on their services (gmail, google docs, maps, etc.) than it is for Google. Plus there's the added effect of reducing Chinese internet competition as a driver for innovation/development, which will hinder businesses that ever hope to compete abroad.

Plenty of orthodox rabbis also say donating is permissible (as far as I've heard from members of the New York ultra-orthodox contingent)

It has also been argued that trafficking in human organs on the black market and laundering the money is also religiously permitted (when it saves lives, apparently - the lucrative profits are completely coincidental)...

'If there is information that harms stability or the people, of course we will have to block it,' he said."

Yes, wouldn't want the people to know about the corruption of your officials. That wouldn't be a good thing.

I used the issue of China in my IT ethics class and said that having Google or Cisco leave China because they refuse to censor brings up a whole host of other issues. If Google leaves, are they taking their code and such with them? What about equipment they used? Are they scrubbing that before leaving? What about any documents pertaining to how their searches are done?

While the Chinese people won't see much of a difference if Google leaves, the Chinese IT folks might have some issues recreating what was once there. Personally, Google should leave and post whatever information they want so people know what they had to deal with in China.

As most asian countries have a cultural bias towards not losing stature, having their dirty laundry aired, the really dirty stuff, would be a mighty slap in the face which China won't be able to deny so easily. They'll deny it, but their words will ring hollow.

It's probably just that they haven't been noticed yet. It took the U.S. Mint a while to notice silver surfer quarters. I don't know if Thinkgeek will be considered a more serious offender because they're selling the quarters rather than giving them away.

Source?

Cash depreciates over time relative to inflation, so almost no one holds significant amounts of cash but rather invest in securities, real estate, commodities, etc.

Here is Warren Buffett's portfolio, as an example.

http://www.gurufocus.com/holdings.php?GuruName=Warren+Buffett

In 2007 he was worth 60 billion, today he is worth 47 billion, which is a 'gain' of 10 billion over last year but is down from the 2007 number.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett#Path_to_wealth
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35799215/ns/business-forbescom/