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"I'm sceptical of anything which proposes to simply double the amount of energy extracted from that gasoline, because, well, physics is physics."

Agreed, but the real question is how are they testing? Downhill with a tailwind? Anyone can achieve 98mpg given the right conditions (downhill in neutral), and since they don't come out and say "we achieved 98mpg using the same technique as fueleconomy.gov" it sounds like BS.

Another reason this sounds like BS: billions of dollars are being invested to meet the 35mpg CAFE standard by 2020. When Congress was talking about requiring 32mpg by 2015 it was estimated it would cost $47 billion dollars to reach that goal: "For the auto industry, it will be costly; the Transportation Department last year estimated that requiring the industry to meet 31.6 mpg by 2015 would cost nearly $47 billion."

So a magic fuel injector that achieves 98 mpg would literally be worth billions of dollars, not to mention win the xprize and $10 million dollars. Any engineer that designed this could join any auto manufacture and write his own ticket. The idea that a startup in California just happened across this technology outdoing the greatest minds in GM, Toyota, Honda, and the academic community just sounds like snake oil, just like the car that runs on water, 130mpg car, 110mpg 0-60 in 3 seconds Mustang. If any of these technologies were real GM or Honda would be announcing it or at the very least they'd be xprize competitors.

Have we forgotten the Perpetual Motion DeLorean scammers already?

What's been missing from the coverage the David Patterson press conferences has been the shrewd, insightful experience and reportage from the OMG ponies! perspective.

Man, how on earth did they manage to exclude the cable news networks?

(PS I honestly can't tell if you were making that same point only more subtly, or if you were honestly implying bloggers had less credibility than "real news.")

Then again, I didn't RTFA all the way through. RTFAATWT?

And if the results were unfavorable, what then?

Here's a recent article on the hazards of transient electromagnetic fields, such as those created by compact fluorescent light bulbs:

More recently, the new findings on transients — particularly those crawling along utility wiring — are causing some scientists to rethink that part of the EMF debate pertaining to the hazards of power lines. Could they have been focusing on the wrong part of the EMF spectrum?

Transients: the post-modern carcinogen
Some earlier, noteable — albeit aborted — research suggests this may be the case. In 1988, Hydro-Québec, a Canadian electric utility, contracted researchers from McGill University to study the health effects of power line EMFs on its employees. Gilles Theriault, MD, DrPH, who led the research and was chair of the department of occupational health at the university, decided to expand his focus to include high-frequency transients and found, even after controlling for smoking, that workers exposed to them had up to a 15-fold risk of developing lung cancer. After the results were published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, the utility decided to put an end to the study.

That research commenced at a time when energy-efficient devices — the major generators of transients — were beginning to saturate North American homes and clutter up power lines. A telltale sign of an energy-efficient device is the ballast, or transformer, that you see near the end of a power cord on a laptop computer, printer, or cell phone charger (although not all devices have them). When plugged in, it's warm to the touch, an indication that it's tamping down current and throwing off transient pollution. Two of the worst creators of transient radiation: light dimmer switches and compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs). Transients are created when current is repeatedly interrupted. A CFL, for instance, saves energy by turning itself on and off repeatedly, as many as 100,000 times per second.

-Is ‘electrosmog’ harming our health?

While I'm posting, here's a neat little website that plots FCC-registered antennas on a google map:
http://www.antennasearch.com/default.asp

Yeah, but in the US, if you were naked, in your own home, it'd also mean you could be done for indecency, so really, it shows how utterly stupid US laws are regarding this sort of thing. See here:

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/34483145/

If I have no right to privacy in my own home, then passers by deserve no right to complain about what they see when staring into my own home. I should be free to jerk off in the window if I see fit, and if they don't like it, they can choose not to look.

The problem is, in the US, you not only have the right to sit outside someone's house, staring in, using binoculars if you so wish, or record every detail. But you also have the right to complain about what you see. Just as you can close curtains if you don't want people to look in, you can simply not look in if you don't like what you see.

Yeah... same bullshit 3 years ago...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13357555/

What happened to that code of conduct 3 years ago?

You do understand that the Democrats wanted to add new privacy protections to the Act, don't you? They gave up the fight when the Republicans, as usual, promised to filibuster. Apparently the Republicans don't want any new privacy protections. You should ask them why the "small government" party wants to continue giving the bosses free rein to continue intruding into our private lives.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35592245/ns/politics/

"Waah, waah, waah!!!! We'd do it if not for the EVIL RETHUGLICANS!!!"

BULLSHIT

George W. Bush's tax cuts passed 51-50 because they required a VP tie-breaker. Ronald Reagan's tax cuts passed a Democrat-controlled House.

The Dems have clear majorities in the House, the Senate, and own the Presidency. They control the budget process - and have since 2006, which coincidentally is when US budget deficts stopped shrinking and started exploding.

There's no way in hell Republicans would try to filibuster real privacy protections and not the normal claptrap and asinine "progressive" efforts to treat as simple civil criminals those who are in reality illegal combatants under the Geneva Conventions.

Care to specify what nebulous those "privacy protections" really were? Were they requirements for soldiers in a firefight on a battlefield to read terrorists their rights before returning sniper fire?

Given the vitriol with which Dems campaigned against the Patriot Act in the past and their current clear control of the reins of the US government, why the hell were they afraid of a filibuster? They're either base hypocrits or spineless pussies. Or both. Take your pick. And them being either or both of those makes you a fool for defending them.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35592245/ns/politics/

And safety, not peformance.

Instead of testng code, evaluating the design process, pretending the NHTSA can even begin to become expert in software design, how about applying the old standards to the new systems?

For instance, braking safety. I was listening to and reading the testimony from Rhonda Smith, where she even describes shifting her Lexus into neutral. Neutral?

A simple test, and I'm not an engineer, but shouldn't a car come to a stop with 'maximum' brake effort, despite the acclerator position? This is solvable in software - if the brakes are going into lock, and ABS is engaged, engine power and/or transmission state have to be compelled to answer the driver's command to stop. Traction control is already being used in many cars; NHTSA should be able to make a test capable of verifying that even multiple malfunctions are overcome.

Crap, my wife's 1995 Saab 900SE has a mode where the ECU shuts down the fuel pump if the engine stops running, on the assumption that something is terribly wrong, and spewing gas to a stopped engine is pointless if not dangerous. How do I know this? Her car developed a habit of stalling at stops. The real cause was a defective vapor recovery canister, causing loss of vacuum and low RPMs, and the ECU saw that as a stopped engine and made sure it stopped.

Certainly there are other states that can be tested for performance and safety, not some quality of performance standard. Most cars have 'safe' or 'cripple' modes to protect the drivetrain if something seems wrong, like the transmission in a gear that should not permit the indicated speed. My '95 Explorer does that, and it's only an OBD-I system. Acclerator position, wheel speed, and transmission mode should all correlate, and if something is wrong the system needs to cripple - slow down, set a max speed, etc.

Aircraft flight control systems are held out as an example of safety and reliability. Most of these, if not all, have to at least ensure the aircraft doesn't exceed the flight envelope and exceed safety limits. This is the sort standard and evaluation the NHTSA needs to focus on.

Maybe NHTSA needs to borrow a few investigators from the FAA and the military? They should be looking to Boeing, McDonnell, Electric Boat, General Dynamics for expertise in verifying safety in vehicles. Maybe even some NASA people. At least NASA seems to have turned the Shuttle program around a little too late. They certainly have a cautionary tale to tell, and a jaundiced eye towards the assurances of the 'experts' and trusting management.

Which would go a long way to reinstating a somewhat adversarial relationship between the regulators and the industry. There should be some tension there. Hiring your industry's former employees is not the way to go.

We can do so much better. We just need to solve the real problems.

You're assuming, quite mistakenly, that those that haven't been tested don't work. Many, many herbal remedies have simply never been tested by modern, double-blind methods, so we just don't know how effective they are (and even synthetic pharmaceuticals are very hard to really assess, as the frequent recalls and modified FDA recommendations attest).

That's true. And, at least on the surface, it seems like a valid objection. However, the American "National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine" spent 10 years and 2.5 billion dollars researching "alternative medicine", and essentially found nothing of any use. With those sorts of results, it's safe to say that herbal remedies are generally useless. Sure, there may be one or two out there that have some degree of efficacy, but if you're going to waste your money on those odds you may as well just go and play the lottery.

By the way, those of you who are citizens of the US may want to have a word with your government about maybe putting the next 2.5 billion into researching something useful.

But how else will we protect students from the horrors of 4th graders with Lego guns?

This is the same Yale University that prints a book about the Muhammad cartoons but removes the cartoons from the book!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32732243/

Maybe Lomborg should just threaten to behead a few Yalies......that sure seems to work if you're Muslim.

According to these articles and others I've read, she did claim executive privilege. You're assuming a lot here. You assume that the "disgruntled" former aide is lying, although there's no evidence of that. You're assuming that the suit is just for purposes of harassment, again with no evidence of that. You're assuming that these emails are all personal (which just from the subject lines that were leaked (see the msnbc link for those too), it's quite obvious that they were about state business.

I made a lot of assumptions about the facts of these e-mails because I only had the first set of articles you posted, plus what I posted later. The second set is a lot more helpful.
I made other assumptions about the complaint based on a pattern. Like I said, there were 13 ethics complaints against Palin resolved (and two outstanding) when she resigned. Of those 13, Palin was found to not have committed any wrongdoing. She was governor for two and a half years. Having 15 complaints about her filed in that time and being found to not have committed wrongdoing in the 13 settled ones seems like her enemies are throwing everything they have at the wall and seeing what sticks. In my book, that counts as evidence in Palin's favor. Once again, you're making the assumption that she's guilty because you disagree with her politics. (By the way, the MSNBC* article says that even if Palin was using the e-mails like the disgruntled former employee says, that's not illegal.)

Whether they should be protected rather than released because they are part of the "deliberative process" is for a court to decide, not Palin. It may very well be that they should remain private for now, but that still doesn't mean it was appropriate or legal for those communications to go through a non-governmental email service.

I originally said that the e-mails being part of the deliberative process and therefore not subject to disclosure was a reasonable thing for Palin to say to the judge. Clearly, the judge would then rule on it. And he did; the MSNBC* article said the judge ruled it not illegal.

*By the way, MSNBC absolutely HATES Palin. If they're saying it "wasn't necessarily illegal" you can probably take their word for it.

I decided to post the whole thing as a reply here since it is not easily accessible, even though there are a couple of replies there and additional comments by me.

Embedded software developer Joseph Stack allegedly intentionally flew a small plane into government offices in Austin, TX, in an act that has been labeled as domestic terrorism. He cited, among other things, IRS regulations about independent contractor status as well as other issues related to government corruption.

Could his behavior have been partially due to vitamin D deficiency syndrome from indoor work? Could vitamin D deficiency also have contributed to the violent behavior alleged of Hans Reiser or Amy Bishop? And is part of the problem also that Joe Stack was not talking to anyone about any of this to think through real solutions and find positive things to do that, as Mr. Rogers sang, would not hurt himself or anyone else?

Here are some useful resources for preventing more copycat violence to show how there are plenty of alternatives to violence despite Joe Stack's claim otherwise in his manifesto:

Treating Disease With Vitamin D

Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy

Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals

Albert Einstein on: Religion and Science

A wombat talks about a global mindshift

TED | Peter Eigen on moving beyond corruption

The Optimism of Uncertainty

Social Movements and Strategic Nonviolence

As another software developer who has done embedded work, here are some non-programming things I've worked on related to helping people see positive alternatives to violence:

Possible cures for a jobless recovery

Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease

Rebutting Communiqué from an Absent Future

The amazing thing to me is not that stuff like this happens. What is amazing is that it does not happen more often, which is a tribute to most of humanity's basic social nature. In a way, even Joe Stack chose a relatively limited approach; an embedded software developer such as he was could have done far more damage if trying to create general mayhem (he could have tampered with nuclear power plants or medical devices or airplane software). There is also irony here that a person took a very advanced piece of technology — a private airplane, and all that it represents as a technological marvel — and used it to destroy a past instead of to create a future.

What do people think and feel about all this?

Looks like the key criterion is: "Is the off-school behavior potentially disruptive to the educational process in school?" You can see how liberally that might be applied. For example, earlier this month the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court upheld a suspension for a girl mocking the principal on a MySpace page, after the school argued that students were talking about it in class instead of studying. (At the same time, a different court ruled the opposite in a separate case. My guess is if any of this goes to the current SCOTUS, they will uphold extensive power rights to school administrators.)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35244016/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/02/rulings-leave-us-student-speech-rights-unresolved/
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/22/nyregion/at-issue-discipline-off-school-grounds.html

PA School District Rules: "When and where the rules apply. The Code of Student Conduct covers students when they are on school grounds, or on the way to or from school. The rules also cover behavior at school events off grounds, as well as any off-grounds behavior (including behavior in the neighborhood) that is likely to lead to disruption at school. (The law is not clear on how far schools can go in punishing students for misbehavior that occurs off grounds or outside of school hours. If your case is of this type, you may wish to seek further advice from a private attorney or the Education Law Center.)"

http://www.elc-pa.org/pubs/downloads%202009/School%20Discipline%20in%20the%20Philadelphia%20SD%202-6-09.pdf

According to these articles and others I've read, she did claim executive privilege. You're assuming a lot here. You assume that the "disgruntled" former aide is lying, although there's no evidence of that. You're assuming that the suit is just for purposes of harassment, again with no evidence of that. You're assuming that these emails are all personal (which just from the subject lines that were leaked (see the msnbc link for those too), it's quite obvious that they were about state business.

Whether they should be protected rather than released because they are part of the "deliberative process" is for a court to decide, not Palin. It may very well be that they should remain private for now, but that still doesn't mean it was appropriate or legal for those communications to go through a non-governmental email service.

During the Korean war the only reason the 1st Marine Division survived and inevitably triumphed over the Chinese was because the US Army abandoned a ton of ordinance and weapons. All the US armed forces lose weapons and ordinance, in fact, recently, nuclear weapons were misplaced for a few hours http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20427730/ .

Just add this to the MASSIVE list of failures at this Winter Olympics, namely: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35464927/ns/world_news-vancouver_winter_olympics/

like this?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4394002

would they not be fools to turn down such an opportunity?

Killing Constellation might actually be the best thing for increasing the chances that a kid gets to fly in space. Constellation was going to lock us into a flight architecture that was not suitable for anything other than occasional grandstanding flights to the Moon or Mars. It was not suitable for the basis of a space economy or a scalable transportation system that could support a lunar mining base and orbital facilities to build solar power satellites, for example. NASA clearly doesn't have a direction to get people into space, but now that it's out of the way, maybe other efforts can get a toe hold. (NASA hasn't yet arrived at a formula for stimulating this, the COTS model was fundamentally flawed, but I suspect that perhaps as few as five more years of floundering, and buying rides from Russia, along with watching China and India get into space, will focus America on this problem.) Here are a few potential contenders:

Skylon
Mystery Lockheed Martin Test Program
Vulcan (DARPA)
SpaceX Falcon


Right now, there are too many disposable rockets, chasing too small a launch market. Most of the private efforts are not able to get sufficient funding for the sort of technology advancement which will be required to get the cost per pound in orbit down by much, which in turn is required if anything useful is gonna happen up there. A seldom-recanted but critical part of the X-33 story was that the business model for VentureStar fell apart. There were at least one, if not two satellite phone companies planning to orbit hundreds of telecom sats. They were looking for large buys, on the order of a flight per week, for years on end, of Shuttle-class payloads (50,000 lbs), and wanted lower cost per pound. When those companies looked like they were going to fail, the primary contractor concluded that the remaining launch market (NASA plus industry at roughly the level we see today) wasn't big enough to justify private funding for the VentureStar, even after they X-33 notorious technical issues were studied and believed to be resolvable.

Clearly that is the case.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27399337/

This was at an actual gun club. At a gun fair. With his parents. They gave him a loaded Uzi and he shot himself in the head. Seems perfectly responsible to me.

Actually there are lots of natural resources in China, what the Chinese are doing and have been doing for years is letting the The United States waste time and money in various regions around the world, then swooping in and securing deals for resources. They are doing that right now in Afghanistan; we have spent billions on relief for Africa, the Chinese instead spend billions securing the rights to natural resources in Africa.

They're already doing that with cars - as if your ECU now acting like a mini flight data recorder wasn't enough, they want to put GPS tracking units in your car.

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Insurance/InsureYourCar/WillYourCarRatYouOut.aspx

Oh and if you have bad credit the dealer may install one too:

http://blogs.computerworld.com/gps_tracking_privacy_violation

I'm sure the police would like that.

Actually, I wouldn't expect that from them at all. The military has no real interest in spying on the civilian population. Perhaps the FBI, CIA, or NSA might do the stuff you were spouting off about, but the military is going to be focused on conducting electronic and cyber warfare, i.e. destroying the enemy's electronic infrastructure and protecting our military's infrastructure.

if you want to be hysterically paranoid, at least do it about the right things...

You're calling someone paranoid by because they aren't correctly identifying which part of the government is spying on them illegally? That's a new one.

However, you'd be wrong anyway.

In late 2008 the U.S Army Reserve spied on peaceful protests against the Federal Reserve.
http://www.infowars.com/images/reserve1.jpg
http://www.infowars.com/images/reserve2.jpg
http://www.infowars.com/images/reserve3.jpg

In 2005, NBC obtained a secret 400-page Defense Department document listing more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country related to peaceful anti-war demonstrations. “The Defense Department document is the first inside look at how the U.S. military has stepped up intelligence collection inside this country since 9/11, which now includes the monitoring of peaceful anti-war and counter-military recruitment groups,” NBC reported.

In the wake of the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon established the Counterintelligence Field Activity. CIFA illegally conducted broad domestic operations that targeted antiwar and other dissident domestic groups and logged these in the TALON database. After the unit received negative publicity, the Pentagon’s senior intelligence official, James R. Clapper, recommended to Sec. Def. Gates that the counterintelligence field office be dismantled and that some of its operations be placed under the authority of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Please be more informed before you speak. Thanks.

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/07/09/1189634.aspx

This is an older article that also talks about the banding.

From the summary: "Instead, NASA will be focused on terrestrial science, such as monitoring global warming."

From the actual article: "In the meantime, the White House will direct NASA to concentrate on Earth-science projects -- principally, researching and monitoring climate change -- and on a new technology research and development program that will one day make human exploration of asteroids and the inner solar system possible. There will also be funding for private companies to develop capsules and rockets that can be used as space taxis to take astronauts on fixed-price contracts to and from the International Space Station -- a major change in the way the agency has done business for the past 50 years."

I'm ambivalent about more Earth-science projects, but IMHO bringing back tech development at NASA with a focus on exploring the inner solar system is the way to go. Not many people seem to realize this, but many/most of the technology development programs in NASA were canceled so that their funding could be diverted towards developing the problem-ridden Ares I medium-lift rocket. The mention of exploring asteroids and the inner solar system is likely a reference to a Flexible Path to Mars architecture, which builds a robust in-space architecture instead of focusing on deep gravity wells like the Moon. It's counter-intuitive, but it's actually energetically easier to travel to an asteroid or the Martian moon Phobos than it is to go to the Moon, and the infrastructure you create for doing so is more applicable to other endeavours in the inner solar system. Establishing in-space refueling depots and mining fuel/water from asteroids will go much more towards making us a spacefaring civilization than landing on the Moon again.

Finally, the emphasize on using fixed-price commercial contracts instead of cost-plus single-source contracts for traveling to Earth orbit will go a long way towards freeing up funds for beyond-Earth exploration, as commercial companies can focus on the well-understood problem of traveling to low-Earth orbit while NASA can focus on beyond.

Not a snail, a sea slug: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34824610/ns/technology_and_science-science/?GT1=43001 And yeah, this was the second thing I thought of when "horizontal gene" was brought up (mitochondria being the first).

Iraq war: 255 million/day
Nasa buget FY 2010:: ~19.6 billion

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15377059/
http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/344612main_Agency_Summary_Final_updates_5_6_09_R2.pdf&ei=q5VgS8faG8LflAfXr6ncCw&sa=X&oi=nshc&resnum=4&ct=result&cd=1&ved=0CBUQzgQoAA&usg=AFQjCNHbvMN_LllUUGX-OGEOk1BtsLAPww

Where did you get your numbers?

I'm not saying we hould be in iraq, I'm saying don't make shit up. Perhaps you meant to say: "77 days in iraq is the entire nasa budget.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34824610/ns/technology_and_science-science/?GT1=43001
The sneaky slugs seem to have stolen the genes that enable this skill from algae that they've eaten. With their contraband genes, the slugs can carry out photosynthesis — the process plants use to convert sunlight into energy.

Using a phrase like "our standard of living" covers up the fact that some people get the benefits of automation, but others pay the costs (directly or indirectly). Marshall Brain wrote about that here:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

On labor saving:
"The Original Affluent Society"
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Above all. what about the world today? One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture. This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production. all the people's material wants usually can be easily satisfied. The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."

With robotics on the way, what are people going to do when there are no jobs in construction?
"USC's 'print-a-house' construction technology"
http://www.physorg.com/news139161727.html
"Caterpillar, the world's largest manufacturer of construction equipment, is starting to support research on the "Contour Crafting" automated construction system that its creator believes will one day be able to build full-scale houses in hours."

Or no jobs in burger flipping even running the machines?
"Robot Chef"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNSKMGurrPI

Or even, next-to-no jobs in medicine? Or software? Or music? Because even if human do those things, automation lets less people do so much more?
"Robot doctor gets thumbs-up from patients"
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4946229/

It's a big like something in Isaac Asimov's story "The Last Question", when it was asked, if you are in a rainstorm, and you take shelter under a tree, what are you going to do when the tree gets wet through and starts dripping on you? Do you say, I'll go under another tree? When robots can automate much of construction, are we going to get jobs again in agriculture or miming or driving trucks or delivering packages?
"[p2p-research] 60 jobs that will rock the future... (not)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-August/004216.html
"[p2p-research] Robot videos and P2P implications (was Re: A thirty year future...)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html

The US is in the midst of vast and increasing unemployment. Many jobs probably are not coming back. Most services are frivolous and related to guarding or make-work.
http://www

Interesting follow-up announcements by WHO today (source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35057450/ns/health-cold_and_flu/ )
[[[
WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said the relatively low number of confirmed deaths from swine flu didn't mean the virus wasn't a pandemic.
"A pandemic has nothing to do with severity or number of deaths," he told The Associated Press. "A pandemic literally is a global spread of a disease."
He said WHO was "always very measured and sober in what we said and we always described the virus as causing overwhelmingly mild disease. "We cannot control how people react to this information," he added.
]]]
So the WHO says that it is technically a pandemic, but that did not mean that it is critical since it produces a "mild disease".
The problem is still with the media coverage that has surrounded a single strain among the existing flu pandemics - and the influence it has had on decision-makers (biased risk management).

By the way: It leaves in place a ban prohibiting corporations and unions from directly contributing funds to candidates for any use. Try to RTFAs next time. We are talking in specific about a corporation/union funding a political advertisement - and only on places appropriate. The internet is still free reign.

Strongly disagreeing, Justice John Paul Stevens said in his dissent, "The court's ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation."

Sorry for my antagonizing tone but this is a serious matter that I hate when some people take lightly.

Right of free speech + right of association = right of groups, as corporations, to speak freely.

Yes, they do have a right to free speech. They have a right to gather. But corporations are an international entity who have no obligation to anyone except their stock holders. We are not arguing their right to free speech anyways, we are just proposing that they should have no right to place advertisements on television or radio which are governed by the FCC. They can place ads on the internet, they can release a DVD and have their movies heard in movie theaters. But they should not be able to directly sponsor advertisements on television.

The SCOTUS' delusional thinking continues:

Roberts, in a separate opinion, said that upholding the limits would have restrained "the vibrant public discourse that is at the foundation of our democracy."

Luckily: It leaves in place a ban prohibiting corporations and unions from directly contributing funds to candidates for any use.

The problem with the "car insurance paying for oil changes" analogy is that if your car breaks, you can buy a new one. Fundamentally, car insurance is about protecting *other people* from *you*. Health insurance is about protecting yourself.

This is fundamentally false.

False assumption is false.

I did not suggest that it would protect you from getting sick, though in the long run preventative care enabled by insurance might. It's about protecting you from the financial consequences of catastrophe. And it does serve to get you treated better once you're already sick. I'm sure you are aware of the fact that if you're uninsured and you go to the ER, you're twice as likely to die?

Certainly participating in the care might do so, but it would do so whether you had insurance or paid out of pocket.

Conveniently you neglect the third scenario, which is "none of the above; I have no insurance and money with which to pay". See my link above.

Deficit spending is not the monster you make it out to be, especially in an economic slump at the zero lower bound on the Fed funds rate. It's called a liquidity trap, and Paul Krugman has written about it many a time. And as for the actual proposal, it's better than deficit-neutral over ten years. Of course, we could solve all of it by expanding Medicare to everyone, but people are inexplicably terrified of that--does anyone know a senior who wishes they didn't have it?

Here's a link showing the top 10 copycat cars produced in China, with pics of the real deal and the rip offs. http://cars.uk.msn.com/features/photos.aspx?cp-documentid=150107488

DUDE,
The UN has decided that Airbus plays dirty. Get over it and quite your GD European WHINING, you little fucking BITCH. Instead, you should be looking at your giving manufacturing secrets to China and that China has their money pegged to the dollar. As it sinks, so will your FUCKING job.
Whiny little bastard.

That would be the same Big Pharma that couldn't keep up with the demand? Yes, there's a good plan. "Hey, let's get people to buy our product, and then make sure we don't have enough of it! Oh, and let's charge so little for it that we barely cover the legal fees to defend ourselves from idiots and conspiracy theorists!".

Yep, that makes perfect sense.

FYI the entire GLOBAL market for ALL vaccines generates about $20 Billion, while $34 Billion is spent annually in the US alone on "Alternative Medicine" (aka. "shit-that-does-nothing-except-make-the-seller-richer"). But "Big Altmed" doesn't sound nearly as ominous, so I guess they get a free pass. It's much more fun to target the people who are actually trying to do some good in this world.

Your wish is my command:

Here's a photo and an article of http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34893608/ns/world_news-haiti_earthquake/ entitled "Obama enlists Bush, Clinton to help on Haiti" that depicts George Walker Bush and Barack Obama in the same place at the same time. I think it's safe to say that this is a real photo.

Or they accurately realize that GWB's leaving office and Obama entering it caused a noticeable easing of tension in world politics. This isn't so much because of the job Obama's done, but rather because of the destructive nature of GWB's administration.

<sarcasm>
Oh yeah, since there's been a change in our foreign policy...
</sarcasm>

(Yeah, he goes around bowing before foreign dictators, bad mouths America and constantly apologizes, but his policies are only an expansion of GWB's.)

It was initially thought that the vaccination would require 2 doses per individual to have a strong enough effect. Once more testing was done and the vaccine was fully developed, it became clear that 1 dose per individual was sufficient.

CIA slipped bugs to Soviets

all the moral relativists will be saying you can't possibly be trying to extend american style rights and freedoms to china. that you have no right to do that and (my favorite part): trying to extend liberties in countries outside the usa is imperialism (!?)

<sarcasm>
you westerners can't possibly judge china because it has a complex history and culture you will never fully understand. you should be sensitive to interesting cultural differences that makes the world an exciting place, like: the chinese enjoy being slaves of the state. that the chinese don't like individualism. that's just a western thing. the chinese like being in a giant harmonious ant colony. the chinese are like worker robots and they like it that way. because of complex historical and cultural reasons you can never grasp. the mandarins of imperial china were highly bureaucratic and so you see the chinese like this highly regimented "harmony". so just accept it. ignore those pesky calls for human rights. clearly tools of western imperialism
</sarcasm>

what you need to do is suck up to the grumpy old technocrats in beijing, like every other kiss ass:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30292772/

thank you google, for not being that kiss ass, FINALLY

Huh, and I thought we already had a flat tax to the tune of 40%.

-l

1) destroying the value of the US dollar,

You are blaming the US government for this? First, I disagree that the value of the dollar is 'destroyed'. Since I don't see your citation, I will provide mine: http://moneycentral.msn.com/detail/stock_quote?Symbol=/EURUS/
Further, do you think the governement has a lot to do with the economy? I think the people who irresponsibly [traded|mortgaged|spent|etc] are to blame for our current condition.

Continue to believe the government when they say there is no inflation

The little I know about economics tells me that much of it is a mind game. If the masses lose faith in the system, the repercussions are magnified. If people keep a calm head and try not to do anything drastic, the 'invisible hand' of the market will correct the inefficiency with minimal collateral damage. I recognize that it is a fine line between outright lying and slowly announcing truth to help minimize effect. Like I started, I am not an economist, and from the sounds of it, neither are you. Let us both decide to keep our sweeping generalizations to ourselves, and try not to believe everything you see on Fox News.

It was not immediately clear how GM reached the 230 mpg in city driving, but industry officials estimated the automaker's calculation took into consideration the Volt traveling 40 miles on the electric battery and then achieving about 50 mpg when the engine kicked in.

"When X-rays are used for medical imaging purposes, they have to be energetic enough to get through the human body. The X-rays used in the backscatter machines in airports have such low energy that they literally bounce off the skin. That is what backscatter implies," Thrall said. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34734234/ns/travel-news/
you know this if you were a radiologist, instead of an idiot.

If, say, your first choice for addressing depression is an SSRI prescription, you've been infected by advertising.

Said by someone who has probably never had major depression.

Severe depression isn't the only kind out there.

Make sure you read what I said about treating depression.

And make sure you read the news lately on using SSRIs:

Limits to antidepressants' effectiveness: study

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Mild to severe depression might be better treated with alternatives to antidepressant drugs, which do not help patients much more than an inactive placebo, researchers said Tuesday.

• http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60454020100105
• http://health.msn.com/health-topics/depression/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100252115
• http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf500/201001051615DOWJONESDJONLINE000323_FORTUNE5.htm

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29546030/

"...sent nude pictures of herself to a boyfriend. When they broke up, he sent them to other high school girls. The girls were harassing her, calling her a slut and a whore. She was miserable and depressed, afraid even to go to school."

Not "high-tech" related, but you could add Schwinn bicycles to that list.