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You must only know evangelical protestants. ... I don't think Methodists have much of a problem with evolution either.

Ironically, we've gone from a Methodist president, to an Evangelical president. Well, maybe. It's unclear what exactly Obama is now.

Although I do find this interesting, from that article:

The United Church of Christ, the denomination from which Obama resigned when he left Wright's church, ... is mostly white, a descendant of New England Puritanism.

We elected a (former?) Evangelical Puritan as the liberal choice? Wow. When your "liberal" choice is a (former?) Puritan, well...

as yes there actually ARE some things, like child porn, that SHOULD be censored, according to ANY ideology

Right! Life is never more complicated than an ultimatum!

yet you see people all the time, especially on slashdot, actually saying "country A censors child porn so how can it criticize another country for censoring political opinion?

Really? ALL the time? ESPECIALLY on slashdot? Lets see two examples. Not half-assed examples that might kinda sorta mean what you say if you looked at them from the most biased perspective, nor examples of people trolling, I want full-ass examples. Gotta be pretty easy to come up with since they happen ALL the time, ESPECIALLY here. Right?

The original argument was whether there was a nutritional difference between organically-fed cows and corn-fed cows.

Well what I probably over dramatized to make my point, if an animal is expected to die in 6 months I would argue that it is nutritionally different as compared to a cow that was active and healthy.

There is also evidence to back this up:

Here: http://www.americangrassfedbeef.com/grass-fed-natural-beef.asp

Here: http://www.askahealer.com/grain-fed-beef.htm

Here: http://www.texasgrassfedbeef.com/id54.htm

Here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25723479/

are just a few sites...

OK, I really, really appreciate this help. Like you, I had exposure to this stuff in undergrad work - some 35 or more years ago, and otherwise, maybe kinda spoon-fed - I only really paid attention to the DOJ actions against IBM and MS. So I'll start re-reading - evidently I didn't retain what I thought that I had.

Yes, I had the right idea for the intention of the anti-trust laws. I guess you were right - I did NOT clearly understand leveraging (and sorry, google wasn't helping me).

And if anything, I was more guilty of thinking as a consumer advocate than CS-y. I think consumers are well-served by music player software assisting them in managing their portable music devices (iTunes/iPod, WMP/Zune, etc). From what I ***thought*** you were saying, if the tech treated a portable music player like a printer (geez - finding decent analogies is f*ing hard), in that the interfaces are known by all, doable by all, then the lock-in is gone - and the leverage is gone. That's what I thought you meant, anyway.

The mosquito repellant/mousetrap example was helpful. However - so far as I know, no one charges for their music playing software - so there's no market to undermine - so long as you don't penalize for the non-use of your software. Is that correct?

But that leaves the iTMS as the leveraged market (I believe that I got the use of terms right here).

Here's the EU antitrust complaint about iTMS - only on the grounds of sales territories - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17920298/

Here's the one about iTMS not supporting WMA - http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205207895

But the complaint goes beyond software licensing politics and charges Apple with deliberately designing its iPod hardware to be incompatible with WMA. One of the third-party components in iPods, the Portal Player System-On-A-Chip, supports WMA, according to the complaint. "Apple, however, deliberately designed the iPod's software so that it would only play a single protected digital format, Apple's FairPlay-modified AAC format," the complaint states. "Deliberately disabling a desirable feature of a computer product is known as 'crippling' a product, and software that does this is known as 'crippleware.' "

Frankly, this sounds exactly like the explanation that you've given - except - the charge is not necessarily true.

Apple, for its part, might reasonably claim it doesn't want to license WMA from Microsoft, a cost the complaint speculates is unlikely to exceed $800,000, or 3 cents per iPod sold in 2005.

Apple didn't disable the feature - they didn't enable this private format. AAC isn't private. FairPlay is, FairPlay with AAC is, but if we see the demise of FairPlay (yeah, I know - and if chickens had lips, they'd tell me how great the future will be) - that just leaves the unsupported codec.

So - if they did a firmware update to support WMA - and they could - PROVIDED THERE'S ENOUGH NVM so to do - then this action would go away, wouldn't it?

But still - the action isn't that iTMS is bad or iPods only support AAC and AAC is private - all misstatements I've seen regularly - it's that iTMS has locked out those preferring to use WMA. If that's true - what about Ogg/Vorbis?

Anyway - thanks for the help - if you don't have time to continue to respond, I understand - but I'm hoping that you will.

There's even a market for Orbital Solar Power Satellites -- namely for remote military outposts that would otherwise need to truck in fuel for generators.

For residential power as well. PG&E has plans to put it into production starting 2016.

How does a rover on Mars cost 4 million per year to operate?

Long distance charges.

I don't think the $4million number is accurate anyway. It's likely higher. Last year they were going to cut the budget by $4 million and turn off one of the rovers but then changed their minds. IT looks like the budget for the program is actually $20 million according to this article.

Hmm... maybe they didn't change their minds and it's not really stuck.

It would be, if the accident was caused by a design flaw that requireed unusual constant maintenance.

First, unusual constant maintence does not indicate a flaw in the design; that's just how the design works out. Second, as long as the manual says "this is the maintence schedule you must follow," how often it occurs becomes irrelevent. The owner knows the car will take a lot of maintence, it says so right in the manual. Finally, saying that Windows requires "unusual constant maintence" is just plain stupid. It doesn't. A user running a virus is no different than someone putting diseal in their unleaded gas only car.

If your Honda needed to have the rear wheel bearings adjusted every thousand miles, and you didn't do it and caused an accident, there would be a pretty good case to take Honda to court - "Why the hell do the bearings need adjusted all the time? No-one else has that!"

No, that would not get anywhere in court. The manual indicates the maintience schedule, and there's no law saying manufactors have to build cars with certain schedules. Throwing out whatever you consider to be "too frequent," I'm sure we already have cases of people that were in accidents because they failed to properly maintain their car... yet no one is suing the manufacturer, they are correctly blaming the driver for failing to maintain their car. It's the owners responsiblity, not the manufacturer's.

Both Linux and Mac OSX are getting to be somewhat mainstream now

Mac yes, Linux no.

when my deeply non-technical mother could identify an Ubuntu boot screen on one of the office computers in CSI, I figured it was making an impression

She likely knows because I'm sure you're constantly going on about it, and like all mom's, she takes some interest in your interests.

and one thing that people like about both of them is the fact that you never need to use antivirus software, and updates are pretty painless.

Updates on Windows are painless. We have an update server, and most updates are auto-approved. We've never had a problem, nor do most.

Linux doesn't have many viruses because nobody is using Linux. Same as Mac although that is changing.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12537279/

There's an argument to be made that an operating system that needs constant updating, extreme care in use and expensive third-party software to keep it from turning into a spam cannon is fundamentally defective, just as a car sold with inadequately-secured wheel bearings would be.

Ya, that's why Linux doesn't have updates all the time, and 10.0 was the last version of OSX released. The fact is that if Joe sixpack starts using linux, linux will get more viruses. And if Linux never gets a mail client that can easily open a movie attachment, Joe sixpack won't even move to Linux, because they see it as too hard.

Actually I believe that's 1/100 over the course of a year - and the rate comparable to that of condoms and the pill.
http://health.msn.com/health-topics/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100068304
If I recall correctly, the failure rate is given assuming a year of average amount of sexual contact per week (Off the top of my head, I've heard 'average' being assumed as '3x/week')

Prolonged exposure (living or going to school) at 200 meters raised the chance of getting leukemia by 70%. 200 meters to 500 meters raised it by 20%. [...] And for those asking for citations, search Google for "power lines leukemia" .

I did. Half of the results I got were of the "study finds no link between power lines, leukemia" type. The rest seemed to be written by internet nuts with no clue what they were talking about. Assuming then you meant to search without the quotes, I repeated the search. This time I found more that substantiate what you said, but realising that half of them didn't know what they were talking about I repeated it on google scholar (as should anyone interested in what actual scientific research on a subject says).

Results: "no relationship was found between leukemia and electric power line configurations", "Residence near high-voltage lines did not increase risk", [test subjects who lived] within 300 metres [of a power line showed a] relative risk [with] 95% confidence interval [of one kind of leukemia of] 0.8-3.5 [, or for another] 0.7-3.8 [, or if exposure was prolonged] 1.0-4.6 [or] 0.9-4.7" (i.e., for those who don't understand how to interpret that last one, no statistically significant effects -- note that this is the study that's usually cited _in favour_ of arguments about power lines causing leukemia). "the risk was not significantly associated with either residential magnetic-field levels ", "The study provides [...] no support for an association between leukemia and [magnetic field exposure]", "the results suggest that typical magnetic fields of high-voltage power lines are not an important cause of leukemia in adults", "These results provide little support for a relation between power-frequency EMF exposure and risk of childhood leukemia", "For residential exposure >= 0.2 uT, the relative risk for leukemia was estimated at .. 95% confidence interval 0.8-2.2" (i.e. not statistically significant). That's the first page of results finished with; I don't see any evidence fdor your assertion of a 70% increase in risk, and I would be cautious at claiming even that there's a link. Google scholar selects widely cited papers first, and papers with the most provocative results are likely to be the most widely cited. Given the number of studies that have been conducted on this subject, we'd expect at least some to come up with postive results based on random variation. That none of the ones I've looked at have even had statistically significant results suggests there's nothing to this, and it really is just random variation we're seeing.

If you can't make a profit playing by the rules then stop trying to make a profit and die

This is more or less what's happenning to the USA as a whole. American companies simply cannot compete against foreign companies, that's why the industrial sector is moving to Asia. It's useless to say "stop trying to make a profit and die", they died a quarter century ago.

It's the US government at all levels, federal, state, and local, that should learn to live by the rules. When the corporations are moving overseas to places with lower taxes this means your taxes are too high, you should cut government spending and taxes at the same time.

Yes, it's clearly the tax rates and not greedy companies wanting to have their cake (american middle class customers) and eat it too (ultra-cheap, no human rights labor).

We can all thank "multilateral trade agreements" for this, and until the US grows a pair and cuts them off through robust trade sanctions the US middle class will continue to be bled dry.

If you can't make a profit playing by the rules then stop trying to make a profit and die

This is more or less what's happenning to the USA as a whole. American companies simply cannot compete against foreign companies, that's why the industrial sector is moving to Asia. It's useless to say "stop trying to make a profit and die", they died a quarter century ago.

It's the US government at all levels, federal, state, and local, that should learn to live by the rules. When the corporations are moving overseas to places with lower taxes this means your taxes are too high, you should cut government spending and taxes at the same time.

Or they could just hire these people.

Bikini clad girls are a lot cuter to watch than robots.

If they're looking for better looking lawn mowers,
try this link ::

(safe for work )

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19901693

Several people died? http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5174391/

If you have a problem with a nuclear facility and you kill 10 people, that says you're doing it correctly (Chernobyl is doing it wrong).

Not sure what attitude that you read into my attempt to be factual from memory and limited facts. I think this is the one I was thinking about and it killed three people. Saw some other articles that sounded a bit questionable in that knee-jerk antinuclear way.

Several people died? http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5174391/

If you have a problem with a nuclear facility and you kill 10 people, that says you're doing it correctly (Chernobyl is doing it wrong).

it's just taken the Internet increasing the flow of information for us to realize this.

That is exactly the problem. Online polls are only really representative of people who get news and information from the Internet, which is a minority of people.

WTF? The main bitch about government healthcare is that taxpayers will be forced to subsidize bad health choices...so you are pointing to an article that shows that isn't the case? Congratulations for not making sense AND once again making nonsense claims about the government. The government only started looking at that trick after private insurance and private employers started doing it!

Here we have multiple private insurance companies and private employeers charging smokers more. That is right...multiple instances of the little "government boogeyman" story you linked...the story is about a TREND not a single incident like your story. How stupid of you to think that private industry isn't already doing it. Oh and in both cases they are paying extra, not being forced. But for shits and giggles since you want to play... How about reading this about an employee was fired for smoking by a private company. After all, private companies trying to increase their bottom line don't want to pay the insurance premiums of smokers and obese people...so just fire them instead!

Eventually we'll hit the point where there's simply not enough benefit to be gotten out of an expensive GPU. For me, that time is long past. For others, it may come in the next few years.

I agree. I haven't played Crysis, but I'm on my second time through Far Cry 2, and playability issues aside, the game looks just astounding. E.g., 1) the human models are so realistic they're descended deep into the Uncanny Valley and creep you out. 2) While the various areas you can go into do have a lot of artificial constraints about where you can walk (cliffs in this case, in the original doom it was walls of hallways and rooms), there is plenty of areas that don't have that and there is no fog of war or limited sight distance needed. I remember there were some hacks to remove the limited sight distance for NWN 1, and it looked okay right up until you started moving around and then it would make the game laggy and crash a lot. 3) Segregated areas. Again, with NWN 1 and lot of other similar games you had to segregate various areas to keep the number of polygons manageable, but with Far Cry 2 they seem to scale things in the distance to a lower resolution so that it stays manageable. They do have distinct areas, but they seem to have made the transition between the two relatively seamless, you only notice a little stuttering when you cross from one map to the next.

Anyhow, it seems that these sorts of games are very close to as realistic as you'd really want before you get diminishing returns for what can physically be portrayed on a 2-D screen. Now in FC2 they could have made a great game if only in addition to the graphics they would have worked on the AI of the soldiers and some decent factions instead of the 100% accurate aim, "x-ray specs vision" soldiers who are in separate factions but all hate you and instantly recognize you and will shoot you on sight.

Using a taser, your inhibition threshold is considerably lower. You're not gonna kill him, according to the maker of the item, no matter what. This is especially a problem with law enforcement, who use those alleged nonlethal tools far more easily than they would fire a gun at someone.

Problem: someone is sitting in a tree.

Solution: TASER!!!

it is 100% possible to be proud of your catholicism, your scottishness, your whatever, and yet still know the limits of that

you present the false choice that you have to be proud of that at the sacrifice of knowing your shared sense of humanity, or visa versa. no, not at all

for example: i know murder is wrong. but i most definitely will kill someone who is pointing a gun at my family. there is no inconsistency in that view whatsoever. likewise, i can take pride in the catholic church, in its teachings, in its grand spectacle, and know at the same time, that the pope is 100% wrong when he says this: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19692094/

no, pope, you are wrong: nothing about being a catholic means i am better than anyone else. and i have in no way reduced my catholic pride, nor have i inflated my pride into blind smug superiority over noncatholic humanity

its all about limits. it is a false dichotomy to say i have to choose between my belief in essential human equality and my religion/ nationality. no, it is not one or the other. would you tell me that if i don't bleieve in murder that i can't defend my family from being hurt or killed with deadly force of my own? of coruse you wouldn't. you understand why that's a flase dichotomy 100%. because its not so cut and dry. then don't present a false choice on the nature of pride either

and ps: please don't babble about "socialism". the word socialism has lost all meaning. before recent times it was already a very broad complex term, but recently its become nothing but a propagandistic term for anything outside certain partisan hackery. so you can label something "socialism" and then cease to think about the merits or detriments of a person's argument, and enter a retarded kneejerk automatic unthinking rejection of whatever someone says. if you wish to be an intellectually honest person, debate someone on the merits of what they say or lack thereof, don't apply mindless lightning rod labels and think you actually somehow defeat the other person's point of view, valid or not

there is nothing wrong with being catholic

there is nothing wrong being scottish

there is nothing wrong with being american

etc.

the problem comes when one of these features of your identity is something you consider more important than your shared sense of humanity

for example, the pope breaks this rule:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19692094/

his assertion is that only the catholic church is a true church

"Christ 'established here on earth' only one church," the document said. The other communities "cannot be called 'churches' in the proper sense" because they do not have apostolic succession -- the ability to trace their bishops back to Christ's original apostles.

here the pope is clearly asserting that catholic identity is superior to protestant identity

now not to gang up on the pope, as pretty much all other religions have this sort of exclusionary belief as a foundational concept: look to islam and its teachings on the superiority of the ummah, for example. but this is very much the source of all the problems in the world: "i am in group {xyz}, you are not in group {xyz}, therefore i am better than you"

it is very possible to be a proud catholic, or a proud sunni, or a proud sikh, or whatever, and yet know the limits of that pride, and subsume your pride in that identity to your identity as a human being. for example: knowing that just because you are a sunni, that does not mean you are automatically better than a shiite. unfortunately, someone just bombed and killed 60 shiites yesterday in iraq. most probably a sunni who views all shiites as dogs. not that there is not also some sunni who sees shiites as inferior but would never kill anyone, but the "original sin", if you will, that makes all crimes in this world possible of race upon race, ethnicity upon ethnicity, nation upon nation, religion upon relgion, etc., is this initial belief: "being in group x makes me superior to people not in group x"

until such a better time in our distant future when this sentiment is seen as the clear and vile evil that it is, right now we are very much mired in a barbarian era of foolish pride, as exemplified by the pope's own statements, a pope who openly embraces and encourages this vile evil of blind pride, of putting membership in some arbitrary group as a basis of superiority, openly breaking the bond of common hunaity we all share

During the cold war, the US got wind that the Soviets were stealing natural gas pipeline control software, so they let them steal a version that had a logic bomb in it. When it blew up, it caused the largest non-nuclear explosion ever seen from space. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4394002 Anyone who uses the stolen data is a fool. Good counter-spies have bad data available for immediate use.

So yes, we do leave classified data around for spies to find. But it's been modified. With something like a fighter jet, the frequencies of the radar systems may have been altered so that the enemy will be looking in the wrong place.

During the cold war, the US got wind that the Soviets were stealing natural gas pipeline control software, so they let them steal a version that had a logic bomb in it. When it blew up, it caused the largest non-nuclear explosion ever seen from space. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4394002
Anyone who uses the stolen data is a fool. Good counter-spies have bad data available for immediate use.

Yep, the US got wind that the Soviets were stealing natural gas pipeline control software, so they let them steal a version that had a logic bomb in it. When it blew up, it caused the largest non-nuclear explosion ever seen from space. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4394002
Anyone who uses the stolen data is a fool.

Yep, the US got wind that the Soviets were stealing natural gas pipeline control software, so they let them steal a version that had a logic bomb in it. When it blew up, it caused the largest non-nuclear explosion ever seen from space. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4394002
Anyone who uses the stolen data is a fool.

It doesn't imply that Macs are immune, it flat-out says that there aren't any viruses out for Macs and this is completely true.

Oh really? This story would seem to contradict what you say.

I believe that has happened many times already....

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/03/daschle/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28642237/

Are you really surprised? If someone wants to drain your bank account, they don't even need to break any encryption, all the information they needed is written on your checks. They don't even need to forge a signature.

If banks were liable for fraud committed with the systems they designed, they'd design more fraud tolerant systems.

1) According to the site, 1190437 people submitted votes or named selections. "Colbert" got 230539 and "Serenity" got about 190k. Even combined, the top two choices only got about 35 percent of the vote. Alone, "Colbert" got about 19% of the vote. Even if the poll results were not biased by ballot stuffing, all they make clear is that no matter what choice NASA made, 80 percent of the voters disagreed with it. In no reasonable sense did "Colbert" win an election -- if a candidate was voted into office with a plurality of only 19% of the vote, there would be calls for his head and the system would probably be reformed.

2)Can we please stop conflating whoever put this survey on with the entirety of NASA? Some small group of people within the organization are responsible for the survey and the name selection. Complain about Bill Gerstenmaier, as it appears that he bears some responsibility for the survey and the naming, or maybe the ISS Project Office.

3)The rules did make it clear that the contest "winner" wouldn't necessarily be picked for the module name. It even gives reasons why: "NASA reserves the right to ultimately select a name in accordance with the best interests of the agency, its needs, and other considerations. Such name may not necessarily be one which is on the list of voted-on candidate names." The ISS is a big international project, and it's possible that the naming of a module might have a diplomatic effect. Relations with the Russians, our major partners on the station, seem somewhat stressed, maybe even on station. So not selecting what may be viewed as the flippant choice for a module name seems the more diplomatically sound choice.

--sabre86

That was my reaction when I saw the show last night, too.

They not only decided to ignore the write-in winner, but also to ignore the winner amongst the 'finalist' names that NASA had selected.

Based on numbers reported from MSNBC:

• Colbert : 'more than 230,000'
• Serenity: about 190,000 (lost 'by more than 40,000 votes')
• Myyearbook: 147,637
• Gaia: 114,427

From that, we know that Tranquility is under 114,427 ... but we also know the relative percentages of the 4 that NASA proposed (which gives us: Earthrise : 24k; Legacy : 35k; Venture: 21k), the total number of votes, and that there were another 4 above Tranquility in the rankings ... even if there was a multi-way tie between Xenu/Socialvibe/Buddy/Ubuntu and Tranquility, and Synergy and Vision got negligible results ... Tranquility couldn't have gotten more than 86k votes.

North American Car of the Year, for starters.
Truth about cars: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/chevrolet-malibu-review/
US News and World Report #1 affordability in mid sized sedans
Consumer Reports even gave it a pretty good review:
http://autos.msn.com/research/vip/ConsumerReportsSnapshot.aspx?year=2009&make=Chevrolet&model=Malibu

I've never seen it advertised, but then I watch traditionally guy stuff where it's all trucks, beer, and sports cars.

And your link doesn't provide much justification, after rolling out a new Saturn campaign with lots of airtime, Saturn sales are down 50% from last year. I don't see how that means anything about Chevy sales (since your own link pointed out that a decent number of folks don't associate Saturn with GM.

I heard about the Malibu on an NPR story, during one of the times GM went beggin in DC, and then saw an article about them in the WSJ, I've driven one as a rental and it was a fine car, not really my style, granted that was only a week of driving, but much better than the new Pontiac I rented when my car was hit a few years ago. When so many varied reviews say, this car is as good as the Japanese offerings, it's worth taking notice especially when popular perception is that GM still generally isn't as good as foreign cars.

Personally, I've never bought a new car in my life and doubt I'll start now, but the financial crisis has got me browsing for a newer car to perhaps replace my 12 year old integra and my wife's 15 year old volvo.

Anyway taxing smokers is smart, because smokers have health problems that taxpayers end up subsidizing through medicare/medicaid. Raising taxes on smokers results in fewer smokers, which results in a lower tax burden for nonsmokers. This is one where the "lower my taxes" crowd should be creaming their jeans, and instead they're whining about it.

Actually you're wrong. A non-smoker on average costs more over their life in medical costs than a smoker. Sure smokers get cancer and emphysema, but the treatments are fairly straight forward for these and usually a smoker dies much younger. Non-smokers tend to get more exotic/costly diseases and in the end cost the tax payers more.

This has been known for some time as this was published in 1997: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/337/15/1052

There have been more recent studies that back this up published out of Holland and at least one other European country in the last year or so.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22995659/

Whatever name is announced to the public, The engineers, mission controllers, and astronauts will call it "Node 3". That's what we have been calling it all through the design stage. For example, in this photo, you can see the hatch is labeled "To LAB", short for US Laboratory Module, not "Destiny".

http://msnbcmedia3.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/060707/060707_last-hatch_hmed_1p.hmedium.jpg

Disclosure: Yes, I am short Goldman Sachs stock. I believe this company is evil and should not exist. We need to begin to break up companies that have as much control over world finances as Goldman Sachs.

Let me see if I get this right:

1. Short GS stock
2. Blog about how evil GS is
3. ???
4. Profit!

There's only one problem with this plan: GS stock has been rising since the start of the year. No wonder the guy believes GS "should not exist": Should GS stock continue to rise, there's no limit to how much the guy can lose.

(For those who have no clue what I'm talking about: "Shorting a stock" basically involves selling stock you don't own. Your only obligation is to return the stock you "borrowed." If you can buy said stock at a lower price than the price you sold it at, you profit on the difference. If the stock becomes worthless, you basically pocket whatever profit you made from the sale of stock you never owned in the first place.)

They had 91% of the market share in the U.S. In several local markets they did have a monopoly. You don't have to have 100% market share to be considered a monopoly, you simply have to have "sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

"The Standard Oil Company of New Jersey and its nineteen subsidiary corporations were declared today by the Supreme Court of the United States to be a conspiracy and combination in restraint of trade.
It was otherwise held to be monopolizing interstate commerce in violation of the Sherman anti-trust law. The dissolution of the combination was ordered to take place within six months."
http://encarta.msn.com/sidebar_761594048/supreme_couhttp://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/09/2243214&from=rss#rt_rules_standard_oil_company_is_illegal_trust.html

That sure sounds like a monopoly to me! Maybe you should revisit your history lessons.

Here are some examples to support your point.

Here is Kevin Bankston, EFF on Olbermann last night. MSNBC is not the mouthpiece of the right wing. Olbermann was about as enthusiastic for Obama as anyone I saw during the campaign.

Here and here are some current left wing blogs being very critical of this policy stand as they were when it was Bush's stand. Meanwhile the right wing media like Fox are spreading FUD and holding up Michelle Bachmann as an exemplar. I do understand that Fox has no credibility criticizing this since they were so nakedly in favor of Bush.

yeh but here's a rationale critique of Obama. It's Olbermann and Professor Turley of George Washington hammering the administration on actual points at issue not blathering speculation.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677#30096358

Ok, my sentence was badly worded. But you got it. So here are some older sources :
400 dolphins stranded at zanzibar in 2006
Another one in UK in 2008.
Other cases are mentioned. About the Military not caring, well, in the first article you can read the navy spoke person stating : "In the U.S. alone, a person is 10 times more likely to be struck by lightning than for sonar to cause a marine mammal stranding,". Such experiments help understanding what happens and help confront deniers.

I'd personally kill every Dolphin myself if it would save a human life.

Ah, if you kill every dolphin, you'll also be killing humans. Though rare, dolphins have saved humans, especially from sharks.

Falcon

Olbermann covered this yesterday and will be talking about it again with Kevin Bankston from EFF today. Olbermann was really pro-Obama during the campaign, and that's not stopping him from excoriating these policies and actions on his show. I'd like to see more journalistic integrity and independence such as this. This demonstrates that Olbermann was not and is not simply anti-Bush. Although he does continue to attribute the policy (correctly) to the Bush administration, I think that's just historical accuracy. From the linked clip comes the notion that the Obama administration is taking these actions to gain favor with the intelligence community. Sounds like fear, and maybe it's quite reasonable fear.

Also I wish the conservative media would take up this kind of criticism instead of presenting sensationalist stories which are mostly speculation. It could be that I'm wrong about the conservative media since I tend to ignore them.

> Unlikely,

This is pretty well documented:

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

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

Note who posted the parent message: Miguel de Icaza. He should know. Here's an interesting interview: Talking Mono with Miguel de Icaza

Reading up on the topic, the UN knew about the uranium before the gulf war in 1991. They knew where it was, and that nothing had been done with it.

That's why the (fake) story about the Niger yellowcake was at all noteworthy. They didn't know where this (entirely fictitious) new yellowcake was, and assumed the worst.

So yes, nukes were at the forefront of the issue, but only as a pretext.

It struck me when I read this article at MSNBC

The stock price doubled since the initial rumors? Really...so who stands to benefit from this? Are Sun and IBM execs pals enough to hint at talks (without committing to any deal)

Understanding that IBM has invested quite a bit in java, I can see how they'd like to acquire Sun. However, it's a bit odd that they'd offer a significant premium (unconfirmed) and then bail on the possibility of another company getting to bid. Yeah, I can see how they'd not want to get into a bidding war over this, but I would've thought they'd retracted their offer as soon as a hint of the possibility of acquisition became news/gossip without something legally binding in place. This is IBM, they aren't known for bold initiatives, after all.

Something about this sounds off, regardless of the rest of this article's speculation on who would be a better Sun benefactor.

This is the same state where the owners and operators of the New Times were arrested for exposing extreme judicial misconduct by prosecutors;

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

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/business/media/19cnd-arrest.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=login

http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/99912

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13508_3-9800829-19.html

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21376598/

Between "speed tax" photo radar on freeways and "Nickel Bag" Joe Arpaio in Arizona, I would definitely call the state highly prosecutorial against it's citizens.

Health Insurance should work like other insurance policies

No, that's stupid. Instead, we should stop calling it "health insurance," stop treating it as if it were insurance, and start calling it "health plan" which is actually what it is (and what everyone needs).

I do not mind universal catastrophic health care, I do mind the idea of paying for every kook who thinks his tummy ache is an emergency.

I hear this argument a lot, but it's actually a very poor one. It would be much, much cheaper if everyone went to their doctors anytime they got the first sign of an unusual symptom (by unusual = something they haven't felt before, or worse than what they've felt before), regardless of how benign that is. If it turns out to be nothing, as it will in most cases, you've wasted a small amount of cash (that adds up, I'll grant you that). However, if it turns out to be something dangerous in its first stages then you've very probably saved enough money to compensate for all the other cases when people didn't actually need the doctor. Simply because the treatment for dangerous conditions in later stages are typically much more complex, and much more expensive than dealing with the problem early on.

This recent story explains why it can be so out of control, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29998460/ [msn.com]

No, it really doesn't. The story says 9 patients made 2,700 ER visits for the past 6 years, it says nothing as to whether they actually NEEDED to go to the ER that often. In fact, 8 of the 9 were drug abusers, so chances are that they were all near-death from overdosing that many times, and the ER was justified.

Yes, the ER is expensive. Do you want less money to be wasted? The first time a junkie shows up in the ER, he needs to get the emergency treatment, followed by a court-mandated detox as well as paid-for shrinks to help him kick the habit. Then he won't have the following emergencies, and by paying more early on, you've again saved money in the long term.

A local hospital in Atlanta (actually more than one) reports many cases of people calling 911 to get a ride downtown where by law they are required to be given a "ticket" to get home. So what happens? Many abuse the system only to waste our money and the valuable time of doctors and nurses just so they can come downtown and see friends or do shopping.

That would be real abuse, and that one didn't come with a link (I was disappointed, I thought your msnbc link was going to talk about that story). First, I don't believe it, because I've been to the ER. If you've reported symptoms and told the paramedics to take you to the hospital, you're going to spend HOURS in the hospital while they test you for the symptoms you reported that were apparently severe enough to warrant an ambulance. There's no way that pain is worth the ride and (bus?) ticket.

I suppose once you got to the hospital you could refuse treatment, but I think the solution to that abuse is simple. If you call 911 and refuse tests, you get charged for all expenditures. If you have a history of calling 911 and tests consistently review that you have nothing, you get either charged with fraud (evidence that you just wanted a ride downtown--wtf?) or you get a court-mandated shrink appointment to manage your hypochondria (which is likely to account for a significant amount of repeat ER visitors).

is ass backwards.

Health Insurance should work like other insurance policies, for catastrophic issues. My auto insurance doesn't pay for maintenance but that is exactly what people expect from medical insurance. The same for dental. There are many services that are expensive simply because a "group/company" is paying for it, not a person. If auto/home/etc insurance worked like how medical/dental does we would have huge premiums to cover for people going in to get their oil changed every 3k and tires rotated just because someone else is helping pay for it.

I do not mind universal catastrophic health care, I do mind the idea of paying for every kook who thinks his tummy ache is an emergency. This recent story explains why it can be so out of control, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29998460/

A local hospital in Atlanta (actually more than one) reports many cases of people calling 911 to get a ride downtown where by law they are required to be given a "ticket" to get home. So what happens? Many abuse the system only to waste our money and the valuable time of doctors and nurses just so they can come downtown and see friends or do shopping.

Any UHC system is going to have to set real boundaries so stuff like this gets stopped. It isn't the treatment of real medical issues that is sinking the system, its the abuse of anyone who cries "I got a boo boo" doesn't even need a "boo boo" to get something and worse not be held accountable when it is nothing.

Scientists figure out how honeybees fly

Sexual harassment, rather than a soap opera.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6955149/page/3/