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This coming from the group that put Florida State on notice for appearance in bowl games because of its mascot but made no mention of Notre Dame's? Somehow I'm not surprised.

he doesn't have a chance in hell of winning.

And since he thought he had a teensy tiny chance, the big boys decided to send him a message:
On December 19, 2007, his youngest brother, Perry Kucinich, was found dead in his home. There was no sign of foul play.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21116732

Thankfully/sadly (take your pick) he hasn't agreed to do The Silmarillion.

Given the bad blood, including a recent "taunting" phonecall, it really is surprising that Jackson would accept the project.

But, then again, money is money (especially when it's LOTS of money).

The FBI keeps arresting and convicting people in this country for ties to terrorist organizations. Now, how do you suppose domestic surveillance contributes to that? Did the idea cross your mind that those arrests and convictions, not to mention the other disrupted plots, are the reason we haven't had something like the Bali bombing, or the London tube bombing, or the Madrid bombing? Of course I'm sure that you also know that the Canadian bomb plotters had connections in the US, that the US helped the Germans foil a dangerous bomb plot, and British and American surveillance helped foil a major attack? There are plenty of other cases as well.... for anyone that cares to know.

On the Legality of the NSA Electronic Intercept Program

Habeas corpus? How quaint.

Your posit is that our governmental expenses would go up. I say the exact opposite would happen, if the results were "open sourced", a variety of different people and businesses could take advantage of the new knowledge, expanding jobs and opportunities many fold over just the one company who would have exclusive "license" to use this new knowledge for x-years. I don't care how big your company is, it isn't as large as "everyone". "Everyone" will always have more points of view and a larger collective intelligence to tap into. And all these companies and people would pay taxes based on an increase of wealth production. Governmental expenses could theoretically go *down*, or they could take the new additional monies created, at the same exact previous percentile parity, and fund more research than what they could previously, the compounding effect.

Closed source is a valid model, but open source allows for faster development and more "wealth production", even if it is initially just more IP. Heck, even the heart of capitalism agrees now, look at the next article, NYSE goes open source. It works with code, it can work with a variety of other types of new research as well. A group of Nobel Laureates just called for more international collaboration with scientific advances, because they think it would work better,a free exchange of results, rather than stricter and more closed-off research. Other smart guys are calling for dropping the economic barriers to expensive peer reviewed articles. I would agree there as well.

    Me, I am gonna trust the smart guys on this one. When you have both the planet's leading and honored professional smart guys AND the planet's leading professional and quite well compensated shrewd big money guys actually agreeing on something, a simple basic premise...well..you wanna bet against the house? The uni can make more by sharing (long run), because as you and others all give out-share- "you" the uni in this case- get to take back as well, because everyone's efforts can be "force multiplied", and that multiplied force down the road can and will turn into money, along with other things, these research results we all want to see.

Great points. For those interested here are some links dealing with the many issues surrounding "global warming". http://links.veronicachapman.com/OriginsOfOil.htm http://www.iceagenow.com/Growing_Glaciers.htm http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.c...9-68c808e8809e http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4520665474899458831 http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/...n2871211.shtml http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/New...s/Aerosols.pdf http://nasadaacs.eos.nasa.gov/articl...6_highlow.html http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17997788/site/newsweek/?ic http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,269886,00.html http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202007/20_1-2_CO2_Scandal.pdf http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=438 http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2007/arch07/070507martianwarming.htm http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=8gfbewe7&keywords=global%20warming#dest http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071211101623.htm

;>

If I understand well, the Chinese did take real hi-res pics of the Moon but when they tried to combine them prior release they suck it up and a crater was duplicated in error.

For programmers, this is similar to combining two subroutines by copying and pasting the code but then forgetting or failing to properly merge the code of the two parts. Let's say you have, for example:

int add_seven_add_three (int num)
{
num += 7;
num += 3;
return (num);
}

int cut_two_add_three (int num)
{
num -= 2;
num += 3;
return (num);
}

int compute (int num)
{
num = add_seven_add_three (num);
num = cut_two_add_three (num);
return (num);
}

Now the above at this state is the same as having two moon photos with a crater (number 3) being one time in the first photo, and a second time in the second photo. Essentially two photos that feature a small region in common. This happens all the time in space imagery.

Then you look at the code and you realise it's silly and carries a performance penalty, so you want to fix it. Seeing that the merge is easy, you give out this task to a junior programmer. But the junior is sloppy and drunk and when they copy-paste they produce this little beast:

int compute (int num)
{
num += 7;
num += 3;
num -= 2;
num += 3;
return (num);
}

Now at this point the above is equivalent to having two moon photos badly merged with the same crater being visible twice in the same photo.

During the code review you find that stupidity and you fix it, while yelling at the junior before firing them:

int compute (int num)
{
return (num + 11);
}

The above is like a properly processed moon photo with no duplicate craters.

(and the junior then sues for wrongful dismissal, oh my)

For me, the fact that the Chinese comminists built a spaceship and then failed to properly merge two photos shows that technology can be easily imitated across nations and the only thing that can keep a nation competitive is the knowledge and skills its people have in their brains. The Chinese successfully copied US and Russian technology, but then failed miserably when they needed to do some work involving knowledge and skills.

A nation investing solely in technology, as the current US administration does, will surely fail and get eaten by other countries that invest more. It can only take a huge hurricane or a superstrong earthquake in the wrong place to damage vital US economy centres and thus to slow down the US economy, allowing competitors to take the number 1 position internationally. Technology is easily copied (for example, the Russian spaceshuttle is a perfect clone of the US one, just look at it, this without saying that Russian engineers aren't good, they do know their stuff, but their until recently communist administration, which is still quite anti-democratic, seemed more inclined to copy rather than research).

What a smart nation must do is to invest in its people... or more specifically in their brains. A nation composed of knowledgeable skilled people will never fail, even if its economy is damaged by hurricanes. Knowledge and skills cannot be imitated by competing nations. While technology can just be copied or surpassed by paying higher grants, basic science and skills take decades to be developed and therefore cannot be copied. The Chinese copied Soyuz (which is also a copy of US crafts) very easily, but they did sloppy scientific work while merging moon photos. Interestingly, TFA says that the first Soviet moon photos also had scientific errors. This means that nations spending

AT&T plans to help find alternative payphone operators for people who need them. The AT&T decision only applies to 13 states serviced by AT&T (SBC) payphones. AT&T only operates about 65,000 of the 1 million payphones in the US, while Verizon operates about 225,000. AT&T plans to sell as many of the phones and lines to independent operators as they can. They expect the majority of the phones to be bought by someone. They even expect to continue selling wholesale payphone service to payphone owners.

It sounds to me they just decided to let someone else field the equipment. There's a lot of exaggeration around this story, but the facts are all over the web. Death of the payphone, indeed. This reaction is kind of like saying IBM getting out of the consumer laptop and desktop PC market was the end of the Windows computer.

There's good reason to doubt. Maybe it's all a conspiracy to make us completely unsure of what's real.

Here are some reasons to doubt news stories:
http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/37/9592
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36694-2005Mar15.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21490838/
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article621189.ece

Major news outlets carried falsified stories in order to gauge citizen reaction. Of course, the catch-22 is that if you feel that the above stories might be fake, we're in the same boat--not knowing what to believe.

Right now, I'm stuck with Comcast - I live in a college-run apartment building, and that's the only option they offer. Unless I find somewhere else to live next year, I'm stuck with Comcast for at least another year and a half.

But after that, I'm jumping ship as soon as I can, and never returning as long as I've got the choice.

I'm sick of having my internet go down without warning, with no indication as to how long it'll be before I can get back online to finish my homework.

I'm sick of Comcast taking channels for no reason - CSPAN2 and one of the leased access channels vanished a week ago, and the four city-run info channels are about to become digital-only at the end of the year I can't say I ever watched those channels for more than thirty seconds at a time, in passing, but they do have their uses and I know that there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that Comcast is replacing them with new content - over the past year or so, I don't think we've gotten a single new channel, but others keep vanishing, one or two at a time.

I'm sick of the fact that, in a Big Ten college town with one of the nation's most successful and popular football teams, Comcast is not only refusing to carry the Big Ten Network (the only cable or satellite company here that doesn't - but is running a smear ad campaign against them. I'm sorry, but it's hard to sympathize with your cost argument doesn't hold much water when you make over five hundred million dollars in profit. And no, carrying ABC, ESPN, and ESPN2 doesn't count as a response for showing football games - it counts as a basic cable package.

I'm even sick of their advertising. Nine times out of ten, the Comcast ads are so painfully bad that I'll actually stop what I'll doing so I don't have to sit through them. Whether it's the smiling, emotionless Botoxed spokeslady, the "Just Ask Zak" ads where a kid breaks into people's homes to tell them how much better Comcast could make their lives, the previously mentioned Big Ten network attack ads, or the new musical style ads about their phone service (which are so awful that I haven't been able to sit through one of them once), the ads are almost reason enough to jump ship in and of themselves.

We haven't gotten to a point yet where buying shows on demand from iTunes or where watching things online legally is quite a viable option - iTunes is still missing a lot of content I'd like to see and is too expensive to allow for following multiple programs, and the network-run streaming sites have some quality issues. Since other alternatives arenn't available, I'll just have to live with Comcast for now - I need high-speed internet for my engineering classes. But between the service issues and the fact that they seem to go out of their way to make me dislike them even more than I do now, I can't wait until the day when I can finally make sure that Comcast never sees a dime of my money again.

Surprisingly good.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22007049/

just remember that shit the next time you dare to call the united states a theocracy.
 
those muslim bitches are at it again. these are the fags who are willing to kill you if you insult their little fucking prophet. intolerance has no meaning in the united states compared to those faggot muslim bitch cunt countries.
 
fuck the koran, fuck allah!

I could imagine instant tattoos -- patches with designs on them, subcutaneous injection of inks.

If some BANK came to your school, and said hey we'll help out a bit with your accounting department functions if you will just make sure all your students use our BANK, you'd look at them like they were insane.

No, a lot of them were quite okay with that.

Okay, not strictly the same thing, but colleges basically took kickbacks to steer students toward a limited selection of banks with overpriced loans.

Oh, I'm sorry, what was all that crap about universities being noble, non-profit institutions?

You probably missed the news then, because congress just had the very first override of a presidential veto over a big water infrastructure bill, said bill being so important the bulk of the nations governors and senators and reps are mostly for it and it isn't because the water system is in great shape and they want to just polish the chrome faucet handles. And you probably have been missing the news of the huge droughts all over and how we don't have good enough storage capacity, and how the big everglades reclamation effort(the Florida water sponge) is stalled dead in the tracks from lack of funding, even with the new bill passed.

Really, I am not blowing smoke here, the national water infrastructure is severely stretched right now, google is your friend there,all over the nation really, along with the bridges and a lot of the normal roads. I could provide a lot more links to prove this point, but just run your own keyword searches there. Estimates for just reppairing what we have now to fix fall betweeen the OMG! and How many zeroes??!! levels. Want just a tiny example of how weird it is getting? Just in the past few months over 90,000 horses have been literally abandoned in the southeast US as people who have them no longer have the grass nor the water to keep them. I am contemplating getting a couple myself, but still not sure if we have adequate needs right now for our small cow herd (I live in north georgia on a big farm, but the drought over all has been bad here, although we did get 1.5 inches of rain this last weekend so that is welcome)(we only harvested 20% of our normal average haycrop this year), going to see how it goes the next month before making a decision. Long range weather is looking bad with la nina, real bad. And look at the mess going on with atlants water supply and water needs further downstream for power plants and to keep some fisheries going in florida. they are goping to run out! they are *mining* water now, it is not being replensihed at anywhere's near the rate it needs to be, and even with emergency restrictions there is a good chance that sucker is going down. There just isn't enough, and we needed a thousand(whatever, bignum there) more huge reservoirs built ten years ago all over the country. And they want billions to build a high speed maglev train to move plutocrats and gamblers around?? And my other point of the dismal state of national broadband still stands as well, we are way down the list on every ranking index I have seen and dropping yearly.

As to getting better cars out there, I agree, totally. They need to drastically increase cafe standards beyond a joke level and shake detroit to its very roots to get them to pay attention, and offer something like eliminating ad valorem and sales tax for plugin hybrids that achieve 60 mpg or better, or pure electrics, and stuff like that. I am also in favor of a national 100% tax credit for installation of active alternative energy solutions for homeowners and small business, to get a lot more points of production out there, and to keep it in place for at least a decade. a manhattan project or moonrace project effort, something of that scale, massive and *now*, right now, pass the damn bill as an emergency measure. If we wait for the economy to collapse further and oil get closer to two hundred a barrel than one hundred like now...well..we just won't be able to do it. The second (or third) worlding of the US will follow.

In other words, we don't need any more dumb fixes, we need smart fixes, cheap fixes, and multi billion wasted dollar magleve trains aren't even a fix, they are just rich peoples toys.

Why not have different URLs for the different domains. http://hotmail.com/ for hotmail users, http://mail.msn.com/ for msn.com users and so on and so forth. Why in the fuck would you use hotmail for 6 different domans' users?

LK

On the west coast of the United States, Dungeness crab season has usually opened by Thanksgiving. It's not unheard of for families to have fresh crab for Turkey Day. Although this year, a nasty oil spill has been causing a lot of problems in San Francisco Bay, so it's been much harder to come by.

Basically everyone I've known who has died, has died of cancer. It drives me crazy that we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars to avenge the deaths of 3,000 people, while under four billion is spent on fighting cancer, which kills half a million people each year. It reminds me again how terrible people are at estimating risk.

References:
NCI budget
Cost of Iraq war
cancer deaths

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21844203/

Personally I could never be happy about a military that "accidentally" murders innocents, spits on the grave by telling them it's their own fault, and then turns around and does it over and over again.

Reference 1
Reference 2
Reference 3

Most of these massacres aren't even covered by the major news providers. These are the exceptions.

Of course, it's the money men that actually make the decision to wage offensive (not defensive) wars: your "representatives" in government, the people who profit by waging war. You know, the people who have that special, god-like ability to determine the price of human life.

That "charity" may have netted Radiohead more than $2 million, if numbers from studies such as this hold up: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21656525/. No, it's not a effective model for every band, but it sure puts record companies looking dumb when the band bypasses them and proves they don't need the label or even an outside service like iTunes. Simmons is a washed-up, bitter old man who is clinging to what little notoriety he has left.

The premise of your argument is wrong: Democrats are in the pockets of big media, because that's where big media contributes. Look at where their political contributions go:

http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.asp?Ind=B02

According to that, Hollywood contributes to Democrats 69% of the time.

As for the news organizations:

From this article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19113485/

Whether you sample your news feed from ABC or CBS (or, yes, even NBC and MSNBC), whether you prefer Fox News Channel or National Public Radio, The Wall Street Journal or The New Yorker, some of the journalists feeding you are also feeding cash to politicians, parties or political action committees.

MSNBC.com identified 143 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 16 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.


So, the agenda that's being pushed through is by Democrats for big media, who contribute to them.

Dinosaur found with vacuum-cleaner mouth
110 million-year-old plant eater discovered in Sahara Desert


WASHINGTON - Perhaps it was one of those eureka moments, when the scientists realized they had discovered a new dinosaur with mouth parts designed to vacuum up food.

The 110 million-year-old plant eater, discovered in the Sahara Desert, was to be unveiled Thursday by the National Geographic Society.

Discoverer Paul Sereno named the elephant-sized animal Niggersaurus taqueti, an acknowledgment of the African country Nigger and a French paleontologist, Philippe Taquet.

Sereno, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence and paleontologist at the University of Chicago, said the first evidence of Niggersaurus was found in the 1990s and now researchers have been able to reconstruct its skull and skeleton.

While Niggersaurus' mouth is shaped like the wide intake slot of a vacuum, it has something lacking in most cleaners -- hundreds of tiny, sharp teeth to grind up its food.

The 30-foot-long Niggersaurus had a feather-light skull held close to the ground to graze like an ancient cow. Sereno described it as a younger cousin of the North American dinosaur Diplodicus.

Its broad muzzle contained more than 50 columns of teeth lined up tightly along the front edge of its jaw. Behind each tooth more were lined up as replacements when one broke off.

Using CT scans the researchers were able study the inside of the animal's skull where the orientation of canals in the organ that helps keep balance disclosed the habitual low pose of the head, they reported.

Niggersaurus also had a backbone consisting of more air than bone.

"The vertebrae are so paper-thin that it is difficult to imagine them coping with the stresses of everyday use -- but we know they did it, and they did it well," Jeffrey Wilson, assistant professor at the University of Michigan and an expedition team member, said in a statement.

The dinosaur's anatomy and lifestyle were to be detailed in the Nov. 21 issue of journal PLoS ONE, the online journal from the Public Library of Science, and in the December of National Geographic magazine.

The first bones of Niggersaurus were picked up in the 1950s by French paleontologists, but the species was not named at that time. Sereno and his team honored this early work by naming the species after Taquet.

The research was partly funded by National Geographic.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21818194/wid/18298287/?GT1=10628

Leave the Sun Alone!!! It loves its Aunt! It's been going through a divorce! You don't know it so you can't judge it!

I know I'm going to hell

That's all well and good, but I wouldn't trust the Sierra Club for stats like that any more than I would trust BP.

Good point. The following MSNBC article mentions a figure of 24,000 deaths per year in the U.S.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5174391/

But we shouldn't even consider building any until we have a *completed* (very) long-term storage/disposal solution for nuclear waste. Deferring it to the next generation is not OK.

In contrast, According to Greenpeace, a 1000 MW nuclear plant generates 27 tons of highly radioactive waste and less than 1000 tons of total radioactive waste. (Realistic amounts are probably lower, but I'll use Greenpeace as an upper bound). The total amount of spent nuclear fuel generated by all nuclear power in the U.S. since 1951-2003 is about 49,000 tons. At a density of about 8-10 tons per cubic meter, this represents a cube about 18 meters on a side, about the volume of two olympic-sized swimming pools.

So what do we do? Continue dumping billions of tons of pollutants, and thousands of tons of uranium and thorium into the atmosphere killing an estimated 24,000 each year? Because we aren't sure it's safer to switch to a power source which has had zero fatalities in 50+ years, and we aren't yet sure what to do with the two swimming pools of waste it's generated in that time?

Blanket statements without proof are a tough way to defend any position.

Let me help you clear your cognitive dissonance.

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/070529_Unclassified_Plame_employement.pdf

"WASHINGTON - An unclassified summary of outed CIA officer Valerie Plame's employment history at the spy agency, disclosed for the first time today in a court filing by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, indicates that Plame was "covert" when her name became public in July 2003."

No, really, it wasn't trolling. I enjoy Slashdot but it boils down to people talking about science-fiction movies, discussing new techie gadgets, constantly whining naively about US laws and cell phone coverage (???) with a pathetic groupthink (well I don't love that part), and various topics that really the Chinese government could care less about. Considering it doesn't block most foreign newspapers, articles like this, and is especially lax with foreign-language media, why should the PRC care about Slashdot?

leereyno,
I looked at some of your other posts, and I wish you had worded this one a little differently.

Are these nations known for their defense of liberty? Are their citizens free?

Patriot Act
Warrantless Wiretapping
Guantanamo

America is hardly at its height in the human rights game. Hell, we're confirming an Attorney General who isn't sure that waterboarding is illegal/torture.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21698732/

No, we're not yet as bad as the nations you listed.

Evil never sleeps and stupid never dies.

But let's keep our eyes open.

Well, if it was fabricated, then the entire world and UN must have been fooled by(sic) that hoax.
Wilson was "in" on the hoax and for his honest and decent service to his country, his wife, Valerie Plame was "outed" by the Bush administration as a warning to others that they'd had better toe the line and go along with the cherry picked "intelligence".

Please provide evidence of this
Hours after the UN endorsed Resolution 1483 (creation of the Development Fund for Iraq), Bush signed Executive Order 13303: in part. "..any attachment, judgment, decree, lien, execution, garnishment, or other judicial process is prohibited, and shall be deemed null and void", with respect to the Development Fund for Iraq and "all Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products, and interests therein."
This executive order means if ExxonMobil or ChevronTexaco, for example, touch Iraqi oil, anything they do with it is immune from prosecution in the US.
The fund is used by the by U.S. Export-Import Bank to back the financing of projects typically awarded to Bechtel and Halliburton subcontractors.
In other words, it is a slush fund for well-connected US corporations.
This adminstration has bankrupted the country while enriching favored insiders.

That's what happened in Gaza. The radicals won, and instituted their own pirate state, complete with oppressive laws and gangs of looting thugs. Same thing happened in Somalia and some African Islamic nations, too
So, why aren't we occupying those regions too? All of these are breeding grounds for OBL camps, right? Drain the swamp? No, nothing to pillage there. No enough ROI in monetary terms, security of the nation be damned.

Iraq is considered a quagmire by many, but perpetual warfare is exactly what this crooked administration wanted. We can't leave, ever, and this is exactly what the Bush administration intended. Pure evil.

Well, if it was fabricated, then the entire world and UN must have been fooled by(sic) that hoax.
Wilson was "in" on the hoax and for his honest and decent service to his country, his wife, Valerie Plame was "outed" by the Bush administration as a warning to others that they'd had better toe the line and go along with the cherry picked "intelligence".

Please provide evidence of this
Hours after the UN endorsed Resolution 1483 (creation of the Development Fund for Iraq), Bush signed Executive Order 13303: in part. "..any attachment, judgment, decree, lien, execution, garnishment, or other judicial process is prohibited, and shall be deemed null and void", with respect to the Development Fund for Iraq and "all Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products, and interests therein."
This executive order means if ExxonMobil or ChevronTexaco, for example, touch Iraqi oil, anything they do with it is immune from prosecution in the US.
The fund is used by the by U.S. Export-Import Bank to back the financing of projects typically awarded to Bechtel and Halliburton subcontractors.
In other words, it is a slush fund for well-connected US corporations.
This adminstration has bankrupted the country while enriching favored insiders.

That's what happened in Gaza. The radicals won, and instituted their own pirate state, complete with oppressive laws and gangs of looting thugs. Same thing happened in Somalia and some African Islamic nations, too
So, why aren't we occupying those regions too? All of these are breeding grounds for OBL camps, right? Drain the swamp? No, nothing to pillage there. No enough ROI in monetary terms, security of the nation be damned.

Iraq is considered a quagmire by many, but perpetual warfare is exactly what this crooked administration wanted. We can't leave, ever, and this is exactly what the Bush administration intended. Pure evil.

Well, if it was fabricated, then the entire world and UN must have been fooled by(sic) that hoax.
Wilson was "in" on the hoax and for his honest and decent service to his country, his wife, Valerie Plame was "outed" by the Bush administration as a warning to others that they'd had better toe the line and go along with the cherry picked "intelligence".

Please provide evidence of this
Hours after the UN endorsed Resolution 1483 (creation of the Development Fund for Iraq), Bush signed Executive Order 13303: in part. "..any attachment, judgment, decree, lien, execution, garnishment, or other judicial process is prohibited, and shall be deemed null and void", with respect to the Development Fund for Iraq and "all Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products, and interests therein."
This executive order means if ExxonMobil or ChevronTexaco, for example, touch Iraqi oil, anything they do with it is immune from prosecution in the US.
The fund is used by the by U.S. Export-Import Bank to back the financing of projects typically awarded to Bechtel and Halliburton subcontractors.
In other words, it is a slush fund for well-connected US corporations.
This adminstration has bankrupted the country while enriching favored insiders.

That's what happened in Gaza. The radicals won, and instituted their own pirate state, complete with oppressive laws and gangs of looting thugs. Same thing happened in Somalia and some African Islamic nations, too
So, why aren't we occupying those regions too? All of these are breeding grounds for OBL camps, right? Drain the swamp? No, nothing to pillage there. No enough ROI in monetary terms, security of the nation be damned.

Iraq is considered a quagmire by many, but perpetual warfare is exactly what this crooked administration wanted. We can't leave, ever, and this is exactly what the Bush administration intended. Pure evil.

So if GM and Ford were right and people really wanted what they say they want why aren't they making money?

Because they have enourmous legacy costs in the form of retirement benefits for former workers?
Besides, GM has managed to turn a profit recently, though it's going to be a while before they've made up what they've lost.

Even Ford has been able to show a profit occasionally.

Though I do agree with your points - I mean, I go car shopping and end up looking at imports. I know I'm somewhat unusual, but why do I end up looking at German and Japanese manufacturers? At the time I was looking for a all wheel drive car with a manual transmission, preferably a hatchback. I'd also like a diesel(hybrid wouldn't help me much, I drive 90% highway). I don't like how high SUVs sit, so that's not a good option for me.

Less bling, more practicality, more affordability!

There's no "near-even" split between parties. Americans currently affiliate as "Democrats" over "Republicans" by something like 37.3:32.7%. That 3.6 points is over 11% of the Republican percentage. Americans voted for Democrats by 11.6% overall nationwide. Right now Democrats have a 15 point advantage over Republicans in the presidential race.

Congress is indeed counted as a whole, which is legitimate. Americans are unhappy with Congress for what Republicans are actively blocking, and Democrats passively accepting. That isn't actually any kind of partisan stalemate, either among the politicos, or the Americans who they're all letting down.

FYI killing sprees in schools is not an issue in Europe.

Mayhaps we spoke too soon. I would say it still happens a lot more frequently in the US.

If it works in the USA where nothing benefiting the environment works then it has to be good...

http://theyellowpages.com/index.php vs.http://www.yellowpages.com/?From=Branding_ypbrnd_yellowpages vs. http://yellowpages.msn.com/
vs. http://www.yellow.com/ vs. http://www.yp.com/ vs. http://www.authoryellowpages.com/ vs. http://yellowpages.washingtonpost.com/
vs. http://www.yellowpages.ca/ vs. http://www.musicyellowpages.com/ vs......

Oh hell do a google and check it out for your self.

The CCD is reaching the end of it's useable life.

No. What's reaching the end of it's useable life is the idiotic sensor resolution race. Except letting anyone know that won't sell new cameras. It's not that all of the megapixels beyond 3 or so won't do any good, it's that all of them are pretty much useless. I know the new whatever model is "better" but that's not a direct result of sensor function.

when really what you need is more levels of greyscale and a better signal to noise ratio
Indeed, what most sensors still haven't improved upon is their actual dynamic range and signal to noise ratio. The higher the resolution, the worse those two functions. Those high-end CMOS sensors are noisier and have even less base performance characteristics than their CCD counterparts. They are cheaper and you can do more tricks.

In non-marketing imaging technology everyone knows the mission critical component is lenses. Sensors are pretty much there. A 2 MP sensor can make a beautiful wall-sized print http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3958138

I suspect that, throughout the U.S., an escape from imprisonment on a felony charge will be prosecuted as a felony charge. 75 Year Old Male Fugitive arrested 28 years after prison escape [October 24, 2007]

The Fugitive makes a good movie.

In real life the news that a convicted killer is on the loose frays nerves and puts a great many innocent lives at risk.