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100% real beef does not mean quality beef. Don't be fooled, as long as it is cow meat, they can call it "beef", even if it means that no person in their right mind would eat it if they knew. One "real beef" product that I find particularly disgusting is pink slime which consists of E. Coli infected beef trimmings off of parts like the spine and from around the intestines that has been washed in an ammonia bath to kill the germs. And yes, it is in McDonalds hamburgers. And since the ammonia is used to kill the germs, the FDA considers it part of the "process" and not as an ingredient, so it doesn't show up on any labels.

The point is that while McDonalds hamburgers don't have any soy or gluten in them, which makes them edible for your friend, it is still garbage meat. You're better off grinding your own (which is actually fairly easy to do) or having the butcher at your local grocery store do it for you while you wait. Only that way you'll know what you're actually eating.

Relevant link for that interest-on-debt figure: http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/newsgraphics/2011/0119-budget/index.html

Bottom line is that US companies pay only slightly more taxes on average than other OECD countries.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/business/economy/03rates.html

Companies want money. They pay for tax experts because the tax savings they bring pays for the tax experts, and then some. For one thing, the cost of those tax experts is fully deductible from their gross income anyway.

The idea that lawyers run the company, as opposed to company management is laughable (Do you think management really wants to give up power?). Tax planning contrivances can indeed create small inefficiences, but again, they do it because these costs bring benefits, and end up paying for themselves and then some. The overall burden is shifted to the economy at large for being inefficient.

By the way, you talk as if Zimbabwe's economic landscape is a bad thing. And it is. They also pay virtually no taxes.

The F.D.A. says there have been at least 30 outbreaks of disease associated with sprouts in this country [the US] since 1996. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group that tracks food safety, said that its review of government data revealed 45 sprout-related outbreaks since 1990, including 2,500 illnesses. The group said that it was aware of one death, in a salmonella outbreak in 2003.

Think about it. Earlier reported cases of bean sprout-borne disease killed one person and sickened 2500 people, just in the US. That's of the cases that the FDA saw.

I agree with your post overall, but I must take issue with the all-too-common conception that the deficit is the root of all evil. It's easy to relate the country's financial actions with household financial jurisprudence, but it's grossly oversimple and just plain wrong, particularly when interest rates are at zero. We have the resources to pull ourselves out of this mess, but if people refuse to grapple with the truths of basic economics, we're in for a very long slog.

You're wrong. The summary is correct:

"Apple and Nokia have agreed to drop all of our current lawsuits and enter into a license covering some of each other’s patents"

Nokia may have got less than what they originally wanted, but it's certainly not just cash.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/technology/15nokia.html?_r=1

And half that NYT article consists of: "Florian Mueller, an intellectual property analyst ...", "Mr. Mueller said ...", "Mr. Mueller said ...", "Mr. Mueller said ..." and "... said Mr. Mueller".

Why does that guy still get such an amount of attention?

According to Apple:

"Apple and Nokia have agreed to drop all of our current lawsuits and enter into a license covering some of each other’s patents, but not the majority of the innovation that makes the iPhone unique"

So it seems Nokia has access to some of that portfolio, although we'll probably never know exactly what

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/technology/15nokia.html?_r=1

I've been a web designer since 1994. As all of my training was in the arts, not scripting or programming, I stumbled along making sites using visual editors until around 2001. At that point I realized that my various transitions from one visual editor to the next (Cyberstudio > Adobe GoLive > Dreamweaver) could be avoided if I did the proper thing and learned how to hand code HTML and CSS.

The New York Times agrees with this approach, and they seem to have one of the better websites around: "It’s our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to “hand code” everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results." Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/business/media/21askthetimes.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

The Washington Post has an entire section about the drug war in Mexico - Mexico at War. As does the New York Times. The BBC has plenty of coverage as well. Perhaps you're just not looking hard enough, or you're more attached to your biases than facts?

In the US they use your phone or in nav system.
http://www.zdnet.com/news/fbi-taps-cell-phone-mic-as-eavesdropping-tool/150467
With the new GPS rules and very friendly telcos, expect ever more data to be available to the FBI with less oversight.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/us/13fbi.html ie. expect to be of interest after 'five meetings of a group" and enjoy terms like "preliminary investigation", “proactively” ect.
Or just fix a device to your car as a nice and legal "tracking beacon" that lasts for months.
China did good with the use of the case via the resonant cavity idea and having lots of legal electronics that phone home by default.
No need to hope the suspects bring their own always on Apple/Google/MS toys.
Catching 100% was just silly. Learn from the US gun walking efforts http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20040189-503544.html - track that shipment.
Then use passive 'bad luck" at the end or COINTELPRO to weaken the group as they hunt for an informer.

Yeah, I'd love to see that sourced too!

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/business/26nocera.html

He also told the grand jurors that sometimes, when he sees somebody driving a Ferrari, he'll check to see if they make enough money to afford it. When I called Mr. Nordlander and others at the I.R.S. to ask whether this was an appropriate way to choose subjects for criminal tax investigations, my questions were met with a stone wall of silence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/us/politics/13donor.html?_r=1&ref=politics

So what exactly is this oppression you're speaking of?

Well, there's Javed Iqbal who wound up sentenced to 6 1/2 years for offering a cable channel the government didn't like -- al-Manar. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/25/nyregion/25tv.html There are dozens of cases of muslims who were convicted and jailed as the result of entrapment or sometimes even innocent activities like holding paintball games.

The FBI treatment of the Black Panthers is probably the best recent textbook example of oppression of a political movement because of their beliefs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton

I would tend to agree that getting sentenced to 6.5 years for offering an unapproved cable channel would be a bit much by several hundred miles. However, that alone doesn't make for a case of "oppression". You and another person both picked cases of Muslims being "oppressed". Yet, I don't seem to recall when the mosques were burned down. Nor do I recall when the mass deportations occurred. When was that exactly?

Point being, yes there are cases here and there but there is little to no evidence of systemic oppression as many people on slashdot and elsewhere seem to believe. Like it or not you can speak of Nazism openly here. Try that in France or Germany. You can openly say "maybe the terrorists are right!". Will it make you popular, probably not. Will it get you arrested if it isn't followed by "and lets do X!". Probably not.

So again I say, where is this tremendous oppression everyone seems to say exists here. I've been to some of those "other countries", have you? Have those who are crying out "oppression"?

Terrorists and foreign intelligence services will also be doing this to use against the United States and its allies, not just journalists. Wikileaks has provided the raw material for data mining to find things the US doesn't even realize about itself, or its allies. There is no surprise that Bradley Manning has been charged with aiding the enemy.

The fallout continues, hopefully it won't be literally.

Al-Qaeda Already Using Wikileaks Material Against Us
Taliban Study WikiLeaks to Hunt Informants
Wikileaks: US will have to reshuffle diplomats following revelations
'They're informants... if they get killed, they deserve it': New book reveals shocking disregard of Julian Assange towards Afghans named in WikiLeaks cables

Since I can anticipate the follow ups:
No, Wikileaks didn't do an adequate job of scrubbing the documents of names at various points which is why they are useful to the Taliban and other groups building death lists.
Yes, I have seen reports of people being killed due to Wikileaks publishing their name, you just have to dig a lot to find them. For some reason it doesn't seem to be a popular news item. Go figure.
Oversight of US diplomacy, military, and intelligence activity is the role of the Congress elected by voters.

Even if nobody was killed, Wikileaks has resulted in a significant disruption to US diplomacy and antiterrorism efforts. (You pull out informants due to their cover being blown and you lose valuable intelligence.)

Poll finds that more Americans oppose WikiLeaks

WASHINGTON — Americans overwhelmingly think that WikiLeaks is doing more harm than good by releasing classified U.S. diplomatic cables, and they want to see the people behind it prosecuted, according to a new McClatchy-Marist Poll.

"Clearly people are very unhappy with it," said Lee Miringoff, the director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., which conducted the national poll.

The survey found that 70 percent of Americans think the leaks are doing more harm than good and want those who publish the secrets to be prosecuted.

Your counterexample is the US just after the Civil War, which bears about as much resemblance to the modern economy as the rain forest does to the Moon?

How about we look at a more modern example, such as Japan:

[A] deflationary trap of collapsed demand... occurs when consumers refuse to consume, corporations hold back on investments and banks sit on cash. It becomes a vicious, self-reinforcing cycle: as prices fall further and jobs disappear, consumers tighten their purse strings even more and companies cut back on spending and delay expansion plans.

Employer-subsidized health insurance is a result of having to get arond WWII wage controls (see http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/is-employer-based-health-insurance-worth-saving/ for info). Unfortunately, it continued after the war, and the result is that people who lose their jobs lose their insurance (that being the majority of the "N milliion uninsured" figure that is bandied about).

When was the last time the cost of living went DOWN?

Japan has been experiencing deflation for most of the past 20 years.

So what exactly is this oppression you're speaking of?

Well, there's Javed Iqbal who wound up sentenced to 6 1/2 years for offering a cable channel the government didn't like -- al-Manar. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/25/nyregion/25tv.html There are dozens of cases of muslims who were convicted and jailed as the result of entrapment or sometimes even innocent activities like holding paintball games.

The FBI treatment of the Black Panthers is probably the best recent textbook example of oppression of a political movement because of their beliefs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton

Let's see:

"Bailouts and more bailouts" for Wall Street, with high-flying bankers flying in and out of the revolving door of working for the government and big banks.

"Bailouts and more bailouts" for automakers

GE paying zero taxes

Started a war in Libya

Started ANOTHER war in Yemen!!!!

Troops still in Iraq

No end in sight in Afghanistan

Gitmo still open, no plans to close

Unconsitutional wiretaps continue

Seriously - Obama sure as hell meets the definition of FASCIST, doesn't he?

I'm not from USA (and really don't care that much what happens inside USA, you create your version of society and as long as it doesn't effect anybody outside your country (like unfortunately most of the things you mention does), you can create your own hell on earth as far as I'm concerned), so I might be wrong, but isn't all of the things you list the result of choices and decisions made in congress and senate, or government officials following procedure created long before Obama came to office (he couldn't somehow magically change all those regulations in one move, could he), which Obama have very little or no influence over.

And we're cutting back. What do they know that we don't? Hmm...

What do the Chinese know that we don't?
Math
Science

And in the US, we want creationism taught in biology classes and forbid schools from using the word 'gay'.

'Nuff said.

Excellent observation.

Now, let's all go back to Mussolini's textbook definition of Fascism, shall we?

âoeFascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate powerâ

There is much in this, that explain the metaphoric "wars" on drugs and "piracy", as well as the never-ending Imperial adventures the Satanic States of AmeriKKKa:

"War alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it. Fascism carries this anti-pacifist struggle into the lives of individuals. It is education for combat... war is to man what maternity is to the woman. I do not believe in perpetual peace; not only do I not believe in it but I find it depressing and a negation of all the fundamental virtues of a man."

Let's see:

"Bailouts and more bailouts" for Wall Street, with high-flying bankers flying in and out of the revolving door of working for the government and big banks.

"Bailouts and more bailouts" for automakers

GE paying zero taxes

Started a war in Libya

Started ANOTHER war in Yemen!!!!

Troops still in Iraq

No end in sight in Afghanistan

Gitmo still open, no plans to close

Unconsitutional wiretaps continue

Seriously - Obama sure as hell meets the definition of FASCIST, doesn't he?

This is the hypocrisy that the world hates the US for.

Your government plays the democracy tune when they wish a people to overthrow a tyranny that doesn't suit their agenda. And when a peaceful, fair election such as the one in Palestine happens, and somebody who you don't like gets elected, the West get their panties in a twist and starts their pathetic economic bullying.

If one of us sneaked a camera into someone's home and took pictures, I guarantee we would go to prison for it. One of our civilizations greatest failings is the way our legal system treats kids. In the southern US it is still legal for schools to sexually assault their students. The Supreme Court's answer is always that "the Constitution does apply but..." followed by some senile hand-waving to excuse forced strip searches, beatings or any other gross violation of human rights the school wants. The reality is our legal system treats children like property. Kids would have more rights if they were prisoners.

You mean all they have to do is blow up the tunnels.

There's a joke about Russia in there.
How about: In Soviet Russia, Airport Blows You Up!

it's certainly better than other options for the poor in china

i always want to ask people who complain about the exploitation of factory workers in poor countries: what's your alternative? go back to the farm and starve?

factories in poor countries are exploitation RELATIVE to standards in the west. but RELATIVE to where these workers are coming from, conditions are BETTER

here, from us history:

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

this is basically china, today

what came of horrible industrial conditions 100 years ago in the usa? workers agitated for the labor laws we now enjoy in the usa (republican attempts to turn the usa back into a poor country with no worker standards notwithstanding)

what are chinese workers now doing?

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/china/labor-issues/index.html

they are asserting their rights, they are agitating for labor laws

this is the way of PROGRESS: you don't move from squalid poor slum to the best conditions in the rich west by snapping your fingers. you climb there, you STRUGGLE. there is no other way

and china is certainly leveraging its industrial might to be as rich as the west, to dominate the west, in a decade or so. it's not exploitation, i'm sorry. it's called progress. chinese workers are busting their ass so their children live by western standards. and that's commendable of them. and some whiny westerner complaining about exploitation is certainly of no use or help to them

I'll give Syria credit for lowering its Big Brother attempt to suppress information. But, thanks to the same internet, any intelligent person can see that days after Syria murders 1,200 of their own protesting citizens, "suddenly" hundreds of students are brought in on buses to the border, cut through a border fence and several wind up dead.
 
Houdini was the master of misdirection. This is a sad attempt to distract its citizens ("Look what tha evil Joos did!!!")
 
Also interesting is that fact that this coincidentally happens on the same day that theSyrian army killed 38 Syrian protesters.

I'll give Syria credit for lowering its Big Brother attempt to suppress information. But, thanks to the same internet, any intelligent person can see that days after Syria murders 1,200 of their own protesting citizens, "suddenly" hundreds of students are brought in on buses to the border, cut through a border fence and several wind up dead.
 
Houdini was the master of misdirection. This is a sad attempt to distract its citizens ("Look what tha evil Joos did!!!")
 
Also interesting is that fact that this coincidentally happens on the same day that theSyrian army killed 38 Syrian protesters.

you don't point out that there is a hell of a lot of money sloshing around in all this, I doubt that these peoples motives are as pure, they are not just worried about 'national security.' Fraud in defense contracting is extremely common. See Boeing tanker contract fraud, BAE systems Bribery and the primary contractor for trailblazer, SAIC, has had previous fraud prosecutions for the FBI information system they worked on and the New York citytime contract: http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20110527/FREE/110529884 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/17/AR2006081701485.html http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/16/business/16tanker.html?_r=2 http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0210/US_settles_with_BAE_in_Saudi_bribery_case.html This kind of activity is very common in the defense department and more generally in corporate america, see the massive amount of fraud that at least partially caused the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The U.S. needs to attack white collar crime much more vigorously. http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/top-secret-america.html http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/13-bankers-vrs-brooksley-born.html

There is a hell of a lot of money sloshing around in all this, I doubt that these peoples motives are as pure as you present them, they are not just worried about 'national security.' Fraud in defense contracting is extremely common. See Boeing tanker contract fraud, BAE systems Bribery and the primary contractor for trailblazer, SAIC, has had previous fraud prosecutions for the FBI information system they worked on and the New York citytime contract: http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20110527/FREE/110529884 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/17/AR2006081701485.html http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/16/business/16tanker.html?_r=2 http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0210/US_settles_with_BAE_in_Saudi_bribery_case.html This kind of activity is very common in the defense department and more generally in corporate america, see the massive amount of fraud that at least partially caused the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The U.S. needs to attack white collar crime much more vigorously. http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/top-secret-america.html http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/13-bankers-vrs-brooksley-born.html

Men with no oversight are doing what they will in the name of national security because they've convinced themselves that they can't permit 9/11 to reoccur, and that it was their fault. They've driven themselves mad, falling into the mentality of "those who prefer security to freedom." It's not that they're innately cruel tyrants, or sadists, it's that they're paranoid and guilt-wracked—a horribly dangerous combination when you add on the "defend the collective" mentality that causes police officers to protect each other when corruption charges manifest.

you don't point out that there is a hell of a lot of money sloshing around in all this, I doubt that these peoples motives are as pure as you present them, they are not just worried about 'national security.' Fraud in defense contracting is extremely common. See Boeing tanker contract fraud, BAE systems Bribery and the primary contractor for trailblazer, SAIC, has had previous fraud prosecutions for the FBI information system they worked on and the New York citytime contract: http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20110527/FREE/110529884 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/17/AR2006081701485.html http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/16/business/16tanker.html?_r=2 http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0210/US_settles_with_BAE_in_Saudi_bribery_case.html This kind of activity is very common in the defense department and more generally in corporate america, see the massive amount of fraud that at least partially caused the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The U.S. needs to attack white collar crime much more vigorously. http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/top-secret-america.html http://natsecurityeb.blogspot.com/2010/10/13-bankers-vrs-brooksley-born.html

The best part, I might add, is that there is nothing "better" about private schools except the mental image society collectively has. The only reason private school students do better is because they are selected for nice things more frequently because of their prestigious background. In fact, I would argue that private school teaching is probably inferior to public schools (at least in Canada); private school teachers are paid significantly less than public schools, and so public schools get their pick first.

The only reason private school students do better on standardized tests is because private schools pick all of the best students with supportive parents. If you have a class who can practically teach themselves, it doesn't matter if a monkey is teaching them, they're going to do better than the class of low income and disenfranchised students.

Can you cite any studies or well known facts to support these statements? I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd just like to see something other than some anonymous person's assertions on a tech chatboard.

Private schools can and do kick out trouble-causing students, and there is a direct correlation between the presence of such children and the overall performance of a class. This is probably a larger factor than merely selecting the academic elite, who themselves may come from abusive or otherwise troubled homes and who may bring such problems into the classroom.

However, the academic elite by and large tend to follow their economic class's trends. In other words, affluent parents spend more on their children's education, give them better tools and more opportunities to do well, and effectively can buy a smoother pathway to the top with fewer obstacles. SAT scores are correlated with wealth.

To argue that private school teaching "is probably inferior to public schools" is a broad and unsubstantiated claim. Leaving aside the fact that some kids attend private school for non-academic reasons (their parent went there, it's smaller, it's more prestigious), we can ask--do private schools really help kids perform better? It's controversial, according to this Time blog, but a separate study shows that Catholic schools do a better job overall.

There are many excellent public schools in the U.S. and Canada; Montgomery County in MD for example, and Middlesex County in Massachusetts are superb--well funded, high academic standards, good support for the arts, and involved parents. The high performing schools in these districts, though, are in the affluent areas like Belmont and Newton and Lexington in Massachusetts. The lower income Middlesex schools in Waltham and Watertown are down a rung or two.

As for the quality of teachers, it's disputable that private schools hire inferior teachers at lower pay, at least in the U.S. This was more true decades ago, but in recent years private schools have had to compete for a shrinking pool of good teachers and they have raised salaries and benefits nearly to union scale. Nonetheless, private schools have remained a desirable destination because the students tend to be better behaved, the troublemakers are removed, and there tends to be more parental buy-in. This only makes sense; when you're paying $16,000 a year for your child, you tend to have more and stronger opinions about how the school is run.

In fact the prices for homes and rent must be falling in normal market conditions in a recession (depression actually)

That's the first sliver of truth in your long series of lies - and it promptly contradicts your earlier position - you did not realize that, right? :-)

First note that it's not just residential housing that is in decline - but commercial real estate as well, affecting businesses and the cost of services: it's now cheaper to rent space in the mall, for example.

So what happens, liar, if you combine the deflationary effects of "lower housing prices" (which you finally admitted exists) and other price drops (such as lower labor costs, lower capital costs, etc.) with the inflationary effects of "higher raw commodities prices" which you too pointed out exist? We get to the real inflation data that is an average formed by the price drops and the price increases - not the 76% lie you are still propagating :-)

Btw., the inflation data I linked to here is not government published but it's the MIT Billion Price Index which is a daily updated index derived from the prices published by thousands of businesses. Do you claim that those thousands of independent businesses are all complicit in some sort of vast global conspiracy to hide true price levels? :-)

Also, you have still not replied in substance to the earlier lies of yours that I've exposed:

  You lied about US purchasing power.

  You lied about 19th century US economics.

  You lied about taxation levels of the country you allegedly live in.

  You lied about 19th century depressions.

  You lied about the current level of inflation.

  You lied about the consumer price index.

Are you able to think and reason for yourself, liar, or are you only repeating right-wing talking points without knowing what they really mean and without being able to defend them?

Yet Canadians are happier about their universal health-care system than US citizens - and Canadian GDP proportional health care costs are half that of the US.

I think you got tricked by British tabloids: they are able to complain about Grandma's Sunday cookies, let alone about a huge health care system that covers and helps tens of millions of people in some of the most dramatic moments in their lives ...

The thing is, in the US there are huge private monopolies that have cornered the market for fun and profits and US citizens still don't have universal health-care - you cannot really do worse than that.

Let me just recount the last 3 days of your "hard money arguments" here on Slashdot, for everyone's education and amusement:

You lied about US purchasing power.
You lied about 19th century US economics.
You lied about taxation levels of the country you supposedly live in.
You lied about 19th century depressions.
You lied about the current level of inflation.
You lied about the consumer price index.

That's just the first 6 lies of yours I found interesting enough to counter - there's many more.

But instead of trying to prove your viewpoint fairly, instead of working to remove your
stigma of a serial liar you come up with yet another new lie?

if measured in coffee, the value of USD decreased at the lows by 76%.

Oh, now we at last learn about the big underlying concept of your ideology,
you re-defined everyday purchasing power to mean the price of 37,500
pounds of raw coffee bean standard contracts and the price of
troy ounces of gold?

So out of tens of thousands of products and services that shape our everyday life
whose average price influences our purchasing power you managed to pick the
two (raw, unprocessed, with no labor costs included) luxory commodities that have
experienced the largest bubbles in recent history?

Wow! :-)

How about the price that impacts most families in the most direct way: the price
of rent (or the price of acquiring a new house)? How about the price of of a loaf
of bread, which has remained virtually unchanged despite a huge increase in grain
prices due to the record hot weather in 2010? How about the price of a car and
the cost of a haircut?

These are the various everyday living cost components that modern price indices
weigh and which influences purchasing power, and yes, the price of coffee is a small part of
it as well, but not just the price of the raw beans, but the price of a
finished coffee product such as a cup of coffee, which has various
types of labor and service costs included ...

If you do that, you get nuanced inflation metrics like this one - which not only
shows how moderate inflation is at the moment but also shows how the US was (and still is)
flirting with dangerous deflation territory ...

Not the 76% big lie you are trying to tell us here.

As you may already have heard, a new strain of E. Coli (EHEC) is spreading in Central Europe (northern Germany seems to be the epicenter) and has killed 18 people so far.

[...] while taking the government numbers at their face value, [...]

The last refuge of the delusional liar: "your numbers must be wrong!".

Here go check the data of an independent inflation tracking project, the Billion Price Index: a daily updated price index derived from literally millions of online prices published not by the government but by thousands of businesses.

The BPI confirms the CPI metrics.

So this confirms once again that you are a serial liar.

Here is what you need to do: stop reading my comments. bye bye.

The last refuge of the fake libertarian: "go, go, go away, I do not want to read your comments, I'm unable to counter them!".

This is Slashdot, not Fox News :-)

Nailed that one. Sure looks like iOS is 'winning' to me. Just over half as many iOS devices as there are Android devices, But people must be sick of this fragmentation and wouldn't ever think of buying an Android device, right? It's a good thing that iOS doesn't have any malware on it, best of all no applications sending off all sorts of non-anonymous data to who knows where, without telling you that this would happen. Before you reply, note that I'm aware Android does this, but if you'll take a gander, you'll find your precious iOS sending uniquely identifiable info about 3x as often as Android, and it doesn't warn you.

Here's a hint: People working on the solutions to this problem work in the financial sector and in quantum physics.

Or journalists. Or intelligence agencies. Or any business that's large enough to have information silos. Or transportation departments. Or internet startups.

He has come out and said that it could be a photo of him, but if so, it was distributed without his knowledge or permission.

Considering the evidence that the photo was a plant, there is more than the necessary minimum reasonable doubt as to its origin.

I admit Weiner showed poor judgment his response to the situation. But just because he's inept at dealing with the situation doesn't mean he's guilty.

If it wasn't him, why does he keep hedging his answers and how did someone else get a picture of his junk if not from him?

Unfortunately, there is a very major force coming from Texas. A few yokels in Texas take school text books and cut out every thing they don't like about history.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html

What ends up happening is that, since Texas buys a lot of textbooks and buys them early, textbook makers don't cater to other state curriculum nearly as much, and other states end up taking the same textbooks.

It's crazy... a very small group of people get to change history with no scientific process or regard to actual education.

The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states.

In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state.

Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 100 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school. ...

There are seven members of the conservative bloc on the board, but they are often joined by one of the other three Republicans on crucial votes. There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.

It's not like they have any choice: Israel has neither natural resources

They had an enormous natural gas find last year:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/world/middleeast/31leviathan.html

A NYTimes article about this very subject said another likely cause is the sharp drop in lead levels in blood, especially in kids: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24crime.html?scp=1&sq=crime%20rate&st=cse Apparently high lead rates lead to a lot more aggressive and violent behavior.

After reading this and recalling what it was like going to NYC in the 1980s, and what it is like going to the "bad neighborhoods" now, I feel as a whole US society is a lot nicer and safer. My neighborhood itself, not too long ago considered to be a "bad" neighborhood, now resembles what my grandparents told me about 1940's Brooklyn or a sitcom (everyone knows each other, says hello, hangs out with each other, etc). When I am in a bad neighborhood now, I feel a lot safer than I did on a typical subway ride in the late 80s. Now some of that may be attributed to me be being a child in the 80s, and I have probably grown a lot more urbanized. But a thought did occur to me: Perhaps high incarceration rates have produced something of a tipping point- you take enough aholes out of the neighborhood, and people are no longer afraid, and thus aren't hiding, and invest time/money to make their property nicer. About a year ago I had to walk to a store about a half mile from the subway in the South Bronx- one of the worst neighborhoods in the entire city, but I never once felt like I was in a dangerous situation like the many times you would see real junkies on the subways ranting and raving. Its not a place I would want to live, but it certainly didn't live up to descriptions from "the Bronx is burning" era.

The Times also mentioned the drop in crack use, and the relative replacement of that with marijuana. Crack can take an otherwise nice person and make them crazy enough to steal and murder. Marijuana takes an otherwise nice person and makes them a bit poorer, and less motivated, but certainly not to murder, and maybe in extreme cases slightly more prone to steal.

He has come out and said that it could be a photo of him, but if so, it was distributed without his knowledge or permission.

Considering the evidence that the photo was a plant, there is more than the necessary minimum reasonable doubt as to its origin.

I admit Weiner showed poor judgment his response to the situation. But just because he's inept at dealing with the situation doesn't mean he's guilty.

Patent coverage is read according to a theory of strict construction, so that in principle if you have a patented trait showing up in your crops you are considered to be infringing.

However US case law has established the principle that accidental contamination of your plants by wind blown pollen etc. is not infringement. As such any lawsuits that are brought involving accidental contamination are not being decided for the plaintiff.

As far as I have been able to determine there has never been a case where accidental transfer of a trait has resulted in a finding of infringement. There has always been some intent such as seed saving or further selection of the accidental contamination.

Patent coverage of food crops is not a new phenomena.

http://cls.casa.colostate.edu/transgeniccrops/patent.html

Where were the protests prior to the development of GMOs?

As far as transfer of RoundUp resistance from Canola, the only evidence I have seen is transfer to other varieties of Canola. This doesn't rise to the standard of transfer to weeds. If you have references to scientific articles please let me know.

And Monsanto claiming in court that evolution of RoundUp ready weeds is not possible? Seems unlikely given their public statements as published here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/business/energy-environment/04weed.html?pagewanted=all

They've actually done these studies. Child-free people are happier at all stages of life, including after the children are grown.

When you think about it, this makes sense. They've been doing what they wanted for the past 20 years, instead of what they had to do. They're better off financially for it too.

Sure, parents and grandparents will deny it. Self-deception is a common coping mechanism, and it's required for propagation of the species. You can't rely on self-reporting to measure differential happiness since people can only imagine how happy they would be if they had made another choice. You have to do long term longitudinal studies. These studies have been done and they show that parents of adult children are happier than parents of young children, but not as happy as married but child free individuals.

The problem is that the evidence goes both ways, some studies show a correlation, others don't.

Good grief. You know what that means? It means that at best the effect is teeny tiny.

It's just a matter of statistics. If you run a thousand tests, at least some of them will show correlation, even if the correlation doesn't actually exist.

And guess which studies get published? That's right, the ones that show a positive result. Studies showing a negative result just sit in people's computers, because the effort of polishing that data up for publication just isn't worth it when you have an uncontroversial, negative result.

It's a cycle you see all the time: you get a bunch of small, slightly positive studies because all the small, negative studies don't get published. Then someone takes those small positive studies and gets funding for a large study - and suddenly the effect goes away. It happened with the medical effects of prayer, it'll happen with cell phones.

Some references:

Power line canceled

Brightsource canceled

Six solar projects blocked by Native American groups

On the effect of the Mojave national monuments on solar projects

The thing is though the resistance to Roundup occurred through natural selection, not transference of the resistance gene from the crops.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/business/energy-environment/04weed.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/science/31tornado.html

continuing to tell me that the factors are simple only tells me your mind is simple