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It was also conclusively proven that having fat friends or family increases the chances of you becoming fat, regardless of your physical distance from those people.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/25/health/25iht-fat.4.6830240.html

That's actually called third hand smoke.

Well, third-hand smoke is considered by at least some docs to be a direct cancer risk.

The NYT doesn't say anything about peer reviews of the study though. Now it does list some of the substances that so called third-hand smoke contains but it doesn't mention what vehicle exhaust contains or the poisons that food is sprayed with. Nor does it say anything about the emissions from the paper industry.

Falcon

A federal court has held that an employee whose health is adversely affected by tobacco smoke residue has a cause of action under the Americans With Disabilities Act [ADA] against an employer who refused to reduce his exposure in his workplace, and a complaint by Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) recently forced a university to protect a woman and her unborn child whose health was threatened by tobacco smoke residue on the clothing of an officemate who smoked outdoors.

In the latter situation one doctor stated that "her sensitivity is also to the tobacco smoke residue on the person or clothing of a smoker, not just the smoke in the air. Therefore, to protect her health, especially during her pregnancy, she should not be assigned to an office with someone who smokes during the work day.'

Another doctor said that "smoking and second hand smoke has known effects on the placenta that carries nourishment to the baby. Therefore, to protect her health and the health of her baby, she should not be assigned to an office with someone who smokes during the workday, even if that person doesn't smoke in that room.'

In addition to these two situations in which a nonsmoking man and woman (and her unborn child) were expressly protected from third hand smoke, several courts have recognized at least by implication the right of children to be protected from third hand smoke.

Apple can't sack employees for whinging so the only thing left to do to avoid the risk is to void the warranties. For all we know employees have complained and it's not just a case of Apple being super Nazis.

They are probably concerned about this: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/03/health/research/03smoke.html Even so, this does not relieve them of their warranty obligations. If they cannot safely handle the item, then they probably have to simply replace it.

I find cigarette smoking to be pretty repulsive myself, though I do enjoy a good cigar from time to time. I think we've gone too war with the war on smoking though. There are actually municipalities now that are considering banning smoking outdoors. WTF is wrong with that picture?

More than thinking about it, I assure you. I fully support banning smoking in bars and restaurants, but sidewalk bans are going too far.

The "biohazard" stuff is crap.

Well, third-hand smoke is considered by at least some docs to be a direct cancer risk.

Among the substances in third-hand smoke are hydrogen cyanide, used in chemical weapons; butane, which is used in lighter fluid; toluene, found in paint thinners; arsenic; lead; carbon monoxide; and even polonium-210, the highly radioactive carcinogen that was used to murder former Russian spy Alexander V. Litvinenko in 2006. Eleven of the compounds are highly carcinogenic.

I suspect your talking about Obama so I thought I would give you a neat read (make sure to check the date). I don't know about you but I think that anyone that works that hard for dismantling nuclear weapons is doing something deserving a peace prize. I don't blame you though I had to read it in a university news paper to know about it. Mainstream journalism really dropped the ball reporting the truth. Although about Linus how has he helped promote humanitarian efforts and world peace? I'm not sure. I simply don't know enough about the guy.

Yet, most people don't get it. Historically, the main motivation for the birth of the internet was specifically to avoid the dreaded Single Point of Failure. What we see in the cloud concept is exactly the opposite. The cloud can (and statistically it will) eat your data, along with everyone's else. What if a whole contry's data infrastructure is in one failed cloud?

Do you trust one company to be better at handling YOUR data than yourself? Do you trust it will never be hacked? Do you trust it will always be online? Do you trust nobody will access it without your consent?

I don't. You shouldn't.

Also, what happens when you get without internet access? What happens when power is out? (my laptop can run for two hours on battery, my router won't)
What happens when the three-strikes law passes? Not if, given current state of affairs. Will you be locked out of all your data? What when you put all your family HD movies in the cloud, will you need to have fiber to watch it with good quality?

Also, economically that's a catastrophe. The cloud will maintain some companies basically with a monopoly on YOUR data. It will destroy the whole industry based on standalone software. Don't be mislead: you WILL have to pay to get even the most basic software running. Many companies already do that with auto-deactivating software. The cloud will only make it easier.

And for those who think the comment above looks like some doomsday dark sci-fi story, I advice to take a look around. Things are already happening. One doesn't have to dig deep to find news of what's already happening.

Last year, Spain granted human rights to apes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/14/opinion/14mon4.html

Does this mean apes also have the right to broadband? And please, no jokes about Nigerian scammers.

...how do I make money off these fools?

You really need to ask Al Gore, he has it down pat.

Plugging this into excel and comparing with election08 data (Feel free to email me asking for the data if you don't trust me), the average Blue state gets $0.96 in spending for every dollar it pays in taxes. The average Red state receives $1.40 in spending for every dollar in taxes it pays.

These tables don't specify, what the money was spent on — a union-entrenching public-works project? Public housing? Paying off farmers to grow less food? One could make a case, that the Democrats are charging the productive to support the rest on purpose — to make everyone addicted to the government's support and destroy the "evil" Capitalism. Your figures would support that claim, actually...

But all that is only a little related to my earlier claim, that Democrats can't govern as good as Republicans. You dismissed my examples (New Orleans, New York before and after Giulliani, Seattle — I'd add Chicago, if I had anything to compare it with) as "cherry-picking" — so, why don't you pick some of your own cherries to demonstrate the opposite?

It's hard for "industrious profit driven capitalists" to get food when they can't leave their houses without being electrocuted to death by downed power-lines.

That's irrelevant — downed power-lines are a danger to the benevolent free food distributors from the government just as well. The broken infrastructure has to be fixed regardless of who is then helping avoid famine. Both, however, are going to happen quickly and without much drama under Capitalism. Under Socialism, on the other hand, things will suffer, even when there is money.

Since there are more Democrats then Republicans at every level of government right now, this creates a strong theoretical reason to believe that Republicans do not perform better then Democrats.

What? How?..

But Nicaragua's GDP is higher right now then it was a couple years ago when they were controlled by right-wing parties. So Nicaragua under "Capitalist" management would have actually done slightly worse.

For the GDP to be simply higher than in prior year, not much is needed. The measure of good government is the speed of the product's continuing growth. Nicaragua's Capitalists left a faster-growing GDP, than it has since grown under the Socialists. Although nobody knows for sure, the simple statistics show the exact opposite to what you are saying, and confirm my assertions: Socialism is bad.

I doubt, you — with your demonstrated knack for Math and Statistics — could've missed the difference between GDP being higher vs. faster-growing. That you picked the former to state: "under "Capitalist" management would have actually done slightly worse," — when the full picture shows the opposite, makes me think, you aren't posting in good faith and reinforces my suspicions about the rest of your data...

Of course, the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union funded a civil war in Nicaragua for two decades is a much larger factor in Nicaragua's current poverty then any decisions by their government.

The civil war wound down 20 years ago. I don't expect them all to have HDTV and nice cars by now, but it does not take that long to figure out, how to survive a bad harvest year...

...which completely explains why we had to drop two of them before they surrendered.

The Japanese wanted terms that included the preservation of the Emperor's position. The U.S. demanded unconditional surrender -- and then not only granted this term most desired by the Japanese, but engaged in active cover-up up Japanese war crimes on the mainland.

No nation is going to decide to make an unconditional surrender in a matter of days: indeed, the idea that when two expansionist imperial powers get into conflict over colonies (which is the story of the Pacific conflict -- just how do you think the U.S. came to be in Hawaii and in the Philippines?), the losing side should cease to exist as an independent nation was historically unprecedented. From the start, Japan was expecting a WWI style armistice.

We didn't have to drop the second bomb, the political effects of the first were still in motion. But we had one uranium bomb, and one plutonium one...surely we should see the effects of both, after all the time and money spent? And it's not like we were dropping them on white people. We'd planned to use the bomb on the Japanese first -- not the Nazis -- from the start of the Manhattan project.

The bombs were dropped because it was completely clear to all that the japanese of that time were going to dig in as deep as possible and were all willing to fight to the death.

No. That's the myth, point for point, but it's absurd to suppose that an invasion would have been necessary to destroy Japan's ability to make war. We'd already pushed them back to the home islands: set up a blockade, lob a couple of bombs at military targets and ports every so often, and without the resources of the mainland Japan would have been starved of fuel and food in a matter of months. As the wik notes, "By August 1945, the Imperial Japanese Navy effectively ceased to exist".

The greatest military commander of the Allies, Eisenhower, knew that Japan was defeated before the bombs dropped: "...I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives."

But more importantly, it was in fact known that the Japanese were ready to sue for peace.

The National Archives in Washington contain US government documents that chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including "capitulation even if the terms were hard". Instead, the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was "fearful" that the US air force would have Japan so "bombed out" that the new weapon would not be able "to show its strength". He later admitted that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb". His foreign policy colleagues were eager "to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip". General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: "There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis." The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the "overwhelming success" of "the experiment".

The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers

The New York Times recently did an extensive article on this scam.

The entire basis of their operation is to fool people into paying for something advertised as free. They claim that their site discloses its fees, but the disclosure is still discrete enough to fool massive numbers of people.

Any site where you make a purchase should disclose the fact that you are making a purchase with at least the level of clarity that you encounter on a reputable site such as Amazon.com. Also a service that advertises itself as "free" should never be allowed to charge -- even if they gratuitously disclosed their fee (which they don't) it would still be a bait an switch scam.

I think DOJ did look at the Enron Developers to determine if products/services actually existed and worked. If this is a trend perhaps the Galleon programmers could also be examined. Any Ponzi and other Stock schemes revolve around what did they know and when did they know it, programmers and Admins are not magically excepted from being examined as they may be material to the scam being pulled off.

Scam brokerage applications apparently are built upon business rules which I hope a programmer is willing to question if they are totally without reason and would walk out if they realized the shell game. I self reference to this with a comment I made about IBM's Moffet and the growing scandal of lack of ethics in the IT Business.

If convicted these guys are going to give a whole bunch of IT professionals a sullied reputation simply by association.

Where will this end? Will IT professionals soon be the butt of jokes like ambulance chasing lawyers?
Oh your a brokerage programmer? Hmm What's 100 brokerage programmers at the bottom of the ocean?

That would be great, except the other three will be doing the same thing very shortly. Same with text message fees. It was David Pogue's number one gripe.

Cellular phone service in the United States is not a free market.

David Pogue commentary also discusses the $1.99 fee for hitting the incorrect button on the phone, where you accidentally request a web service, no matter how fast you cancel the request you get nicked $1.99.

It doesn't matter. According to David Pogue, even if you block data, the moment you hit that button, you get sent a message that says something to the effect that "data is blocked on this device", but since that message is data, you're still charged $1.99 to receive it! They actually charge you $1.99 for that error message too.

The hobbling of the phone OS is optional:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/27/verizon-wireless-says-bring-your-own-device/

(Article from 2 years ago)

CNN, however, does have a birther

Not anymore.

By "someone doing real investigative journalism", do you perhaps mean Glenn Beck and right-wing bloggers?

So when someone finds something negative about the Bush administration, it is journalism. But when someone uncovers things about someone in the Obama administration, which causes enough controversy for him to resign (in the cover of darkness on a holiday weekend) that is right-wing hatemongering? I realize the "green jobs advisor" is no Secretary of Defense, but really?

The device won't be speedy: "Intel says it takes about 30 seconds to process each page of text... It took... about 30 minutes to scan in the pages of a 250-page book and then one hour to process them."

The New York Times used Amazon's Cloud computing to create PDF's for a lot of their public domain files. And there's the PGP cracking efforts slashdot mentioned before.

Maybe Intel should tie this into a cloud computing based system that could distribute each scanned page to a new VM for processing. That way the pages could be prepared in parallel and loaded back to the system.

Ideally the result of the scanning process would be uploaded to Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, Google Books, and digital library efforts around the world, but first things first.

Another option would be to put the pages that are scanned into the ReCaptcha database.

Perhaps because the video wasn't posted online until recently for privacy concerns? Or perhaps because the right people didn't know about it

Yes, that's exactly the problem: "the right people" are Fox commentators like Glenn Beck! The ideological agenda on the "opinion" side is what drives the selection of stories on the "news" side.

kind of like how Van Jones had his name on that 9/11 truther petition for all that time, but it wasn't an issue until someone doing real investigative journalism stumbled upon it?

By "someone doing real investigative journalism", do you perhaps mean Glenn Beck and right-wing bloggers?

And maybe I am forgetful, but I don't recall their two big news programs running that video (Special Report, The Fox Report). Perhaps they did.

Sounds like you're forgetting quite a bit. For clips, see this Daily Show video (starting around 6:45).

For the sake of accuracy, I do not believe that criminal charges were ever filed against Bill Richardson. It would appear that a year long investigation did not provide enough evidence to get a grand jury to indict him. While there are political fingers pointing in both directions, I would think that if they had the evidence, they could have gotten an indictment before Obama even took office.

While I agree that the handling of the New Black Panther case looks political, it was a civil case not a criminal one.

The NYtimes did an interesting article on something similar to this, it was about the exorbitant cost of text to speech devices for the speaking impaired compared to simple consumer solutions like the iphone.

Heres the article, its quite interesting:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/15/technology/15speech.html

Oil is a strange good. The wealthiest economies are those which consume the most of it. Under present conditions, each unit of oil consumed generates wealth. It's extremely hard to argue that oil is not significantly underpriced, to the greater benefit of those who monopolize its consumption.

If the price of oil doubles or triples, the western world would grouse so loudly, the internet might collapse under the collective groan, but in other respects, life would go on. We'd finally have to rationalize our consumption, a project long overdue on any number of other grounds.

I have trouble grasping Chicken Little squawking out of one beak "we're running out of oil, we're all going to freeze" while simultaneously squawking out of the other beak "we've already burned too much, we're all going to roast". Even if the GHG scenario fails to unfold with the anticipated drama, there's still the issue that we are potentially damaging ocean chemistry and wiping out global shellfish ecosystems.

My own position is that we already have more carbon at hand than we can prudently burn and release into the atmosphere, so peak oil is mostly about traders hoping to pump and dump amid a global stock panic.

My sceptic says: I'll believe the world is suffering a major food shortage when nobody grows tobacco. I'll believe the world is suffering a major energy shortage when we can no longer afford to throw a cell phone away because it's so yesterday.

The Afterlife of Cellphones

Regardless, recyclers say that from their vantage point it's obvious that most phones are retired because of psychological, not technological, obsolescence. "There's some fashion driving all of this and, by its nature, fashion is not eternal," says Mark Donovan of M:Metrics, which tracks the wireless industry.

This is a dead giveaway that our society is not yet anywhere close to energy stress, as much as the masters of markets in chaos wish us to fear this.

BULLSHIT

Wait! It gets even better!

Environmental Agency Warns 2 Staff Lawyers Over Video Criticizing Climate Policy

When is Slashdot going to run THAT story? The oh-so-fucking-transparent OBAMA administration censoring dissent!

I can hardly wait for this bunch of assclowns to put themselves in charge of health care!

Woo hoo! That will be even more "change we can believe in".

Obama's the one needing change - changed like a baby's full diaper.

Thousands of years from now, an advanced, starfaring race may stumble across the dusty remnants of our civilization. With intelligence of any sort being a rare commodity among the stars, some alien Poindexter will convince the commander to stop and take a look around instead of continuing on to Barnard's Star or wherever they are headed to

As they dig around among our discarded Big Gulp cups and dowsing rods they will wonder why we never simply used fgnorg-point energy like everyone else.

I think we can all see the message here.

My impression is, that economists in general don't have a good grasp of math

I don't think the biggest problem is economists' grasp of math. Rather, it's that (a) the people implementing the economists' mathematical theories don't have a good grasp of the math, and (b) economists don't have a good grasp of the people their math is supposed to model.

Either it will be competitive or it won't be.

It will appear competitive, because the government's bottomless pockets will allow it to undercut the private competitors. Seriously, look up the history of Standard Oil — which resulted in our existing anti-monopoly laws. Their standard practice was setting up a shop next to competition's to undercut them. Once the competitor went out of business, their prices would go back up... Way up...

Government is a monopoly, thus keeping its activities to what simply can not be done privately (like law enforcement and military) — the things, you know, enumerated in the Constitution — is the only way to protect the citizenry from abuse.

Medicare is an example — it destroyed the private coverage plans for the old age, because nobody can compete with the government. And it is now a major fraud-prone money sink, that's only sustainable, because it does not cover everyone. Oh, yes, Medicare's own investigation claims, they have the least overhead of the medical plans. But if you trust an organization to audit itself, I may have some Enron stocks to sell you...

Even how and how much your food is cooked affects its caloric and nutritional content. Cooking makes a lot of molecules easier to absorb, whether that's energy molecules like carbs and fats or vitamins and minerals. That's a big part of what a guy named Richard Wrangham wrote about in a recent book. 'Course I haven't read the whole thing mind you -- just heard interviews, etc. Interesting stuff that we don't usually think about, though.

Former generals and admirals receive their talking points from the Pentagon and White House.

If you believe McConnell, you're a first class sucker of the message machine

The trawlers rake scoops across the ocean beds to catch shrimp. Which annihilate the corral reefs.

More than just coral reefs. There's an interesting article from the NYT about commercial trawlers features some incredible images from Google Maps.

Trawling is the ecological equivalent of strapping a thick wire cable between two jeeps and driving at high speeds across the fields. You'll kill every animal in your path, as well as most of the shrubs and trees. Look at the paths left behind the trawlers and compare to the areas in front of them. They leave behind a veritable wasteland.

You need only one article to refute the idea that fat makes you fat — Taubes has done the work for the rest of us. Some asshole wrote a big ugly rebuttal to his article, but it was entirely filled with falsehood; if you are really interested (which you might be if you want to cite Taubes' article, because people will come along with the uninformed rebuttal and quote it like it was the bible — irony intended) and you may need to shoot them down.

Short form: We've known for decades to centuries that eating carbs makes you fat and raises your risk of heart disease. You can see it strongly amongst italians (greeks, who are intermixed heavily with them due to the wages of history, eat less fat and have less problems) and amongst peoples of the carribean. Mixing fat and carbs is the problem, because carbs regulate energy storage, period the end. Also, unburned carbohydrates are actually more likely to be converted and stored in a fat cell than unburned fat! Finally, carbohydrates are addictive in that your brain becomes more resistant to them over time (very simplified, but bear with me) and it takes more carbs to feel full, causing the eating of more and more food. Eventually you burn out your pancreas and become a diabetic.

Exercise is, however, absolutely necessary for health. You have about as much lymph fluid as blood but there is no organ tasked to moving it around. This is why you see fat people with super fat ankles; there's not much actual fat there as you know if you've hit those protruding ankle joint bumps on things, but if you don't move around the lymph just settles in your body.

Thing is, though: They're right.

If you haven't read "Good Calories, Bad Calories" by Gary Taubes, you should. This book outlines how 40 years of bad science and personality cults in nutrition research has lead to a serious misunderstanding of the causes of heart disease and obesity.

At the very least you should read his eye-opening NY Times article, which pre-dated the book by a couple of years.

First, that poverty line INCLUDES ALL PPL LIVING HERE.

Right, that's why I was looking at what proportion of the 39 million might be illegal immigrants.

Second, most of the #s for illegals in the states show 15-30 million, not the low 11 million that you claim.

What's your source for that? I was drawing my number from an NYT article, but it seems consistent with numbers from other sources. It does look like these higher numbers are claimed out there (I actually haven't found anything much higher than 20 million, though), but they seem to be the outliers not the consensus estimate.

When you can not check the legal status of a person, then the law is worthless (and the dems know that). All that is required is to simply require hospitals to call in ICE for every person that does not have insurance or public options, and require a legality check on ppl signing up for public options...

I think maybe you're conflating two different issues. 1) Can illegal immigrants get emergency medical care at the hospital. 2) Can they get federal help on paying for insurance. The current bill does not affect question #1. Illegal immigrants will be able to get emergency care after the bill is passed only to the degree they could before. Also it's estimated that about 1/2 of illegal immigrants have health insurance, and could presumably already pay for their care. So issue #1 is a red herring. One point #2, though, the bill says that illegal immigrants can't get aid for buying health insurance and says that enforcement measures should be setup.

ANY reform on medical costs is worth it. several OB-GYN and and an anesthesiologist that I know (none with any previous issues) are paying over 100K/year for malpractice. That is outrageous.

I'm saying that research says it will not significantly, so it's not relevant to this discussion. It's another red herring.

The Kindle DRM works about as well as any can (for eBooks).

The same Kindle that won't tell you how many times you can download a book you've bought? The same Kindle that can arbitrarily delete eBooks you've purchased?

Stop deluding yourself. By its very nature, DRM can never "work" in the favor of the consumer. It has zero benefit for the consumer, regardless of how one might sugarcoat its benefits (including statements such as it "works about as well as any.") It's a twisted mockery of the printed word, and any consumer who buys into this deserves what they get.

All the little workers demand higher and higher wages.

Your words suggest a certain contempt for the American worker/consumer (who are 90% or more of the American people, although some are only discovering their "class" as they are let go as the consequences of Republican economic policies unfold). That in turn indicates a certain myopia, which is suggestive of your economic status/dependency.

Regardless, if you had thought about your last sentence:

I hear it worked great for Detroit.

first, your words might have been different. Since you insist in placing blame upon "all of the little workers" and use Detroit to represent your example, would you care to explain how heavily-unionized Ford keeps ticking along, while GM and Chrysler are lurching towards the abyss?

I am always amused by those who blame America's worker/consumers/soldiers, when it is they who made this country great, and it is they who stood (and stand) between America's wealthy elite - whether they are of the symbiotic or of the parasitical sort - and America's enemies who would take their wealth and slay them out of hand.

You have convinced yourself - and now attempt to convince the world - that leadership and management make no difference.

You complain of "all the little workers" demanding higher wages when it is America's top 5% - exemplified by our CEOs - who drive price increases. It takes a lot of margin to raise your pay and benefits from a multiple of 30 times average worker pay to 400 times; the same goes for higher dividends, and on and on.

If the demands of America's worker/consumer placed a disproportionate burden upon America's economy, then pray tell why has our inequality curve shifted to reflect the wealthy few taking ever more ever faster? http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/13/even-more-gilded/

Consider the implications of that chart, and tell me again whose understanding is "broken".

Health care in this country is about the best in the world.

That is a lie.

"The United States ranks 31st in life expectancy (tied with Kuwait and Chile), according to the latest World Health Organization figures. We rank 37th in infant mortality (partly because of many premature births) and 34th in maternal mortality. A child in the United States is two-and-a-half times as likely to die by age 5 as in Singapore or Sweden, and an American woman is 11 times as likely to die in childbirth as a woman in Ireland."

"Yet another study, cited in a recent report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute, looked at how well 19 developed countries succeeded in avoiding “preventable deaths,” such as those where a disease could be cured or forestalled. What Senator Shelby called “the best health care system” ranked in last place."

It's early, I'm lazy, but the facts match up. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/opinion/05kristof.html?em

Life expectancy does not necessarily equal quality of care. That is about the same as people who say country X has low gun crime with super strict gun laws, therefore we should enact the same! There are other variables to be considered as the poster below points out. If the quality of care here is so terrible, why do people come here for it? I didn't say care was the cheapest here, just that the quality is among the highest.

Health care in this country is about the best in the world.

That is a lie.

"The United States ranks 31st in life expectancy (tied with Kuwait and Chile), according to the latest World Health Organization figures. We rank 37th in infant mortality (partly because of many premature births) and 34th in maternal mortality. A child in the United States is two-and-a-half times as likely to die by age 5 as in Singapore or Sweden, and an American woman is 11 times as likely to die in childbirth as a woman in Ireland."

"Yet another study, cited in a recent report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute, looked at how well 19 developed countries succeeded in avoiding “preventable deaths,” such as those where a disease could be cured or forestalled. What Senator Shelby called “the best health care system” ranked in last place."

It's early, I'm lazy, but the facts match up. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/opinion/05kristof.html?em

This device is 'scientific proof' (AKA the computer said so) for arresting any one of 90% of the people there that they might want to arrest for some reason.

Think dousing rods here. It's an enforcement departments wet dream.

e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/world/middleeast/04sensors.html ?

And Immelt is one of the big time White House visitors. With the health care division, and the "green" products, they stand to make a killing from this influence peddling. Not to mention their extension of the communications office, NBC News/MSNBC.

This device could be useful in business negotiations. If you could smell the fear of the inept decision maker, perhaps you could use his fear of failure to buy a worthless device. It seems to work in Iraq where the Iraqi police are buying bomb seeking divining rods for as much as $60k each from a British company named, ATSC.

Mad Bomb Sniffer Story

The effect of various drugs can also be decreased or increased if you ingest grapefruit.

As the NYTimes reports,

Grapefruit juice can...interfere with the metabolism of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or S.S.R.I.'s, like Prozac, which are used to treat depression.

and

[D]rugs used to lower cholesterol, like Lipitor, Mevacor and Zocor, have increased potency when taken with grapefruit juice. Excessive levels of those drugs can lead to a serious and sometimes fatal muscle disorder called rhabdomyolysis.

Before you start trying to figure out the multiplier so that you can make your pills last longer, Doctors say that

There's no uniformity from one individual to another or from one bottle of grapefruit juice to the next.

It's kind of a craps shoot:

"The problem is the unpredictability of the effect," he said. "You can't just lower your dose of Lipitor and increase your consumption of grapefruit juice.

"There's huge variation in the amount of enzyme people have in their guts. Fooling around with grapefruit juice is not a good idea."

The real issue here is that building infrastructure like this requires such a huge amount of capital that it's a natural monopoly. There's really no way for competitors to come in without a huge investment in laying their own lines that is very much at risk and only serves to lessen their own profit margins.

Yeah, there's absolutely no way a company would spend $28 billion dollars laying the next generation of infrastructure lines in an area already served by Comcast. Definitely not typing on that network as we speak, no sir, couldn't possibly exist because you have a theory that says that it won't happen. Oh, and my area also gets RCN and a couple dozen flavors of DSL.

Oh, and by the way, FIOS is fantastic. Super low pings, massive bandwidth, no hiccups.

See also:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/technology/19fios.html
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/08/19/technology/19fios.2.ready.html
http://www.dslreports.com/gmaps/fios

The real issue here is that building infrastructure like this requires such a huge amount of capital that it's a natural monopoly. There's really no way for competitors to come in without a huge investment in laying their own lines that is very much at risk and only serves to lessen their own profit margins.

Yeah, there's absolutely no way a company would spend $28 billion dollars laying the next generation of infrastructure lines in an area already served by Comcast. Definitely not typing on that network as we speak, no sir, couldn't possibly exist because you have a theory that says that it won't happen. Oh, and my area also gets RCN and a couple dozen flavors of DSL.

Oh, and by the way, FIOS is fantastic. Super low pings, massive bandwidth, no hiccups.

See also:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/technology/19fios.html
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/08/19/technology/19fios.2.ready.html
http://www.dslreports.com/gmaps/fios

Too bad we spend a trillion dollars invading the wrong country based on obvious lies and fabrications. I think we would have been better off spending that money on cool space toys or at least getting Afghanistan right the first time.

We will be paying for the George W Bush's disastrous presidency for a very long time.

There really is no reason for us to be in Afghanistan either, but the media and White House has framed the debate on whether we sould "stay the course" or add more troops. That is the exact stupid debate we had about Iraq a few years ago. Our only support is from local warlords who don't care about our laws and are only loyal to us because we give them taxpayer money and allow them to engage in the drug trade. Even the NYtimes admits that the Presidents brother is in charge of a lot of the drug running and is on the payroll of the CIA.

The Afghanistan War was never about getting Osama bin Laden. The FBI still doesn't list 9/11 as one of the reasons why he is a Wanted person because they have no proof he was involved. The only "proof" is a video released in December 2001, supposedly found in a house in Afghanistan which supposedly had bin Laden admitting to being involved in the plot. The US media were the only ones to not question its authenticity.

Why can't people get past the obvious shell game being played?

Hmm, yes. I think in this case it's both -- it is a legal monopoly, in that government support has been specifically given to one entity, but it's also a natural monopoly, in that the network having been built, the barrier to entry has become so high that competition wouldn't just "happen" through the actions of the free market. Either way, it's stupid & pointless for the government to fund a monopoly, and then let that monopoly stand, without making sure to set strict limits on its business practices, prices, standards, and minimum service levels.

Nationalization would be a good option, though really I think it should happen under more local control; municipalities seem better keyed in to how to handle their own local districts. On the government expenditures point, though, it's not as bad as it seems, or at least, not as bad as the alternative. Keynesian stimulus (such as building out new fiber infrastructure) would do a lot to help fix that unemployment rate (which, recession or no, is still officially nearly in double-digits, which means unofficially it's far beyond), and that's screwing over the young people right now.

Hmm I wonder if this law will let me disconnect a router from the internet... or a Root name server.

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