Slashdot Mirror

Few people in America have Garages to charge their electric cars.

More have Street parking in front of their townhouse or single family house.

Typical myopia of a city-dweller. Try looking at numbers before talking. Cities in the US haven't changed appreciably in population since the '50s. Nearly all the population migration in the past half century was into suburbs. Where a whopping 52% of the country now lives. One of the major distinguishing factors of suburbs vs. urban areas is the high availability of both garages and private driveways. Add to that the entire rural population, another 25% of the country as of 2000. They can do practically anything they like on their property, with no homeowner's associations to worry about. So slightly more than 75% of the country is trivially able to charge an electric vehicle right now, and that ignores numerous garages in cities.

There is a potential market for a street-side charging station, but it's much smaller than you imagine.

Bollywood creates 800 movies a year in India, a place the US is exceptionally upset at for it's lax IP laws, that by all politicians should not have nearly the thriving multimedia industry it does.

Hollywood creates about 600 (603 in 2007).

Given the local differences, it's amazing that they make 10% of the revenue that Hollywood does, while investing only $500K per movie (from the previous PBS report, as contrasted with the average of $100 million for a Hollywood movie.

First, to answer your question. Unless you absolutely need cash in hand ASAP, conventional wisdom states that you ride it out. The market (usually) bounces back and stronger than before. I know were placing a lot of money on faith, but at least there's historical evidence of it being a good rule to follow.

You are correct however that markets are not really all that rational. On the whole, they are. But at the micro level, human nature starts show just how irrational the market is at the base. PBS aired an interesting piece on Nova called Mind Over Matter - Can markets be rational when humans aren't? Very fascinating in that it pits human emotion against raw/pure economic mathematics. It's like watching Klingons working with Vulcans in the market place.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/money/

I see your octopus and raise with cuttlefish

Full NOVA episode

Hmmm, see: Hunting the edge of space and note its time reference.

This is important considering the value of looking so far back in time.

According to NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco, who was interviewed on last night's McNeil Lehrer News Hour, the oil entering the Loop will have minimal environmental impact in other parts of the Gulf. She opines that "By the time the oil is in the loop current, it's likely to be very, very diluted. And, so, it's not likely to have a very significant impact. It sounds scarier than it is."

"The average student debt load in 2008 was $23,200 -- a nearly $5,000 increase over five years."

This is fueled mainly by the boom in higher priced private colleges (University of Phoenix, etc.) and their shifty recruitment practices. Exactly in the same way that mortgages were being given to unqualified homeowners, there has been a huge rise in the numbers of students enrolling at colleges who will let anybody in the door. Recruiters are paid per enrollment in many cases. Frontline covered it recently:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/collegeinc/ (you can watch the show online here)

One of the standout statistics was the 10 percent of public university students are in default, while private colleges have a 44 percent default rate.

You've got it backwards,

A NASA Space/Mars Colony if anything would help us live better with smaller carbon footprint here on Earth.

During the last 40 years NASA has spent lots of R&D money on high efficiency solar Panels, Fuel Cells, Water Recycling/Pufification, all technologies required to live lightly on the land, or in the very finite resources available to Astronauts in space or on the Moon/Mars.

Or alternatively, we could do exactly what Jimmy Carter suggested in 1979 -- for which integrity and foresight he got booed out of the White House --

Launch an Apollo-class initiative to directly create and deploy technologies designed to reduce our energy use and live sustainably right here in Earth's biosphere

Oh, but living within our means will magically work in spaaaaace yet it won't on Earth where it's much more doable?

Don't rely on spin-offs. If you really want technology to save the Earth, invest in technology to save the Earth. Create a National Doing The Right Thing Agency. If you spend money on space, you might get a few tiny spinoffs, but most of it will go on special-purpose hardware which is useless on Earth.

Here's what Carter tried to do, and for which he was considered a failure:

"Point one: I am tonight setting a clear goal for the energy policy of the United States. Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977 -- never. From now on, every new addition to our demand for energy will be met from our own production and our own conservation. The generation-long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped dead in its tracks right now and then reversed as we move through the 1980s, for I am tonight setting the further goal of cutting our dependence on foreign oil by one-half by the end of the next decade -- a saving of over 4-1/2 million barrels of imported oil per day.

Point two: To ensure that we meet these targets, I will use my presidential authority to set import quotas. I'm announcing tonight that for 1979 and 1980, I will forbid the entry into this country of one drop of foreign oil more than these goals allow. These quotas will ensure a reduction in imports even below the ambitious levels we set at the recent Tokyo summit.

Point three: To give us energy security, I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our nation's history to develop America's own alternative sources of fuel -- from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the sun. "

It is an American - and global - tragedy that he didn't get a second term.

Since we know Pres. Obama is a straight ticket 'Progressive'

Obama is a moderate conservative: right wing (favoring the interests of the investment class), socially conservative (opposed to equality for gays and lesbians, opposed to the separation of church and state), and in favor of an aggressive foreign policy. Many of his policies that draw the most clamor from the Fox News set are close to, or even to the right of, those of Reagan or Nixon.

If you want an example of a straight ticket Progressive, look to Teddy Roosevelt -- he founded the party, after all. I'd like it if Obama were dedicated "to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics", but I sure don't see it.

the American people would never elect an out of the closet Progressive/Socialist

Please don't use words when you don't know what they mean.

It's a lot easier to find waste in the military. The military knows where it is. The hard thing, is that you can't cut it. It's not because of the normal turf wars, it's because all too often you're legally forbidden to cut it. There are numerous weapon systems that the military doesn't want, yet, they have forced on them. Let me give an example I found last night. Since the late 80s the Air Force wanted to replace the A-10 close air support attack craft. Their first plan was to create a F-16 variant, the A-16. What happened? In 1990 Congress passed a law mandating that it maintain two wings of the A-10. Why? Well as Ike said, no one knows how to spread the pork around like the Military-Industrial Complex.

So what's going to replace the A-10 now? The F-35, the same plane that was supposed to be "cheap" (especialy compared to the F-22, which last I heard has not been deployed in combat) that's now experiencing huge cost overruns.

Oh wait, there already doing that with humans ready to sell and buy ...... but who wants you to know that?

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,676634,00.html

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2704stockmarket.html

Officer B. Madoff will show up if you call 911 about it.

Because it is? Certainly it is in this case.

I don't know how long you've been paying attention, but media organizations have fought to control nearly every single advancement in the content distribution arena. Their insanity has derailed or generally fucked up a number of great technologies. They've sued their own customers. They've pushed ridiculous monitoring overhead off on people in the business of just carrying packets. They've invaded privacy. They've lied about you to authorities. They've bought laws.

But when I read stories like this its like 10 years ago and I'm watching Cops and here is some beaten housewife, face bruised, blubbering through her bloody lips that even though her husband beats her and drinks to much and she knows he is a degenerate piece shit, she still loves him and does he really have to go to jail? Like her, people like you complain about the transgressions above but you reliably choose them over 'nothing'. No music no movies No TV.

The media organizations do not believe that you are unhappy with them. When they look at their monthly reports they see you still give them your money. It isn't like they have demonstrated particularly clear and forward looking vision.

We can look as far as we can go back in space/time (see NOVA Hunting Teh edge of space and we end with widely scattered light that we cannot see past. Then we go the route of looking at the very very small (see LHC LHC experiments video

So as much as what is all happening in 2012 (what we know scientifically) there is also our point in evolution and science where we see a millionth of a second past the big bang.

When will we and the Aliens be ready to meet?

When they don't have to prove to us what we will then know ourselves.

When you think of it, neither the big bang theorist or the religious creationist are completely correct, as the honesty of teh matter is a bit of both.
Who do you think gave us the content to write our religious texts? And based on their own evolution and advanced technology just as we will be able to look back in hindsight.

Looking back in space time we see widely scattered light -- like what Genesis describes. go figure..

From: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/innovation/episode7_essay1.html

Telesurgery made international news on September 7, 2001, when the first transatlantic surgical procedure took place between New York City and Strasbourg, France at a distance of nearly 4,000 miles. Dubbed "Operation Lindbergh" after Charles Lindbergh's first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic, the surgery was a landmark in experimental long distance telesurgery.

This was also reported in the BBC News, so the English really should know better: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1552211.stm

Looks like someone watched this week's Frontline...

W

NOVA did a piece on this April 2006.

>>> I think that's what they call this, the Pope making an issue out of Internet transparency out of nowhere.

This is Slashdot, so I know that you didn't actually RTFA, but just so you know, the Pope never said anything attacking transparency. Here, I'll copy every direct quote of the Pope from the article for you:

Finally, a cry rose up as he was glimpsed walking in from stage right -- arms out in the familiar pose of benediction. "Papa! Papa!" the crowd cried. He made his way to the throne, sat for a fulsome introduction by the head bishop of the Italian church, then began to speak. What he said did not sound overly encouraging to devotees of the new digital age.

"The times in which we living knows a huge widening of the frontiers of communication," he said (according to our Italian fixer/producer) and the new media of this new age points to a more "egalitarian and pluralistic" forum. But, he went on to say, it also opens a new hole, the "digital divide" between haves and have-nots. Even more ominous, he said, it exacerbates tensions between nations and within nations themselves. And it increases the "dangers of ... intellectual and moral relativism," which can lead to "multiple forms of degradation and humiliation" of the essence of a person, and to the "pollution of the spirit." All in all, it seemed a pretty grim view of the wide open communication parameters being demanded by the Internet age.

So where does this Vatican stand on being more transparent about how it has handled priest abuse cases in decades past? Will it respond to the call for greater openness that we have heard from so many Catholics here, in our two brief days so far? It was hard to glimpse the truth from our Vatican encounter Saturday. We can only hope to be able to shed greater light on the question by week's end.

I think it's a little bit of a stretch to say that the Pope "rails against [...] transparency" when the writers of the article "hope to be able to shed greater light on the question by week's end," don't you? I'm no fan of pedophile priests, so complain about those all you want. But I think it's pretty bad when the headline here is contradicted by the article. Did the submitter (or anyone but me) even read this, or did they go for the most sensational headline?

"it should be to a private agency that has something to lose if they fuck up, not to a bureaucracy which will in all likelihood get a budget increase after a major failure."

Great, just what we need. More Arthur Andersens.

"Arthur Andersen LLP, based in Chicago, was once one of the "Big Five" accounting firms"

It is now the "big four." And it looks like their hands might be a little dirty in the recent economic turmoil.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04232010/watch.html

"The Andersen indictment also put a spotlight on its faulty audits of other companies, most notably Waste Management, Sunbeam and WorldCom. The subsequent bankruptcy of WorldCom, which quickly surpassed Enron as the biggest bankruptcy in history, led to a domino effect of accounting and like corporate scandals that continue to tarnish American business practices."

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

Would the economy be OK now? Just asking.....

Maybe if Alan Greenspan was the one obsessed with pr0n...

I found this an interesting watch: Frontline: The Warning

Here's the straight dope:

http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part3.html

Jobs wanted the Mac to revolutionise the PC market - so he insisted that the team deliver perfection.

Andy Hertzfeld
Steve was upset that the Mac took too long to boot to boot up when you first turned it on so he tried motivating Larry Kenyon by telling him well you know how many millions of people are going to buy this machine - it's going to be millions of people and let's imagine that you can make it boot five seconds faster well that's five seconds times a million every day that's fifty lifetimes, if you can shave five seconds off that you're saving fifty lives. And so it was a nice way of thinking about it, and we did get it to go faster.

Larry Tesler
And the little things he did would create incredible pressure unlike I'd ever experienced before just tearing you to the bone ripping you apart and making you feel worthless.

Bill Atkinson
I mean, he would sometimes tell people this is shit and you had to understand what that meant in Jobs language, you see.
BOB: What did it mean?
BILL: As an engineer, if you understood his language you would understand that that was a request to teach me about this.

Steve Jobs
No that's not usually what I meant. I you know when you get really good people they know they're really good and you don't have to baby peoples egos so much.

Bill Atkinson
And maybe in the process of that dialogue Steve will suggest something that caused his engineers to go back and make it better yet and that's actually what a happened a lot of times Steve really did make the product better without even knowing exactly how the engineer was doing it.

Fossil fuel costs for defense and pollution easily rack up into hundreds of billions of dollars per year. As suggested in the book Brittle Power in 1982, renewable energy has been cheaper for decades than fossil fuels (or nuclear) when you include *all* the externalities.
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power

We just pay for fossil fuel use through our taxes and national debt for the military, and through health costs from mercury pollution and other forms of pollution that lead to health problems (even wonder why much fish is now unsafe to eat from mercury?), systemic risk like of economic disruption or global war over oil, and so on.
        http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461

By the way, it takes more electricity and natural gas to refine a gallon of gasoline from oil than an electric car would need to go the same distance, so all that oil is completely wasted -- except it is profitable for some to fleece the public treasury.
    http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

GE had a cost-competetive production ready electric vehicle built from off-the-shelf parts built in the late 1970s -- you can see it in the Schenectady, NY science museum.

That our elected officials have allowed this public fleecing using fossil fuels, including the destruction of the health of our rivers, oceans, and humanity through smog and mercury, to go on since the Reagan years is an unspeakable tragedy of widespread corruption and ignorance which wider access to pubic records might help some with.

For the cost of less than one half-year of US defense spending the USA could shift to all renewables, eliminating the need for much of the defense budget.
    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
    http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/books/pb3/pb3_table_of_contents
    http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

As Jimmy Carter said in 1979:
    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_crisis.html
"""
We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.
    All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.
"""

The only thing was required to prevent another 9/11 style attack...

And the whole thing would likely have been prevented if our security agencies would have actually worked together and shared information instead of each hoarding a piece of the puzzle.

PBS had an interesting show on it.

Too bad the Feds decided putting hundreds of billions of dollars into Wall Street was a bigger priority.

That's a funny point. While we're all aware that $200 Billion won't even get 768k to every home in the country, just how many mega(giga?)bits do you think it could have gotten us?

I've seen "estimates" for Gbps FTTH setups and do understand that it would cost a lot of dough, but one really does wonder.

I'm quite certain that anything that's overall cheaper than a complete backbone through last-mile overhaul, though orders of magnitude more expensive per bit/second gained in capacity, will be the repeated step taken by every telco and cable provider in existence until the end of time, offering marginal increases in bandwidth every two years to the average consumer that's paid more in telephone/cable bills than the FTTH materials and installation cost in-between upgrade cycles.

Sigh. I should buy a sign that reads:

WTB:

INTERNET THAT MAKES UPGRADING TO 802.11n NECESSARY

SYMMETRICAL CONNECTIONS JUST LIKE THE ONES MY ISP HAS

Oh well the last Cox tech I spoke with said DOCSIS 3.0. Last summer. At least that can max out 100BASE.

Any day now.

As someone with experience, right now (dial-up at home).

Ad-block plus is a must have, no-script is essential, I haven't even loaded a picture in months.

Once in a while, a site won't work without some stupid JavaScript, and I'm reduced to choosing between waiting 15-20 minutes to load the page, or looking for information elsewhere.

Email is fine if you just use POP3, but if you're trying to do more than read message boards online, it's impossible.

Patches for the OS, programs, and games are impossible except via sneakernet.

Anyone know how I go about getting a refund for the cash I contributed to the 200 billion the teclos got?

Again, I'm talking genetics here. The recent PBS series Face of America dealt with this much better than I can. But Indians are genetically Asian (no surprise since you can look at them and see that). Australian aboriginals and New Guinean's are genetically African (though of an ancient branch). Of course, when you get into interpretations of race, you can mire down in all kinds of debates. But genetically, there is no such thing as an "American Indian," or a "Hispanic," or an "Italian," etc. You can only meaningfully test for percentages of African/Asian/European genotypes (though you can go back far enough to when even these "races" become muddied).

Eisenhower was excoriated in the press for Sputnik, but declassified docs showed that he was already on the ball by the time the Soviets launched. Since he couldn't say anything about actual spy satellites, he couldn't fend off the press.

Eisenhower also benefited from Sputnik dispelling the notion of "airspace" beyond the Earth's atmosphere - that national borders didn't extend to infinity.

Hence the "one small ball" quote, he didn't care about getting there first.
The capability was there but he wanted to make sure that a sat flyover wouldn't be interpreted as an act of war.
So instead he waited until the International Geophysical Year to launch his cover "scientific" satellite.

Given the tension of the time, it is probably best he let the soviets get the glory, lest we all be covered in nuclear winter.

For more info PBS has a great segment on Sputnik.

Given the recent reports about the problems with the airline industry, some tech transfer here might not be a bad idea.

with the desert.

A search of Amazon might help.

Cheers,
Yours In Astrakhan,
K. Trout

'Being deaf is not about being disabled, or medically incomplete - it's about being part of a linguistic minority. We're proud, not of the medical aspect of deafness, but of the language we use and the community we live in.'

Deafness is a completely different issue from color-blindness (or even regular blindness) because LANGUAGE IS CULTURE. Almost every meaningful social experience you have is had in the context of language.

Think about losing every story, every song, every conversation you've had because your language has been rendered obsolete. On some level I'm sure everyone in deaf culture would like to be able to hear. But many of them won't trade hearing if it means their favorite songs, poems, and stories will not be passed on. There's a great movie about this called Sound and Fury

First, 20,000 years ago the climate changed for other reasons. No one has ever said that the only way the climate can warm is due to humans burning fossil fuels. Deniers like to act as if AGW proponents have said that, however. 'Tis just a strawman.

Second, 20,000 years ago we didn't have over 100 million people living in cities near the ocean. Over the next century, these millions of people will be displaced, or the land they're on will be protected, at a cost of trillions of dollars. If we can avoid it by spending much less money, say, only one trillion dollars, it makes economic sense to do so.

Spending a trillion dollars sounds almost scary, except when you put in into context of saving several trillion dollars.

The technique being applied is that of RNA interference (RNAi) which was awarded the Nobel prize in 2006. There's a good layman's introduction to it over at PBS.

For a more in-depth introduction, Craig Mello, who was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize gave a Google tech-talk.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/interviews/rapaille.html "The Reptile Always Wins" Traits such as the submission to authority are part of the deep underlying reptile brain. Even when other parts of brain saying not to, it very hard to ignore these base desire to submit. It is the core of our intelligent being. This is more than just "correlation imply causation," it is reflection of deep underlying trait that is known. There is not many news in this story. If you look on this principle you will find much to read.

Medicare and medicaid ... will be expanded to cover something like 15-20 million additional Americans

Do you have a source for that?

Yep See the section labeled "Medicaid Expansion." I thought there was also a provision that would lower the age that Medicare and Medicaid automatically kicked in, but I don't see that here.

Everyone else gets mandated employer insurance

There's an individual mandate, but nobody has said that it has to be via your employer.

That's not correct, but neither was my original statement. The truth is between the two. All employers over 50 employees would be required to provide insurance for their employees or pay a substantial fine per employee over 30 ($8,200 x (# of employees - 30)).

Most people will be required to get insurance if they don't get it from their company, BUT, there will be exceptions (those now covered by Medicaid, those who file a waiver for religious reasons, etc.)

The religious reasons exemption kind of bothers me. I understand that there are those who don't want to seek medical care because they feel that their deity of choice doesn't approve. That's fine, but I don't get to opt out of paying for highways because I don't have a license... and I'm fine with that. It's just one of those infrastructure costs. If the fees for not getting insurance were about the same as the cost of insurance, then I wouldn't see any problem with removing the religious exemption.

You presume that you will always make better choices than your children will?

Spoken like a true teenager.

At the McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., Deborah Yurgelun-Todd and a group of researchers have studied how adolescents perceive emotion as compared to adults. The scientists looked at the brains of 18 children between the ages of 10 and 18 and compared them to 16 adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Both groups were shown pictures of adult faces and asked to identify the emotion on the faces. Using fMRI, the researchers could trace what part of the brain responded as subjects were asked to identify the expression depicted in the picture.

The results surprised the researchers. The adults correctly identified the expression as fear. Yet the teens answered "shocked, surprised, angry." And the teens and adults used different parts of their brains to process what they were feeling. The teens mostly used the amygdala, a small almond shaped region that guides instinctual or "gut" reactions, while the adults relied on the frontal cortex, which governs reason and planning.

As the teens got older, the center of activity shifted more toward the frontal cortex and away from the cruder response of the amygdala.

How old are you? In almost all cases, an adult WILL make better choices than a teenager will.

I've been a teenager, and I'm the father of two former teenagers. I think I know what I'm talking about here.

Actually, it is a proven fact that the teenage brain is not fully developedand is incapable of impulse control. Just like a newborn is incapable of walking, a teenager is incapable of practicing adult self-discipline. It is BECAUSE THEY ARE STILL CHILDREN. You can spout all you want about how adults are old and stupid; it does not change the fact that you are still a child and not physically able to do some things that adults can.

We didn't declare war on Saddam Hussein either. Congress has not declared war since WWII. Congress did pass a law authorizing use of force against Iraq. For what it's worth, Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa on behalf of Al Qaeda that amounts to a public declaration of holy war against the United States.

Sure, those conditions and that money is probably a BIG STEP UP over how many were living

That is pure conjecture. Chinese factory work is institutionalized exploitation of a vast underclass. Most of these people would have been better off as farmers building their own local economies.

If you don't have time to watch this excellent documentary on contemporary china, then just watch section 5: "Two Chinas".

Chavez is a great man. He even has his own tv show http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hugochavez/view/?utm_campaign=viewpage&utm_medium=grid&utm_source=grid where he has been know to declare wars from on a whim

Yes, I'm making the obvious distinction that someone harmed by the "disease" is harmed from getting it in the wild, while someone harmed by the "vaccine" is harmed by something related to receiving it, whether an infection from those given by shot, or the disease itself from those vaccines where that's possible.

And that's where I think you're wrong.
If someone acquires polio "in the wild" it's exactly the same as if someone acquired polio from someone who got OVP.
Here's an interesting link: Nigeria Sees Polio Outbreak from Mutated Vaccine Virus .
In this case if everyone was vaccinated with OVP in the immediate area - it wouldn't have happened.

We have proof that people with it come to the US.

No we don't.
If I'm wrong, please provide a link that 'people with it come to the US', (the 8 cases that I told you about-last century excluded).

You seemed to only support my statement, and said nothing that contradicted it at all, but did so as if you were correcting me.

So when I said "No it won't come back" you must have missed that.
BTW The first part of my last post was copied and pasted from the cdc site. That's why I provided the link.

missing link in above: The Trillion Dollar Bet

Then your pediatrician and physician need to get a better understanding of basic science. There's about 25 micrograms of mercury in 0.5mL of a vaccine preserved with thimerisol (see FDA & Thimerisol under heading 'Thimerisol as a preservative'). The EPA recommendation is 0.1 micrograms/kg/day maximum mercury ingestion (see Mercury in Fish under heading 'Step 1'.) That means for a 6 year-old child, their weight is estimated as (age + 4)*2=20kg. So 2mcg/day. That means a single dose of an average vaccine would give about 2 weeks worth of mercury ingestion, so unless your child goes and eats a swordfish steak the next day, they're perfectly safe.

I understand the desire to avoid ingesting toxic substances, but it's not necessary to avoid ingesting substances in safe levels. To do so really borders on superstition, where you believe that any amount of a 'bad' substance could be harmful.

The decline of albums happened long before iTunes. Back in the days of the cassette tape, there were singles. Then the CD single came along. The really technology to blame was MTV.

Frontline covered this topic in 2004 in an episode called The way the music died.

"What it did really is make the business a one trick pony -- and everything became about the three minutes, the single, the hit single," entertainment attorney Michael Guido tells FRONTLINE. "I think the album died with MTV. The culture in the record companies in the last 20 years has been to reward artists for three minutes of music, not for 40 minutes of music."

The music industry because obsessed with promoting the single only. Albums then became about getting one or two hit singles packaged with a dozen other songs. The music industry shifted focus to selling a song rather than selling the artist.

iTunes was only about selling what the Apple thought their customers wanted. There wasn't a very easy way to get music online at all whether a consumer wanted a single or an entire album. If Apple could provide this store/service they would have an advantage over other players. I'd say Apple was correct in that assumption. They didn't drive this demise; they merely used it to their advantage.

Our manufacturing per capita consistently places us outside of the top 10.

Oh NO! We're outside the top 10! Clear we "don't have a manufacturing sector" as you've said.

Who's "full of shit", now?

Top bracket under Bush is 35%. Top bracket under Clinton is 39.6%.

That's not even remote what I said. I said Clinton gave them a bigger tax cut. Bush's tax cuts, on TOP of Clintons tax cuts, of course puts Bush's rate lower, because he came after.

And I quote:

"I'm the guy who broke the story and reported on the fact that Bill Clinton gave the super rich, the 400 highest income people in America a big tax cut. They were paying 30 cents out of each dollar of their income to the federal government when he came into the office. When he left, it was down to 22. Bush has lowered it to 17. Now, first of all, notice you're probably paying more than 17 cents. May well be paying more than 22. [...] Clinton gave an eight cent tax cut and Bush only gave them five cents."
DAVID CAY JOHNSTON (New York Times)
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01182008/transcript5.html

If you have any other questions about reality, feel free to ask.

Your version of "reality" is about as accurate as Fox News', just swinging to the left.

Try again, without the flagrant ignorance and blinding bias.

http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part3.html

It's a bit old by now, but the history is still interesting and meaningful.

http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html
http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part1.html

They can really be read in any order.

Anyways, I don't think stole is the right word. Xerox gave it away. Jobs was 100% obsessed with it. Gates saw it as the wave of the future. The GUI wasn't a secret by the time it got to Gates. But it was done by Xerox who was too busy worrying about laser printing (which oddly is the main reason the Macs survived at all through the late 80's) to care.

http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part3.html

It's a bit old by now, but the history is still interesting and meaningful.

http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html
http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part1.html

They can really be read in any order.

Anyways, I don't think stole is the right word. Xerox gave it away. Jobs was 100% obsessed with it. Gates saw it as the wave of the future. The GUI wasn't a secret by the time it got to Gates. But it was done by Xerox who was too busy worrying about laser printing (which oddly is the main reason the Macs survived at all through the late 80's) to care.

http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part3.html

It's a bit old by now, but the history is still interesting and meaningful.

http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part2.html
http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part1.html

They can really be read in any order.

Anyways, I don't think stole is the right word. Xerox gave it away. Jobs was 100% obsessed with it. Gates saw it as the wave of the future. The GUI wasn't a secret by the time it got to Gates. But it was done by Xerox who was too busy worrying about laser printing (which oddly is the main reason the Macs survived at all through the late 80's) to care.

PBS' Frontline released a documentary called "Spying on the Home Front" all the way back on May 15th, 2007. The entire documentary is available for viewing online (I believe it's even accessible in Canada; I'm not sure about access from other countries) at that Frontline site. If you're short on time, click the "Watch the Full Program Online" link on the right-hand side of the page, and then click on Chapter 3 in the new window that appears (it's titled "The NSA's Eavesdropping at AT&T"). The whole chapter only lasts about 10 minutes, but again, if you're short on time fast-forward through the chapter to about 4:30. That's the point where Mark Klein describes when he first became aware that a Narus STA system had been installed inside a secret room at a major AT&T facility. Shortly thereafter Brian Reid elaborates on exactly what its presence meant.

Even better, at about 5:05 an interview with Steve Bannerman, VP of Narus Marketing begins, at which point he begins describing just how deeply into network traffic their hardware can probe.

And beautifully, at about 6:35, Steve Bannerman suddenly becomes aware of exactly how deep a whole he's dug for himself, and becomes visibly flustered, starts stammering, and eventually trails off with a couple of classic lines like, "as far as I know, no one's ever proved [sic] anything!"

That part's worth rewinding and replaying a few times over.

Please forgive my obvious schadenfreude, but in the face of entities like the NSA and Naurus, who together apparently have complete access to anything of mine -- and that of my friends, and my family -- that travels over the Internet, schadenfreude is all I've got left.

PBS' Frontline released a documentary called "Spying on the Home Front" all the way back on May 15th, 2007. The entire documentary is available for viewing online (I believe it's even accessible in Canada; I'm not sure about access from other countries) at that Frontline site. If you're short on time, click the "Watch the Full Program Online" link on the right-hand side of the page, and then click on Chapter 3 in the new window that appears (it's titled "The NSA's Eavesdropping at AT&T"). The whole chapter only lasts about 10 minutes, but again, if you're short on time fast-forward through the chapter to about 4:30. That's the point where Mark Klein describes when he first became aware that a Narus STA system had been installed inside a secret room at a major AT&T facility. Shortly thereafter Brian Reid elaborates on exactly what its presence meant.

Even better, at about 5:05 an interview with Steve Bannerman, VP of Narus Marketing begins, at which point he begins describing just how deeply into network traffic their hardware can probe.

And beautifully, at about 6:35, Steve Bannerman suddenly becomes aware of exactly how deep a whole he's dug for himself, and becomes visibly flustered, starts stammering, and eventually trails off with a couple of classic lines like, "as far as I know, no one's ever proved [sic] anything!"

That part's worth rewinding and replaying a few times over.

Please forgive my obvious schadenfreude, but in the face of entities like the NSA and Naurus, who together apparently have complete access to anything of mine -- and that of my friends, and my family -- that travels over the Internet, schadenfreude is all I've got left.

This mouse called dibs 8 years ago.

Seriously though, this certainly isn't the first time this has been done. Previous methods also used similar 3D printing techniques, except that the printed organ was a "dud" that was impregnated (injected and suspended in fluids, as I remember) with cells, instead of the organ being printed in one pass.

Not that this isn't very interesting, it's just not as new as they make it seem.

The Market Maker is a great documentary about an academic who was working on poverty in Africa and decided to do something about it. Dr. Eleni Gabre-Madhin found that famine in her native Ethiopia was not due to a lack of supply of food, but to a problem with distribution. So she created a commodities market. And the results are stunning. She's helping to eradicate hunger, increasing the wealth of farmers and elevating the entire society.

All while making a profit.

As a middle man.

Watch the documentary and see if you still can't understand why a middle man can add value.