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Play pumps are being installed in many places in Africa, and have been for over 5 years now. They're a pretty big success so far. Frontline on PBS did a piece a while ago about them: FRONTLINE - South Africa

You got the sixty million right, but are an order of magnitude out on the current population of cows. Here's my comment to Salon magazine 2 years ago on this subject:
Here are my calculations, with references, courtesy of google and an hour of my time. Thanks also to the USDA and PBS.
Size of national herd, all cows and calves: 106 million.
http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/current/Catt/Catt-07-20-2007.txt
Number on feed (multiplying their GHG impact): 11 million.
(in short, they are only on feed near The End.)
http://www.usda.gov/nass/PUBS/TODAYRPT/cofd0907.txt
Number of bison they ecologically replaced, bison that ALSO produced GHGs:
60 million.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/frontierhouse/frontierlife/essay8.html
OK, so because of the 11 million on feed, the 106 million cows have the GHG impact of a good 120 million grass-fed, so they have double the "natural" level produced by the bison?
But wait! Or, rather, weight:
Bull bison (37% of herd): 1800-2500 lb.
Cow bison (45%): 900-1200 lb.
Calves (18%) :35 lb up to numbers above
sources:
Herd composition:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-541X(198907)53%3A3%3C593%3ACOBPEW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-R
Weight:
http://www.gunpowderbison.com/Kids%20Corner
So the TONNAGE of natural ruminants on the North American plains can be calculated from the above numbers (giving calves half the average of cow and bull) to be an "average bison" weight of 1559 lb. Times 60M, is 46.8 megatons.
The US herd is lighter because it's mostly younger than a natural one; we slaughter cows at 2 years, bison live 20, so a higher proportion of the total is calves.
My first reference also notes that just 33M of that national herd is over 500 lbs. Conservatively giving them all the full adult weight (from wikipedia, "cattle") halfway between 1300 and 1900 lb, and the average of the other 74M that are under 500lb, conservatively, at 400 lb...we get a total tonnage of beef at 41.2 megtons.
Bottom line: there are fewer tons of beef now than there were of bison in the 19th century. Beef eater's disturbance of the natural methane balance is zero, indeed it may be NEGATIVE.
Maybe not; 41.2MT is only 12% less than 46.8MT and my whole-hour of research may have missed a few things. Also, the amplification of GHG output by the 10% of the herd that's on feed is a factor. I'm willing to call it even, although my weight numbers were quite conservative.
So, there's no GHG impact at ALL, compared to the original, natural state. At least not in North America -- but what was the former methane production everywhere that are now cattle ranches? Most ranching is done where there was an equivalent animal before. And even swamps and rainforests have quite a bit of decomposition that produces methane.
Until you do that part of the calc - the previous GHG load from the former "natural" environment, you don't have a calculation, you have HALF a calculation.

How? How do you make a profit arresting someone?

It's not so much arresting the person that's profitable, but arresting all that property is definitely profitable, especially when the property can be confiscated and used/sold even if there's no conviction of the original property owner for any crime after the seizure of said property.

"Forfeitures, however, can fall into two categories--criminal or civil--and due to some high-profile abuses, civil asset forfeiture has become extremely controversial. Under criminal law, the government can seize property as punishment only after its owner has been convicted of a crime, and our justice system ensures that they are considered innocent until proven guilty. But under civil law, it is the property itself--not the owner--that is charged with involvement in a crime. What's more, that property is considered "guilty" until proven innocent in court by its owner, thus turning our usual system of justice on its head.

According to a report prepared for the Senate Judiciary Committee, at least 90 percent of the property that the federal government seeks to forfeit is pursued through civil asset forfeiture. And although forfeiture is intended as punishment for illegal activity, over 80% of the people whose property is seized under civil law are never even charged with a crime according to one study of over 500 federal cases by the Pittsburgh Press. For this reason, critics say, the system can run roughshod over the rights of innocent property owners--and fail to distinguish them from the guilty."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/special/forfeiture.html

Strat

If you're going to do it, you just better make damn sure the government specifies hard benchmarks and deadlines for the companies getting the money. The government subsidized broadband development in the U.S. too (to the tune of tens of billions of $), only to end up with a patchwork system where most people still don't have fiber to their homes and many don't have any broadband options at all. The fastest speed I can get on my DSL line is still only 3Mbps--and I live in an urban area, not out in the boonies.

I was aware of the whole molten sodium ball thing because I remember that spinning 13 tons of molten sodium could be a REALLY bad idea. However, the last I saw of it they were still preparing and had not actually done anything yet.

The last I've heard on that very subject was from a NOVA documentary called Magnetic Storm, which aired in November 2003.
In that documentary, they were just preparing for the experiment with the molten sodium, but did not start.
Which sounds like about the same state you have last heard about as well.

I would have hoped in 6 years time they would have been able to start their experiment but I can not find any updates on their work.
I too would be curious to know what resulted from it.

In case you are interested:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/magnetic/about.html

Now, free medical care for everyone is better how?

Why don't you look at the couple-dozen working, years-to-decades-old, real-world examples and figure it out for yourself? It's not like universal care isn't provided in, oh, every other "first world" country. Loads of data out there.

Theory and ideology are fine. Observation trumps them, though, and we're fortunate to have a wide variety of UHC systems to observe.

I recommend you start by watching this.

Note: the program assumes that you understand how awful our system is compared to those of other comparable countries. If you don't already get that, maybe you should just start with Wikipedia and some Google searches. I'm confident you'll be convinced in short order as I've yet to find anything compelling in favor of our system, and I've looked for it.

I mean when you want to see a girl shove a live lamprey up her arse, give a blowjob to a dog, and piss on a new born baby all in the same video you look in the Japanese porn section of your local library. You DO NOT look in the American section.

I'm not sure what you mean by "local library" but I'll concede to the lamprey example.
But you underestimate the porn industry as well as the random amateurs in the US.

Ballmer sounds like an unpatriotic ass.

Buy American, eh?

Microsoft sees about two-thirds of its revenues coming from abroad these days. It is a true multinational. It is completing a $300 million dollar research campus in Beijing.

The world is flat, as the geek likes to say.

He would have never entertained the idea of moving factories to China for cheap labor.

Allow me to introduce you to the strike at Homestead Mill [and] a new Judas Iscariot

Or is this a bit like the Environmental Protection Agency investigating a murder because... they feel like it....

Funnily enough, for crimes like negligent homicide committed by a corporation, they usually face insignificant penalties. So instead, the government might use the EPA and those various laws to go after the company. Frontline had a great episode on this with regards to a foundry that was polluting like crazy, and also killed a few employees by having extremely lax safety standards and negligent management. The death of the employee? Punishable by like a $7000 fine. Dumping crap in the nearby river? Millions.

Watch the program online: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/workplace/

Then improve efficiency by driving her and the neighbors' kids too. Take turns with the other parents.

Of course, this plan assumes we're not talking about a typical suburbanite who can't name his neighbors and never sees another soul from more than two houses away except at the yearly block party, assuming he bothers to show.

Trillion dollar bet now why did the world trade center get attacked, not once but twice...

There was an excellent "Secrets of the Dead" episode (though I think most are excellent) about the people who made an English translation of the Bible.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/previous_seasons/case_bible/index.html

Let's just think for a moment about which branches of science contradict creationism:
biology
biochemistry
genetics
physics
astronomy
astrophysics

I'm sure there are other _genres_ of science too. Are you really saying that it doesn't matter if a leader of society believes that all the scientists working in these fields are wrong?

Believing in creationism is like believing the earth is flat, and would have huge consequences in many many public policy areas.

I'll just take the last three, physics, astronomy, and astrophysics, and use one example to prove you wrong. Now, go read up on THIS GUY who used all three of these to support the idea that God created the universe.

Now, don't get me wrong, I find flat eathers and young earth creationists just as annoying as you do, so please don't lump all "creationists" together. Many are brilliant scientists who present valid cases for differing levels of creationism based on actual science, much like the example I listed above.

Religion and science are NOT mutually exclusive.

Where did I say anything about racist jobs?

Hint, nowhere. I said "racist laws". And yes anti-emigration laws are at least prejudice if not racist. There were the Know Nothings who in the 1840s and '50s wanted to make it illegal for Irish Catholics to emigrate to the US. In 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed to bar Chinese from immigrating. The Immigration Act of 1924 restricted immigration from both eastern and southern Europe. Why even Benjamin Franklin wanted to restrict Dutch and German immigrants.

On the other hand the Bracero Treaty allowed millions of Mexicans to immigrate between 1942 and 1964.

Falcon

3 and 4 are essentially the same, since what is preventing offspring between A and C is a physical problem. Generally, none of these reasons are considered valid for determining species.

Okay, instead of the dog example, try the canonical example of a 'ring species': these California salamanders. In that case, A and C cannot interbreed, and neither can their gametes.

* The nontransitivity above (A, B, and C) is generally true of ALL creatures if you're allowed to go back in time. Go back far enough, and our ancestors could mate with chimp ancestors. A little farther and we share ancestors!

Yes, that's what we call "speciation". It's a single species differentiating into two species. I hope you can see why going back in time is not reasonable for determining species.

I'm saying that going back in time shows how arbitrary the species concept is. At one point, we and chimps shared a common ancestor. Then we went our separate ways, and are now considered two species. 5 million years ago, we were one species. Now, we're two species. Where do you draw the line?

* What about the poor asexual creatures? How do they have "species"?

Obviously, it's a more complicated problem.

Ability to produce viable offspring is actually only one measure of whether two species are separate, but it's a fairly useful one.

I'm genuinely curious: what other definitions do you use? (I'm a grad student in evo bio.)

Rupert Murdoch has tasked a team with finding a way of charging for News Corp content

LOL, I'm sure he is. The absurdity of Murdoch's news channel here in the States became so outrageous I decided I wasn't willing to subsidize it with the channels I did want to watch on satellite, so I cancelled the satellite subscription and installed an antenna in the attic to pick up OTA DTV/HDTV and get my journalism from PBS.

Its not that journalism isn't worth paying for, its that you need to find value in the journalism that is worth paying for. Values like truth, honesty, facts, and breadth of coverage are valuable and in short supply in some news outlets. Racism, hate, ignorance, and titillation that focuses on those core weaknesses is not something worth paying for in journalism.

NPR is another valuable journalistic outlet worth paying for. Feel free to watch or listen to either and instead of paying Murdoch for the garbage he purveys consider a donation to support real journalism.

We don't know with any confidence that we are poisoning the earth. We know that we are having effects on it but we simply don't know if any or all of those effects are poisonous.

Really? When the recommended allowance of some fish is ZERO servings, i think it is pretty clear that we have poisoned the waters. http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=17694

Beluga whales are toxic waste

As for giving out children asthma, I have never seen a causation study blaming pollution for the cause of asthma.

It is probably because you haven't looked.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10674285
From the abstract: "...In asthmatics, epidemiological studies generally show a positive correlation between the particulate fraction of air pollution and increased morbidity, although roles for other co-pollutants (for example, ozone) are implicated as well. Direct experimentation using air pollutants, especially particles, to investigate their effects on humans or on animal models of asthma provides corroboration of the epidemiology and has begun to identify the pathophysiological mechanisms involved...."

Am I a "religious" environmentalist? Maybe. I don't really know what that means. And when i mentioned destruction/mutation of species, I should have been clear, that i also don't really care about the species pre se ... during the Cretaceousâ"Tertiary extinction event about 3/4 of species were extinguished. I just mentioned it as evidence of the poisoning of the earth.

I am not worried about the earth. The earth will be fine. Long after humans are gone, the Earth will still be around. I am only an environmentalist because I want to preserve the current beauty of the planet for future generations of humans.

For those of you who are interested and have not already seen it, the Foreign Corrupt Practices act and international bribery by large corporations and wealthy individuals was covered in the "Black Money" episode on Frontline. Obviously the Sun case, coming to light more recently and being much smaller than the frauds discussed in the documentary, is not mentioned, but the Sun case is just another smaller instance of a much larger problem.

It's called Neem oil, and the Indian military ran a one-year trial without side effects or pregnancies. The reason you're not going to see any Neem-based contraceptives go through the FDA process is that so far attempts to control it have been largely unsuccessful.

Next week, we'll talk about olive leaf extract...

You are missing the point.

I have no sympathy for corporations that complain about the tax code when they pay lawyers to make extra-complicated spaghetti code-like tax fraud schemes.

Check out this video from 2004 for more info: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/tax/view/

Compliance is simply filling out the legal paperwork and paying the correct fees to the government.
AKA Corporate lawyers.

The corporation has two choices:
(A) Paying $10 million in US taxes.
(B) Sending $2 million overseas to lease foreign property or other "creative accounting schemes". These are setup to be deliberately hard to track. If you think the US tax code is difficult, these guys get paid to obfuscate it even more.

Either way their lawyers are getting a bucketload of cash for their time.
Corporations which abuse tax shelters take calculated risks and weigh the pros/cons of their actions. Simply not paying their lawyers and not filing any taxes is the third choice but definitely more risky than "option B" since it's so obvious.

It's good that we are finally getting some attention paid to corporate tax abuse. Hopefully Linus's Law kicks in and rules get reinforced and streamlined.

The problem was widespread even pre-2004.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/tax/view/
(Please excuse the smaller video quality, PBS has improved but older material is reminiscent of when it was put online, and they rarely re-update.)

And here's a RAND article about the mess from 2008:
http://rand.org/publications/randreview/issues/summer2008/horizon02.html

On a slightly different note:
The check system is in need of an overhaul too. It may not be as bad as the "Catch Me if You Can" days, but it's a shame when people are afraid to write checks.

It reminds me of "the Royal Nonesuch" marketing campaign.

Mr. Clemens must be turning in his grave, in an spatially limited kind of ROFL :)

Good call. Compare for convenience in this article about the relevant bit from Huckleberry Finn, and decide for yourself if this is where Cameron is getting his inspiration.

There's a fine line between [citation needed] and wanting someone else to do your homework for you...

http://www.greenlightnc.com/about/faq/

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=14934

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/04/twc-without-data-caps-internet-upgrades-now-in-doubt.ars

This isn't an exhaustive background on the subject, but it's enough to point you in the right direction. Most of these links are available by googling "greenlight isp". Most of these links, and more like them, have been posted either in this /. article's comments or in the article that ran a few days ago on basically the same subject.


((Googling "Hetch Hetchy" or "Raker Act scandal" also makes for some interesting reading along the same lines))

Recently I saw Nova's "The Incredible Journey of the Butterflies". Given your die-hard-determinist mindset, the new-age-y flavor of the two-minute "Watch a Preview" video at the site http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/butterflies/ is guaranteed to cause cognitive dissonance. I would compare stuff like this to facts like photoelectric-emission-before-quantum-theory, it doesn't fit, it causes cognitive dissonance, it demands a better model. I would like to know if science has more to say about the Monarchs than mumbling stuff like "Natural Selection". I don't even know the figure for the typical mass of a monarch brain, or how many neurons it has, BUT buried in the full Nova episode is a key experiment - they captured some southbound Monarchs in Kansas and released them near Washington D.C. Initially they vectored fairly due-south BUT THEN they changed course towards Mexico, presumably being unfamiliar with any landmarks near D.C, after all they were born in Canada and never went to college. Navigationally LATITUDE is a problem, its why chronometers were invented, how did the butterflies know they weren't being released in Berkeley - I want to see that experiment someday.

Can't speak for CSPAN, but PBS has an awesome video portal to most of their content now... http://www.pbs.org/video#
It was just launched last week

Thanks for the link - PBS rocks. Unfortunately either they are having problems, or they're restricting distribution (perhaps geographically, as I'm in Europe). All I get, on any of the shows, is "this content is currently unavailable" either in audio or as text.

The IBM people saw that business people using the Apple II normally had a Z80 Softcard from Microsoft with CP/M and several Microsoft tools and applications. They decided that their machine should have this as well.

In their meeting with Bill, they were shocked to find out that CP/M belonged to a different company. Bill Gates immediately called Gary Kindall and told him he was sending some very important people to talk to him. The IBM people went to California and when things didn't work out they came back to Seattle and Bill promised to supply an OS himself.

Don't trust me on this - see what the people actually involved said about it:

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

It was just launched last week.

Yep. I remember that provision. And apparently so does Robert X. Cringely. I remember thinking back then that by now we'd have 45 mbps, which was practically unheard of back then. Most of the country was on dialup, and there were a few folks on cablemodems.

So where did the $200 billion go? Read Cringely.

"Wow. You're desperately naive, aren't you?"

No.

"your average corporate conglomerate is so (expletive deleted) big that no little advertising campaign or boycott will make one bit of difference."

I disagree. I also suggested "civil disobedience". Interpret that as you will. I would never advocate use of violence, but if I thought someone was POISONING my family, friends and neighbors, I could get creative in a hurry. I hope you were just using that as a hypothetical example. If you were REALLY in that situation, I think you might get over the idea that you have no recourse other than "voting" to remedy the situation.

"They just move their operations to a neighbourhood where the people are too poor or destitute to raise a fuss."

Check out what happened in BOLIVIA (plenty of poor and destitute people there) when Bechtel corporation bribed the government in an effort to turn the country's clean water supply into a for profit enterprise.

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/bolivia/thestory.html

" . . . small-government [advocates] like yourself have the exact opposite problem: the belief that the government is never the answer."

I certainly don't believe that government is "never" the answer. Government should absolutely be in the business of establishing health and safety regulations, enforcing strong environmental laws, building infrastructure, providing national defense, etc. The problem is that BIG government(especially the monster in Washington DC) is so inherently corrupt that it serves to reinforce rather than combat corporate abuses. The "truth" may be somewhere in the middle but in the U.S. we're definitely beyond the happy medium on the "big government" side.

As you well know, however, potential does not equate actual presence. As long as the conflict of interest is declared, it's still possible to carry on without replacing the players. As I said before, there've been cases in the past where judges had conflicts of interest and were still able to render a fair and appropriate judgement based on what the law actually says. Another case, one that's much more recent, that jumps immediately to mind is the one that was very well documented on Nova, in the episode "Intelligent Design on Trial". You can watch the episode here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/. Judge John Jones, who heard the case, had a history and background that suggested he may have unfairly ruled against the plaintiffs, but with the potential conflict of interest in the open, the case was still heard by him, and he still rendered a fair judgement based on the facts and the law, and not his personal bias.

And if the defendants were aware of the potential conflict and chose to go through with the trial without raising any questions, then it's tacit acceptance of the potential bias, and of the consequences.

In the short term, pebble beds sound good. The problem, if I understand correctly, is that those pebbles are next to impossible to recycle later in things like Fast Reactors. I'm not sure how many decades it will take to convince people, but the future of nuclear fission has to be technologies which reuse/breed the 'spent' Uranium. The joke about calling Uranium 'spent' or 'waste' is that we currently get like 1 percent or less of the potential energy out of Uranium. In this PBS Frontline interview, the former director of the IFR project explains some of the concepts of the now-cancelled Integral Fast Reactor project.

According to Dr. Till, the possibility exists to get approximately 100 times more energy out of Uranium, by recycling it, than any 'conventional' reactor technology (including pebble beds) currently extracts. I'm no engineer, but I believe that it is very hard, once you've put the Uranium into those graphite balls, then run them through a pebble bed reactor, to get the uranium back out of the pebbles for recycling.

Any reactor design which inherently makes it *more difficult* to recycle the 'waste' Uranium is, in my book, a dead-end technology and we should run far and fast away from it.

Take a quiz, find who you are.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/barrier/machines.html

Relevant text:

The two-seat SR-71 was developed in the early 1960s by the U.S. Air Force as a strategic reconnaissance aircraft.

Anybody who is interested in the immense banking fraud we have can start reading here:
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2009/04/time-to-breakup-goldman-sachs.html
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/transcript1.html

additionally, you can add
127.0.0.1 nytimes.com
to your hosts file

It isn't a good idea to joke about government corruption. A lot of people think that there may be some deliberate intent to defraud voters, hiding behind "equipment problems".

The U.S. government is VERY corrupt. For other examples, see The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One and the Slashdot story EFF Says Obama Warrantless Wiretap Defense Is Worse than Bush. There are people in control of the U.S. government who believe in limitless surveillance, dominance of the banks, and killing to make money and get control of oil.

Here's a dose of reality for everyone. If you don't like the prices, don't pay them. If you can do without, do without. If you can't, suck it up and deal with it. You don't need a 10mb+ pipe to get on the Internet. Spend $25 a month and get a DSL line and you won't have to worry about bandwidth caps.

That's the crux of the matter though, isn't it. We're not unhappy about the prices themselves (although that too). It's the fact that there's precisely one or two providers (1 cable and/or 1 dsl). And it seems like they magically follow each other's prices & policies instead of competing. So it's more the monopoly situation most people are unhappy with (at least that's my main problem) and there not being alternative competition offering the service & price we want.

I was on a 3mb DSL line up until this year, and it worked just fine. It cost me $45 a month. I make far more than that in a couple of hours at work. Lets say you make $20 an hour, and given that this is Slashdot, I'd be surprised if anyone made any less than that. For one day's worth of work, you get unlimited, high speed internet access for a month. Now check your reality. Is one day worth of your labor worth an unfair trade for the labor of all of the people who have to labor for you to have an always on, available, high speed internet connection? Or is your labor so much more valuable to society that the one day of your labor is worth so much more than the labor of all the other people who give you 30+/-1 days a month worth of internet access?

And here you go off the deep end building a straw-man argument.

Am I the only customer that they are providing service to? If that were the case, then 1 day of work for a dedicated connection to the ISP backbone would be quite the deal. Now I don't know if you know this, but they also deliver that same connection to hundreds of thousands of other people in your neighbourhood. And, I don't know if it surprises you, but the incremental cost for them providing service for 1 person to 100 000 people, is not 100 000x more expensive (it's significantly less than that). Then there's always the small matter of all service providers (cell phones, landlines, internet, etc) oversubscribing their resources to try and get utilization as close to 100% as possible for as long as possible (hence the reason you often get a busy signal during a crisis even though the other person's line isn't)

And technology progresses, things get better. Deal with it. Being unhappy with the rate of progression is not only to be expected, but encouraged because it should, in theory, improve innovation. You're unhappy with it, start up a business that offers better terms. Of course that's unrealistic here because the telco's & cable companies own government legistlation at all levels to prevent competition from coming in.

And if you don't believe me, and think these companies are really just responding to unreasonable usage, then ask people in rural areas how well their broadband options are doing (dialup still exists there). At the end of the day, these companies are only interested in price gouging (don't forget that in the US, the taxpayers gave, what, like $200 billion dollars for fiber-to-the-premises - whatever happened to all those subsidies & tax breaks?).

Nova on PBS had an episode describing how the amount of sunlight hitting the earth has decreased roughly 3-5% or so due to all of the pollution put into the air from countries like China and India with poor emission controls. They said that all of this pollution is actually cutting the effect of global warming in half.

Wikipedia also has an article on it.

unemployed bankers find something better to do with their lives than make bets about something they don't understand

They knew what they were doing. See:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04032009/transcript1.html

That said, I hope that somebody shows Obama a copy of this week's episode of Bill Moyer's Journal. Hopefully followed by Obama demanding Geithner's resignation and replacing him with somebody who will do what needs to be done to clean up the banking sector, and that's not just buying up toxic assets.

Colbert has simply shown how inherently vulnerable these votes are to manipulation. PZ Myers has been doing this sort of thing for years.

Public poll competitions are a thinly disguised publicity stunt. Frequently, they simply demean and trivialize the event they are promoting. In the case of NASA, this poll has been a farce from day one.

That is the sound of the significance of this event breaking the sound barrier as it passes over your head.

Colbert is a satirist. His job is to lampoon the establishment, popular culture, fad, etc, etc. He has just lampooned public voting competitions, which have been in vogue of late. Internet, SMS, email, telephone based, it doesn't matter. The bottom line is that these "votes" are little more than popularity contests decided by people with too much free time and little else to do with it. Colbert has simply shown how inherently vulnerable these votes are to manipulation. PZ Myers has been doing this sort of thing for years.

Public poll competitions are a thinly disguised publicity stunt. Frequently, they simply demean and trivialize the event they are promoting. In the case of NASA, this poll has been a farce from day one. Even before Colbert, justifiably, entered the competition, the top contender for the module's name was "Serenity", an obvious reference to a recent sci-fi/fantasy show.

This was a billion dollar module meant for serious scientific research and NASA, itself a multi-billion dollar publicly funded institution, had chosen as it's first choice of name, that of a fictional spaceship from some bubblegum space opera made for teenagers, which pays only lip service to scientific fact and theory. This was a (supposedly) serious scientific and educational organization about to name a space station component after something that has never and can never exist. The level of unprofessionalism beggars belief.

What is anyone supposed to think of NASA after such a stunt? Is the whole organisation composed of people who base their ideas on TV shows and loopy ideas instead of hard theory? Considering the organization's continued stance on the Space Elevator concept, despite its proven absurdity over the course of over 50 years, I would have to say that, yes NASA is composed of juveniles who have their heads in the clouds and no idea how to get their actual bodies up there.

For get "Xenu". "Serenity" was and is the real problem. Frankly, Colbert has stepped in and dignified the proceedings by finally putting and end to the debacle. NASA will save itself a lot of face in the long run by naming the module "Colbert" as a reminder of their own folly. Naming it "Serenity" would be a permanent stain on whatever dignity the organization is supposed to have.

And organisation that allows idle tweenagers, teenagers and twenagers to name space modules, rockets, or satellites is an organisation that has no right to send such things into orbit.

I would simply refer you to this: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meltdown/ and this: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tentrillion/

If after seeing those two shows you still feel exactly as you do now I don't think anybody can change your mind in regards to this.

I would simply refer you to this: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meltdown/ and this: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tentrillion/

If after seeing those two shows you still feel exactly as you do now I don't think anybody can change your mind in regards to this.

Nova had a special that covered the "phantom limb" phenomenon in 2001. It was interesting. Here is the companion web page for the episode:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/mind/
Enjoy!

Proof of claim of aerosols caused famine in Africa in the 80's? It's called google! Maybe if you have been using this internet thing for a while you should try it. But since you are too lazy I guess I will do it for you. How about:
http://www.cbc.ca/health/story/2002/07/22/aerosol020722.html
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-54622826.html
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0721-07.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/news/2002/2002-07-22-africandrought.htm
Basically all over the freaking place. I also saw it once on nova on pbs, here I think:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/

They called the police and what? Your story stops dead there, and I bet I can guess why.

The person was arrested and had to hire a lawyer.

See these:

• Column: High Court Child Porn Ruling Erodes Free Speech
• Supreme Court Upholds Child Pornography Law
• Baby photos that fall foul of the PC police
• Is this child pornography?
• Julia's pictures: could it happen to you?

Falcon

They would no longer be able to make political endorsements, but could report on all issues including political campaigns.

Bullshit they would be able to do that. The line between reporting information and advocacy gets blurry. Sometimes the information has such inescapable conclusions, that there's just no line at all.

Did you watch Frontline this week? It slammed GWB's big spending pretty hard. Had that episode run before the 2004 election, you damn well know some people would be screaming that it should be "regulated" speech.

Don't believe me? There's a case before SCOTUS right now, where they're trying to decide whether a movie about a politician was a documentary or campaign advocacy.

Required-to-be-"objective" news would have to be so softball that it's pointless. You can't report what any politician does or says, because their action might be too "obviously" right or wrong, so that mere information becomes political persuasion. If president Johnson goes up to the podium, blows a baby's brains out, sucks up the blood, and grins at the reporters, nonprofit reporters can't say he did that, or their so-called "news" will be labeled "Johnson-bashing."

You think I'm being absurd, but there's that Hillary movie case. It made it to the courts, dudes. This is not a joke and I'm not making it up; it happened and it does happen all the time. In my own locality, there was a stink about whether mailing information about voting records was too PAC-like. I'm not complaining/cheering here about these decisions going the right or wrong way, but they have to be made and sometimes it's a mess. Reporters aren't going to want to get into that kind of trouble, so non-profit news will suck.

Here is the video. You can see the part I'm talking about shortly after the beginning.

The creation of life is not part of the theory of evolution. The application of evolution is seen every day in modern biology, medicine and even manufacturing (those bacteria that create gas out of garbage? Principles of evolution at work). I'm all for the curriculum teaching any theory that is as solid as the theory of evolution, but currently there are none. Unaccepted theories should be kept for college and university students that have a good enough understanding of evolution in order to PROPERLY challenge it. Unfortunately, very few people who argue against evolution are properly educated on the topic. All they know is that it somehow goes against their beliefs (which, btw, it doesn't). So... with that (and it seems that you ARE interested in evolution) you should watch this PBS series by NOVA. It presents both sides of the argument quite well. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/ You decide.

It's little-known that Bush also found some critical errors in Fermilab calculations.

Oh but seriously, Jimmy Carter's background as a nuclear physicist and engineer became somewhat useful during the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor partial-meltdown.

On April 1, President Jimmy Carter arrived at Three Mile Island to inspect the plant. Carter, a trained nuclear engineer, had helped dismantle a damaged Canadian nuclear reactor while serving in the U.S. Navy.

That Onion story also reminded me of this SNL sketch from 1986 or so. Some jokes are eternal...

W