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Can't edit.. The research was by Henry Lai of Oregon State University. He compared the studies and looked for the correlation.
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Cell-phone-cancer-risk-debated-1281040.php

Herberman, he said, was referring to the so-called Interphone study – a 13-country, $15 million European epidemiological study of tumor rates among cell phone users – which was completed in 2005 but remains unpublished because of disagreement among the scientists (some of them funded by industry) on how to interpret the results.

His result showed clearly this;

Lai noted with a chuckle that if you subtract from the literature all of the industry-funded scientific studies, most research shows evidence of health effects from cell phone use.

Ace?

There's a post in the Seattle PI's "Microsoft Blog" that shows the location for the actual store - it is indeed right across the parking lot from the Apple Store.

I can understand why Microsoft would want to do that, I guess, in terms of symbolism - but I think it's a terrible business mistake. Whatever you think of Microsoft and their products, you can't believe they've got the same cachet that Apple does. People aren't going to be hunting them out - but MS has picked a spot with seriously bad visibility from most of the mall. University Village isn't a big enclosed mall - it's an open-air space where most of the shops are scattered among smaller buildings that open straight onto parking lots. The Apple Store is on a side lot that's set back somewhat, but it at least is visible as people are driving through the lot from the 25th Avenue entrance (plus people are going to be looking for them anyway). Someone coming from that entrance and driving straight in won't even see the Microsoft Store - as they pass that side lot, the MS Store will be behind their left shoulder while the Apple Store will be in front of them.

This isn't uncommon knowledge. Here are some links:

This shows Indiana as receiving $1.05 per dollar sent to the IRS, which is admittedly not bad compared to many other states. California only gets back $0.78 per dollar sent.

And this talks about more specific places the money has been spent.

Both of these articles are a little old, but I haven't seen anything more recent that suggests that the trend has changed.

--Jeremy

Well if police can shoot you for ignoring them, what about deaf people? I guess they are just fucked.

You don't need to guess about that. Yes, they are fucked.

Microsoft PAC used to be, but not anymore - and even then that doesn't properly represent leanings of individual employees, which were predominantly Democratic for a decade now.

Really, all you need to do is to hang around the campus in Redmond in the morning and count the Obama stickers. ~

(though of course it's also possible that fewer Republicans just donate more each)

Mom's basement isn't necessarily safe either, don't forget about carbon monoxide poisoning and exposure to radon. Not to mention what happens if you're trapped down there when there's a sudden flood. http://www.seattlepi.com/default/article/Woman-dies-in-flooded-basement-1222646.php

"[...] the kind of evolution and survival of the fittest that animals go through [...]"

Quoting Darwin ( Descent of Man , page 77):

Many animals, however, certainly sympathise with each other's distress or danger. This is the case even with birds; Capt. Stansbury11 found on a salt lake in Utah an old and completely blind pelican, which was very fat, and must have been long and well fed by his companions. Mr. Blyth, as he informs me, saw Indian crows feeding two or three of their companions which were blind; and I have heard of an analogous case with the domestic cock.

A more recent example contradicting "survival of the fittest" among animals:

Orca Whales Take Care of a Permanently Disabled Individual – For Years:

Stumpy was cared for by these whales – on at least two occasions other orcas brought him fish, and often they shielded him from passing boats.

Here's a slideshow that illustrates it.:

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2011/09/14/can-microsofts-windows-8-take-on-apples-ipad/#857-2

No wonder they went from distant 2nd place last gen to last place this gen.

Uhhh... what?

You must be seriously, rabidly anti-Microsoft to believe that. A quick glance at Wikipedia shows that the Xbox 360 has sold 55 million units through June 31st of this year, while the PS3 has sold 51 million units. Also, the Xbox 360 currently the fastest selling console, which means its lead is growing compared to the PS3 (and is currently outselling the Wii by a margin of two-to-one).

Oh, you're absolutely right. However, considering what a bunch of assholes Apple is being, I get a warm tingly feeling every time another company tells Apple to go fuck themselves.

This old "enemy of my enemy is my friend" bullshit is getting tiring. I didn't applaud Eolas when they won against Microsoft, and I don't support this either. This kind of activity will NOT make the patent system more sane. The only thing that will do that is a sane and non-corrupt judiciary and real patent reform (which, if corporations still control the government will be right between never and hell freezing over).

He did get fired but not convicted - http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/No-third-trial-for-ex-deputy-accused-of-jail-886478.php
What does it take?

But I hope this is true - "Frankly, I'm not sure he's even interested in being a police officer anymore."

Yet, if Apple wanted to go the route where they were pandering to the lowest possible common denominator, they'd have had a 500 dollar desktop and a 300 dollar netbook on the market years ago.

This doesn't fit the Apple philosophy of putting together competent products.

(Before people yell at me about how some OEM or home builder can produce a PC that's just as good as an Mac for cheaper, sure, but we're now no longer talking about the shitty super low end of the market anymore).

Steve Jobs made the point that what we think of computers today are like trucks. Not everyone needs a truck, and less people need them. They'll still be around, and much like how Mercedes-Benz's most visible product is their line of cars, they're also in the truck and utility vehicle manufacturing biz.

It makes more sense to leave OSX or OS 11 or whatever's in the pipeline for Apple alone on that basis. They're just going to be relying on them less as their core business. Given though, that the Mac is going to be the platform to develop on for iOS, it makes no sense to neglect the platform.

Sanitation: Like the government garbage strikes in NYC, where trash piled up for weeks? A private company would get the trash picked up (unless prevented from doing so by "labor laws").

Medicine: Government has run up the costs, and slowed the pace of innovation. When rich Canadians need surgery they leave their socialized system for the semi-socialized US system.

Education: Like in Atlanta, where the government schools cheat to get money? The more control government has gained over education, the worse it has become. Or the fact that almost half of all US high school graduates are functionally illiterate.

Wine: I have no idea what that has to do with government.

Public Order: Wars in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Panama, the Baltics. That's just a sample of the US's "public order" this century. If we look at the last century, we can add the Holocaust, the Soviet purges, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, Mao's cleansing, and countless other atrocities. Cops commit more murders in the US than they prevent, and as in the cases of Jose Guerena or John T. Williams, they get away with it. I refrain from murder, rape, and theft because it's wrong, not because it's illegal. And the vast majority of the population does as well.

Irrigation: All the irrigation systems I know of are private. But I don't claim any level of expertise in the field.

Roads: High quality roads, indeed! A private firm would see a bridge (or a road) as an asset to be maintained, in order to reduce the risk of lawsuits, and maintain revenue. To government it's an expense with nothing new and shiny to show the voters.

Fresh water: That would be fairly difficult to do in private industry...at least the way we do it now. But it's not done at the federal level. The farther control of something gets from the people, the worse it seems to get.

Public Health: Is having idiots scream that we're all going to die from the bird flu, or the swine flu, or the flying pigs flu a good thing?

Other than those things, government is responsible for hundreds of millions of murders, stealing wealth from its owners and diverting it to those with political connections (particularly banks and military contractors), and generally slowing the progress of our society.

This has been running for nearly FOUR YEARS . Way to be on the ball, slashdot editors. And as it's still running after four years, it isn't really all that failed now, is it?

My guess is that Elop has a Blackberry or a Windows 7 phone. It starts at the top. He should own and use the N8.

Hehehe - I'm sorry, but Elop... use a phone?! I'm reminded of Bill Gates' infamous Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame email. Bill might have actually made some good points if he didn't sound so much like your average pensioner calling into an ISP helpdesk.

Either Bill's more of a Mac guy then he's been letting on, or when you get that powerful you just don't do these things for yourself. Either way "dogfooding" does not apply to the CEO.

And the President is not a Democrat? The President could have vetoed the law yes? He could have let it sit around and not extend the PATRIOT act correct? What did our Democratic President do -- he went to great lengths to make sure it was signed.

If you think it makes a difference whether we have Democrats or Republicans in WA DC, you are deluded. Together they form a monoparty hell bent on shredding every word in the Constitution as we hurtle toward an Imperial Presidency.

Bush, Obama -- no difference except that even Bush didn't publicly suggest he could execute American citizens on his say so alone without even a show trial. Obama owns that.

The only "people" who have any power are the mega-corps. For example, the Supreme Court has consistently screwed humans with the State Secrets Doctrine, but when Boeing is on the chopping block, the Supreme Court tells the Feds to back off:

OK to invoke when torturing people (Obama's stated preference to the court): http://newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.com/California/News/2011/05_-_May/U_S__Supreme_Court_allows_Boeing_CIA_torture_suit_dismissal/

but the Feds can't get any money out of Boeing if the feds are going to invoke State Secrets with respect to one of Boeing's defenses:

http://blog.seattlepi.com/aerospace/2011/05/23/boeing-says-its-happy-with-suprem-courts-a-12-ruling/

I'll wager that road systems don't pay for themselves and require considerable taxpayer support.

You would win that bet.

Bad news for us biological machines that convert caffeine into code:
http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebigblog/2011/03/14/peak-coffee-could-mean-a-drowsy-future-nyt/

Dear Larry, Sergey, Eric, Mark, Jerry, and friends:

If the brightest idea all your super-smart people can come up with is to interpose yourselves into every interaction a human being is involved in on the internet, then we don't need your kind of economic engine.

The stock market agrees. Google's stock peaked in late 2007. It's now about 25% below the peak. It's not the recession; GOOG has underperformed the DJIA and the NASDAQ since 2007. Google is frantically trying to diversify into something else that makes money. But it's not working. Revenue is still around 97% ads. Revenue is growing, but expenses on all those money losing "products" are growing faster. YouTube is profitable, but only because it's been turned into an ad farm.

Thus the importance of "tracking" to Google. It's their edge in the ad business. If they lose the privilege of tracking their users and exploiting that information for advertising purposes, their margins on advertising will go down. And that's all that brings in money.

Environmentalists have a bad name because the industries that are doing all the damage find character assassination easier than actually cleaning up their mess.

Rigggght.... It's all a big conspiracy against environmentalists perpetrated by the big bad corporations. Environmentalists have never done anything to damage their own character

Frankly, the idea of companies being "friends" is a bit weird

It's very weird indeed

Is this the same Microsoft that settled with Immersion to give them cash to sue Sony in court over vibrating controllers with the proviso that MS would get paid from any settlement with Sony?

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2007/06/18/microsoft-sues-immersion-over-sony-agreement/

If you're looking for a non-evil company, Microsoft isn't it.

I do think Sony's lawsuit is pointless and stupid. Microsoft is smarter to avoid all this. But that's not a question of evil/non-evil, it's just wiser or less wise.

In 2009 Bill Gates had 8% of MS stock, which was 725 million shares. At the time it was worth almost $17 billion.

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2009/08/10/bill-gates-continues-selling-off-microsoft-stock/

Microsoft's problems has been too much engineering/marketing against too little understanding of what the user actually needs to do.

Maybe they should put an acutal user of ther software in charge? No, wait, they already tried it: http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/141821.asp

We should listen to Bill Gates because in this instance he's right. And believe it or not, because of his recent philanthropy, Bill is highly admired in non-tech circles. In a recent 2010 Gallup survey, Bill Gates tied for America's "fifth-most admired man."

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/233324.asp

So the reason we should care and publicize Bill saying this, is because his is a voice that is respected by many that might not take the time to research and be knowledgeable about the topic of vaccines as the readers of Slashdot have.

I agree with your larger philosophical argument, and I'd be much happier if teachers, scientists, and doctors were people's heroes. But in the real world, people listen to celebrities, so let's use them to do good.

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/418803_videoside.html

According to this one, 24 states have "stop and identify" laws. They all require probable cause, but POs can make that up on the fly.

He's not kidding nor exaggerating at all. If a security fix breaks $foo, then, only because Microsoft and $foo's company is in the USA, can be liable to be sued for it.

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/109471.asp An example of a bad update breaking an MS product.

Also if it breaks the system on a laptop or desktop environment as in it won't boot, then people would be extremely mad and businesses will sue.

The "News" shows are just as bad as the "editorials." It is all propaganda.

And you think that any other 'news' shows are any different?

Yes, I do. I don't think that other news shows' editorial staff makes specific decisions on the wording to be used on every story covering a particular issue, like global warming or health care reform. I do not think any other news source has ever stated in a memo that reporters are never to use the phrase "The public option" and must always refer to it as "The government-run option."

Actually, the Kennedy's in general and JFK in particular DESERVE to be ripped apart--but not for the vapid reasons that Sarah Palin's ghost writer came up with.

Look, I'm not here to turn this into some JFK and RFK and Ted Kennedy did all this horrible crap and killed a woman and got away with it and were womanizing nepotistic rich bastards ... all or or some of these things could be said. But what I was trying to say here was that nobody has ever run on that platform. You can write a book of dirt when you're done with politics but writing such a book before you become president is sort of like asking your future opponent if they'd like to have their way with you right now. I mean JFK, though flawed, was a hero to a lot of Americans. And his martyrdom was just icing on the cake. And to call into question one of his most loved and cherished speeches is more than ballsy, it's downright dangerous.

Sarah Palin is a new kind of political monster, unlike the ones I'm used to watching comfortably from my armchair. She's got a twitter feed that sports so many errors, she might actually be the person running it! From a classic Bush-esque prescriptive versus descriptive linguistics error to making accusations and weird religious remarks. It's a microblogging service! Look at what the rest of the politicians use it for: a paid staff techie is told what to put on it and what goes on it is only tepid words praising safe topics for that candidate to like. And those are usually reviewed seventy times before they go up. She has broken the rules of and committed fouls in politics many times and yet people embrace her.

All I wanted to say in my post was that from what I've seen of Sarah Palin, we should have stuck a fork in her long ago yet she remains. And why is that? Well, she's a dangerously well liked and amicable to a large part of the population that you are not familiar with. If she makes a mistake they seem to forgive her and say "I've made that mistake too." If she uses cracked logic or argument tactics long ago written off by academics, her followers just write off the academics. Trust me, as someone who's tried to reason with a supporter with some fairly simple debate analysis of Glenn Beck's logic, I can tell you that you don't want to approach this as some fancy pants intellectual telling them how dumb they are.

Don't confuse this with praise of Sarah Palin or defense of JFK. This is just me trying to warn people about how I see the situation at present. What happens when she runs for president and her opposition preys on some stupid social gaffe of hers? If it's any less than what she's already done, it's merely going to be ignored by or reinforce her supporter's commitment.

they didn't partner with MS, their tech was bought by Homeland security to help filter documents relating to potential terrorists, MS saw what the tech did and suddenly.. the next version of Word came out with exactly the same technology in it. The original judge awarded them $40m for 'intentional patent infringement'.

According to the court: In court documents, Judge Leonard Davis revealed a "particularly damaging" Microsoft internal e-mail that not only acknowledged i4i's patent (No. 5,787,449), but listed the patent number and stated Word would make i4i's technology "obsolete."

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/176685.asp

"The summary must be joking about the ocean gyres."

There are questions about the guy running this company, up here in Washington state.

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/6420ap_wa_pasco_biomass.html

http://pesn.com/2009/08/07/9501560_CEO_appealing_GreenPowerInc_shut-down_order/

Some have voiced serious concerns that this is all snake-oil, primarily because the man hides behind "trade secrets" protection and doesn't really have to discuss how all this works(precisely the reason state regulators shut him down--they cannot really know if he is in compliance if they don't know what he is doing, and so far he hasn't told them). He has also failed to pay some of his employees yet claims he will be hiring up to 500 more employees even though the technical data suggests he only needs 5 people per shift, had the company's demonstration truck burn down, and according to the Seattle PI article, been evicted from his plant location.

The one curious thing is that the military tested his technology and actually published some hard numbers that to me seem rather impressive. Makes me wonder what sort of "garbage" went through his test plant.

  http://pesn.com/2010/02/19/959019_GPI_3rd-party_test_results_trash-to-fuel/

This is the best time-line I was able to find in regards to this company (not surprisingly, from the same website as the submitted article).

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Green_Power_Inc's_NanoDiesel:Catalytic_Pressureless_Depolymerization_(Oiling)

At least the writer of the submitted article is up front--"Note: I have a relationship with GPI, so this report is not truly independent." says the caption accompanying the photo in the article.

Can you say "media blitz"?

Look at the Immersion rumble lawsuit. MS settled with Immersion, part of the settlement was that Immersion was to turn their guns on Sony and then pay MS back with the money Immersion got from Sony.

So MS bolster's Immersions patents by settling and making them look valid, also giving Immersion money to sustain a lawsuit against Sony. MS gets to help crimp Sony's business and help keep out other companies from the gaming market without looking like a patent troll themselves. Well, until the truth leaks out.

Short version: they're scum.

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/147162.asp

Name a single supercomputer, or even mainframe, that has Windows as its primary OS.

Oops - I found one.

Microsoft on Tuesday said a Windows-powered supercomputer recently broke the petaflops barrier for the first time. Known as Tsubame 2.0, the computer was built by researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and ran some tests with Windows High Performance Computing (HPC) Server.

"This is the first time ever for Windows to perform at that scale, which is a big thing for us," Bill Hilf, general manager of Microsoft's Technical Computing group, told seattlepi.com.

Tsubame 2.0, however, performed even faster running Linux. The computer is now No. 4 on the prestigious Top 500 performance list for using Linux to hit 1.19 petaflops.

Likewise, Windows for phones is just now coming out.

Were they obscuring speed limit signs? Did they stop painting the big white "stop here on red" lines on the pavement? Did they do anything to trick drivers into entering an intersection specifically to get a ticket?

Or maybe, just maybe, the folks on the council realized that enforcement increases safety and happens to bring in money, too. Maybe, if they were competent, they realized that it'd be better to spend money on a few dozen cameras and a couple of officers reviewing the pictures, rather than on dozens of officers, cars, equipment, insurance, and gas to get the same level of enforcement.

Better enforcement and lower costs. It sounds good to me.

P.S.: I do not consider shortening yellow lights to be a scam. Routinely running yellow lights means you're doing it wrong (see comment #199322).

That's probably because you haven't looked at the nine patents in question (see the complaint in this PDF).

The first patent listed is the one entitled "Common Name Space for Long and Short Filenames,". It expires in 2013. It's the FAT patent (it's not even related to mobile phones as the article implied). It was used against Tom Tom recently, and since that attempted shake-down, plenty of prior art has been found and has already been submitted to the USPTO.

The second patent seems to be the same as the first one. Can anyone explain what happened there???

The third is about "Monitoring entropic conditions of a flash memory device as an indicator for invoking erasure operations". Reading its full description, this one seems kind of obvious to me, plus 2002 seems kind of late for applying for such a patent. Also with this kind of patent, Microsoft could just as well sue anyone and everyone involved in Flash memory right now. If I'm wrong in my lay interpretation, I'm sure someone will correct me.

The fourth one is entitled "Radio interface layer in a cell phone with a set of APIs having a hardware-independent proxy layer and a hardware-specific driver layer". This one seems so broad and yet so obvious, it was applied for in 2001 (if I'm not understanding the dates and to what they apply to, please someone tell me).

Please take a look at the rest yourself. It's no wonder Microsoft's share price went down as this was announced.

U.S. Patent No. 5,579,517 ("the '517 patent"),
U.S. Patent No. 5,758,352 ("the '352 patent"),
U.S. Patent No. 6,621,746 ("the '746 patent"),
U.S. Patent No. 6,826,762 ("the '762 patent"),
U.S. Patent No. 6,909,910 ("the '910 patent"),
U.S. Patent No. 7,644,376 ("the '376 patent"),
U.S. Patent No. 5,664,133 ("the '133 patent"),
U.S. Patent No. 6,578,054 ("the '054 patent"), and
U.S. Patent No. 6,370,566 ("the '566 patent") (collectively, "the Microsoft Patents"),

The first patent listed: U.S. Patent No. 5,579,517 ("the '517 patent"), entitled "Common Name Space for Long and Short Filenames," is expiring in 2013. It's basically what others have coined the FAT patent, since it could technically be used against anything and everything that uses the FAT file system.

In any case, that patent is probably not even going to last until 2013. Since Microsoft attacked Tom Tom with it, plenty of prior art examples have already been found and submitted to the USPTO for review. I don't have the time to look up the rest of them, perhaps someone else could do it. Here is the list (extracted from Microsoft's complaint in PDF format).

U.S. Patent No. 5,579,517 ("the '517 patent"),
U.S. Patent No. 5,758,352 ("the '352 patent"),
U.S. Patent No. 6,621,746 ("the '746 patent"),
U.S. Patent No. 6,826,762 ("the '762 patent"),
U.S. Patent No. 6,909,910 ("the '910 patent"),
U.S. Patent No. 7,644,376 ("the '376 patent"),
U.S. Patent No. 5,664,133 ("the '133 patent"),
U.S. Patent No. 6,578,054 ("the '054 patent"),
and U.S. Patent No. 6,370,566 ("the '566 patent") (collectively, "the Microsoft Patents"),

He may or may not have understood the concept of in-memory caches and unsaved user work, but it didn't much matter to him.

I know it's easy & popular to rag on BillG, but toward the end of his tenure at MS, he did occasionally come out as an advocate for users & pushed for simplicity & fixing broken things in their ecosystem. Take this example from when he attempted to install Windows Movie Maker in January 2003.

But back to the shutdown thing.

As a naive user, why should I have to ask my computer for permission to shut down? When I tell my TV to power off, it just does it. When I turn the ignition in my car off, the whole thing stops. Same with my VCR, my cell phone, you get the idea.

As a non-naive user, why is it that when I tell my XP laptop to Hibernate, 5% of the time it just flips out, every application crashes, and I can't do anything, including just shutting the damn thing down until I've cleared all the "this program has crashed, how would you like to debug?" messages and then wait for the UI to become responsive finally to the point where I can tell it to shut down. And then takes 5+ minutes to actually shut down. When I close the lid on my MacBook, OS X puts it to sleep. When I open the lid, it wakes up. Every time. Why can't Windows do this? I can't just go to Standby because it drains the battery too much, so I have to Hibernate.

It going to cost Washington state 4 billion dollars to build one lousy fucking bridge:

SeattlePI
WS DOT

By government standards, a billion dollar is hookers-and-blow change.

They've already made comments like, "Windows Phone 7 will be an ad serving machine". http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/212394.asp

Wow. That is an astonishingly-bad piece of messaging. Their corporate perspective truly is warped by their decades-long desktop monopoly. This is where the monopoly actually hinders their ability to develop realistic marketing strategies.

Everything I'm hearing from MS these days assumes defacto widespread consumer adoption of their forthcoming products. In this case, Kostas Mallios, Microsoft's general manager for Strategy and Business Development, was allowed to put the cart before the horse and give a presentation at an advertising convention about Windows 7 Phone subjecting their captive audience to push advertising. I suppose they were desperate to woo these ad execs away from iAd & Google's Admob, but they're really forgetting the priority interest in this equation: please the consumer. Like so many other of their blunders, Microsoft is reducing the end-user experience to benefit their business interests. They just assume they can get away with it because they assume a monopoly position in the category. Whoops!

Safety control systems, especially those where life and limb, as well as massive amounts of money, are at steak aren't the places to be cutting corners and using commodity products rather than purpose-built and well-tested systems.

Yes, that's why the nextgen ATC system for the US is being written in C++ (secure if you know how to herd cats effectively) (http://blog.seattlepi.com/aerospace/archives/202907.asp), instead of Ada (secure unless you ask a bunch of C++ programmers to write in Ada), whilst the UK is writing theirs using Ada (http://www.drdobbs.com/embedded-systems/199905389;jsessionid=QQKCSEKZREME5QE1GHPSKH4ATMY32JVN) . One of those two is well proven in safety-critical systems. The other is used to write Windows. I wonder which was used for the Deepwater Horizon?

This potential bill means congressional support behind a Direct version of a shuttle replacement or something close enough not to matter. Direct is a design to replace the space shuttle with a rocket that puts the cargo and capsule on top of the tank, and moves the shuttle engines on the bottom of the tank. Without having to lift the load of the space shuttle itself, the rocket gets 77mT of cargo to orbit.

Re-using all the major shuttle components provides the cheapest possible option for a Heavy Lift Vehicle, not to mention the quickest, as a Direct design could be flying by 2013. The current plan from the administration doesn't even decide on a HLV design until 2015, let alone start the process of building and testing it. This is not a barrel of pork. Yes, somebody will make some money, but this is the cheapest option at the moment to keep a US heavy lift capability in the near future, and it will be built here in the US.

Current US lift capability stops at only 25mT in the Shuttle cargo bay to Low Earth Orbit. By funding a Direct style vehicle, we get a minimum of 75 mT to orbit without a second stage. This a very good thing. With further development of a second stage, the payload capacity increases to 115mT+. Not only that, but by putting the payload on top of the vehicle, a direct style rocket can support a payload as wide as 12m across (shuttle can only do 5m). So we get the ability to send more per launch and save over the life of a large project. For example, five flights of Direct would have been sufficient to build the ISS, versus the 40 shuttle launches it actually took.

By re-using the same engines and boosters as the space shuttle, we save billions (maybe $10 billion over time) in research and launch facility changes necessary for other designs (Ares would have required 2 new pad designs and new crawlers at a $1 billion a pop). The cost per launch for Direct will be less expensive as well. For comparison, recovery of the shuttle SRB's, refurbishment of the shuttle and launch costs per launch have averaged out to about $1.3 billion per launch. A Direct will cost somewhere north of $200 million for the launch vehicle, plus operating costs, but won't include refurbishment or recovery operations. For the immediate future NASA says it will launch the last shuttle in 2011, and after we'll be paying the Russians $20-30 million per seat for rides in a Soyuz

We save time in that we can have an un-manned cargo version of the vehicle doing test flights by 2013, whereas the engine testing alone for a liquid-fueled booster would take 5 years by the current plan. as all the parts are already man-rated (save for the modified ET), we could be launching Orion capsules on a Direct as soon as the Orions finish development in 2015 or so.

If this passes, I'll be one very happy space fan.

The Zune has managed market share as high as 10% and presumably makes some money, but because it's not market leader and far less successful than the Ipod, it's a "flop", and ridiculed by poeple here.

The Iphone has, last time I checked, less than 5% market share, with market leaders being Nokia who sell far more phones. But because it still brings in some money for Apple, it's a runaway success.

We'll see the same with the Ipad - as long as it sells some and makes money, it's a "success", where as for any other company, it's a "flop" unless it becomes number one.

Ten Million is a steal if you realize how much you can make off renting it out.

Heck yes!. Clinton was getting $100k per night for the Lincoln Bedroom alone.

How about the recent story about the police saying that their patrol car tape was erased, and a citizen managing to prove that they were hiding it from him.

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/418746_video.html

Why should we trust the police? We give them the right to carry guns and use them on citizens!

Nobody wants them for $1500,

Why do you fucking Wintard zealots persist in this fiction? This came out in 2006 you fucking reject from the retard factory. Fuck you and the consumers have emphatically said, "FUCK WINDOWS TABLETS!"

You assume On2 is a small dinky company, but it isn't. It's a part of Google now remember. I'm sure Google hold more than their fair share of patents too to turn this into a game of patent nuclear warfare.

$290 million is chump change? And that's just one of the cases MS lost. $290 million there, another couple of hundred here and it all adds up.

Yes, let's see your citations. The fact that 50% of studies find a significant genetic factor and 50% do not says nothing about their validity. The references to psychology in your signature and alias do not inspire confidence. The field of psychology in general has a pretty atrocious record in addressing the subject of homosexuality scientifically. And I wouldn't expect most psychological studies to have much insight on anything related to genetics.

Moreover, there is evidence that homosexuality may not be genetic, but still not a choice as you suggest. Research indicates that hormones or chemicals in the mother's womb play a significant role in determining sexuality and among men born to mothers who already have had boy (i.e. men with older brothers), there is a greater incidence of homosexuality. This comes up off the top of google: http://www.seattlepi.com/national/275425_gay27.html In short, I would give much greater weight to more recent neuroscientific studies than most strictly psychological studies.

Finally, talk with almost any man who is openly gay (emphasis on openly) and he'll convincingly disabuse you of the notion that it's "choices they made".

For a fascinating account of the tumultuous history of homosexuality and the DSM (a textbook case of the politicization of science for both bad and good), I highly recommend this This American Life broadcast:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/204/81-Words

That's ok, they don't need you to get out of the car to tase you. Refusing to testify against yourself is enough.

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/223578_taser10.html

Think of it as votes on a jury.

Look, Kramerd, I've been pretty hard on you tonight, and I apologize. I'm sure your Dad is a cop, and you look up to him, and wanna defend him, and there's nothing wrong with that.

But your Dad and his friends, well, they've been kinda hard on the sheeple lately. When you taser a dozen autistic kids, baton pregnant women in the stomach, taser and club an epileptic for not obeying commands while he's having a seizure, and beat a little girl while she's trapped in a holding cell....

Well, let's just say the other men who carry guns in uniform lose respect for you. And the sheeple, oh my, well the sheeple do truly horrible things.

They start voting against you on juries.

So do me a favor. Go tell your Dad that if he and his little buddies can't get their act together, then We the People are about to introduce them to the wonderful world of private security, where they can make almost a whole eight dollars an hour. :-)