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This is why the scandals in the previous French government and the UN oil-for-food scandal dwarf anything that's ever gone on in America.

Excuse me? The USA was complicit in the oil-for-food scandal.

"There is no question that the bulk of the illicit oil revenues came from the open sale of Iraqi oil to Jordan and to Turkey, and that that was a way of going around the oil-for-food program," he said. "We were fully aware of the bypass and looked the other way."

-- Senator Carl M. Levin

Why is it hardly anybody in America is aware of this and thinks of it solely as a UN scandal? Are you guys really that brainwashed by the anti-UN propaganda over there? The USA is in no position to point fingers at others regarding the oil-for-food scandal.

You (and I for that matter) may be in the minority in this. While I use all the tools I have available to avoid viewing ads, I don't think most people do. According to this article and a few others I have read, most people end up watching Tivod commercials anyway. I am not sure why, but I think some people like ads to some extent - they may feel it keeps them up to date on popular culture, or they may actually be interested in new products (I am completely speculating here of course). Given a choice to never have to see ads again, I am not sure if as many people would choose to as you might think.

People don't specifically choose the gas station with the ads playing at the pumps, that's crazy. People choose their gas station based on price and location. While they have nothing to do for three minutes, maybe they look at the advertisements around them, for lack of anything else to do while killing three minutes at a gas station. It's hardly anything revolutionary, and it's less damning of the human race than, say, the US averaging 19 hours/week watching television. Maybe you don't have to be quite so anti-social.

National Socialism "considers individual and other societal interests subordinate to the interests of the state."
How does this differ from Liberalism/Socialism? Or Hillary Clinton's famous "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."

As far as I can tell, the one difference between Nazi's and Communists were their stances on private property - Nazi's believed in Private Property insofar as it did what the state directed it to do. VW didn't come up with the Volkswagon themselves.
'Racial Superiority' was part of the Nazi's idealogical arsenal, however it was not and is not the chief defining characteristic any more than anti-Zionism is Communism's.

And Socialism has precious little to do with 'working cooperatively' and everything to do with wealth redistribution. I guess it depends on which side of the equation you're on, eh?

Depends on how you define freedom I guess... Are these examples of free speech? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_v._Frederick http://graphic.pepperdine.edu/perspectives/2007/2007-09-27-Leonard.htm http://www.hecklerspray.com/sally-field-bleeped-for-saying-goddamn-at-the-emmys/200610097.php Would a country that truly had freedom of assembly have "free speech zones"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone http://baltimorechronicle.com/052704FreeSpeechZones.shtml http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/08/04/hilden.freespeech/ Are these signs of a government respecting the freedom of religion? http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2005/09/15/wiretap_mosques_romney_suggests/ http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/state/20070918-1624-ca-mosquesurveillance.html All of these are a lot milder than being run over by tanks, but in the U.S. things are definately moving in the wrong direction.

... we have a 13 month old, and there WAS a study (again, lacking a cite) that said that kids who were in day care for 20 or fewer hours per week showed no differences from kids who were kept at home. After that, there was again no differences between the kids, so there wer really two groups: One in day care for 20 or fewer, one not.

That said, I have no idea where one would go for an unbiased study of these things. A couple of links for your viewing pleasure:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE2D6143CF935A25754C0A9659C8B63
I suspect the parent's study is the one by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. I didn't see that the article attaches NICHHD to a university. Although I'm not sure how that would alter my opinion of the study, now that I think about it.

Same link, another study from UMinn stating that kid's stress levels tend to rise during the day while in day care, but fall during the day while at home.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20051101/news_1n1earlyed.html
A study showing that negative social effects are most pronounced when the kids are in day care for more than 45 hours a week, which seems pretty extreme.

In short, I dunno either. Go Buddhist. There's a middle path here somewhere.

You mean: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/state/20070907-0513-ca-brf-cencoast-dealerrip-off.html/ ?

Well, it would save him from having the tech guys from rummaging through his files. Who knows what they'd screw up while they're pawing through your computer looking for pR0n.

Simply put, we need to store it somewhere. If Yucca mountain is the best we got, then that's the best we got. It may not be a panacea, but storage in above ground casks in-situ is orders of magnitude worse.

But it's not the best site. When storage was originally proposed several sites were studied and the list was narrowed down to Nevada, Texas, and Washington. Both Texas and Washington had relatively strong congressional power and they had their states removed from the list leaving only Nevada which didn't have the congressional mussel. In the end it was politics not science that picked Yucca as the storage site for nuclear waste. However now, because it's so close, California is fighting using Yucca as well as those in Nevada.

So, now you're going to ask, would you say that, if it were in my back yard?

I live in Minnesota, quite a ways from Nevada and if anything were to happen it's have to go over the Rockies to reach me. So I'm not just saying Yucca is bad because it's in my backyard. Currently I oppose nuclear power but because waste already exists it needs to be stored somewhere and I want it stored in the best place for it. Yucca doesn't fit that by a mile, er several hundred miles.

And there's this guy: Armenian immigrant and 5 others convicted of military-weapons charges in FBI sting, plotting to sell anti-aircraft missiles and in the United States on a religious worker visa for the Church of Scientology. What's up with that?

LemonLINK.

Great name, ain't it? It describes the nyetwork pretty accurately.

Par for the course for a district who named this guy Teacher of the Year.

My wife is pretty happy to be out of there...

What threats? That a lady in San Diego with the cheese and ice packs? It was all a load of bullshit.

Your government, working to scare the shit out of you since 9/11.

It is simply fact that every intelligence agency on the planet thought Saddam had WMDs. The questions only concerned the state of his nuclear program. Go read Hans Blix's report to the UNSC in February, right before the invasion. Inform yourself.

And, contrary to popular myth, the evidence still supports the notion that Saddam was seeking uranium in Niger... Joe Wilson's own report said that the former Nigerian PM interpreted Iraqi overtures to "expand business relations" as a desire to purchase uranium, and the British intelligence still stands by their own independent determination to that effect--indeed, their government investigated it after the whole Wilson debacle and concluded that the claims were "well founded". In other words, simply claiming that it was "a lie", like some uber-partisan cartoon, doesn't win you any points here.

The real question about the uranium is this: Why would Iraq be looking for uranium from Niger when we found 500 tons of yellowcake that they already had laying around?

It wasn't an act of terrorism. It was an act of rebellion. There's a difference.

You are right, and they see it:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/op-ed/goodhue/2 0070618-9999-mz1e18goodhu.html

As someone stood up to lead the Pledge of Allegiance at a GOP dinner here Thursday, it was suddenly realized there was no flag in the room. "Pledge to the elephant!" shouted Bob Watkins of the county Board of Education. So the audience, which included Rep. Darrell Issa, state Senate Minority Leader Dick Ackerman, Assembly Republican Leader-Elect George Plescia and Mayor Jerry Sanders, turned toward the GOP banner and recited the pledge while facing the party's symbolic pachyderm. Fortunately, it was a patriotic red, white and blue - with stars. Link: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/bell/2006 0415-9999-7m15bell.html Party before country

Tim Griffin, Michael Elston, Paul McNulty, Monica Goodling
Sara Taylor, Bradley Schlozman, Steve Biskupic, Alberto Gonzalez, David Safavian, Lurita Doan, Ken Tomlinson
Tom Delay, Bob Ney, Conrad Burns, Ted Stevens, Kyle Foggo, Duke Cunningham, Brent Wilkes, Mitchell Wade, Curt Weldon, Donald Rumsfeld, Jim Tobin
Scooter Libby, Manuel Miranda, Darleen Dryun, Thomas Scully, Chuck Mcgee, Pete Domenici
Porter Goss, Brant Bassett, Virgil Goode, Katherine Harris, Jerry Lewis, Ed Buckham, Steven Griles, Mark Foley, Paul Wolfowitz, Ken Lay, Conrad Black, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Roger Stilwell, Tony Rudy, Jack Abramoff, Michael Scanlon, William Heaton, Adam Kidan, Neil Volz,

what does an old whale look like anyways


Like this

I think that the GP meant water dilution. This is a serious problem with marathon runners. There have been cases of runners collapsing and in some cases dying because they have diluted their body salts. Or, according to this web site:

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20070220/n ews_lz1c20fluids.html

  "Too much water and you can experience hyponatremia or water intoxication. Your blood becomes diluted, your brain swells and coma or death can follow, as demonstrated recently by a California woman who died after participating in a radio station's water-drinking contest."

Damn, I wonder if she won?

Because here around 70% (europe) of the gas price is due to taxes (it used to be that way but now it is probably around 60% due to the oil price raise). I do not think you gas in the US is taxed as much.

Here are some link about this tax rate on fuel in europe :
About.com on fuel gas price (first paragraph)
US reluctant to match Europe Gas price taxation

Quote :
For decades, European countries have imposed high taxes on fuel to encourage conservation and fuel-efficient technologies while funding public transportation. In England, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, the taxes on gas are more than twice as much as the underlying cost of the fuel.

• An Iron Curtain is Descending on US
  
  
• Cheney: Water torture is OK
  
  
• Bush administration says detainee shouldn't be able to tell attorney how he was tortured in secret CIA prison
  
  
• The United States is now prosecuting suspected terrorists on the basis of their intentions, not just their actions
  
  
• Man arrested for saying "I think your policies in Iraq are reprehensible"
  
  
• Letter to the editor prompts visit from Secret Service
  
  
• Activist, anti-Bush lawyer "falls to death at hotel
  
  
• Abuse and Torture by U.S. troops
  
  
• plenty more, regretfully...
  
  

You quote the highly reputable Wikipedia as a source of refutation:

"its figures from Nashville Electric Service. But company spokeswoman Laurie Parker said the utility never got a request from the policy center and never gave it any information."

However, as was pointed out to that argument, they didn't receive a request for the information because none was needed. It is published on the web. This is akin to me saying that you didn't eat lunch today because you weren't at Joe's Upchuck Palace. Gore's usage was not refuted, it was substantiated. The figures are a matter of public record, and available on a number of sites, for the entire town. Actually, if you check with your utility, you will probably find your address and usage figures are available online.

The Czech President has put into words an idea that I have had for a long time. That is, the "Global Warming" lobby has become a pseudo-religion, replacing dead Communism, as the socio-economic ideology that will eventually threaten the freedom of democracies and their citizens.

It is certainly acting like a religion, complete with those, all too ready to yell, "heresy" and pull out their "scriptures" of speculative (theory shot) studies, pounding them out as "truth" from the pulpit.

It is a church where the moderate, environmentally concerned is lambasted as "sinner" and "outcast" for not drinking the Holy Communion of climate hysteria.

I don't think it violates the first amendment, (gee teenagers coming up with lols and brbs// ./'s coming up with IANALs would have been prosecuted by now)

However I wonder if they will make sedna a planet too. Sedna is bigger than Pluto. -- Or how about the many moons of jupiter, some of them are bigger than pluto as well. Do they get planetship?

Similar & related:
Arkansas House passes resolution changing possessive of state's name to "Arkansas's"

The rejected laws included provisions to hold terror suspects indefinitely

Actually, the law that was voted on only included provisions to hold terror suspects for 72 hours, not indefinitely.

The law about holding suspects indefinitely which the article mentions (and the article is clear that it's a different law) was struck down by the Supreme Court last week.

The law that could hold a suspect indefinitely required a "security certificate" to be issued by the government, and it only applied to foreign suspects.

We're at *war* with people of a much more "legitimate" religion, with a MUCH longer heritage, for similar beliefs!

Oh, come on. If we were at "war" with Islam, I do believe things would take on a slightly different appearance, don't you? We probably wouldn't have just had a lenghty academic argument over whether or not a newly elected (Muslim) federal legislator should get to use Thomas Jefferson's old copy of the Koran while being sworn in, or have trade relations with all sorts of primarily Muslim countries. Similarly, I don't think Scientologists have dispatched loony suicidal types to kill thousands of people, or pump money, supplies, and deluded basket cases into operations that drive truck bombs into vegetable markets full of women and children (notably, other Muslims).

Don't confuse this with any sort of defense of Scientology (hah! not hardly), but rather a defense against the notion that we're at war with Islam, in its entirety. It's just not the case, at least in that broad of a context. We should be, though, as modern western cultures, completely horrified by our own smilig tolerance of a rapidly expanding theocratic movement that causes things like this to even be in the news. To even be an issue at all. Honestly ... Sharia court establishments that talk in terms of putting people in jail because they want to stop being Muslims? There's no point being 100% tolerant of movements that consider tolerance to be a crime. But that's not the same as "being at war" with the religion, per se.

Story Errors: I would have thought that, after all these years, Slashdot editors would have learned to be editors. Often Slashdot stories are posted that show not even the simplest examination, such as this one, that references an article that does not support was said in the Slashdot story.

This is more of the real story Broadcom sees win for 'H.264' industry (January 27, 2007). However, the article does NOT say that the patents were invalidated; they have not been invalidated.

This statement from the Slashdot story is incorrect: "This ruling clears the way for H.264 to become a widely adopted open standard." If that were true, it would be important, but it is not true, for three reasons: 1) The patents have not been invalidated (yet). 2) There can be an appeal. 3) There are other patents.

Article linked is yesterday's announcement that it's going to the Jury. Here's the link and text of the right article:

Broadcom sees win for 'H.264' industry
By Kathryn Balint and David Washburn
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITERS

January 27, 2007

After just six hours of deliberating, a federal jury found yesterday that chip maker Broadcom did not infringe on two patents held by San Diego-based Qualcomm and determined in two advisory votes that Qualcomm had withheld key information from a standards-making body and the patent office.

Union-Tribune file photo
San Diego-based Qualcomm lost a round in federal court yesterday against Southern California chip-making rival Broadcom.
Qualcomm, which accused Irvine-based Broadcom of infringing on two video-compression patents, was seeking $8.3 million in damages for one of the patents. It did not seek any damages for the other patent.

The San Diego jury's unanimous decision is a win for manufacturers that comply with the same video-compression standard as that used by Broadcom.

Qualcomm had argued that one of the two patents at issue was incorporated into the H.264 industry standard used in millions of consumer devices, such as high-definition DVD players and Apple video iPods.

"We're grateful for the jury's verdict - a resounding victory for Broadcom," said David Rosmann, vice president of intellectual property litigation for the company. "This is a victory not just for Broadcom, but for the entire H.264 industry."

Qualcomm had little to lose in the case but everything to win.

Advertisement
If it had prevailed in its patent-infringement claims, it potentially could have asked courts to ban products that used the industry standard or sought royalty payments from their manufacturers.

Yesterday's decision does not affect Qualcomm's core business of licensing cell phone technology.

A loss for Broadcom, however, could have resulted in the ban of some of its chips and could have cost the company possibly hundreds of millions of dollars in future royalty payments.

The U.S. District Court case was just one of seven lawsuits between the two companies scheduled for trial this year.

"There certainly was a significant upside potential for us, but it was all upside, no downside," said Qualcomm executive vice president and general counsel Lou Lupin. "For Broadcom, it was all downside, no upside. It probably won't have any impact on us one way or the other. It's just the latest round in a series of battles."

The speed with which the nine-member jury returned the verdict was stunning, particularly for a case that involved more than 40 hours of testimony and evidence akin to a graduate-level college course on video compression.

Jury foreman David Ingraham, a Carmel Valley resident and retired vice president of finance and planning for McGraw-Hill, said the quick verdict came about because each jury member entered deliberations with a strong understanding of the evidence.

"I'm not going to say we were all electrical engineers, because we aren't," Ingraham said. "But people listened carefully to the testimony and took good notes - and it came down overwhelmingly on one side."

The jury did find that the two Qualcomm patents in question in the case were valid, a loss to Broadcom, which had argued otherwise.

One of the biggest blows to Qualcomm came in the form of advisory votes, sought by the judge, in which the jury questioned Qualcomm's integrity.

In one advisory vote, the jury found "clear and convincing evidence" that Qualcomm had withheld previous scientific studies on video-compression from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office when applying for one of the patents in question. The jury's advisory vote said that the patent is "unenforceable due to Qualcomm's inequitable conduct in the patent application process."

In the second advisory vote, the jury found that Q

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/business/200701 27-9999-1b27verdict.html
this is the correct link from the original source.

Have you ever lived in Southern Califorina? If there is ever a could in the sky people run off the street to take shelter in the nearest building. Don't ask what happens in a freak rain shower! Drizzle of doom...

I've never lived there, but I learned about this "drizzle of doom" phenomenon a few months ago when I stumbled across the following article on a San Diego news website:

0.02 inches of rain pummels the area

Considering there ARE mirrors on the moon, and the light takes approximately 2.5 seconds round-trip, you ARE seeing the same photons you'd sent 2.5 seconds ago. So to answer your question: yes. In reality, you would never receive an "image" back, as with every particle between here and there (ie: our atmosphere) will reflect, refract, and otherwise distort the "image" (read: combination and organization of sent photons), making it return as a set of seemingly random photons.

...of course we COULD get into the math behind deciphering Gravitational Lenses, but yeah, maybe another time :-).

It's baffling to me why a country that has consistently and fairly been compared with Nazi Germany, to the point of concentration camps and illegal medical experimentation, has been allowed to exist for this long. Drudge reported this morning that they're prepping another nuke test, and it's a well-known fact that they've been developing chem and bio weapons for years. A new Hitler has risen, and we are so busy looking elsewhere that we either haven't noticed or don't care.

Yet people can go around the internet saying "I'm hot 14 yr old and want to fuck" and ask cops to arrest everyone who says yes.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20061203/n ews_2n3internet.html

Something to think about...

And US Marines has used it since at least early 2004.
Silly String wasn't such a silly battle order, their supplier finds

And an anonymous comment in the Schneier blog claims Silly String was originally invented for doing exactly this kind of work.. in the Korea war.

I'm sure a military historian will find that the first use of throwing light strings to discover tripwires was less than a month after the first use of tripwires. :)

I suggest a multi-thousand dollar prize for the first hacker who can open up their servers so the N.K. citizens can see the whole web.

I can't say there is much to recommend it. It is likely that there would be no meaningful payoff that would last more than minutes. Even if you were successful in creating temporary access to a wider range of internet sites, it is likely that the few North Koreas who use the web would be too terrified to make use of it, assuming they even knew about it. Given the nature of the regime, you can assume that their secret police record, monitor, review, and act on the traffic in ways that far exceed the most lurid fantasies about the NSA. Surfing unauthorized web sites would likely constitute a punishable act, especially if an unauthorized site was visited that contained unvetted political, economic, or religious information. If you've stepped over the line in North Korea, you could easily fall prey to the "heredity rule", developed the Dear Leader's father. Under that rule, the North Korean secret police arrest and imprison three generations of a family for the misdeeds of one of them, often for life, which can be short in a North Korean "prison camp" AKA death camp.

Besides, the international incident with the paranoid, now nuclear armed, barbaric regime which is starving its people wouldn't be worth it.

If anyone still insists on it, I suggest you stay away from at least the Koreas and Japan as North Korea has a long history of kidnapping people from those countries for various reasons. Given their ties to organized crime, due to their many criminal enterprises, they could reach even further. Life there is tough even when you are useful to them.

My understanding is that Singapore's punishment for littering, vandalism, drugs, and most everything else, is far more severe than most liberal democracies would tolerate.

That's probably because Singapore isn't exactly a liberal democracy

The PS2 didn't reach 40 million until September 2002, 2.5 years after it went on sale in March 2000. It took it until November 2005 to reach 100 million. I couldn't find any reference to the PS2 hitting 150 million. All I could find was a cite from this month saying the entire "installed base" for all gaming number 150 million.

So I really don't forsee this as being a coup for Sony. It might be, but I don't think so. I bought an N65 and then a Playstation. I bought a Playstation2 and then a Gamecube. I would have bought an original Xbox if any of my friends had them.

At $600, I will never buy a PS3, regardless of the fact that I've already pre-ordered a Wii. Ken was right - at that price, it's not a gaming machine anymore. If I buy a second console, it will be an Xbox 360, even though I loathe Microsoft.

With the high price of the PS3, the initial install base will grow very slowly. This will cause a low volume of game sales, which will further cause fewer games to come out, which will cause fewer people to buy a PS3. It will just snowball from there. Sony simply does not have the first party games to pull this off. I think Nintendo MIGHT be able to do it, but it would take a radical marketing and focus shift. But their first party titles would guarantee an initial install base to get the ball rolling. Microsoft might be able to get it going due to Halo and its penchant for just buying up game developers. Sony would have a small chance of doing it based on games that tend to be exclusive to it (at least initially), but with the pricing they have just guaranteed it will not happen.

It really just comes down to a VERY simple fact - $600. Even at $500, it's a bad deal. $500 is right around the price for a lot of people where purchases move from "do I want this?" to "do I need this?". And when you add on the price of a game and an extra controller, bumping it up around $100, most people will decide they don't need it. I think this would be true even if the Xbox and Wii were launching two years later than the PS3.

And Blu-Ray will do absolutely nothing to help sell more than a few million or so PS3s. Studies have shown that the average household income for HDTV owners is nearly $90k. The people with that kind of money would probably have bought the PS3 anyway. But the people at the lower end of the scale who really stretched their finances to buy the HDTV to begin with will be hard put to shell out for the PS3. And if you look at that study, only about half the people watch HD programming on their HDTVs. These people aren't exactly clamoring for higher quality video.

So while I could completely be wrong, I predict this could be a complete catastrophe for Sony. This opinion doesn't come from fanboism. Nintendo cured me of that with the N64 debacle. Since then I have been fairly platform neutral. Even my disgust with Microsoft wouldn't have kept me from buying an Xbox if I could have convinced my brother to get broadband so we could play online.

My prediction for hitting the different milestones are:
5 million sales in the first 9 months
30 million sales three years from launch
50 million sales five years from launch

But when will it become truly affordable for the masses? That's what most of us want to know. Wake me when it's time to disconnect from the petroleum/nuclear fired grid.

It's already happening in California. This deal is huge. It's between 300 and 900 Megawatts. And what's even more remarkable is that there is no federal or state funding for this project - not even a subsidy or tax break!

The solar electricity is simply profitable. Watch this closely.

Another interesting run is the Solar Tower project in Australia. I'm really excited by this one! Once built, the operating costs drop to near ZERO.

What few people realize is how much the price of electricity varies. So go get your utility bill. Call the nearest solar energy installation guys. You may find that it's profitable RIGHT NOW to put solar cells on your roof!

To make a strange example with a small wink, literally ;-). "The average duration of a single blink of the human eye is 0.3 seconds. The average person blinks 25 times per minute". website with facts. If you are awake for 16 hours/day you'll have blinked around 24,000 times/day or 8,760,000/year => 2,628,000 seconds/year: That means that you are spending on average 730 of your waking hours/year with your eyes closed!. ;-)

It's also about half of the number of hours you spend brushing your teeth on a yearly basis (assuming twice day with 5mins. lost in for each).

I'm just trying to put it into perspective a bit. I agree w/ the hardware part.. but when it comes to those hours: relax a bit.. get some coffee! =D

Plenty of folk are interested in banning on the beaches and the parks

There are entire cities that have banned smoking unless you own your own house. I guess some people are addicted to banning smoking.

You are an abusive writer. Since I can't pay for television time from my disability check I had to find other ways and means to reach people. I don't understand your anger. You can observe for yourself that the planets revolve without an engine humping away guzzling gasoline. If you know anything at all, you know if it happens in one instance it means it can be made to happen by humans. I don't purchase e-mail lists and spam anyone. SlashDot gives me the right to post. If you don't want to read, don't read. When you get over your temper tantrum you might would notice that my Comments are always in line with the Subject under Discussion, but you don't do that because all you want to do is run your mouth and show everyone your backside.

I have made plenty of posts and webpages explaining my theories. That's what the Internet is for. You want to learn, go learn. You want to smear me, smear to your wicked heart's content. I recently made a series of posts in a San Diego blog. I think I did a good job explaining things there if you'd like to read more. Post some trash talk there and they'll erase your post though. http://forum.signonsandiego.com/showpost.php?p=220 9246&postcount=37 .

Ever hear of the discipline called mimetics? That's a lot of what I have done. I have shown how to clash a cold front & a hot front together inside an engine cylinder for an explosion. The temperatures cancel each other out, the metals last longer because the engine doesn't get hot. As far as my Millenial Dawn engine, it is simply a rail gun that fires back at itself, doing Work along the decaying orbits. The balls come back home, cycle repeats. I don't know why you find these things so difficult or why they upset you so. Didn't you know someone was going to do it sooner or later? You're acting like I killed your favorite cat.

I usually steer away from calling my engine a circular rail gun because it might give the wrong impression I copied the rail gun's inventor. I did not. I got the idea from my air+steam engine and also from waterwheels, as the engine is recoiless being two back-to-back waterwheels. Instead of a flow of water, it sets up a flow of dry metal balls. Denser metal molecules = more energy. It is a very simple engine, almost as simple as a wheel or corkscrew.

I know a lot of you guys on SlashDot are kicking & screaming because you wanted Desktop Fusion engines to be so difficult. Go ahead and design all the difficult engines you want. I'm not standing in anyone's way. In fact, if you were to read EVERY POST I'VE EVER MADE nowhere have I said my engines are the only such engines. They're just the first. Now that I have defined "Imitation Energy" you have a new direction to explore if you want. If you don't want, that's your prerogative. But you haven't accomplished a single thing here trying to insult me.

We have been hitting mirrors left on the moon by apollo astronauts since 1969.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/science/2006071 3-9999-lz1c13laser.html

http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/SEhelp/Apoll oLaser.html

Thats 239,000 miles hitting an 18 inch square target.

"I wanna see someone claim that by dissecting oranges he can help us fight heart diseases."

Sure here you go!
SignOnSanDiego.com

/love google

It possibly a scam... SD Union has questioned the background of the company.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/business/200606 08-9999-1b8cat.html

I can assure you there has not been one episode her in the US where a rampage like that has been stopped by a regular citizen carrying a gun. So, you can forget about that fantasy.

On March 22, a young man opened fire on the campus with a 12-gauge shotgun. Three students and two teachers were injured. Agundez, the school's resource officer, chased the man and wounded him in the buttock and jaw.

Woodham drove his mother's car to his high school, wearing a long coat to hide his rifle. When he entered the school, he began firing rampantly, killing his ex-girlfriend Christina Menefee and her friend Lydia Dew, and wounding 7 others before Joel Myrick, the assistant principal, retrieved a pistol from his car parked off school grounds and subdued Woodham.

Thank you for reinforcing the vapid California stereotype.

All Schwarznazi's ballot initiatives go down in flames, except the one putting the state into a lot more debt. Not only do you ignore how all his other policies were rejected. You also ignore how he lied about fixing the budget, got elected by lying about how giant the debt is, then "fixed" it by creating a lot more debt. And your fellow Californians sucked it right down.

Next up, you pretend Californians don't vote for Schwarznazi because he's a Hollywood star. You justify this by saying that Davis wasn't Hollywood - but he got thrown out, you clown. Somehow voting for nonstars other times means you skindeepers didn't vote for actors in Reagan and Schwarznazi. You cite two other potential candidates whose resume consists of... being Hollywood stars, though not big enough to be as popular as Schwarznazi. Ringing the "duh" bell as hard as you can.

Schwarznazi campaigned for Bush, even outside California, which he said he wouldn't do, because Bush was so unpopular in California, though popular elsewhere. You're a gang of liars, you California Schwarznazi boosters. Like the lie you're trying that I said Bush is unpopular because of his deficits. Which I didn't say - I just said he's as unpopular as his deficits are high. Worth noting because not only are Schwarznazi's deficits high, including that new debt you're crowing about, but Bush's debt is is somewhere between 45 and 65 $TRILLION, so high the country can't pay it back. Which also figures into his unpopularity, along with Iraq, among people who can count that high. You can't - 45 is clearly out of your reach. But about a quarter of voters surveyed last month said the economy was more important than even Iraq. Your boys are blowing both, and worshippers like you don't even care.

Sure, you're not a Republican. Noone's a Republican anymore, right? You're an "independent", of course. So you vote for Republicans, and pretend you don't. And if you believe that Hollywood is "liberal", you're wearing a mouse suit in Disneyland.

I might have thought up the nickname "Schwarznazi", but I'm not unique. He's a nazi, just like he said, no matter what other arguments about Schwarznazi you want to lose with me. All my points are meaningful, backed by facts. I don't need some Lalaland liar like you to call me clever. Or spew lies while calling me on the facts.

Now turn your glowing eyeballs back to your TV. I'm sure there's something good on, like a California Republican pretending they're got the state's trains running on time, if only those damn secular Hollywood liberals would just lie down on the tracks, or at least get into the cattlecars.

Some of the advertisements on TV, in magazines and on billboards seem practically pornographic to me.
http://www.quotenet.nl/2005/11/23/hello-boys.jpg

If censorship works, we should put all these scantily clad girls in burkas,
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20051204/i mages/ins_burkas.jpg

to avoid revving up sexually deranged men.

http://www.auvsi.org/competitions/06competitors.cf m
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/08/08/AR2006080800960.html
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20060807- 9999-1m7sub.html
http://mywebcache.com/2006/08/07/subjugator-holds- onto-top-honors-in-9th-annual-auv-competition/

The best way to distribute money from productivity gains fairly is by equalizing bargaining power and information between labor and investors. How do you accomplish that? Unions and collective bargaining.

I'd say that the fairest method is by companies competing for the workforce. Locking Employer and Employee in and endless struggle against each other is neither fair nor a good solution to the problem (what if I don't want to be in a union? Not so fair them is it?) Healthy competition has served us quite well in recent history.

Unions are more necessary than ever if we want all Americans to share in the prosperity that their hard work has created through productivity growth. Just because we're not fighting against a 72-hour workweek anymore doesn't mean the basic reason for the existence of unions, to create equal bargaining power for workers, is any less desirable.

No. A more balanced import and export sheet with the rest of the world and a great (high) education system will ensure American prosperity in the future. Modernization would be a boon as well. Relatively few Americans' hard work has created the productivity growth we've seen (I attribute most of that growth to the baby boomers). Some American's also don't deserve to share in those benefits. Prosperity is not a guarantee in life, nor should it be.

Having also worked in a union myself (not for the big G however), it's laughable to say that the basic reason for the existence of unions is to create equal bargaining power for workers. That might have been true a century ago when there were no such thing as child labor laws, the 40 hour work week, minimum wage, etc, but it is, quite frankly, a stupid reason to argue for their existence now. The laws are in place, they're not going anywhere, the workers have won...and there was much rejoicing.

Let me give some examples of how unions have failed America:

1. Cough. The automobile industry. 'nuff said.

2. Longshore union. They pretty much get first dibs on stuff coming in from over seas, and anything that goes, uh, "missing" is just shrinkage that gets added to the cost of business (read: we pay for it). Despite their jobs being completely useless in an age of robots, they've somehow terrorized shipping companies and lawmakers into giving them the 5 finger discount, 6 figure salaries, and pensions. How hard do they work? Most of them sit on their ass and watch machines do the work they used to do (it's okay to use a machine as long as you still pay the man who's job is being taken over). Useful!

3. If you lived in Southern California you should remember the strike that took place a few years ago in many grocery stores (Vons/Safeway). Not only do these people get paid damn good money for work that requires nothing more than a high school education, they had full healthcare benefits. Why'd they strike? Cause "The Man" wanted them to pay a co-pay like the rest of us. Solution: a strike that will eventually allow other nonunionized grocery chains to overtake them. Nothing says short term profit like long term unemployment!

4. Unionized government labor. Yes, I realize the parent here is one of those people. Thanks to this bullshit (read: pension plans) the City of San Diego is for all practical purposes bankrupt. Mmm. Fiscal 2007 budget: $2.6 billion. Pension fund deficit: $1.43 billion. Solution: cut funding to everything that doesn't have "political suicide" written on it and raise taxes. Sure am glad we have unions! (source: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/pension/2 0060619-9999-1n19bankrupt.html

5. I would say that the downfall of American construction/manufacturing is directly tied to unions who tried to keep jobs no matter what. The resulting inability to compete in the global marketplace doomed the corporations that employed them. I wonder how many familys w

Man, there's a lot of hate in here for Dell. Just curious, why? My GF and boss both have a Dell 700m and I've got to say those things are solid. Small, light, battery life of 3+ hours. Light years better than Vaios, IMHO. I've experienced few problems with their desktop systems as well.

As far as the exploding laptop, is it really the manufacturer's fault? This question would apply regardless of who it is. It would seem to me that if it were a manufacturing defect in the laptop, say in the charging circuitry, those models would be exploding left and right. It was very likely that the battery pack on that thing was made by a third party and sold for half the price of an OEM pack.

That's not to say that OEM battery packs can't blow up. The battery cells are procured from outside manufacturers. Of course, laptop manufacturers will (hopefully) only buy batteries made by reputable firms, but right now there's big business in counterfeit batteries over in China. I remember awhile back Kyocera had phones coming with counterfeit batteries that were exploding in peoples' pockets and hands, inflicting some serious injuries. The thing is, don't just eye Dells with suspicison - I imagine it's possible for any manufacturer to get a bad batch of batteries if they're not careful, but I imagine that's rare and they are, indeed, careful. Big laptop manufacturers probably have direct accounts, anyway.