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"The mysteries and wonders of creation still have many secrets to reveal and lessons to instruct the attentive, as we slowly but inexorably destroy them".

Doppler Sonar, hurray! Best weaponize it asap.

http://suite101.com/a/ocean-pollution-a326713

The Actual Data, huh? Take a look at this. I'll quote the relevant part:

Unlike other stories (specifically, John O'Sullivan's) that improperly cite this study as evidence for global warming deniers, the real story behind this study is that climate scientists are getting closer and closer to being able to accurately measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere using satellite data.

The link you gave shows all the classic hallmarks of denial. It twists the interpretation of the data to claim something that the data does not support. It spends very little time on that part. Can't be glib if you dwell on something. Spends all its words on a pretty facade, and skimps on making sure the foundation is solid. Even gets rather emotional. Reads like one of those bad sales pitches in midnight TV commercials. What I mean is wording like this:

• astonishing story
• scorched an indelible hole
• Sassano turned greenhouse gas theory on it's head
• the IBUKI maps prove exactly the opposite of all conventional expectations

No, the story isn't astonishing. The article is wrong. No it didn't "scorch a hole" in "global warming theory". No, Sassano didn't upend decades of research with a 5 minute long sound bite. And no, the maps don't prove exactly the opposite of expectations. I could go on, because there's a lot more just plain wrong assertions in there, but I'm not going to bother.

Why can't you see that this O'Sullivan guy is a snake oil peddler? A demagogue? There may be grounds for skepticism, but this guy isn't providing them.

82 results fo Social Media Marketing at Microsoft jobs

https://www.linkedin.com/job/q-social-media-marketing-c-microsoft-jobs

Social advertising has become a staple of the media mix as marketers look to leverage their campaigns to drive valuable word of mouth and influence. Microsoft Advertising has helped some of the world’s biggest brands tell their stories

http://advertising.microsoft.com/en-us/social-media

Case Study: How Does Microsoft Do Social Media Marketing?

http://socialmediatoday.com/index.php?q=SMC/200414

Starbucks, Microsoft are mighty in social-media marketing

And let’s not forget: Social media are free to use. That saves Microsoft some money in getting out its targeted marketing messages. Though the social-engagement report found a correlation between social marketing and a company’s financial performance, it was not definitively a causal relationship.

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2009/10/12/starbucks-microsoft-mighty-in-social-media-marketing/

Communication –Blogs, discussions groups, and Twitter were used to provide continuing updates to the company’s followers during the development process for Windows 7. By providing frequent updates, Microsoft was able to build hype for Windows 7 among technology innovators. By increasing excitement of the innovators segment, Microsoft was able to encourage this segment act as brand ambassadors, willing to use their own social networks to pitch Windows 7 to early adopters.

http://suite101.com/article/social-media-marketing-strategies-a220285

"Welfare fraud has become an obvious scandal"

Please cite your sources.

I find pages like this: http://voiceofsandiego.org/2010/11/10/fact-check-the-frequency-of-welfare-fraud/

Where actual investigation, statistically significant, relevant, and specific, make it clear that welfare fraud is over-reported. I hear anecdotes about welfare fraud, but I have yet to see reputable, statistically significant sources listed.

I have a strong suspicion that you, like cayenne8 before you, are simply stereotyping, falling into the same type of ignorance, bigotry, and hatred that continues to keep "them" from having the same opportunities you've had.

I would like to point out that you made no mention of mental health or education in your argument, perhaps you'd like to comment on literally the first result that comes up in a Google search: http://suite101.com/article/suburb-vs-urban-areas-an-educational-comparison-a154719 I know you prefer hand-waving dismissal of facts, but you may want to work harder at passing off your opinion as fact.

And you too, look again, epigenetic allow the transmission of *acquired* traits. /* anon since I modded this thread */

Mod parent up.

Pearl Harbor was bait. Major "oops" that the Japs used shallow-running torpedoes thus making a bigger mess, but hubris is a bitch. The British figured out how to plink ships in shallow harbors:

http://suite101.com/article/the-battle-of-taranto---inspiration-for-pearl-harbour-a307392

Hard to say, really. They may still be out there, or they may have been rounded up and (mostly) buried when the region was converted to Christianity back in the 16th-17th century or so. Probably a bit of both, considering that scientists are still stumbling across the things.

Hell, for all we know, they may have suffered the same fate as all too many Egyptian mummies, which were used as literal firewood and train boiler fuel, among other things.

Like being ground up for medicine?

Hard to say, really. They may still be out there, or they may have been rounded up and (mostly) buried when the region was converted to Christianity back in the 16th-17th century or so. Probably a bit of both, considering that scientists are still stumbling across the things.

Hell, for all we know, they may have suffered the same fate as all too many Egyptian mummies, which were used as literal firewood and train boiler fuel, among other things.

already have them http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/wec.shtml

And, as with so many of these technological "breakthroughs" we see today, Telsa beat them to the punch, a century ago.

Uh, no. If you're going to be a grammar Nazi, at least get it right.

He/Him - the original poster is correct.

That/Who - either are acceptable in this context, and it has no relationship to the he/him decision.

Don't forget that, when considering the extra mining and transportation of rare earth metals required to build a hybrid car, its overall environmental impact might not be any better than a conventional gasoline engine. My choice would be to buy a gasoline powered car with 50% improved efficiency over hybrid--at least until battery technology (and China's environmental policies!) improve.

By a VW (or any other brand) with the TDI diesel and you get that improved efficiency today. While people were buying their hybrid hoping to get 50mpg in their Prius, I was happily driving along at a measly 47mpg with my VW. Plus, I got better performance and the car cost less to purchase.

Don't forget that, when considering the extra mining and transportation of rare earth metals required to build a hybrid car, its overall environmental impact might not be any better than a conventional gasoline engine. My choice would be to buy a gasoline powered car with 50% improved efficiency over hybrid--at least until battery technology (and China's environmental policies!) improve.

only that this study was far from conclusive.

Fine, this study was not conclusive. How about we add in this study (2008), the same comment from the Mayo Clinic, this study (2012) or this one (2012).

They all say the same thing: getting dirty as a kid and growing up in a rural environment reduces ones vulnerabilities to infections and afflictions. It's called the hygiene hypothesis and makes perfect sense when the evidence is examined.

People, particularly kids, who grow in more sterile environments (constantly using hand sanitizers, over using antibiotics, keeping everything spotless) on the whole, have more allergies and other issues than those who don't go OCD or, if you prefer, Monk.

Not sure how much more evidence you need when it's staring you in the face.

The US poor person has healthier food, more comfortable lodgings and much better health by almost any measure than the wealthiest king 200 years ago.

The only one of those that may be plausible may be better healthcare. I don't see many poor people living in something like the Palace of Versaille or eating as voraciously as Louis XIV

I'm completely unbiased on the male vs female front

Well that's a pretty strong claim. On what do you base that?

You probably don't discriminate on purpose, but according t studies our impression of a person varies based on factors that we are not consciously aware of.

If makeup can make a woman look more trustworthy, and tall people earn more that short people, I'd say that people can hold biases that they're themselves unaware of. Some may be biological rather than cultural. Men have been shown to take different economic choices after being shown a photograph of an attractive women.

Given all that I wonder if you can state confidently that you're unbiased on something as ingrained in both our culture and nature as the issue of gender without actually having performed a blind test.

"Republic" means a form of government that is controlled by its subjects. In other words, it's pretty much synonymous with democracy.

- be specific. It's a representative democracy, which is an attempt to prevent mobocracy, which always leads to tyranny.

Examples are plenty, if you are American, you are living in one. But as I said, I am not reinventing a bicycle here.

Of-course unlike all other Republics before it, USA is quite unique in the artificial way that it started its existence. Roman Republic was created on the ruins of the overthrown monarchy, and it ended with Caesar, Sulla and later Pompey - dictators.

It takes a bit of time, but it looks like all republics turn into democracies and then dictatorships.

The height of economic development is achieved during the time the nation is a republic, then of-course, as the nation is very rich BECAUSE it is so free as a republic, that it develops huge appetite for various government programs - too many people are not actually producing anything of value, but they want their bread and circuses, and the politicos deliver.

Of-course this stuff doesn't come from vacuum, it's stolen from those, who actually produce, and it's given away to the mob (but probably mostly to preferred contractors in form of wars - military contracts), and the democracy lives this way until it exhausts the riches acquired by the republic.

Then, as the society collapses because the wealth is inevitably squandered, and the gov't inflates money because it can't really steal anything from anybody anymore, the people 'elect' a dictator (or one comes to power somehow), and that's the unfortunate cycle that gets repeated over and over.

You are right, I am NOT keen on democracy. USA had it correct - it wasn't built as a democracy, it was built as a republic. Democracy always leads to tyranny, not to freedom.

It's very easy to have a majority to vote to trump the freedoms of the minority, and this eventually trumps freedoms of everybody, because it destroys the concept of freedom and gives tools to the government officials that they didn't have before that they use to take away freedoms from everybody.

But in the beginning the majority of the mob is used to steal these freedoms from the minority in order to open this door, at first it's done by promising the majority to use government force to steal something from the minority and give it to the majority.

Government is used as a legalised robbery mechanism, that's how the majority of the people in USA for example (over 50%) only contribute 3% of all income taxes, and minority contributes the rest.

Same with all other 'social' programs, including Medicare, SS, whatever. But this is just a gateway for the government to steal freedoms from everybody and apply this power against everybody (TSA, DHS, Patriot Act, NDAA with indefinite detentions, extrajudicial murder by the POTUS, destruction of money by the Fed, etc.)

I am NOT AT ALL keen on democracy, democracy never leads to more freedoms, only to tyranny, people knew this millennia ago.

Look:
It is a verifiable fact that the U.S. government broke every single treaty they made with the natives.

It is a verifiable fact that European transplants intentionally seeded the native population with disease to exterminate them.

Estimates place the number of Native Americans killed by European invaders anywhere between 1.8 and 100 million.

There's even a Wikipedia entry for the North American Genocide.

You can continue to deny what's in front of your face all you like, just know what sort of company you keep when you do so.

I have never heard of anyone getting sued for copyright infringement by making original content.

http://dominic-von-riedemann.suite101.com/fansubs-2--the-empires-strike-back-a6755

Although I guess some people would not consider subtitle information to be original content -- even though someone has to sit down and translate, enter timing information, positioning information, font information, cultural notes, etc. Or maybe creating work based on what other people have done is not original?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_based_on_novels

None sense.
a kWh is just kilowatts scaled to hours rather than seconds -> i.e. 1 kWh = requires a 3,600 kW power source
i.e.
A power source with 3,600kW of potential energy can provide 3,600 Joules for 1 second, or 1 Joule for an hour.

http://paul-a-heckert.suite101.com/energy-and-power-in-physics-a49740

It is unclear if he is quoting 1kW "potential energy" for $150 (which could be provided by a small gas cylinder for a few cents) or is not quoting any capacities - in which case all the numbers are completely meaningless.

if its "1kW sustained for 2 years" (quoted earlier in the thread, but can't say i've seen it myself), then there is going to be a hulluva lot of really shitty toxic radioactive waste from all the loose neutrinos making any material they touch radioactive.

Riiight, and Windows is built upon DOS to this very day and all the drivers are VXDs with .ini files for configs...get real!

To be fair what the ReactOS guys want to accomplish, to have a Linux that can actually run Windows drivers AND programs without hoop jumping, is ambitious to say the least. Personally I don't see how they'll do it without the Windows source code to look at but I wish them luck.

As for TFA, how do you say "fuck the dissident loving pigs" in Russian? or has everyone already forgot that MSFT SEVERELY pissed off the Russian government by giving dissidents free Windows licenses thus taking away the Russian governments excuse de jure of "stopping pirates" in dissident groups by kicking in doors and seizing equipment

So I have NO doubt the Russian president might want to fund ReactOS, it would give him a way to flip the bird that MSFT gave to them by helping dissidents right back at MSFT by eliminating Windows or even possibly banning it outright in Russia without forcing their businesses to start over from scratch.

Um, okay. Let's look at the results:

1) A link to a school policy explaining teachers' responsibilities with respect to student fights.
2) A story about a family criticizing a teacher for NOT breaking up a fight.
3) A teacher being sued by an adult university student for injuring her while breaking up a fight.
4) A dupe of #2.
5) And another.
6) An article about teachers being urged to tolerate swearing (has a comment near the bottom by someone claiming to have been sued for breaking up a fight; no details provided).
7) Information about avoiding being sued while working.
8) Video of a teacher breaking up a fight and some random anonymous commentary in which someone speculates that the teacher will get sued.
9) A teacher does nothing while an impromptu boxing match occurs in the classroom.
10) A teacher suffers a miscarriage from breaking up a fight. Again, some random commenter speculates that she risked getting sued by breaking up the fight.

I'm seeing lots of claims of these lawsuits. Not a whole heck of a lot to back up those claims. The only actual lawsuit involving the breakup of a fight was the one where the student, an adult, was allegedly injured. The teacher/student factor is irrelevant in that case. If an adult injures another adult, a lawsuit is a real possibility.

I'm sorry, but you're full of it. My argument is that I don't have any way of knowing who it is that's writing a particular entry in an encyclopedia therefore it's a higher requirement for the Wikipedia to have to do that. Those long standing encyclopedias aren't necessarily any more accurate than the wikipedia is ultimately.

And as far as accuracy goes, How accurate is wikipedia? it's hardly the sort of incompetent mush you're suggesting it is.

China would not collapse if they lost 30% of their export revenue.

Top Countries China Exports To

        United States = $162.9 (+30%)
        Hong Kong = $124.5 (+23%)
        Japan = $84 (+14%)
        South Korea = $35.1 (+26%)
        Germany = $32.5 (+37%)
        Netherlands = $25.9 (+40%)
        United Kingdom = $19 (+27%)
        Singapore = $16.6 (+31%)
        Taiwan = $16.6 (+22%)
        Russia = $13.2 (+45%)

Read more at Suite101: China's Top Trading Partners: Chinese Exports & Imports Soar | Suite101.com http://www.suite101.com/content/chinas-top-trading-partners-a3413#ixzz1NGeCLk7X

I do not trust the government to tell the truth on matters this large. While I doubt bin Laden is alive, I doubt the official version of his death even more.

Let's see..... the US Government announces he is dead:

Obama Announces Death of Osama bin Laden

The terrorist organization he headed announces he is dead:

Text: Al Qaeda statement confirming bin Laden's death

The regional troublemaker with a strong intelligence agency and an avowed enemy of the US announces he was dead before the operation:

Iran's intelligence chief says bin Laden died long before the 'alleged raid'

Family members denounce his death:

My father's death was criminal and I may sue the U.S.: Bin Laden's son slams Al Qaeda leader's killing

The locals are protesting his death:

Pakistani tribesmen protest

At this point, I think anyone doubting Bin Laden's death is about ready to star in their own personal Truman Show, and doesn't really need more news or photographs.... maybe a shrink or philosopher. Cogito ergo Bin Laden moritur.

The looney bin is getting crowded. Sanity: step 1, step 2....

the PLAYSTATION3 *does* have the web [...] What say you now?

I've heard it's rubbish, even compared to the Android browser that runs on less RAM. Does the PS3 web browser support even the 2D canvas? And how does it expose button presses on the controllers as events? Google failed me somehow.

http://www.suite101.com/content/the-april-fish-a13685

You might remember that from this movie.

Yes... Viagra
Viagra was discovered in much the same way... And where would we be today if did not have our Viagra spam messages?

According to:

http://www.suite101.com/content/the-discovery-of-viagra-a27733

Excerpt:
In the late 1980s, a Pfizer research group were looking for a compound which would treat hypertension. They were working on a method to enhance the activity of a compound called "atrial natriuretic peptide" (ANP). This compound was a natural diuretic, causing the kidneys to produce more urine, but it also relaxed blood vessel walls. So a drug which enhanced this activity would reduce high blood pressure.

For several different reasons, the compound was almost binned, but one side comment in some of the trials was that after four or five days of taking the drug, penile erections were observed. This attracted the attention of some of the Pfizer scientists who realized that the inhibition of the activity of PDE-5 was overcoming a proposed cause of erectile dysfunction.

Paris is not the first city to implement such a ban on "gas guzzlers", many German cities already do this.

Just the first couple of hits on Google:

http://www.suite101.com/content/more-evidence-of-light-pollution-harm-to-animals-a89082
http://www.urbanwildlands.org/abstracts.html
http://www.britastro.org/dark-skies/wildlife.html
http://calgary.rasc.ca/lp/animals.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pollution

Your right, the west should be quick to judge the foreign cultures we have little personal experience of and take the moral high ground; After all acts like the crippling economic sanctions imposed on Iraq by the UN after bombing their country into the stone age only caused an estimated million civilian casualties of which an estimated 500,000+ were children.

But how can the Chinese live with themselves, not allowing children under the age of 18 to visit Internet cafe's? It is much more important we quietly sweep our acts of indirect genocide under the mat then and focus on the real moral issue here, these backward evil nations that resist us putting a Starbucks and MacDonald's on every street corner.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1719267/pdf/v088p00092b.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_sanctions#Effect_of_the_sanctions_on_the_Iraqi_people

http://www.suite101.com/content/children-as-casualties-of-war-a176530

I believe you are misinformed. The US continues to be the worlds largest manufacturer, measured by value of goods produced. http://www.suite101.com/content/the-good-and-bad-of-american-manufacturing-a212189/

The US makes about 20% of the world's goods, which is about 12% of US economic output.

We make goods in the US. We just don't employ people to make the goods. It has long been a principle of our economic system that producing more goods with fewer people means more goods for everybody.

I share your concern for the increasing number of Americans who are economic outsiders. But the problem is not that we don't make stuff, or that the people who make stuff here aren't well compensated, or that the people who make stuff here can't compete with cheap overseas labor.

I do not think this argument is valid... the school management has 5-6 years to fire a new teacher for nearly any reason. If they can't determine that the teacher is bad in 5 years and grant tenure anyway something is seriously broken in the system. As I see it a more significant problem is that principals rotate in an out ever 2-3 years at most middle/high schools. The turnover in education staff both at the management level as well as the classroom level continues to grow.

1/3 of teachers quit in the first three years.
1/2 quit in the first 5 years.


So maybe it's the never ending wave of new teachers who are bad teachers, cycling in and out. I do not have any statistics for it, but I know it takes awhile to become a master teacher. Being a master of your subject, great showman, and able to effectively manage bureaucracy must be difficult. I suspect a good way to test this would be to get a job as a substitute teacher for a month.

Potentially, there could have been some albedo change that affected the ice melt. However, the prevailing winds from Iceland (jet stream) were to the east, while Greenland is to the west. That's why Europe was so badly affected. On the subject of volcanic eruptions, however, their effect is much more short-term than AGW, but generally the net effect is cooling, not warming. For a recent historical example, do a search on "The Year Without a Summer" Caused by the 1815 Eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, the next year saw the start of a "mini ice age". The northeastern US had snow and frozen lakes in July (prompting a massive move toward the west). Europe suffered extensive crop failures and public unrest due to the cold weather. The cooling is caused by ash in the atmosphere that reflects sunlight, or more seriously, but sulfur that is blasted into the upper atmosphere where it reacts with ozone. The resulting sulfur dioxide causes the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight and causes this cooling. The effect took 50 years or more to subside in the 1815 example. Read more at Suite101: The Year Without a Summer 1816: Caused by the 1815 Eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia http://www.suite101.com/content/the-year-without-a-summer-1816-a54675#ixzz1BsG44VRD A number of people have suggested injecting sulfur into the upper atmosphere to combat AGW, but this "BandAid" fix could have completely unpredictable results, especially with regards to the ozone layer. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125789622

Hah stupid foreigners you ain't seen nothing yet - don't fuck with us! You've been warned!

Wrong again.
http://www.thisnation.com/question/011.html
http://www.suite101.com/content/is-the-united-states-a-democracy-a175274

While James Madison did coin the term Representative Democracy, nothing in the Constitution define the United States as anything but a republic.

"and to the REPUBLIC, for which it stands..." isn't purely by accident. Nor is the appearance of "every State in this Union a Republican form of Government" in article IV of the Constitution.

Yes, they will die from hunger, poor sanitation, wars (civil or otherwise) all of which are going to be made worse by climate change. The World Health Organization already attributes 150,000 deaths annually to the effects of climate change.

Climate change is widely expected to hit the poorest people hardest.

I think you need to consider the effect of making all those factors worse.

That's a problem. I'm quite willing to drop MasterCard is there's a good alternative. The main requirement is that it needs to be accepted by all web shops. So that restricts my options to PayPal, Visa and MasterCard, I think.

Besides PayPal there are other micro-payment services. They are getting to be popular with photographers, with a smartphone such as the iPhone photographers can make a sell virtually anywhere. Of course Wikileaks would have to be signed up with them.

Falcon

Well if you don't want to donate your body to medical science...

The Japanese have come up with some ideas:
http://www.pri.org/world/asia/japan-high-tech-graveyard-in-sky1680.html

Others are taking the family heirloom idea to another level:
http://www.lifegem.com/

Many others prefer sea burials:
http://www.suite101.com/content/burial-at-sea---funeral-choices-for-an-ocean-grave-a305707

Others are taking a sea burial more literally and discovering a way to preserve full body burial without using up more land:
http://www.nmreef.com/memorial+reef.18.lasso

And still others are making records out of corpses:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-08/27/and-vinyly

And the point of burying a body is based on religion, culture and tradition. There are countless points and reasons for burying a body, some we would consider good reasons, others we would consider superstition and/or ridiculous. You obviously lump most of funeral tradition in this second catagory. Personally, I don't have many memories of my grandfather, but I still go to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery to visit him. I like the solitude and cold contemplative beauty of cemeteries, I also like reading gravestones and imagining the lives behind those names and quotes.

But just because I like them, doesn't mean that I believe cemeteries are a sustainable method of burial or corpse disposal. But as my links point out, this is being addressed in many, many different ways. Cremation is becoming more popular, but something about creating a product out of my body after I die appeals to me. Personally I want to use my ashes in making whiskey for all my friends and relatives.

What about you?

The phone is a flop as expected from the Janey Come Lately, no surprise there....

but the BIG success is the AD...

Few ads generate as much talk about the ad over the product than this...

Two segments in particular are generating a lot of posts on web sites... thats the Mystery Woman in the Black Lingerie...

http://www.suite101.com/content/the-windows-7-phone-commercial-and-a-lingerie-clad-woman-a303721

Two segments which probably total 10 seconds and this woman can now cash in.... she is probably the hotest thing out there right now.

For me the theres a third segment with the redheaded bride.. but I prefer redheads. Both would be full time distractions over some stupid phone.... but unfortunately I see alot of people like that, just another reason why I don't have a smart phone.

The ad is a great hit, spot on to the lusers of the crackberry, but the disease is present on all the similar phones users.

A+ Marketing, F- phone, F- OS

This is not the phone you want! Android!

True. According to this article, there are a few more authors who have beaten our Dick.

The article lists:

0. Bible/Homer/Shakespeare/Dickens
1. Stephen King
2. W. Somerset Maugham
3. Ernest Hemingway
and possibly, depending on the current count
4. John Grisham

Ian Fleming seems to be missing from that list, and I suspect others as well.

I sincerely doubt that, as no decent programmer should be doing work for less than 50 bucks an hour. Which is around 100k a year before taxes.

Wow. I hate replying to AC's but this is just idiotic and arrogant...

http://www.worldsalaries.org/computerprogrammer.shtml
http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=Programmer&l1=United+States
http://www.suite101.com/content/computer-programming-career-information-and-wage-expectations-a247160

All of these vary somewhat on what they report incomes to be but they all solidly put the vast majority of programmers short of 6 figure incomes. I'm more than confident that there are a LOT of competent programmers out there making making less than 100,000/year.

If you are getting paid less, it is either because of the industry you are in is surfeit with programmers or you are not specialized enough.

The vast majority of programmers make less. I'm sure some of them are incompetent. And some of them are inexperienced. But there are a lot of experienced competent programmers making less than 6 figures.

As TFA states, soldiers have used bioluminescent creatures in battle for centuries. One of the first military submarines, the Turtle , used foxfire (a bioluminescent fungus) to light the controls for the operator during the US revolutionary war.

This isn't that the market for candles disappeared but rather the government banned candles.

The candle you buy today isn't the candle you could buy ten years ago.

Lead wicks in candles were banned in 2001:

Granting a petition filed by Public Citizen, the National Apartment Association, and the National Multi Housing Council, the Consumer Product Safety Commission noted that some candles containing lead-core wicks can release more than 2,200 micrograms of lead per hour. This amount is about five times the amount of lead required to cause elevated lead blood levels in children, and a hazard to children exists when they are exposed to more than 440 micrograms per hour. Lead Wicks in Candles Banned

In response to increased reports of candle fires, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) [in 1997] asked the National Candle Association to spearhead an ASTM subcommittee to develop consensus standards for improving candle fire safety.
The result was the ASTM Subcommittee on Candle Products, which includes members of the NCA, the CPSC, fire officials, safety organizations and other interested parties.
To date, six ASTM candle standards have been published, two of which are reference standards. http://www.candles.org/industry.html" a>ASTM Standards For Candles

Here in the US they've coined a term for the PC way of going about sex: Enthusiastic Consent. It is an outgrowth of the PC version of "No means No!" from the 1980's. In the 80's in the US they counseled college kids that they had get permission at each step of the way. They actually had role-playing seminars where you'd ask "is it OK if I touch you here?" "Is it OK if I kiss you there?" You really got the feeling that these people had never had a real sexual encounter in their lives, and wanted to make sure that nobody else did either.

From the women's rights site on Enthusiastic Consent:

Under this model, the person initiating contact is required to take account of and not exploit a relationship, the other person's intoxicated state, or the power of peer pressure or social conditioning.

So this has morphed into an "anything can be considered rape" model, where even getting an affirmative "yes" to each of these questions is not enough. The "yes" has to be truly enthusiastic to count. So telling a girl that you love her and want to have sex with her is rape - because you are exploiting your relationship. Have a couple of drinks together? Rape. Tell her "it's Ok, everybody does it?" Rape. Know somebody who lives in a society that is OK with casual sexual encounters? Ooops, that might be social conditioning - better not try to hook up. 'Cause that's rape.

As anyone who frequents /. knows, the power of PC thinking is pervasive. It is like fight club - you cannot discuss PC, because discussing PC means that you are not PC - and therefore are evil. So even linking to source material that written by PC people and espouses their PC beliefs requires an AC posting - lest ye be branded un-PC and evil! So yeah, I agree with you: rape does seem to be all about power - of the feminist kind.

It failed because creating zombies is a lot of work. It's definitely real, and it involves basically poisoning a person and damaging the brain so as to remove most of the thinking part. Basically leaving you with a mindless human to use as a slave. The other problem is that having damaged the brain you're left with something that doesn't really think and is easily out witted by even the dimmest grade school child.

Zombies, Voodoo and Tetrodotoxin: The Truth Behind the Myth

Wow, a few seconds on google and I found something that contradicts your statement about camber.

  The amounts of camber gain varies from car to car, team to team and even by the engineer’s philosophy on suspension set-up.

and

  Pushing the bodywork down (such as when the wings develop down-force) compresses the suspension, and if the car has a camber gain curve, the camber angle will increase. This change in camber may be desirable during high speed cornering

Found this here.

Since your such the expert perhaps you would care to summarize the article for us?

The equation to find the proper turning angle for the Steering Axis Inclination is a nasty fifth order differential equation which IIRC, was really only solvable for a fixed angle if you have round tire, (which if you have a three wheeled solar car with motorcycle tires on it isn't such a bad assumption, the college project of a friend that introduced me to the problem.)

  If you have flat tires and want the vehicle to handle well across a large range of speeds my memory is you have two curves in your answer one to keep the tire "flat" or a maintain maximum tire contact with the tarmac, and one curve varying the angle based on the vehicle speed. IIRC (it has been almost twenty years since I worked any of the math) with round tires the vehicle tends to handle very close to ideal within twenty miles per hour plus or minus the speed you are dialed into. I seem to recall that the math for the Included angle and the scrub radius were a little less hairy but still not something you really wanted to do if you were not looking for really challenging math problems that may or may not be solvable.

Being as the problem may or may not be solvable for a specific weight, size, and speed of vehicle, I would guess that engineers tend to solve for one or two factors that they believe are key and let the other factors be sort of close, I did not worry about keeping the tires flat on the solar car that my friend was building, I can see that keeping the tire flat could greatly improve cornering at > 1G and might make grip more important than responsiveness. If you cannot solve the problem, you have to guess at what is most important, and I just assumed that seventh order differentials are unsolvable, which is the minimum you have if you include spoiler (down force) effects and tire deformation as variables. The answers should be pretty close, but I suspect on some race courses the small differences with the different solutions cause real differences.

Again this is a foggy recollection of what I did in the '90's, but should give an idea of the reasons for the different angles, even though it looks like there is a "correct answer"

Wow, a few seconds on google and I found something that contradicts your statement about camber.

The amounts of camber gain varies from car to car, team to team and even by the engineer’s philosophy on suspension set-up.

and

Pushing the bodywork down (such as when the wings develop down-force) compresses the suspension, and if the car has a camber gain curve, the camber angle will increase. This change in camber may be desirable during high speed cornering

Found this here.

Since your such the expert perhaps you would care to summarize the article for us?

As far back as the Franklin Roosevelt administration, in 1933, when it looked for a minute like the US government might actually start putting people ahead of corporate interests, a group of men, owners of some of our largest industries, including the grandfather of George W. Bush plotted to over throw and replace him with a pro-corporate Fascist regime.

Except FRD and Benito Mussolini copied each other. Some question whether FDR's New Deal was Based on Fascism. Il Duce wrote FDR with appreciation and congradulated him for winning his 1932 election.

Falcon

Microsoft looks to have come up with a Rube Goldberg version of Pentax' elegant "Shake Reduction" SR system that's been in their DSLR bodies for years.

http://photography.suite101.com/article.cfm/pentax_dslr_shake_reduction