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What is your point? That it's ok for Iran to lie and get nuclear weapons because the US did bad stuff?

Whether you hate America or Iran is beside the point. Nuclear proliferation in the middle east is guaranteed now. Saudi Arabia is preparing to acquire nuclear weapons. Anyone who opposed nuclear proliferation would oppose this deal.

On the other hand, if you think it's a good idea for most of the countries in the middle east to have nuclear weapons, then you should support this deal.

I will use the NRA argument here - We would all be safest if everyone has nuclear weapons! Nuclear weapons don't kill people, people kill people!

What could possibly go wrong?

You mean this photograph that was shopped to include the mythical tat?

That's weak trolling even for /.

What is your point? That it's ok for Iran to lie and get nuclear weapons because the US did bad stuff?

Whether you hate America or Iran is beside the point. Nuclear proliferation in the middle east is guaranteed now. Saudi Arabia is preparing to acquire nuclear weapons. Anyone who opposed nuclear proliferation would oppose this deal.

On the other hand, if you think it's a good idea for most of the countries in the middle east to have nuclear weapons, then you should support this deal.

The only important reason it failed is because it was incredibly impractical and expensive to operate. Yes it was a marvel and all that, but you couldn't make money off it.

My understanding is that Concorde's unprofitability was mostly myth. There were problems in the beginning because fear-mongering in the States left only JFK as a destination, but once things settled and the ticket prices were reset to ultra-high class, things settled out just fine.

Had the Concorde really not been profitable, it would have been terminated long before the crash over Paris. That's just how business works. The problem was simply that the planes were aging, no replacement models were being made, and the operators were left to scavenging parts from other Concordes. With the Paris disaster, they had more expenses reinforcing the fuel tanks to try and prevent the disaster from occurring again. These things ultimately tipped the scales to grounding the program.

But is there a demand for crossing the Atlantic in 3 hours? Is there demand to cross the Pacific in 5 or less? Hell yes. If they build it, people will pay the ticket price (and enjoy the view of the curvature of the Earth through the window).

The reactors you're currently familiar with were _designed_ to have the 'radioactive waste' problem - it's what makes them useful for manufacturing atom bombs. Thorium reactors don't have that problem.

Thorium reactors have been around nearly as long as Uranium reactors. One operated for 20 years in the USA from the 1950s to the 1970s. The only reason they were never fully developed was political, not technical (they needed those bombs!):

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

FWIW, we could have got them working and be running the county on unlimited, safe energy for much less than (eg.) the cost of the F35 program. If there was any political willpower.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fin...

Jar Jar Binks rolling, ungrammatical voice sounded like a caricature of a beach living, laid back, ganja smoking Jamaican. And yes, the parody was so horrible that it made me think of the remnants of the last of hte "blackface" shows and minstrel performances from when I was very young.

                              http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fil...

However, Western birth rates are at least close to replacement level, so I don't see any reason to worry at this point.

You must be joking! Much of Europe is in similar straits as Italy:

Italy is a dying country as babies no longer replace people who die, says health minister

The native Europeans are in precipitous decline, and the immigrants they bring in are hostile to European values. The problem is even worse among the children of immigrants. Europe is heading towards civil war, and traditional European values will go by the wayside.

Mod up. Please.

Like this

Or this

Or this

Of course it sounds insane, I'm only reporting the world as it is: fallen, and corrupt.

Now They Want to Euthanize Children

FIRST, Dutch euthanasia advocates said that patient killing will be limited to the competent, terminally ill who ask for it. Then, when doctors began euthanizing patients who clearly were not terminally ill, sweat not, they soothed: medicalized killing will be limited to competent people with incurable illnesses or disabilities. Then, when doctors began killing patients who were depressed but not physically ill, not to worry, they told us: only competent depressed people whose desire to commit suicide is "rational" will have their deaths facilitated. Then, when doctors began killing incompetent people, such as those with Alzheimer's, it's all under control, they crooned: non-voluntary killing will be limited to patients who would have asked for it if they were competent.

And now they want to euthanize children.

In the Netherlands, Groningen University Hospital has decided its doctors will euthanize children under the age of 12, if doctors believe their suffering is intolerable or if they have an incurable illness. But what does that mean? In many cases, as occurs now with adults, it will become an excuse not to provide proper pain control for children who are dying of potentially agonizing maladies such as cancer, and doing away with them instead. As for those deemed "incurable"--this term is merely a euphemism for killing babies and children who are seriously disabled.

For anyone paying attention to the continuing collapse of medical ethics in the Netherlands, this isn't at all shocking. Dutch doctors have been surreptitiously engaging in eugenic euthanasia of disabled babies for years, although it technically is illegal, since infants can't consent to be killed. Indeed, a disturbing 1997 study published in the British medical journal, the Lancet, revealed how deeply pediatric euthanasia has already metastasized into Dutch neo natal medical practice: According to the report, doctors were killing approximately 8 percent of all infants who died each year in the Netherlands. That amounts to approximately 80-90 per year. Of these, one-third would have lived more than a month. At least 10-15 of these killings involved infants who did not require life-sustaining treatment to stay alive. The study found that a shocking 45 percent of neo-natologists and 31 percent of pediatricians who responded to questionnaires had killed infants.

It took the Dutch almost 30 years for their medical practices to fall to the point that Dutch doctors are able to engage in the kind of euthanasia activities that got some German doctors hanged after Nuremberg. ...

Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say

The authors therefore concluded that “what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled”.

After-Birth Abortion - The pro-choice case for infanticide.

No, I didn’t make this up. “Partial-birth abortion” is a term invented by pro-lifers. But “after-birth abortion” is a term invented by two philosophers, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva. In the Journal of Medical Ethics, they propose ....

2. Prior to personhood, human life has no moral claims on us. I’ve seen this position asserted in countless comment threads by supporters of abortion rights. Giubilini and Minerva add only one further premise t

Furthermore they haven't even really hit their stride in quite a few less mature markets like China.

Indications are, Apple won't be selling many more 'luxury class' personal electronics to China at all.

Oh, and while looking up that link about China, I noticed that today, Apple lost $69B in value. Ouch!

Not really. Varoufakis was substituted with a Syriza's hard liner, not by some random moderate guy. Very polite, but a proud Marxist, some even say a mild eurosceptic:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fin...

Finally, the best deal for Greece might be no-deal at all. By staying in the eurozone, not defaulting, and doing the neoliberal "reforms", Greece lost 25% of its GDP in 5 years. Argentina defaulted on its debts in 2001, removed the peg of the peso to the dollar, and 5 years later it was in the middle of a massive economic boom, also fueled by a dirigist and keynesian economic policy, exactly the opposite of what the troika usually recommends.

Are you sure? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

Yes. From your link - " he had spent much of his life battling alcoholism, drug abuse and depression". So, yeah, he may have been depressed and poor when he died, but he was battling depression all along even when he was worth 75 million pounds. There were many times in his life when he was both rich and depressed.

Are you sure? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

"You mean an oil spill which was the result of engineering, judgement and training errors of the operators and had absolutely nothing to do with time pressures"

Uhhh... nope.

I'm talking about oil spills that even the government comission in charge said that were due to cost-cutting malpractices, i.e. "Whether purposeful or not, many of the decisions that BP, Halliburton, and Transocean made that increased the risk of the Macondo blowout clearly saved those companies significant time (and money)": http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fin.... While the report itself can't be so clear-cut on that, it's very easy to read between lines that conflicting interests (time and money versus security) just as stated. http://ccrm.berkeley.edu/pdfs_...

"Or the nuclear power plant which survived the tsunami just fine [...] and only went under due to the engineering error of putting emergency power in the basement?"

Uhhh... nope again.

I'm talking about nuclear power plants that were positively known not to be properly maintained and where whistleblowers were systematically shut down because hearing them would cost money, i.e. "It is important to remember that in February 2011, shortly before the meltdowns, NISA extended the operating license of Fukushima Daiichi despite expressing reservations about a dubious maintenance record and eerily prescient concerns about stress cracks in the back-up diesel generators that left them vulnerable to inundation." or "Telltale warnings began accumulating over the decade prior to 3/11[...] In 2009 NISA and TEPCO discussed the possibility of a 9.2 meter tsunami based on new simulations and archaeological evidence, but NISA did not press TEPCO to take countermeasures. Clearly, there is no basis to TEPCO's claim that the scale of the 3/11 tsunami was inconceivable [...] In terms of tsunami-related risk management, it turns out that TEPCO and two other utilities actually lobbied the government's Earthquake Research Committee on March 3, 2011 to water down wording in a report warning that a massive tsunami could hit the Tohoku coast". http://www.japanfocus.org/-Jef...

"Please if you're going cite major disasters to support your case for management attempting to maximise profit at the expense of safety then at least cite some correct ones."

I did.

the military impose rules of engagement requiring positive ID of the bad guy before you shoot

What, you think we have to ID those journalists and harmless regular folks (kids no exception) before blasting 'em off the map? STOP THAT UN-AMERICAN TREASONOUS BULLSHIT.

I'm not going to argue with most of your points.

But the VTOL version is working: VTOL land test, VTOL sea test, and VTOL Ramp Test

From a Telegraph article:

In recent weeks nearly 100 Uber drivers have been attacked, sometimes while carrying customers. In one case, a taxi passenger was left with a broken face and black eye after he praised Uber.

Cabbies attacked the van of Julien Cinquin, a motorist at Porte Maillot, slashing his tyres and the rear window and throwing a banger in the back seat.

The taxi drivers have the right to protest peacefully. But to attack other people - no.

I've read some comments by French people, saying that they were ashamed and disgusted by the violent behavior of some of the strikers. I wonder if there's a way for French people to peacefully protest that kind of behavior. Maybe they can use taxis only when there is no other means of transportation, until the taxi unions apologize for the violence, and remove from union membership any members who attacked anyone.

None of the stories I've seen put the figure at "dozens of millions of pounds". This article from The Telegraph puts the figure at £11.1 million. The article notes that £6.5m of that figure are "police officer pay costs that would be incurred in normal duties" and mentions overtime costs and "indirect" costs, tallying together to an additional £3.8m. Also, if the picture in the article shows a typical guard detail we see at least 4 uniformed officers, not 2.

We should also take into account those 4 officers are not engaged in regular beat policing but the very specific task of waiting for a very specific person to exit a specific location. There's also the very real possibility this is a politically-motivated policing detail with all the visibility and CYA costs that come with it.

The point may yet be valid but to a lesser degree and perhaps not at all just based on numbers. And with the other factors the Assange case may be so unusual that no meaningful comparison can be made.

(from a different anonymous coward)

Because RBS was run into the ground by *its own management* before the taxpayer bailed it out:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fin...

RBS, HSBC, several other big banks (around 20 that I know of / have worked at) have the same mainframes and suffer the same issues with IBMs incompetency.

Whoever modded my comment flamebait must work for IBM, did I hit a nerve for speaking the truth? I've had to deal with IBM on so many occasions directly at work and time and time again they've let us down.

RBS are building a new system, with IBM ironically, while other banks are trying to move away from them.

Perhaps what happens is that people in the Chair Force eventually realize that nobody has any idea if they are killing bad guys.

He was told that they were carrying rifles on their shoulders, but for all he knew, they were shepherd"s staffs. Still, the directive from somewhere above, a mysterious chain of command that led straight to his headset, was clear: confirmed weapons. ... As he watched the men walk, the one who had fallen behind seemed to hear something and broke into a run to catch up with the other two. Then, bright and silent as a camera flash, the screen lit up with white flame.

http://www.gq.com/news-politic...

In one episode that will fuel controversy about allegations of civilian casualties, he described monitoring a drone strike on a mud compound in Afghanistan and seeing the figure of what he was certain was a child just before it was struck by a Hellfire missile.

When he expressed those concerns to an intelligence observer overseeing the operation, the response came back: "Per the review, it's a dog." Bryant replayed the shot repeatedly on tape and said that he was certain it was a child, not a dog.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

Note -- it seems PTSD can arise from being a drone pilot, but also note, I have absolutely zero sympathy for the drone pilots. It's an incredibly small bit of karma for the horrific acts they've performed and is the least they deserve, and worse, probably most will never even get that.

1) Cigarettes - I completely agree with. Ban it or don't. Taxing something to oblivion to compensate for the harm being done by it is pure money-making on people's deaths.

2) Aside from the above (because it directly hurts others than the smoker themselves), what you stick in your gob-hole is up to you. Nothing speaks louder than paying a competitor because they have something not offered by others. But people don't. People are choosing to eat this stuff. And despite obesity epidemics, we simultaneously have anorexia epidemics and though - on average - we are getting bigger, that's mostly due to IGNORANCE or APATHY, not whatever is in the food. Anyone who cared would eat other things. Few people do.

4) Margarine's been around for over 150 years. The same 150 years where we've all lived longer than ever before. Note that this is, in general, true of almost all the things that health nuts abhor - salt was a major part of diets going back pre-Roman era. I'm not saying we shouldn't improve (we can't do everything the Romans did because it was "good enough for them"), but it's not the killer you make out unless you seriously abuse it. Or, again, are ignorant or apathetic of it.

3) Celebrity chefs are among the worst: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new... In preference to all that "artificial" stuff, they suggest you make meals just as bad, if not worse, than the processed foods you abhor.

Kids should learn to cook because kids should learn to cook. Cooking shouldn't consist of sticking a bag in a microwave. However, if you were to suggest that kids learn to cook by using their smartphone to follow a recipe, there's uproar because it's not how you learned to do it.

Newsflash: People no longer eat up a table, in general. People no longer use napkins on their laps, in general. People no longer sit down for several courses, in general. People no longer eat three square meals a day, in general. Because ALL of those thing are bollocks and unnecessary and the legacy of previous generations that invented them.

However, even back in the 60's / 70's you didn't have the sheer range and volume of food available to you. The cuisines and variety of foodstuffs are unbelievable nowadays. The Mediterranean diet is over in the US, the sushi bar is in London, etc.

But the one factor that's the same in all the above - people. People don't care what they eat. So you can either nanny perfectly competent, intelligent, grown adults (your suggestion), or you can let them kill themselves slowly - when they're going to live far longer than you will anyway.

You, and places like the FDA, etc. are on a loser. The second you ban one thing, the manufacturer's will whack up prices until they find another cheap thing they can get away with. And it'll take decades to ban again. And in the meantime, all you've done is made food more expensive.

There has to be controls, of course, but banning something like salt, sugar or fat is really such a dumb-arse suggestion. Put labels on it. Warn about it. Spread bad press about it. Let economic nature take it's course - when I was a kid, there was no Diet Coke, there was no gluten-free food, there was no "low-fat" yoghurt, there was no allergens clearly marked in bold, there was no nutritional information - those all came about through one manufacturer having to compete for a slightly-more-educated customer base than the others. The fact that 90% of that is absolute bollocks and has actually FUELLED thing like nut allergies is neither here nor there.

Wait a minute, that was France...

You don't say? What a "surprise" ....

The sordid truth about the oil-for-food scandal

... Far from seeking to protect their lucrative trade ties, the real explanation for the opposition of France and Russia to the war was that both countries' political establishments were deeply implicated in a lucrative scam to divert the profits of the UN's oil-for-food programme into their own private coffers.

From the moment the oil-for-food programme was introduced in 1996, Saddam concentrated all his energies on attempting to subvert it. The complex oil-for-food programme was introduced so that the profits from UN-supervised Iraqi oil sales would pay for essential healthcare supplies. The programme was conceived, it should be remembered, to counter the mounting effectiveness of the propaganda campaign of hard-Left activists such as George Galloway, the former Labour MP, who argued that the wide-ranging UN sanctions introduced following the Gulf war were responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqi children.

But as the ISG report clearly demonstrates, Saddam skilfully worked the system so that the profits were diverted to fund his regime rather than feed his people. An important element of this fraud was that a significant percentage of the funds was diverted to set up a voucher system that could be used to bribe a wide network of international politicians who could be counted upon to do Saddam's bidding.

Between them, France and Russia received 45 per cent of the vouchers, with China coming third. In late 2002 and early 2003, France, Russia and China led the anti-war movement at the UN. In France, the vouchers were given to a number of politicians with close links to Mr Chirac, while in Russia they were paid directly to Mr Putin's private office, providing him with his own ready-made slush fund.

Saddam's clever manipulation of the voucher system was a brilliant success: it not only caused a deep split within the security council, it helped him to make irrelevant the much-vaunted policy of containment that was supposed to prevent him from re-emerging as a dominant force the the Middle East. It also enabled him to fund illicit imports of weapons and the technology needed to resume production of weapons of mass destruction, which was his declared aim once the sanctions had been lifted.

By the way, what did the British government have to say about military action in Syria? Do you recall? Just in case you don't:

Cameron forced to rule out British attack on Syria after MPs reject motion

You should probably reexamine your ideas of virtue in regards to international relations. They don't seem to hold water. In fact they are probably dangerous.

Rather than windows, it's to have large digital wall displays that show the outside as if you had giant picture windows. This is the direction airplanes are looking to move in the future as well.

The difference with planes is that any camera attached to the capsule will still be inside the metallic tube and thus useless. They could show some unrelated video footage or a pre-recorded one of the trip however.

Rather than windows, it's to have large digital wall displays that show advertisements. This is the direction airplanes are looking to move in the future as well.

FTFY

1. All the diagrams give the impression that it will be like people flying through tubes as in Futurama. Instead you will be sealed inside a metallic "bullet", that runs in a metallic tube - no windows for you (sort of like James Bond in The Living Daylights).

Rather than windows, it's to have large digital wall displays that show the outside as if you had giant picture windows. This is the direction airplanes are looking to move in the future as well. Tests run by researchers have shown it to be well received by passengers.

It's a pity if you have any sort of claustrophobia.

The seats are actually quite roomy - check out the dimensions in the Hyperloop alpha document.

2. While the device doesn't run in a complete vacuum, it runs in an atmosphere that is low to the point of being unbreathable. But the device doesn't contain any onboard air supply

Yes, it does. Section 4.5.2. Same system as on an airplane.

3. There was no indication that the loop itself was anything more than a single tube.

It's two tubes, one for each direction. In the event of a long term outage, the one open tube can be periodically reversed to allow traffic in both directions, at a cost of throughput.

So if a device fails, all devices that are already in transit and behind it are screwed (see 2 above).

All capsules have mechanical braking systems and are spaced five minutes apart, automatically triggered in the event of an obstruction. They also all have powered wheels for low-speed travel. Section 3.5.2.

It'd be nice if you'd read the document before complaining about the concept.

I think that the proposed "rainbow gravity" (http://phys.org/news/2015-01-black-holes-space-theory.html) and the big bang theory are mutually exclusive

http://www.scientificamerican....
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

remember not so long ago when Russia deported a student because they suspected her of spying, and the ensuing diplomatic ruckus that caused? Sure, you do. She was supposedly researching early 20th Century history, but I can see that being turned into 21st Century military deployments and other locally-gathered coffeeshop intelligence...

Don't forget to fill out that Donor Card

Wow, long-time Slashdotter doesn't update their profile in years and makes a number of comments in a thread - conspiracy details at 11! Did you bother to stop and check what Cursor.org actually was? It's was a minneapolis-based progressive (read: generally anti free trade) news aggregator. Hint: I'm opposed to TPP, at least in its current form.

Again, I'll ask, where do I get my paycheck? ;) Here? ;)

"Apple bashing"? How inarticulate and ultimately blindly supportive of a known repeat bad actor to keep their customers from controlling the iThings they buy. It's hardly far-fetched to see how the company receives bad press. They've made an ugly history for themselves rife with mistreating workers, users, and harming the environment. They found they could get away with non-freedom in software also exploits app developers "mercilessly" as Richard Stallman put it on his reasons why one shouldn't do business with Apple. Apple also uses digital restrictions management on eBooks which is set up so that those eBooks won't work on jailbroken iThings, stuck users with a U2 album and made it hard to delete, censors bitcoin apps for iThings, deauthorized a Wikileaks access application, banned an erotic novel from iTunes because of its cover, left a security hole in iTunes unfixed for 3 years, and more.

Capacity is measured in vehicles/hr, and it's a function of speed and packing. Traffic is not a function of capacity at all. You can have a traffic jam without exceeding capacity (v/hr), and you can hit capacity without traffic.

SDCs increase v/hr because they allow both higher safe speed AND better packing. And since most traffic is actually caused by aggressive and timid drivers, though mostly the latter, we can eliminate that factor as well!

The scientists [...] found that timid drivers had the biggest impact because they "shied away" when the car in front started slowing down, and deliberately started driving even more slowly to increase the gap between them.

What about red lights? Surely even the smoothest of commutes will eventually terminate at a light, and traffic will start to accumulate there. Well, we can eliminate those as well.

I love driving, but as a society, we needs SDCs, and we need to transition as soon as possible. If I slam on the brakes, I can waste thousands of man-hours as traffic behind me slows to a crawl. And if I get in an accident, I can easily waste thousands of man-lifetimes in an urban area while people wait for my mess to get cleaned up. If I have a good excuse, I can probably walk away without even getting a ticket. Autonomous, unilateral decisions that can negatively impact so many others must be reduced or eliminated where possible, and driving is really the most power one person has to negatively impact so many others with such little consequence. SDCs are the only opportunity for the sea change necessary to modify driving behavior to the degree necessary to allow personal transportation to be pleasant and efficient.

In the UK, cold weather kills 25 times more people than hot weather.

No shit Albert.

Globally, cold weather kills 20 times more people than hot weather (study by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine).

In the UK, cold weather kills 25 times more people than hot weather.

So global warming, if it happens, is going to cause a significant decrease in net weather-related fatalities.

You gotta play to win. They already Godwin-ed the debate.

No that pretty much means you lose that game. Although you can cheat of course, there are numerous cases of men working in fertility clinics that fathered hundreds of children, how's that for a life hack.

That would only be possible with a simple 'binary' prediction

Yes, I would accept some of such. For example: "By 2015 Arctic will be ice-free". Do you have any?

Models make specific predictions over a period of time, when most of the predictions made by the model are accurate to a reasonable degree (no model is perfect).

You are right, no model is perfect. Can you link to a prediction, that materialized within, say, 80% of the predicted value(s)?

Which included 7 Billion quid from the Brits, altho the Irish only seem to have used £3.2 billion. Additionally the UK's attempts to stabilize it's own banks have resulted in £14bn going to their Irish subsidiaries.

The Eurozone has badly fucked up this situation by trying to nickel-and-dime these bailouts. For Greece they needed to do €200-250 Billion Euros at nominal (as in zero or 1%) interest back in 2010. They insisted on much less (€110 billion) at 5.5%. Then they acted surprised that a year later they needed to arrange that €100 billion (aka: almost all the money from the first bailout) needed to be written off and the interest rate reduced on the rest. But they're still charging interest (altho 3.5% is slightly less fucking stupid then 5.5% was). And they'll probably have to do a third bailout.

But Ireland, which didn't get nickel-and-dimed by a bunch of self-righteous Germans, is gonna be fine.

They don't mean "barter", when they talk of "cashless society" — and it is the Statists' prescription for everyone , not just Argentina.

The electronic transactions will be subject to the same surveillance our phone-calls already are — who (other than the totalitarian Statists) would seriously consider it, is a mystery to me.

> Last week, I live-blogged a talk by theoretical physicist Amanda Peet, and while there were a great amount of comments and discussions focused on her lecture, there was also a great amount focused on Dr. Peet’s physical appearance. Sure, sometimes I’m judged on my appearance as well—I’m an unusual looking person and I do things to draw attention to myself—but when I talk or write or profess about whatever it is I’m doing professionally, I can always expect to be judged for my merits as a professional. Not for my looks first and then for my scholarship, but for the quality of the work I do. I feel like that’s a privilege, a way I get to play the game of life on “easy mode,” that I wouldn’t get simply if my gender weren’t male.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

No. The anti-vax movement has been largely driven by greed, stupidity, and the parents need to "blame" someone.

No. The anti-vax movement has been entirely driven by unethical pharmaceutical behemoths killing/maiming thousands of children in third world countries, unloading worthless crap on ignorant asshats and raking in massive unearned profits on the misery of millions.
  Glaxo Smith Kline was fined a paltry amount after performing unethical "experiments" on children and killing fourteen of them. Would you trust these jackasses to inject your kids? Hell, their own scientists had to be bribed to cover that shit up. Faked vaccine data lessens confidence in Merck products.
  Merck has lied for years about the efficacy of their vaccines. Why would anybody trust them?
Other countries ban defective vaccines, it's not rocket science to shun poisonous garbage that makes your populace sick and decreases productivity for potentially years. MMR vaccine, lookin' at you.
And that's not even counting poor vaccine quality control, a persistent issue for these massive corporations. In that one case Merck got caught before they could offload those 1,000,000 deadly doses on some unfortunates in Africa and collect tax credits for their philanthropy from the IRS.
FFS even the Nigerians are skeptical by now. Looking at the preponderance of shady practices, outright lies and poor quality of your average vaccine peddler it's no wonder the anti-vax movement is gaining momentum. But don't take my word for anything, go get your annual flu vaccine and risk paralysis or worse, and forget about that "immune system" crap the hippies are trying to foist on everybody. Nutrition isn't that important and you have a basement to live in and keyboard crumbs to make.

I don't have polling data, but it does pass the sniff test to assume that one form of magical thinking, inculcated from birth, would tend to make the personality more at-risk of accepting other magical-thinking proposals.

Well, there are some studies which suggest what you say is true, but there are other scientists and psychologists who have claimed that supernatural beliefs and superstitions are "hard-wired" into humanity. Many anthropologists have argued that some sort of supernatural beliefs were necessary for the foundation of complex societies, but there's disagreement about the exact role or types of beliefs and their effects.

On the other hand, regardless of upbringing, there seem to be specific psychological traits that are highly correlated with religiosity, such as lower intelligence or various personality traits. There have been literally hundreds of studies on this stuff, and your proposal that various superstitious thinking may be related to and/or substituting for religious thinking has been studied for close to 40 years.

There seem to be no clear answers and a lot of contradictory studies about whether paranormal/supernatural beliefs are basically innate or mostly affected by psychological traits or intelligence, or whether nurturing children affects those tendencies in significant ways.

The only thing I can say is that people have believed weird nonsense throughout history, and even if you expunge various myths and bogey men, people will find other weird nonsense to believe -- whether it's aliens or conspiracy theories or whatever. You can even look at demographic stats and polls for other countries -- participation in institutional religion is very low in Europe, and many countries have relatively high numbers there of people who are nominally atheists, but various other types of occult and superstitious elements are exceptionally popular.

Bottom line: decreasing religious indoctrination of youth may have some impact on overall belief in "magical thinking," but many people will still find various weird things to buy into as adults. Aside from natural cognitive tendencies of humans to "ascribe meaning" to random or natural phenomena and such, religion is historically about defining social groups as well as beliefs, and there's a lot of evidence that people will buy into all kinds of weird crap if it seems like the stuff that most of the people around them are into.

I didn't send a dime to Nepal because everyone who asked for it made more money than me

If you mean celebrity actors, or whatever, then so what?

If you mean the head of the Red Cross, then he certainly doesn't earn anywhere near what he could as CEO of a large commercial organisation. In the UK, I just checked and he earns GBP184,000 which is not in the same league as FTSE100 bosses, where the average (median) salary is GBP2,433,000

I didn't send a dime to Nepal because everyone who asked for it made more money than me

If you mean celebrity actors, or whatever, then so what?

If you mean the head of the Red Cross, then he certainly doesn't earn anywhere near what he could as CEO of a large commercial organisation. In the UK, I just checked and he earns GBP184,000 which is not in the same league as FTSE100 bosses, where the average (median) salary is GBP2,433,000

Please forgive this self-reply. I meant to link to this article, with some interesting graphs of raw vs. adjusted temperature data.

Seeing as actual measurements show a steadily increasing temperature

Do actual measurements show a steadily increasing temperature, or is this trend just visible in adjusted measurements? I do not pretend to understand all of the intricacies involved to call foul just yet, but I'd sure like to understand these alleged adjustments better. Are they valid and accurate, or are they just manipulations of the data to present a desired but incorrect result?

Seriously. The real story with this bill is that the republicans are defunding the climate monitoring programs. It will take decades to regain the capabilities we'll lose by defunding them now. There's no turf war between NASA and NOAA, just one between republicans and science.

Well I agree, while purses are open and plenty funding is available for all, there's no reason for conflict. It is refreshing to see that climate research funding is becoming subject to the same level of debate and scrutiny as other items. For too long climate angles have been a literal bill-stuffing no-brainer.

And what about that space stuff? Remember the space stuff?

Nice job trying to write a summary for geeks that attempts to bury the real story.

The paid shill canard is getting shrill. Damn right nice job. If I had managed to communicate the way I truly feel about NASA participating in terrestrial climate research, my summary would not have been accepted. I was pissed when NASA (jointly) fronted the "2014 Warmest Year On Record" statistical flapdoodle, saw it as a clear sign we are on a bad road. They've jumped on the 'big tent' climate bandwagon to aggregate and homogenize oodles of surface measurements, some of which are in dispute, while the clear signals of their own satellites are lightly weighted.

Have they been good at predicting things, or are the things predicted being 'adjusted' to better match the predictions?

"Last month, we are told, the world enjoyed âoeits hottest March since records began in 1880â. This year, according to âoeUS government scientistsâ, already bids to outrank 2014 as âoethe hottest everâ. The figures from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) were based, like all the other three official surface temperature records on which the worldâ(TM)s scientists and politicians rely, on data compiled from a network of weather stations by NOAAâ(TM)s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN).
But here there is a puzzle. These temperature records are not the only ones with official status. The other two, Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and the University of Alabama (UAH), are based on a quite different method of measuring temperature data, by satellites. And these, as they have increasingly done in recent years, give a strikingly different picture. Neither shows last month as anything like the hottest March on record, any more than they showed 2014 as âoethe hottest year everâ.

Back in January and February, two items in this column attracted more than 42,000 comments to the Telegraph website from all over the world. The provocative headings given to them were âoeClimategate the sequel: how we are still being tricked by flawed data on global warmingâ and âoeThe fiddling with temperature data is the biggest scientific scandalâ.
My cue for those pieces was the evidence multiplying from across the world that something very odd has been going on with those official surface temperature records, all of which ultimately rely on data compiled by NOAAâ(TM)s GHCN. Careful analysts have come up with hundreds of examples of how the original data recorded by 3,000-odd weather stations has been âoeadjustedâ, to exaggerate the degree to which the Earth has actually been warming. Figures from earlier decades have repeatedly been adjusted downwards and more recent data adjusted upwards, to show the Earth having warmed much more dramatically than the original data justified.
So strong is the evidence that all this calls for proper investigation that my articles have now brought a heavyweight response. The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has enlisted an international team of five distinguished scientists to carry out a full inquiry into just how far these manipulations of the data may have distorted our picture of what is really happening to global temperatures."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/com...

Difference between raw and final data sets (this is an official graph from NOAA):
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/c...

Firstly, the thing about NHS funding increasing every year is a lie, and our politicians have been told to stop lying about it repeatedly (that link is to the Telegraph which is usually considered to be a Tory paper, so extra truthiness points).

Secondly, we have a rate of about 4% inflation for healthcare costs. Even if they are increasing funding, are they doing it 4% year on year? No.

Thirdly, a lot of the money is going on the stupid PFI contracts which bleed money away from clinical services and go to debt repayment instead. They were transparently a massive con trick from the out - the NHS is the largest employer in Europe. They have a budget larger than small countries. They should be able to borrow money like a small country (ie - by issuing low interest bonds), not have to be sent cap-in-hand to a private company and directed to sign a sweetheart deal with 300% returns for the private company. The citizens of this country are justifiably proud of the NHS and would probably be more than happy to buy those bonds.

Are UKIP right about waste in middle management? Probably. But that's because the middle management are being directed by targets, which are a blunt instrument. If the middle management were tasked with enabling the clinicians to do the most healthcare possible, instead of directing them to waste their time and effort meeting their numbers, it would be a different story. But the targets are there specifically to cut budgets, because they get paid based on the results of those numbers.

Support for the current Government reaches EOL next week and currently seems unlikely to be renewed. However, it looks like an upgrade supported by multiple vendors for five years may be in place shortly after:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...