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1.5 million people have died as a result of our attack on Iraq. White ones, brown ones, Americans, Iraqis, mostly civilians and many of them not from bombs but from starvation after the infrastructure needed for their water, food, and medical care was destroyed.

You will be relieved to know that those figures are almost certainly not true.

ORB's "million Iraqi deaths" survey seriously flawed, new study shows. More here.

Leftist billionaire George Soros underwrote the widely quoted Lancet study written by an anti-war professor. As time goes by it keeps looking worse, and worse.

The Wikileaks contents tend to undermine them as well:

The logs showed there were more than 109,000 violent deaths between 2004 and the end of 2009.

They included 66,081 civilians, 23,984 people classed as "enemy", 15,196 members of the Iraqi security forces, and 3,771 coalition troops.

Iraqi news site in english.

Sir –

You have a very persuasive argument, except you neglect one minor detail: You assume people will take the moral high ground when money is involved. They usually don't. Lawyers aren't any different than Joe Q. Public on the street, excepting that they dress better, make somewhat more money, and (hopefully) are somewhat better trained for their professional field than most.

It is true, and the theme of your post is pursuasive. There are numerous arbitrary and high barriers to entry to effective legal persuasion, not least of which is the need for a lawyer to effectively engage the system.

That being said, in my experience, even after explanation the vast majority of the population lack the ability to understand issues and form concise, sensible arguments on one side or the other of the issues (concise is important because the general response to a failure to understand issues is to verbose verbiage).

To most lawyers, the messes created by the self-represented are often impermeable to the discourse that leads to efficient resolution. That doesn't take away from the access to justice argument you put forward - the law should be clearer and easier to access - but at the same time it's often cheaper and more effective for people to pay a lawyer than self-represent (and that's why most educated people do). I think legal aid is a reasonable solution in many cases - but it has its drawbacks as well (it discourages early settlement, for example).

Finally, it's a central point of economics that specialization creates wealth. Having lawyers allows for more efficient use of the available time and energy of the population; it'd be absurdly inefficient for police, doctors, engineers, janitors, miners, etc., to spend the extraordinary amount of effort necessary to understand every facet of every issue of every dispute that occurs in their lives. Furthermore, the cost to the taxpayer of having the uneducated aggrieved senselessly stand in front of judges for hours bantering about irrelevant points is an enormous cost to society; I find myself regularly reducing well intentioned but misdirected efforts of clients down to the salient points. It's better that a client pay me to do this than the taxpayer, otherwise we create a moral hazard.

Additionally, your argument loses a lot of its intellectual purity and moral superiority when you make the reductio ad absurdum argument in paragraph two. Your post would have gone better without that.

I'm not sure it was absurd. You can see from those links what happens in the absence of a rule-of-law dispute resolution procedure: Violence. It's not absurd, it's not even hyperbole, it's the natural consequence of the demand for justice (in some form, to someone) and the absence of the supply of "justice" (or the appearance of justice, or a justice-like substitute).

Lastly, there is no transparency in the legal system and you're being intellectually dishonest to state otherwise: The legal system is incredibly complex and largely unavailable to the poor. When you have a system that necessitates the use of lawyers and attorneys in every legal preceding, to the point that attempting to advance a case pro se is laughed at by every judge and legal professional -- what then can we honestly say about transparency in the system? If the system requires experts that are licensed through the state to interpret or apply its rules, then the system is not transparent. In fact, it is utterly impervious to external examination, and any protests against it are swiftly dismissed as "uneducated" or rogue. The system is self-contradictory: Pract

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article2062494.ece

I'm a USAmerican and while I'll admit to sucking at math, I think it's a stretch to say I suck "so badly." I'm not exactly sure what The Problem with America Today is, but if I had to guess I'd say a lot of it has to do with extremely large organizations motivated solely by profit (AKA news media) manipulating the international discourse in ways that are profitable, which has nothing to do with a sane representation of reality. It's probably not even that satisfyingly conspiratory, unfortunately, but I do know that I've never seen anyone ram together a few legitimate data points like I have in this blog post (which I'm reproducing in entirety here to save everyone the effort of having to click through to a foreign environment):

In the style of Harper's Index, if with so much less elegance...

Number of deaths in the USA due to fundamentalist Islamic terrorists in 9/2001: 2,996
Estimated number of those that were US citizens: 2,669
Number of deaths in the USA due to traffic accidents in the same month: 3,303
Number of deaths in the USA due to fundamentalist Islamic terrorists between 9/12/2001 and 12/31/2008: 0
Number of deaths in the USA due to traffic accidents in approximately the same period: 303,841
Total approved, as of 12/2009, for the three military operations initiated to combat terrorism in response to 9/11 (excluding funds for CIA, FBI, TSA, Homeland Security, etc.): $1,086,000,000,000
Estimated budget for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration over the same period: $6,520,000,000
The NHTSAs budget, expressed as a percent of the amount allocated for these military operations: 00.
Estimate, in 2008, for the final total cost of the Iraq war alone: $3,000,000,000,000
Amount allocated to the military per terrorism related US citizen death in the USA since 9/11/2001: $406,893,967.78
Amount allocated to the NHTSA per traffic related death: $21,458.59
Amount allocated to the military per terrorism related US citizen death in the USA since 9/12/2001: Undefined
Percentage of causes of death in the USA that kill more people than terrorism: 100
Percentage of causes of death in the USA that receive more public money for prevention than terrorism: 0
Percent change in gross federal debt between 2001 and 2010: 232.97
Percentage of gross federal debt in 2001 that would have been eliminated by 1.086 trillion dollars: 18.8
Amount each US household would receive given 1.086 trillion dollars evenly distributed: $9443.48
Rank of defense, excluding expenditure on active military operations, among all categories of federal spending: 1
Percentage of federal spending in 2009 that went to defense: 23
Percentage of federal income in the same year that came from individual income tax: 43
Percentage that came from social security/social insurance tax: 42
Percentage that came from corporate income tax: 7


Sources: http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_September_11_attacks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHTSA Global Terrorism Database, with specific query used The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11, by the Congressional Research Service (pdf) The three trillion dollar war

How bad is the LED phosphor for the environment?

It doesn't matter; we're going to hit 'peak phosphorous' in 30 years and entirely exhaust supplies in 50-100 years. Because practically every biological process on Earth requires phosphorous we're not going to be around to worry about illuminating our trees in UV.

Right, because no one's ever considered doing this before. Especially not in the UK!

From your first "Soviet Invasion" link, Polish dead 3,000-7,000. From another wikilink total Polish dead 5,620,000 to 5,820,000.
That's not even close to 0.75%

The USA is not clean of dealing with the Nazis, either.

"the red army decided the fate of german militarism." w. churchill.

And the overall price paid in military dead? USA: 416,800 Yugoslavia: 446,000 (first link, again)

The purpose of the copyright isn't to reduce selfishness.

The purpose of the copyright is, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization, "To encourage a dynamic culture, while returning value to creators so that they can lead a dignified economic existence, and to provide widespread, affordable access to content for the public."

By sharing for free, you are providing "affordable access to content for the public", so it follows the purpose of copyright. And according to the hard data, not RIAA lies it's also returning more value to creators.

By reselling, you're not making the content affordable to those who can't afford it: you're just shifting the profits from the author to yourself. You're not following the purpose of copyright.

"... but I do begrudge people from demanding that the rich pay even more taxes.'

Warren Buffett himself says that the rich do NOT pay enough taxes, and that the taxes on the rich should be higher.

"Speaking at a $4,600-a-seat fundraiser in New York for Senator Hillary Clinton, Mr Buffett, who is worth an estimated $52 billion (£26 billion), said: “The 400 of us [here] pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If you’re in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.”

"Mr Buffett said that he was taxed at 17.7 per cent on the $46 million he made last year, without trying to avoid paying higher taxes, while his secretary, who earned $60,000, was taxed at 30 per cent."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/money/tax/article1996735.ece

Yes, in the case of Stonehenge you used to be able to rent a hammer in the village so you could go and chip away at the ancient monument and have a "souvenir". If you don't protect these sites, people will vandalize them. It's not like Stonehenge is the only English Heritage site either, there are plenty of castles, gardens monuments and what ever. It takes money to maintain them.

Just because they have an obvious need doesn't mean that they should go around and randomly charge photographers, though.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article548380.ece

Ah, dreams of my youth, when did you wither away?

For me, about the same time I found out that Margaret Thatcher didn't want the Berlin Wall to come down.

"Even 20 years later, her remarks are likely to cause uproar. They are all the more explosive as she admitted that what she said was quite different from the West’s public pronouncements and official Nato communiqués. She told Mr Gorbachev that he should pay no attention to these.

“We do not want a united Germany,” she said. “This would lead to a change to postwar borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.” "

Mrs Thatcher - TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!

Ahhh the anti-semite card. Always a treat to see that one played.

According to reality, being critical of the policies of the state of Israel is not the same as being anti-semitic.

So tell me, how does it serve the welfare of the people living in the welfare capital of the world when their homes are destroyed by military action, and then basic rebuilding supplies are banned? After significant international pressure, Israel has finally lifted some aspects of this blockade, but the situation in Gaza remains both surreal and humiliating.

But of course it's possible all my information is wrong and is based on some twisted anti-semitic worldview, and Gaza is indeed a welfare capital paradise. When are you moving there? Can I come too?

The UK Government has announced that it will consider open-source software on an equal footing with proprietary commercial software when awarding multi-million-pound IT contracts.

In a paper issued on Tuesday, Tom Watson, the Minister for Digital Engagement, said: “Open Source has been one of the most significant cultural developments in IT and beyond over the last two decades: it has shown that individuals, working together over the Internet, can create products that rival and sometimes beat those of giant corporations.”

And the date on that? February 25, 2009.

Linguists to the rescue...Here's an interesting, relatively well-written, and informative read on just that question...

Txtng: The Gr8 Db8

and for the shorter version...

Txtng: The Gr8 Db8

or

review by Melissa Katsoulis in The Sunday Times

how many stupids are there in the world? How many people exist that are too immature and not evolved enough to have the sense not to swallow the entire content? Who pays to clean up that mess?

I would agree with you, if it weren't for the fact that alcohol is already legal. The Drug Harm Index lists alcohol at number 5, way ahead of the most restricted class A drugs like Ecstasy and LSD. Prohibition of alcohol was a failure. So the genie is out of the bottle... given that one of the most dangerous and addictive drugs is already legal, and that there is no realistic chance of it becoming illegal, then I don't see any reason to prosecute people for trading or consuming drugs that are less harmful.

Why do you assume I vote Republican? Actually, I voted for Cynthia McKinney in the last election, and Nader in years before, mostly as a protest vote. :-) I'm in a "safe state" so I knew the Democrats would win in those states anyway.

Do you see how your assumptions could be part of the problem? Also, Democrats, like Republicans, are a big part of the problem... Democrats are not engaging with these bigger trends. Obama is a mostly a corporatist and upholder of a broken status-quo relative to what we could see. Look at who he put in charge of US economic policy (people from Wall Street). Look who he put in charge of "education" reform (people from big schools). He's also a militarist -- within three days, he used military killer robots (drones) in a way that lead to the (claimed) deaths of three children.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article5575883.ece
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/features/view/feature/Obama-Finds-Predator-Drones-Hilarious-1171
Solutions to moving beyond that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html

You're not engaging with the factual information I presented (as factual as stuff is from the US Government http://www.shadowstats.com/ ). Why? Is it perhaps just too unsettling to think about the implications? Those jobs and population figures are not much of calculations as a statement of facts as presented by the US government and a simple prediction of population growth the next decade based on the last decade.

It's true there are retirements coming up, but that is not going to fix the big trend. And in the short term (next decade) many people in the USA lost much of their retirement nest egg and are working longer, either postponing retirement or going back to work after the had retirement (incidentally, depressing wages).

So, again, where are thirty million net new jobs going to come from in the USA over the next decade?

Are you suggesting people stop trying to make sense of macroeconomic trends? Sure, doing volunteer stuff etc. is great, and I do, but you also just can't stick your head in the sand. Also, how can anyone start a business and hope for success in it if the fundamental dynamics of the economy are changing and they are not aware of it?

Also, if you look at the basic demographics of what is going on in the world (see Hans Rosling), you will see that "foreigners" are rapidly increasing in their ability to produce their own stuff. The USA has very little relative advantage anymore, the way it did when it was the only major intact economy after WWII.
    http://www.gapminder.org/
    http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html
And, you'd also see that even China is automating to cut labor costs...
    http://www.plasticsnews.com/china/english/headlines2.html?id=1278958338

Anyway, you might want to think about how you are filtering, spinning, and assuming information here.

The good news is, this all helps me get a better sense of how to present things, so thanks.

In most of the cases you mention, we're talking about publications self-censoring to avoid losing money. For example, from the very article you link to about Playboy Portugal: "Curiously, it wasn’t the Portuguese authorities who took action, but the parent company, Playboy Enterprises in the US. An outraged Theresa Hennessy, Playboy Enterprises’ Vice President of Public Relations, said: 'We did not see or approve the cover and pictorial in the July issue of Playboy Portugal. It is a shocking breach of our standards, and we would not have allowed it to be published if we had seen it in advance. As a result of this and other issues with the Portuguese publisher, we are in the process of terminating our agreement.' "

There's a big difference between a company choosing not to avoid a market for fear of losing sales, and companies not doing something for fear of violence.

There's also a big difference between that, and people living in fear of being burned alive.

People who would have no problem with someone burning a flag or Bible become apologists for repression in the name of religion.

FWIW, although I think they have a legal right to do whatever they want, I strongly oppose their actions for other reasons:

• I think it's wrong for anyone to do something like this, Christian or not. If they really are Christians, I can't see how this is anywhere close to Christ's teachings.
• I'm a Christian, and since they claim to be Christians, their actions reflect badly on me. This is going to impact all of my future relationships with Muslims.
• "Do unto others..." Christians who live in predominantly Muslim countries face religious persecution constantly. Occasionally it's in a very extreme manner, but most often it's just antagonism. I can't help but think if any of the people at this church knew what it was like to be a religious minority, they'd never do something like this.

There is something familiar about the tide of misinformation which has swept through the subject of sex trafficking in the UK: it flows through exactly the same channels as the now notorious torrent about Saddam Hussein's weapons. In the story of UK sex trafficking, the conclusions of academics who study the sex trade have been subjected to the same treatment as the restrained reports of intelligence analysts who studied Iraqi weapons – stripped of caution, stretched to their most alarming possible meaning and tossed into the public domain. There, they have been picked up by the media who have stretched them even further in stories which have then been treated as reliable sources by politicians, who in turn provided quotes for more misleading stories.

Yes, that doesn't prove that sex workers necessarily enjoy their work. It doesn't prove that other forms of coercion don't exist.But it does frame the issue somewhat differently.

Yep. The most likely reason the movie didn't do that well was because most people didn't want to watch it. Or they were told not to bother from those who watched it.

I wonder if those 5000 John Does are actually the total number of those who pirated the movie - which would be a rather embarrassingly small figure :). From what I hear, I wouldn't bother wasting my bandwidth downloading Hurt Locker, and I doubt I'd bother popping down the local pirate shop to get a copy.

If filmmakers wanted to make more money they should make movies that millions of people will want to watch, and make it easy for them to pay and watch it.

FWIW, I paid to watch Avatar in the cinema. And it was worth my money, nice graphics and all that. Even my mom paid to watch it with one of her friends and they both liked it too. Surprise surprise, my mom doesn't always like the same movies I like. My dad didn't want to watch it - he said it was too long. IIRC he watched LoTR, and I think that did well by most sane estimates.

But despite that, somehow LOTR allegedly didn't make enough money for some crooks to pay Peter Jackson his fair share, and apparently Return of the Jedi never made money ( http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article6024677.ece). "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" lost money too: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100708/02510310122.shtml

So guess who I think are the real thieves and crooks in the movie and music industry? It's not those file sharers.

Makes you wonder how they stay in business. Perhaps the Government should shut them down and put them out of their misery.

how the hell did he buy a phone and start using it without having to register his payment method and add some credit. As far as I know you've not been able to do that in the UK (and I think most of Europe) for at least most of the last decade.

As far as the UK is concerned, you're wrong. There's no legal barrier to buying and topping up a pre-paid phone or sim anonymously with cash, and no current proposals to change this.

There was some talk of this under the previous UK government, e.g.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4969312.ece

but it never got anywhere.

Also, the proposed id cards and national identity register backing them have been abandoned before any significant rollout occurred.

Its possible that the girl pressing charges "is" an agent ("CIA" other "friendly countries" government agency) with the primary mission of getting Assange in an akward position to smear his name and discredit him and wikileaks along with it.

Sleeping with someone is not necessarily outside of the call of duty in the intelligence service.

If the US will kidnap (arrests of convenience, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2982640.ece ) or assassinate ( http://www.brusselstribunal.org/IsraelDeathSquadsIraq.htm ) people they are more than willing to send someone to smear someone to discredit them.

If anything this attack on Assange validates the decision of other wikileaks participants for keeping their identities secret to protect themselves.

I don't know about you but I think its pretty courageous (probably bordering on stupid) to piss off the US government. Their reach extends almost anywhere in the world and they have the time and resources to turn your life into a living hell.

They are tracking my IP now... knock knock... oh oh.

there's no evidence here of "war crimes"

Nangar Khel incident. Polish troops mortar a civilian village. They are currently being tried for war crimes.

Nobody's tried to cover it up.

Kunduz airstrike: German commander ordered the bombing of a crowd surrounding two hijacked fuel tankers. NATO insists that "no civilians were in the vicinity" and 56 "purely enemy insurgents" killed. What actually happened? An estimated 142 civilians killed. Wikipedia says "The major German newsweekly Der Spiegel, in an exhaustive research article published in February 2010, called the incident a war crime - due to the fact that the attack on the tankers had broken a number of rules of conduct, and also led to a later cover-up"

"As details from the deadly Sept. 4 bombing in Kunduz, Afghanistan continue to emerge, it has become more apparent that German commanders both disregarded NATO rules of engagement and misled the US pilots who carried out the attack. One pilot says he would have refused to attack had he been told the truth." Der Spiegel: German Army Withheld Information from US Pilots

Khataba raid: "US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened, Afghan investigators have told The Times. Two pregnant women, a teenage girl, a police officer and his brother were shot on February 12 when US and Afghan special forces stormed their home in Khataba village, outside Gardez in eastern Afghanistan. The precise composition of the force has never been made public. The claims were made as Nato admitted responsibility for all the deaths for the first time last night. It had initially claimed that the women had been dead for several hours when the assault force discovered their bodies." The Times: US special forces 'tried to cover-up' botched Khataba raid in Afghanistan

So...I need a place to keep all this money safe. Yep. Nice and safe. A safe place to keep it hidden. Someplace...safe...

You know, it's not that far-fetched. I've certainly known people who keep a stash of cash scurried away in an obscure corner of their house in case of emergency.

I've certainly heard stories about people keeping money mattresses -- although, it didn't work out so well for this lady who threw out her mother's life savings. :-P

Ironic comment considering mobile phone companies have decided to standardize on Micro USB thanks to EU pressure.

A camera is not a gun. It doesn't threaten the life of police, and it probably won't get you killed, no matter what.

That "probably" is not good enough - especially when dealing with soldiers. It only takes a misunderstanding. If a gun is pointed at you then a mechanical malfunction also can kill you. (That's why we are told to never point a gun at anything but intended targets, among other rules.)

you were almost right: buses have obsoleted trams, not trains

That was just phase one

Tearing up rail lines, to be replaced by bus-only routes is phase 2 :-)

A business's chief priority SHOULD be customer service.

That depends on your business model. Ryanair, for example, keep customer service to an absolute minimum in order to keep fares low. Low fares mean lots of passengers and lots of passengers means profit.

A business's chief priority should be profit. Customer service is a means (but not the only means) to that end.

Even after revising the 1985-2007 mpg estimates to make them comparable to the new 2008 mpg estimates, the 1989 Honda CRX-HF is rated at 41 city and 50 highway mpg.

http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/5263.shtml

After 20 years of technological innovation, and four years of sky-rocketing fuel costs, shouldn't a new car model get at least 41/50 mpg before that car is considered to be ecologically friendly? Yet greencar.com features the 2008 Nissan Rouge (22 city/27 highway mpg) as a "Top 2008 Fuel Economy Faves." The 2008 Nissan Rouge also has a sticker price of $19,250.

http://www.greencar.com/features/fuel-economy/

Seems to me that true economy cars been pulled from the market, and replaces with the new hybrids. Major car manufacturers want us to think that 30+ mpg is something miraculous, and requires an expensive, heavy, complicated, hard-to-maintain, hybrid.

In my opinion there is more to ecological friendliness than just mpg (although the present line-up fails at even that). Hybrids have huge batteries, and disposing of those batteries is never ecologically friendly. Then there is the ecological impact of manufacturing and shipping these huge, heavy, vehicles. Furthermore, recent road tests carried out by Auto Express show that hybrids often have worse CO2 emissions than standard autos.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article3958376.ece

To have a real impact on fuel consumption, and emissions, new vehicles need to be affordable. Hybrids are about the most expensive vehicles on the market. How can hybrids have a positive effect of the environment, if practically nobody can afford the beasts? Even if you can afford the steep sticker price, what about the cost of maintenance? Hybrids have two engines, and use a complicated system to charge their huge batteries. I hate to even think about the cost of maintenance and repair.

It used to be common that most fuel efficient cars also had the lowest sticker price, and lowest maintenance costs. The cars where simply smaller, lighter, and required more manual operations. With smaller, cheaper, parts, and a less complicated design, the cars were cheaper to maintain. When I bought my 1992 Ford Festiva, the 30/37 mpg rating was the least of my criteria, I was also concerned with sticker price, and maintenance costs.

Why can't we do as well now, as we did 16 to 35 years ago?

1973 Honda Civic rated 35/40 mpg
1986 VW Golf Diesel rated 31/40 mpg *
1989 Geo Metro was rated 43/51 mpg
1989 Honda CRX-HF was rated 41/50 mpg
1992 Ford Festiva rated 30/37 mpg

* I got over 50mpg driving from Florida to New Jersey, while running the air conditioner.

Related:

57 mpg? That's so 20 years ago
Want to drive a cheap car that gets eye-popping mileage? In 1987 you could - and it wasn't even a hybrid.

http://money.cnn.com/2007/12/17/autos/honda_civic_hf/index.htm

Efficiency? Think Racing Cars, Not Hybridso
A renowned racing car designer has said that car manufacturers should be looking at making cars lighter to improve efficiency, rather than adding complex drive trains.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7387432.stm

Hot Cars Best Gas Milage
Welcome to hi-mpg.org. We are automotive enthusiasts and travel aficionados who also love the environment. We appreciate both form and function, all while striving to leave future generations a legacy of clean air, scenic grandeur and a continuum of natural resources. In addition: the freedom to drive.

http://hi-mpg.org/best-cars-with-high-gas-mileage.phtml

> > "There are just too many potential sources of ignition (sparks from machinery, static discharge) for it ever to be safe enough for flight, if we hold it to the same standards of safety that commercial jets are.

Then I guess that Boeing holds to different standards than do you!

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/transport/article3675188.ece
'"John Tracy, Boeing's chief technology officer, said: “For the first time in the history of aviation, we have flown a manned airplane that was powered by a hydrogen battery.

Boeing said that hydrogen fuel cells were unlikely to power the engines of large passenger jets but could be used as backup or auxiliary power units onboard."'

The Mozilla Foundation, which is registered as a charity in the United States...

Source And, California registration by the Mozilla Foundation as a charitable trust.

Quick link that proves that everything old is new again. Dang movies with sound and talking!

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/related_features/top_100_films/article3817326.ece

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article7009749.ece

"A leaked MI5 document says that undercover intelligence officers from the People's Liberation Army and the Ministry of Public Security have also approached UK businessmen at trade fairs and exhibitions with the offer of "gifts" and "lavish hospitality".

The gifts -- cameras and memory sticks -- have been found to contain electronic Trojan bugs which provide the Chinese with remote access to users' computers. "

Ah, good old autoplay!

"Them that advertise get eaten."

Indeed. Stephen Hawking would agree with you.

I think you are right. Science suggests some possible cardioprotective and stress relieving benefits to moderate alcohol use. (I think heavy use ie more than 2 drinks on a night increases chances of heart problems).

But- this study is a real buzzkill. Alcohol seems to be a trade in heart benefits for loss of brain functionality. Even moderate drinkers suffer :(
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article1035329.ece
It's a good reason to give up drinking and take up meditation thinks me.

I'd also be very curious to compare red wine drinkers to expensive grape juice drinkers for heart attack studies. All the great things in wine should also exist in high quality unfermented grape juice (antioxidants, tannins, etc).

I'm not a medical researcher, and I do drink alcohol on occasion, but I'm starting to believe that it would be better to be a teetotaller. "Just the coffee please!"

...should be banned from US waters...

That's a contingency they did plan for...

Actually, it's mostly Sri Lankans. .

If they screw over Darth Vader what do you think a bunch of musicians are going to do?

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article6024677.ece

Darth Vader actor David Prowse warns beware of small print

and actually, yes, he did. He was paid $12,000 for his role in the first movie of the original trilogy. It was the latter two movies that he was screwed over on. Still, your point is made.

NHS Choose & Book and medical records database £13bn
- don't work properly, slow, horribly intrusive (central control of your medical records), new govt can't figure out whether to scrap it or try and get something useful out of the £13bn spent.

ID cards £20bn, £1+bn spent
- centrepiece of Labour's Stasi 2.0, including numbering the population and issuing them with tagging to collect data on the minutiae of their lives.

Contactpoint (ID cards for kids) £224m
- making sure the kiddies are on the database by insisting that all schoolkids & parents are registered

Defence Information Infrastructure £7bn
- still not finished

And which country's IT corporations got all the contracts? Yes, the good old US of A.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article7079044.ece

I've not seen stories of LARGE groups of "RIGHT WINGERS" gathering to beat people up or drag people behind trucks.

I've seen the Obama Administration ignore CLEAR intimidation of voters (Black Panthers). I'm sure the violence at the G9/G20 summits was all because of the police, and not the peaceful protesters.

I haven't seen news lately of gays being beaten on a regular basis, I do see video of left wingers assaulting people all the time. If you want, I'll get you a list the MSM won't show you. But you'd chalk it up to Faux news or DrudgeReport hysteria. It only happens if CNN or NYT says it did.

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/mithridate-ombud/2010/03/24/medias-myth-right-wing-violence

http://www.newsmeat.com/fec/bystate_detail.php?st=PA&last=Leboon&first=Norman

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6848176.ece

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2008/09/021387.php

http://www.gaypatriot.net/2009/09/25/msm-promotes-left-wing-fantasies-of-right-wing-violence/

Remembered reading this a few years back. For a bit of quick ingenuity: doctor throws together a dialysis machine, saves baby. Cheers.

The guy became "a total prat" after he was rouged up for taking a picture

They rouged him up? Okay, that's cruel and unusual punishment right there.

I said The BBC gets a £3 billion subsidy, the BBC says it gets £3.3 billion, The Times say the BBC gets £3.6 billion, The Guardian say the BBC gets £3.4 billion. It's a big subsidy.

From The BBC

Our total investment in the creative industries during the year was £1.1billion, or 33% of our annual licence fee income

From The Times:

BBC executives openly admit that the report, which will mean the reassignment of £600 million of the £3.6 billion licence fee

From The Guardian:

The Conservatives have pledged to lay bare how the BBC spends its £3.4bn-a-year licence fee by giving the National Audit Office "full access" to the corporation's account.

I suppose speed limits of 30 mph in a residential area is purely motivated towards speeding tickets income and nothing to do with the 20% fatality at 30mph vs 40 mph where its 90% fatality rate. Seems like this are speed limits imposed by engineers. Of course now they are pushing for 20mph in residential areas which decreases the chance of death to around 2.5%. Of course you could argue its political when over 3 thousand people in the UK alone are killed on roads each year. You can throw out whatever excuse for driving irresponsibly, but don't think your fooling everyone.

figures from Sunday Times which may or may not be 100% accurate but they paint a decent picture. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/transport/article3941769.ece

Unfortunately the evidence doesn't support your hypothesis: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article571206.ece

How about we try teaching people to be rational whilst supplying them with good reasons to behave - that seems logical to me.

What's up with that?

What's up is that the people who brought you Iraqi WMDs are lying again.

The numbers are fictitious and "Stephen Peters, the head of the USGS’s Afghanistan Minerals Project, said that he was unaware of USGS involvement in any new surveying for minerals in Afghanistan in the past two years. 'We are not aware of any discoveries of lithium,' he said."

So the Pentagon has basically gathered up a bunch of old data, done some overflight surveys with no ground truth, and made up numbers. Anyone who knows anything about geology knows what a tricky business mineral exploration is, even without deliberate fraud, and yet the American media reacted with breathless excitment rather than honest and fully justified scepticism to this propaganda.

What's up with that?