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Read on past this rant if you can.

# begin rant # Seems to me like this guy likes to take the sensationalist approach more than the straight facts approach, and shock us out of our right minds. But that's to be expected from a human author. # end rant #

Did anyone else read this and get the impression that he wanted us to think that these horrible, awful scourge-of-mankind diseases ORIGINATED from this facility? I'll post about the origins of two big names he drops here.

Lyme Disease is actually named after a town in Connecticut where it was first documented in the 1970s. That town's name? Old Lyme. I go there every year for a vacation, so I know about it very well. It spreads to humans by ticks - exactly the kind of thing you'd expect Plum to have inside. However, it is easily treated, has a decent grace period before complications occur, and is not debilitating until it gets really bad. You can read more about it here. If this easily curable disease was indeed the result of an experiment at Plum Island, then it was probably the crappiest and least effective bioweapon ever invented.

Now, about West Nile Virus. According to this document: Unless new information comes to light, the first case of West Nile virus to be subjected to scientific study was brought to medical attention in December 1937 at Omogo, West Nile district, Northern Province of Uganda. That case (and the subsequent viral characterization process) was documented by members of the Yellow Fever Research Institute, Entebbe, Uganda in 1940. I seriously doubt they created West Nile in a laboratory that long ago.

The Plum Island laboratory (Link 1 Link 2 got any more links?) has been around plenty longer than Lyme Disease has been known according to this document, but it is newer than West Nile. Directly copied from that site: In 1946, a disease laboratory was built at Fort Terry by the government. Fort Terry was closed in 1948 because we were no longer at war, and it was no longer needed. Fort Terry was reopened to research new ways to go to war, and for the development of chemicals to kill animals.

Draw your own conclusion, here's your sketch pencil.

I have no personal knowledge of the research done at Plum Island. However, they do have a website.
Not that you are likely to believe what they say about themselves. I suspect the father of your childhood friend just got tired of explaining what he did to freaked out people like you, and don't really consider that anecdote evidence of some big coverup of the research that goes on there.

There is also no point in arguing over whether or not the US is still involved in bioweapons research. None of us knows for certain... and those that do, can't say, or aren't believed (when they say that there is no research aimed at developing bioweapons going on).

However, I don't think the two diseases you mention are likely targets for such research, if it is continuing. Nor is "escaped from a bioweapons research lab" the most likely explanation for the arrival of these diseases.

The disease that we call Lyme disease has been around in Europe for quite awhile. Here is a short history. You are correct that no one really knows when it showed up here, but given the tick-infested state of many of the early immigrants to America, I don't think we really need to invoke some governmental conspiracy theory to explain it. As many of the patient testimonials show, this is a difficult disease to diagnose, and I don't find it hard to believe that it existing for a hundred years or so in the US before anyone really noticed it. Furthermore, I don't think Lyme disease would be a likely target for bioweapon research. It requires a tick bite to transmit, and not even a bite by an infected tick is guaranteed to transmit the illness. And the disease doesn't quickly disable the infected person. So: flakely transmission and unreliable effects. Not the best characteristics for a weapon.

Last I heard, the theory for how West Nile came here was via airplane: either a mosquito or two hitched a ride, or a person on board was infected. Since many infected people never really think they have anything worse than the flu, this is not unreasonable.

West nile is also not the big scary disease it is often made out to be, and again strikes me as an unlikely target for bioweapons research. According to the cdc:

"From 1999 through 2001, there were 149 cases of West Nile virus human illness in the United States reported to CDC and confirmed, including 18 deaths. "

Compare that to these numbers for deaths from the flu: somewhere in the 20,000 to 30,000 range EVERY YEAR.

"We're equally proud of our safety record."

Uh hello?
weapons-grade anthrax...

You aren't suggesting that this lab has this are you? Cause this is Plum Island Animal Disease Center
But I mean yeah! diseases are dangerous they could kill us. We should totally stop reasearching them, cause while research might provide us with treatments, vacinations, and all that, there is a small chance that the disease could escape. Better to get rid our research...

Sorry for the Trolling, but it's almost like watching Wargames and Terminator and saying lets get rid of computers...

Where do you get the figure of 100 gallons of diesel fuel to produce 75 gallons of biodiesel? Or did you mean ethanol?

We had some figures earlier from a farmer that indicated it took around 3-10 gallons of (presumably) diesel to plant, fertilize, and harvest 1 acre of corn, yielding about 125-150 bushels of corn; each bushel yields about 2.5 gallons of ethanol, or a bit over 300 gallons/acre. The "tractor" portion of the energy equation is clearly not 100 gallons of diesel to produce 75 gallons of ethanol.

That same acre of corn can yield around 30 gallons of biodiesel, even without high-oil-yield corn (around 4% by weight). There's some energy cost to producing that as well, but again, the cost for planting and harvesting it is clearly not a huge percentage of the yield.

Even transporting the harvest is not that big a deal. A 10-ton truck will be carrying around 425 bushels, I believe (which can yield about 1000 gallons of ethanol and 100 gallons of biodiesel. How much diesel does it take to travel a few hundred miles in such a truck?

For some real numbers, check this 2002 U.S. Department of Agriculture study, it goes into great detail on methodology, assumptions, etc, and includes such things as the energy cost of producing fertilizer. For biodiesel, see An Overview of Biodiesel and Petroleum Diesel Life Cycles.

BTW, a big problem with some of the earlier analyses of how much energy it takes to produce ethanol are that they assume you need to vaporize a large quantity of water/alcohol in the distilling process and that you can't recover any of that energy. You can, of course, recover much of that energy, using the steam to pre-heat the incoming stock. That's not even looking at other possibilities, such as using solar power for heating (with much higher efficiency, when compared to using sunlight to either directly produce electricity and use that for heating, or grow corn and extract energy from that).

What we really need, of course, is an organism that takes sunlight and directly produces ethanol (or methanol, or methane, or whaever) from water and CO2 from the air. Run that through a solar still and you'd have a very effective transformation of sunlight into stored energy.

Anyway, what the original poster didn't mention, is that as the water levels in the aquifer decrease, the energy required (rho*g*h) to pump that water also increases. Eventually, it will be prohibitively expensive to pump the water out of there. Additionally, the concentration of contaminates will also increase. Most Americans really have no idea of the seriousness of the situation here. Much of the agriculture in the U.S. depends on ground water irrigation-- those sources of groundwater are fast disappearing. -S. Dugan

The paper addresses some of the issues raised in the column you linked. Pimentel in particular. It compares the results of several studies and attempts to address them.

Pimentel (who comes up with the negative energy results) tried to include some very hard to quantify items, such as the energy required to build the farm machinery that was used to grow the corn. Certainly a valid input, but he provides no details as to how he came up with his numbers.

This USDA paper addresses the issue. It compares various ethanol studies and concludes a positive energy balance in production.

Natural Resources Conservation Service, to be precise. We've used 12 pt Times New Roman for almost 10 years. Why was State still using Courier? IMHO, it's butt-ugly to read in print...

Why do you need pesticides in the desert were nothing grows anyway?

Why do you believe nothing grows in Iraq? How do you think they feed themselves? See the June 2003 Iraq Crop Condition Update for example.

Read the 1964 act and debate the intent with the people that wrote it...

I doubt they see it as surperflously as you do.

No one here believes a simple public discussion can reflect one's in-depth attitudes...be a bit less cynical and a bit more open minded when adding your own, thanks.

I couldn't find a picture of Colin Pillinger pushing Beagle2 on a shopping trolley, but I found a picture of a beagle pushing a trolley.

Now you know where all those US government research bucks are going...

I see no reason why you should expect to be taken any more seriously pushing your brand of `real socialism'

Proof by example, from Scandinavia over the past century. It's not my brand, after all, I just pointed to the place with the lowest infant mortality and longest lifespans.

As for your specific questions:

You still have not answered these:

1. 1. Do you give more credence to the direct quotes of Jesus than you do to the rest of the Bible? You only told me what you thought of my interpretation of the verses I quoted.

2. 3. Do you agree that socialism and capitalism are not mutually exclusive? I'm still waiting to read how you classify Scandinavia.

   4. Do you agree that the U.S. has been socialist since the imposition of the income tax? Looking back on your posts, you didn't exactly disagree with me when I called the U.S. entitlements socialist, but, again, I wonder how you use the term. It would be helpful if you would let me understand what you mean by the word. I'm more than willing to sync up to your terminology.

   5. Is abortion a more important issue to you than poverty? Again, you never even touched on this after having been asked directly three times. Why?

Jesus ... told us to render unto Caesar only that which was Caesar's

You can accuse me of quoting out of context all you want (I provided several verses of context.) And, of course reasonable people will often have different interpretations. But I am not putting words in Jesus's mouth to further my rhetoric! The word "only" doesn't appear in any translation of that quotation. It does, however, appear quite frequently in paraphrases by people who are jumping through hoops to minimize their taxes.

Jesus ... regularly used military analogies in his preaching, and ...

So, you find the "military anaologies" more to your liking than the direct admonition to turn the other cheek? Indeed, the Quakers are in the minority on this point, which speaks volumes about the state of Christianity today.

... personally drove the money changers from the temple with a whip of cords

I can tell you weren't raised on a ranch. Ask any cowboy whether a whip is for cracking or cutting.

job creation and economic growth are what solve poverty

I agree that job creation helps, which is one of the primary reasons I oppose President Bush and the Republican Party.

no one in the United States today is `poor' in any historically or internationally meaningful sense of the word at all.

Absurd! 3.5% of U.S. households had at least one member experiencing significant hunger due to lack of financial resources at some time in the past 12 months. You need to recalibrate your own laugh test. By the way, that 3.5% figure is sharply up from the previous year.

The `poor' in America wear designer clothes, drive cars...have homes, refrigerators, televisions....

That generalization is untrue as a blanket statement. I've heard that in not so many words from so many Republicans. Setting aside the fact that it's technically a falsehood, to the extent that it is true in part, I wonder if you know why that image aggravates you. What were you saying about appeals to envy?

systems such as welfare, for which you advocate massive tax hikes

You weren't payi

I think your point about money spent on social programmes hurting competitiveness is valid. However these programs are worth it despite the cost.

1. The Shuttle program mainly continues to keep the program's suppliers and contractors in business. The same people could produce far more in the way of truly useful goods and services if they were merely diverted to working on different launch systems, but today's gravy train is guaranteed while any change implies risk to the contractors (the taxpayer would properly see it the other way, but the taxpayers do not have lobbyists working the capitol).
2. The USA used to have a program of farm set-asides, where farmers were paid to idle some of their acreage and prevent overproduction. This guaranteed farmers a profit on those acres and kept prices from tanking. This program was replaced with one of pure subsidies 20 or so years ago. The results have been predictable: we have rampant overproduction while prices remain too low for many farmers to remain in business, all at taxpayer expense.
3. Ethanol subsidies mostly go into the pockets of wealthy corporate interests like Archer Daniels Midland. Some of the surplus corn (from the excessive subsidies) is consumed by the ethanol program, but the taxpayer pays more for a gallon-equivalent of motor fuel produced by this method than a British driver paying 75 p per liter. Ethanol production requires roughly a gallon-equivalent of fossil inputs to produce 1.2 gallons-equivalent of output, at a subsidy of $1.90/gallon; if I have that right, the taxpayer is paying $9.50/gallon for the energy actually created by this process. The rest of the energy is merely transformed from other forms, such as coal, gas and petroleum used on the farm.
4. "Special education" for children who will never be able to function on their own is likely wasted. "Education" for those who are both mentally defective and dying from their conditions is completely wasted.
5. Spending a million dollars (or a half, or a quarter million) to save a very premature infant, when the parents cannot support such a child's needs and the child will sustain serious brain damage, is wasted. Once these babies are born there is nothing medical science can do to make up for the damage that results. We would save more lives by letting them die naturally and putting the money into prenatal care, schooling and programs to prevent pregnancies among people who won't take prenatal care seriously.

It appears the Beeb has confused peak speed with average speed.

According to the US Department of Agriculture, the Great Circle distance from Paris to Tokyo is 6033 miles. Let's round that to 6000 mi. The speed of sound varies with temperature, but using 750mph makes the math easy (at aircraft altitudes, the speed of sound is closer to 700mph).

If it could hold the fuel, the Concorde at Mach 2 (1500mph) could do 6000 miles in four hours. If the EADS jet achieves Mach 4 (3000mph), it could do 6000 miles in two hours. If the entire distance were covered at cruising speed.

My impression (purely from being a passenger) is that it takes half an hour or so for a typical commercial airliner on a 1000 mile flight to reach cruising speed and altitude; the plane will then be at cruising speed for about 60 minutes, and then another 30 minutes is spent in deceleration. Of the 2 hours spent in the air, only half of the time is actually spent at crusing speed.

How long would it take for the EADS-SS to reach Mach 4? And how long would it take it to slow down from that speed to the typical 150mph (+/-) landing speed that current runways are designed for? I doubt the typical passenger is prepared for Michael Schumacher / John Force g-forces on takeoff and landing.

Let's say the EADS-SS takes 45 minutes to reach Mach 4, and another 45 minutes to drop back to landing speeds. Assuming linear acceleration and deceleration, that's an hour and a half spent at an average speed of 1500mph. So 2250 miles of the trip takes 1.5 hours. Transiting the remaining 3750 miles at Mach 4 (3000mph) would take another 1.25 hours, for a total trip of 2.75 hours. [Ignoring any ground taxi times or other delays.]

I would think, fuel-wise (which is basically the only marginal cost of airplane flight), that going from Mach 2 to Mach 4 is more expensive than going from Mach 1 to Mach 2. On the other hand, Mach 1 -> 2 is done in denser air than Mach 2 -> 4, so maybe not.

This could be a great question for a final exam in Engineering Analysis and Synthesis.

Then they started building factories, and told us that we could get rich by making things, even though lots of people got hurt or killed, the air and water got fouled, and the pay wasn't really that good after all. Then we got together and fought for better conditions, and the people that had only been consuming what we made got strong enough to build factories of their own, and the factories picked up and left.

Then they told us, "Don't worry about the factories leaving! The future is in services and intellectual property creation!" So they trained two generations of us to use computers and write memos and move paper around (at our great expense) so we could work in their service industries.

But the service industries didn't have any factories or other major infrastructural investments, so when the consumers of our software code and financial products got well-educated enough to do those things themselves, the service industries had an even easier time of it and ran for the hills.

Now they're not telling us where we're supposed to work, and not telling us how we're supposed to put our expensive educations to use, only that it'll get better some day. But what's left? No farms, no factories, empty office buildings, and even the production of the very food we eat and the houses we live in is restricted to illegal immigrants because no one is willing to pay living wages. There are some jobs that can't be moved easily - construction, machining, auto repair, but how are we supposed to support an entire economy with this?

Well, firstly, there are a lot more immobile jobs than you might think. Health care (except maybe for lab tests) isn't going off shore any time soon, nor will education (even if distance learning really does take off, countries like a US will have a natural competitive advantage here). Curiously enough, these two sectors of the economy are booming right now. Huge parts of the public sector are more or less domestic by definition. Heck, even something as simple as getting a haircut can't be easily outsourced to cheaper countries.

Secondly, the key factor that allows this cycle to improve our economic situation is productivity. For instance, take the farmers. From 1900 to 2000, agricultural employment in the US dropped from 40% of the workforce to 2%. Yet we still export 12 billion$ more food than we import every year; indeed these 2% are producing far more food than the 40% did in 1900. (Arguably subsidies are a factor, but that's another issue). We don't have agricultural jobs any more because we don't need them; our productivity has improved by an order of magnitude. The same then happened to manufacturing, and currently to certain types of services; technological advances in productivity, rather than offshore outsourcing, are the real driver of the shift in jobs from more automatable jobs to the more labor-intensive ones. Even without trade with China and India, this trend would continue; the only main difference would be that a lot of the stuff we are accustomed to getting cheaply from overseas would now be somewhat more expensive.

Terry

" Cooperatives follow three principles that define or identify their distinctive characteristics:

user-owned,

user-controlled, and

user-benefited."

How to Start a Cooperative

Recent studies suggest that the size of cholesterol particles does have an effect on plaque buildup in individuals with high cholesterol. The study in this article shows that individuals with lower cholesterol, but smaller particles, are at a greater risk for heart disease.

Apparently, larger particles are less dense, and do not clump together as readily as smaller particles. I am not a doctor, and I don't play one on TV, so read more for yourself if you really want to understand it.

Here's a link I found that shows hibiscus is considered a noxious weed by the U.S. government and three states.

Well, I will admit to being mixed up on what permafrost is (I was thinking that all permafrost areas were tundra, which is totally wrong). But I won't admit to knowing nothing about Alaska. I've read a bit about it, but never visited.

Anyway, for the record, according to this map Galena is in "lowland and upland area underlain by discontinuous permafrost."

MM
--

Walford has been researching and writing up his results with mice for years. His retort to fad discoveries is to "show me your old mouse".

Recently, an article appeared describing how he' subjecting himself to his own regimen of reduced caloric intake to improve longevity.

He admits it's difficult for people to restrain their diets, but he believes it's necessary if you want to live to be 120 years old.

In addition to quantity, there's the whole issue of diet composition, which is the second part of Calorie Restriction Optimum Nutrition.

The USDA food pyramid is an improvement over the basic 4 food groups I learned when I was young, but it's still been criticized, there are serious profits in making up our current set of foodstuffs.

But others have suggested alternatives that place the carbohydrate group as a smaller portion and put fruits and vegetables as the pyramid base.

The latter would be much more consistent with a hunter gatherer diet that predates agriculture and, IMHO, probably is more closely aligned with the way our bodies were meant to digest food. Our bodies have only recently begun to adapt to the advent of agriculture adn they certainly haven't adapted yet to modern high sugar diets (witness especially the incidence of diabetes among ethnic groups with less exposure to agriculture).

Oh well, soon enough we'll re-engineer ourselves to take power from whatever is highest energy density. Maybe nitromethane:)

US Department of Agriculture FY2003 spending (all, not just food stamps or assistance programs): $72.8 billion

US Dept of Agriculture has a FY2004 budget of $42.9 billion for domestic food assistance programs

So, you were saying that the military is a welfare program for the poor?

Way beyond my meager comprehension!

My apologies in advance if this comes across as mean-spirited - I'm using this to summarize my opinions about Atkins and weight loss in general and make it my sig so I can quit repeating myself.

That said, who said I said that high carb diets are the way to go? High carbs = high calories. People consume too many calories, these days from carbohydrates rather than fat.

Personally, I have been following a diet with a low caloric density, which is essentially what dietitians have been preaching for years. Unfortunately, this message somehow got filtered and warped and we now have Snackwell cookies and "no fat" fruit juice (no fat in my oj? well no shit!). Idiots like Susan Powter even said things like "only the fat you eat becomes fat on your body" (not an exact quote). As you say, Americans are fatter than ever. That is because they eat more calories despite eating less fat. Check out this section in the USDA factbook - you'll note that people are eating less fat but are eating more calories (thanks to eating too much refined grains, for example).

Here is an abstract on the longest (that I have heard of) independent study of the Atkins diet. Note that they are only evaluating his weight loss claims, not the other nonsense he published("fatigue, irritability, depression, trouble concentrating, headaches, insomnia, dizziness, joint and muscle aches, heartburn, colitis, premenstrual syndrome, and water retention and bloating"). When I call bullshit, i'm not just talking about the weight loss. If that statement doesn't make your snake-oil detector go nuts, I have a bridge I want to sell you :D

The conclusion of the study is that, in the long term, the Atkins diet is no better than traditional diet methods (high-carb, low-fat). People lost roughly the same amount of weight after 12 months and both studies had high attrition rates.

In fact, the chief researcher of this study (Gary Foster of the University of Pennsylvania) is quoted as saying the Atkins diet "gives people a framework to eat fewer calories, since most of the choices in this culture are carbohydrate driven." Basically, it's a low cal diet in disguise.

Also, please save your anecdotes. I lost weight by cutting calories, increasing my BMR through weight training, and lots of exercise, but I certainly can't prove that, least of all to you, because for all you know there were other factors I am mis-reporting or I could be simply lying. For all I know you lost much of the weight by taking a walk every night. Or perhaps you lost 40% muscle mass along with that weight. And perhaps one of us is going to gain all the weight back and then some in the future. My fiance lost 20 pounds eating nothing but animal crackers, fruits, and vegetables, but that's hardly healthy and worth promoting. Show me some long term studies (at least link to the abstracts) or don't bother.

When backpacking across North America, I would suggest that you take "Weird Al" Yankovic's advice and venture off the beaten path:

Like Elvis-a-Rama, the Tupperware Museum,
The Boll Weevil Monument, and Cranberry World,
The Shuffleboard Hall of Fame, Poodle Dog Rock,
And the Mecca of Albino Squirrels.

Oh, and don't forget to see the Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota while you're at it. :)

How is that a problem?

. . . it's simply an ethical consideration about making a species that is doomed without us.

The posting for Semiconductor Tarrifs

Steel Tarrifs declared Illegal by the WTO

OJ Tarrifs, though they seem to be being phased out

• You can search the USDA Nutrient Database Website (A bit inconvenient)
• Download the Raw database and search it through your favorite Database program.
• Download the Windows or Palm Binary of the Database

• You can search the USDA Nutrient Database Website (A bit inconvenient)
• Download the Raw database and search it through your favorite Database program.
• Download the Windows or Palm Binary of the Database

• You can search the USDA Nutrient Database Website (A bit inconvenient)
• Download the Raw database and search it through your favorite Database program.
• Download the Windows or Palm Binary of the Database

If you like gnutrition, why not just update the included USDA Nutrient database? I took a cursory look at the source and it appears that the included database (in the 'data' directory) is simply a dump of the USDA's text files (available here). The developers even include a couple of shell script to convert the USDA files into the correct format for gnumeric (mostly it's just stripping illegal characters).

Let's all email them to tell them what a bad idea this is.

• Fighting a risk of heart disease
• Pleasing the physician
• Complying with social expectations
• Looking more like a movie star
• Experimenting with human engineering
• Adapting to a new lifestyle
• "Feeling better"
• ...

• Fighting a risk of heart disease
• Pleasing the physician
• Complying with social expectations
• Looking more like a movie star
• Experimenting with human engineering
• Adapting to a new lifestyle
• "Feeling better"
• ...

"Renewables" are improving, but still can't do the job properly

Not so, according to a USDA study, ethonol yields a 34% energy gain ( USDA REPORT FINDS ETHANOL IS ENERGY EFFICIENT)and that is including growing and harvesting. Wonder what the efficiency of oil is when you figure in transport from who knows where and add the cost of defending it?

I think there are better sources of energy that are just on the horizon but I think ethonol is a good temporary solution. It has enviornmental benifits and I think its better than subsidies for farmers (and taxpayers).

Personally, I find it odd that it would be stamped that, since beef is graded as follows:

Prime, Choice, Select, Standard, Commercial, Utility, Cutter, and Canner.

Eggs and Poultry are graded with letters, but hey. Poultry only goes to C, of course.

You even provide a definition of Grade D beef! That's so nice of you! Really impressive, too, since it doesn't exist.

Educate yourself.

And stop pretending, and spreading your bullshit, okay?

By my simple calculations, to replace the San Onofre Nuclear power plant near where I live, which generates over 1 gigawatt of power, would require 13.7 million cows.

There are *tons* of cows in the US. According to this report , there were 96 million cows in the US in 1992, of which about 22.6% are dairy cows.

So this could be a pretty big deal (particularly if all cows could be used and not just dairy cows) but it would involve a big fraction of the industry getting involved.

When I toured San Onofre, they mentioned that (1) in California, the power companies must buy power from independent producers at the highest rate they are paying for any power, and (2) pig farmers were selling power to them at that time, and making some pretty good money off of it. That was around 1998-99.

You would think with power costs what they are now, every little farm would be looking into this. I hope they are.

I suspect they are not - or if they are they will find the risks too great.

It would be truely bizzare if we had to genetically breed cows to make them more "gas-y". I can just see it now: dairy cows, meat cows, gas cows...

The one image which keeps popping into my mind when such topics crop up is of starving people in other nations utterly bewindered that we could use all this fertile land...to generate electricity.

Of course the US alone already wastes enough food to save all the starving peoples of the world if we chose to do so - it is just a question of distribution.

These are REALLY cool over here. Took a minute or two to make it work, but they're pretty beautiful.

http://www.lpsi.barc.usda.gov/emusnow/stereo/stere o.htm

Also, look at the other electron-microscope images here http://www.lpsi.barc.usda.gov/emusnow/default.htm

These are REALLY cool over here. Took a minute or two to make it work, but they're pretty beautiful.

http://www.lpsi.barc.usda.gov/emusnow/stereo/stere o.htm

Also, look at the other electron-microscope images here http://www.lpsi.barc.usda.gov/emusnow/default.htm

weird snow pictures from afar and up close.

I know if *I* lived in NJ I would want to move elsewhere as soon as possible!

You fail to mention however, what's so frikkin' terrific about where you live! And this comment gets modded up! I'm not a liberator, just a meta-moderator! ;)

Any hare-brain can take a crack at the garden state. That's easy. It is the home to much industrial pollution, Frank Sinatra and Joe Piscopo. And it is the most populated state in the union which is why auto insurance is so overpriced and almost impossible to get; even if you have a perfect driving record, and even then it's no guarantee!

But one thing to consider in the fact that NJ is the most poulated state in the US is how diverse its population is. It is also has a large population of extremely wealthy people (including Ex-Presidents and CEOs of multinational corporations) who would ostensibly have enough money to live anywhere they choose.

People drive down the NJ Turnpike and think they have a sense of what the whole state is about. But if you venture out of Edison NJ you'd realize that NJ has some of the best beaches in the country. The ONLY state in US that has better beachesis Hawaii. I've been to many California beaches, including Newport Beach, Balboa and Dayna Point but I haven't found a single one that I would consider to be better than Long Beach Island.

One thing to understand about NJ is that it is almost a miniature representation of the entire United States. The north is densely populated, industrial and with a diverse ethnic population. The south is primarily agricultural, rural and tourism oriented. NJ is in almost as important a farming state as anywhere in the midwest, and has a larger population (per capita) of horses than Montana!

So you and all you ignorant ass moderators who modded this comment UP can put that THAT in your crack-pipes and smoke it!

YO! COWBOY NEAL! WHERE THE FREAKIN' HELL ARE MY MODERATOR POINTS WHEN I NEED THEM!!!!

What is the average benefit from the Food Stamp Program?

The average monthly benefit was about $80 per person and almost $186 per household in FY 2002. See the chart below for a listing of maximum benefits available to households of various sizes.

See http://www.fns.usda.gov/fsp/faqs.htm#8 for more details.

No, that's back to scrapie (I misremembered the name earlier) -- a disease of SHEEP (and goats, I see -- which would you prefer?), and in the same class as mad cow disease and the nasty New Guinea cannibal affliction called kuru caused by eating the brains of your ancestors (all are caused by prions, a sort of ultraprimitive protein "virus").

For the interested, even Ben Browder has written about this! ("We know you all: The Shippers, the Scapers, The SACC, Farscape Anonymous, CBOOL, FaDoP, The Royal Hynerian Guards, J&ASGTT, the TAC and many other societies. We know you by names and handles far to numerous to mention here.")

I think one of the most exciting things about P2P is that the costs are borne by the consumer, not the publisher. This holds true with Freenet, and holds true with Gnutella and Kazaa as well. If I have a popular, non-commercial web page, I the publisher have to pay to keep my pages up, and the more popular the pages are, the more I pay. With P2P however, the consumers act as distributors as well, so whether it's an audio file, video, web page or whatnot flowing over Freenet/Kazaa/Gnutella, the cost for me to publish is not there. I like this because it means popular, non-commercial media can spread by virtue of popularity, and the Internet can't be monopolized by people who can control the flow of information simply because they own the printing presses and distribution networks. I also think this is what makes P2P something disdained by the powers that be. The RIAA/MPAA's activities are just the short-term, tactical activities of the people who fund them, I care very little for their rationale and look for what the long-term effects would be if they were fully successful, and it doesn't look good - I don't really care about the supposed morality of their authority or whatnot, I'm only interested in the effects of their actions. Thousands of years ago, the concept of property in this economy of scarcity was created. Recently this concept has been extended to the spectrum, to bits of information flowing between me and a friend's computer with it's economy of non-scarcity, and even to species themselves. If we do not build a technological foundation that helps put power in the hands of the people (like Gutenberg, Wozniak, and Justin Frankel), accompanied by social movements that protect people from the powers-that-be using law and authority to dominate them, I think we are headed into a dire future.

BSE, or Mad Cow Disease, as the press has dubbed it, appears to have been transferred from sheep to cattle. About twenty-five ago Great Britain began allowing feed processors to use steamed sheep bone meal in cattle feed. BCE began to appear in bovines a few years later.

The disease in sheep is known as scrapie and has been known for around 250 years, according to the U. S. Department of Agriculture. The USDA even has an active program intended to eliminate scrapie. I am not aware of any definite link between scrapie and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were.

How scrapie was transmitted to elk and deer doesn't seem to be clear, but deer are distant relatives of goats and sheep. It does seems clear that politics is the reason for the name Chronic Wasting Disease, just as the press has insisted on Mad Cow Disease, instead of referring to the true origins of the disease and admitting that it originated in sheep.

It is a problem that they are researching to find out what attracts ants to electricity.

The Institute

Ars News Network

A 5 year old wired article very similiar to this story

I don't see why this kind of thing should cause revulsion. Ants are extremely useful and interesting and they are usually harmless. If there is anything disturbing about this it's that such useful critters needed to be destroyed.

Ever meet fire ants? If you had, you'd understand -- but in fire ants' case, it's more like "Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!"

Anyone care to guess which useful databases are about to be locked off to anyone who can't cough up the required dough?

The argriculture database is defintely Agricola

The legal one is harder to guess. There are really no good legal database hosted by federal government. FLITE is mostly useless. GPO Acess and THOMAS are both potential targets, but those are so important to general public, as oppose to relativly small number to researchers for DOE's PubScience.

IF they do shutdown those two. Then it's time to re-read declaration of Independence:

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

I guarantee you get a lot more return for your money from the government (which isn't hell-bent on taking off a maximal ROI from every taxpayer dollar it collects) than you do from a corporation, which always wants its 15%+ profit.

Or don't you like roads, electrical grids, and all that other good infrastructure and all those wonderful services? Me, personally, I like paying taxes.

Coincidentally enough, I don't think people hate corporations for the same reasons they hate governments. It's not about the money corporations take away, it's the exploitation without accountability (or transparency) -- unless you are a shareholder, you cannot vote a corrupt CEO out of office. I am acutely aware of this paradigm, because there are US politicians who somehow directly affect my life and whom I would dearly love to vote out of office, and I'm not a US citizen.

While I agree that Nintendo's price-fixing is a non-issue as issues go, it's still worth a weather eye, much as many other things are. I'd hate to be serious and uptight all the time.

Oh?

I think the word you're looking for is "farm" instead of prairie.