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That's probably not true. This WaPo article describes North Korean defectors struggling with reading and math.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/11/AR2009041100766_pf.html

Teenage defectors spend two months to two years at nearby Hangyoreh Middle-High School, a remedial boarding school the government built three years ago to help the increasing number of newly arrived youngsters who are unfit for public schools. Many have been out of school for years and have difficulty with basic reading and math.

"All I learned in school in North Korea was that Kim Jong Il was the best leader and that North Korea was the best country," said Lee, who is in her final year at Hangyoreh and hopes to become an English teacher.

"Education in North Korea is useless for life in this country," said the school's principal, Gwak Jong-moon. "When you are too hungry, you don't go to learn and teachers don't go to teach. Many children have been hiding in China for years with no access to schools."

I think the problem with the literacy figures is that a country like North Korea can always cheat by only showing the inspectors the schools for the elite and claiming they are typical. Actually they are far from typical - NK had a famine relatively recently and still has chronic shortages of everything. It's highly unlikely that the non elite education system is particularly high performance.

South Korea isn't like that - rich capitalist asian countries (SK, Japan and Taiwan) have an incredibly high pressure education system and most children seem to go along with it. Thus when North Koreans arrive in South Korea they are far behind as the WaPo article describes.

The 31-year-old blogger's crime: falsely reporting that South Korea had barred banks from purchasing U.S. currency. The authorities said the blogger, Park Dae-sung, will find out his sentence on April 20 for posting the inaccurate story that prosecutors said undermined the county's credibility

First of all, slander is when people talk about it. When it's being written then it's libel.

Saying that, is it libel when it's the truth? From this washington post article on Park Dae-sung's arrest:

Prosecutors claim that one of his postings is clearly false. The government issued an emergency order Dec. 29, Minerva wrote, urging top banks to stop buying dollars. The government has denied issuing the order, but a number of currency traders have told the South Korean media that the government did urge banks that day to refrain from buying dollars.

So, care to retract your comment? After all, it's in itself rather... libellous.

Our problem here in the US is that the entities (telcos) in charge of delivering our bandwidth, refuse to lay down a strand of glass to each of our houses (the last mile).

They typically state It will cost too much, I call BS, please force them US government as they had to in Japan. If they had the will, we would already have it. The telcos financially will NEVER have the will to give us MORE at a reasonable monthly rate. (Japan monthly rates thanks to de-regulation would be a more than reasonable place to start, especially when you consider that it costs less than $5.00 per month to deliver (2 Gigs = $1.00 or .50 cents per 1 Gbps of bandwidth, they can probably provide it cheaper than this, please do NOT accept their FUD).

I personally watched a Japanese official, on CSPAN, state that they make more than enough money as their costs are less than $1.00, the American telco executives looked a bit uncomfortable with what this Japanese NTT telco executive was admitting too. It was telling, humorous and a bit depressing all at the same time. We Americans are so getting raped and dragged over the coals via high fees, customer no service and telco industry FUD!

As you can see, at a figure roughly double Kafka's doomsday HDTV family usage figure of 1+ Terabytes per month, the total cost can be projected at $32, not $560.

Yet both Comcast and Time Warner, etc, are suggesting to be financially viable they need caps as low as 5 Gigabytes, pathetic. (Note: THIS IS FUD ) They, themselves suggested 250 Gigabytes once upon a time (which is still pathetic), but have now started quoting CAPS of less than 50 Gigabytes. I would like 1+ Terabyte of service and usage for around $55.00 per month and you the telco could still make almost double your costs, everyone stop buying the telco FUD.

If you are in an area of the US where the telcos and/or ISPs are talking about monthly bandwidth CAPS of less than 250 megabytes per month, you had better start screaming to your elected officials before you get SCREWED by them. Per BellSouth's Chief Architect Henry Kafka (note his figures are blatantly WRONG) The average IPTV user will likely consume about 224 gigabytes per month

In other words, if your cap is less than 224 gigabytes per month, you are setting yourself up to be charged a heck of lot more each month for service. Besides HD IP television, movie, online gaming and video watching, you have zero control of how much FLASH and other CSS, JavaScript that is loaded from different websites each time you access them, yes it might be small, but it all adds up. The point, if telcos had started building out their fiber since 1994 as they promised to do, over the last mile, pathetic bandwidth CAPS would be NOT be needed. But not building out, keeping the resource scarce they give themselves the excuse they need to charge you more.

Not only should they (telcos) NOT be rewarde

Homosexuals have a different brain structure that is most likely caused by hormonal exposure while in the womb. The jury is still out on the *exact* process/processes that lead to homosexuality, but it's almost universally accepted by the scientific community that homosexuality does have a biological origin.

I learned this in 1998 from my MIT professor in Biopsychology -- people (like the same people who don't believe dinosaurs existed) still like to hem and haw that being gay is simply a lifestyle choice but really, it's not. Any heterosexual couple is capable of giving birth to a completely homosexual child.

OK, first off there's two kids of Muslims in the USA, the Nation of Islam/5 percenters which are to Islam as the Mormons are to Christianity (really, their Allah was born in the early 1900s in Detroit) and immigrant Muslims, you can't mix the two.

How are the latter well integrated? The USA are the one place where most people think of them the strongest as linked to terrorism, whereas in Europe they're more like our own Mexicans.

Here, have a reality check

The strongest indicator of where a voter falls on the issue is whether he or she self-identifies as an evangelical Christian. Ninety-percent of white Protestant evangelicals oppose gay marriage, compared with 48 percent of non-evangelical white Protestants. Seventy-two percent of evangelical white Protestants support a constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage, while just 33 percent of non-evangelicals back such a ban.

Catholics roughly mirror non-evangelical Protestants on the issue -- 38 percent support gay marriage while 36 percent support amending the Constitution to ban it. Not surprisingly, non-religious voters are the most favorably disposed toward both gay marriage (64 percent support) and opposed to an amendment (68 percent).

The majority, in some cases. The vast majority (90%) in self-identified evangelical Christians (which are not the majority of "Christ's followers"). Still at least two orders of magnitudes fewer than 99.99%. (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/parsing-the-polls/parsing-the-polls-gay-marriage.html)

Like, for instance, the NSA...

The NSA doesn't need an opportunistic vulnerability. They just secretly order one put in.

---

Windows and closed source software. The US intelligence agencies back door to every network connected country and business on earth.

Since when were protests "terrorism"?

Since the day when being "tortured" requires you to suffer from organ failure or death.

Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.) noted that the administration's prewar rhetoric, including a remark by then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," helped push Congress's October 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

That kind of language, Larsen said, "always has seemed to be much bigger than the facts that we end up reviewing in retrospect."

The smoking gun and mushroom cloud image, he said, "sounds a lot better than 500 artillery shells of various amounts of degraded material that fit the technical definition of chemical weapons . . . buried in various bunkers in various states of disrepair that we are not even sure Saddam Hussein knew about."

I think you'll discover that if "traditional" newspapers go away, communities will step in to fill the void.

I think you won't:

Well, sorry, but I didn't trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick's identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers. And there wasn't anyone working sources in the police department to counterbalance all of the spin or omission.

From here.

Or is your point that implementing progressive taxation for the purpose of helping all members of society have opportunities available to them is even comparable to illegally seizing private property for merely speaking against corruption?

Yes, it is comparable — and increasingly so. First of all, your priorities are screwed up. "Progressive taxation" is a fact of life, because of the principle, that your taxes are based on your ability to pay. This principle existed since long before the politicians recognized, that they can get elected by promising the poor to "take care" of them. It was neither meant to "give opportunities", nor is it achieving that goal. Despite the poorer half of the Americans paying less than 3% of the total tax, the upward mobility in the country has slowed over the decades.

And now back to the validity of comparing to the case at hand... Contrary to your accusations, the guy's property was seized neither illegally (explicit accusation) nor permanently (implicit). In fact, most of his property is still with him, thankfully. He is, by all appearances, being harassed by the government (incidentally — Democratic government) he criticized, which is very wrong.

But the 90% punitive taxes (except, of course, on the government employees), government's takeover of firms (on the Executive's whim), and refusal to release control of the firms willing and able to pay back the government's money are much worse.

You don't know what they were searching for.

You are only repeating a rumor.

The FBI employs about 12-13,000 special agents whose job it is to investigate violations of 300 or so federal statutes.

That is not a particularly large number, when you come right down to it.

In the American federal system. investigation of the "heinous" crime is almost always a local and state responsibility.

The rare terrorist act makes headlines. White-collar crime - economic crime - comes closer to the truth of what the FBI is all about:

FBI: Internet Fraud Rates Rose 33% Last Year

Agreed, how can we trust these people to take care of things that are this serious when they cant even get a ban on lead done right:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/23/AR2009032301764.html

They try to put a law in place to protect children from lead, and end up banning minibikes and used book sales, whose lead content is equal to about a glass of water.

They mess up a simple lead ban with shitty wording, and we expect them to deal with such things as our privacy laws and national security. We need to get rid of every single sitting senator and house rep next time around, no matter party affiliation, get rid of them all.

As I said ...

I guess Obama reads slashdot

It seems like Obama just can't wait to join as many anti-freedom organisations as he can.

I can understand how you got carried away. It's hard to keep up with all the examples of leftist kook accusations.

Suck it wingnut. Suck it long, suck it hard:

US Attorney Troy Eid files charges against a prisoner for threatening McCain in a letter, prisoner faces an additional five year sentence.

US Attorney Troy Eid says of meth addicts found with guns, bulletproof vests who threatened to kill Obama:

"The law recognizes a difference between a true threat -- one that can be carried out -- and the reported racist rantings of a drug addict," U.S. Attorney Troy Eid said.

He said the men's plans were "more aspirational, perhaps, than operational."

The three have been charged with drug and weapons offenses but not with threatening to assassinate Obama or with other national-security-related crimes.

There are plenty of news sources out there that don't have a lot of those stories (NPR, for example).

Actually NPR is at a record high rating. More people listen to NPR's Morning Edition than watch Good Morning America or the Today Show. Of course that's probably because the number of people who are in their car driving to work form a huge base for NPR that (hopefully) aren't able to watch TV. Here's a link to the Washington Post article

From the original article:

In case you haven't guessed it yet, APRIL FOOLS!!! Seriously, if we get any real news about outages, deaths, or disruptions actually caused by Conficker today, you will read it here first.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2009/04/conficker_worm_strikes_militar.html?wprss=securityfix

If you don't like my source, provide one of your own. Either way, don't attack the messenger unless it truly is a bad source. And, true, while wikipedia is not the best source, it's accurate more times than not. Besides, I've never heard anyone accuse Wikipedia of right-leaning bias!

Would you take the Washington Post meet your standards as a source?

The most notable change is that HuffPost has morphed from a left-leaning site with a modest conservative presence to a pugnaciously liberal operation in which the banner headlines and majority of bloggers holler about the latest outrage perpetrated by the Bush administration.

"We are opposed to the war in Iraq," Huffington says from her Los Angeles home. "We think the troops should come home. The headlines are going to reflect what is in the best interests of the country."

As Lerer puts it: "Attitude is a huge positive, not a negative. People don't have to love you. Maybe people come to you because they don't love you."

After President Bush commuted Scooter Libby's sentence last week, HuffPost put up 15 blogs -- every one of them critical -- including one from Huffington and another by Russell Shaw headlined "President Bush, You Are a Disgrace to My Flag."

Now that we've established that the point of HuffPo is to promote left thinking ideology, do you think that it can be trusted to do non-biased "investigative journalism"? That's what we are discussing here.

(also, note that Scooter Libby did NOT out Valerie Plame. His problem was with his memory which led to perjury. Did Russell Shaw display the same outrage when Bill Clinton committed the same crime as Scooter Libby? Of course not. Scooter's biggest crime was that he was a conservative, not that he lied under oath. Google "Russell Shaw impeachment" for more views of this seemingly non-biased individual. This is the type of "journalism" I expect to see from HuffPo)

As for my personal opinion of Arianna Huffington? Yeah, I like her. I just don't like that she treats people different based on their political beliefs. And her "blog" is the worst. In the example I gave above, people don't see the irony in it. They act as if the crimes from their side is no big deal, but the the other side do it.... OK, imagine if Bush, Rove or Rice ever said, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." Wouldn't they get hammered over it? Well, Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, and Hillary Clinton all said something to that effect? Where is the outrage on HuffPo (or any other media source)? Where are the calls for impeachment? Nothing, just crickets. Anyway, THAT'S my problem with bias on either side. It sets up a double standard. (disclaimer: I was against the Clinton impeachment as well)

The basic issue in the US is the partisan nature of both politics and the media

Agreed, and The Huffington Post is widely regarded as a left leaning blog. I think objective journalism died long before investigative journalism. I would love to see some great, old fashioned, investigative journalism, but I fear it would be extremely biased in today's media outlets.

Luckily scientology has enough money to inscribe their beliefs on stainless steel records and the foresight to place these in titanium boxes in underground vaults, Find me on google earth

Isn't that abridging the freedom of the presses that want to make political statements endorsing candidates? It basically says, "Don't make political endorsements, or else we'll tax you."

The same basic argument has already been made by churches many times. The answer by the Supreme Court has always been, "Endorse anyone you want, just don't expect the Federal government to subsidize it with a tax expenditure." Seems like a reasonable outcome to me.

Just heard that New Hampshire has one of the lowest crime rates per capita of any State in the Union. Nevada, another state similar in population to New Hampshire, has one of the highest. I betcha gun ownership there is much lower than here! :-)

Gun Ownership by State:

30% of households in New Hampshire have guns. 33.8% of households in Nevada have guns.

See this response I posted to someone who argued this as well. Although she's the governor, and the capital is in Juneau, she spends most of her time in Anchorage and Wasilla. She even got paid per diem travel "expenses" when working from home. More background.

Traffic Converter have a note on their site www.trafficconverter2.biz:

On March 18th, in the evening, with no warnings, the German Merchant Processing was cut off. Merchant was at the bank personally (without intermediaries), proved and with the arrangements on the highest level. Up until now the bank was not replying to our inquiries, but finally we received answers from them your Merchant was blocked and the account frozen until the determination of the facts. According to unofficial channels, we have been able to ascertain the following:
"I am sorry to inform you that both VISA and MC have done a surprise on site visit at the offices in Frankfurt. They are actually there as we speak.
They have instructed WC to freeze your account until further notice and both of these companies have different reasons for doing so:

VISA; they want to investigate where all the volume comes from.
MC; High CB`s the past few days."

This is absolutely unprecedented case when two of the largest payment system called the requirement to block the Merchant. We also have a reason to believe that the situation was caused by the recent publication about us and our products in Washington Post:
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/

There are, as you can see, some very serious accusations. Including the relation to Conficker, which we actually are not implicated with (and can prove it if necessary).

As a result of this situation:
- No money to pay;
- No capacity to process products (not because we're not working, but because this volume is not endure any processor)
- There is a chance to get ourselves under prosecution and let down Webmasters.
So, the decision was made to âefault and shut down the Traffic Converter. In case we resolve this issue and manage to refund the money from the bank, we will pay you off all debts as quickly as possible.
If we manage to get the stable traffic conversions we have demonstrated during the year and a half, we will contact you on individual basis.
Thanks to everyone for succesful business cooperation.

why pay X amount of dollars for microsoft-windows when you can get Linux for FREE!

A few reasons:

• Some people happen to own a lot of hardware with no Linux driver.
• The unregistered shareware installed on major-label PCs subsidizes the price of an OEM Windows license. Evidence: Sony has experimented with charging PC buyers $50 not to install unregistered shareware.
• Linux users may still have to buy CrossOver to run apps and games that don't work well in vanilla Wine, at least without a lot of fiddling.
• Web developers who run Linux need to test their sites on Windows Internet Explorer, a Windows OS component that's still the majority web browser on PCs.

This is the outcome of a 5 min google search:
UN http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60143-2004Jul18.html
OSCE http://www.americanpolicy.org/un/election.htm
General (for links, not opinion) http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2004/08/foreigners-monitor-us-elections.html

Probably every human rights organization (even some within the US) felt the urge to monitor, please go on searching, but take off these glasses you wear.

I'm sure your government told you its only those evil communists who distrust the great americans people...

Without speed, all the other features fall by the wayside. You can't enjoy a WebSlice (which is a slice of a Webpage that is constantly updated) if it takes forever to load. And if you look at Internet Explorer's market share, it has steadily been eroded over the past few years by its faster rivals Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera.

...If you've already left IE for a speedier browser, IE8 is not going to bring you back, and Microsoft knows it.

...IE may still hold 67 percent of the browser market, according to Net Apps, but that share is declining. Firefox claims 22 percent, Safari has 8 percent, and Chrome has captured 1 percent. And speed is not their only advantage. Many of the new features in IE8 are simply catch-up features. The rest are not enough to make most switchers switch back.

New IE8 still the slowest browser
Microsoft's final code comes in dead last in JavaScript benchmark tests

Microsoft Corp. may be talking up the performance boost it gave to its just-launched Internet Explorer 8, but the new browser remains the slowest of the top five on the market, benchmark tests show.

Firefox proved to be 59% faster than IE8, while Safari was 47% faster. Opera, the slowest non-Microsoft production browser, was still 38% faster than IE8.

But the real reason most people are leaving IE is not speed:

• Microsoft Debuts IE8, Only to Have It Hacked
• Researcher hacks just-launched IE8

Microsoft's New Browser Is Better, but Still Not Best

A typical 1000 Megawatt coal powerplant such as the behemoth ERGs boondoggle just being completed in SE Wisconsin requires 1215 train carloads of Coal (Carbon) every day. Once burned, each carbon molocule (Atomic Weight 12) will have two Oxygen Molecules (Atomic Weight 16) attached to it and this 'refuse' to be sequestured will weigh 3.67 times as much. All else being equal, this means you would need 4459 boxcars full of carbon junk leaving the power plant. But CO2 can't easily be compressed into boxcars so it is likely the carbon will be sequestered with calcium or silicon (in rock), and weigh much more. And Shell thinks this is cheaper than solar, wind and hydropower? Have I missed April fools day or is someone playing a shell game?

Yeah, that's the problem, too many over-religious Christians in the scientific fields! You just can't keep Christians away from science!

Read it and weep.

Go fuck yourself, you deliberately ignorant mouth-breathing moron. Bush didn't "allow it", Bush TRIED TO STOP IT.

Here's the problem, reported by the Washington Post in 2004:

Report Slams Fannie Mae
Fannie Mae, the giant mortgage finance company, has used improper accounting methods that raise serious questions about the quality of its management and the validity of its financial reports, government regulators reported yesterday.

Though it didn't quantify the effect of what it called pervasive misapplication of accounting rules on the company's books, the report by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight cited one instance in 1998 where the company inappropriately deferred $200 million of estimated expenses, which enabled management to receive full annual bonuses. Had Fannie recorded the expenses in 1998, no bonus would have been paid, the report said.

The report also detailed numerous transactions over several years where it said Fannie Mae management intentionally smoothed out gyrations in its earnings to show investors it was a low-risk company. Fannie "maintained a corporate culture that emphasized stable earnings at the expense of accurate financial disclosures," regulators said in a letter to the company.

Here's who put a stop to the stopping:

Video of DEMOCRATS covering for those problems reported above.

Here's a list of some of those DEMOCRATS:

Maxine Waters: Through nearly a dozen hearings, we were frankly trying to fix something that wasnâ(TM)t broke. Mr. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and particularly at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Franklin Raines.

Gregory Meeks: ⦠I'm just pissed off at OFHEO [the regulators trying to warn Congress of insolvency at the GSEs], because if it wasn't for you, I don't think we'd be here in the first place. ... There's been nothing that indicated that's wrong with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac has come up on its own ... The question that then comes up is the competence that your agency has with reference to deciding and regulating these GSEs.

Lacy Clay: This hearing is about the political lynching of Franklin Raines.

Barney Frank: I don't see anything in this report that raises safety and soundness problems.

Maxine Waters? Hmmm, could she be a CROOK?

Waters Helped Bank Whose Stock She Once Owned

WASHINGTON -- When Rep. Barney Frank was looking to aid a Boston-based lender last fall, the Massachusetts Democrat urged Maxine Waters, a colleague on the House Financial Services Committee, to "stay out of it," he says.

The reason: Ms. Waters, a longtime congresswoman from California, had close ties to the minority-owned institution, OneUnited Bank.

Ms. Waters and her husband have both held financial stakes in the bank. Until recently, her husband was a director. At the same time, Ms. Waters has publicly boosted OneUnited's executives and criticized its government regulators during congressional hearings. Last fall, she helped secure the bank a meeting with Treasury officials.

Barney Frank?

Media Mum on Barney Frank's Fannie Mae Love Connection

Prominent Democrats ran Fannie Mae, the same government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) that donated campaign cash to top Democrats. And one of Fannie Mae's main defenders in the House - Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., a recipient of more than $40,000 in campaign donations from Fan

The person who alerted the authorities was a DC electrical engineer that these two tried to include in their scam, and who went to the FBI fairly shortly after their proposal (more info from the washington post's article). Kundra was not the one who alerted the FBI.

'The Coke side of Politics',

Why bring Ted Kennedy into this?

Don't you mean Barack Obama?

...gad zooks!: A political blog; the writer of whom gets his information from...
...the Washington Post.

FTFY.

You might not like the Washington Post, but it hardly qualifies as "his ass."

There's also the AP and, well, plenty of other hits on Google.

I'd just like to add that to settle global bribery and corruption charges, Siemens recently agreed to pay $1.6 billion in fines - ~$900m to the US, and the rest to the EU. Now that's what I call "staggering".

Dave Cole, senior director of product management at Symantec, said the PIFTS file was part of a "diagnostics patch" shipped to Norton customers on Monday evening. The purpose of the update, Cole said, was to help determine how many customers would need to be migrated to newer versions of its software as more Windows users upgrade to Windows 7.

"We have to make sure before we migrate users to a new product that we can see what kind of load we can expect on our servers, and which customers are going to have to be moved up to the latest version of our product," Cole said.

As to why Symantec has been deleting posts about this from their user forum, Cole said the company noticed that minutes after the update went out hundreds of new users began registering on the forum, leaving inane and sometimes abusive comments.

"We want to be out there in the community, but by the same token, if we see abuse we will shut it down pretty quickly," Cole said. "There was no attempt at secrecy here, but people were spamming the forum and making it unusable to everyone."

In Symantec's defense, when I first heard about this earlier this morning, I noted privately to a couple of folks that some of the comments being left on the Symantec forum bore many of the hallmarks of "4Chan," (a.k.a. "anonymous"), a virtual community that thrives on playing practical jokes and causing trouble online. The summary about this incident posted to News-for-nerds site Slashdot this morning links to a key 4Chan forum.

Of course, the problem with that justification for deletion being that 4chan spamming didn't start until sometime overnight or this morning. Hours earlier several completely legitimate question threads had been deleted with no explanation.

And for the record, your figures are complete bunk. 91,060 - 99,433 is the complete total for civilian deaths in Iraq.

No, it's not. Those are perfectly-documented, reported-in-the-media deaths.

Statistical study in the Lancet (British medical journal) in 2006 came up with a more likely number of over 600,000 violent Iraqi deaths since the invasion. ORB (British polling agency) in 2007 came up with a number more than 1,000,000.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001442.html
http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=78

Or, what seems to me most likely, this is a ploy to get approval for the modernization of nuclear weapons that defense and co. have been wanting. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/04/AR2008120403555.html

3. If the cells that precede the formation of a human being that will never grow to become even a fetus, much less a fully formed infant, can be used to save lives

Why will these never grow to become a fetus or a fully formed infant? Because their lives are cut off. I don't know where you get the 80% figure for zygotes failing to implant- the research I've seen quotes something in the range of 1/3 or so- but even granting your figure, the fact that some fertilized embryos die naturally doesn't provide any justification for killing them by the boatload for research which, despite all the messianic talk from Democratic politicians looking to make political hay since 2001, hasn't shown that using embryonic cells rather than adult cells will result in major cures.

4. All of these things can be taken into consideration without devaluing conscious human life, because conscious human life this is not.

So the only human life that matters is conscious human life? The next time you fall asleep it's time to harvest your organs.

And besides, we can get plenty of cells from elsewhere so the debate is now largely moot save for those few situations where adult cells may not suffice.

If that's so, why the profane attacks on those who think we ought to tread carefully in using embryonic cells?

'Watchmen': Bam! Pow! Whack! Zzzzzz . . .

The intersection of people who find The God Delusion hateful and the people who have actually read The God Delusion is probably less than 1% of the total population.

Dawkins holds that he is correct, as does everyone else with a position on any given issue. It's hardly his fault that the logical consequence is that people who disagree with him are incorrect.

If this were, say, a political discussion, Dawkins' message and tone would positively mild compared to partisans like Rush Limbaugh. Political partisans don't bother with implication. They directly insult the other side's intelligence all the time and no one really bats an eye. I don't seem to Dawkins ever telling someone from the opposition to go fuck himself, for example.

The most efficiently run medical payment service in this country right now is medicare with over 95% efficiency in terms of money going to treatment vs. overhead.

I've found this report that specifically talks about how INEFFICIENT Medicare is and makes recommendations to change that.

This USA Today article complains that Medicare funds the vast majority of residency training in the USA. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a substantial amount of money that is not going to treatment as you said.

This report says fraud is costing in the billions. And this article says that fraud is a growing problem in Medicare costing $60 billion per year and says that fewer than 5%... that's 5% of claims are audited.

According to this Congressional Research Service report Medicare's budget is $420 billion for 2009. If $60 billion is just fraud, that means nearly 15% of Medicare's budget is NOT going to treatment not including all the rest of Medicare's expenses (funding residency, other misc overhead).

Sorry, but to say that Medicare is efficient is just plain wrong.

I'd say they lost whatever souls they had back when they started to help China throw journalists in prison.

Go talk to someone in the military about that whole free government provided healthcare...you get what you pay for...

I agree that the VA is underfunded relative to its size and patient population but, given its funding limitations, it's actually the best performing health system in the US when measured objectively in terms of patient outcomes.

I'd like to see an open-wrt router firmware with.

8+ - Ethernet ports for multi wan (load balancing and fail over) 8+ - port USB so I can attach everything

Different size distribution so we can choose what to install and a nice auto-update to support all the devices.

Good idea and I agree with you!

For those who are not aware, you can get this very cheaply with DD-WRT + multiple router / firewalls or a router/firewall + network hubs.

Just combine a typical 4 port firewall/router that supports and will run DD-WRT, use VLANS and either a second router or a Gigabyte hub...thus port 2 + VLAN1 could be one 8 port gigabyte hub; port 3 + VLAN2 + second 8 port gigabyte hub; assign port 4 + 3rd 8 port gigabyte hub + VLANs. Since VLANs normally start at zero VLAN0, assign that port to a computer and or segregated network for monitoring of the hub and put all your WiFi traffic on this port to the Internet service provider. Thus you segregate your local area network from the WiFi part, thus you can have your port free and open, even charge if you want and make some money, although most just leave it open. And no you do NOT advertise this fact to your ISP.

VLAN0 - All Wifi + Internet (throttled by you as you see fit, so that your usage always gets priority over any other user that does not live in your household) + Quality of Service (QoS) + separate LAN address and PC to monitor everything, pushing this traffic off the LAN and if setup correctly can monitor for Trojan horses installed thanks to buggy browsers, applications and operating systems from proprietary vendors.

VLAN1 - 8 port gigabyte hub - Internet (with priority given to this LAN segment over VLAN0, QoS so that your VoIP gets priority over anything else...thus your phone calls are always clear without interruption

VLAN2 - second 8 port gigabyte hub - Internet (also priority over VLAN0

VLAN3 - third 8 port gigabyte hub - Internet (priority over VLAN0

With that setup you would have 25 ports through that one 4 port hub....doubt you would need that many. The best thing is that you can offer FREE WiFi and prevent users of this FREE WiFi from seeing the rest of your Local Area Network by segmenting the VLANS.

By segregating your Local Area Network, you can offer FREE WiFi without concerns from crackers, phishers and scammers. By definition, hackers will DO NO HARM.

Encourage everyone to open up their WiFi and stop the FUD by those that ONLY want to offer us less than what we already pay for....

The telcos have accepted billions of our tax dollars to build out fiber to our homes, but give us excuses instead. Many other countries have had 100Mbps / 100Mbps since 2000. Japan is starting to implement 1 Gbps / 1Gbps for less than $55 per month NOW. How much are you paying for less than 2 Mbps? Even FIOS will NOT give us more than 45 Mbps and its 2009, is that really a solution?

While the typical router and firewall routers do not have more than 4 ports, you can use VLANs to separate out those four ports. Considering that the lowest priced DD-WRT router is around $35 - $65; you could just extend from 4 to more by chaining + VLAN with additional Router / Firewalls instead of network hubs.

IMPORTANT NOTE about LINKSYS routers: The new ones coming on the shelves since December 2008 DO NOT allow you to use the DD-WRT software. Make sure you ONLY purchase a DD-WRT supported router!

Here is the page showing which routers support DD-WRT; I recommend those reading this that you get one that will support t

We see statistics coming out of America like 92% of Americans believe in a God. This speaks volumes.

I'm calling bullshit on those statistics. Not only is it from the Washington Post, it has volunteer bias (it was a poll); and while many people might claim to be "devote X," most do nothing in regards to their religion outside of their hour mass on Sunday (or other holy day) and the half-hearted attempts at religious holidays.

Now if you're making the point that the American media has effectively sheltered the American public from the truth, you are absolutely 100% correct. I would trust an International news agency over a domestic one any day, except for those located in the Police State more commonly known as the UK.

You know, I'm usually one to go with Hanlon's Razor (never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity), but with the VH-71 Marine One replacement program getting the stinkeye for it's ridiculous cost overruns, for once the conspiracy thing has me suspicious. It's likely the plans being on P2P part is entirely coincidence, and the publicity of the incident is the conspiracy, but I can see it happening. The question now is, which Marine One plans are they? Are they the plans for the helicopters currently in service, and the conspiracy is trying to save the VH-71 program, or were they the VH-71 plans and the conspiracy is trying to kill the VH-71 program?

Really though, it's probably just unrelated coincidence. Most things like this are completely unplanned. Conspiracies require competence, and you just don't find that in government much.

We see statistics coming out of America like 92% of Americans believe in a God. This speaks volumes.

I believe in God you twit.

No you don't, if you did, you'd turn the other cheek instead of shooting back an insult.

Unless you believe in Thor or something, you weren't very specific on which of the thousands and thousands of gods you believe.

We see statistics coming out of America like 92% of Americans believe in a God. This speaks volumes.

I believe in God you twit. You atheists are worse than the religious nuts, oh wait, you _are_ religious nuts! I'm not American, though, so I must be substandard anyway. Me and my silly God, that is.

"Verizon's 2008 operating margin was 17.34%, their return on average equity was 13.93%, neither are particularly stellar or out of line."

Thats wonderful.......errr...how much is their CEO paid? Looking at that I would have to say that the executives of the company are screwing shareholders badly. It is from 2007 of course, but do you really think much has changed?