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The WSJ had an article about this. From the article:

The mutation prevents a molecule called CCR5 from appearing on the surface of cells. CCR5 acts as a kind of door for the virus. Since most HIV strains must bind to CCR5 to enter cells, the mutation bars the virus from entering.

Is CCR5 in any way necessary to the cell? If not, then a molecule which would fit CCR5 like a negative and attach to it would prevent the virus from attaching to the cell. The "doors" would be "jammed".

The WSJ had an article about this. From the article:

The mutation prevents a molecule called CCR5 from appearing on the surface of cells. CCR5 acts as a kind of door for the virus. Since most HIV strains must bind to CCR5 to enter cells, the mutation bars the virus from entering.

Pickens has shelved his plans to build a massive wind farm in Texas due to - as an upthread post noted - a lack of electricity-transmission lines.

Of course, there weren't any high-voltage transmission lines near Hoover Dam when they built that, so this is sort of a spurious argument: If your plan for building a wind farm didn't include connecting it to the grid in some useful way, then your plan was incomplete.

In fairness, in the corporate world there are so many pitfalls that it's essentially impossible to navigate through them all without a strong team of lawyers and accountants.

Laws in America are so complex and vague that the average american commits three felonies a day. The same difficulties apply to companies. Even something as straightforward as paying a CEO takes legal specialists dedicated to that specific area of law. Even think of the difficulties of complying with Sarbanes Oxley from an IT perspective. It takes time to set up all the infrastructure, and if you were a startup, you may not even have had a dedicated sys admin. Then suddenly you have all these regulations you have to comply with.

Not that I'm trying to excuse Zuckerberg. If he was stealing other people's emails, he should go to jail, a much better candidate for jailtime than Terry Childs.

For what it's worth, the Wall Street Journal article says "ABC television stations" and mentions that the deal between Disney and Time Warner covers the cable stations as well as the broadcast network.

That's still not a clear-cut answer, but my guess would be that they were all pulled but ABC gets the lion's share of attention because the Oscars are tonight.

But you missed the fact that you already are paying for someone else's health care in both taxes that go to public hospitals, and in higher premiums. The fact is that with universal coverage, premiums *should* go down due to market forces since the pool of sick people gets diluted with healthy people. Now given that health insurers have an antitrust exemption, have no competition in each state (thanks to collusion) and increase premiums to boost profits (“The average increase is 23 percent and is intended to return California to a target profits of 7 percent, versus 5 percent this year.”), don't bet on it without real competition. Competition driven simply to lower rates, a public option.

The difference in a trillion dollars spent on war, and the 700 billion "spent" in TARP loans, is that loans can get repaid:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126015764384079549.html

Whether or not Bush should have invaded Iraq, and whether or not Obama should have tried to stabilize the financial system are separate issues. Just saying that the spending involved is of a different nature.

All of this might be enough to put investors off stocks entirely, until they consider the long-term alternatives. Measured over the 1978-2008 period, rather than over just one decade, stock performance in real-real terms actually is better than that of just about any other major investment class, Mr. Thornburg found: 4.5% a year. Stocks' ability to keep up with inflation over the very long haul may be their best selling point.

This makes sense, after all. If making boatloads of money on the stock market were so easy, you'd expect people to bid up the price of stocks until it wasn't much easier than making money investing anywhere else.

Rhonda Smith's story of six miles of interstate terror, as her Lexus suddenly zoomed to 100 miles per hour, will set the mood Tuesday for the first congressional hearing on Toyota's acceleration problems.

Yes and if you read more about it you'll find several interesting bits of info. One is that upon inspection there was no evidence that the brakes had been applied, including the MECHANICAL emergency brake. She also claimed under oath that she had complained about the problem to Toyota but the only record Toyota has is for an oil change. She also sold the car to a family member (not something you'd think she'd do if it really were unsafe) and according the the Wall Street Journal the car is still on the road.

Frankly I think there are a lot of people making up stories hoping to get money in a lawsuit, much the same way people made up stories about Audi a few decades ago. Yes, there appear to be some actual problems but there are a lot of liars out there too.

Just abstract the problem a bit from an existing special case.

You see, we already take out certain things with laser when we want to while those things are in flight, so obviously, moving from the special case to a higher level general case, it should be possible to apply the same solution to other types of problems.

The question is: do you have to glue mosquito wings to all of the pieces of junk floating around the Earth first or not?

Judging by the video, that system works by using the laser to burn up the mosquito's wings. The laser doesn't make the mosquito fall, however: it's the fact that the mosquito can lo longer use its wings to counteract gravity that causes it to fall. That's not how it works with satellites, however: something in orbit is already in free-fall. It's not doing anything to hold itself up, it's just moving according to its momentum and the effect of gravity.

Likewise, if you had, say, a laser that could shoot down a missile: probably what this really means is that you've got a laser that can destroy some critical component of the missile, preventing it from detonating at the target site. If your laser can punch a hole in a missile, you've got a fair shot at rendering it inoperable. Maybe it'll fall back into the atmosphere, maybe it'll explode harmlessly somewhere, maybe it'll reach its target but with a non-functional warhead, or maybe it'll become another orbiting piece of space junk. But if you punch a hole in a piece of orbiting space junk, you've got... a piece of orbiting space junk with a hole in it. If you use the laser to cut the space junk in half, you wind up with two pieces of orbiting space junk.

nedlohs provided some good answers to how a laser could exert force upon an object... I don't know how practical that is - I don't know how much energy is required, whether we have lasers that can direct that much energy at a target, etc. - but I don't know, maybe it's workable.

I bought an individual catastrophic health insurance plan from Assurant Health via my local State Farm agent. $5K deductible, the maximum they offer. I didn't bother with the HSA part. I pay under $1500/year. The really good part is that any work done in a hospital is covered in full, which I've made use of a few times so far. Everything else, I pay cash and see whoever I want. For oddball stuff like vision therapy (if you think you have ADD, look up Convergence Insufficiency and get tested) it's great to not have to explain to some bureaucrat what it is and get them to pretend to pay for my health care.

It's scary how conditioned people have become to having a third party (pretend to) pay for their health care. Most of the time when I try to convince people that they'd be better off under a catastrophic/HSA plan they just can't grok it.

The refundable tax credit plan that McCain proposed would have paired perfectly with catastrophic/HSA plans. Unfortunately our President spent $40M on attack ads against that proposal, telling people that it'd tax their health insurance... which was true, if you had a really expensive "Cadillac" plan that cost more than the tax credit was worth, "Cadillac" plans which Obama is now proposing to tax...

Whole Foods Market provides this type of insurance to their workers:
The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare

Unfortunately the socialists reacted badly to his audacity to state facts that run counter to the Democratic Party line so he got into a bit of trouble.

Just abstract the problem a bit from an existing special case.

You see, we already take out certain things with laser when we want to while those things are in flight, so obviously, moving from the special case to a higher level general case, it should be possible to apply the same solution to other types of problems.

The question is: do you have to glue mosquito wings to all of the pieces of junk floating around the Earth first or not?

i accept and acknowledge all of your criticism of socialized medicine. BUT ITS BETTER THAN WHAT WE CURRENTLY HAVE. do you not see that?

when you oppose socialized medicine in the usa, because of all the evils of that you see, you merely support a MUCH WORSE STATUS QUO

are you resisting because you have a better solution? (crickets)

John Mackey does, as does John Stossel.

Regardless of your criticism of their solutions, don't act like "socialized medicine" is the only solution being proposed to fix the U.S.A.'s healthcare woes. That's just ign'ant.

It seems like there are a zillion comments relating to health insurance dogma or 'Go to Canada' or 'go to the UK.' I won't get into how health care SHOULD work (beyond one point that I consider to be quite simple) but will try to answer your question, since I'm in the same boat.

I am in business for myself as a software guy. One day soon we might have an employee or two, but even then our situation won't change too much.

There is really only one thing you can do: go to eHealthinsurance.com, plug in your info and your zip code, and hope your zip code is a good one. Right now I have the misfortune of living in New York State. If I lived in PA, DE, or CT then my insurance would cost anywhere between 1/4 and 1/2 of what I pay now (north of $300 and I'm healthy and young), but New York has one of the most highly regulated insurance markets in the country, either up there with or right behind California. New Jersey is also terrible.

Depending on your income and your situation, there can be benefits to living in a heavily regulated insurance market, but for the most part, if you run a small business or otherwise are a contractor rather than an employee, you're out of luck when it comes to affordable insurance if you are in a state like NY that is very hostile to the insurance industry.

New York screws you two ways because not only are all your choices expensive, but there aren't many choices to begin wtih. What I really wanted was a health savings plan where I could put X amount away (ideally pre-tax, but whatever) and spend it on routine care, and then have insurance for catastrophic stuff. I don't mind paying out of pocket for small things because small things are going to be less than (or, at worst, as much as) my $300 monthly premium anyway - I've had my policy now for three years and have probably made one or two claims on it for a couple hundred bucks worth of stuff, but I've been lucky and haven't needed anything worse. There are plenty of states out there that allow or even encourage this. But in heavily regulated NY and CA, the insurance market needs my buy-in not to balance out my own claims down the line, but because politicians insist on things like demanding that insurers keep on unemployed/COBRA customers are reduced premiums or even no premiums for a set amount of time, and so I end up paying inflated rates.

So if you're lucky, you're in a state that does a better job than NY or CA or NJ in terms of looking out for you (since it's not like total deregulation is really ideal either) but isn't driving out the insurance companies and therefore limiting competition.

WSJ had a good piece about this a few weeks back (subscription required):

Wall Street Journal Wellpoint CEO interview

My two cents about the health care debate going on in other comments is just this: if I could buy insurance from any state, almost all my problems with health care would go away. I encourage you to go to eHealthinsurance and just plug in different zip codes for your neighboring states. Try Connecticut (a pretty good state for health insurance, relatively speaking) and then New York. Then PA or DE. Or Texas. The discrepancies are amazing.

It has come up, and good solutions have been proposed. For example, this one by the brother of Rahm Emmanuel. That is the most maddening thing about the entire healthcare debate, there are some good, easy solutions that will make things a lot better, and that would be popular, but the two plans in congress are so horrible that no one wants them.

Some people have suggested that the reason Democrats are reticent to move away from employer based plans is because that is one of the major benefits of having a union. Many non-union employees get paid the same as union employees, so about the only thing left unions can offer is health insurance (and making it harder to get fired). I don't know if that is true or not.

This type of Orwellian crap comes directly from the same people who run the same banks that ran our economy into the ground

The Democratic party?

Don't mind me. I am expecting troll even though the parent straight out lied about the big banks requiring fingerprints and got a +3.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aSKSoiNbnQY0

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122212948811465427.html

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/barone/2008/10/06/democrats-were-wrong-on-fannie-mae-and-freddie-mac.html

These were the ones from the top 10 (non-you-tube / video / blog) results from my google search of "democrats freddie mae"

But then, the search is probably specific to me since I "signed away my privacy" to Google and plan to continue to do so for every search and email I receive :)

I used to worry about my figerprints being taken. In Texas they require a fingerprint (forget which finger) to get a driver's license.

WSJ has a tremendous volume of financial and business content, plus provocative commentary, active talk-backs, and broad news coverage.

the WSJ, which is truly a national/international content provider

We must be talking about a different WSJ. My experience of the writing in the WSJ is a pseudo-conservative rag that opposes real reform (be it tax, health, etc.) in the government.

I wouldn't pay $155/year (I'm optimistic that you meant annually, though you failed to specify) to someone that advocates the continued weakening of the American institution. I have more self-respect than that.

If you don't believe me... allow me to simply hit their commentary section at random and see what we find (you'll have to excuse my selection as I don't have access to the full set of choices):

Conservatives all my adulthood have said the American people were, on the issue of spending, the frog in the pot of water: The rising heat lulled him, and when the water came full boil, he wouldn't be able to jump out.

But that is the great achievement, if you will, of the past few years. The frog is coming awake at just the last moment. He is jumping out of the water.

(From Can Washington Meet the Demand to Cut Spending? by Peggy Noonan)

Yes. Music to my ears! The old hat about a frog in a pot is a myth. Yet it makes such a useful analogy that they run it anyway. Talk about good writing!

Second, the Conservatives all of the author's adulthood have been driving up the deficits just as much as the Liberals. Is the author claiming both parties want to cook us alive? Why not just say so?

No, this would not deserve even a $100/year fee. This is ridiculous and flies in the face of reality. It's unfortunate for you to try to defend a paper that publishes this sort of nonsense. You are championing an enemy of science and progress.

Can't resist one more quote from that piece:

Second the Republicans should tread delicately while moving forward seriously. Voters are feeling as never before in recent political history the vulnerability of their individual positions. There is no reason to believe they are interested in highly complicated and technical reforms, the kind that go under the heading "homework." As in: "I know my future security depends on understanding this thing and having a responsible view, but I cannot make it out. My whole life is homework. I cannot do more."

We are not a nation of accountants, however much our government tries to turn us into one.

The author advocates against "highly complicated and technical reforms" even if they are best. Let's see... Condorcet voting? Instant runoff? Both are too complicated, we'll stick with simple majority. Should we actually metricate? No, people have enough homework already. And so on. Anti-intellectualism! Gods bless America, land of the too-busy and home of the not brave enough for homework?!

Give me a break.

...to preventing real violence. Thank goodness the Swiss are taking care of that too. Soon shrub assault will be a thing of the past as they codify plants' rights.

When you look at the networking of most smallish cities, there are usually only 3 or 4 real connections out of the city. Usually some OC192 or something to the nearest big city. It's all lined up along the original easements for railroads, power and telephones. A lot of the inter-city traffic is carried on microwave, which means no security at all. Sure, there are a lot more fibers today than in 1990 but after the dotcom burst people stopped pulling in most places. This Google thing may be the start of the next wave.

The smaller your city the further out on the spur you are and the more narrow your options for getting "to the internet" (or to other networks, essentially). The internet isn't ANYTHING, just a way to get from network to network. Right now, the networks themselves for consumers are all in the hands of the telcom companies because they already had the wire. IPv6 will change that because it makes it possible to have mesh networks that actually work. So you could get together with your neighbors at a city council meeting and pay the 10K to pull fiber to a block of houses or even better, neighborhood wireless. IPv4 always needed someone to organize it a little to make it work. It's still highly decentralized and if you look at most university networks, they tend to still follow the original path of lots of publically routable IPs, lots of leased line interconnects to other universities and leased line connections to the closest POPs. But those leased lines are mostly owned by the phone company.

If Google's buying dark fiber, great, but they are still a company. What we need is to look at the internet like a road or highway, something everyone should have access to for free. It's not that expensive to do this in the city, but we will end up heavily subsidizing the country so they can have it also.

CONUS square miles: 2,959,064.44
CONUS square meters: 7.6639417x10^12 m^2

802.11 coverage per AP 802.11g@9mbps: 3.14159 * 76m^2= 18,145 square meters
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/wireless/ps4570/products_white_paper09186a00801d61a3.shtml

422,154,863 access points, 1 every 152 feet.

At $40/pop that's only $16,886,194,520. ($20 for the AP, $20 for the solar panel)

The government is throwing in $7B, we're halfway there! If everyone spent a weekend deploying we could have the majority of country covered with 9mbps by the end of the year.

If you mesh them and use hexagonal cells you'll have 9mbps from the AP to your laptop even at the middle between cells, and 1mbps to each contigous cell. With IPv6 just use a geographic way to assign the prefix (county, township, section, etc. are already there for the entire country). With a similar setup you can ensure an entirely neutral net. Of course, there are better chunks of bandwidth just coming available. Unfortunately the government charges for the auctions. They need to reserve a nice big chunk for the public, license channels by the square mile using a homestead system where one person can only own 1 AP per mile, with no limit on the total they can own.

Implement micropayment billing to recover the costs and build wires (you need wires to be reliable). Keep greed away with stiff federal pound me in the ass penalties for tampering with APs or trying to price gouge. Problem solved.

Yes, it will be fucking slow at first but you have to start somewhere. The people who need high speed will still have their existing networks, they'll just want to patch into the mesh too to reach those potential customers.

It's interesting how you can slice data and get the results you want. If you compare Apple to Apple, year to year, they look great in 4Q09. But if you compare Apple 3Q09 to Apple 4Q09, Apple actually lost market share (18% down to 16%), even though that was their best quarter ever. They did not keep up with the growth of the smartphone market, quarter to quarter.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/02/01/iphone-loses-market-share-in-fourth-quarter/tab/article/

That's more interesting than looking year to year, as it reflects the current way Apple is trending. Given their three-something years in the market, one whole year is just too long to spot a trend.

...and not just because of this story. But let's face it: Very little information (except early reports of the quake itself) was disseminated from Haiti via ham radio. 80% of the cellphone network of the second largest provider in Haiti was re-established within a week of the quake. Don't believe me? Google "ham radio haiti". As a long-time amateur radio operator who has been proclaiming the demise of ham radio for some years now, the proof is irrefutable: Ham radio has been relegated to the technology basement.

Yes, I know the hams will be coming out of the woodwork, defending their hobby. Or are they defending the large sums of money they've sunk into equipment that serves very little purpose in the way of emergency communications in today's world?

Wow, This story sounded a bit familiar, the news hit over two weeks ago!
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100203-708909.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines
The piece of news that is happening is that they started Marketing it on Friday. Wow... a company comes out with a new ad campagin.... great slashdot news.

I do think there are actual pieces of the reform bill that have the potential to make a difference. Actually it's just one. It'll be hugely unpopular, but requiring insurance of all citizens is really the only way to equalize costs.

See, this is actually a perfect example of the problems in the bill. In theory, that is something that could work: it worked in Massachusetts with mixed results, and taking the lessons learned there could probably be made better. And yet, in the bills in congress, they've aligned the incentives in such a way that no one would reasonably buy insurance until they got sick (the tax penalty for not having insurance is significantly smaller than the cost of insurance). Of course if no one buys insurance until they get sick, the cost of insurance will go up. A lot. So much for learning the lessons of what worked and didn't work in Massachusetts.

As a programmer, when I change a system, I like to look first for the smallest change that will make the biggest improvement. This reduces the chance for unintended side effects. This is what I feel congress should do, fix one piece, then after the get it right, fix another piece, etc. If they did it like this, I think we would have a much better healthcare system.

In the first half of last year, the Wall Street Journal had several guest columnists giving their opinion of how to make a better healthcare system. I really liked the approach take by the CEO of Safeway. He looked at what was causing the most expense, and then tried to find a way to cut it. I think a lot of those techniques could be applied nationwide (and of course if insurance is cheaper, more people will be able to afford it).

I also liked these ideas by the brother of Rahm Emanuel where he makes the obvious suggestion of uncoupling insurance from the workplace. This one by the CEO of Whole Foods was highly controversial at the time, but some of his ideas are good. I especially like his point that we should "Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost." The point of doing this is to empower citizens to take care of their own health. Individual people are already more responsible than anyone for their own health, thus making it as easy as possible for them to do so is a good idea.

All of their good ideas are being implemented by Obama.

Really? I mean, there really is no way to defend the republicans, but I haven't seen where Obama has done all that much either.

I do think there are actual pieces of the reform bill that have the potential to make a difference. Actually it's just one. It'll be hugely unpopular, but requiring insurance of all citizens is really the only way to equalize costs.

See, this is actually a perfect example of the problems in the bill. In theory, that is something that could work: it worked in Massachusetts with mixed results, and taking the lessons learned there could probably be made better. And yet, in the bills in congress, they've aligned the incentives in such a way that no one would reasonably buy insurance until they got sick (the tax penalty for not having insurance is significantly smaller than the cost of insurance). Of course if no one buys insurance until they get sick, the cost of insurance will go up. A lot. So much for learning the lessons of what worked and didn't work in Massachusetts.

As a programmer, when I change a system, I like to look first for the smallest change that will make the biggest improvement. This reduces the chance for unintended side effects. This is what I feel congress should do, fix one piece, then after the get it right, fix another piece, etc. If they did it like this, I think we would have a much better healthcare system.

In the first half of last year, the Wall Street Journal had several guest columnists giving their opinion of how to make a better healthcare system. I really liked the approach take by the CEO of Safeway. He looked at what was causing the most expense, and then tried to find a way to cut it. I think a lot of those techniques could be applied nationwide (and of course if insurance is cheaper, more people will be able to afford it).

I also liked these ideas by the brother of Rahm Emanuel where he makes the obvious suggestion of uncoupling insurance from the workplace. This one by the CEO of Whole Foods was highly controversial at the time, but some of his ideas are good. I especially like his point that we should "Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost." The point of doing this is to empower citizens to take care of their own health. Individual people are already more responsible than anyone for their own health, thus making it as easy as possible for them to do so is a good idea.

All of their good ideas are being implemented by Obama.

Really? I mean, there really is no way to defend the republicans, but I haven't seen where Obama has done all that much either.

I do think there are actual pieces of the reform bill that have the potential to make a difference. Actually it's just one. It'll be hugely unpopular, but requiring insurance of all citizens is really the only way to equalize costs.

See, this is actually a perfect example of the problems in the bill. In theory, that is something that could work: it worked in Massachusetts with mixed results, and taking the lessons learned there could probably be made better. And yet, in the bills in congress, they've aligned the incentives in such a way that no one would reasonably buy insurance until they got sick (the tax penalty for not having insurance is significantly smaller than the cost of insurance). Of course if no one buys insurance until they get sick, the cost of insurance will go up. A lot. So much for learning the lessons of what worked and didn't work in Massachusetts.

As a programmer, when I change a system, I like to look first for the smallest change that will make the biggest improvement. This reduces the chance for unintended side effects. This is what I feel congress should do, fix one piece, then after the get it right, fix another piece, etc. If they did it like this, I think we would have a much better healthcare system.

In the first half of last year, the Wall Street Journal had several guest columnists giving their opinion of how to make a better healthcare system. I really liked the approach take by the CEO of Safeway. He looked at what was causing the most expense, and then tried to find a way to cut it. I think a lot of those techniques could be applied nationwide (and of course if insurance is cheaper, more people will be able to afford it).

I also liked these ideas by the brother of Rahm Emanuel where he makes the obvious suggestion of uncoupling insurance from the workplace. This one by the CEO of Whole Foods was highly controversial at the time, but some of his ideas are good. I especially like his point that we should "Make costs transparent so that consumers understand what health-care treatments cost." The point of doing this is to empower citizens to take care of their own health. Individual people are already more responsible than anyone for their own health, thus making it as easy as possible for them to do so is a good idea.

All of their good ideas are being implemented by Obama.

Really? I mean, there really is no way to defend the republicans, but I haven't seen where Obama has done all that much either.

The debts under Bush were worrysome indeed, but they have skyrocketed under the Obama administration, to the point of crisis. The smallest projected deficit under Obama (and presidential budget forecasts are always optimistic) is going to be larger than the largest under Bush.

In any case, a lot of tea party protesters were active during the time of Bush. I don't know if you remember, but congressmen had their phones ringing off the wall with people telling them not to vote for TARP. People were uploading youtube videos trying to explain the problems with TARP (I tried to find some examples, some of them were fairly knowledgeable, but youtube has a horrible search function though frankly, searching for videos is hard anyway. I remember one from this retired guy in Florida who was really upset, talking about how we need a new movement that is not partisan etc. etc. This was in 2008, so before Obama came to office). I also remember hearing some angry Republicans upset after it turned out there were no WMD in Iraq wanting to start a new constitution party. It takes a while for such urges to congeal into action: they need a catalyst.

Incidentally, Obama was extremely popular when he was first elected, but he gave the appearance of continuing the unpopular policies of his predecessor. If you are sincerely interested in understanding the politics of the issue, here is a good article describing how teapartiers view themselves.

In addition there does seem to be a kind of paranoid streak in the teapartiers, that 'they' are trying to takeover the government and bring us communism or something like that, but this is a natural American paranoia, and was evident among many liberals as well, most recently in the lead-up to the presidential elections when many otherwise reasonable people worried that before the election could take place, Bush would declare martial law and cancel the election. It is another similarity that crosses the political divide, although its expression is different in each party.

Over at the WSJ, Peter Diamandis makes a case for private space, while naysayer Taylor Dinerman says he's seen this movie before, and argues the private sector simply is not up for the job.

Over at the WSJ, Peter Diamandis makes a case for private space, while naysayer Taylor Dinerman says he's seen this movie before, and argues the private sector simply is not up for the job.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-26/davos-too-big-to-fail-as-bankers-recoil-in-political-backlash.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/business/economy/26big.html NY Times

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124528373595925623.html WSJ 2009 before the crash

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-oew-ikenson-wial4-2009jun04,0,4807351.story June '09 before the crash

Forgive the formatting, but it's Saturday AM and I went drinking with my sons yesterday.

Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123680870885500701.html

They don't have a lethal system.

They have a targeting system that works on highly-illuminated mosquitos in a box in front of a reflective screen. The optics track the shadows. You wouldn't be able to sleep in a room with this device because it would have ONE REALLY POWERFUL lightbulb. And very bright walls.

Also, there's nothing in the article about differentiating males from females. Except they say they can. I would assume by size, but they don't actually say, nor do they claim that it works, or that they even have a device or a method for doing so.

Obama (or more precisely, the democrats) fail at basic politics. Jon Stewart does an awesome job explaining how bad the Democrats actually are at this. The most basic rule of politics in a democracy is this: do what the voters want (especially when they are paying attention) or get voted out. Bush understood this, which is why he carefully spent a year building up public opinion in favor of the war on Iraq before he finally attacked. Otherwise he likely would have attacked Iraq shortly after 9/11. Public opinion matters in politics.

The democrats are trying to do something most Americans don't actually want, and that is a government takeover of healthcare (or a single payer system, if you prefer to call it that). If they are not actually trying to do that, they have failed miserable at communicating what it is they actually are trying to do. They came up with a convoluted bill that no one understands, is full of financial deceptions and bribes, and thus is easy to portray in any negative light you want. It is really hard to see how either bill in congress could do anything to cut healthcare costs for the average person.

Compare this to the Newt Gengrich's idea. Whether you like the guy or not, he knows politics. Notice how he makes a simple list of ways to improve healthcare, a lot of which anyone could agree on (make health insurance portable, meet the needs of the chronically ill......duh who doesn't agree with that). He also outlines the start of a path towards reaching that goal, so you can see where he's going.

Notice it doesn't look like he's going towards a single payer system, which the public overwhelmingly rejects. If the democrats want to move towards a single payer system, they need to make the case that it is a good idea. So far they have not done that.

Yeah, Google is currently the hot topic of the tech week: Nearly every tech-related blog has some negative opinion about Google either taking on the telcos, privacy concerns, anti-publisher/book settlements, or too big to fail...

Considering they're mainly all blogs, I'd say there maybe some strings being pulled, paid for in the form of cash by a certain rival. That because what Google is doing is no different from that rival, nor what MS, Novell, IBM, HP, etc... has done in the past.

Uhm, the US federal deficit

The guy you were responding to used the word "debt", not "deficit". There is a difference.

The story is the same when you look at national debt. The OP claimed the EU was at twice the levels of the US, but google disagrees with this claim.

The national debt of the US approaches 100% of GDP, roughly the same as the UK.

Greece meanwhile is struggling with a debt of 120% of the GDP. According to the wsj article linked above, Spain has a national debt below 70% of GDP. Portugal was above 75% last year, I didn't see figures for this moment. None of these amounts are anything close to twice the level of the USA, as the OP claimed. Only Japan and Zimbabwe seem to reach that level.

Just block all connections between China and the rest or the world for a week or so. Let's see if China feels the economic impact. If it doesn't stop America and others should simply default on all loans from China. The saving on interest payments will more than allow them to balance their books.

Seriously, any person or company that deals with China any more than they have to gets what they deserve. Why are we dealing with them anyway. Oh yeah, there is so much POTENTIAL for trade with them. Oh wait I forgot, there isn't any western country that isn't running a trade deficit with China. So I ask, why the fuck are we even dealing with them? So Wall Street types can make more profit because Chinese work for peanuts and the profit margins of companies with Chinese labour is so good? Meanwhile, the rest of society is going bankrupt because they are so stupid they continuously pay to support the act of losing their jobs to overseas markets. Yeah times are tough and you need to cut back. Stop buying at China loving Wall Mart, get rid of the extra cars you buy your kids and tell them to ride their fucking bicycles to school like kids used to do. Stop buying the second, third, fourth, big screen LCD TVs. GET FUCKING REAL.

Boycot the Chines motherfuckers. They are the ones allowing Iran to enrich weapons grade fissionables so that they can fuel the process of taking our manufacturing jobs (ironically, with the help of Wall Street). Chop it off now. They are a rotting gangrenous limb on the rest of the world. You can't make friends with a dictator without it somehow affecting you. Internet attacks, aggressive military actions on Tibet and towards Taiwan, and the loss of tens of millions of manufacturing jobs. Working with China has NOT been beneficial to the west. At least not to the average person.

I am working, so this is not a rant from someone recently unemployed. It is a rant at what I see as a downward spiral because greed keeps us dealing with China because we see the false promise of riches. Every time the cost of their goods goes up, they drop the value of their currency, and while we can complain about it, there is nothing that we can actually do about it. Americans and the rest of the west, INCLUDING EUROPE AND CANADA, have all been pussified. Everyone wants their 3000 square foot home and lazyboy chair and football game on TV on Sunday. And no one is ever responsible for their own actions.

So fuck it, stop bitching about Chinese internet attacks, bend over, and let them insert their collective (get it, communists), their collective cocks up you ass. At least you get a cheap DVD player and big screen out of the deal.

Start with money.

You're a bank. You're going to loan out some money for what reason? To get more back. So, the recipient of a loan has to supply something of value. Say, a house.

What happens when the supply of houses matches or exceeds the demand? Houses become valueless. You can't make money supplying them. The bank isn't going to make that loan.

So for our existing monetary system, demand must never be satisfied. We must never build enough houses for all the homeless, and if too many are built, they have to be knocked down.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120709588093381941.html?mod=todays_columnists
http://www.usnews.com/money/blogs/fresh-greens/2009/05/05/what-a-waste-new-homes-demolished-by-bank

When the supply of work meets demand, work becomes valueless.

Which leads us to energy.

The reason we "modernise" is to reduce costs. A human costs say 20k/year. A digging machine costs 250k, with one driver can replace 10 humans digging trenches. Payback after the 1st year.The cost of the energy for the digger is lower than the costs the humans have to pay to live, plus the humans have a 30% tax on top.

So economically, it makes sense to get rid of humans and replace them with machines. In fact, our monetary system pretty much enforces it.

If all human labour can be carried out by machines, then humans will have no money. i.e. Universal machine labour will destroy capitalism and the monetary system. Banks etc. What will happen is the system will devolve into a 2 class system of owners and the owned. Creditors and debtors. Neofeudalism.

You should read Silvio Gesell. He came to a similar conclusion. That if demand is ever satisfied, capitalism stops functioning. (This is why there will always be poverty. It's required by the money system.)

Ofcourse as energy itself (easy energy resources like coal, oil, gas) becomes more scarce and expensive, the running of a 10,000 cpu cluster to emulate 100 billion human neurons is likely to consume quite a lot of energy.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/02/08/verizon-wireless-temporarily-blocks-some-4chan-traffic/

Looks like it was only part of 4chan and the blocked parts are unblocked again. No news here.

Look here.

HR departments and hiring managers are using the most asinine criteria to black list people. These days, with so many out of work due to no fault of their own, there are many talented people out there and if you "fit in" or have the "right attitude" you're not getting a job.

DaVinci wouldn't fit in - he was a misfit according to today's hiring and corporate standards. He couldn't be the unimaginative lemming that corporate America wants.

When did it become wrong to want to work to just earn a living? Why all these standards and things that, to me, were chosen in a capricious manner?Just because some big shot in a business magazine has a certain standard that he pulled out of his ass, it becomes the norm?

I once saw this Wall Street Investment banker harass this Chinese businessman. He brought up a touchy subject just to "see what he was made of". How fucking stupid can you get? By pissing a guy off you saw what he was made of? I'm sure a bunch of lemmings are going to see that on "Wall Street Warriors" (Hulu) and think, "Yeah! Great idea! I'm going to try to piss people off and if they don't get mad, then I won't know what they're made of!"

Corporate hiring practices are moronic and capricious. DaVinci was too god for corporate America and especially Government.

You would be twiddling your thumbs most of the time even if you were watching it in the US, because there are only 11 minutes of actual play time in a 3 hour long game. That is why the ads are the centrepiece of the show.

The Lancet decided to issue a complete retraction after an independent regulator for doctors in the U.K. concluded last week that the study was flawed. The General Medical Council's report on three of the researchers, including Dr. Wakefield, found evidence that some of their actions were conducted for experimental purposes, not clinical care, and without ethics approval. The report also found that Dr. Wakefield drew blood for research purposes from children at his son's birthday party, paying each child £5 (about $8).

More from CNN

Retractions are rare in medical journals and usually occur as a result of fraud or plagiarism, said Marcia Angell, a former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.

"It is a major event when there is a retraction like this," she said. "It sounds like there was a misleading design of the study ... patients not randomly chosen. There were ethical violations."

William Schaffner, professor and chairman of the department of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, described the journal's level of action as "unprecedented."

The WSJ gave more details:
"Researchers at two centers, in England and Belgium, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) tests on 54 patients with severe brain injury. Of these patients, 31 were diagnosed as being in a minimally conscious state, meaning they showed intermittent signs of awareness such as laughing or crying. The other 23 were diagnosed as being in a vegetative state, meaning they were considered unresponsive and unaware of their surroundings."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704259304575043494009308442.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

second entry on Google:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704022804575041212437364420.html

Ten of the 13 authors of the original paper, all of whom were researchers at the Royal Free Hospital and School of Medicine in London, partially retracted the paper in 2004. However, the first author, Andrew Wakefield, didn't. Dr. Wakefield, who is now at the Thoughtful House Center for Children in Austin, Texas, didn't immediately return phone calls seeking comment.

"Many consumer groups have spent 10 years waging a campaign against vaccines even in the face of scientific evidence," said Dr. Horton of the Lancet. "We didn't have the evidence back in 2004 to fully retract the paper but we did have enough concern to persuade the authors to partly retract the paper."

The Lancet decided to issue a complete retraction after an independent regulator for doctors in the U.K. concluded last week that the study was flawed. The General Medical Council's report on three of the researchers, including Dr. Wakefield, found evidence that some of their actions were conducted for experimental purposes, not clinical care, and without ethics approval. The report also found that Dr. Wakefield drew blood for research purposes from children at his son's birthday party, paying each child £5 (about $8).

The Lancet's Dr. Horton said the journal was particularly concerned about the ethical treatment of the children in the study, and that the children had been "cherry-picked" by the study's authors rather than just showing up in the hospital, as described in the paper.

The authors "did suggest these children arrived one after another and this syndrome was apparent, which does lead you to think this is something serious," said Dr. Horton.

If you click the links in the slashdot summary, you'll end up at the original announcement, which told you roughly how many subscriptions the deal was for: 70,000.

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116249026689311557-helTbrheLKgbaJ5iO5z40ZFCiOs_20061109.html?mod=blogs

I guess that's not as much fun as wild speculation though.

Only 11 minutes of a 185 minute NFL broadcast include actual play

So you're not missing out on any action, trust me. :)

According to a report just issued by the "Wall Street Journal", the engineers at Toyota have developed an improved pedal that supposedly fixes the problem causing Toyota cars to accelerate out of control. American regulators have approved the fix, and Toyota will send it to dealers by February 8. This fix allows the dealers to resume selling the 8 models of vehicles affected by the recall.

However, a new angle to the problem recently surfaced, according to a report just issued by the "New York Times" on its blog. CTS, which manufactures the throttle pedal for Toyota, claims that "the slow-return pedal phenomenon, which may occur in extreme environmental conditions, should absolutely not be linked with any sudden, unintended acceleration incidents". In other words, though the pedal is defective, the defect did not cause the unintended acceleration. CTS claims that it did not manufacture the pedals in older Toyota vehicles that exhibited the same acceleration problem.

If CTS is telling the truth, then the actual problem may be the electronic throttle control, the so-called drive-by-wire system.

The latest defect in Toyota cars is quickly developing into the scandal of the 21st century. The problem started when customers of Toyota vehicles began experiencing sudden unexplained acceleration; these incidents began appearing in 2002. Over time, Toyota management claimed that the problem is the floor mat. So, the management issued a recall to replace all the floor mats.

Then, after further studying the problem, the management claimed that the throttle's pedal sometimes becomes stuck due to weather conditions. This new claim lead to the massive global recall of many vehicles sold over the past 3 years.

However, none of these explanations for the sudden acceleration has been satisfactory. Independent investigations leading to an explosion of lawsuits have determined that the problem is the electronic throttle control (ETC) — the so-called drive-by-wire mechanism that links the pedal via some cables to the fuel controller. According to a report by "Businessweek" and another report by the "Wall Street Journal", Toyota is now the defendant in 3 separate class-action lawsuits. The plaintiffs claim that the ETC is defective.

According to a report by the "New York Times" (NYT), "a few years ago, the company sent out a technical bulletin saying some cars accelerate on their own between 38 and 42 mph, and it reprogrammed the electronics with new software codes".

The NYT notes, "John Heywood, director of the Sloan Automotive Lab at MIT, said because Toyota is the only automaker having this problem, it could be something specific to its design, such as the location and integration of the electronics relay sensor."

Further, the Toyota ETC lacks an important safety mechanism: if the customer presses both the throttle pedal and the brake pedal, then the ETC should give priority to the brake. The Toyota ETC gives priority to the throttle. How can Toyota engineers commit such a gross design mistake? Common sense tells us that the brake should receive priority.

Once you can shoot down mosquitos with lasers you might not need a vaccine for malaria.

Wow. That sounds much easier than the old way.

Once you can shoot down mosquitos with lasers you might not need a vaccine for malaria. Like this we should find technological solutions that make vaccines unnecessary. I am wondering why Bill Gates is funding both initiatives.

it still is kind of a problem, and as interconnected as our problems are, here's another example. Patent law is ridiculously out of control with respect to big pharma.

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2010/01/05/fda-drug-approvals-in-2009-up-a-little-from-2008/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wsj%2Fhealth%2Ffeed+(WSJ.com%3A+Health+Blog)

referenced and commented on by jay parkinson at this blog near the bottom of the second page (the one linked) or maybe further as new stuff pushes it further down.
http://blog.jayparkinsonmd.com/page/2

The trial lawyers assn, major Democratic constituent will never let meaningful, loser pays reform pass. Every other industrialized nation has loser pays.

I think that the best way to reduce costs is to have insurance that works like car insurance and not like health insurance works now. Try going to your GP and asking for a price list or negotiating from their stated rate if you can get it. Try getting quotes for elective surgeries. It doesn't work because our society is so unused to skeptically consuming medical services that it is out of the norm to ask for prices. The providers do their best to shame you out of your request. "It's your health. It's priceless." BS.

Regarding doctors and salaries, while it's a good practice for Mayo, I don't like forcing people to do things against their will. Mayo doctors are free to practice elsewhere or on their own. Mayo attracts the best and convinces them to work for a salary by virtue of the doctor's association with Mayo's reputation. That association has a later value in terms of what a former Mayo doc can charge in private practice or demand from a hospital in salary/hourly negotiations. Take that away by making all docs work on uniform salaries and where is the motivation to be a doc or be a better doc? Humanitarianism only goes so far and it can't feed your family. Yes that's on the other end of the spectrum, but consider that West Va is facing a doc shortage crisis because the state's malpractice insurance impoverishes docs because of court precedents in favor of "the people".

Great, we will replace an oil shortage with a lithium shortage.

Some experts believe the huge increase in electric cars will actually strain the world’s lithium supplies in a few years; as with peak oil

My point with regards to Syria is that the position is somewhat hypocritical-

A country which is made up of 300 million people has a position that is inconsistent? I'm shocked! Really, it is difficult for any large organization, or even a single person to be 100% consistent in what they do, so this is to be expected.

Venezuela is more of a threat to peace than Syria overall, but Venezuela provides more oil to the US.

Venezuela is a threat to the peace? You mean through their funding of FARC? Anyway the US doesn't need to provide economic pressure on Venezuela, the Venezuelans keep shooting themselves in the foot economically, most recently devaluing their currency and nationalizing anyone who raises prices as a result. If Chavez keeps on his current course, he will soon follow the common path of Latin American dictators.

If Cuba could trade with the US, it would be a thriving nation being right next door to you and having lots of fertile land.

I don't disagree that ending the embargo would be a good idea, but once again, enough Cuban-Americans oppose it that I really don't see it happening in the near future. I would be happy if I were wrong.

Sure some are unhappy, but there are so many that were poor, but happy. I spent a fair bit of time off resort, because I was searching for some specific species of cactus (Melocactus harlowii and Melocactus matanzanus) and I found the locals both friendly and helpful.

That sounds like a great experience. Foreign visitors to China also had great experiences during the cultural revolution, but that doesn't justify what was happening there. Surely there are happy people in Cuba, but they are not free. I think we can both agree that freedom is a good thing.

the US position on Cuba is probably one of the US' greatest injustices.

If the only reason Cuba is poor is because it can't trade with the US, that doesn't say much for communism, does it? The US has good goals with Cuba: to end communism and make the people free. The mechanisms used to reach this goal haven't always been the best, but the goal is a good one.