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When you put in a specific quoted phrase into a search engine, you expect it to actually find hits with that result. In this case, searching for "Why is windows so expensive" or "why is microsoft windows so expensive" returns a first result of "Why are Mac's So Expensive?"

If you click on the first link returned by Bing, no where in the linked article does it even have a matching phrase for your actual query.

Well to add my exp I have just tried it using Firefox on both WinXP and Windows 7 HP x64, and both seem to be working fine. The only search where I noted the supposed behavior was when I did some Google shopping for Zoom Bass Pedals (my old one is just about had it and I love their fat compression) and that is to be expected since it IS Google shopping.

I tried the same shopping search on Yahoo and found the same redirect behavior. So maybe the person was shopping via Google? Because I just couldn't get the redirect behavior on standard results from either search engine.

http://images.search.yahoo.com/

I often get better results from this that G.I.S.

While China seems to be the boogeyman du jour for America, people should keep in mind that the Euro is competing very successfully against the greenback.

Don't be too sure about the Euro

Another link with the famous Milton Friedman comment about the Euro and a currency crisis.

It will be interesting to see what happens to Greece

France and Germany agree on something?

France and Germany were both bitterly opposed to the invasion of Iraq and said so numerous times as members of the UN. Rumsfeld dismissed them as "old Europe".

While China seems to be the boogeyman du jour for America, people should keep in mind that the Euro is competing very successfully against the greenback.

Debt $6 billion, cash-on-hand $33 billion. MSFT Key Statistics

Accounting question: why not just pay off the debt if they have the cash? Or is their cash somehow not liquid?

Well I'll be! I was researching some facts to karma slut (I'm an AC so karma doesn't matter) and I found that the market cap of Kodak is 1.36 Billion! and Apple has over 5 billion in cash.

I didn't realize that Kodak was sucking wind so much. They used to be such a power house.

Looking at Kodak, it just might be a decent hostile takeover target - look at its cash balance Over 2 billion!

Did they mention his important work in the field of chairodynamics?

Some things speak for themselves.

Microsoft's revenues, $56 billion.
Its profit margin 24%. Debt $6 billion, cash-on-hand $33 billion. MSFT Key Statistics

YUI has a BSD style license and is really nice for building cross browser friendly user interfaces.

The downside of YUI is that the CSS does not validate as it uses the "holly hack" to do IE specific stuff instead of an if define in the header and a separate IE stylesheet.

I know people that like blueprint, you might also check out http://www.webdesignbooth.com/10-promising-css-framework-that-worth-a-look/ and see if any of these meet your needs.

Yahoo is especially interesting here. If you search for something innocuous like Hong Kong

http://search.cn.yahoo.com/search?p=Hong%20Kong

It works fine.

Change the search

http://search.cn.yahoo.com/search?p=Falun%20Gong

And yahoo.cn drops the connection, and seems to do so based on your IP for a few minutes thereafter.

Yahoo is especially interesting here. If you search for something innocuous like Hong Kong

http://search.cn.yahoo.com/search?p=Hong%20Kong

It works fine.

Change the search

http://search.cn.yahoo.com/search?p=Falun%20Gong

And yahoo.cn drops the connection, and seems to do so based on your IP for a few minutes thereafter.

There's still search differences though

http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&q=falun+gong

is quite different to

http://www.google.com/search?hl=zh-CN&q=falun+gong

Though either does a lot better than Yahoo!

http://search.cn.yahoo.com/s?p=falun+gong&v=web&pid=ysearch

Interestingly, the latest research shows that people who use cell phones more are less likely to suffer from Altzheimer's disease. It sounds like this is a non-issue.

(AP) SHANGHAI - While the Iranian Cyber Army stymied Baidu engineers early Tuesday morning, a Chinese government official reportedly praised the Iranian Cyber Army and it's successful attempts at further curbing the dangers away from Chinese citizens. After forcing Baidu to remove the ability to find porn or dissidant materials via searches, the Chinese government noted that the Iranian Cyber Army had finally successfully achieved that with absolutely no infractions.

Cai Wu of The Ministry of Culture in China said, "We are impressed with preliminary reports of zero searches returning offensive materials while the Iranian Cyber Army improved the search page." Wu also pointed out that nowhere in the Tao Te Ching is a reference to Baidu made and therefore it is one of the major factors in China losing its sense of nationality and pride. Wu held up an image of Laozi and said, "Does this happy citizen look like he needed Baidu? No. All he needed was his government's ability to protect him from himself." Wu's only criticism of the 'attack' was simply that he expressed lament "it was not a group of loyal Chinese citizens who made children friendly adjustments to the search engine." Wu showed that the static page replacing the search page loaded on average 33% faster and required no user interaction to facilitate.

The Chinese government and the Iranian government have exchanged notes on how to keep their people from finding materials and lies that erode their ability to protect the cultures and citizens of their respective countries. But with the recent cross country attacks, it appears as though a group in Iran has one-upped the Chinese and shown them the beautiful results of hacking in comparison to the oafish and ugly heavy handed government shutdowns. This means, of course, that a stark internet censorship gap exists widely between the US and China. And other world powers trail far behind Iran and China -- shining examples of the firm yet gentle hand of internet censorship. Rest assured, this reporter has an inkling that a nationalistic competition could take hold similar to the space race or peace race. If there's one sport the winter Olympics might add next, certainly it's the sport of suppressing information.

China is not sitting idly by though, as strategic and selective abortions have left 24 million men without mates. The Chinese government believes this strategy will put them in solid first for socially awkward sexually frustrated males that must argue on internet forums while coding day and night taking breaks only for World of Warcraft (the most demanding mistress of them all). An army of hackers angry at everyone else will undoubtedly arise form this group willing to stop the flow of information worldwide.

Link me to your work good man i will be an avid supporter.

There's an early demo here, though that codebase is abandoned now in favour of a client/server architecture. You should check out http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/gooeyblob/ and http://chaosremakes.wikia.com/wiki/Chaos_Remakes_Wiki if you're a fan of Chaos :)

What does most mean? Here are Ford's income statements, it sure doesn't look like most of anything is going to executives:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=F&annual

Alan Mulally does appear to get quite a lot of money each year:

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/fortune/0709/gallery.women_men_highest_pay.fortune/20.html

But $50 million isn't really that much compared to $150 billion. I guess there could be thousands and thousands of executives that get million dollar bonuses, but I doubt it.

Since so much is done for us by the languages and IDE we use, I think it is reasonable to ask us to know something about the process we program. Programming is deterministic, and this is why many of us do know much about statistics. OTOH, much of what we are asked to program has a statistical nature. Searches do not always call for exact matches. In word processing a texting predictive typing does not return exact results. In finance, we want stochastic predictors concerning where the market probably will be tomorrow. Exactness is so 2000's.

And then there is the issue that software developers should be able to, on some level, research, understand, analyze, and create a policy based solution to a problem. Ignore the fact, as stated in the previous paragraph, that not all these problems are going to have exact, or trivially reproducible solution, and we are still left with understanding the problem. The involves some knowledge of statistics and it's vagaries. Lack of knowledge can lead to massively incorrect understanding. For instance, late last year a paper was published comparing subjective and objective measures of happiness. in this paper is was shown that if, on average, a state in the US express subjective happiness, there was a good chance that state would be happy using objective data. Even my understanding of this is not great, and the explanation is oversimplified, but the basic idea is there. In fact, I look at the data and say that the correlation is not all that great, but I will admit the variables do show at least some limited correlation. The problem is that the popular media takes this graph, which is comparing two technique of measuring a variable, and does not order that variable or imply the variable has any inherent meaning, and uses the data to say that some states are "happy" and some states are "not happy". Clearly we don't expect journalist to have a sufficient graph of math or science to understand why they did was unethical, but we should have expectation that anyone above the level of code monkey would have such an understanding. Otherwise we are going to have programs that will claim to give us valid or otherwise reliable results, when in fact what we have is simply someone's faith that it is a good result, without any well know and well regarded method to back it up.

Its odd someone gets all the way from the middle east, thru Europe, all the way to Detroit with JUST the sort of device these things are meant to detect at JUST the time their deployment is starting to ramp up.

Odd? It's not odd, it's good business! Stocks in both ASEI and OSI have had a nice rise since Christmas.

Microsoft isn't jealous of Apple's profitability, they are just looking for ways to increase their gross revenues.

They are currently a nice bit more profitable than Apple:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=MSFT
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AAPL

Microsoft isn't jealous of Apple's profitability, they are just looking for ways to increase their gross revenues.

They are currently a nice bit more profitable than Apple:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=MSFT
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AAPL

Insider trades are in the public domain. Yahoo stocks has a nice list. According to them, the last trade by an insider was December 2nd, 2009. I wouldn't know how these things go down, but my guess is that's too early to be able to easily pin as illegal behavior without some direct evidence. Also, I'd guess that a lot of the big shots are in it for the long haul and aren't interested in gaming their own stock (I could surely be wrong if the iSlate turns out to be a dud and there's a whole bunch of insider trades before the 27th). I would hope that the SEC would look pretty hard at the trades of reporters who report on stocks in addition to the insiders though.

Or maybe you could step back and realize that no GCM predicts monotonic warming, that there's a difference between local weather and the global climate, and that reading crackpot websites isn't a substitute for a graduate education in climate physics?

So when you say local weather, do you mean like, the northern hemisphere? I ask because that's the half that's in winter now and is what I was referring to. You don't need a graduate education in geology to know that.

Winter Could Be Worst in 25 Years for USA...
Britain braced for heaviest snowfall in 50-years...
Iowa temps 'a solid 30 degrees below normal'...
Seoul buried in heaviest snowfall in 70 years...

You are right, but you are also comparing apples and oranges. You can't compare Luxembourg where you can cover the entire country with 5 cell towers, thus you get "better coverage" with United States, where a wireless startup would need hundreds of billions of dollars to deploy a nation-wide network that is feasible and marketable. Everything is different: size of investment, final product, pricing structure, etc.

It must be nice for the Europeans to reap the benefits and investment that Americans put into emerging technologies...or the Russians, going straight to G4 without any intermediate business costs and investments.

Google cares now, ad revenue down

Profit is +27% YoY. Some internet ad markets are down, in particular display ads, but Google is still growing so clearly AdWords/AdSense are doing ok. You'll have to find another motive for your conspiracy theory.

Have you seen who's running Congress and the White House lately?

Also, from the "no-sense-of-irony" department: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100102/ts_nm/us_denmark_cartoonist My question is: why does any Muslim have a residence permit in Denmark any more?

I wouldn't really say they're tarnished. They're still around and while their stock prices have seen better days, they're not at their worst point and on the rise so it's certainly in better shape than most everyone on that list.

http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=COMS#chart7:symbol=coms;range=my;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined

These are the same folks that want to "nudge" an asteroid! http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091230/ap_on_sc/eu_russia_asteroid_encounter

That's interesting, my experience is completely contrary. I'm a very active Wikipedia contributor and read many English and German articles. My personal impression (and this view is shared by many fellow Wikipedians) is that the coverage of subjects (e.g. chances to find an article about a certain subject) is better on the English Wikipedia, while quality often is better on German Wikipedia.

Unfortunately there is no scientific study (I am aware of) which directly compares German to English Wikipedia in aspects of quality. However, comparisons with other German encyclopedias have been generally supportive of the German Wikipedia (in tests it "won" against Microsoft Encarta and the highly-reputable encyclopedia by Brockhaus). Also, the German Wikipedia was the first one to use Flagged Revisions, a software feature that makes sure every edit is reviewed by an experienced user. Beside that, the German Wikimedia chapter "Wikimedia Deutschland" has done much to facilitate quality improvements (e.g. the Zedler medal for outstandingly good articles; or Wikipedia Academy, an attempt to attract academics as Wikipedia contributors). Although there is no explicit prove, there are many indicators that the German Wikipedia often has articles of higher quality or at least tries to focus more on quality.

Well, it turns out he really is a son of a prominent nigerian banker. I'm not making this up :)

This being slashdot, I can predict that there will be lots of people modding each other up for saying that news should be free, comparing newspapers to manufacturers of buggy whips, etc. Actually the positions of both google and the traditional print media are a lot more nuanced than that, so it might be worth considering whether they actually know their own business better than slashdotters do. This article (not paywalled!) has a nice, up-to-date discussion of the issues. Google is trying to work out a compromise that works for both newspapers and users. The model they seem to have in mind is that articles will be indexed by google, and users will be able to click through to the articles for free after finding them in a google search, but newspapers will still be able to keep users from effectively getting a free subscription without paying for a subscription. Essentially you'd be able to read some number of articles over some period of time, but at some point a paywall will kick in.

Okay, I hear the howls of disgust. We hate paywalls, etc. Yeah, sure. As an internet user, I hate paywalls, and I especially hate sites that try to get into google search results, but then when you click through on the google search results, you can't actually read the content. It's misleading and a waste of my time. But it's not completely unreasonable for, e.g., the Wall Street Journal to want readers to pay for a subscription. They make money that way. They can only do high-quality reporting if they get income. Different newspapers are trying different models. The NY Times has messed around with its setup over the years, with the current situation being that anyone can read anything for free, without registering. That may be a workable business model for the NY Times in the long run, provided that they have some other revenue stream. That's why I subscribe to the NY Times in print. Editorial work isn't free. Sending reporters to Afghanistan isn't free. Yes, they can get some revenue from advertising, but possibly not enough to support high-quality reporting if it's the sole source of revenue.

Please, spare me the buggy whip analogy. It's a false analogy. Cars replaced horse-drawn carriages, and were superior to them. We don't have a superior replacement for traditional newspapers. No Digg is not a replacement for the NY Times.

I really boobies don't know boobies what you are boobies talking about. boobies

If I read TFA correctly it doesn't quite work like this. In fact the whole idea is not workable as stated in the article. Humans don't visualize concepts as individual letters, but entire words. That is how the trick of scrambling letters and still being able to read the text works.

http://www.hakank.org/reading_scrambled_words/r_words.cgi?submit=OK&num_begin_chars=2&num_end_chars=2&text=According+to+a+research+at+an+english+university%2C+it+doesn't+matter+in+what+order+the+letters+in+a+word+are%2C+the+only+important+thing+is+that+first+and+last+letter+is+at+the+right+place.+The+rest+can+be+a+total+mess+and+you+can+still+read+it+without+problem.+This+is+because+we+do+not+read+every+letter+by+itself+but+the+word+as+a+whole.+Cheerio.

Just try typing something by visualizing each individual letter of each word, it is somewhat difficult and time consuming isn't it? In order for this to become practical, entire words would have to be scanned in and coded in a contextual manner (to avoid IBM's classic "Please write to Mrs. Wright right now" problem).

http://rds.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0oGkmx0hzJLijEBGl9XNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTByamR1NnFoBHNlYwNzcgRwb3MDNgRjb2xvA3NrMQR2dGlkAw--/SIG=14bdg6avh/EXP=1261689076/**http%3A//www.abilitynet.org.uk/content/factsheets/pdfs/Voice%2520Recognition%2520for%2520Blind%2520Computer%2520Users.pdf

This is still not not working 100% for voice recognition, so the computer AI technology is not quite there yet to make this practical. Besides, while "brain typing" might be a boon for transcribers and professional writers, I think the privacy implications would be very creepy.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091223/wl_sthasia_afp/pakistanunrestnorthwesteducation

Merry Christmas, you fucking diaper-heads.

P.S. - I don't live in Nebraska, but I am sure going to love paying their MediCare bills! Woo hoo, let's hear it for health care reform! Hooray for economic imperialism!

Uhhhhh...what ads? if you go to the actual search page there isn't any ads, nor has there been as far as I can remember. The problem is folks seem to get This Page, which is often the default page for things like AT&T DSL, for the actual search page when they are two completely different sites.

The funny thing is, as much as I dislike the "home page" of Yahoo, working on PCs for many years I have found the older folks just eat it up. They treat it as "the paper" and will often spend quite a few minutes there reading headlines, checking their Yahoo Mail, looking at stock quotes or checking their horoscope, before every venturing onto the "real" web. So considering how many customers have that set as their home page and have a royal fit if you dare change it, well they must be doing something right there.

But I stand by my original statement: If you ever use the "more" tab (little blue down button below the search box) you will quickly think other sites just suck. To me that more tab is THE killer feature of search. If I type in something like...say "dark knight" I not only get the usual reviews and clips, but with the more tab I get profiles on the actors, interviews with the director (which I didn't even know who was before the more tab and whose interview I found quite fascinating) all sorts of springboards for jumping off of my original search. Google uses something kinda sorta like it at the bottom of their page, but it isn't nearly as complete and page placement matters.

So while most may think Google is all that and a bag of chips I'll just have to stick with what works. Plus this SEO business shows that Yahoo Search is more like Linux-Less visible and thus less a "target" for malware. And competition is always of the good,right?

Uhhhhh...what ads? if you go to the actual search page there isn't any ads, nor has there been as far as I can remember. The problem is folks seem to get This Page, which is often the default page for things like AT&T DSL, for the actual search page when they are two completely different sites.

The funny thing is, as much as I dislike the "home page" of Yahoo, working on PCs for many years I have found the older folks just eat it up. They treat it as "the paper" and will often spend quite a few minutes there reading headlines, checking their Yahoo Mail, looking at stock quotes or checking their horoscope, before every venturing onto the "real" web. So considering how many customers have that set as their home page and have a royal fit if you dare change it, well they must be doing something right there.

But I stand by my original statement: If you ever use the "more" tab (little blue down button below the search box) you will quickly think other sites just suck. To me that more tab is THE killer feature of search. If I type in something like...say "dark knight" I not only get the usual reviews and clips, but with the more tab I get profiles on the actors, interviews with the director (which I didn't even know who was before the more tab and whose interview I found quite fascinating) all sorts of springboards for jumping off of my original search. Google uses something kinda sorta like it at the bottom of their page, but it isn't nearly as complete and page placement matters.

So while most may think Google is all that and a bag of chips I'll just have to stick with what works. Plus this SEO business shows that Yahoo Search is more like Linux-Less visible and thus less a "target" for malware. And competition is always of the good,right?

Well, until they figure out that the remedies have costs in terms of human comfort too:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091220/sc_afp/lifestyleclimatewarminganimalsfood

Comont, proud owner of seven cats and two dogs -- the environmental equivalent of a small fleet of cars -- says defiantly, "Our animals give us so much that I don't feel like a polluter at all.

There is very little logic that goes into either side of this "debate". It's all about finding some OTHER groups of people to demonize, those who lead lives that are not like ours, believe in things we don't, or don't believe in things we do.

After our freedoms are gone, it will be those who ushered them out the door that complain the loudest. The "struggle" to give up your freedom to others is a downhill struggle. Going back won't be so easy, or even possible.

What I wonder is: If we can finally prove that man contributes to climate change at all and thus that changes in the way we live will have an definite impact, then wouldn't it be important to be absolutely sure which long-term direction climate is taking and whether the actions that are being proposed will have the correct, that is reverse effect?

It would seem that instead we are for some reason in a hurry to do something/anything, even though we know that the problem (if it is a problem) has been creeping along for thousands of years.

The notion that we are at some sort of trigger point or point of no return seems more than just a little bit contrived to me. Especially when you realize that most of the leaders in this movement have set themselves up to gain financially by the proposed changes.

You should look into the latest AMD Neo based Netbooks. My local Walmart has started carrying those and I was quite imprssed at how well they do multimedia, which shouldn't be surprising as they are an ULV Athlon with a Radeon GPU for video.

At an average price of $450 IMHO they are a really good deal for a Netbook with some real performance. After playing with one I would certainly go with the AMD other the Atom, which to me feels slower than my old 1.1GHz Celeron. Plus this, like most Intel IGPs, is frankly crapola. You would think they would have figured out how to do decent multimedia acceleration by now.

Loss.

If the CRU letters are any indication, I guess this is how "science" is done these days, now, anyway.

Contrary to right-wing spin, the CRU letters do not indicate falsification or fabrication of data. The only thing they reveal is that scientists can get pissy about shills and wackos who try to disrupt their work. I suspect that's no more the case "these days" than is was in days gone by.

Dear God.

This isn't surprising in the least. Less than two weeks ago they had a workshop for Federal employees on openness in government and it was closed to the public.

Don't forget that Obama promised to have debates on healthcare on C-Span. (google cache)

I’m going to have all the negotiations around a big table,” Obama said. “We’ll have doctors and nurses and hospital administrators. Insurance companies, drug companies — they’ll get a seat at the table, they just won’t be able to buy every chair. But what we’ll do is we’ll have the negotiations televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents and who are making arguments on behalf of drug companies or the insurance companies.

Then he goes on to have closed door meetings with drug companies and insurance companies. Not to mention that he promised to not support any health care bill that forced people to get healthcare.

You'll find very few people here who ever worshiped the Obamassiah. It's no secret that the Dems are just as much in the pocket of the media companies as the Republicans.

As a person who was continually modded down for saying there was (and will be) no difference between Obama and McCain before and during the election I find your statement very funny.

.. the city had claimed it could not access the FiberWAN network's devices. But four days before that bail hearing, the city claimed it had scheduled a power outage at the 1 Market Street datacenter. That power outage would have affected routers and switches running the FiberWAN network.

In the court filing four days later, the city contended that Childs had "booby-trapped" the network to collapse during this power outage by not writing the device configurations to flash on some number of routers. A local news report stated that "experts caught the problem in time and transferred data to permanent files, [Assistant DA Conrad] del Rosario said."

This statement contradicts the city's stance that it had no access to these routers, as there is no way it could have written those configurations to flash, or save them anywhere, on July 19 if it could not access the devices ..

To quote our late great philosopher George Carlin "You know why they call it The American Dream? Because you have to be asleep to believe it."

Which is how we get shit like this being done every single day by greedy pigs. So keep believing pal, because the rich are just getting richer, the poor are growing by huge numbers, and when it gets bad enough we will get someone who can rally the masses and blood will flow. How do you think the French and Russian revolutions came about, anyway?

I'm sorry, Mr. Anon, but I wouldn't wish OO.o on my worst enemy, certainly not upon myself. Why in the name of all that is good did Sun tie OO.o to that bloaty slow ass Java desktop crap I'll never know. I would love to get my hands on a Pre Sun Star office just to see if it was fast before the 500 pound anchor that is desktop Java was tied to it.

So, does anybody know of an Office Suite besides MS Office that isn't dragged down with Java? Because so far all I've seen are just re-badges of OO.o, which means Java cruft. While Java on a server may be fine, desktop Java for Windows is....well eeeew! Plus you then have Java sticking the damned updater into your startup, no matter how many times you turn it off with every update it comes back, and if you aren't careful and uncheck the checkbox Java will toolbar you now.

So I'm sorry that while everyone here just loves to gush about OO.o I just can't share in the excitement as long as it has the crapola that is Java weighing it down. So does anybody know of a preferably free Office Suite that doesn't got the dead weight of Java dragging it down? And folks here love to complain about MSFT trying to bundle, how is Sun trying to dump a VM onto your machine ANY different than MSFT trying to drop Silverlight on your machine at every opportunity?

In both cases it is a big DO NOT WANT that the companies try to drop onto as many machines as possible to boost their installed base. But as long as OO.o is completely crippled unless you drag Java, which frankly has more than its fair share of exploits, I'll just have to pass. Thanks anyway.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080806085036AAUQ7oh

Are United States Citizens required to carry an ID at all times?

No.

However, it references to john gilmore case which shows you either do or do not need an ID to fly because of some secret laws and the mood of the TSA at that particular airport.

Interesting comments here-- a statement that you don't have to have id and some commentary on how the police can pull you over legally in a car for no reason at all and the court even says that the laws are now so complex that you can't obey them all- but "a violation is still a violation".
http://www.thewashcycle.com/2009/02/possible-police-harassment.html

okay... finally a legal site,
http://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/probable-cause-under-wa-state-laws--can-police-ask-7100.html
this may be valid in washington only not in some states... but for what it's worth...

Question police stop: do the police have a right to stop me and ask for Identification while I am walking down the street
Lawyer's answer: Yes they do and you have the right to say no and walk away. Unless they have reasonable suspicion you have committed a crime they have no legal basis to stop you.

But note John M. Kaman's reply...
The cops nightsticked his client from behind as he walked away and then charged him with resisting arrest.

---

On a related note (and a relational note), I had a younger cousin who became a cop. I got to see a nice young man turn into a thug with "funny" stories about abusing his authority over civilians.
power corrupts.

We've just about sold ourselves down the river where we can't fight back any more. It's come so far since the 1950's.

Just the other day the gov't held a Closed meeting on openness. Now that's change I can believe in

Bring it back!? Who said anything about bringing it back???

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091207/us_nm/us_iraq_usa_equipment

Oh Please! There is nothing worse in this world than liberal psychobabble! Do you REALLY think that there are 1.4 MILLION hits under "Jar Jar racist" because it is all just in everyone's heads? really?

I suppose then that we can make a new CGI about some "mud people" that have bones in their noses and chucked "laser spears" and ate a large red centered green fruit that wouldn't be racist either, because they are aliens? The character was such a Stepin Fetchit I'm shocked that whomever owns the rights to the original Stepin Fetchit didn't sue for copyright infringement!

Because diesel is a lot more expensive than gasoline here. Diesel used to be way cheaper tan gas, I don't know what changed to make diesel more expensive. Taxes, maybe?

I'm going to quote a very insightful post I once read. But first, the cliff notes:

1. Diesel is more in-demand in this country than most people think, because there is a very high demand for heating oil in the winter. Heating Oil ~= Diesel with a different dye added.

2. Given a barrel of oil, you can only extract about half as much Diesel fuel as you can regular gasoline. This limits the amount we can supply in-relation to regular gasoline, which is why Diesel (already im high demand) is more expensive.

3. Diesel is more heavily taxed than heating oil or regular gasoline, so in-addition to the fact that diesel is already heavily in-demand, it is the most highly taxed fuel on the road.

So really, the diesel revolution everyone wants to happen in this country is not going to happen. If we had as many Diesel cars as Europe, the fuel prices would go through the roof, because our demand for Diesel/Fuel Oil is already very high.

And now, the quote:

Because the price is set, like all prices in a capitalist economy, by what the market will bear rather than by absolute cost of production. They call this process "market forces," as if they exist outside of themselves, when talking to consumers, but refer to "record profits" when talking to stockholders.

Diesel used to be much cheaper than gasoline, until it became popular to put it into consumer vehicles, but several things have happened to change the production cost of the fuel at the pump.

First is the transition to ultra-low sulfur diesel, which adds perhaps five to eight cents per gallon, counting both direct costs -- the purchase price of low sulfur oil is higher than oil o lesser quality -- and investment costs required to further refine ordinary oil.

The second is taxes. Diesel fuel is essentially the same stuff as heating oil, but is taxed at a higher rate. 18% of the average price at the pump, according to the DOE, is taxes, 54% is the cost of the oil itself, 22% is the cost of refining, and 18% is distribution, marketing, and profit.

Of course many companies sell themselves their own oil, so there may be substantial profit on that transaction as well.

For gasoline, again according to the ODE, 15% of the price is taxes, 55% the cost of the oil, 15% the cost of the refining process, and 14% distribution, marketing, and profit.

In 1990, the average price of gasoline was $1.16 per gallon, the average cost of diesel fuel was $0.73 per gallon, and the average cost of heating fuel was $1.06.

In 2002, the average cost of gasoline was $1.36 per gallon, the average cost of diesel fuel was $0.76 per gallon, and the average cost of heating fuel was $1.13.

1in 2005, the average cost of gasoline was $1.87 per gallon, the average cost of diesel fuel was $1.95 per gallon, and the average cost of heating fuel was $2.05.

As you can easily see, the relative prices have varied all over the map.

The obvious inference is that, despite the higher taxes on diesel fuel in comparison to heating oil, and very similar costs of production, people are more driven to heat their homes than they are to drive their diesel cars, so the companies can charge more.

Likewise, in 1990, diesel cars were uncommon, and the primary users of diesel fuel were commercial, driving large trucks or tractors.

Presumably, a fellow filling up a truck with 300 gallons of diesel fuel every day or two is in a better position to drive a hard bargain than is a fellow filling his VW diesel with 16 gallons one a week or so.

Cheers,

Lee Anne

Hey moron? You might want to Google Jar Jar Racist before you go modding people troll, considering there are 1.4 MILLION hits, nearly all saying the SAME FUCKING THING as I wrote.

Maybe if you had actually bothered to see anything done by Stepin Fetchit you would have a fucking clue as to where the character of Jar Jar came from, since he is pretty much a CGI Stepin Fetchit.

But maybe you were too busy drooling over the thought of big black cocks to actually think of anything else. Now THAT is a troll, you cock slobbering cum dumpster!

ignorance indeed:

(1) Greenland used to be green....
Actually it didn't, it was called GREENLand to lure people there...marketing in action. Or perhaps a translation error.

(2) Medieval Warm Period
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/11/medieval-warm-period-mwp/
2000 year temp graph

(3) Rome used to import ENGLISH wine
correlation vs causation

(4) Astronomers have been pointing out *forever* that Major and Minor Ice Ages are dependent on the precession and nutation of the Earth's orbit.
I don't dispute this. However, there is *no* proof of this causing the *rate* at which we are seeing change today. Something else is effecting the system that wasn't around previously...like us.

(5) http://www.sepp.org/publications/NIPCC_final.pdf where proxy data shows the global warming folks are seriously out to lunch
The Heartland Institute? seriously? they are such a blatant shill for Big Oil and Big Business it's not funny.

The recent disclosures that some scientists may not have followed accepted processes for handling data (ignored more complete data sets for smaller data sets that better supported their ideas etc.) are serious things to investigate and rightly should be investigated. I don't know of any climate change proponents who disagree with that.

It doesn't, however, change the other *vast* accumulated data that show a very marked divergence from historical norms at rates not seen previously.