It's fine to charge people more for health insurance if they want to indulge in behavior that is obviously unhealthy. If people are chain smokers, obese, too lazy to exercise, drug users, heavy drinkers, or have lots of sex partners, they SHOULD pay...so the rest of us don't have to pay for their bad decisions. What would be wrong, though, would be for people to have to pay more for insurance due to things they have no control over, such as genetically-based diseases, or birth defects or things like that.
A few years ago, IBM (Lenovo's Thinkpad predecessor) was saying they would convert all of their enterprise desktops to Linux. Never happened. If Lenovo really does start offering SUSE on a T-series, Thinkpad, it will be a big deal that could start a cascade of non-US desktops to Linux. No wonder, M$ just started offering cut-rate Vista in China. M$ knows how important this is so, though, so the likely outcome is that Microsoft will cut a sweetheart deal with Lenovo and Lenovo will quietly shelve their SUSE plans.
Okay, the robots go in and take care of business by shooting anyone who shoots at them. In time, they are the baddest weapon in the urban landscape and we build thousands more to patrol the streets of Iraq. It soon becomes more and more dangerous to be an insurgent and the numbers of them dwindle until entire weeks pass without a single attack. Then months. Then an entire year. Yes, we've won the war in Iraq. The democratically-elected government of Iraq takes over the army of bots that now patrol with the regular Iraqis. The stillness of peace reigns everywhere in Iraq. Another year of peace goes by and then the democratically-elected shiite-dominated government of Iraq announces that it is entering into a mutual-defense treaty with the democratically-elected shiite-dominated neighbor government of Iran as its partner against the evilness of the west. Yes, we've won. Another foreign policy success.
...many of the engine changes to vehicles sold in the U.S. are a result of California's extremely tough emissions standards. The other big thing you'll notice is that U.S. safety regulations are usually more strict...
Sure there are some different requirements for US cars. That's why I provided the example with the motorcycles where emissions and safety requirements had nothing at all to do with the differences between the US and non-USversions, nor do they with cell phone features and capabilities, housing construction, road maintenance/engineering, or the other stuff I mentioned. But getting back to cars, most of the differences are 'because they can' and saving money per copy is great, as long as the buyer is happy and doesn't know any better. It's only when we see what the rest of the world is getting, that we become unhappy, as in the cell phones that this thread is about.
The OP makes a valid (and humorous) observation that regulatory agencies have a role to play in the types of features and services that are offered for cellular phones in the US. Your troll comment degraded the discussion.
aside from the lack of smaller cars do you care to back that up?
Okay, here's a specific example, although it's for a motorcycle. Several years ago, I was in London and obtained a motorcycle for a specific purpose. The bike I got was a popular model sold by Honda that they also were selling in the US and I was already a happy owner of the US version. I was surprised to find that the UK version had a somewhat more powerful motor due to a better ignition system, dual calipers on the front wheel instead of the single caliper on the us version, a more raked handlebar (okay that's more of a styling issue although it made the bike better handling), and a better suspension for approximately the same price as the US version. Cars are similar, though, The US versions of cars sold in Europe and Japan often have weaker motors, softer suspensions, power-sucking auto transmissions, cheaper seats, lower-quality tires, and weaker brakes. Why? Because US consumers don't know any better and don't expect anything more. Just like cell phones. So...mod this as a troll, close your eyes, and continue in your state of ignorance.
It's not just the cell phones that lag behind their overseas counterparts. The average car on the road in the US is a trashy piece of junk compared to an average car in Japan or the UK. US houses and apartments are often shoddily built and poorly maintained such that after 30 years they are ready to be torn down. Roads in the US are often full of potholes, poorly patched pavement, dangerous angles, and cluttered with hideously ugly advertising signs and strip malls. Major intersections in cities are occupied by 8-way stoplights that meter cars through at about 80 vehicles per hour so they can fly ahead to the next 8-way stoplight in the next block. Europe uses......"roundabouts" that are about 100x more efficient than stoplights.
These are specific examples but there is an underlying theme to all of these. They are the result of uninformed, close-minded, consumers who don't expect anything better and are uninterested in anything better. It's not surprising, then, that the market penetration of Linux, Firefox, and OS software in general is much higher outside of the US.
Aspartame tastes sweet, but it's structurally different from glucose, and so doesn't trigger the insulin response, and isn't picked up by glucose transporters.
Aspartame consists of three components--amino acids phenylalanine and aspartic acid combined with methyl ester. None of these have any similarity to glucose. It has been known for 30 years that an intake of phenylalanine increases the release of insulin into the blood stream. As you might then expect, consumption of aspartame also increases insulin blood levels and that is what has been observed. If you are seriously interested in this, see Melchior, J.C., Ragaud, D., et. al, "Immunoreactive beta-endorphin increases after an aspartame chocolate drink in healthy human subjects." Physiology and Behavior 1991; 50:941-944.
Also, do your own test on this. Give your friends a diet coke, with no other food, a couple of hours after they have last eaten and then observe their response. Within 30 minutes, they'll be asking you if you have something to eat because they'll feel 'hungry' due to the release of insulin into their blood stream which has lowered their blood sugar levels. Tell them the cupboard is bare and they'll be heading for the door to find food. There. Now you too are an aspartame researcher.
The aspartame sweetener is certainly a culprit in the obesity epidemic. Aspartame is widely used as the artificial sweetener in diet coke, diet pepsi, and hundreds of other 'diet' drinks and foods. By itself, aspartame has no calories and diet coke has no calories...so how could drinking a diet drink possibly contribute to obesity? The reason is that it IS such a powerful sweetener. It tastes sweet to the brain and the brain responds by releasing insulin into the blood stream. The insulin released then LOWERS the blood sugar and makes the victin feel hungry, leading them to binge and gorge. The word for the effect is paradoxical obesity.
There's some really strong evidence that God isn't real.
Really? To believe that God is NOT real, then you have to believe that the entire universe spontaneously exploded into existence from nothing 14 billion years back, that life forms spontaneously arose in a primordial soup here on Earth from self-assembling bio-molecules, and that the fundamental relations that constrain the universe were accidental, coincidental or 'just are'. That's difficult to believe, but maybe your proof would make it easier.
There is an interesting psychological thing going on with this.
People are simply UNABLE to believe it. If you took them by the hand and dragged them into the room with the alien body and said touch...believe...they wouldn't because they can't. Big ideas, things far beyond our everyday experience are just too hard to accept, never mind how much evidence there is. Yes, God created the world, yes, Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy, yes, the government has used mind-controlling regimens to create nutjob shooters such as Squeaky Fromme, Sirhan Sirhan, and John Hinckley Jr., yes, the goverment lied about Iraq, yes, there is electronic voting machine fraud, etc. But there is no amount of evidence that would ever convince huge numbers of any of these things. Now THAT'S easy for me to believe...
Betcha no one has ever patented the concept of a 'doorbell' wherein you depress a momentary-contact switch to activate a sound-generating device that signals to all of those within hearing distance that someone is standing in front of the door and wishes to gain access. The old patents cover the idea of pulling a rope or chain to ring a bell but those are so yesterday.
1: Organize and put out press releases about how baaaad M$ is 2: Sue M$ for anti-competitive behavior in federal court 3: Settle with M$ as a group or individually for some insignificant (to M$) amount of money 4: Put out more press releases about how M$ has changed its ways thanks to your heroic efforts 5: Spend the M$ money on useless stuff in your state 6: Tell Google (or whoever the 'victim dujour' is') to carry on as usual 7: Tell Microsoft to carry on as usual 8: GOTO 1 and repeat
$60 billion is an unbelievably large amount of money to give to the ding-dongs who run our intelligence services. There is little or no accountability or oversight for a lot of that money because everything is 'secret' but undoubtedly a lot of the money is going to enrich a relative few through slush funds and special contracts. Some of the graft and corruption could be forgiven if there were actually some results to show for all of that spending but the overall effectiveness of the US intelligence agencies is the worst among the G8 and probably also behind China, Russia, Ukraine, India, Pakistan, South Africa, Vietnam, etc. The result is that Congress and the executive branch know less about what is really happening in the world than any other comparable group anywhere, even though our spending is probably orders of magnitude more. One wonders where the CIA gets the money to fly their victims around the world to the secret prisons for torture and now we know...it just comes out of the slush fund and the amont spent on stuff like the torture flights is probably so small relative to the money being spent to fly friends and family around the world to swank resorts that no one even notices.
Even if the inkjet image fades away, we will still have the digital files saved on cd-rom, right? Oh, wait...those only last 5 to 10 years. Well, okay then, we'll save them on our ntfs-formatted 3-terabyte windows hard drives. Okay, maybe not. Well, then, what about the mag tape drive? Oh, yeah, with that unique format that nothing will be able to read in 20 years. Err...well...who needs a lot of old pictures anyway? We'll just have artists paint historical images for posterity just like they did in the middle ages.
In our hood, there are xbox 360s, PS/3, PS/2, and Wii. Guess what everyone plays with? They play the Wiis while the xbox360s, PS/3s, et. al. collect dust. Why? Because the Wii is just more fun. This changed a little bit a few months back when someone got ahold of a developer version of Halo 3 via a Microsoft employee and the xbox 360 at the lucky home ruled. That lasted for about a week and then back to the wiis. The xbox 360 and PS/3 do have awesome graphics 'potential' but there is nothing in the current or even upcoming games that makes that a compelling feature. Nintendo was obviously dead-on when they focused on the game play and the fun-potential and downplayed the graphics.
It's great that some sort of electromagnetic field might have a
therapeutic value against brain tumors. But this news doesn't
decrease the concern about cell phone/Wi-Fi radiation and brain
tumors...quite the opposite...since something that has ANY demonstrated
effect can obviously have a negative effect as well. The cell
phone industry has maintained for years that there could not possibly
be any effect on a living brain of cell phone radiation, even in the
face of studies
showing increases
in tumors
as well as negative
cognitive effects. Now, perhaps, they will say
that there are effects...but only beneficial ones...not those nasty bad
ones.
The government could implant an rfid device in every one of its citizens, beginning at birth, and then construct a tracking infrastructure and database system that would let them see the physical location of every person in real time and the historical location by consulting the database. Imagine what this would mean:
1) Crime would be ended since, after any crime, the police would only have to log onto the computer to see who was present at the moment the crime was comitted.
2) Population control would be easy since whenever a boy dot was in very close proximity, say less than 1 inche, to a girl dot, a little pink heart could start flashing on the screen and the government watchperson could administer a little remote-controlled voltage zap to the two parties to ruin the amore of the moment.
3) Transportation problems...a thing of the past...since you would need a permit to commute over road xyz which would specify your permitted travel times.
4) Money? Who would need it? Your id tag would just be automatically billed for whatever. If you didn't pay...you could just be confined to whereever and monitored for compliance. No need for prisons, either, for anyone but the most dangerous.
5) Adultery, stalking, speeding, trespassing, etc. are examples of a few of the many crimes that would be obsoleted due to their degree of difficulty and the ease with which transgressors would be identified.
Okay, maybe we are not quite ready for all of this yet, at least the democrats, but the republicans and Attorney General Gonzales would be down with it, no doubt. Also, what about North Korea, Venezueala, Cuba, China, or Saudi Arabia? They would be fine with this stuff, no doubt. And we all will be eventually, like it or not.
It's no different than if the shop had an electrical outlet on the wall outside and he was plugging in his extension cord to take power back to his place. The shop was providing the wi-fi as a service for customers along with the table, the chairs, the warm room, and the overhead lights. He was not a customer so he was not entitled to use the wi-fi. Just because he could, doesn't mean he had a right to it. He was not just 'receiving a radio transmission,' either. He was 'accessing the network' and the radio was just the means to that, just like the extension cord would be the means to get the power.
There's nothing wrong with free wi-fi, as long as it was intended to be free, which wasn't true in this case, and as long as everyone is paying for it.
The cop who passed Oswald in the hallway was accompanied by an employee. The employee identified Oswald as a fellow employee. The cop was looking for someone out of place, and hearing that Oswald was supposed to be there was enough for him to continue his search. How is that a 1 in 100 chance?
Oswald was in the second floor lunch room holding a coke when the policeman raced in, accompanied by the supervisor, looking for the shooter. Undisputed evidence shows that this occurred only 90 seconds after the last shot was fired so Oswald had to stash the gun under a box, race down four flights of stairs, go to the lunchroom, grab a cook, and look non-chalant and surprised when a policeman holding a drawn weapon entered and pointed it at him. Then he has to convice the policeman that he is completely innocent sufficiently that the policeman puts his weapon away and leaves. I don't know about you but I could have not done that and I don't think Dustin Hoffman or Jack Nicholson could have done it either. But Oswald was supposed to done exactly that after he had just allegedly shot the president of the United States. I give it a 1 in 100 chance of coming off successfully and that's generous. If you gave that little task to a thousand athletic young men with steady nerves, I don't think more than one of them would have been completely successful and I'm not sure about even that. The others would have had pounding hearts, out of breath, made a break for it, started to sweat, started shaking, had tinny unconvincing voices, fainted, couldn't say anything, peed their pants, etc.
Regarding your other point, only a handful of people needed to be in on the actual coverup. The other hundreds were just following orders from someone else. For example, on the coverup of the medical evidence and the goofball autopsy, there is one guy who is everywhere telling everyone what to do, where to go, what to say, etc...Admiral Burkley...who was Kennedy's personal physician before the assasination and became Johnson's personal physician after. Admiral Burkley personally rode in the ambulance next to Kennedy's body as it was delivered from Parkland Hospital to Love Field. Maybe he was looking for signs of life.
Sure...but that's not what happened to Kennedy. Why is so hard for you to accept the idea that Lyndon Johnson and a handful of extremists hated Kennedy enough to kill him? There are literally hundreds of examples of assassination of leaders in other countries. Many current world leaders got their job by deep-sixing their predecessors. Why do you think we surround the president with security? In Kennedy's case, Lyndon Johnson was never going to be president if Kennedy was alive...and Johnson knew it...so he conspired to kill Kennedy as his way to become president. The *fingerprint* of Johnson's guy, Mac Wallace, was found in the sniper's nest. Go read the book "Blood, Money & Power: How L.B.J. Killed J.F.K." by Barr McClellan. When you look at the state of the evidence in the Kennedy killing, it's the obvious handiwork of a lawyer (Clark) who understood how evidence was gathered and used. He puts Oswald in the building with a gun at the time the president comes driving by, by telling him some story about helping some government thing or whatever. Then the president gets shot and the shooters run for cover, leaving Oswald standing there wondering what happened. Of course, Oswald had to die...and quickly...before he realized what had really happened and started talking about who had told him what.
You'll say, though, this is all fiction and Oswald did it. The problem is there is a lot of evidence now that shows that Oswald could not have done it. Even the article that is the subject of this thread shows that there was at least another shooter. For starters, Oswald didn't have gunshot residue on his cheek, as determined by a Dallas PD paraffin test, even though he allegedly fired a bolt-action rifle. Oswald did not have any motive to shoot the president. Oswald was an obvious government agent (phony defection to Russia, training in Russian at a prestigious military language school while serving as a Marine, assigned to a top-secret U2 base in Japan, etc.). How many marines today do you think get advanced russian language training, while on duty, unless it's needed for something they are doing for the government? Oswald didn't have a 'getaway' plan. How many assassins go get on a city bus to leave the scene of the crime? There wasn't any way for Oswald to have even known in advance what schedule and routes the buses would be running on the morning of a presidential motorcade. Obviously, the bus was just a spur-of-the-moment idea after Oswald suddenly realized after the shooting (that he probably didn't even know was going to happen) that his hands were dirty and he needed to get away. Yes, there was a shooter on the 6th floor, but it wasn't Oswald, and there were two other shooters, all carefully coordinated, probably by the guy standing on the sidewalk pumping the opened umbrella up and down on a sunny day at the exact spot of the shooting when the president came driving by.
1) There were no eyewitnesses who said they recognized Oswald as the shooter. There was one guy who saw someone shooting from the school book building but he refused to identify the shooter as Oswald, even though he said he would recognize the shooter if he ever saw him again.
2) For Oswald to be the shooter, he had to get the three shots off and hit the target (1 in 50), then race down the stairs to the 2nd floor in 90 seconds and satisfy an extremely suspicious police officer who had just raced in that he was not the shooter (1 in 100), then he had to make his escape from the crime scene on a city bus (1 in 20), then he had to successfully shoot the Dallas police officer with yet another weapon and hide in the theater (1 in 10). Multiply all of these improbable events to arrive at the overall probability...1 in 1 million. Most of us would have had an extremely difficult time even doing one of those things.
3) No, it is not incorrect. None of the 'investigations' was an actual criminal investigation. The 'Warren Commission" was created by Johnson to provide the appearance of an investigation. The FBI quickly stopped their investigation at the request of the white house (Johnson) who put pressure on the FBI Director, Hoover. The Dallas Police Department did a little investigating but the Secret Service elbowed them aside as soon as Oswald was killed. Also, the Dallas PD was a little handicapped because the Secret Service had absconded with the body (at gunpoint), the photos, and the crime scene (the limo) and taken them back to Washington DC. The only thing that the Dallas PD had left was Oswald, the gun, and a few loose ends.
4) Johnson had motive and opportunity, two key things for a murder. Johnson was the guy who created the phony Warren Commission and pressured the Dallas PD to stop doing even the little bit that they had done.
In a nutshell, the location is **small**. Everything is very close together, distances are modest and the shooting was very, very easy from the window to the traveling automobile. The angle was just about ideal for Oswald. The "grassy knoll" is a joke, and the angle from the "knoll" was much less favorable for an assassination attempt.
Not THAT small. If the final shot came from the 6th floor of the school book building, Kennedy would have been about 95 yards away. Getting a 2-inch shot grouping under field conditions on a target moving away and down from your location, using a bolt-action rifle that you are having to work very rapidly is considered a feat of marksmanship. Not impossible, but very, very difficult. The grassy knoll was not a joke, at least from a shooter's viewpoint. A shot from there would have been at closer range at a target moving towards you, rather than away, and the angle would have been better than from the school book building.
Anyone who spends some time looking at the evidence in the Kennedy killing will quickly realize several things:
1) The evidence, such as it is, isn't good enough to show who did the killing, how it was done, or even what Kennedy's actual wounds were.
2) Before even considering the bullet analysis evidence that TFA is referring to, the probability that Oswald did it is about 1 in a million. Not impossible, but unlikely for sure. The bullet analysis evidence, if it doesn't get quickly discredited (as is usual for Kennedy stuff), would make it impossible for Oswald to have done the killing so the probability has gone from.000001 to 0. Not exactly a big surprise.
3) There was never any sort of official investigation like there would be for any random murder on a city street. There were a lot of reports and studies and commissions and such but none of these ever rose to the level of a real criminal investigation by a real law enforcement agency. The closest thing was probably a brief FBI investigation in the first week or so after the shooting that was quickly halted when the FBI agents started to close in on two of the secret service agents who were guarding Kennedy.
4) The guy with the biggest motive to kill Kennedy was Lyndon Johnson, the guy who was president after Kennedy, and he was opposed to any sort of criminal investigation.
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The height of the dust bowl. Drought. Pestilence. Ecological disaster. Glad everything is back to normal now.
It's fine to charge people more for health insurance if they want to indulge in behavior that is obviously unhealthy. If people are chain smokers, obese, too lazy to exercise, drug users, heavy drinkers, or have lots of sex partners, they SHOULD pay...so the rest of us don't have to pay for their bad decisions. What would be wrong, though, would be for people to have to pay more for insurance due to things they have no control over, such as genetically-based diseases, or birth defects or things like that.
A few years ago, IBM (Lenovo's Thinkpad predecessor) was saying they would convert all of their enterprise desktops to Linux. Never happened. If Lenovo really does start offering SUSE on a T-series, Thinkpad, it will be a big deal that could start a cascade of non-US desktops to Linux. No wonder, M$ just started offering cut-rate Vista in China. M$ knows how important this is so, though, so the likely outcome is that Microsoft will cut a sweetheart deal with Lenovo and Lenovo will quietly shelve their SUSE plans.
Okay, the robots go in and take care of business by shooting anyone who shoots at them. In time, they are the baddest weapon in the urban landscape and we build thousands more to patrol the streets of Iraq. It soon becomes more and more dangerous to be an insurgent and the numbers of them dwindle until entire weeks pass without a single attack. Then months. Then an entire year. Yes, we've won the war in Iraq. The democratically-elected government of Iraq takes over the army of bots that now patrol with the regular Iraqis. The stillness of peace reigns everywhere in Iraq. Another year of peace goes by and then the democratically-elected shiite-dominated government of Iraq announces that it is entering into a mutual-defense treaty with the democratically-elected shiite-dominated neighbor government of Iran as its partner against the evilness of the west. Yes, we've won. Another foreign policy success.
...many of the engine changes to vehicles sold in the U.S. are a result of California's extremely tough emissions standards. The other big thing you'll notice is that U.S. safety regulations are usually more strict...
Sure there are some different requirements for US cars. That's why I provided the example with the motorcycles where emissions and safety requirements had nothing at all to do with the differences between the US and non-USversions, nor do they with cell phone features and capabilities, housing construction, road maintenance/engineering, or the other stuff I mentioned. But getting back to cars, most of the differences are 'because they can' and saving money per copy is great, as long as the buyer is happy and doesn't know any better. It's only when we see what the rest of the world is getting, that we become unhappy, as in the cell phones that this thread is about.
The OP makes a valid (and humorous) observation that regulatory agencies have a role to play in the types of features and services that are offered for cellular phones in the US. Your troll comment degraded the discussion.
aside from the lack of smaller cars do you care to back that up?
Okay, here's a specific example, although it's for a motorcycle. Several years ago, I was in London and obtained a motorcycle for a specific purpose. The bike I got was a popular model sold by Honda that they also were selling in the US and I was already a happy owner of the US version. I was surprised to find that the UK version had a somewhat more powerful motor due to a better ignition system, dual calipers on the front wheel instead of the single caliper on the us version, a more raked handlebar (okay that's more of a styling issue although it made the bike better handling), and a better suspension for approximately the same price as the US version. Cars are similar, though, The US versions of cars sold in Europe and Japan often have weaker motors, softer suspensions, power-sucking auto transmissions, cheaper seats, lower-quality tires, and weaker brakes. Why? Because US consumers don't know any better and don't expect anything more. Just like cell phones. So...mod this as a troll, close your eyes, and continue in your state of ignorance.
It's not just the cell phones that lag behind their overseas counterparts. The average car on the road in the US is a trashy piece of junk compared to an average car in Japan or the UK. US houses and apartments are often shoddily built and poorly maintained such that after 30 years they are ready to be torn down. Roads in the US are often full of potholes, poorly patched pavement, dangerous angles, and cluttered with hideously ugly advertising signs and strip malls. Major intersections in cities are occupied by 8-way stoplights that meter cars through at about 80 vehicles per hour so they can fly ahead to the next 8-way stoplight in the next block. Europe uses......"roundabouts" that are about 100x more efficient than stoplights.
These are specific examples but there is an underlying theme to all of these. They are the result of uninformed, close-minded, consumers who don't expect anything better and are uninterested in anything better. It's not surprising, then, that the market penetration of Linux, Firefox, and OS software in general is much higher outside of the US.
Aspartame tastes sweet, but it's structurally different from glucose, and so doesn't trigger the insulin response, and isn't picked up by glucose transporters.
Aspartame consists of three components--amino acids phenylalanine and aspartic acid combined with methyl ester. None of these have any similarity to glucose. It has been known for 30 years that an intake of phenylalanine increases the release of insulin into the blood stream. As you might then expect, consumption of aspartame also increases insulin blood levels and that is what has been observed. If you are seriously interested in this, see Melchior, J.C., Ragaud, D., et. al, "Immunoreactive beta-endorphin increases after an aspartame chocolate drink in healthy human subjects." Physiology and Behavior 1991; 50:941-944.
Also, do your own test on this. Give your friends a diet coke, with no other food, a couple of hours after they have last eaten and then observe their response. Within 30 minutes, they'll be asking you if you have something to eat because they'll feel 'hungry' due to the release of insulin into their blood stream which has lowered their blood sugar levels. Tell them the cupboard is bare and they'll be heading for the door to find food. There. Now you too are an aspartame researcher.
The aspartame sweetener is certainly a culprit in the obesity
epidemic. Aspartame is widely used as the artificial sweetener in
diet coke, diet pepsi, and hundreds of other 'diet' drinks and
foods. By itself, aspartame has no calories and diet coke has no
calories...so how could drinking a diet drink possibly contribute to
obesity? The reason is that it IS such a powerful
sweetener. It tastes sweet to the brain and the brain responds by
releasing insulin into the blood stream. The insulin released
then LOWERS the blood sugar and makes the victin feel hungry, leading
them to binge and gorge. The word for the effect is paradoxical
obesity.
There's some really strong evidence that God isn't real.
Really? To believe that God is NOT real, then you have to believe that the entire universe spontaneously exploded into existence from nothing 14 billion years back, that life forms spontaneously arose in a primordial soup here on Earth from self-assembling bio-molecules, and that the fundamental relations that constrain the universe were accidental, coincidental or 'just are'. That's difficult to believe, but maybe your proof would make it easier.
There is an interesting psychological thing going on with this.
People are simply UNABLE to believe it. If you took them by the hand and dragged them into the room with the alien body and said touch...believe...they wouldn't because they can't. Big ideas, things far beyond our everyday experience are just too hard to accept, never mind how much evidence there is. Yes, God created the world, yes, Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy, yes, the government has used mind-controlling regimens to create nutjob shooters such as Squeaky Fromme, Sirhan Sirhan, and John Hinckley Jr., yes, the goverment lied about Iraq, yes, there is electronic voting machine fraud, etc. But there is no amount of evidence that would ever convince huge numbers of any of these things. Now THAT'S easy for me to believe...
Betcha no one has ever patented the concept of a 'doorbell' wherein you depress a momentary-contact switch to activate a sound-generating device that signals to all of those within hearing distance that someone is standing in front of the door and wishes to gain access. The old patents cover the idea of pulling a rope or chain to ring a bell but those are so yesterday.
1: Organize and put out press releases about how baaaad M$ is
2: Sue M$ for anti-competitive behavior in federal court
3: Settle with M$ as a group or individually for some insignificant (to M$) amount of money
4: Put out more press releases about how M$ has changed its ways thanks to your heroic efforts
5: Spend the M$ money on useless stuff in your state
6: Tell Google (or whoever the 'victim dujour' is') to carry on as usual
7: Tell Microsoft to carry on as usual
8: GOTO 1 and repeat
$60 billion is an unbelievably large amount of money to give to the ding-dongs who run our intelligence services. There is little or no accountability or oversight for a lot of that money because everything is 'secret' but undoubtedly a lot of the money is going to enrich a relative few through slush funds and special contracts. Some of the graft and corruption could be forgiven if there were actually some results to show for all of that spending but the overall effectiveness of the US intelligence agencies is the worst among the G8 and probably also behind China, Russia, Ukraine, India, Pakistan, South Africa, Vietnam, etc. The result is that Congress and the executive branch know less about what is really happening in the world than any other comparable group anywhere, even though our spending is probably orders of magnitude more. One wonders where the CIA gets the money to fly their victims around the world to the secret prisons for torture and now we know...it just comes out of the slush fund and the amont spent on stuff like the torture flights is probably so small relative to the money being spent to fly friends and family around the world to swank resorts that no one even notices.
Even if the inkjet image fades away, we will still have the digital files saved on cd-rom, right? Oh, wait...those only last 5 to 10 years. Well, okay then, we'll save them on our ntfs-formatted 3-terabyte windows hard drives. Okay, maybe not. Well, then, what about the mag tape drive? Oh, yeah, with that unique format that nothing will be able to read in 20 years. Err...well...who needs a lot of old pictures anyway? We'll just have artists paint historical images for posterity just like they did in the middle ages.
In our hood, there are xbox 360s, PS/3, PS/2, and Wii. Guess what everyone plays with? They play the Wiis while the xbox360s, PS/3s, et. al. collect dust. Why? Because the Wii is just more fun. This changed a little bit a few months back when someone got ahold of a developer version of Halo 3 via a Microsoft employee and the xbox 360 at the lucky home ruled. That lasted for about a week and then back to the wiis. The xbox 360 and PS/3 do have awesome graphics 'potential' but there is nothing in the current or even upcoming games that makes that a compelling feature. Nintendo was obviously dead-on when they focused on the game play and the fun-potential and downplayed the graphics.
It's great that some sort of electromagnetic field might have a therapeutic value against brain tumors. But this news doesn't decrease the concern about cell phone/Wi-Fi radiation and brain tumors...quite the opposite...since something that has ANY demonstrated effect can obviously have a negative effect as well. The cell phone industry has maintained for years that there could not possibly be any effect on a living brain of cell phone radiation, even in the face of studies showing increases in tumors as well as negative cognitive effects. Now, perhaps, they will say that there are effects...but only beneficial ones...not those nasty bad ones.
The government could implant an rfid device in every one of its citizens, beginning at birth, and then construct a tracking infrastructure and database system that would let them see the physical location of every person in real time and the historical location by consulting the database. Imagine what this would mean:
1) Crime would be ended since, after any crime, the police would only have to log onto the computer to see who was present at the moment the crime was comitted.
2) Population control would be easy since whenever a boy dot was in very close proximity, say less than 1 inche, to a girl dot, a little pink heart could start flashing on the screen and the government watchperson could administer a little remote-controlled voltage zap to the two parties to ruin the amore of the moment.
3) Transportation problems...a thing of the past...since you would need a permit to commute over road xyz which would specify your permitted travel times.
4) Money? Who would need it? Your id tag would just be automatically billed for whatever. If you didn't pay...you could just be confined to whereever and monitored for compliance. No need for prisons, either, for anyone but the most dangerous.
5) Adultery, stalking, speeding, trespassing, etc. are examples of a few of the many crimes that would be obsoleted due to their degree of difficulty and the ease with which transgressors would be identified.
Okay, maybe we are not quite ready for all of this yet, at least the democrats, but the republicans and Attorney General Gonzales would be down with it, no doubt. Also, what about North Korea, Venezueala, Cuba, China, or Saudi Arabia? They would be fine with this stuff, no doubt. And we all will be eventually, like it or not.
It's no different than if the shop had an electrical outlet on the wall outside and he was plugging in his extension cord to take power back to his place. The shop was providing the wi-fi as a service for customers along with the table, the chairs, the warm room, and the overhead lights. He was not a customer so he was not entitled to use the wi-fi. Just because he could, doesn't mean he had a right to it. He was not just 'receiving a radio transmission,' either. He was 'accessing the network' and the radio was just the means to that, just like the extension cord would be the means to get the power.
There's nothing wrong with free wi-fi, as long as it was intended to be free, which wasn't true in this case, and as long as everyone is paying for it.
The cop who passed Oswald in the hallway was accompanied by an employee. The employee identified Oswald as a fellow employee. The cop was looking for someone out of place, and hearing that Oswald was supposed to be there was enough for him to continue his search. How is that a 1 in 100 chance?
Oswald was in the second floor lunch room holding a coke when the policeman raced in, accompanied by the supervisor, looking for the shooter. Undisputed evidence shows that this occurred only 90 seconds after the last shot was fired so Oswald had to stash the gun under a box, race down four flights of stairs, go to the lunchroom, grab a cook, and look non-chalant and surprised when a policeman holding a drawn weapon entered and pointed it at him. Then he has to convice the policeman that he is completely innocent sufficiently that the policeman puts his weapon away and leaves. I don't know about you but I could have not done that and I don't think Dustin Hoffman or Jack Nicholson could have done it either. But Oswald was supposed to done exactly that after he had just allegedly shot the president of the United States. I give it a 1 in 100 chance of coming off successfully and that's generous. If you gave that little task to a thousand athletic young men with steady nerves, I don't think more than one of them would have been completely successful and I'm not sure about even that. The others would have had pounding hearts, out of breath, made a break for it, started to sweat, started shaking, had tinny unconvincing voices, fainted, couldn't say anything, peed their pants, etc.
Regarding your other point, only a handful of people needed to be in on the actual coverup. The other hundreds were just following orders from someone else. For example, on the coverup of the medical evidence and the goofball autopsy, there is one guy who is everywhere telling everyone what to do, where to go, what to say, etc...Admiral Burkley...who was Kennedy's personal physician before the assasination and became Johnson's personal physician after. Admiral Burkley personally rode in the ambulance next to Kennedy's body as it was delivered from Parkland Hospital to Love Field. Maybe he was looking for signs of life.
One guy can kill a president
Sure...but that's not what happened to Kennedy. Why is so hard for you to accept the idea that Lyndon Johnson and a handful of extremists hated Kennedy enough to kill him? There are literally hundreds of examples of assassination of leaders in other countries. Many current world leaders got their job by deep-sixing their predecessors. Why do you think we surround the president with security? In Kennedy's case, Lyndon Johnson was never going to be president if Kennedy was alive...and Johnson knew it...so he conspired to kill Kennedy as his way to become president. The *fingerprint* of Johnson's guy, Mac Wallace, was found in the sniper's nest. Go read the book "Blood, Money & Power: How L.B.J. Killed J.F.K." by Barr McClellan. When you look at the state of the evidence in the Kennedy killing, it's the obvious handiwork of a lawyer (Clark) who understood how evidence was gathered and used. He puts Oswald in the building with a gun at the time the president comes driving by, by telling him some story about helping some government thing or whatever. Then the president gets shot and the shooters run for cover, leaving Oswald standing there wondering what happened. Of course, Oswald had to die...and quickly...before he realized what had really happened and started talking about who had told him what.
You'll say, though, this is all fiction and Oswald did it. The problem is there is a lot of evidence now that shows that Oswald could not have done it. Even the article that is the subject of this thread shows that there was at least another shooter. For starters, Oswald didn't have gunshot residue on his cheek, as determined by a Dallas PD paraffin test, even though he allegedly fired a bolt-action rifle. Oswald did not have any motive to shoot the president. Oswald was an obvious government agent (phony defection to Russia, training in Russian at a prestigious military language school while serving as a Marine, assigned to a top-secret U2 base in Japan, etc.). How many marines today do you think get advanced russian language training, while on duty, unless it's needed for something they are doing for the government? Oswald didn't have a 'getaway' plan. How many assassins go get on a city bus to leave the scene of the crime? There wasn't any way for Oswald to have even known in advance what schedule and routes the buses would be running on the morning of a presidential motorcade. Obviously, the bus was just a spur-of-the-moment idea after Oswald suddenly realized after the shooting (that he probably didn't even know was going to happen) that his hands were dirty and he needed to get away. Yes, there was a shooter on the 6th floor, but it wasn't Oswald, and there were two other shooters, all carefully coordinated, probably by the guy standing on the sidewalk pumping the opened umbrella up and down on a sunny day at the exact spot of the shooting when the president came driving by.
1) There were no eyewitnesses who said they recognized Oswald as the shooter. There was one guy who saw someone shooting from the school book building but he refused to identify the shooter as Oswald, even though he said he would recognize the shooter if he ever saw him again.
2) For Oswald to be the shooter, he had to get the three shots off and hit the target (1 in 50), then race down the stairs to the 2nd floor in 90 seconds and satisfy an extremely suspicious police officer who had just raced in that he was not the shooter (1 in 100), then he had to make his escape from the crime scene on a city bus (1 in 20), then he had to successfully shoot the Dallas police officer with yet another weapon and hide in the theater (1 in 10). Multiply all of these improbable events to arrive at the overall probability...1 in 1 million. Most of us would have had an extremely difficult time even doing one of those things.
3) No, it is not incorrect. None of the 'investigations' was an actual criminal investigation. The 'Warren Commission" was created by Johnson to provide the appearance of an investigation. The FBI quickly stopped their investigation at the request of the white house (Johnson) who put pressure on the FBI Director, Hoover. The Dallas Police Department did a little investigating but the Secret Service elbowed them aside as soon as Oswald was killed. Also, the Dallas PD was a little handicapped because the Secret Service had absconded with the body (at gunpoint), the photos, and the crime scene (the limo) and taken them back to Washington DC. The only thing that the Dallas PD had left was Oswald, the gun, and a few loose ends.
4) Johnson had motive and opportunity, two key things for a murder. Johnson was the guy who created the phony Warren Commission and pressured the Dallas PD to stop doing even the little bit that they had done.
In a nutshell, the location is **small**. Everything is very close together, distances are modest and the shooting was very, very easy from the window to the traveling automobile. The angle was just about ideal for Oswald. The "grassy knoll" is a joke, and the angle from the "knoll" was much less favorable for an assassination attempt.
Not THAT small. If the final shot came from the 6th floor of the school book building, Kennedy would have been about 95 yards away. Getting a 2-inch shot grouping under field conditions on a target moving away and down from your location, using a bolt-action rifle that you are having to work very rapidly is considered a feat of marksmanship. Not impossible, but very, very difficult. The grassy knoll was not a joke, at least from a shooter's viewpoint. A shot from there would have been at closer range at a target moving towards you, rather than away, and the angle would have been better than from the school book building.
Anyone who spends some time looking at the evidence in the Kennedy killing will quickly realize several things:
.000001 to 0. Not exactly a big surprise.
1) The evidence, such as it is, isn't good enough to show who did the killing, how it was done, or even what Kennedy's actual wounds were.
2) Before even considering the bullet analysis evidence that TFA is referring to, the probability that Oswald did it is about 1 in a million. Not impossible, but unlikely for sure. The bullet analysis evidence, if it doesn't get quickly discredited (as is usual for Kennedy stuff), would make it impossible for Oswald to have done the killing so the probability has gone from
3) There was never any sort of official investigation like there would be for any random murder on a city street. There were a lot of reports and studies and commissions and such but none of these ever rose to the level of a real criminal investigation by a real law enforcement agency. The closest thing was probably a brief FBI investigation in the first week or so after the shooting that was quickly halted when the FBI agents started to close in on two of the secret service agents who were guarding Kennedy.
4) The guy with the biggest motive to kill Kennedy was Lyndon Johnson, the guy who was president after Kennedy, and he was opposed to any sort of criminal investigation.