Hey, if there is enough support for clean food and air (and I'm sure there is), then they will probably get renewed every 4 years.
On the other hand, if our education performance stays as bad as it is, then we probably need to fire everybody, (re)hire people with new ideas who will take a fresh look at what has gone before.
As for social security/medicaid, people shouldn't be eligible for benefits until they have less than $10,000 of assets (not counting their home) in their name. No tax free gifts above $1000 should be allowed to circumvent this rule. Without drastic cuts, both of those programs will probably be cut before I can get them in 40 years.
At what point did Reagan or Bush Sr. have a Congress friendly to spending cuts? Answer, never. The House of Representatives was majority Democrats all 12 years they were in office, and the Senate for 6. Even then, it's very difficult for any democratic government to actually cut taxes, because of the people who would lose 'their' job, and complaining from the vocal constituents who feel entitled for the outrageous handouts the government gives. We should have it be mandatory that all departments (other than Defense and Revenue) should have their existence be re-approved every 4 years, one year after the election. Make the departments justify their existence for the funds spent. (Maybe it's a bad idea, and we'll certainly never see it happen, but at least it would be a change, right?)
It has nothing to do with class, or spiritual warfare. There are plenty of conservatives who have just as much of a problem affording health care, and ridiculous restrictions in our current system, but feel like there are better ways of correcting the situation than putting the government in charge of things.
In my situation for example, my current insurance provider is Cigna. My wife is pregnant, and the cheapest cash option for handling the pregnancy is the local midwife clinic, which, being the natural option has all sorts of extra benefits. But, Cigna doesn't cover services at this place the place because the doctor who runs the clinic won't pigeon-hole herself into only performing this specialty, or some similarly ridiculous explanation. Now, if we had a true free market between providers, insurance, and customers, then we might have a chance at real, affordable health care options. If I had the cash that my employer were spending on Cigna, and I could go spend that money on any provider (and maybe hold on to some of the cash to pay for a higher deductible), I could go get an insurance company that would cover services at this clinic, and have the different insurance companies realize that not covering this particular facility is a bad business decision.
I think one of the biggest problems with our medical system in this country is the lawyers. They aren't doing anything that really gets us closer to better health, but they get an awful lot of the money that we pay in either insurance or actual service fees. I've heard that local doctors have to pay more in malpractice insurance than I make in a year. I heard of one local doctor that would like to practice part time, but because of his malpractice premiums, medicine is an all or nothing practice, and it's not as financially lucrative as it's made out to be.
How do you fix this problem? You've got to throw out malpractice lawsuits, and give oversight of doctors to a medical board. Doctors could pay a fraction of what they pay in malpractice into a fund, and if a doctor makes an error, the fund pays for another doctor to fix the problem. If a doctor consistently has problems with making mistakes, the other doctors either have to pay more to correct his problems, or they decide that he's not fit to continue to practice. I think if you get rid of the malpractice insurance, hospitals' and doctors' rates could drop by a quarter to a third. I think fixing the funding of these doctor's educations to prevent them from graduating with hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt would provide more savings, by letting doctors cut costs instead of having to pay thousands more per month in interest and principle. If you figure that these two things, and throw in self employment taxes (malpractice and student loans) are costing doctors at least $15,000 per month, then the doctor has to make close to $100 per hour to cover these costs that add nothing to the level of service he's providing today, and he hasn't even made anything to pay for his materials and anything to take home. That works out to $25 of the cost of a 15 minute appointment pays for him being a doctor, but provides no benefit to the patient. If we could find a way to eliminate these costs, I think doctors would gladly pass most of those savings on to us, their customers.
Is the administration's pushing of preventive care admirable? In fact, it's the only thing about this administration that I find to be remotely positive. Unfortunately, I don't know that the policies they are pursuing are going to have the results they want. Decades of Medicare, Medicaid, and other Democratic policies that date back to the Depression have so distorted our system that we've be blinded to the fact that we don't have a true free market in medicine, and the result has put us all in a bad situation. By putting more government in the picture, costs of the system as a whole will go up. We're going to be creating thousands, and probably hundreds of thousands of government jobs (at far highe
And what would be the motivation? Could you imagine the reviews Geek Squad (or similar) would get with the BBB (or similar business rating sites). Don't take your service there, they frame their customers for illegal data!!! What company would ever plant evidence against a customer when doing so would get them bad ratings and cost them significant amounts of business?
Even if budgeted a million dollars, divided by 450,000 students in the grade that would be using the book, the development cost of the text would be $2 per student.
One high school teacher I talked to said text book selection is a very political exercise. But with the above numbers, the state could probably develop 3-5 texts for each subject for the million dollar cost, and the individual teachers could use any of the texts since they would all be approved for use by the state.
My wife and I have decided we're going to home school. Researching this, we've found that studies show that children that are home school are statistically better socialized. Are there plenty of cases that we can all think of where parents home school just to shelter their children? Sure, but overall, people that enter home schooling with the right attitude about engaging children with people outside the home have children that are better off. First off, much of the time spent in school isn't spent socializing, it's spent sitting quietly a few feet from friends, whom you aren't allowed to talk to for most of the day. With one day a week around other home school students plus a few activities, a student can get the same amount of socialization that the institution taught student gets in a whole week.
Plus we have the opportunity to have our students go and experience the things they want to learn first hand from some place, and interact with adults. We also remove them from an atmosphere where many students punish their peers for success, and where bullying is prevalent by underachievers against achievers.
But the real reason we've decided to home school is that by every metric that yields success in school, home schooling is better than institution schooling. Those things that really seem to matter are parent interest and participation and student to teacher ratio. Even when home schooling multiple children at a time, the parent does most of the instruction in a one-on-one or a one-on-two basis, and most of the learning comes from reading material that could have been assigned in the school and done at home, or in lab activities. Home school children have a much higher self motivation to learn in a home school situation, because the class moves at their speed, and is best taught tailored to their interests.
FYI, the Catholic Church's position is that in vitro fertilization is immoral, and Catholics that agree with this make up a large percentage of the pro-life movement.
From a Catholic website: IVF violates the rights of the child: it deprives him of his filial relationship with his parental origins and can hinder the maturing of his personality. It objectively deprives conjugal fruitfulness of its unity and integrity, it brings about and manifests a rupture between genetic parenthood, gestational parenthood, and responsibility for upbringing. This threat to the unity and stability of the family is a source of dissension, disorder, and injustice in the whole of social life.
Ex-communication is not levied for leaving the community as there would be no point. 'You're leaving, well you aren't welcome here anymore anyway.'
Ex-communication is for somebody who has committed a serious offense against Church Law (abortion) and has not stopped receiving communion. The prohibition from receiving of communion is intended to force the person to own up to what they've done, but they are not supposed to remove themselves from attending the Church service, since they presumably have an even greater need for forgiveness and instruction now that they've made a grave error. It's possible that individuals would react badly to the person being excommunicated, but it is intended to be an opportunity for those individuals to grow by learning to forgive and love the person who has been excommunicated, not for them to look down on the person and think they are better than the one who has incurred the punishment.
Buying the stock doesn't mean the company will keep the dividends. Dividends declared are for outstanding shares, that is the stock that the company doesn't own. Most companies have unsold shares on their books, because when incorporated, the company's legal filing to be created declares the number of shares of the company that are available. The number of shares can be changed either buy splitting the stock, or filing to change the number of shares available legally (I think this can be done, but I don't know if large publicly owned companies have been successful in getting the shareholders to vote for dilution).
According to the Google finance chart for MSFT, they started offering dividends in '03, but didn't make it a regular quarterly event until August 2004, which is confirmed by MS, plus a one time dividend and a 4 year stock buy back at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/jul04/07-20boardPR.mspx. Google search indicates Microsoft announced stock buy backs of $40 billion in both '06 and '08, but I'm not sure how much of that cash has been paid out yet.
Your math assumed that he was driving 1/10 of the time that he was commuting. What if by Carpooling, he meant that he had one other passenger. Then, 45% of his annual commute would be handled by the other car pool, making 90% of his 21,000 miles his share of the carpooling time, and the remaining 10% the days he drove alone. That would make his annual commute about 41,000 miles, not 210,000 like you suggest. Divide it by 250 (consider vacation), and that would make his daily round trip about 164 miles. Now, that is a lot more than I like to drive, but I have heard of such commutes in some metro areas of the US.
Because different people have different responsibilities.
This is marketing, the marketing group will handle this. Those guys don't have the expertise to work on 'merger details' other than gathering and developing counter strategies, and they'll have individuals from both Sun and Oracle's marketing groups work on something with a little oversight from a vice president or executive concerning strategy. If they need one of the executives to answer questions, they'll have one of them give an interview or press conference for an hour.
The technical groups and the vice presidents and their assistants will execute the plans as the executives make the decisions. When a manager is need as speaking head to handle
(I posted the same story, but linked to the Tom's Hardware article posted in the story)
Well, because they got slapped with a class action lawsuit because Dell (and other vendors) were selling machines with 'Vista capable' stickers on them, that weren't really capable. Here, Microsoft is selling an OS as backwards compatible, where buying Win 7 should guarantee the ability to run any software written since 2003. If enough people buy low end computers that can't, and software they expected to work, who will take the fall, Intel, Microsoft, or the computer vendors? (this was the question I posed in my version of the story)
I recall reading that college books are made intentionally inferior to grade/high school texts for several reasons. The public schools are selling the books to institutions that make large orders, and expect to use the books for several years.
College texts are sold to college bookstores, which you might have 1 to 3 in most college towns, and the student has no choice in which book to get, because the teacher or department decides for them. Then the publisher makes minor alterations to the text from one year, giving the school and the (school owned?) bookstore the opportunity to phase out last year's book with a nearly identical one. This is planned obsolescence at it's finest.
The only way to really break the text book cartel is a commitment to open commons texts that students can put directly on their reader, computer, or have printed at the publisher of their choice. Have a foundation that produces half a dozen texts on each subject at various grade levels, and the educators would still have the option to choose texts that they like, or even mix and match different sections of the texts they like. And you'd probably have printers pop up that would compete to distribute the open texts solely on price and quality, and I'm pretty sure they could get the price of a single copy with a hefty profit for under $20.
Aren't all Rogue type games death=start over? I recall there is a hardcore mode in Diablo, which would give it the same feel. But Diablo is a combat game, where Rogue is more of a survival game. I think Rogue has more replay value for me. Diablo is easily beatable if you are a decent player. The Rogue games are much more difficult, and take much more skill and luck.
Don't forget that 75% of the sex would happen when the woman is infertile. You should only be counting times when she would actually get pregnant, if you are going to calculate an individual incident's chance at pregnancy. 100 couples use the condom, for a year, has sex 25 times that it could result in a pregnancy, 14 will get pregnant (typical use rate), and that yields 100*14/2500, which is a little over 1/2 of a percent. Taking that result (99.44% not pregnancy) to the 25th power should yield something approximating the annual typical use rate of 86%, and the number is 86.9%.
If they are following industry standard practices, pregnancy rates are given in 1 year increments, so this means 1 unintended pregnancy / 100 couples / year. No chemical or barrier method is any better than this.
Of course, there also needs to be an examination between perfect use and typical use as well. The difference between perfect use and typical is user error. Perfect use tells you how often the method 'broke,' and the difference between that and typical use is the 'opps' by people using the system.
Interestingly, the numbers for condoms are a 3% failure rate, but I'm not sure if those numbers are calculated using only instances were pregnancy would likely have occurred if the condom hadn't been used at all. For instance, a typical woman can get pregnant 1 week a month. If you have sex 10 times, and the condom fails once or twice, but the woman wasn't ovulating, then is that still counted as a successful pregnancy prevention in condom failure statistics?
I do know that just over half of all US abortions are the result of people choosing to end a pregnancy that started with a contraceptive failure. I think the unintended pregnancy rate in the US is between 1 and 1.5 million per year.
On the most controversial cases (those decided 5-4), there are 4 justices that always side with the Democrats, Souter, Stevens, Ginsberg and Breyer. Three of those will probably retire in the next year or two, and now because they've been waiting for a Democrat to come to power so they could be replaced with somebody like themselves, Souter has already retired, Ginsberg has cancer, and Stevens is 89. Breyer was appointed by Clinton, and probably would be renominated by Obama if that had to be done periodically.
"At first they came for the Communists but I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came for me and there was no one else to object."
Not sure if this is the original, but I found it with a quick search, and it conveys the meaning of the original, which I seem to recall being much longer.
Except, to censor the location or the content of their public displays is censorship, as much as controlling what they actually say, under American law. Now, should people who are demonstrating respect another person's right to exist peacefully and have their own constitutional rights be respected? Of course. But to censor their rights to say what they will in that space, even if they are advocating violence is still censorship, and I am reluctant to allow any censorship in cases I agree with for fear that I will eventually be censored because I disagree with a lot of what passes as common sense.
That's why we have the right to bear arms here in the U.S., because while we expect the threat of law enforcement to protect us from violence, the government doing so preemptively usually results in the government doing something when nothing was the better choice. With the right to bear arms, we are supposed to protect ourselves from immediate violence.
I've even found myself being affected by this in a very real way several times, because I live in the same city as Fred Phelps, and once even found myself in the unfortunate situation of standing a few feet from the man when I got out of my car, that I thought my heart was going to stop. Another time, one of his followers said something so offensive to me, that I'm pretty sure God doesn't consider his followers to be Christians, and I see his people protesting outside of many churches here in town. There have also been violent confrontations between him, his followers, and other people in town, and they often can't get a fair trial, so they've had some cases moved to other cities just to be able to find try to find an impartial jury. Despite my dislike for the man and the tone and content of his message, he should still have the right to say what he wants (although I wish they would force him to stop with the pornographic stick figures in plain view of children).
Slashdot Mirror
But if you can't tell the difference between 95 and 96 without a thermometer, does it matter?
Hey, if there is enough support for clean food and air (and I'm sure there is), then they will probably get renewed every 4 years.
On the other hand, if our education performance stays as bad as it is, then we probably need to fire everybody, (re)hire people with new ideas who will take a fresh look at what has gone before.
As for social security/medicaid, people shouldn't be eligible for benefits until they have less than $10,000 of assets (not counting their home) in their name. No tax free gifts above $1000 should be allowed to circumvent this rule. Without drastic cuts, both of those programs will probably be cut before I can get them in 40 years.
At what point did Reagan or Bush Sr. have a Congress friendly to spending cuts? Answer, never. The House of Representatives was majority Democrats all 12 years they were in office, and the Senate for 6. Even then, it's very difficult for any democratic government to actually cut taxes, because of the people who would lose 'their' job, and complaining from the vocal constituents who feel entitled for the outrageous handouts the government gives. We should have it be mandatory that all departments (other than Defense and Revenue) should have their existence be re-approved every 4 years, one year after the election. Make the departments justify their existence for the funds spent. (Maybe it's a bad idea, and we'll certainly never see it happen, but at least it would be a change, right?)
It has nothing to do with class, or spiritual warfare. There are plenty of conservatives who have just as much of a problem affording health care, and ridiculous restrictions in our current system, but feel like there are better ways of correcting the situation than putting the government in charge of things.
In my situation for example, my current insurance provider is Cigna. My wife is pregnant, and the cheapest cash option for handling the pregnancy is the local midwife clinic, which, being the natural option has all sorts of extra benefits. But, Cigna doesn't cover services at this place the place because the doctor who runs the clinic won't pigeon-hole herself into only performing this specialty, or some similarly ridiculous explanation. Now, if we had a true free market between providers, insurance, and customers, then we might have a chance at real, affordable health care options. If I had the cash that my employer were spending on Cigna, and I could go spend that money on any provider (and maybe hold on to some of the cash to pay for a higher deductible), I could go get an insurance company that would cover services at this clinic, and have the different insurance companies realize that not covering this particular facility is a bad business decision.
I think one of the biggest problems with our medical system in this country is the lawyers. They aren't doing anything that really gets us closer to better health, but they get an awful lot of the money that we pay in either insurance or actual service fees. I've heard that local doctors have to pay more in malpractice insurance than I make in a year. I heard of one local doctor that would like to practice part time, but because of his malpractice premiums, medicine is an all or nothing practice, and it's not as financially lucrative as it's made out to be.
How do you fix this problem? You've got to throw out malpractice lawsuits, and give oversight of doctors to a medical board. Doctors could pay a fraction of what they pay in malpractice into a fund, and if a doctor makes an error, the fund pays for another doctor to fix the problem. If a doctor consistently has problems with making mistakes, the other doctors either have to pay more to correct his problems, or they decide that he's not fit to continue to practice. I think if you get rid of the malpractice insurance, hospitals' and doctors' rates could drop by a quarter to a third. I think fixing the funding of these doctor's educations to prevent them from graduating with hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt would provide more savings, by letting doctors cut costs instead of having to pay thousands more per month in interest and principle. If you figure that these two things, and throw in self employment taxes (malpractice and student loans) are costing doctors at least $15,000 per month, then the doctor has to make close to $100 per hour to cover these costs that add nothing to the level of service he's providing today, and he hasn't even made anything to pay for his materials and anything to take home. That works out to $25 of the cost of a 15 minute appointment pays for him being a doctor, but provides no benefit to the patient. If we could find a way to eliminate these costs, I think doctors would gladly pass most of those savings on to us, their customers.
Is the administration's pushing of preventive care admirable? In fact, it's the only thing about this administration that I find to be remotely positive. Unfortunately, I don't know that the policies they are pursuing are going to have the results they want. Decades of Medicare, Medicaid, and other Democratic policies that date back to the Depression have so distorted our system that we've be blinded to the fact that we don't have a true free market in medicine, and the result has put us all in a bad situation. By putting more government in the picture, costs of the system as a whole will go up. We're going to be creating thousands, and probably hundreds of thousands of government jobs (at far highe
And what would be the motivation? Could you imagine the reviews Geek Squad (or similar) would get with the BBB (or similar business rating sites). Don't take your service there, they frame their customers for illegal data!!! What company would ever plant evidence against a customer when doing so would get them bad ratings and cost them significant amounts of business?
Even if budgeted a million dollars, divided by 450,000 students in the grade that would be using the book, the development cost of the text would be $2 per student.
One high school teacher I talked to said text book selection is a very political exercise. But with the above numbers, the state could probably develop 3-5 texts for each subject for the million dollar cost, and the individual teachers could use any of the texts since they would all be approved for use by the state.
My wife and I have decided we're going to home school. Researching this, we've found that studies show that children that are home school are statistically better socialized. Are there plenty of cases that we can all think of where parents home school just to shelter their children? Sure, but overall, people that enter home schooling with the right attitude about engaging children with people outside the home have children that are better off. First off, much of the time spent in school isn't spent socializing, it's spent sitting quietly a few feet from friends, whom you aren't allowed to talk to for most of the day. With one day a week around other home school students plus a few activities, a student can get the same amount of socialization that the institution taught student gets in a whole week.
Plus we have the opportunity to have our students go and experience the things they want to learn first hand from some place, and interact with adults. We also remove them from an atmosphere where many students punish their peers for success, and where bullying is prevalent by underachievers against achievers.
But the real reason we've decided to home school is that by every metric that yields success in school, home schooling is better than institution schooling. Those things that really seem to matter are parent interest and participation and student to teacher ratio. Even when home schooling multiple children at a time, the parent does most of the instruction in a one-on-one or a one-on-two basis, and most of the learning comes from reading material that could have been assigned in the school and done at home, or in lab activities. Home school children have a much higher self motivation to learn in a home school situation, because the class moves at their speed, and is best taught tailored to their interests.
Compared to the lifelong cost of coping with the blindness?
FYI, the Catholic Church's position is that in vitro fertilization is immoral, and Catholics that agree with this make up a large percentage of the pro-life movement.
From a Catholic website: IVF violates the rights of the child: it deprives him of his filial relationship with his parental origins and can hinder the maturing of his personality. It objectively deprives conjugal fruitfulness of its unity and integrity, it brings about and manifests a rupture between genetic parenthood, gestational parenthood, and responsibility for upbringing. This threat to the unity and stability of the family is a source of dissension, disorder, and injustice in the whole of social life.
Ex-communication is not levied for leaving the community as there would be no point. 'You're leaving, well you aren't welcome here anymore anyway.'
Ex-communication is for somebody who has committed a serious offense against Church Law (abortion) and has not stopped receiving communion. The prohibition from receiving of communion is intended to force the person to own up to what they've done, but they are not supposed to remove themselves from attending the Church service, since they presumably have an even greater need for forgiveness and instruction now that they've made a grave error. It's possible that individuals would react badly to the person being excommunicated, but it is intended to be an opportunity for those individuals to grow by learning to forgive and love the person who has been excommunicated, not for them to look down on the person and think they are better than the one who has incurred the punishment.
The best places to check are:
http://www.endpcnoise.com/
http://www.silentpcreview.com/
http://www.acousticpc.com/
According to this, 3d support for r6xx and r7xx ATI cards (currently, everything numbered HD 2000 and up) is finally coming out.
Here is one card for $70 that meets your criteria if the 3D support above is really there.
http://www.silentpcreview.com/powercolor-hd4650
Buying the stock doesn't mean the company will keep the dividends. Dividends declared are for outstanding shares, that is the stock that the company doesn't own. Most companies have unsold shares on their books, because when incorporated, the company's legal filing to be created declares the number of shares of the company that are available. The number of shares can be changed either buy splitting the stock, or filing to change the number of shares available legally (I think this can be done, but I don't know if large publicly owned companies have been successful in getting the shareholders to vote for dilution).
According to the Google finance chart for MSFT, they started offering dividends in '03, but didn't make it a regular quarterly event until August 2004, which is confirmed by MS, plus a one time dividend and a 4 year stock buy back at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/jul04/07-20boardPR.mspx. Google search indicates Microsoft announced stock buy backs of $40 billion in both '06 and '08, but I'm not sure how much of that cash has been paid out yet.
Your math assumed that he was driving 1/10 of the time that he was commuting. What if by Carpooling, he meant that he had one other passenger. Then, 45% of his annual commute would be handled by the other car pool, making 90% of his 21,000 miles his share of the carpooling time, and the remaining 10% the days he drove alone. That would make his annual commute about 41,000 miles, not 210,000 like you suggest. Divide it by 250 (consider vacation), and that would make his daily round trip about 164 miles. Now, that is a lot more than I like to drive, but I have heard of such commutes in some metro areas of the US.
Because different people have different responsibilities.
This is marketing, the marketing group will handle this. Those guys don't have the expertise to work on 'merger details' other than gathering and developing counter strategies, and they'll have individuals from both Sun and Oracle's marketing groups work on something with a little oversight from a vice president or executive concerning strategy. If they need one of the executives to answer questions, they'll have one of them give an interview or press conference for an hour.
The technical groups and the vice presidents and their assistants will execute the plans as the executives make the decisions. When a manager is need as speaking head to handle
(I posted the same story, but linked to the Tom's Hardware article posted in the story)
Well, because they got slapped with a class action lawsuit because Dell (and other vendors) were selling machines with 'Vista capable' stickers on them, that weren't really capable. Here, Microsoft is selling an OS as backwards compatible, where buying Win 7 should guarantee the ability to run any software written since 2003. If enough people buy low end computers that can't, and software they expected to work, who will take the fall, Intel, Microsoft, or the computer vendors? (this was the question I posed in my version of the story)
I recall reading that college books are made intentionally inferior to grade/high school texts for several reasons. The public schools are selling the books to institutions that make large orders, and expect to use the books for several years.
College texts are sold to college bookstores, which you might have 1 to 3 in most college towns, and the student has no choice in which book to get, because the teacher or department decides for them. Then the publisher makes minor alterations to the text from one year, giving the school and the (school owned?) bookstore the opportunity to phase out last year's book with a nearly identical one. This is planned obsolescence at it's finest.
The only way to really break the text book cartel is a commitment to open commons texts that students can put directly on their reader, computer, or have printed at the publisher of their choice. Have a foundation that produces half a dozen texts on each subject at various grade levels, and the educators would still have the option to choose texts that they like, or even mix and match different sections of the texts they like. And you'd probably have printers pop up that would compete to distribute the open texts solely on price and quality, and I'm pretty sure they could get the price of a single copy with a hefty profit for under $20.
Aren't all Rogue type games death=start over? I recall there is a hardcore mode in Diablo, which would give it the same feel. But Diablo is a combat game, where Rogue is more of a survival game. I think Rogue has more replay value for me. Diablo is easily beatable if you are a decent player. The Rogue games are much more difficult, and take much more skill and luck.
The side effects of vasectomy are not trivial.
And of course, having children has an emotional component, so it's often best to wait in case your emotions cause you to change your mind later.
Don't forget that 75% of the sex would happen when the woman is infertile. You should only be counting times when she would actually get pregnant, if you are going to calculate an individual incident's chance at pregnancy. 100 couples use the condom, for a year, has sex 25 times that it could result in a pregnancy, 14 will get pregnant (typical use rate), and that yields 100*14/2500, which is a little over 1/2 of a percent. Taking that result (99.44% not pregnancy) to the 25th power should yield something approximating the annual typical use rate of 86%, and the number is 86.9%.
Industry standard is to report % /100 couples /1 year, so that should be what they are reporting.
If they are following industry standard practices, pregnancy rates are given in 1 year increments, so this means 1 unintended pregnancy / 100 couples / year. No chemical or barrier method is any better than this.
Of course, there also needs to be an examination between perfect use and typical use as well. The difference between perfect use and typical is user error. Perfect use tells you how often the method 'broke,' and the difference between that and typical use is the 'opps' by people using the system.
Interestingly, the numbers for condoms are a 3% failure rate, but I'm not sure if those numbers are calculated using only instances were pregnancy would likely have occurred if the condom hadn't been used at all. For instance, a typical woman can get pregnant 1 week a month. If you have sex 10 times, and the condom fails once or twice, but the woman wasn't ovulating, then is that still counted as a successful pregnancy prevention in condom failure statistics?
I do know that just over half of all US abortions are the result of people choosing to end a pregnancy that started with a contraceptive failure. I think the unintended pregnancy rate in the US is between 1 and 1.5 million per year.
On the most controversial cases (those decided 5-4), there are 4 justices that always side with the Democrats, Souter, Stevens, Ginsberg and Breyer. Three of those will probably retire in the next year or two, and now because they've been waiting for a Democrat to come to power so they could be replaced with somebody like themselves, Souter has already retired, Ginsberg has cancer, and Stevens is 89. Breyer was appointed by Clinton, and probably would be renominated by Obama if that had to be done periodically.
"At first they came for the Communists but I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came for me and there was no one else to object."
Not sure if this is the original, but I found it with a quick search, and it conveys the meaning of the original, which I seem to recall being much longer.
Except, to censor the location or the content of their public displays is censorship, as much as controlling what they actually say, under American law. Now, should people who are demonstrating respect another person's right to exist peacefully and have their own constitutional rights be respected? Of course. But to censor their rights to say what they will in that space, even if they are advocating violence is still censorship, and I am reluctant to allow any censorship in cases I agree with for fear that I will eventually be censored because I disagree with a lot of what passes as common sense.
That's why we have the right to bear arms here in the U.S., because while we expect the threat of law enforcement to protect us from violence, the government doing so preemptively usually results in the government doing something when nothing was the better choice. With the right to bear arms, we are supposed to protect ourselves from immediate violence.
I've even found myself being affected by this in a very real way several times, because I live in the same city as Fred Phelps, and once even found myself in the unfortunate situation of standing a few feet from the man when I got out of my car, that I thought my heart was going to stop. Another time, one of his followers said something so offensive to me, that I'm pretty sure God doesn't consider his followers to be Christians, and I see his people protesting outside of many churches here in town. There have also been violent confrontations between him, his followers, and other people in town, and they often can't get a fair trial, so they've had some cases moved to other cities just to be able to find try to find an impartial jury. Despite my dislike for the man and the tone and content of his message, he should still have the right to say what he wants (although I wish they would force him to stop with the pornographic stick figures in plain view of children).