That is the worst citation I have ever seen. The odds of dying just from riding on a motorcycle cannot possibly be 1 in 800. I think what those odds mean is the odds of the cause of death being particular sources, conditional on someone being known to have died. There are about 10 million motorcycles in the US, and if each one is ridden, say, only once per week, then if there is a 1 in 800 chance of dying by riding a motorcycle then there would be on average 650,000 motorcycle deaths in the US each year (650,000 = 10,000,000 motorcycle rides/week * 1/800 deaths / motorcycle ride * 52 weeks/year).

I think the causality is backwards. Republicans aren't going to win because Silicon Valley is contributing to them; rather, Silicon Valley is contributing to Republicans because it looks like they are going to win. The relationship between ad spending and margins of victory are statistically small, and politicians (with certain notable exceptions) are generally not blatantly for sale to the highest bidder. The real reason for contributing is to give to people who generally already agree with you, so that if they get elected they will choose to focus on the priorities that are important to you instead of focusing on something else. In this case, patent reform.

No, the investor class is quite content to keep milking the cash cow that is Microsoft Office, and see steady capital accumulation through dividends and stock buybacks. Nobody who still owns MSFT stock is demanding double digit returns from them at this point. It is upper management who have a psychological need to be a part of an ever growing empire and therefore doesn't mind pissing the owners money away on YAZ (yet another zune).

Actually the Pope can do just that, when he speaks ex cathedra. It only applies to certain fields (e.g., he can't just say the sky is green and that becomes Catholic doctrine), but something like interpreting the literal-ness of the Bible would count. Of course, Popes don't make ex cathedra pronouncements frequently, precisely because it's like using a sledgehammer. So you are correct that usually doctrine gets made in communion with the Bishops in councils, conferences and the like.

All of these are excellent points and I was going to go into it in my earlier post but I got too lazy to do it, so I'm glad that you did. What I would add is that in all religions there is a tension between "true believers" who think that a religion should avoid hierarchies and stay out of public life, versus the "help the people" group that thinks that a religion *has* to be out in the world where the people are.

The problem with the "true believers" approach is that hiding up in a monastery and saying prayers 20 hours a day doesn't seem to do much to help actual people in real suffering, and to a lot of religious people, that is important. Further, its insularity can lead to total inflexibility and stagnation, or even just irrelevance to the outside world. OTOH, the problem with the "help the people" group is that the more a religion has contact with the outside world, there are more temptations and that will lead to more corruption.

The Catholic Church has tended towards the more worldly, "help the people" view, and the Jesuits even more so (of which the current Pope is a member of). But as a result, it has often gotten involved in real world power struggles and fallen to the corruption that a more "pure" religion is less susceptible to. However, it also has a strong component of "true believers," with an option to lead a monastic life, while even clergy that deal directly with the public live a life that is very different from the public that they interact with (vows of poverty, chastity, etc). That flexibility to do both has probably been a big part of why the Catholic Church has lasted as long as it has.

Ummm...exactly. The Bible is obviously an important part of the Catholic belief system but it's the institution of the Church that has the final say. Catholicism is what the Catholic Church, with the Pope at its head, says it is. It may seem tautological but it actually isn't. For example, for many Protestant (especially Evangelical) sects, a layperson could make an effective argument about a controversial subject by saying "Here is what it says in Bible...", while an argument that appeals to an authority such as a pastor would not be (theologically) persuasive. But to a Catholic, the only real trump card is "The Church says..."

Slashdotter geekoid has been on top of this for as long as I have left .sigs on

I can't speak for GB but the USA is the world's second largest manufacturer. Or does it only count as industry if it looks like Pittsburgh in 1950 instead of California in 2014?

At least compared to these Apple products. (Here's a nytimes link if you don't want to go to a random site)

But seriously I'm glad it's going to be displayed in a museum.

It might not have just been Apple. Maybe they took the $578MM from Apple, and another $500MM from a bank to build a $1 bn factory. Even if there were protections against Apple cancelling the order and demanding their money back, there might be others who they owed money to.

Please explain any possible "C" that explains the correlation between US crude oil imports from Norway versus Drivers killed in collision with railway train. Sometimes correlation is just correlation.

I'm not sure what you are saying here. So what if $39.2 billion of education spending is done by the Feds. Isn't having state expenditures (and hopefully state control) a better way of doing things? And most Federal money should be spent on special ed and disadvantaged programs. Costs for special ed can be highly variable and a couple high needs kids could bust the budget of a small district, so spreading that out over a larger tax base is a good thing. And disadvantaged programs tend to have localized severity so that the kind of district that needs to spend on those services won't have the resources from the local tax base and has to get it from elsewhere.

The rest of your stats are a non sequitur. Why is 23.5% after inflation too much? That's about 2.1% per year. Real wages and salaries have gone up by 40% over that time. Maybe there is something more to be said here but this somewhat random data is not advancing your argument

The big metal part at the base of the bulb gets quite hot, even though the plastic cover over the lights remains cool to the touch