Wikipedia has a very good article, actually:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_spies
  With many relevant sources.

  Or you could listen to the Governor of Wisconsin:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Tr6zX1Z6sI
  Although, in this case, he didn't actually do it.

I exaggerate very slightly; a slight majority of all new wealth is in the hands of the top 1% of the population. The top 0.1% probably only has about half of that, so a quarter of the newly created wealth. Anyway, the details vary slightly from source to source because it depends on whether you are talking net wealth, financial wealth, income, etc. etc. Also it depends on who you lump together, which is a judgement call. It gets "worse" the closer you get to Bill.

  More information than you probably care to know about the topic can be found here:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

  Let's look at table 5a. End of 2001, the S&P500 was at 1,148.08. End of 2007, it was at 1,468.36. The S&P 500 isn't a bad proxy for the total value of the entire stock market.

  So, quick guestimate, 2001->2007, richest 1% went from 33.5% OF 1,148 to 38.3% of 1,468, that's 385 to 562 -> a gain of 178. That's more than half of the total 320 point gain.

  So, counting just the stock market (thus not housing bubbles), roughly 55% of the new wealth created between 2001 and 2007 was in the hands of the top 1% of the population.

No, it has been between Rich and Poor, although the Poor are getting stomped, as much as the Rich might want us all to believe otherwise. If you look at the last 20 years, the vast majority if the *new wealth* which has been created has been concentrated in the hands of the top 0.1% of the population. That's where all the money has gone, not towards social security, not towards Cadillac health insurance for people with jobs in manufacturing. Where is the money to provide pensions and health-care to the share of the population who doesn't have it? It's sitting in Bill f-ing Gates bank account, that's where it is.

  There's a plate with 12 cookies on it, a rich guy, a teacher and a regular working Joe.

  The rich guy takes 11 of the cookies, leans over to Joe, and says "I'd watch out, I think the teacher is trying to steal your cookie."

What makes you - or anyone else - think there is only one tipping point? What makes you (or this guy in the article you linked, which I'd already read elsewhere) so certain that we've crossed the tipping point that's crucial in determining the average temperature of the globe in the next century?

  Just because we're past the point where the siberian thaw becomes self-sustaining, that means we must be past the point where the same thing becomes self-sustaining in Antarctica?

  Global climate *is* very complicated, very hard to predict, very hard to model accurately. All of that is definitely true.

  This means that WE DO NOT KNOW what the risks are associated with burning fossil fuels, or with how much. It is entirely possible that the best-case scenarios are right, and that given how much CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) we've put into the atmosphere, everything will be fine. It is also possible (albeit much more unlikely!) that we've already pumped so much CO2 into the atmosphere that nothing we do can make things worse.

  Again, the claims of the Gazprom scientists must be viewed very skeptically. But when Kirpotkin talks as if he is certain about what is going to happen, that isn't accurate either. No one really knows. But we *do* know that there is a good chance that continuing to put CO2 into the atmosphere can't make the situation better, and might make it quite a bit worse.

Not only is global warming real (and you don't have to "believe" in it any more than you have to "believe" in that table), but the poor are *expected* to bear the brunt of the harm! So, yes, we should direct our economic resources towards improving the lot of our fellow people, *and*, as part of that, we should reduce our consumption of fossil fuels. If we need to burn fossil fuels to control HIV or Malaria, you do it. Hell, if fossil fuel fertilizer helped to make third world agriculture viable, that would be a worthwhile trade: although, actually, it tends to have the opposite effect.

  Second, it it not true that it is "too late to do anything about it." This is part of the planned FUD from the fossil fuel lobby:
Stage 1) There isn't enough evidence to be 95% sure we've done anything to the environment,
  and
Stage 2) Now that enough evidence has accumulated, it's because we've already changed the environment, so no point in doing anything about it.

  This has been the plan of the oil industry all along, and they've been happy to tell people about it! But apparently, the need for "balance" in the media is so great, that you have to give equal time to someone even if they just sent a position paper out to their stockholders explaining that they were about to go on television and lie.

  Regardless of what anyone "believes", the facts are actually quite straightforward: there is a great deal of uncertainty, but we can be >95% certain that human activity has raised the temperature of the earth somewhere between 1 and 10 degrees C, over the next century or so.

  It's possible that the earth was getting warmer anyway - in which case any human contribution would probably be smaller, but would have a higher impact since going from +0 to +2 degrees doesn't make much difference but going from +4 to +5 *does*.

  On to my other point - the "Stage 2 argument" is complete and utter bollocks. Yeah, we've had some impact - this doesn't mean that we can't do anything to mitigate further impact! Oh, look, I've spilled coffee on my couch. Well, now that my house is dirty, I might as well shit all over the floor and set my curtains on fire, because it makes no difference, now that the house is dirty anyway.

woot!

But first, let me get this out of the way: it is absolutely true that most people want CS degrees in order to get jobs that you could do equally well with a 2 year associate's degree in Information Technology, and even better with a high school diploma and a bunch of experience.

  HOWEVER, the students are probably better off on the job market with 4 year CS degrees. Looking at things from the perspective of a potential employer, there are two reasons the CS degree has a leg up:
1) All else being equal, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_intelligence_factor">the student capable of learning Calculus is probably more competent at everything else as well<a>. It's far from a guarantee, but on average, this will be true. The CS degree is valuable precisely <b>because</b> many people can't do calculus.
2) The 4 year CS graduate is, on average, from a more privileged background, or, if they're not from a privileged background, they've got an honorary promotion into the privileged class and 4 years in College will teach you how children of privilege (or, "entitled little shits" as we are popularly known) are supposed to behave. The people doing the hiring are, almost without exception, entitled little shits themselves who would rather hire their own kind. More sophisticated types will dress this up as item #1 above.

  You see a very similar dichotomy in medical school admissions, with regards to organic chemistry. In theory, there are a number of situations in which an MD might benefit from knowing ochem, but realistically, it isn't going to come up. Furthermore, ochem is taught as if all of the undergrad biochemistry majors were going to move on to careers in basic research. That said, would the colleges be doing their students a service in dumbing down their ochem curriculum? No, they would not, because the medical schools want students who can pass ochem, for basically the same reason.

  Medical Schools are in a position to be very selective in their admissions. Therefore, they can require (and they do) those students who can pass the ochem courses which are designed to prepare a student for a career in original basic research. This means that ochem is a hoop-to-jump-through for most of the students who would take it. This doesn't mean <b>any</b> of the students would be better served by dumbing it down! If you did, the medical schools would demand upper division molecular biology, which would then fill up with premed students, who don't need the subject material and are just looking for the certification that they are elite; this is happening to some extent already.

  Likewise, really good programming jobs are scarce, so employers are in a position to demand candidates who <b>can</b> do calculus even for jobs that don't need it. Associates degrees (and more) in Information Technology and variants thereof already exist. But people with professional aspirations get CS degrees instead precisely <b>because</b> they are more exclusive and difficult. If you dumb down the CS curricula (or if community colleges start offering CS degrees), employers start to demand master's degrees; this is happening to some extent already.

Allow me to explain.

1) Donate $1 million to the "Me Foundation".
2) The "Me Foundation" gets another $1 million in matching federal money to do their good work (education, medicine for the poor, whatever)
3) Given a near-total lack of oversight, the "Me Foundation" spends this $2 million on bullshit services provided by their for-profit vendor, "Me Incorporated LLC."
4) "Me Incorporated LLC" only spend about $200,000 to provide these bullshit services.
5) $800,000 of profit, on "leveraged philanthropy."

  Gates and Buffett are profiteering scum, and their so-called philanthropy is a travesty. Their educational initiatives are an outright scam (as outlined above), and even their much-ballyhooed HIV work is a travesty, which diverts - sorry, "leverages" - public money away from cheap and effective interventions.

Yes, it is still carbon-based.

  In fact, this appears to be a biochemically-interesting but seriously overhyped discovery.

  AFAICT, this organism still uses the same genetic code, the same nucleotide bases, the same ribose sugars, the same everything - only this organism performs a chemical modification of the phosphate backbone, substituting in arsenic. This is only moderately different from the chemical modifications that we make to our own DNA, RNA and proteins (methylation, for example.)

  That's not a particularly shocking substitution, from a chemical standpoint, and doesn't really say anything about the viability of an organism with an actually *alien* biochemistry. Now, if you look at the periodic table, you'll see that Arsenic is right below Phosphorous - so in a sense, this is a bit like the much more exciting Carbon -> Silicon change which might get you talking rocks on lava worlds breathing vaporized sand and other badass shit. But it's only a tiny bit similar to that, because the role that Phosphorous plays in biology is much different than that of Carbon. Carbon is what everything is made-out-of, Phosphorous is stuck onto the ends of things in order to provide high-energy bonds which can be exploited as an energy currency.

  I would bet that this organism does this as a defense against viruses - which, generally speaking, will not have arsenic-DNA or arsenic-RNA, and so would not be able to infect this organism.

None of the problems we're facing are a result of how well majority rule does-or-does-not scale, and none of them are universal - they are particular features of our culture, place and time. Majority rule is working just fine in Brazil.

  One issue is in the distribution of power within the society, which prevents smart choices by the majority (against climate change, towards higher taxes on the rich, a public option on health care, moving federal funds out of the defense budget and into social services, etc.) from taking effect.

  I used to think this was the chief issue. However, that maldistribution is even worse in Brazil, so it's clearly the cultural issues which predominate, not the economic ones. In Brazil, the wealthy elite can run adds calling economic populists "anti-Brazilian", but no-one cares. That's the difference.

damn_registars needs to read a bit of history about the immediate post-reconstruction period.

  In the south, a "radical republican" coalition of blacks and poor whites became politically dominant (by winning a majority of votes and thus elections) in the period of reconstruction. The KKK came in and suppressed them with violence, with the permission of "moderate republicans" in the north.

  There's a lot of cultural residue from this still in the south - "White Trash", which is *real* white trash and not good ole' boys (who are generally speaking the descendents of the wealthy land owners) remain far less racist, more politically progressive, etc. than wealthier whites in the south. This is especially true in "purple" states like Florida, which is where my mother's family (who fought for the North) are from.

  So, in fact, you've all got it backwards: poor southern whites are *less* racist than rich southern whites. They're not as well educated maybe so they don't hide it as well in polite company.

A minor point of clarification - while you are right on the science, you are wrong on the terminology.

  A mutation that doesn't change the resultant amino acid is called a "synonymous" mutation (sometimes also "silent" although that is archaic deprecated terminology.)

  A mutation that changes the amino acid is "non-synonymous".

  These considerations apply only to the coding regions of genes.

You need to dig into the numbers for this, but that is not true: they happen in >20% of strands of RNA.

  This is more RNA substitutions than you would expect given a *uniform* level of transcriptional error. However, if there are regions where proofreading is relatively poor (and this is probably the case), and you apply a multiple-hypothesis correction across all the many MB which are considered here, then you would expect among the millions of base pairs examined to find some with an error rate >20%, which is what is actually reported. There are also systematic errors in these sequencing machines to contend with.

  Probably there is some editing in there as well, but I'm very skeptical that this accounts for most of what is reported. The fraction of the substitutions found at significantly greater than 20% frequency in a majority of patients are probably editing events, but returning to my original point: this hardly upends the central dogma.

This is not nearly as earth-shattering as the journo makes out.

  When DNA is copied to make new DNA, you get a certain number of copying errors, called mutations - most of them harmless. I assume everyone knows about those.

  When DNA is copied to make a temporary-working-copy RNA, you get a larger number of these copying errors because, in general, they are one-shot non-critical deals. The need for stringency is much lower, the selective advantage for stringency is not so great, so it comes as no surprise that the level of proof-reading is also reduced.

  Now, it's also possible that there are mechanisms by which these RNA molecules can be purposefully edited. As mentioned in the article, significant post-transcriptional editing (including in eukaryotes the readaction of big chunks, which are called "Introns".) But this finding doesn't speak much to that, although the rate is a *sconch* higher than I might expect for random errors. Even so, this doesn't shake the central dogma of molecular biology in any meaningful way, as for example Reverse Transcriptases did.