From the WHO

The whole report is worth reading - there's a lot of information in there and a FAQ on the second page.

The report also notes that there is a tendency to attribute all health problems in a wide area to Chernoybl, and that the major problem is trauma from the panic.

I believe it's arguable whether Chernoybl should be included in any discussion - the cause of the incident was not an accident, it was deliberate (even if those doing it clearly had no idea of what they were doing). So, yeah, you turn off all the safeties and backups, then scram the reactor and ignore the subseqent alarms. Uh... not the greatest idea?

Really? I've never paid the Olympic tax! Sure, some (maybe most) of the athletes get government funding, but it's not that impressive. In the main the bulk of the costs of running the games are paid by the hosts.. NBC giving them $PILESOFMONEY helps with that, but it cost a $EVENLARGERPILEOFMONEY to set up.

I'm amused that you think that a corporately sponsored version of the Olympics would be better.

No, stop being so wrong.

You are paying your ISP to provide internet, regardless of the content. It does not imply any rights to have content available, so tough cookie if it isn't. Net neutrality, wot.

Really? One of these things is not like the others :)

There are jobs in Ireland - but the construction bubble effectively lured a generation into trades when what it turns out is needed is professionals. A number of labs closed down as well as everyone consolidated. There are fields where every position has several people with the skills and experience applying for it leaving graduates in the lurch.
On the flip side, anyone with any kind of decent development experience will have a job in no time. All the major software companies have development centers in Ireland, and it's not just for the 12.5% corporation tax rate. Hiring people here is expensive, the Employer PRSI is high, the income tax is pretty high and the VAT is very high indeed.

The tradespeople got badly shafted by the bubble bursting. Construction is non-existent now and many of them had set up as sole traders and weren't paying their employers PRSI so they don't qualify for anything but the most basic social welfare. Many have left for Australia and Canada where there is demand for their skills.

On the corporation tax: the thinking behind this tax rate was sound. The government at the time cut way back on exceptions to the tax rules so everyone paid the same. As was mentioned above, France's effective corporation tax rate is 8.2% against a headline rate of 33%. There isn't a corporation in the world paying headline rates so what should be being compared is effective rates. Ireland's effective rate is pretty close to the 12.5% headline rate, and is unlikely to change.

All research done on this shows that this is not true. The only thing that has changed is the amount of stuff that gets broken and people that get hurt. That is a function of having more stuff and more people in vulernable places. If cities in places with names like "Tornado Alley" weren't growing, or places like Miami that have historically been swamps regularly hit by hurricanes didn't expand very quickly in the last 30 years, then it wouldn't look so bad. Further, because news is now effectively instant we hear about it now, not yesterday.

It's like saying "Well, Indonesia and Japan were both hit by massive tidal waves in the last 10 years, but we don't have any records of that happening before so it must be our fault". It's nonsensical.

Well, yes. It doesn't. It's an evolving system, why would it return to it's previous state. What it WILL do is find an equilibrium. See Ascension Island for a living, breathing example of this. A few hundred years ago it was a rock. Then along comes Darwin and convinces the British to dump a pile of vegetation and now it's a lush tropical jungle with a diverse biosphere.

A biosphere is not static - it changes based on inputs. A closed biosphere is delicate, and invasive flora or fauna can totally change it but it will eventually find balance. Another great example is the cane toads in Australia. Local birds have finally figured out that it's full of tasty meat, and it's not poisonous if you don't try and go through the top. So now they flip the toads to get at them. This means that the toads now have predators so their population should stabilize. It's changed the Australian biosphere, but it's finding balance.

None of which is to say we should not be reducing carbon emissions, of course, but wild anecdotal claims don't help anything.

They say they "like Dostoyevsky"

I didn't mean the federal goverment, I meant the States themselves.

It's possible that your interpretation is correct, I'm not American so the matter isn't really of much importance to me. Reading the amendment as ratified by the state, I would have thought that the intention was to allow States to raise their own militias independently of the Federal government.
The wording ratified by the states was as follows:

My point (aside from the detail) from my original point stands - the wording is ambiguous, it could have meant either - or even both (because at the time a militia would have been raised from volunteers with their own firearms?).
The intentions of the framers are irrelevant here, the courts decided that the WORDING of the amendment allowed individuals to keep arms of any kind and that the federal goverment could not infringe that right. If the government doesn't like it, their option is to change the wording to disambiguate it. This is an example of the court interpreting legislation (or consitutional wording in this case) but not legislating themselves. They couldn't have decided that the right to bear arms was disallowed because they didn't like it.

Repeat after me, and say this 10 times.

Patents were not created to encourage innovation.
They were created to DISCOURAGE trade secrets, thus making the invention available to all in return for a temporary monopoly. A trade, if you will.

It was a great idea at the time. It's a less good idea now but it probably still has some value, particularly if the terms were shorter

Lobbying your politicians

Courts were never intended to legislate and should not legislate. They are there to interpret legislation. The intent of the law and "intent" when it comes to the constitution mean nothing. What means something is what's written down. Thus you get narrow decisions based on semantics and even syntax all the time. For instnace, the "right to bear arms" was originally not an individual right, but it has subsequently been interpreted as such by the courts because that's how the document reads. There are countless examples of loose wording letting off people who were clearly guilty under the intent of the law. And there are examples of the law being interpreted in a much wider manner than intended due to loose wording.

That, incidentally, is why lawyers get paid a lot of money - because they not only have to know the law, they have to know it in mind-numbing detail, as well as (in the US anyway) know where precedents can be applied.

Good job of confusing the hell out of me :)

I was reading AGW and anthropogenic global warming (or man-made global warming)

Besides, accepted standard Slashdot nomneclature for anti-global warming is "Denier"

It was yellow on dark blue - which is why it was the default colour for those DOS prompts. It's not strictly "easier on the eye", but it's the best contrast you can get.

Well, yes. And if you think about it you can see why.

A large number of people in their prime productive years get mutilated in a short space of time. And these people work for an organisation that has the resources to spend on looking for a solution. I read recently that 1 in 5 single amputees can return to active duty, and those numbers will rise as solutions get better.

I would disagree slightly about your Uplift Books comment - I liked The Uplift War (uplift book 2) the best out of that series. It had more humour and less pathos

God no, that entire Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series was awful. Boring as hell.
His Otherlands was excellent (although be warned, the ending is not)