No, they're correct - you're just thinking of rotation on the wrong axis. To see how it works, try this: Take the word SNOISSIWNOOW and write it on a piece of paper. Rotate the paper 180 degrees so the lower right becomes the upper left. The part of the letters that were the bottom are now on the top - hence "W" becomes an "M" and the result is MOONMISSIONS.

I would agree with you if people drove sanely, but they don't drive as fast as is safe, they drive as fast as they think that they can get away with. They're not interested in the weather conditions or the quality of the road or whether there's anybody around them, they're just interested in getting to wherever they have to go as fast is possible.

You need to get your papers straight. The Post is the left-wing rag who hate every thing that good Americans love. The Times is the neocon rag.

Do you know who the biggest beneficiary of the dollars spent on welfare are? It's not individuals - it's merchants. The money that people receive for welfare doesn't go into the bank - it gets spent for food, clothes and other things. You can argue with where it gets spent, and that's a valid argument, but you can't argue that there is a direct benefit to business and, indirectly, to the tax rolls, from welfare.

Before HIPAA, a patchwork of laws covered patient information confidentiality and almost none addressed who should be notified if data was lost. HIPAA, as clumsy an attempt as it may arguably be, created a standard.

Besides, common sense is not at all common. - one's idea common sense is may be anothers money sink. Security is expensive. Compound that with the fact that your medical information is no longer held all in one place. One's medical insurance provider may keep information confidential, but what about the vendors that it may use for billing, reading MRIs, etc.? How about subcontractors that the contractors use - some of which are in foreign countries? All of them have access to the same information - do they all follow the same confidentiality guidelines? Or the same laws?

I'm not saying that HIPAA is ideal, but there must be a standard of privacy and confidentiality that is independent of the organizations that hold the data all have to be held to. It's not a matter of trust, it's a matter of assuring that patient confidentiality is sacrosanct and that everybody is kept to that standard.

Americans may be appear to be united in their disdain for the Federal Government but they are completely split about what should be done about it or with it. We're clearly split down the middle over whether it is too big or too little, what its role should or shouldn't be in our daily lives or even what it's there for in the first place.

One thing voters aren't split over is that government isn't doing enough for them, whether it's crop subsidies, tax cuts or breaks, pork projects and other ways their representatives "bring home the bacon". Because of this, they also aren't split over the opinion their representative is one of the "good ones" and that the problem comes from the other ones. Otherwise, why would they be continuously reelected?

yes, it wasn't difficult to copy an LP to tape, if you had an hour to spare. It could only be done in real time - and you still only had one copy. You screw up or if the tape gets munched in your player, you do it again. If you didn't want to listen to 25 minutes of silence on your C90, someone had to be there to flip the record over. And, unless you were one of those folks who played their record once to record it and never again so didn't have to worry about scratches or warps, you had to clean the record first - yes, I still have my Discwasher...

Not even close. Not any more. Hollywood loves special-effects-heavy extravaganzas because they require little to no translation to be sold in foreign markets.

Lonely satellite making copies of Nazca.

The only way I can get bread at anywhere near that price is to make it myself.

Yeah, because the ability to drive has everything to do with knowing how to use a clutch.

Oh, yes. I have. And they are even more disfunctional than the Federal Government.

I'm a Californian. California, like Congress, has two factions that are completely unwilling to let the other do anything that would be viewed in a positive light. As for local government, San Francisco, where I live, is only governable when the various factions within city and county are equally balanced against each other.

Wonderful. I'm going to get to pay every picayune city and township to use their roads because roads don't fix themselves and the locals don't feel like giving their services away for free...

A good thought, but the elections that place people in position to make decisions on local affairs aren't run completely locally now. If you think so, look at the last "local" election and see how much money or staff came from districts outside of yours. There are groups of all political and social stripes with axes to grind and money to spend.