Many musical instruments are made of wood. So I guess they are all at risk if the owners come to the US.

In the last 5 years the estimated cost of a system dropped 50 percent. Will vary, there is no uniform amount of sun (around here lots of rather large trees). Have one of the major installers with local folks make you an estimate. There will be multiple choices of how to fund it, the folks making the estimate will explain. Six months ago we had one installed. Generating about 50% of use, enough to get us down to Tier 1 use level.

The utilities appear to be doing a one-sided analysis from what I have noticed. They complain about their lines being loaded by customers generating power and don't count the reduction in line use from the local power a home solar instatllation is helping to power the local neighborhood. Yes, we have a rooftop solar installation. Currently around 90,000 of them in California. Increasing fast. Local solar company is hiring 10-15 new installers *every day* according to local paper.

You have not been paying attention. In the 1950's US health care was the best. But since then it fell dramatically in the world list. A change that has been widely reported. We are now way down the list, and have been for 20 years and more. Not a recent fall at all.

Taxis do exist, one could wish they were cleaner than my own car, not dirtier than my own car.

They let people drive on snow, ice or gravel?

Really, if they would just think of the children, they would set the speed limit and speed limiter devices at 15MPH everywhere. On bicycles too!

As measured by a proprietary algorithm with no human review of its calculation or of fair use -- you will be judged.

Not sure what a 'full size' mailbox is, but our mailbox (by the curb) is (inches) 12wide, 36 tall, 24 deep. Now that is full sized.

AltaVista of yesteryear was unusable just a couple years after AltaVista went into operation. The bad-guy web sites were 95+ percent of all results once the bad guys figured out how AltaVista worked. Not to mention the incredible duplications in the results. Horrible. Useless. I was delighted when google came into existence with useful results.

Software patents are bad since software is mathematics (see groklaw.net) so software should be unpatentable.

Copyright is possibly applicable for software, but only really makes sense if the copyright period is adjusted (for everything!) to be the original 1913 length, 7 years. Or less in at the creater's option (ie if I write something I can specify copyright applies for 1 year and then expires).

For all practical purposes copyright currently applies 'for the life of the universe' which is absurd, harmful, and inappropriate.

It was not climate scientists saying such silly things last year, it was media and ordinary folks. Somehow the climate science prediction that local variability will increase in many places gets ignored, often by people trying to discredit the warming, sometimes by people just not wanting to understand.

The US Postal Service is in trouble because the President of the US signed a bill (in 2006) making the postal service pay into retirement for workers not yet hired and even those not yet born. A unique and crazy law. The USPS does a poor job, I think, but their financial situation is unique and not entirely their fault.

Those seeing politics in science have been fooled by the merchants of doubt. It is not the scientists that introduced politics it is a small group of physicists from the cold war with strong ties to government claiming (without any proof) that the real scientists are playing politics (douby weird given that the merchants of doubt are strongly tied to government). I have no connection with the book "Merchants of Doubt" but I strongly recommend it for explaining how science is being crushed by the anti-science folks.

According to M-theory, ours is not the only universe. Instead, M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. Their creation does not require the intervention of some supernatural being or god. Rather, these multiple universes arise naturally from physical law. -- Stephen Hawking