Why is it the "cranks" are all asking for scientific study or proof and the "sane" ones are all saying "trust we know it works, because we know" and quoting each other in support?

Do you know that for that $63,000 a year you could provide fluoride rinse or tablets to every at-risk kid in a population about 3x the size served by municipal water fluoridation? The rinses and tables have been studied and proven effective and they all use sodium fluoride.

As with any public issue there are conspiracy theorists out there. In this particular case when you start digging you find many reasons to ban fluordation of water supplies an almost 0 evidence to support it, beyond the myths you've been told since a child.

Fluoride in water always sounds good to people who want "better smiles" but it's 99% a waste of the money spent:

1. The version of fluoride they put in the water (Hexafluorosilicic acid) is not shown to help with dental decay issues. Sodium Fluoride is the chemical the ADA studies and recommends for toothpaste and dental products.

2. Hexafluorosilicic acid is a product manufactured from industrial waste in the aluminum industry and is considered a toxic substance. If industry hadn't conned municipalities in to putting it in the water supply as a "fluoride source" it would cost them a good chunk of change to dispose of the stuff. (Look up ALCOA and fluoride).

3. Consumption of unfiltered tap water, I'd say, is just about zero. I know no-one that drinks any substantive quantity of tap water that the fluoride content in it would ever have any clinical effect. Almost any filter designed to remove impurities will remove the fluoride from tap water.

4. Even if people were drinking only tap water, over 95% of the water used in an average municipality is very consumed by any living thing. It washes cars, waters lawns, bathes people, flushes toilets, cools industrial equipment, etc.

5. When I had this discussion with my town a few years ago asking them to provide numbers they told my it cost $63,000 a year in product and personnel to run the fluoridation system for 29.5 million gallons of potable water. That sounds like very little, .2 cents ($.002) per thousand gallons or an average of about $.30 per family per month. Sure when you make the numbers small it doesn't look like much, but think about what $63,000 a year gets if directed an other programs in a town. Another teacher or two? Extended library hours on the weekends? A new after school program?

6. No-one, I mean I searched hard, has studied the rate of change in a community pre and post fluoridation of tap water since an initial study of Grand Rapids and Muskegon in 1945. A study that was ended prematurely but touted as a success anyway despite its very unscientific lack of compensating for outside factors not related to the study itself and the "control" changing programs during the study.

7. The Grand Rapids "study" was based upon Sodium Fluoride, which again is not what we put in the water today. So even if the result was positive the hexafluorosilicic acid used today has never been studied for prevention of tooth decay in municipal water supplies and is a very different chemical compound just like Carbon Monoxide and Carbon Dioxide are very different chemicals. Search for

8. There is no version of any type of fluoride that is indicated by the FDA for the prevention of tooth decay. The municipal water companies are adding an non-FDA approved and unregulated drug to our water supply. The other substance added to water supplies (chlorine to be simple) is approved by the FDA for water and food sanitation.

As you can see, there is simply no supporting truth to the argument that fluoride in municipal water prevents tooth decay. It does cost a significant amount of money, and almost no-one drinks the fluoridated water anyway.

Do your own research. You will come to the same conclusion: municipal water fluoridation is based on lies, it's a waste of money, it doesn't work and it may actually cause harm to public health.

I agree with you. It is still possible to get a lot of the 80's feel by playing with Arduinos and Raspberry Pi's. I will definietly look at the mbed thing.
A few eeks ago I helped my dad to keep an old SCO Unix program running that he has been using for 20 years. He could not us the terminal anymore because he could not get floppy disks to boot DOS for his special terminal program. So we looked into using a RaspPi with ckermit.

Any suggestions on that FPGA board?

Bender runs on 6502? THAT explains a lot!

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. KIT?

There are 20 men for each girl at that place. Stay away :) That said, I know a woman who studied there.

Let's clarify something technical here.

Thermonuclear refers to the use of fusion to gain more energy. It can be used for two things:

a) To make a really humongous bomb. High-yield more than 5MT.
b) To boost a pure fission bomb to get the same amount of energy in a smaller package.

Almost all modern nuclear weapons are of the b) sort. They are all thermonuclear but they are small. A pure fission device (Little boy, for instance) is physically large for the boom you get.

That said, most of the weapons do not use thermonuclear energy as a main source. The thermonuclear reaction produces copious neutron which boosts the fission part. The weapon is still primary a boosted fission device.

Type (a) high-yield weapons are scarce things. The US, for one, does not have any, the Russians not many and they have a specific bunker-busting role. They are also physically large devices and hard to steal.

(b) type weapons are much more common. This is the threat, but they are still thermonuclear.

If the Iranians get one, I would be freaked because then the Saudis will buy a few from Pakistan.

When it comes to fanaticism the Persians are not even close to the Saudis. I would be freaked if they get a bomb.

Uhm, the US is a BIG country. The Iranians are probably capable of building maybe a 150-200kt device, if that. An EMP pulse would take out the power in mid-sized city for a few weeks at most. It would also cause major damage on the ground.

90% of the US population would not die from starvation. Maybe 0.1% would die from the blast itself.

Even if they had a 50's style high-yield multi-megaton thermonuclear device they could not make 90% of the US population starve.

Even the USSR at its high point would not have been able to kill 90% of the US population with massive missile strike.

Of course, after the Iranians made their point and killed 0.1% of US citizens they would face the music.

You really think that the Israelis are so stupid as to get the US to engage in a proxy war for them so that they can claim Arab land?
Really?

I disagree with Israelis and think the US should make peace with Persian ASAP, but the Israelis are acting out of fear. They live in a rough neighbourhood.

Suppose all guns came without safety catches. I now go and blame this technical oversight for the increase in people with blown-off heads.

You now claim that blaming the safety-catch-less badly designed guns for the casualties is asinine.

> It gets the job done quickly and easily,

So does a gun without a safety catch.

Uhuh

CSV is for p*ssies. Postgres can store BLOBs directly, right? All you need is a table with an integer id and a blob.

Hah. Slashdot breaks too! It is the Icelandic 'thorn' character http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

I once had a small Notes web thing running for a bunch of people in Scandinavia. The thing crashed every time when someone from Iceland worked with it. Ruend out that the icelandic character is not in some middle european character set (this was before UTF-8) and wasted Notes every time. That was a total bastard of a problem to find.