Not to detract from your main point, but breast feeding is one of those topics which has been highly politicized and any weird claims like this should be taken with a grain of salt. I've read a study claiming what you say (can't find it now), here's another study claiming that isn't true. There are many more. Enough that I think you'd need to be an expert in the field in order to sort between them.

Usually though, when researchers start dickering over this sort of thing, what you can say for sure is that whatever the effect may be it isn't large enough or definitive enough to shut up all the people who are wrong about it. So at the end of the day it likely doesn't matter.

I wouldn't mind if they made another expensive one, as long as it was for people with normal sized hands. The last good joystick I had was a Logitech: it had two hat switches and three buttons on top, all of which I could reach with my thumb of average length. It was wonderful, ergonomic, had force feedback, and cost me something like $90 many years ago.

A few years ago I pulled it out and realized that it was unrecoverably broken, so I spent some money and got a Saitek X65F - it's one of those premium all-metal joysticks, build quality was fantastic. The top of the joystick though, the head part, is ridiculously huge. My thumb would have to be at least twice as long as it is in order to reach all the buttons and switches there. (I do not have small hands.) And this problem doesn't seem to be unique to the X65F: all of the premium joysticks have gigantic heads. They can advertise more buttons and hat switches that way, I guess, but they're useless if you have to take your hand off the stick to reach them.

Anonymity isn't built into this. A Senator who wishes to place a hold anonymously brings the issue to his party leader and they place the hold on his behalf, without revealing his identity. As for why there's no time limit: I imagine because there was no need for it originally.

Well you can read the wikipedia article if you want, but all of these procedural rules boil down to pretty much the same thing: good rules which exist to foster informed consideration and thoughtful discussion of pending legislation become tools of abuse when the goal stops being about passing good legislation and starts being about pleasing your campaign donors.

The Senate hold was originally about giving a senator time to gather additional information on an issue, now it's a way to stop bills which a senator doesn't like without needing or allowing a vote on them. It can be defeated by a cloture vote, but this requires 60/100 senators rather than a simple majority. This rule has been used to great effect over the last six years to stop anything and everything. You may have heard that our congress over that time has been the least productive congress ever? This is what they've been using to achieve that. Most famously though, Ted Stevens and Robert Byrd used secret holds to stop an anti-corruption transparency bill (temporarily - they were found out pretty quickly). Stevens was later convicted for corruption related to taking money from oil companies, though that conviction was later thrown out for procedural reasons.

"Some people" are wondering things? Who? I see no links to that particular claim.

I seems like the submitter had intended to say "i am wondering" but decided to go all Fox News on it. We can do better than this.

This seems like a false dillema - how much agonizing do you do over whether you'll subscribe to DirecTV or DIsh or both or neither? If you want one you pick one, and if it turns out you don't like it you switch.

Really the music situation is much better than that, there are more choices and none of the awful contracts. You can switch easily if you wish and some of them offer free trials, or even entirely free versions. This is no worse than any other subscription service and better than many. Of course it's different from actually owning the music, but no one has claimed equivalency there. You can always just buy the songs if you want, from many sources.

Is that seriously the logic here? "I saw some random animal doing it, so I'm going to do it too." Cats eat vomit. Rabbits eat shit. (Technically slightly different from their regular shit. Not enough to matter to these unnamed celebrities I'd wager.)

::Sigh:: Fine, whatever. It's probably healthier than most diet fads.

Er, what? There was never any danger of the Fallout franchise being killed, that legal struggle was entirely about Bethesda suing the shit out of Interplay in order to take the rights to the Fallout MMO that Interplay was developing. Without Bethesda's interference the MMO may or may not have been completed, but it had no impact on the rights to the single player games.

Oh for Pete's sake... BOTH OF THOSE BILLS HAD MAJORITY SUPPORT. How is that not an embarrassment? The very existence of the Patriot Act, now the Freedom Act, is humiliating.

You kidding? It did tons of good. Did you see that thread the other day? People falling over themselves to talk about how great he was and how they wanted to vote for him. Some of those people are going to read this now and realize that the whole thing was just more grandstanding, but some are not. Not everyone sees every story, not everyone gets the whole picture, and as long as some people wind up with a perception of the shining hero then the song and dance has done some good.

Can you back this up? I question the accuracy of this statement, partly because the earth currently has 7.3 billion people (projected to exceed 8 billion in 2025), and partly because the only statistic for this that I can find gives 200 million as the most that the United States could support sustainably at a high standard of living. Now, sustainable support isn't what we're talking about here (though it should be) we're talking about support by any temporary means. Our current extremely high yields are thanks to artificial fertilizer, but if you want to stretch that to 6 billion people (or 7.3 billion) you're talking about an awful lot of fertilizer.

We pay money to farmers in order to keep the supply steady and the price of food consistent, and also lobbying, but not because there's a surplus of food. In fact, quite the opposite. The fact that population growth is slowing in some areas is irrelevant, it's still rising globally.

It isn't all about population either, it's also affluence - you've no doubt heard that the average American consumes ~30 times as much energy as the average Indian. In other words, the fact that most of the world is (comparatively) poor is what is allowing us to get by with our current population. So what happens as developing countries develop?

Usually whenever this topic comes up, some yokel will say, "As populations become more affluent, their birthrate goes down. Problem solved." Conveniently overlooking the fact that as populations become more affluent they also consume more, at a faster rate than the birth rate reduction. This is what I meant by something which won't be acted on until it can no longer be denied. There's a lot of denial out there on this subject.

All it takes is three.

It's necessary now. The laws won't be changed until after it can no longer be denied, long after it's necessary. The choice you describe is not one which people will put up with, and is unenforceable anyway. There's no way to tell whether or not a man has sired a child.

My guess: whether or not the treatment is difficult / expensive to administer, it will be made very expensive to purchase. Prohibitively expensive. So expensive that relatively few people will be able to get it.

There's a book by Jack Vance about this, sorta, called To Live Forever. Like all of Vance's books it's definitely worth a read, though I'm not sure it really grants any insight here.

I don't think so. The links in the summary were to the paper and to explanations of the results of the paper. As it so happens, in the third link in addition to the paper results there was also an explanation of the feature but there was nothing in the summary that said, "This is the link you click on to find out how to do this."

You're right that I didn't click on the links, but since the links didn't give any indication that one of them was providing the information that I was after I'm not willing to take the blame for that one.