DES was approved by the FDA, so clearly the FDA was not helpful in preventing the drug from reaching the market.

Thalidomide was not approved by the FDA primarily due to bureaucratic delay. While the FDA doctors would not approve it as they were waiting for evidence it was safe and effective, they would have approved it eventually were it not for the birth defects that starting showing up in other countries. Drug testing protocols simply did not test pregnant women. I.e., the US was largely spared thalidomide babies because the approval process was slower than in other countries as there was nothing in the testing to date that would have prevented approval.

When you read a headline that FDA approves new drug able to prevent 10,000 deaths annually, rest assure this also means the FDA has been blocking a drug that would have prevented 10,000 annually, most likely for quite a few years.

The drug companies have considerable incentive to market new and expensive (non-generic) drugs. But the expense to bring new drugs to market is also very high, at least in part due to FDA rules. The very high costs tend to kill-off promising developments that would simply not be economical to develop. Real life can be a bit complicated.

The cop did not choke him -- this leaves a mark every time. He died of a heart attack. Were the cops guilty of brutality. Yes. Every takedown is brutal AFAIAC. I don't know if this met the legal definition of police brutality and neither do anyone else. But they did not choke him.

The law was brutal because NYC has to make sure they collect very high tobacco taxes

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War has never been the real way to depopulate the earth, grand total deaths through history due to war are likely less than 500 million. The bubonic plague aka black death is credited with killing off 1/3 to 1/2 of the population in Europe and Chine -- much more effective

Of course, we have better ways to kill lots people these days, just a few EMP's weapons could kill billions as civilization collapses. A single truly nasty bio-weapon release -- airborn smallpox or ebola could do the same with direct deaths as well as collapse.

You are not pulling heat out of the atmosphere. More accurately you are pulling heat out of the atmosphere then re-releasing the heat into the atmosphere as the generated electricity or mechanical energy is used. You are simply not introducing additional heat into the atmosphere by not burning coal or splitting atoms, etc.

However, heating the earth's atmosphere via energy generation is negligible. Total earth energy consumption is about 15 terawatts, total earth solar irradiance is about 173,000 terawatts. This raises the global mean temperature by about 0.0065 degrees C

Yes, but if you want to know how obese a city is you now have a new choice. A) Analyze at remains from the sewer B) Analyze photos from Facebook or C) Spend 5 minutes at the local Walmart.

The FCC is still changing their proposed regulation (reportedly over 300 pages worth). The link you reference is about 5 pages worth. The proposed regs have not been released to the public.

No shortage of stupid user interface choices. Some of the ones I've hated the most.

* Hiding menu options, aka personalized menus
* Wholesale rearranging and renaming of user interfaces between versions, esp. for infrequently used options
* Super secret hidden files.
* Windows 8

Nonsense, congress could pass changes that emasculate the FCC in this regard. Certainly the current POTUS would doubtless veto, but the next one might not.

Likelihood of such a restriction on the FCC is another question, and I would guess fairly improbable. Should this regulation become very unpopular, then it would be likely to be overturned by congress.

Greek fire is often thought to include calcium oxide a.k.a. quicklime. This is caustic and has been used as chemical weapon by itself. That is why I originally said it was arguably a chemical weapon though the primary effectiveness is clearly as an incendiary. Primarily I included as a reference because it is more more widely recognized as being used in warfare. The pure chemical weapons go back a long time -- far predating greek fire.

Greek fire is arguably a chemical weapon and well known.

National Geographic has a nice article about the long history of chemical (and biological) weapons,

The real difference in the modern era, it has become an economical form of warfare as well as more effective (higher rate of casualties) than older chemical attacks.

Considering that so many are focused on CO2 as a pollutant, they won't care about the pollution scrubbers at the centralized plants because we don't capture the carbon. Ans yes, lots of greens don't appear to understand this connection.

It is not just the Feds cash flood, it is the zero-rate interest. People chasing returns are practically forced into the stock market to try and get returns.

Pfft, they should just call the CIA/NSA to get one of their "backup copies".

I don't know, if you have a comet or asteroid impact big enough to eject material into space you have to consider that the ejecta is going to be heated by a large amount. Much of the "ejecta" is in the form of vaporized rock, much of the solid ejecta will be fractured. The fireball associated with an impact of this size is also going to be large (10's or 100's of km in diameter), so you get additional heating beyond the heating of atmospheric compression while the ejecta is departing.

Seems like organics would be unlikely to survive the trip most of the time.

The slower eject will not be generally be heated as much, but you won't find those on the moon.

And if that Chinese family serves you Peking Duck what would you then conclude?