I'd like to think that before I die the idea of shooting one's self in the ass and/or groin with plasma after using the restroom is not only common but encouraged in the interest of cleanliness and good manners.

Number of deaths for leading causes of death (US)
Heart disease: 631,636
Cancer: 559,888
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 137,119
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 124,583
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 121,599
And for terrorism it averages out to a couple of hundred a year over the last 2 decades.

Here is the real Safety Alert System according to what's likely to kill you:
Eating too much junk food/smoking/drinking too much/drugs/being old: RED
Unlucking/crappy driver/being old: ORANGE
about a thousand other things . . .
Terrorism: Green

a little periodical called High Times.

I'd prefer to see a plan that included that too but a viable public option with guaranteed issue should also significantly cut down on malpractice costs even if no specific provision to enforce it. A large portion of malpractice judgments deal with providing continuing care for patients who are going to have a difficult time finding coverage for what is a pre-existing condition.

A public guarantee issue should greatly reduce the patient's out of pocket cost for that care and hopefully cut some of your malpractice premiums because that portion of those judgments shouldn't be as large.

Here is a list of average teacher salaries and a ranking on the that salary against the cost of living in that state. California is narrowly 1st for highest average salary and 44th when you factor in the cost of living.

There are aspects of beauty that tend to be nearly universal and have a strong genetic link. Clear skin and symmetric facial features are good examples of that. The subtle effect of hormones on a woman's appearance has a measurable impact on their perceived beauty and men have likely evolved to find those effects appealing. The prominence in proportion of specific secondary sexual characteristics may vary by culture but people also tend to pair off with people from their own cultures so while there is no one definition of what is beautiful it stands to reason that there is evolutionary pressure to conform to that of one's culture.

It's also important to consider that men often have different standards of feminine beauty than women and the fashion elite do. Porn is more consistent than fashion with regard to the primary elements of their respective aesthetics.

If the purpose of copyright is to give exclusive rights to a work of intellectual property for a given period to promote the creation of those works before they are added to the wealth of the public domain then what does that mean for copyrighted closed-source software? It seems like the public would be entitled to the source of any software when the copyright for that software expires because people don't tend to just copyright binaries.

This leads to some awkward problems with closed source projects that we don't tend to find with other copyrighted works because it raises the risks that a copyright owner would be protected without any guarantee that they'd be able to supply the public with their copyrighted work when their protection elapsed. But there is also the issue that they never really released the source either. It could be argued that they released a derivative work of their own source when they sold copies of the binaries so compelling them to release the source might not be wrong as well as impractical.

Given the long copyright terms we have now and the pace of technology I don't expect this to be that serious of an issue but we really don't seem prepared to handle this.

Communication - Ill defined or changing specifications and poor documentation make development and testing very difficult.
Technical - Large systems tend to be very complicated and it's difficult and expensive to make them fault tolerant and build in the sort of redundancy, validation, and security that make critical systems reliable.
Leadership - Decision makers on the client and supplier side often don't know enough details about various parts of the project to really know what they want much less what they need.
Organizational - Setting deadlines before defining the scope of the project, belligerent coworkers and other HR issues, uncooperative clients, cutting testing time to meet deadlines, and other general issues within the organizations can lead to death march development and other undesirable situations.

From the article: The Bush Administration resisted calls for an identity card in the US after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

I guess it would be more accurate to say, "The Bush Administration resisted calls for an identity card in the US after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 until he signed the Real ID Act into law in 2005."

The message was: "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."

If he'd gotten a loan and the loan payments were near $3,000/yr (which is pretty unlikely) or his average electricity savings increased over the life of the loan (more likely) he could offset his loan with his electricity savings and have a cost of little to nothing. I don't think solar is the best energy saving home improvement most people could make for their dollar but it's starting to get competitive.

The city is charging a fee for access to the network so the bonds could be paid back in part or in whole with revenue from the project and that same network adds value to the real estate. In practice TDS will probably undercut the city on cost at a loss or something close to it to punish them and dissuade others from trying to build their own municipal network as thuggish telecoms tend to do. It would be nice if the city could sue them for noncopetitive practices and use the money to pay off their bonds but that won't happen.

If you don't like municipal projects you should consider protesting them by staying off the streets, sidewalks, stay out of parks and libraries, hauling off your own garbage, digging your own well, making sure your body's waste is processed in septic tanks, etc.

If we can get it down to the size of a hamster we'll be rid of drug mules too (along with the vast majority of the traveling public).

The argument that millions of people believe it isn't very compelling. Millions of ignorant adults in the US are convinced that vaccinations cause autism.

The audience for their claims are the majority of Iranians who mistrust and hate the west and get virtually all of their news from state-run or state-controlled news agencies. If the Iranian government was more unified in what appears to be a blatant election fraud conspiracy then I doubt the public would do more than a day or two of fairly small, half-hearted protests.

They share a western border with Iraq and an eastern border with Afghanistan. In the last 60 years the US has helped overthrow one of their leaders, supported one of their enemies in a pretty devastating war against them, many of our top officials have threated regime change against their government, and over the last several years we've funded various non-governmental organizations within Iran with the goal of undermining their leadership. I don't support Iran's government in the least but we've made their claims of Western interference a very easy sell and I'm not that convinced that we've ever stopped interfering with their admittedly crappy government.