Mitrial valve replacements often use pig tissue. Jessie Helms had one. :) As long as it's not in a germ line cell (inheritable) it does NOT matter.

Your premise that funding for US education is higher than everyone else is simply false. Look at the Scandinavian countries and their level of per student funding.

Why would you tie CS education to visas for those who will compete with those same students receiving that education? Think about that. When we have a barely adequate supply of home-grown talent, will the visa numbers be reduced? If so, funding for education will also be cut, returning us to the days of insufficient education.! If CS education is important to our society (and it is) then it should be funded on its own merits. This is a rich country that is constantly pretending to be poor. If there is a lack of funding, it's because taxes on the wealthy have been cut and cut again. For example, if capital gains were taxed as regular income, we would have no problem funding education in this country.

They want to criticize Snowden for not being more selctive in his release of information? But he offered discuss with the NSA what releases might compromise US security. They refused to talk with him. Now they say he released more than the minimum necessary to demonstrate that the NSA was breaking the law. What is a respecatble whistle-blower to do?

The word socialism gets tossed around carelessly by right wing pols who don't know what it is. To them it's just a nasty thing you say when liberals like me want to redistribute a little wealth. But real socialism, as meant by Karl Marx, is defined as "the ownership of the means of production by the state". Domestic spending on public education or health care is NOT socialism. But government assumption of corporate shares is the real thing. In our system of economics, corporations are not people and governments do not own the means of production.

I get your drift... but two points: Obamacare actually saves money while insuring more people. (Congressional Budget Office analysis). That's because the current system of treating the poor in emergency rooms is outrageously inefficient. And secondly, doctors are not really rich. They may make more than your or me, but in the overall scheme of things it's hospital administrators, pharmaceutical company CEOs, insurance company owners, and bankers who are really really rich.

The biggest political success for Republicans in the last 30 years was convincing the middle and lower middle class to be afraid of the poor. They should instead be very very afraid of the rich.

What Hansen is advocating are plutonium fast breeder reactors. Like the Clinch River plant that was cancelled in the 1980s. He wants to mass-produce them on an assembly line. He wants small distrubuted plants full of plutonium. This is one crazy dude.

He never defends his assertion that nuclear can ramp up faster than solar and wind. He ignores the fact that the government continues to massively subsidize nuclear via the Price-Anderson liability limitation and support for research. He ignores the fact that current plants take 10 years to build. And when he says the new plants would be cheaper than existing plants, I had to laugh. Cheaper than "outrageously overpriced" is still not all that cheap.

So yes, fix the waste problem, fix the terrorist problem, fix the fuel supply problem, fix the cost over-run problem, and fix the economically un-competitive problem And THEN we'll talk.

If the nuclear boys want to play with dangerous toys, they need to find a nice uninhabited planet to do it on. The innovation has been in wind, solar, geothermal, and even natural gas. Those guys are smart, they are having fun, and they do not destroy massive chunks of real estate.

Read the October 1986 issue of Scientific American to see what happens when guys having fun melt down a reactor.

I carry a phone with no contract or data plan. I can text and surf only from wifi.

I know a (former) CIA agent who did operations inside China and Russia. They didn't catch him so they didn't do anything.

I've had two responses to my suggestion that Snowden is safer because he claims to have divulged all. One says he was never in danger because the US could not get to him in Russia. The other says he would be killed anyway just to prove a point.

Of course Snowden is a smart guy. The way to really make himself safe is to hold the most embarrassing information in a safe place with instructions to release it if he is killed. That's what a smart guy would do. And the US agencies know he is a smart guy.

That's what I would say too.... if I had a target on my back. If he has disclosed everything, there is no reason to take him out.

There is a lot more that Snowden has not released yet. He is wisely using the drip, drip, drip method of disclosure so the press and public have time to digest each successive piece of information. Before it's done, it will become clear that the House and Senate oversight committees were either derelict in their duties or complicit in illegal activities. They either knew or they didn't. Either way, eventually they will be the ones asking for clemency.

That's what conservation subsidies and tax credits are all about. When we insulated my daughter's house this year, about 1/3rd of the cost was covered by tax credits and a subsidy funded by the stimulus money appropriated in 2009. If you don't want to hurt people, you will be concerned about the long term effects of climate change and the effects of nuclear meltdowns. Ask the people in Alaska who are being disposessed by melting sea ice and massive winter storms washing their houses (that have been there for generations) into the sea. Ask the people in Fukushima.

I live in the most energy efficient house in my county, based on good insulation, solar heating, and thermal mass. We just retrofitted my daughter's house (built in 1968) with insulation in attic, walls and crawl space. Nobody is wearing thermal underwear. Nobody is uncomfortable. And we are saving lots of money by NOT using energy. But "cheap" energy undercuts such efforts. The payback time is too long for most folks if energy stays cheap. But energy is only cheap if you ignore the cost of environmental damage. If that damage were included on your power bill each monty, insulation and solar power would look pretty good.

From the article: "Those energy sources cannot scale up fast enough" to deliver the amount of cheap and reliable power the world needs, "

But nuclear power is neither cheap nor reliable. So why do they suggest that as a replacement for renewables. As to the "fast enough" part of that, solar and wind can be ramped up much faster than nuclear. The rationale of the article is not logical.

As opposed to "burn it if you've got it" industrialism? No, I said nothing about shivering. But much energy is wasted because it is too cheap. Conservation is the cheapest source of "new" energy supply.

And I guess if global warming runs it's course, we'll all be to hot to shiver. :)