Darrell Issa strongly opposes net neutrality, with a Republican platform that supports some ironic thing called "internet freedom". Last year, Issa ripped into FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski at a Congressional hearing, accusing him of doing Obama's bidding regarding net neutrality (wtf?).

In short, Issa is a conservative Republican who has been on a mission to destroy net neutrality.

Influenza is and has always been lethal. There are different types of influenzavirus A, and they are named based on the two main proteins that allow it to infect cells: hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N). A new strain can result from mutation after an influenza virus is transmitted from an animal species to humans. My understanding is that (small) viral mutations occur all the time; thus, we create a flu vaccine based on the three strains that we believe are going to be most common in the next year. These are the seasonal epidemics, and are caused by antigenic drift. The "old" strains will either have died out or many people will still have immunity to them. However, if a gene reassortment occurs involving strains from different animal species (antigenic shift), then a global pandemic can result. The pandemic ends after people begin developing immunity to the new strain, and new infections begin to drop, and this phase is called the post-pandemic phase.

(In response to your other post...) incidentally, I have narcolepsy, although it wasn't caused by the vaccine. I wonder how the vaccine may have lead to these cases, though.

I'd much rather not have Santorum go Santorum on my ass...

I'm not so sure I would agree with Google's typical defense on this issue, which is that they have an algorithm that automatically ranks all the search results and they can't change that. Except they manually change the results. When companies break their rules, they can punish them. For example, when BMW's German website was found to influence results, Google banned them from their index. An eyeglass company, DecorMyEyes, verbally abused its customers to generate bad reviews ... and more publicity. After being published in The Times, they dropped the company from the index. Even in the Santorum case, they eventually made some results less prominent. Google has also been accused of pushing up the rankings of its own products. So it's kinda hypocritical to say that Google doesn't adjust individual results.

The irony is that the FDA, through the investigation of its own scientists, released companies' trade secrets. An FDA contractor had compiled a report, and one of the fired scientists came across it by doing a search online.

Also, spying on members of Congress and making an "enemies" list of them is certainly a great way to piss off some powerful people...

Why does Apple need to complain and whine about all these stupid patents? It's already the largest and most profitable technology company, and its cash reserves are insane. Everything it's doing is just like the Microsoft of the 1990's. And Steve Jobs was possibly a bigger asshole than Gates and Ballmer. Except, for some reason, people actually liked Jobs.

Sure, I agree with your points. But they don't have much to do with government control and regulation. What's your solution to these problems? Having a single-payer healthcare system and schools run by the federal government? Half the country would start to scream "socialism," even though it's much more like the systems in other developed countries. The problem isn't the tax deductions that employers get from offering health insurance, it's from the healthcare system and health insurance itself. Do you know what else isn't sometimes covered by insurance? Anesthesiologists. Because when you're going into surgery, nobody asks whether the anesthesiologist is in-network or out-of-network.

What? The free market has produced very few advances in medical technology. Many of the advances in the basic sciences (including biochemistry and physics) are sponsored by the government. The same goes for drugs and medical equipment. The free market has actually not developed many items on its own, without piggy-backing on projects that were originally or partially government funded. Interestingly, the government also pays a large portion of the costs of training medical residents.

Price controls? There aren't any. I used to work at a very large biotech that sold good but absurdly expensive drugs, because there aren't any price controls that prevented it from doing so. And I actually argue for greater barriers to entry in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. There are too many drugs and devices on the market that don't work, and may do more harm than good. One of the first things we learned about in my CS courses was the Therac-25. Additionally, things like metal-on-metal hip replacements should not have been approved, given their high failure rates and higher tendency of causing metal toxicity.

As the sibling posters have pointed out, you're falsely equating two things. Although the Republicans essentially block any Democratic bill, that doesn't mean the Democrats knew they would oppose it. When it was revealed in 2004 that John Edwards was exploiting the tax loophole, Republicans everywhere assailed the loophole. According to that article/blog post, the Wall St. Journal's editorial page, which is just as conservative as Fox News, criticized Edwards. As did Robert Novak and Sean Hannity. So no, you're wrong. Only the Senate Republicans' proposal was made because they knew the Democrats would vote against it.

Isn't this completely off-topic? Anyway ... Our society currently values a college education. How many companies are going to hire you if you only have a high school diploma? Other than those that may require a portfolio (e.g., art, music, programming, web design, etc.), there are few. You can't even apply for medical or graduate school without a bachelor's or equivalent.

No one said that the Democrats are pushing for students to go to four-year colleges. They want to allow students to receive the financial aid to do so, and they want to prevent the predatory for-profit schools from abusing the system.

I agree that the best solution is a free college education (or one that is so heavily subsidized that it is inexpensive, like in most other countries). The problem is that the education system in the US is broken, partially by design. The US is practically the only developed country in the world with a strong private college system, and this elitism only means that more money is being funneled away from public schools and into the deep pockets of private schools. I went to UC Berkeley, which has about five times as many undergraduate students as Harvard or Yale, but the endowment is only approximately one-tenth and one-seventh of those schools', respectively.

Your logic is retarded. This was a provision that would remove tax loopholes on the wealthy to pay for the funding of the federal Stafford loans program (who was, incidentally, a Republican). These are tax loopholes that even the Republicans opposed! How does this make the Democrats "hate the small guy"?

I don't know if Slashdot loves repeating the "both parties are the same, both parties are stupid" mantra, but really, at least make a coherent argument when doing so. You're just like Mitt Romney, trying to rewrite history.

From the lab's website, it appears that this wide-angle bionic eye has only 98 electrodes. I believe each electrode can only stimulate one photoreceptor, creating a "phosphene" (which is essentially a single point of light). With 98 electrodes, you can have a grid of up to 98 phosphenes to give a very primitive description of what you see. This research group also has a high-acuity implant with 1024 electrodes for better quality.

As to your original comment, I don't know but I imagine that stimulating any brain tissue is a complex thing itself. I've seen a short video about a woman using the Dobelle system, in which a pair of glasses with 144 electrodes is wired directly through the skull and the electrode is implanted in the visual cortex. I'm not sure what kind of signal processing is involved, but every patient had to be trained to interpret the images they saw (similar to this case). It looks much more difficult than the neuroprosthetic arms, since vision requires much less room for error.

Many groups have done similar things, but with different approaches. Here's a list of some of them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_prosthesis

Your numbers for the K-12 education are off by an order of magnitude. The total state budget for K-12 education is $39.2 billion. With a total enrollment in the state of 6.2 million students, then it's an average of $6,300 per student.

What's really destroying education in California is Proposition 13. That single proposition stripped away a significant amount of money earned from property taxes. The housing market has ballooned a lot over the past few decades, but now many properties have an assessed value way below their true market values.