In other news today, cancers, diseases and viruses remain uncured.

Id say HP starting in its garage would be how the Valley was made possible. Or Wozniak and Jobs in the Home Brew Computer club. Bill Hewlett went to Stanford and MIT. Both private schools. David Packard went to Stanford. Wozniak QUIT UC Berkeley. Jobs went to Reed College, a private school and dropped out after learning about Calligraphy and Typesetting.

Anyways, a robber baron, Leland Stanford, has more to do with making SiVal the SiVal than anything else.

Bezos went to Princeton , a private school. And Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Jeff Bezos went to Montessori schools, something I pay for to put my kids through because the state doesn't even bother to teach kids from 2-5, some investment in the future. And kindergarten is half days.

I would say given the state financed universities being on the verge on bankruptcy and the tuition now being where most private schools are they are doomed.

Note that in 1960s california universities were free. Through corruption, unions and pensions they are radically more expensive than they are worth, and many students lament how hard it is to pay off the useless education they got.

While Gates, Jobs, Wozniak and even Larry Ellison are drop outs.

And when when the affiliates move to Texas or some other business friendly state, CA gets destroyed even more than if they were to have left the tax alone.

Pathetic, really.

Alpha particles can be breathed and actually is the most ionizing of all the ionizing radiation.

Alpha particles are extremely dangerous but are not penetrating.

The worst vector is to have an alpha emitter embedded in living tissue.

You must understand radiation exposure is not the same thing as exposure to hot particles or hot particles embedded in vivo.

There is a terrible misunderstanding going on. Sure, you could eat dinner next to a solid block of plutonium if its not critical its just a metal brock that emits some radiation. There used to be uranium paints and glazes used on cookware. Atomized and superheated fission products or fission products in salts and compounds embedded in vivo is a bloody mess. Its porrly understood and you can't use "x-rays, cosmic rays, plane flights" and trash like that to compare. The rays aren't that dangerous. The hot particles are very very dangerous because they can become part of your own biology and emit, even at low levels, inside your body.

So much for your sheet of paper. If that was the cause, Radon wouldn't be remediated and people would just enjoy sniffing alpha particles.

This has been a long time coming.

Chinese Professor
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTSQozWP-rM

HA HA HA America
http://www.atom.com/funny_videos/haha_america/

Our arrogant decadent hedonistic lazyness will cause American hegemony to end with with a whimper...

Prepare to be strangers in your own land.

These accidents would be a lot more unlikely if plants had to buy private insurance , the underwriters of insurance would force operators to basically promise that a large scale event was very, very unlikely.

Insurance programs have raised the safety of cars quite a bit, they could do the same thing here.

Oil spills and nuclear explosions are forcibly underwritten by the taxpayers, the operators dont have to pay any insurance premiums and we will pay up to all of our wealth to clean up a worst case disaster.

The caps are 75 million for oil and for nuclear, 12 billion have to be covered and the rest is the taxpayers responsibility.

They get to make all the money, and lose nothing if the bad stuff happens.

Thats ok, the second book is more equal than the first one :)

Its a CONSTITUTIONAL representative Republic, with a bicameral house, an executive and a judicial branch.

Two wolves and a sheep voting for dinner is democracy.

Sharia is democracy.

Also, the Senate was purposely designed to be obstructionist and to give small states as much power as large states.

Improperly educated people of today, largely devoid of critical thinking skills and the ability to abstract concepts (e.g. banning smoking is a gateway to ALL statutory behavior modification, seems like its serving the greater good but its a gateway to a radical totalitarian authoritarian police state controlled by oligarchical collectivists), gladly subscribed to things that were clearly outlined in book like:

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
We - Yevgeny Zamyatin
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Animal Farm - George Orwell
1984 - George Orwell.

Given IPADs and Kindles, its shocking people aren't reading more of this material.
   

I have many developers on CentOS 4 and 5, and the last developer on CentOS 3.x retired it due to hardware failure. The bloody OS outlasted the HARDWARE.

People drastically underestimate an OS running for more than a half a decade in security/errata support mode with a totally stable ABI, KABI and API.

CentOS and its parent, RHEL, are a godsend.

At some point it was stated somewhere that the i386 instructions are done such that they favor an i686 instruction mix but are compatible with i386.

Anyone who cares about performance is on x86_64 anyway, and i386 is there for legacy-junk support.

For performance sensitive stuff, eg, libc and openssl, there are i686 packages available and installed by default. But if i386 people are willing to put up with PAE and its performance hit or a (3GB/1GB split) in non PAE-32-bit, what does it really matter?

"CNN/FOX going out of business due to low ratings is actually GOOD for US Democracy."

A democracy is two wolves and sheep voting on what's for dinner.

The US is a constitutional republic. The constitutional goes about limiting the powers of government through 17 prohibitive clauses. (Interestingly enough, the general welfare clause which is used often to expand the federal government far beyond its intended power appears in the midst of a prohibitive clause in reference to taxation apportionment, but hey, why wouldn't James Madison backdoor the constitution just for kicks. Even though he explained in letters that an expansionist view of this clause would render the document useless, but hey, he wrote it, no biggie, modern judges know more than the author about its intent)

Also worth noting is the rights enumerated in the bill of rights was perceived by some as unnecessary as the government just wrought would be so limited the 10th would take care of the rest. Thank goodness for the enumerations we got since "life liberty property" and rights reserved is somehow vague.

Without the protection of a constitution we really don't have much, and majoritarian rule will undoubtedly lead to increasing internal strife. One could argue the march towards majoritarian tyranny is part of an overarching strategy bring about a crisis.

I also have an interesting history on Rule 22 / Filibuster in the Senate.

History of the Filibuster (Rule 22) in the Senate.

A long time ago any Senator could prevent any law simply by talking about it. Any senator could stop the move to cloture. This was by design. Its to make the little states have a lot of power in the face of the big ones because representation in the house is apportioned. Its a simple and clever concept to have a working bicameral house. Its designed to stop tyrants.

Then a certain president named Wilson who brought us gems like the Federal Reserve system by sneaking it through in a December 23rd vote where almost none of congress was present. (He signed it despite the sneak attack) Think recess appointment, but treasonous. A mark of a patriot.

Anyways, Wilson gets his way and the Fed has been using the hidden tax of inflation like a weapon against the people ever since.

Wilson also helped to dupe the states into the 17th Amendment, giving the election of Senators from the State legislature (making the State legislatures more or less irrelevant in the face of today's Fedzilla) and giving it to the people - more democracy (translates to bigger Federal government)! Major shift in power there. Less checking and balancing.

Fast forward to 1917. Wilson wants to bring America to war. The Senate uses a filibuster (then, by any member just not moving to cloture) to stop Wilson's war.

Wilson can't take no and wont tolerate the filibuster, so he has the rules changed. Now a move to cloture happens if TWO THIRDS agree to move. WAR BEGINS. Typical of a tyrant, they like that stuff so it distracts from the failing state and failing policies.

More who urinate on the Constitution come over the years it erodes to THREE Fifths.

First it was one senator.

Then 23

Then 35

See the trend?

As the constitutionality of the Fedzilla comes more and more out of bounds, the more they want to force the Senate to enact unconstitutional laws.

Now we have acting federal congressman saying:

QUOTE
"It is time to shut it down"
"God didn't create the filibuster, it's part of the Senate rules."
"It is outrageous"
"It tends to be, in many cases, the senators from those smaller states that aggregate to get up to be the 40."
"Less populous states end up with a disproportionate amount of power."

This was the design of the bicameral house. This is what the senate was supposed to do. Obstruct, slow down and make sure the disaffected get their say in Fedzilla lest they be crushed by majoritarian politics. It was designed to stop 51% wiping away the 49%.

Anyways, always irritating to see people adopt NEWSPEAK, especially in regards to the constitutional and the Framer's intent. Changing the meaning of words is the next best thing to banning literacy for tyrants.