The TSA has been fairly successful at portraying people who worry about X-rays in the same way as people who worry about cell phone radiation.

They say that these X-rays are:
1) "soft" X-rays
2) they only go through a tiny layer of skin and soft tissue
3) if you're in an air plane then you are getting cosmic radiation anyway and you don't worry about that.

But actually the hard x-rays at the dentist are absorbed by your teeth. No one gets tooth cancer. But soft tissue like your skin and breasts do get cancer. Your balls are seldom exposed to radiation so no one knows if your balls get cancer or if it makes you impotent or means your kids have birth defects or what happens. The fact that it gets absorbed in a small area of your body means that while it's a small dose, it's very concentrated in areas where you don't want to get cancer. If you're on a plane and this radiation was coming from the space then the fuselage would absorb almost of it.

The X-ray scanners work like the TV at your grand parents house. It scans a beam of X-rays and creates a picture. You know how your grand parents put up with a lousy picture instead of getting a new TV? The TSA is like that. These guys aren't trained radiologists. They'll live with a degraded picture instead of wondering if it's giving you too high a dose of radiation.

X-rays really are quite a different thing from cell phone radiation. It's true that most scientists don't think cell phones cause cancer, but these are a different thing and the TSA is being dishonest here. If the protest succeeded or if it didn't succeed doesn't matter. I'm not going to go through the scanners until you people have beta tested it.

The kids are all foreign. When they all go home, we won't have anything left at all.

If we didn't drive them out, they would say here. You're right that we should eliminate the H1-B visas, instead we should just let the smart people live here indefinitely.

The mere act of immigrating means that you are willing to take risks and try new things. That you are willing to make sacrifices. That you are highly motivated. These are the people we need to build the economy.

Unfortunately, the H1-B visa is business unfriendly because it doesn't let immigrants create their own start-ups. It's also worker unfriendly. H1-B workers know they have can't afford to get fired so they take all kinds of abuse at work. And we have to do it too because we have to compete with them.

When we boot them out of the country, most of them don't go home. Once they have immigrated the first time, it's easy to do it again. Most go to Canada, Germany or Switzerland. They only go home when they want to. But when they do you're right that we're screwed. These days anything can be made anywhere and sold anywhere. They'll compete with us directly. They'll have a lower cost of living. They'll pay taxes to their government instead of to ours. When our company goes out of business, we'll have to learn Mandarin or retire early.

These days most of Africa has pretty OK water. Governments and NGOs have put wells everywhere. I've drank water from hundreds of villages across southern Africa and I didn't get any sicker than when I only drank bottled water.

The locals are often paranoid about their water. They'll boil city water, or in Zambia they mix Klorin[tm] into it.

I drink filtered water at home because it's no work, but if I were visiting someone's house I'd be fine with drinking whatever water they drink.

Except if it comes from a river. Only drink well water or tap water. Never drink water from a river.

And the can't hurt you. Except for the raw beaf in Ethiopia. It's risky to eat raw beaf, but it's good to try new things. :)

I live in Zambia so I mostly know that area of Africa. The US was sponsering wars in Mozambique, Angola and Zaire as part of the cold war efforts.

Also the if you look at Sudan the civil war with the south and the current crisis in Darfur are funded by European oil interests. Read up on the story of Tiny Roland. He made his money by funding rebel movements in exchange for land and minerals. He was a large SPLA funder.

There is also a dictatorship in Equatorial Guinea funded by oil. The US is the largest foreign investor in that country.

We all know that security researchers are drama queens. As soon as they find a bug, they want to get a bull-horn out and start crowing about it.

Microsoft on the other hand says that if you don't keep it secret for months or even years then you are a bad person and will try to get you fired.

What they should do is just pay a $100 per day for keeping it secret until the bug is fixed. That way even if you don't get bragging rights, you get a pay check.

Signing a non-disclosure agreement like this is pretty normal. It's a part of most businesses but no one wants to do it for free.

I'm going to test out the comments feature as well to make sure everything is working...

Yup. Looks Ok.

There is no wifi in East Africa. You're wrong that laying cables is unimportant and also wrong that it's not happening.

When I traveled in Ethiopia they had 200 day labourers digging ditches for fibre optic cables to Kenya. On the Kenyan side it's mechanized and faster. One night I camped next to a huge pile of fibre optic cables higher than my head. In Zambia as well they are laying cable everywhere. It's very exciting.

From the guardian article, they're projecting that biogas will be cheaper.

"What's more, aside from the intial set-up costs, we expect to see an average saving of 0.40 per litre of fuel (based on an average diesel price of 0.67 per litre compared with biomethane at 0.27 per litre)".

Of course, 200 buses is quite a small scale operation, but it's still very cool.