Please explain how Reagan's economic policies make everyone "just pour some money into the top of the pyramid". Low tax rates mean you keep more of the money you make, and hand less of it over to the government to distribute to others for some greater good that they've decided on. How does me keeping more of my own money equate to pouring money into the top of a pyramid?

The pyramid scheme you describe is the exact opposite of Reaganomics - it's the essence of liberal government and wealth redistribution. And it fails because it discourages hard work, risk-taking and innovation. Trickle-down economics does work - people who keep more of their money invest and create new jobs. The economic expansion of the '80s and the dot-com boom of the '90s were directly fueled by exactly that. The economic hard times we've fallen on now don't refute trickle-down economics in any way - there is no way to abolish economic downturns or the business cycle, and the European economies which have maintained high tax rates are feeling the same pain and more, while they also failed to match the US economy during the good times.

I'd say replacing the sequential access of a tape drive with random access and the ability to write one portion of a program while reading earlier portions qualifies as revolutionary change. For most people, the "wow" factor of the DVR comes from the ability to continue program recording while they pause their viewing. This can't be done with a tape drive. Also, Tivo was the first service I know of to make this sort of programming manipulation easy to do, with a built in scheduling guide and a user-interface that's still the best I've seen in DVRs.

The reason I finally gave up my TiVO is because DirecTV made it impossible to use DVR features with their HD programming unless you use DirecTV's DVRs. And this kind of lockout is a very big reason - perhaps the biggest reason - behind "why Tivo is not more popular". It wouldn't bother me nearly as much if DirecTV's DVRs were even close to Tivo's in terms of user-interface, responsiveness and ease of use.

Come on people -- when you think of clean water, clean air, and sustainable living, doesn't your mind immediately jump to India?

Nope. When I think of India I think of hundreds of millions of people finally making the climb out of poverty to a decent standard of living. Granted, that standard of living won't let the average Indian squander nearly as many resources as the average environmentally aware American, but it's still a huge accomplishment that deserves applause and support. I'm glad to see the Indian government is not prepared to slow down or stop that economic progress to please some self-appointed guardians of the earth in the US and Europe armed with questionable data and questionable science.

Perhaps their new research group could use this as a slogan: "India: #1 In Environmental Stewardship Since The Bhopal Disaster".

Very cheap shot. The Bhopal Disaster was a disaster caused by Union Carbide, an American company.

I see this keeps repeating, but this is utter bullshit. US military is needed just as much as a kick in the balls. Europe certainly doesn't need it.

LOL - fine, so have your democratically elected leaders let our democratically elected leaders know. The vast majority of Americans have no desire to spend billions protecting Europeans from threats they don't believe exist. The US certainly isn't occupying Europe, and when Rumsfeld made noises about reducing forces in Europe a few years ago your leaders screamed like they were all French. But I'm sure you know best.

Face reality, pal - the only utter bullshit is that emanating from your keyboard. Your leaders have no intention of letting the US go, much to my wallet's regret. Maybe your snottiness and grotesque ingratitude can convince them to stop freeloading on the US, raise your taxes and mount their own defenses, but I'm skeptical.

The only thing the US military does those days is war crimes. Lots of them.

Ah, nothing like the ungrateful whining of pampered idiots who won't pay for their own defense.

Obama is a man to be respected for his accomplishments during the past year.

I have similar accomplishments in the field of literature - namely, none. But I intend to do big things one day, just like Obama. Since the Nobel Comittee has wisely decided not to wait for any actual accomplishments, I'll expect my award and check soon.

Look, this is just embarrassing - obviously, the Nobel Committee feels it is punishing American voters for "wrong" decisions by awarding prizes to the likes of Jimmy Carter and Al Gore during the Bush administration, and now is rewarding Americans for "right" thinking by bestowing their award on Obama. The president should feel insulted and should decline.

Note that until the Industrial Revolution and the growth of urban centers it wasn't much different in the US or England - people here had lots of children too. Rural farmers need children to help do the work, and much of the world's poor are subsistence farmers. I remember seeing some study in Bangladesh that showed children of impoverished families there represented a net gain in income by the time they were 10. Children allow them to plant and harvest more crops, tend more livestock, and know that someone will look after them if they fall ill, become injured or grow old.

Poor people don't typically have lots of time of free time with nothing better to do than have sex - they're usually too busy working harder than most of us can imagine, trying to scratch out a living. They have many children for a lot of different reasons but the primary reason is that children past the age of 5 or 6 can work and help the family to survive. The more children, the more income. Grown children are also the only Social Security rural farmers in Third World nations will ever have in their old age. Their lives depend on having many children.

Grow the economy, provide decent educations, let people move out of poverty, give women access to education and the workforce, and the birth rate goes down. In southern India, where Bangalore and other high-tech centers have sprung up, the birth rate is now below the replacement rate. In poor northern Indian states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh the birth rate is about twice the replacement rate.

Want to see the world's population go down in a meaningful way? Do things to help Third World nations grow their economies, like lowering US trade barriers to African and Asian imports.

No matter how many children you decide to have, the world's impoverished will have considerably more than two. The world's population growth isn't being driven by people in the industrialized West - they're either at or below replacement levels. It's being driven by people in the Third World. It makes economic sense for the poor of the world to have many children, and nothing short of economic improvement or coercion will stop them. If you really want to reduce the world's population, work to help the people of underdeveloped nations achieve wealth. It's happening in India right now - millions of people are moving from poverty to the economic middle class. And they're having fewer children as a result.

Homo sapiens may not be the ideal kind of advanced life form either. Otherwise it wouldn't destroy its own habitat on a global scale, nor cause avoidable mass extinction of other species.

As far as I know, homo sapiens is the only life form that even considers habitat destruction or species extinction and tries to prevent them. Someone has already posted about the fact that modern-day environmentalism serves as a belief system for many, starting with the assumption of man's inherent evil and guilt. This assumption is as irrational and tiresome in this new religion as it was in the old ones.

Obviously we haven't destroyed our habitat in any significant way, since there are more of us around than ever. And why would causing the mass extinction of other species make us less than ideal as an advanced life form anyway? Sure, we depend on a number of other species for our existence, but there are a lot of species whose existence means nothing to ours. I happen to share your belief that we must preserve these species, but it's a belief, not a law of physics. For all we know, the most advanced life form in the galaxy is heading this way after wiping out all other life in it's neighborhood.

California Vehicle Code: 21654. (a) Notwithstanding the prima facie speed limits, any vehicle proceeding upon a highway at a speed less than the normal speed of traffic moving in the same direction at such time shall be driven in the right-hand lane for traffic or as close as practicable to the right-hand edge or curb, except when overtaking and passing another vehicle proceeding in the same direction or when preparing for a left turn at an intersection or into a private road or driveway.

So it can't read PDFs. Big negative IMHO - I wouldn't mind having something like this (at $150 max) to stash dozens of technical references and white papers on. But I'm not going to go through the hassle of converting every PDF I'd want to store.

Doesn't the Kindle have a USB port? Can't this be used to load PDFs and files in other formats? If not, what is the USB port for?

Brilliant. So as long as we all destroy the ecological balance of the planet equally, it's fine. Who cares if we sicken and kill off all the animals at the top of the food chain, leading to a massive overpopulation of grazers and further destruction of nature, as long as it reduced the incidence of half a dozen diseases.

Yeah, what's half a dozen diseases causing millions of human deaths every year when we need to worry about destroying some mythical "ecological balance"? Let's ban DDT worldwide.

People in the West can afford this kind of arrogance because they aren't the ones threatened by those half a dozen diseases. If your mother, wife or daughter were to die of malaria, I'm sure you and your smugness would both be fine knowing that your ecological concerns were being catered to. Meanwhile, enjoy the return of the American bedbug.

The solution was only found after both sides found that it's better for peace to accept the mutual right to exist.

The solution was found after Germany was utterly defeated, occupied and dismembered, and the cost was millions of lives. And what led to WW2 was exactly Hitler's insistence on invading and annexing foreign territory - given the lengths to which Stalin and Chamberlain went to avoid conflict with Germany, it's simply naive to state that WW2 would have happened whether Hitler existed or not.

It's not hard to see parallels in the CIA and US military's use of interrogation techniques in Bush's War on Terror, the effects of labeling one race as 'the enemy,' the crackdown on free speech, or the use of suicide bombers in Iraq.

What crackdown on free speech? When did this happen, and how has it affected anyone's ability to say, record, broadcast or publish whatever they want? And when did one race get labeled "the enemy"? Which race was it? And what exactly were the effects of this labeling which didn't happen?

What nonsense. But no worse than many reviews on TV shows, movies, gardening, or cooking which never fail to throw in some gratuitous, mindless slam at Bush.