Agree witht the above, toll roads should solely be "additional but avoidable throughfares", that is a free but longer alternative needs to exist.

If a company wants to pay to build a shorter route this is okay, if people can afford the toll they spend money and save time, but if not they take the longer route and pay with their time. It can never be the only-connection and all toll-roads should revert to free-roads in 10-20yrs time.

So your saying the average slashdotter is still likely to have problems pulling chicks even when they own their own spaceship and have control of the fundamental force of GRAVITY!

That is one seriously harsh hypothetical world your living in there man ;)

"But in the meantime, they'll continue to increase our reliance on them "

Ummm, don't you think that perhaps you have a bit of a say in this part? Your the bigger country here fella's. Maybe, just maybe, China is offering a service that you are buying. No gun at your head or anything, this is free-trade capatalism pure and simple. If it is not really in US long-term interest is a second point we could debate, but even if this trade is detrimental to the US why is that China's problem to worry about and not yours?

I think what concerns me is the inability to deal with uncertainty. As you say the scientific-percentages are normally forced into not-proven/proven in criminal proceedings or balance of evidence in civil proceedings.

Science by contrast normally comes with error bars but court judgments not so much. Not sure how you give out a sentence of guilty +/- 30% so perhaps there is no better system. Maybe the law is fine we just need to focus on better diagnostics in the science area.

Thimerosal does not need to be in modern vaccines - single dose sterile packaging SHOULD be able to render it unnecessary. This is a good thing, while injecting trace amounts may not be statistically linkable to autism if you can avoid any unnecessary heavy metal exposure then you should. Same with radiation, X-rays or pesticides, each will eat away at your ability to live to 90.

We currently have the technology and economics to avoid thimerosals use, perhaps some poorer countries do not. In the West problems only arise when health staff get sloppy and reuse packs or are unable to notice a seal broken during shipment. Blaming such incidents on the FDA not allowing mercury use is incorrect - its plane old management failure, its harder to fix and most of know it too well.

They've always made decisions but courts sometimes crave a level of certainty that science isn't always able to provide and that is where mistakes can be made IMHO. Not that I think this is the case with the MMR vaccine, this issiue IS actually black-and-white. Others are not.

I think problems can arise when the science is new - e.g. shaken baby syndrome. Forensics thought they could tell when babies where being deliberately shaken to death. Unfourtunately they hadn't calibrated their forensic screens against a large enough sample of accidental trauma injuries to be able to distinguish the two - several innocent parents went to jail as a result.

Your a doctor and THAT is your sig? Please tell me your not using slashdot to record experimental subject data.

So what your saying is Facebook should have a downgrade button so you can rank people.

Then come monday morning 190 of your "Friends" would get a little: -1 you've just lost a Friend message. That is so mean, what fun you could have...

Much research has been done by HEREOC (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission) into writing one for Australia. Not sure where it has led or if Rudd wants to introduce it.

Not that the research I saw had provisions for unfiltered interent access - maybe it would be interesting to have a "bill-of-rights" written in the modern age. Can't help thinking in this day of spin that it would largely be a fluff-document.

Although I suppose even after the American bill of rights was written the abolition of slavery remained a century away and the clearances of the Indians wouldn't stop for 200 years. Perhaps all such works start off as shallow and only become meaningful as they are proven useful with time.

Kennedy went through with the bay of pigs invasion but he didn't really orchestrate it did he? It had been planned for some time before he took office.

The fact it wasn't his idea or something he really agreed with was probably a major reason for its failure. If Eisenhower had the time to implement it agressively perhaps it would have worked, or if Kennedy had the guts to back out maybe the missile crisis could have been prevented by other means. Instead...

Surely this will depend on how the future economics will look, if all the worlds wealth stays in the US and Europe then perhaps your point is valid.

But, if some of the poorer parts of the world start getting richer (china, russia, brazil and india) perhaps the hub-model will be valid again, serving to provide the flow of people a multi-polar world power structure will require. I.e. maybe we will need both the A380 and the dreamliner.

The UK should never be used as an example when talking about railway networks.

Something has gone badly wrong with the sector itself. No idea what it is - bad privatisation?, legacy technology?, poor economic incentives? corrupted unions?, shoddy companies?, entrenched interests?, political lobby groups? Whatever it is, the result is your just doing it wrong. Compared to those of western europe my experience of UK trains are that they are slower, more expensive to build and run, more frequently late and unable to deal with weather

In england the problem is implementation not the idea itself nor the technology.

I disagree that terrestrial transport is anywhere near its zenith. I sincerely hope for major improvements in my lifetime.

In terms of environmental efficiency rail travel beats air-travel hands down. It *SHOULD* be the better solution. Power just got entrenched in the wrong hands and those hands stopped innovating. It should have been a perfect innovation playground; rail owns the land the tracks traverse and have complete environment control (no independent vehicles, central control, decimeter scale-knowledge of the route, possibility of total sensor coverage, no dropping out of the sky if the engine cuts).

One of the major economic/political stuff ups of the modern era is the failure of the rail-networks in most countries. At the very least we should be thinking of installing robotic cargo trains with automatic packet-addressing carrages. Parallel to this should be high-speed passanger lines like those in France or Spain (300 km/hr on standard lines with the possibility of 500km/hr maglev). Most countries rail networks are worse than they were in the 1950's.

In the far future tunnel-boring technology should be cheap enough that we can consider vaccum evacuated tunnels spanning the country. At this point rail should be able to retake the speed-records. Economically this will only occur of course if maintaining the tunnel-vaccuum uses less energy than orbital hops.

Maybe we shouldn't consider the airline at fault for not changing seat sizes rather than mainstream america (or UK, or Canada, or Australia) for changing ass sizes.

Damn the FAA for stopping us from smoking and enjoying ourselves on flights!

No wait, the smoke-filled planes really sucked.

Are you sure we aren't looking back with false nostalga, perhaps even getting a bit bigger in the intervening years and confusing that with the seats getting less comfortable?

I think the new tv screens that allow you to choose when you watch a movie or play games are a huge improvement.

Now if only we could have a "parents-only" section.