"...We.re going to make this much more difficult for you if you don't cooperate"

I wonder if that constitutes a terrorist threat?

Y'know what? Screw'em. I'd post a tear down, then I'd reassemble it and stick it under a long haul trucker's trailer.

The only practical way to do it is to enforce the fact that when someone opts out of paying for a service, they have opted out of receiving that service.

Please tell me you aren't a hospital administrator.

Fortunately, there are laws that force hospitals to provide emergency services. Emergency services shouldn't be a betting game any more than health care. In the case of house fires, I would argue that the only practical way to prevent this situation from happening again is to levy taxes at the state level and pay fire personnel from the state coffers. Allowing a city to refuse to render emergency aid where no other aid is available is criminal.

So much for using humor to make a point...

There comes a point where the rubber must hit the road, and in your case I believe the problem you're having is a lack of proof. Thermal radiation is not Hawking radiation, and Hawking radiation, as opposed to evaporation, should not only be more "noticeable" for tiny black holes, it also becomes more "noticeable" for black holes traveling at relativistic speeds or with an extremely high spin, according to the theory. As for the "imagined scenario", it's imagined because we can't reproduce it -- it is, thus far, a mathematical theorem. And while the LHC has been proposed as a being powerful enough to generate microscopic black holes that would almost immediately evaporate, unless you have some means for generating similar black holes in your shorts, your ass won't produce Hawking Radiation any more than mine does.

The executives of, say, Ford who elected to commit negligent homicide by not fixing a known safety defect should be charged as such.

AMEN! Like the ignition modules that failed while the card was going highway speeds because Ford mounted them closer to the engine to save $4 per car, and even when they realized it was causing DEATHS, they refused to alter the design because it might indicate an admission of liability. That's negligent homicide. The executives that made that decision should have spent time in prison and the company itself should have been heavily fined.

So by your explanation, I give off Hawking radiation just by walking across the room? My understanding of Hawking radiation had to do with more of a shearing effect caused by extreme gravitational conditions parting two virtual particles to result in a single real particle. I'm not sure my ass qualifies as a sufficiently large gravitational well, nor can I picture a pseudo event horizon forming at any distance behind it while I walk.

Al Gore's scare and doom movie caused this.
Lee said at the time that he experienced an "awakening" when he watched former Vice President Al Gore's environmental documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."

Yeah, and David Chapman blamed his murder of John Lennon on "The Catcher in the Rye." We should definitely form our critiques based on the actions of the criminally insane... Like George Bush forming his opinions based on the advice of Karl Rove, for instance...

-- The entire professional news industry & every US reporter, investigator & journalist
-- is a gutless fucking coward for supporting this.

Or, maybe they're not cowardly, they just don't believe in the same things that you do.

No, sorry, I have to agree. Gutless cowards. The truth is, Wikileaks has performed the journalistic task of communicating information to the general public. If there's some kind of generally agreed upon journalistic ethical standard that Wikileaks has violated, I'm not aware of what it would be.

At the end of the day, I'd say the various news rags are just mad they didn't get the scoop, or their corporate bosses are mad that they couldn't squash the story to protect their political propagandist message (cough - Rupert Murdoch - cough).

I accept a certain degree of uninformed idiocy around here, but I will speak up when it is directly in my specialized fields of knowledge.

IANAB (I am not a biologist), but I'm well-read enough to know that "rs79" has no idea what he's talking about. Thank you for speaking up.

Where's the citation?

Hello?

Is this thing on? Is there anyone out there? Hello?

I was thinking the exact same thing, so I looked it up:

"The World Health Organization (WHO) has produced a six-stage classification that describes the process by which a novel influenza virus moves from the first few infections in humans through to a pandemic. This starts with the virus mostly infecting animals, with a few cases where animals infect people, then moves through the stage where the virus begins to spread directly between people, and ends with a pandemic when infections from the new virus have spread worldwide.

"A disease or condition is not a pandemic merely because it is widespread or kills many people; it must also be infectious. For instance, cancer is responsible for many deaths but is not considered a pandemic because the disease is not infectious or contagious."

So "pandemic" doesn't just mean something contagious that's occurring worldwide, otherwise the common cold would have been classified as pandemic throughout recorded history.

And what if you passionately and eloquently communicate your views, and your representative pockets another $5k donation from Comcast and ignores you?

If you're talking directly to your representative at all then you're doing it wrong. You, by yourself, constitute one vote. The folks that started MoveOn.org had the right idea. You get a group together, get funding, circulate a petition, get some air time on the news, and THEN show up at your representative's office with a camera crew. You're not trying to convince your kindly uncle to loan you $5 for popcorn at the movies. You're trying to move the political machine, and no one person or even one small group ever does that. You must create a united movement and use that muscle to move the machine.

It's politics. Learn to play the game or you will lose.

My 10 year old taught herself how to use Powerpoint and now she makes professional looking slide shows about animals as a way of ENTERTAINING HERSELF. She could teach her grandparents how to use Office, if they had the inclination to learn it.

Kids nowadays are growing up surrounded by computers, and their young, pliable minds pick it all up far too easily. A formal class on the subject would only appeal to kids much further down the economic spectrum, the kids whose environments aren't populated with an abundance of electronic devices. How many kids do you know that would be interested in a computer class that taught how to use a keyboard and mouse?

If you're just looking for hobbyist information, try out HackADay.com It's a great jump-off point to sites where people hack all the way down to the metal -- and sometimes even design the metal itself.

The question has been asked a few times in this thread, but I haven't seen it answered yet. I think that while your interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, as it was originally intended, is correct, it does not speak for the current times and needs itself to be amended.

We do not have state militias capable of defending against an invading army. I'm not saying the common citizenry couldn't be roused quickly to offer a respectable defense, but the weapons used nowadays by armies are not accessible by the common man, nor should they be. Perhaps you disagree with that last statement, but then I would ask you, do you actually think that the general public should have unfettered access to the kinds of weapons needed to fend off any army? I would argue that the technology has changed to the extent that giving everyone any weapons they can afford creates a situation where come people will be driving tanks to work and gangs will have rocket launchers.

The original framers were good, reasonable men, but they weren't fortune tellers. I think you're fighting for the wrong thing.

By your logic, people should be allowed to own nuclear weapons!

I'm guessing you spent a lot of time get your butt kicked or sitting alone in your mom's basement. d00d, lighten up. The point of the article is that AI controlled cars are no longer putzing along at 5 miles an hour and doing a poor job of navigating a semi-difficult maze. They are starting to rival stunt car drivers for accuracy and control.

Speaking as a former teenager, if you had parked a car like that while I was in the car, I'd have given a rebel yell and then asked you if I could try it. And if you were stupid enough to let me, I'd probably have jacked your car up. Because that's what real teenage boys do. They're not experienced enough to know what will kill them, they have a sense of immortality, and they do some of the stupidest crap and often get away with it because they don't know how dangerous it really is.