Given that the only thing the TSA can possibly achieve is keeping people from traveling, I don't see how they could have a radically different metric of success.

I suspect, though, that instead of "people" they meant and/or said "terrorists" or "people without identification". Which, since they are charged with keeping terrorists and unidentifiable people off planes, is exactly success for the TSA.

Don't like it? Petition Congress to change the TSA's mandate.

First, this is "secure zone" theory. A zone is either secure or not, so if something "insecure" gets into the secure zone, it immediately flips and needs to be sterilized. May seem like an overreaction to you right now, but I'd bet $1,000 (sorry, the economy has reduced my hypothetical betting cash) that if we were not doing that you'd be hearing about it all over Fox "news".

Second, the Underwear Bomber didn't board anywhere in the purview of our TSA. Obviously no matter how stringent our TSA policies are, they aren't going to keep the Nigerian airport security up to par. We're exerting some diplomatic efforts to get airports which send planes into the US to step up their security after this, but that's not the TSA, that's the State Department.

Third, you are hearing Napolitano's statement out of context, and showing that Fox "news" (hey, the quotes are there at the request of Murdoch himself, who says there are something like 1.5 hours per day of news news on Fox "news" and the rest is just opinion and talk radio fodder) is your main information source. Specifically, she was talking about the reaction AFTER the plane landed. TSA security was tightened in anticipation of a second phase to a planned attack (which never came, thankfully).

Fourth, I agree the TSA's procedures are generally useless and security theater rather than real security. Has nothing to do with the Underwear Bomber incident (again, no TSA involvement there at all until after the fact), but does pertain to the focus of this article.

I don't see it in Google's direct statements, but Mossberg and the NYTimes both said the current phone will not work on Verizon, so if you want to use it on Verizon you'll need to wait and buy the Verizon model.

I suspect that if the Verizon model supports GSM and CDMA Google will have a bunch of ticked off T-Mobile customers (for not giving them the ability to go to Verizon later on without rebuying new hardware ...)

So, the "turn around and cancel" option is $179 + $350 ... for a net price of $529. Identical to the "just buy it unlocked" price.

Seems like a 100% reasonable ETF to me (far moreso than Verizon's ETF of twice the phone "discount" to cover "phone assistance" and "network upgrades" per their statement to the FTC).

Wouldn't you use GoogleVoice instead of the talk minutes when calling? I thought that was one of the draws of Google's Android (although I haven't gone deep enough into the release info to see if it's still there).

As for the plan being different with the phone than without, T-Mobile is taking $350 off the price of the phone for your 2-year commitment plus the extra $20/month (the plan with unlimited data, as with the Nexus One plan, is $59/mo, $20 less than the N1 plan). I dunno, sounds like a really bad deal, but might appeal to those who absolutely have to have a phone now and have $200 to spend but not $600 to spend. Note that T-Mobile usually tacks on $10/month for non-contract plans, but the contract plans on their site don't appear to offer unlimited data, so there's no apples-to-apples comparison.

By making more energy-efficient products, reducing energy waste in storage and transmission, and sourcing the energy from sustainable/renewable energy sources.

Oil is a geo-thermal byproduct? No, it's a geothermal+plant byproduct. The question is not what is "natural", but rather what is sustainable and renewable.

Oil is not being created in the earth at anywhere near the rate we are consuming it; we have blazed through millions of years of production in a few short centuries! Maybe we should look into enhancing the production of oil? Bury more plants? Yeah, that will make sense, and allow the humans living 100,000 years from now to get a little bump in oil capacity. I'm pretty sure that's too late, though.

I'm not sure what you mean by your "rare-earth allocations" parenthetical, but in terms of being sustainable, yes, that is absolutely more efficient. In terms of energy efficiency, small-engine burning of hydrocarbons is highly inefficient. Doesn't entirely make up for power losses during transmission, but it comes pretty darned close. Unless you start by factoring in the "efficiency" of how much wind energy is captured by a particular wind turbine, which is nonsensical (yeah, 0.01% of the wind's energy is captured, but that's both the point and irrelevant given the abundance of the wind).

Also, you "hand-waved" away carbon sequestration: will that NOT affect the efficiency of small internal combustion engines? Presumably you are imagining some sort of a system which will capture all the CO2 going out the tailpipe like catalytic converters work on Nitrous oxides to send out N2? I'm not sure. CO2 is highly stable, moreso than the various nitruous oxides, and it will take more than a simple catalyst to "onburn" it down to pure carbons; even if such a thing existed, you then have to deal with accumulation and elimination of that quantity (which wouldn't necessarily affect overall efficiency if it happens at the same time you pump gas, but if you are allowing it to accumulate and get cleaned out every year or six months on an oil-change-like schedule, you'll have problems).

Also, you didn't speak of liquid hydrocarbon efficiency losses just from transport and storage: we put a lot of complex hydrocarbons into the air just by evaporation while moving it from refinery to motor cylinder. Obviously this has environmental impact, but if we put environmental blinders on and just assume someone will solve that problem for us, it also equates to a few additional percentage points of energy lost.

Also, you didn't speak of liquid hydrocarbon refining losses. Those oil refineries don't run on hopes and wishes: they take a significant amount of energy (both in the form of electricity and in the form of burned product). They also don't start with one barrel of oil and output precisely the cuts of gasoline and jet fuel the consumers want: there is energy wasted there due to marketability and by-product production (by-products which are significantly less in-demand than the main products ... which is why they are called by-products ...)

Ummm ... because that wasn't the original claim. But, yes, you are correct: the anti-immunization crowd are also pretty significant indicators of a propensity to take cult and predetermined beliefs over science. Not sure how the US fares there relative to other developed nations, though. On the moon data ... never heard that one before. The 2012 movie? Likewise never heard masses of people claiming it's a believable or even relevant depiction of anything (the 2012 mythos in general is more pervasive than I'd like, but given that it's time-based and not gaining momentum I'd rather just wait it out and see it disappear completely in 2013 than rail against it now).

That wasn't the point of the original poster (who was not me, by the way). Understanding and acceptance of Evolution (not "Darwinism" ... I'm not sure how you define such a term, but it seems to denote adherence to the theory of Evolution as originally espoused by Darwin, whereas Evolution is a living theory which has grown significantly since Darwin's work on it ... and I'd rather not overly revere any particular scientist; I don't speak of the General Theory of Relativity as "Einsteinism" either) is a bellwether for the society's relationship between science and religion. AND, unlike most other scientific theories which people find inconsistent with their beliefs, there is good data on how people see Evolution.

You are correct in saying that correlation does not imply causation. I'm not sure of the point you are trying to make there, either in response to what I wrote or what "Zombie Ryushu" wrote before. Apparently I am just as dense as you think. Please expound on that.

Well, you asked nicely, so I'll have to address this.

I'm not sure what statistics you are using to say that fewer people in the US believe in literal interpretations of religion today than before. Can I just say "Bible" here, since the topic of this was Christianity? I'd be interested in seeing the numbers, but I suspect it really depends on how you define "literal interpretations". If you go back to our Deist Founding Fathers (note that Deism would have no problem at all with evolution), you wouldn't see many examples of literalism. On the other hand, I imagine the general hoi polloi of the nation had generally different views on religion than the more "elite" political class.

In general, though, I don't see anecdotal evidence matching up to your claim of religious fundamentalism being at an all-time low in the US. LDS (Mormon) rosters are at an all-time high in the US, and their beliefs are highly fundamentalist. You can also see dramatic rises in both "Born-again Christian" and "Non-Denominational Christian" responses to the ARIS surveys (going up 294% and 4,040%, respectively, from 1990 to 2008), both of which tend to be highly fundamentalist in nature (moreso than the more "mainstream" established churches, both in teaching and in the resoluteness of their followers).

IMHO, the main thing to look at in terms of religious fundamentalism is in relation to the rest of the world. This is important because your statement of a decline of science (not just "your" statement, but the whole premise of this discussion) is in relation to the rest of the world. Taken as an internal absolute, more people believe more things about science in the US today than any other time of our history, and we as a collective know more about the world through science than we have ever known before. But, in relation to other countries, we can see that the US is making fewer scientific advances than the rest of the world, so what are the possible causes of that?

While religious literalism (which the OP exemplified with the Evolution/Creationism "debate") may be at an all-time low in the US (your claim; I haven't the figures to prove or refute it), relative to the rest of the world, the US has one of the absolute highest levels of literalism. This has NOT always been the case, and is a rather recent (as in, last 20 years) development. It's not so much that the US has seen a dramatic resurgence of fundamentalism (although I believe we have seen that, if not in % of population then in rigidity of belief), but moreso that the rest of the world has become less fundamentalist (certain areas excluded, of course). This make the US "literalism" measurement stick out amongst the other western nations, and even amongst the world nations taken as a whole.

Here's an article discussing this, along with pretty bar graphs. You'll see that the only western nation with less acceptance of evolution than the US is Turkey. You'll also note that the researchers for that report claim that the acceptance of evolution in the US has decline in the past 20 years.

From the article above (where the "first" and "second" reasons the researchers found to explain the odd low ranking of the US were a fundamentalist tradition and Republican politicization of the issue):

I thought we were debating the idea of a Thorium-based reactor initiative (necessarily creating new power plants) versus creating new Uranium-based power plants.

I agree: if the alternative to a new Thorium-based reactor is expanding capacity on outdated Gen-2 Uranium plants, then the safety question is heavily in favor of the new design.

Obviously a Thorium reactor should be cheaper to build in terms of footprint, location, and mass of systems (no remote locations, no massive water towers, etc), but currently makes up for that by expensive new technology, and will for the foreseeable future (until we've made a hundred of them). In that incrementalist short-term future, it seems the three options (new Thorium reactor, new Uranium reactor, new spark plugs and shiny hub caps in the old Uranium reactors) should all be weighed as options, and the middle option isn't price-prohibitive.

So far as what has been commissioned: I see that as an unfairly narrow view. Look instead to what we should be commissioning in the future.

Yeah. And when 1% of all people in the US had computers, we were kings of the world. And when 50% of us lived in dirt-floored shacks and 90% were educated in one-room schools we were an up-and-comer on the world stage, poised for greatness.

The problem with your observation is that you leave out the simple fact that the evidence for evolution, and the global acceptance of it, have both increased by an order of magnitude more than US acceptance of that theory. THAT is what indicates our civilization is circling the drain. When the rest of the world can accept scientific truths and you are holding on to your superstitions afraid the truth might shake your blind faith, you are circling a very dark and lonely drain.

How about, "the company that basically 'won' the last decade spent big and smart on R&D in the 2001-2002 dot-com crash."

ref: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123819035034460761.html

You don't get iPods and iPhones without research money.

... which was fairly easy given that the German and Italian governments were practically tossing their rockstars out (with small exceptions given to those whose theories consistently conformed to the state Master Race theories and politics).

Seems like what we really need to return to our state of brilliance is for some major international superpower to decide that it no longer cares about science or technology except insofar as the science's theories support or can be twisted to support the state-sanctioned superstitions.

Oh yeah. That was us last decade. Oops.

And yet, H1-B increases supply for engineers while increasing demand for lawyers. Funny, that.

(Really, I'm just jousting ... I'm all for getting brilliant engineers over here to compete with me; makes competing much easier for me on a personal level than moving the entire operation to India and have me compete remotely with $100/day workers.)

I think the truth is more glaring: With 5% of the world population, unless you lead in science you simply can't expect to be the world leader at much of anything.

I think the main argument against Thorium is that it isn't Uranium. While that may seem specious, the argument has some merit: we have a large body of knowledge in dealing with Uranium. We'll end up finding issues with large-scale Thorium reactors, just as we did when going from Uranium prototypes to large-scale Gen-2 reactors in the 1950s.

Of course, the other potential problem is the geographic dispersion of the mineral. Australia and India are the big winners there, although with the US coming in fourth (after Norway) so far as we know today, it's a bit better distribution than we have with oil (Uranium leaves the US as #8 in the world, but Canada is #1 by a long shot, and I think the US is more comfortable with that than with India in a similar position). Of course, the problem with this is that it's really a big unknown because we haven't really been looking for it.

Not to say we shouldn't do it, given all the benefits. But let's not fool ourselves into believing that it's a so-obvious-we-should-have-done-it-yesterday solution.

Two corrections:

1. Hydrogen also exists in molecular form requiring extraction. Palladium membranes, if they ever become commercially feasible, can pull hydrogen out of atmospheric air with very little energy input. But, by and large, the only reliable way of getting hydrogen for mass fuel use is by electrolysis (splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen), which necessarily takes more energy than combining it back again (damned entropy!)

2. The natural sources of energy include coal, oil and gas reserves (tertiary sources), but also direct sources solar energy, wind, geothermal, and secondary sources - biofuels. Moving from tertiary to secondary or primary sources (wind is kinda a secondary source, but doesn't quite fit with the biofuels) reduces the impact of the use of the energy, increases the amount of energy available, and keeps us "within budget" because we can't use tomorrow's sunlight today (while we can obviously use all the oil in the earth).