With some additional analysis not available in the abstract:

https://www.economist.com/fina...

Apologies for the paywall link, but I don't have another source at the moment.

Perhaps you meant ethylene, a relatively harmless compound that is emitted by ripening fruit and stimulates nearby cells to ripen more quickly. This is why it's recommended to ripen certain fruits and vegetables in paper bags (e.g. avocados.)

Phosgene is a chemical warfare agent from World War I. As sinister as some processed foods may be, I'm not sure they're to the point of using MWDs on our food yet...

Stupid expired search result pages. Bill permalink: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:s.00778:

Wrong. This bill was introduced April 1st as S.778 to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

THOMAS link: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d111:10:./temp/~bdcFpU::|/bss/|

Here's Rockefeller's press release: http://rockefeller.senate.gov/press/record.cfm?id=311060&

Run, don't walk, to call your senators.

Nebraska also uses the same method as Maine to distribute their electoral votes. I think that if more states used such a system we would see more 50-state campaigns and platforms, rather than two candidates slugging it out over 1% of the vote in Ohio & Pennsylvania.

See: http://www.fairvote.org/e_college/me_ne.htm

A check on Opensecrets.org shows that for the 2004 election cycle, SBC gave $22,550 to Joe Barton and $15,500 to Fred Upton. SBC was their 2nd and 1st largest single contributors, respectively. Looking at 2006, Comcast and the National Cable & Telecommunications Assn (a cable industry PAC) are heavily contributing to both of their re-election campaigns.

While it might look like this is a feint to extract more contributions in the cable vs. DSL battle, I suspect that cable providers wouldn't mind using this legislation to degrade competing VoIP services either...