If you remove the subsidies on the coal plants too, coal is way more expensive.

This is a neat idea, but not yet remotely ready to try in people. There were quite significant local infammatory reactions (big lumps!) in some of the mice tested.
There's probably ten years of work, and well north of $150 million dollars before the first human tests.
Good luck!

Gentoo is good, but only if
1) you can follow instructions with religious fervour until you know what you are doing (i.e. go line by lein throught the install guide!)
2) First download and burn a rescue CD (gentoo itself will do) and make sure that it boots your hardware.
3) You don't mind spending about half an hour a week updating stuff - this is half an hour of your time, the PC will take several hours a week updating stuff.

Gentoo is much easier to use than it was five years ago, and you will learn a lot, but you have to want to. If you don't then try Debian or Ubuntu - which are also very fine distributions, but will not require you to learn a lot of stuff. Gentoo will.

It's not promsicuous and monogamous mice, it's about a relatively promsicuous species of mouse, and a diffferent, relatively monogamous, species of mouse. These different species have different immune systems. It shows less about mice, than about wishful thinking...

This was a cross-sectional survey of schoolchildren. It tells you nothing about the direction of causation. Maybe using Facebook and texting a lot does indeed cause early sex, drug use and drinking. Maybe kids who use drugs, drink and have sex, use Facebook more to tell others about it,and text a lot to arrange their busy social lives. Most likely, kids who have sex, drink and drugs, have significant major issues in their lives already, and may be using texting and Facebook as alternative (or additional) coping strategies.

Nothing to see here, pass along please.

Kids who text all the time and live (sort of) on Facebook or Bebo may well be kids who already have problems. This study is a survey of schoolkids at point in time, and does not provide any data on whether early sex and drugs cause Facebook, Facebook causes early sex and drugs, or, most likely, both reflect existing issues facing the kids. Indeed texting and Facebook are likely better coping strategies than sex and drugs, though perhpas les immediately enjoyable.

Pass along please, nothing to see here.
 

From our perspective (I'm a health policy person based in Europe), US health care is staggeringly expensive, very variable, and very unfair. It's the single biggest cause of personal bankruptcy in the States.

Your health is poor, overall, especially you have poor child health, and relatively poor maternal and infant health.

A large part of your population have no access to good quality health care, and this imposes large costs on your society.

Your major companies find high health care costs for staff a major burden, and this sharply reduces the competitiveness of good US employers.

You have the highest administrative costs for heath care that I know of, now running over 30%, and at current rates of increase, in thirty years you will be spending 100% of your GDP on health services.
At the top end, there is no better health care anywhere for acute illnesses, but very few people can access this.

The proposed changes are a start, and only a start. With no public option, there is a real risk that the insurance companies will continue to combine together to rip you off. However, the current proposals will save a lot of money over the next decade, which is why the insurance companies are spending millions buying ads, and influencing politicians to stop the change.

I hope it passes!

I manage all my home directories with Unison, including 80Gig of pictures across Linux and Windows. The only issue I've noticed is that for single files over 1G it gets slow, so I split up my thunderbird folders to get under this. Everything else just works.

I work with a Government agency in Ireland, (I work for a university to avoid confusion). We developed a really innovative information system with them, a web-based system which allows flexible mapping, GIS work, sophisticated calculations, open ended queries, loads of pre-specified reports and more. It is entirely open source.

It would have been economically unfeasible, and, I think, technically impossible, with closed source software.

The developers were paid, and are still being paid, quite a large amount of money to build this for us, maintain it, and keep it moving forwards. My view is that give great value for money. All the stuff they develop for us is GPLed.

This seems like quite a viable model to me. What's not viable is the 'write a better video-processor' model which you describe. You need to work with your clients, support them in improving productivity, ease of use, cool new features, whatever it is they need for their business.

Good luck,

Anthony Staines