Well I sure hope so and without the tragically fatal explosion that killed three people the last time. While interested in space technology and what's going on, I've no interest in a trip to space myself.
The competition:EADS Astrium, no stranger to space inovation, builder of satellites and satellite engines plans to start a one stage tourism system this year that will take people into space. Unlike Virgin Galactic this one stage system will take off and land from an airport. If started on schedule, the first commercial flight would be possible by 2012. However Virgin Galactic has a few years head start on Astrium.
Can't say I understand why guys want to hang rubber testicles from their hitch, but I see no harm. To each his own or different strokes and all that. It must be a testosterone thing because I can't see a woman hanging a rubber vagina from her vehicle.
Virginia State Del. Lionel Spruill introduced a bill to ban displaying replicas of *snark* human genitalia on vehicles. His reason, a safety issue because it could distract other drivers. Truck drivers would risk a $250 fine under his proposal.
Tasha Maltby doesn't mind, nor does she mind the weird stares.
"I am a pet, I generally act animal like and I lead a really easy life," she said.
"I don't cook or clean and I don't go anywhere without Dani. It might seem strange but it makes us both happy. It's my culture and my choice. It isn't hurting anyone."
Last month, with Miss Maltby on a leash as usual, the couple tried to board a bus at the bus station.
The driver, who was off duty, was standing near the door.
Mr Graves alleged: "He shoved me off the bus. He called us freaks and he called Tasha a dog.
"He said, 'We don't let freaks and dogs like you on'. ....
In a separate incident, police were called when the driver, who has not been named, refused to allow other passengers on board after the couple ignored his orders and sat down.
But according to a Reuters report, the bus firm Arriva has apologized.
Arriva would not comment on specifics but said it apologised if the couple felt they had been discriminated against. It added, however, that the driver was worried about safety and the company told Maltby to take the leash off in the future.
"We have spoken to the driver who has talked about health and safety," a spokesman said. "Should she be attached to a chain and something happens on the bus, that could be dangerous. All we are saying is that she is very welcome to use the buses but not when she is on her lead."
I just don't know what to say about this other that I'm shocked. Look I don't care what drugs adults do, but if your going to tax it, for gods sake make it legal first.
Spitzer, in his 2008-09 budget proposal unveiled Tuesday, said he wants to create a tax stamp for illegal drugs, similar to such stamps used for cigarettes, which he says would raise $13 million in the coming fiscal year and $17 million annually after that.
According to a memo explaining the eyebrow-raising proposal, "The bill contains a unique and strict secrecy requirement, preserving the confidentiality of any information obtained from a dealer."
Disclosure of the information in some cases would be allowed for a criminal or civil proceeding involving taxes.
But "the bill specifically provides that none of the information may be used against the dealer in any criminal proceeding [other than a tax crime] unless it has been obtained independently," the memo said.
Dubbing it the "crack tax," state Sen. Martin Golden, a Brooklyn Republican and former city cop, called Spitzer's plan "another pie-in-the-sky idea that really has no legitimacy, and hopefully is not a first step toward legalizing drugs."
The plan, modeled after one in North Carolina, would require arrested drug dealers or users to purchase different tax stamps from the state.
Tennessee enacted a similar provision that brought in nearly $2 million dollars. The tax is supposed to go towards fighting drugs, but the article fails to mention the success in that area.
What next? I have it, a bomb tax with a strict secrecy requirement, preserving the confidentiality of any information obtained from a terrorist.
It seems that past techniques haven't been working well garnering support for tactics to stave off climate change. The alarmists are switching to more dire scare tactics, saying that are armed forces, police, and security services face may face future strain.
LONDON, Jan 24 (Reuters) - Security forces round the world will face tough new challenges as climate change unleashes violent storms, raises sea levels and causes floods and famines, a new report said on Thursday.
Up to 200 million people could become environmental refugees by the middle of the century, bringing to one billion the number of people displaced by conflicts, natural disasters and large development projects, the Oxford Research Group report said.
"It is crucial that governments begin to take steps now towards developing effective policy solutions for the police, security services and military to help them adapt to the new and changing demands," said author Chris Abbott.
"However, they must resist the temptation to use force to try and control insecurity and maintain the status quo. In this instance, prevention really is the only cure," he added.
The Oxford Research Group is an independent think-tank that regularly issues reports on global security issues. Abbott's report is titled "An uncertain future -- law enforcement, national security and climate change."
To back their theory the use the worst temperature increase numbers (1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius) to lend credibility. What they don't say is that those numbers are highly disputable and far from proven with data.
Wisconsin presently has the best health care in the country. Doyle as well as many in Wisconsin state government want to change that. Why? Because they are not much interested in improving health care, only universal coverage. Simply saying that everyone has health insurance is meaningless if it isn't quality care. Making health care free (at least for lower income people) is worth many votes at election time.
If really you think universal coverage is good, look at the waiting lines in Canada. Britain has universal coverage too, but almost 900,000 are waiting for admission to NHS hospitals, with the shortage of care the cause of more that 50,000 operations canceled every year. Sweden has universal health care, but if you need heart surgery the wait can take as long as 25 weeks. Universal Health care is substandard health care in any country around the world that has implemented it.
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2006 found that while many Americans were not getting a high standard of care, whether or not they had insurance was largely unrelated to the quality of care. Which do you think is less expensive, having the cost of treating the poor passed along to us in higher taxes, or the bureaucracy of government managed health care?
Wise up people. Universal health care does not mean universal access. Access to a list IS NOT access to health care. What universal health care access does mean is access to less quality health care, because that kind of care is rationed health care. Maybe while you wait you should consider how much chronic pain you can stand.
Please watch this five and a half minute video clip.
A Short Course in Brain Surgery
It seems that there should be something workable without resorting to government run health care which has been a proven failure. Retail clinics are springing up around the nation, and offering easier access to high-quality care at better prices than hospitals and affiliated clinics.
One of the most promising developments is the emergence of retail-based "convenient care" clinics that are providing consumers with easier access to high-quality, routine health care at affordable prices. There are about 400 such clinics today and could be several thousand more in the next few years, but their growth is being threatened by burdensome regulations in some states and opposition from some corners of organized medicine.
Convenient care clinics are small health-care facilities with new brand names like RediClinic, MinuteClinic, and Take Care Health Clinics. Most are located in high-traffic retail outlets with pharmacies, such as Wal-Mart, CVS and Walgreen stores. Regional health-care systems have also opened retail-based clinics in their service areas, either directly or in partnerships with independent operators. These clinics generally are staffed by certified nurse practitioners who diagnose, treat and prescribe medications for a limited set of common ailments, such as strep throat and ear infections. They also administer health screenings, medical tests, immunizations, basic physical exams and other preventive care.
Convenient care clinics have been embraced by consumers, who give them consistently high marks for patient satisfaction: 97% of the more than 4,000 RediClinic patients surveyed this year said they would recommend RediClinic to their relatives and friends. This is because the clinics are delivering something that is all too rare in our system — convenient and affordable health care.
The quality of care at convenient care clinics stems from their use of nationally certified nurse practitioners, who are registered nurses with master's degrees or comparable advanced training. Research over the past 30 years has consistently shown that the primary care provided by nurse practitioners is comparable in quality to that provided by physicians, though nurse practitioners are still required to collaborate with local physicians in most states.
Patients who have conditions that are outside of convenient care clinics' limited scope of practice, or who need ongoing care, are referred to local physicians, and nurse practitioners use evidence-based treatment protocols and electronic medical-record systems to standardize care and facilitate continuity of care when other clinicians are involved. According to a recent study conducted by the RAND Corporation, Americans receive evidence-based care only 55% of the time at conventional health-care delivery outlets. MinuteClinic's recent analysis of 58,000 sore-throat cases seen at their clinics showed that the diagnosis and treatment conformed to evidence-based guidelines 99.15% of the time.
Convenience is assured through the location of the sites and the fact that they are open seven days a week, including extended hours on weekdays. No appointments are necessary, and visits take only about 15 minutes due to the clinics' limited set of services. The clinics' location in stores with pharmacies provides additional convenience because patients can go across the aisle to get their prescriptions filled rather than having to make separate trips for this purpose.
The problem is that regulations on retail convenient care clinics varies state to state, and many states are trying to at least regulate if not eliminate them. Recently on this forum I posted about Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino trying to block retailers from opening medical clinics inside stores in Massachusetts, contending that making money off of sick people is wrong. I have to wonder if he thinks doctors should work for gratis. The American Medical Association is pushing for government intervention to reduce the spread of retail convenient care clinics.
I guess I have ranted long enough on this, but it really bothers me that people do not understand the dangers of government managed health care.
This is a nice player I came across. It has just about any public domain song ever published. You can search by artist or song title, but best of all it's free.
You can get your own at Dizzler.com (Free registration). But it's not only for playing music. You can search YouTube and other internet videos.
Embed it for use it on your website, or download the desktop version. If you use it on your desktop you can also listen to radio stations, or play the many included games.
The skin is fully customizable, meaning that you can just change skins, or change individual parts of the skin's image (like changing buttons, images, menus etc).
Just plug in a domain or IP and they will list all the neighbors on your physical server drive. This blog is shared with 109 other domains. That is relatively small compared to some I have checked. My fourm server with HostGator is shared with 336 others.
However without knowing the physical size of the drive in the server, how many neighbors on your drive is rather ambiguous. Besides server load comes more from CPU and memory load than from storage room.
ST. CHARLES, Mo. - What the ...? A St. Louis-area town is considering a bill that would ban swearing in bars, along with table-dancing, drinking contests and profane music.
City officials contend the bill is needed to keep rowdy crowds under control because the historic downtown area gets a little too lively on some nights.
City Councilman Richard Veit said he was prompted to propose the bill after complaints about bad bar behavior. He says it will give police some rules to enforce when things get too rowdy.
If crowds get too lively and needing control, why not just arrest, and charge them with sane ordiances, like disturbing the peace or disorderly conduct?
WTF!? Excuse my skepticism, but I think most police officers hearing someone swear in a bar will think of this ordinance (assuming it would pass), chuckle and move on.
On a related note, this article reminded me of a video clip I saw recently.
Personally I think the world needs more moms like this. Jane Hambleton placed an ad and sold her 19 year old son Steven's car after finding booze under the front seat.
"OLDS 1999 Intrigue. Totally uncool parents who obviously don't love teenage son, selling his car. Only driven for three weeks before snoopy mom who needs to get a life found booze under front seat. $3,700/offer. Call meanest mom on the planet."
Steven said it was a friend who left the booze in the car not him. Tough luck I say. Mom and her son received offers to do a show from Good Morning America, Oprah Winfrey, and Ellen DeGeneres.
And while Mom likes Oprah, Steven loves Ellen, and Mom was inclined to give this one to her son, considering she had taken away his car and all.
They were going back to Iowa to sort it all out, and were unreachable yesterday.
All of which proved one thing: America needed this. Oh boy, did we need this kind of tough love, the kind that says, "I am not your friend. I am your mother. Eat your peas. Now."
The mom was perfectly with in her rights to sell the car because she bought it for him to begin with at Thanksgiving time, and set forh two rules. No Booze, and Keep It Locked.
I have watched each of these Video's carefully, and before they are banned you may want to download them for your own purposes, but this crack all started with the Cartoons, and this major break at the Islamic Conference is an eye opener.
Below is a video clip released by the Navy of five Iranian fast boats surrounding three US warships, last Sunday, in the Strait of Hormuz.
In an in your face confrontation it would take a lot more than 5 Iranian fast boats, even against one US warship. Still it isn't a laughing matter as I remember the USS Cole.
By a 74-24 vote, the Senate approved a proposal by Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., prohibiting the Transportation Department from spending money on a North American Free Trade Agreement pilot program giving Mexican trucks greater access to U.S. highways.
The proposal is part of a $106 billion transportation and housing spending bill that the Senate hopes to vote on later this week. The House approved a similar provision to Dorgan's in July as part of its version of the transportation spending bill.
As if it wasn't bad enough to give Mexican trucks free reign on our roads, the Bush administration wanted to use tax dollars to improve the roads.
Now the Bush administration is going ahead with the plan anyway, suggesting a loophole in that the ban by Congress, which prohibits the government from spending money to "establish" the program. The government says the new rules don't apply since the current program started prior to the ban.
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is going ahead with a controversial pilot program giving Mexican trucks greater access to U.S. highways despite a new law by Congress against it.
The decision to proceed with the four-month-old program, which allows participating Mexican trucking companies to send loads throughout the United States, comes despite language in a recently signed spending bill aimed at blocking it.
The Department of Transportation is taking advantage of a loophole in the new law, which prohibits the government from spending money to "establish" the program. The government says the new rules don't apply since the current program started in September.
WTF is wrong with this picture? Bush isn't stupid, and knows that it will be a boon to illegal border crossing, not to mention terrorists. Who does he owe that he is willing to wave a dismissive hand at our national security, and the problem with illegal immigration?
Forget megapixels, how about 3 billion pixels (I guess that would be 3000 mexapixels).
Bill Gates and ex-Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi have donated a combined $30 million to the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which will feature the largest digital camera ever constructed. Scientists say it will provide a "color movie" of the universe.
The donation will go partly to the construction of LSST's three giant mirrors, which will enable it to survey more of the sky faster than any other telescope. With its three-billion pixel camera, the telescope will produce 30 terabytes of images that will be immediately available to the public online.
"LSST is truly an internet telescope, which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone that wants to explore it," said Gates, who donated $10 million to the project. "The 8.4 meter LSST telescope (is) the ultimate network peripheral device to explore the universe."
Gates and Simonyi join Google as major tech industry backers of the LSST. The telescope is a showcase for demonstrating how computing power can enable scientific advances. By using three mirrors instead of two, the telescope will image more than 50 times the amount of sky as other telescopes. Its speed and wide field will allow scientists to constantly scan the sky, turning out time-lapse movies of the dynamic universe surrounding us. The ability to quickly detect changes in the sky will help scientists spot asteroids, like the one that might strike Mars this month, which scientists fear could also hit Earth with disastrous consequences.
But it won't be only heavyweight physicists who can explore the telescope's unprecedented abilities. The open-source nature of the project means that amateur astronomers will be able to harness one of the most remarkable datasets in the world, looking for comets, asteroids, supernovae and other phenomena.
The article goes on to say that Google will be mapping the universe as they now map the Earth. The downside is that it isn't scheduled for completion until 2014.
RIAA is getting pretty nasty, and may just end up shooting themselves in the foot. In a panic mode they are going after their own customers, instead of finding ways to embrace digital technology in this new age.
Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.
The industry's lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are "unauthorized copies" of copyrighted recordings.
What next, one player per DVD? Buy another DVD to play in your car instead of using the one you play in your home?
In an in your face confrontation it would take a lot more than 5 Iranian fast boats, even against one US warship. Still it isn't a laughing matter as I remember the USS Cole.
