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Remember back to the beginning of the long, long idiocy of passing Obamacare: the talking points of the day were to make sure that the 30-45 million uninsured were provided with health insurance.
Washington Times) Congress‘ official scorekeeper said Wednesday that 30 million people will be uninsured when President Obama’s health care law goes fully into effect, including six million Americans who are expected to pay a tax penalty — about two million more than originally forecast when the law was passed in 2010.
“For years, the president and his Democrat allies in Congress have sworn up and down that failing to comply with the individual mandate did not result in a tax on individuals or families,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican. “Now the nonpartisan CBO makes clear that the tax will hit 6 million Americans — mainly middle-class individuals and families.”
So, what you have is a system that will actually reduce care for Americans, bring rationing to the country, put more money in the hands of the Central Government through taxes/penalties, cause employers to dump their insurance plans, put government in charge of quite a few American’s health plans, and, still not cover the people the legislation was supposed to cover.
... Continued cartoon by Lisa http://bitly.com/PZGDmX
The software for the PC upgrade is will soon be entering beta testing. In the meantime I wanted to address some questions and list some interesting new features in Politicollision’s upcoming upgrade.
First, let’s talk about features. PC is going to have some major updates to bring it up to speed with some of the latest trends. If I was to try to list out all of the new features and bug fixes, this page would seemingly go on for ages so here is an abbreviated list of some of the features I am most excited about.
• Responsive Design. I want to present a beautiful browsing experience no matter what device you are viewing the site on. The Bootstrap-based front end and admin templates will accommodate computer, tablet, and mobile screens.
• Up + Down Voting. The new default voting method for PC is through up and down buttons.
• Infinite Scrolling. Why lose visitors by making them click through pagination links to continue reading? The new infinite scrolling feature (optional) will automatically load the next page’s content when you approach the bottom of a page.
• Multiple Level Commenting. Continue the discussion with as many levels of sub-comments that you need.
• Comment Permalinks. Similar to Reddit.com, you can now link to the start of a specific comment thread.
• Improved User Profiles. User profile pages will now feature Skype, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest links.
• Change Authors. Want to attribute an article to another member? Edit the author from the edit story page.
• Maintenance Mode. Similar to WordPress’ method, display a message to non-admin users when you need to temporarily bring your site down for maintenance.
• Password Reset Method. PC now emails you a link so that you can choose the new password when you forget it.
More information to follow as it comes available.
Throughout Australia, a tiny wasp stings and paralyzes redback spiders before laying an egg that develops into a larva and slowly devours the dangerous arachnids, Australian researchers have announced.
The find is good news for Australians watching out for the redbacks, a type of spider whose bite can potentially be lethal.
The wasp was first described scientifically in 1775 by a Danish entomologist, thanks to samples collected in 1768 in Australia by Captain James Cook. But since then, "scientists have largely forgotten about the wasp," said professor Andy Austin, a researcher at Australia's University of Adelaide, in a statement.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Twinkling city lights, raging wildfires and colorful auroras are lit up in new dazzling nighttime views of the Earth.
The new images released Wednesday are courtesy of a newly launched NASA-NOAA satellite that's equipped with a sensor to observe the planet at night.
There's the Nile River bathed in city lights. A map of the United States shows the populated East Coast illuminated. Light from fishing boats can be pinpointed.
The satellite also captured the glow from natural sources including moonlight, northern lights and naturally-occurring fires.
After Superstorm Sandy made landfall in late October, hard-hit New Jersey, lower Manhattan and the Rockaways appeared dark in the satellite images compared with surrounding areas — the result of widespread power outages.
Antarctica gained 140,000 km² of ice overnight, to reach the sixth highest daily area ever recorded. Another day like today, and tomorrow will break the all-time record for most sea ice ever measured at either pole.
As a Petty Officer on active duty in the U.S. Navy, Nick Hair spent nine consecutive months living on a ship the size of a city with 4,000 sailors on round-the-clock shifts. He slept in a room stuffed with 100 other people and longed for the days he spent hiking in the woods and running in wide fields back home near Westchester, New York.
They've found life in Antarctica's Lake Vida!
ABSTRACT
The permanent ice cover of Lake Vida (Antarctica) encapsulates an extreme cryogenic brine ecosystem (−13 °C; salinity, 200). This aphotic ecosystem is anoxic and consists of a slightly acidic (pH 6.2) sodium chloride-dominated brine. Expeditions in 2005 and 2010 were conducted to investigate the biogeochemistry of Lake Vida’s brine system.[...]
The link is to the Abstract. A pdf of the full paper is at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/11/21/1208607109.full.pdf+html
A U.N. conference that kicked off today in Dubai has sparked fear of Internet censorship in the U.S. -- something U.S. Ambassador Terry Kramer said he is doing everything in his power to prevent.
“Nothing regarding the Internet do we want subject to U.N. review and regulation,” Kramer told FoxNews.com.
Monday marked the first day of an 11-day conference. Kramer, who leads the U.S. delegation at the conference, said that the first day had “gone well” and so far delegates are “still in the early stage, talking about what should be reviewed when.” No specific regulations have been debated yet.
But regulations likely to come up soon are far reaching with signification ramifications, ranging from changes to the way web addresses like ".com" are distributed to charging websites for sending information (for example, a company like Google or Amazon could be required to pay cable companies a charge every time someone used their site.)
“[Proposals] on content review and on pricing the transfer of content, which would essentially tax the Internet… we are actively opposing those,” Kramer said.
While almost all of the U.N. meeting is secret, many documents have leaked, including one proposal from the Russian delegation declaring "the sovereign right … to regulate the national Internet segment."
It echoes a call from Russian President Vladimir Putin last year calling for “global control over such [Internet] exchange. This is certainly a priority on the international agenda.”
Kramer said the Russian proposal worried him
North Korea’s latest satellite-carrying rocket is sitting on the launch pad, and now reportedly just needs to be fueled. But the last time North Korea tried to send a satellite into orbit, the rocket blew up after 90 seconds and crashed into the sea. Will Pyongyang repeat and succeed this time? Maybe. But don’t hold your breath.
FTA: "A lack of exercise is now causing as many deaths as smoking across the world, a study suggests.
The report, published in the Lancet to coincide with the build-up to the Olympics, estimates that about a third of adults are not doing enough physical activity, causing 5.3m deaths a year.
That equates to about one in 10 deaths from diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and breast and colon cancer.
Researchers said the problem was now so bad it should be treated as a pandemic."
In study, by two UCLA researchers, found that female politicians with what are described as stereotypically feminine features tended to be Republicans, and the reverse was also true for Democratic women. GOP women rated, on average, twice as stereotypically feminine as Democrats.
In fact, the authors said the correlation was so strong that undergraduates were regularly able to guess someone's party affiliation just by the way she looked.
In one of the last updates before the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) shuts down until 2015, CERN has announced that its observation of the Higgs boson (or a particle that is Higgs-like) is now approaching 7 sigma certainty.
5 sigma — 99.9999% certainty... — is the threshold for an observation to be labeled a scientific discovery. CERN crossed the 5 sigma threshold this summer. At 7 sigma, both the CMS and ATLAS teams are reporting that there’s only a 0.0000000001% chance that they haven’t found a Higgs-like particle.
