Given how campaigning works, I doubt she chose it. She probably just approved it and put too high an amount of trust in the people who selected it.

As for it being Canadian, so what? I'd like a president who's less jingoistic.

According to this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station

the space station has an orbital velocity of 27,700 km/sec or roughly 7700 meters/sec. and is orbiting at a height of 350 to 460 km above the earth.

Also according to wikipedia, drag from re-entry starts to become non-negligable at about 120 km altitude. So, the earthward velocity component when it finally drops to 120 km = sqrt(2 * 9.8 m/s/s * 230,000) is roughly 2,100 m/s.

Compared to the orbital velocity, that's not a lot, but if you take the root of the squares of the two you end up with roughly 8,000 m/s or mach 23.

This is about as reasonable as seeing how a tissue survives a sustained 100 mph wind. They would have to use some sort of composite that can't be reasonably termed paper for it to retain any structural integrity during deceleration to wind speeds.

This sounds like someone has been watching too much Bugs Bunny lately.

My two are busy snoring in their fleece lined soft walled dog bed. Louie looks a bit like he's missing his. Since he's sacked out, I'm sure he spent a GREAT time running around meeting everyone and chasing everything else on 4 legs though.

Here's an interesting first read summarizing current objections:

http://www.actionbioscience.org/biotech/mcgee.html

The first objection discussed in detail is pretty widely accepted. Cloning anything is HARD. You have less than a 100% success rate even when you already know how to do it "right". Even when you think you do, though, problems may not show up til well after the animal/human can experience suffering.

Another objection is determination of parenting responsibility/authority. As difficult as it was, I'm not sure I'd trade growing up in my family for growing up as intellectual property of a corporation or as a science project.

That's somewhat similar to part of #4's post. The likely to inevitable degradation of the regard for a human life to the view of it as property.

As for genetic manipulation of the traits of offspring, I'm with #8. We've had far too much artificial support of inheritable disease spreading and too many decades of sending the healthiest breeding males off to war. We NEED to start repairing those effects through genetic surgery.

Is there a risk that there will be a tendency to eliminate homosexuality? I suppose it's possible in the long term. However, we're talking really long term here most likely.

We still don't have a clue on genetic markers for it (assuming they exist) let alone traits like intelligence and longevity.

As someone who is gay, I'm not certain I particularly care. It's not as if there's some form of genocide occurring.

Symmetric features, a great singing voice, strength or an extremely efficient respiratory or circulatory system are far easier to find and select for. It's highly unlikely that all this will provided for free as a universal birthright,

I think folks should be far more concerned about saddling kids with sports or profession specific traits that make them feel coerced to do/become specific things at their parent's whim. On top of that, there's those who will have even less chance to compete.

I can't remember where, but I read once that all it would take to clean house on tort lawyers would be to pass a federal law allowing legal malpractice lawsuits.

From there, clients would sue their own lawyers for losing their case and lawyers would eventually end up suing their professors and schools for failing to adequately educate them.

Given this, I'm not even sure that's needed.

I can understand and appreciate the growing need to track the progression of diseases. Two things don't make sense to me though. The first is why accumulation of tracking data stops once the animal leaves a farm.

This leaves animal transport and processing facilities totally unaccounted for. Unless the animals are strictly segregated, it's entirely possible that it could spread when they are aggregated for transport. If it survives outside the body (like avian flu virus) it can even infect later arrivals.

The other thing that I don't understand is why individual animals in large groups don't need to be individually chipped. If the vector is a particular production run of animal feed, it's a bit tough to determine which one.

Add into that the problem mentioned above and it seems that you've lost most of what this system was supposed to provide.

Doomsayers have a long and well established history. Christianity has had a huge number of such prophets in the last 200 years alone - when the rate of change in society has been the highest.

I really liked what James Blish pointed out in his Flying cities books. Legends are meant to communicate - just not necessarily in the way you think.

I believe that doom sayers in general are expressing their strong discomfort for their present or future conditions. They find the change upsetting enough that they'd rather the world end instead.

Funnily enough, some of those folks seem to be in charge in the US and some western European countries.

Poker or gambling in general is something I could care less about. What's interesting to me is speculating on what would have led to this farcical use of police and court time and resources.

I wouldn't be surprised if one or two of the long standing members were policemen who accidentally mentioned the game in front of the wrong guy - at the office.

That person is itching for visibility or sees gambling as "immoral" and things take off from there. Regardless, they should be hung out to dry.

Unfortunately, the city probably won't back down for liability reasons - thus screwing up some reasonably innocent peoples' lives - including a 13 year old.

Until I read the description, I just assumed the person who ate that also enjoyed haggis with a side of lutefisk liberally sprinkled nuoc mom. Now I'll just assume the haggis part - heh.

It's also worth noting that the use of regular file to the ipod touch and iphone have ALSO been disabled.

Between that and the new arms race on cryptography for managing your OWN legally purchased content, I've decided to forgo Ipods entirely.

As an earlier poster noted, http://www.anythingbutipod.com/ is a great site. They're a bit biased towards the Iriver and Cowon brands but it's not hard to see why - the sound quality from them is incredible compared to ipods - especially the new ipod "classic"s.

I'm going with the Cowon D2 for four main reasons:

it's kept the mass storage mode of operation unlike the newest apple ipods

it supports an incredible number of audio and video codecs - including FLAC and Ogg

it has incredible battery life that will allow me to use it well past the usual lifetime of lithium batteries

it allows you to use 8 GB memory cards to extend the internal storage - effectively allowing for an infinite extention of storage if you want to have dedicated cards for different purposes.

Enough about my choice - go check the above site out and pick your own ipod replacement. Enjoy freedom for a change!

Chris