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The main change to the plot involved the ending (which is what the thread linked to in the OP concerns). It was changed because the studios didn't want to make a film depicting New York covered with dead bodies. It wasn't as terrible as it could've been, but I don't think it particularly makes sense, at least as much as the original... Yeah, that scene was just ludicrous. Not one, not two, but three alleyways full of gang members, followed by some gratuitous Zack Snyder violence.

You think the market should react before the money is flowing? Isn't the point of the stimulus to get the money flowing again? That sounds an awful lot like a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Perhaps the markets went down due to reasons other than the stimulus.

Anyone see Watchmen, the movie based on the seminal graphic novel from Alan Moore? As you may recall I'm a fan of the graphic novel (warning, spoilers!) and was unsurprisingly disappointed by the movie. Director Zack Synder tried to create a painfully loyal "best of" frame-by-frame recreation of the comic. But he couldn't help be Zack Synder. The story doesn't have a lot of action, but when it does, Zack Snyder flips into MUST KICK AS MUCH ASS IN AS LITTLE TIME AS POSSIBLE mode. There's all sorts of gratuitous blood spurts and bone crunching. Anyone here see it? What did you think?

Yes, Obama was not the cause of the mess, which was the argument presented in the OP. He inherited it from Bush. But beyond that, he's been in office for a little over a month and a half. The Dow has been falling steadily downward since October 2007... in other words some 10 times longer than Obama has been in office. Perhaps it's a little bit premature to judge the effectiveness of his policies, hmm? Or would you like him to wave a magic wand and make the financial crisis go away? No

Social control is more a tenet of totalitarianism, not liberalism. Conservatives can be totalitarians as well.

It's quite rough for construction in general. They're proposing elevating huge sections of the highway onto large concrete platforms sitting on towers to be able to get that many lanes through. Think of an elevated freeway off ramp... for 30 miles... going up the side of a mountain. And not just any mountain but the Great Continental Divide.

Certainly well after cell differentiation occurs, and if you're going after stem cells don't you want undifferentiated ones?

There's a considerable difference between how smart a given person is and how much they know about how to build systems which are smarter than themselves.

Not to mention the limited surface area of roadway available through the mountains, a problem I hope this image makes abundantly clear:

I think a ban on human cloning is just fine if it comes in the wake of removing restrictions against embryonic stem cell research, which seems to be exactly what is happening. When Michael J. Fox, Parkinson's victim was out advocating stem cell research, his governor James Talent was out drumming up the case against... cloning: http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=21226 This was particularly deceptive as the amendment in question explicitly banned cloning: http://www.sos.mo.gov/elections/2006petitions/ppStemCell.asp While this not just a total strawman but an outright lie against the case for cell research, it's one I think should be addressed to assuage people's concerns. They should know that stem cell research is being done in the best interest of Parkinson's victims, quadraplegics/paraplegics, etc. and not towards ends like human cloning.

Michael Moore's movie Sicko blames Billy Tauzin, who was offered some $2.5 million to lobby for it [source], and departed Congress to become CEO of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. I'll let you be the judge on that one... Michael Moore reports, you decide.

For the record, I wanted "Bush to fail", certainly after Iraq. Had his strategies succeeded I would've had to rethink my world view. The failure of his strategies at least confirms in my mind that their ideological roots are flawed as well.

I'm not sure what you're asking. The present arrangement precludes Medicare from buying drugs directly from the pharmaceutical companies, allowing them to negotiate volume pricing. Instead the drugs are first distributed to pharmacies, who charge retail price and then bill the government. In the end Medicare recipients get their drugs from the government. I don't see how Medicare negotiating a volume discount affects the market rate. People are either on Medicare or they aren't, and when they are they're going to get their drugs from the government as long as they're eligible. The only difference is how much the government is able to acquire those drugs for in the first place.

I would guess it contains a logic language similar to Prolog for performing queries across formally specified relations between different knowledge systems. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedSome people have pointed out MIT's START as an existing alternative: http://start.csail.mit.edu/ ...however I'm terribly underimpressed. START is unable to answer fairly basic biology questions like "Are humans mammals?" I sure hope Wolfram Alpha will be able to answer those kinds of questions...

That's a very good question. The 2003 Prescription Drug Bill has boosted Medicare expenses by $100 billion per year. This bill requires Medicare pay retail price for drugs, as opposed to negotiating with pharmaceuticals for bulk discounts. This is the reason drugs from Canadian pharmacies are so much cheaper than the ones available in America. I hope the Democrats seek to undo this terrible piece of legislation soon.

Okay, Bush is the orgin of all things bad.

I think his speech was universally panned, and he's also in the unfortunate position of having similar mannerisms (at least in that speech) to a Gomer Pyle-type character, Kenneth the Page from the popular NBC sitcom 30 Rock. It's not so much the content of the speech itself. That was mostly fine. However his country bumpkin-styled delivery will haunt him for quite some time. I certainly didn't know he was a Rhodes Scholar nor would I ever suspect him of being one. Just his mannerisms alone put him in Sarah Palin territory in my mind, which is sad because it sounds like he's substantially smarter than how he appears.

Sadly the current plan is to expand I-70 between Denver and Silverthorne from 4 lanes to 6. This stretch of highway is already plagued with persistent traffic jams as it includes a several thousand foot ascent to one of the highest vehicular tunnels in the world (the Eisenhower tunnel at ~11,000 feet) which carries with it not only the complete trucking traffic of one of the main east/west corridors of the Interstate highway system, but massive amounts of ski traffic. Now we can expect a decade of excessive traffic density, poor road conditions, and construction. A rail system (at least between Denver and the ski towns on the western slope of the Rockies) has been proposed as the solution many, many times, however it was rejected because it was more expensive than simply expanding the highway to 6 lanes. It'd be interesting to see what federal subsidies were offered for a 6 lane highway expansion versus a rail system. Note that there's already a rail system (operated by Union-Pacific) between Denver and some of the ski towns (Winter Park and Steamboat) operated by Union-Pacific. There is presently no rail system which provides service between Denver and any of the ski towns directly along the I-70 corridor (e.g. Loveland, Breckenridge, Keystone, Copper Mountain, Vail). On the western slope a rail system exists farther west, connecting several ski areas including Aspen Mountain, Aspen Highlands, Buttermilk, Snowmass, Sunlight and Avon and almost reaching Vail, but not quite, and the only route to Denver requires you travel much farther south to Colorado Springs, then take a train from there. The rest of the ski towns are only accessible via highways. Here's a repost from an earlier thread about my opinions of the Ski Train, the only rail service between Denver and Colorado ski areas (Winter Park and Steamboat): http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?p=327042#post327042 EDIT: Ski Train tickets are now $59 for a day trip (arriving 9:30AM and departing 4:15PM). If you wish to stay overnight, the fare is $118. [source] A lift ticket to Winter Park is $92 [source], meaning a trip to Winter Park on the Ski Train will run you a minimum of $151, or $210 if you plan on staying overnight (not including lodging). Some unbiased info in the Ski Train if you don't want to read my long tirade: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/getaways/01/07/ski.train/

I agree the deficit is completely out of control, but at this point I don't have a better alternative that deficit spending to get the economy stimulated again. I hope our kids, grand kids, great grand kids, etc enjoy their high-speed rail. I expect more of them will enjoy high speed rail than will enjoy a vacation in democratic Iraq.

While I agree with your former point, I don't agree with the latter. If Obama doesn't get us out of this mess he will be remembered for his lack of success. However, Bush will certainly be remembered as the guy in charge when the financial crisis began and the Dow took its multi-thousand point plunge.

The main difference between Objective C vs. C# or Java is the other two have a certain degree of ubiquity (thanks to the Mono project re: C#) whereas there's little you can do with Objective C outside of Apple platforms. Also, Objective C isn't garbage collected by default (whereas C# and Java both are) and garbage collection isn't supported on the iPhone. I'm not sure why Apple made this decision. They were quite content for another garbage collected language (JavaScript) being the ONLY way developers could target the platform for over a year, but after shipping support for native apps they omitted the Objective C 2.0 garbage collector. This is particularly frustrating as I would love to target the iPhone with Ruby (using MacRuby) but MacRuby relies on the Objective C garbage collector. The garbage collector itself has been released as open source however the hooks into the runtime remain proprietary. This means that Objective C 2.0's garbage collection only works when using Apple's proprietary version of the compiler/runtime. If you're content to target Apple's proprietary platforms exclusively, Objective C is pretty nice.

Something tells me Obama's motives are a little bit different than Lyle Lanley's

Both matter, just as they would with transistors or any other sort of component. However, the largest part of the human brain in terms of neurons, the cerebellum, isn't even necessary for humans to function (although any human without one is going to be a bit of a klutz)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/07/AR2009030701794.html?hpid%3Dtopnews⊂=AR Obama is investing in intercity high-speed rail projects, with the goal of eventually having a cross-country high speed rail system. I'm really glad to see this as thus far our government has seemed content with the Eisenhower Interstate highway system, and air travel as being the two most practical ways of traveling long distance. Buses and trains are nearly as expensive as flying in most cases and take many days longer. Maybe one day soon America will be one of those modern countries with newfangled conveniences like not having to drive everywhere.

So Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica, is about to release a search engine for formal knowledge based on Mathematica: http://www.twine.com/item/122mz8lz9-4c/wolfram-alpha-is-coming-and-it-could-be-as-important-as-google The idea is they'll hand curate a formal knowledge database about science, technology, geography, weather, cooking, business, travel, people, music, etc. and from this Mathematica will be able to apply rich calculations to answer natural language questions. It will be interesting to see how well this works.