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A Surrey woman's holiday in California has turned into a healthcare nightmare. The 68-year old needed emergency surgery after her appendix burst, but now she can't come home due to a lack of hospital beds. Arlene Meeks has been in a California hospital since December 17th. Her family has been trying to get her transferred back to the Lower Mainland for 2 weeks now but they haven't had any luck. Stephen Harris with the South Fraser Health Region says the issue is a shortage of ventilated intensive care unit beds, which are highly specialized. He says over the holidays, it's...

An enduring myth about farm subsidies is that they go to needy family farms. But in reality, price supports have accelerated the demise of small farms because the benefits go to the most profitable growers, says the Wall Street Journal. According to Citizens Against Government Waste: -- Three-quarters of the payments under the 2002 farm bill have gone to the richest 10 percent of farmers. -- More than half of the $1.9 billion sugar program lines the pockets of the wealthiest 1 percent of plantation owners. -- In 2003 the biggest single recipient of farm aid was Riceland Foods in...

Climate Change: A Danish commission looks at the negative effect of biofuels on the environment as a new study shows ethanol use may actually increase pollution. The Kyoto deal is full of unintended consequences. The recently formed Cramer Commission, named after Dutch Environment Minister Jacqueline Cramer, who chaired it before entering the cabinet, was formed to develop ways to ensure that crops used to create biofuels as replacements for oil and gas don't do more harm than good. It seems that in the rush to develop these alternative fuels, forests in Asia have been burned to clear land for palm...

AMSTERDAM, April 4, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – An MP of the Dutch Labour Party has suggested that stay-at-home mothers who used state subsidies for their education should pay the government back since their work at home is “wasted” on child rearing. Sharon Dijksma believes that punitive measures should be taken against women who choose to stay at home with children after graduating from university instead of entering the paid workforce. “A highly educated woman who chooses to stay home and not to work: that is destruction of capital,” said Dijksma, deputy leader of the Labour Party (PvdA) in 'Forum', a...

October 17, 2005 - Nintendo of America on Tuesday will announce a groundbreaking partnership with Wi-Fi provider Wayport to make available free Internet access to DS owners at McDonald's restaurants across the nation. Nintendo and Wayport will offer complimentary Wi-Fi hotspots at McDonald's establishments, enabling DS owners to use the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, which launches November 14 in the states, to play online games with or against each other. Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection marks the company's entry into the online arena. The service is dramatically different from competitors because it is entirely free to consumers who already have wireless Internet access...

I was googling looking for ringtones. I thought that maybe I might be able to sign up for an e-mail service or something and get a free ringtone. So I googled and the first thing that came up was Katazo.com I gave them my phone number. They sent me a text message with a number on it. And I put that number into a form on their web site. I didn't get a free ringtone though. All I got was a text message every day. At a rate of 1 dollar per message. And I can't get them to stop...

Searching for small targets in large spaces is a common problem in the sciences. Because blind search is inadequate for such searches, it needs to be supplemented with additional information, thereby transforming a blind search into an assisted search. This additional information can be quantified and indicates that assisted searches themselves result from searching higher-level search spaces--by conducting, as it were, a search for a search. Thus, the original search gets displaced to a higher-level search. The key result in this paper is a displacement theorem, which shows that successfully resolving such a higher-level search is exponentially more difficult than...

LOS ANGELES — Hydrogen-fueled cars have been hailed as the future of transportation — clean, safe and propelled by a power source whose only by-products are air and water. [snip] The problem, critics say, is that the technology that makes the fuel of the future generates just as much pollution as the gasoline-powered vehicles we drive right now. [snip] Extracting useful quantities of hydrogen from water requires a massive amount of energy — energy that typically comes from burning oil or coal.

Today’s Special Election Day DUmmie FUnnies editions starts off much earlier than I had planned. Why? Because yesterday I was suffering a bad case of the pre-election jitters. However, when I woke up this morning my mood completely changed since I am now secure in the knowledge that Bush will WIN big. However, the mood on the DUmmie site is now shifting from false optimism to downright gloom. You can see an example of DUmmie gloom on this THREAD appropriately titled, “I'm very used to having the American people disappoint the shit out of me.” And I think, DUmmie BurtWorm...

They are cowards...

I guess they didn't want us to see them cry

Scientists Claim To Tap The Free Energy Of Space by Richard Walters ("For the People" magazine) Physicist Bruce DePalma has a 100 kilowatt generator, which he invented, sitting in his garage. It could power his whole house, but if he turns it on, the government may confiscate it. Harvard educated DePalma, who taught physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 15 years, claims that his electrical generator can provide cheap, inexhaustible, self sustaining and non polluting source of energy, using principles that flout conventional physics and are still not fully understood. His N machine, as it is called, is...

<p>Annie was an ethnic Chinese born in Malaysia who had legally emigrated to the U.S. decades ago. She entered my law office with her mother, who clutched a well-worn copy of a Chinese language book called What You Need to Know About Life in America that is eventually encountered by most immigration lawyers.</p>

Not long ago I wrote a commentary, "The Great Hydrogen Myth," in which I opined that throwing another billion dollars at more research for the purpose of replacing oil, coal, or natural gas was a huge waste. Recently, that commentary was posted on an Internet site for those who work in industries that provide and use various forms of energy. It's a favorite among the many engineers and scientists whose lives are devoted to energy issues. Here are some of the responses my commentary received. The names of the innocent have been protected because their jobs depend upon it. "I...