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khou is reporting the shooter as bill phillips. i dont know him but i heard he was known as kind of a hothead. the man he killed is reported to be david beverly. ive known dave for several years. he was a gold badge in charge of the eee parts group, a very competent guy.

Some will be up on manslaughter chargers

Where did you get this information? Nothing I have read says they will face any criminal charges.

WAWAWAWAWAWAWAWAWA...Saddam was executed...WAWAWAWAWAWAWAWA

What else matters?

How about the fact that instead of foreign insurgents and Sunni extremists killing our troops every day, we can now add Sunni moderates to the list?

I don't question whether or not he deserved to die (he obviously did), but the way his execution was handled is only throwing gas on the fire. Look at it this way: is the sectarian blowback from the appearance that this was a Shiite lynching and not justice making it easier or harder for our troops to get the job done?

This execution was simply a bunch of thugs killing another thug. Listening to those idiots jabber back and forth like a bunch of monkeys pretty much makes it apparent there will never be a stable Iraq.

Amen to that. Cutting taxes without spending offsets is BS.

Makes you wonder why it's so hard for Congress to understand. Paying down the national debt is a defacto tax cut anyway, but getting there isn't politically sexy so both parties have ignored its feasibility.

Servicing the national debt is the third most expensive item on the budget, behind Defense and income redistribution programs. And we get NOTHING for it - no roads, no guns, no police. It's like flushing half a trillion dollars down the toilet every year, paying interest on programs that no longer exist (in some cases) and are no longer useful (in most cases).

If we paid off the debt today, everyone would get around a 7% tax cut - with no spending cuts necessary. A nice start, but it will take years of economic tighthandedness to make it happen. Which is why it will never happen.

And yes we are at war, but the defense budget represents less than 20% of our expenditures. There are other places to cut.

Thank you for posting the relevant precedent - very interesting! I guess with all the crime that goes on I was a little naive to assume this sort of thing hadn't happened before...

If the bullet can be removed without general anesthesia, the suspect loses. If general anesthesia is required, the suspect wins.

Ok so who decides whether general anesthesia is required or not? What if one physician says he can do it and another disagrees? What if the suspect has a high-risk medical condition such that a doctor recommends against removal at all? If the patient dies while undergoing surgery, who is responsible?

In this case probably not but I sure don't want to give the govt. a precident to perform surgery on suspects in order to obtain suspected evidence. Give them that power, and it can only lead to a very bad and dark place eventually. Sometimes it's better to let a case go than set up future generations for who knows what horrors politicians will visit upon them.

This situation definately raises some interesting questions. What if it's not a suspect but some bystander that got popped? Do we want the right to force them to undergo invasive surgery? And what if the surgery wasn't so "safe" (btw, there is no such thing as "safe" surgery) - who makes the determination if we're going to force a suspect to undergo it?

This has the potential to set a dangerous precedent.

Why dont they just get their mathematicians from India like we do?

I apologize for the attitudes of some in this thread. The Brits have been staunch allies for a long, long time and have shared technologies with us in the past (Chobham armor and many others) going back to WWII. I have no objections to sharing this technology with our good friends and allies.

Ditto. The blindness to history exhibited by some is appalling. I fail to see how anyone could find satisfaction in a decision that isolates our constant ally for the last hundred years and will cost American jobs. I would expect to see responses like this on DU.

Because of your lax immigration standards, your industries are loaded with potential security threats. Your government refuses to abide by the security plans laid out in the JSF contract, hence they will not be getting the software

I didn't see this as the rationale anywhere in the article - what is your source for the contention that "lax immigration standards" are the reason for this decision?

There's two separate issues here - actual market value (which has nothing to do with property taxes) and the arbitrary value the Appraisal District places on your home. Just because your house has been appraised at FMV doesn't mean your taxes haven't just been jacked up. Go back through your old property tax paperwork and look for the trend.

Sorry for the misunderstanding - when I said "property value," I meant "assessed value" which is obviously different. If, like me, you're taking a bath on property taxes because the real estate market is crap in your area, you have at least a little consolation. File a protest with the ARB with comps (assessed value not market value - VERY IMPORTANT) or some other evidence and they'll decrease your assessed value which will decrease your property taxes.

I caught both films as well. Nativity Story was awful - it was like watching something some high schooler put together. You'll be MUCH more moved if you go to a local church and see a live nativity. I though Apocalypto was fantastic, probably Mel's best work since Braveheart.

"It's the 30 percent hike in his property tax appraisal"

That is ridiculously high.

Remember Rick Perry's amazing property tax "cut" he handed Texans right before the election?

Well it just got eaten up by a corresponding magical increase in property value, just as many thought would happen.

But you have the added pressure of stamping plans that guarantee your design won't collapse and kill people.

If an interstellar probe gets lost, it's pretty much par for the course.

LOL! Circuits class was almost as bad as thermodynamics.

I got thermo the second time around. Orbital mechanics nearly drove me insane.

Your picture speaks a thousand words.

I guess because Rick Perry thinks something sounds impossible, we shouldn't even try. If morons like this ran NASA back in the 60s we never would have made it to the moon.

I assume from your post that you don't own a Japanese car.

Please dont misunderstand me - 401ks are GREAT. And you're a fool not to take at least as much as your employer will match. Its just that some of the investment options suck, quite frankly. The "targeted retirement" funds are very misleading and should be avoided at all costs. Over half of all mutual funds got beat by their respective indices last year so you're set if you can get the lowest expense ratio index fund you can find.

I have an S&P 500 index fund with a .09% expense ratio which is probably the best mutual fund value out there.

#4 misses the point. Target date funds are misleading to investors because they stack expense ratios. When you look at the prospectus it looks like a low expense ratio but in reality it's an expense ratio on top of those imposed by all the funds being held. You're basically paying a guy to move mutual funds around every few years, something you could easily do yourself. Not to mention the fact that since many of these plans don't have the best investment options to begin with, it's not such a great idea to throw your hat into a scheme that sucks away potential gains.