House Committee on Ways & Means – Republican — This kind of solves the problem if you think of it. Jails have health care.

Today, Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp R-MI released a letter from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation JCT confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill H.R. 3962, as amended could land people in jail. The JCT letter makes clear that Americans who do not maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” and who choose not to pay the bill’s new individual mandate tax generally 2.5% of income, are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.

found by Matt Duvall

GENEVA : THE $6.5 billion machine designed to recreate the conditions present at the beginning of time had to be switched off after a bird dropped a “bit of baguette” into it, causing it to overheat.

As a result, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland had to postpone their plans last week to emulate the universe’s Big Bang.

The European particle physics laboratory near Geneva launched the LHC in September last year. Physicists hoped to prove the existence of the Higgs boson, or God particle, which gives matter in the universe its mass.

But the LHC, which when running will collide protons travelling at 99.9 per cent of the speed of light, has been out of action since a helium leak caused it to be shut down nine days after its start-up.

The bird dropped bread on a compensating capacitor – where the mains electricity supply enters the collider – cutting power to the LHC during a test run.

This app demeans us both

The Cry Translator listens to a whining child and analyzes the pitch, volume, tone and inflection of his nerve-jangling noise. Ten seconds later, it provides you with one of five “translations”: hungry, sleepy, stressed, annoyed or bored.

The idea of this $30 iPhone application, apart from preying on the anxieties of new parents, is to help teach you the meanings of the distinctive sounds and to help out babysitters who might otherwise try to feed your three-month old (hunger) instead of just switching over to the Family Guy from American Idol (bored). The application even gives advice on what to do, depending on the translation.

According to the seller, Biloop Technologic, clinical tests have proven the app to be accurate 96% of the time, and it will “continue to translate crying regardless of the age of the child”.

Obviously what happened Thursday at Ft. Hood was a tragedy. Just as obviously, Sgt. Kimberly Munley who got shot while taking Hasan out is a hero. So are others who helped the wounded as the firing continued. So, flying the flag at half staff seems a reasonable tribute to the fallen and the heroes. But…

Why isn’t the flag flown at half mast for the soldiers killed or wounded daily in combat? Don’t they deserve the same tribute for their sacrifice? Aren’t their injuries and deaths just as tragic under their heroic circumstances? Or has the flow of coffins from overseas been too steady from unpopular wars for us to even bother with… them?

I do feel we should be honoring those who died, were wounded and took action under fire at Ft. Hood. I just wonder what it says that we don’t accord the same to the others.

• Verizon iPhone release coming in 2010.
• Fortune mag has a bunch of odd articles about Microsoft. I comment on them.
• Mein Kampf approved by App store.
• SSD’s now bricking up. Blamed on firmware.
• The Sun is in trouble with the EU now.
• Intuit-online killed.
• Flash once again under attack.
• Cell phone inventor does not like the current direction of the business.
• Software patents under attack.

RIO DE JANEIRO – A Brazilian bricklayer reportedly killed in a car crash shocked his mourning family by showing up alive at his funeral. Relatives of Ademir Jorge Goncalves, 59, had identified him as the victim of a Sunday night car crash in Parana state in southern Brazil, police said.

As is customary in Brazil, the funeral was held the following day, which happened to be the holiday of Finados, when Brazilians visit cemeteries to honor the dead. What family members didn’t know was that Goncalves had spent the night at a truck stop talking with friends over drinks of a sugarcane liquor known as cachaca, his niece Rosa Sampaio told the O Globo newspaper. He did not get word about his own funeral until it was already happening Monday morning.

A police spokesman in the town of Santo Antonio da Platina said Goncalves rushed to the funeral to let family members know he was not dead.

“The corpse was badly disfigured, but dressed in similar clothing,” said the police spokesman, who talked on condition of anonymity as he wasn’t authorized to discuss the case. “People are afraid to look for very long when they identify bodies, and I think that is what happened in this case.” Sampaio told O Globo that some family members were not sure the body was Goncalves.

“My two uncles and I had doubts about the identification,” she told O Globo. “But an aunt and four of his friends identified the body, so what were we to do? We went ahead with the funeral.”

I’m gonna milk the Halloween thing for as long as possible.

Warning, coarse language.

Too bizarre for words. The fact that it’s in Japanese doesn’t help.

While the reason for this may be reasonable, how many others are in jail, even been executed, because prosecutors are immune from answering, like the rest of us, for their actions? Perhaps it’s time to have their offices wired with cameras and mics like police cars that catch dirty cops in the act. What’s that line about power corrupting?

In July 1977, retired police captain John Schweer was shot and killed while working as a night watchman at an Oldsmobile dealership in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Two teenagers, Curtis McGhee and Terry Harrington, were convicted of the murder based on evidence they allege was knowingly fabricated by prosecutors.
[...]
Now both men are suing the Pottawattamie County prosecutors, claiming they coerced and coached witnesses, fabricated evidence and arrested them without probable cause. But according to federal law supported by numerous legal precedents, prosecutors have immunity for anything they do during a trial. Richter and Hrvol say they were just doing their job.

“If a prosecutor knowingly introduces false evidence at trial, that prosecutor is absolutely immune from lawsuit,” explains Stephen Sanders, an attorney representing Richter and Hrvol. The rationale is that if prosecutors could be blamed for errors in a trial, they would become vulnerable targets for any litigious convict with an ax to grind.

“This means that some people who are genuinely wronged by a prosecutor [are not] able to recover,” Sanders concedes.
[...]
Hrvol and Richter cannot be tried for knowingly putting a dishonest witness on the stand. They don’t have to own up to the fact that they presented false evidence or coerced a witness’s testimony. But fortunately for McGhee and Harrington, they did something on which the law is not completely clear — they didn’t just present the evidence at trial, but also helped gather it. In an unusual move, the prosecutors aided detectives by canvassing the neighborhood and interviewing witnesses, and so their actions may not be covered by absolute immunity. That is what the Supreme Court will decide.

Fertility is falling and families are shrinking in places— such as Brazil, Indonesia, and even parts of India—that people think of as teeming with children. As our briefing shows, the fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less—the magic number that is consistent with a stable population and is usually called “the replacement rate of fertility”. Sometime between 2020 and 2050 the world’s fertility rate will fall below the global replacement rate.

At a time when Malthusian worries are resurgent and people fear the consequences for an overcrowded planet, the decline in fertility is surprising and somewhat reassuring. It means that worries about a population explosion are themselves being exploded—and it carries a lesson about how to solve the problems of climate change.

Today’s fall in fertility is both very large and very fast. Poor countries are racing through the same demographic transition as rich ones, starting at an earlier stage of development and moving more quickly. The transition from a rate of five to that of two, which took 130 years to happen in Britain—from 1800 to 1930—took just 20 years—from 1965 to 1985—in South Korea. Mothers in developing countries today can expect to have three children. Their mothers had six. In some countries the speed of decline in the fertility rate has been astonishing. In Iran, it dropped from seven in 1984 to 1.9 in 2006—and to just 1.5 in Tehran. That is about as fast as social change can happen.

On the other hand:

The Malthusians are right that the world’s population is still increasing and can do a lot more environmental damage before it peaks at just over 9 billion in 2050.

On a vaguely related topic, many Chinese never learned how not to get pregnant.