n2doc
n2doc's JournalTom Toles- It's Your Choice
This is actually what democracy is about, and this time is as real as it gets.
The newly House-passed Paul Ryan budget. Romney-endorsed, defines things about as clearly as they could be defined. The budget is a sharp redistribution of benefits, away from the poor, and toward the rich. There is absolutely no other way to interpret it. Absolutely no other way. Less for the poor. More for the rich. There you have it. Your choice.
For the middle class, or what’s left of it, voters get to determine for themselves how this will work out for them. A good number of people apparently believe that their future health care interests are best served by demolishing the recently enacted universal coverage law. Maybe they should think that through, but presumably they will. Cutting taxes for the rich is a plan with a track record now, and people can decide for themselves whether it has yielded the results for the middle class that were promised. Possibly the rich just aren’t quite rich enough yet. But it’s no longer a theoretical debate about feelings and frustrations. Now it’s a real choice in the real world. Over to you.
By Tom Toles | 07:15 AM ET, 04/02/2012
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/tom-toles/post/its-your-choice/2012/03/30/gIQA1K4NlS_blog.html
Federal agents serve warrants at Oakland medical cannabis school
Federal agents descended early Monday on Oaksterdam University — California's first cannabis industry training school — securing the downtown Oakland facility as they served search warrants.
A spokeswoman with the Internal Revenue Service said the raid is part of a joint investigation with the Drug Enforcement Agency but she declined to elaborate.
"It's an ongoing investigation and everything is under seal, so we're not able to comment," she said.
Oakland in many ways has served as the cradle of California's medical cannabis movement and Oaksterdam University owner Richard Lee has been at the forefront. He runs a school, a plant nursery and a dispensary, and spearheaded California's recent unsuccessful ballot initiative to legalize marijuana.
The raid comes as federal officials are stepping up a crackdown on medical cannabis dispensaries and the landlords who provide them space in which to operate.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/04/federal-agents-serve-warrants-at-oakland-medical-cannabis-school.html
Talk about a ludicrous toon
What it needs is another couple of panels, showing Ryan and boys robbing the medicare stagecoach before letting it crash over into the canyon.
Google to allow people to change their weather on April 1
Another sighting of Google’s yearly April Fool’s Day jokes is live. If you search for “weather” you will have the standard forecast available, but you’ll have the new option of using the “Google Weather Control” interface to make changes if you’d like. You’ll see in the image above I set it to snow in Beverly Hills on Sunday.
Once you make your changes, Google prompts you with this warning: “Please notice, after submitting it takes approximately 45 minutes until your weather changes take effect. Note: exercise caution when setting extremes.”
http://www.techi.com/2012/03/google-to-allow-people-to-change-their-weather-on-april-1/
Piracy cut in half in France, yet music and movie revenues fell
France made waves in the P2P industry by implementing a controversial graduated response program in 2010 that was designed to reduce the amount of illegal downloads by establishing progressively-harsher penalties on file sharers. The results were strong, as shown in Hadopi’s report, with file-sharing activities traffic slashed by two-thirds in 2011. However, the goal of increasing revenues in the French music and movie industries did not materialize and revenues fell in both industries.
The French music market fell 3.9% in 2011 while the video market fell 2.7%.
As Ernesto of TorrentFreak says, “If we follow the logic employed by the anti-piracy lobby during the past decade, this means that piracy is actually boosting sales.”
The declines in revenue were inevitable and will continue as technology makes it less-expensive to be entertained. Legal downloads and streaming services do not generate the revenue nor the profits that DVDs and CDs once did. The obsessive pursuits by governments, lobbyists, and anti-piracy organizations are wastes of energy when the real challenge the industries face are evolutionary. They are simply not adapting fast enough.
more
http://www.techi.com/2012/03/piracy-cut-in-half-in-france-yet-music-and-movie-revenues-fell/
AIDS 'could be eliminated in our lifetime'
HIV treatment as prevention strategy considered a "game changer" but lack of funding prevents implementation.
Meera Dalal Last Modified: 31 Mar 2012 18:43
When Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, Director of the Louis Pasteur Institute in France and winner of the Nobel Prize in 2008 for her discovery of HIV, first isolated the HIV virus in 1982, she had no idea she had stumbled onto the greatest epidemic of our time.
"Initially, we thought only a small group of people were affected by the disease," Barre-Sinoussi told Al Jazeera. "Very naively, we did not realise the magnitude of the epidemic."
She was right to be wary. Since then, 60 million people have been infected with HIV and over 30 million have died, akin to half the population of the United Kingdom.
But Barre-Sinoussi was not easily disheartened. "I believe in science. If not now, in the long term, we will find other strategies. My dream is to see the end of HIV before I die."
Her belief was not unfounded.
more
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/03/2012329135644720577.html
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