Where's the land come from? From cattle pastures. "The two companies' sugar cane plantations are more than 1,000 miles south of the Amazon forest, where high rainfall makes sugar cane an uneconomical crop. (Plant stress creates the sugar, so a period of drought makes for the best sugar cane.)" (From http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/stories/050608dnbusethanol.39bab41.html)

One of the reasons for the other states to be involved is that generally if you are married in one state the other states will also recognize your marriage even if you couldn't have been legally married in the other states.

The problem here is that the federal Defense of Marriage Act makes it legal for states to refuse to recognize gay marriages performed legally in other states, which makes the "full faith and credit" argument for involvement by other state AGs specious.

A third party candidacy? I really doubt it. The only way a third-party/independent challenge can work in America is by siphoning off large numbers votes from otherwise-Republican AND otherwise-Democratic voters. Can you seriously see a significant number of Republicans abandoning McCain to support a Clinton ticket? I can't. The only effect would be to split the Democratic vote and hand McCain the presidency on a silver platter. Fortunately, I think Clinton is smart enough to realize this.

You might want to rethink your historical comparison there. The reason that Lieberman succeeded as an independent was because the Republicans broke in large numbers to support his candidacy over the stuffed-shirt that their own party was running. Any national third-party/independent candidate can ONLY succeed by drawing significant numbers away from both usually-Democratic and usually-Republican voters, AND capturing a large number of independents. There's virtually no way that Clinton could achieve this. No significant number of core Republicans will support her candidacy over McCain's. All she would achieve would be to siphon away Democratic voters who might otherwise be persuaded to vote for Obama, and therefore hand the presidency to McCain on a silver platter. Fortunately, I think Clinton is smart enough to realize this, although I fear that a good number of her supporters might choose to ignore the potential ramifications and call for an independent candidacy anyway.

I can't see an Obama-Clinton ticket as anything but a surefire route to four years of John McCain in the White House. Nothing will energize the Republican base and turn away waffling centrist Republicans and independents faster than a ticket with Clinton's name on it. And after criticizing Clinton's policy proposals as too much same-old same-old during the primary, how can Obama add her to the ticket and still claim to be a candidate for change? I've seen other female Democrats floated as possible veeps (McCaskill, Napolitano, and others); if Obama wants a race-and-gender combination ticket, pick one of them instead.

If Obama does not have 2025, and Hillary won California, New York, Ohio, Texas, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and revotes in Florida and Michigan, she should be the nominee.

W.E.S.: I'm somewhat sympathetic to your argument, which seems to be that the candidate who can win those high-population states has a better chance of winning the general election. The fact remains, however, that the rules are not set up that way. The Democrats apportion their state delegates proportionally rather than winner-take-all. If you've got a problem with the rules, fine - start organizing a push to change them for the next election cycle, and we can have an open debate about whether or not it's better to have the primaries work more like the general election. Arguing to change the rules in mid-election is patently unfair, and when the change in rules benefits the candidate that you obviously favor, it doesn't reflect very well on you.

Regarding Florida and Michigan: seating those delegates as-is is tremendously unfair, since (a) the states broke the rules, which has to have *some* consequence, and (b) those states voted on the understanding that the delegates would *not* be seated, which definitely affected voting patterns. (I'm a MI Democrat, and I opted not to vote in the primary given the situation, and quite a few of my friends did too.) The idea of a revote is attractive, but the states *did* break the rules, and should reasonably suffer the consequences. Let it go to the convention. That used to be the *purpose* of conventions, remember?

Go do some research and refresh your assumptions. Adult women, numerically, are a larger percentage of American gamers than adolescent males. The average age of the US gamer is 33.

I can't believe I'm the first one to point this out, but here it is: hacking the iPhone to make it work with other cell carriers, if that can actually be done, eliminates a couple of the phone's most interesting features. Random-access voicemail, for example, which requires substantial setup on the provider's side. And while you might be able to unlock the iPhone for calls on other networks, what are the chances of unlocking it for data use on those networks?

Google's plan for the Books project (previously Google Print) has always included the provision that in-copyright works could only be accessed in short snippetts. Google's search engine also contains a matching algorithm that theoretically prevents you from simply searching on the next distinctive word in the text and getting the entire text in piecemeal fashion.

The problem here isn't that the attorneys were sacked, Gizmo. That seems to be fairly common when a new administration comes in: both W and Clinton turned over the ranks of the US Attorneys upon their accession. The problem is that these eight were clearly fired for political rather than performance reasons - namely, some form or other of disloyalty to Bush's agenda - and can be replaced under a little-noticed provision of the Patriot Act that bypasses Congressional approval and allows the administration to appoint replacements directly, which is unheard-of. Make sense now?