Affentitten

You know for a fact? Great proof. What if the product is not the same? If it's a patent product it's likely not. If it's a generic or post-patent, then you as the consumer have the choice at the pharmacy counter. In fact, you're far more likely to be constrained by your pharmacist's business deal than your doctor's post-it note block. What you're rather stupidly alledging is that your doctor will say "Gee, this product would be perfect for my patient....but these other guys gave me a pen. It's not quite the right drug, but what the hell. A biro's a biro."

Actually Australia is one of the most vigilant countries in the world when it comes to this sort of thing. And if you think your doctor is persuaded by a biro, you need to get another quack.

First F-35 delivered to the Air Force But the first operational squadron won't be in place till 2017 -18 at the earliest. They better start planning now for the aircraft that will replace these ones. Due to come online in 2346.

A grain of truth. But I think the age cut-off to join the ADF is actually 60. Though of course, I can't see them sticking you in the infantry at that age. About 15 or so years ago, part of this rationale was applied to the police force in NSW. Basically there were some issues with 18 year old school bully types walking out of high school and straight into the police academy. This was a particular issue with young guys from the country areas who had basically seen bugger all of life. And suddenly they were in the city having to deal with something like a domestic dispute between two elderly homosexuals. They were also easy prey for older, smarter and much more corrupt police. So they made it compulsory that cops were going to have to do some form of tertiary education. Not just so they could get a nice diploma to hang on their wall, but in the hope that a year or two of college would grow them up a bit and perhaps give them a little more life experience.

We have the same thing here with Ned Kelly. Robber, murderer, thief, cop killer. But nowadays he portrayed as some gentle Irish freedom fighter trapped by circumstances and an oppressive colonial state.

PLus if you ship people to Moon Base Alpha, won't they just have babies there too? And population variation in an environment like that will be even more critical to manage.

What about Charlie Uniform November Tango? That would make the White House press release hard to write? I've always favoured making military code words more gentle and ridiculous. Would have been much more humiliating if Osama's codename had been Ballerina / Donkey / Gaylord / Bullwinkle

In a lot of Asia and the ME your garbage is taken away by the local untouchables for a small fee. So once a day old Mr Parvaaz and his two sons come along on their donkey cart and you pay them 5 cents to take your crap away. They then pick through it, resell what they can and burn the rest on some wasteland.

Well it's the 'getting off' that causes the population problem. And condoms are still cheaper than moon bases!

Personally I think when you start throwing a gaggle of lawyers at the GC looking for loopholes you're on the slip n' slide to doom.

I sense a conspiracy given that the word "Geronimo" has been used repeatedly in the last series of Doctor Who.

Well there was great interest given the similarities between the culture in NZ and the surface of the moon.

Although the White House was connected to real-time information during the raid, neither Mr Obama nor Mr Panetta saw bin Laden's shooting as it happened, Mr Panetta told PBS in a separate interview taped on Tuesday

Nope. From BBC Mr Panetta said the Pakistani government was also not informed of the operation in advance because the CIA feared that word of it might have been leaked. "It was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardise the mission. They might alert the targets," he told Time magazine.

Yes but given a finite bucket of money for scientific research, I am looking at the potential reward for spending say $X billion on: 1) A cure for malaria / cancer / crack addiction 2) Bringing greater equality to education / healthcare / justice 3) Finding out what sort of gases might be present in the rings of Saturn

From my point of view it just seems to be such a colossal waste of money. Yet another one of those things that are hard to justify when there are so many more pressing needs amongst humanity down here.

I guess it would have been nice to see him brought to trial and dismantled in the dock. But he could have sat there the whole time and looked dignified and mystical while the yapping dogs of the West tried to bring him down. At least we've saved ourselves 15 years of Johnny Cochran 2.0

It's like trading a loaf of bread for a winning lottery ticket. I bet just about every human being in an American uniform would have given their genitals to be on one of those choppers.

Totally worth the risk for this sort of pay off. I'm pretty sure they assessed whether there were laser beams in the local minaret.

I can just imagine the briefing in the White House: "Mr President, we have confirmed bin Laden's location. He could move at any time. Do we have a GO?" "Negative, General. I want Wills and Kate to be married first. We'll wait till next week."

Interesting to note that Pakistan was not informed of the operation at all and even scrambled their fighters. Definitely there was the assumption that the Pakistanis were not to be trusted. One US chopper crashed on the insert. Happily no repeat of Operation Eagle Claw.

I'd also suggest that the reason this intelligence took years to come to fruition was because the USA didn't want to share too many details with Pakistan! They played a great hand there.

Cool reasoning. Totalitarian Russia did it. So we can too.

Actually $50m since 2007. Plus another $2m kicked in by the airline pilots association.

An eminently sensible look at the implications of Osama's death Hold the Jubilation