"The general threshold for perforating the skin is about 330 feet a second.  Apart from bone, skin offers the greatest resistance to penetration. If it can pass through the skin it is potentially lethal, even if the bullets are small.  If you shoved something 3mm across into someone's chest you could kill them. It's the same with these bullets, they could penetrate the heart." As the manufacturer points out, though, the energy produced is less than one tenth that of an air rifle:
http://www.swissminigun.com/ammunition.html

In fact, looking at the weight of the projectile in question (0.12 grams), it has no more mass than a soft-air BB, which generally range from 0.12 to 0.2 grams.  I've personally been hit by more than my share of those, at velocities up to 400 fps, and have only had a couple of occasions where any blood was drawn.  The cross section with these bullets is smaller, but if someone shot me with this little revolver, I think I would be inclined to ask them to stop it...

But they go way further with this:

"Jonathan Spencer, consultant forensic scientist and firearms expert, said that although the gun, which fires bullets at a speed of 399 feet a second, was tiny, it could still prove fatal and in the eyes of the law was as dangerous as a machine gun."
"It is capable of killing someone. Under section 5 of the Firearms Act it would be a prohibited weapon. It would be on the same scale as a machine gun."

For some reason, I have trouble fathoming this comparison:

"In September 2006 the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives(ATF) in New York issued a warning about the gun after being alerted by a police officer who spotted it on a website.  Special Agent William McMahon said the gun was so small it could pass for a key fob, and warned it made the perfect stealth weapon for serious criminals." Ummm, ya, a seriously retarded criminal, in my opinion - one that would be willing to spend around $6,000 (more, on black market, I'm sure) for a gun that could only possibly have any effect at point blank range, and even then might do little or no harm.... it would seem to me that a simple shank would have far more predictable results.

I think someone has been watching too many James Bond movies.....

On page 38 of http://www.pewclimate.org/docUploads/Market_Consequences-report.pdf there is an interesting bit of information on how bureaucrats at the EPA evaluate the cost vs benefit of potential policies:

So if I'm reading this right, the average person would be willing to spend $7.7 million to extend their life one year, and that this is the basis for determining the cost effectiveness and relative impact of environmental policies?  I hope the EPA never has to save us from a real threat - they could rationalize spending the entire GDP of the U.S. to save 0.4% of its population!

Maybe I sound callous about this?  What is the value of a human life?  The problem in putting such a number to it, though, is the abuse of power it enables, because it makes no economic sense.  We're talking about a theoretical value man-year of life that would take the average wage earner around 250 years to earn!  How can we as citizens possibly bear the level of financial burden that could potentially find license in such reasoning?

Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology

The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering.