Drinking water quality in the United States is generally good. In 2006, 89.3 percent of the nation's community water systems were in compliance with all of more than 90 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards. Most of the systems out of compliance are small systems in rural areas and small towns, partly because most public water systems are small ones. Drinking water quality in the U.S. is regulated by state and federal laws and codes, which set Maximum Contaminant Levels for some pollutants and naturally occurring constituents, determine various operational requirements, require public notification for violation of standards, provide guidance to state primacy agencies, and require utilities to publish consumer confidence reports.
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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So I went out into the night and the neon and let the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to be just a segment of that mass organism, just one more drifting chip of consciousness under the geodesics.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
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—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
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“fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.”
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