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Senior staff positions at places like the SEC are exactly the types of position that change when a new Administration comes to power. In comparison to a country like Britain, where the civil service is largely tenured and only the Cabinet changes, American presidents appoint literally thousands of people throughout the Executive Branch.

I thought the comments from the Republicans in the article were rather surprising. All of these events took place during the Bush administration, and many of the staff involved were probably Bush appointees.

The real scandal here is the staffing of regulatory agencies by opponents of regulation, a common practice during the Bush Administration. One of the most effective "deregulatory" actions of that Administration was having their appointees to regulatory bodies sit on their hands for four or eight years. For another example, see this article contrasting antitrust policies at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission.

google's cache

A few notes:

• What does a pretty traveler on the beach have to do with the story? Is it supposed to entice viewers to read it?
• The main article is Slashdotted, so here's Google's text-only cached version: link

On the article, the main qualm for the author of the main article seems to be with Indonesia's inclusion into the Special 301 list. For those that didn't read the article but don't know what that list is, the Special 301 list monitors countries that are known for infringing IP rights on a wide-scale (or at least that's the jist I got from reading the articles).

If one reads at least the Executive Summary for Indonesia's report, it is made pretty clear that the analyzed paragraph is not the reason why Indonesia was included on that list. Their issues are, like many second- and third-world countries, much more far-reaching that.

Firstly, it is important to recognize that these are not governmental mandates. These are requests. While there is some legitimacy in claiming that the exclusive use of (free and) open-source software imbalances the playing field for companies looking to make a profit, it is very weak. Nobody complained when Germany or France switched over to OpenDocument format and Linux on government desktops, even though that both of those actions, according to the IIPA, would be guilty of the same thing. It should be a government's decision to determine whether they want to adopt a purely free and open-source computing environment; in fact, it is actually a pretty good decision for them since it would help them deter privacy at-home (which is ultimately what these folks want) while saving them massive dollars. I highly doubt that this will be followed through; too many questions would be raised.

Secondly, one the real reasons why Indonesia is on that list is clearly stated if one reads a bit further down into the report. They are reported as ranking in the world's top 12 countries for business software piracy. That more than likely means they get lots and lots of copies of Office from TPB or wherever. I'm not against piracy, but that would definitely be a legitimate cause for landing up on that list. They are also reported to have lots of other issues with illegal copying/selling/et al.

I am not against piracy (at least on a personal level), but I am against sensational journalism that only blows up a few pixels out of the bigger picture instead of looking at the whole image. This is hardly an attack on open-source; it's just a "thing they noticed."

Google Cache link

As a person who lived through dos and 3.1, it felt like microsoft cared very little about piracy back then.

However, when I did some googling, it looks like microsoft has put a lot of money and effort into stopping piracy all the way back to at least 1990. Microsoft anti-piracy articles dominate the search results and I wasn't able to easily find any good examples of them tolerating piracy (tho I remember talk of them tolerating it in china and i remember talk of them tolerating it with windows 3.1/3.11).

Perhaps we were rationalizing, or perhaps microsoft had variable enforcement depending on market penetration.

While typing this, I realized my piracy toleration attitude came from windows 3.1 so I did some searches on tolerating windows 3.1 piracy and got some hits.

http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:Cs-TDEi65mkJ:blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/index.php%3Fp%3D709+microsoft+tolerated+windows+3.1+piracy&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
for example.

"than failing to put anti-copy protection on MS-DOS in 1983 or encouraging easy copying of its "enterprise" virtualization software today. Similarly making it easy for users to "illegally" copy and install Office 4.0 for Windows 3.1X while straight facedly working with both WordPerfect Corporation and Lotus Development to help these companies prevent illegal copying, was a simple tactical extension of a long term strategy based on using piracy as a way of gaining market share. "

This matches the Microsoft I grew up with and know well. Strongly saying one thing, and selectively doing other things. Saying you had to follow the legitimate API's to be Windows 95 certified, but using backdoor API's for Word95 and then still certifying it. Saying you want a partnership with a smaller company, learning their technology, dropping the patnership, and then bringing out a similar product (and being sued for it and losing a few times).

I'm sure that Microsoft is strongly against piracy wherever it has high market penetration. I'm sure it says that it is strongly against piracy everywhere but some areas are very low on the enforcement list.

Here's a list of some key security flaws to look out for. The first four are all related to the IP type 0 routing header feature:

1. Trespassing

IPv6's advanced network discovery lets you select the path for your packets, but it could also let an attacker go where he or she should not go. "You can have them reach places they should not reach, and interact with equipment not in direct sight," according to Biondi and Ebalard. And an attacker could drill down and get more information on your remote networks, too.

2. Filtering device bypass

Many currently-installed filtering devices, such as firewalls, were not designed for IPv6. DMZ protection for IPv6 traffic varies in many products, as does firewall filtering of IPv6 packets. Experts worry that with such devices in place, an attacker could hide traffic or a payload using Route Header 0.

3. Denial-of-service (DOS)

DOS attacks can occur when IPv6 packets are sent back and forth through the same link until they overwhelm bandwidth. And you know what can happen after that -- not just the service disruption itself, but other attacks that are masked by the DOS.

"According to Philippe, you can mark a single packet such that it'll go around and around and around in these huge routing loops, such that a single packet will be able to consume far more link bandwidth than it could have previously," says Dan Kaminsky, director of penetration testing services for IOActive. "An 88x bandwidth amplifier is actually a fairly big deal, and will allow someone with a 1.5Mbit link to kill a 100Mbit upstream. That would be pretty bad."

4. Anycast: Not safe anymore

"Anycast works by announcing the same IP at many places on Internet so that each box can go to the nearest one," explains Biondi and Ebalard.

Trouble is, IPv6's routing header 0 feature "can single out all instances of an anycast service," according to the French researchers, and basically negate the benefits of anycasting.

The researchers concluded that IPv6's type 0 routing headers "have no applications, and only bring security issues." The only way to protect yourself for now is to disallow "RH0" in your network, and to prevent your host systems from processing it as well, they said.

5. IPv6 puts IPv4 at risk

There are bigger-picture problems than routing headers. Once you enable IPv6, you may open up your IPv4 network and devices to its vulnerabilities as well. This is a hot button for service providers testing out IPv6, but the problem applies to enterprises with large WANs also, says Nicholas Fischbach, senior manager of network engineering/security for COLT Telecom Group plc (Nasdaq: COLT; London: CTM.L).

"Turn on IPv6, and a number of DOS conditions may put your revenue- generating [IPv4] backbone at risk," Fischbach says.

And IPv6 isn't just a network issue, either. "It will also impact security devices, operating systems, and applications," he says. "Making an application IPv6-ready requires changes, some minor, some major, depending on the application and how it's written. But at the end of the day, it could mean another exposure of a security hole that no one thought of, or [had] only fixed in the IPv4 part."

  Kelly Jackson Higgins, Senior Editor, Dark Reading

From http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:aDqU_9rcWCMJ:www.darkreading.com/security/perimeter/showArticle.jhtml%3FarticleID%3D208804503+%22IPv6%22+and+%22security%22&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

(One version of) that code applies an "artificial correction" to the MXD tree ring density time series. Sections 4.3 and 4.4 of this unpublished manuscript describe an "artificial correction" (yes, they use those exact words) to the MXD tree ring density time series. They describe why they applied it.

I suspect they're the same thing, and that this correction was documented, but not used in a published manuscript. In any case, you have no evidence of "blatant lying" unless you can prove that (1) this correction was applied in a published manuscript, and (2) their documented procedure doesn't mention this correction.

http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:Dfgjclo2lSUJ:www.fusiongarage.com/blog/%3Fp%3D6+http://www.fusiongarage.com/blog/%3Fp%3D6&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a/

http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.phantomdev.com%2Fmacbook_mod_2%2F&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Guess it's time to get a Relakks account. Basically you use a VPN account which gives you some random Swedish IP address. This will keep you off the radar of those collecting IP addresses for a while.

Not related to them or anything, I was just a satisfied customer for a few months. I gave it up when I realized I almost never downloaded movies and music anymore.

Slashdotted.
yahoo cache
google cache

http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:6l-STbmY0DkJ:www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/07/28/+site:www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/07/28/&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us (sorry, Google cached copy because the website is weird)

CALVIN: "Dad, what's a control freak?"
DAD: "That's what lazy, slipshod, careless, cut-corner workers call anyone who cares enough to do something right."
CALVIN: "Am I in the presence of their king? Should I kneel?"
DAD: "If anything works in this world, it's because one of us took charge."

> Apple basically invented the home computer

That's rich :)

They revolutionized the home computer with a GUI interface model stolen from Xerox, they lowered the price of the hardware (Woz was a wizard after all), but they haven't invented it.

Apple stole nothing. Apple PAID Xerox for the technology (which was actually barely useable until Andy Hertzfeld, Randy Wigginton, Jef Raskin, Steve Capps, and others at Apple made some fundamental changes and improvements).

The first home computer intended for consumers was from Altair - aprox. one year before Apple I was released. And the credits for the "home computer" as it is today cannot be attributed to a single individual or company. Far from it.

The last part of your statement is true; however, Steve Wozniak (and hence, Apple) is, however, rightfully credited at making the home computer USEABLE, by having a ROM-based monitor "OS" on-board. The Apple 1 (which I own) WAS the first home computer (or any computer) you could simply turn on and start using, without having to manually toggle in a bootloader using address and data switches (an idea stolen from the PDP-8, while we're talking about "stolen" technology), then load in a paper tape (or, if you were a real masochist, you could simply toggle in the software...)

If the summary is laughably wrong, then you might also want to try and fix the Google cache.

To quote your good self : "My reaction to seeing other Apress books getting the free, electronic version treatment is: Im good with you pirating my book! Now, of course, I cant actively participate in pirating my book but, heck, its around on plenty of free e-book sites and on RapidShare. There are even links on Twitter to torrents like this. I am happy for you to pirate my book, but Im NOT A LAWYER, and I cant guarantee what Apress would do about it so youd be doing it off your own back! So, uhm, dont pirate it? The only condition, of course, if you do is that if you like the book and you think a print copy would be swell to own, please buy one even if its just for someone you know who wants to learn to program!"

Redirecting your page is like closing the barn door once the horse has bolted unfortunately.

Oh, and congrats on your first child :)

You can read the original content here - http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:y8CuWLUgkMkJ:beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/+beginning+ruby.org&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari

Single Payer

Citation needed.

Then citation is needed for where the Constitution of the USA authorizes federal government interference in medicine.

I asked for citations, so here's my own. Western PA Coalition for Single-Payer Healthcare lists 5 polls taken this year. Of them the Kaiser Health Tracking Poll says 58% favor and 38% oppose single payer health care. A Time Magazine poll says 49% favor and 46% oppose single payer insurance. None of the 5 polls say 60% of the people polled prefer single payer health care.

What is needed to reduce the cost of medicine is not socialized medicine but competition. While normal or average health care costs have gone up in markets where there is competition cost have declined. Look at Lasik eye surgery, in "1999 the average price of LASIK was well over $2,000 per eye." By 2001 1 in 5 surgeons were offering Lasik for under $1000 per eye. Costs have also dropped for cosmetic surgery. Costs were driven down too because of Medical tourism.

Falcon

Health care is a type of good can't be fairly traded in a free market.

Oh, I left something out in my previous reply to this post, as it happens I had 2 appointments at my doctor's office today and I was running a little late.

Now let's see what freer markets in health care can do. In 1999 the cost of LASIK eye corrective surgery was "well over $2,000 per eye", whereas "in 2001 one in five surgeons was offering LASIK for less than $1,000 per eye." Competition cut the cost of LASIK by almost half. Or take medical tourism, it has also driven surgery costs down. Even with airfare and any hotel stay flying to China, India, Russia, or other countries the costs are lower, and you can get care just as good. While medical care cares are rising in general, competition has driven cost down in some medical fields.

Just as real competition in other fields, such as computers, drives costs down competition in medicine has and will continue to drive costs down. Heck, despite the complaints Walmart gets about driving pay down they have also driven living costs down. My doc has given me a few prescriptions, just today she adjusted one of them, and although the clinic can send them electronically I ask for a printed form so I can go shopping for the lowest cost. With Walmart's $10 max price on thousands of drugs, they have been the lowest price for all of the prescriptions I've been given but one. What I think is ironic is that the one price that was lower was at Target yet for other drugs Target cost twice as much.

Falcon

- Among other incidents, at the school with the largest number of African-American students in the Ivy League, nooses and racial epithets have been anonymously scattered around professors' offices.

- Differential prosecution and punishment of drug offenses and other minor nonviolent offenses (with black men incarcerated at eight times the rate of white men).

- Black Americans were specifically targeted to receive sub-prime loans, even when they could have qualified for prime-rate loans, with a differential result that probably pushed a lot of African American families into losing their homes. (another on higher rates: here.)

- The USAF considers it still necessary to actively recruit minorities into the officer corps, which is over 80% white.

I could go on, but I've done enough research for you so far. Similar results can be found for differential treatment of other minorities, as well as women (who are actually a slim majority, but still the disempowered group).

Note that these are mostly instances of institutionalized racism or sexism -- where there is officially no difference on the law books or in the policies, but organizations still have cultures that privilege whiteness and maleness, and corresponding values and attitudes, above women and people of color. This is the kind of racism and sexism that is alive and well today, but is all the more insidious, because most of us white males are trained not to be even remotely aware of its existence, or (when confronted with it) to brush it off as isolated incidents, a few bad apples, etc. The biggest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn't exist, as they say.

Also, this is all without getting into stereotypical portrayals in the media. For instance, when was the last time you saw a movie with an Asian American hero who didn't either (1) know kung fu or (2) flail helplessly in the clutches of his own geekery? When have you seen an Asian American love interest? (Outside of Harold & Kumar, which was explicitly intended as a corrective to that attitude in media portrayals). Have you ever noticed that if there's a black character in an action movie, he's almost certainly one of the first to die, and nearly guaranteed to be dead by the end? (c.f. Battlestar Galactica, with plenty of other instances easily discoverable). I won't go on, but these sorts of cases have a powerful effect on society's perception of people of color, and on PoC's perceptions of themselves, too.

But as for vaccines and auto-immune diseases, since you're too f'ing lazy to do your own research, is The Lancet a good enough peer-reviewd medical journal for you?

Here are examples in humans: the first deals specifically with swine flu vaccines

For example, a form of Guillain-Barré syndrome (polyradiculoneuritis) was associated with the 1976-77 vaccination campaign against swine influenza, using the A/New Jersey/8/76 swine-flu vaccine.

The estimated attributable risk of vaccine- related Guillain-Barré syndrome in the adult population was just less than one case per 100 000 vaccinations, and the period of increased risk in swine-flu vaccinated versus non-vaccinated individuals was concentrated primarily within the 5 weeks after vaccination (relative risk 760)

and measles vaccines:

Another example of confirmed autoimmune adverse effects after vaccination is idiopathic thrombocytopenia, which might arise after administration of the measles-mumps-rubella vaccination

and

Which autoimmune diseases, if any, have been proven to be due to vaccines?

A form of rabies vaccine produced from infected rabbit CNS tissue induced an acute disseminated encephalomyelitis in 01% of vaccinees.

In 1976, cases of Guillain-Barré neuritis arose after vaccination with swine influenza virus, albeit still a rare event. Autoimmune thrombocytopenia has been described after measles vaccination, but with a much lower frequency than that seen after wild measles virus infection (one in 30 000 vs one in 5000)

Hepatitis B vaccine and MS

Hepatitis B and multiple sclerosis The possibility of an association between the hepatitis B vaccination and development of multiple sclerosis was first raised in France, after a report of 35 cases of primary demyelinating events occurring at a hospital in Paris between 1991 and 1997, within 8 weeks of recombinant hepatitis B vaccine injection. 57,58 The neurological manifestations were similar to those observed in multiple sclerosis. There were inflammatory changes in the cerebrospinal fluid and lesions were noted in the cerebral white matter on T2-weighted MR images. Clinically definite multiple sclerosis was diagnosed in half of the patients, after a mean follow-up of 3 years. These

and anti-cancer vaccines

Additionally, cancer vaccines based on dendritic cells pulsed with tumour antigens carry a substantial risk of autoimmunity.

The logical choice, since his book machine is probably immune to all viruses.

Don't you just hate it when they just accidentally the entire pirate bay?

You'll note that even in this study they didn't sequence any DNA; they just looked at the expressed mRNA.

I couldn't quite figure that out from TFA. It sounded like they sequenced the DNA and cDNA, but then they talk about mRNA.

http://www.genomeweb.com/sequencing/snps-non-cancerous-tissue-may-differ-those-blood-study-finds http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:0S55-4qOoysJ:www.genomeweb.com/sequencing/snps-non-cancerous-tissue-may-differ-those-blood-study-finds+SNPs+in+Non-Cancerous+Tissue+May+Differ+From+Those+In+Blood,+Study+Finds&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us Sneaky cache to avoid login

On the other hand, when the team sequenced BAK1 cDNA from healthy aortic tissue obtained from a Quebec transplant service, they found the same three SNPs as in the aortic tissue from the AAA cases. The researchers verified their findings by sequencing both strands of DNA and repeating the sequencing several times.

So far, Schweitzer said it's unclear whether these BAK1 differences in the blood and aortic tissue are the consequence of RNA editing, which changes the messenger RNA but not the gene, or DNA editing, which involves differences in the gene itself.

Hmmm. And here I thought that the US merely forbid US-based credit card companies from paying to on-line casinos. That'd be entirely legal

Then you haven't been paying attention. The USA has pursued actions against foreign-based Internet gambling sites, including Partypoker.com. Also, forbidding credit card payments is against WTO treaties, which are (per the constitution), the law of the land.

You would still need to buy over 120 monopoly games to get that much monopoly money. Much more reasonable but even that is probably excessive.

Wrong! (using Google's cache b/c the normal link is dead)

I came across this article at Windows for Devices earlier today: http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:PKmZMViNa2MJ:www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS9375883682.html+thinkpad+arm+netbook&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

Lenovo? Considering a Thinkpad Netbook? I'm typing this on a Thinkpad X40 running Debian; 2.4 lbs of full size keys goodness. I won't consider another machine without its keyboard or Trackpoint. But I can only drool at the thought of am X series type Thinkpad with and ARM based CPU and true all day capability.

Lenovo with an ARM cpu on a Thinkpad? Nah, it'll never happen... And I understand this even though my profession has nothing to do with the computers.