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Dyson spheres (or swarms) would probably be the best way to detect an advanced civilization, especially a Kardashev Type II or Type III civilization.

In a Dyson sphere (or swarm) a civilization surrounds an entire star to capture most or all of its luminosity; severely cutting down on its optical luminosity but accentuating the IR luminosity. (The physics of a rigid sphere surrounding a star are pretty challenging, and some sort of swarm or cloud seems more likely, at least to our limited technological understanding.) So, to hunt for a Dyson sphere, you look for objects with an unusual excess of IR, and a lack of optical light. The IRAS IR satellite was used to search for Dyson spheres within ~ 1000 light years of the Earth (producing a handful of so-so candidates). Carrigan calls these sorts of searches "Interstellar Archaeology." They have one great advantage in that they don't require any cooperation from the other end (i.e., no beacons or other signals).

As it happens, I have recently speculated that "Object X" in M33 (the Triangulum Galaxy) could represent the signature of a Dyson sphere / swarm from 3 million light years away. If this (unlikely) possibility were to be true, it would represent the signature of a Kardashev Type III or near Type III civilization. Interstellar Archaeology is the only possible form of SETI across such vast distances.

The radioactive iodine is almost certain to cause cancers and mortality in Japanese children in coming years.

From the IAEA staff report "Thyroid Cancer Effects in Children" :

The main consequence of the Chernobyl accident is thyroid cancer in children, some of whom were not yet born at the time of the accident. Following the vapour explosion and fire at the Chernobyl reactor, radioactive iodine was released and spread in the surrounding area. Despite measures taken, children in southern Belarus and northern Ukraine, were exposed to radiation in the weeks following the accident , particularly by consuming milk from pastured cows and leafy vegetables that had been contaminated with radioactive iodine.

Radioactive Iodine has a half-life of 8 days, so it is the immediate exposure that is the problem here. Unfortunately, the Japanese government took 3 days after the Iodine exposure was publicly announced (and, presumably, more days after they knew about it), to ban the eating of contaminated spinach (a "leafy vegetable") and dairy milk. Worse, when the iodine contamination was first made public, Mr. Yukio Edano, Japan's chief Cabinet secretary, urge calm, saying that the contaminated food posed "no immediate threat." What weasel words - these cancers will take months to years to develop, so there is indeed no "immediate" threat. He should have urged people not to drink milk or vegetables from the affected area, instead.

Here is some more information about the risk from Iodine-131 at Fukushima. This is a problem particularly for children as their bodies take up the Iodine - similar doses don't cause problems for mature adults.

This chart applies only to "prompt" doses. Most of the casualties from Chernobyl (4000 to 8000 fatalities and counting) were from Thyroid cancer caused by exposure of children to radioactive Iodine. This is not just a dose effect, as the same dosage from another material, or of adults rather than children, won't cause these cancers. So, this chart is not appropriate for these long-term dangers.

Radioactive iodine has been found in milk and spinach near Fukushima, ad it is very worrying that the Japanese government is only talking about "immediate effects" when the real danger is long term.

I posted what I know here :

http://forum.americafree.tv/showthread.php?p=45045

It looks like the undersea cable is fine and BGP is up, but there is no reachability past the landing site. This indicates that there is probably not physical damage, at least to the landing site and the first hop routers, but a cut somewhere after that. If I had to guess, I would guess that Gaddafi or his minions just told the ISPs to shut it down.

As the only Libyan landing site I know of is in Tripoli, this may also cut off the liberated areas in Cyrenaica.

Redundancy in routing is good - an overland link between Benghazi and Alexandria could be very useful right now.

Google has gone positively copyright absolutist - not just in YouTube (which, of course, grew up on a steady diet of infringement), but also in Adwords and maybe Adsense.

Adwords now disallows ads with phrases like "music videos" or "Internet TV," under the theory that any site advertising such must be guilty of, not just infringement, but "hacking and cracking." As their standard of proof is "guilty until proven innocent," arguing with them is fairly frustrating...

After the sale of YouTube, video oriented sites are popping up everywhere, and many of them seem to be oriented around a similar exit strategy, so this doesn't surprise me. (Disclosure - I am with AmericaFree.TV and I look at a lot of video sites, but the 6 mentioned were all new to me.)

It is my feeling that this is a weakness of the entire statistically based advertising and ranking model, which looks at the actions of computers and tries to infer the intent of their owners. Using spyware to bring people to your site will piss them off, and they likely won't stick around, but if all you want to do is to artifically inflate your traffic statistics so that you can do a quick sale, what do you care ? This is beginning to remind me of the dot-com days...

I think that there should be an open commercial ID (maybe a frame with certain properties, like a specific color or shade of grey - it should be very easy to pick out.

If there was one, we (AmericaFree.TV) would use it, and I suspect other Internet television broadcasters would too. Why ? Because in the long run commercials (as opposed to product placements, sponsored events, etc.) will only work if people want to receive them, and because people will just fast forward through them anyway.

For a list of worldwide stations - Smart Digital Network
America Free TV

The attention is definitely waning - here is plot of the NASA web site traffic. (The plot is courtesy of Alexa and may not work in all browsers, so I put a JPEG of today's ranking up.)

You can clearly see peaks for both Landings - according to Alexa, greater than the peak at the time of the Columbia disaster and a decline more or less to baseline since.