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"Well, I would say that in the year 2000 the country failed abysmally in the presidential election process. There's no doubt in my mind that Al Gore was elected president. He received the most votes nationwide and in my opinion he also received the most votes in Florida. And the decision was made, as you know, by a 5-4 vote on a highly partisan basis by the US Supreme Court. I would say in 2000 there was a failure. The year 2004 is hard to grade. I don't have any detailed information about what actually went on in Ohio. If Ohio had gone one way or the other it would have changed the outcome of the election. And the only thing that I know about Ohio was that there's general consensus, that the secretary of state of Ohio, who was responsible for the administration of elections was highly partisan in his public approach and perhaps even in his private administration but I don't know about that."
http://www.american.edu/media/speeches/carter.htm

Disclaimer: I'm not an American, so do not know how liked Jimmy Carter actually is, but I don't reply on Fox for my dose of world news, and many respected UK journalists/news agencies were quite open in their opinion that Bush actually lost the 2000 election.

http://www.american.edu/TED/saipan.htm
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/05/09/real.delay/
http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/sweatshops /saipan/abc040100.html
http://www.msmagazine.com/spring2006/paradise_full .asp

Here is one article. And another article from a right wing perspective, and yet another article from the left side of the aisle. Then there's this and this and this, too.

Any more objections?

Oh and about their prisoner harvesting?
http://www.american.edu/TED/prisonorgans.htm
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=1125056
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/harvestingorgansinc hina30mar06.shtml
http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,1756808,0 0.html
http://www.rense.com/general10/org.htm

Thank you very much and have a nice day.

Because you can't manufacture and sell "common sense."

Seriously: take any application or tool that you manufacture or market, re-paint it (or re-style the GUI) in red, white, and shades of chrome, stick a friggin' caduceus in the upper right hand corner, then sell it into the Medical Industry as being "expressly configured for Doctors," jack up the price by a factor of SEVEN, and watch 'em fly outta your warehouse.

* The Soviet Mayak nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, in the town of Chelyabinsk.
* The Bhopal Disaster.
* The GM Pinto.
* The John Hancock Building.
* The Silver Bridge collapse, in West Virginia.
* The Teton Dam.
Now arguably, they had to pick the top ten, but it is very hard to imagine a top ten without at least Bhopal.

There's a big problem with motorcycle clones in China and other parts of Asia (my favorite is the Hongda). In some cases the engines are exact replicas, or may even be manufactured in the same plant that makes the real thing. Despite most of these bikes being exact clones of good designs, they're made with horrible steel that's extremely brittle. The few people I know who bought chinese imitation bikes all had their frames crack within a year.

Well I don't know about the Soviet Union but I do know about Romania:
Despite its isolationism, Romanian IT was largely based on Western technology. However, there was a major technological lag between Romanian-produced hardware and that available in Western nations. The mainstays of Romanian production during the 1980s were minicomputers: the Felix C, licensed from the French Iris-50, which was compatible with, and based on, the Honeywell Bull C11; the Independent which was compatible with, and based on, the DEC PDP/11; the Coral which was likewise an unlicensed relative of the DEC VAX 11/730.
Taken from http://www.american.edu/carmel/dj2877a/page4.html

Wine is made in many countries and is not exclusive to one country. Sake is AFAIK made only in Japan

http://www.american.edu/TED/honda.htm

They're coming to the US too. There are a lot of cheaply made Chinese dirt bikes that have engines nearly identical to the ones Honda was using in the late 1980s. One of the motorcycle boards I regularly read has a few threads of users who bought these bikes to play around with and see how they compare. In almost all cases, they are made with poor quality materials which result in cracked plastic and frames that fracture easily (not a good thing, especially on a motorcycle).

I believe the soviets did the same thing back in the 60s and 70s.

I think that this is a bad development. No matter how safe proponents say it is, many future generation have to deal with the waste of an energy form that we can just use for a short time (there is only enough low-cost uranium for fifty years, at the *present rate* of power use). Apart from that many regimes are not cautious, or even worse, use it for development of nuclear arms.

For those reasons, we should strive for disarming countries with nuclear weapons (including European countries, and the United States), and try to find better alternatives for nuclear energy.

In The Netherlands, where I live, wind energy could be very viable as an alternative. Oddly, building of windmills is blocked by environmental groups. And in other countries dams and solar energy may work (with enough development).

And yes, it would help a bit if we used less energy. So, buy a Soekris or VIA Epia board next time ;).

I think that this is a bad development. No matter how safe proponents say it is, many future generation have to deal with the waste of an energy form that we can just use for a short time (there is only enough low-cost uranium for fifty years, at the *present rate* of power use). Apart from that many regimes are not cautious, or even worse, use it for development of nuclear arms.

For those reasons, we should strive for disarming countries with nuclear weapons (including European countries, and the United States), and try to find better alternatives for nuclear energy.

In The Netherlands, where I live, wind energy could be very viable as an alternative. Oddly, building of windmills is blocked by environmental groups. And in other countries dams and solar energy may work (with enough development).

And yes, it would help a bit if we used less energy. So, buy a Soekris or VIA Epia board next time ;).

Polish law might lack legal or prosecutorial precedent of actually going after infringers, but the laws certainly do exist both as part of recent overhaul of polish IP law and because it is simply increasingly required of poland to be part of europe.

http://www.american.edu/initeb/rw9257a/property.ht m

I was just on Some Random Website the other day reading about how before hops found its way into beers (sometime around the fourteenth century, I think), its principle use in Europe was as a medicinal herb. Usually brewed as a tea, as I recall.

Another Fun Beer Fact: before the British "discovered" how to put hops in their beer, the primary flavoring agent they used was creeping charlie. Ever since I found that out, I've always kinda wondered what that would taste like ...

Another plant that seems to have tremendous health benefits (fightin' cancer, and alzheimer's, and as a general anti-inflammatory, etc.) is turmeric -- which is one of the primary ingredients of curry.

Hmmmm ... beer and curry ... the British must live fer freakin' ever.

American University's Center for Social Media working with the Washington College of Law coordinated the release yesterday of a Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use authored by several independent film organizations. The statement explains approaches documentary makers can take in asserting fair use rights in their films.

American University's Center for Social Media working with the Washington College of Law coordinated the release yesterday of a Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use authored by several independent film organizations. The statement explains approaches documentary makers can take in asserting fair use rights in their films.

Hard to believe right? I am from the coastal city of Bosaso on the horn of Africa, and some of my relatives took pride in their high-seas piracy. I have always heard of illegal Japanese and Norwegian ships illegaly fishing in our shores, while Somalis, with not central government and coast guard, sat around in anger and frustration.

This piracy started as a way to defend our coast-lines from illegal international fishing. Somalia hasn't had a government since 1990, and our fish resources became the loot of international fishing conglomerates. Others have used our coast to dump their waste, even nuclear waste.

After the fall of the Somali government, our coast guard's ships and vessels were looted by tribes. Some of our ships and boats were sold to illegal fishing companies, which didn't go far but stayed to fish in our waters! While other boats stayed in the hands of tribal leaders and warlords who used them for piracy and people smuggling to the middle east, although more often as a vehicle for products and trade with Yemen, our neighbor to the North.

It's funny how companies registered in Democratic developed nations, and pay their taxes there, are the ones looting our natural resources and using our sea and land to dump their waste.

http://gurukul.ucc.american.edu/ted/somalia.htm

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=249 733&area=/breaking_news/breaking_news__africa/

http://somalinet.com/news/world/Somalia/1063

I wish the international community would deploy high-tech sonic weapons to defend us against real theives, not just pirates, blinded and deafended by greed.

- Mahammad Darwish

American University's Washington College of Law has several podcasts on iTunes now including one with most of the big panels and speakers.

American University's Washington College of Law has several podcasts on iTunes now including one with most of the big panels and speakers.

Yeap, there is a dispute between not only China and Vietnam, but also Taiwan about offshore oil deposits in the South China Sea. Here's a good case study of the Spratly Islands Dispute.

The loss of American blood and treasure in foreign conflicts was presaged by the warning from President Dwight Eisenhower regarding the USA's "military-industrial complex".

Yet Eisenhower set the stage for the Vietnam War.

the way to fight polution is at the source. stop corporations from producing polution. if that is done, then the people won't have to spend tax dollars cleaning up the mess.

Actually in the US the government is the biggest polluter and the government exempts itself from many environmental laws. It's the same elsehere, the old Soviet Union generated a lot of pollution. Lake Baikal in Siberia was heavily polluted and the lake holds 20% of the world's fresh water. One source of pollution is a paper mill in Baikalsk which was first planned in 1954.

We're looking at this from a US perspective, not a global Many Foriegn countries don't have the telecommunications infrastructure that we have here in the US such as the http://www.cs.georgetown.edu/~denning/cosc450/pape rs/acker.htmlSoviet Union, former http://www.american.edu/carmel/BS2787A/infrast.htm #IndustryCzech Republic

That's interesting, because I graduated from Michigan Law and I don't recall them instilling anything about the spelling of judgment/judgement.

Google also shows mixed spellings, even on law school exam questiones, e.g. http://library.wcl.american.edu/exams/Exam.php3?Fr omPage=ExamByCourse&CourseID=20&ExamID=170

Methinks thou arst a fibbah.

This article (PDF) suggests that the genitive ending was -es in Old English, and -ies or -ys in Middle English, and that the apostrophe was introduced as a replacement for omitted vowels.

However, he also describes an alternative view: that the apostrophe was originally used because of the mistaken assumption that the genitive ending was already a contraction of "his". Apparently even Shakespeare made this mistake...

unlike religion, science is self-correcting over the long term. If someone fudges the data and comes up with a wrong conclusion eventually someone else will discover that and get it right.

Bad software developers have built houses

http://www.american.edu/TED/projects/tedcross/xoil pr15.htm
http://www.pinr.com/index.php(more general region info)
http://www.energybulletin.net/4673.html
and many many more

You can start with the 1976 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species rhino ban agreement. I know that happened probably a good 15 years before you were born, which is like, o-my-god, soooo long ago...

Percy Schmeiser, a Saskatchwan farmer, was sued by agribusiness Monsanto...when the "roundup-ready" canola was found on Schmeiser's farm - blown there by the wind. Although Schmeiser didn't want the plants, and tried to get rid of the plants, he lost the lawsuit.

Without a renewed license, Iraqi farmers cannot replant each year's seeds, like 97 percent of them currently do. Also, they cannot sell or trade the seeds - because the genetic materials of the crops are patented.

Or Basmati Rice... friggin' pirates...

Here is a report you might be interested to read. It concerns a nuclear plant in the UK.
I'm sure you probably believe that this would never happen in the US...

You guys really trust in the absolute safety of our western modernized nuclear plants...

About 2 Months ago, the UK Atomic Energy Authority announced that 30 kg of plutonium were unaccounted for by the Sellafield nuclear plant, in the UK. Since 1952, the Sellafield plant has been releasing nuclear waste into the Irish Sea making it the most radioactive sea in the wold (yes, even beating the Baltic Sea).

Do you all believe that our governements are 100% committed to make population safety a priority against economic interests?
Do you really believe that a major nuclear accident will never occur in the western part of the world? How arrogant is this?...

The thing with nuclear energy is that one major incident is enough to devaste whole countries and kill millions of people.

No matter how low the probability of a nuclear accident (and it is higher than you think), it is not a matter of "if" but of "when".

The real issue is that there is no other way to make our planet healthier and safer but to cut down on our need for energy.
This article is about trying to make maximum use of a given amount of energy. In my mind that beats by far converting the use of fossile fuels to the use of nuclear energy.

We, western countries, like to tell that we produce energy in the most secure fashion in the world. But we do not like admitting that we are also the biggest polluters in the world.

As many posters have pointed out Sellafiled (or Windscale as it was called before its last major incident) is nowhere near London. It's on the Irish sea which is handy for all that nasty run-off from the plant.
Luminous green is the 41st shade to be added to existing 40 shades of green Ireland had become famous for.

Like the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River? I'll grant you that the nuclear debate in the US long ago degenerated into shouting. However, the Chinese committees that make these decisions accept so little outside input, and what input there is even today confined by self censorship, that the "advantage" you speak of can quickly show itself an illusion.

So, here's a real-life example: I bought my first computer for use in music, and that is still my primary use (outside of work). There isn't much free (or open source) pro-quality music software. According to RMS, this means that I simply shouldn't do music on my PC, because I sacrifice my freedom when I use proprietary software. This just demonstrates that he either doesn't know what freedom is, or doesn't know what a computer is. How is it more free for me to not get the job done? There are times when you should sacrifice your freedom in service of a moral principle, (for example, not buying slave-produced chocolate), but this one doesn't make sense. I shouldn't use any software to do the job because none of it is as free as RMS says it should be?

I think that the real problem is that RMS has some transcendent view of computers that doesn't have much to do with what they really are for most people. ESR (and OSI) seem to understand this - people use computers to get the job done. Whatever gets the job done best is what creates the most freedom. ('Best' is a word that can vary from user to user - most reliable, cheapest, easiest to use, etc.) Open source is a vastly better engineering model, and that is its primary benefit. (I hope some serious open source music apps start happening!)

One of the other problems with RMS is that he thinks that if two parties enter into a mutually agreeable relationship, it is only ethical and free if it meets his requirements, instead of their own. If I choose to purchase crappy software from MS and agree to their EULA it may be dumb, but why is it unfree? The real freedom occurs when I select the product - I can choose OSS or proprietary. If RMS has his way I will be less free, because I will only be able to select OSS software.

Final disclaimer: while I disagree with RMS about many things, I do not intend any disrespect to him. The creation of the GPL (and many of the GNU tools) demonstrate his brilliance, and, while I think his principles are wrong, I must admit (and admire) the fact that he sticks with them. I would never suggest that he abandon principle, just that he rethink the ones to which he is committed. Hint to /.ers: it's possible to strongly disagree with him without denigrating him as a human being.

"Argentina get all pissy about the Falkland Islands, which are hardly worth the trouble."

*ahem* "In a study conducted by tow private companies, Geco Prakla of Norway and Spectrum of Britain, it is estimated that the potential oil reserves [of the Falklands] may exceed by more than 50% the reserves of the UK sector of the North Sea"

Of COURSE we had a war.... there was OIL involved!

The scary thing is, that the statement also rings true the other way - "of COURSE there was oil involved - it was a war!"

/me shakes head resignedly, and holds breath waiting for fusion power...

Bad form self-reply yada yada...
I just saw something on the news about opening the markets for rice in South Korea. The problems with this are similar to the problems involved with accepting food aid. The idea that "aid" is given with harmful intent (specifically, weaking the local production of similar products and progressively create a captive market) but it's a reality that's become far more profitable for the aid-giving country with the advent of IP protected GM foods.

http://www.american.edu/TED/KORRICE.HTM

It started two decades ago...
The Tribune
America.edu
Google for more...

Also, I understand that most new oil production there is in the Arctic. We'll see how much of a mess that makes. I suspect that since the western oil companies are getting involved, that we won't see any deliberate pollution, but who knows. One of the big attractions of Russia for them is the lax attitude towards pollution. Certainly, they aren't interested in producing in Alaska, where they get not only high costs, but also bad publicity for even trivial spills.

Well... the concern here is probably the mercury vapors. When the ambient temperature is high, at least. And even that not too much.

Metallic mercury risk is only in the vapors; and, when ingested, it causes violent diarrhea. (It's not entirely friendly material, but no cause of fear, at least unless combined with liability lawyers and clueless jury. Which could explain the hazmat dudes. The threat of lawyers often leads to irrational behavior.)

The salts are dangerous when they are soluble. Calomel is quite harmless, in comparison with soluble mercury(II) chloride. (A better example here is barium, which is very toxic, and barium sulphide, which is commonly used as x-ray contrast stuff in medicine, and is nontoxic because its extremely low solubility.) The real bitch, however, are organic mercury compounds, eg. dimethyl mercury, which - in combination with fishing industry - can lead to whole villages being affected (see Minamata Disease).

I have never expirenced downtime from my telephone provider (unless it was a powercut)

If you had seen these reports, or looked at the article, you would realize that things like 'powercuts' are what we're talking about. It's not terribly suprising that among hundreds of private companies competing with each other, some are going to have shittier networks than others.

This report, on the Polish telecom industry, paints a much different picture than the U.S. one. 32 phones per 100 people and '[cost is] one of the highest in Europe' don't indicate an advanced tele infrastructure.

I like dissing the U.S. as much as the next non-USian, but it's easier if you go for the tender spots.

There is an incorrect statement, caused by an error in my original test. I updated my test, and the last line should read

Code in bar.WonkPrime.doThat can access this.fld, this.mth, sameInput.fld, sameInput.mth. But it can't access superInput.fld or superInput.mth.

Your last comment (protected members have package visibility AND are visible to subclasses) helps explain the discrepancy betweeen foo.WonkPrime and bar.WonkPrime: there are two distinct access rules in play. The package visibility rule (which only applies to foo.WonkPrime) allows foo.* to access any protected member in any instance of foo.Wonk. The subclass visibility rule allows bar.WonkPrime to access protected members inherited from foo.Wonk. (For me, it was helpful to think that "protected members inherited from foo.Wonk" != "protected members in foo.Wonk")

There is order in the universe, and I'll stop wasting everyone's time now. :)

Look at air travel - there you have spend a ton of time just getting on a plane because of very few bad people.

The delays are not because of the terrorists since it is generally agreed that they won't use that method twice and if they tried the people on board wouldn't allow it.

In England those bad people were called "the King" (in the US they are now called "the current administration") and that is why the founding fathers specifically put into the documents they used to form a new government that people should remain unencumbered when travelling from place to place -

Why? Because they still remembered (as embodied in the Magna Carta) when the King tried to prevent people from moving around after the plagues (they were moving to find better pay for their work and the owning class wanted them to stay in the same place and work for the same pre-plague wages when there was an overabundance of laborers - after the plagues there was a severe shortage of laborers and they wanted to follow the best wages. Since the work was geographically fixed the owning class realized that unfixed wages during a labor shortage could create a bidding war since laborers would move to an area of higher wages and it would create a labor vaccuum in the area they left and they would have to raise wages even higher to get the laborers back.

Our real and virtual ability to move about unemcumbered, unharassed, without checkpoints requiring showing of papers and threat of incarceration is impinged now for the same reasons it was 1500 years ago. Money, power and control.

As for water being more radioactive after removal, umm... Source?

Here's the link. A Google search for "sellafield, ireland" will bring up the various links.
Sellafield, UK

UTPD officials say the current security system is adequate. "I think we've got a good system in place, and I think the apprehension of six individuals shows how the system works," Stalder said.

So, they caught the perps. That's fine for simple vandalism, but if they continue to hide behind "homeland security," I would demand that they actualy provide that level of security. Specifically, the system failed in three ways:
- They don't know if all intrusions resulted in capture. I suspect not; it's the criminals that don't get caught that you need to worry about.
- There is no proof that these kids didn't do any damage. They could have planted a dozen bombs set to go off in a year, and by that time they will have served their probation and fled the country. The tunnels allow unsupervised access to anyone, just for limitied periods of time.
- In the era of disposable terrorists, the act has often been commited before their body parts can be arrested.

Sure, keeping the maps secret could make it more difficult for someone, but won't deter someone who's serious. These kids did it _for_fun_, and the lack of maps didn't deter them. I say release the maps, because this information could be valuable to people who live and work in the area. The poison you might find may have been placed there by the government and not 'terrorists'.

I didn't even see the pdf link on that page, hence the apology for lack of detail.

Many people are campaigning to get the plant closed down though. The argument is that it is a bad idea to ship very radioactive materials around the globe. There has also been some trouble with governments not wanting to take their waste back from us as per their contractural obligations. Some links below.

Pollution crossing international borders

Might not make any money

Deliberate falsification of reprocessing records for a MOX shipment to Japan.

Link

The idea was correct, just not the analysis.

When customers stop buying it, corporations will stop selling it.

If that were the case, Monsanto would have stopped selling Posilac long ago. On the other hand, when your executives are appointed to the EPA, and you can prevent the news from airing the truth, who cares about the puss content of 1/3rd of America's childrens' milk?

Customers have all kinds of choice. It is awareness and influence that are starkly lacking in the modern America.

You want sources for the draining of the southern Iraqi marshes? Googling on 'marsh', 'arab', 'drain and 'iraq' gets me 1130 hits. Number 1 is a Voice of America site and number 2 is an American University site, so I guess they fail your GWB/Rummy filter. Number 3 is an article by Robert Fisk however:

"The first time I saw the Marshes, just east of the Baghdad-Basra highway, the tourist guide was true to its words. For miles, thousands of reed huts stood on earth and papyrus islands, each inhabited by the descendants of the ancient Sumerians, a time warp of simplicity which, according to old Arabic scripts, may have begun with a devastating flood around AD620. The last time I went there, the women from one Marsh Arab village were prostituting themselves to lorry driversto make money for their impoverished families."

Its hosted on a website called Common Dreams which looks to be fairly left-leaning as far as I can see.

Link number 4 which is an article hosted on the South Wales Worker's Education Association website (not a notable hotbed of neo-con thinking) which cites UN studies and includes some comparitive Landsat images:

"This section marshals the latest evidence of a tragedy developing in Iraq since the 1970s. The drainage of the wetlands that have been home to the Ma'dan or Marsh Arabs for 5,000 years."

Link 5 is an article on the US Institute of Peace website, but this is a congressionally funded federal agency so probably fails your GWB filter.

Link 6 is a page on a personal webpage of some bloke called Mike. I don't think he's a sock-puppet for GWB, indeed looking at the site index he seems to be fairly right-on sort of chap (albeit with unfortunate goth-ey tendencies back in the 80s). Here's the first sentence:

"These satellite photos reveal exactly how Saddam Hussein is systematically draining the marshes of southern Iraq, transforming a unique eco-system into a man-made desert and destroying the ancient home of the Ma'dan or Marsh Arabs."

Link 7 is a BBC website for children. Here's the text:

"There are about 250,000 of this Shia Muslim group, also called Madan, living in Iraq. They originally lived in the marshes around the southern end of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

After the first Gulf War, they tried to overthrow Saddam. The Iraqi government stopped them.

Saddam's government decided to drain the marshes, which split up all the Madan. This removed their ability to threaten the old regime."

Link 8 is another personal webpage, this time for a Dutch doctoral student in mathematics. It has photos of a trip he took to Iraq as part of a delegation trying to overturn the sanctions that existed post-GW1, so I think its reasonable to conclude that he doesn't much care for GWB.

Link 9 is a State dept website, so probably fails your GWB-filter.

Link 10 is a Kuwaiti website, so they probably count as GWB's sock-puppets for you.

There you go. Five out of the 10 are probably tainted for you (although I note that only 1 is an overt propaganda site). If that ratio holds good for the rest of the links then you've got 560 more webpages you can read.

Regards Luke

PS Dunno why the l

By the way, the Pan-American highway has a small gap due to a nature preserve so your rally race would need to board ships. It is called the Darien Gap and is about 50 miles wide so it could also be closed with a tunnel. But I doubt if the economic incentive is there to do that way. More likely the rainforest will be sacrificed.

Actually, in Italy, some tourists nare NOT wanted. Italy has a problem with ignorant, littering, loud, obnoxious tourists. The kind who sit on church steps in shorts and tshirts dropping mcdonalds litter beside them.

there is much press on the matter.

http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/955768/posts
http://www.american.edu/TED/VENICE.HTM