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Sellafield

Sellafield 2
... keep googling...

You see, I'm perfectly aware that nuclear energy has some advantages; unfortunately it's a dangerous beast to handle that requires large long term investments. Whenever there's lots of money involved, MBAs start the pissing contest against the "foolish" "overly cautious" scientists (that could they themselves make grave mistakes) over who holds the purse. Then invariably the shit hits the fan and when that happens it's not like in chem industry where at most a couple of generations are affected in a relatively limited area. You get entire regions gravely contaminated for centuries, millennia, eras where no human can live without 100% chance of dying. It's a rather cynical logic but I feel it's good. A nuclear mistake is irreparable, I don't want my descendancy to pay for it forever while I can live with something more temporary.

The only people suffering long-term health problems from Hirosima, Nagasaki, and Chernobyl are/were those who where younger than 4 years old at the time of radiation exposure. Most of the long term illnesses, even in those cases, where treatable forms of thyroid cancer. Compare that to the hundreds of thousands killed or blinded by the Union Carbide accident in Bhopal, India.

I can testify from experience that what you describe is exactly the way this sort of thing goes down.

Back in 1995, I was a clueless undergraduate at a university that shall remain nameless. I was helping the student government get its office LAN issues straightened out, and when word got around that I knew my way around a computer they volunteered me to be the one to process the data from those very surveys you mention.

Now, being as it was 1995 and this Web thing was still new and shiny, I had the bright idea that instead of publishing a book with the results, like they did every year (at great expense), they should put up a Web site and let people generate reports from a database instead. After tracking down a few other students who knew way more about the Web than I did, we hacked it all together and launched the puppy in short order -- the first time, as far as we could find out, that any university had provided such data through the Web (anyone have any earlier examples?). A technical triumph.

Not, however, a political one. The faculty union went through the roof when they discovered that anybody on the planet could look up the rating of a given faculty member. They demanded that the site be completely taken down, and that disciplinary action be taken against me and my merry band of miscreant geeks.

In the end, we managed to negotiate a compromise -- the site would be blocked by IP to anyone not on the campus network, and we would get away with a stern talking-to for having the temerity to do something innovative. After I left the project, though, the faculty leaned on the student government types hard enough to convince them to abandon the project altogether.

That experience was what convinced me that I wanted to make a career using Web technologies; I figured that anything that frightened complacent incompetents *that much* was something worth being a part of :-)

And later the art of exterminating "Indians" was very much advanced by the US ingeniously using econmic warfare by sponsoring the killing of buffalos (Paragraph E).

I wonder if US paranoia can in part be attributed to the fact that the US never came to grips with its violent past.

Quite contrary to Germany. Could you imagine a US president kneeling in front of North Vietnamese monument to honor the Vietcong who died in the war with the US? Well, a German chancellor fell to his knees when visiting Poland in 1960s honoring the Polish soldiers that died in WWII.

WWII is the reason why Europeans loath war so much. Fortunately at this point in time the meaning of war seems to be clearly embedded in the European collective memory.

They are quite progressive about this subject. Here is a research paper on the German law.

They are quite progressive about this subject. Here is a research paper on the German law.

• Guatemala
• Iran
• Chile
• 
  ...Just to name a few.

• Guatemala
• Iran
• Chile
• 
  ...Just to name a few.

You must not
have looked very hard.

The bhopal disater is a well documented, widley known example of a horrible environmental disater.
--

It is generally believed that memories of youth are rarely seen before age 4. It is at that age that metacognition, the ability to think about thinking, (i.e. to realize that one is capable of self-reflection) first appears in a very limited (as opposed to "normal" adult) capacity.

Apparently, once this ability surfaces, memories become more readily achieved, mainly because the individual knows they exist (if you don't know you have a memory...).

Memories that do remain salient are typically those of concrete objects, often playthings, such as the "red ball" a previous poster had mentioned that (s)he recalled, and are typically just recollections of these objects rather than the events associated with them; this correlates to the developmental stages of preoperational and concrete operational thought as outlined by Piagetian theory.

Personally, the first memory I recall is around the time of Sr. Kindergarten (~age 5) and a bright yellow, METAL, Tonka Dump-Truck I got for Xmas. <rant> Why is it toys aren't metal anymore, I mean back in the day, transformers, G.I. Joe planes, Tonka, all metal, now, crappy plastic! Those transformers that shoot sparks out now, the plastic melts. argh! </rant>. At about grade 2 (~age 6/7) I can *clearly* recall playing with other kids at recess and remember the names of kids I haven't seen in over 20 years.

Yes, and I took a screen shot, too!

You could have linked: HTML Email: Whenever Possible, Turn It Off!.

That's okay... my college, which shall remain nameless, is in Washington, DC, and back in 1996, on their website, they had a doctored photo of the university quad with the Washington Monument in the background. Besides the fact we're miles away and it's not visibile... they put it on the wrong side!

CBDTPA & other such future laws will outlaw information sharing. They will forbid the fundamental right to share. It is very important to understand this process.

(1) "The Right to Read" by Richard M. Stallman.

http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

(The important thing about this story is that it was written before the DMCA was even proposed!)

(2) "What's Wrong With Copy Protection" by John Gilmore.

http://cryptome.org/jg-wwwcp.htm

(3) "Re-evaluating Copyright: The Public Must Prevail" by Richard M. Stallman.

http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/reevaluating-copyrig ht.html

What is copyright, and what is it meant to accomplish? How can we tell whether it is meeting its goals?

This was also written before the DMCA; Stallman argued that copyright law had _already_ gone too far.

(4) Sold Out, By James Boyle

http://www.wcl.american.edu/pub/faculty/boyle/sold _out.htm

They claim they want to find out how much real life hacking use wireless networks are getting... but then they tell people where these are (roughly, DC is not really a huge city). It seems to me that this will just lead to more people looking for them just for fun, and not for any real use.

Anyway, the real wireless hotspot in DC is going to be American University since they're going all wireless this year. Nothing says wide open like a campus network! ;-)

If you don't want to go that route, you could also contact the local Bar Association (think lawyers, not beer) to see if there is a local practitioner that would help you for reduced fee or no fee.

More than likely, everyone involved is a Delaware corporation and the cases would probably be brought in Del, so it would be pretty easy to combine them and have one lawyer take care of this for all of you. Of course, if you band together and all chip in some cash, you can probably get a decent sized firm to take the case and send these idiots a letter. Once they see that you have gotten a big gun to represent you, they will probably go bother someone else.

I can't wait to get out of law school so that I can go after scum like this.

Frank

Sweatshop practices is nothing worse than child Labor. I think no Amendment could save their arse out of this.

I wonder if /. editors ever read newspaper at all, otherwise they'd not make this story a big deal, compare with other alleged crimes Nike was accused to have committed.

Nobody tells the truth all the time, because I quite frankly don't think there is such a thing as truth. There are things near truth, but never the absolute.

Here is a good source of info for Valdez. Ugly background, but good. I usually will not back something up unless necessary to prove it, otherwise it comes to me citing facts not debating. :)

Uh, actually that wasn't the case.

The Valdez hit a reef, in open waters.
Here's what actually happened, to prevent more FUD and stupid dumbass lies:
"Although the weather that night was conducive to traveling, some small icebergs (growlers) had drifted into the sound from the Columbia Glacier. Captain Hazelwood radioed to the Coast Guard station that he would be changing course in order to avoid the growlers. Growlers are chunks of ice from glaciers which make a growling sound when knocked against the ship's hull. The captain received permission to move into the northbound lane. Before retiring to his cabin, Captain Hazelwood instructed his third mate Gregory Cousins to steer the vessel back into the southbound lane once it passed Busby Island. Although Cousins did give the instructions to the helmsman to steer the vessel to the right, the vessel was not turning sharply enough and at 12:04 a.m. the vessel hit Bligh Reef. It is not known whether Cousins gave the orders too late, the helmsman did not follow instructions properly, or if something was wrong with the steering system of the vessel" [source]

And also, the port never got rid of any spill experts. I gotta say, you guys are pretty funny. A simple google search to find the legal documents would save you guys so much time looking stupid.

The US cannot continue to try and impose its laws on the rest of the world. The De Beers example is a case in point.

For years the directors of DeBeers have been unable to travel to the US due to outstanding anti-trust caes's against them.

Still they continue to trade, and travel the rest of the world. This article tells how previous cases against the company have failed. Now, having realised how futile their attempts are, they are trying to play nice with the company.

The US can declare jurisdiction over the entire internet, but unless they do a Noriega, and go in and kidnap a few people, the laws will not mean much unless people visit the US.

OK, I'll bite, how about Sagan's prediction after the Gulf war:

Shortly after the first oil wells began to burn, Carl Sagan appeared on ABC's Nightline and predicted that " the net effects would be similar to the explosion of the Indonesian volcano Tambora in 1815, which resulted in the year 1816 being known as the year without a summer" (p. 37,
1992).

Or, how about the great frozen earth from 1975:

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects

Or, what about the great earthquakes that were predicted in The Jupiter Effect:

Such was the forecast of a scholarly and well-documented book entitied The Jupiter Effect, coauthored in 1974 by Cambridge astrophysicists John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann. The book targeted 1982 as a time when meteorological and geological activity would build up and become intensely magnified thanks to a variety, of physical mechanisms operating simultaneously. Highlighting the forecast was a massive and disastrous earthquake on the southern section of the San Andreas Fault near Los Angeles.

Should I go on...

Here is a gem for you. This stupid locker ruined my trip to Munich, Germany. In fact, they've computerized a lot of these lockers in the train station in Munich where I was staying. *None* of them worked. This one (and the it was the only one) just gave the pretense of working. It would take your five DM and allow you to select a locker, and then you'd get the above error and lose your money. Since I could not find a working locker, I was forced to skip Munich altogether this summer.

having never heard of the rabbit case, but having seen many references to it in this story, i took a look at the Rabbit case. it is almost too amazing to believe, and not helping matters is the similarity to the old children's song, 'there was an old lady who swallows a fly'. if it wasn't so serious a problem, it would be insanely comical. it sounds like a joke:

basically, over a century ago wealthy englishmen brought rabbits to AUS so that they might hunt them. eventually the rabbit population boomed to well over 200 million, becoming more than a nuisance, rather an extremely ferocious natural disaster. they brought in a virus (myxo) to kill the rabbits, and it almost worked, but eventually the rabbits became resistant.

and this is where it gets almost too weird to believe.

they bring in ferrets to hunt the rabbits down. however, the ferrets are found to be carrying bovine tuberculoses. so they release a different strain of myxo to get rid of the ferrets.

so finally they are researching a new virus to kill the rabbits, but the virus escapes the labs and spreads through australia and new zealand. so they come up with a vaccine...

and the saga continues.

on a more USian note, how about introducing a few hundred wolves back into the ecosystem to at least nibble at the incredible deer population? what's a few small children, anyway?

-sam

I just graduated with CS degree from American University and I have worked on projects in groups and by myself. From experience, I can say that there is a time for both team and solo work, but sadly, many times the wrong methods are chosen.

When you should work by yourself:
Whenever you are learning something very new, which should be about 75% - 85% of your classes. If students work in groups, it is far too easy for some students to get by without learning a thing. I have seen groups of three where one student did everything, and the other two merely wrote in extra documentation! This cheats your best students and wastes time/money on your poor students.

When you should work in a group:
Whenever you are applying the knowledge you have gained toward a large project that would be too difficult for one student to complete in one semester. This would be typical of your later CS classes where you aren't learning how to program, but rather, higher level concepts such as operating systems, games, etc. Good students will have much less tolerance for slackers when developing a system of 30,000 lines than they will for your standard 'implement data structure X' project.

This is somewhat questionable info. Consider especially the "arabmedia.com" provenance. According to what I would think is a more trustworthy site,

http://fas.org/nuke/hew/Israel/index.html

"Reports that Zalman Shapiro, the American owner of the nuclear fuel processing company NUMEC, supplied enriched uranium to Israel in the 1960s seems to have been authoritatively refuted by Hersh."

The cite apparently refers to:

AUTHOR: Hersh, Seymour M.
TITLE: The Samson option: Israel's nuclear arsenal and American foreign policy / Seymour M. Hersh. -- 1st ed.
ISBN/ISSN: 0394570065
IMPRINT: New York, Random House, c1991
PHYS DESC: 354 p., 24 cm.

The point of Drake's paper (which the parent post has [snip]ped) is really how the Arab states can approach disarmament, and not really a serious study of Israeli nuclear development, which she gets only from secondary sources.

The whole paper can be found at her web site.

Last summer, I was looking into designing an interdisciplinary major relating to computers and social science. I found my school has a 500-level course in the History of Computing taught by a Dr. Thomas Bergin. For some more information:

http://www.csis.american.edu/ - Department web site

http://www.clark.american.edu/~tbergin/ - Professor's web site

http://www.csis.american.edu/museum/sloan/html/def ault.htm - A dated web site about a history of computing project sponsored by the Sloan Foundation

Hope that helps some!

Last summer, I was looking into designing an interdisciplinary major relating to computers and social science. I found my school has a 500-level course in the History of Computing taught by a Dr. Thomas Bergin. For some more information:

http://www.csis.american.edu/ - Department web site

http://www.clark.american.edu/~tbergin/ - Professor's web site

http://www.csis.american.edu/museum/sloan/html/def ault.htm - A dated web site about a history of computing project sponsored by the Sloan Foundation

Hope that helps some!

Last summer, I was looking into designing an interdisciplinary major relating to computers and social science. I found my school has a 500-level course in the History of Computing taught by a Dr. Thomas Bergin. For some more information:

http://www.csis.american.edu/ - Department web site

http://www.clark.american.edu/~tbergin/ - Professor's web site

http://www.csis.american.edu/museum/sloan/html/def ault.htm - A dated web site about a history of computing project sponsored by the Sloan Foundation

Hope that helps some!

In as much as corporations are "natural persons" under Federal law, Nike must be held to the same standards that other individuals are held to: Nike must receive the death penalty for its crimes against humanity.

Nike has engaged in countless acts of child labor abuse. They've not only failed to produce any benefits for the society that gave them corporate status; they've actively harmed that society. And other societies. It makes the US look like one evil corporate behemoth instead of the peaceful land of freedom our forefathers envisioned and drafted in our Constitution.

When individuals kill other individuals, they receive the death penalty. When corporations do the same, they get to keep teh proceeds and profits? Even serial-killers are denied that right under most state laws.

Anti-trust law is good and all, but it doesn't go far enough. Nike must receive the corporate death penalty (having its charter of incorporation burnt and its board members tried for criminal activities) not because they've harmed other corporations (as antitrust law concerns itself with) but because Nike has harmed actual living and breathing human beings.

Corporations like Nike have no place in any modern civil society. They are as good as dead.

Does this mean massive international man-hunts for the infamous "Carlos the Hacker"?

Best encrypt with ScramDisk (Windows 95/98 version here) locally, and with GnuPG for transmission, all your CueCat code and use anonymous remailers for version releases to Freenet, or be prepared to live out your life in a shadowy realm of underground coders dwelling in the hidden spaces between the giants of the United Corporations of the World.

Just when the Tuvalunese start getting an income stream that doesn't involve having their islands, or their neighbours', trashed by phosphate mining, ICANN wipe them out with the .tel TLD !

In relation to physical, economic, psychological and social conditions, responsible parenthood is exercised, either by the deliberate and generous decision to raise a numerous family, or by the decision, made for grave motives and with due respect for the moral law, to avoid for the time being, or even for an indeterminate period, a new birth.

17. Upright men can even better convince themselves of the solid grounds on which the teaching of the Church in this field is based, if they care to reflect upon the consequences of methods of artificial birth control. Let them consider, first of all, how wide and easy a road would thus be opened up towards conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality. Not much experience is needed in order to know human weakness, and to understand that men -- especially the young, who are so vulnerable on this point -- have need of encouragement to be faithful to the moral law, so that they must not be offered some easy means of eluding its observance. It is also to be feared that the man, growing used to the employment of anti-conceptive practices, may finally lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer his respected and beloved companion.

Let it be considered also that a dangerous weapon would thus be placed in the hands of those public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies. Who could blame a government for applying to the solution of the problems of the community those means acknowledged to be licit for married couples in the solution of a family problem? Who will stop rulers from favoring, from even imposing upon their peoples, if they were to consider it necessary, the method of contraception which they judge to be more efficacious? In such a way men, wishing to avoid individual, family, or social difficulties encountered in the observance of the divine law, would reach the point of placing at the mercy of the intervention of public authorities the most personal and most reserved sector of conjugal intimacy...

Consequently, if the mission of generating life is not to be exposed to the arbitrary will of men, one must necessarily recognize insurmountable limits to the possibility of man's domination over his own body and its functions; limits which no man, whether a private individual or one invested with authority, may licitly surpass. And such limits cannot be determined otherwise than by the respect due to the integrity of the human organism and its functions, according to the principles recalled earlier, and also according to the correct understanding of the "principle of totality" illustrated by our predecessor Pope Pius XII...

We are well aware of the serious difficulties experienced by public authorities in this regard, especially in the developing countries. To their legitimate preoccupations we devoted our encyclical letter POPULORUM PROGRESSIO. But with our predecessor Pope John XXIII, we repeat: no solution to these difficulties is acceptable "which does violence to man's essential dignity" and is based only on an utterly materialistic conception of man himself and of his life. The only possible solution to this question is one which envisages the social and economic progress both of individuals and of the whole human society, and which respects and promotes true human values [26]. Neither can one, without grave injustice, consider divine providence to be responsible for what depends, instead, on a lack of wisdom in government, on an insufficient sense of social justice, on selfish monopolization, or again on blameworthy indolence in confronting the efforts and the sacrifices necessary to ensure the raising of living standards of a people and all of its sons [27].

Pope Paul VI: Hu manae Vitae

• When I, a publishing Web site, release a document (let's say my photograph) what happens to it? Well, some hapless fool comes along with his browser and tries to download it. It is coppied from disk to memory. Ok, that one's handled by court precident. The copy is considered to be legally a form of viewing, and is legal. Now it's coppied to the network card. A little greyer, but still arguably viewing. Now it's sent across the network (this is assuming that my image fits in a single packet). On the network it is treated just like any other IP packet. It may be coppied by routers (not really accounted for by precident, but probably fair use). It may be dropped and I will re-transmit (a second copy without request... that makes for interesting cocktail conversations after the BAR meeting). It may be recieved by multiple targets. WHOA! What's that? Well, there's nothing to stop me from using a multicast address as my src. Is this legal? I simply do not know. What if I'm caching it in a proxy? What if I'm mirroring it in order to view off-line?
  
• Ok, so what about that evil Gnutella? Well, it's just another network, right? If I download copyrighted material, it's illegal copying, right? What about gnut? gnut downloads things at random and re-offers them for download! That'll be a fun case. Gnutella also allows for a kind of file sharing that no one has really exploited. You could easily build a totally caching Gnutella client that will serve requests for everything you download. This seems like a mistake until you realize that if everyone does this, then bandwidth will no longer be an issue. You can figure out who to download from based on ping times, and in most cases, you will be reducing backbone traffic. If the clients get a lot smarter, gnutella ma soon become the next killer app of the Internet, and it would certainly challenge many ideas of copyright....

American University law professor James Boyle has a nice article addressing this point ("Foucault in Cyberspace: Surveillance, Sovereignty, and Hard-Wired Censors"), in which he argues that proponents of the idea that the web is uncensorable underestimate the ability of the government to regulate the net, and to enroll private agents (e.g. ISPs) to enforce policy.

I argue that the conceptual structure and jurisprudential assumptions of digital libertarianism lead its practitioners to ignore the ways in which the state can often use privatized enforcement and state-backed technologies to evade some of the supposed practical (and constitutional) restraints on the exercise of legal power over the Net.

Warning: Be prepared for somewhat dense prose, if you're not used to reading this kind of article. It's well worth the effort, though; he certainly changed the way I thought about net censorship. I also recommend the rest of his site to anyone interested intellectual property issues. (If only he'd get rid of that one <blink> tag, arggghh.)

American University law professor James Boyle has a nice article addressing this point ("Foucault in Cyberspace: Surveillance, Sovereignty, and Hard-Wired Censors"), in which he argues that proponents of the idea that the web is uncensorable underestimate the ability of the government to regulate the net, and to enroll private agents (e.g. ISPs) to enforce policy.

I argue that the conceptual structure and jurisprudential assumptions of digital libertarianism lead its practitioners to ignore the ways in which the state can often use privatized enforcement and state-backed technologies to evade some of the supposed practical (and constitutional) restraints on the exercise of legal power over the Net.

Warning: Be prepared for somewhat dense prose, if you're not used to reading this kind of article. It's well worth the effort, though; he certainly changed the way I thought about net censorship. I also recommend the rest of his site to anyone interested intellectual property issues. (If only he'd get rid of that one <blink> tag, arggghh.)

American University law professor James Boyle has a nice article addressing this point ("Foucault in Cyberspace: Surveillance, Sovereignty, and Hard-Wired Censors"), in which he argues that proponents of the idea that the web is uncensorable underestimate the ability of the government to regulate the net, and to enroll private agents (e.g. ISPs) to enforce policy.

I argue that the conceptual structure and jurisprudential assumptions of digital libertarianism lead its practitioners to ignore the ways in which the state can often use privatized enforcement and state-backed technologies to evade some of the supposed practical (and constitutional) restraints on the exercise of legal power over the Net.

Warning: Be prepared for somewhat dense prose, if you're not used to reading this kind of article. It's well worth the effort, though; he certainly changed the way I thought about net censorship. I also recommend the rest of his site to anyone interested intellectual property issues. (If only he'd get rid of that one <blink> tag, arggghh.)

see this American University Page as a start