Slashdot Mirror

Let's see.

http://www.american.edu/kogod/...

Corvette comes in #3, while the Tesla Model S comes in #14. Unless the model 3 has radically increased it's sourcing from the US, I suspect the Model 3 will remain around the 14th rank.

...already knew that. And it's not quite as hard as they make out.

And yet, when I searched for the application of the Geneva Convention in non-state wars, I immediately found a paper stating that such conventions do NOT apply to non-state actors, and that revising such conventions to apply to such cases is an ongoing effort. See http://digitalcommons.wcl.amer...

Sorry to confuse you with the facts.

But let's add in "No taxation without representation" so those who may not vote pay no taxes (including property and sales).

That principle is not absolute. For example, even legal immigrants — such as H1B or Green Card holders — can not vote, yet are expected to pay all sorts of taxes.

Or, to be completely fair since we claim to support democracy, if you can't vote, the law doesn't apply to you.

So, without any changes to rules of franchise, you are going to officially allow the disenfranchised — such as all non-citizens, minors, convicted felons and residents of Washington, D.C. — to commit any crime?

Obviously, it can still be a democracy, even if not everyone is allowed to vote. Ancient Athens — the first known democracy in human history — only allowed free-born men to vote, for example...

Agreed. If it did not spy, it might be a neat gadget, but you just can't be sure, especially as it is networked connected and apparently always updating itself. I worked on the IBM Personal Speech Assistant, a small handheld device that did speech recognition for command-and-control, in the late 1990s, but it had a push-to-talk button. Of course, we are so surrounded these days with devices with microphones and cameras which auto-update (cell phones, laptops, tablets) that it is becoming harder to know what any of them are doing. But I'm assuming this system explicitly sends audio over the network to Amazon. Maybe it has special hardware to not send audio unless you say the keyword? When I was musing about building speech recognition into a physical keyboard, we talked about that idea at IBM as a way to save power, with special low-power hardware to listen for just one keyword without needing to wake up the entire system. Anyway, this privacy issue needs thinking through...

Also, there is some other social aspect of it that feels weird somehow. The video about it with the white Yuppi couple with three kids (or was one a babysitter?) was a little creepy in some ways, since Echo is made to look almost like a new person joining the family, taking the role of an unmarried aunt or uncle, say. Perhaps this device subconsciously addresses a need unfulfilled by the USA's lack of an extended family living together (which has been the historic norm during human history, like in longhouses)? Is there an implication that this device might end up pushing real people out of the home, like when the dad has to ask how to spell "cantaloupe", displaced by a device...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

It's also strange how the video shows it in several rooms, like either people move it or they bought several? Somehow a physical robot might not feel as weird -- although it would have the same privacy and social issues or more because a robot could move things. From a top Google match or robots and privacy:
"Robots and Privacy - American University Washington College of Law"
https://www.wcl.american.edu/p...
"M. Ryan Calo, "Robots and Privacy," in Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics (Patrick Lin, George Bekey, and Keith Abney, eds.) (Cambridge: MIT Press, forthcoming) ... It is not hard to imagine why robots raise privacy concerns. Practically by definition, robots are equipped with the ability to sense, process, and record the world around them (Denning et al 2008; Singer 2009, 67). Robots can go places humans cannot go, see things humans cannot see. Robots are, first and foremost, a human instrument. And after industrial manufacturing, the principle use to which we've put that instrument has been surveillance. ... There are a number of different ways one might categorize or group the impact of robotics on privacy. This chapter breaks the effects into three categories--direct surveillance, access, and social meaning--with the goal of introducing the reader to a wide variety of issues. Where possible, the chapter points toward ways in which we might mitigate or redress the potential impact of robots on privacy, but acknowledges that in some cases redress will be difficult under the current state of privacy law. ..."

Anyway, we'll see how this plays out with Echo as a sort of robot without hands...

There are a lot of things I like about Amazon (ignoring employment conditions for packers), even its Kindle hardware, but the Fire phone and now this seem like overreach. That is not because they are not interesting products, but more because, as

My personal experience differs from yours. I saw plenty of evidence of piracy in my youth. I don't have any kind of scientific study* to point to piracy rates over time, and I suspect neither do you. I'm very suspicious that human nature has changed over the past 30 years. Hell, I'd argue that software piracy is the reason we are all stuck with no competition to MS Office today. Literally every home computer I have ever worked on for a friend or family member until MS started "activation" had a copy of the office suite from work or school on it. In college during the 90s, I'm not sure I came upon a legitimate copy of a game anywhere unless you include Sega Genesis.

* I found a paper that seems to show the US piracy rate holding steady or maybe declining slightly since the days of Doom. European piracy seems to have plummeted since then.

http://www.wcl.american.edu/lawandgov/cgs/about.cfm#scorecard -- Kind of a useless measurement if it's not comparative, but there is LOTS of data there, and most of it indicates that despite the fact that the NSA spying programs were "revealed" during Obama's administration (they existed for Bush too!) -- There are good signs that the government is taking steps towards better transparency as promised, and progress in this area has been ongoing, making the "most transparent" statement a true one, but leaving a long way to go to be desired.

Yeah, Al Gore is basically the Town Joke around Nashville, TN. During the three years I lived there, I never once heard his name mentioned in a respectful manner, and that includes on the local radio stations.

Most of the time you could get a laugh just by dropping his name into a conversation.

In the 2000 election, in Davidson County, which shares its boundaries with the city of Nashville, Gore received 120508 votes to Bush's 84117. (Source; scroll down to get the Tennessee data set.) So I suspect your observations say a lot more about the kind of people you choose to associate with than they do about Gore or anyone else.

Exactly, thank you for putting it so succinctly. ACTA was badly named. It is not what it pretends to be. This seems to be a common understanding among people who've studied the treaty. Another good article in the American University Washington College of Law series, this one written by Margot E. Kaminski, say that:

"ACTA is primarily a copyright treaty, masquerading as a treaty that addresses dangerous medicines and defective imports."

The reasons that software professionals and free/open-stuff advocates have opposed the treaty has nothing to do with trade law, and everything to do with the criminal penalties for IP violations and the changing relationship between ISPs and their customer.

I disagree, ACTA is not, at heart, a trade agreement at all. It's a law enforcement treaty focusing on intellectual property. It aims to harmonise the enforcement measure with regard to intellectual property across the signatories. There's evidence for this in every portion of ACTA, but you just have to look at the headings for the two substantive chapters:

• Chapter II: Legal Framework for Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights
• Chapter III: Enforcement Practices

This doesn't diminish your point or Senator Wyden's. To quote an excellent article by Sean Flynn, ACTA would affect:

"evidentiary standards required for property seizures and criminal prosecution. It would affect state common law, where many trade secret obligations reside. And primarily it would affect the evolution of federal law, including the large federal statutory enactments on patents, copyrights and trademarks."

The president doesn't have any enumerated (or un-enumerated) powers that cover this territory, indeed, the power to regulate intellectual property, I understand, is an enumerated power of congress (Article I, sec 8 of the constitution). Therefore the agreement should be submitted to congress by the president and more specifically by the USTR under his authority.

Well if you'd bothered Googling him you would see he doesn't exactly look Chinese http://www.wcl.american.edu/alumni/dac/lee.cfm

Hey, as long as he's an "idiot", how about getting him to lose the case defending his patent, so badly that it sets court precedent? Most of the ruling precedents (on adapting and reusing and refurbishing something patented) go back to an 1800s cotton baler case. http://www.wcl.american.edu/journal/lawrev/48/gajarsa.pdf?rd=1 Please, defend your patent! Just try to do it hideously and incompetently.

as apposed to the arrests made on a member of anonymous?

Well, yes, as opposed to that. The quiet arrest of one or a few people has a different effect than images of brutality perpetrated on protesters 1 2 3.

Did you know that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were initially publicised with almost no public interest? It was not until the photos leaked that anybody cared.

The U.S. Senate simply needs to not ratify it.

Right?

Maybe, maybe not. From the last link above:

"The USTR has stated repeatedly that ACTA will enter into force in the US as an executive agreement that does not require any congressional role. Thus, USTR argues, the agreement will be binding on the US once Ambassador Kirk, as the US negotiating representative, agrees to it. Congress will not receive the opportunity to review and amend the agreement before it goes into effect, as it would in any traditional international agreement binding on the US. If USTR succeeds in this bold plan, it will dramatically expand presidential power to make law without congressional consent."

I know that Slashdot frowns on this kind of thing, but if you'd followed the last link in TFS, you would have discovered that the US Trade Representative has declared that ACTA will take effect in the US by Executive Order. Why? 'Cuz they said so.

That's right, folks, it's a treaty, but it's not a treaty! So that little part of the U.S. Constitution requiring ratification by the Senate doesn't apply! Really! This is not the treaty you're looking for!

http://www.wcl.american.edu/pijip/go/blog-post/academic-sign-on-letter-to-obama-on-acta
found it.

So, what'll happen, is anywhere the mines have degraded and cracked open and are thus probably inert, will glow green, so people will avoid those "dangerous" areas, and anywhere the mines remain hermetically sealed, will not glow, thus it looks "safe" but is actually very dangerous.

If machine scanners can detect explosives what makes you think living things can't? Are these scanners just scams to get money from airports, border crossings, and seaports?

Even worse, its not failsafe. If a spot is not glowing, is that because coverage was not 100% because a vehicle was parked there, or maybe the heat from a fire killed the bacteria, or ...

I agree nothing may be failsafe but...

Safest thing to do, is just ignore the results. No one benefits but the contractors, which was probably the whole point to begin with.

... these bacteria could be helpful for clearing mine fields by mine sweepers. Someone above said how Afghanistan is the most heavily mined country in the world. I don't know if it is true but it was mined when the Soviets invaded and continued to be mined after the Soviets left, in fighting between the different factions of Mujahideen. Southeast Asia was pretty heavily mined as well as Angola and other nations. Even today unexploded ordinances are found in the Ardennes region of France from WWII as well as in the US from the Civil War.

Falcon

I don't know how you could blame them. In 1997 a US company called RiceTek patented a strain of Rice they called Basmati, a name the Indians have been using for centuries. All kinds of companies take out defensive patents, where they never intend to collect money from other people, but they don't want to pay for obvious ideas either. There's no reason the same thing wouldn't happen in the copyright arena. From here:

According to Dr Vandana Shiva, director of a Delhi-based research foundation which monitors issues involving patents and biopiracy, the main aim for obtaining the patent by RiceTec Inc. is to fool the consumers in believing there is no difference between spurious Basmati and real Basmati. Moreover, she claims the "theft involved in the Basmati patent is, therefore, threefold: a theft of collective intellectual and biodiversity heritage on Indian farmers, a theft from Indian traders and exporters whose markets are being stolen by RiceTec Inc., and finally a deception of consumers since RiceTec is using a stolen name Basmati for rice which are derived from Indian rice but not grown in India, and hence are not the same quality."

It doesn't seem odd the Malaysians would seek to prevent similar problems. The situation isn't exactly the same, since this is a copyright and RiceTek took out a patent, but I think the business objective is the same.

I grew up on a farm and have killed and eaten many animals as a part of my daily life as a young man.

Around 20 years ago I stopped eating meat altogether after a fairly gruesome botched attempt at killing an animal. It left an indelible (inedible?) impression on me that I couldn't shake. My reasons for maintaining that vegetarianism however were manyfold.

1/ I've realised I simply don't need to eat meat to be healthy: I very rarely get sick and have am in very good physical condition.

2/ I found eating meat to be less metabolically efficient: I noticed an improvement in my sleep patterns and did not feel sluggish/tired after dinners.

3/ Eating meat is environmentally inefficient: Rather than cutting down trees to grow plants to grow grains to feed to cattle to form into meat, some of which will be eaten, just eat the plants directly. A huge portion of the world's C02 comes from cow 'emissions' meanwhile there is an increasingly lack of plant surface to transform this C02 back into oxygen.

4/ Meat now smells and (when accidentally eaten tastes) somehow rotten. It's just not something I would ever want to put in my mouth anymore than carpet or polystyrene. Meat is a dietary habit, cut with a kick of testosterone. You can get over it.

5/ Animal meat is absolutely murder, of course it is! It doesn't matter whether it's aware of it or not, whether it's feeling pain (almost all farm animals are utterly terrified just prior to death), it's murder to satisfy a dietary habit no matter which way you look at it.. When I was killing cows and pigs with a knife of a gun I was murdering them: killing them against their will.

6/ Eating meat is unncessary in my 21 century western dietary context: People started eating meat out of necessity in harsh conditions. Our bodies reflect that we haven't done it for long: unlike cats, sharks and dogs, we have never killed animals with our own hands and/or teeth. We've had to invent weapons to do so, the same weapons we used to kill other people. Just as I do not need to kill other people, expanding or defending territory, I don't need to eat animal parts to be a healthy human. And what of the mythic Food Chain? If you think paying people to prod cows, sheep and pigs into the back of a truck, drive them scared out of their minds for miles in their own shit, lead them into a large building with men in white overalls bearing stun guns and knives reflects anything as congenital as a 'food chain', you're out of your depth..)

7/ Meat from farms is, in general, far from a safe or remotely 'natural' product these days. In fact most meat from the U.S is banned here in Europe because it's so augmented with artificial hormones considered harmful to human bodies.

I've mentioned the sad case of Pidgey before, but considering this milestone, I think it's worth bringing it up again.

Pidgey is a Pokemon. In February 2007, Pidgey had his own page at Wikipedia. You could go there and see a small template(since deleted) explaining to you what Pidgey is and various other pieces of information about him. It was objectively a useful resource.

Pidgey no longer has a page. Pidgey has a paragraph. A tragically short and dry affair devoid of even the most basic image. One can learn very little about Pidgey from reading it. And why is this? Why must Pidgey be so excised from the the site? Because he is a Pokemon? Does being a cartoon character or a children's toy or anything else automatically make something unworthy of a few kilobytes of page space on the the supposed repository of all the world's knowledge. The sad fact is that answer to that question is a resounding YES.

"A page for every Pokemon" was once used as a derogatory remark about Wikipedia. Evidently, enough faceless wikicrats took exception to this and decided to purge all mention of Pidgey and all the rest of the Pokemon, beyond the barest minimum of exposure, to make sure Wikipedia was regarded as a "professional" and "encyclopedic" resource. Pidgey and the Pokemon, and countless others have been subjected to the digital equivalent of a book burning by people who held an opinion that certain information was not "worthy" of archival. This from the same crowd of people who think that the Cloud Gate, Wood Badges, Ima Hogg and Books on the psychology of Est are all topics worthy enough to be Featured Articles. Compared to such worthies, perhaps Pidgey, merely part of a 5 billion dollar franchise, does fall a little short. But as short as all that?

Technology is improving, access to knowledge and the cost of providing it are plummeting; Yet Wikipedia's growth is slowing. Pidgey is merely a symptom of the underlying decay present in the online encyclopedia. His purge was less about practicalities than it was about running Wikipedia in a way at odds with it ostensibly free, open and inclusive nature. His fate was the result of all information on Wikipedia that falls under the baleful eyes of those editors with opinions and the power to exercise them.

Pidgey's was not the first page to be purged from Wikipedia, nor the most important. But it will not be the last, or the smallest.

Actually, the mineral as specified in your example is a natural substance - "rock mineral". While modern and moronic patent examiners might indeed grant a patent on the mineral they should not have done so. The treatment in your example is novel and an invention and therefore should be patentable. Patenting the mineral itself forecloses on a fact of nature and as such would preempt any investigation of other properties of the mineral by anyone not holding the patent until the patent expired, regardless of how those properties were applied. Suppose for instance that lurking in the catalytic properties of the mineral was a trait that would - say - convert copper to a room-temperature superconductor - no such thing, but just suppose. That use of the mineral could in no way be construed as an infringement on your medical method for treating cancer using the mineral. Your persistence in defending a patent of a naturally occurring mineral would have delayed the advancement of science in general, physics in particular, and technology as well, merely because you are "protecting" your "discovery." In fact given the results of the University of Mississippi's attempt to patent tumeric, it seems possible that even your method of treatment might not be patentable if any prior art could be demonstrated.

I will draw a correlation to Kathy Lee Gifford http://www1.american.edu/ted/kathylee.htm and other celebrities finding out their named products being built with child labor in sweat shop conditions. Do you continue to let it happen or do you speak out against it? Do you discontinue your association with the RIAA? The fans and press need to pressure bands for an answer.

well before posting I looked up Metallica and they have apprantly changed their view and look to be ending their association with Warner Music. http://www.zeropaid.com/news/9440/metallica_now_embraces_filesharing/

War on peas

Who's to say only the "American people" got fucked over? It's usually the rest of us.

When some greedy corporation in the US gets the urge to over-reach common sense in the name of profit, people die. Hello Halliburton, Blackwater - sorry, "Xe" - Merck, Chevron, Shell, Union Carbide, Monsanto - This is going on all around you, every day. It's just the kind of business y'all have been trained to tolerate, encourage and sponsor. And let's be frank, the absurd US military budget is largely what it is so that they can keep doing it with impunity. Nice little system.

If a corporation is legally a person, then let them be shut down and incarcerated like the murderers and thieves they are.

As someone who lives on and studies the world's largest freshwater lake (Lake Michigan-Huron)

Lake Michigan-Huron, two lakes really, is not the largest freshwater lake in the world, Lake Baikal in Russia's Siberia is. However Lake Baikal was used as a dump by the Soviets and is polluted too.

Falcon

First, I'll point out that I believe that nuclear weapons aren't in the same category as nuclear power; that'd be like adding deaths from tank weapons into automotive deaths.

Still, I think it's an interesting topic.
Hiroshima: 140k
Nagasaki: 80k
Chernobyl: 57 direct deaths, 4k 'additional cancer cases', estimated, not all of which would be fatal.
Other: Various accidents; under a hundred. Less than 1% of the above, easily within the margin of error of the nuclear weapons usage.

224k total, of which 1.8% can be attributed, partially, to nuclear power(Chernobyl was also a weapons material plant, which affected it's design).

If you believe this article, 24k lives are 'shortened' by coal power, cause 2.8k cases of lung cancer a year, 4k deaths from asthma, heart attacks, etc... At 4k, we're killing a Chernobyl's worth of citizens each and every year. In the 63 years since the nuclear attacks in 1945, that would be 252,000 people.

On to China - They've made it a 'goal' to reduce their annual coal mining deaths to a 'mere' 5k in 2007 over the 7k of 2003. In 1988 - "chronic
obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) was 26% of all causes of death. If even a fraction of a percent of those deaths are from the pollution from coal power, 26k a year isn't outrageous from a country of over a billion.

Basically; I figure coal power kills more people every year than Chernobyl accident did period, and it bypasses our nuclear bombings in less than five years.

And people wonder why I'd shut down all the coal plants if I could...

Despite what you may have heard, we Americans are not as unsophisticated as you might think. Even those of us that are Conservatives.

Well, you have me convinced. "At least one sheep in Scotland is black on at least one side."

Taking used to be used primarily for government sponsored project. Now it is used because some random company thinks that just because they can make money with a property, they should own it.

Fooey. Companies have fought over trademarks since there were trademarks. Being sued for one is nothing new. If you don't believe me, cf. http://www.american.edu/ted/budweis.htm, and ask Budejovicky Budvar about "Budweiser".

A short description of the environmental problems associated with the Kuwaiti oil fires found here

According to the article, about 6 million barrels were burned a day at the disaster's peak, and it lasted about 8 months. Worldwide oil production is about 80 million barrels per day (don't know what it was in 1991). While the Kuwaiti fires were a local environmental disaster, and the poor burning quality produced a lot of soot, I think the global impact is still nowhere near the global impact of worldwide oil use.
I couldn't find good numbers for Beijing, but as someone else already pointed out, that Kuwaiti oil was going to get burned one way or another.

This point is important, except that it is exceptionally hypocritical to outlaw slavery in our home countries while supporting it abroad. I know it's not technically slavery but it is in many ways. I think 9 year olds should be in school, not a sweat shop.

http://www.american.edu/IRVINE/sarahg/capsule2.jpg - Yep that's it.

I realize there are people that rely on older technologies that can't render anything other than ASCII

Yeah, I really should dump my 2005 release of PINE and build Alpine so I get wchar support...

And your ASCII art e-mails take up less bandwidth and render better than HTML?

HTML email is usually a minimum of twice the size of even quoted-printable plain text. I took the time to estimate the storage requirements of plain text and HTML based on a selection of real-world messages (paypal, amazon, ebay etc..), 14GB Vs. 56GB archived mail last year for my accounts alone. Thankfully most people don't send both. The actual size of my mail archive was around 25GB, including PDF's and images (procmail introduces ppt and doc to the null device on my behalf).

As you should not be using color to convey semantic information; there's no advantage to sending HTML over trivially marked ASCII. The only issue is misguided use of proportional fonts which break ASCII formatted tables -- an edge case.

However, I have never heard a good argument against HTML e-mail.

You probably get out too much, perhaps read a bunch instead

Get the tastiest breed of cow, find the tastiest cow of the breed, kill the poor thing, and grow the cloned meat in a vat.

Once the system is working, I'd imagine it'd be a lot cheaper than the current system, think of the energy cows waste (breathing, blood pumping, etc). Admittedly cows allowed to roam get that energy from grass, but it's still trading a massive waste of land for a massive amount of unwanted methane

I'm sure meat grown in a vat would be a lot easier to tinker with than meat grown by a cow, allowing things like vitamin enriched beef, long life beef, burn resistant beef, bacon flavor beef (admit it, you know you want it), possibly even replacing the cow fat with something like omega-3 fat...

As for ethics, some people may comment about not giving a damn if an animal feels pain, but I'm sure if they bothered to research it, all but the most psychopathic would feel empathy, they'd just rather not think too deeply about it. Likewise, I suspect my footwear was made by some child slaves in some faraway country, so while I avoid that brand, I'm fairly sure if I researched the brands of footwear I do buy, I'd find some pretty bad things.

I agree with some of what you say, however I have problems with some of it.

The Indian government has opened the market up to international trade, and these farmers can't be competitive. They're competing with Thai and Indonesian farmers who are two to three decades ahead of them in terms of technology, and whose families have been farming for ten generations.

They're also compeating with US farmers who get billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies, as well as heavily subsidized Japanese and European farmers.

What does the Indian government propose? GM seeds! They dole them out by the tonne without explaining that they can't be reseeded (it's not illegal, it's just impossible: the crops can't be replanted).

Except they can be reseeded: "Goliath Whomps David'. And let's not forget biopiracy, the patenting of plants Indians and other South Asians have been growing for generations: The Basmati Rice case.

OK, let's discuss the computers made in Cuba. You go first.

I tried to tout the merits something like this could have for non-critical regular user backups, but as previous posters mention, it was shot down.

I was suggesting to run DrFTPD as a backend with NetDrive as an access medium. It looks good on paper, but I've never had the chance to apply it so widescale :)

With DrFTPD it's easy to setup whatever kind of redundancy you would want, ie: "at least 3 nodes will mirror all files in /doc" or whatever. NetDrive (and I'm sure there are others) help take away the learning curve and hassle of "here, use this internal ftp for backups, not a network drive" as it will map the actual FTP to a network drive and appear like normal.

Just my 2c.

I was thinking Brazil myself.

I was thinking of Brazil myself. I'd like to go there for a year as part of a study abroad program.

Maybe it's time to move to India.

Why not. Your job already has.

I was thinking Brazil myself. Nice weather and good place to retire. Probably more stable and less people per square km. Less strife and unrest.

And with how many people there are in India, WiMax will be maxed out to a point it isn't very reliable or usable, much like many support centers I have had to recently use.

I'm going for the many people that seem to suffer this disorder in aggrigate, so that they might wake up from the long nightmare of perceived suffering and be able to see real injustice and dillemas in other cultures

Oh, I'm quite aware of injustice throughout the world such as the San, Bushmen, of southern and western Africa. Because of diamond mining interests the San are being forced off their ancestral homelands in Botswana among other countries. Meanwhile some like De Beers, who also brought South Africa apartheid, are making out like bandits. Cellphones in the west causes conflict and fighting in the Congo over coltan. Elsewhere "Burmese villagers sued oil company Unocal for human rights violations." Back in Africa, oil is fueling Conflict in the Niger Delta.

How can this be? http://www.american.edu/TED/ice/congo-coltan.htm The conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, formally Zaire, is complex, complicated by the struggle for power over the country's vast resources by actors within and outside Congo. In recent years, one particular mineral, coltan, has been at the center of the fight. The precious ore is mined in rebel-controlled areas at the expense of national parks and depletion of wildlife. Coltan is a key element in cell phones, computer chips, nuclear reactors, and PlayStations. The market for the mineral has greatly increased in recent years, exacerbating conflict in Congo. Sorry - I have read all the details of the guy, but is he is helping to stop new computer purchase, his is also helping the Gorillas as well!! MX

CALEA, enacted in 1994, requires that telephone companies ensure that their networks do not impede law enforcement agencies from setting up wiretaps. In 2005 the scope of the law was extended to include all "facilities-based" Internet service providers. However, the law has provisions that exempt private networks, such as those operated by many colleges and universities, from such regulation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

What is a "private network"?

Neither the statute nor the FCC's rules define the term. However, it's strongly suggested that interconnected networks will be considered private when made available only to limited constituencies, rather than to the general public. Thus, campus networks that exclude the public at large, such as those that require University ID cards or password authentication, would likely be considered private.

To continue to offer access to the internet to the public at large, a service the AU Library has long offered, is to increase the likelihood that the campus network will be deemed "public" and thus subject to CALEA.

Yes, they contained it. Inside the plant, however, things were rather different:

"At 6 a.m., there was a shift change in the control room. A new arrival noticed that the temperature in the holding tanks was excessive and used a backup valve called a block valve to shut off the coolant venting,[4] but around 950 m (250,000 US gallons) of coolant had already leaked from the primary loop. It was not until 165 minutes after the start of the problem that radiation alarms activated as contaminated water reached detectors -- by that time, the radiation levels in the primary coolant water were around 300 times expected levels, and the plant was seriously contaminated."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_acc ident

The clean-up took a while, and cost a fortune. Also, radioactive liquids are a big problem generally because they tend to be harder to contain than solids.

"Water continues to leak into the shelter, spreading radioactive materials throughout the wrecked reactor building and potentially into the surrounding groundwater."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_incident#Th e_need_for_future_repairs

I'm general in favour of nuclear power, but we don't seem very good at managing the inevitable accidents and incidents.

Anyways, sounds like a useful mineral... Wonder what happens to it once it has 'absorbed' the radiation? (Could not read the article, /.ed?)

Lucky it's in the artic, since the Sovs have been using that place as a dumping ground for their nuclear subs and other non-reprocessed waste for decades:

http://www.american.edu/ted/arctic.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6058302.stm

Never mind the fact that scientists are witnessing ice shelves in Antarctica falling into the sea. Or that the North Pole is melting so that there will soon be a North-West Passage which Canada is laying claims to. Or that much of the global warming data does not come from NASA. Or that ski areas in the Alpsare going out of business. Or that there is glacial melting everywhere.. Or that Indonesia's islands are being submerged by rising sea level. Call me a deluded, but it seems that the preponderance of evidence is on the side of these so called "global warming" fanatics.

in some regions they are overpopulated. http://www.american.edu/TED/elephbot.htm

i also love how that page is titled "dicks"

As compared to whom? The history challenged individuals who think corporations know best?

Like Shell Oil?

Or Texaco?

Or Enron?

Or These 14 rapacious monsters (Caterpillar, Chevron, CocaCola, Dow, Dyncorp, Ford, KBR-Halliburton, Lockheed, Monsanto, Nestle, Phillip Morris, Pfizer, SLDE, Walmart all of whom have disgusting track records of either exploitation, environmental destruction, corruption, or some combination thereof?

Government is the only remaining bullwark between the thugs who run industry and the people they use up as labour resource and then destroy as a product. It is the only safeguard the environment has: if governments do not constrain industry, then industry will always look at the quarterly report and continue to crap all over the planet. And given how collusive government is with industry, it is NOT a pretty or welcoming picture - as government has, for the past several thousand years, proven itself to be little more than the means of protecting and projecting the interests of the ruling classes. The struggle is real, not imagined. And it is only through a re-imagined and re-energised public sector will our species have any hope of surviving the coming crises in Energy, Environment, and Population reduction.

It is the poster who is historically challenged and politically ignorant.

RS

You know its also possible to vote for Gore and yet criticize his handling of those scientific "facts"?

It's true. You can.

Gore has been right around the world (not to worry, he's carbon neutral by investing in his own company) and never yet answered questions from scientists about some of his statements which are simply false. He always begins by telling people not to record or note what he has to say. He then answers no questions.

Look at the result of just going to the store and getting a chocolate bar: http://www.american.edu/ted/chocolate-slave.htm

I don't want to see a child used for sex or used in slavery, but I think it is obvious which is worse. Pedophilia is a problem that has been around for a long time and will continue to be. The percentage of people that are into it is certainly in the double digits. Pushing it underground is not going to help things, there needs to be real dialog. The internet has gotten it in the public eye more, maybe this new site is a step in the right direction should they allow it. Maybe something practical can be done about it instead of just ignoring the problem.

There are a few slight of hands Apple has pulled. Apple compares the total amount of waste recycled vs. what they sold when not too many people were buying Apple computers. But, Apple doesn't pick up old Apples. What Apple does is recycle computers when a new purchase is made.

Imagine that Dell sold 5,000,000 computers from 1995 to 2000 and about 5,000,000 computers between 2000 and 2007. Let's say Apple sold only 500,000 computers between 1995 and 2000, but 5,000,000 computers between 2000 and 2007. While I am pulling numbers out of my darker neither regions, let's assume all computers weigh exactly the same.

Let's say that 20% of Dell's customers return a computer when they purchase a new Dell, but only 10% of Apple's customers do the same. So, Dell recycled 1,000,000 computers between 2000 to 2007 and Apple only recycled 500,000 computers. Dell recycled more, but look at Apple's metric:

Dell only recycled 20% of their computers based upon the 1995 to 2000 sales information. However, Apple recycling rate is 100%.

Since Apple recycles when a customer buys a new machine, a better measurement would be machines recycled vs. the number now being purchased. Under these circumstances, does Apple shine so bright?

Now a rap at Greenpeace. Greenpeace's big problem with Apple is that Apple doesn't expand its recycling program world wide. Apple only recycles in the U.S. and Canada. However, in Europe and Japan, either Apple has a recycling partner where you can drop off your computer, or the government has its own recycling program. The U.S., Canada, Europe, and Japan probably cover 99% of Apple's market.

Meanwhile, most large corporations don't use Dell's recycling program because repackaging and shipping computers (even for free postage) is too costly. It's cheaper to simply have them carted off. Considering that large corporations probably account for at least 50% of Dell's business, that's a lot of computers not being recycled. Apple, which has a very small presence in large corporations doesn't have this issue. So, although Dell's program looks better on paper, it may simply not be as extensive.

I've had a lot of problems with Greenpeace over the years. They tend to do publicity stunts which many times have their own environmental consequences.

In 1995, Shell Oil wanted to sink an oil platform in deep water. Shell claimed that not only it was the cheapest alternative, but also the most ecological. The oil would seep out at a very slow rate, and there was minimal amount of life near the spot. The quanity of heavy metals and other toxins were minimal compared to the amount spewed out by deep sea vents.

Greenpeace however, forced Shell to take the platform back to shore to be dismantled. Later on, Greenpeace internal memos showed the Shell was actually correct in wanting to sink the platform as the most environmentally favored approach. Dragging the platform to the shore could result in it falling apart and leaking vast quantity of oil near the shoreline. The cost of dismantling the rig would be born by the taxpayers because that was all tax deductible. Plus, the oil slug and heavy metals now had to be disposed on land.

Greenpeace's response was that although it would have been more environmentally sound to dispose of the platform at sea, they felt it set a bad precedence. So, they risked a possible ecological catastrophe just to make a PR point. See http://www.american.edu/TED/SHELLRIG.HTM for more details.

There is a huge black market in CFCs. Very, VERY large, actually. It is so large that one of the mob rackets in Miami is supposedly dedicated full-time to bringing it in and selling it to people who need it due to the cost of replacing hardware that requires CFC-12.

One of my vehicles is a 1993 Chevy Blazer, and it requires R-12 freon. I ran out of it, and my mechanic in my tiny town told me he can get as much as I want for $30 a pound -- as much as I want and as often as I want. I elected to upgrade to the newer freon replacement, which was a $1000 upgrade. Now my vehicle's air conditioner performs about 70% less than before -- in the hot summers of Chicago the vehicle isn't used because it won't chill enough. I've had it looked at by 3 mechanics, and they all told me to go back to the old R-12 freon, which is readily available on the black market.

Don't believe for a minute that CFCs are gone -- they're banned, but they're still in use and will continue to be.