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Anything can be done badly and rare earth mining does require the use of many toxic chemicals but that can be managed.

From http://azstarnet.com/business/local/big-pollution-risk-seen-in-rare-earth-mining/article_c604dd80-7a8d-5ab5-8342-0f9b8dbb35fb.html

That's what the one U.S. rare-earth mine in production, in Mountain Pass, Calif., has done.
The mine's operator, Molycorp Inc., invested hundreds of millions of dollars in technologies to recycle wastewater and dramatically reduce tailings when it reopened the 60-year-old site in 2011.
That's why Molycorp had no opposition from the Center for Biological Diversity, which has fought many mines, including Rosemont.

More than you, apparently:

http://azstarnet.com/news/blogs/senor-reporter/emissions-tests-required-in-mexico-but-not-catalytic-converters/article_330c6e04-1f92-11e1-a900-001871e3ce6c.html
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2011/04/11/20110411arizona-mexico-truck-pollution-regulation.html
http://teamsternation.blogspot.com/2011/04/us-pays-to-put-catalytic-converters-on.html

...clearly an act of self defense by the officer(s) involved.

Kinda funny how one sided that argument always goes given that it we aren't permitted the same luxuries

>The Supreme Court has never explicitly ruled on whether children born in the United States to illegal immigrant parents are entitled to birthright citizenship

Thanks to the Arizona senate were probably going to see that challenge very soon.
members of the Senate Appropriations Committee voted Tuesday to deny citizenship to children born in Arizona whose parents can't prove citizenship or permanent legal presence.

He had to go to the second one because walmart does not sell ammo before 7 am. No one there denied him ammo for being crazy, just early.

His first stop, a Walmart between his house and the scene of the shooting, doesn't sell bullets before 7 a.m. It was only 6:12 a.m.

Source Arizona Daily Star:
http://azstarnet.com/news/state-and-regional/article_4ea654b2-b1a9-5ca0-ad91-8ef689b3ea5d.html

Ah crap.

I apologize. Someone else used a similar turn of phrase and I didn't look who you were responding to (I assumed it was me.)

His favorite books include the Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf and Alice in Wonderland.

Apparently, he also did volunteer work for... are you ready for this... a Book Fair!

http://azstarnet.com/events/collection_aebeb63c-2f9e-11df-9021-001cc4c002e0.html?photo=8

He also did volunteer work at a Tuscon Book Fair:

http://azstarnet.com/events/collection_aebeb63c-2f9e-11df-9021-001cc4c002e0.html?photo=8

And you're still thinking 20th century warfare. Who said anything about guns? The grade-school bully used intimidation mostly.

Not that I'm comparing China to grade-school bullies. China is much better at this all this than a grade-schooler.

I'm not saying we haven't also done so for decades. And I'm not trying to keep score of who is right or wrong, and how often. Just pointing out that the world is not all that kind to us, and hasn't been for a long time, whether we deserve it or not. If you think pursuing a policy of behaving better and being kinder to the rest of the world is in our best interest, say so and support those who agree with you. I'm saying that along with a policy of behaving better, we need to also pursue a policy of self-preservation, while trying to avoid doing so in a way that hampers our future prospects. And how to do that, in detail, is beyond me. So be thankful I'm not in power.

In the past this was true, but this law exists specifically to remove that stipulation. Please read the legislation. You may be stopped "upon reasonable suspicion that an entity is not legally allowed to live within the country".

Perhaps you're confusing this with with the evidence criteria provision. The law says that race may be a factor, but it may not only be an only factor. Of course this is laughable -- people will be stopped for race, and cops will find (or create) additional evidence after-the-fact.

It's telling that even the Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police opposes this law, as they believe it will erode trust with immigrants and distract police from more serious threats.

Thanks for the explanation, President Obama! By the way, I think you forgot you killed Pontiac. It's an easy mistake to make, you're all busy with health care "reform", shirking your responsibilities as commander-in-chief, golfing, et cetera.

they could make you clean out the refrigerator at an AT&T branch office

They could do the eye, skin, and hair color.

That is a known myth spread by feminists. I'm afraid that actually, what research has consistently and repeatedly proven is just the opposite.

A couple of links (this is what I have just found in a 30-second google search, but there is much more evidence):

http://www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/108552
http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/family/08/20/parenting.gender/index.html

Please, don't take things from granted as if they were science just because they sound good.

So one anecdote, that wasn't even sourced, is all the proof you need?

Here's a counterpoint then.

This dissenting review perfectly sums up my opinion of this movie's childish storytelling: http://regulus2.azstarnet.com/blogs/philmguy/10190

Al Gore took part in environmental studies while he was in college.

"Gore learned of global warming in the late 1960s as a student at Harvard University. He studied under a professor who had been measuring carbon gases for years and anticipated the danger that was coming."

But we all know there is a legitimate doubt about anthropogenic global warming.
doubts

doubts

doubts

The question I have is why the RIAA dropped cases against a bunch of UofA students recently: http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/byauthor/235178

They've been doing it with DUI for a while. And here in my state (some might call it the third world), THE OFFICERS ARE DRAWING BLOOD FROM SUSPECTS THEMSELVES IN THE BACK OF SQUAD CARS.

Sorry for the caps, but it makes me that angry.

This is just as much about adults as it is about kids. Most humans have urges to have sex they can't hold indefinitely. Abstinence will prevent HIV, STDs and unwanted pregnancies in theory, but it is impossible actually to put into practice. Do you actually know anyone who will abstain from sex their whole life ? And if you are talking about abstinence before marriage, as is apparently taught in some places, that excludes a whole category of people who can't get married - gays, and who are most at risk for HIV. Also, some straight girls who pledged to remain "virgins" before marriage have substituted intercourse with other even higher-risk behavior like anal sex because they just don't know any better.

What we need a comprehensive sex education program that focuses on safe sex, contraception, and preventing STDs/HIV. I don't think abstinence should deserve more than a footnote in such a program because we already know teaching it alone doesn't work.

Note that 16 states have already rejected funds for abstinence-only education, the most recent of which being Arizona.

FYI :
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/21606.php
http://www.avert.org/abstinence.htm
http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/221980
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/reproductive_rights/2008/01/ariz-gov-napoli.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26623-2004Dec1.html

And bad ones at that. http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/hourlyupdate/220455.php This govenor wants to make school free if you get a 3.0 GPA.

They had their chance, but none of them wanted it. Now, you have a chance.

A true statement and a valid point, but there's a piece missing from the "walking down the street" analogy that seems to be eluding most of us. When a person walks down the street and looks into a home through a street-facing window, it's extremely unlikely that the window is actually a one-way mirror that only allows viewing in. So yes, they can see what's inside, but anyone inside can also see them. Stop and think about that for a moment, because it's a natural check-and-balance mechanism that, in my opinion, should not be left out of these sorts of privacy discussions: While you can't deny other people the right to look at you in public without your permission, it's only fair that you get to look at them at the same time. If nothing else, it's reasonable to at least have the opportunity to know who is looking.

But with Google Street View, or the Zaio Corp. database, or any similar endeavor, you don't get that courtesy. Even if you were lucky enough to spot the camera in the ten to fifteen seconds it was visible, you still don't know how many millions of people just looked into your life at that moment. And don't forget this is Google we're talking about: among other things, the new background checker for lazy hiring managers, who naturally have your home address at the top of your résumé. Suddenly anyone who lives in a Street View-covered area had better:

1. have heard of Google Street View;
2. look up any addresses that people might associate with them on Google Street View;
3. zoom in on every angle to make sure there's nothing that compromises them—and a pox on the first fool who tries to imply you can't be compromised in a snapshot if you're not doing anything wrong;
4. request a takedown from Google on anything they don't like;
5. wait and see how fast Google rushes to put a big gaping hole in their lovely new feature.

For the record, I like Street View. I've been hoping Google would add something like that for some time. But don't gloss over the privacy concerns by equating walking down the street and looking through a window with driving a van down hundreds of streets taking millions of photographs and associating them with street addresses on the world's largest search engine. Only one of these makes your private life public, and it's not the first one.

A truck records signal from your WiFi router? How about people taking a picture of your house to sell to banks and insurance companies? Or aerial close-ups of your backyard?

Well, I've already given one. Mr. Swann is known as the 'most tested guinea pig in parapsychology', or something like that.

Allison Dubois (inspiration for NBC's Medium) was tested by Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona.

There are plenty more, but you don't really care. You're just chest-pounding on the superiority of your belief system vs. those who allow for something more.

...
"The new camera will cost about $6 million to build...

When it is finished, the new camera will weigh about 2,000 pounds and take images using a billion pixels. For comparison, a nice, store-bought digital camera uses one one-hundredth of that amount. Workers will haul the camera to the telescope using an elevator in WIYN's dome.

Project scientists expect the camera to be operational as early as 2009."

The Icelandic morning newspaper, Morgunblaðið started their online edition in 1995 i think.

The Arizona Daily Star launched May 5th 1995.

hehe

This has nothing to do with reducing terrorism and everything to do with reducing illegal immigration.

All-laptop high school to open in Vail

In addition to laptops they claim they are installing other hardware.

But Long is working to change things. Along with the 300 Smart Boards being installed this summer, TUSD also is putting response pads in select classrooms. It's similar to the "ask the audience" lifeline on the game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" Teachers ask a question and can gauge the group's understanding based on the answers.

The Smart Boards are a huge step, she said. With a few clicks, teachers will be able to fly the class into Egypt through a digital map and highlight the history of the Valley of the Kings with photos, videos and multimedia timelines.

I'm glad I went to an excellent public high school.
Excellent test scores, 100% graduation rate and 98% of students go to college.
It was a public high school, but you had to be a high performer and test in. I think overall the experience of the school was excellent because everybody was at the same high level. Junior and Senior years were almost all advanced placement classes, so many of the students had enough credits to start college as sophomores. In some ways classes like calculus were better than what I had in college, because you got 2 extra hours a week of class time (5 days vs 3days per week).
Overall I think the education I got there was better than at a regular public high school, because you had peers you could study with, systems existed to address high performers (ie some students took vector calc at the university), and classes could be more rigorous. Not everybody learns the same level, we should have school systems that recognize the difference. We need to allow advanced students to excel, rather than holding them back so they advance at the same speed as the other students.

This reminds me of something I heard a while back. About a Mexican men's soccer team signing the most hotshot woman on the women's national team. Look here.

It's hard to avoid a gender bias of one sort or another.

I heard about it on NPR. This woman was giving the background, and then she started interviewing this mexican sports reporter on air. This guy said that he thought the team was probably only doing it as a publicity stunt. And the NPR woman immediately took off with "So you're part of this Mexican machismo thing?"

So my wife and I were listening to this in the car. I was like "Poor guy. Getting blindsided by the women's issued agenda like that." My wife, of course, immediately took it up as a women's issues agenda.

There was no discussion allowed that being a female MIGHT ACTUALLY impede one's physical ability. This chick is 5'4", ~120 lbs. So the suggestion that she might not be able to compete in speed and strength against a 6'2" 185 lb man (both of whom are trained professional athletes) is sexism? (Wait - soccer is just running around and kicking a ball right? Her size shouldn't matter because the players don't really fight with each other. Soccer is not a violent sport. No, this is wrong. Soccer has enough violence to generate plenty of in game injuries.)

Of course if a man beats his wife then these size and strength issues return, but as welcome allies to women. It's been pointed out to me (gleefully) that women tend to have more fine motor dexterity, and higher IQs. Rock climbers have explained to me that women are better climbers. The best climbers in the sport are all women b/c they have more finesse. Sexual equality is only an issue when WOMEN are getting the short end of the stick. Cause any woman should also be able to compete as a pro football lineman, right?

What I learned by getting in this entanglement with my wife is that I should just follow the example set by Harry Belafonte. Whenever someone says "Harry Belafonte! You shouldn't be leading those women astray!" you come back with "Hey, women of today know what they're doing." And whenever someone busts out with "Women are better than YOU, jack! There's no way you could be superior in any field." Just think of all that poontang you'll be able to nab by smiling and nodding. This is the only path left for a big, strong, dumb male.

"Building" a Mame cabinet is no where as hard as it used to be because there's been great advancements in the mame cabinet building community, and a ton of support "niche" market providers to create products that make it really easy to convert an existing cabinet (or build your own)... hell there's even a book on the topic to step you throuh the process.

Yeah, it's not hard. I picked up Project Arcade from Barnes and Noble on a whim and then decided to build my own cocktail arcade. It wasn't that difficult. I spent $370 total.

Here's a couple of tips, first, using a keyboard controller for your input is neat, but very difficult to work with. Most newer PS2 keyboard "fix" the ghosting problem by failing to report the 3rd key in alignment. That means instead of ghost keys, you'll have keys that just don't show up.

Second, I had the idea, like many others I'm sure, to use a compactflash card instead of a harddrive. This was a bad idea, compactflash is just too slow. Advmame is 70 megs, it takes forever just to load that 70 megs into ram.

Third, for the love of god, use CAT5 for your wiring. At first glance you don't realize that each joystick is going to use 8 wires, and each button uses 2, and when all is said and done, you're going to have a clump of 80 wires that are difficult to manage.

Here's a nice little pricelist I compiled of my mame cabinet.

Finally, work out exactly how much of everything you'll need. It's pretty annoying to have to go to the store and pick up something you missed. You'll notice from my pricelist, there's the littlest things listed. I had to go to the store 3 times to pick up different sized wood screws, or a set of corner braces, etc.

Humor me for a minute.

..opposing views that introduce counter-evidence and new concepts) are modded down...

cheers- raga

MjM

Be that as it may, people still occasionally find themselves face to face with these animals (which were just pulled out of my ass spur of the moment like...)

Observe:
Montana
Arizona Not to mention the occasional bear wandering into the city limits in places like Albuquerque, NM, etc.

Regardless of what they "usually" do, injuries and fatalities do occur on occasion. Besides, if it were available and actually worked in a way to keep a person safe while hiking, etc. people would buy it, look at the "bear mace" that's out there. I've never bought or even seen it so I don't recall the actual product name or what it is commonly called, all I remember is that it's heavy duty pepper spray supposedly strong enough to repel wild animals.

Anyway, the original point I guess wasn't so much that the application I envisioned would make bears and bobcats like being around you, but perhaps something that makes them more sedate and not something you would normally wear during the entire time "in the woods" but something that can be applied/sprayed/whatever in a pinch.

4'33", otherwise as the Silent Sonata, was written by composer John Cage. A pianist would enter onto the stage and sit at a piano for a timed interval of four minutes and thirty-three seconds. During this period, the normally insignificant ambient noise of the audience and environment became the music itself. Of most interest, while there were no written notes for the piece, the performance produces a different sound each and every time.

On an amusing note, it would be interesting to simply sit down at a computer and click the stop button on WinAMP to listen for four and a half minutes to the noises that are habitually ignored at a computer workstation. And besides--what kind of a world would we be in if silence becomes patented?

As some that read the news might say, "No shit, Sherlock."

If he's clueless, at least he should read the news, no?

Officials say the problem could be even more widespread: Some of the tens of thousands of rapists, molesters and others missing nationally could be hiding in Arizona, they say, especially because an estimated 33,500 are missing in California.

Note there's no real evidence for any of this except "lots of sex offenders are missing and Arizone is such a fantastic place to live we suspect they're all moving here."

Maybe they're onto something. After all, the numbers mentioned in this article equate to a statewide population of more than 13,000 registered sex offenders for a population of about 5.5 Million residents - about a half a percent of its population. Compare that to 3000 for the entire state of Conneticut for a population of a little over 3 Million, or less than 0.1% of its population.

Are things really so much better in Arizona that there should be five times as many registered sex offenders? Per capita, their sex offender registry is nearly double that even of California!

Must be all the sunshine and beaches they have in Arizona. Especially in Tucson. I lived there a couple of years one winter and I recall there being old people everywhere. And we all know it's those dirty old men who fiddle little kids in the park... those bastards.

Maybe they can incorporate this information into the flag or their license plates or something. It would appear Arizona is the mecca for sex offenders!

And let's not even go into "alternative" music, where the only appeal (it isn't the quality of sound) is that it isn't mainstream.

Don't forget the gastronomical topics. For years it was the wine snobs, and the last ten years it has been the beer snobs. If it is dark and bitter, and (and this is important) comes from a small "brewery," it is always superior to anything mass-produced. I'm sorry, but bitter crap, even if "hand crafted" is still bitter crap.

There will always be a certain group of people who latch onto something unusual to feel superior. For the most part that is fine; however, the haughty look-down-the-nose comments at "the masses" gets tiresome. Too bad most can't look in the mirror and see themselves for the pretentious assholes that they are.

Reading an MS PR release is like listening to an Al Gore speech in my mind.

Yes, very similar. In both cases a person/company made a statement about their limited involvement in something and in both cases the fuckwads of yellow rags like FoxNews, The Register and Slashdot immediately exagerate those statements in order to make their context into something that can be poked fun at.

Did Microsoft claim to invent any of this stuff? No.

Does Microsoft claim to fund and work with said technologies aggresively? Yes.

Did Al Gore claim to invent the Internet? No.

Did Al Gore claim to have taken proactive measures to aid in securin funding to technological projects that ended up being key to the development to the World Wide Web?

Vinton G. Cerf, a senior vice president at MCI Worldcom and the person who really gets the credited for inventing the Internet, e-mailed this to The Washington Post: "I think it is very fair to say that the Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the vice president in his current role and in his earlier role as senator." - www.azstarnet.com

So instead of blaming Microsoft for making insane claims, why not instead blame Shitdot for exagerating their more modest claims into insane claims? But you'd probably rather not hear it, just like you don't want to hear that Al Gore might have had anything to do with the Internet. It doesn't play well on your tiny mind.

John Cage totally has Paul Simon beat in the 'sound of silence' game. His song, 4'33", IS silence!

Half right, half wrong...

Apple didn't invent it, they licensed it from George Gerpheide. Apple was the first to market a laptop with a touchpad.

If you want a source for this tidbit, click away.

I wanted to post a updated link for this... was under the 'today' section... ;-)

Cage's compositions at least have a warmer more human feeling.

Warmer and more human like his 4'33" composition?

If you want to start at the beginning:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

If you want to start at the beginning:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

If you want to start at the beginning:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

If you want to start at the beginning:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4