Slashdot Mirror

That used to happen to me because Google had double standards.

Basically the paywall journal sites would show Google a different page ("juicy info") from what they showed me ("login/pay $$$").

Often the info is available on other websites for free (not necessarily the same journal/article - could be different), but I would have to skip all the paywall crap to look for the sites that aren't.

In contrast Google "dropped" BMW Germany for providing different info to Google's crawler vs normal visitors: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/4685750.stm

Things appear to have improved a bit since. Nowadays normally at least I get the summary/abstract page with the keywords I searched for :).

If we assume that Chernobyl killed EVERYONE who lived within the exclusion zone, then we'd not have had "hundreds of thousands" of deaths, since there weren't "hundreds of thousands" living in the zone.

Further, it should be noted that some people did NOT move out of the zone when told to do so, and continue to live in that area.

Let me play your game. Citation?

Oh, and where did you get the notion that single digits of people at Fukushima had died of radiation to date? I still haven't found any evidence that ANY people have died there as a result of radiation exposure.

I don't know where the great-great grandparent poster got that notion... My understanding was that a few people died at the very beginning, but not from radiation exposure, and others have been reported to have been hospitalized after stepping in radioactive water http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12845304.

The BBC report about LulzSec quitting mentioned that the group also indicated they had some 5 GB of information on hand from the hacked sites, that would be released over the upcoming three weeks.

So much for quitting. It seems that only accounts for the hacking attacks.

While the UK does have the very occasional tremor, they're so minor that nothing more than a single roof tile has ever moved*.

Not true. The British Geological Survey issued an alert the day before yesterday, albeit not one of a high-priority "news flash" type since it was a mere 2.7ML. There are usually a couple above 3ML every year. There was a 5.2 magnitude in 2008.

I'm not trying to suggest even the record 6.1ML (or indeed the T5/F2 tornado in 2005) should be something that would cause great concern to a modern nuclear plant (I assume not).

There is an excess of FUD irrationality arising from Fukushima, and I'm generally pro nuclear power here in UK. But I respect that other people might have an informed, rational assessment of the risks involved and still sensibly arrive at a different view. And even the most rational of minds surely cannot help but observe the reminder that shit happens.

Sure - there's plenty of investment in both off-shore and on-shore wind generation in the UK (this gives a pretty good idea of the scale), but it doesn't change the fact that wind power cannot at present - in lieu of radical developments in energy storage, or demand modulation - provide reliable base-load. Wind-farms - even when offshore generate plenty of objections.

It's disappointing that there have not been more offshore tidal energy schemes, since these could be an entirely reliable energy source. The usual excuse offered is that whilst there are plenty of prototype devices, none of them are considered mature enough for large-scale investment.

Rather than increasing the amount of nuclear energy the in the UK, the proposed reactors are replacements for existing nuclear generation capacity that is reaching the end its life. What is perhaps interesting is that economics are starting to look very favourable for Nuclear generation right now - renewable generation is not cheap.

British withdrawal is probably further away now than it was when the IRA in its present guise got started in 1969.

I say we should wash our hands of the place. There are evil ignorant bigots on both "sides." The latest round of misery was orchestrated by the UVF.

They don't deserve to be British. They're certainly not human beings.

1 million CCTV cameras are installed in UK to safeguard public rights http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8159141.stm

You're certainly right that it's nature's way, but the question mark appears when I'm making a conscious decision to have a hand in the process. The fox which digs a hole which exposes the worm and the bird which takes the worm don't really have the capacity to make a choice. I do have a choice to help the birds, or help the worms, or leave everything alone, or give some balanced input to offset the tremendous impact my modern lifestyle is having.

The Duke of Edinburgh, bless his privileged socks, fairly effectively summarised two different approaches in a recent interview: you can be an conservationist, concerning yourself at a species level with extinction and other large-scale changes; or you can be a "bunny hugger", worrying too much about the plight of some random donkey. I'd like not to lose sight of the wood for the trees without losing the compassion of the latter sort.

Not sure why the article on the CDP car was submitted. They didn't even come close to winning.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-13875464

Are we talking normal size the world over, or "normal-sized" by American standards?

Well, it was in Cambridge and that's in the UK; I think it'd be a fair compromise if it was average-sized by UK standards.

Granted, according to Forbes the percentage of "overweight" (BMI > 25) adults in the UK is ~10% lower than in the US, but it's still very high.

Either I'm not seeing a lot of detail in the linked article, or it's just not there. This one has more info:

      BBC News - FBI targets cyber security scammers
      http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13887152

Already been done...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8249792.stm

"Gordon Brown has said he is sorry for the "appalling" way World War II code-breaker Alan Turing was treated for being gay."

I dunno. Then we start charging people for saying "hey, the police are trying to bust you" or "hey, there's a speed trap up ahead."

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1343959/Driver-flashed-headlights-warn-motorists-speed-trap-fined.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/somerset/4569124.stm

Apparently anyway Thales is "good enough" for NASA as it has provided over half of the pressurized volume on the US side of the ISS: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12614262 http://www.thalesaleniaspace-issmodules.com/

The guarantee card system expires in just over a week's time, and cheques are supposed to be abolished in 2018.

And because of that we can achieve what a man 100 years ago could only dream of.

A small proportion of us can achieve it. And much of what we can achieve does not reduce the suffering of man.

We work fewer hours than the average man 100 years back could imagine.

No, we don't. The organised labour movement which actually reduced working hours is older than you seem to think. Pay attention. Just before WW1, people were working around 50 hours per week, depending on area of employment. Now I don't know a soul today who works less than 40-45 hours a week. Add to that the fact that ongoing education is effectively compulsory to get and maintain any sort of steady job today, whereas back then it was a luxury for the privileged few, and you'll find that we're spending more hours per week toward the practice of wage slavery than one hundred years.

Women are no longer slaves of the household thanks to devices that shave hours off of household tasks.

Obvious sexist thinking. Women are no longer "slaves of the household" because war killed lots of men, not because they no longer had to wash the dishes. Compare improved worker conditions following the Black Death.

Our standard of health would make a person from the early 1900s weep in joy, especially if they have a toothache.

It's true that universal healthcare services have provided analgesics to more people. The progress of adult medicine is consistently overrated, though - life expectancy improvements have mostly been about reducing infant mortality.

We live in much greater comfort

Define "comfort".

and can travel around.

So what?

The mentally ill aren't locked in dark asylums

Well, not always. Today we have "care in the community", a euphemism for making them walk the streets until they commit some crime and can be locked up. I know it's difficult for people who have swallowed the fallacy of the rational human mind to believe it, but some people are a danger to themselves or others and need residential care, sometimes involuntarily.

But thanks to privatisation of certain residential care facilities, we witness precisely the abuse of a hundred years ago.

and the poor can even get government funding (rather than the historical option of starving to death or begging a rich person for help).

Sometimes. Laws since the 1980s across the Western world have severely restricted support for the poor.

The average person can learn more than they could ever before

If they have the time, and are not distracted.

practical access to education is less restricted than ever before.

What is "access to education"? Do you mean availability of books? It's far harder to get a good university education in the UK than, say, 30 years ago, when university access was granted on merit rather than requiring loans etc.

BBC News are reporting however that there were intrusions in CIA and SOCA. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13859868 "Metropolitan Police's e-crimes unit had confirmed the raid was linked to the recent intrusion attacks on the websites of the CIA and Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca)." Just slack journalism or is this now a fact? I thought they previously said it was DDOS and nothing was intruded upon or compromised.

According to the BBC story,

A man, named locally as Ryan Cleary, 19, has been arrested in Wickford, Essex. Police have not identified him.

The site AnonOps Communications published his name, date of birth, and address on May 12. They match the details of the BBC article.

According to a metro.co.uk article, Ryan Cleary was a former member of Anonymous, who broke off and formed his own group, after hacking and publishing information from one of Anonoymous's servers in May. From an interview with Cleary,

Hacking into the Anonymous system was ‘regrettable but necessary’, he told website Thinq.

‘The only way to make things safe is to make users aware how insecure it is,’ he added.

None of this is definite, but it fits together.

The BBC reported that the police stated "The arrest follows an investigation into network intrusions and distributed denial of service attacks against a number of international business and intelligence agencies by what is believed to be the same hacking group."

according to the BBC Scotland Yard didn't comment on any LulzSec connection but that the arrest was "pre-planned [and] intelligence-led".

imo a Lulz-triggered raid is possible but unlikely related to the DDOS of the SOCA homepage - somehow I don't think that a multi-agency-operation can be executed within 1 day

Oh please. Even letters were always dependent on some organization to deliver them.

What sort of organisation is needed for you with your horse to provide a service taking a letter from A to B?

Ditto for the "open Internet".

The Internet was an end stage, but it was still much better when it was about distributed autonomous peers rather than a few private backbone providers and Facebooks.

And the majority of people never built their own radio set.

But many people could and many people did. And if you couldn't yourself, there'd be someone local to fix yours.

People didn't change, technology did.

The patented automatic ass-wiper was built and, even though it never really worked as well as the human hand, people forgot how to wipe their ass.

And that abused labour has seen their wages raise in the double digits per year.

Stop regurgitating soundbites from Slashdot and pay attention to what is happening in China.

If it wasn't for their manufacturing, they'd still live in an oppressive country, but living in even worse conditions.

"We treat the slaves better than the previous master, thus our slave trade is justified." Also, when you dismantle the security of the state - you may recall that China was once fairly socialist in the way it provided for its people - then of course people will end up in worse conditions and have to flee to exploitation in the city.

Mountain: meet molehill (or, Slashdot: meet tabloid newspaper. This story to be filed with the recent .Net developer hyperbole)

Skype 2.8 on my Mac is showing a dialog offering the choices of: Later/Skip Version/Update.

It seems that it is in everybody's interest for Skype auto update, just because they can't write bug-free software. They were taken offline in December by a buggy version of the client on Windows.

I'm going to be hitting the Update button on that dialog BTW.

With apologies to Kermit and the rest of the at risk biomass, I humbly submit, World's oceans in 'shocking' decline.

Meanwhile, floods and fires continue. I have always thought that the first major impact on society will be on food supplies, with a concomitant increase in food prices. This will at first bring civil unrest in poorer countries, as food takes up an increasingly large proportion of their livelihood. Eventually these high food prices will have a severe economic impact on wealthy nations as well.

When we have enough storage space on the device, what's to be gained by constantly shuttling data backward and forward? And there's not just the cost to consider - if you lose your connection for whatever reason, the device is more or less a brick.

This guy doesn't seem convinced by the new Chromebook, that's for sure.

The point I'm trying to make is that the US has responded to a terrorist act of death and destruction by indiscriminately raining down death and destruction a hundred or thousand-fold on innocent Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis, Yemenis, and now - or soon - Libyans. It's far, far more death and destruction than can be attributed to al Qaeda on 9/11, or since, or even "the enemy" if you want to include "militants" or "insurgents" - which are basically people who want us to stop killing them and leave their countries. If the US is justified in that, what are those countries, and their allies, justified in doing to the US?

If they bombed the US with drones would it be okay because it isn't "hostile"?

I agree with you on everything else on but this - when Afghanis mutilate their women or in Libya rape is used as punishment I tend to say get those who are in charge out. It doesn't change the fact that it should be done lawfully without bending the terms, and "the good guys" are always not so good either, sometimes by mistake, sometimes by simply because lack of proper oversight and happy trigger finger / sadistic people.

No, taxation is the price of civilisation.

In other words, WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, and IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

And my last word to you my friend, a quote from another forum....

Japan's lower house of parliament has approved a new law requiring schools to teach children to be patriotic. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's ruling coalition voted for the law, which cites "loving our country" as a goal of Japanese pupils' compulsory education. Opposition members of parliament protested against the bill, warning that it could spread nationalism.

How do you counter an adult populace that still remembers the pains of the past, even if they gloss over the actual transgressions that caused them? Maybe you try to brainwash their children into believing that loyalty to their country always comes first.

Loyalty above morality. Loyalty above justice. Loyalty above logic. That's part of what unchecked patriotism tends to promote and it's what Japan, at least on the surface, appears to be slowly moving toward. It's a rather disturbing development that is in stark contrast to the more conciliatory German position. Modern Germany has been careful to error on the side of caution when it comes to overly nationalistic motivations and even though there are many destructive forces still present in Germany they at least seem to have the wherewithal to admit to their problems and work towards resolving them. Japan, on the other hand, appears to be far more reluctant to admit such problems, let alone address them. In fact it would appear that they have virtually no intention of truly resolving these issues and, on the surface, appear to be toying with a careful and deliberate change in direction back toward the mistakes of the past.

On Monday, Japan's upper house of parliament passed a bill setting out steps for holding a referendum on revising the country's pacifist constitution, which has not been changed since 1947. Drawn up by the US occupation authorities after WWII, it bans military force in settling international disputes and prohibits maintaining a military for warfare. But the government wants Japan to be more assertive on the world stage, with a military able to take part in peacekeeping missions abroad.

Am I the only one who is a little concerned that these 'peacekeeping' missions may only be stepping stone to a more aggressive and militant Japan in the distant future? Just think of how many wars and other acts of hostility could be prevented if people would take action in the early stages of questionable new directions instead of waiting until it's far too late.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/6669061.stm

Looks like they already got to you, ay?!

This regularly happens to Virgin in Australia.

Passengers getting fucked by Virgin?

Is this some sort of "in Soviet Russia" joke?

That's nothing.

According to the BBC, there is now another virgin notifying "customers" who got infected.

If you had Israel as your near neighbours, wouldn't you want decent missiles too? Remember, this is the country that is herding Palestinians into ghettos and slaughtering them. The war criminal Ariel Sharon used to talk about a "final solution" for the Palestinian problem - chilling stuff, I'm sure you'll agree!

Oh, and look at the latest piece of crazyness from the Israeli terrorist wackos:

Jerusalem rabbis 'condemn dog to death by stoning'

So the mad rabbis are ordering children to stone a stray dog to death?

As well as simply moving people out of areas that might be impacted.

All 200 million of them? Although that seems to be a conservative estimate, other estimates go up to a billion of displaced people by 2050. But I guess there is nothing to worry about, those will mostly be poor people in Bangladesh or some island states, it is not like we care about those. Oh, no, wait, seems London, New York, Tokyo and others will also be out of luck.

And, of course, the fact that potentially 15%-40% of all species will die out with only a moderate amount of warming is just an added bonus. I mean, that is not going to affect us, right?

I want to point out how the police behaved in this riot. They stood their ground, but did not use an unnecessary force.

You haven't seen the video coverage on the BBC yet then? At 0:16 you can see what looks like a 2-3 officers holding down a person, while what looks like a female officer drops her elbow onto the persons spine 3 or 4 times.

While I can't tell the context of that encounter - I find it difficult to imagine a scenario where that level of violence was required on a suspect that was already being held down...? And while this is only one encounter - its still a unnecessary level of abuse directed towards a citizen by a person of authority.

In the United Kingdom, making a private copy of copyrighted media without the copyright owner's consent is illegal: this includes ripping music from a CD to a computer or digital music player.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/6457369.stm

Well, thats nice that you believe an outright liar

I believe he already said he didn't care about Gore. I have no idea about what Gore lied about (I'm really not familiar with the guy), but you do know that just because someone lies doesn't mean you should paint everything that says something similar with the same brush.

and call me names for your ignorance.

He called you a Coward. Capital C. As in Anonymous Coward. It wasn't an insult, it was your name.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8511670.stm

There, you want science, there is NO PROVABLE GLOBAL WARMING despite $20 million and manipulation of data to prove it.

From the linked article:

E - How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?
I'm 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 - there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.

I think this is a very plain English question and answer, which should be completely understandable to everyone. If this is the expert you want to use, he is saying in no uncertain terms that A) there is climate warming, and B) humans are likely the cause.

If you want to find an expert to support your claims, keep looking.

It was then that I realized that if I treated a dog the way they were treating my grandpa, keeping a dog alive when you knew for a damn fact he was going to die within a week, but that week would be full of horrid pain, you'd be up on charges of animal cruelty

This was one of the arguments mentioned in the show.

I've yet to see a link to it, so here it is for those in the UK that want to catch it on iPlayer:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0120dxp/Terry_Pratchett_Choosing_to_Die/

I don't advocate piracy, but there's also a torrent out there if UK viewers somehow are unable to watch on iPlayer: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/6470486/Terry_Pratchett_-_Choosing_to_Die

I found it quite upsetting. Haven't been quite right at work today after watching it on the commute to work :s

Short of locking him up, how is the state going to stop him from committing suicide? Everything you need for a quick painless death is available from your local well-stocked welding supply shop: a small tank of dry nitrogen, regulator, tubing, and breathing mask. Set it up so the mask is at a slight overpressure and you're in business: pass out after 30-60 seconds, heart stops beating with no chance of restarting after 10-12 minutes. Total cost probably less than £100.

There's a woman in the US distributing instructions and selling partial kits for doing much the same thing with a large plastic bag and a tank of helium from the party-supply store.

How effective is it? One of the reasons that Halon fire suppression systems were banned was that leaks resulted in odorless Halon pooling under raised floors, and techs working on the cabling passing out and suffocating when they stuck their head down into the pool. The Russian Navy still uses it in submarines; in 2008, 20 people died when the fire suppression system was accidentally activated (the article contains an error; the Russian Navy subsequently issued a clarification that the gas involved was Halon, not freon).

You make it sound like we're doing a smart thing, paying other nations to handle the nuclear hassle for us.

Not really, since we ended up having nuclear plants on our borders anyway (notice that trend going on in western Switzerland/southern France?)...

The Washington Post has an entire section about the drug war in Mexico - Mexico at War. As does the New York Times. The BBC has plenty of coverage as well. Perhaps you're just not looking hard enough, or you're more attached to your biases than facts?

Isn't this just a reprint of this article http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12718251 from 3 months ago?

Pretty ironic that one of the addresses mentioned above belongs to a Malaysian government official given their stance on porn.

Do they not realise that Apple own the letter 'i'?

They do? Someone had better tell the BBC the bad news...

Except for iPlayer.

And again, I repeat what I already posted:

People who openly say that the War on Drugs is a failure and will never ever work:

- Global Commission on Drug Policy,
- Kofi Annan,
- Ernesto Zedillo (former Mexican president),
- Fernando Henrique Cardoso (former Brasilian president),
- Cesar Gaviria (former Colombian president),
- Paul Volcker (former boss of the Federal Reserve),
- George Papandreou (current Greek prime minister),
- Sir Richard Branson,
- Javier Solana (former "foreign minister"-equivalent of the EU),
- George Schultz (US foreign minister),
- Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa (latin-American authors).

If you believe in authority (baaad idea), here's some: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13624303
And the report: http://www.globalcommissionondrugs.org/Report

What do you think it's doing in Afghanistan?? You think they're going to let a bunch of sheepherders strangle the family business?

Accidents at red lights are usually caused by carelessness, drunk driving, or some other obvious problem that no camera is going to fix.

Are you sure about that now?

A campaign to cut criminal behaviour on level crossings reveals that more than a quarter of offenders were women aged 50-65.

Those damn middle aged women just wont listen to reason!

e.g. will we start letting the excess die in a gutter? The question isn't, can we feed these people? It's: Will we? We don't need these people. There's no jobs for them. Should we just let them starve? Capitalism says yes, socialism says no. I don't know of a third answer (that doesn't boil down to one or the other in practical terms).

You asked a yes or no question, so it makes sense that yes and no are the only two options. The "socialism" question should be "how could we handle the problem"? We could improve economic stability in countries where warlords take what they want. It doesn't currently make sense to invest time and money in something that will probably just get stolen from you, so those countries have farmland but produce very few crops.

Or we could distribute condoms and tell the third world "no, this isn't an evil conspiracy to give you aids."

We can't solve the problem by throwing food at poor people, period. It cannot be done and will never work. But that doesn't mean we can't try. It, alone, cannot solve the problem, but it does not require us to oppose the catholic church, police the world, or start down a slippery slope of imperialism, so that's the plan we're going with.

Actually, think I've found the case number and state

CV-2008-4379-4 Arkansas
http://www.onpointnews.com/docs/nudephotos.pdf
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7744345.stm

As of yet, I can't find if there was a ruling or if it was dismissed / settled. No luck on courts.arkansas.gov, findlaw.com or justia.com.

India:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf53.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_policy_of_India

China:
http://world-nuclear.org/info/inf63.html
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-05/26/content_12580470.htm

China is starting to suffer brownouts due to policy to limit coal. China is using 50% of world coal production.

http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/
http://www.eia.gov/oiaf/ieo/world.html

I will disagree with EIA about coal in China. There is currently a new policy that says no more new coal power plants unless they replace old coal plants. New coal plants have to be more efficient too (eg. combined cycle, or coal gassification). China will also run out of its coal reserves within 30 years at current extraction rates.

China cannot grow coal because lack of the resource - they are become one of the largest importers of coal. This is expecting to cause brownouts this summer,

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/05/energy-shortages-spreading-rationing-in.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/30/us-china-power-price-idUSTRE74T1TG20110530

http://www.cnbc.com/id/43219200

I ask not to argue, but to have something to slap in the faces of all the treehuggers...

You can say I am a treehugger - a nuclear treehugger ;) I view fossil based energy sources as vastly more damaging than nuclear. I would prefer that fusion be available, but alas, you have to do with what you have. Renewables are OK but there is a problem when you have 8 billion people and each one wants to have their energy (transport, heat, air conditioning, food, etc).

Energy independence is paramount and if nuclear is the only option for base-load non-CO2 emitting energy source, then I have no choice but welcome nuclear.

Frankly, I don't know what the "green" crowd (anti-everything crowd these days - can't call them rational anymore) wants. In Germany now they are protesting that they don't want the power lines to move power from north to south because they look ugly.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13257804
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,757658,00.html

Unless the average citizen of Western states wants to either drastically reduce their power consumption or accept foreign energy hegemony over their economies, nuclear power is essential at least in the interim.

If Germany can pull it off, the interim could be very short -- nuclear replaced by sustainable energy by 2022.

They have already apologised for it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13693791

My bet is they planned to just turn it on and apologise later because it would still be more profitable than trying to get everyone to switch it on voluntarily. Also some great free publicity for their new feature.

Africa? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7086777.stm
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-02-22/china-s-investment-in-africa-to-increase-to-50-billion-by-2015-bank-says.html

Might be funny if Communist China's investment in Africa actually improves Africa more than all that Western aid.