Slashdot Mirror

Buggers Broadcasting Communism was the old Tory cry.

They are unquestionably racist, patronising various minorities via national policy intended to display the range of fashionable backgrounds rather than be nationally and regionally representative. Then you have whole channels dedicated to special needs: BBC 3 caters entirely for the idiot, and BBC 4 to the significant minority suffering from chronic bluffers' syndrome.

Chairmen remain rich white men. The BBC is a sad game to pat people on the head and make them feel more relevant than they really are. Which brings us to H2G2.

Buggers Broadcasting Communism was the old Tory cry.

They are unquestionably racist, patronising various minorities via national policy intended to display the range of fashionable backgrounds rather than be nationally and regionally representative. Then you have whole channels dedicated to special needs: BBC 3 caters entirely for the idiot, and BBC 4 to the significant minority suffering from chronic bluffers' syndrome.

Chairmen remain rich white men. The BBC is a sad game to pat people on the head and make them feel more relevant than they really are. Which brings us to H2G2.

The BBC World Service, for example, is funded by separate bureaucracy.

This is the current website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/

Well, no, but it raises an important point.

China is the world's worst polluter. Maybe we should be following the Great Khan's example?

(warning: the aforementioned is only slightly tongue-in-cheek; after all, China is home to some of the world's worst human rights abusers, a regime which runs on slave labor, zero environmental protection, and outright theft of IP from anyone stupid enough to do business with them).

The great swings in temperature and the harsh radiation found in space require the phone be placed inside the satellite casing to give it some protection. A hole will have to be cut in the side of the casing therefore to allow the phone's camera lens to see out.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12253228

There are alternative sources if one looks. Some material may be objectionable, viewer discretion is advised.

Besides the U.S. commercial and cable broadcasters, there is news service on PBS stations with some streaming and podcasts available from http://www.pbs.org./ Many PBS and other public stations also carry the BBC which has much available on the web too.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/

A great many international newscasts are carried by the non-profit public satellite broadcaster MHz on their WorldView channel. (They have a number of other international channels also)

This guide is easier to browse than the one on their website:
http://proweb.myersinfosys.com/day.php?timezone=0&station=world&channel=MHz+Worldview&airdate=

They have free news and paid programs on-demand streamed through ROKU
mhznetworks.org/roku

Many of the news sources they carry have websites with some content available, here are some:

http://www.dw-world.de/ (Deutsche Welle from Germany)
http://www.euronews.net/
http://www.france24.com/en/
http://www.rt.com/ (Russia Today)
http://www.aljazeera.net/english
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=AlJazeeraEnglish#g/u
http://www.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/ (NHK Newsline)
http://www.youtube.com/taiwanmactv

Not sure where a country is? Here's a good but simple map.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/CIA_WorldFactBook-Political_world.svg

More info and a list of stations carrying WorldView:
http://www.mhznetworks.org/mhzworldview/

Sometimes a station has them on a secondary digital channel (Like KCET 28.4 Los Angeles) that isn't on cable. Ask your cable operator to add it if they're not carrying the feed.

You mean, they are no longer using tanks to roll down protests at the Tianman Square?

Never did. That is a myth. Protesters were killed the old-fashioned way, just like in Ohio.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8057762.stm

Disclaimer; I work for an online retailer.
 
 

So who loses here? Nobody. Victimless crime.

This is *exactly* the attitude that lets so much of this crime continue. Actually, I'll cut customers some slack, because most of them think that the "big bad" credit cards' issuing banks eat the cost, when as you say, the retailers actually do. (In fact, I'd guess that the banks are quite happy for that false impression to continue).

But anyway, I don't count people being falsely branded as paedophiles, losing their jobs and being ostracised by their families as "victimless".

That aside, do you honestly think the cost of this doesn't come out in the wash as increased prices for everyone? That "insurance" you describe that retailers should have- do you think it's paid for with magical pixie pennies?

Yes, they should probably have insurance to cover payment fraud and theft in general anyway- but you can be sure it's going to cost *significantly* more than if the police and credit card companies both remotely cared about preventing such fraud.

The credit card companies do *not* give a toss about fraud. We can cancel obviously fraudulent transactions, but we can't notify the customer directly that their card is being misused (we don't have access to their contact details, which probably makes sense, except that the CC company won't "pass on" or do anything about this anyway).

The police here in the UK will do nothing to investigate blatantly fraud in such cases, even when we have a concrete address, etc.
 
This isn't a case of accepting that there will always be problems with fraud- this is the fact that even when they *know* about such crimes and have a chance to stop them, both the police and the CC companies wash their hands of it and let it continue.

You've actually never seen laser beams at night?

Video of a laser pointer hitting a cockpit.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7990013.stm

It makes a huge spot of bright light on the windshield.

As an art specialist, you know about stuff like parallax. When you move from side to side, object appear to move. The further away an object is, the less it appears to move. By comparing pictures of a star taken six months apart (when the Earth has moved to the opposite side of the Sun), astronomers and astrometric scientists, measure how far a star has moved relative to the background stars, and can determine how distant the star is.

Another thing you are probably aware of is the inverse square law. A light source, like a candle, appears dimmer the farther away it is. Astronomers use a particular class of stars called Cepheid variables as candles. Cepheid variable stars grow brighter and dimmer with a regular rhythmic pulses. Their overall brightness is directly related to the frequency of their pulses. So when an astronomer sees a Cepheid variable, she can determine the pulse rate and compute the absolute brightness of the star. She can then use the inverse square law to figure out how far away it would have to be to match the observed brightness.

So, by using those two techniques (and a bunch of other ones), astronomers can build a pretty good model of stellar distances.

The question of how fast the Earth is moving through space is based on an assumption which has been proven false. There is no such thing as absolute motion. Every part of the sky is red-shifted. Every part of the sky is moving away from the Earth. Having said that, the speed of the Earth relative to the local group of galaxies is about 250km/s. Relativistic effects don't really start to be significant (1 percent variation from Newtonian motion) until around 30,000 km/s, so the dilation effects due to the Earth's motion are insignificant.

See here for some recent case where a 19 year old was sent to jail for 16 weeks for not disclosing his password to the police.

So, the US has just to copy some lines from the UKs "Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000" and police will be fine.
First, you'll be temporary withheld for whatever reason, then you'll be arrested for not disclosing your password.

I'm glad you asked. I was going to send all their kit to Nigeria. I'm sure that data will be safe there.

How is being locked in to a proprietary format supposed to stop things like wikileaks? Or do they think that wikileaks won't be able to buy or pirate msoffice in order to read the leaked documents?

Yeah, and why buy MS Office when data forensic tools can get much more information out of Office documents than Office itself? Not the first time this has bitten people in the butt.

It's either £9 for one month, or £6 per month for 3 months - did you mean lock in for them, or lock in for me? If me, you're quite right - my £8/month deal is on a 2 year contract. My point was that £9 per month (or even £6 per month with 3 month lock-in) is not obviously subsidised. Certainly not in the order of "subsidised ski holidays", and a damn site more useful in terms of tacking "the digital divide". The BBC suggest that Race Online 2012 has "negotiated" this deal, not that uk.gov has subsidised it, and that seems credible to me.

Well very begrudgingly, he said they knew about the efforts of PC enthusiasts and didn't mind. UK users can see the short interview for Click at the CES here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006m9ry

It simply was in the news, after OECD reports. Very quick Google search (I'm sure you can easily find more; and Wiki article "Social mobility" doesn't look bad either) gives:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8162616.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/10/oecd-uk-worst-social-mobility

(now we can start guessing the reasons why it apparently(?) went unnoticed in the US)

Surely you don't look at 9/11 as an isolated event? (Iran, for one, being part of the general background too)

I didn't claim they were the only group to get backing. But at the least - reports of...inconsistencies (considering them, it is pretty damn close to backing primarily this one group) were ignored.

But regarding more directly "...is responsible for ...everyone that died in Afghanistan and Pakistan in military actions since 9-10-01" and "I didn't say anything about pre 9-10-01" - of course you did. Surely you must realize how the course of action was set before that date? That perhaps (regarding further link) the date was mostly set & some forces in place?

GWoC is 8850km, 4/5k estimates were based off a number that is meant to be translated to mean infinity but was incorrectly translated to mean something else.

This is what I never understood, china was able to do it so long ago with stone yet we can't do it with electric wire.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9359000/9359075.stm

Across northwestern North America, every example of a common peat moss called Sphagnum subnitens is genetically identical...

That means every specimen can be traced back to a single parent, which likely conquered North America in less than 300 years... ...the same is not true in Europe, where a wide variety of S. subnitens mosses live.

"All of the plants of S. subnitens in northwestern North America appear to have descended from just one parent," ...

"100% of the gene pool was contributed by one individual."

Genetically identical plants of S. subnitens range from coastal Oregon to the western Aleutian Islands, a distance of some 4115km.

                                http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9359000/9359075.stm

DOUGLAS

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9359000/9359075.stm

Across northwestern North America, every example of a common peat moss called Sphagnum subnitens is genetically identical...

That means every specimen can be traced back to a single parent, which likely conquered North America in less than 300 years... ...the same is not true in Europe, where a wide variety of S. subnitens mosses live.

"All of the plants of S. subnitens in northwestern North America appear to have descended from just one parent," ...

"100% of the gene pool was contributed by one individual."

Genetically identical plants of S. subnitens range from coastal Oregon to the western Aleutian Islands, a distance of some 4115km.

                                http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9359000/9359075.stm

DOUGLAS

BBC article on the pre-published article

Overall where I find this summary and blog post irritating is that the study presented very little evidence that e-readers were sub-standard to printed books (the fonts are intentionally quite similar), except an anecdote from a 'Neuroscience blogger'. As noted higher in the thread, the e-reader theoretical ability to support a harder-to-read font (my kindle only accepts three very clear standard fonts currently, but that's software) should, in the long run, make them better.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-11573666 via http://lifehacker.com/5672301/hard-to-read-fonts-can-make-text-easier-to-remember via http://lifehacker.com/5733692/harder-to-read-fonts-may-improve-learning via http://idle.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1950904&cid=34880154

It's probably because of this:

BBC News, however, reports that US government officials have intervened, and Kernell has begun serving time at federal correctional institute in Ashland, Kentucky.

When most people think of an ideal criminal justice system, they think of judges and juries, not government officials. This system does not seem to be a well-oiled machine:

The BOP is not bound by judicial recommendations, one legal expert said federal sentencing was often "arbitrary". "The judge can give either incarceration or probation, but if it's incarceration the state gives power to the Bureau of Prisons to determine the nature of incarceration," said Professor Robert Weisberg, director of the criminal justice center at Stanford University in California. "There is not a general or uniform US rule," he added. "There is huge local variation."

I was tempted to say that you are wrong, that unemployment is a problem in general but not within CS, because I live a country with one of the crappier economy of Western Europe (Spain), with circa 20% employment and neither me nor any of my classmates from around Europe had problems finding CS jobs. Then I searched for some data to back up my personal experience and found this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10477551 Moral of the story: less anecdote, more data

Your data seems to be for entry level developers, not experienced devs.

I was tempted to say that you are wrong, that unemployment is a problem in general but not within CS, because I live a country with one of the crappier economy of Western Europe (Spain), with circa 20% employment and neither me nor any of my classmates from around Europe had problems finding CS jobs.
Then I searched for some data to back up my personal experience and found this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10477551

Moral of the story: less anecdote, more data

but history is flooded with examples of rising temps, lower temps, higher CO2, lower CO2, and I don't quite see how what we are doing rises above being background noise, in the larger picture.

Except, of course, that it's not. In case you're too busy to click and read, it's an article that explains that CO2 levels are substantially higher now than any point in the last 800,000 years. Typically the largest increases were around 30 ppm/1000 years. In the 17 years prior to that article in 2006, CO2 had risen 30 ppm.

But by all means, let's continue to ignore these things and wait until we're absolutely certain before we go off and improve our planet and (if you're in the US) reduce our dependency on foreign oil and other such drastic, uncomfortable measures.

Not really.

Human civilizations only really started forming about 10,000 years ago.

Which is less than 1 iceage cycle.

And things weren't dramatically different over atleast the last 8 iceages.

We'd have to go back billions of years for that.

Since as is, we're already 1/3rd higher in CO2 than it's been in 8 iceage cycles.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5314592.stm

As I understand it, OtherOS had already been disabled in slim PS3s (though the firmware still contained the code), and that's what Geohot was attempting to reenable. Sony's reaction was to remove OtherOS from existing fat PS3s. I may be remembering it wrong, though. In other words, Sony decided to remove OtherOS from slim PS3 models (that is, they shipped without the option), despite the fact that the hardware can handle it without issues, a decision which certainly appears arbitrary. It looks to me like they no longer wanted to sell consoles with OtherOS enabled, and they took the first opportunity they could to disable it in the older PS3s as well (perhaps so they wouldn't have to maintain multiple sets of firmware). I would suggest that Geohot's difficult-to-execute hack was simply a convenient scapegoat for a decision Sony had already wanted to make (for whatever reason).

You are wrong - Hotz stated that he had begun working on hacking the PS3 in Summer of 2009 - search for "begun the hack last summer", before the Slims had been introduced.

Further, and most important, Hotz was NOT trying to re-enable the OtherOS. His hack used the THEN-EXISTING OtherOS feature - see here. That potential danger was what Sony was trying to stem when they finally removed OtherOS from the Fat models. Thus the OtherOS removal was a RESPONSE to Hotz's original hack which ABUSED the OtherOS feature to achieve it's ends.

All *fail0verflow* did was try to get the functionality back, and Sony named them in the motion as well, so we're sort of stuck defending both them and Geohot since Sony named them together. (I do agree that the relative size of each party has nothing to do with who is right and who is wrong.)

That may or may not be true - I'm a cynical guy, 36 years of life tends to do that to you :) . My personal opinion is that the OtherOS thing became a convenient excuse for fail0verflow. However, if that was the only thing that happened, then I don't think Sony would have reacted to this extent. What they did was make public the know-how to hack the PS3, something which could maybe pose a risk to Sony from professional pirates, but was still not easily actionable for most people. So that was not too outrageous. But then Geohot, possibly eager to stake some sort of claim for himself since his earlier exploit had been mostly neutralized and his thunder stolen by fail0verflow, used this discovery to find out the PS3 root key - something that would make piracy EXTREMELY CONVENIENT, not just for pirates, but even for slightly technical-minded individuals - and then performed the godawful act of posting this to the World Wide Web.

I think Sony are certainly right in trying to protect their investment and means of making money (I think any of us would, too, if we were placed in a similarly impossible situation. I don't think any of the people defending the hackers would be as understanding if it was their means of earning that was jeopardized by this action). One potential misstep Sony may have made is in suing fail0verflow, as in my opinion, all they announced was the know-how to give you the means to expend effort yourself and hack into the PS3, hardly lawsuit material imo. But what Geohot did was inescapably wrong. He is not a kid anymore, he knows the potentially destructive effects such an open hack can have on a business.

I highly doubt that removal of otherOS was the catalyst. That has just been the excuse for why it has taken so long. Truth in matter, it took blood in the water. Some sort of moderate success and boisterous claim to get the ball rolling. Its been that way for a long time. Case in point, people are trying to say that it is a myth that Sony are responding to geohot and AMOF it is geohot who responded after otherOS was removed. The truth is, he started this before otherOS was removed and before the PS3 slim was even announced. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8478764.stm Monday, 25 January 2010 "'Open curiosity' Mr Hotz said that he had begun the hack last summer when he had spent three weeks analysing the hardware. After a long break, he spent a further two weeks cracking the console, which he described as a "very secure system". " He basically outed when he started work on this in a BBC interview. So all this stuff about otherOS being the cause is a case of people trying to rewrite history to justify their actions.

NewsCorp bought MySpace for $580 million five years ago. Good going Murdoch. I hope the rest of your investments do as well.

The prohibition on extraditing if the death penalty is not taken off the table is a European thing, but it isn't an EU thing. It's a result of the European Convention on Human Rights, which encompases more countries (like Switzerland) and is substantially older than the EU. The only thing the EU has to do with it, is that the EU is, as of fairly recently, as bound to it as the signatory nations.

Interestingly, there is some evidence that the convention may start being used to argue against extradition due to the combination of the length of sentences typically handed out and the poor conditions in US prisons.

This kind of exists in the form of Consumer magazines and TV shows such as Which and Watchdog. The problem is shareholders don't really care about consumers, they care about profits and you would have to do something that would really fuck off a lot of consumers before it affected profits. Irritating a small number of people will not (which is what T-Mobile have done here).

This BBC video link shows how fast the flooding is - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12161502

The "original" is perhaps on the ABC website

More disturbing is the amount of water that went through the town of Grantham

This BBC video link shows how fast the flooding is - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12161502

Sounds like they have a bunch of people using the spiffy new Win 7 data eater!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12152517

This is dumb, dumb, dumb.

There is only one reason this is described as a "one-way" mission; Mankind's incredibly stupid reliance on chemical rockets. Chemical rockets *will not* allow us to explore any of outer space in a meaningful way, with the possible (and expensive) exception of near earth orbit.

We already have the technology to jet where-ever we want around the solar system. Project Orion.

There was a BBC show on it.

The short story: It was a design to use small nuclear explosives to push up against an abalative impact plate with shock absorbs. One pulse every 120 seconds. Significant levels of acceleration, and a mass to energy ratio that would make any rocket scientist blush. We could *easily* send a million ton spacecraft to Mars, with more than sufficient fuel to return several massive (10s of thousands of tons) spacecraft back to earth.

We could do round trips every 6 months without blinking an eye, with the added side effect of using much of the world's weapons grade nuclear fuel. Enhancements to the design switched from Fission to Fusion; at which point Orion spacecraft would be able to start to move around interstellar space. Early designs using current materials could achieve 0.05-0.1c . Designs using future materials (or possible relying upon non-solid ablative surfaces (this includes a plate that is sprayed with an oil solution before each blast)) could theoretically achieve .8c . This would make round-trips to Alpha Centauri possible.

How do you get around the nuclear radiation issues? Simple. First, there's no serious issue with radiation in space; build it in orbit, and there's not much to worry about. Second, the fallout/radiation from direct planetary launches would be dwarfed by weapons tests that occurred in the past, and probably by fossil fuel plant emissions, as well. The total fallout released from a planetary launch of a 6,000 ton vehicle would be equal to a 10-megaton nuclear blast (roughly one worldwide instance of cancer per launch), even using thermonuclear blasts. Further refinements to the technology could significantly reduce that; and mankind has pursued far less interesting pursuits that have caused a great deal more fallout (and heighted rates of cancer) than a real, "nuclear" space program.

In an ideal world, we'd build a few *huge* orion stations, and launch them into orbit. I'm talk multi-million ton hulks. The fallout from these launches would be significant, but would still be smaller in magnitude than the fallout from the various nuclear weapons tests that occurred during the cold war. These stations would contain the industrial complex needed to build additional ships, and smaller vessels capable of mining the needed materials from the moon. Hopefully, there are sufficient levels of fissionable and fusible materials on the moon. At that point, man kind could return to using chemical rockets as ferries to get into space; to deliver small cargos and personnel to the constructions stations.

How would you pay for this venture? That begs the question: Whats the best way to profit of a massive nuclear pulse drive in space? To move asteroids! Mining of the asteroid belt would be a serious proposition, and the low gravity (and lack of atmosphere) makes the usage of our Orion drives even more palpable. It would be necessary to figure out a cheap way to return these metals to earth; however, initial studies have suggested that even very small asteroids (1 mile diameter) can contain tens of trillions of dollars of metals.

The loss rate would be terrific, but one could imagine breaking asteroids into 500 m chunks, surrounding them with layers of ceramic heat shield, and them aiming them for the middle of the ocean, Siberia, or other wasteland type area. I have a feeling we can devise a more elegant solution over time.

This could happen in our life

While I think Islam is a vile practice too sick to be called a religion, especially with their treatment of women and children, to be fair from what I've read that particular "tradition" is only among the Pashtun tribes and the others look down upon them for their sick shit. But the Pashtuns have been very powerful in their territory and as in all things with power comes the ability to do whatever the hell you want and get away with it.

And frankly with all the reports of Blackwater (or whatever bullshit name they call themselves this week) trying to recreate "Full Metal Jacket" all over the middle east while we pay them big bucks to do so honestly we've lost so much of the moral high ground we don't really have much room to talk on the subject of evil shit. A parable about pointing out splinters while there is a log in your eye comes to mind. But blaming the Muslims for what the Pashtuns do would be like blaming Christianity for what those Mormon polygamists do. If you read the article one of the above posters linked to you'll see they went to the local Mullah who said flat footed it is child abuse and that it is happening because there simply isn't ANY law there.

But Twitter, I do not get why they sought out twitter. I mean, in terms of information, I can't imagine criminalizing 'tweets' have been sent. Facebook maybe, but not twitter.

"A man who posted a Twitter message threatening to blow up an airport is facing a £3,000 bill after losing an appeal against his conviction."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-11736785

A boy (8-15-ish) who dances erotically for a group of men, and is then used as a prostitute.

There was a good documentary on Channel 4 (UK) about it, and there's a decent article here.

I think they're different. The World doesn't care as much about some British chief executive.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qj9z
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p002vsn9

The Radio 4 programme is much longer.

I think they're different. The World doesn't care as much about some British chief executive.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qj9z
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p002vsn9

The Radio 4 programme is much longer.

Tacitly outsource pirate eradication to countries that can just kill them and don't have to follow rules.

If you'd been following the Somali pirate problem for a while, you'd know that several countries have armed naval vessels in the area. Oddly, it turns out that when a large armed ship turns up, everyone's just "fishing". Well except for some real Darwin award candidates ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11825293 ) who attacked a ship.

Also, no, you can't just wander around the seas with a heavily armed ship and be fine. A lot of countries will arrest you if you enter their waters (we can start with the UK, I'm not going to do an exhaustive search of gun laws right now).

Not all drugs are created equal. I would place marijuana somewhere between Tobacco and Alcohol -- Both of which are already legal.

You are right, not all drugs are created equal: in fact, cannabis is much less dangerous than either alcohol or tobacco.
Alcohol 'more harmful than heroin' says Prof David Nutt

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8285406.stm
"to take the British Hawk fighter jets rather than a much cheaper Italian alternative."
Why buy a system thats requested when everybody wins with another contact?

And there is a significant opposition to excessive security measures, not least in courts: http://www.google.com/search?q=lawsuits+against+tsa In any case, intrusive security is only the most obvious example of government overreach. In most European countries, taxpayers have delegated the responsibility to the government for everything from healthcare, and education to all encompassing cradle to grave nanny state to even silly things like art. Many of the most important things in an average European's life are decided not by him individually, but by the collective. This includes his life too: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/251988.stm If your life costs the taxpayer more than £44K per year or whatever the amount is today as decided by NICE you are left to die for the good of the collective.

I find it a creepy coincidence, I read this earlier today:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12136274

I was thinking about a similar rise of the religious right in the US and the parallels between the tea party and the rather agressive right wing islamists in Pakistan. I was thinking about the fact that although they're both each others arch enemy, their movements in politics, their rhetoric and so forth are actually quite similar, they both have a strong will to see religious values enshrined in law and are agressive about pushing this viewpoint. I thought to myself, well, at least it's not as bad in the US, even if it's politically similar, at least in the US elected officials aren't getting shot by the opposition.

So for this to happen, just a few hours later, wow, just wow. If this really was an action by a member of the US religious right and/or a tea party member, then I guess the parallels between Pakistans islamic right, and America's christian right are even greater than I thought was the case.

If this is the case, then it's pretty fucking disturbing. If it is the case then I can only hope it's a turning point for the US and the moderates in America turn round hammer the extremists on both side of the fence into the ground and say enough is enough and stop even entertaining their rhetoric.

I hadn't even heard about the stuff regarding Palin putting crosshairs over opponents, if this guy who did the shooting is linked to the tea party, then Palin's comments about Assange having blood on his hands now look horrendously hypocritical.

Japanese farm cetaceans.

Citation please.

Seriously : I've heard a lot of things claimed about what the Japanese do to cetaceans, but I've not hear that claim before.

I know - google it. So I did. There was reporting of a proposal to do that in 2002. Since then ... nothing I've found. The (alleged) site doesn't mention it either.

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a kite that someone once flew?

Is that inherently wrong?

Probably no more inherently wrong than farming any other self-aware organism is. And I'm looking at you, Dean Swift, you little NOT-hypocrite, you!

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2010/01/state_dept_launching_democracy.html
..the State Department says, it's launching a Twitter contest to "tweet what you think democracy is in 140 characters or less." The person who gets the most "unique re-tweets" will receive a Flip Video HD Camcorder."
"Evan Williams [co-founder of Twitter] says Twitter fundamental to government"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8563109.stm
"open exchange of information will prevail in most regions, but we don't have any specific plans in China or other areas where we're blocked"
All sounded so cool when it was aimed at ....
Welcome back to reality. Enjoy the gems from WikiLeaks, note whats missing and welcome to the honeypot.