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Forgive me if I'm a little cynical about the police. Here where I live, the police decided to go out and bust some street racers. They got to the K-Mart where the street racers usually hang out, and were quite disappointed when they couldn't find any.

So they Arrested everyone at K-Mart. And when that wasn't enough to get their jollies, they arrested everyone eating at the Sonic next door.

So "boo hoo" these people were arrested and released, right? Now, every job they apply to, they will have to tell their employer-to-be they were arrested. Certainly doesn't look good at all when you're applying for a bonded position or one requiring a security clearance.

Of course, justice here just isn't what it's cracked up to be. We have a DA who is gung-ho about DNA evidence, but when it proves someone was wrongly convicted, he sits around screaming LALALALA at the top of his lungs with his fingers in his ears. Of course, we can't talk about DNA evidence without mentioning that Houston has one of the most corrupt crime labs in recent history, with a number of convictions based on testimony about tests that were never performed. Of course, we're not seeing any of the prosecutors getting to a perjury trial.

Appears Congresscritters are feeling the "heat"

According to the very active Biodiesel forum at TDIClub.com, this study isn't worth the electrons you're viewing it with. One poster notes, "This Cornell fellow brings this up about once a year. Do a search on this site and see the FUD."

I run Biodiesel in my New Beetle TDI engine when I can, so I'm biased, but I agree with my fellow TDI'ers. When the study says "It takes 27 percent more energy to turn soybeans into biodiesel fuel," there's no comparison being made against the alternative. How much energy does it take to pump crude oil out of the ground? How much energy is burned loading it onto a tanker, and then refining it into useful products?

How much energy will be used to clean up the hazardous chemicals required to turn prehistoric ferns into internal combustion fuel? How many gallons of gasoline were burned in the funeral procession for the 15 workers killed near Houston when a tank of benzene exploded this year? By comparison, you can make Biodiesel in a converted water heater, with lye and methanol (hazardous chemicals, but available at any hardware store).

And I won't even touch the issue of how many soldiers must die to ensure the continued flow of addictive foreign petroleum...

It's amazing how much misguidedness there is in such a short post.

"I guess Power Computing folded": Actually, Apple bought Power Computing, and their tech docs are still in Apple's Knowledge Base.

"McMac thing was just one way they stifled the competition.": Stifling the competition is when you're Microsoft and you say "if you sell hardware with other operating systems, we won't let you sell ours" or "We're not going to produce Office for Mac if you don't bundle IE on every Mac." That is, exercising market strength to control the actions of independent competitors. What Apple did may have been uncool to Power, UMax, and MOT and their customers, but ultimately that's the chance they took when they tied their business to licensing something from a single source, especially a "beleaguered" one with a known history of proprietary behavior. It's Apple's prerogative, as it is any company's, to license or not license its technologies as it sees fit, when it chooses to, so long as they don't violate whatever licensing agreement was in place.

Know why Macs could read PC disks but not vice versa? Easy. Apple's HFS filesystem was copyrighted: Give me a break. The copyright is irrelevant. PC's have always been able to read 1.4 MB (and larger) Mac disks with third party software. Windows doesn't build in the ability for the same reason they don't bundle an AppleWorks file importer for Word on Windows. They're the big fish, Apple's the small fish, and the small fish has to cater to the needs of the big fish, not the other way around. And 400K and 800K Mac disks couldn't be read by Windows PC's because Apple used more expensive variable-speed floppy drives and GCR encoding on the disks, making 800K Mac disks physically unreadable by PC drives. By doing that, they squeezed more out of each disk -- remember that PC disks were 720K. They later switched to single-speed and MFM encoding for 1.4 MB disks, same as in the PC world, which is why those disks can be read.

This isn't to say that Apple hasn't been jerks to their customers, distributors, competitors and developers, but your particular examples don't hold water and make you sound pissy rather than well-reasoned.

I originally posted from memory and didn't take the time to do an on-line search. While there may have been an issue with that (which I've never heard of), the infamous Hubble mirror problem was that Perkin-Elmer built the mirror wrong due to a flawed instrument, and ignored the other instruments that were telling them it wasn't the right shape. Some details on the measuring error you mention are given here and a mention of a misplaced measuring rod cap is discussed here.

No NASA fixed that problem by altering the lense of the hubble. It was very similar to a big RK.

I dunno, but this will probably make his head explode.

Mexico? Isn't that a tad to far over towards the "complete anarchy" side of the problem? On this side of the border you'll get your door kicked in one day for downloading an mp3 which I understand is not so good but on that side of the border the police chief lasts all of one day. I'm in Texas too and I'm staying put.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/321 7908

Uh, no. The bans on lewd cheerleading and gay foster parents failed to pass. The linked page provides a quick list of some of the things that passed and didn't in the last Texas legislative session. Some of the items are pretty funny. Or pretty sad, depending on your POV.

A quick note to everyone from outside Texas - We have a part time legislature. It meets for 140 days every two years. The standard joke in the state is that we'd be a hell of a lot better off if they met for 2 days every 140 years.

Not too shabby. But Mikey Dell's little ranch cost more.

Odd part is, he pay less in property taxes than me.
(Average tech worker with average house in same area)

If you think Congress is going to divert a couple trillion dollars for something like this, you're insane.

No, I think you fail to understand the insanity of the neocons in power. They continually threaten comedians and talk show hosts for discussing things like "sending our army into iraq without armor was like sending animals to slaughter". The truth scares the shit out of them, because they have long since abandoned any pretense of honesty.

You can believe that the neocons are jizzing their pants over this tech, thinking about how they can use this to put away those annoying liberals for good instead of just making weak threats of "treason" for telling the truth about the vast waste of money their campaign has been. How many billions of dollars were spent on the war before they got around to "gee maybe we should armor our vehicles so fewer soldiers die every day"? Of course, these are also the people who attack those who want the soldiers to come home now while they're still alive as "anti-american" and "anti-soldiers", because "pro-americans" would support the death of every last soldier out there 100%

And do you know what? The system doesn't HAVE to work. All they have to do is convince 12 people that the system is perfect and cannot fail, and you can arrest whoever you damn well please, with faked evidence nobody would dispute.

The sad thing is that it's already happening. this is just the abuse of the system in the state of Texas. Thousands of cases potentially based on lies, dressed up as "indisputable" DNA evidence.

There was that kid, but if you want to go fusion, you might look at these people.

I thought gamma ray bursts and the resulting creation of a black hole were the result of Hyper-Novas not from the merger of two neutron stars.

Here is another one with the same pictures:
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/31 69765

IBM is not alone. The US oil industry is still cutting jobs , even though profits have been at record highs along with gasoline prices. The oil industry has been continuing a 25-year job-reduction trend mainly caused by compuer-aided productivity and the migration of oil prodution outside the US. A rational person might think that companies & investors would get even more profit if they employed more people to obtain more oil.

To be fair, I should point out that the 'safe sex' policies lauded by prior administrations weren't exactly effective either. Better to try something new that doesn't work than stick with the same old that hasn't been working for decades.

Actually, that's incorrect. Since there has been a greater focus on abstinence over safer sex, HIV rates have stayed the same http://www2.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-12/ 02/content_396638.htm and abortion rates are up http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial /outlook/2851283 which generally means more unwanted pregnancies. Not an effective policy at all, and seemingly worse than the one under Clinton.

Disclaimer: I realize that the op-ed I cited pins the abortion increase on economic policy, but that's an opinion and I think it's fair to say that the majority of abortions are due to an unwanted pregnancy, even if for economic reasons.

This is what we Americans think of our snow-niggers to the north.

If you socialist fucktards don't wisen up your IP laws, we'll have to send over a couple of our grand-ma's to kick your military's ass.

You realize of course that the woman who CLAIMED to find that finger is now facing fraud charges right?
here
or here
or here even
another one

In other words.. she's a known con artist, and now she's paying the price for being clumsy.

• Search Engine Low Down - Google Tests Cost-Per-Impression Pricing and Targeting for AdWords
• San Jose Mercury News - Google changing the way ads are created, priced
• Silicon.com, UK - Google steps into banner ad world
• Houston Chronicle - Google testing systems that place ads on specific Web sites

Unfortunately, I don't see anything about this on Google's press release page yet.

--
Conversions of Currency Rates of Exchange

Earth's geologic history is pretty clear: It says, quite frankly, that single-planet species don't last. Right now we're a single-planet species. We need to fix that.

John Young
Astronaut
Houston Chronicle
2004-12-17

The IRS is now outsourcing tax debt collection to regular collection corporations. Last time they piloted this program, it lost the government money. Imagine how much more this will lose, when some of our most confidential info gets "lost" into the blackhatsphere.

To get attention. There's no way the broadband industry will permit this. Check the massive campaign they've done (via Republican legislators) in Philadelphia and Houston to prevent municipal WiFi there.

MIT's Multimedia lab led by Negroponte is working on a $100 laptop project for poor people that seems to have a fair amount of financial backing. More here

Here is a sample of the close to 200 links posted on Complete April Fools Day Reference

kylewenda.com - the government records your phone calls... scary
google.com - Google releases Google Gulp
theregister.co.uk - Bush twins to join Air Force tech unit in Iraq
spacedaily.com - Bush Cancels Space Shuttle Program
chron.com - Bush Twins in Maxim
slashdot.org - Say 'Cheese' to Google Satellite at 10AM
habitablezone.com - Terrible News: The UN has voted to close down the Internet!
ebay.com - Google Gulp Invite
sswug.org - Run MSSQL on your xbox and linux
worldofwarcraft.com - Panda Express joke making fun of EQ and its /pizza
techtree.com - Apple hires DVD Jon

Isn't April Fools Day just the best? =] For a 'full' list of sites pulling pranks today check out this list here

Here is a sample:

kellyosbourne.org - Sanctuary records group shut us down
nukefreezone.net - Making fun of atrios.blogspot.com
weebl.jolt.co.uk - Replaced with Cats-By-Mail
telecom.co.nz - Click 2 Brick
ytmnd.com - (NSFW) hacked by teens for christ
wingus.ampedhost.com - Site converted into Mingus' Gently-Used Furniture store. Oh dear. Why won't he be kind?
homestarrunner.com - Now a pay service.
whirlpool.net.au - Australia's biggest Luddite to head Australia's largest telco
thinkgeek.com - Fake product listings.
theregister.co.uk - Bush twins to join Air Force tech unit in Iraq
creativebits.org - Site purchased by Microsoft
ocremix.org - Now partnered with EA (or something like that). Called EA ReMix.
spacedaily.com - Bush Cancels Space Shuttle Program
planet.gnome.org - Switched sites with planet.kde.org
planet.kde.org - Switched sites with planet.gnome.org
ietf.org - RFC: Efficient Transformation Formats of Unicode
beejaysworld.de - Gentoo dropping livecds for x86
nature.com - Apollo bacteria spur lunar erosion
antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov - Water On Mars
smh.com.au - (Free Reg Req) SMEGmail offers 1 terabyte storage
smh.com.au - (Free Reg Req) Linux looks to Hilton for exposure
thetoque.com - Canada Builds Own Missile Defense Shield
onion.com - U.S. Dog Owners Fear Arrival of Africanized Fleas
chron.com - Bush Twins in Maxim
ask.com - Jeeves has been replaced by a robot
animenewsnetwork.com - Viz Unlicenses Naruto
uninventthewheel.co.uk - New BMW technology to get around the EU ban on right hand drive cars in Europe.
newgrounds.com - changing to numagrounds.com
neopets.com - neopets adds 50 new pets
www.firstloox.org - The Loox is being recalled
packages.gentoo.org - Adobe doesn't sell products for Linux
pc.ign.com - Microsoft World of Wordcraft (Extremely Obvious)
spamusement.com - Page full of spoof banner ads
gentooexperimental.org - Gentoo using the NT kernel
moddb.com

I'm just happy Houston isn't the only place with problems like that.

Maybe with enough of this going on, people will realize that DNA testing isn't "proof".

Bush is doing what we elected him to do. Protect our second amendment rights and not spend our money on abortions.

So, what you're saying is that all those other amendments are way less important than the second amendment?

Besides, if you were really worried about abortions, you wouldn't be backing a president whose policies have increased the number of abortions. Sure, the man may talk the talk, but he doesn't walk the walk. Look at the real figures. He's worse on abortions than Clinton.

I think The Aerospace Corporation did an extensive study which NASA used. Here is a link. http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/space/293 6913 I think saying that the NASA did this without any evidence is pretty much like the press. My sensation has been that when it suits them to ignore evidence, they do, and when they have something juicy that sells they are more like Great White sharks. Cheers. mdw ;-)

Samuel Wright, Senior Vice President, Government Relations, Cendant Corporation, Washington, DC

Cendant has been a client of Claria (formerly Gator). At one time, Cendant was one of Claria's top twenty advertisers.

No free WiFi for you! is in the Houston Chronicle.

The best quote:
"Obviously, this needs to dropped into the folder marked 'Evil.'"

Do we even know what happens when a dirty bomb goes off? Yes, I know it's a normal explosive device laced with nuclear material, but what does that mean in terms of harmfulness?

It depends on the size of the bomb. Really, you have the bomb explosion that causes the damage and the exposure to radiation likely makes the place the bomb exploded uninhabitable or at least undesirable. An explosion like the one in oklahoma city could probably carry the material a few city blocks at least.

Some links:

Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,76873,00.html



BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2037769.stm

Overall, the number of casualties might not be that large but the psychological and economic impact could be huge.

If one if these went off in lower Manhattan, it could cost billions between lost business and people not wanting to go back to NYC.

I read the article before it was posted here on Slashdot, and the book Nuclear Terrorism. I have no doubt that terrorists could create a dirty bomb and if they had the resources and the time come up with a conventional nuclear weapon.

After all, if a teenage American boy could make a nuclear reactor in his backyard what makes you think terrorists can't make a nuclear weapon?

Oh, and do your own self-flogging. And not at work, mind you.

You mean like this guy?

(How embarassing that he has the same name as me. No relation, I assure you. The men from my gene pool are smart enough to spank their monkeys without getting caught!)

Private health care costs more. For example:

Illness and medical bills now cause roughly half of all bankruptcies in the United States, more than a 23-fold increase since 1981, according to a new study. The study, which estimated that medical bankruptcies affect 2.2 million Americans annually, also found most of those bankrupted by illness had health insurance or lost it only because of the illness. (Emphasis mine)

Who said he had to install anything? He could have used one of these with about 5 seconds of unmonitored physical access

Or you could read TFA

Unless you think they should hot-glue-gun the keyboard into the PS/2 port?

I see the White House covering for [Enron]

You do? Where?

prosecution nearly nonexistent

Come again?

the governor who opposed Enron ousted from office by the White House and replaced with an Enron supporter selected by the White House

Do you have proof that this replacement is related to Enron, or is this just causation without correlation?

Steal billions, go free, and you get to choose a new governor who's yer best bud.

Which of those that stole billions are "going free"? They are either already sentences, awaiting sentencing, or awaiting their trial. Trials take time, especially in humongously complex cases like this one.

The law is an ass. Little smurfs get destroyed for disobeying laws bought by rich men, and rich men steal billions without consequence.

I find it humorous that you are comparing US law, which is prosecuting the Enron hustlers you are referring to, with Norway's law, which is doing the "smurf destroying."

Fortunately we now have DNA testing to help ensure that this type of investigatorial mistake is not frequently repeated.

See also Houston's crime lab where DNA "testing" simply became another way for prosecutors to lie in court and go for convicting whoever they thought should take the fall rather than the real criminals.

So that is what happened to the Beagle lander! They finally found it.

My personal choice would be not to commit any crimes that might place me in such a situation.

I hope you don't live in Texas.

There, anyone, even you, could be a sex offender, and not even know it.

When the corruption of the system is so flagrant, I wonder if your personal choice holds any weight at all.

The article in another newspaper - no reg required.

a few more lucrative speaking engagements...

Tenet makes $35,000 a pop, or more than $500,000 since resigning a few months ago. Plus, book deal in the works!

I'm not sure what he did to deserve all this.

Currently, the bulk of the big spammers live and operate within the United States. They may host their Web sites in China, buy lists of open proxies from Romania, and commission viruses from Russian Mafia programmers -- but they live in the "comfort" of the U.S. whose laws they flout.

They do not want to move overseas. They want the comforts of home -- to make millions without leaving the couch. They are small-minded, hurtful, nasty little people. They want the world delivered to their door, and are willing to steal and destroy to get it -- but only if they can do that stealing and destroying from behind a screen. They are not brave. When they are challenged, they retreat into paranoia and lash out with lawsuits based on conspiracy theories. Can't do that from East Bumfuckistan.

It's not illegal to lose the shareholders money, just that they can be sued for ceertain mistakes that include criminal acts and cost the shareholder.
Here's URLs to stories on three of the biggest shareholder lawsuits of late. In every one, you'll see words like fraud and malfeesance, and specific allegations such as the management being sued 'failed to disclose information legally required by the SEC' (usually in quarters immediately prior to period covered by the suit), or sold off their own shares at the stock's peak, while hiding the fact from the board. That's what gets a company sued with even some chance of success, not doing something legal such as disclosing source code as part of involvement in an open source project.

http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/18941.html

http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/8340.html
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/special/e nron/2873746

It doesn't look as if he's stopped. "I'm trying to set up an infrastructure of empowerment and understanding power." (He speaks rap and PHB.)

>>>"Military draft stealing away the lives of an entire generation of young Americans (and then some)? YOUR FAULT."

>>Draft? Hate to tell you this, but the draft was the democrats idea, and now it's certainly not going to come to pass.

>Which time Sparky?? Draft is how you get people >to serve in a war nobody believes in. Perhaps >if you get your head out of your ass and look >at how many people are not re-enlisting and how >few are enlisting, you might get a clue about >how Bush will get people to serve for his ever >expanding war for oil/wealth/power watever.

It seems like that would be common sense and you certainly hear it enough to think it's true but it looks like it just isn't the case.

Military Numbers are rising
Military re-enlistment rates exceeding Pentagon goals
Are you going to be drafted?

No wonder the Grand Jury is taking so long to indict Delay - he's a master at obfuscating his slime trails. The _Houston Chronicle_ reported that Delay, after denying involvement in Texas Republican Craddick's Democrat manhunt (claiming he ignored Craddick's requests for help), admitted that he complied, getting the ID# of a Democrat's plane and at least supplying it to Craddick. That info was earlier confirmed by DHS as the info used to trick them into finding the plane, under the false impression that it was some kind of emergency rescue service. The Texas cops who actually made the call reportedly destroyed all records of the transactions prior to the conclusion of their investigation, contrary to law. And DHS itself claimed to be investigating these "shenanigans" as criminal abuse of the DHS chain of command. These charges are the subject of the subpoena with which I started this thread. And the subject of Delay's "admonishment" by Congress earlier this month.

BTW, the point was "moot" was because DHS refused to assist the illegal search beyond their initial location of the plane, once their operators discovered what was up. If it were civilians, rather than the Democratic wing of the Texas legislature, creatures like Delay would have no compunction against pushing DHS further, rather than just letting Texas cops make a call which could be denied. The reporter might think that mooted the search, but it certainly doesn't invalidate this abuse by Delay, or its model for further abuses if he continues to get away with it.

The denial comes from "leading pro-life expert on abortion statistics says the study is flawed": "Dr. Randy O'Bannon, director of education at the National Right to Life Committee" in "LifeNews.com", "News Source for the Pro-Life Community". The author is a professional Christian ethicist, statistician, and antiabortion himself. He used antiabortion statistics. His economic conclusions might be debatable, but only the antitruth, antiabortion propagandists are taking denials of the trend seriously.

An idiot. Kerry won't do any more to reduce abortion than Bush will.

Legality isn't the only way to attack abortion. It's proveable that Clinton had the lowest number of abortions per year in 24 years, and he was pro-choice.

His hypothetical "make it cost as much as having a baby" in his Health Care reform won't survive the first legal challenge. One thing you have to give the pro-abortion people credit for is understanding the "slippery slope" idea. They oppose EVERYTHING that affects the availability of abortion even the tiniest amount. Because they know that if we reach the point where abortion is illegal in any way, however slight, the line between illegal and legal will continue moving back the other way.

Not entirely true- NARAL has supported legislation that has helped women become mothers in the past, such as the WIC program, pregnancy coverage in Medicare, and so on. You see, that's the problem- the true pro-abortionists don't have much power, and most of the other side is merely pro-choice, and that includes choosing life. Anything that supports a woman's RIGHT TO CHOOSE they'll support- it's just a matter of using the correct terminology.

Fact is, abortion is going to continue exactly as is until a new Supreme Court rules that some form(s) of abortion are regulatable.

Read http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1998/roe.wade/deci sion/, even the original Roe V. Wade ruled that some form(s) of abortion are regulatable.

Note, by the way, that my duaghter required my written permission to get her ears pierced. An abortion she could have done without even letting me know she was missing school that day.

That IS regulation- it's a HIPPA issue. And actually, under that relatively new law, if she chooses to disallow you from visiting her in the hospital as a minor when she's undergoing heart surgery, that's her right. (I know- we used HIPPA to keep my father-in-law out of the birthing room during the birth of my son at my wife's request).

You're missing a point - Kerry doesn't CARE why you vote for him, as long as you vote for him. So, you have your own agenda? Who cares, so long as your vote is going to the Dems?

True enough- which is why I'll be running myself in 2008.

I'm not, however, trying to imply that this is unique to Kerry. It is typical of all political figures. If you don't win the election, it doesn't really matter. If you do, it doesn't really matter that people voted against your opponent rather than for you.

And that's why Kerry, too, will be a one-term president.

This is a big problem with all special interests to a greater or lesser extent. They tend to be "safe". That is, they tend to vote either Democrat or Republican almost exclusively. The environmentalists vote Dem, so both sides can safely ignore them. The pro-lifers vote Rep, so both sides can safely ignore them.

I'm a Catholic Pro-lifer voting for Kerry because I believe he'll do a better job of reducing abortion than Bush has done. What does that make me?

The only time this changes is when one of these blocs refuses to come to the polls, or votes third party. Which tends to cause the D/R that they dislike even more to win. So they don't make that mistake again for a while, and the Dems and Reps ignore them for another twenty years or so.

Also true- which is why my signature may yet be a lie. If EITHER Bush or Kerry is winning my winner-take-all state, Peroutka will be getting my vote instead.

Only way it will ever change is if such a bloc splinters, or starts offering their vote to either side, depending on who makes the best offer. Which happens about once a century....

I think it may yet happen with Bush, based on This factoid

What about all those DJs that mix different songs together and call it their own original creation? Would they be liable in the same way?

I guess you haven't been paying attention reciently! A federal judge in cincinnati ruled that sampling (which is what you are refering to) is illegal and violates copyright law First Link from Google News about the story

Unlike his brother Neil Bush