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I haven't heard of any municipality that puts it's own wired or wireless access up give it away for free. While it doesn't say how it's going to be paid for in this article the articles I've read that have said how the infrastructure is being paid for have said that either a private company or subscribers are the ones who pay. This is what Earthlink and Google are doing in San Francisco. The two companies are building a wireless network with thier own money. Now they are offering two plans, free access with slower speeds, advertizing pays for this, and a paid subscriber plan for faster speeds. I'd bet if the same thing were offered in Lafayette, La they'd take it, but it isn't.

The reason why the investors still cling to Sony is simple: they are still a profitable company when all divisions are added:

- Profit from fiscal second quarter 2005: $240 million
- Profit from fiscal second quarter 2006: $14 million

However, things could be more rosy:

- Without the battery recall, their profits would have been much higher ($429 million higher, to be precise)
- $366 million operating loss in its gaming division because of charges related to the preparation of the PS3 (somewhat acceptable if you're an investor)
- Reduced shipment target for the PSP to 9 million from 12 million for fiscal 2006
- Limited number of PS3 consoles upon release due to manufacturing problems and price drop for the Japanese version = less revenue
- Revised forecast for fiscal year through March 2007 to $673 million, down 38% from initial projection and down 35% from fiscal 2005

Source: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/fn/4288948. html (read the rest, it's not game-related but still very interesting)

Yes, but are you sure those are necessarily evil networks?

Your post reminded me of the ad-hoc "Free Public WiFi" that I've been seeing a lot of, and I've never gotten a connection through. A quick Google revealed that this seems to be a case of computers picking up that ad-hoc network from other computers and rebroadcasting that name for the next while. TechBlog: "Free Public WiFi"? Not!

And yes, I don't have a problem connecting to sketchy networks. Other people can always associate with the legitimate network I'm on and try attacks, and my firewall's decent. And if I'm worried about sniffing I'll launch a VPN.

You're up against crime labs who stand up under oath in court and lie through their teeth, and somehow, the prosecutors never get around to prosecuting them for perjury.

You're up against prosecutors who rely on things like the public's belief that DNA tests are 100% accurate and that only one person could possibly have "that DNA" when "that DNA" used to be actually just a match against the presence or absense of 16 or so genes... with only 65536 possible combinations (at 16 markers). While new tests can exactly match one DNA sample to another, DNA "fingerprints" as espoused by the government continue to focus only on a limited number of "markers" meaning that dozens, possibly hundreds of people in a large city will share the same "fingerprint".

You're up against district attourneys who think DNA testing is awesome, unless it's used to prove one of their convicts innocent. Clearly if two people raped the woman, and two people's DNA was retrieved, and the convicted person turned out to be neither of them, the woman must have forgotten the third rapist, rather than picked out the wrong person on a lineup.

As the other person said, "good luck with your absolute belief in the state", and may God help us all.

Ah, it was a misplaced cap. http://www.chron.com/content/interactive/space/mis sions/sts-103/hubble/archive/900928.html

I don't know about your story, but I do know that the focal length of the hubble miror was wrong, and they only detected it when it was actually in space, due to damage (lost chip of paint IIRC) to a mesuremant device.
http://www.chron.com/content/interactive/space/mis sions/sts-103/hubble/archive/900914.html : Search for "hubble glasses" reveals others.

Here's the secret about DNA tests: They don't identify you.

The original tests looked for a certain number of snippets of DNA that were considered "genes". Fewer than a dozen at first, but towards the end of this test's usage, they were up to about 16. With only 2^16 possibilities ("there or not there", 16 times), it matched you, probably your family members, and about 50 thousand other people, assuming that none of those snippets of DNA were actually the gene for having two arms or something like that, since they didn't really know how all that worked back then.

Now that they have a better idea of how genetics works, they match based on the distance between particular genes on a chromosome. Every time people mate, the chromosome swap doesn't always line up the exact same way leading to genes that move up or down, or so the theory goes. Nobody is actually sure how accurate this is, the only studies done have been by the companies selling the kit or by criminal justice researchers, but simple logic dictates that the gene can only move so far before it runs into another important part of the sequence (unless it moves too, and if all the genes move at once, then the distance between them hasn't changed at all!), meaning that there is some finite limit to the variations this can map.

The only true way to genetically identify someone would be a complete map of at least one chromosome, and preferrably more. The Y chromosome matches every generation in a lineage of men, likewise, the X in a male identifies his mother and brothers, so those are disqualified. Of course, a complete map is ridiculously expensive and time consuming, and in these days of money going to bridges to nowhere and websites to track the money that went to bridges to nowhere, justice has to be done on a discount.

So what does this mean? It means that when the government starts collecting DNA samples from anyone and everyone, they'll have a pool of positive matches from which to pick the easiest sucker to blame the crime on. Of course, the prosecuting attourney won't mention that there are other people who match that sample, when he presents the "evidence" to the jurors, and the expert witness they paid to lie (have you ever seen a prosecutor prosecute their own star witness for perjury? I haven't. They always seem to be just "wrong") will neglect to mention that there were other matches, but they were either politically inconvenient (lol republican lol) or just plain rich. They won't need to worry about motive, alibis, or anything else, because the prosecutor will convince the jury who has watched far too much Law and Order that the DNA test is perfect.

Or hell, they could just do what Houston does, and just lie through the teeth about the whole thing.

DNA match evidence is widely perceived as completely reliable by juries, public, judges, etc...and a less-reliable matching will erode that confidence.

Absolutely right! DNA tests are 100% accurate and foolproof. The prosecutors say so themselves. In fact, this new test is so easy, all you do is push a button, and the screen lights up "guilty".

OIC.

So the new video showing Bin Laden with the 9/11 pilots reading their wills on camera shows NO relationship between the head of Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda operatives?

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/world/42280 95.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-23829 19,00.html

RIGHT.
Let's hurry up and attack Iran then, so we can get their Oi.... I mean stop their nucular weapons program.

just listen to what the founder said about greenpeace's opposition to nukes in the 70. Such wonderful foresight has been a great boon to the environment.

Am I crazy, or maybe should daddy have told junior to get off that god damn video game system?

"We can keep your data forever, even when you say you want to delete it." Reference

I don't want my business documents held forever on a server anyone can access.

I hear just like any 35 year old vehicle they had to fool with the starter to even get the engine to fire http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14705397//, and once it was in orbit parts started falling off http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/nation/4201 025.html/.

I'd jump off a a baloon with a $1200 rocket strapped to my back before I'd go into orbit with that piece of junk.

by Robert Blumen

We are living in Brazil. The future as foretold by Terry Gilliam's 1985 rich and multi-layered film masterpiece Brazil is upon us. First released fifteen years ago, Terry Gilliam's Brazil was astonishingly accurate in forecasting political trends. In a previous essay, I examined the film as a critique of socialist central planning. In this piece, I will discuss how Brazil portends Bush's War on Terror.

The world of Brazil shows a totalitarian society in which freedom has been forfeited for a false promise of protection from terrorist attacks. Gilliam shows how the threat of terrorism is manipulated by the state as a means of political control over the population. The threat of terror is created by the internal security police in order to generate public acceptance of totalitarian police powers.

Gilliam's exposition raises some important questions: Is the terror created by the power of the state in the alleged pursuit of terrorism worse than the terrorism itself? And are they really any different?

The ministers of state in Brazil have succeeded in creating a society organized around a continuous response to the threat of terrorism. Random bombings occur regularly. The protagonist Sam and his mother must go through a security check in order to enter a restaurant. And then during their meal a large explosion blows out the back of the dining room; they continue eating while bodies are dragged away.

As in modern America, there is some doubt about whether Brazil's "War on Terrorism" is really working. At the opening of the film Minister Helpmann, the Deputy Minister of information (the internal security agency), appears on TV immediately after a bombing takes place:

• INTERVIEWER: Do you think that the government is winning the battle against terrorists?

  HELPMANN: Oh yes. Our morale is much higher than theirs, we're fielding all their strokes, running a lot of them out, and pretty consistently knocking them for six. I'd say they're nearly out of the game.

  INTERVIEWER: But the bombing campaign is now in its thirteenth year.

  HELPMANN: Beginner's luck.

Now in the US, we are told by the Bush administration that the war on terrorism will become a more or less permanent state of affairs.

• U.S. war may last decades
  Military pushed to think broadly
  By KAREN MASTERSON

  WASHINGTON - The U.S. war on terrorism may rage for decades and has forced Pentagon strategists to think more broadly than they've had to since World War II, a top military official said Sunday.

  "The fact that it could last several years, or many years, or maybe our lifetimes would not surprise me," Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Sunday on ABC's This Week.

The film has been reissued on DVD with commentary by the director in which he states that it was his intention to convey that there were so many government plants, double agents, agents provocateurs, moles, infiltrators, etc. that at some point even the government did not know for sure whether there were any real terrorists or whether all of the terror was fabricated by the police as part of their anti-terror campaign.

In a conversation between Sam and Ministry of Information office Jack Lint, Lint reveals how he - as a key member of the internal security department - understands the events that are taking place:

• SAM: You don't really think Tuttle and the g

You use a harddrive, don't you?

1) Write history to drive
2) Delete it afterwards
3) Fascist regime confiscates computer, uses magnetic analysis to determine what you had deleted
4) Fuck it, fascist regime decides its easier just to arrest you as a terrorist pedophile hippy communist pinko and just make stuff up at trial
5) ... wait, what were we arguing about?

And if you think America isn't where I'm talking about, consider Andrea Yates, who the prosecutor paid one Dr. Dietz $100,000 to essentially lie about what drove Yates to drown her children. His testimony? After examining Yates, his professional opinion was that Yates had watched a Law and Order episode about a woman drowning her children and decided to emulate that. Of course, the prosecutor just couldn't find it in the government's best interest to prosecute their star witness for perjury, so as punishment for lying at the first trial, Dr. Dietz was only paid $50,000 for the second trial. But the prosecutor did not act alone. The judge, upon discovering that Dr. Dietz's testimony was "incorrect" (again, the prosecutor just couldn't make the leap to call it a "lie") did not declare a mistrial. That had to be forced by an appeals court.

And if you think Andrea Yates is alone in facing a government that stopped at nothing to try and destroy her, you're sadly mistaken.

Plus, mars is warming with receding ice caps. Maybe solar effects are what is driving our change? http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/3362375 .html [chron.com]

Does it matter what the cause is? If the temperature goes up, a lot of people in Manhattan will be unable to live there anymore. It appears that shifts in the ocean currents will make living in Europe a lot more difficult too.

So, even if the temperature going up is caused directly by the sun, it behooves us to fight it. Anyone who likes the planet like it is right now (esp. anyone near the coasts) has a reason to try to keep the global temperature the same. Because if the temperature changes, you can't be sure what will happen. Well, you can be sure of one thing, that is things won't be the way they are right now. Change is the only certainty.

Even if the sun is causing the warming, but we could counter it by reducing CO2 emissions, we should do it.

But CO2 levels we are low on the million year scale, if you believe stuff in wikipedia...

Graph at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide levels were 10x what they are now

"Changes in carbon dioxide during the Phanerozoic (the last 542 million years). The recent period is located on the left-hand side of the plot, and it appears that much of the last 550 million years has experienced carbon dioxide concentrations significantly higher than the present day."

Plus, mars is warming with receding ice caps. Maybe solar effects are what is driving our change? http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/3362375 .html

I am always a bit skeptical, since I was the generation that had both Igloo effect and global warming in the same textbook in middle school...

You call that paranoid? I call that "too much trust in the cops". Try living in Houston. It ain't paranoia when they ARE out to get you.

The artic, however, seems to be melting; again though, not on the big island of Greenland.

The ice on Greenland IS melting:

"Thawing ice alarms scientists"

"UT study seems to confirm research indicating faster melting caused by global warming"

By ERIC BERGER
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

"Greenland's massive ice sheet is melting rapidly, losing the equivalent of Lake Houston every six hours."

"That's the conclusion of a study by University of Texas at Austin scientists that appears to confirm earlier, controversial research that suggests the melting of Greenland's ice has nearly tripled since the late 1990s. Greenland's ice sheet contains about 10 percent of the world's fresh water."

"The findings concern climate scientists, who say that since the Industrial Revolution, and especially since the mid-1900s, carbon dioxide levels have risen by more than 40 percent. They attribute much of the increase to fossil fuel burning and say that, in the absence of increased carbon emissions, no natural factor can explain warming global temperatures."

"The warming effect, scientists fear, is accelerating and could lead to rising sea levels."

"'This is a good indication of global warming, that it's there,' said the study's lead author, Jianli Chen, a researcher at UT's Center for Space Research. 'At least, it's happening in the Arctic.'"

"Using two satellites that measured the change in the mass of Greenland's ice sheet, the researchers, publishing last week in the journal Science, found that Greenland was losing 57 cubic miles of ice a year."

"At that rate, Greenland is raising sea levels by less than a half-inch per decade. But still more rapid ice loss could accelerate that rate. If all of Greenland's ice were to melt, seas would rise by 21 feet."

"'Existing ice sheet models estimate that most of the ice sheet will be removed within 1,000 years,' said Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., lead author of the Greenland ice study earlier this year that the new work seems to confirm."

"'This is a very conservative estimate, and the time scale is at least three times too large. Whether it will happen in the next century, we do not know. But, realistically, every year we look at Greenland, we realize that things are changing faster than we thought.'"

"One of the first scientists to study Greenland's thinning ice sheet, NASA glaciologist William Krabill, said the two new studies make a strong case that the melting of Greenland has accelerated."

"'There is no question that the sign is correct, Greenland is thinning and losing mass,' Krabill said."

"He added, however, that there are limitations on the new research. The satellites only began collecting data in 2002, making it difficult to discern whether the recent ice loss is part of a long-term trend."

"Chen said he's expecting the two satellites used in the study to continue collecting data through at least 2010."

"Scientists say coastal residents shouldn't be immediately concerned about rising seas due to glacial melting in Greenland and Antarctica, where there is increasing evidence that a warming climate also is causing ice loss."

"'Houston has produced much larger apparent sea level changes locally through groundwater pumping, and coastal construction contributes to receding coastlines,' said Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, an atmospheric sciences professor at Texas A&M University."

"'We saw in New Orleans the effect of marsh drainage and upstream damming of sediment on the height of land relative to sea level. I expect that, for the next several decades, what Texans do directly to our coast will have a much bigger effect than what global warming will do to our coast.'"

"eric.berger@chron.com"

I thought your comment looked familiar. Are you Tubby Bartles, or do you just post like him? Mods, see http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2006/08/ste orn_and_free_1.html , about 1/3 of the way down; note the "Aug 19" posting date.

http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2006/08/ste orn_and_free_1.html

Quote: "Recall that Steorn is a former e-business company that saw its market vanish during the dot.com bust. It stands to reason that Steorn has re-tooled as a Web marketing company, and is using the "free energy" promotion as a platform to show future clients how it can leverage print advertising and a slick Web site to promote their products and ideas. If so, it's a pretty brilliant strategy."

1. Pretend to invent an impossible technology that nobody will believe in.
2. Promote the heck out of it on the internet.
3. ???
4. Profit.

Well, the infamous missing step three is "Demonstrate to your web-marketting customers that you can market even such a preposterous idea as free energy successfully and they will flock to your doors".

Yeah what happened to those Arab looking guys? Apparently they were buying prepaid phones, unlocking and then selling them. That's conspiracy to commit fraud and money laundering? Even worse than the people that hype these things are the ones that are so damn embarassed to break the whole thing off instead try to send the people for jail...for what unlocking phones?? Why isn't that illegal?

The injunction has been blocked, at least temporarily.

Snippet
------------
  Aug. 18, 2006, 1:13PM
Court Blocks Order to Turn Off Dish DVRs

By DAVID KOENIG AP Business Writer
© 2006 The Associated Press

DALLAS -- A federal appeals court on Friday temporarily blocked a trial judge's order that EchoStar Communications Corp., parent of the Dish satellite-TV service, disable more than 3 million digital video recorders.

A fine anti-Bush troll/joke, but a few facts are in order....

WASHINGTON - All year, the government has promised stepped-up testing to see if bird flu wings its way to the United States. On Monday, the Bush administration announced those tests got a hit -- but the suspect isn't the much-feared Asian strain of the virus.

In almost the same breath, Agriculture Department officials announced that routine testing had turned up the possibility of the H5N1 virus in the two swans on the shore of Michigan's Lake Erie -- but that genetic testing has ruled out the so-called highly pathogenic version that has ravaged poultry and killed at least 138 people elsewhere in the world.

"We do not believe this virus represents a risk to human health," declared Ron DeHaven, administrator of USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. "This is not the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus that has spread through much of other parts of the world."

Better still, try drinking diet cola and then chewing some mentos mints.

Mothers tasted baby food in front of airport security guards to prove it contained no liquid explosives.

At Dulles, one passenger fished a bottle of Tequila from a carry-on bag. It joined the rest of the newly classified contraband in a trash container.

There are good reasons to stick to card games like Poker, i can think of at least 11 million great reasons to give Poker a chance. If Magic had that kinda money in it, I think a lot more people would be trading those "killer" decks, and there would be some really interesting big hands.

I'd say his father is the far greater villain in the situation. People forget the things he did when he was head of the CIA during the 80's. I digress. We're talking Bush Jr. Reasons to go into Iraq.

1 - 75 unanimous security council resolutions finding Iraq in violation of the terms of their surrender. In 1991 the UN authorized military force against Iraq, and peace was dependent on their complete duplicity. They did not cooperate, and while many say that the US belitted the UN, in fact one could argue that if the US did nothing, the UN would become a joke. I don't understand why the UN will jump head first into an evolving situation they don't understand (like sending troops into Yugoslavia as it broke up) while completely ignoring genocides like Rwanda. The UN waves its finger, but rarely does anything about anything. How many times could they insist "comply or else" if "or else" meant nothing?

2 - WMD did exist. Saddam used them on his own people, and he currently stands on trial for that. This is not disputed by anyone. We gave them plenty of advance warning before we went into the country, and we watched a huge caravan leave Iraq into Syria. At the time Powell suggested that those were the smoking guns we would now never find. But we did however find sarin gas, and illegal missiles. He found storage facilities, and training manuals detailing how to use the WMD. So they did exist, and we found some of them. Why do people continue to insist they never existed and they we never found any?

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outl ook/3997601.html http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/july-de c98/clinton_12-16.html

Here is what I don't understand. Governments all around the world insisted they had WMD. Clinton bombed Iraq without consulting Congress or the UN, and no one questioned him. Kerry, Gore, Clinton and every Democratic leader insisted Iraq had WMD. They all voted to go to war. But after the fact, they all insist the Bush invented the situation and lied. How is that possible? This is why I hate partisan politics. Facts are obscured by trying to make the other party look bad.

3 - 30 million Iraqi civilians lived in fear for their lives. Saddam intentionally kept food shipments out of cities, shut off water, used rape and torture as a means to keep the populace fearful. Some Iraqi civilians were driven to living in caves, because he declared open genocide on the Kurds.

I hate to invoke Godwin's law here, but consider this. After WWI, Germany was smacked down with the Treaty of Versailles. They weren't supposed to arm themselves. Hitler decided to test the water, built weapons and marched troops into the DMZ by the Rhineland. The world didn't want to go back to war, so they ignored the situation. Iraq is not the power Germany was, however, at the time Germany was in its worst economic situation ever and had no weapons. We watched as Hitler openly defied the League of Nations and braced for war. If we stopped Hitler when he first marched small forces into the Rhineland, how many tens of millions of lives might have been spared?

When someone is committing great atrocities, like Saddam did, you take action.

They also said that Saddam had WMD and that the invasion of Iraq wasn't for the oil.

1) Iraq DID have WMDs. See FoxNews.

2) If the invasion of Iraq for really for the oil, then why is it over $75/barrel? Sure, this is also due to the unrest in Lebanon/Isreal, but it was over $70/barrel prior to that. See Chron.Com

Embrace, extend, and extinguish.

Maybe the Strait of Malacca isn't exactly the Pacific, but there have been problems there recently.

When I recently visited the Houston Museum of Natural Science (for the Body Worlds travelling exhibit -- cool!), I noticed that their Hall of the Americas included Ken and Linda Lay as contributors. You don't see it on the website -- in fact, Google doesn't show any instances of his name on the hmns.org site at all -- but up at the Americas exhibit, there's a big, glowing sign proclaiming the Lay family's generosity.

I wondered at the time whether they just hadn't gotten around to applying the duct tape, like they did at Enron Field, since renamed to something more wholesome. But now that we* can look back and say "Aw, poor schmuck", maybe the HMNS and the other museums that benefitted from Lay's largesse can put the duct tape away for good.

* "we": For values of "we" that don't include Enron shareholders as of late 2001.

Here in Houston (ex-home of Enron) electricity has been "de-regulated" (I like that word. government comes along and forces companies to share power lines, and it's now "de-regulated") for a while, and pretty much all the choices are the same. Oh, theres commercials about my "power to choose" (get it? power? hahah) that tell me I can choose a company who will let me "lock in" a rate, or a different company whose rates "go up and down with the market". Of course, the companies have all done the math themselves, so the total you pay is pretty much the same over a full year.

Meanwhile, some other large cities in Texas have public electricity utilities who buy into shares of private power plant output to power their grid, and their average kWh charge is roughly half that of the average Houstonian's charge. Even at peak it's less, even though the utility has to pay extra to pull the extra energy. As a bonus, in San Antonio's case, the utility profits go back into the city, to the point that losing it would mean having to double the property tax to make up for it. I wonder if a company could ever slough off the dead weight they always seem to collect (stockholders, CEOs, middle management, that guy in the corner who nobody knows what he does but he's always been there and the multimillion dollar stadium naming deals) to compete with that? (For that matter, I wonder how the utility operates without the dead weight of unfirable workers and pensioners that cling to government institutions)

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/c asey/3921787.html

Gun control does not work. The concept is fundamentally flawed. Outlawing guns does not make civilians fundamentally safer... It simply means that no law abiding citizen will own a firearm. When only criminals have guns, crime rates go up. Why? Criminals make choices and decisions just like other people (most of the time). If they are afraid doing X may cause them to get shot, the chances of them deciding to do X decrease.

We should learn from Canada's past mistakes and stop trying to control guns. Those who wish to hurt others will always find a mean to do so, so please stop trying to remove an important line of defense from the hands of law-abiding citizens.

...Decades ago, big tobacco was doing the same thing with tobacco

Whenever someone like you brings up big tobacco they are imagining $$$ coming from the courts for climate change. It is the only practical avenue for the greenies to circumvent the will of the electorate.

As for Kyoto, I'll admit ignorance. Do you deny there's a problem, or are you only claiming that Kyoto's no solution? If the latter, what do you recommend?

I deny there is a problem. Kyoto is madness. I recommend continuing on the environmental path established 50 years ago. To reduce harmful pollutants. That is President Bush's policy. CO2 is not a pollutant, it is plant food.

Personally, I'm in favor of incentives to reduce pollution and encourage efficiency. I think nuclear power (fusion and fission) can be part of the solution, especially (with respect to fission) in the short term.

Efficiency will get you 20-40% reduction in usage. Energy usage grows at 5% per year. Ding. Next. Nuclear power is great. Unfortunately the greenies have hobbled reactor research since 3 mile island. Now we need the Japanese to construct them. I would like to see large ones dedicated to producing hydrogen. Don't waste your breath about fusion. After decades of hearing it is only a decade away, it is tiresome.

Again, I'm not claiming that Kyoto is the solution (and nor are those who are pushing Kyoto - they merely claim that it's a good first step). Rather, I'm claiming that global warming is real, anthropogenic, and harmful. If you think otherwise, the benefits/dangers of Kyoto don't really factor into it.

Don't you think it is a bit unrealistic to ask for $1 trillion in worldwide economic devastation and offer nothing in return? Some first step. Do you really have confidence in the Kyoto architects? Are they really credible? Your last declarations are particularly amusing. Repeating them over and over does not make it true. Climate has been warming for 12000 years. What was the result? The ascent of man. I fear the day when the warming stops.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/nation/3984 459.html

Pete Solis was arrested in May on a charge of sexual assault of a child. He could not immediately be reached Monday evening.

If we assume that 50% of them are plugged in, that's an additional 100MW of generating capacity needed worldwide.
  From a Houston Chronicle aritcle, http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2006/06/coa l_affordable_1.html, an 1000MW coal plant spews 6 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per year.
So, a 100MW coal plant would spew 600,000 tons of CO2 per year [544,310,844 kg]
That's the impact. But, this is only for 2W standby power for one product.
Also ... $2.63 * 50 million = $131.5 million. That's like 1000 houses for 1000 homeless families ... and that's in the United States ... that money could go further in other places.

Okay, okay, I'll be serious. Let me give you a feel for politics where I live. My two senators represent 22+ million Texans (that's 11+ million per Senator), and my representative is one of 32 (each representing ~714+K).* A gathering of 285 calm, polite, and rational leftists isn't (if history is going to be our guide here) exactly going to sway a Representative who has to run an expensive campaign every other year (and so is beholden to wealthy benefactors) or a Senator who is beholden to (i) wealthy benefactors and (ii) 20 million conservative Texans.

Maybe you don't believe me about how messed up Texas is, so let me give you a feel. The school finance system here is *so* messed up that a judge ordered the state legislature to fix it. So what did they do? They turned their attention to the ``provocative dancing" of high school cheerleaders: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/3 166954.html

As Kent Brockman aptly noted, ``Democracy just doesn't work." Though I am with Churchill on this one, in that the other forms of government work even worse.

* Obviously, that's the number of Texas, not the number of people on the Texas voter rolls. However, apportionment is based on population, not the number of voters.

No kidding, and they don't even cover the U.S. ones very well. What about New Orleans, which the Army Corps of Engineers admitted they screwed up on? And it's only a year or so ago? Losing an entire city counts as a disaster, I think.

Or how about Bhopal? Chernobyl? Texas City? All of those nearly destroyed an entire community.

Then there are the dam breaches, which are apparently more common than I thought. The Vajont Dam in 1963 (2,000 dead), Buffalo Creek flood of 1972 (125 dead), Val di Stave dam 1985 (268 dead), Shakidor dam in 2005(40 dead), Banqiao dam 1975 (26,000 dead), the list goes on.

As far as vehicles, how about the Pinto? Or the Comet jetliner?

Things I hope don't turn out to be engineering disasters: Umatilla chemical weapons depot, Yucca mountain, Three Gorges dam.

LOL Capitalism LOL

What's that? A city utility charging half the price of the private energy providers, and still turning enough of a profit to cut property tax bills in half?

I guess once you don't have to deal with the greedy fuckwits of a CxO brigade and shareholders, you CAN provide better service for less. I'm sure you're still trying to figure out how you can run a power plant without paying some idiot loser like Lay 50 million dollars, but keep trying, it'll come to you someday.

Me: Knock, knock

Private Texan Ranch Owner: Yup?

Me: I'm from the government, I'd like to place these cameras on your land, so that people on the internet can....

After reading over my phone company's privacy policy, http://att.sbc.com/gen/privacy-policy?pid=2506#4 it seems that they have violated said policy. According to AT&T, "We must disclose information, when requested, to comply with court orders or subpoenas," but there clearly weren't any court orders involved with them turning the information over to the NSA, according to this article: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/business/38 59829.html.

AT&T says that the data is "Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI), http://att.sbc.com/gen/privacy-policy?pid=2566, and that "Protecting the privacy of your service and usage records is your right and our duty under federal law," although "our local SBC telephone company may also be required to disclose CPNI for legal and regulatory reasons such as a court order," but again there was clearly no court orders involved according to the article about Qwest's refusal to cooperate.

If they didn't break any laws (which I doubt, but is a possibility) they certainly have broken their promise to their customers. That might be grounds for legal action, false advertising perhaps?

In all of my history as a US citizen, I have seen enough to beleive that the courts here are legit and fair.

Former Illinois Governor (and future prisoner) Ryan stopped executions here when it was found that half the people on death row were proven innocent. A few cops, prosecutors, etc are now in prison for faking evidence, etc.

You might click on a few of these links:

Experts question arson convictions
Texas Case Spurs Arson Conviction Questions
Arson experts cite bad evidence in '04 execution

They detail how the "experts" used junk science. Imagine your house burns down and your family dies, and you get the death penalty for murdering them, even though the fire was an accident.

Bad enough his family died, worse that they killed him for the "murder" based on evidence that didn't prove anything.

A friend's brother spent five years in federal prison for loaning money to a cocaine dealer, never saw or touched any of the actual drug. The dealer went to prison for two years.

There's a fellow serving life inder California's "three strikes" law for stealing a candy bar!

I fear my "justice" system. You should as well.

...and tell me that you could've predicted where computer security was going for the next 50 years then.

DDoS attacks? Botnets? Spam zombies? "Old school" viruses (and by old school, I mean it seems like these kind of viruses have become less-common than they were in the early-mid 1990s) that wipe your whole HDD? Mail clients that auto-execute a scripting language that a maliciously-minded high schooler can understand? Exploit-discovery tools like Metasploit? (or heck, even the very concept of an "exploit"?)

These things weren't conceived-of then. Not on anybody's radar at all. Remember, this was a time when IBM was selling computers to the 5 people in the world they said might have a use for them...

Yet Alan Cox has the nuts to come to us, saying "listen to me! I hack on Linux's kernel, and now I have an MBA, so I can predict the future now!"? He may be as close to a good predictor of the future of computer security as we have, but my point is that there are FAR too many variables -- far too much emergent behavior and unpredictable events -- between now and 50 years from now for he or anybody else to make a competent projection out that far.

For all Cox knows, the human race could be exterminated in 2015 by a nuclear war with the >Russians and the Islamic world, fueled by rising inflation or even a currency meltdown somewhere (possibly even the U.S.).

C'mon, John, the first step is to admit you have a problem.

Crow T. Trollbot

At least there's one criminal who is willing to accept personal responsibility.

People like me who make their own videos hate YouTube because it recompresses the videos into FLV format at an extremely low bit rate. It also renders stereo audio tracks down to mono, probably also at a reduced bit rate. All this transcoding is why a video from YouTube loads so fast, but it also means that the video looks and sounds significantly worse than the original. Read more about it here: YouTube and the Flash video format.

Maybe this guy has the answer after all; reduce the human population by 90%! http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/3 769650.html

It sounds as if NASA has been having some success at 'pushing back' against the Bush administration's reluctance to fund Science.

Recent embarassment over inflicting political spin on scientific findings may have given NASA a little budgetary leeway.

There is slightly more detail in this articleat the Houston Chronicle.