Slashdot Mirror

Yes, unless your partner is both the religious and jealous type (Joseph was OK with it, apparently).

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Or that new peer-reviewed study on glyphosphate.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2315057/Is-worlds-popular-weed-killer-causing-Parkinsons-New-study-shows-Roundup-herbicide-linked-cancer-infertility.html

With all the crying wolf lately it's a wonder we still see these articles. What happened to SARS, did all five victims of the "pandemic" die without passing it on? H1N1 caused some sniffles. Donald Rumsfeld made a killing with his quack medicine while GSK fleeced the Brits out of a healthy chunk of their health budget during the swine flu hoax. Every year there's a new fake pandemic.

Almost makes you hope the promised pandemic finally arrives to take out the idiots who keep pump-and-dumping their antiviral stocks.

This has been a fascinating phenomenon, and it's only going to evolve more as time goes on.

Crowdsourcing or witch hunt? Reddit, 4chan users try to ID Boston bomb suspects

Boston bombing: How internet detectives got it very wrong

'I didn't do anything!' High school track runner forced to deny involvement in Boston Marathon bombings after a picture of him and his coach is widely circulated

Social media as breaking-news feed: Worse information, faster

Worse information, faster -- this neatly sums it up, and I'm a huge proponent of social media and its benefits, including to government.

And for the record, no, the FBI wasn't seeking to "censor" anyone, and the "next logical step" (as I have seen asserted elsewhere) won't be to "shut down" internet or social media resources during major public emergencies; however, law enforcement agencies absolutely can request, once they have identified suspects via investigative and legal processes, that people focus on those instead of playing CSI: Internet.

Sadly, the echo chamber of the internet enables some people, in seemingly increasing numbers, to go a step further and choose to believe everything is automatically a "false flag" conspiracy with the stated perpetrators "framed"â¦..

The "wisdom of crowds" can be a misnomer.

Re: "control surveillance state is bollocks...."
The problem for the UK is the long term slide from a real judicial warrant to a bureaucratic warrant to a self signed police letter to your local council all "just having a look".
Recall:
Private watch lists:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/blacklist-thousands-of-construction-workers-denied-1469233
Less public review/press when caught legal vision
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2163799/UK-soldiers-beat-innocent-Iraqi-men-black-ops-jails-new-secret-justice-law-means-torture-hidden-forever.html
The "wish" lists:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/may/11/police-software-maps-digital-movements
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/government-may-sanction-chemical-incapacitant-use-on-rioters-scientists-fear-6612084.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/9046668/UK-riots-paratroopers-are-trained-in-riot-control.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/09/riot-control-chemicals-plastic-bullets
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2114601/Water-cannons-streets-months-Tear-gas-Tasers-police-wish-list-combat-riots.html
Going private:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jun/20/g4s-chief-mass-police-privatisation
Going "undercover" for a good few years :)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jan/20/undercover-police-children-activists

Re: "control surveillance state is bollocks...."
The problem for the UK is the long term slide from a real judicial warrant to a bureaucratic warrant to a self signed police letter to your local council all "just having a look".
Recall:
Private watch lists:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/blacklist-thousands-of-construction-workers-denied-1469233
Less public review/press when caught legal vision
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2163799/UK-soldiers-beat-innocent-Iraqi-men-black-ops-jails-new-secret-justice-law-means-torture-hidden-forever.html
The "wish" lists:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/may/11/police-software-maps-digital-movements
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/government-may-sanction-chemical-incapacitant-use-on-rioters-scientists-fear-6612084.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/9046668/UK-riots-paratroopers-are-trained-in-riot-control.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/09/riot-control-chemicals-plastic-bullets
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2114601/Water-cannons-streets-months-Tear-gas-Tasers-police-wish-list-combat-riots.html
Going private:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jun/20/g4s-chief-mass-police-privatisation
Going "undercover" for a good few years :)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jan/20/undercover-police-children-activists

There just happened to be a drill requiring the presence of snipers on roofs, the presence of men from Craft International (motto 'Violence does solve problems') near where one of the bombs was planted and exploded, a man running away from the explosion whilst everyone else was crouching in shock (i.e. he was experienced in reacting to explosions), a photo possibly showing the pressure cooker before it exploded - man, it is big. A Craft man with a radioactivity monitor in his hand near one explosion. Craft men guarding a grey haired white guy who has two bags, standing at the edge of the finish line bomb blast zone - before the explosion.

There just happened to be a drill requiring the presence of snipers on roofs, the presence of men from Craft International (motto 'Violence does solve problems') near where one of the bombs was planted and exploded, a man running away from the explosion whilst everyone else was crouching in shock (i.e. he was experienced in reacting to explosions), a photo possibly showing the pressure cooker before it exploded - man, it is big. A Craft man with a radioactivity monitor in his hand near one explosion. Craft men guarding a grey haired white guy who has two bags, standing at the edge of the finish line bomb blast zone - before the explosion.

I'm sorry, but you;'re incorrect about the wage gap being debunked "time and time again." While the wage gap is not 70cents on the dollar anymore, there is a significant difference in women's pay. In Ontario, according to Stats Canada, the gap is currently 25%. It's also the same in the US according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is worse than it has been since 2005.

I'm very sorry you feel discriminated against, but this supposed attack on male rights is horse shit made up by bitter people who cannot tolerate the fact that 1000 years of cultural manipulation by us white men is being undone.

The numbers of male nurses has increased incredibly in the last 30 years, and male nurses are currently making significantly more money than women, and are in higher positions.

There are massive campaigns to get more men involved teaching, and early child development. There's also employment campaigns to get more women involved in trades, including the more dangerous ones, those campaigns are primarily ones which you complain about in your first paragraph (scholarships directed at women).

Yes, all interest-bearing debt is BAD.

Muzzie, are you?

Not to be that guy, but I wanted to know more about the acid thing, couldn't find it. It's actually Mercedes, BMW refused to put it in their cars. It also creates an incredibly toxic gas along side the acid.

More here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2307265/EPA-nominee-tough-questions-approved-new-car-air-conditioner-refrigerant-caused-ENGINE-FIRES-Mercedes-Benz-tests.html

4K per month?! Do you think an actor is only in one show per week, and in only one episode?! Usually they are in several shows every week, you can safely assume they make 10K per month at least.

And of course let's not forget that SAG-AFTRA rates are only for C-listers and small shows, A-listers are another story. As an example, Ashton kutcher makes 700K (seven hundred thousand) per episode:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2185525/Ashton-Kutcher-named-highest-paid-US-TV-star-700-000-episode-Two-Half-Men.html

I bet...

you don't get invited to parties at all. In fact, I feel that way about most internet trolls... never met one at a party, ya know what I mean?

I bet you all look like this too: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2208835/Leo-Traynor-The-day-I-confronted-Twitter-troll-stalked-3-years.html

Enjoy your neckbeard.

This is a youtube video with history of discoveries https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJsUDcSc6hE , http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/stats/ - has more up to date info. There are two projects to find almost all asteroids in comining decades http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Synoptic_Survey_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-STARRS Pan STARRS already works to some degree see http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/stats/ again, Those projects, which work now, are in process of upgrade http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2117062/Nasa-boosts-funds-telescope-team-hunting-dangerous-asteroids.html and then there will be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_Terrestrial-impact_Last_Alert_System Europeans too have project to deploy some telescopes http://belissima.aob.rs/Conf2012/Milani_2012.pdf and Russians think of this too. There are also satellites which look for asteroids like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_Earth_Object_Surveillance_Satellite there are pending projects in Europe http://www.dlr.de/fa/Portaldata/17/Resources/dokumente/abt_17/projekte/Handout_Asteroid_Finder.pdf ( I think it can be resumed later ) and in Russia. There are consents http://b612foundation.org/sentinelmission/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_Earth_Object_Camera of satellites with infrared telescopes. combined we have: we know almost all big asteroids > 1 km ( 95% now ) , so probability the Earth is hit hard is less, than, say 30 years ago - because we know 95% of big asteroids are already do not hit us in near future ( btw asteroid which caused dino extintion was several km wide, we know maybe 99.9% of all such asteroids now). Currently we have quite a high rate of discovery ( which will be much bigger in 2020s due to planned big asteroid hunting telescopes ) so in 30 years - we have only unknown asteroids few meters wide ( similar to than in Chelyabinsk ), we could be faster if mentioned satellites are launched and they work as expected. But even if we keep just today's rate of discovery the worst we could unexpectedly get - is a destruction of a city, in 30 years even with the current rate ( given planned improvements though ) of discovery we will have very low probability to have even this unexpected event.

Argentina is not China, Russia, and has never been an enemy, or at war, with USA.

At least officially.

If Argentina would have gotten lucky and sunk a carrier you might have found out whose side we were really on. It is probably a good thing you didn't, or you might glow in the dark. Hell, we even gave them access to Vortex. The relationship doesn't get any more special than that.

Seriously, President Kirchner is shaping up to be a replacement Hugo Chavez. You're not a US or UK ally. Do not overplay your hand.

You know, I know the US plays hardball in its own interests.. most nations do. But I would not count on screwing around with the UK, Australia, or Canada and not expect to end up with the US in the fray on their behalf.

It's astonishing, what with all the various gadgets enticing people's attention in the 1970s and 1980s, that it's only now become a problem.

I wonder what changed between now and then that has dramatically increased the incidence of accidents caused by driver distractions. But I suppose we needed something to make up for all mechanic and doctor billing lost after seat-belts and crackdowns on drunk drivers. Those people have mouths to feed, after all.

A few things here: other than things that impaired driving (and there were appropriate laws about that back in the 70's and 80's), what we have now are roadways designed for faster speeds, and vehicles with different safety standards (mostly significantly better). However, we also have significantly more vehicles on the road, and it is significantly easier to get your license and to afford a vehicle. Link this to a culture with isolationist tendencies, and you get a situation where something that would have been relatively safe in a 70's car can be incredibly dangerous today, even with improved standards. Plus, with the improved flow of information, people actually find out about all the bad stuff that goes on now, whereas back then, the problem wasn't assumed to be as big as it actually was.

Or something like that.

Actually, it hasn't only now become a problem. If anything, the other problems have decreased to the point that it's finally significant enough to focus on. Traffic fatalities have gone down at the same time as the use of gadgets have gone up. In fact, you're 5 times as likely to be in a distracted driving accident due to daydreaming as you are to be in one due to mobile phone use. The bans don't work, they just give lawmakers something to do that has the appearance of addressing the real problem while they ignore what really works because what really works doesn't get votes.

Lie: Texting is making the roads more dangerous than they used to be. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, "In 2011, traffic deaths fell 2% to 32,367 from the previous year, making traffic deaths in 2011 at the lowest level since 1949 -- and a 26% decline since 2005."

Lie: Texting is causing the majority of distracted driving accidents. In the news today, "According to the report, which was published earlier this week, 62 percent of the drivers studied were 'generally distracted or lost in thought.' Conversely, the study found that only 12 percent of those examined were using their cell phones - either texting, talking, or dialing.

Lie: The solution to texting accidents is a ban A "study by researchers at the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) finds no reductions in crashes after laws take effect that ban texting by all drivers. In fact, such bans are associated with a slight increase in the frequency of insurance claims filed under collision coverage for damage to vehicles in crashes."

Opinion: We're focusing on the wrong problem. I spend about two hours a day commuting and get to observe both great and courteous drivers and and also dangerous and rude drivers. People like to focus on banning gadgets because it gives a false sense of hope, they hope that the answer is simple and safer roadways can be had by stopping people from doing something. My opinion is that safer driving comes by education, training, testing and enforcement. I believe that gadget bans are as ineffective as the distracted driving laws that are ignored already. Focusing on a specific detail like a phone causes people to do the same thing they would without the ban, but they do it in a more clandestine way which actually makes the real problem, distraction, worse.

Don't take my word for these facts. Search for statistics about traffic fatalities and for the study done by Erie Insurance Group. Here are a couple links to get you started:

• Wikipedia - List of motor vehicle deaths in U.S. by year
• Daily Mail - Keep your mind on the road
• Highway Loss Data Institute - Texting bans don't reduce crashes; effects are slight crash increases

You might want to try checking your facts before posting. Here's a hint: No she won't

Wrong!!!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1034634/Lady-Thatcher-honoured-State-funeral.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8570506/Police-covered-up-violent-campaign-to-turn-London-area-Islamic.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1374443/Police-hid-abuse-60-girls-Asian-takeaway-workers-linked-Charlene-Downes-murder.html
http://www.bnp.org.uk/news/muslim-paedophile-gangs-have-been-operating-%E2%80%9Cdecades%E2%80%9D-admits-former-police-chief
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/14/iran-gay-men-executed-hanging_n_1515207.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/07/iran-executes-men-homosexuality-charges
http://www.gaypatriot.net/2006/11/27/gay-holocaust-in-iran-4000-killed-and-counting/
http://www.torontosun.com/2012/03/26/disgust-over-muslim-wife-beating-book
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2012/03/23/19543371.html
https://www.google.ca/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=police+in+UK+scared+of+muslims&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&redir_esc=&ei=PpFhUd0HwpaIAojLgagO#hl=en&gs_rn=8&gs_ri=psy-ab&tok=YRHZtAg-ihnWR_44H-nTgw&pq=muslim%20wife%20beating%20canada&cp=11&gs_id=9oj&xhr=t&q=islam+acid+attacks&es_nrs=true&pf=p&client=ubuntu&hs=AVY&channel=fs&sclient=psy-ab&oq=islam+acid+&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_qf.&bvm=bv.44770516,d.cGE&fp=d05afac0920070b6&biw=1390&bih=672r
I could post links for you all day but it would be pointless you love Islam because it lets you be a terrorist and get away with it because people are to scared to stand up to terrorists of the false prophet Muhammad. Your above post is exactly what your Muhammad stands for, way to represent he must be proud.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2265732/Mike-Murasoi-fish-contaminated-radiation-Fukushima-nuclear-disaster-2-500-times-legal-limit.html

It was confirmed by Tepco to have amounts of radioactive cesium equal to 254,000 becquerels per kilogram, or 2540 times the limit of 100 becquerels/kg set for seafood by the government.

...

On 21 August last year, Tepco announced that rockfish caught in the Pacific Ocean within the circular area of 20 km around the plant, which is closed to all human activity, had a level of 25,800 becquerels of cesium per kilogram .

It's painfully obvious that this is caused by ongoing leakage of radioactive water from the plant. In contrast, there has be a reduction in radiatons levels on land http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201303120107. It's unlikely that biological concentration in the food chain is the primary cause after two years of radiation decay and sea water dilution.

If you don't trust the Japanese government, this would explain why they are prohibiting non-government organizations from sampling the ocean near the plant location. They say it's still too dangerous.

The motivation for a coverup is that ongoing radioactive ocean contamination would be a huge international incident. China, Korea, Taiwan, Viet Nam, Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines would all protest. There would be reputational repercussions, diplomatic turmoil and possibly economic sanctions. There is still a lot of hostility in the region from WW2, and this would be just the issue to reopen those wounds. Not to mention current rivalry over ocean areas that have China, Tiawan and Japan sending naval vessels to tiny islands with disputed ownership.

Approved by the megalomaniac Late and unworkable.

...if you want to get rid of the hateful attitude of the low/middle income folks against the wealthy/super rich income folks, make all taxes flat taxes...

Or you could just eliminate all the super rich folks, who really do live in a different world. How do you become super rich and earn equivalents of 100s/1000s of years of genuine work savings from an ordinary person upon birth? You guys should look at some serious death taxes so that people who have not done a days work don't have the ear of politicians (money talks) and claim that everyone who works for them should be working for 2 dollars a day or less to compete with third world.

Lots of health links collected by me: http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823

Iain Banks should look into iodine, vitamin D, eating a lot more vegetables, medically supervised vegetable juice and/or water fasting, and a variety of other things (beyond what is in mainstream medicine might be helpful, too). While once you have cancer getting rid of it is iffy, some things can still help, including preventing it from coming back again if you do manage to get rid of it somehow. See especially:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article24.aspx

And see also these other links:
http://theiodineproject.webs.com/cancerandiodine.htm
http://www.futurity.org/health-medicine/vitamin-d-helps-body-put-brakes-on-cancer/
http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART03060/Treating-Cancer-With-Integrative-Medicine.html

And:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2098363/Fasting-help-combat-cancer-boost-effectiveness-treatments.html
"In every case, combining fasting with chemotherapy made the cancer treatment more effective. Multiple cycles of fasting combined with chemotherapy cured 20 per cent of those with a highly aggressive form of cancer while 40 per cent with a limited spread of the same cancer were cured."

Mix that approach with a high-phyto-nutrient diet (including certain mushrooms), eliminating refined sugar and refined starch, eliminating food additives, supplementing with vitamin D and iodine, and some other related changes, and maybe there is some small chance of Iain Banks getting several more years of good health.

And so we can get at least one more fantastic Culture novel. :-)

I love his writing. I hope we can figure out a way to help him with all this post-scarcity technology like he wrote about and which we already have to some small degree (like the internet), whether he would choose to use that time to write another novel or not.

But the health advice above is generally good for anyone who wants to minimize cancer risk and maximize health. And I could only put all that together thanks to the internet and similar post-scarcity technology like Google and web servers and personal computers and all the advances in nutritional science made possible by less expensive testing and the accumulation of medical research knowledge and so on. Which is all the stuff implied in his books. Even if much of Earth may perhaps be oblivious to it all:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_State_of_the_Art
"'Also while I'd been away, the ship had sent a request on a postcard to the BBC's World Service, asking for 'Mr David Bowie's "Space Oddity" for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her.' (This from a machine that could have swamped Earth's entire electro-magnetic spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn't get the request played. The ship thought this was hilarious.'"

Ultimately, claiming that the only way to ensure accountability is the profit motive is claiming that government itself doesn't and can't work.

You're right as far as I'm concerned. Once you decide government by its nature can't be held accountable, then nobody can be ultimately because government (or anything in its stead) perform similar roles and similar accountability issues whether for profit or not.

I'd say that the accountability problems of government are less due to the profit motive (though it does help) and more due to the vast size and complexity of modern governments.

For example, the UK government recently implemented changes in their disability benefits laws. They implemented some stringent medical tests (as I understand it) for determining whether someone had sufficient disability to qualify for incapacity benefits (which I gather among other things meant too disabled to work).

The end result was about two thirds of people came off the rolls completely (which ended up being more than 2% of the UK's total population!). More than half of those (878,000 people) excluded chose not to go through the tests at all. So how much of this was expected?

Apparently, the UK government had determined that more than a billion pounds were lost over six years due to fraud.

According to this news story, the average cost of incapacity benefits were almost 4,400 pounds per claimant per year. That ends up being about 3.8 billion pounds per year saved from the people who chose not to undergo the new tests for incapacity. It's possible that a measurable portion of that wasn't fraud, but I suspect most of it was fraud of some sort. Meaning the government was off in its estimates of fraud by probably a factor of 20.

This is what I think accountability means in a modern government. No one knows how much fraud there is, even to an order of magnitude. But when they put in accountability for it, a lot of the consumption magically goes away.

Ultimately, claiming that the only way to ensure accountability is the profit motive is claiming that government itself doesn't and can't work.

You're right as far as I'm concerned. Once you decide government by its nature can't be held accountable, then nobody can be ultimately because government (or anything in its stead) perform similar roles and similar accountability issues whether for profit or not.

I'd say that the accountability problems of government are less due to the profit motive (though it does help) and more due to the vast size and complexity of modern governments.

For example, the UK government recently implemented changes in their disability benefits laws. They implemented some stringent medical tests (as I understand it) for determining whether someone had sufficient disability to qualify for incapacity benefits (which I gather among other things meant too disabled to work).

The end result was about two thirds of people came off the rolls completely (which ended up being more than 2% of the UK's total population!). More than half of those (878,000 people) excluded chose not to go through the tests at all. So how much of this was expected?

Apparently, the UK government had determined that more than a billion pounds were lost over six years due to fraud.

According to this news story, the average cost of incapacity benefits were almost 4,400 pounds per claimant per year. That ends up being about 3.8 billion pounds per year saved from the people who chose not to undergo the new tests for incapacity. It's possible that a measurable portion of that wasn't fraud, but I suspect most of it was fraud of some sort. Meaning the government was off in its estimates of fraud by probably a factor of 20.

This is what I think accountability means in a modern government. No one knows how much fraud there is, even to an order of magnitude. But when they put in accountability for it, a lot of the consumption magically goes away.

I wish I was lying. Sadly, it is all too true. And we're not even talking about consensual euthanasia, either.

Why modify anything when you've got lots of less noticeable and cheaper devices to do that?

I'm sitting with my phone across the table from you, am I twittering or am I filming you? I'm wearing this thing, will you, as a member of general public, assume it's some kind of MP3 player or something, or will you correctly guess it's a camera? Will you know that a pen or a lighter I'm twiddling with is actually a cheap spy camera?

Only thing I get from these debates "OMG, it's Google, they'll surely invade your anu^Wprivate life!" and "OMG, but there were no devices with recording capabilities like that before! (except there were)"

By the way, it seems you're less likely to lose your privacy to Google Glass than to any of things I mentioned, just because you'll be careful about what you do and what you say after you see someone wearing those. Are you careful about these things with the guy you're talking in the bar with? (By the way, he just switched on the audio recorder on his phone, did you notice that?)

What can you do? Every message you send if you phone is flagged is logged, every phone connecting to a flagged phone is logged.
When a clean phone connects it is tracked, when a known phone rings out to a clean phone your logged.
So both sides have to swap clean phones details and change phones quickly without infiltration or plea deal along the sim supply line- dealer, courier, contact...
Then you had the "performance monitoring and diagnostic tools" layer added by helpful third parties to hardware that just seemed to log data input as a user keystrokes once enabled that make anything like https useless.
This was 2008 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1041011/MI5-launch-spy-sky-UK-manhunt-British-Taliban-fought-Afghanistan.html flying 12,000ft and 15,000ft over a few cities trying to find known voice prints.

Yet I remember a mother who tortured a child online so much she committed suicide. Guess it happens. Is that adult a felon? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-494809/Girl-13-commits-suicide-cyber-bullied-neighbour-posing-teenage-boy.html

Per the Daily Mail, that great bastion of scientific rigor, we find that the internet has a mass of about 50 grams, "the same as a strawberry":

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2057018/Internet-weighs-strawberry.html

Then the angular momentum of the internet about the center of the Earth is (50 grams) / (24 hours) * R, where R is the mean radius of the internet from the axis of rotation of the Earth. Computing R is hard, since the parts of the internet in Europe (far northern latitudes) will contribute less than those near the equator. If we take R_earth cos 45 as an estimate for the radius (which is probably sensible, roughly splitting the difference between Europe and the US/Japan/Korea), we get that the angular momentum of the Earth is

2.6 kilogram-meters per second.

Sharks have been able to sense electric fields for a very long time, migratory birds see magnetic fields, good luck sorting out the venemous platypus and all its strangeness... natural processes have had hundreds of millions of years to get a head start on us.

I think most people are no longer surprised by such things. Nature has been at this stuff way longer than we've even existed.

The bank used public IP addresses (existing, used elsewhere) for their internal network? The one that designed that should be considered a bigger security threat that any current cyberattack.

BTW, the CNN editorial "Why cyber attacks threaten our freedom" is another piece of art of more or less the same magnitude. I'd say that is on a par with this one

1 out of 3 dollars spent is for "national defense." 33% is a pretty big "small" portion right off that bat.

That's a good example of what I refer to. US military spending is epic in its waste. For example, I was part of a non profit team that put an airship prototype up to 95k feet, which is a world record. The total cost over a number of years was somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars. The US military has paid over a hundred million dollars for an airship that failed in flight. Three orders of magnitude less cost and something that actually worked.

But then US military procurement is massively corrupt. For example, small caliber ammunition was for a time manufactured by a single plant in Missouri. When it couldn't keep up with ammunition demand after the Iraqi invasion in 2003, they finally opened up ammunition production to competition. This paper describes the issues surrounding that shortage. From it (emphasized phrase by me):

The reduction in funding during these years also affected the United Statesâ(TM) ammunition production capability resulting in a steady decline since the Cold War. Since 1989, there has been a 68% decrease in the capacity of the munitions industrial base. The number of facilities mirrors this decline. Government owned facilities fell from 28 to 13, and privately owned facilities decreased from 163 to 69. The production of small arms ammunition has been consolidated in a single government owned facility at Lake City Army Ammunition Plant at Lake City, Missouri.

It's also worth noting that defense spending is not 1 in 3 dollars, but rather 1 in 5 due to the presence of considerable entitlement spending into Social Security and Medicare (neither which serve a national interest I might add).

Well, my understanding is that the working conditions have improved from outright dangerous to merely bad, which is par for the course in poor countries (and arguably better than subsistence agriculture) but certainly not something to be proud of for a market leading company with a profit margin above 20%.

Where did you find the salary figures? I guess $700 would be about median wage in China, which would be fantastic for a manual worker, but I doubt anyone who works at the factory floor actually makes anywhere close to that. This article from January of this year claims that the entry level wage in one factory is £180, or about $275.

How much would it hurt Apple's bottom line to increase gross wages by $100 per worker overnight (in addition to planned wage increases)? Well, Apple has less than a million workers in China, so it would be less than $1.2 billion a year which would bring Apples profit margin down by one or two percent. Apple does not think that it's worth it, but they might reconsider if they continue to get criticism.

Suicides are typically caused by things like depression, drug addiction, personal loss, unemployment, violence, persecution and other severe life crises. The suicide rate for all causes in China is about 20 per 100,000 people. I think working conditions or living conditions would have to be pretty damned poor for them to be the primary motive behind several suicides in a town of 100,000.

It's nice that things are improving. Who knows, if Apple keeps getting angry criticism, especially from their customers, they may get the working conditions up to where they'll be able to remove the suicide nets.

Thank goodness someone in the US is picking up on this. This has been news in the UK all week.

First: wtf is this doing on tec.slashdot.org?

Second: this red line was crossed a long time ago: Syria used chemical weapons in Homs, US state department cables reveal It's just that the world won't care unless it was the scary beaded guys that did it, when Assad did it last December the world pretended it didn't happened

Third: don't pretend you care, the death toll is reaching 100.000, Assad launched everything in his arsenal from cluster bombs to SCUDs, about 1.000.000 people were displaced. Unless something spills over the Golan heights nothing will be done except strong worded letters to all parts involved

Bottom line: move along, nothing to see here

The evidence is piling up that after a short period of warming the Earth's surface temperature is no longer increasing. In fact, in the Southern Hemisphere there is a slight decrease. Here is an easy-to-digest article discussing the data and illustrating how the climate models (that the scare mongering is based off) are very wrong: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2294560/The-great-green-1-The-hard-proof-finally-shows-global-warming-forecasts-costing-billions-WRONG-along.html

The skeptics were right. "An Inconvenient Truth" is actually an "Inconvenient Lie". Now, it is always ok to be wrong and change your position when presented with new data that contradict your existing position. That's what science is about, after all. However, it will be interesting to see the Slashdotters that prefer to maintain their entrenched 'climate alarmist' position rather than accept that the new scientific evidence shows that the data shows that the Earth's surface temperature has stabilized - and the rise was from reasons we don't fully understand.

It is disgusting that many people lots their jobs for being skeptical about the cause and extend of global warming. There was 'blackballing' of anyone opposed to the truth about the warming. It shows how witchhunts still happen if you oppose the prevailing environmentalist/Democrat/Progressive/Socialist views that have take hold in the Western World. Once you start focussing on the evidence (and counter arguments for an against the strength of the evidence) it is hard to believe in the prevailing 'leftist' narrative. Most people want to do good, but let's get fact-based about it, eh? drop the touchy-feely stuff and demonisation of those who hold counter-views; sometimes when you really *listen* to an opponent's view you will learn something about your own position.

Please excuse me while I feel smug. Posters vilified my skeptical position made in another thread around a month ago. Thanks to Thomas Sowell's insight on the climate I became aware of scientific studies that showed the climate alarmist models didn't match the observations. Sowell is not only great for this, he also has a brilliant understanding of economics (as the prodigy of the brilliant Milton Friedman) - and the inevitable failure of collectivist systems if they dominate individual economic activity, ie. crush personal liberty and personal economic liberty (called 'capitalism').

You don't even need Google Glass:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2049052/Gang-cheats-casino-55k-using-contact-lenses-invisible-ink-marked-cards.html

http://www.poker.org/news/italian-conmen-arrested-for-casino-fraud-in-cannes-13927/

That a 2001 census! - 12 years ago! - Things have changed a lot since then. The immigration from Muslim countries have been so intense, and the birthrate of Muslims been so high, that Christians now are just above 50% and still dropping. All the lost percentages have been lost to the Muslim groups.

I don't like the Daily Mail, but they have the best graph: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2246436/Census-2011-religion-data-reveal-4m-fewer-Christians-1-4-atheist.html

It's fairly obvious that the ex-[identified-as]-Christians are now atheist.

...no, no -- that's not how it's going to be "picked up".

Let's take a look:

NBC News: Particle confirmed as Higgs boson

Associated Press: Physicists say they have found a Higgs boson

Reuters: Strong signs Higgs boson has been found: CERN

Wall Street Journal: New Data Boosts Case for Higgs Boson Find

FOX News: Physicists say they have found long-sought Higgs boson

Washington Post: A closer look at the Higgs boson particle that helps explain what gives matter size and shape

Chicago Tribune: Strong signs Higgs boson has been found: CERN

Sky News: Higgs Boson: Experts Sure Of 'God Particle'

New York Daily News: Physicists say they have discovered crucial subatomic particle known as Higgs boson

Boston Globe: Physicists say they have found a Higgs boson

BBC (UK): LHC cements Higgs boson identification

BusinessWeek: Case for Higgs Boson Strengthened by New CERN Analysis

The Daily Mail (UK): Scientists say they HAVE found the 'God particle' - but admit they still aren't sure what type of Higgs boson it is

The Independent (UK): Have they found the Higgs boson at last? Cern physicists say they're confident of 'God particle' breakthrough

Telegraph (UK): Higgs boson: scientists confident they have discovered the 'God particle'

News Limited (AU): Higgs boson, the God particle, discovered by CERN

US News and World Report: Physicists Observe Higgs Boson, the Elusive 'God Particle'

None of these articles make any links to "God" other than a few -- mostly UK, not US -- sources referring to it as the so-called "God particle", but even those explain exactly what this particle is theorized to be, not anything supernatural, "proving God exists", or having anything whatever to do with God.

He's not a hero. He violated his contract with the US government. All claims to moral superiority on his part are void since he had no authorization to handle the materials in the first place and the indiscriminate nature of what he collected.

So in your mind, you have to be willing to throw puppies off a cliff to be a hero?

Or the soilder has to be willing to gun down children and the elderly to be a hero?

All because they were being just as indiscriminate and acting equally so on orders?

With heros like that, no wonder you are such a messed up human being.

What is this? The dailymail? Front page story without substance?

3d printable guns? As in water guns for kids? Or do you mean real guns? You can't even make a 3d printer hotend with a 3d printer, how would printing a working gun be possible?

What's next, search engines with 3d printable nuclear warheads?

It goes the other way too. If you need someone to look like an idiot on a show or commercial, in recent history it's far more likely that the man will look stupid then the woman, to the point the only 'dumb' actor was the man.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1290144/Why-DOES-TV-love-portray-men-idle-feckless-idiots.html
http://www.modernman.com/why-do-commercials-think-men-are-idiots/
http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-reasons-commercials-are-sexist-against-men/

Way to get more money!

Like this shit isn't stuff we already extrapolated from previous observations and data years ago. The only new piece of data is Mg.

You know what? we found titanium ore on the surface of the moon. I don't hear anyone screaming to get money to return to the moon.....

I wonder when there'll start to be some sort of crackdown on personal UAVs or RCVs. I've still not heard of any incidents of these being used to harm people*, but maybe this is the first incident. It's bound to happen at some point though, and I certainly expect a wave of copycats, accompanied some panic and backlash. The technology's probably not at that stage yet - would need larger payloads or much better automatic guidance for anyone to do much. I can't see it far off someone sticking a grenade on the front of one though for a cheap guided missile, or a ricin tipped spike and just fly one into someone. Might seem a bit far fetched, but there's certainly people out there with a will to do so.

Of course, what can be actually be done about them isn't clear. It'd be like trying to stop pirate radio, but potentially even more difficult - fully automated devices wouldn't need any radio link, so the only thing you could really do it stopping purchase or having some form of traceable identifiers.

* With the huge exception of military drones of course. Crime using RCVs is certainly not new, see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1112673/Remote-control-toy-helicopter-used-fly-drugs-prison.html

Further down the same article, they offer these gems:

Waitrose may have had an uncomfortable few days following a PR campaign online that went sour but it is not the first big player to be burned in this way.
Many other businesses have tried to whip up interest on Twitter only for it to blow up in their faces, while others initiatives have just been plain poorly judged or in bad taste.
In 2009 the Daily Telegraph wanted to show how techno-savvy it was by allowing tweets about the Budget to appear on its website automatically using a Twitterfall.
If someone used the hashtag #budget it would pop up on telegraph.co.uk but it was quickly hijacked by those who used it to make jokes at the paper's expense (pictured right)
Some choice comments included: 'Even the Indie is better than this drivel'.
McDonalds also wanted to boost its profile online by using the hashtag #McDStories to ask people to regale stories of their hard-working staff - but it didn't go at all to plan.
Tweeters came straight back with their horror stories at restaurants, claiming they were given food poisoning, and that one burger contained a finger nail.
Search engine giant Bing also courted controversy when it pledged to donate to charity following a devastating Japanese earthquake in a stunt they believed would also boost their profile online.
Their staff tweeted: 'How you can #SupportJapan - For every retweet, @bing will give $1 to Japan quake victims, up to $100k'.
But instead all it got was a barrage of abuse from people convinced it was in poor taste.
Only this year coffee giant Starbucks put its foot in it on Twitter.
They were forced to issue an apology after it managed to upset people in Ireland.
It 'erroneously posted' a tweet which encouraged followers on there to 'show us what makes you proud to be British' - and outraged replies followed.
And sometimes companies get it completely and utterly wrong.
Condom giant Durex decided to run a PR campaign with the hashtag #DurexJoke.
In utterly disastrous fashion it decided to start the ball rolling with this joke to its South African followers - 'Why did God give men penises? So they'd have at least one way to shut a woman up. #DurexJoke'.
It went very badly for them from there.

----

(A bit Off-Topic, but every time I copied some text from there, it automatically appended

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2205975/Waitrose-Twitter-backlash-I-shop-Waitrose--I-dont-like-surrounded-poor-people.html#ixzz2MgdsTGfK
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

at the end. I wonder what technical trickery they are doing ;p)

Further down the same article, they offer these gems:

Waitrose may have had an uncomfortable few days following a PR campaign online that went sour but it is not the first big player to be burned in this way.
Many other businesses have tried to whip up interest on Twitter only for it to blow up in their faces, while others initiatives have just been plain poorly judged or in bad taste.
In 2009 the Daily Telegraph wanted to show how techno-savvy it was by allowing tweets about the Budget to appear on its website automatically using a Twitterfall.
If someone used the hashtag #budget it would pop up on telegraph.co.uk but it was quickly hijacked by those who used it to make jokes at the paper's expense (pictured right)
Some choice comments included: 'Even the Indie is better than this drivel'.
McDonalds also wanted to boost its profile online by using the hashtag #McDStories to ask people to regale stories of their hard-working staff - but it didn't go at all to plan.
Tweeters came straight back with their horror stories at restaurants, claiming they were given food poisoning, and that one burger contained a finger nail.
Search engine giant Bing also courted controversy when it pledged to donate to charity following a devastating Japanese earthquake in a stunt they believed would also boost their profile online.
Their staff tweeted: 'How you can #SupportJapan - For every retweet, @bing will give $1 to Japan quake victims, up to $100k'.
But instead all it got was a barrage of abuse from people convinced it was in poor taste.
Only this year coffee giant Starbucks put its foot in it on Twitter.
They were forced to issue an apology after it managed to upset people in Ireland.
It 'erroneously posted' a tweet which encouraged followers on there to 'show us what makes you proud to be British' - and outraged replies followed.
And sometimes companies get it completely and utterly wrong.
Condom giant Durex decided to run a PR campaign with the hashtag #DurexJoke.
In utterly disastrous fashion it decided to start the ball rolling with this joke to its South African followers - 'Why did God give men penises? So they'd have at least one way to shut a woman up. #DurexJoke'.
It went very badly for them from there.

----

(A bit Off-Topic, but every time I copied some text from there, it automatically appended

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2205975/Waitrose-Twitter-backlash-I-shop-Waitrose--I-dont-like-surrounded-poor-people.html#ixzz2MgdsTGfK
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

at the end. I wonder what technical trickery they are doing ;p)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2205975/Waitrose-Twitter-backlash-I-shop-Waitrose--I-dont-like-surrounded-poor-people.html 'I shop at Waitrose because... I don't like being surrounded by poor people': Internet jokers hijack 'posh people's supermarket' Twitter stunt Supermarket asks Twitter why people go there using the hashtag #WaitroseReasons but got some answers it will not have liked Majority of people who replied concentrated on its posh reputation and only a minority gave serious answers 'I shop at Waitrose because Clarrisa’s pony just WILL NOT eat ASDA Value straw,' one said Another said: 'I shop at Waitrose because the toilet paper is made from 24ct gold thread' Waitrose's PR team tweeted back that they enjoyed 'most of them'

We don't have guns and yet somehow aren't being robbed, raped and murdered nearly as much as you guys.

Actually, you are worse off.

The fact that you can't even defend yourself in your own home with anything, much less a gun, is a travesty.

Also thinking of the US as a generally violent place is wrong - violence is concentrated in a few ares of the country (like along the border) while any area that has populations as homogenous as countries in Europe having very little violent crime at all.

I've been all over Europe and there were many places I felt less safe than most states of the U.S.

The Texas bill is specifically in response to a hobbyist model plane with video camera catching this slaughterhouse polluting a Texas river. I find it infuriating that the response of a politician to a polluter being caught isn't to ask the local EPA to more tightly monitor likely offenders but to criminalize the act of reporting the pollution!