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Not a place I'd want to move my family to or have any long term plans.........and it seems a lot of South Africans feels the same way.........

http://www.sa-austin.com/blog/2011/04/what-were-your-main-reasons-for-leaving-south-africa-263.html
http://digitaljournal.com/article/267776

The story is right here http://digitaljournal.com/article/322092. This is not a racial case but straight up the ability of an ex-judge father to pervert the course of justice via a corruption of the legal system. From cooked testimony by police to an assailant briefed by the criminal justice system to protect one of their own. It looks pretty much like if the shooter had been black and the victim white, the shooters connection to the justice system would still have allowed him to walk away free.

In a few more words, it should be noted that Thomas Jefferson got to be President without being a Christian.

I think Jefferson would disagree with you. He was a Christian even if he defined the term differently than most people. A few quotes from the wikipedia article on Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson believed that Natives should give up their own cultures, religions, and lifestyles to assimilate to western European culture, Christian religion, and a European-style agriculture, which he believed to be superior.

As a landowner he played a role in governing his local Episcopal Church; in terms of belief he was inclined toward Deism and the moral philosophy of Christianity.

In a private letter to Benjamin Rush, Jefferson refers to himself as "Christian" (1803): "To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence..."

The question is: would a declared and outspoken atheist have a remote chance of getting voted into some important office? Since atheists in the US are trusted just about as much as rapists and hated more than any other "minority" I think the answer is no way in hell

When companies can move production anywhere, they'll always use workers in one location as bargaining chips to get an even better deal for their next plant, so it becomes a race to the bottom for wages.

The old deal was "you want to sell to our people, either open a plant here or be prepared to pay duties."

Real wages haven't risen in 30 years. NAFTA was a mistake, not because the US and Canada and Mexico are "enemies", but because a healthy trade relationship involves give and take between all participants - and companies are no longer required to "give" in order to take.

Look at Caterpillar's latest move - record profits, they buy a locomotive engine manufacturer, get government grants, then tell the employees - take a 50% wage cut and also roll back all those benefits, or we're closing shop - we've got another place that is giving us money right now to train workers to do your jobs for $12 an hour in Muncie.

The NAFTA legislation only requires a 6-month notice to pull out. If multi-nationals won't play fair under the new rules, let them live with the old rules.

I recently looked for scientific articles supporting the claim that fish makes you smarter. It seems the scientific consensus on omega 3/fish oil is inconclusive at best. Here's an example of what I found:

"However, Cochrane reviews of these studies have indicated that most of them are observational studies, that hardly any RCTs have been done and that all studies have led to inconsistent and contradictory results that do not support most of the claims."
http://digitaljournal.com/article/284399

Here's another article with a list of contradictory studies. One of the studies was on alzheimers and showed no effect.
http://www.pcrm.org/search/?cid=2723

Maybe you should try getting more of your news from the Daily Show as well. It has been shown that Daily Show viewers are more informed than others. http://thinkprogress.org/default/2007/04/16/11946/daily-show-fox-knowledge/

Oldish study, there was another done in 2008 http://digitaljournal.com/article/259144 (still oldish)

Of course you would already know this if you watched the Daily Show. =)

I almost believed this story, then, with my superior intelligence (as shown by my browser, Opera) I realized that this story is probably pulled out someone's ass.

Someone with superior intelligence probably would've remembered the correlation between browser usage and IQ was shown to be an elaborate hoax.

(Yes I know you weren't being serious, but feel free to "whoosh" anyway)

Didn't bother to actually READ my post before responding huh? Kinda missed the relevant part? here I'll highlight it for you " you are looking at as much as a year and a half of backlog sometimes"

Now let me make this perfectly clear: The odds of finding a judge to let you walk out before they have actually scanned your PCs for porn involving children? Oh about ZERO. And even in my little state you are talking a year and a half backlog, in the bigger states you may be looking at 2 to 3 YEARS. Now that is before they even know whether you've done anything or not, okay?

And if you don't think innocents get railroaded if you say the magic word you might want to talk to Michael Fiola that was handed a laptop where the AV didn't work and had been rooted BY HIS EMPLOYER and when a routine check of the laptop turned up CP? He was fired, arrested, and it cost him $250,000+ to clear his name. Sure he can sue them now, good luck with that number one, and number two that isn't gonna bring back the two years in hell he suffered.

So tell me Jane, do YOU have $250,000 lying around to defend yourself? Can YOU survive without a job and with everyone calling you "suspected child pornographer' for the next 2 years? Because I can tell you if the answer is NO to either one you'll be looking at about a year and a half in county waiting for the scan, while getting a public pretender whose only "advice' to you is "plead guilty" so he can move on to the next loser. I don't make this nasty world Jane, I just live in it.

Yes but you see they are NOT gonna rule in your favor until they check your machine, after all for all they know you have several Gbs of child pron just sitting there. So you will get your hearing in ohhh...about two years during which you will be in county dealing with the methhead looking for trouble and the wife beater that needs a new punching bag.

Look folks I don't like this anymore than you but the problem is everyone here is making the classic is ought fallacy where everyone is saying "it OUGHT not to be like this!" and I'm simply pointing out that with our current hysteria and overloaded court system that is the way it IS right now. As I said my friend Adam is in the state crime lab doing this 5 days a week. I have lunch with him probably 3 or 4 times a year when I'm in that area, so I know what kind of time you would be looking at before they could even complete their investigation. And this is a small state that isn't having a budget crisis, imagine how long your wait would be in say California?

You don't want this? Then get off your butts and get out there! Go to the conventions and public gatherings where the state and federal congress critters show up and MAKE YOUR VOICE HEARD. Start a FB page pointing out that this "think of teh childrenz ZOMG!" bullshit has gone too far, get people to see any law that has the world children in it doesn't automatically make it a good law.

But for final proof of what I say I point you to the case of Michael Fiola that was given a company laptop turned out to be rooted. even though there were several viruses running on the PC and the company AV had obviously failed when a standard audit turned up CP he was fired, jailed, and ultimately had to pay over $250,000 in legal fees to clear his name. How many of you have a spare $250k lying around, hmmm?

So while I'm glad Mr Schneier has the money and the name to hopefully clear himself if this were to happen to him, for the average Joe on /. you'd be looking at 1 to 2 years in jail with no income waiting on the results and dealing with a public pretender whose only advice would be "plead guilty". I'm not making this stuff up folks, I wish I was.

Seriously: Oh, hai! You have won a free TV! Please go to 5245 Public Safety Circle to claim your prize!

Don't laugh, it's happened.

Perhaps we should. Or better we must. Terrorists are indeed not stupid. They see that many people enter the country illegally, so if they really want, they can get in.

They already have experience in other types of bombing. Public transport or a market are often great places. Take any place where people are together and they could easily form a stampede as described here and that was 63 people, just because somebody yelled 'Bomb'. Put somebody there with a REAL bomb and Fox News will spread the panic better then anybody could do.

How about doing some research?

I may not have had all the details correct, but as I said, it was something I heard on the radio. To be more accurate (now that I've bothered to look deeper into it) a grandmother in Iraq was part of plan to single out women, have them raped, and then she'd "console" them by talking them into blowing themselves up, rather than letting themselves be murdered by their families for the dishonor of being raped. There are reports of a similar plan being used against boys in Afghanistan where they are raped by men and then giving the option of blowing themselves up and getting into heaven, or being executed for having "participated" in gay sex and going to hell.

While they're by no means the only state with budget problems, it is kind of coincidental that we're seeing this from Texas in the midst of a budget deficit. With $10 billion in lost revenue, they're starting to get creative like demanding university offer a $10k bachelors degree. Oh the abuse of the educational system, both lower and higher education. It's probably going to come down to just cuts across the board. My friends from Texas have often bragged about it but Texas doesn't have income tax so it's sort of asking a lot to do all this on 6.25% sales tax. You can make promises like "no new taxes" and "more tax cuts" but it looks like they'll run Amazon out of town on this one. Well, they were right that taxes hurt businesses! Bye bye Amazon!

They already have a cloud city featured in the movie Avatar. Now it is going to be 'cloud computing city'. What is next? 3D cloud computing city?*

*Stupid /. will not let me write in Chinese!

No one is calling Assange a terrorist or a combatant of any form, legal or illegal.

You would be wrong about thatwould be wrong about that. Examples from the horses mouth: http://www.house.gov/apps/list/hearing/ny03_king/kingsupportsprosecutionofwikileaks.html http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/301603

the real problem, actually, is that the existing, legal phone system inside armerica's prisons is grossly corrupt. prison phone system providers are given a monopoly, charge exorbitant rates (a 630% markup over normal residential prices) and then actually kickback money to prison officials and politicians to keep their sweet contracts (57.5% of profits to the state of new york, for example).

my source for these numbers is here

add to that the fact that even if an inmate can get a prison job, the wages are usually in the dollar-or-less per hour range, sometimes as low as 20c/hr, and you have a situation where the legal phone system is financially unusable. the result is that the economic impulse to get a black market cellphone -- even a $200 one -- is strong.

if america really wanted to stop black market cellphones, they'd cancel verizon's prison phone contract and offer reasonably-priced access to phone systems to inmates.

my source for the prison wages info is: here

I hear this bullshit all the time from Americans trying to justify widespread gun ownership and it's real crap. Guns don't make killing easier 'in some ways' - guns make killing easier period. It's the first killing weapon where you don't have to be within physical contact of your victim to kill them, and it's accurate

Not so much.

The incident would NOT have happened in a unionized workplace because she wouldn't have risked her job for resisting the abuse. And the above case is not covered by any employment laws at all, thanks to the at-will employment doctrine, you fucking retard. The initial phone caller, with baseless accusations of theft, would have been more than enough to cost her her job.

This case was not an isolated incident as there are dozens of reported cases of fast food managers taking advantage of their female subordinates. It is the tip of the ice-berg. It happens because they either comply with the manager or get fired.

She stopped when asked. Watch the video again. After he says "If the bubble touches me, you're going to be arrested for assault," no more bubbles are seen.

Right. Which is why I pointed out that it's interesting that there is no footage of her immediately prior to her arrest. According to this article, she wasn't even arrested for the bubbles.

However, according to CNews, Winkels [the lady] confirmed that she wasn’t arrested for blowing bubbles but instead detained for wearing a backpack and having a lawyer’s number written on her arm. She was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit mischief over $5,000.

So are people really upset that she was asked to stop or are they just misinformed due to suggestive editing in the video?

detained for wearing a backpack and having a lawyer’s number written on her arm.

How. Can you. Justify. ARRESTING PEOPLE FOR THAT!? What the fuck is wrong with you? What kind of twisted, fucked up upbringing made you so blindly submissive to authority that no matter how obvious it is that they are grossly abusing their power, you will keep saying that they are right to do what they do? You disgust me, you fascist pig, you're really a horrible, horrible person.

She stopped when asked. Watch the video again. After he says "If the bubble touches me, you're going to be arrested for assault," no more bubbles are seen.

Right. Which is why I pointed out that it's interesting that there is no footage of her immediately prior to her arrest. According to this article, she wasn't even arrested for the bubbles.

However, according to CNews, Winkels [the lady] confirmed that she wasn’t arrested for blowing bubbles but instead detained for wearing a backpack and having a lawyer’s number written on her arm. She was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit mischief over $5,000.

So are people really upset that she was asked to stop or are they just misinformed due to suggestive editing in the video?

http://www.emaxhealth.com/1275/deep-cuts-health-care-services-uk
http://www.dailypaul.com/node/140810
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/295111
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1253438/Mid-Staffordshire-NHS-hospital-routinely-neglected-patients.html?ITO=1490

My source for torture not working is several years of various readings, news articles, and so on. Sorry, I don't have a library saved, but I've been hearing it over and over for nearly the past decade. Here's what a google search for "torture truth" yields, among other things:

Washington Post: 5 myths about torture and truth
- Gestapo had better results from tips and informers, and failed to break (with torture) many.
- between 1500 and 1750, French prosecutors tried to torture confessions out of 785 individuals.... the number of prisoners who said anything was low, from 3 percent in Paris to 14 percent in Toulouse. [note: that's three percent said ANYTHING, let alone the truth]
- the CIA's own 1963 interrogation manual explains that "a time-consuming delay results" -- hardly useful when every moment matters.
- you can't reliably train to resist torture

Washington Post: The Torture Myth

Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq during Desert Storm, and who was sent by the Pentagon in 2003 -- long before Abu Ghraib -- to assess interrogations in Iraq.... says Herrington, torture is simply "not a good way to get information." In his experience, nine out of 10 people can be persuaded to talk with no "stress methods" at all, let alone cruel and unusual ones. Asked whether that would be true of religiously motivated fanatics, he says that the "batting average" might be lower: "perhaps six out of ten." And if you beat up the remaining four? "They'll just tell you anything to get you to stop."

That's from someone whose job has been to extract information, and he says that torture doesn't work well.

Perhaps you don't like the Washington Post. Let's look at the BBC, reknowned as one of the better news sources in the world. (This was found by googling for "torture effective".)

BBC News: The truth about torture
This would actually seem to support your claims: they note several torturers who feel it's very effective. I'll accept that as a counterpoint. I'm including it so that you don't claim that I'm not linking things which disagree with what I expected to find. (There are several articles/pages about harsh techniques having yielded valuable information.)

FBI Interrogator says cookies are more effective than torture

On the other hand, there are lots of pages about torture being ineffective, too:

Information Secured Through Torture Proved Unreliable, CIA Concluded

When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods.... The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.

In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions.... Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.

(Bold emphasis added by me. The "results" yielded by torture were valueless, whereas what he said before they tortured him was useful.)

Former Head of the Defense Intelligence Agency Says Torture Produces Unreliable Information
http://www.youtube.

But, I'm not really surprised the lengths these "fake companies" will go. Money is a precious thing in this world and if you can't 'seem' to make it legally, you may just turn to crime. Even people who would have never considered doing something like this may be driven to new heights in desperation.

However, some of these people may or may not be the desperate, dirt poor, starving, "means-to-an-end" people I portrayed but, take a minute and think of the things you would probably do if there was truly, no other way you could think to survive in this messed up little world.

We already do.

Ok, ours don't have guns (probably), but they do fly.

Yet!

We already do.

Ok, ours don't have guns (probably), but they do fly.

Half of South Africa's young have AIDS from rape:
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/264771

Half of South Africa's young have AIDS from rape
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/264771

ROFL!

Given a choice between paying attention to television talking heads, or paying attention to scientists, I'd go with the scientists.

Amusingly, the same site notes that corporations are taking global warming seriously-- if you go by the market-theory, I'd say that this is pretty serious.

Well, not necessarily.

I keep hearing from various media about "dire economic impacts" and such. I don't recall the nautical shipping industry panicking like this over the fact that they can't reasonably send ships through a hurricane, and those happen much more frequently than volcanic eruptions of this magnitude. I get the impression that the rarity of this event that the airliners should be thankful for is also the very reason they are overreacting to it.

The problem is that we have become dependent on the 'ready today' ability to move people and goods around the world. Sixty years ago there was no FedEX overnight service that you could reliably depend on. The 1950s Tulip sellers in Holland sold their tulips to customers within a few tens of kilometers of their fields. Today, there are huge international shipping operations that depend on being able to ship those same tulips half-way around the world in less than 36 hours. Florists in Kenya are losing an estimated USD $2 million every day sitting on product that is literally rotting before their eyes.

I'm sure you can find many more examples of industry that is time sensitive and losing out due to this problem. Some examples that come quickly to mind are factories that depend on regular replenishment of components. There is a trend for smaller fabrication houses to stock only enough product to complete a fixed amount of orders. It's more economically reasonable for these small houses to stock only what they need and overnight or 2day more parts as they need them than to stock an indefinite supply. These companies are sitting idle and unable to fulfill contracts. The economic loss that potentially creates is huge. Imagine for a second the cost in lost future contracts, late penalties and loss of sales for a company who's model depends on being able to ship items around the world in less than two days. Now multiply that by all the countries that ship to, from and over europe. That's starting to get expensive.

Don't forget about all the stranded people that aren't getting their work done either. I'm staying at a hotel in Norway right now and I'm surrounded by oil industry people that are stuck here, trying to get back to the UK, France and the USA. They're trying their best to do their work, but there's only so much you can do from a lappy in the hotel loby. You can bet those folks are costing their companies some serious down time. Not only are they not doing their work, they're costing the company money staying in the expensive hotel, eating expensive food. That adds up over 7 million estimated stranded people.

Then there's the the airlines that are already hurting due to bad management, expensive fuel and a struggling economy. They have labor contracts they are obliged to fulfill. Just because their employees aren't flying and servicing, they're still entitled to their salaries. Loan and bond payments are still due even when 90% of your aircraft are sitting at an airport taking up space. You can bet every municipality that runs an airport is still expecting the airlines to pay their airport leases and gate fees even though no passengers are flying. Sum all that up and you're WAY in the red for this month.

Shipping is a slightly different ball game. When you put your stuff on a boat and ship it to Norway from New Orleans (we just did this a few weeks ago), you expect it to arrive at some point in the future. You don't expect it to arrive today, or on 28 April. You expect it to arrive at some point within 6-12 weeks (that's what the shipping company quoted). If you build your business model around that type of speed, you build it very differently. You can bet that a company that relies on shipped goods over airfreight has a much bigger buffer of raw materials and product. When a boat is delayed due to hurricane, crowded port, or whatever, it has an impact, but a much smaller impact. You can bet that a steel mill doesn't rely

or we might use our tectonic weapon on them :O

This is a common myth. Police officers are *rarely* killed on the job.

Once is enough to make the rest of them kinda skittish

1
2
3,4,5,6
7
8
9

In less than 10 years, from one police force, in Canada. There have probably been more, but I'm getting depressed searching for them.

Interesting, at least one source is reporting that Greenbaum has been let go: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/282386

There are actually a couple of related interesting stories. There was the accidental contamination of vaccines by bird flu http://www.naturalnews.com/026571_Baxter_New_Zealand_health.html And then there is the fact the same company filed a patent for h1n1 1 year before it broke out http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/276194

When did doctors stop washing their hands? My son has some health issues that cause us to see doctors at least once a week. I don't recall ever seeing a doctor or nurse enter a room without first taking a handful of alcohol foam and cleaning their hands well with it. Hand washing isn't a very effective means to prevent spreading the flu:
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/279963
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/09/24/hand.washing.helpful/index.html

Well, yes there is: http://www.mail-archive.com/meteorite-list@meteoritecentral.com/msg77530.html So, a meteorite, or if you read the BBC papers, a "space rock." Let's at least pretend we care about the news, not being our usual, fitful selves.

Sex outside of marriage? You can be damned well sure she ought to be arrested.

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/246259/Saudi_Arabia_Rape_victim_gets_200_lashes

Unfortunately, much of NASA is focused on building things, not doing things. Look at the argument over the repair capabilities that made the Hubble a success : Nasa is letting go of those capabilities. The new Manned Space Flight System - Orion - will not have the capability to repair future Hubbles. In my opinion Hubble is the biggest success NASA has had since Apollo, and as before we are going to let the capability die.

The builder types of would respond "its cheaper to build new ones," except, of course, we more or less won't. The current paradigm means that we will launch a telescope, have it fail, and then wait 20-30 years until another of the same type can be orbited. And, there seems to be no real effort expended on new types of propulsion and certainly no effort on new types of manned propulsion.

The Russians, meanwhile, view everything they have ever launched as an asset. You bet that they are going to use their ISS modules as long as they can, and maybe just a little more.

How long will it be before these containers use a self contained nuclear fusion based generator?

I think he meant portable nuclear fission generators.

If you're a Sprint customer and received a $14,000 bill for one month (for a supposed unlimited plan), you'd probably be saying the same thing about Sprint too. Personally, I just think both Cogent and Sprint deserve each other.

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/251093/Report_Women_Lie_Better_Than_Men

I wonder how many of the McCain|MILF 2008 shirts have been turning up at rallies...

It's not even Palin's BS count that bugs me, it's how utterly moronic I find her stated views regardless of their honesty. I wouldn't trust her to run a bakesale. She hasn't been getting all that much face time on Australian TV, but there's been enough to make me shudder. http://www.palinaspresident.com/ might be a bit tongue in cheek, but not nearly enough for my comfort.

I'm not necessarily much of a Biden fan either, but he does get experience points and I like that he's one of the least wealthy senators in the country on top of that. My (admittedly underinformed but who cares, I'm foreign) opinion is that he looks like he'd be a solid administrator, as opposed to Cheney's role as shadowy puppetmaster.

That piece is written with a very strong bias, and I was very disturbed over it until I read other news sources. According to other sources, the police did indeed have a warrant and they confiscated items such as "PVC pipe, chicken wire and duct tape. The RNC Welcoming Committee wanted to lock themselves together in human barricades called ''sleeping dragons.'' Also included in the raids were knives, flammable liquids, five-gallon buckets of urine, homemade caltrops (which are devices used to puncture bus tires), bolt cutters, sledgehammers, protective padding and plastic buckets that were cut into shields."

Now while I do think this raid was extreme and unconstitutional, it isn't nearly as terrible as salon.com made it out to be.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/259223
http://www.thedickinsonpress.com/ap/index.cfm?page=view&id=D92SNM600

As an engineer I am appealed at the desperation of the Israeli engineers who now make and modify weapons that serve no purpose other than to inflict massive civilian causalities and create psychological terror. Those engineers need to be held to account same as those who make the bomb vests for suicide bombers.

Quotes from the links:

Today, driven largely by the US, online poker is close to a $2 billion industry.
Online poker revenues have grown from $82.7 million in 2001 to $2.4 billion (all numbers US) in 2005; last year, more than $60 billion was gambled on poker sites; and every day, 1.8 million players toss their ante into the virtual pots of the Internet.

Until now, U.S. laws governing Internet gambling have been ambiguous, leaving the way open for the $12 billion online industry to flourish with American customers.

I know about that way. The other article was about some way of processing multiple images and isolating the best parts of all images without a correction signal.

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/223593/New_Lucky_system_gives_clearest_pictures_of_space

I think this uses more images (I get the impression this new system might have four images to average).

If you don't want to (or can't) sign up, perhaps a review is what you need.

A look inside SpiralFrog...

Inside SpiralFrog Beta

SpiralFrog... Mixed Reviews

And many more.

It was a British judge who didn't know what websites were.

Google is the answer.

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/117879/Coupl e_faced_charges_for_busting_a_speeding_cop

He withdrew the complaint.

Girls giving out their email adress on slashdot!!!??? Whats next cats and dogs getting married.... :o http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/53689/Dog_an d_cat_allegedly_mate_and_reproduce_Weird

If you look at the whole picture, evolution is unprovable and ID is unprovable, which means that to whichever wing you choose, you choose so on a BELIEF. ID vs Evolution is not about proving the origin of man anyway, its about TRYING to prove that there is or is not a God.

You urge us to go to the website of Kent Hovind, a tax evading Young Earth Creationist who's favorite arguments are so weak that even other creationists say he makes "mistakes in facts and logic which do the creationist cause no good". Hovind is a professional debater who depends primarily on one tactic; he throws out questions (most of which are irrelevant) so quickly that his opponents cannot answer all of the within the alloted time. He This tactic would fail in a written debate where the opposition had time to answer all his questions. That's probably why hovind dislikes standard debate formats and refuses to participate in online debates.

• Hovind's fake challenge
• Tax evasion and fake PhD's
• Hovind debates at UTK