Slashdot Mirror

Normally I would agree with you, but the MOX issue is still up in the air, so to speak. Take a look at these, just text search down to "MOX". In fact, they are the first two Google News results on "MOX" at the moment.
http://www.bellona.org/articles/articles_2011/mox_reactor_coolant_loss
http://www.economist.com/blogs/asiaview/2011/03/after_earthquake

One more point about the press. It is using Chernobyl and Three Mile Island as comparisons, but have forgotten Windscale (1957). That disaster was widely reported at the time. The graphite reactor was more experimental than the operators realized. The geometry of these things is tricky.

Windscale was between Chern. and TMI in severity, so would be an instructive scenario of the after effects of a radiation leak.

Look at who started using Drupal in the last year or two: The Economist, The Grammys, Fast Company, The Examiner, House.gov (and all ~535 house websites) recently moved to Drupal, Energy.gov, WhiteHouse.gov, and here's a list of some 120 national governments using Drupal.

But hey, Drupal only has 2% market share of all sites on the web, is being adopted by government and corporate organizations at a maddening pace, and just had their first major release in 3 years. There's no reason why this Drupal shit should be discussed on Slashdot.

TFA is confused; the process can be used to make parts 65% lighter than traditional. The Economist has a much better article:
http://www.economist.com/node/18114221?story_id=18114221
Companies like EADS are using these methods with stuff like titanium to make parts the shape they need to be for their function, not the shape they need to be for their function + manufacturing considerations. That's where a lot of the weight savings come in. This bike is just a tech demo.

Interesting topical article over at The Economist that's basically saying the public sector workers earn less when they have a degree (e.g. District Attorney vs. corp. lawyer). Workers without degrees earn more (e.g. janitor at the District Attorney's office earns more than a janitor at a private law firm, unless the city has outsourced the work).

They've also been running articles for a while now explaining that people with public pensions are screwed. The States have been allowed to get away with bad accounting or rather far too lenient forecasting and so there's a huge pension liability So maybe public worker's lower wages won't be compensated for by better pensions.

And pundits say printed magazines are dead. TFA cites the kindle edition of the Economist as costing more than a subscription which includes the print edition and full access to the website. Of course it gives the costs in the UK. In the US the Kindle edition costs $10.49. I semi-regularly buy the print edition from Barnes and Noble for a few dollars less. Thing I notice though is that the Kindle edition seems to be monthly whereas the print edition is weekly. And I bet the web edition, which has the archives, is updated daily.

Falcon

so by your logic, Mubarak's a stand-up guy? i'm confused (not really).

in the world you live in people don't act out of short term personal interest? corruption is not an issue? the only rule in DC with respect to corruption is "don't get caught (in public)". corollary to that is "have enough dirt on enough other people to prevent them from making your corruption public." Examples of recent failures to follow this rule are Rangel and Cunningham.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Cunningham
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_B._Rangel

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/08/charlie_rangel

Alas, however, that is not as corrupt as America gets. Political scandals in Congress always seem to focus unflinchingly on the trees, without so much as a glance at the wood. Does anyone really believe that donors—especially corporate ones—stump up millions of dollars for candidates at each election without any hope of reward? Does anyone really think that the benefactors that presidents routinely appoint to plum positions are really the best men for the job? Is it possible for politicians to raise the sums needed to win important public offices in America without compromising themselves in some way? None of these questions, needless to say, will be answered at the hearing about Mr Rangel that the Democratic leadership is trying so hard to forestall.

Rather topical Daily Chart" over at the Economist last week. Yes, HTC have held their own, but look at poor Nokia. Totally squeezed out by Apple, who with a < 5% market share are taking > 50% of the profits. Looking at their downward spiral, it's clear that Nokia need something radical. It needs to be more radical than the Razr was for Motorola.

...the technology used to fuel democracy protests in Egypt...

The subtext of all this ubiquitous commentary is that technology invented in the USA is helping these poor plebs in less advanced countries to win their freedom and hence become more American-like.

It is, of course, a load of bollox.

The role of new media has been picked up by the mainstream western press and held up as if it would never have happened without this technology and hence allows the west to take credit for this uprising. The fact that the era of cheap food has come to an end, the demographics of the Arab world and the middle east has produced a massive generation of young people, and people are willing to organise by any means available including good old fashioned word-of-mouth doesn't have the same soundbite-friendly ring to it.

And legalizing everything and handing out heroin to addicts actually reduces drug addicts.

Don't expect Americans to actually take notice. They'll start imprisoning file sharers along with the drug users and promise it'll reduce piracy.

will become popular with other iPad magazine apps like the Economist

At $1 per issue I'd be tempted to subscribe to the Economist. Make it $2 for both electronic and print editions and I'd be more likely to subscribe.

Falcon

Interesting article over at The Economist analyzing how much cheap Chinese imports have saved Americans money by keeping domestic manufacturing in check. Americans like their goods cheap more than they like wage inflation it seems.

Wouldn't a better solution be to break-up the ISP Monopolies, just as we broke-up the AT&T Phone monopoly during the 1980s?

Trying to impose net neutrality is a good idea, but doesn't solve the CORE problem: Lack of choice for customers. They are treating the symptom rather than the root disease.

You don't by any chance write for the Economist, do you?

Seriously: It's times like this that I wish people in the US would get out a little more often, or at least admit that there might be other ways to do things than their own. There are tons of problems with the Internet in different countries around the world, but the US problem is (or rather, should be) the most easily rectified. Given the right conditions, there's no reason why ISPs wouldn't compete themselves back into a world-leading position in Internet services.

I'm a big proponent of Network Neutrality, in fact I'm on my (tiny little developing) country's Internet Governance steering committee. But I find it amusing and disturbing all at once that we're more able to let market forces drive Internet development than the US is.

This is the chart from the article, college educated wages are increasing, lower class wages are stagnant not declining (chart is in 2009 dollars): http://media.economist.com/images/images-magazine/2011/01/22/sr/20110122_src762.gif

I for one find it awesome that many people are trying Science, Nature, or PNAS, then, if rejected, go for PLoS ONE. Here's a case of an, IMO, awesome paper that was originally submitted to PNAS (may have to google the url to get through) but ended up in PLoS ONE. This is the sort of paper that shows the power of computer science applied to social science.

Bullshit. By age 30 I was making more than both my parents combined.

You're offering a personal anecdote to counter well-known statistics? You might want to reconsider how bright you think you are.

Dismal scientists who look at happiness often contend that, beyond a GDP per capita of just $15,000 (measured at purchasing-power parity), money does not buy happiness. Up to that point the correlation between the two is strong, but thereafter it falls away. If this is true then some heretical conclusions follow: rich America is no happier than poorer Brazil, so what is the point in people who live in rich countries working harder to get ever richer? Politicians should concentrate on maximising the mental health of their voters, rather than the size of their pay cheques. But plot the data another way, on a logarithmic scale where each increment represents a 100% increase in income per head, and the relationship between wealth and happiness looks more robust.

I think this is reasonable. The economists have been generally aware of a diminishing marginal return for each dollar you get for a while now.

A Drupal site doesn't have to look like anything in particular (especially a stock Drupal site with a blue theme and "Drupal devil" icon).

Here's

a newspaper: http://observer.com/
a magazine site: http://www.economist.com/
a discussion site: http://dailypaul.com/
a parody site: http://www.theonion.com/

And some more: 45 Drupal Sites Which You May Not Have Known Were Drupal Based

But this superficial study ignores the fact that every time Microsoft callously upgrades their Operating System without due diligence into compatibility problems with a trillion other bits of software and hardware out there, there are a gazillion compatibility issues to sort out. All the IT professionals run off to classes and seminars and have to retrain anyway, and then begin the mammoth task of ironing out all their unique business software routines, banging it all into shape and forcing it to work. It takes time. Microsoft upgrades are a major pain in the butt to the IT staff on any decent sized firm! Of course, they want this. It guarantees job security. But must the job itself be so painful?

To top it all off, Microsoft are being hypocritical here. They are warning against the change to Open Source software because of the costs in changing, yet ignore just how enormously they had just changed Microsoft Office 2007 when they introduced the Ribbon bar across all the old drop down menu's we used to know! Their rather experimental Ribbon was not just a view option leaving all the old commands and drop down menu's intact, but instead killed many of the old commands and routines users knew. It was an autocratic rewrite of the entire Office suite forcing everyone to go back to basics and learn how to suck eggs. The sheer human capital lost in this arrogant decision was astonishing! Workers with years of Office experience, who could format Word with ease and design beautiful Excel spreadsheets in their sleep, all suddenly found themselves powerless. As the old joke goes,

12. Every time GM introduced a new model, car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

I admit to being an idealist and dreamer, and maybe even a tiny bit lazy. Or is that sane? At a deep, gut level, I just feel that once I learn a piece of basic software like Word I should not have to re-learn the basics all over again. Call me lazy, but I don't want progress and new functionality to force me to have to relearn the basics. The modern world is complex enough, thank you very much!

So even though we are graphic designers and forced to use Mac, the one thing that keeps me wishing a Mac-ish Open Source revolution would sweep away all competitors is the fact that the Open Source model is more grassroots driven, and less likely to waste so much human capital on pointless 'renovations' to the software. Not only that, but it is Open source! The code is open, and available to all. Programmers can design stuff compatible with their Open standards. Microsoft isn't Open. They keep the latest editions of Word locked so that I can't open a .docx file in Open Office. We're talking about a monopoly here! So why on earth did the Australian government mandate support for a monopoly!?

I want the world's governments to accelerate their support of Open Source, not retard it. I like the fact that the

At this rate, there will be naked chicks in The Economist by 2014!

They're already there. And yes, I get it on my iPad.

Then how do you explain Microsoft, which has never had a very positive image, yet managed to dominate both the desktop operating system and Web browser markets?

Perhaps having no respect for the law helped?

Makes me think of "The marvellous Magyar microcars"
http://www.economist.com/node/17722676
Just as Apple/Stalin/Amazon try a "no cars" via Comecon or "store", Hungary went for the microcar.
Amazon should learn from this. The more "no" is screamed, books are removed, the more very smart people will enjoy finding a way around the brand and their legal enforcers.
The fun will start when errors slip past and Amazon has to reach in and remove every copy sold at the wrong price.
East Germany had to do that for a cartoon in its only satire magazine called Eulenspiegel in 1969. Every post office had to find and log every copy sent out with the local police. Whats the difference now? Amazon will get them all?

a government that's deeper in debt than any other government has ever been in all of recorded history

I'm not thrilled about the debt, but this is nowhere near true. Today, Japan's national debt is close to or has surpassed 200% of GDP. The average European country is up around 80% IIRC. We are around 65% or 70% - I forget exactly (read The Economist for good figures.) Our debt is presently still somewhat less than it was at the end of WWII. Of course, we were in much better shape to pay it off then than now for many reasons.

As a side note, one of the causes of the boom in the 50s was the Marshall Plan and other programs we used to rebuild the nations of Europe and all across the globe, that were destroyed in WWII. The Marshall Plan gave money to those countries, but they had to spend it on American goods - food, supplies, tractors, trucks, factory equipment, etc. which generated something on the order of $5 of economic activity in the US for every dollar sent over there (that's my number, which is just the typical fanout of a dollar spent on goods.) So (again, my estimate) the government probably received about $1 in new corporate and personal income taxes for every $1 sent overseas.

China has only just been growing for a few years now. For the people to really feel the effects it takes more years after the growth happens. In fact Their people are in better shape, a lot better, in 20 years. Poverty was at around 84% in the mid 80's. In 2005 it was 16%. Chinas middle class has also been rising. While they might not be at the levels of the western world yet, they are getting big and better with much investment by their own countries infrastructure is only going to help them more.

That fallacy is a fallacy... http://www.economist.com/comment/336777#comment-336777

My comments on moving beyond the general issues of limited demand, increasing productivity, and centralization of wealth:
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comment-392
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/#comment-402

It appears as though the priorities are shifting towards airplanes that are cheaper & more suitable for asymmetrical fighting: http://www.economist.com/node/17079443.

hey well they are going into debt too now http://buttonwood.economist.com/content/gdc

so it looks like peter is borrowing money from paul to have paul borrow money from peter

Yes, we demand you pay your fair share of taxes, for the services you consume.

Define "fair share".

Yes, we, the people of America, have done quite a bit to improve this land. The roads, sewers, electrical systems, not to mention all the services you get here, such as social security.

Roads were built by seizing other improved land. My subdivision, on the other hand, built its own roads and sewers, my electrical utility is privately owned, and I have little hope of ever seeing the money I "pay into" Social Security.

It is unanimous consent, because you consent by staying.

Not good enough. I was born here, and nobody can "consent" for me. Furthermore, you claim exclusive "ownership" of wide swaths of geographic area, and without easements, I cannot leave easily.

There is no exit tax in America.

There is an exit tax in America.

This is far from the first electric bus setup.

Around 100 years ago something similar was tried in London. The service collapsed in 1909.

With a bus fleet BTW you can do as they did 100 years ago and just swap out battery packs alleviating the need for long recharging times.

And the other problem is it takes two barrels of crude equivalent to manufacture one ethanol equivalent of a barrel of oil.

Citation, citation, citation, or its Bullshit! Here are som eof my own citations, which only took a couple of minutes to get and type up: Brazil has an energy returned on energy invested of between 8:1 and 10:1 for ethanol. In the US corn based ethanol may have an EROEI of about 1.1:1, just barely positive. While the EROEI for petroleum currently ranges between 16:1 and 20:1 ethanol does have a positive EROEI in the single digits.

Falcon

Wikileaks is guilty only of receiving the data and publishing the parts they feel are morally justifiable to make public, not stealing, and not espionage, and certainly not treason (they aren't even eligible to commit that one).

Well, thats kind of the problem.

Taliban Study WikiLeaks to Hunt Informants
WikiLeaks Comes Under Fire from Rights Groups
Wikileaks Fails “Due Diligence” Review

This could turn into a feedback loop. If enough informants against the Taliban and Al Qaeda are killed as a result of Wikileaks, it could have consequences in the United States or Europe.

The diplomatic consequences have already been considerable.

What motivates Assange?

In December, 2006, WikiLeaks posted its first document: a “secret decision,” signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, a Somali rebel leader for the Islamic Courts Union, that had been culled from traffic passing through the Tor network to China. The document called for the execution of government officials by hiring “criminals” as hit men. Assange and the others were uncertain of its authenticity, but they thought that readers, using Wikipedia-like features of the site, would help analyze it. They published the decision with a lengthy commentary, which asked, “Is it a bold manifesto by a flamboyant Islamic militant with links to Bin Laden? Or is it a clever smear by US intelligence, designed to discredit the Union, fracture Somali alliances and manipulate China?”

The document’s authenticity was never determined, and news about WikiLeaks quickly superseded the leak itself. Several weeks later, Assange flew to Kenya for the World Social Forum, an anti-capitalist convention, to make a presentation about the Web site. “ No Secrets

Assange the Anti-American

Manning supposedly had some encrypted chats with Assange prior to releasing any material. It will be very interesting if those come to light.

I think this sheds some interesting light on the Assange case in Sweden and its political connotations...

Your link shines little light on Assange's case. It reveals that the Swedish government has connections with the US to share anti-terrorist intelligence. It appears to have worked..... until last weekend.

It is possible that Assange will be hoisted on his own petard. Consider: Assange released stolen classified secret American military and diplomatic dispatches. Some of the dispatches released by Assange's Wikileaks showed the discreet connections between Sweden and the US to share anti-terrorism intelligence. As a result of the revelations, the Swedish parliament may have forced their Justice ministry to cut off ties to the US. As a result of severing the intelligence ties, the Swedes may have missed vital intelligence that could have prevented the suicide bombing. The Swedish Justice ministry is not amused by the bombing, and being forced to cut ties with the US as a result of Assange's revelations, and cuts no slack for Assange in prosecution. Ouch. No American pressure required - only the natural result of screwing with anti-terrorism intelligence in a time of widespread threat of terrorism, as Wikileaks has done repeatedly. (I think various people like to use the phrase - "blowback") We will be lucky if the recklessness of Assange and Wikileaks doesn't end up killing large numbers of people. Sweden may only be the first to see the result of Assange's handiwork, I doubt if it is the last.

“My attitude on this is that there are two areas of culpability,” Gates said on ABC’s This Week. “One is legal culpability. And that's up to the Justice Department and others -- that's not my arena.

“But there's also a moral culpability,” he added. “And that's where I think the verdict is guilty on WikiLeaks. They have put this out without any regard whatsoever for the consequences.”

Those consequences could be the loss of innocent lives, Gates said, and not just those of American troops.

“If I'm angry, it is because I believe that this information puts those in Afghanistan who have helped us at risk. It puts our soldiers at risk because they can learn a lot -- our adversaries can learn a lot about our techniques, tactics and procedures from the body of these leaked documents,” the secretary said.

Gates said that having an intelligence background, he knows that “protecting your sources is sacrosanct.” He noted that “there was no sense of responsibility or accountability” associated with the leak of information. WikiLeaks Guilty on Moral Grounds, (Secretary of Defense) Gates Says

How many terrorist attacks of any sort have taken place in Sweden or The Netherlands?

Sweden had its first suicide bombing this last weekend. The Netherlands have seen a number of killings, perhaps to some disturbing views: Dutch Muslim: 'Murder is normal'.

How many middle class persons of any country - people two or three times above that country's poverty line - have parked an explosives-laden truck next to a building and blown it up?

The middle class are strongly represented among terrorists and leaders of terrorist organizations. Here are just a few examples, there are many more:

“Doctor’s Plot” Trial Examines Unexpected Source for UK Terrorist Attacks
MOHAMMED ATTA - 9/11 Ring Leader
Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri (MD) - Al-Qaeda's theological leader

It might be easier if this was all about poverty and social safety nets, but that isn't the case. Increasing numbers of young Muslims born and raised in the West are taking up arms and bombs to kill in the name of what they call Jihad. They are being radicalized in Western Europe.

The poverty/terror myth

How many terrorist attacks of any sort have taken place in Sweden or The Netherlands?

Sweden had its first suicide bombing this last weekend. The Netherlands have seen a number of killings, perhaps to some disturbing views: Dutch Muslim: 'Murder is normal'.

How many middle class persons of any country - people two or three times above that country's poverty line - have parked an explosives-laden truck next to a building and blown it up?

The middle class are strongly represented among terrorists and leaders of terrorist organizations. Here are just a few examples, there are many more:

“Doctor’s Plot” Trial Examines Unexpected Source for UK Terrorist Attacks
MOHAMMED ATTA - 9/11 Ring Leader
Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri (MD) - Al-Qaeda's theological leader

It might be easier if this was all about poverty and social safety nets, but that isn't the case. Increasing numbers of young Muslims born and raised in the West are taking up arms and bombs to kill in the name of what they call Jihad. They are being radicalized in Western Europe.

The poverty/terror myth

How about we just stop killing and otherwise pissing off brown-skinned people?

You don't understand what is actually happening. Read Bin Laden's Letter to America. You will see that the actual demand isn't to be "left alone". Bin Laden's first demand is:

(Q2) As for the second question that we want to answer: What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?

(1) The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.

Bin Laden demands that we convert to Islam. He follows that up with demands that we ditch the Constitution, implement Islamic Sharia law, and do away with the separation of church and state. Among other things we would have to start killing homosexuals and adulterers, end the charging of interest on bank loans, put an end to drug use, pornography, and alcohol use, amputating the hands of thieves, and many other things. Dressing "immodestly" could get you whipped, which probably means burkas for women. Men would have to grow their beards out, or face a whipping. Crucifixion may be a required punishment for some crimes. Afghanistan under the Taliban was almost ideal to them. If we do not agree to this we can expect that his minions will continue to try to kill us.

It is not especially significant that Bin Laden issued that demand to the United States, in time every country will have to deal with it. Subduing the United States is just one step along their path, and they understand that it could take 500 years. Many countries have been attacked. Stockholm had a suicide bomber this weekend. (Thankfully it appears that one of the Stockholm terrorist's bombs blew prematurely and he couldn't get about five more planted - otherwise it might have been another Madrid, London 7/7, Bali, or similar bombing.)

What Do the Terrorists Want? [A Caliphate]

In nearly all cases, the jihadi terrorists have a patently self-evident ambition: to establish a world dominated by Muslims, Islam, and Islamic law, the Shari'a. Or, again to cite the Daily Telegraph, their "real project is the extension of the Islamic territory across the globe, and the establishment of a worldwide 'caliphate' founded on Shari'a law."

Terrorists openly declare this goal. The Islamists who assassinated Anwar el-Sadat in 1981 decorated their holding cages with banners proclaiming the "caliphate or death." A biography of one of the most influential Islamist thinkers of recent times and an influence on Osama bin Laden, Abdullah Azzam declares that his life "revolved around a single goal, namely the establishment of Allah's Rule on earth" and restoring the caliphate.

Bin Laden himself spoke of ensuring that "the pious caliphate will start from Afghanistan." His chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, also dreamed of re-establishing the caliphate, for then, he wrote, "history would make a new turn, God willing, in the opposite direction against the empire of the United States and the world's Jewish government." Another Al-Qaeda leader, Fazlur Rehman Khalil, publishes a magazine that has declared "Due to the blessings of jihad, America's countdown has begun. It will declare defeat soon," to be followed by the creation of a caliphate.

Good background here.

Ignoring them won't make them go away. They have their own goals - nothing we do other than covert to Islam or fight them will dissuade them. Trying to buy them off or deal with them only delays the inevitable. We are in for a long struggle that will be far bloodier for us if we aren't clear about it. Al Qaeda has a f

If you are going to indulge in this activity unprotected by real anonymity make sure you have a dysfunctional Trojan client installed on your hardware and feign ignorance, funnily enough very likely to be true if you are foolish enough to to attempt these kind of activities as a amateur, not a dysfunctional one of course.

So at a minimum hack your desktop wirelessly using a notebook with a boot from USB OS and software and have no computer books on the premises, also helps to have Tea party posters and Republican literature http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/12/science (the ignorance is more believable).

http://www.economist.com/node/9912566?story_id=9912566 "Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh and Mike Staunton of the London Business School examined* the record of 16 stockmarkets which were in continuous operation over the course of the 20th century. In itself, this selection showed survivorship bias by excluding the likes of Russia and China. The academics found that only three other countries could match the American record of having no 20-year periods with negative real returns. Other investors were far less lucky. Japanese, French, German and Spanish investors all suffered instances where they had to wait 50-60 years to earn a positive real return; in Italy and Belgium, the waiting period stretched to 70 years. It was no good following the famous advice to "put the shares in a drawer and forget about them"; the furniture would not have lasted that long." I'd recommend reading the whole article, but long story short, the belief that the stockmarket over the long run always goes up is based off nothing more than confirmation bias, really. So this strategy of investing in the stockmarket could actually come back to bite them in the ass. Although a one-off gift of, say, a billion dollars, might be "pissed away" relatively quickly, at least the money would definitely be used and reach those who need it.

The Economist summed it up well, I thought:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/11/wikileaks

"At this point, what WikiLeaks is doing seems like tattling: telling Sally what Billy said to Jane. It's sometimes possible that Sally really ought to know what Billy said to Jane, if Billy were engaged in some morally culpable deception. But in general, we frown on gossips. If there's something particularly damning in the diplomatic cables WikiLeaks has gotten a hold of, the organisation should bring together a board of experienced people with different perspectives to review the merits of releasing that particular cable. But simply grabbing as many diplomatic cables as you can get your hands on and making them public is not a socially worthy activity."

I think that releasing Secret material can be in the public interest, but if it is not revealing wrongdoing of some sort not all workings need to be fully public. The problem of course is how do we know if we can't look at everything...

http://www.economist.com/node/17577107

I watched a German documentary this morning about how the Euro was bad (German is not my mother tongue, but I am fluent and could understand everything). Some of the stuff in that was political dynamite: I don't think that politicians in Europe understand the powder keg that they are sitting on.

From the The Economist article,

The most concerned onlooker is Germany, which sees its credit lying behind the entire euro area. As ever, Europe’s biggest tabloid, Bild, captured the mood this week, asking “First the Greeks, then the Irish, thenwill we end up having to pay for everyone in Europe?

Oh, let's piss off the Germans . . .grand idea . . . in Europe, that always ends in tears.

Your bias is showing.

So, it is bias to recognize Soros is a billionaire and a leftist activist? Hmmm. OK, I'll meet you half way.

1.5 million people have died as a result of our attack on Iraq. ... many of them not from bombs but from starvation after the infrastructure needed for their water, food, and medical care was destroyed.

There is nothing within your links that makes the study 'almost certainly' anything.

Your bias and ignorance are showing. You also clearly aren't giving Saddam his due in neglecting and misusing the Iraqi infrastructure which has greatly added to the misery in Iraq.

How much better off would the Iraqi people have been if Saddam had built water, sewage, and power plants instead of a series of palace complexes, and smuggled luxury goods and weapons? The Iraqi people were not helped by the abuse of the Oil for Food program / scandal. We helped lift the yoke from the Iraqi people and are helping them rebuild their country. They are likely to end up far better off than if Saddam had continued in power, and probably with many fewer dead. (What's that? Oil?)

If that wasn't enough, they're more likely to be arrested than make an arrest. They're absurdly expensive: we're paying $200M per arrest, about 4 arrests a year, and the arrests are almost exclusively small quantity drug possession charges. Last, on the very small percentage of flights they're actually on, they're not even sitting among the potential threats, they're always cloistered up in first class, which makes them really really easy to spot and really useless in spotting anything suspicious.

Free speech is causing harm!

Just like yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater, or releasing the names and addresses of informants against Mafia hit men, or the names and locations of informants against Al Qaeda & Taliban cut-throats & beheaders like Wikileaks is doing.

Dead informants mean fewer people to pass on information on scum like Shahzad, who tried to bomb Times Square with a bomb like this.

Calling himself a Muslim soldier, Shahzad pleaded guilty in June to 10 terrorism and weapons counts. He said the Pakistan Taliban provided him with more than $15,000 and five days of explosives training late last year and early this year, months after he became a U.S. citizen.

Would even a Wembley stadium type attack convince even most people many on Slashdot that terrorism is a serious problem? I wonder.

Bin Laden's demand to the United States (The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.) is that we all convert to his brand Islam, change our governments to observe Sharia, or he and his minions will continue to try to kill us. Their ultimate goal is to conquer the world for Islam, not simply get the US out of anywhere, destroy Israel, or anything else. Al Qaeda believes it is justified in killing 4,000,000 Americans in pursuit of its goal. As it is, Al Qaeda's world wide body count must be easily in the tens of thousands by now.

Meanwhile, planning continues for the next Al Qaeda assault in Europe, following up on the successful mass attacks in London and Madrid, various assassinations, and the failed attacks in Germany, France, and other places. (Hopefully there is a well placed informant or two that will survive the Wikileaks releases.)

I wonder how many on Slashdot are members of the Internet Jihad, or are otherwise radicalized and trying to influence opinion?

“I imagine how the great jihad will take place, how the Muslims will win, God willing, and rule the whole world, and establish the greatest empire once again!!!” reads another Internet posting from Mr. Abdulmutallab.

This is not the secular, political language of resistance against foreign occupation. It is the language of apocalyptic salvation. It has nothing to do with Iraq, Afghanistan or the Palestinians, although countless young Muslims identify passionately with stories of perceived injustice. Radical Islam claims that martyrdom is the ultimate act of faith – the highest duty of a believer, next to the worship of Allah itself.

“

Sir –

You have a very persuasive argument, except you neglect one minor detail: You assume people will take the moral high ground when money is involved. They usually don't. Lawyers aren't any different than Joe Q. Public on the street, excepting that they dress better, make somewhat more money, and (hopefully) are somewhat better trained for their professional field than most.

It is true, and the theme of your post is pursuasive. There are numerous arbitrary and high barriers to entry to effective legal persuasion, not least of which is the need for a lawyer to effectively engage the system.

That being said, in my experience, even after explanation the vast majority of the population lack the ability to understand issues and form concise, sensible arguments on one side or the other of the issues (concise is important because the general response to a failure to understand issues is to verbose verbiage).

To most lawyers, the messes created by the self-represented are often impermeable to the discourse that leads to efficient resolution. That doesn't take away from the access to justice argument you put forward - the law should be clearer and easier to access - but at the same time it's often cheaper and more effective for people to pay a lawyer than self-represent (and that's why most educated people do). I think legal aid is a reasonable solution in many cases - but it has its drawbacks as well (it discourages early settlement, for example).

Finally, it's a central point of economics that specialization creates wealth. Having lawyers allows for more efficient use of the available time and energy of the population; it'd be absurdly inefficient for police, doctors, engineers, janitors, miners, etc., to spend the extraordinary amount of effort necessary to understand every facet of every issue of every dispute that occurs in their lives. Furthermore, the cost to the taxpayer of having the uneducated aggrieved senselessly stand in front of judges for hours bantering about irrelevant points is an enormous cost to society; I find myself regularly reducing well intentioned but misdirected efforts of clients down to the salient points. It's better that a client pay me to do this than the taxpayer, otherwise we create a moral hazard.

Additionally, your argument loses a lot of its intellectual purity and moral superiority when you make the reductio ad absurdum argument in paragraph two. Your post would have gone better without that.

I'm not sure it was absurd. You can see from those links what happens in the absence of a rule-of-law dispute resolution procedure: Violence. It's not absurd, it's not even hyperbole, it's the natural consequence of the demand for justice (in some form, to someone) and the absence of the supply of "justice" (or the appearance of justice, or a justice-like substitute).

Lastly, there is no transparency in the legal system and you're being intellectually dishonest to state otherwise: The legal system is incredibly complex and largely unavailable to the poor. When you have a system that necessitates the use of lawyers and attorneys in every legal preceding, to the point that attempting to advance a case pro se is laughed at by every judge and legal professional -- what then can we honestly say about transparency in the system? If the system requires experts that are licensed through the state to interpret or apply its rules, then the system is not transparent. In fact, it is utterly impervious to external examination, and any protests against it are swiftly dismissed as "uneducated" or rogue. The system is self-contradictory: Pract

No kidding. I went to the economist website. It sounds even worse! I'd bet much of this is also to do with minor drug offences

"there's been a similar surge in private prison construction as the inmate population has tripled between 1987 and 2007: Inmates in private prisons now account for 9% of the total US prison population"

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/08/private_prisons

Here is another article by them about rampant fraud in China's research. More power to Brazil and other countries that are legitimately improving their scientific establishment rather than faking it till they make it.

News for nerds who never took a biology course and are deeply suspicious of the so-called "sciences"

They didn't even read The Economist. In 2007.

That's just it - they haven't done anything to reverse the disaster.

They couldn't reverse the disaster. The only they could do was keep it from getting even worse with the stimulus money. I'm trying to find the GAO study where it estimated what the unemployment rate would have been if there wasn't a stimulus - it would have been much higher.

On the other hand, we're going to have to stop the Gov spending or private sector will slow down.

I strongly believe that if we followed the Republican way, we'd be really bad off. BUT, if the Reps were in power, they would have done exactly the same thing as the Dems. Why? Because like all politicians, they want to keep their cushy overpaid jobs.

Please explain how having 300+ variations of something impacts you personally in any negative way. And how in the world would you consider Linux or Open Office 'unfinished?'

It dilutes (floods) the marketplace and makes it harder to choose between them. So, instead, people... leave Windows/OSX on their machine. Heck, I did!

Monopolies are bad. Oligopolies are bad. However, on the flip side, marketplace dilution is bad.

Economically, Linux distributions are inferior goods that are imperfect substitutes in monopolistic competition with one another, drawing upon the same resources (namely, people).

Please explain how having 300+ variations of something impacts you personally in any negative way. And how in the world would you consider Linux or Open Office 'unfinished?'

It dilutes (floods) the marketplace and makes it harder to choose between them. So, instead, people... leave Windows/OSX on their machine. Heck, I did!

Monopolies are bad. Oligopolies are bad. However, on the flip side, marketplace dilution is bad.

Economically, Linux distributions are inferior goods that are imperfect substitutes in monopolistic competition with one another, drawing upon the same resources (namely, people).

Please explain how having 300+ variations of something impacts you personally in any negative way. And how in the world would you consider Linux or Open Office 'unfinished?'

It dilutes (floods) the marketplace and makes it harder to choose between them. So, instead, people... leave Windows/OSX on their machine. Heck, I did!

Monopolies are bad. Oligopolies are bad. However, on the flip side, marketplace dilution is bad.

Economically, Linux distributions are inferior goods that are imperfect substitutes in monopolistic competition with one another, drawing upon the same resources (namely, people).

There... you're doing it again.

The 'funny' part is in the fact that you are treating this as if it is a technical problem with a technical solution.
Namely, "let's wash our hands off this and give them a jailbreak button"-solution. It isn't.

Apple is a corporation - first and foremost.
THEN, after we establish that, we determine what kind of a corporation they are this day, month, decade... Are they more into technical business, artistic, musical, IP rights... etc.
Being a corporation, their main (possibly only) goal is MAKING MONEY. And that means make it NOW! FUCK THE CSR!

And there is no money in giving users a 'jailbreak button'. Not for Apple that is.
In fact, you can probably bet your ass that somewhere in the wast field of corporate spreadsheets there is a column (or several) that would suddenly dip into 'red' should Apple users get such an option.
Say... something like... 'planned number of apps/products bought through the app store per user'.
Apps/products they will no longer have access to as they have chosen not to accept the EULAs that give exclusive salesman rights to Apple stores and services.
And suddenly, with each (now thoroughly documented) 'jailbreak' - Apple starts losing money.
Sure, it's only perceived spreadsheet money to us - but not to the stockholders and bankers.

Apple's customers are not tied into Apple's services because of their own convenience or safety - they are LOCKED IN because that makes sure they don't spend their money somewhere else.
And a 'jailbroken' iPhone gives them exactly that option - to go somewhere else.
Besides, that stinks a lot like that obscenity that Google is doing.

Actually I've been lurking around here since the late 90s

Even funnier.
All it lacks is a "Back in my day..." or a "Get off my lawn!" to tie into a classic Slashdot meme.