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From ABC News:

The district has not yet written its policy on how the cameras will be used, (Deputy Superintendent Robert) Voles said, but the list of people who can view the tapes is limited.

Only a school principal, vice principal, superintendent, school board member or board attorney can view the recordings, he said. A parent, student or teacher would have to go through court.

So, have a judge friendly with the school system, and you have a way of stonewalling any legitimate counterpoints if Johnny and Susie get into trouble.

Water. We're running out as is, especially out in the midwest where it's all going to feed cows. The only way we could survive this long would be to be a planet of vegetarians. I'm all for it, but try convincing Texas that it can't eat meat anymore, even with impending doom down the road. Good luck.

Firstly... I don't know what planet you've been living on, but 3/4th of the earth's surface is covered in water. Desalination is not that difficult, and right now is mostly expensive due to the energies involved (clean cheap energy will change this). Combine this with the recycling technologies I mentioned (fully closed-system living/working units) and the ability to grow meat without the rest of the animal, and I think you have most of this covered.

A tremendous amount of the water we use is for things like toilet/shower/laundry and all of that will be easily recycled (locally even) in the future (technology exists now, just not practical). You need to factor this into your thinking.

I work at NASA as I said in my post and a lot of our technologies have plenty of uses on this spaceship we call earth.

Cheers,
Justin

"The future looks bright to those who know the way." - myself

Scratch Pac Man the movie off the list. Apparently another immortal is already on it.

Let's point them to: Let's see . . . Disney World "Pirates of the Carribean"

"The old "Pirates!" game

Tropico 2 "Pirate's Cove"

I'm sure you get the idea. . .

[and not some ultra-capitalist western cowboy-regime driven company who has come up with the vaccine. Thank's to the last part of Soviet, this vaccine may come to use even for the ones who need it the most (poor African and Asian countries) and not only the people who can afford it.

You couldn't possibly be talking about the same ultra-capitalist country who wants to give a 25 billion dollars to Africa while it's country is in the middle of a recession could you?

Yes, the big evil US empire that allows foreign workers to take US jobs via the H-1B and other liberal immigration/foreign labor laws, and who's pharmaceutical industry charges it's own citizens more money for prescription drugs than foreign countries. If an HIV vaccine were found in the US, the US citizens would pay the most for us.

Yes, the ultra-capitalist western cowboy-regime driven nation has it out for you.

I'm not convince his light skin is entirely because of vitiligo. Wouldn't it make more sence to dye the light patches. Anyway, here's a good read about all his excuses. The nose jobs was just to help him breath better. Riiiight.

You mean the way the Arizona Public Service (electric company) leases their unused fiberoptic capacity ... they installed the cable for their own communications needs, but it apparently comes in only one size: big.

See here: for further informaton on how the power companies are doing it without having to ruin radio.

http://disneyworld.disney.go.com/waltdisneyworld/p arksandmore/entertainment/entertainmentindex?id=DD DisneyQuestENT&bhcp=1

AT&T Wireless has had this for quite some time. It's called find-a-friend, and it lets you locate and be located by other AT&T GSM customers that you specify. I do have a GSM/GPRS phone with AT&T and I've read a little about the feature, but never used it.

And besides, maybe our intelligence saying it was Osama was wrong. Our intelligence about the WMD in Iraq was wrong

I don't want to go supertechnical on your logic argument here, but what evidence do you have that our intelligence about WMD in Iraq was wrong? Just because it has not been proven to your satisfaction does not mean that it was wrong.

We know that a scientist was ordered to bury parts of a gas centrifuge in his flowerbed.
We know that Iraq buried entire squadrons of fighter jets to prevent their discovery/destruction.

And yes, there appears that there may have been a misstatement about Iraq+Niger+Uranium, but British Intelligence stands behind the connection. But even if this was a mistake, and there was no attempt to buy uranium from Niger, it does not mean that Iraq had no WMD.

Assertion: Some Cats are Black
Your Refutation: This cat is not black, and you have shown me no black cats, so therefore there are no black cats.

Now your assertion may turn out to be true, that the intelligence was wrong, and there were no WMD, but you are making it in absence of any evidence that it was actually wrong, and that there are definitively no WMD.

We do know, definitively, that Iraq at one time had WMD, and that the inspectors who were trying to eradicate it were withdrawn after repeated interference by the Iraqi government, but they could have secretly destroyed it all without telling us or proving it to us.

Just as, last night, all the black cats on the planet may have suddenly expired.

You've been leapfrogged -- the kernel already showed up in one movie, and the boot loader was in the title of another. I'm waiting for the Torvalds & Stallman stuffed toys any day now... :-)

Ahh...Slashdot syndrome. You really think it works that way, don't you? You probably think radio is still about the music. You have some reading ahead of you, young padewan.
In particular, an article called
Radio - pay for play?. But more than that, just search google for "radio payola", and see what you can read. Most of the money made by ads that isn't profit goes into operating costs.

PS - it scales downward like that, independent radio stations with enough of an established listener base get sent almost all (if not all) of their music by labels for free, while lesser ones still may have to pay for their music.

And you pay them pennies for the right to play the song versus the payola the artist and label have to cough up to get a song played. Yes, payola is alive and well, just not as blatant as it was in the fifties. Read more and more.

The record labels should have been paying Napster, and should be paying Kazaa, Morpheus, et al for the promotion they provide. Instead, this promotion is free, and they are looking a gift horse in the mouth.

He did have a mullet. And even scarier, look whats coming next summer.

Well, for one thing, it'll actually be "Digital".

My mom, despite a reasonably technical background, bought a Kodak PLUSDigital camera -- which sounded to her like a "disposable digital" camera. In reality, it was simply a standard, film-based camera with CD-ROM processing included in the price. Of course, the price was several buck$ higher than she would have paid for a regular disposable camera.

I don't think she's gotten around to developing the pix yet, so I don't know how well the concept worked.

Meanwhile, Ritz' idea sounds like a winner:

* I can get rid of the obvious "oops" pix, even without the LCD.

* I'll be able to afford $10 bucks a pop a lot easier than $200, for the small number of pix I take.

* Developing onto both CD and 4x6 hard-copy is better than I could do with a $200 camera, anyway.

* By the time I get serious about taking digital pictures, someone on Slashdot will have hacked together an interface. If they can hack Furby, a "simple" digital camera can't be that tough.

By the way, guys... when you hack the interface, don't forget the IR mods!

For the life of me, I can't remember white collar workers ever striking.

Tell that to Boeing.

I don't know much about microwaves, but this story at ABC News seems like a pretty amazing idea (Summary: cover swaths of the moon with solar panels and beam the energy back to Earth via microwaves). What's 150 billion in the grand scheme of things?

There'll still be the idealists who scream about defacing the surface of the moon, but it would be relatively low maitenance (no elements to damage the panels, except for the occasional meteorite) and wouldn't take up precious space here on Earth, where things can grow or live. As romantic as some of us can be, the moon is still just a big chunk of lifeless mafic rock.

Anybody actually have an idea how well this would work?

They did the same thing during the world series if Barry Bonds managed to hit a home run into a target in the San Francisco Bay. Pac Bell park is right on the water, but the target was pretty far out.

Link: http://msn.espn.go.com/mlb/playoffs2002/s/2002/102 1/1449087.html

For those too young to remember - PK are initials of late Phil Katz, the original author of PKZip, a pretty unusual character. Here's a link about how he died.

AFAIK the company is now run by his mom pretty much.

One of the best pieces of evidence of this is the anchor for ABC news in the US, Peter Jennings, who grew up in Ottawa, Canada.

I'm not saying that the only important quality for a network news anchor is their voice, I mean, hairdos are important too. It is just a majorly important thing.

How this can be used to explain the oft-made-fun-of accent of Tom Brokaw, one of the other two major network anchors, I don't know.

OK lame to reply to my own post.. but...

Apparently, a last minute flood of absentee military votes was enough to flip the Florida result in Bushs favor (I mean, all other fraud known and not know notwithstanding).

Seems to me if they do implement this 'vote electronically and transmit over the internet' system the it might be the vote riggers idea of an ideal voting system. Note espeically that unlike other attempts to compromise voting this system is not limited to one-state-at-at-a-time type attacks, just compromise it once (OK so you have to be an insider, say at the Pentagon) then inject votes, almost impercitbly to tip the scales of the election in only the key states.

I'm not saying this happened last time in Florida, but we better watch out in case it happens next time, because if that happens, bye bye Constitional Democracy.

Not sure if military types (being mostly poor and black, but carrying guns) tend to vote mostly republicrat or demicon.

This is the same software that was actually used in the 2002 Georgia elections.

With suggestions, post Florida 2000, to further expand the roll of electronic voting in the next presidential election, this could be an issue of some concern. You can download the source code ('borrowed' from an ftp server left accidentally open by Diebold) and decide for yourself.

Republicans would no more rig an election than they would, I dunno, commit larceny.

Republicans don't do anything wrong, ever. Especially if it has political traction.

If they do do something wrong, well then, the Democrats did it first, which makes it excusable. The Republicans just did it to ensure their political survival, see. Or it's because the ends justifies the means. Abortion is murder, Jesus is coming, and liberals are commie terrorists. Anything is justifiable if you're purpose is higher.

Its one of the harded things to get right. Simple operations, at least to a human, are very difficult for automated systems. We're very close to having the data sensory equipment for such robots, but we're still not there in terms of control software.

There have been plenty of robots performing complex tests, but they have problems with real world situations. And no, I don't think the US Navy's attempt to run a frigate with an NT server counts!

i think the spokesman Metz is in a tizzy because the team he wants to work for is having a lousy season.

America (the U.S.) doesn't have a monopoly on odd lawsuits. Our neighbors to the north can get odd, ay?

This is an article about a woman suing for "wrongful birth", and she is the one that was wrongfully born. I wonder what the remedy would be if she won?

(On the first hole of this past week's British Open, Tiger Woods lost the ball from his tee shot.) He ended up losing by two strokes.
ESPN says:

Of all the aspects that amaze about Tiger Woods' lost tee ball on the first hole of the championship, the one that fascinated me most was that his playing partner, Sergio Garcia, ostensibly, was helping him search.

Yeah. Right. And Saddam Hussein is currently helping the search for weapons of mass destruction.

As charades go, this scene was right up there with Bruno Kirby shouting out, "Baby fish mouth" in "When Harry Met Sally."

In fact, Sergio may damn well have found that ball, and then done what Judge Smails would have done to Al Cverik's ball in the rough -- driven it so far into the shaggy brush of Kent with his foot, its next stop was the core of the planet.

When the marshal eventually found Tiger's ball 30 minutes later, I wanted to do a quick forensics test to see if there was any Adidas golf shoe residue on that bad boy.

Considering Tiger missed the playoff at the Open by two shots, Ben Curtis might owe Sergio's foot 10 percent of that check.

I also suspect there aren't many laws against whacking golf balls around or smacking rocks with a tennis racket. Both of which are activities I participated in as a kid.

Coincidentally, as a kid (14-ish) I walked around residential neighborhoods with a .22 rifle to and from the local "open space" (before it was a "park", where you can't even pick the flowers now) and never did anything stupid with real guns. This was mid 70's California.

We were once stopped by cops and they just said unload the guns and go home. heh. Those were the days.

Maybe Bram Cohen has no problem with piracy and yet he did BitTorrent in a manner that was not conducive to piracy because he has more than one interest. I am very interested in human rights also, but when I wrote an XML parser for Python human rights were not foremost in my mind. BitTorrent allows the redistribution of information. That furthers Bram's goals even if the information distributed is always legal. For instance safety activists could use BitTorrent to redistribute videos of a pilot falling asleep at the wheel.

There's a completely different risk imposed by another kind of electronic device: video cameras. The risk is that passengers will tape the pilot sleeping at the controls.

Well, actually, there are a lot, though they don't JUST target CEOs, they also target other members of the work force that piss them off. Even though they may not be as effective as mass terrorists like those seen on (and after) the dreaded day two years gone, they too get the job done. Now which type of terrorism do YOU think is more popular?

"How many individuals in the WTC had 'bad behavior'?"

Depends who ya ask, now doesn't it? I know we heroize the poor souls that were needlessly killed on GWB-day, but I think that the terrorists flying the planes thought that there was indeed 'bad behavior' going on in those buildings, mostly in the oppression of a group of people that they believe deserves to be masters of the earth. And if you look at their situations, you see why! Sure, we think it's awful for them to kill a few thousand civilians, and it is, but they see daily US bombings in Iraq (even before our current war started), economic sanctions that kept several Arab states poor enough that starvation was a primary killer of millions of innocents, not to mention the fueling of warfare between Arab nations with weapons contributions, etc. But I rant. Think of it this way -- are the acts of that day more or less justified than the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

The people who dropped the A-bombs were not considered, terrorists, they were 'heroes,' they 'ended the war.' But they killed hundreds of thousands of innocents. That makes the WTC attacks look like chump change. And yes, they do think they are at War.

Sorry to rant -- comments like this just show a one-sidedness of knowledge that I refuse to ignore.

Sensors detecting radiation. A nuclear bomb is a gamma source that can be detected at a distance unless heavily shielded. See also here. Chemical weapons also may leak signature compounds, which can be detected with the appropriate equipment--though not quite as sensitively.

IANA law enforcement official, but I would be very surprised if there were not already radiation monitors (fixed and mobile) in all of the largest U.S. cities. (Have another article.) They are definitely already installed--and catching innocent people--in New York, and I'm sure that they are in the D.C., too.

Unprecented?
J. Q. Adams v. Jackson - 1824

Well, the CIA Got Uranium Reference Cut in a speech the President gave in October. So why did it appear again in January, despite what the CIA had already told the administration?

I really prefer a president lying about a blowjob he has got, then muddeling the issue of Iraq and the war on terror. But then I have the moral of a liberal...

How about this: ABC News

First, it says Walt Disney's "The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh."

Second, look harder at your target before being a critic. Looking at one web page is not research. I took me two clicks to find this.

I'll argue the Frank Lloyd Wright example of genius.

The guy is a moron whose disasters should never have been let off a drafting table.

Nice article specifically on Falling Water falling apart.

His son was much more the genius as the inventor of the Lincoln Log.

This seems to give no credit as far as I can tell. Disney would gladly have you believe that it is "Walt Disney's Winnie the Poo" (quoted from that page) rather than "AA Milne's Winnie the Pooh." As time goes on, and a generation or two passes, less and less kids will associate Winnie the Pooh with Milne, and more of them will think of Pooh as videos and stuffed animals that they can buy at the Disney store in their local mall.

There was just now a segment on ABC World News about The [Grateful] Dead's new model for making money off music. They record their shows every night, take orders from fans at the show, have their audio man master it, ship it off for duplication on CDs, and have it in the mail to the fan within about three days.

Instead of the $1/album typically made by signed bands they make $8-$10 on the three-CD set that sells for $22. They've turned a quarter of a million dollars on the CDs from their performances at Red Rocks over the past couple of weeks.

Not mentioned at the link, but Peter Jennings added that the music companies don't like being cut out of the loop like that.

Nah. Grover Norquist is pushing for Reagan to replace Alexander Hamilton. I suppose it's appropriate, given that prudent fiscal management is passé.

I'm sick of the news media ignoring Iran just because the government and their goons won't let any Western media take pictures. There were protests around the world and all the media report about Iran today is those unfortunate twins!

Here's the information on the satellite uplink jamming. The jammed TV stations include NITV and Azadi TV.

For information on today's protests in which 100,000 came out in Tehran, there is information from the BBC and the Jerusalem Post.

First-hand accounts of today's events have been posted on sympathetic websites like Iran va Jahan and SMCCDI.

Information on Internet censorship can be found here (parrotting the Iranian government line that it was all about sex) and more objective articles here and here.

c)Pro-American regimes are what we're fighting against in many cases (or the degredation of Americanistic countries).

A noble fight. But please don't lose sight of the rest of humanity's wish for even a smidgen of the developed world's freedom.

Suddenly hanging chads aren't so silly anymore...

Soon we'll have to worry if the software does a commit between voters, or caches everyone's vote 'till the end of the night.

Which is worse: having a real-time record of votes cast so the losing politician can dredge up voters just before closing, or keeping it like it is now with all the votes uncounted (and presumably unaccountable) until the end of the vote...

NASA has been looking at new shuttle designs for quite a while, but like anything involvingthe guvmint, it takes a loooong time.

You can see one here.

I amazes me how often the bureaucrats in the Intelligence Comunity ignore what they already know.

The nth Country Expiriment proved that once knowlege is available to the public, and similar results can be obtained without knowlege of the methods used in previous successes.

If this grad student could compile this information, then so could sombody else, and it's probable that sombody already has.

This information should be used to point out the weaknesses inherent in our infrastructure, and show where this infrastructure needs to be diversified. IMHO, attempts to improve security by centralizing comunications and power distribution are doomed to failure, and will only make us weaker. Micro supliers and home based power generation would make terrorist attacks against the power grid inconsequential. The weaknesses in comunications infrastructure can probably only be cured by creating a third alternative (community high-band?) to the cablemodem and telephone company monopolies on delivering service.

For the right price, you can just buy the data from Platts - power line rights of ways, water pipes, etc. Once you have the data, you can throw it into any GIS software (purchased for the right price). Example: you need to get the natural gas pipline information to the road repair crews, so when they dig they're sure they won't hit anything... all this data used to be open, because noone thought you could do anything with it.

So what if I know where the local 500KV transformer yard is located over the 3rd hill on the left, who in their right mind would want to damage it? Then we realized how many people in the world really aren't in their right minds... I'm not complaining that this data should be bottled up again; what was really lacking was the chain of custody of who accessed the data, and for what purpose.

http://espn.go.com/moresports/news/2003/0704/15767 45.html

Get rid of the airplanes and airports:

Hire Chicago's Mayor Daly for a night to fix the airport ala Meigs Field.

Keeping your brain focused and in gear is the real problem with cell phones and other gadgets.

"It's not just the physical distraction of holding the handset -- there's the intellectual distraction of holding the conversation."

"...cell phone conversations using "hands-free" devices are just as likely to cause dangerous distractions as those conducted on hand held phones."

"There is a very substantial decrease in the amount of brain activity, the amount of neural activity allocated to driving, while you are simultaneously listening,"

Hang up and drive.

"A pro-spammer bill, backed by the big media sites including Microsoft, passed through committee."

from abc7news: "According to an Assembly analysis, the spammer could be fined $1,000 per unwanted e-mail or $1 million per incident, whichever was less, plus actual damages to the recipient. An incident is defined in the bill as "a single transmission of substantially similar content." But Givens complained the bill would allow a judge to reduce the penalties to actual damages and $100 per e-mail or $100,000 per incident, whichever was less, if the advertiser had taken "due care" to prevent the transmission of unsolicited ads. ", under the bill that passed. Doesn't sound very pro-spammer to me even under the reduced penalty.

What's better is that the second link (as of this moment) is from KGOs website, and it reads "Consumer-Backed Anti-Spam Bill Passes". Now, if you follow the link (go against your normal /. instincts for just a moment, please) the headline says "Consumer-Backed Anti-Spam Bill Fails".