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Georgy was tragically mauled by Arnold supporters after she tapped one of them in the side of the head with her book when they wouldn't move to the other side of the stage on cue.

She reportedly begged the first paramedics to tell animal control officers to put the half-dozen 13-year old boys to sleep as soon as possible, because "they're such fucking dorks, God."

Spokesmen for the Arnold campaign explained that "Arnoold votahs are intehnsely terrytoryal, and if one of their persanal spahces is compramahsed, they'll attack the intruder like abooncha gohdam pyrahhnas! Hooo! Looka the teeth oon thaone!"

Art Bell discounts the Schwarzenegger campaign's explaination, and suspects the boys may be under the control of Libertarian Party satellites launched from their secret clubhouse deep in the woodlands of New Hampshire.

In other news, Yassir Arafat dropped dead. But he's better now.

After the break: Could Matt Drudge look any more like a retarded fisherman in that damn hat of his? Jesus, Matt. They have gay guys now that can help you with that.

A good article on the actual meaning of the word "ironic".. It'd have to be one of the most mis-used words in English.

The article says this asteroid was about 8 meters in diameter. Anything below say 50-75m is just going to burn up - you do not get any real damage until around 100m (such as the tunguska asteroid you mentioned).

The only ones the astronomers are -really- worried about are the ones whose diameter can be measured in miles - these are the only ones that would become 'planet killers'.

Although we aren't seeing asteroids 8m across until just after it has passed, it is pretty amazing they are able to find an 8m wide dark object against a pitch black background 88000 miles away at all. These are not unusual, we are just seeing more of them now. They are no danger to us, so although we can see them we can ignore them if we like.

With their detection systems able to see these tiny objects at that distance, we are likely (in at least the very near future) to see the mile-wide-plus planet killers months and even years before they come anywhere near us - we would have plenty of warning.

All we would then need to do is sent a probe there equipped with rockets to push it aside. Exploding asteroids (as in the films) is the wrong idea, this just would send a lot of large fragments towards us (still large enough enough to do lots of damage and numerous enough to hit much of the earths surface, even if no longer massive enough to kill the planet).

A much better idea is over time to gently push it out of the way over the course of a few months. You don't need a lot of force if you do it over time, even a Robin Reliant could manage it. Since we will soon have the ability to detect these asteroids years before they arrive, this would give us plenty of time to do this.

Just place a few dozen ion engines on one side of the asteroid, hit the switch and a few months later it'll be passing a few thousand kilometers to the side of us, rather than hitting us.

Also, we're currently above the galactic disk and moving away. We aren't likely to see any increase in the number of asteroids any time soon for any reason other than our detection systems improving so we see more of the ones already out there.

If you don't know what that is or what its aims are then you don't know squat about the current cabinet. It's also not a secret; in this 1998 document signed by, for example, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, you can see the whole sorry plan for the current mess in Iraq: the ludicrous overstatement of Saddam's threat, the insistance that the UN need not be heeded if it gives the wrong answer, and the ever-present concern about oil. Total bullshit from start to end but it's bullshit written by the people now running your country.

Cheney is just a stooge, he has no ability or area of intrest beyond geting contracts for the people that put him in place.

Rumsfeld is slightly different in that he really is just an evil bastard. After shaking hands with Saddam he then helped arm him with various biological and chemical weapons. There is a copy of Saddam's shopping list at the end of this Congressional transcript but the original Senate Banking Committee report used to be available on line, but seems to have become buried beneath Google results to references to it. Rumsfeld lied in the above transcript when he said he had no knowledge of all this. In fact, he arranged the loans from the US to Iraq to pay for the bioweapons (which is where the Senate Banking Committee comes into it). The reason this was done was to help Saddam kill Iranian soldiers in the Iraq-Iran war, it was not even pretended that this would be a deterent: this was for actual use in the current conflict. The CIA later sent over specialists in biological warfare to help "calibrate" the weapons.

This is the real reason they were so sure Saddam had WMD: Rumsfeld had seen the receipts. The assumtion was that he would never have got rid of them, whereas the reality was that he had, probably because he knew the inspectors would one day have to be let back in and he thought that the US would have to listen to those UN inspectors even if it didn't believe what it was hearing. He was wrong!

Before you vote next time, perhaps you should find out about the people involved. Its not that hard if you are actually interested in looking.

TWW

If you don't know what that is or what its aims are then you don't know squat about the current cabinet. It's also not a secret; in this 1998 document signed by, for example, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, you can see the whole sorry plan for the current mess in Iraq: the ludicrous overstatement of Saddam's threat, the insistance that the UN need not be heeded if it gives the wrong answer, and the ever-present concern about oil. Total bullshit from start to end but it's bullshit written by the people now running your country.

Cheney is just a stooge, he has no ability or area of intrest beyond geting contracts for the people that put him in place.

Rumsfeld is slightly different in that he really is just an evil bastard. After shaking hands with Saddam he then helped arm him with various biological and chemical weapons. There is a copy of Saddam's shopping list at the end of this Congressional transcript but the original Senate Banking Committee report used to be available on line, but seems to have become buried beneath Google results to references to it. Rumsfeld lied in the above transcript when he said he had no knowledge of all this. In fact, he arranged the loans from the US to Iraq to pay for the bioweapons (which is where the Senate Banking Committee comes into it). The reason this was done was to help Saddam kill Iranian soldiers in the Iraq-Iran war, it was not even pretended that this would be a deterent: this was for actual use in the current conflict. The CIA later sent over specialists in biological warfare to help "calibrate" the weapons.

This is the real reason they were so sure Saddam had WMD: Rumsfeld had seen the receipts. The assumtion was that he would never have got rid of them, whereas the reality was that he had, probably because he knew the inspectors would one day have to be let back in and he thought that the US would have to listen to those UN inspectors even if it didn't believe what it was hearing. He was wrong!

Before you vote next time, perhaps you should find out about the people involved. Its not that hard if you are actually interested in looking.

TWW

Have such things happened in the USA in recent times?

This caused comment within days of the event. (-: It seems that this guy got the message too late. :-)

The UK has 80% of the best tidal sites within the EU..

As of 27 June, it would appear that the Crown Prosecution Service was still deciding whether or not to charge the employee, but she was fired.

If the story was made up, then no official secrets were leaked, and there would be no case for the arrest or any charges.

Of course, being hyper-paranoid, it's possible that the story was made up within some government agency, which would still make it an official secret...

--

the US didn't plant the bugs, a leader in competition with China's leader planted the bugs. This was admitted to by the Chinease.

This article indicates that 45% of Americans believe in young earth creationism

Damn ! He's at it again ! Jean Marie, won't you ever learn ???

Thomas Miconi-

(PS: More seriously, the man seems to be called Alex Serge-Vieux. Never heard about him, but if his credentials are genuine, we can say two things:
1) He's probably not the most stupid manager on this planet (Paris-Dauphine and La Sorbonne means "good", especially if it's on the teaching side of the desk; same thing for Le Monde).
2) His political inclinations seem to lean on the center-left. He served as a top civil servant under Socialist governments only. In the French system, this speaks a lot.

for example, they quote some statistics about how teenagers engage in sex talk or meet up - but um, with dodgy old men, or simply other teenagers? It hardly surprises me that plenty of teenagers engage in sex chat or meet up with other teenagers, but the context of that survey implies it is the former.

I think the point they were trying to make was, if you talk to someone in a chatroom, you have no real guarantee that they are who they say they are - if they say they're another teenager, they might be another teenager or they might be a dodgy old man pretending to be a teenager. Obviously the vast majority of them really are other teenagers, and most of the time everything works out just fine.

When you arrange to meet someone, you can do so carefully (meet in a public place with lots of people around, go with parents or friends so you're not alone, and make sure you have a way to leave if things turn out not to be as you expected) or you can do so recklessly ("Hey, my parents will be out of town this weekend and they think I'm staying with a friend, here's my address"). If children aren't aware of the dangers, they won't make wise decisions. Parents can't always be there, which is why it's important to teach children how to make wise decisions on their own.

"There is a real moral panic underway in the UK about this now"

Oh, do give over.

For one thing the UK *is not* the tabloids.

They try to foster a particular opinion as being national whether it is or not, and the Sun recently dropped the ball bigtime with their 'Bruno Bonkers' headline that they had to reprint because it was insensitive trash.

The whole deal with 'peadophiles' in the UK is that we don't have the association with 'Terrorism' that the US has. We've had terrorism for so long that it doesn't affect us. Kiddy Fiddlers, on the other hand, are this scary lurking menace that haunt the internet, street corners and *live in your town*.

The Brass Eye Peadophile special nailed this concept completely, and the flak that surrounded it was indicative of the PR value of this kind of fear.

The British public, generally speaking, have a bit more cynicism.

It is interesting that many slashdotters often warn against the encroachment of IP laws on software development, yet seem to be blind to the same issue with regard to agriculture.

Isn't the right to grow food as important as the rigth to develop software?

If a program can be contaminated with foreign IP, does the same problem not also apply to a field of crops?

How beneficial is it to the third world to have the IP rights to the food they grow owned by multi-nationals?

"We should commercially introduce GM crops, they say, because we need to feed the poor.

When this argument was first used aggressively by Monsanto in the late 1990s, the poor had other ideas. African delegates from Ethiopia to Burundi, Senegal and Mozambique, at special negotiations of the UN food and agriculture organisation "strongly" objected that "the image of the poor and hungry from our countries is being used by giant multinational corporations to push a technology that is neither safe, environmentally friendly, nor economically beneficial to us""

It is probably a good time to post this:

Bush covers up climate research (again)

well to continue your analogy, I'd be pretty horrified if my neighbour, and her mates, reduced my house to rubble, and then handed control of my land over to some local street thugs who then started growing opium on it, raping me, my wife and kids, and banning any women/girls in what remains of the house from going to school.

Not quite an RFID story, but it shows the beginning of the end of any pretense of personal liberty.

Here's a story to freeze your soul: 500 paedophiles to be tracked by satellite tags.

We give up a little liberty, over and over again. And soon there is none left.

I've made the following statement before on Slashdot, but it bears repeating.

First, we tag the pedophiles, real and imagined. This is seen as justified and is welcomed.

Then, we do it "for the children". We tag the children, for after all, they are being kidnapped continually, no? (No, they are not. And any kidnapper would cut out the tracker anyway.)

Then, we do it "for our collective safety". After all, are you for America or for al Queda? Patriot or traitor?

Then, corporate businesses will use trackers for people on the job. After all, they aren't entitled to their jobs, are they? It's a free market, and businesses don't owe people a job. If people don't like being tagged, they can move to another job, no? (No, eventually they can't. Try to get a job without taking a drug test, or having your credit report requested).

Eventually, credit card companies will require one be tagged to obtain a credit card. After all, we aren't owed a credit card, are we? It's a free world, and you don't need a credit card to live.

The military will demand trackers. Just because.

You'll be required to wear a tracker to obtain a passport.

And someday, only trackable people will be allowed into public venues. Or political rallies. Or just to drive. Because people will be used to it, they will look at anyone who objects as a hippy drug using liberal.

Think not? Try refusing a drug test sometime.

We can't allow they to establish the precendent. Listen to an old dude: once you let the bastards get that foothold, they never surrender until they own you. Power is always gained for power's own sake. People who like power are never satisfied with a little taste.

We won't be a damned bit safer with universal human tracking. Any advantage we get by tracking a lost child will be nullified by the ramifications of corporate or political malocontents being tracked and neutralized. We will not see the results of having our every move watched, because they will not be observable. What could happen, WON'T happen because people will know they are being watched. A devastating cloud of suppression is being laid down.

And remember: Bill Gates, GW Bush, or Ken Lay won't be trackable, you can bet your ass. Only the relatively powerless will be under the watchful eye of our corporate bosses.

• "war on terrorism protects everybody"
  Okay, fighting terrorism is good. But is he doing an effective job? And who is benefiting? Take the Iraq war -- we were told that we had proof that Iraq had WMD, and it turns out that that was false, and the Bush administration knew it. So we are spending US$4 billion dollars a month for a war that hasn't increased security. (see cost of war) And who is making money from the war? Just Cheney's former company, who he is still being paid by. (see Cheney paid by Pentagon contractor).
  
  And, by the way, terrorists tried to murder government officials (Democrats) and media with anthrax. The administration doesn't seem to be making any progress in tracking these people down, now, have they?
  
  
• "the tax cuts and rebates were for everybody (even people who don't pay taxes):"
  Okay, first of all, the "people who don't pay taxes" bit. The administration was misleading here. Rebates were given to those who didn't pay INCOME taxes, but those people still paid PAYROLL taxes. And because there is a ceiling for payroll taxes, the working poor pay a higher percentage of their income in payroll taxes than rich people do.
  
  As for the tax cuts and rebates being for everyone, who gets by far the most money? Answer: the rich. Take the dividend tax cut. The rich own lots of stock and therefore highly profit from this. The poor and middle-class don't. The administration tried to claim that more Americans than ever own stocks, but didn't mention that most Americans own stocks IN RETIREMENT ACCOUNTS, and this won't be affected by the dividend tax cut. And take the cut in the estate tax. The estate tax only affects people who have more than a million dollars in assets: the rich.
  
  And, by the way, if you want to stimulate the economy by giving people money, then economists agree that you should give the money to the poor, not the rich. Why? Because the poor will spend it on goods (food, clothing, housing...), which in turn will help stores and manufacturers. The rich will just save it, which is not nearly as effective.
  
  
• "the faith based initiative benefits the downtrodden":
  How does the faith-based initiative help the downtrodden? All it does is funnel money that would have previously gone to non-church related charities to churches. In fact, it make things worse, because faith-based institutions are free to discriminate against people they don't like.
  

Simple arithmetic is all that is necessary here. If I had $10 and you had $10 and you then gave me $1 I'd have $11 and you'd have $9 i.e. I got richer you got poorer. Whilst this doesn't take into account money supply, nor inflation, I'm sure you understand the fundamentals now, and are probably a more deft economist than Milton Friedman, so you can now go and ruin the economy of the european country of your choice.

...another 23 Bill Gates's and they could throw together and build a space elevator :))

--> click! ;)

"Everyone who complained that Microsoft is so evil for the lack in quality of code they put out, raise your hand so we can heckle you. "

I wonder if the average MS heckler imagines the software development wing of MS looks like Gringott's Bank. I don't think it occurs to them that the programmers there are human.

More seriously, they were in a field in Maryland.

As you can see here.

Why is it that all interviews online are posted as question, answer, question, answer...

It's such a boring, lazy way of writing. Why not do what grown up journalists do and actually write something?

Why is it that all interviews online are posted as question, answer, question, answer...

It's such a boring, lazy way of writing. Why not do what grown up journalists do and actually write something?

Imagine some sort of transceiver device in your automobile which automaticaly changes micropayment tolls just for going down certain roads.

I take it you mean something like this proposal or this item that were recently put forth in the UK?

At about a third of the way along the cable - 36,000km from Earth - objects take a year to complete a full orbit.

dodged like this?

No.

Why do you say that? I'm not even sure whether the Beatles have any stake any more in Apple Records. It was a financial disaster for them. And in fact they don't even hold the copyright to their own songs (guess who does). They didn't gain anything from "intellectual property rights" as far as I can see.

* Where did all the UN Food for Oil money disppear to?
Food for oil, I don't see much money in that deal. No money can't disappear.

Well, you don't walk into a grocery store with 10 gallons of unleaded and trade it for food. Oil gets sold, money buys food, food goes to Iraq... or at least that's what was supposed to happen. The UN got a nice "administation" cut off the top, but no one seems to know exactly where those billions went. And as much as people like to point the finger at Haliburton and claim they're a bunch of war profiteers its interesting how no one brings up the TotalFinaElf scandals and their involvement in some very, very shading dealings in Iraq.

* How much business did France and Germany do with Iraq in violation of UN resolutions?
None that I know of. Of course I have seen a lot of this crap on public forums or frog-bashing sites. But no report of those on any remotely reliable source, not even on Fox News (only exception is an op'ed column by William Safire in the NYT, which allegations have been denied by the US administration itself). Given the unusually aggressive stance the Bush administration has taken against those countries, I guess that any credible lead on that subject would have been leaked to the press in no time.

See the TotalElfFina articles above. Plus, the Germans and the French were trading *a lot* with the Iraqi gov't in the late 90s. It would be interesting to see just how "liberal" their interpretations of the sanctions exactly were. I think its been underreported.

* How the "sactions are killing millions of Iraqi babies" stories were bogus.
Economic sanctions are a useful tool to destabilize a regime or prevent it from endangering its neighbours but you have to admit that the population ends up paying the highest price to them. It might eventually be worth the price (South African Apartheid regime) or not (Cuba comes to mind). In the case of Irak, I guess that the food for oil program somehow prevented the most severe famines but I don't know of hard facts. Do you have them?

This assumes that if there was no oil for food program there would have been "severe famines" which also seems to be a pretty unsubstaciated claim. What looks like what happened was Saddam hyped up and played the "starving" baby angle for all it was worth. The "food" he got for his oil didn't make it to the Iraqi people. If you average $5billion a year in aid and spend $13million on healthcare, that's a lot of money unaccounted for.

* How much of the Arab and some European press were getting paid by Saddam
Come on! You're not saying that any media that voiced opinions differing from the official White House point of view were sold to Saddam, are you?

Not at all. What I am saying is that there were reporters/editors in the Arab press who were getting money (commissions, bribes, call it what you want) from the Iraqi gov't to file reports that were sympathetic to Saddam. There was speculation that some European editor/reporters were pocketing cash. That, as far as I know, hasn't been proven, but the point of this entire /. article is about stuff that hasn't gotten a lot of attention. There's been no followup as far as I know.

And which countries do you target in "some European press". Given your post's general tone, I guess you include France and Germany. But what about Spain, England or Poland. Even thou

Check out: http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmeric asDefenses.pdf

This has been quite disturbing to everyone I've talked to about it... My wife flat out refuses to talk to be about it because it makes so much sense and is so upsetting... This has gotten a lot of press lately. Check out:

911 and the Bush Administration
The Guardian

Those with Weblogs should contribute to the weblog project mentioned on Metafilter about this:
WHO were you?

Unfortunately, it just makes more sense that we provoked these arabic countries to either let us build a pipeline to feed China with Oil, or we would do it by force. "A carpet of Gold, or a carpet of Bombs..."

And with regard to the junk fax laws, someone sued fax.com for 2.2 TRILLION dollars about a year ago, and has the faxes to prove the case.

Hilarious quote from him: "I'd be very happy if we just got $100 billion."

fax.com claim to send 3 million faxes a day, and have been in operation four years.

Fun with calculator time: That's 4,380,000,000 faxes. That's 6,570,000,000,000 dollars, which is coincidently almost exactly the national debt last I checked.

Great point! That's why you should keep an eye on some foreign media sources. While the US may lead the modern world it also blinds all its own citizens; get a second opinion, check out The BBC, CBC, and The Guardian

Maybe not in the US but internationaly there have been many incidences. (BTW the list is not complete. At least one big incident, when a German Lufthansa jet was hijacked to Somalia in the 70s, is missing.)

Just goes to show that you should not listen to the prevailing wisdom but think out of the box when trying to anticipate terrorist activities.

Outside of the US there was enough evidence that hijacking plans has always been an option for terrorists.
(BTW the list is not complete. At least one big incident when a German Lufthansa jet was hijacked to Somalia in the 70s is missing.)

"Yep ... better to save those precision weapons for more lucrative civilian targets, like the Chinese embassy."

Or journalists' hotels and offices

Come on, guys, everybody knows that the spam capital of the world is the beautiful Boca Raton, Florida: in spanish and in english.

China ha nothing to do with this.

Yep ... better to save those precision weapons for more lucrative civilian targets, like the Chinese embassy.

You po' Merkins miss out on the great Steve Bell, still going strong in the Guardian (though unfortunately not on their website). Look out for his "If..." and older "Maggie's Farm" strips. It's a shame you've also missed out on his recent interpretations of Bush Jnr. - truly savage :-)

Not "proof", but ever is.

Here is an article ,originally publushed in The Observer, that makes a good case for U.S. involvement in the Venezuelan Coup D'etat that overthrew the Chavez Presidency.

It is fair to note that the article is accurate in it's disparaging remarks about both Otto Reich and Elliot Abrams.

The similarity between the ecconomic and historical events leading to the April Coup (US interference with trade, propaganda published by White House spokesmen in the US media, and demands that the democraticly elected President of Venezuela step down) are very similar to the events that occurred before the assassination of Allende in Chile.

This may not be the acual smoking gun, but this is.

US military personel and Intelligence Officers have been getting very upset when ordered to take part in poorly planned exercises that don't match ideals they joined up to defend.

two down. I may have to take a break soon, I do have a life you know.

Not "proof", but ever is.

Here is an article ,originally publushed in The Observer, that makes a good case for U.S. involvement in the Venezuelan Coup D'etat that overthrew the Chavez Presidency.

It is fair to note that the article is accurate in it's disparaging remarks about both Otto Reich and Elliot Abrams.

The similarity between the ecconomic and historical events leading to the April Coup (US interference with trade, propaganda published by White House spokesmen in the US media, and demands that the democraticly elected President of Venezuela step down) are very similar to the events that occurred before the assassination of Allende in Chile.

This may not be the acual smoking gun, but this is.

US military personel and Intelligence Officers have been getting very upset when ordered to take part in poorly planned exercises that don't match ideals they joined up to defend.

two down. I may have to take a break soon, I do have a life you know.

If you must fall into the role of jingoist and ideologue by demonizing publications of vaguely defined enemies, at least try to be a little more accurate... "women aren't allowed to drive"--indeed! But only in the US supported regime.

And in other news, bacteria still run the planet.

And the US Administration has so obviously learned their lesson that they would never dare interfere with another South American country ever again. Yeah Right!!!

Mmm. The study looks somewhat skewed to me. It's in the interests of the US dept. Justice to present the figures in the best possible light after all...

Given the much more concentrated nature of British society, I would expect (all other things being equal) Britain to have a far higher crime rate in all categories than the US. Humans, like most primates, are territorial and crowding has a negative effect.The USA has some 280(ish) million people in it. The UK has some 60(ish) million people (a ratio of 1/4.5), in an area approximately 1/40th the size. The UK has similar population concentration issues as well - 14% of the country population live in London. Millions more commute into it to work every day.

According to safestreets washington dc had 262 murders with a population of 600,000. That means (I can barely believe this!) 0.04% of the population were murdered in DC last year! London had 190 with 8 million inhabitants... New York, under Giuliani, has recorded a murder-rate fall from 1,927 in 1993 to 643 in 2001 (Livingstone's London), in a similar city-size. He made it 10% in the last year... I hope you keep it up.

London is by far the worst place to live in the UK for any crime. It's a melting pot of rich and poor, officially the world's most multi-cultural society, an immigration target as the stepping-stone to the rest of the UK, and has lots of social issues. I still feel a *lot* safer in the UK than the US, and I've lived in both. I've never had any problems in either, OTOH, I did have a doctor refuse to come out on a night call in LA until morning, she said it was too dangerous. I've never had that in the UK, or anything remotely like it.

There's no need to cower or fear, the truth is stark and simple. You are more likely to be assaulted or burgled in the UK than the US. You are more likely to be killed in the US than the UK. Your call.

Simon.

Lamo broke into the NY Times computer and found out that all their news stories are ghost written by the CEOs of Haliburton, Bechtel and Enron.

It would be more likely that Lamo found evidence that the NYT really is run by former Soviet "useful idiots". We are talking about a paper that has its own Pulitzer prizewinning apologist for Stalin.

Though in all fairness the NYT is likely just another bunch of leftist hypocrits. They complain about high prision populations, police "brutality", the Patriot Act, AG Ashcroft, etc., but when some kid makes them look stupid they go running to the FBI. Pathetic.

The US is not imperialist

Well, some would argue otherwise... this article by a recent UK cabinet minister is quite interesting.

Please provide the source for your statement. Otherwise it should be modded as -1 for troll.

Look around the web on site:

here,
here,
here,
here, and lots more places.

It is clear that the majority intent of Florida's voters was to send Gore to the White House. Furthermore, it is clear that Florida's voting process was seriously biased against minorities, who predominantly vote Democratic.

The only reason why this wasn't discovered during the recount was because the Bush family managed to cut the recount short as long as it was still favorable for Bush.

Or we need to add a new mod of "+1 strong opinion of of a bitter loser."

With Bush as president, we all are losing: we are getting wars, economic problems, huge budget deficits, a failing educational system, rollback of civil rights protections, deterioration of international relations, etc.

It is pretty depressing that Republicans care more about who the President had sex with than about how the country is doing.

Yeah, the police are a great bunch of guys. I live in Jacksonville BTW.