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FTFA: "reality of what is happening — and what can happen — in a war that affects and involves all of us. I would rather confront readers with the Taliban’s treatment of women than ignore it.". Time Managing Editor Richard Stengel.

I will come back to the thread later, when there are several hundred comments to read.

Not much to write about an article claiming that we should be looking at the big picture while in reality deviously trying to obscure the real big picture by appealing to our emotions and instincts to care and protect. As many scientists need to know - It's hard to put emotions aside, and look at the raw numbers to see just who is hurting most and why. That is the only way to look at the "big picture", not this crap story which is doing the opposite.

BTW, here is another CIA Red Cell PR campaign, this time directed at Americans more than anyone else, appealing to the almighty $.

Well, David Hockney is a pretty significant artist. And he describes his iPad as "a wonderful new drawing medium" albeit he is "at a loss as to how to make it pay"

see eg
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/may/11/david-hockney-ipad-drawings

Just imagine if we shared global climate data with everyone... oh wait.

You realize the raw data has not been shared, only the mysteriously "adjusted" data.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/15/phil-jones-lost-weather-data
http://article.nationalreview.com/407512/the-dog-ate-global-warming/patrick-j-michaels

No, they cannot prove your wrong since it is damage control - the only shaky moral ground they can invent to stand on. Notice that these shills never talk about the 20K+ innocent Afghan civilians who are already murdered - not even an apology, or feign of concern - like they want you to think it never happened.

While not necessarily directly harmful to the Allied forces, the leaks include the names of informants and those sympathetic to Allied forces.

To Shillnonymous and friends. Reality: Out of the thousands of records only three records contain a name of an "informant". One of which died and another was a pro-Taliban double agent. Not to mention that the White House also had the opportunity to redact names via the New Your Times contact, but declined to do so - they could not have cared less

All those news channels (and there are many - mostly US based) all all standing on very shaky moral ground, considering the news channels and their parrots talking about "thousands of Informants exposed" just happen to NOT talk about the murdered 20K+ civilians. What is more important - actual deaths or your self delusion/lies over thousands of imaginary Informants "and their families" dying.

Recall http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/ "U.K. newspaper The Guardian, which published online 700,000 expense claims by members of the U.K. Parliament" and http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/06/19/0152259/Newspaper-Crowdsources-700000-Page-Investigation-of-MP-Expenses
End users could be given forms with details removed and look for the classic 'straight lines'
eg."If you look at his performance, it was a straight line up"
http://www.investmentadvisor.com/Issues/2009/January%202009/Pages/More-Regulation-PostMadoff.aspx
Anything of interest could be noted. The main issue would be an elite backlash, their trusts and generational insider trading would have to be protected.

Well firstly in the UK it's actually just over a "third" rather than a "quarter" to send the message first class (and if it's important or time sensitive you'll want to send it first class), and much more if you want it recorded to ensure it arrives. You then have to get an envelope, if you don't have a printer you need to find some way to print it out (add on the cost of the paper and printer ink), you have to take the time to go buy these items and then you then have to take more time out to go post your letter and again wait several days to see if you get a response (at least with an email you should get a pretty instant "Thanks for your email", with a letter it could be delayed, lost in the post or just filed in this guy's waste bin and you have no way of knowning). There are all kinds of reasons to send an email over a letter, cost is a minor one, convenience is a much bigger one, and then there are "green" considerations, paperless is much kinder to the environment. When we're meant to be aiming for "Broadband Britain" it seems this guy is actually going backwards. What's the point encouraging schemes to put broadband in the homes of every voter in the UK just to turn around and tell them not to use it for email?

On your point 4.
This is the pentagons fuckup, wikileaks was willing to take help redacting sensitive info but the pentagon ignored them and merely tried to shut them up entirely.

Wikileaks did redact quite a lot of info on it's own anyway.

"Assange says that they subsequently responded to a White House request in advance, passed back via the New York Times, to redact informant material. They asked the Pentagon for assistance, but got no response. As a result, he says, WikiLeaks did their best with their own resources."

so they did act responsibly.
If anything it was the pentagon being irresponsible.
people keep talking about how while wikileaks did redact stuff they wouldn't know enough to redact it effectively enough.
Meanwhile the groups who could have done that ignored them or just tried to shut them up completely.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/aug/02/afghan-war-logs-wikileaks

No.

Apparently "defendants lost the right to anonymity in 1988" (source) but I don't have a Statutory or Case law reference for that. Nor does that explicitly state that it applies to all cases. I would imagine, however, that it does.

Also, skimming through case law records (on Bailii), I can't see any anonymised cases after 1988.

I could be wrong, however - I'm not a lawyer.

Sure thing buddy. At least Im not committing any logical fallacies by attacking an argument without any other argument nor any proof. Find the tip of the iceberg that is my proof below. Who is the ignorant one here? Perhaps you should re-examine that. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/oct/13/highereducation.research http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_gene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8361863.stm

This is the pentagons fuckup, wikileaks was willing to take help redacting sensitive info but the pentagon ignored them and merely tried to shut them up entirely.

Wikileaks did redact quite a lot of info on it's own anyway.

Assange says that they subsequently responded to a White House request in advance, passed back via the New York Times, to redact informant material. They asked the Pentagon for assistance, but got no response. As a result, he says, WikiLeaks did their best with their own resources.

so they did act responsibly.
If anything it was the pentagon being irresponsible.
people keep talking about how while wikileaks did redact stuff they wouldn't know enough to redact it effectively enough.
Meanwhile the groups who could have done that ignored them or just tried to shut them up completely.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/aug/02/afghan-war-logs-wikileaks

They did.

Wikileaks did redact quite a lot of info.
wikileaks did in fact ask for help with redacting sensitive info from the documents:

Assange says that they subsequently responded to a White House request in advance, passed back via the New York Times, to redact informant material. They asked the Pentagon for assistance, but got no response. As a result, he says, WikiLeaks did their best with their own resources.

so they did act responsibly.
If anything it was the pentagon being irresponsible.
people keep talking about how while wikileaks did redact stuff they wouldn't know enough to redact it effectively enough.
Meanwhile the groups who could have done that ignored them or just tried to shut them up completely.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/aug/02/afghan-war-logs-wikileaks

Google has denied these claims:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2367436,00.asp

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9180192/Google_denies_talks_with_Verizon_to_end_Net_neutrality_

"The New York Times is quite simply wrong," wrote Mistique Cano, a Google spokesman, in an e-mail. "We have not had any conversations with Verizon about paying for carriage of Google traffic. We remain as committed as we always have been to an open Internet."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/05/gogle-denies-verizon-deal-net-neutrality

A Google spokeswoman told the Guardian: "The New York Times is quite simply wrong. We have not had any conversations with Verizon about paying for carriage of Google traffic. We remain as committed as we always have been to an open internet.

Verizon has also moved to dismiss the story. A company statement reads: "The NYT article regarding conversations between Google and Verizon is mistaken. It fundamentally misunderstands our purpose. As we said in our earlier FCC filing, our goal is an internet policy framework that ensures openness and accountability, and incorporates specific FCC authority, while maintaining investment and innovation. To suggest this is a business arrangement between our companies is entirely incorrect."

Actually wikileaks did in fact ask for help with redacting sensitive info from the documents:

Assange says that they subsequently responded to a White House request in advance, passed back via the New York Times, to redact informant material. They asked the Pentagon for assistance, but got no response. As a result, he says, WikiLeaks did their best with their own resources.

so they did act responsibly. If anything it was the pentagon being irresponsible.
people keep talking about how while wikileaks did redact stuff they wouldn't know enough to redact it effectively enough.
Meanwhile the groups who could have done that ignored them or just tried to shut them up completely.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/aug/02/afghan-war-logs-wikileaks

Seems like it's that holiday everyday...

You do believe the wikileaks documents, don't you?

I haven't shuffled through all of them, or seen a believable analysis of the whole enchilada. But according to one Guardian article, your simple assertion is probably bullshit. (Gotta love the patriotic mods. Any slop of bile will pass as fact if it's in favor of the home team...)

Remember, this is the same military that said, "We don't do body counts." There's a reason for that. Of course the military is going to claim there weren't any civilians, and the Taliban will claim only civilians died, but nonetheless, we apparently killed the same guy twice and then arrested him a few months later. And during the first assassination attempt, the US military stated that no civilians died, while villagers told Reuters that 300 civilians as well as Taliban fighters had died.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/26/afghanistan-war-logs-helmand-bombing

The special forces command claimed that Ikhlas was "conducting a major Shura" – a conference of top Taliban. After dropping six 2,000lb GBU-31 guided bombs on the meeting from a B1 jet, the coalition reported "effectively destroying the primary target location" and killing 50 "Taliban senior commanders, security and fighters". Lt Gen John Mulholland, of the special operations command, later claimed "over 150 Taliban fighters" had been killed.

It was later realised that despite "multiple forms of positive identification" Ikhlas had in fact probably never been there at all. The US was to claim to have killed him again in another air strike on 2 December 2007, and subsequently arrested a Mullah Ikhlas many months later, on 7 May 2008, in Garmsir, further south in Helmand.

A statement released from Bagram air base on the day of Operation Jang Baz said the bombs had been dropped "after ensuring there were no innocent Afghans in the surrounding area".

Within 24 hours, however, villagers were telling a very different story from the one presented in the war logs. Locals told Reuters that up to 300 civilians – as well as a number of Taliban – were killed in the air strike after they had been rounded up to watch a Taliban-organised public hanging of two suspected spies. No mention of such a "Taliban court" appears in the official war logs , where it might have flagged up the prospect of civilian deaths.

Please mod my parent post up - or undo the ignorant troll moderation via meta-moderation.

Nothing in the post is trolling.

The Troll mod should stay, you deserved it. If you were not trolling, your extremely naive. Only Rupert Murdochs paper The Times/Fox media mouthpieces tried to make the claim that people have already been assassinated based on this material. However there is not one single shred of evidence to back up the claim - not even a single name of someone potentially in danger. Oh yeah, the one name that they did mention on the front page, implying that it was recent assassination - actually died two years ago... but they fail to mention little facts like that, or tell you buried right down on page 13.

On the other hand, you have direct evidence of thousands of civilian deaths. I don't see you being too concerned about that FACT - only some Fox fiction. So, please stop your trolling - or switch off Fox news and friends, mouthpieces for the MIC, and start thinking for yourself.

Wikileaks is a small group of people dealing with lots and lots of data. It's not surprising that they screwed up and released papers with personal info in them.

Well, actually, they didn't released papers with personal info - Only Rupert Murdochs paper The Times/Fox media mouthpieces tried to make that shit stick - however the echo chamber that is the US mainstream media has tried (successfully I might add) to amplify this lame point despite there being not one single shred of evidence to back up the claim. Oh yeah, the one name that they do mention as already dead - died two years ago... but they fail to mention little facts like that, or tell you buried down on page 13.

Courtesy of the inimitable Emo Philips.

This seems to be a key point that is obfuscated or ignored by deniers. That there are gigantic sinks of fossil carbon, in addition to the fossil fuels we bring up, that have been sequestered safely under the conditions prevelant during all of human civilization. Many of these are predicted to, or have already begun being released, as global temperatures rise. Positive feedback means the more it happens, the more it will happen, until the system spirals wildly out of control.

Example of this are the permafrost areas at the edge of the Northern polar region, the Methane Clathrates, reversal of the Amazon rain forest from a carbon sink to a source, and the greater absorption of heat from sunlight as melting ice and snow changes Earth's albedo.

And here is what is meant by irreversible--that these feedback loops will accelerate and cause massive disruption in time scales directly relevant to human civilization--i.e. the next few centuries, at least. Deniers like to bring up crap about there having been massive changes in temp all throughout the billions of years of the fossil record, so we should all relax. That is true, but in each case, these changes caused massive dislocation or extinction of the dominant plant and animal species of that time.

We're talking about what happens to this particular race of animals that is here spending its time reading and writing Slashdot postings. It is disingenuous for deniers to claim some lofty halo of wisdom that transcends mere human-centric concerns, especially when, for the most vociferous of them (such as the paid lackeys of Exxon-Mobile), they are more concerned with making a buck in the next fiscal quarter than they are about the concerns of even the humans alive today, much less those not yet born.

the amount of regulation in plant creation

Every aspect of manufacturing and industry is regulated in the Western world. The factories that manufacturing solar cells are also regulated. Regulation is a cost of doing business. The BP spill should remind everyone of what happens when regulation fails.

[...]

Cleaning up decommissioned sites is costing £72 billion Who do you think pays for this - the nuclear industry, or the tax payer? Why are taxpayers subsidising disposal costs for new-build plants? The nuclear industry benefits enormously from the taxpayer.

China is the largest manufacturer of solar cells right now. They just passed Germany. I really doubt that Chinese regulation of solar-cell factories is anywhere close to Western regulation.

Also, what's the cost of "decommissioning" solar panels?

"politically correct" as opposed to "environmentally correct" disposal of waste

Do you have any evidence that this occurs? Storage and disposal of nuclear waste has real costs - even nuclear industry scientists acknowledge that disposing of the UK's nuclear waste stockpile will cost £85 billion. Cleaning up decommissioned sites is costing £72 billion Who do you think pays for this - the nuclear industry, or the tax payer? Why are taxpayers subsidising disposal costs for new-build plants? The nuclear industry benefits enormously from the taxpayer.

Your numbers still follow outdated technology cira 1970s. Consider the construction of modern reactor technologies. The waste is a tiny fraction of the size and danger of the kind you are now quoting the cleanup figures for. But that is the same in every industry, just look at how much it costs to cleanup a lot of ancient mines which were operating under far less strict environmental guidelines.

Furthermore the numbers you're quoting for disposal assumes complete waste. Instead I wonder how much the cost would be if it is either reprocessed, or used as straight fuel for a CANDU reactor. That's right, they may even be able to sell the waste rather than simply pay someone to take it.

the amount of regulation in plant creation

Every aspect of manufacturing and industry is regulated in the Western world. The factories that manufacturing solar cells are also regulated. Regulation is a cost of doing business. The BP spill should remind everyone of what happens when regulation fails.

"green" subsidies for solar

The study authors already thought of that - from TFA: "While the study includes subsidies for both solar and nuclear power, it estimates that if subsidies were removed from solar power, the crossover point would be delayed by a maximum of nine years."

"politically correct" as opposed to "environmentally correct" disposal of waste

Do you have any evidence that this occurs? Storage and disposal of nuclear waste has real costs - even nuclear industry scientists acknowledge that disposing of the UK's nuclear waste stockpile will cost £85 billion. Cleaning up decommissioned sites is costing £72 billion Who do you think pays for this - the nuclear industry, or the tax payer? Why are taxpayers subsidising disposal costs for new-build plants? The nuclear industry benefits enormously from the taxpayer.

As soon as I download them via POP3 into Thunderbird. But then, I'm paranoid regarding my data and don't wish to leave it on hardware that I don't own and control.

I on the other hand view anyone who really wants to view my entire email history as completely demented and think they deserve to read the decades worth of drivel that I have accumulated as punishment for being nosy.

To be honest though, I know my bank accumulate all the data of everything I have ever bought. I know there are various secretive credit reference agencies that store all sorts of data about me. I can only ask them to send me a copy, I cannot legally stop them unless they hold inaccurate information . I know there also know there are more shady companies the illegally hold data about my political affiliations and allow potential employers to search it.

I know that there are millions of other ways big companies snoop on my life and I have given up worrying about it. It is unfortunate but we have to realise we have almost no privacy left in this digital age. We can try and minimise our exposure, but I have long since just decided I am happy for people to know most things about me.

My real name is VERY similar to my slashdot ID so anyone who knew me would instantly realise who I am from this or any other post.

Here are a few interesting links:

http://www.peoplecheck.co.uk/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_check
http://background-check-services-review.toptenreviews.com/

This company has been closed down last year but I bet there are others:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/may/27/construction-worker-blacklist-database1

A big criticism of Julian Assange is his constant courting of the media

Seasoned intelligence analysts have warned that Assange may be arrested or "disappeared" due to the leaked information. His best defence against this is to be very visible. Courting the media also helps to further the mission of Wikileaks and Assange's aims of "just reform". Why, exactly, is talking to the press a problem, when your aim is to leak information and get the attention of said press?

Be cautious of stories that try to smear Assange, for they may well not be true. The Guardian said: "Since the release of the Apache helicopter video, there has been some evidence of low-level attempts to smear Wikileaks. Online stories accuse Assange of spending Wikileaks money on expensive hotels (at a follow-up meeting in Stockholm, he slept on an office floor); of selling data to mainstream media (the subject of money was never mentioned); or charging for media interviews (also never mentioned)."

his past, which is hardly whiter than white given all the suspected hacking he has done... Assange isn't angel or particularly 'moral'

Having once been a hacker does not make one immoral. I'm reminded of this quote: "We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals."

The only thing which seperates him from older, more seasoned leaking website owners is that he is talented at courting PR and media

Except that Wikileaks was famous before Assange became famous, or to say it another way - Assange is famous because of Wikileaks; Wikileaks is not famous because of Assange. At the end of the day, Wikileaks can only leak material that is in turn leaked to them. If the only thing that they offered were better PR, why did initial leakers choose to leak via Wikileaks, rather than some other web site? And if they do indeed offer better PR, and you believe some information you have is so important to the public that it should be leaked, then surely good PR is exactly what you want?

They already have the sound cannons that cause instantaneous and permanent hearing damage, and can rapidly cause permanent deafness.

They were used against protesters to the G20 meeting.

Just to protect against your comment being skewed as "police were causing permanent damage to protesters", the Toronto police were approved to use the LRAD in voice mode but blocked from using alert mode. Used as per their instructions and judge's orders, the devices are unlikely to cause permanent damage. Similarly, being authorized to carry guns isn't the same as shooting protesters dead.

Sources:
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/torontog20summit/article/828473--toronto-police-can-use-sound-cannons-but-at-lower-range
http://open.salon.com/blog/gordon_wagner/2010/05/27/lrads_--_sound_cannon_for_crowd_control
http://www.gcaudio.com/resources/howtos/loudness.html

I like how you take the time to do all that research but you don't bother doing something as simple as typing "Sonic Cannon G20" into Google. If you had you might have realized that he was probably referring to the 2009 meeting in Pittsburgh, not the 2010 meeting in Toronto.

The first link to said search:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2009/sep/25/sonic-cannon-g20-pittsburgh/

It was last year's G20 in Pittsburgh. Heres a Guardian article (first one I could find, too lazy to find a better one) with a video attached. Youtube will also lead you to some horrifying videos.

Now I'm not sure about a case of instantaneous and permanent hearing damage, but from the videos you can tell how terribly inhumane this weapon is.

Well, you have the latter part correct:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/18/rumsfeld-gq-iraq-bible-quotes-bush

One of the top planners of the US war in Iraq gave President George Bush secret intelligence briefs headlined with biblical quotations, in a bid to boost his standing with the deeply religious president but one that risked sparking a conflagration in the Muslim world if the papers leaked.

Because in part it is true. We are free to run rampant over any country we wish, make foolish investments that topple economies around the world, humiliate their people and religion, and the list goes on. I recently read the book "The Al Qaeda reader" by Raymond Ibrahim who had translated and collected many writings by Bin Laden and Zwahiri while he was working at the library of congress. The writings are somewhat long and drawn out but they are philosophical musings but this one here is the most relevant of them all http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver But the other part is that "because they hate our freedom" sounds good and since it is partly true it works to sell the war and distract attention away from why the war is really being waged which is because it works up voters who support politicians who are strong against our enamies and gets cash flowing to arms manufacturers as well as cripple Israel's enemies. As for oil? Well Afghanistan has none worth mentioning and Iraq produces less than two million barrels per day, also hardly worth mentioning especially for what we are paying for combined with Iraq is below pre-war production still to this day. America's leaders needed a war somewhere and small factors drew us to Iraq and Afghanistan. Why are we not hunting down Omar al Bashir the only sitting head of state to ever be charged with genocide yet is waltzing free and clear wherever he pleases.

I don't know how much of the content at the links below is repeated in TFA, but I thought these were good:

• Interview in the Guardian
• Audio interview on BBC R4 Media Show. The Assange segment starts about 2/3 through from memory, but the first bit on Bloody Sunday is interesting and worth a listen too.

Apologies to those outside the UK or otherwise without access as the second interview is on iPlayer.

(Incidentally, the Guardian also had access to the Afghanistan data, as was mentioned in a previous /. article. Since I have the tabs open, I'll repeat some key links from that here:)

• Wikileaks' Afghanistan war logs: how our datajournalism operation worked
• Wikileaks Afghanistan files: download the key incidents as a spreadsheet
• Afghanistan war logs: our selection of significant incidents

I don't know how much of the content at the links below is repeated in TFA, but I thought these were good:

• Interview in the Guardian
• Audio interview on BBC R4 Media Show. The Assange segment starts about 2/3 through from memory, but the first bit on Bloody Sunday is interesting and worth a listen too.

Apologies to those outside the UK or otherwise without access as the second interview is on iPlayer.

(Incidentally, the Guardian also had access to the Afghanistan data, as was mentioned in a previous /. article. Since I have the tabs open, I'll repeat some key links from that here:)

• Wikileaks' Afghanistan war logs: how our datajournalism operation worked
• Wikileaks Afghanistan files: download the key incidents as a spreadsheet
• Afghanistan war logs: our selection of significant incidents

I don't know how much of the content at the links below is repeated in TFA, but I thought these were good:

• Interview in the Guardian
• Audio interview on BBC R4 Media Show. The Assange segment starts about 2/3 through from memory, but the first bit on Bloody Sunday is interesting and worth a listen too.

Apologies to those outside the UK or otherwise without access as the second interview is on iPlayer.

(Incidentally, the Guardian also had access to the Afghanistan data, as was mentioned in a previous /. article. Since I have the tabs open, I'll repeat some key links from that here:)

• Wikileaks' Afghanistan war logs: how our datajournalism operation worked
• Wikileaks Afghanistan files: download the key incidents as a spreadsheet
• Afghanistan war logs: our selection of significant incidents

I don't know how much of the content at the links below is repeated in TFA, but I thought these were good:

• Interview in the Guardian
• Audio interview on BBC R4 Media Show. The Assange segment starts about 2/3 through from memory, but the first bit on Bloody Sunday is interesting and worth a listen too.

Apologies to those outside the UK or otherwise without access as the second interview is on iPlayer.

(Incidentally, the Guardian also had access to the Afghanistan data, as was mentioned in a previous /. article. Since I have the tabs open, I'll repeat some key links from that here:)

• Wikileaks' Afghanistan war logs: how our datajournalism operation worked
• Wikileaks Afghanistan files: download the key incidents as a spreadsheet
• Afghanistan war logs: our selection of significant incidents

Are you sure about that?
http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/iphone-being-used-to-develop-military-apps-20091222/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/dec/17/iphone-apple
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10724344
http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/bullet-flight-100-the-next-iphone-killer-application
http://singularityhub.com/2009/08/18/commanding-military-drones-now-iphone-has-an-app-for-that/

> Researchers have long known that mammals, including humans, lack a key enzyme -- one possessed by most of the animal kingdom and even plants -- that reverses severe sun damage

The story description is misleading. By careful omission it gives the impression that this enzyme is the only one that can repair sun-damaged DNA damaged by UV, emphasizing that humans lack it. OH CRUEL LORD! But we do in fact already have other enzymes that repair DNA damage and these are very old news. Ohio U. are just talking about one mechanism, but the press release makes it sound like the only one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_repair
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8053698

Seems to be a trend with journal articles: Release the journal article and a popular press article; Take huge liberties with the popular press article to guarantee widespread media coverage (and we guess future funding and sunscreen merchandising). Note Ohio U. is the source of the journal article and this press release:
http://www.medicaldaily.com/news/20100725/550/researchers-discover-how-key-enzyme-repairs-sun-damaged-dna.htm

We saw the same thing recently with the silly "chicken or egg" article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jul/18/chicken-and-egg-conundrum-solved

I'm not knocking either journal article. What they did was pretty cool, but would these people please learn to be honest in their press releases too? You would think they would have learned from Climategate?

And in the UK "Android" phone sales are up 300%.

Creationists: if you feel threatened, please move your fight to the origins of the universe, but as your name implies, your theory has nothing to add after the moment of creation.

There was an interview with the guy that copied the movies about that airstrike that killed some reporters among other non-combatants...
Can't find the actual chat but here's a story talking about it:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/25/wikileaks-war-logs-back-story

For five days, Bradass87 opened his heart to Lamo. He described how his job gave him access to two secret networks: the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, SIPRNET, which carries US diplomatic and military intelligence classified "secret"; and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System which uses a different security system to carry similar material classified up to "top secret". He said this had allowed him to see "incredible things, awful things that belong in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC almost criminal political backdealings the non-PR version of world events and crises."

Bradass87 suggested that "someone I know intimately" had been downloading and compressing and encrypting all this data and uploading it to someone he identified as Julian Assange. At times, he claimed he himself had leaked the material, suggesting that he had taken in blank CDs, labelled as Lady Gaga's music, slotted them into his high-security laptop and lip-synched to nonexistent music to cover his downloading: "i want people to see the truth," he said.

It's much easier to "justify" bringing in a CD than a memory card.

Currently it appears that the main wikileaks site is unavailable. Thankfully wikileaks is actively mirrored, a list of which can be found on http://wikileaks.info/, http://mirror.wikileaks.info/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010/ ought to take you straight to the original page. On a side note, the guardians' data blog have a nice writeup and sample of the data: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/datablog/2010/jul/25/wikileaks-afghanistan-data

Credit to Emo Phillips:

Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"

He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"

He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too!"

Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.

The Taliban offered to hand over bin Laden, the US turned them down. There was never a prospect of going in until we got bin Laden, they were in it for the long haul from the start. They wanted to transform Afghanistan into a proxy state as part of their grand strategy.

Not quite. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.terrorism5

President Bush rejected an offer from the taliban to discuss handing bin Laden over to a third country while researching whether bin Laden was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, in return for the US to cease bombing Afghanistan.

An offer of discussion is not close to an offer to hand over.

It was the equivalent of a movie director offering to look at an actresses resume if she sleeps with him, not offering the part.

B sues A for libel/slander/defamation

Actually, the US is not particularly bad in the libel/slander/defamation department. For example, US law places the burden of proof on the plaintiff to show that the defendant's statements about them are demonstrably false. In fact, there is a law in progress intended to shield US citizens from libel lawsuits originating in countries like England where the accused is actually expected to prove the truth of their statements about the accuser.

... there aren't enough hybrids to produce any meaningful change in the statistics yet.

True ... but I wouldn't worry about your statistics ... 63% of the time they are made up anyways.

Besides ... isn't this the same college that brought us Cold Fusion?

I remember when people had reading comprehension.

Hint look at the URL - http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/02/taliban-pakistan-justice-women-flogging

Then read the article.

As for being naive about whats going on in Afghanistan, I have family members there and as late as June of 2010 one of my students was an Afghani Pashtun exchange student who was very enlightening about the difference between pre-invasion and post invasion Afghanistan.

Pakistan is not Afghanistan.

Here http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2000/aug/30/childprotection.society in the UK a crowd of morons got confused between paedophile and paediatrician and the doctor had graffiti painted on her windows and had to leave her house.
The moral of this story is *not* that we should abandon use of the word paediatrician.

Stop serious action? The only serious actions I know of in regard to global warming are those that will a) make some people some serious money, ...

and b) it will cause some people (oil companies) to lose some serious money. Oh look, they're funding as much climate change denial as they can get away with. Do you think they're doing that out of belief that it's for the greater good, or because it's cost effective for them? If anyone has some truly compelling research that would destroy our understanding of climate change, they would have no trouble getting industry funding for it. Yet this hasn't happened, and pretty much every major scientific body including the national science academies of the major industrialised nations agrees that there is a problem.

So nation building or supporting humanitarian efforts is less important than iPods?

Yes.

News flash for you, before the fall of 2001 girls who went to school were killed in Afghanistan. So the rise of the iPod and OS X is more important than the work done in Afghanistan?

It must be nice to be so naive. I'm too old to remember when I was that easily fooled by my own government.

N. Africa seems to be high on the list of places where the EU want to go with solar.

Like the one on this page:
http://www.ogc.gov.uk/
(just turn it through 90 degrees)

Allegedly it cost 14k
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1901656/OGC-unveils-new-logo-to-red-faces.html

Could have been worse; could have been this one:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/artblog/2007/jun/05/howlisasimpsontooktheolym
(£400,000, that one).

What about the long term ongoing leaks in Nigeria that are regularly the fault of US companies like Exxon Mobil? Those have been far more devastating to the areas effected due to the fact the US companies don't actually even clean those up at all in some cases. I think somehow the BP oil spill isn't even the biggest oil tragedy of the last decade in this context, let alone the biggest environmental disaster of the century.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell

http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/nigerian-spills-make-valdez-look-like-drop-in-bucket/19483921

Of course, perhaps the worst part is that when the locals take action against oil companies responsible, they get branded terrorists an al Qaeda sympathisers by the West. It couldn't possibly simply be because they're sick of the kind of pollution that's occuring on their land could it?

Americans are right to be annoyed, and BP were incompetent and wrong in allowing the spill to happen. But what fucks me off more than anything is a) the anti-British sentiment from Obama over the whole thing, b) the fact this anti-British sentiment has been taken further in an attempt to tear BP apart as a company by some people, c) the fact that America consumes such vast amounts of oil pushing the need for such dangerous deep sea drilling in the first place, and d) the hypocrisy of points a), b) and c) in the context of the fact US companies and the US in general if it's to be believed that the Iraq war was about oil, have been guilty of far, far worse when it comes to oil. It's the utter hypocrisy, the arrogance of it that stinks- a proper reaction should've been some god damn soul searching over whether perhaps such dependence on oil is such a good idea after all and realisation that not just BP, but BP's partners such as the Texas company that owns a massive share in the well, Haliburton and Transocean which was responsible for some of the shoddy work that caused the problem, and most importantly, America itself and it's thirst for oil and it's weak regulations that allowed this to happen- isn't the fact oil companies only by law have to pay up £75 million over things like this evidence enough that American legislation holding oil companies to account is woefully inadequate?

The only people I have come across that support Nuclear are Nuclear scientists, and deluded Slashdot posters, indulging in wishfull thinking.

And the French. Don'f forget the French. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France

Or the Japanese... - http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf79.html

Or the British even... - http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/apr/15/nuclearpower-edf

How about the rest of europe... - http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/ukfs_news/hi/newsid_4710000/newsid_4713300/4713398.stm