Slashdot Mirror

Also, When can the UK expect Obama to come over and talk with minor MPs to talk about US banks ruining costing the country billions and to pay the British citizens compensation?

I think the difference between an environmental disaster and financial disaster are pretty evident. You invested in the United States? Apparently that was a big mistake and hopefully you learned your lesson. You can't expect every country you invest in to apologize and pay you back when your investments go negative. That's not how investing works. If you didn't want to lose your money, maybe you shouldn't have been chasing the highly rated securities with highly rated returns that sounded too damn good to be true. Now you know not to trust our rating companies and our securities. The difference with the environmental disaster is that regulations were set for BP that apparently weren't followed and some percentage of the people affected weren't invested in BP. I applaud Cameron for his genuine concern but the blame by no means rests on him or his British constituents. And I can think of one case where Obama did meet with Northern Ireland MPs to help with their economic slump.

If I was Cameron I would have just ignored those senators.

Cameron had that choice. Whether you like it or not, I guess he felt it was a valuable show of support. If you are so staunchly anti-American, do not vote for Cameron. I've heard things come out of his mouth this past week that make me even blush. Is Obama that keen on the UK? I think he says he is but you won't see as much action from Obama as you will from Cameron.

The UK doesn't tell the US what to do with their prisoners, the US shouldn't tell the UK what to do with theirs.

I can't fucking believe you would say that when UK courts convicted him of a plane bombing that killed 270 civilians -- 189 of them Americans. I'm not sorry that my government is concerned what a country that has an extradition treaty with us does with people convicted of killing Americans overseas.

The guy probably would have been released on appeal anyway. The evidence against him was shockingly bad and should've been laughed out of court.

Listen, if your justice system is flawed then fix it. I don't know anything about that court case or the evidence. But when someone as closely allied to the United States as the United Kingdom convicts a man for a plane bombing then I'm inclined to believe he's guilty. Seriously, if someone blew up a plane in the United States with 189 UK citizens on it and then we "think we found the guy" and then we let him go years later on some phony health problems would you be upset? Now imagine some huge multi-billion dollar company like Exxon had been trying to use him as a token to drill in his home country's oil fields. Oh and the whole time the United States people are saying: "He was innocent anyway." How would you fucking feel about that?!

It looks like BP might have used the same people for its image editing needs as Microsoft and Iran

"Consumers everywhere want to have confidence that the internet companies they rely on will provide comprehensive search results and act as responsible stewards of their information."

"Censorship should not be in any way accepted by any company anywhere," Clinton declared. "American companies should take a principled stand."

-- US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, referring to Chinese internet censorship.

Because two days earlier, the very same newspaper reported they'd only lost 66% of their readership.

Like this one. I don't see the Feds moving to shut it down.

The CIA likes to keep these sorts of sites up. It's a way of monitoring the organizations. So if Inspire stays up, what was posted on that blog to make the FBI jump?

but that the example which ye have unwisely set, of mingling religion with politics, may be disavowed and reprobated by every inhabitant of America.

Well shit, first was Thomas Jefferson, now the Republicans are going to have to erase Thomas Paine from our history books? What do you want to bet that Texans accidentally remove the Thomas Aquinas references they just added while they're on a roll (it wouldn't be the first time a bunch of Republicans got together and proved that "all of us are more stupid than some of us" [see last paragraph of this article])?

But hey, once the Republicans gave up on America The Greatest, why should they bother with the great minds of America when they can teach kids about the great minds of France like Calvin?

And the bomb in Times Square? From all the accounts I've read it was given away by the smoke, which seems like a failure to detonate. Yeah, the police "disarmed" it, but since it was a dud and had almost certainly already failed then they wouldn't have prevented it if it had been made correctly.

The paywall proper has only been in effect a few weeks, maybe better marketing and a better price point (I think £1 a day is too much for digitally delivered content, especially if the actual print edition is the same price!). An interesting piece by David Mitchell at the Guardian as to why he would like to see this succeed is worth a read.

A comment to the Guardian piece by "Scurra" sums it up for me:

(Extract) "The drawback is the part about paying for everything else that I don't want. That's the "piracy" argument in a nutshell. There's good evidence that a lot of things that that are downloaded "illegally" are not "lost sales" because the downloader often ends up not wanting whatever it is. But it also tends to show that if they do want it, they often go out and pay money for it properly. Now I agree that part of the problem is that somehow you need to find and then build an audience - but once you've found them, they are generally willing to pay. It's just that finding the best way to pay is proving extremely elusive in the world of "print" media when translated online.

Although as the piece notes, charging even a nominal fee tends to persuade people to value something. As a result, "micropayments" may indeed be a possibility, except that no-one seems to have figured out how to square this with possible privacy issues (since it's far more risky than flat credit card payments because of the sheer volume involved.) "

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3011105.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_Naki

Quote BBC article: Employed at first as a gardener, Mr Naki worked his way up to become even more nimble-fingered on the operating table than Professor Barnard[1] himself.His work helped the first heart transplant become a reality and for years after that he passed on those skills to thousands of young surgeons.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/31/black-surgeon-first-heart-transplant

But a decade later, with Barnard's help, his contribution gained international recognition. "Hamilton Naki had better technical skills than I did," Barnard said. "He was a better craftsman than me, especially when it came to stitching, and had very good hands in the theatre."

See also:
http://www.developmentpractice.org.za/learning-materials/category/29-capacity-building?download=114%3Abuilding-capacity

Many of those surgeons who learnt from Hamilton would go on to become professors and top surgeons
all over the world. He was often credited in their academic papers. Hamilton was not intimidated by
anyone. Dr Brian (Benzy) Cohen who now runs the national fertility centre in Texas, was performing an
intricate operation on a pig's main vein. As he was completing the procedure he was about to put in
another stitch. Hamilton - who had done the operation many times - said: "Benzy, that's enough. Tie it
off now." Believing that an extra suture would stop any bleeding, Cohen proceeded and the operation
was a failure. The next time, Cohen recalls: "When Hamilton said, 'Benzy tie it off' my immediate reply
was, "Yes Hamilton" and I tied it off. I learnt immediately that here was a man who understood vascular
surgical technique better than anyone else."

[1] Christiaan Neethling Barnard (November 8, 1922 - September 2, 2001) was a South African cardiac surgeon who performed the world's first successful human-to-human heart transplant.

As much as I would love to see this fail, it's still early days in this projects inception, and I don't think they were expecting it to massively take off anyway. The paywall proper has only been in effect a few weeks, maybe better marketing and a better price point (I think £1 a day is too much for digitally delivered content, especially if the actual print edition is the same price!).

An interesting piece by David Mitchell at the Guardian as to why he would like to see this succeed is worth a read.

Corporations aren't the uncaring robot beasts you seem to be convinced they are. Corporations are still run by people. And there's no way that the people running BP would have allowed themselves to continue pumping unthinkable amounts of oil into the ocean without putting up a real effort to stop it, bad press and huge fines or none.

I'd hate to burst your bubble but oil companies don't give a rats ass. Here's an excerpt from this article. Take note that the article is a bit old though.

In fact, more oil is spilled from the delta's network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP's Deepwater Horizon rig last month

Fortunately you don't have to secure the entire area. You just have to secure safe transit lanes for merchant shipping.

This picture might be old, but it does illustrate the point. There are dozens of traffic lanes in the Indian Ocean, and if you secure one the pirates will attack the next. You can't expect to secure dozens of shipping lanes, each thousands of miles long.

Regarding your other post,

Yes. When the Somalis are willing to behave in the manner of civilized nations then they can have the same rights as those civilized nations. As long as they permit their citizens to commit crimes on the high seas they have no grounds to complain when we deny them access to those same seas.

I'd hardly call Somalia a nation. It's an area that's been in civil war for almost 20 years, there's about 30 groups struggling over control, their waters are being plundered by international fishing ships, and "in the coastal areas of war-ridden Somalia, piracy still is the only show in town, the only booming economy." (source)

Words like "nation" and "allowing" their "citizens" don't apply here. It's harder to survive there than most of us can imagine, and piracy is their one source of income.

If you won't take my word for it (and I sincerely hope you won't), I suggest you read this article, written by someone who spent the last 17 years covering the situation in Somalia, and knows what he's talking about.

Fucking major citation needed. Seriously, what decade do you think it is?

(Heavy) Rock fans are known to buy shitloads of merchandise. And this regardless of which decade it currently is. Here are some starting points. Google the rest for yourself.

"During this period, Kiss merchandise became a substantial source of income for the group. Some of the products released included a pair of comic books issued by Marvel (the first one of which contained ink mixed with actual blood donated by the group), a pinball machine, Kiss dolls, "Kiss Your Face Makeup" kits, Halloween masks, board games, and many other pieces of memorabilia. Membership in the Kiss Army, the band's fan club, was in the six figures. Between 1977 and 1979, worldwide merchandise sales (in-store and on tour) reached an estimated $100 million" (Source)

"Artists nervously eyeing sliding CD sales have recently alighted upon band-related merchandise and touring as revenue generators that might fill the gap. But heavy metal bands have long relied on those twin income streams to survive away from the mainstream. Copping said some made more from merchandise than ticket sales." (Source)

"That's what I mean in terms of moving parts, and it's the last thing that anybody thinks about when it comes to the things you need for your band to be successful, but it (merchandise) is also one of the most important streams of revenue. There are some bands that really get it. I think for the most part where Cinder Block comes from is from that punk rock ethos, and those guys get it. Metal bands get it." (Source)

"We were all living in big houses and had nice cars, but touring was how we paid our rent and how we drove our pretty cars. We were able to do that even though we literally made zero dollars off albums. I mean, zero. So really you're talking about touring and merchandise as a big part of it." (Source)

Not only was it a 2.2b lawsuit, but it was brought on by US Software Firms.

US software firm sues China over Green Dam piracy

them?

McCain is as incoherent as Rand Paul, the male version of Sarah Palin.

Yours In Astrakhan,
Kilgore T.

It was only a big deal to the paid US shills

Says the paid Warmist shill (after all, if anyone who disagrees with you is paid then anyone who disagrees with them must be paid. Makes as much sense as your theory).

So rather than taking the word of you, the handsomely paid shill, ahow about we poll the public?

Oh, somebody did.

Looks like in fact public trust took a giant hit. But then as a paid shill one of your favorite past-times is "hiding the decline", apparently in any form.

The Guardian is having a debate on Climategate this Wednesday. Leading protagonists from the two sides of the debate are on the panel. Details are at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/30/guardian-debate-climate-science-emails

Where did anybody say that PepsiCo paid money to "bypass the normal selection criteria and post bad science?"

In the slashdot summary:

[...] and many more have voiced concerns over parent company Seed's decision to include a paid blog under the nutrition category from PepsiCo.

In the first linked article, multiple times -- here's one:

They aren't going to be doing any scienceblogging — this is straight-up commercial propaganda.

In the very first reply to this story:

Translation: "Damn, how do we get away with this next time? Do you know how much money Pepsi was giving us for selling out your reputations? [...]"

In my first reply to you:

PepsiCo was paying ScienceBlogs.com to be able to post their blog there

And just about every comment in this discussion that's critical of ScienceBlogs.com. How did you miss the point so many times?

Why is it okay for one industry to be on the site, but not another?

That's a strawman. I'm saying it's OK for any industry to be there as long as they meet the standards and aren't paying to get in. PepsiCo was paying to get in. Are you seriously trying to tell me that PepsiCo would have been accepted on their own merit but just wanted to get rid of excess money?

Now, if you have documentation as to PepsiCo bribing anyone at ScienceBlogs then I and many others would like to see it

Citation 1
Citation 2
NOTE: You should have seen these by now...

because even if the so called bribe was refused after it was disclosed, it brings into question anything posted on the site as ScienceBlogs would have zero credibility.

Wow, a momentary glimmer of understanding the issue. Hold on to that, and don't let go...

facebook is simply free speech

and in china, the simple act of free speech is a politicized concept. politicized by the chinese government

the chinese government has defined speech as not free, so anyone who engages in it is by that very act of speaking freely engaging in political unrest, according to the parameters established by the chinese government

and all the chinese government has done is defined their own weakness. most of the time, you speak freely, and if they don't like it, they send you to work camps for 11 years. but someday, dear china, someone will speak the simple truth, you won't like it, and the simple act of you moving against that speaker of the truth you dislike will ignite a maelstrom of political unrest that will sweep you away. all internal, dear china, no imperialistic meddling foreigners needed

you've made free speech your enemy, china, and therefore all you've really done is define the parameters under which you will fail: due to the anger of your own people. you have already defined how you will fall: your own hardheaded need to control, even to the extent of the contents of people's thoughts. it is your fatal weakness, because your people are not robots, even though you treat them this way

china, your weakness is not imperialistic foreigners. it is your own people. because you have defined them as such. you have told them their minds are not free

Firstly, only a proportion of people, probably a rather small proportion in some industries, is supporting the work that many people enjoy. Those people are getting screwed, because they are paying considerably more than their "fair share", while the freeloaders contribute nothing.

Study finds pirates 10 times more likely to buy music

Secondly, we do not know how much better the incentive would be to create and share more and better works in future if everyone contributed in return for what they take today. Although it's popular to think of Big Media as The Enemy(TM) around these parts, the reality is that a lot of commercial creative work is made and distributed by much smaller organisations, which use a lot of the money they bring in just to pay the salaries and invest the rest in a very few new projects, often only one at once. In a lot of cases, the entire business at risk of failure if any of those new projects doesn't make it, so relatively few new projects are attempted. Instead, much of the follow-up work winds up repeating a previously successful formula that is likely to be a safe bet, rather than going for something innovative that might be a better product with rich rewards, but also carries a much higher risk.

Only a problem if you
1) care about Big Media
or 2) think that if Big Media fails, creative works will stop being produced

As the Dead Kennedys said, "Home taping is killing record industry profits! We left this side blank so you can help"

They probably shouldn't.

There's increasing evidence that... well, there's just no point to arguing because people's internalized beliefs are fairly static.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/03/confirmation-bias-scientific-evidence

"The classic paper on the last of those strategies is from Lord, Ross and Lepper in 1979: they took two groups of people, one in favour of the death penalty, the other against it, and then presented each with a piece of scientific evidence that supported their pre-existing view, and a piece that challenged it; murder rates went up or down, for example, after the abolition of capital punishment in a state.

The results were as you might imagine. Each group found extensive methodological holes in the evidence they disagreed with, but ignored the very same holes in the evidence that reinforced their views."

But that doesn't make the arguing less fun!

It's not ok for google to inadvertadly capture minute packets of useless information, but it's ok for the government to direct ISPs to intercept data illegally.

The Australian Labor party have time and time again broken their promises, Barging ahead with Policies that their citizens do no want and completely fucking up things they tried to achieve

The only reason Google are in hot water is because they stood up to Senator Conroy and he got upset about it.

I for one will be making my vote count this year and I urge all fellow Australian slashdotters to do the same.

I love this country as much as the next patriotic guy...and love means being able to view things honestly.

Er, I don't think this is an issue of whether or not you're "patriotic enough." I think you're overlooking that a lot of other countries also through stuff out, like Great Britain. And in China, they throw it out, it just gets thrown out in their country next to their cities. When you snidely comment "It's the American way" you kind of omit that it's also the way of many other countries.

So one of the big problems is that we try to treat garbage and pollution from a capitalistic perspective. We may give countries or pay to have countries take our garbage under the understanding that it's being recycled. But more often than not it is just dumped or the precious metals are harvested in very environmentally damaging ways. And this is a problem with a world wide capitalism similar to how the mafia ruined parts of New Jersey with illegal dumping of NYC's garbage. It's corruption. China shows that a corrupt socialist system exhibits the same environmental problems on their local level. And when we feed that corruption and turn a blind eye then, yes, it is also our problem.

Face it: as a country, we throw out a MASSIVE amount of stuff.

This is true. It's also true that stuff we buy (from both inside our country and from the outside) are designed to be disposable. Your toaster breaks. Do you A) bring it to the repairman down the street and pay $50 to get it repaired by a skilled technician or B) go to Wal-Mart and buy your next $12 toaster? If we do A we're stupid and cannot manage our money. If we do B then you're criticizing us and calling it the American way. So what's an average citizen to do?

Come on, mods: if you can't be honest about yourself, what can you be honest about? Shut off Olbermann and Beck, accept what our country is, and just deal with it. Seriously.

Do you think it's the moderators that desire this situation? That want this situation? Do you think it's Olbermann and Beck that promote this situation? The entire world is part of the problem. The fact that everyone on Earth consumes products and produces waste that will be around longer than their flesh is a potential problem as our population increases. This happens in every country, not just the United States. Your criticisms are strangely specific. Jon Stewart supports this just as much as Glenn Beck. It is a universal problem of pollution and disposal yet you turn it into an American responsibility. Why is that?

Do you really think that if Americans stopped doing it, the problem would magically disappear because the disposal of the electronics in Japan goes through some magical Fern Gully process?

Sorry to go to such an offtopic response but I cannot understand why this blame is placed on Americans. As to the topic of HTML 5 affecting this pollution, attacking some standard far down the chain does not make nearly as much sense as instituting government regulations to make computers more recyclable without hindering them too much. If you perceive what you say to be "the American way" to be a problem than it's obvious our current system has not adapted to regulate itself.

Naaaah.........how about

GAY BRITANNIA!!!!!

Gay refugees must get asylum, rule judges

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/07/gay-refugees-asylum-seekers

Very true. Monsanto and friends have bought off the political side and continue to lobby heavily so that clear labels on GM food are not required - preventing consumers from making an informed choice in the free market.

Too weak. They can't win that one. Knowing the sentiment of the consumer, all producers of non-GM food need to do is label their products with "no GM ingredients inside" label.

Very true. Monsanto and friends have bought off the political side and continue to lobby heavily so that clear labels on GM food are not required - preventing consumers from making an informed choice in the free market. Now as part of this broader campaign of voter/consumer deception, they just need to convince all the consumers that are not paying attention that their products are all A-Ok for consumption - so they trot out people like this Jonathan Jones so called "professor" to use his credentials to sway public opinion.

They have to do this campaign to deceive, since consumers tend to avoid GM Food in droves - just look at how fast McDonald's had to drop GM potatoes from their fries. They may be able to buy politicians and hide their GM labels, but consumers are still a force to be reckoned with, and thanks to the internet - more informed than ever.

actually the antioxidants thing is a scam.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/feb/12/advertising.food

The antioxidant story is one of the most ubiquitous health claims of the nutritionists. Antioxidants mop up free radicals, so in theory, looking at metabolism flow charts in biochemistry textbooks, having more of them might be beneficial to health. High blood levels of antioxidants were associated, in the 1980s, with longer life. Fruit and vegetables have lots of antioxidants, and fruit and veg really are good for you. So it all made sense.

But when you do compare people taking antioxidant supplement tablets with people on placebo, there's no benefit; if anything, the antioxidant pills are harmful. Fruit and veg are still good for you, but as you can see, it looks as if it's complicated and it might not just be about the extra antioxidants. It's a surprising finding, but that's science all over: the results are often counterintuitive.

That is why it is called CLIMATE CHANGE

not global warming......dumby

No, its called that because

“’Climate change’ is less frightening than ’global warming.’ ... While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge” (p. 142).

Luntz Memo on the Environment (2002) "The phrase "global warming" appeared frequently in President Bush's speeches in 2001, but decreased to almost nothing during 2002, when the memo was produced."

... if this plan involved any of the same people who wanted to set off a nuclear bomb on the moon.

Clever analogy. If America consumed 20 million barrels of raw sewage every day, and if humankind's thirst for raw sewage was so desperate that it led them to start wars, dig in environmentally special areas until the only places left for them to find more sewage was underneath the ocean - then you'd be spot on. I find it funny to see America looking around for who to blame here. They bought the SUVs. They are the biggest oil consumers in the world (along with the UK) - and they're still buying. The pollution in Nigeria caused by oil is desperate - this kind of thing happens every year. But no one cares at all about Nigeria, because Nigerians are worth a lot less than Americans. The board of BP aren't my favourite people, but singling them out is ridiculous (and politically expedient). So in short, perhaps better to throw shit at the next SUV you see, or the next person who tells you they've been scuba diving in the caribbean (like the then-head of Greenpeace, Lord Melchett) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/30/oil-spills-nigeria-niger-delta-shell

I'll be sure to remember that next time I go to a voting booth.

I don't think he sees the world the way you and most other people do (including the Clay institute bunch).

To me this is the actual problem - trying to give 1 million dollars to Perelman is like giving a million dollars in $1 notes directly to a champion race horse.

The people trying to do that are just being very stupid. What's the race horse going to do with a million dollar bills? They are just wasting their time and annoying the horse.

If you genuinely want to benefit the race horse you use your brains and figure out how to use the 1 million dollars to help the horse in a different way.

The last I know, he's living with his mother and sister[1] who aren't very well off, but probably are supporting him. So go figure...

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/23/grigory-perelman-rejects-1m-dollars

I think you (and they) do not understand Perelman, his mind does not work like that. They should stop annoying him by trying to give him the money.

A better way to give Grigory Perelman 1 million dollars is to give a monthly allowance to whoever happens to be supporting him (and doing a good enough job of it).

Maybe they could secretly[1] give the money to his mom and sister (maybe a small lump sum in addition to the monthly allowance). They were/are supporting him[2].

He does not seem to be the sort of guy who can take good care of himself. I suspect that the people taking care of him allow him to focus on stuff like math, otherwise he might not be healthy enough to do so (or even alive).

[1] He may not take it well if he knew.

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1526782/Worlds-top-maths-genius-jobless-and-living-with-mother.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/23/grigory-perelman-rejects-1m-dollars

Here's a starting point for you.

More damagingly, he added in an email to Mann with the subject line "HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL": "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is!

This has, rightly, become one of the most famous of the emails. And for once, it means what it seems to mean"

Or, you could just try using google.

Funny how we have to keep re-posting links to the actual emails when all you have to do is claim it's all a lie and a fantasy.

I lived in England and traveled around Europe for 3 years. Great beer, old/ancient cities, and gorgeous women. Everything else pretty much sucked ass though.

Let's see a 25% sales tax rate, $8 for a gallon of gas, houses for 3 times the price at 1/2 the size, electronics, clothing, food, and cars that are nearly twice as much, oh yeah did I forget the cronic 10-19% unemployment rate among adults and 75-99% unemployment rate among teenagers.

Get me a plane ticket I want to move right now!

Most college degrees in the US are pretty much not worth the paper they're printed on. Euro degrees even more so. I think the concept of hiring young people the moment they are legal to work and then train them according to their skills is a long missing concept in society.

All the rest of a "well rounded" education can easily be filled in by watching the discovery and history channels and reading a few books.

US employment rate has consistently been higher than the UKs over the last decade (currently USA 9.3%, UK 7.9%). The youth unemployment rate is 19.1% (2009 figure, latest I could find), almost exactly the same as the USA rate for the same year year. Sales tax (VAT) is 17.5%. Petrol is currently £1.14 per litre = £4.31 per us gallon = $6.53. Food is not double the price - its very hard to compare basics like bread and milk are about the same, other things are a little more. Cars are a lot more, but I think 1.5 times as much for most common models. House prices is hard, £250,000 could get you a large 4-bed house in Inverness or a studio flat in Chelsea. Houses are generally smaller, but certainly not three times the price unless you compare the city of London prices.

Nothing prevents an unmarried hetero couple from entering a civil partnership with each other (just go to city hall and have a judge do it).

Not here in the UK. straight couples can only get married and gay couples can only get a civil partnership.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/24/straight-civil-partnerships

That's like taxing tampons or pads because they know that 50% of people need them.

In the UK (and I believe the rest of the EU) they DO tax sanitary products. It took quite a lot of campaigning to get them placed in the 'reduced' rate of tax (5%) rather than the 'luxury' rate (currently 17.5%, soon to be 20%) as well. See here for example.

then they dig up their free bags of money in sullivan county, and get on with their average suburban wannabe lives. when the kgb calls, they find a paranoid schizophrenic's blog and rivet their kgb bosses with useless tales of intrigue from the wild west. this spy ring is a joke

I thought that was pretty obvious.
The very first article I read about the bust contained this suppossedly intercepted message:

"You were sent to USA for long-term service trip. Your education, your bank accounts, car, house, etc - all these serve one goal: fulfill your main mission, ie to search and develop ties in policymaking circles in US and send intels (intelligence reports) to C (Centre)," an intercepted message said according to the indictment.

It sounds like the kind of exposition you'd hear in a hollywood movie when the writer wants to explain background to the audience, not the kind of thing a real spy handler would ever write -- unless he was super pissed that his spies had just taken his free money and run off with it.

usually a deal is done with a small nation to expatriot the prisoners to. Palau (link to guardian article) was trying to deal with the US to take 17 of the prisoners in return for quite large infrastructure grants ($200m).

This study actually correlates purchases and piracy:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pirates-buy-more-music

The rest of these articles link back to the studies they quote. They are basically information that states how piracy has actually helped industries to make money.
Piracy is good:
http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html
http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/internet-piracy-is-good-for-films-1
http://torrentfreak.com/why-most-artists-profit-from-piracy/
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/99958-toc-piracy-may-boost-sales-research-suggests.html

However, these tax breaks for the gaming industry were not only pre-election pledges, they were pre-election pledges for both parties.

O RLY?

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/38468/No-game-tax-breaks-in-Tory-manifesto

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/apr/12/labour-manifesto-libel-legislation

I said The BBC gets a £3 billion subsidy, the BBC says it gets £3.3 billion, The Times say the BBC gets £3.6 billion, The Guardian say the BBC gets £3.4 billion. It's a big subsidy.

From The BBC

Our total investment in the creative industries during the year was £1.1billion, or 33% of our annual licence fee income

From The Times:

BBC executives openly admit that the report, which will mean the reassignment of £600 million of the £3.6 billion licence fee

From The Guardian:

The Conservatives have pledged to lay bare how the BBC spends its £3.4bn-a-year licence fee by giving the National Audit Office "full access" to the corporation's account.

If anybody is laughing their ass off about this story, it would be Steve Jobs.

He would, but he's still too busy answering emails about iPhone 4 signal loss issues. ~

There's a real easy solution to get rid of flash trading and excessive speculation and get the stock market back to investing...a sales tax on stock sales. I see no reason stocks should be exempt from other "products".

All those big houses use computerized trading to game the system, remember this story?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jul/06/golman-sachs-computer-codes-stolen

Then some fed prosecutor (I forget who know) let it out that this was bad because "in the wrong hands" the code could "manipulate the markets".

Well, in ANY hands that means it could and was designed to
"manipulate the markets". These too big to fail places get a license to steal, to skim off billions, and when that isn't enough, they still get bailed out, loot gets stolen from everyone else and handed to them. Then they can take that loot and buy bonds and government paper of assorted kinds, get even more money, put everyone else into "debt" to them.

And having their boys in and out of the Fed and Treasury and Sec..naw, that isn't a conflict of interest...

From the Guardian...

"Most embarrassingly for Viacom, court documents revealed in in March that at the same time that it was suing Google and YouTube, Viacom was itself uploading its content in secret and trying to make it look stolen - so that people would be more interested in it.

One excerpt from the documents filed by YouTube was particularly notable for the embarrassment caused: "Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jun/23/youtube-wins-viacom-lawsuit

So Viacom were being pretty dodgy about IP in the first place, then complaining!

I never claimed his work was original, only an idiot would, especially since Clonus was already mentioned by someone else; anyway there are only seven basic plots (according to Christopher Booker). It's not hard to find the same stories and ideas cropping up again and again in fiction. What is relevant is what influenced the script for the Island. The Clonus Horror was a minor low budget film, the film rights to Spares -which was a very successful book by a well known author- was bought by DreamWorks who went on to produce The Island after those rights lapsed. It is simplistic to think Spares or Clonus are the sole influence/inspiration for The Island, but it is certainly disingenuous to suggest Spares had nothing to do with it, or any apparent connections are only coincidental.

"We have no plans to do X" != "We will never do X". Bear in mind that the incoming government don't get to see the books in advance. I mean, do you call this sensible grown-up politics?

It's still lower than in Belgium and Denmark, and only a gnat's chuff higher than France. Sooner or later the barmy bastard Brussels bureaucrats would have forced us to put it up (or in their language, "harmonized" it) anyway.

Not all that offtopic. We're talking about the moral weirdness of capital punishment, and this is an important data point.

It's interesting that so many people sentenced to death in Utah opted for the firing squad. Why choose it? My guess is that they like the melodrama. And that's big irony behind capital punishment: in seeking our revenge against the most brutal killers, we're actually giving a nasty bunch of a losers a heroic end.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/may/06/ukcrime1

Massive investment in CCTV cameras to prevent crime in the UK has failed to have a significant impact, despite billions of pounds spent on the new technology, a senior police officer piloting a new database has warned. Only 3% of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV images, despite the fact that Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe.

A the most watched nation on earth, we're familiar with this path in the UK. Expect issues, as seen at http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/17/birmingham-stops-spy-cameras-project