Slashdot Mirror

Actually, it is a terrible idea for citizens, and whoever modded you insightful doesn't live in the UK. Past experience suggests that if you give an inch, they take a mile. Terror laws were introduced on the understanding that they would not be abused. Guess what? They were abused, and not just by the police harassing legitimate protesters, photographers, and just every day civilians. Councils used terror laws to justify snooping on people suspected of lying about where they lived so they could get their child into a local school, spying on suspected litterbugs, and spying on council employees. There's plenty other cases documenting the systematic exploitation of these laws.

The mere fact that these iditos knew full well there would be a public outcry, and that they should focus on shipping lanes and illegal immigrants in order to spin this, should sending warning bells across the UK. It's quite clear that the police view activists and legitimate protesters as "domestic extremists", so there's only one reason they want the capabilities of these drones: They're lying bastards who want to infiltrate what little privacy we have left in our lives even further to make us live in fear, and to stifle dissent.

despite the best efforts of autocrats and dictators and brutal ugly rulers imposing their will throughout history, a few free minds always fell through the cracks and advanced mankind in scientific progress, despite some of mankind's efforts to keep us backwards

so the terrible irony here is that china WILL produce great scientists, just like the soviet union. and just like those soviet scientists, strong minds in spite of the system they were raised in, those minds will yearn strongly for a free society

and so those great chinese scientists will either yearn to leave china and go to the west, just like their soviet predecessors, where they can be free of all the enforced mediocrity in the political and information environment around them, or, more hopefully, they will serve as the seed of china's transformation to a free society

what i'm saying is, china will produce galileos. and galileo made scientific discoveries which challenged the political environment he was brought up in: catholic dogma. and galileo paid a price for that: house arrest. it will be sad and cruel but inevitable, but the best chinese minds of the future will inevitably wind up opposing the chinese autocracy, and will pay a heavy price for that. we can only hope that enough in china can see the stupidity of punishing their greatest minds for the sake of adhering to a brutal regime, which is brutal only to sustain itself, to be brutal another day

and my comment about galileo is not theoretical, its reality, this is the future and current reality of china's greatest minds:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/25/china-jails-liu-xiaobo

He told friends that he knew the risk of imprisonment when he drafted Charter 08, which demands the open election of public officials, freedom of religion and expression, and the abolition of subversion laws.

"We should end the practice of viewing words as crimes," the petition says.

Liu was arrested last December before the Charter was made public. Other drafters and signatories have been harassed. The mainstream media have been forbidden to cover the subject and censors have blocked many related internet sites and articles. Many Chinese are unaware that it exists.

Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco and Margaret Atwood are among 300 international writers who have called for the release of Liu, who is a former president of the Independent Chinese PEN Centre.

"Liu Xiaobo's case is about agreed international human rights standards, not merely the internal affairs of China," said John Ralston Saul, the president of International PEN. "China is signatory to international treaties and conventions, and cannot be given a free pass when it acts against its own and international standards."

The United States and European Union have also urged Beijing to free Liu.

"We continue to call on the government of China to release him immediately," Gregory May, first secretary with the US Embassy, said outside the courthouse today. May was one of a dozen diplomats stopped by authorities from attending the trial and sentencing.

Foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told reporters this week that statements from embassies calling for Liu's release were "a gross interference of China's internal affairs".

Their imagination is their only limit If MP3s were the cassette, MusicDNA will be the CD."

Lets hope this crashes and burns.

What you say is true, but torentfreak isn't a good citation, as it has an obvious bias. How about the Guardian?

Study finds pirates 10 times more likely to buy music
According to research, those who download 'free' music are also the industry's largest audience for digital sales

Everybody knows that music sales have continued to fall in recent years, and that filesharing is usually blamed. We are made to imagine legions of internet criminals, their fingers on track-pads, downloading songs via BitTorrent and never paying for anything. One of the only bits of good news amid this doom and gloom is the steady rise in digital music sales. Millions of internet do-gooders, their fingers on track-pads, who pay for songs they like - purchasing them from Amazon or iTunes Music Store. And yet according to Professor Anne-Britt Gran's new research, these two groups may be the same.

Wisely, the study did not rely on music pirates' honesty. Researchers asked music buyers to prove that they had proof of purchase.

The paper's conclusions emerge just as Sweden's Pirate Bay trial comes to a close. Pirate Bay's four defendants, who helped operate the notorious BitTorrent tracker, were sentenced to a year in jail and fined 30m SEK (£2,500,000) in damages.

Yes, but having a closed library also intersect nicely with more nefarious interests:

Vatican told bishops to cover up sex abuse:
" The Vatican instructed Catholic bishops around the world to cover up cases of sexual abuse or risk being thrown out of the Church.

"The Observer has obtained a 40-year-old confidential document from the secret Vatican archive which lawyers are calling a 'blueprint for deception and concealment'. One British lawyer acting for Church child abuse victims has described it as 'explosive'.

"The 69-page Latin document bearing the seal of Pope John XXIII was sent to every bishop in the world. The instructions outline a policy of 'strictest' secrecy in dealing with allegations of sexual abuse and threatens those who speak out with excommunication.

They also call for the victim to take an oath of secrecy at the time of making a complaint to Church officials. It states that the instructions are to 'be diligently stored in the secret archives of the Curia [Vatican] as strictly confidential. Nor is it to be published nor added to with any commentaries.' "Texan lawyer Daniel Shea ... said: 'These instructions went out to every bishop around the globe and would certainly have applied in Britain. It proves there was an international conspiracy by the Church to hush up sexual abuse issues. It is a devious attempt to conceal criminal conduct and is a blueprint for deception and concealment.' "

I understand the value of not having old works destroyed by centuries of even careful use. I also see some value in a researcher or lawyer saying "I'd like to see any and all documents you have relating to an instance of child abuse that happened in 1962 in Madison Wisconsin at Saint Mary's of the Springs involving..." without having to know the names of specific documents. Or should researchers consult the index titled "Child abuse documents"?

Pachauri [...] told the Guardian: "We have a very clear idea of what is happening. I don't know why the minister is supporting this unsubstantiated research. It is an extremely arrogant statement."
[...]
Pachauri dismissed the report saying it was not "peer reviewed" and had few "scientific citations".
"With the greatest of respect this guy retired years ago and I find it totally baffling that he comes out and throws out everything that has been established years ago."
[...] Pachauri said that such statements were reminiscent of "climate change deniers and school boy science".

I am a person who believes in anthropogenic global warming. I am often called a "denier" even though the people who call me that are unable to specify what it is that I deny. I understand very well the common meaning of the term "denier": it is one who dares to challenge the propriety of ANYTHING that supports AGW theory; it has nothing to do with denial. It is a term used as such by the uninformed throngs, and by IPCC Chairman Pachauri. It is a despicable method by which to vilify critical thinkers, to dismiss their critical questions, and to thereby erode the scientific basis of the public debate.

This is congruent with another report that mentioned
  Google put its Google China staff on paid leave and
suspended their access after the incident:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/18/china-google-cyber-attack

      A lot of evidence points into google treating it as an internal security leak
, and is conducting an internal audit on all its China employee. It seems
Google has very good external security but is very vulnerable from inside .In the hacking very likely some google China employee was found to have leaked
information that facilitate the attack. And that explain Google management's fury
  as it would be a moment as shocking for them as the
“Cambridge Five” for British government .

    Firstly it would mean Google can no longer count on its Chinese
employee’s loyalty when it clashes with their loyalty to China, so if
it wants to operate in China it has to continue with a tainted staff, though that
should have been expected for any corporation operating in a foreign country.

    Secondly it would mean there are serious security loopholes in Google
internal management as it failed to implement a safety mechanism to
check or limit inside attack.It this is true, pile on the fact that
Google is already facing increasing privacy scrutiny in the US and
Europe,it would be a heavy blow to Google’s reputation as a whole as
it sends out the message that Google cannot be trusted with your data
IN ANY COUNTRY.

    In my opinion Google failed to take care of its own fences,However
  Google’s genius lies in politicizing this incident ,as
it completely shadows the question of Google’s own internal security
vulnerability, as evidenced by the blanket omitting of this question
in most of the news reports I have seen.It became a Good vs Evil in the news ,
and you cannot criticizing Good ole Google
without being grouped with the Evil Chinese Communist, can you?

guardian.co.uk: We gave the US the Beatles and all we got back was this lousy data.gov site...

Bear in mind, this is about the findings of a British reasearch team applicable to the UK; it's not just shut-in children suffering from vitamin D but adults working all day in artificially lit offices, going to the gym with no windows instead of running, or just sitting inside all day watching tv or playing games instead of out kicking a ball about etc. The problem is especially seen in those who have trouble getting vitamin D from sunlight; those with darker skins, such as pakistani or asian origin need more sunlight to create the same amount of vitamin D, the elderly also suffer.

Also, ordinary milk in the UK is not fortfied with vitamin D; only baby formula. One of the suggestions of the researchers is to add it to foodstuffs such as milk to combat this modern resurgence.

Aside from you grossly misstating what the article actually says, the citation you provide makes it clear why Fox viewers are "wrong". Essentially the authors state what (in their opinion) is the correct answer and if you don't agree with their very left wing view of the world then you are wrong.

An in-depth analysis of a series of polls conducted June through September found 48% incorrectly believed that evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda have been found, 22% that weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, and 25% that world public opinion favored the US going to war with Iraq. Overall 60% had at least one of these three misperceptions.

There have been plenty of reports that Saddam and Bin Laden had been in contact. Although the contact is now assumed to be minimal, it's a far cry from "Saddam was the brains behind 9/11". And I question whether someone who believes there was no contact is "right".

Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction. He used them to kill thousands of people. None were found after the invasion, but whether a response is right or wrong depends a lot on how the question was phrased. Believing "weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq" is different than Saddam "had loads of weapons of mass destruction in 2003 that we recovered"

Finally, world opinion was mixed to the invasion. Thirty six countries were involved in the invasion so it's hard to claim that "world public opinion favored the US going to war with Iraq" is completely wrong. More countries opposed the invasion that supported it, but opinion was at least mixed. Unless of course you get your news from NPR.

Slate did this, the NYT should talk to their management about lessons learedn.

You make a number of valid points. However, I believe that you're talking about Salon.com. Slate is and (with possibly some limited exceptions I'm not aware of) an advertising-supported site that still gets tons of links and traffic.

On a more substantive note, two things: (1) stories will still be free to users who read only a few per month, which helps to avoid the Salon.com problem. (2) It doesn't take effect until 2011 which means they still have time to abandon the whole thing if advertising revenues tick upwards.

I still think it's a rotten idea.

This reminds me of the Smiley Face trademark escapades. The posters for the Watchmen movie were different depending on the country. There was also an issue with Wal-Mart using it, apparently.

Copyright lawyers have to earn their salaries somehow, I suppose.

My answer to that would be "lots", but not because I am doing anything wrong or expect to do something wrong in the future.

One of the problems with DNA is that it is circumstantial evidence by nature, but the juries are often too clueless to understand that. The fact of the matter is, odds are almost 100% that at some point in my lifetime, my DNA will be present at or near the scene of a crime. Likewise for every person on this earth. You leave your DNA and fingerprints when you sit on a seat on the bus, when you rest your hands on the counter at Target, when you eat at a restaurant, etc. Given how broadly your DNA gets spread and given the rate of crime in the world, if the DNA of non-criminals were in a national database, the odds of being tied incorrectly to a crime approaches 100% fairly rapidly.

Now if DNA were only allowed in very narrow circumstances, that might be different---if the only use were in rape trials, and only DNA obtained from bodily fluids, the risk of false positives would be much smaller. Even then, though, the risk that the rules would change to allow DNA to be used in a broader range of cases would be looming overhead.

That's not even counting the risk of false positive "matches", which given current testing methodologies is staggeringly high.

So what do I have to hide? Simple. My ordinary, irrelevant daily activities that under normal circumstances would not tie me to any crime because of a lack of any connection to that crime sufficient to result in a DNA search but that in the presence of a national database might easily lead to a conviction on purely circumstantial evidence resulting out of those ordinary, innocent activities.

Curious, is this /. post and its subject, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/18/china-google-cyber-attack, searchable within China? "I do hope if this doesn't result in hiring discrimination against Chinese candidates" "A trojan is a hidden program allowing unauthorized access to a computer." A Trojan may also be an ethnic Chinese employee in US or China working for Google. Things are not always what they appear to be. What if Chinese students or employees still have family ties to China? A good number of those ties either have Communist Party roots, coercive pressure. national loyalty, or subtle influence. Some Chinese students were in the position to go to school, get visas, or come to the US inadvertently based on their family and political ties. A background check will never uncover Party history or relationships that might make an employee a risk.

Libraries already pay a fee to the author each time a book is loaned out.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/jan/07/public-lending-right-library

You can read more at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/mar/13/surveillance-police-protest

They don't bother with social engineering. China's industrial espionage program is extensive and very well organized.

I'm sure doing business in NYC ain't cheap - do they really need an entire building in midtown Manhattan?

The New York Times management has made mistakes, but they aren't complete dummies. They don't actually have an entire building in midtown Manhattan anymore. But as far as being a "global newspaper of record," being based in what some have called the "capital city of the world" isn't a bad idea.

From 2006: Newman leads attack on the acting clones
 
An Excerpt:

Paul Newman has lent his support to an image protection bill that prohibits the use of a person's image or voice for up to 70 years after their death. The veteran actor warned that recent advances in digital technology meant that his work could be re-edited, enabling his image to appear in "a whole movie" without his consent. "They could make a whole movie that looked like me, talked like me, acted like me, sounded like me, but wasn't me," Newman, 81, told the Connecticut state assembly last Friday. However, the bill is opposed by the Motion Picture Association of America, which fears that it could infringe on film-makers' rights of expression and their ability to use old footage in their movies.

I also remember reading that when Newman died his will contained a clause that specifically prohibited him ever being digitally "re-animated."

say the dutch or the swedes

right now, the dutch and swedish government are monitoring information and any chatter within its borders. terrorist cells, mafia organizations, pedophiles, and other possible criminals they have leads on. this is normal, this is status quo, and this will always be the case. why do you have a problem with this?

right now the chinese are monitoring chatter as well. the scale of the monitoring is many orders of magnitude larger than the liberal governments (adjusted for population even), and it is aimed at EVERYONE. what they consider criminal is: any pornography, simply saying negative things about the government, agitating for the rights of minorities in the fringes of the imperial empire, like tibet and xinjiang, or even just religious proselytization

in the liberal western governments, any potential criminals caught by surveillance methods will have an open trial, with free and vigorous representation, open handling of evidence, last as long as necessary, and then will receive a sentence that tightasses in the west always grumble is way too light. in china, the potential criminal will have a quick kangaroo court with mystery evidence where everyone in the room is a representative of the ONLY legal political party, and then the sentenced will get something like 11 years hard labor simply for asking for human rights, or death for shoddy business practices. meanwhile, the west bails out their asshole corporate sleazebags, and tolerates deranged lunatics protesting at funerals saying god is punishing the west for tolerating gays. THAT'S the difference between china and the west

chinese free speech:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/25/china-jails-liu-xiaobo

chinese corporate punishment:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/4315627/Two-sentenced-to-death-over-China-melamine-milk-scandal.html

western free speech:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westboro_Baptist_Church

western corporate punishment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citigroup#Federal_bailout_2008

now, when you mention chinese surveillance in the same breath as western surveillance, YOU LOOK LIKE A MORON for not realizaing these obvious massive differences in METHOD, PURPOSE, EFFECT, and CONTEXT

do you really want to continue down this retarded road of yours? go ahead. you're obviously a highly propagandized fool. let's put it this way: in china, criticizing the chinese government the way you are criticizing the west right now is grounds for a reprimand, and if you continue, incarceration. i have a strong feeling if you were in beijing right now, a chickenshit like you would not writing what you are saying

i know someone that just took a teaching position in shanghai. they made her sign a piece of paper saying she wouldn't criticize the government. chinese students can come here and write anything negative about the west they want. the west is not afraid of criticism. china is. we rule by consent, not by force. THAT'S the difference between the west and china. you are a moron for not understanding the OBVIOUS differences in scale and purpose

but you know what, you keep talking. i'll keep calling you a moron. i think you're a low iq cretin, but i support the principles of tolerance that exists in the west, so i support your right to type as much of your ignorant mental diarrhea as you want. we tolerate deluded wackjobs with deranged ideas in the west like westboro baptist church, and you. in china, its jail or death. know the fucking difference, fucktard

Sorry, but your interpretation in terms of Saudi Arabia really doesn't make sense to me. The 1991 invasion of Iraq was primarily aimed at taking Kuwait away from Iraq. Sure, Saudi Arabia wasn't happy about having Iraqi troops on their border, but that was secondary. The link gets even weaker when you talk about the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The invasion of Afghanistan was primarily an attempt to destroy Al Qaeda, and Bush apparently wanted to do that even before 9/11.

but there is the Saudi tie in there too (Bin Laden wants to overthrow the Saudi government, that's how he started remember).

Hmm...well, I wasn't that familiar with Bin Laden's bio, but looking at the WP article, he actually started out by fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. When the US invaded Iraq in 1991, he criticized the Saudis for letting troops on American soil, so they banished him.

And when you come to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, I really don't think it holds up if you try to analyze it as an action to protect Saudi Arabia from Saddam. Iraq's military capacity had been devastated in 1991. The WMD thing was obviously a baldfaced lie cooked up by Cheney as a pretext. (If they'd believed in it themselves, that would be hard to reconcile with the Valerie Plame affair and Powell's admission that he lied to the UN.) Since Bush and Cheney knew that Iraq had a degraded conventional military capacity and no WMDs, it doesn't make sense to say that the reason for the invasion was to protect Saudi Arabia. I think a more realistic assessment of the motivation for the war is that it was a political reaction to 9/11, based on an impulse to take military action as a response to do something -- anything -- in order to be seen as striking back forcefully. W was probably also predisposed to go along with Cheney because of a family grudge against Saddam, because of the Iraqi assassination plot in 1993.

• http://blogs.zdnet.com/mobile-gadgeteer/?p=1799
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/19/gps-close-to-breakdown
• http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1184550/GPS-satellite-close-breakdown-fail-2010--leading-motorists-straight-trouble.html
• http://sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2009/05/18/daily24.html
• http://www.digitaltrends.com/international/gps-satellites-to-start-failing-next-year/

Considering most of these articles were on slashdot before, you don't have much of an excuse.

I suspect the involvement of an intelligence agency and you've pointed to another possible one. There was some stolen broken hardware in Canada as well: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/dec/06/break-in-targets-climate-scientist That looks like the same kind of spook work.

Don't you think she knows that? It's called protocol. Either A) she's just putting up a strong showing for american audiences and has said something completely different to the Chinese, or B) she really is going to do something. Who knows what? So far Obama has not shown much interest in rocking the boat any (see Wall Street bail out for evidence) but Hillary Clinton is not exactly the kind to shy away from a fight.

It'll be interesting -- I would like to see some tougher trade policies with China. For me personally, I'm really tired of importing Chinese goods that are made with no pollution controls, especially when those goods are laced with cadmium or melamine. I'm also annoyed that they sabotaged the Copenhagen talks on climate change. In fact, this could be exactly what the administration is reacting to, maybe Obama et al. got burned and are in no mood to play nice with China the way past presidents have done.

Well, you're kind of trolling here by being a huge dick, but whatever. I'll bite. Here is what happened:

Daily Mail is a flaming turd bag of an information source. They either purposefully or ignorantly distorted his research (as most major news orgs will, since they cannot cover science with any degree of accuracy).

If you want real information, get it from a place that focuses on actual science reporting or from the journal/research that the scientist published. In short, get your science information from the scientists. Not CNN/Fox/Daily Mail/MSNBC or whatever major news source is getting it wrong that week.

The decision to sideline Beijing is remarkable as China is the largest iron ore importer, accounting for more than 50 per cent of the seaborne market.

The miners have so far held no substantive negotiations with the Chinese side, led by Baosteel, the big state-owned steel mill, according to people familiar with the talks.

They added that there were no plans to travel to China for talks, meeting instead in Singapore.

One executive said: "As far as I am concerned, they [the Chinese negotiators] could come over to Australia if they want to talk."

There are some allegations making the rounds that Obama was played by the Chinese in Copenhagen. The mining case plus Google's actions makes me wonder if the West has decided that China has gotten too big for its britches and is being reminded that they are not a superpower yet and that they need to learn to be a little more cooperative with the rest of the world.

India, O.K. Eastern Europe? Stay out of Russia. Guy I know had his business taken over by the Russian Mob. There is no Rule of Law in either Russia or China.

I don't see how a rocket with a payload of nothing but dollar bills is going to get us any closer to Jupiter.

To be fair, sending C-130s with payloads of nothing but dollar bills didn't do more for success in Iraq, either.

Facebook.

About time! Read "with friends like these"

Yes.

Yeah, there is clearly no other country in the world up in arms over these scanners.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/jan/06/apple-tablet-chip-leaks-latest The tablet is real, if you were paying any attention to news and patents, you'd know that. It will most likely be announced around Jan 27.

There's USB and in the EU manufacturers have agreed to a universal charger: http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2009/jun/30/universal-mobile-phone-charger

Nuclear weapons are inherently difficult weapons to create, and to even dream of doing to you need to the fissile material, which is even harder to obtain.

100 years ago, the very concept of nuclear weapons was unknown.
75 years ago, nuclear weapons just did not exist and chain reactions were just theorized.
50 years ago, only a few nations had them - and after devoting several years of dedicated development and billions of dollars of outlay.
Today the reason why the Nuclear Club is fairly small is not because of difficulty or cost but because many nations agreed (sometimes with arms behind back or guns to head) not to develop them.

A similar path can be seen for flight (barely exists 100 years ago -> today people build awesome airplanes in their garage as a fun hobby), electronics (today's hackers and circuit benders fart around with more computational power than major universities had at one point within living memory), medicine (kids are doing genetic manipulation at home for fun just a bit over 50 years after our modern understanding of DNA) and more. I hope you see how this curve works....

Gathering Uranium from the ocean now is possible and proven and in just 50 years could be as simple as oceanic harvesting with some custom nanobots or other methods. There ought to be some u235 in there. The rest of the process - and I'm just thinking in 50 years - would be pathetically easy and quite accessible.

If nukes are the big problem in just the next 50 years, I will be surprised and relieved. Even as an NYC resident, I fear the mushroom cloud less than the earnest homebrewer coming up with a "Captain Tripps" or "White Plague" virus and releasing it on purpose or by accident. Why bomb part of a city when one can wipe out an entire population? What, you say? Why that would be dumb - it would kill off everybody. Not if it were targeted towards certain ethnic groups, perhaps not even killing everyone - just the men or the women or maybe just their kids. What is nuking one city compared to the psychological and demographic blow of forcing a nation to bury its children in mass graves via an nearly untraceable method?

He was in the country lawfully. He did not run, he stood from his seat when a plain clothes cop yelled 'He's here!' to 2 of his colleagues. The police did not identify themselves before shooting.. Oh, and the police lied about it aftewards.

Except that this already has happended in the UK and he was carrying a lot less than planted explosives. A coat was enough for Jean Charles de Menezes to be shot seven times in the head.
And yet the reports into the shooting of an innocent men found no members of the police guilty and security measures in the UK have continued to become more invasive.

Be careful what you wish for.

In just a single day, the terrorists inflected between $1 trillion and $3 trillion.

Someone else posted a link that says 2 trillion. Other sources I find say closer to $900 billion. Either way, those are on order of what we have spent on the war so far. It keeps going up.

Exactly HOW do you support your conclusion?

Notice that those war costs are real expenditures - they can be tracked to actual invoices, not someone's grand guesses (which are often politically charged to sound big in order to justify war.) Those $2 trillion numbers include all kinds of indirect damages like the effect on the economy, the stock market, etc. But the figures we use for the war are only the actual expenditures. If you were to account for the war costs the same way you account for the costs of the 9/11 hijacking, then we would have a different picture.

How many times do you think a "success" like 9-11 need happen before we can't recover economically? Not many.

Wow: that would take a lot of research. How many do you think it would take? Fortunately, they now lock the doors to the cockpits, which is the biggest preventative measure we could possibly take.

I wonder if your question is trying to make it seem like I don't care about the effects of 9/11. That is hardly the case. The discussion here is about war costs and imaging scanner costs. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan don't do anything to prevent another hijacking. Neither do imaging systems. The imaging systems prevent suicide bombers, not hijackings. Biiiiig difference in costs between those two items. A suicide bomber destroying one plane can't do the kind of damage that happened on 9/11. Nobody is saying that it could.

Remember why the USSR fell? The US spread disinformation to make a fake enemy, the "Star Wars" missile defense system, to get the USSR to spend like mad. It disrupted their economy. What are we doing now? Spending absurd amounts on a military campaign during the worst economic condition in 50 years. Eerily familiar. Kinda scary.

In just a single day, the terrorists inflected between $1 trillion and $3 trillion.

Someone else posted a link that says 2 trillion. Other sources I find say closer to $900 billion. Either way, those are on order of what we have spent on the war so far. It keeps going up.

Exactly HOW do you support your conclusion?

Notice that those war costs are real expenditures - they can be tracked to actual invoices, not someone's grand guesses (which are often politically charged to sound big in order to justify war.) Those $2 trillion numbers include all kinds of indirect damages like the effect on the economy, the stock market, etc. But the figures we use for the war are only the actual expenditures. If you were to account for the war costs the same way you account for the costs of the 9/11 hijacking, then we would have a different picture.

How many times do you think a "success" like 9-11 need happen before we can't recover economically? Not many.

Wow: that would take a lot of research. How many do you think it would take? Fortunately, they now lock the doors to the cockpits, which is the biggest preventative measure we could possibly take.

I wonder if your question is trying to make it seem like I don't care about the effects of 9/11. That is hardly the case. The discussion here is about war costs and imaging scanner costs. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan don't do anything to prevent another hijacking. Neither do imaging systems. The imaging systems prevent suicide bombers, not hijackings. Biiiiig difference in costs between those two items. A suicide bomber destroying one plane can't do the kind of damage that happened on 9/11. Nobody is saying that it could.

Remember why the USSR fell? The US spread disinformation to make a fake enemy, the "Star Wars" missile defense system, to get the USSR to spend like mad. It disrupted their economy. What are we doing now? Spending absurd amounts on a military campaign during the worst economic condition in 50 years. Eerily familiar. Kinda scary.

There was an article that mentioned that use of these scanners violated GB laws on child porn.

The U.K. must have some very weird laws on pornography then. In most civilized countries, including the U.S., nudity!=pornography. Do people in the U.K. get arrested for taking family photos at nude beaches?

Agreeing with the other responder and you might find this interesting. Looks like those across the pond disagrees with you.

There was an article that mentioned that use of these scanners violated GB laws on child porn. So now you have kids (up to 17) - very impressionable and angsty kids - that will become the target of recruitment by terrorist organizations. Epic FAIL.

What we need to do now is to accept that airline travel is not safe, and can never be safe. Everything in life that has the best rewards also has the greatest risks. Why can't we just factor risk into airline travel for the reward of being a timezone away in an hour? I would still fly. And those who wouldn't would push for a transcontinental high-speed train (Mag-Lev?) which would have a lower risk/reward, but just as cost effective.

New scanners break child porn laws

The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned.

Privacy campaigners claim the images created by the machines are so graphic they amount to "virtual strip-searching" and have called for safeguards to protect the privacy of passengers involved.

Ministers now face having to exempt under 18s from the scans or face the delays of introducing new legislation to ensure airport security staff do not commit offences under child pornography laws.

Don't forget that the average worker on this were paid 5-10 dollars a DAY. Pratically slavery

In Zimbabwe since 2002 they've been engaging in an innovative agriculture program: seizing farms owned by white farmers and turning them over to military lackeys who know nothing about agriculture. Surprisingly, yields are down.

Zimbabwe was once a major food exporter to southern Africa. Now they can't even feed themselves.

So yeah, the sad part is that lot of farmers that could have feed their communities are pushed out of business by thugs who then don't know what to do with the land.

Both U2 and the Stones evade their respective taxes through the Netherlands, making Bono quite the hypocrite. Details on the tax changes that motivated the switch out of Ireland.

P.S:

Here's a selection of Bible quotes advocating the killing of non-Christians, or those who are perceived to violate Christian tenets.

And some articles about contemporary Christians advocating the deaths of non-believers and sinners, sometimes taking efforts to cause those deaths.

Since when has every desktop computer OS been able to run every piece of software written for every other OS? Since when has every desktop computer been able to run every OS?

You're engaging in semantic shifting. There's a difference between being able to run third party programs written for your operating system and being able to run programs written for other operating systems.

Also, intellectual property really isn't property.

You can argue that women have a choice, but in poor provinces, you can bet that it would be akin to prostitution, where young women are basically forced into the lifestyle because they have no other options.

Compared to what women would normally do in poor provinces to get by?

I think that if China is worried about 'demeaning women', it should worry more about:

The lopsided male-female ratio is believed to be the result of female infanticide in a society that values boys and where most couples are allowed only one child.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/mar/17/china.mainsection

Or

"China is the only country where suicides among women outnumber men," Yang Fude, vice-president of Beijing Hui Long Guan Hospital, was quoted by the China Daily as saying.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUST2878220070911

I would like more substantial proof that women are being 'demeaned' by internet porn more than China's own disastrous social policies (which began in their current form long before the internet came about).

A quick search for 'rural chinese porn' (in english and chinese) showed nothing but story after story about China's porn crackdown and nothing even remotely resembling the subjugation of poor rural women.

More proof, please.

-b

How often do you see the net total adjusted for the current economic situation? Are the book markets actually loosing money?

On a related topic Charles Arthur tried to go through various numbers and statistic as related to music piracy in this article on The Guardian's site.

The first clue of where all those downloaders are really spending their money came in searching for games statistics: year after year ELSPA had hailed "a record year". In fact if you look at the graph above, you'll see that games spend has risen dramatically - from £1.18bn in 1999 to £4.03bn in 2008.

Meanwhile music spending (allowing for that * of adjustment in 2004 onwards) has gone from £1.94bn to £1.31bn.

DVD sales and rentals, meanwhile, have nearly doubled, from a total of £1.286bn in 1999 to £2.56bn in 2008.

If we assume that there's roughly the same amount of discretionary spending available (which, even allowing for the credit bubble, should be roughly true; most of the credit went into houses), then it's clear who the culprit is: the games industry. By 2009, the amount spent in games and music is almost exactly the same as 1999 (though note that the music industry changed its methods from 2004).

Link to graph refered to.

How often do you see the net total adjusted for the current economic situation? Are the book markets actually loosing money?

On a related topic Charles Arthur tried to go through various numbers and statistic as related to music piracy in this article on The Guardian's site.

The first clue of where all those downloaders are really spending their money came in searching for games statistics: year after year ELSPA had hailed "a record year". In fact if you look at the graph above, you'll see that games spend has risen dramatically - from £1.18bn in 1999 to £4.03bn in 2008.

Meanwhile music spending (allowing for that * of adjustment in 2004 onwards) has gone from £1.94bn to £1.31bn.

DVD sales and rentals, meanwhile, have nearly doubled, from a total of £1.286bn in 1999 to £2.56bn in 2008.

If we assume that there's roughly the same amount of discretionary spending available (which, even allowing for the credit bubble, should be roughly true; most of the credit went into houses), then it's clear who the culprit is: the games industry. By 2009, the amount spent in games and music is almost exactly the same as 1999 (though note that the music industry changed its methods from 2004).

Link to graph refered to.

They missed some hideously-bad ads for Microsoft.

My favorite "bad Microsoft ad" is a 2000 TV ad, which uses the musical theme of "Confutatis Maledictis" from Mozart's Requiem. The screen says "Where do you want to go today?" while the chorus sings "Confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus addictis" ("The damned and accursed are convicted to the flames of Hell").

There's also a 2009 ad featuring a vomiting woman.