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However, if plays nice and owns up to all the stuff he says he didn't do but they claim he did

Not quite true.

From http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2005/jul/09/weekend7.weekend2:

Gary was kept in a police station overnight. Then the Americans offered him a deal, via his British solicitor. "They said, 'If you incur the cost of the whole extradition process, be a good boy, come over here, we'll give you three or four years, rather than the whole sentence.' I said, 'OK, give me that in writing.' They said, 'Oh no, we can't do that.' So they were offering a secret trial, no right of appeal on the outcome, no comment to the newspapers, and nothing in writing. My solicitor, doing her job, advised me to take it, and when I said no, she was very, 'Ooh, they're going to come down heavy.'"

Also, from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/27/internationalcrime.hacking...

In a further twist, it has emerged that a crucial file containing details of the early meetings with the US prosecutors, at which the offers were apparently made, has gone missing from the office of McKinnon's solicitor. A laptop holding details of the same meetings was stolen from the car of one of his barristers.

There's a rather good interview with Gary McKinnon on the Guardian's web site from earlier this month.

Provides quite an insight into what he did, why he says he did it and his mental state.

Wonder if he was a /. poster. Wouldn't surprise me.

perhaps its because of all those killer cyclists out there.

cycling is still good for you though, just don't let it go to your head so you think you have right of way over everyone else.

Exercise is good for many reasons, including improving muscle tone, reducing your risk of heart attacks, improving your aerobic capacity and so on. However, my experience is that it's virtually impossible to lose weight by exercise alone unless you go to the lengths of Steve Vaught.

I managed to lose 60 pounds (and have now kept it off for about six months), and the key was combining the exercise I was already doing with eating less. Initially, I ate a lot of those not-very-tasty diet meals; long-term, I've largely cut out things like fries and cola from my diet, and just gotten used to eating smaller portions and not snacking between meals. Now that I've lost the weight, I still eat nice food; I've just learned that I have to eat less of it if I want to maintain a reasonable weight.

As far as exercise goes, I echo the suggestions to try riding a bike. Can be as solo, or as social, as you like.

"Believes he is appointed by God - check"
Cite this ... you know, just give me a Bush quote that supports this in any way ...

http://www.slate.com/id/2106590/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/nov/02/usa.religion

"Believes he is absolute ruler - check"
See above. Also, just what has he ever got done without congress.

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0604b.asp

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/04/30/bush_challenges_hundreds_of_laws/

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/bush-commutes-libbys-sentence/

So. How would have Kerry ( or Obama ) handled Iraq...

Really quite irrelevant to the question of Bush, but... Iraq was nothing to do with 9/11, and invading the country has solved nothing and given the US a whole raft of problems in the mideast which are now just going to get worse. It is an attempt to dominate the mideast by force, which the US has neither the patience, the budget, nor the military might to do.

I've usually found ./ to be populated with people who are a step above the median in intellegence. Why don't we see many people taking the long term view,

I don't believe political disagreements have anything to do with intelligence. Osama Bin Laden is intelligent, that doesn't mean you have to agree with him.

Perhaps the world you want to live in is dominated by Christian Fundamentalists, whom Christ would have disowned - I'd rather not live in that world.

The US has helped, and continues to help, to prop up the festering cesspool of little dictators in the mideast - they backed Saddam in the 80s, backed the Iranian coup before that, and currently back Pakistan, Saudi, Israel, and many others with military and monetary assistance. If you want to address those issues, I suggest you look to your own countries current actions in backing undesirable regimes worldwide.

So the trail leads back to the licence server - which Microsoft is turning off for its customers. Why is it doing that? According to Rob Bennett, who wrote the shock email, it was too complicated to support. "Every time there is an OS upgrade, you saw support issues. People would call in because they couldn't download licences. We had to write new code, new configurations each time,"

So it was too much hassle to support, and as for the customers who had purchased music, they thought forever - they could take a running jump.

More 'non-lethal' force options - to use against 'undesirable' expressions by the domestic populations of 'liberal democracies' - that have lawfully assembled against the wishes of their 'representatives'.

This is worse than the sub-harmonic puke-ray, or the microwave brain-fryer.

Welcome to the movie, "Brazil."

This is old news. I submitted a piece about these on 15th May!
Here is a link to the article in question.

"If we didn't need oil, we wouldn't have troops in the ME. If we didn't have troops in the ME to begin with, 9/11 would never have happened."

As long as Israel continues to exist, and receives funding from the United States, Al-Qaeda would have reason to attack the United States.

Read Bin Laden's letter to America, it explains all of this.

You don't even need to go far in the letter:

"As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:

(1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.

a) You attacked us in Palestine: "

Even if you weren't burning gasoline in your cars, you'd still be consuming oil for plastics, lubrication, vasoline, and any other petroleum based product or process.

There are many parallel processing and networking API's and out there - both past and present - OpenMP, pthreads, CUDA, sockets, etc...

There is a proposal by Apple to create a common API for parallel processing (OpenCL) which would be cross-platform compatible. The Guardian has an article on this topic.

Cite this ... you know, just give me a Bush quote that supports this in any way ...

Here.

See above.

Here.

Also, just what has he ever got done without congress.

He suspended habeas corpus despite the Constitution explicitly mandating that only Congress could do that.

So. How would have Kerry ( or Obama ) handled Iraq, and how exactly would that have been better for the US's future?

They wouldn't have invaded Iraq. We would have a trillion dollars more in our pocket than we do now, we wouldn't have seriously damaged international relations and lost as much clout as we have, and about a half million Iraqis would probably still be alive.

Should we ignore the problem represented by the *entire* mideast, till someone pops a nuke in an American city?

Here's where your lack of knowledge of the situation really kicks in. The "mideast" isn't a monolithic entity out for blood, it's a highly fragmented mix of different nations, ethnicities, and ideologies. We don't have the resources to invade every country, so we have to actually deal with the mideast problems individually. Afghanistan needed to be invaded. Nobody, including Obama, has criticized Bush on the subject of invasion of Afghanistan. Iraq was an idiotic mistake. Now if Iran gets close to developing nuclear weapons, invasion might be necessary; however, since we've spent so much militarily and diplomatically on Iraq, we might not be able to deal with Iran.

The weapons inspector program worked. Saddam didn't have WMD and he wasn't building them. All invading did was show the rest of the world that not having nuclear weapons makes you vulnerable. North Korea simply announced that they had nuclear weapons and would use them if they felt like it, and Bush knuckled under and suddenly insisted on diplomacy rather than force. This is a kind of cowardice that severely undercuts our ability to deal with future despots with nuclear weapons.

I've usually found ./ to be populated with people who are a step above the median in intellegence. Why don't we see many people taking the long term view, looking 20-50 years down the line, and the kind of world we want to live in then? You think a festering cesspool of little dictators with access to nukes or radiological bombs would be a bright place to live? If nothing else, Iraq 2 has started to drain the swamp.

You've missed another point. There aren't a finite amount of terrorists, and if we kill them all we win. New ones are created every day, and all using overwhelming force like we have done in Iraq does is create new ones. Invading Iraq was the wrong move to make. It made the world less safe of a place. If your judgment is so faulty that you can't see that simple fact, then you're certainly not someone I can trust to look 30-50 years in the future.

We are willing to give up probably the cleanest source of nuclear energy developed so far, just because we are afraid of petty despots and terrorists getting their hands on a nuke. We are letting a tiny, tiny minority of small minded psychopaths determine the technological evolution of the human race, simply because we are scared.

I believe the problem is acquiring enriched uranium is the hardest part of constructing a nuclear weapon - some would say the only hard part.

I get nervous when folks start talking about "free" services.

Really? Do fire engines make you nervous, then? Or public water fountains? Street lights?

You must be a nervous wreck in any city.

As a practical matter, for humans to live in cities (and at this level of population and industry, a lot of us have to - more than half the human race now lives in cities), a number of public goods and common goods must be provided.

We can certainly debate whether "free" wi-fi should be one of them, but to get upset at the very idea of "free" services is pointless. (Unless perhaps you've got a time machine and plan to go back and either stop or radically change the course of, the industrial/urban revolution.)

Have a look at the "David Kelly affair" which led to the Hutton Inquiry which led to the BBC avoiding investigative journalism of NuLabours government (they still are in many ways) and finally look at recent discussions at the whole situation as it has become clear that the BBC were correct! Even if you are not that interested in the UK this relates to an item of interest to most of the world: the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction able to launch in 45 minutes.

As an assist here are a couple of links the get you started:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr_David_Kelly
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton_Inquiry

The following seems to be a good (if unorganized) set of articles relating to this.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/davidkelly

I'd love to find a country that's figured out how they should be balanced and needs a MSEE grad with PM experience that can look past a late-night semi-inebriated /. post...

Norway. It's also the most peaceful place in the world. I lived there until March, I moved since I got a one-of-a-kind job elsewhere. That's still a place I would recommend, though. The health care system is universal, tax levels are supposed to be the highest in the world, but that's not true: they are high for the rich bastards, I never paid more than 29.5% of my income and my last salary was about $7500 a month before taxes.

And, yes, they are desperate to find people there. With the current oil prices their economy is on the way up, but you cannot improvise engineers in a few months, so chances are you can find a job there fairly easily. They also have movies/TV in original language (mostly English) and most people speak decent English too, so you are not completely lost in a foreign country until you learn Norwegian. Norwegians are also efficient as Germans, but without the rudeness; pretty nice people to work with.

This type of tsunami is the exact same as what is predicted will ultimately wipe out most of the Eastern Seaboard. It will make Katrina and even the tsunami that hit in the Indian Ocean look like a cake walk. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/aug/10/science.spain

Actually there is a bias now, against young men. The numbers show young men are doing more poorly in general in grade school than woman. They are trending to go to college less and are more likely to have problems in school. Yet a good chunk of the activism and money goes towards woman now.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/jan/25/news.citynews Now, where is Viacom's track record with regards to collecting and using personal information?

and the line of blather you're pushing is pretty damn far off the mark

Is it?

http://www.exyoung.com/Journalism/WindFarm.htm
http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080710/NEWS02/807100355/1003/NEWS02
http://www.redorbit.com/news/business/1434788/wind_farm_project_could_double_in_size_developers_expect_to/
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/story?id=48596
http://www.iberianature.com/spainblog/2008/06/wind-farm-construction-in-capercaillie-habitat-paralysed-by-judge/
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=16203
http://www.wind-watch.org/news/2007/12/31/wind-farm-plans-pose-big-threat-to-harbour-porpoise/
http://renewableenergylaw.blogspot.com/2005/02/kansas-wind-farm-faces-another-lawsuit.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/22/windpower.greenpolitics?gusrc=rss&feed=uknews
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6875711/

I'm not even trying hard. Just put

court halt "wind farm"

into Google. No FOX News involved. And no, these aren't the NIMBY cases; I skipped those. These are enviro's killing wind development over "rare grasslands", various birds, etc.

The evidence for the intolerence of "all the greens" for basically any development at all, including so-called "renewable" energy is obvious. Pull your greeny head our of your ass and pay attention.

About the only true thing the Bush administration has said and they issue a grovelling apology.

Le American is a good example of the power of US press and propaganda. If your particular country does not have someone in favor of wars of aggression that harm your business interests, just wait a few years.

This is a dark day for everyone. The Bush administration and the next will use this immunity to identify and crush political opposition. This will embolden them to more conquest and oppression, which will result in more of the same. Beware.

I was half joking, there isn't a specific law, except those on racial discrimination which are used to justify all manner of things from forced (or arranged as they call it) marriages to female circumcision to voodoo exorcism.

What's obvious is that the police often go soft or turn a blind eye to avoid being accused of racism.

And none of those is from the Daily Mail - for the benefit of lefty imbeciles like the one who modded me down.

Quite:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jul/06/travelandtransport.usa

What is a good online British paper for your American cousins to read?

The Guardian is better than most, especially for science and tech.

The take-down actions against AMVs have mostly been initiated by the Japanese music rights holders, not the anime studios. The original request to remove 30,000 AMVs from YouTube ih 2006 came from the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC).

YouTube/Google don't really have much say in the matter; they simply have to follow the take-down provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. If you wished to contest their decision, you could have filed a counter-notice. That requires the rights holder to file suit within fourteen days or else the ISP must restore the material.

Anybody creating material that might trigger a DMCA takedown notice should definitely read the FAQ at chillingeffects cited above before posting. You have rights, too.

Where the largest danger presented by the car (20x the danger of the bike!) is that you will become (more) unfit and die from some disease of the fat. But, people prefer to drive, because "biking's dangerous".

P.S. Guardian is a bit left wing, BBC prone to side with Government/Official view.

> in that most of the Oil-for-Food funds were being siphoned off for Saddam's personal use while his people starved.

did you think that iraqi people is going better now ? (maybe yes if your source is foxnews )

>we saw how much corruption there actually was in the Oil-for-Food program. Thanks France.

uhm USA got more oil from this program than france in fact usa got 52% of it

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/may/17/otherparties.iraq

and about corruption you should backcheck halliburton http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/ or blackwater http://oversight.house.gov/story.asp?ID=1163 too

Every person who's private information may have been exposed should be informed. The company screwed up in a way that could cause people who trusted them a big problem. The least the company should do is notify the victims. They should also set aside funds and resources to help anyone who is defrauded as a result. A class action suit might convince companies to do these minimal things.

EU privacy laws are about to take a dive, so citizens and customers will be shafted more often.

Ultimately, this will cause great harm to all commerce. If enough innocent people get shafted, others will lose confidence.

Here Bush is upset over flawed intelligence and the findings show that the Intelligence was flawed, and it was a mistake and not an intentional lie. US Intelligence has always been flawed and Johnson and Clinton didn't get impeached for wars or military strikes that killed people based on flawed intelligence. In fact Clinton's impeachment trial was over Monica Lewinsky not Sudan, and he won his appeal.

What it means is that we need to improve intelligence gathering and learn from mistakes so we don't repeat them. If Bush repeated his mistakes we'd already be at war with Iran and North Korea, and good thing we are not.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/jan/27/iraq.davidhirst

It's old news, actually. Get back to your MTV before you accidentally learn something.

From my point of view, I see Muslims detained without basic rights.

More Muslims have done that to each other than "Kaffir-Harbis" or whoever

For starters, two wrongs don't make a right.Also by asking "where's my outrage" you seem to imply that I somehow find that acceptable, I don't!
As for how could Muslims do this, we already had a long discussion about acts of Muslims vs. what Islam allows and disallows :)

Anyway, my aim here wasn't criticising American detainment per se but simply noting that reality is not conformant with your belief that America is somehow under Saudi/Muslim control when more than 100 Saudis were forcefully detained. I shouldn't really need to bring evidence that Muslims are harassed anyway. Should be obvious :(

the Hijab/Naqab/Burqua is a symbol of oppression of women and fundamentally incompatible with modernity

Says who? I personally know female doctors, teachers and programmers who are muhajabat or munaqabat. Interestingly, in the colledge I worked in, it seemed to me that the vieled female students tended to score more in exams and be better programmers than the non-veiled, who seemed more interested in superficial things. Of course this is my personal observation and this isn't always the case but it shows there's no conflict between hijab and modernity. I'm sure you can find similar examples in other places/countries.

Muslim women declare it's their own choice,

Now that, is nonsense

You mean that no Muslim woman declares that (which is wrong, they even filed lawsuits to defend their right to wear hijab) or you mean that even if they declared that hijab is their choice they're wrong and should be forced to take it off?
Now here's the problem: the western world allows things that are scientifically proven as harmful like alcohol or smoking all in the name of freedom, yet they want to ban consenting adult women from an activity because it's perceived symbolically harmful by non-Muslims. Now that's hypocricy.

and ongoing pressure to stop building mosques.

Where?

Germany and Italy, for starters. I could probably find more examples in several European countries if I look hard enough.

Besides, attacking religion is entirely acceptable in modern discourse in the modern world.

Again, I wasn't specifically criticising the Pope's attack on Islam (he has a right to say what he wants) but providing a counterexample to your claim that Christians are somehow afraid of Muslims. In hindsight, I didn't really need an example, it's enough to be aware of the news in the past months to see that no one seems to respect Muslims at all (let alone fear them as you claim).

As to why Muslims seem to care a lot for not having their religion insulted, it's because they seem to be among the last people who actually care about the position of religion in their lives, Al-Hamdulillah. Everyone else seems to have more or less abandoned it so the jokes/insults to their religion don't really matter to them.

Christians/Jews who do care about their religion would probably take offence in the insults you mentioned as well.

You mean in the dark ages?

Of course not. If anything it's "IP" being banded around like some new religion with WIPO and their clown army inadvertently leading us towards a second dark age.

When there were no books available to the common person?

Nothing at all to do with the fact that the printing press hadn't been invented?

No recordings of music for them to enjoy?

I hear the underground pagan live music scene was kicking back in 955AD! Rock fans thought they were the first but even back then Christians were determined to ruin it for the kids.

No engineered medicines to improve quality of life?

Okay, you got me. I'm sure the dark ages could have been brought to a swift end with seroxat for all!

I'm not willing to throw intellectual property under the bus until you can explain to me how people with ideas can distribute their life work and be fairly compensated.

This "ideas" language you're using is complete nonsense, you're fairly compensated for your work by providing something people want at the price the market dictates. In the case of digital distribution, the price is close to zero. What we're seeing is middlemen lobbying for the right to sell hot air at an inflated cost or to sell raindrops in a torrential downpour.

Even powell said "this is bullshit" but he read the Anthrax line and portable chemical factories lines with a straight face. He's an unelectable pariah at best and a war criminal at worst. His doubts never stopped him from helping to wage war for false reasons. A higher crime I cannot think of.

perhaps you should search for
"climate change" , ice age there is so much information your punny brain won't be avail to proses it anyway
yahoo search
here is some info
this makes it realy clear if you read all of it!

Betcha Stephen Hawking might argue that... that is, if he was allowed to be born.

Ahem, since you draw the guy into the debate, are you aware of Hawking's position? Because that might surprise you. He is way more radical than just selecting the healthy ones, he goes straight for actively tampering with the DNA. He's in favour of stem-cell research too.

Ahhh, so that's why the polar bear population has doubled since 1960.

MYTH: Polar bear numbers are increasing.

The Guardian can be wrong? Shocking!

Here's one science dissenter :

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/sep/16/highereducation.climatechange

The cause of the droughts remains a mystery: some blame climate change and others say it is down to farmers destroying surface vegetation. Satellite images suggest vegetation in the region has recovered significantly over the last 15 years, pushing the southern Sahara into retreat.

This is obviously exactly what anybody would expect, but somehow the ipcc has obscured even basic logic in many people. More energy available for plants = more plants, since plants use this energy to procreate.

Polar bears already have problems. Ice freezes later and thaws sooner, so bears have to swim further and many drown.

Ahhh, so that's why the polar bear population has doubled since 1960. All the weak, fat asses are being "naturally selected?"

Finally, the National Geographic was a little glib, if not intentionally missleading, when it said:

Haha, it's finally happening :-) The Republican pandering is starting to confuse the cult. Having trouble figuring out who's on your side now? That's rich! No clear battle lines anymore. You might have to actually learn something... nah. Won't happen. You guys will rally confused around different ordained ministers and it will turn into the Protestants vs. the Catholics all over again. I'll buy ringside tickets and popcorn for that if you guys haven't burned it all in your gas tanks and starved half the planet by then.

Nat Geo's on your team buddy. They are full on, global warming cultists. The only thing making that quote misleading in that it doesn't even mention the polar ice maximum was much thicker than average this year. Funny how there are no blowhard alarmists shouting about being buried by a mile of ice.

The alarmists are alarmingly correct.

And you wrap it up by talking as if the whole thing melted already. Good job! Funding secure. Now you can go back to wasting taxpayer dollars on your imaginary problem.

There's no such thing as a flop in the pharma industry. If they spend the money to do research, they sure as hell spend the money to get the clinical trials come out the way they want.

Think I'm exaggerating? Check out the latest research regarding Prozac.

Besides that, $1bn is chump change for research these days. Gillette claims to have spent $750 million on R&D for the Mach 3 razor, and these were pretty reasonably priced, even when they were introduced. Pharma pricing is all about inelastic demand, and it needs to either be moderated through collective bargaining at the national level or outright regulation.

I'm willing to take the hit "thru" my 401k.

I can't believe that somebody modded that drivel +3: Insightful...

Bloody cheats, they must have used a time machine to send grapes that can't possibly be grown locally back to 2005 (or maybe they took them from the medieval warm times!). Reality called, the british wine industry has been producing locally from the 70s. The climate has been so good lately that an English red wine won an international prize in 2006.

If only the atmosphere had a way to regulate its H2O content... that would be swell. Maybe we could call it rain!

Point 2, 4 and 5 are left as an exercise to the reader... they have been brought up and discussed/debunked to death in any climate discussion for the last two years.

Interesting. Googlesearch for obama+telecom+immunity reveals a Guardian article that shows that he voted (with only 30 other Democratic Senators) against the immunity.

This may have been a hedge, though; because the bill started in the Senate, he knew there would be another chance to vote after it came back from the House.

Hmmm, hit #4 in the search is a CBS News piece dated 6/21/2008 that has him issuing a statement in support of the House's update of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but said he would try to strip a provision granting immunity to telecommunication companies when the bill comes to a vote in the Senate next week.

I like the idea of an anti-corporate Senator, and I love the idea of an anti-corporate President. It's about time for another TR.

You're almost right, but not quite.

Today there is government backing behind state of the art malware, and it is a lot more sophisticated than you give it credit for. Todays black hats are guns for hire, owning vast botnets, often they are only loosely affiliated with government agencies.

The effectiveness of botnets is primarily measured by their ability to infiltrate and function WITHOUT doing any detectable harm. The vast percentage of compromised machines are dormant, and do NO HARM, they are only a very occasionally test fired to assess their operational status.

The primary purpose of botnets is NOT monetary, it is political. They are rarely used to directly make money.

Just take a look at what happened to Estonia for example...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/may/17/topstories3.russia [guardian.co.uk]

Back in the 60's when the components that make up the internet were designed, the main concern was designing a network of computers that could communicate even when under attack during a time of war. Today governments have the exact opposite concern.

The only defense mechanisms that work against todays malware are distributed ones, short of disconnecting themselves from the internet, individuals have no hope, you just simply won't suspect the mechanism that will be used to comprimise your machine.

This is something white hats are only just coming to grips with.

Todays hackers will be looking to gain deep penetration into aspiring OS platforms as early as they possibly can, to ensure they are in there from day one. Macs are easily popular enough to attract the interest of black hats, if you're on any machine directly or indirectly connected to the internet you should be worried about malware, Macs are definitely not immue.

I think you have a fundamental mis-understanding of the nature of malware today.

It may be comforting to you to think that malware is still made by idiots and targeted towards idiots.

Today there is government backing behind malware, and it is a lot more sophisticated than you give it credit for. I guarentee, even amongst the Slashdot crowd, there's a large percentage of comprimised machines, and these machines are all silently waiting ready to participate in botnet attacks at the nod of a shadey government head. Many owners of botnets are guns for hire, loosely affiliated with government agencies and use their network only very occasionally to sniff out the odd bank account to suppliment income they attain from government agencies.

Just take a look at what happened to Estonia for example...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/may/17/topstories3.russia

I think its a safe bet a large number of governments have botnets at their disposal, and many would be suprised by the percentage of machines out there that have been comprimised.

Back in the 60's when the components that make up the internet were designed, the main concern was designing a network of computers that could communicate even when under attack during a time of war. Today governments have the exact opposite concern.

The only defense mechanisms that work against malware today are distributed ones, individuals have no hope.

With Macs becoming popular people really should be worried about malware, it's a safe bet they have already been targeted and infiltrated. Thinking that only Windows gets targeted because it's users are foold and hackers hate Bill is really quite stupendously naive.

Brazil will be the first to implement this.

...high rates of obesity (soul food), diabetes (sweet tea), and heart disease....

Having just moved from there, to the Bay Area, Ca....
Yes, Ga is unhealthy. Alot of the blame can also be put on the government of the state, which continues to push for more and wider highways (as if 16 lanes isnt enough), continue to allow and support the majority of power plants running on fossil fuels, mainly coal and including 3 of the dirtiest in the US, with two in the top 3 of that list. This, combined with naturally high humidity, ultra high pollen counts and high temperatures makes the air quality suck, putting Atlanta in 4th for most challenging place to live with asthma and consistently in the Top Ten smoggiest cities. This keeps people inside. Going anywhere basically means driving there as sprawl and the resulting proliferation of more roads without increased mass transit or even bike lanes(again, gvmt sponsored), reckless drivers in large vehicles thanks to (previously, and relatively) cheap gas and the whole "southern/redneck" bit that leans towards F250s with 12"lift on mud tires, and the horrid air make it difficult to impossible to walk or bike anywhere (outside of Down/Mid Town Atl) for fear of your life. So people tend to sit on their fat asses in their offices all day and eat at one of about 20 McDonads or Waffle Houses in the 2mi radius of their home (after driving there of course)... not that I miss having a 24h eatery nearby (I miss my WaHo and Marietta Diner!). Add to all that that NASCAR is a "Sport" in Ga, and as such, "exercising" consists of sitting in bleachers (or on the sofa), smoking, drinking budweiser and eating chilli cheese dogs while watching cars go in circles.

Alot of this could be fixed by improving mass-transit, curbing Sprawl (which is what really caused the drought) and improving Atlanta's Bikability. Generally getting people out of their cars and walking or biking places. MARTA's subway line only goes to about 3 useful places: the airport, downtown, and perimeter mall, while a majority of people live in Cobb County, which rejected having anything to do with a Marta rail line (think: "It will bring in the colored people to steal our TV's!").

Ga is way behind in most rankings of things as well: the Gov'ner has repeatedly struck down attempts to allow Sunday sales of any alcoholic beverage (outside of a restaurant), the most recent time saying it would teach "better time management," thus keeping Georgia one of 3 states still having such arcane blue laws. The state is kept in the past though laws like this, as well as the control the churches have over it and its citizens, which al

Then who exactly voted for Muhammad Abbas? Who voted for the Hamas in Gaza? I'm sure those were the Jews. Yes, those sneaky, evil Jews...

Sure, technically they can vote - for a "government" that has little to no power, except what it can strong-arm for itself via the use of militias. In terms of the actual government that controls their country, no vote whatsoever. (Actually, one thing that really scares some of the the Israelis is that one day, the Palestinians will stop asking for independence and start asking for a vote; this is unlikely to happen.)

If the Palestinians didn't use their right to travel to transport weapons, munitions and explosives, I can promise you the checkpoints would gradually disappear. Unfortunately each time a checkpoint is removed, yet another suicide belt or other weapon is discovered, proving the need for these checkpoints.

I wouldn't bet on it. In any case, the way the Israeli government uses checkpoint closures isn't helping matters.

There are probably tens, maybe hundreds, of instances in history where a war created refugees which were never allowed home. Why should this conflict be special? You started the war, you lost the war, fucking deal with the consequences and stop whining.

I suggest you check your history. The war - the original one, at least - was started by the Zionist movement. They used mass immigration to try and turn Palestine into a Jewish state, followed by by terrorist tactics to kick out the British mandate. Then the war started. There's fairly widespread suspicion that the Zionist/Israeli side of the civil war deliberately tried to force out the Arabs in an attempt at ethnic cleansing; IIRC, it's even reasonably well-founded. This is why the refugees are so insistent on wanting to return home.

They have their own government, which is supposed to treat them as equals. When the Palestinian government decides it wants to coexist peacefully with Israel, Palestinians will be able to visit Israel or work in it. I'm not sure what else exactly you want. Do you want Palestinians to be able to vote for two Parliaments or what?

In practice, their government doesn't control Palestine (except for the minor things) - the Israeli government does. They have effective control over housing policy, policing, partially over power and water, a veto (via assasination or arrest) over the choice of politicians, etc.

Sorry, all true. Arab citizens of Israel get all the perks of being an Israeli citizen - the right to vote, free world-class health services, generous welfare, etc - all without obligations such as having to serve in the Army. Arabs in Israel are arguably better off than anywhere else in the world, with the possible exception of countries rich in oil, yet they never cease to complain about their condition.

...and all they have to put up with is widespread racism and discrimination (particularly in housing, lots of which is Jewish-only) together with no political influence. Oh, and some particularly nasty government tactics to stop them setting up home in Jerusalem or even force them out of their existing homes there in order to make it as Jewish as possible.

Exploding buses, pizza parlors and discotheques filled with children are "horrors". Blowing up a Passover Seder meal in a hotel is a "horror". Checkpoints, closures and targeted killings of armed terrorist leaders are not my idea of a cup of tea, but they are not "horrors".

Admittedly, the Israeli side mostly gave up on terrorist tactics once they won and got an army, but that's not saying much. The checkpoint closures leave people without essential supplies or income and strand people on the wrong side. The targeted killings aren't and tend to kill random passers-by even when they do

Aside from the RSS feeds of Slashdot and the main UK dailys, I like to read semantically or search engine generated feeds:

Delicious popular tag 'politics':
http://del.icio.us/rss/popular/politics

Delicious popular tag 'science':
http://del.icio.us/rss/popular/science

Google News search 'biodiesel', an endless stream of positive news:
http://news.google.co.uk/news?hl=en&ned=uk&q=biodiesel&ie=UTF-8&output=rss

I'm hoping that Delicious may eventually allow combinations of tags, e.g. popular uk+politics.

Plus a few other plain RSS feeds:

BBC Technology:
http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/technology/rss.xml

XKCD A webcomic of romance and math humor.
http://xkcd.com/rss.xml

Tech-On Asian Technology News:
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/index.rdf

The Guardian's 'Comment is Free' article stream with comment section:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/rss

Buffalo Beast, US political satire:
http://interglacial.com/rss/buffalo_beast.rss

Fabians political society:
http://fabians.org.uk/index2.php?option=com_ds-syndicate&version=1&feed_id=1

My wife's parents owned two cockatoos (unfortunately, one passed away a few years back, so it is down to one now). When both birds were in the midst of a screech-fest and the phone rang, my father-in-law would answer it "Hello, Jurassic Park!"

BTW, the current theory is that the chicken is the closest living relative of the T-Rex: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/apr/13/uknews.taxonomy

Imagine the drumsticks you could have eaten back in the Cretaceous! That is, if they didn't eat you first.

actually, the truth is we don't know.

we've been blind in iran for years.