Slashdot Mirror

These license plate scanners are already everywhere in my city in Virginia. At least half the police cruisers seem to have them now. I've noticed the cruisers sitting on the sides of the road at certain choke points in the highway (bridges, tunnels), just scanning every car that passes by. There also seems to be a proliferation of private companies around here scanning as well. Just the other day I was walking to my car at my university parking lot, and I noticed some unidentified civilian vehicle with scanners mounted front and back slowly driving by all the parked cars.

It has gotten so bad, the city has hired a private company to drive around scanning every vehicle looking for people who are behind on paying their state property taxes! If your license plate shows up as a "hit" they will put a boot on your car regardless of where it happens to be. Doesn't matter if you just happen to be out getting groceries, your car is now stuck there until you settle your tax debt. Better call a taxi.

NHC did a poor job of communicating, which led to city officials like Bloomberg playing down the storm as close as 48h prior to landfall. The problem was that Sandy didn't fit the classic definition of a hurricane, even though we had 75-80kt winds over a few hundred mile wide path. So while everyone is running around saying "it's not a hurricane", it still packed those 75-80kt winds and had a very large storm surge.

We were without power for about 7 days on Long Island, and it took close to three weeks for gas lines to subside. Even with filling up my tank a day or two prior to the storm, I was having trouble getting gas 10 days later.

Fortunately, we still had water & gas at home, so cooking / bathing was not an issue.

Here is Portsmouth Virginia, the local government hired a private company to drive around the city with license plate scanners and boot any car it found where the owner was flagged for being behind on paying taxes to the city. Didn't matter if that left the owner stranded. If you didn't have the money immediately to pay your overdue taxes, better find a new way to get to work.

In Portsmouth, pay personal property taxes or get the boot

A case in point. One of the largest private military firms around and they make less than half what it takes to get on the Fortune 500 list. They indeed don't have the resources or the guns.

2009 Story out of Denver, Colorodo:

Kelly Coffman-Lee wanted to tell the world about her love of tofu by picking the letters for her car's license plate. Her suggestion for the plate on her Suzuki: "ILVTOFU." Department of Revenue spokesman Mark Couch said the letters could be misinterpreted. Coffman-Lee, 38, said tofu is a staple of her family's diet because they are vegan and that the DMV misinterpreted her message.

2012 Story out of Virgina:

If the Department of Motor Vehicles is going to let people praise certain religions or ethnicities on their license plates, it also must let people denigrate individuals of those faiths and nationalities. That's the opinion of a Circuit Court judge, who ruled last week that part of the DMV's guidelines governing vanity tags is unconstitutional. The ruling stemmed from an appeal from an Iraq War veteran who disagreed with the state's decision last year to revoke his personalized plates, which read "ICUHAJI." "Haji" is a common and often derogatory term for Arabs used by U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. The veteran's attorney, however, said his client did not intend to offend anyone.

This is yet another career-ender for some unfortunate officer. These incidents aren't even called "relieved" any more, they're flat-out called "firings". They have skyrocketed in recent years, so much so that the Navy Times keeps a list, updating it frequently. It is a long list. A few of them are justified, such as "a loss of confidence in Parkerâ(TM)s ability to command" (incompetent) or "a survey found a poor command climate" (officer is such a prick above and beyond normal officer prickishness that it makes his subordinates do a bad job). A few are DWI or other arrests, which makes sense as you don't want someone with that lack of self-control in charge of nuclear weapons. A lot of these firings are what's called "zipper failure" or more formally "having an âoeunduly familiar relationshipâ with a female member of the crew." Hey, humans are humans, you put females on a ship and this is what will happen. Well, equal opportunity, right? Cmdr. Etta Jones was fired for among other things, taking a 9mm pistol out of a gun safe and pointing it hat her crew. It's a hard life being a Navy commander, all eyes are on you and you can be held accountable for everything, even if you didn't do it.

It worked great. They found him with a conventional wiretap.

The rape is the worst though. Daniel Phillips is a pedophile.

http://hamptonroads.com/2011/01/man-flown-iraq-face-norfolk-charges

So they drag these guys from halfway around the world to try them in my backyard (I live 30 miles from Norfolk, where the Eastern District court is). The Eastern District is also notorious for patent suits. In that article, the newspaper claims it's the speediness that attracts these cases, but I'm guessing it's the likelihood of getting a jury packed with current and former military members who favor harsh punishments for trivial infractions.

We've also had our share of Somali pirates and a few Guantanamo prisoners tried here.

oh i can buy other phones, but there is no signal at my house for anyone but verizon

Not even a land line? I thought that's what the universal service fee was for: to get land-line coverage up to 100%.

Where I live, the land line choices are Verizon... and Verizon. There was even an article in the local paper today about how Verizon is letting its copper infrastructure go to waste, so if you live in a place that doesn't have FTTx, you're definitely screwed.

On a similar note, I suppose you have never heard of Henrietta Lacks and how pharmaceutical companies patented her cancer cells, the strain which makes them billions of dollars and responsible for causing her untimely demise.

I am in Northern Virginia. There is no power outage or severe weather here.

I'm gonna believe the multiple news stories that say you're wrong.

The litigation has so far cost the university $352,874.76, Wood said, adding that the fees have been paid for from private funds.

And that's just legal fees from the university's side of things, the state itself has its own costs to look at for the first investigation and I'm sure many people are spending hours handling this. So you might be wondering what the original research that Mann did cost the university? Answer: under $500,000. So with this latest round of litigation, the Attorney General -- who is championing this effort under the guise of protecting tax payer dollars -- will force the state of Virginia to pay up again.

When I submitted this, I was hoping to find some news of this latest round from the more conservative press (Fox News, Washington Times) instead of the more liberal (New York Times, Washington Post) but there's nothing from that side of the spectrum. I think a local paper put it best in an editorial entitled Cuccinelli Needs to Cut Our Losses.

The same AG who changed the Virginia state seal to cover up a breast. The same state seal designed by George Wythe, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. http://hamptonroads.com/2010/04/cuccinelli-opts-more-modest-state-seal

Last time i checked most people carry a cellphone which authorities can use to locate your person at all times.

BUT electricity usage can be used to get a warrant to search your home:

"An unusually high electricity bill alerted police to a possible marijuana-growing operation, the warrant said."

I would think that the use of electricity usage data should play out the same way, but who knows!

I knows!
Granting warrants for excessive electricity use is routine in the USA.

Here's one from 2004: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0330044pot1.html
Here's one from 2009: http://hamptonroads.com/node/510056

Of course they have.

Good job by commodore64. It looks like you're one step closer to having your way. A federal court has ruled that that it's legal for the federal government to install cameras on a farmer's private property.

Camera convicted him but raised battle over privacy
Farmers beware: Big Brother may be watching.
http://hamptonroads.com/2009/02/camera-convicted-him-raised-battle-over-privacy

I was thinking of this guy actually:

http://hamptonroads.com/2008/09/johnson-wins-edwards-hits-wall-purpose

Quote:
"I planned on hitting the wall, but I didn't plan on the wall slowing me down that much," Edwards said. "In video games, you can just run into the wall and run it wide open. That's what I did, but it didn't quite work out the same as the video game."

Nobody should be surprised by password issues anymore. That's like being surprised that some people cheat on their taxes; it's just a fundamental part of human nature.

Anyone remember these stories? Someone got an ATM manual off the web, learned the default password ... and walks up to an ATM, switches it to debug mode, makes it think the $20's were actually fives -- oh, and dispense everything in fives. And promptly makes off with hundreds of dollars by cleaning out (untraceable) prepaid debit cards.

One of the most telling points is that there's a year's difference between these two stories. Another is that the default passcode to some models of ATM is 123456. And this is for ATMs, where there's a very obvious and immediate impact to lax security (many thousands of dollars lost per incident since the reprogramming can go undetected for days). Considering this, it's not surprising that SQL server passwords don't get changed, for exactly the same reason: "I cut meat and I sell groceries. That's my job. I don't know anything about [securing] an ATM." is not all that far from "I'm just an application developer, I use SQL to get stuff done for the business. What do I know about security?"

Both are regrettable (they both have the same end result; pwnage) and they both flow from human nature.

If you read the Drupal theme developer's guide you'd know that basic Drupal theming works exactly that way. A page template is simply an HTML page with tags inserted where you want specific components to appear.

The power of Drupal's approach to theming is that you can do as little, or as much, customization of detailed component formatting as you want.

It's a site development platform, not simple blogware that lets you play with look and feel. This is why the Onion, HamptonRoads.com, New York Observer and Ozzy Osborne's website can all run Drupal but not look or act like my weblog or JumpTV.

A maglev project at Old Dominion University has been a boondoggle and an embarrassment to the community:
http://www.odu.edu/webroot/orgs/IA/university_news.nsf/articles/11152006091139AM
http://content.hamptonroads.com/story.cfm?story=122680&ran=183404

It's such a shame.

Now local officials want to construct a light rail line linking two non-residential areas. More colossal waste.

http://content.hamptonroads.com/story.cfm?story=136584&ran=226930&tref=rss

The miracle is that these decision makers keep their jobs. There must be a bright future in wasting money.

A maglev project at Old Dominion University has been a boondoggle and an embarrassment to the community:
http://www.odu.edu/webroot/orgs/IA/university_news.nsf/articles/11152006091139AM
http://content.hamptonroads.com/story.cfm?story=122680&ran=183404

It's such a shame.

Now local officials want to construct a light rail line linking two non-residential areas. More colossal waste.

http://content.hamptonroads.com/story.cfm?story=136584&ran=226930&tref=rss

The miracle is that these decision makers keep their jobs. There must be a bright future in wasting money.

Wonko the very sane very smart.

Could you provide some examples you saw and experienced where people performance on US subs deterioated during your tenure in the Navy? Nothing classified please.

Also see the Norfolk sub fleet stand down. 01/11/2007
http://content.hamptonroads.com/story.cfm?story=117428&ran=182798&tref=po

The USS Greenville and Ehime Maru near Oahu, Hawaii, 02/09/2001
http://www.ntsb.gov/publictn/2005/MAB0501.htm

Thanks,
Jim

That's a pretty baseless accusation, is it not?

People can have all sorts of reasons for being moderates. Considering that elections are NOT consistently won by the same party every time around, it's fair to say that a rather significant portion of Americans are moderates.

Different times call for different strategies. The priorities of the nation change. The parties themselves change -- the Democrats are now championing many of the ideas the Republicans originally espoused regarding small government. I'd say that you'd be an outright idiot to vote for the same party year after year.

I lie somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum. I want the government to be as small as possible, but still provide adequate social services to its citizens in areas where it's necessary such as education and healthcare. Perhaps you could think of it as trimming the fat.

I'd hypothetically support a candidate like Ron Paul so that we could abolish unnecessary and outdated federal agencies. However, I'd be in support of later re-establishing similar agencies in a manner that is more efficient and suited to today's society. The IRS is a fantastic example, as the US tax code has become so convoluted and enormous that it requires a gigantic federal agency to make sense of it, not to mention the huge portion of the financial industry that's devoted to explaining this tax code to "normal people". A simplified (not necessarily flat) tax code would reduce a vast portion of the overhead associated with the IRS, would close loopholes exploited by the wealthy, and just might make people despise the government a tiny bit less.

Tangent: Now I'll note that I don't support Ron Paul, because he'd allow states to establish their own agencies in areas where the federal government would no longer have oversight under his idealistic plan. After spending the majority of my life in New Jersey, I can safely say that this would be a catastrophe at best. If there's one thing (actually 50) more corrupt and less efficient than the Federal Government, it's state government.

I could also point to the vast number of state governments that would have banned the teaching of evolution if they had their way. Many more have passed marriage amendments aimed at restricting the rights of same-sex couples, but also have a number of nasty side-effects such as also restricting the rights of single parents, or unmarried couples with children. If you want to make some conservative Virginians piping mad, explain to them how their marriage amendment encourages abortion. Then ask if they read the damn thing before voting on it. (Do not attempt above if said Virginian might be carrying a gun. This is a state where it's legal to carry a concealed firearm into a school board meeting -- no, I'm not making this up). End tangent.

What the GP poster was pointing out is that by virtually any accepted political ideology in the US, George Bush has failed on all accounts. He's accomplished none of his conservative social agenda, has vastly increased the size of the government as well as push the national debt to new highs. Free-market capitalism is out of the question, with the number of no-bid war-profiteering contracts he's handed out to his friends. Conservatives have every reason to hate his guts with a firey passion.

Liberals also have quite a few reasons of their own to hate him that I don't think I need to go into.

No matter how you look at it, there is practically no positive spin on the Bush presidency. It is a dismal failure on all accounts unless you're Halliburton.

Generally the american public feels they are entitled to never ever be offended / bothered / or belittled in any way. If someone should talk back to a character in the theaters, or be seen smoking within 50 feet of a nonsmoker, or have a plane fly over their well house and wake the baby up, the feel personally affronted.

http://content.hamptonroads.com/story.cfm?story=132339&ran=146893

Whereas people in less degenerate societies are able to deal with these 'affronts' in stride, we can not. I blame our legal system that has grown like a cancer for 40 years now. Our legal system has more then anything else created a public that feels it is entitled to live a perfect harmonious life free from any 'nuisance'. And if something offends you can make money by suing. We are even suing God.

http://www.journalstar.com/articles/2007/09/18/news/politics/doc46ef102aa68ed928664526.txt

P.S. I love my country, but it is time we realize that our run has run out. All societies go through moments of glory, and then sink again into the dust. Just as China was once great, then fell, and is now great again, perhaps so to with America. Maybe it will take 1300 years though. In some ways our space program can be considered an analogy to their blue sea fleet in the 14th century. Just as they forgot why they needed an to spend all this money on the sea, we see no reason to for going out in space when we have so many problems at home. Just my 2 cents. But be sure all you smug Europeans, that americans are no different then anyone else. Transplant someone form Poland, or Germany and stick them in american society today, and they will end up just as 'fat and stupid' as everyone else. We are not genetically inferior, we have just had it too easy, and been lied to for too long.

"Technology that makes communications interceptable by Good Guys probably makes communications interceptable by Bad Guys." Obvious, when you think about it.

If you want to create some scary implications, Blackwater is starting its own "intelligence" agency. Being a private entity, 4th and 5th Amendment rules about search warrants and self-incrimination do not apply, although one must assume that any local/state/federal laws regarding monitoring and/or recording of communications would apply. You know, if they get caught. And since Blackwater has done contract work for the United States government in the past, one must assume that the United States is a potential customer of Blackwater Total Intelligence Solutions.

Just as food for thought, and to add to the conversation, here's a recent interview with Mythic regarding Warhammer Online.

http://home.hamptonroads.com/blog/threads.cfm?page =6&page_id=1512&uid=3#top1512

After all, these machines were never seriously designed with security in mind...they were designed to be easily compromised.

That's bullshit, and you know it.

When these systems are vulnerable, it's just as easy for ANYONE to take advantage of that fact. Not one party or one political stripe.

As for ATM security:

Citibank ATM fiasco "worst ever"
ATM reprogrammed to give out 4 times more money
Diebold ATMs hit by Nachi worm

http://www.odu.edu/webroot/orgs/IA/university_news .nsf/articles/01252006095739AM

http://www.odu.edu/webroot/orgs/IA/university_news .nsf/articles/09272005090143PM

and an image: http://media.hamptonroads.com/images/news/plasmape ncilbig.jpg

Old Dominion had this a while ago, and I believe that it was slashdotted too.

March 23, 2006 No Accountability

The cop who shot Sal Culosi won't face charges:

The Fairfax County police officer who shot an unarmed man to death in January will not be charged with a crime, the county's chief prosecutor announced this afternoon.

From the start, Fairfax police declared that the killing of Salvatore J. Culosi Jr., 37, was an accident and that the SWAT officer who fired had done so unintentionally. Fairfax Commonwealth's Attorney Robert F. Horan Jr. said that when a person fires a gun without malice and unintentionally kills someone, "they do not commit a crime."

I'm calling bullshit, here. In 30+ years as a prosecutor, Mr. Horan has never pursued charges against a police officer. Not once.

Horan said the officer was aware that he should not have had a finger on the trigger and that he should not have had his .45-caliber H&K handgun pointed at anyone. "As he [the officer] says, you keep your finger straight," Horan said. "He felt his finger was straight. . . . But obviously his finger is not straight up. His finger has to be on the trigger."

Tests showed no defect in the gun.

So a cop draws his gun and points it at a suspect (a no-no), has his finger on the trigger (a no-no), the gun goes off and kills a man, and Horan can't find enough to make the case for criminal negligence?

And why don't we get to know the name of Culosi's killer?

Let's apply these standards to a civilian. Let's say I'm showing my new, legally-purchased MP5 to a buddy. Just for kicks, and wholly without malice, I pretend like I'm a cowboy cop, and my friend assumes the role of the hapless optometrist I suspect of gambling. I pretend I'm raiding his home, point the gun at him, and, having put my finger on the trigger and having forgotten there's a bullet inside, the gun goes off, killing my friend.

Anyone think the police would hold off on releasing my name to the press?

Anyone think I'd escape criminal negligence charges?

More here:

March 29, 2006 Sal Culosi Update

A few items culled from the Justice for Sal site maintained by Culosi's family:

1) A couple of weeks ago, the Fairfax Police Department incredulously issued a news release warning that it would be cracking down on illegal NCAA tournament pools. Three months after one of its officers shot and killed Culosi, Fairfax PD titled its press release, "Illegal Gambling Not Worth the Risk." Words fail.

2) Here's a very recent case from Portsmouth, Virginia in which a kid was convicted of involuntary manslaughter after accidentally shooting a friend. The case is significant because Fairfax prosecutor Robert Horan has repeatedly insisted that Virginia law won't let him charge Officer Bullock with a crime. The facts of the Portsmouth case pretty clearly suggest otherwise.

3) The Washington Post weighs in with another editorial, this time with pointed criticism of Horan for declining to bring charges. The Post also reiterates its position against using SWAT teams for routine policing.

I understand your point. I can even logically follow along and agree with your arguement.

But somehow, the CEO still ends up with the new yacht, and the pensions go unfunded...

Update: Another journalist also reported on the device. The Article has a picture of the plasma pencil. The Article is here.

1) In what US city are you not within blocks of an elementery school? There are 2 schools within 1/4 mile of my house. That doesn't count 1 high school and 1 middle school.

2) Many sex offender lists are hopelessly outdated. People have had to post signs or move because their house is on the list and they are constantly harassed.Link

3) Most people on the sexual offenders list were listed for reasons other than pedophilia! Your children aren't their target your wife maybe. I checked my zip code and the "list" is long. About 20 individual of these 20, 10 are for 'aggravated sexual battery' , 8 are listed as rape. The other two have a long list of repeated rape, indecent liberties with a minor, aggravated sexual battery etc. These persons should not be released period!

4) Public harassment doesn't 'fix' a person from being a sexual deviant. I would rather see sex offenders given muuch longer sentances with mandatory therapy. And they don't get out until the doctor says they get out. The therapy might be expensive but if it stops one repeat offender it's worth it. Right now sexual deviants are just getting time and many aren't serving all of it

5) If they would let out some of the 3 time minor drug (Marijuana) ofenders they would have more room and save enough money to do #4

6) In regards to the spammer, they need to go after what the spammer is selling! It wouldn't happen so much if someone weren't profiting!

Now that our side is dominant and impleneting it's policies (mostly rolling back socialism in favor of classical liberalism) it is now the Democratic party yelling STOP! in an attempt to preserve their gains.

Towards classical liberalism? Really?

Since when is a $1.2 TRILLION Medicare spending bill (passed by Dubya) something that a smaller government would do?

The idea that Bush is any fiscal conservative at all is a bunch of cracksmokery.

You clearly don't read enough of the Cato Institute which called him a "Progressive President" or The Economist magazine or Reason magazine where Bush's spending record is concerned. Oh, and Bush's "lean budget" this year? It's "like being the slimmest sumo wrestler in the ring."

Soaring yearly budget deficits approaching 5% of yearly GDP are not the work of any "classical liberal"; those deficits -- as the great (and *real* classical liberal) economist Milton Friedman once wrote of deficits decades ago -- are nothing more than a tax increase on future generations. 90% steel tarriffs (ruled illegal by the WTO) are certainly not the work of any free-trading classical liberal (although to his credit, CAFTA is admittedly a nice step).

The very notion that President Bush is returning us to a more classical liberal -- a.k.a. moderate libertarian -- society is almost completely intellectually-bankrupt, whether we are discussing economics (as we are in this thread) or social policy.

We've hit Bush's economic leg, and find he hasn't one to stand on. Clearly Bush has little in the way of classical liberal leanings there (his Social Security reform aside, although even there, his plan will effectively discredit the value of private investment by greatly restricting the basket of investments into which people may invest). What about his classical liberal views on social policy?

He doesn't have a leg to stand on there either.

The real classical liberals would not have attacked a foreign nation unprovoked (Iraq), although they certainly would've fought back against the 9/11 attackers (i.e., we would have gone to Afghanistan, as we actually did). Classical liberals believe in the value of privacy; Bush does not. Classical liberals (usually) support private gun ownership; Bush supported the Assault Weapons Ban even though even the anti-gun Violence Policy Center's own leader said the AWB was of little value (the re-enactment of the AWB thankfully died in Congress, no thanks to Bush). The classical liberals of today -- like Milton Friedman -- support the legalization, or at least decriminalization of illegal drugs; Bush, like any conservative, opposes it (thanks to Ronald Reagan's promotion of the so-failed-even-some-Republicans-admit-it-now "war on drugs").

As a final nail in his socially non-classical liberal policy: on free speech, classical liberals love freedom of speech -- they wrote the First Amendment after all! We would allow full, free, and unrestricted speech on our airwaves (with exceptions perhaps only for very-specific, very limited national security instances, e.g. disallowing the announcement of the procedures and launch codes for any of our nuclear missiles, though

Not really. There are prisoners in a military jail in Norfolk who the gov't has labeled as terrorists and they have no access to lawyers. Some of them have been in jail for over a year with no charges against them at all. See this article:
http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?sto ry=87136&ran=93787

It's easy to figure out what happened if you do a little snooping around. The CNN article doesn't tell you what buttons he pressed, and searching Google for "TI-30 Xa SE VA" will bring up every article on the matter which all have identical writeups.

Now, I took the first link that Google threw at me and there's a better picture there of the two calculators held up side-by-side. The "fixed" calculator is the one on the left. As you can see, the newly removed button is in the lower left corner of the calculator.

If you know your TI calculators, you'll know exactly what this button does, or rather, what its second function does. If you have no idea where I'm going with this, check out a stock TI-30 Xa here. It's a large enough image that you can easily see the symbols written in yellow above the key in the lower left corner of the calculator.

The symbols above the key in question are "FD" which means "press this key if you want to convert a Fraction to a Decimal or a Decmial to a Fraction". All you have to do to access this function is press the yellow "2nd" key located all the way at the upper left of the calculator (it's in the same row as the blanked out keys on the modified TIs).

I double checked my assumption, and you can see the directions in the manual on page 6 of the PDF.

TI just removed the yellow lettering above the key and hoped that no one would figure out the "2nd" + "FD" key combination.

The state specifically asked Texas Instruments two years ago to wipe out the fraction function on its calculators if it wanted to sell them to Virginia's schools, said Lois A. Williams, a middle-school math specialist with the Virginia Department of Education.

Students need to work with fractions the old-fashioned way, with a paper and pencil, as required by the state, she said.

Texas Instruments disabled the key that converted numbers into fractions and left it blank on the calculator. The calculator passed a review by officials at Texas Instruments and the staff of the state's math department, Williams said.

It was one of four calculator models approved by the state for use in middle schools.

This guy is happy about that.

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:IYt6OxzGghYJ:ww w.mofed.org/Fried_KFC.htm+peta+kfc+%22fake+blood%2 2&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:CeHAJqPY0sUJ:ww w.leftist.org/haightspeech/archives/000158.html+pe ta+kfc+%22fake+blood%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:Rrv7BJw_ujYJ:ww w.peta.org.uk/at/summer2004/Summer04p10-11.pdf+pet a+kfc+%22fake+blood%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:M6HTwcKo6SgJ:ww w.peta.org/feat/AT-Spring2004/Page16-17.pdf+peta+k fc+%22fake+blood%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?sto ry=84143&ran=196910

"quaint" indeed, but both Canadian and American courts have had the ability to impose a gag order. A recent US case of breaking the gag order (oddly enough, ALSO involving a government bribery/corruption charge) is whats led to the recent demands of laws to keep journalists from keeping their sources private (odd that the Republicans didn't call for such laws when their administration ousted a CIA agent, but "defy" a republican appointed judge and all hell breaks loose).

I'll admit I didn't really think too long and hard about that particular point because I didn't really believe that, but... if you had stopped to think for a second you would have realized that it doesn't necessarily have to be a dinosaur bone just because it's too large to fit in a helicopter. Case in point: this. I would imagine mammoth bones could be sufficiently large as well.

You say that as if it is a bad thing. Meetings with the President or Vice President have never been public record. Even Howard Dean understands this, in spite of what he is ranting about now.

The Virginian Pilot has a terrible habit of changing the link every time they make an update to a story. The article is (for now) at http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story.cfm?sto ry=63543&ran=55013.

She appeared in federal court in Virginia but she is from Akron, Ohio so you're linking to someone else's contact info.

The 22 year old guy she was working with thought he was breaking the law with a 20-something hottie instead of this 55 year old overweight felon from Akron. He must feel pretty stupid about now.
this story has more detail

Fat people need to consume just as much as ever.

Eventually they die, and need
Fat caskets


But, before you die, you should relax:
Fat Vacations


And of course they need a community to be a part of:
Their own Internet 'Fat Portal'

Personally, I think there are a couple of things worth noting regarding this decision. 1st -- although $325 million is a bit "staggering", it's interesting to note that this is the first mission competition that really was a winner take all competition. 30 proposals were submitted, 4 made the finals, and then one winner was picked. I have to think NASA will be doing a lot more of this, since it's got to be more economical in the long-run.

2nd, one of the losers was the extremely cool ARES Martian Airplane proposal. I'm biased because some of the people in my lab were on the science team for that proposal, but I think it would have pushed both the scientific and engineering envelope more than Phoenix will. Was NASA being too conservative (like I think), or simply prudent? I think it's probably hard to tell right now. I sure hope ARES has a shot in 2011 if they run another Scout competition, since I think it'll remain a cool idea even then...

See this story in the Hampton Roads paper if you are more interested about ARES' s rejection/want to see a picture of the prototype.

After the next carrier, the George H.W. Bush, the Navy intends to unveil a new design; it will be roughly the size of a Nimitz-class ship but with automated systems that could cut the ship's company of 3,200 by one-third or more and a new reactor able to power electromagnetic catapults and directed-energy weapons .

My favorate involves moving a set of offices (used by Naval training personel, my friend is an officer and IT worker in said office) from Windows 98 and 2000 to Redhat. Yes, it is happening in a few places withing the military. Anyways, the IT staff there has been utilizing Linux and BSD for years, and decided to write up a report to outline it's effectiveness and security so that they could obtain approval to use it for all of the desktops under their control. Needless to say, they got approval with the usual stipulations (such as: some workstations demand Windows for certain software that only runs on Win32, and emulation is not an option). But, the military wanted them to also keep on hand a collection of spare Windows 2000 workstations "just in case", because "Linux is not yet proven" - that was their honest answer (why they needed entire workstations and not just a collection of "ready to go" Ghost images was a point of laughter in itself). The total: 50 workstations for a network of 200 systems. The cost of paying for those workstations and then keeping them on hand, and then paying for the Win2k clients and licenses for the next year was nearly triple the cost of moving the existing workstations over to Redhat 7.x (which was the newest RH release at the time) and hiring outside training for whatever training they might need (which didn't involve a move to Open or Star Office, because they were planning on running Microsoft Office anyways).

One of the people that "approved" the move was father-in-law for a local Microsoft sales person. Sure the plan got "approval" due to it's merits, but the contigency plan effectively killed the move.