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Regardless of whether they've broken a world-changing story so far, they've produced a chilling effect on corruption.

It isn't so much corruption that is shut down, as American diplomatic operations. Dealing with actual corruption would require a scapel, not the blunt object of the Wikileaks releases.

Battered by a scandal which seems to provide a fresh wave of embarrassment with each passing day, the US government is being forced to undertake a major reshuffle of the embassy staff, military personnel and intelligence operatives whose work has been laid bare by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks.

The Obama administration was yesterday facing a crisis in its diplomatic service, amid growing evidence that the ongoing publication of a tranche of supposedly-confidential communiqués will make normal work difficult, if not dangerous, for important State Department employees across the world.

"In the short run, we're almost out of business," a senior US diplomat told the Reuters news agency, saying it could take five years to rebuild trust. "It is really, really bad. I cannot exaggerate it. In all honesty, nobody wants to talk to us ... Some people still have to, particularly (in) government but ... they are already asking us things like, 'Are you going to write about this?'"

"We're going to have to pull out some of our best people – the diplomats who best represented the United States and were the most thoughtful in their analysis – because they dared to report back the truth about the nations in which they serve."

Julian Assange’s EgoLeaks
WikiLeaks’ Selective Morality

WikiLeaks Reportedly Outs 100s of Afghan Informants

... in spite of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's claim that sensitive information had been removed from the leaked documents, that reporters scanning the reports for just a couple hours found hundreds of Afghan names mentioned as aiding the U.S.-led war effort.

One specific example cited by the paper is a report on an interview conducted by military officers of a potential Taliban defector. The militant is named, along with his father and the village in which they live.

"The leaks certainly have put in real risk and danger the lives and integrity of many Afghans," a senior official at the Afghan foreign ministry told The Times on condition of anonymity. "The U.S. is both morally and legally responsible for any harm that the leaks might cause to the individuals, particularly those who have been named. It will further limit the U.S./international access to the uncensored views of Afghans."

One former intelligence official told the paper that the Taliban could launch revenge attacks on "traitors" in the coming days.

Blood Already on Assange’s Hands (and the WikiLeaks-Gitmo Connection)

The other 187 countries haven't publicly gone after Wikileaks in the same way as the US government has. More importantly, the US is apparently already in talks with Sweden to extradite him for espionage, and it has successfully put pressure on the Swedish government and justice system to prosecute people under questionable circumstances before.

I heard the same story on the radio yesterday and it is the papers. Check out the Google search. Here's some articles on it:

Here's The Guardian's article on it, from today. Here's another from The Independent

39-year-old Australian supplied the Metropolitan Police with contact details upon arriving in the UK in October. Police sources confirmed that they have a telephone number for Mr Assange and are fully aware of where he is staying.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/wikileaks-chief-what-will-he-do-next-2148813.html

I do not understand how he can leak information if the authorities know where he sits? Cannot they use the Echelon or NSA to block or modify his traffic?

The irony. All of these awful accusations against the US, the West, etc, etc, comparing those countries / regions to Iran and China and Russia - and yet, the supposed object of all of this "targeting" is allowed to go free. If the government of the US were as nasty as you all think it is, he would not be around at this point.

39-year-old Australian supplied the Metropolitan Police with contact details upon arriving in the UK in October. Police sources confirmed that they have a telephone number for Mr Assange and are fully aware of where he is staying.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/wikileaks-chief-what-will-he-do-next-2148813.html

I do not understand how he can leak information if the authorities know where he sits? Cannot they use the Echelon or NSA to block or modify his traffic?

This is just Assange using wikileaks to attack a country he hates.

Clearly this is why the headline story on BBC news today is about China's thinking on North Korea, and the headline story in The Independent is about missiles in Iran, both of which are sourced from the Wikileaks cables and neither of which is remotely 'anti-US'. I'm sure there are numerous other examples. It seems that you are being deceived by the US government propaganda machine, which attempts to bias (US) public opinion against things it doesn't like by claiming that they are attacking the democratic beacon of justice and humanity, the great and powerful USA, land of the free etc etc.

soon you'll lose your right to trial by jury, be logged on some huge data base, sections of the population will be segregated, forced to move from the desirable areas into slums then the trains to the gas/torture chambers will start.......

Are you being ironic? Because as it happens, every one of these is the case in the UK except the gas chambers.

Right to trial by jury - 28 day detention/recent use of this power/"Kettling" of students as young as 15 on demonstrations for 12+ hours at a time - did you know this particular policing technique originated in Nazi Poland to force Jews to the gas chamber? :/

Logged on some huge database - Police DNA database (they take a sample if merely questioning you and will lie about removing the data - EU has to get involved and force them), TV licensing, DVLA, Council Tax, Electoral register, etc, etc - in most of these cases the operating body also sells an edited version of the database to private companies for targeted mailing or other purposes.

Sections of the population segregated - Largely propaganda driven in the media against certain groups/ethnicities; in particular the Muslim population has been targeted for example by CCTV

Forced to move into slums - The new government is stripping out housing benefit and cutting down the length of time you can 'own' social housing to two years minimum (previously they were owned for life) and if your earning power increases above an arbitrary threshold they'll toss you out; the Conservative mayor of London even finds this unpalatable ) and predicts that it will lead to the cities becoming the preserve of the rich and white.

So yeah, no gas chambers just yet, but I'm sure some bright spark will suggest it as a way to cut down on the money spent in fuel subsidies for pensioners or whatever soon enough.

Posting AC because I really don't have any faith in this country any more.

No, the difference is that Iran stones women, Saudi Arabia beheads them. Both agree that Facebook is immoral though.

Are you fucking kidding?

There's a hell of a lot wrong with this country but that's not one of the problems. The UK has been one of the most active in the world in dealing with the problem of arranged marriages, and other abuse. We've been pouring a fortune into it with a number of high profile convictions, as well as countless other cases of assisting people in getting out of those kind of situations. Our country even intervenes politically and legally as far as it can in situations where people have been taken to other countries, such as Pakistan to be married on.

Perhaps the reason you hear about the UK in this context is precisely because we're one of the few countries in the world that does deal with the problem rather than sweep it under the carpet. We even have specific precedent whereby if someone has been pushed into an arrange marriage they can have it anulled specifically on that basis without having to worry about the usual divorce proceedings-

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/teenager-wins-battle-to-annul-arranged-marriage-658001.html

If you were looking for a reason to slag off the UK, this wasn't it. Pick one of the thousands of other reasons, like, I don't know, perhaps the fact people are being arrested merely for saying something on Twitter as in TFA?

That sounds like a fair outlook on things, keep in mind the word "piracy" is pretty heavily abused. When I say it, I really just mean "disobeying copyright law" (note, I did misuse the term in my last post; I don't actually encourage people to pirate my wares given that I licence them CC0 so there is no copyright to infringe upon.. slip of the tongue :S)

As evidenced by my own vocabulary error, you can work with public domain or copyleft content and get some of the benefits of cultural liberty without infringing upon copyright, and you can encourage people to use copyleft instruments to avoid the negative ramifications of copyright. I see that you approve of these, as I do also.

But to be clear I do additionally champion the direct infringement of copyrighted works because I do personally believe that copyright law is foundationally immoral.. not to mention gapingly unenforceable in the face of today's technology and globally connected marketplace.

"Intellectual Property" literally means owning ideas, and ideas exist only as irremovable components of the minds of people who have learned them. Thus IP directly means owning the thoughts of other people, and controlling who can express those parts of themselves and who cannot.

Laying claim over other's minds is as bad an incentive to create art as laying claim over other's bodies is to process cotton. Sure, it drives your profits up immensely, but only on the backs of others. On the one hand there are countless ways to make money from art without first censoring the entire planet. On the other hand, it is literally not my concern how art gets funded. I simply want the freedom to share my thoughts, and if every selfish artist in the world simply stopped all their creativity for want of funds as a result I would still see the tradeoff as an enormous gain. Hell I can produce my own art and I will when I'm bored enough. Would I become the last artist in the world? How would people not outbid each other to hear me hum off key if nobody else is even doing it?

I create art, and having to vet clearance against other people's copyright makes that job technically impossible — if practically only very difficult. I guarantee every new piece of art infringes someone's copyright, it's just that you hope whoever you step on in the crowded sea of toes never notices. That is a terrible game of Russian Roulette to even pretend to play.

When we craft (or modernize) law we compare the law against certain maxims, and one such popular yardstick is that possession is nine tenths of the law. Directly, I possess everything in my mind, and I possess every megabyte of information on the hardware I physically own from mp3 players to computers to media center. That makes it my prerogative should I choose to share that data with another person, or should another person choose to share similar data with me.

Intruding within that well established and strategically easy to defend personal property arrangement to add complicated enforcement of Intellectual Property rights from people all over the planet is realistically absurd. No one has the capacity to prevent my sharing that information; Nobody could afford to even make an attempt. You'd have more luck trying to enforce a law that no wild birds may fly greater than 50 feet from the ground, and all violating birds will somehow be ticketed and fined.

It's a stretch to imagine a law so ineffective and ignored with such volume could have any impact on commercial artwork to begin with. Every piece of digital information is being shared freely somewhere right now, yet art continues to be made and Youtube accepts more than 24 hours of video upl

poison umbrellas from Russia, 2.0

I've been wondering why we don't use an oxy-helium combination, actually. Does anyone know?

Might have something to do with this

Aw, that's the best you have? I thought you might actually think of a solution. But yeah, if the Palestinians could make a credible commitment of peace, then there would be a settlement within a year. The Israelis withdrew from Gaza, after all, there's no reason to believe they wouldn't also withdraw from Palestine. Most people don't want to fight. How to deal with people who do want to fight, like the Palestinians, or the Serbian forces, is the major difficulty of world peace.

Every year Isrealis kill more Palestinians than vice versa. So "how to deal with people who do want to fight", like the Israelis, is the major difficulty in this conflict. Resolving a conflict is always the responsibility of the side in power. Just compare the Isreali military to the handful of Palestinian terrorists and it's obvious which side could end the conflict if they wanted to.

? What does the national debt have to do with kids working for a dollar an hour at age 12? In any case, as you can see from this chart, something needs to be done about healthcare. Even if we cut the military completely, it will still be quite expensive. And I'm not opposed to cutting the military completely.

The previous poster was being sarcastic about child labor if you couldn't tell. The point being made is that all of the things we spend money on contribute to our debt. We can continue the wars, or we can continue providing healthcare, education, etc. to the public. The most striking thing about the chart you provided is not the increase in Medicare spending, but the increase in payments on the national debt. To me, this means we have to cut spending and raise taxes ASAP to prevent complete financial collapse in the future. If we do this now, it could be reasonable to maintain our current level of public health services. If we don't raise taxes and cut spending to address our deficit/debt soon, we are fucked.

They wanted to negotiate after the bombs were already falling. Was there any reason in particular to trust them at that point? I mean, I'm not going to deny that the Afghanistan war was conducted horribly, but I have no love for the Taliban. Afghanistan is better without them.

So once the bombs are falling it's too late for them to surrender? We have to stay the course and bomb them into oblivion because they might not be trustworthy enough? Sorry, I completely disagree with that. If the offer was available at any time to potentially end what has become the longest war in American history, we should have taken it

Why argue about about electric power? You can find North Korean famine graves on
Google Earth.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/north-korea-uncovered-palaces-labour-camps-and-mass-graves-1711573.html

That's some economy they've got going there. From what I have read, North Koreans
that live in the north have access to the Chinese border. Some with savings cross the border,
buy a large can of cooking oil, and resell small bags of oil for people to buy for special
occasions. They wouldn't be able to do this if there was cooking oil in the local shops.
To make sure that private savings would not become a threat to the regime's power, they
devalued the currency.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/07/12/100712fa_fact_demick

If you are a subscriber, you can read the whole article. If you are not, you have to drive down to the library or skip the whole thing.

He's gotten an early start on celebrating what would be John Lennon's 70th birthday.

That relates to this story in another way: George Harrison formed Handmade Films in order to finance the Monty Python film The Life of Brian. And another Python film, The Meaning of Life, features in its intro...wait for it...a moving building (tip: skip to 5:30 to see it).

Guess I've got Beatles on the Brain.

Is that an ideal that's especially resonant with the Chinese culture for some reason?

No, it's something that is resonant with people that want to suppress speech. Look at recent articles and you will see similar lame excuses (ie. stopping terror, child porn, copyright protection) for allowing the NSA/FBI/etc to spy on citizens or try to take down their computers.

Actually, the idea DOES resonante with the Chinese, for cultural reasons that go back centuries. Confucianism held sway in China throughout much of their history, and that philosophy puts a high value on deference to the authorities, be it the Emporor or your local official. And what replaced it in the 20th century... Maoist communism... went from deference of authority to virtual enslavement of it. Chinese culture has never known an ethos of personal freedom the way the West understands it. And lest you think that improved living conditions and the presence of a market has changed anything, keep in mind that when Jackie Chan gave a speech to a major business group in Hong Kong, he got a standing ovation when he said that too much freedom in China was a bad thing, and that the government needed to maintain order and tranquility. One of the reasons that NY Times pundit Thomas Friedman admires the Chinese so much is that they have the benefits of a market economy, while having a government with total authority... easier to "get things done" that way, you see.

"to lift 1000 grams (1 kg), you need about 163 grams (~0.16 kg) of helium"
150 tons = 150,000 kg
150,000 * 163 = 24,450,000 grams of helium needed
24,450,000 grams of helium = 137,000 cubic meters
"A billion cubic metres - or about half of the world's reserves"
2 billion / 137,000 = 14,598.5

14,598.5 airships before we run out of the current reserves. I think we're good. (Except for that last half airship, it'll be kinda screwed.)

The figures I was referring to were in the telegraph article yes, but you hadn't posted that one up before, which is why I was asking where the "TWO MILLION POUNDS to solve ONE CRIME" stuff was coming from.

I appreciate attempts to educate me, I know I'm ignorant on many topics, but saying "I'll get out the crayons" when you hadn't actually linked all the articles you were getting your figures from felt very insulting to me.

I guessed you missed the bit about only 1/1000 crimes being caught by cameras. I had mentioned that statistic - I didn't realise that negating to put a link caused you to call me an arsehole.

Especially when I then explain WHERE the stat came from; and you say "Why bother to provide references at all if you were only going to link half of them" - all the info was there in the post you replied to.

Anyway, that statistic is fairly widely available.

I'll try and remember to cite every single source next time.

Still, I'm a little offended at being called a 'conspiracy theorist' for giving real-world statistics. In reality it's more like the other way around.

I'm trying to get the clearest objective picture I can about what's going on the food industry, and it doesn't look pretty. Sorry. I'm sure you have access to information that I don't, and follow these things more closely. I rely on reports by journalists, researchers, government agencies, and activists who also have access to information that I don't, and who also follow these things more closely than I do. Just because I'm not in the field doesn't mean I can't try to find what's going on and form an opinion. I will see if I can find the Journal of Dairy Science report you're talking about.

Anyway, you can accuse me of FUD, but there are real, serious, and ongoing health consequences to food industry practices:
* Mad Cow Disease: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3355625.stm
* E Coli in Spinach: http://www.kwtx.com/home/headlines/4198816.html
* Salmonella in Eggs: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/business/23eggs.html?_r=1&ref=business

People die when industry cuts corners and regulatory agencies don't do their job.

More of my resources:
* Agricultural Antibiotic Use Contributes To 'Super-Bugs' In Humans - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/07/050705010900.htm
* Denmark's Case for Antibiotic-Free Animals - http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/10/eveningnews/main6195054.shtml
* The above article cites Professor Ellen Silbergeld - http://faculty.jhsph.edu/Default.cfm?faculty_id=648
* The true cost of cheap chicken - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-true-cost-of-cheap-chicken-768062.html
* Agriculture Pollution report from Defra (UK government) - http://www.defra.gov.uk/foodfarm/landmanage/water/csf/index.htm
* Wikipedia page on Factory Farming - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_farming

Activists (I am listing them separately, to be fair):
* http://www.nrdc.org/water/pollution/ffarms.asp
* http://www.ciwf.org.uk/
* http://www.farmsanctuary.org/issues/factoryfarming/
* http://www.iowasource.com/health/CAFO_airqu_0805.html
* Food, Inc. (movie)
* Ominvore's Dillemma, Michael Pollan
* Eating Animals, Michael Safran Foer

Hint: Look at murdering rates on countries with strict weaponry control, then contrast them to those in USA.

Nazi Germany: 5.9 million Jews, 2 million Soviet POWs, 1.8 million Poles, 1.5 million Gypsies, 250,000 disabled, 15,000 homosexuals. Wikipedia

Soviet Union under Stalin: ~20 million Wikipedia

Communist China under Mao: 45 million The Independent

It seems I have more to fear from government imposed gun control than from any thug on the street.

Mass murderers agree: Gun Control works

So are you saying that if more American soldiers ended up dieing, all would be fine according to you?

Here is how preposterous your comment is. American soldiers are fighting a known enemy who kills more innocent civilians and children then the American soldier even thought to. Last year alone, it was more then 2/3rds the civilian collateral casualty rates. In fact, the argument could be made since democracy was imposed in the area, that if the forces of the Taliban and terrorists organizations would stop killing innocent civilians and participate in the democratically elected government for whatever change they wish to impose, that our soldiers wouldn't be killing anyone.

Giving this information out could do little to stop any so called mass murder by our soldiers and directly cause an increase in murder and civilian deaths by the Taliban and it's allies. You shouldn't let your ideology blind you from the facts. Otherwise you will only be pretending to be righteous when you are in fact no worse then who you accuse.

Tea Party doesn't like to be confused with facts

They hardly cost the country billions, £37M is barely enough to put together a premier football team these days. In return I like the fact that we don't have a president - the power of the monarchy might only be theoretical these days but it's a reminder that parliament is not meant to be an absolute power, and the royals themselves contribute a lot in terms of bringing tourism (around £500m per year) and business investment to the country. I used to be anti-monarchy, and I'll admit I still like to grumble about them from time to time, and they do seem to enjoy making life difficult for themselves with contoversial public actions, but I've come around to thinking they probably are, on balance, good for the country.

The rulers of Dubai wants to know what the CEO of Haliburton is doing.

Or they just want to be sure that its harder for the rest of the world find out about its dark side.

Just as well I was already planing to never visit the place.

Are parents really so stupid that they don't realize this?

Some British parents are.

There is a lot of belief in politics that if we make something illegal, people will stop doing it.

They are fully aware that this is not true; but stopping people doing it isn't the objective. That's not even close to being foremost on their minds. Politicians are driven by personal power and political motives. They want to be seen to be "doing something", "being tough" and "sending a strong message".

Due to recent well covered events it's easier to demonstrate my point when discussing drugs. Whilst it obviously isn't the same issue, it's an area I think most people would agree that has many similar issues, is highly related and is subject to similar attitudes from politicians, the public and the media.

Politicians have numerous advisers with a very solid understanding of the situation. However (at least here in the UK) when the experts give actual opinions based on expertise, they get sacked. Or they get frustrated by the sole political motivation and quit.

Claudia Rubin from Release – a national centre of expertise on drugs and drugs law – said the expert should not have been penalised. "It's a real shame and a real indictment of the Government's refusal to take any proper advice on this subject," she said.

Meanwhile we rely on unelected Lords for a bit of reason. The then (unelected) Science Minister reacted furiously:

As science champion in Government' I can't just stand aside on this one.

Prof Nutt (the guy who got sacked see above) himself wrote more recently:

the niceties of legal process and proper procedure on drug classification are as nothing beside the media-driven political demand that something must be done, and done now.

(I'll point out the sources above are across the political spectrum, as far as the broadsheets go the "Torygraph" is perhaps the furthest to the right and the Guardian furthest to the left; the Independent supposedly dead-centre but generally considered to be a lefty. The government they're all criticising was the centre-left Labour Party.)

Energy is already cheaper than it has ever been in human history, and we are destroying more topsoil, not less. That's because, no matter how cheap energy becomes, it's still cheaper to destroy the topsoil than to produce by other means.

The more topsoil you destroy, the lower your crop yields. The lower your crop yields, the lower your return on investment on farming. The lower your ROI on farming, the higher the ROI on buying topsoil (or fertilizer, or whatever) from the guy who can dig the fertilizer out of the ground, or the guy who can use the energy from the nuclear power plant who can synthesize it out of thin air. The less food there is, and the more people there are, the more valuable food becomes.

Sure, the rumors came out in 2009. Now the only question his whether it's BHP or someone else who buys Potash, Inc.

Given sufficient time, markets self-correct. Population/demographic trends are trends that take decades to play out. More than enough time for even the slowest market to react, and that's why (despite the crashes of 1929 and 2008) Malthus. Was. Still. Wrong.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/you-ask-the-questions-pete-townshend-660476.html

You once publicly instructed the Rolling Stones not to grow old gracefully. What about Pete Townshend? Are you glad you didn't die before you got old?

Nick MacGregor, by e-mail

Ah hypocrisy! Does the questioner believe I am looking graceful? I feel like a wreck after five Who shows in the past week. Recently, I did my stint as an editor at Faber and Faber, and even that didn't feel graceful. How was I to know that the literary fraternity live harder, faster and more illicitly than rock stars?

And from People.com
Pete himself, who wrote in My Generation in 1966, "Hope I die before I grow old," now feels drastically different about aging. "Picasso," he points out, "still had a shining light in his eyes at 76."

The one think you have to understand about Jobs is that he's primarily motivated by good design.

No, he's partially motivated by the desire for his products to make a design //statement// ... which isn't quite the same thing.

What we think of as "great" design often isn't very "good". Consider the Phillippe Starck lemon squeezer:

Iconic design, instantly reconisable, a design classic. But the eighty-dollar Starck squeezer supposedly isn't as good at squeezing lemons as one-dollar plastic thing from Walmart. It makes a mess, and it's intrinsically a bad idea to make a lemonjuicer out of a metal like aluminium, it reacts and potentially taints the end-product. There's a gold-plated version ... gold-plating is often a very functional feature, but with the Stark, gold-plating the item means that it ends up even less functional than the simple cast-and-polished version, because lemon juice messes up the finish on the "plated" version, so the "gold" version is strictly for show. It's designed for looks rather than for satisfying its official core purpose. It's a lemon squeezer that shouldn't be allowed to come into contact with lemon juice.

Apple's iPhones have always looked cool, but for years they weren't particularly good phones for making phone calls. Bad acoustics, no recordable user-ringtones, no tactile speed-dial buttons, no swappable battery. If making and receiving calls was a priority for you, you were better off with something much cheaper. Similarly with the internal architecture of the iPhone3.x OS, as a personal organiser-type device, the OS design was quite appalling compared to, say, where Palm OS had been ten years earlier. No synchronisation API? No OS support for rich text? If you wanted to synchronise raw text files from your iPOS3 device to a Windows PC from the onboard Memo app, by default you couldn't, because the iTunes software didn't "do" any form of wordprocessor file, including basic unformatted text. It wasn't a "Windows" problem, it was an "Apple" problem. You had to go out and buy Microsoft OneNote, and have iTunes synch memos with //that//. iPOS3.x didn't even have support for to-do lists, which probably ranked it lower than those old late-eighties Casio and Sharp things that looked like plastic toys.

I have an iPod Touch, and use it almost exclusively with a Google Calendar app and Evernote (plus a bit of Google mapping and web-browsing). I find it too awkward to use as an MP3 player. The curve of the back of the case is a nice bit of design meant to make the device look as slim as possible for a given volume, but the effect is then ruined by Apple's decision to use a mirror-finish chromey "Look At Me!" backplate, which makes the back as noticeable as possible. Mine got scratched within ten minutes of taking it out of the box, and I now have it stealthed in black sticky-tape. It's actually nicer to use without the eye-jarring mirror-finish rim, but I guess their priority was to make it "blingy", even if that conflicted with other aspects of the design. Ergonomically, the iPad's single button screams design suckiness. People like clicky edge-buttons to flip pages and hotlink favourite apps, But with the iPad, Apple insisted that you didn't need more than one front button. Then with iPOS4's added features, they had to squeeze extra features onto the single button using double-clicks. The device's hardware interface was already outmoded by the time that the accompanying OS was finished and the unit was ready for release. //Good// design would have given the iPad at least five buttons, rather than launching the gadget with just one and keeping the multi-button iPad as a possible must-have upgrade for 2011 or 2012.

Apple don't do "good" design. Apple have marketed some brilliant design classi

Everything was going swimmingly until he got hooked, line and sinker by the police who smelt something fishy. I wonder if he was acting on behalf of Sid The Squida thieving octopus who was released early last year from NZ.

c6gunnr wrote:

Ok, then everybody is wrong. [wikipedia.org]

The Wikipedia article seems heavily slanted. It diligently lists all the problems the UN inspectors faced, but avoids mentioning their main conclusion. Let's go to some sources.
The Hindu:

"Contrary to Western intelligence claims about Iraq's supposed arms capability in the run-up to the 2003 invasion, the fact was that Saddam Hussein had destroyed his weapons of mass destruction and dismantled the infrastructure after the 1991 Gulf War, according to the United Nations' former chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix. Giving evidence before the Iraq inquiry committee here on Tuesday, Mr. Blix was emphatic that Iraq had “no weapons” by 2003."

The Independent (UK):

"The Government's case for war against Saddam Hussein was undermined further yesterday when the former United Nations chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, said that Iraq had probably destroyed its most deadly weapons of mass destruction more than a decade ago.

Mr Blix, who retired in June, told the Australian state broadcaster ABC: "I'm certainly more and more to the conclusion that Iraq has, as they maintained, destroyed all, almost, of what they had in the summer of 1991. [...]

Mr Blix's remarks are in contrast to the claims made by London and Washington in the run-up to the war that Saddam was harbouring a large cache of deadly weapons, which could be deployed easily and quickly.[...]

Another weapons expert and former UN inspector, David Albright, said last night that the Iraq Survey Group had apparently failed to find anything significant. They are "not finding the kinds of things the administration expected to find, large quantities of biological and chemical weapons or evidence that they were destroyed prior to the war", he said."

c6gunnr wrote:

Ah, yes, that hotbed of political insight, The Onion. Well clearly I must be wrong, then.

You're missing the point. The question was if people, outside of the Bush administration, doubted the claims of WMDs even before the war. And they did. To many outsiders, it was perfectly clear how ridiculous the claims were.

R. Murdoch has many times claimed liberal media bias of competitors in his market space.

Creating more conservative media certainly paid well for him but it seems to be a bit far fetched to assume that this bias does not reflect his political leanings. Since he perceives his competiors as biased to the left he obviously leans the other way.

Clearly this is not tied to a specific party but rather conservative policies. In this vein Murdoch's media machine was green lighted to support Blair once it became clear he was not to role back the Thatcher "revolution" and was about to pull Labour to the right. This is turn later gave him direct access to the poodle PM.

When I lived in the US I was appalled at what passed as news in your country. How much Murdoch's Fox is responsible for lowering the standards I can not discern but it fell a long hard way from the Cronkite gold standard. I know live in Canada and having access to CBC is like manna for the soul.

R. Murdoch has many times claimed liberal media bias of competitors in his market space.

Creating more conservative media certainly paid well for him but it seems to be a bit far fetched to assume that this bias does not reflect his political leanings. Since he perceives his competiors as biased to the left he obviously leans the other way.

Clearly this is not tied to a specific party but rather conservative policies. In this vein Murdoch's media machine was green lighted to support Blair once it became clear he was not to role back the Thatcher "revolution" and was about to pull Labour to the right. This is turn later gave him direct access to the poodle PM.

When I lived in the US I was appalled at what passed as news in your country. How much Murdoch's Fox is responsible for lowering the standards I can not discern but it fell a long hard way from the Cronkite gold standard. I know live in Canada and having access to CBC is like manna for the soul.

I doubt he holds any of the opinions featured in his newspapers.

I don't think you've paid much attention to R. Murdoch before, have you?

If fraction per capita of gunfire crime is good, then bad would be one or more gun crimes per capita? Still a lot in my book.

And about Switzerland - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/rise-in-gun-crime-forces-swiss-to-reconsider-right-to-bear-arms-446946.html

According to The Independent, the judge has added Weiner to the Sex Offenders Register for the specific purpose of causing the general prison population to identify him as a pervert and make him suffer, even though there is no indication that Weiner possessed this material for any purpose other than to screw up Thomson's life.

I think Weiner is a scumbag who deserves to go to prison, but he is *not* a sex offender and does not need to be kept away from children's playgrounds when he is released. I certainly don't agree with this tactic by the judge - surely placing people who are not sex offenders on a list of sex offenders renders the list meaningless for any monitoring or preventative purpose? And since when was justice about eye-for-eye revenge in this civilised society?!

Much better to go back to bare-knuckle boxing. The gloves mean people take a lot more hits to the head and take more punishment in the long term. Nice paragraph in this article but this is fairly common knowledge among Western Martial Artists.

You mean like ... china, paper, woodblock printing, gunpowder, compass, the fork, fireworks, go, maglev wind power generators, negative numbers, menus, tea, toilet paper or the toothbrush?

I mean, granted, not all of these are new things - in fact most of them are all fairly old (the maglev being the exception), but I really doubt any of us would want to go without them.

You mean the maglev that was designed and built by Germans?

Haha, a day never goes by when I am not stunned by something on slashdot.

So far I've only been able to find one person who was able to cite a death that follows on from the information in the leak that WL passed to the three newspapers.

I'm also confused that you confer the term "innocent" on those who inform. Whether it's for one side or the other, once you "snitch" you lose the right to be an innocent in the war - you are a willing participant. Granted, the families of those people may also be targetted, but let those be the only figures that count towards the "innocent".

Celebrating a wedding, but being bombed by US warplanes - that's innocent. More than 30 innocents were killed in that single US action. When you can cite more than 30 innocent victims of the WL action, let me know.

Right. Because that's worked so well. Keep in mind that these refer to apps that made it through the vetting process.

Actually, your examples do in fact prove how well the process is working.

Not one of the apps you describe scammed people out of money or information. They are all examples of developers using other methods to get their apps to the top of the store list to get more people to buy them.

If that's the best you can come up with, then I think that speaks volumes to how good a job Apple is actually doing.

The problem here, and it is a logner term on Apple and many of supporters run into, is that the iPhone isn't remotely secure from this in any shape form or fashion.

So, you go tell someone who had this or this or this and see how far your credibility goes.

These phones are now general purpose computers that happen to have devices that make them capable of making phone calls. If you think that your general purpose computing device is immune to these types of things then you will most likely one day get a nice big shock. Apple is relly good about thier reality distortion field making people think they are somehow can't have this type of thing happen, mostly people who should really know better, but reality is that it doesn't.

Apple gets more apps submitted than their entire staff could filter to that level of security, indeed they would need to be one of the largest employers in the world to do so. Apple can't protect you, all they can do is make you feel good about having lousy security. It is not their fault it is lousy either, they simply can't provide non-lousy security for millions of devices and many many thousands of applications one may download. Personally the Android market place's significant difference in freedom more than outweighs the slight benefit in security and what little difference there is can be more than mitigated if you just read what the app accesses.

Well, part of the news here is the comparison to Apple's heavily-controlled store model. Would this have happened on the iPhone? Would the app have even been approved?

Yes. Yes it would have.

Those are examples of a developer "hacking" into people's itunes accounts to buy his crappy apps, not the app itself stealing data from the phone and sending it to a server. Still sucks, but it's a different issue. I think the itunes username and passwords were harvested via good old-fashioned viruses, trojans and phishing. Maybe some brute force attacks.

Right. Because that approval process has worked without any flaws.

Well, part of the news here is the comparison to Apple's heavily-controlled store model. Would this have happened on the iPhone? Would the app have even been approved?

Yes. Yes it would have.

Right. Because that's worked so well. Keep in mind that these refer to apps that made it through the vetting process.

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

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

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

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

the amount of regulation in plant creation

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

"green" subsidies for solar

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

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

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

Here you go.

Richard Clarke, the White House counter-terrorism coordinator at the time, has revealed details of a meeting the day after the attacks during which officials considered the US response. Already, he said, they were certain al-Qa'ida was to blame and there was no hint of Iraqi involvement. "Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq," Mr Clarke said. "We all said, 'No, no, al-Qa'ida is in Afghanistan.'"

But Mr Clarke, who is expected to testify on Tuesday before a federal panel reviewing the attacks, said Mr Rumsfeld complained in the meeting that "there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq." A spokesman for Mr Rumsfeld last night said he could not comment immediately.

...this will get police to your (approximate) location even if all you do is dial it and hang up

Unfortunately not here in the UK

So the NIMBY hordes are secretly funded by the oil industry?

Yes, actually.

This isn't anything particularly new either. Check out this one from 1979. Even when environmental groups aren't being directly funded by the fossil fuel industry, they are propping up anti-nuke advertising.