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UC San Francisco's Sam Hawgood, who started in July, is the highest-paid UC chancellor, at $750,000 . In hoping to erase disparities, regents noted that Gene Block, who came to UCLA in 2007, is paid $428,480, which is below what Gillman will be paid at a smaller campus. (In addition to salaries, chancellors receive housing or housing allowances.)

Absolutely ridiculous.

Administrators ate my tuition

Here's an interactive chart with a state by state breakdown. Why the obscene jump in administration, especially over the last 20 years? Far greater than the educators, you know the ones actually doing something, many educators are adjunct instructors (pardon the source), in a nutshell so they're working cheaper and they comprise the super majority of instructors.

braindead republicans, ruining the country

Your bias is showing. Both parties are fully bought and paid for and further corporate special interests. Democrats were in control for many years and furthered ghastly policies began by the previous administration. Apathy and partisan politics is ruining this country. Control by splitting into hostile groups, it's not new and it's effective, you're doing them proud! The Millennials will make up a larger voting block than the Boomers this year.

Remember this one?
http://articles.latimes.com/19...
Mars Probe Lost Due to Simple Math Error

Yes, no record but guessing yes, and yes.

He openly spoke against these things on the campaign trail, but look at his pre-presidential voting record:

http://opinion.latimes.com/opi...

Do you realize that many of those California counties with the lowest vaccination rates are solidly GOP, compare your map with this one.

In reality to settle it we'd need some serious cross tabs on questions that have never seemed to been asked together. However, I still remain confident that 80% is an gross exaggeration and I would win any bet on it.

Cars with autonomous freeway driving will be out in just a couple of years, according to automotive manufacturers. Nearly all the major players are predicting fully autonomous cars will be a solved problem sometime between 2020 and 2025.

Why is every cool technology always exactly ten years away?

Cars with autonomous freeway driving will be out in just a couple of years, according to automotive manufacturers. Nearly all the major players are predicting fully autonomous cars will be a solved problem sometime between 2020 and 2025.

Keep in mind that cars can and will make use of a variety of sensors besides vision that are much easier and reliable to process. I'm betting the first generation of automated highway driving uses no vision systems at all... just radar, lidar, and sonar, plus GPS for nativation. More to the point, they can use ALL of them at once. Those are more than enough to handle highway driving. Cars today are already using some of these systems for their intelligent cruise control, auto-parking, and collision avoidance systems.

Make no mistake... computers are going to be FAR better drivers than humans. No getting drowsy or falling asleep. No distractions by the passengers in the seat next to you or the rugrats in the back. No rear-ending cars while looking at your cellphone or putting on makeup or one of the ten thousand stupid things humans do every day behind the wheel. Fully autonomous cars can't come fast enough, and they'll likely be coming a hell of a lot faster than you think.

Funny because sensor fusion isn't so simple. It's a big step from auto following a car to actual autonomous driving on freeways in a more reliable way than even the worst human drivers. Comparing the state of the art today to sunny day freely moving traffic human drivers - we are no where near humans. Add heavy rain, dirty sensors, snow, road construction, etc and we will have need for humans to sit and nanny autonomous vehicles from the inside for a long time.
Furthermore all this "solved problem in 10 years" smacks of the leading computer scientists in the 60s claiming they could beat the best human in 10 years. Then it was another 10. Granted it was only 4 times of saying 10 years so yes eventually. Further still there is the legal ramifications of when the first human fatality due to autonomous driving occurs - common sense and logic will take a back seat to "think of the children" in the USA and we both know it. We are more likely 30 years out than 5-10. However what chaps my hide is people saying this stunt of using a combination of cruise control, lane following, and car distance following is autonomous driving is like saying Siri is strong AI.

I take it you have never worked on any computer vision papers or any teams that have tried vehicle automation? Because even autonomous freeway driving in the USA is far far far off - perhaps 30 years or more.

Cars with autonomous freeway driving will be out in just a couple of years, according to automotive manufacturers. Nearly all the major players are predicting fully autonomous cars will be a solved problem sometime between 2020 and 2025.

Keep in mind that cars can and will make use of a variety of sensors besides vision that are much easier and reliable to process. I'm betting the first generation of automated highway driving uses no vision systems at all... just radar, lidar, and sonar, plus GPS for nativation. More to the point, they can use ALL of them at once. Those are more than enough to handle highway driving. Cars today are already using some of these systems for their intelligent cruise control, auto-parking, and collision avoidance systems.

Make no mistake... computers are going to be FAR better drivers than humans. No getting drowsy or falling asleep. No distractions by the passengers in the seat next to you or the rugrats in the back. No rear-ending cars while looking at your cellphone or putting on makeup or one of the ten thousand stupid things humans do every day behind the wheel. Fully autonomous cars can't come fast enough, and they'll likely be coming a hell of a lot faster than you think.

Reagan and the NRA started the whole gun control craze when the Black Panthers started open carry demonstrations teaching black people how to protect themselves. They pushed for and passed the California gun control laws you hate so much to try and disarm blacks.
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...

In 1991 Reagan backed the Brady Bill which placed a 7 day waiting period on purchasing guns and allowed for background checks.
http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03...

Along with former presidents Ford and Carter, Reagan signed a publicly posted letter backing the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban.
http://articles.latimes.com/19...

need any more info on Saint Ronnie's anti-gun position?

The difference between Pi and the golden ratio is that the golden ratio isn't transcendental, it's just irrational. In fact, you can state Phi perfectly as (1 + sqrt(5)) / 2.

Yeah, I'm a fan of Darren Aronofsky

He should pay his PAs better.

Well, this is one of those questions that has a few big fat "depends" attached to the answer.

If they were just going to throw away that information, I unqualifiedly agree with you. No reasonable person would refuse to give their DNA if it would be thrown away as soon as it had exonerated them.

But what if they intend to *keep* that information and use it to match against future crimes? Then a reasonable person might well pause. One obvious uncertainty is what future versions of the government considers a "crime". Even if I have total trust in the "deep state" under President Obama, I should recognize others might reasonably feel differently, and nobody should feel such a level of trust for future administrations yet to be determined.

Possibly a more serious issue is our assumptions about the perfection of matching DNA samples against vast archives of DNA data. The FBI likes to claim literally astronomical chances like "113 billion to 1" against a false positive DNA match, but they're not exactly disinterested. Furthermore such figures are based on long strings of untested assumptions about things being statistically independent of each other. While it's manifestly clear that false matches are unlikely, we cannot really know whether they are sufficiently likely to treat as positive proof when we're talking about matching against potentially millions of samples.

So while it's quite reasonable not to be worried about what happens with your biometric data today, it's maybe not so reasonable to be so casual about having it retained and aggregated for decades to come. Keeping data without really testing it's future utility (or even disutility) is something bureaucracies do by habit and instinct, and people with the skepticism and mathematical knowledge to be entrusted with such a decision are few and far between.

Basically nobody involved is likely to have the grasp of statistics necessary to properly parse the results

"The men matched at nine of the 13 locations on chromosomes, or loci, commonly used to distinguish people.

The FBI estimated the odds of unrelated people sharing those genetic markers to be as remote as 1 in 113 billion. But the mug shots of the two felons suggested that they were not related: One was black, the other white."
  -- FBI resists scrutiny of 'matches'

Diverting 93% of the water to grow lettuce in the desert since 1920 had nothing to do with it.

Also, ignore the arctic ice that's been increasing for three years, the antarctic ice that's always grown and hit a new record in 2014, snow in Hawaii, and the great lakes that have frozen early,and that have frozen over compete the last two years. Ignore Niagara falls that has frozen over two years in a row and ignore all the record cold around the country. Ignore the fact we kill killed half the worlds trees in the last 100 years and where we do theres drought and ignore the fact the IPCC did not admit trees ate CO2 until 2010. Ignore the fact NAS falsified the CO2 hypothesis in 2010 and ignore the fact the climate models now have 95% error.Ignore the fact corals have genes that upregulate to ignore acidification and warming and ignore the fact pollution (I'm especially looking at you big oil) has gotten worse while we're distracted by this nonsense. Ignore the fact not a single IPCC prediction ever came true.

And especially ignore NAA/NOAA when they say "there has been no warming this century"

Creation science, social science, climate science... if you have to add "science" to a word to give it legitimacy, it's not science any more than the Democratic People's republic of North Korea is a democracy. Real sciences yield natural laws to quote Feynman.

Instead, look at 01% of a country that is 2% of the world.

Refs:
1) Ice
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...
http://news.ku.dk/all_news/201...
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/ear...
http://www.nasa.gov/content/go...

2) records:
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/vide...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
http://www.staradvertiser.com/...
https://www.facebook.com/video...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
http://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/febru...
http://www.latimes.com/local/l...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

3) Trees:
http://www.pri.org/stories/201...
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
http://www.agu.org/news/press/...

The only places in the world where one shut down road has a 250 mile detour is deep northern or rainforest regions

http://www.latimes.com/nation/... Is 225 miles in Nevada to get around a major interstate freeway closure long enough for you?

That's merely a major freeway that closed due to a flood. There are places in the Rockies where there is exactly one road into the valley and places along the coasts where there is exactly one bridge onto the island and if it closes there is no detour. Also enjoy driving through the western parts of the country during forest fire season.

And i will say it again : nuclear power is prohibitively expensive.

And all the other ways of making electricity are prohibitively expensive too. In 2003, Calpine had a multi billion dollar lawsuit against Siemens and GE for a large number of gas turbines. GE and Siemens' F-series gas turbines were laughably defective at launch and the Siemens units, in particular, had a tendency to completely self-destruct under rather easy to achieve conditions.

Heavy industrial equipment is expensive. Fuel for power plants is expensive too. It just happens that the machines are so large and powerful that the cost is divided hundreds of thousands, or even millions of ways among all the customers.

You make some good points, but Snowden is stuck in Russia, and I intentionally did not want to get in to "Who is Worse?".

But it's unavoidable. It's like trying to watch with a straight face as Chris Brown gets a lecture on how to treat women....by O.J. Simpson.

Murders of Politkovskaya, Litvinenko, and now Nemtsov are just the tip of the iceberg.

Pennies on the hundred dollar bill - and that's assuming Putin ordered or condoned their killings. Obama has killed thousands of innocent people with his drones, including barely 16 year old boys for political speech their fathers made.

If you are referring to Mohamedou Ould Slahi

I'm referring to the more than 50 people who are still being held in Gitmo, some of which have been cleared for release from when Obama was still a Senator. The cop-out that 'their home countries wouldn't take them back' never held any water, since the U.S. spent years ignoring Urugay's offer to take some in, before finally freeing six men late last year.

The Fairness Doctrine was abolished in 1987.

Much to Illiberals' chagrin.

discontinued almost 30 years ago

I'm "frothing at the mouth" over the reintroduction of it in 2015. It was wrong then, it is wrong now...

It's already happening.

Here, let me back up your point with last week's news from the LA Times:

"Michael Hiltzik of The Los Angeles Times reports that Southern California Edison, the local electrical utility, has let go of 500 IT employees by outsourcing jobs to Tata and Infosys who are top users/abusers of the U.S. H1-B visa process; 400 So Cal employees were laid off and 100 'left voluntarily', many with decades of experience. As indicative of a trend this has now become, last year Minnesota-based agribusiness behemoth Cargill said it would outsource as many as 900 IT jobs to Tata.
 
These employees perform the crucial work of installing, maintaining and managing Edison's computer hardware and software for functions as varied as payroll and billing, dispatching and electrical load management across Edison's vast power generating and electric transmission network. The workers I interviewed are in their 50s or 60s and have spent decades serving as loyal Edison employees.
 
"They told us they could replace one of us with three, four, or five Indian personnel and still save money," one laid-off Edison worker told me, recounting a group meeting with supervisors last year. "They said, 'We can get four Indian guys for cheaper than the price of you.' You could hear a pin drop in the room."
 
They're not the sort of uniquely creative engineering aces that high-tech companies say they need H-1B visas to hire from abroad, or foreign students with master's degrees or doctorates from U.S. universities who also can be employed under the H-1B program. They're experienced systems analysts and technicians for whom these jobs have been stairways from the working class to five- or six-figure middle-class incomes. Many got their training at technical institutes or from Edison itself.
 
This worker and the half-dozen others I interviewed asked to remain anonymous because their severance packages forbid them to speak disparagingly about the company."

This federal judge disagrees with you

The "sharing economy" has a dark side and will be coming to a workplace near you if this crap is allowed to continue.

Lynda Obst and Kip Thorne came up with the the movie, then gave it to Spielberg and Jonathan Nolan to work out a scenario.

http://articles.latimes.com/20...

It's a project that has its genesis in the two-decades-long friendship between Obst, an astronomy enthusiast who produced "The Siege" and "The Fisher King," and Thorne, the Feynman professor of theoretical physics at Caltech. (When Obst was producing "Contact," adapted by screenwriters James V. Hart and Michael Goldenberg from Carl Sagan's novel, Thorne conceptualized a wormhole sequence for the film that also advanced the field of theoretical physics.)

Over the years, Thorne's work on gravitational-wave detectors, which calculate negative space in things like black holes and imploding galaxies, has been at the very front edge of Einsteinian astrophysics. At one point Obst and Thorne were brainstorming about, as Obst puts it, "the most exotic events in the universe suddenly becoming accessible to humans," and crafted a potential cinematic scenario that hooked Spielberg enough to consider directing.

And that version was...
Well, let's just say that Jar Jar Abrams and studio heads would have loved it.
There is sex in zero gravity and a Chinese expedition too. And the robot wears a baseball cap.

The manufacturer is under investigation. No surprise then that it lead to some illness

This research clearly shows, the comments must be regulated — to ensure, only the certified experts are allowed to express opinions, and that all different points of view are fairly represented. The current so-called "freedom" is, obviously, putting us in danger — and it is over-rated anyway.

To keep the "playing field" level, the hitherto unregulated online news-sources (which also attract the most dangerous comments) shall be subjected to the same rules as TV-broadcasters, thus shutting down the smaller and annoyingly quirky ones among them. The respected (and, incidentally, government-supporting) establishments will thus be (smartly) helped.

Dissemination of information deemed incorrect by the benevolent and omniscient regulators, or failures to represent all points of view fairly, shall lead to the withdrawals of certification and any other licenses — easy to achieve without much fuss because a license, by definition is a permission granted by the Executive, and can be withdrawn (or not-renewed) without having to convince the skeptical Judiciary. Anybody talking about the First Amendment shall be ignored (and put on a watch-list) as a fringe crazy — this is not the 60-ies, you can not protest like that .

Regulation on slashdot hasn't worked for sometime now, though. The level of group think here is astounding. Every now and then I see a 10+ year old article on "This day on Slashdot" and notice just how much better the comments use to be on Slashdot compared to all the +5 insightful one-liners we get these days. Clearly, the mod system hasn't scaled well. Something new needs to be thought up.

This research clearly shows, the comments must be regulated — to ensure, only the certified experts are allowed to express opinions, and that all different points of view are fairly represented. The current so-called "freedom" is, obviously, putting us in danger — and it is over-rated anyway.

To keep the "playing field" level, the hitherto unregulated online news-sources (which also attract the most dangerous comments) shall be subjected to the same rules as TV-broadcasters, thus shutting down the smaller and annoyingly quirky ones among them. The respected (and, incidentally, government-supporting) establishments will thus be (smartly) helped.

Dissemination of information deemed incorrect by the benevolent and omniscient regulators, or failures to represent all points of view fairly, shall lead to the withdrawals of certification and any other licenses — easy to achieve without much fuss because a license, by definition is a permission granted by the Executive, and can be withdrawn (or not-renewed) without having to convince the skeptical Judiciary. Anybody talking about the First Amendment shall be ignored (and put on a watch-list) as a fringe crazy — this is not the 60-ies, you can not protest like that .

The sad thing is this isn't a joke

It is for your friendly neighborhood fusion center. Just ask Ross Ulbricht.

These reports seem to be a bit old (from 2011 or so), but here are a couple:

http://graphics.latimes.com/usmap-autism-rates-state/

http://www.statemaster.com/graph/hea_aut_num_of_chi_wit_aut_percap-autism-number-children-per-capita

In both, Mississippi's autism rates seem much lower than other states. However, this could be because of lack of testing or resources for parents of autistic kids. So autism incidences don't get reported and autism seems rate in the state. Better detection and resources are the main reason for the autism "spike", not vaccines or some mysterious "toxin."

Full disclosure: My son was diagnosed on the spectrum - Asperger's Syndrome. I'm also likely autistic, though undiagnosed. (Getting a diagnosis for me now won't help me - I've developed my own coping mechanisms - or my son so there's no reason to pay for the diagnosis.)

Researchers say these microscopic organisms are an example of "extreme evolutionary stasis" and represent the greatest lack of evolution ever seen.

They may also, paradoxically, prove that Darwin's theory of evolution is true.

The rule of life is don't fix it if it isn't broken. - William Schopf, UCLA

"If evolution is a product of changes in the physical and biological environment, and there are no changes in the physical and biological environment, then there will be no evolution," said J. William Schopf, a paleobiologist at UCLA.

He calls it the null hypothesis required of Darwin's equation.

In a paper published this week in PNAS, Schopf and his colleagues describe three distinct communities of the deep sea microbes separated from each other in time by hundreds of millions of years.

The first is a fossilized community found in 2.3-billion-year-old rock in Western Australia. The second fossilized community was discovered in 1.8-billion-year-old rock, also from Western Australia. The third is a living community discovered in the last decade in sediments off the west coast of South America.

The researchers say that despite their vast age differences, the three communities look exactly the same, each exhibiting a telltale irregular weblike fabric, and a two-tier structure.

"In form, function and metabolism, they are identical," Schopf said.

It may seem unlikely that any organism can remain the same for 2.3 billion ye

ars, but Schopf said that for these deep sea microbes, the lack of evolution makes sense.

"Surface environments change all the time and when they change, the biology changes," he said. "But the muds underneath the ocean don't receive any signals from the above environment."

The microbes described in the study live 4 to 12 inches beneath the deep sea sediments, in one of the most stable environments on Earth. Their world is cold and dark -- an endless night that feels none of the effects of either ice ages or warming spells.

"There is no turning of sediments, things don't get stirred up, there is no oxygen at all -- they get no time signal, there is no change," said Schopf.

The microbes reproduce asexually, which keeps genetic changes to a minimum, and their simple ecosystem requires only nitrate and sulfur for energy.

"They are well adapted for their environment, and there isn't any competition," Schopf said.

So with no pressure to change, Schopf proposes that these organisms didn't.

"The rule of life is don't fix it if it isn't broken," he said.

Schopf said it is likely that these ancient organisms exist at the bottom of oceans throughout the world, but finding them is difficult and expensive, since it involves drilling into sediments at the bottom of the ocean.

He also said there may be other similarly static communities on our planet. The next place he'd like to look are microbes that live deep in the pore spaces of rocks half a mile beneath the surface of the Earth.

"I suspect that is an environment that hasn't changed much over the history of the Earth," he said.

http://www.latimes.com/science...

They needed to find some way to afford the bonus to the CEO and her lieutenants for all the "value" they delivered in 2014.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-ibm-redefines-20150202-column.html

If there's one person at IBM who deserved a bottom performance rank it's their CEO.

Only if your claims are too vague to test. If you make a claim that's specific enough to be tested scientifically, you need to have an actual scientific study to back it up. For example, POM just lost on appeal because they made specific medical claims about pomegranate juice that they couldn't back up with results from randomized clinical trials. So if you want to sell expensive placebos, you need to limit your claims to something vague enough that it can't be tested definitively.

They are actually more open about it than you think.

Some "scientists" want the food pyramid to be reconsidered in light of climate change and the carbon costs of the food.

No matter what you think about climate change, it has shit to do with what food is healthy and what is not and what is the best mix for people to follow.

There was a small backlash and few campaigns appealing against taking military money

http://articles.latimes.com/19...

A British Airways jumbo jet lost power in an engine on takeoff from Los Angeles International Airport last month, but the pilot elected not to make an emergency landing for repairs, deciding instead to continue the 5,400-mile, transatlantic flight to London on the remaining three engines, officials said Monday.

Because of unfavorable winds and inefficiencies resulting from the engine loss, the Boeing 747-400 burned more fuel than anticipated, and the pilot was forced to cut the nonstop flight short and land in Manchester, England, the airline said.

It was Houston. Not surprisingly, they caught the guy almost immediately.

More homeless camps are appearing beyond downtown L.A.'s skid row

That state is making the US into a third world country.

Society has too much to deal with already.

Mostly because we permit people to take advantage of other people. In fact, that's much of what our society is based around maintaining: a status quo in which one person exists at the expense of another, due to artificial scarcity designed to funnel profit to the already-rich. The whole thing is a fraud.

you say "fraud", but to me fraud usually involves a specific monetary value

That's because money is what is most important to you, but it says nothing about the definition of fraud: "deceit, trickery, sharp practice, or breach of confidence, perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair or dishonest advantage." And not all profit is monetary, either, further driving home the point that you don't know what fraud means.

As a society, financial fraud is much easier to deal with than other kinds of fraud

So when a problem is hard, we should just throw up our hands and say "fuck it"? This reminds me of the Gates Foundation, when they were caught making for-profit investments in corporations killing the people they were claiming to be trying to save. They rapidly issued a press release stating that they would be reviewing the ethics of their investments, then the next day it went away and they made another one saying precisely the opposite, because that would be a difficult process. Yeah, saving the world is hard, but that's no excuse just to fuck it up.

We don't advance society by simply passing on problems.

That's it, let unelected government officials decide. We'll have the Jenny McCarthy's on one side and government thugs on the other. What could go wrong?

The smartest thing that ever came out of Jenny McCarthy's mouth was Jim Carrey's dick. That is not particularly impressive. Government thugs less so.

That's it, let unelected government officials decide. We'll have the Jenny McCarthy's on one side and government thugs on the other. What could go wrong?

Are you seriously so fucking stupid you think the guy slept with a 17yold BECAUSE he's a democrat? The problem is that because of tribal identity, and complete fucking ignorance, the republican for the last three plus decades have been pulling this country farther and farther to the radical fascist right. This is simply another attempt to rig the system against the people, and let corporations leech more money out of the population. Then we have stupid fucking idiots like you who keep trying to shift attention away from what's going on so YOUR "tribe" never has to take responsibility for anything they do.

This isn't about some totally disconnected fucking idiocy you want to weave around to distract people... it's about peoples basic rights to information thats not censored and fabricated by the few with enough resources to control them. Pull your head out of your ass for once in your life.

But, if you want to talk about pedophiles and sexual criminals in office, fine, here yah go:

http://www.democraticundergrou...

http://ringoffireradio.com/201...

http://www.911review.org/Alex/...

http://articles.latimes.com/20...

This has been true at the local level as well. Police departments made a practice of maintaining files based on surveillance of local politicians and had no qualms about letting their targets know they were being watched.

For example:

The commendation resolution, which several council members said they acted on without paying attention, gives no hint of Paul's role in the controversial PDID. The unit was accused of keeping files on elected officials considered hostile to the LAPD and of infiltrating liberal organizations.

The PDID was disbanded by the Police Commission in 1983 and replaced by an anti-terrorist division after the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit accusing the unit of spying on 131 law-abiding citizens and organizations. The lawsuit was settled in January, 1984, when the city agreed to pay $1.8 million in damages.

Before the suit was settled, an LAPD internal investigation found that Paul had stored confidential PDID files in the garage of his Long Beach home and had provided sensitive information to a private, right-wing organization. Paul was suspended, but a police trial board later found that his activities had been sanctioned by his supervisors, and he was reinstated with back pay.

The controversy over the PDID activities lasted for months, grabbing headlines regularly and prompting widespread criticism of the department.

"This is outrageous," Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU said upon learning of the council's action Tuesday. "Jay Paul betrayed this city; he disgraced the Police Department."

http://articles.latimes.com/19...

You think you are being a smart ass, but you seem to have blurred the lines between fact and conjecture.

He's both a smartass - and right.

The big problem with weathershifting is that sometimes powerful dynasties are laid low. There are remnents of forests and towns under teh sands of the Sahara as exposed by Radar mapping:

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech... This was likely the result of the end of the last glacial age. But the issues are the same. A tiny bit drier in Nebraska, and it will turn into a desert. There are old dunes not far below the topsoil in many parts:

http://articles.latimes.com/19...

Will it happen? I dunno. It might. Large scale weather shifts might topple America's dominance, and as far as I am concerned, patriotic Americans would do well to consider adverse possibilities. "It can't happen here" just doesn't sit well.

What we'll probably see occur is at some point the insurance companies are going to stop writing policies on risky properties. Some have already. Currently, there's a lot of investment going on in new Miami properties by many people who aren't actually planning to live there, they see it as an investment. And since at the moment, they are able to get disaster insurance, how can they lose? Well, they can should their policies get cancelled. Give it another Katrina or New Orleans and that could start happening.

The other possibility is the government could at some point decide the problem is serious enough but understand that taxing the fossil fuel industries directly will be ineffective. An alternative would be more subsidies on clean energies and disaster bail-out funds all paid for by taxes on the consumption of fossil fuels. That could happen after the next disaster incident where people start clamoring for "bail outs" or money to build more sea walls. Those things could find funding from consumption taxes, which will make fossil fuel production less attractive because the market is moving elsewhere. But there's going to be a lot of opposition from moneyed interests, it remains to be seen how long it will take for such things to occur and impact the market sufficiently to make any difference.

The other thing I'm worried about though is the tendency to use this as an excuse to expand nuclear power. The problem I have with that is not that nulcear power CAN BE made safe, but that the way things work, IT WON'T BE. Think Deepwater Horizon. Do you really want a BP running a nuclear power station? Think incompetence. Google "nuclear accidents." The history of safety in the industry is not good, nor is it in ANY of the fossil fuel industries. And there's a new one now-- New Mexico. Not too serious an accident I gather (though an expensive one), certainly it's not a Fukushima, but the point is not how serious it is, but that it happened at all, demonstrating that stupid accidents happen all too often: http://www.latimes.com/nation/...

Huh? The submitter didn't make anything up... the quote was clearly from the bottom of this LA Times article, which was their very first link in the summary:

http://www.latimes.com/nation/...

The SciAm article is just a relevant reference about plutonium poisoning.

but anonymity also allows people to express themselves without exposing themselves to harassment.

...or worse ...and even worse.

Wrong. That deregulation was regulation requiring that whoever owned the wire, had to rent it out to competitors. Thus, competitors were born and prices for long distance plummeted.

From 1999:

The price war has led to speculation that long-distance phone service eventually will be "free" with a package of other communication services.

The intensifying competition reflects the continuing shake-up in the once-stodgy U.S. telephone industry, where phone companies are being forced to reduce rates because of intense competition in the long-distance market stemming from the 1996 Telecommunications Act.

http://articles.latimes.com/19...

Christ, even the asshole nominating him for the least prestigious award in history can't even remember where he landed a probe...

It happens when the only thing the geek remembers are the leather clad babes with guns on his tee shirt.

Maybe it's because I grew up in Pasadena, home of Caltech, mother ship of science nerdery, but I recognized Taylor's type immediately. Take a look at him: the dorky eyeglasses, the beard that's not really hip enough to be hipster, the elaborate tattoos that spill out from under that shirt all the way to Taylor's wrists. The man even had a tattoo of the Rosetta landing needled onto his leg back in January! And garish casual shirts of all kinds are part of his everyday wardrobe. Matt Taylor could be a character in ''The Big Bang Theory.''

And part of Science Nerd culture seems to be that if your brain is big enough, it's OK for you to dress for every single occasion as though you were pondering the theory of relativity while walking your dog. So Matt Taylor donned completely inappropriate wear -- inappropriate because a scientist ought to dress professionally when presenting his work to the public, which is not the same as messing around in a lab.

The real problem with Rosetta scientist's inappropriate shirt

The North Korean regime's survival depends on keeping its people completely uninformed. Here's an article about how even a little bit of information about the outside world can destroy the carefully constructed myths that sustain North Korean society: http://articles.latimes.com/20...

"About two years ago, a North Korean who worked in the state fisheries division was on a boat in the Yellow Sea when his transistor radio picked up a South Korean situation comedy. The radio program featured two young women who were fighting over a parking space in their apartment complex. A parking space? The North Korean was astonished by the idea that there was a place with so many cars that there would be a shortage of places to park them. Although he was in his late 30s and a director of his division, he had never met anyone who owned their own car. The North Korean never forgot that radio show and ended up defecting to South Korea last year."

The article is old, but I don't think things have changed much in North Korea.

They have. When I was there earlier this year, we got stuck in legitimate traffic jams a couple of different times. There are about 10 times as many cars on the road as there were just 5 years ago, according to the (Australian) tour guide. It is the single biggest and most visible sign of change he had seen.

The North Korean regime's survival depends on keeping its people completely uninformed. Here's an article about how even a little bit of information about the outside world can destroy the carefully constructed myths that sustain North Korean society: http://articles.latimes.com/20...

"About two years ago, a North Korean who worked in the state fisheries division was on a boat in the Yellow Sea when his transistor radio picked up a South Korean situation comedy. The radio program featured two young women who were fighting over a parking space in their apartment complex.
A parking space? The North Korean was astonished by the idea that there was a place with so many cars that there would be a shortage of places to park them. Although he was in his late 30s and a director of his division, he had never met anyone who owned their own car.
The North Korean never forgot that radio show and ended up defecting to South Korea last year."

The article is old, but I don't think things have changed much in North Korea.

Better to have cameras than not; maybee...... juries can be played by selective use of cams, excluding other cam footage, and plain old laying a trap for the unwary citizen.

You asked: I read the news. Google for you:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ka...
"But it goes both ways; video – or the lack of it – can also damn officers. Two on the Daytona Beach force lost their jobs after a video mysteriously blanked out in the middle of an encounter with a woman who allegedly hid a bag of cocaine in her mouth; she said the officers knocked her down, shoved a flashlight between her lips and kicked her in the head, but that part of the encounter wasn’t caught on film thanks to one officer failing to turn his camera on and a “malfunction” with the other officer’s camera midway through the arrest. A forensic analysis of the cam showed that the “malfunction” was caused by the officer shutting it down. Chief Chitwood has said the policy there is, “If you turn it off, you’re done.”"

That's Daytona. In Oakland. Mysteriously Shut Off Camera Syndrome doesn't hurt and officer much:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
"OAKLAND, Calif.—Over the last two years, the Oakland Police Department (OPD) has disciplined police officers on 24 occasions for disabling or failing to activate body-worn cameras, newly released public records show. The City of Oakland did not provide any records prior to 2013, and the OPD did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/...
"Hargraves was found to have violated policy by taping over his nametag, and Wong was found to have acted improperly by failing to report the incident to internal affairs and also turning off Hargraves' lapel camera"

http://crooksandliars.com/susi...
"However, the above video, which shows several officers with their body-mounted cameras turned off – a departmental violation - is just the latest example of Oakland police officers not wanting any accountability.The video is also a clear demonstration of just how high tensions are between Oakland police and citizens."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12...
"In other cases it was the absence of video that got the officer in trouble. An officer in Daytona Beach, Fla., was forced to resign after he was caught turning off his camera at critical moments. An Albuquerque officer who shot and killed a woman in April — and whose camera was off at the time — was fired on Monday after being investigated for not complying with department orders that required officers to record all interactions with civilians.

But even when video does exist, it is often not decisive. In the case of Mr. Garner, the Staten Island man who died in July after a police officer put him in a chokehold, a video of the encounter taken with a bystander’s cellphone and viewed millions of times was enough to stir visceral outrage — but not to secure an indictment."

The records show that on November 8, 2013 one officer was terminated after failing to activate his camera. Less than two weeks later, another resigned for improperly removing the camera from his or her uniform. However, most officers received minor discipline in comparison."

Antenna removal:
http://www.latimes.com/local/l...
"os Angele

Back in 2008 when I was still working in aviation security (Security Program Architect for an Operator, not American), I visited both LAX and Frankfurt. Whilst Frankfurt hadn't kept up with the times, LAX was absolutely horrible. I was completely stunned at the routine, and almost by design, breaches of quarantine when handling screened and unscreened baggage and don't even get me started on the traffic management at checkpoints. It was one of the most ineffectual designs and implementations I've ever seen in the civilised world.

Gee, I wonder why http://articles.latimes.com/2014/mar/28/local/la-me-lax-luggage-theft-20140328 LAX allowed routine breaches of quarantine when handling baggage...

It must be assumed to be by design for the purpose of facilitating ongoing criminal enterprise, as they'd had a well publicized baggage theft operation right before you evaluated them and they've still got well publicized baggage theft operations.

"management runs to the US Government "
was that before or after they speculated on a certain Black President's preference for films with Black movie stars?

http://www.latimes.com/enterta...

"Should I ask him if he liked DJANGO?" she wrote, referring to the film about a freed slave. Later in the exchange Pascal wondered if she should ask Obama if he liked two other African American-focused films, "The Butler" and "Think Like a Man."

I don't think anyone ever wants to be a position to have to talk to Al Sharpton about racially insensitive remarks.

I agree that helping countries develop helps slow the birthrate. My point is that slowing the birthrate helps countries develop, also. Culture (ex: "Ten or 15 more sons will be a healthy sign.") and lack of birth control also contribute to big families.

And yes, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has helped women get birth control. Family planning is an important topic for Melinda Gates. I'm not saying people aren't emphasizing the need at all for birth control these days. But there was much more emphasis on it in the 1960s and 1970s. These days, how many warnings do you hear in the news, about population increase?

Regarding fear of seeming to be a racist, do a Google on "population control racism" (without the quotes). You'll see lots of articles, in which people claim that population control equals racism. Ex: the MotherJones has an article titled "Why Is Population Control Such a Radioactive Topic?". This article says, "Rinku Sen is a leading racial justice advocate, the publisher of ColorLines magazine, and president of the Applied Research Center: The reason people get so upset about population control is because historically reproduction has been controlled without the consent of the controlled person or community—usually with a deep racial or class dimension."

Certainly not everyone believes population control == racism. The government of China, with its one-child policy, is certainly not racist against Asians. But unfortunately, many people do think control == racism.