Slashdot Mirror

Reality check: The only "tea party" affiliate that has filibustered ANYTHING was Rand Paul who tried to filibuster the renewal of the PATRIOT act. . . Your beloved Democratic majority in the Senate tried to block him at every juncture and MADE SURE it passed.

Implying that it's just Democrats supporting the act, rather than large majorities of both parties, makes you a very dishonest person. I hope you realize that.

You people are dangerous (sorry to say, but it's true).

You're delusional, and you seem to forget all the Bush cheerleaders who turned a blind eye to all the trouble he caused, and now try to pin those problems on Obama. It would be funny if it weren't so scary.

Here's an example from the analogue era:

http://articles.latimes.com/1991-07-16/business/fi-2502_1_polaroid-case

Polaroid claimed Kodak infringed on their instant film patents and claimed $12 billion. They ended up settling for under a billion, but the entire range of Kodak instant print cameras and films was taken off the market permanently.

For example, your diary can be used against you in court:

http://articles.latimes.com/1994-02-02/news/mn-18241_1_high-court

So, the simple solution to this is to keep both encrypted data on your hard drive and an "encrypted" paper diary.

It doesn't matter if the paper diary is really encrypted or if it is just gibberish. I doubt that you would be compelled to "decrypt" the diary, and then it's pretty easy to point out to the judge that for all the police know, the data on the hard drive is a copy of the diary, and if you can't be compelled to reveal the key for one, then why should you be compelled to reveal it for the other?

One problem with your reasoning is that they don't need you to reveal your password to them; you just need to enter into the computer.

Also, if you store self-incriminating evidence (even in the form of a hashed password on a computer), the 5th Amendment might not help you. For example, your diary can be used against you in court:

http://articles.latimes.com/1994-02-02/news/mn-18241_1_high-court

Ok, I messed that up. The above quotes were from here: http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-trachea-transplant-stem-cell-20110708,0,2121263.story I had too many of the same story open at the same time. I do recommend the above story for more info on how the fits in with previous work.

"The only way for us to continue to have crime reduction is to start anticipating where crime is going to occur."

Maybe not having a poverty rate of over 16% would be a way?

The LA Times/a has an article about controlling invasive squirrels which eat fruit from backyard trees. In the comments, everyone debates the merits of trapping the squirrels and releasing them elsewhere, shooting them with a BB gun, etc. But no one mentions getting a cat. I've had many cats over the years and one thing they consistently is get rid of varmints. You don't even have to adopt one. If let you neighbors know you want one, someone will have one. Just make sure you get it spaded/neutered.

That's what they do in California.

Every year in Southern California, at the same time of the year, small groups of rogue firefighters light coordinated blazes across the land, usually around Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Bernardino. They do this because they want job security and they love the thrill of fighting large blazes. You hear all the sob stories about people losing their homes in the fires, but these are usually cabins and other second/vacation homes for well-off people who were most certainly insured. They cry all the way to the bank.

The official explanation for the cause of the fires is usually, "it's summer, the sun's out and it gets hot." Once in awhile they get creative and blame it on some asshole tossing away a smoldering cigarette butt.

Firefighters, being a part of the protected neo-gestapo of first responders, can and do break the law to further their own aims.

-2006: Citigroup and M$ Develop a New Digital Identity Solution

-2008: Citi's Market Montage Solution Supports 200,000 Updates per Second with SQL Server 2005

- june 2011: Citigroup hacker attack affected more customers than first thought

-a week later, in the neighborhood of Redmont (about the PSN outage): "As a company, you can look back 8, 9 years ago, when Bill Gates wrote his Trustworthy Computing Memo that basically said, 'We need to change the way we architect our products and it has to be designed into the way we architect our products and services.' So it’s in our DNA, across the company. This is not just an IEB thing. So this has really been a multi-year effort for us as a company and it’ll continue to be one because this future, which we think is very much about services and very much cloud based - whether it be entertainment consumption or productivity - in order to do that, you have to have a secure environment. So we’re going to continue to do that and we don’t want to see any of our competitors hurt along the way. We think that’s bad for consumers."

The government can spy on everybody, and shouldn't, but does; but they aren't acting on it very much.

Yes well, amassing power and abusing power at the same time doesn't tend to work so well. Dictatorship 101 says that by the time the public starts protesting, it should already be too late. The barriers, the self-imposed compartmentalization and restrictions the government puts on itself are nothing but curtains the government could pull aside or pierce at will. Handing them more and more power is like sticking your hand deeper and deeper in a bear trap on the logic that it hasn't snapped shut yet.

Besides, does the public really know what's going on? Give AT&T a national security lettter, hook up the NSA to their core server and boom, instant mass surveillance with 99.9% of AT&T not even knowing that it happens. What if the same happened to VISA, cell phone tower records, all tax records and so on, except you never heard about it? We do know they collected international transfers through the SWIFT system for years, and we only know that because other governments demand answers.

The government wants to give the impression that they're not acting on it very much. But they have over a million people on their terrorist watch list. The government has fiddled with total information awareness programs before and probably still do in secret. Don't expect them to be so blunt as to throw you in a jail cell without trial, you'll just subtly find that you kept away from any critical positions and every government agency is going over you with a fine tooth comb.

The only points you list are those where the government as a power entity doesn't care. They care about threats to their own power, who you sleep with they honestly don't care except as a potential weapon to make you resign. They only care if you want to reduce their power or increase oversight, transparency and accountability. As long as people quibble over social issues or tax rates while the power grab continues, they're happy. Why ruin people's illusion of choice? Make people believe they want it and chose it.

We are in no way affiliated with Lulzsec.

They do not wish to be affiliated with us. We have slightly similar motis operandi, but their targets are chosen for lulz. Ours are chosen by the greatest detectable stench of corruption.

And as to the recent Lulzsec attacks on Anonymous, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/06/lulzsec-anonymous-cyber-fight.html , whether true or not, someone within either organization wants the two groups to be and appear separate. We are fine with this separation.

Expect Us.

Now, he went to jail for six months for drug possession but also the very large sum of money. They were able to prove that he was a dealer and was en route to make more purchases. If he had had BitCoins, he merely would have kept a wallet on his phone then transferred the cash to the woman and could have denied the whole transaction had taken place and was clueless about the shrooms in his car.

I think there are several misconceptions in this statement.

The first is that having or moving a large amount of cash is somehow wrong or illegal. Some governments have tried to make it so, eg with border controls, but fundamentally this is not evidence of anything and the Supreme Court has struck down convictions based on these laws. Generally you should be careful with drawing conclusions about AML related things because the relevant laws are very vague.

The second is that doing such a trade with Bitcoin would give plausible deniability. No, if the woman was working with the police, she could just give them the address she was going to use to receive the payment beforehand, and after the trade the block chain would contain evidence of payment to that address. They could then use the contents of the dealers wallet as proof he paid her.

Corporate embezzlement becomes easier, drug dealing becomes easier, funding terrorism becomes easier, etc.

Again, I think this is a common misconception, albiet an understandable one because it is frequently spread by governments. The reality is that prosecutions under money laundering laws are rare, and when they occur they almost always occur in tandem with some other crime (as by definition, money laundering is attempting to hide the proceeds of crime). The idea that these laws help the fight against terrorism is especially absurd as modern terrorism is not an especially expensive thing and thus attempting to spot terrorists by their financial activity is always going to be chasing a needle in a field of haystacks. For just one example, take a look at the official UK government guidance on how money services businesses should spot terrorists (page 45):

6.9.4 Examples of activity that might suggest to staff that there could be potential terrorist activity
The customer is unable to satisfactorily explain the source of income.

Frequent address changes.

Media reports on suspected or arrested terrorists or groups.

.... and that's it. Yes, merely changing your address frequently and not being able to 'satisfy' some random front-line staff member at a bank is potentially enough to trigger a suspicious activity report (SAR) indicating you might be a terrorist. Needless to say, the volume of SARs in some countries is so high that the police are barely able to process them at all.

In short, having done much research on this lately, the case for AML laws saving us from drug dealers and terrorists needs to be really well laid out, given how draconian they are (some practically establish a financial police state). Yet there's little such evidence. The Economist called time on this state of affairs years ago, but I doubt they will change anytime soon. The "War On Terror" always takes precedence over other things, unfortunately.

You keep saying this but you fail to provide any details on how this will be done. When transactions are anonymous, how in the hell does this happen?

Your understanding is wrong. Bitcoin allows for good privacy (but not as good as cash), if you want it. Exchanges, being private businesses like any other, are free to demand whatever identity proofs they want, and as KYC laws require them to do so, I believe all the big ones do. Mt Gox

EMI is for sale right now. Probably around $2-3B.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-0621-ct-emi-20110622,0,1830090.story

Warner was just sold for $3.3B. The other two are Universal and Sony. The entire industry is worth about $15B. But the computer companies would only want the recorded libraries, not the rest of the business. Probably around $10B to buy that piece.

There are great ways to fund investigative journalism. Here are a few:

http://homedelivery.nytimes.com/
https://services.chicagotribune.com/
http://www.latimes.com/about/mediagroup/shop-and-subscribe/
http://service.usatoday.com/

More investigative journalism comes out of daily newspapers than anywhere else. Subscribe to your local newspaper.

The old "grow weeds so you can pull them" trick? I would think that trick is about used up, and or the world has enough "weeds" on its own.

The one problem with lulz is that if you play them as a card, someone has to go down. If not, then the ball will get passed to someone who will look into it. The evidence had better be pristine as well or in this technical clime it will get picked apart. So if you find a scape goat, it can't be sloppy, and this group implies there are multiples of them, so you need multiple scape goats.

Now didn't some country make some arrests already concerning one of these groups? I was surprised where they were. I figured they were home grown. Or did some patsy fit the bill? This is why a guy needs to see what bills for appropriations are coming up. Of course this pretense wouldn't take too long hold up, Congress seems to have the attention span of an ADD fruit fly on crack. They hand out the money, the problem goes away, everyone is happy as pigs in slop. Rinse and repeat as necessary.

I don't know, that takes a lot of balls.

Here is more of a fucked up scenario that we could worry about. Did you look at those videos? I didn't want to point out the obvious. But imagine if lets say, another disgruntled ethic group with possibly a jealous bone to pick with us decided to implement those tactics? A big influx of weapons to them, not unlike the one we seen our incompetent/crooked agents unleash in Cartel country, would be a nice starter for them to augment those Flash Robberies, transforming them into Flash Tactics or Flash Terrorism.

From what I glean isn't there some hostile groups in that geographic region that have maps of territories they want to "liberate" back from us? Some old news, but still interesting. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laplaza/2008/04/mexico-reconque.html Checking the date, that is from 2008, of course its stale, but I ponder what has become of this kind of thing.

"The changing economics of Made in China will benefit both the rich and poor world."

It won't help the U.S! We keep demanding cheap goods, no matter how poorly made they are, and the only way to get that is to take advantage of poorer countries and manufacture overseas. Of course, that means there are no manufacturing jobs anywhere in the country, so in another few years, the only place in the U.S. where anyone will be able to shop or work will be Walmart.

On the one hand, you have the iPhone--built in China and it's an absolute miracle of modern technology. Have you SEEN one of those things on the inside? Rows and rows of tiny little dots on a board and I can't even guess what any of it does. I'm sure, given U.S. labor costs, it would cost a lot more than it currently does.

On the other hand, I don't know where to buy decent clothes. I bought a 12-pack of socks a couple weeks ago and three of them were mis-sewn. Every time my wife buys a 3-pack of underwear for the kid, she takes them out of the package, washes them, and 1 or 2 will come out of the washer--their first wash, having never been worn--with the waistline frayed.

I'm not saying that everything that is (or was) made in America is automatically great, but wouldn't it be great if people DID give a shit about the quality of what they made, and that the money would stay within our borders? But I think the opportunity to do good has passed. I saw Schmatta a few months ago and that, too, is depressing as hell. It's the story of New York's fabled garment district and it ends with some fun stats: 40 years ago, 95% of clothing sold in America was made here. Today, 5% is.

The only thing America has now is an entertainment industry and bullshit I.P. laws. Oh yeah, and prisons and wars. And a bailed-out, fucked-up auto industry that somehow managed to learn almost NOTHING after they started loosing their asses in the 80s. (They started to regain their composure a bit in the 90s but then they just started making SUVs.)

Maybe I've seen Jerry McGuire too many times but I really would be happy owning fewer things that held together better and I would be more than happy to pay more for that. My parents bought a microwave within a few years of when they first became common (early/mid-80s) and it has been replaced exactly once, and that replacement is still in use. Sure, new ones cost less than $100 at Walmart now, but I've bought 3 or 4 since buying my house in the late 90s. I don't care if it costs less overall to live like this--money isn't everything. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch should make anyone stop and think "hmm, maybe rampant consumerism isn't the way to go."

PS: we also, as a country, need to stop looking down on blue-collar work. Not everyone needs a college degree. We really need to have trade schools at the high school and college levels.

The stimulation to cause orgasm may come from other parts of the body (clitoris, g-spot, etc[1]), but so far I haven't heard the uterus as one of the erogenous zones.

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=127280&page=1
http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-orside11feb11,0,79450.story

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-missing-billions-20110613,0,4414060.story

6.6 billions. It looks like they trusted the soldiers in the field too much and just let them handle the cash the way they saw fit.

A paragraph of the article that got my attention:

"The White House decided to use the money in the so-called Development Fund for Iraq, which was created by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to hold money amassed during the years when Hussein's regime was under crippling economic and trade sanctions."

Why would the WH create that Fund unless they had imediate plans to invade Iraq?

A cameraman filmed Hungarian revolt http://articles.latimes.com/2008/may/11/local/me-miko11 "Miko was shocked to learn that the Soviets had found and confiscated the footage in his locker and were using it to identify people."
Take care where you post your pic and who sees you re this:
After reading http://www.torontosun.com/2011/06/14/tearful-cop-apologizes-for-threatening-to-taser-suspects-testicles
"I’m Tasering you in the f---ing nuts"

I didn't mean to imply that it was common place but it has happened. I also did not mean to imply that illegals are solely responsible, it was an example of how the current system is flawed and works against itself.

http://projects.latimes.com/hospitals/emergency-rooms/no/open/list/

This is a list of hospitals that have closed ERs because of costs. Again, I am not suggesting illegals are the cause of the problem. I'm suggesting that they represent one of the many factors, primarily because all other avenues of health care access are denied to them.

Next time do some simple Google searching before you simply say someone is wrong.

Short of locking him up, how is the state going to stop him from committing suicide? Everything you need for a quick painless death is available from your local well-stocked welding supply shop: a small tank of dry nitrogen, regulator, tubing, and breathing mask. Set it up so the mask is at a slight overpressure and you're in business: pass out after 30-60 seconds, heart stops beating with no chance of restarting after 10-12 minutes. Total cost probably less than £100.

There's a woman in the US distributing instructions and selling partial kits for doing much the same thing with a large plastic bag and a tank of helium from the party-supply store.

How effective is it? One of the reasons that Halon fire suppression systems were banned was that leaks resulted in odorless Halon pooling under raised floors, and techs working on the cabling passing out and suffocating when they stuck their head down into the pool. The Russian Navy still uses it in submarines; in 2008, 20 people died when the fire suppression system was accidentally activated (the article contains an error; the Russian Navy subsequently issued a clarification that the gas involved was Halon, not freon).

I have to vehemently disagree with you.
  The story of Bell, California that won the LA Times a pulitzer this year
The Hired Truck scandal in Chicago
Chicago Tribune exposes University of Illinois clout-based-admissions procedures

I can go on...

> He was magna cum laude. Verified by Harvard. Not as high as summa, but the point
> remains that he was top 10% of his class at Harvard.

Not so fast. Back when Zero was in Harvard they were going through terrible grade inflation. I have on another tab a 1999 LA Times piece announcing a new system at Harvard where only 10% will get magna cum laude. It says that under the previous system 76% of Harvard Law grads got honors. Granted that he DID get a law degree from Harvard and that ain't easy peasy. But isn't it interesting that we don't know what sort of classes he took? Did he take the easy stuff or take classes under the profs that give the hard work?

http://articles.latimes.com/1999/jun/10/news/mn-46135

Like saying she needs to visit all 60 states ("one left to go," plus Alaska and Hawaii)? Or maybe signing her signature and dating it three years in the past?

Put under a spotlight, and speaking or writing away from a script, you are bound to be caught saying something stupid. Of course, that goes doubly if you are stupid.

First of all, this is Massachusetts. The first communist state in American.

You can't even spell the name of the country right? PAPERS PLEASE!

As to your point, I guess that means Texas has the honor of being the first fascist state in the US.

i suspect this is just an extension of the purposely harassing someone laws that got royally screwed up in the process. they are designed to stop intimidation and harassment of someone specific by someone specific.

An example of this is where someone's father has passed on and a person who is upset with them for any reason, decides to send pictures of him dead with captions drawn on it saying something I'm glad or something similar. It's to stop someone from calling up repeatedly and saying congratulations on losing your job, your house, your car, I'm gonna fuck your daughter and steal your wife.

The ability of someone to do that can be debated, but the intentions would be pure malice and some people think the government has the ability to stop some of that by laws with penalties much the same way they do with laws against physical violence.

Don't delude yourself into thinking something like this law was supposed to cleans the intertubes for the fine citizens of that state. It's more to do with crap like this

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/02/family-gets-go-ahead-to-sue-chp-over-release-of-grisly-crash-photos.html

If we want to be sure that we don't want one of our major cities to be blown up one day, we should shut down nuclear power

Of course! It is not like there are THOUSANDS of NUCLEAR WEAPONS ready to do actual damage at moments notice. No sir!! After all, nuclear power produces plutonium so efficiently that the highly inefficient US military decided to make their own plutonium pits instead for these weapons..

And of course plutonium cannot be used as a fuel because using that instead of virgin uranium makes bunnies cry.

proliferation point of view, with respect to the risk of nuclear terrorism

I say we go further. burn all physics books!, especially those ones that deal with particle and nuclear physics. No one needs to know about cross sections. It is the devils knowledge!!

On a more serious note, anyone that brings up proliferation as a significant problem is a little crazy. You know, there are these things like radiation detectors that can detect a few atoms of contamination. I think they would detect a nuclear reactor worth of fuel going missing... It is not easy to build a nuclear weapon even though conceptually it seems so. An effective plutonium device is very difficult to produce and a "dirty bomb" is the most useless type of a bomb and it is easy to clean up.

If you want to worry about proliferation, worry about chemical and biological agents because these happened and are likely to happen again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin_gas_attack_on_the_Tokyo_subway

Here's a nice list of attempting smuggling of nuclear stuff. Basically all after USSR fell apart. None of these were sourced from nuclear energy. They call came from nuclear weapons programs.

http://articles.latimes.com/keyword/smuggling-russia

PS. This was mostly sarcasm, but since mdsolar is probably modding with 10 accounts, this will get -1 anyway ;)

And finally, nuclear energy from Uranium will not become exhausted for at least 1000 years. With fusion, nuclear will be permanent base load, unless we nuke ourselves over coal/oil/gas/food/water (take your pick) to kingdom come..

You have missed this story completely. Try this from the LA Times, dipshit. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/06/sarah-palin-says-paul-revere-warned-the-british.html

I was going to bring up the Downtown LA freeway "vandal" as well, here is the original LA Times story. What's funny is Caltrans recently redid all of the signage on the 110 though downtown, and though they replaced his particular sign, they completely adopted his informational scheme for the 110-four level interchange, to the point that the signs downtown are almost strange in their helpfulness compared to the signs on the 405 on the Westside or around the 101 in the Cahuenga pass.

It's the sort of defacement of public property I can get behind. But it looks like they've also doubled the barbed wire on all of the signs :P

"Act of War" except when such cyber warfare is directed at Iran by a join Israel/U.S. operation. Then it's just ... uh. Definitely not war

So, your thinking is what? That poor, peaceful Iran is being picked on? That the mean old US and Israel started a war on blameless Iran? Apart from the fact that you are speculating about the source of Stuxnet, the outrage is purely imaginary. If anything, Iran is lucky things aren't worse for it given its reckless, murderous behavior.

Israel Seizes Cargo Ship Carrying Tons of Iranian Weapons Bound For Hamas in Gaza

Hezbollah's stockpile bigger, deadlier

In the 2006 war, Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets into northern Israel. Most were inaccurate, short-range models, but the attacks killed at least 39 civilians and had a profound psychological effect on Israelis....

Hezbollah now has about 27,000 rockets and missiles, more than double its supply before the 2006 war, Israeli officials say. Acquisitions include Iranian missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv, they allege.

"We know without a doubt that the international embargo on the transfer of weapons to Hezbollah has been deliberately violated by the governments of Iran and Syria," said Mark Regev, an Israeli government spokesman.

The U.S. government, which has designated Hezbollah a terrorist group, accuses Iran of providing arms, training and millions of dollars. Syria also has emerged as an arms supplier, not just a conduit for Iranian arms, Israeli officials say.

Iran Builds Rockets to Arm Hezbollah, Deter Sanctions (Update2)

August 4, 2006 06:05 EDT
Aug. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Many of the rockets Hezbollah is firing into Israel are made in Iran, demonstrating the Islamic republic's success in copying Chinese and Russian technology to build its own weapons industry.

The Shiite Muslim group's arsenal includes Iranian-built portable Katyusha rockets, Israeli Reserve Brigadier General Yossi Kuperwasser said. Hezbollah struck an Israeli ship on July 14 with an Iranian-made C802 Noor guided missile. The militia also has Iran's Zelzal rocket, with a range of 120 miles, enough to reach Tel Aviv from south Lebanon, said Yaakov Amidror, a retired major general who ran Israel's National Defense College.

List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2011
List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2010
List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2009
List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2008

Iran says can cut energy to Europe, hit enemies (Reuters)

28 February 2010
Iran could make European countries suffer by cutting off energy supplies and can target any adversary with its missiles, a senior Iranian military official said on Sunday....

“Iran is standing on 50 percent of the world’s energy and should it so decide Europe will have to spend the winter in cold,” Hossein Salami, deputy commander of the elite Revolutionary Guards, said in a meeting with war veterans and volunteers in Kerman, according to Fars news agency.

“Our missiles are now able to target any spot in which the conspirators are in, and the c

The governor, the legislature, and the unions have all but given up on the electorate now that the polls show no one is in favor of increasing taxes yet again.

Here's a great quote:
"Go get a deal done," said David Kieffer, executive director of the state council of the influential Service Employees International Union, in a challenge to Brown and the Legislature. Californians "would vote the taxes down," he said, and "they don't actually need to be involved in this decision."

That's what is ruining this state.

Some references:

Power line canceled

Brightsource canceled

Six solar projects blocked by Native American groups

On the effect of the Mojave national monuments on solar projects

All of this does not matter to the question of artists canceling appearances. If an artist does not want to appear in Israel, that's fine. An artists who cancels is being suckered into making a political statement under the guise/threat of avoiding making one.

More so than other artists that cancelled, I think Gil-Scott Heron would have delivered strong messages in his performance. As much as any performer I can think of, he has a long history of fighting racism. I'm not sure Santana and Elvis Costello would have delivered significant messages in their music had they not cancelled.

It's unfortunate that Gil-Scott Heron won't be around to perform either for the troops or general public there at some future date.

I can appreciate that the rest of the world may underestimate how difficult some policy decisions can be when we mostly lack diverse and in depth news sources. (showing more violence isn't showing more depth) I think it would be to Israels advantage to make LBA and/or other English language broadcasters more widely available (direct streaming, livestation etc.) While some internal political conflict and problems may seem an embarrassing thing to show internationally, those who have seen conflicts between political parties and groups elsewhere might at least be a little more sympathetic to the political pressure (suicide?) that sometimes cripples major policy changes.

The high level of activity in the middle-east is motivated more people to try and look a little deeper than the 'short on facts, long on pundit posturing' coverage we're mostly handed.

There are some serious issues that should at least be discussed widely. Failure to do so erodes credibility. Even friends question friends.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/report-44-of-israeli-jews-support-rabbis-edict-forbidding-rentals-to-arabs-in-safed-1.333825

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/23/world/la-fg-israel-intolerance-20110123

http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=219464

http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20Editorials/2010/July/12%20o/Deteriorating%20Conditions%20for%20Israeli%20Arab%20Citizens%20By%20Stephen%20Lendman.htm

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/yermi-brenner/learning-from-the-rabbis-_b_821393.html

It doesn't matter if the response is asymmetric. At least Israel is defending its borders and sending a message unlike some countries that are almost letting them sneak in.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/03/illegal-immigrants-disguised-as-us-marines-fail-to-get-through-border-checkpoint.html

No matter what your principles are or the ideals you stand for, it is never a good idea to piss off the guys holding the guns when you are not carrying one.

And yet it seems the 2nd amendment nuts aren't nearly as concerned with the 1st amendment, NRA over EFF any day. What they don't understand that it won't matter if you have guns if you don't know when or why to grab them. Tienmen..what? Liu Xio..who? And if the founders had lived in 2011 and seen the mass surveillance I think they would have moved the 4th up to 2nd, because if the government control your every move, your every communication, everything you search for or read online then nobody would get coordinated to rebel. Lone dissenters are always easily neutralized.

The Patriot Act just passed another 4 year extension even though Osama is dead and the US has seen no terror of any significance in years. Face it, the "war" never ends and sooner or later they'll just pass this as permanent legislation, all governments are like a sponge sucking up power never relinquishing it. Another disturbing trend I've noticed is that more and more news sites now move to Facebook discussions, pretty soon the "public voice" will not include anyone without a Facebook account. Like boiling a frog we are softly being gagged, so thin most don't even realize it.

if you think any conceivable spacecraft could bring enough of it in to make a dent in the prices.

    You're overthinking it.

    You don't need any conceivable spacecraft to bring it home. You only need to get it into a geostationary orbit, and thrust appropriately to simulate dropping straight down slowly. There are tremendous options for reentry that don't involve burning the shit out of the hull of your spacecraft (or the payload). It just takes a lot of fuel, which is impractical to lift from Earth.

    But where, oh where, oh where would you find something to give you propulsion?

    That is, of course, if the buyers are on Earth or want it for space purposes. The buyer always determines the destination.

    The future of space travel, including developing new and better propulsion system, will *require* people living in it. Observing and experimenting with it. Making propulsion devices that work, and those that don't.

    Right now, our understanding of space travel is primitive at best. We're like sailors in the Rocky Mountains, planning ships send to the open seas. The only experience we have so far is sending a whole bunch of paper sailboats down a creek, and a few bamboo rafts.

    The people who learned to build ships that could cross the ocean lived on the shore. The built and sailed and learned from each others achievements.

    We don't really know anything about space travel, and we never will, unless we try.

[citation needed]

The U.S.: Where Europe comes to slum

U.S. to Become New Center of Low-cost Manufacturing?

At this point it doesn't really matter so much who developed it. Regardless, we're still potentially collateral damage or potential targets of a fully disassembled/reverse-engineered/built-fresh-with-a new-twist version as well as whatever the original authors might unleash. Whoever made it was shortsighted if they felt that even versions attempting to be very specific wouldn't be analyzed and modified or cause some collateral damage as-is. Pruning target-filtering code seems it would be a relatively trivial task.

Some say Israel had people bragging about it.
http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=10596

Collateral damage adding to some other bad event? You decide.
  I don't think the victims had a clue.

http://www.publicradio.org/columns/kpcc/kpccnewsinbrief/2008/11/officials-unveil-why-yorba-lin.html
http://articles.latimes.com/keyword/yorba-linda-ca
http://www.ylwd.com/fireupdate/pdf/Freeway%20Complex%20Fire%20Report.pdf

One day you'll wake up and it'll be too late to do anything about their world markets domination.

China's got a buttload of problems coming up fast, like:

• o Wage Inflation - average wages are expected to double in the next 5 years while food and housing inflation is already here that means a significant loss in global competitiveness
• o Massive Gender Imbalance - 55% male to 45% female birth ratio - that means crime, revolution or possibly war is coming, because when young men can't get laid, they take their frustration out in violence
• o Too Many Retirees - The one child policy is turning their social security system upside down - there just aren't going to be enough young workers to support all the old people in non-productive retirement
• o Massive Waste - a command economy is great when the people running the show guess right, but when they guess wrong you get massive waste like Ghost Cities and boondoggle trains.

One day you'll wake up and it'll be too late to do anything about their world markets domination.

China's got a buttload of problems coming up fast, like:

• o Wage Inflation - average wages are expected to double in the next 5 years while food and housing inflation is already here that means a significant loss in global competitiveness
• o Massive Gender Imbalance - 55% male to 45% female birth ratio - that means crime, revolution or possibly war is coming, because when young men can't get laid, they take their frustration out in violence
• o Too Many Retirees - The one child policy is turning their social security system upside down - there just aren't going to be enough young workers to support all the old people in non-productive retirement
• o Massive Waste - a command economy is great when the people running the show guess right, but when they guess wrong you get massive waste like Ghost Cities and boondoggle trains.

In many large cities, tap water tastes like you are drinking out of a sewer. NYC is probably the most famous example, but it is also true elsewhere.

Um, what? Someone is actually selling bottle NYC tap water and people love it. Check out this article. Here's a choice quote:

Michael Saucier, a spokesman for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, notes that the city's water beat 150 other municipal water systems in New York state in a taste test last summer.

Not just for national security.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2010/07/oliver-stone-hitler-israel-chavez.html

If Ford had teamed up with Facebook, they could have called the car the, "Smart Ass"; just a thought...

    I was about to say you were wrong, but you are correct.

    There were other incidents several years ago, where people on the east coast of the US with antennas pointed down to the horizon, or people in Europe, could pick up the occasional unencrypted transmissions.

    The gov't runs several different satellite systems. There are encrypted and unencrypted transmissions. As far as I know, none of them manipulate brain waves though (had to include that for the tinfoil hat crowd). I'd be sure that the control signals are sent over the encrypted channels. There are less encrypted channels available, so they are used for more sensitive data. Flying around on an average flight may not have constituted "sensitive" data, and could have been in the clear. If they knew it would be viewing a target of any value, it would have been on an encrypted channel.

coward. we're supposed to cower in fear of these people?

That's the beauty of the Internet, isn't? It allows you to sit in your parent's basement (or whatever safe location you are in) and demand that other peoples' lives should be put at risk so that you can feel good. Meanwhile, the people who actually have to make these decisions are required to factor in other concerns besides their egos -- details like the safety of Americans living abroad, who might well be lynched if there is a backlash in response to their actions. They have to act like adults, not like children playing superhero. Remember the ~20 innocent UN workers who got lynched in Afghanistan after Terry Jones made his oh-so-brave political statement by burning a Koran in Florida? What would you say to the next 20 innocents whose lives you could have spared but chose not to? "Sorry, your life is less important than my sense of justice"?

A survey has shown that atheists and agnostics know the most about religion. Atheists also tend to be more intelligent and obey the golden rule. This flies in the face of the idea behind the wedge strategy, that materialism leads to a decline in society.

Actually, they are telling Foxconn to clean up their act - reference

For what it's worth, from what I've read a big motivation in these suicides is accident compensation for families or somesuch. That's more a product of society in general. Both theirs and ours.

That was the point. NO other candidates have ever had to proven themselves born in the USA.

Well Obama was an unusual candidate in many ways - he was an unknown that rose to popularity even faster than Jimmy Carter. This was intentionally done by the media - they liked him, wrote about him, and put him on a pedestal. Other than puff pieces in newsmagazines (and TV newsmagazines), no one really knew much about him.

As far as previous presidents, they made their birth certificates available early in their political careers, just not on the Internet because it either didn't exist or wasn't as widely used as it was in 2007 and 2008. But, for your edification, here is LBJ's BC, Richard Nixon's was filed in 1942, when he was 29. Here is a copy of it online. You can also find Ronald Reagan's birth certificate online, and he was born way back in 1911. Reagan, like many presidents, also served in the military and had honorable careers serving in the national defense, and every president until W. released their military records before or during their campaign. W released many of his in 2000, and the rest were released in 2004, after some fake memos were reported as real by Dan Rather on CBS news.

Frankly I never bought in to any of the birther rhetoric. It seemed stupid and distracting, and I made fun of them for their ridiculous antics. But then when that image was released on the White House web site - well, it's weird. Why would they put up a doctored image like that? I think it's clear he was born in Hawaii, but that image is all manipulated. Why? I just don't get it.

Listen. I'm not uh-merican, I don't live there, so I don't really give a rat's ass anyway. Anything is better than Dubya. I'm content.

That being said, here's what I saw:

In 2008 the Obama campaign released a "certification of live birth". This certification is printed on a laser printer (it says so right there in the bottom left corner) and so has no relationship whatsoever to the original document from 1961, other than that it is claimed to contain the same info. The serial number is blacked out for some reason.

FactCheck.org then released more photos of the same certification of live birth. It is dated Jun 7 2007. The serial number is now shown: 151 1961 - 010641.

The scandal grows more, almost spilling over from the right-wingnuts channels to the regular media.

The white house releases a digital impression of a certified copy of the long-form certificate. Certified means, in context, that there's this Alvin T. Onaka again and his signature stamp is shown at the bottom of the picture: "I certify this is a true copy or abstract of the record on file in the Hawaii state department of health".

Typewriters do not create pixellated white margins on letters. Look at the letters NHA where it says DUNHAM in the pdf.

Look at the date stamp. The 6 in 1961 is of a different color than the 1 and the 9 and the other 1 (they're black, it's greenish).
Look at the serial number in the top left corner: 151 61 10641. That 1 at the end is greenish, the other figures are black.

So this is not a straight copy. To me, it looks like a scan of a microfiche that was superimposed on that greenish background, none too expertly.

I did not follow this story too closely. Has Obama ever publicly declared "I was born in the USA"?