Slashdot Mirror

but the point stands.

That doesn't make your point any less flamebait in this story. You might as well go to AIDS conferences and tell their speakers that it's their own fault for getting AIDS.

Actually, their problems seem to be based on Carly Fiorina's face. I mean, yeesh. I click on the "Michigan" link in the summary, and I just get assaulted.

http://blog.mlive.com/flintjournal/newsnow/2008/04/post_moto_kid_death_story_here.html

Note the last part. The Flint Journal must be extremely confident in how road-safe this tank is.

Most nuclear plants have been running in the U.S. and France for more than 30 years without issues.

Most, without issues?. Not all? What does most mean to us?

1. 1. -- There is NO safe dose of ionizing radiation, and also economic viability
2. 2. -- Nuclear power plant incidents at home and abroad
3. 3. -- Nuclear power plant incident preparedness documents
4. 4. -- A little alarmist media, because sometimes we should be alarmed

1. -- Some exerpts from "The Politics of Power: Risks and Costs of Nuclear Power Plants": http://www.garynull.com/The%20Politics%20of%20Power%20Final%20&%20Final%20Footnotes.pdf

The NAS (The National Academies of Science (NAS) report, Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation,) finding had long ago been discovered and presented by John Gofman, M.D., Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California and Chairman of the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility (CNR). Dr. Gofman said the following in 1994:

The lowest dose of ionizing radiation is one nuclear track through one cell...Either a track goes through the nucleus and affects it, or it doesn't...I came up with nine studies of cancer being produced where we're dealing with up to maybe eight or 10 tracks per cell. Four involved breast cancer ... it's not a question of 'We don't know.' The DOE has never refuted this evidence. They just ignore it, because it's inconvenient. We can now say, there cannot be a safe dose of radiation. There is no safe threshold. If this truth is known, then any permitted radiation is a permit to commit murder.

and

Critics complain that nuclear energy is expensive because of (1) the time and resources it takes to build and decommission nuclear power plants and other nuclear facilities; (2) the hidden costs of mining the uranium ores, reprocessing and storing the waste, and purging the environment of radioactive pollution; and (3) costly health problems from exposure to low level radiation. The Department of Energy (DOE) has admitted that, "economic viability for a nuclear plant is difficult to demonstrate."

Thomas Cochran, a nuclear physicist and Director of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) says that nuclear power is "uneconomical, it has a safety problem, it has a horrendous proliferation problem on the global level, and it has a long-term waste problem that hasn't been solved."iii He notes that "nuclear power would be a great solution to greenhouse gases" that cause global warming, were it not for those four problems!

2. -- http://www.atomicarchive.com/Reports/Japan/Accidents.shtml This link is a list of "Major Nuclear Power Plant Incidents" from around the world, including the US.

Here's another one from last year in Michigan: http://blog.mlive.com/grpress/2008/02/palisades_nuclear_power_plant.html

3. -- http://www.redcross.org/images/pdfs/code/nuclear_power_plant.pdf and http://www.fema.gov/areyouready/nuclear_power_plants.shtm are links to the Red Cross and FEMA nuclear power plant incident preparedness documents.

4. -- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7553564094124690254

Michigan Democrats will have a hard time casting meaningful votes, considering Obama and Edwards aren't on the ballot.

Also, in the general election the vast right-wing conspiracy would rather run against Clinton with her 50% negative rating than against Obama, who seems to be successfully casting himself as the outsider/candidate of "change".

Exposure to violent movies, television shows and video games significantly increases the risk that the viewer or player will behave aggressively in both the long and short term, according to a new University of Michigan study published Tuesday in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

A link is seen among children who were in the upper quartile on violence viewing in middle childhood, 15 years later:

- 11 percent of males had been convicted of a crime, compared with 3 percent for other males.

- 42 percent of males had "pushed, grabbed or shoved their spouse" in the past year, compared with 22 percent of other males.

- 39 percent of females had "thrown something at their spouse" in the past year, compared with 17 percent of other females.

- 17 percent of females had "punched, beaten, or choked" another adult when angry in the past year, compared with 4 percent of other females.

Source: "The Impact of Electronic Media Violence: Scientific Theory and Research," by University of Michigan professor L. Rowell Huesmann.

It's a topic that has been debated extensively, but this is one of the first studies that shows the relation between viewing media violence and real criminal behavior, according to the study's author, L. Rowell Huesmann, a senior research scientist at the U-M Institute for Social Research.

"This is the first study that shows a relation between childhood exposure to violent TV, playing violent video games, seeing violent movies, and behaving violently enough to be incarcerated as a delinquent," said Huesmann, a professor of communication studies and psychology.

Huesmann and his team followed a group of children for three years as they moved through middle childhood. They found increasing rates of aggression for both boys and girls who watched more television violence, even when taking into account initial aggressive tendencies and other background factors. A 15-year follow-up of those children showed that those who habitually watched violent media grew up to be more aggressive young adults.

Huesmann also cited many independent studies and experiments with similar results, stating that the majority of one-shot survey studies have shown that children who watch more media violence on a daily basis behave more aggressively on a daily basis.

In another experiment cited, both children and adults who watched a violent movie showed significantly more aggression than the children and adults who watched a nonviolent movie when playing a physical game immediately after watching the films.

Video games were also addressed in the study, although experiments involving exposure to violent games are not as extensive or long-term.

"Because players of violent video games are not just observers but also 'active' participants in violent actions and are generally reinforced for using violence to gain desired goals, the effects on stimulating long-term increases in violent behavior should be even greater for video games than for TV, movies or Internet displays of violence," Huesmann wrote in the study.

Not to worry. It looks like Michigan has come to its senses. http://www.mlive.com/news/grpress/index.ssf?/base/business-0/1195614303284600.xml&coll=6

The project has been basically canceled, or scaled down.

Washtenaw county is home to CmdrTaco (Rob Malda), which has a plan to bring wireless to the whole county. It, too, seems to be having problems with financing. The plan was to have a free service with paid members getting faster access. The second link claims that to be profitable, 5% of the county needs to sign up.

But a good portion of the population (i.e. most of Ann Arbor) can get fairly cheap DSL through AT&T/Speakeasy (okay, maybe Speakeasy isn't so cheap), or most of the county (I think) can get cable through Comcast.

Students on the U of M campus (a sizable portion of the city's population) can get wireless from many locations. It's not uncommon to have people run open WiFi spots in neighborhoods around campus as well. People push these wireless services as enabling low-income households and rural areas to get broadband speeds. Low-income households are likely to not find the faster service worth buying, and rural areas still have substantial infrastructure costs (the houses are spread out more, and wireless access points have fairly pitiful range). I'm just not sure current wireless technology is really a better solution for the "last mile".

On the other hand, it seems to make some sense for dense downtown regions. People like to congregate there, and businesses might be willing to chip in (instead of many businesses administering their own wireless access points). People who live downtown might be willing to pay $10 or $20/mo to get faster speeds where they live and in all the businesses they frequent.

But county-wide, like this Washtenaw program? I'm just not sure the demand is there and/or the technology is sufficient.

The link was broken for me, but I found a different one that might have the same quotes:

http://www.mlive.com/news/grpress/index.ssf?/base/ news-35/117620854957570.xml&coll=6

pretty messed up...

I guess you don't know much about iran.

Iran is perhaps the most extreme fundamentalist muslim nation in the world.

They're leader preaches for hate of everything non-muslim, and for the destruction of the western society.

Perhaps you should read some of the latest speeches from Ahmadinijad and about iran:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0%2C%2C2-200705067 7%2C00.html&cid=0
http://www.mlive.com/newsflash/international/index .ssf?/base/international-36/117096206117070.xml&st orylist=international
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/35552.html
http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level_English.php?cat= Politics&loid=8.0.384504986&par=

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RXL2HKEOGw&mode=re lated&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wkF3Pkup5g&mode=re lated&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRkQMv-3R2k&mode=re lated&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6q2h1lKOF0&mode=re lated&search=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nMak6VnH4U&mode=re lated&search=

and many many more... just open your eyes and realize who you're talking about.

http://www.mlive.com/news/grpress/index.ssf?/base/ news-0/116108910317950.xml&coll=6 Dunno how accurate it is, but they're claiming it was a she, and she was born in Michigan.

"20/20 Communications is no stranger to wireless projects - it set up a wireless system in Saline, as well as Sylvan and Scio townships, in what Woolf called smaller versions of Wireless Washtenaw. The company, and not the county, is planning to pay the estimated $42 million cost to set up the service and provide the free access within county borders."

Oh, and ahem: "The company, and not the county, is planning to pay the estimated $42 million cost to set up the service and provide the free access within county borders."

I suspect that even if the county were heavily subsidizing the system, it'd be a net gain for people here.

First and foremost all those minimum wage jobs are scarcer than the producers apparently thought. All the easily-found jobs pay more than minimum wage. Spurlock signs on with a temp agency at $7/hr; his companion Jamieson dickers her wage down to minimum so as to not cheat the show's premise. (Spurlock quits when he finds deductions bring his take home down to a measly $4.26. This is important. We return to the puzzle of his deductions shortly.)

That way I can take a plane to see that guy I met on MySpace in the middle east.

So much for that Chaperone.

The defendant was already on probation. He was busted in 2000 for cracking passwords on arbornet.org. He was 17 at the time, and one of the terms of his probation was to stay off the internet.

http://www.mlive.com/news/aanews/index.ssf?/base/n ews-11/1103213452260230.xml

(limited personal information cookie-filling-out required)

Boo hoo. He voilated the terms of his cake-walk probabtion. Have fun in prison.

Anyone think the Infineon execs will take this as badly as the CEO of CyberNET (see this article)??

It somewhat still amazes me that these people think because they are supposedly good at business that they are going to be good at breaking the law. At what point does making an amazingly fat paycheck stop a person from wanting more? As incidences like these continue to happen, I get closer and closer to believing it never ends... and that's not even mentioning the big ones like Enron and MCI.

Here's a vote to salary caps in the corporate world!!!

Or like the borked pay-at-the-pump systems in Ann Arbor, MI that would accept the mag strip on your driver's license as a credit card. Of course the computer systems stored everyones driver's license number that used this technique to steal gas and they were pretty easy to track down. News Article Here

Bullshit. Is that the game we are playing? Prove it. Offer more information or hell, even a resource for your quote. Otherwise your allegation is outlandish and your reasoning false.

Okay, I'll save you the five seconds it would take to google for "Diebold deliver electoral votes", with an article from the ol' KZoo Gazette: Here ya go..

Come on. This is hardly new, nor is it a fact that is under dispute. The CEO of Diebold said he is committed to delivering Ohio's electoral votes to the president. Their machines have demonstrably failed in real elections. They have been caught violating regulations by installing uncertified software on deployed voting machines in California. Voters have been disenfranchised by them, a fact they do not dispute.

If you would like more information, my signature should provide one-click access to plenty of information.

The only reason you have to call "bullshit" is 1) ignorance and 2) a predisposition to believe that it couldn't be true, that a rich CEO of a powerful corporation couldn't possibly be trying to subvert democracy. Sadly the first is quite common, and the second unjustified by any analysis of history.

They are not Anti-Christian:

example

More like anti-censorship and anti-theocracy.

there's nothing inherently wrong with using proprietary communication protocols, especially when they're being used by a for-profit company.

That's where you're most completely wrong. Using a proprietary protocol is absolutely inherently bad. Especially if you're not in big business, but the millitary. I don't have time/space here to fully explain (but the links give clues), and others have written volumes.

practical reasons to not use this software do include the presence of DRM

Neither X_Bones nor Saeed al-Sahaf has given any explanation as to why DRM is impractical. In another thread it was pointed out that Saeed al-Sahaf's reaction to DRM was hardly more than an ingrained revulsion to a hated acroynym. (He immediately Godwinned)

I can think of one reason why DRM might be a negative (beyond the fact that it implies a proprietary protocol), and that is that it probably won't completely work. Users expecting protections that aren't really there may put themselves at risk. But maybe you can give some better reasons.

lot of money for something you yourself said could be done in an hour

In case you didn't pick up on this, Groove is bloatware, and only 15% of its features are needed by a normal user.

Here, I'll write one line that encompasses 60% of the features an average user needs from Groove.
25 6 * * * user rsync -e ssh user@ourproj.dyndns.org:/home/gruv/data ~user/gruv/data;chmod -R -w ~user/gruv

The other 40% functionality can be accomplished by 20-40 more lines. But of course then one more challenge is faced: convincing the network admin to allow ssh traffic. If he's smart this is already done, but if he's stupid it's impossible. So then one must turn to one of the many how-tos explaining how to pierce overly-restrictive firewalls. (It's quite funny that the main reason people are installing Groove is that it subverts their firewalls)

(even though the necessary tools are freely available on that platform, and better yet aren't tied to it)

First, I think I'd need an actual Microsoft Windows, which is non-free (and in fact 299 dollars). The .Net 7.x compiler system is also rather pricey, but I could squeak by with gcc prehaps.

But then for every other user, the necessary additional tools are sshd, crond, and python. I could convince an average Windows user to install maybe one of those, but not all of them.

I'm glad BSD is dying. Just think about all those lost developers, making/porting programs for a terminal OS. Soon they will be free to pursue more enriching activities, such as weaving and pinochle

-Adam

and don't forget that the War on Terror is actually a religous crusade of Christianity against Islam (sound familiar?). Consider this recent news story about a terrorist and his arsenal in Michigan.

"Federal agents arrest a Muslim man, a member of a radical sect, living in Michigan on gun and drug charges. When they search his home, they discover a bunker containing a cache of weapons and explosives worthy of an army: an anti-aircraft gun capable of firing 550 rounds per minute up to four miles away, machine guns, explosives, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and booby traps. Investigators also find pictures of President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with scope cross-hairs drawn over them."

oh wait a minute. He was not Muslim. He was a white militia member, so he does not get shipped off to Cuba without a lawyer!

-FL

It's playing at the Michigan Theater in downtown Ann Arbor. I think you can spring for the bus ride from Ypsi. Here's a link with a little more local info.

Every time I turn on the TV or the Radio, I hear the ads talking about thousands of jobs opening in the fast growing field of IT.

I looked in todays newspaper, there were 0 IT jobs!

And then, they've got crappy classes at our local community colleges, churning out "IT Professionals".

Ugh.

I'm glad I have a job *knocks on wood*

...is from the end of The Elements, Tom Lehrer's parody of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Modern Major General."

I used to have a recording of a Pharmacia chemist singing it with his barbershop quartet, but someone stole it and left 4 other CDs behind. Go figure.

But, when the franchise for cable was given to Comcast, they had made all these promises that they would be a lot better than mediaone, provide better customer service, better actual service, etc, etc. Instead, it has been a disaster in terms of service, they've reduced the features you get with your service, and increased the price.

Frankly it would be nice for the city to be able to dictate certain reasonable conditions. And this would be negotiated when their contract expires in about a year. Here is an article.

This story was in today's newspaper. Rural govenments here in Michigan have been getting fed up waiting for the usual suspects to provide high-speed service. I can see this working in such small towns. Hopefully they'll get it right.

You confuse and mix up differend things like sex, pornography and rape. People DO get hurt through rape and indeed there are extremely rare stories of rape to make porn but no-one gets hurt by looking at pornography or sex as such, not even (small) children when they have been brought up with an open mind to the human sexuality.

A prime example of wrong upbringing is this Irv Bos who so couragiously told about his (childhood) trauma after his dad's barn burned down. The source of his grief is not caused by his hiding of a porn book in the barn but by the superstition that false preaching had brought into his mind!

The sort of people that preach this dangerous belief are often (decendants of Dutch) immigrants of years gone by. These people came from remote rural areas and for them time has stopped when they left Europe. They try to cling to a world that no longer exists, not in the US and even less in The Netherlands. Thank God over here the topic of "Porn Is Dangerous" is largely a non-issue.

What remains is a dangerous liking by some to restrict access to information, based on obscure ideas that come forth out of the same sick minds as that caused mr. Bos his grief. In the old Jerusalem they were called Pharisees, in the US they are know by names like reverent Bakker to give just one example..... Good luck in the struggle

Following the library money:

Pro-filter group takes big money lead

Pro-filter factions win money battle
"Thanks to $35,000 gift from AFA, groups pushing for Internet filters have advantage"