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Uhhh....your Ameriphobia is showing. When all you do all day is think about how America is bad, then it's not surprising when you invent scenarios in which you are correct

U.S. Tries to Make It Easier to Wiretap the Internet

FBI drive for encryption backdoors is déjà vu for security experts

Yeah .. you're right .. its Ameriphobia when US companies are complying the gubmint

Oil is becoming a smaller part of our energy use. Perhaps it is already starting to run out. Nice little article on Chine running out of coal here: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/does-china-face-a-peak-coal-threat/

I actually found it very hard, until I found this: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/flash/magazine/20100616-watson-trivia-game/data.xml

You can already play against Watson here. However it seems to be a very limited question bank so Watson may have an unfair advantage there.

A computer will be much better at facts. So it's mostly a question of grammar. And the hardest problem is likely figuring out wordplay, which occasionally comes up in jeopardy.

If you think this is true, you can play against Watson online. About seven years ago, I saw some pretty impressive crossword solvers that were decent at wordplay and I've imagined they've gotten much better at developing novel links between words to exploit puns and the like. Never perfect but slowly getting better in odd ways -- like most of AI.

We've discussed this so many times it hurts. I've wanted to watch this for almost a year, I was hoping Jeopardy! wouldn't need to milk this hype for all it's worth to stay relevant.

I was reading just yesterday that the bee population was being affected by a combination of a virus and a fungus and that this is the main reason for the decline.

You mean like filing a lawsuit because the words "under God" exist in the Pledge of Allegiance?
http://atheism.about.com/b/2007/11/08/new-hampshire-lawsuit-filed-against-pledge-of-allegiance.htm

How about lawsuits against the Bush adminstration and the Patriot Act?
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/29/terror/main614638.shtml

How about lawsuits filed against Bush's "No Child Left Behind" legislation?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/20/education/20cnd-child.html?hp&ex=1114056000&en=fcbac357dd9bb745&ei=5094&partner=homepage

These lawsuits are no more or less credible than the one suggesting (rightfully) that the Federal govt has no authority to force any private citizen to purchase any good or service from the private sector.

The fact is that there's no shortage of "flaming crazies" on either side of the isle. And as the previous poster suggested, that's a good thing in keeping the flaming crazies who are actually in power, in check.

Boston Globe

Kansas Matters (w/ large AP story)

Fox News (appears to be the same as first, from the AP)

Huffinton Post

NYTimes (Economix blog)

allmilitary.com (Miami Herald article)

Another good one

A great one, a 1993 article from Reason

Orrin Hatch

This is from the first couple pages of the first two Google searches I tried. Not fucking hard to find.

Do you want to do carbon credits next? That one should be even easier.

It is worth noting that while this judge says that the individual mandate is unconstitutional, two other Federal judges (one in Michigan, and one from a different case in Virginia) have said that it is just fine. This will doubtless go all the way up to the Supreme Court.

It is worth noting that while this judge says that the individual mandate is unconstitutional, two other Federal judges (one in Michigan, and one from a different case in Virginia) have said that it is just fine. This will doubtless go all the way up to the Supreme Court.

And yet even the Obama administration has insisted that this is not a tax.

"For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase,” the president said last September, in a spirited exchange with George Stephanopoulos on the ABC News program “This Week.”

When Mr. Stephanopoulos said the penalty appeared to fit the dictionary definition of a tax, Mr. Obama replied, “I absolutely reject that notion.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/18/health/policy/18health.html

To put it another way, if what you say is true, why didn't the administration simply levy a tax?

(Not trying to be snotty here; I genuinely don't know the answer to this.)

- Alaska Jack

We already have the largest aircraft carrier fleet on the entire planet, our most likely enemies are groups like NK and Iran that would be lucky to come at us with kamikaze speedboats, and THIS is what we add even more debt for?

BTW - When we did red vs blue naval wargames a few years back, those kamikaze speedboats kicked the blue team's ass.

It was so embarassing that...

When the Red Team sank much of the Blue navy despite the Blue navy's firing of guns and missiles, it illustrated a cheap way to beat a very expensive fleet. After the Blue force was sunk, the game was ordered to begin again, with the Blue Team eventually declared the victor.

The last few meaningful encounters the USA has had with low-tech asymmetric warfare have gone relatively poorly for them.

Maybe that was your conclusion after reading that book but it was not the same conclusion that others had..

http://climateprogress.org/2009/10/14/superfreakonomics-errors-nathan-myhrvold-intellectual-ventures-bill-gates-warren-buffet/
http://www.grist.org/article/2009-10-13-new-book-superfreakonomics-pushes-global-cooling-myths/
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/global-warming-in-superfreakonomics-the-anatomy-of-a-smear/
http://reason.com/archives/2009/11/03/superfreaking-out-over-climate

To be honest I would not either. It was meant more as a talking point and certainly not to incite anyone into leaking. By the way this article and especially the graph in it explains HFT well.

The problem is that while he does indeed have money, he also has X-ray specs which allow for him to have an unfair advantage over the other players.

To emphasize this point, here are quotes from an article last year on this same story:

Loopholes in market rules give high-speed investors an early glance at how others are trading... some of those orders were most likely routed to a collection of high-frequency traders for just 30 milliseconds -- 0.03 seconds -- in what are known as flash orders. While markets are supposed to ensure transparency by showing orders to everyone simultaneously, a loophole in regulations allows marketplaces like Nasdaq to show traders some orders ahead of everyone else in exchange for a fee.

Sounds like plain old insider trading to me. Maybe worse, since it's the market-maker who's taking kickbacks.

Corporations allow for economies of scale that pure private ownership cannot.

wtf? He is talking about limited liability, not economies of scale. If there were no corporations, then investors in market activity become legally liable for the activities of the company. He's talking about removing corporations, but not removing companies. Corporation laws have a nasty side-effect that creates a moral race to the bottom, and we have seen some repugnant acts from companies yet nobody is held responsible. Wouldn't it be nice if powerful people would be more responsible for the shit they make? Instead we reward the psychopath, and many CEOs are psychopaths.

The state introduced this problem, and they should protect against it, if the corporation is such a wonderful thing. Instead we see corporations being used as a power grab for plutocrats.

Here is some more complete information on this subject if anyone is curious. Interestingly
it looks like Republicans are largely responsible for this.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/47-Percent-Dont-Pay-Taxes-No-Big-Deal-3230

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/business/economy/14leonhardt.html

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2010-04-16-editorial16_ST_N.htm

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Nearly-half-of-US-households-apf-1105567323.html?x=0&.v=1

the New York Times has an app, when they could do all this in the browser?

Funny you picked the NYT. I'm a regular reader. They made an app because they're trying to be "cool." Compare the app to the NYT website. The website is many times more functional. Blogs have links that work, and comments. The app shows exactly one blog entry. The links are text-only (no URL) and don't work. The app crashes a lot too, though hopefully they'll fix that. Overall, the NYT experience is far better in the browser. I would guess they're going to (re)-erect a paywall and see if it works within the Apple ecosystem; it definitely didn't work outside it (nor do I actually expect it to work inside), but I can't blame them for trying. But if you're looking for some kind of functionality the website can't or doesn't offer... don't think you're going to find it.

Why, in fact, are there any apps at all?

Well, I don't think you're going to implement a fully live astronomy application on a website - no one has managed it yet, anyway - but the iPxd environment does it well. It's a dedicated computer. This is great for complex games (none in porn I ever heard of), for compute heavy tasks that you don't want server-side and are really cumbersome client-side within a supposedly secure environment (again, nothing like that in porn.) Apps also run away from a connected situation, whereas you have to be connected for anything beyond the basics if the functionality is being provided by the website. That's a good reason for an NYT app, but not for porn - no need to be connected there at all, just save the content you want and there you have it. Active tools like ping and trace are better as apps (the network may be in trouble.) Terminals are great apps and lousy websites. Anything where you don't want to share your data with unknowns; spreadsheets, word processing -- that all works pretty well on the iPad, not so much on the iPod. Music apps, like iSequence or Digidrummer... pretty useless over a laggy network connection. As apps, though, they're awesome. GPS apps... that's hardware specific, you need an app for that... Seismograph and Acceleration apps, again, website won't cut it... meditation and the like where loops and generated sound with images give you something to zone out by, that's a pure waste of network bandwidth but a great job for an app... Chinese character tutor is a great app, works on the web, but when you're not connected, an app is better. A nice banner app is great for when you're in a car and you want to tell someone their lights are/are-not on, or pass your cell number...

Emulators would be *really* great apps... if they were allowed. Sigh. My single greatest regret about the Apple ecosystem. Emulated classic computers, HP calculators, genetic code generators... these all call to me.

See, porn is easily available media, at least at the moment. There's nothing about it that requires an app. And Apple does, in fact, have every right to say they're not going to get involved. I think it's cowardly, wrong-headed (especially in light of all the extreme violence they're perfectly happy to sell) and socially retarded (in a nutshell, sex is good, even in casual form) but still, they have the right. If it really trips your trigger, just jailbreak the thing and be done with it. Otherwise, you're dealing with Apple, not some porn firm. Get used to it. Jobs is stubborn, and the odds of him admitting he made a socially poor choice... they seem low to me. Very. Especially since it seems to be a financially high quality choice.

Portugal and Spain are already in talks to end roaming charges between the two countries: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/technology/08roam.html

> loss of a producing citizen/taxpayer as well as diversion of law-enforcement funds
> pay his room and board for years, in a prison already overcrowded

Follow the money. The prison industry has a powerful lobby pushing for mandatory prison sentences and longer sentences for more and more offenses. A Pennsylvania Judge was caught sending kids to jail over the smallest infractions and getting kickbacks from the jail owner. (citation: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html )

The points you cited above are reasons they put MORE people in jail, not arguments against it.
The money goes like this: all of us -> taxes -> prisons -> lobbyists -> congress -> laws that put more people in prison. Repeat.
The USA has more incarcerated people per capita than any other country in the world, by a large margin. (google it)

Yet by many measures we have less crime than most other countries. This is a testament to how broken and corrupt our Congress has become.

standard disclaimer, child porn is bad, etc etc

> I believe that the laws prohibiting possession of child pornography have been shown to reduce the production of same

Citation needed.

I find it hard to believe that throwing someone in jail and ruining their life for having a drawing of Bart Simpson having sex has any beneficial effect. (Here's my citation: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/08/bart-simpson-child-pornography-and-free-speech/ )

What cause is that? Releasing a stream of illegally-released classified information from a democratic nation?

Too bad people can't see this for what it is: a foreign national releasing illegally-obtained classified information in a coordinated effort to deliberately try to influence public opinion and US policy.

Assange has already said he considers himself a "media insurgent", and that if forced to choose between "journalist" and activist/advocate, he would choose the latter. His response to a Washington Post reporter's query he apparently felt wasn't deserving of his attention was, "I'm too busy ending two wars."

He's an egomaniac, and the fact that Wikileaks is "going to publish classified information anyway" is used as a justification by mainstream media outlets to go ahead with the publication, under the guise of the public's "right to know". Well, since Wikileaks would likely publish any and all classified information it could get its hands on, my interpretation of the media's justification is that they feel they, not the government that works on behalf of the people, are the arbiters of what does and doesn't constitute properly-classified national security information.

That's exactly where this is leading, and what it results in is an environment where closed and repressive societies have an advantage in the information realm over open and democratic societies. Steven Aftergood, a guy who is a veteran crusader against excessive government secrecy and director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, said, "WikiLeaks must be counted among the enemies of open society because it does not respect the rule of law nor does it honor the rights of individuals." Indeed.

THIS is restricting press freedoms.

To those who believe wikileaks was in the wrong, here's an example of what we're trying to cover up: we're pressuring the Germans not to arrest CIA agents who kidnapped, on *German* soil, a *German national* who was *mistakenly* believed to be a terrorist. We *tortured him*, then let him rot in a hole in the ground for years before letting him out with no acknowledgement of guilt or even responsibility. This shit needs to come to light. Assange may have his own axes to grind, but what he's doing is right and protected under US law (Pentagon Papers case, duh). The Times article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/world/europe/09wikileaks-elmasri.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Your comment made an article that was on the front page of the New York Times: Hackers Attack Those Seen as WikiLeaks Enemies

BTW, New York times is quoting you (search for lunch counter) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/world/09wiki.html?hp Either of JOHN F. BURNS or RAVI SOMAIYA reads ?. :-)

Is it normal in Europe to have sex without someone's consent? Because that's what he's accused of doing. Twice. With two different women.

The New York Times

According to accounts the women gave to the police and friends, they each had consensual sexual encounters with Mr. Assange that became nonconsensual. One woman said that Mr. Assange had ignored her appeals to stop after a condom broke. The other woman said that she and Mr. Assange had begun a sexual encounter using a condom, but that Mr. Assange did not comply with her appeals to stop when it was no longer in use. Mr. Assange has questioned the veracity of those accounts.

(highlighted for your enjoyment)

Whether you believe their claims personally or not is entirely irrelevant. The point of criminal investigations is to see whether there's sufficient evidence to take a case to trial. The point of a trial is to establish facts and render a verdict on the findings. If you believe the entire Swiss criminal justice system is that horribly corrupt, I'd love to see evidence that you believed that before this one particular person found himself under investigation by them. "They accused my hero, therefore they are corrupt!" is simply not a valid argument.

As for INTERPOL's actions, they simply responded to a request from a participatory member state. INTERPOL merely requires that such requests not be for political or religious crimes. Otherwise, they simply process the request and move along.

I'm not surprised at all. While this is an extreme example, it remains standard practice.

The system, and by that I mean, "ALL HUMAN CULTURE" is designed to allow psychopaths to ply their trade. We are pre-programmed to let this kind of shit go, to avoid it, to assume that the aggressor really IS the victim. We think, "Nobody would behave so utterly contrary to the unspoken social laws which govern the tribe, therefore we must be perceiving this incorrectly." The bigger the lie, the easier the sell. It's true.

The truth is also, and yes, it does seem surprising but it's just the way of a psychopathic society, (and Yes, America the Competitive, IS a society based on the rules of the psychopaths who we allowed into politics and business). -That an innocent man can wind up in prison for not lifting his drawers for the airport security while a true monster can roam free for years before finally being locked up.

And this Borker freak is basically a failed model. His psychopathy was too extreme. There are MANY successful ones, who torment their victims and climb the success ladder without even a spark firing in their Frontal Lobes, all because they have better learned how to manipulate. Even Borker had learned how to extract the maximum amount of psychological pain from his victims while evading the traps of the law.

He says the case was dismissed but contends that since then, he's been careful not to make physical threats against customers -- Ms. Rodriguez included.

I mention that sending that photo of her apartment building sounds kind of threatening.

Nothing but an image he copied off of the Web, from Google Earth, Mr. Borker says. He says he sent it to her only to underscore that when it came time to hire a process server to commence litigation, he'd find her. The "hand in fire" threat? Metaphorical, he says. Then again, he acknowledges with a sly grin, if Ms. Rodriguez thought that Tony Russo seemed a little scary, that was fine.

But in his telling of events, he is her victim, not the other way around.

The psychopath always blames the victim of the very crimes committed against them. In the case of Bush and Cheney, they blamed the Iraqis and Afghans while merrily singing "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb. . , Bomb, Bomb Iran." The lies are huge and ridiculous and the crimes are sickening, and because the rest of us are programmed to be human, we go along with it.

And that, folks, is why the world is as it is today. Because we haven't learned how to identify and put down our human waste.

There are tests, you know. Both brain scans and personality tests which are very accurate. We could have prevented the collapse of the economy and of several wars with ease, but we didn't. Consider that. There are people who are living on the street, starving in America and all over the world because we simply didn't know about the Psychopath. The false humans walking around among us who feed on the creation of misery.

Read that original article again, and recognize that this kind of behavior is happening everywhere, that you have encountered it many times in your life, and that the psychopath wishes to create a culture which is friendly toward psychopaths. That's why the banks are insane, why the government is insane, and why we have been killed by BP. (The Gulf is still leaking, folks.)

-FL

This isn't about PCs disappearing. This is about the bulk of personal "computing" moving onto devices other than PCs*. And even if it's overstated in the article, it's essentially sound as a trend. For people who aren't authoring (and even some who are), PCs are more or less overkill.

None of this means PCs won't be produced or used. They'll just likely become a minority in a larger sea of devices. Or, as his Steveness says, PCs will be like trucks. That's the end of the PC-centric Era, and it's not a particularly controversial idea.

* Where PC means the desktop/workstation form factor that terms has come to signify. Yes, I know, technically it means "personal computer" and you could grandfather anything with a CPU into that; doesn't change the fact the term PC has come to mean something more specific and it's this usage the article is running with.

Congressmen/women have to go thru the scan. Everyone has to go thru the scan.

Not all of them do. Those high enough up the ranks can bypass security when flying commercial.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/no-security-pat-downs-for-boehner/

When exactly did either woman say "Stop"? Where did you get your information?

Sweden Issues Warrant for WikiLeaks Founder By JOHN F. BURNS and RAVI SOMAIYA Published: November 18, 2010 "According to accounts the women gave to the police and friends, they each had consensual sexual encounters with Mr. Assange that became nonconsensual. One woman said that Mr. Assange had ignored her appeals to stop after a condom broke. The other woman said that she and Mr. Assange had begun a sexual encounter using a condom, but that Mr. Assange did not comply with her appeals to stop when it was no longer in use."

I ask because your interpretation doesn't square with the factual record.

And the problem is that your "factual record" probably is sourced from Assange's lawyers, who are going around and bullshitting about this case.

For example, Assange wasn't wearing a condom when he fucked Jessica, so how could Jessica withdraw consent because of a broken condom?

That's not how the allegations go. It's more like this: (a) she sleeps with him first on the night, he uses a condom; (b) he is going to sleep with her again on the morning, doesn't put a condom on, she tells him not to do it without a condom, and he does it anyway.

Everyone is interpreting the claims of the prosecution that consent had been withdrawn to mean that the women actually said "No", "Stop", or "Don't". That is the interpretation the prosecution would like us to have. Indeed, that would be rape. But I've never seen the prosecution actually claimed the women ever said "No." The claims of the prosecution have been very vague, and its sounding more and more like BS.

Well, that's how prosecution claims tend to sound when your only source about them is what the defense says.

In any case it's clear that the women were initially pleased with Assange and only reported the events to the Police immediately after they discovered that Assange had been sleeping around with other women. That doesn't sound like rape, that sounds like promiscuity.

As I've said elsewhere, real-life rape victims often act very strangely, in a way that's superficially inconsistent with having been raped.

That certainly isn't in the referenced article - where do you find that she appealed to him to stop and he did not?

Sweden Issues Warrant for WikiLeaks Founder
By JOHN F. BURNS and RAVI SOMAIYA
Published: November 18, 2010

The money quote:

According to accounts the women gave to the police and friends, they each had consensual sexual encounters with Mr. Assange that became nonconsensual. One woman said that Mr. Assange had ignored her appeals to stop after a condom broke. The other woman said that she and Mr. Assange had begun a sexual encounter using a condom, but that Mr. Assange did not comply with her appeals to stop when it was no longer in use.

The big problem that I see is that there's some media right now whose "reporting" is basically repeating Assange's lawyers' statements at length.

I play the piano. Over the years, I have collected 15,000 piano scores in PDF form, covering about 400 years of classical keyboard works. It’s like lint in the drier of the Internet. Much of it is not available anywhere for purchase, or even findable in libraries for circulation. Max Reger’s arrangement for two pianos of Wagner’s overture, for instance? Well, the Max Reger Institute in Karlsruhe, Germany has a copy

At the Van Cliburn piano competition, a couple years ago, I gave tiny thumb drives to some of the winners and said, “Enjoy.” Each thumb drive was smaller than my pinky but contained was the whole 15 GB trove. It blew their minds. Basically, every significant piano piece is in the pile.

Yes, but prior to 9/11, how plausible would it have struck you that a group of Islamic Extremists could hijack four commercial airliners and perform kamikaze attacks with them?

It was a known and planned for scenario.

ny times

In 1994, two jetliners were hijacked by people who wanted to crash
them into buildings, one of them by an Islamic militant group. And
the 2000 edition of the FAA's annual report on Criminal Acts Against
Aviation, published this year, said that although Osama Bin Laden 'is
not known to have attacked civil aviation, he has both the motivation
and the wherewithal to do so,' adding, 'Bin Laden's anti-Western and
anti-American attitudes make him and his followers a significant
threat to civil aviation, particularly to U.S. civil aviation'.

He is accused of rape.

Marianne Ny, director of the Stockholm prosecutor’s office, said in a statement that she had moved to have Mr. Assange extradited to Sweden on suspicion of “rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion.” The accusations were first made against Mr. Assange, 39, an Australian who created the whistle-blowers’ site, after he traveled to Sweden in mid-August and had brief relationships with two Swedish women that he has described as consensual.

...

According to accounts the women gave to the police and friends, they each had consensual sexual encounters with Mr. Assange that became nonconsensual. One woman said that Mr. Assange had ignored her appeals to stop after a condom broke. The other woman said that she and Mr. Assange had begun a sexual encounter using a condom, but that Mr. Assange did not comply with her appeals to stop when it was no longer in use. Mr. Assange has questioned the veracity of those accounts.

Source: New York Times

The New York Times

According to accounts the women gave to the police and friends, they each had consensual sexual encounters with Mr. Assange that became nonconsensual. One woman said that Mr. Assange had ignored her appeals to stop after a condom broke. The other woman said that she and Mr. Assange had begun a sexual encounter using a condom, but that Mr. Assange did not comply with her appeals to stop when it was no longer in use. Mr. Assange has questioned the veracity of those accounts.

The New York Times article about the case says:

According to accounts the women gave to the police and friends, they each had consensual sexual encounters with Mr. Assange that became nonconsensual. One woman said that Mr. Assange had ignored her appeals to stop after a condom broke. The other woman said that she and Mr. Assange had begun a sexual encounter using a condom, but that Mr. Assange did not comply with her appeals to stop when it was no longer in use. Mr. Assange has questioned the veracity of those accounts.

We were attacked from Afghanistan

Wait, what? Of the 19 hijackers, 15 were Saudi, 2 from UAE, 1 was Egyptian, and one was Lebanese. The funding came from Saudi Arabia, and continues to ome from Saudi Arabia from this day, as current US diplomatic cables explicitly lay out (the money quote: "Saudi donors remain the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda.") Afghanistan (and Iraq) had absolutely nothing to do with anything about 9/11 other than being places we could bomb the hell out of without compromising our petroleum supplies.

And before you start spouting any of that "but Al Qaeda was in Afghanistan" silliness, they're in a score of other countries too, most notably Saudi Arabia, where the attacks actually came from.

This kind of makes me wish I hadn't bought the wifi nook already, it is much better for the cost.

Take heart, your regular Nook gets 10 days sans Wifi while the color gets 8 hours . So I wouldn't go kicking yourself if you have ever gone extended periods without recharging.

And I should have specified color E-ink as it will give comparable periods of use with black and white. It might not be as great with colors like the color Nook's VividView technology but it will last many days. And it will probably be twice as expensive, that's why I'm waiting and watching. For reading, I'm guessing it's going to best Apple's LCD based iPad. We shall see though.

Just because the machines were in Vatican City doesn't mean the machines belonged to the Vatican.

Maybe there's Internet access in Vatican City that outsiders can use.

Not sure if the WiFi in the Vatican Library also provides Internet access: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/vatican-library-to-reopen-next-week/

Copyright infringement isn't theft, otherwise prosecutors could use "theft laws" on infringers just to avoid dealing with the "fair use" stuff.

Text messages are $0.50 each to send or receive in Canada. So very awesome having a three-way confusopoly controlling 95% of the market.

It's even worse when you learn that texts are max 160 bytes because that's the amount of space left in the packets your phone is sending to the tower anyway (see this article). They cost absolutely nothing in terms of bandwidth. 100% profit.

Then see if the training budget will cover this: :-)
    http://www.humorproject.com/conference/

See also:
    http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/health/30vitamin.html?permid=196#comment196

By the way, as an alternative to working:
    http://idlenest.freehostia.com/mirror/www.whywork.org/index.html

And, consider:

The US currently spends as much on schooling, social security, and welfare to give every citizen about US$800 a month.
    http://www.basicincome.org/bien/aboutbasicincome.html

And it spends enough on Medicare/Medicaid to cover everyone with good health care if it was managed better.
    http://www.singlepayeraction.org/

And the US spends more than twice as much on "defense" in a year than it would take to change the entire country over to using renewable energy and no longer need much of a defense department.
    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan

It's all about the paradigm and a global mindshift beyond narrow vested interests.
    http://www.global-mindshift.org/memes/wombat.swf

Something you are missing is that another reason for not disclosing another country's difficulties or embarrassments is it helps nobody. Whereas if China knows that the US knows something that they would rather not have public then China "owes" the US. The exchange of such IOUs make for diplomacy.

I'm not missing it. I didn't claim there was no need for secrets, I'm saying that people within the power structures upon which secrecy is predicated inevitably abuse this secrecy in order to empower themselves and their cliques.

The problem, in short, is not binary. It's 'all secrets or none'. Even wikileaks recognises this in their willingness to expunge certain details from the leaked cables.

Regarding fears about negative impacts of the leaks themselves to US diplomacy, I'll let Secretary of Defense Robert Gates make the case:

“Now, I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on. I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought. The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets. Many governments — some governments — deal with us because they fear us, some because they respect us, most because they need us. We are still essentially, as has been said before, the indispensable nation.

“So other nations will continue to deal with us. They will continue to work with us. We will continue to share sensitive information with one another.

“Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign policy? I think fairly modest.’’

Since nytimes requires a referer in order to show the printpage, it's not fixable by slashdot.

If you feel like fiddling around with your HTTP headers, here is the link.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/world/asia/05wikileaks-china.html?_r=4&hp=&pagewanted=print

I think it's pretty commonly known that paypal sucks.

It is also pretty well known that PayPal is wildly successful:

PayPal accounted for 37 percent of eBay's overall revenue in the third quarter compared with 23 percent just five years ago. EBay's payments unit, which consists mostly of PayPal, had $838 million in revenue in the three months ended Sept. 30, up 22 percent from the period a year earlier. The auction and retail operations, which eBay calls marketplace, took in $1.41 billion in revenue during the same period, an increase of just 3 percent.
If the current growth patterns continue, PayPal will surpass its parent in revenue around 2014 -- and even sooner if the unit is able to insinuate itself into mobile payments as successfully as it has with Web transactions. For PayPal, the Future Is Mobile

PayPal Black Friday Payments Up 27%

Actually, it says not to post links to websites that disseminate them. Like, for example, this one: http://www.nytimes.com/

• Block the particular offender, because it would leave all others like it intact
• Use sentiment analysis, because it would discriminate any controversial subject
• Begin to expose user reviews for merchants alongside their search results without affecting the search results.

Instead they developed an "algorithmic solution which detects the merchant from the Times article along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience."

Before reading TFA my thought was that they could merely put zero weight on links in reviews claiming negative user experience. But Google's blog post says that was already being done: The review sites' links are rel=nofollow. "Ironically, some of the most reputable links to Decor My Eyes came from mainstream news websites such as the New York Times and Bloomberg."

NY Times article states on page 3 that "Google is intimately familiar with the rage inspired by DecorMyEyes. If you type the company’s name in a Google Shopping search, you’ll see a collection of more than 300 reviews, many of them arias sung in the key of livid." My guess is that they have finally stopped ignoring this information for their search results.

The tricky part is to keep the algorithm not suspect to manipulation by merchants who would write good reviews for themselves and bad for the competition.

Also see ...

Bubbles of Energy Are Found [in our] Galaxy [Center]
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/science/space/10galaxy.html?scp=5&sq=galaxy&st=cse

Looks like Science/Scienctists might discover White Holes as early as next year if this keeps up. :-)

Here's some background.

Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders have joined the Pentagon in criticizing the organization for risking people's lives by publishing war logs identifying Afghans working for the Americans or acting as informers.

Some more

But Ahmad Nader Nadery, the Commissioner of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) told Channel 4 News the damage is already done, because thousands of Afghans have already downloaded the files.

'Thousands of Afghans have downloaded the entire package'

He said: "Release of names of the tribal elders and community members who met US, ISAF or NATO forces is an absolute irresponsibility.

"There is no protection mechanisms for these people, be it informant or other community members who as part of the role as an elder meets with the officials or international forces, while wikileaks served greatly in brining to public some of the unspoken files, it certainly also acted against the principle of "Do No Harm" that all civil society and watchdogs have to adhere to.

I don't have the link handy, but AIHRC and other local organizations also stated that the assassination rate went dramatically up after the release.

Well this other kind of life is completely different. It's so different that we know it cannot possibly be related to all of the other Earth life that we've known about thus far, as there is nothing in common. That means abiogenesis (the spontaneous generation of life from precursor non-living materials) happened at least TWICE on just this one planet.

Actually it is related (the original bacteria had completely phosophorous in its DNA), the bacteria is not completely different (there are at least 5 elements in the DNA that are the same), and its quite possible that there the DNA is still comprised of some/mostly phosphorous. All that happened was that she took phosphorous based bacteria that was living in an environment already high in arsenic, and removed other phosphorous and added lots more arsenic, and it seems that the bacteria survives, and most probably some of the phosphorous has been switched in the DNA. Perhaps this article will remove some confusion: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/science/03arsenic.html?pagewanted=2&hp

Still that said, that there probably is some arsenic substituting for phosphorous in the DNA at all is quite a revelation.

According to this NYT article this is a normal earthly bacterium that, when placed in an environment full of arsenic, started swapping arsenic for phosphorus. It's not a totally new form of life unrelated to what we know.