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I got hit with a login when I tried to use the link in the summary but was able to surf to this link. You'll get a splash advertisement for the Economist or something but I'd wager most people would tolerate that more than logging in.

All you had to do was read a single news story for the point. It's the truth versus the rah-rah bullshit patriotism that passes for news these days.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26warlogs.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

The archive is a vivid reminder that the Afghan conflict until recently was a second-class war, with money, troops and attention lavished on Iraq while soldiers and Marines lamented that the Afghans they were training were not being paid.

The reports — usually spare summaries but sometimes detailed narratives — shed light on some elements of the war that have been largely hidden from the public eye:

  The Taliban have used portable heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, a fact that has not been publicly disclosed by the military. This type of weapon helped the Afghan mujahedeen defeat the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

  Secret commando units like Task Force 373 — a classified group of Army and Navy special operatives — work from a “capture/kill list” of about 70 top insurgent commanders. These missions, which have been stepped up under the Obama administration, claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment.

  The military employs more and more drone aircraft to survey the battlefield and strike targets in Afghanistan, although their performance is less impressive than officially portrayed. Some crash or collide, forcing American troops to undertake risky retrieval missions before the Taliban can claim the drone’s weaponry.

  The Central Intelligence Agency has expanded paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan. The units launch ambushes, order airstrikes and conduct night raids. From 2001 to 2008, the C.I.A. paid the budget of Afghanistan’s spy agency and ran it as a virtual subsidiary.

So, the Taliban are apparently using advanced weaponry against ineffective drones, and the CIA has once again formed a secret police force that's terrorizing Afghani citizens for the crime of defending themselves against a foreign invader.

There is no oil in Bumfuckistan. Only rocks, more rocks, even more rocks, religious nutters and poppy plants.

And a metric shitload of Lithium, Copper and other precious metals.

There is no oil in Bumfuckistan. Only rocks, more rocks, even more rocks, religious nutters and poppy plants.

Erm, does Kazakhstan count as Bumfuckistan? Because if it does, they apparently have "a single field [that] stands ready to produce two-thirds as much oil each day as the entire gulf does". Also according to geologists Afghanistan has "nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits".

There is no oil in Bumfuckistan. Only rocks, more rocks, even more rocks, religious nutters and poppy plants.

Erm, does Kazakhstan count as Bumfuckistan? Because if it does, they apparently have "a single field [that] stands ready to produce two-thirds as much oil each day as the entire gulf does". Also according to geologists Afghanistan has "nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits".

You may prefer the rocks in nearby Afghanistan.

Everyone would want the highest power possible. The law would have the opposite affect of its promoters.

You're probably right. Don't have the source available at the moment, but I remember reading that when fast food joints in some location was forced to put calories on their menu, the average number of calories per meal purchased went UP.

Ah - Stanford study of Starbucks: 6% Fewer calories

However - Yale and NYU study of McD's, Wendys, BK, and KFC:
"they found that people had, in fact, ordered slightly more calories than the typical customer had before the labeling law went into effect, in July 2008."

If I buy a computer that comes with Windows preinstalled, I am paying for it somewhere along the line. It's probably not itemized, but it's built into the cost. On the other hand, offering a Linux option costs nothing but ostensibly helps sales.

Analogy: Go to any restaurant and order a cheeseburger. What you get is not two halves of a bun with beef and cheese between them, but that plus lettuce, tomato, onion, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, and Jah only knows what else, and only in the ritziest establishments do the menus tell you what specifically. Now, suppose you have an allergy to one of those extra ingredients (eggs in mayo are a common allergen), and request your sandwich without it. The waiter tells you "Nobody likes a cheeseburger without mayo!" and per restaurant policy, the kitchen refuses to prepare it in a way that you can eat it. Granted, the restaurant cannot logically stock every ingredient a customer might want to eat, and has every right to refuse to prepare a recipe that requires less effort and less cost to prepare, and is less harmful to the customer -- but equally, I've every right to eat somewhere else. (The state of the market right now, it's more a political gesture than anything else, but at least before Dell had something to distinguish itself from its competitors besides its policy of knowingly selling total shit.)

77% of iPhone users are fan boys/girls
80% of Android users value freedom of choice

and whenever the geek holds the short end of the stick he makes up the stats that will explain it all away.

_____

In the news this week:

MEASURED by profits, Microsoft trounces Apple and Google. In the most recent three months, Microsoft earned $4.52 billion, versus Apple's $3.25 billion and Google's $1.8 billion. But, dear investors, where is the love for this beaten-down company?
Lost from view is what arguably is Microsoft's very best story -- its transformation into a powerhouse supplier of the specialized software that meets the complex needs of large corporations, what the trade calls selling to "the enterprise."
Microsoft's enterprise software business alone is approaching the size of Oracle. But despite that astounding growth, Microsoft must accept that, fair or not, victories on the enterprise side draw about as much attention as being the No. 1 wholesale seller of plumbing supplies. Even With All Its Profits, Microsoft Has a Popularity Problem [July 24]

The Eastern district of Texas was, and perhaps still is friendly to patent trolls

I'd like a citation for that. I send mail via FedEx all the time for work. I don't send personal correspondence that way, but that's because the USPS is cheaper for a simple letter than FedEx is (even with the recent stamp hikes) and I'm not usually worried about delivery time. If FedEx became the cheaper way to mail photo's of my daughter to her grandparents, then I'd probaby take that route. Are you saying that it is illegal for FedEx to deliver mail that isn't next day delivery somehow?

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/14/business/private-couriers-and-postal-service-slug-it-out.html

Because it's pretty hard to embed lead in code?

I remember reading a Chapter from Freakonomics describing how temporarily imposing an economic contract (X happens, Y dollars change hands) on what had formerly been a social contract (X happens, you should feel proud/guilty) ended up permanently voiding the social contract.

While it's probably the case that MS is some combination of "Afraid bounties would bankrupt them" and "Using obscurity in place of security" and "Everything you don't want to be", I do wonder if they might accidentally be doing the Right Thing. Probably not, of course, but what if Mozilla and Google's Big Bounties actually ended up damaging the motivation of those who search for and report vulnerabilities because it's the right thing to do?

Anyone know how many other companies have substantial vulnerability bounties? Moreover, anyone know if there's any research on possible links between bounty offers and useful reports?

Too bad this story can't be combined with this story: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/health/20docs.html?_r=2

That would save us all a lot of trouble.

"It's a pretty well known fact that in most western countries there are schemes in place to allow intelligence agencies direct internal access to cell phone provider networks."

All the more reason to port Zimmerman's Zfone to the iPhone and Android and any other smart phone you can think of.

This is what I'm talking about. For some reason, black men are outliers in: not receiving an education, not getting a job, and landing in jail far more than any other racial group.

http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/rd_reducingracialdisparity.pdf

These dynamics are partially true in regard to drug offenses, where African Americans are particularly overrepresented in drug arrests. Evidence of racially disparate treatment of drug arrestees is apparent by viewing the rate of reported drug use among African Americans. According to self-report data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, African Americans constituted 14% of drug users in 2006, only slightly higher than their percentage in the general population. Yet African Americans represented 35% of those arrested in 2006 for drug offenses, 53% of drug convictions, and 45% of drug offenders in prison in 2004 (the most recent year for which prison data are available)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/national/20blackmen.html

The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990's. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20's were jobless — that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20's were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.

Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990's and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20's who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30's, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.

In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school.

Those three things listed apply just as equally to Democrats:

a. Democrats really believe it and always will, no matter how much you point out facts that prove them wrong.
b. When said facts disagree with their worldview, they will accuse the source of being right wing and biased ("neo-con") and therefore by definition incorrect
c. Somewhere, they are actually doing the same thing they are accusing the right of, except much more efficiently and effectively (the current Congress has been a shining example).

However, I would add a fourth item for Democrats:

d. Democrats are the ones who constantly position themselves as the superior, enlightened intellectuals, yet they do all the same bad things they accuse Republicans of doing. In effect, they use moral superiority as an argument to justify being just as evil. (e.g., Obama and other Democrats criticizing recess appointments under Bush, yet when in power, they do the same thing and claim it's for the good of the country).

The left and the right are exactly the same in that their political views are their religions. However, the embezzlement claim isn't a "Republican talking point." It really happened.

Your "almighty dollar" statement makes you dangerously close to sounding like a stereotype. I can even hear you saying "maaaaan" at the end of it!

Certainly. Here is the embezzlement story from the New York Times, and here is the result of the internal ACORN investigation about their poor management practices.

Also, When can the UK expect Obama to come over and talk with minor MPs to talk about US banks ruining costing the country billions and to pay the British citizens compensation?

I think the difference between an environmental disaster and financial disaster are pretty evident. You invested in the United States? Apparently that was a big mistake and hopefully you learned your lesson. You can't expect every country you invest in to apologize and pay you back when your investments go negative. That's not how investing works. If you didn't want to lose your money, maybe you shouldn't have been chasing the highly rated securities with highly rated returns that sounded too damn good to be true. Now you know not to trust our rating companies and our securities. The difference with the environmental disaster is that regulations were set for BP that apparently weren't followed and some percentage of the people affected weren't invested in BP. I applaud Cameron for his genuine concern but the blame by no means rests on him or his British constituents. And I can think of one case where Obama did meet with Northern Ireland MPs to help with their economic slump.

If I was Cameron I would have just ignored those senators.

Cameron had that choice. Whether you like it or not, I guess he felt it was a valuable show of support. If you are so staunchly anti-American, do not vote for Cameron. I've heard things come out of his mouth this past week that make me even blush. Is Obama that keen on the UK? I think he says he is but you won't see as much action from Obama as you will from Cameron.

The UK doesn't tell the US what to do with their prisoners, the US shouldn't tell the UK what to do with theirs.

I can't fucking believe you would say that when UK courts convicted him of a plane bombing that killed 270 civilians -- 189 of them Americans. I'm not sorry that my government is concerned what a country that has an extradition treaty with us does with people convicted of killing Americans overseas.

The guy probably would have been released on appeal anyway. The evidence against him was shockingly bad and should've been laughed out of court.

Listen, if your justice system is flawed then fix it. I don't know anything about that court case or the evidence. But when someone as closely allied to the United States as the United Kingdom convicts a man for a plane bombing then I'm inclined to believe he's guilty. Seriously, if someone blew up a plane in the United States with 189 UK citizens on it and then we "think we found the guy" and then we let him go years later on some phony health problems would you be upset? Now imagine some huge multi-billion dollar company like Exxon had been trying to use him as a token to drill in his home country's oil fields. Oh and the whole time the United States people are saying: "He was innocent anyway." How would you fucking feel about that?!

Because you need a fragile motor/compressor for the process, and air tanks have to be re-tested yearly? Because storing air at 3,000 PSI ain't easy? It's actually a great idea; you'd eliminate the generator in the wind turbine itself, and replace it with an air compressor. Then the generator gets to live on the ground with the air motor and the generator, and hopefully the mast can be the tank. But that's still adding an air tank, compressor, and air motor where you formerly had none. Cost is the answer.

The key problem here is storage you don't have to store locally. airbladders at the bottom of a lake/sea or storing the air in a disused saltmines

Which myth are you talking about? If you're talking about this myth, it's irrelevant in regard to the OP. The whole point of my post is that the high density areas are easy to service and the low density areas are hard, and the OP was talking specifically about rural areas with low density of people.

I find it interesting that the airlines have unbundled services so that they can "lower air fares", yet they still can't seem to make profits the way they used to. This article in the NYT (see link below) points out that while passenger and freight volumes are back up to pre-recession levels, the airlines are still not making pre-recession profits. Another point that I found interesting is that passenger load factors are also significantly higher in the past. So from a cost-accounting perspective, the airlines have reduced or shifted several large factors in their cost bases: underutilized aircraft, "fees" for things that used to cost the airlines extra, and industry consolidation that should also reduce employee costs (two merged airlines don't need as many mechanics, pilots, or flight attendants). A couple more points should also give some food for thought. The aforementioned industry consolidation gives the airlines more power to raise ticket prices because of reduced competition (and fewer routes). Also, oil prices are not nearly what they were in 2008/2009, so that's another large expense that has been reduced.

The point I'm trying to make is that the airline industry has seen major shifts that should in theory increase revenues while decreasing expenses. Something else must be going on and I don't have the whole story, but it makes me wonder if there is some serious mismanagement going on. Or maybe unbundling combined with all the other hassles of air travel are starting to make customers change their behaviors.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/business/global/19iht-ravover.html?_r=1&ref=business

The environment inside a cell is enormously complex, containing millions of proteins, nucleic acid structures, lipids, carbohydrates, etc of many thousands of different types.

Add to this the recent discovery that there are over one hundred species of bacteria populating the average healthy lung (over 2,000 microbes per square centimeter), and that people with asthma have different collection of microbes in their lungs than healthy people.

Yet Google is far from a monopoly yet they are being investigated in Europe for unfair business practices. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/opinion/15thu3.html?_r=3

The iPhone 4 song video that started the press conf... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKIcaejkpD4&feature=player_embedded

Moderators: I am not joking, the New York Times report from the press conference reported this...

But I agree that there are cultural and geographical distances that caused BP to really screw up the public relations. For instance, though everyone in Texas knows on which side their bread is buttered, but we like our coast line only as oily as necessary. This means that we likely would not have wasted time trying to save the hole. We like drilling holes. It makes us a lot of money. Recall, the rig was insured. Plug the hole, build a new rig, drill a new hole, a thousand engineers don't lose their jobs. Texas is all about engineering jobs. England is a nation of shopkeepers paranoid about keeping stock, not creating it. Half of BP problems was an unwillingness to give up on the hole.

Also, Texas would have never given into the fishing and tourists interests. The fishing industry will not admit that they kill more in bycatch and destroy their livelihood by overfishing way more than an oil spill ever will. Let the fishing industry sue for loss of income. As we have seen in the articles, many of them do cash business, so cannot substantiate income, or at least not substantiate without getting in trouble with internal revenue. Louisiana in particular would have a hard time whining given that they support killing sea turtles to get shrimp.

Of course the tourist industry psychotically believes that it can exist without cheap energy. Florida might make a ruckus in congress, but Texas has the craziest congress people of all. These are the people who complain about the deficit while maximizing it by insuring clear lake always has high paying government jobs, and fighting for contract for their fishing buddies. One word from them and energy goes up 25%. Look at it this way. Texas has it own personal grid. Not hooked up to the national grid. It is like we are the Brits that did not cave into the EU.

But I agree that there are cultural and geographical distances that caused BP to really screw up the public relations. For instance, though everyone in Texas knows on which side their bread is buttered, but we like our coast line only as oily as necessary. This means that we likely would not have wasted time trying to save the hole. We like drilling holes. It makes us a lot of money. Recall, the rig was insured. Plug the hole, build a new rig, drill a new hole, a thousand engineers don't lose their jobs. Texas is all about engineering jobs. England is a nation of shopkeepers paranoid about keeping stock, not creating it. Half of BP problems was an unwillingness to give up on the hole.

Also, Texas would have never given into the fishing and tourists interests. The fishing industry will not admit that they kill more in bycatch and destroy their livelihood by overfishing way more than an oil spill ever will. Let the fishing industry sue for loss of income. As we have seen in the articles, many of them do cash business, so cannot substantiate income, or at least not substantiate without getting in trouble with internal revenue. Louisiana in particular would have a hard time whining given that they support killing sea turtles to get shrimp.

Of course the tourist industry psychotically believes that it can exist without cheap energy. Florida might make a ruckus in congress, but Texas has the craziest congress people of all. These are the people who complain about the deficit while maximizing it by insuring clear lake always has high paying government jobs, and fighting for contract for their fishing buddies. One word from them and energy goes up 25%. Look at it this way. Texas has it own personal grid. Not hooked up to the national grid. It is like we are the Brits that did not cave into the EU.

"go, setup a reserve somewhere, grow your own food, make your own textiles/clothing, and abscond modern conveniences like electricity and petroleum"

ohhhh, _now_ i see! if we don't go to the extreme (off-grid, etc) then we just roll over and die, i.e., we shouldn't put forth strong opinions about the really shitty things done by the individuals at bp who made the decisions that led to the bp organization as a whole wrecking a region's economy, thereby destroying the livelihoods of many people. in this case, yes, these individuals and this organization are evil

fwiw, i don't like greenpeace, and i'm not an "anti-globalisation wannabe". bp knew of the problems, yet continued down a wreckless, destructive path :

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/05/30/1548218/BP-Knew-of-Deepwater-Horizon-Problems-11-Months-Ago
http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/12/news/companies/bp_house_hearing/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30rig.html?pagewanted=all

so, cheers victor -- i'll raise my pint of ale, you can raise your cup of koolaid

bp knew of the problems:

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/05/30/1548218/BP-Knew-of-Deepwater-Horizon-Problems-11-Months-Ago
http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/12/news/companies/bp_house_hearing/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30rig.html?pagewanted=all

bp knew the huge risks and yet still greedily chased the profits, so it's not a big leap to expect that after the spill they would still chase profits if given the chance. Corp's are run by people who can commit ridiculous crimes such as bringing the world economy to the brink of collapse, or _destroying_ the environment (and the local/regional economy with it) and *if* they get caught they almost never do any jail time, and any fines they're slapped with are laughably small. The bastards know they own congress and therefore act accordingly. Here in 2010, I find it staggering that one could make assertions such as you have made (and this being /. , i should not be amazed that this tripe is modded insightful, but i am amazed). Enjoy your koolaid!

Too tempting to ignore. Part of the delay in fixing the oil leak is a fault of the US government. I have no love for BP, but I don't for the gubment either. I sure blame fixing will require decades of hindsight. Maybe you will believe me if you read this , generally liberal news source

You say that like having a full time job, financial success, and parental status has anything to do with whether or not one has a dependency issue. See here for what I mean. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying your friends are addicts or have problems, just that the points you're making do not demonstrate that they aren't.

Obviously the plastic is still coming from somewhere, it's not like aliens dropped it there one night.

I'm not much for conspiracy/outlandish theories, but it would be interesting to see where any current or recently de-commissioned deep sea oil wells were in relation to this ares (particularly any that have had Halliburton, Transocean, or BP involved). Maybe we're looking at remnants of various Junk Shots.

New York Times had an interesting writeup on a fecal transplant case just the other day, so it's funny that this comes up in conversation now. NPR had an interesting story about how bacteria affect the efficiency of digestion a while back too. It's amazing what we don't know about our bodies, and a little bit scary how willing we are to wade into that unknown and just start changing things

A possible (C) is an endowment model, such as proposed here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/opinion/28swensen.html

In this model the news source is an endowed foundation, ostensibly free from both the profit motive and government control. The model is the same as pursued by many universities - one of the authors of the above Op-Ed is the chief investment officer at Yale.

The endowment model has problems, to be sure (for example, endowed institutions may not legally attempt to influence legislation or elections). But, it's something at least worth considering since other options seem to have significant problems as well.

Proof of the study. The data shows we're approaching deflation. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/what-have-we-learned/

According to a newspaper article I read several months ago, sudden acceleration never happens with standard shift cars.

True, I've never suffered at the hands of Kim Jeong Il. My wife's grandfather was executed due to being accused of communism. The accusation stuck with my father-in-law which made it extremely difficult for him to pass the civil service examination.
  I have access to all the information an average Korean does, and more as I have access to information in English, which the average Korean does not. The Korean public is clearly unhappy with the way in which the current ruling party dealt with the sinking of the Cheonan, as evidenced by the latest regional elections. They are worried that the aggressive stance will cause a war.
I believe I've explained in other posts what the sunshine policy accomplished as compared with sanctions. The North Korean government is not comprised of madmen or insane lunatics. They all know what would happen if they provoked a war, and China is much more leery of backing the North. Dialogue is in the best interests of all players in the region, and they all know that. They key is getting both sides to come to an agreement for the energy issue in North Korea, and then having both sides stick to the agreement.

Oh and I don't have numbers off-hand to back me up, but I would venture that more than 50% of the current South Korean population has never suffered at the hands of North Korea either.

Sometimes you end up having to scale your nuclear plant back because there's so much renewable energy:

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/sudden-surplus-calls-for-quick-thinking/

Columbia is accustomed to reducing power to 85 percent and sometimes 60 percent. In the following days, however, BPA asked the nuclear [note: I added "nuclear" for context] plant operators to go down to just 22 percent. “This year was extraordinary because it all came so heavy and so fast,’’ Mr. Milstein said.

Here by renewable energy, you mean hydroelectricity. And they had an excess due to larger than normal amount of rain. And the reason why they had an excess of electricity was because they lacked the transmission capacity to sell the power to other areas where it was needed.

Look it up, DNA testing this way is putting innocent people in jail.

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/07/sudden-surplus-calls-for-quick-thinking/

Columbia is accustomed to reducing power to 85 percent and sometimes 60 percent. In the following days, however, BPA asked the nuclear [note: I added "nuclear" for context] plant operators to go down to just 22 percent. “This year was extraordinary because it all came so heavy and so fast,’’ Mr. Milstein said.

This is same reason why newspapers report how unwise people are with money when they get greedy. It is no surprise that SCO has such success in Utah given that people have been able to steal millions of dollars just by putting fancy fliers on cars promising huge returns.

if one's research findings tend to support human-caused climate change - means to live and work in an environment of constant accusations of fraud, calls for investigations (or for criminal prosecutions), demands for access to every draft, every intermediate calculation, and every email exchanged with colleagues, daily hate mail and threats, and attempts to pressure the institutions that employ us and fund our research. Through experience, we have learned that there is no review of climate scientists' work that isn't deemed a "whitewash" by climate change contrarians; there is no casual remark that can't be seized upon, blown out of proportion and distorted; and there is no person whose character can't be assassinated, no matter how careful and honest their research.

Internal communications of the IPCC to authors of the scientific review now say the following:

My advice to the authors on responding to the media is only in respect of queries regarding the I.P.C.C. Some of them are new to the I.P.C.C., and we would not want them to provide uninformed responses or opinions. We now have in place a structure and a system in the I.P.C.C. for outreach and communications with the outside world.The I.P.C.C. authors are not employed by the I.P.C.C., and hence they are free to deal with the media on their own avocations and the organizations they are employed by. But they should desist at this stage on speaking on behalf of the I.P.C.C.

As a climate scientist and a computer scientist and an advocate for openness and replicability my position is greatly weakened by people using "openness" as an excuse for harrassment and witch-hunting.

The inevitable short result of this approach to openness is going to be that scientists will do as much work as possible on their laptops and their yahoo email accounts. Using their funded platforms will be only for production runs and final drafts of publications; this will minimize the amount of exposure of their actual work to hostile parties. We will also see far fewer really good people getting into work with any controversy, lest they be subjected to public abuse; eventually only work of little consequence will attract the intellectually adventurous.

I really want the open science movement to be about making science more accessible and more appealing and more part of the culture. This subversion of the open science movement in the name of derailing climate science, which in turn hides the real intent of delaying climate policy until all the fossil reserves are cashed in, is a disaster on more fronts than one. One unfortunate aspect is that it drives important segments of the scientific community to treat the open science movement as a threat to science. Advocates of open science would do well to think twice about the motivations and actions of this gang.

We did?

I've a pro-fission guy, and pro-atomic weapons, but even I realize that Plutonium was a fraking mess at best.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/science/earth/11plutonium.html?src=mv

Triple the amount of waste in the soil than was projected at Hanford, in a couple hundred years it'll be in the Columbia River.

And we produced more than twice the amount of Plutonium we needed

http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/gao/rced97098.htm

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d06352.pdf

It cost 10 billion dollars to clean up Rocky Flats, a "clean" site compared to Hanford.

It's going to cost the UK a total of 146 billion dollars to clean their Plutonium site up.

So why in 40+ years didn't we figure this out if we were so damned good at it?

Good article on the subject:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/magazine/what-if-it-s-all-been-a-big-fat-lie.html?pagewanted=print

Probably the single best-balanced (says my biochem background) article I've seen on the subject.

Obesity from too much carb-seeking tends to come in the wake of protein and fat starvation, which are natural results of all this "healthy eating" of the past couple decades. Combine that with the new paranoia about letting kids be kids (gods forbid they have an unsupervised moment) and too much sitting in front of the computer, and it's no wonder we've got a generation as wide as they are tall.

(BTW at 55, devourer of dead cows and slave in the sunshine, I still wear the same clothes I did in college.)

"The American public ... just like your teenage kids, aren't acting in a way that they should act" with respect to climate change.

Then maybe he should set an example.

Sorry, I guess my html screwed up.

Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/technology/19google.html?_r=1

Whoa calm down! It doesn't matter if Linux actually infringes or not, corporations will still be leary about adoption as long as there are claims out there that it does. That it is the exact definition of encumbered, the adoption of Linux is impeded by a heavy load, that being the bad publicity from the SCO and Microsoft/Novell fiascos.

Do you remember this issue, when there was a BSD driver that was included in Linux and was re-licenced as GPL by mistake? Or how about this one, where the OpenBSD project stripped the comments from a GPL'd driver and re-licensed it as BSD? Obviously there are some copyright issues slipping through the cracks even among the different OSS projects. Since Linux has so many contributors from so many different places, it is easy for a company to start spreading claims that one piece, somewhere, might be infringing.

As soon as the corporate lawyers get wind of that kind of thing, they'll push to avoid adoption and to migrate solutions away from Linux. Look at the Unisys LZW patent in GIF files or the Fraunhofer patents in MP3 files. Companies were panicking because they might have an MP3 stored somewhere, without any understanding of the actual issue.

Background material:

Vista class action lawsuit.

New York Times article: "Corps of Microsoft engineers, for example, have been dispatched to tweak hardware and software to make Vista PCs faster and less prone to crashing."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/27/business/media/27movie.html is the really old initial lawsuit article.

But basically Jackson had a gross cut contract, and claimed that New Line sold some of the rights to things like DVD distribution to other Time Warner companies for lower than market value - which of course reduces their gross (and hence Jackson's cut).

I think they settled, but I didn't really follow it closely - it's a pretty obvious technique though bound to get you sued...

Peter Jackson had to sue New Line Cinema to get paid for LotR. New Line claimed they lost money on the trilogy.

Indeed, on top of that I recall the Tolkein Trust suing New Line for hundreds of millions after New Line only paid them $62,000 for the rights to the movies. New Line apparently claimed that was 7.5 percent of the gross of the films. Isn't that the standard these days? (as the article notes)