Slashdot Mirror

You mean like this guy?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/nyregion/10cnd-spitzer.html

What I like about it is he ran on the platform to clean up New York and prostitution.

LOL.

I think he has his own TV show now...or maybe he will be at CNN.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/19/AR2010051905338.html

All in all...I see the end coming for a lot of countries. In debt, power hungry and greedy gigantic revolts will be happening and the world is gonna BURN.

-Hack

The circuit breakers were implemented in India several years ago. I definitely know about the Bombay Stock Exchange. They were kicked into action when the Congress won by a landslide in the last general elections. And to the extent of my knowledge, India doesn't even have automated, high-frequency trading. This makes me wonder why the US stock markets didn't have any circuit breakers till date.

I didn't notice scientists telling President Bush that it was perfectly okay to burn fossil fuels. In fact, it seems like scientists have been saying pretty much the same thing for decades, but the last head of government never listened.

Here's a link. Note that he said "the majority of America supports health care reform." Not "the majority of America supports the health care bill that was passed." Hell, I'll even spare you the link that cites 77% of the population being in favor of a choice of a public option, because that's on HuffPost and therefore obviously biased.

I wanted health care reform. I think the current bill is not very good (it is, in fact, almost exactly what Republicans proposed as an alternative to the system Hillary proposed 15 years ago), but I think it is at least a step in the right direction to preventing medical bankruptcies. The Republican party was in power for over a decade and did exactly jack squat about resolving healthcare inequality and the obvious problems our system has. What we ended up getting due to Obama and the democrats is not good, but it's better than nothing.

When Bush was president, left-wing nutjobs were not much better. Are we comparing the worst of the worst of both parties?

When Bush was president, the most vocal "left-wing nutjobs" bitched about stuff that was TRUE. Sure, there were quite a few that were unhappy about the results in Florida, but I don't remember them being given nearly as much media attention as, say, the birthers have. The majority of us were pissed about going to war on false pretenses, not "robbing medicare to pay for socialized medicine" or crap like this.

--Jeremy

You said:

It's voluntary, so there is no invasion of privacy going on, when you give up your DNA willingly you can't be expected it to be held very strongly in confidentiality.

There's an interesting related story here. From the article itself:

Members of the tiny, isolated tribe had given DNA samples to university researchers starting in 1990, in the hope that they might provide genetic clues to the tribe’s devastating rate of diabetes. But they learned that their blood samples had been used to study many other things, including mental illness and theories of the tribe’s geographical origins that contradict their traditional stories.

We all know what the majority of slashdotters probably think about the tribe's beliefs, origin myths, etc. But the fact is that the researches thought that once they had the material (the DNA/blood), they could crunch the numbers in attempts to answer many questions. But the donors of said material didn't approve all that was done. I'm not trying to say who is right or wrong, but it's a cautionary tale for any organization that wants to conduct research of this kind.

From the 1940s to the 1970s, Ivy League colleges took naked pictures of every incoming freshman, supposedly for use in scientific studies of the students' posture.

I am not making this up. See, e.g., this Times coverage from 1995.

I'm not going to make any kind of normative statement about whether people should say Yes to Cal's offer, here, but just wanted to point out that weird-ass instrusions into student privacy are nothing new.

Not really - the motive is the same, giant corporation taking secrets for commercial benefit vs giant corporation (which happens to be owned by the Chinese government) taking secrets for commercial benefit. The Chinese government, with its many state-owned operations, is not equivalent to the US government - the Chinese government as much concerned about running businesses as it is about governing.

Note that I'm not condoning either the Chinese or the US behaviour, I'm simply trying to inject some perspective into the current debate which often consists of hysterical 'us and them' finger-pointing, just as used to occur with the Russians who the US now gets along quite well with. It all reminds me of Orwell's "We're at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia."

To provide an alternative and perhaps more relevant example of non-Chinese industrial espionage, the US accused the French government of industrial espionage in the 90s, and vice versa.

Not really - the motive is the same, giant corporation taking secrets for commercial benefit vs giant corporation (which happens to be owned by the Chinese government) taking secrets for commercial benefit. The Chinese government, with its many state-owned operations, is not equivalent to the US government - the Chinese government as much concerned about running businesses as it is about governing.

Note that I'm not condoning either the Chinese or the US behaviour, I'm simply trying to inject some perspective into the current debate which often consists of hysterical 'us and them' finger-pointing, just as used to occur with the Russians who the US now gets along quite well with. It all reminds me of Orwell's "We're at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia."

To provide an alternative and perhaps more relevant example of non-Chinese industrial espionage, the US accused the French government of industrial espionage in the 90s, and vice versa.

You must be kidding me. Robert Mullins article is not worthy of publication, just because it is has a catchy byline regarding smelly duck eggs. The content is vague and overstated in many places. The content nothing more than bits of fluff without any kind of supporting detail. It has nothing it in that is new or inspiring and is so dry and boring, I simply began to fall asleep halfway through it. Robert Mullins should be slapped with a wet noodle for writing such drivel.

The only saving grace to the whole thing, was in the comments submitted by readers. Inside this is a gem of links supplied by one such anonymous reader. If you want the tip of the iceberg on hundreds of Chinese Government espionage cases, then follow these links.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/02/AR2008040203952.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/25/60minutes/main6242498.shtml
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military/3319656
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/KG31Ad01.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/world/europe/01spy.html?src=sch&pagewanted=all
http://www.intelligencesearch.com/ia068.html

However to dig deeper. The Chinese are not the only ones targeting Government and other high tech companies in the US. There are many others, but China is going much further than just the US. It would seem that the Chinese officials, are casting a huge net to capture just about anything they can get and only later throwing away what they don't need. No wonder China is advancing so fast in all the major technologies, including space, military and civilian.

"From Rice Paddies to Rocket Ships". In only a few short years has China advanced or simply stolen it's future? Followed by actual case studies and methods, would have made an article worth reading and a far better byline. I can't believe I wasted 10 minutes of my time reading that piece of crap. Thank the gods for an enlightened and intelligent reader that offered a few links and with just that small effort did far more than Robert Mullins did in a whole page.

I seriously object to my comments being marked as troll! This was not trolling. It's a serious point. It's hardly reasonable to say that there's one rule if it happens in the US, and another for everywhere else. Yes, I know that there were/are wars in both places, but there _have_ been deaths that were murder rather than battlefield deaths, and US citizens have not been held to account in courts of the countries where the actions took place.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/05/wikileaks-exposes-video-o_n_525569.html
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/05/12/iraq.soldiers.killed/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/world/asia/08blackwater.html

Which is to say that there is no absolute rule that a person should be tried in the jurisdiction of the place under which the action had effect.

The author didn't state it elegantly, but he still made the point -- Chinese industrial espionage is very real, is here now, and it is state-sponsored. China views hacking not only as a fast-track to becoming an industrial superpower, but they view it as a method of becoming a military superpower, too. A good part of China's military buildup involves locating and training talented young people, as well as hiring the already established hacker-underground folk for military purposes. They figure (probably correctly) that they are nowhere near capable of competing with the US military on a technological front, but if they can shut down our command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) networks (not coincidentally, this is also why they developed the satellite-killing missile), then they have essentially shut us down, especially for any military response to an attack on Taiwan.

Here are just a few examples of the many, many already known about cases of Chinese espionage.
- The infamous Cox Report (regarding the PRC stealing our most advanced nuclear weapon designs)
- The well-known Google attacks
- A Boeing engineer was sentenced to 15 years for espionage, selling rocket technology to the PRC
- The FBI caught an American with very high security clearance and a Taiwanese-American selling classified information about weapon-sales to Taiwan to the PRC.
- The British MI5 released a report detailing all kinds of Chinese espionage. For example, high-profile UK businessmen have been approached by PRC spies with lavish gifts which include USB flash drives infected with trojans to steal information, and in 2008, an aide to Gordon Brown had his Blackberry stolen after a sexy Chinese woman approached him in Beijing -- a classic, almost too classic to be true, Soviet-style tactic. Other diplomats, too, have been sexually blackmailed by the PRC to divulge information.
- Here is a research paper by Northrop Grumman regarding China's cyber-warfare abilities, 88 pages filled with the stuff. Turn to page 67 for a "Timeline of Significant Chinese Related Cyber Events 1999-Present," let alone the details of the rest of the paper which shows the large effort by the PRC to improve their cyber-warfare and espionage abilities.

Here are some more excerpts:

MI5 Report

The MI5 report described how China’s computer hacking campaign had attacked British defense, energy, communications and manufacturing companies, as well as public relations companies and international law firms. The document explicitly warned British executives dealing with China against so-called honey trap methods in which it said the Chinese tried to cultivate personal relationships, “often using lavish hospitality and flattery,” either within China or abroad.

“Chinese intelligence services have also been known to exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships and illegal activities to pressurize individuals to cooperate with them,” it warned. “Hotel rooms in major Chinese cities such as Beijing and Shanghai which have been frequented by foreigners are likely to be bugged. Hotel rooms have been searched while the occupants are out of the room.”

The author didn't state it elegantly, but he still made the point -- Chinese industrial espionage is very real, is here now, and it is state-sponsored. China views hacking not only as a fast-track to becoming an industrial superpower, but they view it as a method of becoming a military superpower, too. A good part of China's military buildup involves locating and training talented young people, as well as hiring the already established hacker-underground folk for military purposes. They figure (probably correctly) that they are nowhere near capable of competing with the US military on a technological front, but if they can shut down our command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) networks (not coincidentally, this is also why they developed the satellite-killing missile), then they have essentially shut us down, especially for any military response to an attack on Taiwan.

Here are just a few examples of the many, many already known about cases of Chinese espionage.
- The infamous Cox Report (regarding the PRC stealing our most advanced nuclear weapon designs)
- The well-known Google attacks
- A Boeing engineer was sentenced to 15 years for espionage, selling rocket technology to the PRC
- The FBI caught an American with very high security clearance and a Taiwanese-American selling classified information about weapon-sales to Taiwan to the PRC.
- The British MI5 released a report detailing all kinds of Chinese espionage. For example, high-profile UK businessmen have been approached by PRC spies with lavish gifts which include USB flash drives infected with trojans to steal information, and in 2008, an aide to Gordon Brown had his Blackberry stolen after a sexy Chinese woman approached him in Beijing -- a classic, almost too classic to be true, Soviet-style tactic. Other diplomats, too, have been sexually blackmailed by the PRC to divulge information.
- Here is a research paper by Northrop Grumman regarding China's cyber-warfare abilities, 88 pages filled with the stuff. Turn to page 67 for a "Timeline of Significant Chinese Related Cyber Events 1999-Present," let alone the details of the rest of the paper which shows the large effort by the PRC to improve their cyber-warfare and espionage abilities.

Here are some more excerpts:

MI5 Report

The MI5 report described how China’s computer hacking campaign had attacked British defense, energy, communications and manufacturing companies, as well as public relations companies and international law firms. The document explicitly warned British executives dealing with China against so-called honey trap methods in which it said the Chinese tried to cultivate personal relationships, “often using lavish hospitality and flattery,” either within China or abroad.

“Chinese intelligence services have also been known to exploit vulnerabilities such as sexual relationships and illegal activities to pressurize individuals to cooperate with them,” it warned. “Hotel rooms in major Chinese cities such as Beijing and Shanghai which have been frequented by foreigners are likely to be bugged. Hotel rooms have been searched while the occupants are out of the room.”

Yet Google's Street View has been collecting data on people's Wifi networks. Germany Asks Google to Surrender Private Data.

Do no evil?

Falcon

Oh, btw way I loved the movie The Graduate when I saw it as a kid.

Oh you are missing a lot of facts here. There are nuclear plant construction permits going forward right now. I personally was involved in the construction of a new chemical plant post-Bhopal. There are definitely coal burning power plants going forward. The reason that no new refineries are being built in the US is because of lack of profitability in that business.

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS278&=&q=new+coal+burning+power+plants&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/business/energy-environment/17nukes.html

Is it really so hard to simply go through Facebook's privacy settings yourself and consciously set them to whatever you want (as far as that's possible)?

Yes, it really is "so hard". Intentionally so. Take a look at this NY Times graphic showing all the privacy settings options that exist throughout a Facebook profile. (Or, at least, the options the NY Times was able to find.) You can see that the options behave in inconsistent ways. You can set "maximum privacy" on one page without realizing that an option at a different level over-rides this (e.g. third-party ads may still have access).

To really insure maximum privacy, you not only have to navigate this maze of options (the NY Times graphic helps to make sure you've nailed them all), but you have to repeatedly re-check your settings since Facebook can (and does) change the settings interface (and thus the default settings) from time to time. So a previously "highly private" profile can have information leak unless you are actively checking whenever there are changes.

As I said before, this is probably intentional. Facebook would prefer to have more access to data and more ability to redistribute personal data for profit. So it is to their advantage if people don't have maximally-private settings. A plugin that actually produces a clean, sane, and useful privacy settings interface can thus make it much easier to control those settings. It also points out just had bad Facebook's settings and customization pages really are: you need third-party apps and newspaper flow-charts to make sense of them.

...except that they wont actually delete your account without running through a massive number of hoops - one site and another among several that pop up with a "delete facebook" search on google

It's not sexist. Some posts in this thread are outright lies. "Cougar" is banned for being an adult term. So is Sugar Daddy, contrary to what some claim. Not sexist.

Did you even RTFA? (I think we all know I'm not new here.) The same company that runs CougarLife currently has google ads for another site they run — a Sugar Daddy site:

When notified by Google of the decision, CougarLife proposed substituting a different ad for the ones that were running, picturing older women and younger men together. Cougarlife said it would use an image of the company's president, Claudia Opdenkelder, 39, without a man in the picture (she lives with her 25-year-old boyfriend).

But the advertising department was told in an e-mail message from its Google representative that "the policy is focused particularly around the concept of 'cougar dating' as a whole," and asked if the company would be open to changing "the 'cougar' theme/language specifically (including the domain if necessary)." CougarLife forwarded the e-mail messages to The New York Times. Google would not comment on the messages but did confirm that they were consistent with the new policy on cougar sites.

"It's just wrong all around," Ms. Opdenkelder said. "It's age and gender discrimination. It's just about older, successful, independent, strong women who enjoy someone that's younger. Some of the men sites, they are borderline prostitution, and Google has no problem having them advertise." CougarLife said it was considering filing a discrimination complaint with a Canadian agency that oversees equality issues between private parties, and was looking into possible legal recourse in the United States.

CougarLife.com is owned by Avid Life Media, which also owns ArrangementSeekers.com, which describes itself as "the original Sugar Daddy service catering to ambitious and attractive girls seeking successful and generous benefactors to fulfill their lifestyle needs!"

Avid Life Media executives said that while some specific advertisements for the ArrangementSeekers site had been rejected, the ads were evaluated on a case-by-case basis and the site was still advertising with Google.

I don't know how much simpler it can get, but Google outright said that the policy related to the concept of cougar dating as a whole, but they continue to run ads for Sugar Daddy sites. And the proof is right in TFA. It could not be any clearer a case of sexism!

Well here we are two weeks later. Where is the landfall of oil slicks?

Louisiana: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/05/18/us/18spill_CA1.html

Where are the masses of oiled birds?

Again, Louisiana: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/us/16oil.html

Well here we are two weeks later. Where is the landfall of oil slicks?

Louisiana: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/05/18/us/18spill_CA1.html

Where are the masses of oiled birds?

Again, Louisiana: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/us/16oil.html

I really don't know where anyone would get the idea Texas is filled with racist dumbasses.

The Tevatron is so thoroughly outclassed by the LHC that they have to take advantage of every opportunity to make a press release and show that they are still relevant. Once the LHC starts producing science data there will be impossible to justify funding for the Tevatron. The whole of Fermi Lab. (which uses about half the science money given by the D.O.E.) will be in danger of being closed, so they are fighting for survival. During the Bush administration they had to get private funding to avoid lay-offs. http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/good-news-or-less-bad-news-for-american-science/

U.S. Supreme Court in Shaughnessy v. U.S. ex rel Mezei in 1953 held that the US Government had the authority to incarcerate "excludable aliens" indefinitely without trial. http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/mariel.html discusses one long-running example. So you're wrong to claim that "never before in memory" has SCOTUS held that the government has such authority.

It wasn't until 2005 (at which point the persons discussed in that URL had been "indefinitely detained" for 25 years) that SCOTUS held contrariwise http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/13/politics/13immig.html.

You do know that they met their fund raising goal in only 5 days, right?
From the article: "They announced their project on April 24. They reached their $10,000 goal in 12 days". http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/nyregion/12about.html

the same time the supreme court made this ruling today, they made another ruling:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/us/politics/18court.html

which says that juveniles cannot get life sentences for nonhomicides. that sounds like progress to me, no?

so that's two inches in the win column, which means it's just as i say: fluttering in the breeze, two inches here and there

my advice to you is to save your ammunition for the REAL slides in liberty, such as the post-9/11 bullshit. but if you insist on having a heart attack every time something sounds like a vague few inches in a direction you dislike, you're simply a drama queen. liberty needs defending, not hysterics over mosquitoes

but don't let me stop you from whining and moaning. for some people, that seems to be the only point

Before you wish for more Supreme Court justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas, you may wish to read this article, also in the NYTimes, about another recent court decision where the two were again part of the dissent. In this case, they dissented from the majority's ruling that life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for a teenager who hasn't killed (or been party to a killing) is cruel and unusual punishment.

Scalia's and Thomas' objection to civil commitment has nothing to do with opposing excessive sentences and everything to do with opposing an administration they personally do not like (If you want to play the 'limiting Federal powers' card, please check up on some of their terrorism-related rulings during the Bush administration first).

The summary is incorrect. The majority opinion was written by Breyer, not Kennedy. Kennedy is one of the two (not three like it says) who concurred but thought the majority opinion was too broad. See http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/us/politics/18offenders.html

Did the Dunbar amendment about "free enterprise" pass? It's not mentioned. It says she "backed [it]," but not that she was successful. We're left to fill in the blanks.

Google is your friend: Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change

They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.”

“Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation,” said one conservative member, Terri Leo. “You know, ‘capitalist pig!’ ”

There is one last chance: the Board of Education will make a final vote on Friday, May 21.

The dispersant Corexit is itself toxic, which means BP is adding more poison to hide the first.

The one great advantage of Corexit, however, is that it makes the oil sink below view, so BP is literally hoping, like a naughty toddler, that out of sight means out of mind. A few weeks from now, when dead fish begin piling up on the shore and people ask "What's up with all the stinking fish?" you can depend on Pat Robertson to blame the homosexuals, Sarah Palin to blame the liberals and Fox news to report on the new terrorist attack on the Gulf.

And we'll believe it.

But, Dear God, I hope not. As much as I hate to say it, I think the previous vicious AC poster is right -- killing the Gulf of Mexico might be the only thing that gets our attention and forces us to make better choices.

In addition to encouraging you to RTFA, let me strongly encourage you to consider the political position consistently advocated by the paper that published the FA. The Guardian makes no pretense at all of being balanced, centrist, unbiased, or apolitical. This is the British newspaper (and web site) that developed a web site with the names and addresses of registered voters in Ohio, and encouraged their readers to write to them to exhort them to vote for John Kerry rather than George Bush. (Bush won Ohio by a handful of votes--which Ohio politicos attributed to the furious backlash the Guardian created, but that's another story.)

In other words, the Guardian article is an advocacy piece meant to alarm, rather than enlighten. If you're a Brit, this will come as no surprise--if you're as Internet-savvy as a SlashDot reader should be, you shouldn't be surprised, either.

The sun will come up tomorrow, even in Texas...
Despite the panicked anxiety of the writer (and the New York Times, here), it's not terribly controversial to emphasize the strong Christian views of many of America's founders. Which is not to say that America's Constitution is a statement of Christian faith--which is often how this argument is misconstrued. (A standard freshman year American History exam question is to compare and contrast the Christian and Deist views expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.) But it is interesting to know that in most U.S. states you had to be a professing Christian in order to run for political office--it provides a perspective on our First Amendment that is all-too-often missing when discussing what the "separation of church and state" means. (What it meant, then, was that no state could "establish" a church--in the way that the Church of England is established in the U.K., or the Lutheran Church is established in Denmark. They're supported by taxes, their leadership is appointed by government, etc.--they are state religions. Jefferson wrote about a "vast wall separating church and state" to reassure Baptists in New England that they would not face oppression by Congregationalists.).

Isaac Newton vs. military technology:
Well gosh--I can see the insidious hand of Sarah Palin here, too. Or...perhaps, it might be worthwhile to consider that the intentional pursuit of military technology as a means of achieving battlefield superiority has been a hallmark of U.S. strategy since the Civil War. Especially in Texas, home to Ft. Hood, Ft. Sam Houston, Lackland AFB, and most U.S. Air Force pilot training. To me (who majored in Economics and American History) that sounds like a pretty perceptive point to make. I'd include Isaac Newton, too--but presumably they decided something had to give. Oh, well.

Guns
TFA breathlessly tells Brit readers that:

The new curriculum asserts that "the right to keep and bear arms" is an important element of a democratic society.

One can understand that this would so shock a Brit that he might drop his second or third pint of Guinness Stout that he'd swilled that day. Which is to say, what a Brit might find commonplace (down two or three pints of Guinness Stout in the U.S. and you're a de facto alcoholic) in the U.S. is seen as entirely normative. Again--given that the entire point of the Second Amendment was a direct reaction to the abuses of British occupation forces prior to American independence--this is a pretty welcome emphasis on the impact of early American history on our constitution and present-day policy. Not to mention, of course, that in Texas even self-avowed liberals emphasize their support for "Second Amendment Rights".

Think critically--read critically
I'm far less bothered by this article (it's the Guardian, for heaven's sake, what would you expect?) than I am by the fact that SlashDot's editors include

Don't worry, it's already happening. You can breathe again. Oceans' alarm: Jellyfish swarms

The dispersant Corexit is itself toxic, which means BP is adding more poison to hide the first.

The one great advantage of Corexit, however, is that it makes the oil sink below view, so BP is literally hoping, like a naughty toddler, that out of sight means out of mind. A few weeks from now, when dead fish begin piling up on the shore and people ask "What's up with all the stinking fish?" you can depend on Pat Robertson to blame the homosexuals, Sarah Palin to blame the liberals and Fox news to report on the new terrorist attack on the Gulf.

And we'll believe it.

But, Dear God, I hope not. As much as I hate to say it, I think the previous vicious AC poster is right -- killing the Gulf of Mexico might be the only thing that gets our attention and forces us to make better choices.

New York Times: "Scientists Find Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf" * gushing 80,000 barrels a day * The well is 5,000-feet down. * The shallowest oil plume is 2,300 feet down. * The deepest bubble of oil is 4,200 feet down. * Will bubble up for decades. * At most 5% of the spilled oil will ever be recovered. "one big oil bubble is 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick."

I've added the following to the story:
Errata 5/16/2010:
We originally reported that the main hole was 5 feet in diameter, spewing an estimated 4 barrels per second, with a possible total approaching 1 million barrels/day. The pipe is actually 21 inches in diameter; and the high end estimated total leakage is in the range of 3.4 barrels/day (Ref.). We deeply regret the error.

And I've added this from Paul Noel:
May 15 Update and Correction
Take a look at the May 15 story in the New York Times: Scientists Find Giant Plumes of Oil Forming Under the Gulf. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/us/16oil.html
This represents the oil per my prediction including the distillation that I told you was happening with the tar balls. The stunning implication is that I was wrong in quantity and the leak may in fact be much larger than I said. My curiosity has to do with the motion of these mats. Will they sink or will they warm up and float up somewhere? Big surprises and not fun ones could be in store. I sort of suspect they will hang around and wander for a while and then rise to the surface. (Only a suspicion-- Lets hope it doesn't happen!) Round and round they go, where they stop nobody knows.
Just one mat the size described represents over 240,000 barrels per day over the entire spill duration and the article implies more than one of these! We are absolutely safe to say I am totally confirmed on oil volumes and then some. The article suggests 4 or 5 such mats. If this is so the gush could easily have exceeded 1 million barrels of oil per day.
I can safely say now that if there was any doubt of what I was saying about the leak there should be no doubt now.
On a side note: I just learned from Alabama sources that the situation is far worse than is being portrayed. No facts to describe this except that qualitative analysis.
Sterling the riser is in fact and I was wrong on the size it is a 21 inch riser. Sorry to all but none the less it is massive. Even if the pressure were 20,000 PSI shouldn't that about be Sci-Fi to most people. You don't want to stand in the way of that for sure. I suspect based on the mat sizes that my pressure statements are correct.
The facts are that BP has just kicked out into the ocean a spill that is much more than equal to Exxon Valdez every day for 18 days now. It could be 3 times that every day.
I will say it now and without any reservation: The heads of BP, Haliburton and Transocean should be arrested and tried under the Common Law for crimes against humanity and against nature itself. On conviction they should be executed for their crimes as a monument to corporate management that you should never consider to do such evil deeds again. What has happened here is beyond war crimes. It is absolutely evil what they have done. Silence and no action on this licenses more disasters to come.
BP testimony before Congress states that their worst case was 60,000 Barrels per day. That estimate is at least 7 times too low to account for the now observed facts. I am assuming only one such mat exists for this estimate. I can only guess based on this that my estimates could be low by a very wide margin. I am definitely not high at all.
My apologies for any errors that may have allowed distraction, but this situation is vastly out of hand.
I think if you realize that one mat described is about 1.7 cubic miles in size, and the well keeps on blowing and easily could do this for years, you get a hint of the size of the oil deposit under the Gulf of Mexico. At this rate the Deposit could deliver in 1 year something in the order of 35 cubic miles of oil. It could blow for a decade or more if it is not stopped. It isn't anywhere near out. I just hope they get it corked up shortly. That relief well they are drilling could blowout too!
I told you there was a "dragon" down there! [Symbolism] I have warned people that he has only nipped us. [Symbolism]
This is by no me

I see your crushing, err, Google search and raise you an article by Krugman on Reagan's legacy.

I can use something broad like Google search because those phrases returns lots of documentation for the economic failures Chavez and engendered in Venezeula. You, on the other hand, are forced to cherry-pick ONE result from a biased commentator.

And even though YOU had to cherry-pick yours lamer-than-a-Thalidomide-dachshund "refutation", you didn't/coudn't refute the fact that Chavez is running Venezeula into the ground.

And would that be Enron-advisor Paul Krugman?

Note AGAIN that I'm not cherry-picking results.

I see your crushing, err, Google search and raise you an article by Krugman on Reagan's legacy.

Most of the terrorist arrests in the US didn't even require a book. Thinking, i.e. "conspiring," was enough. In fact the CIA recently decided to mark an American Islamic cleric for death, though he is not thought to have been--or even expected to be--directly involved with carrying out any terrorist attack, though I suppose that case involves thinking out loud.

They had another choice?

Possibly. It certainly isn't completely out of the question. Either way, we'll never know if they could have done anything because they weren't given the opportunity to try.

First, the shuttle can land safely with certain tiles missing. It does that with regularity. There's a sizable safety margin everywhere but the leading edge of the wing. They could have spacewalked somebody to pry a tile or two off of less sensitive areas (e.g. near the OMS engines where a dozen tiles fell off during Columbia's maiden flight) and affixed them to the leading edge of the wing. They wouldn't have been as good as the higher-temperature tiles that are supposed to be there, but they would have been better than a gaping hole. Secondarily, they could have affixed additional metal plating over the affected area, ripped from consoles inside the orbiter and bent to suit, using whatever screws and drills that they had handy. You know, an Apollo-style repair.

Second, had the orbiter been reprogrammed by ground engineers, it might have been possible to land at an angle that takes some of the heat off of the damaged wing, either by favoring the opposite side during the hottest parts of reentry or by adjusting the angle of entry to be steeper, thus A. putting more heat on the bottom tiles and less on the leading edge, and B. dropping them more quickly into an area with greater air density against the wing that might provide better thermal transfer. I'm not sure if that last part would make up for the extra heating due to falling like a rock, but that's for somebody to actually model, not for me to guess about. In any case, they could have experimented with several computer models to find the reentry vector that gave them the best chance at survival instead of just using the standard reentry vector.

Third, in the absence of a way to patch things up, the U.S. military has thousands of launch vehicles that could readily be hacked up to carry a food and power payload into space on short notice. We call them ICBMs. They're theoretically fueled up and ready to launch at a moment's notice, and they have enough thrust to match the shuttle's speed. Rip out the warheads, carefully balance your payload components, fasten them in properly, put the thing up there, match speed with the shuttle, blow the payload in the general direction of the cargo bay, then restart the missile's engines to bring it back down to Earth. Don't get me wrong, hitting the target would make the missile defense tests look like a cakewalk by comparison, but it would also involve precisely known trajectories and two vehicles that can, at least to some extent, adjust course to meet each other.... And of course, there are enough missiles sitting in silos that if you screwed up with the first one, you could launch another one 90 minutes later on the next trip around. It would have been the single most expensive piece of foam in the history of the world, but then again, it was anyway, so....

Finally, there was a Soyuz ISS mission scheduled just two months later that could have been diverted as an emergency return vehicle. Pulled back a few weeks and combined with an ICBM for supply delivery, there is every possibility that they could have gotten the crew home safely, at which time the shuttle could have been landed on autopilot (optionally out in the middle of the ocean or desert if they were sufficiently worried) without risk to the crew.

Either way, regardless of whether it would or would not have been possible to save the crew, if they had put thousands of people to work looking for a solution, there's at least some possibility that they might have found one. As it stood, they didn't, so they couldn't.

This money is used by the universities/colleges to keep tuition lower...

For state colleges, this is correct. That is why in state tuition is lower than out of state tuition, because the state taxes cover a portion of the college costs. I don't know if private colleges get state funding.

Don't forget that pretty much all accredited colleges and universities get not only state funds (if they are officially state-sponsored), but also Federal funds, even if it's only through Federally guaranteed loans and grants made to the students.

However, that doesn't address the real issue: tuition seems to have been rising steadily over the years. When I went to college, all I had to pay was $70 per quarter—the University of California system still prided itself on being "tuition-free", so they called that $70 a "fee". That was 1966. In 2010, they still call what the students pay "fees", but the amount has gone up:

All students enrolling at the CSU pay the systemwide State University Fee which is currently $4,026 per academic year for undergraduate students enrolling in more than 6 units per term and $2,334 for undergraduates enrolling in 6 or fewer units. ... These fees vary by campus. The fee information in this section reflects the combined total of systemwide and campus fees for undergraduates.

Students who are not classified as residents of the state of California must also pay nonresident tuition when enrolling for courses at the CSU. Nonresident tuition is currently assessed at the rate of $372 per semester unit or $248 per quarter unit with an academic year maximum of $11,160.

Source

It looks like in-state tuition is about 4 thousand dollars per year at the University of California. Hmm. That doesn't sound too bad, does it? Aren't these people overreacting just a tad? Also...I remember the chicks as being prettier.

Most of the issues addressed in the summary actually result from the fact that top US universities are insanely expensive.

Student net cost of college is much less than the "sticker price". Just like at a car dealer, price discrimination goes on in college. Those who can pay (or are unwilling to explore the aid options) pay full, those who can't pay less.

This article claims "At public four-year colleges the average net price is about $1,600 (compared with a list price of $7,020). At private four-year colleges, it's about $11,900, compared with a list tuition price of $26,273" and "The net tuition price paid by students at public two-year college has been declining steadily for at least 15 years, after adjusting for inflation. At public and private four-year colleges, the average net price is lower this year than it was five years earlier -- despite significant increases in published prices."

Add to the NPR source now the New York Times

In 2008 I learned I had failed treatment for prostate cancer (72GY radiation & 2.5 years triple hormonal blockade). The disease was metastatic in skeleton and soft tissue with a PSA doubling time of 24 days which is very dangerous. Severe bleeding and bone pain quickly developed. Chemotherapy does not extend survival time for prostate cancer patients, moreover it has serious side effects. There was no clinical trial of DCA for prostate cancer. I decided to self-administer Sodium Dichloroacetate (DCA).

DCA is an orphan drug which for 30+ years has been safely used in the U.S.A. to treat infants born with congenial lactic acidosis; also to treat cerebral ischemia among other conditions, so it is well described in the literature and the side effects are understood. It is not completely benign but is far safer in my opinion than radiation, hormonal blockade or chemotherapy. I had already done my homework and knew to watch for hypoglycemia. I limited my dose to 15mg/kg and took benfotiamine to minimize peripheral neuropathy, R+Lipoic Acid for hepatic support, and arranged regular lab work to monitor liver function.

30 days after initiating DCA the pain in my hips and lower spine ceased. One day unremitting pain, the next day none. 60 days after starting DCA the profuse bleeding from bladder and colon ceased completely. My PSA doubling time dropped from 24 days to 72 months and stabilized.

I developed a little numbness in my toes, which was expected. That is reversible over time. As with many cancer drugs, the evil little cells eventually developed resistance to DCA and I resumed androgen blockade for a time before switching to another self-administered novel treatment. Because of DCA I enjoyed ten wonderful, pain-free months during which I traveled, worked outdoors, got a tan, recovered my strength and my spirits. I have no regrets, not one.

This pattern of temporary remission seems to be a typical experience for early adopters of DCA, although there have been a few reports of complete cures (prostate cancer, sarcoma). About 1,700 patients around the world are currently utilizing DCA as a cancer treatment, off-label. The most organized DCA treatment program is offered by the Medicor Clinic in Canada: http://www.medicorcancer.com/dca-reports.html

Reading about DCA on the web one encounters venomous hostility to self-administered novel treatments for cancer, and to the use of DCA in particular; sadly, one such source has been quoted today on /. A more appropriate reference might be this op-ed in the New York Times, "Patents Over Patients" http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/opinion/01moss.html

Whether it is more ethical to allow patients (and their doctors) to utilize an orphan drug off-label, or to tell them they can't utilize a molecule that may extend or even save their lives is a question for another discussion.

No, they don't.

Speed of an aircraft carrier is classified. Operational depth of submarines are classified. Crush depth of submarines are classified. Speed of the F-22 is classified. Range, speed and max depth of torpedos is classified. What the X-37 is doing up in space, classified.

The US intelligence satellite constellation, all classified.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/health/01iht-01patc.11576407.html
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1033/1

Why is there a high suicide rate on the Reservation? Well it's ten times higher then the US average there. The reasons are poverty, perceived lack of a future, broken homes, alcoholism, no where to go, violence among the peergroup and gang violence.

I'm not "pro-suicide" because I've seen how it destroys families. You can talk about how it's selfish to "keep someone around who is suffering", but I doubt you've know a friend who killed themselves which then spawns three or five attempts within hours.

Actually, it doesn't take alot of torment to contemplate suicide or to act on it, the American Indian population has been wracked by this for about thirty years, folks just kill themselves for seemingly no reason.

Personal experience, good friend, one evening we are out, he says "I need to stop home have dinner with my mom, come back in a half hour." We drop him off, five minutes late, he is dead. No torment, no illness, seemingly happy, none of the suicide warning signs.

Suicidal tendencies aren't about choice, its a mental illness that needs to be properly treated.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/09/us/09suicide.html

Yeah how about that, it's almost as if the Network of roadways has some sort of legal Neutrality...

Sure. As long as your papers are in order, you are properly tagged every where you go, and they can identify you easily with the traffic cameras.

And that's how they plan to fix the Internet.

They photoshopped it away, the original is at http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/05/12/nyregion/12about_CA0/12about_CA0-articleLarge.jpg (mirrored at http://f.lolwh.at/eggy/12about_CA0-articleLarge.jpg in case they remove it).

Maybe they are doing Dr. B. Stanley Pons Dr. Martin Fleischmann experiment in jar all over again

http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/science/050399sci-cold-fusion.html
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/1258

there is a way that is cheaper and more effective.

Family history.

With the exception of (not-nonexistent; but quite rare) conditions caused by a mutation or mutations that originated with you, not earlier in the line, or a fairly small number of well developed genetic tests, most of which you aren't going to get over the counter at CVS, you'll have a better chance of learning about the likely phenotypic consequences of your genes by looking at mommy and daddy

You are correct.

I just went through a stack of articles on this so let me see if I got it right.

There are two kinds of genetic diseases.

First there are the extremely rare diseases which are caused by a single mutation, like Gaucher disease. If it was in your family, you'd almost certainly know it, or you'd at least know that you have a problem in your family, because you would have had relatives who had it. Like most of the rare diseases on that list http://www.pathway.com/more_info/full_list_of_conditions (all of which you can look up in Wikipedia) it's a pretty dramatic disease.

One of them in the news lately was Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, which is worth looking up http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/health/research/11gene.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charcot-Marie-Tooth_disease just because it's so interesting.

Second there are the more common diseases like breast cancer, colorectal cancer, coronary artery disease, diabetes, etc., which most of us will die from.

There are a few single-gene mutations that will usually result in cancer, like the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene for breast cancer, which occur in about 1 or 2% of the population.

But most of the other genes that are associated with those diseases only confer an additional 1% (or less) risk of the disease. That's the big frustration in genetic medicine. The doctor tells you, "You've got a genetic variation that, other things being equal, gives you a 1% increased risk of getting diabetes." How is that information going to change your life in any way?

Scientists think they're doing pretty well if they discover a gene that increases the risk of a common disease by 10%. Now 10% is the *relative* risk. If 5% of the population gets a particular disease, that gene will increase the risk to 5.5%, which is not much greater. So you've found out that you have an increase in the *absolute* risk of 0.5% from that one gene. (But you don't know anything about the dozens of genes affecting that disease that they haven't discovered yet.)

One of the problems with BRCA1 and BRCA2 is that those genes were patented by Myriad Genetics, which was charging $3,000 or more to test for that one gene. Many of the most important genes were patented, and one of the disadvantages of that was that it made it impossible to put together a cheap screen of all the common disease-associated mutations. Myriad just lost a patent lawsuit, and if that decision is upheld, we will be able to get genetic screens with every important known mutation. http://www.aclu.org/free-speech/brca-genes-and-patents But I can't tell from Pathway's web site whether they include BRCA1 and BRCA2 screening in their test.

Another problem is that mutations are caused by a defect in DNA. There are lots of defects. The Pathway test may be testing for one breast cancer mutation, while you have a different mutation somewhere else along the DNA strand that gives a protein with a different but equally damaging defect.

Now that I look at it again, I see that they don't include Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease in their genetic screen. http://www.pathway.com/more_info/full_list_of_conditions (Maybe that's

PowerPoint is just like a jack-in-the-box, waiting to popup and reveal secrets. First a war in Afghanistan and now a war against internet users.

To answer my own question ... here is a link.

The NYT has the images so wrapped up in javascript, plugins, and whatnot that noscript didn't let me get to it. :-P

Google as a company makes money by giving away information. In order to get that information, we selectively let them collect information on us. Our privacy has value to us, so we want to keep it private. But not trading information is against Google's very nature. They make money by disseminating information.

This is why Google can be so careless as they were with Buzz. You could see that lack of regard reflected in Jim Clark's (Google CIO) comments about Buzz. All that valuable private information won't make money so long as it's locked up. If your intimate details are revealed to the web, you might lose sleep over it but Google can only make money out of it.

This works so long as we trust Google, and mostly they've kept that trust. But in Buzz and with Doubleclick they're skirting close to the edge. They want to see how far they can push us, and that's proving a moving target. But even if they do push us too far, look at Yahoo! Even after the revelation they were ratting out their Chinese users to the Chinese government, many people continue to have a Yahoo email account anyway. The same applies to the recent leaking of Microsoft documents showing they will sell info on you to 'law enforcement' (for a fee), but most people still use Windows.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/technology/07yahoo.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10459676-38.html

Don't trust Privacy Law to protect you. In many countries its a feel-good toothless tiger. Take Australia's. Here's a feel-good FAQ with a feel-good quiz, but what it doesn't mention is that if someone violates your privacy you have no legal recourse. The worst the Privacy Commissioner can do is issue a non-binding finding that has no financial, civil or criminal penalty.

http://www.privacy.gov.au/faq/individuals