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Take mormonism..Horrible theology, but an excellent family culture.

Er, no. They have an excellent family culture as long as you adhere to 'Leave it to Beaver' cultural norms.

Kid misbehavin'? Send 'em for some re-edukashun.

Fags next door creeping you out by getting married and adopting unwanted children? Make sure their relationship is prevented from legal recognition and that their kids don't have the legal protections of married parents.

Pro family my ass. If they were truly pro-family then my family would present no threat to them. However as an organization they spent millions last year fighting against the right for myself and my husband's marriage to be recognized. That money could have been spent subsidizing all the kids in CA who will lose their health insurance now that our state budget is circling the drain. Instead of those millions being spent for something good like treating a kids asthma, diabetes, or leukemia, they spent it on divisive PR campaign to keep me a second class citizen. And don't even get me started on how 'pro-family' they are when their kids turn out to be gay.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/us/politics/29cyber.html

Jesus, people, learn to use Google:

In 2002 alone, the last year with figures released by the Social Security Administration, nine million W-2's with incorrect Social Security numbers landed in the suspense file, accounting for $56 billion in earnings, or about 1.5 percent of total reported wages.

Social Security officials do not know what fraction of the suspense file corresponds to the earnings of illegal immigrants. But they suspect that the portion is significant.

''Our assumption is that about three-quarters of other-than-legal immigrants pay payroll taxes,'' said Stephen C. Goss, Social Security's chief actuary, using the agency's term for illegal immigration.

Secondly, he didn't just walk up to them, open his trench coat and say "Pssst, wanna buy some C4 and a Stinger?" They were looking for stuff, so the FBI put forward a supplier.

Actually, the informant, Shahed Hussain, did go around saying things like that, in this case and another one, and federal agents have set up other people like that.

Hussain was a Pakistani immigrant who went undercover for the feds seven years ago to avoid deportation after being convicted of fraud. He was going around to mosques offering people money. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/nyregion/23informant.html And by being a government informant, (1) Hussain was getting paid a lot of money (hundreds of thousands of dollars, as I recall) (2) He got out of prosecution and possibly prison for his own crimes (3) Instead of being deported, he was allowed to stay in the country, which for a lot of immigrants is most important of all.

Hussain was responsible for a conviction in another case http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/nyregion/11plot.html in which he entrapped two men who never had anything to do with terrorism before, and who never could have gotten such weapons before, by loaning them $50,000.

One of the plotters in the current case needed money because his brother was sick. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2009/05/25/2009-05-25_terror_plotter_did_it_for_me_brother.html

Finally, if an FBI agent *had* walked up and said "Pssst, wanna buy some C4 and a Stinger?" and they said yes, then got busted, that'd stand up in court. Offering an illegal item for sale is not legal entrapment.

Well, depending on the circumstances it can be entrapment. If the person had no predisposition to commit a crime, and the FBI agent entices him by using an unreasonable amount of pressure, such as offering a huge amount of money, it can be entrapment. It's a jury question.

Cf. John Delorean's coke bust.

DeLorean was acquitted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_De_Lorean That's a good example of entrapment, because DeLorean was offered an unreasonable amount of money, in desperate circumstances, to do something he would not otherwise do.

Or anybody who gets busted for soliciting prostitution when the prostitute turns out to be a police officer.

If someone solicits a prostitute, that would show predisposition to commit a crime.

In contrast, a person who has never committed an act of terrorism, and has nothing to do with terrorists, who is enticed to take a large amount of money and then informed that it is for terrorist purposes, is entrapped, under the law.

Unfortunately, it's easy to manipulate juries with prejudicial issues, such as the defendant's race and religion. Right now, many jurors will be prejudiced against Muslim Arabs, and it's relatively easy for a prosecutor to get a conviction against them by using scare tactics.

A good example was Hemant Lakhani, whose case was the subject of a good program on This American LIfe. http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1088 One of the jurors agreed that he was entrapped, but she felt pressured by the other jurors to go along. Most people who listen to that broadcast would come to the same conclusion. But Lakhani is in jail for the rest of his life.

Next time around, the time will come for them to be prejudiced against another ethnic group or religion.

What was your race and religion again?

Secondly, he didn't just walk up to them, open his trench coat and say "Pssst, wanna buy some C4 and a Stinger?" They were looking for stuff, so the FBI put forward a supplier.

Actually, the informant, Shahed Hussain, did go around saying things like that, in this case and another one, and federal agents have set up other people like that.

Hussain was a Pakistani immigrant who went undercover for the feds seven years ago to avoid deportation after being convicted of fraud. He was going around to mosques offering people money. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/nyregion/23informant.html And by being a government informant, (1) Hussain was getting paid a lot of money (hundreds of thousands of dollars, as I recall) (2) He got out of prosecution and possibly prison for his own crimes (3) Instead of being deported, he was allowed to stay in the country, which for a lot of immigrants is most important of all.

Hussain was responsible for a conviction in another case http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/nyregion/11plot.html in which he entrapped two men who never had anything to do with terrorism before, and who never could have gotten such weapons before, by loaning them $50,000.

One of the plotters in the current case needed money because his brother was sick. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2009/05/25/2009-05-25_terror_plotter_did_it_for_me_brother.html

Finally, if an FBI agent *had* walked up and said "Pssst, wanna buy some C4 and a Stinger?" and they said yes, then got busted, that'd stand up in court. Offering an illegal item for sale is not legal entrapment.

Well, depending on the circumstances it can be entrapment. If the person had no predisposition to commit a crime, and the FBI agent entices him by using an unreasonable amount of pressure, such as offering a huge amount of money, it can be entrapment. It's a jury question.

Cf. John Delorean's coke bust.

DeLorean was acquitted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_De_Lorean That's a good example of entrapment, because DeLorean was offered an unreasonable amount of money, in desperate circumstances, to do something he would not otherwise do.

Or anybody who gets busted for soliciting prostitution when the prostitute turns out to be a police officer.

If someone solicits a prostitute, that would show predisposition to commit a crime.

In contrast, a person who has never committed an act of terrorism, and has nothing to do with terrorists, who is enticed to take a large amount of money and then informed that it is for terrorist purposes, is entrapped, under the law.

Unfortunately, it's easy to manipulate juries with prejudicial issues, such as the defendant's race and religion. Right now, many jurors will be prejudiced against Muslim Arabs, and it's relatively easy for a prosecutor to get a conviction against them by using scare tactics.

A good example was Hemant Lakhani, whose case was the subject of a good program on This American LIfe. http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1088 One of the jurors agreed that he was entrapped, but she felt pressured by the other jurors to go along. Most people who listen to that broadcast would come to the same conclusion. But Lakhani is in jail for the rest of his life.

Next time around, the time will come for them to be prejudiced against another ethnic group or religion.

What was your race and religion again?

You might want to add that the deposition he lied in was a court case about the very same subject material in which he was the defendant and which he was fined by the court (contempt of court) and lost his law license over after the impeachment was over and he was out of office at the expiration of his term.

Here is another look from a PDF file from the personal page of Dr. Ronald B. Standler

Pittsburgh's always been a strong college town with CMU and Pitt, especially with the extremely strong UPMC hospital group. A few years ago, city leadership finally figured out that if they encouraged those students to stick around post-graduation, they might just have something there. Furthermore, housing prices were depressed in Pittsburgh before the housing bubble, so values increased to more in line with actual worth, as opposed to going far beyond. When the bubble burst, there was little to no drop in values.

Oh, and the NYTimes has been written a couple nice articles lately.

Pittsburgh's always been a strong college town with CMU and Pitt, especially with the extremely strong UPMC hospital group. A few years ago, city leadership finally figured out that if they encouraged those students to stick around post-graduation, they might just have something there. Furthermore, housing prices were depressed in Pittsburgh before the housing bubble, so values increased to more in line with actual worth, as opposed to going far beyond. When the bubble burst, there was little to no drop in values.

Oh, and the NYTimes has been written a couple nice articles lately.

CmdrTaco, you posted this dupe to early as the last one was only posted 8 days ago. You are supposed to wait at least a month before duping. Thank you.

Today's article is more centered on the battle that the author believes is about to transpire between content providers and users. If you're having trouble finding these parts:

Content producers, on the other hand, might not be so thrilled.

He goes on to cite the New York Times effort to provide an open API to their stories as well as Michael Lynton, Sony CEO Troll and wraps up with Obama's often referenced cybersecurity czar (god, I hate typing that):

So far, calls for action such as Lynton's have mostly fallen on deaf ears. But with President Obama due to announce a "cybersecurity czar" this week, there is every indication that the U.S. government is ready to become more directly involved in the workings of the Internet and the Web. According to the White House, the new position will have "broad authority" over the nation's computer networks, both public and private. If that authority includes protecting the economic interests of American Web-based businesses, we could be heading for a helluva scuffle.

I wouldn't call it a dupe as this gives us something new to talk about from a blog.

According to the recent NYT piece on aging yet brilliant physicist Freeman Dyson:

Dyson published a paper titled "Can We Control the Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere?" His answer was yes, and he added that any emergency could be temporarily thwarted with a "carbon bank" of "fast-growing trees." He calculated how many trees it would take to remove all carbon from the atmosphere. The number, he says, was a trillion, which was "in principle quite feasible."

You can disagree with his math, but he does raise an interesting point. Sometimes the best ideas are also the simplest.

As an aside, I noticed that a lot of his critics seem to focus on what happens if you extract too much carbon from the atmosphere - which begs the question of how can Global Warming be an irreversible, extinction-threatening process if it's so 'easy' to fight.

It's Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI) is so low that you end up burning up all your energy profit transporting it. IIRC, it has an EROEI of (at best) 1.5 to 2. Many studies show it has a negative EROEI. (Pimentel et al)

I've read similar research. In fact, I would say this information debunks the "Food vs. Fuel" argument. This article notes that it takes 1.2 gallons of oil to produce a bushel of corn. Therefore, the price of corn is directly linked to the price of oil. It doesn't matter if we use corn as fuel or not. It's not a demand problem, it's a supply problem.

That information is far more damning than a few fuel pumps in cars not designed to run on ethanol in the first place.

HFCS is not precisely the problem.

The problem is mostly that American's caloric intake increased almost 25% between 1970 and 2000, while at the same time we became more sedentary. Any difference that the sort of calories (fat, protein, complex carbs, simple sugars, whatever) might make is swamped by the fact the we just eat too much gorram food and don't get our asses up and moving enough.

A couple hundred extra calories a day above your metabolic needs is going to make you a lard-ass whether you eat them as wheat germ and broccoli, or as bacon double cheeseburgers. (Though the bacon double cheeseburgers will probably still hit you harder in terms of cancer, heart disease, and other fun effects.)

As for Taubes and his famous "What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie" story, he's full of crap.

I know that the attempted move was to schedule I. If it was at schedule IV in the 1980's, or schedule II as the other poster states prior to the attempt to move it to schedule I, either way, I do remember that dentists were using it as an anesthetic back then as well (a big newspaper stink was made about actors using specific dentists (other docs?) because the dentists used it as an anesthetic even in the face of the DEA's war on medical professionals for coca and narcotics at the time, with the DEA war continuing on medical professionals and patients over pain narcotics now), so the other poster may be correct as to the schedule II instead of IV prior to the attempt to move to schedule I.

As for the NYT article about Coca Cola, Coke, and coca leaf extract and cocaine, it's here, but my browser isn't showing any picture of the plant as the article suggests. I do recall seeing the original article in print, with the processing plant either illustrated or actually pictured as part of a building along with barbed wire/fence surrounding it.

So, for the bots, while Coca Cola (Coke, or Classic Coke, not New Coke) still contains coca leaf extract (without the cocaine) for flavoring in its secret formula (and maybe a little beverage addiction thrown in to boost sales), new coke apparently doesn't contain any coca leaf extract, as that would have prevented any move of cocaine/coca to schedule I and still keep Coca Cola (Coke) beverage/soft drink legal. Nor would New Coke contain cocaine. The old original Coca Cola did contain real coca leaf extract including the cocaine part originally and for years after, as evidenced by their own advertising and public formula listing (as well as probable government and/or private laboratory testing/confirmation.

You should at least call them sweat factories. There is a whole city that makes socks:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/24/business/worldbusiness/24china.html?pagewanted=print&position=

Other types of biofuel may be better than corn, but they have their problems too. According to a shocking report by "Time Magazine", "if the world gets even 10% of its energy from these new kinds of crops, most tropical forests will probably disappear."

Not surprisingly, lobbyists for American agribusiness are angry as hell about the conclusions of the EPA study.

Really, the best way to partially fix this nonsense is to make Iowa (and its corn farmers) the last state to participate in both the Republican primary and the Democratic primary. Due to the importance of Iowa as the first state in the presidential primaries (including caucuses), Iowan agribusiness has a stranglehold on American politics, and its politicians do stupid things (like supporting corn-based ethanol) in order to cater to Iowa.

Also, has anyone noticed that no one has mentioned the #1 reason for the growing energy problem and its associated pollution problem? The #1 reason is overpopulation. If we reduced greenhouse-gas emissions by 3% over 10 years but increased the population by 3% over the same period across all nations, then we effectively accomplished nothing.

Can anyone guess why overpopulation is never mentioned by American politicians? Could the concept of overpopulation be too closely tied to illegal immigration?

..if this NY Times editorial is a sign of the times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/opinion/24sun2.htm .

Basically, it says that the ethanol lobbyists are fighting back against the EPA attempting to do its job by actually measuring the effects of ethanol as fuel.

However, surveys of medical professionals indicate that as recently as 1986 infants as old as 15 months were receiving no anesthesia during surgery at most American hospitals.

- N.Y. Times

Thankfully, here in Australia we have cane-sugar! And an obesity level approaching America's... Wait a second!

HFCS is not precisely the problem.

0.6% seems like a good ballpark figure for false positives.This research paper claims 0.6%. This article says "Commercial facial recognition technology ... had a 1 percent false positive rate."

15000 faces/sec * 0.6% false positives = 90 false positives per second.

How many cops does it take to ask 90 people per second to come to the police station to answer a few questions? How many busses does it take to take 90 people per second to the police station?

Once they get there, if it takes five minutes to look at each suspect's papers, run them through the computer, and clear them, that police station waiting room will need to be big enough to hold 27,000 people.

It is so refreshing to read an artice like this. It's worth taking the time to read the whole article. I hope it gets all the attention it deserves and starts a larger discussion.

I think that the idea of spending 4 years at a liberal arts school, learning more for the sake of learning than for anything else, is a beautiful, Utopian idea...it would be wonderful if our society could support each individual taking 4+ years just to learn, not connected to any trade, not contributing to the economy (and not preparing to contribute to it in a very directed or specific sense, at least). The costs are just prohibitive, though, and tuition keeps rising...for those who can pay for it, fine. I was fortunate enough to have parents who saved money from time I was born to be able to pay for me to go to college, and I'm glad I had the education that I did. But my English major has only led to a series of unfulfilling and depressing jobs...the author's experiences resonate with me...To encourage All people to go to a four-year college, though (usually accumulating a sizeable amount of debt in the process) is a very narrow-minded view, divorced from market realities.

Brand expert John Tantillo published a post on his marketing blog a few months ago about the importance of focusing on one's personal brand in a weakened market. In it, he also republished a "30-second personal brand inventory." Not everyone's personal brand is going to mesh with a desk job...

If you read the New York Times movie review, we still don't know how "the original T-800 runs the State of California." Maybe that's for the next movie. :P

Yeah or the EC has decided they want more money. Hmm, our coffers are looking a little low, I know lets sue MS again, hmm which product to chose ..

Actually, it wasn't the EU who initiated this case. Opera, backed by Mozilla, Google, and others, got the EU to investigate what they argued were actions that violated antitrust law.

While I don't always agree with MS's practices, having a competition hearing at a time when the regional experts are unavailable is stupid.

Actually, none of the people Microsoft claimed to be worried about not attending never attend these hearings anyway. Hearings are usually attended by staff level personell in the first place. The hearing would also be attended by the European Commissioner for Competition.

I think a reasonable request has been turned down for political reasons.

A reasonable request for something no one else gets granted. Right. You are buying into Microsoft's bullshit.

Instead of blindly believing Microsoft's lies, check out the comments by Thomas Vinje and commission spokesman Jonathan Todd. It turns out that Microsoft is just lying and stalling, probably hoping for the current competition commissioner to retire later this year and have a more Microsoft-friendly person appointed.

got this from one of the related links at the bottom of TFA:

According to the person, Microsoft will argue that Internet browsing is inseparable from the Windows operating system. Microsoft will also emphasize that consumers can download and use any competing browser with Windows, and that Internet Explorer's share of the browser market has been falling steadily.

so thats part of their argument? "You see, we're loosing, so that means it's ok for us to cheat!"

here is the article (May 8th)

Are you kidding me? Have you been paying attention at all? Obama is continuing all of the bad policies of George W. Bush and adding a few new ones for good measure.

Don't believe me? Check out this little tidbit:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/us/politics/21obama.html?_r=2&emc=eta1

Obama is consider locking up "potential" terrorists without trial. Remember that recently potential terrorists have been broadened to include anyone who has voted third party, been pro-life or pro-guns, or disagrees with government policies.

For those of you who still have rose-colored glasses regarding President Obama, you need to start paying attention. As good as he sounds in his speeches, he is rapidly moving our nation toward fascism.

"Yes, bush was a disaster, but if you expect Obama to be any better, you're fooling yourself." After reading the article below, I'm inclined to believe you. The US is sliding downhill fast . . . http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/us/politics/21obama.html?_r=2

mostly its the urban crime. it seems new york city cleaned up its crime act from the 80s and 90s but the hudson river cities have lagged, and are still stuck in that crime wave. but poughkeepsie is not as bad as newburgh. newburgh is scary. newburgh in fact just knocked one out of the ballpark in the sad state of urban crime in hudson river cities by giving us homegrown terrorists:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/nyregion/22terror.html

plus poughkeepsie has that big beautiful old railroad bridge they're opening this year to pedestrians for the 400 year celebration of henry hudson's arrival in 1609. pouhgkeepsie will have its renaissance soon enough

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/nyregion/25metjournal.html

mostly its the urban crime. it seems new york city cleaned up its crime act from the 80s and 90s but the hudson river cities have lagged, and are still stuck in that crime wave. but poughkeepsie is not as bad as newburgh. newburgh is scary. newburgh in fact just knocked one out of the ballpark in the sad state of urban crime in hudson river cities by giving us homegrown terrorists:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/22/nyregion/22terror.html

plus poughkeepsie has that big beautiful old railroad bridge they're opening this year to pedestrians for the 400 year celebration of henry hudson's arrival in 1609. pouhgkeepsie will have its renaissance soon enough

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/nyregion/25metjournal.html

Welcome to the wonderful world of state propaganda, my fellow comrade! You see our great and glorious leader Obama is planning a sin tax on sodas and therefor he has to have the puppet known as the media demonize them first, so as to make him a hero of the people when he makes them too expensive for the poor to have. Kinda like how P2P is the cause of all leaks of state secrets instead of moronic officials in the party putting Kazaa on a government laptop.

So enjoy dear comrade. We live in a wondrous and glorious state where there are no abuses of power and every tax is for our own good. You and I are but children who cannot be trusted to make such descions for ourselves about what to consume, so our glorious leader and the state shall take such difficult decisions away from us. And the entire time their great communications arm, the main stream media, will cheer and tell us how great everything is! Isn't that nice comrade?

Sufficient demand for a service will create a market. Maybe, instead of trying to plug the extraordinarily leaky dike holding back vice, we should embrace, tax, and regulate it. Craigslist prostitution ads aren't a problem per se: they merely constitute another signal telling us it's time to re-examine some of our old prejudices.

Microsoft is moneyhatting its way into the scene

Indeed. The funny thing is that even though they push Silverlight, major sites drop it and go back to Flash/AIR.

After MLB move reported a while ago on Slashdot, New York Times dropped their Silverlight reader and unveiled the Times Reader 2, which is AIR based.

At the same token, if government (or corporations for that matter) fail to provide for more than a single lane of traffic, then there are going to be traffic jams. However, if the road is wide and broad, then the line of long haul truckers are no longer an issue. Likewise, if there is fiber to every home in the US, suddenly the packet hogs are no longer an issue.

The US has continuously fallen behind in broadband rankings, as corporations wallow in their greed. The fact is, government (as Cory starts to allude to) is no longer getting quid quo pro from governmental entities. And, as we have seen from the recent bailouts here in the US, even demanding that the average taxpayer support their avarice. It's unfortunate that the notion of conservatism is being shredded as the Republicans seem unable to call corporations out for their dishonesty and lies, which is evident to anyone who looks closely.

It's 35 not 42. http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/05/19/19climatewire-white-house-proposes-new-stricter-national-f-12208.html Helps to do some research.

The Fiction Circus article linked to from the slashdot summary isn't as good as the NY Times article that it links to.

This is big news for people in publishing [...]

No, not really. One reason it's not big news is that scribd is currently too small a commercial entity to make any difference in this big marketplace. Another reason it's not big news is that other people are already selling digital books without DRM. Fictionwise and Baen are two examples that come to mind.

So, really, writers have absolutely no incentive to deal with Amazon anymore as their "bookstore," especially since the next generation of ebook readers will surely be touchscreen netbooks, making the Kindle look like a Tiger handheld next to the future's Game Boy.

Well, no. Amazon is a huge, profitable business that readers know about. Scribd isn't. That's a pretty strong incentive for writers to deal with Amazon -- or, more accurately, it's a pretty strong incentive for their publishers to. The author generally doesn't make any decisions about the distribution channels through which a book gets to the public.

You mean kind of like exposing the identity of an active duty undercover CIA agent?

Plame being a CIA agent was an open secret. Also, leaking her name was — whether legal or illegal — a deliberate act. Whoever did it, knew, what they were doing. On contrast, Biden did not mean to reveal the secret. He simply has demonstrated himself to be a fool again, who does not know, what he is doing or saying... His plagiarist prime is decades behind him — he is simply an old fool now, whose mind has long deteriorated either from health decline or just arrogance...

Its been clear since the vice-presidential debates last fall, that having Sarah Palin be "within heartbeat from presidency" would've been a lot safer for the US and the world... But hey, how much was spent on her clothing was deemed more important, than the giant errors in his foreign policy "experience" and other problems.

On March 16, 2007, at these hearings about the disclosure, Waxman read a statement about Plame's CIA career that had been cleared by CIA director Gen. Michael V. Hayden and the CIA, stating that she was undercover and that her employment status with the CIA was classified information prohibited from disclosure under Executive Order 12958.

Note that at the time she was exposed, she was still considered an undercover operative. And here's another source:

...whether administration officials had illegally disclosed the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer.

She was still active duty, she could have gone undercover when a new assignment came up, and Cheney and Co. leaked her name anyway to the press for political purposes. And yet somehow my comment above is getting flamebait and troll mods for pointing this out. The words "double standards" come to mind. When Republicans lie and cheat and steal, it's for our protection, when Democrats do it, it's because they're traitorous liberals who hate america. Hypocrisy.

Well, "cannibalism" still occurs in "modern" times. The most infamous incidents of cannibalism occurred in China from 1966 until 1976. According to a report by the "New York Times" in 1993, "At some high schools, students killed their principals in the school courtyard and then cooked and ate the bodies to celebrate a triumph over 'counterrevolutionaries,' the documents report. Government-run cafeterias are said to have displayed bodies dangling on meat hooks and to have served human flesh to employees.

'There are many varieties of cannibalism,' declares one report, 'and among them are these: killing someone and making a late dinner of it, slicing off the meat and having a big party, dividing up the flesh so each person takes a large chunk home to boil, roasting the liver and eating it for its medicinal properties, and so on.'

The documents suggest that at least 137 people, and probably hundreds more, were eaten in Guangxi Province in southern China in the late 1960's. In most cases, many people ate the flesh of one corpse, so the number of cannibals may have numbered in the thousands."

According to a report by "Time Magazine" in 2001, "The atrocities took many forms, according to documents. One report refers to 'eating people as an after-dinner snack . . .barbecuing people's livers . . .banqueting on human meat.' The same document matter-of-factly relates specific tales of depravity. 'On May 14, 1968,' it says, 'a group of 11, led by the Wei brothers, captured a man named Chen Guorong and killed him with a big knife before cutting out his liver. They shared the human meat with 20 participants.' The same month Wu Shufang, a teacher at the Wuxuan Middle School, was beaten to death; her liver was roasted and eaten. During 1968, 91 members of the Communist Party in Guangxi were expelled on charges that they were involved in cannibalism, but none was severely punished."

To this day, some of the cannibals still hold political power in the Chinese government.

The next question is, what does REM sleep bring? It's commonly believed to be the required / most beneficial part of a person's sleep, but what specifically occurs during that period to, for example, update the type of memory you mention?

No, the most essential type of sleep is slow-wave sleep, which is even mentioned in TFA.

I've done some computational modelling of the cerebral cortex, and my hypothesis (page 7/139) is that slow-wave sleep is used to re-strengthen competitive connections between cortical columns, restoring the ability to think clearly.

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/05/magazine/awakening-to-sleep.html?sec=health&pagewanted=all

I wish you were right about this. After all evidence is building that the US torture policies have lead to many well documented deaths and have been authorized at the highest level. Yet, that doesn't mean that Bush wasn't elected president (although technically the first time around he may not have been).

Will be interesting to see if there are enough hardcore dead-enders still around on /. to get this modded as flamebait.

...no offense implied to your post, with which I agree...but seriously mods, marking the fact that women don't like to be told that they are fat as "informative"? Are you serious? Let's mark posts that tell us that the sun is probably coming up tomorrow as informative as well.

...and no ladies, the jeans don't make your ass look fat...the dozen donuts that you ate this weekend make your ass look fat. ;)



BTW, I tried to comment here:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/what-do-women-want-in-a-laptop/

...but my thoughts are still awaiting moderation (facists)...so I will repeat myself:

In general, men and women *do* tend to look for diferent things in gadgets. Let's not pretend otherwise. That is not to say that all men are knowledgeable about such things or that all women are not, but seriously, when arguing a point about women not being technically clueless and Dell being insulting and/or condescending, perhaps they could get a better spokesperson. Seriously, did you folks read her comments?

If the netbook is great for using the Internet and has a long memory,

Long memory? Okay marketing "expert", perhaps you should step out of the spotlight now...since you have just reinforced the stereotypes that you are trying to dispel.

$0.02

- Scuba

Apologies for the reply to self, but I tried a few more links which did not resolve, but the current IHT landing page says it all: "The most recent IHT articles can now be found by searching NYTimes.com. We are in the process of moving IHT articles dating back to 1991 over to NYTimes.com. Thanks for your patience as we complete this transition."

Interesting. I got quite upset with the IHT-NYT change a while ago for exactly this reason: many bookmarks and links to news articles that I had made throughout the years evaporated overnight, making me regret not printing or saving the text of those articles when I had the chance. But apparently the NYT has fixed it now. Crampton links to two articles of a scoop he had a few years ago, and they resolve to a new page. And a bookmark that I have on the computer I'm working on now has the same thing, suggesting that they must have transferred their news archive to the new site.

The original bookmark: http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/24/opinion/edcardenas.php now resolves to http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/opinion/24iht-edcardenas.1.20395821.html

I'll try it later with my other bookmarks, but it seems like they have responded to the criticism well.

Anything but DerriAir.

This reminds me of the proposed new state motto for Wisconsin: "Come Smell Our Fresh Dairy Air". But the popular winner in the statewide vote was "Eat Cheese or Die!"

Unfortunately the state declined both of these suggestions and decided to stick with the old slogan, "America's Dairyland".

You've got your story posted on the NYTimes website and here at slashdot. So you've got your name and that particular search term listed on two sites with very high Google pagerank with in effect pushes the other links down. This seems like a good start in making it harder to pirate the books in question.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/us/politics/14photos.html?_r=1&ref=politics [nytimes.com]"

I agree with you that this is the case on most issues, but in this situation, this reversal of decisions was just good common sense.

It's starting to not look a whole lot different:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/us/politics/14photos.html?_r=1&ref=politics

This is the reaction sequence that's being proposed here: link.

Previously, the sticking point was that there was no logical way for the sugar (ribose) to spontaneously attach to the base. Organisms use enzymes to transfer a ribose phosphate group to a base, but of course, in the time before enzymes could be coded for, that wouldn't be possible. This sequence neatly sidesteps that, and also provides a more logical reason for phosphate to be involved; it is the reagent that attacks that tricyclic pyrimidosugar, breaking the bond to form ribocytidine phosphate.

Coincidentally, UV light deaminates cytosine to form uracil, which is where that second base comes from. This is why DNA uses thymine instead of uracil, by the way- as the archival storage medium for our genetic information, it would be unwise to have one base easily interconvert into another. The shorter expected lifetime of RNA means the interconversion is not a concern, though.

There is no ... legit gun dealers in the US who are selling fully automatic rifles and RPGs etc in mass quantities to be smuggled to Mexico. That is just so ludicrous as to be mega laughable. It's a stupid...

Actually, many guns sold in the US are turning up involved in crimes in Mexico.

Sorry, I get confused with one of his essays: Unhapppy Meals. I haven't read the book I mentioned, although I think it covers some similar topics. It's only the first chapter that's free.

They must put the funds in escrow until they have settled their final appeals. The float on $1.5 billion is significant, so they are out something regardless of their final verdict. "The company must write a bank guarantee for the fine right away, though that guarantee is held in a bank account until appeals are exhausted, a process that could take years." ref