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you realize, of course, that that list translates into not being allowed to criticize the chinese government, right?

you can think of gw bush govt anyway you want... actually, that's the whole point: you can sit here on slashdot or anywhere else and criticize gw bush and his govt all you want

but if you were to criticize the govt in china?

you would be raise the attention of these nice people

so at best, you are naive, at worst, you are seriously deluded about what really goes on in china

basically, you see the innocuous language above, "to protect chinese sovereignty" etc, and take those bureaucratic words at their least harmful interpretation

oh if only that were the truth

but i am afraid you are quite mistaken about what really goes in china with censorship

go ahead, search the internet, do some research on the subject if you don't believe me. confirm what i am saying via multiple sources from multiple countries

and keep in mind while you are doing that research that someone in china could not be doing the same thing: their access is filtered and watched

next time, please educate yourself a little before you start screaming high holy moral indignation

you're just revealing your own ignorance about reality

The entire nam war was one big my lai, it was based on high elected official lies, backed by military "leaders", the alleged tonkin gulf attack which didn't happen. The current iraq war is another case, based 100% on lies-saddam-no attack on NYC,no ties to al queda, no WMD of note, etc. All lies, known about in advance. Every guy there right now is not following his oath, if he took one and is aware of the situation now. And every member in Congress who is not right this second working towards impeachment of the high level end-times crusader whackjob creeps who are pushing this current disaster are *also* violating their oaths. The full senate report was issued last week. With absolutely no ambiguity it says the whole deal is one big fat lie. So? Where next? It's just a "war" just mass screaming death and misery and insane profits for the globalists. Where are those oaths now?

One guy is at least trying, he actually takes his oath seriously, and can *read*. He knows he has been lied to, so, he acted according to his oath. And as expected the career oath breaking dotmil crud are trying to break him.

Nuremberg, just following orders is no excuse

Before it is too late, before they pull off another reichstagg fire phony terror attack

Don't think this will save the situation, it has just made it worse, yet people for some mysterious reason still think this will work.

No, it won't work. The system is broken. Until those demons are in prison and the whole system is cleansed of the filth, it will just keep getting worse.

I love www.electoral-vote.com, but I think the New York Times deserves a lot of credit for their Flash-based election guide:

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/washington/2006ELECTION GUIDE.html

The by-population version is insightful in a very Edward Tufte-esque sort of way.

Evolution doesn't work that way. First off, human evolution became stalled the moment we started making our environment adapt to us, instead of adapting to it. So saying "humans will evolve into X in Y years" is innacurate - it assumes that we'll start changing to suit the environment we're living in by then, instead of doing the opposite.

Now, a human growing up in a low-g environment might certainly face developmental problems. Ie, you hit growth spurts in puberty and reach a height of 7 feet tall. But that isn't evolution, as there is no genetic componant.

When the Democrats are also demonstrated to have systematically abused the voting apparatus to rig elections, then there will be just as large an uproar.

Umm... you've never heard of the city of Chicago and the "Democratic Machine"? Over 70 years of outright fraud, including swinging the 1960 presedential election in favor of Kennedy (ballot stuffing to the tune of 91% of the vote!). Newer crimes and misdemeanors by the Chicago Machine are uncovered almost weekly, with Mayor Daley and Governer Rod Blagojevich sacrificing thier staff to Federal investiagors.

Republicans or Democrats, the party in power will always have players with few scruples that try to rig the election process. The answer? Always vote against the incumbent, no matter what their party affiliation. You'll be better off.

Sorry for the karma whoring but here's an RSS link to the site that doesn't require registration and the no-ads no pictures version.

Pretend you're a news feed or printer and you too can read stories without inhibiting log-ins or advertisements!

Now, for my two cents, I like WoW. But I loved Star Wars Galaxies pre-CU. I had two accounts in that game. It had this special kind of social aspect to it where people were dependent on even the most mundane professions. On top of that, you could level by dancing in a cantina all day, simply chatting with people. The fighting classes had to come in to relieve fatigue and wounds. It was a great system that, in my opinion, could have been more popular than WoW.

In WoW, fighting is the only thing that gains prestige. All the best weapons are looted, there is no dependence on non-fighting classes nor is there such a thing. I think that if anything is going to surpass WoW at this point, it has to be something that so far out there that it's not even well defined yet.

One thing is sure, it needs to accomodate both fighting classes and socializing classes and keep them equally important.

Sorry for the karma whoring but here's an RSS link to the site that doesn't require registration and the no-ads no pictures version.

Pretend you're a news feed or printer and you too can read stories without inhibiting log-ins or advertisements!

Now, for my two cents, I like WoW. But I loved Star Wars Galaxies pre-CU. I had two accounts in that game. It had this special kind of social aspect to it where people were dependent on even the most mundane professions. On top of that, you could level by dancing in a cantina all day, simply chatting with people. The fighting classes had to come in to relieve fatigue and wounds. It was a great system that, in my opinion, could have been more popular than WoW.

In WoW, fighting is the only thing that gains prestige. All the best weapons are looted, there is no dependence on non-fighting classes nor is there such a thing. I think that if anything is going to surpass WoW at this point, it has to be something that so far out there that it's not even well defined yet.

One thing is sure, it needs to accomodate both fighting classes and socializing classes and keep them equally important.

Just as a follow-up to this post, for posterity:

Click here

To quote Ace Ventura - "MAN I'm tired of being right!" ;)

The article meanders around without making much of a point, but this seems to be the gist of it:

They [Microsoft]haven't complained about what's going on, and to be honest, I think these Mac developments have been the best press that they've received in a long time. Negativity is abundant on the PC side of things because of Vista issues, but everyone seems thrilled with Microsoft's appearance on the Mac scene.

He goes on to say:

In contrast, Apple doesn't seem to be in any hurry about getting OS X to run on any other machines besides the ones that they make.

Of course Microsoft is unconcerned, because they make money by selling Windows. They are not a PC OEM. Apple has a different business model. The company makes most of its money selling hardware. The well-integrated OS and hardware are what coax consumers to buy Macs. You can't have one without the other and still call it a Mac. As us old fogies remember, Apple tried letting other companies build Macs, and it was not exactly a rousing success for Apple. Sales of clones ate into Apple's market without building overall market share.

Boot Camp and the various virtualization technologies are giving Windows users the opportunity to buy Apple hardware and compare the Mac experience with the Windows experience on the same machine, with no special technical expertise required. So far the results have been overwhelmingly positive for Apple. There's a reason Apple was confident enough to bring a x86 processor into Macintosh hardware again (it's been done before). Apple knows that if customers compare Windows to OS X head-to-head, OS X will gain users. If even a small percentage of new Mac purchasers make OS X the primary OS on their Mac, OS X will gain marketshare.

So far the strategy appears to be working. The low "green" rating for Apple is unfortunate, but it's not going to keep people from buying Macs. Dell, the company Jobs considers as Apple's biggest rival, isn't exactly kicking ass, and Microsoft's troubles with Vista are well-known.

How is it that Microsoft is beating Apple at its own game?

If Google really does this, can you imagine what the spammers will try?

Maybe they'll buy those blink ads on the radio. Maybe spam email will start containing sound clips. Maybe they'll distribute ring tones with high-pitched noises that make the right hash value.

On the other hand, maybe everyone will just get Blue Bunny ads whenever the ice cream truck rolls by.

The fact that the names were part of an ongoing investigation is utterly meaningless because the FBI will not tell us who they were investigating or what they were being investigated for. What you are saying, ultimately, is that you trust the FBI to do what is right regardless of your ability to discern what they are actually doing. The lack of transparency in these kind of programs is what is truly alarming, not the fact that they exist at all. Granting legitimacy to a formerly secret data sharing program effectively grants legitimacy to any program like it. And since the burden of discretion is left up to a narrow channel of the federal government without any public, judicial, or legislative oversight, you will not have an opportunity to complain about it when a related (and likely escalated) program goes into effect, because you will never hear about it unless a ballsy investigative journalist picks up on clues, harasses the government for details, or gets a call from an inside whistleblower. Furthermore, it would be naiive to assume the FBI were only interested in investigating terror suspects -- the federal government has a rich history of infiltrating and conducting surveilance on student dissidents and campus organization. Just last year the Pentagon put the UCSC activist group "Students Against War" on a Credible Threat list...for protesting military recruiters at a campus job fair.

There seems to be a lot of useless technology in the news today. The New York Times is covering a breaking story about downloading movies http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/technology/31bas ics.html?ref=technology.

Uh, because they contain harmful and dangerous pesticides?

Now explain why the democratic, free-market US not only bans marijuana (which has never been shown to be harmful or addictive), but even bans forms of hemp that do not contain the hallucinogenic substance (THC) in marijuana.

The decision to press formal charges followed days of widening public skepticism about the true extent of the suspected plot, first disclosed on Aug. 10, when the police warned that conspirators had planned to commit mass murder on what one officer called an "unimaginable scale." The information disclosed Monday gave a sense of the scope of the investigation... --SNIP-- ...the credibility of the allegations will not be tested until the accused are taken before a jury, in a trial that is not expected to begin for at least two years

Customers will be able to download an unlimited number of Universal songs to their computer and one other device. They will not be able to transfer those songs onto a compact disc, and they must visit the site at least once a month to maintain access to their music.

If you don't like their policy, don't work around it. Let them know their policy stinks and should be corrected.

I personally hate the NYTimes. I don't want to register and log in to see a new web page, so I don't go there. They don't get my eyeballs for their ads, and google news almost always has the same story somewhere else.

They have a ton of email addresses listed at:
    http://nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/infoservd irectory.html

Some include:
publisher@nytimes.com
managing-editor@nytimes.com
circulation@nytimes.com

Be nice if you write them, explain nicely why you hate them and their policies.

Considering that the New York Times has itself recommended BugMeNot, I think that's perhaps not the greatest example of slashdot's "attitude."

If you dont like their product/service dont buy/use it. Shop elsewhere.

Dear sirs, I'm sure this was an oversight, and probably not an intentional one. There are several people in the world, myself included, that do not use Windows or Macintosh for their computer operating system. However, we still use the internet for much of our news. We use an operating system called Linux. Your website does not allow itself to be browsed using Linux. According to this page on your site: http://video.on.nytimes.com/faq/inde...d50be95e3:7 8f1 only Windows and Macintosh are supported. It would not be difficult to change this and allow more potential users to appreciate the quality of your product. I refer you to this page on the BBC web site as an example: http://www.bbc.co.uk/accessibility/ I hope you will take this into consideration. Thank you.

I'd love to see where your 36% is coming from. I am a college student, but both my parents work in education so I have *some* knowledge of how things work outside my own school. In my experience, both from my school and everything I've heard about where my parents work as well as where my friends are going to school, college bookstores are violently for-profit. For example, my school's bookstore is no longer run by the school itself, but by Barnes and Nobel (someone else in this thread said B&N's college stores pay for their megastores - I don't know enough to comment and would like to see proof, but I could imagine that math working out...)

And I can speak directly both to meaningless changes in editions and to the shoddy quality of books. As mentioned elsewhere on this thread, I've had professors hand out sheets explaining how Version 6 of a textbook is different from Version 7 (the answer being that some essays were moved around but, other than that, no changes were made). Likewise, having been in high school far too recently, textbooks always had tougher binding, at the expense of not looking quite as pretty as the books we 'get' to buy in college.

In addition, your argument that the stores' main complaint is students returning books doesn't ring true to me. The store buys enough books for most of the class to buy them and, with used books, tries to have enough on hand to not run out. Having the extra stock at the end of the buying cycle (as you say, about two weeks into class) cannot possibly be that much less obnoxious than getting returns. Having worked at bookstores (admitedly, not a college store) returns are EASY and, even if I had to go through however many hundreds of returns the college stores undoubtedly get, that cannot possibly be a big dent in their profits.

I'm gonna echo a sentiment I've seen elsewhere on this page: textbooks and the texbook industry is, more often than not, a scam. Now, I have no direct evidence of this, but everything in my experience - the 'updates' which only move things around, the bullshit shrink-wraping to include unneeded things to returns are impossible, the return policies of the school stores themselves, the quality of the actual textbooks - leads me to that conclusion. In addition, everything I've read about textbooks furthers this conclusion.

I just reread your post. In all fairness, you never said that the textbook industry *isn't* a big moneymaking scam. But the tone of your post, specifically that college stores are non-profit (ha!) led to this post. Sorry if it was a bit rambling...
-Trillian
PS - Links:
Students Find $100 Texbooks Cost $50 Overseas (needs reg but bugmenot works) http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/21/education/21BOOK .html?ex=1156910400&en=9c634fe677e1fe19&ei=5070
Textbook Publisher Kickback Scam?
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/11/26/eveningn ews/main585832.shtml
Just What The Professor Ordered (needs reg, talks about 5 publishers control 80% of the market)
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F3 0D15FB35550C758DDDA00894DD404482

I'd love to see where your 36% is coming from. I am a college student, but both my parents work in education so I have *some* knowledge of how things work outside my own school. In my experience, both from my school and everything I've heard about where my parents work as well as where my friends are going to school, college bookstores are violently for-profit. For example, my school's bookstore is no longer run by the school itself, but by Barnes and Nobel (someone else in this thread said B&N's college stores pay for their megastores - I don't know enough to comment and would like to see proof, but I could imagine that math working out...)

And I can speak directly both to meaningless changes in editions and to the shoddy quality of books. As mentioned elsewhere on this thread, I've had professors hand out sheets explaining how Version 6 of a textbook is different from Version 7 (the answer being that some essays were moved around but, other than that, no changes were made). Likewise, having been in high school far too recently, textbooks always had tougher binding, at the expense of not looking quite as pretty as the books we 'get' to buy in college.

In addition, your argument that the stores' main complaint is students returning books doesn't ring true to me. The store buys enough books for most of the class to buy them and, with used books, tries to have enough on hand to not run out. Having the extra stock at the end of the buying cycle (as you say, about two weeks into class) cannot possibly be that much less obnoxious than getting returns. Having worked at bookstores (admitedly, not a college store) returns are EASY and, even if I had to go through however many hundreds of returns the college stores undoubtedly get, that cannot possibly be a big dent in their profits.

I'm gonna echo a sentiment I've seen elsewhere on this page: textbooks and the texbook industry is, more often than not, a scam. Now, I have no direct evidence of this, but everything in my experience - the 'updates' which only move things around, the bullshit shrink-wraping to include unneeded things to returns are impossible, the return policies of the school stores themselves, the quality of the actual textbooks - leads me to that conclusion. In addition, everything I've read about textbooks furthers this conclusion.

I just reread your post. In all fairness, you never said that the textbook industry *isn't* a big moneymaking scam. But the tone of your post, specifically that college stores are non-profit (ha!) led to this post. Sorry if it was a bit rambling...
-Trillian
PS - Links:
Students Find $100 Texbooks Cost $50 Overseas (needs reg but bugmenot works) http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/21/education/21BOOK .html?ex=1156910400&en=9c634fe677e1fe19&ei=5070
Textbook Publisher Kickback Scam?
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/11/26/eveningn ews/main585832.shtml
Just What The Professor Ordered (needs reg, talks about 5 publishers control 80% of the market)
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F3 0D15FB35550C758DDDA00894DD404482

That's just a link to a Roland the Plogger blog, who doesn't understand the problem. Read the New York Times story, which has important facts the Plogger missed, like the fact that this has been happening for the past five years. The local paper, the Register-Guard, has a good story. "On the way down, the camera lens illuminates a nighttime blizzard, a flurry of broken chunks of plankton called "marine snow." This is evidence of what caused this year's hypoxia - an onslaught of nutrients brought to shallow coastal waters by wind-driven currents, whose decomposing structures suck up available oxygen."

This is no mysterious dramatic event. It happens every year, but this year, it's worse than usual, possibly because ocean currents have shifted due to weather.

Here is a brief summary from the first few paragraphs of the the carefully-written New York Times Story

But it is no longer just chatter in the ether. What started online almost two decades ago as a means of swapping child pornography has transformed in recent years into a more complex and diversified community that uses the virtual world to advance its interests in the real one.

Today, pedophiles go online to seek tips for getting near children -- at camps, through foster care, at community gatherings and at countless other events. They swap stories about day-to-day encounters with minors. And they make use of technology to help take their arguments to others, like sharing online a printable booklet to be distributed to children that extols the benefits of sex with adults.

The community's online infrastructure is surprisingly elaborate. There are Internet radio stations run by and for pedophiles; a putative charity that raised money to send Eastern European children to a camp where they were apparently visited by pedophiles; and an online jewelry company that markets pendants proclaiming the wearer as being sexually attracted to children, allowing anyone in the know to recognize them.

Any crime involving more than one person begins with "chatting" of one kind or another, and yes, "horror" is the right word for men telling each other exactly how to accomplish intercourse with a seven- or eight-year-old girl.

The article that you describe as sensationalistic was called "world-class journalism" by Alex Jones, the director of Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. This quotation is from the link I provided in my first post. The NYT article requires registration to read and may soon cost money, but slashdot readers who read it may decide for themselves whether its contents are merely sensationalistic.

What I meant by "ten-year prison sentences" was that simply that the threat of punishment deters crime. I do not propose that these sentences be handed out without due process. But I do think that a person convicted of knowingly hosting a private, secret website that allows people to plan and carry out crimes against children should go to prison. Under our system, such a conviction would not be easy to obtain, nor should it be.

I tried to distinguish between protected free speech, such as a letter to the editor of a newspaper or a website posting defending the right to read and distribute child pornography--on the one hand--and conspiratorial use of the mail, telephone service, or Internet to carry out a crime, on the other. Some war protesters once blew their noses into an American flag in front of a marine recruiter in an attempt to provoke him--a protected, if disgusting, act of free expression. Had they met in secret to make explicit plans to blow up the recruiting office and took steps to carry these plans out--that would not be protected speech.

You should not have construed what I wrote to suggest that I want to abandon the Bill of Rights. I explicitly said otherwise. I do not believe we need to "balance" our rights against the need to fight crime, but I do believe we need to fight crime. Many kiddie porn laws are probably unconstitutional, as you suggest. For example, it would probably be possible to ban Nabokov's Lolita under some of them on the grounds that the author may seem to be "approving" of underage sex. On the other hand, we can strengthen laws to stop people like this currently over-publicized creep from Thailand (trebly a creep for confessing to a crime he would have liked to have committed but probably didn't) from lurking around Internet back alleys exchanging information about child care centers that hire men without background checks.

The founding fathers had good reason to fear the government and fear the police. And yet, they needed government, and they needed police, as do we. The Times story shows why the Internet needs better governing and better policing.

... when it's really the increases in underwater volcanic activity that are mostly to blame.

See Warming of the world ocean, 1955-2003, published in the Geophysical Research Letters.

The dead zone off the Oregon coast, last season's record-breaking hurricane season, the 2004 super-quake in the Indian Ocean, changes in long-standing weather patterns (because of the change in heat distribution in the oceans) - all are signals of increased techtonic activity.

Israel bears most of the blame for the latest crisis in Lebanon. They launched an invasion on the pretense of searching for two captured soldiers, even though they themselves were holding hundreds (thousands?) of captured hezbollah soldiers

How does total garbage like this get marked as insightful?

Jesus Christ, people, these are recent historical events. A matter in full view, and amply recorded by a variety of sources. This isn't like digging up old records of the Punic Wars or something, it happened just this fucking year.

They didn't launch an invasion on "the pretense" that you state. Since you seem to have missed it, Hezbollah *launched rockets* at a *city* in Israel, and then ambushed an IDF patrol with ATGMs, killing three soldiers and taking two prisoner.

That's not a minor little border skirmish like occasionally happened in Berlin during the Cold War. When you're *launching artillery rockets* at another nation's population centers, there's a word for that: war. When you do something of that sort, you're taking the gloves off. And I think everyone, from the pinkest neo-Marxist socialist feeb, to the most rabid big-L Libertarian nutbat, can agree that one of the *foremost responsibilities* of *any* government is to actually protect its citizens from attack, especially by NGOs firing free-flight artillery rockets from the other side of some line on a map. And *despite* that simple fact, Israel has put up with that kind of thing from Hezbollah for *years*, ever since it withdrew from Southern Lebanon in the first place.

To say this was a reaction to nothing more than the kidnapping of two soldiers is a grotesque and bald-faced mendaciousness on your part.

And even if that's *all* it was, Israel would still have been entirely justified in going after Hezbollah. Nation-states get to do that kind of thing when their citizens are attacked and kidnapped by foreign powers.

it was against the wrong people entirely

Again, bullshit.

Take a look at this. Clicky the before and after buttons. Turn the labels on.

Note the scale. The photo covers an area about 1000 yards on a side. Plug your local neighborhood into Google Maps, zoom into the 500' level, and mentally compare.

By and large, if it was a Hezbollah building, they flattened it. If it's civilian, it's still standing. This neighborhood was *Hezbollah headquarters*, and the area of the picture is small enough that even if Israel had turned the entire area into rubble, that would still represent a targeted attack on a tiny portion of the city itself. If there was one place Israel would have bombed into complete oblivion, it would have been this.

But they didn't do that.

Now let's be realistic for a moment,

I reject that comment with a mocking laugh when it comes from anyone who starts off with blatantly misrepresenting facts in the opening paragraph of his argument. An essential prerequisite of moral behavior is getting facts right, and you've shown little enough interest in doing that that I'm not particularly concerned with the color of the sky or the direction of gravity in your personal reality.

Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is what prevented the Cold War from warming up. It might take the current crisis in the Middle East off the boil as well.

Consider this:

• They've already had the West topple their democratically elected government before. This was pure and simple an attempt by us to get our greedy mitts on their oil (google for Operation Ajax).
• The Iranians (perhaps rightly) fear unprovoked aggression from America. It's now clear that the claims of Weapons of Mass Destruction used in the current Iraq campaign were just propaganda to allow the invasion of an oil-rich nation. Why should Iran not think we want to do the same thing again?
• The US was sabre rattling against Iran by calling it part of the comically titled "Axis of Evil" even when the moderate Mohammad Khatami was president (and, yes, Iran is. at least nominally, a democracy...)
• All the horror expressed in the America media about oil-rich Iran's claimed civilian programme sounds somewhat hollow when their so-called fellow Axis-of-Evil partner North Korea has happily admitted to a military nuclear programme (total oil reserves of North Korea in millions of barrels: 0).
• Israel already has them (google for Mordechai Vanunu who served 18 years in an Israeli prison for leaking information about their nuclear programme to the British Press. Awfully long sentence if the programme didn't exist, don't you think...?) .

For this last reason, president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's beligerent stance towards Israel is largely regarded as rhetoric. Afterall, Mutually Assured Destruction is, well, mutual.

I for one think Iran having nuclear weapons will make us stop taking ill-advised decisions when it comes to meddling in the affairs of small, oil-rich countries.

The Associated Press and the New York Times are now reporting that Atlantis will not launch Sunday. The delay will "give engineers more time to determine whether one of the most powerful lightning strikes ever at a Kennedy Space Center launch pad caused any problems. The lightning Friday didn't hit the shuttle -- it struck a wire attached to a tower used to protect the spacecraft from such strikes at the launch pad -- but it created a lightning field around the vehicle, NASA managers said. The launch, planned for Sunday, now won't happen until at least Monday."

So my kids would love for me to get one or two, knowing that we would also be buying them for kids in underpriveledged nations. But, I am not buying my kids in this country a computer with a built-in webcam.

The successful in this country (the United States of America) have overwhelmingly worked for it!

The link you provided requires registration. Here is a study of my own that gives you a good idea of how upward mobility in the US really works. Here's a handy graphic. You'll note that over a decade or so that in the richest 1% half of them were still in the richest 1% and 80% of them were still in the richest 20%. Are you telling me that of the people born into the top 1% almost all of them worked harder than the other 99% of society to remain in that position?

I am by no means a millionaire or even close, but I also know that I do not have the same desire/drive to do certain things that most millionaires do possess at this time in my life.

I'm not a millionaire either, but I am very smart and have made good economic decisions most of my life. I've worked hard and I fully expect I will be a millionaire by the time I retire, so long as my investments and plans work as well as they have been. That does not, however, mean I am blind to accurately interpreting the statistics. For every dollar of that million I earn over the course of my lifetime, I'm earning about $1.80 for someone else who has done nothing other than loan their money to me through a bank for mortgages and other loans I need in order to have the capital to make money in the first place. In my particular case that means one dollar to person from a less affluent background moving up for two dollars to someone already at the top of the heap. At this rate, I might move to the middle of the pack, but in general it means more and more wealth is consolidating in fewer and fewer hands. It is called condensation of wealth and if you ever to an economics class you should know it plays a big part in almost every economic model.

Wealth disparity in the US is increasing and is higher than about 1/3 of the rest of the world. That isn't terrible, but it is by no means "THE best country for ANYONE to change their status in society."

(not to mention a laudable use of unicode), check out Tim Kreider. It's rather moving, actually: "Pluto has rented a tuxedo."

"Being born wealthy is the path to success." BULLSHIT!! The successful in this country (the United States of America) have overwhelmingly worked for it! http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/stanley-milli onaire.html A statistic from the article - "Most of us have never felt at a disadvantage because we did not receive any inheritance. About 80 percent of us are first-generation affluent." The difference between millionaires (who have achieved it on their own merit) and those who bitch about our economic and societal injustices is that they do not take what they don't have given to them and make it a crutch for their lack of success! They have great ideas and instead of bitching about the patent system in the U.S. they actually do something about getting those ideas to market or doing what it takes to save and build a successful business. I am by no means a millionaire or even close, but I also know that I do not have the same desire/drive to do certain things that most millionaires do possess at this time in my life. I currently have other priorities. I really wish people would quit bitching about the inequities in the United States social-economic system and spend that time actually doing something productive to change their status. I will definitely argue that this is THE best country for ANYONE to change their status in society if they have the drive and desire to do so.

Pigs get stressed more than most animals when they are housed in high density pens. So there is now a move to selectively breed the "stress" out of pigs. There are also much more advanced methods of slaughter now, such as Temple Grandin's Stairway to Heaven.

The larger problem is actually meat consumption. It takes 12,000 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef... and that's the natural way of growing beef! Imagine doing it in a factory... each pound of beef requires six pounds of corn that could be eaten by us instead. When you look at the numbers for meat, its a depressing story.

Economic and environmental issues dictate that the final solution will be processed foods grown where species can be raised most cheaply. They will probably be adequate as a food source for us, albeit a rather boring one. Not much meat in it. Heavily cooked. Fortified with vitamins and additives to make it worth eating.

If someone else can think up something more interesting and more likely I'm all ears.

Nobel prize winners can even be crackpots. Linus Pauling has been pushing the benefits of Vitamin C. Of course nutrition isn't the field he won the prize for.

William Shockley won the prize in Physics for inventing the transistor. He used the prize as a foundation for the soapbox from which he spouted racist bile.

A proper argument is based on facts. PhD vs. grade eight education. Doesn't matter. If some illiterate has the facts in his corner and the PhD only has theory well; reality always trumps theory.

Actually, taking experts too seriously can sometimes have horrible consequences. There was a British 'expert' who got a bunch of people convicted of murder because their kids died of sudden crib death. "... the testimony of Sir Roy Meadow, a prominent pediatrician who was the first to suggest in 1977 that some mothers induce illness in their children to draw attention to themselves." http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=hea lth&res=9B0DE0DE163AF93BA35751C0A9629C8B63

The New York Times answered that question in an editorial about voting machine sales practices. The editorial is password protected, of course. If you don't like using BugMeNot, I summarized it in my article "E-voting: why election officials push for it "

Send him to Singapore and have him canned
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F5 0914F7385B0C718CDDAD0894DC494D81&n=Top%2FReference %2FTimes%20Topics%2FSubjects%2FV%2FVandalism
That would fix his little red wagon :)

The general opinion about why NSA pushed DES to be 56 bits instead of 128 bits is that "differential cryptography" attacks weaken it to about 55 bits anyway, so in fact you're not losing anything, and the 56-bit version was more compact and easier to implement in hardware. Searching a 56-bit keyspace isn't exactly in the reach of run-of-the-mill computers - you need a whole bunch of them working together to get any speed. On the other hand, Gilmore's custom DES cracker and the distributed crack are *so* 1998. I don't know how much ASIC technology has improved since then - Pentium IIs were up to 400 MHz, compared to ~3 GHz for a typical Intel desktop today, and memory prices and performance have also improved significantly, so maybe you could use 1/10 as many machines.

"AOL did not provide any of the information necessary to identify the searchers."

Oh, really? A couple of NY Times reporters didn't let that stop them. They used the search data to find and interview User No. 4417749, Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga. Link to story below. Bugmenot login works.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09aol .html?ex=1156392000&en=4908a895fec7a6a7&ei=5070

But you are right. These are not facts. Let's keep our eyes wide shut.

One could argue that the fact that we find these disfunctions is proof positive that the nuclear safety process is working, but the truth is that there is a hudge gap between the reality of the danger and the supposed nuclear safety : it's only because of various counter powers that these disfunctions are known. The nuclear industries are closely linked to the military industries and to say the least the field lacks in transparency

I should also point that if you sticked to a scientific and factual approach of the problem, you would certainly realize that defining something as safe once and for all clearly is not a good safety procedure. Err , let's just hope you are not in charge here !

Proliferation of nuclear power will lead to chernobyl like problems, if not only statistically then in the same way that the US power grid is failing : safety brings no short term profit.

But in all your arrogance and pride for your technology i doubt that you can stand back from this nuclear fiction, untill a disaster happens. In your backyard maybe ?

Security processes have no zero default, and you know it. Nuclear safety is a myth. What is the risk ? Don't ask. What are the benefits ? Trust us. The reality is that we shall leave our fate in the hands of the nuclear goons, despite the wastes, despites the risk, despite the damage already done but most of all despite the fact that this energy is over used and wasted in mainly illogicals and ineficient ways. Only the fake sense of safe and infinite energy that the nuclear industries promess permits such a waste of energy, and this has other dramatic effects. One simple example : excessive packaging. Very expensive energy wise, very destructive (plastics, heavy metals in paints, chemical tratement of paper et al), mostly useless.

And keep the insults to yourself, nuclear monger, because be it reason or unfortunately disaster, time is on my side.

(Fyi: this link to the New York Times article bypasses any need to login/register with the nytimes.com website.)

I'm the Cleversafe Dispersed Storage software-development project leader. I work with Chris Gladwin (mentioned in the New York Times article) as a fellow manager at Cleversafe.

I offer some comments below to help outline some of the unique aspects of the Cleversafe technology.

Encryption is not dispersal. Cleversafe provides both, and then some. The Cleversafe Dispersed Storage software disperses any "datasource" (typically a file) into several slices (our current software current uses 11 slices in an 11-lose-any-5 scheme; future versions may use additional schemes with "wider" slice sets). Additionally, our software also encrypts, compresses, scrambles, and signs the datasource content, but we are not trying to reinvent the wheel: other software technologies exist to do these things, and we leverage them extensively.

We found that a bigger challenge than creating or managing dispersal algorithms was to make the entire storage system regardless of the dispersal algorithm used (and we design the system to be dispersal-scheme agnostic). The meta-data management system and many other things took us far longer to implement then the Cleversafe IDA. It's not hard to use Reed-Solomon, or some other algorithm on a single file or a small set of files and disperse the slices by hand onto several different system (or use variants of this like the 3-piece secret story with Amy, Bob, and Charlie mentioned above). It's much harder to manage this across an entire file system (with hundreds of thousand of files--or many more depending on the file system) for an unlimited number of file systems from all the various users across to be stored on heterogeneous set of an unlimited-number of geographically-dispersed, commodity-storage nodes in a completely-decentralized way with no dependence on the original source of the data (eg, you could sledgehammer your laptop and not lose any data that's stored on our grid/storage service). (I apologize for that run-on sentence.)

Further, dispersed-storage systems do not require replication. (Dispersal systems may replicate data for performance purposes, if at all, depending on the application/configuration/installation/context.) If a system replicates entire copies of the data (be they encrypted or not) then it, by (our) definition is not a dispersed-storage system. So a continual question I have when evaluate other systems: do they replicate the data in whole or not? Most systems replicate.

Cleversafe is not the first to present a dispersal system, but we like to think we are the first to make it broadly usable by people and inter-operable with other systems. See our cmdline client (which will soon have continous-backup and XML-programmable policy management), our Dispersed Storage API, our dsgfs file system, a soon-to-be released GUI client, and future "connectors" (what we call the applications that leverage our technology) to come, all available at http://www.cleversafe.org.

A side note: "revision management" is built into the Cleversafe system to address what I call "soft" failures (accidental deletes, application failures, etc) vs. "hard" failures (hard disk crashes) as well as archival requirements.

I believe that the concept of "dispersed storage" will eventually change how the world thinks about storage systems--regardless of whether or not these are Cleversafe-based systems (I think Cleversafe presents the best such system, but I of course am biased).

Here's a reg-free link.

Courtesy of the New York Times Link Generator.

I'm glad for the update. I first picked up on them in a Slashdot article linked to a in 2003. It's good to see where they're going.

I'm glad for the update. I first picked up on them in a Slashdot article linked to a in 2003. It's good to see where they're going.

Yep! Just like this case: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/15/opinion/15tues4. html?ex=1313294400&en=687375003b802612&ei=5090&par tner=rssuserland&emc=rss I totally agree with you that the judges like to legislate from the bench!! This case of Tivo vs. Echostar is an example of the legal system working, I agree that you were a troll by throwing in your Rush Limbaugh talking point in this forum :)

It's the question of our time.

Does the NSA scheme cross the line? Does P2P? Porn? Apparently the release of AOL's search information crossed the line.. how about retina-scanning talking billboards?

Technology and transparency will need to solve the problem of how to protect people from 'evil', including failsafe identity protection.

In my imagination security in the future is not a firewall, but a black box from within which the user can peer at the world through a hole. No information escapes from the box but a clickstream, signifying selections.

Yet it takes little to identify Thelma Arnold (identified by her search record on AOL), so the avatar that Thelma inhabits in cyberspace, that outline of her that her clickstream paints, will need to be Not_Thelma. And transparency is the only way that Thelma can trust the net, transparency so that google, car manufacturers, politicians, the MPAA, and children too can trust each other.

Or trust their neighbors. We can't stone John M. Karr just yet, but his case demonstrates the need to be able to identify and thwart evil. The NYT has a chilling article on the sophisticated underground network of pedophiles that has been empowered by the net http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/21/technology/21ped o.html.

I don't know about a subnet, but I like to think that there is an engineering solution here, a protocol or GNU license that can keep the internet open, free, and safe.

Actually, the workers in the US have the highest average of working hours in the industrialized world, along with the lowest (and still falling) vacation time. Japanese businessmen, at least here in Asia, are actually renowned for their vacation and extravagant leisure activities, particularly expensive golfing vacations. Their reputation may be different on the other side of the pond, but that's probably more PR or urban legend than anything else. That's not to say they're not hardworking when they're at work, just that the hours thing is more myth than fact, probably related to the fact that many Asian societies do pressure their children to place foremost emphasis on their education, to the exclusion of all else. That's not so different from parents in the US, but Asian parents do seem to be much more agressive about it, at least from what I've seen -- which isn't imperical evidence, of course.

Where are you from that tremendous work ethic is not something to be admired?

I'm from a country where, like most of the developed world, productivity gains in the past half century mean that the average person should be able to have the same quality of life as people did in the 1950's while working 10 hours a week, and where productivity gains in the past fifteen years mean we should be able to enjoy the same quality of life as we did in the early '90's working 30 hours a week.

But due to the unreflective stupidity of people who believe that working long hours is inherently virtuous, many people--mostly men--continue to work themselves into early graves. And all of this is done for no more happiness.

So do I admire someone who has the ability to work hard for long hours? Yes--I'm one of those myself. But do I admire someone who thinks it is inherently virtuous to work long hours, which is what I take "work ethic" to mean? Of course not.

Work is a means to an end, and when it no longer serves that end it is time to focus less on work and more on enjoying life.

I haven't seen any legal argument for why the government shouldn't monitor calls with foreign countries.

Read your US Constitution. And while you're reading it, tell me which three amendments were broken here,

because I don't see any.

Sad, but true... On the flip side, if everyone were like /., I would lose a lot of stock in MS :P

More like thirty two hammer blows to the head.

I was interested in your question, so I did some research. The grandparent poster is overstating the case, but there were polls back in December/January that kind of back him up.

The NY Times says, "The poll found that 53 percent of Americans approved of Mr. Bush's authorizing eavesdropping without prior court approval 'in order to reduce the threat of terrorism.'"

The CS Monitor (reporting on a Zogby poll) says, "Nearly half of likely voters, 49 percent, say Bush has the constitutional powers to approve such a plan".

I don't have more recent figures. The President's popularity is roughly the same now that it was then, though it had risen a bit for a while in the meantime.

The crappy NY Times graph of national evolution beliefs is rigged to make the US look like antievolutionists outnumber the evolutionists. They moved the 50% mark that's accurate near the top of the scale towards the 0%, so us antievolutionists look like they've got 50%, "don't know" has a chunk of the remaining 50%, and evolutionists have a much smaller share than antievolutionists. But measure the bars, and you can see that anti/evolutionists are the same in number, around 40%.

They link to only the briefest abstract from the actual research, with no stats. I wonder if the Times is lying about the whole thing to puff up the antievolutionists, who could be a small minority of Americans, like in the rest of the countries.