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Corporate propoganda here and a positive review in the New York Times here.

* Where did all the UN Food for Oil money disppear to?
Food for oil, I don't see much money in that deal. No money can't disappear.

Well, you don't walk into a grocery store with 10 gallons of unleaded and trade it for food. Oil gets sold, money buys food, food goes to Iraq... or at least that's what was supposed to happen. The UN got a nice "administation" cut off the top, but no one seems to know exactly where those billions went. And as much as people like to point the finger at Haliburton and claim they're a bunch of war profiteers its interesting how no one brings up the TotalFinaElf scandals and their involvement in some very, very shading dealings in Iraq.

* How much business did France and Germany do with Iraq in violation of UN resolutions?
None that I know of. Of course I have seen a lot of this crap on public forums or frog-bashing sites. But no report of those on any remotely reliable source, not even on Fox News (only exception is an op'ed column by William Safire in the NYT, which allegations have been denied by the US administration itself). Given the unusually aggressive stance the Bush administration has taken against those countries, I guess that any credible lead on that subject would have been leaked to the press in no time.

See the TotalElfFina articles above. Plus, the Germans and the French were trading *a lot* with the Iraqi gov't in the late 90s. It would be interesting to see just how "liberal" their interpretations of the sanctions exactly were. I think its been underreported.

* How the "sactions are killing millions of Iraqi babies" stories were bogus.
Economic sanctions are a useful tool to destabilize a regime or prevent it from endangering its neighbours but you have to admit that the population ends up paying the highest price to them. It might eventually be worth the price (South African Apartheid regime) or not (Cuba comes to mind). In the case of Irak, I guess that the food for oil program somehow prevented the most severe famines but I don't know of hard facts. Do you have them?

This assumes that if there was no oil for food program there would have been "severe famines" which also seems to be a pretty unsubstaciated claim. What looks like what happened was Saddam hyped up and played the "starving" baby angle for all it was worth. The "food" he got for his oil didn't make it to the Iraqi people. If you average $5billion a year in aid and spend $13million on healthcare, that's a lot of money unaccounted for.

* How much of the Arab and some European press were getting paid by Saddam
Come on! You're not saying that any media that voiced opinions differing from the official White House point of view were sold to Saddam, are you?

Not at all. What I am saying is that there were reporters/editors in the Arab press who were getting money (commissions, bribes, call it what you want) from the Iraqi gov't to file reports that were sympathetic to Saddam. There was speculation that some European editor/reporters were pocketing cash. That, as far as I know, hasn't been proven, but the point of this entire /. article is about stuff that hasn't gotten a lot of attention. There's been no followup as far as I know.

And which countries do you target in "some European press". Given your post's general tone, I guess you include France and Germany. But what about Spain, England or Poland. Even thou

Walter Sullivan, a science writer and editor for The New York Times, died in 1996.

Spooky.

• Don't know the patent system is badly broken
• Don't care
• Don't know what a patent is

Just remember this simple fact : People have long memories and these management twits will pay for their nazi policies once the economy improves.

I hate to break the bad news, but the economy isn't going to improve that way. Perhaps you haven't been keeping up with the news, but the economy itself appears to be growing, but only as a result of significant debt increases but people are still losing jobs.

So: this is a jobless "recovery", and because the U.S. is still the largest customer base (I hate the word "consumer"), it means that the "recovery" won't last very long, once people in the U.S. start to run out of credit:

1. People who run out of credit can't pay for goods and services.
2. Businesses that sell to individuals will see a sharp decline in demand.
3. Those businesses will cut jobs, increasing the feedback in step 1, and thus the economic decline.
4. Those businesses will also cut demand for goods and services, thus causing upstream businesses to cut jobs and demand for goods and services, thus accelerating the economic decline.
5. Those businesses above that need to fill some of the jobs they previously eliminated will do so primarily by hiring overseas workers.
6. Those who lose work will have a much harder time getting credit because of all the people who came before that defaulted as a result of running out of credit while still being jobless, so being unemployed will really mean you probably won't have any money to spend (hint: credit is the only thing keeping the U.S. economy afloat right now).

And I'm not the only one concerned about this.

End result? IMO, there's a reasonable chance that the U.S. economy will collapse in a crash at least as bad as the Great Depression, because the very people who are needed to support the economy will be unable to do so because they're unemployed. And because their jobs are being shipped overseas, they won't ever be employed until the cost of living in the U.S. drops to roughly the same or less than it is in the poorest of countries -- businesses won't have any real incentive to hire locally otherwise.

And that means that you can permanently say goodbye to the first-world standard of living we currently enjoy, unless you're in the richest few percent of the population.

And lest you think that all this activity will cause other countries to see increases in their standard of living (and thus their cost of living), remember that we're seeing proof before our eyes that employers are willing and able to shift jobs elsewhere much more quickly than economies can adjust to it. That means that whichever country has the lowest standard of living (while still being able to provide sufficiently skilled workers) will be the one to supply the workforce. Which country that happens to be may change over time but the speed that employers can shift their hiring patterns will ultimately determine the amount of time that the country's economy can grow before it loses its jobs to some other (cheaper) source.

Just remember: the cheapest possible worker is the one who uses the fewest resources. That means someone living in a dirt-floored hut with no running water, using the money he's paid to barely buy enough food to survive.

To get a glimpse into user's conception of the state of affairs, check out this NYT article (reg, blah, blah). See the picture of the poor mother after she "was informed of the lawsuit by a reporter," (Times-speak for injecting the correspondent as actor) and read in horror as she opines through apparent tears, "'Why don't they sue KaZaA?' Ms. Bassett added. 'Why are they suing the people? That's the part I don't understand.'"

No one is addressing this glaring disconnect between the conceptions of regular users and the situation as seen by both techies and the RIAA. Her son might have understood what he was doing, but he is a minor, and she is legally (and monetarily) obligated to cover the civil damages. She didn't even know it was wrong. Did she miss the full-page ads in National newspapers? Doesn't she read Slashdot? It doesn't matter (except for her). This is a case of miscommunication, and the reprocussions in popular media will only make the RIAA look like crass bullies. That is a good thing. This was a major misstep on their part.

> Well, I would hardly call even President Bush "a member of the radical right wing". I think this term is usually reserved for the folks who let religious beliefs be their primary guide in their political views

Read up on some of his appointees. How about more lead for children and the healing power of Jesus to start you off? He's a self-proclaimed born-again, reads the bible every morning, thinks hes doing gods work in the middle east, etc.

From the New York Times: Article (NYT reg req)

"The industry is trying to enlist broader public support with a campaign intended to show that its nemesis --- the peer-to-peer networks for swapping files like KaZaA and Morpheus --- are used not only to trade songs but also pornographic images, including child pornography. ... 'As a guy in the record industry and as a parent, I am shocked that these services are being used to lure children to stuff that is really ugly,' said Andrew Lack, the chief executive of Sony Music Entertainment. ... The available evidence does not show that pornography on file-sharing systems is growing any faster than through other online vehicles. Indeed, the federally financed child pornography tip line run by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children found that 1.3 percent of the reports of Internet child pornography were related to file-sharing services so far this year, down from 2.1 percent last year. Nearly three-quarters of child pornography reported is on Web sites."

Report of Ecstasy Drug's Great Risks Is Retracted

Seems that even Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine can make blatant errors in their experiments.

Here is the google news link, no NYT registration required. Aiming at Pornography to Hit Music Piracy

I thought it would be interesting to see NTY's take on the story.
http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_2100-1023_3-50722 68.html

I thought it would be interesting to see NTY's take on the story.
http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_2100-1023_3-50722 68.html

Separate cargo and crew are exactly what we need for space missions in the next few decades.

The cargo can fly on a Delta-2 rocket. The crew can take a Ford Expedition from Cape Canaveral to the NASA pavillion at Walt Disney World.

There, they can conduct all their orbital duties in complete safety, while being more accessible to the admiring public than ever before!

(Oops, maybe Disney isn't that safe after all...)

• Article 1
• Article 2
• Article 3
• Article 4
• Google news search

As usual....Same article without registration

You probably can't convince me that the move by Universal -- a unit of hard-luck French water utility Vivendi -- doesn't have anything to do with Universal's pending aquisition by GE's NBC unit.

I figure it's one of two things:

* Vivendi is looking to spoil the deal with a profit-killing "poison pill". This would be the strategy of former Vivendi chairman Jean-Marie Messier -- but it's also part of why he's the former chairman.

* GE has already given Universal marching orders -- this was planned months ago. According to this morning's NPR report, Vivendi has been shopping for a buyer for its entertainment units for months, but all previous deals have fallen through. They're likely to do whatever GE says at this point (unless we're back to the first option).

General Electric isn't in the business of filing baseless lawsuits -- they're in the business of making money. Maybe they'll be the ones to blow the lid off the CD price scam once and for all.

If you like me refuse to register with NYTimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/02/science/space/ 02 STRI.html?ex=1063080000&en=dff6c05797550ede&ei=506 2&partner=GOOGLE

Link

I haven't heard of David Pogue in years... I have always liked his writings. He use to write on the last page of MacWorld every month, but got replaced by some other (not as good) guy.

No-registration-required version of the article.

here

for you lazy Geeks:

Link

No argument here; we are really not saying terribly different things. The difficulty, though, is that testing cannot be relied upon to uncover the low probability but catastrophic failures. (In fact, in the case of the shuttle, pieces of the insulating foam had come off on previous launches -- and the "optimists" took that to be a test.)

Similarly, as Bruce Schneier has frequently pointed out, testing is not a reliable way of detecting security flaws.

It seems to me that part of the problem is the need for us to adopt a different "mental perspective" than we normally do. If I am trying to do an everyday task -- say, putting up a mailbox -- I will tend to think along the lines of , "If I do this, will it work?" In thinking about these low-probability failures, though, the right question is more like, "If I do this, is there any possible way it can fail?"

Incidentally, the New York Times has another Op-Ed article on the shuttle affair.

Rich
SCO delenda est.

If I had gone and said the north american power grid should be replaced at the wake of the outages [ . . . ], I would have been accused of countless acts of civil disobediance.

My first question is what is wrong with Slashdot? I mean someone saw fit to give the parent coward "Insightful" for what she or he wrote? Someone wind the clock back before 2000 when Slashdot wasn't frequented by Microsoft apologists.

I'm not sure what makes you think your exercising your 1st Amendment right to speak freely (assuming you're a US citizen) would be branded civil disobedince, but in case you're really worried (and not just ranting) know you're in good comapny: first, the outage of August 2003 has produced a US-Canadain task force to investigate problems with the aging power grid. In fact, the power grid is so important that it is the subject of dozens of assessments conducted by North American Electric Reliabilty Council. Let's just say that NERC is not sanguine about the reliability of the North-American power grid. The problem is so widespread that even US lawmakers anticipate a massive political dispute.

Regarding your comparison of the power grid to the Internet, network events such as MSBlaster and Sobig.F highlight the fragility of an information network built of insecure nodes. At present, the overwelming majority of the nodes of the Internet are powered by Microsoft software. For better or for worse, "press releases and open letters right at the wake [sic] of major worms" draw attention to the real effects of maintaining so insecure an information network. MSBlaster and Sobig.F are not theories but facts and so prove the unreliability of an Internet composed mainly of Microsoft-powered nodes. The timely discussion of network events such as MSBlaster, Mimda, Code Red, Sobig.X, etc. in the press should, in my opinion, be an obligation of network adminstrators.

Given your post, you'd probably have us ignore the problem in the hopes that the next worm/virus/trojan does not damage our shared information network even more spectacularly. Thanks, but I would rather disseminate information and share data about such network events rather than stop my eyes, ears, and mouth with sand.

I feel so much better now.

Google link so you dont have to subscribe: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/29/opinion/29PETR.h tml?ex=1062734400&en=75c0dd6ec27f1277&ei=5062&part ner=GOOGLE

Google partnered link

The google link, or at least the one that the "partner site" gets.

Googlified

Failure is always an option

According to this nytimes story, seven computers of his were seized on Tuesday. And he apparently admitted to the FBI already that he did it. So I think it's safe to say that the FBI's been keeping enough tabs on him to not let him slip away.

And his name is Jeffrey Lee Parson. Too bad user jparson is a lurker, otherwise we might be able to see if this is the same jparson.

New York Times has much more information.

"A court official in Minnesota identified the teenager as Jeffrey Lee Parson, 18, known online as ``teekid.'' A U.S. official in Washington also confirmed an arrest was made early Friday."

Here's a trojan thread, for starters.

The original article from the NYTimes is more complete. You can read it here

The M$NBC article claims, "Today, four years into the five-year partnership, the protests are over and Microsoft technology is firmly entrenched at MIT." Irony? Looks like an outright lie to me and an implicit endorsement I doubt any University, especially MIT, would make or will be happy about. It misrepresents the original 1999 initiative, the extent of penetration and M$ influence.

MIT has it's own private computer system, Athena What else would you expect from the people who developed X, kerbos and many other awesome packages while M$ was putzing around with Windoze 3.1? Athena finished in 1991, where did M$ want to go at that time? MIT is more likely to take credit for being an early haven for RMS.

Here is an informative PDF about Athena and kerbos usage at MIT With 96% of the students using Athena, I'd say that M$ hardly has a toe in the door. Indeed, it's hard to imagine serious scientific computing with Microsoft, though there are some interesting and expensive toys available on that platform, Athena seems to have them all and their betters. Here is an old list of software available to Athena users

"The university?s educational computer network is being overhauled to use Microsoft?s .Net architecture." Is a particularly rich lie considering the Company's ambition of 1999, expressed in this NYT article, to be set the tone for MIT and 36 other companies and thereby pervert everyone's standards and lock up all publishing in M$ DRM. The above article also claimed that M$ had become the "de facto standard" at Universities. It seems strange that M$ feels the need to restate the case four years later. Slashdot covered that move and the student comments are cutting.

Some things remain the same, however. The few M$ boxes seem to be the same headache at MIT as they are everywhere:

1. 750 boxes infected with sobig and blaster, presumably student owned, remedy is rebuild.
2. Problems with mail directories:
3. Problems with different versions of M$ office (another old page)

I can hardly believe that I read half of that nauseating piece of BS. Microsoft has tried to make policy at Universities and they have bought a few whores at some of them. This article is typical Microsoft, "we've already won" when the battle is far from over, "smart people use us" when the truth is far from it and "look how generous we are to be giving away Millions of dollars worth of binaries" as if an M$ CD was worth any more than an AOL CD. NBC should be ashamed to publish such rubbish, someone is asleep at the wheel.

Punching holes in this article for the last 30 minutes has been fun. Microsoft polute a LUG mailing list? No way. Come here, pig, I'm going to eat you alive. Bang, pow, bite, squeel, squeel, smash crash thud. /* - Big Grin full of exposed teeth - */ Only someone completely immersed in M$ BS and completely ignorant of scientific computing and campus life in general would think M$NBC was being critical of M$.

I now return you to news that matters and reality, which have nothing to do with M$ press releases.

here is the actual article

From page 2 of the NY Times article at

Dr. Sinclair said. Resveratrol, he said, is unstable on exposure to the air and "goes off within a day of popping the cork."

Resveratrol is synthesized by plants in response to stress like lack of nutrients and fungal infection. It exists in the skin of both red and white grapes but is found in amounts 10 times as high in red wine as in white because of the different manufacturing process.

Epidemiological studies point to red wine as containing some beneficial antidote, but it is not yet certain whether alcohol, resveratrol or a combination of the two is the active ingredient.

"Peanuts also contain bioactive components such as resveratrol (the substance also found in red wine), beta sitosterol, flavonoids, and antioxidants, the benefits of which nutrition scientists are only beginning to discover.

"Peanuts also contain bioactive components such as resveratrol (the substance also found in red wine), beta sitosterol, flavonoids, and antioxidants, the benefits of which nutrition scientists are only beginning to discover.

the terrorist futures market:

link

Yeah, it's doing a lot better now, especially the new 17-year High in housing starts and the fact that the NASDAQ has hit a 16-month high.

Thanks for pointing that out!

1st Pasture beef & Lamb are actually cheaper than feedlot beef & lamb. The fact is without huge subsidies over 95% of America's feedlot industry would be unsustainable.

You see feedlot meat has huge costs - corn has to be grown & rotated apon thousands apon thousands of acres of prime agricultural land. Massive ammounts or petroleum based fertilisers are needed, Huge amounts of expensive anti-biotics & hormones are need as the cattle have to cope with living waist high in shit. Ontop of which there's the huge enviromental cleanup costs associated with clearing all that shit & the associated contamination. The abbatoir costs are much higher too, as extreme practices are needed due to the fact the cattle have spent most of their lives waist high in shit & it's embedded into every pore of their skins.

Hence in Oz, where feedlot subsidies don't exist, feedlots only exist for the gourmet & Jap export marbled meet trade, the end supermarket cost is just to high for supermarkets

Cattle can simply graze on huge cattlestations consisting of marginal open woodland & former unsustainable dustbowl cropping land that been semi re-wooded by nature over a couple of decades, They can also drink rank bore water brought up automatically by windmills. Many arn't even likely to ever see humans till they've hearded up by choppers, motor bikes & dogs at slaughter time.

Sheep can graze quite sustainably on arid land Salt Bush as long as one doesn't overstock. They to can also drink rank bore water brought up automatically by windmills.

Here's some linkage on a Journo who actually bought a steer & ran it through the feedlot system, the reality of that steer's life's absolutelly revolting & totally unviable economically. They do literally have to pump the steer full of anti-biotics (passed prohibition levels for the EU) so it can cope with living knee high in shit.

NYTimes blurb

NPR Real audio piece

1st Pasture beef & Lamb are actually cheaper than feedlot beef & lamb. The fact is without huge subsidies over 95% of America's feedlot industry would be unsustainable.

You see feedlot meat has huge costs - corn has to be grown & rotated apon thousands apon thousands of acres of prime agricultural land. Massive ammounts or petroleum based fertilisers are needed, Huge amounts of expensive anti-biotics & hormones are need as the cattle have to cope with living waist high in shit. Ontop of which there's the huge enviromental cleanup costs associated with clearing all that shit & the associated contamination. The abbatoir costs are much higher too, as extreme practices are needed due to the fact the cattle have spent most of their lives waist high in shit & it's embedded into every pore of their skins.

Hence in Oz, where feedlot subsidies don't exist, feedlots only exist for the gourmet & Jap export marbled meet trade, the end supermarket cost is just to high for supermarkets

Cattle can simply graze on huge cattlestations consisting of marginal open woodland & former unsustainable dustbowl cropping land that been semi re-wooded by nature over a couple of decades, They can also drink rank bore water brought up automatically by windmills. Many arn't even likely to ever see humans till they've hearded up by choppers, motor bikes & dogs at slaughter time.

Sheep can graze quite sustainably on arid land Salt Bush as long as one doesn't overstock. They to can also drink rank bore water brought up automatically by windmills.

Here's some linkage on a Journo who actually bought a steer & ran it through the feedlot system, the reality of that steers life's absolutelly revolting & totally unviable economically

NYTimes blurb

NPR Real audio piece

Yes. We shouldn't even be considering spending this money. Why do we need to track these people? More tracking==More government spending==Infrastructure to track people. What next, Super ID Cards for everyone, ala China?

I'll try to keep it simple: it's not my responsibility to clothe, feed, and otherwise take care of other people. If people want to voluntarily give money to charity, churches, homeless shelters, etc. that's cool. But the answer is not to provide free healthcare and other incentives to stay homeless, but rather to remove welfare and social security that allows people to remain like this.

If non-profits and charitable groups want to feed these people they should be allowed to, but tracking them and sheltering them in not the government's job. Provide for the common defense, enforce the law, and leave me the hell alone!

Here's how it works.

1. When the government provides it for free, the marginal cost to the consumer becomes zero. Therefore, people consume more than they otherwise would. If your gas were free, you'd drive more.

2. As people consume more, demand exceeds supply, and prices increase.

3. Government responds to this problem in one of two ways:

a. Paying the higher and higher prices. Everyone pays more, but since the amount they pay is only affected negligibly by how much they consume, this is no incentive for them to consume less. The costs to taxpayers overwhelmingly exceed what taxpayers were told it would cost.

b. Imposing price controls, and rationing the remaining supply. Get ready to wait in line.

4. Rich people go to other countries for medical treatments the government won't approve.

The really sad thing is that I'm still probably going to vote for Dean.

Google has this article, too. No reg required.

that Apple has over 100,000 pre-orders of the Power Mac G5. See the link.

With all the attention DVD's have been getting lately (for instance)and the main cause of their sales boom being pricing (20$ and under) - don't you think that the CD industry could save itself simply by lowering the cost of CD's to say - 5-7$ like vinyl used to be?

Have you looked at deanforamerica.com? I'd say that site is a good indicator of Internet-awareness. The man has a *blog*, for crying out loud! [...] i long for the day when the *president* writes a daily weblog.

Whore, noone needs to register. The article link doesn't ask you to. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/15/national/15HUBB. html?ex=1061524800&en=b265c90e2d78c71c&ei=5062&par tner=GOOGLE

It was taken from here and here. Both links are non-registration.