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Watch it and then shut up.

Just like the other Aussies who started smacking me around here and mindlessly modding me down, you don't really seem to know what your government and industries are actually doing (or not doing). The program however was demonstrating a different story, and keep in mind that the people in the program were also Aussies. The most shocking fact, mentioned out of hand and not the point of the program:

the Queensland rainforest is being destroyed at the same rate as the Amazon rainforest.

Does that sound like sustainable natural resource management to you?

Here's the portal for the episode, if they stream the full thing eventually..

if you go back to the 1980's crime was a lot more rampant, murder rates were double and triple what they are today. the justice system was a joke and criminals were back on the street within hours of being arrested.

in NYC i used to see drug dealers openly selling drugs on the streets with cops 50 feet away saying they couldn't do anything about it

between guiliani and bloomberg they cleaned up NYC. its safe now in most places. and putting drug users/dealers in jail is part of the reason

What you said changes nothing. Jailing people works less well than prevention and rehabilitation, it doesn't not work at all, it just doesn't work as well and costs a lot more. So those people who were locked up, saving the streets of NY, could have been treated or prevented totally and for a lot less money. All legitimate studies point to that. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/buyers/doitwork.html

A common sense idea made law that goes against the big oil and gas industries? Maybe there is hope after all!
Its a little old, but here is a good PBS report on the subject fot the lesser informed:
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/613/index.html

My point is that the exploration of Earth was made by heroes willing to risk their lives and often without any hope of returning. My point is in the first people who sailed from Indonesia to Peru, or who crossed the Aleutian land bridge, or who struck out into the wilderness of northern Europe after being driven from Rome. Exploration and colonization is risky. We should be willing to take those risks if we want the rewards.

The best way to explore Mars with human beings is to make it a one-way trip. There would be plenty people willing to volunteer. It would be cheaper and reap lots of scientific rewards.

That's my point -- that human space travel is expensive only because we're thinking inside the box that says we have to return people safely. Start thinking outside that box and the universe looks like a mountain ready and waiting to be climbed.

You must be a republican, because you're attacking democrats with some weird out-of-left-field comparison to Stalin, claiming that the left-leaning among us want to silence expression, when it's the republicans who:

* want to suppress political expression in the form of one bogus voter ID law after another, running on a fraudulent specter of non-existent voter fraud (one source of many), or because "kids vote liberal" (source)
* want to suppress emotional expression by way of banning gay marriage for no discernable reason other than "gays make us uncomfortable" (and remember, these are the same guys who also don't like interracial marriage!) (source)
* want to suppress academic and scientific speech using bogus lawsuits AT THE GOVERNMENT LEVEL (source) just because they don't like the facts the science reveals
* fight repeatedly to curtail regulations on what chemicals big industries pump into the ground (source) or what they put in our food (three republicans eating pink slime to stick it to obama)


Oh, wait, it's because someone made a joke about punching an anti-science, anti-vaxxer in the face, that dems are teh eeevil! That same anti-science, anti-vaccine nonsense, by the way, which has led to many deaths.

Republicans...what will they think of next? Nothing! That's the joke..they don't really think.

The US has one of the most advanced scientific communities in the world, and leads in terms of innovation and creation. This country is seeing enough heartbreak as it is from extremely divisive and counter-productive religion/political debates, let's at least keep the scientific/technological community above such disparaging and gloomy arguments.

It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism."

OBL declared war against America. As the parent stated, once there is a decared war, the international law of war takes over, and civil and criminal laws no longer apply.

"Under the law," he declared himself a combatant, which made him a legal target of military forces. There's no requirement in the law of war to have a trial before you can shoot at someone during combat.

Will black hole's gravity pull pulls in dark matter and/or anti-matter?

Gravity effects everything, it's the most powerful fundamental force of all.

"The Elegant Universe" book, CD and Series by Nova
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/elegant-universe-dimensions.html freaking ads I can't get past them.
Uses a pool table as an example, the only thing that escapes a pool table is sound.
Sound being gravity, which exerts it's force in all dimensions.

Gravity rated 4th in strengths of the fundamental forces, yet the force it exerts in all dimensions added together,
gravity sucks big time.

"What DOES piss me off about the military is how many old choppers and warbirds we have wrapped in plastic out at the boneyard."

Worn-out high-time military birds would need expensive overhauls before civilian service, and replacement radios and avionics in many cases. Beware the "aircraft-shaped object" which LOOKS just dandy parked in the desert but needs overhaul before return to service. There's often structural deterioration you can only see on X-ray.

"Now if it is useful for parts then yes, i can see it, but frankly all those early to late 60s choppers and warbirds are so hopelessly out of date the military is never gonna want to fly those again and they would fetch a damned good price on the civilian market."

And dig beaucoup ditches when they came apart. Civilians don't have the money and support equipment to fly their own Phantoms etc. unless they are extremely rich. The vast majority of the sixties stuff was gone when I went to AMARC for Aircraft Battle Damage Repair training in the 1990s. (I'm retired USAF Comm/Nav, Engine troop, and later Crew Chief. Broncos, Phantoms, and F-16 A/B/C/D)

AMARC has historically had a pretty good return to the taxpayer, with aircraft and parts routinely going to civilian agencies. Retired airliners also go there to be cannibalised for parts to keep the tanker fleet going. The drone program has made good use of aging fighters in training and weapons testing.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/where-combat-planes-retire.html

"AMARC's return on investment is impressive. In FY02, the facility gave 99 aircraft valued at $520 million a new life, and it reclaimed $732.5 million worth of spare parts and placed them back into the active inventory. Thus, on an annual budget of $47 million, AMARC returned a total of $1.25 billion worth of equipment to the Department of Defense."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/stockmarket/

Unfortunately you can't stream it anywhere.

But the BBC adapted it with re-recorded narration, and it's right over here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4auzn4bK1bM

Remember, this was all stuff we knew about in the late 90's.

The only interesting question is, did we fail to learn the lessons from LTCM, or did we learn the wrong ones?

FRAUD ALERT: It was not a mathematical model that caused the problem. It was fraud. Financial organizations convinced investors that they had a "mathematical model" so that they could steal. The theft was ENTIRELY deliberate, as is described in detail in the 1997 book F.I.A.S.C.O.: Blood in the Water on Wall Street, by Frank Partnoy. Somehow the issues were kept quiet for 11 more years until the theft could be completed in the 2008 financial crash. Traders called their work "ripping the client's face off" .

There are other editions of the book, such as this one published in 1999, Fiasco: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader, and a 2009 I-told-you-so edition of the original name.

Nothing has been done to reform the extremely corrupt financial system in the United States. No one in the SEC, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the government organization that is supposed to police financial fraud, was prosecuted, even though the agency knew of the abuses. See the February 17, 2009 show Frontline: Inside the Meltdown.

Even though the U.S. dollar is experiencing rampant inflation in 2012, U.S. banks give less than 1% interest on savings. Those who would like to invest can't because the system is so corrupt it cannot be trusted. Corporations hold unprecedented amounts of cash. See, for example, the October 7, 2010 Washington Post article, U.S. companies buy back stock in droves as they hold record levels of cash.

F.I.A.S.C.O. stands for "Fixed Income Annual Sporting Clays Outing" (See page 100 of the 2009 edition.), held at a shooting range called "Sandanona, a club in upstate New York" (Page 97 of the 2009 edition). Traders would go there to shoot guns. The idea was to encourage their taste for violence so that they would be even more financially violent toward the customer.

Perhaps the April 27, 2012 BBC article, Black-Scholes: The maths formula linked to the financial crash referenced in this Slashdot story was influenced by public relations agencies trying to get people to believe that the crash was caused by errors in mathematical thinking, and not by fraud, so that the financial industry can continue stealing.

It would be helpful if Slashdot editors signed a statement about each story saying that they know of no conflict of interest, and no one was paid to run the story.

If you're in a courtroom, you should ALWAYS assume than anyone presenting evidence has an agenda (because they almost always do).

It's not so much the lawyers presenting the 'evidence' you have to worry about; it's the unqualified 'expert witnesses' who are allowed to testify, even though the only thing they're experts in is getting certified as an expert witness.

Calling our modern judiciary the "justice" system is the biggest, least funny joke in American history.

Good watch: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/real-csi/ One thing they didn't cover, however, was the horror behind "expert" psychologists/psychiatrists and the damage they inflict.

Saw this too and it should be a req'd link in the summary. They shed a lot of light on how most of forensic evidence does not hold to the scientific method and that many so called expert court witnesses are anything but, even with the fancy sounding diploma mill accreditation.

You should watch The Confessions if you are actually so ignorant. Probably you know better and are just blinded by Google fanboyism (another human trait, can ignore any evidence that doesn't support "our team"). but if you really have so much faith in humanity brace yourself before watching.

Actually the real reason why the people in the USA don't have the high speed networks is because they got cheated.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html
http://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htm

Up until recently, I would have agreed with you on every point. I also work for a school and the subject of iPads and one-to-one programs come up fairly often, so I know whereof you speak. However, I recently saw a spot on the PBS News Hour about a school that is doing very well at incorporating students with learning disabilities into regular classrooms, and iPads loaded with word matching and speech-to-text applications are part of their recipe to help students with learning disorders, especially dyslexia. It is clear that they are not just giving the kids iPads and letting the tech sort itself out.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/american-graduate/jan-june12/amgradengaging_03-21.html

They start talking about the technology at 2:30 into the video.

One of the areas where the US needs more focus is end-of-life care. More often than not, individuals and their families are opting for expensive treatments at the end that may cause suffering and not provide any benefits for a tiny chance at a cure. One of the twists of advances in medicine is that people can be kept alive despite major medical problems, but many would not consider being kept alive in that state as "living" especially when no cure is likely.

This was the background of the infamous "death panels" fiasco at the beginning of the health care reform debate. Under Medicare rules, doctors can only bill for their time for certain things. Discussing end-of-life options was not eligible. So doctors had to (1) not bill, (2) lie about their time, or (3) not discuss the options at all. The proposed change was made so that it would encourage doctors to have these discussions with patients that would reduce costs and suffering. But the Republicans twisted it into some sort of tribunal where people would have to advocate for their lives.

For a more reasoned look at the problem watch this Frontline about end-of-life care today and the issues surrounding it. The one perspective from the doctors is complex as they all want to save their patients but they question whether some of their treatments cause their patients more suffering more than anything else.

TL;DR: You utterly missed the point of the example, and don't understand how the USPS functions. Your sources are even more egregious examples of cherry-picking.

Let's review the facts of a specifically-appropriate example. The USPS has turned a profit consistently with the exception of a huge Congress-mandated payout. Yes, there are customer complaints and lost packages. Yes, occasionally increasing efficiency means slowing down mail service to accommodate smoother routing. To look at any single quality as an indicator of success or failure, like the apparent deficit, list of complaints, or the delivery speed between two counties is as just as naive as claiming that all government is perfect all the time.

With that in mind, let's review a few specific points you make:

But you blame it on the same government that you want to run insurance?

Yes. It's also the same government that put a man on the moon, funds research, executes falsely-convicted prisoners, invades other countries, and does many other things, all under separate branches, each with distinct motivations, responsibilities, and management. There is no hypocrisy in seeing that the United States government can do two entirely separate things with two entirely separate branches and have two entirely separate outcomes. The USPS made a profit efficiently, and Congress added expenses.

And don't even get started saying that Healthcare is failing in the private sector.

Healthcare is failing in the private sector. The biggest issue is the cost of care. Doctors and nurses have to be paid, and supplies need to be refilled. Under the current entirely-private system, a hospital has no idea if an incoming patient will end up costing them millions of dollars that won't ever be repaid. To mitigate the risk of that gamble, rates for all services are raised to ensure that the hospital will break even on its expenses, and maybe even turn a profit.

Then, of course, there's the trouble of dealing with insurance companies. The mandated move to standard transports has done little to ease the pain of working with hundreds of providers, each of which has their particular system for handling claims. The proposed system allows (or at least did in one draft... I don't think the provision survived politics) hospitals to deal with a single endpoint, that will pass claims on to any providers involved.

Why is it that UPS and FedEx are doing so well? Is it because the USPS cannot deliver packages?

No, it's because UPS and FedEx provide a premium service for a premium price. As I recall from my days in manufacturing (which is several years ago), FedEx's handling is better, because they've made that a priority. UPS was faster for many places in the country, because they'd optimized their distribution for speed. They fill market needs that aren't in the USPS's priorities, just as private insurance providers could do under the proposed system. You could still get additional insurance to cover your car-racing accident injuries.

They delay. So let's push our healthcare under that same "efficient" system. Let's just say, "Hold on sir, we'll get you that heart... when we are damn well ready."

They also process almost every letter through an automatic sorter. I don't suggest processing human hearts through a sorting machine, and I don't suggest delays, either. The delay led to more cost-effective service, with little decline in quality. I'd expect an insurance provider (any insurance provider) to do the same: Provide a level of service that's adequate while minimizing costs. For example, don't cover elective surgeries that make my rates go up.

"...labor costs (53% of its expenses for UPS, 32% for FedEx compared with 80% with the USPS)"

That

There's amendments with lower numbers they ignore all the time.

Why should the 10th be any different?

The actual problem, as generally seen on Slashdot, is that many people fail to understand how they get applied in practice as opposed to their actually being ignored. Prisoners of War, for example, have generally never been subject to Habeas corpus - a subject of perpetual confusion on Slashdot. German and Italian POWs in the UK, US, and Canada didn't have the right to Habeas Corpus in WW2, Al Qaeda members taken prisoner originally didn't either. (Perhaps they now wish Bin Laden hadn't declared War on the US. Of course it took 9/11 for the US to reply in kind, legally.)

Last I saw, the US and the UK are not at war, yet at least one of those gitmo prisoners whose Habeas Corpus requests were ignored was a British citizen.

There's amendments with lower numbers they ignore all the time.

Why should the 10th be any different?

The actual problem, as generally seen on Slashdot, is that many people fail to understand how they get applied in practice as opposed to their actually being ignored. Prisoners of War, for example, have generally never been subject to Habeas corpus - a subject of perpetual confusion on Slashdot. German and Italian POWs in the UK, US, and Canada didn't have the right to Habeas Corpus in WW2, Al Qaeda members taken prisoner originally didn't either. (Perhaps they now wish Bin Laden hadn't declared War on the US. Of course it took 9/11 for the US to reply in kind, legally.)

Sorry but you will be hit by the caps UNLESS you use the monopoly's service, sorry. Oh and the way they bundle I can't even tell them to keep the basic cable which i don't want (and don't even own a TV) because it will cost MORE to not have it! Oh and as for "make them pay" how about nationalizing the lines because they committed MASSIVE fraud because we already paid 200 BILLION for nationwide high speed and all we got was a low rez Goatse.

So I don't know what fantasy island you are living on but in the flyover states you have ONE teleco and ONE cableco and you vill NOT use the competitors unless you want to be bitchslapped. Know what my cap is? Its 70Gb and I got lucky as I was grandfathered in, the new residential caps are 36GB! lets see you use Vonage on THAT Beeeotch, oh and just FYI but they don't even bother to give you ANY way to measure usage, they just silently hit you with $1.50 per Gb if you go over, fun huh?

Read this all the way through.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/wallstreet/weill/demise.html

"Bush's administration the number of regulations increased from 110,000 to 150,000 pages."

What kind of regulations? Where is your source information? Following your theory on a government caused collapse in the housing market meant they would have been complicit in removing the very regulations that prevented.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/wallstreet/weill/demise.html

it's actual, real life, scientific research - published in a well read and respected peer reviewed medical journal. But if it's just the messenger that has you all wee weed up, try PBS
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health/jan-june12/aspirin_03-21.html

Thorium only solves the 'we need energy' problem, and at a questionable scale.

Compare with the Integral Fast Reactor or the GE or MIT follow-ups to that which also consume all the nuclear waste that's been produced to date, trading 300,000 year waste for 300-year waste. We know how to construct buildings that will last 300 years.

Estimates are that the existing waste is sufficient to supply the world's energy needs for about a century.

And we can actually get 'greens' interested in cleaning up nuclear waste. This *is* the solution for Yucca Mountain problem (and terrorist threats to existing plant storage).

The two existing problems are Anti-Nuke political lobbyists who can't tell a LWR from a neutron and the politicians who they buy off.

Likewise, if there was a law that prohibited prayer in anyplace outside of a religious institution, I could say I was not an anti-religious zealot because I only supported the enforcement in flagrant cases, for instance, where a family was praying in public in a distracting manner, or where someone was having a party and playing Fireflight too loud. Then we could bring them to court and prosecute them for playing. You see, I don't hate the people who choose to worship false idols and fails to follow the bible(Matthew 6:5), I simply want an ordered society where we follow the rule of law. That I get to harass people who annoy me, even when they are in the privacy of their own home, is just frosting on the cake.

Just because one hates a little less than one peers does not give the person a right to deny their bigotry. Is a person who only burns down empty churches and synagogues any less of a bigot than someone who shoot the members? I would think not. Just because one is a little less hateful and therefore is ridiculed by one's peers, does that give free reign to other denegate the annoying people? I don't think so.

I believe that Card thinks he is not a homophobe just like rush thinks he did nothing wrong on his little trip to the DR or Santorum thinks that he believes he has respect for the ability of woman to think for herself. And all these people are probably a little less crazy than some of the other people in their peer group, and for that we can be thankful. That there are some insane people who are not so insane as to actually want to do harm to the people they hate, unless, or course, they don't know their place. People who are just keeping the lesser folks in their place and enforcing the norms of society, then, are to thanks, not called out for who they are.

Which is to say that I know where Card is coming from, and by the measure of the religious right that wishes to convert anyone they do not agree with I am sure he is a flaming liberal that love to bend over for Obama, but in the world where love and tolerance and acceptance prevail, only a homophobe could write something like that. The rest of us believe that we adults should be able to have consensual sex in our homes and show affection for who we please outdoors. After all, I don't see police harassing straight couples leaving the theatre.

Riiight, because all those CEOs are gonna give up their coke and hooker bonuses so they don't have to stick it to the consumer...oh wait, that's not what they do, they simply jack up the price! I hate to break the news to ya sparky but even in areas where there is supposedly competition we have seen what happens is companies simply collude to raise prices together. Every time the government tries to stick it to a corp thanks to globalism if they don't raise prices they simply move but there is no way in hell they are gonna just eat the cost as that would cut into profits and with Wall Street being Vegas with nicer clothes if you do that then your stock takes a nosedive.

Whether you like it or not any gouging of the corps just ends up being dumped on the back of the poor consumer. Hell in my own area the working poor simply can't even have Internet as the cableco and teleco have been matching each others price raises one for one so now the cheapest usable Internet (I don't consider a WISP that offers 512Kb down with towers that go down for days at a time really usable and even that is $60 a month and a $125 hookup fee) is $75 a month and that is if you can even get it as even though its a college town and the city has grown by over a third neither the cableco nor the teleco have moved a single inch as far as coverage in over a decade.

This is why we need to nationalize the lines and open them up to REAL competition as what we have here in the states now is a bad joke unless you live in one of the megacities. We already paid 200 billion to have the nation wired for high speed and all we got in return is a Goatse from the corps so we should demand they pay the money back with interest in 90 days or we take the lines. if they want a monopoly? We'll give them a decade on every house they run FTTH, 25 if those homes previously had no service. Because the whole "greed is good" mantra that has infected this country like a cancer has killed any chance of getting anything vital like nationwide broadband done by private corps, hell they don't even upgrade their own systems and instead simply slap caps and other crap on instead of increasing capacity.

It is a hell of a drug. Extremely addicting to the point of toothless men sucking and swallowing for another hit. If you know what I mean. Dignity? WTF is that???

In all seriousness watch this. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/

Heck, robots recognizing smiles made it into popular culture over 10 years ago. I *think* it was this episode of Scientific American Frontiers, http://www.pbs.org/saf/1510/index.html (Robot Pals), if not an earlier one. This actually may have shown a later version of the robot (the one that kind of looks like an Ewok).

There was a creepy robotic face with exaggerated mouth that would recognize people smiling at it and making other faces, and make those faces back.

Freedom of the press is an illusion, has been for a long time now.

Freedom of the press is reserved for those who have one, and most of the press is controlled by a few companies which also just happen to be the big content companies.

Lack of imagination detected, on both your parts.

Democracy Now

PBS

Al Jazeera

No one needs to limit themselves to the likes of MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NYT, Forbes, Fox, Mother Jones, ..., not to mention the plethora of webbish stuff (blogs & etc.). Anyone who does is just being lazy (or has kids, so no time :-).

Children's brains use it or loose it.. For children developing their brains are strengthening the connections they use and pruning the ones they don't. A large amount of this activity happens up to age 5-6 and almost completes between 14-18. Not to say you can't learn at that point, but it is much easier before then to develop new skills.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/teenbrain/work/adolescent.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaptic_pruning

It doesn't look like PBS was all that impressed either

There are those with boots on the ground in these poverty stricken areas that disagree with your conclusion about redistribution. There was PBS documentary a few years ago about an Ethiopian expat. working in the US who returned to her home country to solve the problem of famine. In spite of many decades of billions of dollars of direct aid, there were still massive regional famines in her home country. She saw that access to capital and markets was restricted for poor rural farmers, so they were not getting fair prices for their product nor were they able to get accurate market information about which crops to grow. The issue is very complicated, tied up with government corruption, state control, rent-seeking monopolists, etc., but many international aid organizations including the UN have embraced the concept.

The basic premise is a variation on the "teach a man to fish" argument. In this case it is "give a man access to a market where he can sell the fish for a fair and transparent price" and he'll eat for a lifetime. The agricultural revolution in the west was not simply one of better farm machinery and fertilizers. It also included infrastructure like grain storage, transportation, access to capital and futures markets.

By your own count on the number of people killed it has been a phenomenal success. WWI alone saw an estimated 8.5 million killed and WWII saw another 20 million killed. And I'm not even including civilian casualties.

Consider that the population of the world has expanded from roughly 2 billion in WW2 to 7 billion now that is an achievement otherwise unheralded in human history. Insinuate what you will about humanity but it took nuclear weapons to bring about today's age of relative peace.

Study your history, there has never been a single year without war. This is why nukes were named 'peacemakers', it was what they did.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/

If you have the time, watch. That's some scary shit right there. I'm an apartment dweller myself. I've had an adjacent neighbor move in beside me once. He was extremely paranoid and my entire apartment complex smelled like paint thinner as though someone was spray painting a car inside a unit. Most likely doing the whole shake and bake thing I bet. It could have killed many people. Several neighbors and myself complained over the course of a week. He was soon gone and so was the problem. One of my friends at another complex had his neighbor's door kicked in during broad daylight. They usually team up with a handheld make shift welded battering ram and bust the door down. Otherwise they go for the window on 1st floor units. Smash and grab for only 20 seconds and they were gone. One of the neighbors asked was the hell was going on as they were leaving (now that's a pair of balls for you) and they told her to fuck off. The police came to file yet another report. Too late. I'm sure it ended up in a bottomless pit someplace only to be reviewed by the new cold-case rookie some 20 years later.

Of all things, you criticize the one person staunchly in favor of the drug war who himself lost the will to stay clean. If that man can fall to addiction, it's a safe bet to assume anyone can. You don't have the freewill that you *think* you do. Chemicals do modify our behavior and a false perspective of what's truly important in life.

Glendower. - I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur. - Why, so can I; or so can any man:
But will they come when you do call for them ?
                                                                (1 Henry IV, 3.1)

The grandparent might have us believe there are no witches. You would have us believe there are no terrorists, just panic and hysteria. And yet, when our enemies, men who once walked upon the earth, such as Bin Laden and Al-Awlaki, called them, terrorists came or formed among us. Now they are arrested and tried regularly. This isn't myth, this isn't panic. this is fact. We ignore it at our peril.

FBI’s Top Ten News Stories for the Week Ending January 27, 2012
Denver: Man Arrested for Providing Material Support to a Designated Foreign Terrorist Organization
Baltimore: Man Pleads Guilty to Attempted Use of a Weapon of Mass Destruction in Plot to Attack Armed Forces Recruiting Center
Washington Field: Man Pleads Guilty to Shootings at Pentagon, Other Military Buildings

FBI’s Top Ten News Stories for the Week Ending January 13, 2012
Tampa: Florida Resident Charged with Plotting to Bomb Locations in Tampa
Baltimore: Former Army Solider Charged with Attempting to Provide Material Support to al Shabaab

FBI’s Top Ten News Stories for the Week Ending December 9, 2011
Seattle: Man Pleads Guilty in Plot to Attack Military Processing Center

FBI’s Top Ten News Stories for the Week Ending December 2, 2011
San Diego: Woman Guilty of Conspiring to Provide Material Support to al Shabaab

More here.

I've followed Wired since its launch in the 90's. Sometimes they've had good articles, but mostly they publish SHOCK science articles. Contrarian articles. Anything to attract attention. Except that when you read the frakking article, you see the scientists/engineer/expert they are talking to is a fringe player that most of his peers thought was wrong and the writer blowing up something that really had no bearing. How many of these great SHOCK and CONTRARIAN articles have panned out over the last 20 years? Precious few. Pop Sci does a much better job.

Wired's writers are so desperate for an attention grabbing story that they will glom on to anything that can be spun into an article that goes against the grain or seems to rebel. They won't do a good job of checking basic facts, they don't investigate if the claims stand up. Hell, they don't even check to see if the logic in their article makes sense -- as per this article. As others pointed out, the article is mostly about pharma and medical science. All the examples I read in that article was about pharma and medical science. The writer ignored things like the mathematics of quantum physics being proved ever more correct, and relativity. The only "science" failing to deliver more results is medicine.

The whole reason medical "science" is failing has been a topic for the last 10 years. Basically it comes down to the industrialization of medical research where university profs spend their days hoping to make a discovery which can be turned into a billion dollar idea for a company. Because of that pressure, other researchers have noticed that a lot of lab results never pan out in production. The current thinking is that over-wishful thinking and too much pressure makes medical researchers take shortcuts with their data to make a discovery seem real or more relevant than it is.

THAT would have been a good article, and the late Omni magazine would have had a good article or two on that. Instead we have Wired: Omni without the good taste.

Seriously boycott Apple for poor working conditions in China?

What next? boycotting Apple for using metals, because they were mined, causing pollution? While pretending this wasn't the same for every manufacturer on earth.

Remember the Foxconn workers threatening mass suicide. They were Xbox 360 workers:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45969515/ns/world_news-asia_pacific/t/xbox-workers-china-threatened-mass-suicide/

Or how about the Android products made by Foxconn, like the new Amazon Tablet:
http://phandroid.com/2011/07/14/amazon-chooses-foxconn-to-manufacturer-their-10-1-inch-android-tablet/

Would any of those pushing an Apple boycott add Amazon/Android/Microsoft products to the list?

It isn't even just tech products, in fact the lower down the price/technology scale, the worse the conditions likely are.

Where were your jeans made? Go watch China Blue:
http://video.pbs.org/video/1488092077/

Many people have actually plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit. http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/When_the_Innocent_Plead_Guilty.php
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/plea/faqs/

There are many reasons why they would do so. Even you might do so if convinced that it's in your best interest to plead guilty even though innocent.

Imagine if you think by pleading guilty you had 100% chance of 2 years in prison and if you didn't you had a 90% chance of decades in prison, which would you pick? Did the chap have a lawyer helping him?

This isn't just Apple, it is every manufacturer of almost everything you own.

There is an excellent documentary called "China Blue" that follows a young girl from her village, to a work dormitory producing jeans.
http://video.pbs.org/video/1488092077/

In a world of economic, regulatory and political disparity, this is what Global Capitalism generates. The locations willing to offer the lowest wages and the least protection to workers, get the work.

It the the golden times, from the late 1940's into the 1950's America enjoyed a massive competitive head start with most of the rest of the world being bombed into oblivion, and needing to rebuild. This was sustained for some time longer by staying ahead of the technology curve, and only outsourcing lower tech commodity work.

But the world has shifted. There will be no golden times for the USA in our lifetimes. Our competition is no longer recovering, we are no longer ahead of the technology curve. We outsourced the technology and the engineering. It doesn't take long for our contractors to become our competition when they are the ones designing to hardware and software anyway. Did we think them reliant on our brilliant executive management?

People can point fingers at "evil" right wing politicians, "evil" left wing politicians, "evil" corporations or "evil" unions. But in the end, that is trivia to occupy us while Rome burns.

We are in a race to the bottom and it has significant momentum, so you better get used to it.

Funnily how people will rabidly fight to preserve every egg that got a sperm in it, right up until the fetus squirts out of a woman's vagina. At that point it's either completely on its own or they actively work to kill it. Right up until it comes down with a terminal illness and wants some "medical lead" to end its suffering. Then it's back to it being immoral and illegal again.

Very strong.
jump to 1:20 ish.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/jan-june11/nova_01-19.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z07dB3sKTs

http://www.wifr.com/news/headlines/Homeless_Deaths_in_the_Stateline_136027648.html
http://www.kulr8.com/news/local/Dozens-Gather-To-Remember-Homeless-Deaths-136039473.html
http://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/dyingwithoutdignity/dyingwithoutdignity.pdf
This one has a positive tone, at least something is being done:
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jan/27/local/me-skidrow-deaths27

Obviously, the absolute numbers are not huge, but most or all of these deaths could have been prevented through better shelter and soup kitchen offers rather then the bare minimum that is currently on offer. Initiatives such as letting homeless people help and give a hand in the soup kitchens could help them feel some self-worth again, which leads to motivation to at least try and do something about their current station in life.

I work a full 37 hour work week including the occasional paid overtime. I don't consider any of those hours to be "working for the government", I have no idea how that silly simplification has taken root with you guys.

You know what? I don't mind that 70-year old fat asshole getting a new heart. I sure don't mind children getting the urgent medical care they need, either. Nor do I mind anyone, no matter their station in life, viewpoints, personal wealth, race, creed or color, getting the medical help they need. Who are you to put different amounts of worth on different people's heads?

Please note that your current insurance-based privatized health care system is massively more expensive than the public health care systems of the countries you usually compare yourselves to. They're getting better health care for less:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/etc/graphs.html

I pay my taxes gladly. With them, I buy civilization.

They ran a piece last summer tracking down a 1940s drone. It had a new-fangled invention called a TV camera that weighed 100 pounds at that time. The operator had to be in line-of-sight.

I'm talking about meddling in areas such as renewal projects, shopping patterns/habits, and in general helping folks who live in that neighborhood rise above the bad situation they're in. Consider also this: What if the system were abused? What if neighborhoods (or rather, townships) were offered an 'out' from the blacklisting for a fee?

Then this information also should be publicized. Preferably with list of of places that used that opt-out. Sorry, you are not going to convince me that ignorance is better than knowledge.

Also, what of the opposite? I can tell you right now that a black man in Harrison, Arkansas after dark is in greater physical danger than he would ever be in Compton, California. Would his particular GPS indicate that maybe he should keep driving until he sees a safer town for him (say, Sprinfgield, MO)?

Hey, here is your idea for a patent and app. Go for it.

Finally, since crime statistics are compiled on an annual basis, and often change from area to area each year, what you'd get is outdated at best, so it may well be useless to you in either event.

There are many places that stay bad for decades. And I don't think there is so much fluctuation month-to-month to invalidate the idea.

If, as you suggest, there is some significant difference in crime incidence during daylight hours as opposed to darkness, I'd like to know that, also.

Indeed, but I doubt the patent's stated goal would cover that, which is why I mentioned it.

So because it is not perfect and does not provide every possible information, the idea is worthless?

I'm talking about meddling in areas such as renewal projects, shopping patterns/habits, and in general helping folks who live in that neighborhood rise above the bad situation they're in. Consider also this: What if the system were abused? What if neighborhoods (or rather, townships) were offered an 'out' from the blacklisting for a fee?

Also, what of the opposite? I can tell you right now that a black man in Harrison, Arkansas after dark is in greater physical danger than he would ever be in Compton, California. Would his particular GPS indicate that maybe he should keep driving until he sees a safer town for him (say, Sprinfgield, MO)?

Finally, since crime statistics are compiled on an annual basis, and often change from area to area each year, what you'd get is outdated at best, so it may well be useless to you in either event.

If, as you suggest, there is some significant difference in crime incidence during daylight hours as opposed to darkness, I'd like to know that, also.

Indeed, but I doubt the patent's stated goal would cover that, which is why I mentioned it.

PBS might also support it. Last month, the News Hour ran a story on piracy. They interviewed two "opposing" parties, the Open Internet Coalition and the MPAA, whose only difference was how much copying should be regulated: a lot, or a lot more. That was the most biased, unbalanced, and stupidly wrong coverage I'd ever seen from PBS. I thought they were a cut above the rest of the mainstream media. They weren't, not that time.

Check out http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health/jan-june11/jesseext_04-21.html and related pages on that site. As the parent of an autistic child, I can clearly see the difference.