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We never learn from our mistakes:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pu...

Our country and government should not give the telecoms a dime until they do what they say they will to the satisfaction of the auditors and regulators. Promises are worthless.

I hope this time Congress attached some performance requirements so they don't just TAKE the money and do NOTHING like last time.

Actually they are. There is a push to make birth control available in the US over the counter, like it is in most of the world. But the abortion lobby doesn't want it to happen, because they would lose a revenue stream and the power that comes along with statutory middle-man status.

That narrative was pushed, but mostly by agents who opposed Planned Parenthood and the like anyway, making their criticism suspect.

However, looking elsewhere, you see the concern may be directed towards the potential such laws as written, are meant as ways to circumvent the existing reforms of the ACA, if a bit less overtly than some of the TRAP laws.

In fact, Planned Parenthood of California supported that state's laws.

Now maybe it's not the case that the conservatives are up to no good, but are you surprised that they will be criticized and distrusted? And given that your own premise is based on a distrust of Planned Parenthood, you can't be indignant about it coming back to you either.

I guess only Nixon can go to China.

And it should be an explicit goal of the Republican party system too:

And the people who are more invested in the organization, are more senior in the organization have more power than the people who are not. And that’s for very good reason. It’s because you want a party to have consistency over time. You want it to have a structure where people have to compromise with each other.

And basically you want it to have a series of stability, so you don’t get carried away by momentary fads and crazy demagogues. So, by some logic, this structure exists to prevent Donald Trump and people like Donald Trump, who are of the moment.

David Brooks on Newshour

Not to mention that the wealth of a nation lies in the general public.

It does not. Half the world' wealth is held by the top 1% of individuals PBS

There are 120 nations with less wealth each than Bill Gates alone Knoema

400 Americans have more wealth than half of all other Americans PolitiFact

If you look at the detail of those 400 richest Americans you find that a small percentage of those have more than all the rest of the 400.

Getting the picture?

Suggestions: plenty of vitamin D (I take about 5000/day),

At 5k/day - you're above what's considered safe:
The safe upper limit for vitamin D is:
        4,000 IU/day for children 9 years and older, adults, and pregnant and breast-feeding teens and women (100 mcg/day)

And well above the RDA:
9 to 70 years: 600 IU (15 mcg/day)

You're putting yourself at risk of vascular calcification

I suggest you check out this great Frontline episode on supplements.

Also, turn off wireless devices/router/cable box at night to help you sleep better.

No...
You're bathed in EM all the time from countless sources - turning off your wifi won't make a dent.

Unfortunately, current nuclear technology is only sufficient for a decade or so at current global energy consumption levels - after that we will have exhausted the global uranium supply.

You have raised this irrelevant point in several threads for this article, and in many threads for prior articles where nuclear power is discussed, and you have been corrected on it's relevance multiple times - yet you persist. First, the figure you cite precedes more recent exploration results, e.g. greater Olympic Dam reserves. Second, due to unexploited proven reserves, relatively low current Uranium demand dampening exploration, and issues with access (permafrost, etc.), there is a great deal of exploration still to be done. Third, proven Gen-IV designs, particularly the IFR (see next part of this response), obviate the need for the relatively rare fissile Uranium isotopes which fuel Gen-III designs, vastly extending the usefulness of the proven reserves as fuel.

Every one of these counterpoints has been brought up in response to your prior posts about having only a decade of usable Uranium reserves remaining. Yet you persist. Repeatedly.

If we want to go nuclear we need to invest heavily in developing reactors that can consume thorium and/or non-enriched uranium as their primary fuel. At present we ave only a few model prototypes and lots of grand designs that have never been tested.

No, just no. The IFR project headed by Dr. Charles Till under the Clinton-42 administration was production-ready. Every safety (to an unprecedented level), proliferation, scalability, modularity, and waste issue had been addressed. Only some components of the cost were still a problem at the time, and would have declined significantly over the years since then. It was ready for a first production build. Clinton-42 shut it down for symbolic reasons, and in large part due to then-Senator Kerry being a damned fool who didn't understand the IFR technology, mistakenly attributing proliferation concerns to it.

To be clear, I'm not arguing against pursuing Thorium reactor designs. Rather, it's your assertion that Thorium reactors are necessary due to the limited fissile Uranium within proven (with old data) Uranium reserves that provokes a response. The IFR was not some untested "grand design". The IFR prototype EBR-II passed safety tests worse than the effects of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, and passed those tests in 1986. Imagine if the reactors at Fukushima had been supplanted with IFRs by, say, 2006 (two decades after the EBR-II safety tests, over a decade after IFR was foolishly cancelled, plenty of time for approval of GE's S-PRISM design with enough time left for construction and de-activation of the old reactors) - no wall-to-wall nuclear hysteria "breaking news" for CNN. The BN-800, a less safe (Russian, so no surprise there) variant of the IFR is generating power now, even though that's not even it's primary purpose. The Chinese have already begun to construct a BN-800 variant intended for power generation. Clinton-42 (Congress actually, through legislation, but at the administration's urging, primarily originating from O'Leary) cancelled the IFR in 1994. We could have been essentially done with domestic coal by now.

- T

A few years ago I was watching the Killer landslide documentary. There was a brief shot of video from inside a (national guard?) helicopter than panned over the instrument panel. In that brief moment I noticed that there was video display on the instrument panel that was overlaid with a road map of the area and that the map kept correct orientation with the outside world as the helicopter banked around (which given that the roads hand been obliterated by the landslide would have been a handy thing for the pilots).

So the augmented reality displays have been around for a long long time to the point that they have filtered down to "mere" rescue choppers.

It is well-known that most domestic terrorists are well educated, middle class to wealthy individuals.

Most Domestic 'Jihadists' Are Educated, Well-Off

However, many foreign terrorists are also very wealthy.

Osama Bin Laden Had $29 Million in Wealth, Requested it Mainly Be Used for âJihadâ(TM) in Personal Will

Whatâ(TM)s made the Islamic State one of the richest terrorist armies in history?

The World's Richest Terrorists

I see your leftist Slashdot conspiracy and raise the fact that the same often happens when you don't beat the rightwing drums: exhibit 1, exhibit 2, exhibit 3

Not sure if down-modding pro-homeopathy is really a right-wing type thing to do, probably more of a secular-humanist type thing.

If you click the links I posted in my comments (to other Slashdot stories, e.g. about the use of VR to dull phantom limb pain), you can see it's just about the fact that triggering a placebo effect can be a valid course of therapy in some cases. Homeopathy is, as far as I am concerned, a obvious example of triggering a placebo effect.

I'm pretty sure the downmodding was more because I was countering the attack on Jeremy Corbyn (which that whole story was about), who is the devil incarnate as far as the right wing UK is concerned.

In Exhibit 3, it looked like you might have misunderstood the parent poster but they thought you were being coy. Communicating tone isn't easy on the internet. Yet another reason I don't care about karma.

I'm not sure how I misunderstood him. He claimed, as far as I can see, that only Muslims massacre people for clearly idiotic/nonsense reasons, under a title of "keep saying there's no Islamic terrorist problem". I tried to counter that with an example of how we, the enlightened Westerners with our democracy, just as well use nonsense reasons ("spreading democracy", "destroying WMDs") for justifying massacring people. The arguments used are different but in the end it's just a matter of finetuning the justification to better resonate with the intended target public.

Maybe I should have been more explicit: you can just as easily title a comment as "keep saying there's no Western democracy problem", with as content "I'll believe it when Russia, China, Iran and North Korea start repeated drone bombing of as many other countries as the US, while also triggering the rise of a scourge similar to IS as cherry on the cake.". And such a claim would be equally nonsensical, as far as I'm concerned. Correlation & causation...

he had to prove his innocence instead of the State having to prove his guilt.

You're spouting nonsense... They did have ample evidence indicating his guilt. It has always fallen to the defendant to provide a defense, and counter / refute the state's (otherwise-compelling) incriminating evidence.

It's a disturbing trend where we're proving innocence as opposed to relying on the State to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

You don't seem to know what "beyond a reasonable doubt" means... It has never meant "100% sure, absolutely irrefutable and infallible proof". It's a very high standard of evidence, but never has anyone pretended innocent men never look guilty beyond a reasonable doubt... Hence the critical NEED for defense lawyers for the accused, from the very start of legal systems.

Given the time that has passed, the case should have not been prosecuted unless it was so air-tight that an alibi would not have made a difference.

It's ridiculous to put such an impossibly high burden on the prosecution in any circumstances. A huge number of guilty criminals would never be punished, because they were minimally able to hide their crimes behind a tiny sliver of possible doubt.

In addition, I don't believe ANY case can EVER be so airtight that an iron-clad alibi would still result in a conviction. Eyewitnesses can easily make mistakes.... plenty of people LOOK quite similar, so even video evidence could be faulty. Similarly, NO form of forensic evidence is free of "collisions", where two people, out of a pool of millions, have practically identical features (e.g. fingerprints, DNA, etc.).

Just ask the National Academies: "no studies have been conducted of large populations to determine how many sources might share the same or similar features."
http://www8.nationalacademies....

Or ask Brandon Mayfield how he feels about the accuracy of fingerprint evidence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontl...

Edward de Vere was Shakes a spear

Those aren't all his policies... for instance, there's nothing about abortion, climate change, education, marijuana, ISIS, Iran, or North Korea.

So... supplement with other sources. For the lazy, here's PBS for a start, though it isn't comprehensive either.

Regarding the hospital bombing: you don't need conspiracy theories, you only have to read the ever changing statements put out by the US military in the wake of the attack (from "mistake" to "it was a Taliban hideout from which US troops were attacked" to "mistake" again, and everything in between), combined with the facts that e.g. the attacks continued for 30 minutes after Doctors without Borders got into contact with US military officials, and that only the hospital was hit within the compound.

I think I also finally understand why I'm not getting the point that I wanted to make across to you: you seem to genuinely believe that Bush reason for invading Iraq was "spreading democracy". I naively assumed that pretty much everyone by now understood that was not a goal at all (probably caught in a similar trap as you earlier due to the "many others" that I regularly talk to, read and hear).

I was not in any way talking about moral relativism or about what social form is superior to another or not. Given my (yes, my) assumption that the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with democracy and that democracy was just a pretext (ab)used to mobilise public support for committing atrocities, I was trying to point out that this is no different to (ab)using Islam for exactly the same purpose. You seem to argue in favour of take everyone's justifications for committing atrocities mostly at face value.

You may also want to watch The Rise of ISIS by NPR frontline for some background on how the ISIS mess started starting from Al-Qaeda and the Iraq war. If you replace Sunni/Shia with Hutu/Tutsi in the story about the power struggles and repression of certain groups, you get something that's very close to the Hutu/Tutsi situation in Rwanda and (to some lesser extent) Congo. And if you want background about how Al Qaeda started (it's much more complex than "the US gave some weapons to some Afghans to fight the Russians"), you may want to watch the excellent BBC documentary Bitter Lake.

I sort of agree.

Honestly, we already pay gasoline taxes that are supposed to go to the building and maintenance of roads.

Only, the wall street journal (paywalled) says that states are instead using that stable, guaranteed income to pay for other things like debt.
40% of federal fuel taxes [1] go to things other than roads as well.

I'm all for top earners paying more taxes, as we honestly don't need a nobility with more money than small countries, but I'm not sure that income makes sense to put into roads.

I'd rather fuel taxes actually went to road building and maintenance like it's supposed to...

Having increased high earner income tax fund social and work programs aimed at poverty does make sense though. If politicians would actually do it and not funnel it elsewhere.

If you look carefully, you'll realize, the gloomy predictions tend to include non-committal words like "may" or "could":

Sea Rise Could Force Millions In Florida To Adapt Or Flee

This makes them non-falsifiable and thus unscientific...

Unscientific, but convenient... Years later, when the earlier peddled fears fail to materialize, the peddlers offer you new ones without having to blush about the past ones: we never said, it will stop snowing in Scotland, only that it could .

... across the St. Lawrence River with a Trebuchet made of balsa wood bought from the nearest hobby store count?

Oh wait, I forgot, we are making nice with Canada now. Make that the Rio Grande.

"natural gas produces less CO2 than coal" It's more than that, coal also produces ash that ends up warming the snow it lands on by absorbing sunlight. Re: arctic.

Well fine, but if you're going to use natural gas, make sure you burn it and not just let it escape to the atmosphere. Sadly, the latter happens all-too-often.

As a greenhouse gas, methane (the principal component of natural gas) is much worse than carbon dioxide.

But this did take action. They started draining the reservoir straight away. This reduced the loss rate and the pressure behind the leak which then gave them the ability to cap it. It really isn't that easy to do. As for the size of the leak the total loss is equivalent to around 5 Billion cubic feet (that is the normal measurement not tonnes), this compares to a US production rate of around 2,400 billion cubic feet per month.

It is still the worst methane leak in american history but it is far from as bad as some are making out.

Have a read of this - http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ru...

Those that RTFA may be put off from being given only a preview to the PBS documentary. Here's a link to NOVA's website where one can watch the entire episode.

Yes and no.

Calories from different sources are metabolized differently, but different ratios of macronutrients in the diet seem to make no difference in weight gain or loss over the long term - it's the amount of calories that counts, no matter the source.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/is-a-calorie-a-calorie.html

You left out the nerve gases Tabun and Sarin, which Saddam had in quantity, and VX nerve gas, which he secretly disposed of by dumping large amounts of it in the dessert. You also left out biological weapons which Saddam also developed.

Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction

The Bush administration was NOT adamant that "Saddam had a bomb." They were adamant that he not GET a bomb.

The West didn't sell Saddam chemical agents, Iraq manufactured them by itself. Any state that can produce modern insecticides can produce nerve gas. Mustard gas is less demanding, if a country has a chemical industry it can make it.

Below is a link to the text of Powell speech. He seems to mention chemical weapons a lot, with some mention of biological, and of nuclear program information.

Full text of Colin Powell's speech

Powell wasn't setup, at least not deliberately. Most intelligence agencies thought Saddam had WMDs, but not everyone thought it was worth going after him. It was very unfortunate in many ways that the Bush administration didn't make the information public. At the end of the day Powell was not responsible for the information he presented, that was the responsibility of the intelligence agencies. His job as the US chief diplomat was to make the US case.

Cryptome has an interesting list https://cryptome.org/2013-info...
Note the backgrounds to Daniel Ellsberg, Sibel Edmonds, John Kiriakou, Thomas Drake, J. Kirk Wiebe, William Binney, Edward Snowden.

As to the ".. rendering such Byzantine cover-ups far more likely to fail."
What has failed for the CIA?
United States President's Commission on CIA Activities within the United States in the mid 1970's went fine even after the MKUltra news https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Doctors and medics get to stay in their professions
CIA medics monitored brutal interrogation tactics (December 12, 2014)
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ru...
The public will even take in a policy of "Hacked federal files couldn't be encrypted because government computers are too old" (2015/06/16)
http://www.latimes.com/nation/...

As far as passible the US seems able to close ranks around its medical, nuclear, chemical, biological contractors and workers but seems to allow issues about signals intelligence, digital files and the policy of torture to exist in the wider press.
Or the results of Operation Paperclip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
So the US Byzantine cover-ups works. The US press only seems to find a few people every generation on a limited set of topics.

His model is way too weak.

We further assume that a leak of information from any conspirator is sufficient to expose the conspiracy and render it redundant

So any single person acting alone, of any stature in society, can bust open a conspiracy and get it on CNN?

The problems with this model are many:

1. It ignores authority and credibility of the leaker

2. It ignores the reach of the leaker

3. It does not define when a conspiracy theory has been proven (e.g. a reasonable definition is whether a specified percentage of the population understand the conspiracy to be true)

For example, to use one of the examples of a true conspiracy the author used, the NSA:

The National Security Agency (NSA) PRISM affair—The staggering extent of spying by the NSA and its allies on civilian internet users was exposed by contractor Edward Snowden in 2013.

That's just factually wrong. It was substantially exposed on PBS in 2007. Why am I quoting PBS? Because I know it is perceived as an authoritative source. Why do most people not know about this? Because PBS lacks the reach.

Both authoratativeness and reach are required to expose a conspiracy. And once these two elements are added into the model, then one is forced to accept a non-trivial definition of conspiracy-proven-true by setting a threshold of population who believes (and not simply saying one leaker implies the whole world instantaneously and fully believes).

No, the epidemic was started by the eating of bats in Guinea, according to the Frontline Ebola Documentary ( http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontl... ) But then, what do they know?

Article mention it is done clean.

Since you don't have the knowledge to know when you are out of your depth, I will help you along. The article (really more like a brochure) you cited only covers the p side (they call it "positive potential electrical charge") and doesn't cover the n side of the p-n junction.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/solar/insi-nf.html This is a link where NOVA (the science guys) explain how solar cells work. Notice they mention boron and phosphorus. Phosphorus is typically deposited chemically, using CVD (chemical vapor disposition). I am not an expert in the field, but from what I have been told the phosphorus deposition is not clean.

Furthermore, your link doesn't seem to acknowledge that making a reasonably pure silicon wafer for the solar panels requires forming silicon crystals. Cheap methods for doing that involve some nasty processes.

There is a good article that discusses the capture and the wider circumstances here (note the author's name).

OPERATION PRIMROSE - The Story of the Capture of the Enigma Cypher Machine from U11O by David Balme

An excerpt:

The capture of U110 and the Enigma machine was the greatest kept secret of the war. It was expunged from the official Naval records and only a few persons in the Allied war effort were informed that the German Navy cyphers were being broken. The information obtained was, of course, given to all necessary commands, but the source was kept camouflaged. In fact, even after the war when Captain Roskill, the official Naval war historian, came to write the history of the war at sea, he found no mention of it in the records. . . .

That evening, of the 9th May 1941 the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, signalled Baker-Cresswell: "Hearty congratulations. The petals of your flower are of rare beauty". When David Balme, who led the boarding-party from HMS Bulldog, went to Buckingham Palace to receive the Distinguished Service Cross he had earned in the action, His Majesty King George VI remarked, according to Roskill, that the operation was the most important single event in the whole war at sea.

It had been intended that the capture of the Enigma was never going to be divulged, but when the Blunt/Philby spy ring was broken in the 1950s, it was found that information of the Enigma had been given to the Russians as the spies had been working in British Intelligence and another spy, Cairncross, had worked at Bletchley.

As Britain's allies, the Russians had been given information relative to their theatre of war, but the source had remained camouflaged, as it was to other recipients. It is interesting to note that the information which Blunt/Philby gave to the Russians on the enigma did not leak out to the Germans. Subsequently, the records were released under the normal thirty-year rule and are now available from the Government Archives at Kew to anyone of any nationality.

In 1981 the German Sunday paper, Bild am Sonntag, ran a serial on the Battle of the Atlantic. The editor interviewed David Balme, the Boarding Officer, and Dönitz. When Dönitz was told how the British captured the Enigma from U110 and had used it, he would not believe it, forty years after the event. Dönitz died still not believing it.

Historians writing today state that the enigma probably shortened the war by two years. As things turned out, that is probably a fair assessment, but in May 1941, Britain was losing the war in the Atlantic and North Africa. The enigma from U110 saved her from defeat in that crucial time before the USA joined her.

There was also a NOVA program with some interesting detail:

"Decoding Nazi Secrets"

NARRATOR: The only document on the U-110 that did not end up in British hands was the book of love poems to Edith. The papers that were captured, including the bigram tables, were priceless. When the documents reached Bletchley Park, the codebreakers rejoiced. The tables and charts would lead to a drastic improvement in fixing U-boat positions, so convoys could be routed evasively around the wolf packs.

VALERIE EMERY: The prize were the bigram tables and they were magnificent, although some of them had got a bit wet and we had to dry them. Geoffrey Tandy, having been at the Natural History Museum, had access to proper drying paper which he brought down by a load, and we had to dry those and clean them up and distribute them as necessary.

NARRATOR: Almost immediately the results were evident. On June 23rd, 1941, Bletchley Park decoded a U-boat message that would save a convoy. It was heading for England laden with supplies, and the codebreakers discovered that a wolf pack of 10 U-boats was lying in wait. Armed with this knowledge, the Ad

I am not sure I agree with your evidence against. I can argue by some measures the wealth gap is larger than it has ever been.

Over the past 30 years when the wealth gap has exploded, social safety net programs and union power was reduced, not strengthened. If you want to see what wealth inequality looks like under strong social programs, look at the 1960s. In 1963, the top 1% had 35x more wealth than the median family. This is what the social programs after the Great Depression gave us. This disparity grew to 40x by 1983, when our social safety nets started deteriorating. Fast forward to 2013, and the top 1% has 97x more wealth than the median family.

Its really even worse than this, because almost all of the wealth gap has been caused by the top 0.01%. If you look at wealth growth of the top .01%-1%, the growth is pretty flat. It is only the top 0.01%, or about 10,000 families, that are seeing all of this growth.

The great society programs enacted in '64-'65 allowed the US economy to keeping growing after the post-WW2 prosperity faded, and kept inequality from growing significantly for 20 years. Once Reagan started to lower taxes and defeat the unions (without enacting other worker protections) the rise in inequality was inevitable.

We have plenty of evidence that strong social programs help the poor. Just look at Scandinavian countries. All we have evidence of in the US is that social programs can be run poorly. That is a reason to improve and strengthen them, not scuttle them.

The most eloquent and persuasive explanation may be found in Niall Ferguson's book "Civilization: The West and the Rest". I highly recommend it.

http://www.amazon.com/Civiliza...
http://www.pbs.org/show/civili...

They don't want a theocracy

Theocracy is is exactly what they want.
When they are not planning to bring about Armageddon by looking for loopholes in the Bible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Some Fundamentalist Christians believe that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ cannot occur until the Third Temple is constructed in Jerusalem, which requires the appearance of a red heifer born in Israel.
Clyde Lott, a cattle breeder in O'Neill, Nebraska, United States, is attempting to systematically breed red heifers and export them to Israel to establish a breeding line of red heifers in Israel in the hope that this will bring about the construction of the Third Temple and ultimately the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.[9]

P.S. Dear moderator, we can do this until I run out of copy/paste... or you run out of mod-points.

They don't want a theocracy

Theocracy is is exactly what they want.
When they are not planning to bring about Armageddon by looking for loopholes in the Bible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Some Fundamentalist Christians believe that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ cannot occur until the Third Temple is constructed in Jerusalem, which requires the appearance of a red heifer born in Israel.
Clyde Lott, a cattle breeder in O'Neill, Nebraska, United States, is attempting to systematically breed red heifers and export them to Israel to establish a breeding line of red heifers in Israel in the hope that this will bring about the construction of the Third Temple and ultimately the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.[9]

Not exact figures, but here's $200B (in 2007) that taxpayers paid to the telcos and never got shit from. It should be known that the excise tax from the Telecommunications Act of 1996 continued for quite some time after 2007, if it still doesn't today.

I'd meant to include a link:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/nation-july-dec13-guns_07-23/

Nova

Looks like you lied. I'm the guy that fact checks liberals when they claim something that is black/white and can be without spin. Nearly 100% rate at proving them liars.

I'd love to see fusion reactors eventually, but no, we really don't need them now.

What we have is a huge nuclear waste problem from the light-water fission reactors. That is a primitive design that only uses 3% of the fuel and the waste is going to be hot for 300,000 years. Leaving that to posterity is wildly irresponsible.

Fortunately, we have a solution. Anybody with a high school diploma should know that the only thing that can be done with nuclear waste is to transmute it down to less radioactive elements. Fortunately we have the technology to do that: the fast breeder reactors. We can take 300,000 year waste and make it into waste that's going to be a problem for less than a few hundred years - we can build casks that can last that long (and English will still be understood at that time).

We have a moral imperative to do this, and the side effect of cleaning up the mess we've inherited is enough power for all conceivable power needs for humans for over a century. Plenty of time to get fusion reactors perfected (yes, they should still be worked on!).

We already have the technology but politicians killed it so that global warming could remain a political football (in the US). Fortunately Russia has continued to progress and they're helping China get online over the next decade. The successor to the current US system will eventually buy these reactors from China because we'll need them and the politicians cannot destroy everything for their own powerbase forever. It's a shame that the People complacently allow such potential to be squandered, but it's not for a lack of technical ability to solve these problems.

It is disappointing to see the fusion people constantly claim that they would have been done by now had their funding not been cut, and then be *so* wrong about their T&M budgets for the current big research project. Maybe the current generation in positions of authority don't have what it takes (and that can be OK since we have time).

Yeah, a political guy thought his job (and the jobs of his underlings) was to make the President look good. Like I said - this is bi-partisan. Just look at all the jerks in the Obama admin who forgot they were working at the taxpayers' expense and think their jobs are to make Obama look good.

Here's some of the faux-gagging of Hansen:

2006 CBS hansen, while supposedly gagged rants to "60 minutes"

2007 PBS theoretically gagged and persecuted interview.

Jan 2006 NYT interview by the supposedly gagged man with the most-read paper on the planet.

2006 WaPo The supposedly gagged man gives a panel discussion on what he supposedly cannot say without being waterboarded and it's published in one the nation's most-read papers

People really need to stop being manipulated by propaganda meisters like Hansen and his friends. There are TONS of articles in the web based on interviews and talks the man made while he was supposedly wearing a dick-cheney-administered ball-gag. The man is on record admitting that the famous global warming hearings in the Senate in 1988 were political theater - they were scheduled for a hot day and the Democrats made sure to kill the AC in the hearing room so everybody would be hot and sweating in all the pictures and video. YOU HAVE BEEN MANIPULATED, possibly for your entire life by this man and his political allies.

Other than the IRA, has anyone else used that tactic with real bombs?

Just some small, no-name country with a couple of tiny explosives that really didn't cause as much damage as everyone thinks.

With respect to Democrat readers, your only viable candidate on that side (Hillary Clinton) is a weak contender, while the Republican side appears to have both Trump and Carson as strong candidates.

Don't count out the Bern yet. He's already tracking better than Obama was 8 years ago (compared to Hillary)

And while Hillary is definitely a career politico, she's never actually won an election for anything in her life.

I stay away from the "the other side will do *this* when elected" rhetoric, and try to confine myself to analysis of present situation and past performance. Please bear that in mind when replying - I'm not being a partisan echo chamber.

Money is a pretty good indicator of who will win an election in this country. With a 95% success rate, it's a pretty-good rule of thumb to use.

Bernie doesn't have his own money, so he has to rely on donations. Donations come from moneyed interests in return for political favors, and Bernie won't sell himself that way, so he won't get a lot of money.

He also says things which are easy to (unfairly) attack, such as sticking with the term "Democratic Socialism". Socialism is closely aligned in the public's mind with Communism, the USSR and cold war, and to a lesser extend the Fascism of WWII Italy.

While you and I can sort through the actual meanings, the public will only see what the pundits say. They will see Bernie as wanting to implement a completely non-democratic political system (Socialism!), and without the money to make his voice known it's unlikely that he'll get very far.

Yes, I agree with his position and rationale, but as the saying goes: it's not enough to be right, you have to be effective.

If you're an American (or frankly, any innocent person) anywhere in the world who isn't an active member of a foreign terrorist organization or an agent of a foreign power, the Intelligence Community DOES NOT CARE ABOUT and actually DOES NOT WANT your data. Sounds crazy and bizarre for foreign intelligence agencies to care about things like foreign intelligence, I know, but it's true.

You would think. And, if the government lived up to our ideals for it, that would be true. Why would a government want to spy on their own citizens?

But in the real world, history shows us that sometimes governments decide that they do want to spy on their own citizens. They decide that some citizens are "dissenters" and need to be spied on. They decide that court orders and civil rights don't apply to them. They make "enemy lists" and try to dig out dirt to discredit the enemies. They wiretap reformers and try to blackmail them.

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

http://schools.yrdsb.ca/markvi...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

But I did know the Nazis were using the Swastika symbol. So what? I will proudly and happily use the Swastika for what it is, a Hindu symbol and a decorative motif from ancient India. I recently ran into a group Indians and their priest in the Starbucks (@ State College PA) The women were wearing white saris with ornate decorative borders. The motifs in their border? The Swastika and the Star of David alternating in a series!

Not sure how many noticed the irony!

There are some incredible documentaries.

Man on Wire

Grizzly Man

Deep Water

A Class Divided: aka Blue Eyes Brown Eyes

Tim's Vermeer

The Challenger Disaster (More a dramatization, but accurate and very very good)

Enjoy! :)

The recent rulings have been that laptop searches are unconstitutional. The courts have said this is so because a ) laptops and phones contain highly personal information, much more so that suitcases normally do, and b) customs is to be searching for things like products being smuggled in, or drugs. Hard drives can't contain drugs and wouldn't contain smuggled products. Two recent examples include:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ru...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

The Obama administration has argued that they don't need a warrant, but the courts have ruled against them.

I had the opportunity to go and see a talk by Dr. Charles Till, he was the director of the Argonne National Laboratory West, and developed the Integral Fast Reactor. A great speaker and very passionate about his work there. I could hear the frustration in his voice still when he talked about their work being shut down during the Clinton Administration, and this talk was in 2013, many years after. I was extremely impressed with how far he pushed everyone to go to actually BREAK their reactor, he wanted near unrealistic safety, and he got it! Every aspect of the reactor had safety as the foremost concern and so much of it became completely hands off, robotic hands to handle nuclear products and stuff. He talked about how every single problem government wanted them to solve, they solved, nuclear waste, proliferation of weapons, etc. All except the cost, but it was shut down in the 90s, the cost would have dropped a lot since then, either with cheaper technology or cheaper engineering.

It really makes me sad--and I can understand his frustration--that this got closed, with those extra years of research who knows how viable nuclear power would be now.

Interview with Dr. Till

I don't think this is nonsense, and it's actually been reported before. See this Bill Moyers transcript for another, much older, source. Here are a couple more sources from 2007: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/15/AR2007051500864.html and http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/16/AR2007081601358.html. Basically, the White House was so desperate to have DoJ authorization for the program, they visited a man in the hospital who was very ill, almost certainly very medicated, and in no condition to make decisions about the legality of domestic surveillance. It seems like they were trying to take advantage of Ashcroft's state and trick him into signing the papers. Notably, Alberto Gonzales, an attorney general later in the Bush administration, was among those visiting from the White House. Also, Ashcroft wasn't even the Attorney General at the time; because of his illness, he had transferred the power to Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey. Bush went around Comey to try to take advantage of a very ill man to try to get the surveillance authorized.

Will PBS re-make "Spying On The Home Front" in the light of subsequent revelations? The Ashcroft hospital incident is documented.

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

It's still worth watching.

It's really too bad that the fabulous museum exhibit display Deep Tree isn't more broadly available. .

Aha, happy to be mistaken and outdated on this one- I looked and found that now there is a web page via NOVA with a good interesting subset of the data. It's nicely done and at the DeepTree link at this link.

Lee pled down to fairly light charges, with 50 or so completely dismissed. Lee was awarded a $1.6 million settlement from the U.S. federal government and several news organizations for privacy violations. I guess the government just passes out money to suspected Chinese spies?

It wasn't so much the government that settled as it was the four news organizations.

It appears to me that the lawsuit the Wen Ho Lee brought was a revenge suit to try to find out who had ratted him out by giving his name to the press.
The people at LANL closed ranks and refused to tell. After all, they had been filing complaints about his violating security measures long before the FBI was investigating Lee.
So Lee sues the news organizations to make them reveal the sources. Historically, the media would have an easy win on First Amendment rights and centuries of case law. The judge, Thomas Penfield Jackson, ignores all this and finds the reporters in contempt and gives them a $500 a day fine.
If you remember the DOJ vs Microsoft case, you'll know why Judge Jackson has a grudge against the media.

The settlement is really bad news for the rest of us.
It's going to make it easy for politicians to shut up the press when something they don't like is reported.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...

Also, note that the government's condition was that Wen Ho Lee gets none of the government's money - it goes only to pay lawyer's expenses.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06...

Whether or not he was actively spying, I can't say. I find it very difficult to think that a Taiwanese would do anything to help China.
But I'm real sure he was up to no good.

You really need to read this of you want to talk about the Wen Ho Lee case.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02...

If nothing else, he should have been imprisoned for this felony:
"They did discover that Dr. Lee had given his password to his children so they could connect to the Internet and play computer games through his Los Alamos computer while they were at college. "

Of course the main reason for dropping the charges was that they had no smoking gun. That is, Lee copied all these documents, but they didn't catch him transferring them. The tapes just disappeared. Part of the settlement was that Lee would reveal the location of the missing tapes, and the big reveal was "I threw them in the trash". That in itself is a felony.

Also the government settled for a plea bargain in the original spy case was to a large extent due to the defense lawyers filing to get security clearance to get access to the 400,000 documents Lee downloaded, and secondly to put them into the court records.

Once again, I maintain that the Wen Ho Lee case is nothing like the Xi Xiaoxing case.

This is completely wrong. What stands out about this post is that it has remained so highly modded since it was posted. I generally don't see this combination of complete nonsense plus persistent high modding here. Is there that much animosity towards Brahmins?

Let me tell you why it's wrong: I'm a Brahmin (yes, that's the correct spelling). Everyone in my family has had to work their entire lives, going back to my great grandparents who came from a village. You don't get any special treatment from the government, no royalty check, you don't get a stipend from a temple, unless you're an employee. No. F--king. Stipend. No support from anyone except what you get when you work LIKE EVERYONE ELSE. I've known lots of Brahmins, and they too have had to work just like everyone else. No silver f--king spoon I ever saw.

You know what being a Brahmin is closest to outside India? The Jewish priestly class. I was describing that Brahmins were a priestly caste to a friend of mine (he inquired - not like I bring it up here - no one cares) and he asked if we had any extra temple responsibilities and mentioned the Cohanim - people with the surname Cohen - this is the Jewish priestly class. That's it, that's all a Brahmin is. I don't think non-Cohens have this kind of animosity towards Cohens. I have never ever thought about this literally in all my decades on this planet until just now. I will now have to inquire. Unbelievable.

Seriously? What's up with the modding of this post? I could understand if there were a +1 Troll, but WTF? Seriously, where is this coming from? I'm sure there were abuses in the past, but I have never seen or heard of one, or heard any - ANY - anti-other-caste sentiment from any Brahmin I know. I'm straining my brain right now to remember and... no, not a word. Don't get me wrong, I don't come from any particularly politically-correct background, I've heard the occasional busting on other groups, but never anti-caste sentiment.

Because cable companies (which became cable ISPs) weren't originally something you could call a public utility. When they started, nobody knew what was the best way to rig up houses, or allocate bandwidth. When they started offering Internet service, that increased the complexity because now each home needed to be able to transmit data back to the cable company. These were all complex problems with a plethora of possible solutions. The "myth of capitalist efficiency" is precisely what filtered out the bad solutions over three decades, leaving only the efficient ones.

Who cares about the cable companies? If we had a public data utility, we'd have just strung fiber everywhere and no one would have had to solve the problem of transmitting upstream over coax. Then those who wanted to continue to be robbed by the cable companies could continue to do so while the rest of us purchased our data services a la carte. Heck, the cable companies could even provide their services over the new infrastructure.

This is what we were supposed to get via our existing common carrier infrastructure if the phone companies hadn't stolen all the money for it. Since private industry has proven itself too inept or crooked to get this done, I think it's high time we take it over as a public works project.

but other than that there are no downsides.

Texas ranks in or near the bottom 20% in the nation in education and access to health care, and its poverty level puts in 46th (out of 50), in between Arkansas and Alabama. It has the highest uninsured rate in the nation. It leads all other states in the number of executions of innocent people. Texas has the highest percentage of children who don't have any access to health care.

  http://educationblog.dallasnew...

http://www.texasobserver.org/t...

http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2013/0...

http://watchdogblog.dallasnews...

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

Among Texas' other poor rankings are 50th for the EPA's toxic exposure score, 47th for total toxic chemicals released into waterways, 46th for cancer-causing chemicals released, 45th for developmental toxins released, and 49th for reproductive toxins released. So, when you say "diverse ecosystems" I assume you mean there are some places you can live and get cancer and some places you just cannot live.

Texas ranks 50th (out of 50) for greenhouse emissions.

In summary, poverty, poorly educated people, sick kids and an environment disaster not to mention the climate that you mention putting Texas near the bottom of the comfort index rankings do not add up to Texas being a "nice place to live". The highly-touted "Texas Miracle" is a lie.

And here are some unretouched photos of people Texas has elected governor:

http://cdn2-b.examiner.com/sit...

http://www.highwaygirl.com/hwg...

And the current governor believes a U.S. military exercise in the region is really an all-out invasion by Obama and the US government to take over Texas. Or, he just says that to pander to his pig-ignorant electorate.

I'm sorry friend, but Texas is a shit-hole. My thoughts and prayers go out to everyone who lives there. In Jesus' name.