Slashdot Mirror

{sarcasm}
Given that the well-known CIA/FBI mole and General Proponent of Big Government known as Moxie Marlinspike has stated "Shane and Sarah are easily two of my favorite people in the world." in reference to two of the three hikers, I bet you are exactly right with those assumptions you're making there...
{/sarcasm}

;)

...about 18-20 years ago, when the WorldWideWeb consisted of about 50 sites - all text based - and things were a LOT looser, some yutz screwed up his router config and set his public IP to 127.0.0.1. It didn't really "crash" the internet but there was this incredible sucking sound as all those packets tried to go home.

Then there was the backhoe operator a couple of years later who was working near a railroad right of way and dug up a fiber bundle belonging to one of the major carriers of the time (MCI IIRC). He ended up blacking out most of the US Eastern Seaboard.

And then there was LDDS (sometimes knows as Larry, Darryl and Darryl Service) who reportedly placed a regional switch in a basement near The Point in Pittsburgh just in time for the 1996 flood.

The pair, according to police, had knowledge of a software glitch in one of the high-bet slot machines. In order to expose the glitch, a special "double-up" feature had to be internally activated. The men persuaded casino technicians to alter "soft" options on the machines, such as volume and screen brightness controls. Such perks aren't unusual for high-rollers, who can wager anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of dollars in one day.

This is what makes it theft. Or more specifically it's being charged as wire fraud, if I'm understanding that correctly.

The pair, according to police, had knowledge of a software glitch in one of the high-bet slot machines. In order to expose the glitch, a special "double-up" feature had to be internally activated. The men persuaded casino technicians to alter "soft" options on the machines, such as volume and screen brightness controls. Such perks aren't unusual for high-rollers, who can wager anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of dollars in one day.

One Meadows employee, who was not criminally charged or accused of wrongdoing, agreed to enable the double-up feature on the machine with the glitch.

Normally, such a feature would allow a player to risk doubling his winnings or potentially losing them all. The double-up feature isn't usually enabled on the machines in part because it's unpopular with most gamblers, who are unwilling to risk large amounts of money.

Read the story and you'll see that there's a lot more to it then just his preferences. For instance he was using a third-party to cash in winnings that he knew would raise eyebrows.

Stop the hyperbole. Even if someone is dying because they can't pay for treatment, trying to spread the cost among less than 50% of the population (you know, the only people who actually pay taxes) is still not guaranteed to provide good care for everyone.

What's the hyperbole? The National Academy of Science, Institute of Medicine said that 45,000 people die every year for lack of medical treatment. That's not in doubt, because there's more evidence than I can fit in a Slashdot post. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06339/743713-84.stm

I was following the healthcare debate during the Nixon Administration. Nixon's Secretary of Health and Human Services was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Moynihan came up with a pretty good health care plan. As Ralph Nader said, on domestic policy, both the Republicans and Democrats are farther to the right than Nixon. For this, Nixon deserves a slightly cooler place in Hell.

I don't know what kind of guarantee you want. If we *don't* pay for health care for such people, they're going to die. If we do pay for their health care, they won't die. Medicaid and Medicare stopped a lot of people from dying.

If it is true that 50% of the population pay taxes, that's because most of them are children, or retired, or disabled. So what?

The people who should pay taxes are the top 40% who make 75% of the income. Seems right to me. If they're making so much from American society, they ought to pay their share of the costs of running American society (As the economist Adam Smith said.)

That's it. No hidden fees or universal service/911 funds.

Probably not for long. Pre-paid wireless accounts in the US have long been exempt from funding 911 service but there is legislation working its way through congress to change that.

With all the spying the government does on Americans, they'd damn well better be spying on our enemies. Isn't this EXACTLY what the CIA and friends are for?

In some (many?) places, failing to comply with a subpoena *is* contempt of court.

I guess it would depend on what the subpoena wanted. I can see someone not turning over something as being contempt of court. However in the long run, you are most likely facing charges of something like interfering with the courts or something. If you aren't in a court, it's probably interfering with a criminal investigation (if it's a criminal matter).

Some guy got 14 years or so because he didn't comply with a court order to put $2,000,000 in escrow. He claimed the money was lost in an investment and couldn't comply. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09192/983301-454.stm

Well, he didn't get 14 years, he was imprisoned for 14 years. The slight difference is where he was never sentenced but jailed. This case is interesting in that I wasn't aware civil matter judges had the power to place someone in an actual prison. Generally, they can only go to the county detention facility (or a federal detention facility if it's federal court but divorce shouldn't be in a federal court) until an official charge has been adjudicated against him.

On the surface, and without knowing all the facts, it sounds like he suffered from poor representation by his legal team (or perhaps attempted to defend himself) and an overly aggressive judge that abused his power beyond the scope it was ever intended to have. The contempt of court charge is only supposed to push someone into compliance with the order. It's not really a punishment else the 4th, 5th, and 6th amendments require an indictment, impartiality, open and public trial (by your peers) and reasonable punishment without excessive fines. It seems as if the judge in this case either ignored that, or forgot that he sent the guy to jail in the first place.

It won't be indefinitely. Failing to comply with a subpoena or interfering with it's execution has a set time for jail terms and will be prosecuted accordingly. Probably what you are thinking of is contempt of court in which a judge can throw someone into jail.

In some (many?) places, failing to comply with a subpoena *is* contempt of court.

There are limits to that too- but they are a bit more relaxed and you sometimes need a higher court to pretty much tell the lower court to stop doing it.

Some guy got 14 years or so because he didn't comply with a court order to put $2,000,000 in escrow. He claimed the money was lost in an investment and couldn't comply. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09192/983301-454.stm

They can indeed, although the current record for that is 14 years. In practice I suspect they'd probably let him out at whatever the long end of the charges would've resulted in.

That being said, it would be a pretty blatant violation of the 5th amendment given that it's not a locked box or residence. Both of which the court could authorize to be broken into with the appropriate warrant. A person's memory is substantively different in that the only methods of breaking in their clearly require torture and other forms of illegal interrogation techniques.

After all a person doesn't have to say anything at all during an interrogation.

I'm not sure about how the judicial system works over there, over here he could've likely been hit with contempt of court charges, well ignoring the 5th amendment issue, and he could be jailed indefinitely. And contempt of court is not subjected to the normal habeas corpus rules either. It's not common, but contempt of court detentions can span years.

The Upper Big Branch mine was a non-union mine. In union mines, workers have the power to stop the types of unsafe working practices that contributed to the UBB fatalities.

Yucca Mountain happens to be the only safe place to store the shit. It's a giant rock that you can stick shit under, and it'll block radiation. On top of that, they do research inside the waste site; this means they stick shit in radiation-impervious steel barrels so it's a non-issue sitting at ground level, effectively. Where else are you gonna put it all?

Yucca Mountain is the biggest Nuclear Pork Project of all time.

We don't need "some place to stick the shit under"...97% of what you call "shit" is FUEL that can be reused in Nuclear Power Plants.

Now, it makes no sense to Reprocess the fuel right now because Uranium is still cheaper to mine, but that won't always be the case. When it isn't, we'll have HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS OF YEARS worth of Nuclear Fuel sitting quietly in these stainless steel casks (which you would practically need a f$%king tactical Nuclear Weapon to penetrate, anyway).

I favor the approach Westinghouse has used with the AP1000 -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000

"Radioactive waste -- a longstanding concern of environmental advocates and nuclear power critics -- can be stored indefinitely in water on the plant site, company officials said." -- http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09088/959091-96.stm

The problem of "radioactive waste" is the biggest INVENTED problem of all time. It DOES NOT exist anywhere outside of the media.

The only real "waste" are things like clothing, gloves, building materials, dirt, etc. that have become radioactive. All of that equals about 1% of what people count as "waste".

Basically, you need nothing more than a dust mask and thick rubber gloves to safely pick it up -- you could bury it in a whole the size of an Olympic sized swimming pool and never think about it again.

The Islamic world wasn't the whole of his examples, just an afterthought thrown in there.

Look at any Digg story about rape. Or any article that drifts into whether abortion should be legal in cases of rape.

Then there are stories like this http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10211/1076338-455.stm where every mention of rape is assumed to actually be consensual sex (in other words, she asked for it).

Or these pamphlets that aim to spread the message everywhere http://jezebel.com/5482688/you-make-men-want-to-be-sinful-blaming-the-victim-religious-pamphlet-edition

Or http://jezebel.com/5478360/she-knew-what-would-happen-if-she-started-drinking-blaming-the-victim-princeton-edition

This shows that it isn't just a small nutball collective: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1251040/Rape-Its-fault-victims-say-50-women.html?ITO=1490&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+dailymail/home+(Home+|+Mail+Online)

The boys aren't to blame because she drank a bit: http://current.com/1db6i4c

Here's what rapists think about it: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/2010/04/15/why-dont-we-accept-victim-blaming-from-rapists/

There are a whole host of weirder cases, too, that imply that rape victims actually gave consent. Remember how Whoopi Goldberg ranting about how Roman Polanski's drugging and raping an unconscious child wasn't really rape? I'm not sure what she was getting at, but if it wasn't rape then it stands to reason that Whoopi thought something about the unconscious, drugged girl gave consent to Polanski.

But if you can produce mainstream commentators...

You are moving goalposts and putting them someplace strange and unnecessary. This isn't about political commentators blaming the victim, it's about members of the public blaming the victim, all the time. Fair enough that you can find a lone person with an insane definition of anything, but this is hardly a rare viewpoint.

Awhile ago I compared the cost of an iPhone in the US and the UK. You had to pay for the phone, pay a higher per month cost, pay to receive calls, get fewer free minutes and fewer free texts. This is despite the fact the UK has a higher tax rate and considering most things are more expensive in the UK I think that speaks volumes about how much of a rip-off phones are in the US.

At the time there were exclusive deals so there was only one seller of the iPhone in both the UK and US.

In the US you can't take your phone to another network or you have to put up a fight. Where as I don't have to. Not that I really do take my phone across networks. It's just too easy to get a new phone for no cost.

It's not just the iphone and some sort of Apple elitist pricing like their computers. In general it just seems more expensive and it seems fairly standard to pay something for the phone while still having to take out a contract.

A quick look at verizon shows only 7 phones that can be had for free on a 2 year contract and they're all old phones and it would appear their cheapest package is $39.99 and that's just for talking. Where as for $42.92 I got a completely free Android G1 when it came out on a 18 month contract with unlimited internet, unlimited texts and 800 minutes which I only use when I call people because I receive calls for free. Plus the phone was unlocked from day one without me having to ask so I can put any SIM card in it that I want. The reason is because standards have been set and they have to operate in a more open and cooperative way so really the only way to draw customers in is with better deals rather than locking them in with a different network or closed phone.

CDMA might have a superior signal but I have no problems with my network and I prefer being able to take my phone to whoever has the best deal. That and if I want to take my phone abroad I will have more luck with GSM. I've not seen anything that says CDMA is by far a clear winner and I believe this link is a fair comparison.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07119/781379-371.stm

GSM came out of Finland and was helped by multiple funding EU funding which sort of proves my point that the best option doesn't come from corporations only or the government only but instead a combination of both.

The bulk of the US population isn't that spread out. By far most people live along the coasts and believe it or not if you go outside of cities, like London not everyone lives right beside each other in Europe. I live out in the fens so most of the land around my small village is flat farm land but I get 3G and 8 meg broadband. Where I lived in the US was a fairly similar area with similar spread between towns / villages and my only option, if I still lived there would be dial-up and a costly mobile phone which may or may not have a decent connection.

Thanks to the land being cheaper here (because there isn't much here) they're going to put a data center on the outskirts and loads of fiber to connect it up with London so I can probably look forward to a fiber connection in a few years.

I'm not sure if I can think of anything that came about in modern day America where corporations have had a lot of control or full control and they have competed through providing a superior services with competitive prices rather than lock in and anti competitive actions.

They always say this, and we always find something.
Check out this article about hard drive density i just found from 2001:
http://www.post-gazette.com/healthscience/20011029disk1029p2.asp

"...within two or three years, advances in storage capacity will begin to taper off, he predicted."

Drives were about $300 for 80GB back then... Last weekend i bought a 2TB drive for $125.

Yeah, we will always find something. These articles about "zomg technology is going to END!" need to stop.
-Taylor

http://www.post-gazette.com/regionstate/20001102napkin5.asp

Specifically, females with a 4th set of cones.

All the evidence shows that ...kids raised in gay households are 2-3x as likely to consider themselves gay as kids raised in a straight household.

I know this is troll feeding, but GADDAMMIT!! NO IT FUCKING DOESN'T. Here and here and here. You fucking asshole.

ALL of the evidence shows EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT YOU SAID.

Note also that recent research suggests that the human optics system may be a type known as blocked tetrachromatic instead of trichromatic (with one set of frequencies blocked by the optics system) and that some women may be functionally tetrachromatic due to the fact that women have two X chromosomes, one of which occasionally carries a mutated gene for one of the light receptors (which would really make them blocked pentachormats since the 4th functional receptor is different from the 4th "blocked" receptor of the human baseline condition, so they've got five photo receptor types, like butterflies, only with one of them blocked) . Looking for Madam Tetrachromat .

Online test: Are You a Tetrachromat?

revealing confidential information that is being discussed by a grand jury

I don't see that in the article.

Revealing information can tip off criminals ot possible source of information and point them to evidence that could be destroyed to damage any case.

Well, it seems that wasn't the case. They believed the defendant made the twitter posts.

"How can it be a crime? It's not a secure communication." But Mr. Burkoff said that it's one thing to listen to police information and even to share it. It's another, though, to provide it to someone for potentially criminal purposes.

"Men arrested for G-20 Twittering say it's free speech"http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09278/1003126-53.stm Corporations are always above the law.

There is no evidence suggesting that Google was sharing the extraneous information. The quotes you chose even mention the distinction between listening to unencrypted radio broadcasts and how the information from that is used.

"How can it be a crime? It's not a secure communication."
But Mr. Burkoff said that it's one thing to listen to police information and even to share it. It's another, though, to provide it to someone for potentially criminal purposes.

"Men arrested for G-20 Twittering say it's free speech"http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09278/1003126-53.stm
Corporations are always above the law.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10104/1050455-100.stm

Where do I sign up to be like Susan Hogan.

Too bad my TVs and computers and even my books and newspapers are only tri-chromatic :(.

I always have mixed feelings about reports of abuse by police. I hate police harassment as much as anyone and I know people personally who have been victims.

On the other hand, I live in an American city where three policemen were ambushed and shot to death six months ago, another policeman was shot to death last week, and finally a policewoman was almost carjacked yesterday.

You may be correct that statistically, police work is no more dangerous than other jobs. Emotionally, I do think there is a big difference between working a job where violence is expected instead of, say, being a farmer trying to avoid farming accidents.

Police are jumpy and have a good reason to be. When I'm around them I never get too close.

In terms of deaths on the job, police officer doesn't even make the top ten.

I stand by my statement. Police officers *are* rarely killed on the job.

I always have mixed feelings about reports of abuse by police. I hate police harassment as much as anyone and I know people personally who have been victims.

On the other hand, I live in an American city where three policemen were ambushed and shot to death six months ago, another policeman was shot to death last week, and finally a policewoman was almost carjacked yesterday.

You may be correct that statistically, police work is no more dangerous than other jobs. Emotionally, I do think there is a big difference between working a job where violence is expected instead of, say, being a farmer trying to avoid farming accidents.

Police are jumpy and have a good reason to be. When I'm around them I never get too close.

In terms of deaths on the job, police officer doesn't even make the top ten.

I stand by my statement. Police officers *are* rarely killed on the job.

Council President Doug Shields told the students that they invited the tax man by sitting out local elections. "When you're out there for 2.3 percent voter turnout, guess who's on the target list? You."
...

Council has a hearing on taxes set for Nov. 30 and could vote to impose the tax next month. If passed, it would likely be challenged in court.

The city is just acting stupidly by threatening to tax the students and tuition fees. It should simply reduce police and fire services to the univ neighbourhoods and ask the univs to hire private security for protection and refuse to maintain things like synchronized traffic lights and traffic by pass and other such things.

They do. Both CMU and Pitt have private police forces. And you don't think that things like Pitt games bring venue to the city? The city seems to think so.

Also it should charge market rates for their sewer connections, water supplies and use of public spaces for utilities. The univs will come back begging to give up their tax exempt status and agree to pay real estate taxes like all other residents and businesses are paying. In fact if their tax exempt status is revoked, almost all the businesses and private property owners will see a big reduction in their tax bills.

I would hope you think we should also charge churches real estate taxes. I feel pretty confident all the churches take up more real estate than the universities. I wonder what the public reaction to that would be?

Blame the greedy CMU that charges 48000$ a year from their students,

Greedy? CMU has a *tiny* endowment compared to their status (only 10% of their operating budget). None of student tuition goes to the endowment, its all used to operate the university. And, of course, many students seem very happy to pay it. I wish that universities didn't have to charge that much, but I think it's unfair to call CMU greedy.

refuses to bear its fair share of the cost of providing civic services passing the burden on the shrinking tax base.

It's not the shrinking tax base that's to blame. Its the city mismanagement of it's pension fund. "That need stems from decades of questionable management of the city's pension fund, which holds around one-third of the $899 million it should to cover future obligations."

Anyway, it's a fairly strange idea. Paying for "the privilege to get an education in the city" may just make you decide it is a privilege you don't need. And seeing the vast amount of students running around town, people not taking this privilege would be a severe cut into city's finances...

It's called "padding the charges to try to force a plea deal", and it's one of the reasons our justice system is so fucked up.

Thousands of people plead guilty to shit they didn't do each year, because they're offered the "reasonable" alternative - accept a jail sentence of X amount, OR get 5x the time and financially ruined and never be able to work again because they had the "temerity" to protest their innocence.

Welcome to America. "Justice" means jack shit here.

Is this what they look like?

Security was not handled by the city of Pittsburgh, although they did provide a good proportion of the actual policemen. The summit was designated a National Special Security Event by the Department of Homeland Security, a designation which by law puts the Secret Service, a police force closely associated with the President, in charge of operations.

no filesystem, just raw writes and reads to that card. and no I don't need JFFS to wear level it, SD cards have that built into their hardware.

You still have an operating system, which interfaces with the hardware, and tells it how to write. You must be working with tiny specialized robots.

When you do something like this, you'll realize that we do in fact need more of a modular operating system and environment to work with in order to do some of the larger tasks. And you'll still need logs from each device.

There are some sicknesses that socialized healthcare either will not cover or will not cover thoroughly enough to really cure.

Name one.

In the U.K., under the NICE system, they set a price limit on every condition. If they can save a year of life for about $50,000, they will do it. If it costs more than that, NICE recommends against it, but if people complain about it, the government usually gives in and pays for it anyway. They try to avoid giving out $100,000 drugs that have minimal effectiveness, but they treat long-term conditions better than we do in the U.S.

The U.K. is the cheapest, stingiest system in Europe. Sweden probably has the best care in the world.

But even in the US you can usually get on so many programs and with the aid of various non-profits and a good story in the newspaper or TV news station get enough help to get the care you need.

I just spent several days on the phone over the last few months trying to help a friend of mine who lost his job and health insurance get on Medicaid, so I know something about what actually happens. The city welfare agency just delayed his application for months. He had one condition that required lifetime medication to save his life, so it was a serious business. I made half a dozen calls to those non-profits and got nowhere.

But don't take my word for it. Here's a story in the Wall Street Journal that demonstrates how you can die in the U.S. if you can't afford health care. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06339/743713-84.stm The WSJ had a whole series like that. (This is for people who don't believe Michael Moore.)

Granted, you will probably be in debt till you die, but even if you are poor you can usually *get* the initial treatments

As the WSJ story shows, that's not true.

but with socialized healthcare you get placed in "review hell" because A) the doctors get paid the same really no matter what they do and B) there are many other doctors/clinics.

So how come the Mayo Clinic, where doctors are on salary and get paid the same whatever they do, has some of the best outcomes in the country?

If you say you need antibiotics for something, chances are in the US you can get them for whatever weak reason,

That's supposed to be a benefit? If you take antibiotics when you don't need them, you're growing antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which could kill you later.

with socialized healtcare if you have a non-common illness the answer will always be to wait longer.

Ridiculous. I just read an article in the New England Journal of Medicine in which French doctors described how they were treating cryopyrin-associated periodic syndrome in their socialist system. Is that non-common enough for you? They were using canakinumab, which will probably cost tens of thousands of dollars per year.

They might have technical chops or they might just be taking advantage of a disgruntled employee or other low-tech hole; it's impossible to say so far. What's clear is that they obviously had no idea what to do with the data once they got their hands on it.

I mean, did they really think they could just grab a dump of T-Mobile's customer database and sell it to AT&T? C'mon. Let's think about that for a minute -- what the hell is AT&T going to do with it? I'm sure their marketing department knows all about T-Mobile's demographics versus their own, and if not (and if they care) they could find out with a few calls and some relatively small payments to a research firm. Same with just about anything else I can possibly imagine them extracting from T-Mobile's servers. If AT&T or Verizon is really dying to know something about T-Mobile's operations, they have lots of easier ways to figure it out that involve a lot less risk than buying red-hot DB dumps from criminals.

Also, anyone with half a brain ought to realize that all the telco companies live in fear of being broken into, and that a major breakin is going to hurt the public's perception of the entire industry. The U.S. cellular telcos are, basically, a cartel: and if there's one thing cartel members hate more than each other, it's disruptive outsiders. T-Mobile's competitors probably didn't respond because they thought it was a joke, or some sort of Nigeria scam; if they'd known it was serious, they almost certainly would have done what Pepsi did and called the cops. Not for altruistic reasons, but for sound business ones: having basically mercenary criminals screwing around, stealing data, scaring customers, and generally upsetting the normal business environment is not to any legitimate player's advantage.

The other red-flag that screams amateur hour about the whole thing is what they did after being turned down by the "competitors" -- they posted what amounts to a "for sale" ad to the Full Disclosure list. They thought that was the best venue for selling a shitload of customer financial records? Really? There are bulletin boards, whole online communities, where criminals trade identity information. It's a mature underground economy; the information they had -- names, addresses, CC numbers, SSNs -- would have been a fungible, commodity product, well-understood and easy to resell for cash.

However they got the information in the first place, it's pretty clear they didn't think their cunning plan all the way through.)

Time for the obligatory "Bill Gates' wife was the project manager for Microsoft Bob" post.

(Though, to be fair, she was "only" his girlfriend at the time of Bob's development and release of Microsoft Bob.)

The way Britain and the US are going, the only true bastion of freedom and human rights will be Canada soon . . .

I'm not so sure. If this article is accurate, then it sounds like we have more freedom of speech and religion than you guys do.

In the photos in question, two girls, Marissa Miller and Grace Kelly, are seen lying side by side in their bras. One of them is talking on a phone, while the other makes a peace sign. In the second picture, the third girl, who is not named in the lawsuit, is seen emerging from the shower, with a towel wrapped around her, below her breasts.
"The two photographs, which depict no sexual activity or display of pubic area, are not illegal under Pennsylvania's crimes code and, indeed, are images protected by the First Amendment," the lawsuit said.

source

So you're pretty much completely correct. It remains to be seen whether the courts will accept this argument.

This might be something like what zappepcs was remembering. I dimly recall reading similar research several years ago -- basically, the findings are that babies appear to be more aware of or interested in snake and spider shapes, but do not fear them until they've seen an adult express fear at them. A choice excerpt (emphasis mine):

Even though the babies pay special attention to spiders and snakes, they do not innately fear them, Dr. Rakison said.

"If you put a baby in a tank with a snake," he said, "they would show no fear whatsoever."

Instead, babies seem to have a "perceptual template" for the creatures that primes them to be scared of them once they see an adult showing such fear.

All of this could be rooted in our evolutionary history, Dr. Rakison said, and could even explain why we might fear spiders and snakes more than lions and cheetahs, for instance.

"It's thought our ancestors spent a great deal of time on the savannas in Africa, so you could see lions coming from a distance," he said.

"Spiders and snakes tend to be hidden from view, though, and you tend to see them close up. Our ancestors, particularly the women, spent a lot of time gathering food, on their knees with their infant close by, so you can imagine you're picking plants out of the ground and all of a sudden there's a snake or a spider right there."

Dr. Rakison's baby studies build on earlier work with monkeys done by Susan Mineka at Northwestern University.

Cheers,

• town size: 1.5 square miles
• population: 5000 + 1800 students living in town('cept I think I'm the only one who sticks around for summer - the town is paradise!) + 8000 students on campus

... Oh, yeah, and we've got the entire town rigged with fiber, a six point bus topology backbone of multi strand fiber which branches off to each house. Also, automatic utility metering/monitoring, digital HDTV, VOIP, security, and wifi hotspots run over it. BTW, run by our local town government's created company, hometown utilicom. Fiber, 2mbit down/128k up, $25, 3mbit/3mbit $80, and take a cut off of that if you're a student or buy a phone/internet/tv package. Free digital HDTV with basic service, etc. They do web hosting, too. I'm sure you see what I'm getting at here. It's not just doable, it's being done and the service is exceptional.

The best part is that the town put up fiber because none of the local telcos would provide service... now they're climbing over each other to get to our last mile. So much so that they lobbied for laws to be passed to make sure that towns can't do this kind of thing. Kutztown was grandfathered in after the law passed and now towns have to give the telcos 18 months to service them before they start their own projects.

BTW, the entire infrastructure was paid for with 30 year bonds. We even generate our own electricity, too. Since the town provides everything the town needs and the community pays a reasonable price for it (economies of scale and all that), taxes haven't been raised in 70 years. Checking the link for hometownu, it appears they're testing 5/8mbit. Love this friggin' town!

The Sippingport reactor went critical on December 2, 1957.
50 years on, 'Atoms for Peace' is remembered We know a lot about the commercial development of nuclear power.

By distributing, I mean if the girl sends the boy a few pictures of herself. (Assuming that both are under 18).

In that case both could be charged with a felony:
The boy with possession of child pornography, and the girl with producing said child pornography.

A couple of example news articles:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetlife/2004-03-29-child-self-porn_x.htm
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08157/887288-56.stm

I'm probably not the pirate to be askin' right now 'cause I probably won't say ... it's just embarrassin'. Aye, 'tis. You got three scallywags who run balls out right now. It's frustratin'. Just frustratin'. The whole thing is frustratin'... I mean, look at this place. 'Tis a ghost town... I don't know. What arrr ye gonna do? Nothin' ye can do. Just pick up and try again tomorrow, I guess... Now ye best me movin' along, mates. I've said my piece.

-- Doug Mientkiewicz, after Tuesday night's loss to the Dodgers

I dug some more. Pepsi immediately notified Coca-Cola of the letter. Coca-Cola contacted the FBI.

More likely your lawyer will tell you how useless and unenforceable HIPAA is.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06362/749444-114.stm

"It's a fact of neuroscience that everything we experience is actually a figment of our imagination. Although our sensations feel accurate and truthful, they do not necessarily reproduce the physical reality of the outside world. Although our sensations feel accurate and truthful, they do not necessarily reproduce the physical reality of the outside world."

I think you totally misunderstood what they were getting at, poorly chosen words. According to physics of relativity, "insideness vs outsideness" is an illusion of consciousness. Reality is a continuous field. i.e. If we were in a simulation you wouldn't know it. There is no object "out there" per se, all your mind is doing is discretizing a continuous surface of data that you percieve or have access to into chunked-objects that don't really exist. i.e. a tree is not seperate from the earth, which ultimately is not seperate from space, which is ultimately not seperate from the sun, all of these things are continuously connected in ways we don't fully understand.

How we currently interpret reality is based on what we think we know, not what we actually know. There's a huge difference. A color blind person interprets the features of world differently then someone with full color vision for example, and there are rare 'tetra chromats' that see the world in full four color vision.

The point is you there are gaps in what we are able to detect and perceive, what you ultimately are perceiving in the end is data, when you go to sleep for instance, you could die and not KNOW that you in fact have died, the only reasonable indicator that you have died would be the fact that you are no longer conscious but you wouldn't ever know that you were not.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06256/721190-114.stm

while a billion colors is obviously ridiculous, there are people who can see 100x more colors than an average person

scientists have recently identified a very small, very rare population of women who see in 4 colors, to a total of 100 million colors

most humans see in 3 colors, about 1 million colors: red, green, and blue. a tetrachromat has an extra cone type between red and green, around orange. it's only women because the mutation requires two x chromosomes to work

read all about it, they describe a women who can look into a river and make out silting and depth levels a normal human can't, x-men mutant indeed!:

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06256/721190-114.stm

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

Like it or not, we don't have the workforce to fill out those sorts of jobs anymore, and frankly it doesn't make any economic sense to force a decently educated worker into a job that could be filled for much less cost by someone who has no education at all.

I don't disagree with your point of assigning overqualified workers to menial jobs. I'd like to point out, though, that our native resources for uneducated, impoverished labor do exist. Unfortunately, these potential grape pickers are disillusioned by the cheaper immigrant labor and diminished wages, so they largely end up pursuing more lucrative, illegal wages. So we end up maintaining our own ideal grape pickers in prison (1 in 100 Americans are in prison) or on welfare.

People will say, "Oh, they don't want to pick grapes." Actually, they don't want to pick grapes for what illegal immigrants will accept as compensation. Many of them would probably pick grapes for what taxpayers are paying to incarcerate them.

Seth

Then your IT geek card is in doubt, as 1s of googling brings up:

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08012/848675-96.stm/
http://times.busytrade.com/1153/4/Toshiba_Cuts_Prices_and_Increases_Marketing_for_HD_DVD.html/
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080220.RBLURAY20/TPStory/?query=Toshiba/
http://gizmodo.com/344680/the-real-reason-warner-went-blu+ray/

I don't think the payouts nor the amounts are in doubt.

What is in doubt is whether BD will actually succeed. It's price tag makes downloads look inviting.