Slashdot Mirror

This stuff wouldn't be allowed in warfare, why is it allowed in use by civilian agencies?

Oh, you mean like hollow point bullets that the military does not use, but local police forces do use?

Don't be a gullible. Seriously. We all know they shouldn't be using or doing certain things, but they do.

People sent texts from protest marches in Iran and some of the Arab spring stuff, and the governments weren't successful in stopping that

However, law enforcement agencies did turn off cell capabilities in San Francisco on board the BART trains during the protests against police brutality: BART police and cell service.

linkage: http://www.sfbg.com/bruce/2011/07/11/editorial-end-bart-coverup

Ummm... we don't throw it away. From the wikipedia article on sludge:

Sludge is not a safe fertilizer. It contains significant quantities of heavy metals and other contaminants. More of it is burned or landfilled than is used for fertilizer, which isn't safe anyway. We could use AIWPS to provide safe, centralized sewer systems which produce clean water and clean fertilizer, but we don't.

Also, why do you say that human feces is "our best compost"? I'd be curious to see a reference for that assertion, if you have one.

Sorry, can't find anything online right now because of all the dipshits who say it's not safe to compost human waste clogging google. It does require more care than a normal compost pile, but you can use a composting toilet (for example, a bason toilet — scroll down to "PROJECT BASON IN PRAINHA DO CANTO VERDE" — incompetent web design, no named anchors) makes it a triviality.

http://www.sfbg.com/39/31/cover_spying_on_the_government.html

I'm not all that up on the history of the Boston tea party, but I don't think it was intended to terrorize anyone.

Ok, I'll grant that "terrorist" isn't a very good label, though I'll note that the tea certainly wasn't a military target. Also, property damage is always a violent act, even if nobody gets hurt. Finally, the government likes to throw around the word terrorists for exactly the kinds of acts like the Boston Tea Party:

When protesters become 'terrorists'

A note at the end of original article claims that the article is mixed with fact and fiction, although googling reveals that the THC orange is most likely to be untrue.

I'm not so sure bias is such a terrible thing. "Objective news" is somewhat of a recent phenomenon, historically speaking, and one I've been thinking is not such a great proposition. The simple fact of the matter is that *no one* is truly objective.

Well duh. The trouble, of course, is not advocacy -- one of my favorite news sources is the blatantly left-wing SF Bay Guardian, and the similarly left-wing Democracy Now -- but disguised advocacy, advocacy making a pretense of objectivity.

I'd much rather have clear, disclosed biases.

Yes, exactly. But then, wouldn't it also be nice to have some informations sources that you could trust to seperate out the editorializing from the news, and some neutral presentation of facts at least as well as a half-dozen volunteers messing around with a wikipedia page?

The kind of press we have now can't even be bothered to call bullshit when Bush tries to spin the Iraq was as the result of faulty intelligence, and skips over the fact that the UN weapon inspections were in-fact interrupted by the invasion that he now claims was intended to enable them...

The real reason the wall worked that long is that none of the tigers had previously felt motivated enough to jump at it. Apparently Siberians are more aggressive than Bengals, and maybe the two drunk kids pissed her off or just acted enough like prey or cat toys that she went for them. My cats sit on the couch looking out the window at Bird TV, and when one of them sees a laser pointer red dot he has to jump for it without thinking about it first (the other one says "Hey, stop wavin' that thing around".) And I've seen zoo leopards looking at the crowds, intensely tracking the smaller ones that get separated a bit from their herds; I'd feel much safer around tigers.

Though anything in the SF Bay Guardian should be taken with a grain of salt, it should be noted that publication blames now-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) for the Presidio arrangement, not the Bush-41 Administration. Since the legislation was passed during the Clinton-42 administration, blaming it on either Bush is farfetched.

But the course taken wasn't unreasonable. The Presidio was already developed when it was a military base. Turning it into a traditional, naturalist national park would have required un-development, destroying pre-existing housing, buildings and roads. (Restoring it to its native grassy sand dunes would have required deforestation.) Mixing updates of the prior development with other expansion of public use and re-naturalization made sense -- and given the immense value of just the already-developed real estate, having the whole project pay its own way should have been a no-brainer.

I direct just such a post-baccalaureate program at Mills College in Oakland, California, not far from Silicon Valley. It is coed, although the majority of students are women. Many successful graduates have gone on to industry jobs and CS PhD programs. The application deadline is February 1, if any Slashdotters want to apply.

There was a recent article about the program in the San Francisco Bay Guaridan. For more information, see http://ics.mills.edu and/or contact me.

I hate freeloaders.

So do I! Oh, wait. You did mean ALL freeloaders, right? Or are you talking about a particular kind that's somehow more repulsive than the rest?

Tim Redmond of the San Francisco Bay Guardian has an interesting perspective on Craigslist:

A little background. Mr. Newmark, whom everyone calls "Craig," has created a system of online advertising that has pretty much wiped out traditional daily newspaper classified ads in many of the 115 US markets where he now operates. He's also hurt the alternative press, although the damage to the dailies is deeper. Some say Craig has single-handedly destroyed thousands of newspaper jobs.

He calls Craigslist the Walmart of classified ads because it siphons money out of the local economy since Craigslist doesn't employ people locally in the markets in which it operates.

-FL

Unfortuanately the feds (not SF) gave LucasFilm a 90 year lease, and they have the right to sublet the land for profit.

I cite the Bay Guardian with caution, but I think this outlines how little SF gains from this deal:
http://www.sfbg.com/News/33/44/presidio.html

Not everyone is happy about Lucasfilm moving to the Presido. Here's a sample: from the San Francisco Bay Guardian

build your own pvr

Can I get Sarah to build mine? ;-)

Read about the origins of Corporate propaganda and PR

Take the Red Pill to "Escape the Matrix" of neoliberal propaganda!

A book from Stuart Ewen about the origins of corporate propaganda

This one is a little bit "out there"

More about Escaping the Matrix of neoliberal propaganda

More about propaganda and how our society was molded by money around the idea of corporate and govt propaganda

How they do fight back against the forces of money in Denmark

A short history of the struggle between the rich and the rest of us

Look, I know where you are coming from. I had much the same ideas 10 years ago. I hardly know where to start with my reply to you, as it took me 10 years to unlearn all that crap I ingested.

One viewpoint might be to try and see govt as a machine. There are many types of machines, and in my life I have studied, operated and designed many types of machines,from nuclear power plant, to cars, to analog and digital circuits to software systems. Sometimes machines need to be complicated if we want to be able to accomplish a goal.

Another perspective might be to understand that culture may be evolved and formed through outside forces, and that there are forces in this world which may in general gain if you and I lose.

Here ya go. Read these:

one

Two

Three

Four

Five
Six

the average moviegoer (even one who liked I, Robot) is bound to find Innocence unbearably pretentious and boring. But mileage for those who are perhaps pretentious and boring themselves may vary.

Hey CLinton had his number called and lied to get out of it, you speak as if this is something new.

"Everyone else does it, so why does it matter?" Sorry, but I didn't vote for Clinton back in '92, either. I don't think that people should get to lie about this stuff and not have that held against them. Oh, wait, you just like to lump people into neat categories of "Liberal asshole" and "Republican god", rather than face the messier reality of real life.

Umm for the umpteenth time Oil is fungable if all the Oil in Iraq went to france the cost US companies pay for oil would go down as much as if all the Oil came to the US. If you dont understand market economics dont pretend to know what you are talking about..

So, according to you, the only 2 options are:

1) All of Iraq's oil comes to the US
2) All of Iraq's oil goes to France

What about:

3) Iraq keeps its oil, and the US cuts down on its dependance on foriegn oil by ramping up utilization of non-fossil fuel energy sources

But, hey, if that happened, energy & oil companies (i.e. the backers of Bush & Cheney) wouldn't be able to continue making massive profits.

Yes because puttiong that information togeter as it has now been done had nothing to do with the fact it actually happened? Look at Perl Harbor, all indications were months in advance something was going to happen, if we let the modern Liberal run things then we would still have comitties on why the radar was not followed up on, and would not have actually done anything about Japan..

Have you any evidence that backs up your assertion that a "modern liberal" wouldn't have reacted to the attack on Perl Harbor? I believe that liberals and conservatives alike supported going into Afghanistan. Do you remember? You know, that other war that we're in that nobody talks about anymore? The vote was unanimous.

Second: There's a difference between a) doing absolutely NOTHING to keep an eye on terrorist activities and b) working as hard as you can and learning as much as possible about what terrorists are planing. Bush & Co. did (a): They ignored the Clinton-appointed terrorist adivsor Richard Clarke and FBI memos before September 11th. Which would you rather see, a President that did NOTHING to make terrorism a priority, or one that tried as hard as possible to prevent terrorist attacks, even if they failed? I, for one, would rather see the latter.

But, obviously, you're not concerned with reality, but just your black & white view of it. Critical thinking is _hard_, and if you don't want to do that, then only you will suffer the consequences.

The SF Bay Guardian runs this list every year, and it's consistently left leaning. However, there are always a few stories on the list that are centrist, irrefutable and frightening. Like these two from the current list:

4) High uranium levels found in troops and civilians
10) New nuke plants: taxpayers support, industry profits

In the San Francisco area, you might look into Immaculate Computers as a place to buy a quiet machine. Here's an Annalee Newitz write-up from the SF Bay Guardian about them. They're a small San Francisco business doing custom computers with low lead components and noiseless power supplies.

May I carry a concealed firearm in California? Except in extremely limited circumstances, you may not carry a concealed firearm on your person in public unless you have a valid CCW license. CCW permits are issued only by a county sheriff to residents of the county, or by the head of a city police department to residents of that city.

I live in another state and have a permit to carry a concealed handgun that was issued in my home state. Does my permit allow me to carry a concealed handgun while in California? No. Weapons permits from other states are not valid in California.

The City and County of San Francisco is downright parsimonious in issuing CCW permits:

San Francisco is the toughest city in California, if not America, in which to be granted a CCW permit. Currently there are only five permits issued to non-law enforcement personnel in the city. (as of June 2003)

So if Darl carried his weapon concealed in San Francisco, and he has not obtained a permit from Sheriff Hennessey (a reporter could easily ask), he's broken California state law, and should go to jail or at least pay a stiff fine. (Had the weapon remained in a locked container, he would be okay.)

"DRM turns computers against their owners. I don't want a Disney security guard sitting in my living room watching my every move."
- Ian Clarke, creator of Freenet

Hubble this instead of something that you're highly unlikely to see!

To quote Eisenhower again "If the United Nations once admits that international disputes can be settled by using force, then we will have destroyed the foundation of the organization and our best hope of establishing a world order"
Mighty Ironic :)
I was in New York recently and took the guided UN tour. I don't remember the exact figures but they had a chart detailing how much it would cost to provide the world with clean drinking water, prevent major, currently curable crippling diseases (like polio) etc. And the total cost for the project was less than what the world annually spent on arms (military..)
I've spent a lot of time in Pakistan and they have a huge debt problem , paying interest alone which saps the budget. Total debt of $50 billion with a GDP roughly 4-5 times that. Wonder if somehow could call a moratorium on war and spend that money just for a year on two on fixing the world. Incidentally america spends roughly the same amount of money the rest of the world combined spend on arms.

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." -Martin Luther King Jr.

Anyone interested in reading more about the effect Clear Channel's conquest has on local broadcasting should check out the San Francisco Bay Guardian's story about about local station KMEL.

ClearChannel signed a deal with the city of San Francisco a few years back that should make any self-respecting civil libertarian cringe.

The city board of supervisors (then controlled by mayor Willie Brown) passed an ordinance to prohibit newspapers from putting their own vending boxes on city streets. All newspapers would have to be sold through city-sanctioned newspaper racks or city-sanctioned newspaper kiosks. No newspaper would be allowed to place its own rack on the streets. They then contracted with ClearChannel to place and run these news racks, allowing CLearChannel to determine which papers could exist in them. Some newspaper publishers have filed suit to block the law, but I'm not sure how effective that will be. No matter what the outcome, the city will be obligated to pay ClearChannel for the "administration" of these racks.

Here's an article on the subject.

The strongest anti-American sentiment I saw was a sentiment that we caused September 11th by having a foreign policy which pissed off foreign countries. There is also a sentiment that the current adminstration is a bunch of war mongers.

There is no sentiment that America is the great Satan or the other kind of nonsense which is common in some middle eastern countries. In fact, Acapulco has a lot of large banners saying "God Bless America" when I was there a year ago.

I've frequently read one of the more radical newspapers, La Jornada; it is left-wing, but no more so than the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

- Sam

Did it work reliably in San Francisco?

I thought I'd also take this chance to give a link to a good list of tattoo artists, if you happen to be in the San Francisco Bay area.

Both KGO and KSFO are Disney affiliates and sister stations.

It's Disney pandering to the extremists on all sides.

I have no doubt that all these DJs are good friends off mike.

The swell ISP Speakeasy Networks is on record saying customers are allowed to share in an article about community wireless networks.

That's pretty funny. It's also pretty funny that most of us paying homage to Office Space are doing so from a cubicle somewhere in corporate IT land.

It reminds me of a theory put forward by Tom Tomorrow about Dilbert.

In this op-ed piece, he suggests "that fellow cartoonist Scott Adams might actually be "providing a valuable service for all those idiotic bosses" he parodies in his syndicated strip, Dilbert -- "by giving their employees a safety valve that's just edgy enough to ring true, without inspiring anyone to actually question the fundamental assumptions of corporate America."

It's a compelling idea that could apply to Office Space just as well.

These type of efforts are so important

Yeah, good thinking, Michael. Yesterday in New York would have been the perfect time to assault Bill Gates with an unknown white substance.

Honestly, while I support the right to protest and yell as much as you want, I'm baffled by how everyone seems to think hitting someone with a pie is cute and harmless, and not an assault on someone's person. I suppose that's because it's limited to leftish causes -- I suspect if anti-abortionists went around throwing pies at feminists the response would be different.

As loathsome as I find Willie Brown (why can't someone that brilliant use his skills to improve government instead of just manipulating it?) I give him credit for being the one recipient to insist that the attack on him be taken seriously. Second place goes to the elderly UK politician who decked the 20-something guy who pied him. (Said guy than had the nerve to whine about it.)

Now if I were Bill Gates, I'd have offered $10,000 to the first person to pie the guy who nailed him, offer to be repeated on each of the next 60 days. What's the point of being a billionaire if you can't do something like that?

Its lucky that nothing like that would ever happen in the land of the free.

ps. I hate responding to so called trolls, but this one has been modded up twice

He brings up some very good points -- and the sort of backhand at Slashdot isn't anything that hasn't been said and nodded at by everyone here, and yeah, I'm sure we'll all get over it. Where he runs into a problem, though, is in his amusing assertion that the "legitimate" media [characterization is mine, not a quote] have and adhere to these standards of ethics. That's laughable. I wish I could find the references now, but I don't remember whether it was in the San Francisco Chronicle or the San Francisco Bay Guardian that I read about the publishing policy at the Los Angeles Times a few years ago -- where the publisher overruled the editorial staff and declared that no articles that were antagonistic to the advertisers would be run.

It's true of every news organ that the subscription fees (if any) do not even come close to financing the business. News outlets, whether they're radio, television, print, or online, are not actually in business for the reader. It's the same old story, guys: Follow the Money. The people who are actually making these "news" organs into profitable businesses are the advertisers, and don't think that the editorial and publishing staffs don't know this. They know exactly who their customers are. The customers are the advertisers. And their product is their subscriber base. The way they manufacture their product is to spew forth infotainment designed to keep their product's infamously short attention span focused on the medium long enough to score an ad impression.

The only part of this article that I really disagree with is his holier-than-thou attitude. Yeah right, offline media have ethics. Go watch The Insider and look at how 60 Minutes -- big guns in traditional media, I'd say -- sucked up to tobacco.

If you're in journalism, you're a whore. So what? We're mostly not down on prostitution around here, so long as we get our share. Here's fifty bucks; suck on this.

Nevermind the fact that if the big companies pull all of the tech shops out of the area, SF would be bankrupt in less than a year. Punish the producers.

Gee exagerating a little huh? As if San Francisico's economy depends completely on big tech companies. The fact is that S.F .'s economy relies heavily on tourism and trade not just big technology companies. So if all of the large tech firms pulled out, San Francisco would do just fine, after all it is one of the most beautiful cities in the U.S. As for how some big companies have acted towards S.F lately, check out how they are attempting to ream S.F. with a stupid lawsuit even after the city offered to settle.

Don't get me wrong I am not against technology or tech companies per say, but your appraisal of the situation is just as jilted and biased as you accuse S.F. and the posters to Slashdot as being. Life is not that black and white.

The Internet is at once the greatest threat to and the greatest hope for our liberties. The threats: the web is increasingly the turf of a handful of media companies: Time Warner /AOL, for example. The web also contains sites which most people would find repellant, making it easier for the well-meaning and the prudes to demand access restrictions.

At the same time, the web is our greatest protection from tyranny. Look at what has happened with attempts to ban DeCSS code or obfuscate the power companies' complicity in the California crunch.

How did I run across these things in the first place? Simply by reading /. with a low threshhold. The truth is out there, but adults shouldn't expect to be spoon-fed.

Bruce's article is good and shows a lot of different viewpoints on the California "power crisis" ... but maybe if Bruce was more involved with everything that is going on, or if he talked to some people about it ... in a nutshell, PG&E is scamming everyone and outright threatening blackouts if they don't get their way (and they have had rolling blackouts here). San Francisco, in particular, is the only city in the entire country that is federally mandated to have cheap, public power... so PG&E has spent a lot of money to keep that law out of its way. And there's so much more. PG&E can go to hell, and there is a growing ratepayers strike happening in the SF Bay Area. For more information that is more specific than what Bruce writes, check out the SF Bay Guardian coverage or SF Independent Media Center coverage. The corporate media is just reciting press releases from PG&E and Gov. Davis.

If nothing else, it's fun to speculate about such things. As I said, take it with a huge grain of salt.

(1) Political demonstrations are certainly interesting to me, but why is this "news for nerds", as opposed to just news?

(2) There are stories leaking about some *serious* abuses of police authority going down in Philadelphia, like severe beatings before and after arrest, protestors held for several days without a charge, and so on:
http://www.phillyimc.org/
http://www.indymedia.org/

(3) As far as I can tell, these stories are not making it into the print media. If you're not on the net, you don't even know that there are thousands of people protesting, and over 300 people arrested. Oh, wait a minute, I guess there was this *one* story in a local SF paper, I just missed it:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ex aminer/archive/2000/08/08/NEWS114 31.dtl

(4) If it makes you all feel any better, a bunch of the lefty activists I know are running down to Los Angeles to protest at the Democratic convention (anyone who's paying any attention realizes that the Democrats aren't all that much different from the Republicans these days):
http://www.sfbg.com/News/34/45/45nfdnc. html

It's a surprise that the same company that appears to be for open access for cable lines would take this approach ...

Like the article says, it's not to late to stop them. If you live in San Francisco, go to those meetings and make your opinion heard!

the other three are:

• Garbage In
• Too Much Homework
• Editorial: High tech's toxic time bomb

IMO, the "Garbage In" article is a bit more informative and less tear-jerky than the one linked in the main story.

the other three are:

• Garbage In
• Too Much Homework
• Editorial: High tech's toxic time bomb

IMO, the "Garbage In" article is a bit more informative and less tear-jerky than the one linked in the main story.

the other three are:

• Garbage In
• Too Much Homework
• Editorial: High tech's toxic time bomb

IMO, the "Garbage In" article is a bit more informative and less tear-jerky than the one linked in the main story.

This "article" is published by the SFBG, aka The San Francisco Bay Guardian. This highly reputable and serious news organization's headline for today is:

"Cross-Dress For Less! Charles Anders hits Union Square in search of the perfect tranny wardrobe"

Thanks, but no thanks. Transvestites, and bullshit hippie news articles are both things I try to avoid. I'll stick to ZDNet. I just hope that some earthquake or bizzare boating accident kills off these new bozo Timothy/Mikey-likes-it Slashdot authors so we can get back to the Slashdot we all remember.


Bowie J. Poag

That was a joke. Lots of folks fell for it, though.