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It simple states that water can exists in environments that is hostile to life as we know it.

No shit, Sherlock.

Yeah, seriously. The "conventional wisdom" is not that water implies life, but rather that the absence of water implies the absence of life.

We search for water on other worlds not because we're sure that's where there will be life, but rather because it's the first, most basic indicator of the possibility of the only kind of life we know can exist.

Water alone is not sufficient? Duh! Nobody ever thought it was.

I do take issue with the idea that only 12% of the water on earth has life. AFAIK, a cup of water from any natural source in or in the ground has some sort of life in it.

Yeah, like the very first look we took 600 feet under the Anarctic ice sheet showed complex life. Sounds fishy. Or shrimpy as the case may be.

Here is an example of airport workers arrested for smuggling drugs, guns and even grenades on airplanes. And this was in 1999.

http://articles.sfgate.com/1999-09-10/news/17698252_1_undercover-agents-baggage-handler-smuggling

Security of any system is based upon the strength of the weakest link.

For those that don't know, "acting like a know-it-all" is just something that less knowledgeable people like to say about us more knowledgeable people, as if they are taking some moral high ground by being less knowledgeable.

Hmm, if people say you act like a know-it-all and you really do think you know it all, maybe you're really one of these people.

And I guess your point is... I should not have expressed that opinion?

No, I think that your point was that we should not have expressed an opinion which differed from yours, even though none of us knew the whole story at that time. My point was that you were full of crap for saying that.

"I think this is a good moment for all of us to reflect on how rallying around this lying criminal stained our profession"

Yes, that's what you said. Look a few centimetres up if you don't remember saying it.

Innocent until proven guilty doesn't mean, don't have a discussion.

Which is why there is a different description for what you said, which is that having a discussion about the possibility that he might not be a lying criminal has somehow "stained our profession".

I can't believe I'm explaining this.

Then maybe you should try listening to what you're saying. You might learn something useful. If you look waaay up at the top of the page you'll even find links to articles that have a few things to say about this "lying criminal" and the fine organization he worked for, as told by the very people who found him guilty earlier this week.

"I think he's a decent guy. Like many IT people, protective of his work. Possibly a little paranoid. But the problem he had was that he didn't have good management to keep that in check."

"Management did everything they possibly could wrong [...] There was ineffective management, ineffective communication. I think that if they put the city on trial, they would be guilty, too."

Is that all nonsense too, which anybody including the jurors who know more about this trial than anyone else here, should have been able to see through immediately? Or is it possible that you were just looking for an excuse to believe that Terry Childs was a lying criminal instead of being objective?

There are so many things wrong with that trial that it's hard to fathom how it got as far as it did. But one thing stands out, that is mentioned here elsewhere that is absolutely shocking and ought to be understandable and worrisome to all citizens, technical or non-technical:

"The jury deliberated for several days before a lone holdout against conviction was removed from the panel, for reasons that were not disclosed. After an alternate was put in that juror's place, the panel started over and reached a decision in a matter of hours."

What the heck is that for a travesty of process? It looks like the One Microsoft Way of thinking entering the courts with fakery all through. He was a city employee, arrested by city cops who had assisted in inappropriate baiting (conference call), held in a city jail, prosecuted by a city district attorney, in a trial presided over by a city judge, tried by a city jury, and presumably staying and continuing to stay in a city jail. That's not going to result in even the possibility of a fair trial. Then when the jury drags in deliberation, it's rebuilt to return the verdict desired by all these other city employees.

you feel entitled to detain me because of the failings of the government system?

Yes they do. The Tea Party is a States Rights' revival movement. This law is a vehicle for them to vent frustration about the failure of the federal government to seal the borders.

Too bad you have to be caught in the middle, but hey, you're just a foreigner. And we don't do body counts.

this article has more SF douchery. A good friend of mine was a paramedic for the city of SFO. Her ambulance was broadsided and her back was injured, and she was let go and had to fight for severance.

She knew more than one firefighter who was injured on the job and was let go with minimal compensation, and ended up homeless in the Tenderloin district.

Unless you are one of the six-figure privileged, you need to watch your back as a city of San Francisco employee...

From the San Francisco Chronicle this week:

More than 1 in 3 of San Francisco's nearly 27,000 city workers earned $100,000 or more last year - a number that has been growing steadily for the past decade.

The number of city workers paid at least $100,000 in base salary totaled 6,449 last year. When such extras as overtime are included, the number jumped to 9,487 workers, nearly eight times the number from a decade ago. And that calculation doesn't include the cost of often-generous city benefits such as health care and pensions.

The pay data obtained by The Chronicle show that many of the high earners bolstered their base pay with overtime and "other pay," a category that includes payouts for unused vacation days and extra money for working late-night shifts.

Leading 2009's $100,000 Club was the Police Department's Charles Keohane, a deputy chief who retired midyear.

His total payout was $516,118, city records show, the bulk of which came from cashing out stored-up vacation, sick days and comp time. Several other police employees who changed rank or retired also saw their annual earnings swell.

When asked how he felt about landing in the No. 1 spot, Keohane joked, "Not so good, if it's going to get my name in the paper."

The 36-year SFPD veteran, whose last assignment was head of administration, said much of that pay was taken out in taxes. "I helped reduce the deficit," he said.

The average city worker salary in San Francisco is $93,000 before benefits, according to Deputy City Controller Monique Zmuda. The data take into account everyone from park gardeners and street cleaners to attorneys and technology specialists.

Almost 100 city employees made $200,000 or more in 2009; six bumped past $300,000 when overtime and other cash-outs were included.
Muni chief's base pay

Only one city employee had a base salary topping $300,000. Nathaniel Ford, executive director of the Municipal Transportation Agency, made $332,489.

Mayor Gavin Newsom had a base salary of $250,903 in 2009, which put him 29th on the list of best-paid city employees.

The ballooning number of highly paid workers is driven by several factors, including inflation, a persistent reliance on overtime and generous contracts in a city known for its politically potent unions.

The city also negotiated a deal to give raises to some workers who agreed to pick up a portion of their pension contributions, City Controller Ben Rosenfield said. That arrangement pushed almost 2,000 city employees above the $100,000 mark in recent years, he said.

In years past, the $100,000 Club included large numbers of Muni operators, transit supervisors, firefighters, police officers and sheriff's deputies who padded their paychecks with hundreds of hours of overtime, paid out at a rate of time-and-a-half.

But a 2008 rule capped most employees' overtime to 30 percent of base pay, in effect spreading out overtime opportunities to more employees, Zmuda said. That and other efforts to curtail overtime appear to be working, with payments projected to drop to $139.8 million this fiscal year, down from $142.1 million last year and $167.7 million the year before, according to the controller's office.

In the fiscal year that ended in June 2009, city salaries accounted for $2.5 billion of the $6.6 billion budget. That does not include the cost of benefits.

Faced with a $483 million deficit heading into the new fiscal year that

"We had a lot of sympathy for him," said juror Jason Chilton, who is a network engineer. "He was put in a position he should not have been put in.

"Management did everything they possibly could wrong," Chilton said. "There was ineffective management, ineffective communication. I think that if they put the city on trial, they would be guilty, too."

linky:

Are we getting too hung up on the password issue? Was his refusal to divulge the passwords what he's being found guilty of? Or is it the fact that if he stepped in front of a bus, the city had no hope of being able to manage the network? My place of employment has "the password list" and it's known to more than one person. If the city allowed Childs to hold all the keys, they're pretty stupid. If they had a policy prohibiting that, I could understand why violating it could get you jail time.

Basically he was guilty of not providing the passwords to his superiors. This is equivalent to being hired by the city to build a new stadium and then refusing to give the city the keys. I do not know what everyone is so up in arms about.

For a proper analysis see sfgate

Jeeze, I thought people on slashdot were smart?

http://articles.sfgate.com/2008-02-15/business/17139861_1_trojan-horse-computer-associates-security-vendor

There. Digital picture frames pre-loaded with viruses. Was it really that hard to understand?

This article outlines some pretty good arguments for why they wouldn't buy ARM:
1. No history of making *big* acquisitions like this.
2. They don't necessarily need this ARM (see A4 chip)
3. Would ride the line of anti-trust
4. They like to crush competitors by out-designing them, out-marketing them and out-selling them (not by buying out their partners)

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/08/09/GOOGLE.TMP

Googling someone -- a prospective job candidate, a teenage crush, your son's soccer coach -- is a commonplace ritual of modern life. But the search engine company evidently doesn't appreciate a taste of its own medicine.

Google has blackballed online technology news service Cnet News.com for googling Eric Schmidt, CEO of the Mountain View company, and including some personal information about him in a story last month. Google told a Cnet editor that it will not speak with Cnet reporters until August 2006, according to Jai Singh, editor in chief of Cnet News.com in San Francisco.

"We published a story that recounted how we found information on the (Google) CEO in a public forum using their service," Singh said. "They had issue with the fact that they felt it was private information and our point is it was public information obtained through public channels using Google search."

Google declined to comment.

Reporter Elinor Mills' Cnet article made the point that Google, the search engine used by more than half of U.S. Internet users, has much potential for privacy invasion, particularly through data it collects that is not available to the public, such as logs of Google searches. She illustrated the story with information that could readily be obtained by anyone with access to Google and the Internet: Schmidt's net worth, home neighborhood, attendance at Burning Man and enthusiasm for amateur piloting.

"From what I understand, most of (Google's objection to the article) had to do with the anecdotal lead we used to illustrate the point that information could be obtained rather easily using Google search," Singh said.

Mark Glaser, a columnist with Online Journalism Review, run by the USC Annenberg School, said Google was overreacting.

"Google helps people search for this kind of information. For them to be upset that someone would publicize it is a little bit strange. It could end up backfiring on them because it gives more attention to the (privacy) problem," he said.

An entire company shunning an entire media outlet is unusual, although isolated bans are not.

Athletes and movie stars are known for refusing to talk to reporters who have angered them. During the height of the steroids scandal in March, Barry Bonds once refused to speak to the media while The Chronicle's Giants beat reporter was present.

Companies sometimes pull advertisements to retaliate for media coverage they consider unfair. In April, General Motors pulled all its ads in the Los Angeles Times over what it called "factual errors and misrepresentations," a ban that the Wall Street Journal reported could have cost the newspaper about $10 million annually. GM resumed advertising in the Los Angeles Times this month.

Media critic Ben Bagdikian said Google and other everyday digital technologies indeed raise privacy concerns, but he predicted that the ban against Cnet will not last.

"No one can force one party to speak to another party," he wrote in an e-mail. "My guess is that for business reasons, and to respond to unkind words directed at Google, it will be hard for Google not to reply, at which point the whole messy fight will make both parties look so ridiculous in public that the general public will get bored and both parties will suffer in their businesses."

E-mail Carolyn Said at csaid@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page D - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Schmidt is a hypocrite.

biggest open secret in the whole affair is that Vaughn Walker is himself homosexual.

It's not a secret at all, he's openly gay but according to this San Francisco Chronicle article "Walker [...] has never taken pains to disguise - or advertise - his orientation."

Sounds like you're making something out of nothing. I have mod points and briefly considered modding you troll but decided that a reply was more fair.

I get the feeling this whole showdown is a Larry and Sergey thing. And that Eric Schmidt is against it, and probably the rest of the board is as well. They would rather be pusillanimous like John Chambers and just make as much money off China as possible, even if it means aid and abet totalitarianism and not standing for anything except quarterly share price (again: see John Chambers). I applaud refusing to censor information on the internet, this is a line in the sand they have drawn, to perhaps 'do no evil' and in Slashdot spirit we should all be behind it....

I suspect you are right, having observed the three of them at work up close. Except, I think that it is pretty much all Sergey and not Larry, who tends to demonstrate flexible morality from time to time. The illustrious Dr Schmidt would appear to rather more concerned with the great issues of jousting with Microsoft and maximizing profit than making the world a better place.

So all trade sanctions, even those related to human rights violations, are "imperialism" in your opinion?

In a pretend world, there could be sanctions related to human rights violations that were based on moral values. You're welcome to provide me with a real world example from the United States.

Keep in mind we have supported governments of Iraq, Indonesia, Iran, Columbia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, China, and others while they violated human rights. We even supported apartheid South Africa and we still support apartheid in Israel/Palestine. Some support was financial aid, or trade deals, or even with direct military support. In places like Guatemala we were directly involved in torture, murder, and violence, like the raping of an American nun, who was also burned with cigarettes and lowered into a pit full of rats and dead bodies.

So, what I don't think should count is sanctions against Iraq, for instance, since our political goals changed our policy. Not even the facade of something I would call a moral value system had anything to do with it. You are still welcome to provide evidence to the contrary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gscKnNAxBpE

You took the naive analysis and screwed it up. No one lives 100 miles north of the 49th parallel. No one lives in the Rockies. Look at the map. You wire up the cities, and you have most of the population. It's as if you said, "Well Austrialia only has a population density of 7.3/sq miles!" and conveniently neglect to mention that almost everyone lives in either Sydney or Melbourne.

Take a look at Manhattan. AT&T can't even support the iPhone there. Sure AT&T says the problems with the iPhone aren't due to their network, but rather the phone itself, but if that was true, then we'd see the same problems outside the US, and we don't.

The infrastructure of the US sucks, and it's because neither the corporations nor the government is putting money into it. Well let me rephrase that. The government, thanks to the stimulus plan we're starting to see some investment in that. But damnit, I want my smart grid, but I'd settle for US 101 to be paved.

Quite frankly the in a country of more than 300 million losing the half million people that live in isolated mountain shacks surrounded by barbed wire isn't that much of a loss on the national scene.

(And yes, I did grow up in the rural midwest.)

Once again, people who live too close to the ocean are going to have problems, global warming or no. Most beaches I've been to have oceans that shift by more than 64mm every 3 or 4 seconds. Of course this will increase the maximum distance inland the ocean goes during a storm at high tide, but people in Hawaii and such who live close enough to the ocean to worry about that already often build their houses on stilts to avoid such floods.

Humans are animals and they devolve quickly given the lack of framework to behave with civility, morality, and concern. I also believe in sex education from an early age. Children can be manipulated and abused horribly. I just saw this example of a horrible outcome: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/02/21/MNDU1C2M7E.DTL&feed=rss.news that saddened me.

Boys need guidance and parenting. Given to their own whims, they can learn and habituate a great deal of disfunction in terms of sex, relationships, and consequences. Hands-on is better than hands-off-with-incumbent-gamble/hope that they turn out ok.

Well maybe because we've grown to be dependent on the way the climate is today, and a lot of people may end up dying?

If this is the case, lots of people are going to die, AGW or no AGW. Maybe we should focus our efforts on becoming more flexible to environmental change instead of focusing on CO2, that way we can save lives.

As an example, ocean levels are predicted to rise at around 3mm a year. This may sound like a lot cumulatively, until you remember that tectonic plates move at 65mm a year. Things like this happen with or without global warming.

You claimed that burning wood was "banned in California" but it turns out that burning wood is restricted (not banned) in a certain part of California, for a few days per year.

Here are some more links then:

link, link and link.

Specifically note the "an end to the familiar, open-front hearth in new homes and remodels." If that is not a 100% ban then what is it? These are local regulations, but they are spreading fast.

Also note that the Central Valley is an agricultural region with farms miles away from each other, and only few cities.

I hope that clears the confusion as much as it is humanly possible. The executive summary is simple: for many locales it is illegal to install a wood-burning fireplace, and if you already have one it is illegal to use it on some days (in winter - just when you need it.)

Again, this is just an example of how deep the government control can go. We don't need to worry about their justifications. Today they may be valid - to keep the air clean. Tomorrow they may be bogus - to reduce the carbon footprint. Or maybe later they will tax you for your car mileage, separately from the gas tax that you already pay. Once governments take the power to regulate your life they seldom let it go.

Independence Day is a piss-take, though it took my second viewing to decide it was intentional.

Try the trailer that Channel 4 played before airing the film in the UK (admittedly, their trailers often poke fun at content that isn't meant to be funny, quite skilfully pointing out that something is crap but why you'll enjoy it anyway). The SF Chronicle is the only text review of a sample from Metacritic that seems to get it.

I think the movie failed in this respect because it is so inconsistent, the first half is standard Hollywood popcorn fare and by the time it's descended into pantomime the movie has already established itself as exactly what it then tries to mock.

I deeply disliked I Robot as. But let it be said that Robyn Asimov, who I assume knew her dad pretty well, commented that the dear Doctor would have liked the movie, because he thought that the only way his cerebral stories could make it to the screen was as complete rewrites (story here)

Your link points back to this same story. Here's an alternative.

Did you read TFA? They tried that and failed. Stanford and Cal have referred to The Big Game for a hundred years or so.

Try not to use Paypal, or any of the abusive companies owned by eBay. Never vote for anyone associated with eBay.

I'm going to have to call "NPOV violation" on that one... it's a list of their losses, while their wins have gone unmentioned.

I work for Tynt. I appreciate the discussion here and want to make sure that everyone knows we want to be respectful of the opinions here. Not sure i I will get flamed just for wading in, but I hope not.

To clarify on a few points

1. Tracking and Attribution – the attribution feature is separate from the tracking features. The tracking features work very much like any other analytics tool. We do not store any personally identifiable information, but we do want to help publishers learn what content people are choosing to preserve and promote. In addition, publishers can turn the attribution feature on or off on their sites. If you want to see what is actually collected - sign up for an account and look at the dashboard, you will see that we are tracking the content, not the user.

3. What if I don’t want this behavior? We are currently working on a global opt out for users who would rather not have Tynt monitor them. In the interim you can opt out on a site by site basis (i.e. the opt out for the SF Gate is here: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/faq.shtml#faq1.5%23ixzz0bxLIAbL7). More info on how to not have Tynt monitor you is available in our FAQs here: http://www1.tynt.com/faq-technical-topics#ixzz0bxGzIgPZ

but as pointed out in the comments here, NoScript is a very effective tool for this.

Derek

thats all good and well.

Except:

What happens when the owner of Tynt decides to sell the company? Is the new owner going to keep doing what you say your doing?

We are talking about the tech world, where new startups get bought up left and right.

how about if someone happens to copy and paste something that isn't legal in possible the USA but is okay in another country. You going to give up all the info on the person at the request of the law enforcement?

Honestly, I don't like how you choose to make your paycheck. I seriously hope this sort of business model doesn't pan out, and that you, well, go broke, and do the honorable thing.

i.e. the opt out for the SF Gate is here: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/faq.shtml#faq1.5%23ixzz0bxLIAbL7

I clicked on that link, then opened the AdBlock Plus console. One of the blockable items is indeed a script served from one of your servers (r1.tcr60.tynt.com). However I notice that the URL of this page is appended to the URL of the script - the full link is

http://r1.tcr60.tynt.com/a/v/0bxLIAbL7?site=ad1_AICmWr3PaXab7jrHtB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sfgate.com%2Fchronicle%2Ffaq.shtml%23faq1.5%2523ixzz0bxLIAbL7&referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fyro.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F10%2F01%2F14%2F1818222%2FTynt-Insight-Is-Watching-You-Cut-and-Paste%3Fart_pos%3D16

The same is true of your second link, there's a script referenced in the page with the URL of this page as part of the query string. So you're tracking referrers too. No offence, but this is starting to look shadier and shadier the deeper I dig.

Speaking of machines that really suck... isn't that another application requiring "delicate physical action and feedback"?

I work for Tynt. I appreciate the discussion here and want to make sure that everyone knows we want to be respectful of the opinions here. Not sure i I will get flamed just for wading in, but I hope not. To clarify on a few points 1. Tracking and Attribution – the attribution feature is separate from the tracking features. The tracking features work very much like any other analytics tool. We do not store any personally identifiable information, but we do want to help publishers learn what content people are choosing to preserve and promote. In addition, publishers can turn the attribution feature on or off on their sites. If you want to see what is actually collected - sign up for an account and look at the dashboard, you will see that we are tracking the content, not the user. 3. What if I don’t want this behavior? We are currently working on a global opt out for users who would rather not have Tynt monitor them. In the interim you can opt out on a site by site basis (i.e. the opt out for the SF Gate is here: http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/faq.shtml#faq1.5%23ixzz0bxLIAbL7). More info on how to not have Tynt monitor you is available in our FAQs here: http://www1.tynt.com/faq-technical-topics#ixzz0bxGzIgPZ but as pointed out in the comments here, NoScript is a very effective tool for this. Derek

That was 2 trillion dollars, not billion. How many of those disasters caused even that much money?

Since you brought up the cost of Katrina, What about it? It was a fraction the cost of 911. And these are natural disasters -- and effect generally effect a narrow group or location specific economy.

The wildfires may displace home owners, but rarely do any significant infrastructure damage. And certainly not even in the league of a 911 type attack.

It's disingenuous of you to suggest that because airline crashes are "part of an airline's operating expense" is justification to ignore the economic impact of 4 being deliberately turned in to smart bombs. On what day where there two or more airliners then went down? And on what single day did even ONE of them bring down a few buildings? When did any of those other crashes down the entire air space for even HOURS, let alone days? That's a HUGE impact and you're either being deliberately obtuse, ignorant, or flat out lying to distort the truth.

Your fears are unfounded and irrational.

I would suggest your rose colored glasses are a bit fogged and that you are being irrational by deliberately ignoring facts. This country just cannot absorb more than a handful of 911 type disasters. It's simple arithmetic.

That terrorist attack did NOT bring the economy down

Again, who said it did? Are you suggesting with your statement that it had no economic impact what so ever? I'm suggesting it was a huge impact -- and contributed significantly to an economy already going down after the dot-com bust. I welcome any citation stating otherwise.

I'm guessing you wont cede the point as you appear to be to emotionally invested in your position. To the point of constantly putting words in my mouth. That said, I can only add: "Best of luck to you!"

People will trade information on technologies, how-to information, plans, and parts to make sophisticated products in their home or workshop.

Yeah well, don't be so optimistic. You can bet there are certain groups who will always be out to nip that kind of thing at the bud.

We have the ability to cut the levels of CO2 we emit, so it seems sensible to do so. Maybe it will all be for nothing and we later find that the earth was naturally warming anyway, but we might just find that it was the right thing to do. If we do nothing, it could be far too late.

It's a tradeoff. What exactly are you proposing we do it cut levels of CO2? Stop driving? Cap and trade? Each of these have a cost associated with them. How much are you willing to cut in order change something?

On the evidence I have seen, I am in the belief that human industrial processes are warming the earth and that we need to do something about it quickly before the damage is very severe.

On the evidence I have seen, I am of the belief that California will fall into the ocean, but there is nothing we can do about it and the damage will be very severe. In fact, it is already happening. This is an effect known as continental drift (and in the case of those apartments, erosion), and it is happening faster than oceans are rising (as the IPCC report mentions, oceans are rising at around 3 mm a year).

One thing that you rarely hear mentioned in the climate debate is that all those things are happening anyway. At best we can only slow the process down somewhat. No matter what we do, coastal areas will be flooded and fall into the sea, droughts will displace others, crop and grazing land will be destroyed. These are all processes that happen without global warming. We are going to have to adapt to them no matter what.

The unknown in the global climate system is how much CO2 is affecting things. We have estimates, but the true, hard cold fact is we don't know. There are no good peer reviewed papers that claim to know how much of the current warming is caused by CO2. Also, it is unknown what the precise effect of global warming would be. It is true that some climate models predict less rain in areas of the southwest US and other areas, but even the IPCC report asserts they are not reliable on a less than continental scale. There is some evidence that global warming could turn the Sahara green. In addition, there is strong experimental evidence that a doubling of CO2 would improve crop productivity, helping even the subsistence farmers.

you're right. terry childs may not be batshit crazy, but he has a cell phone camera and 1100 secret modems. that scares the crap out of me! i'm calling the police! again!

With the AT&T network, "under-served areas of the US" includes pretty much the entire country, including isolated rural towns like San Francisco.

So theoretically they've exposed themselves to prosecution for perjury. If I called the DA in San Francisco or in my own jurisdiction and asked them to prosecute, what do you think the chances are that they'd do it? Zero, I'd guess.

IANAL, but I remember reading that it's particularly rare to prosecute for perjury in general.

I don't hear anyone complaining about security breaches, viruses, spyware, and malware in general on the iPhone

Then you haven't been paying attention. Any iPhone app can read your entire contacts list and upload it to the internet, including your own phone number and details. This hasn't just happened once. It's happened more than once. Who knows how many of those 100,000 apps do this?

It's a fallacy that the app stores approval process can catch malware. Apples inspections aren't deep or focussed enough to do that and there are examples of this problem in action. Contrast this to Android. If an app reads your phones data Android tells you that up front when you install it. Apps cannot access that data if they don't have permission to it. That's how real security works - the idea that overworked reviewers who spend less than an hour on any given app are a replacement for sandboxing is crazy.

It means you like to be hacked and crashed

Tens of thousands of Web sites, many of them small sites running the WordPress blogging software, have been broken, returning a "fatal error" message in recent weeks. According to security experts those messages are actually generated by some buggy malicious code sneaked onto them by Gumblar's authors.

They've had since at least August 27th to correct their oversight (the date when Storm8's behavior was first documented publicly). Considering that it could be verified by just installing one of the listed games and running tcpdump while registering it, I'd have to say they haven't been at all interested in investigating.

Just to add to it, Storm8 doesn't even deny that the collection happened! They only deny that it is intentional.

So, perhaps this gene is more of a "delusion of competence" gene?

FTFY

And again, let's just play the blame game. You have to lay off about 10% of your workforce, which is really not a popular move at all. Would you rather:

a) Divert attention from your own game of poker and blame the stubborn, evil regulators instead? Due diligence anyone?
b) Go into the details of your less-than-ideal-management which made you need a strong partner in the first place?

And again, let's just play the blame game. You have to lay off about 10% of your workforce, which is really not a popular move at all. Would you rather:

a) Divert attention from your own game of poker and blame the stubborn, evil regulators instead? Due diligence anyone?
b) Go into the details of your less-than-ideal-management which made you need a strong partner in the first place?

We do need to think about our future energy needs both with respect to the environment and energy security. What we don't need is silly government micro management of our lives. So yes that means we need to subsidize nuclear, wind and solar power. The problem is that the greenies block everything. They block nuclear energy and they even block solar energy. Diane Feinstein plans on banning solar panels in the Mojave Desert even though that is one of the best places for them. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/20/MN4T19OTBJ.DTL And then the greenies don't want to allow wind power on mountains in Vermont and New Hampshire even though no-one lives on the top of a mountain. They dig their heads on the sand and pretend that with a growing population we can just conserve our way out of this crisis - which is of course way out of reality. Then they try to impose draconian restrictions on the rest of us. I can just imagine the next step - banning video games because of energy use.

You fail to mention that the "protesters" used Oscar Grant's death as an excuse to trash downtown Oakland. They "smashed storefronts and cars, set several cars ablaze and blocked streets." http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/08/MN2N155CN1.DTL

Way to oversimplify a really complicated situation.

You fail to mention that the "protesters" used Oscar Grant's death as an excuse to trash downtown Oakland. They "smashed storefronts and cars, set several cars ablaze and blocked streets." http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/01/08/MN2N155CN1.DTL

Way to oversimplify a really complicated situation.

It is vital to certain parties that war become intractable, perpetual and expanding.

"War brings business to Feinstein spouse: Blum's firms win multimillion-dollar defense contracts in Iraq, Afghanistan"

Afghanistan - the proxy war

"Implementing the McChrystal plan will perpetuate the longstanding fundamentals of US national security policy: maintaining a global military presence, configuring US forces for global power projection, and employing those forces to intervene on a global basis. The McChrystal plan modestly updates these fundamentals to account for the lessons of 9/11 and Iraq, cultural awareness and sensitivity nudging aside advanced technology as the signature of American military power, for example. Yet at its core, the McChrystal plan aims to avert change. Its purpose - despite 9/11 and despite the failures of Iraq - is to preserve the status quo. . . .

If the president assents to McChrystal's request, he will void his promise of change at least so far as national security policy is concerned. The Afghanistan war will continue until the end of his first term and probably beyond. It will consume hundreds of billions of dollars. It will result in hundreds or perhaps thousands more American combat deaths - costs that the hawks are loath to acknowledge.

As the fighting drags on from one year to the next, the engagement of US forces in armed nation-building projects in distant lands will become the new normalcy. Americans of all ages will come to accept war as a perpetual condition, as young Americans already do. That "keeping Americans safe" obliges the United States to seek, maintain, and exploit unambiguous military supremacy will become utterly uncontroversial."

That depends entirely upon where you look. The San Francisco Municipal Railway runs all of its electric vehicles (streetcars and trolley coaches) on power from the Hetch Hetchy dam. BART buys most of its electricity from hydro plants. Besides, cleaning up a handful of power plants is far easier than cleaning up millions of cars.

Actually, a friend of mine who immigrated to the US from Denmark as an adult has a very different belief. Her children are given far more after school work than she was as a child, and the homework kills their enthusiasm for learning. She transferred her son from a school which gave him three hours of homework per night at age ten to one that gives him less than one hour of homework per night. His academic performance has increased dramatically. If her six year old daughter starts to perform poorly in the public school, she plans to transfer her to the same private school.

Here's a pretty good and reasonably balanced discussion of the topic: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/10/08/ING0FLHNM21.DTL

According to the Tolkien trust, they already had a contract that gave them 7.5% of the gross revenue (source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/02/11/financial/f115544S35.DTL&tsp=1). Based on that, the trick with "all the money from the box office was spent on advertising" (or similar) should have been blocked in the first place. But it seems New Line still found an excuse for not paying.

For the next film, you may be right about the flat fee up front. If I was a manager of the Tolkien trust, that would be the only way I'd sign a deal with New Line again.