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"(jk - I think he has been lowering taxes)"

But by lowering taxes, the state government hasn't gotten the income it needs, and our education system (including the state universities, such as UCLA and Berkley) is taking a large hit. He is also threatening to close state parks, trim health care, and release prisoners in order to help close the budget hole. Californians are being robbed in more ways then money....

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/11/MNCUUD91O.DTL

So what is better? Something free that everyone has access to or something that only the rich and privileged can attain? I would think that most \.ers would be cheering this since its akin to open source.

To be fair to Stanford, it's not only the "rich and privileged" who have access to its degree programs. As of this year, Stanford no longer charges tuition for students whose family income is less than $100,000 per year. Most other "posh" American schools have similar programs -- Harvard, for example, waives tuition for families earning less than $60,000. In 2005, Yale announced that it would waive tuition for any musicians who wanted to pursue a Master's degree in music and were good enough to be accepted in the program. And so on.

Education really doesn't put up as many barriers in America as people think. It's the people who are rich who put up the barriers, whether they're going to university or not.

Noted feminist Lindsay Lohan.

Snow plows have used magnetic guidance such as this for years now: http://www.path.berkeley.edu/PATH/Research/snowplow/

CalTrans started using a lane marker system on I-80 over Donner Pass in 1998: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/10/29/MN172839.DTL

There's still an operator, but it's not the airport shuttle either. You probably want a person to operate the blade, and make other decisions that vary with the conditions created by each storm. Keeping the operator safe (and keeping an expensive asset out of the ditch) is worthwhile, especially when time is a factor.

> Arm chair engineers! Sheesh ...except that I'm not an air chair engineer. I am a real life engineer, and I work on a real fire engine.

Sadly for your argument, I have never tried to cut 2" rebar. Instead, I've actually done it. We didn't use a cutting torch, either. We used a good old fashioned K12. It worked fine, and we didn't need any of our specialized shearing equipment. We certainly did not need a plasma cutter. Your assertion that construction using thicker / higher grade steel cannot fail is nothing short of hubris.

I also don't need to be told about "concrete they build bridges out of". I've dealt with that as well in my career. Your statement that you cannot "burn through it" is bunk. I've seen how it handles heat load, and how it spawls. I've dealt with it collapsing. You, clearly, have not. That, or I need you to contact my state comptroller, so that he can sue the piss out of every contractor in the state for substituting "junk you get from the hardware store".

But enough about me. Here's some real life that you failed to account for.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2007/04/29/BAGVOPHQU46.DTL&o=0
Don't just gloss over the images. Study where the heat was, what failed, and how it failed. Also study what didn't fail, and what shape it's in as far as structural contribution. Also notice being "Big Steel" didn't really seem to matter. It failed anyway.

Concrete makes an awesome heat sink if thick enough, and can buy a small amount of time. However, the steel in the towers was not encased in such a concrete sink. If it was, there wouldn't be any talk of "fire resistive coatings". There'd be talk of "more inches of concrete". End of story.

So, I'm sorry, Tux, but I have to call bullshit. Some day when you throw on the 60+ pounds of PPE and actually fight fires, you'll probably have a better understanding of the immense void between "ivory tower theorists" and reality. I'm certain what you say looks good on paper - but it isn't correct, not even close. Your agument is nothing short of an appeal to the "held together by mass" perception... "it has TWO INCH STEEL! CONCRETE! NOT JUNK FROM HARDWARE STORE! MASSIVE!" Yep, and I stare at it in complete and total awe.

But in truth, the towers were based on math. Remove an element... and it's done.

If you're into this topic (and I hope you are), there's a great book you MUST read by a guy named Francis Brannigan. He's one of the funner people I've hung out with, and had tons of great stories to boot. And as far as structural behavior under fire loads... he was The Man. Get the book, give it a read. You won't be disappointed.
http://books.google.com/books?id=FVFZlqDdM4sC

Yeah. The Twin Towers should have toppled over, but instead, they blew up like a building that was being imploded for demolition. Also, the melting point of the steel used in the Twin Towers is actually about 400 degrees HOTTER than the temperature at which jet fuel burns.

In Oakland CA, a tanker truck carrying gasoline crashed under an overpass crashed and burst into flames. (Everyone was OK) The heat from the gasoline caused the metal in the overpass to weaken and the whole thing collapsed.

This pretty much proves that burning fuel can cause metal to weaken and a structure to collapse. This is especially true when you consider that jet fuel burns hotter than gasoline.

The Twin Towers would also be the first example in history of a steel building where the steel failed due to fire.

Maybe so, but it happened. Other examples would be the one I listed (although not a building) and WTC7.

In other words, "Truthers" are full of shit. They've been debunked countless times and they keep coming back. Accept it, you are wrong. There is no government conspiracy. There was no demolition. Terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into buildings where the heat from the fires caused them to collapse. That is FACT!

Where it's going, yes. How strong it will be, not so much

Quoting from this sfgate article: "The remains that Reiser revealed Monday were found about 4 p.m. buried on the side of a steep hill off a deer trail between Redwood Regional Park and the Huckleberry Botanic Regional Preserve, less than 200 yards behind a house on Skyline Boulevard, said Reiser's attorney, William Du Bois, who accompanied his client to the site"

Compare with what this guy posted in 2007

Citation Granted

Under a heavy police guard, Reiser, handcuffed to his attorney, William Du Bois, led officers through heavy brush and poison oak to where his wife's body was buried off the 8200 block of Skyline Boulevard.

"Without any hesitation, he went exactly to where the grave site was," said Oakland homicide Lt. Ersie Joyner. Police said there were no signs that the grave had been dug before Nina Reiser was killed.

Good enough for you?

According to this article:

[FasTrak] toll evaders were responsible for $31.4 million in unpaid bridge tolls in the 2006-07 fiscal year

What?? They sure do go dump Toxic Waste because there aren't specific injunctions and court orders not telling them to...
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/11165
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2006/5/27/93622.shtml?s=ic
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Toxic_waste_dump_killing_children_in_Kenya_UN_report_999.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/06/MN2510MASF.DTL&type=printable

You think these companies waited until they were in trouble to start dumping their crap?

I like the ones in Emeryville, California.

Whoa there. There is not a TON of oil off our coastline. There is oil in the Eastern Gulf; there are no deposits off the East and West Coasts (at least, according to the US Geological Survey, and I would trust them). The oil contained in the Eastern Gulf is enough to meet America's current consumption for three years, which is not enough time to wean ourselves off our oil teat. That three year figure assumes that a) American consumption holds steady and b) that the oil can be pumped out fast enough. Neither of those assumptions are terribly good ones. Also, the timetable in being able to start getting out of the Eastern Gulf is not the "couple years" you say, but between 5 and 10.

That is not to say there isn't a vast supply of oil in America. There are deposits in North and South Dakota into Montana, as well as a mother lode of oil shale in the Appalachian Basin. However, it is difficult to get usable oil out of either those deposits, which results in higher costs in extraction and therefore higher costs of crude and higher "prices at the pump." Indeed, in 1999, when the Dakota reserve was found, it was dismissed as uneconomical (because oil was ~$10 a barrel). It might be more economical now, but it will always cost more than other crude. Also, there are vast deposits in the Arctic, but it is unclear whether we will be allowed to drill there (Canada might get the rights).

So, we have oil. However, in order to get at most of that oil, it will take the ~20 years you say it will take to get alternative sources like wind, solar, nuclear, etc. to come online. The oil that has already been mapped out will take at least 5 years. By the time we are able to get oil from our reserves, we will be able to consume much less oil, if we start aggressively pursuing alternatives now.

Now, that's not to say we shouldn't extract this oil. If we wean ourselves off oil, and then drill this oil, we can make ourselves a pretty penny and probably have a similarly large influence over geopolitics like OPEC countries now have. However, saying that we should start drilling so we can keep feeding our oil habit is stupid: there is a gap where we are still extraordinarily dependent on foreign oil, and the time it takes for both oil production and alternative energy sources to come fully online is roughly the same. Additionally, due to the costs of extraction from our deposits, we will not see much of a decrease in price. So because both (most of) American oil and alternative energies are a) expensive and b) ~20 years away, we might as well invest in the renewable energy source.

Local decriminalization typically means that the cops simply don't go out of their way to uncover and investigate certain crimes, regardless of whether or not they're federal, state or local ordinance violations.

Just for instance, the San Mateo county sheriff's office recently raided a home poker tournament. I guess they weren't interested in prosecuting prostitution.

So I'm not crazy

I have noticed a lot more dropped calls on the iPhone 3g. Between the poorer battery life, the dropped calls

I just read a better article from Tuesday's San Francisco Chronicle that shows you're not crazy:

• "Shadow side of iPhone 3G's blockbuster success"

From the article:

• "I was driving down Folsom Street in San Francisco and I got a dropped call 10 times. I get dropped calls just standing in one place"
• Yarbrough's complaints stem from spotty phone reception due to the phone's 3G wireless technology. He said when the phone is set to ride on the faster 3G network, the signal often fluctuates and drops calls even though it should be able to revert to a slower wireless technology called Edge.

  He's taken to turning off his phone's 3G connection when making phone calls and relying on the Edge technology to maintain his conversations.

• Kevin Karkada, a 29-year-old Danville software consultant, shares many of the same complaints about reception. But his biggest concern is battery consumption, which he said often leaves him with very little juice by the early evening.

  He's also taken to turning off 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and e-mail syncing just to ensure a strong charge throughout the day.

Uh, this is something completely unprecedented. The Terminator just announced this the other week. The thing is, he's also cutting people's hours and laying off a bunch of other employees.

What usually happens in California is that the budget eventually gets passed; people are still getting paid.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/01/MNEP122S2P.DTL
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/25/MN0B11V432.DTL

Uh, this is something completely unprecedented. The Terminator just announced this the other week. The thing is, he's also cutting people's hours and laying off a bunch of other employees.

What usually happens in California is that the budget eventually gets passed; people are still getting paid.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/01/MNEP122S2P.DTL
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/25/MN0B11V432.DTL

First, the system has to work nearly perfectly out of the gate - this isn't a 100 person startup (according to this article, just the increase in the number of state workers since Arnold took office (not the total, just the increase) is 26,000 (total is more than 200,000). Remember, this is payroll - you make a mistake, say on FICA or Federal income tax witholding, and you could easily be looking at millions in penalties. You've also got to keep in mind all the other things that get taken out of people's paychecks - insurance payments, retirement savings, wage garnishments, etc. Those not only need to get taken out, accurately, but the amounts getting taken out need to get paid to the appropriate entities (private companies, federal, state and potentially local governments, private individuals, etc.). Any mistakes there could mean penalties or lawsuits.

Let's look at the back end for a minute. California will have some type of General Ledger-based accounting system - every one of those paychecks (not to mention all of the deductions, etc.) need to get posted against the appropriate GL account - I'm going to guess the number of those accounts is at least in the tens of thousands - so that money that is or isn't paid out is deducted from the appropriate department/group/whatever. Now, assuming you've taken care of all that (and again, not really any room for errors - it's a problem if the DOT suddenly can't pay the contractors that are working on the roads because somebody deducted too many paychecks from their GL account) you've got to deal with actually printing the checks and doing the electronic transfers. Here you might actually get lucky, and only have to generate a set of files in the right format - or the current payroll program might actually print the checks, too. Now, because this is temporary, you need to figure everything twice - what it would have been normally, what it will be with the cut to minimum wage, and you need to keep track of that difference so you can pay it out when the budget is finally approved. Oh, and you'll have to figure out the legal implications (what happens to people who's wages are garnished at a level that leaves their paychecks at zero or less? How do the Feds react to not getting the witholding when they are supposed to?). So, sure, you think you can do all that, with no bugs or errors, in less than six months, you're hired.

It was found in the same office that it was left in.

Don't think so. All state employee wages are public information, as shown by the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year or last year. They published the wages of several high-profile people, and provided a search function on their website so you could look up the base salary for any state worker making $100k+.

So reports the SF Chronicle in an article from the AP:

(08-05) 11:59 PDT San Francisco, CA (AP) --

The company that runs an airport security prescreening program says they've found a laptop containing the personal information of 33,000 people more than a week after it apparently went missing.
...

They found the missing laptop in the room where it was supposed to be:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/08/05/financial/f102608D05.DTL&tsp=1

Arnold also is proposing a temporary 1% increase
in sales taxes:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/04/BA2212523E.DTL

I bet there won't be any programming problems stopping this.

A motive that was given in this news account was that he was working on a vaccine for Anthrax and wanted to test it.

Wasn't that the plot of Mission Impossible 2 (no, I can't seem to drink it off my mind). Is the government driven by TV and the movies?

Given that this has been a headline for at least 12 hours now, I did some reading.

A motive that was given in this news account
was that he was working on a vaccine for Anthrax and wanted to test it.

There was also some evidence that before the 2001 anthrax attack, he had conducted tests outside of normal work protocol. His attorney stated that he had been cooperating with the FBI for more than a year. There is also a report that he was forcibly removed from his job due to his becoming unstable.

The impression I get is that he had psychological problems that drew the attention of authorities. Those same problems may have
made it hard to deal with the pressure of an FBI investigation of more then 12 months.

There are reports of evidence that in he same time frame as the attacks, he removed anthrax material from work to do his own tests.
These tests may or may not have been related to the attacks themselves. There are also reports that he was about to be indicted.

The lowest-paying entry-level police jobs I could find on the West Coast start around $40k per year. Make it a career and you can become one of the highest-paid public employees around.

http://www.sfgate.com/webdb/citypay/

You mention San Diego, which was in the zero percentile (absolute bottom) for police pay in California as of 2006. The minimum recruit base pay was right around $30k compared to a median of roughly $47k. Not a lot of money in this day and age, but certainly more than being "lucky" to get $20k per year.

http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2006/12/21/news/01buck.txt

I think you would only need to accelerate out of the gravity well of Titan (plus a little more to boost from Titan's orbital speed to Saturn's escape velocity). The rest of the trip is downhill to a parking orbit around the Earth or Moon.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's how it would work.

Big old sausages full of Titan's Finest, with a few oxygen tanks strapped on, some low power rocket engines, and a good guidance system. Biggest energy drain of the whole trip would be the LEDs that light up the ship's name: on the Earth-facing side of the lead sausage, in letters 1,000 feet high, Chevron Condoleezza Rice (visible in amateur telescopes for most of the trip).

Yeah, that's prolly going to happen in a hundred years. Feedstock for the orbital factories, very little of Titan's juices would get to Earth itself.

> if they wanted vengeance they may have sent him to a maximum security prision

You mean like this guy, who Pennsylvanians gave life w/o possibility of parole for *not* killing a cop (he was unarmed and hiding, his bank-robbing partner had the gun and got the death penalty).

Maybe Newsome will issue a retraining order for... Ummm RESTRAINING order AGAINST him, too?

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/02/27/MNGP8OBRL41.DTL

http://www.examiner.com/a-606664~Man_boasts_he_had_sex_with_mayor.html

When bad press like this happens.... you read about stuff like this:

"Prior to the incident at the mayor's building, Shin -- who has written several books on spirituality -- attended a town hall meeting Newsom held in the Bayview neighborhood on Feb. 10. Shin sat in the front row and appeared to be taking pictures of the lower half of the mayor's body, according to a declaration by Franco Fleming, a police officer assigned to the mayor's security detail.

At one point, Newsom's jacket fell off a chair and Shin picked it up, wiped it off in a caressing manner and then held it on his lap, according to Fleming's declaration. He proceeded to attempt to get Newsom's attention in a flirtatious manner. Afterward, he grabbed the mayor and prevented him from closing his car door till a police officer intervened.

Two days later, at an event commemorating the same-sex marriages at City Hall, Shin stood just feet from the mayor, taking pictures as he spoke. At one point, he grabbed the mayor's arm, wearing a purple latex glove."

THIS is the stuff which makes San FranCISCO San FranSIDESHOW...

You can't be a dragonslayer (a hero) if there are no dragons to slay.

1) Make your city a 'sanctuary city' for criminals
2) Release a violent gang member (here illegally) so he can shoot a dad and two sons
3) ???
4) Swoop in like Batman, retrieve the codes, Hero!!!!

Now we know what step 3 is, to demonize some competant IT employee.
Lock Terry Childs up, charge him with 4 fellony counts, and a 5 million dollar bail!!!
What is the threat here, that he'll roam the streets and garot children with the white cord from his iPod???
Hero indeed.

will in fact place the City of San Francisco in danger

Well, there's already enough danger thanks to Mayor Gavin Newsom's policies.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/21/BA5C11SK2S.DTL&type=printable

It never occurred to this brain dead megabozo that when you say "Come one come all to our sanctuary. We'll hide you!" that there will be bad people to take advantage of that? A complete and utter tool.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/07/09/MNG9JJRI8K1.DTL

Uh huh. No corruption in that town, no dirty back door politics, huh?

I've owned my place since the 70s, left in the 80s, but have no reason to sell.

--Toll_Free

Obama's junket must be funded by the United States taxpayers because Saddam Hussein is dead and can no longer buy Democrats.

Alcoholics Anonymous, the renowned 12-step program that directs problem drinkers to seek help from a higher power, says it's not a religion and is open to nonbelievers. But it has enough religious overtones that a parolee can't be ordered to attend its meetings as a condition of staying out of prison, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

In fact, said the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, the constitutional dividing line between church and state in such cases is so clear that a parole officer can be sued for damages for ordering a parolee to go through rehabilitation at Alcoholics Anonymous or an affiliated program for drug addicts.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/09/08/BA99S1AKQ.DTL

This is San Francisco, which would like to rename a sewage treatment plant after George W Bush. I'm guessing the feds aren't in any big hurry to jump in.

In SF, it really isn't a big stretch to get hit by Muni:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/18/BAGDUH578.DTL&tsp=1

http://www.muniaccidentlawyers.com/

"There are an average of nine injuries every day on the San Francisco Municipal Railway."

Nice

Sure! You just need to be better at searching:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/08/12/BU163548.DTL&type=printable

Want more?
http://money.cnn.com/2004/03/09/technology/echostar_viacom/index.htm

Viacom are notorious for just adding to the subscribers bills without asking the customers what they want.

In Denmark there was a few years ago a big case where TV3 (satellite subscribers - subscribing to viacoms package) have been fooled into a money trap they could not get out of. There where examples of sellers treatening their subscribers with legal action and putting them into the "bad credit lists" etc.

This was a BIG thing and they've been up in the news several times.

Drivers will be alerted to empty parking places either by displays on street signs, or by looking at maps on screens of their smartphones.

So let me get mind around this, California bans cellphones while behind the wheel but will possibly tie this to cellphones or even a confusing screen on your dashboard?
When will the madness end?

When you vote for a bill you don't get to pick and choose what sections you are voting for. It's all or nothing.

Obama voted for an amendment which would remove the telecom immunity provision of the bill, but it didn't pass. So instead of voting to take a way a tool in our war on terror, he voted for the bill as a whole.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2008/07/10/MN3H11ME7C.DTL

As his campaign manager said:

Sen. Obama has said before that the compromise bill is not perfect. Given the choice between voting for an improved yet imperfect bill, and losing important surveillance tools, Sen. Obama chose to support the FISA compromise."

Opponents, including Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., argued that a legal exemption is at best premature, because details of the wiretapping program are not yet fully known. But a Dodd amendment that would have stripped out the immunity title received just 32 votes, all of them from Democrats, including Obama, along with Sen. Bernie Sanders, independent-Vt.

I realize that you must be joking, but for those who didn't read the linked page to the sfgate columnist (here), this is the story according to him:

For those of you who have not yet received the pamphlet (mailed free to anyone who buys me an automobile), the word Mondegreen, meaning a mishearing of a popular phrase or song lyric, was coined by the writer Sylvia Wright.

As a child she had heard the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray" and had believed that one stanza went like this:

Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands
Oh where hae you been?
They hae slay the Earl of Murray,
And Lady Mondegreen.

Poor Lady Mondegreen, thought Sylvia Wright. A tragic heroine dying with her liege; how poetic. When it turned out, some years later, that what they had actually done was slay the Earl of Murray and lay him on the green, Wright was so distraught by the sudden disappearance of her heroine that she memorialized her with a neologism.

The whole Blog is basically coming straight from an Associated Press article. Here's the link to it;

San Francisco/AP article

Unfortunately we live in a soundbite nation....

on SF Gate
  it is far more nuanced than they simply didn't like him. More correctly they didn't find the whole of his testimony believable. Likely because it was a lie.

I've been on a San Francisco criminal jury, and there is no way you would find 12 people in this area where all 12 would convict of murder simply because "they didn't like the guy". These jurors live here, they all personally know plenty of asocial people, they probably like some of them even.

Hans Reiser already admitted to lying on the stand.

"Let me begin by asking if you're willing to admit, here and now, that when you (previously) testified you willfully concealed the fact that you routinely removed the battery from your cell phone after Nina disappeared?" Hora asked.

"Yes, and I feel badly about that," Reiser said.

"And that was a willfully false or deliberately misleading statement of a material fact, do you agree?" the prosecutor asked.

"Yes," Reiser responded.

Mars Had an Ancient Impact Like Earth

No it didn't. Like Earth, Mars had an ancient impact, but the impact itself was decidedly NOT like the impact Earth experienced.

Earth's impact obliterated the Mars-sized object that impacted earth, leaving a ring of ejects circling the Earth. The ring coalesced into the moon. This didn't happen on Mars; Mars has no giant satellite, only two small moons.

Also, I saw a few different accounts, and not everyone is yet convinced that the disparity between Mars' poles was caused by a giant impact. The San Fransisco Chrinicle, for instance, says "Huge impact may have divided Mars surface".

In the past some scientists have held that the great divide on Mars was caused by the upwelling of semi-molten material from the planet's interior, or perhaps by several smaller meteorite impacts. But now the theory of a single giant impact has gained major support. It's an intriguing theory - most of it derived from computer calculations and NASA spacecraft. But one scientist expressed some modest reservations about it in a separate commentary in Nature.

If this could have happened, could life have been on Mars at he time but completely wiped out, with its remnant chemicals starting life over on Earth?

There have been meteorites that are Martians.

And here I thought he was going to reveal the C++ was gay...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/10/19/entertainment/e190351D69.DTL

Since this came from an Anon internet comment here is a little corroboration attesting to the fact this was B&E-stolen passwords-spyware install instead of super smart kid-bored and better than his teachers-break into network just to do it.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/06/17/state/n230024D29.DTL

Relevant text:

Prosecutors alleged that between January and May, Khan repeatedly broke into school after hours with a stolen master key. They said he used teachers' passwords to hack into computers and change his grades and test scores, often changing the Cs and Fs he received into As.

He is also accused of changing the grades of 12 other students and installing spyware that would let him access the school computer from a remote location.

One can only wonder whether this is yet more Pentagon disinformation to scare dim-witted Third World generals, like the anti-matter bomb.

That's what they call their new president and this plan lives up to the name. Massive censorship to "fight child porn" is a very American stupidity that I doubted any other state besides the Vatican would follow.

The SF Gate had another story about this four days ago. They point out that several other countries have done similar things. Everyone's censoring like it's 1998 again.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/13/BA7I118B1I.DTL&hw=traffic+accident+hoax&sn=001&sc=1000

There is a clear difference in the cases, though. Those Germans fought for political reasons. Furthermore, some of them fought out of loyalty to their country. Islamoterrorists fight for Allah and dream to die while killing a whole bunch of infidels for a chance to get into the paradise and get their 72 virgins.

You could argue about politics to those German and changed their world view. Can you convince Islamoterrorists to forsake their Allah and their heavenly pleasure with 72 virgins, river of wine plus pearly boys? In order to do that, you must argue on the religious ground, but governments everywhere fail to do so because of political correctness. You've got to show people that Islam is not a Religion of Peace(TM). Instead, the US government actually provide Islamoterrorists al-Quran, halal food, and all sort of religious stuff under the guise of respecting their human rights and not being Islamophobic. In fact, the US government allows Islamic propagandas to be taught at schools while erasing anything that could potentially damage Islam. Can anyone be reformed under those conditions, honestly?