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If this was true, faculty salaries would've spiked on new demand and availability of cheap credit.

A quick overview of where the state education money is going http://www.sfgate.com/news/special/pages/2005/ucsalary/ tells you that most universities nowadays are just a stadium and sports team operation with education annoyingly tacked on here and there.

we're short of excellent engineers

We're also short of employers willing to foster excellent engineers.

Germany requires employers to maintain apprentice positions or incur work hours by apprentices according to established ratios of positions and work hours with non-apprentices, with specific criteria for exactly what apprentice means. This is a burden to German employers. One that they can afford because German employers are protected from competition with the sovereign subsided Asian industry with indifferent environmental regulation and disposable workers. Google "germany anti-dumping" and read all about it.

As a result of these industrial policies Germany has enjoyed steady economic growth for four decades. Only the predictable sovereign debt crises of the EU PIGS has interrupted this.

The attitude in the US is you have veteran level experience or you need not apply, you appear for work and produce at that level immediately and you do not expect to experience growth or development on our dime. This works in the US because the workforce understands that it is fungible; some company owned subsistence worker in a third world hell hole can always be used instead.

The good news is this is all going to change. The pendulum has swung so far over to one side that it can't go any further and will soon cycle back the other way. We're building our monuments in China. We're building our bridges in China. If it goes any further we'll be buying our infantry weapons from China with money borrowed from China and drop shipping them to Afghanistan.

You protect your industry and your workforce or you decline.

we're short of excellent engineers

We're also short of employers willing to foster excellent engineers.

Germany requires employers to maintain apprentice positions or incur work hours by apprentices according to established ratios of positions and work hours with non-apprentices, with specific criteria for exactly what apprentice means. This is a burden to German employers. One that they can afford because German employers are protected from competition with the sovereign subsided Asian industry with indifferent environmental regulation and disposable workers. Google "germany anti-dumping" and read all about it.

As a result of these industrial policies Germany has enjoyed steady economic growth for four decades. Only the predictable sovereign debt crises of the EU PIGS has interrupted this.

The attitude in the US is you have veteran level experience or you need not apply, you appear for work and produce at that level immediately and you do not expect to experience growth or development on our dime. This works in the US because the workforce understands that it is fungible; some company owned subsistence worker in a third world hell hole can always be used instead.

The good news is this is all going to change. The pendulum has swung so far over to one side that it can't go any further and will soon cycle back the other way. We're building our monuments in China. We're building our bridges in China. If it goes any further we'll be buying our infantry weapons from China with money borrowed from China and drop shipping them to Afghanistan.

You protect your industry and your workforce or you decline.

That would be a lot of thinkin for a person to be doing in a split second while a knife is flying at them

I hear you, but you missed one point: The knife was not flying at them. The officer shot the guy first, then he threw the knife.

If you read other accounts, there was some other Keystone Cops type stuff, where the guy threw the bottle, liquid spilled out of the bottle, and one of the officers slipped on the liquid and fell on his ass. That was when the second officer drew his weapon and reportedly fired two seconds later. If you read between the lines, it sounds like a pair of poorly trained, less-than-competent officers felt like they were losing control of a situation (with a crazy drunk, no less) and freaked out.

I mean, come on... this is who they were up against. And that photo isn't a mugshot, it's his driver's license photo. That's what he used to look like when he went to the DMV. In all honesty, I don't even know you, but I'm pretty sure you could take him.

Grr. I accidentally posted this as an AC. Here's your context:

Two years ago BART PD shot and killed an unarmed, handcuffed man on the platform[1] of the West Oakland BART Station. White cop, black detainee. It California, if not the rest of the US, it's extremely rare for on-duty police officers to be charged with felonies surrounding shooting deaths. The police officer was tried, and convicted of involuntary manslaughter with a "gun enhancement". The judge threw out the "gun enhancement" and sentenced the police officer to the minimum amount of jail time required by law.

Two months ago BART PD shot and killed a man on the platform of Civic Center BART Station[2]. This time the deceased was a white man. BART PD alleged that he was drunk, aggressive, had a knife, and had already thrown a bottle at one of the police officers. BART has released security video of the situation which, unfortunately, doesn't seem to clarify much[3]. Witnesses at the scene claim that the man was not acting aggressively[3,4], and that the man's actions did not warrant the use of lethal force. There is, apparently, some dispute as to whether the man had a knife in the first place.

Last week, there were rumours swirling around about protests scheduled for Thursday regarding this latest shooting. In response, BART preemptively shut down their cell phone repeaters in the San Francisco portion of the subway[5]. This raised the ire of Anonymous[6], who obtained and subsequently released user information (names, addresses, passwords, telephone numbers) from BART's myBART.org site[7,8].

That's about as succinct as I can make the current tensions surrounding BART PD.

Meanwhile on the streets of San Francisco:

In January, SFPD shot an aggressive, knife wielding, wheelchair equipped man in the leg[9]. He was shot with a beanbag gun and subsequently dropped his knife. Allegedly the act of dropping his knife was considered further aggression, so SFPD shot him with a gun. He survived and is now suing the city[10].

In July, SFPD shot a man running away from SF MUNI fare inspectors. Allegedly he shot at SFPD, and police officers returned fire[11]. He died. People protested[12]. The latest twist is that the deceased in this case accidentally inflicted the lethal wound upon himself[13].

So, yes, there's a lot of tension in the BART system and in San Francisco right about now.

Add to the mix that there's a general sense of BART dragging their feet in releasing footage and being less than transparent and, yeah, people get more pissed. Throw in a side of pimping a child and allegedly murdering a pregnant woman, and yeah, some people feel very strongly that the latest SFPD shooting was justified. And, yeah, there's there's a lot of tension both between the public and the police as well as within the general community at large.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BART_Police_shooting_of_Oscar_Grant
2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BART_Police#Passengers_killed_by_the_department
3: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/07/charles_hill_bart_shooting_vid.php
4: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/07/charles_hill_identified_as_man.php
5: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/08/13/national/a110904D55.DTL
6: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/14/BAH71KN6CK.DTL
7: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011

Grr. I accidentally posted this as an AC. Here's your context:

Two years ago BART PD shot and killed an unarmed, handcuffed man on the platform[1] of the West Oakland BART Station. White cop, black detainee. It California, if not the rest of the US, it's extremely rare for on-duty police officers to be charged with felonies surrounding shooting deaths. The police officer was tried, and convicted of involuntary manslaughter with a "gun enhancement". The judge threw out the "gun enhancement" and sentenced the police officer to the minimum amount of jail time required by law.

Two months ago BART PD shot and killed a man on the platform of Civic Center BART Station[2]. This time the deceased was a white man. BART PD alleged that he was drunk, aggressive, had a knife, and had already thrown a bottle at one of the police officers. BART has released security video of the situation which, unfortunately, doesn't seem to clarify much[3]. Witnesses at the scene claim that the man was not acting aggressively[3,4], and that the man's actions did not warrant the use of lethal force. There is, apparently, some dispute as to whether the man had a knife in the first place.

Last week, there were rumours swirling around about protests scheduled for Thursday regarding this latest shooting. In response, BART preemptively shut down their cell phone repeaters in the San Francisco portion of the subway[5]. This raised the ire of Anonymous[6], who obtained and subsequently released user information (names, addresses, passwords, telephone numbers) from BART's myBART.org site[7,8].

That's about as succinct as I can make the current tensions surrounding BART PD.

Meanwhile on the streets of San Francisco:

In January, SFPD shot an aggressive, knife wielding, wheelchair equipped man in the leg[9]. He was shot with a beanbag gun and subsequently dropped his knife. Allegedly the act of dropping his knife was considered further aggression, so SFPD shot him with a gun. He survived and is now suing the city[10].

In July, SFPD shot a man running away from SF MUNI fare inspectors. Allegedly he shot at SFPD, and police officers returned fire[11]. He died. People protested[12]. The latest twist is that the deceased in this case accidentally inflicted the lethal wound upon himself[13].

So, yes, there's a lot of tension in the BART system and in San Francisco right about now.

Add to the mix that there's a general sense of BART dragging their feet in releasing footage and being less than transparent and, yeah, people get more pissed. Throw in a side of pimping a child and allegedly murdering a pregnant woman, and yeah, some people feel very strongly that the latest SFPD shooting was justified. And, yeah, there's there's a lot of tension both between the public and the police as well as within the general community at large.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BART_Police_shooting_of_Oscar_Grant
2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BART_Police#Passengers_killed_by_the_department
3: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/07/charles_hill_bart_shooting_vid.php
4: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/07/charles_hill_identified_as_man.php
5: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/08/13/national/a110904D55.DTL
6: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/14/BAH71KN6CK.DTL
7: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011

Grr. I accidentally posted this as an AC. Here's your context:

Two years ago BART PD shot and killed an unarmed, handcuffed man on the platform[1] of the West Oakland BART Station. White cop, black detainee. It California, if not the rest of the US, it's extremely rare for on-duty police officers to be charged with felonies surrounding shooting deaths. The police officer was tried, and convicted of involuntary manslaughter with a "gun enhancement". The judge threw out the "gun enhancement" and sentenced the police officer to the minimum amount of jail time required by law.

Two months ago BART PD shot and killed a man on the platform of Civic Center BART Station[2]. This time the deceased was a white man. BART PD alleged that he was drunk, aggressive, had a knife, and had already thrown a bottle at one of the police officers. BART has released security video of the situation which, unfortunately, doesn't seem to clarify much[3]. Witnesses at the scene claim that the man was not acting aggressively[3,4], and that the man's actions did not warrant the use of lethal force. There is, apparently, some dispute as to whether the man had a knife in the first place.

Last week, there were rumours swirling around about protests scheduled for Thursday regarding this latest shooting. In response, BART preemptively shut down their cell phone repeaters in the San Francisco portion of the subway[5]. This raised the ire of Anonymous[6], who obtained and subsequently released user information (names, addresses, passwords, telephone numbers) from BART's myBART.org site[7,8].

That's about as succinct as I can make the current tensions surrounding BART PD.

Meanwhile on the streets of San Francisco:

In January, SFPD shot an aggressive, knife wielding, wheelchair equipped man in the leg[9]. He was shot with a beanbag gun and subsequently dropped his knife. Allegedly the act of dropping his knife was considered further aggression, so SFPD shot him with a gun. He survived and is now suing the city[10].

In July, SFPD shot a man running away from SF MUNI fare inspectors. Allegedly he shot at SFPD, and police officers returned fire[11]. He died. People protested[12]. The latest twist is that the deceased in this case accidentally inflicted the lethal wound upon himself[13].

So, yes, there's a lot of tension in the BART system and in San Francisco right about now.

Add to the mix that there's a general sense of BART dragging their feet in releasing footage and being less than transparent and, yeah, people get more pissed. Throw in a side of pimping a child and allegedly murdering a pregnant woman, and yeah, some people feel very strongly that the latest SFPD shooting was justified. And, yeah, there's there's a lot of tension both between the public and the police as well as within the general community at large.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BART_Police_shooting_of_Oscar_Grant
2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BART_Police#Passengers_killed_by_the_department
3: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/07/charles_hill_bart_shooting_vid.php
4: http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2011/07/charles_hill_identified_as_man.php
5: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/08/13/national/a110904D55.DTL
6: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/14/BAH71KN6CK.DTL
7: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011

Might as well be a new meme for the crazies such as yourself who just toss the name around and don't even know what you're whining about.

Yeah, I know. Crazies like me never know what they're talking about.

This happened a couple of years ago in Silicon Valley. Took out 911 and ATMs in some cases. Just happened to be during contract negotiations with the labor union.

Or here is an even better idea, how about you don't use your cell phone for the damned Internet and instead either use the Wifi which is all over the damned place or wait until you get home?

Everyone is just gonna have to face some cold hard facts, like 1.-the carriers have oversubscribed like mad and frankly their towers can't take it, and 2.-unlike land lines we can't just run bigger pipes.

Hell we may already be royally fucking ourselves by killing off the honey bees with some of the freqs we are already using and yet like greedy children all I hear is "more more more!". I travel plenty across the south and while I can't speak for the rest of the country I can say that down here most of the towers are so damned overloaded by fucking iPhones that bars don't mean shit and one of my fastest growing services is putting in "mini-towers" that plug into your cable or DSL just so people can bypass the tower bullshit when they are at home (because God fricking forbid they should put down the damned iPhone and use a home phone when AT HOME, oh perish the fricking thought).

To use a line from one of the best engineers ever "She just can't take no more!". The towers are overloaded, the phone services are rapidly turning into shit, the cell phone simply wasn't made for everybody and their damned dog to be watching videos and surfing their asses off on iPhones. So why not put down the damned iPhone and just use the fricking Wifi which is actually MADE for that shit, how about that? Hell the iPhone does have Wifi doesn't it? Because one thing I've learned is that iPhone junkies would rather take a baseball bat to the nuts than put that damned thing down. I'd love to see a chart comparing cell service quality before and after iPhone, because I bet the quality level goes to shit like a turd thrown off the Empire state Building when iPhone hit the scene.

Seriously, what would you do if your employer raided your 401k to pay it's bills?

Well, first off they can't because I own the account. Pensions are not always set up as legally separate trusts and so become vulnerable to broken promises. However, pensions also promise relatively high rates of return for what people once perceived (incorrectly) to be essentially zero risk. In a 401k or any other real investment the value goes up and down depending upon the actual or likely future value of the assets contained within it. My point is this: there's risk in any investment, even a "safe" pension and people must learn to accept that . If they don't like that, let them opt out and invest (or not) their own money as they please.

You'd demand serious benefits and pay to cover the fact that your employer is stealing from you.

You can "demand" whatever you want, but that doesn't mean that you're in a position to receive it. As I said previously, there is no way that California taxpayers are going to make state pensioners whole for the difference between what's in their pensions accounts and what was "promised" to them. If they try to raise taxes, then there will be another tax revolt ala Proposition 13 to keep the government's hands out of our pockets. Investors won't loan more money to California so that it can continue paying outsized pensions to retired state employees or they will demand punitive interest rates. California has long been on the road towards a massive collision with reality and we are in the first stages already. Mark my words, if it comes down to a choice between paying the bond holders, paying the welfare or paying the pensioners, the pensioners are going to loose that fight and it will be cold day in hell before the taxpayers shell out for those state employee pensions. California state employees and teachers are going to take an investment haircut, just like the rest of us did in our retirement accounts, unless their pension fund managers outperform Warren Buffet himself. So, the only question will be how much less will pensioners get? I cannot say that I will be to sorry to see fewer "public pension millionaires".

Showdown brewing over CA state employee pensions

Here is the first one I came across and it looks like there is a name to go with it George Tenet the former head of the CIA IIRC.

But Google is your pal, just put in "American Airlines 9-11 shorted stocks" and you'll find plenty of sources, they have just been ignored. But who better to know what was coming and profit from it than the head of the CIA?

Phil Bronstein of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote a retort to the reader comments regarding several deaths over the past few weeks

http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-476045

According to Northwestern and Northeastern University researchers, every year hundreds of Americans are wrongfully forced out of the country. It happened to this American citizen after committing a crime (throwing rocks). He kept telling authorities that he thought he was an American citizen but didnâ(TM)t have the paperwork or access to an attorney to prove it to the authorities, so he was deported to Jamaica. For ten years ...
Some people are actually threatened by officers that if they donâ(TM)t give up their citizenship claims they may be prosecuted for making false claims.

http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-07-27/news/17218849_1_judy-rabinovitz-immigration-laws-illegal-immigrant

U.S. citizens wrongly detained, deported by ICE

Veloz is one of hundreds of U.S. citizens who have landed in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and struggled to prove they don't belong there, according to advocacy groups and legal scholars, who have tracked such cases around the country. Some citizens have been deported. ...
Jacqueline Stevens, A UC Santa Barbara professor of law and society, said she had identified 160 cases of people who had been detained or deported but whose U.S. citizenship was later affirmed by the federal government or a jury. And several immigrant legal aid groups have helped free dozens of other citizens in recent years.

Right now a lot of medical transcription work is sent overseas to take advantage of low cost out sourcing. A few years ago a woman in Pakistan threatened to publish medical records from UCSF Medical Center on the internet unless she was paid a bit more.

While it's always possible that external intruders could get by the network security, the EHR's security, and figure out how to access and make sense of the proprietary data in the systems, the biggest threat is from people on the inside.

IAAHITC - I Am A Healthcare IT Consultant

Must be karma for booting a passenger off Flight 488 earlier in the week for wearing baggy pants. They must be too busy acting as fashion police than to be concerned with their IT infrastructure. Accompanying YouTube video to the above: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOQI_FhKbw0

"She and top aides were known to communicate using private email accounts. Perez said Palin gave the state a CD with emails from her Yahoo account, and other employees were asked to review their private accounts for emails related to state business and to send those to their state accounts."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2011/06/09/national/a162558D34.DTL#ixzz1Ot7usAXc

She gave them a CD! Come on already.

His estate? He's not dead. He's still in prison. If you'd been watching the news recently you would have seen that they are now investigating him for the still unsolved 1982 Tylenol murders, and they asked him to submit a DNA sample for this investigation but he refused. (They may seek a court order to compel him to provide the DNA sample.) The auction is occurring because he's been ordered by the court to pay restitution to the families of the victims. The court judgement occurred in 2006. Ever since then he's been fighting against the auction of his possessions, but apparently it is actually going to go through now.

I'm sure the president has the ability to veto this though. Surely he will?

"Because Obama was in France for meetings of the Group of Eight nations, he directed that an autopen machine, which holds a pen and replicates his signature, be used to sign the bill, the White House said."
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/05/26/bloomberg1376-LLTGQ90YHQ0X01-03RT0Q7C05LIS1S0GM1FIG4797.DTL

Also on another article, in French It is said that the white house declared this law as "crucial for the security of USA). It is not the first time that Obama do not care about it but it is the first time I see him endorse it fully. That is now official : even a progressive democrat in power is a threat to privacy. What are we suposed to do now ?

Hate to say this, but Apple is the new Sony. Steve jobs will as much as admit it. He loved Sony like we all did back in the day of Trinitrons and Walkmans. They made GORGEOUS hardware.

Great article discussing just that here.

"Alan Deutschman, Reynolds professor of business journalism at University of Nevada-Reno and author of "The Second Coming of Steve Jobs" -- the definitive unauthorized biography of the Apple CEO -- notes that from his early twenties on, Jobs had a fascination with Sony that bordered on obsession.
[...]
"At the time, Sony was committed to not releasing a crappy product just because the market was there; they waited until they had a truly revolutionary innovation, combined it with great design and then profited from it for long, long time," says Deutschman."

Now I wonder how would the counterpart in Japan look like, if Japan chooses a similar solution.

The problem is, they're not exactly swimming in land in Japan. (They're swimming in radioactivity.) They'd have to build it on the side of a mountain or something. Seriously though, the best option is to expatriate as rapidly as possible. Spend some of their money while it's worth something to secure some land for their citizens in some other nation and send them packing. Whole towns are now flooded at high tide since the 'quake. Japan is facing a chronic land shortage.

All this comes off as insensitive I'm sure, and I'm sorry, but it doesn't make sense to build anything in Japan any more. I'd be talking real seriously with Brazil. They already have lots of Japanese and surely they could benefit from lots more. The Japanese are very serious about protecting the environment in their own country, so it might actually improve their environmental conditions to import them all.

Link1
Link2
Link3

Do you even read tech/science news?

Put a billion dollars on a Macbook and people will fuck it up beyond recognition. At the moment, the popular virus toolkits and script kiddies all focus on MS, but that is slowly changing.

**I spent 10 seconds googling 'mac vulnerabilities'. I probably could have found some better links, but I don't want to waste any more time on someone so misinformed.

The San Francisco Chronicle, hardly a right-wing organization, insists that they were threatened with banning from the press pool, then threatened with further White House retaliation if they even reported on the ban, and that the WH then lied about the whole thing. I repeat, that's The San Francisco Chronicle, not the WSJ or Forbes or The Washington Times.

http://articles.sfgate.com/1999-09-16/news/17698950_1_insurance-salesman-intelligence-test-police-chief-fred-lau Robert Jordan -- the would-be policeman from Connecticut who scored too high on an intelligence test -- is not interested in becoming a San Francisco cop, despite a personal invitation from Police Chief Fred Lau. "I don't think I could afford to make the move. It's not that I don't want to," Jordan said yesterday from his home in Waterford, Conn. ... Lau said he was not guaranteeing a job to Jordan -- or anyone else who applies with similar intellectual vigor. But Lau said that the San Francisco Police Department, which is set to hire 200 officers in the next few months, would do well with people such as Jordan, a 48-year-old former insurance salesman. Out of more than 2,000 officers who work for the San Francisco police, at least 10 have law degrees and a handful of others have doctorates, Lau said.

He was subsequently invited to apply to the San Fransisco force.

Anybody know if he wound up there? Apparently a mayor has the same name, so it's hard to search.

the report points out that a growing volume of research publications does not necessarily mean in increase in quality

No kidding. China (and Asia South-Pacific in general) has a rampant plagiarism problem. E.g.,:

http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml
http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-04-11/news/20844688_1_yuan-papers-professor

This practice has permeated many of the country's scientific journals, where it is commonplace to copy-and-paste large sections of others' work. International journals are typically able to shield this using "similarity detectors" and peer review, but the occasional hack-job still gets through occasionally.

>>Linky or it doesn't count.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/us/19prop8.html
http://www.sfgate.com/webdb/prop8/
http://www.afterellen.com/node/39787

Will this do?

Depending on the marriage vows/contract, it could certainly be considered a breach of contract and a form of fraud.

Because it seems the guy was being dishonest, that's always a good hint that someone is doing something wrong.

If he just wanted to consensually have sex with multiple partners, that's not a problem in the USA, but in most states, it is generally assumed that "marriage" means you can't go around doing that.

From an "evolution" POV it's no surprise that many humans view cheating seriously. They don't produce offspring in the millions.

BTW committing adultery could technically get you a life sentence in Michigan, if they follow the law to the letter: http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-01-24/news/17225912_1_sexual-conduct-sentence-michigan-court

Learn how to drive. On a more serious note, the actual formula is 4d{+2}/k-d{+2}. He's done a bunch of theoretical math. Kudos to him http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-03-05/news/28661918_1_graphing-calculator-international-math-olympiad-stanford-university-math

The Senate bill is S.23, aka "America Invents", sponsor Patrick Leahy, who's been trying to get patent reform done for years.
Bill status query at thomas.loc.gov (not sure if these are persistent), Computerworld article, National Journal with some brief comments from pro/neutral/con parties, SF Chron article.

Silicon Valley businesses large and small were mostly against it, IBM was for it. Dianne Feinstein attempted an amendment to remove the First-to-File part, but voted for it anyway after that failed. Barbara Boxer voted against.

The US patent system has been first-to-invent for a long time, while Europe has been first-to-file. There's lots of other detail, largely intended to reduce the amount of patent litigation, improve the coordination with non-US patents, potentially improve the problems with patents on things with prior art and obviousness, and affect some tax issues."

Face it women know the dangers of having sex before engaging. Don't let them about face when shit gets real. /flame

Really? Then why do the same general group of pro-lifers insist on not having proper sex education?

http://dir.salon.com/news/feature/2004/02/24/abstinence/index.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jul/20/george-bush-teen-pregnancy-abstinence
http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-02-11/news/17229994_1_abstinence-comprehensive-sex-education-sexual-and-reproductive-health

Face it, the issue is religious and political and not about what's good for society.

A writer in SFGate had a pretty good commentary. The stats show that this makes Craigslist 11,000 times safer than Oakland.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?entry_id=83684

(and sorry, I have no source)

Here's an article that has links to several sources, albeit from the American perspective. I haven't checked all of the links, but at least a couple seem to work.

I'm not suggesting that "anonymous" was responsible, only that an attack using similar software could cause lines to burst. The national NBC reporting that just aired Saturday February 12th failed to mention ANY of the issues that were raised locally.

The welds were of variable quality and of course pressure-induced failure will be at weak spots. Report say there were multiple failures at once. I've been unable to find any explanation as to why the pressure shot up right before the explosion.

The line was a 30" major distribution line about 50 years old run at pressures of up to 400 p.s.i.

P.G. & E. didn't even for sure know what kind of pipe they had, which calls into question whether they even knew how much pressure it could safely handle. Their records are incomplete and some were wrong. They claim to have no records of numerous calls from people reporting smelling gas as far back as two months before the explosion. They've switched their public statements around. It took them about two hours to even get people to a valve to cut off the gas. They had reported that a malfunction caused a pressure spike but later backtracked trying to claim that running the pressure up to the normal limit two years earlier somehow weakened the line. The period in question was summer/fall. If line pressures had to be elevated to overcome demand-related pressure loss in downstream lines that would have been during winter. (more likely to be an issue with the explosions in the eastern U.S.). The utility neglected to install and use any automatic shutoff equipment.

There are clearly problems with the utility company procedures, but it's that recanted malfunction causing pressure spike part that would be consistent with an attack via software.

There were a number of reports by California media regarding what happened. Some pulled offline later.
There are videos on YouTube with various local residents commenting on what happened.

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20110122/WIRE/110129816

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pHP2Kpjo9OgJ:articles.sfgate.com/2011-01-09/news/27020428_1_gas-pipeline-pg-e-fatal-blast+gas-pipeline-pg-e-fatal-blast&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a&source=www.google.com

http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-01-11/news/27022021_1_pg-e-gas-line-spike

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20110122/WIRE/110129816

http://www.fox40.com/news/headlines/ktxl-tv-pgesanbrunopipe,0,4690306.story

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3z9VRqxOtE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6Uza3-EDRc

The worm is not limited to what's in use in Iran. The people in the field that use Windows systems to spit out the code actually used by the control systems generally don't have the knowledge to disassemble the code and spot problems that aren't immediately apparent (like periodic instability or a timed attack). Given that things like pumping stations aren't set up often, expect that most use outside contractors.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9185419/Siemens_Stuxnet_worm_hit_industrial_systems

The national reporting simply blaming the incident on welds was misleading. At least region

If China can fine Walmart http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/01/26/bloomberg1376-LFM8EF6JTSEA01-198KCAIC8BBDM0DUFP7VNMOL1J.DTL what's to prevent us from doing the same with a company that conducts work that supports foreign programs in violation of programs such as the NPT and the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010?

I don't know where the "2 millions" came from regarding iPads, but yeah looks like it's not 7 million iPads. It's 7 million iPads IN Q4 2010 ALONE. I could find sources, about how many iPads have been sold, but you'll just ignore them because they don't fit with your vision.

I think that Apple will compete just fine, Flash is one thing, but as far as "controlling their own devices", a lot of people (the majority?) DO NOT CARE.

Please show me sources where Android is selling far better in tablets (remember the actual article is about tablets). When you can't, you'll just accuse me of being an Apple fanboy. If I were, it's pretty strange that I own an Android phone, and would sooner get an Android tablet than an iPad.

There was a great article recently comparing Apple today with the Sony of last century that quoted Sony founder Ibuka (about releasing a color tv before the technology was ready) saying :

"And Ibuka refused, saying, 'No, we will only do great products. We will only do high quality goods. We will only do breakthrough technology.'"

An attitude unfortunately mostly absent in today's tech industry.

Many used cars end up in Mexico, where they can be turned around for a significant profit thanks to NAFTA.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/24/MN99V44MC.DTL

The worst crime in history is allowing DHS to exist in violation with the constitution in the first place,, which has now digressed to the crimes (each one is separate) committed by banksters with no oversight. While reading, keep this fact about DHS vs Constitution in the top of your mind, everything comes from 911 and DHS and the missing 2.3 trillion the day before

(From that pdf let's just get right to it then)
STATEMENT OF
JASON WEINSTEIN
DEPUTY ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL
CRIMINAL DIVISION
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON JUDICIARY
SUBCOMMITTEE ON CRIME, TERRORISM, AND HOMELAND SECURITY
UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ENTITLED
“DATA RETENTION AS A TOOL FOR INVESTIGATING INTERNET CHILD PORNOGRAPHY AND OTHER INTERNET CRIMES”
PRESENTED
JANUARY 25, 2011

My opinion is this all has gone too far back when the nsa fios splitters were found out. This is another attempt at an "Internet ID" , a man in the middle attack. It's another cog in the end game, which is to shut up the truth while tyranny reins in. Clearly they need this cog to build lists to round people up.

... Hand me the taser, I smell that nasty camel nose in the tent again.

"I have great confidence that Tim and the rest of the executive management team will do a terrific job executing the exciting plans we have in place for 2011." -- Steve Jobs

I'd say The Steve hasn't exactly kept it a secret whom he views as his heir apparent.

I don't post anything on my profile or anywhere else that I consider to be important. I don't post pictures of my children on Facebook (and nor does my wife).

Uh...why?

Surely you understand that the paranoia about child abduction is mostly overblown? And that someone who decides to kidnap a kid isn't going to go to Facebook looking at parent-posted photos like some sort of child rapist's catalog, he/she is going to drive the street is his/her windowless van offering candy? And that you can control who can see your photos on Facebook, so you can share photos of your kids with friends and family but not strangers?

How does this start at the top?

"Jerry Brown's budget cuts start in his own office"
http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-01-08/bay-area/27017383_1_budget-cuts-office-budget-jerry-brown

A link to the actual ruling would have been nice: http://www.sfgate.com/ZKUI (PDF).

Begging a dying man to go for a weapon so he could be finished off is sick.

Actually, I took it as the opposite, as in "Don't do it, or you'll be dead".

Whether or not you agree with the conclusions wikileaks came up with from the video, it's pretty undeniable that the soldiers involved were having a grand time.

Didn't sound like a "grand time" to me. It sounded like a group of professional soldiers going about their business. Apparently they were engaged in stopping the Mehdi Army. The Mehdi Army caused Iraq plenty of grief.

It is a remarkable change from years past, when the militia, led by the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, controlled a broad swath of Baghdad, including local governments and police forces. But its use of extortion and violence began alienating much of the Shiite population to the point that many quietly supported U.S. military sweeps against the group. Mahdi Army waning, a tentative sign of stability in Iraq

EPA wants new tax for superfund

Subsidies for superfund increased from 300 million in 1995 to 1.2 billion in 2005

President bush shift costs of superfunds to taxpayers

and just because no one seem to know this

Oil among most subsidized industry in the US

Elimiating major subsidies saves 45 billion over 10 years

Faith based debate is ineffective. Facts are what counts. Just because all the documentation is not listed does not mean that one's faith based opinion is correct. Sometimes one has to read something other than the approved texts.

The US gas production is more and more dependent on shale gas production, due to the progress of the hydraulic fracturing technique . Although the American Petroleum Institute claims that there this technique pose little or no threat to underground drinking water, environmentalists say otherwise and their voice has been gaining strength thanks to the recently released Gasland documentary film.
What is clear to me is that there is no reason to explain why Dick Cheney exempted the gas drilling industry from the Safe Drinking Water Act, but to protect the gas industry profitability...
To be fair with Democrats, I also have to say that Obama strongly supports shale gas extraction. Good luck, America!

Apple TV 2 was launched in October 2010 http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/Apple-TV-Sells-1-Million-Units-297554/. That is less than 3 months ago. By comparison, Roku, an arguably superior offering, is yet to reach its 1 millionth sale (across all models), after 2 years!

Most news articles comenting on the 1 million units milestone have made a point of comparing it to the 74 days it took for the original iPhone to reach the same milestone. That is a phenominal achievement by anyone's yard stick. However, I doubt that the Apple TV will follow the same trajectory as the iPhone.

Looking forward, even Roku CEO, Anthony Wood, acknowledges that Apple TV will only become even more compelling as he expects Apple to launch an App Store for Apple TV, which would bring along many more content sources, more games, and more attention to the Apple TV http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/12/20/businessinsider-roku-2010-12.DTL

but I'm fairly sure that if you're living a reasonable lifestyle then genetics completely dominates. After that it's probably as much down to happiness as anything else.

That's what you get for 'being fairly sure' instead of actually investigating. We've noticed a lot. We've noticed that exercise keeps your telomeres long. Also important in that study, the more exercise, the longer the telomeres. There are lots of studies like this that show exercise can reverse the effects of aging. This one is not related to aging directly, but exercise helps you grow new brain cells. Some researchers at Berkeley did a 20 year study of more than 100,000 runners, and found that the more you run, the longer you live, up to 50 miles a week (the benefits probably extend beyond 50 miles a week, but they couldn't find enough people who run that far to get good numbers). It's pretty clear there are a lot of things you can do to live longer.

You also may consider reading a book about nutrition, since you likely have some misconceptions in that area, too.

Google, for instance, added nearly 3,500 employees to its work force so for this year and promised everyone raises of at least 10 percent next year. The company, based just a few miles away from Yahoo's Sunnyvale, Calif., headquarters, also gave all 23,300 of its workers an after-tax holiday bonus of $1,000.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/12/13/financial/f192043S08.DTL#ixzz18KJ9rQue