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Google covert agent salary, and this page states that CIA officers start at $34,000 to $52,000 a year.

Don't feel to bad for them, though. The base pay is lousy, but after a year or two, you can get a lot more in consulting fees from the Chinese.

you don't even want to know what you'd have to pay in the US or UK for a reliable Ninja.

In fact, I was curious, and I went on a Google search.

1. Google ninja, and it turns out ninja were the covert agents of feudal Japan.
2. Google covert agent salary, and this page states that CIA officers start at $34,000 to $52,000 a year.

I'd like to see the citations for your numbers.

I live in an area where gun collecting, clay shooting, sport course shooting, still target shooting, hunting, and just putting ammo into cans are common hobbies. I remember far more deadly beating around here than accidental gun deaths.

Accidental deaths tend to be in the form of cars, motorcycles, ATVs, boats, and farm machinery. Accidental gun deaths are caused when people with no respect for the power and utility of firearms pick them up at the corner shop without sufficient training.

About 30% of Americans polled by Gallup own firearms personally and 40% say they have a gun in their home. 47% of men in some demographic groups personally own at least one firearm.

In 2001, 800 to 900 gun deaths were accidental in the US. About 11,000 were homicides, and the biggest number -- about 58% of all gun-related deaths in 2001 -- were suicides. Other sources have higher numbers, but I didn't find anything higher than 1,500 annually in a quip that sounds extremely anti-firearm in a top-ten list of accidental deaths.

Now, since there are around 300 million people in the US and around 300 million firearms, I'd say less than 1000 accidental deaths is much better than the situation for accidental death for motorists and passengers in cars (33,040 of whom died in 2005) or bicyclists (of whom 784 died in 2005, but at 3 to 11 times as many deaths per mile as those in cars).

About 5,000 people die from food poisoning each year in the US, with about 1,800 of those dying from known pathogens. Seventy-five percent of those known pathogens are strains of just three pathogens: Salmonella, Listeria, and Toxoplasma.

Remember that top ten list I mentioned? Firearms accidents were listed at #7, although if using other sources for the number they would have fallen possibly at #8 or #9.

Death by gases (poisoning and asphyxiation) are in the same neighborhood as accidental gun deaths. Suffocation (choking blocking the respiratory tract or asphyxiation just due to lack of oxygen and not some other gas getting in its way) is double or more, as are fire-related deaths and drownings.

Roughly double the items in the previous paragraph to find 8,600 people per year lethally poisoned by solids or liquids including truly poisonous foods but not foods contaminated by infectious food-borne pathogens like salmonella.

Almost double that again to find that nearly 15,000 people plunge to untimely deaths each year.

Motor vehicle crashes (accounting for over 43,000 fatalities per year according to their unnamed sources) lead by a huge margin. That's more than suicides, homicides, and accidental deaths by gun put together.

I guess it's time to tell people about the dangers of letting their loved ones around ladders, stairs, food, and especially cars.

2 points:

1- you mean you have a greater chance of drowning yourself than of getting killed by someone else in a gun accident ? Spot the difference ?

2- Baths, pools and rivers are not designed to kill. guns are. Spot the difference ?

the GP source says accidental deaths = 10% of voluntary homicides. I don't know if that qualifies as "small".

BTW, it says here 1,500 accidental gun deaths per year, not 100 ? http://www.soyouwanna.com/site/toptens/accidents/accidentsfull.html

You're holding the fork the right way. Me, I'm a righty and hold the fork in my right hand, which is backwards (at least here in Europe).

Anyone can go to a sperm bank and get some money in exchange for their precious bodily fluids. It's how I paid for CS books in college. There's probably a billion little copies of me running around somewhere, since I was tall, smart, and a college student.

Actually, that random link I found has a kinda cute picture of a duck looking down his pants. Heh. He looks sad!

Here's a start. You don't need slashdot's help!

http://www.novartisclinicaltrials.com/etrials/home .do?pl_id=bmretk000019
http://www.soyouwanna.com/site/syws/guineapig/guin eapigFULL.html

Why go to India's poor ? The poor in the US can go to these links and do all types of experiments, for a variety of disorders.

I've got to call you and others on this poor logic: Anecdotal evidence proves nothing. Your logic:

1. The 9/11 actors traveled under valid id.
2. Requiring id would not have stopped the 9/11 actors.
3. Requiring id does not reduce the risk of airline attack.

Imagine any number of scenarios eliminated by the requirement, such as: (a) ten known terrorists enter the U.S.; (b) they buy tickets under pseudonyms; and (c) they execute the attack based on overpowering the onboard air marshals.

As an aside, Mr. Gilmore's argument is partly absurd. "I have a freedom to travel within the U.S. without id" != "Any company providing air travel is required to provide services to me regardless of my identity". He does provide some interesting arguments about to what extent the executive branch may decide who is denied access to travel via air or how they share threat assessments with private travel providers.

1. Pick a name and start using it (called "common usage")
2. Register a new name with the courts

So I wonder if you can give any name that you want to a police officer. If they find out it isn't your real name you can always claim you have changed it under the "common usage" method. But my guess is if you give them any name other than what is on your driver's license they will just claim it is "fraudulant intent".

Mebon

Oh, and it doesn't matter because the US doesn't allow numbers in names

Erm, this has got to be a joke? OK, maybe you've been spending a lot of "quality time" with yourself under your bridge and have only just noticed that something's going on outside. When you get a moment, click over to Groklaw and bone up on some facts, if you like.

You might want to study some of the more
Common logical errors yourself, if you're going to accuse me of using vacuous logic... you've attacked everything but the argument itself there.

groklaw is an interesting and informative site, but you can't have read groklaw much, or you'd have spotted the disclaimer. it's right on the frontpage, at the top, and after you do read it maybe you'll realise groklaw is not a recognised court and the opinions of a paralegal and the IANAL participants who post comments - much like Darl McBrides' opinion - doesn't count for squat. There's actually not a lot of pertinent facts there, beyond the relevant statutes and rulings so far. That is a side effect of the fact the case hasn't come even as far as the disclosure part yet! That will change in time, of course, but until the goalposts are fixed nobody can make an informed guess of the final score.

But really, don't try to convince anyone that a CEO would be in his right mind to make a decision with as much potential downside, and no discernible upside, using reasoning so vacuous.

Perhaps you're not aware of it, but huge, complex, lumbering courtcases don't always return the verdict the cognoscenti are rooting for. Sometimes hard facts gets in the way, or sometimes those same facts get deliberately obfuscated by one side to the point where it goes into endless appeals.

Don't get me wrong - I'm rooting for IBM and linux, but if SCO eventually WIN this case, then they'll probably spend the next ten years trying to sue every company that didn't pay up on time or cease and desist right into the ground.

Even in the event of a win for SCO, they might not have a case for those who don't pay at this stage, but i don't know, as IANAL, but EV1's lawyers must have seen some threat.

Yo're right. There is no potential upside. Only two vicious downsides - either risk being dragged through the courts by a company with "extortion" as a business model or dragged through the mud by know-nothing knowitalls. EV1s really big mistake was letting any of this become public knowledge. I find it unlikely that they are the only company to pay a license fee, but they seem to be the only ones being lambasted for it.

This site has information on what you need to do to be a sperm donor.

It's actually a little more involved than most people think, but once you get through all the paperwork and all, it seems to be rather worthwhile.

Hangovers are caused by your body being dehydrated. To fix the worst of the effect, drink lots of water (preferably the night before) or, if you happen to be an EMT, stick some saline solution right into your blood.

Not quite.

Hangovers are caused by your body producing acetaldehyde as it metabolizes alcohol. Dehydration does play a role, but it is a supporting role.

A good description of what happens, and good advice on what to do about it can be found here.

Alternatively, you can pick up the RU-21 pill designed by the KGB to keep their agents from getting hangovers.

I thought the timescale was pretty reasonable, possibly even conservative. From a social/technological standpoint, the changes he's talking about aren't that far from the amount of change we've seen since 1950. OTOH, it's entirely possible that Moore's Law will collapse sometime within the next ten to twenty years, which would delay these predictions indefinitely.

The only place I think he stumbles is where he tries to predict the consequences of this increased automation. The predictions of massive unemployment may be offset by the jobs generated by the manufacture and repair of robots. But even those jobs could be automated somewhat, and the new jobs will almost inevitably require greater technical skills than the jobs they replace. Sad to say, such skills are beyond the capacities of a significant segment of our population.

So unemployment is bound to rise, and rise dramatically. The way corporations are currently run, I would see this unemployment much the way the author describes.

But--and this particular 'but' requires a complete overhaul of modern capitalism--it could also become a form of emancipation. As the system stands now, the owner of a grocery store that switched over to automated stockers and registers would simply pocket the savings. Now, earlier in the automation trend, this was acceptable because anything you did to replace jobs in one area correlated with an increase in jobs in another area. But when it gets to the point where an employer can take an expensive human off the clock and drop in a much cheaper robot, our attitude towards the whole work==compensation equation.

Also, this whole debate seems to gloss over a couple of very important questions: First, what are the consequences of making an autonomous, semi-intelligent "worker class?" What sort of ethical concerns should we be thinking about? Second, when the vast majority of work is done by robots, what is left for humans to do? How do we justify our own existence?

I got into a long discussion with my brother-in-law. He took the position that work is inherently ennobling, while I claimed it was a necessary evil. His view, which I found unreasonable, was that some jobs should never be automated, to give people a way to "earn their keep."

The attitude that a person can simply sit around on his or her butt all day, and expect to be rewarded for it horrifies me. What horrifies me more is the idea that, in this predicted world of vast wealth, a very few could feel entitled to almost all of it, simply because they've taken away the means by which people traditionally "earned their share" of it.

As I said earlier, if such a world ever comes about, we need to rewrite the traditional equation. I would start with a guaranteed minimum standard of living for the whole world. Food, housing, medical care, and education would all become inalienable rights.

Next, I would place a hard cap on the amount of property a single person can own, probably expressed as a percentage of total world production, or maybe some multiple of the minimum. It would be high enough that people would have an incentive to get off their butts and do something, but low enough that we don't have "gods among insects" like these guys.

I realize I'm turning into a communist wacko even as I write this. But if it gets to the point where the owners of the companies that create wealth no longer have any reason to distribute any of it as wages, I think it would be only a matter of time until such harebrained ideas suddenly appeared very desirable.

so many links are good !

All those years learning Hindustani, so I could understand the tech support guy, down the drain. Who the hell speaks Czech? At least Hindustani is the third most commonly spoken language in the world.

Here's where I go when _I_ want to learn.

How Stuff Works - Helped with a project or two.
So You Wanna - Doesn't look like it's been updated recently, a pity too. Great step-guides to doing lots of things, from good interviews to skydiving (some vague, some specific)
Everything2 - Geeks guide to everything and anything (including the kitchen sink)

I just want to mention that April Fools to me has always been to make up BELIEVABLE stories that you can gloat over later - which really adds to more of the fun.

I mean, funny as some of this may be, it gets tiring after a while. I mean, you can make a story believable but still false and a good April Fools candidate.

So learn to write some good stories and THEN post to the site, eh?

p.s. the above link provides information that helps a great deal in all sorts of situations, I highly recommend it.

OTOH, besides the money-earning aspect, I really don't think oscars are all that, it's like a bunch of movie people get together and give themselves an award. how about something we get to vote on?

Sorry, but you're wrong.

Figure skating gets its name from the Compulsory Figures (also known as School Figures) skaters did in competition up until 1990. When a skater competed in Compulsory Figures, he/she would trace a set pattern on the ice, such as the ever-popular Figure 8. To make matters more difficult, the skater had to skate the Figure using a prescribed part of the blade (such as the forward inside edge of the left skate, but more on that later). After the Figure was completed, judges would get off their fat butts and squat down on the ice to check the tracing and see how close it came to perfection. They took points off if the tracings didn't match the set pattern (if the skater went too far before turning, for example) and if there were additional tracings caused by putting the other foot down or wobbling. As you could probably imagine, Compulsory Figures did not exactly make for compelling television, and they were eliminated in 1990.

Source: http://www.soyouwanna.com/site/syws/skating/skatin g.html#para1.1

Of course, it begs the question - why does this situation exist in IT?

DOOOT! 'Begs the question' Used incorrectly at line 8.. Just an FYI

Check out So you wanna make a low-budget movie on SoYouWanna.com.

This is probably a good starting point. You should be able to find some good tips and some additonal references to check out.

Non Sequitur \Non seq"ui*tur\ [L., it does not follow]
n 1: a reply that has no relevance to what preceded it

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There is no scientific evidence that ultrasonic can/will repel pests.
We MIGHT be able to say in the least that some pests are temporarly annoyed, however they easily adjust.

pest control article mentioning ultrasonic

There is a big conspiracy out there. Go into any DVD store or rental and see how many have soundtracks or even *subtitles* in French. I went into a few to find a film for my French girlfriend and I to watch and came out with ZERO. Plenty of less widespread language such as Finnish, but nothing for the 10th most spoken language in the world. Now I know all these films are dubbed for French cinema. It would be great if the dubbed tracks could be released so that we can watch films in many different languages.

Phillip.

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