Slashdot Mirror

I just heard on the news they were planning to insight a riot according to an undercover informant and they confiscated a machete, a hatchet, throwing knives, axes, bolt cutters, equipment used in rappelling - and three 5-gallon buckets of urine.

Like all of those are illegal. NOT! As for 3 buckets of urine, from the Star-Tribune:

"The alleged urine, Nestor maintained, was actually three buckets, two of which contained dirty water used to flush toilets while conserving water. The third was seized from an illegal apartment occupied by someone not connected to the RNC protests. There was no bathroom in the illegal apartment and urine was collected in a bucket, Nestor said."

But hey, dont let that get in your way. please continue telling us about free speech and peaceful demonstrations.

But hey, don't let the truth get in your way.

Falcon

I should also supply a link to my fox news neocon website showing all this propaganda
http://politicsinminnesota.com/2008/aug/30/authorities-seize-weapons-equipment-and-urine-pre-rnc-raids-5-arrested
or
http://www.startribune.com/politics/27695244.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUnciatkEP7DhUsr

I'm not sure what peaceful demonstrators need with a 5 gallons worth of urine, gas masks and home made caltrop to disable buses.

Project died. I guess. Poles are still all over half the suburb.

http://www.startribune.com/nation/26267974.html?location_refer=Homepage:8

The ratio of OEM Vista to OEM Linux at Walmart.com is about 50:1. The Athlon LE at $350. The HP Elite Intel Quad Core with 64 bit Vista at $1700.

Walmart isn't known for keeping product in stock that isn't moving. I spend a fair bit of time in hipster coffee shops (don't judge me, it's part of my job), the patrons of which I take as a fairly good bellwether of consumer tech

The hipster coffee shop has fallen on hard times. Starbucks coffee is too expensive, new survey says

It could have kept a small whale fresh.
http://www.startribune.com/nation/25645564.html

I've never asked for a movie ticket refund because the movie sucked, so why would you expect to refund a game if it sucks?

Actually, if you leave during the first 15-20 minutes and tell the manager "The Movie sucks, I'd like a refund" they will generally oblige you.

Source: http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/yourmoney/11349201.html

Do you honestly think that if more people knew they could get refunds by leaving in the first 15-20 minutes of the movie, they would just say "fuck it, nothing I can do now!"?

Still, one city mentioned is Montecello, Minnesota, and they state:
"Our position has never been that it is unlawful for cities to do this, but you can't use your powers as a city to create an uneven playing field"

That is done already - in Minnesota, many cities have municipal (city owned) liquor stores - including Montecello. This is protected by a post prohibition state law that was meant to control the sale of liquor, however, so I'm not sure if they can use it as precedent, but in most areas there are also non-city owned liquor stores. City owned broadband should be at a price point similar to what telecos offer (or do not - Qwest is notoriously bad for its broadband offerings and is being smothered by Comcast - they still don't have ADSL2, so technically it should be at a price point similar to competition, which means Qwest can go fsck themselves or step up and get out of the dark ages) and profits are used instead of raising taxes.

I do not have a problem with bandwidth caps as long as
a) I can buy more bandwith or buy an unlimited plan

Cable is sold as unlimited. The only problem is that the providers oversold, once people started taking advantage of what they were sold the companies started complaining people used what they were sold.

As for Verizon it seems they are the only ones getting with the program. With their FiOS they are offering up to 50mbps downloads and 20mbps uploads. Right now it's only in a few cities but they hope to expand it to 50 in the next couple of years. The fastest service cost $140 with slower plans also available.

What's trolling about this....what is factually wrong with my previous post?

Your comment is the typical type of crap my grandmother spews where she selects a few details from news stories, then relates them incorrectly to support her theories that non-whites & immigrants are getting things too good while she suffers.

Yesterday's supreme court decision affirmed that the legal process applied to 'enemy combatant' prisoners of the US should be the same as the process applied to US citizens. They're entitled to be charged with a crime or be released in a timely fashion. They can't just be locked up indefinitely due to suspicion.

If you can't read the articles about the supreme court decision and properly interpret its significance, then you live as another example of our failing educational system.

Seth

No regulation is needed. The market responded. They very well could come back as oil companies develop the Bakken Valley. Even with increased demand, we have new technology to get to oil that we couldn't get to before.

Besides, who are you to say who drives what? I really hate someone telling me what to do with my money on completely legal activities.

In Minnesota, police need a license from the state. There are three ways to get a license. Two of them require a college degree (only two years). If the degree is in the wrong field they must also complete a certificate program. To get a license without a degree, officers can move from another jurisdiction where they have five years experience in law enforcement.

Minnesota police also have to maintain physical standards, pass a psychological evaluation, not have any felony convictions or any of a long list of lesser convictions.

They must also complete 48 continuing education credits every three years.

Despite those rules, a suicidal man died today after St. Paul police used a taser on him.

They frequently vote as a block because they face repercussions within their own party if they break ranks. Consider a case in Minnesota where six Republicans were booted from their committee leadership assignments for breaking ranks. Their own party could have gone further, such as removing them from committees altogether, cutting their staff, or refusing to endorse them at caucuses.

Yup and it's really hurting everyone from large pizza chains right down to the local Asian restaurant my wife and I frequent at least three times a month.

Flour prices have skyrocketed due to the corn (as you have mentioned) and the fact that farmers are then locked into subsidy land because farmers who grow other crops on corn acreage lose their subsidy for the current year and are fined the market value of the crop they chose to grow instead but are also threatened that they may be permanently ineligible to receive future subsidies (link).

So while we are getting more "inexpensive" gas and we are lessening our dependencies on foreign oil, we are creating an uncomfortable situation in our food stores and prices. I'd rather we deal with more mass transit and alternative fuel sources that don't fuck with our domestic food supplies.

Anyway, RIP Gary. Here's a link to a newspaper story: RIP .

Michael Moore is pretty damn close...wants Fidel Castro as his guest and to give his acceptance speech at the Oscars.
http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/movies/15815122.html

Barack Obama is the next best thing: http://www.aim.org/aim-column/obamas-communist-mentor/

You wouldn't be trumping the Romney card if you lived in Massachusetts. He practically dismantled our education system and proved he's inept at balancing a checkbook. He did little to get our state out of recession and, in the opinion of many Massachusetts residents, he lied about the state's budget. This Star Tribune article sums up much of this sentiment well. Everything about the man is staged and scripted. I guess a rehearsed weasel is better than what we have now, but can't you raise your standards just a little higher?

Article and Video

Article and Video

This student shouldn't have any trouble getting into law school.

From TFA http://www.startribune.com/local/west/13549646.html

Natalie Friedman, a senior who is not part of any sports programs, said she was called in by her dean and scolded about Facebook photos of her behind a bar at a friend's house with drinks visible. She declined to say whether she was drinking, saying that no one can prove there was alcohol in the beverages.

Friedman said some of the photos obtained by school officials show students holding drinks at weddings and family vacations.

Some Minnesota pols are way ahead of you... they are pushing for an Acela-style line to connect the metropolises Duluth and Minneapolis.

Your estimate of Ms. Thomas' income is fairly close. In another article she indicated she makes $36,000 per year. She also has two children.

I don't know where your calculations on the loan payments came from but they aren't working out right for me (although they are relatively close).

Assuming the federal rate remained at 4.05% through the life of the loan, she would need to pay $27,035.05 per year. She has two children so the poverty level for her family is $17,170 per year. I'm not up to calculating her taxes so I'll just take your estimate that she can contribute $27,311.36 per year which means she could pay it off in just under ten years.

Ms. Thomas is 30 years old so she would have 25 years to save for retirement. Also note the interest rate is likely to climb. At 10%, it would take her 17 years. At 12.3% it would take her 70 years. And at 12.4% she would never be able to pay it. Finally, I believe there is a limit on how long a judgment is valid. I don't think any judgments are valid past 20 years. So she would have at least 15 years to save for retirement.

Assuming all disposable income is funneled to repaying her debt to society

This is a civil suit. She would be repaying her debt to the record labels.

The Startribune is reporting the jury found the Jammie Thomas had willfully committed copyright infringement.

Sucks to be her. I hope she appeals and doesn't get a jury of backwater hicks this time. I'm from MN and can say that :P.

A 2001 evaluation of the bridge, prepared by the University of Minnesota, reported that there were preliminary signs of fatigue on the steel truss section under the roadway, but no cracking.

The report said there was no need for the Minnesota Transportation Department to replace the bridge because of fatigue cracking.

But a May 2006 report by the department noted that inspectors saw fatigue cracks and bending of girders along the span's approaches.

For more info, see today's Minneapolis Star Tribune article.

I have a method of Minnesota infrastructure maintenance that can assure sound bridges. My technique involves billing the Twins owner for the $392 million of government revenue (collected via a sale tax hike) being used to fund the new $522 million baseball stadium. My technique also involves continuing to dash the hopes of Minnesota football fans for a new government funded $0.5 billion football stadium. Instead, let the team owners rely on sports geek revenue to fund their stadiums, and misappropriate the tax revenue into infrastructure.

On the other hand, perhaps it isn't necessary to piss off all the Minnesota sports geeks (read: voters) and instead utilize the $2 billion dollar state surplus to deal with the states bridges. But alas, there are voters to buy with that money.

This is about the priorities of the citizens of a staggeringly wealthy nation being focused on everything but the infrastructure.

While I agree with you 100%, with a few exceptions he had great taste in cars.

http://www.startribune.com/462/story/1337783.html

One good thing about it: If you follow it instead of the link to the print version, you get to see what this son of a bitch looks like.

In the phone call, Smith told Roanna Cleofe that he wanted her to arrange to have someone take photos of Hollis' children. If Hollis wants to testify, she can, he said. "We're going to give her the option of which one of her kids she's going to sacrifice for doing so."

Cleofe, who has been charged in connection with the alleged threat, told an FBI agent that she didn't believe Smith was serious.
        - Dan Browning, Star Tribune (story link), 2-Aug-2007

It would be nice if people didn't post "print" links to articles. Lots of times this cuts out the advertising that the publisher has on the web page.

There's a reason people post "print" link to articles instead of to the ad-laden one, and it's the publishers' faults.

It's because for years now, we the consumers have been so abused with web publishers pushing ads on us that we immediately jump to defend ourselves against them, whether it's justified or not. If Internet publishers had been reasonable all these years and given us an ad or two with our content, it wouldn't be a problem, and I seriously doubt there would be such a backlash against ads nowadays.

But that's not what happened. Once a few publishers found out that they could make some money with ads, they figured they could make even more money with ads. So then we had pop-ups, pop-unders, animated bouncy ads, flash gizmos, interstitials, etc.

And as a direct result of that, now we have AdBlock plus and links to the print version of articles, and publishers are making less money from ads because of their collective greed and abuse. Unfortunately, sites such as the Star Tribune, which actually doesn't have many ads, have to suffer as well because of the sins of their industry. It may not be right, and it may not be fair, but it's just the mode we all necessarily have to operate in today.

For what it's worth, though, here is the ad-laden link to the article if you want give it some eyeballs. One good thing about it: If you follow it instead of the link to the print version, you get to see what this son of a bitch looks like.

http://www.startribune.com/462/story/1056434.html

Wait, people post stupid, embarrassing and/or illegal crap on their MySpace pages? Who knew!?

Real ID was passed back as part of an "essential" Iraq funding package. As such it had no separate committee hearings. And at the time, guess who controlled Congress?

Many states are opposed to this not due to privacy concerns but simply because it's another unfunded federal mandate. Minnesota estimates it will cost the state $31 million over five years. Total national costs have ballooned to something like $17 billion. Congress allocated all of $40 million to pay for it.

I know it would take some work for me to produce a certified birth certificate or passport to get a license.

It will be interesting to see what happens when boarding restrictions, etc. go into effect. If this law isn't killed outright at the federal level, I believe it will be effectively ignored in many situations.

More info and an opinion piece:

Real ID was passed back as part of an "essential" Iraq funding package. As such it had no separate committee hearings. And at the time, guess who controlled Congress?

Many states are opposed to this not due to privacy concerns but simply because it's another unfunded federal mandate. Minnesota estimates it will cost the state $31 million over five years. Total national costs have ballooned to something like $17 billion. Congress allocated all of $40 million to pay for it.

I know it would take some work for me to produce a certified birth certificate or passport to get a license.

It will be interesting to see what happens when boarding restrictions, etc. go into effect. If this law isn't killed outright at the federal level, I believe it will be effectively ignored in many situations.

More info and an opinion piece:

• Roadguy - A funny, intelligent blog about transportation in Minnesota.
• Minnesota Public Radio - Check to see if I want to call into any shows that day.
• Minneapolis E-Democracy Issue Forum - Not a blog or web forum, a mailing list. Mailing lists are way better than web forums. Lots of good local information on events, politics, etc.
• St. Paul E-Democracy Issue Forum - Another mailing list.
• Linux Weekly News - Every Thursday
• Polinaut - When the mood strikes me and/or I want to see if anything I did up at the Minnesota Capitol made the news.
• The Strib - Only for the netlets (letters to the editor posted online only). For everything else it's strictly reading the hardcopy for me. It's too hard on the eyes to read from a screen.

• Roadguy - A funny, intelligent blog about transportation in Minnesota.
• Minnesota Public Radio - Check to see if I want to call into any shows that day.
• Minneapolis E-Democracy Issue Forum - Not a blog or web forum, a mailing list. Mailing lists are way better than web forums. Lots of good local information on events, politics, etc.
• St. Paul E-Democracy Issue Forum - Another mailing list.
• Linux Weekly News - Every Thursday
• Polinaut - When the mood strikes me and/or I want to see if anything I did up at the Minnesota Capitol made the news.
• The Strib - Only for the netlets (letters to the editor posted online only). For everything else it's strictly reading the hardcopy for me. It's too hard on the eyes to read from a screen.

If you are seriously interested in looking at the carbon benefits of biofuels, one needs to consider the research done by Professor Tilman at the University of Minnesota. http://pd.startribune.com/sp?eId=18&ecId=197096337 &rNum=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.startribune.com%2F562 %2Fstory%2F1060375.html Not only does the use of a diverse native prarie create a much greater return on energy invested than corn or sugar, but because it is a perennial there is no tilling (better efficiency, easy on the topsoil), the root structures end up sequesturing tons of extra carbon on a permanent basis, the nitrogen fixing of some of the plants actually improves the soil and, of course, it is better for wildlife. Combining diverse prairie biomass production with cellulosic ethanol production and the infrastructure that the corn ethanol is providing may not solve every problem, but it sure beats petroleum and corn ethanol.

Shure offer headphones with a button that shuts off the music and feeds in sound from outside. I use Grado headphones which are open-backed; they don't attenuate outside sounds at all, I can hear the outside world through them perfectly clearly and hold a conversation normally, just with music superimposed onto my hearing. Why should sensible, responsible users of headphones be penalised because some idiots listening to earbuds at deafening levels walk into oncoming traffic? Hell, why are the authoritarian fuckwits running New York seemingly outlawing everything they even vaguely disapprove of?

racism by the majority is rightfully condemned, but some minorities seem to be able to get away with inciting hatred.

That is not what happened. According to the article, the prosecuters took his email messages from the mail server where they were stored. It is implicit in the phrasing that the guy who's getting sued had his personal email account managed and stored on a server that did not belong to him, and they read the messages that he had stored on a server in his own email account. That's why it is such a benchmark case: the feds seem to be claiming that they don't need a warrant to read your email if it's on hotmail, yahoo, gmail, etc.

From the article:


The government needs a search warrant if it wants to read the U.S. mail that arrives at your home. But federal prosecutors say they don't need a search warrant to read your e-mail messages if those messages happen to be stored in someone else's computer.

That would include all of the Big Four e-mail providers -- Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail and Google -- that together hold e-mail accounts for 135 million Americans.

Twenty years ago, when only a relative handful of scientists and scholars had e-mail, Congress passed a law giving state and federal officials broad access to messages stored on the computers of e-mail providers.

Now that law, the Stored Communications Act of 1986, is being challenged in federal court in Ohio by Steven Warshak, a seller of "natural male enhancement" products who was indicted for mail fraud and money laundering after federal investigators sifted through thousands of his e-mails.

The government isn't saying it has unfettered access to e-mail. But e-mail users should not expect privacy when they allow an outside party to store their messages, prosecutors argue. In fact, many e-mail providers require their customers to sign agreements acknowledging that the provider may release customer information as required by law.

http://www.startribune.com/789/story/884388.html


It is truly a concern. Running your own mail server has never been as good an idea as it is now.

Do you think you're exaggerating?

Muslims removed from airplane when passengers found praying to be suspicious

What they should do is refuse to assist in improving computer automated wiretapping and data traffic snooping, [and] massive government data mining operations. That the methods "Homeland Security" uses to violate our rights) are currently ponderous, expensive technologies designed by government-funded teams is a good thing for the safety of our democracy.

The borg: "You will assist us."
Hue: "I will not assist you."

Ironically (or not), Major League Baseball is trying to do just that...

How about whacking off to DVD porn while driving drunk? Must be nice to be rich!

/*By the system of the site I use (Facebook) you should be a friend of a friend, or attend OSU to see that.*/

What do you mean by "... should be a friend of a friend or attend OSU..."? As far as I know, I can do a name search on Facebook for whomever I want and read whatever I want from their profile page. Anything you put on Facebook is *public* information and should be treated as such. I've already seen articles in my local paper about hiring officers using alumni e-mail addresses to look at what a person has posted on their Facebook account, and using that data as part of the hiring process.

As the grandparent said, social networking sites are as public as a sign on your lawn. If you put something up, and it gets read by the "wrong" person, well, that's your fault.

This article http://www.startribune.com/535/story/45512.html from a year ago would make me believe the researchers in Australia were not the first to accomplish this. Either that or they've taken a long time to tell anyone about it. The Star Tribune article is actually more interesting in that it gives more specifics on how the cells were actually grown.

"...posted letters to representatives (written on actual paper) are the best way to let politicians know your opinion -- the beliefs that they've been elected to represent."

Actually, the best method to get their attention is to throw money and free trips at them.

or the "terrorist" in Gitmo told that menstrual blood was smeared on his Koran

LOL - that never happened. You might want to read about how the prisoners are actually treated, especially in regards to their Koran (they can only be touched by "infidel" US soldiers who are wearing a clean white cotton glove on their right hand). The whole Newsweek Koran story was an absolute farce, and has been repeatedly shown to be so.

And before you keep yelling "Geneva Conventions" please read them, you don't qualify for them just by breathing and there are many ways to get yourself excluded from them.

Check with the people we've sent to Syria for interrogation;

Syria? SYRIA?!? What the HELL are you talking about? Syria is by NO means an ally.

but we bombed the fuck out of a country that had nothing - nothing - to do with 9/11.

Yeah, Saddam probably didn't (although the documents being released recently certainly point to him and Bin Laden working together, or at least having nice friendly chats going back as far as 1995, as well as outlining his broad support for terrorists and his terrorist training camps... Zarqawi didn't just randomly choose Iraq as a place to go to after he was injured in Afghanistan). But why does that matter? He is the biggest living mass murderer, he tried to have Bush Sr. assassinated (something we should have overthrown him for in the first place), he had acid dripped on the faces of judges who didn't condemn people to death (btw, you might not want to read that story, it's about one of the guys who helped set up the new Iraqi court system and he says in the article that he "did not meet one Iraqi who told me that it was a mistake to remove [Hussein] from power"), etc etc etc (^8).

Its easy. Just do what we Americans do for prescription drugs. We buy them from Canada because they are about 1/2 the price.

The State of Minnesota asks that its employees purchase their prescription drugs from Canada for savings. That's great and all if Customs would stop seizing them.

I love being told by my Governor to break Federal Law. Awesome.

"These are fearful times for Americans who value freedom from government snooping, and it's a clear measure of that mood that Google's fight with the federal government is persistently taken as a struggle over personal privacy. It is not. In its subpoena for a week's worth of search results, the Justice Department is specifically not asking for the identities of the searchers. In response, Google is specifically not citing its users' privacy as justification for declining to comply. Rather, it is defending its own trade secrets -- proprietary details of the workings of its Web-searching software that it says would be revealed in those endless lists of addresses." http://www.startribune.com/561/story/222963.html

You're wrong, earbuds DO allow quite a bit of noise in. In fact, a recent study claimed the exact opposite to what you said - that earbuds are LESS efficient at closing outside noise than padded supra-aural/circumaural headphones, and therefore kids are turning them up higher than regular headphones to compensate.

It's inner-ear monitors, AKA ear-canal-phones, AKA earplug headphones that completely isolate the music from external noise - with the major benefit being that you don't have to turn up the volume as high to drown out that extraneous noise. I never have to turn up my Ultimate Ears IEMs much further than 50% before I feel its deafening.

Both can cause hearing loss - as can regular supra aural and circumaural headphones - if the volume is too loud. The lesson is the same - lots of decibels = hearing loss, and it's stupid not to know this. I think it would be an ugly precedent if this guy won this suit.

Memoir writers walk a wavy line between reality and invention: What author James Frey and others said in 2003 about challenges to the truthfulness of his bestselling nonfiction memoir.