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However, I have NO sympathy for the Bush administration when they are the blunt of these criticisms because of their shameless dishonesty in trying to explain what happened:

Later, hiding twice over, he used them as an excuse, saying he did not want to frighten them by ending the reading before finishing the book. Later still, and repeatedly, he said he saw the first plane strike the tower that morning (in fact, no one saw that live; the film was not available until the evening) and that he remarked, "That's some bad pilot"--pure strut. As the Wall Street Journal reported, he also magnified his role in managing the crisis, claiming he gave orders others gave. Conflicting accounts of Bush's communications documented by the 9/11 Commission now raise doubts whether, as he and Cheney told the commissioners, he ordered Cheney to shoot down any hijacked planes still in the air, or whether Cheney, in the White House bunker, acted on his own. (source) (more)

Whoops that first link to a review should be http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97aug/zoot.htm. It's by James Fallows from The Atlantic Monthly.

One such piece of software is a cult-hit, Zoot. See reviews here and here. Find out more at the Yahoo Group for it, which also happens to have excellent lists of other excellent but often underappreciated PIM software.

Also consider web-based task managers like Yahoo Calendar. The advantage is that they are easily accessible from anywhere and there's no need for backups. Yahoo task management also syncs with a lot of other stuff, I think.

For the moment, lets assume that we're only dealing with basic GM (accellerated hybridization) and not transgenic crops -- although, click here for a great article about how GM crops will save the environment. You can also hit up this editorial in, of all places, the Yale Daily News.

On a related note, consider this readable account of how genetic engineering to insert IL-4 into an otherwise fairly innocuous mousepox transformed this disease to where it would effectively kill all the mice, even those mice that had been previously vaccinated to protect them against mousepox.

Actually I was referring not just to Iraq, but also to Afghanistan, and to the whole of our foreign policy. While Clinton enacted a directive that made it US policy to oust Saddam, Bush has made it US policy to oust whomever it pleases.

Maybe you and I mean different things when we say "pre-emptive". To me, the term means to attack another country when it has not directly attacked you. I understand and agree with your point that Saddam had been thumbing his nose at the world community for 12 years, but I don't believe that he was a greater threat to us in 2003 than he was in 2001 or 1999, or 1997... .

My use of the term "long-standing European alliances" may be a point of contention as well. I was thinking a little bit more broadly than you, in the sense that since Lafayette (remember him?), the French and Americans have been allies. I also would count Germany as a strong European ally - for most of the Cold War they were our primary bulwhark against Communism on the European continent. Some alliances require paper - others don't, or at least shouldn't.

I understand your anger at the French for selling Saddam weapons, but getting self-righteous about it isn't exactly helpful. After all, the US set him up in the first place, in an effort to offset the Revolutionary Iranian government. This is not the only time we have supported leaders whom we later had to remove. The French are not without fault, but Saddam the Slaughterer really only became our enemy after he screwed up by invading Kuwait. Our high horse isn't so tall.

Your assessment of the administration's post-war planning is charitable at best, and ignores the fact that there were many well-qualified people who attempted to help the administration plan for the post-invasion rebuilding, only to be rebuffed. In fact, the administration gunned down Gen. Shinseki when he told Congress that it would take far more troops than Rumsfeld committed to manage Iraq. To blame our own lack of planning on Saddam is to ignore a large body of evidence that very directly shows the administration's failure to plan properly.

You have leapt to the assumption that I hold a special place in my heart for Kerry, which I don't. As an aside, I don't know what "French-looking" means to you or why that has to do with anything, but I will be voting for him because I believe that his foreign policy will be more rational and ultimately useful in the war against reactionary terrorists than Bush's has been. You presume to know my background and my political inclinations, but I'd suggest to you that such inferences can be misleading at best.

One final note. Try posting as a member, rather than as an AC. More people will read your post if you do, and it will be easier to take your comments as more than just angry flaming.

First there are all the variants on cryptic crosswords. See The Atlantic Monthly for some very nice ones (and some very tough ones). If you look around a bit Stephen Sondheim (yup, the guy who writes Broadway Musicals) also published a book of fun (and challenging crosswords).

Then there are cross number puzzles - there are some simple ones, but I'm thinking of one like this . It is fairly small but very fun to solve. (This would probably be of most interest in a school with a distinct science/math orientation.)

I've thought a couple of times about building a crossword that would translate letters into differently colored squares (using only a couple of colors and simple patterns) so that the correctly solved problem would make a picture but ended up trying to find a fun program that would take a completed crossword and an image and find a decent mapping to make the crossword look like the image. (There are some interesting ways to fiddle this idea - the checked lights might only match in shape/color,letters might map to multiple shapes, you might have to determine the mapping of letters to shapes (perhaps matching lines/colors in adjacent squares as clues) ....)

> What I'd like to see is better history simulation. Get a program that can take certain factors and use it to predict the outcome.

It probably isn't exactly what you're thinking of, but similar things have been done using artificial life techniques to simulate things like the Anasazi disappearance and genocide.

Dieter Wulf's article in The Atlantic Magazine shows a picture (not on the web) of a Wunderwaffen or Nazi "miracle weapon" that looks exactly like the White Knight Space Ship One combo. Not to knock Burt Rutan or anything, but it goes to show the German war machine did some serious thought. What's interesting is that they current thoery on the plane was to fly it into US buildings.

FYI, the term lolita refers strictly to kiddie porn. It comes from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita that described a sexual relationship between a middle aged man and a twelve year old girl. The book was a best seller.

So anytime you see porn described as "lolita" porn, the chances are excellent that it contains illegal images. Stay far away from that stuff.

Not so; piracy was used for copyright infringement since at least the middle 1800s, as evidenced, e.g., here in a The Atlantic Monthly column from 1867 written about Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Scott Turow served on Illinois Governor George Ryan's special commission on the death penalty

I think baseball *seems* complex because it's actually fairly easy to observe the nuances of the game while you're watching. You can see how much lattitude the pitcher is giving a runner. You can observe where the fielders are positioning themselves for a particular batterr, and so on. In football the matchups often change (for example, on a cross route a receiver may be covered at various times by three different defenders), and the guys on both sides of the ball have to always be ready to adjust their predetermined pattern as the play develops.

For some excellent insight into the world of an offensive lineman in the NFL, check out this story (written by "Blackhawk Down" author Mark Bowden) about the day to day life of Eagle's center Hank Fraley.

In every one of these cases they caught up before the rest of the market could do anything about them.

I wouldn't call it catchup. What I would call it is leveraging a monopoly position to force a product (that's often inferior i.g. outlook express) onto customers whether they like it or not.

That's what they did with the browser by integrating it deeply with the OS. That's what they are trying to do with the media player.

Standard oil tried to do it with refineries and railroads. The movie companies tried to do it by owning the movie theatres.

The only difference between now and then is that then politicians had enough spine to stand up against it, and take action that would promote meaningful change.

It is questionable if the EUs recent actions will be effective because the fine, as large as it is, represents a very small part of Microsoft's fortune that they can afford to pay.

I do not see anything on the horizon that would change their current business practices.

The biblical lesson was to illustrate how Joseph received special insight into the dream from God, of course.

But, if you look at the story in another light, Joseph went on to become a very powerful advisor to the Pharoah.

Being able to give advice to a tyrant that is likely to kill people who give him advice that displeases him requires enormous mental dexterity under pressure. Which probably also accounts some for Joseph's later success.

I'm reminded of this by seeing an old movie starring the late Peter Ustinov as Nero and some other actor who portrayed Nero's advisor. Whoever wrote the screenplay did a wonderful job showing just how much acumen is required of an advisor to a tyrant.

Some portrayal of daily life with the former tyrant of Iraquagmire is here.

Fight club is a gorgeous piece of film making. It's dystopian fiction at its finest and a brilliant moment in American cinema, and yes it is violent. But its not violent for the sake of violence or to excite. The violence is symbolic of the disconnect the men feel from American society which is dominated by feel good female-emotions. For real life info about this phenomenon, read The War Against Boys.

This article from the Atlantic Monthly has a recommended workaround for the problems of an electron beam for this kind of storage system not being well-behaved outside a vacuum.

More serious is the objection that this scheme would involve putting the film inside a vacuum chamber, for electron beams behave normally only in such a rarefied environment. This difficulty could be avoided by allowing the electron beam to play on one side of a partition, and by pressing the film against the other side, if this partition were such as to allow the electrons to go through perpendicular to its surface, and to prevent them from spreading out sideways. Such partitions, in crude form, could certainly be constructed, and they will hardly hold up the general development.

"
Existing totals could then be read by photocell, and the new total entered by an electron beam.
"

Pretty cool foresight.

<i>The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut. It takes pictures 3 millimeters square, later to be projected or enlarged, which after all involves only a factor of 10 beyond present practice. The lens is of universal focus, down to any distance accommodated by the unaided eye, simply because it is of short focal length. There is a built-in photocell on the walnut such as we now have on at least one camera, which automatically adjusts exposure for a wide range of illumination. There is film in the walnut for a hundred exposures, and the spring for operating its shutter and shifting its film is wound once for all when the film clip is inserted. It produces its result in full color. It may well be stereoscopic, and record with two spaced glass eyes, for striking improvements in stereoscopic technique are just around the corner.
</i>

Interestingly, in the same article, he predicted the CD Rom, the Internet, Wikipedia, Color Photography -- well before the first dry cameras or the first computers.

Why worry about the jobs situation? You don't need a job. A rise in GDP means the economy is "better". So we all win!

And GDP is delicious, and nutritious. I'm eating fried GDP with Jobless Recovery hot sauce, and this weekend it's GDP with Consumer Confidence Index noodles, followed by GDP pie. And it's Atkins friendly (no carbos)!

Just kidding. I'm not having my GDP and eating it too, although I hear from 1% of the population that it is very good.

NASA takes every precaution that it can to prevent a mishap, but accidents happen.

I hope that is the case today, but I want to see independant evidence of it. NASA has lost the benefit of the doubt. The sad, terrible, fact is that the CAIB showed that even though sincere, brilliant, and dedicated NASA employees and contractors believed that they and NASA as a whole were taking "every precaution", they were not.

I know it is difficult for those in and close to NASA to accept and internalise this horrible conclusion, but internalize they must, or as the CAIB reprised the Roger's Commission, another investigation will be probing the deaths of more astronauts in a few years and coming to much the same conclusions.

Remember how so many in the shuttle program flatly refused to believe that foam could be the proximate cause of Columbia's demise? A lot of them maintained that belief right up until the moment the CAIB shot a hole in an RCC panel (in a test the Board had to directly administer itself after getting NASA to perform an "unnecessary" test became so much hassle). It's hard to admit you're wrong about something that cost the lives of friends and and co-workers, but it has to be done if more lives are not to be lost. Just as Gene Kranz stood up before his controllers after the Apollo 1 fire and declared "we are the cause," before leading them on the road to the Sea of Tranquility, everybody connected to today's NASA human spaceflight program must accept a similar burden.

If you haven't read the CAIB cover to cover, you must. You should also read this excellent article in The Atlantic Monthly on the disaster and investigation itself

If you have read the CAIB, how can you disgree with these findings?

a) That the loss of Columbia was not a unforseable "accident", but a preventable event that had many precursors.

b) NASA had a dysfunctional to non-existant safety culture that meant that many of the precautions that could have saved the lives of the crew simply didn't happen. One example: the ground camera network that documented launches was allowed to degrade.

c) That bureaucracy triumphed over engineering: requests for additional photography to assess the foam strike damage after the ground camera results were inconclusive were denied, for example.

d) Even the engineering had lapses: in particular the CAIB faulted NASA for an over-reliance on simulation over testing, and griped about "engineering by viewgraphs."

e) That hostility and derision greeted any external criticisms of the program or program safety. This insularity contributed to the collapse of the safety culture and so to the loss of the Columbia. It's for this reason that I will not accept on faith alone that NASA is taking "every precaution", because if it did Columbia would still be in one piece and it's crew alive.

Finally, let me say that I'm sorry for your loss and that nothing can detract from the fact that this was an incredible crew of brave and brilliant people.

Yeah, sure. Diamonds are real scarce.

The catch is that some pages are transient (generated pages, news articles, etc), so the data you're grabbing isn't necessarily enough to get back to that page in the future. It would probably be better to also record the client's GET or POST request, along with the post data, if any, as well as things like username/password [security issue, but maybe useful enough to warrant it]). Additionaly, it's probably worth setting aside space to cache the retrieved document as well, at least for text/* mime types, but maybe graphics & other media as well.

A proxy does sound like the right way to do this though, if only because a proxy neatly solves the problem of allowing people to switch between different computers (home, work, laptop) and still have access to a central traffic database.

I've worked with a Zope debugger that did basically this kind of thing: it acted as a proxy server, so you point your web browser at it, and it records timestamped .in and .out files for every request your web client makes, capturing all the data being sent both out to the remote web server and back in to your client browser. If you wanted to replay something, there were tools to fire off the .out files & parse the results that came back to make sure that the .in responses matched what you expected.

This kind of web proxy framework is very slick for web site debugging, but it could also be a suitable mechanism for the kind of "where was I?" tool that is being asked for. You could even do something silly like cache the .in and .out results in a big MySQL table with full text indexing on the payload field, so you could search it reasonably quickly.

A very clever system built over this would manage data aset growth by having a way to replace duplicated documents (images, text, etc) with something like symlinks to each other, so that you don't end up grabbing, say, hundreds of copies of the Slashdot logo. Better still, the software could detect page furniture (logos, icons, structural graphics, ads, etc) and throw that out while keeping the good stuff (news photos, etc). But that starts sounding like a deep AI problem, and is probably more trouble than it's worth. If you can just consolidate identical data, that's already a big win.

It would be interesting to see someone put these & related ideas together into something people could actually use. The closest things I know of -- and these are both worth reading about -- are Gordon Bell's MyLifeBits project at Microsoft Research, and Vannevar Bush's As We May Think essay for the July 1945 issue of Atlantic Monthly. Both of these concepts get into the same thing that we're talking about for the web here, but in a much broader way -- Bell wants to digitally record everything in his life, but we're only dealing with web activity.

Baby steps... :-)

The Atlantic Monthly had an article about the Pluto situation years ago. The problem, though, is that "kids love Pluto." Scientists have tried to change names before (such as the dinosaur example). It'll be interesting to see what the public says about Pluto's demotion (if it occurs).

• Vannevar Bush
• Ted Nelson

A couple of years ago, I went to the H2k2 conference here in New York City. I saw a fascinating talk there where I first heard the term "deep web" and some of its ramifications for national security. National security was very much on our minds at the time being only roughly a mile and a half from what we call "Ground Zero" (never liked that term).

The guy giving the speech claimed that he was a retired FBI agent and seemed to have a great deal of insight into the inner workings of national intelligence. As pointed out in the article, the speaker made the same claim that search engines only gleaned about 1% of the total information on the web. He recommended a tool called Copernic (as well as one other one that I can't remember right now) that bills itself as a "deep web" search tool. But all it appears to do is assemble the results from a bunch of other search engines. I don't recall it ever returning anything significantly "deeper" than what your average google search can yield, however.

Back to the topic of national security, he made mention that terrorist communities are thriving on the fact that only 1% of the total amount of information on the web is readily accessible. All kinds of information that would be beneficial for the NSA to know is just plain inaccessible.

He also faulted the intelligence communities for hiring "blonde haired pretty boy" college graduates, fresh out of school to analyze data in foreign languages instead of hiring local speakers. A 4.0 linguistics student will still miss out on a lot of the nuance to a conversation that a native, say Pashto, speaker will clue right into. Of course, the argument could be made that at least the "loyalties" of an American college graduate are almost guaranteed to be in the right place you can't ignore that he/she will be blind to much of the subtext of a conversation in a foreign language.

A little offtopic, but more alarmingly a point was made about the lack of digitization in the NSA of intelligence documents. Meaning that an agent will typically risk life and limb gaining access to a piece of information, who will then pass that info to a "runner" who places it in an "orange envelope" to signify its classified status. Then that same orange envelope goes into a locked filing cabinet where a good 7 or 8 times out of 10 it never sees the light of day and no attempt is made to analyze it.

But such is the challenge of the modern age. We are drowning in all of the information to produce. Vannevar Bush addressed this issue with astounding clarity right after world war II.

Quoth the Doctor:

"There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers--conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial."

...and...

The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.

We are dealing with this problem (access to the information we produce) to a far greater extent than at any time in human history. The web, which was at one point designed and intended to be a more effective way to deal with and disseminate the oceans of data produce, has little more than square rigged ships to skim its surface.

However my stepmom couldn't stand that being a social giant. I was to relate to everyone and anyone.

Amazingly enough, Fark had an article just yesterday discussing this very topic.

The idea is that extroverts are energized by the presence of people, whereas introverts are fatigued by people (but that does not necessarily mean that they are shy, its just that they are fatigued by people.) So extroverts, being energized by people like food, don't really get how introverts would wanna be hiding from people all the time.

Clickable Link because it's a good article. I enjoyed it.

The Army needs helicopters to move soldiers around the battlefield, but with so many other ways of directing fire (much more accurate indirect fire through Paladin systems, for example), and better coordination with the fast-movers (the Air Force and Army have a ways to go in this regard, but they're getting better), the days of the wannabe Hind are over.

Say what you will about Rumsfeld, but he has at least made the top brass look long and hard at all the systems in the pipeline to be sure they match future needs.

They were just ignored. See Blind Into Baghdad in the January Atlantic.

At the end of WWII research director Vannevar Bush predicted the IT revolution. He was eerily right in many ways, but some things are still to come. For some time I had the following quote hanging on my wall:

In the outside world, all forms of intelligence whether of sound or sight, have been reduced to the form of varying currents in an electric circuit in order that they may be transmitted. Inside the human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs. Must we always transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one electrical phenomenon to another?

Does the economic boom of Bangalore have an influence on the average living standard of the typical citizen of Karnataka?

The most damning thing however, at least as far as I'm concerned, is that the fact that outsourcing per se has not been the shining star in whatever percentage growth we've had, either in GDP terms or in forex terms. Remittances by Indian workers internationally, and other star sectors, such as pharmaceuticals, agriculture, automobiles and telecom, are more to blame. Look up any article on the outsourcing 'boom'; all of them uniformly talk about what will happen in 2007.

Is the indian middle class a closed economic system or does a member of the indian middle class spend a large percentage of her money on stuff which is produced by the lower classes?

In a sense, I suppose you could argue that other sectors are also like that; for all its impressive record, the pharmaceutical industry, for instance, is mostly a motley group of itsy-bitsy factories spread all over the landscape. The same for the diary industry (which is another of those success stories), and as Roblimo will probably post on newsforge, it's also true for the outsourcing sector. (Trying to differentiate between 'outsourcing' and 'product'-based companies)

Things are, however, changing.

Is there a major difference between the communist and the noncommunist indian states in this respect?

[The irony of course is that gokulpod, despite being from Kerala, doesn't seem to know much about this.;-) ]

Old article, from 1982, but quite revealing (I think there was a posting on this to Slashdot a few years back).

The diamond trade is not only a carefuly controlled monopoly, but the whole idea of diamonds being "rare" and "valuable" is a carefuly crafted (over almost 100 years) con on (mainly) Americans.

i wouldn't recommend buying diamonds for things to buy that keep their value over time.

A new way to be mad...

This could be one reason for calling 911 prior to whacking your least favorite limb off...

...who used IBM Holorith cards to track the progress of the Holocaust. So I guess we shouldn't hold IBM and Thomas J. Watson responsible for that, either, even though they clearly knew what the technology was being used for.

One of the caib investigators told me that he asked Linda Ham, "As a manager, how do you seek out dissenting opinions?"

According to him, she answered, "Well, when I hear about them ..."

He interrupted. "Linda, by their very nature you may not hear about them."

"Well, when somebody comes forward and tells me about them."

"But Linda, what techniques do you use to get them?"

He told me she had no answer.

sPh

an excellent article I found in another /. thread about this disaster.

1. "In 1982... National Geographic ran a computer altered photo of the Pyramids at Giza on it's cover." Re: Photography in the Age of Falsification
2. Gulf War Conflict, soldier facing a local with his rifle; main subjects were repositioned and people in the background were cloned. Re: http://www.zonezero.com/magazine/articles/altered/ altered.html
3. The couple in some US State I don't remember, they had septuplets or something; the wife's teeth were extremely whitened compared to real life.

Related articles:

1. New York Times: Guidelines on Our Integrity
2. Washington Post: Policy on Manipulation of Photographic Images
3. Photographs that lie

I'm replying to myself, but here's an answer to the grandparent post:

From the Atlantic Monthly article referenced earlier:

The possible significance of this was not lost on Cain: during the launch a piece of solid foam had broken off from the shuttle's external fuel tank, and at high speed had smashed into the left wing; after minimal consideration the shuttle program managers (who stood above Mission Control in the NASA hierarchy) had dismissed the incident as essentially unthreatening. Like almost everyone else at NASA, Cain had taken the managers at their word--and he still did.

That answer your question?

SB

The Atlantic Monthly article was in the November 2003 issue. It's available online here.

I just remember Watergate. .... Guys like Agnew got nailed for things completely unrelated, but without the scandal, they never would have been investigated. If this blows up, watch for a lot of other things (Haliburton?) to suddenly show up on the law-enforcement agendas.

Didja know that Rumsfeld was a member of Nixon's cabinet?

"Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, Assistant to the President, and a member of the President's Cabinet (1969-1970); and, as Counsellor to the President, Director of the Economic Stabilization Program, and a member of the President's Cabinet (1971-1972)."
- Source

The Rumsfeld-Cheney-Nixon connection is also interesting:

"When President Richard M. Nixon selected Rumsfeld as White House counselor in 1970, Cheney joined him as his deputy. In August 1974, Gerald Ford assumed the presidency and asked Rumsfeld to be his chief of staff. Rumsfeld immediately sought out Cheney."
- Source

Rumsfeld never got press as a major Watergate player. But this is interesting:

"Rumsfeld was not entirely divorced from Nixon's political operations. There is no sign that he was involved in any of the illegalities of Watergate, but he was willing to offer Nixon other help of a not particularly exalted nature--some dirt on political enemies, some covert ties with a prominent pollster. The Nixon tapes reveal that Rumsfeld often worked with and was a special favorite of John Mitchell and Charles Colson, Nixon's roughest political operators, who viewed Rumsfeld as savvier than other White House aides."
- Source

Mitchell was an obstructor of justice, and Colson was a hatchet man. Rummy was close with those guys? Must be sweet to have a resume like that -- fits right in with the Bush administration.

-kgj

We haven't even really started to hit the backlash of men's gender inequity yet.

Not of men, but of boys perhaps?

Took me a while, but that's an interresting article.

I see this as less of a willful release of power, and more of a willful destruction of antergy.

If this is just a small patch in the middle of a thriving rainforest, no problem -- when the ash is exhausted and the nutrient poor soil won't grow crops, it is abandoned and the rainforest regrows quickly. But most of the time it is massive deforestation instead.

Interestingly, there was an article a while back that suggested that the reason the South American rain forests grow as well as they do is because early indians cultivated the soil for farming. A similar situation is believed to be true for North America as well.

So cutting down the old trees to encourage growth of young ones is just the opposite of what you need to prevent unnaturally intense forest fires.

I'm not so sure about that. While younger trees are often consumed (and nature obviously reseeds), my understanding was that it was the dead wood that provided the fuel. By logging an area, we tend to remove the dead wood before it ignites.

Next, you also argue that extinction of species has been happening for a long time and that makes it normal, natural and okay. This overlooks the key issues of rates of extinction.

I'm hardly arguing that we aren't indirectly causing the extinctions. I'm arguing that we are changing the environment to meet our needs, and as a result, we are taking over the processes that used to be provided by various wildlife. As we take over those natural processes, the wildlife that depended on that place in the eco-system no longer has a home and goes extinct. But as I said, we are further changing our environment by preserving those animals which would otherwise disappear.

Finally, there's your delightful argument that [waste] "came out of the Earth in the first place. There's no reason why it can't just go back". This completely ignores the fact that one of the major results of industrialization is the concentration of wastes and the creation of entirely new forms of waste.

With enough energy, we can restore anything we use back to a natural state. That includes "Enriched" Uranium byproducts, which can either be reused, or reprocessed back into stable elements. (Processes exist to degrade radioisotopes into isotopes with a half-life of minutes. These expend a great deal of energy, then become an inert chemical.) BTW, that's FISSION, not Fusion. Fusion is still a Pie-in-the-Sky energy source. Even if fusion is finally accomplished, it still won't be as "clean" as everyone makes it out to be.

And of course, we shout down as "eco-freaks" those who have the temerity to suggest that technologies that produce less wastes are better than technologies to clean up waste.

You can only squeeze so much water out of a rock. Energy efficiency is the goal of any engine producer. However, there are hard ceilings on how efficient a given process can be. Interestingly enough, extremely high energy density processes (such as fission) tend to be cleaner than less efficient processes. However, the more energy you have, the more cautious you have to be with it. I label "Eco-freaks" as annoying anti-progressives, because they tend to hate any and all technology. They keep saying, "make the existing stuff 100% clean!" Sorry, it isn't going to happen. We have to move to processes such as Fission which produce bountiful energy, but are seen as "evil" by eco-freaks because of how dangerous they are.

Our choices boil down to:

1. Improve our technology and continue to improve the "eco-loop" we took over as a species.

2. Live like wildlife and be subject to the whims of the environment.

As a minor comment, the dinosaurs were in the second category.

People will believe that if the sensors don't show it, it must not be there. The heating systems will complicate and potentially lead to other, new kinds of catastrophic failure (as anticipated by the /. editor Michael's comment on the wisdom of heating a large tank of liquid oxygen).

This article is must reading, I think.

Using this same logic, given current trends, the world population in a few centuries will be less than the current US population.

For a good article on people trying to save their sick kids, see the Atlantic Monthly's 2001 article Cloning Trevor. It provides a good overview of the intricacies of emotions surrounding the debate, and exactly how misunderstood cloning is; for example, how hard it is to work with and propagate cloned stem cell lines, and how this will eventually force the research overseas.