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Better than Texas, where you have to pay money to vote (the mandated ID must be free to be legal, but it's ok for it to require other paperwork that costs money, so long as the ID itself is free). http://www.theguardian.com/us-...

In flight, definitely. But sadly not the first fatality for commercial space flight, or for Virgin come to that, Scaled Composites had an explosion during a ground test that killed three people in 2007. That set back didn't halt development, and I hope this one doesn't either.

Microsoft is too busy shifting merchandise to spy on customers.

Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month.

The documents show that:

* Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal;
* The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;
* The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide;
* Microsoft also worked with the FBI's Data Intercept Unit to "understand" potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases;
* In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;
* Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a "team sport".

http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

A proposed internet tax is the least of problems with Hungary's current government. Selected headlines from around the web:

The Guardian: Hungary's rabid right is taking the country to a political abyss

The Tablet: Meet Europe’s New Fascists

The Telegraph: Inside the far-Right stronghold where Hungarian Jews fear for the future

Aljazeera: Hungary: Towards the Abyss Investigating why critics of Hungary's authoritarian government believe it is leading the country towards fascism

The Tablet's, tagline is "A New Read on Jewish Life" and of course Aljazeera is Islamic. The Telegraph and Guardian are respectable British publications. They all agree that Hungary is leaning fascist.

I take my watch off at the end of the day. I put it on in the morning. How big a difference is it to set it "on a charger on my nightstand", instead of just "on my nightstand?"

I guess it really wouldn't be, unless you wanted to use it as a sleep monitor as well.

A set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.

1) A scientific mindset is not a set of beliefs. Scientists do not worship what they cannot understand; they only seek to understand it.
2) Scientists do not consider the cause or purpose of the universe, only its nature. Cause or purpose implies an intelligent creator. We do not have any objective evidence that one exists. The Bible is not objective evidence, only philosophy, narrative, and metaphor. Even if it were, the current versions of the work have been translated and interpreted so many times by so many people with so many different agendas to push that the original meaning has been lost for thousands of years.
3) There is no objective evidence that a superhuman agency or agencies created the universe. There is conjecture and hypothesis. The problem is that the zealots insist that you prove a negative when you express an opinion on the subject. As we all know, proving a negative is impossible. Thinking that something is possible doesn't mean you believe it to actually be the case. We do not know what was happening before the Big Bang happened, as current technology does not exist to look beyond the singularity. Nothing can be proven or disproven about the origin of the Big Bang at the moment, and that is not a concession of a weak argument; the three most important words in science are "I don't know".
4) Exactly what devotional and ritual observances do scientists engage in? The closest I can come up with is getting your morning coffee.
5) Scientifically based solutions and practices are not the same as a moral code. Morals are arbitrary rules of conduct that a particular slice of humanity has decided are worth upholding, and as such, cannot by definition be associated with science. Nothing in science says you can't have sex before marriage, for example, or stone the gays to death, or beat your wife, or kill your slaves..

I'm positive you don't know what you're talking about.

What the deniers dispute is humans having a majoritive effect on climate change. The science on that is not settled.

It's settled. Getting 97% of scientists to agree on something is virtually impossible if there is no objective evidence. CO2 in the atmosphere makes temperatures rise. We're dumping CO2 into the atmosphere by the billions of tons. Therefore, more heat from the sun is trapped in the atmosphere, making global temperature rise. Honestly, it's not a difficult concept, and if you need an example of a greenhouse effect gone mad, take a look at Venus. It's like 863 degrees F / 462 degrees C on the surface, in large part to the atmosphere being 96% CO2. The origins of the high levels of CO2 on Venus are different from those on Earth, but they share a similar problem in that there is insufficient biomass to recapture the carbon in the atmosphere.

especially when new papers are being published trying to explain a hiatus in the warming trend and the significance of the oceans in the atmospheric temperature.

Please link to some of those papers; if they're not in reputable peer-reviewed publications, though, don't bother.

If the science on that was settled there would be no use for continued research.

You are failing to grasp the nature of scientific endeavor. We will never know everything about a particular topic; there is always more knowledge to be obtained. If 97% (or even a significant majority) of the new research contradicts the human-caused theory of global warming, then a conclusio

I mean shit, look at Al Gore, if there was a list of everybody on the planet sorted by personal carbon consumption, he'd probably be in the top 1%.

Gore is carbon neutral isn't he?

I don't care how energy efficient his 20 bedroom house or his private jet are;

Gore doesn't have a private jet.

both inevitably consume a LOT more energy than your typical person's luxuries.

How does a jet consume energy without existing?

In a small contained lab environment we can sit there and measure how much of a greenhouse effect different gases have, but historical data doesn't even so much as show a correlation between greenhouse gases and climate change.

That's not true for any of the past 420 million years

IIt doesn't appear to harm ocean life

Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit.

plant life, or land animals either

Bullshit

as during one of Earth's "greenest" periods in history we had 20 times the present atmospheric CO2, really fucking massively sized insects, dinosaurs, and more.

Kind of irrelevant. We have existent species now. Those are the ones that have to be able to live. Really fucking massively sized insects, and dinosaurs are already dead.

Other data suggests that rises in atmospheric CO2 follow rises in climate, not the other way around

Nope:
CO2, increasing since about 1750.
Temp, from about 1900.

As for global warming itself, it could be fully or partially man caused. I don't know, but again, I don't think it's a problem either way, so I don't really give a crap.

Well, we've got a lot of science now, so we don't need to base our decisions on what you think.

It's entirely possible that the higher CO2 we're seeing is yet another rise following a climate change that we had no part in.

No it's not. It's from the combustion of fossil fuels.

And by the way, the arguments for stopping climate change so that we can save the economy are also incredibly stupid and self defeating.

Bullshit

We have not, even one time, seen a case where climate change has caused long term economic damage.

Bullshit. Economic impact of global warming is costing the world more than $1.2 trillion a year, wiping 1.6% annually from global GDP

Meanwhile we have seen on well more than one occasion where stupid economic decisions cause global long term collapse. Hurting the economy for what is probably much ado about nothing is therefore pointless

The 10 state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative saw their combined economies increase by 1.6 billion in the first three years. Oh, the pain! The pain! Ouch! Stop the hurt!


Why did /. vote this bullshit +5, interesting? I would have thought anti-science grandstanding was antithetical to "news for nerds". This place really has dropped in discernment over the past few years hasn't it. .

Re: "There was malware installed to get more information than just the IP."
The press has more details on the word "software":
http://gizmodo.com/fbi-plants-...
"....-brand malware would be planted on his computer, allowing the Agency to ultimately nab the purported perpetrator. "
http://www.slate.com/blogs/fut... (OCT. 28 2014)
"...using a phony—and malware-laced..."
http://www.theguardian.com/com... (29 October 2014)
"...all to deliver malware to a suspect in a criminal case.." http://rt.com/usa/200131-seatt... ( October 28, 2014)
"... was made possible with the use of a so-called “Computer & Internet Protocol Address Verifier” program, or CIPAV, that had been remotely installed on the
individual’s machine to collect and then communicate to the authorities the user-specific information that eventually identified the suspect."

Aside from the fact that you're comparing the supposed collective seeping of a liquid into the ocean with human bloodloss and a bunch of random numbers you pulled out of your bum, I'm sure the fishers that are out of business due to the incredible damage to the marine food web are very thrilled that you think oil contamination is harmless, let alone the effects of Corexit, the extremely toxic that BP wantonly sprayed all over the spill to help hide evidence of the crime.
http://www.theguardian.com/env...


So now there are several hundred meter-thick swaths of death sludge, 100 meters thick in some places..
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re...
But a little oil's harmless, right guys?

Privacy of Skype communications is very important for Microsoft and always good to keep in mind (probably all logged and kept forever):

http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

"The washing, touching, and kissing of these bodies — typical in many West African burials — can be deadly. But prohibiting communities from properly honoring their dead ones — and thereby worsening their distrust in medical professionals—can be deadly, too. ref

Ghusl Al Mayyah (Washing the Body)

The Difficulty of Burying Ebola's Victims - Smithsonian

Ebola cremation ruling prompts secret burials in Liberia

Makes me wonder what the local governments in the region are doing to combat the outbreak, they do have governments in that part of the planet? If Ebola broke out in Texas for instance, a state of emergency would be declared then quarantine imposed on anyone within a ten miles of an Ebola victim. The situation would have been resolved within months. They do have governments in that part of the planet?

Seven percent you say? I wonder why this graphic shows 7% - pretty much spot-on to the Kyoto target...

But the reduction by the US has been greater, percentage-wise, than the EU. The US is down 7%, the EU down 6.9%...

... The experiment we were discussing was Spencer's radiation experiment. Not "global warming". You keep trying to apply my arguments about Spencer's challenge to the broader issue of global warming, aka "climate change", and it's not valid to do so. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2014-10-25]

Once again, how bizarre. The whole reason Slayers deny that an enclosed source warms is because that implies greenhouse gases can't warm the surface:

.. the CO2-warming model rely on the concept of "back radiation", which physicists (not climate scientists) have proved to be impossible. I'm happy to leave actual climate science to climate scientists. But when THEIR models rely on a fundamental misunderstanding of physics, I'll take the physicists' word for it, thank you very much. .. [Jane Q. Public, 2012-07-05]

... The only reason I agreed to work through the Spencer experiment with you was because I already knew you were wrong, and wanted the chance to show that to everybody, unequivocally. Well, I got that chance. And as soon as I get it written up (which as I have stated before will take a while), I fully intend to show everybody. You asked me if I really was willing to publish the results, no matter the outcome. Well, now that in fact it didn't go well for you, sour grapes isn't going to get you anywhere. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2014-10-25]

If Jane is so sure that his Sky Dragon Slayer nonsense is correct, why can't he write down a simple energy conservation equation around the heated source without wrongly "cancelling" terms? Ironically, this is the very first equation needed to understand Spencer's experiment. And Jane can't even get the first equation right. Prof. Cox is right: this isn't even degree-level physics.

Jane, if you tried just once to write down an energy conservation equation for a boundary around the source without wrongly "cancelling" terms, you'd realize all this Slayer nonsense is wrong.

... maybe Jane/Lonny could just ask Prof. Cox if the required electrical heating power depends on the cooler vacuum chamber wall temperature? I bet Jane/Lonny Eachus $100 that Prof. Cox answers "yes" to the previous question. Is Jane/Lonny Eachus chicken?

... If you want to ask him about what amounts to a pretty straightforward textbook radiation problem, go right ahead. But I already know the answer -- which, in fact, I got from textbooks on the subject -- so I don't have to bet. You go ahead, if you want to. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2014-10-]

In other words: bok bok bok BOKKKKK. That's what I thought. Jane/Lonny Eachus is chicken.

If Jane/Lonny Eachus were a real skeptic, he'd at least consider the possibility that Jane's "radiant power output" equation doesn't describe "electrical heating power". Jane's textbooks don't say to use a "radiant power output" equation to describe "electrical heating power".

That's why Jane is too chicken to ask Prof. Cox if electrical heating power depends on the cooler vacuum chamber wall temperature. Because Jane's afraid that Prof. Cox will say yes. If not, why did Prof. Cox say all these things?

Remember,

... I repeat: your use of a heat transfer equation, rather than a radiant power equation, to calculate the radiant power output of the hottest object in an isolated vacuum environment is just laughable. Your own "power in = power out" claim shows it to be wrong. It contradicts your own calculations, which I showed to be wrong 3 different ways. Hell, you even got some simple math wrong. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2014-10-23]

Once again, Jane confuses "radiant power output" with "electrical heating power". Since "electrical heating power" is zero if the chamber walls are at the same temperature as the source, Jane is simply wrong to use a "radiant power output" equation to describe "electrical heating power". As I just explained, mainstream physicists and even most climate contrarians agree that "electrical heating power" has to account for the chamber wall temperature.

If Jane tried just once to write down an energy conservation equation for a boundary around the source without wrongly "cancelling" terms, he'd realize that this Slayer nonsense is wrong.

Or maybe Jane could listen to Prof. Brian Cox. Jane/Lonny Eachus likes Prof. Brian Cox and is very bothered by the fact that Prof. Cox agrees with mainstream physics. Jane/Lonny urges Prof. Cox to take time from his obviously busy schedule to review the actual state of the science on this extremely important subject.

Jane/Lonny seems to think that physicists just need to be told the glorious Sky Dragon Slayer "truth" and then they'll happily abandon conservation of energy. Maybe Jane/Lonny Eachus could convince physicists like Prof. Cox by finally writing down an energy conservation equation for a boundary around the source without wrongly "cancelling" terms? Or maybe Jane/Lonny could just ask Prof. Cox if the required electrical heating power depends on the cooler vacuum chamber wall temperature?

I bet Jane/Lonny Eachus $100 that Prof. Cox answers "yes" to the previous question. Is Jane/Lonny Eachus chicken?

Mod parent up. Here is a discussion of the various definitions of "species"; also, it's worth clicking through to this list.

Ignore what I said above.

I start imagining conspiracies when I don't have my pills.
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

Initial reports suggested there were more gunmen at large, with a third shooting outside a shopping centre, fuelling the air of panic.
But that report was later retracted and the Ottawa police chief, Charles Bourdeleau, said it was unclear whether the dead gunman had acted alone or with accomplices.

Oh and sorry about piling all kinds on nonsense from "lone wolves" to little girls as if any of it is related.
I'm such a dick when I don't get my pills.

Perhaps you could use your obviously epic google skills to look up the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet. You know the one the article is actually talking about? The one that is shrinking and unstable and could cause sea levels to rise by 1.2 metres? I think that's worth at least keeping an eye on. Don't you?

Modelling - Terry Richardson, anyone?
Acting - 'casting couch'
Banking - Guardian article
The military - Sexual Assault in the US Military

Am sure there are many others.

Even assuming this is true, how many averted robberies are worth the loss of a human life? One? a hundred? a thousand? How many averted crimes are worth the 100 children that are accidentally killed by guns each year?

Clearly cars should be banned. What about swimming pools? I sure there are a ton of things that have value even if somehow people loose their life because those things exist

In the case of firearms, the police have no legal obligation to protect you. This has been upheld in court. This goes back to common law (aka "God given" right) for the right to protect yourself. Not a civil right, that can be taken away. We have a natural right to protect ourselves. That includes the use of firearms.

Who commits 90% of the gun crime in the U.S.? Certainly not law abiding citizens.

Clearly not by definition.

MILLIONS of crimes are prevented every year by law abiding citizens either brandishing (99% of the time) or using (1% of the time) their legally held guns.

Citation needed, I think.

Even assuming this is true, how many averted robberies are worth the loss of a human life? One? a hundred? a thousand? How many averted crimes are worth the 100 children that are accidentally killed by guns each year?

Secondly: look up what the word 'democide' means. You're an idiot who wants to get us all killed by our government.

Still, only 200 million people were killed by their own governments in the last century, so it's no big deal.

Perhaps you should look up the word "democracy". You'll find that the way bad governments are removed in a democracy is by voting them out of office. The USA is allegedly one of those, so that' the way to remove a government, not by making war on it.

The problem is there are not enough pedophiles to prosecute. The state has been forced to "create" pedophiles.

That doesn't really seem to be the problem. It is more like something approaching the opposite.

Rotherham child abuse scandal: 1,400 children exploited, report finds

Rotherham child sexual abuse scandal is tip of iceberg, says police chief

There will be more Rotherham-style child sexual exploitation scandals unearthed in the coming months as the “stone is lifted” on the scale of abuse perpetrated on the young, one of Britain’s top police officers has warned.

No. But such is the moral panic over child molestation in the UK that no-one dare stand up and defend him.

I don't think you could build a good case that "moral panic" over child molestation is the biggest problem the UK has in this regard, viz:

Rotherham child abuse scandal: 1,400 children exploited, report finds

Prof Jay said: "No-one knows the true scale of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham over the years. Our conservative estimate is that approximately 1,400 children were sexually exploited over the full inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013."

Revealing details of the inquiry's findings, Prof Jay said: "It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered."

The inquiry team found examples of "children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone ....

The report found: "Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so."

Failures by those charged with protecting children happened despite three reports between 2002 and 2006 which both the council and police were aware of, and "which could not have been clearer in the description of the situation in Rotherham".

No indeed, it appears the "moral panic" you are looking for is not about child molestation.

Rotherham child sexual abuse scandal is tip of iceberg, says police chief

There will be more Rotherham-style child sexual exploitation scandals unearthed in the coming months as the “stone is lifted” on the scale of abuse perpetrated on the young, one of Britain’s top police officers has warned.

Children are being abused an hour after being groomed online, Rotherham sex abuse scandal expert warns

Paedophiles are abusing children in real life within an hour of grooming them online, the professor who led the investigation into the Rotherham sex abuse scandal has warned.

Professor Alexis Jay, who compiled a report into how gangs of mainly Asian men groomed, terrorised and abused 1,400 girls as young as 11 in Rotherham over a 16-year period said sex abuse went on undetected in many other areas across Britain.

IIRC, AWS ditched wikileaks.org like a hot potatoe after a simple phone call by some US official. Of all the services suggested here, AWS would probably be the last service one should look at for this purpose.

An EU spokesman later said the removal was "not a good judgement" by Google.

Clearly google should have a team of philosophers, ethicists, social activists, and legal theorists evaluate each of the 1000 requests per day to ensure that each link removed is a "good judgment."

Google could have a team of 100 persons on this, handling 10 requests each, and it wouldn't even show as a rounding error on the result in a sub-department P&L. Google have around 55.000 employees and are insanely profitable. So Google could absolutely do this properly without problem, but that doesn't make the law/ruling any less stupid.

An EU spokesman later said the removal was "not a good judgement" by Google.

Clearly google should have a team of philosophers, ethicists, social activists, and legal theorists evaluate each of the 1000 requests per day to ensure that each link removed is a "good judgment."

http://www.denverpost.com/news...
"They harden themselves to survive inside prison, guards said in recent interviews. Then they find they can't snap out of it at the end of the day. Some seethe to themselves. Others commit suicide. Depression, alcoholism, domestic violence and heart attacks are common. And entire communities suffer. ... Prison work "bleeds over into your private life. You go into restaurants, you sit with your back to the wall. You want to see all the entrances and exits, and you notice if somebody is carrying something bulky. You can't turn these skills off," said Matthew von Hobe, 50, a former manager at the four-prison federal complex in Florence. He knows of two colleagues who committed suicide."

So, like you imply, looks like a tough road to rehabilitation for many prison guards...

Good to see so many comments mentioning the lead connection to violent crime. There are nutritional connections too.
"Omega-3, junk food and the link between violence and what we eat: Research with British and US offenders suggests nutritional deficiencies may play a key role in aggressive behaviour"
http://www.theguardian.com/pol...

The problem is, of course, the prison is one of the main social safety nets in the USA, and also that putting people in prison boosts the employment rate (jobs for guards, prisoners off the unemployment roles). We need to rethink our economy, like with a basic income that a person does not get while incarcerated?

Also related to show how bad it could get:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...
"The "kids for cash" scandal unfolded in 2008 over judicial kickbacks at the Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Two judges, President Judge Mark Ciavarella and Senior Judge Michael Conahan, were accused of accepting money from Robert Mericle, builder of two private, for-profit juvenile facilities, in return for contracting with the facilities and imposing harsh sentences on juveniles brought before their courts to increase the number of inmates in the detention centers."

Here is am excerpt from a related satire by me regarding expanding prisons for copyright violators that I sent to the US DOJ a dozen years ago in response to a slashdot article, but sadly sometimes it seems people may be taking it more as a blueprint than a cautionary tale: :-(
http://www.pdfernhout.net/micr...
"""
My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. ...
First off, we all know our current set of laws requires a micropayment each time a U.S. law is discussed, referenced, or applied by any person anywhere in the world. This financial incentive has produced a large amount of new law over the last decade. This body of law is all based on a core legal code owned by that fine example of American corporate capitalism at its best, the MicroSlaw Corporation.
MicroSlaw's core code defines a legal operating standard or OS we can all rely on. While I know some GPL supporters may be painting a rosy view of free law to the general public, it is obvious that any so called free alternative to MicroSlaw's legal code fails at the start because it would require great costs for learning about new so-called free laws, plus additional costs to switch all legal forms and court procedures to the new so called free standard. So free laws are really more expensive, especially as we are talking here about free as in cost, not free as in freedom.
In any case, why wou

âoeWe do know that the Iraqi regime has chemical and biological weapons. His regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons â" including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas. His regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of biological weaponsâ"including anthrax and botulism toxin, and possibly smallpox.â -- Rumsfeld to Congres

Iraq did not have biological weapons. Iraq was known to have sarin and mustard gas. So what?

Powell:

Let's look at one. This one is about a weapons munition facility, a facility that holds ammunition at a place called Taji (ph). This is one of about 65 such facilities in Iraq. We know that this one has housed chemical munitions. In fact, this is where the Iraqis recently came up with the additional four chemical weapon shells.

Your contention it was for already and new weapons is ludicrous. By the time of the invasion that gas that they already had was decades old and highly ineffective. That's why they needed to manufacture new ones.

You are attempting to revise history by claiming it was only for new ones. There are many, many quotes and papers stating they were also looking for stockpiles. Stop lying idiot.

So when the Bush administration found the chemical weapons, they were so vindicated that they trotted them out in front of Congress? Hell no. You know why? The weapons they found were of so little importance that they barely mentioned it. Why don't you stop spinning this, you coward.

No sane person is going to think an "old" WMD is just fine and a "new" WMD is not.

You do realize that not all weaponry lasts forever right? Even nuclear weapons are retired because the components may not be as effective as when they were put into service. Since the Iran-Iraq War, the world knew Iraq had mustard and sarin gas. This is not news.

Old or new, if the basis for the war was that Iraq had WMDs in its possession, this fits the bill.

Not when the actual claim by Colin Powell and the administration was that Iraq was MANUFACTURING new chemical weapons.

Let's look at one. This one is about a weapons munition facility, a facility that holds ammunition at a place called Taji (ph). This is one of about 65 such facilities in Iraq. We know that this one has housed chemical munitions. In fact, this is where the Iraqis recently came up with the additional four chemical weapon shells. Here, you see 15 munitions bunkers in yellow and red outlines. The four that are in red squares represent active chemical munitions bunkers.

It's irrelevant either way at this point, we left. There's no reason to spin it unless we're going to try and hold someone accountable for them being in Iraq. Are people so hateful of Bush that this kind of spin is even seen as worthwhile?

No, it's conservatives that are spinning these discoveries that Bush was right when in reality they are not. That's dishonest. That is spin.

When they searched the home of an Iraqi nuclear scientist, they uncovered roughly 2,000 pages of documents. You see them here being brought out of the home and placed in U.N. hands. Some of the material is classified and related to Iraq's nuclear program. . . This one is about a weapons munition facility, a facility that holds ammunition at a place called Taji (ph). This is one of about 65 such facilities in Iraq. We know that this one has housed chemical munitions. In fact, this is where the Iraqis recently came up with the additional four chemical weapon shells . . . The four that are in red squares represent active chemical munitions bunkers. . . . First, you will recall that it took UNSCOM four long and frustrating years to pry - to pry - an admission out of Iraq that it had biological weapons. . . One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq's biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.

The Bush administration claimed that Iraq had biological, chemical, and maybe nuclear weapons. As for biological weapons, especially the mobile weapons factories, were never found. The nuclear weapons were also never found as Iraq never had the capability. As for chemical weapons, the world has known that Iraq already had mustard gas and sarin since the end of the Iran-Iraq war. The claim by the Bush administration was that they were manufacturing more and newer chemical ones. This was never substantiated. Most likely US soldiers uncovered the old mustard gas and sarin stockpiles.

For a more typical example, Starbucks is still fresh in public memory. They sold a lot of coffee in the UK, but made no profit there because their income and expenses were the same, so no UK tax. On the other hand, their Swiss coffee bean distribution business was very profitable. You might say they were paying too much for the beans in order to artificially boost the profits of their Swiss company (low tax) at the expense of their UK company (high tax), but they say that if you want good beans, they cost money, and the high profitability of their bean distribution was because it was a slick, high-quality operation.

Obviously, that's over-simplifying but, even for this version, how do you fix it? For your Microsoft example, who decides how much would be a fair price for Dublin to pay the Redmond business, given that there is no chance of an open bidding process with the single supplier who also happens to own the Dublin company?

VeraCrypt's website says it's "based on TrueCrypt", but the licence page says it's released under the Microsoft (!) Public licence (which is a free software licence, incompatible with the GPL.)

But TrueCrypt (now unmaintained) was never released under any free software licence, so VeraCrypt can't be both based on TrueCrypt and be under the Microsoft Public Licence. Anyone know which info is accurate and why they make this conflicting claim?

Of course, using Microsoft's codeplex hosting, and Microsoft's licence raises doubts about the software given that Microsoft has already been caught handing data to the NSA and putting in backdoors for the NSA.

...before finally deteriorating into an insignificant third rate state in the EU. That's what real Western democracies are.

I'm sorry what nations in the EU are deteriorating?
Sure the financial crisis hit some of countries hard, but that is short term, in general most poor EU member countries are getting dramatically better: http://www.theguardian.com/com...

I don't think you can claim that long term EU member countries are deteriorating, northern Europe all the way down to Germany and France aren't doing bad.

Oracle "retained" Florian Müller as a consultant ref. Groklaw answering Florian Mueller FUD ref ref.

As such, infection rates among the population of medical staff are highly dependent on the conditions of the environment.

True. Not a helpful point though.

A properly maintained quarantine with medical professionals engaging in best practices should basically have a 0% infection rate,

Are you hearing the reports about the Spanish infection case? Allegedly (and it is an allegation, but one that has not yet, to my knowledge, been denied by the authorities of the hospital involved) the nurses cleaning up after the deaths of the two missionaries in Madrid were issued with torn protective equipment, held together by sticky tape.

That's in a First World, modern hospital. I don't blame the nurses there for quitting.

I now expect Americans to start shouting "we're better than that!" ; from the country where it's first case was set away from the emergency room after he informed them of his symptoms and travel history. Yeah, right, of course America will do better ; I am so confident.

All the protocols in the world are fuck-all use if they're not followed, comprehensively, from day one.

You're a fucking fascist if the mere mention of China immediately makes you approve the program. The NSA should not be going around the world weakening everyone's encryption tools, period. Americans, Iranians, Germans, Chinese, Palestinians, French, etc. should not have their encryption tools nefariously weakened. American government agencies should not go around the world slowing the progress of technology.

Now we can discuss this disclosures outcome :

Did China learn anything from this? Unlikely. They actively spy on the U.S. embassy in China, U.S. intelligence agencies here, etc. If China didn't know, it's only because they chose to ignore American spies and focus on industrial secrets. If this scares them, then maybe they'll spend more spy money on traditional spy shit, and improving their own technology, and less on stealing American industrial secrets. Net impact America from China known : Only positive.

Did Germany or South Korea learn anything? I donno maybe, maybe not, but they're our allies so who cares. Did their people know? As Slavoj Zizek said, "The greatest achievement of Wikileaks, is that we ordinary people are no longer allowed to pretend that we don't know." That applies here too.

What is the overall effect on you and I? There are more people and organizations interested in using encryption. There are now countries interested in making their own electronics, including microprocessors. It's all beneficial for folks who work in IT, software, etc. because it means they need more tech workers, more tech workers get to do really interesting work around security, and more tech products come out from more different countries.

Fuck off already, it's overcrowded here, the property values are already in a stupid bubble, why don't you go somewhere where the cost of living isn't insane and getting worse.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-...

"the typical cost per individual employee of renting somewhere to live and leasing office space to $120,000 (£73,800) a year."[in London]

But half of these employees are getting little more than minimum wage, whilst the city leaches pull the average wage up.

No (because of the language barrier), but they will have copyright on the picture they take. Finally !

David J. Slater

(captcha is "merited")

is ***profit*** for Verizon & other teleco's really that complicated?

Considering that US has private prisons while Sweden is closing its prisons, you have a point I guess...

http://www.theguardian.com/soc...

How do US authorities feel about foreign nations hacking into US military and corporate computers? For example, this story: Chinese authorities hacked into Pentagon and other sensitive computers:

China’s military hacked into computer networks of civilian transportation companies hired by the Pentagon at least nine times, breaking into computers aboard a commercial ship, targeting logistics companies and uploading malicious software onto an airline’s computers, Senate investigators said Wednesday. ...

A yearlong investigation announced by the Senate Armed Services Committee identified at least 20 break-ins or other unspecified cyber events targeting companies, including nine successful break-ins of contractor networks. ...

Earlier this summer, in an apparently unrelated investigation, the US accused five members of the Chinese military of hacking computers for economic espionage purposes. It accused them of hacking into five US nuclear and technology companies’ computer systems and a major steel workers union’s system, conducting economic espionage and stealing confidential business information, sensitive trade secrets and internal communications for competitive advantage.

I'm guessing they don't like that. Which perhaps is what the United States means by "American Exceptionalism".

I think the word "teleportation" is being dumbed down in the same way that "cloning" was re-defined to include only what is currently possible, rather than the full sense the word had previously. See also: invisibility.

The Tata Nano was a cheap car made on the cheap for the masses....and it's reception was lukewarm to cold. Even the least favourable of Indian society did not want to be seen buying the "cheap" Tata car.- sales were atrocious - ..they would rather buy a used, higher end car

Sorry to interrupt your masturbatory political fantasy, but Iraq stabilization and reconstruction was so incredibly screwed up by Bush and his incompetent neo-con thugs that the current Middle East clusterfuck, or is equivalent, was inevitable. It's like the python infestation in Florida. Once those suckers get out and start breeding, there's no way in hell to clean up the mess.

After the collapse of the Hussein regime, the Bush administration had no effective plan to deal with the aftermath. That's why we're screwed right now. Some examples, with references.

The 12 Billion in cash that was airlifted into Iraq and pretty much disappeared into thin air

The memorandum concludes: "Many of the funds appear to have been lost to corruption and waste ... thousands of 'ghost employees' were receiving pay cheques from Iraqi ministries under the CPA's control. Some of the funds could have enriched both criminals and insurgents fighting the United States."

The team that the Bush administration sent for Iraq reconstrction was riddled with incompetence and cronyism.

To pass muster with O'Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration.

O'Beirne's staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade .

The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget, even though they didn't have a background in accounting.

Then there was the case of General Shinseki who was right about the troop levels needed to occupy Iraq, and was publicly shot down for expressing his correct opinion.

Shinseki publicly clashed with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld during the planning of the war in Iraq over how many troops the United States would need to keep in Iraq for the postwar occupation of that country. As Army Chief of Staff, General Shinseki testified to the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee that "something in the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would probably be required for postwar Iraq. This was an estimate far higher than the figure being proposed by Secretary Rumsfeld in his invasion plan, and it was rejected in strong language by both Rumsfeld and his Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, who was another chief planner of the invasion and occupation. From then on, Shinseki's influence on the Joint Chiefs of Staff reportedly waned. Critics of the Bush Administration alleged that Shinseki was forced into early retirement as Army Chief of Staff because of his comments on troop levels; however, his retirement was announced nearly a year before those comments.

When the insurgency took hold in postwar Iraq, Shinseki's comments and their public rejection by the civilian leadership were often cited by those who felt the Bush administration deployed too few troops to Iraq. On November 15, 2006, in testimony before Congress, CENTCOM Commander Gen. John Abizaid said that General Shinseki had been correct that more troops were needed.

Over here in the real world, we are still living with the horrible consequences of invading the wrong country

Crop yields down. Yes, seriously.

All you've shown is that we're growing more corn - which should be no surprise to anyone given how it's used in all our first-world processed junk food, and now we're even using it to fuel our cars. And the US has been subsidizing the hell out of it.

Suggesting that global warming could be a net positive for global crop yields flies in the face of all research to date:

http://www.skepticalscience.co...

http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...

http://www.theguardian.com/env...

This is one of the biggest problems global warming is bringing with it, I don't know how you'd missed it.

You'll never see this kind of desperate hand-wringing over the lack of diversity in the nursing field for the last 100 years. But that's because we have a current sociological neurosis that says we have to force women into every field whether they want it or not.

Not EVERY field. Just the fields that tend to pay better than average and are physically easy. For example:
http://www.theguardian.com/mon...

Oil rig workers tend to earn a lot but the work is physically hard. How many women do you see yelling and screaming about the even worse numbers there than for "sitting at a computer typing all day" type jobs?

I have a daughter. She has zero technical interests at all. I have a son. He has some technical interests, but just barely. It appears to me that the majority of people just have no interest in learning anything past about the 4th to 7th grades. After examining their friends to see if what I was seeing was normal, I found out that my children are fairly representative of their peers. In fact, they do have a slight edge on their peers because most of their friends have no interest at all in the society that has been left to them. There is nothing in it for them so why try? My children are at least trying somewhat but they do not appear to be hopeful at all about their futures. :(

That is the idea of some of them, yes.

.... eight synagogues were attacked. One, in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles, was firebombed by a 400-strong mob. A kosher supermarket and pharmacy were smashed and looted; the crowd's chants and banners included "Death to Jews" and "Slit Jews' throats". ...In Germany last month, molotov cocktails were lobbed into the Bergische synagogue in Wuppertal – previously destroyed on Kristallnacht – and a Berlin imam, Abu Bilal Ismail, called on Allah to "destroy the Zionist Jews Count them and kill them, to the very last one." Bottles were thrown through the window of an antisemitism campaigner in Frankfurt; an elderly Jewish man was beaten up at a pro-Israel rally in Hamburg; ... An Amsterdam rabbi, Binjamin Jacobs, had his front door stoned, and two Jewish women were attacked – one beaten, the other the victim of arson – after they hung Israeli flags from their balconies. In Belgium, a woman was reportedly turned away from a shop with the words: "We don't currently sell to Jews."

In Italy, the Jewish owners of dozens of shops and other businesses in Rome arrived to find swastikas and anti-Jewish slogans daubed on shutters and windows. One slogan read: "Every Palestinian is like a comrade. Same enemy. Same barricade"; another: "Jews, your end is near." Abd al-Barr al-Rawdhi, an imam from the north eastern town of San Donà di Piave, is to be deported after being video-recorded giving a sermon calling for the extermination of the Jews." -- Antisemitism on rise across Europe 'in worst times since the Nazis'

Until then you'll no doubt do your part to combat the "Jewish problem" with lies and distortion until the "New Order" arrives.

Sometimes that metric is correct. Sometimes government policy and the views of society are corrupt or evil and would strongly disapprove of various good deeds. See:

Underground Railroad
Hidden Children In France During the Holocaust*
Tour de France champ saved Jews in WWII

Sadly such measures may be needed again in the future to save Jews in Europe.

Antisemitism on rise across Europe 'in worst times since the Nazis'
Europe's Alarming New Anti-Semitism

Footage released of Guardian editors destroying Snowden hard drives

In two tense meetings last June and July [2013] the cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, explicitly warned the Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, to return the Snowden documents.

Heywood, sent personally by David Cameron, told the editor to stop publishing articles based on leaked material from American's National Security Agency and GCHQ. At one point Heywood said: "We can do this nicely or we can go to law". He added: "A lot of people in government think you should be closed down."

I would no longer consider England a safe country to use as a backup for documents that the American government wants back.

So this is part of a collective hallucination?

The problem with suing people who have lots of money is that they can afford good lawyers - and it shouldn't take a very good lawyer to get something this stupid thrown out of court.

You I might think so. However, Google has been losing cases very much like this one in Europe. Over there they now have to, on demand, remove search results involving any person who asks them to do so.

One thing we have to realize is that while your typical non-tech "muggle" might have a laughably wrong view of how the Internet works, in the real world they are the ones who decide what the laws are.