Slashdot Mirror

How could a federal database of people with mental health problems (instantly searchable during the background check) possibly be in compliance with HIPAA?

When public health is at risk, HIPAA laws have certain limitations. For example, in the case of an Ebola outbreak, state and federal government can share patients' medical records.

An argument could be made that psychopaths buying guns represents a clear public health risk.

http://www.toledoblade.com/ima...

Free range chickens wander about over acres of grasslands eating bugs. Like wild caught salmon, eggs from these chickens are bright orange.

No, that just indicates what the chicken was fed, not whether it was allowed to walk around. Feeding them marigold flowers are enough to yield bright colored eggs, even if they were held in a feeder cage their whole life. Though some people claim the darker yolk is healthier. Personally I can't tell the difference in taste. Anyways, what the chicken is fed will obviously change the egg color and nutritional content, but that doesn't mean free range either tastes better or is healthier.

Organic food practices produce measurably better food (lower cholesteral, higher vitamins, lower saturated acids) with measurably lower results (50,000 survey in Britain showed lower weight and 9% lower lymphoma risk).

Hmm...While I haven't seen where you source this from, it doesn't sound likely.

First, dietary cholesterol (i.e. the cholesterol found in food that you eat) doesn't actually raise your blood cholesterol unless your liver determines that body is deficient in cholesterol, so I'm not sure how lower cholesterol is supposed to be a benefit. When people have high blood cholesterol, it's typically because they're consuming such a high amount of simple sugars (including "organic" sugar, if you want to go that route) that their liver is having to convert the excess glucose into lipids. If you've ever heard of how "foie gras" is made, this is basically what people with high cholesterol are doing to themselves. Simple sugars come from a lot of sources that you probably don't expect as well, like bread, fruit, rice, and pasta.

Second, you're going to need to be specific on vitamins, and more importantly, what the animal was fed. Yes, there will be a difference in nutritional content AND taste when it comes to say corn fed beef vs grass fed beef. Whether or not it's organic doesn't play a role in that however.

Third, saturated fats are actually not bad for you. The bad fats are trans fats, which aren't found in meat products unless they're fried or cooked using some kind of vegetable substance that has hydrogenated oils. The original fear for saturated fats came from the same false fear over dietary cholesterol. That is, they associated higher saturated fats with higher cholesterol. The reason this happened is because saturated fats from dietary sources help the body fill its own lipid needs faster, therefore when your liver produces its lipids, it creates more lipids that remain in the blood (cholesterol, triglycerides) thus making the numbers appear "worse".

Fourth and finally, you're going to see a reduction in disease among people who follow just about any controlled diet. The reason why is because these people tend to do less things that are well known to be dangerous like smoking, drinking, and drugs, and furthermore, they're more likely to exercise.

The largest cause of ecoli contamination is someone touched something's butt and then didn't wash their hands thoroughly. Use of recreational water on crops is another source of contamination.

No, it's not. There's actually a LOT of evidence that most e. coli and salmonella outbreaks are caused specifically by organic farming.

http://www.science20.com/scien...
http://www.realclearscience.co...

Organic spinach and sprouts in particular are especially risky. In fact, organic sprouts are so dangerous that big chain stores Kroger and Wal-Mart have an official policy to not carry them.

http://www.toledoblade.com/Ret...

Hate to break it to you

I wonder how many people would have had second thoughts about investing if they'd seen the corpulent greaseball they were entrusting their money to.

Gabriel Silverstein of New York flies using flight plans as standard procedure, said the Iowa state troopers who detained him in Iowa City this spring were more blatant [than those in another case]. “It was, ‘We are inspecting your plane,’ not, ‘May we search your plane?’ ” Mr. Silverstein said.

In the two-hour encounter one of the lawmen advised him to confess to possessing “a little personal-use dope and it’ll be all over and easy.” Mr. Silverstein said he was hardly about to make such a confession, considering that he refrains from drinking coffee, much less anything illegal.

The Iowa City stop was the second for him in four days. Mr. Silverstein also had been visited by two Customs agents in Hobart, Okla., during a fuel stop on the outbound leg of a business trip from New Jersey to California and back with his husband. They checked his paperwork and quickly inspected his baggage while he fueled the plane, he said.

That's a pretty damned clear set-up for a slam-dunk civil forfeiture case with a bonus uncontested drug possession charge.

You're incredibly] naive.

Term limits don't help. The reason the current Congress is dysfunctional is that most of it's guys got elected in the past six years, and they don't have any experience in the herculean task of getting Texas and California to agree. They honestly think that getting nothing done is better for their political futures then reforming the immigration system and passing a budget because all their political experience is from the last three elections, and in those elections a lot more people lost because they didn't suck up to the base enough then lost because they sucked up too much.

They also increase corruption exponentially. For example in the early 90s Michigan passed term limits. In 2001 two Senate terms had passed, so the entire Senate was term-limited. Their political careers were over. So they got their buddies on the compensation commission to recommend a 36% pay increase, and refused to bring it to the Senate floor. At the time pay raises had to be voted down by both houses to not take effect, and all pre-term limits Senators were on a pension scheme where your benefit is based on your last earnings, so essentially these wily old goats got themselves a huge raise for life and they didn't have to vote for it. Term Limits mean your legislators are exactly smart enough to really screw you over, but have no reason to not screw you.

Another example: let's say you're a mediocre Representative. Due to term limits you can't stay a Representative. But you're mediocre, so you ain't gonna be a Senator. Some lobbyist comes through and tells you about all this pork-barrel spending he is supporting, and (incidentally) his firm is seriously considering hiring a guy with your exact resume to a six-figure job the month you get termed-out.

Hell, let's say you're a first-term guy because the previous guy got term-limited. The President has an idea that annoys a powerful group in your district. Most of your voters have barely heard of you, but they have heard of (and respect) the UAW/NRA/whoever. You think the President's idea is great. Do you have the balls to fight the UAW/NRA/whoever, and how do you win? If you're John Dingell it's easy. People voted for you, because they like you. If you're the new guy who got elected because he was the one spewing the exact UAW/NRA/whatever line it's not easy.

One time I hacked Donkey Kong on Atari 2600 for a guy who wanted to propose using a message embedded in the game. The text in the screenshot looks funny because it's necessary to use a flickering trick to display text on the 2600 -- it looks better on the actual machine.

Before worrying about China, Google "Cancer Cluster" and check out this country.
From Clyde, OH to St.Louis, MO, we have plenty!!

• American Pad and Paper
• KB Toys
• Bealls Brothers / Palais Royal (merged into Stage Stores)

Actually...

A former Ottawa Hills police officer was sentenced to 10 years in prison Monday for the shooting of a motorcyclist during a May, 2009, traffic stop.

Thomas White, 27, was convicted May 14 in Lucas County Common Pleas Court of felonious assault with a gun specification for the shooting of Michael McCloskey, Jr. A jury deliberated for about six hours after a week-long trial before reaching a verdict.

Mr. McCloskey, 25, was paralyzed from the waist down after being shot in the back while stopped on his motorcycle at Indian Road and Central Avenue. The incident was recorded on the dashboard camera in White's patrol vehicle and played for the jury.

The fact is that bad cops are brought to justice. But don't let the fact's obscure your irrational hatred of authority.

Daniel Phillips, you stabbed a 15 year old kid? That's not funny!

http://www.toledoblade.com/Police-Fire/2008/08/27/Youth-stabbed-in-fight-outside-mall-is-identified.html

They have been researching digital cameras since the 1970s and have like 1000 patents relating to digital cameras.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Sasson
They literally the invented digital still camera and got a patent for it in 1978
Their patents have been tested in court. However Kodak seems to have no problems licensing its patents. Kodak
doesnt pursue frivolous or overly broad claims. Kodak actually invented most of the digital camera technology existing today
and licenses it to everybody.

Apple tried to claim a patent claim against kodak and got bitchslapped in May.
http://www.toledoblade.com/Courts/2011/05/16/Apple-loses-round-in-digital-camera-patent-dispute-with-Eastman-Kodak.html

Especially if you ride a motorcycle. The cop might decide to put a bullet into your back for fun. And he will probably get off scott free. At least we got rid of one of the most notorious speed traps in Ohio this year.

what the fuck is the liberal media and where can I find it?

MSNBC or CBS News is the best place to start.
Want an example, last night on the Rachael Maddow show, what were they going over... AIG, TOTUS (Teleprompter of the United States) making fun of mentally challenged kids, Tim "TurboTax" Geithner lying about "what he knew and when he knew it", Chris Dodd lying about adding the provision that let AIG give the bonuses.... NO, how deregulation from 8-10 years ago created this mess (read in "8 years of failed Bush policies")*. It is as if nothing else even happened.
*Actually happened before Bush was elected, but they weren't going to let the facts get in the way of this one.

I seem to also remember the Wasington Post coming out and saying that the media during the campiagn was far more favorable to Obama. Here is one example http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081101/COLUMNIST14/811010373/-1/COLUMNIST

Can we expect anyone who followed a warrantless wiretap from the Bush administration to also be fired then? I mean, they violated our privacy as well.

As far as is known, they have only listened on some international calls. With the vast majority of Americans never calling into the suspicious hot-spots, their privacy was never threatened. But very little is known — one side wants things to be kept secret, understandably, and the other does not care to separate known facts from the darkest what-if-suspicions...

Who should be demanding justice, is Joe the Plumber whose records (and not just the measly phone-calls, but serious things) were improperly accessed as a result of his sudden fame. Even if one buys the bureaucrat's line, that the searches were justified by the "what if he owes child support?" considerations, there is absolutely no justification for sharing the dirt with newspapers.

(While searching for the links, I found the following gem: "He is also not registered to operate as a plumber in Ohio, which means he's not a plumber." Wow... I must not be a software engineer, and Picasso must not have been an artist... Absolutely not...)

Sounds like super awesome fun.
Wonder why no-one has thought of that before?

Joe really IS a plumber. He does not have a license to be a plumber, but he doesn't need one because the company he works for has the license.

In fact, according to Ohio building regulations, he must maintain his own license to do plumbing work. He has not completed any sort of training program. If Joe is a plumber, heck, so am I - I don't have a license and my training is minimal and informal, but I can sweat copper pipe or unclog a drain line or replace a valve washer.

The question was if Joe would get boned if he made more than $250K.

A slight marginal tax increase on high incomes - a return to a top marginal rate that prevailed during the go-go 80's - is not "getting boned."

Obama said he would take Joe's money and "spread it around". Can you tell me the difference between that and stealing?

First, who issued that money? If we play with the government's counters, we don't have much room to complain when it wants a cut. "Render on to Caesar, what is Caesar's," as one philosopher put it.

Second, as I have already explained, that money was made and the rewards reaped by relying on a number of government services and policies. All claims of property ultimately rest of government action. You want the government to enforce your "property rights", you pay for it.

Making you pay for services rendered is not stealing.

WRONG. You assume that the purpose of the government is to keep rich people rich.

That is, under capitalism, exactly one of the purposes of government: to create and protect "property rights". As the rich are the ones with property, that means keeping rich people rich.

Let's say, for example, that the purpose is to bring jobs to a community that needs it. That community may give tax breaks to a company to try to entice it to move to a factory or whatever to this particular community

Why are there big companies at all? Why isn't the community growing small businesses to create jobs and create local wealth, instead of competing in a race to the bottom to whore itself out to one megacorporation or another?

These large companies exist because of government actions and government policies that funnel wealth and power to where it's already concentrated, and which screw over small and independent business. A company doesn't become "too big to fail" without some state action along the way.

Next, if you believe that life is better in those countries, you are free to move there. I live here because I like it here. I like knowing that I stand a chance of getting rich one day without having the government steal it from me. That's why I'm here. If I wanted something different, I'd move. Which makes me wonder, assuming you are in the US, WHY? If Denmark or Norway is so much better, MOVE THERE!

First, the point was that - assuming you don't come from a rich family - you stand bugger-all chance of getting rich one day. That's what a lack of intergenerational class mobility means. The "American Dream" that if you just work hard, you can get ahead, is right now better represented in those other nations I mentioned.

So if that's really your goal, and you don't want anything to change here, then YOU should MOVE THERE!

Second, are you really unable to comprehend that I can love the U.S. and yet see imperfections that I want to remedy?

You know, I hail from the great state of Maryland. It is my home, and I love it. I grew up here and so I love it; my friends and family are here, and so I love it. I love its geography, from the beaches to the mountains; its history, the Free State, the Battle of Baltimore; its culture, its crazy mix of South and North, th

You're compairing the downtime costs of a rarely visited website for a cult with that of one of the biggest financial presences on the internet?... oooookay then, whatever you think proves your point I guess...

And I'm not condoning his behavior... kids a moron. Key thing is this: KIDS ARE FUCKING MORONS! You don't put a kid in jail for it, that's stupid. You think putting him in prison is going to be an improvement to society? You think that a court case, fine, community service, and record of it isn't quite enough to get it into his head he screwed up big? Only way to drive the point home is to put him IN PRISON for a year and a half?

I don't know if you've ever been to court before, maybe on a traffic ticket, or similar... you damn well know how serious an issue is while you're there. Damn near any real sentence and a firm warning would have done a crap load more good not only for the kid, but society as a whole. He's going to be a much more productive and useful person if you get his ass into college then if you throw him in with rapists and killers.

Continue to argue your side if you want, but do you really think this kid for screwing off one weekend and doing something stupid which effected 1 website for a day or two is as bad as trying to solicit a 13 year old girl, or rigging an election, or forcing your daughter to stab her pet cat... because those were all about the same sentences he's going in for.

"Don't forget that people went to jail for rigging the recount in Ohio. The big question is, why rig a recount if the regular count wasn't rigged in the first place?"

Because you're looking for a political conspiracy where there is none. And your "Brad Blog" would know that too if he would RTFA he himself linked from. The women weren't convicted of conspiracy, they were convicted of negligence. The conviction was for, and I quote, "for rigging the 2004 presidential election recount to make their job easier.". This was a case of two elections workers being lazy and getting caught, not colluding in a conspiracy to throw the election. One of them was a Democrat. Their supervising board consisted of two Republicans, and two Democrats. And in the recount, Kerry actually gained votes, and Bush lost votes, something the court never disputed. The court also didn't allege that the recount was fraudulent. Their boss said they simply made some mistakes, but the prosecutor and judge stated they thought there was "more" to the story, and seemed to imply that they thought more election workers were cutting their workload in violation of election laws, and that the two convicted women were covering for fellow workers, who came from both the Democratic and Republican parties.

From the AP article:

The prosecutor did not claim the rigged recount affected the outcome of the election; Kerry gained 17 votes and Bush lost six in the county recount

The BradBlog took a negligence case and spun it as a conspiracy theory to suit his own political ends.

real wages are down from their peak (which occurred more than 35 years ago)

However real hourly compensation has been rising pretty steadily. More benefits are being passed through employers tax free, such as health care costs, which don't show up in wages. And the government pulls out more of your money in payroll taxes (of course, if you think Social Security and other taxes are a waste, then you might be able to argue that real compensation has not actually been going up).

minimum wage is just over half of its peak

Minimum wage workers tend to be young. Only 2% of workers over age 25 earn the minimum wage. About half of minimum wage earners are under age 25, and about one-fourth are age 16-19.

The minimum wage probably causes more unemployment (and for illegal aliens, informal employment) than it helps to reduce poverty. Most people in poverty earn more than the minimum wage, but are poor because they work fewer hours than those not in poverty. Often this is because they are single parents.

there are 12 million more Americans living in poverty today than 30 years ago

Of course, the definition of "poverty" has been raised during this time. 30 years ago, most people in poverty did not have microwave ovens or refrigerators or a car. See this article for a comparison of "the poor" from 30 years ago to today.

I'm not saying it is cool to be poor, but it is far easier to be poor in 2008 than 1978.

Keep in mind we have taken on about 30 million illegal immigrants over the last 30 years as well. They are doing a heck of a lot better in the US than they would have were they came from (where they would be truly "poor"), but they will pull down average wage numbers as they don't come in highly skilled.

millions are now losing their homes

That is true, but of course homeownership was at an all time high of 69% before the bubble burst. It still remains higher than most other developed countries. Plus while they may be defaulting on home loans, most are able to rent.

Unemployment is at 6 percent nationwide and 11 percent in my state of Michigan.

US unemployment is actually 5.7%, while Michigan's is 8.5%.

But this does make one think that Michigan is doing something wrong. According to the Economic Freedom of North America study, Michigan is ranked 39th of the states and provinces in terms of subnational level economic freedom. Thus, I suggest that Michigan improve its policies to enhance its economic freedom.

You might not be aware of this fact it if you come from a background of privilege, but that doesn't say good things about you.

Well I've done the taxes for many poor immigrants to help them get the Earned Income Tax Credit, which actually does something to reduce poverty.

The litigation follows a decision last week handed down by a judge who ruled that a speed-camera program in a southeast Ohio community was illegal.

The decision stems from a class-action lawsuit involving more than 1,500 drivers filed in Trumbull County Common Pleas Court.

Judge John M. Stuard ruled that Girard, Ohio, officials illegally changed traffic violations from the criminal code to a civil infraction in order to avoid the state law.

But, when was the last time your HMO sent you a letter, reminding you that you should get a check-up?

For my Dad, last week actually (and usually about every three months since he has diabetes) from his HMO. For me? Due to increasing costs of insurance (thanks to the government mandating my HMO cover me for stuff I don't want coverage for), I've dropped my insurance and found it cheaper to pay my own way. Even with that, I've gotten post cards from my doctor, dentist and ophthalmologist within the last 6 months advising me to make an appointment (the latter two for my dad as well). Maybe people should pick better doctors if their doctors don't care about them? I'm also not sure I want my government knowing my medical history, especially if I want to be critical of that government. Ok, I know I don't want my government knowing anything about my medical history (which, IMO, is my most private information).

t's more of a thing of altruism I think. You may never understand me, because we see different things. Let me see if I can explain what I think: you are afraid of giving power to the government, because they will come back later to expect something from you. I see it more, you may say idealistically, but well, I think the government is the PEOPLE. The government gives me things (health, whatever), and it expects me to pay taxes, and nothing else. You too are afraid of your government, because of the way you think (warning: I'm not saying it's wrong, I just say I think different): you always expect something in return, and you think everyone else also expects something in return. Well, I think the government is more harmless than a big corporation. Sure, a huge government monopolizing everything is not healthier either.

Don't you see that's exactly the problem? Government is made of people. People are fallible whether they are part of a business or a government. I have a choice to not use a business that I dislike and go elsewhere, I don't have a choice for a different government when mine gives my personal info to an intern to take home, who then loses it, gets access to my FBI records illegally, or gives a political contributor hundreds of millions of dollars in workers' compensation funds to use as a hedge fund. Government is potentially MORE harmful because it has powers that no business can ever have.

Do I hate big corporations? Certainly not, I try to avoid them whenever I can, because you give them more power if you buy things from them. But obviously there are certain things, huge things, that can't be paid by small companies: A large scale network, like the phone, cable, well those are examples of things that can't be done by small companies.

The more you use a government, the more power you give them. The more you invite them into your life, the more control they will have over your life. I can fire my phone company, my satellite company or even my mortgage company if they start pissing me off. I can't fire my government quite so easily. Look at the current national debt in the US. We could fire everyone tomorrow who refuses to spend money only on eliminating the debt and without a red cent going anywhere else, it will still take years to get rid of it. That's a best case scenario. In all reality, we'll be burdened with that debt for my entire lifetime.

What? Are you on crack or what? That money actually help build the iron curtain. The USSR wasn't as bad as you and I were told it was. If they were poor it was only because you provoked them, you made them spend more and more in weapons and military. If you weren't there to bother them, they MIGHT have been a happy communist country, a

In some cases yes, if you consider engineered pesticide resistant crops that can't reproduce on their own to be sustainable.

But I thought we were on animal farms, in which case maintaining wastewater systems appears to cost too much as well.

Nevermind that factory farming leads us to do insane things: Lettuce from national fast food chain Taco Bell makes people ill all over the country. A crazy stroke of coincidence? No, they buy the most of their lettuce from one single farm in California and ship it all across America. And this isn't some secret moon lettuce from the future that chops itself, it is the same stuff that virtually anyone with a patch of dirt big enough to stand on can grow by just throwing seeds out, then kicking back and doing mostly nothing.

Taken as a whole, the practice is probably not in everyone's best interest.

Such high prices in Europe does not hurt the European standard of living because many Europeans use public transportation; bus and trains are relatively cheap to ride. In the USA, many Americans refuse to use public transportation due to class snobbery. In my neck of the woods, about 80% of the passengers on the bus is either impoverished Americans (from ghetto neighborhoods) or illegal aliens from Mexico. The occupancy of the buses is about 50% during most of the day. Meanwhile, the freeways are packed with late-model cars driven by the wealthier class.

Frankly, even if gas prices increased to $10 per gallon in the USA, Americans would not necessarily experience a decline in their standard of living -- if they use public transportation. It is cheap although it may be slighly inconvenient because you must time your life according to the bus or train schedule.

Note that American politicians never compare European gas prices to American gas prices. The politicians just tell Americans what they want to hear: "Gas at $3.50 is too expensive. We Americans are a sad, pathetic victim of the greedy oil companies. We should force them to lower gas prices back to $1.50 per gallon so we can enjoy your monster SUV."

These are the same Americans who overwhelmingly supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

.... Seriously folks, there have been big corporations and governments trying to influence the way schools go with everything from computers to food. Advertising brought into schools to get kids to buy things. Special interest groups spending money on things schools need to get a new generation of consumers interested in them.

Try:


* Discounts from Apple, Microsoft, etc on computers (I'd link, but I'm going to go with this as a given...)
* Coca-Cola
* Book It (Pizza Hut)
* A growing trend of commercialization of sporting events and buildings
* Large amounts of money being spent by religious lobbies to support Creationist teachings in schools....
* Large amounts of money being spent to promote evolution as a science teaching in schools
* Politicians getting involved in the above 2 items
* Politics derailing attempts to get anything done about improvments in materials and course work.

Where there is money and future political mindsets involved, people will spare no amount of money and/or stupidity on all sides of a debate. It's really too bad that politics and ideology wars have to get in the way of doing what schools should be doing, give the kids the ability to think for themselves instead of telling them what to think.

Ohio Creates 'Pre-Crime' Sex Offender Registry


In a scene right out of Spielberg's vision of Philip K. Dick's classic short story the state of Ohio has established a pre-crime registry for sex offenders--even if they've never been charged with a crime!

"The person's name, address, and photograph would be placed on a new Internet database and the person would be subjected to the same registration and community notification requirements and restrictions on where he could live."

I can't wait to see how this is going to affect the current trend that has divorcing women making false accusations against their husbands during the custody phase of proceedings! Then there's the way this (being that it is a civil matter) can be expanded to encompass so many other things...

Could this new registry be away for the homophobic to reverse the trends towards civil rights homosexuals have achieved in recent years? What about the affect this can have on children engaged in normal sex play for their ages? I'm reminded of Ryan Zylstra, Leah DuBuc, Laura M. Wilcox, Genarlow Wilson and other teenagers and children who have had their lives ruined by this type of hysteria and the lack of due process that comes with it. And who can forget the vigilantes who murder people they find on these lists? People like William Elliott, who was placed on the registry at age nineteen for having sex with his two weeks shy of sixteen year old girlfriend and thanks to the registry murdered.

Now they want a civil registry they can place people on without the benefit of a conviction or a jury trial? Next thing you know they'll be pushing for a pink triangle on your ID! Oh wait... Well just remember that when you give up your rights one by one, you're doing it for the children....

I'm posting the original submission because I believe anyone who follows the links here will see quite clearly how bad this is even beyond the usual Constitutional violations. This is a law that will harm the very same people it purports to protect!

--I*Love*Green*Olives

School is not a fucking social experience. It's a zoo.

Until kids can go to public schools without having to deal with crazy niggers beating on white girls, they should all fucking rot.

Lemme tell ya, I'm a pretty big fucking dude. And, like most nerdy white kids, I keep to myself. I went to all sorts of schools growing up, 7 in all. Every one of them had more than a few degenerate fucks that liked to attack people for no reason. I have had my face grabbed, kneed in the groin, by random people I didn't even know. Friends were beat to the ground and kicked by niggers for looking at them wrong, or for just being white. A friend had their kid stabbed in the face, near the eye, with a pencil just recently at a public, mostly black high school. The principal is now trying to force her to put her kid back in the same school. Fucking idiot.

And god fucking help you if you decide to fight back when attacked. The whole mantra all through my degenrate public schooling was that "if you defend yourself, you get suspended along with whomever attacks you". This is the kind of doublespeak bullshit that the public schools have become. Blame the victims because all the fat stupid fuck teachers are too lazy to do their fucking jobs.

It was not a fucking picnic. I am not putting my kids through any kind of similar experience.

There was a time not long ago when entire sections of a town would be burnt to the fucking ground if some white person got the fuck beat out of them by a crazy bitch nigger. Now, people just roll over and take it for granted that they have to go to school, work, and live their lives with mongoloids.

Well, I'm fucking sick of it. I will not pay taxes to support it. I will not send my kids to be abused. I will be happy to point out whenever people are being railroaded by bullshit affirmative action and pansy-ass blame-the-victim mentality. I didn't fucking keep slaves. I didn't enact any fucking Jim Crowe laws. But I sure as fuck will unless niggers learn how to act.

The military is a tremendous career opportunity for many people, only because their alternatives are so puny. Tell those extraordinary benefits to the veterans whose VA is $1B short, while Congress spends $1B a week in Iraq. Or all the veterans suffering from the denied effects of war theater toxins, from Agent Orange to depleted uranium to whatever's giving them "Gulf War syndrome" to anthrax vaccine poisoning to the latest out of Falluja.

This is not to say that military benefits aren't a good carrot - compared to the stick of poverty. But where would recruiting be, without that poverty? Especially now that recruiting has failed to meet minimum quotas for months on end, and our demand for troops only increasing every day, there's even less incentive for this government to feed those kinds of benefits into the civilian education and health system.

I'm glad so many people, including yourself, have gotten a "second chance" from the government to escape the cycle of poverty into which so many people are born. I'd rather that we offered those benefits the first time around, to everyone, not just those we need for our killing machine. The killing machine is necessary, and does a phenomenal job - even killing much fewer than ever before to execute our foreign policies, with fewer of our own casualties, on a much bigger, more complex scale. I just hesitate to praise our military "alternative jobs program" without considering the failure of our default jobs program: universal education and healthcare. I do not excuse people who raise children to be poor, while buying all kinds of unnecessary products. I do think they're balanced (at least), for double the trouble, by corporate welfare in military budgets. I'd rather see all the Pentagon waste instead paying for better public education.

This problem is compounded by the US fighting wars for corporations, rather than the American people. While the US has always done so, the wars have usually been covert, or at least their corporate basis. Modern media have pushed more of these corporate wars into view, as well as their real beneficiaries. That progression makes it both more necessary to recruit more people, especially those without another corporate career track, and more necessary to offer material benefits, to compensate for the loss of "patriotism and honor" as motivators to enlist. Corporate participation in the war policies also cuts benefits, as "bottom line" analysis justifies underequipping troops, cutting hazard pay and other compensation, and underfunding veterans.

The military is certainly the best (or least bad) option for many Americans today, as it has been for centuries (and, of course, not just in America, but universally). But we can do better. The goals of educating, employing, and creating other opportunities for Americans to escape disadvantage are our noblest. The military is sufficient, but we can do better.

Craig Morton claims he will pound a nail into a board with a banana. He will undertake this folly tomorrow in front of an unforgiving audience: kids.

There is, of course, a secret that will prevent Morton from playing the fool. He will pretreat the banana with a component of air that has been compressed and expanded until it becomes liquid nitrogen. At minus-320 degrees, liquid nitrogen will star in several trick demonstrations all day tomorrow as part of COSI's "Strange Matters" exhibit.

More at: http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/ 20050422/ART03/504220323/-1/ART"

Cryogenics and the application of industrial gases is pretty interesting stuff.

Who says he hasn't allready voted in November. Mary Poppins, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Michael Jordan, Jeffrey Dahmer, Brett Favre, George Foreman and Maria Lopez were unfairly disenfranchised however: Man pleads guilty to filing bogus voter registrations

[...] a very poorly designed reactor, a shutdown of the insufficient safety systems, and a government that didn't care about its people. None of those conditions exists in US nuclear power plants.

The Pentagon is building its own Internet, the military's world wide web for the wars of the future.

The goal is to give all American commanders and troops a moving picture of all foreign enemies and threats - "a God's-eye view" of battle.

This "Internet in the sky," Peter Teets, under secretary of the Air Force, told Congress, would allow "marines in a Humvee, in a faraway land, in the middle of a rainstorm, to open up their laptops, request imagery" from a spy satellite, and "get it downloaded within seconds."

John Garing, strategic planning director at the Defense Information Security Agency, now starting to build the war net, said: "The essence of net-centric warfare is our ability to deploy a war-fighting force anywhere, anytime. Information technology is the key to that." ...

That is the vision of the new web: war machines with a common language for all military forces, instantly emitting encyclopedias of lethal information against all enemies. ...

The bandwidth requirements seem bottomless. The military will need 40 or 50 times what it used at the height of the Iraq war last year, a Rand Corporation study estimates - enough to give front-line soldiers bandwidth equal to downloading three feature-length movies a second.

"The disengagement plan is the preservative of the sequence principle. It is the bottle of formaldehyde within which you place the president's formula so that it will be preserved for a very lengthy period. The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians." (my emphasis)

http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?A ID=/20041018/BREAKINGNEWS/%20%2041018011

Three computers were taken sometime between 11 p.m. Monday and 7 a.m. Tuesday, apparently by an intruder who broke a side window.

One of the computers belonged to office manager Barbara Koonce, who was responsible for names and addresses of hundreds of party members, volunteers, and candidates, a master schedule for all candidates' events, and financial information.

It also included a list of registered Democrats - information that had been analyzed as part of the Democrats' campaign strategy, Ms. Koonce said.

He's right that many of these charges haven't been proven yet in criminal courts - they've only been reported in the last few days. But the election is two weeks away, the charges are serious, credible, and backed by both eyewitness testimony and physical evidence. We're not officers of the court assigning sentences. We're citizens who must be outraged when our democracy is attacked, demanding swift justice. Not inventing imaginary "everyone does it" equivalents. Slashdot is part of "the media", misfit or not. Imagine if the Washington Post waited for the Senate Watergate hearings on that Republican crime: without journalistic interest, the hearings never would have been held, and that "second rate burglary" would never have risen to the impeachment threat that forced Nixon to resign. Incidentally ending an ideological/profiteering war across the world, and exposing Republican treason against democracy. On that note, a Watergate-style breakin in Toledo, (swing state) Ohio also hasn't been proven. It is also not yet proven that voting Republican may be hazardous to your health, but it's an open secret . Thanks for the backup.

"You have just about all the liberal media pulling out the stops to pull a smear job on the swiftboat vets. The only points they have been able to prove is that some of the vets charges are true and others are subject to dispute."

Actually the "liberal" media's coverage of the Swift Boat Vet ads dramatically increased their air play and dramatically increased the damage they did to Kerry. I don't think most people would have seen them had they not been played over and over nationally and internationally on the news.

"I won't go into farenheit 911"

Why not because you know you would embarrass yourself? Why, because Faherenheit 911 was never given free air time other than snippets on the news just like the Swift Boat Vet ads. You have to pay money and go out of your way to see Fahrenheit 911. Big difference between that and Sinclair giving this propaganda film a huge block of commercial free time in prime time. Moore's distribution strategy is pretty smart. This move by Sinclair is likely to cause more backlash than win Bush votes. I say let them go for it though I think each affiliate should be allowed the choice to decide if they are going to carry it.

I suckered my dad into watching Fahrenheit 911 on DVD with the deal I would watch Farenhype 911 the Republican rebuttal featuring Ann Coulter, the wicked witch of the right. He lasted until Moore started showing pictures of the dead and wounded Iraqi civilians and walked out when they showed wounded soldiers screaming in pain. He came back and ranted about Moore using blood and gore. My parents then sat down for the evening entertainment looking at gruesome fake corpses on CSI. I tried to tell him all he was seeing was the reality and horror of Iraq, reality you don't normally see because the war coverage is so heavily censored by the Bush administration and the "liberal" media. Its stuff we did see in Vietnam. All the American public sees most of the time is the Pentagon claiming how many insurgents they killed today. For some reason they never count the dead women and children.

"You may be the most ardent supporter for either side, American citizen or other but you have your freedom of speech because these men and others like them paid the price."

There are many brave veterans to whom we do owe a the debt you describe. These particular POW's did make a great personal sacrifice and they do deserve to be honored for it. Do they deserve to pick our President for us, no. If they want to speak their peace let them buy air time or distribute this as a movie or DVD like everyone else.

These particular POW's didn't do anything that gave me my "freedom of speech" or even protected it. They fought in a deeply misguided war, one that the U.S. didn't fight to win, didn't win and which killed millions of people, many of whom were innocent civilians. Vietnam and especially Nixon's prosecution in fact deeply threatened our Freedom of Speech, remember the Pentagon Papers, Kent State, Watergate, and before that Chicago 1968.

You are just engaging in shameless flag waving.

Kerry's testimony might not have been the smartest move for someone planning a political career but it wasn't untrue. The U.S. did commit a pretty long list of atrocities in Vietnam, all the ones Kerry listed, the fact that you and these POW's are in denial over it isn't helping anyone. You think I'm lieing, well read the Toledo Blade's expose on the 101st Airborne's Tiger Force and its rampage through Vietnam. Its not a well known history because none other than Dick Cheney as White House Chief of Staff and Donald Rumsfeld in his first stint as Secretrary of Defense buried the investigation and the story in the mid 70's.

You need to realize someday that America isn't perfect and it most certainly isn't always in the right, and has often made some grave mistake. People who challenge it when this happens are heros too, it takes a lot of guts to challenge your government and your nation when its in the wrong.

NBC ran a story on how several people have been arrested this year for wearing anti-Bush t-shirts at Bush rallies. They wear something over the shirt (otherwise they couldn't even get in), then reveal the shirt. Then the Secret Service tells the local cops to revoke their "pass" (to public grounds) and arrest them for trespassing. The charges don't stand up in court, but by then of course the false arrest has served its purpose.

Second are these "protest zones." (I'm aware BOTH parties are guilty of this, so don't point that out as if it nullifies the issue somehow). This is America; we do not have "free speech zones."

Nobody ever said Democracy wasn't a little inconvenient or expensive at times. We don't seem to mind sending our soldiers to die for our rights, or spending billions on nation building, yet somehow can supress those same rights at home by citing the fear of crumpling the grass in a public park.

Of course, like many things about the business operations of a traditional publisher that has ventured online, the reasons are simple but the solutions complicated. The New York Times requires that its users register, which makes it difficult for search engines to spider its content.

As a rule I do not read any newspaper online that I have to register for. In fact, I refuse to purchase the Star Tribune or Pioneer Press here in Minnesota because of their policy requiring user registration. Fake accounts be dammed, you want me to read your paper and have to look through your ads you will let me do so without a cookie linked to information, fake or otherwise.

an even more impenetrable barrier is the Times' paid archive. Because it stows material more than a week old behind an archive wall, you have to cough up $3 per article. Since few are willing to pay for content they can get free elsewhere, search engines, which often base results on relevancy (read: popularity), will continue to dis the Times -- as well as other media sites that make you register or pay for old news (The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal).

This is a horrible problem that I have run into in recent times trying to do simple research on the web. I was trying to look for articles pertaining to a friend that currently resides in Perrysburg, OH. I did a simple search on the Toledo Blade's website only to find a link to a third-party archive company that required me to pay a fee to access more than a short blurb about the story. Unwilling to drive the 665 miles to Toledo from where I currently live just to read a hardcopy I gave up on my search for these articles due to this barrier. But while doing research about NEPA I find that The Scranton Times has a much better free searchable archive of information than does the The Times Leader which requires you to pay to visit their archive. Wonder who gets my visits?

I really think that these policies could lead to the downfall of traditional news outlets. I have absolutely no desire to pay money for information that should be easily available. Hell, if you are going to charge I can't see a $3 fee! A couple hundred words are worth $3 in storage? No way. Perhaps if I asked them to mail me the copy of the article then $3 would be reasonable.

"There isn't a compelling business argument today that would suggest that giving away our content is a good idea," Nisenholtz said. Even though the Lexis-Nexis deal is an all-you-can-eat model -- not based on usage -- the Times can ill afford to undermine its relationship with such an important customer. It simply can't charge Lexis-Nexis tens of millions of dollars while giving away the same content free over the Web.

The argument that makes sense is that people aren't going to be willing to pay you $3 for a computer copy of an article that is only a couple hundred words. Make the fee something reasonable or watch as you begin to waste a lot of money paying the third party archive to host your data and no one retrives it. Perhaps a rival newspaper would open their database up and people would start going to them instead. We can always hope.

In this article by the Toledo Blade an alleged "computer expert" and state rep candidate Mr. Myers expresses his views as it pertains to paper trails and EVM's as "I liken this part of the bill to adding a ladder to an elevator. We had something good. Now it is just made more complex."

I guess adding a printer COULD make these pesky things a little more complex AND prone to failure, but I fail to see why. If a system can't pipe data to more than one output/storage device it's not worth having IMHO.

When we have up and coming wanna-be politicians whom are supposed to know better (you would think someone claiming to be a bonna-fide computer expert would) and we still get drivel from them like this I really feel they don't want honest elections. Trust being the core component behind most large issues in life, such as money, relationships, voting, driving...trust this : to error is human, to really screw something up takes a computer.

Yes, and they recruit and draft for it, and have full carpet bombs and everything. The definition of war, by US standards, is when Congress declares it.

Newspeak, eh ?-)

You do realize that yours is an utterly ridicilous argument, don't you ? The definition of war in common language is a conflict between large armed forces, which certainly fit Vietnam.

I'd imagine, that had the USSR launched a nuclear attack during the cold war, you'd have called that a war, even before your congress got around to formally deciding that.

We lost a 'police action' trying to keep democracy in a nation. We didn't lose our homeland to an invading force.

You got involved in a foreign war, performed various atrocities and war crimes, lost to an inferior force, abandoned your allies and escaped. Are you really arguing that this was less shamefull than fighting against a superior invasion army to save one's homeland and losing ?

The joke would be funnier if it wasn't told every time someone mentions France.

Sorta like when linux and bugs and viruses are mentioned when a Microsoft story is mentioned? You don't seem to mind that...

What does spreading information about current computer security threats have to do with retelling the same tired joke for 60 years ?

The thing is, most Microsoft jokes are actually quite accurate - Microsoft products are, generally speaking, buggy and very vulnerable to viruses, whereas Linux is neither. Microsofts business ethics also seem to be somewhat lacking, as evidenced by the conviction of abuse of monopoly by your own justice system.

On the other hand, twisting 60 year old history time and again just because you can't think of any new jokes is annoying. Especially since it gets invariably modded to +5 Funny.

Or is this some kind of misguided patriotic anger at France, because it was smart enough to stay out of Iraq ?

Not to be unfair to your well-taken larger point, but your premise is only true in theory.

Exceptions to the military following the orders of politicians come in various ways, from self-protection to obstinance. Let's take just one. Sometimes orders are nebulous or ambivalent. Sometimes military engagements are ill-defined. And sometimes deniability goes all the way to the top. Case in point: Tiger Force in Vietnam.

As the Toledo Blade's Pulitzer-winning investigative series established last year, Tiger Force was a law unto itself. Ostensibly performing recon, the truth was much more complex and sinister. In fact, the squad was just raping and murdering whomever they pleased, as surviving members told the Blade's reporters. Nobody specifically ordered them to do what they did. Nor--and this is the key point--did anyone tell them not to do it. (Note for the conspiracy-minded: the Blade is far from being a leftwing publication. It's a family-owned daily newspaper--one of the last--serving steak-and-potatoes Ohio. It doesn't get much more staid than this in journalism.)

Fast-forward to this year's atrocities in Abu Ghraib. The soldiers say they were told to commit torture. Their commanders deny it. The politicians deny it. The truth is probably somewhere in between. We only need look at the souvenir photos of US soldiers committing evil to know it didn't take a politician anywhere to tell them to enjoy it.

We cannot excuse military malfeasance and free-lancing. The answer is oversight, constant and vigilant, and punishment for abuses. And we must be very cautious about what technologies that barely-governable institution is allowed to play with.

...and the other one

If they were warning shots, why didn't the ambulance driver turn back? If you're getting warnign shots fired at you and you continue to do whatever caused the warning shots in the first place you have no right to complain.

The whole aritcle is a bunch reports of people being shot at while in the US controlled areas. So therefore it MUST be US. I mean it's not like the Iraqis would ever harm an innocent right?

So you would agree then that this is a different media picture than the one given by the US media? This is not some far left crazy media outlet, but stodgy old conservative BBC. I assure you the average media outlet anywhere else in the world depicts the US in even worse light. Worldwide conspiracy, or with a grain of truth?

You're right that the article doesn't prove that the allegations against the US troops are true. But it does report both sides of the situation, including Iraqi eye witnesses on the ground, while the US media mostly just reprints Pentagon press releases.

Seriously. Don't take my word for it, read some foreign media on the web for a while. There is plenty of British, Canadian, Australian, Indian, and many other english language news sources you can read.

Is the driver dead? Then it wasn't a sniper and certainly not a US sniper shootig at it. Doing so would violate international law and the uniform code. US soldiers have the felxilbity to disobey orders that are clearly illegal.

Are you implying the US never violates international law or commits war crimes? There is plenty of easily accessible documentation of the opposite.

I don't follow this. Are you suggesting it belongs elsewhere?

Let's look at another case - university costs have gone up 10% over the past year across the nation, for various reasons. Should the administrators be compensated with a pay raise because they're managed to keep the college going through tought times?

You'll probably argue that this isn't the job market. But would you be satisfied if you end up paying raised education costs for a computer science program, only to find yourself in a barren tech industry?

No, dumping refers to selling a product at a price below its value to damage competition.

American tech workers are overpaid. That's becoming apparent. But by completely cutting jobs instead of reducing wages, what chances are corporations giving the working class?

Having family in SE Michigan, I tried to check on the details of the blackout in that area. The Detroit Free Press, a Knight-Ridder newpaper has this story which would have been appropriate for just about any paper nationwide. In contrast, the independent Toledo Blade actually offers a local account of the goings-on, with relevant information like when the power is expected back. Is one-size-fits-all news good enough?

Computer-illiterate power plant manager + Blaster = Blackout

The first time Slashdot covered this story was about five months ago when the event actually occured.

toledoblade.com story
Bart Beavers, a member of the task force based out of the FBI office in Toledo, said search warrants obtained for six other residences were not served because the occupants were not home or for various other reasons.

they need to update their uncapping how-to and add at the very end :

if guys in suits show up at your residence, do NOT answer the door.

Sure it does

The Toledo Blade and Buckeye Cable are both owned by Block Communications Incorporated

Makes you think, doesn't it?

When I visited the Toledo Blade's main page, I noticed something interesting: the banner ads at the top *and* bottom of the page were for none other than our new favorite ISP, Buckeye Express. One at the top for their digital cable, one at the bottom for their ISP "service".

The only other banner ad I've seen on the site is for the local TV station -- and out of 6 pages (12 ads) I pulled up, only 4 of them (1/3) were for the TV station. The rest were either Buckeye cable or Buckeye internet.

Both ads are served through doubleclick.net (wish we could /. this site!), so it seems possible that they're just randomly placed. Sometimes, you even have the ironic juxtaposition of a story about Buckeye bracketed by ads for the service.

The paper's relationship with a major advertiser makes me wonder. Just how big was the "raid"? Was the FBI even really involved at all? The story says "Members of the Toledo police computer crimes task force and FBI agents seized computers and modems..." without ever telling how many FBI agents were involved or interviewing anyone with the local FBI office.

But they did get an interview with "Paul Shryock, vice president of information technology at Buckeye CableSystem."

Did the Toledo Blade blow things out of proportion at the behest of their biggest online advertiser? Did the local DA need a high-profile "cyber crime" in the week before election day, but couldn't get any of the local pedophiles to cooperate? Are we getting the whole story here?

At least we know the answer to the last question.

Searches by police, FBI target bandits of bandwidth

it looks like the providers are implementing a broad front attack on users. I've already heard of Buckeye users cancelling their accounts but with no competition in an area, its DSL hell or dial-up. A great choice (but at least with dial-up I don't get many telemarketers - they just show up in my spam box).

Blade Communications Inc.
541 N. Superior St.
Toledo, OH 43660

Phone: 419-724-6000
Fax: 419-724-6080
Online: Web Site

Mr. Paul W. Shryock
Buckeye Cablevision, Inc.
5566 Southwyck Blvd.
Toledo, Ohio 43607
Fax: 419-724-7074

" You're welcome to try Buckeye Express for yourself in our Customer Service lobby at 5566 Southwyck Blvd [Toledo OH]. "

Buckeye info: 419-724-9800
Tech Support: 419-724-3278

-=Ivan