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There is zero risk of supercriticality.

Look, I'm sure the risk is small; it may even be "infinitesimal" but it isn't zero. Consider for example a situation where the containment vessel is cracked (as has already happened) and that crack leads to the uranium going down into one particular area of the vessel. Consider also the situation where the bottom of the vessel has been filled in with other material (dried up salt from sea water?) forcing a change in configuration.

There are reasons to believe that a stable critical mass will not be reached; it's incredibly difficult to do and the uranium will tend to blow it's self apart immediately that happens meaning that no real nuclear explosion will happen. However, a little more humility and a whole bunch more circumspection would really help you maintain credibility for when you want to persuade people that the modern "safe" nuclear plants really are safe.

That's the trouble. Nuclear plants are held to a massively high standard of "safe" already.

Did you know, for example, that Coal kills 4,000 (not a typo) more people per wattHour than Nuclear does? But its a slow, boring kind of killed, like the 40,000+ who die every year in automobile accidents in the US alone, not the fun exciting kind of killed that you get every couple of years when an airliner crashes and kills 200 folk halfway around the globe, making national news.

To have a meaningful discussion you need to compare nuclear safety to other power-generation mechanisms (more people fall off roofs installing solar panels and die every year than have been killed by nuclear power generation disasters). And then scale them to account for the power generated. Once you do so, you realize just how unsafe many of the alternatives actually are.

And those thyroid cancers - while exceedingly unpleasant - killed about 40 people.

Nuclear is not 100% safe. Nothing is. It does happen to be about 4,000 times as safe as Coal though, measured in terms of human deaths per megawatt generated.

The law lists a fixed amount of statutory damage per infringement. So their calculations are correct.

The judge says you're wrong. See page 3 (PDF page 4) of the ruling.

an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work, for which any one infringer is liable individually, or for which any two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally, in a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 as the court considers just.

It has long been held that statutory damages apply once for each work infringed. The 13 record companies argued that the word 'or' applied three commas back rather than applying to the comma immediately preceding the word. The record companies argued that when two or more people are involved the $750 to $30,000 award applied to each copy rather than each work.

If you continue to the last paragraph on page 5 of the PDF you will see the judge rejected that interpretation. The judge found that the actual number of copies was a key factor influencing where the award would fall in the $750 to $30,000 range. The part after the word 'or' simply means that when two or more people infringe together they share responsibility rather than having a separate damage award against each of them.

The record companies even put forth the judge's interpretation throughout most of the litigation. They didn't ask for damages per copy until they hired a new law firm in September 2010, some four months after the court granted summary judgment.

With the judge's interpretation, damages would be somewhere between $7.5 million and $1.5 billion. That is still astonishingly high but nowhere near the $75 trillion the record companies were asking for.

"You should have chosen a law school."

You're really joking right? more and more

Lawyer's have is worse than IT!

"You should have chosen a law school."

You're really joking right? more and more

Lawyer's have is worse than IT!

Exclusive partnerships, by their very nature, lock out competition and as such are innately anti-competitive.

Rather than seeing AT&T buy up besieged T-Mo (I use a T-mo prepaid sim in my smart phone, btw. No data plan, I use wifi hotspots for data.) I would rather see handset makers barred from signing exclusive backroom deals-- the whole "Give us $$$, and we'll partner exclusively!" shit has to end.

If the iPhone had been readily available on multiple carriers from the go, then at least two things would have been avoided. Namely, AT&T's network wouldnt have crashed into the floor from data service use, Verizon would have picked up a fair chunk of the iPhone userbase (Even if CDMA is inferior to GSM in this regard, being unable to use data while talking-- end users would not know that, nor notice, most likely), and T-Mobile would have been directly competitive with AT&T's offerings.

Instead you had a very sweet price inflation due to regulated supply coupled with excessive demand, which worked VERY nicely for Apple and AT&T, at the expense of the rest of the already under-competitive cellular market. It practically stinks of racketeering. (Yes, I know this threat is passed now, with the new exception in the DMCA for it, yet in the historical period I am railing against Apple+ATT really did play the That's a nice iPhone you have there, shame if something were to happen to it. card to keep iphone users from letting the air out of their price inflation scheme.)

The REAL solution is to ban these kinds of backroom deals, and enforce against them. (Sadly, no money-minded politician will campaign for, or enact such a provision, because killing backroom deals would kill a good portion of their "Campaign Funding")

I fucking HATE apple right now.

You typically receive a breakdown pie-chart of how the taxes are spent each year, by your state (usually around January or February). I haven't looked at every state, but the two that I've lived in most recently have shown education expenses between around 55% to 60% despite the states having frequent loud "we don't spend enough of the money on education and we can't give the students quality schooling, because of it!" contingent. Namely, Oregon and Colorado.

I only did minimal digging around, so I didn't grab it straight from the source, but here's a chart sourced from the state of Oregon that shows 54% spent on education, 17% spent on prisons, 24% spent on human services. Colorado is at about 49% on education. Washington looks to be about 40%. Other states that I've looked at seem to show education as the biggest chunk of expenses and often accounting for around half of all expenses.

In addition, the federal government also budgets for education to supplement this.

Oregon Tax Dollars: Where do they come from and where do they go?

Colorado Tax Expenses Breakdown

Washington Tax Expense Breakdown

As a result, I have always had a difficult time taking complaints of "we don't have enough money!" seriously, when they often consume more tax resources than every other expense, combined.

The guy went to jail was being paid by Hezbollah to broadcast the station($28K/month). http://ztruth.typepad.com/ztruth/2008/12/new-york-javed-iqbal-pleads-guilty-to-broadcasting-hezbollah-television-in-us.html

Posada is finally being tried for the airline bombing which, although he is a terrorist, he may not have done. http://venezuela-us.org/2011/01/28/el-paso-diary-day-9-in-the-trial-of-posada-carriles-abascals-testimony-damages-posadas-defense/

Even Cuba admits the five cubans are inteligence officers sent to the US to spy, it's just a matter of what they were sent here to spy on. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Five

I don't believe this guy should be freed(and he likely won't be freed). He wasn't doing this out of concern for people, he was doing it because he was getting paid by the US. He's a mercenary, but he didn't kill anyone so instead of being executed he's being sent to prison.

When I read it, the book was Michael Swanwick's excellent 'Vacuum Flowers':

http://tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said_the_tensor/2005/02/earthless.html

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/vacuum.htm

"What you have to understand is the extreme speed with which the technology blossomed," Bors said. "When Earth first became conscious, it used all its resources to spread the technology as efficiently as possible. The first transceiver was implanted in March, let's say, and all Earth was integrated by Christmas. The first clear notion anybody off-planet had of what had actually happened was when the warcraft were launched."

This was written in 1987, 6 years before Vinge's essay on the Singularity, which references it. And here, before anyone had heard of the Cylon Hybrids or even the Borg, is Swanwick's sample of a 'Comprise' brain at work:

"Rotate grating six raise two and rotate again reroute quote the Comprise agree in principle but with reservations unquote raise the vial of eagle's blood reroute using Allen wrench adjust the potentiometer to the red mark reroute ship to Sanfrisco marked green code green reroute injecting kerosene between vascular stations seventeen and twelve reroute bedding excavation-"

Remember, this is the news channel that doesn't understand how a pie chart works (or simply cannot add to 100).

http://ebroodle.typepad.com/ebroodle/2009/11/republican-pie-chart-fail.html

You expect them to understand anything more complex than an abacus?

People over and over again seem to fall for this mistake. Saudi Arabia is the only country that requires women to be escorted with a "mahram." No other Muslim country makes this claim that it's a requirement,

That's nonsense, and you know it.

While the Taliban ruled Afghanistan mahram was the norm.
In many tribal zones in Pakistan this is still the norm.

But that's just one part of the problem. Shall we talk about Honor Killings? That practice is actually spreading, even to Canada and the US.

How about you prove your side?

You seriously can't find anyone taking a realistic look at the so called, "fair tax", and finding it wanting?

Google is your friend.

Ever heard of Brad DeLong (a professor of Economics and chair of the Political Economy major at the University of California, Berkeley)? Wow, that took like 15 seconds...

I suppose he is an idiot too because he doesn't agree with you...

I've read a lot about it. It's just one more plan to make the rich pay less and everyone else pay more...

if they prove deliberate destruction of evidence, doesn't that constitute admission of guilt? or some other loss-by-default?

No, but it does allow the prosecutor to give the jury instructions that they may make a adverse inference[1] as to the contents of the destroyed relevant evidence from the fact that the defendant knowingly (sometimes even negligently) destroyed it. Essentially, they are telling the jury that they can infer that the evidence would weaken the defendant's case from the fact that he willfully destroyed it.[2] The jury is not required to make such an inference but it may -- as contrasted from the fact that prosecutors are forbidden from trying to make adverse inferences from a refusal to testify based on 5A grounds, such jury instructions would be illegal and the whole conviction overturned.

This is a very onerous instruction and so is reserved for cases in which it was shown that the destruction was knowing or negligent but it's necessary in order for the discovery system to work. In the absence of a adverse inference rule, litigants would have a very strong incentive to preemptively destroy any incriminating evidence as soon as they became aware of an investigation or a lawsuit. In cases against corporations in which internal emails/documents play a pivotal role in proving that the behavior was part of a pattern/policy of the company (and not merely a rogue employee) this would be fatal to the plaintiff/State. The same logic applies in cases against the State[3] where they refuse to disclose evidence that might be favorable to the defendant.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_inference
[2] http://vegaslitigator.com/blog/?cat=50 (discussing the Nevada statute, not the Federal one, but many parallels and the same basic concepts exist).
[3] http://legalholds.typepad.com/legalholds/2009/04/negligent-destruction-of-evidence-is-sufficient-to-support-an-adverse-inference-instruction-although.html An interesting case in which police destruction of evidence helps to get defendants off the hook because they allege that the destroyed evidence would undermine the State's case. IOW, the adverse-inference doctrine cuts both for and against the State. The defendants did eventually convince the court that the radio communications were relevant.

What's probably a more pertinent concern is the dearth of relevant information for those people.

Well, everyone remembers: http://williamkamkwamba.typepad.com/ we had a few posts here at /. about him.

He pulled the information from the library; the books were in English, which he did not speak. Can't you imagine someone like him pulling similar instructions from makezine.com and running it through babel fish on his OLPCsystem? Even learning another language in the hopes of getting out of their impoverished area would be useful. Sure, all I use the internet for is pr0n and celebrity gossip, and every so often /., but there is no dearth of information out there that is actually useful (the ratio of useful to useless is likely small, I'll give you that).

There is alot of other stuff we take for granted: quickly looking up things on wikipedia, knowing areas we've never been with google earth. In some places, all you know about the world is what you've seen and what you your parents thought to tell you. Further, almanacs and weather predictions, which many of us don't need anymore, would be hideously valued if your lively hood is agriculture.

in a small town or village in a place that takes hours or days to drive to

If it takes you hours or days to get to a library or get the news, slow internet would be huge.

The point he made is that you could, if you want to live in Somalia, for example, which is apparently a libertarian paradise.

1. Is Somalia A Libertarian Paradise?
2. Solamia "was an experiment in anarchy, not libertarianism. Libertarianism is dependant on a small government providing for the protection of rights and enforcement of contracts."
3. "Somalia as libertarian paradise? "That response would, of course, be the one John Locke offered four centuries ago:"

   liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others, which cannot be where there is no law; and is not, as we are told, “a liberty for every man to do what he lists.” For who could be free, when every other man’s humour might domineer over him? But a liberty to dispose and order freely as he lists his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own.

Selective cognition is selective.

It most certainly is.

Falcon

Time travel means nothing if you don't have Arnold. But then again, he wasn't too good at solving problems in real life, but he did do good in movies. I hope to see the evolution of the internet for robots :D

Coal and NG: 0%

Really? The Coal industry gets *no* money from the federal gov't?

EPA Act 2005 "$2.3 billion in tax credits. Of these, 18 request credits for integrated gasification combined cycle plants and 4 for advanced coal-based generation plants. Applications include projects using bituminous, subbituminous, and lignite coals to be built in 19 states" and "$2.7 billion in tax credits. Project are proposed in 17 states: Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington"

Not all 'subsidies' are grants. If they get tax credits for their work it's the same thing. The Oil industry gets tens of billions of dollars in tax breaks annually.

$17 billion between 2002 and 2008 for coal source

Nuclear is certainly green from the point of view of CO2 production

and Coal is green from the aspect of the electricity fairy farts you so astutely mentioned. Nuclear needs massive subsidies to ever get off the ground. $8 billion loan guarantees And it has waste issues. Why not put that money towards something that doesn't have those issues?

Mod this up. I've seen a lot of screwy analogies, but this one is first class. (Of course, there is the minor problem that half the world's economists seem to have completely forgotten everything the world has ever learned about macro. "Perhaps macroeconomics should be banned." —J. Bradford DeLong.)

Usually in classics it doesn't feel like someone is stabbing your ears with awl. Ok, sometimes it does, but I am not a fan of all classics anyway.

Lets compare two movies – Avatar (physical and emotional pain) and Ultraviolet (enjoyed a lot).

In Ultraviolet (not popular) plot is scarce: love story – one innuendo; description of the times they live in – few paragraphs. To understand anything, you really have to follow. But the part of the plot that is there is OK and makes sense, id est, I can understand why each character is doing what what they do, or at least imagine valid reason.

In Avatar, the things that happen simply don't make this emotional sense:

1. Harmony with nature – we plug them and own them (mind you that only Navi can pwn others)
2. Dialogues, that are cheesy and hard to believe.
3. Bad guys are sooooo evil and despicable. I can feel, how script writer is poking my brain to make me feel hate towards them. It is like super-stimuli and I am no fan of it.

I think this unattractive to true spammers due to the $0.01 per hundred messages charge, and they'll just be terminated anyways. The real spammers send millions of messages a day, most of them to invalid recipients that never get anywhere.

Most spam abuse of SES is likely to come from the uninformed, or misguided newbies.

As described on amazon's site

:

• When you first register, you'll have access to the SES "sandbox" where you can send email only to addresses that you have verified. The verification process sends a confirmation email to the address to be verified; the recipient must click on a link embedded in the email in order to verify the address. You must also verify the email address (or addresses) that will be used to send messages.
• At this point, with verified addresses in hand, you can send up to 200 messages per day, at a maximum rate of 1 message per second.
• Once your application is up and running, the next step is to request production access using the SES Production Access Request Form. We'll review your request and generally contact you within 24 hours.
• Once granted production access, you will no longer have to verify the destination addresses and you'll be able to send email to any address. ... SES will begin to increase your daily sending quota and your maximum send rate based on a number of factors including the amount of email that you send, the number of rejections and bounces that occur, and the number of complaints that it generates. This will occur gradually over time as your activities provide evidence that you are using SES in a responsible manner.
• Newly verified production accounts can send up to 1,000 emails every 24 hours.

Yeah, well, the money for such things isn't available these days. What are you going to do? Not start wars in the middle east? Stop letting a handful of rich executives scoop up all the world's money? Who will buy the mega-yachts and supercars, or the mega-yachts with supercars inside? Won't somebody think of the supercar-launching-mega-yacht builders!?

Randi very clearly lays out of the bounds of any tests beforehand, and what is considered proof. ...And then changes those parameters at any time. If you Google this you'll see many independent complaints about this.

If anyone had actually passed that test, they would, you know, sue him, because they were promised payment of a million dollars if they did that. There is an actual contract with actual winning conditions.

No can do, as per the contract, which is designed to benefit James, not the applicant:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/89173/exposing_the_unfair_truth_about_the.html

But since you've made that claim, you should be able to demonstrate that Randi has, at least once, laid out a test and winning conditions, and then backpeddled once someone actually won.

Except it's no contract in the lawful sense. Seek and Ye shall find:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/89173/exposing_the_unfair_truth_about_the_pg2.html?cat=17

Video: James Randi Challenge Exposed - A Lawyer Explains:
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1442

Professor Michael Prescott found that James Randi’s million dollar challenge is very much an illusion that have fooled people for decades:
http://torbjornsassersson.wordpress.com/2010/05/02/james-randi-and-his-one-million-dollar-challenge-fraud/
http://michaelprescott.freeservers.com/challenge.htm

Examples (hard to find these days as SEO or litigations have made sites disappear, they used to be easy to find):

Rico Kolodzey
http://www.rense.com/general50/james.htm

Riley G Matthews
http://www.rileyg.com/pressdir.htm

Serios
http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/michael_prescotts_blog/2006/08/lets_get_serios.html

Or you are a liar and a slanderer who has accused someone of criminal fraud.

These are not my claims, and there are many many more, however hard to find now. Some is to be found in articles, some in books. I'll let the reader make the good judgement wether this is true or false, I don't have the time or interest to investigate it in detail for you.

You missed my point entirely though. Since everything "supernatural" can be explained away with magic tricks or similar mundane tricks, then it is impossible to prove that you just did something "supernatural". If you read more about James Randi, you'll see his argumentation is dismissive of diversity of people, intolerant and arrogant. So the "Challenge" then quickly turns into a fight for survival, and often end up in the courts. Not very nice.

Yeah, you moron, because that's what he's testing.

Wow, where did that come from?

If he let people win by 'statistics', he'd have a constant stream of people claiming they could predict a coin toss 75% of the time....and eventually one of them would happen to do that. Because that's how statistics work.

But how can you ever dismiss statistics? It is crucial to make discoveries and validate them in any field. Nothing is ever as black and white as some people want the world to be..

This has been discussed to death in other forums. If a basketball player misses the hoop 1 in 100 shots, is she no longer a basketball player? This is the way statistics is being misused to dismiss any results in the JRF chalenge. In the

As pointed out, the science geeks who criticize astrology usually focus on the trappings. They evaluate astrology as a hard science and, not surprisingly, find it lacking.

A game developer posted an interesting article about Astrology as Fiction. Meaning, don't look at it as an ironclad way to try to predict the future, but look at it like we do with games and stories. For example, we don't criticize Star Wars for being false even though the story is entirely made up. But, there's still some value to the story, and likewise with astrology.

I think the biggest value of astrology is that it introduces another point of view to consider. Reading "a tall, dark stranger will enter your life!" might make me think of a tall, dark friend who might be able to help me with a current problem. Not that much different than chatting with someone while considering a problem to generate ideas, only astrology merely requires the daily paper not someone's time. Sure, there are some people who take astrology too literally, but that's kind of like someone believing Star Wars is real; a sign of possible problems in the individual, not a reason to ban fiction.

Really? Americans sold them fully automatic AKs and hand grenades?
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_mmBw3uzPnJI/TDL6TdwOQuI/AAAAAAABaVU/B1QMkH2PuQw/s1600/weapons_of_mexican_drug_cartel_17.jpg
http://www.deseretnews.com/photos/midres/874557.jpg

Those RPG's came from the US?
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_mmBw3uzPnJI/TDL5zWaiA5I/AAAAAAABaT0/cpJghwohg9c/s1600/weapons_of_mexican_drug_cartel_29.jpg
http://ppjg.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/picture5.jpg

That M60 was probably made in the US, but sure as fuck didn't come to cartel hands thru Texas!
http://stylemens.typepad.com/details__details/images/2008/11/17/power10.jpg

M1919 wow!
http://img.breitbart.com/images/2009/4/14/ap-p/9d90422f-c905-457a-8e1a-3f3d9f401f9f.jpg

The argument that all those firearms comes from the US is a red herring from Mexico to place blame on the US, which anti-gunners, the media, and power-hungry politicians latched onto like rabid dogs.

On one hand you have South America which has been at the center of cold-war proxy wars for decades with all kinds of ordanance.... on the other hand, maybe cartels prefer semi-auto rifles and revolvers for twice the price?

Think critically some time.

Besides, where the hell do you get something like THIS in the US?
http://www.everydaynodaysoff.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Mexican-Drug-Lord-Guns-Diamonds-5.jpg

If you like someone who murders people, regularly steals from the government to enrich himself, sets up a paradise for criminals, maintains his rule through fear and oppression, and just made himself supreme dictator for life and you'll be shot if you say otherwise, be my guest.

Just don't be surprised if I tend to disagree with you.

You forgot some things: in particular, the GPU and DVD
The full story: Revisiting "How Much Power Does My Laptop Really Use"?
Graph

In the unlikely case that you were not: Show me any evidence from a reputable source that Ayers wrote DOMF and that refutes all the statements to the contrary (see 1 or 2 for instance). Tell me why a part-time university lecturer, who in his other job is a State Senator and is campaigning for the US senate needs do scholarly publication (something that is usually of necessity only for full-time tenure-track positions).

Well, there is heavy suggestion from the structure of the writing that it was Ayers: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/breakthrough_on_the_authorship_1.html And, of course, he admitted it. http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2009/10/bill-ayers-admits-he-wrote-dreams-of-my-father.html

Also, since you seem less-than-well-informed about student writing in the HLR: The president of the HLR is also editor-in-chief, and as such contributes as well. The president is selected from the editors, so any president has done some writing before. Most if not all student writing in HLR takes the form of Notes, Recent Cases, Recent Legislation, and Book Notes. The _articles_ in HLR are by professors, judges, and law practitioners, so it is entirely unsurprising that neither Obama nor any of his other sophomore classmates have published any articles in HLR.

He would have published, either before or after, because he is a lawyer. A Juris Doctorate is a doctorate level degree. He is an academic, and law students (promising ones, at least) do write law review articles -- and sign them. Obama didn't so any of the things that a law review editor does -- he didn't write or even cosign on any articles, he's never published as an attorney, and he didn't even get a Supreme Court clerkship like most HLR editors. He has every appearance of someone who just spending time and checking off boxes on a resume.

The paper notebook, with the password written in it, sitting next to the computer, is also joint property.

Totally with you on that one. To expand on my analogy, what if both spouses have a joint PO box? Both have a key, but do they have the right to open the letters addressed solely to the other spouse? So, I did a little homework.. I think this one is going to come down to whether the judge equates e-mail to postal mail.

You don't need Wikileaks or /. comments to see obvious evidence of fraud, corruption and criminal activity by BofA and all of the other big banks.

Municipal bond bid-rigging

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-24/bankers-rigging-municipal-contract-bids-admit-to-lying-to-cover-up-tracks.html

Failing to transfer mortgage notes into MBS trusts . . . but not keeping them on the balance sheets either? Hmmmmm.

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2010/11/countrywide-routinely-failed-to-send-key-docs-to-mbs-trustees.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EconomistsView+(Economist's+View+(EconomistsView))
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-02/bofa-drags-balance-sheet-confidence-backward-commentary-by-jonathan-weil.html

These are great because a senior BofA executive testified under oath that BofA routinely never trasnferred mortgage notes to the mortgage trusts when they were sold as "Mortgage Backed Securities" i.e. they were really "Nothing Backed Securities"

Now, the funny part is that BofA is Disavowing the testimony of its own executive.

http://www.bankinvestmentconsultant.com/news/bofa-mortgage-2670073-1.html?zkPrintable=1&nopagination=1

If you need any further evidence of fradu and corruption, "4closurefraud.com" also has a mountain of dirt and evidence of fraud, forgery and corruption bu BofA and the other the big banks.

Anyone still doing business with these scumbags is either completely apathetic to the idea of "voting with your dollars" as a form of social activism, or just a fool.

Oh, don't be silly. Of course they're a group. Group, group, group. A group of very definite people who aren't anonymous and who commit deliberate deeds. Under the law, they are a conspiracy, i.e. a group of people planning and executing crimes. They don't have to know anything more than each others' nicknames for that. They are a group. They sa And the media is whitewashing them terribly -- and so are many of you. http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2010/12/major-media-white-washing-4chan-anonglobalpr-agitprop.html

This blogger "claims" that someone at Google did this by accident, that, "the person who shared this clearly wasn’t supposed to."

This is Google. Google knows what it's doing. They don't have such an extensive interview process just to hire idiots who don't know a mouse from a keyboard.

This was a planned leak designed specifically for marketing purposes.

Oscar Swartz is the founder of that company, and seems like a pretty cold guy.
Blog here (swedish): http://swartz.typepad.com/

There are places on the internet where smart people think very hard about issues like this. It turns out that the most effective terrorism is inspired by Open Source Software models, where sharing and reuse of common components improves efficiency. (It's not so strange to think of the Kalashnikov or a bomb detonator design as a piece of code.) The goal of terrorists is to de-legitimize national governments by causing them to weaken or collapse. Then, non-state entities can find a niche in the vacuum left behind. They've been incredibly effective in Mexico, Nigeria and many other places. Giant powers like the USA and the USSR are much harder beast to take down, but clearly, there is precedent.

There's plenty of controversy about the new full body scanners that the TSA is installing at airports, and plenty more about the way some TSA agents are handling those that choose to opt out.

The heart of the matter comes from the fact that the TSA often doesn't understand that it is in show business, not security business. A rational look at the threats facing travelers would indicate that intense scrutiny of a four ounce jar of mouthwash or aggressive frisking of a child is a misplaced use of resources. If the goal is to find dangerous items in cargo or track down Stinger missiles, this isn't going to help.

Instead, the mission appears to be twofold:

1. Reassure the public that the government is really trying and

2. Keep random bad actors off guard by frequently raising the bar on getting caught

The challenge with #1 is that if people believe they're going to get groped, or get cancer, or have to wait in line even longer on Thanksgiving, they cease to be on your side. Particularly once they realize how irrational it is to try to stop a threat after it's already been perpetrated. (Imagine the havoc if someone had a brassiere-based weapon...)

And the challenge of #2 is that the cost of raising the bar gets higher and higher.

Smart marketers know how to pivot. I think it's time to do that. Start marketing the idea that flying is safe, like driving, but it's not perfect, like driving. If someone is crazy enough to hurt themselves or spend their life in jail, we're not going to stop them, and even if we did, they'd just cause havoc somewhere else. So instead of spending billions of dollars a year in time and money pretending, let's just get back to work.

The current model doesn't scale.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/11/groping-for-a-marketing-solution-tsa-and-security-theater.html

This is very much like what Schneier has been saying for years, but nobody else really cared till things got sexual. Isn't that like our species ;-)

Schneier, from 2005:

Exactly two things have made airline travel safer since 9/11: reinforcement of cockpit doors, and passengers who now know that they may have to fight back. Everything else -- Secure Flight and Trusted Traveler included -- is security theater. We would all be a lot safer if, instead, we implemented enhanced baggage security -- both ensuring that a passenger's bags don't fly unless he does, and explosives screening for all baggage -- as well as background checks and increased screening for airport employees.
Then we could take all the money we save and apply it to intelligence, investigation and emergency response. These are security measures that pay dividends regardless of what the terrorists are planning next, whether it's the movie plot threat of the moment, or something entirely different.

Simple. All-Purpose. Protest. Stick Out Your Tongue

Yah, the glory days.

Now you have people like THIS

http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2010/09/former_los_alamos_physicist_ch.html

and THIS

http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2007/07/oak-ridge-emplo.html

It looks a little like a rocket launch: http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:isb6V-eFHtqIzM:http://www.edpadgett.com/blog/uploaded_images/rocket-742730.jpg&t=1

Except it was too smooth.

This one's in pretty calm air, though, and the corkscrew is probably energy scrubbing, maybe the guidance system having a temporary issue, maybe a layer of different wind direction:

http://timesnews.typepad.com/news/images/us_missile_launch.jpg

This, on the other hand, is a time-lapse exposure of the flame, so its path is affected by wind; the smoke is not visible at all:

http://kbhr933.com/wp-content/uploads/Vandenberg-Launch.jpg

Or, we can look for an answer that doesn't paint most of us as backwards hyper-religious hicks... I know that (especially from the outside) it certainly seems like we are from all the news coverage and wacky stories, but most people here who are religious follow a gentler, kinder, more accepting version.

The question is: do sufficient number of you follow the "God is a psychopath" version of Christianity to account for the differences in this poll? Well, according to this Slactivist post, Tim LaHaye has sold 65 million books. Now, these books aren't going to sell on quality - because they're bloody awful - so they must be selling because there's at least 65 million people who agree with his viewpoint. And 65 million of 310 million is about 20%, which is certainly enough to affect statistics.

Unfortunately, those of us who share some views considered right wing (eg, my views on taxes, many social programs, and guns) get lumped together with those assholes

I'm sorry to say this, but sharing right-wing viewpoint on taxes and social programs - namely, that the poor should shoulder the majority of the tax burden and die rather than get any support - does make you an asshole. In fact it's pretty much the definition of an asshole. Perhaps you meant "those lunatics"?

I would suggest that a non-religious reason for not giving up or resigning ourselves is just a "don't ever give up" mentality.

"Don't ever give up" is a fine explanation when you're, say, fighting cancer. It doesn't really make sense when you're dying of old age and have no chance of ever leaving hospital.

Have a good friend, Russell who broke both his arms. This might help give a new perspective on the issue.

This is a common criticism of the left, and it is designed to protect members of the right from real charges of racism. Let me be clear, your comment contains no element of racism. The statement "the Tea Party are racists" is inaccurate, but "some Tea Party members, including leaders in the movement, espouse racist views" is accurate.

I could point to Mike Williams, Glenn Beck's "deap-seated hatred of white people" comment (among many other comments), or a host of others for examples of the movement in general (liberal Joan Walsh seems to have a nice summary).

What these all have in common is they are specific examples of racism, not general "they're all racists!" kind of fear-mongering. I commend the Tea Party for dealing with its racist fringe the way it has. I think that is the proper way to handle these issues, not putting your head in the sand and shouting "both sides" (a la Rand Paul when a MoveOn protestor got stomped on by his volunteer).

Liberals weren't clamoring for McCain's birth certificate. We aren't accusing John Boehner of anti-colonial sentiment driving his decisions. Sure, there are boneheaded liberals. You're welcome to bring it up. I'll take a look and decide that Olbermann's off his rocker, or that Media Matters is too whiny (which sometimes I do find).

You have to allow for the possibility that, sometimes (or often), liberals are crying racism not because it's a political gambit to appeal to "stupid voters", but because someone on your side is being a racist.

Hereyouare

2kw is possible if the car is very aerodynamic. The power required for wind resistance at 25 km/s ( = 56 mph ) and a drag coefficient of 0.25 = about 2 kw or 2.6 HP per m^2 cross sectional area.

Your car has 150hp so it can accelerate up to highway speed quickly. It only needs a few HP to maintain highway speed. 40HP is all you need to keep an average mid-sized car going along on the highway at 100kmh. 40HP is about 30Kw, so for most cars he is off by a factor of ten.

And then there is this absolutely priceless anecdote about Billy Kristol, the scion of the founder of The Weekly Standard: http://thegspot.typepad.com/blog/2008/10/most-awesome-wi.html .

I remember back in the late '90s when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture to an economic philosophy class I was taking. It was a great lecture, made more so by the fact that the class was only about ten or twelve students and we got got ask all kinds of questions and got a lot of great, provocative answers. Anyhow, Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol back either during the first Bush administration. The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at The White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at UPenn and the Kennedy School of Government. With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. "I oppose it", Irving replied. "It subverts meritocracy."

FFS, trash IE6 and the ERP systems. Jesus H. Christ, they can do SOMETHING new and different. Rewrite the crap in FLash, for crying out loud. Rewrite it to run in Java VM. Or, go back and code a real damned application. I don't give one small rat's ass about shit designed to run with/under/on/around IE6. Braindead sumbitches actually paid real money for that crap - let them pay to fix the problems encountered now that IE6 is dead. Pay through the freaking nose! http://ken_ashford.typepad.com/.a/6a00d834515b2069e201053605c23c970c-pi Play us some music, FFS

It's more than that. Since most Linux systems use ext{2,3,4}, CFQ is designed to behave very well with them. However, XFS and JFS do better with deadline or no-op. In fact, on my Athlon 64 X2 w/ 4G RAM, using XFS and CFQ at 2.5GHz did worse than XFS and deadline at 1GHz. Yes, CFQ and XFS clash that badly.

(Site pimp: I did some of my own testing, and reported on it here. I also provide basic shell scripts, so others can do their own tests.)

What made you so mad at Christians in general? You are a true odd ball. Do you hate everything in this world that you are unable to achieve? I've known people like that, and you reek of it.

This blog entry is actually a good starting point, if you're sincere about wanting to know why people "hate" Christians. (Some ads on the page may be NSFW.)

*sigh* Thanks a lot for burning 2 hours of my time (supposed to be writing at the moment) :p. That's a wonderful blog entry and I (naturally) started reading her other posts as well. Amazingly lucid writer - she goes on my 'permanent reading' list. Cheers/

So you're saying priests, bishops, and the pope are moustache-twirling Machiavellian types who just want to manipulate people? That they don't care about the spiritual and emotional well-being of their fellow faithful?

Insofar as we're talking about the "top executives" of the Church, absolutely. As in any centralized and bureaucratic organization, the higher you go, the more rife the corruption is.

To what end are they running this manipulation? Is it a 2000 year old secret conspiracy to accomplish... what exactly?

It's not a secret conspiracy, since the Church is out there in the open, and so is its hierarchy. It's just a scheme to maintain power for those on the top. Significantly less power than some time in the past, mind you. Ever wondered why the Church fought any egalitarian movements - republicanism, and later socialism - tooth and nail, "embracing" them only after the defeat was completely clear?. Why they so happily supported the authoritarian regimes of Franco and Salazar, so long as they were willing to share some of that power with the Church?

The other aspect is money. Catholic Church is not exactly poor, and it's those on the top which effectively control it. And, last I checked, neither the Pope nor the cardinals practice good honest Christian asceticism on a day-to-day basis, nor even anything approaching to it. To give an example to compare against, the priest in this picture - walking on the street among random people - was a Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Maybe if more church heads were willing to live like that, the churches would get more respect...

What made you so mad at Christians in general? You are a true odd ball. Do you hate everything in this world that you are unable to achieve? I've known people like that, and you reek of it.

This blog entry is actually a good starting point, if you're sincere about wanting to know why people "hate" Christians. (Some ads on the page may be NSFW.)

In some jurisdictions. "Surveillance requires warrant"

Here's what the man himself had to say about his wife on the eve of his conviction:

Ask me what has been my most fortunate experience of the past two decades, and I’d say it was gaining the selfless love of my wife, Liu Xia. She cannot be present in the courtroom today, but I still want to tell you, my sweetheart, that I'm confident that your love for me will be as always. Over the years, in my non-free life, our love has contained bitterness imposed by the external environment, but is boundless in afterthought. I am sentenced to a visible prison while you are waiting in an invisible one. Your love is sunlight that transcends prison walls and bars, stroking every inch of my skin, warming my every cell, letting me maintain my inner calm, magnanimous and bright, so that every minute in prison is full of meaning. But my love for you is full of guilt and regret, sometimes heavy enough hobble my steps. I am a hard stone in the wilderness, putting up with the pummeling of raging storms, and too cold for anyone to dare touch. But my love is hard, sharp, and can penetrate any obstacles. Even if I am crushed into powder, I will embrace you with the ashes....

More quotes and commentary can be found here. I think the Nobel committee may have accidentally found a worthy peace prize recipient for a change.