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The LHC black holes are not new. Physicists have seen super-heavy particles hitting the upper atmosphere for some time. These particles are huge (something like half the plank mass, but memory is a bit fuzzy ), and moving very fast. It is not known where these particles originate from, but the idea of the black holes in the LHC is based on the same mechanism. The LHC black holes would get generated very similarly to the mechanism that these super heavy particles possibly generate black holes in the upper atmosphere. See http://www.college.ucla.edu/news/07/ultra-high-energy-particles.html and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7598996.stm for more info

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-Depression-5409.aspx

The URL says it all.

I refer to the McWhirter-Sanders study (1990) on the subject, as your CDC study curiously is not cited. It is indeed a Kinsey Institute study, but not a Kinsey study. If you can refer to a more recognized, professional institution studying sexual behavior, please do. In the study, nearly 14% of respondents had "more than incidental" homosexual relations. Assuming each one of those is a potential marriage, 13% of the population has potentially been impacted. This is the high end of the figure.

There is also a 2008 Joseph Fried study on the subject indicating a total percentage of approximately 9.8% (broken down among political affiliations for the curious) homosexual relationship experience.

http://www.law.ucla.edu/williamsinstitute/publications/SameSexCouplesandGLBpopACS.pdf

Self-identified population is over 4%; this is a fraction of the actual number and recognizes its own internal problems in methodology.

Your essential mistake is in assuming that only "out" and fully homosexual individuals may wish to marry. Instead, the figure should include anyone who has had more than an incidental same-sex relationship (i.e. everyone but the one-time "experiments"), and thus you are grossly underestimating the percentage. Still, the essential point, that it is a "very small" minority, is simply invalid. They're almost all "very small" minorities; even if you use an overly conservative 5% figure, you've still got a population larger than almost any individual ethnic or religious minority in this country.

You have to spend money to make money.

the gov't doesn't create wealth, so this statement would be valid if it were applied to private enterprise, where every time a dollar exchanges hands, wealth is created.

Create 200k jobs and the economy improves. See the Hoover Dam. I think this is a great idea.

maybe, until you realize that the hoover dam and other infrastructure projects like it actually prolonged the great depression.

Check my math but doesn't 100B for 212,000 jobs equate to $471,698 per job created? Is this why stimulus policies may actually make things worse, not better?

Good critique of Lerner: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/lerner_errors.html Dunno why the summary mentions him at all.

Thanks for the link - nice to see a collection against the nuttiness. I'm waiting for my favorite reply, "But the sun is charged, it emits charged particles, what do you think the solar wind is?". I want to help those people....

Note that the above paper does not mention the "wildly speculative" spiraling magnetic fields idea.

But this is /., where no one cares about science unless it is wildly speculative.

Good critique of Lerner: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/lerner_errors.html Dunno why the summary mentions him at all.

Classically, in most models, "Conservatives" want to minimize government regulation and involvement; while "Liberals" want to maximize it, regulate business, and do all "for the people" that they can-- as far as telling businesses who they have to hire, what they should/must make (see France), to go as far as taking peoples' insurance away and instead forcing their own insurance on them at cost in taxes (see socialized healthcare).

Actually, this is exactly backwards when you look at history prior to, say, 1840ish. Liberals were people who wanted to maximize liberty (individualistic personal freedom) for the sake of individual happiness and prosperity, and Conservatives were people who wanted centralized power (divinely-appointed kings) because it appealed to their aesthetic craving for orderliness and organization. In US history, the split was perhaps best exemplified by the wide gulf between far-Left Jefferson and far-Right Hamilton.

Then around the mid-1800s, things flipped around when a number of thinkers (most notably Karl Marx) decided that the goals of Liberalism (maximum individual happiness and prosperity) could be achieved through the mechanisms of Conservatism (centralized power), and that since centralized power seemed much more "efficient" it should therefore be implemented. (Donald Knuth's comment that "premature optimization is the root of all evil" is apt here.)

The proper Liberal-Conservative spectrum, viewed from that pre-Marx perspective, thus has Classical Liberalism on the far Left, Monarchy on the far Right, and both Fascism and Communism on the far Right just slightly left of Monarchy (with the famed Communism/Fascism mutual hatred stemming from professional jealousy and egoism nearly as much as from actual ideological divides, not much different from the internecine Communist hatreds like Stalinism/Trotskyism and Stalinism/Maoism).

Against this scale, the US Democratic Party is rather ill-defined: most are in a fuzzy mass toward the middle, with some straying far left or right. FDR, today cheered/vilified as a paragon of the Left, was actually a Right-winger who was only a step away from Fascism. If you actually look at what was said during the 1930s, he lavishly praised Mussolini and favored big business interests in the New Deal. He actually had the balls to say that competition was a bad thing, and encouraged industrial consolidation into monopolies. Big businesses were actually major FDR supporters, while small entrepreneurs were squashed as he neutered antitrust laws and increased barriers to entry.

The US Republican Party, in contrast with the Democrats, is divided into three clearly defined and strikingly different camps: the "Social Conservatives" at the far right, who think that the whole democracy thing is overrated and would be content to return to divine kingship (so long as said king was appointed by the correct religion, i.e. theirs); the "Neoliberals" and "Fiscal Conservatives", who despite lip service toward laissez faire principles are actually somewhere in the middle not far from the Democrats (the principle difference being which industries they favor); and the tiny handful of libertarians, Ron Paul now being the default example, who are actually farther left than most Democrats but foolishly think of themselves as "Conservatives" and "right-wingers".

Not that it matters much, but this canard about only Indonesian citizens enrolling in schools in Indonesia is complete crap and is further evidence of just how morally bankrupt the entire "controversy" is.

I not only happen to live right across the straits from Indonesia [1], I also keep going there for short-trips, one as recently as two weeks back. Many of my colleagues, including my immediate boss, are Indonesian, as are many friends; many more grew up as ex-pats in Jakarta, in ways similar to Obama did in the 60's. Take it from me; you dont need to be Indonesian to attend a school there. It is a piece of absolute and complete rubbish that should insult anybody's intelligence.

On further googling: Perhaps you meant to talk about this piece of excrement, the true extent of whose stench is only apparent when you realize that Obama attended a public school that's colloquially called as SDN Besuki, and not a Catholic school named after St Francis of Assisi in Bahasa Indonesia (that's Indonesia's national language, in case you were wondering).

[1] - I mean that in a reality-based, non-Palin-isque sense; yes, Indonesia is just across the Straits of Malacca, some 45 min away by boat. I can, indeed, see Indonesia on a clear day and sometimes receive Indonesian mobile network while I'm in my own room.

Wow this is old news. Our galaxy with the black hole center was identified at UCLA years ago; http://www.astro.ucla.edu/research/galcenter/ http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=18712 tag-redundant ;)

Oh and FDR fixed the econom

FDR prolonged the Great Depression by at least 7 years with the New Deal.

You mean the planned economy that starved tens of millions

The famine of 1931-33, which killed about 4.5 million, was a pre-WWII event, caused by a combination of poor planning and natural disasters and possibly deliberately exploited by Stalin for political ends.

Around the same time, the U.S. experienced the Dust Bowl, caused by a combination of poor planning and natural disasters. Few people died, because of centralized relief efforts and programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Soil Conservation Service.

Is the lesson here a) centralized planning == doubleplus ungood, b) centralized planning == doubleplus good, or c) life is too complicated for simple answers? I"m going with c.

I'm afraid it's not at all clear that FDR's policies did anything to lift us out of the Great Depression.

It has become a favorite canard of conservatives that FDR's policies were either ineffective or lengthened the Depression. A look at the numbers shows that it's nonsense.

Employment began to recover as the New Deal were put into place. In 1937, due to conservative opposition, New Deal programs were cut - and employment dived. It rose with their restoration. (That's non-farm, non-WPA employment, BTW.)

The GDP shows the same pattern. As does industrial production.

The hole dug by Hoover was so deep that it took a while, but FDR's policies reversed the downward trends in production and employment. Employment was higher in 1937 than in any previous year except 1929, the peak of the boom, and reached a new high by 1940. The GDP exceeded 1929 levels in 1937. In fact, looking at these numbers, I have to retract my statement that WWII brought us out of the Depression - contrary to popular wisdom, it seems that the New Deal did that well before the war.

So shouldn't the longest distance to the far "edge" be 13.8 billion light years

No, because spacetime is curved and the expansion rate is neither constant nor equal to the speed of light.

The misconception is that the Big Bang was an explosion of matter into space, and there is some volume of space with matter in it and some volume outside of which no matter has yet reached.

In modern cosmology, the Big Bang is an expansion of space. There is no center or edge of the universe (although there is an edge of the universe we can see, because light hasn't yet reaches us from farther), and matter is distributed more or less uniformly everywhere in space. More details in this FAQ.

Anyway, how can we go from that size to estimate how old it is? Because they expect it to expand at light speed?

They look at the relationship between how far away objects are and how fast they're moving (via Doppler shift). This gives them the expansion history of the universe. Farther objects are older. Also, the structure of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the early universe depends on how the universe has expanded between then and now. When combined with the general relativity theory of cosmology and how the universe expands, you can back out an age estimate.

An answer is already in the first two paragraphs in what you commented on, troll. (Is this some homage to Gould -- ignoring what the other side writes looks similar to the link I gave at the top of this garbage thread?)

Don't mix honours for good public writing with honours for research, see e.g. this. Mayr, Maynard Smith et al each has more weight inside the field than Dawkins and Gould have together. The supporters Gould had in the field was generally extreme left, see this for some of the funnier things I've ever read on that debate.

Tooby/Cosmides description is strengthened by the intelligence researchers's criticism against Gould on his writing on intelligence (far outside his area!). Very similar. (Also a similar thesis as his writing on evolution; Marxism have problems with behaviour being built in/inherited for some reason I don't care about.)

but for the most part, they all fall somewhere around the center and try to keep it there.

Not according to this UCLA prof's research.

The idea that NY Times LA Times NBC CBS ABC Wash Post NPR AP are in the American center is laughable.

My brothers-in-arms across the hall whipped up something which might get you started:

http://research.cens.ucla.edu/projects/2007/Systems/DTS/

They use it to manage 100 seismic sensors strung out in a 500km line across Mexico.

Looks related to this research done in the late seventies.

C.T. Russell and R.C. Elphic. ISEE observations of flux transfer events at the dayside mangetopause. Geophyiscal Research Letters, vol. 6, pp.33-36, 1979.

Aikon-

Well, I'll admit this sounds intuitive with the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems applied to the Big Bang.

No, it has nothing to do with singularities (or the Big Bang). It has more to do with matter which orbits black holes.

Now, I'm not a physicist either but I have read a lot that speculates the Big Bang was a singularity that created a hot unstable mess. All the mass of the universe in a singularity suddenly starts blowing out and producing massive heat. Although what was around this singularity is nothing--not even space.

Don't think of the singularity as a point that blew matter in all directions. As you correctly note, there is nothing "around" a singularity. For now limit consideration to an infinite universe, which is preferred by standard inflation scnearios. Then a singularity isn't even really a single point. The universe is still infinite in extent, it's just that the matter/energy in it is of infinite density. (See here.) Think of the Big Bang as where space expands making the matter less dense, rather than some single location that spews matter away from itself.

As always, it brings up interesting questions about what was before that epoch since it is kind of clear that such a singularity could not be possibly be stable for any amount of time (as this research indicates).

To reiterate, this research has nothing to do with the singularity inside of black holes. It has to do with matter which is outside black holes not being able to make its way in, due to the pressure created by other infalling matter. The black hole itself does not emit any appreciable matter/radiation (other than a very tiny amount of Hawking radiation).

All I could think of was that I really wish they called micro black holes that exist for minute fractions of a second something other than "black holes." It scares people unnaturally.

I agree. "Micro black hole" is a terrible name. I prefer "Death, Tiny Destroyer of Worlds".

And if you can read book upside down, you are George W. Bush.

that prolonged the Great Depression by 7 years or so?

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-Depression-5409.aspx?RelNum=5409

Brilliant stuff...

It's just like the fundamental principle that it is better to risk letting a guilty man go free, at least for now, than to risk sentencing an innocent man erroneously.

For what it's worth, a more widely-known version is by William Blackstone: "Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."

Ok, well circumnavigated is a bit of an odd term ill admit, but its to do with the fact that the visible universe was much smaller in the past, and space itself has expanded. When the light was emitted originally, the universe was only 40million light years across. The space has expanded to its current size.

baut forums info on this
ned wright info

Ah, yes, nice way to slip in the old, oft-repeated chestnut about the "liberal bias" of the American media. There have been many rebuttals to this claim, such as this one, but even studies that ostensibly support the idea of a "liberal bias," such as this one from UCLA, include surprising nuggets that contradict conventional wisdom. (The UCLA report, for example, claims the Drudge Report is slightly left-leaning, despite its conservative reputation, while public television news reporting trends conservative, despite a widely-held belief that PBS news is left-leaning.)

That's a FAQ.

If so, then when your ISP queries one of the thirteen root servers for the .gov authority, the attacker could still return a fake response and set himself up as the DNS authority for .gov, at least as far as your ISP knew.

Anyone know how plausible that attack remains? Knowledgeable responses welcome :)

First, to answer your question regarding the plausibility: there are a few scenarios in which it is possible. The most likely scenario is that you're on the same local network as an attacker so that he/she can intercept your DNS traffic and forge replies. This might be the case when you're using the wireless provided at a coffee shop, for instance. There exist automated tools to make this simple, and I would consider this the biggest vector of attack. The only other case I can think of is that an attacker has control of a router between you and the root servers. While this is technically possible, I would personally regard it as fairly infeasible for the average attacker. If you're in $THIRD_WORLD_COUNTRY and the mob controls internet access, you might have something to worry about.

I'm involved with a project called SecSpider that monitors the deployment of DNSSEC. We use a distributed network of pollers around the world to collect RRsets from all known DNSSEC-enabled zones. One of the reasons we use pollers from different locations is to detect attacks such as either of the two listed above, more likely the latter. If any attack were to occur, we stand the best chance of detecting it. We have been monitoring since 2005 and have yet to see such an attack.

An additional benefit of collecting all these RRsets is that we have what we call a "world-wide perspective" on DNSKEYs. Whenever we collect a set of DNSKEY RRsets from a zone, if the set is consistent across pollers, we add it to our DLV repository. A DLV (DNSSEC lookaside validation) resource record is very similar to a DS (delegation signer) record. It contains a cryptographic hash of the DNSKEYs served by a zone so that the zone's integrity can be checked. However, instead of being served by the zone's parent, it can be served by anyone.

The typical way in which a resolver detects if a zone is secure is by tracing a secure delegation from the root. Instead of the typical manner of starting at the root and querying recursively for NS records, the resolver queries for both NS and DS records. Then when it queries one of the nameservers listed in the NS records, it asks for the DNSKEYs and verifies them using the DS record. In this way, it is possible to build a chain of trust that leads all the way back to the root nameservers.

Unfortunately, without the root being signed, this process will not work. One alternative is to configure your resolver to query for DLV records to bootstrap the process. When your resolver queries a zone for DNSKEY RRs, it will also query the DLV repository for a DLV recording matching that zone. It will then attempt to cryptographically verify the DNSKEYs using that record. If it verifies, you know that someone you trust thinks your DNSKEYs are right, side-stepping the typical chain of trust (thus the name: "lookaside"). If you were to configure your resolver to use our repository, you would be able to verify if the DNSKEYs you receive are the same as the DNSKEYs being seen by all of our pollers around the world. Not perfect security, but definitely an improvement on the current situation.

If you're interested in the details of our project, you can check out our web site or ask me for more details. We have information on how to use our repository in our FAQ.

You mention the notion of real-world testing of DNSSEC. It's worth noting that there are actually several TLDs that are currently signed (mostly ccTLDs), as well as a large number of second-level domains. gov is hardly the first, but it should definitely be the highest-profile rollout to date. We're currently waiting with bated breath to see the outcome.

If so, then when your ISP queries one of the thirteen root servers for the .gov authority, the attacker could still return a fake response and set himself up as the DNS authority for .gov, at least as far as your ISP knew.

Anyone know how plausible that attack remains? Knowledgeable responses welcome :)

First, to answer your question regarding the plausibility: there are a few scenarios in which it is possible. The most likely scenario is that you're on the same local network as an attacker so that he/she can intercept your DNS traffic and forge replies. This might be the case when you're using the wireless provided at a coffee shop, for instance. There exist automated tools to make this simple, and I would consider this the biggest vector of attack. The only other case I can think of is that an attacker has control of a router between you and the root servers. While this is technically possible, I would personally regard it as fairly infeasible for the average attacker. If you're in $THIRD_WORLD_COUNTRY and the mob controls internet access, you might have something to worry about.

I'm involved with a project called SecSpider that monitors the deployment of DNSSEC. We use a distributed network of pollers around the world to collect RRsets from all known DNSSEC-enabled zones. One of the reasons we use pollers from different locations is to detect attacks such as either of the two listed above, more likely the latter. If any attack were to occur, we stand the best chance of detecting it. We have been monitoring since 2005 and have yet to see such an attack.

An additional benefit of collecting all these RRsets is that we have what we call a "world-wide perspective" on DNSKEYs. Whenever we collect a set of DNSKEY RRsets from a zone, if the set is consistent across pollers, we add it to our DLV repository. A DLV (DNSSEC lookaside validation) resource record is very similar to a DS (delegation signer) record. It contains a cryptographic hash of the DNSKEYs served by a zone so that the zone's integrity can be checked. However, instead of being served by the zone's parent, it can be served by anyone.

The typical way in which a resolver detects if a zone is secure is by tracing a secure delegation from the root. Instead of the typical manner of starting at the root and querying recursively for NS records, the resolver queries for both NS and DS records. Then when it queries one of the nameservers listed in the NS records, it asks for the DNSKEYs and verifies them using the DS record. In this way, it is possible to build a chain of trust that leads all the way back to the root nameservers.

Unfortunately, without the root being signed, this process will not work. One alternative is to configure your resolver to query for DLV records to bootstrap the process. When your resolver queries a zone for DNSKEY RRs, it will also query the DLV repository for a DLV recording matching that zone. It will then attempt to cryptographically verify the DNSKEYs using that record. If it verifies, you know that someone you trust thinks your DNSKEYs are right, side-stepping the typical chain of trust (thus the name: "lookaside"). If you were to configure your resolver to use our repository, you would be able to verify if the DNSKEYs you receive are the same as the DNSKEYs being seen by all of our pollers around the world. Not perfect security, but definitely an improvement on the current situation.

If you're interested in the details of our project, you can check out our web site or ask me for more details. We have information on how to use our repository in our FAQ.

You mention the notion of real-world testing of DNSSEC. It's worth noting that there are actually several TLDs that are currently signed (mostly ccTLDs), as well as a large number of second-level domains. gov is hardly the first, but it should definitely be the highest-profile rollout to date. We're currently waiting with bated breath to see the outcome.

So what? The USA govt, sponsored and largely run by corporate interests (of which media corporations are subsidiary) isn't any more credible.

I don't think any government's words should be taken at face value, but I also don't believe for a moment that the Chinese government is on par with the US government in credibility and transparency. there are shades of gray, and I see the US and China in much different areas of the spectrum. The fact is that the press, including foreign press, is more free to report things *here* than *there*. However, my point above was not whether the US government is more credible than the Chinese government. I'm glad we agree on the fact that there are legitimate reasons why people across the world, including in the US, have a right and a need for privacy, and that right is threatened by the tracing tools these governments seek.

Even the Tiananmen Square "Massacre" is a myth.

The Tiananmen Square massacre is historical fact. If you want to dispute the particulars, such as how many died, where they died, etc., fine. I give greater weight to the Red Cross's casualty estimates than to the Chinese government. Gregory Clark does not seem impartial, nor does he seem to have fully read the US government documents he is quoting, since on the whole they contradict his core assertion, ie, that the massacre didn't happen. He seems to have cherry-picked the parts that suit him best, while ignoring other relevant content. He claims that they show that "They confirm that there was no massacre in the square", which is a cheap attempt at deception, since he then goes on to admit that much of the killing appears to have been just outside the square. He attempts to minimize the event by ignoring important parts of the story, such as at least one tank crushing protesters, and troops with fixed bayonets firing metal bullets directly into crowds of unarmed civilians, and then tries to diminish the importance of the event by comparing it to other atrocities, as if that made it somehow more acceptable.

I think that if he had confined his assertion to stating that the massacre as it happened and the massacre as the news media reported it appear to be different, he would be on more accurate.

I find it interesting that in arguing that the US govt is not trustworthy, you quote a source who himself quotes US govt documents, referring to them as "a source whose sober impartiality cannot possibly be doubted".

Have you paid attention to what's been done with protesters at the DNC and RNC events?

Some. I'll make no apologies or excuses for heavy-handed police action, whether it is here or over there, but the difference between the RNC / DNC protests and Tiananmen Square is mind-boggling. This article talks about Amy Goodman's arrest, and I think makes an interesting point about journalists, the events they cover, and the law. I have read that most protesters were peaceful, and were left alone by police. The tear gas didn't come out and the arrests didn't happen until some (a very small minority) protesters got violent and started trashing property. It appears that Amy got caught up in that. As for the warrantess poo preemption, I don't know about that incident. However, before getting up in arms about the lack of warrants, I have to ask did the event meet these requirements? "Reasonable grounds" and "exigent circumstances" seem to be the key.

To the original topic: If it were in my power to grant or withhold, I would never entrust China (or any government - even my own) with tools that would help it roll back the shield of anonymity that protects the natural right of people to speak freely.

I can certainly agree with that.

Amen, brother.

I see. Is this the official Chinese description of what happened? I'm willing to admit that I might be less than fully informed, but I'm reluctant to give credibility to what the Chinese government says.

So what? The USA govt, sponsored and largely run by corporate interests (of which media corporations are subsidiary) isn't any more credible.

The USA establishment is pushing the lie that Russia was the aggressor against Georgia (which Russia was policing S. Ossetia by international agreement when they were attacked), and Presidential candidates are using that story as a call to arms against Russia!

Even the Tiananmen Square "Massacre" is a myth.

The Chinese government speaks not just though its state-controlled press, but through its actions as well, and their actions speak louder to me than their words. Members of the press from abroad have been intimidated and had pictures of protests confiscated by the Chinese government.

- How many requests for permission to protest were made? My latest sources say about 77.

- Of those, how many were granted permission to protest during the Games?

- Of those, how many actually protested during the Games?

- Learning Chinese would be great, but is more than I can do right now. What reliable and trustworthy (ie, non-government related) sources of information are there for an English-speaker like myself?

It seems that Beijing has gone out of its way to squash free speech, intimidate critics, and to imprison dissidents. Are all these sources willfully libeling China?

Have you paid attention to what's been done with protesters at the DNC and RNC events? The cops even arrested Amy Goodman and her staff; journalists from Salon.com were also threatened. Police surrounded protesters homes (no warrants, you see) and later charged them with intent to throw feces at convention-goers because they owned composting toilets; or that they were planning to make bombs because protesters had "chemicals" which turned out to be common cleaning and gardening products in their homes.

To the original topic: If it were in my power to grant or withhold, I would never entrust China (or any government - even my own) with tools that would help it roll back the shield of anonymity that protects the natural right of people to speak freely.

I can certainly agree with that.

Exactly - the magnetic confinement for a fusion torus is already completely closed. With a torus, as I understand, there are issues with plasma stability that limit the performance of the devices. However, there is no need for this light looping when you can just alter the magnetic field. Stellarators use a sort of 'helical' magnetic field twisting around a toroid to create a much more stable environment. See: http://www.physics.ucla.edu/icnsp/Html/spong/w7x_with_coils.JPG.

UCLA study backs up parent:

One of our measures found that the Drudge Report is the most centrist of all media outlets in our sample. Our other measure found that Fox Newsâ(TM) Special Report is the most centrist. These findings refer strictly to the news stories of the outlets.

source: A Measure of Media Bias

Google Philip Zack http://www.ph.ucla.edu/EPI/bioter/anthraxmissingarmylab.html "Documents from the inquiry show that one unauthorized person who was observed entering the lab building at night was Langford's predecessor, Lt. Col. Philip Zack, who at the time no longer worked at Fort Detrick. A surveillance camera recorded Zack being let in at 8:40 p.m. on Jan. 23, 1992, apparently by Dr. Marian Rippy, a lab pathologist and close friend of Zack's, according to a report filed by a security guard."

I've been following this on an excellent site of Dr. Meryl Nass - highly recommended. Also, might suggest anyone to read this article.

Thanks for your excellent post.

Sorry, dood, but I call complete and utter BS on the FBI's fairy tale. Try perusing this outstanding site by a most knowledgeable individual and also read this excellent article.

Once upon a time, way back when I worked in Seattle, there was this clown of a police chief named Fitzsimons. Everytime someone was murdered, without any investigation whatsoever, Fitzsimons would proclaim the murder to be drug-related.

Of course, it turned out in 9 out of 10 times to be an unrelated homicide of some sort - but the damage had already been done to the hapless victim's reputation.

FYI: That sorry ass police chief left Seattle to join the faculty of the FBI Academy at Quantico.....wonder what lessons he taught the feebs (bet it had something to do with pinning unsolved murders on unfortunate suicides......)

Actually, you might be interested in real studies on the matter. Here's one from UCLA (hardly a right-wing place), which determines that drudge, fox news, etc are actually pretty damn even and not as right-wing as you claim, while the "traditional" media lean FAR left.

Well, that seems to depend on your reference point. Americans have a very wide range of media sources to get their news from, and they can choose to change the news sources they consume anytime they like. In comparison they've got an entrenched two party political system you can only change every four years. (And believe me, from an outsider's perspective it's sometimes extremely difficult to tell your two parties apart)

Both the average political leaning of your media and your elected representatives present choices your population has made. I'd argue that they are far more free in scope to choose when it comes to the media and so that better represents their collective will than your elected politicians do. The disparity is not that your media is to the left of your population, it's that your politics is to the right.

Media bias cuts both ways now, get over it.

Actually, you might be interested in real studies on the matter. Here's one from UCLA (hardly a right-wing place), which determines that drudge, fox news, etc are actually pretty damn even and not as right-wing as you claim, while the "traditional" media lean FAR left.

I should point out George W...

You don't have to convince me here. All I want to know is how much Mexican bribery money he and his cronies like Johnny Sutton get every year to keep the border open and turn our border patrol agents into political prisoners when they actually do make drug busts.

Rather was the only one he tried to make an issue out of it and he was destroyed...

Actually, Rather was destroyed by his own hubris and inability to double-check his source. He ran with a bad story, and rather than admit that he'd been snookered, he kept screaming about how obvious forgeries were "genuine" till CBS had no choice but to axe him.

We could switch to Hillary though she has shady dealings...

Again, you don't have to convince me there.

So I suspect the "media bias" you see these days is the "liberal" media is biting the bullet and embracing Obama because there just isn't anyone better.

Actually, there are many. Bob Barr would make a decent candidate. A number of the candidates on the Republican and Democrat stages would have been better, but the Media were caught up in the star power of just a few and wouldn't give the others equal time and exposure to make their case to the American people.

At least he is very smart, charismatic, a good speaker and is a complete change from the disaster of the last eight years.

Somewhat like driving a car that's on fire with the doors welded shut from the heat, and driving it off a pier into 50-foot deep water, but yes, a "change"...

If we keep playing the gotcha politics you are going to end up with someone with a squeaky clean record but who is totally incompetent

You mean like Jimmy Carter? Obama is dangerously close to him both in policies and experience level. And you remember the damage Carter did to us in just four years.

I don't like McCain, but I like even less someone whose response to an economic crisis is to hike my taxes.

And think about it this way: the last thing I should want is to let the Democrats have control of both the Congress and the Presidency. I mean seriously, the last time they had that, we had two years of fright (the "glory days" of the Clinton years didn't start until after the Republicans were in power in Congress). And before that, I grew up in them, so I can remember the Carter days quite well thank you very much.

I'm surprised that more folks here aren't running their own resolvers. It isn't that hard, especially if you don't need to act as an authoritative server for serving your own domains and just need a recursive resolver. One nice hack you can configure if you run your own resolver is dnssec - cryptographically secured dns lookup. While there aren't many dns zones that are cryptographically signed yet, there are a little over 10,000 (see http://secspider.cs.ucla.edu/ ). That is a start. Unless people start using dnssec and demanding that their websites be in secured dns zones, companies won't be bother to do the work needed to configure their dns zones with dnssec. A pdf with simple instructions for setting up dnssec can be found here. I set up my domains and resolvers this way, and it only took an afternoon to get acquainted enough with the concepts to bumble through the instructions. I've been running it for a few days now and it seems to be working just fine. http://www.isc.org/sw/bind/docs/DNSSEC_in_6_minutes.pdf

As in 100%? Of course not. But I think "innocent man sent to jail" is very, very rare.

Depends on the value of n. IIRC, for low values (e.g., N=1), 50% may be innocent. For a "high" value of 10, 10% maybe innocent. With a million imprisoned, that would be 100,000 innocents in the US. That is probably about right. There are lots of people found innocent only by virtue of DNA retesting. Consider all the people locked up without the benefit of evidence to exonerate them. It is at least 0.3%.

I think there is one other significant problem to overcome: radiaton, whether cosmic ray radiation or sunspot/solar storm radiation. In a spacecraft or space station this is a significant problem. On earth we are protected by our magnetic field. Venus doesn't have an instrinsic magnetic field to speak of, but does have an induced magnetic field. This might be an advantage to colonists of a floating Venusian city versus those of a space station. http://www-ssc.igpp.ucla.edu/personnel/russell/papers/venus_mag/

I have heard two theories regarding this. One is that Venus is regularly losing atmosphere, but because it already has an unbelievably crushing density of atmosphere, it will not have any noticeable thinning for millions of years.

Another theory that I have heard is that the magnetic field of Venus is actually caused by the interaction of solar wind with it's ionosphere, thus limiting the loss of atmosphere due to solar wind.

In the interest of "fairness" here's a response to the study. A brief quote:

Summary: News outlets including CNN cited a study of several major media outlets by a UCLA political scientist and a University of Missouri-Columbia economist purporting to "show a strong liberal bias." But the study employed a measure of "bias" so problematic that its findings are next to useless, and the authors -- both former fellows at conservative think tanks cited in the study to illustrate liberal bias -- seem unaware of the substantial scholarly work that exists on the topic.

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/groseclose/Media.Bias.8.htm

The largest DLV repository that validates that the DNSKEYs belong to who they say they belong to (think Verisign-style verification), is run by isc.org.

(My employer, BTW.)

I'm a part of a DNSSEC monitoring project (called SecSpider). [...] This serves the same purpose as ISC's repo, but the data is collected in an orthogonal manner. We currently have DLV records for over 12000 zones, although we haven't directly verified the identity of any of them.

That's an intriguing idea, but it doesn't really serve the same purpose as ISC's DLV until you do verify identity. (Would UCLA's lawyers be comfortable with someone relying on your DLV record repository for, say, banking transactions?)

...is to sign the root and deploy DNSSEC.

Unfortunately that's politically non-expedient. But now that this vulnerability is out there, maybe the political will can at last materialize.

The political will has been shifting a lot lately. I've spoken directly to the gentleman in charge of managing the root zone, and he says that technically speaking it would be an overnight change. All the DNSKEYs and RRSIGs have been generated, he's waiting for the OK from above, which he says appears to be more likely with each passing day.

The second-best solution is to deploy DNSSEC using DNSSEC Lookaside Validation (which means you get trust anchors from some other known site, not from the root zone). And that's available now.

The largest DLV repository that validates that the DNSKEYs belong to who they say they belong to (think Verisign-style verification), is run by isc.org. At this writing, this zone has a grand total of twenty five DLV records. Not exactly what I would call useful from a security standpoint, although it is a start.

I'm a part of a DNSSEC monitoring project (called SecSpider). We have a set of pollers distributed around the world from which we collect data about the current deployment. In conjunction with this, when we are able to collect an identical DNSKEY RRset, we generate DLV records and serve them from one of our delegations. For details on how to use it, check out our blog. This serves the same purpose as ISC's repo, but the data is collected in an orthogonal manner. We currently have DLV records for over 12000 zones, although we haven't directly verified the identity of any of them.

The worst thing about DNSSEC is it's too damn complicated at present; there needs to be the equivalent of "one-click" zone signing. ISC (and others) are working on getting us closer to that.

This I can't disagree with. DNSSEC is over-engineered by academic crypto people. In fact, DNS in general is somewhat over-engineered, but at least it was successfully rolled out. ISC's efforts are valiant, and hopefully with a larger roll-out their tools will become de-facto.

The third-best solution is what's been done today. We just made it a lot harder to exploit the vulnerability--typically about 16000 times harder, depending on your configuration. There's a difference between "harder" and "impossible" though.

Yes, the difference is that impossible isn't possible. You can't stop a determined hacker, not even with the best technology (think of social engineering attacks). Security is like an onion: as soon as you pull away one layer there are a dozen more to get in your way.

...is to sign the root and deploy DNSSEC.

Unfortunately that's politically non-expedient. But now that this vulnerability is out there, maybe the political will can at last materialize.

The political will has been shifting a lot lately. I've spoken directly to the gentleman in charge of managing the root zone, and he says that technically speaking it would be an overnight change. All the DNSKEYs and RRSIGs have been generated, he's waiting for the OK from above, which he says appears to be more likely with each passing day.

The second-best solution is to deploy DNSSEC using DNSSEC Lookaside Validation (which means you get trust anchors from some other known site, not from the root zone). And that's available now.

The largest DLV repository that validates that the DNSKEYs belong to who they say they belong to (think Verisign-style verification), is run by isc.org. At this writing, this zone has a grand total of twenty five DLV records. Not exactly what I would call useful from a security standpoint, although it is a start.

I'm a part of a DNSSEC monitoring project (called SecSpider). We have a set of pollers distributed around the world from which we collect data about the current deployment. In conjunction with this, when we are able to collect an identical DNSKEY RRset, we generate DLV records and serve them from one of our delegations. For details on how to use it, check out our blog. This serves the same purpose as ISC's repo, but the data is collected in an orthogonal manner. We currently have DLV records for over 12000 zones, although we haven't directly verified the identity of any of them.

The worst thing about DNSSEC is it's too damn complicated at present; there needs to be the equivalent of "one-click" zone signing. ISC (and others) are working on getting us closer to that.

This I can't disagree with. DNSSEC is over-engineered by academic crypto people. In fact, DNS in general is somewhat over-engineered, but at least it was successfully rolled out. ISC's efforts are valiant, and hopefully with a larger roll-out their tools will become de-facto.

The third-best solution is what's been done today. We just made it a lot harder to exploit the vulnerability--typically about 16000 times harder, depending on your configuration. There's a difference between "harder" and "impossible" though.

Yes, the difference is that impossible isn't possible. You can't stop a determined hacker, not even with the best technology (think of social engineering attacks). Security is like an onion: as soon as you pull away one layer there are a dozen more to get in your way.

They are nothing like a piston engine
http://www.aardvark.co.nz/pjet/pde.shtml
http://www.seas.ucla.edu/combustion/projects/pulsed_detonation_wave.html

This question was raised and discussed by Alexander Volokh in n Guilty Men.

You could say that the system worked just fine before we had copyrights and patents at all. It wasn't broken back then, so why did they introduce copyrights and patents in the first place?

This explains it all really nicely:
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm

To save you 300 pages of reading "Against Intellectual Monopoly," basically patents don't spur innovation, not even the ones on concrete inventions. Case after case is presented where it is clear that the idea of spurring innovation through patents is flawed at best, and highly damaging at worst. They basically prove that steam engine development was slowed down by patents and only really began to chug when the patents expired. Inventors you thought were heroes finally come across in a more realistic light. They present lots of examples like this and you just basically see the light (at the end of the tunnel?). Now, if your goal was to slow down technological progress or science itself, then maybe patents would be a good idea.

Before reading some chapters from Boldrin & Levine I was somewhat convinced that copyright at least had some beneficial elements to it that should be respected and preserved, but they sure put the nail in that coffin too. They went through the origins of copyright as a *relaxation* to a censorship regime by the crown (IIRC), and it just went downhill from there. Now it just seems like copyright is extended to every damn little thing, and that wasn't the original purpose of it by far. While they don't prove that removing copyright would be beneficial to everyone, they take a shot at showing that it wouldn't be a total disaster to authors/artists. For everyone else, it wouldn't prevent new books from being written, new music from being produced, etc., and it would be a net gainer, by far.

If you have the time to read a 300 page book this summer, by all means at least read a few chapters of Boldrin & Levine. You will understand intellectual property much better and hopefully lose a few sacred cows in the process.

You can select what you may want to read from this landing page:
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm