Slashdot Mirror

Informed consent as practised by my two physicians seems to underscore knowledge and concern on their part. While there are processes of informed consent that detail a patient's understanding and consent, there is also, a modus operandi on the part of concerned practioners that brings with it an effort to make sure a patient is well informed and consentual before a course of medication is undertaken. My experience is, if your physicians talks of informed consent and walks you through a process of understanding, then, it's likely you're in a position to reach an informed decision. If OTOH your physician merely says, to the effect, I prescribing X, take it, then, I'd look for another doctor.

These guys look like they are paid for research.
How do you trust a study like this? And for $5 I do
not think it is worth the paper it is printed on.

The big push for tipping the last presidential election was the manipulation of voting registrations, suppressing turnout and not counting votes (provisional voting, etc.)

Most systems electronic or otherwise can be manipulated, especially absentee ballots, but even
so-called scanner systems are not verified and have county wide control points where the vote can be manipulated. Ramsey County Public Voting Test

This shaky system is layered on top of real manipulation, the gerrymandering of districts. So we have a system that is so full of holes, chokepoints and thumbs on the scales that it is a wonder it is accepted by the public

This article rightfully points out some very icky things about Skype. User beware.

As far as the policy set for by John Ashcroft as to how crimes are to be prosecuted, that may be true. However, that has not any bearing on how the Judical system must react to a conviction of the crime. Prosecution and penalties for the conviction are actually two very seperate phases of a criminal trial and are purposefully kept distinct under the law.

The Penalty phase of each criminal trial is driven by another set of requirements that the Supreme court has ruled on a number of times regarding how it is to be treated. The standing rule of law in this country is proportionality of punishment to the crime. See this summation of those decisions for factual reference. They are quite frankly explicitly barred from arbitrarily imposimg the maximum sentence. Now we all read in the papers where that is not the case in lower court rulings, but what we generally do not hear is that where those extreme penalties are rendered and appealed, they are most often corrected to reflect the proportionality requirement. Granted, the appeals only happen in cases where the convicted individual has resources to pursue an appeal and hence the problem lies in the fact that the lower courts are ignoring the proportionality requirement and justice is left undone for those who do not have the economic resources to pursue an appellate correction. That is where the real issue lies and where a second crime is actually occuring.

Perhaps you would like to reverse a number of Supreme Court decisions directly dealing with proportionality of punishment. We are clearly deviating from those decisions with consequences such as this bill puts forth.

Download the torrent

New stuff include

• Gnome 2.10.1, which makes the desktop a lot faster than before
• X.org
• Simplified update- and package management
• Much faster boot process
• Better laptop support (ie suspending, hibernating, processor frequency scaling)
• Kickstart support for automated largescale installations
• Live CD and Install CD both use the new debian installer infrastructure
• UTF-8 by default
• A program for collecting information about what hardware works and what doesn't
• Kubuntu - complete KDE 3.4 based version of Ubuntu

Stuff people are going to bitch about

• No graphical installer. The current installer is extremely simple and has been streamlined even further in this release. A graphical installer is planned for the next version (Breezy Badger).
• No menu editor installed. One can always edit the files by hand, or install kmenu or something similar for gnome. The official gnome menu editor just didn't finish in time.
• No DivX or MP3 support. These are simple to add though and anyone coming from debian will probably already know of the Marillat repositories. Just look at the instructions in the wiki or use Hoary After-Install helper or another script to do the dirty work for you.

OSDir has published a lot of screenshots of Ubuntu.

Oh and if you are interested to know if your laptop or other piece of hardware is supported, some info can be found in the wiki on the Hardware support-page

Primary mirrors

• United States
• United Kingdom
• Europe

Other mirrors

Australia Canada Croatia Czech Republic France Germany Germany Ireland Italy Lithuania Namibia Netherlands Norway Portugal Portugal South Africa Spain Switzerland United Kingdom United Kingdom United Kingdom United States United States United States

Anybody have any software that would take a large image file and apply a google-map-like interface to it?

Squeak has a lot of programmers interested, a lot of people in education too... But perhaps not so many designers, no. But in the usual mode of open source: if you don't like it, lend a hand!

Though it's not as bad as it is on default- most people have a customized environment, though a better default should be picked. A couple screenshots from my Squeak images, one with with an IceWM theme and another IceWM theme'd Squeak.

Squeak has a lot of programmers interested, a lot of people in education too... But perhaps not so many designers, no. But in the usual mode of open source: if you don't like it, lend a hand!

Though it's not as bad as it is on default- most people have a customized environment, though a better default should be picked. A couple screenshots from my Squeak images, one with with an IceWM theme and another IceWM theme'd Squeak.

Please read the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war.

Just engaging in warlike activities is not sufficient to grant POW status if you get caught. You have to follow certain rules. If there is some doubt, then the default is POW status until decided otherwise by "a competent tribunal". However, the use of the word "doubt" in this case may be a bad choice. It may indicate any case where there is reason to suspect they are not protected, or it may only refer to those cases where it's truly unclear. If it's the latter, then it's possible to be caught while doing something so clearly a violation that they can immediately shoot you without bothering with a tribunal.

The UCMJ has it's own set of rules, which I haven't read in detail. It's quite possible that some people not granted protected status in the conventions are still granted protection by our own rules.

It could be worse, when companies like UPS started doing this, the quality and resolution was *terrible*. [...] The resulting signature was so funny, I kept it. (Before you flame me for posting my signature, look at the actual image).

If you squint your eyes just right you can make it out! Bad idea to post your signature, Mr. ;,!.'',_!.

I'm always astonished how poorly most digitizers work (Target, Best Buy being the worst I usually run into), with results that only vaguely look like my signature.

It could be worse, when companies like UPS started doing this, the quality and resolution was *terrible*. Back in 1997 or so, my brother sent me a package which I signed for, and they were advertising the "you can track your package online, and even see who signed for it." The resulting signature was so funny, I kept it. (Before you flame me for posting my signature, look at the actual image).

Funny thing is i was arguing with a photoshop wonk about this just last week. It seems that when it first surfaced, it was 'debunked' by end-users on worth1000.com.

Levin et al were published by ACM more than a year ago.

Some criticism: Their website only shows images that show the strength of their method. They don't show any examples of it's weaknesses, and it does have some.

A much more interesting website would be this one:

http://mountains.ece.umn.edu/~liron/colorization/

A similar technique, a comparison with the levin et al method, images that show how both techniques sometimes don't work so well, and a nifty java applet so you can try it yourself.

Both of these techniques, however, seem to depend on a good quality grayscale image. This is paradoxical because the emphasis in colorization has been old film. A lot of that stuff is coarser, and higher contrast, than any of these images. Silver oxide without any dyes added has a big spike in it's color sensitivity for blue light, as well, so what tone you do have to work with is maybe not going to be correct.

Perhaps there's a place in the limbic system you can stimulate and cause pleasure -- that wouldn't suprise me. But that's not a "pleasure center". That idea comes from a simplistic neo-phrenological model of brain architecture.

Being on the U of MN Solar Vehicle Project, I can agree that in it's current state, you will never see a car that is powered completely by the sun. Also being a driver, I will say that the cars are uncomfortable to ride in, hot, noisy, and the suspensions are very stiff to make it more efficient.

That being said, the project is a way for engineers to learn about many different technologies that they would never be exposed to in the classroom. Companies love to hire those that have worked on these cars because they have experience in not just concept to production, but also in management and taking responsibility.

After racing or so many years, the cars have reached a point where they are all very light and collect approximately the same amount of solar energy. The callenge is to create a reliable car, which is more difficult than one may think. Teams spend two years designing and building a car, and in the end, there is inevitably still work to do the night before the race. An additional challenge this year is that the cars will be headng north to Canada, where much less light is available.

And it is still awesome to see the looks on faces of people (especially kids) as that funny looking car pulls into a stop. Everyone that sees it is amazed and has tons of questions, so you can;t really say it gets boring (unless you never get a chance to actually see it).

{Begin shameless plug}
U of MN Solar Vehicle Project

Well, there goes another snappy Slashdot post. 6.74E15 gallons is about 12% bigger than the capacity of all the Great Lakes. Since Mars has only about 28.4% Earth's surface area, that puts just this one reservoir in a league with a "Great Lakes" over 4x the size of ours. Now that is a lot of water, and maybe even a repository for Martian life.

What is this fictional "University of Minneapolis" of which you speak? Do you perhaps mean the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities)?
http://www1.umn.edu/twincities/index.php
Are you *sure* you're in college?

From an intitial glance it looks like they pre-generated tiles for the 15 different scale settings. Then it just becomes a matter of feeding out the ~49 tiles that fall withing the lat/long fed to them by the java applet running on the client. All the labels are pre-set except the bubble/drop-shadow... which is being generated by the local client.

So the google server feeds back the image grid, and any marker/bubble data with their cooresponding lat/longs and the local machine creates all the eye candy.... very slick.

I am also hoping for a more in depth analysis so us folks creating interfaces for Mapserverhttp://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/ can borrow some ideas!

new NSAppleScript("get duration of current track").execute(new NSMutableDictionary());

how many people can install WINDOWS? just the other week I had to pull a hd out of a system and defragment the HD because the windows installer had locked up due to a 97% fragmented HDD... The person who did it, was trying to fix a slow computer issue by replacing her old windows ME with windows XP, the slowness was obviously due to disk fragmentation, although a quick scan for spyware found one spyware application that had come with a shareware screensaver. See, most people think they're technically savy --; when they've got reinstalling windows by themsleves to fix serious issues down pat. I had actually mentioned to the person that oftentimes windows needs to be defragmented when a computer slows down, and if that doesn't fix it it's probabbly spyware and she STILL tried to use an upgrade CD of windows XP to try to 'fix' a computer that only needed defragmenting.
Installers are getting better, live CDs are great
fyi the mirrors for ubuntu have live cds and live cd torrents. Literally as easy as popping in a CD and you can 'try' linux on a computer. True, the live CD isn't optimized for AMD 64 (they have an AMD 64 installer, though) but it should run in the 64's 32-bit mode anyways. not sure and I don't have a 64 around the house to test the live with :

how many people can install WINDOWS? just the other week I had to pull a hd out of a system and defragment the HD because the windows installer had locked up due to a 97% fragmented HDD... The person who did it, was trying to fix a slow computer issue by replacing her old windows ME with windows XP, the slowness was obviously due to disk fragmentation, although a quick scan for spyware found one spyware application that had come with a shareware screensaver. See, most people think they're technically savy --; when they've got reinstalling windows by themsleves to fix serious issues down pat. I had actually mentioned to the person that oftentimes windows needs to be defragmented when a computer slows down, and if that doesn't fix it it's probabbly spyware and she STILL tried to use an upgrade CD of windows XP to try to 'fix' a computer that only needed defragmenting.
Installers are getting better, live CDs are great
fyi the mirrors for ubuntu have live cds and live cd torrents. Literally as easy as popping in a CD and you can 'try' linux on a computer. True, the live CD isn't optimized for AMD 64 (they have an AMD 64 installer, though) but it should run in the 64's 32-bit mode anyways. not sure and I don't have a 64 around the house to test the live with :

The other AC is correct. We simply ARE, and there are an awful lot of us. More girl lovers than boy lovers, though the boy lovers are better organized.

Note that in the original story, the man was NOT a pedophile. He didn't become interested in his step-daughter until she was physically entering womanhood. Such attraction is very common, and does not constitute pedophilia. It is also symptomatic of something else. Every study shows that the vast majority of child molesters are NOT pedophiles, and the vast majority of pedophiles are NOT child molesters.

But the common ideas about this subject are flawed top to bottom. Rind et al discovered that CONSENTUAL adult-child sex has consequences ranging from slightly negative to slightly positive - and there is reason to believe that most of the negativity comes not from the sex itself, but from growing up hearing the antisexual views of society, and internalizing them.

Looking at the issue historically, and in sex-positive cultures, there do not seem to be negative psychological effects from CONSENTUAL adult-child sexuality. Naturally, one has to consider STDs and physical harm, but considering that the vast majority of such contact between pedophiles and children has historically not involved penetration, this is not generally a problem.

However, we should distinguish this from the case with "situational offenders". Absurdly enough, the professionals consider "situational offenders" (like Roy in the article) less of a threat than child lovers, despite the fact that these situational offenders tend to have less empathy for children and generally became offenders because of a fundamental lack of self control.

Anyway, I encourage all of you to learn more about this subject. Here's a few links to start you on your way:

Encyclopedia links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedophilia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rind_et_al.

A paper on Antisexuality

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~under006/Library/Antisexual ity.html

Y'all might enjoy this - a theory that might explain the evolutionary origins of pedophilia - AND human intelligence.

http://www.davidbrin.com/neotenyarticle1.html

and a support forum - Girl Chat:

http://www.annabelleigh.net/

I'll go ahead and post the two Wikipedia articles here as replies to this message.

Baldur

Yes - but if no-one else turns up anything, the reason I gave you that link and left you to google for others is because those 30 boxes and many other documents in the University of Minnesota CBI collections would be a good place to look for this kind of historical stuff - stuff which isn't really ever likely to appear on a website. BTW - look what they use to navigate their dictionary pages!

I don't live anywhere near Minnesota and maybe you don't either but if I did, I'd certainly be sticking my nose into some of those boxes. :) What intrigues me most is the hint in the article I quoted earlier that IBM had a policy of opposing software patents.

Why not 23?

Ask astronomers again in a couple of months if they all agree if the morphology of planetary nebulae is solved by the magnetic field alone.

It's cool that they had done POLARIMETRIC measurement of these objects (that's far more dead than UV spectroscopy), however. Especially there is a star like Eta Carinae which seems to have a weaker magnetic field and its bi-polar structure is being driven by its stellar wind alone.

What about Robert Kane's Ultimate Resposibility?

'...to be ultimately responsible for an action, the agent must be responsible for anything that is a sufficient reason (condition, cause or motive) for the action's occurring. If, for example, a choice issues from, and can be sufficiently explained by, an agent's character and motives (together with background conditions), then to be ultimately responsible for the choice, the agent must be at least in part responsible by virtue of past voluntary choices or actions for having the character and motives he or she now has.'

Why do people 'choose' the things that they 'choose'? Do monopolists encourage apathy?

Two excellent open source programs with a lot of mathematical and statistical power are R ( www.r-project.org) and MacAnova ( www.stat.umn.edu/macanova). Both are used in college level teaching of elementary and advanced statistical topics. R is almost a clone of S-Plus and MacAnova is in the same family but is not closely related. Both are extendable by writing functions or macros.

Two things:

There's a difference between 'weather' and 'climate'. The latter has longer time scales (which makes things harder) and much less spatial resolution (which makes things easier).

As an analogy, say you pour cream into a hot cup of coffee. It's supremely difficult to model exactly how the cream swirls around in the cup due to the nonlinearity of turbulence. But it's pretty easy to accurately model the avg. concentration of cream, and the average temperature, etc., of that coffee cup 20 minutes later. That's not to say that climate models are supremely accurate, just that their success is not necessarily closely coupled with weather prediction.

Also, in regard to skepticism, there's this fundamental problem of certainty. Because environmental (like biological) systems are so frickin' complex, and it's so hard to do controlled experiments (here's an excellent counter-example), it's really hard to judge things by the reproducable results standard (and even when you do, polluters can muddy the waters anyway).

So what to do? I don't think it's inappropriate, in the face of provacative but uncertain evidence, to take measures to mitigate the risk. Does this indicate a lack of skepticism, or prudent risk management?

exit polls change

You can get unadulterated exit poll information. Use that.

Exit polls are changed to match vote counts *as a matter of standard procedure*. Makes you wonder what the point is. Maybe not intentionally to be used as a validation tool.

You are pointing to the adjusted exit poll information.

So, just sent a registered letter to the patent examiner with a registered copy to the attorneys pointing out that there is prior art for claim one. this 1998 ISO comment, this 1997 IBM document or a few zillion others.

Now how is this really different from IBM's project?

A skeptic might think that IBM simply want to have a foot in the door of these big anarchic distributed projects.

Despite the stunning power available to this kind of distributed computing, it is less useful than it appears. In my research area (computational biology), the effort of parallelizing an algorithm and collating the results is seldom worth the dividend in speedup. Supercomputers generally run idle at most universities, for this very reason.

Folding@home was a nice success story, and there are further applications of those models, e.g. simulations of prion aggregation (mad cow disease, Alzheimer's, etc). But (IMO) this is the exception, rather than the rule. Anyone who thinks that parallelization is a quick & easy panacea to difficult computational problems in general is living in a dream world (and I say that as a proud owner of several Macs with parallelized RISC CPUs *and* go-faster stripes).

I've lost count of the number of times I've heard these cheap parallelization ideas floated (another example is building cheap clusters out of console hardware which I reckon I first heard in 1996!). And every other month someone offers me supercomputer time... the problem is in redesigning the algorithm to work in parallel. Certain algorithms, such as MCMC, are better suited to this treatment than others.

Of course, then you have to persuade a bunch of other scientists that Your Algorithm is the most deserving, which is a political issue (but hey, if it saves those CPUs from being used for the eminently futile task of looking for bug-eyed aliens, maybe it's a good thing...)

HERE

Your stanse wreaks of a of prejudice and hatred, invoking the spirit of anti-Christianity.

You saying you're not an elitist is like Kerry saying he's been consistent.

Or you could stop smoking. As a result of this seemingly obvious course of action, you pay even less (nothing actually), live longer, stop annoying people around you, stop fueling an immoral industry, and stop contributing in your own small way to why our species is still largely primitive as a whole.

You make it sound so easy. You actually sound like someone who has never been addicted to nicotine.
In case you are not aware, Nicotine is as addictive as heroin. http://www1.umn.edu/perio/tobacco/nicaddct.html Not many people tell a heroin addict to just quit - they get him treatment. Nicotine works by activitating the pleasure centers of your brain, the reward centers. It increases the level of dopamine in your brain, making you feel good, relaxed, just like heroin. Take the drug away, and the addict begins to crave it. True, we don't lay in our vomit doing the herky-jerky like heroin addicts do, but it does feel like crap. Try this little experiment - breathe out all the way. Now don't breathe back in. See how long you go without breathing in. That's what it's like when you try to quit, except you know that if you give in and take a "breath," you've lost.

"Immoral industry" - wow. You do realize, of course, that without the "sin taxes" placed on tobacco, federal and state governments will have to raise taxes across the board to recoup that loss, right? Would you rather I pay those taxes for you, or do you want to chip in (if you want to help out on my sin taxes, send you check to...)? I don't have numbers, but I'm going to guess that the tobacco industry employs at least a couple thousand people. Where do their jobs go when we stop feuling this immoral industry? After we kill the immoral tobacco industry, who are we going after next? The immoral alcohol industry? The immoral oil companies? The immoral porn industry? The immoral gun industry? Give me a break.

By the way, I don't think you speak for all of us when you talk of how primitive we are. I, for one, have this newfangled invention called "fire" in my cave. Come over sometime, I'll show it to you. We can talk about my collection of cave art, too.

There are several similar sites using slightly different formulas. Another good one is here.

Predicting weather, analysis of objects in conditions where hundreds and thousands of variables are present, etc.

I remember my dad worked on the Grand Challenge project.

A single timestep took around an hour and took up around 60 nodes on a Origin 2000 system (I think thats what it was at the time). He did his processing at the MSC (Minnesota Supercomputing Institute). But with faster computers doing more calculations, research takes less time and money basically.

Besides the UMN site already mentioned above, I highly recommend everyone regularly visit RealClear Politics (whose rolling averages have become a de facto barometer for journalists), The Horserace Blog (Jay Cost crunches the numbers in a way that puts the mainstream press' attempts to shame, and explains every step of his analyses), and Daly Thoughts (the best single state-by-state analysis of poll trends).

This site does the same thing only they're much more trasparent about their methods. They have also started to use poll data from multiple sources to minimize bias.

First off, if you are wanting to teach, set aside time when you've learned the program to create some multimedia tutorials. Get camtasia studio and record tutorials, export them to flash. It's better and fast than writing a book with screenshots.

If you are wanting some linux movies, check out xvidcap.

It's a great idea to promote and use open source software. Some might say that those skills will have no marketability because the apps are open source and not industry standard. However, when teaching an art class and including computers, all you have to do is emphasize "Now this is free so you can use it at home. Photoshop is what most people in business use, but the same principles apply." Kids will remember that and they will pick up the right app if they are really interested in that field.

Save the money by using OSS and buy some really nice digital cameras for everyone to use. Have the kids go out and capture the world. They'll love it. Then bring the pictures into gimp, try different things from contrasts to layermasking, and painting. Create meaningful collages. If they learn the gimp, they'll pick up photoshop, and then freehand, etc. They'll be fine. I'd recommend gimp over photoshop elements any day.

Here are learning links I've found on blender. This is really a cool program to teach, but I know it will be difficult for some people to pick up. Teach them how to create a text object, write their name and render it with different light setups. Future filmmakers will really appreciate it I think.

http://www.bl3nder.com/tutorials/ http://www.ctr.co.at/swf/3ds_max_1_zb1_num_calc.ht m http://www.blenderama.com/index.php?id=276 http://www.vrotvrot.com/xoom/tutorials.html http://blendedmind.i8.com/tutorials.html#tutorials http://www.blender.org/modules/documentation/htmlI / http://www.tutorialguide.net/software/blender/ http://www.blender3d.com/cms/Tutorials.243.0.html http://www.tltsu.ru/archive/blender/BlenderTutoria lPart3_.pdf http://project-blender.onlinehome.de/ http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~mein/blender/ http://www.ingiebee.com/Blendermania/tutorial_list .html http://renderosity.com/ http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0 4/30/217225 http://www.geocities.com/paulthepuzzles/aardvarks. html http://blender.excellentwhale.com/ http://www.selleri.org/Blender/ http://www.swissquake.ch/chumbalum-soft/index.html http://www.elysiun.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=11202 6#112026 http://vrotvrot.com/xoom/tutorials.html http://www.linuxgraphic.org/section3d/blender/page

on Screen Pick a person to vote for President.

Under that Pictures of each canidate, and the parties that support them.

Pictures are an invitation to disaster--remember the debacle when Time altered OJ Simpson's mugshot photo for their cover, probably to make him look more threatening. (Links: Time mugshot image; comparison with Newsweek print of same image.)

What if you discover partway through election day that your candidate's image is being garbled? What if the tint or contrast settings on some of the screens are off, so your candidate looks purple? No pictures, thank you.

You select one and press the vote button at the bottom, It then verifies you want that canidate, yes / no with no going back.

You forgot the last steps: the machine then prints a human-readable (optionally also machine-readable) ballot with all your votes, which you verify and drop in the ballot box before you leave. A touchscreen system with no paper trail is unacceptable.

From the story: "How is this functionally different from a national ID card?"

It isn't different. The driver's license name is the kind of lying with which many things are sold to U.S. citizens. Other examples are: 1) The "Patriot" Missile, as though you are not patriotic unless you are in favor of a particular weapon of mass destruction. 2) The "Patriot" Act, as though you are not patriotic unless you are in favor of laws that most congress people passed without reading. And, 3) The "Peacekeeper" Missile, which tries to give people the idea that a nuclear weapon keeps the peace.

This kind of lying takes advantage of the fact that most U.S. citizens have to trust their government because they simply don't have time to understand what their government is doing.

Most media exists to make money. Advertisers are understandably careful not to alienate anyone. It is not possible to develop an accurate opinion of government activities only by listening to the carefully crafted phrases from media employees who would lose their jobs if they seemed to indicate a preference for one policy over another.

Books are the major media that are not ad-supported. Have a quick look at the reviews of 3 movies and 35 books that try to tell you a little about U.S. goverment corruption: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government. If you don't read about the subjects mentioned, you are not informed. If you don't like the books listed, pick your own.

Even though most people simply don't have time to understand their government, it is still amazing how much distrust U.S. citizens have of their government, and yet they don't take control.

There is good reason not to trust a more efficient national driver's license, because it would be used by the government to suppress political dissent. For example, see the New York Times article, F.B.I. Scrutinizes Antiwar Rallies. Here's a quote: "Critics of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, for instance, have sued the government to learn how their names ended up on a "no fly" list used to stop suspected terrorists from boarding planes." There are many people whose jobs depend on their ability to fly. They may be forced to stop any analysis of government activity if they are harassed when they try to fly.

That article discusses a few of the other abuses. If you didn't like the Vietnam War, and demonstrated against it, the FBI would go to your neighbors and friends and "investigate" you. Merely the investigation caused enough fear to discourage most people; they could not afford to lose friends and the support of neighbors. People would think, "If someone is being investigated, that person must have done something wrong."

(Note that you can read that article at the New York Times web site, but only under extremely adversarial conditions. You can pay more than the entire cost of the newspaper in which the article was originally printed. Or, you can get a discount under plans which cause you to lose your money in a short time if you don't use the plans quickly enough. No one should underestimate the self-destructive rapacity of managers of ad-supported media.)

Driver's licenses are already a national ID card. The U.S. government is only trying to make the data gathering more efficient. The fundamental problem is not whether or not a national ID card is a good idea, the problem is that, although the U.S. government functions well in many ways, the government is corrupt in many other ways.

If you truly love your country, you will not just enjoy the advantages, you will be there for your country when there are problems.

Buildup of atmospheric C02 is moderated by "sinks" on the earth's surface that use some C02 and store much of the carbon in living organisms, organic matter and carbonate minerals, says soil scientist H.H. Cheng. These carbon sinks include the oceans that cover more than 70 percent of the earth surface, forests and other vegetation covering the land, and organic matter in the soil.

Interestingly, this article talks about soil as a possible source of CO2 buildup in the atmosphere, making the El Nino effect not always a good indicator of how much a rise or fall in atmospheric CO2 should be. Finally, here is article that that argues that rises in atmospheric CO2 are not a cause for alarm: PortlandTribune.com | Rise in CO2 levels is no cause for alarm

Schedule for Bill Moyer's Now

The Third Parties

Conventional assumptions about the electorate as polarized Republican and Democratic camps misses the trend of the last three presidential elections -- third-party candidates are tipping the outcome of presidential elections.

-- Lawrence R. Jacobs, director of the 2004 Elections Project for the Humphrey Institute PBS's ONLINE NEWSHOUR reports that the United States is home to more than 54 political parties, 37 of which have had candidates run for President. Although only a handful of third-party candidates have received more than 10% of the vote in all the years since 1860, third parties are often thought to have a major influence on U.S. policy and political debate.

Third parties often raise issues that major-party presidential candidates neglect, sometimes leading to substantial change in the public dialogue. Ross Perot, running on a platform that advocated reducing the federal budget deficit, received 19 percent of the vote in the 1992 election. The fact that Perot's key issue has been an important question in almost every campaign since is seen as somewhat of a victory for the Reform Party, even though their candidate lost the election.

In 2000, what might have been seen as the next high point for third parties was marred by controversy. Ralph Nader gained more than two million votes as the Green Party candidate, but some Democrats blamed Nader for causing candidate Al Gore's defeat by attracting votes that might have otherwise gone to Gore. But it is rare that third parties garner enough votes to warrant this kind of complaint. More often, third parties struggle to raise the millions necessary to run a presidential campaign, and have a hard time getting a fraction of the media exposure the Republican and Democratic candidates receive. Read about how third-party candidates are regularly excluded from the televised presidential debates.)

In the end, some voters who might support a third-party candidate's platform worry that their votes will be "wasted" on a candidate who is unlikely to win. Because of the way the United States electoral system works, only the candidate who wins the majority of popular votes in most states receives any electoral votes. (Learn more about the electoral college system.)

Despite these challenges, third parties continue to endorse candidates for the presidency. Each election year, dozens of people decide to run for the presidency. In October 2004, with the election less than a month away, Ballot Access News reports five third-party candidates will appear on a significant number of state ballots, an accomplishment in itself. Although there are few requirements for eligibility, a significant amount of paperwork is required to become a viable candidate. Each state has its own ballot laws, each one requiring that a party obtain a different number of signatures to get on that state's ballot. This is why third-party candidates are seldom listed on every state ballot.

THE WASHINGTON TIMES reported in September 2004 that third-party candidates in this election are as much or more of a threat to President George W. Bush than they are to his challenger John Kerry. Libertarian presidential hopeful Michael Badnarik told the TIMES, "We are playing to the conservatives who do not have a party to vote for. For example, Republicans have traditionally stood for smaller government, but this president has not adhered to that standard." Badnarik is currently on

There's really no reason not to get a real bike. It's faster, more efficient, better for you, and better for everyone else too. I think I know what the problem is here:

You can't squeeze your ample posterior into those sleek lycra bike shorts. Here's what you do, my friend.

Take the shorts and duct-tape them to the refrigerator. Then the next time you go to get beer/soda/ice cream/etc., you'll see them there and think, "If I keep stuffing my face I'll never fit into these sleek lycra shorts." Then go do 20 situps instead.

You may want to tape another pair of shorts near whereever you keep the chips.

Finally, a (real) bicycle is one of the greatest gadgets ever created. It is THE most efficient mode of transportation. It has been refined for over a century.

It requires you to do some work, but it will pay back your input with improved health, better physique, and increased energy.

Plus, you get to be a bike snob, too. Welcome.

The problem with a train is that you need high population desnity along that route. This isn't all that common in the US, which is sparsely populated compared to much of the world.

ITS applies to rural areas too. I work for the ITS Institute at the University of Minnesota. It's not like ITS is a new thing. It's been around for more than a decade. There is a too.

An example of rural ITS work is driver assistance technologies (like heads-up-display) for snowplows and emergency vehicles (police, ambulance). Driving across a rural farm road in a blizzard can be quite difficult. We developed a HUD system that projected an image of the road, based on DGPS location information.

I'd like to add that I'm not against trains or mass transit. Certain areas of the US can utilize trains effectively, many already do. Personally, I think trains are great for urban areas. In Minnesota, we've finally opened our first urban rail line since the street cars disappeared 50+ years ago. It has surpassed all expectations for passenger levels. Now the people who claimed it would never have been used now claim that the expectations were artifically low. It isn't just the "car lobby". There are people out there who actually fear mass transit as if it's a plot to take away their cars.

The problem with a train is that you need high population desnity along that route. This isn't all that common in the US, which is sparsely populated compared to much of the world.

ITS applies to rural areas too. I work for the ITS Institute at the University of Minnesota. It's not like ITS is a new thing. It's been around for more than a decade. There is a too.

An example of rural ITS work is driver assistance technologies (like heads-up-display) for snowplows and emergency vehicles (police, ambulance). Driving across a rural farm road in a blizzard can be quite difficult. We developed a HUD system that projected an image of the road, based on DGPS location information.

I'd like to add that I'm not against trains or mass transit. Certain areas of the US can utilize trains effectively, many already do. Personally, I think trains are great for urban areas. In Minnesota, we've finally opened our first urban rail line since the street cars disappeared 50+ years ago. It has surpassed all expectations for passenger levels. Now the people who claimed it would never have been used now claim that the expectations were artifically low. It isn't just the "car lobby". There are people out there who actually fear mass transit as if it's a plot to take away their cars.

One of the interesting things is that ice expands because of hydrogen bonding, similar to what is happening in the material in the article. What makes the rigid structure in ice is that the hydrogen bonds have a longer half-life in ice than in water.

http://www.atlas.gc.ca

This is built on Chameleon, a GPL frontend for the GPL UMN mapserver whose development were partially funded by Canadian and American governments, respectively, for purely selfish reasons (reducing the costs of producing GIS servers, and being able to provide more information to more groups more cheaply.)

It gives you an idea of how they setup the experement.

The team devised a Rube Goldberg-like contraption using a large green plastic garbage can, a drill with a mixing head, and a length of PVC piping. The device permitted them to pump the guar gum solution directly into the pool, an operation that took about four hours on a Saturday afternoon.

That entire comment is untrue for so many reasons.

Big pharmaceutical companies do not have a monopoly on R&D. There are many university and government labs work on pharma therapies.

Most antibiotics are not based on penicillin. See this list:
http://www.courses.ahc.umn.edu/medical-school/IDis /Antibiotic/list.html

Many pharmaceuticals are based on natural products - drug companies take millions of compounds and screen them for activity on particular enzymes/bacteria/whatever. There has to be a source for these compounds. Conveniently, we have a source of a massive variety of organic compounds (some extremely complex and would require years of research to produce a full synthetic route) which likely have at least some biological activity - other living organisms. 'Natural' products. These compounds certainly can be patented but they might not have to be - the lead candidates found in the screening are then taken and modified to produce thousands of derivatives which are then also screened. The lead candidates from this may differ significantly from the starting compunds and can again be patented.

In any case, extremely complex antibiotics have a good chance of either being unstable or toxic or both.