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Do they order the police and national guard to round up all gang members and get them off of our streets? ... And what happens when an individual police force tries to get tough on gangs? Civil lawsuits! The police "violated" these murderers', rapists', drug-dealers', and illegals' "rights."

...

I live in fear of my own government.

People like you, who think that the government can take away rights from people just because they're from a different country or have a different skin tone than you, are the reason that the current Congress thinks it can get away with legislature like the bill we are talking about now. You cannot have it both ways. You either support the Bill of Rights and the rule of law, or you can support dragnet round-up of gangs, and mass incarceration and deportation. We cannot bypass due process. That sort of flagrant disregard for the law is what led to a Canadian citizen getting deported by the CIA to be tortured in Syria. Besides, some MS-13 members use deportation as a free trip home, and others use it as a recruitment technique. By the way, El Salvador is in Central America, not South America.

Please think of the implications of your accusations.

and now with no ads!

I'm more concerned about the "nearly 250 from the Census Bureau containing such personal information as names, incomes and Social Security numbers". I heard a sound bite about it from the Commerce Dept. statement this morning, they said not to worry, the data is, and I quote, "password protected".

Yeah, that's real comforting.

Brian Krebs, at the Washington Post, has some additional background information and comments in his "SecurityFix" blog.

Actually, the current Mayor of Chicago is named Daley. You found his father who gave JFK Chicago in 1960 which some say is why JFK flew to Nixon rather than vice versa.

There was a question as to whether votes for Kerry were on machines before the polls opened in 2004. If you've been in this city you know that Unions only protect one ticket and either scare or beat up the other.
Philadelphia has a lot of things - a two party system isn't one of them.

What's most amusing about Democrat charges is that they try to blame Governor's or the Federal system whereas vote control occurs at the local level.
(And I won't even get into the NJSC replacing Torch with Lautenberg.)

Really? Which scientists? The AP did a survey of climatologists; all those who had seen the movie confirmed its accuracy. But perhaps you think Senator James Inhofe is a better scientist. Or that Richard Linzen's $2500 a day he charges fossil fuel companies makes him an unbiased source.

Or perhaps you're just clapping as loud as you can and hoping that proves your claims.

Um... Notice how very few Israelis are actually disagreeing with that assesment? Victory isn't making piles of rubble. If you look at the larger picture, this was a victory for Hezbollah without a doubt.

There was no way Hezbollah, some rag-tag little militia, was supposed to be able to stand up the IDF.

What happened is that Israel got hit very hard. They lost a lot of soldiers, and worse a lot of tanks.

Hezbollah was able to fight the ground forces of Israel to a standstill,

Sure, Israel destroyed a lot of infrastructure with a little "shock and awe" air power. Doesn't really do much other than harm the citizenry and piss them off. In the end, Israel couldn't do what mattered, and that's occupy the land that was and still is controlled by Hezbollah.

Make no bones about it. Hezbollah lured Israel into a fight at the time and place of their choosing,

...handed Israel an unexpected spanking, and sent them packing without giving up much of anything.

At the strategic level, this was a stunning victory for Hezbollah and all the nations/groups that oppose Israel. It would be very foolish to view it otherwise.

So believe the borehole measurements where contemporary instruments examine ground temperatures from the past. Or compare the size of the error bars to the size of the effects. Wikipedia has some charts that show both.

>all scientists agree to in order to receive more funding

The way to get funding would be to have a major disagreement to compel more research.

>right-wing common sense

"First, we know the surface temperature of the earth is warming. " -- George W. Bush, June 2001.
"I have said consistently that global warming is a serious problem." -- George W. Bush, June 2006

If you don't believe scientists, isn't it right-wing common sense to believe someone who speaks for God?

Democracy dies when voters get their non-news from television instead of researching sites like Vote Smart, when voters leave school without a basic education and never get it later.

How can US voters make wise decisions if they don't know who borders whom, or the difference between Sunni and Shi'a (read to near the end)? /. readers in the US, help your country: use Google and go find things out.
I keep six faithful serving men
Who teach me well and true
Their names are What and Where and When
And How and Why and Who. -- Rudyard Kipling

Except that Exxon has been posting record profits and not record revenues.

It seems that a week cannot pass without finding big news about gas prices. They're up, they're down ...

I agree totally about Harken. However, I disagree about Clinton's lying. Here's what he said: http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2006/09/i-did-no t-have-sexual-relations-with.html

But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time. Never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people.

Here's an exerpt from his deposition: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/spec ial/clinton/stories/whatclintonsaid.htm

Q. At any time were you and Monica Lewinsky alone together in the Oval Office?

A. I don't recall, but as I said, when she worked at the legislative affairs office, they always had somebody there on the weekends. I typically worked some on the weekends. Sometimes they'd bring me things on the weekends. She - it seems to me she brought things to me once or twice on the weekends. In that case, whatever time she would be in there, drop it off, exchange a few words and go, she was there. I don't have any specific recollections of what the issues were, what was going on, but when the Congress is there, we're working all the time, and typically I would do some work on one of the days of the weekends in the afternoon.

So, was he in the habit of getting a BJ with other people present?

You wrote:

(blow jobs are not intercourse).

... bullshit. So, if you're ever thrown in jail, and some guy decides to make you his bitch, you'd happily suck his cock because "blow jobs are not intercourse"? Or is that the excuse you used when you were caught behind the school ... "its not sex" ... :-)

As to whether its perjury or not, its irrelevent as to whether it was directly related to the Paula Jones case - background questions are used to establish the credibility (or lack of it) of a witness. That the witness can be shown to lie under oath about something not directly related to the current instance goes directly to the character, honesty, and reliability of a witness. Clinton was a liar. So is Emperor Bush. And Bush probably wouldn't be where he is now if Clinton had kept his fly zipped.

I totally trust your descriptions of recent events even w/o a reference to a single news piece. But then again I doubt you read any yourself, probably just got some excerpts from Kos. Try peeking out of your echo chamber once in a while.

• Situation Called Dire in West Iraq Anbar Is Lost Politically, Marine Analyst Says
• Iraq?s Anbar province a lost cause? Intelligence report pessimistic about controlling western province
• Iraqi insurgents launch wave of sectarian attacks in Kirkuk
• US intel report: Iraq's Anbar province 'politically lost'

Here's how well loved you are in Iraq imperialist scum bag:

"Millions of Iraqis believe that suicide attacks against British troops are justified, a secret military poll commissioned by senior officers has revealed.

The poll, undertaken for the Ministry of Defence and seen by The Sunday Telegraph, shows that up to 65 per cent of Iraqi citizens support attacks and fewer than one per cent think Allied military involvement is helping to improve security in their country.

It demonstrates for the first time the true strength of anti-Western feeling in Iraq after more than two and a half years of bloody occupation."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2005/10/23/wirq23.xml

And even more Iraqis support the U.S. leaving peacefully and don't trust the U.S. occupiers:

"Four out of five Iraqis report holding a negative view of the U.S. occupation authority and of coalition forces, according to a new poll conducted for the occupation authority.

In the poll, 80 percent of the Iraqis questioned reported a lack of confidence in the Coalition Provisional Authority, and 82 percent said they disapprove of the U.S. and allied militaries in Iraq."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A224 03-2004May12.html

And that was in 2004 before the torture at Abu Gharaib had been revealed to the world, the numbers are no doubt worse now.

You aren't wanted you aren't needed, get gone already.

You sed: "None of my Marines would ever grab a civilian to hide behind while advancing on an enemy position. We would never kidnap the children of a family and threaten to kill the kids if the family didn't allow a weapons or bomb cache to be located in the house. And we sure as hell would never drive a carbomb into a crowd of kids hoping to kill as many of them as we could just so it would make the evening news."

No instead you bomb an ENTIRE CITY into rubble killing hundreds if not thousands and making life miserable for tens of thousands of people of now homeless people. You would then write off that great number of civilian dead as collateral damage.

"The video shows a good deal of the damage to the city (2/3s of buildings damaged) and has some graphic shots of the dead. At one point the health workers excavate a shallow grave with a body bag. They look inside and say "Atfal"-- "children." Someone had had to bury them hastily."

http://www.juancole.com/2005/06/fallujah-film-ital ian-magazine-diario.html

" * On 9 November, CNN Correspondent Karl Penhaul reported the use of cluster bombs in the offensive: "The sky over Falluja seems to explode as U.S. Marines launch their much-trumpeted ground assault. War planes drop cluster bombs on insurgent positions and artillery batteries fire smoke rounds to conceal a Marine advance."[17]
* November 10, 2004 reports by the Washington Post suggest that US armed forces used white phosphorus grenades and/or artillery shells, creating walls of fire in the city. Doctors working inside Fallujah report seeing melted corpses of suspected insurgents.[18] The use of WP ammunition was confirmed from various independent sources, including US troops who had suffered WP burns due to 'friendly fire'. On November 16, 2005 The Independent reported that Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Barry Venable "disclosed that (white phosphorus) had been used to dislodge enemy fighters from entrenched positions in the city"..."We use them primarily as obscurants, for smokescreens or target marking in some cases. However it is an incendiary weapon and may be used against enemy combatants." [19] But a day before, Robert Tuttle the US ambassador to London denied that white phos

The exit poll numbers, which had previously been extremely accurate in just about every election I'd ever heard of,

Exit polls are generally inaccurate.

Here's another side of the story, focussing on Claudia Mitchell, the woman seen in TFA.

From a study reported on in the WSJ back in January, and elaborated on later, Microsoft's time to patch vulnerabilities they classify as "critical" has risen 25% since 2003, to 134 days. Except, however, in the case of full-disclosure vulnerabilities, where details and almost always proof-of-concept code were released to the general public. For those vulnerabilities, the time to fix fell from 71 days in 2003 to 46 days in 2005. Based on the data, full disclosure does in fact accelerate the fix and the problems aren't being addressed in a reasonable timeframe without it (4 months for a self-classified critical vulnerability isn't particularly timely).

From a study reported on in the WSJ back in January, and elaborated on later, Microsoft's time to patch vulnerabilities they classify as "critical" has risen 25% since 2003, to 134 days. Except, however, in the case of full-disclosure vulnerabilities, where details and almost always proof-of-concept code were released to the general public. For those vulnerabilities, the time to fix fell from 71 days in 2003 to 46 days in 2005. Based on the data, full disclosure does in fact accelerate the fix and the problems aren't being addressed in a reasonable timeframe without it (4 months for a self-classified critical vulnerability isn't particularly timely).

While we're at it, can someone please
Repeal
all
SECRET
LAWS!?

Actually the errors in the 2004 exit polls are due to the fact they were horribly unrepresentative. Link. In class the other day we in fact looked at some of the polling data and the main problem with most of the skewed exit-polls is that they were polling a skewed segment of the population. The particular poll I looked at from a precinct in Virgina was 60% women, 40% men. There are also other factors, such as the one the article points out, which is that Republicans are les likely to participate in the poll. Collectively, these can really skew the polls. What happened in 2004 is no different than the "Dewey defeats Truman" election. In that election pollsters used data collected from phone surveys to predict that Dewey would defeat Truman. What they did not realize back then was that only affulent people owned phones and that affulent people were the bulk of Dewey's base, ergo skewed results and a Truman victory. Exit polls are only as good as the methodology on which they are based.

You are so naive. Don't call Al Qaeda? Sooo...drop all my suppliers for my business that are based anywhere outside the country, or maybe even inside the country. How the heck am I supposed to know that the guy selling me left handed widgets is or is not under investigation? And if the guy I ordered flowers from for my mom might also be muslim. Maybe I ate at a middle eastern restaurant and it shows up on my credit card...

Or just suck it up and accept that anything I do or say, domestic and foreign, will be monitored and recorded for later correlation and data mining. And just hope that no Israeli company goes into competition with me.

Disparaging? hardly. This is just a sensationalist way to report the news. Here is the actual comment (from the Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/09/08/AR2006090800599.html):

  "I mean Cuban, Puerto Rican, they are all very hot," the governor says on the recording. "They have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it."

the article continues...

'Garcia, who is Puerto Rican and the only Latina Republican in the assembly, appeared with Schwarzenegger yesterday and said she was not offended by the governor's comments. Garcia earlier told the Times that she refers to herself a "hot-blooded Latina."

"I love the governor because he is a straight talker just like I am," she said.'

That's interesting. It's too bad you fail to point to the law that prohibits "broadcasting terrorist media". Oh, and you said he was only receiving these broadcasts, which is not the same as broadcasting. Oh wait, you don't even provide a link to this story that you obviously "read recently" and I totally can't make this up guys.

Brett Bursey
Police dogs loosed on recruitment protestors
Other protestors arrested
Veteran arrested on Veteran's day for reading an editorial out loud
Not arrested, just confined behind barbed wire
Military treating Quakers like terrorists
Grandmother arrested over "Investigate Florida Votergate" sign

Brett Bursey
Police dogs loosed on recruitment protestors
Other protestors arrested
Veteran arrested on Veteran's day for reading an editorial out loud
Not arrested, just confined behind barbed wire
Military treating Quakers like terrorists
Grandmother arrested over "Investigate Florida Votergate" sign

• The Iraq war: I agree that it is unlikely that Al Gore would have invaded Iraq. As a result, Saddam Hussein would still be in power supporting over a dozen terrorist organizations and trying to direct terrorist attacks against the US. He would still be developing illegal WMD in contravention of his UN obligations, likely without any UN inspectors in the country (we found over a dozen illegal weapons programs that the UN did not now about, and the only reason he let the inspectors back into Iraq in late 2002 was because we parked 150,000 troops at his doorstep), he would have been able to finance these weapons through the continuing corruption of the Oil-for-Food program. The citizens of Iraq would have no say in their destiny, and instead they would still be living under a brutal dictatorship, and Saddam would probably have killed another 100,000-200,000 of them (based on his 20 year history of killing almost 2 million people). On the brighter side, we wouldn't have lost almost 3,000 of our own soldiers fighting over there, we would have saved some money, and the country would be more stable than it appears right now.
  
• Libya wouldn't have voluntarily given up its hidden WMD programs.
  
• The seed of democracy wouldn't have spread into Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt leading to the most democratic elections these nations have ever seen.
  
• North Korea would have still been pretending to abide by the NPT and accepting international aid and support while secretly working on nuclear weapons and long range missiles. I can't imagine Al Gore confronting North Korea about this, let alone successfully organizing 5-party talks with North Korea like President Bush did.
  
• Iran might not have felt as much motivation to pursue a nuclear program, but its hard to say.
  
• It is very unlikely that Al Gore would have pushed through tax cuts in the face of the economic slowdown that started Q3 2000 and was exasperated by the Sept 11th terrorist attacks. These tax cuts have been responsible for one of the longest periods of economic expansion in decades. Instead, I imagine Gore would have kept the stifling tax rates of Bill Clintons presidency, trying to funnel money into his Social Security "lock box" and compounding our economic problems.
  
• Based on his stance on the environment, I bet Al Gore would have tried to implement the greenhouse gas targets found in the Kyoto protocol even though the US Senate defeated Kyoto by a vote of 95-0 during Bill Clinton's presidency. This would have caused us to have even higher energy prices and would have further restricted our economy.
  
• Many Europeans would probably like us more now, for whatever that is worth.

and there is no way they can harm you

I run a business where I pay for my bandwidth as well as the salaries of the people who manage it. 40% of email is spam and it costs me $250k a year to manage it.

While there may not be any physical harm arising from this action there is most certainly economic harm. So what is it then, stealing or trespassing? I say both.

"The Washington Post" reports, " California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said yesterday that 'people in high positions" at Hewlett-Packard "could be involved in illegal activity.' 'Do we think a crime occurred?' Lockyer said. 'Yes.' But he said the attorney general's office was still trying to figure out 'who did what, when.' "

According to a report by the "San Francisco Chronicle", Patricia Dunn (the chair of the HP board of directors) ordered the execution of the criminal act.

Give Lockyer's position on this matter, the attorney general will certainly pursue a criminal case against Dunn. She may spend some time in prison since the issue at hand is a criminal matter, not a civil one.

A case like this is currently before the WTO and if the US loses it will either have to ban all inter-state betting in the US (which would effectively kill the horse-racing industry) or countries like Antigua will be able to put tarriffs on US imports. The issue is that from a WTO perspective you can ban anything you want for import provided that domestic production is also banned. As the US allows betting (lotteries and even gambling websites such as YouBet.com -- which proudly describes itself as "US-based and licensed, NASDAQ-listed"), the Antiguans are arguing that the US's position is untenable. So far, the WTO seems to agree with them.

But there's more! Since, the US is preventing more online gambling than Antigua can possibly raise in tarriffs, they are asking the WTO permission to be able to pirate Hollywood films and raise the money by selling them. Needless to say, everyone in Hollywood thinks this is a superb idea and welcomes it with open arms.

The remarkable thing is the amount of headway that Antigua has made so far against all odds (as this Washington Post article punningly puts it)

Pre-teens have been using plastic for quite some time now. Girls Say Hello Kitty To Hello Debit Card (2004)

Like where? How do I know if it's credible?

One thing I'm sure of: If both "sides" of the political spectrum think it's advantageous for me to be misled about the state of the planet, I'm not going to be able to draw a sound conclusion.

You're not doing your argument any favors with your sarcasm.

This comes out on the same day as news that we've discovered vast new oil reserves in the Gulf of Mexico.

More carbon to pump in to the atmosphere! Hooray!

The group was "planning to commit a series of terrorist attacks against solely Canadian targets in southern Ontario,"

"This group took steps to acquire three tons of ammonium nitrate and other components necessary to create explosive devices," he said.

"To put this in context, the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people took one ton of ammonium nitrate."

. ... "This group posed a real and serious threat," McDonell said. "It had the capacity and intent to carry out these attacks."

Glenn: I have a lot of respect for your views on this -- your reporting on the issue has been very sane.

Going back and looking at exactly what Maynor told Krebs is helpful:

Yes, it's a device driver. The thing is, there's a flaw in the OS, but I don't want to specifically point to it, so in the video you'll see I used a third-party USB device. What I'm trying to do is highlight the problems in device drivers themselves, not any one particular flaw. [Maynor misspoke here, and I later clarified this point with him. The wireless device driver that powers the internal wireless card on the Macbook contains flaws that -- when exploited -- give the attacker the ability to create or delete files, or modify system settings. The flaw is in fact in the Macbook's wireless device driver, which is made by a third party. So again, to be clear, the flaw is not, as he suggests in the transcript of this interview, in the Mac OS X operating system itself.]

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/08 /the_macbook_wireless_exploit_i.html

So, really, we don't know what Maynor told Krebs because Krebs is covering himself up with the "misspoke" clause. I blame Krebs. It's very possible that Maynor felt burned by Krebs's story and that's why he is refusing to talk with Krebs, which gives Krebs space NOT to retract his story and say he got it wrong.

I'm really starting to think the demo had a lot of "shortcuts", but if it wasn't for Kreb's introduction on the exploit being done on the native Airport hardware, and his "cigarette" quote the story would be going to sleep....

Perhaps. It is, however, not for lack of trying.

He states that the ONLY reason he's saying something now is because he's talking about Intels drivers, not Apples.

They didn't seem to mind talking about how Apple "leaned on them pretty hard" back when they were claiming that the exploit worked on the Apple-supplied driver. You know -- before they admitted that the vulnerability demonstrated used a third-party driver, and not the one that Apple ships?

It's blatantly obvious that Apple's lawyers have come down on him like a ton of bricks, forcing him to be quiet until they get a patch out.

How? On what grounds could they do this?

Also note where Ellch says: "Why am I switching the subject from Apple's bug to Intel's? Because it's patched, and Secureworks has no influence over what I say regarding this one."

Well, what really set the stuff ablaze was the "cigarette in the eye" comment. What puzzles me is I can't find where that came from. In Brian Krebs's first article, he says: http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/08 /hijacking_a_macbook_in_60_seco.html ""We're not picking specifically on Macs here, but if you watch those 'Get a Mac' commercials enough, it eventually makes you want to stab one of those users in the eye with a lit cigarette or something," Maynor said. "The main problem here is that device drivers are a funny mix of stuff put together by hardware and software developers, and these guys are often under the gun to produce the code that will power products that the manufacturer is often in a hurry to get to market." Now everyone else who quoted that was just referring to Kreb's article. Did anyone actually hear (besides Krebs) Maynor make this statement? Why did only Krebs report it? Did he make that quote up? Maynor is appartenly a Mac user himself.

OK, they are under heavy "legal" pressure by Apple. So the bug belongs to Apple -- and not to the third party wifi driver that the video shown at Blackhat refers to? Let's be clear -- the problem is not Maynor and Ellch. It's the reporting on this -- starting from Brian Krebs at the Washington Post. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/08 /hijacking_a_macbook_in_60_seco.html

You don't see a problem when fully 50% or more of the population is ignorant of basic science?

Maybe you will understand when they arrive with torches at your ivory tower.

If you're working in a scientific occupation, you *will* be scapegoated by the increasingly ignorant. These people actively sanction violence against judges. Do you think that they'll hesitate to send a few 'eggheads' to the hell they so fervently believe in?

It matters.

I'm not saying that we glorified you, but the USA's image was nowhere near where it's today. Anti-Americanism boiling under the surface is something different from wide-spread open distrust towards the USA.

Okay- fair enough. I still believe that there are bigger issues at play here than trying to make sure that Europe likes us.

As for Iraq: Nobody believed you when you said that Saddam paid Osama (which he didn't),

I'm not sure what you mean by "paid Osama" (Osama was already rich- why would Iraq need to pay him?), but even assuming Iraq had no relationship with al Qaeda, they had still been supporting dozens of other terrorist organizations (like Abu Nidal, the PKK, Carlos the Jackal, etc) for decades. Or do you think that Russia didn't believe us?

nobody believed you when you said he didn't comply with the weapon restrictions

That's strange. In January, 2003, just weeks before the invasion, Hans Blix himself testified that Iraq "appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance - not even today - of the disarmament, which was demanded of it" (Source). So I guess he believed it. In fact, several other governments have also publically stated that they believed this as well. And guess what? They were exactly right. The Iraqi Survey Group found dozens of illegal and hidden weapons programs in Iraq that the UN didn't know about. True, we didn't find the old decaying stockpiles of weapons we thought we would find, but instead what we found was much worse.

almost nobody wanted to help you when you attacked a country that was well under control (partially due to you already keeping them in check).

If Iraq had been well under control, they would not have been supporting international terrorist groups to commit murder, they wouldn't have been gaming the UN Oil-For-Food program to allow them to smuggle any proscribed item that they wanted in the country, and they wouldn't have been developing dozens of illegal and hidden weapons that UNMOVIC didn't know about.

In the process you destabilized the country and possibly the region.

Are you somehow under the impression that the middle east was "stable" prior to 2003?

Also, you're making yourself unpopular with the very people you claimed to have freed, as you a) are an invader, b) have plunged their entire country into conditions even worse then before and c) are effectively taking away their oil resources.

We may be unpopular, and we certainly are invaders, but how can you claim that conditions in Iraq are worse than under Saddam? And how can you claim that we are taking away their oil- "effectively" or not?

Iraq is not a fun place to be right now, and like I said, we all wish it was going better there now than it is. But at least now the Iraqis have a chance to determine their own future, rather than suffer under a brutal and tyrannical dictator. Not only did Saddam directly murder hundreds of thousands of his own innocent civilians (some estimates are as high as 2 million), but he started two bloody wars that cost millions more to die, and countless others suffered and died under his direction because of his refusal to cooperate with the UN to lift sanctions in the 1990s.

So would you rather live like that, or live in an Iraq today that is violent, dangerous, and scary, b

NOPE. S.Arabia. 19 of 21 plane-crashers came from SA. The money came from there. Logically Bush shd have invaded SA. But he didn't.

NOPE. Iraq was AGAINST qaeda and laden. You could have asked saddam to catch Laden and he would have gladly done it for you.. But NO. You had to invade and oust him and kill 2300 US soldiers as a result of your misbeggotten policy.

US law != international law. Get that right.

I know you are sarcastic... but wanted to clarify it for the lower brethren bro...

I'm a fifth year in college right now and to date I have not witnessed one speech that needed a PowerPoint presentation. In my experience, people use PP as a crutch for remembering what they're going to say next, not to reinforce their points. Sadly, I've seen a professor do this as well (needless to say, it wasn't a very stimulating lecture). It's possible to use PP effectively, but it's sooooo easy to do it wrong. The last thing these kids need to learn to be professional is PP. To learn further about the detriments of (mis)using PP, learn about PP's possible connection with the shuttle crash.

Management nixed the idea, because they never "got it" in the first place. And in this particular case, it was not management's fault for being dense, but the engineer's for choosing to do a powerpoint presentation rather than plainly saying to management: "Houston, we have a huge problem, and we need to do something about it now".

Predictably, management dosed off during the boring powerpoint presentation, and only learned about the tiles when they saw the accident coverage on CNN...

This video was posted 3 weeks ago and only had a 100 odd ratings, even after appearing on slashdot. Meanwhile a regular skanky youtube teen could get thousands within a hours. Even you guys will probably move on to the next story in a few minutes. I think the government is safe.

You're comparing apples and oranges. Just because they're both on YouTube doesn't mean that they are in competition or are being viewed by the same audience. The story has already hit Time and The Washington Post.

There are other reasons to believe that De Kort won't get Lockheed or the Coast Guard to change anything, but the number of times his video has been viewed on YouTube isn't one of them. The cat is out of the bag, and they'll have to respond to the charges now, one way or another.

while health spending accounts and direct negotiating drive prices downward

Again, another misunderstanding you have - The national debt is a credit line extended to US corporations backed by the rest of the world.

I wouldn't stop at "some" stock... Google spent $1 Billion on this company. And even though $1b is a relatively small amount to corporate Google, it is still an investment, so it would be nice if this badware alert is a sort of spread-no-evil-you-should-change-your-ways message to AOL.

Hmm, now that I think about, only the rape bit seems to have changed...

not really

The Earth has an opinion.

You've got to be kidding! In theory, the readers, and by extension the posters, of /. are better educated than the run-of-the-mill sheep in this country, but I really doubt that now. Does anyone actually read stories like this, this, or this.

People, let's start using that grey matter for once. Yes, there are definitely people who would want to blow up planes, and yes, there are ways that it could be done. The War on Moisture isn't going to make anyone safer. Beyond the huge inconvenience and expense factor (read Schneier's Wired essay (I posted the link to his blog rather than the Wired article due to updates), a simple question of proportion should come in here. According to the US government's own statistics, fewer than 2,000 people were killed WORLDWIDE in 2004 by terrorists. Even if you add in the thousands of people killed on 9/11, you're still talking about 10,000 people, tops. Compare that to the number of people killed each year in car crashes (38,000 US fatalities in 2004), malaria (1,000,000 to 3,000,000 per year worldwide, mostly in Africa), or heart disease (276 out of ever 100,000 people in the US in 1996, or 22,800 in New York City alone). In fact, if the statistics are right, more people are hit by lightning each year (1 person out of every 600,000 per year, or 10,000 worldwide) than are killed by terrorists.

So, are you going to stop driving your car? Stop smoking/drinking? Stop taking romantic walks in the rain? (ok, so maybe not a good one on /.) Think of all the lives that would be saved if the billions of dollars that are being spent protecting us from push-up bras and shampoo were spent on finding a cure for malaria, or tuburculosis, or lung cancer, or AIDS.

Bah, the world is filled with nothing but sheep.

Once we can take a patient's blood and make stem cells that are a perfect match for their tissue type, the whole fetal stem cell issue will be irrelevant. As it largely is already for those who look at where the field is REALLY moving.

Not from the blood -- from the reproductive organs, and it already apparently works in male mice. Back in March of this year, researchers in Germany were able to coax testicular cells into the equivalent of embryonic stem cells. If this works in humans (and a similar mechanism could be found for female humans), then as you said, this would eliminate the problem of foreign tissue rejection and the need to take anti-rejection medication. IMHO, this is really the best path for research to take, since a lot of ailments arise later in life, when the person is an adult, and may not have had his/her embryonic cells harvested.

From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/03/24/AR2006032401721.html

Embryonic Stem Cell Success
In Mouse Experiment, Cells From Testes Are Transformed

by Rick Weiss, Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 25, 2006; Page A11

Scientists in Germany said yesterday that they had retrieved easily obtained cells from the testes of male mice and transformed them into what appear to be embryonic stem cells, the versatile and medically promising biological building blocks that can morph into all kinds of living tissues.

If similar starter cells exist in the testes of men, as several scientists yesterday said they now believe is likely, then it may not be difficult for scientists to cultivate them in laboratory dishes, grow them into new tissues and transplant those tissues into the ailing organs of men who donated the cells.

The technique would have vast advantages over the current approach to growing "personalized" replacement parts -- an approach that has stirred intense political controversy because it requires the creation and destruction of cloned human embryos as stem cell sources. The new work suggests that every male may already have everything he needs to regenerate new tissues -- at least with a little help from his local cell biologist.

No one knows whether cells with similar potential exist inside female bodies -- a crucial question if women, too, are to have access to new tissues genetically matched to themselves and so not susceptible to rejection by their immune systems. But recent studies have led many researchers to conclude that the possibility is greater than previously believed.

"We may not be as successful in getting the same result in humans as in mice," said study leader Gerd Hasenfuss, a cardiologist at Georg-August-University of Goettingen. "But I am very much convinced that this is the basis for a therapeutic strategy. I am optimistic."

Other scientists said the findings are exciting but reiterated Hasenfuss's first point, noting that mice have been cured of many diseases that still kill humans every day.

"The major caveat is that this was done in mice, and unfortunately we're starting to learn there really is a difference between mouse and human," said Evan Snyder, director of the stem cell program at the Burnham Institute in San Diego.

Embryonic stem cells are among the earliest cells to appear in newly developing organisms and have the potential to become every kind of cell or tissue in the body. In recent years, scientists have learned to keep them alive in laboratory dishes and, by adding certain nutrients or hormones, coax them to become pancreatic cells, cardiac cells, nerve cells or others that may someday serve as living "patches" for patients with diabetes, heart disease, spinal cord injuries or other degenerative conditions.

The new report, published yesterday in the online edition of the journal Nature, is not the firs