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The National Geographic article says half a millimeter, but the Washington Post article says they're up to 1/3 of an inch (8.5 mm, for the uneducated). I wonder which one is correct...

There's a bug of some sort. I'm putting the link in right, but something is wrong. The link is to this WaPo story.

Here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/discovery-of-worms-from-hell-deep-beneath-earths-surface-raises-new-questions/2011/05/31/AGnzJTGH_story.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/discovery-of-worms-from-hell-deep-beneath-earths-surface-raises-new-questions/2011/05/31/AGnzJTGH_story.html

Try this.

FTFY http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/discovery-of-worms-from-hell-deep-beneath-earths-surface-raises-new-questions/2011/05/31/AGnzJTGH_story.html

Until it's fixed...

Here you go : functionnal link

Here it is
Multicellular life deep in the earth is interesting but I'd like to find sentient slashdot editors.

For instance: arthroscopic knee surgery, a very common procedure, doesn't actually help.. If you were afraid of "duh" research, you'd never ask that question in the first place.

Not the greatest of examples for 'duh' ness. There were longstanding concerns that arthroscopic surgery for osteoarthritis (the usual form of 'wear and tear' arthritis) shouldn't work because there was no plausible mechanism to explain it. It continued to be popular because (at least the US) because you could bill for it and you were 'doing something'. It actually did work - people got better - but likely because they got off the knee and had physical therapy. It had nothing to do with the surgery.

The sham experiment was proposed numerous times but never managed to get past the various Institutional Review Boards - basically ethics committees - who felt that doing sham surgery with anesthesia and an incision would not be ethical since there was a chance of harm and no chance of help. Turns out they were wrong, but that happens. It created quite a stir in the ethics literature. Sometimes you really do have to check out those assumptions.

Still up for examination: Arthroscopic surgery for ACL (Anterior Cruciate Ligament) repair and meniscal surgery (the meniscus in the knee is a little shock absorber that often gets frayed and worn out, arthroscopic surgery is often done to 'clean up' the little bugger) may well be of little benefit compared to rest and rehab. You don't know until you look. Especially in medicine, we have volumes and volumes of 'received wisdom' - stuff that has been taught for generations but never subject to rigorous analysis. There is a lot of garbage in that 'wisdom'. Stay tuned.

For instance: arthroscopic knee surgery, a very common procedure, doesn't actually help.. If you were afraid of "duh" research, you'd never ask that question in the first place.

If a hacker gets my PSN account information I hope and expect our military to drop some bunker busters on his punk ass.

Anything less than lethal retaliation for annoying hacking incidents is unacceptable.

Anonymous is targeting people and companies that I don't particularly hate, and it's starting to piss me off. I say the more precision bombs that fall on Anonymous (and their army of basement dwelling poseurs) the better.

You need look no further than 9/11 first responders. Of course, the politicians then tried to stiff them after using 9/11 imagery for commercials.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/blog-post/2010/12/jon_stewarts_campaign_for_the.html

Yes, the vote was 74-13.
It took more digging than it should have (neither Slashdot nor Bloomberg gave links or dates; good going, guys), but here's some pertinent info:
The bill is S.1038, passed May 24, 2011. It was sponsored by Harry Reid, and cosponsored by Mitch McConnell.
I can't see a way to see the actual vote on either the Senate or Library of Congress pages, so here it is from the Washington Post. Votes for: 40 Republicans, 34 Democrats. Against: 3 Republicans, 9 Democrats (and Bernie Sanders, Independent).

As always, please contact your Senator and tell them how you feel about how they voted. Find their information through here. (Remember, a written letter carries a hell of a lot more weight than an email. A hand-written letter will probably go right to the Congressman's desk, rather than their staff.)

And FYI: The House version, H.R.67 is still in subcommittee. The House and Senate versions will have to be reconciled before they're passed. You should probably write your Representative too.

Except Linked in has revenue and a pretty solid plan.

Maybe it's the fact that most people here have no idea about the financial market?

Well OK, how much revenue, how much expected revenue, and what is the basis of their plan? You will have to excuse the rest of us for not having detailed financial about companies we have no interest in.

Quoting a washington post blog : "LinkedIn made $94 million in the first quarter of 2011, and its net income was $15.4 million in 2010"

So you cite a list of failed terrorist attacks since the bill was passed. How many of those were actually prevented as a direct result of the patriot act, and how many simply as a result of normal police work? I read some statistics a while back on the number of people actually arrested under the provisions of the patriot act for terrorism related charges, and how many resulted in convictions. I can't find this data anymore so I will not quote it here for fear of spreading hearsay. Let me just say if someone can get this number it would add a lot to the dabate, especially when compared to the number of people arrested under the act for non terrorism related charges. It was also interesting to note what percentage of the arrested were muslim and what percentage were catholic. I hope someone can find this data but I imagine it is not widely publicised and I have had no luck. If anyone does find this please pm them to me as I hate losing good sources, especially when they are hard to find again. I did find some limited data from The Washington Post in 2005 but that is out of date. The department of justice seems to have the data but not in an easily accessible or quotable form.

For now however, being unable to present facts about the effectiveness of the patriot act against terrorism, I will instead present facts about it's abuse at the hands of overzealous officials and law enforcement: Courtesy of wikipedia

I hear name calling, "You are naive" but nothing factual. Which TEA party isn't grass roots? Who is funding them if they aren't grass roots? Those would be excellent facts to back up your assertations.

Did I hear you say according to your assertions that Rand Paul is ultra conservative far right?

The TEA party was effective in Utah, Wisconsin, Florida just to name a few locations. Just because you haven't been paying attention, doesn't mean it didn't happen.

I hear name calling, "You are naive" but nothing factual. Which TEA party isn't grass roots? Who is funding them if they aren't grass roots? Those would be excellent facts to back up your assertations.

Did I hear you say according to your assertions that Rand Paul is ultra conservative far right?

The TEA party was effective in Utah, Wisconsin, Florida just to name a few locations. Just because you haven't been paying attention, doesn't mean it didn't happen.

No, it actually isn't a useless argument in this case.

When there's some indication that the smallpox vaccine actually does increase resistance to HIV infection, the argument is a fairly interesting one to bring up.

if we have snopes.com?

I think Snopes has been caught out on some hot political issues. They are great for debunking urban legends. But there is FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and to a lesser extent The Washington Post.

I just want to back up information, as well as clear it up a little bit. Pandora pays around 19/100 cent per song played. So there is a royalty fee assessed and it is said to be twice as much as satellite radio. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/18/AR2008081801525.html

Where are all these powerful lobbyists going to come from if we get rid of the quid pro quo of having government officials become lobbyists with huge salaries?

They'll be former party officials who were never officially "government officials."
Or they'll be people who put together a firm simply for the purpose of being lobbyists from the industry themselves.
It's not the "who", it's the fact that they can make the threats and promises that in any other setting would amount to bribery.

Which political organizations will lobbyists target if we reduce the power of those organizations by allowing other parties to be voted in?

There will still be political parties.
There will still be individual representatives to target.

Which politicians will lobbyists target when term limits prevents them from buying a senator for 20 to 30 years? Fresh blood in congress means a reduction in strings.

Sons, daughters, neices, nephews... you forget how incestuous Congress really is.
For that matter, say (just pulling a name here) Boeing is in need of some new law to help them out. You don't think Boeing's staff can't come up with a list of "possibly sympathetic" and "Need to stop them from speaking against us" representatives within an hour?

Political attack and support ads are not the main problem crippling our government. Corruption and the amassing of power are.

You say that as if they are not one and the same.

Lobbyists only have real power because we've allowed them to be incestuously intertwined with government. Those ties should be broken, but not by curtailing free speech.

That was the whole point of campaign finance laws:
- Banning coordinated issue ads
- Banning coordinated "sneaky soft money" right next to an election

If you can't do those two things, even if some corrupt asstard in a black robe wrongly conflates them with "free speech", then you can NEVER break the incestuous ties of lobbyists and government representatives.

It's a good thing we don't have revolving doors between corporations and the government committees that regulate them. Otherwise we might have FCC Commissioners working in the FCC and then being rewarded by employment by the companies they were regulating, like going to work for NBC/Comcast. Oh, oops.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/regulator-to-join-comcast-after-ok-of-nbc-deal/2011/05/11/AFSSl6zG_story.html

Don't forget, though, that today's PCs are more powerful than the mainframes of that time. The IBM PC was out at the same time as the Commodore, and it sported only a 4 mz CPU.

However, I don't believe the story. The comment where he allegedly hacked into a government computer with a Commodore 64 comes straight from wikipedia, and the wiki article gives this as a citation, but the Washington Post article the wiki article cites has no mention of his hacking, or any mention of computers at all.

What if all the intel about tracking bin Laden had been made public? Would kind of defeat the purpose of hunting someone down if you were basically broadcasting how you were doing it so they could find out.

In fairness to Wikileaks, they tried.

It is a miracle that al-Qaeda leaders did not read this classified document before bin Laden was killed. If they had, they would have been alerted to the fact that the CIA was on the trail of bin Laden's courier, and they would had made the connection between the courier, bin Laden and Abbottabad -- which could have blown the bin Laden operation.

Prior to 9/11, the problem with Bin Laden was treated as a police problem, hence the warrants. Warrants are essentially a passive measure - if this guy comes into your hands, send him to us, please. After 9/11, the Congress issued the Authorization for Use of Military Force against the perpetrators, and it became a military problem. Bin Laden was now actively sought. The US delivered an ultimatum (so much firmer than a warrant) to the Taliban:

US tells Taliban to give up Bin Laden or face attack

Afghanistan will be offered a final chance today to escape a devastating US military onslaught when a delegation from Pakistan delivers an ultimatum to the Taliban leadership to hand over Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in the New York and Washington attacks, within three days.
With thousands of Afghans already fleeing their homes in anticipation of an assault, the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, said: "They will have to make their choice - whether they want to get rid of this curse within their country or face the full wrath of the United States."

The pressure on the US administration to exact revenge was underlined by a public opinion poll which showed that 84% of Americans supported military retaliation. Two-thirds of them would support it "even if it means many thousands of innocent civilians may be killed".

As call-up plans for at least 35,000 reservists were finalised yesterday, the task of planning the US military response shifted to Tampa, Florida, the headquarters of the Pentagon's central command (Centcom), which is responsible for actions in the Middle East, south and central Asia.

The Centcom commander, General Tommy Franks, has at his disposal a range of special forces and two navy battle groups equipped with 900 Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Doesn't an ultimatum with a threat of war seem a little clearer then a warrant or wanted poster?

But, it so happens, one of the links you provided also adds some clarity that I'm surprised you didn't note: Bin Laden, Most Wanted For Embassy Bombings?

The curious omission underscores the Justice Department's decision, so far, to not seek formal criminal charges against bin Laden for approving al-Qaeda's most notorious and successful terrorist attack. The notice says bin Laden is "a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world" but does not provide details.

The absence has also provided fodder for conspiracy theorists who think the U.S. government or another power was behind the Sept. 11 hijackings. From this point of view, the lack of a Sept. 11 reference suggests that the connection to al-Qaeda is uncertain.

Exhaustive government and independent investigations have concluded otherwise, of course, and bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders have proudly taken responsibility for the hijackings. FBI officials say the wanted poster merely reflects the government's long-standing practice of relying on actual criminal charges in the notices.

There's no mystery here," said FBI spokesman Rex Tomb. "They could add 9/11 on there, but they have not because they don't need to at this point. . . . There is a logic to it."

David N. Kelley, the former U.S. attorney in New York who oversaw terrorism cases when bin Laden was indicted for the embassy bombings there in 1998, said he is not at all surprised by the lack of a reference to Sept. 11 on the official wanted poster. Kelley said the issue is a matter of legal restrictions and the need to be fair to any defendant.

"It might seem a little strange from the outside, but it makes sense from a legal point of view," said Kelley, now in private practice. "If I were in government, I'd be troubled if I were asked to put up a wanted picture where no formal charges had been filed, no matter who it w

Ok, I've checked your other links, and they only contain circumstantial evidence, and vague quotes from Bin Laden like:

The militant Islamic group decided "we should destroy towers in America" because "we are a free people... and we want to regain the freedom of our nation," said bin Laden

In fact, there are news reports which clearly state that he denied involvement in the 9/11 attacks (CNN):

Islamic militant leader Osama bin Laden, the man the United States considers the prime suspect in last week's terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, denied any role Sunday in the actions believed to have killed thousands.

In a statement issued to the Arabic satellite channel Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, bin Laden said, "The U.S. government has consistently blamed me for being behind every occasion its enemies attack it.

"I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seems to have been planned by people for personal reasons," bin Laden's statement said.

If one article claims Bin Laden took responsibility for the attacks, and supports it with vague, fragmented quotes, and another article claims he didn't, supporting it with whole, clear sentences, I find the latter more believable.

Here's an article clearly stating the lack of formal charges against Bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks (Washington Post):

The curious omission underscores the Justice Department's decision, so far, to not seek formal criminal charges against bin Laden for approving al-Qaeda's most notorious and successful terrorist attack. The notice says bin Laden is "a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world" but does not provide details.

I don't pretend to know what it is, but clearly something is wrong here.

As far as I can tell, Bin Laden was rightly suspected for other terrorism attacks, and supported terrorism in words if not in actions, so I don't object to the USA chasing and trying to apprehend him. I am, however, concerned that the whole truth isn't getting out.

A survey has shown that atheists and agnostics know the most about religion. Atheists also tend to be more intelligent and obey the golden rule. This flies in the face of the idea behind the wedge strategy, that materialism leads to a decline in society.

In a separate case, Orrin Hatch inadvertently revealed on September 12,2001 that we had been monitoring the communications of bin Laden's associates, though whether that had any effect on anything isn't clear.

It isn't just fox news that says bad things will happen if Syria falls: See here

I am a Lebanese person who's been living in Aleppo for that past 8 months now. I have no particular political leaning, and I am disgusted by all the government here has done to its own people and to mine(they occupied us for ~29 years). I grew up in west Beirut during the Syrian occupation, and I remember being taught by my parents never to speak badly of the Syrians in public, there was a constant fear that the 'mukhabarat' were everywhere and you never knew who was listening. My uncle 'disappeared' while crossing a Syrian checkpoint for over a month(He moved to Canada a few years later because he couldn't stand living here anymore).

Even so, I'll still tell you that I think that if Bashar is ousted it will *not* be a pleasant time for this entire area. The army here is more likely to completely fall apart rather than stand aside as it did in Egypt. Anyone who's lived here, who's talked to people here and who knows the history of the region will tell you the same. This is more likely to become another Iraq than another Egypt or Tunisia. Sectarian feelings run extremely high.

I personally would like to see Syria becoming a democracy, I would really like to see the Assad dynasty committed to the history books, but you shouldn't be dismissing opinions about Syria exploding and taking down the region with it as fox news bullshit. The situation is a lot more complex than what is presented in the mainstream media.

I believe there's a picture of a downed helo on WaPo:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/osama-bin-ladens-hideout-raided-in-pakistan/2011/05/02/AFmxZ7YF_gallery.html#photo=7

Not that it's likely to change your mind, but you're wrong. As it stands right now, Bush economic decisions account for about $7 trillion of the current debt, compared to $1.7 trillion that can be laid at Obama's feet (and that includes the tax cut extensions forced in December by the right). And given that Obama came in just as the economy hit bottom, you can hardly blame him for reduced tax receipts, even if you disagree with stimulus spending as a means to avert a depression.

Uh... yes.

The Bailout started under Bush, you might recall. But regardless off whose idea it was, it hasn't been the massive waste of money that you present it as. As of June last year, 75% of the money had been repaid. And the government was actually turning a profit on what it was getting back.

Opposing the Bailout is one thing; personally, I think that it sets a bad precedent to loan out that much money with no consequences. But to present it as the sole cause of the deficit and to blame it exclusively on Democrats is simply incorrect. If you want the true cause of the deficit, the fact is that the recession is to blame. But massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans (which cost more than the new healthcare law) and two foreign wars, none of which were paid for certainly didn't help.

A space station on the other hand, is something they are interested in investing in, an investment in themselves (or at least an investment in sabre rattling).

I hope they do a better job with their space station than they did with their high speed rail system.

Downloading child pornography doesn't seem to be a violent crime to me. Why did they need to send a SWAT style raid rather than knocking on the door with a warrant? Did the guy have a history of violent crime?

Aggresive raids get people killed - both the people being raided (e.g. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/26/AR2006012602136.html) and the police doing the raid (e.g. http://amarillo.com/stories/112201/tex_firedfor.shtml - note that was a raid of someone who owned a lot of guns, but the police did manage to fire 369 shots killing one of their own while the guy being raided did not touch a gun let alone fire a single shot).

For suspects of non-violent crimes (and downloading/viewing child pornography is not more violent than downloading/viewing videos of an assault - that the production of the pornography involves violence is irrelevant) and even for convicted non-violent criminals "kicck the door down and point guns at everyone" raids are only going to increase the risk of death and injury.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/22/AR2007032201882.html

Does that story give you the creeps or not?

So the government can make you rat on your clients and you can't even tell your own people your doing the work of the government

The page asks you to enter in three separate numbers based on the taxes you paid in 2010: Social Security, Medicare and income tax.

That's pretty clear from the start, isn't it? If you're not supposed to pay attention to them, why are you prompted for them as the very first step? Why are you reminded about them in the grand total at the bottom?

The receipt then shows that 100% of your Social Security taxes go to the Social Security program.

Are you arguing that, since the receipt doesn't show Social Security as a percentage of total taxes, the government is trying to fool you?

That makes no sense.

SS and Medicare, unlike income taxes, are itemized on your pay stub - you can see exactly how much is being deducted for those programs.

You can't do that with military personnel salaries and benefits, for example, or student financial aid for college. That's where this receipt, which looks like it originated with a group called Third Way, comes in.

Even if you pick one of the provided income levels, you'll see the exact dollar figures for each item. No one's trying to fool you - they're trying to inform you.

The right to jury trial requires mobs with guns to COMPEL some citizen somewhere to sit on the jury at my trial.

The right to vote requires mobs with guns to COMPEL bigots to allow minorities access to the ballot box.

Primitive man was not born with these rights in nature - they are positive rights provided by our society. You don't object to them because they are fundamental to democracy and you now take them for granted, but they are still positive rights.

One of my main objections to Libertarianism is that it does not seem to recognize civil rights as it should. Thus, we end up with people like Rand Paul, who opposes the Civil Rights Act.

"The problems resulted in soaring costs"

That's weird, I thought the census was $1.6 billion under budget.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2010/08/2010_census_was_16_billion_und.html

I live in the DC area and I was offered the job of lead architect/consultant overseeing the building of the datacenter for the 2010 census. In fact, I was offered this job six times in various forms over the last 6-8 years. I turned it down because I already have a good job. Not to mention the long ass commute out to the boonies of MD everyday. From what I understand, they had a lot of trouble finding good talent for the job.

Also, the various offers told a tale:

• Deploy Red Hat
• Finish incomplete Red Hat deployment
• Migrate from incomplete Red Hat deployment to SuSe
• Finish incomplete SuSe deployment

"The problems resulted in soaring costs"

That's weird, I thought the census was $1.6 billion under budget.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2010/08/2010_census_was_16_billion_und.html

So if we have the government pay for MORE people's healthcare, it will cost the government LESS money? That's not what the CBO says.

I suspect you began this argument with a conclusion and thus my arguments aren't actually going to have any impact. Nonetheless, the GP poster said "per-capita" and he's correct. The US actually does pay dramatically more per capita for healthcare than just about every industrialized nation with single-payer health insurance. (And we have worse health outcomes.)

A chart is here. It's striking.

As to what the Affordable Care Act has to do with this... While, it costs more because it insures more people. But it has nothing to do with Medicare, except insofar as it tries to brings per-person healthcare costs down by giving the gov't some of the market power enjoyed by other state-run healthcare systems.

Not sure about your other points, but the point about eliminating the Bush tax cuts is on the money:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/how-to-halve-the-deficit-by-doing-nothing/2011/03/25/AFXb0RoB_blog.html

Hmmm... seems every one of my guesses at the statistics was 180 degrees off. Literally, every one of them. ;) A 2005 misleading press release (called "States with Higher Gun Ownership and Weak Gun Laws Lead Nation in Gun Death") by the Violence Prevention Center did conclude that "More guns means more gun death and injury. Fewer guns means less gun death and injury. It's a simple equation." Unfortunately, their pronouncements on the five-state statistics only prove that you can make a small subset of a dataset say the opposite of what the whole dataset says.

I grabbed stats for gun ownership rates by state from the Washington Post, and you can get violent crime rates from a variety of sources (e.g. violent crime rates by state for `04 and `05, or gun crimes by state for 2009).

If you merge all that together, it shows a mildly negative correlation between per-capita gun ownership and gun homicide (-0.2612653943), and similarly between gun ownership and robberies with firearms (-0.2144191759) [varies depending on the years you compare & whether you include Puerto Rico, etc.]

In a related news, Terminator was granted France's highest honor "La Légion d'Honneur"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/schwarzenegger_receives_frances_highest_honor/2011/04/05/AF0E1iiC_video.html?wprss=rss_homepage

Wait t'ill 2029 for more rise of the robots news.

For a well-known example, the age-old bar tab should have invalidated Amazon's "One-Click". That was well publicized and still got approved. You can claim to be following some set of guidelines, but that just shifts the blame to whoever is making the idiotic guidelines that adding 'on the internet' or recently 'on a mobile device' is somehow a non-obvious extension of prior art. This is an ongoing problem of having the bar set way too low. I don't care whose fault it is, I just want it fixed.

But to counter your direct claims, what do you say to reports of the patent office clearance quotas ([1] [2]) The idea of hurrying up to clear out the backlog only inflates the problem of companies needing to file defensive patents on every trivial little thing, causing even more backlog...

And then there's the whole aspect of "when in doubt, approve and let the courts figure it out" (e.g. [3]) which certainly isn't helping.

The AP article indicates that they are confident they can still read the recorders.

Fortunately, we have a president in the whitehouse who IS the open government president. He would never allow for this kind of thing. He just received a transparency award for crying out loud! So what if it was behind closed doors?

Shame that you have to go AC to state something that's that obvious. Looking at Christians about 600 years ago, they're pretty much a carbon copy of modern islam, with witch hunts and having women basically as home slaves on one end (compare woman headdress from 600 years ago in catholic heartland of Italy and modern islamic woman headdress), and killing off scientists and seeking political control on other.

Speaking as a Christian, I wish I could disagree with you, but I'd just be trying to fool myself. Some of the most arrogant, judgemental and hypocritical people I've met are Christians. And the sad thing is, I can't even say that we've ultimately improved - the various molestation charges, the extremely loud stereotypical evangelists that scream at you if you question their logic, and so on.

The Vatican really just needs to learn it's doing nothing more than making us all look bad

Tim Minchin's 'Pope Song' ought to sum this up

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Power_Grid_of_Japan.PNG

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/world/japan-power-grid/

Take the above 2 links into account and you have a pretty serious picture. South half of Japan uses different a different frequency than the northern half. Post-tsunami the northern half had severe power failures.

Additionally, you don't just plug in a motor to a transmission line. You need transformers and switches for that. You'd also need to drop power to wherever you connected it to and protect the "temporary" power source so people don't accidentally wander into it (there is a reason those power lines are way up in the air).

Also, for the lengths they were talking about, resistance of the line and availability of wire is a concern.

They have done an excellent job of getting power back to the plant to continue doing what they are doing.

This brings to mind a quote I once heard from (former Van Halen frontman) David Lee Roth: When asked how you know when you've "made it," Roth responded: "When you can spell 'subpoena' without thinking about it." The abundance of copyright and patent litigation volleyed against Android is testimony to its success. Time will tell whether or not it will be able to survive the onslaught.