Slashdot Mirror

Although the CIA certainly was involved in both cases, it's not correct to say the US caused either of these coups. They did not cause the government to fall, it was already falling in both cases, all the CIA did was to make sure it fell in the direction they wanted.

You have it all wrong. First of all, go read about IRAN CONTRA, that will tell you that they did indeed, along with the brits, engineer that coup from A to Z. It's not a zany conspiracy theory, it's a well documented fact.
Secondly, you list the result of black ops (sabotaging production etc) as things the CIA isn't responsible for, which is just plain blind.

There isn't any proof that the CIA was involved in Chile, no smoking gun besides their exact modus operandi, but Iran was declassified, it's written down, you just have to go read it.

As an addendum to your post about 'IRAN CONTRA', there's indeed plenty of declassified US government documents showing the CIA's involvement in the Chile coup too, look up Project FUBELT - aka Track II of dealing with Chile:

"The documents undermine the claims by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger that they had cancelled plans to bring forth a coup against Allende."

So yes, it's another well documented example of US sponsored/facilitated violent overthrowing of a democratically elected government.

If you're using internet explorer, you deserve every known bug that M$ neglects to patch for a long long time.

FTFY. All mayor browsers except Opera suffered from this attack vector, but all others patched it fairly fast. This isn't a problem with bugs, this is a problem with the patching of those bugs, and M$ shows how little they care for customers every day they leave exposing bugs like this and many others unpatched for *years*.

ya know, massive operations centers are just soooo glass house IS anyway, totally 80's thinkin

On the other hand, re-creating the 80's War Games style control room on the company dime would have a certain degree of old-school nerd cachet.

That's fascinating. I wonder why that is though. Perhaps on some basic level, weather patterns are like the classic Feigenbaum diagram - well-defined cycles in some regions and utter, battshiat chaos in others. I wonder you happen to live smack in the middle of a chaotic window :). *sigh* I wouldn't mind that at all.

Levity aside, I'm definitely gonna look into whether this sort of glaring difference in predictability has been studied (it surely must have been!).

Since I would intuitively expect such regions of order/chaos to be functions of phase space variables (rather than merely geographic location), I suspect (a wild speculation I agree) these regions might actually be moving around so that if you looked at historical records for Cambridge, the degree of regularity of the weather changes over time.

If nothing else is posted, the speed limit on German roads is 100 km/h (~ 62 mph), 50 km/h in built-up areas. The Autobahns have no general speed limit, country roads do. See: Zeichen 393.

I think you're looking for one of these.

These definitely don't look flat, I assure you. :P

Hey, what were you doing in my living room??

I think you're looking for one of these.

These definitely don't look flat, I assure you. :P

Does anyone have an opinion of SRWares Iron browser?
  * https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/SRWare_Iron

Its a version of Chromium which aims to remove all the user tracking information.

Might be wrong but it does not appear to be in any repositories, so its a (albeit simple) manual install.

Direct link to their website:
    * http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron.php

The Germans should go back to basics.

How did you get modded up with a comment like "No one was affected by that silly rootkit?" Apparently enough people were affected that the Texas Attorney General sued, class action suits were filed in New York and California, and even even Italy, the EFF, and the FTC investigated Sony over the rootkit scandal. Dismissively saying that nobody was affected by it is just ignorance or trolling.

And it wasn't just "a particular CD"; it was a nice list of titles; 102 different albums in total according to Wikipedia. Millions of CDs. MediaMax alone went out on 20 million discs.

Your point that other IT concerns outweigh the problems with Sony's rootkit is valid, but you're comparing apples and oranges here. And the way you dismissed the seriousness of the rootkit makes you look like a fool or someone with an agenda.

How did you get modded up with a comment like "No one was affected by that silly rootkit?" Apparently enough people were affected that the Texas Attorney General sued, class action suits were filed in New York and California, and even even Italy, the EFF, and the FTC investigated Sony over the rootkit scandal. Dismissively saying that nobody was affected by it is just ignorance or trolling.

And it wasn't just "a particular CD"; it was a nice list of titles; 102 different albums in total according to Wikipedia. Millions of CDs. MediaMax alone went out on 20 million discs.

Your point that other IT concerns outweigh the problems with Sony's rootkit is valid, but you're comparing apples and oranges here. And the way you dismissed the seriousness of the rootkit makes you look like a fool or someone with an agenda.

How did you get modded up with a comment like "No one was affected by that silly rootkit?" Apparently enough people were affected that the Texas Attorney General sued, class action suits were filed in New York and California, and even even Italy, the EFF, and the FTC investigated Sony over the rootkit scandal. Dismissively saying that nobody was affected by it is just ignorance or trolling.

And it wasn't just "a particular CD"; it was a nice list of titles; 102 different albums in total according to Wikipedia. Millions of CDs. MediaMax alone went out on 20 million discs.

Your point that other IT concerns outweigh the problems with Sony's rootkit is valid, but you're comparing apples and oranges here. And the way you dismissed the seriousness of the rootkit makes you look like a fool or someone with an agenda.

I am not exactly sure what you are looking for here. What you quote is an empirical fact verified by psychology studies. If you want a reason for that trait to be common in humans, I guess the reason would probably be something along the lines of it being an evolutionarily successful trait as it allows humans to trust each other and therefore work together, but IANAEP.

I am not exactly sure what you are looking for here. What you quote is an empirical fact verified by psychology studies. If you want a reason for that trait to be common in humans, I guess the reason would probably be something along the lines of it being an evolutionarily successful trait as it allows humans to trust each other and therefore work together, but IANAEP.

You certainly can be prosecuted by your own country for breaking their laws anywhere on the planet. And you can be prosecuted for breaking one country's laws without ever having been there. Cf. all those folks sitting in Gitmo right now, waiting for trial.

Some right bits, some wrong bits. Any nation will try to prosecute you for (perceived) offenses against it or its citizens. If the crime (or "crime") is against someone else, other nation's laws usually apply. IE, you (US citizen) murder a spaniard in Paris, jurisdiction is most likely to be French, though Spain might have a say in it.

Countries can and have bent over backwards to apply their laws to non-citizens in foreign countries doing things with and to foreigners. For instance Manuel Noriega, where we invaded an entire country, brought him back as a prisoner of war, then went looking for charges to hang on him. There's not a lot of doubt he DID all that he was accused of, but the charges were an afterthought - an excuse after the fact.

Gitmo is a similar situation. They aren't criminals, precisely, in that they are "prisoners of war"... but the conventions of war only exist between nations, and non-governmental entities like the Taliban or Al-Qaeda are not subscribers to things like the Geneva Conventions on war. More, Guantanamo was established precisely to prevent USA law from applying to those prisoners. On US soil, they have certain rights under US law, that the government didn't want to extend to them.

Your answer on "illegal in Iran" applies to the US as well. Consider the case of Dmitry Sklyarov as a practical example.

My statement was not limited to that one possible event, but for the sake of argument...

The particular "one in a million occurrence" of an oil rig blowing up would happen daily if there were a million oil rigs out there. There aren't.

Fixed that for you. But even with a million (or as you said, 'millions'), you aren't guaranteed to get an explosion daily. That's the thing with statistics. It's only "statistically likely" to happen on a daily basis, over some period, you are likely to have yay many explosion.

And there are more rigs out there than I, at least, thought. On the order of 3500 according to this article (agreeing with other sources +-300).

It's not like the judge had any actual legal leeway. He's only allowed to rule on what is presented before the courts. Without even a token appearance, it's an uncontested case. Federal rules of civil procedure require he enter a default judgment for whatever relief the plaintiff asks.

IE, if you don't respond, the court is required to fine you "the moon and the stars", if that's what the plaintiff asks for.

There's not "nothing" in Nevada.

There's hundreds of holes made by nuclear weapons tests.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Nevada_Test_Site_craters.jpg

The Yucca Flats/Yucca Mountain area is actually the perfect place to put nuclear waste, because it is nuclear waste.

The problem that India, China, and much of Africa have is underdevelopment. They have enough farm land to easily support their population, but are using techniques that predate the agricultural revolution in Europe.

Population density is not currently, and won't be for a while, a question of survival. It's a question of standard of living. The number of people that the world could support with a rural-Indian standard of living is huge, but you'd have a hard time convincing a typical westerner that this is adequate. The number that it can support with a US level of consumption is probably lower than the current world population.

It's called a single-subject rule and it appears that some US states have such rules. Like any law, there is some interpretation involved, but even under a loose version of the rule, a riders that are way off-topic could be prevented. I suspect part of the problem is a legislative culture in which unrelated riders is just how things are done.

*One* is significant. Everyone understands there may be civilian casualties in a war... But when it happens you do not cover it up! If they still do it often means something very dirty is going on, like violating international agreements.

For Cisco VPNs, you would want vpnc, not OpenVPN. The N900 (of course as a normal Linux computer) can run both. I assume it is not the only phone with VPN support, but I don't know.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/SNES_Controller.jpg

Oh, I see they have it in a sort of "geek gadget" shop too...

Effective counter terrorism is about intelligence gathering. The old fashioned way, as was done before computers and the net. The real trouble for India started when then Prime Minister IK Gujral decided to shut down RAW's operations within Pakistan as a goodwill gesture, in 1998, resulting in complete failure to detect the military build up before the Kargil conflict of 1999.
Blanket spying on the entire country's Blackberry traffic won't amount to anything; terrorists will find other ways to communicate.(What's more, they used satellite phones, not Blackberries, during the Bombay attacks).
The games of espionage, counter intelligence, infiltration etc are just as valid now as they were during the Cold War.

As a professor who has supplied documents on many open records request. If you've done nothing wrong, why fight it?

Ever heard of a fishing expedition? All it takes is for them to find something, anything... and if they don't find anything... guess what, the cost is borne by the taxpayer regardless.

The extraordinary claim is this : for very long geological periods the climate system has flown under the radar of a asserted catastrophic tipping point. But inspite of this, and inspite of the fact that climate changing variables (including but not limited to c02) have changed wildly during these periods, it is only now, with the advent of human industrial civilization that the Earth is now in serious trouble and only radical and immediate restructuring of our society is going to fix it.

The extraordinary proof to that is in this graph.

The normal temperature variations before the industrial revolution were in the order of a half degree over a thousand years.

After we started drilling and burning fossil oil, temperature variation has been reversed from a generally negative trend to a positive one degree over a hundred years. Even without sophisticated analysis, isn't that factor of 20:1 extraordinary enough to warrant increased caution?

In fact, everything that we currently mine (copper, iron, zinc, platinum, gold, etc.) came from asteroid impacts.

Only in the sense that Earth is basically built of asteroids in the first place. But in that limit, you're just advocating mining on Earth again, the nearest and most habitable such body.

all those elements moved to the core, leaving only things like calcium and silicon and carbon in the Earth's crust when it cooled. All the useful elements came from asteroid impacts after that.

Good lord, no. Certainly elements did tend to head to the core preferentially. Such siderophilic (iron-loving) elements are fairly rare in the Earth's upper layers. Others are still fairly common. Or at least common enough. Even iron, which lead the charge to the core during differentiation, is awfully common in the crust.

In fact, silicon (the second most abundant element in the crust) is only about ten times more common than iron, which is about as abundant as calcium (which you cite as being abundant). Aluminum is more abundant than calcium and is in fact only a few times less abundant than silicon. (Oxygen, incidentally, is the most common element in the crust, beating silicon out by a factor of a few.) In fact, most metals we're particularly attached to are about one-in-ten-thousandth as common as silicon. If you factor in the fact that they're usually found in clumps, that's a very cheerful thought.

(For the record.)

By the way, if your theory of asteroid delivery were true, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't have very much metals to work with. The Earth's crust is tectonically recycled every several hundred million years (any given chunk has been subducted and recycled several times, more or less; we estimated this my first year of grad school, but I forget the numbers exactly), so you could only rely on the metals delivered in the past few hundred million years. Asteroid impacts are getting rarer all the time, especially big ones.

Also, recall that a given asteroid is as likely as much rock as metal. In fact, Earth is more metal per mass than the average asteroid. (A lot of our silicates ended up in the Moon instead.) However, some asteroids are definitely mostly metallic and for mining purposes, that's a mad bonus. (For metals raining down from heaven, however, you have to factor in the fraction of the asteroids that isn't metal.)

Also, you're not factoring in the costs of bringing metals back to the Earth (if that's your goal). It's far more expensive to do that than to mine them here and will be for the foreseeable future. Of course, if your goal is to use them in space anyway, then it might be better to mine them there. (On the other hand, then you have to build the refining and construction infrastructure in space, which has a lot of challenges of its own.)

Ok, the main argument was about China doing many more "right things" on specific domains than the US. But what about an Asian democracy doing exactly the same.

Come on USA, when will you wake up ?

Ok, the main argument was about China doing many more "right things" on specific domains than the US. But what about an Asian democracy doing exactly the same.

Come on USA, when will you wake up ?

Ok, the main argument was about China doing many more "right things" on specific domains than the US. But what about an Asian democracy doing exactly the same.

Come on USA, when will you wake up ?

Ok, the main argument was about China doing many more "right things" on specific domains than the US. But what about an Asian democracy doing exactly the same.

Come on USA, when will you wake up ?

Ok, the main argument was about China doing many more "right things" on specific domains than the US. But what about an Asian democracy doing exactly the same.

Come on USA, when will you wake up ?

I remember back in the early 80s some DoD contractor had a prototype of a flying "trashcan" like in the Dick Tray comics.
I thought it had some sort of jet engine with a steerable nozzle on the bottom. I think it was probably the Williams X-Jet, but I swear it was painted stealth black.

I used to dream about having one of those, and even as an adult I think it would be so cool to fly one of those around.

I'm guessing that the program probably got canceled because of stability problems. But I would expect that now, with high speed DSPs and gyros like Dean Kamen has used for his scooter and his ubercool wheelchair, that the stability problems could be overcome.

The Indian monitor lizard is also known for wedging itself tightly into crevices and holding onto rocks. It was famously used by the Marathas to scale the walls of a fortress during the battle of Sinhagad by tying a rope to its tail and releasing it to climb the wall.

The Indian monitor lizard is also known for wedging itself tightly into crevices and holding onto rocks. It was famously used by the Marathas to scale the walls of a fortress during the battle of Sinhagad by tying a rope to its tail and releasing it to climb the wall.

Look up CNC. Probably quite expensive unless you have one at work or know someone using one at college - they'll be quite expensive capital equipment so while the incremental cost to actually use it is probably quite small, anywhere doing it as a business is looking to recoup the cost of the machine.

(I'd be more helpful but I'd only be looking it up myself.)

Looks like this project was the inspiration for the PXL-2000...

To see why this is too good to be true, try actually restricting yourself freely distributed media, and derivative works thereon.

This is not hard. I run Ubuntu on both my computers. I get my music from Jamendo, a website that hosts CC-licensed music. I play Nexuiz, a free FPS roughly based off Quake (and I'm not a big gamer). The biggest exception would be movies, as it's harder to find copylefted films, but many of those that I download are old enough that they shouldn't qualify for copyright anymore.

Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer buying recordings of music made by my favourite bands to buying T-shirts and mugs with their faces on them.

Nothing is stopping you from doing so. Nothing is stopping your favorite bands from selling recordings. Weakened or abolished copyright law will not do this either.

'I've carried more water than Gunga Din for the business community -- the people who pay the taxes.'"

So much for the idea, hugely popular with the 'business community,' that taxes are always just passed through to the consumer.
I guess he must be a democrat, right?

PS - it isn't this David Hoyle in case anyone else was wondering...

Translation: I am bought and paid for so screw you.

'I've carried more water than Gunga Din for the business community -- the people who pay the taxes.'"

So much for the idea, hugely popular with the 'business community,' that taxes are always just passed through to the consumer.
I guess he must be a democrat, right?

PS - it isn't this David Hoyle in case anyone else was wondering...

DISCLAIMER: I'm a native French speaker and a former language student.

I hafta agree that French is a PITA to learn. I would say that it's not consistent enough. There are so many exceptions to the exceptions of French grammar and spelling rules that... It just feels like one of those times when you try to compile some weird and/or complex piece of software yourself, and your OS keeps telling you you need yet another dependency. But yeah, that was mostly about written French, 'cause spoken French is much easier — no, those weird-sounding phonemes you can learn how to produce; it just takes practice and a good phonetics handbook.

Besides, you should never forget that the entire French territory is much bigger than most people think http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Outre-mer_en_sans_Terre_Adelie.png (alright, almost no one lives in Clipperton and French Southern and Antarctic Lands, I'll give you that, but every other overseas territory is inhabited). Just don't go to Réunion if you hate volcanoes and cyclones — naaah, they're not as dangerous as you might think. ;)

A crazy-looking double 's' that looks like a cursive lower case 'f' followed by a normal 's' can be seen in the The US Declaration of Independence and Constitution where there are 2 's' characters in a row. this article says the ß character was originally an fz dipthong, and used to be expressed as 'fs'.

A crazy-looking double 's' that looks like a cursive lower case 'f' followed by a normal 's' can be seen in the The US Declaration of Independence and Constitution where there are 2 's' characters in a row. this article says the ß character was originally an fz dipthong, and used to be expressed as 'fs'.

No. I'm saying that though it's useful to be able to read handwriting, it's generally often a waste of time to do it -- particularily in the case of old classical scientific works. Sure, you can read this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Constitution_Pg1of4_AC.jpg rather than a good-quality transcript of the US constitution.

But doing so *will* mean you spend more time, and that time is spent on superficial items. The quality of the handwriting, is *not* the reason why people consider the US constitution a interesting document to study. (okay, so maybe for a few, but at a guess, 99%+ of the ones who ARE interested in the consititution are NOT interested in the handwriting)

Sure, it's useful to be able to read poorly readable sources. (though a lot LESS useful than it used to be, since a diminishing proportion of sources are handwritten)

But nevertheless, if given the CHOICE between a poorly readable scan, and a high-quality typeset version of the same text, and your interest is to learn what is in the text. Then most of the time, scanning the handwritten scan, is a waste of time.

That actually happens. See this story and this infographic.

It must be depressing to outright refuse to read thousands of man-years worth of original mathematical, scientific, medical and philosophical works because they used ink and joined letters together.

Hm. Take a look at Leibniz' cursive, Martin Luther's, Leonardo da Vinci's? Even someone who obviously spent a lot of effort at a beautiful script, like George Washington, can be tricky to read for modern eyes.

The conservatives make up about 40-50% of the Oregon/Washington.

Look at 2008, no county went more than 50-60% Obama
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9a/2008prescountymap.PNG

In 2004, Kerry only won Oregon by 4.16% and in 2000 Gore won by 0.44%

Free-To-Air (FTA) feeds and Wildfeeds are plentiful. Do some reading on http://www.satforums.com/ see if you can steer the dish, and if it's possible to enable it for Ku as well a C band (I'm guessing it's C because of the size). You can often refit a C band mesh dish to work on Ku by laying metal window screening on the surface of the reflector. Then you have to mount a KU feed at the focal point, usually offset next to the C feedhorn. Great site to find out what you can view FTA from your location: Lyngsat, for the central US try this page. To see if you can view a satellite from your location there are simple calculators on Lyngsat.

Free-To-Air (FTA) feeds and Wildfeeds are plentiful. Do some reading on http://www.satforums.com/ see if you can steer the dish, and if it's possible to enable it for Ku as well a C band (I'm guessing it's C because of the size). You can often refit a C band mesh dish to work on Ku by laying metal window screening on the surface of the reflector. Then you have to mount a KU feed at the focal point, usually offset next to the C feedhorn. Great site to find out what you can view FTA from your location: Lyngsat, for the central US try this page. To see if you can view a satellite from your location there are simple calculators on Lyngsat.