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Bruce Schneier's essay on Security: The value of privacy

Ehmm..wait a minute!!

Pons and Fleischman were definitely on to something and it was actually MIT that cooked the books during their review because they did not want to lose hot fusion research/grant money!

Hear it from an insider, MIT's Chief Science Writer at the time:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=33C82463A8CBFC88

My long-time friend, Dr. Eugene Mallove, is dead. The local police have ruled his death a homicide. At this writing, his killer is (or "killers" are) unknown, and the precise reasons for his brutal killing are equally mysterious. The timing of Gene's death - May 14, 2004, just as his 15-year, literal one scientist crusade to force the world's scientific and political communities to take seriously a revolutionary form of energy that can literally "change the world" was finally about to be vindicated this year, by a reversal of the original negative analysis 15 years ago by the same government agency, the U.S. Department of Energy - makes no sense, regardless of the exact reasons for his murder. - Richard C. Hoagland

In this 5-hour broadcast, (the late) Eugene Mallove shares new energy ideas and concepts for the first four hours, followed by an hour of Open Lines.

Since Pons and Fleischman:

By 1991, 92 groups of researchers from 10 different countries had reported excess heat, tritium, neutrons or other nuclear effects.[73] Over 3,000 cold fusion papers have been published including about 1,000 in peer-reviewed journals (see indices in further reading, below). In March 1995, Dr. Edmund Storms compiled a list of 21 published papers reporting excess heat and articles have been published in peer reviewed journals such as Naturwissenschaften, European Physical Journal A, European Physical Journal C, Journal of Solid State Phenomena, Physical Review A, Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, Japanese Journal of Applied Physics, and Journal of Fusion Energy (see indices in further reading, below).

The generation of excess heat has been reported by (among others):

* Michael McKubre, director of the Energy Research Center at SRI International,
* Giuliano Preparata (ENEA (Italy))
* Richard A. Oriani (University of Minnesota, in December 1990),
* Robert A. Huggins (at Stanford University in March 1990),
* Yoshiaki Arata (Osaka University, Japan),
* T. Mizuno (Hokkaido University, Japan),
* T. Ohmori (Japan),

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion#Experimental_reports

"Despite a backdrop of meager funding and career-killing derision from mainstream scientists and engineers, cold fusion is anything but a dead field of research. Presenters at the MIT event estimated that 3,000 published studies from scientists around the world have contributed to the growing canon of evidence suggesting that small but promising amounts of energy can be generated using the infamous tabletop apparatus."

"MIT's Peter Hagelstein, on the other hand, said "cold fusion" reactions have yielded surplus energy from as far back as the initial experiments in 1989. Verification of these controversial results is not the problem -- many labs around the world have reproduced parts of the results many times. "

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/08/cold_fusion?currentPage=all#

U.S. Navy Report Supports Cold Fusion:

and again I'll say privacy is an illusion...case in point:

Yale Students' Lawsuit Unmasks Anonymous Trolls, Opens Pandora's Box
By Ryan Singel Email 07.30.08

"Women named Jill and Hillary should be raped."

Those are the words of "AK-47" -- a poster to the college-admissions web forum AutoAdmit.com. AK-47 was one of a handful of students heaping misogynist scorn on women attending the nations' top law schools in 2007, in posts so vile they spurred a national debate on the limits of online anonymity, and an unprecedented federal lawsuit aimed at unmasking and punishing the posters.

Now lawyers for two female Yale Law School students have ascertained AK-47's real identity, along with the identities of other AutoAdmit posters, who all now face the likely publication of their names in court records -- potentially marking a death sentence for the comment trolls' budding legal careers even before the case has gone to trial.

The unmasking of the posters marks a milestone in a rare legal challenge to the norms of online commenting, where arguments live on for years in search-engine results and where reputations can be sullied nearly irreparably by anyone with a grudge, a laptop and a WiFi connection. Yet a year after the lawsuit was filed, little else has been resolved -- and legal controversies have multiplied. The women themselves have gone silent, and their lawyers -- two of whom are now themselves being sued -- are not talking to the press. Legal experts are beginning to wonder aloud if there's any point in pressing the messy lawsuit.

"You have good lawyers putting their time in on the case, and in a policy sense, they are achieving something, says Ann Bartow, an associate professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law. "But in a victim sense -- assuming you think of the women as victims -- it's not clear what this is going to achieve."

The AutoAdmit controversy began even before one of the women, identified in court documents as "Jane Doe I," started classes in the fall of 2005, the lawsuit alleges. Doe I was alerted in the summer to an AutoAdmit comment thread entitled "Stupid Bitch to Attend Law School." The thread included messages such as, "I think I will sodomize her. Repeatedly" and a reply claiming "she has herpes." The second woman, Jane Doe II, was similarly attacked beginning in January 2007.

Both women tried in vain to persuade the administrators of the AutoAdmit.com site to remove the threads, according to the lawsuit. But then the story of the cyber-harassment hit the front page of The Washington Post, and the law school trolls became fodder for cable news shows. Soon after, the female law students, with help from Stanford and Yale law professors, filed the federal lawsuit in June 2007 seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.

The Jane Doe plaintiffs contend that the postings about them became etched into the first page of search engine results on their names, costing them prestigious jobs, infecting their relationships with friends and family, and even forcing one to stop going to the gym for fear of stalkers.

"We have never had such a way to lie and distort facts about people -- to spread lies and distortions in a way that is attached to them," says Bartow. "And you can game it to come up on the front page of Google."

Bartow believes the problem lies in technology outstripping the law and our cultural responses. George Washington University Law Professor Daniel Solove, who's been thinking about the issue long enough to have written a book called The Future of Reputation, agrees. He says the law needs to change.

"The internet isn't a radical-free zone where you can hurt people. But on the other hand, we can't have everyone rushing to the court, because the court is a blunt tool," Solove says. "We need something to help shape norms -- there needs to be some kind of push back against the notion that the internet is a place wh

Almost forgot the FIRMWARE

Maybe we should shift gears and talk about the revolving door or corruption on election equipment manufactures and the elected officials that keep buying and using the crap.

Joking aside, AW&ST ran a story about a recently-cancelled TSTO system with a "Mothership" based on the XB-70 (aesthetically at least).

Hangar 18 at Groom Lake is fairly big, no? There's at least 2 pictures of a very large white plane that has no reasonable explanation (I believe this may be one.

How is this a Troll? Apple follows the steps in the GP to a tee.

Jobs was very involved with the design and UI of the iPod.

I predict another one of those raps about how lame this guy was and how "it can't possibly happen to us"...

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2003/06/59401

more questions?

--

Yes, in Germany the government is voted as well and therefor selected by the "users". That's pretty much the same with Google: don't vote (=use) for it, if you don't like it.
The government is voted by the majority and I have to live with it, even if I haven't voted for it. When I choose Google then it's me and noone else that is responsible for this choice.

Quite a difference, isn't it?

Nintendo DS mod chip. Wired has a short blog post as well.

There is a great fear that nobody else (the up-and-comer Mark Begich for example) will be able to pull the kind of strings in Washington that Stevens was able to pull -- at least not for decades.

Ah well there's the catch. So, Alaskans don't care if they elect dumb, corrupt politicians just so long as they bring in the pork for the state? I've often wondered about the electees from Alaska. Murkowski... now there's another story. He resigns to become governor and then appoints his daughter in his place?

What about the common good of the country as a whole? Your senator does not merely pass laws that affect only Alaska, but all the other 300 million of us. And powerful, corrupt politicians like yours have been coming up with dumbass laws that affect all the US for decades. For just one fun example, how about the Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Choice Act.

Our state certainly needs to rid itself of corruption. If Stevens is convicted it will be a sad day.

I'm a bit dumbfounded by this. What on earth could be sad about kicking out a senator that has been proven corrupt? Oh.. yeah, he's powerful and brings money and investment, not to mention I'm sure great parties with the oil execs at the Chalet.

I know what it's like to lose a powerful government rep. Tom Foley was speaker of the house until he was the first speaker to be unseated in ages (or maybe forever, I forget). His opponent, Nethercutt, a replublican, chided Foley for being in office so long--how does one get to be speaker otherwise?--and promised to serve only two terms. Haha. Well, that promise went out the window. Anyway, eastern Washington survived gaining a lying newbie representative, I'm sure Alaska will get over this fiasco.

-Aaron

I'd rather have a more ethically responsible corporation in charge of software and hardware that can endanger human life.

This is old, but coincidental, IMHO, nonetheless.

I realize TFA only talks about bundling a few conveniences together in cars, and not running the car itself or other silly Jetson-like automation; but my fear is that if you let closed source "in the door", at some point MS will "extend" (heh!) and screw up perfectly good cars.

Secondly, considering MS's propensity toward DRM (see Vista, broadcast flags) and the simple fact that GPS can talk on the internet, this is not an entertainment "packaging" that I would welcome openly without much scrutiny.

UK citizens are safe in the knowledge that they're being watched.

That poster is no one-off either. After it became fashionable to compare everything to 1984 the Government agencies realised they could play on people's paranoia. Hence the 'watchful eyes' poster, the targeting benefit fraud campaign and the warning to car tax evaders ("You can't escape the DVLA computer").

UK citizens are safe in the knowledge that they're being watched. That's it citizen, keep moving. Nothing to see here.

Ignoring the Orwellian references, could this be used for some good?

There was a story a while back in Wired about the iPhone development. A key part of the story was when the iPhone team approached Jobs with a buggy, barely-functioning prototype. Jobs coldly told them, "We don't have a product yet". This motivated them to get the phone up to par in the mere three months before its debut.

Sadly, I don't think a run-of-the-mill CEO would have had this reaction, and the employees wouldn't have had the motivation to fix things. Without jobs, the iPhone might have been the Vista of the cell phone world.

I assume, from the context of your comment, that when you say "a power plant in every home" that you meant "a nuclear power plant in every home."

I probably read many the same books that you did, and I'm far from being a tree-hugger; but I have toured a nuke (my uncle worked in one and gave us a tour way before 9-11 made that impossible) and I can tell you that scaling that down is going to present a difficult engineering challenge - among all the other hurdles that you have to clear.

If you remove the word nuclear (either explicit or implied) from your comment, I wholeheartedly agree.

I wonder if anyone has examined the cost of deploying solar cells in, for example, median strips of highways and in parking lots and on rooftops. Compare this against the cost of deploying even a garden variety "community nuke" and I'll bet that the cost is competitive, and without the concomitant risk of nuclear material exposure.

How about supplanting solar panels with wind turbines? These turbines could be deployed anywhere and - surprise surprise, are insensitive to impinging solar radiation. All they need is wind, and you can even get that while it's raining. (And sunny, too, so you get a double whammy from the wind and solar panels.)

We have to start thinking creatively, 'tis true. I believe that we can do this in a slightly safer fashion than nuclear power in localized areas - still utilizing them, of course, for major metropolitan areas where they make sense.

Wireless headset companies are tirelessly trying to use the harmful radiation excuse to get people to use their products. Anybody remember the popcorn video on the internet a few weeks a go? That was created by a headset manufacturer to sell more headsets. It makes me wonder if this story is related.

I could cite my brother, who is studying medicine and genetic engineering, but this being the web, I'll just grab a few headlines from Google, post them, and get back to work.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/01/synthetic_genome

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/science/05angi.html

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/29/news/genome.php

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6733797.stm

I can believe time travel before I believe faster than light travel.

We are, actually, much closer to FTL travel than we are to time travel. You can't travel faster than light through the fabric of spacetime, but, as we all know, that fabric isn't flat. If you can change the shape (as large objects do), then you can effectively get from point A to point B faster than light could by taking the normal route. See:

http://arxivblog.com/?p=523 or
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/12/physicists-do-t.html

It's completely theoretical, and requires extra dimensions, and we have no chance of doing anything with it any time soon. But, that's farther than we are with time travel.

Cue the 400 posts arguing whether or not "Internet" should be capitalized.

Nope.

Also, I'm more interested in there being a Rocky Mountain Safe Streets Task Force and why they think a geek like Edward Davidson is really a danger to the public.

This Wired article must have been where I read about it, if it wasn't linked on here. I remember the wrapped like a turkey in tin foil part conjuring up memories of Kramer, vegetable oil and some "Seinfeld" episode...gross.

Look at the comments from Dana Hom (former COO of DTIS) on this Wired story. http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/07/former-san-fran.html He adds some insight into how the SF government operates and convinces me that this guy is getting railroaded. It reminds me of a fired sysadmin that we had to investigate for "hacking" when all he was doing was changing permissions on his folder structure. Suddenly the PHB didn't have access to other users folders on the network and assumed there was something malicious going on.

citation needed

teledildonics

The Miss Kanna case mod

The Katsuya Matsumura Anime girl computer case mod

Just like a woman

Real Doll

Boy Toy Dolls

Programmed for love

Therapeutic 'doll therapy' for dementia seems the most accepted by the medical community and is still controversial, there are other therapeutic studies going on, but I only a spent minute or two googling.

Fast forward to 2008Q2. Searchenginewatch.com reports a dismal 3% rise of 2008Q2 compared to 2008Q1. The weak ad revenue from housing, automobile, and finance sectors are blamed, as is Google's recent efforts to focus on ad quality rather than ad quantity.

Back to the subject of this post. Putting revenue aside, quinthar.com's "analysis" is upside down. Raising the threshold of minimum bids leads to reduced revenue just as raising the minimum wage leads to reduced employment. All it does is redirect business that would otherwise take place to the black market or competitors. Google knows this; they are not greedily seeking short-term gains as quinthar.com accuses. On the contrary, there are other reasons to force minimum prices, and in the case of Google, Google wants to improve ad quality in order to improve or maintain its brand image and realize long-term gains (or at least sustainability).

The Internet is not a bubble, it's a juggernaut. It has changed the world, but it has taken much longer than was imagined during the dot-com era (but in hindsight, it's still fast). Newspapers are on their last breath. But that doesn't make the Internet immune from the general economy. That's the main reason for Google's slower growth rate.

Mouse over the link in the summary. If it says "the register" like this one did, you can be pretty sure that the summary is as informative, if less humorous (oops, sorry, that's "humourous").

I googled and found two other sites with news of this: Wired Blogs and Clean Technica

On a more green note, the CherryPal is supposed to sell for under $400 (monitor, keyboard, etc. not included). It should hit the market on August 4th, 2008. For that price and low energy use, it will appeal to wallets as well as the environmentally conscious. Though there is some understandable skepticism, I'll praise any manufacturer that lowers the bar on PC environmental impact.

Directly improving the climate falls under the term Geoengineering. Here's a wired article on the subject that explores other viable ways to solve the CO2 problem or help cool the planet: http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-07/ff_geoengineering
More is here:
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/10/geoengineering-.html

Basically there are three other ways that can help to alleviate the problem and any or all of them could be used:

* Seeding the oceans with iron to promote algae growth and thus CO2 sequestration
* Introducing Sulfur Dioxide into the upper atmosphere (per wired article) which deflects sunlight.
* Detonate nukes to inject dust into the upper atmosphere which also deflects sunlight.

BTM

Directly improving the climate falls under the term Geoengineering. Here's a wired article on the subject that explores other viable ways to solve the CO2 problem or help cool the planet: http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-07/ff_geoengineering
More is here:
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/10/geoengineering-.html

Basically there are three other ways that can help to alleviate the problem and any or all of them could be used:

* Seeding the oceans with iron to promote algae growth and thus CO2 sequestration
* Introducing Sulfur Dioxide into the upper atmosphere (per wired article) which deflects sunlight.
* Detonate nukes to inject dust into the upper atmosphere which also deflects sunlight.

BTM

you still shouldn't out the others working on similar things:

-------------

By 1991, 92 groups of researchers from 10 different countries had reported excess heat, tritium, neutrons or other nuclear effects.[73] Over 3,000 cold fusion papers have been published including about 1,000 in peer-reviewed journals (see indices in further reading, below). In March 1995, Dr. Edmund Storms compiled a list of 21 published papers reporting excess heat and articles have been published in peer reviewed journals such as Naturwissenschaften, European Physical Journal A, European Physical Journal C, Journal of Solid State Phenomena, Physical Review A, Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry, Japanese Journal of Applied Physics, and Journal of Fusion Energy (see indices in further reading, below).

The generation of excess heat has been reported by (among others):

* Michael McKubre, director of the Energy Research Center at SRI International,
* Giuliano Preparata (ENEA (Italy))
* Richard A. Oriani (University of Minnesota, in December 1990),
* Robert A. Huggins (at Stanford University in March 1990),
* Yoshiaki Arata (Osaka University, Japan),
* T. Mizuno (Hokkaido University, Japan),
* T. Ohmori (Japan),

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion#Experimental_reports

"Despite a backdrop of meager funding and career-killing derision from mainstream scientists and engineers, cold fusion is anything but a dead field of research. Presenters at the MIT event estimated that 3,000 published studies from scientists around the world have contributed to the growing canon of evidence suggesting that small but promising amounts of energy can be generated using the infamous tabletop apparatus."

"MIT's Peter Hagelstein, on the other hand, said "cold fusion" reactions have yielded surplus energy from as far back as the initial experiments in 1989. Verification of these controversial results is not the problem -- many labs around the world have reproduced parts of the results many times. "

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/08/cold_fusion?currentPage=all#

U.S. Navy Report Supports Cold Fusion:
http://www.infinite-energy.com/iemagazine/issue44/navy.html

""Last March, scientists at the annual conference of the august American Physical Society heard presentations on cold fusion. Next month, the Second International Conference on Future Energy will be held in Washington, D.C. The vast majority of physicists remains skeptical, but at the Office of Naval Research, six of the nine experiments performed produced an unexplainable amount of excess heat.""

http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060808/REPOSITORY/608080316&SearchID=73253345954312

"Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a tabletop accelerator that produces nuclear fusion at room temperature, providing confirmation of an earlier experiment conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), while offering substantial improvements over the original design."

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/ny_team_confirms_ucla_tabletop_fusion_10017.html

Science in Neglect - Nobel Laureate S

If anyone cares about the real story I recommend you read this article http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/08/07/18/30FE-sf-network-lockout_1.html . Or read the comments by Dana Horn on this wired article. http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/07/former-san-fran.html Just because Hans Reiser was guilty doesn't mean every geek that is accused is guilty.

Insightful?

The PS2 is far more similar to the Will than the 360. The biggest problem is storage capacity. Followed by processor/graphics ability...then you have the whole issue of downloadable content http://blog.wired.com/games/2008/02/nintendo-will-b.html

The Wii is NOT in the same class as the 360/PS3. Pretending that the reason for a crappy version of Rock Band is due to 'lazy developers' is just a matter of sticking your head in the sand.

One of the underlieing assumptions of the Invisible Hand is that a rise in price will immediately bring production up to a new equilibrium. Of course, this is really an abstraction that makes the thought experiment work; in the real world, Nintendo can't immediately increase production to meet increased demand, because it takes time to build new manufacturing facilities. It's also not worthwhile to invest in new facilities to serve a short-term spike. Big investments like that have to pay off for the long haul. Since it was expected that the Wii would start making demand last spring, it wasn't worth too much effort to increase manufacturing rates. (I suspect WiiFit created a new demand spike which threw off that prediction.)

So if they can't meet demand, the Invisible Hand says they should increase the cost. This pads their profit margin, allowing them to reinvest into building facilities to build more Wiis, and then sell later at a cheaper price when manufacturing ramps up. This is also the best strategy for retailers (even if they were a monopoly), since it pads their margins just as much. So why hasn't this happened?

Nintendo has a long term need to maintain its brand image. If it sold the Wii at $300 or more (which is where the eBay price suggests the equilibrium price is at), it would be competing around the same price point as the XBox 360. Since the Wii is (let's face it) less powerful than the 360, many would perceive this as evil price gouging. At launch, the 360 was already considered too expensive (though many considered it cheep when the PS3's price was announced). Brand perception may be more important than a short term profit increase.

Where I live, Comcast started this a few days ago, as well. (a smaller company was sold to comcast last year, and so we were stuck with them). Oddly enough, however, instead of being redirected to a comcast page, we're being redirected to an earthlink ad page.

A spot of research brought up this Wired article from April on possible site hijacking through such error pages... http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/04/isps-error-page.html

Not sure if it's related, but Comcast was recently in discussions to sell their rights up here (that they just bought), and one of the possible buyers, iirc, was Roger's (though am not in Canada, just very near).

Hehe, good one - Too bad though, I will stick to using custom HOSTS files, due to this & others like it:

DNS Root Servers Attacked:

http://it.slashdot.org/it/07/02/06/2238225.shtml

&, more recently (bug in DNS that Mr. Dan Kaminsky discovered):

DNS Flaw in BIND:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1460

So, no thanks... I also don't need "javascript/iframes" poisoned attacks from badwebsites or bad adbanners either, per this example (1 of MANY like it the past 2-4 yrs. now no less, with even Microsoft & other notables falling victim to it no less):

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1460

&/or

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/11/doubleclick

For just a couple examples thereof... there are FAR more.

Plus, I don't "burn time" calling out to DNS servers either (IP to URL resolutions) for access to my personal list of fav. websites (250 or so)!

I instead, act as my OWN "DNS Server" more-or-less, which is a heck of a lot faster too, than calling out to a potentially exploited DNS server (poisoned, myself being "man-in-the-middle" attacked (only helps some here though), etc. et al)...

PLUS - I do NOT see "adbanners" either (I block them - why on earth would I forego "HBO 'no commercials' Internetting" vs. otherwise? I pay for my linetime, sorry webmasters, & I don't want to get any poisoned adbanners either)...

(That alone is orders of magnitude F A S T E R, than calling out to DNS servers that may be compromised, & my app (noted in my last post) makes SURE their IP address to URL conversion is current (via the PING code I reused no less)... combined w/ NOT SEEING ADBANNERS? Hey - I fly online... even on "low speed" DSL (what I currently use)).

APK

I don't think it's exactly a "publicity stunt." In Yorke's own words: "Every record for the last four, including my solo record, has been leaked. So the idea was like, we'll leak it, then." Source

It was more of an experiment to Radiohead. They are showing people (specifically other bands) that you don't need to follow the business model of big labels to sell music successfully. Radiohead made more money out of the In Rainbows "strategy" than all their previous albums made, put together! They didn't think this would be as successful as it ended up being. However, they didn't want to look snobbish by not selling actual CDs, so doing what they did went hand in hand with cooperating with label companies. Everybody wins, or so I see it. I don't think they could have dodged working with the big labels entirely.

True enough, but be honest with yourself. If there's are books about not collecting stamps, organizations dedicated to not collecting stamps, and websites all about how to not collect stamps, and movements to preach the greatness of not collecting stamps, guess what not collecting stamps has become?

or related ones. I looked it up, the WH keeps requesting small increases to the NSF... http://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/ and they request specific amounts for projects only to see them whacked http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/12/us-budget-spell.html

Now I know, there are going to be the standard cry-about-Iraq-because-if-not-Iraq type crap totally ignoring the fact that just a small percentage of earmarks wasted on works named after LIVING congressmen could pay for any number of our own pet projects.

The money has always been there, Congress has the final responsibility for directing it correctly. Iraq is a very good excuse to spend money how they want while pointing "SEE SEE SEE SEE" elsewhere. In other words, one negative about Iraq that people ignore is that its mere existence allows Congress to waste money because they can always lay claim to the fact that Iraq consumes more.

without Iraq the money would be just as unavailable as it is today. This situation will not change until neither Democrats or Republicans are dominant.

Furthermore, the article is ridiculously biased.
At the end, the author closes with the line "If anything, the changes simply reflect that Obama is just another politician"- one of the most popular right-wing attacks on Obama.
Take a look at the picture, again: http://blog.wired.com/.shared/image.html?/photos/uncategorized/2008/07/15/mccain_obama_versionaista.jpg
That's not some sort of scrub or replacing a sentence that made him look bad or backing down from a strong position. It's an outright replacement of an older quote with a newer one. If anything, it makes Obama's Iraq policy even clearer.
At the bottom, it also shows there are two links that have been added as well.
If there is some sort of "just another politician" type of coverup of an older policy going on at Obama's site, it's certainly not in the picture given in the article; and this makes me think that this is just whining: "He updated his page instead of leaving it static from January to November? HOW DARE HE?!"

The version I heard was that there was water in a sensor that fooled the avionics computer.

Where I got the info
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/06/video-stealth-b.html

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-07/ff_hansreiser

But this is cool if it works:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/bemore.html

http://www.gizmag.com/go/7214/

Add to that, Helium is no longer a strategic gas, and thus rationed.

What about a helium shortage?

Unless we run out of helium.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.08/helium.html

"At our current rate of consumption, Cliffside will likely be empty in 10 to 25 years, and the Earth will be virtually helium-free by the end of the 21st century."

They must not read /.

Helium Crisis Approaching, slashdot earlier this year.

A Helium Shortage?, Wired eight years ago.

In the interest of improving the signal:noise ratio...

http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/news/2005/11/69529

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/05/did_the_pirate_.html

"Is the Pirate Bay a front for right wing extremists in Sweden? Yesterday our Epicenter blog, linked to an interesting YouTube video in which Tobias Andersson of The Pirate Bay if asked to defend the site against charges that Carl Lundstrom, former CEO of Rix Telecom and âoewell-known right-wing extremist in Sweden,â funded the early development of the site. [video after the jump]

Interesting, it turns out that Pirate Bay did take bandwidth and server space from Rix Telecom while is was controlled by Lundstrom, who, as Epicenter says, is probably going to end up being an MPAA/RIAA target at some point."

if you are fine with giving money to fascist millionaires rather than the people who make content that entertains you, then you are fucked up big time.

Hmm. I'm not convinced. What about VoIP? I *like* my low-latency reliable VoIP, and I like the fact that my ISP is able to prioritize it over bulk traffic like BT. Ditto small HTTP traffic bursts, DNS requests, etc.

This is not an issue of prioritization; this is a forced destruction of undesired (by ISP standards) streams.

Besides your ISP more than likely uses hot-potato routing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot-potato_routing which does its best to take the shortest path _out_ of their network regardless of increase in latency caused by taking a longer path once out of their network. Unless you have a SLA, you're getting the worst service available. Oddly, with hot-potato routing, you even have a chance of some streams taking a shorter path when the network gets more congested (depending on topology, of course).

Also, congestion is hardly an issue with modern ISPs (in the US, tax dollars funded development of new optical backbones): http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2004/09/65121

IMHO, if I purchase a "bulk" link, I expect all traffic to be treated equally and the ISP to not cancel streams. I do like you're idea of users flagging traffic as bulk but wonder about the implementation, incentive and enforcement details.

"I seriously doubt Photoshop would stop you [printing bank notes], but that's just me. It seems a little pointless to have photo-editing software try to do that. "

Then be amazed, because it is in Photoshop CS (I don't know about later versions -- I presume it's there too). Without some fiddling (see the Wired article below), you can't cut-and-paste parts of a bank note image larger than a certain size, you can't open a file with a bank note image, you can't print it, etc.

Refer to this post, this /. article, this international government agreement that encouraged its "voluntary" implementation, and this Wired article describing how pointless it all is.

But the "feature" is definitely there, so I wouldn't put it past the RIAA/MPAA to ask software and/or hardware vendors to "voluntarily" comply with a similar request to hinder "prohibited" operations. The real question is whether vendors would be foolish enough to cave to them. Hopefully not.

For the last 4 or 5 years Photoshop has had a module that prevents that. See this Wired article.

Adobe acknowledged last week that its Photoshop CS digital editing package includes a "counterfeit deterrence system" designed to prevent users from accessing images of currency.... The anti-counterfeit software in Photoshop CS was developed by the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group

It's not hard to circumvent, but it certainly is there.

"go/no-go" pills - amphetamine
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2003/02/57434

What really gets to me is that the damn Congress keeps rolling over and letting him get away with this shit.

Then don't let them. This PAC has been organized to make them pay. An article about it in Wired can be found here.

Bottom line: the talk, the phone calls, the letters didn't do shit. Now make the bastards get real jobs. Put up or shut up -you are being monitored anyway.

You should try this: http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/16-07/pl_print For example, see question number 2... You have to put into perspective the actual risk vs perceived risk.