And Picard told us that the war with the Klingons was sparked by a botched first contact with them. But that contact didn't seem to be botched.
You don't call being shot in the chest by a xenophobic Okie corn farmer a botched first contact? The only thing they coulda done to make a worst first impression was to put on white hoods and burn a cross in front of his spaceship.
Looks like Paramount is still trying to grab viewwers by their gonads. I know that I was certainly paying close attention to the 'disinfection' scene where the guy got to rub gelatin all over the scantily-clad vulcan girl.
Still, I was pleasantly surprised by the level of prejudice, intolerance and violence. This show definitely played a lot like an old TOS show. It was quite a refreshing change of pace from Voyager and TNG's 'moral issue of the week' approach.
When I decided I wanted to watch Excel Saga fansubs, I found the early episodes (1-9) on Morpheus.
When I was looking for the LOTR trailer this morning, I found it on Morpheus.
If it works *nearly* that good for Audio files (And yes, you can share OGG's with it), then it has Napster beat hands down. It even appears to be free of the spyware that infests the other Kazzaa clients.
Does the analogy extend to scientists? Do they have some responsibility to take part in social, political, etc. processes to ensure that the world they release their tools into is ready and capable of making ethical and moral use of them? If so, what are the minimum requirements and limits of this responsibility?
In the 40's, scientists in the United States, Germany, and Russia were all very rapidly untangling the secrets of nuclear fission, nominally for use in weapons.
Many of the scientists have since decried their own work, but the fact remains that this 'weapons' technology and the research that lead to it has given rise to a goodly proportion of the technology we use today in the modern world.
While saftey questions, many of which are unfounded, still abound, its apparent that fission energy will be the cheapest, safest, and and cleanest energy that mankind can harness until solar collectors are dramatically improved, or fusion energy passes 'breakeven' levels on a sustained basis.
Most of the computer technology we use ultimately arises from the work of men who's research also led to military uses and was used in the construction of atomic weapons.
The upcoming generation of quantum computing relies on theories that are even more closley tied to nuclear fission.
Most scientists don't think in terms of 'how can I create a better, more deadly weapon'. They think in terms of unlocking the secrets of the universe. These actions, just like any other actions, have positive and negative consequences.
Let's all remember that this guy lost an election to a corpse, please.
Seriously, I'm afraid that this line of reasoning is only going to continue under the Bush administration.
Anyone who violates the conservative faction's very narrow definition of legality and morality is going to face harsher and harsher penalties. It's the 'hackers' right now. I'll be charitable and say that that means anyone who illegally breaks into a computer system or network. It will be expanded in the very near future to include anyone who violates non-circumvention clause of the DMCA. Seriously, how far are those two apart?
It can be reasonably argued that violating copy protections will put illegal technology or information in the hands of terrorists.
The logical progression is pretty evident from that point on. Anyone caught breaking a copyright will be targeted, and then anyone who illegaly owns copyrighted material will be targeted.
Hmmm... I wonder if I should encrypt the stash of Anime fansubs on my HDD. Wait, encryption is going to be illegal to! I'm a terroist either way!
Congress will just keep passing laws to give Bush and Ashcroft what they want in the name of 'National Security'. Don't think for a second that they won't.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The Taliban have threatened to execute any U.N. worker who uses computers and communications equipment in Afghanistan, forcing a near halt to the remaining relief work in the country, U.N. officials said Monday.
The militia raided U.N. offices in Kabul, the capital, and Kandahar, where the Taliban leadership is based, during the weekend and sealed their satellite telephones, walkie-talkies, computers and vehicles to bar them from use, according to U.N. spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker.
This is probably a troll, so mod me down for biting.
1. What are the uses of cryptography as a "Human Rights Tool"?
Okay, say you live in China, where the government is known to imprison members of certain religous groups using rather spurious claims that these groups are 'terrorist groups'. You've heard of the Faulan Gaun (sp?).
How else do you meet and exchange information and be free in your religion (which the U.S. considers a 'human right') without the aid of data encryption. There are a few ways to do it, but data encryption is the safest and fastest way to do so.
By the same token, look at Amnesty International's website. You won't be able to in China, or other certain countries, unless you use a proxy that bypasses the national filtering. Then, you won't be able to do it safely unless unless your connection to that proxy is encrypted so that you can't be spied upon. Safeweb rocks for surfing pr0n at work. It is essential tool for individuals in China who want to learn about the world around them without seeing it filtered through the prejudices of the Communist Party.
One last example. Say you are an Amnesty International worker in a country where your work is only barely tolerated, like Afghanistan. If you're smart, you'll hide evidences of human rights abuse behind strong encryption so that the collection of that evidence can't be used against you by a hostile court. Bescrypt is the first tool that comes to mind, but I know that there are equally good open source tools that will do the same job.
I could go on and on. Remember that these 'belligerant' governments aren't the only governments that try to violate human rights. The U.S. government will do it if they can get away with it. You've heard of Echelon? Carnivore? These privacy invading tools are completely useless in the face of 2048-bit strength DSS encryption, which is the default key-length in PGP.
Kevin Mitnick's laptop, which is still in posession of the Fed, has *yet* to yeild up any of his secrets that could be used against him because the data inside was encrypted. I think many/.ers feel like Kevin's rights were repeatedly violated. The data in his laptop cannot be used against him to further violate his rights after he's finally out and about to be able to work again.
Encryption is a wondrous power. Let's *not* give it up just because it rubs LEO's the wrong way. The police already have enough power to solve even the most heinous of crimes, just as they are *currently* doing in the WTC attack. Let's not give them more than they need.
Hmm... The Sony Info-lithium battery, which is what powers my camera, and *looked* like the battery he was using ran about $35 at BestBuy, the last time I checked, IIRC.
You wouldn't think that there are any positions like this left.
I'm a webmaster/artist for a medium-sized company in Texas that handles financial data. My duties range from in-company photographer to web design to server administration. I don't make *quite* as much as the developers we employ, but I do make quite a bit more than 'industry standard'. Also, I get to delve into all aspects of my job, unlike the developers who are stuck coding Java 40 hours a week. I've become siginificantly more experienced at photography, and I've increased my art skills. I was strictly an Apache admin before I started, but now, because this is a '31 Flavors' shop, I know as much about IIS as I do about Apache. (And yes, I keep the MS servers patched against things like Code Red and Nimda.)
If you can find a position like this, I highly recommend it.
If a normal guy like me can come up with these, you know that scary, insidious, Terrorist types are lightyears ahead:
1. Use existing crypto programs or write your own. Anyone with access to a high-level math textbook or a book on encryption and a little bit of coding experience can currently write crypto that is brute-forceable only by supercomputers. The same is true of the existing versions of PGP and other crypto programs available world-wide.
2. Steganography. Apps exist world-wide that will hide plain or crypted data in all sorts of things. Images, MP3's, Spam Mail, etc...
3. Use non government-controlled chanels to transmit data. Sneaker-net, by definition, is uncrackable without a spy in the house. No technology currently allows LEO's to read a CD without first placing it in a drive. This may not be far off, but it's still effective, so far as I know. Also, most phone companies can be persuaded to install 'burglar alarm' circuits that are just non-powered plain copper that between any two given locations.
4. XOR Crypted data in a manner so that if decrypted without first XORing it back, it will decrypt into useless, but not random information. I'm not a coder, but I can imagine that some talented hacker somewhere could come up with a scheme of encoding a crypted message so that it decrypted as Mom's cookie recipe if you didn't decode it properly.
5. For communications in which anonymity is more important than secrecy, use existing file-sharing networks to propogate messages. Freenet is the best example of this.
6. Transmit textual data in non-standard image formats. Ascii text is easy to detect. A compressed PNG of text data would be much more difficult to detect, especially by automated methods. A compressed or reencrypted raw bitmap would be even more difficult to detect. Existing image scanning programs work by scanning for a predertimined signature. Making images of text so that there is no signature possible is fairly easy in photoshop.
Heh, Gatesco's army of trained attack lawyers outta have fun scanning geocities and tripod anti-MS pages for 'generator = "MS Frontpage"' meta tags.
BUT... we should remember data on the web is always mutable. I understand that there are Apache mods which will appened information to any document served, letting a free hosting provider 'add' banners to any given webpage for example. It wouldn't be any trick at all to add code to Apache or any other server software that would add the formentioned meta tag to every document served from a high-traffic site such as/.
We all know that ever last bit of/. is generated on Linux, Taco. How 'bout giving the MSies something to froth about and have Apache or Slash add the tag?
From the article: While we can place great efforts into teaching people how to avoid buffer overflows in languages such as C it is likely they will introduce them into their programs anyway. It makes more sense from a security perspective to replace the language with one that makes buffer overflows difficult.
This is why you shouldn't use an MS designed languages like VB or C#.
Seriously, I understand what he's saying about C. It allows low level access to a computer's hardware, and can be easily broken at that low level... Thus the need for garbage collection and careful avoidance of Stack-overflow conditions.
On the other hand, we have Java, which trades convenience for security. Sure, it's easy to get started coding in Java, but heaven help you if you want to distribute a Java-based application to everyday (non-hacker) computer users. A webpage is the only medium in which Joe-sixpack is very likely to view any given Java application, giving full-scale Java applications a somewhat more limited potential user base.
Seriously, then, what is the best application and system language in terms of security, power, and convenience?
Derivative works are traditionally afforded at least some copyright protection, especially if the person who creates them adheres to the rules of Fair Use.
This means, more or less, that when you create a program that is GPL'd and have pulled source from other programs, that as author, you hold the copyright, and can theoretically sue if someone abuses your work in a manner prohibited by the GPL.
IANAL and whether or not this will hold up in any given court is anybody's guess at this point since its never been tried.
Yes, folks, it's true. The Vidomi encoder has been released as free software under the GPL, thus ending the conflict -- despite my reminders that the conflict could have been ended by dropping the GPL linkage, the makers doggedly insisted on becoming part of the GPL community! The FSF has verified the current implementation GPL compliant as well; it's not the same as holy penguin pee, but it's more than good enough.
Wired News Story about Mirrors and Pers Accounts
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 2
It's pretty damn nice to see that *someone* recognizes that the value of the internet in such a horrendous crisis doesn't come from one or two companies posting information, but from hundreds and thousands of... dare I say it... heroic individuals who do their little insignifcant part to take care of people.
Kudos to sites like Slashdot and ESPN. Super Kudos to all the individuals with webcams and mirror sites. You guys did the country and world an invaluable service yesterday. As someone who is separated by thousands of miles from the horror, I thank you for giving us a information line into what really happened.
If you are looking for news, you will find the most current information on TV or radio.
Many online news services are not available, because of extremely high demand.
Below are links to cached copies of news sites as they appeared earlier today.
Breaking news: Attacks hit US [Washington Post - CNN.com (cached)]
While the fourth amendment may not have been violated due to the fact that there was a valid search warrant, this kind of tactic sounds like classic 'silencing' to me. The warrant was sealed, right? Why were the offices raided? The quote in the reuters story from the owner indicated that he seemed to think that his news outlets were being targeted for being related to terrorist groups. There was *no* firm reason for the raid given.
Sounds very totalitarian, doesn't it?
As a Texan, I'm rather upset that we have a 'anti-terrorism force' at all! Hevean help me if I started to express anti-American views on my website!
You may not download, save, reproduce, or otherwise illegally use images on this website. By clicking the link below, you attest to the fact that you will abide by this license and report all instances of its violation to the copyright holder at once.
I beleive it was Brazil(? Please correct me) who recently ordered pharma plants to start manufacturing AIDS drugs in violation of U.S. patents. What are the consequences for countries who violate patents like this? Can we take this as a sign that violating a patent in this manner, 'for the public good' so to speak, is going to become more common and acceptable?
When I was younger, my father worked as a 'Security Policeman' (read: heavily armed security guard) at a DOE installation in Texas. He would regularly bring home large coffee cans full of expended slugs from the installation's firing range. He melted down the lead over a camp stove and used wooden casts to make some fairly large sculptures. The process was far from perfect since, but he did manage to make some nice-looking artwork.
Of course if there was as much lead left at the firing range as what he brought home, you *know* there was some serious soil and groundwater contamination going on...
While I won't comment on the morality of hunting, one of the biggest dangers to American endangered species is lead and mercury poisoning from pollution and... expended bullets.
I saw a documentary not long ago on Animal Planet that featured a doctor removing a lot of contaminated material from an eagle's stomach, including lead slugs.
Now, if you're going to tear up a tract of land by bombing it and destroying all the life therein, I wonder if pollution is going to be the biggest of your worries.
Slashdot Mirror
And Picard told us that the war with the Klingons was sparked by a botched first contact with them. But that contact didn't seem to be botched.
You don't call being shot in the chest by a xenophobic Okie corn farmer a botched first contact? The only thing they coulda done to make a worst first impression was to put on white hoods and burn a cross in front of his spaceship.
Looks like Paramount is still trying to grab viewwers by their gonads. I know that I was certainly paying close attention to the 'disinfection' scene where the guy got to rub gelatin all over the scantily-clad vulcan girl.
Still, I was pleasantly surprised by the level of prejudice, intolerance and violence. This show definitely played a lot like an old TOS show. It was quite a refreshing change of pace from Voyager and TNG's 'moral issue of the week' approach.
"Dude, sweet tunes! When did you buy the new XXXXXXX album?"
"Oh, I didn't buy it. I downloaded it. I woulda bought it, but you can't play CD's in your computer any more."
Yeah. Like this *isn't* going to be all over Morpheus by about 11:30 this evening.
When I decided I wanted to watch Excel Saga fansubs, I found the early episodes (1-9) on Morpheus.
When I was looking for the LOTR trailer this morning, I found it on Morpheus.
If it works *nearly* that good for Audio files (And yes, you can share OGG's with it), then it has Napster beat hands down. It even appears to be free of the spyware that infests the other Kazzaa clients.
Does the analogy extend to scientists? Do they have some responsibility to take part in social, political, etc. processes to ensure that the world they release their tools into is ready and capable of making ethical and moral use of them? If so, what are the minimum requirements and limits of this responsibility?
In the 40's, scientists in the United States, Germany, and Russia were all very rapidly untangling the secrets of nuclear fission, nominally for use in weapons.
Many of the scientists have since decried their own work, but the fact remains that this 'weapons' technology and the research that lead to it has given rise to a goodly proportion of the technology we use today in the modern world.
While saftey questions, many of which are unfounded, still abound, its apparent that fission energy will be the cheapest, safest, and and cleanest energy that mankind can harness until solar collectors are dramatically improved, or fusion energy passes 'breakeven' levels on a sustained basis.
Most of the computer technology we use ultimately arises from the work of men who's research also led to military uses and was used in the construction of atomic weapons.
The upcoming generation of quantum computing relies on theories that are even more closley tied to nuclear fission.
Most scientists don't think in terms of 'how can I create a better, more deadly weapon'. They think in terms of unlocking the secrets of the universe. These actions, just like any other actions, have positive and negative consequences.
You wouldn't know the good, if not for the bad.
Let's all remember that this guy lost an election to a corpse, please.
Seriously, I'm afraid that this line of reasoning is only going to continue under the Bush administration.
Anyone who violates the conservative faction's very narrow definition of legality and morality is going to face harsher and harsher penalties. It's the 'hackers' right now. I'll be charitable and say that that means anyone who illegally breaks into a computer system or network. It will be expanded in the very near future to include anyone who violates non-circumvention clause of the DMCA. Seriously, how far are those two apart?
It can be reasonably argued that violating copy protections will put illegal technology or information in the hands of terrorists.
The logical progression is pretty evident from that point on. Anyone caught breaking a copyright will be targeted, and then anyone who illegaly owns copyrighted material will be targeted.
Hmmm... I wonder if I should encrypt the stash of Anime fansubs on my HDD. Wait, encryption is going to be illegal to! I'm a terroist either way!
Congress will just keep passing laws to give Bush and Ashcroft what they want in the name of 'National Security'. Don't think for a second that they won't.
Okay, I posted the above as a mental excerise and then switched over to Wired News where I read the following:
0 .html
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,47074,0
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The Taliban have threatened to execute any U.N. worker who uses computers and communications equipment in Afghanistan, forcing a near halt to the remaining relief work in the country, U.N. officials said Monday.
The militia raided U.N. offices in Kabul, the capital, and Kandahar, where the Taliban leadership is based, during the weekend and sealed their satellite telephones, walkie-talkies, computers and vehicles to bar them from use, according to U.N. spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker.
This is probably a troll, so mod me down for biting.
/.ers feel like Kevin's rights were repeatedly violated. The data in his laptop cannot be used against him to further violate his rights after he's finally out and about to be able to work again.
1. What are the uses of cryptography as a "Human Rights Tool"?
Okay, say you live in China, where the government is known to imprison members of certain religous groups using rather spurious claims that these groups are 'terrorist groups'. You've heard of the Faulan Gaun (sp?).
How else do you meet and exchange information and be free in your religion (which the U.S. considers a 'human right') without the aid of data encryption. There are a few ways to do it, but data encryption is the safest and fastest way to do so.
By the same token, look at Amnesty International's website. You won't be able to in China, or other certain countries, unless you use a proxy that bypasses the national filtering. Then, you won't be able to do it safely unless unless your connection to that proxy is encrypted so that you can't be spied upon. Safeweb rocks for surfing pr0n at work. It is essential tool for individuals in China who want to learn about the world around them without seeing it filtered through the prejudices of the Communist Party.
One last example. Say you are an Amnesty International worker in a country where your work is only barely tolerated, like Afghanistan. If you're smart, you'll hide evidences of human rights abuse behind strong encryption so that the collection of that evidence can't be used against you by a hostile court. Bescrypt is the first tool that comes to mind, but I know that there are equally good open source tools that will do the same job.
I could go on and on. Remember that these 'belligerant' governments aren't the only governments that try to violate human rights. The U.S. government will do it if they can get away with it. You've heard of Echelon? Carnivore? These privacy invading tools are completely useless in the face of 2048-bit strength DSS encryption, which is the default key-length in PGP.
Kevin Mitnick's laptop, which is still in posession of the Fed, has *yet* to yeild up any of his secrets that could be used against him because the data inside was encrypted. I think many
Encryption is a wondrous power. Let's *not* give it up just because it rubs LEO's the wrong way. The police already have enough power to solve even the most heinous of crimes, just as they are *currently* doing in the WTC attack. Let's not give them more than they need.
Hmm... The Sony Info-lithium battery, which is what powers my camera, and *looked* like the battery he was using ran about $35 at BestBuy, the last time I checked, IIRC.
You wouldn't think that there are any positions like this left.
I'm a webmaster/artist for a medium-sized company in Texas that handles financial data. My duties range from in-company photographer to web design to server administration. I don't make *quite* as much as the developers we employ, but I do make quite a bit more than 'industry standard'. Also, I get to delve into all aspects of my job, unlike the developers who are stuck coding Java 40 hours a week. I've become siginificantly more experienced at photography, and I've increased my art skills. I was strictly an Apache admin before I started, but now, because this is a '31 Flavors' shop, I know as much about IIS as I do about Apache. (And yes, I keep the MS servers patched against things like Code Red and Nimda.)
If you can find a position like this, I highly recommend it.
If a normal guy like me can come up with these, you know that scary, insidious, Terrorist types are lightyears ahead:
1. Use existing crypto programs or write your own. Anyone with access to a high-level math textbook or a book on encryption and a little bit of coding experience can currently write crypto that is brute-forceable only by supercomputers. The same is true of the existing versions of PGP and other crypto programs available world-wide.
2. Steganography. Apps exist world-wide that will hide plain or crypted data in all sorts of things. Images, MP3's, Spam Mail, etc...
3. Use non government-controlled chanels to transmit data. Sneaker-net, by definition, is uncrackable without a spy in the house. No technology currently allows LEO's to read a CD without first placing it in a drive. This may not be far off, but it's still effective, so far as I know. Also, most phone companies can be persuaded to install 'burglar alarm' circuits that are just non-powered plain copper that between any two given locations.
4. XOR Crypted data in a manner so that if decrypted without first XORing it back, it will decrypt into useless, but not random information. I'm not a coder, but I can imagine that some talented hacker somewhere could come up with a scheme of encoding a crypted message so that it decrypted as Mom's cookie recipe if you didn't decode it properly.
5. For communications in which anonymity is more important than secrecy, use existing file-sharing networks to propogate messages. Freenet is the best example of this.
6. Transmit textual data in non-standard image formats. Ascii text is easy to detect. A compressed PNG of text data would be much more difficult to detect, especially by automated methods. A compressed or reencrypted raw bitmap would be even more difficult to detect. Existing image scanning programs work by scanning for a predertimined signature. Making images of text so that there is no signature possible is fairly easy in photoshop.
Heh, Gatesco's army of trained attack lawyers outta have fun scanning geocities and tripod anti-MS pages for 'generator = "MS Frontpage"' meta tags.
/.
/. is generated on Linux, Taco. How 'bout giving the MSies something to froth about and have Apache or Slash add the tag?
BUT... we should remember data on the web is always mutable. I understand that there are Apache mods which will appened information to any document served, letting a free hosting provider 'add' banners to any given webpage for example. It wouldn't be any trick at all to add code to Apache or any other server software that would add the formentioned meta tag to every document served from a high-traffic site such as
We all know that ever last bit of
From the article: While we can place great efforts into teaching people how to avoid buffer overflows in languages such as C it is likely they will introduce them into their programs anyway. It makes more sense from a security perspective to replace the language with one that makes buffer overflows difficult.
This is why you shouldn't use an MS designed languages like VB or C#.
Seriously, I understand what he's saying about C. It allows low level access to a computer's hardware, and can be easily broken at that low level... Thus the need for garbage collection and careful avoidance of Stack-overflow conditions.
On the other hand, we have Java, which trades convenience for security. Sure, it's easy to get started coding in Java, but heaven help you if you want to distribute a Java-based application to everyday (non-hacker) computer users. A webpage is the only medium in which Joe-sixpack is very likely to view any given Java application, giving full-scale Java applications a somewhat more limited potential user base.
Seriously, then, what is the best application and system language in terms of security, power, and convenience?
What happens if you need CPR or something
Think about that for a second... CPR wouldn't really help someone who didn't have a heart, no?
If your artificial heart stops you just change the battery. If you stop breathing, mouth to mouth *without* Cardio-massage would work just fine.
Derivative works are traditionally afforded at least some copyright protection, especially if the person who creates them adheres to the rules of Fair Use.
This means, more or less, that when you create a program that is GPL'd and have pulled source from other programs, that as author, you hold the copyright, and can theoretically sue if someone abuses your work in a manner prohibited by the GPL.
IANAL and whether or not this will hold up in any given court is anybody's guess at this point since its never been tried.
Ask Avery of VirtualDub fame whether or not this has been sucessfully enforced:
Yes, folks, it's true. The Vidomi encoder has been released as free software under the GPL, thus ending the conflict -- despite my reminders that the conflict could have been ended by dropping the GPL linkage, the makers doggedly insisted on becoming part of the GPL community! The FSF has verified the current implementation GPL compliant as well; it's not the same as holy penguin pee, but it's more than good enough.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,46766,00. html
It's pretty damn nice to see that *someone* recognizes that the value of the internet in such a horrendous crisis doesn't come from one or two companies posting information, but from hundreds and thousands of... dare I say it... heroic individuals who do their little insignifcant part to take care of people.
Kudos to sites like Slashdot and ESPN. Super Kudos to all the individuals with webcams and mirror sites. You guys did the country and world an invaluable service yesterday. As someone who is separated by thousands of miles from the horror, I thank you for giving us a information line into what really happened.
If you are looking for news, you will find the most current information on TV or radio.
Many online news services are not available, because of extremely high demand.
Below are links to cached copies of news sites as they appeared earlier today.
Breaking news: Attacks hit US [Washington Post - CNN.com (cached)]
While the fourth amendment may not have been violated due to the fact that there was a valid search warrant, this kind of tactic sounds like classic 'silencing' to me. The warrant was sealed, right? Why were the offices raided? The quote in the reuters story from the owner indicated that he seemed to think that his news outlets were being targeted for being related to terrorist groups. There was *no* firm reason for the raid given.
Sounds very totalitarian, doesn't it?
As a Texan, I'm rather upset that we have a 'anti-terrorism force' at all! Hevean help me if I started to express anti-American views on my website!
Sigh...
Hey, here are some images you can have for free:
http://www.furinkan.net/art/
I'm the artist and owner, but maybe if my work gets around, people might be willing to pay me for large, high-resolution scans!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but not a single current browser supports the format natively.
Most browsers did not support PNG's natively until their 4.0 versions. Tables until 2.0, etc...
Undoubtedly, incompatiable version of SVG format will make it into IE 6.5 or 7.0 and Mozilla 9.3.4... if Moz ever gets that far.
I beleive it was Brazil(? Please correct me) who recently ordered pharma plants to start manufacturing AIDS drugs in violation of U.S. patents. What are the consequences for countries who violate patents like this? Can we take this as a sign that violating a patent in this manner, 'for the public good' so to speak, is going to become more common and acceptable?
When I was younger, my father worked as a 'Security Policeman' (read: heavily armed security guard) at a DOE installation in Texas. He would regularly bring home large coffee cans full of expended slugs from the installation's firing range. He melted down the lead over a camp stove and used wooden casts to make some fairly large sculptures. The process was far from perfect since, but he did manage to make some nice-looking artwork.
Of course if there was as much lead left at the firing range as what he brought home, you *know* there was some serious soil and groundwater contamination going on...
While I won't comment on the morality of hunting, one of the biggest dangers to American endangered species is lead and mercury poisoning from pollution and... expended bullets.
I saw a documentary not long ago on Animal Planet that featured a doctor removing a lot of contaminated material from an eagle's stomach, including lead slugs.
Now, if you're going to tear up a tract of land by bombing it and destroying all the life therein, I wonder if pollution is going to be the biggest of your worries.