The Sicilian Mafia were pretty well protected even with lousy encryption. There's a culture that discourages anyone from talking about it, there's fear, and there's corruption in the Italian government.
If you're interested in this kind of thing- or just looking for a good read- try picking up Excellent Cadavers. It's the story of two Italian judges who finally tire of the fear, the silence, and the corruption, and take on the Mafia; the article makes reference to this guy being involved in the murders of two judges and I assume that's who they're referring to. It's one of the best nonfiction books I've ever read- it really gets into the characters but also gets into the social underpinnings and economics of the Mafia. It's a tragic book because the judges end up assassinated, but it's also really inspiring because they refuse to back down, they refuse to compromise, and at the price of their lives they dealt a crippling blow to the Sicilian Mafia.
(1) eyes are relatively smaller in larger animals. Adult humans have smaller eyes than infants, for example. T. rex and other large, carnivorous dinosaurs have relatively small eyes, but that's exactly as you'd expect.
(2) plenty of animals manage to take down prey just fine without the use of arms. Sharks and crocodiles, for instance.
(3) Concerning healed wounds, plenty of broken and healed bones are found. The problem: how do you tell it was T. rex that did it? Some healed breaks have been identified as the work of T. rex, but other people are skeptical. After all, it's not as if the bones come with a "This bone was broken by T. rex" stamp. Short of having a tooth actually get lodged in the bone and then seeing some healing taking place (not impossible, but very improbable) we can't know for sure how these bones got broken.
(4)This is not the only instance of large groups of carnivorous dinosaurs being found together. There's a site currently being worked in Alberta with over a dozen tyrannosaurs.
(5) Elephant graveyards are a myth
They want their own GPS system, even though we have one already.
Or could it be, I don't know, that the Europeans feel a bit uneasy with such a commercially and strategically important piece of infrastructure in U.S. hands? Funny, it's almost as if they don't trust the USA.
A few years ago, I doubt this would have been so much of a concern. But in recent years, the U.S. has belittled Europe as irrelevant ("Old Europe"), openly mocked countries that disagree with us, put aside the idea of pursuing international consensus in favor of a "We can do whatever the hell we want" foreign policy, and taken an increasingly hostile stance towards the rest of the world ("You're either with us or against us" for instance). The Europeans are asking whether we can really be relied upon to act as their friends- and rightly so.
But that's a far cry from expecting those children from being able to help me solve Navier-Stokes equations, apply classical thermodynamics, statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics to arrive at quantitative models of deflagration explosions.
A name- the idea, rather than the magnetic disk used to store it- doesn't weigh anything. So figure your idea is worth anything- even 1. 1 divided by 0 lbs. = infinity dollars per pound. And of course, dollars per pound is worth more than gold, which is worth a finite number of dollars per pound.
I really wonder about Blizzard though. I wasn't terrifically bothered by the lack of non-causasian humans in Warcraft III; after all the whole fantasy thing is sort of a modified version of medieval Europe, which was pretty white.
But I thought that Starcraft verged on overt racism- the only black characters were the dumb, nose-picking, powerless SCV pilots- basically, the manual laborers. Everyone else is lily-white. Well, OK I think Duran from the expansion was black. And evil.
I don't buy into the concept of political correctness, but I do think that the vision promoted by Starcraft- where there aren't any positive portrayals of non-white humans- was really a step backwards from the vision promoted by Star Trek, where you've got blacks and asians and whatnot serving as equals. It's disappointing that Blizzard seems to be so backwards looking and narrow-minded in the fantasy worlds it creates.
Like you say, you can err too much one way or the other. Apple's a good example of the same company making both mistakes. Before Jobs came back, they kept screwing up their next-generation OS projects because they kept trying to add in everything except the kitchen sink, and ended up with these huge, overambitious projects with too many programmers and too many features which got bogged down. For a while, it was unclear if we were ever going to see a new OS, or if Apple was even going to survive.
On the other hand, they released the Newton before the bugs were entirely out of the system and the handwriting recognition software wasn't quite up to the task. As a result, initial reviews and first impressions were negative. Eventually they got the kinks out and turned it into a decent product, but by that time it was too late, the damage had been done, and they had trouble selling the things.
These discoveries are being blown out of proportion because of the ID thing, I think. "Proof" of human evolution? First of all, science never "proves" anything. It corroborates certain hypotheses, and rejects others, but all scientific hypotheses- evolution, the Big Bang, continental drift, whatever- are (potentially) subject to falsification. That's what makes them empirical, *scientific* hypotheses rather than logical deductions, opinions, or articles of faith.
Second, we've had transitional fossils for a long time, and we keep discovering them. In 1861 we found Archaeopteryx, a bird with feathers and wings like a modern bird, but a long bony tail, clawed fingers, and teeth, like a dinosaur. In the 1880s we found birds that are intermediate between Archaeopteryx and modern birds, such as Hesperornis, which has a short tail and a beak at the tip of the jaws, but retains teeth (it's not an ancestor of modern birds since it was a flightless diver, but it's closer to modern birds than most other Cretaceous birds). In recent years, we've found fossils intermediate between Hesperornis and Archaeopteryx, such as the Chinese Confuciusornis. It's still not clear if we have anything that more-or-less neatly plugs the gap between Archaeopteryx and Confuciusornis(though Jeholornis could be such a creature), but sooner or later, we'll find that. Another good example is whale evolution. Just twenty years ago we had virtually no good primitive fossil whales, now we've got things like Ichthyolestes, Ambulocetus, Kutchicetus and soforth, and it's turned into a textbook case of a major adaptive transition from the land to the sea. As for human evolution, well, insofar as you can "prove" anything in human evolution, it was proven a long time ago by discoveries such as Australopithecus and Homo erectus. Yes, these latest discoveries are important, but in the big picture, they just a few more large boulders added to what long ago became a mountain of evidence.
Man did not evolve wearing pants. The foreskin ceased to offer protection and became a liability after humankind decided to clothe itself. As one who was circumcised as an adult, I am *very* familiar with the liabilities of a foreskin, and of the backwardness of places where something as simple and common sense as circumcision is not routine. (Case in point: I was born in Europe and therefore was deprived of the benefits of circumcision for my first 22 years.)Perhaps it's just that I am sufficiently confident in my masculinity that I don't care (or, better still, am glad) that an inconsequential piece of my penis was cut off.
First, it is funny how various countries are putting a nationalistic spin on it. Israeli newspapers are focusing on the fact that the inventor is an Israeli. Australian newspapers are focusing on the fact that he is Australian. Only the national newspapers are spinning this as "revolutionary technology."
Yes, but bought by an American company. USA! USA! USA!
I was JUST thinking that. This seems like the beginning of a whole slew of semi-ridiculous ideas that get funded because their proponents seem 'ahead of their time'
In related news, NewsCorp bought Myspace.com for 580 million.
Basically, this is two degrees of separation: the suspect (and I'd be willing to bet the threshhold for what qualifies as a suspected threat to national security has been lowered substantially since 9/11), anyone who's communicated with the suspect, and anyone who's communicated with anyone who's communicated the suspect could potentially have their emails read.
Figure your suspect has emailed 100 people in the past year, and then figure that each of those people has emailed 100 different people. Assuming no overlap, that would mean 10,000 different people who could have their email snooped because of this suspect. That's a pretty simplistic take on things, in reality some people might email a dozen people, many will email hundreds, some might email a thousand. What's a realistic estimate for the number of people within two degrees of separation on your average email social network, anyhow?
Hell, is it even useful to generate 10,000 different leads? I could see how maybe you could generate useful leads if a couple names kept popping up again and again in the inboxes of terrorists and their associates, but this just seems like an overly broad license to spy.
You know, I wonder, even OBL must get spam from Nigeria and penis enlargement scams, so do those guys end up on CIA watchlists?
Don't forget all those articles the NYTimes' Judith Miller wrote about Iraq's WMD programs. Of course, you also have to give her White House sources credit too.
I warned everyone that nanotech was a bad idea. Now what do we have? Nanopatents. Tiny, self-replicating patents. Soon, they will reproduce and patent everything on the planet, down to the last molecule, at which point all life on earth will drown in a sea of litigation.
This so sounds like something that fell through a wormhole from 1999. Buzz marketing, brand, users... Sure these things are worth a lot, but two billion dollars? Not unless you've got revenues and a business model. Do they have this?
I couldn't find out; I tried looking on the website. All I could get off their website was "Mark Zuckerberg- Founder. Dustin Moskovitz- Keeper. Chris Hughes- Empath." Great. What the $#&* is an empath and how the hell does it contribute to the bottom line? Does he get in touch with his feelings to make business decisions... like, "Mark... I'm getting some very wistful readings on our fourth-quarter profits, some ennui about our attempts to sell demographic data... but advertising revenues for 2007 feel joyful, even ecstatic. My feelings warn me against a merger... but that could also be a bit of food poisoning from the Chinese buffet last night."
Maybe these guys really are the Next Big Thing. But it sounds like a heck of a lot of hype and users without a clear model for turning a profit. And we've seen that before; most of those companies crashed and burned.
All of thoes same talking points lost you the last election. If you ever want to succed your going to have to come up with a real idea instead of just complaining.
It's called "analysis". It means thinking about what you did right, and what you did wrong, and it's part of running an effective government.
Anyhow, here's a few ideas for you: fire incompetent people like Rumsfeld, and replace them with someone new who has the slightest goddamn clue what they're doing, has an actual plan and will listen to what his subordinates on the ground are telling him. Recognize reality when it conflicts with your ideology. Be honest, instead of constantly seeking to distort reality for political gain. Reward honesty, instead of firing and sidelining the people who disagree with you like Colin Powell and General Shinseki. Hire people to important posts when they have valuable experience, instead of hiring your buddies and people who agree with you politically like "Brownie". Work with other countries instead of bullying them. Plan for the worst.
Those are a few solutions. But the Bush administration keeps doing things the same fucked up way, and expecting different results. Look at Rumsfeld. He got up in front of Congress and they asked him what his plan for civil war was, and he just kept saying, we're trying to make sure that won't happen. No actual plans for what would happen if civil war did happen, just saying it wouldn't. Which is how we ended up with an insurgency- by denying that it would happen in the first place. It's idiotic, because it sure as hell looks like we've got a civil war going on right now. He's learned absolutely nothing, and he should have been fired a long time ago.
The first actual study of some of them has already noted that the documents showed that Saddam's government was far weaker and more confused than we ever thought; that Saddam and his government were living in a dangerous fantasy world.
Putting aside the question of whether invading was morally right, and the abominable postwar planning and strategy (or rather, complete and total absence of any postwar planning and strategy), this raises a very serious question: was the invasion (as opposed to the occupation we now find ourselves mired in) a good decision from a military standpoint?
The short, superficial answer is: yes, because we won. But the question is, did we win because the U.S. military is so much better than the Iraqi military, or because Saddam did some incredibly stupid things? Was Rumsfeld a strategic genius, or arrogant and stupid, and only saved by the fact that Saddam acted even more stupid- by hobbling his army, by not listening to his commanders, and worrying about coups and Shiite uprisings instead of the U.S. military?
Anyhow, it's a bit academic at this point- we're stuck with the outcome, and we're not going to be invading anyone else for a long time. But I think it's worth thinking about, so we draw the right lessons from the war. Kaplan, Slate.com's military columnist, wrote a piece about how the U.S. offensive was just a couple weeks away from grinding to a halt due to a lack of spare parts and supplies. http://www.slate.com/id/2103552/ If Hussein had done a few things differently- blown up some of the bridges into Bagdad, followed the Russian model and ceded territory to attack the supply lines with guerillas- he might have been able to slow Rumsfeld's light and lean military and inflicted some serious casualties.
"So, the game that was announced five years ago that was going to run on the then "next generation consoles" (ps2, gc, xbox) is now being put on hold to decide if it will run on the current "next generation consoles" (ps3, 360, rev)
Maybe their production facilities are running low on crystals and vespene gas.
There is no question that Pons and Fleischmann discovered some kind of previous unknown phenomena in their U Utah lab in the late 1980's. The question is what?
One of the basic principles of science is parsimony: choose the simplest explanation that fits the facts. I don't know what happened in the lab because I wasn't there, but if I'm offered a choice between assuming (A) some previously unknown phenomena, which nobody has been able to reliably reproduce, or (B)malfunctioning equipment or outright fraud, (B) seems a lot more parsimonious. Scientific experiements go wrong all the time, and scientists commit fraud more often than we'd like to think (the Korean cloning guy comes to mind).
A home owner's association for video games? What leaps to mind is a Dark Wizard with a towering Impregnible Fortress of Suffering, encircled by a moat of molten lava, guarded by skeletal demons and fiery red dragons, all surrounded by a blasted landscape of wasted desert and thorn trees... and then right next to it, some asshole goes and builds a ranch-style home complete with a garage, a minivan in the driveway, and a well-tended lawn and COMPLETELY ruins the neighborhood...
Slashdot Mirror
If you're interested in this kind of thing- or just looking for a good read- try picking up Excellent Cadavers. It's the story of two Italian judges who finally tire of the fear, the silence, and the corruption, and take on the Mafia; the article makes reference to this guy being involved in the murders of two judges and I assume that's who they're referring to. It's one of the best nonfiction books I've ever read- it really gets into the characters but also gets into the social underpinnings and economics of the Mafia. It's a tragic book because the judges end up assassinated, but it's also really inspiring because they refuse to back down, they refuse to compromise, and at the price of their lives they dealt a crippling blow to the Sicilian Mafia.
(1) eyes are relatively smaller in larger animals. Adult humans have smaller eyes than infants, for example. T. rex and other large, carnivorous dinosaurs have relatively small eyes, but that's exactly as you'd expect. (2) plenty of animals manage to take down prey just fine without the use of arms. Sharks and crocodiles, for instance. (3) Concerning healed wounds, plenty of broken and healed bones are found. The problem: how do you tell it was T. rex that did it? Some healed breaks have been identified as the work of T. rex, but other people are skeptical. After all, it's not as if the bones come with a "This bone was broken by T. rex" stamp. Short of having a tooth actually get lodged in the bone and then seeing some healing taking place (not impossible, but very improbable) we can't know for sure how these bones got broken. (4)This is not the only instance of large groups of carnivorous dinosaurs being found together. There's a site currently being worked in Alberta with over a dozen tyrannosaurs. (5) Elephant graveyards are a myth
Eh, I'm not impressed. Now, my Wireless Air Guitar, there's a worthy hack.
Or could it be, I don't know, that the Europeans feel a bit uneasy with such a commercially and strategically important piece of infrastructure in U.S. hands? Funny, it's almost as if they don't trust the USA.
A few years ago, I doubt this would have been so much of a concern. But in recent years, the U.S. has belittled Europe as irrelevant ("Old Europe"), openly mocked countries that disagree with us, put aside the idea of pursuing international consensus in favor of a "We can do whatever the hell we want" foreign policy, and taken an increasingly hostile stance towards the rest of the world ("You're either with us or against us" for instance). The Europeans are asking whether we can really be relied upon to act as their friends- and rightly so.
Aha! A charlatan!
A name- the idea, rather than the magnetic disk used to store it- doesn't weigh anything. So figure your idea is worth anything- even 1. 1 divided by 0 lbs. = infinity dollars per pound. And of course, dollars per pound is worth more than gold, which is worth a finite number of dollars per pound.
But I thought that Starcraft verged on overt racism- the only black characters were the dumb, nose-picking, powerless SCV pilots- basically, the manual laborers. Everyone else is lily-white. Well, OK I think Duran from the expansion was black. And evil.
I don't buy into the concept of political correctness, but I do think that the vision promoted by Starcraft- where there aren't any positive portrayals of non-white humans- was really a step backwards from the vision promoted by Star Trek, where you've got blacks and asians and whatnot serving as equals. It's disappointing that Blizzard seems to be so backwards looking and narrow-minded in the fantasy worlds it creates.
On the other hand, they released the Newton before the bugs were entirely out of the system and the handwriting recognition software wasn't quite up to the task. As a result, initial reviews and first impressions were negative. Eventually they got the kinks out and turned it into a decent product, but by that time it was too late, the damage had been done, and they had trouble selling the things.
Second, we've had transitional fossils for a long time, and we keep discovering them. In 1861 we found Archaeopteryx, a bird with feathers and wings like a modern bird, but a long bony tail, clawed fingers, and teeth, like a dinosaur. In the 1880s we found birds that are intermediate between Archaeopteryx and modern birds, such as Hesperornis, which has a short tail and a beak at the tip of the jaws, but retains teeth (it's not an ancestor of modern birds since it was a flightless diver, but it's closer to modern birds than most other Cretaceous birds). In recent years, we've found fossils intermediate between Hesperornis and Archaeopteryx, such as the Chinese Confuciusornis. It's still not clear if we have anything that more-or-less neatly plugs the gap between Archaeopteryx and Confuciusornis(though Jeholornis could be such a creature), but sooner or later, we'll find that. Another good example is whale evolution. Just twenty years ago we had virtually no good primitive fossil whales, now we've got things like Ichthyolestes, Ambulocetus, Kutchicetus and soforth, and it's turned into a textbook case of a major adaptive transition from the land to the sea. As for human evolution, well, insofar as you can "prove" anything in human evolution, it was proven a long time ago by discoveries such as Australopithecus and Homo erectus. Yes, these latest discoveries are important, but in the big picture, they just a few more large boulders added to what long ago became a mountain of evidence.
There was shrinkage! Significant shrinkage!
Pfft. That's nothing. I amputated my own nipples.
Yes, but bought by an American company. USA! USA! USA!
In related news, NewsCorp bought Myspace.com for 580 million.
It's not fat. The architecture is just big-boned.
Figure your suspect has emailed 100 people in the past year, and then figure that each of those people has emailed 100 different people. Assuming no overlap, that would mean 10,000 different people who could have their email snooped because of this suspect. That's a pretty simplistic take on things, in reality some people might email a dozen people, many will email hundreds, some might email a thousand. What's a realistic estimate for the number of people within two degrees of separation on your average email social network, anyhow?
Hell, is it even useful to generate 10,000 different leads? I could see how maybe you could generate useful leads if a couple names kept popping up again and again in the inboxes of terrorists and their associates, but this just seems like an overly broad license to spy.
You know, I wonder, even OBL must get spam from Nigeria and penis enlargement scams, so do those guys end up on CIA watchlists?
Don't forget all those articles the NYTimes' Judith Miller wrote about Iraq's WMD programs. Of course, you also have to give her White House sources credit too.
I warned everyone that nanotech was a bad idea. Now what do we have? Nanopatents. Tiny, self-replicating patents. Soon, they will reproduce and patent everything on the planet, down to the last molecule, at which point all life on earth will drown in a sea of litigation.
Canada would never spy on the U.S. As an employee of the CIA, I can assure you that you have no idea what you're talking aboot, eh?
I couldn't find out; I tried looking on the website. All I could get off their website was "Mark Zuckerberg- Founder. Dustin Moskovitz- Keeper. Chris Hughes- Empath." Great. What the $#&* is an empath and how the hell does it contribute to the bottom line? Does he get in touch with his feelings to make business decisions... like, "Mark... I'm getting some very wistful readings on our fourth-quarter profits, some ennui about our attempts to sell demographic data... but advertising revenues for 2007 feel joyful, even ecstatic. My feelings warn me against a merger... but that could also be a bit of food poisoning from the Chinese buffet last night."
Maybe these guys really are the Next Big Thing. But it sounds like a heck of a lot of hype and users without a clear model for turning a profit. And we've seen that before; most of those companies crashed and burned.
It's called "analysis". It means thinking about what you did right, and what you did wrong, and it's part of running an effective government.
Anyhow, here's a few ideas for you: fire incompetent people like Rumsfeld, and replace them with someone new who has the slightest goddamn clue what they're doing, has an actual plan and will listen to what his subordinates on the ground are telling him. Recognize reality when it conflicts with your ideology. Be honest, instead of constantly seeking to distort reality for political gain. Reward honesty, instead of firing and sidelining the people who disagree with you like Colin Powell and General Shinseki. Hire people to important posts when they have valuable experience, instead of hiring your buddies and people who agree with you politically like "Brownie". Work with other countries instead of bullying them. Plan for the worst.
Those are a few solutions. But the Bush administration keeps doing things the same fucked up way, and expecting different results. Look at Rumsfeld. He got up in front of Congress and they asked him what his plan for civil war was, and he just kept saying, we're trying to make sure that won't happen. No actual plans for what would happen if civil war did happen, just saying it wouldn't. Which is how we ended up with an insurgency- by denying that it would happen in the first place. It's idiotic, because it sure as hell looks like we've got a civil war going on right now. He's learned absolutely nothing, and he should have been fired a long time ago.
Putting aside the question of whether invading was morally right, and the abominable postwar planning and strategy (or rather, complete and total absence of any postwar planning and strategy), this raises a very serious question: was the invasion (as opposed to the occupation we now find ourselves mired in) a good decision from a military standpoint?
The short, superficial answer is: yes, because we won. But the question is, did we win because the U.S. military is so much better than the Iraqi military, or because Saddam did some incredibly stupid things? Was Rumsfeld a strategic genius, or arrogant and stupid, and only saved by the fact that Saddam acted even more stupid- by hobbling his army, by not listening to his commanders, and worrying about coups and Shiite uprisings instead of the U.S. military?
Anyhow, it's a bit academic at this point- we're stuck with the outcome, and we're not going to be invading anyone else for a long time. But I think it's worth thinking about, so we draw the right lessons from the war. Kaplan, Slate.com's military columnist, wrote a piece about how the U.S. offensive was just a couple weeks away from grinding to a halt due to a lack of spare parts and supplies. http://www.slate.com/id/2103552/ If Hussein had done a few things differently- blown up some of the bridges into Bagdad, followed the Russian model and ceded territory to attack the supply lines with guerillas- he might have been able to slow Rumsfeld's light and lean military and inflicted some serious casualties.
All I can say is, I have *got* to get the number of this guy's dealer.
Maybe their production facilities are running low on crystals and vespene gas.
One of the basic principles of science is parsimony: choose the simplest explanation that fits the facts. I don't know what happened in the lab because I wasn't there, but if I'm offered a choice between assuming (A) some previously unknown phenomena, which nobody has been able to reliably reproduce, or (B)malfunctioning equipment or outright fraud, (B) seems a lot more parsimonious. Scientific experiements go wrong all the time, and scientists commit fraud more often than we'd like to think (the Korean cloning guy comes to mind).
A home owner's association for video games? What leaps to mind is a Dark Wizard with a towering Impregnible Fortress of Suffering, encircled by a moat of molten lava, guarded by skeletal demons and fiery red dragons, all surrounded by a blasted landscape of wasted desert and thorn trees... and then right next to it, some asshole goes and builds a ranch-style home complete with a garage, a minivan in the driveway, and a well-tended lawn and COMPLETELY ruins the neighborhood...