The US system has always had a similar capability.

sigh, I knew exactly what this was the moment I saw the image. I need to get outside more.

It's wonderful. You get over sticker shock after you've been looking at "designer" furniture for a while. I'm doing my part to prop up the vintage market.

With the exception of Chernobyl, there is so little external release of radioactive materials at nuclear facilities as to be negligible -- mostly in the form of radioactive Xenon and other gases, or minute amounts of tritium quickly diluted into larger water supplies -- that the idea of finding huge populations of mutant insects is preposterous, it doesn't even pass the laugh test.

Lately BB seems to be in the habit of spreading pseudoscience or outright misinformation about civilian nuclear power.

only marry for love, and never sign a prenup... sigh.

oh, and stay away from show business. this is what it does to you. tell your kids to be engineers or accountants. life in the arts is a miserable existence.

Glue boards are the single most inhumane way I can imagine to kill rodents. There are serious animal cruelty issues involved. You shouldn't even make the reference in sarcasm...

Can someone explain to me how Design Within Reach is.. well... Within Reach? It seems to me one of the goals of mid century designers was for their products to be available to median income families. Hard for me to cough up $3700 for an Eames Lounge... $8000 for a Knoll sofa...

I added a couple of my videos tonight.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/irees/2400781470/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/irees/2400762530/

It's kind of a mean spirited parody.

I've taken a few similar ones.

http://flickr.com/photos/irees/6054169/in/set-72157594166842049/

http://flickr.com/photos/irees/213671033/in/set-72157594166842049/

http://flickr.com/photos/irees/6054070/in/set-72157594166842049/

"fully platform independent method to distribute content with the DRM that the rights holders literally demand."

Haute Pie, do you know how ridiculously incorrect this statement is? Fully platform independent?

honored... a thousand years.. in. the. FUTURE!

:)

Oh, this happens to me all the time -- we have a few raccoons and possums in our neighborhood -- they routinely steal our landlord's cats food. They are somewhat friendly, and only run when we get too close. This is in an urban area, as well, so it's interesting to see the refugee wildlife.

Here's a pic of the cat and raccoon together:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/irees/2148607624/

Raccoon and possum together:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/irees/2263605434/

Just raccoon:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/irees/2148606270/

This is ridiculous, and I'm curious to see anyone defending shari'a law even to the tone of "it's not a cut and dry case." Punishment for apostasy is thoughtcrime. This is absolutely against the foundation of all western thought. How many wars did we fight to achieve this? It's not something up for debate. If you disagree, find new culture plz thx.

This goes for all religious fundamntalists. It's becoming harder and harder for a secularist like me to have hope for the future.

I was under the impression that people played MMORPGs *because* of the grinding, not in spite of it.

Let's wait for statistically valid results...

I happily await the coming infrared arms race.

And of course, the most simple argument, that the defendant could simply claim to not recall the password.

But mistake No. 1. was having the files unlocked while in transit across the border.

Takuan,

Plutonium is most certainly not forever -- all isotopes are unstable and decay.

Pu-238 is a strong alpha emitter and is the isotope used in power generation in space. It has a half-life of 88 years. Pu-239 is the fissile component of most nuclear weapons and has a half-life of 24,100 years.

c'mon Cory, variable pricing is just a cover for price increases. :)

It will probably have about as much basis in fact as an episode of Thundercats.... or for that matter, House.

Yet again, this fucking place makes me sick. Will the US have sane government again in my lifetime? Let's take bets.

Maybe they'll have a separate bus that goes straight to a CIA prison in Matamoras. In the name of cross-agency cooperation of course!

As an urban photographer, I have first hand experience with this kind of "vigilance" on several occasions. Obviously the people defending this have never known how unpleasant it is to be detained and harassed for legal activities. It's a personal violation, someone exerting brute power over you, a kind of groping, it's an action to make you helpless and isolated. The authorities are getting their first tastes of a police state, and I'm afraid they like the flavor.

This behavior is consistent with the common failure modes of democratic states. Everyone here should dwell on this for a while. We've managed to stand for 200 years without giving up -all- of our liberties to prevent crime, but they all seem to crumble in a couple years in the face of 'terrorism.'

Officer, I am not breaking the law. If I am, you must arrest me and this will be settled in court.

Yes, definitely unconstitutional.

It's Tokyo. The image is flipped horizontally. Here is a google maps link to the area shown:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&time=&date=&ttype=&q=tokyo&ie=UTF8&ll=35.683235,139.791884&spn=0.03329,0.046091&t=k&z=15&om=1

All religion is magic.

bsd qft

Johnnyweird, apparently being exposed to some "enhanced interrogation" techniques is part of special forces training, to help prepare you to resist torture in the event you are captured.

Love iTunes? Hate iTunes?

Arrrghbob, I suppose people teaching the controversy of atoms are shut down by the "Culture of Sciencism."

You miss the free marketplace of ideas right in front of you. Evolutionary biology is as active an area of research as ever, with real fruit being borne in fighting disease. If you'd like to propose an alternative fundamental dogma of modern biology -- something that doesn't involve nucleic acids and proteins -- you're free to do so. Keep in mind that the metric you'll be judged on is your theory's explanatory and predictive power. The problem with fundies is the theory of "god did it" just doesn't go very far in understanding the world and shaping it.

Needs electrodes.

What machine translation program is causing these strange errors I wonder? I asked a chinese friend -- one instance was "chicken", another instance was "squid" (the one linked in the comments.)

It seems a kind of prisoner's dilemma. As soon as the US uses this technique, the UK can retaliate with the exact same technique to bring the captors back to the UK for kidnapping charges. If anyone uses it, everyone loses.

When I was a kid, the bedtime story was that the rule of law separated American civilization from police-state repression. Curious how life turns out.

My own favorite self-built temple:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justo_Gallego_Martínez
http://www.citynoise.org/article/732
http://www.citynoise.org/article/831

Plural of virus is viruses... at least in virology literature.

Basically it's a futile battle that no one can win. So don't worry about it, eat well and be merry. :)

I look forward to awesome btard type graffiti on the "Pledge Wall" asap!

This would make an awesome datacenter. :)

I find it hard to fault the device manufacturers since unlocked GSM phones tend to be some completely awesome and unrestricted in functionality. They only become gimped when sold by a carrier with subsidy. This, of course, is the way to protest against the system: to buy unlocked, full-featured phones... but ultimately we appear to be either too cheap or too lazy to make much of a stand against oppression.

yeah, big surprise Austinites try to appropriate anything creative done in the state as their own.

The only ameliorating thing about the DMCA is that the internet is a big place. But anyway, maybe I'm just too cynical, but you can't fault them for lockout. No one in a dominant market position has much incentive for building open hardware platforms.

I mean, I served my time in RMS's army. But I guess nowadays I'll buy a locked device if the quality is good enough.. it just becomes a line in a comparison matrix. I can always switch if something really fundamentally better comes along. Would Apple push their luck to that point? Who knows. Maybe if no one makes devices that are competitive enough.

The sashimi car is a regular fixture here in Houston.. it's often parked outside the Rice graduate bar on Friday afternoons. :)

Yes. Was just about to also post that. That's some real hardcore cryptographic lock there.

Jesus, people. There's no real cryptography involved, because any keys used could be easily recovered. A computer is a state machine. The only way the iPod could become truly locked is if you had to send your library file to the iPod through Apple-owned servers to sign it with their private key. I haven't seen anything saying this is the case, as it'd make itunes sync require internet access.

And of course, as others said, there are valid reasons to have a db checksum. Apple doesn't provide a public API, much less is obligated to document internal implementation details. Regardless, it'll be reversed in a few days.

Anyway, linux linux yeah yeah. I wish I had back all the time I've spent fighting with Linux machines over the past decade... before I gave up on Desktop Linux and just got a Mac.