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Or, at least, they got an arrest warrant. No news on whether or not they've arrested him. India has some remarkably wacky laws for stuff like this, which the Church is apparently all too happy to use. 4 July 2012.This morning, officers of the Delhi Police reached Sanal Edamaruku’s house to arrest h...

I got a master's degree in computer engineering last year, so maybe I can be relevant here. First, computer engineering and computer science are very different fields, and software engineering is different from both of them. Computer engineering tends to focus on hardware and low-level software, but...

I got a better idea, there's no need to build new reactor designs when we can just stuff the thorium into existing CANDU plants. http://www.iaea.org/inisnkm/nkm/aws/fnss/abstracts/abst_te_1319_4.html You can also run existing light water reactors on a fuel mix that's mostly thorium. It's been done ...

A lot of the backers for this are libertarians, but fundamentally seasteading isn't about libertarianism, or any particular ideology; it's about creating a more fluid market in governance. If some seasteads fail because they forgot to defend themselves from pirates at all, and others have their gove...

Yay! Good riddance to the creepy king I say - I've loathed him from the first. I'm of the opinion that the only thing that could be worse than that king, would be using the twins from the Shining, and Sadako to sell food. Come play with us forever and ever.... In a better world than this, Burger Ki...

To prevent this, consider using a really fine-grained secure backup service -- if bitcoin ever becomes mainstream, then I'm sure there will be trivial services for making sure they don't vanish. The technical issue here is not hard. To prevent people stealing your bitcoins from this third party ser...

College is not the best course for everyone, and it's time society comes to grips with that (actually, some societies either have, or never lost sight of that fact). This, right here, is a very nice summary of Thiel's goal. The main purpose of this "20 under 20" program is to generate con...

Lets say I'm using a computer for my bitcoins. Being lazy and/or a bit paranoid I haven't got any backups. Something happens (say, a house fire) that destroys all information on that computer. Have I just lost all my bitcoins for good ? Yes. The same holds true if you have cash money that burns. To...

Here's another one in Iowa that all my relatives have been buzzing about. The eagle babies are pretty adorable, and the camera has night vision so you can see them at any time.

Iowa voted three supreme court justices out of office, as petty retribution for legalizing gay marriage. Damn. On the plus side, gay marriage didn't get any less legal, nor will it. We still have the last laugh.

Hell, the waste that comes out of most reactors in the US can be used directly as fuel in Canadian CANDU reactors. I think we should stop calling it waste and call it what it really is: slightly used fuel.

When I was in high school, a consortium of train companies sent some speakers to warn us that trains are heavy, have a long stopping distance, and can't swerve off the rails to avoid hitting someone. I thought they were going to an awful lot of effort to belabor the obvious, but apparently some peop...

Is the political situation in Iran even that heated that they would consider getting and even using nuclear weapons? Or is that just paranoia of the arab-hating West? Getting nuclear weapons, sure, that makes sense for Iran. Actually using them would be the height of stupidity. (Also, Iran is predo...

That would pretty much scream "HEY EVERYONE, WE'RE USING THIS THING FOR PLUTONIUM! WHY HASN'T ISRAEL BOMBED US YET?!" It would be too obvious.

Also, Russia is supplying the fuel and taking the spent fuel rods back. I imagine they would take a dim view of any such shenanigans.

Some technical details: the plant is a Russian VVER-1000 , a solid and dependable design with a good track record. It's a pressurized water reactor, pretty similar to the plants in the US, and will produce 1 GW of electricity. A fun thing about the VVER and similar reactors: they're great for provid...

(g) THE RIGHT TO OPT OUT OF INSTRUCTION ON THE ACQUIRED IMMUNE 36 DEFICIENCY SYNDROME PURSUANT TO SECTION 15-716. Yes. Parents in the state can opt out of instruction relating to AIDS. Interesting that they single out AIDS. Do they see AIDS as a "gay disease" that good wholesome straight ...

It makes you wonder what this woman is doing in a Republican party too stupid to even hate the right "ragheads," as they put it. Haven't you heard? Sikhs hate our freedom because we won't accept the teachings of the prophet Mohammed. And don't even get me started on those super-violent Ja...

Congratulations. Looks like this whole private rocket launch business might really pan out. "The California-based firm developed the vehicle with a large subsidy from Nasa." Not far without government assistance by the looks of it. They developed the smaller Falcon 1 rocket with only priv...

Yes, there are people who openly advocate mass murder, and draw cheering crowds to listen to them. The YouTube video got taken down (apparently it's against the YouTube rules to incite murder), but there's a mirror on Vimeo . It's less than a minute long, but it was hard to listen to. That question...

Meanwhile, if you try to get priests excommunicated for child abuse, you can expect the Church to drag its feet every step of the way.

So they're going to be selling the Nexus One though intermediary stores. Big deal. The point of the Nexus One was to have an unlocked Android phone widely available to people who wanted them, so that OS updates didn't have to go through sluggish third-party companies like Verizon or HTC. This announ...

The officer involved with the physical assault and racial statement should face jail time. The video captures the event quite clearly, and there is no justification for his actions at all. However, regarding making this a hate crime? I think it is more his dislike with this individual or maybe gang...

The argument that is being made, though, is that it is NOT a case of remembering or not remembering. It comes down to fundamental understanding. I don't remember shit about grade 9 math, I couldn't tell you what I learned or who the damned teacher was without a yearbook or something to remind me. B...

Another big anti-gay crusader has been found employing a gay prostitute, allegedly to carry his luggage. George Alan Rekers hired this "assistant" from the highly NSFW Rentboy.com but claims he had no idea that the man he was hiring was involved in sex work -- apparently the pictures of na...

How very convenient that, right as congress is trying to pass a contentious financial reform bill , a big scandal erupts over people at the SEC watching porn. This isn't a new thing; for years, the SEC semiannual reports have been mentioning the problems they have with some employees porning it up w...