I really hate the way the term Luddite is used -- people should read a bit of history (here for a start). The real Luddites were not anti-technology. They were highly skilled workers rebelling against the creation of textile sweatshops. It's a pity their rebellion was put down so violently -- we have a need for more Luddites in today's economy where our iPhones are produced by people who are effectively living in slavery.

if you value your privacy, but prefer google's search results to duck duck go's, then startpage will anonymise and encrypt your searches, send them to google, and return the results. Fsck the NSA!

Okay, this is perhaps stating the obvious, but recently, facebook seems to be making such a bewildering set of changes which trample your privacy, that it's impossible to keep track of what's going on. Take FB messages -- without any notification that I was aware of, it started telling people whether I'd read their messages or not. Then it stopped doing this (as far as I can tell), but kept doing it for group messages. Then it started telling me where people were located when they were messaging me. Incredible!

And the link between the murder, and bath-salts is.... The hysteria in the U.S. over recreational drug use is amazing. For example, all the news stories about Johnny Lewis mentioned police speculation that he was on the drug "smiles" when he went berserk, despite there being no evidence whatseover of this. e.g. http://abcnews.go.com/US/actor-johnny-lewis-suspected-taking-drug-smiles-killings/story?id=17346564 Time and time again, these speculative drug links make a big splash in the media, and then by the time they prove false, no one cares. I would have thought Slashdot was a bit more into looking at the evidence before making wild speculation, but apparently not.

At the same time as the arrest in this case, there is a trial going on against a guy for receiving a photo of consentual fisting: http://obscenitylawyer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/porn-trial-this-time-its-extreme.html And we also had the trial against Paul Chambers for tweeting a bomb joke (he was found not guilty thankfully). The crown prosecution service are a joke.

What this means is that the drugs which are legal, are potentially more dangerous than the ones which are banned. Marijuana, mushrooms, LSD have been around long enough that they've been well studied, and we know the risks are minimal. But the latest synthesised version of them has not been studied, and might be dangerous. When will we learn that the war on drugs is just making things worse?

Well, is the data that sensitive? Here is one they released: http://pdfcast.org/pdf/nato-1 Old and dull. And Sabu yesterday claimed they were about to release a bunch of Sun emails. Now they say they won't. There's a bit more smoke than fire.

Nice thread title. Racist much?

In reports of this size, there will always be small errors. The problem is that right wing bloggers trumpet these up to raise doubts about the basic science, and then fox news et. al. broadcast this even further. The result is a complete disaster: people will not make the sacrifices needed to stop climate change if they have doubts about whether it is happening. A great example is leakegate, where the Sunday Telegraph used a tiny citation error to suggest a conspiracy of scientists to falsify evidence of global warming (the UN report cited another report which contained the peer reviewed work, rather than directly citing the peer reviewed work). Eventually, the Telegraph retracted their article, but not before the damage was done. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/06/leakegate-a-retraction/ As Mark Twain said, lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on...

We need more than just the ones on the list. All minutes of all government meetings (including cabinet meetings) should be published except parts which have security implications. Just like opensource code allows for scrutiny, opening up government will make representatives think twice before screwing us over...

Propublica is pretty awesome, and their recent piece about Magnetar, and the market crash is a great example of that. http://www.propublica.org/feature/the-magnetar-trade-how-one-hedge-fund-helped-keep-the-housing-bubble-going And with the recent videos released by wikileaks of the US military mowing down civilians, it seems more and more, it is alternative media which is doing real journalism. Newspapers claim they are loosing money because of internet news and thus can't afford to do investigative reporting. Propublica and wikileaks are the other side of that coin.

Yeah, I think it better to read the original sources rather than the shit journalism on this. There's a non-technical section of the report and to my mind, it is saying the opposite of the headline: "Stop emitting CO2 or geoengineering could be our only hope The future of the Earth could rest on potentially dangerous and unproven geoengineering technologies unless emissions of carbon dioxide can be greatly reduced, the latest Royal Society report has found.

I also love the variation of headlines for this story. Slashdot and the BBC report it as "UK Royal Society Claims Geo-engineering Feasible," while the Financial Times reports it as "Hopes dashed for geo-engineering solutions". The Nature blog has an interesting entry about the variation in headlines.