Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment extradition and double criminality principle (Score 2) 351

A fundamental underpinning of extradition proceedings is the âoedouble criminalityâ principle. If Canada is to extradite, there must be an offence charged in the U.S. that corresponds to one in Canadian law. While Canada has followed the UN with sanctions on Iran as regards nuclear and missile technology, I'm not aware that UN sanctions ever covered the trade in telecoms. Since in Canada sanctions like this emanate from the UN, I doubt there is a matching crime here. There is also the Foreign Extraterritorial Measures Act that spells out that American sanctions cannot operate in Canada -- otherwise 10,000s of Canadians who have visited Cuba could be rounded up.

Comment Can we stop the "critics call torture" horseshit (Score 5, Insightful) 319

It is one of the total failures of journalism that they keep acting like the jury is out on whether waterboarding is torture. It is torture by the definition of multiple US courts -- ones that successfully prosecuted Japanese soldiers for torture in the 40s precisely for waterboarding. It is a long-standing precedent that waterboarding is very much torture in the eyes of the US court system. The promulgation of this phony sense of ambiguity is a lie perpetrated by the media for the benefit of the neocon establishment.

Comment Re:hypocrites (Score 5, Insightful) 644

They are not hypocrites.

It is not fundamentally hypocritical to follow the rules as they exist and simultaneously advocate that the rules be changed. This fallacy is what gets trotted out on Fox every time Warren Buffet says the same thing.

It's like calling someone a hypocrite if they advocate for pot legalization, but don't smoke up. There's nothing hypocritical about this position at all.

Comment Need to use the system against itself (Score 4, Interesting) 200

(1) go to the local police station, city offices, courts, city hall and make a note of a bunch of license plates in the employee lots.
(2) print out paper license plate sized versions of the plate numbers
(3) park a car at the speed sensor.
(4) tape a paper copy on the back of the car
(5) cover a softball with tin-foil
(6) play catch in front of the speed sensor
(7) repeat for all your fake license plates
(8) ?????
(9) Profit!

Biotech

Experimental Drug Targeting Alzheimer's Disease Shows Anti-Aging Effects (nextbigfuture.com) 101

schwit1 writes with news that researchers at the Salk Institute have found that an experimental drug candidate aimed at combating Alzheimer's disease has a host of unexpected anti-aging effects in animals. Says the article: The Salk team expanded upon their previous development of a drug candidate, called J147, which takes a different tack by targeting Alzheimer's major risk factor–old age. In the new work, the team showed that the drug candidate worked well in a mouse model of aging not typically used in Alzheimer's research. When these mice were treated with J147, they had better memory and cognition, healthier blood vessels in the brain and other improved physiological features.

"Initially, the impetus was to test this drug in a novel animal model that was more similar to 99 percent of Alzheimer's cases," says Antonio Currais, the lead author and a member of Professor David Schubert's Cellular Neurobiology Laboratory at Salk. "We did not predict we'd see this sort of anti-aging effect, but J147 made old mice look like they were young, based upon a number of physiological parameters."

Comment RequestPolicy and NoScript (Score 1) 353

I use many plugins and my go-to ones are CookieMonster, Ghostery, FlashBlock, NoScript and RefControl. CookieMonster, Ghostery and Flashblock are easy to get used to, but NoScript and RefControl make an interesting pair.

Using these at first is incredibly painful. It is a true education how fragile the construction of some web sites is, with scripts and components coming from all over the place. Because you have to approve every cross site reference, separately to load and to execute scripts, you really get a feel for how cobbled-together some sites really are -- random CSSs loading from who knows where, scripts from google, trackers, CDNs, web design houses, software vendors -- a real dogs breakfast. It can be a challenge to work out how much actually has to run in order for the site to work, versus how much is analytics and advertising overheads.

As I type this, scripts from three different google tracking systems, as well as rpxnow and ooyala, whoever they are, are NOT running in my browser. But for some reason slashdot won't work without loading some junk from fsdn.com.

Earth

Peru Indignant After Greenpeace Damages Ancient Nazca Site 465

HughPickens.com writes The NYT reports that Peruvian authorities say Greenpeace activists have damaged the fragile, and restricted, landscape near the Nazca lines, ancient man-made designs etched in the Peruvian desert when they placed a large sign that promoted renewable energy near a set of lines that form the shape of a giant hummingbird. The sign was meant to draw the attention of world leaders, reporters and others who were in Lima, the Peruvian capital, for a United Nations summit meeting aimed at reaching an agreement to address climate change. Greenpeace issued a statement apologizing for the stunt at the archaeological site and its international executive director, Kumi Naidoo, flew to Lima to apologize for scarring one of Peru's most treasured national symbols. "We are not ready to accept apologies from anybody," says Luis Jaime Castillo, the vice minister for cultural heritage. "Let them apologize after they repair the damage."

Slashdot Top Deals

"I say we take off; nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." - Corporal Hicks, in "Aliens"

Working...