There was a time when Seattle seemed to be headed towards a Boeing economic mono-culture of sorts, and when company employment cratered in 1970, the whole region felt it. At such point as something awful happens to Amazon - say, shareholders demanding a reasonable profit - it could get a bit dark in the CBD.

TL:DR, Ed will not be pardoned, as an object example to a potentially very leaky age.

Per TFA: For the first 80 years of its life, it was used almost entirely to prosecute spies. The president has prosecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all president before him combined. His Justice Department has vastly expanded the scope of the law.

There's a good reason for this. The digitization of most current technical, planning, organizational, and intelligence information means that it can be distributed in mass in ways detrimental to the interests of the United States by any metric. Manning and Snowden have demonstrated the risk from users inside the system. One can lock down systems, but all for not unless the vast majority of users elect not to try. Like so many aspects of criminal law, so many perps slip through without justice being meted out, that those who do get caught, tried, and convicted oftentimes get the book thrown at them as an example to others. "See Dick do something bad? Don't be a Dick." This isn't going to change in the foreseeable future.

So, while Chelsea and Ed may have provided a degree of public service by bringing to light certain practices "we" as a body would prefer the government not engage in, they also dumped boatloads of information that do nothing - much less than nothing - to protect the liberties of Americans. So, Ed will remain a wanted suspect, and if caught and convicted like Chelsea, will do hard time.

I first heard of sci-hub via a /. story not too long ago. Subsequently, when the "Prescription Meds Get Trapped In Disturbing Pee-To-Food-To-Pee Loop" story was posted a couple of weeks ago, linking to a paywalled academic paper, I followed my usual steps:

• 1) try the link, sometimes the paper turns out to be free to read;
• 2) hit the university home pages of the authors, who often have at least the final draft as a free to read PDF;
• 3) punt...

But not this time. I surfed directly to the sci-hub home page, and stuck the paper title into the search box. Success! Having RTFP, I could follow up in discussion with a better idea of what the hell was going on. Whether I should have left it at punting this time is another discussion.

Abstract: the water may have just been treated for bacteria, and that hasn't cut it for urban effluent for at least a decade.

I've read the paper, and I was disappointed to find that the researchers didn't provide any context regarding the type(s) of treatment used on the wastewater before it was dumped into the irrigation systems.

I followed up with one of the footnotes: Wastewater treatment and use in agriculture - FAO irrigation and drainage paper 47, where I find in section 2.3 that for water to be recycled for crops that were likely to be eaten uncooked, the FAO is just talking in terms of stabilization ponds for killing off the microorganisms. That's not enough. It also needs to be filtered, as if they were dealing with brackish or seawater.

I'd been to a couple of American Water Works Association conferences in the aughts, so I know the treatment industry has been aware of and has the techniques for clearing what goes into our toilets out of the waste water at manageable costs. As of the 2007 conference, the main concern was to avoid loading up the critters downstream from the waste water plants with caffeine, birth control hormones, pain relievers, and recreational drugs.

But, given the anticipated growth in water reuse for both irrigation and drinking, water system managers were already anticipating the need to do better. In this case, the Israelis obviously need to do better.

Full disclosure: I served on a water supply board for 5 years.

I suspect the reason(s) why the Administration doesn't declassify the redacted pages of the 9/11 report has to do with intel sources and methods, rather than any smoking gun.

G-fucking-WB didn't help his PR when he facilitated flying home members of the House of Saud and their retainers who happened to be in the US on 9/11. Sure, the King and lead princes were probably worried about Arabs being beaten in the streets of the US, and at that point not knowing whether or not one of their number had a direct hand in the attacks, whether family in the US would be rotting in jail during a prolonged investigation.

Plus, the extended Bush family and their Dallas cronies owe their personal connections to the Sauds for making buckets of money on SA business. The President should have sucked it up and reordered his priorities. Like I said, bad PR, at the very least, when he didn't know if the Royal family was involved.

Declassification or no, the real issue we already know: in the 1930s, the Royal family handed over the religious education and indoctrination of SA to the knuckle-dragging Wahhabi imams in exchange for keeping the S in SA, while cranking billions into foundations that have fed Wahhabi crap into generations of international Moslem youth.

Granted, it's a bummer that Apple hasn't tended to the Git client shipped with Xcode.

That said, I'd argue just about anyone who takes the trouble to install and use Xcode and the associated command line stuff that comes with it is going to know how to steer ($PATH) around (fink, macports) a problematic tool once informed about it.

She got this onto Slashdot, so the hard part is on its way to being handled: getting the word out.

I don't always subject myself to AMC's crappy theaters. But, when I do, I use phone screens as spit wad targets.

The beauty is, the users night vision will be totally shot by their spit wad-smeared screens, and they'll never know where the goop is coming from.

"Of course, the hackers had no clue what they were modifying."

The report discussed the intruders having little apparent knowledge of what they were doing. The anonymous reader assumes this to mean that the intruders didn't know they were screwing with a water treatment SCADA system.

I think it just as likely that they had figured out they had tapped into a process control system, and were figuring out how to manipulate the system... driving by Braille.

The RISK report report authors could have summarized the situation by reaching back to the prophetic words of Simon & Garfunkel: Clowns to left of me, jokers to the right, Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.

You're right, he's bluffing, and bowlshyting. Mr. Puzder is trying to divert attention by blaming the Federal government for his problems, when what's really going on is the labor market: it's lost a lot of the slack Puzder and his ilk have been coasting on for six years, and thus he's looking at having to raise wages to get and retain staff.

If wage pressures become high enough, CKE Restaurants will invest in technologies to improve productivity members. This is a good thing, since if people were always cheaper than capital equipment, we'd still be using manual typewriters... if we had any time to spare after working the fields with a scathe. Taken at face value, that's the model Puzder apparently prefers.

DC Comics v. Towle at first appears to add to a slippery slope that would eventually see all car designs as copyrightable the moment they roll off an assembly line or a garage.

But, a closer reading of the decision seem to show that what's at issue isn't the shape of the car so much as the names it is marketed under. The 9th Circuit built their opinion atop Halicki Films, LLC v. Sanderson Sales & Mktg. , to wit "an automotive character [Eleanor] may be copyrightable even if it appears as a yellow Fastback Ford Mustang in one film, and a silver 1967 Shelby GT-500 in another."

The Carroll Hall Shelby Trust arranged for a custom car shop to create and market Shelby GT-500 "Eleanor" replicas. If you compare a "stock" GT-500 to the relatively minor mods that make "Eleanor" in the Gone In 60 Seconds 2000 remake, Shelby probably would have been in the clear just selling cars "resembling Eleanor". But, by marketing it as Eleanor, not so fast.

I think this is even more clear with the Towle ruling. Making a Batmobile, probably fine. Marketing it as a Batmobile, with the likely-to-be trademarked Batman logo on the doors, rims, and steering wheel turns out to have been a risky move.

Beating the example to death: if I want to revive a style by assembling and selling Studebaker Avanti lookalikes, and market them as Indietro, I'm probably safe under both the US Copyright Office's definition of "useful articles" and parody case law. But, if I try to slap Avanti on the nose, I'd probably soon end up in hot water with whoever current holds the copyrights and trademarks of the former Avanti Motor Corporation.

Just an aside: If I hit a paywall, I usually made a sport of finding an unencumbered copy of a paper at an author's university home page.

In this case, it's not necessary. The full paper is available from the /. post's link. Once onto the Sage page, you'll find the links "Full Text" and "Full Text (PDF)" under the heading "This Article".