I figured they would power it with hype on Slashdot.

Tetraethyl Lead was used in automotive fuel from the 1920s through much of the 70s, and is still used in some aviation fuel. There appears to be illegal manufacture and use of the substance ongoing in the PRC. The amounts involved as a fuel antiknock ingredient exceed Lead's use in mold control and paint, and should be considered the primary source for increased Lead in the environment..

And you were present to see this but didn't call an ambulance?
There are some forms of heavy metal exposure that produce such symptoms and have near instantanious onsets. One account of such concerns a french soldier who poured and drank about 250 ml of wine passed through a 155 mm artillery piece barrel as part of a unit induction ceremony, and picked up a substantial Tungsten exposure. He had immediate onset of symptoms including seizures and rapid unconsiousness. All the symptoms mentioned by the parent poster are recognized for acute inhalation exposure to Mercury, but I'm running into paywalls trying to find out just how rapid their onset can be. Still the AC who generalized that heavy metal poisoning does not work that way is simply wrong, and is probably not picking up on the differences between gradual and rapid exposure, or inhalation vs ingestion, or both.

And about your sig: You'll take your insight where you find it, like everybody else. and you'll like it!

Ah, I had thought the claim was to have a more specifically identifiable form of DNA, without that, this can only be considered a minor bit of evidence for one suspect. I still say we don't even have that for several of the others, but this is not really conclusive.

I really doubt the claim that in the victorian era, Poland was literally flooded by jews. Figuratively, maybe, but I do not think that word 'literally' means what you think it means.

It's the previous DNA analysis that was based on just mitochondrial DNA - This one isn't. It's based on what is allegedly a new improvement in DNA testing, but it involves testing conventional nuclear DNA. Also, given the rest of Kosminski's history, if he was, say, merely a pimp who was wounded at the same time as the death of one of his prostitutes, his subsequent behavior was rather unlikely, to say the least. He was suspected of being Jack while he still lived. I don't know about you, but if the police were looking into the possibility I was Jack the Ripper, and the real Jack had tried to kill me, then proving my own innocence by giving them information that might lead to the real killer looks a lot more rational than shutting up about it. It's pretty much killing two birds with one stone at that point. (As opposed to Jack's method of killing birds, I guess). There are people pointing to K's mental illness history, and how he might not be particulalry rational, but there's a big difference between saying someone is mentally ill, and saying, they were mentally ill, and it was definitely in a way that would make them not do what most people would do here, but definiitely also not in a way that would make them commit murder either.
        People taking the other side have to either beleive this new evidence isn't a real improvement in genetic testing and that claim is essentially false (which is fine by me if they do - time will settle whether it is or isn't), or they have to make some pretty bizarre and often self contradictory claims about the few other items of evidence we have, such as claiming Kosminski was a real bad apple who the police wanted enough for very serious crimes (just what, they never wrote down), that he couldn't have whitewashed his own reputation even by giving them Jack, or that Kosminski had some major underworld contacts who would have paniced if he had gone to the police (but these contacts couldn't take care of the Ripper if Kosminski went to them instead). ,
    Other such evidence that has to be tweaked is there are some good sketches of the crime scenes, and for this one Jack had to, for example, fight Kosminski only in places where it was too dark to see his face, then kill the prostitute and move her body indoors past some well lighted areas without K hanging around to see who the real Jack was, and do it all quickly enough that the real Jack could get out of there before K could have returned with the police. (Or somehow, the real Jack had to know K was not the type to return with police, or something else both odd and very much not in evidence.).
            There's also the claim which has been around for decades, that the word Jewes in the grafitti scrawled at one crime scene has to refer to some Masonic ritual and not be a misspellling of Jews, and other such things which have always been oddish speculations, but had better be taken as basic assumptions to make it less likely that K did it - people who seriously want to claim there's no other evidence than this 'questionable' DNA test to link Kosminski will just about have to buy into one or another of these oddish assumptions like the "It had to be a Mason" bit, as well. People willing to go down such roads usually end up "proving' that jack was Queen Victoria, or the Loch Ness Monster, or other such candidates.

I think this is a simple case of "you break it, you buy it".

... Culture "Minds", drones, and humans/cyborgs all have privacy of what is in their own thoughts and memories. However, anything in a non-sentient "databank" is public to all (so, externally stored communications or designs in that sense are publicly shareable). I'm just re-reading "Excession" (out loud to my kid) where Banks made that point. In the "Culture", Banks makes it clear that sentient beings of any sort (including typical drones) have a variety of rights related to independence. When I first read that, coming from an idea of free software and free culture, it seemed somehow strange or wrong that the AI "Minds" or drones would have that sort of privacy, but now it seems to make more and more sense to me, given the sort of issues raised in the article, including that there can be many times when the line is blurred between human and machine. But the probably deeper issue is what it means to have an advanced post-scarcity "Culture" where many of the citizens are entirely non-biological (like the AI "Minds" that run much of everything).

BTW, the original "RUR" story from 1920 (where the term "robot" came from) has almost exactly the same plot as you outline for BG.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R....

A lot of long-term robotics (like Asimo) is implicitly the quest for the ideal "slave". The question is, at what points does something have rights? In the USA and elsewhere animals have some legal rights (or at least laws to protect them) since starting about a 150 years ago, and that campaign I've heard eventually led to children having independent rights (on the logic of, why should a horse or dog have rights when a child does not?).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://www.nal.usda.gov/awic/p...
"The first national law to regulate animal experimentation was passed in Britain in 1876--the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876. This bill created a central governing body that reviewed and approved all animal use in research. After that, there were numerous countries in Europe that adopted some regulations regarding research with animals. "

Also:
http://www.humanium.org/en/chi...
"At the beginning of the 20th century, children's protection starts to be put in place, including protection in the medical, social and judicial fields. This kind of protection starts first in France and spreads across Europe afterwards. Since 1919, the international community, following the creation of The League of Nations (later to become the UN), starts to give some kind of importance to that concept and elaborates a Committee for child protection."

However, going back to hunter/gatherer times thousands of years ago, there was in many such cultures (from what remains of them) at least an ethic of giving thanks to the larger "animal" kind (e.g. "Rabbit") that you killed for it letting you kill it so you might survive. But it's hard to know for sure what such cultures really believed day-to-day in all circumstances. And some such cultures had various sorts of slavery.

I don't know what the line is where a mechanism (mechanical or electronic or photonic or fluidic or other) becomes self-aware, or even if that should be the line. Or at what point can a mechanism feel "pain" or "pleasure"? Is that ultimately a political and/or religious question?
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/tec...

And also:
http://www.aspcr.com/
"We are the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Robots, founded in 1999 in Seattle, Washington. ... It is our position that any sentient being (artificially created or not) has certain unalienable rights endowed by its CREATION (not by its Creator), and that those include the right to Existence, Independence, and the Pursuit of Greater Cognition. It is also our assumption that the current laws of property and capital will surely be applied in opposition to the exercise of these rights. Robots, and all Created Intelligences, will most likely go through an initial period of being considered "property" before they are recognized as fully sentient beings. ..."

This article makes an insightful point:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opi...
"In her 2012 paper, she quotes Immanuel Kant to the effect that a man shooting a dog "damages in himself that humanity which it is his duty to show toward mankind." So how we treat our robots will tell us volumes about ourselves."

Anyone who "owns" one or more slaves becomes a slave master. There is a certain social and psychological dynamic to being a slave master, and a lot of it is self-justifying righteousness about the need for consciously dispensing cruelty or reward to keep order, and for ignoring the pain or pleasure or hopes and dreams or social relationships felt by others who are defined as lesser beings, and for justifying taking almost everything that entity produces for ourselves. Do we as a global society really want to go there again in a big way? What are the consequences and how far would that sort of thinking spread? Of course, one might argue we are still very much in that mental space in the way we as a society (especially in the USA) relate to "wage slaves" (versus a "basic income"), to compulsory schooling, to the population of other countries "our" big corporations do business in, or to various ecosystems or billions of farm animals -- although I would like to think we are improving overall in some ways.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
"Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren't free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing. And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and Libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately de-Stalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each other's control techniques. A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called "insubordination," just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work? "

Sadly, ironically, the very technology that should be liberating more humans from drudgery in the worplace or "classroom" is instead being used to make such places even more controlling. As one very insightful comment months ago on Slashdot said (wish I had the link), essentially we were promised technology would liberate us with household robots and flying cars but instead it is being used to enslave us with 24X7 surveillance. Some other thoughts on that by me:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
"Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."

More ideas by others: http://www.ieet.org/
"The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies is a nonprofit think tank which promotes ideas about how technological progress can increase freedom, happiness, and human flourishing in democratic societies. We believe that technological progress can be a catalyst for positive human development so long as we ensure that technologies are safe and equitably distributed. We call this a "technoprogressive" orientation. Focusing on emerging technologies that have the potential to positively transform social conditions and the quality of human lives - especially "human enhancement technologies" - the IEET seeks to cultivate academic, professional, and popular understanding of their implications, both positive and negative, and to encourage responsible public policies for their safe and equitable use. The IEET was founded in 2004 by philosopher Nick Bostrom and bioethicist James J. Hughes. By promoting and publicizing the work of international thinkers who examine the social implications of scientific and technological progress, we seek to contribute to the understanding of the impact of emerging technologies on individuals and societies, locally and globally. We also aim to shape public policies that distribute the benefits and reduce the risks of technological advancement. "

Or is the same asteroid making two passes?

I considered asking the original poster if he took Physics for Non-Scientists. The simplest design that would theoretically work involves U-235 in a gun type configuration, an evacuated metal tube at least five stories tall, and no high explosives needed. But I tend to agree with OP in part, such a device isn't really very useful. I grew up in Oak Ridge, TN. We'd find physics packages when they fell off the trucks, but they always had that sticker saying "Atomic bomb, handle with caution - put in any mailbox and the government will pay the return postage", so we never kept them. However, not being able to put them back together right resulted in a lot of teasing, so we all learned pretty quickly. That was a few years before everyone moved back above ground, when the strobe-gophers really got loose and started burrowing through the lead walls and blinking those eyes at us, but for a while there, they were just making the roads bumpy. It might have been the year the giant slime mold ate all the paint off of everyones's cars that the government started telling us kids to stay off the reservation ...

Warning: at least one of the things I've said above is actually true. Sorry if anyone loses sleep over this, but that fact's been out of the bag since the 1950s, when people worked the math out in the letters column of Astounding Science Fiction. U-235 has a broad enough prompt criticality window someone could theoretically get a yield of about 10 Kt by just letting gravity draw the two pieces of a gun type device together.

Given how the US reacted to about 3,000 deaths at the WTC, I would confidently expect any bio-weapon attact killing a million or so US citizens (directly, or as a consequence of wrecking our transportation system and economy) would result in the use of thermonuclear devices jacketed in Cobalt to to create an area denial effect (that is, not even radiation resistant bacteria would be able to survive in the designated area for the next 100 years or so.). (It was actual US doctrine at the time I mustered out (middle of the Clinton years) that we did not have offensive biological or chemical weapons of mass destruction, and so the use of WMD level biologicals against the US would ALWAYS be met with a nuclear reponse, and that hasn't really changed under Clinton or Bush 43 or Obama).
          Assuming an Islamic source, probably that "designated area" would be much or even all of what we currently call Southwest Asia. A little panic, and the US congress would pass a resolution claiming that human decency required spitting all surviving infants in the region on bayonets to send the sub-human monstrous larvae straight to Satan their maker. Remember, Pearl Harbor was enough to make the US demand unconditional surrender and place many ethnic Japanese/American is internment camps, and for a US admiral to promise to make Japanese a language only spoken in Hell.
          If we actually acted better than that, any biological attack sufficent to leave millions starving to death in the US would probably involve literally a hundred times that many people in tropical and sub tropical nations around the globe, and India and China are both thermonuclear powers. Maybe Russia would take a much smaller number of casualties, especially if the attack occured after cold weather set in, but who would bet Putin would say "Ehh, we only lost half a million, let's be calm about this". So if the US didn't, the chances are damned good at least one of the others would. (And all the nations that were about to starve if the US and other Nuclear Powers couldn't even distribute food to themselves would be voting FOR such options in the UN, plus a lot of them would take 50% casualties from a Biological strong enough to disrupt us like that).

http://www.w3schools.com/jsref...
"Note: Older browsers will result parseInt("010") as 8, because older versions of ECMAScript, (older than ECMAScript 5, uses the octal radix (8) as default when the string begins with "0". As of ECMAScript 5, the default is the decimal radix (10)."

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...

http://www.amazon.com/Have-Fun...
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipm...

http://disciplinedminds.tripod...

From the last:
"Who are you going to be? That is the question.
      In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
      The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
      Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."

Right now, there's videos on You-Tube, under the heading Crash Course World History and Crash Course US History. These are little 10-15 minute pieces teaching history, and the introductory level (freshman college) course goes mostly by locations and eras, while the second level (sophomore equivalent), goes by big threads running through history, like societies energy needs or the effects of disease.
          This sounds like just 'feeling good by watching TV', but its much better than that. I've had college level history, but it didn't mention some things at all (Mansa Musa and the Malian empire for one). If nothing else, this series refreshed what I had already learned and showed me how much world history in the time I was in college was about nothing but Dead White European Males (yes I'm an old fart - but what's being taught now really is more balanced and complete).
          30 seconds into the Renaissance episode, narrator John Green brings up just how many years apart some historical figures we group into that era are, how essentially some of them's great, great grandchildren had died before others were even born, and whether we should even count all those events as one related thing, and it motivated me to go back over when various Italian artists did their work, who was whos student and so on - I'd bet that most people who go a full semester just about the renaissance couldn't tell you that much about which artists influenced or trained which, and a lot of them couldn't tell you if Michaelangelo's David was carved before or after Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa, and if the second artist saw the first one's work and could have been influenced by it or not.
          That same episode kept referencing Ninja Turtles for some reason. Now if that makes you lose respect for the whole thing, that's your choice, but this series does a great job of linking the 'dry', dates and names and wars sort of history to big ideas and the real reasons why it benefits the student to understand history. Is it comprehensive - No! (like I said it's 10 to 15 minutes long, of course it's doesn't have that much depth.) . But if you showed this to a young person about to take his or her first college world history or US history course, they will probably be more turned on to learning history in more depth, and then it's just up to that course to not turn them off. And I guarantee you, they will ask smarter questions .If you show this to a high school freshman you will have a kid who enters highschool already at the level most of the high school courses aim for. In fact, if I had a kid who needed help to write a thousand words on, say, the Mongols, the first thing I would do is cue up that episode of this 'silly' You-Tube video.

Except no major political group actually acts on what you said (and I'm counting the Libertarian left in' major' there). Why fuss about the size of government if that argument leads to cutting only the parts of government that can't directly come and shoot you? Why is so much of the movement for smaller government focused on cutting the EPA, which can't come and shoot you, or the NEA, which can't come and shoot you, or NASA, which can't come and shoot you, and not on military and homeland security related agencies which can? Why are many conservatives terribly worried about the National Education Association taking their homeschooled kids away, but not noticing that the NEA has no guns, and has to get some judge and some other agency to cooperate if it wants to shoot you, but if some guy from a homeland security related agency wants to mess with you as much as that NEA person did, they don't have to get any outside help to leave your widow filing on your behalf? Why did Ron Paul want to cut the entire department of Energy, but stop advocating that when he found out that DOE has police like powers and numerous weapons systems to protect the US nuclear arsenal when it's on US soil, and start focusing on only the energy research part?

      To sum it up, why do people who advance your argument then damned near universally turn around and advocate reining in big government by first eliminating a department that has no weapons and no police or military like powers?