I had to look it up also.

An "interstitial" pops up before the page you want, or a few seconds after.

It's a speed-bump in reading the website: stop, grab the mouse, find the close mark, get rid of the thing, and continue.

It's basically adding mosquitoes to your browsing experience.

(Some of them don't even have the "X" corner icon. You have to choose one of the presented links to close.)

Web sites like Enenews are full of shit.

That's saying a lot. Even shit is not really full of shit, it is mostly comprised of (wholesome, drinkable) water. With Science and Special Equipment we can separate the shit particles from the water, but only a fool would attempt this with a inappropriately configured or blunt instrument like the human tongue.

Reading Enenews for information on Fukushima or nuclear topics in general is like trying to separate out shit with your tongue. It may be possible to do it on small scale, since there are bits of fact scattered around there, but when all is said and done you wind up with a mouth full of shit.

It doesn't take a lot of shit to create a world of shit, since we have a low tolerance for knowingly eating shit. People who believe that the whole world is turning to shit enjoy reading Enenews because it gives them a delicious sense of hopelessness, and even the most secular will find there a yummy stew of End Times Crap, Brought To You By Science! (tm) that they can savor without buying into the whole god-thing.

If you ever tire of the shit, visit Hiroshima Syndrome where Leslie Corrice has gathered an amazing amount of Fukushima information from the early days of the disaster. He also calls out the shit that has appeared in news sources through the world, and does it with an amazing amount of diligence and patience. I read the whole damned site and sent him a couple of contributions because his willingness to sift through shit is a noble endeavor worthy of recognition and reward.

Okay then, let's look at this from the perspective of morality.

One very good theory of morality is based on suffering.

The exploits of Hacking Team have greatly increased the suffering of a large number of people, while other actions they could have taken (such as reporting their exploits so that vendors can fix them) would have reduced that same suffering.

This is the definition of evil under the that theory: when your actions cause increased suffering of many people, it's evil.

Yes, there are corner cases and nuanced situations (such as the suffering of a caught criminal), but overall it's a good working definition and under that definition Hacking Team is [was] evil.

Or we could look at this from the perspective of Christian ethics.

According to Father Guido Sarducci, sins have penitant value. Lying is worth a dollar, killing is worth $50,000, and masturbation is something like $0.50.

(Yes, I'm referring to the selling of indulgances by the Catholic church.)

The exploits of Hacking Team have caused the torture and death of people. Hacking Team probably has an ecumenical debt worth millions of dollars.

This is the definition of sin under the that theory: when your actions damage society so much that you must atone by donating large sums of money to charity.

This is another good working definition and under that definition Hacking Team has racked up an enormous bank account of sin.

Hacking Team should vanish, we'd be all the better for it.

Yay for vaccine, some day, even for infants.
Yay for FREE mosquito nets.
But you do realize however... these are measures that we --- the countries who have already eradicated Malaria --- would not tolerate, if WE were as affected as they?

THE WHITEWASHED VERSION OF HISTORY
You're living it. Most people have no real perspective on DDT at all, it is simply something evil which allowed persons in developed countries which had already eradicated Malaria to claim its discontinuance as "the greatest environmental victory for everybody, ever"... though actually, taking lead out of gasoline was the real greatest victory. Most are too zero-tolerance enviro-Puritan even to consider a distinction between a light regimen of spraying walls inside homes versus the (mind bogglingly huge) agricultural applications throughout North America up to 1972, which everyone agrees was a bad idea. DDT is simply some 'evil banned substance'. Anyone talking about it is a loon. Anyone asking, where could they possibly get some is a subversive. It has come to this. That is the extent of this modern ugly.

THE UNWASHED VERSION OF HISTORY: BLOOD ON OUR HANDS
How do you calculate the value of 50 million lives, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, most of them children? Sadly, you have to go to a politically motivated website to find this figure in proper context, and an an excellent summary of DDT's history:

"As recently as 2005, 500 million people around the world (approximately one-twelfth of the earth's population) were contracting malaria on an annual basis; and each year, 2 to 3 million of them died as a result. Since the 1972 U.S. ban on DDT, more than 50 million people--about 90 percent of whom resided in sub-Saharan Africa, and most of whom were children younger than five--have died of malaria. Said the World Health Organization, "more people are now infected [with malaria] than at any point in history," with "up to half a billion cases [being reported] every year." Anywhere from 1 to 2 million of those people die from the disease. Dr. Wenceslaus Kilama, chairman of Malaria Foundation International, placed this figure into perspective: "This is like loading up seven Boeing 747 airliners each day, then deliberately crashing them into Mt. Kilimanjaro." "The resurgence of a disease that was almost eradicated [many] years ago is a case study in the danger of putting concern for nature above concern for people," said Nizam Ahmad, a Bangladeshi analyst who focuses on the problems that affect developing countries.

Or find this Wayback New Yorker article describing the human triumph of malaria eradication that may well be from the point of view of DDT itself, for no other measure taken deserves near as much praise. Or this which cites a telling South African infection/mortality study with a particularly chilling graph.

Or the paper The Burden of Early Exposure to Malaria in the United States, 1850-1860: Malnutrition and Immune Disorders [2007] which not only describes the direct impact of malaria in the United States, but also suggests some previously-unexplored side effects of such an endemic disease on populations that made life really suck. For example, "Union Army recruits who spent their early years in malaria-endemic counties were 1.1 inches shorter at enlistment due to malnutrition and were 13 percent more susceptible to infections during the U.S. Civil War as a result of immune disorders than were those from malaria-free regions."

I'm not bringing all this up because I'm trying to convince you that Malaria is bad. We know it's bad. But in the early 1970s something happened within the United States and several other countries who had completely escaped this monster. Something awful. The foundation-less (though eloquent) rhetoric of Rachel Carson caused people to view DDT emotionally, to the extent that they began to marginalize, then forget, the horror that they had endured for centuries. They forgot the complete triumph of Malaria eradication with DDT and what it meant (along with mass produced antibiotics and Smallpox vaccine) for almost every child to grow to maturity healthy and undamaged. They even turned blind to the real statistics of other countries. They saw no difference between a tiny application (one molecule thick does the trick!) on household walls versus tons in agriculture. Despite the ongoing horror... just a few of them decided that DDT should be banned outright, everywhere.

Because in order to make an omelet you have to break 50 million eggs. There are things uglier than genocide. Genocide is easy to detect, easy to hate. It's far more difficult to weigh the damage done by people who meant well who continue to make awful choices, and lack the courage even to re-examine the choices they have made.

I've often heard this repeated, but is it actually true?

Suppose I'm in a public space (say, a park) having a quiet conversation with someone, and keeping track of passersby: If someone walks up we stop talking.

Does this mean that someone (from the government) with a parabolic mic can eavesdrop on my conversations without a warrant?

The argument is that it's only what a policeman would hear if he walked up and listened, but in that case we would stop talking.

I have every expectation of privacy if I take steps to ensure that privacy: looking around to make sure no one can see me, for instance. Does this mean that the police can video-tape the sidewalk from the window of any office building without a warrant?

I also note that there's no expectation of privacy *in your home* if you don't have the drapes closed. The implication is that we don't have an expectation of privacy *anywhere*, except in our homes and only if we're concealed.

Does that sound like a free country?

In any event, we shouldn't be mindlessly repeating that meme as if it's the "law of the land". The more you say it, it only makes more people believe it.

Instead, we should be mindlessly repeating things things that sway public perception in a better direction.

Built like a brick shithouse. Aluminum frame. Massively stable power supply with over-spec'd transformer and giant electrolytic. Gold plating on everything that mattered (yes many in that day did not). Rugged S-100 backplane with plenty proper reinforcement to the frame, which in the days of S-100 when routine maintenance was important, was key. Some of us remember the days when you could insert and remove components from computer systems without making the whole machine scooting around like a puppy avoiding a bath.

A B&W memory mapped display that was extremely stable and flicker free even when the whole screen was blinking, which involves massive spikes in CRT current. Screen refresh was smooth. In those days most computer displays failed what I called the 'blink test', where you fill the display with blink/reverse type and watch the characters in the corners. On a black/white blink they would tend to shift position a little. Vector's did not. Beautiful Cherry keyboard, keys metal spring-squishy with a firm stop and perfect debounce which was handled in software by the 'monitor' (=BIOS).

This made Vector's own CP/M word processing software MEMORITE one of the most amazing tools for a secretary to become accustomed to. It may be hard to believe but once upon a time, word wrapping and shifting paragraphs on the screen as you type usually was a flickery, clunky process. Some early word processors even delayed reformatting until you left off typing or ended a paragraph, to minimize the jarring flicker and redraw. When you typed into MEMORITE individual words repositioned themselves to smoothly you actually had a mental impression of them moving as if they were real objects. This simple phenomenon was unprecedented in those days of 4Mhz Z80, even in machines with memory mapped display.

When people who used Vector 3 and MEMORITE were forced to migrate to 'newer, better' PC-compatible word processing platforms running WordPerfect and MSWord, they felt as if they had lost a friend. One secretary who found the Vector Graphic to be the only machine who could keep up with her typing without losing characters or making the screen into an unwatchable flicker-fest, had to transition to MSWord on early Windows. She asked me, "Are things going to get worse from now on?"

Maintaining Vector Graphic machines gave my own career a great start. But it was also a curse. Now I'm more conscious and outspoken of crappy engineering than most other people.

Not often these days does something like this manage to offend me to the core, but that article really got my goat. It is a masterpiece sure, well written even. But it is constructed to lead you down a narrow garden path of thinking and reason you into a little corner from which you the conclude you are somehow under attack and only way through is to keep on the path. I left the path half-way, trampled a bit of shrubbery and climbed a tree to look down on this weird thing. I saw an ancient tactic for Manufacturing Consent,

1. Begin by manufacturing and presenting an "oppressor/victim scenario".
2. Attempt to convince reader that they are in this "victim" group.
3. Present a view that does not ascribe any Free Will or choice to the "victim group".
4. In this tactical reasoning the only "Free Will" is possessed by the oppressor, who is using it for "evil".
5. Further elevate this aggressor scenario by claiming some natural right not to be "victimized".
6. This gives reader an ego massage. They are no longer a "victim", merely "concerned about the Rights of Others"
7. Choose a base motive you think would be most contemptible to your audience and ascribe it to the oppressor.
8. Once the argument is under way, focus entirely on oppressor's actions. Steer away from victims' actions or choices.
9. Congratulations! You are mustering a troll army to become a self-described "Moral Majority".
10. When it distills into a Cause, it need not be morally defensible or even comprise a majority.

So you are this poor defenseless human being, right? You are foraging on the green fields of Internet, picking out the choice clover that sprouts there. You are a sheep that Will Safely Graze in the pasture of human endeavor and will thrive happily unless your most precious possession --- your attention --- is stolen from you by those with Corporate Interest in mind. You have no Free Will in the matter. The rectangle that is your Facebook Page is being infringed upon by Advertising. Your personal information and patterns of behavior, which you supply of your own free will, is being stolen by others.

If you are lucky you've been raised by parents who would Laugh Out Loud at this kind of argument, and you inherently recognize and fix on the part of the argument that is most tenuous and contrived. Like since when do people have some sort of right not to be distracted in public places?

Advertising -- and even PR and Propaganda-- is applied in the world like any business model. Winor lose. Some of the models are stupid, some are clever. If you don't like what they're selling don't give them traction. And if you some day find yourself surrounded by a true-majority of people whose opinions you are uncomfortable with, you are left with the usual options: fight or flight.

Power/communications/routing down event? Was monitor quorum lost? Inquiring minds that are not trolls are curious and grateful that the path to restoration was clear. Best wishes.

They don't.

Oh, it gets better.

We don't know if there's even a *difference* between a neutrino and an antineutrino. It may in fact be its own antiparticle.

And then there's this thing about how they each oscillate among three types.

I can see Beavis and Butthead saying "Dude! Let's strap a PISTOL to this DRONE and make it SHOOT. Heh heh heh." That shit is so obvious as to be scarcely newsworthy, let alone eyebrow-raising. To make it shoot they use... a solenoid, right? Well Gosh Lolly Good Golly!

If it's man-threatening eyebrow raisin' tech yer interested in, analyze the motion on multiple axes of this Breast Massaging Robot and also Patent CN102058466A for a similar device that has more useful functions and methods than the Mozilla Web API:

The invention discloses a Chinese massage robot, relating to the field of Chinese massage mechanical and automatic devices. The Chinese massage robot is characterized by comprising a bed body (16), a spatial six degrees of freedom main body mechanism and a massage hand (15) and can realize a palm-rubbing technique, a scrubbing method, a pushing manipulation, a wiping manipulation, a pressing manipulation, a pointing method, a finger-nail pressing method, a clapping method, a striking method, a rebounding method, a rolling method, a palm-kneading method, a finger-kneading method, a tremble manipulation, a shaking manipulation, a holding method, a kneading method, a plucking method, a pushing method, a twisting method, a pulling and turning method, a stretching method and other general single-hand and dual-hand massage methods. The invention has the advantages of simple structure, high rigidity, small size, light weight, low cost, large motion space, sensitive and quick action, favorable decoupling, real-time and dynamic response characteristics of system control, and the like.

Let goofballs who are easily amused play with guns and drones. We cannot afford to lose our lead on this technology front.

True but the testing they undergo is less rigorous than drugs and yet every so often a new drug has to be recalled because of either rare side effects or long term effects that were not known at the time of release. That is not a reason to ban GMO since, as with drugs, the benefits can outweigh the risks. However we would never dream of giving someone a new drug without telling them what they were taking so why should it be ok to let people eat GMO without telling them?

If GMO labelling were mandatory then companies would be forced to pass the benefits onto consumers: if GMO strawberries are cheaper to grow then they should be cheaper in the shops. This combined with an education campaign would mean that people would see and understand the benefits of GMO and so be more supportive of it. By hiding it the corporations can pocket the savings instead of us and they don't have to bother educating anyone which perpetuates the resistance to the technology.

"Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history."

So begins the short story Manna, by Marshall Brain (full text on the web). It's the creepiest dystopian story I've read in a long while... made even creepier by the breezy and cheerful way its central character (who reminds me of Philip J. Fry from Futurama for some reason) tells how the robotic revolution will really go down. Take a few minutes to check it our. Your eyeballs will pop out on springs.

As I write this I'm thinking, should I even mention this story? Someone may think it's a great idea. I'm also thinking, perhaps if enough people read the story they'll have time to think about it and perhaps find a way to stop it from playing out to the end that is described. Some appropriate response that falls short of going full frontal Luddite.

Never mind those cute robots unable to walk up stairs, though some day they will. Forget that silly stuff about Skynet, it doesn't want to hurt you, though some day it will. But the first robots may actually be... people. Starting tomorrow.

Also by the author,
Robotic Nation
The Second Intelligent Species: How Humans Will Become as Irrelevant as Cockroaches

Through the /SARC when it comes down to it you are right of course. Please +mod Parent as an amazingly and thought provoking response, a fine rant response. I must admit that over the years I have been part of the problem. Despite time put in to learn the mechanics of computer language, network, protocol and presentation, applying many an operations-oriented shim or patch or fix.. I have NOT delved deep into any single open-source project, taken the reins, become part of a team, or even one of those prolific lone wolf coders. I have no curriculum vitae in open source. Now that I look back on it that's kind of shameful, especially as I present myself as a critic of the times. I'll try to do better with the next half of my life.

Who are those bad actors and what is bad acting? Leaving aside the potential for cross site scripting, malformed instructions, rooting and malware for a moment. There was a time when smooth continuous motion on the borders of a web page, however clever the item, was considered distracting by static purists, who even objected to looping animation. I was never one of those, though I did see they clearly disliked the intrusive and unexpected. Then came the sounds, loud and lots. In a platform where a mute button or volume control must be explicitly coded few did and if your volume control was up you'd be blasted out of your seat muttering "What were they thinking?" But all that is past and gone. There are no aesthetic elements made possible by Flash that are not not do-able from HTML or JS.

And because migration is now possible some feel migration is necessary. The Register is cheekier than I, spicing urgent reminders with lambasting criticism. Clearly from Adobe's position proactive measures are necessary and a ground-up audit/rewrite is necessary using a compiler framework that (with performance penalty of course) mitigates the silly things like use-after-free. And in Open Source there have been reverse engineering projects and attempts to replicate Flash, lately even shims...

But what has been missing is an publicly audited open source Flash initiative that had begun years ago, begun right as Flash was introduced. Some would call such a thing intellectual property theft. I'd bring up OpenSSL as a shining example except for... certain things that have happened. Are they worse than the things that might have happened if some corporate actor, RSA for example, imposed bin-only blobs on everyone, Windows Linux and Apple? Who can say.

What you really mean is, You reach down and you flip Flash over on its back. Flash lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping.

Point taken.

This is not the first time that someone has claimed to observe pentaquarks. I'd suggest holding off the welcome until this result is confirmed by several other experiments. Last time there was a confusing mixture of confirmations and non-confirmations until the consensus emerged that there was no evidence to support the existence of pentaquarks.