Over the years I can think of many times we've received a call from our credit card companies to "report suspicious activity". Sometimes it's annoying (yes, we are travelling, please don't cancel our card) but other times it's saved us thousands of dollars.

I personally cannot think of anyone who has gotten a call from medical establishment to report "suspicious activity" or any other kind of "fraud alert", but perhaps others have? If not, the fact that credit card companies respond to these would make them less profitable activity than defrauding companies that don't alert or respond.

And yours are so great too! Look everybody! http://slashdot.org/~dugancent

Welcome to the steeplechase. Room for everyone, hats off.

I'm a pretty big critic of fellow environmentalists who get carried away with authority, sometimes actually doing environmental harm in the pursuit of theory (e.g. ROHS, removal of recycled content lead from circuit boards, replaced with tin mined from Indonesian coral islands, oy vey. Like replacing plastic with "organic, natural" baby seal pelts).

However, in defense of the enviros and the article posted on /., organic waste really is a pretty cutting edge activity. A century ago pig farmers actually collected significant amounts of food waste, and until very recently the Egyptian Zabaleen community (Coptic Christians) ran a hugely successful organic waste collection system in Cairo. It was a fairly recent innovation to put recyclables and organics and junk into "landfills" and incinerators. It's legitimate to study public policy and efforts to achieve more sustainable cities.

When I was in charge of a state recycling program in the 90s (MA DEP), however, I found that rewarding positive behavior got better publicity than "fines" for not recycling. We ran a "recycling lottery" in Somerville where they'd choose a household at random and if they had their recyclables out, they got $200. It generated the awareness the Seattle fine is trying to achieve without the Drudge-Report-iness. It's also easier to backtrack if the whole thing turns out to be a mistake, if you've given out prizes for affirmative behavior instead of fines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... Shanzhai not shenzhai

On an evolutionary time scale, this is a snapshot. "Europeans" meant something for several thousand years, but the intermarriage and population growth and travel will commingle DNA in a century or two (evolutionarily known as an "instant"). I'm white and have native American DNA, most black / African Americans are dark skinned and have loads of European DNA, etc etc. These DNA results are interesting but it's like trying to follow a weather pattern, the geographical barriers are toast.

Have been to these markets in Shenzhen and Foshan, and to similar marketplaces in Cairo and Lima and Jakarta. In Chinese there is a word "shenzhai" I think which means to "hack" or copy, but it doesn't have the nefarious English connotations. It's more like a musician jamming someone else's guitar riff, it's seen as a talent worthy of applause. Slate had a great article in 2012, "The Chinese Steve Jobs is Probably a Pirate". I'm now working with 3 researchers at universities to document what we call the "Tinkerer Blessing", which is the opposite of the "Resource Curse"... correlating that emerging markets with a lack of natural resources develop better through technology repair and "grey market" activity. Simon Lin of Acer, Terry Gou of Foxconn, both started in video display refurbishment, by the way. http://www.slate.com/articles/...

While it's popular to cheer for victims of lost jobs and the unemployed, the brutal truth is that unemployment is 4% (in my state) and asshole-dom is about 14%. We look forward to MS-less resumes to grow our business. There's a shortage of smart employees, and until we figure out how to educate the emerging intellect-nots, medium-tech industry needs the dis-employed. Or immigrants. We are color blind, we don't care.

Dark matter simply means matter that is too small to be detected by what humans have so far developed to see, but which gravity study suggests should be there. Seventy years ago, Pluto was probably "dark matter". Giving a name to "everything" we can't see and then finding evidence that there's something more is a bit curious. What hasn't been "seen" yet is "dark". We will eat away at "dark" matter one snapshot at a time.

If the code-writing industry is going to rely on civil court judges and federal patent clerks to make the decisions, the firms with 2 lawyers per coder will win out. If the code-writing industry goes to no-patents, it will be from each coder according to his ability, to each according to his need. The only solution is for some industry gurus to come up with some rules which everyone agrees to abide by, and then to submit the concensus in friend-of-court decisions. I have no idea whether anyone in the industry is prepared to even define the 80/20 rule, but if they can agree on the WORST patent decisions (either way) and get some concensus on them, and then try to find commonalities in what made those "bad", it could be a start.

The Bible tells us that: Adam lived 930 years. (Genesis 5:5) ... Seth lived 912 years.(Genesis 5:8) ... Methuselah lived 969 years.(Genesis 5:27) ... And Noah lived 950 years. (Genesis 9:29) ... And that Fruit Flies lived 120 days (Lost Scroll) ...

1. Guiyu is a used semiconductor / chip harvesting and reuse center. The acid baths stuff (for biproduct after chip reuse) stopped years ago, the material is now shipped to Dowa in Japan. There's an ongoing issue with incineration of the boards to concentrate the metals ash for Dowa - that is the focus of the improvements in the article.

2. Guiyu's main industry is textile dying. The river pollution blamed on "e-waste" is almost identical to Louhajang River in Bangladesh - a textile industry pollution site.

3. Abogbloshie in Ghana is mostly an automobile junkyard. Very little of the "e-waste" there is recently imported. African cities have had TV and recycling for a long time. World Bank statistics show Nigeria had 6.9M households with TV in 2006, for example. India has NO used imports, plenty of informal sector processes.

4. Three separate peer reviewed studies show 85%-91% reuse of used electronics imports in South America and Africa.

5. According to TFA, the material currently processed in Guiyu is mostly generated in China.

6. USA has never been a significant exporter to Africa.

Emerging markets pay $$ for all the shipping. They pay for stuff they want, which is usually reuse value. They also generate "e-waste" and have their own dumps. China and India and Africa generate more electronic junk than USA or Europe. For some decent academic study on the Hoax, here are links to research at Memorial University, MIT, ASU, and UN at this /. story from last December. http://news.slashdot.org/story.... Innocent tinkerers and fixers are getting a firehose of bullshit #FreeHurricaneBenson. It is true that China (and TCL, the largest TV manufacturer in China) have invested in a clean up of Guiyu, and it's true Guiyu was nasty, but there was fortunately not all that much "ewaste" to clean up (worst is incineration of boards to concentrate ash, after chip harvest, prior to export to Dowa). Unfortunately they are not taking on cleanup of the textile industry, so the arsenic in the water samples will remain. Finding arsenic in the Guiyu river should have tipped people off in the first place, it has nothing to do with e-waste and everything to do with textile factories and copper mining.