Mother Jones recently published an article America's Real Criminal Element: Lead, detailing the correlation between decrease in environmental lead levels (mostly due to unleaded gasoline laws) and the decrease in crime rates (with a 20-year delay). The numbers are impressive, and they've correlated across areas of the country that enacted lead control laws at different times. The research is thorough and they make bold claims: "Gasoline lead may explain as much as 90 percent of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century." I highly recommend giving it a thorough read.

Right, there's no immediate threat to the environment. That's why they keep trapping radioactive wildlife.

Or like this: http://goo.gl/t3rGM

No, this is awesome! I want the feature available so we can all charge people money to send us messages. Then everyone can just put on their business card and e-mail footer how much it costs to talk to them, and then nobody has to ever talk to anyone who isn't willing to pay (or can't afford) to talk to them.

You know, this started out as snark, but then I realized that that's actually how the real world works ($1000/plate political dinners, lobbyists, conventions), and just got depressed.

It'll be interesting to watch the dip in Google's search traffic as half the web searches instantly move over to this site.

Similarly, is there any statistically significant weight difference between people who drink beer from cans vs. glass bottles?

That sounds frighteningly accurate.
From a different Wired article: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/nsa-whistleblower/

So, the short, accurate answer to Wyden's question would be "We're spying on everyone. Literally. It would take too much work to even calculate the number of people we're spying on. Go away."

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/best-of-2600-emmanuel-goldstein/1102658944?ean=9780470294192
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/2600-magazine-2600-magazine/1104039139?ean=2940014186568

Guess I can't tell that joke about a solar-powered flashlight anymore.

Right. Because historically, the kids buying video games are the ones out there beating up other kids and stealing their lunch money. Why don't we leverage a 1% tax on footballs and jerseys as well, or maybe weight-lifting equipment?

What a great message. "If you buy this video game, someone may come along and kick your ass, so we're going to charge you extra so the government can try to prevent that."

Right. Giving Verizon incentive to slow down your traffic in the middle of your Skype call so you'll pay them more money? Doesn't sound like a good idea. I'm pretty sure that would be a deal-breaker for me.

Kevin,

Every time I see your name mentioned in an article written by Kevin Poulsen, I wonder how many people reading it know the connection. Do you have any interesting stories of crossing paths with someone your knew from your "ghost in the wire" days, or unexpected relationships you've developed or continued with people who either impacted your life, or were impacted by your actions back then?

The more amusing footnotes to this story are the #kennethcoletweets tweets that everyone is making up now:
http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23kennethcoletweets

@KennethColePR: "People from New Orleans are flooding into Kenneth Cole stores!" #KennethColeTweets
@KennethColePR: Jeffrey Dahmer would have eaten up our spring collection! #KennethColeTweets
And many more...

I had the OSX version of surveillancesaver installed on my mac, but when I upgraded to Snow Leopard it quit working. Found out it was written in Quartz, so I re-compiled it with the new version, and got it working again.

Then I found out that the guys who wrote the original went on to found the Public Viewpoint Project, which searches for publicly available webcams and creates an RSS feed. I can't find their web site anymore, but the RSS feed is still up. I added to the screen saver the ability to connect to their RSS feed, d/l camera URLs and test them out before showing them.

I recently created a Google Code space for it, it's available here: http://code.google.com/p/surveillancesaverosx [google.com]

It still has some bugs, if there are any "expert" Quartz developers out there, I'd love to get some pointers.

A while back I ran across the SurveillanceSaver project - a simple screen saver which contained a small list of webcams it would cycle through. I had the OSX version installed on my mac, but when I upgraded to Snow Leopard it quit working. Found out it was written in Quartz, so I re-compiled it with the new version, and got it working again.

Then I found out that the guys who wrote it went on to found the Public Viewpoint Project, which searches for publicly available webcams and creates an RSS feed. I can't find their web site anymore, but the RSS feed is still up. I added to their screen saver the ability to connect to their RSS feed, d/l camera URLs and test them out before showing them.

I recently created a Google Code space for it, it's available here: http://code.google.com/p/surveillancesaverosx

It still has some bugs, if there are any "expert" Quartz developers out there, I'd love to get some pointers.