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Censorship

EPA Quashed Report Skeptical of Global Warming 1057

theodp writes "CNET reports that less than two weeks before the EPA formally submitted its pro-carbon dioxide regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty 'decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.' In an e-mail message (pdf) to a staff researcher on March 17, the EPA official wrote: 'The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward...and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.' The employee was also ordered not to 'have any direct communication' with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic. In a statement, the EPA took aim at the credentials of the report's author, Alan Carlin (BS Physics-Caltech, PhD Econ-MIT), describing him as 'not a scientist.' BTW, the official who chastised Carlin also found himself caught up in a 2005 brouhaha over mercury emissions after top EPA officials ordered the findings of a Harvard University study stripped from public records."
GNU is Not Unix

Stallman On the State of Free Software 25 Years On 367

TRNick writes "What's the state of free software, 25 years after GNU's birth? TechRadar has an interview with Richard Stallman to find out. Stallman thinks free software is making good progress: 'Nowadays hardware developers are also increasingly likely to publish the interface specs so that we can develop free software that works with the hardware. Perhaps we are turning the corner, but we still have a big fight on our hands before all computer users have freedom.' But how many of us actually run an operating system that Richard Stallman would consider free? Many of the more popular GNU/Linux distributions, including Mandriva and Ubuntu, bundle proprietary code with their free software packages. Perhaps free software has reached a large enough install base that companies are happy to use it for their own gain, but aren't quite so willing to make their own commitments to free software development. How important this is to the success of free software depends on how strong your stance is on freedom is."

Comment Re:HD-TV (Score 1) 440

I live in a rural area where cable is not available, and my property is so heavily wooded that satellite is out of the question, so I have been relying on a roof-mounted TV antenna for roughly 5 years. My location is about halfway between Cincinnati and Dayton in SW Ohio, and with analog, I could pick up the majority of both city's broadcast stations as well as the PBS channels for both cities. I purchased and installed a 50" Plasma HD a couple of weeks ago, and when I fired up the setup program, I was more than a little pleased to find that nearly all the tv stations in the area are already broadcasting in digital, and better than that, most of them offer more than 1 channel with different content; for instance, the Dayton PBS station broadcasts 6 separate "channels" (for lack of a better word), as in 16-1, 15-2, 16-3, 16-4, 16-5, and 16-6. Each of these streams carries a different program. The digital signal is far superior to the analog, and is clear and static-free regardless of atmospheric conditions. Even the stations which had pitifully weak analog signals here are clear and strong with digital. My television station lineup went from about 13 channels with analog to about 40 channels with digital, and it must be that the digital format is superior, because the analog channels that were weak and frequently full of static are still so after the change in television sets, but the same station's digital content is clear and static free. I hope that everyone has the same experience as I have had. I was a skeptic too, and was just about ready to abandon tv for the internet altogether when I decided to give a new set a try. I am completely sold, and the cable/satellite channels can keep their 'services' as far as I'm concerned.

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