I never said what orbit the KKVs are in or that they would need to change from LEO to MEO.

Not only that, but HOW you voted is also obtainable. I worked on a California Assembly campaign in 1993, and the list we were using to make campaign calls with was based on all voters who had voted FOR a specific state voter's initiative protecting gun rights. The GOP state organization got the information from the Secretary of State's office, IIRC. How you vote is not private. You just have to pay some fees to get the list, and most people don't want to do that.

I never said that the first attack would be the satelites, but it very well may be. How much warning do you have when the KKV is already in orbit? All it has to do is change orbit slightly and your satelite is dead. Also, you suggest that a state would use nukes before their satelites are taken out. I don't agree. Whether you agree or not with the concept of MAD (mutually assured destruction), it is clear that the major nuclear powers do. It is quite conceivable that there could be a conventional conflict that would not escalate to a nuclear launch. In that case, taking out GPS would level the playing field for weaker nations and coalitions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militarisation_of_space

Please understand that the technology to kill satelites has been around for a long time. Several military contractors for the US Defense Department have developed kinetic kill vehicles. They are in orbit as we speak. Their purpose is to destroy satelites by ramming into them at high velocity. They are like an anvil with a guidance system and a simple propulsion system. I know that Boeing had these back in the early 1990s. I'm sure there are hundreds or thousands of them up there by now with their targets locked in. If the US has them, you know the Russians and possibly the Chinese have them. If there is a major war between any of the major powers on Earth, the satelites will be one of the first casualties.

Also, of course, the Chinese proved they could destroy satelites from the earth by their launch of a missile at one of their own several years ago. (Thanks for the space debris, China.)

FIrst world countries do that, too. Farmers in California burn off the stubble of their crops so they can put more carbon, etc. into the soil. It's also easier and cheaper to do that. It puts a lot of silica into the air and can cause breathing problems.

Or it could cause regional or tribal wars with people trying to get the best land for themselves.

I agree with this recommendation. All of my kids started using a mouse with TuxPaint. Since you can use the tuxpaint-config (Debian/Ubuntu) package to restrict behaviors that will confuse and frustrate the little one, it is ideal. To make it easier for them to find the pictures that they've saved, I'd suggest creating a symbolic link from the .tuxpaint picture directory to the desktop.

Also, once they know how to find their pictures, they will have lots of fun emailing them to loved ones like grandmothers. They have so much pride in their creations that they will automatically want to print 50 copies of each picture, so giving them an inexpensive way to share them will help them feel good about what they've done. Just make sure they have a really easy way to send everything to your mother-in-law, and you can enjoy a little bonus passive-aggressive humor at the same time.

You may also be concerned that your child make a good first impression with their fellow 3-year-olds, so maybe you could write a simple script to automatically email these pictures to their Facebook profile whenever a new file lands in that folder. You can never start too young teaching them to make nasty comments about other 3-year-olds' pictures. Cyber-bullies must be cultivated at an early age or they will end up at the end of the pecking order.

On a more serious note, one caveat to teaching computer games to your children so early is that they will think of the computer as an entertainment center. This is where they will go when they want to have fun. Instead of using the computer to research cellular biology or track the stars in Celestia, they will just seek out whatever games they can find. Instead of using their imaginations, getting physical exercise, and learning to coordinate their large muscles, they will be begging you to log them into the computer. Do not fail to set firm time boundaries for screen time, or you will have kids who always say, "Dad, I'm bored," hoping you will provide entertainment instead of them showing initiative to make their own fun. You will want to make daily use of the commands: passwd -u [username] and passwd -l [username].

If the poster has no experience with administering Linux, Apache, PHP, and MySQL, what good does Webmin do? Webmin is only user friendly to those who know what they are doing already. There are no really good explanations for anything in Webmin, so they would all be confusing to a Newbie.

If you want to start with something that is pretty automated, check out the XAMPP project for Windows.

If you are planning on using LAMP (instead of WAMP), I would suggest just using some of the awesome tutorials out there. They will pretty much walk you through every step. If you use Ubuntu Server, either install Apache, PHP, and MySQL during the server install, or learn to use something simple like apt-get. The basic command is: "apt-get install apache2 php-5 mysql-server" and almost everything is configured for you. Or, if you want to use something like Drupal 6 for your forum, you could just issue the command "apt-get install drupal6" and all of the other stuff should be installed for you (I say should because I have never done it that way). If you want to stick with phpbb, just issue the command "apt-get install phpbb3" and it will be installed with all of the dependent programs.

Most of the tutorials will walk you through exactly what commands to issue. If you go to Linux.org you can take a basic tutorial on how to use the CLI. The Apache site has pretty good documentation for most things that you'll need to configure the Web server. If you're going to just put one site on the machine, the basic Apache server setup is already installed by Ubuntu. You just have to start placing your Web pages into /var/www/ and possibly configuring a few settings in your php.ini file at /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini to enlarge maximum file sizes, timeouts, etc. If you install phpmyadmin (apt-get install phpmyadmin), you can easily create the MySQL database and the database user and password needed for your installation.

When learning Linux, using the man pages and the "locate" command to find stuff is very helpful. Just remember to run the "updatedb" command to create or update the list of files and folders for the locate command. You can pretty much Google for anything you need help with, and you should be able to figure things out.

Or try using a hosting company with all this stuff already in place. Lots of them provide scripts that automate the basic install of everything. Once you get your feet wet, you can try installing it all from scratch, but that isn't really necessary at the beginning.

"Gannon was charged with resisting arrest, simple assault on a police officer and disorderly conduct."

The original charge seems to be disorderly conduct. Whatever he shouted at the police while they were driving by, plus whatever he said prior to being tackled is probably what the disorderly conduct was about.

If you ask me, they probably would have arrested him for saying "Booo!"

Isn't falsifying evidence when you give false evidence? How is trying to preserve your own evidence by keeping it away from the police classified as falsifying evidence?

These police officers were way out of line. Sounds like they can dish out their own insults, but they can't take it. They should both receive mandatory anger management and be kicked off the police force for using excessive force. I mean, what do you do when the police act like criminals -- just play along and let them bully you? Actions like these make people afraid of the police, and that has terrible consequences for community policing.

I'm pretty sure Mr. Gannon is right: he does have a right to video tape anyone in public, including the police. AFAIK, the rule there is that if there is an expectation of privacy, you can't record people and use it as evidence. But on a public street, there is no expectation of privacy.

But I wonder if there is another reason for why he ditched the camera. Maybe it was because it would condemn him instead of the police. The article doesn't really tell both sides of the story, so that is possible. I guess we'll see after the contents of the video are made public.

I totally agree. Every time I drive anywhere in the western US, I see thousands of acres just sitting there doing nothing. When my family moved from Texas to the Salt Lake Valley in Utah, most of what we passed had received no human influence at all. There were several small settlements created by Native American tribes, but for the most part they were underdeveloped and falling apart. It wasn't until we reached areas that the Mormon pioneers settled that we saw luscious farmland, well-built towns, and signs of progress. The pioneers made it that way by creating irrigation canals, roads, schools, and factories. It was all desert before they got here.

Even there, though, much of the State of Utah is undeveloped arid steppe and doesn't support human farming or industry. I can't help but think that it is only that way because nobody has done anything about it yet. The land is just waiting. There is SO much unused space here and throughout the rest of the US. Even in areas lush with vegetation, like western Washington and Oregon states, most of the population exists around existing cities, leaving 80% of what you drive past undeveloped. We could easily squeeze in thousands more cities into those spaces. Why don't we? Because nobody has the vision or leadership required to do so. Everyone just wants to make one suburban development after another, which only tends to increase the traffic problems. Most of the cities of Utah, Idaho, Nevada, and Arizona were pretty much established because Brigham Young simply asked people to go build towns away from where everyone else had already settled. That took shared sacrifice and hard work. It took vision. Where is that vision today?

This world isn't even close to being fully utilized, and that includes the arid regions of the Middle East and Africa. Simple things can make such a difference. For example, just placing some fist-sized or bigger rocks in fields of dry, sterile, unproductive soil can prevent most of the rain water from draining off and can turn hard-baked clay into productive farmland. Adding charcoal from burned plants into the poor soil of the Amazon plains can turn it into rich farmland. We are coming up with more techniques every year for improving sustainable crop yields in the poorest of places. We can meet the challenges of the future if we put our minds to it.

We have barely scratched the surface of what the Earth can produce. Population controls are for the pessimists of the world.

In Soviet Russia, Comcast cable box turns you in.

(Then, don't plan on doing anything else.)

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

Thank you for your response. I totally agree with the sentiment that the US government response to disasters is perhaps not the finest. We're saying the same thing. Lots of people think that since the US government seems so powerful that we must have a good reason to feel secure and not worry about preparing for disaster. We US-ians do tend to think we are the top of everything. We often feel invincible. It is hubris, plain and simple. You are correct.

My main point is that you cannot depend on the government -- any government -- to fully protect you from harm. How long did it take the Japanese government to respond to people on the ground in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake/tsunami? I'll bet a million dollars that people died because the government couldn't get there fast enough.

Taking the Japanese disaster as an example, there are also lots of people that are still sleeping on the floors of school gymnasiums. They are still waiting for emergency shelter to be built for them, but they are lower on the priority list than the very young or the very old.

For lots of them, perhaps there was nothing that they could have done to prepare more, but perhaps there was something they could have done. I lived in Japan for two years, and I'll attest to the fact that the Japanese use a lot of their disposable income to buy new material possessions. Americans would be astonished at the waste. It seems like everyone must have the latest electronic gadgets. On daigomi no hi (big garbage day), you can walk down the street and see right and left that people have thrown away what appear to be brand new couches and other furniture, TV sets, stereos, refrigerators, and so forth. Then they just go buy new stuff. What if they had saved more of that disposable income and put it into the bank? If they had, would as many of them still be sleeping on the floor of a gymnasium? Perhaps not.

So perhaps all of us should look around -- or in the mirror -- and see what we can do to be more prepared. Our families and the families of others depend on it.

Sorry to disagree with all of the Verizon bashers, but I think this is just a case of bad training of call center staff.

I have been in the telecom industry for 20 years, and I've never heard of such a thing happening. As far as I know, all customers have a right by law to see the call detail they are being billed for. Customer service staff are trained on how to treat CPNI (Customer Proprietary Network Information) confidentially and what can and cannot be done with the information. There is an element of that training that usually involves how entities other than the customer (e.g., law enforcement agencies) can get access to the CPNI of a customer, and the only way to do that is with a subpoena (Sorry Jack Bauer!).

For most call center staff and direct supervisors, training always seems to be an issue. The customer service rep was probably just confused. People make mistakes. Do we have to sue to solve every problem? (Don't answer that . . .)

lnstead of clogging our courts with a stupid case like this, couldn't the customer just hang up and call back to get a different rep? Or how about this simple line, "May I please speak to your supervisor?" Or how about calling Verizon's executive offices or main number and ask for a customer ombudsman? Most big companies like Verizon have such a group. Here's another tactic: Call Verizon and select the option for canceling your account. You'll be routed to a retention group who will bend over backwards to save your account.

If none of those work, you can always go to the Web site of either the FCC, your state's Public Utility Commission, or the FTC and file a complaint. These complaints actually get worked by real people, and the problems usually get resolved pretty quickly. Any of those options would cost our taxpayers far less than the route this person took.

Even here in the US, you shouldn't count on the government to get there in the nick of time to save you. There are also times when it is too dangerous for first responders to do much, since it might place them in just as great danger. It pays to be cautious and well prepared for disasters and emergencies. How many of us have 72 hour kits available? How many of us have a one-year supply of food, or even a 2 week supply of food? What about firearms and ammo (no flamebait or trolling intended). How many people know how to start a camp fire and cook all of your meals over it?