Enviro stuff

Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air (withouthotair.com)

Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air

Whistling outlawed in Scotland

But only if you make hand gestures while you do it.

Flirty texting could land Scots in jail for 10 years | The Register

The offence will be committed if someone sends an unsolicited text message to someone else which a court finds was designed to give the sender sexual gratification or to humiliate, distress or alarm the receiver.

Causing a person to see or hear an indecent communication is also an offence. It can be committed by reading “a passage in a book or magazine” or by communicating the sounds of actual or simulated sexual activity or by communicating in sign language.

It will be up to prosecutors and courts to decide which communications are serious enough to warrant the heavy jail terms,

I have mixed feeling about this. On the one hand harassment for sexual purposes is just as criminal as harassment for any other purpose. But in a country where judges can go easy on pedophiles who only boff particularly seductive six-year-olds, I don’t feel all that good about the discretion that’s going to be exercised.

Yep, repairing your infrastructure is a spree

BBC NEWS | Africa | Nigeria launches $10bn oil spree

But the real push to spend such a large chunk of money from the nation’s oil coffers came not from the public, but from state governors.

Haggling

Nigeria’s power grid has all but totally collapsed.

Investment and job creation are almost impossible without a reliable electricity supply. The government promised to repair it, and said it needs to spend some of the nation’s savings to do so.

But state governors refused to allow funds to be withdrawn without getting a share.

“It was necessary to carry the state governments along,” a Ministry of Finance spokesman said.

“They have to plug holes in their budgets or deliver programmes they have promised their people.”

But civil society activists say there might be a more sinister outcome - the money might be frittered away or stolen.

I feel sad about this story, because there’s such a strong undercurrent of opinion that Nigeria shouldn’t have a functioning electrical grid, because they broke the one they had, or something. Electricity is, as the article notes, an essential ingredient for economic development. And the country has $18 billion in oil revenues socked away, of which it plans to spend $5 billion for the power grid. But oh, no, this “spree” could result in inflation (even though an enormous chunk of the money will be going to foreign contractors).

And yeah, the other $5 billion for provincial governments: maybe ugh, maybe not. Without a little more detail we have no idea whether the activists are blowing smoke. But the overall impression I get is that the best thing according the the BBC would be for the $18 billion to keep sitting in banks in rich countries, drawing minimal interest, while Nigerians remain desperately poor and without the capital to help themselves.

Worse than Hell

The tragic story of 1st Sgt. Jeff McKinney - Army News, opinions, editorials, news from Iraq, photos, reports - Army Times

Studies by the Army, the Defense Department, Rand Corp. and others cite the same reasons why troops with mental health issues don’t seek help: fear of being seen as “weak,” inadequate access to care, concern that asking for help can hurt a career, and guilt about letting battle buddies go out on patrol without them.

Among the troubling factors is that, like McKinney, many of those who choose suicide aren’t young first-tour junior troops. Forty-seven percent of soldiers who have killed themselves in theater are older than 30. And half were in paygrades E-5 or above. Experts are concerned that it’s harder to spot signs of potential suicide in such war-hardened veterans.

McKinney’s family believes that if his chain of command had paid closer attention to the symptoms, his death might have been avoided. And they hope that by talking about it now, months after his death, they might help prevent other suicides.

This isn’t people who don’t know what war is about. It’s people who do. Read the whole damn thing. The whole story reeks of people who just didn’t want to see that there was any kind of problem, didn’t even bother to think that going without sleep for days on end is really a bad idea.

Dinowowza

Dinosaur Fossils Discovered in Utah - NYTimes.com

An excavation revealed at least four sauropods, which are long-necked, long-tailed plant-eating dinosaurs, and two carnivorous ones, according to the bureau. It may have also uncovered an herbivorous stegosaurus.

Animal burrows and petrified tree trunks 6 feet in diameter were found nearby. The site doesn’t contain any new species but offers scientists the chance to learn more about the ecology of that time, said Scott Foss, a BLM paleontologist.

This sounds incredibly cool, and makes me wish (as I have about once every five years since I was a kid) that I could be a palaeontologist.

I also really wonder what brought all those creatures together, or if the site was just a particularly fortunate burial ground for a few hundred or few thousand years. Definitely something to follow…

A little good news for transit

Real-estate projects boom near light rail

Transit officials estimate that since 2004, developers have spent close to $6 billion on public and private projects on and around the future light-rail line

Dystopia link farmlet

DIY Wiretapping: The Ultimate Guide (and How to Fight Back) - IT Security

Did you think wiretapping was just for the FBI and mobsters? It’s actually so easy that we can show you how to install and manage different wiretapping systems yourself.

* Tap in using your own phone: Listen to other people’s calls through your own basic telephone by hooking up your phone to a part of the original line that runs outside the house of your target. By cutting one of the plugs so that the red and green wires are exposed, you can figure out which part to plug into your phone and complete the connection.

PC World - Privacy Crusader Sues Virginia

Betty “BJ” Ostergren, a Virginia-based privacy advocate who has been fighting to stop county and state government offices from posting public records containing Social Security numbers and other personal records on their sites. As part of her campaign to publicize the issue, Ostergren has routinely downloaded documents containing Social Security numbers from county Web sites and reposted them on her own site .

Ostergren and the ACLU had previously said that a recent bill amending Virginia’s Personal Information Act would do nothing to prevent county governments in the state from posting documents without first redacting Social Security numbers and other sensitive days. Rather, she claimed , the measure seems to have been designed specifically to curtail her campaign to publicize and end that practice

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | 50 office-speak phrases you love to hate

‘You can’t have your cake and eat it, so you have to step up to the plate and face the music.’ It was in that moment I knew I had to resign before somebody got badly hurt by a pencil.”

Quoted without comment

Phorm failed to mention ‘illegal’ trials at Home Office meeting in 2007 | The Register

The Home Office held a private meeting with Phorm in August last year, but BT’s interception and profiling partner did not disclose that it had completed an allegedly illegal trial of its technology on tens of thousands of unwitting broadband subscribers just weeks earlier.

A new definition for chutzpah?

newsobserver.com | U.S. company: crash lawsuit governed by Islamic law

The crash of Blackwater Flight 61 occurred in the rugged mountains of central Afghanistan in 2004, killing three soldiers and the three-man crew.

The widows of the soldiers sued Presidential Airways, Blackwater’s sister company, which was under contract with the U.S. military to fly cargo and personnel around Afghanistan.

Presidential Airways argued that the lawsuit must be dismissed; legal doctrine holds that soldiers cannot sue the government, and the company was acting as an agent of the government.

Last year, a series of federal judges dismissed that argument.

In April, Presidential asked a federal judge in Florida to dismiss the lawsuit because the case is controlled by Afghanistan’s Islamic law. If the judge agrees that Afghan law applies, the lawsuit would be dismissed. The company also plans to ask a judge to dismiss the lawsuit on the constitutional grounds that a court should not interfere in military decision-making.

The National Transportation Safety Board has blamed the crash on Presidential for its “failure to require its flight crews to file and fly a defined route,” and for not providing oversight to make sure its crews followed company policies and Pentagon and FAA safety regulations.

Apparently they’re trying to throw everything at the wall and see if any of it with stick, and ignoring the fact that pretty much all of their rationales for why the suit should be thrown out contradict each other. (And anyway, just how do you determine the “law” of a country where much of the territory is governed by “I don’t like you, I shoot you if I can get away with it”?)

But what really struck me is that this pleading to be judged under Sharia law, Erik Prince has perhaps become the first honest-to-goodness Islamofascist to be spotted outside the confines of neocon ravings.

Way too late, but still lovely.

Universal Adapter: Westinghouse Throws Its Support Behind Universal Adapter Concept

Green Plug’s technology allows every electronic device to communicate its own energy requirements to one adapter, allowing for several goods to use the same power box. But in order for the universal adapter to work, companies have to embed Green Plug’s firmware into their electronics.

Westinghouse, the first company to sign on with Green Plug, said the adapter would not only help it cut costs (it wouldn’t have to sell power adapters with each product if the consumer already has a universal one at home), the environmental savings are huge as well.