idwiyo

idwiyo's Journal

December 20, 2013

SOP exceptions for GD.

Can you please add SOP exception for pope?

As I understand from your answer to another poster that pope is a "big news" for now, editing SOP will remove all ambiguity. Not everyone reads this this forum, so exception in SOP might be a good idea as something more permanent until it expires.

December 10, 2013

Jon Stewart on the benefits of NSA surveillance: If you like your spy, you can keep your spy

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/10/jon-stewart-on-the-benefits-of-nsa-surveillance-if-you-like-your-spy-you-can-keep-your-spy/

Even as the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance activities continue to come to light, Jon Stewart argued on Monday, they weren’t totally without at least one merit.

“On the bright side, under this plan, if you like your NSA spy, you get to keep your NSA spy,” Stewart said to open The Daily Show, pointing out that just about every aspect of the agency’s monitoring that had been denied by President Barack Obama turned out to be happening anyway, despite his insistence that it was being carried out in a manner consistent with the “rule of law.”

“It turns out it wasn’t so much ‘rule of law-consistent’ as ‘rule of law-adjacent,” Stewart explained. “Rules are meant to be broken. I’m sorry, no, that’s Precious Moments figurines. Those are meant to be broken. Rules are meant to be followed.”
...

Keeping his attention on the NSA’s online surveillance, Stewart turned to Aasif Mandvi — or, “Greychalk” the “proud dwarf paladin,” as he insisted on being named — to get his take on the news that the NSA had also taken to spying on players in the World of Warcraft and Second Life realms.

...

November 14, 2013

Question submitted by idwiyo

The text of this question will be publicly available after it has been reviewed and answered by a DU Administrator. Please be aware that sometimes messages are not answered immediately. Thank you for your patience. --The DU Administrators

November 12, 2013

"Getting drunk without the hangover or health risks..."

Sounds like a great idea to me. Never mind it's non-addictive, wonder how many lives can be saved, crimes not committed, adults and children lives not ruined by living with an alchoholic.

Getting drunk without the hangover or health risks – scientist seeks investment for ‘alcohol substitute’ drug

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/getting-drunk-without-the-hangover-or-health-risks--scientist-seeks-investment-for-alcohol-substitute-drug-8931946.html

The “serious revolution in health” is being pioneered by the former Government drugs advisor Professor David Nutt, and has been described as doing for alcohol what the e-cigarette has done for tobacco use.

It targets neurotransmitters in the brain directly, giving the taker feelings of pleasure and disinhibition that are in some cases “indistinguishable” from the effects of drinking. Yet because it acts directly, it can also be immediately blocked by taking an antidote – with “drinkers” potentially able to then drive or return to work straight away.

Prof Nutt is one of the country’s leading neuropsychopharmacologists, but he and his team at Imperial College London have hit a stumbling block – perhaps unsurprisingly, no one in the drinks industry is willing to fund the drug’s development.
...
One of the biggest benefits to Prof Nutt’s alcohol substitute would be to remove addiction as a drinking problem. The scientist said 10 per cent of drinkers become addicted, and that addicts account for most of the one and a half million people killed by alcohol every year.
...

Edited to add: Wiki page for David Nutt: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt

June 2, 2013

Comfort food: canned salmon soup

This is one of my favourite soups, its very easy and very fast to cook.

1 cup of potatoes, peeled and chopped into small cubes
1/3 cup of grated carrots
1 213g (6 oz) can of canned salmon
2 tablespoons of fresh dill weed
2 tablespoons flat leaf parsley
1 large bay leaf
salt - to taste
black pepper - to taste

Place potatoes, carrots, bay leaf, salt into the cook-pot, add enough water to cover potatoes with about 1.5 inches of liquid, add all the liquid from the canned salmon. Bring to boil, reduce heat and simmer until potatoes are ready (10-15 min). I prefer mine to be very soft.

Remove thick parts of the stalks from dill weed and parsley, chop fine and set aside. Chop and set aside remaining dill weed and parsley leaf.

When potatoes are cooked add salmon, chopped parsley and dill weed stalks, more salt if needed, add hot water if soup is too thick. I prefer mine fairly thick. Bring to boil, reduce heat and let it simmer for 5 min.

Remove from heat, add chopped dill weed and parsley, let it stand for a couple of minutes before serving. Serve with crusty bread or Jacob's Cream Crackers (Water Biscuits). Enjoy!

Edit: I changed the cooking time for potatoes to 10-15 min. Please check after 10 min if potatoes are ready. Some of the heritage potatoes I use take longer to cook.

June 2, 2013

Terror watch lists: Can you keep tabs on every suspect?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22718000

But is it practical - or even possible - to keep close tabs on every person who comes to the attention of the security services?

No, according to Dame Stella Rimington, former head of the of MI5. To see that, she says, you just have to look at the numbers.

...

To keep a constant watch on just one of those people, you would need a team of at least six surveillance operatives, Dame Stella says. But of course they couldn't work 24 hours a day, so you would need three teams of six.

...

And if 2,000 people were to be followed like that, we'd be talking about 50,000 full-time spies doing nothing but following suspected terrorists. That's more than 10 times the number of people employed by MI5. The numbers don't add up.

March 31, 2013

WikiLeacks

Hi Admins!

As you are aware of course I am British, so please forgive me if this is a stupid question but is it legally allowed to post a link to anything that is hosted and/or was released by WikiLeacks on DU?

Would be OK if you were UK website but have no idea where US stands on this issue.

March 8, 2013

Hugo Chávez kept his promise to the people of Venezuela

Hugo Chávez kept his promise to the people of Venezuela

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/05/hugo-chavez-people-venezuelan-president

The facts speak for themselves: the percentage of households in poverty fell from 55% in 1995 to 26.4% in 2009. When Chávez was sworn into office unemployment was 15%, in June 2009 it was 7.8%. Compare that to current unemployment figures in Europe. In that period Chávez won 56% of the vote in 1998, 60% in 2000, survived a coup d'état in 2002, got over 7m votes in 2006 and secured 54.4% of the vote last October. He was a rare thing, almost incomprehensible to those in the US and Europe who continue to see the world through the Manichean prism of the cold war: an avowed Marxist who was also an avowed democrat. To those who think the expression of the masses should have limited or no place in the serious business of politics all the talking and goings on in Chávez's meetings were anathema, proof that he was both fake and a populist. But to the people who tuned in and participated en masse, it was politics and true democracy not only for the sophisticated, the propertied or the lettered.

For all the attention paid to the relation between Chávez and Castro, the lesser known fact is that Chávez's political education owes more to another Marxist president who was also an avowed democrat: Chile's Salvador Allende. "Like Allende, we're pacifists and democrats," he once said. "Unlike Allende, we're armed."

March 8, 2013

Thank you, Bradley Manning! I am proud to be British because of you.

This is a shorter online version of the article I read in Guardian yesterday. If someone has a link to full version, can you post it please?

I wish it was not true. I wish I didn't read it. I can not believe its Bradley Manning who is facing years in prison yet torturers are walking free because president Obama has their backs. I don't understand and I don't ever want to understand how could ANYONE justify what was done by UK and US governments.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/mar/06/pentagon-iraqi-torture-centres-link

Revealed: Pentagon's link to Iraqi torture centres
Exclusive: General David Petraeus and 'dirty wars' veteran behind commando units implicated in detainee abuse

The Guardian/BBC Arabic investigation was sparked by the release of classified US military logs on WikiLeaks that detailed hundreds of incidents where US soldiers came across tortured detainees in a network of detention centres run by the police commandos across Iraq. Private Bradley Manning, 25, is facing a prison sentence of up to 20 years after he pleaded guilty to leaking the documents.

The pattern in Iraq provides an eerie parallel to the well-documented human rights abuses committed by US-advised and funded paramilitary squads in Central America in the 1980s. Steele was head of a US team of special military advisers that trained units of El Salvador's security forces in counterinsurgency. Petraeus visited El Salvador in 1986 while Steele was there and became a major advocate of counterinsurgency methods.

January 12, 2013

Biggest Structure in Universe: Large Quasar Group Is 4 Billion Light Years Across

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130111092539.htm

...
The team, led by Dr Roger Clowes from UCLan's Jeremiah Horrocks Institute, has identified the LQG which is so significant in size it also challenges the Cosmological Principle: the assumption that the universe, when viewed at a sufficiently large scale, looks the same no matter where you are observing it from.
...
To give some sense of scale, our galaxy, the Milky Way, is separated from its nearest neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy, by about 0.75 Megaparsecs (Mpc) or 2.5 million light-years.

Whole clusters of galaxies can be 2-3 Mpc across but LQGs can be 200 Mpc or more across. Based on the Cosmological Principle and the modern theory of cosmology, calculations suggest that astrophysicists should not be able to find a structure larger than 370 Mpc.

Dr Clowes' newly discovered LQG however has a typical dimension of 500 Mpc. But because it is elongated, its longest dimension is 1200 Mpc (or 4 billion light years) -- some 1600 times larger than the distance from the Milky Way to Andromeda.
...

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