Five companies have agreed to pay $1.16 million in fines to settle charges of sending spam without a warning that it contains sexually explicit material, U.S. regulators said Wednesday.

FTC cracks down on porn spam

Decius wrote:

Rattle wrote:
Wikipedia has some of the best resources on the the history of the court.

How could you miss the article on the new nominee?

Without knowing anything else about the guy, one thing that I don't like is how young he is -- at only 50, we'll probably be stuck with him for a long time for better or worse.

RE: John Roberts Jr.

IT was the sort of confession that a decade ago might have been scribbled in a teenager's diary, then quietly tucked away in a drawer: "Somewhat recently," wrote a boy who identified himself only as Zach, 16, from Tennessee, on his personal Web page, "I told my parents I was gay." He noted, "This didn't go over very well," and "They tell me that there is something psychologically wrong with me, and they 'raised me wrong.' "

But what grabbed the attention of Zach's friends and subsequently of both gay activists and fundamentalist Christians around the world who came across the entry, made on May 29, was not the intimacy of the confession. Teenagers have been outing themselves online for years, and many of Zach's friends already knew he was gay. It was another sentence in the Web log: "Today, my mother, father and I had a very long 'talk' in my room, where they let me know I am to apply for a fundamentalist Christian program for gays."

Finally, in 2000, the APA formally rejected this nonsense.

Gay Teenager Stirs a Storm - New York Times

A pear is just a pear, except when it is also a laser-coded information delivery system with advanced security clearance.

And that is what pears - not to mention organic apples, waxy cucumbers and delicate peaches - are becoming in some supermarkets around the country. A new technology being used by produce distributors employs lasers to tattoo fruits and vegetables with their names, identifying numbers, countries of origin and other information that helps speed distribution. The marks are burned onto the outer layer of the skin and are visible to discerning consumers and befuddled cashiers alike.

Tattooed Fruit Is on Way

Both Republicans and Democrats said that a nomination announcement in the next few days could push the news of Karl Rove and a federal investigation into who leaked the name of a C.I.A. officer off the front pages, a development that would be highly welcome at the White House. Mr. Rove, Mr. Bush's senior adviser, has been named by two reporters as a source of the leak, a potential crime.

Bush to Announce His Nominee for Supreme Court Tonight

The corner of Sarah and Olive looks almost nothing as it did 25 years ago when a 19-year-old drug dealer named Quintin Moss was gunned down from a slow-moving car. The boarded-up houses have been replaced by a new townhouse development marked by sleek stone gates; the drug dealers and prostitutes are gone.

And the man convicted of the killing, Larry Griffin, was executed 10 years ago.

Yet the city's top prosecutor has decided to re-investigate the murder as if it just happened, out of new concerns that the wrong man may have been put to death for the crime.

Executed Man May Be Cleared in New Inquiry

Decius wrote:

bucy wrote:
If this really works, can we generate power from it or is it
only useful as a neutron source?

There is an IEEE article links from my second meme on this that covers that topic. If the experiment can be reproduced it will need to be scaled, alot... Right now its not efficient. An efficient version is not going to be something that would run on a tabletop. This is still a big industry scale steam turbine. The advantage is that its easy to control, its waste products degrade quickly, and its fuel is abundant.

I wonder if steam turbines are really the most efficient way of converting reactions like this into usable electric power. It seems like such a 19th century approach...

There are a number of other possibilities:

Stirling engines -- great on paper but its been hard so far to build practical ones.

magnetohydrodynamic generators

Certain fusion reactions can apparently generate electricity more-or-less directly: there are some big electrodes in the reactor and you can pull electricity straight out. See the
Wikipedia article on fusion power.

RE: Table Top Nuclear Fisson

I'm still skeptical but the upshot of this is that their experiment
is simple and cheap -- I suspect many physicists can set it up
with stuff lying around the lab.

If this really works, can we generate power from it or is it
only useful as a neutron source?

RE: Table Top Nuclear Fisson

The best way for doubters to control a questionable new technology is to embrace it, lest it remain wholly in the hands of enthusiasts who think there is nothing questionable about it.

I think this is all stuff I've heard before, mostly in Wired, but
worthwhile nonetheless.

Environmental Heresies

According to a White House staffer, a memo representing official Bush administration space policy calls for no more than 15 space shuttle flights before the fleet is retired in 2010.

For the amount of money they've spent trying to get Shuttle flying again, how much closer could we be to a new launch system?

White House Memo Calls For Slashing Remaining Space Shuttle Flights