“We’re basically hardening the watersheds and feeding them a high-salt diet. There is a direct connection between the number of driveways and parking lots we have and the quality of our water,” said Sujay Kaushal of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Frostburg, Md.
Yearly Archives: 2005
Cost of Government Secrecy Continues to Grow
www.opengovernment.org (PDF):
The government is withholding more information than ever from the public and expanding ways of shrouding data. Last year, federal agencies spent a record $148 creating and storing new secrets for each $1 spent declassifying old secrets, a coalition of watchdog groups reported Saturday. That’s a $28 jump from 2003 when $120 was spent to keep secrets for every $1 spent revealing them.
Slashdot discussion
Another Glorious Wisconsin Weekend
S & P 500 Following Gasoline Price Surges
Chart of the Day looks at how the stock market has responded to significant increases in gasoline prices over the past 25 years.
Yergin on the Coming Energy Crisis
Daniel Yergin, Author of the excellent: The Prize on the coming energy crisis:
Man’s technical ingenuity has collided with nature’s rage in the Gulf of Mexico, and the outcome has been an integrated energy disaster. The full scope will not be understood until the waters recede, the damage to platforms and refineries is assessed, and the extent of damage to underwater pipelines from undersea mudslides is determined. Yet what has happened is on a scale not seen before, and the impact of the price spikes and dislocations will roll across the entire economy. Even as we confront the human tragedy, the consequences will also force us to think more expansively about energy security, and to focus harder on a matter which other events have already emphasized: The need for new infrastructure and investment in our energy sector.
Kelo Politics
Mike Beebe, Arkansas’s attorney general and a Democratic gubernatorial candidate, said some complacent things about the state property rights after Kelo. Republican Asa Hutchinson pounced. The tussle suggests that takings will be an issue in the campaign, with each candidate trying to demonstrate his property rights bona fides. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reports:
Massachusetts Turns off Microsoft Office
The State of Massachusetts is moving its workers away from Microsoft Office toward open source tools.
Ray Kurzweil
Glenn Reynolds interviews Kurzweil, with some interesting charts on US science and technology education.
The Customer is Always Wrong: EFF’s Guide to DRM and Online Music
Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Many digital music services employ digital rights management (DRM) — also known as “copy protection” — that prevents you from doing things like using the portable player of your choice or creating remixes. Forget about breaking the DRM to make traditional uses like CD burning and so forth. Breaking the DRM or distributing the tools to break DRM may expose you to liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) even if you’re not making any illegal uses.
In other words, in this brave new world of “authorized music services,” law-abiding music fans often get less for their money than they did in the old world of CDs (or at least, the world before record companies started crippling CDs with DRM, too). Unfortunately, in an effort to attract customers, these music services try to obscure the restrictions they impose on you with clever marketing.
Before and After New Orleans Satellite Photos
Don Park has posted satellite photos before and after Hurricane Katrina, via GlobeXplorer.