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companies that are suffering from Microsoft lock-in

The City of Munich is going thru this. The first big hurdle (which they have cleared) was replacing M$Office macros and templates. http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/09/5284.ars
(The next big hurdle is getting SAP's stuff to behave with a non-M$ OS or getting a replacement for the closed, proprietary stuff.)
The city's goal is to gain control of the source code for EVERYTHING they use.
They have their own spin of Debian. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux
(Progress report there on the city's conversion to all-FOSS; they are taking a very cautious, conservative approach WRT the timetable.)

The region of Extremadura in Spain was far more bold. They first converted over to FOSS apps under the payware OS--then in a single weekend switched the whole public sector over to a FOSS OS.
http://www.osnews.com/story/12611
Their spin of Debian is called LinEx. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GnuLinEx

...and, of course, there's the classic example from the previous century of a corp getting its tit caught in the wringer with payware licenses and a BSA raid and deciding to get off that junk post haste.
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-6488047_ITM
http://news.cnet.com/2008-1082_3-5065859.html

gewg_ (CAPTCHA: ragweed; How'd they know?)

...and why is this modded "Interesting"? I would say flame-bait. Especially since the laws created and signed by the Legislative and Executive are being abused by the Judicial not the other way around... Consider me baited: I live in MN which is so Democratic we had to invent our own Democratic party (the DFL) and are the only state that voted for Mondale.

What's happening here? time, and time, and time again MN's courts uphold our constitutionally protected rights.

I might mention that it is a completely conservative state that is currently re-writing history to be more pro-american. Is that the Hope and Change you were looking for?

You weren't affected by the 42 day timer bug? Or the 20/32 bit page counter pointer bug that wasn't fixed until SP1?

Not that I know of, and after some googling around I can't even find anything resembling the bugs you're talking about. Can you link me to a KB article ?

Wish I could, the best I could find was a snippet from a PCWorld article about this. Then again, nothing like the web existed back in those days....

The "fragmentation problem" in NTFS is grossly overstated for all but corner cases. ...could never detect any meaningful difference in performance between drives purportedly having 50% or more fragmentation, and drives having less than 10% fragmentation.

You and I could not be more diametrically opposed on these topics. First off, OS/2 2.1 onward was never unstable for me and ran on three different architecture/CPUs that I used, flawlessly and reliably, unless I pushed it by running the win32 subsystem.

Second, only with massive tweaking and running only specific software could I ever get a month out of NT 4.0. If I deviated, it would fail faster. Before SP1, you were guaranteed to BSOD in 42 days or whenever your page counter overflowed 20 bits and tried to reference a page above the 20 bits or in the overflow range. The memory there was corrupted.

BTW, MS's recommendation was weekly reboots, circa 97/98.

Where is this recommendation ?

Well, a quick google search indicates that there is no real documentation left on the web before SP4 regarding NT 4.0 if you're looking for specifics such as bug fixes etc. I'm pretty sure I still have an NT 4.0 SP1 disk somewhere around here, but it'll be at the bottom of a box if it hasn't been thrown out already. Otherwise I'd link it for you. NT 4.0 was a massive pile of crap when it came out. SP1 fixed a ton of major issues. SP2 added features and broke everything again. SP3 fixed the breakage. It was the source of the "only apply and run odd service packs" mantra that was around for years. Since there's no easily or even not so easily found data for anything prior to SP6, feel free to either accept these statements or not. It really doesn't matter for something that is more than 10 years in the past. However, a brief brainstorm shows that the memory and stability problems were not rare.

Server 2008R2 is NT 6.1. Server 2003 R2 was a relatively minor update, most of its "improvements" basically just a collection of userspace tools.

Really? So there would be no core changes? Perhaps an almost usable Server Core installation, for starters? And I suppose IIS 7.5 and .NET 3.51 are also minor changes? And we won't get into the innards where all the token manipulation routines have been greatly restricted. I don't recall when they created the 4 base security tokens, maybe they showed up in 2008. They certainly took effect in 2008 R2.

Here http://www.petergreenberg.com/2009/02/16/ice-autopilot-examined-as-possible-causes-of-buffalo-plane-crash/

And here http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-15601745/tu-154-crash-blamed.html

and that was just a quick search...

Worry about non-problems?

You just broke the needle off of my bullshit meter. There is so much unarguable evidence of SERIOUS problems with illegal immigration that I can't believe that ignoramus like you still exist.

How would like your house shot up by those "non-problem" illegal immigrants? Perhaps 30 rounds or so from an AK47 that are directed at YOUR family would change your mind?

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-17332392_ITM

There's thousands of stories just like those. I personally know people who are leaving the border areas because they can no longer deal with the crime and violence that these "non-problem" Hispanic immigrants bring with them. What planet do you live on that you don't know anything about this?

My family immigrated to the United States from Germany following WWII. My father was the first in his family born in the United States. Growing up around his family I spoke German before I spoke English. In all I'm at least somewhat familiar with and sympathetic to the plight of immigrants and those wanting to come here.

This wave of illegal immigrants from south of the border is nothing like the legal immigration from Europe and Asia. They bring with them violence, crime, and diseases that were eradicated from our country decades ago.

I have no problem with legal immigration from any area of the world but ILLEGAL immigration is a real problem and head in the sand people like you aren't helping.

P.S. If you really want to hear a rant let me put you in touch with some friends of mine that are Russian immigrants from the 80s. They are unbelievably pissed off about the situation. They got here with no English language and no money and have worked their assess of for more than two decades to get the things that are almost handed to the Hispanics. You can argue with them if you'd like but they're going to own your seemingly ignorant ass.

Wrong. They want trillions to flow into producing today's tech, en-masse, right now. End of story.

Only certain kinds of tech like wind farms and solar panels and in some cases, Ethanol...

NF3 is only just now becoming recognized as a greenhouse gas for a reason -

Don't forget chemicals used in the manufacture of these cells. My point was that no energy source is perfect and the longer we wait to replace fossil fuel plants the harder it will be to mitigate AGW. We need to use every clean tech we have and that includes nuclear power.

Fusion itself can breed tritium.

D+D => He3+n and D+T=>He4+n are neutron sources that an be used to breed Tritium from Li6 although the fuel will probably have to run a bit lean on Tritium to make up for neutron losses. This makes Q=inf slightly more difficult to acheive. However, the irradiation of various reactor components by neutrons could pose a problem eventually. It's an active part of the research.

Two very closely related nonsense claims. When will people stop pushing this FUD? Let's start with wind. There was ONE -- read it, ONE -- wind farm, built early on, that had bird kill problems:

Do you know why I mentioned it? It was the subject of a lawsuit brought on by C.B.D.

Right -- fair and balanced, as if bogus claims are on equal footing as valid ones. "Some say" wind kills birds. "Some say" coal causes health problems. Both have problems -- there's your equivalence, right?

They're stupid claims and so is the notion that we should abandon nuclear power as an option. That is the point.

Do you even comprehend how much radioactive material several to dozens of billions of curies per reactor is? Nuclear has great potential but also great risk.

What is the risk is by pumping out 30 billion tons of CO2 every year? What is the risk of building even more coal plants instead of using every single low carbon tech we have? Right now we can reduce emissions. In the long term we'll probably see more solar and fusion energy become commonplace, right now nuclear is a bridge to reduce emissions now while we get the others up and running. Do you know what is sick about all of this? France actually gets it. They didn't cower in fear over the technology and now they have one of the lowest CO2/capita of any industrialized nation. If the US merely swapped out Coal for Nuclear we wouldn't be so afraid of Kyoto's targets for CO2 reduction. Hell we'd pretty much be there now if we hadn't essentially stopped building new reactors.

I think there's good and bad. I agree with you that it's pointed out some of my bad habits. But I think my spelling has actually gotten worse in a lot of ways just due to automation laziness. After all, "automation complacency" has been a well understood effect in the aviation world for some time. But I still don't know if it's the fact that it's gotten worse or that the spell checker is just pointing out the awful truth. I do know that I'm always a lot more paranoid on my spelling when spell checking is absent.

Charter's latest assault 'committed' upon our fellow citizens is to require zipcodes appended to email IDs!

No wonder why Paul Allen sold stocks in Charter.

Falcon

From: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-19229004_ITM

Val Noorda Kreidel, Ray Noorda's only daughter, shot herself to death at her home in Huntington Beach, California at 8am last Thursday morning, March 17, according to Orange County supervising deputy coroner Cullen Ellingburgh.

She shot herself in the head with a handgun, Ellingburgh said. He ruled out murder.
Ms. Kreidel committed suicide less than a week after the fracas over the management of the Canopy Group, her father's venture capital operation, was settled.

She was 49 and leaves a husband, four daughters and a son in addition to her parents and brothers.

The settlement transferred Canopy's 32% position in the infamous SCO Group and an undisclosed amount of money to former Canopy CEO Ralph Yarro. The Yahoo message board related to SCO's stock wasn't content with the initial report that Ms. Kriedel died of an apparent heart attack and placed calls to the coroner that tore away the protective euphemism.

Given Ms. Kriedel's conservative Mormon roots, one can understand why the family might be giving it out that she died of natural causes.

An interesting response from an AC, copied here so more folks will see it:
=========
Yep, I know about shareholder value and agency theory, and yes it is indeed ridiculous. Many companies, particularly the newer ones like Google, already consider it obsolete, and more will as time goes, of course.
          http://freekvermeulen.blogspot.com/2008/07/shareholder-value-orientation-now-where.html
          http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-28502078_ITM

This one is my favorite article about this, particularly see the linked articles:
http://thenextwavefutures.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/the-end-of-shareholder-value/
======

Yep, I know about shareholder value and agency theory, and yes it is indeed ridiculous. Many companies, particularly the newer ones like Google, already consider it obsolete, and more will as time goes, of course.
http://freekvermeulen.blogspot.com/2008/07/shareholder-value-orientation-now-where.html
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-28502078_ITM
This one is my favorite article about this, particularly see the linked articles:
http://thenextwavefutures.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/the-end-of-shareholder-value/

The thing is, modern economic research has shown we are not primarily self interested. People are more motivated by notions of fairness and reciprocity than by self interest. Well, most people. In the right circumstances.

The key phrase being "Most people. In the right circumstances." Most people in the right circumstances can also be brutal prison guards and torture people. The Stanford Prison Experiment had to be ended after 6 days even though it was scheduled to last 2 weeks. People have asked how Germans allowed the NAZIs to get away with the Holocaust. A teacher in 1967 in a California high school was asked this so he set up an experiment, which got out of control, the The Third Wave. A fictionalized account was written as the book and movie "The Wave". Finally the German remake, "Die Welle" was released in 2008. Read some of the results Google returns.

Remember, Adam Smith also said, "Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all. " and "It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion. "

Adam Smith also believed in small government. He argued for a limited government, the role being to "provide national defense, the administration of justice, and public goods. In other words, it should protect citizens from external and internal aggression and supply goods that the free market may not provide."

Falcon

Business buys whatever it wants, including firearms, governments, and public opinion.

Businesses buying firearms? Sure but how many businesses do you see brandishing firearms against people? Government? It only matters if businesses buy government when said government is big and powerful. A small and weak government doesn't have much to offer businesses. Businesses buying public opinion? Sure, businesses can buy some people's opinion, those who can't think for themselves or who are greedy. However people have to power to force businesses to their will. Do you really think apartheid would have ended in South Africa without strong public opinion? Quite simply stockholders big and small forced the corporations they owned shares in to either actively oppose apartheid or to pull out of South Africa, to disinvest.

Even major US corporations are changing, or seeming to. Look at the top 10 companies in the US at least trying to greenwash themselves. One of those is GE with it's $90 million "Ecomagination" advertising campaign. Now I'm not saying all of them are actually trying to clean up, I bet many are only trying to hoodwink the public (where do you think Greenwash comes from?), but with shareholders pushing some corporations are trying to do good.

However what that Huffington Post article does not say is that in the US the government is by far the biggest polluter. Governments routinely exempt themselves from laws they pass. Weak governments don't have that ability.

Falcon

Which is precisely why corporate CEOs - and sundry other people at the top of various food chains - are likely to be the least ethical people you're going to meet. Ethically ambiguous people are thus more capable of making decisions that maximize profit, in true the-end-justifies-the-means fashion.

Yep, I know. Part of what led to this is the "shareholder value" ideology that originated in the 1970s and became common in the 1980s. Here is some links: http://thenextwavefutures.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/the-end-of-shareholder-value/ http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2005/oct/02/theobserver.observerbusiness4 http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dobbin/cv/articles/2005_PPST_Fligstein.pdf http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-28502078_ITM http://www.globalchange.com/shareholdervalue.htm It is off-topic though.

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-11275848_ITM

Gee, thanks, I'll definately take that advice next time.

In 1987, the drug's creators had originally obtained a "methods" patent on using the combination of two generic vasodilators (hydralazine and isosorbide dinitrate) that seemed to have a pronounced beneficial effect in treating heart failure.

The methods patent, which expires in 2007, was not race-specific.

Soon thereafter the patent owners applied for a new race-specific methods patent to use the generic combination to treat heart failure in African-American patients.

If my knowledge of pharmecetical patents is so out of whack as to be foolish, that doesn't say a lot for the lawyers, judges, and patent inspectors involved in this case.

In the USA the entire building could be seized and the owner would have to reclaim it.

http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/csa/853.htm#n

Until recently he would also have to prove in court that he knew nothing about what it was being used for. It's kinda hard to prove a negative so there were plenty of cases of (eg.) people renting out big boats only to have the government seize them because the renter used them to transport drugs.

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-632700_ITM

War on drugs, yay!

In Texas the constant truck traffic is tearing up small roads in the western part of the state where the turbines are being rapidly erected.

The solution is a weight-mile tax, so that truckers pay the full cost of the damage they do to the roads. But good luck getting it enacted, because the national trucking industry hates the weight-mile tax system.

"The Computer & Communications Industry Association has filed a so-called Tunney Act challenge to the Department of Justice's controversial settlement with Microsoft in 2001", Sep 2003

"The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) is criticizing last month's decision by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to exclusively use Microsoft Corp. software, arguing that recent computer virus and worm attacks against Microsoft products are evidence that such a decision is a poor choice", Aug 2003

I guess this was before Daniel Geer got fired ..

Membership as of 2003: Yahoo, Oracle, Sun, Nortel, AOL, not.Microsoft

Myriad claims their patents cover ALL tests related to the genes. Go to http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-15489528_ITM. Scroll down to the Myriad case study, and read about the cease-and-desist letters Myriad sent to Canadian provinces in 2001:

"The cease-and-desist orders sent by Myriad to the provincial health care authorities stated that the provincial screening tests infringed Myriad's patents by using the patented genes. The fact that the test used by the provinces was different from the one claimed by Myriad in its patents was not relevant because ultimately any screening test required use of the patented genes."

Really? New research is making it apparent that you may not need to make a sonic boom when going supersonic. Any bets the government has this more advanced than some random academic research?

What's absolutely lovely about the internet? You have a research library available at your desk.

Here's at least one article about how much Bush sucks and is making everything worse not even 74 days into his first term: Salon, 2001-03-16

How about Bush declaring war on the environment? CNN, 2001-03-23

And Bush wants to destroy education: Newsweek, 2001-02-05

Oh, wait, that's right. When you criticize a Dem president, you gotta give them a change to prove themselves. When it's a Repub, sick the dogs on 'im.

This is more of a semantic issue, but I don't think that many biologists would claim that dogs are exempt from basic products of sexual reproduction such as hybrid vigor.

The Backcross Project link that you provided in one of your previous posts shows how the principle of hybrid vigor was applied by Robert Schaible to improve the health of his Dalmatians. If hybrid vigor did not exist in dogs (i.e. a diverse pedigree conferred no advantage), then it would be perfectly acceptable to sire many puppies with the same stud. Hybrid vigor is merely the converse of inbreeding depression. True, heterosis is no panacea. Biologist have observed hybrid depression as well as more neutral products of heterozygosity and outbreeding. The fact that outbreeding is not a surefire way to insure genetic health shouldn't lead us to conclude that hybrid vigor is non-existant (or non-existant in dogs).

The person who wrote the last link in your post has some strange ideas about genetics.

e.g. Puppies cannot have genes that the parents DON'T have. It isn't possible.

Hasn't Jennie Chen heard of mutation?

Another error:

What happens when you mix 2 bad sets of genes? You get puppies with bad genes! Duh! 2 unhealthy parents don't make 1 healthy puppy, unless it was a miracle.

Someone needs to tell Jennie Chen about epistasis, regression towards the mean, and heterozygosity.

see page 196 of "Straight and Level: practical airplan economics". Here is the google book search link. though that may not be a stable link. You can also look here or here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/25/opinion/25krugman.html?pagewanted=print

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-16108152_ITM

Did your subscription to Google expire?

Main How To Ruin A Retail Company

A prime case study on how to ruin a retail company:

• Profits from sales were down a bit, because some retail sales changed to the Internets.
• Management switched salespersons from commission based pay to meager hourly wages.
• Sales droped further.
• Management fired long-term, experienced and expensive salespersons and hires unqualified but cheaper people instead.
• Sales drop further.
• Overpaid management gets fired.
• New management finds the company is bankrupt.

Circuit City Fires 2,000 Workers to Cut Costs, Feb. 6, 2003
Circuit City Stores Inc. has fired 2,000 people, including salespeople at its outlet near Gateway Mall in Springfield, in a move to cut costs.

The electronics retailer announced it is firing 5 percent of its work force and also converting commissioned sales people to hourly pay.

Circuit City to Fire 3,400, Hire Less Costly Workers, March 28, 2007
Circuit City Stores Inc., the second-largest U.S. electronics retailer after Best Buy Co., fired 3,400 of its highest-paid hourly workers and will hire replacements willing to work for less.
...
"Firing 3,400 of arguably the most successful sales people in the company could prove terrible for morale," Colin McGranahan, an analyst with Sanford Bernstein & Co., wrote in a note today. "The question remains as to whether Circuit City can rebuild in time for the all-important holiday season."
...
Circuit City shares rose 35 cents to $19.23 at 4:18 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading.
...
In 2003, Circuit City switched employees from commission- based pay to hourly pay, matching an earlier move by Best Buy. That switch had a "dramatically negative impact on sales," McGranahan said today.

Circuit City, Electronics Retailer, Seeks Bankruptcy , Nov. 10, 2008
The petition for Chapter 11 protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Richmond, Virginia, listed $3.4 billion in assets and $2.32 billion in liabilities, driving the shares down 56 percent before the New York Stock Exchange halted trading.
...
Circuit City fell 14 cents to 11 cents at 9:30 a.m. before the start of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The NYSE halted buying and selling of the shares after the stock's early plunge.
...
On Sept. 29, Circuit City reported a loss of $239.2 million that was more than triple from a year earlier after sales fell for the sixth straight quarter.

Without well motivated sales-persons any specialized retailer can only lose.

Here the shareholders lost too. No tears for them. Why did they not stop the disastrous management plans?

Only long term Circuit City CEO Philip Schoonover, who was only fired six weeks ago, made a fortune by ruining the company. He got more than twice per year of what successful retail chain CEO's got. From the second link:

Chief Executive Officer Philip Schoonover was paid $8.52 million in fiscal 2006, including a salary of $975,000. Best Buy CEO

FTFA:
"Aren't they supposed to be held in the spirit of freedom and openness?
Not in China."
yeah, blame china... The IOC doesn't have a track record for sending takedown notices / sueing to people displaying anything remotely Olympic branded:
http://news.sbs.com.au/worldnewsaustralia/ioc_sues_website_using_olympics_logos_552593
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-7217512_ITM
the IOC are just as bad as the MAFIIA, but they've got a perfect scapegoat to trial DRM this time around because the West aren't big fans of china as it is, so the IOC spin doctors say "we didn't want drm" publicly, while privately supporting the concept. /rant

FTFA:
"Arenâ(TM)t they supposed to be held in the spirit of freedom and openness?
Not in China."

yeah, blame china... The IOC doesn't have a track record for sending takedown notices / sueing to people displaying anything remotely Olympic branded:
http://news.sbs.com.au/worldnewsaustralia/ioc_sues_website_using_olympics_logos_552593
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-7217512_ITM
the IOC are just as bad as the MAFIIA, but they've got a perfect scapegoat to trial DRM this time around because the West aren't big fans of china as it is, so the IOC spin doctors say "we didn't want drm" publicly, while privately supporting the concept. /rant

Here is an article that talks about Vit D malnutrian in Australia.
  They and New Zealand do not fortify milk, butter, etc.

I worked for a SF area startup in 1990 that produced and sold cameras for "digital prepress" (later called "desktop publishing", and now just "publishing" ;) that had the highest resolution around, to compete with drum scanners that were then the expensive industry standard equipment.

We took a 512x512 Hitachi video sensor with a 2x2 C-M/Y-K mask repeated over it, for initial 1Kx1Kx40bit images that we derived from DSP on the intensity of the color-masked pixels. Then we physically stepped the sensor through 8x8 subpixel shifts, subsampling each pixel 64x. We ran the resulting 320MB raw composite files through a bank of multiple 25MFLOPS DSPs (interconnected and logic-accelerated by a fat FPGA) to produce 4Kx4Kx36bit 72MB files. In 1990 that was an awesome achievement.

We poured dramatic engineering work into that platform, which replaced a $150K drum scanner with a $30K PC (on DOS or Win3.0, or plus optional $5K Mac with its GUI including Photoshop 1.0). We had to deal with DSP for micropositioning the video sensor quickly (using feedback data from a laser/interferometer), with new color spaces (I was part of the JPEG org that produced the image format), with custom interconnects at blazing bandwidth, with parallel multiprocessing at then-supercomputer speeds written in C on DOS, and even with the physics of the light variably distorted by turbulence in the air between the camera and scanned slides, heated by the hot lights necessary for exposures fast enough to allow 64 frames and rescan before the sensor wiggled.

All for a 16Mpxl camera that's now beaten by big sensors on handheld consumer devices for under $2K (in 2008, not 1990, dollars). But I can proudly say that we beat them by almost 20 years.

Looking at the Clintons' record on H1B visas and Hillary's deep connections with companies like India's Tata (remember this http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-22654114_ITM) its no surprise that IT professionals are rejecting her. She's all for sending our jobs overseas.

Can Floridian school boards really claim to not understand why 40% of their 8th grade students lack even just a "basic" understanding of science? Or why they can't retain/get enough qualified science teachers?
They know science education is important, they know that without it, the won't be competitive in the global economy. With evolution framing all of our knowledge of biology, do you really expect these kids to be taken seriously when they enter the job market? How the hell are they going to get through an evolutionary biology class in college if they are taught to believe the mumbo jumbo ID BS?
On a related topic, does anyone have any thoughts on how the US in general can start to retain more of the science talent that we have? Any thoughts from those of you in other countries as to how you retain teachers?
As much as I would like to say the problem is just located on America's Wang, its not, we have a science education brain drain all over this country. There isn't nearly enough emphasis on science/engineering throughout our school system, and adding to the problem, we wont give work visas to the foreign students who get graduate degrees here.
We know the whole US cant just switch to a service economy with everyone ironing each others shirts for money, we have to drive/design new tech to maintain our leadership.
How can we reverse this trend?

On the contrary:

- A study sponsored by a consortium of media companies, done by the University of Chicago, found that under any of 4 methodologies, a full-state recount in Florida would have made Gore the winner in 2000.
Summary at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2000_Florida_results
NORC Florida Ballots Project: http://www2.norc.org/fl/

- Gore offered to have a full-state recount, but this was rejected by Bush and Republicans:
Article from South Florida Sun-Sentinal: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-7243729_ITM

Disclaimer: I seriously don't want to start a flamewar or anything, please keep it civil.

The legalization of abortion also occurred in a similar time frame and also has been attributed to a large statistical decrease in violent crime. http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-10490717_ITM

Are both studies wrong? One study? More bending of statistics to make up for science? Anyone specifically in the know?

GoogleMap: http://tinyurl.com/ts7nh "About 1965, (3) probably in winter (Hoare, 2003), a decision was made to construct a giant rendition of the Readymix company logo virtually exactly halfway along the Eyre Highway, north of the 225 mile peg. ...The diamond, its long axis at a bearing of 82[degrees] true, measured two miles long by one mile high [3.2 x 1.6km, so each side was 1.8km], with each letter being 800x600 feet [240x180m]." Reference: http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286- 9508372_ITM