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There are many political figures and organizations at least trying to have an influence on this issue. I wouldn't necessarily say that any of these entities have significant political power unto themselves (except the Republican party, I guess), but that taken as a whole, they may persuade some politicians up on Capitol Hill to reconsider their position. E.g.:

National Organization of Women's petition.

Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy's petition.

Cheney's position regarding the senate filibuster.

And, finally, the Republican party's plans for ending the filibuster.

And credit given where credit due, I picked up this story from a post on a mailing list from Paul Ferguson and his tech news.

What I found to be so interesting about this story is that unlike the other thefts, this one did not require the theft of a computer or social engineering skills. This one looks like the works of a group of hackers and now has the FBI's computer crime squad joined in the investigation.

funny!... just put a gps system on his car! but in all seriousness... you two could be xboxing each other in real time if you had a DUAL Bonded EVDO HSDPA to WIFI router... it'd gecha 3000k and 80ms. thats enough to do realtime video chatting while driving! Its at wireless internet dual evdo hsdpa laptop and wireless internet dual evdo hsdpa router

I know alot about nothing Has a few relevant posts regarding the ability of Re-pubs to effectly voice any valid concerns, dissent, critical thinking skills, or anything else requiring enough backbone to stand up to the trolling neocons. Religious Reich Do the Repubs have the balls to think for themselves? I ain't holding out any hope. 'Sig, I don't need no stinking sig!'

I know alot about nothing Has a few relevant posts regarding the ability of Re-pubs to effectly voice any valid concerns, dissent, critical thinking skills, or anything else requiring enough backbone to stand up to the trolling neocons. Religious Reich Do the Repubs have the balls to think for themselves? I ain't holding out any hope. 'Sig, I don't need no stinking sig!'

I know alot about nothing Has a few relevant posts regarding the ability of Re-pubs to effectly voice any valid concerns, dissent, critical thinking skills, or anything else requiring enough backbone to stand up to the trolling neocons. Religious Reich Do the Repubs have the balls to think for themselves? I ain't holding out any hope. 'Sig, I don't need no stinking sig!'

The story was rejected.

Just venting, but -- to the moderator who decided that the story was newsworthy only after it was too late to do anything about it -- thanks for nothing! Judging from the comments above, it seems likely that the Slashdot community would have liked to know about this YESTERDAY.

Markos "Paid-by-Howard-Dean" Zuniga was 0 for 2004.

Not one of his candidates won. Nada. Zilch. The big bagel. Zero. None.

The Bill & Melinda gates has given over $10 million to the Discovery Institutes, one of the major thinktanks behind "Intelligent Design". While the money was not targeted for Intelligent Design studies this is major support for a nut job organization. How much of the $10M is siphoned off (via overhead charges)for general operating expenses?

A parameter that can be used to characterized the closeness of a given fluid to being perfect is the ratio of its viscosity to its volume density of entropy. This ratio is conjectured to be always larger than hbar/(4 pi) (hbar being the Planck constant).

At first sight this conjecture is violated by superfluid helium. But according to Landau superfluid helium at nonzero temperature can be thought of as having two components: the superfluid component which can flow without friction, and the normal component which has finite viscosity. The viscosity of the normal component satisfies the conjecture.

See this article or this blog.

If we needed membership to be geek, then those of us who are truly geek would never be let in the club to begin with.

"I would not join a club that would have me as a member." --Groucho Marx... or how ever it goes... ;-)

Anyway, veering noticeably ontopic, ndiswrapper hell only applies to network cards which lack a native Linux driver. So, in a way, you're getting secondary Windows hell...

Having read this article, your blog http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/, being an admin of http://it.wiktionary.org/ I am really wondering the same. Wiktionary is so much more than an "ordinary" dictionary like websters ... just take the glossaries we are creating. Some of them quite specific like the Italian-German geological terminology on the Italian wiktionary, the Christianity-glossary on nl and it .... all the pronunciations (most of them Dutch). Now with Ultimate Wiktionary all the work done during the last months will have even more value. People are contributing not only with words, but also from the financial side. It be came of so much value for educational purposes, for people studying languages. It even attraccted attention of European Community level glossaries. I'd very much like to know what Larry would say if he knew that language professionals are working on wiktionary. I'd like him to have a closer look to what he described and he will see that the actual Wiktionary, the development that went on and on during the last year ... or really not even a year ... is so much more than he says. Thanks for your attention! Sabine Cretella

To see where I am coming from, examine the view that porting open source applications to windows is a bad thing. An excellent posting on this viewpoint can be found here:

http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2004/12/how-to-kill-ope n-source-on-desktop.html

By encouraging people to extend a proprietary platform instead of an open one, you lock them in to that platform and discourage development and usage of open alternatives.

I don't believe that this is applicable for all software like many others do, however. I think there is a line between infrastructure and information applications that must be open and ones that serve special markets and are fair game for the proprietary software market.

As some extreme examples to exhibit the point, imagine if http had been a proprietary protocol, and the company in control of it now decided to charge a fee to use it. On the other side, look at Photoshop, a specialized graphics editing application that is useful and profitable for many, but whose existance as a proprietary application doesn't inhibit innovation in the graphics market.

Click fraud in Adwords/Adsense. Google says the problem is minimal, but it's not. Yes, it's in Google's best interest to clean it up to maintain confidence in the system, but they don't want to let on how big a problem it is for the same reason. They don't want people to start asking for credits or refunds.

Scams perpetrated through Adwords/Adsense. Keywords are being bid up by the scum that can afford to--the ones that lie to make the sale. It's tough for a legit company to compete with one that will lie. As a publisher I have almost no control over what ads are displayed on the site, I can only block by URL and not by company for example. I cannot block Claria the company, I must block whatever URL they or their affiliates decide to use this week. And I'm limited to a total of 200 URLs in the Adwords block list.

Toleration of spyware distribution through blogger.com. Want some spyware? Try one of these blogs.

Click fraud in Adwords/Adsense. Google says the problem is minimal, but it's not. Yes, it's in Google's best interest to clean it up to maintain confidence in the system, but they don't want to let on how big a problem it is for the same reason. They don't want people to start asking for credits or refunds.

Scams perpetrated through Adwords/Adsense. Keywords are being bid up by the scum that can afford to--the ones that lie to make the sale. It's tough for a legit company to compete with one that will lie. As a publisher I have almost no control over what ads are displayed on the site, I can only block by URL and not by company for example. I cannot block Claria the company, I must block whatever URL they or their affiliates decide to use this week. And I'm limited to a total of 200 URLs in the Adwords block list.

Toleration of spyware distribution through blogger.com. Want some spyware? Try one of these blogs.

Click fraud in Adwords/Adsense. Google says the problem is minimal, but it's not. Yes, it's in Google's best interest to clean it up to maintain confidence in the system, but they don't want to let on how big a problem it is for the same reason. They don't want people to start asking for credits or refunds.

Scams perpetrated through Adwords/Adsense. Keywords are being bid up by the scum that can afford to--the ones that lie to make the sale. It's tough for a legit company to compete with one that will lie. As a publisher I have almost no control over what ads are displayed on the site, I can only block by URL and not by company for example. I cannot block Claria the company, I must block whatever URL they or their affiliates decide to use this week. And I'm limited to a total of 200 URLs in the Adwords block list.

Toleration of spyware distribution through blogger.com. Want some spyware? Try one of these blogs.

Click fraud in Adwords/Adsense. Google says the problem is minimal, but it's not. Yes, it's in Google's best interest to clean it up to maintain confidence in the system, but they don't want to let on how big a problem it is for the same reason. They don't want people to start asking for credits or refunds.

Scams perpetrated through Adwords/Adsense. Keywords are being bid up by the scum that can afford to--the ones that lie to make the sale. It's tough for a legit company to compete with one that will lie. As a publisher I have almost no control over what ads are displayed on the site, I can only block by URL and not by company for example. I cannot block Claria the company, I must block whatever URL they or their affiliates decide to use this week. And I'm limited to a total of 200 URLs in the Adwords block list.

Toleration of spyware distribution through blogger.com. Want some spyware? Try one of these blogs.

Click fraud in Adwords/Adsense. Google says the problem is minimal, but it's not. Yes, it's in Google's best interest to clean it up to maintain confidence in the system, but they don't want to let on how big a problem it is for the same reason. They don't want people to start asking for credits or refunds.

Scams perpetrated through Adwords/Adsense. Keywords are being bid up by the scum that can afford to--the ones that lie to make the sale. It's tough for a legit company to compete with one that will lie. As a publisher I have almost no control over what ads are displayed on the site, I can only block by URL and not by company for example. I cannot block Claria the company, I must block whatever URL they or their affiliates decide to use this week. And I'm limited to a total of 200 URLs in the Adwords block list.

Toleration of spyware distribution through blogger.com. Want some spyware? Try one of these blogs.

With version 8.0, Opera has "improved" the interface by dumbing it down to the least common denominator. They've eliminated the Multiple Document Interface (MDI) by default and added really annoying close tab buttons on each and every tab. The lack of MDI means you can not resize a tab within the browser window.

To fix these shortcomings and make Opera behave as it did in version 7.x, you need to go to the hidden "Advanced Preferences". After 30 minutes of searching, the only way I could access this dialog was by clicking the link located at Operawatch.

Slashdot will not let me post the appropriate link correctly, but it is "opera:/button/Show%20Preferences,100,,,top10". If that does not work properly, add the following to your standard_toolbar.ini file: Button9, "Show preferences"="Show preferences, 100, , , "top10""

Eventually you should get a new button on your toolbar (you may have to go to Customize Toolbar to manually add it to a toolbar you have displayed), which you will have to click to access the Advanced Preferences. Once you are in the dialog, go to Windows and select Advanced Opera Workspace.

I knew when I saw the scene with the caskets of the dead servicemen that these guys were playing with fire. Good on them that they kept it up as good as they did given the amount of crap they must have been getting from above.

This is a major threat to the privacy of personal information in the context of highway travel. And very similar initiatives exist to install such systems on American cars & highways. I've been engaged in research on DSRC and the design of Vehicle Safety Communication technologies. Much more info can be found here.

U.S. Military hackers - is an oxymoron... almost as funny as "Military intelligence"

--
http://unk1911.blogspot.com

this asteroid could be a good thing as it may unite the world in a common cause against a danger that can wipe all of us out indiscriminately. yey for world peace.

--
http://unk1911.blogspot.com

After setting off the alarm at MicroCenter (a computer store) I had some creep try and stop me, claiming he "helped with security" at the store. I told him to take a hike and walked past him. He ended up following me to my car, mumbling about "taking down my license plate number". I wrote letters to the store manager, the corporate Customer Service department, and I blogged about it. I never did hear anything from the company.

This was #5 in the first google search I tried. (Your turn guessing my search terms :) It both mentions and disputes your candidate (Erasmus).

According to TFA, the main task of JFCCNW is to bring down websites that don't portray America in good light.

It is going to be more of a PR-damage limitation excercise than anything else. And a good way to spend millions of taxpayer money.


Until they start going after opposition sites like Daily Kos or Eschaton because they're critical of the current administration. Collateral damage in the War on Terror, you know.

Don't think it could happen here? GOP Denial of Service attack on New Hampshire Democratic Phone Bank

hate replying to my self but as this post http://psphacks.blogspot.com/2005/04/psp-home-cont rol-10.html says this is definantly just another web-ap.
I love hacking devices , but the real cool hacking here is the web interface and control mechanism the guy made , the fact he uses a psp to click the buttons is not really important .

Digging through the HTML, the link should have been to:

http://psphacks.blogspot.com/2005/04/psp-home-cont rol-10.html

Or even better here

Here's a case in point. I've been reading this one for awhile:

Jon's Jail Journal
http://jonsjailjournal.blogspot.com/

I tried... but couldn't get it to work under NT4.

not true, the launch psp is clocked @ 222mhz cap. read this. there was a nicer looking article about it, but it lacked specificity.
-e

Or worse, regurgitated corporate PR releases.

Funny, that's what I thought journalists already did.

But at least there's an army of bloggers out there, willing to brave life and limb in the world's trouble spots, telling you how it really is from their armchairs.

Absolutely. If it weren't for all the brave journalists in Iraq, and covering the last election, we would have no clue what was going on.

The credit likely goes to Tim Karr, the author of the article, or one authors of the 34 results for the term on Google. I was surprised there were only 34 results, and I don't imagine that'll be the case for too long, if everyone else was as satisified with the phrase as I was. :)

It seems that blogs are another offshoot of the failure of mainstream media. The blog Baghdad Burning: http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/ provides insight into the Iraq war that inbedded journalists have missed.

Might be this one. Not so much peeved as wondering what kind of job satisfaction you can have at Microsoft compared to companies that put their product out as fast as Google.

I still use Google as my primary search engine, but the more I read about the company, the less I like it. If Yahoo had a Usenet database, I'd probably switch to it.

Here's analysis of AACS that was blogged last December. One interesting point mentioned is that there is no requirement to wait for keys to get compromized before revocation begins. They can revoke keys whenever they want, publicly claim it was due to hackers, and stimulate new equipment sales any time they want.

..the guy who removed the review (which was a good one IMHO), explained why he took it down. It might be nitpicking, or perhaps he did it without putting much thinking into it, but it hardly seems like he's on Sonys' payroll.

In any case, is his site, and he can decide what to screen and what not. Don't like it? There's a whole bunch of pages with user reviews out there aswell. No biggie.

You put that well, although I disagree.
Every time the government imposes censorship on election speech, it undermines the integrity of the election process.

Let's be clear here that the bill would not prevent the FEC from censoring the internet. It would amend section 301 of BCRA, to clarify the issue in Shays-Meehan v FEC, which requires the FEC to revisit rulemaking on applying section 301 to the internet.
The public comment period for that rulemaking is now under way, and we need slashdotters to take part and be heard. www.fec.gov.

There are other placs in BCRA, such as 311, that attempt to censor campaign speech, and this bill will not fix those problems. Even before BCRA, the FEC, relying on 317 of FECA, has been trying to censor the internet, and we've been fighting it.

This bill is typical of what congress does. It passes a stupid law under pressure from special interest groups. Here the special interest group was the Pew Charitable Trust, which spent ~100 million to pass BCRA (McCain-Feingold).
This turned out to have unforseen consequences on another special interest group, in this case bloggers, so a bill is being introduced to cater to that interest group. And so it goes.

It's not about making sense or doing the right thing - it is about responding to stimuli, like an amoeba does.
By all means let's support this bill. Whether it passes or not, the support it gets is a measure of how much clout we have.
But it doesn't fix the problem, just provides some grease for the squeakiest wheel. Kudos to Declan at cnet and Commissioner Brad Smith and Mike (Krepanski?), Michelle Malkin, the instapundit,
the three thousand of you who have signed the coalition's petition.
But there's much more work to do to free the internet from state and federal regulation of political speech.
I blog about this stuff at ballots.blogspot.com.
One of the best sources to keep up with these issues is Rick Hasen's http://www.electionlawblog.com.
I try to do what I can, but frankly I need either help from other lawyers, or somebody with deep pockets, before I take on the FEC in court.

I bought the CD after seeing the music video. My friend posted about the BitTorrent release on his blog. I downloaded it and then read more about the band on The Stranger's website and listened to them on KEXP's website. After researching them using only the internet, I end up buying their CD just a few days after downloading the music video. As you can see, it earned them a sale.

This guy is blogging about it, but it doesn't seem so positive. http://waterflavored.blogspot.com/

...on whether these use the already-known-to-exist IBM PowerPC 970MP, a dual core version of the G5. This could mean that we'd have >2.5GHz dual-dual core Power Mac systems.

Further, an update to Apple's CHUD tools (subsequently pulled) had clear references to quad processor capability, as well as references to the 970MP, and the single core 970GX.

What could essentially be called "quad G5" systems (including Xserves) are just a matter of time. And with dual >1GHz frontside busses and PC3200 DDR RAM (8GB max in Power Mac, 16GB max (also ECC) in Xserve), these machines are nothing to sneeze at.

What will be interesting to see is when the Power Macs will have PCI-X and Blu-Ray. From the most current round of rumors, it looks like that's still another upgrade away...

...it changes it's attitude. An excerpt from my blog entry earlier this week:

When I buy groceries, the digital display at the register is running a Windows application to show my purchases.

At the autoparts store, the inventory system has a Windows interface to a SQL Server database.

The woman who sells me insurance runs a Microsoft Access application on her laptop.

To withdraw money from my bank's ATM machine, I use a Windows interface -- I know, because when the ATM crashes, it displays Windows XP dialog boxes.

I could come up with more examples, but the point should be clear: Businesses survive on vertical market software, and that means Windows. Companies don't buy their core applications at the store -- they go to a value-added reseller (VAR) or independent software vendor (VAR), or even develop the software in-house.

Linux could compete for industry-specific applications, if it had the tools to compete with Access, Visual Basic, and the other facilities that ISVs and MIS departments rely upon. Ease the transition, provide better tools... in some ways, I think that is what Mono was meant to do, by bringing the .NET "platform" to Linux.

If Linux is to become universal (even even significantly competitive) in the business world, it needs to understand how that business software is created.

I actually started a discussion on the sex determination of visitors sometime ago on my crazy ideas blog. You may want to read/contribute .... would be interesting though to figure out the gender of the visitor.

Guess they just stole some idea from there for this statistic :-).

I actually started a discussion on the sex determination of visitors sometime ago on my crazy ideas blog. You may want to read/contribute .... would be interesting though to figure out the gender of the visitor.

Guess they just stole some idea from there for this statistic :-).

What makes a standard viable without the formal blessing of a standards organization?

I've just finished an article covering the emergence of del.icio.us as an example of a new standard that works without the formal blessing of a standards organization. In this case it is a standard of categorizing knowledge.

In short, the emergence of physical libraries of knowledge forced the adoption of a taxonomy around which to organize it. As libraries grew, they were organized to reduce seek time. Now that information has been released from the constraints of physical form, exponentially expanding in scope, magnitude and power, the seek time problem has arisen again. The information explosion costs an increasing amount of time, people and programmers are needed to ensure the floods of new knowledge have been classified correctly. Something had to give.

So a new way of organizing information has emerged which harnesses the folk-masses to categorize their own information. In grass roots style, users classify information using separate single words. Whatever words best describe a chunk of information. It's open source cataloging in which a personal vocabulary is the set of categories.

It's a surprisingly simple and viable approach.

I've always been a fan of Scott Pakin's automatic complaint-letter generator. When I was in college, we used this all the time, including for submitting letters to the editor of our school paper. Letters that were actually printed. (Guess which one).

This post was brought to you by a shameless plug.

Or better yet, do this with a genetic algorithm combined with simulated annealing!

--
http://unk1911.blogspot.com

There are TWO models detailing the origins of our species. One model is the Out-of-Africa model. This effectively states that Homo sapiens left africa and COMPLETELY replaced Home Erectus (found in China) and Homo sapiens neandertalensis in Europe with little to no inter-breeding. This is the current "popular" theory.

However, there is another model called the multi-regional model that states Homo sapiens evolved sperately on each of the different continents. How could this happen you say? Because enough interbreeding went on to maintain species integrity. Proponents of the Out-of-Africa model tend to ignore fossil evidence from Dali China that shows a skull exhibiting charateristics closer to H. sapiens than H. erectus - pre-dating the earliest evidence from Africa. Or other evidence such as a blending of charateristics in the middle east (mix of Neanderthal/H. Sapiens): EXACTLY where you would expect to find that sort of thing.

Check out the following link: http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2005/02/more-on-multi regional-model.html

Or google: Milford Wolpoff http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Milford+Wolpo ff

The Out-of-Africanists are force fitting a theory on the existing data. Something they are able to get away with because the current "most popular" scientists (D. Johanson, Leekey) push it. Its unfortunate that politics has worked its way into science.

Remember, you only find what you are looking for.