Slashdot Mirror

To quote Paul Tsongas, "do your goddamn homework!" Google all sides of the stories, read things you disagree with, challenge your assumptions.

For instance, I assumed "if Kerry's war record is good enough for the U.S. Navy, it's good enough for me." Then I started doing my goddamn homework....

you couldn't believe this slander if you'd bothered to research any of the evidence

The more research I do, the more I'm convinced Kerry is a liar. His own stories do not match each other.

How did memories of Cambodia get seared in Kerry's memory? Probably from watching "Apocalypse Now." Anyway, here he's been caught telling a whopping hell of a lie.

Then there is his infamous testimony before Congress, much of which was taken from Jane Fonda's "Winter Soldier" propaganda festival. Real men took torture to avoid signing false confessions. John Kerry proffered false confessions to Congress, just to enhance his standing with political leftists.

Increasingly, John Kerry has only his little band of brothers corroborating his stories. Scores of veterans have gone on the record to correct Kerry's lies. Sample chapters are widely available.

Kerry has his eight veteran supporters. Hundreds of veterans who served with him remember him as a pathetic coward who inflated his war record so he could hurry home and spread shit about them.

It is very easy for a rich man like J. Forbes Kerry to buy off his small crew. A million bucks each and they'll be his whores forever!

Why just the Libertarian party? Why not other third parties too. Personally I couldn't vote for the Democrats or Republicans in good conscience. But I couldn't vote for the Libertarians either. Check out all the parties that you can. Don't just latch onto the first one that's "Not Republicrat". That would be as bad as being in the "Not Bush" party.

There's David Cobb the Green Party candidate, Michael Peroutka the Constitution Party candidate, Ralph Nader the Reform Party candidate (no, I'm not kidding), and as mentioned, Michael Badnarik the Libertarian Party candidate.

Those are just the four parties I've heard the most mention of. If you don't like any of them, keep looking. If you're really interested in them, there are even Socialist and Nazi parties.

If you want a quick intro to the Green and Libertarian parties, search the videos on C-Span for the Cobb/Badnarik debate. It's very informative and gives you in a nutshell what the policies of the two parties are, and helps to highlight the problems of having just two major parties.

Technically, SBVT is funded by oil executives who are very close to Bush. The guy who started it is John O'Neill, a longtime opponent of Kerry from the Nixon days.

This doesn't change your point, of course, but the Kerry / O'Neill story is interesting. C-SPAN has a debate between the two from 1971, which gets to the SBVTs' real motivation for lying. None of them served with him, so they have no idea how he performed in combat. But they do hate him for protesting the war.

Actually, I just looked. C-Span does have video of both conventions.

Actually, I just looked. C-Span does have video of both conventions.

Furthermore, why, when several of the "third party options" are on the ballots in all 50 states ... why are they not allowed to be in the "official" presidential debates?

Just FYI, the first Presidential debate occurred this past weekend, between the Green Party candidate David Cobb and the Libertarians' Michael Badnarik. C-Span covered it -- there's still an audio/video link from their homepage.

Not that the current duopoly will ever allow a third-party player in the debates again. But they're very handy on the local level. A friend of mine, Gary Page, ran as a Green against a shoe-in Republican, a placeholder Democrat, and a lost-in-the-clouds Libertarian. A local group (Realtors, I think) held a debate with all four. Though the Republican won, Gary's performance was so strong that the Democrats recruited him to run for Congress on their behalf this year.

Keep an eye on the grass roots... they're coming up Green.

Here, let me help you:

From the 2002 State of the Union address:

"Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens -- leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections -- then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world."

From the 2003 State of the Union address:

"Year after year, Saddam Hussein has gone to elaborate lengths, spent enormous sums, taken great risks, to build and keep weapons of mass destruction"

That's not Democratic propaganda, that's Bush propaganda. It's right there, Bush stating that Iraq has been developing chemical, biological, and nuclear WMDs. Maybe you need to stop listening to Republican talk-show propaganda and read the facts that are easily available.

On the June 29 JPL briefing on Cassini/Huygens it was mentioned that they might be able to adjust the trajectory by about one degree. I don't know how that translates to distance on the surface. Briefing available here (sorry, Real format only). Even more briefings here.

Also, it's not usually scientific, but there's educational, and sometimes interesting, video at C-SPAN / BookTV, but their archive doesn't go back very far.

Other than NPR, which is great, you can find some interesting talk at Rant Radio, which is occasionally even tech-oriented. And if you're a politics geek you can listen to anything C-SPAN covers online.

Al Gore's speech last week touched on some of the issues here and I think he expressed them poignantly. Everyone should see this speech. video or audio.

"President Bush is claiming the unilateral right to do that to any American citizen he believes is an "enemy combatant." Those are the magic words. If the President alone decides that those two words accurately describe someone, then that person can be immediately locked up and held incommunicado for as long as the President wants, with no court having the right to determine whether the facts actually justify his imprisonment.

Now if the President makes a mistake, or is given faulty information by somebody working for him, and locks up the wrong person, then it's almost impossible for that person to prove his innocence - because he can't talk to a lawyer or his family or anyone else and he doesn't even have the right to know what specific crime he is accused of committing. So a constitutional right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness that we used to think of in an old-fashioned way as "inalienable" can now be instantly stripped from any American by the President with no meaningful review by any other branch of government.

How do we feel about that? Is that OK?

Here's another recent change in our civil liberties: Now, if it wants to, the federal government has the right to monitor every website you go to on the internet, keep a list of everyone you send email to or receive email from and everyone who you call on the telephone or who calls you - and they don't even have to show probable cause that you've done anything wrong. Nor do they ever have to report to any court on what they're doing with the information. Moreover, there are precious few safeguards to keep them from reading the content of all your email.

Everybody fine with that?

If so, what about this next change?

For America's first 212 years, it used to be that if the police wanted to search your house, they had to be able to convince an independent judge to give them a search warrant and then (with rare exceptions) they had to go bang on your door and yell, "Open up!" Then, if you didn't quickly open up, they could knock the door down. Also, if they seized anything, they had to leave a list explaining what they had taken. That way, if it was all a terrible mistake (as it sometimes is) you could go and get your stuff back.

But that's all changed now. Starting two years ago, federal agents were given broad new statutory authority by the Patriot Act to "sneak and peak" in non-terrorism cases. They can secretly enter your home with no warning - whether you are there or not - and they can wait for months before telling you they were there. And it doesn't have to have any relationship to terrorism whatsoever. It applies to any garden-variety crime. And the new law makes it very easy to get around the need for a traditional warrant - simply by saying that searching your house might have some connection (even a remote one) to the investigation of some agent of a foreign power. Then they can go to another court, a secret court, that more or less has to give them a warrant whenever they ask.

Three weeks ago, in a speech at FBI Headquarters, President Bush went even further and formally proposed that the Attorney General be allowed to authorize subpoenas by administrative order, without the need for a warrant from any court.

What about the right to consult a lawyer if you're arrested? Is that important?

Attorney General Ashcroft has issued regulations authorizing the secret monitoring of attorney-client conversations on his say-so alone; bypassing procedures for obtaining prior judicial review for such monitoring in the rare instances when it was permitted in the past. Now, whoever is in custody has to assume that the government is always listening to c

I remember when cookies were first implemented by Netscape. I also remember when the first banner ads appeared on yahoo. People could boycott those sites. I remember when slashdot didn't have ads.

And at every step, somebody complained, loudly, that this was the end of the world.

Maybe it's not a good thing that doubleclick knows just about every news article I read these days. Maybe it's not so great that those news articles are crammed between (blocked) ads.

But you know what? Those are mere trivial annoyances to these "drive-by installers" (discussed this morning on c-span with a guy from the FTC) that use known security vulnerabilities to install themselves on my mom's computer to pummel her with pornographic ads. Fortunately she's a Mozilla convert, but the fact remains -- sure, tracking cookies are unnerving, but it's not like the full-on assult against consumers that's going on now.

The features I get because I use cookies (like being able to stay logged in to slashdot) or accept advertising as a form of revenue (like the fact that slashdot even exists [though I do block the ads]) are acceptable trade offs. Hotbar, gator, and the myriad of other spyware tools offer absolutely NOTHING but annoyances. Nothing.

BBC is kinda late with this story, this picture was shown during the NASA Marsrover briefing of thursday last week, and the article says nothing more than was already said at that briefing. You can watch reruns of the briefings here and here. Real format only :-/

Anybody with an internet connection can watch nasa news briefings at cspan.org. Just that most people don't try to find this stuff, which is sad. Nasa search at CSPAN

Start by explaining why every intelligence agency in the world though Saddam had WMDs.

That's a line repeated by a lot of pro-Bush editorialists in the past months. It's partly false, and partly an oversimplification.

You see, there's WMD, and then there's WMD. Experts on WMD actually call it CBN (Chemical, Biological, and Nuclear), and they understand that chemical weapons score a distant third in potential for mass suffering. Historical research has shown they barely surpass conventional explosives in lethality (often falling short of TNT's destructiveness). Saddam might've had a little, but not enough to worry about.

The falsehood Bush can be accused of is not "Iraq has WMD", but "Iraqi WMD will threaten US citizens within a year".

Since the US funded Iraqi chemical weapons in the 80s, there was a reasonable expectation some of that capability had survived. But those weapons couldn't consitute a threat to the US, as Bush claimed. Since there was no threat, and no reason to believe there was a threat, the claim of "pre-emption" is false.

Of course, there were plenty of good reasons to remove Saddam Hussein. Above all, it was agreed that getting rid of him would improve life in Iraq and security in it's neighbors. But just prior to being elected, Bush swore that US soldiers would be used only for straightforward military conflicts, never for "nation building" jobs (which is where our troops are dying today). Ironically, Bush had painted his disdain for policing other countries as the strongest position distinguishing him from Al Gore on foreign policy topics.

By reversing on a campaign pledge, he has betrayed everyone who voted for him. (Runs in the family!). Gore told the hard truth about tough jobs the Armed Forces would face, honesty that prehaps contributed to his loss.

including three long range rocket programs (which are useless without WMD warheads),

Conventional warheads on long-range missiles have proven themselves to be quite useful over the past 60 years.

an active ricin program, botulin reference strains hidden in a home refrigerator at the orders of the Iraqi secret police, laboratories in secret police safe houses.

Why would we add in things you just made up from thin air? If any item on that list was real, these accusations against Bush just wouldn't be happening.

I would argue that nobody in the world, including those in Iraq, knew that Saddam had only a few WMD's,

I knew that. I informed the Pentagon, and posted on Slashdot too. We knew that Iraq had, at worst, a handful of low-effectiveness chemical weapons, and nothing biological or nuclear.

John Kerry lied about US policy and atrocities in the Vietnam War.

To deny that US military conduct in the Vietnam "Police Action" was atrocious suggests either deep ignorance or total misanthropy.

c-span has it here.

There are a lot of C-SPAN junkies
Shouldn't that be:
There are a lot of C-SPAN junkies?

Also, we haven't been anywhere near foreign policy, but if you're interested, this video (RealPlayer) has a wide-ranging debate between Richard Perle, another neoconservative, a journalist, and Josh Marshall, with whom I tend to agree. I'm not trying to argue any of the points made, it just seems to me that the were made well by both sides in the debate.

There apparently will be several live feeds available of the hearing tomorrow for those away from their TVs.

I guess someone is using Perl a little too much lately. Fortunately, instead of a channel discussing Perl modules, we're stuck with C-SPANInstead.

The MPAA and RIAA do mind. They talk about it on the P2P hearings I watched on CSPAN. I guess they would rather see progress of human kind, like what they did here, to see their own sales.
-Seriv

It is not stamped. Instead it is "Franked", or signed by the congressman (or stamped, really, with his signature). But it is not free... Congress pays the Postal Service for this, and it comes from each Member's budget.

Check out this C-span link.

Someone please mod the parent post up! The points in the post above are facts that were well-known and taught in schools when I was growing up but which has been expunged from the PC textbooks of today.

How do we know these things are really true? We were here! My grandfather was born in 1875 only ten years after the end of the war. I have personally met a man who was brought to this country as a slave (Charlie Smith). This stuff is not ancient history it is family history for millions of people.

3.14159

C-Span is the only news resource that can actually be called "fair and balanced", because all they do is show you what actually happened. Little to no analysis. It's awesome, and will only become more valuable as media consolidation moves forward.

They have 3 TV channels, a radio station, and streaming web feeds of everything. They even have a video library of notable coverage and events, all available for free.

is like a Monty Python skit. For those who haven't seen it on C-SPAN, I highly recommend finding the next showing and marking it on your calendar.

Philip Taubman was on C-SPAN's Booknotes last Sunday. They have information about the book, a transcript of the interview, and even video (not sure what format).

Well, you asked! ;-). We are off-topic, so moderators. Moderate with abandon.

You can start by watching Parliament debate it. Blair made some very persuasive arguments (better than I will in the few minutes I'm spending here). link

The basic idea is that Hussein attacked Kuwait. He surrendered under certain demands, but he has failed to meet them. "Peace" was granted only because of those demands. However, he has never met those demands. He has tried to get out from under them. In other words, "we" have been at war with Iraq for 12+ years.

There is a moral argument. It's a brutal regime by itself and the current "containment" program (sanctions) has made it even worse. He will be able to threaten millions in the middle-east and beyond.

There is a legal argument. Iraq has not met U.N. demand. Some countries/people want absolute and definitive proof of weapons. This is nearly impossible -- even with complete compliance with inspections. Iraq is big. ABC's (Atomic, Biological, Chemical) are small.

There is a common sense argument. Can we point to the ABC weapons? No, at least not with unclassifiable data. (Read, the value of having the ability to get the information is to high to give up for the political benefit). However all reason points to him having these weapons. Further, Hussein has prooven time and time again the willingness to back down just before war. As troops move back home, he rachets up the rhetoric and his weapons programs. (Fool me one, shame on you. Fool me five times... shame on me)

There is a strategic argument. If the U.N. can't uphold its promise of disarmament (do it voluntarily or we'll do it by force) because it rejects forece, then it is a body that will not be taken seriously by the world. It would then become powerless. Hussein would then go Kim Jung Il on us, put together a nuclear program and cause some serious havoc in the region.

On Sept. 11: Personally, I am not quite convinced on the links between Iraq and Sept. 11. Bin Laden and Hussein are -- at best -- "enemy of my enemy is my friend" types. Still, Sept. 11, showed the possibility for small powers to do great damage to the Western world. It was a realization that to protect our lives--one cannot

My reservations are: 1) End game -- can we build safer, better state within Iraq 2) Will the cities go black-hawk-down on us 3) Will the economic and political cost for (my) country--the United States be to great to bear alone. 4) After this, can we afford the even more expensive task of building greater relationships with the rest of the world. It will be difficult to put down this active enemy, but it will be much more difficult to make the more passive ones friends.

But those are mine.

P.S. The worst, however, has been much of Europe's unwillingness to even threaten war. If the allies had acted more as one, it seems to me war might have been less likely.

On the back of a movie case, you get a complete description of what potentially offensive scenes are in it. In a game, you do not know anything about what scenes will open up as the game progress.

Love games, hate censorship, but after listening to a hearing on C-SPAN they got me convinced. This was long after I had already played GTA3, and interesting enough, I remember having many good laughs at the violence in it with my friends - I think it is funny. For kids, I do not think it is funny.

Complete ratings in movies are not considered censorship, why suggest that it does video games? Video gaming is turning into a bigger money maker than movies, and without the same level of piracy concerns. In this growing market, we need to curb the corporate desire to push the limits of accepted violence. I think (as pointed out in the hearing C-SPAN) that the game companies are making a bad business decision fighting for violence; if they could come up some with non-violent but GREAT games, the parent-purchase market is open for the taking.

I see us traveling down the same dark path now. I know this Santayana quote is almost cliche now but it bears repeating: "Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it."

(only Russ Feingold having the intestinal fortitude to stand against it in the senate)

This is a little off-topic, but I listen to C-Span streamed every day over the web, and DAMN Russ Feingold has his shit together. He consistently impresses me with his eloquence and grasp of the issues. Why can't we get the really good people running for President? Who are we going to have next time, Bush v. Gore again?

Why can't we get a win-win choice for once?!? Feingold v. John McCain, or Feingold v. Colin Powell? I'd be proud to have any of those men leading the U.S.

Okay, okay... I'm done now. :)

A ha! But where better of a place for Bush to flex his might and make it look like he cares about corporate accountability than against a corporation where there are no political ties?

Accounting and junk faxing are two completely separate things, but it makes the CEO liable for just that much more.

/rumor mill/ Did anyone hear about those capacity swaps between WorldCom and fax.com? Someone should investigate! /rumor mill/ :-)

Yeah right, so how smart is this, Fort Hood?. It would be easier to just pay all the people involded cash, and not have to worry about storing the excess hardware that is going nowhere.

What Jackson actually said was, "John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it now if he can." Please note that name. Marshall was the first jurist to argue that the Supreme Court could review the actions of other branches of government. In 1830 this concept was still controversial. Now it's universally accepted. Recent presidents ignore the Court at their peril. Eisenhower enforced court orders he empahtically disagreed with. Nixon was forced to obey an order that cost him the Presidency. FDR, probably the most popular President in history, couldn't even get away with adding friendly judges to the court.

Available for viewing - roughly an hour long.

Here 'tis

Nobody seems to know. As I understand, it passed by a voice vote. This means that the fact that the bill passed was recorded, but the actual votes were not.

Nice way to appease your "financial backer" and dodge the nasty PR, huh?

OK, I don't claim to know anything about NASA reuseable launch program, or the psychological guilt factor of being 'rich' . I don't claim to know a hell of a lot on taxes, politics, or economics. What I do know is that if the Bush tax plan is approved then I will be paying five percent less, my parents will be paying six percent less, and my girlfriend's parents (who support seven kids on about $30K/year and can barely keep up) will have to pay NONE.

I suggest you avoid bringing up topics you apparently know nothing about, especially if you are considering it in jest. Leave ignorance to those people who don't care about things. I'd like to think that we slashdotters would like to be informed and accurately informed, and to form our opinions based on truly legitimate information, not just some crack editorialist for Salon.com. I had observed that the website containing the article does not list any of the author's credentials, save for "editor." I do believe I would much more likely trust someone described as "veteran economist," or (wink, wink) "masters in business degree from Harvard."

Now, in true slashdot fashion, if anybody would like to get the FACTS and make an INFORMED decision, try following this link. It is on the House of Representatives website. While I couldn't find a copy of the actual tax proposal itself, feel free to browse house.gov and even better, c-span has loads of information on everything that the house and the President does.

If somebody happens to find a link to that tax proposal, please post it!

BTW, Now that I think of it, this whole tirade could be considered off-topic... but I believe that a call for awareness of the facts is highly important, and core to what has made slashdot so great.


-- &lt RANT &gt I propose to the IETF that the surrounding tags become official identification for slashdot.com readers! &lt /RANT &gt

Furthermore, if you ask an economist to tell you why, they will tell you it's due to IT growth.

And not just any economist, but ask Alan Greenspan. He says exactly this in the "Hearing on Fiscal Challenges Facing the Bush Administration", January 25, 2001. (C-SPAN has this hearing in real media on their site, but this is not a direct link. It is somewhere in the Business and Economy category).

-ictatha

And without any attribution either.

I heard it all on C-SPAN Radio over the holidays.

Hypocrite.

--
"Deep in the ocean are treasures beyond compare,

In fact, when you actually look at the record of the debates so far, it's interesting to notice the other times the word "Internet" has been uttered.

In the first debate (3 Oct 00), the word "Internet" was used three times, all by Governor Bush:

• "Look. [Al Gore] is a man who's got great numbers. He talks about numbers. I'm beginning to think not only did he invent the Internet but he invented the calculator."

• "Testing is the cornerstone of [educational] reform... and we ask them to post the results on the Internet." (Does he mean "we will" ask them? I'm unsure.)

• "I believe there needs to be instant disclosure [of campaign contributions] on the Internet as to who is giving to whom."

And that's it! Neither of the vice presidential candidates mentioned the word "Internet" in their debate, and in Wednesday night's debate, the word "Internet" was only used in the instance which inspired (if that is the right word for Katz's repetitious drumming) this discussion.

So in all, four mentions of the Internet, all by Gov. Bush: once in a joke, once in a cultural criticism, and twice in useful applications of information technology.

Yours,
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.

You can see the arguments for yourself here (in RealMedia format) on Cspan.org.

There wouldn't be any huge parent companies anymore (at least temporarily). We would all get our news from smaller, independent outlets.

We would all get our news from smaller, independent outlets. We would, of course, have to decide for ourselves on the credibility of said news outlets. That in and of itself is a scary thought, we would have to make an important decision with information that we would have to go out and gather ourselves.

The foundation of today's news media is organizations like United Press International, BBC News, National Public Radio News, the Associated Press, the New York Times. These are all outstanding news organizations.

The Washington Post (a pretty good paper) owns Newsweek, an alright magazine, though its website is now hosted by MSNBC.

US News and World Report is also pretty good.

Skipping the rest of the good newspapers and the plethora of great magazines around the country (as well as the really bad ones) we get to Corporate Media. Time isn't really bad per se, but knowing what we know about Time Warner (I am an employee of the company) I personally stay away.

I stay away from all U.S. television news sources for reliable information, except for the excellent Newshour with Jim Lehrer and C-SPAN, both independent media. The former rocks, and I live in the neighborhood where Lehrer grew up; the latter isn't really news but has very informative content on current issues.

Okay! I hope I have convinced everyone that you don't have to worry about your news source if you know where to go. Even if Time Warner bought up half of these news souces somehow, it could never get them all. Also remember that if good journalists realize they are working for a company with a deteriorating reputation, they jump ship.

Form your own opinion! Watch it.

--

If you're interested in watching the hearing, you can see it in full (almost 3 hours long) in realvideo format from C-Span.com. The url is http://video.c-span.o rg:8080/ramgen/ldrive/e071100_digital.rm.

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

• Keith Rhodes, GAO
  
• Harris Miller, Technology Association of America
• Sandra England, McAfee, A Network Associates Company
• Peter Tippett, ICSA.net

• Criminalizing the creation of all viruses or self replicating programs -- even for research purposes.
  
• Making "hacking" a federal crime with severe punishments
  
• criminalizing THE HIRING of "white hat hackers" so that anyone who has EVER been convicted of "hacking" will be permanently barred from employment in the computer industry.
  
• Of course they recommended against any corporation hiring "hacker" security firms and recommended that these organizations be criminalized.
  

He was also on the Diane Rehm show the same day and you can listen to it in real audio. It should be permanently archived.