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I think the Pentagon owes taxpayers a few Trillion $ of taxpayer money.

Here's a link to the story. It's all the information I have.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/08/60minute s/main828098.shtml

We should have active government intervention to break up ghettos and disperse racial communities.

Just tear-down the buildings they currently live in and then replace those buildings with housing that require a six-figure income. Sounds like it's working well in the Windy City...

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/12/11/60II/mai n532704.shtml

...This is marketing genius at work!!

Yes, because Microsoft is so good at making predicitions seeing them to fruition.

Just like GW Bush is yours.

Do you mean like this?

• Patriot Act Abuses Seen
  
• Critics cite PATRIOT Act abuse and misuse
  
• Abuse of the "Patriot Act"
  
• Patriot Act Abuses and Misuses Abound, ACLU Says
  
• More Signs of Patriot Act Abuse

This is not their responsibility to make sure predatory activity is prevented.
Is it ANY places' responsilbility (online or in the physical world) to do that?

I had an experence in the late 1980s going to a roller skating rink. I wore a tweed hat which I was asked to remove because "gang members wear hats". It's a mystery to me as what what gang would be wearing a tweed jacket and a hat... but clearly as this was a place with many kids they experenced pressure to make sure it was a safe enviroment... or at the very least look like it's a safe enviroment, a hatless one.

Chucky Cheeses I remember had a policy that you had to be a certain age in order to play in some large plastic jungle gym thing... 8 was ok but 9 was not or something along those lines. I thought it was odd at the time but I imagine they were doing something to make it look like they were protecting kids from sexual predators. As it turns out they had crappy pizza and were so mega anal it wasn't even funny.

If you are going to market your service tward kids, you are expected to do the very minimum possible to help make sure that it's a safe enviroment, which would include listing to jackasses that believe that gangs wear hats, which for all I know they do.

When does MySpace's accountability end and an individual's accountability begins?

And MSN had a their bout with their online chat system, where shockingly enough were were issues with kids running off to meet older people where the only resolution they had was to permit only registered users to use their service. Pretty much killed their service, which is likely exactly what they wanted to do. I doubt they wanted the responciblity, and who could blame them.

But we're going to have to deal with jackasses that expect others to do their job for them until we as a people relaise that perhaps it's a GOOD idea to actually educate kids on these dangers. Don't take candy from strangers, and don't go off to meet 40 year old men at hotels. What is really sad is this is an old problem... just with new technology.

I'm reminded of Mark Buller, the guy who improved the accidental enhancement mousepox into a 100% deadly disease even in mice vaccinated against it. A guy named Ramshaw was researching transmissable mouse contraceptives to deal with an overpopulation problem and spliced a gene for the immunosuppressant IL-4 into mousepox. Unfortunately, this led to the death of 60% of the test mice. Buller published research where he expanded on this idea by putting the IL-4 gene in a better spot and put in another gene to maximize production. This killed mice even treated with anti-viral drugs with a nearly 100% fatality rate.

Fortunately, however, Buller seems to have tried to make up for this a little by having come up with a counter-measure. This provides a hope for some people to live in case of genetically engineered smallpox, but I don't think that the kind of drugs required are even close to being common and inexpensive enough to help the public at large.

One of these days, I'm worried that unethical or thoughtless biologist are going to publish exploits for the human immune system, and one of these days technology is going to get cheap enough and ubiquitous enough for the biologist equivalent of a script kiddie to wage genocide. I'm worried that in the next century, we're going to get an object lesson in just how hard it is to "patch and update" our immune system.

Stephen was on 60 Minutes this Sunday. Link to video. And the CBS text.

So it will be awhile before we're like the Europeans.

We don't want to be like the Europeans. Generally speaking, the US produces far more and creates much more wealth than most European countries. This is not only good for the economy as a whole, but it's also a good way to increase personal income and purchasing power. Europe knows this, and thus countries like France are starting to repeal some of their Draconian employee protection laws.

The problem in the US is that some employers abuse the strong work ethic. They only see graphs that say More Work == More Profit without properly understanding how things like employee exhaustion and low morale impact their bottom line. They also fail to understand that far more work can be produced by improving working conditions and morale rather than demanding slave hours. Unfortunately, many employees are reticent to change jobs during times of economic uncertainty, and they're also cautious about bringing suits against their employer. Thus some (not all) employers get away with it for a time. However, it can't last, and employers end up shooting themselves in the foot long-term.

And when jurisdictions start getting less and less money from gas taxes, they will attempt to raise that money through other means. They will not readily give up that revenue stream.
See Oregon and their proposed tax per mile, instead of per gallon.

Sadly, more and more people keep leaving this admin and pointing their finger back at the white house's lying. Yet, it is people like you that allow such corwardice, lying, and treason from such a group. Sadly, this guy is making Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton look positively angelic. I suspect that even if bush came out and admitted to this, you would still insist that he is legal and ethical.

When you stop having blind faith and open up to reason, you will find that many things are plain illegal and unethical. The original poster had it right.

I can honestly say that you're pretty clueless on the issue
Oh look, here is an article from 2005, 3 years after the "Axis of Evil" speech, talking about the youth movements in Iran.
You've taken some very common facts, tossed in a name in a lame attempt to give your opinion some weight, then just started just making shit up. Bush and Ahmadinejad shooting their mouths off from across the globe really doesn't show any insight into what is really going on. I plead that you actually do some reading on the issue before making shit up next time. Please.

Basically, the article reads like a marketing pamphlet, and isn't all that informative. Based on the nature of the threats involved, though, it's unlikely that the system will perform as a "protective forcefield" in realistic conditions. It may well be useful and valuable, but I'm very dubious that it will in any way live up to how some people are hyping it.

Because the world's climate scientists have so much to gain by tricking people into driving more fuel efficient cars.

Actually, the energy companies make more money off natural gas per joule than gasoline.

Enron was 100% for America ratifying the kyoto treaty. This is directly due to the money that stands to be gained from alternative fuels like natural gas (which, btw, yields carbon dioxide when burned so it's not much better than gas).

As for TFA, I know this 'group-think' thing exists, and am not surprised that the scientific community (which is just like any other) is biased against uncommon beliefs. Just look at whenever a development in physics happens: the world descends upon the 'upstarts' and almost always criticizes their data, their methods, etc.

We'd like to think that the heliocentric theory, as an example, was initially rejected due to the catholic church (as I first learned it). However, geocentricity was also defended by fellow scientists, and if human nature remains constant, they ferverently believed it as well.

There's a very good book by PJ O'Rourke called "All the trouble in the world." He compares, side-by-side, the argument about greenhouse gasses (then called something else, obviously) and global cooling Vs. the modern statements about global warming. When looked at right next to eachother, these crises-of-the day have the same research telling opposing stories using the same wording. In one instance, statements made by scientists in the 1970's is nearly word-for-word plagurized by Al Gore in the 1990's, with a couple words moved around and "cooling" replaced with "warming" and "ice age" replaced with "flooding/drought."

As a closing thought, we already know political partisans' brains practically shut off when exposed to views they share. I wouldn't be surprised that 'kool-aid drinkers' are common in every idealogical forum, and eat up all factual and fictional data supporting their views without a second thought.

Did you know that the Bush administration has barred climate researchers working for the government from speaking directly to the press? And that press releases, statements, or publicly released research on any climate matter must pass through the White House first, where they are essentially rewritten?

Maybe you should tune into 60 minutes more often.

---Piltz worked under the Clinton and Bush administrations. Each year, he helped write a report to Congress called "Our Changing Planet." Piltz says he is responsible for editing the report and sending a review draft to the White House.

Asked what happens, Piltz says: "It comes back with a large number of edits, handwritten on the hard copy by the chief-of-staff of the Council on Environmental Quality." Asked who the chief of staff is, Piltz says, "Phil Cooney." Piltz says Cooney is not a scientist. "He's a lawyer. He was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, before going into the White House," he says.

Cooney, the former oil industry lobbyist, became chief-of-staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Piltz says Cooney edited climate reports in his own hand. In one report, a line that said earth is undergoing rapid change becomes "may be undergoing change." "Uncertainty" becomes "significant remaining uncertainty." One line that says energy production contributes to warming was just crossed out.

"He was obviously passing it through a political screen," says Piltz. "He would put in the word potential or may or weaken or delete text that had to do with the likely consequence of climate change, pump up uncertainty language throughout." ----

"it takes, on average, 10 years and 1 billion dollars to get a new drug approved in the U.S. ..."

This is simply incorrect. It is likely that this statistic is referring to the time it takes for a drug company to develop and gain approval for a new drug. According to Washington Monthly in May 2000, at that time the FDA approval process was taking about a year, and had decreased from about 2.5 years after so-called "fast track" procedures were implemented in the 90s: (http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2000/00 05.pomper.html)

"If you are arguing that the FDA plays down risks in order to allow buisnesses to sell dangerous products, that is just not true."

I am, and I am by no means alone. For evidence and opinions on this side of the question, you might want to check out:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6520630/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/pres cription/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A313 5-2004Dec15.html

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1126/p02s01-uspo.htm l

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/ a/2004/11/23/MNGSPA04NI1.DTL

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050205/bob10 .asp

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/15/60II/mai n674293.shtml

"Well, that, and you know... ELECTIONS!!!"

You mean the ones that happen Every four years? (Well, every two... sort of)

We all know Bush's approval rating, and yet he's still in office. Power to the people, indeed.

the phrase "don't give them ideas" is commonly used?

The problem isn't if the game MADE him do it, but if the game helped him do it MORE EFFICIENTLY.

From the original CBS News link (not TFA) :

"The video game industry gave him a cranial menu that popped up in the blink of an eye, in that police station," says Thompson. "And that menu offered him the split-second decision to kill the officers, shoot them in the head, flee in a police car, just as the game itself trained them to do."

Perhaps if he hadn't played the game, he would have shot them in the chest where hopefully the cops couldn't have died instantly.

In other words, videogames TRAIN the players to become better and more effective criminals. I don't know about you, but the thought gives me the creeps.

Hey, don't knock them, they're trying. Why, one day they may even provide email access to their agents!

Why are aol worrying about spam we are living in a 'spam free world' now Bill Gates promised sheesh another example of AOL jumping on the bandwagon with to little to late.

Seriously though I really object to the idea of any system that requires any form of pay to use for email, it opens up a very worrying reality of email tax, lets face the US government started charging for the phone system to pay for WW1 whats next email tax to pay for the war in Iraq.

Sure, I see your point. I'd be more likely to do business with fine, upstanding, well-dressed "white guys" than other groups. I mean, appearance is 99% of your reputation, right?

You have sound reasoning, but I think it relies on the government being almost too competent..... I found this article (and that woman's story) to be a good basis to think otherwise:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/25/60minute s/main526954.shtml

What I think is up with those documents is that they got filtered, anything important taken out beforehand, and these are the scraps given to the public. If nothing comes out of it - they can say "Hey, we tried." If anything actually comes out of it, that's icing on the cake, and may have been an find they wouldn't have made with their current resources.

It reminds me of when East Germany fell (1989) and West Germany essentially overtook ("united with") the former communist Government in 1990. In a last ditch effort to save state secrets (the Russians still had influence and enough people had double agent, agent, etcetera roles in the DDR that they didn't want the West to find out), they shredded all the documents before unification.

But for some reason, they left it at that, put the thing essentially neatly and sequentially in garbage bags and dumped them. Since them, Germany has had a facility for taping these documents together (now they use computers) and are still finding the names of DDR agents that were in West Germany, perhaps KGB agents (perhaps?), and other secrets and were still making arrests based on this information.

The point of that story is that if even a humongous economy like Germany (in the top 10 of the world) cannot or will not afford get all those documents together and extract the information in a more timely manner (within a scant several years instead of over 15 years) - why would the US been immune to this problem?

It might have a more resources, but they are also scattered among many interests. Consider that the arabic language is the obstacle in this case (as opposed to shredding) and it's clear that they could use the help deciphering it.

But I agree, they aren't going to give away any obviously groundbreaking information. Yet, intelligence is sometimes relies on linking many small, seemingly irrevalent, pieces of information together rather than a single smoking gun.

Video tapes, chewing gum, what's the difference? Well, for video tapes you get twice the sentence.

Mr Dada- your implication is clear- and I question the intelligence of anyone who posts that kind of threat on a public board. The FCC, like any gov't organizations, can overstep its bounds. And if you don't like it, it can be changed with your vote. I don't want to talk politics, but the tired internet debate is just like the (insert contraversial subject) debate. It is the apathy of the American electorate that allows these crazy schemes to go forward.
Lest you think the above post is speculative: The FCC is an important organizations, as the following article illustrates.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/20/tech/mai n1419502.shtml
FAA On Trail Of Pirate Radio Station
MIAMI, March 20, 2006 (AP)
The FAA said it has conducted about 30 similar investigations of pirate broadcasts interfering with airport transmissions in the past decade.
(AP) Airline pilots taking off from Miami International Airport are getting an earful of hip-hop tunes from a pirate radio station that sometimes interfere with their communications with the control tower.

Right, the forgery issue was always a red herring, perhaps the most successful one in history. What the memo said has been confirmed to be true, while the memo itself may be a forgery. Liberals think it was planted by Rove, conservatives think it was planted by desperate liberals. Conservatives win this one though because disproving this one piece of evidence has somehow caused the public to ignore the rest of the case.

If I forge a document stating that Hawaii is one of the 50 United States, does it make it any less true?

See this CBS article discussing Marian Carr Knox's discussion of the memos and the veracity of the claims.

The documents were proven to be forgeries by Peter Tytell, proof of which was even included in CBS's own Thornburgh-Boccardi report. It's in Appendix 4.

... incredible ... amazing ... thoroughly impressed ... cool ... flat out amazing ... amazing ... unbelievably ... major ...

Lying astroturfer, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.

• First paragraph gives fake credentials to suck wary reader in. Check.
• Rest of article in hype overdrive. Check.
• Claims alternative points of view are troll/flamebait/bash. Check.
• Article is a disorganised mishmash of "positive" points. Check.
• Claims that making the equivalent of a procedure call to existing code is amazing. Check.
• Claims functionality that's been available for years under other names is somehow new. Check.
• Take home point links to further marketing drivel. Check.

It appears to have been mod'ed up by sock puppets too.

Don't think it's an astroturfer? Learn more about undercover marketing, M$' astroturfing history, non-M$ astroturfing, net astroturfing and non-net astroturfing.

---

The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".

If they'd followed the same principle with the intelligence that before the war they claimed they had, and after the war they claimed was "bad intelligence" (whoops!)-- I mean, if they'd just published the "Saddam has WMDs" intelligence on the internet and asked "hey, can anyone fact check this?"-- we wouldn't be in a war needing random volunteers to translate Iraqi documents in the first place.

Of course it would also help if they were a bit smarter with their hiring policies to begin with.

Don't forget Hurricane Rita. Another cat 5 storm within a month of Katrina. Here's a link to a Rita blog that has a lot of informative stories and videos.

For stuff like this:

http://www.thetalentshow.org/images/cbspoll-314.gi f

http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/031306_poll_iraq .pdf

This fellow is a fine previous example of an exception to Azimov's first law.

Funny how history repeats itself, though that should mean that we can lear from it. A good place to start would be Frank Zappa's testimony to congress about the music censoring episode in the 80's that you mentioned. He questions if the comitee that appointed itself to do that moral work could really be fair and unbiased, he states that it was all cooked up as a smokescreen for passing an anti-piracy tax (is there a similar initiative brewing right now?), and he offers an alternative: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/10/06/tech/gam ecore/main924513.shtml
It's also worth checking out his appearance on Crossfire over 20 years ago: http://www.crooksandliars.com/2006/01/10.html (about 3/4 of the way towards the bottom of the page). The details are slightly different, but the core issue is basically the same: the freedom of speech and expression vs. helping parents raise their children.

And then there's Alberta's oil sands, which may contain another 2 trillion or even more.

T. Boone Pickens once rejected working those fields because to make it profitable, oil would have to skyrocket to the unbelievably high price of $5 a barrel. Oil was $61.58 yesterday. Developing this field is now Pickens' largest single investment.

"If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about."

This is the most naive, despicably un-American sentiment of all the tripe that's thrown around in this charade that is post-9/11 paranoia.

I'm sorry for being ad hominem, but please, try to use your imagination here.

This sheep-like "nothing bad happens to good people" mentality is the type of smug, head-in-the-sand mentality that destroys free society. My folks emigrated from behind the "Iron Curtain" in the late 60s exactly to escape the sort of propoganda and easy government-sanctioned persecution that I see creeping up all around us. Let me tell you stories about family and friends fired, harrassed, jailed, and yeah, even tortured because their actions were "misinterpreted", Sometimes they were released without apology a few months later, sometimes not. Sometimes the reason for the police action was political. Sometimes they were framed by competitors. Sometimes they were "snitched" on by neighbors with vendettas. Sometimes they just had the wrong guy. When paranoia rules and every out-of-step behavior is potentially subversive (or "terroristic") it's pretty easy to wreak havoc with people's lives, either intentionally or not.

But that doesn't happen here, right? You wouldn't get labeled terrorist and jailed indefinitely for something as silly as trolling unsavory websites right? Or be charged with a crime and have your property destroyed because you had a stupid bumper sticker, right? And we'd never get so paranoid about air travel as to make a mother drink her own breast milk to prove its safe before boarding a plane, or maybe create a secret no-fly list that is impossible to audit or even acknowledge but sometimes bars toddlers from flying because they might be terrorists (along with hundreds of others, including members of Congress), right? I mean, these are good people who didn't do anything wrong. I can't imagine that there'd be a slew of kafkaesque civil rights abuses that an internal Justice Dept. investigation might uncover, right? (I won't even touch domestic wiretapping) I mean, those who have nothing to fear have nothing to hide, right? Right.

These are just small examples, and maybe not even very good one. And maybe you'll never inconvenienced like the couple in this story. But who knows. Maybe you'll be the victim of identity theft, or even framed.. Maybe you'll have to engage in some bizzare but innocent behavior. Maybe you'll want to voice an unpopular opinion, or go read/hear someone else's horrible and unpopular opinion. Or maybe it'll just be some bureaucratic "oops". But, if it does happen, and YOU find yourself interrogated by the FBI, or forced to explain some blotch on your record for the rest of your life, or maybe even jailed without charge for a few months, then you come tell me how, sure, maybe you lost three months of your life in a cell being molested by thugs, but hey, at the end, everyone figured out it was just a big mistake. So really, it was OK. We're all safer for it. God bless America.

Where do I get my crap? Hmmm...

  http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/press/1997/DECEMBER /199708.htm/
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2005-02-23-aid s-india-cover_x.htm?csp=34
http://qa.aidsmatters.org/answer/13479/
http://indiatogether.org/2005/jun/ksh-blaming.htm
http://www.youandaids.org/Asia%20Pacific%20at%20a% 20Glance/India/index.asp
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3886883.stm
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/08/60minute s/main610961.shtml

Maybe they do have a very low per capita incidince of HIV, but it's been shown that the rate of infection is increasing at a rate more than any other country. Combined with the sheer number of people, infected and not, the virus is set to explode. Sorry, I can't find the particular article in which I read this at this moment, but when I do find it, I'll be happy to share. Everywhere I've read, it's extremely taboo for Indians to discuss sex and AIDS.

I don't think the numbers you link to tell the story very well. It's like trying to say that Luxemborg has a larger economy than the US because thier GDP per capita is 60% higher than ours, which is obviously not the case. Compare China and India. They're the only two countries that are close enough to be comparable in popluation and economic status. The CIA world factbook (the source of information that Nationmaster uses) says that 0.9% of Indians are infected, that 0.6% of US citizens are infected, and that 0.1% of Chinese are infected, and that there are about six times the number of Indians infected as there are Chinese, despite China having a third of a million more people (i.e. approximately one United States more people than India).

My point to the poster I replied to was that Indians get it on like nobody's business. I stand by it.

All of this was accomplished without the PATRIOT Act, and nothing in the PATRIOT Act would have made a difference if the same mistakes were made.

Also, the attacks in Madrid and London happened while the Patriot Act was in full force (and the illegal wiretapping was already going on). How come they were not prevented?

This is not a crime-enforcing bill, it is a counter-terrorism bill.
Keep lying to yourself, hopefully one day you will wake up...

Sure. And "Two years from now, spam will be solved

He relished the task, launching a reign of terror which was brutal even by the standards of the Baath Party.

According to opposition groups, thousands were murdered.

Victims were made to drink petrol before being set alight or strapped to concrete blocks and tipped into the Shatt-al-Arab waterway.

Bodies were bulldozed into the ground and, according to aid agencies, Al-Majid was filmed selecting Shia prisoners for execution. It was for his earlier atrocities, though, that he gained his nickname. He masterminded chemical attacks on Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s.

On one occasion he rejected suggestions he had killed 182,000 people with the chilling reply: "No, it couldn't have been more than 100,000."

His most infamous outrage was the use of poison gas to kill thousands of Kurds at Halabja in 1988.

Human Rights Watch covers it.

The Telegraph has done a series of stories: here, here, and here:

Like thousands of other Kurds who lived in Halabja he had become inured to the frequent artillery bombardments launched by Baghdad's big guns across the valley.

It was not until he saw a yellow mist settling over the town that he realised this attack was different.

Within hours his five children had died an excruciating death. They were among about 5,000 Kurds killed by Saddam Hussein's poison gas on March 16, 1988, as he exacted a hideous revenge for their support of Iran in the Iran-Iraq war.

The Christian Science Monitor did this story:

The memory of every Iraqi Kurd is seared with vivid images of Baghdad's 1988 genocide against its own ethnic Kurds when troops loyal to the Iraqi strongman were under orders to kill every Kurdish male in northern Iraq between the ages of 18 and 55. During the Anfal campaign, rights groups say more than 100,000 men disappeared, 4,000 villages were destroyed, and 60 more villages were subject to chemical weapons attack.

Some 5,000 Kurds died during the gassing of Halabja alone. The photograph of a man shielding an infant with his body ? both killed by gas ? has become an icon of Kurdish suffering and of Iraqi war crimes.

Although a part of the defense establishment didn't believe it for a time, the State Department apparently didn't get the word even in 2001.

This site has photos.

Why this should be hard to believe when Iraq was actively using chemical weapons against the Iranians at the time, and more and more mass graves with thousands of bodies from simple mass murder each are turning up in Iraq, I'll neven know.

Saddam's government apparently even killed as many as 61,000 just in Baghdad alone.

The survey obtained Monday, which the polling firm planned to release

The GOP is going to use the survey results to propose redistricting that will tip the balance of the legislature towards the right. See gerrymandering, Texas, and DeLay.

Ray-ban - has an ugly, overflashed website

Green-bay Packers - not in the superbowl since 1998, and lost.

Caimen Islands - never won independence from the Brits

Day-keeper???

Fay Wray - serial polyandress

Jay Leno - did have enough class to call and apologize for slandering a viewer.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/22/entertai nment/main1339184.shtml

Mary Kay - an entire business built on vanity
Pay Day - decent candybar, and the reason I get depressed again every Thursday.

Everyone Loves Raymond. No, everyone doesn't. The one shining moment in this sitcom was when the kid drew a scary picture and wrote dish about his family that got his parents called to the school. Unfortunately, the show only reinforced Deborah's "deviancy" and the nuts' normality.

Stay Puff - yeah, he looked tough, but how did he handle proton beams?

Safeway - rat infested; left Texas sometime in the '80's

... the fleecing of Californians was mostly during Clinton.

A simple Google(California Enron) will get you lots of information, almost all of which contradicts your statement. Similarly a Google(Bush California price caps) will show you that starting before the inauguration and lasting until at least the end of May, 2001, Bush refused to impose price caps to stop the gouging.

"We will not take any action that makes California's problems worse and that's why I oppose price caps,"
-- George Bush, May 29, 2001

President-elect Bush bluntly rejected yesterday the electricity price caps desperately sought by Gov. Gray Davis, calling them "a short-term delay of a needed solution."

Bush, in his first direct comments on California's rolling blackouts, whose repercussions are beginning to cascade beyond the state's borders, blamed the problem on California's "flawed" deregulation legislation, which he said the state has to fix.

"I have read where some propose price controls," Bush told the Associated Press. "I'm against price controls."

Finally take a look a what CBS News had to say:

Before the 2000 election, Enron employees pondered the possibilities of a Bush win.

"It'd be great. I'd love to see Ken Lay Secretary of Energy," says one Enron worker.

That didn't happen, but they were sure President Bush would fight any limits on sky-high energy prices.

...in February 1996...[t]he Sudanese offered to arrest Bin Laden and extradite him to Saudi Arabia or, barring that, to "baby-sit" him--monitoring all his activities and associates.

Former Sudanese officials claim that Sudan offered to expel Bin Ladin to the United States. Clinton administration officials deny ever receiving such an offer. We have not found any reliable evidence to support the Sudanese claim.

Here's the text for those people at work that can visit /., but not fohguild.com:
--

Smed
Registered User

Join Date: Apr 2005
Posts: 50

The new CBS story including the interview I did is now up here:

http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/tech...in500397.sh tml

For the record, it was done prior to my getting involved in this thread. One quote I gave the CBS interviewer had to do with us never releasing anything that wasn't done . Throughout this particular thread I've had you all (and here I will give Utnayan the credit) point out several times in the past where there were unfinished pieces of some of our expansions.

As I've double checked some of the specific instances he listed (and others as well) I think it's fair to say that there were indeed cases where stuff wasn't properly finished as it should have been. In other cases stuff was in fact completed, but bad loot was dropping.. or in some cases some progression stopping bugs.

I apologize for that.

We've got the process in place to make sure that doesn't happen again. My biggest beef all along with these issues is the idea that we would have done it on purpose. That has never been the case. We do take a great deal of pride in what we do, and as I've stated before in this thread we love making great online games. We need to always keep quality as our main priority when we're releasing content, and I think for the most part we do. I also know that as a company we've matured and our releases have gotten cleaner and cleaner. We're never going to be perfect, but we can and we will be better.

Smed
__________________
John Smedley
President, Sony Online Entertainment

Microsoft's general counsel said "Transparency is vitally important in what can be a very opaque process in Brussels. We've decided to open this up so people can understand the issues."

Also a ZDNet article, FSF berates apathy over Microsoft antitrust case , reports that the FSFE has criticised EU IT firms for not supporting the EC in its antitrust case against Microsoft.

ZDNet report that George Greve said in a blog entry that "[the] FSFE has been working on this case for many years, from the original investigation, over the 2004 decision, to the European Court case where it is now one of two [active] remaining third parties on the side of the European Commission. I only hope that more companies will help us defending their interests in this -- to this date, FSFE has received virtually no support for this case from the industry. Consequently, all the credit belongs to the free software community, including in particular the Fellows of the FSFE."

Greve also responds to the new EU complaint by ECIS applauding it, but pointing out that this may seem inconsistent as Microsoft has already reached individual settlements with ECIS members such as RealNetworks and Sun.

Also there is a good Guardian article from a few days ago which summarises and criticises recent rebuffs by MS to the EC's decision.

Also there is an entry on Tod Bishop's Microsoft Blog, Lessig advocates Microsoft , reporting that Lessig supports Microsoft's InfoCard project.

"For some reason or another, the gaming industry has grown used to the idea that a game can ship with some bugs and that this is somehow an excusable side effect of dealing with computer software," Silverman contends. If a CD doesn't play the last track, you go get your money back. If a DVD is missing a chapter, you go get your money back. If the display on your television doesn't work properly, you go get your money back. If a car company forgets -- I don't know, the seat belts, you go get your money back (assuming you were dumb enough to buy a car without seat belts in the first place). Moreover, if one particular company keeps releasing CDs or DVDs or TVs or cars with bugs in them, people start to avoid that company like the plague because they're releasing "incomplete" products.

Actually, more often then not, when someone releases a defective product (car, etc.), they issue a recall. Yes, this is so common, that there's a word for it. How many automotive recalls have there been? Many, to say the least. Frequently, a recall just means you bring your car back, and get whatever's broken in it fixed, and you go on with your life.

Software's even easier to fix. You don't even have to bring it back to the shop! Frequently, you can get it fixed for free, in under 5 minutes, without even getting out of your chair!

Concievably, software companys could increase their QA and/or development budgets by several orders of magnitude and iron out a few more bugs before release (or adopt a development method that avoids these sort of issues in the first place), but that cost would have to be passed on to the customer, and it wouldn't be cheap.

Yes, if a group becomes notorious for releasing unusable software, people will stop patronizing them. But a non-fatal bug here or there... who cares?


Back to the topic of writing bugless code, according to this article:
"When Neumann's group worked with NASA on software for the space shuttle, developers were so careful about bugs that they produced just three lines of code per day..."

Bugless code is very expensive. Anyone who claims all software should be flawless clearly has no idea what they're talking about.

1. Security, security, security
This has never be a paramount feature of Windows V.anything. In fact, it's been anything but the 3 s's. We are still waiting for the IE fix as well as the grandiose top priority on security.

2. Internet Explorer 7: IE gets a much-needed, Firefox-inspired makeover
See #1 .. we are still waiting. Can we cut the shit and focus on a more secure browser instead of glitz and tabs?

3. Righteous eye candy:
See #2.. Could we get something to nip that little spyware problem please? Enough with the froof.

4. Desktop search:
hot tip: [START] -> right click -> explore -> F3 (above the #4 key). if your 1eet, dir /s

5. Better updates:
Can we get that XP patch first? Maybe if you weren't dicking with the eye-candy, we could have this before 2007.

6. More media:
Ok, this looks like a good fix. Oh, wait.. no mention of fixing it I guess. How long has this been a problem?

7-10.. add your own

Apple has a great product (I own one myself, and I LOVED it), but the ipods have a few flaws, ok,ALOT of flaws.

If Amazon could design a device that a) has a battery that doesnt die after 1 year b) has a hard drive that doesn't die after 1 year I'd be alot happier.

I have a 5 year old mp3 player that still works great (too bad it only holds 128 megs). My 4G ipod just died after 1 year 1 month exactly (never dropped it or anything which would damage it in any way). Now, I understand hardware can die, but for $400, I'd expect it to last more then a year. Luckily I bought a 2 year warranty so I got mine replaced for free, but many other people weren't so lucky and now have a $400 paperweight.

If your ipod isn't under warranty you can always get the battery replaced for around $60-70, if its the hard drive, you might aswell buy a new one. I will never buy another iPod or Apple product again after the stress and fustration this ordeal has caused me.

This last christmas, my sister and her husband decided to buy themselves 2 ipod nanos, they ended up returning them and getting replacements about 5 times because they didnt work (each replacement didnt work either). They eventually gave up on the nano and bought 2 ipod videos.

I'll probably be modded down for speaking out against Apple/ipod.

dead ipods faulty ipods

Ipod Battery Class Action Lawsuit Class Action Lawsuit against Apple for their faulty Ipod Nano Apple settles Ipod Class Action Lawsuit

The iPod Customer Service Story and Other Fairy Tales

http://www.ipodsdirtysecret.com/

Hopefully Amazon's "ipod" will work for more then a year. I could care less about how it looks, it will be in my pocket 99% of the time anyway. So please, design something that is a quality product, not just pretty looking.

There was an interesting story about the Alberta oilsands on 60 minutes a year ago.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/01/20/60minute s/main1225184.shtml/

According to the guy at Shell Canada, there might be potentially 2 trillion barrels of oil there. However, most of it can't me mined cost effectively... yet.