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I don't agree with his comment about not being able, as an automotive enthusiast, to modify your car. Besides all the rice-boy type modifications, people have been hacking their newer cars in ingenious ways. There was an article (which may require free registration) in the Chicago Tribune about people modifying their Toyota Prius for more efficiency, customizing it's dashboard and integral LCD (to be able to display any ol' video signal), etc. Look, people find a way to hack everything.

It's even less of an issue with PCs. There are enough electrical/computer engineers in the world to tell us how to hack just about anything. People said that the Intel Celeron (R) wasn't SMP capable, but look at all the people that were out there drilling pins out and rewiring their CPUs to take advantage of the PII core! Don't tell me that you won't be able to hack hardware; it just becomes more challenging and FUN!

I don't agree with his comment about not being able, as an automotive enthusiast, to modify your car. Besides all the rice-boy type modifications, people have been hacking their newer cars in ingenious ways. There was an article (which may require free registration) in the Chicago Tribune about people modifying their Toyota Prius for more efficiency, customizing it's dashboard and integral LCD (to be able to display any ol' video signal), etc. Look, people find a way to hack everything.

It's even less of an issue with PCs. There are enough electrical/computer engineers in the world to tell us how to hack just about anything. People said that the Intel Celeron (R) wasn't SMP capable, but look at all the people that were out there drilling pins out and rewiring their CPUs to take advantage of the PII core! Don't tell me that you won't be able to hack hardware; it just becomes more challenging and FUN!

Now I have an idea of what Slashdot must have been like in the early days. Best series of intelligent and coherent posts Ive read in a long time.

I would love to see the essence of StoryMan's post expanded and posted in a more visible location.

The post looks like it belongs in the Code of Hammurabi or at least mentioned in that Sunscreen song! ;-) Thanks again, folks!

Take a look at this article from the Chicago Tribune. It would have been known as the Dearborn Tower, but I guess not anymore. The model of the proposed building is pretty cool.

-Cyc

Take a look at this article from the Chicago Tribune. It would have been known as the Dearborn Tower, but I guess not anymore. The model of the proposed building is pretty cool.

-Cyc

I agree. There was an artical in the chicago tribune newpaper Yesterday on a company called copyright.net that is using a peice of software, little bot anyway. To scan the harddrives of users that are using the service of napster or gunata(sp) looking for Songs that are copyrighted. The link to the article is HERE

Once is finds a song title on your system is sends of a letter of demand to your ISP, demanding that your connection be terminated until you remove the offending title. This is very much like breading and entering to me. They are not part of any of the services that the user uses, but they secretly invade a system and scan the hard drive. There needs to be laws protecting us from Blantant attacts on our privacy like this. I posted this to /. yesterday but it was rejected as an article so figure is sorta fits here.
The Zaphod

And here's the URL in plaintext since /. has a way of mangling long URLs (any spaces which appear here should not be there):

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/zorn /0,1122,SAV-9908260240,00.html

The few things that stuck out with me were:

Yes, the camera work is a great idea - I can't say it was done well because, well, it wasn't, but, we are talking about the first weekend of this. Having a couple of camermen (read: targets) ON the field during play was a great idea, I liked being able to "be in the tackle" and I also liked the view from the camera suspended above the field behind the Quarterback (while a columnist from The Chicago Tribune said that "there's a reason why people want tickets on the fifty yard line").

As for play, well, the opener wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. The televized game was (this is also a segue into a con) The New York / New Jersey Hitmen vs. The Las Vegas Outlaws, it was a trouncing!!! The game ended up being 19-0 LV. In the 4th quarter they switched games over to The Orlando Rage vs. The Chicago Enforcers. This was what seemed to be a very decent game. But, the question that was running through my mind the whole night was - "I'm from Chicago. I live in Chicago. Why the hell am i watching NY/NJ play LV when my home team is playing?!?!?!"

Granted there are pure hard-core football fans but those fans are more of a fan for their home team so one of the many things that will have to be looked over is the regionalizing of games. I watched the first games because I wanted to see if the XFL was going to be football, not a show of tits and ass and wrestling hoaxes. I'm going to stay a fan NOT because of the XFL but because of the teams and The Enforcers in particular. Yes, there was a huge showing of tits and ass and in most cases, thats a good thing. But, if i want to see half-naked women on a saturday night or sunday afternoon, I'd give my girlfriend a kiss on the cheek and see a fully-naked woman infront of me (and her breasts aren't fake)

The trips into the locker room (which were heavily hyped) were less than spectacular. The miking up of more than 20 people made for quintessential four-star-five-second-delay-goofs (maybe they need seven). They also have to get betterannouncers. There was virtually no insight into the game or who the players were. But I did have the opprotunity to have Gov. Jesse "The Body" Ventura scream at me for over 2 hours.

If you were/are a fan of old-school football when guys actually got popped this may be for you 'cause the rules made the game. I'm not trying to say this is some hard-core rough-nose football that is sure as hell going to impress everyone (I've seen Lawrence Taylor play live) but these guys are out to win. The starting salary for Quarterbacks is $50,000, Kickers get $35,000 and everyone else gets $45,000. The incentive is that with every regular season game, the winning team splits a pot of $100,000. The championship pays a pot of $1,000,000. So in fact, they arent paid all that much to play - but they do get paid more to win.

Other noteworthy rules are:

No fair catches. Recievers are given a 5 yard "halo" that can't be breached until he catches the ball. I can tell you now, as long as its only a five yard penalty for breaching it, the kicking team is going to do all they can to kill the poor-lame-duck-reciever.

One man-in-motion towards the line of scrimmage before the snap.

Bump-and-run all the way down the field. If the Defensive End can, they can have their hands on the wide reciever throughout the entire play with a few exceptions. 1) Until the ball is in the air 2) The Reciever passes him (no hitting from the side or from the back). This can maked timed plays (eg. 12 and In) very difficult.

No coin toss. The ball is set in the middle of the field and one player from each team run 20 yds and fight for posession of the ball. Kinda cool but, a player from Orlando (I believe) seperated his shoulder during this and was out of the game before it even began.

The four games (eight teams) are played on seperate nights, two on saturday and two on sunday.

The ratings showed that people were definitely interested but that was the first weekend, let's see what happens in the weeks to come and if they can keep their fan-base. All in all *I* thought it was an enjoyable weekend of football and seeing how it is in its infancy - I'm sure it'll only get better.

At least, that's what the Washington Post reported. Texas is really about the only exception to that rule, actually. The Illinois court case Boies cited had the court rejecting dimpled ballots, as the Chicago Tribune found.

--

Today's Chicago Tribune has a story ("Chicago certifies vote") that gives the number of "ballots cast ... in which a vote for president was not counted." Due to both undervotes and overvotes (the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners doesn't differentiate), the number was 72,093 or seven percent.

If we had a system where the president would be elected by a plurality of the national popular vote, surely the Bush people would be challenging this, trying to gain additional votes through a recount. Just two more cities with situations like this and -- under an election by national popular vote -- that's enough to change the outcome.

Today's Chicago Tribune has a story ("Chicago certifies vote") that gives the number of "ballots cast ... in which a vote for president was not counted." Due to both undervotes and overvotes (the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners doesn't differentiate), the number was 72,093 or seven percent.

If we had a system where the president would be elected by a plurality of the national popular vote, surely the Bush people would be challenging this, trying to gain additional votes through a recount. Just two more cities with situations like this and -- under an election by national popular vote -- that's enough to change the outcome.

Fifteen minutes with a web-browser brings up some of the real "FACTS" behind several of your items. I don't have time to check them all -- I wish you had done it before posting:

FICTION: Al Gore said his father, a senator, was a champion of civil rights during the 1960's.

FACT: Gore's father voted against the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and was a racist who was fond of using the "N" word.

I assume you're refering to the Washington Post's article from back in April, though I've never seen any mention of Al Sr. being "fond of using the 'N' word"! Here's the full quote from the Post article:

Long before Bill Clinton came along, Gore lived in the shadow of another dominant politician, his father, Sen. Albert Gore Sr. of Tennessee. Many of the deepest tensions of American race relations were played out during the long career of Sen. Gore, whose opposition to the segregated ways of his native South angered many of his constituents and eventually led to his political demise. With one notable exception, when he capitulated to regional sentiment and opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the choices he made over more than three decades in Washington were courageous -- and they provided lasting lessons in the political education of the son. If there are as many ways of looking at Al Gore on the issue of race as Wallace Stevens found to look at a blackbird, the first views, shading all the rest, including his relationship with Clinton, come from the life and times of his parents.
(no longer available for free from the Post, but a reprint is available at http://www.jessejacksonjr.o rg/ issues/i042300173.html)

FICTION: Al Gore claimed the book "Love Story" was based on his life and Tipper's.

FACT: Author Erich Segal called a press conference to deny his claim. (Couldn't he at least lie about a love story where his sweetheart doesn't die?"

This is actually an older story that first started circulating in 1997. Here's the actual article from the time about Erich Segal's supposed "denial."

"When the author Erich Segal was asked about Gore's impression, he stated that the preppy hockey-playing male lead, Oliver Barrett IV, indeed was modeled after Gore and Gore's Harvard roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones." (Original from December 1997 NYTimes no longer available on-line. Similar article at the Chicago Tribune http://chicagotribune.com/news/metro/chicago/print edition/article/0,2669,SAV-0008280152,FF .html )

FICTION: While running for office, Gore's campaign literature claimed he was a "Brilliant Student".

FACT: Washington newspapers said he barely passed Harvard and consistently earned D's and C's.

What are these mythical "Washington newspapers" you keep citing? Give me an actual cite, ferkrisakes.

In this case, you're talking about this article from the March 18 Washington Post. Gore did get one D, some C's, and a B his first year, but his grades moved up from there, and he was generally an A and B student his senior year. He graudated cum laude (a far cry from "barely passing") based on the strength of his thesis. Here's a quote from the article:

In his junior year, he earned a B, a B-plus and an A-minus in three government courses, and he aced his senior government thesis on the impact of television on the presidency, a strong finish that made him a cum laude graduate. His devotion to the subject by then was so intense that he gave much of his time to a not-for-credit seminar with his favorite professor, Richard Neustadt, an expert on the presidency.

-- Adam

The New Science of Character Assassination
Phil Agre
15 October 2000

You are welcome to forward this article electronically to anyone for any noncommercial purpose.

The past ten days will go down as a turning point in American history. This is what it's like when the far right is taking over your country: the people support Al Gore's policies, but the polls are shifting toward George W. Bush because the media is filled with false attacks on Al Gore's character. A story in today's (10/15/00) New York Times states openly what has been clear all along, that this campaign of character assassination has been planned and executed over a long period by the Republicans.
--Story Link--

Character assassination is, of course, nothing new for Republicans, who mastered the art in the days of Richard Nixon. What's new is that the press constantly repeats the lies. Not just once or twice, not just the occasional slip, but over and over and over.

Let us consider the New York Times story in detail. Written by Alison Mitchell, it describes Al Gore's abject apology for two trivial and much-exaggerated errors in the first debate as "the culmination of a skillful and sustained 18-month campaign by Republicans to portray the vice president as flawed and untrustworthy".

The New York Times discerns four landmarks in this campaign, and they are as follows:

• Landmark number one:

• ... in December 1997 ... the [Republican National] committee announced it had started a contest to come up with a slogan for Mr. Gore after he told reporters that the hero and heroine in the novel "Love Story" were modeled after him and his wife, Tipper. (Erich Segal, the author, soon said that his protagonist, Oliver Barrett IV, was only partly based on Mr. Gore, while Jenny Cavilleri had nothing to do with Tipper Gore.)

  In this case, the RNC's claim was false. Gore had not told anyone that Love Story was based on him and his wife. Rather, he had mentioned a newspaper article that had inaccurately said that, and was carefully to say that he only had the article's word to go on. Observe that Mitchell repeats the RNC's false account, and then (following the longstanding convention) makes it sound as though Segal was contradicting Gore, when in fact he was defending him. The false "Love Story" store continues to be repeated to the present day.
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number two:

• So when Mr. Gore said in an interview with CNN in March 1999 that "during my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet", Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the majority leader, issued this mocking statement: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the paper clip".

  The problem, of course, was that Gore's claim was correct. As the Internet's scientific leaders attest, often heatedly, Gore recognized the significance of the Internet very early, and took the initiative in doing the political work and articulating the public vision that made the Internet possible. His sentence, which is often not quoted in its entirety, makes perfectly clear that he was talking about the work he did in the context of his Congressional service, and that he is not claiming, ridiculously, to have done the technical work as well. Mitchell shades the story by omitting the Republicans' (and media's) most common distortion of the matter, that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. This falsehood has been repeated on literally hundreds of occasions, and George W. Bush routinely uses it in his speeches.
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number three:

• On the day Mr. Gore announced his candidacy in Carthage, Tenn., his family's hometown, Jim Nicholson, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, had a more elaborate stunt. He rode in a wagon pulled by mules to the hotel on Embassy Row in Washington where Mr. Gore lived for much of his youth.

  "He has tried to pass himself off as this hardscrabble, homespun central Tennessee farm boy and that is not what he is", said Mr. Nicholson, playing off the fact that Mr. Gore had told The Des Moines Register that he had learned to slop hogs and clear land on the family farm. Friends later told reporters that Mr. Gore's father had kept him on a backbreaking work schedule during summers on the family farm.

  The problem, again, is that Gore's claim was true. He did work on his family farm as a child. This time, Mitchell admits that the Republicans were making it up. But she still shades the story by making it sound as though the truth hadn't come out until later, and as though the contrary view rests solely on the word of Gore's friends. In fact the childhood farm chores had been extensively reported for a decade. The false claim that Gore had lied about the chores was repeated on many occasions in the press.
  --Story Link--
  --Story Link--

• Landmark number four:

• The Republicans got help as well from an unexpected source. When the Democratic primary fight became bitter, former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey insisted that Mr. Gore had deliberately distorted his policy positions in what he called a "pattern of misrepresentation". At one point, Mr. Bradley spat out, "Why should we believe that you will tell the truth as president if you don't tell the truth as a candidate?"

  The problem is that Bradley is endlessly quoted to this effect without any attempt to determine whether he is right. In fact Bradley often wrongly accused Gore of distorting his positions.

And that's it. That, according to the New York Times, is the story of the Republicans' campaign to paint Al Gore as an embellisher. The New York Times cites four accusations, all of them false, and in every case the New York Times either repeats the false accusations as truth or else provides misleading accounts of them.

The New York Times' article is not an aberration. The list of false attacks on Al Gore's character that have been circulated in the media for the last two years is extraordinary. In some cases, as in the ones (mis)cited by the New York Times, Gore is accused of lying when he was actually telling the truth:

• Several publications have called Gore a liar in very harsh terms because he claimed that his father was a pioneer in the civil rights movement. It is true that his father lost his nerve on the Civil Rights Act, but that does not change the overwhelming and (until recently) universally accepted evidence of his leadership on civil rights. Gore's assertion is perfectly accurate.
• 
  --Story Link--
• In probably the single most vicious attack of the entire campaign, several publications have suggested that Gore lied when claiming to have been present at his sister's death. The only evidence they offer is that he also made a political speech the same day, and Gore's driver has explained his schedule for that day in detail.
• 
  --Story Link--

In other cases, Gore's words are twisted, misquoted, or simply made up to make him sound as though he were making a claim that he was not making. For example, some publications have even claimed, falsely, that Gore literally uttered the words "inventing the Internet".
--Story Link--

There are many others:

• In the closing moments of Gore's second debate with George W. Bush, Jim Lehrer falsely accused Gore of having called Bush a "bumbler" in one of his campaign commercials.
• 
  --Story Link--

  Was this simply a mistake on Lehrer's part? Okay, but Lehrer made his "mistake" in the context of rebuking Gore for his own miniscule mistakes in the first debate.

• Gore told a a union audience that his mother had sung the "union label" song to him as a child. Gore's comment was obviously a joke and the audience took it as a joke. Yet, incredibly, numerous supposed journalists have asserted that he meant it seriously, or else tried (on no evidence) to cast doubt on Gore's obviously-true claim that it was a joke.
• 
  --Story Link--
• When Gore spoke of his proposal to put Social Security and Medicare in a "lockbox", some "journalists" accused him of dissembling on the astonishing grounds that he was not actually proposing to put the money into a physical box.
• 
  --Story Link--
• When the Washington Post finally gave up on the "Love Story" story, pretending that it had only recently been disproven, they moved to another falsehood. Gore had claimed that his sister was the first volunteer for the Peace Corps. This claim was accurate, inasmuch as his sister had in fact worked for the Corps without pay from its earliest days, only later joining its paid staff. But the Post called Gore's claim a "lie", on the grounds that she had not worked as a volunteer *overseas*, which Gore had never claimed; they did not mention that she worked without pay.
• 
  --Story Link--
• Gore told some students in New Hampshire the story of a Tennessee community activist who brought his attention to a toxic dump, whereupon he looked for other examples, found Love Canal, and held the first hearings on the issue. "Journalists" first misquoted him as having claimed to to have started the issue, when in fact he was giving credit to the activists. Even when the misquotation was grudgingly corrected, they continued to distort his words, as if he were claiming to have discovered the toxic pollution at Love Canal.

In yet other cases, Gore made a trivial error that has been exaggerated by his critics, and the exaggeration has been falsely attributed to him. Such is the case with the school in Florida that Gore cited in the first of his debates with George W. Bush.
--Story Link--

These are just a few examples among many. People make mistakes all the time. Al Gore is one of them, and it's surprising that an army of opposition researchers hasn't come up with more substantive errors after fact-checking a whole life of public statements. So is George W. Bush, whose errors during the two debates so far have been dramatically worse than those of Gore. To start with, Bush falsely implied that the Europeans have no troops in Kosovo, when in fact they have tens of thousands, and that the United States has significant numbers of troops in Haiti, when it does not. And he made numerous false statements:

• that Gore was outspending him, when the opposite was true;
• that the rate of uninsured people was falling in Texas and rising nationally, when the opposite was true;
• that the men who killed James Byrd would be put to death, when only two had been sentenced to death and their appeals had not been exhausted;
• that middle-income seniors would get drug coverage immediately under his Medicare plan;
• that Gore had lied about this;
• that the new spending in his budget plan is equal to the tax cuts;
• that "most of the tax reductions [in his plan] go to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder";
• that the president is unable to influence the actions of the Food and Drug Administration;
• that Hillary Clinton's 1993 national health insurance initiative would have entailed nationalizing health care; and
• that Gore had claimed to be the author of the Earned Income Tax Credit law.

That is just a partial list of Bush's "mistakes" in two ninety-minute debates, and it doesn't include the dubious numbers he quoted from Republicans in the Senate or the mess he made of education, taxes, Social Security, and the Middle East. Nor does it include the "mistakes" that littered his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, or the especially egregious "mistakes" of his brutal campaign against John McCain in South Carolina, and so on.
--Story Link--

With only a few exceptions (like the one just cited), the press has gone to great lengths to cover up or minimize Bush's false statements. Press coverage of the first debate focused overwhelmingly on Gore's two comparatively trivial errors and on endless suggestions that Gore was rude for having sighed several times.
--Story Link--

Of course, the sighs were often exaggerated by turning the volume up. (Falsely calling someone a liar, as Bush did several times, is not rude?) Pundits bizarrely praised Bush for his command of the issues after the first debate despite his lengthy catalog of errors:
--Catalog Link--

And the 10/5/00 Washington Post buried the Democrats' list of Bush errors at the end of a long story about Bush's accusations against Gore.

The problem is systemic. A reporter for a British newspaper, the Observer, was struck at the completely different approaches of the reporters covering Gore and Bush, and reported a disturbing incident in which a Washington Post reporter well-known for her open hostility to Gore held a toy gun to his head.
--Story Link--

Indeed, press coverage of Gore has been spun in a strongly negative fashion for a long time.
--Story Link--
--Story Link--
--Story Link--

The press, following the lead of Republican "investigators", has repeatedly falsified and spun the famous Buddhist temple event, among others.
--Story Link--

They have also falsified and exaggerated Gore's performance in earlier debates, thereby creating a caricuture of him as a vicious attacker.
--Story Link--

Yes, the press has suggested that Bush is not mentally competent to run the country. But it has not fabricated huge amounts of evidence to support this charge, and it has not routinely used vocabulary that is remotely as harsh as that used against Gore. You have rarely seen the media call Bush a "moron" or "idiot", but Gore has routinely been called much worse. Here is a very partial list:

• "evil"
• "imperious&qu ot;, "repellent"
• "lethal", "ruthless", "liar"
• "ruthless", "relentless", "bully", "maniacal"
• "manipulative", "dishonest"

(I am citing the Daily Howler for most of these examples so that you can read some analysis of them. But the Howler provides precise citations for the originals, which should be easy to look up.)

Indeed, Bush's alleged mental incompetence is often tacitly used to excuse his falsehoods -- he doesn't know what he's talking about, so he can't be lying. Or Gore is accused of a "pattern" of false and exaggerated statements, but then Bush escapes the same accusation for the simple reason that nobody bothers to gather Bush's false and exaggerated statements in one place.

This is just the press. We're not even talking about the conservatives on the Internet that have been circulating long lists of Gore's supposed lies and exaggerations -- most of which are, of course, themselves lies or exaggerations, including garbled and embellished versions of the already false versions in the press. Some of these lists are credited to the RNC, but of course it is hard to know for sure.

The new science of character assassination, then, has several components:

• It starts with a strategy: a conscious choice by a political party that it is going to position its opponent in a certain way. The 10/15/00 Washington Post quotes a Republican consultant as saying that "PR 101 is define your opponent before he tries to define himself", and the whole campaign is clearly organized by the principles of PR.
• It requires a clearinghouse to distribute "facts" that fit the strategy. In this case the burden has been carried by the Republican National Committee and by the office of House majority leader Dick Armey, which got its start by circulating the original fraudulent charges from Wired News about Gore's Internet statement.
• It requires rank-and-file supporters who are willing to pass along any junk that fits the party line.
• But above all, it requires a press corps that has decided to go along with it. Part of the problem is that the press operates in packs -- an echo chamber of lazy pundits in which every "fact" that fits a prevailing stereotype gets endlessly repeated.

But it's not just that. It is not surprising that Rupert Murdoch's media properties, such as Fox and the New York Post, publish smears against people who disagree with Murdoch's far-right views. But it can hardly be an accident that the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Associated Press have all assigned reporters to the Gore campaign who write, day in and day out, the same sorts of exaggerated smears. To be sure, the press is not unanimous in spreading Republican lies as truth; the contrast between the NYT/Post/AP axis and the calm reporting of the Los Angeles Times could hardly be greater. But the Post, Times, and AP, all well-connected and widely syndicated, set the tone for the press as a whole. The fix is clearly in, and these establishment media operations are clearly down with it. They see which way the wind is blowing, and they don't want to get left behind.

A kind of coup is in effect, continuing the pattern of the Whitewater hoax and impeachment. If the far right succeeds in its campaign, then the incoming government will be staffed by people who are trained in the new science of character assassination. It's all they know. And having destroyed Al Gore, they will come after the rest of us.

Copyright (c) 2000 by Philip E. Agre.
All rights reserved.

Jeez, you could maybe use this great resource of information called the internet to answer your own question!!

Here is a good article by Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune

simply because you are ill-informed and do not research any claims by the candidates.
Do you listen to everything that you hear???

Thanks to Eric Zorn with the Chicago Tribune for this:

In June 1986, back when there were fewer than 5,000 network host sites (there are tens of millions today) available to a comparative handful of knowledgeable users, Gore, then a senator from Tennessee, introduced the Supercomputer Network Study Act in response to fears in the research community that the U.S. was dangerously lagging in this area.

Then in October 1988, Gore introduced the National High-Performance Computer Technology Act. After it died, he reintroduced it in May of the following year. It called for more ambitious funding to improve and expand the connections between universities, libraries and other institutions. Both before and after the act passed in 1991, Gore spoke frequently of "the information superhighway," a phrase he is widely credited with coining and that recalled the key role his late father, also a U.S. senator, played in building (figuratively, of course!) the interstate highway system.

Computer scientist Vinton Cerf, sometimes called "The Father of the Internet," was co-designer of the communications protocol that forms the backbone of the Internet and a pioneer in the academic/military computer networks from which the Internet sprung. In a statement sent to me Monday by MCI WorldCom, where he is now senior vice president of Internet Architecture and Technology, Cerf wrote:

"Gore's support for the research agencies ... helped to shape the development of the NSFNET--a national network with international connections that took up where its predecessor, the ARPANET, left off. ... By the mid-late 1980s, then-Senator Gore had become a visible proponent of NSFNET, which enthusiasm and insight continued and grew with his election to the Vice Presidency. For having seen the potential in these technologies, and for having pursued and argued for legislation and administration support for research in these areas ... I think it is entirely fitting that the Vice President take some credit for helping to create an environment in which [the] Internet could thrive."

There you have it. If you wish to read the entire article that I got this info from you can either do a simple search on google or you can just click on this link:

GORE'S INTERNET LINK IS NOTHING TO JOKE ABOUT

Thanks to Eric Zorn with the Chicago Tribune for this:

In June 1986, back when there were fewer than 5,000 network host sites (there are tens of millions today) available to a comparative handful of knowledgeable users, Gore, then a senator from Tennessee, introduced the Supercomputer Network Study Act in response to fears in the research community that the U.S. was dangerously lagging in this area.

Then in October 1988, Gore introduced the National High-Performance Computer Technology Act. After it died, he reintroduced it in May of the following year. It called for more ambitious funding to improve and expand the connections between universities, libraries and other institutions. Both before and after the act passed in 1991, Gore spoke frequently of "the information superhighway," a phrase he is widely credited with coining and that recalled the key role his late father, also a U.S. senator, played in building (figuratively, of course!) the interstate highway system.

Computer scientist Vinton Cerf, sometimes called "The Father of the Internet," was co-designer of the communications protocol that forms the backbone of the Internet and a pioneer in the academic/military computer networks from which the Internet sprung. In a statement sent to me Monday by MCI WorldCom, where he is now senior vice president of Internet Architecture and Technology, Cerf wrote:

"Gore's support for the research agencies ... helped to shape the development of the NSFNET--a national network with international connections that took up where its predecessor, the ARPANET, left off. ... By the mid-late 1980s, then-Senator Gore had become a visible proponent of NSFNET, which enthusiasm and insight continued and grew with his election to the Vice Presidency. For having seen the potential in these technologies, and for having pursued and argued for legislation and administration support for research in these areas ... I think it is entirely fitting that the Vice President take some credit for helping to create an environment in which [the] Internet could thrive."

There you have it. If you wish to read the entire article that I got this info from you can either do a simple search on google or you can just click on this link:

GORE'S INTERNET LINK IS NOTHING TO JOKE ABOUT

Had Rob said, "Signal 11 incorrectly believes that I implemented the karma cap to spite him. He's spreading false information that it's only applied to certain accounts." it would have been much different. Not only is it more informative than "Signal 11 is an idiot," it would also make Rob look like the better man.

If Rob was publishing some official statement on the "Signal 11 controversy", then perhaps I would expect him to use this language. However, this was an online chat, and, to a certain extent, I would expect it to follow the rules of regular conversations - always try to say things diplomatically, but a slip of the tongue or an outburst of emotion is regrettable but forgivable.

I find it disturbing that, even here, everyone's words are being used against them, like a court of law. I remember, back when I first discovered the Internet, I loved that you could put your best foot forward. I could think overnight about a response on a newsgroup, and really put my idea into the best words possible. I silently agreed with the flames against misspellers and those who didn't research the facts, not because I thought they were idiots, but because they didn't take full advantage of the medium, didn't use a spell checker, and didn't search on the web for 5 minutes to do a sanity check on their idea.

Even today, when a well-meaning co-worker sends out a virus alert or get-rich-quick-scheme, I quickly put out a rebuttal with the proper web site link, but then send a slightly longer personal message telling the originator how I found it was a hoax - I feel it's a duty of mine, to instruct others in the power of these new tools, rather to insult them as newbies and idiots.

However, I see more and more people trying to make others eat their words, simply because technology allows them to become etched in silicon. Al Gore is constantly harassed about saying he "created the Internet", while what he said was slightly different ("During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet"), and lots of folks have defended him since then, including Vinton Cerf. George Bush, Jr. gets his own ribbing for various slips of the tongue (including my favorite non-event from the campaign, the so-called "RATS" subliminal message). Indeed, most of politics seems to be an endurance race, to see who can go the longest without saying something wrong and/or stupid. Which may explain why so little gets said these days...

I guess it goes back to Nixon, when he was caught on tape saying some truly awful things. It had a dual political purpose - on one hand, it gave some evidence to the Watergate investigators, but on the other hand, it gave a window into the man's personal life, highlighting some deep flaws.

This may be where the problem is - the press has gotten the impression that it's in the slips of the tongue and the political mistakes that we find the true character of a person, and are constantly trying to get past the "surface" and find the flaws of the "true" person. We have bought into the idea, and are berating Rob for one statement, which may be damning out of context, but completely human if taken in context.

Stop playing the "I caught you!" game, and start treating people like humans, flawed but forgivable. (And sorry, dboyles, for a comment more directed to the community than your comment).

With the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Congress has catered so completely to copyright holders that everyone else must resort to legal loopholes in order to exercise their First Amendment rights.

Last week the Chicago Tribune had a column that goes into some detail about some of the additional lobbying that Bill Gates has done recently. It's quite scary, in fact. A brief quote from the article:

The Republicans even pledged to turn Microsoft's conviction into a campaign issue. "This should be looked into by Congress," said Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi.

You'll need to log in to view the actual article.
Brett

Here's an article from the Chicago Tribune about this. They claim there will be 1000 spots for low-power FM radio stations...

Ok, that was a little messed up, my post, but here's an rticle at the chicago tribune about it...

The night was not completely uneventful for Commonwealth Edison Co. An explosion in northwest suburban Niles knocked out a support for a transmission tower for 130,000-volt lines, briefly knocking out power to 4,000 customers, a company spokesman said. The explosion occurred five minutes before midnight and did not appear to be Y2K-related.

Possibly. It may be possible to refresh your brain using stem cells. And more stem cells. And yet more.

BTW, editorial email addies are available here.

Alex Bischoff
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