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"IT staff usually enjoy unrivaled access to the deepest details of an organization's structure, and all too often, some submit to the urge to use that knowledge for nefarious purposes.

At least we can count on the police to put a stop to this.

http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/21.58.html#subj5

[According to the third Detroit Free Press story, a cop who stalked a woman
using his access to police databases was "suspended for a day without pay."
That'll teach 'em! --Declan] [FROM POLITECH]

> Date: Sat, 04 Aug 2001 02:08:36
> From: "Ed Walker"
> Subject: Michigan cops abusing database

> www.governing.com/news had a link to a freep article that may be of
> interest to politechnicals. The first two links are the story, and the
> third is an account of a truly creepy cop stalking someone he met while on
> duty.

> Michigan Newspaper: Police Abuse Database Police throughout Michigan,
> entrusted with the personal and confidential information in a state law
> enforcement database, have used it to stalk women, threaten motorists and
> settle scores. Over the past five years, more than 90 Michigan police
> officers, dispatchers, federal agents and security guards have abused the
> Law Enforcement Information Network, according to a Detroit Free Press
> examination of LEIN records and police reports. More: Detroit Free Press
> http://www.freep.com/news/mich/lein31_20010731.htm
> http://www.freep.com/news/mich/lein1_20010801.htm
> http://www.freep.com/news/mich/amber31_20010731.ht m

You looked Alan Ralsky up in jail?

It's a good thing you're only his brother.

Otherwise, "Alan Ralsky" might find a name change to "Betty Sue" and become someone's prison beeyitch. (it might still happen)

I wonder if he'll have to mortgage "The House That Spam Built"[1] to pay his lawyer to plea bargin to stay out of prison? What will he do for a job to pay the mortgage? (any assets, including money he might have stashed away and could use to pay the mortgage back off could, and likely would, be confiscated, just as his "toys" were in October, '5.

The DOJ has him in the can and his records are sealed for seventy-two hours.

I'm surprised the story hasn't appeared yet.

There's a story at news.google.com:

Hackers quaking over reported Spam King's arrest

My suggestion on SPAM-L was to use this opportunity to put the DMA on hold this time (they wrote CAN-SPAM and a VP said opt-in wasn't a viable economic model so they wouldn't use it) and have any number of the CongressCritters who later admitted rubber-stamping CAN-SPAM was ineffective at best, get something put into their hands which "Prevents the possibility of another Alan Ralsky" (but I also have said, "...we know there are others, but it makes for a good buzzphrase for them to use as a sales pitch to their peers, not to mention good press for them to toot their own horn. If that'll produce better legislation, such as fighting Ronnie "You Can't Legislate Me Out Of Business" Skelson, I'll let them toot all they want....").

____________________________________

[1]
Here's the original Slashdot story, but the Detroit Free Press link it points to produces a 404. Fortunately, the Wayback Machine has many copies, such as this one.

(I'm dragging this out for those who don't know about the Wayback Machine)

If anyone wants additional info about Alan Ralsky there's plenty there about him.

The conduct that landed DuBuc in an Illinois facility for juvenile sex offenders came to light in 1995, when a police officer visited her fourth-grade class in Howell to talk about child and substance abuse. DuBuc sought him out to complain about the way her stepmother was treating her and her natural sister. Police investigated and determined that some inappropriate sex play had taken place between DuBuc and her younger stepsiblings.

----BRIAN DICKERSON, FREE PRESS COLUMNIST, March 29, 2006

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20 060329/NEWS05/603290409/1122/

In other words, a police officer came to her school as part of a campaign against child abuse. Leah reported her concerns (perhaps exaggerated - who knows?) about the real kind of child abuse--real abuse, not 'Wah! Mummy makes me eat my beets!' and what happens? The police investigated, ignored this, and proceeded to prosecute and persecute a ten year old girl on the flimsiest of pretexts: i.e., the "anti child abuse" campaign became a pretext for . . . child abuse.

Also isn't it interesting the way ten year old Leah DuBuc gets thrown away when she tries to complain about her step-mother's treatment by the word of her step-sisters? Hmmm...looks like Daddy and Mommy decided they didn't need her anymore. Makes sense, let's punish the little bitch for daring to complain about the way we treat her...the little puke gets it better than she deserves! So they toss her into some 'residential rehabilitation school' and after awhile it all goes away, right? Only it didn't work as well as they must have hoped if some eleven years later she dares complain about it again!

Look, if Gonzales really thought that even 10 people in their city were going out on "a kidnapping a day" or whatever, wouldn't they think they would've known someone? Someone check the numbers! Ghu, this is Slashdot, one would have thought this would be the FIRST thing people here would do! Take the numbers they like to toss around--The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children likes to quote a 20 billion USD annually comes from the Child Porn industry, so let's do some math:

Figure that there are about 1 billion people worldwide with both internet access and enough money to pay for these fictitious child porn web sites. I say fictitious because lets face it, any websites with the kinds of stuff Mr. Gonzales is talking about wouldn't saty up for more than a few hours--if that! The Windows 2000 source code that was leaked a bit back would have lasted longer and we all know how quickly that went down!

Use the figure often provided, that pedophiles make up less than 1% of the population - call it 1% for simplicity.

Assume the extremely unlikely case that every single pedophile, worldwide, with internet access and some cash, is subscribing to these web sites.

Now, throw in the $20 billion figure.

1,000,000,000 divided by 100: 10,000,000 (10 million) peds.

20,000,000,000 divided by 10,000,000: $2,000 per ped, per year, for cp.

Does anybody really believe that the average ped could afford $2,000 per year for child pornography? Keep in mind that many of these would still be in middle income countries, and would drive the average down.

Orwell coined the phrase "doublethink," and self-contradiction is a requisite of delusion, oftentimes.

So I have to wonder, what is it that we're supposed to be distracted from this time by hunting down those nasty 'pedofiles' instead of addressing the real problems? I mean is it truly only a coincidence that everytime we get an bill up that would end the intrafamilial violence exemptions they trot out the 3\/1L Perverts in raincoats and while we're all chasing after that sterotype the bill just goes away whilst protecting Daddy's right to do whatever he wants.

The lead gameplay developer for the recently-released Galactic Civilizations 2, Cari Begle, is female - she just got interviewed by the Detroit Free Press. Cari's the person everyone goes to when there's a bug needs fixing. Maybe playing games isn't yet a place where you can get fair competition, but developing certainly is.

Using this political forum, I simply want to apologize to all you left wing nuts and say "you were right". I give up trying to defend anything Bush has to say anymore personally or on-line (not that I've done it here recently).

Between the destabilization / chaos going on in Iraq as the Bush admin. clearly didn't plan or forsee what was going to happen after Saddam, and now the absolute, irrevocable proof that Bush does lie and cover up (in this case, Katrina), it's getting REALLY HARD to get behind the president on anything these days... It just makes the Bush admin look like a bunch of inept, CYA idiots whose guiding principal is cronyism. When Bush opens his mouth, most non-koolaid drinking conservatives should now wonder just what agenda does he have.

BUT, I'm STILL not voting Democratic because (A) they are just as bad as the Republicans, and (B) they very much want to take away the right to persue my hobbies with all the strength they can muster (ie, off-road vehicle driving).

Looks like people at Nintendo have been reading this:

"Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant" (2005, Harvard Business School Publishing), by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.

Ironically, it's also the book Ford cited when it took the knife to its belly a few weeks ago...
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200 6601230398

Ford's ethanol hybrid

"CIS acknowledged that it is unlikely to see any of the judgment money but said that it was time that spammers learnt that their actions would result in an economic death penalty"

By economic death penalty they must refer to something that is never actually carried out, delayed by infinite appeals and more for show than anything else. They'll never get a dime of those billions, the spammer will continue to spam (check out http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200 5601040360 - if the legal system won't do anything about a woman who was caught three times driving with a suspended license to her probation officer they won't do anything significant about a spammer) and people like me will lose ever more faith in the system.

We have people awarding impossible fines with full knowledge that they will never be recovered (ie: they knowingly refused to mete out justice since their "justice" is only something that exists on paper and in their fantasy world). We have judges who order restraining orders against David Letterman because somebody claimed he was using psychic powers to harass her. We have people who will devote months of their lives to sit on juries and render verdict even though everybody knows from the start that what the jury says is irrelevant because everything gets rewritten on appeal anyway.

The system is broke. The overlords of the system don't care; these people have much less respect for the law than the criminals they try in their courts.

I'm glad to read Marriot is offering credit fraud monitoring to the affected people like how Ford offered to its employees when they recently lost 70,000 employee/retiree SSNs. Unless it is lifetime monitoring I fail to see the long term value.

Wait a second, why don't the credit bureaus offer free lifetime credit fraud monitoring to everyone in the first place?

• Obscene conduct can include indecent exposure and urinating in public if police convict a person of the charges three separate times, said MSU police Detective Earl Barringer.
• Jones also said that not every person on the sex offender list has necessarily committed an egregious crime such as rape or molestation because a conviction of indecent exposure, even in cases such as public urination, can land someone on the list.
• Michigan's sex-offender registry currently includes teenagers prosecuted for having consensual sex with underage girlfriends and a woman convicted of urinating in public.
• Violations ranging from groping or fondling to more minor offenses, like public indecency -- which includes urinating in a public park -- are posted on the sex offender registry for 10 years. More serious offenses, such as aggravated criminal sexual assault, are posted for life.

Yes, given the huge problems in the world, Slashdot's anal focus on Microsoft used to bother me also. But, Slashdot is nothing if not about small things: gadgets, nanobots, lego hacks and crazy conspiracy theories float endlessly down a collective river of desire for free software, free music and free movies. We keep reading because there are occasional flashes of brilliance and once in a while the editors actually post some "Stuff that Matters".

BTW, the "demoicde" numbers you post are interesting -- and depressing. I don't see the United States listed on the chart though. Seems like killing 240,000 people with nukes during WW2 would count as democide: [ http://www.freep.com/news/nw/hiroshima5e_20050805. htm ]

Those who are bashing McDonald's for causing fatness in people need to step back and think for a minute. It's the people who are causing the fatness, not McDonald's, by choosing what to eat at McDonald's.

For the past year or so, I've eaten 2-3 times a week from or at McDonald's, be it breakfast or lunch/dinner. I hardly excersize, and *gasp* I've actually been losing weight over this past year. Not a huge amount, and McDonald's isn't the reason I'm losing weight, but it does show that eating at McDonald's doesn't instantly make you a McBlimp.

And it's not just me. A reporter for another paper did a similar self-study in response to "Super Size Me", but only for two weeks. He, too, lost weight, but his cholesterol went up. (Can't seem to find the article in question, unfortunatly.)

In short, eating at McDonald's is fine, as long as you watch what you and the kids are eating. Milk or orange juice instead of soda (or at least diet soda), skipping the fries most of the time (excess carbs lead to excess fat if they're not burned off) and you don't have nearly as big of a problem as everyone claims.

(Sorry-Let me link that for you)
http://www.freep.com/money/tech/mwend6_20021206.ht m
http://www.macobserver.com/article/2002/12/06.11.s html
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/12/06/155422 7&tid=133

From a Detroit Free Press article: "Electronic Arts wrote that his account was terminated because he violated terms of service by posting links to outside Web sites within the game and because of player complaints, which they would not detail. "'It is simply not true' that the company tried to censor Ludlow, Brown said. 'He got kicked out for breaking the rules and for annoying other players.'"

Let's say that I think I'm scientifically literate. Let's also say that I think that I can write. Further, let's say that my local paper doesn't have a science section. Clearly, I should contact my paper and get hired for a weekly column.

One thing that has irked me over the years is that even papers with really good science reporters still end up using utterly awful AP articles. Since these things were written for the entire nation, shouldn't a little care be taken to get it right?

One example is here
But essentially the study (commissioned by a group in favor of G rated movies) found that over a 10 year period, Hollywood G rated fare tended to be far more profitable than R rated fare.
 
Make of it what you will, but it tells me that families want family-friendly movies.
 
Respectfully,
Anomaly

And McDonalds food that causes you to loose weight

It already does.

WalMart

• uses Illegal child labor.
• forces people to work off the clock.
• discriminates against women.

Show me a hand-held device that defeats television. Show me a device which will de-fuse a rabid neo-con. Show me a tool that can be used to bring religions together in peace.

http://www.freep.com/art/2000/mar/03/handgun.jpg

Here in the U.S. we should be all too familiar with leaders that sign treaties or agreements and then go against their word when it is in their best interest (the wonderful world of baby Bush)... Likewise, China is not going to decrease the amount of spam that comes out of its borders because it is not in their self-interest. Once again, money is the motivator... anyone surprised? As long as someone can make a buck filling your email inbox with penis enlargement ads, they will continue to do so. It's not rocket science kids, it is economics. There is a great article (http://www.freep.com/money/tech/mwend22_20021122. htm)about a 57 year old man that has made a living off spamming. As long as the capability is there it will be manipulated. So, thank you China for coughing up your John Hancock, but please forgive me if I'm a tad unenthusiastic.

http://www.freep.com/news/metro/dicker20_20031020. htm

This mentions people on the michigan sex offender list, without names.. but states a woman is there for public urination, and some guys are there for consensual sex with underage girlfriends.

Both are examples given by the grandparent.

Have a look here to:

http://www.geocities.com/eadvocate/issues/harm-reg ister.html

Sure, make me look up the links. Have a look at what this unmotivated mob can do:
Original Story and the Follow Up and a summary

There seems to be this prevalent "the free market" will solve anything. Seems like no-one knows their history enough that when "the free market" ruled during the beginning of the industrial era factory workers were more or less slaves (they got paid but no boarding) to the wims of the factory owners.

Oh really? They couldn't work on the farm instead of on the assembly line? They were "born" into their job (like the former Soviet Union) with no chance to ever resign or quit?

Only after government restrictions and worker unions was a balance between the two met. (I guess there will never be complete balance, just less unfair in one way or the other.)

Please, by all means, give an example. It's hard to refute the issue when I've yet to see someone with a valid complaint about a specific instance (pay, working conditions, etc.) make the argument. Because, you know that I will be able to find an instance where the government intervened originally on behalf of the corporation to perpetuate the working conditions.

Assuming you're going to go the working conditions for the pay route: I would also have to argue, what is so different about working conditions then as opposed to now? For example, IBP in Iowa employs thousands of Mexicans (I don't even have to pretend they are legal immigrants, everyone knows they are not, and IBP and customs have a "working agreement") to work cutting gizzards and beaks out of chickens on a minute-by-minute basis. The work is sick and disgusting and, if you've ever been inside one of the plants, it's got the smell of something that is a cross between an "old folk's home" and a funeral home.

Arguably, these individuals are working in the worse conditions in the nation, and are only paid maybe 12 bucks an hour, and many of them struggle to maintain their sanity. But where are the unions stepping down to protect these Mexicans? They died out, because people were willing to work without unionizing, and many thought the company put forth a good faith effort to keep their work environment clean for them.

You see, what you perceive as unreasonable, is just something you don't want to do. There is someone who *does* want to do the job, and they'll most likely get compensated justly for it. Just as competition occurs in the market, so too does it occur in the workforce. Assuming no outside government influence or intervention, and you've got a reasonable system.

The reason companies do this is because they have exactly one reason to exist. To Make Money. There are no other objectives for a company. Furthermore if the company is on the stock exchange the board has a resposibility to their owners (stock holders) to Make More Money. If it were legal a corporate entity would have no qualms about killing off half of it's workers as well as consumers in the process, as long as they made more money that way.

I like this sophomoric argument. Why? Because it embodies the ultimate Green and socialist fear that corporations want to see their employees suffer. Yet these individuals, would like to see more taxes, more government spending, more government regulation over industries that eventually don't exist anymore, yet are still "regulated" by a hundred-thousand person branch of the government.

What example have I?

Let's try the auto industry for starters. Ford and GM are now "junk bond" status. In case you don't know what that means, it's essentially saying that their creditors own more of the company than even stock and bond holders. Unless they file for bankruptcy, they will be dissolved. What then, happens to the myriad of government jobs relying on regulations of the auto industry? Granted, we'll still have cars, but they'll be imported or Saturns (for lack of a better example).

The assumption by Greens, environmentalists, and socialists is that corporations and industries will always exist. They seem to ignore the fact that

Gee there's a surprise, a guy who is a master at revisionist history, see all the bastardizations of the original trilogy, had an interview in 2005 that's contrary to what was said in an interview in the late 90's. Of course he says now that there was never any story post ROTJ, it suits his life better to not have further story.

When he first announced that he was doing Ep's 1, 2, 3 it suited his life at the time to also say he was planning 7, 8, and 9.

Why should it surprise anyone that he now says there's no story past ROTJ. It's not like he hasn't changed his story before. After all just ask my posts Great Great Great Grandparent

There is an interview with Lucas here:
http://www.freep.com/news/latestnews/pm3907_200504 26.htm
in which he describes the story behind the story.

Originally, it ("Star Wars") was meant to be one movie. I wanted to start in the middle. It was meant to be a Saturday matinee serial. You never saw the first three episodes and you never saw what happened afterwards, I wrote the back story. I wrote what happened in Episode I, II, III and then I did Episode IV and it grew. It got so big that I chopped it up and made it into three movies. And then when I finished those three with "Return of Jedi," I didn't think I would go back and do the other ones.

Geez, you can put the ppls in suspended animation with hydrogen sulfide gas already. It's not like biology is rocket science or anything.
http://www.freep.com/news/nw/less22e_20050422.htm

In many cases, [police]

turned a valuable crime-fighting tool into a personal search engine for home addresses, for driving records and for criminal files of love interests, colleagues, bosses or rivals.
. . . .
Part-time Memphis police officer Scott Woods.... [used the database] to find out personal information about a woman he met on the Internet....
. . . .
Woods later told the woman he had followed her home the night before, according to police records. He called her by her middle name, which she had not told him. He described her height and weight. And he went on to call her at home and work up to three times a day, according to police and sheriff's records.

But there are laws in place to prevent these abuses.

[Orange County, Florida, Sheriff Kevin] Beary was so upset by [a critical Letter to the Editor] that he had his staff look up [the letter writer's] address using driver's license records and fired off a letter to her.

"I never in any way sent that letter to you with the intent of intimidating you. Please know that I am confident I was within the purview of the Florida Public Records Law when I obtained your mailing address. I sincerely regret the fact that my letter upset you," Beary wrote.

Violators of the driver's privacy act can be sued in U.S. District Court for damages of at least $2,500, punitive damages, attorney's fees and all other relief the court determines to be appropriate.

But sheriff's officials said that it was legal to look up Gawronski's address on the driver's database. Sheriff's spokesman Jim Solomons said responding to a resident's concern is well within Beary's official duties.

Ok, so maybe those laws have loopholes. But all he did was send her an intimidating letter. Cops would never use databases to do worse.

Prosecutor's Office Uses Database to Smear Prosecutor's Political Opponent,
Police Lieutenant Charged With Abusing Database to Influence Elections
Cop Uses Database to Find Woman's Unlisted Phone Number -- Gives It to Woman's Ex

A few bad apples. The databases wouldn't be used to frame political opponents.

[A U.S. Federal Court jury]

concluded that the FBI and the Police had framed the two activists in an effort to stifle Earth First! and stop participation in 'Redwood Summer', a planned campaign of non-violent direct action against the destruction of old-growth forest.

But we all know that those Earth Firsters are, essentially, terrorists. Why should terrorists be protected by laws? The FBI doesn't frame peaceful protesters!

More ominously,

the FBI suggested that "legal" efforts to deal with [Martin Luther] King [Jr.] might not be enough. "It may be unrealistic," the memorandum went on, to limit ourselves as we have been doing to legalistic proofs or definitely conclusive evidence that would stand up in testimony in court or before Congressional Committees...
. . . .
[FBI officials] agreed to use "all available investigative techniques" to develop information for use "to discredit" King. Proposals discussed included using ministers, "disgruntled" acquaintances, "aggress

The problem with something like the weather is that a) as implied in the previous paragraph, it's difficult to predict what the weather is going to be much less model how our input controls will change the weather - currently we can manage only a week to two weeks with moderate accuracy (the longer timeframe you can predict something then the less energy you need to put into the input), b) the consequences of a mistake in your control or unintended outcomes can be quite catastrophic, c) there's a lot of conflicting interests in the weather control business, you will never get agreement on what the weather should be, d) weather control has military application, and e) weather control is likely to be highly centralized, that probably makes it vulnerable to terrorist or military attack and it'll probably become a font of bureaucratic power.

If you look at current weather control efforts, you already see some of the problems I'm talking about. Inducing rain (seeding clouds) in one location can take away rain from where the cloud would have gone. Politicians in some countries have too much control over the process. China apparently uses cloud seeding to "guarantee" that big, outdoor, political events in Beijing have the appropriate sunny weather.

What is Beck and Star Wars doing on the O.C.?

Never saw the O.C., but I will tonight. Beck will be premiering 4 or 5 cuts from his unreleased new albums.

Off topic, I know, but I don't give a damn. This one should be worth watching.

New York State and New York City are both attempting to collect so-called "usage" taxes on cigarettes.

They are not sales taxes per se because they may be charged on items (in this case cigarettes) purchased abroad, out of state and out of the city. Their law is written to cover a tax on the ownership and use of the cigarettes in city or State jurisdiction and they are suing on that basis in order to collect "unpaid usage fees."

The idea behind "no tax on the Internet" within the US Congress was to try to encourage growth and business as well as to try to attract Internet companies to build in the US, hiring American workers and basing the "brick and mortar" and "employee" part of the Internet at home.

Obviously this State system of taxation -- even on the "honor system" -- threatens this premise. It would, therefore, be just for Internet companies to leave that State (which may require that they collect revenues for the State) and, perhaps, cease from doing any business within that State (as cigarette sales websites are considering for New York State and City). I can imagine the public outcry were that to happen.

So is *every* industry full of whores?

I challenge anyone to name a single industry which doesn't conduct "studies" which favour itself.
Nothing's as bad as the pharmaceutical industry. Or how about the world of financial analysis at the end of the 90's? Those were some pretty screwed up "studies".

And now we've got characters like David Lereah (head of the Association of Realtors) on TV everyday screeching "There is no housing bubble" (although he's sounding very depserate lately).

Using the media, the legal system, the court of public opinion, and analysis/forecasting is *how* business is done today. We live in 'spin land'. If you're going to start calling people whores than apparently we're living in one big giant brothel.

Hey... how come I'm not getting laid?

"And we all know those are the same people. Sheesh."

Nah, I don't think that's what the article meant. Going after the big dogs -- the counterfeiters and the sellers -- and suing downloaders are not mutually exclusive acts. The problem is being attacked on both end. Our government has lately been putting increasing pressure on the Chinese government to put a stop to counterfeiting of all sorts of items, including DVDs, and busting the guys selling them on the streets is typically the job of the police. But since international diplomacy and police raids of stores selling counterfied DVDs don't fall as well into "your rights online," you seldom see them reported on Slashdot.

In short, the "why don't they go after the real pirates instead" sentiment is often expressed around here when there's a story about busting file sharers. They are.

"The companies involved here will be providing basic access for free and charging those who want faster acccess. The assumption is that the powerusers will be subsidizing the freeloaders. In fact, I believe the county is planning on charging a franchise fee, making this actually a source of income."

Workers told 'no smoking,' even if it's at home.

I would have copy/pasted from the USA Today article but at the time I read it the link was unavailable on the main page so from this article at the Detroit Free Press:

On Friday, a helicopter carrying Port Authority detectives was hit by a laser beam as its crew surveyed the area to try to pinpoint the origin of the first beam.

I just love the wording they chose to describe the stupidity... "hit by a laser beam". They make it seem like the dude was firing a laser gun at them and harming the helicopter. Ugh. Yeah, pointing a laser pointer at a flying aircraft is dumb and it's unnecessary but to attempt to make it sound like some physical damage could have been done by the laser is just sensationalism.

Perhaps on the day last week when Harry Potter Book 6 became available for pre-order. Wouldn't that book alone perhaps count for a million or so of the 2.8 million sales? Especially since Book 5 sold 5 million copies in the first 24 hours?

Google is also doing Michigan's library (the University of Michigan, that is). Seven million volumes.

An announcement is forthcoming today.

Detroit Free Press article: http://www.freep.com/money/tech/mwend14e_20041214. htm

The size of the U-M undertaking is staggering. It involves the use of new technology developed by Google that greatly speeds the digitizing process. Without that technology -- which Google won't discuss in detail -- the task would be impossible, says John Wilkin, the U-M associate librarian who is heading the project.

"Going as fast as we can with the traditional means of doing this, it would take us about 1,600 years to do all 7 million volumes," he said. "Google will do it in six years."

Under the agreement, the library will get a digital copy of every book scanned. With those copies, the library can prepare special research projects, virtual exhibitions and more relevant scholarly and academic material for its students and faculty.

"If we were to do this job ourselves, it would probably cost us $600 million," Wilkin said. "That's just the human cost of preparing the material for scanning, packing it up and sending it out to vendors and then quality-control checking of the results. This is easily a billion-dollar effort."

Items will start appearing in 2005 with completion predicted for 2010. Can you imagine how many libraries there are out there? The information that could be gathered seems endless. I'm guessing they'll come up with a good way to detect duplicates in future libraries, but as anyone who has wandered through a University library knows there are a LOT of shady books that seem like they haven't been widely published and there are a LOT of things that were self published by academics in the University itself (theses, postdoc research, etc).

It looks like the largest portion of this will be 7 million items from the University of Michigan (compared to only 40,000 from Harvard). Good article from the Detroit Free Press.

Look at GameSpy. Their overall scores are out of five stars, with the possibility of half stars in the score. The overall score that a game can get is severely restricted, and as long as it's decent, it's almost guaranteed to get seven stars or higher - a score that most of us would consider to be "good."

On the other hand, look at the mainstream media. Papers like the USA Today and the Detroit Free Press grade games on a scale of one to four. This is even more restrictive...but not in a good way. A game can only get one of two positive scores - a three or a four - and it's usually got to be bloody amazing to reach the four star level. Most of the games that I see get revieved in papers tend to get scores of two or three stars. That's not terrible, but I know that most of the people I know tend to think of a 3/4 as being much worse than a 7/10. Maybe it just seems harsher. I'm not sure why that is, but observations that I've made over the years seem to back that up.

The scoring systems vary from site to site and from one kind of media to another, and that could be enough to make up the difference.

Ashcroft ensured our safety by covering the breasts of statues in the justice department.

His more radically conservative replacement will complete this initiative, furthering American safety, by requiring burkas for all female statues.

Slashdot is overwhelmingly workers versus executives and business owners so it is not surprising that they have a protectionistic and socialist outlook on employment.

And of course executives like this guy who burned all the shareholders and put thousands of employees in the unemployment line, gets *replaced* and slinks away (to the boardroom) with $100 million. Yes, we should realize how hard they work for for the good of the *cough* country.

For one thing, many people believed that John Kerry supported gay marriage, perhaps due to stunts like this one, where a phone campaign said Kerry supported gay marriage. (The stunt is ugly not only because it was wrong on Kerry's position, but also because the phone call implied it was coming from a pro-Kerry camp.)

Ugly politicking aside, Kerry does support civil unions, which many people are against anyway, since it would support government sanctioning of homosexuality in their minds. He comes from a state where gay marriage is legal, and he has never spoken particularly against that.

So if you're homophobic, Bush was definitely your man. If you were pro-gay-marriage, you'd have to go look over at the Libertarians. Kerry was somewhere in between, with his civil unions.

Detroit Free Press
gay marriage related phone calls
phony absentee ballot calls in WV. Search archive for "Karen Cole"

We can argue whether greed is wrong or not, but let's not quibble over a moral issue. . . . Many of them make a couple million dollars a year, but a lot of that is in stock options.

The average CEO makes 300 times the salary of an average worker. This one burned the company's original stockholders, leaving them with nothing, and walks away with $100 million because he's being replaced. And his options were vested as a reward. Let's not forget the $1.5 million bonus. And he gets to stay on the board of directors where he gets to set the compensation for the next CEO. It's not a quibble over a moral issue, it's a financial obscenity. It's called looting a company.

"The game will actually launch a week after the company's other hot holiday title, "Half-Life 2," which debuts Nov. 16."

SOE is notorious for launching games with content that is not finished or buggy (SWG Launch, EverQuest Expansion end game content, etc.). Blizzard on the other hand is known for at times delaying a game, and then delaying a game again just to work out all the minor bugs.

The question I would like to ask Slashdot readers is if it worth launching a game early, yet buggy to grab a certain market from competition? I know Themis group thinks a poor launch can cost a company millions of dollars http://www.themis-group.com/uploads/Cost%20of%20La unch.xls, but will the benefit of launching early exceed the costs?

Brian Whitener

http://www.gameguidesonline.com/

Not knowing that civilian contractors perform "armed combat" is an idiot mistake One source

During the first Persian Gulf War, one civilian contractor was employed for every 60 active-duty personnel. That figure has grown to about one in 10, according to a Century Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy research foundation in New York City. More than 20,000 private contractors are being used in Iraq. While many perform engineering, clerical and construction work, others "have increasingly engaged in the exchange of fire formerly limited to soldiers," according to the foundation's September 2004 study titled "Legions Stretched Thin: the U.S. Army's Manpower Crisis." "It is perfectly appropriate to hire contractors, and most of their uses are not controversial, but we have no way of knowing what is happening with them in Iraq or elsewhere," said Leif Wellington Haase, co-author of the report. "There is little if no oversight for contractors, and in a democracy that is pretty troubling." Since the first stories of abuse at Abu Ghraib, the role of private contractors in America's war on terror has been brought into question. "Private security people are out of control," said Carl Conneta, co-director of the Project On Defense Alternatives, a nonpartisan arms control think tank in Cambridge, Mass. "Accountability is very tough to impose on them, and they are operating in a Wild West environment. "They don't have the same type of legal constraints that are operating inside the military," Conneta said.

In Milwaukee, Kerry supporters forcibly occupied a GOP campaign HQ and disrupted all operations using a bullhorn.

In Cleveland the NAACP's National Voter Fund and "ACT Ohio" are under investigation for voter registration fraud prompting the local prosecutor to state "We've seen voter fraud before, but never on this level. I grew up in Chicago and this looks like the politics of Mayor Daley in the '50s and '60s."

Pro-democrat voter registration fraud in Racine, WI

Michigan

Florida

Denver and Minnesota are also locations of suspected fraud.

Want more?

Via name_withheld from SensibleErection:
Colorado
Ohio
Pennsylvania
Florida
Tennessee
Michigan
West Virginia
Wisconsin