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This is just free money.

No, it's not free money. It literally cost you a leg to get that money.

What tort reform like this does is give HMOs and insurance companies a hard number to factor in when calculating how much risk to take with someone's health.

If cutting a few corners will save 10 Million dollars over the course of the next 10 years but statistically there will be 30 people who are adversely affected by these cut corners, the company only has to do the math. 7.5 million dollars spent over 10 years as a result of settling the lawsuits, or 10 million dollars spent as a result of paying to do it right...

Capping awards has the effect of making profit more important than quality health care.

Medical mistakes kill more people in the US every year than tobacco! But who is it that the government shook down for money? "Big Tobacco"!

How about the guy who had his penis removed by mistake? Is $250,000 supposed to be just compensation for him? FUCK NO!

Tort "reform" would have the effect of limiting the responsibility that health care professionals have to take over the quality of their work.

LK

North Korea has invited diplomats to visit the blast site of what is reported tpo be a "deliberate detonation of a mountain" as part of a hydroelectric project.

The spectacular start of a big project fits with the date of the blast in N. Korea.

Nothing to see here, please move along...

N. Korea Blast

But hey, how about this novel idea. We give Bush and Kerry a pass on Viet Nam and any post Viet Nam shenanigans, and we base the campaign on, say, everything they've done since 1980? Or even 1990? Or 2000? I'd even settle on since 9/11? Anything?

I'm starting to think that basing our election on some war that happened 30 years ago is just yet another manifestation of fucking baby boomers making everything about them.

Just read this: No Times Roman on typewriters.

Thanks for the info on the Selectrics - was there a screen to compose a line before rendering?

More than half a dozen document experts contacted by ABC News said they had doubts about the memos' authenticity.

"These documents do not appear to have been the result of technology that was available in 1972 and 1973," said Bill Flynn, one of country's top authorities on document authentication. "The cumulative evidence that's available ... indicates that these documents were produced on a computer, not a typewriter:"

I could keep going all day with this crap, but it won't matter one slice of cheese to you. If there is one thing I have learned, it's that conservatives have abrogated all pretense of morality seeking the truth, and instead just seek myriad ways to twist the truth to their advantage.

I think that those are words to reflect upon on Friday, when you are broiling your lunch of crow and humility (if you can find any). I find that crow tastes best when it is fresh, and with a bit of salt. A little peper and basil don't hurt either. Putting off eating it just means it will be cold, and will taste worse than it has to. Wait too long and you might even get sick.

Cheers.... or should I say, bon appetit?

You really shouldn't take CBS's denial at face value. Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter-accusations. That's how it works.

An intellectually honest person would leave open the POSSIBLITY that they are wrong. You are backing yourself into a corner here.

From Drudge:

XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX THU SEPT 09, 2004 22:45:32 ET XXXXX

CBSNEWS LAUNCHES INTERNAL INVESTIGATION AFTER SUSPICIOUS BUSH DOCS AIRED

**Exclusive**

CBS NEWS executives have launched an internal investigation into whether its premiere news program 60 MINUTES aired fabricated documents relating to Bush's National Guard service, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

"The reputation and integrity of the entire news division is at stake, if we are in error, it will be corrected," a top CBS source explained late Thursday.

The source, who asked not to be named, described CBSNEWS anchor and 60 MINUTES correspondent Dan Rather as being privately "shell-shocked" by the increasingly likelihood that the documents in question were fraudulent.

Rather, who anchored the segment presenting new information on the president's military service, will personally correct the record on-air, if need be, the source explained from New York.

and ABC News now have stories about it.

From the ABC News article:

Among the points Flynn and other experts noted:

The memos were written using a proportional typeface, where letters take up variable space according to their size, rather than fixed-pitch typeface used on typewriters, where each letter is allotted the same space. Proportional typefaces are available only on computers or on very high-end typewriters that were unlikely to be used by the National Guard.

The memos include superscript, i.e. the "th" in "187th" appears above the line in a smaller font. Superscript was not available on typewriters.

The memos included "curly" apostrophes rather than straight apostrophes found on typewriters.

The font used in the memos is Times Roman, which was in use for printing but not in typewriters. The Haas Atlas -- the bible of fonts -- does not list Times Roman as an available font for typewriters.

The vertical spacing used in the memos, measured at 13 points, was not available in typewriters, and only became possible with the advent of computers.

CBS seriously screwed up on this one.

--Stephen

Even though he missed the correct question, he still won the game. (Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

The AP claims he's still going as of 9/8/04 (see here)

The summer of Jeopardy Guy

Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam in the 80s
http://i.cnn.net/cnn/2002/US/09/30/sproject.irq.re gime.change/rumsfeld.80s.jpg

America's WMD: Air Force tests "mother of all bombs"
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/2020/iraq_moab03 0311.html

"In a flashy debut for its biggest non-nuclear bomb, the Air Force today dropped a 21,000-pound behemoth onto a test range in Florida"

"Anthrax sent to U.S. senate matches Army strain"
http://www.cnn.com/2001/HEALTH/conditions/12/18/an thrax.investigation/

CNN: Army confirms anthrax production in Utah
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/12/12/army.anthrax/

BUSH SPURNS BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS BAN
http://www.guardian.co.uk/bush/story/0,7369,494257 ,00.html

"a 1972 treaty banning biological weapons has been added to the list of international protocols Bush has decided to ignore"

U.S. accused of trying to derail anti-torture pact
http://www.photius.com/rogue_nations/torture.html

"The United States on Tuesday was accused of trying to derail a new draft international treaty against torture that has taken a decade to negotiate."

"The treaty, which is to be debated in the U.N. Economic and Social Council beginning on Wednesday, would set up an international system of inspections for all sites where prisoners were held, to insure that torture was not taking place. "

and this:

Document details American plan to bug phones and emails of key U.N. Security Council members
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239, 905936,00.html

I don't think Moore's film is the cause of "controversy". I think the hawkish Bush administration and previous republican ones are the cause of controversy. Don't shoot the messenger.

How many terrorism-related convictions have there been in the US since 9/11? (And how many of those haven't been dismissed at DoJ's request?)

The worst has already happened.

"We don't want Kafka knocking on the door in the middle of the night," he said. But "there is some risk."

The rest of the world calls them bullets? If they called them donuts, would he be wrong?

You can call them donuts if you like. Major General Charles Wald, Joint Chiefs' Vice Director for Strategic Plans and Policy, calls them bullets. So does everyone else in the army, because that's what they are.

Thanks for playing. Perhaps you can sign up for internet classes on distinguishing fiction from truth, and your ass from a hole in the ground.

If you're looking for a great aggregate of news sites put into context, I highly recommend The Note. While the ABC News site itself has a leftward bias, The Note stands out for being pretty impartial, and extremely thorough. Now that college is back in session, I don't have time to visit it as often, because it's a long read, especially if you follow all of the links.

For a good analysis of things, I prefer the Christian Science Monitor. The bias vacillates, simply because of the variety of guest columnists.

these soldiers are much more of a threat to US citizens on US soil than either the chinese military or the rest of the axis of evil's militaries.

"Sorry to interrupt you, Alex, but the contestant was actually correct!"

In all seriousness, though, your very cropped quote is quite disingenuous, given the important omission of the following:

Thirteen Democratic members of the House of Representatives, raising the specter of possible civil rights violations that they said took place in Florida and elsewhere in the 2000 election, wrote to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in July, asking him to send observers.

Furthermore, I see no political slander anywhere, neither in the grandparent post nor in the article itself. I assume what you must be talking about would be this:

Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee of California agreed.

"This represents a step in the right direction toward ensuring that this year's elections are fair and transparent," she said.

"I am pleased that the State Department responded by acting on this need for international monitors. We sincerely hope that the presence of the monitors will make certain that every person's voice is heard, every person's vote is counted."

If we as a nation truly have nothing to hide, this will be a nice vindication of our way of doing things. On the other hand, if there are real issues, best to find them and deal with them.

Since when is it in the job description of the Police Department to help carry out statistical surveys for the local library? If the librarians want more statistics, they can simply log more traffic.

BTW, how do you propose keeping all users indoors may help with their statistics? Is it so the librarians can look them over and make notes like "suspicious-looking priest in black with glasses and TiBook" in their little statistical notebooks?

Encrypting wouldn't help much as they would have to give out the key anyway it being a public access point

Yeees. Go on. Keep thinking, you're on to something here. What if it ceases to be a public access point when you turn encryption on? Since the library already had an encrypted AP too, it seems to me this one was intentionally left public and open. Hell, he even had a library card so if they had encrypted the signal and made the AP available for known users only, he would most likely have had access to the key. It would be interesting to see the incident report.

BTW, he's not alone being questioned by police about his horrible crimes and terrorist activities.

There are other benefits to having wireless in your handheld gaming platform, though. It can become a useful internet appliance as well, picking up bundles of data whenever you pass a hotspot. For those people who carry a gaming system around with them a lot (I'd be one of them if I were utilizing public transportation) this could be quite a bonus. Plus, you could have some kind of dating game where people raise badly-modeled mythical creatures (for instance, like this game - like those guys could get girlfriends) and then use them as some sort of pathetic excuse for near-human interaction. And really, isn't that what computers are all about, helping people with no social skills overcome their awkwardness so they can fuck and fulfill their generic imperative?

President Bush's team exerts close control over admission to his campaign events. Dissenters and would-be hecklers are turned away, campaign officials say. On several occasions in recent weeks, Democrats who have gotten in have been ejected because they wore pro-Kerry T-shirts.

By contrast, most of Kerry's events are open to the public[...]

Kerry's more open approach carries political risks. Sometimes protesters show up and try to disrupt his appearances. To get across their point that Kerry is a flip-flopper, they often clap flip-flop sandals over their heads, and chant, "Four more years!"

Such dissent is never a problem for Bush.

every Anime film I have ever seen has had some sort of morally/socially disturbing scene

Yeah, that really sucks. I sure prefer my animated features to be two hours of mindless pap with zero mental stimulation.

every Anime film I have ever seen has had some sort of morally/socially disturbing scene

Yeah, that really sucks. I sure prefer my animated features to be two hours of mindless pap with zero mental stimulation.

every Anime film I have ever seen has had some sort of morally/socially disturbing scene

Yeah, that really sucks. I sure prefer my animated features to be two hours of mindless pap with zero mental stimulation.

every Anime film I have ever seen has had some sort of morally/socially disturbing scene

Yeah, that really sucks. I sure prefer my animated features to be two hours of mindless pap with zero mental stimulation.

every Anime film I have ever seen has had some sort of morally/socially disturbing scene

Yeah, that really sucks. I sure prefer my animated features to be two hours of mindless pap with zero mental stimulation.

every Anime film I have ever seen has had some sort of morally/socially disturbing scene

Yeah, that really sucks. I sure prefer my animated features to be two hours of mindless pap with zero mental stimulation.

every Anime film I have ever seen has had some sort of morally/socially disturbing scene

Yeah, that really sucks. I sure prefer my animated features to be two hours of mindless pap with zero mental stimulation.

He says "When you go to your department store and you buy 10 Cognac glasses and two weeks later you break two of them, the store doesn't give you two backup copies," , however Disney offers a replacement fee if you damage your DVD. Which is it RIAA?

While a lot of people will say that screaming about insecure voting machines is a bunch of FUD, I think there is a legitimate reason to be far more scared of insecurities in digital voting than in the traditional kind. The nice thing about paper/punchcards/crayon is that the scale of fraud is limited by the physical nature of the medium. It's tough to dispose of a lot of votes without anyone noticing a precinct is missing, and it's difficult to make much of a differece forging individual ballots. The problem with electronic voting is that like every other industry that's gone digital (accounting to spreadsheets for example), the scale and efficiency of mundane tasks is amplified by many orders of magnitude. It's tough to make much of a dent in an election by registering under ten names and voting ten times. It's easy (if you have an exploit) to to click once to change 10,000 votes in a manner that looks utterly plausible. So for all the talk of just giving red meat to the media to have another thing to panic about, I'd say why the heck can't we force Florida to print paper reciepts?

Yes, but screen time for J.Lo was cut. In its original form, it was more Bennifer than the final version. For some reason (GIGLI), the Bennifer thing was toned down.

I have wondered that myself, but I think it is just a coincidence - Sergey was born in Moscow, and his family emigrated to the US in 1979 according to this. David was born in the US in 1950. Still could be distantish relations, but if you google (what else?) on "david brin" and "sergey brin" then you only find 4 pages of hits with both names, all of which seem to be coincidental. So if there is a relation, they are keeping it well hidden!

There's also Young Adam. E&R also gave this film two thumbs up. Decent film, if a little nihilistic.

Also, if anyone hasn't heard of a decent NC-17 movie since Showgirls...

I've heard good things about Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers, though I haven't seen it myself yet. For what it's worth, Ebert & Roeper both gave it two thumbs up.

Yeah, that's right RIAA. But I'll also buy what mp3's I dig. Take for instance Breaking Benjamin. I pulled down a crapload of their songs via Kazaa and, apon realising they rock out, rushed down to Future Shop to gets me a copy just yesterday. The fact that my cd burner isn't working is beside the point.

The point is you greedy bastards at RIAA got your money. You have a great advertising and distribution mechanism working for you and you won't even admit it.

Obviously, someone got their petabytes and terabytes mixed up. If you use 40 terabytes, you get 699 megabytes per movie and 3.8 megabytes per song, which is about right. Still doesn't explain 100 gigabytes of material to trade, or up to 250,000 songs, as that would be 400kb per song. The Routers story is the only one I've seen that mentions these numbers so I'm not sure if Ashcroft screwed it up or if it was an overeager journalist. The AP version offers more details. It also has this sentence: Ashcroft said the hubs can store digital data each day equivalent to 60,000 full-length movies or 10 million songs. Doesn't mention anything about petabytes.

I wonder if most people know the real story behind the "I Have a Scream" speech. As Dean himself later acknowledged, it wasn't exactly a Presidential moment for him regardless of the crowd noise the major networks didn't broadcast, but it probably shouldn't have been a campaign-killer for him either.

To be clear, I'm a Dean supporter only in the sense that I'm a Nader supporter...the better either of them do as Independents, the more weight my Bush vote carries (shameless journal plug: Bush Did Not Lie ).

I've already heard plenty of complaints about a scratch destroying more info on a DVD than a CD due to density.

According to this site that's hooey.

"A common misperception is that a scratch will be worse on a DVD than on a CD because of higher storage density and because video is heavily compressed. DVD data density is physically four times that of CD-ROM, so it's true that a scratch will affect more data. But DVD error correction is at least ten times better than CD-ROM error correction and more than makes up for the density increase."

And that came from Disney, so you can trust it 110%!

On the specific issue of Iraq, the oil for food program was a scandalousmess. In which Iraq artfully maneuvered create a scism in the security council through kick-backs and bribes to members.

The UN was created as a forum such that memeber coutries could debate issues and policies without resorting to war. I see little of that today... it seems that it has become more an assembly of cabals, voting in blocks to 'legitimize' their actions.

I wouldn't trust the government to run nuclear power. Scratch that... there is one way I'd trust the government to run nuclear power:

All elected officials (and bureaucrats) need to live in the immediate vicinity of a power plant. Nuclear, coal, wind, hydro, solar, etc. They need to live with (and provide budget for) the plants that supply them with power, and they need to live in the immediate vicinity of the risk too! Chalk it up to their elected (or appointed) "duty."

On the flip side, you've got celebrities and politicians voting down clean power:
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/ap20030811_1031.html /
If everyone used their arguments, we'd never put any power plants anywhere.

Just because I can eat a bannana by shoving it up my nose and down my throat, doesn't make it normal OR right.

Doesn't make it illegal or immoral, either. As for bestiality, I would consider that animal abuse unless you can prove that the chicken likes it. The only kink you might stump me with is incest between consenting adults. I don't like the idea, but Libertarian Extraordinaire, John Stossel put up a surprisingly strong defense of it on prime-time television.

1. McVeigh was not an Arab or a Muslim. He was, in his own words, "an American Christian Patriot". If they did go to a terrorist training camp in the Phillipines, it sure as hell wasn't for religious reasons. Indeed, McVeigh made it clear that his intention was to start a war against Muslims.

2. Ted Kaczynski was not an Arab Muslim.

3. Eric Rudolph, the abortion clinic bomber and the guy who bombed the Atlanta Olympics, is not an Arab Muslim.

4. John Salvi, the guy who waltzed into Planned Parenthood and shot up a bunch of people, certainly was not an Arab Muslim

5. John Allen Williams Mohammed, while a convert to the Islamic splinter group called "the five percenters," is not Arab. Lee Malvo is neither Arab nor Muslim.

6. Evidence suggests that the anthrax attacks were the work of someone working in the BW community, and the list of current persons of interest does not seem to include any "Arab Muslims." On that subject, I suggest looking at this ABC story, and asking yourself this question: can you guarantee that if Donald Rumsfeld were brought a variation on this idea involving anthrax attacks associating Iraq with al-Qaida, he'd have had the sense that McNamara (I can't believe I just wrote THAT phrase) had and turn it down? Of course, this argument is used all the time in conspiracy theories, so I wouldn't blame you for dismissing it.

7. While Richard Reid is a Muslim convert, he most certainly is not Arab.

8. At least one person involved in the 9/11 plot was a non-Arab Muslim; and the protectors of the 9/11 hijackers were non-Arab Muslims (the Taliban are not Arabs).

9. I can think of four other terrorist attacks, and one foiled terrorist attack, on US soil since 1979 that involved Muslims: the CIA shootings, the Empire State Building shootings, the first World Trade Center attack, 9/11, and the foiled attack on LAX on Y2K. Three of these were planned by al-Qaida. The CIA shooter, Mir Aimal Kasi, was a Pakistani (Pakistanis are not Muslims; indeed, aside from behavior, there is no effective way of distinguishing a Pakistani Muslim from an Indian Hindu, Zoroastrian, Jain, or Christian from Indian states bordering on Pakistan.

10. If we become Nazi Germany, it will be thanks to racists like you. Have a nice day!

And, all too often, against his buddies. About half the persian gulf war casualties were friendly fire, not even counting murders and self-inflicted casualties. And sometimes they buddies you're fighting against are high on speed

Back on topic -- training soldiers in a video game will just make them that much more careless in this regard. You lose something when you bomb the canadians in the simulation, and then go out drinking with the same guys that evening.

There's something about taking someone's home to build a baseball stadium that really ticks me off.

Also:
- Hezbollah
- Al-Jazeera
- Red China
- Fidel Castro
- The Mafia
- The Sandinistas

This sounds like the news story about candidates stealing each other's signs. I don't think attacking a web site or taking down a sign will have much influence on the election, but I find the attempt disturbing.

While we are talking about word fest and such, don't forget the National Spelling Bee

ESPN telecasts and I always watch it :D
Its pretty entertaining actually in a nerdy kind of way. (Isn't that the reason we are all on slashdot!)

And Bill Simmons (The Sports Guy on ESPN) wrote an interesting diary too.

I don't see any harm in the airlines requiring an ID to board there planes. After all, most tickets you bye are non-transferable, so it makes sense to make sure that the people you think are getting on are actually the people whom are supposed to be getting on.

OTOH Ohio is already making sure that you can't DRIVE anonymously through the state by putting scanners on the turnpike that reads every license plate. Won't be long and they will be asking for 'Papers' at every state border.