Slashdot Mirror

To bypass the lameness filter, I'd just like to add that we need to seal our borders, deport the sand niggers, and nuke their homeland.

LA Times Report the plane had diverted from its westbound route and had swung back toward Washington, D.C. ... The crash site was about 80 miles northwest of Camp David and 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.

So it looks like it was heading either for Washington or Camp David.

Problem with Washington as a destination is that it flew far, far past it. OTOH, perhaps they fucked up: if it had turned earlier, I'll just bet it would have hit the White House shortly after the other three attacks.

Mmmm, are you in possession of some information that we aren't knowing of?

How about: this information.

Try doing at least a little footwork, dumbass troll.

Man, I don't think Slashdot can claim responsibility for most of online America and a good bit of the rest of the online world simultaneously hitting every news site.

The washington post is still responding and has updated their front page with a picture of the collapsed tower. I think they're hosted on Akamai.

I got the NYT login page for the article, but I didn't log in. Globe and Mail and Canoe are two Canadian news site still reachable from where I am.

CNN seems to have a stripped-down front page that's now struggling to stay up.

The LA Times is now reachable again from where I am, and has a different angle pic before the tower collapse.

My university is a long way from NYC (I'm in Canada) but some of my friends are leaving to go home and watch the news. I know that in the context of pain and suffering world-wide, this is a small event, but it is still a horrible tragedy and a sad, sad day for those whose loved ones are victims.

Christopher

This post is a little stale by now, since Slashdot's database seemed to take a hit too for a while, and I went home to watch the tv coverage myself, but I'm posting anyway just for posterity.

Story Links:
BBC
MSNBC
CNN
Chicago Tribune
Globe and Mail
Washington Times
Sydney Morning Herald
New Zealand Herald
LA Times


Picture Links:
BBC
Sydney Morning Herald

"LA Times" - Single-Number Plan Raises Privacy Fears. System would link telephones, faxes and Web addresses while creating giant databases.

A controversial technology under development by the communications industry that links Internet addresses with phone numbers has quietly picked up key government support as concern mounts among critics that the technology will broadly undermine privacy.

The technology, known as e-number, or ENUM, would link phone numbers to codes that computer servers use to route traffic on the Web. Proponents say the technology would improve communication for consumers and marketers alike.

[ ... ]

But privacy advocates fear the system could undermine online privacy and erode the security of the public phone system as well. They worry that the system would destroy a pillar of Internet privacy: the assumption by users that they enjoy anonymity in cyberspace.

The government's endorsement of the technology, disclosed in interviews and outlined in an Aug. 21 letter distributed to an industry group, is seen as critical in pushing it forward.

"The United States does see merit in pursing discussions regarding implementation of a coordinated, global [system] . . . for ENUM," Julian E. Minard, a State Department advisor to the International Telecommunication Advisory Committee, wrote to representatives of AT&T and other companies. But Minard cautioned in the letter that aspects of the technology advocated by industry "go beyond what is prudent or necessary."

There's a lot of detailed technical info here.

He brings up some very good points -- and the sort of backhand at Slashdot isn't anything that hasn't been said and nodded at by everyone here, and yeah, I'm sure we'll all get over it. Where he runs into a problem, though, is in his amusing assertion that the "legitimate" media [characterization is mine, not a quote] have and adhere to these standards of ethics. That's laughable. I wish I could find the references now, but I don't remember whether it was in the San Francisco Chronicle or the San Francisco Bay Guardian that I read about the publishing policy at the Los Angeles Times a few years ago -- where the publisher overruled the editorial staff and declared that no articles that were antagonistic to the advertisers would be run.

It's true of every news organ that the subscription fees (if any) do not even come close to financing the business. News outlets, whether they're radio, television, print, or online, are not actually in business for the reader. It's the same old story, guys: Follow the Money. The people who are actually making these "news" organs into profitable businesses are the advertisers, and don't think that the editorial and publishing staffs don't know this. They know exactly who their customers are. The customers are the advertisers. And their product is their subscriber base. The way they manufacture their product is to spew forth infotainment designed to keep their product's infamously short attention span focused on the medium long enough to score an ad impression.

The only part of this article that I really disagree with is his holier-than-thou attitude. Yeah right, offline media have ethics. Go watch The Insider and look at how 60 Minutes -- big guns in traditional media, I'd say -- sucked up to tobacco.

If you're in journalism, you're a whore. So what? We're mostly not down on prostitution around here, so long as we get our share. Here's fifty bucks; suck on this.

Hi John,

I submitted this as a story to Slashdot hoping you would comment, but they rejected it. :) And I hate to bug you with an e-mail.

But I was wondering what you thought of this technique that was written about in the LA Times. It sounds extremely interesting, particularly if it could be used for realistic rendering of skin. Too complex for a real-time game, e.g., DOOM?

...in the first paragraph here?

The exact same article ran in the August 6 LA Times.

I've referenced it a couple times here already.

The Vonnegut comment at the end is great!

"The e-book is a ridiculous idea," said Vonnegut, who hasn't read his work on a computer and never intends to. "The printed book is so satisfactory, so responsive to our fingertips. So much of this new stuff is utterly unneeded."

damn, after reading the news about the american student who was held unfairly in russia and then released yesterday, i couldn't help but think there was a private exchange behind the scenes regarding our american prisoner and Dimitry. i think Dmitry was being made an example of as a way for the US to get back at Russia for unfairly holding our american student on bullshit (planted) drug charges.
after reading the full story regarding our jailed american student, i couldn't help but laugh as i read all the 'Free Dmitry' sites! i mean, maybe the US doesn't feel so strongly about the speech and freedom issues like we think they do. perhaps they were just playing a bit of hard ball with the russians to get our american student released...
just my thoughts...

Front Page article in the LA Times about E-Books and Dmitry. Had a great picture of one of the protests on an inside continuation page (pic not available on line, bummer!).

LA Times article on the bail.

Front Page article in the LA Times about E-Books and Dmitry. Had a great picture of one of the protests on an inside continuation page (pic not available on line, bummer!).

LA Times article on the bail.

You remember what Sony executive said? He promised to take "the battle" to every user's home and computer. As soon as digital TV becomes more commonplace I expect to see media corporations like Sony start lobbying for making the net access by open and unapproved (uncontrolled) hardware and software illegal.

After all, the net was created hippies with no strong profit mentality.

LA Times Article The LA Times article is remarkably balanced and well written, actually... I was going to write Wilson myself, but it appears he has a decent handle on the situation. How refreshing.

I know, the idea of a Flash animation of a slide rule is kinda strange. But hey, it's cool.

I know, the idea of a Flash animation of a slide rule is kinda strange. But hey, it's cool.

Cyc is going open source, so here's a little anecdote that might be worth the read:

It was 1980 in a room at Arden Hills Operations. 2 floors below hummed and hissed one of the largest of the world's several legendary acreages of supercomputers, but these were fresh out of production, running through their paces with signs hanging over them saying things like "Los Alamos", "Lawrence Livermore" and, of course, "Fort Meade". One of Control Data Corporation's managers burst through the door to that room where, 2 floors above the humming and hissing, sat a bunch of fresh-out-of-the-University PLATO systems programmers, pounding away on around a million lines of COMPASS assembly language to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of the Cybers. They didn't have the luxury of "C", let alone Perl, because there might be close to a thousand users actively sharing one Cyber mainframe, and every key press would pierce through the Cyber's peripheral processing units and the Network Operating System's drivers to activate a user's application program. They turned to look at the breathless manager who told them that the Japanese were coming -- armed with something called "Fifth Generation Computers" and that the US had better respond. They didn't know it then, but Control Data Corporation (still a darling of the spook-shops 7 years after Cray left CDC to put first current to a Cray-1) was taking a leading role in mobilizing its troops to respond to this, the Pearl Harbor of computing. They wanted programmers who would pack up their few possessions and move away from the Twin Cities to sunnier climes -- yet to be chosen but known to be some subtropical paradise such as San Diego and Austin. Eventually, Austin was chosen and a bunch of them _did_ pack up and leave the winterland for a summerland. I was there in that room and was among those who didn't volunteer. I stayed until that same manager told me they would not be needing the mass-market version of PLATO -- the very thing I had moved to Arden Hills to pursue, leaving behind Urbana, Illinois and a project to develop an 8086 OS for personal computing on an emulation of that processor written to run on a mainframe.

Urbana, Illinois, you might recall, was the fictional birthplace of the fictitious HAL 9000 computer of the science fiction story "2001: A Space Odessy" which was sponsored by CDC in its first network television broadcast, I believe on NBC, during which a CDC ad showed kids breaking into their school in Springfield, Illinois to access the PLATO terminals there. One of those kids was Steve Freyder, the guy who would end up as a PLATO system programmer in Urbana working on the 8086 emulator with me so we could write a pre-first-silicon personal computer OS but that was before that same manager hired me off to CDC telling me I could work on taking PLATO to the mass market. Urbana was also the place where another PLATO system programmer, Ray Ozzie, had created a notesfile (we called them "notesfiles" rather than "newsgroups") on the University of Illinois PLATO system -- a notesfile to discuss artificial intelligence. David Woolley had just implemented notesfiles on PLATO so anyone could create one and some of us were just creating stupid little notesfiles. I created "important notes", "stupid notes", "apathetic notes" and "commie notes", etc. Ray titled his notesfile "ain" which stood for Artificial Intelligence Notes. Ray used "ain" as a stage for what might be called an early experiment in performance art during which he drew AI adherents down into the stinking pits of neology where they would respond in earnest to travesties of "blocks world" composed of such Frank Zappa out-takes as "crux of the biscuit" based on new-fangled computing devices like "inverse muffler bearings". A good time was had by most. I think it is safe to say that even with all the creative humor poured into this effort, Ray had a "bad attitude" toward AI.

It was against this backdrop of derision against AI culture by the PLATO culture's leadership, despite the mythos of Urbana as HAL's birthplace, that the CDC managers were attempting to whip up excitement for a Manhattan Project among PLATO systems programmers against the Yellow Fifth Generation Computing Peril. It is a testament to Minnesotan restraint that not one person laughed out loud.

The Manhattan Project in Austin ended up being called the Microelectronics Computing Consortium (MCC) which is where Doug Lenat met with Marvin Minsky and started what would become Cyc.

See the LA Times story on Cyc going open source for more details.

An Interesting and semi-related article was in the LA Times this morning, about how Disney is laying off a good chunk of it's animation group, and many of the older members think that the new environment does not foster the kind of (perceived) creativity that made Disney famous.

From the Article:
But longtime animators say the more serious problem is that the division--once the premier place to work--lacks the creative vibrancy that fostered such hits as "Lion King."

You're missing the point. The end result of capitalism is a single monopoly. We saw it at the beginning of the last century, and it is making a fashionable comeback at the beginning of this century. Corporations have no obligations to the consumer, their only legal obligation is to the shareholder. That's why there are decisions by companies like Firestone that figure 100 deaths is better than 1 million recalls: simple math. Our current system of government is toothless against these corporations. First, corporations make huge contributions to lawmakers. Even if you don't believe this is a "pay-to-play" system, one must admit that all that cash gives AOL/Time-Warner a rather loud megaphone to broadcast its views. Second, corporations have all the rights of humans (except for the Fourth Amendment, I believe), with none of the pesky drawbacks, like mortality.

"Big Media" is a problem because "Big Media" has an interest in what news it lets its consumers hear. Did anyone expect to hear criticism on the Time-Warner holdings about the AOL/Time-Warner merger? Recently, The Boston Globe refused to run an ad critical of Staples. (See FAIR for a summary) The Globe is owned by the same company that owns The LA Times -- both with strong ties to Staples.

This "Corporate Republic bullshit" is not getting old. It's terrifying to see that success is measured only in dollars. It's horrifying to see large corporations spreading their money around, strangling voices of dissent with cash. It's disgusting that people aren't pissed about the narrowing of social dialogue.

This was on the front page of the LA Times a few days ago and presents the record industry in a much better light: http://www.latimes.com/news/front/20010531/t000045 508.html.

Why didn't this make slashdot?? It is just as newsworthy as this topic, perhaps more so because it shows a side to the industry than I and many others probably have never seen. And before you cry "bias" remember that the LA Times is one of the most liberal, anti-corporate papers in the nation.

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters?? Please. I'm almost embarassed to be a nerd. All nerds aren't socialists. And some nerds can even understand the concept of opportunity cost.

for an even more damaging (long-term) story about our favorite entertainment corporations, check this story from last week's L.A. Times. Payola never went away, but now it looks like it might finally have raised enough eyebrows to start hurting.


--

For some reason, /. insists on inserting spaces randomly into comments

proper link

I guess more traditional practices include customer ripoffs.

I note, for example, this 23 May 2001 Press Release, where Earthlink announced

"EARTHLINK NAMES COCA-COLA EXECUTIVE TO HEAD ITS MARKETING EFFORTS
New executive vice president of marketing brings a wealth of experience to EarthLink"

The LA Times had this story about the ouster of one of the founders, under controversial circumstances.

I figure it is bloody in there.

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

In review of the Web, I find that it is a misperception that he's bilingual. His brother Jeb is, but George W. may not be.

I do recall recently when a reporter (was it on his trip to Mexico?) asked a question in Spanish and George W. answered it. The question might have been "How are you today Mr. President?" though...

"I know that taking a stand against Scientology is likely to subject me and my family to the same abuse Mr. Ward has experienced. But there comes a point where people of good will *must* stand up to criminals-- even to those who are experts in using the courts to harass." --- Keith Henson

14 months ago things were still good. Now though, any money is probably okay especially given the picture in this article from the LA Times.

The real issue is one that should interest /. readers: access to the data. Prior to the Celera paper on the genome, the standard at Science papers on new sequences was for the authors to deposit their annotated sequences in the public GenBank database. Celera made special arrangements with Science to keep its human genome sequence secret (actually quasi-secret. You can access small chunks of it from Celera if you sign away many of your rights to do as you wish with the information).

Since open exchange of data is the lifeblood of science and served as a precedent and inspiration for RMS's original thinking on free software, this precedent is legitimate cause for concern. Without access to the complete sequence, scientists have limited ability to build upon Celera's work and to look for errors in the genome.

In fact, the previous sentence is somewhat hyperbolic---the HGP sequence is freely available and many universities and other not-for-profit laboratories are licensing full access to the Celera data, but as a point of principle Lander was right to voice concern.

In fact, if you think about it from the standard knee-jerk conservative point of view, the new mystery over only 30 K genes should be something the government funded labs should be shouting from the rooftops. After all, if the genome were completely understood, then the government could close its checkbook, issue a great tax refund, and send the scientists home or into the private sector. However, if a great conspiracy of scientists suppressed their mastry of the genome and said that lots more research was necessary to understand it, then they would guarantee further trips to the trough. This is the standard conservative criticism of research on global climate change---that the scientists know it's bunk, but continue to pretend that more research is needed in order to receive continuing funding.

I would like to inform you of an increasing problem with our society lately... it is called SPAM.

...
yadda yadda yadda... more text and hyperlinks...
even a link to "Remove you from our mailing list" (which actually just adds you to 3 other newsletters/mailing lists that you don't want)...
...

Thank you for your time.
PS. If you don't send this to 30 people within the next 5 minutes, you will have bad luck for the rest of your life.

Prior to today, how much coverage has there been?

Damn little. Slashdot had a piece on Friday. Then nothing until Wednsday when the L.A. Times did an article.

Mike Swaine picked up on a Register article, also on Wednsday.

That was it, near as I can tell until today when everyone is covering it after the fact.

Prior to today, how much coverage has there been?

Damn little. Slashdot had a piece on Friday. Then nothing until Wednsday when the L.A. Times did an article.

Mike Swaine picked up on a Register article, also on Wednsday.

That was it, near as I can tell until today when everyone is covering it after the fact.

An opposing viewpoint: In the Los Angeles Times today there was a column defending the school bullies and blaming that nasty 'ol Bill of Rights instead (it's media and guns! Get them both!).

Really? Do you fail to note the incredible 90+% of media is controlled by 6 companies in the US? The news outlets that are being bought by the likes of Disney and GE? That the editor of the LA Times talks about taking a bazooka to the wall between marketing and editorial? Advertisers making demands to content providers?

Documenting the corporitization of the media and the risks to society that entails is beyond the scope of this comment :) However, that Mr. Shirky can so easily dismis these concerns without even acknowledging these issues gives me pause. If you'd like to learn about the corporitization of the media I suggest you check out Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, Manufacturing Consent (documentary) by Noam Chomsky, and Rich Media, Poor Democracy by Robert McChesney.

On the topic of the media and Seattle protests, the mainstream media did not cover globalization issues at all prior to the protests. Virtually, all coverage of globalization was confined to the business pages for whom the terms of globalization were already written. There were no discussions of human rights and labor issues of globalization. Activists organizing for Seattle recognized this and saw the need to create their own media. Hence, Indymedia was born and now there are 40 spread throughout the world.

Indymedia - become the media

If the music industry is losing sooooo much money to people pirating music, then why do all the big newspapers GIVE AWAY their news stories on their websites?

Ever heard of:
The Detroit News (My hometown rag)
The London Times
The New York Times
USA Today
The L.A. Times
The Boston Globe

The list goes on and on.

It's obvious to me that these newspapers are generating their own revenue by advertising themselves. Music artists have it easy because the LISTENERS do most of the promotions when they rip/encode to MP3!!!

IMHO, this whole napster thing looks like one ingenious publicity stunt to sell MORE records.

"In many ways, we are caught up in the educational equivalent of a nuclear arms race. We know that this overemphasis on test scores hurts all involved, especially students. But we also know that anyone or any institution opting out of the competition does so at considerable risk."

"Atkinson is challenging test makers to come up with a new test that would be directly tied to college preparatory courses rather than to what he considers "an ill-defined measure of aptitude or intelligence" like the SAT."

"He was the founding chairman of the National Research Council's Board on Testing and Assessment and was once a distinguished visiting scholar at the Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT for the College Board."

St. Petersburg Times - Tampabay: Cameras scanned fans for criminals. Super Bowl fans had their privacy invaded by the technology, critics say. Law officials cite security.

Is the new surveillance system the latest twist on Big Brother? Face-matching surveillance already is well established at more than 70 casinos. But the system's biggest opportunities lie in more benign functions: Identifying customers at ATMs or participants in welfare programs, and screening people who want to enter secure workplace areas.

At Raymond James Stadium, surveillance system cameras were focused only on people entering at turnstiles. No cameras were used inside to pan the fans inside. But cameras did sweep the crowds at the NFL Experience, indicating the growing reach of database systems to try and match faces even in large groups.

At UCLA, professor Borgman questioned the technical ability of a system to identify individual faces so quickly.

"If these surveillance systems spread, there may be a considerable margin of error in determining the identity of people who get snagged," she said. "And that is a big price to pay for your civil rights."

The FaceTrac(TM) core facial recognition technology provides the ability to locate faces, to build 'face print' templates and to recognize matches to images stored in a database. When integrated with G-TEC's law enforcement database, FaceTrac(TM) allows rapid search, comparison and identification of suspect facial photos within the database. FaceTrac(TM) may be used for surveillance with multiple locations networked to a high capacity site, for analysis and system-search results. G-TEC installed FaceTrac(TM) at the Raymond James Stadium as a single site system, integrated with a custom designed database and search result notifications for tracking faces in a crowd and monitoring access to secure areas.

The system used for the Super Bowl project, first reported yesterday by the St. Petersburg Times, was lent by companies seeking to market the technology to law enforcement agencies. Tampa police accepted the free use of the system as an experiment and worked with local and national police agencies to manage it during the week of the game, said Durkin.

Dave Watkins, managing director of Graphco Technologies Inc., said the event gave the company a chance to learn how the software would perform, which camera angles were most effective and how the lenses of the 20 video cameras should be focused in a public place.

The American Civil Liberties Union("ACLU") opposes the involuntary capture of biometric details, such as face-recognition data, DNA and retina scans. The organization, in its list of "Privacy Principles," considers the fingerprinting of convicted criminals a worthy exception.

"We are quickly moving to the point where law enforcement and the private sector will be able to identify us no matter where we go, no matter how anonymous we think we are," said Barry Steinhardt, the ACLU's associate director. "Not only is it going to rob us of our anonymity, but it's going to be used as a tool of law enforcement to round up 'the usual suspects' and to hassle people on the streets."

The practice is almost certainly legal, but it is in an emerging area of the law that has not been fully tested in court, said Harvard Law School professor Bill Stuntz.

Super Bowl 2001 fans were secretly treated to a mass, biometric scan in which video cameras tied to a temporary law-enforcement command centre digitised their faces and compared them against photographic lists of known malefactors.

Everyone entering Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida last Sunday was subjected to the surveillance system cameras, set up at the entrance turnstiles. No notice or disclosure was ever given, and no one, therefore, had an opportunity to decline to enter the stadium if they should have objected to this unprecedented treatment.

[ ... ]

"The Company's face-recognition technology is unique because of its capabilities of both rapid and accurate real-time acquisition as well as its scalability to databases containing millions of faces. Therefore, the software can instantly calculate an individual's eigenface from either live video or a still digital image, and then search a database of millions in only a few seconds in order to find similar or matching images."

'Similar or matching.' This clearly acknowledges the possibility that innocent civilians going about their peaceable business may be stopped, hassled, even arrested, merely for resembling someone naughty. This raises sticky issues regarding the presumption of innocence many of us were encouraged to believe in during our grammar-school civics lessons. Is there a violation of this principle when a person is required to produce evidence that they are not, in fact, the evil bastard whom they unfortunately resemble?

Unknown to the 100,000 people who passed through the turnstiles at Sunday's Super Bowl, hidden cameras scanned each of their faces and compared the portraits with photos of terrorists and known criminals of every stripe.

In a command post at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla., the digitized images of fans and workers were cross-checked against files of local police, the "FBI" and state agencies at the rate of a million images a minute.

The cameras identified 19 people with criminal histories, none of them of a "significant" nature, Tampa authorities said. But the undisclosed first test of the technology at a major U.S. sporting event raised arguments about privacy versus security and questions about the future of such spying and its uses.

"Oh my God, it's yet another nail in the coffin of personal liberty," said Bruce Schneier, founder and chief technical officer of "Counterpane" Internet Security Inc., a security monitoring company.

"It's another manifestation of a surveillance society, which says we're going to watch you all the time just in case you might do something wrong," said Schneier, whose book "Secrets & Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World" warned of the increasing encroachment on civil liberties in high-tech society.

[ ... ]

Other applications are expected to include ATM machines and public events such as the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

certain irresponsible docters recommed we drink eight cups of the vile stuff a day!

Yes, I know it's meant as a joke, but the 8 glasses-of-water rule is a myth; the LA Times had a really interesting article on it here...
--

In case anyone tries to read the story after 11/29, here's the URL:
http://www.latimes.com/business/columns/techcol/20 001127/t000113753.html

As a software engineer, I understand why so little time is spent developing new code. The more code you have in production, the more time you spend supporting the users. Between coworkers who can't figure out how to access a network drive and users who don't know what software that they spec'd out themselves does, I have very little time in any given day to write code. I write code maybe two hours a day, and either handle service problems or overhead items the rest of the time.

It's discouraging, but unavoidable in this field.

I was also able to find the article here.

http://www.latimes.com/business/columns/dnation/to days.topstory.htm

The article's title is "No 'Silver Bullet' for Software's Growing Complexity" in case it shifts again and someone has to search for it.

If hand recounts are less accurate than machine recounts, why are hand recounts ordered by law in case in dispute in both Florida and Texas, as well as most of the other states?

Not true. What the Texas law does say is that if both a hand and machine recount are requested, only one, the hand recount is performed. Under Texas law, one may not have multiple recounts. In Florida, it is up to each county, provided they have the results in by deadline. Furthermore, as the Washington Post found, most states don't count dimples.

How easy is it to stuff the ballot box when you're in a roomful of extremely partisan observers from the other side? Do you think the Dem's are ripping out chads right under the Republicans noses?

Not conclusive at all. After all, the Republicans did complain about the interpretations of dimpled chads that Broward County came up with. The Republican judge on the Broward County board disagreed with tons of the calls, and one Republican observer was thrown out for disagreeing with a call. So, just because the Republicans were there didn't mean they didn't object to the calls. They just didn't control the process.

How can Gore have "clearly lost" the hand recount when the recount wasn't allowed to finish? Do you think shipping in goons to harass election canvassing boards into calling off recounts is an acceptable outcome in a Western democracy?

Because the race is over after either the arbitrary deadline the Florida Supreme Court made, or the original deadline in the statute the Legislature passed before the election. As for the "goons" complaint, the Democratic election supervisor in Miami-Dade County told the Los Angeles Times that the demonstration was peaceful, and did not intimidate him. He would have made the decision anyway, as there wasn't enough time. Don't forget that the Democrats on the County board originally voted not to have a manual recount, until the Gore campaign threatened to sue them. As a Democrat, it would have been easy for him to claim he was intimidated; he didn't.

The woman who certified this vote, and who has consistently attempted to block all attempts at hand recounts, is Bush's co-campaign chair in Florida. How can this be allowed to happen? Do they not have conflict of interest laws in Florida? Further, her job is due to be slated out of existence at the end of her term, which means she's looking for work. She'll get a plum appointment in a Bush administration, maybe even an Ambassadorship. Is this the way we do elections in America? Sounds more like one of those new Russian states making it's first attempt at democracy.

She does have an obvious defense, that it is her job and she was following the law. After all, the Attorney General for Florida jumped in the dispute, and he managed Gore's campaign in Florida. The judges and workers in Broward County and elsewhere who judges the dimpled ballots voted for Gore, and some of them contributed to his campaign, had stickers for him on their cars, and are members of the DNC. (Evidence, as though it matters: here) Surely there were conflicts of interest there too? At least her job had very straightforward deadlines in law, and later dictated by the courts-- the local Democratic officials were interpreting dimples and stray marks, which has much more room for bias. She certified all recounts that came before the legislated deadline. She then certified all recounts before the Florida Supreme Court imposed deadline.

Why are most of the optical counting machines in Florida in Republican areas, where the shitty old punchcard systems are in place in Democratic strongholds?

Not true. The Orlando Sentinal published a list of spoiled ballots for counties and electoral systems. It lists tabulation systems used, and who won each county. There's also a link to a map. Note that optical systems and punchcard systems are distributed proportionally in counties the each candidate won, although Gore did have slightly more spoiled ballots in counties he won.

But that wasn't my point. My point is that in any situation where it comes down to a civilian's word against a cop in a court of law, the cop will come out the winner, every time, no questions asked.

The conviction of three Los Angeles police officers on corruption charges represents a watershed for the city, legal observers said Wednesday, because it signals that jurors here no longer automatically give credence to the men and women who are sworn to serve and protect.

"In Los Angeles, a badge is no longer a shield," said Santa Monica defense lawyer Gigi Gordon, who has followed the Rampart case closely.

For a picture of total war, read this disturbing account ; of the Chechen war in the Los Angeles Times. (WARNING: not for sensitive readers. I mean it, it's pretty horrific).

You may notice that this terrible war is being conducted without any smart weapons. You may also note that members of the Russian government apparently care little for the lives of the men they send into battle. The respect for life begins with one's own men and women in uniform.

Apropos of nothing (I hope), take a look here.

The bands like Offspring, who have platinum sales (and thus sell enough to recieve royalties) are the ones with something to lose by giving the recordings away.

However, Offspring announced that it will digitally distribute their album for _FREE_ on the Internet one month before the CD comes out! They claim that it will only help their sales.

I hear Somalia has minimal government. Enjoy yourself.

Actually, Somalia does have minimal government, and it would seem that things are going pretty well now considering what they've been through in the past.

What they're trying to do is bypass it by making it so you can't record, even though you may record. Such a law is moot if there isn't any equipment capable (or in this case, all available equipment is crippled and castrated) of recording.

Up until now, the media cartels have grudgingly tolerated home recording because of quality degradation inherent in analog signals. All of a sudden "digital" comes along with the promise of infinite flawless error-corrected non-degrading copies. No tapes that wear out, no records that scratch up, no magnification of error from copy to copy. At fist they were cool with it since the equipment to write it to media large nough to hold it was beyond the means of normal people. But abruptly storage, bandwidth, compression, and processing power all caught up and turned digital media into a two way street: people could once again record their own media. Now they're all scrambling to "secure" their digital media without understanding the meaning of the word: to keep others from getting something you already have. I hate to break it to them, but they have already given or sold their stuff to us, and the only think copyright allows them to prevent us from doing is giving it to someone else. Anything else is our business.

Want to stop piracy? Convince people that copying is wrong because you honestly deserve their money and don't give them a reason to willfully rip you off because they want to see you go into bankruptcy. Hiding behind the "protecting the artists" excuse isn't working, especially when the artists don't want your protection.

This is the rather naive and complacent attitude of the general populus that the MPAA is counting on. In reality it really is a "slippery slope" kind of proposition that you have bought off on.

First, you can not figure what kind of enhancements can be made by knowing the encryption scheme. That is akin to what a patent examiner said at the turn of the century - "that everything that will be invented has been invented". Needless to say he was dead wrong. It is presumptuous to say that there can't be enhancements because you can't think of any off hand.

Secondly, why do we have to buy DVD players from select manufacturers in the first place? Maybe that's why you can't afford one. Why is the MPAA even involved in hardware anyway??? They make movies, they shouldn't have control over the devices that play them. If you doubt this, the government already bitched slapped them in the fifties. The U.S. Department of Justice' antitrust division filed suit against the eight major studios, accusing them of 'monopolizing the distribution of their films.' Gee, I guess history does repeat itself. They were forced to give up control of the theatre chains.

Third, the MPAA would rather dismantle the internet rather than lose their 'precious' encryption scheme. I take it you like to use the net now? How about when they come after slashdot because they might find DeCSS here? AKA Microsoft and the Kerberos scam (do a search if you don't know). The real croak is that in Taiwan there are so called 'legit' dvd disc makers by day and pirate houses by night stamping out bit by bit copies (it's far easier than hassling with DeCSS)
See here.

Fourth, government has already bowed to companies. That's how they were able to pass the DMCA in the dead of night with no debate and a voice vote (so nobody would be on record). That's why my own congressman (senator Hatch) tried to attach anonymously (at the request of a company, because their drug patent is about to expire) a bill to extend the length of drug patents. He had to do it anonymously because he knows voting seniors who can't afford drugs as it is would be really pissed. They are.

It's an academic excercise that is best left up to people who actually will explain it better for people like me.

Fifth, you don't mind that other people control what you can and cannot see. I do. This is a constitutional excercise. Otherwise you have other people explain better to you what may and may not do/see/read. It's called freedom.

Sixth, everybody knows that the best random numbers comes from shot noise generated from a reversed biased zener diode. See here.

I could go on, but I believe I have dismantled your post sufficiently.

People are already "work boycotting" the RIAA members (and I'd guess the MPAA members are next, if it hasn't started already). There was an article in the LA Times about this in July. The gist of the article was that the record labels were finding it impossible to fill technical positions, in part because of the image created by their recent legal battles.