Slashdot Mirror

More so, since this was not a leaked story.

The strip is not blasphemous in any serious way.

Says you. Keep in mind, after the Danish cartoons, people are likely to tread a little bit lightly rather than get some expert opinion on what might qualify as blasphemous. Throw in CAIR getting lawsuit happy (whether the lawsuits have merit or not) and you've got a recipe for less backbone enhanced editors to exclude the comics. The flip side to the comic is that some papers won't run it because of a tastless sex joke. No clear breakdown on why different papers are excluding it.

Here ya go. It looks like, depending on your neck of the woods, editors won't run it because it either has a tasteless sex joke, or because it might offend Muslims.

Of course, some scholars http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/3/20/215835 /227 don't believe executive privilege should even be an issue here.

And the really fun part is watching the White House Press Secretary, Tony Snow, trying to explain http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_displa y.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003560724 why this was bad for the Clinton Administration, but OK for the Bush Regime.

"In other words, the government only needs warrants for unreasonable
searches and seizures."

Still wrong. I am not a lawyer, but I do know that that whole pesky "and without probable cause" part comes into play, oh, somewhere..

These are interesting..
http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2006/05/1727886.php
http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_displa y.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002463957

You simply stated exactly what Mr. Hayden said in an interview with reporters a couple of weeks back - that the government only needs warrants for unreasonable searches. Sad that someone who is supposed to head up one of the most powerful and important intelligence organizations in the world doesn't even know the 4th amendment.

When corrected on the issue, that it also requires PROBABLE CAUSE, Hayden actually argued back that it the only standard for obtaining warrants was for unreasonable searches.

You've made the same mistake.

Ah, but it's not. They're already monitoring reporters calls to find their sources for stories that might embarrass the administration.

Combine that with the fact that they already get news outlets to bury many of the stories that do get out, it looks like they're already stomping on the first amendment.

--MarkusQ

They failed even before it happened:

"..In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.

On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: "It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us."

Also that June, with the 2004 hurricane season starting, the Corps' project manager Al Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. ..."

Guess it's okay though, people still have those tax cuts he gave them.

According to this, , 75% of Bush supporters believe Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda (and 20% believe Saddam was directly involved in 9/11, though another study puts that at 56%). 72% of Bush supporters believe Iraq had WMD or a program to develop them, 72% believe Bush supports the treaty banning landmines. The list goes on. None of these beliefs are correct, but when you can successfully trick people into believing these things, you can probably trick them into voting for Bush too.

What good purpose does this device serve?

It's like taking heroin away from a junkie.

They might, you know, have an insightful conversation or read the news, read a book or think a little more.

Then, maybe we'd wouldn't have have the problem where 32% of the American population believe that Saddam Hussein personally planned the 9/11 attacks or other such bullshit.

He was merely selective in his enforcement,

So a police officer can swear "to uphold the law", and then go around shooting unauthorized immigrants on sight, and that's just "selective enforcement".

You don't know that, and I find it rather idiotic that you'd assume this.

Since I work for the Pentagon as a military planner, I actually do know this pretty well. But you can prove it yourself without any special insider knowledge.

The fact that the Pentagon and State Department were not asked to plan for post-war Iraq has been well documented in the USA's media.

Firstly, everyone with any knowledge of what the full power of the US military really means

That's a freakishly wrong interpretation. You think using "full power" means "all powers", when it really just means "all powers that would be useful towards achieving a goal". Since in that same speech Bush said his goal was not merely the defeat of Iraq or the destruction of Saddam's power, but the "liberation" of a hidden Iraqi democracy, turning it into a nuclear wasteland would've been directly counterproductive.

Your complaint is equivalent to arguing that I didn't use my AK-47 when I was trying to fix your computer.

I'll try to address what I think you meant because I'd prefer to give you the benefit of the doubt and hope that you don't think Congress voted to allow the President to end the world.

No, you're giving the President the benefit of the doubt.

So, by "power", do you mean firepower, or do you mean effectiveness?

I mean DIs. Grount troops. Sentries. Patrollers. "Boots"

You know, those people that were entirely too scarce after Saddam's collapse... which, if they had been there, could've helped get things off to a positive start.

Again, this was a case of changing his mind under new conditions rather than a lie.

There are no new conditions, except in his mind. The USA was vulnerable to attacks before, and it still is. Anyone too stupid to notice the possibility of terrorism without a gigantic example doesn't deserve to be President, regardless of such an example actually having been provided.

Furthermore, since he didn't learn the lesson of September 11th (that threats come not only from nations, but non-state organizations), he's got an even stronger disqualifaction. ("New Afgani government replacing the Taliban? Check. Al Quaida destroyed? Nevermind, moving right along to Iraq...")

There's an interesting interview with Google co-founder Sergei Brin about the future of google advertising.

The subject says it. I have to applaud such an excellent troll.

That said, I find the level of hostility and even outright hatred directed at me for a casual comment - that was not even the substance of my post - astonishing. My initial post was intended to point out that Cuba has long been used as a major base of operations for electronic signals intercepts and espionage by both the USA and the USSR/Russia. Nothing more, nothing less. If you choose to read it in a paranoiac manner that you believe implies malice where none exists, that is your issue, not mine.

Some of you have gone so far as to make attempts to learn details of my identity (you know who you are and now so do I - don't worry, I won't publish your identities or other personal information even though it would be an excellent object lesson). If you have something you want to know, just ask - I just might answer. There's really no need for your kind of subterfuge.

Now, despite my better judgement, on to the rest of your response because the record needs to be set straight.

Pro-Shah U.S. satellite stations and CNN's reliability: The report I referred to was broadcast from Los Angeles without any restrictions by government censors. Your comment that "CNN are the people who admitted to censoring various news broadcasts out of Iraq" is supposed to cast doubt on the reliablilty of the L.A. report. What you fail to mention is that every major news organization in the world has to submit to government censors of one kind or another when reporting from a war zone. If you were inside Iraq like CNN, BBC, CBC, AFP, AP and others, you had to submit your reports for vetting by Iraqi government censors. If you were an embedded reporter with U.S. forces, you had to sign a (leaked) contract and agree to restrictions before you were even allowed to be embedded. Reporters are still forbidden to disclose the terms of the contract or the penalities for doing so. Journalists were then required to get the authorization of the company commander to send their reports. At CENTCOM headquarters, information was tightly controlled and heavily censored before it was ever presented to reporters so that they never got anything less than the rosiest possible picture. This was preceded by blanket U.S. government censorship in the first Gulf War and subsequent conflicts. Intelligence Onine, a respected global intelligence community newsletter, documented that the airmobile Fourth Psychological Operations Group, from Fort Bragg, North Carolina were active employees of CNN who participated in news production. In the U.K. and Northern Ireland during the worst days of the fighting, it was illegal to broadcast even the voice of an IRA or Sinn Fein member. If you're a reporter in Israel/Occupied Territories, you must sign an agreement to submit to Israeli military censorship as a condition of working there. The list goes on and on. It goes with the territory if you're reporting from a conflict zone, not from a studio in suburban Los Angeles.

Ad hominem attacks: Read very carefully. I made no accusations against anyone. In fact, it was you, Phil, who attempted to equate me with "our enemies" and wrote of my supposed "sympathies towards the Cuban government." You're hardly without sin, so you certainly shouldn't be casting stones, or aspersions for that matter.

Student protests: Iranian students were protesting against plans by their government to privatize its university system - the system is currently government-subsidized - which would result in massive tuition increases and deny access to a post-secondary education to all but the wealthiest Iranians. That is the context in which the protests were taking place and that is

Not true - the NYT came to Google to work out a deal so that google would spider the NYT's news articles (which would have been unavailable to google's web spiders because of the NYT's registration). This info comes from this column which is referenced by this /. article. It's a good read on how the NYT needs google more than the other way around.

Other search engines would love Google to make stupid decisions to censor some of the better news content. A partnership with NYT would just give them one leg up on Google. Google can't afford that.

Okay, time to drop the crack pipe. Nobody said *anything* about censorship. What *is* being discussed is the NYT's decision to allow google news readers to view NYT's article without having to register (a topic you completly screw up in the next paragraph).

On another note, regarding the "moronic registration process", I'm sure NYT has had plenty of time to re-evaluate its registration process to determine if it is counter-productive. I'm sure the money they save on consulting and profiling studies because they can link their stories to users far outweighs the $.005/hit of advertising money lost due to the 5% of its potential readers that are turned away.

I seriously doubt the *main* reason the NYT has registration is for profiling studies. They want email addresses to sell (IMO) - an email address from a NYT reader is worth more than one from, say, etoys.com (or wherever). They decided it's worth it to them to go without the email addr in order to get the page view from google (and more importantly, a possible daily reader and/or subscriber). Besides, with the referrer-google, you onl;y get to view the *one* article without registration - if you then go to another NYT article linked from within NYT, you have to register.

The previous layout was a whole lot simpler, just a simple list of categories, top stories within each, and four or five links to that story from different sources. One nice touch was that the link for each story was the headline used for it, which was nice because you could tell at a glance who was just repeating a wire feed and who really had something worthwhile -- and sometimes you could get nicely contrasting stories (like, say, the same event in Kashmir as described by both Indian & Pakistani news sources). The new, more complex & busy layout doesn't allow them to do this anymore, which IMO is a change for the worse.

AS for the new layout, I dunno. It has much higher information density, which the Edward Tufte fan in me thinks is a very good thing. But it's a very busy layout, and so a bit overwhelming to me. I'm finding that I haven't spent as much time on the new version as I was before on the old one, and I'm not checking it as often either -- maybe just a cursory glance once or twice a day, as opposed to a more careful skim several times a day before. Compared to the sparse layouts that Google ordinarily uses, a design this heavy feels very jarring to me, where on another site I probably wouldn't care. Hopefully I'll get over this.

Here's an interesting angle though, from the article the original submitter noted:

Google News already has made arrangements with some leading news sites that use registration schemes -- such as The New York Times. Google News users who click on links to NYTimes.com articles at Google News go directly to the article -- there's no intervening registration screen -- even if they're not already registered at NYTimes.com. This works, explains product manager Mayer, because the site allows Google's spiders to crawl its content and include links in the Google service. When a non-registered user hits a NYTimes.com page, the site will recognize that it's a referral from Google News and serve up the content -- delaying the registration requirement for one page. When the Google News user tries to go elsewhere on NYTimes.com, then the registration system kicks in. If the user is already registered, then NYTimes.com reads the user's NYT cookie and doesn't ask for registration information.

Why can't Slashdot come up with such an arrangment? The NY TImes is one of the best news sources on the 'net, and I'm sure their staff has to have at least some Slashdot fans. The constant whining disclaimers about having to register -- and the even more bizarre constant opposition to the very idea -- could all be short-circuited if the two sites could enter into a similar arrangement. Why has this never happened? Lack of imagination, or is one side or the other just uninterested? Whatever the obstacle has been, I'd be happy if we could just get over it and set up some kind of arrangement.

2 Editors Out After Political Disputes

In full:

JULY 02, 2002
2 Editors Out After Political Disputes
Publishers Allegedly Sought Coverage Changes

By Joe Strupp

NEW YORK -- The election season has barely begun and already allegations that publishers have succumbed to political candidates seeking favorable treatment have led at least two editors to abruptly leave their jobs.

The first departure occurred June 19 when the Brown Publishing Co., owner of the weekly Vandalia (Ohio) Drummer News, fired Editor Kevin O'Boyle. The termination came nearly two months after Brown Publishing CEO and President Roy Brown lost a Republican congressional primary to former Dayton Mayor Mike Turner.

During Brown's campaign, O'Boyle had spoken out against some of the campaign's tactics, which O'Boyle said included forcing the Brown papers to run campaign press releases and sending campaign flyers to editors for distribution. "It wasn't ethical," O'Boyle, who spent seven years at the paper, told E. "It bothered me as a Christian and a newsperson."

Brown Publishing executives have denied any illegal campaign practices.

The Turner campaign claimed the Brown coverage went beyond regular news reporting and should have been treated as a campaign contribution. Complaints by Turner to the Federal Election Commission sparked an ongoing FEC investigation.

Joel Dempsey, Brown Publishing's general counsel, would not discuss details of O'Boyle's firing, but said it had nothing to do with his criticism of the Brown campaign. "A personnel decision was made concerning the quality of the newspaper and his ability to work for his publisher," he said.

On June 21, Tom McDonald, editor of the 18,716-daily-circulation Pine Bluff (Ark.) Commercial, quit his job after two years to protest the paper's endorsement procedures in a local congressional race.

McDonald claimed the paper's parent company, Stephens Media Group of Las Vegas, improperly directed the paper to support former Rep. Jay Dickey, a Republican, in his campaign against incumbent Democrat Mike Ross. And, he told E, "I was also told to keep my disagreements in-house."

McDonald claimed that Stephens Media executives and Commercial Publisher Charles A. Berry allowed Dickey to influence them with a list of demands for favorable coverage, which included requests for halting letters to the editor from a pro-Ross reader, less comment from Ross on Dickey press releases, and more coverage of Dickey's plans to help black voters.

The former editor also objected to the paper's plans to announce its endorsement this summer, instead of waiting until weeks before the election -- and accused Stephens Media of ordering it because Dickey is a friend of the Stephens family.

Sherman Frederick, Stephens Media CEO and president, denied that Dickey influenced the newspaper's coverage and said no endorsement had been made -- but admitted that Dickey has had a longtime relationship with the Stephens family. He also pointed out that newspaper owners have always directed endorsements, and added, referring to McDonald's objections: "He's living in a world that doesn't exist."

Source: Editor & Publisher Online

Seymour Cray's final product involved the fastest switching technology ever activated in a super computer, which was then coupled into a massively parallel computing system. The Cray-3/Super Scalable System had a revolutionary GaAs control processor with potentially tens of millions of computing memory elements. This system (an adaptation of the original GaAs Cray-3) was financed by the NSA. Seymour Cray accepted this funding in a last-ditch effort to save his company and when I visited the Colorado Springs office, I was actually given the impression by one of their executives that they had a working model and would consider commercial sale of the device. Cray Computer Corporation went bankrupt shortly thereafter in the first business failure of Cray's phenomenal career. About a year later, Cray was killed in a jeeping accident. Having cut my teeth on his machines at the CDC/Urbana PLATO project, I knew Cray was unhappy with the direction his technology had been taken by "the spook shops" from before the day he left CDC to found Cray Research on his farm in in Wisconsin.

Recent revelations of RSA's vulnerability come as no surprise. The NSA, despite the fact that it is run by unaccountable bureaucrats embedded in a dough ball of Federal funding, is probably far beyond a cabal of private hackers in their capabilities.

Lest hackers and civil libertarians get the idea that now is the time for civil disobedience in protest of regulations against unlimited key sizes, you should probably be aware that Federal officials are so embolden by their lack of accountability that some of them have slipped up and are explicitly threatening suspects with prisoner gang rape. Given the prevalence of HIV infection in the prison systems, and the efficiency with which the virus is transmitted during gang rape, such threats amount to murderous sexual sadism as punishment for civil disobedience. In one of the most outrageous examples, Assistant U.S. attorney Gordon Zubrod from Harrisburg, PA made the following statement in a broadcast statement to 3 suspects who fled to Canada (this statement was captured for the public record during a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interview):

"You're going to be the boyfriend of a very bad man if you wait out your extradition."

If you think the use of murderous sexual sadism against protesters who engage in civil disobedience is unrealistic, or somehow so low risk as to be inconsequential, you should read Torture In The American Gulag before taking any personal risks.