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Another website defined Fascism as: "Mussolini said that fascism should more properly be called "corporatism" since it was, under Mussolini, a blending of state and corporate power. Mussolini ought to know; he was the first fascist leader."

But, I like what Henery A Wallace said, in 1944:
http://www.furnitureforthepeople.com/danger.htm
" If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. ...

  American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, ...

  Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after "the present unpleasantness" ceases: The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power.
"

That last sentence defines what is now called 'FUD'. The Germans are no longer the threat they once were, but Microsoft has seen no problem helping the Communist in China round up dissidents and jail them, or worse.

Now, Microsoft is calling in its chips, all those "campaign contributions" it has flooded the Congress and the Senate with.

Do you NOW see what happens when Justice is thwarted and the guilty are given mere slaps on the wrist and with a wink and a nod told they can continue with "business as usual"?

it is? it seems like mostly what the 'intelligence' community does in the united states these days is spy on unarmed, constitutionally-protected demonstrators. like these cases, for instance:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11751418/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/03/14/AR2006031401520_pf.html
http://www.dailytexanonline.com/media/paper410/new s/2006/03/24/TopStories/Students.Fbi.Lecture.Displ ays.Watch.List-1716066.shtml?norewrite200603281210 &sourcedomain=www.dailytexanonline.com
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/artic le_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001995631
http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?Stor yID=20060214-053955-9494r
http://www.tbo.com/news/metro/MGBTP976FJE.html

Ok, so it's not spying. But the explosion could be detected from orbit. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4394002

This is basically non-news (if it's up on C|net that should give you a clue).

The actual "article" is nothing but a rehash for a development update posted to http://spaces.msn.com/morethanmail/ . It seems that our dear Ina even missed the point the actual blog entry was intended to make. It wasn't about Hotmail, or POP accounts, it's that it logically separates email account instead of everything going into the same place.

Nothing to see here. Carry on.

You misunderstand how the world works. Sugar water == big money, and big money can be used to buy & sell important things. No doubt she mentioned to you that Coca Cola is accused of killing union leaders in other countries over the profits on sugar water.

Whatever cause you think is important, her sugar-water could have a bigger impact (positive or negative) in that cause than you're likely to make.

I work for a financial services company who has a clients who are supposed to receive emails from us related to trades. Since I manage our web presence, email deliverability is also my problem.

Here are the places to start:

Free Certification
AOL: http://postmaster.aol.com/whitelist/
Yahoo: http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/mail/cgi_bulkmai l
Verizon: http://www2.verizon.net/micro/whitelist/request_fo rm.asp?id=isp

Reporting
Spamcop: http://www.spamcop.net/w3m?action=ispsignupform
Hotmail: http://postmaster.msn.com/snds/
Senderbase: http://www.senderbase.org/

Email Signing
SPF: http://www.openspf.org/
DomainKeys: http://domainkeys.sourceforge.net/

Paid Certification
Bonded Sender: http://www.bondedsender.com/
Habeas: http://www.habeas.com/
Goodmail: http://www.goodmailsystems.com/

A lot of providers outside the US have many of their own rules and regulations to follow, which makes it quite difficult to achieve deliverability. At the end of the day, we try to follow all the rules that have been laid out from existing companies and then deal with individual providers on a needs basis. The more users that use that ISP, the more we are willing to obey their individual rules.

Unfortunately, I see paid certification becoming the way of the future. If I can pay to guarantee to have my clients email delivered rather then negotiate with ISPs every other week based on their varying criteria, I'm pretty sure my company will pay for it. I don't like it, but results are the bottom line.

Well now I get a sense of where the inability to know the market comes from. Get a clue Ballmer -- to best compete with your competition you get to know them intimately.

Your strongest plan to defeat you competition is to know them as if you were them!

John Paul II and Benedict have been very concilliatory to Jews.

True, but even so, there are people still alive today that remember a Catholic church that was less than concilliatory towards Jews.

Islam's relationship with other faiths is absolutely abysmal.

The "I've been offended the most" race is just pointless. Call on those causing harm to the world regardless of their ethnic, racial, or national origin and quit using "because they're evil" as an excuse to commit atrocities and injustices against them.

I still have my hotmail account from pre-microsoft. It's now so overloaded with spam that I only check it once a month or so to sift through the garbage...

Even better, as one of the ancient and original Hotmail accounts, it has [free] POP3 access -- a Hotmail option now only available by paying for either MSN Hotmail Plus or MSN Premium.

BTW, the only [known?] way to determine if your basic free Hotmail account is POP3-accessible is by trying it. Use your full e-mail address as the username (e.g., somebody@hotmail.com) and your normal Hotmail password. The server's address is: http://services.msn.com/svcs/hotmail/httpmail.asp .

If it works for you as it does for me, enjoy!

Sure, I see your point. I'd be more likely to do business with fine, upstanding, well-dressed "white guys" than other groups. I mean, appearance is 99% of your reputation, right?

Ok apparently according to nbcnews he really is dead.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12050783/

But dude, pulling out a clique like that for a deal death is just sick..

..all you jokesters making fun of the "innovative" change of moving the categories to the left. And you're right, it's not revolutionary, but evolutionary.

But I feel the need to point out that it's an excellent move (IMO) BECAUSE it's evolutionary. Look at the ridiculous mess that is http://www.msn.com/, with all its ads and news articles and links to other MSN resources [1]. Then consider http://www.google.com/. It has the word "Google" (sometimes themed for a given holiday), a search bar, the a "search" button, all smack in the middle. Everything else is in small standard or linked text.

It's a testament to elegantly simple design. The claw hammer, the Volkswagen Beetle, the Colt M1911A1 .45 ACP, Google.... all these things are great because they're dirt simple and do exactly what they were designed to do with no cruft.

I just had to say it.

-Glee

[1] Notice that search.msn.com itself has been cleaned up to look almost exactly like Google.

Al-Qaeda goes through #2s faster than the Enterprise went through red-shirted ensigns, apparently:
Nov. 16, 2001 -- Air strikes in Afghanistan may have killed Mohammed Atef, the No. 2 man in the Al Qaeda terrorist network, Pentagon officials said today.
(http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Nov2001/n11162001 _200111168.html)
March 18, 2004 - Pakistani officials believe they have the No. 2 man in al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, cornered.
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Mar2004/n03182004_ 2004031811.html
September 28, 2005 - Gen. Richard Myers, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon that the U.S. military considered Abu Azzam the "No. 2 Al Qaeda operative in Iraq, next to Zarqawi."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9518556/site/newsweek/ from/RL.5/
Spreading this information to would-be terrorists could be _THE_ key to defeating terrorism globally. "If I work hard for the cause... I may get promoted... if I get promoted enough, I might be second only to bin Laden himself... wait a minute..."

You don't work for Fidelity do you?

I'd hope that limited information is stored on the laptop, and that data syncs up when on the network. Otherwise you risk losing it... either through theft or throgh hardware problems.

And just to rehash history... it's not like Israel has EVER tried to spy on the US before or anything.

When the government does business with a US company, it's a heck of a lot easier for the administration to send someone over to said company threatening, "Hey, we don't like what you're doing! Keep it up and we'll happily send your entire company on a quail hunting trip with Dick Cheney!" It just doesn't have the same affect on a foreign owned company, unfortunatly.

Also see this article, about the S&P 500 being a poor mutual fund: http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/P25387.asp

The truth is not that black and white.

What if you are using Google for search, and you start to discover that response time to Google "seems slow" compared to Yahoo (who hypothetically is paying for "tiered access") ? If you are most people, you'll just start using Yahoo. Or MSN (don't think for a minute that Microsoft wouldn't jump at the chance to get ahead of the line of Google). The customer would hardly ever get blocked.. just pages would be slow to load.

If you want to see this "fuck it up just enough to be annoying" business model in action, look at Netflix. The vast majority of Netflix customers are blissfully unaware of the "rent too much, you get less" policies. The 5% that notice are usually the least-profitable customers, so Netflix loses very little if those customers go to Blockbuster. The vast majority (probably anywhere from 50% - 80%) never see the "policy". The people in between who get throttled either blame it on the delivery mechanism (damn post office!) or don't even notice because they're not sitting on their front porch with a stopwatch.

Same thing will happen here. Most users won't notice. If they do notice, they'll just switch to whatever works.. like the Internet, they'll view it as "damage" and route around it. The few that do? Dollars to donuts, AT&T et. al. view them as "unprofitable" and would prefer they go play BitTorrent on somebody else's network.

Welcome to modern business: where pissing off customers can be viewed as a "good" thing.

The printable version (pops up "Print" dialog box, which you can safely cancel out of) has no such distractions.

Meanwhile, I've noticed that many of the people (not you necessarily) who complain loudly about cluttered web pages run Firefox with dozens of extensions and have at least 5 tabs open at any given point not to mention all the ultra-important widgets that tell them exactly what the state of the universe is and do I have mail already. I prefer to keep things simple.

2. Science owns all, religion is to be lambasted

This is where you're wrong, my friend. You only get bashed if you're a Christian. All other religions are OK and should be tolerated even if they do murder people with a different religious point of view.

Isn't it great? So much for those who claim that it's only a handful of extremists!

This a cute story, but it promotes a rather simplistic view of the world.

What about the snake whose best friend is a hamster?

• H&R Block successfully lobbied to severely curtail an innovative California program to assist poor people filling out their taxes (Source: This article in Mother Jones, a regular National Magazine Award-winner)

• H&R Block charges close to 500 percent for short-term tax refund loans. These loans are predominantely used by poor people claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit. (Source: NY Times Reporter David Cay Johnston's excellent book "Perfectly Legal" and this MSNBC article about the state of California suing H&R Block.)

• I have completed the full 1040 for four tax years, including accounting for capital losses and miscellaneous income and interest, and it's just NOT THAT HARD to do your own taxes.

You mean like this or this? The former connects to Microsoft Money. I tried both and now use Total Look...obviously I'm not a tin-foil hat type.

Other products in the same class (free stock reports, essentially, right?) also have 15 or 20 minute delays, it's not a specific disadvantage to Google Finance.
Google Finance stock delays
Yahoo Finance stock delays
MSN Money stock delays

Besides that, Google News left beta in January... doesn't seem they've stopped developing that, at the very least.

I guess I wrongly assumed that ALL providers would be somewhat sensible and do this. I guess not.

You do guess correctly. Bring on the smart cards...

"Debit card theft can be far more severe than credit card theft for consumers. For starters, different consumer protections apply. Account holders are liable for only up to $50 of credit card fraud -- but consumers can be liable for the entire balance of their bank account after debit card fraud, according to federal banking regulations. Many banks voluntarily extend credit card-style protection to debit cards, but they are not required to do so. Moreover, debit/check/ATM card fraud means money is instantly missing from the consumer's account. That can lead to bounced checks and other hassles. In credit card fraud, consumers generally never lose the money and simply don't pay the bill for the fraud."

None of your supposed resources refute my claim: female infanticide (including abortion) happens en masse in Communist China.

That is Communist China, is it not? Or are you arguing that it is happening in alternative-universe China? Sidereal China? Capitalist and Democratic China? Huh? Help me out here. If it isn't happening in Communist China then where is it happening?

Here's a reading comprehension aid for you: I said it was happening in China, not because of Communism. I do stand by the fact that the Communists' One Child Policy is at fault for this despicable tradition reinfesting China. Call that racist. Call that whatever. But it is 100% irrefutable FACT .

Now please, tell us all again, in the name of abject intellectual dishonesty, that female infanticide does not occur in Communist China. What part of what I said was racist or wrong? The part where Chinese girls are being killed (at some time during their pre and post natal development) with prejudice? Or that it was happening in Communist China?

I'm totally sick of your lies, and I have karma to spare.

Female infanticide is a major problem in Communist China

Female infanticide was brought back by the one child policy

and the men in Communist China are going to pay. Dearly.

That is not racism.
That is not ignorance.

That is a fact that millions of Chinese men are going to face with a level of reality so vivid and frightening that their lamentations will be heard loud and clear for generations to come, in all corners of the world.

Please, carry on with your Holocaust Denial, and bring on those Holocaust denial moderators. The families who have wrought this horror upon womankind in China will still pay for their crimes against women, even if this post goes to -1.

You won't read the wikipedia article, so I shall provide you with something shorter:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=free%20ma rket
http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/freemarket?vi ew=uk
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/free+market
http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_/free%2520market .html

"trading without government control: an economic system in which businesses operate without government control in matters such as pricing and wage levels"

Any questions?

I suppose the analogy I would draw out is that both HTTP and NNTP are redistributed by "network nodes" in the relevant networks -- TCP/IP for the first and a set of connected servers for the latter. In the HTTP case, Google downloaded images, modified them, and then served them to the public. As clients, they were the last dot on the tracert between them and the servers they downloaded from. Their argument is that as NNTP providers, they're entitled to download content from other sites, modify it, and serve it to the public in full despite the fact that there is little difference between the relevant networks. They're both peer-to-peer networks. As clients, they are still the last dot on the tracert between themselves and the servers they get stuff from. Moreover, they're obviously the last "nntp node" to touch the data before it is modified and served.

Does my analogy make any sense? Sorry if it doesn't -- it's been a long night.

It happens all the time in communist China and it is a major part of their culture.

Here are some facts for other mods to read:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5953508

I'm not a Bill Gates apologist, but I think he knows about 3rd world issues: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10415553/site/newsweek

>>Here is interesting, and typical situations from those that "win" the lottery: http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Savinganddebt/ Savemoney/P99649.asp

If the above link doesn't illustrate that poverty is a behavioral disorder, then I don't know what does.

There is an old thought experiment suggesting that were all the wealth taken from the wealthy (whatever that means) and distributed equally among all, that within a few years it would find its way right back to its original owners. Stories such as that at the end of the URL above make me believe this.

The bill, cleared by voice vote in the House Financial Services Committee, would prohibit a gambling business from accepting credit cards, checks, wire transfers and electronic funds transfers in illegal gambling transactions. Unlawful gambling, under the legislation, would include placing bets on online poker sites, for example, and any other online wager made or received in a place where such a bet is illegal under federal or state law.

So, today, its legal to do money transfers for illegal gambling?

So, today, in my state, the government is the only legal gambling outfit? (lottery)

So, its illegal for me to do business in another country according to their laws?

I don't gamble beyond retirement funds, insurance, and whatnot.

Here is interesting, and typical situations from those that "win" the lottery: http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Savinganddebt/ Savemoney/P99649.asp

In the end, nothing will change. Offshore gambling will be no different.

I think this is what he was talking about.

If 100% of Latin America were Christian (which it is not) that would still only make up 25% of the total population of Christians world-wide.

South America: 25%
Europe: 23%
Africa: 18%
Russia: 6%
Asia: 14%
North America: 13%
Oceania: 1%

[Catholics] then grew into the largest denomination in the United States, now numbering 52 million, nearly one-fourth of the country's population. Most recently the American church has even begun to wear a Third World face: Hispanics now comprise 25 to 30 percent of American Catholics.

From TFA (1) audio, video and data technology requires a new type of wiring called "category 5," which has five strands within one sheath. Wrong....

"...John Chambers himself keeps three TiVos in his home, while Cisco senior VP Mike Volpi was a TiVo beta tester."

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11768175/site/newsweek/

Isn't it obvious that TiVo with its industry best less than 1 percent churn rate, friendly UI, and increasing value propostition is the front end of Cisco's hardware pipe to the house?

What a shocker.

There was an interesting article in Newsweek this week, describing how the 9/11 commission recommended an oversight board to make sure the government was protecting our civil liberties.

It was set up in December 2004, but the board has never hired a staff or had a meeting.

So, yeah.. Our government really takes civil liberties seriously..

The article is available at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11677336/site/newsweek /

The big question (for males) is obviously, would fuel cells increase or decrease the risks of burning the scrotum and penis? :-o

Hey man, don't knock my little Mexican friends:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10652469/

I prefer to call them land-pirahnas

The practicality of sending a probe to the surface of a far-flung moon for remote experimentation or return payload for terrestrial experimentation aside, the worry with such a procedure would be contamination.

Actually, part of the beauty of this discovery is that we wouldn't necessarily have to do that, because it seems that the geyser system on Enceladus is shooting liquid water (and whatever it contains) all around the Saturn system. From a piece of commentary by James Oberg on Why the Enceladus discovery matters:

Enceladus has now offered, on a space platter, the easiest-so-far way to examine directly the composition of such oceans. We don't have to drill or melt our way through a hundred miles of an outer ice shell, as on Jupiter's moon Europa, or fight our way down through and back up through a thick atmosphere such as found on Titan, Saturn's largest moon.

We can go out there to Enceladus and pick up the samples in deep space, delivered conveniently by the geyser system that appears to be driven by the same heating process -- gravitational flexing -- that created the Enceladus liquid water pools in the first place. ...

An aerogel-equipped spacecraft could be dispatched to the Saturn system to make repeated passes over Enceladus (the geysers don't seem to be permanent features) while opening Stardust-like collection grids. Bonus passes through the upper atmosphere of Titan and the outer rings of Saturn might also be possible. And we may get even more potential targets as the Cassini probe that discovered these wonders continues to explore.

Traditionally, shareholders have weilded a lot of power over a company, because a drop in price significantly inhibits a company's ability to raise capital. The problem here is that Google doesn't need to raise capital. Let me repeat that, Google doesn't need to raise capital.

http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/invsub/inside r/trans.asp?view=All&Symbol=GOOG

Google founders, insiders, and employees all like to "raise capital", clearly evident by the torrent of sells. Secondly, Google is almost certainly maturing, and that will mean mergers and acquisitions -- usually done through share equity -- COMPLETELY dependent upon the share price staying elevated.

Just because a company has enough money in the bank to pay the bills doesn't mean they don't care about share price. Google is certainly desperate to keep a bloated valuation.

Yet the very tactics that they have used in the past to ferret out information--cordons and searches, midnight raids on the homes of suspected cell members, destruction of crops of those suspected of supporting the insurgents--only alienate the population further.

I don't mean to discount their identification of a genetic link (which I think is valid), and I have no idea how Costa Ricans drink their coffee, but previous research has identified a risk in unfiltered coffee like that through a percolator or French press (or Turkish, Espresso machine, etc) vs filtered coffee. Since terpenes (oils) in unfiltered coffee are suspected raising cholesterol, it is possible that elevated cholesterol levels from drinking unfiltered coffee may also play a role here.

    In any case, having that gene and drinking a lot of unfiltered coffee would put a person most at risk, I would think.

Yeah, I wonder why they didn't stick with http://search.msn.com/ , it actually isn't that bad.... with the current http://www.live.com/ experience they can be sure that nobody will use this new service more than once (if at all - so far I didn't manage to find something since it's still loading).

There's no way in hell spin like this would be tolerated on slashdot.

Bullshit. The only thing even possibly biased in the entire review is the one paragraph "teaser" at the beginning designed to get the reader in. And it's not even biased, it's just making an odd comparison with something completely unrelated.

Anyway, I don't mind this review .. but would like to see reviews of Microsoft products well tolerated on here in a balanced manner.

When M$ tolerates balanced reviews on their own website then maybe we can talk about "balance" on slashdot.

Slashdot is a generally open source website. Open source websites are needed to balance out blatantly biased high volume sites like microsoft, msn and Paul Thurrott.

---

Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.

"... You are given a chance during basic and advanced training to quit. Just pack it up and go home. No harm, no foul... "

No harm? no foul?

""He's just afraid because he is not able to do the swim correctly right now, and he just wants to leave and go home," said Staff Sgt. Anthony Davis on the Feb. 7 videotape.

After 20 minutes of trying to coax Tharp into the pool, the drill instructor turned physical in apparent violation of Marine Corps regulations -- striking Tharp across the chest.

"That right there, where this Marine grabs the recruit, this is not how you treat recruits," said Eugene Fidell, the president of the National Institute of Military Justice, when NBC News showed him the video. "I mean, this is a wrongful touching. Basically, it's an assault."

Marine Corps officials say Tharp voluntarily entered the pool the next day, where he drowned during a 25-meter swim. "
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6988854/"

The recently uncovered Saddam tapes (while far from a smoking gun), do lend support to the idea that a crapload of weapons and related tech were squirreled away to Syria and/or buried in the desert during the ramp-up to the war.

A spokeswoman for John Negroponte, director of national intelligence, said information contained in the transcriptions of the tapes was already known to intelligence officials.

"Intelligence community analysts from the CIA, and the DIA reviewed the translations and found that, while fascinating, from a historical perspective the tapes do not reveal anything that changes their post-war analysis of Iraq's weapons programs nor do they change the findings contained in the comprehensive Iraq Survey group report," she said in a statement.

These NASA cuts are just the tip of what coming up. Americans have spent way too much money; http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&si d=amz.HoNLRL_0&refer=us

It's interesting that these cuts focus on earth science and the same satellites that keep us informed about climate changes. One of the thorny issues for this administration has been global warming, and this seems like another case of this administration's approach to problems. Rather than fix the problem, they try to make the problem disappear by attacking or dismantling those who publicize it. Remember Abu Ghraib? The administration's immediate response wasn't, "We're sorry, it'll never happen again." No, it was, "Who were those bastards who released the photos - let's get 'em!" How about the reclassification of thousands of declassified documents? Not to mention the recent censorship of NASA publications by a representative from the White House http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11240405/.

This administration's 'problem solving' and our financial situation highlighted in that article makes me feel like American power is crumbling from the inside out. While continuing to bark, we've lost our bite. http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/03/07/us.iran.ap/ index.html

This isn't any different than the phantom console, magnets which supposedly help your arthritis or whatever book that Kevin Trudeau is bilking people into buying claiming this is information that the government doesn't want you to know about.

This shouldn't surprise anyone. Not the least of which that there are VC idiots who will gladly pony up the money for a non-existant, never-to-be-made product simply because it has oodles of neat sounding words in its description.

*PT Barnum never actually said those words but people routinely attribute the phrase to him.