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I did a search on Google for Gillette, razor, and bags and came up with a pretty good list. Here's a sample compilation of stories. I came across it on Fark, was pretty funny so I remembered it.

My research shows that Degraan took up the CEO position in October 2000 and announced that he would take "no radical new strategy" (link).

I can't find any conclusive evidence concerning his political leanings. However, I did find evidence suggesting that Gillette as a company tends to favor Democratic candidates by a 5-2 ratio in terms of donations.

My main point was that companies/organizations will time announcements to influence elections when possible. In 1998, it doesn't really matter. In 2000, releasing that news in October might hurt the incumbent while not releasing that news wouldn't have an impact.

Whether or not Gillette is an example of this isn't really an issue for me, as I have no doubt that decisions to withold/release information are determined by whether or not they want the candidate benefiting from such information to take office.

You *could* disable your camcorder (cover the lens or whatnot) and proceed to pretend to "film" the movie while watching it. It's quite legal, even if it might drive theater managers nuts. It also makes enforcement of this infeasible, if done widely enough.

Here is the bill text, which should really have been included in the story. (Actually, IMHO, Slashdot policy should be to require a link to bill text when submitting a story on new legislation.)

A similar [to the DMCA] piece of European legislation called the European Union Copyright Directive is being prepared.

Where is a list of how citizens should contact their EU representatives?

Dear XYZ,

Like you, I am aggrieved at the tragic loss of life resulting from the horrendous events of September 11, 2001. Every American has been touched by this trauma which will linger forever in the memory of our nation.

Though I want to see the perpetrators of these acts brought to justice, I must beg you not to compromise American civil liberties in your pursuit of justice. The loss of American citizens' ability to move and communicate freely and their right to privacy would be a greater casualty than the thousands killed Tuesday morning, considering how many millions of Americans have already died defending those freedoms throughout our country's history. In the end, reduction of civil liberty will not prevent a repetition of such disasters -- only a worldwide attention to the root causes of terrorism (like poverty, warfare, injustice, child abuse, intolerance, and racism) can do that.

Benjamin Franklin said that those who give up necessary liberties for security deserve neither security nor freedom. I must echo his sentiment. Do not allow our sacred rights of freedom of speech, privacy, association or movement to be abridged in the coming days of difficult choices. America's enemies hate us in part because we are a free and open society, and they fear the potential that that represents. Do not give them the victory they cannot themselves win by destroying the core of our society, our beloved liberties.

God Bless America,

NAME AND ADDRESS

I mean, how long does it take someone to download the main post at 56K? Good thing I've got DSL ...

Basically, what Jon's saying is Ashcroft is a liar, we should phone our senators and congress members, and we should stop the right wing.

Damn, hate it when Jon's right.

Now, the problem is that most of us are lazy, and seem to think that Bush is a goofus, not realizing he's a vindictive bastard out to get back at us for deep-sixing his dad. So, it's highly unlikely we'll contact the US Senate Judiciary Committee and actually take our destiny in our own hands, because it's way easier just to post on /. and do nothing.

Me, I asked my two US Senators. In person.

Because the battle is not in some far off distant time, it's now. If we fight back for privacy, fight back for at least moderate appointments, Bush will be forced to back down just like Clinton was at the beginning of his first term.

Or you can just let them sell your private info to the highest bidder ...

The Low Power Radio Coalition has made it easy for you to send letters to your Congressmen. Just click on http://congress.nw.dc.us/lpr/, fill in your zip code, and then click on a few buttons. Text for letters will be generated for you. I recommend that you cut/paste the text into a real word processor and print from there, since it will look more professional. It'll only cost you $1 in stamps to mail the letters, or you can have them emailed.
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Two years ago, they elected Tammy Baldwin to Congress. She was (and is) the first out lesbian elected to Congress, and during they primary, smart money was on either of her two "more electable" opponents.

Tammy and her supporters talked about issues that college students and 20-somethings in Madison cared about (education, health care), talked with them (not down to them), got them excited about the election, and had a really amazing voter turnout organizing system that got a lot of people to the polls who often don't bother to vote.

The key thing to remember is TO VOTE. None of this works otherwise. Find your your Representatives in Congress here, and call them to find out how to register to vote, if you aren't already registered.

The reason Bush doesn't worry about offending young net-literate adults is because insignificant percentages of them vote in most places. The only way to change that is to vote.

Find out who your representative is here. Scroll to the bottom of the page for a zip code lookup. I guarantee someone in that office will be able to tell you how to register to vote if you aren't currently registered.

Submit your comments via the two step process into the FCC's automated system for recieving comments from the public -- ECFS:

http://www.fcc.gov/e-file/ecfs.html

Submitting your comments is apparently a two step process -- the first is to fill out the form with your personal information (the "proceeding" heading at the title should have 00-67 put in there)

Next, you use your browser to send the file. I put my comments in ASCII text, and pretty much took the boilerplate letter from here:

http://congress.nw.dc.us/cgi-bin/oo_compose.pl?dir =hrrc&comptype=agency&agency=1 12&message=101

and added my signature to the bottom.

Then there's a confirmation page, and your comments are on file with the FCC.

(I think this will work better than bulkmailing the inboxes of the FCC comissioners, which will likely be tuned out.)

Actually the correct URL is: Here.

Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC

According to the Home Redording Rights Coalition homepage (the 'defendants' in the case) at HRRC.org, the case number is 00-67, ""

This link should take you to the Electronic Comment File Submission for 00-67 where you type your complaint.

The HRRC has provided a form letter here Please remember to add a personalized .sig!

Get even more educated! read A summary on fair use w/r/t this case, and A PDF of the HRRC comments on the issue.

Here's the link that the Home Recording Rights Coalition has set up for people to send comments (in support of the HRRC) to the FCC.

Of course there is age discrimination in engineering-- especially in software engineering. This is a well documented fact.You can find an in-depth study here . Why would a company hire a very expensive, very experienced engineer when they can source the project to a consultancy (Andersen et. al.) which will simply human wave the problem with indentured H1-B visa employees? Even if the project management is really bad, the programmers totally demoralized, and the project majorly screwed up, they can usually produce something that pretends to work. For internet software, that's all you need.
According to the Programmer's Guild (PG), U.S. industry has already reached its quota of H1-B visas (a program that allows non-resident/non-greencard foreign nationals to work in the U.S. for 6 years). This, despite having last year doubled the size of the program to 115,000 visas annually.Because IT salaries are totally out of control now, having risen to a whopping $54,000, U.S. industry has put the full court press on congress to dramatically increase the quota or eliminate it altogether.Congress, responding appropriately to the huge campaign contributions from big biz, will most likely pass such an increase, according to the IEEE One particularly interesting point about the leading bill winding its way through the senate is the name: "American Competitiveness in the 21st Century act". I guess that congress does not think the current crop of American born programmers are very competitive.

I'd like to know what people here think. Will a million new "guest workers" in the next 5 years help the quality of U.S. software engineering, thus expanding the pie for everyone? Or will 1 million new indentured servants allow IT management to continue many of their screwed up practices because they know that engineering can't complain.

So it's time for us to take advantage of this website and the chance it gives us to organize. We should all be writing our representatives to ask them to pressure the library of congress to digitize their collection (At least those with expired copyrights.)

And we should write directly to the LOC to express our opinions as well.

Microsoft put up this page to write to members of the White House, Congress and State Officials, to tell them what we think...

So why wouldn't we use that!? :-)

Microsoft put up this page to write to members of the White House, Congress and State Officials and tell them what we think...

So why wouldn't we use that!? :-)

Microsoft put up this page to write to members of the White House, Congress and State Officials...

So why wouldn't we use that!? :-)

micros~1 a monopoly? no way! I'm going to go to MS's freedom to innovate site.

hmmm, I want to contact my elected officials. <CLICK>

whoa, it seems like my elected officials are running solaris and powered by linux!

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Actually, DOE funding has remained relatively flat and funding of Basic Research within DOE has been cut. See:

ACS Government Affairs Web Page

While the overall federal R&D budget has increased, a large portion of this money has gone to NIH (medical research). Funding of Basic Science (fundamental physics and chemistry) has remained flat or decreased during the last decade, largely due to pressures on Congress to reduce deficit spending. Unfortunately, additional basic science research will be needed at some point in the future to fuel advances in medical and other applied research.

Considering the current robust economy congress should be increasing rather than decreasing R&D budgets.

A long time ago I was reading through some GNU software and they were pushing another organization called "The League for Programming Freedom". I managed to find their web site at http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/ However it looks like the organization isn't doing to well. "Getting a domain name might not be a priority until the LPF has an actual committee to take it forward". The organization really is a good idea and we really should be pushing to turn it into a decent lobby organization, or perhaps the EFF should branch out. Though for letter writing/emailing you get your representatives address info here. I'd really recommend sending them something. Remember to be polite and to include the address you're registered to vote at. (If you're not registered you should be.) On the list of recent news that had this little tidbit "02 Sep 99: Lucent gets patent on sine/cosine table lookup" Hmm... hasn't that one being done by hand since, say shortly after sine/cosine were invented? diane

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