Slashdot Mirror

Well, Microsoft is creating new jobs in the US as well. Just a few months ago, they got approval to expand their facilites in Redmond in order to ultimately accomodate an additional 10,000 employees there.

According to reports out, India is expected to grow it's current internet user base from 35 million to 100 million...So...a $1.7 billion investment will go a long way if the Gov't clamps down on piracy and Open Source.

Well, stupid for Microsoft, I suppose, since it would expose them to greater competition against Excel and Word.

Consumers would benefit immensely if Microsoft made the interface specifications to the their products completely open, free and unencumbered so that consumers could buy bundles in competitive marketplace with lower prices, higher quality products and a faster pace of innovation. As it stands, you can buy your convenient, powerful bundled Word/spreadsheet or Excel/document prepartion software from exactly one source. Sole source means the pricing power is skewed towards the supplier.

There's a favorable argument for bundling based on the convenience it provides. But bundling also provides hidden chains that limit purchasing decisions because you can't move to a better spreadsheet without giving up Excel's interoperability with Word or vice versa.

Bundling the OS with the computer is "convenient", too.

Bundling their way up the application software stack from the OS has worked well for Microsoft over the years and I don't expect them to give up this lucrative strategy easily. If they have to pay South Korea US$32 million or the EU some fine an order of magnitude larger, that's just testimony to how valuable the API is to them. Risking the occasional fine, settling with aggrieved litigants is just a cost to be weighed in the overall accounting.

Too little, too late legal sanctions requiring MS to distribute stripped, unbundled versions long after their competitors have bitten the dust are only a minor blip on the radar. The underwhelming uptake of Windows sans media player in Europe indicates that closing the barn door is being done after the horse has left.

Meanwhile, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly is satisfied with dog and pony shows that will have negligible impact on the competitive landscape. Indeed, time is on the side of MS as they roll-out Innovative© bundled new products and multi-year licensing schemes to their corporate captive audience that build up barriers to migration on multiple fronts. It used to be that competitive products had to work just like Word or Excel. As new entries like OpenOffice and Mozilla/Firefox provide good functionality and reasonable MS interoperability to address to those old barriers to migration, new barriers get put up. Most corporations are too wedded to Exchange, Active Directory or have already bought a multi-year license agreement that make migration away from Microsoft uncomfortable.

Thomas Penfield Jackson was right; he still says what he thinks. If he had kept his mouth shut when he was supposed to then this agonizing drawn-out process of killing the beast to release its stranglehold on the market would not be necessary.

"I must go, the Joker is at it again."
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/fun/Bizarro.asp?date =20051202

Reminds me of a story in Seattle wherein an admittedly mean old man living at a subsidized housing place for the elderly would post unpleasant things about where he lived on his (kooky) website. It went to court, and the judge ordered him to alter his site. The man eventually wound up in jail after infuriating the judge (by doing things like hosting content in the Netherlands), and was even put in solitary confinement for a bit.

http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0222/nc-ande rson2.shtml http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/74939_freespee ch17.shtml
His wacky tinfoil hat website: http://www.contracabal.org/#

O'Donnell urged anyone with Xbox problems to call 1-800-4myXbox or go to http://www.xbox.com./ If the problems can't be immediately resolved, Microsoft will pay to ship the console overnight to a repair center, overnight it back once it's fixed, or ship a replacement.

"They'll be playing again in three to five days," O'Donnell said.

In a particularly eerie co-incidence... Catholic theologicans this week urged the Pope to agree that unbaptized children don't go to Limbo.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1103AP_Vati can_Limbo.html

Just in time, apparently, now that .xxx is there!

As an aside, the Marxist-Feminist author Andrea Dworkin's angry, angry, angry book "Pornography" is a good read for anyone wishing to become thoroughly disgusted (or at least, morally and intellectually challenged) by the barrenness and degradation of the pornographic enterprise in general. There's more than one side to the freedom question here.

This article indicates that they are offering an option to Cragslist more that competing with GoogleBase.

"3, Insightful"? How 'bout "0, Uninformed"? The crimes laid out in Thomas Penfield Jackson, U.S. District Judge's COURT'S FINDINGS OF FACT are criminal under any reasonable legal system, including those of a 'truly free society'. There is an old saying: "your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose" that is applicable. 5-year perspective on the case is interesting. Microsoft regularly flexes their patent muscle by refusing to grant use of patents it owns to competitors. E.g. Bill Gates himself has turned down patent licensing requests for use of Microsoft patents proposed as IETF standards. (google Microsoft IETF patent or read this) Their anti-competitive practices most certainly do involve patents. Patent abuse is even an incriminating component of the above FINDINGS OF FACT. And Microsoft's abuses go far beyond those discussed in the FINDINGS OF FACT; see http://kmfms.com/whatsbad.html.

Which Microsoft financials are you looking at? The Home and Entertainment department (which is what the Xbox is part of) posted losses of 1.2B in 2003, 1.2B in 2004, and 391M in 2005. That's hardly profitable for two years. You could read MSFT's 10-K report, or the many articles that have been written about it.

How does this make you feel Doc? http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/ 2002633184_iraqvote19.html

Microsoft will embrace the XBMC project just fine after they sue the project for trademark infringement over the XBOX name, and then release their own Xbox Media Center(TM). Its how MS does business.

If you didn't already read about the Windows Defender thing: look no further.

I guess it's not champagne unless it's made in france, either?

Correct... and not just anywhere in France; it has to actually be made in the Champagne area (duh!)

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/foodwine/200 2582914_winecol26.html

It seems someone else was using "Windows Defender" until MS sent in their lawyers. Tucked into the agreement was a line making the prior owner give all rights to the "Defender" name to MS. Two weeks later, MS announces the new name.

I was referring to a previous article about UK police wanting to put people in jail for 90 days while they crack the suspects hard drive. No trial, just 3 months away from your friends and family. Granted, this particular article is about the United States' feds, but we don't need any new legislation to hold our citizens in jail without trial. We just need to call them a terrorist or emamy combatant or some other vile name and pack them off to Guantanamo for over 3 years (so far). This wiretap is just a way for the police state to get more power to abuse.

I run a brick-and-mortar business that is profitable, growing, and even has actual physical assets, yet I can't raise a few hundred grand to open some new stores. I must be doing something terribly wrong if these guys can get money for an idea for a program that they'll give away once it's complete (or if it's ever completed).

In case you haven't heard of this book: The Portable MBA in Entrepreneurship

I think that book will help you with jumping through the hoops in getting money. In nutshell, have a written plan on how you'll use the money or better yet, a business plan and have plenty of evidence that opening those stores will generate the extra $$$ to pay off the loan. I'd advise staying away from VCs. They'll want an ROI of at least 40% a year and then they'll fuck you.

One strategy, Hit and run is common enough as a tactic that it is well documented. The other twenty four tactics will also look familiar. Slashdot has become mainstream some while ago, you do see it mentioned and even cited in non-tech print media. So that means you will get a fair number of people that don't know any better than to swallow the marketing. But there are also those that do know better and do seem to have an agenda.

The implications are that no one would support MS without getting paid in some way.

Anyway, MS is probably making so much noise about vaporware like 'Internet versions of Office and Windows' in order to steal thunder from discussions of open standards like OpenDocument or to get people from downloading and testing OpenOffice.org. I mean if MS Office is so much better, what does M$ have to lose? People would try OOo, say 'nah', and then go back to MS Office, right? Or won't that happen ?

'Many are specially trained, sometimes at corporate headquarters, Gossett said, as in the case with Microsoft. They are expected to devote about 10 to 15 hours a week talking up the products to friends, securing corporate sponsorship of campus events and lobbying student newspaper reporters to mention products in articles. They also must plaster bulletin boards with posters and chalk sidewalks -- tactics known as "guerrilla marketing," which, marketing firms acknowledge, intentionally skirt the boundaries of campus rules.'

The special training at corporate headquarters is probably one of the reasons there is sometimes a hiatus and it'll go a few days without a peep in defense of M$. They'll also attack, usually with logical fallacies (e.g. ad hominem), any criticism or even critique of products or initiatives that are being launched. (e.g. right now MS SQL.) Read carefully the next attacks from MS fanbois and see that they usually change the topic or go into name calling.

Anyway, it's not a surprise to see them go after OOo and less so for OpenDocument. Both cut into their MS Office revenue. OpenDocument cuts off the lock-in at the file format level, removing dependence on MS for continued use of the documents.

Yeah, suicide girls has an iPod-formatted video podcast right on their homepage (and it is aimed specifically at the iPod). I ran into their website today and thought that was freakin' awesome. Once I clear up some HD space, I'll have to subscribe. Also, here is another article about porn on the iPod. I forwarded that to my mom.

It was interesting to read this article after just last night hearing a short news blurb on my local CBS affiliate about the porn industry is "embracing" the new iPod with man on the street interviews with people who don't like the idea of having the "guy sitting next to them in class looking at porn," and overarching implications that parents should be alarmed and ready to take up arms to defend their kids' innocence.

Other perspectives:
Pornographers embracing iPod
Will iPod Be Eye for Porn?
Harness iPod's dollar power -- porn on the go
How do you know Apple's new device will succeed? iPod Porn
Apple iPod delivers "iPorno" revolution

I know that I will be modded down for this* but in other article they clearly stated that they atemped to send a total of 18 million spam messages.(http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/2 46245_msftzombie28.html)

"Microsoft said it found a computer user whose machine had been turned into a zombie and put the associated code on a test machine, to see what happened. Once on the Internet, the company says, the infected machine received 5 million connections from spam operations using the network, causing the computer to attempt to send more than 18 million spam messages during a 20-day period." * this is ./ the MS version of FUD.

You'd think so, but then we've read about anyone from real terrorists to CIA operatives get nabbed through tracking plain ol' cell phones!

Pornographers embracing iPod:

When Apple Computer unveiled the video-capable version of its popular iPod music player this month, it trumpeted the fact that users could download Pixar short films and top music videos, along with recent episodes of "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives."

But video clips of a spicier nature quickly became available as free, iPod-friendly downloads. That created an immediate problem for parents already scrambling to keep abreast of their teenagers' computer routines...........

Roche has already agreed to let others manufacture it as a generic. See this artical from the Seattle Times

5) Waste - heres the big one. You can probably solve the other problems, but the waste one is the biggy. You dont want to transport this stuff all over the world for security reasons, and you need somewhere to store it for a LONG time, we are talking tens of thousands of years here. Thats so long it almost seems like fantasty. If the romans had used nuclear, we'd still be guarding their waste now, long after their whole civlisation ahs crumbled. We lecture kids about not getting big debst in their teens that might take 5 years to pay off. we get scared about taking on 25 year mortagges, but we are happy to dump a serious waste problem on our descendents for the next ten thousand?


I am one of those people who beleives that every problem has a solution, one possible solution for nuclear waste is vitrification. If you can turn liquid nuclear waste into a solid then it becomes a hell of a lot easier to manage.

Seems to me that energy wise fossil fuels and nuclear produce similar amounts (although different types) of waste, just that nuclear waste is highly concentrated. The status quo is not a option, we will run out of fossil fuels, if we want civilized soceity to thrive we need energy.

Even if Apple licensed the iPod software as an application for PDAs, it would be crap without that magnificent little input device. It's a shame they couldn't figure out how to put a scroll wheel on the Moto iTunes phone, as that's probably why they had to limit it to 100 songs.

Listening to music is a secondary activity, PDAing is a primary activity. My ideal device might have a scroll wheel and an LCD on one side for music and a completely separate display and keyboard for PDA/phone functions on the other side.

Apple filed for patents on the scroll wheel and other iPod technologies but success is uncertain.

Someone should point out that the U.S. hardly seems like a country and culture that champions free speech.

Protesters are placed in "free speech zones" (nice euphemism!) where they will not be seen on TV
http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/08/04/hilden.freespeec h/
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2004/01/04/INGPQ40MB81.DTL

A high-school student who made a political poster got a visit from the secret service (they confiscated the poster)
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/170992_prosser 28.html

Police, FBI, and Homeland security frequently target and harrass protesters
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/ACLU_sues_Homeland_S ecurity_for_arresting_spying_on_vegans_who_protest ed_0922.html
http://www.progressive.org/mcwatch04/mc1021a04.htm l

The FBI defines peace groups as "terrorists"
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/ACLU_reveals_FBI_lab eled_peace_affirmative_action_group_terrori_0829.h tml

An Ohio paper did not print some story for fear of being jailed.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/artic le_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000976374

The government has misrepresented and altered the conclusions of scientific panels on global warming and other issues.
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,62339,00. html

Officials how have an unpopular (but true) message are fired (numerous), their wives are targeted (Plame), etc.

The BBC says the "embedded journalist" restrictions on the Iraq calls into question the credibility of Americas media
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/ 20030425/media_nm/iraq_media_bbc_dc_4

People were excluded from church for being of the wrong party.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/church_politics

Airline passengers who ask questions are targeted
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=512&u=/ ap/20040317/ap_on_go_coairline_passenger_screening _3&printer=1

The US has a history of killing non-US journalists in Iraq...so many times that it's getting hard to believe it's not intentional.

People wearing anti-Bush T-shirts arrested
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/South/08/21/heckler.fir ed.ap/index.html

Teachers Evicted From Bush Event for Wearing 'Protect Our Civil Liberties' T-Shirts.
http://www.progressive.org/mcwatch04/mc101604.htm

Someone wearing an anti-Bush T-shirt was kicked off a Southwest plane.

and so on...

Certainly, America is not as bad off as Saudi Arabia, but that's not saying much.
This is not a country we can trust to safeguard free speech on the internet.

I think Americans only u

Here's 3 links on articles on how MS fired an employer who posted in his blog that Mac G5s were being delivered to MS.

Hyku
MacNN
Seattlepi

"There exist outrageous levels of crime that create a powder keg every time the police isn't controlling the streets."

This is not correct. The crime rate in the U.S. has been declining since 1993:

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance.htm#Crime

And the reporting of violent crimes in New Orleans is mostly devoid of facts (i.e. sensationalism):

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?articl e_id=4797
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/ 2002520986_katmyth26.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/20 05-09-29-after-further-review_x.htm

"Did you know a typical Chinese peasant now lives longer than a US citizen? (Bet they don't mention facts like that on Fox)"

That's an interesting theory, but not proven by sources. A typical Chinese citizen lives just under 71 years, but a typical US citizen lives just under 78 years.

http://www.china-club.de/english/chinaguide/ueberb lick.htm
http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_1741500824_4/U nited_States_(People).html#p73

The promised information about him is here:

President, George C. Marshall Institute.

Adjunct Scholar, Competitive Enterprise Institute. Member, CEI Board of Directors. President and Founder, Solutions Consulting. President Emeritus, Global Climate Coalition. President, Solutions Consulting, Inc. Former Senior Vice President, Jellinek, Schwartz and Conolly, Inc. Chief Administrative Officer, Center for Naval Analyses.

According to federal lobbying records, O'Keef e was a paid lobbyist for ExxonMobil, 2001, 2002 and 2003 on the issues of environment and climate change, with contacts with the White House and the Office of Management and Budget. He writes frequently about climate change in his presidentail role at the George C. Marshall Institute.

O'Keefe has a long history of involvement with the fossil fuel industry. O'Keefe also served as Executive Vice President and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, a position he held until 2000.

...and on some of the organisations he works for:

Competitive Enterprise Institute has received $1,645,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998.
George C. Marshall Institute has received $515,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998.
American Petroleum Institute
Currently "deactivated", the Global Climate Coalition was "A coalition of companies and trade associations seeking to present the views of industry in the global warming debate."

But back to the point. China is still a poor country. While the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese people have improved greatly over the last couple of decades, there are still large parts of China which are very poor. Nearly one-third of all children in some provinces are malnourished, for instance.

Despite all that, I don't really object to China's space program. It's still a very small part of the government's budget, and it's a hell of a lot more benign way of boosting national pride than invading other countries, the traditional way governments stoke nationalism.

And you think that peer review is a safeguard? Remember the Schon affair where all his papers were peer reviewed, the guy almost got a Nobel prize before he'd have to retire, and in the end it was all made up! Give these guys credit for writing a paper that's too comprehensive to be written in Nature even though as they say "clearly the absence of such exotic dark matter would have considerable significance". I'm guessing that the significance of "no dark matter out there" are not in the field of physics but in politics and economy, like "what a waste of time and money!!" Getting through peer review at the Astrophysical Journal can take months, and if that's not a reason good enough to get it out unreviewed: if those two are right, then the solution was there to grab for anyone with a knowledge in GR calculations... and there's an awful lot of those!

*Cheese releases fumes that many chemical sniffers will register as those of an explosive. **Kitty litter is often slightly radioactive. It's probably a beta emitter - alpha gets absorbed too easily - but I can't find a definitive source of information.

If these new detectors can detect a nanogram of stilton, but still miss people with semi-automatics, then I don't see we've gained much. Unless there's a plan to use the next NASA mission to the moon to verify its composition is not, as Google claim, swiss cheese.

Of course, we could run into other problems. Will there be false alarms from residue? A lot of Americans do own guns, which means residue on the sorts of scale we're talking about is certainly possible. The security guards are also armed, which means there will be a background reading from those weapons. If cheese is still detected, then not only will we have to deal with actual pieces of cheese, but also any person who has eaten cheese in the past month.

There is no doubt we need a good, functioning weapons detector. I am rather hoping these guys have figured out how to build one. If I am skeptical, it is because I want to see better evidence that they really HAVE figured out how to build one.

Well, at least it can ONLY affect florida. -sigh- guess i won't be buying games in florida on vacation anymore.

I guess I won't be going on vacation in Florida anymore. It's apparently ok in Florida to shoot people for any reason you like, but it's gonna be jail time if you sell the wrong video games?

Not to sound prejudiced against 1/50 of my fellow countrymen or anything, but this is not a state that should exist on this Earth. Can we at least dig a moat or something to symbolically separate ourselves from these people?

The government has established that police can collect evidence against people without a warrant (or other due process) when they "mistakenly" violate the security of people's persons, houses, papers and effects, if the police make the mistake "in good faith". Here in NYC, the cops go to apartment buildings where known offenders (like drug dealers) live, then break in neighbors' doors (on different floors, sometimes), look around, and score a bust without a warrant when they find something. Fourth Amendment? That's as quaint as the Geneva Conventions.

How will Chief Justice Roberts rule on torture of "mistakenly" captured people? The Supreme Court Chief Justice controls the secret FISA court which governs domestic spying. Not to mention the Chief Justice's control of whether foreign rulings have legal standing in American courts. When the government tortures to death Harry Buttle instead of Harry Tuttle, will Mrs. Buttle even be entitled to a refund?

In fact, geeks make better lovers.

See:
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/317296p-271 224c.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2005/05/08/LVGFJCI2A71.DTL
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/lifestyle/26662_sexy geek.shtml

Microsoft holds the yearly Imagine Cup, which has had thousands of participants who program all kinds of .NET projects. Each year, a set of Student Ambassadors to Microsoft are involved in promoting this competition and getting HS/college students interested in real-world programming projects which they continue to own and could potentially sell after demonstrating them to MS and INETA members. I was one such SA, and was priveleged to know others who were knowledgeable and motivated, but it was a constant battle because the Imagine Cup was poorly timed (because we all know MS is never late) both years I promoted it and didn't jive well with college Senior Design projects. Of all the SAs (in past years anyway), I know of very few who had offers and accepted them at MS, while others like my friend Gayle were more prominant in that they left MS for Google (Seattle Times) and had good reasons for it. I'm also definitely not working for Microsoft, and I can safely say we all saw MS to be massive and unwieldy with the coveted VS.NET devs hidden behind scores of contractors and PR people and PowerPoint Slides.

The axe that I'm grinding is in the city's refusal to do what the people want, the Monorail and stadiums are perfect examples of this. If this (monorail) were started in ernest years ago on the first ballot, it would be less than light rail. I think the city officials were mad that the people wanted something other than the dream that they put together with the feds on rail. They had their plan, they had their regional transit authority, they had a fist full of federal money and they didn't want anything to mess it up, even if the people really wanted something else. We were going to have light rail, like it or not.

In any case, here's the article from the Seattle Times outlining the strategy of opponents using lawsuits to raise the bond prices for the monorail project. It's not something that I made up, but as the author goes on to point out, it is a solid strategy. The opponents only need to win once.

http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/ texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=monorail22m&date =20050322&query=monorail+lawsuit

I've copied the article, I'm sorry the formatting did not carry...

Lawsuit puts Monorail funding by bonds in doubt By Mike Lindblom Seattle Times staff reporter E-mail article Print view Search Most e-mailed Most read RSS Statement by Monorail's finance director (PDF) Archive: Tax bill drives frustration over monorail The Seattle Monorail Project (SMP) is facing another financial obstacle: a lawsuit that could hinder the agency's plans to sell $1.7 billion in construction bonds. The suit, filed by eight Seattle residents, contends the monorail's annual car-tab tax is illegal because the tax bills are based on an old state chart that assigns most used vehicles a higher value than the actual market price. Controversy about the tax is nothing new. And it didn't dissuade voters from backing the proposed 14-mile-long Ballard to West Seattle line last fall when they overwhelmingly rejected "Monorail Recall" Initiative 83, which would have stopped the project. Monorail officials are worried that the suit, which goes to a preliminary hearing next week in King County Superior Court, could harm the project's credit rating. "Any delay in the resolution of this lawsuit will likely disrupt, if not delay, the financing and construction of the Monorail Green Line," SMP Finance Director Jonathan Buchter stated in an affidavit in January. By causing uncertainty in the credit markets, the lawsuit would force SMP to pay higher interest rates or spend more on bond insurance, he predicted. "Moreover, as long as this litigation remains pending, financing or construction may be unable to commence," Buchter said. The monorail and Sound Transit prevailed in a separate legal challenge to car-tab taxes last year. Buchter believes SMP is on solid legal ground, but he said bond markets dislike any unsettled litigation. "This is a harassment," Buchter said last week of the case. The SMP is considering selling bonds before a construction contract is signed, in hopes of beating an expected rise in interest rates, Buchter said. Henry Aronson, who led an anti-monorail campaign in 2002, is a leader of the legal team for the plaintiffs. He said undoing the tax -- not disrupting a bond sale -- is the goal of the lawsuit. "We think taxpayers have a right to a refund for money that is unlawfully taken from them,

1st:
"Do you really think that nobody in Rainier Valley or Tukwila needs to commute to downtown Seattle, or that nobody needs to get to or from the airports?

Light rail's route through the Rainier Valley and Tukwilla is about gentrification, not transit. Not enough people need to make that commute to make either solution cost effective, neither monorail or light rail. People in the Rainier Valley and Tukwilla, by large measure, do not shop downtown or at Northgate and don't fly that often. I'd be really surprised if any significent portion of the residents there worked downtown too. Not a slight, just demographics. The airlines are attempting to flee the airport for Boeing field even as we're adding a third runway for them too, that puts them right next to the Rainier Valley, you could make that with a $2 taxi ride. The only cost effective solution is lots of smaller busses operating in the Rainier Valley and Tukwilla. This isn't very sexy though, and wouldn't really help turn-over any of the properties there, that's why I believe that it wasn't selected.
The major transportation problem in Seattle that needs to get solved is the East-West route across the lake. No solution addresses this, because residents along the East and West sides of 520 & I-90 are among Washington's richest households and have more than enough money to hire lawyers and kill any proposed project. In short, their neighborhoods don't need gentrification and they would resist a public transit solution, so nothing happens.
In the monorai's favor, it does address two very heavy routes, it would address West Seattle (there's really only one route there and back)to downtown and Ballard to downtown along 15th.

2nd:
Monorail: $11.4 billion / 14 miles (SMP's June financing plan, see this Seattle P-I article)
...monorail officials were planning on paying for the line by selling 50-year junk bonds.

On the surface this appears correct, but the vast majority of the $11.4 billion you quote is for interest on those bonds, not the actual cost. The original estimate of the monorail project is $1.75 billion, with 4 times that cost going to pay interest on the bonds.
From the following article http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/transportation/23091 0_monorail01.html

Monorail project documents released last week showed that the monorail would be spending $11 billion over more than four decades -- $2 billion in principal and $9 billion in interest. Much of the interest is deferred, which raises costs. About 20 percent of the bonds are unrated -- sometimes called "junk bonds" -- and carry high interest rates of 7 to 8 percent.

I stay by my original price comparison, measured side-by-side, mile-for-mile, building monorail is cheaper than laying track.

[most of long anti-light rail diatribe deleted]

I seem to recall that building monorail is 1/10 the cost per mile. ... I think the overall budget for the 14 mile light rail project is something like $2.4 Billion. The city officials love it.... You couldn't kill the light rail project any more than you could kill the "big dig" in Boston... It's all about pork.... That's exactly why I like the monorail and hate the light rail. Light rail is going to be 10 times more expensive and doesn't even span a major traffic route! Nothing's getting solved here in Seattle by building it and nobody's going to use it.

Monorail: $11.4 billion / 14 miles (SMP's June financing plan, see this Seattle P-I article)
Light rail: $2.4 billion / 14 miles (your figures, corroborated by Sound Transit)

So ... how, exactly, is light rail 10 times more expensive per mile?

And how does the light rail line, which runs along I-5, not "span a major traffic route"? Do you really think that nobody in Rainier Valley or Tukwila needs to commute to downtown Seattle, or that nobody needs to get to or from the airports?

And those four times we voted for the monorail? That was before anybody knew that the monorail officials were planning on paying for the line by selling 50-year junk bonds.

Praise whatever holy entity you believe in that the city finally listened to the state treasurer. I think this project killed itself with their budget plan back in June. Somehow, $11 billion for a 14 mile monorail that would carry something like 1000 passengers per day seemed fiscally irresponsible (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/transportation/2295 04_monorail22.html). Seattle needs major transportation relief, but blowing that much in one place is absurd. The monorail has a funny way of not dying though, so I expect it to wind up on the ballot as an initiative. I don't quite see how the whole eastern vs western Washington thing crept in here, but there is quite enough bitterness and high-mindedness on both sides of that fence.

Once the city council backed the mayor to withdraw support, the monoral project was forced to put a measure on the upcoming November ballot so Seattle citizens can vote a fifth time on the monorail project. This time they're being offered the option of a 10-mile long route (as opposed to the original 14-mile route) that would (only) cost $5B. This whole mess started when it was discovered that the original route would wind up costing $11B to build.

The Seattle PI had a good article on the latest developments in the paper yesterday.

Straight out of the 10Q "Xbox consoles have negative gross margins." An additional thing you forgot is that MS slashed the price of the XBox. It is more than likely that any efficiencies they made in manufacturing the consoles could not make up for nearly halving the price. As you have not provided a cite to back up your claims I consider myself done with this.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/20 02384648_farm16m.html

ENUMCLAW -- Authorities are reviewing hundreds of hours of videotapes seized from a rural Enumclaw-area farm that police say is frequented by men who engage in sex acts with animals.

The videotapes police have viewed thus far depict men having sex with horses, including one that shows a Seattle man shortly before he died July 2, said Enumclaw police Cmdr. Eric Sortland. Police are reviewing the tapes to make sure no laws have been broken.

"Activities like these are often collateral sexual crimes beyond the animal aspect," said Sortland, adding that investigators want to make sure crimes such as child abuse or forcible rape were not occurring on the property.

Washington is one of 17 states that does not outlaw bestiality

Instead of wasting time with what goes on in bedrooms between consenting adults, they should be investigating graft, corruption, etc., in Foggy Bottom. They could start with Halliburton. BTW, they STILL haven't explained how Jeff Gannon (google Bush's man-date) got his press pass.

Plastic guns? Do you have any examples? I am rather curious
Normally when someone says that I always think of Die Hard 2 and snicker.

You need to quit getting your firearm information from movies.

Try Glocks, Smith & Wesson, or the HK USP. Disassembled with the components spread out amongst carry-ons, these weapons have plenty of opportunities to get on board.

This

message is to every musician speaking out against file sharing:
get your facts straight, and stop regurgitating everything the major label tells you.
Anyone still clinging to the cage-format for music is either a middleman or lazy. Squidnecks

You major label suckers make me laugh
Do you really think your label would come out and say, "Hey we cut your paycheck in half because you've got to help pay for the 250 billion copies we give away. Have they mentioned when they cut new releases by 25% sales dropped 4.1% and they blamed it on P2P? Have they mentioned that they responded to that drop by raising the cost of your CD $1 every year? Does that seem like a good business move to you? Or does that smell like fear?
Ask yourself what kind of business would cut research and development first? I'll tell you: the business that's about to make it's bed up in a mother fuckin hearse.
While Hilary Rosen and the RIAA are trying to convince you that free listeners are a bad thing, those same five labels that pay them are charging you $500,000 to buy you spins
While you're negotiating whether or not the latest Napster pays you 1/3 of a cent per download, Comcast and AOL are turning the information highway into a toll road.
you know the end is near when Britney Spears is calling it a moral issue
they've positioned you right between their wallets and your fans
they can't really expect to turn the tide with a few pathetic lawsuits
So you gotta ask yourself how does one stop a flood? You build a damn.
IT'S THE ISPs, IT'S THE ISPs!
Comcast will have every last consumer on their knees
starting with 5.3 million subscribers to cable access high speed
they own the wires, so they can discriminate with bandwidth and queuing fees
guaranteed monopoly by the FCC so

We're standing on the verge of an artistic cleansing of biblical proportions I say bring it
when the wickedness of big business is great in the earth
and it will even try to sell the waters that it's drowning in
marching two rappers
two rockers
two composers
two programmers
onto a pirate ship
in a free-market flood
until businessmen are businessmen
and art is art again. Rock

this is not an issue of children not recognizing value in art
this is an issue of children recognizing value-less art
getting artists paid doesn't even play a part
The truth is
for the first time since it's creat

I think that it would be more responsible to first try this procedure on animals, like monkeys or pigs. For instance, maybe they could transplant a pig's face to a monkey. They might even market these to insane rich people as "exotic pets."
Another idea I had that would have a similar market is cosmetic surgery for dogs.

Update: Just on a whim I googled "cosmetic surgery for dogs" and found this. I'm gonna go throw up now.

Slashdot isn't the spammer here. I don't bother with reporting spam with Spamcop anymore, but this SPAMIS idiot is spamming with a political agenda, or maybe he just hates Microsoft. For those readers that don't know what this is about, here's a sample of the spam that this guy is sending. This is the first time a URL is mentioned and it being /. surprized me. Here's today's SPAMIS spam (received on an email addres that's never been used:

Message-Id:
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 05:22:48 +0600
From: (my postmaster address)
To: (my postmaster address)
Subject: BREAKING NEWS: Microsoft Plans to Outsource Over 10,000 Jobs to China
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.13
X-Mailer: Ximian Evolution 1.4.3

Saturday, September 3rd, 2005 - 12:20am
SEATTLE TIMES / By Brier Dudley - Technology Reporter

MICROSOFT PLANS TO STOP SUPPORTING THE AMERICAN ECONOMY
BY OUTSOURCING MORE THAN 10,000 JOBS OVER 10 YEARS TO CHINA

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstech nology/2002468560_msftgoogle03.html

----- ---- --- -- - -
Microsoft is on track to outsource more than 1,000 jobs a year
to China, according to blistering evidence released yesterday
in Microsoft's increasingly nasty spat with Google over an
employee who jumped ship in July.

In a revelation that highlights the complexity of China
President Hu Jintao's visit to Seattle and Microsoft on Monday,
legal filings detailed claims of how Microsoft had offended the
Chinese government by not outsourcing as many jobs as promised
to Chinese technology vendors.

COMMENTS AT: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/04/225 6208&tid=109&tid=218

----- ---- --- -- - -
Public Service Announcement Brought to You by SPAMIS :
Strategic Partnership Against Microsoft Illegal Spam
----- ---- --- -- - -

[ SPAMIS NOTIFICATION ]:

Thanks to Individual and Server Contributions, SPAMIS is Now "FULLY READY"
to Begin Increasing Microsoft Public Service Announcement Emails to 20 Times
the Amount of Internet Email Users by 25 Times the Current Sending Rate &
Speed When a Certain Activity Transpires to "ANY" Past, Present or Future
SPAMIS Member(s) and/or "ANY" SPAMIS Affiliate(s).

[ CURRENTLY IN WAITING FOR THIS ACTIVITY TO TRANSPIRE TO BEGIN ]
[ SPAMIS / PO Box 1259, Seattle, WA 98101 - USA }

yes, probably. sun positions the JDS package as a cost saving alternative to MSFT. i'd have to assume that they did some homework and validated this, in their case at least, to be true. sun is not known for having great sales persons, so it's unlikely that they won such a deal by bamboozling the client.

They want to implement this over a couple of years, by that time maybe something new comes up.

first, it takes corporations years to do this sort of thing. that's just the way it is. no matter what the solution might be. so they should wait for something new to come up, and then apply the same logic that if they wait even longer, something newER will come up, and then ... etc. second, corporations aren't concerned about something new coming up. they want a stable solution, for the long term. they aren't so interested in running the latest version of every piece of software like you are on your desktop maybe.

You mean the U of Wash prof, Sandeep Krishnamurthy, http://sandeepworld.blogspot.com/ who criticized MS Word's grammar checker in March http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/28/192323 1/ http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/217802_gram mar28.asp/ hasn't done it already? He made it sound so easy.