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My folks live in rural Vermont, right down the road from where that moose fell in love with that cow a few years back. Anyway - they have 3 megabit DSL with a local company (Vermontel, IIRC) that essentially never goes down for something like $30/month. The Vermontel support is great, apparently. I know this by inference - they deal with my father's crap and he speaks only good of them.

• "John Ashcroft is not a patriot." -- Howard Dean
• "I don't think it's patriotic to put on a flight suit and prance around on the deck of an aircraft carrier looking for a photo op." -- Wes Clark
• "We hear them in the cries of the false patriots who bully dissenters into silence and submission. These are familiar fights. We've fought and won them before. And with John Kerry and John Edwards leading us, we will win them again" -- Ted Kennedy
• "The policy that the administration is following in Iraq is ... anti-patriotic at the core..." -- Sen. Graham
• "we deserve a president who stands up for patriotism and its real definition, which is doing what makes our country stronger and safer and more secure." -- John Kerry
• "a group of people around the President whose main allegiance is to each other and their ideology rather than to the United States." -- Howard Dean

American intelligence agencies are now looking to Wiki solutions for sharing intelligence, and it's far superior to any previous databases. Although it hasn't existed long enough to draw final conclusions, many say it works well. Perhaps UK intelligence agencies will follow America's lead and do the same?

Get in touch with this guy who prints edible sushi out of an inkjet.

The current definitive answer on JavaScript, Java, and Flash support: JavaScript yes, Java no, Flash maybe.

From David Pogue's Ultimate iPhone FAQs List, Part 2:

Markoff: "What about all those plugins that live within Safari now, like Flash or like Java or like JavaScript?"

Jobs: "Well, JavaScript's built into the Phone. Sure."

Markoff: "And what are you thinking about Flash and Java?"

Jobs: "Java's not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It's this big heavyweight ball and chain."

Markoff: "Flash?"

Jobs: "Well, you might see that."

Markoff: "What about YouTube-"

Jobs: "Yeah, YouTube--of course. But you don't need to have Flash to show YouTube. All you need to do is deal with YouTube. And plus, we could get 'em to up their video resolution at the same time, by using h.264 instead of the old codec."

"These are devices that need to work, and you can't do that if you load any software on them," he said. "That doesn't mean there's not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn't mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment."

Prosecutors, police and lawmakers all seem to be making the assumption that computer owners should be responsible for everything that is sent to and from the Internet. Yet, we have average people with little knowledge of computer security who are using hard to secure Windows computers. A large percentage of all Windows computer have been infected by spyware or browser hijackers or have had back doors placed in them my hackers or the malware itself. A recent New York Times article was titled the Attack of the Zombie Computers Is Growing Threat. It says that "botnet programs are present on about 11 percent of the more than 650 million computers attached to the Internet". Most of those zombie computers are probably spewing out spam for porn, pump-and-dump stock schemes, or illegal activities such as phishing schemes that steal peoples charge card numbers or passwords. Should those 70 million Windows computer owners around the world also be arrested and sentenced to years or decades in prison?

Last night on ABC, on TV, I saw a 20/20 segment about "Prison Time For Viewing Porn". In that case a teenage boy was facing the possibility of 90 years in prison because several child porn files that were found on the family computer. Police pounded on the door of their Phoenix home at 6:00 a.m. and seized the family computer. The sixteen-year-old boy offered to take a lie detector test and passed the test, but prosecutors continued to press charges. A computer expert later looked at the hard drive and found more than 200 infected files and back doors that allowed hackers to access the family computer from remote locations. Most likely someone else used the insecure Bandy family computer as a place to store the files which they did not dare store it on their own computer.

I have heard that many computer repair people spend much of their time removing spyware from computers belonging to people who complain that computers are running slowly. Prosecutors and police should take into account that these people were not using a more secure operating system such as MAC OS X, Linux or BSD. However, security problems or other misleading circumstances can occur when using Mac, Linux, or BSD. For instance, I use Linux and when I find an interesting website with various interesting Linux, ham radio, solar energy or nutrition related files, I occasionally use the wget command to download most of what is on that web page. I latter frequently am surprised to discover that the wget command also downloaded hundreds of pictures of New England covered bridges or family photos too. I most would most likely not notice if child porn photos had also automatically been downloaded into an obscure subdirectory.

How can law makers, police, prosecutors and child protection supporters seriously suggest holding people accountable for what is found computers without outlawing the use of Windows first? Furthermore, where I live the local cable companies provide their customers with broadband routers which are wide open to being used by nighbors by default. The telephone company where I live provides wireless routers which by default use insecure WEP encryption method. About half of all wireless networks do not have any security enabled and many of the others just use WEP or are still using the defalt SSID and password. Many people also do not use antivirus software, spyware removal software, properly secured firewalls or the latest security updates. Even with Windows security patches installed there are frequently unpatched zero-day exploits out there such as the one for Word documents that Microsoft failed to patch earlier this week on "patch Tuesday." How can police and lawmakers seriously suggest holding people accountable for what is on people computers in these circumstances.

ror allowing Windows computers in the classroom in the first place.

Botnets are huge and well known to anyone who ever glances into their spam box.

Some collection of security experts claim that they are tracking 400,000 infected machines
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/technology/07net .html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

These machines are sending out spam, and a fair amount of it is porn spam. The obvious conclusion
is that most every Windows-using school in America has porn on the disks of its classroom computers.

Actually the percentage of infected machines in schools is probably higher than the general percentage,
because schools typically don't have much budget for IT staff, and they often have older computers.

Which currency are you going to use to get 7 figures out of $1?

> Also, what about web games that use Flash.

There'll be no Flash or Java on the first iteration of these phones, although that's probably because involving too many developers would kill the secrecy around this product. The next revs will probably support them.

Another kicker is: no video support in the current camera (although that'll probably change soon). Lots of people use their cameras to record video.

It seems that the web browser doesn't know Java or Flash.
This is from a NYT journalist:
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/the-ulti mate-iphone-frequently-asked-questions/

No, the summary is not fine. It seems everyone (developers) are not seeing the big picture. There are more statements made by Jobs on the NYT. He says: "That doesn't mean there's not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn't mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment." _Controlled Environment_ See, Apple wants to ensure that the phone maintains a great user experience. Imagine the customer support nightmare for Apple and Cingular if third-party applications have problems. They do not want that! It's the same as opening and releasing Mac OS X to the masses of beige-boxes. They do not want to support your _extra_ problems caused by incompatible hardware and other junk you want to install. They will let independent developers make software for the iPhone, but they will control the install process, maybe through iTunes such as the games on the iPod. On another note, I think the open source community needs to take a page from this. Tighter control on APIs/platforms/interfaces. Maybe we could get something stable that "just works(tm)". Reference article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/technology/11cnd -apple.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Jobs said the iPhone OS was OS X. Let's take him at his word. A safe assumption is that it's Leopard.

I found it interesting that he made no mention of Leopard at Macworld. Or of iLife '07, both of which we know are coming. Thinking back to the WWDC and the talk of "secret features in Leopard" I'm left to wonder how many of those deal with the iPhone. Rumor has it that iLife '07 includes a spreadsheet app.

The iPhone appears to be a consumer device, but if Apple wanted to put a businesslike face on it they could include their own (perhaps MS-compatible) word processor and spreadsheet, and have it instantly sync when the phone is plugged in for charging, along with the calendar, etc. Allow push mail from anywhere and Microsoft will become irrelevant.

As for the killer app, I can think of one possibility, especially if we find it's integrated into Leopard: Skype, or an Apple-branded VOIP client. They'd have a hard time getting that past Cingular, but it would definitely sell a lot of iPhones in places where WiFi is free/cheap.

David Pogue says that the iPhone's screen uses glass, so it should be much more scratch resistant than the plastic screened iPods.

and he apparently has noticed that while he was fighting head-to-head with Sony's PS3, Nintendo's Wii embraced and extended themselves and created a new battlefield - old people, women, and girls - while also winning over most of the "market" of 13-35 year old males traditionally thought of as the focus.

That plus the Nintendo Wii is selling way more consoles and games in Japan, according to an article I just read in the New York Times in the tech section.

This post is NOT a troll.

So many rich, spoilt yanks (I am a rich, spoilt Brit) are posting to this discussion as if they have something to contribute based on their western decadent upbringing. The fact is that they are not even planning for a single one of these machines to end up in the US of A. They are intended to go to THE THIRD WORLD.

The third world consists of a great many places where buying even 1 text book for each child would break the bank for the government.

If you are going to contribute something to this discussion please try and put yourself in the position of a child in africa, who has no toys other that what they can make themselves, probably very few books and can only go to school once per week as that is all the country can afford teachers for.

As for talking about eye strain, please follow the link below and read up about the infant mortality rate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality

In short, the kids have far worse things to worry about than eye strain, like dying of Aids because some western drug company wants a bit more profit and put the price beyond what poor countries can afford because it makes more profit in the west.
And when a country refuses to follow western drug patent laws like India, did the US of A government lobbies the WTO until the country gets financially punished for trying to save some lives. (more links below)

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0 7EED7163FF937A15750C0A9639C8B63&sec=health
http://www.news-medical.net/?id=8684

The idea of the OLPC program is that by providing children in the third world with a decent education we can try and level the playing field in the future and enable these countries to better compete with us economically in the west. This has to done soon or the gap between rich countries and poor will become so huge that the idea of joining some looney religious sect that promotes suicide bombing will become very appealing.

If you knew that there was a high chance of dieing of starvation you might just commit suicide too, especially if you have had to watch someone starve to death as this is supposedly one of the worst ways to go. As it is a great many people from the third world are willing to risk some pretty hairy sea voyages on home made rafts just to end up in our countries and work for less than we would consider. Fast forward 10 years and who knows how bad things will get.

Once again, this post is not a troll, so please don't moderate it as such just because you dont like hearing anything bad said about the US or its residents.

Since 'Mutually Assured Destruction' doesn't work when defending against a patent troll (they don't produce anything that can infringe your patents), maybe it would be a start to limit the maximum amount of awarded damages to $5M (for example.) If a patent of a legitimate inventor is ever infringed by some big business, the settlement is more than enough for them to retire and continue inventing if they so choose. Wouldn't it however remove the incentive for trolls, spending easily as much as $5M in the hopes of getting awarded $200M?

Then as an encore someone might be able to convince USPTO there isn't such a thing as software patents. Good reading materials: An industry at risk, So Small a Town, So Many Patent Suits

Second, the authorities in Germany state that everything was done legally and that it's not a case of 'dragnet investigation', since neither prosecution nor police had access to all the data but instead the search was conducted by the CC companies. It was just "standard investigation procedure", even though it has never been done before.

Third, the majority of CCs were apparently not stolen; one of the porn "consumers" was a secondary school teacher (still living in his moms basement btw); huge amounts of kiddie porn were found on his computers. Most of the 322 persons that turned up in the search have a criminal record related to child porn. The whole investigation is sold as a major success throughout the big media outlets in Germany.

The owners of the transaction server are still unknown and will probably remain so (not as stupid as their customers, operating from the Philippines).

My thoughts: whatever data there is out there, it will be used - by governments, corporations and individuals. You do not have any control over your data in a post-9/11-world. The more data there is, the greater the risk you will end up as a match in someones DB query. Now, when it comes to child porn, many people don't care any longer if a search was warranted or illegal, they will only see the results. Along with rising amounts of data being collected, the risk of being targeted as an innocent person rises exponentially. This is why we should all be worried, no matter how glad we are that a few more sick child abusers end up in jail. Seeing how much data we generate each day, I'm increasingly glad I have neither a CC nor a cell phone.

On a somewhat related note: European institutions and governments seem to have no problem with handing out whatever data there is; along with the flight passenger data, the US still has full access to the SWIFT transaction data as well, even though there's no legal backing for such practices in the EU.

>>> I'm not dignifying this with a response.

>> That's too bad. Because I just explained to you why environmentalists are more interested in shutting down "big business" than simply assessing them their true quotal share of the costs.

No, you didn't explain why. You simply asserted that they were, proposed a plan which basically reflects the Kyoto Protocol (which environmentalists generally support), and claimed that because environmentalists don't support such a plan (when in fact most do) that they must only be interested in shutting down big business.

>> I could refute it line by line, but I know you probably haven't bothered to seriously read the stuff in that link yourself. You can hurl links at me all day long and I'll spend 20x as much time refuting them, only for you to move on to the next link. Nevertheless, it's the same crock: 1) The "tax subsidy" is simply because the oil industry has unusual structuring of capital expenses; any other industry with the same kinds of projects would be treated the same way. 2) Roads are a subsidy to transportation, *irresepective* of the fuel source of that transportation, and therefore cannot be counted as an oil subsidy; and they're are already paid for through taxes. Yes, there's a shortfall; this is due to expenditures on underused roads. 3) The sales tax bit is flat out wrong. The federal tax alone is more than the typical state sales tax.

1) is just handwaving about how the oil industry is special, in a way that is too complex for a buffoon like me to understand. If these record profits must not be taxed because of the sheer capital investment needed to maintain oil production, that's a damned good sign that the industry as a whole needs to be abandoned as soon as possible. 2) is a load of crap, since more than 99% of the vehicles on the road consume gasoline alone. The fact that our public policies generally support lots of road-building rather than reliance on mass transit does increase demand for oil, and hence is properly seen as a subsidy to the oil industry. 3) The federal tax is specifically earmarked towards building and maintaining roads, which support the oil industry. States charge their own sales taxes on gasoline (which go into the general fund), but these are typically far lower than sales taxes on other goods and services. Nowhere is the oil industry charged for deaths and illnesses related to air pollution caused by their products (one estimate puts that subsidy at around $10B/year for the Los Angeles area alone). Nor is it being charged for the damage done by the CO2 put into the atmosphere. When these things start happening, I'll believe that the oil industry isn't getting special treatment.

>>> DING DING DING DING DING DING DING! You're exactly right: you can get all the oil you want from these places simply by paying the market rate. Hence, no troops necessary. Hence, troops are not a true cost of getting oil. Hence, not having troop costs embedded in the price of oil is not a subsidy.

Dude, the U.S. learned their lesson in the 1970's, when the OPEC countries exercised their independence and soveriegnty in 1973. They decided to stop selling to Israel and its allies. Our Sacred Economy went into a tailspin. But while most of them reacted by pursuing meaningful energy independence,

Also, you can try to paint the oil industry as the hapless recipient of misguided and unrequested public assistance, but I think the oil companies are begging for us to continue our military meddling in the Middle East. When Iran nationalized the oil industry in the 1950s, the CIA helped overthrow prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh, exchanging him for a shah that would give its oil industry back to BP. Obviously, the nationalization (with no compensation) was cutting deeply into oil profits, and I doubt that the oil industry would just sit back and take it, when they had the ear of a country with a hug

All the *times site have a "single page" link, could it be possible to use this link in the submissions and forget about multi-page articles ?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/technology/07net .html?pagewanted=all

Don't know yet, but given that the 2007 North American International Auto Show is this week, we might be hearing more. And given that these will all be available for model year 2008, which will occur mid to late calendar year 2007, we'll have to hear something about price pretty soon. GM knows it has to be cost-competitive. And, frankly, buyers need to know that spending a little more up front will be better for everything from the environment, to fossil fuel foreign policy, to their pocketbooks. But even though compact fluorescents are provably less expensive over their lifetime than incandescents, it's still tough to convince people to change.

Nearly the entire current endowment is from contributions that Gates has made. Buffett has made commitments, but not actually transfered the money. See:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/26/business/26buffe tt.html?ex=1168318800&en=3df887f0928b4842&ei=5070

The foundation is structured such that it is not supposed to have to have any assets left some period, I believe 50 years, after Bill and Melinda have died. Buffett's contributions are contingent upon Bill or Melinda being actively involved in the administration of the foundation, and at this point are mostly commitments, but I think he will be done handing the money over within ten years.

Here's a slashdot article confirming the 50 year half of what I said:
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/ 02/1842208

And here's a NY Times piece confirming much of the other half of what I said(it does not specify the exact terms of Buffett's contribution):
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/26/business/26buffe tt.html?ex=1168318800&en=3df887f0928b4842&ei=5070

Illegal immigration sucks money from the economy and stresses our entire infrastructure.

quoting:

At first blush, the preoccupation over immigration seems reasonable. Since 1980, eight million illegal immigrants have entered the work force. Two-thirds of them never completed high school. It is sensible to expect that, because they were willing to work for low wages, they would undercut the position in the labor market of American high school dropouts.

This common sense, however, ignores half the picture. Over the last quarter-century, the number of people without any college education, including high school dropouts, has fallen sharply. This has reduced the pool of workers who are most vulnerable to competition from illegal immigrants.

In addition, as businesses and other economic agents have adjusted to immigration, they have made changes that have muted much of immigration's impact on American workers.

For instance, the availability of foreign workers at low wages in the Nebraska poultry industry made companies realize that they had the personnel to expand. So they invested in new equipment, generating jobs that would not otherwise be there. In California's strawberry patches, illegal immigrants are not competing against native workers; they are competing against pickers in Michoacán, Mexico. If the immigrant pickers did not come north across the border, the strawberries would.

Illegal immigration sucks money from the economy and stresses our entire infrastructure.

quoting:

At first blush, the preoccupation over immigration seems reasonable. Since 1980, eight million illegal immigrants have entered the work force. Two-thirds of them never completed high school. It is sensible to expect that, because they were willing to work for low wages, they would undercut the position in the labor market of American high school dropouts.

This common sense, however, ignores half the picture. Over the last quarter-century, the number of people without any college education, including high school dropouts, has fallen sharply. This has reduced the pool of workers who are most vulnerable to competition from illegal immigrants.

In addition, as businesses and other economic agents have adjusted to immigration, they have made changes that have muted much of immigration's impact on American workers.

For instance, the availability of foreign workers at low wages in the Nebraska poultry industry made companies realize that they had the personnel to expand. So they invested in new equipment, generating jobs that would not otherwise be there. In California's strawberry patches, illegal immigrants are not competing against native workers; they are competing against pickers in Michoacán, Mexico. If the immigrant pickers did not come north across the border, the strawberries would.

Like this?

Wonder how Pelosi feels about it....

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/01/04/on-t he-hill-for-the-children-and-the-grandchildren/

I know I posted this elsewhere yesterday, but with the "thinkofthechildren" tag, I couldn't resist.

Here's the full list of "In Search Of:" episodes.

Leonard Nimoy - Filmography
In Search Of:

Deadly Ants
Immortality
Firewalkers
Haunted Castles
Troy
Pyramid Secrets
Butch Cassidy
Reincarnation
Hurricanes
Mayan Mysteries
Shark Worshippers
The Coming of the Ice Age
Witch Doctors
Hypnosis
The Dead Sea Scrolls
The Ogo Pogo Monster
The Garden of Eden
Swamp Monsters
The Secrets of Life
The Lost Dutchman Mine
The Man Who Would Not Die
Earthquakes
Inca Treasure
Ghosts
Killer Bees
Other Voices
Learning ESP
Psychic Detectives
Life After Death
UFOs
Martians
Voodoo
The Mummy's Curse
Michael Rockefeller
The Easter Island Massacre
Strange Visitors
Nazi Plunder
The Loch Ness Monster
The Bermuda Triangle
The Magic of Stonehenge

http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v _id=24581

The Bush administration is also manipulating the media: Bush Spent $1.6 Bil. on 'Spin'. The practice is illegal: Buying of News by Bush's Aides Is Ruled Illegal. The Bush administration believes that it can break laws: Bush challenges hundreds of laws. "Spinning" is an overly gentle word for lying. An October 24, 2006 Washington Post story, Spinning the Course explores a few of the lies which attempt to corrupt what the voters learn about their government.

That paragraph is from a summary of Bush administration corruption I wrote because I wanted to do more than just vote: The Bush administration found support for war through manipulation. I hope other people will write their own summaries.

like his Address to the United Nations justifying the war on Iraq

I tracked that down back when Bush was trying to deny he went to war because of WMD's - to prove to anyone who would listen that Bush was blowing smoke out his ass. The more I looked, the more I found intelligent, coherant speeches outside of the electoral spotlight. It was then that it dawned on me what a cleverly deceitful man Bush is, and how he'd been faking the idiot-speech the entire time, for our benefit.

He also does it to throw folks like you and I off, thinking that nobody so idiotic could possibly be a threat, so we dismiss him, giving him freedom to, say, authorize the openning of our mail without search warrants.

Do you feel guilty when you use Windows XP?

I bet Google does:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/01/03/bus iness/03google.xlarge1.jpg

At least she makes no bones about using the think-of-the-children excuse to do whatever she wants:

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/01/04/on-t he-hill-for-the-children-and-the-grandchildren

What that means to you I guess depends on your particular leanings... [Raise taxes|Shred constitution|trample rights|etc.]

There are still human beings in this country who don't enjoy equal civil rights. I think we're getting ahead of ourselves worrying about civil rights for robots.

No Reg link to the article, courtesy of the New York Times Link Generator.

The article had a useful graphic on the left side of the page comparing CFL to standard light bulbs. The CFL bulbs contain about 4 milligrams of mercury.

One to screw it in the socket, and two to lock the employees of the store that sold it in for the night.

There's a fine line here, which you're blowing right through in your eager regurgitation of Business 101.

Yes, the ultimate purpose of management in a for-profit corporation is to maximize shareholder returns. But, whether we like it or not, for-profit corporations have unique power in our society. If management does not at least think about the social consequences of its actions, there is little individuals or government can do to repair the damage. (A good example of socially destructive profit maximization is Wal-Mart's repeated attempts to foist its employee health care expenses onto state taxpayers.)

In their pursuit of returns, managers should be bound by basic ethics, not just the letter of the law. The duties of citizenship, which are attendant on all participants in a free society, extend to for-profit corporations as well as (usually for-profit) individuals.

Deceiving employees into feelings of loyalty is beyond the pale; inspiring those same feelings legitimately by consistently treating well-performing employees better than the competition is terrific. Also, simply dismissing ineffective (but well-intentioned) employees is not always the best remedy for their ineffectiveness. Instead, shifting them to jobs where their skills allow them to be more effective, if possible, allows the company to save the expense and risk of hiring entirely new and unknown employees for those positions, while avoiding the social consequences of putting workers onto the street.

Finally, shareholder returns can be seen from several viewpoints. While loyalty (on either management's or employee's end) is unlikely to positively affect next quarter's numbers, it can be instrumental in building a business that will enjoy success and low costs in the longer term. Hiring and turnover, while good for HR departments, represent a huge cost for business, both through direct costs and the loss of (or inability to even build at all) institutional memory.

Look at how much more horrible life has gotten in China since Nixon went there and normalized relations, and since Clinton opened the trade firehose. Their pathetic burgeoning middle class is a sure sign of how horribly downhill things will go for the victims of communist rule when the West decides to engage rather than isolate.

move along. Oh the irony. Anyhow, while this may be good news correct me if I'm wrong but US government has made headway reclassifying previously unclassified documents, as reported for instance here. I don't really know the ins and outs, but isn't it kind of one hand giving while the other takes away?

A 25-square-mile shelf of floating ice that jutted into the Arctic Ocean for 3,000 years from Canada's northernmost shore broke away abruptly in the summer of 2005, apparently freed by sharply warming temperatures and jostling wind and waves, scientists said yesterday.

*sigh* Global warming is not quite that simple, and frankly you're either an idiot or a troll.

What global warming means is that there is more energy in the weather systems of the world. That energy gets expressed as more _extreme_ temperature. The snow storms in Denver at the moment are just as much a symptom of global warming as the heat waves in Europe were in summer.

The weather is a vast engine that pumps heat energy around the globe. Global warming will result in this engine becoming unstable. One aspect of that may well be a complete breakdown of the heat-transfer mechanisms in the North Atlantic - which, in turn, would see glaciers in New York before too long, while, at the same time, causing the icecaps in Greenland and Antarctica to melt.

Climatology is hard. So's being a sane person with a brain, and not a troll.

Mr Jobs later surrendered his options before they were exercised, implying that he did not gain any direct benefit from them. He was later given a grant of restricted stock by the company instead.

Presumably, Microsoft read the same New York Times Op-Edon bias as everyone else, that basically says that people claim to be uninfluenced by things like this but that they really are fooling themselves and are biased. Microsoft wouldn't have done this laptop giveaway if they didn't think it would work- that is, result in at least slightly better reviews than they would have gotten otherwise.

...livestock are responsible for about 18 percent of the global warming effect, more than transportation's contribution.

'ccording to the NY times the reason is the margins on LCD's is failing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/25/technology/25fla t.html?ex=1324702800&en=5384410d70a991c4&ei=5088&p artner=rssnyt&emc=rss
"There is another issue as well, which is that the profit margins on L.C.D. TVs have fallen sharply because of competition."

AND
"To help Panasonic maintain sales of both technologies, it sells plasma sets from 37 to 65 inches on the diagonal, while its L.C.D. TVs can only be purchased in sizes from 23 to 32 inches. "

Paraphrased, we make 500-1500$ tvs, and we make 1500-3500$ tv's, and we think you should buy the more expensive, and we should know- we make both!

These elements aren't useful in the commercial or industrial sense. At the moment, only a handful of atoms can be created at a time.

The creation of these elements is more useful for testing our theories of the structure of the nucleus (finding the Island of Stability) and of the periodicity of the chemical elements (if the chemical properties of these rather unnatural elements correspond to their positions on the Periodic Table).

Really, and what "Lawlessness" is that

Well, the "domestic" surveillance thing could be one example, given that it was apparently specifically the kind of surveillance for which FISA was passed and the secret court and after-the-fact warrants were created. Of course, if you're arguing that breaking the law is OK when you like the end result or the people doing it, then you're already knee-deep in lawlessness, you just refuse to acknowledge it as such.

I think I'll go instead with the unrestrained and unchecked spending in Iraq with no oversight which has led to such things as US companies stealing Iraqi equipment and charging the US government for them as Custer Battles allegedly did. Or the US replacement for the Oil for Food program which has already become an order of magnitude more corrupt (remember when Iraqi Oil was going to pay for all of this?), with such wonderful boondoggles such as paying Halliburton for an oil pipeline that it was incapable of building (and knew it, according to its own consultants).

Lawlessness could also be found in the signing statements used by President Bush to ignore and/or revise laws that Congress passed for his review. The Constitution specifically lays out the process by which laws come into force, and specifically demands that the President either veto them so that they do not become law, or "he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed".

After the battle of Midway, some dumbass editor in the midwest, can't remember which, reported that the key to winning was the breaking of the Japanese code.

Think about it. Every Administration makes mistakes. Many things they do can be misinterpreted by reporters and editors than have shown by emprical evidence to be not so bright. Regardless, they should all think...what good will come of this being published in this time of war? Will this help our effort to WIN? If not, then take a little responsibility and make some of that shared sacrafice they all keep whining about and DON'T PUBLISH!