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Actually a number of strange artifacts have been found, such as the so-called Baghdad Battery or ancient designs that bear a strong resemblence to modern aircraft, or giant figures that are unrecognizable unless viewed from the air, or ancient computing devices long before Charles Babbage, among others. Also fascinating are ideas about what things like the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail actually were.

If you pay attention, you will notice that the less discoveries like this fit in with our existing ideas of how things were, the less likely anyone is to have heard of them. If we really valued the purpose of science then we would focus the most attention on the oddball discoveries that seem to defy our theories, rather than the current focus which is on research that is the most likely to be commercially useful and thus the most likely to receive funding. It disturbs me that the mainstream knee-jerk response to anomalies is to find a way to dismiss them based on what we think we know. I would much rather see the fascination with the unknown. Scientific skepticism means you do not draw unfounded conclusions or rely on assumptions; it does not mean that you make excuses for not investigating.

"and short of torture (which they defined in terms or organ failure and death)"

Come on. That's ridiculous. That's not what Gonzales said in his infamous memo defining torture. Firstly, the phrase was "death OR organ failure", not "and". Also, torture was defined as producing pain such that, "When the pain is physical, it must be of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure." There are restrictions for psychological torture too. So, by implication if it isn't painful or it isn't pain equivalent to death or organ failure, it's not torture and it's just fine.

And, really, how bad could that be?

[*Cough*]

As a student at Drexel, I have had the privilege of hearing about this research firsthand - it is more than convincing. There is no doubt in my mind that he is 100% correct. For those of you in doubt - he is not claiming that all stones were "cast" or "molded" into places. Only the ones at the top and on the outside of most of the "newer" pyramids. The older pyramids do not use this technology. It is believed the egyptians discovered this technology as they were building and their pyramids became more sofisticated as a result. You can just look at the pictures:

The Bent Pyramid (an older pyramid), its obvious blocks put into place from a quarry up until where it bends.
http://www.richard-seaman.com/Travel/Egypt/Dahshur /BentPyramid/EgyptianPoliceman.jpg

Now, look inside the Red Pyramid (a newer pyramid), tell me they carved 26 million bricks with such perfect precision. They carved Limestone, using copper tools (ahem, softer than limestone), so perfectly together that you can't even fit a playing card between them? I don't think so.
http://www.richard-seaman.com/Travel/Egypt/Dahshur /AllPyramids/StaircaseInsideRedPyramid.jpg

This article can also be found on the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/science/01pyrami d.html?ref=science

Favorite quote from the NYT article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/29/business/29bizco urt.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

When Mr. Goldstein noted that "every single major patent bar association in the country has filed on our side," the chief justice interjected: "Well, which way does that cut? That just indicates that this is profitable for the patent bar." And when Mr. Goldstein referred to experts who had testified that the Teleflex patent was not obvious, the chief justice asked: "Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? I mean, the least insightful person you can find?"

Chief Justice Roberts made the comments with a smile, and the courtroom audience responded with laughter. Mr. Goldstein, an experienced Supreme Court advocate, was unfazed at finding himself the straight man in a courtroom comedy. He kept returning to his theme, which was that the Federal Circuit's test, properly understood, served the function of focusing the inquiry.

Thanks,
Leabre

Actually the problem isn't that they patented their pedal and sued. The old ETC system had the sensor on the mobile portion of the pedal, and it had a tendency to wear out wires. The Teleflex pedal combined the adjustable pedal and the ETC system with the minor tweak of placing the sensor on the fixed portion of the pedal. OK, that's dandy, and covers sections 1-3 of the patent. The problem is that they added section 4 of the patent which is a claim on all systems using a sensor mounted on the stationary portion of the system.

Teleflex isn't suing over the design of the pedal, they are suing over the concept of the design.

Since I've seen plenty of articles on this, but none describing exactly what's at issue in this case, I did some searching and found this link to the Petitioner's Brief. [PDF Warning]

Apparently, an old patent existed for adjustible gas pedals, such that the pedal could be moved to suit the size of the driver. Additionally a second patent existed for a gas pedal which was linked to an Electronically Controlled Throttle (ECT). Teleflex then apparently patented a brake pedal which used a combination of the two technologies, which is, I think, about as obvious as it gets, and then sued KSR Int'l for infringement.

I also found this NYT article on the subject, which explains the case, and how such idiotic patents are allowed to stand.

I just had to respond to one of the many errors in this post. The Kaibab upwarp did not exist when the Colorado river first started flowing over the area. The upwarp happened gradually and as the land rose, the river stayed at about the same height, gradually cutting a channel into the rising land.

You are passing off theory as fact. http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/scien ce/060600sci-environ-canyon.html:

"The modern Colorado appears to be a young river that flows out of the Rockies and hits a huge plateau, called the Kaibab Upwarp, which is 50 million to 70 million years old. Instead of being shunted away from this barrier, the river runs right through it. Moreover, when sediments from the river are examined closely, it is clear that the western end of the canyon -- where it flattens out and begins its final run to the Gulf of California -- is many millions of years younger than the eastern part of the river."

Ironically:

"For critical periods of canyon formation, the geologic record is entirely missing. The rocks and fossils that researchers need in order to tell a coherent story have either washed away or been buried, presumably in places not yet discovered."

The key is, "presumably in places not yet discovered".

And unfortunately:

"Then, during various periods of uplift apparently caused by collisions between gigantic slabs of the earth's crust, the Kaibab Upwarp began to rise at a rate that exactly matched the river's capacity to erode the landscape. According to this view, the canyon cutting took place gradually, with the river staying in place and the land around it rising upward.

This theory held sway for more than 50 years, Dr. Young said, but today it has few adherents because too many pieces of the puzzle do not fit. For example, as mentioned, a major part of the riverbed shows strong evidence of being younger than the Kaibab Upwarp."

[...]

I'd like to respond to any other errors you've noticed in my post now.

In the new service, BitTorrent's partners will upload authorized versions of their TV shows and films onto the network. No pricing details have yet been announced. Files will be protected by Microsoft's content management system, and files will play right inside the user's Web browser. Users who buy content will have to enter a special encryption key before watching the movie, and they will only be able to view it on two computers -- say, a desktop and a laptop they might bring with them on a business trip.

to start discussing within 30 days potential remedies, including different note sizes for different denominations and raised numerals and perforated dots on the bills.

That's a time scale, which is very short for bureaucracy.

I was watching the Colbert Report the other day and the CEO from Timberland was on there explaining his carbon neutral stance and he sounded quite avid about it. He was clearly agitated from Steven's persona of a right wing nut who couldn't understand. It was more awkward than funny.

But it caused me to wonder what would happen if I urged the big company I work for (and it is multi-national) to go carbon neutral. Well, on the surface, we don't burn anything. But I thought harder about the thousands of computers we must operate and the kilowatt upon kilowatt of power that is most likely used by each facility. Ok, so (since we can't assume the power company is adjusting for it) we offset the power consumption through planting some trees. Well, how many trees and how much land would this cost? And what about the thousands of computers we buy yearly from Dell or IBM? What about the plastics that go into the casings? And what about the companies that they buy the chips from and where do they buy the ore that's refined to make the silicon chips?

The more I taxed my brain with this possible carbon neutral proposition, the more it looked like this was going to require a lot of resources. Resources being money. And while we're doing this, some other IT company isn't and we're competing with them to do business with our customers. So my proposition might be passed around at the office as a joke until the CTO got ahold of it and thought about the shareholder and rejected it.

So before any of you say a carbon tax is stupid because consumers will start to buy the most environmentally friendly products, you're simply wrong. The only way they'll buy it is if the environment is having direct negative impacts on their business. And the irony is that if it does negatively affect their business that means lost profits. And lost profits means they'll have less money to spend on their solutions. So our environmentally friendly services with a carbon neutral company will probably be out of the question if they're more expensive. Tell me, when you buy your computer or your Xbox360/PS3/Wii or your new processor, does carbon neutrality figure into your pricing at all? I'll bet it doesn't.

And at the end of the day, my coworkers will tell me that there's X number of companies that are worse than us so I shouldn't even worry about it. Or that we don't even need to worry about that because it's the people who make our tools that should be conscious. But we do need to at least think about it. We might even need to worry about it more than others because we're the least obvious target yet the largest base of carbon output. Take Wal-Mart for example. Just look at the trucks they use for their distribution centers. 500 distribution centers across the states with probably thousands of stores--all of those places being supplied regularly from the coasts and producers by truck. Such an easy thing to overlook--especially if they contract those truckers because then it's not their fault, it's not their conscious and they can have articles hailing them as the greenest distribute in the world while the contractor doesn't care because they're doing business with the largest distributor in the world.

I'm not going to tell you whether or not a carbon tax is a good idea. I'm just going to ask you to tell me what scenario would have to go down for an entire industry to collectively switch to being carbon neutral. And I mean that everybody has to be on board because it will affect price. And when that price goes up, if it doesn't go up across the board, consumers will on average opt for the cheaper product. What would have to be happening to make that consumer stay away from non-carbon neutral compa

Until they start making it easy for Joe Average to pipe Internet based content to the big LCD or Plasma they're been fighting for on black friday for Xmas...I don't see internet streamed content displacing regular, cable or satellite tv.

It is not impinging on a right to freedom, it is just following through the obvious implication - if you are in a public space you are being observed.

What made Saddam Hussein powerful? Information. Whenever a person checked into a hotel, a paper with his full name and a copy of his passport was given to the security quarters. Iraq was a castle; a bird could not go in without being checked. If you caused offense, you could be put in prison for good. If you were lucky you would be tried one day; if not, then we have a word in Arabic that means you rot, as food rots.

An article about this was published in may in the nytimes

I read another article in which Litvinenko suspected the poison was in the tea served to him.

Also, Litvinenko and Putin have a long history:
New York Times: (from the archives, paid registration required)

President Boris N. Yeltsin ordered an inquiry today into spectacular charges leveled earlier this week -- so far without evidence -- that Russia's equivalent of the F.B.I. plotted to kill one of the country's most influential tycoons.

The tycoon is Boris A. Berezovsky, an oil magnate and director of Russia's biggest television network, who was a leading supporter of Mr. Yeltsin during the last presidential campaign in 1996.

Mr. Berezovsky, who is still alive, released a letter last week asserting that the Federal Security Service, a spinoff of the old Soviet K.G.B. that is responsible for domestic law enforcement, plotted last winter to murder him.

On Tuesday the source of Mr. Berezovsky's information, a Security Service colonel named Aleksandr Litvinenko, called a news conference to elaborate on the accusation and warn that a rogue element was running wild within the agency.

...

The list of very prominent people who once opposed Putin and suffered extremely nasty reversals of fortune is growing conspicuously long:

• Life sentence to a Siberian gulag [Mikhail Khodorkovsky]
• Slow, painful, and irreversible death from radiation poisoning [Litvinenko]
• Execution (hitman style) on one's doorstep [Anna Politkovskaya]
• Execution leaving a soccer game [Andrei Kozlov]
• Execution at one's dacha [Enver Ziganshin]
• Dioxin poisoning (nearly fatal) [Viktor A. Yushchenko]

Ironically, an interview of Litvinenko from December 15 2004 included this prophetic quote:

I read another article in which Litvinenko suspected the poison was in the tea served to him.

Also, Litvinenko and Putin have a long history:
New York Times: (from the archives, paid registration required)

President Boris N. Yeltsin ordered an inquiry today into spectacular charges leveled earlier this week -- so far without evidence -- that Russia's equivalent of the F.B.I. plotted to kill one of the country's most influential tycoons.

The tycoon is Boris A. Berezovsky, an oil magnate and director of Russia's biggest television network, who was a leading supporter of Mr. Yeltsin during the last presidential campaign in 1996.

Mr. Berezovsky, who is still alive, released a letter last week asserting that the Federal Security Service, a spinoff of the old Soviet K.G.B. that is responsible for domestic law enforcement, plotted last winter to murder him.

On Tuesday the source of Mr. Berezovsky's information, a Security Service colonel named Aleksandr Litvinenko, called a news conference to elaborate on the accusation and warn that a rogue element was running wild within the agency.

...

The list of very prominent people who once opposed Putin and suffered extremely nasty reversals of fortune is growing conspicuously long:

• Life sentence to a Siberian gulag [Mikhail Khodorkovsky]
• Slow, painful, and irreversible death from radiation poisoning [Litvinenko]
• Execution (hitman style) on one's doorstep [Anna Politkovskaya]
• Execution leaving a soccer game [Andrei Kozlov]
• Execution at one's dacha [Enver Ziganshin]
• Dioxin poisoning (nearly fatal) [Viktor A. Yushchenko]

Ironically, an interview of Litvinenko from December 15 2004 included this prophetic quote:

"I am sick of Slashdotters characterizing me, a Christian, as somebody who believes in a nebulous God at the edge of the universe who doesn't do anything and wants us to accept his existence by blind faith. "

Well, I don't mean to insult you or create a personal affront. There is just one problem, though, you do believe in god based on Blind faith. You just choose to call it something different, "acting in trust of God's promises." Promises you believe in on blind faith.

"I believe in a God who can change lives who made promises that *can* be tested"

Well, what are those testable promises?

"God outlines a covenant in the New Testament: a covenant under which Christians can communicate with God one on one through prayer and get actual answers...
And as outlandish as it seems, I believe in the Christian God rather than Allah or Buddha because I believe he *does* answer prayers (my parents and I cried out to Jesus for help just before a head-on collision and the other car was suddenly knocked out of our path to the other lane) and *does* heal people (my mom was healed of asthma at a prayer meeting). "

You say that you think God makes testable promises but, I suspect, the **only** answer you will accept no matter what the outcome is that the test is positive for god. Unless you are willing to accept that a test may disprove your concept of god as well as prove your concept of god then it isn't a test at all. In fact, a major study on prayer and healing found no benefit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/health/31pray.ht ml?ex=1301461200&en=4acf338be4900000&ei=5088&partn er=rssnyt&emc=rss

Ready to give up God now? No? Why not? You said you could test god. Now, you can debate the details of the study, but before you do you should state what evidence you **would** accept as proof that your concept of god is wrong. If you can't, then there is no point even debating the study because your mind is closed.

You sound like a sincere and nice person--the kind of person I don't like to publicly disagree with over religion because your beliefs are inexorably intertwined with your view of who you are and how you fit into the world. There is no room for you too talk objectively about your religious beliefs because to change them would be to give up what you think of as your most fundamental values as a person.

If the covenant was as you say, then Judaeo Christians would be significantly healthier than non Judaeo Christianss. They aren't. The fact that your mom got better after a prayer meeting isn't proof either. She did a lot of things before she got better. She probably ate cereal that day, too, but you know enough to know that just because something happens before that that doesn't mean it caused what happened after. Statistically, without a doubt, someone died somewhere in the world just after you prayed, but you also know enough not to think you caused that by praying.

I'm not trying to tell you not to believe in your concept of God. What you choose to believe is up to you but don't try and pretend it is scientific.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/15/world/africa/15c airo.html

http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=56301& SelectRegion=Middle_East

http://www.sandmonkey.org/2006/10/30/the-eid-sexua l-harassment-incident/

As well as the Dawkins book ("The God Delusion", for those of you on the other side of the Atlantic -- I guess it's been supressed as "unAmerican" over there) this is a good, interesting, authoritative and rather depressing read: American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury.

I find the strength of religion in the U.S. depressing, too, but what's this about "suppressed as un-American"? Both books have been pretty prominently covered in the press (NY Times, Newsweek...), and I got both books at my local public library. Are you using "suppressed" to mean "some people disagreed with"?

Other presidents in the million-dollar bracket were Peter G. Traber from Baylor College of Medicine (more than $1.3 million), E. Gordon Gee of Vanderbilt University (nearly $1.2 million) and Karen L. Pletz of Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences (more than $1 million). Three other presidents who stepped down recently also earned more than $1 million: Jeffrey S. Lehman of Cornell University, Roger H. Hull of Union College and Donald E. Ross of Lynn University. The most highly paid public university president, David P. Roselle of the University of Delaware, neared the $1 million mark: he earned $729,054 in salary and $250,517 in benefits. A university spokesman declined to comment. The climb in the college chiefs' income is driven largely by the greater competition for experienced university executives as the baby boom generation retires and by institutions' increasing willingness to poach, said Raymond D. Cotton, a lawyer who specializes in academic presidents' contracts and compensation. "The absolute number of people available who can do these jobs well is shrinking," Mr. Cotton said. "When demand increases and supply is shrinking, price goes up."

...when it's the ruling elite that wants more cash. Even when (if the Tsar is to be believed) they don't do their bloody jobs!

The rest of us...we're just a labor market to be manipulated by people like the Tsar and the college presidents -- no matter how well we do ours

Is that both China and India are already suffering from staff shortages. They can barely get enough unskilled labour, never mind highly skilled IT staff.

e.g.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/03/business/03labor .html?ex=1301716800&en=49c0d472886e1f39&ei=5088&pa rtner=rssnyt&emc=rss
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15212647/

And with a billion dollar budget, this $200 million dollar request is very feasable.

This sounds like a project for google.org more than google.com projects like this is why the started the google foundation with 1 Billion in start up funds.

"The ambitious founders of Google, the popular search engine company, have set up a philanthropy, giving it seed money of about $1 billion and a mandate to tackle poverty, disease and global warming.
But unlike most charities, this one will be for-profit, allowing it to fund start-up companies, form partnerships with venture capitalists and even lobby Congress. It will also pay taxes."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/14/technology/14goo gle.html?ei=5070&en=34734cd29e33eac7&ex=1163998800 &adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1163874077-JfKBwifhkRrkgg62H/WNS w

If Google pursues this, I don't think they'll do so for financial reasons, but rather for PR reasons

I'm not so sure about that. At the rate their data centers are growing, power is everything to them. It's so important that they built one of their newest facilities on the Columbia River, just so they could get close to a hydro plant for cheap electricity. Supporting a project like this would certainly be a PR slam-dunk for them, and I'm sure that hasn't escaped them, but if it has as much promise as it appears to, it would certainly benefit them in more practical ways.

Especially considering that the library people who are supposed to be teaching them are all idiots. We had to do that in my sophomore year in high school, and our librarian taught us such useful things as "Google uses boolean search terms" and "The internet is never reliable".

Every year, more than two million children die of diarrhea and other sicknesses caused by dirty water and a lack of "access to sanitation." That is the common euphemism for the reality that more than a third of the world's people -- 2.6 billion -- have no decent place to go to the bathroom, while more than a billion get water for drinking, washing and cooking from sources polluted by human and animal feces.Toilets Underused to Fight Disease

A lot of these comments are about teachers cheating. Isn't this an argument _for_ national standardized tests? You get all the kids in the gym in groups and all the tests leave the room with the principal in a sealed container. Clear responsibility.

I'm a little tired of hearing "teaching to the test" because so many school systems have expanded to somethng like 40 "core areas" spreading the kid's attention a mile wide and an inch deep. American culture may be an oxymoron and it can be politically correct and tempting to throw a ton of stuff at kids while you've got them locked in, but there is also a lot to be said for a solid core foundation of reading, writing, and arithmetic preparing a kid to be a good citizen.

And if you want to send your kid to a charter school, assume you are sending him to a _worse_ school:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/education/17char ter.html?ex=1250481600&en=2ca89632b6310e38&ei=5090 &partner=rssuserland

Personally, I would like to see _more_ federal intervention concentrated on public education (like the rest of the world has). Then local boards could spend less time wondering whether evolution should be banned and books with witches should be burned.

In tomorrows NYTimes, Chris Stephenson, general manager for global marketing of the entertainment business at Microsoft, discussing Zune's "share through the air" capability, poses a question: "What if the Zune could help turn armies of music pirates into legitimate music promoters?" These guys have so little regard for the consumer, and are so full of it, I can't wait for that sharing music thingy to fall flat on its face.

Maybe he's a democrat: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/31/florida_te rminals_dont_cooperate/ http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0 DE0DA103EF93AA25751C0A9609C8B63&n=Top%2FReference% 2FTimes%20Topics%2FPeople%2FB%2FBush%2C%20George%2 0W. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=vie wArticle&code=20030715&articleId=106

Perhaps casual acceptance of blatant bribery won't be so commonplace in the US someday.

Given the state of industry kickback these days, it's doubtful.

I've been waiting for threading to return so I could respond to this. Parent should be modded down.

David Pogue is currently working on a Vista book. He posted about it in his blog only a month ago:
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/10/20/blogging -from-microsoft/

Oh, and he's written plenty of Windows books too: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/102-3339995-6 640159?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=david +pogue

There appears to be a bit of bias in your post.
When you leave out half of the truth you're being a little biased yourself - hopefully you're just ignorant.

He's a technology writer and he writes about what's current. Leave the bias accusations behind.

Excellent news! Below is the link, registration required, for the New York Times. I will try to paste the article.

Second. Anyone out there working on books that have examples? Please reply with any good 'how to' sources.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/09/technology/09chi p.html?ref=technology

SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov. 8 -- A $90 million supercomputer made for nuclear weapons simulation cannot yet be rivaled by a single PC chip for a serious video gamer. But the gap is closing quickly.

Indeed, a new breed of consumer-oriented graphics chips have roughly the brute computing processing power of the world's fastest computing system of just seven years ago. And the latest advance came Wednesday when the Nvidia Corporation introduced its next-generation processor, capable of more than three trillion mathematical operations per second.

Nvidia and its rival, ATI Technologies, which was recently acquired by the microprocessor maker Advanced Micro Devices, are engaged in a technology race that is rapidly changing the face of computing as the chips -- known as graphical processing units, or G.P.U.'s -- take on more general capabilities.

In recent years, the lead has switched quickly with each new family of chips, and for the moment the new chip, the GeForce 8800, appears to give the performance advantage to Nvidia.

On Wednesday, the company said its processors would be priced at $599 and $449, sold as add-ins for use by video game enthusiasts and for computer users with advanced graphics applications.

Yet both companies have said that the line between such chips and conventional microprocessors is beginning to blur. For example, the new Nvidia chip will handle physics computations that are performed by Sony's Cell microprocessor in the company's forthcoming PlayStation 3 console.

The new Nvidia chip will have 128 processors intended for specific functions, including displaying high-resolution video.

And the next generation of the 8800, scheduled to arrive in about a year, will have "double precision" mathematical capabilities that will make it a more direct competitor to today's supercomputers for many applications.

"I am eagerly looking forward to our next generation," said Andy Keane, general manager of Nvidia's professional products division, a business the company set up recently to aim at commercial high-performance computing applications like geosciences and gene splicing.

The chips made by Nvidia and ATI are shaking up the computing industry and causing a level of excitement among computer designers, who in recent years have complained that the industry seemed to have run out of new ideas for gaining computing speed. ATI and Advanced Micro Devices have said they are working on a chip, likely to emerge in 2008, that would combine the functions of conventional microprocessors and graphics processors.

That convergence was emphasized earlier this year when an annual competition sponsored by Microsoft's research labs to determine the fastest sorting algorithm was won this year by a team that used a G.P.U. instead of a traditional microprocessor. The result is significant, according to Microsoft researchers, because sorting is a basic element of many modern computing operations.

Moreover, while innovation in the world of conventional microprocessors has become more muted and largely confined to adding multiple processors, or "cores," to single chips, G.P.U. technology is continuing to advance rapidly.

"The G.P.U. has this incredible memory bandwidth, and it will continue to double for the foreseeable future," said Jim Gray, manager of Microsoft's eScience group.

Although the comparison has many caveats, both computer scientists and game designers said that Nvidia GeForce 8800 had in some ways moved near the realm for the computing power of the supercomputing world of the last decade.

The fastest of thes

Boy, the marketing geniuses at Microsoft are really working overtime. Points can only be bought in $5.00 increments? What the hell? This isn't Costco for music - people are already used to two ideals - all you can eat subscriptions (which Zune offers) or a la carte purchases. If i hear one song I want to buy, I sure as hell am not going to go through a lengthy process and spend $5.00 to do so.

What a dumb move. Each Zune review I've read so far has been down on the player, but more importantly on Microsoft's "treat users like idiots" approach.

David Pogue - http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/09/technology/09pog ue.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin
David Ewalt - http://blogs.forbes.com/digitaldownload/
Walt Mossberg - http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB11630284839 3917854-wNNFl42I1SSNBP6dH5xF08kTRlQ_20071108.html

Until you experienced a blue screen of death while playing "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", your life is utterly meaningless

For reference:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/04/18/rumsfeld/ (April 18th of this year)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/washington/01cnd -rumsfeld.html?ei=5070&en=2148bb81cafef9d0&ex=1163 221200&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1163076529-g9kIMjR0v6pCeRK B7CId4A (November 1st of this year)

Source?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboa rd.php?az=view_oet&address=358x1293 (multiple comments liking Saddam to Al Qaeda who was resonsible for the attacks)
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/03/20/9-11-and-sadda m/

Actually, we didn't lie. Believing something to be true that later turns out to be false is not lying.

While your statement is true, it is not true in this case. It has been well established that this administration had already planned to invade Iraq before the September 11th attacks and that any information which did not fit the plan was thrown out.

See this link: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,69 03,1185407,00.html

Further, it is well known that what limited intelligence we had was twisted to fit the goal. For instance, when the White House was told by Defense Department analysts that aluminum tubes found in Iraq were actually to be used for rockets, the administration found others who thought the the tubes could be used in a nuclear program. Even then Secretary of State Powell, after looking at the intelligence, said the tubes were for rockets. Guess which opinion the White House used.

Then we lied that Iraq was tied to Al Qaeda.

See the link from Democratic Underground I previously listed. There are several quotes in which Bush specifically says that Iraq was tied to Al Qaeda. However, if you want other sources you can try these:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/attack/140133_bushir aq18.html (Fourth paragraph)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3119676.stm
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0803/080803nj2.htm (3/4 of the way down the page)
http://www.newscloud.com/read/73666/ (Rice making the comment for the administration)

I could go on if you like but I'm sure you can find other sources, including Bush's own comments on the White House web site (if they haven't removed the evidence) which shows Bush linking Iraq and Al Qaeda even though it was well known that Saddam hated Al Qaeda and had given specific orders to his minions not to cooperate in anyway with Al Qaeda.

I think you are the one missing something here. They are Iraqis, and they consider themselves Iraqis (I'm friends with one.). It's just that they consider themselves Sunni, Shia, Christians, and Kurds first, Iraqis second.

The clan comes first, even ahead of their religious faction.

From One Nation, Divisible:

The problem is that they have so many social obligations more important to them than national unity. Iraqis bravely went to the polls and waved their purple fingers, but they voted along sectarian lines. Appeals to their religion trumped appeals to the national interest. And as the beleaguered police in Amara saw last week, religion gets trumped by the most important obligation of all: the clan.

The deadly battle in Amara wasn't between Sunnis and Shiites, but between two Shiite clans that have feuded for generations. After one clan's militia destroyed police stations and took over half the city, the Iraqi Army did not ride to the rescue. Authorities regained control only after the clan leaders negotiated a truce.

When the U.S. invaded Iraq, American optimists invoked Germany and Japan as models for their democratization project, but Iraq didn't have the cultural cohesion or national identity of those countries. The shrewdest forecasts I heard came not from foreign policy experts but from anthropologists and sociologists who noted a crucial statistic: nearly half of Iraqis were married to their first or second cousins.

Unlike General Thurman and other Westerners, members of these tightly knit Iraqi clans don't look on society as a collection of individuals working for the common good of the nation. "In a modern state a citizen's allegiance is to the state, but theirs is to their clan and their tribe," Ihsan M. al-Hassan, a sociologist at the University of Baghdad, warned three years ago. "If one person in your clan does something wrong, you favor him anyway, and you expect others to treat their relatives the same way."

Vote for a third party is not, by definition, 'None of the Above'

Nevada has it right:
Senate results...
Ensign 321,186 55%
Carter 237,875 41%
None of These Candidates 8,192 1%
Schumann 7,749 1%
Trainor 5,246 1%

Governor results...
Gibbons 277,855 48%
Titus 254,920 44%
None of These Candidates 20,619 4%
Hansen 19,966 3%
Bergland 6,731 1%

That's not an option for me. Until there's a candidate that actually makes me want to vote FOR them, instead of against the other guy, I'll consider re-registering. Either that or a federal law (although I'll take a state law in the interm) requiring 'None of the Above' as an entry.

Until then, I'll be waiting.

Montevideo, Uruguay -- The New Yorker once ran a cartoon by Peter Steiner of two dogs, with one sitting at a computer keyboard saying to the other, ''On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.''

Nobody also knows you're Uruguay.

A tiny country of three million people, wedged between Brazil and Argentina, Uruguay has come from nowhere to partner with India's biggest technology company, Tata Consultancy Services, to create in just four years one of the largest outsourcing operations in Latin America.

Yes, when Tata's Indian employees in Mumbai are asleep, its 650 Uruguayan engineers and programmers now pick up the work and help run the computers and backroom operations for the likes of American Express, Procter & Gamble and some major U.S. banks -- all from Montevideo.

The firm runs on strict Tata principles, as if it were in Mumbai, so to see Uruguayans pretending to be Indians serving Americans is quite a scene. Said Rosina Marmion, 27, an Uruguayan manager, ''Our customers expect us to behave like Indians -- to react the same way.''

Jeez. Use the inter-web to find out information about the candidates in your area. This should take 5 minutes. Now... vote!

What's that? You want to be even more informed than what you can get in 5 minutes? Well, now that's a different question: "Ask Slashdot: How Much Information Is Required For Me To Make An Informed Vote?" (The answer to that question is either none or infinity.)

You cannot accurately predict the future behavior of the people you vote for. Many 'informed' voters voted for Bush last time and now regret it (and think of all those Democratic primary voters who voted for Kerry). The candidates you are voting for are actually - gasp - real people. And there's an incredibly high likelihood that once they're elected they'll change their positions on any number of important (to you) issues. And using past life experience to predict future behavior in office is no guarantee either (Ahem... McCain v. Torture)

If you don't feel like searching the web. Just go and vote. It'll just take a minute. And at the very least, if you go through the process of voting now, next time there's an election you may remember this point in your life and try a little harder to be prepared.

Recalling the Extradition Treaty and accompanying Protocol between the United States of America and the [*16] Republic of Poland signed at Warsaw November 22, 1927 and the Supplementary Extradition Treaty signed at Warsaw April 5, 1935

Dunno about Poland, and I don't mean to support the GP's general US bashing, but there were at least two cases of American soldiers who've killed people in car accidents in Romania, only to be quickly taken out of the country and made to stand a mock trial in the States, where they would be invariably found not guilty, or given some joke sentence. One of them killed a Romanian rock star, otherwise the whole thing might've been whitewashed. Here's some articles about that.

Not to mention the 'hotshots' that ran into a cable car wire in Italy, killing 20 people, only to be charged in the US and acquitted. So, I would say that the GP's doubts about the US's fairness in dealing with its own people that commit crimes abroad aren't completely unfounded. Not to mention that having a certain extradition treaty doesn't mean the US applies it.

Disclaimer: I've nothing against decent, ordinary americans who can't be made responsible for the arrogance of their government. However, it's appalling to see that there are some who are unaware of their own government's wrongdoings, and then think it's just some bad people that have a problem with the US.

1. Microsoft Internet Explorer 7
2. The MPAA
3. The RIAA
4. Flash
5. Javascript
6. Pointless registration screens.
7. Content blocked for certain regions.
8. Spammers
9. Phishers
10. Senator Orrin Hatch
11. Nigeria (I mean, come on, how many millionaire spam scams emails have you ever gotten from Belarus or Burma?)
12. Senator Ted. "Tubey" Stevens
13. Bears (Not sure on this one, but Colbert insisted it belonged here)

But, but, opting to delay until after the elections would be wrong! The people NEED this news NOW!

I mean, opting to delay so it wouldn't affect the elections would be like The IRS delaying any tax actions until after the elections or The department of justice delaying the hearing of a corrupt lobbiest with ties all the way up to Rove, Cheney and Bush until after the elections.

And that would just be WRONG WRONG WRONG! Clearly this news, that coincidently helps the Republicans case on the war of terror... (er... sort of) NEEDED to be out before an election that even the Republicans are now expecting to lose. And that news that would seriously harm the public's perceptions of Republicans? Clearly, that needs to wait until AFTER the election.

Your Liberal media at work, folks! (Please ignore the hard-line Republican parent companies behind the curtain.)

So, Saddam Hussein's verdict, the death sentence, is read 48 hours before the U.S. midterm elections...

That's just a coincidence, right?

But, when Republican congressmen are discovered to be gay pederasts, or famous evangelical ministers are outed for using methamphetamines with male prostitutes and the news comes out in the weeks prior to the election...

That's a deliberate attempt to time the news with the election, right?

What do you believe?

If you are an American Republican, you will incur the wrath of your fellow party members unless you answer yes to both questions.

What do you think the Iraqis believe?

Given that there are very few Republicans in Iraq, do you suppose it's possible that they might take a more cynical view on the timing of the verdict?

Could an appearance of impropriety by the Iraqi court could be, by far, the most reckless of the "October Surprises"? (Though neither in October, nor a surprise...)

U.S. troops could actually die in greater numbers because of such blows to the credibility of Iraq's supposedly new, independent government (and its courts).

Despite the limitations of both data sets, several findings are of interest. The poverty rate is 28 percent among the Hezbollah militants and 33 percent for the population. In terms of education the Hezbollah fighters are more likely to have attended secondary school than are people in the general population (47 versus 38 percent). The results suggest that poverty is inversely related, and education positively related, to the likelihood that someone becomes a Hezbollah fighter.

Similarly, Claude Berrebi, a graduate student in economics at Princeton, has studied the characteristics of recent suicide bombers in Israel. From information on the Web sites of Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, he was able to paint a statistical picture of suicide bombers. He compared that to survey-based data on the broader Palestinian population of roughly comparable age. His results indicate that suicide bombers are less than half as likely to come from impoverished families than is the population as a whole. In addition, more than half of the suicide bombers had attended school after high school, while less than 15 percent of the population in the same age group had any post-high-school education.

Study Finds Most Bombers Are Educated

The study, released this month by an Israeli think tank, looked at the 163 Palestinians -- 155 men and 8 women -- who killed themselves while attacking Israeli targets between September 2000 and December 2005. It found that almost a quarter (37 individuals) graduated from college and another quarter (39) from high school. There is no clear information about the education level of 76 of the suicide bombers, but researchers at the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, which published the study, assumed that many of these terrorists also had achieved high levels of education.

"This illustrates what we have been saying for years, which is that the chief motivating factor for suicide terrorism is ideology, a conviction that the cause is just, and not simple-mindedness or economic distress," said Yoram Kahati, senior research fellow at the center. Palestinian suicide terrorism, he said, is typically a product of a combustible combination of militant ideological fervor and a personal or collective sense of hopelessness. "These are people who are not stupid, yet are absolutely convinced that they are doing the right thing by sacrificing their lives," Kahati said.....

"This corresponds with the worldwide pattern" of the typical suicide bomber "and shatters a lot of our simplistic assumptions that if we cure the world of poverty, terrorism will go away," said Bruce Hoffman, a leading counter-terrorism expert who heads the Rand Corporation's Washington office. Suicide terrorism "is a much more complex phenomenon, not amenable to any simple cause or simple solution," he said.

Even for Shoe Bombers, Education and Success Are Linked

THE fifth anniversary of 9/11 passed with a great deal of hand-wringing over all the people who want to kill Americans. Especially worrisome is the apparent rise of terrorists whose origins seem far from fanatical.

These terrorists are not desperately poor uneducated people from the Middle East. A surprisingly l

"I wouldn't though, to teach him that revenge doesn't solve anything."

I'm sure he was just too bored to vote on all those bills.

Unfortunately, as both the NYT and Washington Post report, the documentary itself is a stinker. They both claim it does little to present actual problems, showing instead unfeasible hacks that admittedly would never work, and contenting itself to merely cast doubt over the voting machines rather than providing any solid evidence. And let's be honest -- it's easy to cast doubt on anything, including paper voting or anything else. On top if it all, the woman at the center of it all reportedly comes off as a crackpot, rather than someone with whom the public would actually empathize.

Not having seen it myself, I can't make any conclusions of my own, but if the reviews are accurate, this film does a disservice to the concept of secure voting by further validating the fringe/crackpot image that people already have regarding this issue.

The real news is that Diebold is so furious over such a vague "expose." What they should be doing is simply ignoring the whole thing, unless questioned specifically. By launching their own campaign against it, they're legitimizing the film -- which may actually be a good thing -- and giving it more attention than it may have otherwise received.

Personally, I think there are much bigger problems with the voting system than the machines that count the votes. Primaries, party politics, and campaign financing all throw much bigger wrenches into the gears than a couple of districts in Ohio that might have gotten shafted.

To place Google in context, Mr. Kraus offered a brief history lesson. In the 1990's, he said, I.B.M. was widely perceived in Silicon Valley as a "gentle giant" that was easy to partner with while Microsoft was perceived as an "extraordinarily fearsome, competitive company wanting to be in as many businesses as possible and with the engineering talent capable of implementing effectively anything." Now, in the view of Mr. Kraus, "Microsoft is becoming I.B.M. and Google is becoming Microsoft." Mr. Kraus is the chief executive and a founder of JotSpot, a Silicon Valley start-up hoping to sell blogging and other self-publishing tools to corporations.

What if it is illegal to vote absentee?

In Texas your are only allowed to vote absentee if:
http://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/pamphlets/ear lyvote.shtml
* going to be away from your county on Election Day and during early voting;
* sick or disabled;
* 65 years of age or older on Election Day; or
* confined in jail, but eligible to vote.

They don't have anything about not trusting the vote. These are the only elligible reasons to vote absentee and not following the correct procedures for voting absentee is considered voting fraud. You are even required to take your own ballot to the postoffice. It is a crime to have someone else deliver it for you. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/23/us/politics/23su ppress.html?ex=1316664000&en=862d1e52931e06ca&ei=5 088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss Kind of defeats the purpose of letting people that are too sick or old to drive to the polling station vote absentee when you force them to drive to the post office, but that is how screwed up the system is. Not sure how the people in jail are suppose to vote?

There is ample evidence of a) the ease in which Diebold voting machines can be patched and b) votes being switched to Republican candidates. Diebolds CEO vowed to deliver the 2004 presidential election to Mr. Bush.

Concerns are already mounting in Texas and Arkansas that votes are being flipped in early 2006 voting.

It's not a conspiracy when so many municipalities conclude that Diebold machines are not fit for elections.