Slashdot Mirror

Here is another great one that was posted by the New York Times yesterday: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/national/11terro r.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin Imagine being charged with a crime, but the evidence is classified, the judge's rulings are classified, and the government's response to the defense team's motion for dismissal is classified. So here you are sitting in jail, hoping that the American legal system (where you are innocent until proven guilty) will not fail you, and your defense lawyers are prevented from reading ANYTHING about the case... because it's all classified. How is that for a free country?

Rosalind W. Picard, one of Media Lab's prominent research scientists, is regularly cited as a supporter of intelligent design. The New York Times writes about the Anti-Evolution Petition that "advocates who have pushed to dilute its teaching have regularly pointed to a petition signed by 514 scientists and engineers", including " Rosalind W. Picard , director of the affective computing research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology".

Can Rosalind Picard please explain how teaching Intelligent Design is good for the educational system? Is she hoping to secure a big fat grant for her Affective Computing Research Group from the Discovery Institute?

Wikipedia's Discovery Institute says:

The Templeton Foundation, who provided grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, later asked intelligent design proponents to submit proposals for actual research, "They never came in," said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned. "From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of scientific review," he said.

The MIT Media Lab is often criticised for being more interested in securing corporate funding than having any scientific rigor and or intellectual seriousness. If Rosalind Picard is such a rigorous scientist who supports Intelligent Design, then why doesn't she submit a proposal to the Discovery Institute to do some actual research to prove her irrational beliefs?

Knock Knock.
Who's there?
Intelligent Designer.
Intelligent Designer who?
God.

-Don

You should be forced to take a real economics class before repeating garbage like this. The housing bubble -- if there is a bubble -- is being created by historically low interest rates as a result of foreign central banks buying US debt, an increasing population and an artifically limited housing supply. This last issue was addressed in long NYTimes article last Sunday about an economist named Edward Glaeser.

You mean like in Canada?

"But a Supreme Court ruling last June - it found that a Quebec provincial ban on private health insurance was unconstitutional when patients were suffering and even dying on waiting lists - appears to have become a turning point for the entire country." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/international/am ericas/26canada.html

*thumbs up*

Such as that videogames can help you get fit? So far that project is going okay, as far as the New York Times is concerned...

(That was a mirror; the original is behind their firewall here)

But on a public policy side, there's no landfill shortage at all.

Check out this article from the New York Times magazine, "Recycling is Garbage" by John Tierney. From the article:

A. Clark Wiseman, an economist at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., has calculated that if Americans keep generating garbage at current rates for 1,000 years, and if all their garbage is put in a landfill 100 yards deep, by the year 3000 this national garbage heap will fill a square piece of land 35 miles on each side.

This doesn't seem a huge imposition in a country the size of America. The garbage would occupy only 5 percent of the area needed for the national array of solar panels proposed by environmentalists. The millennial landfill would fit on one-tenth of 1 percent of the range land now available for grazing in the continental United States. And if it still pains you to think of depriving posterity of that 35-mile square, remember that the loss will be only temporary. Eventually, like previous landfills, the mounds of trash will be covered with grass and become a minuscule addition to the nation's 150,000 square miles of parkland.

It appears someone archived it here.... http://www.williams.edu/HistSci/curriculum/101/gar bage.html

And there's the actual nytimes page... http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/063096- tierney-magazine.html (If you get to this link from John Tierney's nytimes columnist page, they give you this article for free, but if you follow any other link, they try to charge you. weird!)

"One of the major problems with that is that both blacks and hispanics in the USA decent from the less succesfull individuals in their 'home' societies."

For Hispanics, this is of course a major factor (as a pure gene clustering label, the designation "hispanic" is far from optimal. I.e. most hispanic societies have a white upper class, a mestizo middle and an indian/black underclass, on a "color scale"). In the case of african-americans, they in general do considerably better than africans. Of course, environmental conditions in Africa are very sub-optimal, while there has been a small but significant amount of gene exchange between whites and africans in the US, making a straight comparison harder.

"Also, early education and training are fundamental for developing certain skills well, and those 2 groups are less likely to get those due to social circumstances."

True to some degree, although huge interventions to rectify the situation has so far been unsuccessful. Also, note that "skills" are not measured in the tests described here.

"Any pointers to such studies that are factual and undisputed?

I have yet to see one."

Having "undisputed" as a threshold in a new field is a bit harsh. Still, I linked to a summary of two such papers in my previous post, published in Science last September. For even more coverage of those papers, see the NYTimes article. (registration required)

It's no surprise this bill is coming out of New Jersey. NJ has host to two major Internet speech cases in the past 2 years: E merson, NJ city council members sue EyeOnEmerson.com over anonymous postings [freedomforum.org] (note: the council members lost their case) Troy Hills Village, (Parsippany, NJ) vs. John & Jane Doe users of ApartmentRatings.com [nytimes.com] (note: case still in progress)

Coincidentally, the New York Times today has an op-ed that argues this is a terrible idea. The main point of the op-ed is that such power generation would encourage environmentally-harmful factory farming, which is the source of all the dung, by essentially subsidizing their dung production. Dung power would have other bad environmental side effects, too.

A Load of Manure
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/04/opinion/04niman. html

TALK of reducing our dependence on foreign oil through alternative energy sources like biomass is everywhere these days -- even on our president's lips. As a livestock farmer and environmental lawyer, I've paid particular attention to discussion about using manure as "green power." The idea sounds appealing, but power from manure turns out to be a poor source of energy. Unlike solar or wind, it can create more environmental problems than it solves. And it ends up subsidizing large agribusiness. That's why energy from manure should really be considered a form of "brown power."
continued..

Ground-based telescope systems are actually important, contrary to popular /. opinion. For example, Swift takes about a minute to slew its Ultraviolet and Optical Telescope (UVOT) to a gamma ray burst (GRB). When Swift first triggers on a GRB, it sends that information to the ground, which is then sent throughout the world to astronomers and robotic telescope systems alike. Those robotic systems are then observing the GRB (provided that it's night and not raining at the telescope's location) within a few seconds of Swift triggering on the GRB. Thus, they are able to observe the *early* optical and infrared afterglow, while Swift is still slewing to the GRB.

There are also cataclysmic variable surveys, transient surveys, and other uses of the robotic systems when they're not pursuing GRBs. These are far easier and cheaper to develop and deploy than space-based telescopes. Each mission has it's limitations, but there is good science to be done by each. Thinking Telescopes has more information about robotic systems and the software behind them.

So yes, the days of a professional astronomer staring through a telescope to study the stars is probably long over. But that does not mean that ground systems are obsolete or outdated. Hell with the budget cannibalization going on at NASA, astronomers are going to loose the largest means of space based missions: Explorers. So when we can't launch into space, we'll build on the ground or make balloon experiments to observe in energies that are blocked by the ozone (amazingly enough, these are still done).

And the picture they use in the bloody article is a RADIO telescope! Radio really isn't affected by contrails or climate change! The biggest concern is in the optical to infrared ranges, where the moisture and clouds do the most damage to light (diffraction, reflection, etc). Radio and microwave suffer most from cell phones, gps units, radio and television broadcasting, etc. That's why radio observatories are out in the middle of *no where*.

I was gonna say Schwinn, but your analogy is excellent.

Anyway, I'd be horrified if I had to give up Graffiti and go to a keyboard that is too small to touch-type, or a PDA that is too big to fit in my pocket. And I actually like having a small phone with a tiny screen that is separate from my Palm. I don't have to worry about my PDA being hacked, which becomes a concern as soon as you put a transceiver in the unit. So if the guy is right, then I guess I'll be going back to a paper planner.

Yes, I know it's possible, and Google's probably not doing anything to prevent it--but is Gmail for Chinese citizens Google-sanctioned or -encouraged? I'd like to understand why the Economist, the Times , the BBC, Red Herring , and others are reporting that Google's withholding Gmail from China. No cheap shots please.

Reg-free, non-expiring link: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/technology/circu its/02pogue.html?ex=1298955600&en=f5c97e002a9f9979 &ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Courtesy of http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink

David Pogue has his review of the new Apple MacBook Pro in the New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/02/technology/circu its/02pogue.html

NASA to Cut Back Scientific Missions Because of Budget:

"ome of the most notable missions on NASA's scientific agenda would be postponed indefinitely or canceled under the agency's new budget, despite its administrator's vow to Congress six months ago that not "one thin dime" would be taken from space science to pay for President Bush's plan to send astronauts to the Moon and Mars."

Recent articles on private health care in Canada from the "right-wing pseudo-news" orginizations Reuters and the NY Times.

Alberta moves to expand private health care
Feb 28, 2006

As Canada's Slow-Motion Public Health System Falters, Private Medical Care Is Surging
February 26, 2006

Full disclosure: I'm featured in the article. :-)

Quote from the One or Zero web site: "The OneOrZero Task Management and Helpdesk software is licensed under the latest version of the GPL."

-
Cheney's company is building prisons for the U.S. government.

A lot of news papers have some bad eggs, The Washington Post and The New Republic not excluded. This stuff happens and it isn't fair to point fingers at the entire newspaper because of one or two bad reporters that have slipped through the cracks, as most long standing papers have this happen at one or more points in their lifespans. And for papers like the WP and NYT, these things are few and far between and dealt with effectively. If they were not, then yes, call it a bad paper, but hold them to the same standards.

The NYT has always been upfront when they find out about this stuff, just as any major newspaper should be expected to.

A lot of news papers have some bad eggs, The Washington Post and The New Republic not excluded. This stuff happens and it isn't fair to point fingers at the entire newspaper because of one or two bad reporters that have slipped through the cracks, as most long standing papers have this happen at one or more points in their lifespans. And for papers like the WP and NYT, these things are few and far between and dealt with effectively. If they were not, then yes, call it a bad paper, but hold them to the same standards.

The NYT has always been upfront when they find out about this stuff, just as any major newspaper should be expected to.

Please don't comment on stories in which you have no interest. I'm enjoying the discussion, and learning a lot.

-
Cheney's company is building prisons for the U.S. government.

(NYT warning) At the end of the year, he gave $165 million to a tiny charity set up to benefit the golf program at Oklahoma State University, reaping Mr. Pickens a tax deduction. Records show that the money spent less than an hour on Dec. 30 in the account of the university's charity, O.S.U. Cowboy Golf Inc., before it was invested in a hedge fund controlled by Mr. Pickens, BP Capital Management...By giving the money before 2005 expired, Mr. Pickens was able to take advantage of a provision in Hurricane Katrina relief legislation that allowed him a deduction for a charitable gift equal to 100 percent of his adjusted gross income

Agreed: If you want Mac malware, you have to go to a store and buy it.

It's completely unacceptable that Slashdot editors would post this garbage. From the referenced article:

"In the past two weeks, information-security companies like Symantec Inc., Sophos PLC and McAfee Inc. have identified several security issues related to the latest version of Apple's Mac operating system, called OS X. Among the concerns: two "worms," programs written by unknown hackers that were designed to spread themselves to other Macs through Apple's iChat instant-messaging software and Bluetooth wireless-communications capability."

Translation: Some public relations drone, with no technical knowledge, paid the Wall Street Journal to post the article. The Wall Street Journal is a "What the rich want you to think" publication, and, in my experience, usually unreliable for anything useful. Note that the article jumps from subject to subject rapidly, apparently to hide the fact that there are no actual incidents of Mac infections to report.

Another translation: Symantec, a maker of very buggy security software of poor design, and other "security" companies want Mac users to buy their products.

Some people, in my opinion, spend their entire working lives being dishonest, trying to trick other people. In my experience some of them work for WSJ.

-
Cheney's company is rapidly building prisons for the U.S. government.

Halliburton Subsidiary Gets Contract to Add Temporary Immigration Detention Centers (Free registration required.)

Won't somebody think of Manny Perry! http://www.nytimes.com/videosrc/movies/20031116_MP AA2_LO.ram

Gee, even the White House thinks they did a lousy job...

From the Trivia section of the Wikipedia article: Karl Rove's reputation for political dirty tricks is such that, among both his supporters and critics the phrase "Rovian" has come to be used as a synonym for "Machiavellian". The documentary Bush's Brain "...depicts Rove as the most powerful political consultant in American history and, in essence, a co-president" according to USA Today. [101] [101] links to a USA Today article: http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2004-03-1 1-southwest-film-fest_x.htm

"Smoke gets in your Eyes" - New York Times article: http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB 0916FB345B0C728FDDA90994DD404482&n=Top%2FReference %2FTimes%20Topics%2FPeople%2FR%2FRove%2C%20Karl

OK, I would not say that any of these links constitute absolute proof (except for the first one, but this wasn't the main point of our disagreement), but they do indicate that my opinion is not outside mainstream thought. Sorry for not bringing up more articles, but I really do not have a total source list for this matter handy.

Now, if you could find solid proof of the dreaded WMDs that George W. was so worried about before the Iraq invasion (and he still half-heartedly allures that exist), I would be very impressed.

"Yeah, yeah. Arabs don't like jews"

We were discussing Iran, not any Arab country. Oh wait. I get it. You have proven that you know so little about anything that I bet you are one of those hicks who think that Iranians are "Ay-rabs!" This is too funny. Thanks for letting us know that those gawldang towelheads are all the same thing!

http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/001401.html

Concerning Iran's nuclear weapons program which you deny exists, here is some further documentation:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/international/eu rope/31afp-iran.html?ex=1296363600&en=a9b804207336 fb47&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

If you don't know that Iranians are not "Ay-rabs", it is not surprising at all that you know nothing about their nuclear weapons building. I think you operate from a "hate the United States first" M.O. and let everything flow from that, including the idea that the U.S. is the ultimate arch-villain in everything, regardless of the facts.

As for your statement, "Saddam knows there isn't a God"? That is just a statement of your religious faith. You have a faith that there is no God, and you project it on others.

As Whitman told me on the day in May 2003 that she announced her resignation as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency: ''In meetings, I'd ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!'' (Whitman, whose faith in Bush has since been renewed, denies making these remarks and is now a leader of the president's re-election effort in New Jersey.)

-2. Same article from New York Times magazine in 2004:

[Hungarian-born Holocaust-survivor and Democratic congressman from California] Tom Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.
''I don't know why you're talking about Sweden,'' Bush said. ''They're the neutral one. They don't have an army.''
Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: ''Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They're the ones that are historically neutral, without an army.''

-3.Same article in the New York Times magazine from 2004

Such challenges -- from either Powell or his opposite number as the top official in domestic policy, Paul O'Neill -- were trials that Bush had less and less patience for as the months passed. [...] Top officials, from cabinet members on down, were often told when they would speak in Bush's presence, for how long and on what topic. The president would listen without betraying any reaction. Sometimes there would be cross-discussions -- Powell and Rumsfeld, for instance, briefly parrying on an issue -- but the president would rarely prod anyone with direct, informed questions.

--http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/wilkerson.htmlFr om Lawrence Wilkerson, chief aide to Colin Powell who played a major part in planning the invasion of Iraq, in PBS interview with David Brancaccio

I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council. How do you think that makes me feel? Thirty-one years in the United States Army and I more or less end my career with that kind of a blot on my record? That's not a very comforting thing.

Not entirely sure how much more eyewitness accounts of Bush's attitude, person

Just because in your mind (and in many other people's minds) Rumsfeld has been discredited (hey I don't like him either), making a broad, sweeping generalization is a little foolish.

Its also the birthplace of jewish extremism and christian extremism. So what?
The Horn of Africa was the birthplace of christian and jewish extremism? That'a new one. I think you've misread my statement.

By breaking my statements down sentence by sentence instead of paragraph by paragraph, you are taking them out of context. For example my statement about how America has lost the moral high-ground. I was asking it in a much greater sence. Ask any jihadi what America is guilty of and they will mention far more than just the terrible things perpetrated in Iraq. They point to our decadent society, our dishonesty in everyday life, the sex and violence we promote in media and entertainment. They point at the cartoons. All of these things are what they are claiming war against. Iraq is merely an excuse; a focal point.

If you're going to argue my points, please argue against them in context.

Jihad has everything to do with Iraq. The same forces (IE extremism) that caused 9/11 are now working in Iraq, thanks to America. Had America not entered Iraq these forces would have continued to work in the other countries. Among the goals of these groups include the goal of destroying whole countries and trying to establish islamic law. Along the way, hundreds of thousands if not millions have perished in other countries. If you don't believe me, read up on what really happened in Somalia and the Horn of Africa during the 1990s. Even to this day these same groups (of which Bin Laden played a huge role in the 90s) still wreak their havoc on civillian populations in Sudan. Frankly the insurgents in Iraq are pretty tame by comparison. However they've already demonstrated their brutality and they don't hesitate to kill fellow muslims.

America's merely being in Iraq brought these already existant forces in Arab society to action. True Iraq didn't have many extremists (well except for the Sunnis) before the fall of Saddam. But Saddam's regime left a very fertile ground for the seeds of extremism which poured into the country. An amazing piece of investigative reporting can be found in today's NY Times Magazine: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/iraq.ht ml?8hpib

There have been atrocities committed by the Americans (just in the interest of disclosure I am a US citizen living in the US). These people must be punished. Looking at the entire region, and from first-hand accounts out of Iraq during the first year in Iraq, the attrocities and bloodshed committed by insurgents and islamic facist jihadi from Africa to the middle east, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of people affected by the Saddam regime, the scale of these things committed by muslims against muslims and other people is pretty mind-bobbling.

A fascinating look at the whole situation came out in 1998 in a book called "Bin Laden: The man who declared war on America." Even if only a fraction of the book can be substantiated now, years after the fact, it is pretty sobering.

So who is going to sue me when I design a gene to make Avastin and Herceptin? This will be the real test of our obsolete intellectual property regime, when the medical establishment's equivalent of the RIAA/MPAA sues cancer patients for synthesizing their own drugs, like the music industry is now suing your neighbor's kids.

One has little impact on anyone but himself, the other causes headaches for people all over the world.

Some priorities!

Actually, some spy intercepts were purely domestic - but that's not the point. It's called "Domestic" because one person is in the US, and it isn't a purely international communication.

Since this program resulted in thousands of dead end leads, only an idiot would claim that only terrorists were monitored under this act.
If the NSA was only spying on terrorists, then FISA would have granted warrants (even after the wiretap had started). Given that the administration decided to end run around FISA, it's reasonable to speculate who else was being spied upon - particularly considering this crowd's track record with honesty.

No rational person can make the case that the disclosure of this program has damaged national security, so by making it you prove your irrationality. It's not like Al Qaeda didn't know that the NSA existed, or that the NSA was spying on phone calls. No one, and I mean no one is arguing that the NSA shouldn't be able to spy on terrorists. Why in the world would terrorists care whether or not the NSA got warrants to do this? The best excuse this administration can offer is that reminding the terrorists that the NSA taps phone calls damages national security, otherwise "they forget". If keeping the NSA out of the headlines is that important, then they'd damn well better follow the law.

It's not about eavesdropping on people who want to kill us - otherwise those thousands of dead ends wouldn't have happened. It's about whether the President can pick and choose which laws he wants to follow by invoking the excuse of a perpetual war, relegating Congress to a powerless debating soceity.

The candy asses are on the right - people who will happily give away this country's proud heritage because they're terrified of the big bad swarthy bogeyman. Grow a spine.

Actually, some spy intercepts were purely domestic - but that's not the point. It's called "Domestic" because one person is in the US, and it isn't a purely international communication.

Since this program resulted in thousands of dead end leads, only an idiot would claim that only terrorists were monitored under this act.
If the NSA was only spying on terrorists, then FISA would have granted warrants (even after the wiretap had started). Given that the administration decided to end run around FISA, it's reasonable to speculate who else was being spied upon - particularly considering this crowd's track record with honesty.

No rational person can make the case that the disclosure of this program has damaged national security, so by making it you prove your irrationality. It's not like Al Qaeda didn't know that the NSA existed, or that the NSA was spying on phone calls. No one, and I mean no one is arguing that the NSA shouldn't be able to spy on terrorists. Why in the world would terrorists care whether or not the NSA got warrants to do this? The best excuse this administration can offer is that reminding the terrorists that the NSA taps phone calls damages national security, otherwise "they forget". If keeping the NSA out of the headlines is that important, then they'd damn well better follow the law.

It's not about eavesdropping on people who want to kill us - otherwise those thousands of dead ends wouldn't have happened. It's about whether the President can pick and choose which laws he wants to follow by invoking the excuse of a perpetual war, relegating Congress to a powerless debating soceity.

The candy asses are on the right - people who will happily give away this country's proud heritage because they're terrified of the big bad swarthy bogeyman. Grow a spine.

It's safe to release all of the domestic spying records, now that Bush got his literal "get out of jail free" deal from his Republican Congress.

After terrorists attack our ports through infiltrating the royal United Arab Emirates corporation that just got handed the ports management contracts, I expect Congress will pass a law that says that "no one could have anticipated that the ports would be infiltrated through their foreign managers".

It's safe to release all of the domestic spying records, now that Bush got his literal "get out of jail free" deal from his Republican Congress.

After terrorists attack our ports through infiltrating the royal United Arab Emirates corporation that just got handed the ports management contracts, I expect Congress will pass a law that says that "no one could have anticipated that the ports would be infiltrated through their foreign managers".

These are titantic anti-intellecutal events that go signficantly beyond "anti-republican rhetoric."

Let's not forget recent events at NASA which seem more concerned with crippling science in order to avoid hurting creationist's feelings. The scientists (i.e. IMO, intellectuals), won that battle, but they shouldn't have even had to have fought it in the first place.

I found an interesting story from The New York Times (no registration needed when I just checked) last year about time obsession that caused the train wreck. It was an interesting read.

So Long, Dalai Lama: Google Adapts to China

...

Only one of the 161 images produced by searching in Chinese for the Dalai Lama on Google.cn shows the 14th Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet since 1940. He is pictured as a young man meeting senior Chinese officials. That was before 1959, when China's People's Liberation Army invaded Tibet and the Dalai Lama fled into exile.

...

But few have cooperated as openly as Google. Google's local staff works closely with Chinese officials to ensure that search results from Google.cn do not include information, images or links to Web sites that the government does not want its people to see.

...

In other cases, the omissions are glaring. Searches for photos of Tiananmen Square on regular Google produce many shots of a man blocking a column of tanks outside the square, the iconic image of the 1989 democracy movement and the later crackdown.

...

1. Microsoft releases sloppy software, as usual, with an amazing number of extremely severe vulnerabilities.
   
   (Compare Microsoft Windows XP with OpenBSD, which is equally complicated. Quote from OpenBSD: "Code often gets audited multiple times, and by multiple people with different auditing skills." The OpenBSD team is number one because they want to be.)
   
   
2. Microsoft refuses to fix vulnerabilities, as usual.
   
   
3. Microsoft sells protection called OneCare Live.
   
   
4. Accidentally, or not, Microsoft protection software sometimes disables the software of other companies, demonstrating that customers cannot depend on other companies for protection. So, everyone must buy their protection from Microsoft.
   
   
5. Profit Before: Microsoft now sells a new copy of its operating system software to everyone who buys a new computer, even if the customer stopped using the old computer and bought a new one because the old one was too infected, and thus already owns a license.
   
   Profit Now: A protection racket would be even more profitable. Microsoft would collect money every year for a subscription to its protection updates.

From the Slashdot story: "This should be a cautionary tale about deploying beta products in production environments."

That's not what happens in the case of Microsoft's virtual monopoly. Many people, when they find their computer has become slow, buy a new computer. Then Microsoft sells another copy of Windows, which, of course, still has huge security risks.

The incredible CPU-sucking of Norton software also helps Microsoft sell more copies of Windows, also.

Somehow Microsoft has arranged that owners of Microsoft Windows XP must pay again when they get a new computer.

It's miserable to have billionaires who care only about money riding on your back. That's why open source is necessary.

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 15, 2006 - It may not be the last laugh, but on Friday afternoon, after the close of the stock market, Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple Computer, shared an e-mail chuckle with his employees. The message was prompted by the 12 percent surge in Apple's stock price last week, which pushed the company's market capitalization to $72.13 billion, passing Dell's value of $71.97 billion.

In 1997, shortly after Mr. Jobs returned to Apple, Dell's founder and chairman, Michael S. Dell, was asked at a technology conference what might be done to fix Apple.

"What would I do?" Mr. Dell said to an audience of several thousand information technology managers. "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."

On Friday, apparently savoring the moment, Mr. Jobs sent a brief e-mail message to Apple employees, which read: "Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn't perfect at predicting the future. Based on today's stock market close, Apple is worth more than Dell. Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today. Steve."

Or, get a DVD from the library, which is also free.

Reading books is the best way to get an education and have fun, too: The New York Time Bestseller list. Once you know the title, use your library's online catalog to reserve the book.

Well, Bloomberg is pretty anal. Banning smoking in New York? There's something vaguely blasphemous about that--I remember a scene in Sex in the City where Carrie goes to a backlot of New York to escape the politically correct Nazis and have a smoke in peace. Yeah, I know smoking is bad for you, but it might be better to ban fast food joints--a recent New York Times article (genital dimensions required) talked about the skyrocketing incidence of diabetes in New York. Diabetes rips your body apart, causing chronic health problems for decades (at least smoking tends to kill quickly.) The implications for public health costs and readiness are staggering. Of course, the advance of diabetes, and its causes, require a bit more subtle consideration, something a knee-jerk PC type like Bloomberg is not particularly adept at...

I've been broadcasting "toqerTV LIVE at the 7 Bamboo karaoke lounge" for 2 years now. Even with AOL flippin the bill for bandwidth, I haven't been able to pay off my bills.

Camcorder Capable of streaming - $600
First 2 months hosting at he.net $1600 (they tacked on an early cancellation fee)
Encoding PC - $600
DSL setup and monthly (first year)(speakeasy) $1400
bunch of misc costs here and there, $1000

Even with donations (usually only got enough to pay the credit card minimums) to help me pay stuff off, after the first year with interest charges my first years credit card balance was $5000, now it's $7000 on year 2.

I've tried exploring every kind of sponsorship I could find, but nobody wants to sponsor a karaoke video stream. I've offered web ads, ads in our karaoke songbooks, vinyl banners hung from our stage, and even overlayed ads on our stream. I've approached local businesses (mostly resuraunts), i've approached DUI lawyers and bails bondsman (you'd figure advertising in a bar would be hot to them) I've tried contacting budweiser, coors, etc. Nobody is really interested in advertising on an online station. It could be my content, I dunno.

I've heard ads on my fellow shoutcasters radio stations, but it's mostly companies that do business on the net. It's not the type of businesses you usually hear on FM radio stations.

The technology is there. Internet radio does sound way better than FM these days. Unfortunatly advertisers don't see a reason to go there. For most of them, it's a lack of understanding of the technology, but there are some savvy ones. The Savvy ones know that the number of listeners your station can reach is limited by your bandwidth, which on average amounts to about 200 listeners per station on even the best bandwidth.

I don't know what to do anymore. I love what I do, it's damn unique and the few regular viewers we have are really cool. Lately though just lookin at the numbers, even with AOL sponsoring my bandwidth if I don't start getting either advertising dollars or more regular donations, i'm going to have to stop it. Wife and I had our first kid 2 months ago, I have other bills to worry about. Then again, I feel the stream and the small community I created is my baby too.

I was even featured in the New York Times which in print terms should have been as good as a slashdot effect. Yet I never got a single call or email from an interested advertiser.

I think i'm just gonna wrap this up by saying internet broadcasting is cool as hell. I just wish advertisers would see it the same way.

Beverly Young, wife of Representative C. W. Bill Young, Republican of Florida, for one.

"Further, if your going to link to a news story try to make it an unbiased one. The article you linked to was on a site that's about as biased as you can get."

It was an article that had Sheehan's description of what happened, not "assumptions" about what she did (some mainstream media reacted similarly to the way you did and exaggerated or made up statements about what happened.)

The NYT pointed out that "An officer who insisted on anonymity because the officers are not authorized to speak publicly about their work said the guards at the speech had been instructed to watch Ms. Sheehan closely in case she sought to interrupt the event to gain attention for her cause."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/02/politics/02sheeh an.html

You might have also noticed that later the charges were dropped, an apology issued, and the statement "We were wrong and shouldn't have arrested her" was given.

Find a source that suits you here: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=Capitol +Police+Chief+Terrance+Gainer+apology&btnG=Search+ News

According to the NYTimes, it was this meeting that set things off

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even tacitly take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears, and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus. And you've got to make it stop.

"...in this case, Yahoo was obeying Chinese law since that was the jurisdiction in which this event took place..."

As the Sheraton incident here in Mexico shows, it seems that the US Treasury Department sometimes can influence the decision of a US company in a foreing country to either obey local laws or not...food for tought...