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Here are some examples to support your point.

Here is Kevin Bankston, EFF on Olbermann last night. MSNBC is not the mouthpiece of the right wing. Olbermann was about as enthusiastic for Obama as anyone I saw during the campaign.

Here and here are some current left wing blogs being very critical of this policy stand as they were when it was Bush's stand. Meanwhile the right wing media like Fox are spreading FUD and holding up Michelle Bachmann as an exemplar. I do understand that Fox has no credibility criticizing this since they were so nakedly in favor of Bush.

Still, I don't expect even the blogosphere to treat Obama like it treated Bush. Where are the posts comparing Obama to Hitler?

Bush had years to build up a reputation. Obama is still in the process of tearing down his original reputation. Give him two years and if he's done anything near what Bush did two years into his first term I think you will see plenty of people making such comparisons.

Bush's motorcade was pelted with snowballs on the way to his inauguration while Obama got a party. With the except of a couple of months after 9-11, Bush was pretty much relentlessly attacked by the media, Hollywood elites and blogosphere for all eight years.

If newspapers die, so does reporting

This comes from an article at salon.com http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2009/02/17/newspapers/ , but I've heard it a number of times, most recently on CBC Radio. Turns out that every other media gets most of their copy off the wire news services, and, on radio for example, reads it straight off the sheet. There's a funky name for it in the business that slips my mind right now.

Now, I've got my own beefs with the quality of reporting such as it exists today, but if you think it is bad now, what happens when newspapers go down the toilet? Does that just leave us with journalism by press release? Or, yegads, bloggers as our primary source.

It seems to me that newspapers still add value in terms of content, but their distribution model has died and they haven't figured out how to get revenue out of on-line services. So what if google is sending eyeballs their way, if there isn't enough money to be made in the paper's on-line ads?

Is it the case that the only people making real money out of on-line ads is google? If so, how long will that model work for google - it sounds like a long term loser, if all google's customers aren't making money off of what google is selling them?

I have some empathy for the papers here - google is another goddamned distributer getting rich off of content providers, no?

Grist for the mill - I'm not intending to troll here.

Why do artists continue to fall into the "label" trap and sign contracts guaranteeing a lopsided pay schedule? Is there not enough evidence, documentation, and common knowledge that the labels are evil and their business model is dead? Do they not know about the Courtney Love manifesto? Reznor hosts a version of it as well, and has interesting comments of his own.

Any new artist (or existing artist exiting a contract) that doesn't at least try to leverage the internet is helping perpetuate the label problem. I'm sorry to say, those folks deserve what they get.

I'm not going to support labels or their artists with my money. Right, wrong, or indifferent, thats just a fact of life.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/06/obama/index.html

What's absolutely lovely about the internet? You have a research library available at your desk.

Here's at least one article about how much Bush sucks and is making everything worse not even 74 days into his first term: Salon, 2001-03-16

How about Bush declaring war on the environment? CNN, 2001-03-23

And Bush wants to destroy education: Newsweek, 2001-02-05

Oh, wait, that's right. When you criticize a Dem president, you gotta give them a change to prove themselves. When it's a Repub, sick the dogs on 'im.

Exactly. Iran is a prime example of a country which is constantly threatened by regional powers (and the US) and has built up it's defence in response.

Before you mod me down, note that I'm not saying I sympathise with Iran, just that it's a matter of public record that a major reason Israel/US hasn't invaded Iran in the last few years is due to their retaliatory capacity. This, of course is only encouraging proliferation.

Hopefully Obama can make a break from the previous administration in this regard, but I doubt it.

Just for fun, theoretically, you can put payloads into orbit and on routes to the moon/planets/asteroids if you give them a solar sail. (People could not survive that trip, unless encoded in data bits and silicon.)

Maggots and leeches are proving effective in medicine in various ways.
    "Maggots and Leeches: Old Medicine is New"
    http://www.livescience.com/health/050419_maggots.html

In round figures, people are about 90% bacteria by numbers, and about 10% bacteria by weight. Bathing too often may disrupt your bacterial ecology and lead to infections or skin problems, and growing up in too clean environments may lead to immune problems. Although exactly what is too much is problematical. See:
    "The filthy, stinking truth: The messy history of cleanliness, and why our obsession with dirt may be making us sick."
    http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/11/30/dirt_on_clean/

Until we actually landed on the moon, the best scientists still thought landers might sink into dust. Someday, we may turn the Moon into a green paradise using greenhouses and artificial lighting or mirrors.

Psychologically, the individual's perception is still the center of everything (though people try to move beyond that in their thinking). Quantum mechanics reflects this. Still, we may be living in a simulation in which case, like those living in Plato's "Cave", most of what we assume may be just a shadow of the truth:
    http://www.simulation-argument.com/

Anyway, just having fun with your points. I like your insightful comment that knowing enough to be dangerous (as opposed to nothing or lots) is a source of difficulties.

Here is the big issue with Moore's law and it was forseen in the 1960s:
    http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The fundamental problem posed by the cybernation revolution in the U.S. is that it invalidates the general mechanism so far employed to undergird people's rights as consumers. Up to this time economic resources have been distributed on the basis of contributions to production, with machines and men competing for employment on somewhat equal terms. In the developing cybernated system, potentially unlimited output can be achieved by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings. As machines take over production from men, they absorb an increasing proportion of resources while the men who are displaced become dependent on minimal and unrelated government measures -- unemployment insurance, social security, welfare payments. These measures are less and less able to disguise a historic paradox: That a substantial proportion of the population is subsisting on minimal incomes, often below the poverty line, at a time when sufficient productive potential is available to supply the needs of everyone in the U.S. The existence of this paradox is denied or ignored by conventional economic analysis."

So, we are about to see a lot of divide-by-zero errors in economic equations as computing prices falling to zero drives almost every other price towards zero.

Unfortunately, most news sources in the US are biased, and the number of mainstream media outlets with liberal leanings appear to outnumber the conservative ones.

Except of course that is demonstrably false. Conservative writers dominate editorial pages and conservative commentators dominate TV.

On the national level: CNN, which has lost all credibility as a news source, is mostly iReporters and Hollywood gossip, and engage in constant concern trolling on Democrats

Fixed that for you.

Another non-climate-scientist who thinks nearly all of the climate scientists are wrong about the climate.

You're off there. In fact, in the article you linked to on the very same page, you see that he has published at least one paper in the field. Sure, his main field is physics, but how long does it actually take to become an expert in a field? By the time you're his age, you've had enough time to expand into a lot of areas.

Dyson seems well aware that the climate is, in fact, warming.

Did you actually spend any time figuring out what he does claim? Once again, in the first paragraph of the article you linked to, Dyson states his opinion "[Global warming] is a real problem, but it's nothing like as serious as people are led to believe. The idea that global warming is the most important problem facing the world is total nonsense and is doing a lot of harm."

Dyson's wrong to repeat the "global cooling" myth

He was actually there in the late 60s. I had a textbook that talked about global cooling, and gave possible solutions. Indeed, there is no reason to doubt that eventually we will enter into another ice age. The paper linked to in your link basically outlines the path scientists made from thinking in terms of ice ages, solar forcing, etc. to becoming aware of the consequences of human interaction on the global climate. It shows convincingly that in those days no one was worried about immediately entering into an ice age. However, it doesn't contradict, and in fact confirms, that there was a general consensus that we would eventually enter another ice age.

Basically you're a troll who didn't even read your own articles. And a slashdot editor. Wow, should that be a surprise?

Oh look. Another non-climate-scientist who thinks nearly all of the climate scientists are wrong about the climate.

Non-experts who disagree with experts are a dime a dozen in any field, but for some reason, global warming seems to be the only field where they make headlines. Wonder why that is.

The sports writer who for some reason was tasked with writing this science article let Dyson get away with a couple of groaners. One was his comment:

The warming, he says, is not global but local, "making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter."

Climate scientists will be the first to tell you that global warming affects the poles disproportionately. That doesn't make it "local" -- and the fact that those words are not in quotes suggests to me that Dyson never said it. Dyson seems well aware that the climate is, in fact, warming.

Dyson's wrong to repeat the "global cooling" myth, and in his Salon interview a couple of years ago, he was wrong to assert that polar bear populations are increasing. But then, he didn't almost win the Nobel Prize for Polar Bears. He's undoubtedly a genius when it comes to physics, but why does the media love to find global-warming contrarians who are not experts on global warming? There's a question I'd like to see explored.

They called the police and what? Your story stops dead there, and I bet I can guess why.

The person was arrested and had to hire a lawyer.

See these:

• Column: High Court Child Porn Ruling Erodes Free Speech
• Supreme Court Upholds Child Pornography Law
• Baby photos that fall foul of the PC police
• Is this child pornography?
• Julia's pictures: could it happen to you?

Falcon

Yeah, but DOES IT RUN LINUX?

With implanted medical monitors, LINUX RUNS YOU!

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/print.html

And unless We, The People run the lines all she and countless other Americans are going to get from the telecos is the finger. And I don't know about you, but I for one would like to have many choices for broadband instead of bending over and taking it like I have to do now. Most of us just can't give up our homes and livelihoods to escape the screwing.

The "government is bad & inefficient" mantra is nothing more than a means for shoveling money from the public into (a very few) private hands. We should start treating the Internet like other public utilities and interstate infrastructure. Then we might start getting 50 Mbps full duplex connections like the Asians and Europeans.

There's an article that sums up the point that we need to get back to public investment at Salon:

Barack Obama's bold, ambitious budget plan proves that he is the true heir of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Consider Obama's Rooseveltian energy plan. In 1939, President Roosevelt decided to mobilize Americans to create a new source of energy: atomic power. Although he was urged to focus on government-funded R&D, FDR chose a different route. He wisely encouraged private capital to invest in atomic energy research by a variety of tax incentives. To make atomic power investment more palatable to private capital, FDR boldly chose to make all other forms of energy in the U.S. uneconomical, by slapping high taxes on kerosene and coal. With the money from the new federal Kerosene Cap and Trade system, President Roosevelt and Congress funded a small-scale federal research program, in the hope of attracting much greater private investment ...

Wait. What's that you say? FDR didn't do that? He poured federal money into the all-public Manhattan Project and created the first atomic bomb in a couple of years? He didn't tax kerosene to make it uneconomical and to encourage private investment in atomic power?

Oh. OK. Never mind.

But what about Social Security? In 1935, FDR signed the historic Social Security Act. It created a complex "retirement mandate" system, forcing all elderly Americans to buy expensive annuities from private insurance companies, without, however, imposing price controls on the insurance companies ...

What? FDR didn't force the elderly to subsidize private annuity brokers? He imposed a single, simple, efficient tax to pay for a single, simple, efficient public system of retirement benefits?

All right, then, forget FDR. He was a socialist, anyway. Let Dwight Eisenhower serve as a model for the Obama administration. President Eisenhower authorized the biggest infrastructure program in American history, when he signed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956. The interstate highway act created an elaborate system of private tax incentives and public-private partnerships (PPPs) to encourage private corporations to build national highways. To begin with, all U.S. highways were leased to domestic and foreign corporations for a period of decades. Second, all U.S. highways were set up with toll booths, so that American drivers would be forced to repay the corporate owners of the national highways every few dozen miles. Finally, a system of high-speed lanes with higher tolls was created, so that the rich could whiz down the road while middle-class and poor Americans were stuck in traffic jams ...

There was no reason for the administration to intervene at all in this case. There was no legal requirement for them to take a position in the case. This may not reflect favoring the RIAA so much as a general trend by the Obama adminstration to favor a very strong federal government going so far as to endorse many of Bush's worst positions (see for example http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/15/obama/). Restrictions on statutory damages would thus be something the administration would not favor. Either way this isn't a good thing, but it may be premature to conclude that this indicates any particular bias towards towards the RIAA.

Will cost me about 1085 Pounds as a student (incl. wireless mouse/keyboard), but for this money I get a computer which provides me with excellent value for the price

Mac apparently keep resale value better, too: 1, 2, 3, 4

Yeah, you're REALLY gonna need to cite that.

Are you REALLY that lazy, or do you just feel the need to feign ignorance?

I heard about it on TV, months ago, so I don't have a URL handy, but you know, the first handful of search results are perfectly good:

http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art43105.asp
http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2003/05/06/breeding/index.html
http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/parenting/children-do-not-make-couples-any-happier-1245184.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1941195/Marriage-without-children-the-key-to-bliss.html
http://www.newsweek.com/id/143792

You may be happier for a few years, but if your last decades are spent wishing you had a family, are you really happier overall?

You're assuming you'll be wishing for a family if you don't have one. You're REALLY going to need to cite that!

How many people are on bad terms with their families? How many people raise children, only to have them turn out as selfish, sociopaths, criminals, etc.?

Raising children also happens to be an unimaginable amount of endless, thankless, work.

Medical care, on the other hand, has an obfuscated price structure. Do you want to know how much something will cost? You can't find out. There's a price for the insurance company which is a trade secret, a cost for cash paying customers, and another cost for government. What really pisses me off is that there's a price to pay in cash, assuming the doctor won't cut you a discount, is MORE than the insurance price! The insurer will take their sweet ass time to pay the doc (I've seen over a year!) and yet, if I pay NOW, it costs more! I tell you doctors are pretty stupid when it comes to business!

Do you know who the true customer is? The one who pays. That's right! The insurance company is the REAL customer! They're the ones that the docs answer to: not us. That's why health care is so over the top! And the other thing is keeping folks alive for another month or so. My wife had an 89 year old patient who had a heart valve replaced. The doc who did it said that the patient will be gone in a couple of months because he was too old to handle the surgery - at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars to the tax payer. Why are we spending so much money keeping people who should be dead alive for a couple of more months? I'm not suggesting a Soylent Green scenario, but we have to face the facts of life that we can't live forever. Sure the doc could be wrong and that old guy could live to 100, but the odds are, he'll be gone and our health care costs continue to spiral out of control. I'm sorry for being callous, but I have a real problem with spending thousands and thousands of dollars on people who should be dead: they're too old, they lived hard (smoked, drank, fucked everything in sight, etc...)

Nope, IT is not going to help anything. We, as a society really need to reevaluate our priorities and and how we pay for our care.

The good ole USA (and Australia, etc).

equating Norton with China, North Korea, or any of the numerous and viable human rights watch hotspots on the planet.

Because the State of California is giving out private donations?

Because 100% of the nation's research is done in California? The same California that is now facing a $40 billion deficit because of tax cutting jihadists and obviously has so much money to throw around?

I was kind of pissed at Bush for blocking federal funding on new lines until I really thought about it for awhile. There's nothing that precludes researchers from doing research on new lines.

Other than lack of funding, having to spend large sums of money on setting separate labs so no federal money would be used on the verboten stem cells, and lack of funding?

If people wanted this so bad, what prevented them from pulling out their checkbooks? Hello, there, Silicon Valley. There's lots of rich people there. How about a donation? You, too, Hollywood, if this is such a big issue.

And in other news, Chewbaca brings his family to Endor...

First, it satisfies a niche constituency, who like to see abortion-related topics pressed to the forefront at every opportunity.

Is that so, Mr. Pot? Embryonic stem cell research has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with abortion. It takes fertilized embryos from fertility clinics for research that would otherwise be thrown in the trash.

Second, his tax plan does probably kill off the possibility of private funding.

Yes, because the rich suffered SO MUCH in the 90's with a marginal tax rate 3% higher than it is now. This whining about Obama and taxes is so stupid it makes one's hair hurt.

because the bulk of the benefits will be impossible to monetize. Since anyone can use the products of basic research, those who fund it create something that their freeloading competitors can use just as easily as they can. So basic research will always be starved under a private sector regime.

No, this is why there is a patent system. I know, much reviled here, but that's what it's for.

But with private sector research, you have to mark off a majority of the profits for lobbying, advertising, and the annual 15% increase in compensation for board members already earning millions per year, with the little left over going back into R&D.

Second, the percentage of deduction for charitable giving for those in the top bracket is going to drop to 28% -- a 7% drop in some circumstances.

Charity is insignificant next to social spending from the government. The Hooverites in the 30's were counting on charity to pull us out of the Great Depression - it didn't happen then, and it wont happen now.

Hell yeah! And if you want a road built

People used to do that a lot more than they do now.

Because we used to believe in the public sector in this country, and used to have a 91% marginal tax rate, even under Republican presidents like Eisenhower and Nixon. But now, after decades of free market propaganda, our media and politicians love that free market cock. They're insatiable:

In 1939, President Roosevelt decided to mobilize Americans to create a new source of energy: atomic power. Although he was urged to focus on government-funded R&D, FDR chose a different route. He wisely encouraged private capital to invest in atomic energy research by a variety of tax incentives. To make atomic power investment more palatable to private capital, FDR boldly chose to make all other forms of energy in the U.S. uneconomical, by slapping high taxes on kerosene and coal. With the money from the new federal Kerosene Cap and Trade system, President Roosevelt and Congress funded a small-scale federal research program, in the hope of attracting much greater private investment ...

Wait. What's that you say? FDR didn't do that? He poured federal money into the all-public Manhattan Project and created the

So Ebert and O'Hehir think it was teh awesome? But both seem to also have an annoying tendency to like stuff that I find fake, like Dark City, and conversely hate anything by Terry Gilliam. (Tideland aside, how can anyone who appreciates moving pictures dislike Gilliam?)

I'm going to say this is probably an awful movie.

Another good one to read -> http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/print.html

Are Fathers Optional?

Seriously, read the article.

You see, Hoover bungled it for three years, then FDR socialist policies stagnated us from 1933-1940. It wasn't until we started arming up and lending materials to the UK that things took off.

This revisionist version of history has been making the rounds lately, but it's false.

FDR's policies got us heading out of the depression, and they worked pretty well. What slowed them down was doing a half-assed job: cutting back and raising taxes in 1937 because he thought balancing the budget was more important than getting the economy back on its feet.

Everyone says musicians should be making their money from concerts. Ok.

An important point in this debate is that thanks to the accounting chicanery that goes on in the recording industry concerts are in fact about the only thing that musicians signed with major labels get paid to do. For a first-hand account, I suggest this bit:
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/

http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/

Begone, troll.

http://www.salon.com/tech/giga_om/online_video/2009/02/15/the_definitive_primer_to_the_pirate_bay_trial/index.html?source=rss&aim=/tech/giga_om/online_video
Janko Roettgers for Salon.com wrote an excellent summary of previous events and a preview of what to expect regarding the trial of the Pirate Bay. Should bring anyone up to speed on the trial.

Clearly it looks as if the RIAA's fear-inducing campaign has managed to sway even the minds here at /.

Media purchases have been on the rise in the last few years. Many recent movies have topped the charts in profits. File-sharing does not cause a loss of revenue, and in no way does it "steal from the creators".

If you're looking for a group to blame for the dwindling of the artists' funds(which I doubt is true due to file-sharing, citation needed please), you need only look at the ones who've headed the campaigns to convince you of file-sharing illegality through repulsive lawsuits. These guys are behind the real piracy.

The argument that piracy doesn't hurt sales and cost the companies and artists money, is false.

It is not. At most, it hurts an obsolete business model. The "recording industry" is not artists, is not art and is not music: it's publishers. The recording industry is in the business of providing up-front recording costs, promotion costs, production and distribution costs to artists.
With the advent of cheap computers and open-source software you can record yourself for a few thousand (even a few hundred) dollars. up-front recording cost resolution: recording industry no longer required.
With internet sites like myspace, plus the ease and near costlessness of having your own site, it's very possible for artists to do their own promotion. promotion cost resolution: recording industry no longer required.
With the internet an artist no longer has to "produce" a physical product, so "production" costs are zero. If they want to, they can do small-run CD's for relatively small money. production cost resolution: recording industry no longer required.
Still with the internet, If the artist chooses to truly embrace what the internet can do for them, they can distribute via bittorrent, reducing their bandwidth costs substantially. or, if they still want to sell their bits, there are plenty of on-line music retailers that will sell for them. distribution cost resolution: recording industry no longer required.
The final note on this, is that while the recording industry provided these up-front costs, they were 100% recoverable. In other words it was a loan to the band. If the album sold, the record company made it's profit, and the bands profit went to repay the loan. Most bands don't make any money selling albums: they make money on tour.

Bottom line: do not confuse the (very loud) group talking about the end-of-days with artists. There was music before these dinosaurs showed up, and there will be music after they go extinct.

My experience directly contradicts it.

You have not related any relevant personal experience, and if you did/could it would be anecdotal at best.

She basically is http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/09/23/feinstein/

Your theory doesn't hold up. For evidence, look at El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras.

Revolutions don't occur due to poverty. It's a voice that leads the charge. Good luck with that if your government's going to silence those speakers with wiretaps, zones with no free speech, house raids, COINTELPRO, and the like.

You obviously haven't heard of concentrated solar thermal/electric power. All it takes is some concrete and steel, glass (SiO2), maybe aluminum for mirrors, and optionally molten salt for storage.

I have heard of it, and have posted links to concentrated solar thermal power myself. One of the most frequent links I've posted is for SciAm article "A Solar Grand Plan". However solar is not the baseload, the salt is.

Falcon

You obviously haven't heard of concentrated solar thermal/electric power. All it takes is some concrete and steel, glass (SiO2), maybe aluminum for mirrors, and optionally molten salt for storage.

The salt can store power for hours, so some people are even calling it solar baseload.

Solar Thermal power (http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/04/14/solar_electric_thermal/index.html) (aka Concentrated Solar Power, aka Baseload Solar Thermal Power) doesn't require anything rare or elaborate and it is much more efficient than solar panels. It's a little foolish to start declaring Peak Iridium as the death of solar before we've even started.

Cory Doctorow's story Liberation Spectrum seems relevant.

Ah slashdot, one of the places where restriction of certain types of space weapons can be compared to Neville Chamberlin and the Holocaust. You people do realize that we spend more on our Military than every other country combined, right? We spend 7x what China does. Lack of space-missiles is pretty tame. Here's a liberal point of view on how far our military spending is outpacing all other nations.

Here is a pilot complaining about the 'modern airplanes almost fly themselves' myth. (You'll need to wait for some ads before the page loads.) And here he talks about the sort of training which produces people able to land a crippled plane on a river instead of a skyscraper.

The military have autonomous planes, but this isn't really relevant to airliners. The military will (if it has to) accept a crash every thousand flights. The airline industry won't accept a crash every million.

Here is a pilot complaining about the 'modern airplanes almost fly themselves' myth. (You'll need to wait for some ads before the page loads.) And here he talks about the sort of training which produces people able to land a crippled plane on a river instead of a skyscraper.

The military have autonomous planes, but this isn't really relevant to airliners. The military will (if it has to) accept a crash every thousand flights. The airline industry won't accept a crash every million.

It is often assumed that, in the US at least, marijuana was made illegal to protect alcohol profits. here is one link: http://blogs.salon.com/0002762/stories/2003/12/22/whyIsMarijuanaIllegal.html

As the link you provide goes over it wasn't just, or even mainly, because of alcohol that hemp was made illegal. Hemp was seen as a threat to a number of rich and powerful industrialists.

Falcon

granddaddy was a drunk in germany and ireland, and so alcohol is familiar

while marijuana was something that was first encountered as something brown-skinned people used, and therefore, exotic and scary and somehow more dangerous

the first american anti-marijuana laws were in the western states in the early 1900s, and they were explicitly pointed at mexican and mexican american behavior:

In the early 1900s, the western states developed significant tensions regarding the influx of Mexican-Americans. The revolution in Mexico in 1910 spilled over the border, with General Pershing's army clashing with bandit Pancho Villa. Later in that decade, bad feelings developed between the small farmer and the large farms that used cheaper Mexican labor. Then, the depression came and increased tensions, as jobs and welfare resources became scarce.

One of the "differences" seized upon during this time was the fact that many Mexicans smoked marijuana and had brought the plant with them, and it was through this that California apparently passed the first state marijuana law, outlawing "preparations of hemp, or loco weed."

However, one of the first state laws outlawing marijuana may have been influenced, not just by Mexicans using the drug, but, oddly enough, because of Mormons using it. Mormons who traveled to Mexico in 1910 came back to Salt Lake City with marijuana. The church's reaction to this may have contributed to the state's marijuana law. (Note: the source for this speculation is from articles by Charles Whitebread, Professor of Law at USC Law School in a paper for the Virginia Law Review, and a speech to the California Judges Association (sourced below). Mormon blogger Ardis Parshall disputes this.)

Other states quickly followed suit with marijuana prohibition laws, including Wyoming (1915), Texas (1919), Iowa (1923), Nevada (1923), Oregon (1923), Washington (1923), Arkansas (1923), and Nebraska (1927). These laws tended to be specifically targeted against the Mexican-American population.

http://blogs.salon.com/0002762/stories/2003/12/22/whyIsMarijuanaIllegal.html

I have yet to hear/see a rational reason why marijuana is still illegal.

There is a perfectly rational reason: Greed.

Granted, a confluence of interests was responsible for the prohibition of cannabis, but I submit the primary impetus came from Hearst, who, as the article linked above mentions, had "invested heavily in the timber industry to support his newspaper chain and didn't want to see the development of hemp paper in competition."

It is often assumed that, in the US at least, marijuana was made illegal to protect alcohol profits. here is one link: http://blogs.salon.com/0002762/stories/2003/12/22/whyIsMarijuanaIllegal.html

Two years later, (Professor) Vernor Vinge published a short novel called "True Names" (the message in the title is about the first realization of the meaning of "ID Theft"). "True Names" envisaged Gibson's cyberspace, basically, five years earlier. Vinge wrote about getting the idea from a "talk" encounter with another minicomputer modem user in the early 70's.

And then there's Marc Steigler, an experienced IT developer who co-wrote, with Joseph Delany, "Valentina: Soul in Sapphire" in 1984, with realistic depictions of a development process and future computer networks. Steigler has also done numerous short stories in which programming work appears...correctly.

And in 1989, programmer Rick Cook wrote "Wizard's Bane" that sent programmer "Wiz" Zumwalt on a multi-book series of adventures in a D&D alternate world. Wiz's powers come from his programming, and C development environments and especially, Wiz's slow trial-and-error creation of a FORTH development environment out of, well, magic in the air, get many pages of exposition...because they're crucial to the plot. (It's complete with references to cartoons in Brodie's classic "Starting FORTH" that only a small subset of programmers would even get.)

Longtime programmer Ellen Ullman is mostly known as an essayist about the process of programming and inner lives of programmers, (cf. "Close to the Machine") but she did one novel, "The Bug".

And Stephenson has been much-addressed already, so that's my top-of-the-head list complete of published SF writers that have gotten programming, systems development, or operation / hacking correct because they're actually in the business.

Not to take anything away from this new guy, but every decade brings us a few. It's just a shame it's a few. Any of them could get it right with some research.

Let's start here:

White House Vandalized In Transition, G.A.O. Finds

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CEFDE163CF931A25755C0A9649C8B63

That doesn't confirm much. It doesn't even say how many keyboards, out of the 62 replaced, were missing W keys. It could be just a few. But I'm guessing zero. Who has claimed to have personally seen the supposed vandalism? I find it odd nobody ever took pictures of it. The GAO interviewed 100 people, which is enough to get several people to report rumors they had heard as truth. I wouldn't be surprised if there were even a few people who had developed false memories of the events after the rumor had gone around a while.

Check out the following links:

http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/05/23/vandals/print.html
http://dir.salon.com/story/politics/feature/2002/06/13/scandal/print.html
http://www.fair.org/activism/vandal-update.html

Let's start here:

White House Vandalized In Transition, G.A.O. Finds

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CEFDE163CF931A25755C0A9649C8B63

That doesn't confirm much. It doesn't even say how many keyboards, out of the 62 replaced, were missing W keys. It could be just a few. But I'm guessing zero. Who has claimed to have personally seen the supposed vandalism? I find it odd nobody ever took pictures of it. The GAO interviewed 100 people, which is enough to get several people to report rumors they had heard as truth. I wouldn't be surprised if there were even a few people who had developed false memories of the events after the rumor had gone around a while.

Check out the following links:

http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/05/23/vandals/print.html
http://dir.salon.com/story/politics/feature/2002/06/13/scandal/print.html
http://www.fair.org/activism/vandal-update.html

If you want to know just how badly the RIAA labels screw over their artists, read any treatise by any RIAA musician (except Mad Donna or the dufus drummer from Metallica). There are good ones by Courtney Love and Steve Albini that will make you feel REAL sorry for the fools who sign with major labels.

FYI, the links:
Courtney Love redefines music piracy and blasts the RIAA
The Problem With Music by Steve Albini

I'm disappointed, I wanted cartoons! If anybody else was disappointed at the lack of cartoons in that link, enjoy:

A Farewell salute
The raw, gritty, and absolutely true story of a computer operating system's mascot who overcame unimaginable hardship and went on to become an unparallelled success (maybe he went back to that job he had in that cartoon that no one reads)
You can't trust science
Sparky buys a house (Tomorrow is prescient)
Alan Greenspan (Yikes! Tom Tomorrow has balls of crystal!)
A handy guide to the (2007) housing market

And since this is a nerd site: Barack Obama and the Invasion of Time (not a Tomorrow doodle)

I'm disappointed, I wanted cartoons! If anybody else was disappointed at the lack of cartoons in that link, enjoy:

A Farewell salute
The raw, gritty, and absolutely true story of a computer operating system's mascot who overcame unimaginable hardship and went on to become an unparallelled success (maybe he went back to that job he had in that cartoon that no one reads)
You can't trust science
Sparky buys a house (Tomorrow is prescient)
Alan Greenspan (Yikes! Tom Tomorrow has balls of crystal!)
A handy guide to the (2007) housing market

And since this is a nerd site: Barack Obama and the Invasion of Time (not a Tomorrow doodle)

The W keys incident didn't happen. There was no conspiracy to remove W keys from keyboards. There may have been a couple, but it was definitely not $4k worth of damages.

And neither did the rest of that. It was bunk that was started as a joke column, which suddenly gained a life of its own. Sort of like Bill Gates and the 640kb or Al Gore and the invention of the internet. Neither Gates nor Gore ever actually made the attributed statement.

The White House vandal scandal that wasn't

Or from W himself at: George W. Bush, Clinton defender

Whether or not you care to admit it, there was no massive scale vandalism or vast Left wing conspiracy here. It's just a few people are too obtuse to admit that maybe it didn't happen.

The W keys incident didn't happen. There was no conspiracy to remove W keys from keyboards. There may have been a couple, but it was definitely not $4k worth of damages.

And neither did the rest of that. It was bunk that was started as a joke column, which suddenly gained a life of its own. Sort of like Bill Gates and the 640kb or Al Gore and the invention of the internet. Neither Gates nor Gore ever actually made the attributed statement.

The White House vandal scandal that wasn't

Or from W himself at: George W. Bush, Clinton defender

Whether or not you care to admit it, there was no massive scale vandalism or vast Left wing conspiracy here. It's just a few people are too obtuse to admit that maybe it didn't happen.