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it's great that the world's largest software maker is fighting to give more options to people in need

Yep! That's their mission!

In other news, Global Warming benefits public health! according to White House flack.

I think I know which camp of public opinion you subscribe to.

Keynesian economics haven't been "modern" for a while now.

Austrian economics have been "modern" even less. The closest modern equivalent would be supply-side economics, but that didn't really work, neither on practical nor theoretical grounds.

We have evidence of an NSA-controlled room in the Folsom Street AT&T facilities in San Francisco. We have evidence that AT&T diverted copies of everyone's Internet traffic into that room. And we know that there's very sophisticated equipment in that room that is capable of doing real-time analysis analysis of the Internet traffic that is getting routed into there.

Link

Wrong Wrong Wrong. How can you be so wrong and yet get modded insightful (who says Geeks can't be Conservative stooges)? You've mashed different FISA issues together to make it sound like there were no FISA problems. I believe thats called a strawman, but you beat the crap out of him, congrats. No way you work at a telecom, no siree.

As noted below parts of FISA have been ruled unconstitutional. SO YES it is illegal. Your strawman argument is crap. A court ruled it was illegal to intercept communications where both parties were outside the US, that was the reasoning behind updating FISA. The Democrats were on board with that part, but the repubs put all kinds of extras in there (like the immunity) which is not exactly an earth shattering development (evil people do evil things). Yes some Dems love big business and don't mind the idea of legalizing anything that helps profits, but thats not a case to dismiss all the problems with FISA or the administrations handling of this issue. Then theres all the scare tactics the Repubs used to ram the vote down congresses throat. Everything around FISA has been yet another Repub. clusterf#!k.

If you want a detailed, thoughtfull analysis from, i dont know, a constitutional lawyer, I suggest you check out Glen Greenwald's blog at Salon. He's far more knowledgable than I.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald

might also check out the eff. who are involved in this case
while you're there, give 'em some money, because there are too few people fighting the good fight and far too many like the parent spreading misinformation.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/09/parts-fisa-held-unconstitutional
http://w2.eff.org/Censorship/Terrorism_militias/fisa_faq.html

BushCo don't really give a rat's ass about Congress, except when they've been tied up and begging for abuse a little too long and someone from the Administration has to go to the Hill and spit on them.

The courts, however, especially at the level of the Circuit Courts, are a different story.

The telco immunity provisions in this legislation are to keep the White House from being found (as part of some telco trial) to have broken the law. It's got little to do with protecting the telcos other than as a way to sell it to the public.

Glenn Greenwald over at Salon had a good interview with the EFF's lead counsel in the ATT/NSA/let's-just-snoop-the-whole-backbone trial that explains this quite well.

This is all about closing off the courts to examination of Executive Branch violations of the Constitution. Which is why it's actually a much, much bigger deal than most people seem to understand.

It's easy. If you don't know who to contact or how to phrase your objection use this link:
https://secure.aclu.org/site/Advocacy?pagename=homepage&id=727&page=UserAction

Note that you can modify the letter template before you hit send if you don't agree with all of the text or wish to add points of your own.

There is another informational article on Salon.

(*) Does not apply to non-US citizens. (Although nothing actually stops you from mailing them anyway.)

Wrong! Vista overtook the entire install base of apple within 5 weeks of launch.. check your numbers

This behavior -- having telecoms secretly turn over to the Federal Government all information about the communications of Americans -- is exactly what multiple federal laws were designed to prevent. We criminalized exactly that behavior through the laws we enacted.

And now that it is revealed that the Federal government and many (though not all) telecoms continuously broke those laws -- motivated by profit in the case of telecoms and by a desire for unchecked surveillance power in the case of the Bush administration -- our political establishment and Congress are working hand-in-hand to prevent any further disclosures of this lawbreaking and to forever prevent any accountability for it. Merely to describe this behavior is to demonstrate its profound corruption and threat to the very concept of an open democratic government operating under the "rule of law."

The condemnation of Moveon has nothing to do with questioning someone in the military, but anyone who dares to question the bullshit of the right wing. If the Democrats who voted to condemn Moveon had two brains between them, they would have added language to the bill that condemned the attacks on Max Cleland, John Kerry, John Murtha, the generals who have questioned the war, and Rush Limbaugh's "phony soldiers". Then the Republicans in the Senate would have been forced to condemn the right wing's attacks on those who have served or are serving in the military, or be shown to be political hacks. But the Democrats who voted for this bill didn't do that. Because they are stupid.

Actually, Petreaus's report is backed up by the Brookings Institute, hardly arch conservative

You mean those two supposed critics of the war, that Dick Cheney called no friends of the administration, that have been big war backers from the start?

The fact of the matter is, conditions are improving in Iraq

Liar.

when your leftist ban on DDT has resulted in the deaths of 100 million people from Malaria since its inception

Debunked. Site is down at the moment for some reason.

the banning of the personal ownership of weapons

Which Democrats are calling for a ban on personal weapons, exactly? And of the current candidates for president, which one has backed gun control any time recently? I'll give you a hint: the candidate is from New York, and isn't Hillary Clinton.

the nationalization of health care

So what part of our current system do you like best? That we spend twice as much per patient as other industrialized nations for worse care? That insurance companies take your expensive premiums and use the money to try and find ways to deny you care? Or the fact that Cuba is catching up to us in health care despite spending 1/30th as much per patient?

yes, you'll be expanding, again, the IRS

Reagan and the Bushes have ensured the necessity of the largest tax increases in the history of this country. It's just a matter of when they go into effect.

If Move-On is pro-American, name me one web page where Move-On advocates -any- policy that will: a) improve the world share of American GDP

Irrelevant.

b) improve American access to or control of world's natural resources.

Irrelevant.

c) support American corporations, over foreign corporations

Irrelevant. Do you also demand that the American Cancer Society come up with better plans for fighting forest fires?

The USA is going to win the war in Iraq

Then we're going to need another 400,000 troops. And that's just to pacify Baghdad. I'm sure the 101st fighting keyboarders in the wingnutosphere are going to go down to their local recruitment office and sign up any day now. Any day now.

because, MoveOn wants the United States to be destroyed.

That's alright son, just go back to drinking the Kool-Aid. Soon, the pain of being that damn stupid will all go away...

This comment is beyond ignorant; it is at the least deceitful. There are thousands of artists (and I'm one) who signed contracts, but have never gotten a penny in royalties. The musicians do not get the money, and no, they are not protected by the RIAA, which is by definition an industry group. In fact, there is no group that represents those musicians (there is a kind of lobbying effort in D.C., but it's just lawyers feeling good about themselves). This has been well known since the Napster suit, when a letter to the presiding judge made the point (see: http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/04/23/copyright/). BTW, she ignored it, and the RIAA has gone on to better things, such as bankrupting single moms.

I am delighted that people download my music, since I will never be paid for it. The total royalties owed over the past 40 years has been estimated to be well over $200,000. That is the real story. You are buying the Industry's version, and why not? They have the money, the clout, the Congressional and Executive branch's support, and in this case, the Federal Judiciary. But it does not mean they are right.

As much as I agree with you that from a normative standpoint it makes more economic sense for the goverment to ensure the health of its citizens, this might never be the case. You seem to assume that there exists a clear-cut separation between government and corporations. Allow me to disabuse you of such an unbecoming misconception with a few well-known examples:

This article mentions Donald Rumsfeld's role, as former COO of G.D Searle (the makers of Aspartame, a well-known cancerigen) in not only avoiding the indictment of the company on charges of misrepresenting findings and concealing facts about aspartame's effects but in "persuading" the FDA under Reagan's administration to approve aspartame for human consumption. You might have noticed that Rumsfeld eventually went on to become Secretary of Defense (again) under President G.W. Bush.

A brief perusal of the wikipedia entries for other relevant members of Bush's cabinet will show their close ties to the corporate sector, particularly in strategic areas such as energy (cf. Dick Cheney or Condoleezza Rice, who even had an oil tanker named after her as a token of gratitude from Chevron.) This argument can nevertheless be extrapolated to other public officials of previous and present administrations, both in the US and most other countries for that matter.

Stemming from a common misconception (what I think Weber called the 'holistic vision' of the State, i.e. the State as a monadic, discrete entity), the notion that, as you write "the government does not have a legitimate incentive for profit" is, at best, incorrect. It might not be "legitimate" inasmuch as normative thinking would (dis)allow, but that does not make it any less real. You would probably be hard pressed to find an instance in history where a monopoly or an economic crisis was not created with the collussion of government.

Copyright rewards creators.

No it doesn't. The reality, not the fiction that you're pushing, is that it tends to reward distributors, middlemen and assorted other parasites. Creators sometimes get lucky and are rewarded but it's the exception rather than the rule.

Naive people like you who think "copyright is goooood" are a large part of the problem. That and lying astroturfers fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.

The rights of many different parties are being balanced here, including the rights of billions of free citizens to do what they damn well please with what they have in their hands. Your "sky is falling" nonsense implying that copyright is the only incentive for creating content is also silly. People have been creating and sharing since the dawn of time and the jury is still out on how much of an incentive and/or disincentive copyright is to that process.

---

Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.

I think it is this you're having in mind: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2732

I found a bit more info at http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2004/08/12/evolvable_hardware/index.html?pn=2 - including some info about antenna design using this technique.

Actually, it happened at the federal level in 1937, predating the hippies and the 60s by quite a few years. Still, it was banned largely for cultural reasons. Back in those days politicians were much more worried (even terrified) about what jazz musicians (i.e., blacks) and Mexicans might do to white people after smoking pot.

"Caught fabricating"? The Dan Rather story?
Are you sure? Near as I can tell, a bunch of right-wing bloggers (at least some of whom had close ties to the Republican party) raised all sorts of questions about one document produced to support the story that George W Bush did not complete his military commitment.

To my knowledge, nobody ever *proved* the documents to be false. But under question of their veracity, and dealing with an awkward story that indicted a incumbent presidential candidate, CBS fell on its sword.

Interestingly, even if the documents had been forged (which was not established), the fact of the story remained: young George W Bush did not complete his military service. He went AWOL. Unfortunately, the story got so muddled (in part thanks to a subservient press that was nowhere as critical of the Swift Boat Veterans smear campaign) that it never got traction with the public.

Salon has an update, focused on Dan Rather's case against CBS, which seeks to restore his reputation: http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/09/27/dan_rather_suit/index.html?source=rss&aim=yahoo-salon

If there's one thing the last ten years of American politics have taught us, it's that conventional wisdom is an ass, manipulated by unscrupulous people with destructive agendas and parroted by the ill-informed.

That's what the FCC is supposed to do. That's what it was created to do: Make sure everybody's toys will play nice with everybody else's toys.

too bad that's TOTALLY UNNECESSARY!!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_radio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Radio
http://www.greaterdemocracy.org/framing_openspectrum.html
http://www.greaterdemocracy.org/OpenSpectrumFAQ.html
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/03/12/spectrum/index.html

The myth of interference
Internet architect David Reed explains how bad science created the broadcast industry.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By David Weinberger

March 12, 2003 | There's a reason our television sets so outgun us, spraying us with trillions of bits while we respond only with the laughable trickles from our remotes. To enable signals to get through intact, the government has to divide the spectrum of frequencies into bands, which it then licenses to particular broadcasters. NBC has a license and you don't.

Thus, NBC gets to bathe you in "Friends," followed by a very special "Scrubs," and you get to sit passively on your couch. It's an asymmetric bargain that dominates our cultural, economic and political lives -- only the rich and famous can deliver their messages -- and it's all based on the fact that radio waves in their untamed habitat interfere with one another.

Except they don't.

"Interference is a metaphor that paints an old limitation of technology as a fact of nature." So says David P. Reed, electrical engineer, computer scientist, and one of the architects of the Internet. If he's right, then spectrum isn't a resource to be divvied up like gold or parceled out like land. It's not even a set of pipes with their capacity limited by how wide they are or an aerial highway with white lines to maintain order.

Spectrum is more like the colors of the rainbow, including the ones our eyes can't discern. Says Reed: "There's no scarcity of spectrum any more than there's a scarcity of the color green. We could instantly hook up to the Internet everyone who can pick up a radio signal, and they could pump through as many bits as they could ever want. We'd go from an economy of digital scarcity to an economy of digital abundance."

So throw out the rulebook on what should be regulated and what shouldn't. Rethink completely the role of the Federal Communications Commission in deciding who gets allocated what. If Reed is right, nearly a century of government policy on how to best administer the airwaves needs to be reconfigured, from the bottom up.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Spectrum as color seems like an ungainly metaphor on which to hang a sweeping policy change with such important social and economic implications. But Reed will tell you it's not a metaphor at all. Spectrum is color. It's the literal, honest-to-Feynman truth.

David Reed is many things, but crackpot is not one of them. He was a professor of computer science at MIT, then chief scientist at Software Arts during its VisiCalc days, and then the chief scientist at Lotus during its 1-2-3 days. But he is probably best known as a coauthor of the paper that got the Internet's architecture right: "End-to-End Arguments in System Design."

Or you may recognize him as the author of what's come to be known as Reed's Law -- which says the true value of a network isn't determined by the number of individual nodes it connects (Metcalfe's Law) but by the far higher number of groups it enables. But I have to confess that I'm biased when it

Right, and in other news:

Microsoft Supports Open Standards http://www.microsoft.com/uk/openxml/default.mspx
Steve Jobs Hates DRM http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2007/02/23/itunes/index_np.html

Two college kids set up Fairtunes (Salon article) during the Napster heyday so music downloaders could contribute money directly to musicians. They received a pittance in donations despite a lot of publicity.

Fairtunes was divorced from the act of grabbing an MP3 from Napster, so perhaps the people who claimed they weren't pirates and intended to donate money conveniently never got around to paying. Maybe by making the donation part of the download process, Radiohead will get more people to pay a decent price... but I wouldn't bet on people's ethics on the Internet.

Oppose the censorship that is inflicted upon us NOW

Which censorship is that, exactly, anyway? You certainly seem able to say whatever you'd like here, without fear of political actions being taken against you. Now, certainly there are plenty of university professors that don't want to hear certain perspectives in their classrooms (or have to grade papers expressing them), and there are workplaces where some actions and attitudes simply aren't tolerated... but there is no central authority preventing you from dealing with those situations yourself (if by no other means, then by simply choosing another school or job). I don't have to listen to what you have to say, but that's not the same as censorship. And I can't call up the government and have you silenced (which WOULD be such).

It's the corporate censorship where stories that harm a corporation's relationship with the government are spiked. Do you really think a multinational corporation will pay lobbyists millions of dollars to get beneficial legislation, and then jeopardize those invested millions by criticising the government? For exaample, Rupert Murdoch's NY POST refused to print any stories that were critical of the Chinese government because he had business deals pending with that same Chinese government. He wasn't about to screw that up. Was that censorship? Sure it was.

Dan Rather got fired because he his employer wanted to suck up to the Republicans, and his story about Bush ditching his duty in the National Guard was not helping. He is suing CBS about it, and there's an interesting quote about the Internal CBS panel that reviewed Rather's story about the memo.

As the panel called witnesses, Sumner Redstone, CEO of Viacom (CBS's owner), declared his interest in the 2004 election. "I look at the election from what's good for Viacom. I vote for what's good for Viacom. I vote, today, Viacom," he said. In fact, Viacom had a number of crucial issues before the Federal Communications Commission, including loosening media ownership rules. "I don't want to denigrate Kerry," said Redstone, "but from a Viacom standpoint, the election of a Republican administration is a better deal. Because the Republican administration has stood for many things we believe in, deregulation and so on. The Democrats are not bad people ... But from a Viacom standpoint, we believe the election of a Republican administration is better for our company."

So Rather is looking to have his day in court, because the memo never was proven false, and he wants to be vindicated. But the case exposes how Viacom was more interested in supporting and promoting the current government than earning money through a sensational story.

Censorship also happens when people get tased for using their free speech. Some Americans still think you can say whatever you want here, but you can't -- the guy who tried his "free speech" rights at John Kerry's lecture found that out when he got tackled and tased for merely asking a question and speaking out of turn. He was not doing anything except standing at a microphone and speaking freely, and got tased for his troubles.

Censorship shows up in other ways, too. You think you might have right to free speech and criticise the government, but you might then find yourself on a no-fly list (like Senator Ted Kerry experienced 5 times until he made personal call to the head of DHS and get it stopped) or on the end of other governmental harassment like political analyst Naomi Wolf, who is now on the "get-searched-every-time-you-fly list".

For serious censorship, look at the old FBI programs like "COINTELPRO" where trying to start a new party or being anti-war would get you harassed, beaten up, vandalized -- anything to stop you from being able to make a political change. Martin Luther King was surveilled by the FBI and blackmailed in an attem

On the off-chance you haven't already seen this, Courtney Love made much the same point in this speech at the Digital Hollywood Online Entertainment conference many years ago. She was responding to the whole Metalica vs. Napster thing. I think she was ahead of her time.

I'm not thanking them.

I have friends in bands, with CDs, none of who would be caught dead with an RIAA label contract. The biggest fools are those foolish enough to sign with a major label. See Courtney Love Does The Math, among other articles, none of which paint a very rosy picture of the monsters who run the labels.

These guys, like every other artist, WANT their music to be heard. They will be more than happy to let you serve MP3s from eDonkey or Kazaa. P2P and internet radio are all the indies have.

Meanwhile, the RIAA lies about Piracy, when in fact if you want far better quality copies of each and every top 40 song there is, all you have to do is tune your radio to a top-40 station, plug it into your computer and sample it for a couple of hours, then spend 10 minutes editing. Far easier and less time consuming even than iTunes, with better quality rips! But the RIAA labels control what goes on the radio; they can keep indies off. What they can't control is internet radio, which they have effectively killed, and P2P, which they are trying desperately to kill.

At the risk of repeating myself (better than not getting the point through), this is about crushing the cartel's independant competetion, not about "piracy". Yes, P2P costs them sales - but not because you won't buy that Britney Spears CD after downloading all the songs. It's because after you buy those four indie CDs by that band you found on P2P or internet radio for five bucks apiece, you no longer have the twenty to buy Britney's drek. If you like it, you'll buy it, and only a fool or a damned thief would believe otherwise.

-mcgrew

There's a lady with a book out now with the premise that those in power take advantage of public shock (911, Katrina) to get away with stuff they wouldn't otherwise (Patriot Act, changing entire economies).

Well the main reason is the consumer's willingness to pay.

True.

But record labels also need to recoup their investments and one "successful" artist has to pay for many "unsucceful" artists.

False. Lets not describe their wholesale corruption with anything so nice as "recouping their investments". These people are thieves; with everything from illegal payola and artists contracts to massive overcharging for technical services and "lost" royalties. They lie about royalties, they lie about production costs, they lie about how much they assist the artist and they lie about how heavily the "successful" artists subsidize the unsuccessful artists.

Just like hollywood accountants they claim to be losing money on most artists but basically, just like spammers, they never stop lying. Any claims like you've just made about unsuccessful artists being subsidized should be ignored unless there's exceptionally strong evidence proving the claims.

---

It's not piracy, it's sharing. Didn't your parents teach you to share?

Funny that you posted all those links but you forgot to post a link to show what she was actually wearing. I guess I can understand though, since then people would realize that her sweatshirt actually looked nothing like a bomb vest.

wearing a device that looks like an IED, that you designed specifically to look like an IED

The device did not look like an IED and it clearly was not designed to look like an IED. I doubt Star had ever imagined anyone would mistake it for an IED.

http://images.salon.com/tech/machinist/blog/2007/09/21/star_simpson/story.jpg

But of course, none of this helps Mediadefender. But don't go pretending that Internet censorship is impossible, period.

But of course, none of this helps Mediadefender. But don't go pretending that Internet censorship is impossible, period.

...that a device designed to incapacitate people might be dangerous?!?!

Up next! Bombs considered harmful to Iraqi and Afghan children!

Steve Albini has been around the industry for a while, and here is what he has to say on the matter... Also, Courtney Love of Hole pretty much agrees with his assessment. When you factor in "recoupable expenses" bands really don't get much at all from recordings until they hit gold or platinum. Of course, YMMV and I sincerely hope that it does.

No, we haven't. The NeoCons just hijacked the Party on the way to Never-Nervous Land and stopped listening to us because the Far Far Right demanded their agenda be implemented, kicked in massive campaign contributions, and since their agenda was big and splashy, made sure it got all the press coverage.

Conservatives had no problem backing Bush to the hilt in 2000, when everyone knew he was an incompetent idiot. And no problem backing him in 2004 when everyone knew he was an incompetent, warmongering, torturing, Constitution shredding, cowardly, incompetent idiot. But now that he's killing their electoral chances for the next generation, he's suddenly not a real conservative anymore. Glenn Greenwald has a nice rant on the subject.

I would have expected hard-core liberals to remove the W key from the keyboard altogether.

He's no hero. He always let Cobra Commander -- the leader of a ruthless terrorist orgainization determined to rule the world -- get away. A real leader like George W. Bush would never let that happen.

The great fraud being perpetrated in our political discourse is the concerted attempt by movement conservatives, now that the Bush presidency lay irreversibly in ruins, to repudiate George Bush by claiming that he is not, and never has been, a "real conservative." This con game is being perpetrated by the very same conservatives who -- when his presidency looked to be an epic success -- glorified George W. Bush, ensured both of his election victories, depicted him as the heroic Second Coming of Ronald Reagan, and celebrated him as the embodiment of True Conservatism.

This fraud is as transparent as it is dishonest, yet there are signs that the media is nonetheless beginning to adopt this theme that there is some sort of epic and long-standing "Bush-conservative schism." But very little effort is required to see what a fraud that storyline is.

One of the few propositions on which Bush supporters and critics agree is that George Bush does not change and has not changed at all over the last six years. He is exactly the same.

And none of the supposed grounds for conservative discontent -- especially Bush's immigration position -- is even remotely new. Bush's immigration views have been well-known since before he was first elected in 2000, yet conservatives have devoted to him virtually cult-like loyalty and support. Just logically speaking, Bush's immigration views cannot be the cause of the flamboyant conservative "rebellion" against Bush since those views long co-existed with intense conservative devotion to Bush.

There is really only one thing that has changed about George W. Bush from the 2002-2004 era when conservatives hailed him as the Great Conservative Leader, and now. Whereas Bush was a wildly popular leader then, which made conservatives eager to claim him as their Standard-Bearer, he is now one of the most despised presidents in U.S. history, and conservatives are thus desperate to disassociate themselves from the President for whom they are solely responsible. It is painfully obvious there is nothing noble, substantive or principled driving this right-wing outburst; it is a pure act of self-preservation.

Even with the imperfect results, it is surprisingly easy, using free MP3 editing tools available on the net, to take the output of SteamRipper and patch the files back into something very close to pristine tracks. Also, many web stations do not overlap tracks. And unlike P2P networks, it is completely safe from the RIAA snoops - your IP address is never made public as part of the process and you will never find yourself in court as a result. Think about it: in the RIAA's eyes, thanks to Web Radio and Streamripper, you can download free, un-DRM'd copyrighted music all day long and they can't find you!

Anyway, the point that there are other, possibly easier ways to pirate music is not relevant. Your arguments may make sense to us, but to the RIAA any opportunity for people to get music for free is bad and must be stopped.

I have no doubt P2P is costing them money, though not to the tune they calculate; just because someone downloads it doesn't mean they would have bought it otherwise. But online radio is not costing them money, it is free advertising. I have nothing against revenue sharing; that is how radio in Europe has worked for a long time and at the end of the day the station is making money off the music too. But the rates need to be reasonable as the stations are also advertising the music.

Agreed, no argument here. That wasn't the point of my post. I'm just trying to explain what their agenda is, not validate it.

Right now, SoundExchange is being rather unreasonable.

Again, I agree. Still, it doesn't change my point. More info here:

http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2007/07/16/interne t_radio_copying/

How ironic that Andrew Burt should do this.

Andrew Burt was responsible for the first real unfettered access I had to USENET, back in the days when my telnet access was through a CP/CMS machine, and so telnet into Nyx.net (back when it was still known as nyx.cs.du.edu) was all cluttered with ANSI codes and improper scrolling yet still readable. aburt's Nyx site was where I went to read the anime newsgroup rec.arts.anime that a friend had told me about, and where I was inducted into online writing circles where we wrote our tales and shared our stories freely on the Internet. Though defunct now, alt.pub.dragons-inn and alt.pub.havens-rest were really jumping back in the day.

And Burt was also a more direct champion of writing circles, in his work with Critters. According to the article, he believed that espousing some of the principles of the Open Source movement in writing would lead to more and better writers.

And now look what he's doing. What a shame that it should come to this.

Take Alberto Gonzales' inability to recall much more than his first name for example.

Oh, he did get that one? I thought the situation was more like this.

Crap, did I miss a strip with Binkley?

Probably.

You are mischaracterizing what I wrote. I said that the Administration promoted torture, which it did (although I probably should have linked to this Bybee memo to Gonzales instead of the other one, which was my error). As for Gonzales, you did not quote the full language; before the part about commissary privileges, he wrote, "The nature of the new war [on terrorism] places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians, and the need to try terrorists for war crimes such as wantonly killing civilians. In my judgment, this new paradign renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners...." What could that mean other than that he felt formerly prohibited methods of interrogation, meaning torture, were now allowable?

The need to absolutely renounce torture as a methodology is not grounded in law but in common sense. Not only doesn't it work as a means of getting reliable information (just ask Porter Goss), but it removes any moral arguments to having Americans (both soldiers and civilians) tortured in return. Even Gonzales' memo points out that "[t]he United States could not invoke the [Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war] if enemy forces threatened to mistreat or mistreated U.S. or colation [sic] forces captured during operations in Afghanistan, or if they denied Red Cross access or other POW privileges." For the White House counsel to advocate this is bad enough. When that same official becomes the Attorney General, the *symbol* of justice and respect for law, it goes beyond the pale.

As for Guantanamo, I don't think we should have a facility like that at all. If these people are criminals, try them with the full strictures of our military or civilian legal systems. If they are not, release them. If we think they're terrorists, release them and follow them. If they have been in our custody more than a few weeks or months, any information they have is stale and useless anyway.

Ours is a nation founded on principles of law rather than royal caprice, of fundamental rights of all people rather than those we like (or who are like us). Remember? "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The rest of that Declaration is worth reading as well, particularly when it enumerates the offenses of the king. "He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:" Warrantless wiretaps, anyone? "He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation." Hmm, contractors managing the interrogation at Abu Ghraib and serving among our troops in Iraq? And as for Guantanamo, how about this pair? "For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences."

This is not America, or at least, not the America to which we should be aspiring. Secret prisons, indefinite confinement without trial or even charge, wiretapping citizens without warrants, finding "legal" justification for torture, invasions of non-belligerent nations? That's Stalin's U.S.S.R., not the country whose Constitution our president, vice president, attorney general and elected officials swear to uphold. {Prof. Jonathan}

I find it funny that the guys at Hot Air can't bring themselves to admit that a liberal website, salon.com, are the brave ones hosting the comic strip. Most of the comments are about how the political left is bending over backwards to appease radical islam.

Ain't cognitive dissonance a bitch?

Mike McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, gave away more information to the El Paso Times about the illegal domestic wiretapping program than anyone else (see Glenn Greenwald: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/08/23/ mcconell/index.html), details that were so secret the government sez they can't be said in court. I hope he's prosecuted for leaking! (And then pardoned, of course.)

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There's no sin in using a session cookie to provide dynamic content.

Explain to me how the offending comic counts as "dynamic content" such that it would conceivably require a cookie to get to?

It uses a static JPG, at a static path, linked by a static (except for ads) page, accessible via a well-defined click-path from the Salon main page. Nothing about that requires cookies.

Now, personally I have stopped caring about cookies, since Firefox will clear them (and all "private data") on exit. But mechanism aside, I must second the GP's point - No cookie for you, Salon! Except that instead of depriving myself of whatever I may want to see there, I simply let them set whatever useless (and short-lived) cookies they want, if it makes them feel better to think they've "tracked" a "new" viewer every time I visit.

Direct link to the cartoon.

A cartoon that criticizes women's attempts to act superior and also discusses Islamic religious practices is too complicated for most newspapers.

Of course, banning it gives it publicity, too.

sigh... Just read the comic and then do a Google News search, okay? Is that really so hard to do?

http://www.salon.com/comics/opus/2007/08/26/opus/
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=opus+is lam&btnG=Search+News

There you go, lazy boy, you can just click away. No, I'm not the parent poster, but it's pretty damn obvious that he's right.

So after screwing around at Salon.com:
Today's strip is here. And all strips here.