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It was a joke. I fully understand that every technology has beneficial effects, including RFID. I understand that the majority of privacy issues are overstated, although things like chipped passports still worry me. I am well aware how useful RFID can be in a number of situations, such as the one you described.

I understand that DRM, while being problematic for privacy advocates and those of us who like complete control over our own computers, is, when properly applied, one plausible way of encouraging more people to acquire non-infringing copies of media. I don't like it cos I fit into both the above categories but, as long as they don't figure out how to stop me re-encoding media in a decent format, I can live with their attempts.

I'm not keen on the RIAA or MPAA cos, viewed as monolithic organisations, they're both bastards. However, I understand that it's naive to label any one organisation or individual as completely good or evil - for example, a friend of mine works for Microsoft, and another is getting his education courtesy of IBM.

None of this stops me seeing the article title, having a sudden image of many millions of geeks having spontaneous heart-attacks, ruining my keyboard with the proverbial Morning Dew and deciding to share that little frisson of amusement with the rest of Slashdot, in the hope of cheering people up. My investments in the keyboard-manufacturing industry have nothing to do with it at all.

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/05/08/futur e_tv/index_np.html?x

These guys are really good at producing pulled-from-an-uncomfortable-place figures for how much money will be lost because of a weekday event. If you're willing to go through Salon's hoops, you can read King Kaufman ridicule their creative accounting of this years NCAA mens basketball tournament.

Anybody remember the AMBER Act... which was (imo) a good 'thing'?

Did you know Senator Joe Biden (D-Del.) snuck, the RAVE Act into the AMBER Act (See H.R. 834 Source: http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi ?dbname=108_cong_bills&docid=f:h834ih.txt.pdf (Note: this is a PDF file)).

Do you even know what the RAVE Act was? Here's a snip:

Section 305 of the CLEAN-UP Act stipulates that:

`Whoever, for a commercial purpose, knowingly promotes any rave, dance, music, or other entertainment event, that takes place under circumstances where the promoter knows or reasonably ought to know that a controlled substance will be used or distributed in violation of Federal law or the law of the place where the event is held, shall be fined under title 18, United States Code, or imprisoned for not more than 9 years, or both.'

Under the provision, any concert promoter, nightclub owner and arena or stadium owner could be fined and jailed, since a reasonable person would know some people use drugs at musical events."

The thing about this Act is, "Taken literally, the law is so broad that letting people smoke marijuana at a private house party could be a federal felony." Source: http://inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=322_0_2_0_ C

Salon.com's take was, "Your glow stick could land you in jail" By Janelle Brown
.
Event Promoters could get up to 20 years in jail and a $250,000 fine if participants do drugs.
Source: http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2003/04/16/rave/i ndex_np.html

Having been one of 'those' who implemented usenet and having invested many hours into trying to understand, I offer this for consideration.

If there was a plan that was created about the time of MacAurther, "THEY" did not count on the existence of the Internet. Source: http://www.flyingsnail.com/Dahbud/theplan.html

Use your imagination and picture how things might be if there were no Internet....

Then figure out what "THEY" will attempt to control next...that will probably be attached to another major bill....and not the one that comes in your mailbox every month.

This site is a worthwhile visit: http://www.unrealid.com/

I personally did not like the phantom menace, but I did like the http://dir.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2001/11/05 /phantom_edit/index.htmlphantom edit 1.1. (Which I'm sure there are still live torrents of)

I found the phantom edit a lot more fluid and less annoying than the phantom menace. Deffinetly worth checking out for anyone who was dissapointed in Ep 1

You misunderstand.

When you are criticizing a movie vaguely, you implicitly have an outcome that you would prefer in mind. Specifically, make a better movie. Generally, your specific criticisms point to how you would improve it; if you complain the directing is poor, you have this idea of what better directing would be. You may not be able to do it yourself, but you know you've seen it. Artistic criticism rarely falls under this.

The topic at hand is one of those rare instances, since the criticism boils down to "CS Lewis shouldn't be true to himself when he writes" (or at least that's what I'm trying to convince you of), and my point is that there is not an acceptable alternative to that. If CS Lewis had tried to write non-Christian books, that contained a worldview he did not share... well, the person I replied to would never have had an opportunity to criticize, because he'd have never heard of CS Lewis.

(Another artistic example I've seen is when people criticize a movie not for being what it is, but for not being what the author thought it should be; my canonical example of that is this review of Monsters, Inc. in Salon, where the author spends most of it bitching that the movie wasn't "darker". He didn't like Monsters, Inc. not because it was poorly directed, or in fact even a poor movie, but because it wasn't some other completely different movie. Uh, excuse me? This is a little less egregiously wrong since it is at least possible to make the change, unlike a single author which can hardly change his worldview to write one book, but still, it's hardly fair to call that a review of Monsters, Inc... it's more a review of this movie that the reviewer has in their head but none of the rest of us have seen. False labelling, at the least.)

This comes up much more in the political arena, where I apply it much more aggressively. When somebody shrieks about some opposition plan, you need to have a better one to get my attention. Simple negativity is pointless. Sometimes that better plan may even be "do nothing, what you believe is a problem isn't", but still, that may be a better plan. (The party itself often has a "better plan", but the individuals and random people on the street are often just pointlessly critical.)

The real thing I'm getting at here isn't the idea that you shouldn't criticize, it's that when you don't even have a feasible alternative, what's the point? You're just being pointlessly negative (except perhaps in certain teaching situations). What's the point of criticizing somebody who already did the least bad thing they could possibly do, if they had no good choices? (Which isn't what I believe the situation is with CS Lewis, but I suspect describes the original poster's point. What's the alternative that works for CS Lewis?)

• Marc Andreessen made 100s of millions of dollars shortly after graduating from UIUC. Today's graduates of the same university face moving back in with their parents. "Fuck that, I got mine!"
• Brian Behlendorf decided he'd rather go to India to recruit software engineers than help out the graduating classes of 2001-2004 here in the US.
• Robert Malda stood idly by and said NOTHING while his company offshored its flagship product.

Miguel de Icaza, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond, and Linus Torvalds all got rich off the Open Source Movement. What do you have to look forward to?

OSDN == Offshore Software Development NOW!!! Read how OSDN is helping to offshore American High-Tech to the Third World!

Wow, is anyone else surprised CNET put this in here:

> Why did these ID requirements get attached to an "emergency" military
> spending bill??
> Because it's difficult for politicians to vote against money that will go to the troops
> in Iraq and tsunami relief. The funds cover ammunition, weapons, tracked combat
> vehicles, aircraft, troop housing, death benefits, and so on.

The Republicans control congress and the executive branch now, and they wanted to have this National ID bill. By attaching this to a wholly unrelated military spending bill, the so-called advocates of small government will get their national ID card wish.

As an interesting aside it's funny that they chose to stick this into a military spending bill for Iraq. Anyone recall that the Bush Administration told us told this war was going to cost? I thought this was was supposed to cost between $10 and $100 billion? We're already more than three times the high end figure, with no end in sight. This is the fourth emergency allocation of money Bush has asked for for his war "on the cheap".

Anyway, make no mistake about it. The Republicans are now using their complete control to railroad this bill through, by sticking this thing in a military spending bill. It's a perfect catch-22. If the Democrats voted against it, they would have been accused of being against our troops (John Kerry, please take some time to describe how that feels). If they voted for it, it miraculously becomes a bipartisan bill so the Republicans can pass the blame around to evade responsibility. Even after this, the Democrats can be accused of "flip-flopping" since they voted against the national ID before, and now they're voting for it when it's buried in a military spending bill (Senator Kerry, your turn again). Wow, it's a win-win-win situation for the Republicans.

Of course, for the Democrats and the public in general, it's a nice lose-lose-lose situation though. Maybe a brave Democrat can filibuster this bill so it doesn't get railroaded through. Oh, wait, the Republicans want to get rid of the filibuster, too.

I call upon all the Democratic senators and representatives who read Slashdot to stop this as soon as possible! There. I've done my part.

that sounds familiar:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/04/30/dawki ns/index.html

You delve into agnosticism in "The Ancestor's Tale." How does it differ from atheism?

It's said that the only rational stance is agnosticism because you can neither prove nor disprove the existence of the supernatural creator. I find that a weak position. It is true that you can't disprove anything but you can put a probability value on it. There's an infinite number of things that you can't disprove: unicorns, werewolves, and teapots in orbit around Mars. But we don't pay any heed to them unless there is some positive reason to think that they do exist.

in case you missed my post above (which I reposted becuase it was modded -1 flamebait because it was critical of the geek darling author..) see this well-writen article about this bigot:

http://dir.salon.com/books/feature/2000/02/03/card /index.html

Will just add more fuel to the fire for burning him at the stake.

As much as I like his books (at least ones that are not trying to turn me into a drooling mormon) he is a dispicable human and an outrageous bigot:
See
http://dir.salon.com/books/feature/2000/02/03/card /index.html
and his actual views
http://www.nauvoo.com/library/card-hypocrites.html
Those articles will turn you off on that guy.. or at least stop purchasing his books.

(this was originally buried in another thread, but reposting here as OSC is really not a nice guy, so does not surprise me that he would turn on a large segment of his fans.)

As much as I like his books (at least ones that are not trying to turn me into a drooling mormon) he is a dispicable human and an outrageous bigot:
See
http://dir.salon.com/books/feature/2000/02/03/card /index.html
and his actual views
http://www.nauvoo.com/library/card-hypocrites.html

Those articles will turn you off on that guy.. or at least stop purchasing his books.

Don't pay, don't comment, don't contribute. Go someplace else and watch the site wither on the vine.

The market only responds to the high-order bit, where the decision about which bit is highest-order is also decided by the market.

Suppose you have a great Chinese restaurant near your house. The food is world-class. The owner is nice. But the service is consistently slower than you wish. You can't simply stop going there and expect a new one, just like it, to pop up to compete. The market doesn't work that way. It can't discriminate why you are failing to send it money. Especially if you're eating Indian food at the restaurant next door in the interim, in which case it will conclude you have stopped liking Chinese, and you're more likely to get two Indian food restaurants than an Indian and a punctual Chinese one.

It's common in US Presidential elections for newly elected Presidents to claim, as our latest president did, that The People actively wanted the whole platform, when in fact mostly all a vote ever shows is that "for some reason(s), you thought this president was better (or less bad) than the other." It certainly does mean "for all reasons" nor does it help you discover for which reason(s).

Salon Magazine tried the same thing as is being complained about here quite a while back. They wanted to charge people for posting on TableTalk , their online forum, but continue to allow people to read for free. I was incensed. Charge the content producers and let the users get things for free? As a sensible poster, I stopped posting and went away. Salon continued, though, in spite of that.

What's hilarious to me about complaining about such matters here is that Slashdot is a haven of free software buffs--that is, people who champion the idea that people should pay to produce stuff (you do have to eat while you code) but you shouldn't have to pay to use stuff (you don't pay for the result of all that free software that it cost someone to produce).

Perhaps the human mind is some sort of capitalist market, deciding what rationales are most and least important based on internal market forces that we can only barely understand because we see only that same, elusive, high order bit of outcome. Maybe understanding the process from the outcome is more than we should expect...

For a long time it seemed clear to just about everybody that the beauty and elegance of the world seemed to be prima facie evidence for a divine creator. But the philosopher David Hume already realized three centuries ago that this was a bad argument. It leads to an infinite regression. You can't statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you're still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing. Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.

Richard Dawkins has falsified research and not followed the scientific method, and has been basied and let his Atheism show in his works. Evolution, has turned into an Atheist basied story. Science has become the New Atheism. If there is to be a seperation of church and state, why is the Atheist church/religion allowed to teach their religion in public schools in the form of Evolution? I mean Evolution supports and promotes Atheism by saying "God does not exist". This makes Atheists hypocrits.

Seriously though, has it not attracted your attention that this whole debate is solely an American issue? The rest of the world recognizes that the Scientific Method is humanity's best tool for determining truth, and it isn't up for debate. The theory of evolution has endured a century of testing and refinement and is objectively viewed to be truth. Only in America is this in question because only in America are really, really stupid (or evil power-mad - take your pick) people in charge of the social agenda. And only in America are a majority of people falling for this tripe. What is the matter with y'all?

So, go ahead y'all keep believing in the tooth fairy and meanwhile do not be surprised that the rest of the world takes you less and less seriously. At international gatherings you will be like the opinionated bigot uncle that everyone keeps trying to dodge.

There's a good Salon article on Richard Dawkins that should be mandatory reading for anyone looking for a dose of truth.

The deal with these fundamentalists is that people that actually have a brain don't dare to speak up anymore.

Unless they are confronted, they will just keep on repeating the lies until it becomes true. And who is going to oppose them? It's becoming more and more difficult to speak up against the people of fate.
Real outspoken Atheist are rare, lately. We need a hero :(

...of the VA Linux IPO.

I actually told my 20-something sister (who could hardly print on Windows at the time, much less know what the hell Linux was) about the stock price's surge. She asked "what do they make?" I actually didn't know what they made either, so she said something like "whatever..."

How things have changed since, both for me and VA.

I'm not surprised by the semi-disappointing prediction MS made. If anything, their doubled profit seems like more-than-great news for them (I'm no investor though).

I'm sorry I don't regularly get my news from that bastion of journalistic integrity the NY Sun *cough tabloid*cough*

Spitzer is the ATTORNEY GENERAL of NY. It is not his job to write and push bills through the legistlature. It IS his job to enforce the laws of NY state and he is doing a damn good job if you ask me. Also, if "the legislature is so appalled at his idea", why have I heard absolutely nothing to that effect in the past two years since that particular issue has even been talked about?

A visit to your website reveals your One True Righteous Crusade to apparently be concealed carry gun laws and their preservation. Aparently when you saw Spitzer took some action which was even remotely anti-gun, you decided he must be evil. You offer an interesting study on the irrational, complete black or white mindset of so many people. Do I completely agree with every last syllable uttered by the guy? No certainly not. But, shockingly enough, I am able to make the rational, sane assessment that he's doing a lot of good and is therefore worthy of my support even though he may not agree with me on the minutia of every last issue I'm interested in. See how that works? It's what we call a small logical compromise. Furthermore I actually live in New York, YOU seem to live in Oklahoma. Why do you even care? Ohhh right, because you're irrationally fixated with single issue zealotry. shame, that.

And the best you got is "hindsight is always 20/20"? FUCK YOU!

The report was one point of information in a mountain of data, and if Bush had tried to act on it before 9/11 (say, by introducing passenger screening and ethnic profiling, or having the FAA issue a notice to passengers that they should be prepared to fight hijackers instead of quietly submitting to them) it would have been liberal cretins downplaying the threat and talking about "a falsely induced state of fear". You think I'm kidding? Here's some excerpts from a 2000 Salon.com article called "The hyping of domestic terrorism", written by some low-life from "The Nation":

"The threat from terrorists is so high," began ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz's news account, "the potential for massive casualties is so real, that an independent panel is pushing the government to take immediate, drastic action." Warned commission chairman L. Paul Bremer III at a press conference: "The threat of international terrorism is becoming more deadly." In the Los Angeles Times, commission advisor Brian Michael Wilson of the Rand Corp. called the report "a wake up call to a more violent future."

But behind this dramatic and headline-grabbing report, the facts are these: The National Commission on Terrorism's warnings are a con job, with roughly the veracity of the latest Robert Ludlum novel.

...

Facts also do not square well with the commission's alarming suggestion that, as commission advisor Jenkins puts it, "current efforts to detect, prevent and prepare for such attacks are inadequate."

...

By attempting to set off a panic over external enemies, the National Commission on Terrorism is serving those inside-the-Beltway policy goals. But if it resonates with the press and public, it is because exaggerated fear of terrorism serves as a useful distraction from sweeping national anxiety over globalization and the growing power of transnational corporations. The report's vision of hordes of foreign students launching biowarfare from college campuses, revives an American tradition of immigrant-bashing that has played out periodically during periods of national change and uncertainty: the Masonic conspiracy panic of 1798, which led to the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts; the Red Scare of the 1920s, which helped pave the way for immigration quotas; and of course McCarthyism.

I think "cultural trend-setter" is a stereotype almost anyone would appreciate. I'm not just talking about the cast of "Queer Eye" here.

Anyway, whether the stereotype is accurate or not (and from what I've seen in San Francisco, there's a lot of truth to it) is beside the point. Businesses are making policy decisions based on the idea of transforming cities to make them more gay-friendly. Google "creative class", or look at this recent Salon article about the economist whose writings on the creative class are getting published in the Harvard Business Review and other business-friendly locations.

This is payback for Christian Coalition "navigating" Microsoft through anti-trust waters.

The Christian Coalition consists solely of Ralph Reed? Gee, I guess they're not as scary as I thought....

The fact that a former executive director of the CC also happened to be the founder of a political consulting firm hired by Microsoft does not, in and of itself, say that the CC had anything to do with this. As the Salon article in question notes, "Reed was always more of a pol than a preacher, even in his heyday at the Christian Coalition." Ralphie seems to have no problem serving both his God and Mammon at the same time.

This is payback for Christian Coalition "navigating" Microsoft through anti-trust waters.

The Christian Coalition consists solely of Ralph Reed? Gee, I guess they're not as scary as I thought....

The fact that a former executive director of the CC also happened to be the founder of a political consulting firm hired by Microsoft does not, in and of itself, say that the CC had anything to do with this. As the Salon article in question notes, "Reed was always more of a pol than a preacher, even in his heyday at the Christian Coalition." Ralphie seems to have no problem serving both his God and Mammon at the same time.

This is payback for Christian Coalition "navigating" Microsoft through anti-trust waters.

Would you consider this game to be a further development of the Electronic Arts game, Majestic - http://dir.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/08/10/majes tic/index.html? Do you remember it? Text messages & emails & pages at all hours of the day? A combination of "The X-Files", "The Game" and a lot of imagination. And then, it was pulled from the market right after 9/11.

The US publishing lobbyists would say YES absolutely. In fact, they've been actively fighting against libraries (not to mention used book sellers) for several years. To them, the library system is just as "evil" as Kazaa.

If that's the way you feel about it, perhaps you should read this article, "Courtney Love Does the Math". And she should know.

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

Clearly, sex is bad to Lucas. (Some might agree.)

Sarah Vowell's book The Partly Cloudy Patriot has a chapter in it about how a remark that Al Gore made while speaking at a public school got misquoted by a single word and then blown up by the supposedly "liberal" media into a frenzy that took on a life of its own, and effectively, however unfairly and undeservedly, tarred Gore as a self-aggrandizing liar. I won't recount the story here... go borrow the book-on-cd from your local library. It's read by the author, so it'll be like having a defense of Al Gore read to you by Violet of The Incredibles.

From the book:
"[Gore] was widely perceived as arrogant. If you know something, you're not smart. You're a smarty-pants. It's annoying. People get annoyed with your knowledge. It goes back to high school, to not doing your homework ... 'There's something I should know, I don't know why I should know it but someone knows it and I don't. So I'm going to have to make fun of him now.'"

Courtney Love's article on the subject

Producer Steve Albini's take

Long story short: Stay the fuck away from major labels. Even if 'nobody has heard of you' as an independent artist, you're still more likely to make money than by being shackled to the RIAA.

You really ought to read David Brin's thoughts on Crichton's lecture. Or, if one novelist berating another isn't good enough for you, go read up on what Jared Diamond has to say about him.

Personally, I don't have a whole lot of respect for Crichton's "science", and would give more credibility to anything I read in SciAm than anything he ever said.

noah

Neal Stephenson (writing as "Stephen Bury") described a drone politician controlled that way. And some say that this is already standard political practice

It's about a couple hackers who gain total control of their bodies; sure to be a secret fantasy among geeks. (Not in a gay sort of way)

It is an illegal practice, and has been that way for about 45 years in the United States.

Which is why the labels use independent record promoters to get around the law. Read this.

Yeah, Wal*Mart workers are free to give money to unions. They just better not join them, or if they do, take part in any union activity.

Their latest idea is to outsource the drive-through talker. The drive-through intercom will be remoted to an offsite location, where the order will be keyed into the kitchen computer network.

If we had a $15/hr minimum wage, we'd see far more robotics and automation. But what would we do with all the excess people? We tried this.

These things seem esthetically appropriate for bringing sunlight-colored light into buildings. They're better than windows for moving the light around corners and deep inside large structures. But the article touts their energy efficiency compared to electric lighting. How much energy is consumed in their manufacture and installation, compared to electric lighting? How long will the fiber system last, what are its maintenance costs compared with electric lighting? If making the fibers costs (in joules) about the same or less than making the wires, or the lenses last longer than current bulbs, this could in fact save energy. But if the fibers or other components cost more, possibly multiples of their electric counterparts, this system's popularity could rush us towards our energy bankruptcy much sooner. With oil production reaching its inevitable decline as soon as a couple of years from now, we can't afford yet another efficiency boondoggle.

I stopped reading Salon.com when they began charging for "premium" content.

But then Salon's "premium" content consists mainly of self-appointed elitists sneering at anything good and true in the world, so it wasn't much of a loss.

But I like this quote:

"Bill Hewlett used to remind us that "The marketing guys said the HP-35 would be a failure because it was too small, and then we couldn't make them fast enough to meet the demand. The marketing folks don't know everything."

Because it was too small. Talk about misreading a market. Computing became ubiquitous entirely because of continuing miniaturization. Of course marketers would argue that they've now learned their lesson. They won't make that mistake again! No. They'll make some other ridiculous mistake. Not because they're stupid people, but because they don't understand current technology limitations and how trends imply change upon those limitations. Presumably, those former marketers thought "bigger meant better". Bigger cars were "better", right? They didn't see the potential utility of a pocket calculator, just as some will miss the utility of some other invention or advancement.

Marketing is fine as a tool for finding products people want. But it's useless for determining if a completely new technology might create or revolutionize a market. See the Dyson vacuum cleaner as another example of marketers misreading how new technology might completely change a mature market. Marketing works best only after the marketers understand a technology and its limitations, in coordination with traditional market analysis. Not prior. --M

you're assuming that the record company has already recovered its costs. This is practically never true. The only reason the record companies are able to stay in business at all is because a small number of blockbuster artists make them a fortune, which subsidizes all the music they sell that never breaks even.

Bullshit. Most of the costs are absorbed by the artist, not the label. This is how acts like Toni Braxton and TLC earn their lables over $150 million apiece and yet end up declaring bankruptcy.

Madison County's elections supervisor, Linda Howell, had a peculiarly personal reason for distrusting the central voter file: She had received a letter saying that since she had committed a felony, she would not be allowed to vote.

• http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=327
• http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/08/ 04/florida/print.html
• http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040517 &s=palast
• http://www.newtimesbpb.com/issues/2002-10-31/news/ news2.html

Lawsuit on same:

• http://www.naacp.org/news/2000/2000-11-28.html

Madison County's elections supervisor, Linda Howell, had a peculiarly personal reason for distrusting the central voter file: She had received a letter saying that since she had committed a felony, she would not be allowed to vote.

• http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=327
• http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/08/ 04/florida/print.html
• http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040517 &s=palast
• http://www.newtimesbpb.com/issues/2002-10-31/news/ news2.html

Lawsuit on same:

• http://www.naacp.org/news/2000/2000-11-28.html

Choicepoint is the firm that Katherine Harris, who simultaneously served in the Bush campaign and as head vote-counter in Florida (no other democracy allows that, by the way), used to come up with a felon list.

Wrong. Choicepoint was contracted to generate the list before Katherine Harris was in office. And they were hired by a woman named Ethel Baxter, who is a Democrat.

The list included thousands of blacks who weren't eligible to vote (at least 5,000).

Good. That was the goal- to identify the people that were ineligible. Like it or not, but Florida is one of a handful of states that do not allow convicted felons to vote. This felon list was generated to fulfull some of the requirements of a 1998 Florida statute passed by the legislature in response to problems with voter fraud during a 1996 mayoral election.

It was set up to disenfranchise everyone who had a similar name (even first initial and last name) as a felon.

The list was not "set up" to disenfranchise anybody. The Florida law that required the list was designed for an imperfect list. It clearly placed the burdon of verifying the names on the 67 individual county election supervisors. Oh, and white people were twice as likely as black people to be erroneously included in the list.

Considering that blacks voted 90-10 for Gore and that Bush only won the state (officially) by 537 votes, Bush owes his presidency to Choicepoint.

Bull crap. The USCCR was unable to identify a single voter that was incorrectly prevented from voting because of the felon list.

salon just shows you an ad and then redirects you to a page that sets the registration cookie. you can go to it directly to circumvent the ads.

http://www.salon.com/news/cookie.html

that will set a cookie that will give u access to the site for the day.

talk about lame design.

-rob

Salon.com requires a soul-sucking registration link.

No it doesn't. the linked story is from their RSS feed. And if you want it in graphical glory, just take a day pass.

You are correct, the article doesn't mention it, I was thinking of the article from the Boston Globe which does point that out.

And so does this article from Salon.
Googling provides many more.
No troll, just stating a fact. I didn't say rednecks are stupid, just pointed out this is a major contributor to this issue.

I disagree with the sexuality issue being the deciding factor in the very close election. I see the manipulation of the voting machines and their talleys as the source of the extra votes needed to grease Bush back into the White House. Although, some bizarre media maniupulation may have assisted.

why do you expect Microsoft to support you?

Because blocking pirates from upgrading Windows hurts Microsoft's paying customers too, as well as just about anyone who has an email account. Salon had a nice article talking about virtually the same points as the parent poster.

For those who want more, the best links on for intelligent green reading:

WorldChanging.com -- which also has an article about wave power.

TreeHugger, which is already linked in the story.

Dave Pollard, which writes very insightfully about lots of things including environmental philosophy.

Green Car Congress, where you can get the best news about green mobility, cool cars & industrial developments.

IDFuel, which is more about design but covers some of the same ground as TreeHugger.com

FuelCellWorks for all the latest news about fuel cells.

Grist Magazine, for news and a touch of humor, plus lots of interviews.

that's what they get for not going along with the crowd.