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Credit Freeze Under Fire

'The so-called Financial Data Protection Act of 2006 (HR3997) would also weaken state laws requiring disclosure of security breaches. In California, businesses must notify people if their personal info "was, or is reasonably believed to have been, acquired by an unauthorized person."

'Under the proposed federal legislation, such disclosure would have to be made only if a company determines that a security breach "is reasonably likely to result in harm or inconvenience" to individual consumers.

'"Basically, the company would have to know that you're a victim of identity theft before it needs to tell you that you could be a victim of identity theft," said Ed Mierzwinski, director of the U.S. Public Interest Group's consumer program in Washington.'

In the SF Bay Area, Safeway and Albersons already offer full online shopping to the door, ala webvan and have been for a little while now. Like a lot of web ideas that died during the Crash, but are doing fine now and just needed some time to get the model right and more penetration, this seems like a pretty obvious/good idea. The earlier guy was talking about NYC having similiar services.

I suspect that this is something that makes a lot more sense on a metro by metro basis, hooked into existing stores just as an added service, instead of a nationwide thing. Only non-perishables, like amazon, seems kinda annoying and limited unless there are deep discounts. I would rather pay a few pennies more to not have to order my groceries repeatedly. But maybe that's just me.

Bob Parsons, owner of GoDaddy, contributed $10,000.00 US to Perverted-Justice.com, an online vigilante group. Perverted-Justice is the group involved with Dateline NBC. Media groups and journalism scholars have taken Dateline NBC to task for journalism ethics violations regarding their involvement with Perverted-Justice.

Sensitive data leaks, missing plutonium, hard drives with classified data unaccounted for....

Those kinds of failures.

The kind of incompetencies and oversight that can not and should not be tolerated or have excuses made for, whether they are dealing with projects that relate to national security or just studying the fluid dynamics of ketchup. People have been fired for much less in the past.

I was surprised that the article didn't mention the Kevin Flanagan case, which involved Bank of America, outsourcing, and this 'train your replacement or no severance' policy.

In 2003, Mr. Flanagan, a programmer for BofA, was told that his job was being outsourced and that he had to train his (Indian) replacement to receive severance. (Some news reports say he was fired after refusing.) He went into the parking lot and shot himself.

The Kevin Flanagan Case
U.S. Tech Workers Bear Brunt of Immigration Policy (1st graf)
Techies see jobs go overseas (graf: "Suicide Blamed on Layoff")

I just closed my bank account with them. I had to do it anyway (moved to an area with no BofA branches within 60 miles) but I made sure to tell the agent the OTHER reason why. They can rot in Hell.

David Lazarus, the guy who wrote this article, discussed exactly that back in 2003 when BofA first indicated it was setting up a subsidiary in India.

Apparently you've been out of the loop-

Executive Authority: How Bush redefines the intent of the law Instead of vetoing bills, he officially disregards portions with which he doesn't agree.

A city near me just used eminent domain to seize prime waterfront land owned by Wal*Mart and intended to be used for a Sam's Club... it will now be a mixture of small(er) businesses, restaurants, and apartments, with the waterfront set aside as a park. They cited the recent Supreme Court ruling in the process.

Are China and the US becoming more and more like eachother nowadays? It's like this country is moving to a pseudo-communist form of government :(

Please, what a lot of fearmongering and nonsense. Communist governments spend vast sums of nonexistant money, they tend to create an elite "politburo" class of elite rich while everyone else remains poor, they begin wars and conquor countries to control resources they otherwise wouldn't have and couldn't afford, and they promote lies in schools that run contrary to science and evidence.

Now tell me, HOW is America becoming to a pseudo-communist form of government??

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/ 05/25/BAGO0J1C5O18.DTL

This is the story of a physics teacher who tries to sustain interest by doing interesting experiments, whosesafety is now being questioned.

In about 20 years I expect a metric shit-ton of blackmail material will be available for our future up-and-coming politicians.

Nope, there'll be an Act of Congress declaring all such material "inadmissable" for the purposes of political discussion. You won't be able to go back farther than seven years when dredging for dirt on a candidate. Any non-felony convictions will be covered, as will any blogs, comments, web postings or letters to the editor. Everyone gets the "I learned from my mistakes" get-out-of-hassle-free card, not just conservative right-wingers.

Ya, and when you make people pass English exams to graduate from high school the idiots who can't pass sue the state. I love America. You know it just has to be racist if a person who happens to be a minority fails the exam ... I mean, only white kids are dumb and fail exams. When latinos or African-Americans fail an exam, it's not because they're dumb but because of some conspiracy of white people to make them fail.

Frankly, I cant believe this tech couldnt have been done already, even twenty or thirty years ago. I have to imagine we've had the tech to do adhesiveness on demand based on an external stimuli ( such as electricity ) for many years. We have had the ability when the opposite material is metal since atleast the beginning of the space race, but even sticking to any surface on demand shouldnt be too difficult.

There was a row a few years back when medical records from the UCSF hospital were being help hostage by the Indian company doing transcriptions? SF Gate has an article about it.

Any sensitive or proprietary information should not be handled by a company outside the country. Federal laws such as HIPPA just plain don't apply beyond the borders (duh) and law enforcement can be powerless.

I assume that in India, the manual labor required to count all the paper ballots is cheaper than it would be in the U.S.

Cheaper than free? While I can't speak knowledgeably about the entire U.S. of A (polling issues are handled on a state-by-state basis), I do know that most (if not all) of the poll workers in this country are there on a volunteer basis. Maybe some of 'em are paid a stipend or something ... I dunno ... but I doubt that would make hand-counting any more expensive than buying and maintaining those damned machines. Arguably, it might even be less expensive in the long run.

At any rate, none of the arguments I've seen in favor of touch-screen voting have anything directly to do with the bottom line. Usually it's voter-privacy issues for people with disabilities (who would otherwise need to rely on a "volunteer" to correctly read and mark their votes for them), and language issues for "English-challenged" citizens (who wouldn't be able to read or understand the ballot). The National Federation For The Blind, for instance, has been in and out of bed with Diebold for years over the issue of ballot accessibility.

Ha, maybe. :)

In any case, Splenda is more chemically-similar to sugar than Nutrasweet is, which explains the more-similar taste. (Molecular structure of sugar and Splenda here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/ a/2004/09/15/FDGA58M7L21.DTL&o=3 I'm not finding diags. for Nutrasweet in a 30 sec. googling...)

I've always consumed diet sodas; that's what my parents got me hooked-on, and so that's what I'm used-to. Sugared sodas taste "weird" to me...

Most people can't tell the difference" between Dasani and tap water, at least in San Francisco.

Now Los Angeles has some lousy water courtesy of the concrete canal that is the California Aquaduct.

Woops, got link wrong. The budget stat is from: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2005/07/20/BAGV0DQLD01.DTL

http://cdn.sfgate.com/gate/av/movies/2006/04/30/je tbugv2_m4.mp4

Actually, it's moved: http://cdn.sfgate.com/gate/av/movies/2006/04/30/je tbugv2_m4.mp4

http://sfgate.com/g/av/movies/2006/04/30/jetbug_m4 .mp4

Here you go: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/2006/04/08/MNGE9I686K1.DTL

...that might not be as far off as you think (or hope or wish), since the Travolta movie is based on only the first half of the novel. And then, of course, there's Hubbard's ten-volume series Mission Earth. Thank you for listening...

Flash uses a version of the On vp2 codec to the best of my knowledge.

Other codecs can produce better if not as good quality at the same file sizes.
Sorenson, (I'm not kidding)
3ivx for creating platform independent MP4
Apple's H.264
And MPEG1 - for the size that the Flash movies were encoded

Some of the above codecs are also VBR where you set your desired quality level and each frame is only as big as it needs to be. But alas, Flash is on most browsers. What I haven't seen are DVD sized flash videos or any of larger dimensons.

FYI, I'm on a Quad mac and the video immediately starts chugging when the browser window is in the background. I'd rather look at a streaming Quicktime like the one here:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/ a/2006/04/30/MNGJGII7BB1.DTL&o=0

The quality is better, and it even streams fine on my upgraded dual g4 cube.

This AP story is all over the press, not just MSNBC

For example:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,193749,00.html
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/ 04/21/financial/f080720D78.DTL
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/lo cal/states/california/northern_california/14397469 .htm
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/tech/20060424-0 012-ca-applesecurity.html
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/APPLE_SECUR ITY?SITE=KFWB&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME= 2006-04-30-15-15-12

Here's another version from a pro-Mac paper:

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/ 05/01/BUGK7IHGOC1.DTL

Sourced mainly from SANS, which is for real.

The problem with either side of this argument is simply that WE DO NOT KNOW what the government is doing. What they claim to be doing is "protecting citizens" and listening to the conversations of terrorists, but we have no way of proving that. In fact, some people fear domestic spying against war critics and even political opponents. Sources? Newsweek, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times(not a direct link, but a mirror) and CNN to start. So tell me, are you feeling a little more nervous yet?

Raw Story is in danger. Your right to read news stories and writing that disrupt the government/Big Media symbiosis is under attack. And you probably don't even know it.

There has been so much going on lately, what with plans to nuke Iran and the rolling mutiny among the top brass that you may well have missed another growing menace to all that we have built here.

The Internet phenomenon - the dizzying evolution from Netscape to Yahoo to Google to the new world of blogs and wikis - is the result of an essential structural attribute of the medium: the content-neutrality of the pipes we use to connect to it. It is the natural tendency of the powerful to silence and hinder anything that threatens their dominance, but the phone companies could not stop AOL, AOL could not stop Yahoo, and Yahoo could not stop Google, because the folks who owned the pipes used to carry all those ones and zeroes to and from your computer were not permitted to discriminate against bits they didn't like. (The concept of the "common carrier" dates back at least to the earliest regulation of railroads more than a hundred years ago.) That level field has also resulted in the current flowering of our participatory democracy. But that flower is about to pruned or even torn out by the roots.

The Orwellian "Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006," sponsored by Congressman Joe Barton (R, Texas), will, if it becomes law, allow your Internet provider to charge you extra to read this column. It will allow your provider to block this column entirely. Congressman Ed Markey (D, Mass), who sponsored a defeated amendment that would have explicitly preserved neutrality, explains:

The Joe Barton (R-TX) sponsored telecommunications bill that is moving through the Energy & Commerce Committee in the House would fundamentally change the way the Internet works. ... In short, the Barton bill opens the door for the Bells and other ISPs to throw out a key principle of net neutrality and enact a new era of telecom taxes and tolls, roadblocks that would shut down the avenues of innovation that have allowed the Internet to become what it is today.

That bill took a big step toward being enacted into law last week.

A House subcommittee handed phone companies a victory Wednesday by voting 27-4 to advance a bill that would make it easier for them to deliver television service over the Internet and clearing the way for all Internet carriers to charge more for speedier delivery. ...

Earlier in the day, the subcommittee voted 23-8 to reject an amendment by Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., that would have inserted specific language designed to enforce network neutrality and prevent the feared creation of fast and slow lanes on the Internet.

"Members from both sides of the aisle endorsed a plan which will permit cable and phone companies to construct 'pay as you surf, pay as you post' toll booths for the Internet" said Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington.

But Sonia Arrison, director of technology studies for the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, dismissed concerns that the proposed bill would lead to a two-tiered Internet.

"There's plenty of competition," Arrison said. "The market will

In consumer electronics, there are two factors that generally direct which format becomes standard: time-to-market and licensing.

The first-to-market standards proposal has a good shot at winning, because by the time other competing proposals get to market, the first one has so much market penetration that nobody wants the second for fear of incompatibility.

Licensing models that are less restrictive and more open also tend to find favor among consumers. The less cost and hassle the consumer experiences wins product loyalty in the marketplace.

Consider a few examples:

VHS vs. Betamax: Sony was first-to-market with Betamax in 1975, followed in 1976 by JVC with the VHS format. Based on time, Betamax should have become the standard for magnetic recording of video. However, Sony made a mistake with licensing: only Sony would produce Betamax tapes and devices. JVC opened up their technology to licensed manufacturers, allowing for competition in the marketplace which drove the prices of VHS far enough below that of Betamax (and increased the features) to influence the marketplace to invest in VHS technology. Because at the time Betamax devices were still expensive, there was little market penetration for JVC to overcome. In summary, the open standard won.

DVD vs. Divx (not the codec): Does anyone remember this debate? Those who do, remember that these two competing CD-like digital video distribution technologies were in a little war for the consumer's pocketbook. Both technologies came out about the same time, so time-to-market wasn't an issue. The issue was Divx pay-per-view licensing model: instead of buying a video once and wathing it an infinite number of times (as with DVD), the consumer would buy the Divx video fairly cheaply but then pay something every time it is watched. Needless to say, this went over like a fart in church. DVD won based on its superior licensing model.

AM Stereo: I'm not up on the licensing models or time frame of the competing AM stereo technologies, but they were both late-to-market in relation to standard AM radio. There was already HUGE market penetration of standard AM broadcast equipment and receivers; few people saw benefit in replacing that equipment. Had there been just one proposal for AM Stereo, and had it been completely open, it is still doubtful it would have ever caught on.

Microsoft vs. Linux (Gates vs. Torvalds):consumer but it poses problems for developers who, for economic reasons, wish to maintain security over their intellectual property. It is for this reason that many hardware manufacturers do not support Linux: their legal departments cannot confidently say that their intellectual property will be protected if they provide Linux drivers for their products. In this regard, Microsoft's licensing model is superior to Linux's for the developer.

So in the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD debate, who will win? Which proposed standard will be first-to-market? Which will have the less-restrictive licensing model? What about the third factor, technical superiority? What about the fourth factor -- does the public even want it (think DAT or video phones)?

~Jon

Jon Carrol's column in SFGate has a little comparison.

"SILENT HILL worked for me because of the confidence and command of director Christophe Gans. I'm not familiar with the source material at all, so I'm not going to discuss it as an adaptation, except in the broadest terms. I can't tell you how faithful it is to the already-established mythology of the various SILENT HILL games, but I can tell you that there are certain touches in the way the film's put together that seem like a sly nod to the basic experience of gaming. ...

Roger Ebert seemed to find the film's explanations baffling even as he was impressed by it technically. I'm not sure why this would confuse anyone... basically it boils down to a vengeful spirit looking for payback against the town that did it harm... but I also think the answers are far less important than the way the questions are presented. For example... I have no idea what the fuck Pyramid Head is, or how he's connected to the Demon, or what purpose he serves aside from freaking my shit out, and frankly, I don't care. He's one of the most striking images I've seen in a horror film in recent memory, and both of his big scenes are exhilarating. If you're tired of teenagers in danger and you're tired of remakes of

The choice is in whether you succumb to that temptation or not. I wouldn't call someone had homosexual tendancies, but didn't have homosexual sex a homosexual, any more than I'd call someone who had an urge to drink, but never did, an alchoholic.

If you've never had an alcoholic drink in your life, you won't have any urge to drink. (at least not the type of "hunger" a reformed alcoholic might feel)

If you're homosexual, you'll know it whether or not you've previously "succumbed to temptation". Most people know their sexual preferences long before they're old enough to act on them. Homosexuality IS NOT analagous to an addictive substance. Would YOU be able to suppress your (assumedly) heterosexual tendacies if called-upon to do so? For your entire life?

Check out the news coverage of gay penguins. To me, it appears that homosexuality is something that has probably existed in nature for thousands of years and will continue to do so.

On a less serious note...perhaps tux is in on the gay penguin consiracy

5. RedHat won't take an I.O.U.
4. To pay for Novell he'd have to have "Golden Palace" tattooed on his face.
3. "Buy an island near Japan? Shit, get two."
2. Excessive ATM fees finally broke him.
1. Just blew $100k on that shirt from Brokeback Mountain

You can sell nuclear energy to me when you can answer the question "What do we do with 48 tons of nuclear waste generated per year per plant"? Arrogant people think nuclear power is perfectly safe. Paranoid people think nuclear power will destroy the planet. Intelligent people see plant designs that are intrinsically safe, but want to know what we're going to do with the waste.

The ONLY solution the industry has right now is "bury it" (Yucca), "make it someone else's problem" (Arizona's) and "hope we're not around if it is a problem"(whoever is on the planet when Yucca breaks open, or is attacked, or a society 1,000 years from now, which can't read English, trundles into the mysterious cave and comes out with Magical Glowing Glass.)

Industry never changes. Their solutions to waste never change; it's always about hiding it or making it someone else's problem, because those are the cheapest and easiest.

We've got about 50,000 tons of nuclear waste sitting around in various stockpiles across the nation; more than any other hazardous waste, and if you want to get really scared- some of it is sitting in pools of water (because it heats itself constantly) in STEEL CONTAINERS.

The only solution on the table right now is Yucca; only problem is, we're just extending the parameters of "bury a hole" and "be long gone when it becomes a problem." The stuff in Yucca mountain will be around for 100,000 years. There are serious problems with making stuff last that long, making signs that people will understand even 1,000 years from now, geological changes over just a few thousand years, etc.

Actually, it's not as great a job as you think. Since the female stars are the name draws, they pretty much pick who they will work with. Male performers make less than the female actors for the same amount of time on camera.

Interestingly, Viagara has changed the industry a great deal. Where before they'd hire any ugly shmoe who could become "camera ready" on demand, Viagara has made that qualification less important. Now, male performers have to look good...and be willing to take double or more the recommended dose of Viagara.

I guess all that Viagara is tax-deductible though...

not hispanic. looks black. check here
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/ch ronicle/archive/2006/04/08/MNGE9I686K1.DTL&o=0

There is actually a story in today's San Francisco Chronical about exactly that...People in San Francisco are having their MacBooks stolen from them as they work in coffee shops. One guy was even stabbed in the chest as two guys made off with his computer.

Not in San Francisco, apparently.

qz

Interestingly, there's an article in the Chronicle today regarding the fact that people in San Francisco are having their laptops stolen while they are using them--one guy was stabbed for his.

The story does has a ring of sensationalism about it, though...

"it takes, on average, 10 years and 1 billion dollars to get a new drug approved in the U.S. ..."

This is simply incorrect. It is likely that this statistic is referring to the time it takes for a drug company to develop and gain approval for a new drug. According to Washington Monthly in May 2000, at that time the FDA approval process was taking about a year, and had decreased from about 2.5 years after so-called "fast track" procedures were implemented in the 90s: (http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2000/00 05.pomper.html)

"If you are arguing that the FDA plays down risks in order to allow buisnesses to sell dangerous products, that is just not true."

I am, and I am by no means alone. For evidence and opinions on this side of the question, you might want to check out:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6520630/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/pres cription/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A313 5-2004Dec15.html

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1126/p02s01-uspo.htm l

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/ a/2004/11/23/MNGSPA04NI1.DTL

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050205/bob10 .asp

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/15/60II/mai n674293.shtml

No, the one about killing ponies was a different story. Although in this case both the pro- and anti-pony forces are Republican.

Well, T'loin folks just need to be tight with da Mayor like Larry and Sergey are...

Not a huge surprise -- San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome is good friends with Larry and Sergei.

GM is certainly cutting back amid collapsing SUV sales due largely to increased gas prices. While I'm in favor of an energy tax that reflects the energy source's impact on the environment (driving us to cleaner, efficient sources), gas taxes are simply not popular and unlikely to stick around. Ask California. If we can't increase gas taxes, what's the point of an energy tax? Our best hope today really is that the gov't gets out of the way and stops propping up artificially low energy prices either through subsidies or foreign policy.

Maybe I can use it to loosen the cork on this bottle of wine for manly men.

First, please be aware that there is apparently a link between "texting" (sending an SMS) an being shot dead in your house:
    http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/ 04/02/BAGEUI24SP1.DTL

The former association is probably tenuous at best, however the latter article actually seems fairly well done. The Sweeds are able to do some great large-scale studies, as they have a fairly homogenous population with amazing levels of data collection.

I read the article, and this study was fairly well designed.

The important conclusions of the study was that long term, high quantity use of phones (both cellular, and cordless) was associated with a several fold increase in brain cancer risk (about 3-6x the risk in those with over 2000 cumulative hours of use) and that this result was seen most clearly after 10+ years after the exposure, consistent with the possible long-term / slow developing nature of cancer.

To put this in perspective, the lifetime risk for brain cancer is about 0.5%. If the results of this study were true, and you were a cell phone addict, perhaps you could increase your risk 10-fold, meaning your chance of getting a tumor had risen to 5%? The risk of dying of other things is much higher (heart disease and stroke: 40%, other cancers 20%, etc.) so it may not be worth worrying about.

Could the results be bogus?

This study is a retrospective case-control design, which means that they took people diagnosed with tumors, found healthy control subjects (matched on age, sex and geographic location), and then asked both groups about their cell phone use over the prior 20 years. It's fairly easy with these sorts of designs to have confounds. One of the most common and easiest to understand confound are 'response biases.'

In this study, this could work in several ways: Perhaps people with brain tumor are pissed off, have heard about possible connections with cellphone use, and are (perhaps subconsciously) looking for something to blame. Thus, they tend to overstate their cellphone use. The controls, who have no tumors, have no particular agenda and report their cell use more accurately. Another form this could take would be if the tumor folks with high cell use respond to the surveys accurately, whereas the controls with high cell use just throw them in the trash.
The authors have a few of points arguing against this thesis : first, the observed relationships follow a dose-response-latency model, which they suggest may not be likely to be how unequal response bias would look. Second, they had nearly identical and high response rates (90%) for both groups. Third, they found the relationships even when looking at cordless phones (which have generally not been demonized in the popular press).

One thing that did jump out at me were the demographic issues -- the authors mention that both gender and class (wealth, or socioeconomic status) are related to cell use (e.g. rich men use the most). They claim to have adjusted statistically for these issues, but the method was not described in this paper (it may be in their prior papers). However, in a retrospective case/control study like this, one should always question "is there anything unusual about group X". People with brain tumors? Wealthy males with very high cellphone use who were early adopters? Perhaps there is a core group of subjects that is driving the statistical relationship? E.g. high users are computer nerds who don't get enough sunlight, eat crappy diets and are vitamin deficient, and spend their lives in server farms inhaling chemicals from their computers? The authors did not report having measured any of these obvious confounds, which does leave a pretty big possible explanation: that the association between high cell use and cancer is true, but that the correlation is not causal.

"Some people say the universe is governed by universal laws. Others say it is but a joke of the Elder Gods.

"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought." someone said. "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."

Note that I am -not- including the pharmaceutical industry in this, as the profit motive actually drives innovation to some degree in that field.

I'm not even slightly convinced that it drives innovation in the rest of the health care field, though. All it does is lead to San Jose, CA (at the heart of Silicon Valley) losing its only downtown hospital because it serviced a poorer section of the Bay Area, many of whom were uninsured or underinsured, creating a cascade of trauma center overloads that threatens the emergency care for hundreds of thousands of people.... So much for "do no harm."

The very fact that the lives of people in the South Bay---arguably one of the richest areas in the country---are being put in jeopardy by a greedy health care provider should give us pause, as it means that no part of the country is safe from the potential for complete health care collapse. What's to stop HCA from closing down their hospitals in rural areas, resulting in people simply not being able to get health care at all?

The current system is failing miserably, largely because of a handful of companies that care more about protecting profits than the lives of the people they care for. As far as I'm concerned, any money that would be lost by forcing hospital operations to be nonprofit and more highly regulated (e.g. preventing hospital closures or moves of more than a mile in metro areas/five miles in rural areas) would be totally worth it. Columbia/HCA can keep their blood money.

Yeah. Profit works really well in the public interest....

Senate passed it today - I just pasted one of the first links google news kicks out when you search for "Lobbying Reform bill". Senators McCain and Feingold are complaining it doesn't go far enough (it doesn't). It's a start though.

1. Amazon
2. Walmart
3. HP
4. IBM
5. SGI
6. Most banks

1. DPI
2. Card System Solutions
3. T-Mobile