Slashdot Mirror

Maybe even a philosopher poet...
Perhaps you've read this link?

When Phil Gramm (aka Foreclosure Phil - http://www.slate.com/id/2194933/) became an executive with UBS bank, he was sitting in your face.

You're welcome

Actually, you make the money by breaking into those computers, collect all those profiles, then hock them to burglars in nice batches for a decent 'compensation'.

Kind of like I believe the going rate for a creditcard number was $4 per ten.

First off, make sure to read the Slate article, not the crappy techdirt page that just summarizes and links to it.

The Slate article makes a lot of oversimplified analogies. One big difference between books and music is that with music, there is only a very tiny difference in utility between a CD and a song bought online and downloaded. Personally, I perceive the CD as having slightly negative utility compared to the download, because it's just one more physical object to clutter up my house. Other people might prefer the convenience of having the CD, since you don't need to make backup copies of CDs. But in general, they're pretty much interchangeable products. With books, however, there are huge differences in utility between paper and download. I can easily make notes in a paper book. I can loan it to a friend to take to the beach. It's never going to become obsolete, whereas a digital book in a specialized e-book format is almost certainly going to become obsolete within 5-10 years.

Because music has nearly the same utility regardless of whether it's embodied in a physical object, there are lots and lots of people who copy their music from other people without paying for it. There's really no such phenomenon in the case of books. Okay, sure, there are people who scan entire books and post them on scribd or something, but it's a very tiny niche, so this is another case where the analogy between books and music breaks down.

The article says $10 is cheap for a digital book. This is both an oversimplification and an irrelevance to their argument by analogy. In the case of music, the huge difference is that if I want to buy one track, I can buy it for about $1 by downloading it, whereas on CD I would have had to pay $10, even if I didn't want the rest of the music on it. That's an order of magnitude difference in price. When it comes to books, there's nothing like that. $10 is ridiculously expensive for a used mass-market paperback. $10 is not cheap for a new mass-market paperback. $10 is about the going price for a trade paperback. $10 would be insanely cheap for an illustrated physics textbook.

If you want to look for a real threat to the book publishing industry that's analogous to the threat file-sharing poses to the music industry, it's not the Kindle, it's the extreme efficiency of the used book market these days. Years ago, one of my favorite things to do on a weekend was bum around used bookstores in a place like Berkeley or New York. It was fun, but it was incredibly inefficient, and the used books weren't particularly cheap. Today, you can get pretty much any used book you want online, at a very reasonable price, and the internet has obsoleted the concept of a bricks and mortar used bookstore. A lot of titles go for something like a buck plus shipping. This is what the book publishers should really be afraid of. They hate the used book market. I see this most vividly at the community college where I teach. The publishers bring out a new edition of the textbook every few years, for the sole purpose of killing off the used book market. The sales reps are now constantly pushing DRM'd books that the students use on a rental basis, meaning that when they stop paying, they can no longer read the book.

Here it is I think.

ref: http://www.slate.com/id/2210636/pagenum/all/#p2

the real national crisis was a Fannie Mae house of cards that the American left created?

Citation needed

There's a lot out there. If you want to follow the WSJ, you can go there through the back issues, all the way back to when Fannie Mae

Both Democrats and Republicans supported Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

And half of the Republicans if you want to be that way.

Yeah, well, you would be right. I mean, I remember Reagan promising that free trade would improve American companies and instead, over the last thirty years, it has utterly destroyed them

Thing is is Reagan didn't fully support free trade. For instance to protect Harley Davidson he imposed tariffs on Japanese motorcycles. He also imposed tariffs on Japanese electronics. Fact is is there has been no free trade in a long tyme. One way or another US businesses have used government to restrict trade.

And Republicans still keep pushing that free trade button with every dictatorship to all we have left is our secretary of state heading off to China to go publicly beg for money. That's pathetic.

Ah, something we agree on. One of the things that bothers me is that while Republicans use the rhetoric of free trade they don't really support it.

So you want to be part of the problem?

Yeah I do. Lock and load! :-) Just kidding.

Perhaps I was a bit harsh. Maybe a thread from yesterday is affecting me more than I should let it. That discussion was also about free markets, trade, but no matter how much research I presented the other party only ridiculed it without backing up their own position. It seems too many want to ridicule a proposal without making their own, and I have to include myself there because I don't always make a proposition.

Falcon

.. the firm presumably wasn't thrilled about having its attorneys' home purchases broadcast ..

The firm's got a point if you ask me.

.. (the firm) demanded that BlockShopper remove the items. When BlockShopper refused, the firm sued the 15-staff startup for trademark infringement.

This is an overkill, but I'm sure they just meant to teach these boneheads a lesson - don't fuck with lawyers.

Because people with 14-16 year old daughters who shack up with some manipulative scumbag will tend to turn to vigilantism if the police don't do something about it.

I'm from the UK, where the age of consent is 16. Now you could argue that this was an arbitrary line. I think it's more or less right though, this guy dug up the some studies

http://www.slate.com/id/2174841

He proposes three boundary ages

12 - when you can physically have sex - when women reach puberty
16 - when you're intellectually mature - people under 16 score quite badly on intelligence tests
25 - when you have some kind of emotional maturity - people under that age don't have proper self regulatory systems

Which is a bit like a boot sequence when you think of it - I particularly like the way there's ten years between 16 and 25 where you're smart but clueless.

As he puts it -

I'd draw the object line at 12, the cognitive line at 16, and the self-regulatory line at 25. I'd lock up anyone who went after a 5-year-old. I'd come down hard on a 38-year-old who married a 15-year-old. And if I ran a college, I'd discipline professors for sleeping with freshmen. When you're 35, "she's legal" isn't good enough.

What I wouldn't do is slap a mandatory sentence on a 17-year-old, even if his nominal girlfriend were 12.

Now 16 is the age of consent in the UK. And I wouldn't date anyone under 25, so his lines seem reasonable to me. 18, the age of consent in the US seems a bit high, but I don't see a problem with that. Actually one thing about the US that I definitely don't agree with is criminalizing sex between two under 18 year olds. I personally don't think it is good thing for under 18 year olds to be having sex with each other, but I don't think it should be illegal.

But an age of consent of 14 in places like Serbia is probably the reason that there are so many trafficked East European girls working as prostitutes in the UK. 14 year olds are way to young to know whether their new, older boyfriend in a sports car who promised them a job as a dancer in London is a pimp or not.

Slate.com has a Change-o-Meter at http://www.slate.com/id/2209273/ [Slate.com] to track the "amount of change" President Obama has brought to Washington.

Well, maybe not, but Cornell researchers found that autism spiked when cable TV became more widespread. It may or may not be related...of course, there is the factor of affluence and whether autism would be more likely to be diagnosed and treated in households that could afford cable. Maybe there's a statistically significance between whether or not parents of autistic children drive luxury cars or own large houses, too, but who knows. However, there was a difference in autism rates when correlated to television watching.

You've narrowed the field to the US. I think your first citation covered ALL climatologists

No, 97% of active climatologists, who may be US scientists. However as a previous poster said scientists from other nations, such as Norway, may have an even bigger reason to say Global Warming is real and something needs to be done. Afterall the Scandinavians are at or below sea level.

unlike his predecessor, Bush II did not aggressively seek to replace all of the partisan government employees throughout the executive branch.

Bush did wage a War on Science.

It's quite obvious when you look at some of the conflicting policy statements coming from CIA, State, and NASA during his administration.

Where were all those conflicting opinions about Iraq having WMDs before the invasion of Iraq? I'm still waiting to see all those WMDs. Then there's the case against Microsoft, the Clinton admin had MS on the ropes but when Bush came into office MS was let off with barely a slap on the wrist. What I find ironic about that is that Texas, the state Bush was governor of before becoming president, was one of the first states to sue MS.

My point being that global warming "deniers" don't get as much funding as global warming "believers" because if there is no global warming

I don't see it that way at all. The oil companies have deep pockets, well not so deep since the price of oil tanked, and would of been happy to pay scientists who disagreed with Global Warming. The same with the coal industry.

Falcon

Look at this

http://www.slate.com/id/2146475/
To summarize, then: In February 1999 one of Saddam Hussein's chief nuclear goons paid a visit to Niger, but his identity was not noticed by Joseph Wilson, nor emphasized in his "report" to the CIA, nor mentioned at all in his later memoir. British intelligence picked up the news of the Zahawie visit from French and Italian sources and passed it on to Washington. Zahawie's denials of any background or knowledge, in respect of nuclear matters, are plainly laughable based on his past record, and he is still taken seriously enough as an expert on such matters to be invited (as part of a Jordanian delegation) to Hans Blix's commission on WMD. Two very senior and experienced diplomats in the field of WMDs and disarmament, both of them from countries by no means aligned with the Bush administration, have been kind enough to share with me their disquiet at his activities. What responsible American administration could possibly have viewed any of this with indifference?

The subsequent mysteriously forged documents claiming evidence of an actual deal made between Zahawie and Niger were circulated well after the first British report (and may have been intended to discredit it) and have been deemed irrelevant by two independent inquiries in London. The original British report carefully said that Saddam had "sought" uranium, not that he had acquired it. The possible significance of a later return visit - this time by a minister from Niger to Baghdad in 2001 - has not as yet been clarified by the work of the Iraq Survey Group.

This means that both pillars of the biggest scandal-mongering effort yet mounted by the "anti-war" movement - the twin allegations of a false story exposed by Wilson and then of a state-run vendetta undertaken against him and the lady wife who dispatched him on the mission - are in irretrievable ruins. The truth is the exact polar opposite. The original Niger connection was both authentic and important, and Wilson's utter failure to grasp it or even examine it was not enough to make Karl Rove even turn over in bed. All the work of the supposed "outing" was inadvertently performed by Wilson's admirer Robert Novak. Of course, one defends the Bush administration at one's own peril. Thanks largely to Stephen Hadley, assistant to the president for national security affairs, our incompetent and divided government grew so nervous as to disown the words that appeared in the 2003 State of the Union address. But the facts are still the facts, and it is high time that they received one-millionth of the attention that the "Plamegate" farce has garnered.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/humannature/archive/2009/01/23/incest-and-eugenics.aspx

http://www.slate.com/?id=2067499

http://www.slate.com/id/2114964

Academic Dave Gwydion has a colorful recap by one faculty spy who supported the resolution. The anonymous scribe reports that Summers didn't lose support from faculty members who objected to his comments, but from those who "object to Larry either because they think he's an arrogant prick who deserves to be taken down a peg, or because they think he's funnelling money in the wrong direction." Assistant professor LubÅs Motl, who opposed the resolution, thinks the vote "will be mentioned as a sad day in the history of Harvard University" as "an example of another era of McCarthyism." A physicist, Motl believes the majority of votes against Summers were cast by faculty of the humanities, "especially the people who think that they can determine the scientific truth by a vote."

Bingo.

This is a natural extension of war now-a-days. This is akin to saying, "Soldiers Now Using Bullets in War".

If the dominant hand-held projectile weapon were still the musket, or people just still believed that, then yes, it would be news!

Anyway you may be interested in knowing that not but 5 months before, in the Russia/Georgia war the previous August, exactly the same thing was going on and an intrepid Slate reporter got involved in downloading botnet software from pro-Russian hackers.

> "The bigger question with the cloud is, who really pays?"

That question was raised and answered when the cloud was formed....'everyone'.

This was originally written in response to a similar ruling in Australia, but Slate's William Saletan had much the same idea:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/humannature/archive/2008/12/16/is-this-child-pornography.aspx
Does the West past your free speech test now?

A couple of points..

I apparently don't count as a person since I vastly prefer ebooks. However, I prefer them via FBReader on my Nokia N810, not Amazon's kindle. And, since you can't even purchase an amazon ebook without having a kindle registered to your Amazon account (among other restrictions), their offering does absolutely nothing for me and has cost them several sales already.

That said, I've always had good experiences ordering books from Aamzon, but abysmal experiences with a camera purchase, which wasn't surprising given how notoriously hard to reach their customer service number has been historically, though they apparently have made improvements.

You mean the EAS that DOESN'T WORK on massive nets? http://www.slate.com/id/2157395/sidebar/2157437/

See Slate's Amazon.con: How the online retail giant hoodwinks the press for details on why this story is idiotic:

Some, but not all, of these accounts went on to concede that Amazon would not provide revenue data for the entire shopping season, or even for its "peak day." Nor would Amazon confirm or deny that one or both of these revenue figures exceeded those for 2007. Without this information, we can't possibly know whether Amazon had a good year in comparison either to other retailers or to its own sales during the previous Christmas shopping season.

The same reasoning or lack thereof applies to the Kindle (which I don't like for its DRM and other problems), since Amazon won't release sales numbers for it.

So, did Amazon have their best ever holiday season? Maybe: but we're unlikely to know enough about the metrics used to make this claim to know.

(Clearly, the answer must be 'yes'. But I'm just wondering if anyone knows more about it. Do they intentionally leave in some slack just for such a reason when they lay a cable like this?)

If you think about it, given the long length of the cable compared to the depth of the ocean floor, you aren't adding much the total length of the run buy taking it to the surface. You could easily have some slack in the system to accommodate this. And of course, the cable is cut, so you might just add a new splice section to 'make up the slack' if needed. The couple of articles I found didn't really address your question, though.

Seems to work just about all the time -- unless it's Jack being tortured. And the creators of the show exhibit no such agenda.

See this Slate article, for example:

Jack Bauer--played by Kiefer Sutherland--was an inspiration at early "brainstorming meetings" of military officials at Guantanamo in September of 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial new interrogation techniques including water-boarding, sexual humiliation, and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer "gave people lots of ideas." Michael Chertoff, the homeland-security chief, once gushed in a panel discussion on 24 organized by the Heritage Foundation that the show "reflects real life."

Amnd teh New Yorker:

This past November, U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, flew to Southern California to meet with the creative team behind 24. Finnegan, who was accompanied by three of the most experienced military and F.B.I. interrogators in the country, arrived on the set as the crew was filming.... Finnegan and the others had come to voice their concern that the show's central political premise--that the letter of American law must be sacrificed for the country's securitywas having a toxic effect. In their view, the show promoted unethical and illegal behavior and had adversely affected the training and performance of real American soldiers. "I'd like them to stop," Finnegan said of the show's producers. "They should do a show where torture backfires."

If the U.S. lifts drug prohibition, you wouldn't be able to control people's use of it in critical situations such as an E.R. nurse, air-traffic controller, pilot, railroad engineer, etc. etc. etc.

And you can now? Or do you just hide your head in the sand and assume everyone around you doesn't do drugs, because "That would be illegal!1!!"

And how long would it be before drug-use discrimination lawsuits arise saying you can't not hire or fire someone simply because they use drugs?

This would change from the way it is now, because...? The supreme court's come down on the side of drug tests again and again: http://www.slate.com/?id=2067710 Changing this would require more than just repealing drug bans, there'd have to be new legislation to make stoner a "protected class" or whatever.

Am I at the right website? Has my DNS been hijacked? I mean, my browser's location bar shows "slashdot.org" as the domain, but...

...where the hell is the suspicion that the FBI is plugged right in to the database for these things back at Amazon HQ?

For the first time in my Slashdot-reading life, I'm actually disappointed that there isn't more skepticism and hostile commentary being generated here! Every time the Kindle is brought up, all I see is some weak commentary. What the hell happened to the outrage over Section 215 of the Patriot Act that was so abundant a few years back?

From the link I just gave: "Would you know if Section 215 had been used on you? Nope. The person made to turn over the records is gagged and cannot disclose the search to anyone."

Has everyone succumbed to Patriot Act Fatigue or something?

The Patriot Act is still out there, and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!

Come on Slashdot readers ... there have to be a few of the strong-opinioned variety of you left! Come forward and tell me that you absolutely, unequivocally believe that there's no way, no chance, no how that the government of the United States of America hasn't plugged itself into the back-end of these things, and that they aren't engaged in data mining for "suspected terrorists" by monitoring every download you make with the Kindle. It would be such easy pickings, such low-hanging fruit! There it all is, in one nice location, in a nice corporate-maintained database! Sweet! You want to tell me the FBI is passing up on that juicy little store of information?

Really?

Personally I believe anyone who wants a Kindle is a fool. If I were going to buy an e-book reader (and I'm not), I'd actually consider the freaking Sony model first, which is far more offline (i.e. not reliant on communication with a mothership, unlike the Kindle). Yes, Sony! Ain't that amazing!?

You're probably thinking about the 2000 article in Wired, 'Why the Future Doesn't Need Us', which he said in a 2003 interview was Wired's title, not his.. It was criticized in quite a few places, but there were plenty of people who gave merit to what he was saying.

I think it's wise to understand that there are risks inherent to almost any solution, and no just adopt technology for technology's sake -- look at what happened with the election machines, and those damned flash splash pages in the late 90s. I probably need to re-read his article, as I can't remember most of it, but I don't remember it being as pessimistic as people made it out to be.

While "The One" was blasting NAFTA to gain support, he sought to secretly reassure Canadian government, that he has no plans to change the agreement.

His campaign position's on coal kept changing faster, than any hacker could download...

The lowest income, on which the taxes will be increased.

Fortunately, Joe Biden's foreign policy statements like:

When we kicked -- along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, "Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don't know -- if you don't, Hezbollah will control it."

...will confuse any adversary for good...

PS: In-person voter fraud doesn't happen in statistically significant numbers. Despite a five year crackdown by the Department of Justice, there were a whopping 120 prosecutions nationwide resulting in 86 convictions. (Sorry, registration required. Try news.google.com search for "In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud")

Only a handful of these were for double voting. A large chunk involved vote-buying in down-ticket races. Many were for illegal registration (legal resident non-citizens registering to vote), often filling out a "motor voter" section on a drivers licesnse application.

Remember, this big push to prosecute the non-existant voter fraud led to the firing of US attornies by the Bush administration.

Voter fraud is just a strawman argument rasied by Republicans to disenfranchise voters.

Adjust it for inflation and see what it looks like.

It is adjusted for inflation. Also check this graph with a lot more variables blah

The economy has done better when the President is a Democrat than when the President is a Republican.

http://www.slate.com/id/2199810/
http://www.coba.unr.edu/econ/wp/papers/UNRECONWP06008.pdf
http://www.boom2bust.com/2008/09/10/are-democrats-or-republicans-better-for-the-us-economy/

The "known knowns and known unknowns" speech now seems a major contribution to modern philosophy.

What's with the morons taking aim at libertarians? It's not like we have any power outside of the city / state level yet.

http://www.slate.com/id/2202489/

SAP ain't small town or lower class. They are integral to a lot of businesses (whether that's a good thing or not remains to be seen).

People still think that artificial restriction of infinite goods are something that should be legally propped up as a business model, and anything other than that is "communism".

As it happens, there is a somewhat famous case where freedom of speech related tangentially to pedophilia was defended in the United States. (The case involved a suit by the parents of a murdered 10 year old boy, against an organization which apparently advocates a radical alteration of the age of consent, the suit having been brought because it was discovered that one of the two murderers, both adult men, had visited the organization's web site.

Daily Show Reminds Us that NAMBLA is a Joke

Allowing such a suit to proceed would threaten civil discourse. What if the next homicidal whako happens to be a reader of Slate, which published a few articles with more rational discussions of revision to age of consent laws? Rethinking the Age of Consent

Myanmar is the preferred usage, Burmese is acceptable, and to remind readers it was once called Burma when appropriate.

I will refrain from the obvious Times-bashing jokes.

See also: http://www.slate.com/id/2191002/

Some supporting evidence making it hard to fit this prize into an ideological box...

• Here is a very good essay by Edward Glaeser on the work that got Krugman the prize.
• Here is an essay where Krugman takes a liberal reporter to task for misunderstanding and opposing globalization.
• And here is a somewhat more technical essay on why free trade is better than the alternatives even if your trading partners have horrible records on the environment and labor rights.

In his popular writing, including his NY Times column, Krugman is a pretty outspoken liberal on most issues. But within his academic expertise -- which is what he won the prize for -- he is very willing to depart from liberal orthodoxy if that's where logic and evidence lead him.

when your political enemies run the media as a propaganda arm of their party, then whistle innocently or cry "tinfoil hat" when anyone points out the obvious.

Citation, please? Certainly a lot of room for debate that the media is performing propaganda solely for either party, or that there is a monolithic bias to the entire industry. Yes, conventional wisdom says that Fox News slants conservative, and PBS slants liberal, and shame on BOTH of them for it.

When your political enemies start arresting people for wearing "give peace a chance" t-shirts in the mall.

I assume you're referring to the case of Mr. Stephen Downs, in Guilderland, NY? Yes, the dispute reportedly arose from his wearing a "Give Peace a Chance" t-shirt. However, the facts of the case are that he was arrested for refusing to leave private property, and charged with trespassing. The charges were later dropped against him, and the guard who signed the trespass complaint was fired. You can read a good summary of the case law, and why malls aren't considered public property in the sense of free speech protections over at Slate.

When your political enemies create "free speech zones", and their partisan court appointees uphold the obvious constitutional breach

The same free speech zones used repeatedly by both the Democrats and Republicans at their conventions? Let's be intellectually honest at least - neither party is interested in having their elaborately planned proceedings disrupted by minor inconveniences like disagreements.

When your political enemies engage in domestic surveillance which makes watergate look like piss in the ocean.

I assume you're talking about the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program here? Which was, rightfully, exposed & subjected to intense scrutiny & oversight? I'll agree that these programs were disgraceful - but to pretend that nobody in the democratic-controlled congress knew about the programs (or indeed, has continued to vote for bills that support them, such as the recent FISA amendment) is flat-out dishonest.

When your political enemies give rise to a multi-billion dollar industry of astroturfing campaign firms trying to "manufacture" "public support" for their intolerant, totalitarian positions.

Yes, because Democrats never astroturf in the interests of winning a campaign, right? The name David Axelrod sound familiar? (Hint: Chief media strategist for Barack Obama's presidential campaign.) Again, let's not pretend that one side does it, and the other doesn't.

You have to fight dirty too. The age of honor is over.

No, what you should do is throw every stinking, corrupt one of the bunch - Democrats & Republicans - out of office. They represent YOU, so what does it say about you that you turn a blind eye towards ugly tactics in the support of your own principles, and decry them when used by your "political enemies"? The ends do not justify the means. The ends should be achieved by honorable men & women representing their constituents in a conscientious manner. "Eye for an eye" tactics sure don't seem to be the "change" and "reform" both candidates are promising us.

Actually, it's not just Democrats that are/were in on it. It was a bi-partisan screw up.

More info on the Indian EVMs here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_voting_machines

That means the first thing that you did stupid, is chose the way you elect :)

Actually for it's time the way president were elected, via the electoral college, was needed. Some states were more rural while other were more urban with large populations. If the president was elected by popular vote then urban centers would control who was elected president. This is no longer true though, today cities could be either Democrat or Republican, or split. I will say though that I think the passing of the Amendment 12 - Choosing the President, Vice-President, was a mistake. Before it's passage every candidate ran for president. Then in congress the electoral college would vote. If there were more than 2 candidates the candidate with the lowest vote count would be dropped then another vote taken. Eventually when there were only 2 candidates left the final vote would be for who would be president, with the loser becoming vice president. Of course this "robs" political parties of their power so they pushed to have president and vice president run as a team.

Me, I'd rather amend the constitution again. This amendment would repeal the 12th amendment, and would abolish the electoral college. Voters would vote directly for president, with every candidate running for president. Using one of the Condorcet methods of voting the winner would become president and runner up the vp.

For voting itself, paper ballots or e-voting, I propose something like the machines used in India. "Indian EVM compared with Diebold". "The Bombay Ballot".

Falcon

The prophet killed 1200 jews in one of his religious massacres (e.g. google for "khaybar").

Perhaps you are not a native speaker of English. The word "massacre" is generally reserved for cases where one side has no ability to resist the other; the word for what occured at Khaibar, where a 1,400 to 1,800-men army of Muslims attacked a fortress occupied by about 10,000, would be "battle" or "siege". HTH.

That the early Muslims fought a lot of people, no one disputes. We may argue about the justification or brutality of these battles. But to call these battles "religious massacres" is simply inaccurate.

Saying that religiously massacring jews is wrong is saying islam is evil.

So saying that religiously massacring Midianites is wrong is saying Judiasm is evil? And saying that religiously massacring Muslims is wrong means that Hinduism is evil? And saying that religiously massacring Protestants is wrong means that Catholicism is evil? And..well, choose your match-up.

While your point about trying to present a more pithy message is valid, your bullet quote is incorrect.

Barack Obama strongly supports the principle of network neutrality

The difference might appear minor, but this is what the pols do. They get you to believe they support something, but then come back later with BS like "well, what I said was I believe in the principle of foo" - which gives them plenty of room to claim that they never really supported foo, or that you just have a difference of opinion on what foo is, and what you think of foo, s/he never really understood it to mean bar.

Whether it is drilling for domestic fuel, bailing out people who took out loans for homes they couldn't afford (it isn't a tax-payer-funded "bail-out" my senator claims), bridges to nowhere, peanut museums, etc pols will always, always find a way to spin it and make us seem like we don't know what we we're talking about. How often has Sen. Obama said something like "Well, that's not the person (Rev. Wright, William Ayers, Tony Rezko, etc) I knew"? He isn't alone in this two-facedness, it comes from both sides, but the expediency of disassociation from notorious Chicago politics in this case is interesting at least.

It just appears to me as someone who is trying to objectively evaluate the options, that his supporters have drunk the kool-aid. He can't do anything wrong, and any criticism of him, his proposed policies, his past, or the company he keeps, is shouted down or met with cries of racism. It isn't about the exchange of ideas with this guy or his campaign. There is no debate, no discussion. If you don't like the direction he wants to take the country, you're a racist, and that is the only possible reason he might lose. Really sad, and makes me very wary of his administration might do to free speech in this country. From what I've been able to gather, WGN inviting on someone from the left to argue for Obama wasn't good enough. The campaign made an obvious effort to muzzle speech they didn't like - instead of arguing against the content and making their case why it was wrong.

Yesterday I saw Sen. Shumer (D-NY) and Sen. Kyle (R-AZ) on one of the talking heads programs. They obviously disagreed on current events, yet it was civil, respectful, and they both made their arguments well.

To the original point, when you quote a pol, quote them exactly - because every word matters, and they'll use that to play the people and the tax payers like a fiddle. To state flat out that Sen. Obama supports net neutrality is simply not correct.

I'm not sure why you think the Democrats are focussing on Palin, when Obama has done anything but that. Perhaps you're confusing the blogosphere with the real game on the ground?

here is the research providing the links.

Frederick J. Zimmerman, PhD and Dimitri A. Christakis, MD, MPH. "Associations Between Content Types of Early Media Exposure and Subsequent Attentional Problems" PEDIATRICS Vol. 120 No. 5 November 2007, pp. 986-992
L. Rowell Huesmann, Jessica Moise-Titus, Cheryl-Lynn Podolski, and Leonard D. Eron. "Longitudinal Relations Between Children's Exposure to TV Violence and Their Aggressive and Violent Behavior in Young Adulthood: 1977-1992" Developmental Psychology 2003, Vol. 39, No. 2, 201-221.
American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Committee on Public Education. "Media Violence" PEDIATRICS Vol. 108 No. 5 November 2001, pp. 1222-1226
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  http://www.gamecouch.com/2008/02/interview-dr-cheryl-olson-co-author-of-grand-theft-childhood/
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Have you seen what the White House does to people? It sucks their life right out of them. White House years are like dog years. I predict that if elected, McCain will die of a stress-induced heart attack within 2 years and Palin will be President.

Care to bet? An actuarial firm actually did a study of McCain and Obama's likelihood of remaining healthy in office (a better question than 'is he alive?' for determining whether or not they are able to perform the duties of the president). They found that McCain has a 90.3% chance of staying in good health through 2011. Obviously, the chances of him staying alive are higher. I'd take those odds any day.

It came up first on Google, and provided a somewhat biased, but mainly factual overview of what happened. Would you prefer...

Wikipedia
Slate's Leftward view where they paint him as a hero. (I wonder how they treated Bernie Ebbers and Ken Lay?)
The New York Times
The Seattle Times
...or just Google him for crying out loud.

Yeah, that's an old one that has been completely debunked. http://www.slate.com/id/2186786/

Actually, that's only one kind of ad. There are a bunch of different basic types, not all of which attempt to work on subconscious associations. Check it out: http://www.slate.com/id/2170872/nav/tap1/

Actually, this is a significant problem...

The market has a long-term 12% return, but most people only get 4-6% back on their mutual fund investments on average. In fact, the higher your salary, the less your investments tend to return.

This has been known for quite some time.

Why you're such a lousy investor.

For most people, a pension is better. The problem is a lot of pensions aren't much safer.

How Wall Street Wrecked United's Pension

Either way you're taking on significant risk.

In my case, I had the option of investing for myself or having a pension.

Investing for myself is risky, but I know how to invest. While there's almost no way I could invest to the insane level of return that the pension promises, it would require I work at my job for 30 years. I can't guarantee that my job or my pension will be around in 30 years. Moreover, I don't particularly want to be here 30 years.

The problem is, when everyone starts at my job, they get the same options. In the nineties, everyone was picking self investment, because the market was doing insanely well, but now that it's not so good, people can't maintain the value of their investments.

Anyway, to find out more, I highly recommend Frontline's segment Can You Afford to Retire?