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Dell knows exactly what it's doing: establishing and maintaning a confusopoly in the PC business. They intentionally make it hard to figure out the price, because they hope you'll get tired and just accept whatever number is on the screen.

It's just like a bait-and-switch, except harder to prove.

The U.S. is pro-democracy, but only insofar as democracy is a means to guarantee a liberal and limited government. The UN is anything but, because of its member states, who are far more willing (indeed eager) to regulate, limit, and filter the internet. Other nations already have a voice--they just don't have ultimate control. And that's a good thing.

The U.S. is pro-democracy? - only insofar as it serves their intentions by giving it lip service. Historically the USA has been for Democracy only when the democratic process results in a government they find pliant or tolerable.

Our current pretender, Mr. Bush is allied with Musharraf, the Pakistani dictator who overthrew a democratically elected government. The Bush Admin has expended great efforts stretching the truth about N.Korea, Iran and Iraq, while hiding the truth about Pakistan's exportation of nuclear tech to other countries. Up until recently the Bush Administration was happy to ally with one of the world's present day devils, Uzbekistan's Karimov, and even after last May's Uzbek government's Andijon massacre of their protesting citzenry, which was described by one of the protestors with "They shot at us like rabbits", equivocated before supporting the EU demand for an International Inquiry. While this was going on, they had actively tried to destablize Chavez in Venezuela, who won his election. Then there is the Abdullah love pecks.

Are these allies of ours liberal and limited governments? The only reason the Bush Admin presently loudly touts democracy, is that it's the only even half-assed rationale left for Bush's War Upon Iraq. It certainly wasn't waged to get our real enemy, the 911 perps, many of whom have licked their wounds received from Afghanistan battles up in Pakistan.

And this is only our present Administration. The Pro Democracy spin is hype. The American Government is comprised of powermongering control freaks, the truth notwithstanding.

Yeah, so The USA is better than the Dynastic Maoposeur gang's Great Firewall of China, and mainliand's i-net policy of Hu owns Yu; so all your posts are belong to the People's Republic, but the US government is still insidious, and still without a clue. I was spooked to see how a weird-assed robot with a dot mil DNS resolution made a jump across two web domains on a previously invisible thread, in the temporary weblogs, only to have both providers(1 UK and 1 US based) erase its tracks on the permannent logs. Especially since the pages had nothing whatsover to do with "terrorism". One was a satire about Mike Savage's and Alan Ginsburg's frolicking relationship from the past, and the other some political cartoons.

The great terrorist hunters of the Naval War College , investigating adolescent humour poking fun at right-wing homophobia in their herculean attempts to probe and root out the evil doers. They aren't called Rear Admirals for nothing; In The Navy...

The USA politicians want control of the internet only for the sake of control, and for the advantages they can then provide to their cronies.

It is astonishing that "fair and balanced" FoxNews would only be getting the story from sources that are on only one side of the issue. Especially since the soruces appear to be in the back pocket of Microsoft. Must be a simple matter of forgetting to check their sources. I doubt the ever so ethical journalists there would present a slanted story in favor of some large corporation.

Never judge a book by its' cover - or an organization by its' title...

And hes quoting an article by Citizens Against Government Waste who are also a lobby group with close ties to Microsoft.

They are recyciling each other's crap.

That is only natural. In the fiercely competetitive sector of lobbying, market forces guarantee that competing service providers will use every available method to produce their services cheaper to stay competitive. This constant strive for efficiency is what makes capitalistic system of offering lobbying services in a free market such a superior alternative to the communistic tradition of state-owned and centrally managed lobby groups with their unrealistic five-year plans.

And hes quoting an article by Citizens Against Government Waste who are also a lobby group with close ties to Microsoft.

They are recyciling each other's crap.

The guy who wrote the article for foxnews, James Pendergrast, works for:

Americans for Technology Leadership

Read all about the pro-Microsoft jobs they do:

here

Sourcewatch has some pretty good information on ATL and the very right-winged netblock owner for Pendergast's website.

Sourcewatch has some pretty good information on ATL and the very right-winged netblock owner for Pendergast's website.

By reading the Article I was surprised by their argument. Not only is it flimsy, it just doesn't add up.

Now I know why....

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=America ns_for_Technology_Leadership

We need to get in contact with Fox News and see that this stops here.

foxnewsonline@foxnews.com

From http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=America ns_for_Technology_Leadership

<SNIP>
Americans for Technology Leadership was founded by Jonathan Zuck in 1999 as a "grassroots" organisations for concerned consumers who want less regulation in the technology sector. It also campaigns on general tech issues such as spam.

It has been frequently described as a Microsoft front group. [1] (http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor /archives/000421.shtml)
[2] (http://www.aaxnet.com/news/M010823.html)
[3] http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/blog/computers /tanks.html

In August 2001 the Los Angeles Times reported that a ATL was behind a "carefully orchestrated nationwide campaign to create the impression of a surging grass-roots movement" behind Microsoft. "The campaign, orchestrated by a group partly funded by Microsoft, goes to great lengths so that the letters appear to be spontaneous expressions from ordinary citizens. Letters sent in the last month are printed on personalized stationery using different wording, color and typefaces--details that distinguish those efforts from common lobbying tactics that go on in politics every day. Experts said there's little precedent for such an effort supported by a company defending itself against government accusations of illegal behavior."

According to the Times, the campaign was discovered when Utah's Attorney General at the time Mark Shurtleff received letters "purportedly written by at least two dead people ... imploring him to go easy on Microsoft Corp. for its conduct as a monopoly."

Eighteen state's attorneys general were joining with the Justice Department in its anti-trust suit against Microsoft. Iowa's Attorney General Tom Miller reported receiving more than 50 letters in support of Microsoft during the summer of 2001. "No two letters are identical, but the giveaway lies in the phrasing," the Times wrote. "Four Iowa letters included this sentence: 'Strong competition and innovation have been the twin hallmarks of the technology industry.' Three others use exactly these words: "If the future is going to be as successful as the recent past, the technology sector must remain free from excess regulation."

Dewey Square Group and DCI Group sibling firm DCI/New Media are credited with assisting Microsoft with its "grass-roots" campaign, according to the Times.
</SNIP>

I wrote an e-mail to Foxnews using my gmail account. Besides answering some of Pendergast's claims, I quoted sourcewatch and said a couple of things to them. Let's see how they answer.

From http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=America ns_for_Technology_Leadership

Americans for Technology Leadership was founded by Jonathan Zuck in 1999 as a "grassroots" organisations for concerned consumers who want less regulation in the technology sector. It also campaigns on general tech issues such as spam.

It has been frequently described as a Microsoft front group.

ATL's domain name, techleadership.org, is registered to the Association for Competitive Technology. The site is hosted by Thomas E. Stock and Thomas J. Synhorst's LLC, TSE Enterprises. Synhorst is a founding member of the DCI Group, a Washington DC-based strategic consulting and lobbying firm which has counted Microsoft as a prime client for a number of years.

The FoxNews hatchetjob on open document formats is written by the Exec Director of a Microsoft lobbyist. Anyone who gets any news from Fox needs to set their "taint" bit. As in "Fox News: 't ain't never true!".

It's James Prendergast.. Who's he? Well, he works for Americans for Technology Leadership. And who are they? Well, last time they made the news, it was for a letter writing campaign, in support of Microsoft, in which thousands of largely identical letters were sent, including a number from dead people.

Can you say "Astroturfing"?

Just the ones watching Fox News.

Additionally, his research interests on that UVA page (where he is the CATO Institute Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies) include:

The core issue over the next ten years will not be "How much will the climate warm?" but, rather, "Why did it warm so little?" My research also leads me to believe that the next decade will see the emergence of a paradigm of "robust earth," as opposed to the fashionable "fragility" concept. The papers listed below provide some evidence for these observations. It is entirely possible that human influence on the atmosphere is not necessarily deleterious and that it is simply another component of the dynamic planet.

Ok, so let's look at 'Tech Central Station,' the location hosting the article the free republic is referencing. Dr. Michaels articles on there include:
  Stepping up the Pressure:The all-out, last-ditch effort by global warming alarmists to find any excuse to compel the US to take action.
  Tip of the Iceberg:Yet another predictable distortion.
  Conjecture vs. Science: Are the editors of Science are more interested in conjecture than in firm scientific findings?
 

And, incidentally, as stated on the About TCS webpage, 'Tech Central Station' is published by DCI Group, LLC. And, DCI LLC is "top Republican lobby and PR firm associated with telemarketing company Feather Larson & Synhorst DCI and the direct-mail firm FYI Messaging. The DCI group publishes the website Tech Central Station and has close ties to the George W. Bush administration." according to Source watch.

This is pretty clearly an guy who does not buy into global warming as a concept, despite near universal agreement in the scientific community. To hear him proclaim 'no its not' arguments to scientific articles in both Nature and Science seems to carry rather little weight...particularly when he is publishing on a clearly partisan website. Write a Science/Nature (or hell PNAS, whatever) article refuting this, have it peer-reviewed and then there might be some reason to talk. Until that point, this is little more than personal ideaology posing as "science."

-Ted

Like a proper little Darwin

Like a proper little Darwin

That's according to SEPP, a body funded by Exxon, Shell, Unocal and ARCO. The article was written by the editor of a newsletter by CEI, an "organization dedicated to advancing the principles of free enterprise and limited government".

That might go some way towards explaining why the figure given for North America's carbon emissions is less than a third of the figure given on wikipedia.

Indeed. Their choice of name seems cynical and manipulative in light of their publication list.

The AdTI has taken a few potshots at Linux and Open Source in general. The one that caught my attention was the paper by Ken Brown entitled Samizdat where he claimed that Linux Torvalds based used code from Minix as the basis for Linux. Subsequent investigation showed that Brown grossly msirepresented the position of those he interviewded in his research, including Andrew Tannenbaum, the author of Minux who told Brown in no uncertain terms that this was not the case.

It is a measure of how laughably skewed the paper was that even Microsoft came ot dismiss the report as being less than helpful.

Slashdot has discussed the AdTI before as well.

Apparently, you need to learn the difference between the count of glaciers vs. size of glaciers.It is why the GP refers to Antarctica "Monster" glaciers. All alpine glaciers (whose total count is much higher than the total number on Antarctica) are receding. In addition, glaciers on greenland are receding.

"The ocean temperatures are rising"
And you thought the Texans were distorting data? More reading material for you.

Anyway, what's the crime here? About 0.11 C of ocean warming in 40 years. That's 0.027C per decade, which is several times lower than the initial estimates for ocean warming that got this issue onto the front burner in the first place. The bottom line is that warming of the next 100 years is going to be wimpy. That can be gleaned from another model used in the same paper, which does not have volcanoes and assumes the sun is constant. It gives an ocean warming rate that corresponds to about 0.6C in the next 100 years, which translates to a total global warming only around 1.4C. This is far from the 5.8C making the newspapers these days.

So now your debate is not that ocean warming is occurring, but the degree of it? In fact, here is a more telling link. Why the man would call himself an authority and then threaten to sue because experts in the field declared him a 2-bit player, is beside me. Reminds me of a SCO type guy.

Yes, BS needs to be stopped, but I would say that I will listen to real experts, rather than self-proclaimed nobodies.

Because once you have tenure there is little they can do to you. Short of academic fraud you can make all sorts of wild, unfounded, or simply off-the-beaten path claims you like.

As for CATO your own,, has an entry. One of the external links of interest is available but is available here.

I don't have either the information or inclination to say whether cato is reliable, but I don't doubt your claim. However, from the top of the article:

Richard S. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

If the article is somehow misused or not representative of his original publication, someone should let him know. If Richard S. Lindzen isn't reliable, why is he still at MIT?

I don't seek to assert that the claims in the article are correct, just that they merit consideration, and the whole concept of global warming is not necessarily a fact, or due to CO2. We don't know yet, but the article presents a valid, well argued view on the situation. Read it. Cato sicken you? MIT PDF google cache of pdf

To be fair, Article questioning Lindzen's integrity.

NO! That is a recipe for continuation of the status quo. They BOTH need to feel the heat NOW. Otherwise the Dems will take over and think their social agenda of increasing the loss of our freedoms for different reasons was the cause of their "success" at the polls. You wind up in a perpetual seesaw resulting in the steady elimination of all rights equally between the two. You repeatedly trade bully one for bully two, then reverse and repeat.

There is nothing you or I can do to stop the pendulum of the bi-polar polity, other than convince enough people who will vote to actually change it. There was a chance at a third party with clout, but Buchanan, the Republican loyalist to the end, took the FEC money and trashed them in 2000. Demcorats still blame Nader, the fools, they should be blaming Buchanan, Perot and Ventura.

In the current circumstances, the best that can be achieved is an evenness of parties, and the abrasion that comes with it. I think that a large part of the economic boom in the 90's was due to the great friction between the parties. Neither side had enough power to suck their vigorish off of the top, and the free market that could, did. The equities traders screwed it up, but equity traders should be dealt with. If they didn't venture for capitalisation of the business, they are leeches, sucking from the valuation of the compensation provided to the producers of the product.

An Abridged Listing Why I Beat Upon Republicans Presently

The republicans have gained the upper hand in large part by betraying both their core ideology and the Dreamtime America. NeoConservatism's maturation can be traced from marxism to trotskyite CIA stooges to Scoop Jackson DemoHawks to Reagan to the Son of Bush. They have never given up the marxist trait of spewing rhetoric, the truth notwithstanding. The self-confessed American traitor, David Horrowitz calls Kerry and Fonda traitors, and is given stature within the Right. The putrescence of moral relevancy oozing from the partisan defense of a president who fixed the intelligence and the facts around his policy of familial vengence, and took America into an unrighteous conflict without contemplating the aftermath. a president who sings sweet songs of liberty and democracy, yet gives aid to dictatorial destroyers of democracy, has liasons with leaders loathsome of liberty, and goes out on ManDates with Saudi Princes who come to the USA laden with extra baggage.

When did conservatives begin to support due process of law applied inequally to humans? That is a high crime against America, yet they still repeatedly remind us that a stained blue dress is impeachable? Why not decry Blood-Stained Iraq Sands?

Bush's SCOTUS nomimee Roberts is a dangerous and activist judge who DOES NOT adjudicate using original intent, and all the country can think about is which way he'll decide on abortion cases. His assent in the Hamdi v Rumsfeld appeal is frightful. It posits that a president is above the very law that legitimises his power, stating this is a function of war power, in a war upon unstated enemies, of an indeterminate duration. Why hasn't anyone asked Roberts just what the hell he was doing during that ongoing criminal enterprise: The Reagan Administration? This is ano

That is why it was worded as "serious consequences" instead of "military action" for example, no?

This was the intent behind the statement.

I guess my little exposé of the illogic of claiming to know hidden "intents" behind plain statements which do not convey them went over your head. I suppose then, that you had in depth conversations with the UN ambassadors, at which, behind the closed doors, they did explain to you what they really meant by "serious consequences", so that someone of such cosmic importance to the world as yourself would not be so needlessly kept in the dark, no? Or, alternatively, a position I humbly subscribe to, you just made shit up to fit your supremacist fantasies.

No you didn't. You simply restated the quote I provided, and attributed it to Powell yourself. Doesn't change the facts.

In response to your quote of:

Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix has said Iraq had failed to provide evidence in its declaration to prove that it no longer has weapons of mass destruction

I pointed out this CNN article titled "Powell lays out path in Iraq dispute", which contains your text verbatim. Word "Annan" does not occur there even once. You on the other hand, did not provide a link to your source. This is the example of your "arguments ... all backed by facts which have been cited, unlike your wild accusations and paranoid delusions".

Perhaps that procedure of yours of breaking bricks with your forehead before typing anything, which you employ to get your "thinking juices" going, has some side effects?

So I thought you might be interested to know the actual definition of the term 'strawman'.

Sure. Here is one. And another. And another. I was even as generous as to provide you with a clarification of the particular definition I was referring to, quoting myself: "Building and attacking mis-representations of your opponents position ", about which Wikipedia states that "Some logic textbooks define the straw-man fallacy only as a misrepresented argument".

You on the other hand, as expected, dug up some poor approximation, quoted it and promptly misunderstood it. Another example of your "informed" position.

You have accused me - six times no less! - of creating weak or sham arguments for you to easily refute. ... So you are claiming that I am purposefully making weak arguments for you to defeat?

Your lack of comprehension (or desperation to deceive) is truly of heroic proportions. Let me repeat again: "Building and attacking mis-representations of your opponents position ". As in, you are doing both the building and attacking. Like, oh I don't know, when accused of "building and attacking your opponent's position" you then proceed to pretend that it means you building the representations and then me attacking them ... and go down hill from there.

Stawman Fallacy! Remember these words, because that is what you do most of the time. At least now you know that your bullshit has a name. Which must hurt, because, judging by your general attitude, you probably "thought" you invented that crap all by yourself.

I believe what you were actually trying to claim is that I am using 'red herring' arguments, not 'strawman' arguments.

"Strawman" argument is a specific type of "red herring" argument. Close but no cigar.

It's okay, by this time I've grown used to educating you.

You must mean you have grown used to being educated by me, as this example clearly shows

All of this is a big smokescreen to cover up truly newsworthy events the media is trying to ignore.

Yes, he does hold out the promise of a reasonable approach, but unfortunately he's a highly compromised advocate for industry. His history as a shill is fairly well known locally in BC, once it was outed how tightly he was wound up with the nasty spinmeisters at Burson Marstellar, but elsewhere he's held up as a poster boy. Too bad.

----
Burson Marstellar - Managing perceptions that drive performance -- their slogan.

Yes, he does hold out the promise of a reasonable approach, but unfortunately he's a highly compromised advocate for industry. His history as a shill is fairly well known locally in BC, once it was outed how tightly he was wound up with the nasty spinmeisters at Burson Marstellar, but elsewhere he's held up as a poster boy. Too bad.

----
Burson Marstellar - Managing perceptions that drive performance -- their slogan.

"Just like we had no obligation to the rest of the world in both world wars. we went in not because we were obligated, but because it was the right thing to do."

We entered WW I because the Germans sank the Lusitania. Even though they published a full page ad in American Newspapers warning people sailing to Britain that any ship carrying war goods was subject to sinking, (which the Lusitania was), when it was sunk with americans onboard we got sucked into the war.

We entered WW II because of Pearl Harbor.

Before BOTH incidents the majority of people here in the US were Isolationalist. Doing the "right" thing, had nothing to do with our entrance into either war.

"and if we were in iraq for the oil, we sure as hell wouldn't be paying opec's prices for it."

I'd suggest you read Wolfowitz's papers for the Project for a New American Century to understand why we invaded Iraq. Iraq not only has the 2nd largest oil reserves, but being centrally located in the middle east it is the perfect place to have permanent military bases.

Keep in mind this was written in the 1990's long before 9/11 and the whole preemptive strike/WMD
tale.

Anyhow, it is a kind of tautological system, wealthy people fund politicians, PR firms, lobbyists, think tanks and whatnot. They also own most of the major media, and even PBS is starting to look like it has commercials between shows.

The majority shareholders of finance companies pay some think tanks to make the case for eliminating bankruptcy protections (unless you're wealthy) or to privatize social security. Then they pay lobbyists, and finance campaigns of candidates they support, the politicians start talking about this. Their employees - editorialists for the newspapers, magazine and TV networks they hand out the party line like the commissars of the USSR used to.

Perhaps a better example for us was the supposed shortage of high-tech labor in the late 1990s. Only one senator voted not to lift the number of H1-Bs coming into the country. I believe the "shortage" was manufactured, but now that there is a glut of foreign IT workers in the country where is the movement to correct it? There isn't much of one - the big money likes a labor glut, and as far as IT workers, there's a variety of tools to wield against them doing anything about it - all that money, various laws to prevent worker organizing, IT workers who think they're brilliant and everyone else is beneath them and only losers worry about things like this.

The scariest thing for me is when I sit at a table and hear someone repeat word-for-word - word-for-word (!) something said on TV to get them to think a certain way. I have been in focus groups and know that they are just saying those exact phrases to make people think a certain way. This entire propaganda system doesn't disturb me as much as when I hear the people around me repeating the propaganda message, word-for-word like it was said on TV, back to me. It's like their brain hasn't done any processing except acceptance of the message that came from the TV, via the PR firm, via the focus group, via the company, via the wealthy majority shareholders of that company. That is what I find scarier than the whole propaganda system.

Wikipedia may look open and mutable at first, but it is not. Most people learn this the hard way, get discouraged and stop contributing to wiki encyclopedias altogether. I am/was very involved in Wikipedia over the past year, and say this from experience. Hopefully the painful frustration around this discovery will not prevent people from contributing to wiki encyclopedia's other than Wikipedia. Unfortunately, most people begin getting frustrated, think they can beat the system, then disappear from Wikipedia and every other wiki encyclopedia altogether, which is unfortunate. Even Wikipedia administrators like w:User:172 and w:User:secretlondon have been badgered off of Wikipedia, not to mention a host of users.

While Wikipedia itself will always be the way it is, articles are licensed under the GFDL, which is one positive thing. Unfortunately, most of the articles are garbage. Even the well-written articles have other people come in later and introduce the same bias you can find in the corporate media. It is like gold surrounded by dung. If I transfer a Wikipedia article to another wiki, I almost always use an old version of it, before people came in and started modifying it.

Good wikis to check out are:

• Infoshop's OpenWiki - a general wiki with an anarchist bent (and run in an authoritarian fashion)
• Anarchopedia - a general wiki with an anarchist bent (and run in an anarchic fashion)
• Sourcewatch (was "Disinfopedia")- a good progressive wiki with a focus on think tanks, lobbyists, public relations firms and so forth
• dKosopedia - a "left/progressive/liberal/Democratic" wiki
• Demopedia - the "liberal/progressive" Democratic Underground's wiki

I urge you to contribute to these wiki's for historical, political, economic and other such subjects as Wikipedia is hopeless for these topics. The views reflect the owner's, which is as it almost always is. Thus, you will feel better building the new society within the shell of the old in these other places, where you will be part of a welcoming instead of hostile community. And of course, especially since Wikipedia uses the GNU FDL, continue to contribute to pages on the w:brontosaurus and such, but realize that Wikipedia will always have biased historical articles, and trying to fight it is pointless, the deck is stacked against you. We'll write our history on these wiki's, the conservatives will write theirs on Wikipedia and other wikis, and that's how it is.

As with software, there's ambiguity in the meaning of the English word "free". Most of the discussion here is focussing on "free as in beer". Price is important to many, natually enough, not least because of the intrusion required online to make sure you've paid.

But I suspect a lot of /.ers are more concerned with "free as in speech". This is often, but not always, connected to the pricing. "Free" newspapers are owned by businesses whose reason for publishing is to make money: if you're not paying upfront for the paper, then all their revenue is coming from ads, and they thererefore have even more need to keep their editorial policy in line with their advertisers. It's already been pointed out above that supposedly "independent" news media like the BBC aren't all that independent: running a news site really well costs money, and the BBC is still reliant on an increasingly pushy and spin-loving UK government to pay its bills.

Having a no-charge business model also puts pressure on costs, and makes getting cheap or "free" (i.e. no-cost) content all the more attractive. The independence of the reporting can suffer as a result. The NYT has coincidentally just run a story about how the White House is pushing pro-government "news" stories to the networks, paid for by the taxpayer, which don't always clue the viewer who produced them. This isn't necessarily a conspiracy, it's just "good business". The same conflict of interest exists in a corporate-owned newspaper, online or hardcopy.

I think many people attribute a sense of mission to their news provider. Some people think FOX tells it "fair and balanced", and watch it for that reason. Good for them. I personally would rather watch Bullwinkle re-runs than FOX News, but that's beside the point. Consciously or unconsciously, a lot of people believe that their favorite news provider is mostly "telling the truth" about what's going on in the world, and are unable or unwilling to see conflicts of interest, especially when they're unaware of how their favorite news provider's business model works. I simply don't believe that a GE-owned news business is always going to tell the truth about what GE gets up to.

The one large-scale attempt that I'm aware of to build a global news network which is free both of corporate and government control is Indymedia. Their quality varies anywhere from excellent first-hand reporting, to the truly awful. Freedom is like that: you have the freedom to write something which some people really want to hear, and other people really hate. The US and some European govts have been cracking down on Indymedia lately, which doesn't bode well for freedom of speech. This is true even if you don't like Indymedia's anarchist/left-wing editorial policy: people have the right to report the news as they see it. You equally have a right to redress if lies are told about you.

So the Indymedia model is far from perfect. How then can an international news network operate which is free of both corporate and government interference? If 100% free-as-in-freedom news isn't possible without a regular revenue stream, then how do you at least maximize the freedom AND the quality of the content?

PS: BugMeNot helps you skirt around that "free" registration with the NYT.

Source: Wi-Fi Networking News, February 1, 2005

Glenn Fleishman has done a neat job of identifying some of the leading groups and individuals that are trying to stop U.S. municipalities from setting up wireless internet systems, such as the Heartland Institute and the New Millennium Research Council, "a sock puppet for the incumbent telecommunications interests" that don't want municipalities to compete with their own private, for-profit services. According to tech columnist Dan Gillmor , the anti-WiFi campaign is yet another example of the "ongoing scandal" of "lack of transparency in the world of opinion-making. ... What we have today is a system of opinion laundering, where powerful interests try to create public support for their side of issues without disclosing the hidden agendas."

Source: Wi-Fi Networking News, February 1, 2005

Glenn Fleishman has done a neat job of identifying some of the leading groups and individuals that are trying to stop U.S. municipalities from setting up wireless internet systems, such as the Heartland Institute and the New Millennium Research Council, "a sock puppet for the incumbent telecommunications interests" that don't want municipalities to compete with their own private, for-profit services. According to tech columnist Dan Gillmor , the anti-WiFi campaign is yet another example of the "ongoing scandal" of "lack of transparency in the world of opinion-making. ... What we have today is a system of opinion laundering, where powerful interests try to create public support for their side of issues without disclosing the hidden agendas."

Just thought I'd mention that ActivistCash.com is a site run by the "Center for Consumer Freedom" -- a front group for the restaurant, bar, and food processing industries (which probably has something to do with why the site is so focused on PETA and Mothers Against Drunk Driving). Among their other projects, CCF has campaigned in the past against the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Just a point of reference to help you evaluate the information presented there.

Administrative Contact:
Center for Consumer Freedom (WXZCXFOFKO) bowers@ConsumerFreedom.com
1775 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Suite 1200
Washington, DC 20006
US
202-463-7112

. Ah, there's the number for Bergman, 202-463-7100, same answering machine as Center for Consumer Freedom. Interesting how this address is just a few doors down from the white house - couldn't be a lobbyist firm could it? Maybe source watch got it right after all.
Must be tough keeping all those organizations strait.

...ah the things that Speakeasy's unlimited long distance has done to my spare time...

For a list of "scientists" who are really shills for big industry denying global warming, see:
environmentaldefense.org
Also, when your right-wing relatives start citing contrary "legitimate sources", it's always good to look them up at the Disinfopedia:
sourcewatch.org
Here you can easily identify sheep-skinned pundits and astroturfers.

Who is behind "Activist Cash"?

Don't get me wrong, it does look like the UCS is partisan. But it's not like the rebuttal is coming from a totally neutral voice, either.

You don't want to be like those uneducated people who buy already grown food, or already assembled cars do you ?

If you buy food from someone who tells you that he will sue you if you tinker with his food (like Monsanto) and THEN you tinker with it anyway and are surprised that you got sued, then you are equally stupid as those "hackers" in this story. If, on the other hand, you only want ready consumer goods and will gladly give up your rights to do anything with them, then good luck. Your examples are flawed because proprietary software is not like already grown food -- it's more like Monsanto seeds. Proprietary software is not like already assembled car -- it's more like a car with welded hood when dealer tells you that he will sue you if you dare to open it, in a shrink-wrap "license" you find in your trunk after you already buy the car. Free Software is not like growing your own food but like sharing the recipes and not suing anyone who "steals" your idea of a good meal. It's really sad that even people on Slashdot fail to understand that not-so-subtle difference.

For a better idea of who the Heartland Institute are one need only consult Sourcewatch, the web site formerly known as the Disinfopedia. The opinions of the Heartland Institute cannot be trusted, ever. I rank them down at the bottom with the Alexis de Toqueville Institute's FUD about FOSS.

The US supported dictatorships in Argentina and Uruguay, too, that's part of Plan Condor (http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Operat ion_Condor/.

In Uruguay, the left (FA) was the minority in that time, but they made the mistake of having a 350k+ people public gathering, in a country with 1.5 million voters.
The elections were stolen from the favorite a center-leftist to say the least, with a little help from the CIA (e.g.: dead people voting, burned votes, it's not clear who would have won otherwise), and were won by the the authoritarian extreme right that later gave the government to the military for 11 dark years .
"Special forces" got trained in Panama by US forces, in special "intelligence" techniques, like the ones you have seen in iraq performed to prisoners. They used them on comunists and tupamaros (a guerrilla group that was already completely in jail), and on everybody they didn't like.

Those military groups wouldn't have ever attained that power without the lots of support from the outside that they got. Of course, the US were not as important in Uruguay as in other countries, but it shows the kind of support they had for such regimes in south America.

If they're truly fake, it shouldn't be hard to disprove what they're saying, and you shouldn't have to resort to logical fallacies to discredit them. Ad hominem attacks have no place in science.

What they're saying has been disproved. There is no scientific debate on these points:

• global climate change is occuring,
• some part of this change is due to human activity
• the change is a potential threat to the well-being of humans

What's happening here isn't science. The "Scientific Alliance" was founded by Robert Durward, a quarry owner who is known for his extremist views (he describes himself as "a businessman who is totally fed up with all this environmental stuff" and thinks Tony Blair ought to "declare martial law and let the army sort out our schools, hospitals, and roads as well"), and by political shill Mark Adams.

This PR and corporate shillery, no different than research sponsored by tobacco companies that claimed no link between cigarettes and cancer. It is entirely approriate to label it as such.

(Yes, one can fine a few credentialed scientists who honestly disagree. One can also find a few cosmologists who still hold to the Steady State theory, even the odd biologist who holds with creationism. That doesn't mean there's any lack of a scientific consensus on these issues.)

Kenny Boy

Kenny Boy

The BBC article seems to take this Scientific Alliance (even the name drips of corporate PR'ism) at face value, either that or the British sense of sarcasm so dry as to be beyond subtle.

So, I looked them up myself and found the following links pretty quickly:

SourceWatch and GMwatch which seem to coroborate the claims of duplicitousness in the original submission.

But at some point politics has to enter the picture. A bunch of academic scientists convinced that we are heading for trouble are never going to be able to do anything about it by themselves. They need to convince those with real power first. Hence the "task force of senior politicians, business leaders and academics from around the world". So you are almost right. It's no longer just science, it is moving into the realm of politics. And that is as it should be.

One biased resource (rightwing) is "Activist Cash":
http://www.activistcash.com/

If wish to check things out from a slightly "leftwing" bias, you might check out "SourceWatch" (formerly "Disinfopedia"):

http://www.sourcewatch.org/

You might also want to check out general resources like "Wikipedia":

http://en.wikipedia.org

Center for American Progress

They are a very old Libertarian think tank. They have an agenda and an axe to grind. They believe that all legislation regulating the economy is bad. It would be unlikely that they would reach a conclusion that anti-trust laws are a good thing.