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It appears no one/few checked out the rules for leaving comments on that forum. the jerk violated the rules, then did it again at least once. (other versions of the story have it being done multiple times). When you abuse a site, expect the site to try to stop you anyway they can.

You're posting vulgar, sexually oriented comments from your workplace? Sorry - you just violated the standard workplace rules about sexually harassing activities that are now standard practice in corporate America.

Oh - you work at a school?

Well then, You not only violated the working policies but you also (in today's freaked out America where everything is terrorism ) just turned on the "public pedophile/child abuser frenzy mode". [even if you're not a pedophile]. You will be gone from that school in moments and if you resist or try to fight it, the local community will burn you in Effigy. ( a small but nearby town).

yes its all hypersenstive crapola but that's the way it is in the new politically Palinized (formerly "Bushified") America. Politically based emotional manipulation will turn everything into a fear-based Hysteria-of-the-mobs event.

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/help/stories.nsf/termsofservice/story58C6115339C8CADB8625706800596EE1?OpenDocument

to their latest poll in the same section. Unfortunately the poll about strangest foods is closed...

http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/talk-of-the-day/talk-of-the-day/2009/11/have-you-ever-truly-gone-hungry/

Of course, I can't attach these comments to the article itself, because comments are disabled there now even though the story is only three days old.

There is another food-related story on now, to which you can still post: Have you ever truly gone hungry?. Just post your comments and followup jokes there instead. Just use a suitable proxy if you value your continued employment.

or maybe just doesn't like pussy, to deal with it.

Probably. Indeed, 20 minutes ago, I posted a banana comment to today's food story, and it is still up...

Sure you you answer: "Never, as there is always some tasty pussy around me" or something similar. Or "Never, as there is always some tasty banana nearby" if that's the way you swing.

I wonder where - in the St. Louis Dispatch policies - it states for employees to track down the ip address of those making offensive (but not illegal) posts and then contact the work.

Right here: http://www.stltoday.com/help/privacy-policy

Our web servers automatically collect limited information about your computer's connection to the Internet, including your IP address (but not the e-mail address), when you visit our sites. Your IP address does not contain personally identifiable information, nor does it identify you personally.

Oh wait...

Well, maybe here:

We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information. In some cases, however, we may provide information to legal officials as described in "Compliance with Legal Process" below.

Hmm no, that would make what he did against his own terms of service...
But wait, i see that compliance with legal process part now, so I'm sure it gives them permission there:

Compliance with Legal Process
We may disclose personal information if we or one of our affiliated companies is required by law to disclose personal information, or if we believe in good faith that such action is necessary to comply with a law or some legal process, to protect or defend our rights and property, to protect against misuse or unauthorized use of our web sites or to protect the personal safety or property of our users or the public.

Oh, holy crap. No laws were broken, so nothing in their terms states they can do this, and plenty of places state they can't.

If anyone needs fired, it's the ass at this paper that violated his own companies TOS, as well as broke the law to do it.

Should this Kurt guy have blown the whistle, or kept his mouth shut? Dunno. Depends on how you feel about whistle-blowers. Maybe he has kids in that school...

From TFA:

"Then there's Rocky Mountain oysters. They're good, too. Fans of a certain Illinois festival know what I'm talking about. 'Nuf said."

I'm not worried about some teacher who's eaten pussy. Lotta people eat pussy.

I'm worried about the fact that Kurt Greenbaum's eaten balls. And liked it. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But even Mr. T. had his limits back in the "Mr. T Ate My Balls" meme. The balls that Mr. T ate were always human balls, but Kurt Greenbaum doesn't eat human balls. He eats the balls of animals. And he says so right there in his own article.

Using your employer's time to violate your employer's privacy policy to ruin the career of a guy whose only offence was to make a wisecrack about eating pussy is bad enough. But doing it after just having used your employer's website to tell the entire world that you've eaten bovine testicles turns your poor judgement into hypocrisy of the highest order. Mr. Greenbaum, you can eat all the balls you want on your own time. But keep that kind of smut off your employer's website. There are children reading, for fuck's sake :)

Now consider the following (bold text by me):

http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/the-editors-desk/the-editors-desk/2009/11/post-a-vulgar-comment-while-youre-at-work-lose-your-job/all-comments/

By mid-morning, a number of folks had commented about their experiences with Bird’s Nest Soup, octopus, cow brains and rattlesnake. Then, while I was in our 10 a.m. news meeting, someone posted in reply a single word, a vulgar expression for a part of a woman’s anatomy. It was there only a minute before a colleague deleted it.

A few minutes later, the same guy posted the same single-word comment again. I deleted it, but noticed in the WordPress e-mail alert that his comment had come from an IP address at a local school. So I called the school. They were happy to have me forward the e-mail, though I wasn’t sure what they’d be able to do with the meager information it included. About six hours later, I heard from the school’s headmaster. The school’s IT director took a shine to the challenge. Long story short: Using the time-frame of the comments, our website location and the IP addresses in the WordPress e-mail, he tracked it back to a specific computer. The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot.

So we have an individual who was using work assets to make not one, but two vulgar posts. It kinda makes you wonder how intent was this guy in checking that web page over and over (like many slashdoters do), re-posting the vulgarity as many times as needed... not the type of activity you are supposed to be doing while on the clock (after all, they give you a paycheck for work, not because you are pretty or something.)

The school was in the right in asking the guy "what are you doing, ON THE CLOCK, with OUR COMPUTER ASSETS, posting the same profanity several times?

It is also worth noting that the school didn't fire him, but that he quit on the spot... or so says the story, but that's irrelevant anyways. The guy had it coming.

Now I can't way to see the juvenile posters making this a case of libertarian freedom of speech vs 1984'esque police control and the war on terror.

"""
We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information.
"""
    -- http://www.stltoday.com/help/privacy-policy

For anyone interested in what and where the blog in question is: http://stlmealdeals.blogspot.com/. It is not law related, it has to do with restaurant deals in the St Louis area which is where she recently relocated to. Reference: http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/stl-jobwatch/uncategorized/2009/10/re-located-to-st-louis-nyc-lawyer-learns-the-price-of-honesty/

Get out under that fucking rock you live under and watch as this bill is attempted to being rammed down the throat of the American public.

What bill? Did Obama submit one? Or are you talking about all the bills floating around congress Obama had nothing to do with? And you are wrong, Bush not Obama imprisoned people denying them habeas corpus and pushed the unitary executive theory wherein the president holds almost all power. Actually those still at Gitmo, whom Bush put there, Obama wants to put on trial. If that your definition of tyranny then you need to learn what it really is. May I suggest OneLook.

This search warrant is not evidence that the sky is falling.

Not in this case but news like this is becoming very commonplace.

If you are aware of the Missouri MIAC documents or the Virginia Terrorism threat assessment document then you know that law enforcement are basically being trained to think you are a possible terrorist unless you do nothing but sit at home and watch televison all day.

So far you're right. Unemployment in the Great Depression was around 30% and was still 20% when WWII started. By next year we could very well be in a depression, though.

That's a hard statement for me to accept.. given that we don't even really have a definition of depression. We have a period in history called the Great Depression.. that's about it. Saying we may well get that bad I feel is a stretch.

Actually, yes. I know employed people who eat at the St. John's breadline. And there's a charity food bank on South Grand that has lines going down the street on Saturday mornings.

I'd have to double check, but I believe IL has been one of the states harder hit by the economy. I certainly haven't seen anything in my city. Food banks have seen a rise in need, but I hardly think it matches anything in the Great Depression.

AND they didn't have food stamps back in the '30s.

Food stamps pay very little. I'm guessing you're suggesting that we might not see breadlines is because people are getting food stamps.

And Springfield hasn't really been hit that hard by the recession, as its main "industry" is state government.

Huh? IL state goverment is in some pretty serious finanical trouble, according to this. State employees all over are being let go or having pay cut as state goverments suddenly have no income. So I wouldn't be suprised if things were worse in Springfield accordingly.

Actually the 70s were worse than now (so far); higher unemployment, stagnant wages, and high inflation. Economically it was a very bad time to be a young man. However, in other respects I miss the 70s.

Well, I can't say I have any firsthand knowledge, just the research I did on recessions of the past. I think it's encouraging that we aren't as bad as the 70s.. we might not get that bad either. Nobody really knows. Of course, government spending didn't get us out of the Great Depression, WW2 did. Hopefully that won't be the only way for us to get out of this mess... but fortunately we seem pretty far off from getting that bad.

Pot was going to be lagal "any day now", and as there was cheap and effective birth control and there were no STDs that weren't easily curable, women would come up and ask "wanna fuck?" The only ones that do that these days are prostitutes.

Ha. Well HIV started in mainly gay populations in the late 70s. If I'm remembering my health classes correctly. But yes, that does sound nicer than today... which Bush and his policy of "abstence is the only form of birth control" religious nonsense. Although I'm hearing PP advertising on the radio to ask about free birth control and family planning.. so hopefully that's Obama's influence helping turn things around.

The US bicentennial was one hell of a nationwide stoned drunken orgy. It was a great time to be a young man, despite the recession and inflation and gas lines.

Well, maybe if you have nothing, might as well get stoned, drunk and laid! Maybe some good can come of this after all! ;-)

No, it's not news because the sole purpose of any RLC is to generate revenue.

In fact, most traffic safetly laws are just ways to bilk honest citizens of their money. See this: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090204/ap_on_re_us/seat_belt_laws

Speed limits not set according to civil engineering standards actually increase rates of accidents. RLC change accidents from one type to another, even though lenghting yellow light time would result in an overall decrese in accidents. Of course insurance companies are all for it; if accident rates get too low they must lower permiums. So they want "just enough risk" to justify higher premiums for everyone.

That's what happens when you let goverment control your life though; lots of power and money are irresistable to those rigging these systems.

Expect more cops out; when states get into revenue crunches, they step up enforcement to write more tickets.

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/business/stories.nsf/yourmoney/story/7788F79C1BEA1C52862575360005B4AD?OpenDocument

Luckily, the vast majority of laws are good laws

I would like to think that, but there are LOTS of bad laws you never heard of. For instance, just yesterday I saw an article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch (horrible web site design) that the Missouri legislature is considering legalization of margarine.

Yep, margarine. A bad law made worse by being completely unenforced, making disregard of the law the norm. IMO laws should have life spans; if all laws died after ten years, good ones (like laws against murder) would be quickly rewritten, while laws against margarine or laws heavily taxing sugar would die naturally.

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/story/A5DA99A5DC85587B862574F0000EB107?OpenDocument

http://suburbanjournals.stltoday.com/articles/2007/11/11/news/sj2tn20071110-1111stc_pokin_1.ii1.txt

1. The girl was not emotionally healthy. She was diagnosed both with ADD and depression. The family was not in denial.

2. The harasser, and adult, knew this, and in fact, appears to have exploited it.

The parents did do some things wrong, like allowing the girl to have a MySpace account in the first place, but that can't excuse this woman's actions.

One other interesting point: the mother of the child that committed suicide helped her daughter violate the TOS. Does that mean she can be prosecuted also?

This was going to b ethe topic of my journal today, but now it won't be. There's a writer for the St Louis Post Dispatch that encourages looking up prospective dates on various sites. This is what was actually finished (it was going to be a long journal)

I was noodling around the various newspapers, and since I'm originally from the St. Louis arew I checked out the Post Dispatch. In it I ran across an item called The Data Diva says: Check your date out before you go out.

This nerdy looking (but not bad looking) lady, Jaimi Dowdell, seems to think that you should google your dates. I think her tinfoil hat is on too tight.

Speaking of tinfoil hats, soon you might need one for real, at least if you're going to demonstrate in front of the capitol.

But I digress. Ms. "Diva" may google, but she obviously doesn't wiki, as a diva is a singer. Anyway, she writes

That's right, friends. I background my dates
I may not have figured out how to find Mr. Right, but I can assure you that information about Mr. Wrong is everywhere. You just have to know where to look.

And I'm not just talking to the ladies. Guys, we've got closets, too. With a little work, you can get past her shoes and wardrobe to see if any skeletons are rattling around.

Right about now, some of you are probably thinking I'm just a little creepy.

Not just creepy, but seriously delusional.

Each time you buy a house, register to vote, list your phone number, etc. you leave a trail containing bits and pieces of your life. The Web site ZabaSearch crawls the online world picking up this trail from sites containing public records and other personal information.

So I looked up this zabasearch to see if I could find myself. I plugged in "steve mcgrew", my meatspace name.

No, I'm not the comedian from Colorado. There were hits; lots and lots of hits. So I narrowed it down to Illinois.

Lots of hits. Lots and lots of hits. Stephanie McGrew. Serena McGrew. Sharon McGrew. So I narrowed it down further and did an in-browser search for "Springfield". Finally it found me - from eight fucking years ago! It listed my age correctly, but had my address on reservoir. I moved out of that rented house in 2000 when I bought the house on 7th street. The house on 7th street I diaried about extensively on K5 after my marriage came apart.

There is some SERIOUSLY bad data on this site! I clicked "images" and there were a lot of images. Images of people I never met, not one of them me. This despite the fact that I've uplodaed several pics of myself to various places, including my old now-defunct domain mcgrew.info.

The comedian from Colorado was prominent in the photos. There's one of him with Dolly parton.

It says it has a home address and phone number, which it will gladly cough up for a price.

Nope. The only phone I have is a Net 10 prepaid phone. You're not going to find its number on the internet. The search site is a scam; I should sue them for slander, since it thinks I'm the comedian from Colorado, who had the web site "Steve McGrew's White Trash World".

It says it knows my income and home value. Not likely! Not if it thinks I still live on Reservoir Street.

Personally, I'd have to be a LOT harder up to go out with the sort of freak who would investigate someone before dating them, and someone dumb enough to think that you could actually learn anything about a person from the internet.

Or at least, this is Boeing's view on the matter. The Government Accountability Office has until mid-june to review the case. It is said to be an uphill battle. Hopefully, the truth (in either way) will be known.

Too often on Slashdot, it can be difficult - if not impossible to trace a link to a primary source, and this link is really no better.

But the impression I have is of a fire waiting to happen. The power supply as a whole could be at its normal operating temperature. That doesn't meant that heat couldn't build up dangerously in some tight corner behind it.

The risk isn't unique to the XBox or the power brick. Poor ventilation is probably the roots cause of hundreds - if not thousands - of fires ignited by ordinary home appliances.

Considering that 20 percent of the U.S. corn crop was converted into 5 billion gallons of ethanol in 2006, (and that amount replaced only 1 percent of U.S. oil consumption). The prices of food products containing barley and wheat are also on the rise because farmers are switching to growing subsidized corn crops instead of other less profitable grain crops. Dwindling barley feedstock supplies also currently coincide with a pretty large reduction in other crops used as livestock feed, prices of which are also climbing. Thus another unintended consequence is the increase in the price of meat and dairy products consumers are currently experiencing as well. We haven't even started to talk about how diesel fuel prices are simultaneously causing food, feedstock, and crop prices to skyrocket.

And you call that evidence.... we should make better schools.

Evidence? You want scary read this St Louis Post Dispatch story. Thirty people who had been arrested on drug charges were released after the arresting officer was shot and killed. Apparently the only "evidence" was the cop's word.

"Well" you say, "that's just one redneck state?" Well, I live next door to that state, here in Illinois they fired two detectives for perjury, planting evidence, and other bogus stunts - after the two were caught. The detectives weren't charged with their obviously criminal actions, and one man who had been arrested on charges of being a dope dealer, then released when it was clear the charges were bogus, is suing.

It's too bad that the law doesn't have the same definition for "evidence" as scientists. It's pretty easy to see how this "creationist" garbage gets started.

BTW, no where in the Bible does it say how old the universe (or the earth) is or how God went about making life. Like the two stories about dopers, they're just taking some asshat's word for it.

However, there's no way for them to have known that putting her in a situation that's all too common would have resulted in this tragic outcome. There's no intent to cause harm.

I have to disagree with you there. While I agree that we can't exactly equate this with murder, the 'criminal' in question knew perfectly well that Megan was emotionally unstable:

According to Tina, Megan had gone on vacations with this family. They knew how she struggled with depression, that she took medication. (http://stcharlesjournal.stltoday.com/articles/2007/11/10/news/sj2tn20071110-1111stc_pokin_1.ii1.txt)

The last message they sent her, "Everybody in O'Fallon knows how you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. Have a shitty rest of your life. The world would be a better place without you.", is something I seriously hope people wouldn't send to an emotionally unstable girl who had just been ditched by her boyfriend. Also, there was every intent to cause harm. At least emotional harm. Why else would you, an adult, do your very best to gain an 13-year emotionally unstable old girl's trust and then send her a message like that?

1) Nowhere in everything I read was there anything listed which could be called probable cause on the accused mothers part. Nothing in all of it describes why she would even really dislike the girl in question.

The police report - without using the mother's name - states:
"(She) stated in the months leading up Meier's daughter's suicide, she instigated and monitored a 'my space' account which was created for the sole purpose of communicating with Meier's daughter.

"(She) said she, with the help of temporary employee named ------ constructed a profile of 'good looking' male on 'my space' in order to 'find out what Megan (Meier's daughter) was saying on-line' about her daughter. (She) explained the communication between the fake male profile and Megan was aimed at gaining Megan's confidence and finding out what Megan felt about her daughter and other people.

"(She) stated she, her daughter and (the temporary employee) all typed, read and monitored the communication between the fake male profile and Megan .....

This woman is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

This is only true in a court of law, it's not true in the court of public opinion. I'll give an example: I believe Bush is guilty of desertion when he went AWOL in the Air National Guard. There's that's my public opinion, now for my opinion in a court of law. As it is now I would have to have a lot more info if I were on a jury in a court case before I could say "guilty". With what I know now I would have to vote "innocent". And I don't even like Bush!!!

The reason the police and the press don't always publish everything is bloody simple.

But even more important, it is to keep information from becoming common knowledge to aid the investigation. The less details of the case are known to the general public the more likely a suspect can be pinned down on having knowledge they couldn't have unless they were involved.

They had no reason to publish anything, they weren't going to charge anyone, but now with all the publicity the DA is reopening the case.

By publishing for instance what was said right before the suicide, the woman in question can no longer be indentified as the person who sent it if she shows knowledge of what had been said. Before she could only have known what was in the messages if she had seen them, when they were sent. Now, she can just claim she read it somewhere.

In a police report she admits what she did so there is no need to prove she did it.

But the most important thing here is, innocent until proven guilty.

Seeing as how she admits she did it she is GUILTY. As for the "innocent until proven" that's only true in a court of law, it's not true in the court of public opinion.

What do you do if we later find out the Myspace guy really did exist, and it wasn't the neighbor lady?

"Six weeks after Megan died, on a Saturday morning, a neighbor down the street, a different neighbor, one they didn't know well, called and insisted that they meet that morning at a counselor's office in northern O'Fallon."

"The woman would not provide details. Ron and Tina went. Their grief counselor was there. As well as a counselor from Fort Zumwalt West Middle School.'

"The neighbor from down the street, a single mom with a daughter the same age as Megan, informed the Meiers that Josh Evans never existed."

"She told the Meiers that Josh Evans was created by adults, a family on their block. These adults, she told the Meiers, were the parents of Megan's former girlfriend, the one with whom she had a falling out. These were the people who'd asked the Meiers to store their foosball table."

Besides that, there's really no way they could've known the little girl would commit suicide.

"According to Tina, Megan had gone on vacations with this family. They knew how she struggled with depression, that she took medication."

The journalist could have written about the suicide phenomenon (which goes back as far as history does) but that's not interesting. Myspace-assisted suicide apparently is.

Did you (or, I have to wonder, quite a few of the posters so far) actually read the backstory to this FP?

This didn't occur as a "Myspace-assisted suicide" - A small group of supposedly responsible adults decided to pose as a love-interest for a rather emotionally disturbed girl, all to find out gossip about their own kids. One particular parent and her daughter took it too far and "drove" said emotional cripple to suicide.

Now, personally, I don't really give a damn one way or the other. As seems so common in these situations, everyone involved behaved like complete idiots. The adults behaved in a reprehensible manner, but probably not actually illegal (thus the lack of charges filed over anything except the foosball table). The now-dead girl had, as we all do, a choice; she chose exceptionally poorly, but satisfied Darwin in the process.

But this involves more than just another angsty teen idiot and their MySpace page. Bloggers outed the offending mother because of the lack of criminal charges, yet most people feel she deserves some form of punishment for all this. If the police won't act, it falls to society to decide how best to deal with her; and if she suffers a bit of harassment - quite a lot, actually - I for one would not consider it undeserved.

Read the story, and note who filed a police report. They put themselves on the public record a long time ago.

When someone posts your address online over an alleged crime or slight...

Did you read the fucking story? Do you know what happened? Since in typical slashdot fashion you jump to conclusions before understanding any background, here's a nutshell since you'll probably not read the link anyway.

Try the local paper in the town involved.

Basically a teenage girl, who suffered from depression, ADD, and weight issues, met an online friend Josh in myspace. for 6 weeks she'd talk to him. One day he immediately stopped being 'nice' and started saying she was fat, she's a slut, and the world would be better without her.

Immediately after getting these emails Megan was hysterical, her father tried to calm her down, and 20 minutes later she was found in her room where she hung herself. Do you really think an entirely different event happened in that interim time that instead led to her suicide?

The major outrage here is that this Josh kid never existed, but was the ADULT MOTHER of one of Megan's former friends down the street. Moreover, this woman KNEW about Megan's depression. What kind of sick twisted adult fucks around with a teenager, specifically one that is depressed and has weight issues?

You claim that breaking up with a psycho before they kill themselves is the same thing as fucking with a persons head, pretending to be a fellow teenager and gaining her trust and then telling her she's a slut and fat, knowing that the person was depressed and had weight issues to begin with?

In the video, Kuehnlein, a St. George officer for about two years, approaches a young man who was sitting in a parked car about 2 a.m. in a commuter lot near Spokane and Reavis Barracks roads. Kuehnlein asks for identification. When Darrow asks whether he did anything wrong, the officer orders him out of the car and begins shouting.

"You want to try me? You want to try me tonight? You think you have a bad night? I will ruin your night. ... Do you want to try me tonight, young boy?"

Darrow says no.

"Do you want to go to jail for some (expletive) reason I come up with?" the police officer says. Later, Darrow says, "I don't want any problems, officer."

"You're about to get it," Kuehnlein is heard saying. "You already started your (expletive) problems with your attitude."

After the officer notices the camera, he says, "I don't really care about your cameras, 'cause I'm about ready to tow your car, then we can tear 'em all apart."

You would think so, would you. However as they just discovered here in St. Louis, they only turn the power on to the street lights at night! D'Oh. RTFA here

Voters would be able to see that their vote counted in the right direction, and unless someone else knows your private key, nobody would be able to tell who you voted for.

Meatspace criminals worry me a lot more.

Last year I had my car, cell phone, debit card (and pin) and checks stolen by a meatspace woman I was trying to help. At least they can't kill you or injure you over the internet!

Meatspace criminals worry me a lot more.

Last year I had my car, cell phone, debit card (and pin) and checks stolen by a meatspace woman I was trying to help. At least they can't kill you or injure you over the internet!

Local STL news coverage seems kinda frosty:
St. Louis Post-Dispatch ...from which you glean that the ACLU is an "activist group," which is probably fair, but interesting how they're called such first, instead of simply saying ACLU in title or even the 1st sentence like the Associated Press did.

And the obligatory non-response from the local PD...

"The St. Louis Police Department has had little to say about the ACLU's plan. [Chief] Mokwa has said the taping would be legal and that he believed it would capture scenes of officers acting professionally. When asked for Mokwa's thoughts on Wednesday, a police spokeswoman sent an e-mail that 'the chief's reaction was the same as it has been in the past.'"

I suggest you read the linked book yourself, consider the proposition, and decide for yourself whether the claim has any merit. Be sure to also consider the modern-day concentration of capital in the hands of the few - Executive pay vs. Worker-drone pay rising from 42x in 1982 to 350x today, for example.

but I can't buy the claim that "receiving underpriced food" constitutes "losing".

Listen to Chomsky's talk yourself. How are hundreds of Mexican corn farmers (using labor-intensive farming methods) supposed to make a living off their farm if they have to compete with my grandfather's two tenant farmers, who plant and harvest hundreds of acres by themselves with their advanced tractors & harvesters? The real-world says they can't, and millions of displaced farmers and farm laborers become economic refugees. They're desperate for any kind of work in teh cities, no matter how boring & hazardous it might be.

There was something in Mark Ames' Going Postal Rage, Murder and Rebellion about how the middle class has come to advocate their own economic destruction. I hope you read a link or two (and find a torrent), and reconsider your position. :)

http://images.stltoday.com/stltoday/multimedia/fos sil.jpgDirect link to non resizing graphic.

The graphic doesn't show the most interesting discovery, because trees should still be standing upright underground.

Anyway, did the ground below just sank/moved suddenly (25 square miles no less)? And the entire area was sitting on a big slap of rock?

If this is so wonderful, why is GE closing one the two remaining Incandescent light plants in the US? http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/business/stories. nsf/story/8D30EC3A4F735E358625728C000EE86C?OpenDoc ument

2. Missouri requires photo id and proof of citzenship for all voters

Almost, but no cigar.

The Supreme Court has ruled the photo ID requirement for voting law unconstitutional

Or, from the Post
Missouri high court strikes down voter ID law

I mean, look at this!

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/ stlouiscitycounty/story/B400FAC3338F7D0C8625721500 2217D1?OpenDocument

Giving the right to vote to thousands of people, without even making them sign pesky cards or fill out paperwork.

How nice of them.

Obviously, the above is not the DNC directly, but an activist group which really, really supports the DNC. And it's an allegation, but one which seems to have a lot of steam behind it.

Even more obviously, the DNC is hardly alone in doing this - the good old GOP has done it as well.

What strikes me is that people are treating a stupid automated call drive as the big issue - it's not. Smear campaigns do fall under the first ammendment, regardless of how stupid they are (and I think they're a huge waste). Smearing an opponent does not disenfranchise voters the same way as preventing them from going to a polling place does.

There are serioius issues that need to be looked at when it comes to voting security - electronic or otherwise. Far too many zombies emerging to vote and far too many voter registration cards for people that don't exist.

Auto-dialers don't piss me off nearly as much as thousands of "questionable" voter registration cards. Now THAT is disenfranchisement by reducing the power of each individual's vote

"The freedom of speech ends when causing bodily injury"

Excellent point! Then why do you care about individuals expressing their 2nd amendment rights to keep and bear arms regardless of whether or not they cause bodily injury or even threaten to at all?

"and certainly my rights are in conflict when a simple electrical fire can blow up my neighbors house and take mine with it."

The exact same thing can happen if your neighbor happens to use natural gas. In fact, natural gas explosions are far more numerous (by a significant magnitude) than personal ammo dump explosions. Yet, which one are you worried about?

"The NRA seems to focus selectively on guns"

So? Maybe their arguments should be expanded. That, however, does not make them apply less to guns.

"So, you think it should be legal for someone to wave a gun in your face? "

Such brandishing of weapons in an assaultive or threatening fashion is a perfect example of existing laws against gun crime that the NRA specifically wants enforced even more. Don't confuse the constitional right to merely have them (which the NRA supports) with the idea of actually doing bad things with them (something the NRA is a leading voice against.)

"I guess you must be smarter than a supreme court justice."

I know I have better reading comprehension than a few of them. And no, I will not chill on thinking that the Bill of Rights is a good idea.

Such as this

There have been a number of reports about problems cancelling AOL. An even funnier onne is the recent story about the difficulty of getting a dead guy off of AOL. A quick google for the keywords here, "Maxine Gauthier AOL", shows over 9000 hits, and most seem to be about this story.

At the end of the article, she says she's cancelling her AOL account as a result.

Good luck with THAT!

The problem? An AOL account once held by Gauthier's late father still showed billing charges accumulating against it. The account had been dormant for months; the credit card he used for it was inactive at least as long.

Nevertheless, AOL kept charging $25.90 each month for dial-up online access. Late fees for non-payment accumulated on the credit card, too.

Gauthier even offered to send a copy of her father's obituary as proof he truly was dead. AOL was unmoved.

"An AOL service guy told me to stop complaining and learn to use a computer," she said. "Then he hung up."

AOL was just in the news over the weekend in an article about a woman who can't get AOL to cancel her dead fathers account. What an awful company. Lets not forget AOL was also the company that had the employee who sold a few hundred thousand credit card numbers. I don't think I would even use the free stuff they are now advertising. They probably have rootkits at the ready - easily detectable ones at that - just to really implode in grand style.

  As the Marquis de Talleyrand said after losing a chess game. ""It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder!"

Even dead people can't escape AOL

By David Sheets
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
08/04/2006

Maxine Gauthier doesn't own a computer. She doesn't know the first thing about Web browsing or sending e-mail. She's not even sure where to find a computer's "on" button, as she describes it.

Yet for the past nine months, she has been fighting one of the most persistent and some say irritating institutions in cyberspace: AOL, formerly known as America Online.

"They just haven't wanted to let go," the 55-year-old St. Louisan said. "I don't think they'll ever really let go."

The problem? An AOL account once held by Gauthier's late father still showed billing charges accumulating against it. The account had been dormant for months; the credit card he used for it was inactive at least as long.

Nevertheless, AOL kept charging $25.90 each month for dial-up online access. Late fees for non-payment accumulated on the credit card, too.

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/business/columnis ts.nsf/techtalk/story/A0F7FD49EFA6565A862571BF006C 005A?OpenDocument