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Free speech fight hits Kirkwood High
[snip]
They never brought the list to school, but by early March, it was circulating around campus. When two junior girls brought it to administrators' attention, all five boys received 10-day suspensions.

It's a situation that is cropping up ever more frequently as the Internet blurs the line between students' on-campus behavior and their off-campus lives.

A high school senior in Pennsylvania was suspended in January for posting a parody profile of his principal on MySpace, another popular networking site.

New Jersey's Oceanport School District paid $117,500 to settle a case brought by a student who had been disciplined for putting up a Web site from home that harshly criticized his middle school and compared the principal to a dictator.

The courts have long held - since the Supreme Court's Tinker v. Des Moines decision in 1969 - that public schools can restrict students' First Amendment rights only when what they say materially disrupts school operations.

Officials say that's exactly what happened in Kirkwood. The list Bates and his friends posted left some girls in tears and forced administrators to spend most of a morning handling the situation, said district spokeswoman Nona King.

"These remarks were personal and cruel, and they were made about over 100 junior girls," King said.

[snip]

The boys suspended at Kirkwood and their parents were all surprised that the school could impose discipline for Internet postings made at home, said Mark Bates, Aaron's father.

Aaron's parents said they don't defend what the boys did but don't feel it was the school's place to punish them.

"These kids had no inkling that this could have been the result of what they did," Mark Bates said.

And civil liberties advocates argue that noncriminal behavior that happens outside of school is none of the school's business.

"This was off-campus speech," said Tony Rothert, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri. "It wasn't these students that caused the disruption. . . . If they'd done something to bring it into the school, it would be a different case."

Rothert said he has been in contact with the family of one of the boys.
[snip]

Microsoft has been experiencing a lot of disorganization recently. With the qualification of some machines as un-Vista capable, it's delay of Vista until January 2007, popular technology experts' Opinions that "America isn't ready for Microsoft's Vista", and all kinds of project delays (Media Center, XBox, etc.) they are in need of some clear visual indication as to the direction they must take. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

I find this statement from an InformationWeek article to clear up what ProClarity exactly does: "ProClarity makes analysis and visualization software." Much of this software is in very popular demand now; a friend of mine just started a job at a company called SSS, which makes visualization software for modeling all kinds of information and displaying it in a manner that is very informative and interactive. Google released something similar, Google Analytics, for websites, and it has been a huge success (heck, Slashdot uses it).

Overall, I think this is a very smart move on Microsoft's part. Software for organizing information can be very useful. It's also nice to see some Microsoft articles on Slashdot for a change (even though I'm not a big fan of Microsoft), rather than the usual Googlomination.

I live in St. Louis, where the X Prize started.

X Prize connection did little for region

Thank you for injecting reason into this thread!! I deal with US District Court often in child porn cases and they have a very simple criteria:

If the only place CP exists is in the cache, there is certainly plausible deniability that you intended to possess it and a charge will not be filed. They realize what browser hijackers and popups can do.

I regularly see suspects with GB's of CP in meticulously catalogged directories and on DVD's. The "oops" defense evaporates.

Some folks miss asking a basic question: How did the agent/detective/deputy come to believe that a specific person has cp? Despite what the tinfoil hat crowd thinks, searching for "small breasts" in Google photos will not lead to a search warrant and computer seizure. Publicly seeking an 11 year old girl for sex http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/neighborhoods/sto ries.nsf/meramecjournal/news/story/50043336D0D5B4E 486257019004B435C?OpenDocument on the other hand, will get their interest.

Well, you can try asking for one. The railroads (in the US) are hiring right now due to the combined effects of the recent economic upswing and new retirement rules, which caused an unexpected surge in early retirements. Here's some sites to check out:
Demand clogs traffic, profits for Union Pacific
Union Pacific website
BNSF website
and more

pray that we end up like the other "Cold War"

It's appropriate that Microsoft refers to it as MAD. For Microsoft's sake, I'd strongly recommend they review each of the components of MAD - mutually assured destruction.

How would Microsoft be affected? I, like many other members of the F/OSS, spend many hours of my day dealing with Microsoft uses and their customers. I'm increasingly irritated with the support time their products require, though I've attributed a good portion of that to the lack of sophistication of the user. Yesterday I spent four hours dealing with rather messed up registry disaster problem.

Instead of fixing, I'm going to replace and eliminate. I will no longer quietly support Microsoft products, and instead will advise affected parties that the solution is to use something else. We know this to be the recommended solution for IE. I've already done this with Mozilla (quite successfully, with several hundred converts in the past month alone) for some time. Microsoft wants a "us vs. them" but may not realize the mutual part of the destruction means "them too." I'm ready to start doing my part.

Mainstream? Like Forbes, BusinessWeek , Ziff-Davis (and here and here too), CBS News, USA Today, and most have heard of PC Magazine, plus a lot of papers like The Houston Chronicle, The Detroit News, the Syracuse Post-Standard, The Baltimore Sun, and the St. Louis Post-Standard. I have all those links plus others in a list I just send to people. I keep adding to it as I find more. Usually gets the message across that I'm not making stuff up.

Could they have been from other states? If not, I stand corrected, the info I had was on a Mercedes Benz TD (see article). I did find thisTDI FAQ, but it is not clear on the current situation and for onw I'm out of time.

Page A7 of the April 4 2004 edition of the St. Louis Dispatch.

Oh, and here's the link:
"This is a must": Bel-Ridge threatens officers who don't write enough tickets

How's that foot taste?

Ok- as other people have pointed out, you are trying to read more meaning into those numbers than is actually there. Our unemployment rate is 5.6%, and while this is not a perfect measurement, that is the closest estimate that we have of the people that are actually looking for jobs and cant find them. And while 5.6% isn't anything to get excited about, historically we have had much worse.

Thus we behold the latest right-wing meme. This attempted rebuttal of this poll has shown up throughout the media, including a letter to the editor in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and posited by Tony Blankeley of The Washington Times this morning on NPR's The Diane Rehm show. Using the same example of (paraphrased) "Bush didn't personally claim an imminent threat from WMDs, though most liberals think he did."

There's apparently no evidence that GWB made that exact claim, so believing that he did gives you a "misperception." But there was plenty of (mis)information circling around, including the famous British memo about Iraq being able to deploy WMD's 45 minutes after Saddam might order it. It's certainly possible that people might believe those words came from Bush himself, rather than advisors or pundits, which is technically mistaken. But the essential perception remains accurate: The US and UK administrations, led by Bush and Blair, used the idea of WMD's being used sometime in the near fute as a justification for the war.

Compare that to the misperceptions that were polled.

(1) Evidence found for link between Iraq and Al Qaeda
(2) Evidence found of WMDs in Iraq
(3) Positive world opinion about Iraq war

Either there was a link betwen Al Qaeda and Iraq, or not. WMD's were found, or not. The world has a positive opinion of the Iraq war, or not. No selective parsing of who said what when.

To use a favorite right-wing term, this type of painful parsing (like the meaning of "slog") to make words mean what you want them to mean, seems positively "Clintonian."

That right there goes to prove the...

No, that doesn't really prove anything. That's one decision. When I'm thinking about the balance of lies told, the malace involved, (and really) the regularity, I think Rush comes out worse.

Bill is the guy with his hand in the cookie jar saying: "I wasn't taking one. Really. Um, my doctor told me to -- for my health."
It's kind of funny, kind of innocent (not totally, but), and mostly harmless.

Rush is the guy saying lies like: "Susy isn't as nice as she seems. She's actually been planning on killing her mother. And kids, don't go to school. That's where they harvest the body parts."
It's someone's nasty invention; for what purpose? To spread hostility? To entertain? And there's always a new one on schedule. I think this is worse. You don't have to agree.

And I seem to remember that there were suspicions or rumors of his addiction before he came forward. Might not be true. Don't know for sure.

P.S. I thought this was really funny. Check out If Bill Clinton were an addict, here's how Rush might spin it.

You can read more about this court decision here.

Here's a post dispatch article.
O and heres a neat little tool that you can use:
http://revenue.stlouisco.com/

Not that I'm implying you should use it to find an address given a real name :)

Right now the USAF uses Dexedrine as a stimulant to stay alert and 'ward off fatigue' during long missions... I don't think it's fair for you to use the word 'speed', which is an illegal drug, in the place of the legal (when used properly) Dexedrin. Which is also used to treat Attention Deficit Disorder and Narcolepsy

Get real? Gas prices here doubled in less than 4 hours! Check out the article

It's a good place for news. More updates at http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/ News/862569F9005CA6AA86256AC400494C2A?OpenDocument
Check http://www.stltoday.com for more updates.

It's a good place for news. More updates at http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/ News/862569F9005CA6AA86256AC400494C2A?OpenDocument
Check http://www.stltoday.com for more updates.

Not much info, but more than I can get off of anywhere else. goto:

St. Louis Today