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There was an article in The Atlantic magazine a few years ago that postulated that the new model for car production would be small "shops" that would custom make a few cars at a time (not certain about numbers, but assume a few thousand).
I'm not an Atlantic subscriber, but I think I found the article: Reinventing the Wheels - 95.01 ...New ways to design, manufacture, and sell cars can make them ten times more fuel-efficient, and at the same time safer, sportier, more beautiful and comfortable, far more durable, and probably cheaper. Here comes the biggest change...
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/96apr/oil/wheels .htm
Very interesting read about a totally different paradigm for car production, which has now apparently started to be reality (per your links).

There was a good piece in the Atlantic I read last night about Torture and it's place in fighting terrorism.

The Dark Art Of Interrogation By Mark Bowden in the Oct 2003 Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200310/bowden

It closes with the following, which I agree with.

"The Bush Administration has adopted exactly the right posture on the matter. Candor and consistency
are not always public virtues. Torture is a crime against humanity, but coercion is an issue that is
rightly handled with a wink, or even a touch of hypocrisy; it should be banned but also quietly
practiced. Those who protest coercive methods will exaggerate their horrors, which is good: it
generates a useful climate of fear. It is wise of the President to reiterate U.S. support for international
agreements banning torture, and it is wise for American interrogators to employ whatever coercive methods
work. It is also smart not to discuss the matter with anyone.
If interrogators step over the line from coercion to outright torture, they should be held personally
responsible. But no interrogator is ever going to be prosecuted for keeping Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
awake, cold, alone, and uncomfortable. Nor should he be."

China isn't a Superpower now and I doubt in the next 25 years they will be.

I wrote a small paper about this last month for a Grad School class, I'll spam it out here...

I'm a military historian primarily who has spent the bulk of my studies on the American West (1860-1890), the Arab Israeli Wars (1956-1982) and the Second World War in both the Pacific Theatre of Operations (PTO) and Western European Theatre of Operations (ETO) and the strategic nuclear element of the Cold War.

A piece in the Atlantic Monthly in June caught my attentions, How We Would Fight China by Robert Kaplan - http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200506/kaplan, was of interest to me.

I base my stance that the United States is a Superpower by its military strength. A modern Nation-State or Bloc cannot really be a Superpower unless it possesses the military might to enforce its will or act as the steel gauntlet under the silk glove.

The PRC maintains the largest standing army in the world, although there is a general belief both within the PLA and among outside observers that numbers are of limited usefulness in estimating the power of a military. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) includes the PRC's Navy and Air Force. The PLA's official budget for 2005 is $30 billion, but this does not include money used for foreign weapons purchases, military-related R&D, or the paramilitary PAP. A recent RAND study estimates that the total military spending of the PRC is 1.4-1.7 times as large as the official military budget. By some estimates of true spending, the PRC's military spending, approximately $56 billion, is third after the US's of over $400 billion and the Russian Federation.

The PRC, despite possession of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, is widely seen both within and outside of China as having only limited ability to project military power beyond its borders and is not generally considered a true superpower, although it is widely seen as a major regional power. This is due to the limited effectiveness of its navy due to the lack of aircraft carriers and a limited air force with much less flight training time, and older planes.

A large army and large navy do not make a Superpower. China lacks the ability to project power either with an air bridge as the United States did in '48, '73, '90-91 or sealift as the United States has done time and time again since the end of the Second World War. Where the United States can deploy tens of thousands of personnel and multiple combat Brigades in the air or by sea to any point on the planet, China will have a hard time moving units across the Taiwan Straights under the best of conditions.

While the PRC does have a number of nuclear systems that can strike the United States or Europe, they lack the number to be an effective deterrent against the American nuclear forces. When I say a deterrent against the American nuclear force, I am drawing a line between the use of nuclear weapons against urban centers to kill people and the use of nuclear weapons to blow up someone else's nuclear weapons. The concept of MAD was not that both the United States and Soviet Union had enough nuclear weapons to kill lots and many people; the concept of MAD was centered on both sides having nuclear weapons that could destroy both sides' nuclear weapons. China lacks the nuclear weapons to eliminate the American nuclear systems and so MAD will not exist between the US and PRC.

It is estimated that the PRC has 400 nuclear devices of which 325 are deliverable. 24 of these are on the DF-5 series of ICBM that could strike the United States. The United States has 500 Minuteman III missiles and 288 Trident II D-5 missiles that can strike the PRC with over 3,000 warheads.

Conventionally the PRC lacks naval systems for sea-lane control that are vital to any imperial designs. The French, British, American, and Soviet empires/hegemonies relied on large and capable naval forces to maintain control of the sea-lanes and

What's a sea hen?

A sea hen is nautical slang for a woman who goes to sea. She would often be the wife of a captain but in this context, a prostitute.

Pairing "sea hen" with "Black Gown", i.e. a clergyman , would be a slur on the clergy.

Franklin's detailed apology for his mistake is a peerless example of his subtle humour, which was often mistaken for gravitas.

Greets!

OK, up front, I work with Ted, I know him personally, I admire him a lot, so feel free to ignore this post if you want to continue your bigoted, uninformed opinions instead of learning something.

First up, Ted is NOT an uninformed old man - he is the reason, along with Bush and Englebart, that you are all sitting in front of interconnected computers.

Author of two of the most influential books of the computer age, Literary Machines and Computer Lib/Dream Machines (not available in print - I have a copy or two if people are interested), creator of Xanadu WHICH IS AVAILABLE as the Udanax project [site down - Google cache] in both Gold and Green versions.

Victim of a Wired hatchet job - see his reply here

You'll have to take his word for it, but he's pretty sure when asked how his ideas could be simplified, he answered "you could make links one way and use a back button". Familiar?

Everyone that talks about transclusion or linking is refering back to Ted's work.

So show some respect, inform yoursleves and then perhaps, just for once, an informed debate can occur on slashdot!

The New York Times has had its problems, but their reporters are some of the best in the business, and while there is an editorial slant, it isn't extreme. The Atlantic provides good monthly material, and The Economist does so on a weekly basis. Those are my picks for daily, weekly, and monthly news, but there are other sources. The Christian Science Monitor is a great daily paper, for example. You may agree or disagree with my picks, but the profession of journalism isn't dead, and good sources of news are available.

I would also advance the notion that just because the editorial bias of a newspaper is disagreeable to you doesn't mean that the organization is corrupt. Newspapers are run by people, and people sometimes make mistakes. Note that during the runup to the Iraq invasion, The Atlantic provided excellent coverage and made many warnings that the Administration's plans were misguided. To me that is proof that following only one news source is a bad idea. You have to read from more than one source, whose biases you know, and make your own assessments from there.

I realize that it's de rigeur to bash on the news media, whether you're attacking from the Right or the Left, but the media is a business, and it gives people what they want. Americans need to take responsibility for at least some of the sorry state of our media. We have consistently voted in politicians who allowed the media conglomerates more and more power. We watch trash like Fox News. We read USA Today. That's not proof of a lack of credible journalism. It's proof that we're lazy.

If you wanted to knock the American economy down a peg or two then convincing us that Kyoto is a good idea is a good way to do it.

Another good way to do it would be to leave America largely dependent on oil from Saudi Arabia, a country which may suffer a political and economic implosion any day now. Or to continue to pour money into that country when there is no doubt that a lot of that money is being used to fund the very people who are trying to kill you.

Global warming isn't the only reason to get off oil. If Kyoto will have that much of an impact on the economy, it's a good sign that something is already very wrong.

Nuclear power, by the way, has experienced something of a renaissance with environmentalists, especially with recent innovations like the pebble bed reactor which are far more resistant to meltdown. The problem with nuclear reactors is that they're expensive.

As for China, they aren't likely to do anything as long as their disregard for the environment and their labour gives them a competitive advantage. Because it isn't like a totalitarian regime is going to listen to the environmentalist lobby--they'll do whatever they can get away with. The only way to put pressure on them is to stop buying their goods. To spell it out for you, we would have to stop buying goods simply on the basis of cheap prices, and start considering the hidden costs. But too many large corporations cut costs by buying from countries that pay their people almost nothing and disregard the environment (Mexico is another example,) and the government looks the other way.

So yeah, that's a good question: why isn't anyone pressuring the Chinese to clean up their neighborhood?

"Their obsession with heterosexuality gives a narrow miss. When raising kids, it doesn't matter as much the form of the family unit, as that it is a stable and self-sufficient familty unit."

I'll demote my own post because I don't have much of a link to back it up: There have been studies that show pretty conclusively that the form does matter; children who do not have both a strong male and female role model growing up have a disadvantage compared to those who do not.

I believe there was an article in that hotbed of conservativism, The Atlantic Monthly(2), that covered the research many years back.

(2) Current subscription to TAM required to read online, but I bet your local library has a microfiche or dead-tree version hanging around somewhere.

Dieter Wulf's article in The Atlantic Magazine shows a picture (not on the web) of a Wunderwaffen or Nazi "miracle weapon" that looks exactly like the White Knight Space Ship One combo. Not to knock Burt Rutan or anything, but it goes to show the German war machine did some serious thought. What's interesting is that they current thoery on the plane was to fly it into US buildings. Here's the picture

There was an Article in the Atlantic Monthly, I believe, that interviewed an ex-CIA head honcho and he said one of the problems with Afghanistan ops was that the Agency couldn't find people "to eat shitty food for years, not get laid." Agents were all middle class folks from Suburbia, in Virginia. IIRC, it was in that same article that Peter Bergen mentions that it was easier to infiltrate Palestinian organizations, because they were more prone to enjoy a night with prostitutes then wahabists (but I might be misquoting here - the Atlantic article used to be free access, IIRC). Meaning, it was easier to get along and become friends. :-)

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200410/bergen

There's been a rise in black ops, and human rights violation as we see from the media. But as everything from the Bush administration, it's all muscle and no brain: mainly torture. I guess the days were agents knew each other face-to-face are over. It's a whole different ball game infiltrating an Arab organization than infiltrating the Soviet KGB...
We can assume that, for instance, in Iraq, there's no intelligence, no infiltration, because the number of insurgent incidents keep rising.

A fascinating post yours was.

More on this - Epstein wrote what's now considered to be the "classic" expose of the whole De Beers / diamonds racket for The Atlantic Monthly back in 1982.

It's in 3 parts - here's a link - http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/82feb/8202diamon d1.htm

NOTE ----- You'll either need to subscribe or chamge your useragent to Google (or whatever).

Saying Ziegler was fired misses the reality of what happened to him.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200504/wallace

quote:

All told, Clear Channel currently owns some 1,200 radio stations nationwide, one of which happens to be Louisville, Kentucky's WHAS, the AM talk station from which John Ziegler was fired, amid spectacular gossip and controversy, in August of 2003. Which means that Mr. Ziegler now works in Los Angeles for the same company that just fired him in Louisville, such that his firing now appears--in retrospect, and considering the relative sizes of the Louisville and LA markets--to have been a promotion.

Re:You've missed the point (Score:2, Interesting)
by lowrydr310 (830514) on Thursday March 17, @09:12AM (#11964442)

Is it possible for the Plaintiff (the spammers in this case) to be ordered to pay the Defendant's legal bills when they (the plaintiffs) lose the case?

IANAFL

It's possible, but I don't know how likely it is. The trial lawyers, being a very powerful lobby, have consistently opposed the idea. See http://www.overlawyered.com/archives/000199.html

June 14, 2003
Essay on loser-pays

The following essay was written circa 1999 by our editor and formerly appeared on the site's topical page on loser-pays.

* * *

America differs from all other Western democracies (indeed, from virtually all nations of any sort) in its refusal to recognize the principle that the losing side in litigation should contribute toward "making whole" its prevailing opponent. It's long past time this country joined the world in adopting that principle; unfortunately, any steps toward doing so must contend with deeply entrenched resistance from the organized bar, which likes the system the way it is.

Overlawyered.com's editor wrote an account in Reason, June 1995, aimed at explaining how loser-pays works in practice and dispelling some of the more common misconceptions about the device. He also testified before Congress when the issue came up that year as part of the "Contract with America". Not online, unfortunately, are most of the relevant sections from The Litigation Explosion, which argues at length for the loser-pays idea, especially chapter 15, "Strict Liability for Lawyering".

As other countries recognize, the arguments in support of the indemnity principle are overwhelming. They include basic fairness, compensation of the victimized opponent, deterrence of tactical or poorly founded claims and legal maneuvers, and the provision of incentives for accepting reasonable settlements. Sad to say, the American bar, though loud in proclaiming that every other industry and profession should be made to pay for its mistakes, changes its mind in this one area, demanding an across-the-board charitable immunity for its own lucrative industry of suing people.

Also in 1995, Rep. Chris Cox (R-Calif.) published a succinct defense of the loser-pays principle, terming it the "full recovery rule" and pointing out that it would improve the position of a large number of plaintiffs with meritorious claims who currently go undercompensated because of the need to pay their lawyers large sums which cannot be recovered from the opponent.

Author James Fallows of The Atlantic called the idea "overdue" and included it in his list of "Ten New Year's Resolutions for America" (National Public Radio).

The principle in other countries: .....

Go to http://www.overlawyered.com/archives/000199.html to read the rest of it.

An example from Overlawyered.com's "Loser Pays" archives (bold added):

March 15, 2005
"Doctor fights, wins; lawyers aren't swayed"

Dr. Zev Maycon has been sued four times in three years; he's been dismissed before trial each time, but has missed weeks of work as a result, to the

Re:You've missed the point (Score:2, Interesting)
by lowrydr310 (830514) on Thursday March 17, @09:12AM (#11964442)

Is it possible for the Plaintiff (the spammers in this case) to be ordered to pay the Defendant's legal bills when they (the plaintiffs) lose the case?

IANAFL

It's possible, but I don't know how likely it is. The trial lawyers, being a very powerful lobby, have consistently opposed the idea. See http://www.overlawyered.com/archives/000199.html

June 14, 2003
Essay on loser-pays

The following essay was written circa 1999 by our editor and formerly appeared on the site's topical page on loser-pays.

* * *

America differs from all other Western democracies (indeed, from virtually all nations of any sort) in its refusal to recognize the principle that the losing side in litigation should contribute toward "making whole" its prevailing opponent. It's long past time this country joined the world in adopting that principle; unfortunately, any steps toward doing so must contend with deeply entrenched resistance from the organized bar, which likes the system the way it is.

Overlawyered.com's editor wrote an account in Reason, June 1995, aimed at explaining how loser-pays works in practice and dispelling some of the more common misconceptions about the device. He also testified before Congress when the issue came up that year as part of the "Contract with America". Not online, unfortunately, are most of the relevant sections from The Litigation Explosion, which argues at length for the loser-pays idea, especially chapter 15, "Strict Liability for Lawyering".

As other countries recognize, the arguments in support of the indemnity principle are overwhelming. They include basic fairness, compensation of the victimized opponent, deterrence of tactical or poorly founded claims and legal maneuvers, and the provision of incentives for accepting reasonable settlements. Sad to say, the American bar, though loud in proclaiming that every other industry and profession should be made to pay for its mistakes, changes its mind in this one area, demanding an across-the-board charitable immunity for its own lucrative industry of suing people.

Also in 1995, Rep. Chris Cox (R-Calif.) published a succinct defense of the loser-pays principle, terming it the "full recovery rule" and pointing out that it would improve the position of a large number of plaintiffs with meritorious claims who currently go undercompensated because of the need to pay their lawyers large sums which cannot be recovered from the opponent.

Author James Fallows of The Atlantic called the idea "overdue" and included it in his list of "Ten New Year's Resolutions for America" (National Public Radio).

The principle in other countries: .....

Go to http://www.overlawyered.com/archives/000199.html to read the rest of it.

An example from Overlawyered.com's "Loser Pays" archives (bold added):

March 15, 2005
"Doctor fights, wins; lawyers aren't swayed"

Dr. Zev Maycon has been sued four times in three years; he's been dismissed before trial each time, but has missed weeks of work as a result, to the

No. Part of the point of cryptography is to make accessing information cost more than information is worth.

Besides, it's illegal, and if that aspect doesn't phase you, this might be a more effective method of getting rid of your competition.

My first reaction when reading this headline is: If you did read the article Inside Al Qaeda's Hard Disk (bummer! requires subscription now), you will see that this very sort of journalism gives those people ideas to pursue.

The sensationalism that the media puts on some things can make these attacks a self fullfulling prophecy in a way.

The U.S. needs more people like Clarke in public service. Not because he spins a good yarn, but because he has consistently offered lucid and nonpartisan analysis of the terrorist threat throughout his career. It is shameful that rather than responding to his arguments the Bush Administration went into attack mode, and even more shameful that the Democrats were unwilling to make Bush's failure in the war on terrorism a bigger campaign issue.

A lot of us are simply introverts. It's just who we are. Extroverts seem convinced that we're "broken" and thus must be "fixed" with counselling, or medication, or whatever. I'd rather be alone than with a group of people I don't know. Small group of my friends? Fine, great, as long as it doesn't last forever.

For the extroverts out there, I suggest you read Caring for Your Introvert.

Dieter Wulf's article in The Atlantic Magazine shows a picture (not on the web) of a Wunderwaffen or Nazi "miracle weapon" that looks exactly like the White Knight Space Ship One combo. Not to knock Burt Rutan or anything, but it goes to show the German war machine did some serious thought. What's interesting is that they current thoery on the plane was to fly it into US buildings.

There's still good journalism in America, but you have to read it, not watch it:

The New York Times is widely derided for having a "liberal bias," but there is still no paper in the US that covers as much of what is going on in the world today and presents as wide a range of intelligent and interesting commentary. The print edition is jam-packed with info, and while people complain about the fact that you have to register to get free news from NYT online, it's more than worth the money. ;-)

The Christian Science Monitor, despite the name is a scrupulously independent voice. Their print version is formatted not to bring you every ounce of news, but to pick and choose stories of interest from around the world. CSM doesn't focus on immediacy, which is quite refreshing in the era of instant news stories without any meat.

The Wall Street Journal takes flak because it represents the voice of The Man, but if you recognize that the Journal's bias is in favor of the capitalist marketplace, it's an excellent source of information. The reporting is solid and the range of coverage is impressive.

Getting back to the theme of going beyond knee-jerk immediacy, there are several excellent weekly and monthly magazines available in the states. I'm partial to The Economist, which is not published in the States, and so provides much more coverage of the rest off the world. I happen to agree with most of their editorial bias, but I sometimes disagree with it. One of the nice things about the Economist is that they state their views in a way that allows you to separate the facts from their views.

I'm also partial to The Atlantic, a monthly magazine that explores a wide range of issues. Their coverage of 9/11, the war in Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq has been superb for its depth, range of viewpoints, and clarity.

There are plenty of other great news sources in the United States. I merely listed some of my favorites. My point is that if you expect the television to provide you with serious news coverage, you'll continue to be disappointed. If you take the time to sift through a few print publications, you may be amazed at what's out there.

Anyone who is interested in the Times' problems, which may or may not have been solved (depending on to whom one lisetns) should read Howell Raines' article in the Atlantic.

" if 53% of Americans were Christian fanatics this country would be a very, very different place"

I see where you're going, but this isn't necessarily true. Most regular people who think of themselves as Christian prefer others to do the hard Chrstian work for them. So they will, for example, vote for a guy who they think will curb abortion. That doesn't mean they live their lives turning the other cheek or teach their children to do so.

Seriously, would Jesus run for President? Or deny clemency to a death-row inmate?

Turning the Supreme Court is somewhat like turning an oil tanker, it takes longer than you think. Rarely has a 4 year term ever produced a radical shift, if ever. The Atlantic had an article about this in its current issue:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200411/wittes

I appreciate your eloquent insights, but perhaps you should read up on Kerry's history in the Senate and his approach to fighting terrorism. Foreign policy is about more than just "defense". I don't agree with every aspect of the Kerry approach, but your generalizations are uninformed:

How John Kerry busted the terrorists' favorite bank describes how Senator Kerry dealt a huge blow to terrorist financing in the 1990s.

Kerry Would Fight Terrorism Better delineates the approach Kerry would take to try and not only fight terrorists but stop them from sprouting up in the first place.

Kerry Faces the World discusses how Kerry's foreign policy approach is very similar to that of the first President Bush.

On the one hand (and on the other) gives The Economist's view of Kerry's foreign policy approach.

Bluster and determination are not enough to fight terrorists. You have to be smarter and more flexible than they are. And you have to believe that a free and open society is inherently stronger than a society run by a closed, secretive government. In my opinion Bush believes that only by severely curtailing the very freedoms we are fighting to preserve and insisting on blind obedience can we beat terrorists. To me, that is playing right into their hands.

The U.S. occupation of Iraq is a debacle not because the government did no planning but because a vast amount of expert planning was willfully ignored by the people in charge.

My favorite:

A typical instance occurred in the hard-fought 1996 race for a seat on the Alabama Supreme Court between Rove's client, Harold See, then a University of Alabama law professor, and the Democratic incumbent, Kenneth Ingram. According to someone who worked for him, Rove, dissatisfied with the campaign's progress, had flyers printed up--absent any trace of who was behind them--viciously attacking See and his family.

Yup, anonymously attack his own client, so that people assume the opponents are doing it, making them look bad. This actually happens.

A typical instance occurred in the hard-fought 1996 race for a seat on the Alabama Supreme Court between Rove's client, Harold See, then a University of Alabama law professor, and the Democratic incumbent, Kenneth Ingram. According to someone who worked for him, Rove, dissatisfied with the campaign's progress, had flyers printed up--absent any trace of who was behind them--viciously attacking See and his family. "We were trying to craft a message to reach some of the blue-collar, lower-middle-class people," the staffer says. "You'd roll it up, put a rubber band around it, and paperboy it at houses late at night. I was told, 'Do not hand it to anybody, do not tell anybody who you're with, and if you can, borrow a car that doesn't have your tags.' So I borrowed a buddy's car [and drove] down the middle of the street ... I had Hefty bags stuffed full of these rolled-up pamphlets, and I'd cruise the designated neighborhoods, throwing these things out with both hands and literally driving with my knees." The ploy left Rove's opponent at a loss. Ingram's staff realized that it would be fruitless to try to persuade the public that the See campaign was attacking its own candidate in order "to create a backlash against the Democrat," as Joe Perkins, who worked for Ingram, put it to me. Presumably the public would believe that Democrats were spreading terrible rumors about See and his family. "They just beat you down to your knees," Ingram said of being on the receiving end of Rove's attacks. See won the race.

Some of Kennedy's campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children. "We were trying to counter the positives from that ad," a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. "It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information," the staffer went on. "That was a major device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that's one of the ways that Karl got the information out--he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out." This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state. "What Rove does," says Joe Perkins, "is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin', tobacco-chewin', pickup-drivin' kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take."

Proof of what, exactly? That the Washington Times, which reported that article, is the Rev. Moon's rightwing propaganda organ, in the service of Bush's reelection? That that PR rag wouldn't investigate these gunshots to connect them to Rove? You want more "proof" about Rove, and these specific political crimes I cited, read the article by Joshua Green that the Daily News article, to which I linked, referenced in its report. Hell, read the long New Yorker profile from early 2003. Proof of the WT journalistic crimes are too abundant to parse.

Let me quote a few paragraphs:

But the 2000 election was not Rove's closest race. That had come earlier, and serves as a greater testament to his skill. In 1994 a group called the Business Council of Alabama appealed to Rove to help run a slate of Republican candidates for the state supreme court. ...

Newspaper coverage on November 9, the morning after the election, focused on the Republican Fob James's upset of the Democratic Governor Jim Folsom. But another drama was rapidly unfolding. In the race for chief justice, which had been neck and neck the evening before, Hooper awoke to discover himself trailing by 698 votes. Throughout the day ballots trickled in from remote corners of the state, until at last an unofficial tally showed that Rove's client had lost--by 304 votes. Hornsby's campaign declared victory.

Rove had other plans, and immediately moved for a recount. "Karl called the next morning," says a former Rove staffer. "He said, 'We came real close. You guys did a great job. But now we really need to rally around Perry Hooper. We've got a real good shot at this, but we need to win over the people of Alabama.'" Rove explained how this was to be done. "Our role was to try to keep people motivated about Perry Hooper's election," the staffer continued, "and then to undermine the other side's support by casting them as liars, cheaters, stealers, immoral--all of that." (Rove did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.)

...

The race came down to a dispute over absentee ballots. Hornsby's campaign fought to include approximately 2,000 late-arriving ballots that had been excluded because they weren't notarized or witnessed, as required by law. Also mindful of public relations, the Hornsby campaign brought forward a man who claimed that the absentee ballot of his son, overseas in the military, was in danger of being disallowed. The matter wound up in court. "The last marching order we had from Karl," says a former employee, "was 'Make sure you continue to talk this up. The only way we're going to be successful is if the Alabama public continues to care about it.'" ...

The recount stretched into the following year. On Inauguration Day both candidates appeared for the ceremonies. By March the all-Democratic Alabama Supreme Court had ordered that the absentee ballots be counted. By April the matter was before the Eleventh Federal Circuit Court. The byzantine legal maneuvering continued for months. In mid-October a federal appeals-court judge finally ruled that the ballots could not be counted, and ordered the secretary of state to certify Hooper as the winner--only to have Hornsby's legal team appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which temporarily stayed the case. By now the recount had dragged on for almost a year.

When I went to visit Hooper, not long ago, we sat in the parlor of his Montgomery home as he described the denouement of Karl Rove's closest race. "On the afternoon of October the nineteenth," Hooper recalled, "I was in the back yard planting five hundred pink sweet Williams in my wife's garden, and she hollered out the back door, 'Your secretary just called--the Supreme Court just made a ruling that you're the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court!'" In the final tally he had prevailed by just 262 votes. Hooper smiled broadly and handed me a large photo of his swearing-in ceremony the next day. "That Karl Rove w

One of the first highlights of his career was the famously tight 1986 Texas governor's race, in which his candidate and mentor, the Republican oilman Bill Clements, sought to oust the Democratic incumbent Mark White. The race is legendary in Texas political lore for Rove's discovery that his office was bugged--news of which, coincidentally or not, distracted attention from an evening debate in which his candidate was expected to fare poorly.

There is an excellent article entitled The Oil We Eat on Harper's website about how it currently takes 1.1 calories of oil energy to produce 1 calorie of food energy. It is very interesting.

There is also an interesting Atlantic Monthly article about how GM foods may be good for the environment.

I find the idea that we've so badly damaged the topsoil in the that the midwest is effectively 6 feet lower than it was 200+ years ago to be particularly interesting.

Yes, and that may a key reason why the opinion polls are more variable this year than most. Polls try to measure "likely voters," but how do you identify "likely" in a high-turnout year? Hence the argument between Gallop and MoveOn.org. But there's still room for improvement. Check out this table of registered voter turnout. In the USA in 2000, it was 67.4%. Many nations have much igher turnout. Here's some turnout figures as a percent of population from wikipedia

Year Voting Age Pop. Turnout % Turnout
2000 205,815,000 105,586,274 51.30%
1996 196,511,000 96,456,345 49.08%
1992 189,529,000 104,405,155 55.09%
1988 182,778,000 91,594,693 50.11%

My point with this data is to underscore that if either party could get a third of its stay-at-homes in battleground states to turn out on Nov 2, they would sweep the battlegrounds. There is plenty of gold to be mined there.

Historically, Republicans have optained higher turnout than Democrats (sorry I couldn't easily google the numbers to support this). In any case, the Bush campaign is addressing the question "why do our people stay at home?" Maybe their voters are disgusted with both candidates. If so, maybe gay marriage or a similar issue will get them to the polls. Otherwise, try and make the race about the other guy; make him even more disgusting.

Historically, the demographic groups that vote Democratic tend to under-register and turn out less. Also, historically according to Charlie Cook late undecided voters eventually vote 2:1 or 3:1 against the incumbent. They also tend to come from the middle of the political spectrum; hence undecided. So Kerry has two ways to draw voters: one is to reach for the middle -- keep the undecideds from going to Bush -- if they merely stay undecided, he gets a big chunk of them. The other is to register and turn out his traditional demographic supporters.

Why don't the republicans reach for the middle, the undecideds? An excellent question. Their strategy is set by Karl Rove and he's the best in the business, so I'm confident it's their best bet. My guess is that going negative will repel some of the middle, but increase turnout of the base, while staying positive would do a little of the opposite. Rove must have weighed the two carefully and chosen what he thought would get the most votes.

Remember, one of the goals of 9/11 was not just to kill people but to hurt the US economy.

Sorry, totally off-topic, but according to the previously posted article about al-Qaeda's hard drive from the Atlantic Monthly, the major goal was to provoke the US into an overly extreme counter-attack and sway public opinion to their side.

Just something to think about ...

(I can't find the full text anymore -- the link below is subscribers only. Anyone?)

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200409/cullis on

The answer to the "Iraq Al-Qaeda claim" is buried deep in a story carried by Slashdot Inside Al-Qaeda's Hard Drive . Alan Cullison covered the events in Afghanistan for Wall Street Journal and he managed to get his hands on a hard drive containing Al-Qaedas messages Al-Qaeda's members were not pleased with Osama's move to Afganistan from the Sudan. Afganistan just did not have the infrastructure - no roads, decent telephones or even showers so they wanted to move base to another country and they approached Iraqi officials and discussed the matter, but most of Al-Qaeda's members were not up to the move because of Saddam Hussein not being a proper muslim.

In my opinion, the bad guys have always been Pakistan, but the US has always been batting its eyelids and looking away. They are the ones peddling WMD secrets to other "rouge" states. Richard Clarke was right in not letting the U-2 flights fly over sitting security concerns with Pakistan. Pakistan has always supported the Taliban who in turn supported Al-Qaeda. Pakistan could do nothing against Al-Qaeda because it would damage their relationship with the Taliban. The tide only changed when Al-Qaeda tried to assasinate Pakistans President Pervez Musharraf. That is when Al-Qaeda memebrs started being arrested left right and centre and most of them located in the big Pakistani cities.

Using the Al-Qaeda connection to attack Iraq was just plain wrong and it has now played into the hands of Al-Qaeda by providing them the base they much wanted in the first place but couldnt get,IRAQ.

The database is really just persistent program state, right? So why do you have a separate application, etc. for the database?

When you start putting constraints, triggers, etc. on tables, you are already sliding down that slippery slope. Whenever you have a slippery slope, it's a clear sign that a new way of thinking is neeeded.

Why not write the whole application in the database? The stock answer is that the embedded language is not insert adjective here enough to run my application. Why does this have to be the case? Why can't a powerful language have its own database? Why do you have to retrieve variables from the database? Why can't the variables just be in the database in the first place?

Imagine perl tied hashes, but you can also do SQL queries on the same data if you like, no performance penalty. Why not?

If the inventors of motorized vehicles had gotten stuck in this same brain-rut, we would be driving horse-drawn carriages pulled by mechanical horses, instead of automobiles designed from scratch to use engines.

Yesterday we saw that the filesystem is the database. Today we see that the database should be the language. See where this is going? Go read As We May Think again. Prof. Bush is still out in front of us. There's no operating system. There's no file system. There's data, there's the user, and there's the glue (a language) that binds them together. Everything else is just artifacts of the haphazard way we implemented it.

by Vannevar Bush in his prophetic paper As We May Think :

In the outside world, all forms of intelligence whether of sound or sight, have been reduced to the form of varying currents in an electric circuit in order that they may be transmitted. Inside the human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs. Must we always transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one electrical phenomenon to another?

Read the whole paper. It's really amazing.

I'm not at all comfortable with the idea of gov't peering into my home (the infrared peekaboo case comes to mind), but you are a public person in the public space, and CCTV is actually a very small price to pay for the benefit of many fewer "broken windows".

On September 30, Bobby Fischer began his rematch with Boris Spassky in Sveti Stefan, Yugoslavia.

Interesting. I was just down in Montenegro for some vacation (in Kotor) and had a look at Sveti Stefan from the road. (It's in Montenegro.)

Sveti Stefan is basically a little island covered by a big classy hotel. It's the most exclusive tourist spot in Montenegro, and possibly the most exclusive in the former Yugoslavia.

Quite nice. There are some pictures here.

Other trivia: Fischer was hanging out in Budapest for I don't know how long (but a good while), being secretive and paranoid and anti-semitic and all those other nice BF things. A friend of mine claimed to have gone to repair his computer, and to have swiped a copy of his work-in-progress (a giant anti-semitic and anti-US paranoid rant, surprise surprise).

I offered to post it on the Net but the friend was afraid he'd get in trouble. I never did read it.

There's an interesting, if weirdly-formatted, article on BF in the Atlantic - a bit old though.

And here's a site almost as weird as the man himself, with radio interview downloads.

Contrary to popular belief, Fischer didn't emerge from the womb a full-blown grand master. While he was learning the game, as a child in Brooklyn, he was essentially a hotshot club player--a prodigy, to be sure, but not obviously world-championship material. But at age thirteen, in 1956, Fischer made a colossal leap. That year he became the youngest player ever to win the U.S. Junior Championship. He also dominated the U.S. tournament circuit. What was astounding wasn't simply that a gawky thirteen-year-old kid in blue jeans was suddenly winning chess tournaments. It was the way he was winning. He didn't just beat people--he humiliated them.

Maybe the onset of puberty "turned on" his mental illness. This article and others seem to suggest that puberty can trigger an underlying mental condition. In fact, this article says:

Social phobia is the irrational fear and avoidance of being in a situation in which a person's activities can be watched by others. In a sense, it is a form of "performance anxiety," but a social phobia causes symptomsthat go well beyond the normal nervousness before an on-stage appearance. People suffering social phobias intensely fear being watched or humiliated while doing something--such as signing a personal check, drinking a cup of coffee, buttoning a coat or eating a meal--in front of others. Many patients suffer a generalized form of social phobia, in which they fear and avoid most interactions with other people. This makes it difficult for them to go to work or school, or to socialize at all. Social phobias occur equally among men and women, generally developing after puberty and peaking after age 30. A person can suffer from one or a cluster of social phobias.

Sounds like Mr. Fischer to me!

While Bobby Fischer might have technically violated some U.S. laws, (and this one technicality is just the first that he has dealt with) he really should simply be left alone.

I've been following Bobby Fischer since he started publishing Chess columns in Boys' Life. While not necessarily a hacker, certainly a classic geek.

He all but dropped out of society in almost a Ted Kaczynski fashion, and can IMHO be classified as the most persecuted American by the U.S. Government. He was also wanted a few years ago on tax evasion charges, but I thought that got cleared up. He really has been hounded by the U.S. government for many things, and gone through ups and downs in his life that I would not wish on anybody.

A really good writeup about Bobby Fischer's trip to Yugoslavia is on bobbyfischer.net

I had to use the internet wayback machine because for some reason the regular website is down. Probably due to some slashdotting, although in this case probably not directly due to slashdot it self (surprisingly). Some absolutely incredible articles. I've also seen segments on television news programs that have also discussed his life, and it seems rather pathetic. How much of this is brought onto himself, and how much is out right presecution remains to be debated, but he should really be given a nice quite spot in Montana and be left alone.

Maybe the U.S. government is afraid of letting intelligent people who think the U.S. government is screwed up be left alone.

I wanted to submit this link when i submitted the story but it was an afterthought. It is a great story on what Fischer has been up to in the alantic monthly. story>/A>

Here is a more thorough article on Fischer's rise and fall.

Having done a little digging on my own (google can be your friend, but a dictionary can be even better) it appears that "some guy on slashdot" got it right, while the various dictionaries you quote in fact copied not only each other's mistakes, but the mistakes as they have propogated into common parlence. As to the 'chicken-or-egg' question of whether the misuse first began among the semi-literate masses, or was spoon-fed to them by the semi-literate media and/or erroneous reference compendia, can only be left to speculation.

huh. who knew I'd spark all this debate with an off-hand comment? interesting and amazing.

As much as I appreciate Google as the wonderful tool that it indeed is, I can't afford to think of it as the "be all end all" repository of human knowledge. It maybe the closest thing to the Library of Alexandria we have in modern civilzation. Seemingly more than most, but at that not even close to a "deep web" search engine because that problem as yet hasn't been adequately formulated yet. Tim Berners Lee and crew as well as a great many others are, no doubt, hard at work on the case.

But until the semantic web (or some alternative approach) emerges and is accepted and becomes a reality for most, all that even the best search engines are currently capable of doing is skimming over roughly the top 5% of the entire sum of knowledge and information on the web. It's the same problem that Dr. Bush addressed in his famous paper but on a much grander scale than perhaps even he could imagine.

From serendipit-e:

Firstly, it's worth remembering that Google only indexes a third of the web's nine billion pages. That it does so as comprehensively, if not more so, than anyone else, isn't at issue. Information costs money, and this has taken the sheen off the 'Internet' as it was once sold to us. The most valuable collections limit their access, for very good economic reasons: they can't afford not to.

The best collections are Web-accessible, after a fashion. For example, San Francisco Library's public collections are one of the Web's treasures - and accessible to any visitor who takes time to pick up a Library card - but beyond the crawlers. They represent the tip of the iceberg of the Internet that Google can't see - but that the rest of us can enjoy.

However this brain drain, this emptying of the commons simply isn't what we were promised ten years ago, when the Internet was first sold to the public as, amongst other things, an almost infinite source of information. Ten years on, the reality hasn't lived up to the promise, and as Net Time co-founder Geert Lovink pointed out in a panel on Saturday, and as we've noted too, Internet usage in the West is stalling. The public is not stupid, and is now reaching for the off switch.

While it isn't exactly fair to blame Google for this. Google has succeeded in becoming the branding for the Great Internet Project. But obviously, it can't be responsible for the content, which leaves us all somewhat underwhelming. But the corporation continues to highlight the metaphysical properties of its technology with some absurd claims, and at the very least, encourages commentators to describe its collection as something it isn't.

I can definetly appreciate the value of having multiple sources for your information. But as far as I'm aware, only the OED is the accepted standard for defining both current and historical usage of any word or term. The OED does not seek to impose their views on anyone, the approach I appreciate the most. They merely preserve past meanings based upon historical documents and glean neologisms emerging from popular useage. C

if you want a magazine with real content, i know playboy may have some decent articles, but the atlantic has some really great articles and little fact blurbs that you can not find anywhere else.

some of my favorite atlantic articles have been about politics and like i said earlier there is a bit of a left slant to the information, but they had an article called, The Mind of Geroge W Bush that I felt was a wonderful piece of journalism with a high level of integrity. It wasn't bashing in anyway, simply layed out a slate of facts, many of which were commendable and quite a few which would have been hard for a lesser journalist to not use to bash W.

Your quote about broccoli and your Africa implication suggests you have an agenda; you've forgotten of course that we went into Liberia recently. But I'll turn your fallacy on its head: if we went to war for economic power, we should invade Africa for the diamond market.

But that would be silly, since diamonds are worthless.

It seems to have a pretty intelligent, well-informed and even influential subscriber base. You can tell a lot about a magazine just by reading the letters to the editor. After it published a somewhat disparaging article ("The Fall of the House of Saud", by Robert Baer) on Saudi Arabia's ruling family, the Saudi Embassy's Propaganda Chief, err, I mean "Director of Information" wrote quite a lengthy letter to the editor contesting the article. I doubt he writes many letters to "Details", but hey, I could be wrong.

I used to subscribe to the Economist, but I could never get through an issue before the next week's came. Their often severe editorial slant bothered me at times as well.

As for Wired: at one point I viewed my subscription to Wired as some sort of geek passport, some sort of sign I'd embraced geekdom. But somewhere along the way their articles stopped holding my attention. I don't really miss it.

The Atlantic features in-depth stories on topics that are relevant, yet one seldom finds the same kind of information that any story in the Atlantic features. For example, as the Iraq situation heated but before the rest of media seriously used the word "invasion," the May issue featured Tales of the Tyrant, a piece about Saddam.

Earlier than that, the April 2001 issue gave us culture closer to home in The Organization Kid, which anyone who has been involved in the education process as a student, parent or teacher should be forced to read. The article adopts a skeptical tone of today's do-it-all culture without being didactic or heavy handed.

The former NYT Editor who left after the Jayson Blair scandal aired his opinions concerning the Times, the importance of the Times and the direction of news in America in a piece so long and thoughtful that I planned to read the lead before a run, and instead spent 1.5 hours reading and digesting the article before running even crossed my mind again.

And then there's the "Primary Sources" sections, which I'll leave for another rave. Fact is that The Atlantic is a consistantly great read.

The Atlantic features in-depth stories on topics that are relevant, yet one seldom finds the same kind of information that any story in the Atlantic features. For example, as the Iraq situation heated but before the rest of media seriously used the word "invasion," the May issue featured Tales of the Tyrant, a piece about Saddam.

Earlier than that, the April 2001 issue gave us culture closer to home in The Organization Kid, which anyone who has been involved in the education process as a student, parent or teacher should be forced to read. The article adopts a skeptical tone of today's do-it-all culture without being didactic or heavy handed.

The former NYT Editor who left after the Jayson Blair scandal aired his opinions concerning the Times, the importance of the Times and the direction of news in America in a piece so long and thoughtful that I planned to read the lead before a run, and instead spent 1.5 hours reading and digesting the article before running even crossed my mind again.

And then there's the "Primary Sources" sections, which I'll leave for another rave. Fact is that The Atlantic is a consistantly great read.

As others have mentioned, The Atlantic is a bright spot on the American media landscape. It's impressive in that it shows a lot of the deeper trends, and it isn't afraid to explore ideas. Instead of focusing on controversy, the articles tend to be more about getting past the shrill argument and down to the real matter at hand. William Langeweische and James Fallows write brilliantly. It's worth noting that the Atlantic has offered perhaps the best overall coverage of 9/11 and its aftermath of any American magazine.

For those who complain about supporting advertising, check out The New Republic. It gets right down to business. The pages don't have much advertising. Excellent coverage of a wide variety of topics make it a worthy suppliment to the Economist, and proof that not all American publishers underestimate the average American's brain power.

It can be very worthwhile to read The New Republic and then read The National Review. Also not aimed at children, the National Review is solidly right-wing Catholic. The experience of reading both magazines one after another can be incredibly jarring. But for me it reveals a lot about why American politics is dominated by polarization and controversy. It also forces me to confront a world-view that overlaps with my own only infrequently.