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The Republicans would be very foolish to end the filibuster. It's a tool they have used to good effect for many, many years. Remember, they weren't always the majority party, and they may not always remain as such.

Strategy concerns aside, I think the American people would be horrified if the nuclear option were invoked. We are a country that has always supported a divided government with proper separation of power, and a blatant power grab like this would not go over well.

There are only three, short periods (2 years each) where the White House and the Congress were of the same party. Interestingly, these are often viewed as some of the worst time periods for the governing party! It appears that neither side is good at reining in their extremists without the opposition to run interference.

Finally, for all the noise about the Democrats being a minority in the Senate, they represent a majority of people in the United States. From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A554 29-2005Mar21.html/:

"According to the Census Bureau's July 2004 population estimates, the 44 Democratic senators represent 148,026,027 people; the 55 Republican senators 144,765,157."

So there would suddenly be a lot of constituents who might be slightly pissed that they no longer have representation in the Senate.

Funny you should bring that up, just the other day I was reading an op-ed piece in the Washington post about this very subject. It was an interesting read, check it out here.

OK pal, that's true under most conditions depending on how you count the votes that were cast and valid.

What about the votes that didn't even make it to the recount? The African Americans who gave up after waiting 4 hours in line? The votes summarilly tossed without notification in poor (again mostly African American) communities?

Don't believe me. Believe former President and Jimmy Carter, who said, in the summer of 2004, that:

some basic international requirements for a fair election are missing in Florida.

Read it in The Washington Post .

I don't care so much if a Democrat or a Republican wins, but we must get the election right.

This may make your brain explode, but it's not my fault if it does.

Republican Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan) placed a "hold" on a Bush nominee - denying her and up-or-down vote - because she's pro-choice. Even though she's a nominee for a position at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is not exactly a hotbed of abortion decisions.

Damn that Ted Kennedy!

According to the Washington Post article highlighting her service on the Supreme Court, O'Connor was considered a swing vote because she has exhibited less of a political agenda than most of her fellow Justices, generally being relatively open to rational persuasion, and less predictable in her decisions as a result.

In my opinion, this isn't "questionable behavior from a SC justice"; the Supreme Court Justices are supposed to be non-partisan and open to discussion on polarizing issues. To the extent that Sandra Day O'Connor exemplified these positive characteristics as a Justice to a greater degree than her colleagues, she has been considered a "swing vote".

I will take you at your word that you are a decent guy and that your query was genuine. Can I dislike Microsoft while still liking individuals who work there or who work with their products? Sure. Just as I can criticize the actions of the government while being good friends with my neighbor Joe Civic Servant down the street. We are all familiar with how groups of decent individuals can come together in an organization that then causes them to act in ways that perpetuate the organization, even if those ways wind up being bad.

Has Microsoft changed? I don't see much of a change. Their attack on Linux hasn't gained much traction, so in recent months and years they have occasionally tried the carrot instead of the stick and said nice things about Open Source and Free Software. But since the GPL is antithetical to their business model, it seems to be just words. Their actions continue to show that they have not changed.

I spent 15 minutes with Google to come up with some recent relevant examples that show their current attitude. Is every story below accurate? Maybe not. But when there's that much smoke...

Ballmer: Linux violates patents; use it and you will be sued by somebody

MS Office XML Format licence is incompatible with the GPL

HP Memo: "Microsoft will soon be launching a patent-based legal offensive against Linux"

Microsoft using the WTO as a proxy to fight free software

Microsoft's antitrust offering 'blocks Samba'

Microsoft's New Monopoly

Microsoft remains unrepentant, says antitrust judge

Rivals Say Microsoft Flouts Antitrust Settlement

Congress is fighting back against the Supreme Court decision too: House Votes To Undercut High Court On Property. If the bill passes, then it's not likely that the town will approve the museum/hotel in protest.

Microsoft is strictly amateur hour.

This is hardly true. Even years ago, a CCIA report (submitted to the court during the MS antitrust case -- admittedly CCIA is/was a critic of MS) called Microsoft's political influence "in many ways unprecedented in modern political history." One Seattle based study/article placed Microsoft as the number three corporate political donor. Nor can one discount the effect of policy groups, think tanks, and industry groups financed by the corporation but not accounted for in lobbying and political contributions.

There have been a number of shareholder efforts attempting to get MS to either prohibit unregulated soft money contributions or publish policies for such spending. Here for example.

Anyway, this is a tiny bit of the info that's out there. Just possibly, Microsoft is more than an amateur in political influence.

the biggest recipients of Oil Vouchers (which are, well, you know, VOUCHERS, not actual oil, or actual money) were US citizen and corporations.

Of course - the whole point of the oil-for-food system was to actually promote the continuing sale of Iraqi oil so that the proceeds to feed the Iraqi people, despite their glorious leader's bad habit of attacking neighboring countries or local ethnic minorities. Much of that business was done through US companies, just like it was done through companies all over the world (oil is used everywhere, don't you know). The issue is the personal receipt of those vouchers by people who used them in various forms of influence peddling. At least a couple of unscrupulous American oil traders used them for personal profit. I was referring to the receipt of them by officials (say, in France) who either themselves, or through their close associates, were able to loudly proclaim their commitment to using French security council veto power to block any UN sanction of force to remove Saddam. The Russians (another huge recipient, and shady dealer in the vouchers) pretty much said the same thing, only in even more absolute terms). Hell, both countries made regular press releases to that effect. It's one thing for people in the oil business, who trade oil every day, to buy oil vouchers from Iraq. It's quite another to receive them as "gifts" in the same period of time that you're saying Saddam should be left alone in his brutality.

"shooting at the UN-mandated no-fly-zone patrol aircraft every day" care to back that with a link? Can't find one? Yeah, thought so.

"Every day" as in "every day that they could re-assemble the anti-aircraft hardware that UK and US pilots continually destroyed when/wherever they could find it." Usually they found it by tracing the targeting radar signals and fire they were taking from it. On a first page of Google results, here is an example of a typical month or two of Iraqi AA facilities illuminating and/or shooting (once in range, if allowed by the pilots) at patroling aircraft. Or here, where a Washington Post correspondent mentions the hundreds of engagements that started to ramp up after 1998 when Saddam had started to rebuild is AA facilities (with, of course, oil-for-food money). Or here, where CNN mentions Iraq firing SA-2 missiles into Kuwaiti airspace trying to knock down observation planes over the southern no-fly zone. Or here, where pilots mention the hundreds of such encounters that started to increase after 1998. Or, articles like this
Soooo, which ethnic groups did saddam target during the "Oil for Food" program

I was referring more to the general subjugation of the Shia majority to the Sunni minority. Goes without saying that the Kurds got the shaft starting way back in the 1970s. Under the northern no-fly zone, though, which also precluded the movement of any Iraqi military hardware in that area, the Kurds actually built up substantially better lives (through trade with their northern neighbors) and were in a much better position to thrive when Saddam was completely taken out of the picture. Under the protection of the no-fly enforcement, the Kurds evolved an independent political entity that defined a de facto state including ministries, a parliament, central banking/currency, and a functional bureaucracy. Knowing they weren't getting attacked by Saddam any longer, they didn't bother waiting for his inevitable demise. The investment in that Kurdish infrastructure only came because of trust in the ongoing protection from the no-fly operations.

I thought it was phony too. Googled the center and Dr. Safar.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/04/21/AR2005042101262_2.html

The center exists and they do this kind of science.

http://www.post-gazette.com/lifestyle/20020331safa r0331fnp2.asp The doctor exists and he's done some cool shit. Or did. He's passed on.

This sounds like intriguing science.

Sheep with human brains and other organs.
or
Google Search
- The glow from the firefly has been inserted into tobacco plants making them glow in the dark.
or Google Search
- A human embryo cloned using a cell from a man's leg and a cow's ovum lived and developed for twelve days until it was terminated.
or Google Search
- Goats bred with a spider gene produce milk which is processed to make "BioSteel".. The US military has set up their own goat farm to make bulletproof vests, aerospace and medical supplies.
or Google Search
- Extended Life Spans
or Google Search

This is not just a turning point in history. It's also the fulcrum upon which technology balances our very evolution. ted

The article is somewhat light on facts. From what I recall, during drowning or suffocation, brain damage occurs in humans quite soon (10 minutes?). How is it that this process negates the lack of oxygen to the brain, allowing no damage to occur? Is it the temperature of the liquid used for replacing the blood?

Also, the article has "Although the animals are clinically dead, their tissues and organs are perfectly preserved." followed immediately by "Damaged blood vessels and tissues can then be repaired via surgery." So, which is it?

I suppose we'll have to wait for a real scientific journal to publish this before we find out much more.

Also, another attempt at hibernation, this time in mice, using a different method involving hydrogen sulfide gas.

"All file sharing programs are subject to this decision, as are all technologies that can be used to infringe copyrights. Whether any of them would be found to be liable under the 'inducement' standard set out by the Supreme Court is another matter entirely. In fact, we don't even know whether Grokster will be held legally liable under that standard. That is for the lower court to decide in the next phase of this case."

And . . .

"Well, anyone can be sued, but you wouldn't win a case against a software manufacturer just because it can be used for infringement. What the Supreme Court said is that a technology manufacturer who 'distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement' can be held legally responsible for the copyright infringment of others. So there has to be some affirmative activity to promote infringement."

Now all we have to do is get Congress to reign in the REAL problem, the ridiculous copyright laws that constitute primary infringement. Crank it down to 10 or 20 years, not life plus 70! And make it so that everything written on a napkin is not automatically copyrighted. Make someone at least go to a copyright office website to get their copyright protection initially, and for a reneweal after a year.

Sure. Tell that to that sick fuck who molested 35,000 times.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/06/22/AR2005062201829.html/

But I don't want to be a pirate. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A614 63-2004Nov18.html But seriously... I heard that Apple is building these boards in a subterranean facility at Area 51 and that those black helicopters patrol the area. You know, the ones that are silent. I also heard that they're going to put modified alien DNA film on the keyboards so that if you use one of these DRM approved machines the DNA will be absorbed into your body and then the government can track you with their StarWars satellites and then mame/kill you if you download illegal torrents. But you didn't hear it from me. We never had this conversation.

Nice one about the chemical weapons, particularly mustard gas. You do know that the United States supplied him with those chemical weapons he used on Iran and the Kurds? Good ole Donald Rumsfeld himself visited Saddam while he was gassing the Kurds. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename= article&node=&contentId=A52241-2002Dec29&notFound= true sorry couldn't get auto-link to work.

"It's astonishing what human ingenuity and creativity can do," he said. "My part was pretty small, actually." Whenever people would mention that Kilby was responsible for the entire modern digital world, he liked to tell the story of the beaver and the rabbit sitting in the woods near Hoover Dam. "Did you build that one?" the rabbit asked. "No, but it was based on an idea of mine," the beaver replied.

Washington Post is reporting scientists may have detected signals from the craft, but is off course in lower orbit. The Planetary Society logs does not have any reference yet to this.

It tends to work correctly on shit that really doesn't matter (i.e. GIS data). It doesn't seem to work very well for civil rights violations such as the Patriot Act.

Why, yes. Given a vast market share, a company can do what is called a "play action fake" in US-rules football. The leader (quarterback), artfully attempts to convince the opposition that events will unfold one way, when they may not. Motives include buying time, and misdirection.
Done right, the play action fake is incredibly useful.
Done ronngg, and you're the next Osborne.

Here is a Washington Post article about the same thing. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/06/19/AR2005061900653.html

As if high quality DIY photoprinting on ever cheaper home printers weren't making life hard enough for photo labs, now the professional photographer's version of DRM is further cutting into business. Washington Post enlarged on an AP story about Walmart and Walgreens refusing to print pix of ordinary folks because they looked "too good" to be amateur and where suspsected of being pirated from the internet. The pro photographers do understand the problem: "Steve Noble, who oversees regulatory affairs at the Photo Marketers Association, believes the situation will remain hazy unless copyright laws that were written in a different technological era are altered to reflect the ossibilities of digital dissemination." If you google around, you find the problem is on blogs and bulletin boards for the last 6 months. ....yet another story of a digital technology leaving a world of gutenburg legal ideas in disarray.

Blogs serve an interesting and occasionally useful purpose, but will probably always lack the relative objectivity of good news sources such as NPR.

Bad news, comrade: Washington Post | Congress seeks to end funding for PBS and NPR within two years

The gist: a video store owner in Provo, Utah (widely considered to be among the country's most religious/conservative/"moral" cities), was being sued because he carried adult titles. The basis for the suit was that he was violating community values and community standards by making these explicit titles available to the public. An excerpt from the article explains what was really going on in Provo:

Utah County cable subscribers had ordered at least 20,000 explicit movies in the past two years; the Sun Coast Video store in the town of Orem was deriving 20 percent of its rental sales from adult movies, even though adult movies only made up 2 percent of the store's inventory; Dirty Jo Punsters in nearby Spanish Fork was racking up on average $111,000 dollars per year selling sex toys, blow up dolls and other adult fare; the Provo Marriott across the street from the courthouse sold 3,448 adult pay-per-view movie rentals in 1998 alone.

It seems to me that this crap is all for show.

~Anonymous Coward

Problem is, reviewers like Stephen Hunter at the Washington Post just "simply do not get it" (his own words: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/06/09/AR2005060901951.html) and trash them in reviews. Seriously, he starts out by saying he's the wrong person to review it, then proceeds to give a negative review. What ever happened to "I don't get it, so I recuse myself", I'll never know.

Well, I don't know. "I thought it was kind of arbitrary" is as good an opinion as any; I don't think someone needs to either love or hate something in order to be qualified to review it.

On a tangent, though, it's sad that whenever a movie has a female protagonist, who is competent and achieves things, and who is not constantly used as a poster girl for Important Female Issues, then that makes the movie a Girl Power movie for every second Western reviewer. It's sad, because it emphasizes how few Western movies have competent female protagonists without a Female Agenda, and how alien this concept is to some people. :/

Problem is, reviewers like Stephen Hunter at the Washington Post just "simply do not get it" (his own words: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/06/09/AR2005060901951.html) and trash them in reviews. Seriously, he starts out by saying he's the wrong person to review it, then proceeds to give a negative review. What ever happened to "I don't get it, so I recuse myself", I'll never know.

Anyway, when I try to loan Miyazaki movies to my sister's kids, they never get to watching them-- because they haven't heard of them and "they're different". So a lack of marketing and a lack of a brand really make it suffer.

Too many parents rely on brand (e.g. Disney, Nickleodeon, HBO) as a filter for what they'll let their kids see. Too many kids only want to watch the branded stuff their peers mention.

It reminds me of a John Lasseter (sp?) interview about Pixar, when an executive asked (for Toy Story), "okay, what are the 8 songs?" The idea of doing a movie (to compete with Disney, no less) that didn't follow The Formula and include the marketable songs was considered folly.

So Miyazaki-type movies have an uphill battle because "they're different" and they lack the marketing bit to appeal to 'the consumer masses'.

For the record, Miyazaki does not always meet with wide acclaim. Howl's Moving Castle has received various lukewarm reviews. Granted I'd rather watch a Miyazaki failure than one of the more recent Disney releases, but sometimes Miyazaki's work is just a bit too aimless and phantasmagoric to be considered universal in its appeal.

People forget that Disney went through a similar set of death spasms in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It wasn't until a series of solid releases -- The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and the Lion King -- that Disney retreived its street cred. The films after these four definitely drop off in quality IMHO... this dropoff though was masked by the rise of Pixar thank goodness.

first you can't understand metric and now you can't spell ?
i guess it's understandable when 50% of you are mentally ill.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/06/09/AR2005060902283.html

Public Broadcasting Targeted By House
Panel Seeks to End CPB's Funding Within 2 Years

A House subcommittee voted yesterday to sharply reduce the federal government's financial support for public broadcasting, including eliminating taxpayer funds that help underwrite such popular children's educational programs as "Sesame Street," "Reading Rainbow," "Arthur" and "Postcards From Buster."

In addition, the subcommittee acted to eliminate within two years all federal money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting ...

So long as we're linking around... try here or here.

I don't know how to win the "war on terror", but this is sure as hell a way to lose it.

How many of you have the balls to actually read these two columns from that ultra-right-wing, reactionary Washington Post:

Amnesty's Amnesia

Hyperbole and Human Rights

You can't call Applebaum and Dionne apologists for W, either.

Unfortunately, registration is required, so here's some tidbits:

"Why do President Bush's critics make life so easy for him?"

Why does gulag matter? The word refers to the vast machinery of political subjugation created by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union and comes from the acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei , or Main Camp Administration. As my Post colleague Anne Applebaum noted in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Gulag," it eventually came to refer to "the system of Soviet slave labor itself, in all its forms and varieties."

These included "labor camps, punishment camps, criminal and political camps, women's camps, children's camps, transit camps," Applebaum wrote. Gulag also came to stand for "the Soviet repressive system itself," including "the arrests, the interrogations, the transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths."

"A few years ago I spent several days sitting in the back of a library in London, reading through newsletters, pamphlets and other accounts of Soviet prison conditions published in the 1970s and '80s by Amnesty International. Sometimes these reports were remarkably detailed, testifying to the extraordinary ability of prisoners to smuggle out their stories. One included the memorable observation that on Sept. 13, 1979, the prisoner Zhukauskas "found a white worm" in his soup. A more harrowing 1987 news release told the story of the hunger strike and prison death of dissident writer Anatoly Marchenko. His widow, denied a death certificate or a proper funeral, wrote his name in ballpoint pen on his makeshift grave."

"Amnesty, in other words, was an organization that once knew the meaning of the word "gulag." Amnesty also once knew the importance of political neutrality. On its Web site, the organization still describes itself as "independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion." In the Cold War era, this neutrality was important, since it prevented the organization's publications, whether on prison food or prison deaths, from being seen as propaganda for one side or another.

I don't know when Amnesty ceased to be politically neutral or at what point its leaders' views morphed into ordinary anti-Americanism. But surely Amnesty's recent misuse of the word "gulag" marks some kind of turning point. In the past few days, not only has Amnesty's secretary general, Irene Khan, called the U.S. prison for enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, "the gulag of our times," but Amnesty's U.S. director, William Schulz, has agreed that U.S. prisons for enemy combatants are "similar at least in character, if not in size, to what happened in the gulag." In an interview, Schulz also said that foreign governments should prosecute U.S. officials, as if they were the equivalent of the Soviet Union's criminal leadership."

"Amnesty, by misusing language, by discarding its former neutrality, and by handing the administration an easy way to brush off "ridiculous" accusations, also deprives itself of what should be its best ally. The United States, as the world's largest and most powerful democracy, remains, for all its flaws, the world's best hope for the promotion of human rights. If Amnesty still believes in its stated mission, its leaders should push American democratic institutions to influence U.S. policy for the good of the world, and not attack the American government for the satisfaction of their own political faction."

How many of you have the balls to actually read these two columns from that ultra-right-wing, reactionary Washington Post:

Amnesty's Amnesia

Hyperbole and Human Rights

You can't call Applebaum and Dionne apologists for W, either.

Unfortunately, registration is required, so here's some tidbits:

"Why do President Bush's critics make life so easy for him?"

Why does gulag matter? The word refers to the vast machinery of political subjugation created by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union and comes from the acronym for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei , or Main Camp Administration. As my Post colleague Anne Applebaum noted in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Gulag," it eventually came to refer to "the system of Soviet slave labor itself, in all its forms and varieties."

These included "labor camps, punishment camps, criminal and political camps, women's camps, children's camps, transit camps," Applebaum wrote. Gulag also came to stand for "the Soviet repressive system itself," including "the arrests, the interrogations, the transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths."

"A few years ago I spent several days sitting in the back of a library in London, reading through newsletters, pamphlets and other accounts of Soviet prison conditions published in the 1970s and '80s by Amnesty International. Sometimes these reports were remarkably detailed, testifying to the extraordinary ability of prisoners to smuggle out their stories. One included the memorable observation that on Sept. 13, 1979, the prisoner Zhukauskas "found a white worm" in his soup. A more harrowing 1987 news release told the story of the hunger strike and prison death of dissident writer Anatoly Marchenko. His widow, denied a death certificate or a proper funeral, wrote his name in ballpoint pen on his makeshift grave."

"Amnesty, in other words, was an organization that once knew the meaning of the word "gulag." Amnesty also once knew the importance of political neutrality. On its Web site, the organization still describes itself as "independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion." In the Cold War era, this neutrality was important, since it prevented the organization's publications, whether on prison food or prison deaths, from being seen as propaganda for one side or another.

I don't know when Amnesty ceased to be politically neutral or at what point its leaders' views morphed into ordinary anti-Americanism. But surely Amnesty's recent misuse of the word "gulag" marks some kind of turning point. In the past few days, not only has Amnesty's secretary general, Irene Khan, called the U.S. prison for enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, "the gulag of our times," but Amnesty's U.S. director, William Schulz, has agreed that U.S. prisons for enemy combatants are "similar at least in character, if not in size, to what happened in the gulag." In an interview, Schulz also said that foreign governments should prosecute U.S. officials, as if they were the equivalent of the Soviet Union's criminal leadership."

"Amnesty, by misusing language, by discarding its former neutrality, and by handing the administration an easy way to brush off "ridiculous" accusations, also deprives itself of what should be its best ally. The United States, as the world's largest and most powerful democracy, remains, for all its flaws, the world's best hope for the promotion of human rights. If Amnesty still believes in its stated mission, its leaders should push American democratic institutions to influence U.S. policy for the good of the world, and not attack the American government for the satisfaction of their own political faction."

Can you prove that adapting current agricultural techniques in developing countries from using pesticides to using organic methods would not cause a mass famine due to lost production?

As for famine or starvation, not all of this is due to lack of food, but where there are shortages many of those shortages are directly related to conflict and/or political policies. An example is Zimbabwe, before President Robert Mugabe evicted White farmers off thier land and gave it to his cronies Zimbabwe was a breadbasket of Southern Africa producing much more food than the country consumed, it was net exporter of food. Now that there aren't people on the land who know how to farm, grow food, Zimbabwe almost continuously face famine. And just as in Ethiopia, Zimbabwe is also suffering from draught which is directly linked to global warming. In cases such as this pesticides and herbicides won't help.

U.N. to Resume Food Aid to Zimbabwe

...
Drought in southern Africa has cut food production in several nations but none so severely as Zimbabwe, which has a population of 12.7 million. The country's agricultural sector is reeling from triple-digit inflation and the effects of a land redistribution program that parceled out white-owned commercial farms to landless blacks and a large number of government officials.

Once known as the breadbasket of southern Africa for its bounteous exports of corn and other staples, Zimbabwe has failed to produce enough food for its own population since the often-violent land seizures began in 2000.
...

Can you prove the using pesticides and herbicides increases crop yields without health or environmental risks?

Bill Clinton ?
Hillary Clinton ?
Al Gore ?

Whoever it was, they were right, though perhaps they thought a larger quantity of the weapons would be found.

(I am a private pilot). If you are flying in IMC (Instrument Meteorological Conditions - on instruments alone), you have placed the lives of your pax in the hands of the pilot and his instruments. There are no outside clues when things go wrong. See here
for the top 100 air disasters. Two of them were purely ILS failures.

I'm not so confident that it can't happen. There are numerous anecdotal stories in the industry of NAV equipment wandering off course. In 1999 there were 76 reported incidents of possible cellphone interference. On IMC, and especially when on approach, these have the potential to end in disaster.

The Itanium angle is interesting, especially considering that the Itanium was jointly developed by Intel and HP, and Apple already has a partnership with HP, selling iPods.

However, one of the bigger problems that Apple is having with IBM is that laptop sales are overtaking desktop sales in the PC market, but IBM has yet to furnish Apple with a low-power G5 suitable for laptops.

Is the Itanium any more suitable for laptops than the G5? It's supposed to be more of a server chip, so I'm guessing not. And if Apple has to fall back on the Pentium M for its PowerBook line, then that pretty much wipes away the advantage of the Itanium, as all software will have to be recompiled for little endian x86, anyway.

An Excerpt:

Even for green activists within the evangelical movement, there are landmines. One faction in the movement, called dispensationalism, argues that the return of Jesus and the end of the world are near, so it is pointless to fret about environmental degradation.

James G. Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first interior secretary, famously made this argument before Congress in 1981, saying: "God gave us these things to use. After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back." The enduring appeal of End Time musings among evangelicals is reflected in the phenomenal success of the Left Behind series of apocalyptic potboilers, which have sold more than 60 million copies and are the best-selling novels in the country.

They're finding permafrost is melting. What's usually all year round ice beneath the lakes is melting. Lakes are getting bigger because of other areas of ice melting, and it might be the cause of the warming of permafrost. They at least appear to be symptoms of the same overall problem, a change in climate.

To quote from this article.

"As temperatures rise, ice and snow melt and put more water into Arctic lakes." and "They now believe additional lake surface brought on by melting is just the first part of the process. In the southern parts of the Siberia study area, the permafrost itself is believed to be melting."

So perhaps an accurate headline might have been Arctic Warming Is Causing Lakes To Grow Bigger, And The Drying Up Of Lakes Due To The Melting Of Permafrost. The Former May Be Causing The Latter.

Their original headline still appears perfectly accurate to me though and, while I'm no journalist, it also seems more effective.

I was reading a story a few weeks ago about a lake in Russia just being sucked into a sinkhole and disappearing.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/06/03/AR2005060301524.html

Russian lake disappearing into a sinkhole
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0604russia- lake04.html

U.S. consumers retire or replace roughly 133,000 personal computers per day, according to research firm Gartner Inc.

See for example http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/05/31/AR2005053101502.html/ (registration required)

But Alberto Gonzales testified that the PATRIOT Act had never been used to try to get information from a library. Are you accusing the Attorney General of committing a federal crime by lying to Congress? I'm shocked... shocked!

Hash collision. Hash collision? Not really, but by analogy. Read this:

"Naperville library officials said the technology cannot be used to reconstruct a person's actual fingerprint. The scanners, made by Naperville-based U.S. Biometrics Corp., use an algorithm to convert 15 or more specific points into a unique numeric sequence."

So, basically, this is a geometric 15-point "fingerprint hash" calculated from the actual biometric measurements. Sounds more benign than than recording the actual fingerprint, doesn't it? Except, of course, if your 15-point "hash" happens to coincide (within tolerance) of someone else's who happens to be a criminal of some kind. Then, when the collects a bunch of fingerprints from a crime scene, they might run them through the same 15-point "hash" calculation, screen them against all the other such sequences they might obtain from the local library database under a secret court order. *Poof* Congratulations, you are a "person of interest", based on even *less* precise information than if they did have your real fingerprint.

Of course, you will be politely asked to voluntarily turn over your full fingerprint to verify that it does not match the one collected. And only people with nothing to hide would have a problem with this, right? It is not as if mistakes ever happen with fingerprints.

My attitude is: if the police state does not have my fingerprint, then it can't turn up in erroneous searches, and I and my family won't have the joy of experiencing the repercussions of a false positive. The police state can fingerprint all the criminals and others where fingerprint identification is necessary for the job (e.g., in the military, it is recorded for identification purposes), but when they start advocating fingerprinting of the general populace, I think there is something seriously wrong.

Fingerprinting is good, but it is not 100% reliable, and you can ruin people's lives if a mistake is made. Why should any more trust be placed in this 15-point measurements? What is wrong with plain, old, address and name for the sake of a library card?

Texas just convicted his political organizaion's fundraiser for illegal fundraising for corporations, and covering up the evidence (as well as all kinds of legal mumbo jumbo to escape justice). That proves that either Delay worked for illegal fundraising, or that he runs and promotes a major fundraising organization, central to his career, without supervising it. Though the latter is obviously just a lie he'll tell in a last resort to escape justice, both are evil.

How about when Delay coerced a fellow Republican to vote for the Medicare drug bill? The bill itself was a tissue of lies, deliberately underestimating the cost by hundreds of $billions, to miss a maximum Republicans set as a condition for backing it. This serious charge by the Republican leader was proven when even Delay's rigged ethics panel came down on him, a rarity in Congress.

You want evil? He protected Marianas Islands sweatshops (and sex slavers) at the request of a briber^Wlobbyist, telling his corporate backers there to "Stand firm. Resist evil.". That's evil.

He diverted funds from a children's charity to fund his parties at the Republican National Convention. Pretty evil.

And he packed the ethics committee with dependents, to avoid charges that finally were too much for even his majority to suppress. Then purged members who wouldn't stand for the whitewash. Then tried to change the rules so they would no longer "require leaders to step aside temporarily if indicted" - once he was facing indictment. Evil.

Why are you clinging to this bad guy? Does he bring home the bacon to you, from the pork he carves out of our taxes in Congress? Do you own a pharmaceutical company? Are you a congressmember on his payroll? Or are you just so "partisan" that when the Republican Majority Leader is proven guilty, all you care about is whether "Democrats are just as bad", though of course you have no proof of your codependent jealousy?

Texas just convicted his political organizaion's fundraiser for illegal fundraising for corporations, and covering up the evidence (as well as all kinds of legal mumbo jumbo to escape justice). That proves that either Delay worked for illegal fundraising, or that he runs and promotes a major fundraising organization, central to his career, without supervising it. Though the latter is obviously just a lie he'll tell in a last resort to escape justice, both are evil.

How about when Delay coerced a fellow Republican to vote for the Medicare drug bill? The bill itself was a tissue of lies, deliberately underestimating the cost by hundreds of $billions, to miss a maximum Republicans set as a condition for backing it. This serious charge by the Republican leader was proven when even Delay's rigged ethics panel came down on him, a rarity in Congress.

You want evil? He protected Marianas Islands sweatshops (and sex slavers) at the request of a briber^Wlobbyist, telling his corporate backers there to "Stand firm. Resist evil.". That's evil.

He diverted funds from a children's charity to fund his parties at the Republican National Convention. Pretty evil.

And he packed the ethics committee with dependents, to avoid charges that finally were too much for even his majority to suppress. Then purged members who wouldn't stand for the whitewash. Then tried to change the rules so they would no longer "require leaders to step aside temporarily if indicted" - once he was facing indictment. Evil.

Why are you clinging to this bad guy? Does he bring home the bacon to you, from the pork he carves out of our taxes in Congress? Do you own a pharmaceutical company? Are you a congressmember on his payroll? Or are you just so "partisan" that when the Republican Majority Leader is proven guilty, all you care about is whether "Democrats are just as bad", though of course you have no proof of your codependent jealousy?

Report: 108 Died In U.S. Custody

isnt it obvious

They left out the address of AQ Khan, who runs a mailorder nukes biz in Pakistan. Just put an account# from Libya, Iran or North Korea, or maybe Saudi Arabia on your order, and you can get all the tutorial you need. You'll still have to get the fuel from somewhere, but there's plenty of Russian, Kazakh or even good ol' Italian mafia dealers. Try the Carlyle Group - they might be your one-stop-shop, including the negotiations that signal your initiation into the nuclear club.

You mock how you expect a lie from the AC account about owning an airline, wherein we should all just accept the fact that you are a grown, well-travelled person because you are using the mzwaterski account (with a very high UID, I might add--what, have you had that account for like a week or something?).

I do not recall where I claimed to be a "freedom minded person." I simply pointed out that your trust in the logic that goes behind the TSA prohibited item list is naive, because: there are many complaints about the inconsistencies of the list (such as how you can't carry on a lighter, but you can carry on 4 boxes of matches), how the policies are enforced, the very fact that your gold-standard document you hold up explicitly states that it is up to the TSA screeners whether to abide by the list or not, and you also seem to give yourself such self-importance that if it hasn't happened to you then it just doesn't happen, or happen often.

Yeah, right. I'm just making all this stuff up. I made up all those newspaper articles too. But I forget my place; I am conversing with THE mzwaterski, a barometer of the people, a man with the pulse of the nation. If it hasn't happened to him, or if he doesn't know about it, then it must not exist.

Your comments are based on rumors and I highly doubt you've ever had anything mentioned above confiscated from you.

On the other hand we know what I am (among other things): AN EVIL ANONYMOUS COWARD!!!! Oooooooooohhhhh! I'm gonna corrupt your women and upset your traditional way of life!!!!

Juniper has a horse in the race, selling network devices.

There's currently an IPv6 conference at which they're appearing as well. The conference ends today (2005-May-26).

There's a Washington Post article on the summit.

I'm posting from the summit, where they have a IPv6 802.11 network up for visitors use.

Juniper has a horse in the race, selling network devices.

There's currently an IPv6 conference at which they're appearing as well. The conference ends today (2005-May-26).

There's a Washington Post article on the summit.

I'm posting from the summit, where they have a IPv6 802.11 network up for visitors use.