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The FBI thinks otherwise.

"In one similarity to Nokia's smart phones, the tablet employs the Opera browser from Opera Software ASA."

Sounds like Uncle Bill is taking a page from Nature Boy's playbook. Filter those who have access to you so you never have to hear an opposing opinion.

if NASA does not terminate the project to favor Bush's push to put humans on Mars, the Voyager 1 has enough power to last another 15 years (2020). in that case, they should be able to retain enough data to calculate what is going on in the heliosheath and beyond. I don't think 'hot' is used to describe a location that is 7 billion miles from the sun :-} .. but they should be able to calculate a close temperature based on the distance and magnetic fields among many other factoring (IANAS)

Want retarded laws: up to 2003, state governments reserved the right to arrest consenting adults for having non-biblical sex. Even worse, it is still illegal in some places for non married persons to "live together in sin".

Now I know, the ACLU is a bunch of commie liberals, but let us not forget the very public rebuke Ashcroft et al. received because not only were their search warrant requests being rubber stamped by the judicial panel, but they were also full of errors (one agent was even barred from appearing before the court because he regularly included errors): "In virtually every instance, the government's misstatements and omissions in FISA applications and violations of the Court's orders involved information sharing and unauthorized disseminations to criminal investigators and prosecutors."

Now for some corrections (from Section 215 text):

`(a)(1) The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or a designee of the Director (whose rank shall be no lower than Assistant Special Agent in Charge) may make an application for an order requiring the production of any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution.

`(A) a judge of the court established by section 103(a); or
`(B) a United States Magistrate Judge under chapter 43 of title 28, United States Code, who is publicly designated by the Chief Justice of the United States to have the power to hear applications and grant orders for the production of tangible things under this section on behalf of a judge of that court; and
`(2) shall specify that the records concerned are sought for an authorized investigation conducted in accordance with subsection (a)(2) to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.

So we've established that you are technically correct that not just anyone can make the requests (as I mentioned, the cleaning crews and secretaries are excluded), and there is oversight (that rubber-stamps the requests, no matter how factually in error they are).

The PATRIOT Act is interesting reading. I suggest you read the text some time instead of getting the boiled down versions off of Fox News.

The issue is not what government would do. The issue is conservative politicians, like our president, claiming to be for moral values but ignoring the poor.

See this.

A quote:

Bush's promised promised tax incentives for private giving were stripped at the last minute from the $1.6 trillion tax cut legislation "to make room for the estate-tax repeal that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy," Kuo said.

cells in animals before they can try the therapy in humans.

I know it is a personal pet peeve of mine but it just makes my skin crawl when people separate humans and animals. Humans ARE animals!

On a slightly more ontopic note: This is the breaking point for future scientific study specifically biomedic/stemcell research in the United States. There are two bills in the house about to be voted on - The Cord Blood Stem Cell Act 2005 HR 596 and Stem Cell Research Act 2005 HR 810 in the house, which surprisingly has *bipartisan support* which even more surprisingly is more than likely to pass and most surprisingly (well...not so much for some of us) is very likely to be vetoed (first time ever for GWB) by the President. Unbelievable.

store it in a shielded sleeve until you use it?

Actually, the card uses some of the scan energy to signal that it has been accessed... With the new laws in Florida, you'll be able to just shoot into the crowd when you get an unauthorized access.

Worked for the U.S. Government: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/05/04/AR2005050402134.html

Why dont we spend 100 billion on building a giant golden pyramid? If we don't the chinese will surely do it before us.

Space weapons are just not very effective. That all powerful laser system was already tried in the SDI boondogle and found impossible. Even the SDI gave up on placing the lasers in space and put them on the ground (that did not work either). Nuclear and power laser technology has not improved drastically in the last 30 years.

Also, there is a misconception that if the chinese are first to develop space weapons then they would gain a huge advantage. Fact is, space weapons can be destroyed very easily (and cheaply compared to the price of the weapons) by any country with space launch capabilities.

That's incredibly simple-minded

Some of the most basic concepts are simple, and trying to nuance your way around them is when you wind up with philosophical contradictions written into law and policy. My point, in referring to keeping weapons (around the house, or in space) is that the tools themselves do not have a motive, or make decisions.

Any call for peace boils down to you can't protect your family!

How is being prepared to keep the peace, and having the capacity to deter aggression in the face of people demonstrably happy to slaughter, a bad thing? Regardless of scale - from burglaring punks kicking down doors (such as this example, right here in my county a couple days ago) to larger groups of them taking over countries (see Afghanistan, the Baltics, or Kuwait) - a demonstrated willingness to do something about it, and an established capacity to do so, are critical.

Do you not see a difference between owning a gun, and placing WMDs in space? Hmm?

Not really, no. We already have megatons worth of nukes floating silently through the seas every day, and fuel-burning aircraft with incredibly destructive payloads constantly circling the globe. The whole point of exploring how to use orbital positions and technologies is to make that same capacity more effective, efficient, and more of a consideration for bad guys. If we can take out a radar installation with more precision, less risk and loss of life, and with less old-fashioned hardware having to be maintained, deployed, and flown all over the place - that's a good thing.

Keep your gun, I really don't care. I think you live in a fantasy world if you think you need it to protect your family

Guns are used more often in brandishments against intruders than you are obviously aware. A few years back, sitting at the same computer (well, different CPU) that I'm sitting at right now, I had the the 1:30AM delight of having my back door beat on by a guy in an obvious lather. Just "wanted to use the phone," he said. Some people were giving him trouble and he wanted to call his mom (now, mind you he was in his mid-twenties). I refused to open the door (a large glass one), whereupon he started beating it again, and then started rooting through the large rocks in the garden. I had a few moments to deal with that situation, and showing him that I was on the phone dialing 911 would do nothing. I'm happy to say that a long time friend, boarding with my wife and I, heard the ruckus and came downstairs armed. That completely changed the events of the next few minutes, and stopped the guy from smashing the glass. He ran aroud the front of the house and was looking in through other windows - including those of our neighbor - when the police finally arrived and took care of him (turns out he fled from a drug deal gone bad, had knifed someone, and was trying to lay low). If it had been just my wife home, I'd have been really glad for her access to the shotgun (a most wonderfully dramatic attitude adjuster that definately gives your average smash-in clown pause) and her long experience in using it. There is absolutely no fantasy involved in my personal experiences with this, the huge escalation of gang activity in my city (mostly MS13, a particularly violent and theft/burglary-financed central American gang that has taken root here as it has so many other places), or in my refusal to abandon whatever edge I may have over some twit with a knife or baseball bat. I'm legal about my readiness and use of force, unlike them. I'm trained, I'm a range officer, I've spent more time carefully placing shots with handguns, rifles, and shotguns than most people ever will. I spend time teaching people how to safely use guns, and because I'm a hunter, I've got intimate knowledge of the devastating effects that firearms can produce. There's nothing simplistic about my experiece, about

I looked this up while I was posting and I don't understand it.

Now, voting isn't a Human Right, it's a right enumerated in the Constitution and has conditions. I'm not sure it's as high a level right as Speech, Freedom Religion, Arms.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A978 5-2004Aug17.html

The 14th Amendment (1868) permits states to deny the vote "for participation in rebellion, or other crime."

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constituti on.amendmentxiv.html

Sounds like the ban exists because of anti-Black laws from the Post-Reconstruction from the Democrats that came back then, and it's held up by Republicans and Social Conservatives now, it's a State issue so it should be easier to repeal at a local level, but I don't hear about liberal states like Oregon (where I live) working to repeal it.

I don't understand why Ex-cons can't vote.

Newsweek reported that American Guantanamo guards, among other abuse and torture, threw a Koran in a toilet. That specific abuse has been reported many times over the past couple of years, including just recently, by witnesses released from the prison. After years of being held without cause. Newsweek confirmed those stories with Federal source, and the Pentagon had reviewed it days before publication, without contradicting the claim.

What kind of "proof" is Newsweek, or anyone, going to get? Investigate the inside of an overseas US torture prison, in Cuba, where even Congressional investigations have met with fraud? Even Newsweek's "retraction" is nominal - they don't admit they got the facts wrong, just that they regret the consequences of publishing it. Like pissing off the Bush administration, which they've been so careful to otherwise support. In fact, Newsweek is continuing to investigate the story, hardly a rejection of the report as "false".

The week the story was published, violent demonstrations in Afghanistan, where we run other torture prisons, and an ongoing, inconclusive war, kill many people. Which isn't unusual in our adminstration of Afghanistan. What is unusual is for Afghans to read Newsweek. Even Bush's Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers (Rumsfeld's right-hand man), blames Afghani "politics", not Newsweek. But since Rice's State Department blames Newsweek, rather than itself, it must be true, right? Especially since they've gotten the rest of the mass media to carry that story.

In fairness, I wonder: what do you think about the lies Newsweek published about WMD in Iraq, shepherding us to war, which came from the Pentagon? Which the Pentagon blames on the uncorroborated lies of one man, Chalabi, an Iranian agent?

Newsweek reported that American Guantanamo guards, among other abuse and torture, threw a Koran in a toilet. That specific abuse has been reported many times over the past couple of years, including just recently, by witnesses released from the prison. After years of being held without cause. Newsweek confirmed those stories with Federal source, and the Pentagon had reviewed it days before publication, without contradicting the claim.

What kind of "proof" is Newsweek, or anyone, going to get? Investigate the inside of an overseas US torture prison, in Cuba, where even Congressional investigations have met with fraud? Even Newsweek's "retraction" is nominal - they don't admit they got the facts wrong, just that they regret the consequences of publishing it. Like pissing off the Bush administration, which they've been so careful to otherwise support. In fact, Newsweek is continuing to investigate the story, hardly a rejection of the report as "false".

The week the story was published, violent demonstrations in Afghanistan, where we run other torture prisons, and an ongoing, inconclusive war, kill many people. Which isn't unusual in our adminstration of Afghanistan. What is unusual is for Afghans to read Newsweek. Even Bush's Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers (Rumsfeld's right-hand man), blames Afghani "politics", not Newsweek. But since Rice's State Department blames Newsweek, rather than itself, it must be true, right? Especially since they've gotten the rest of the mass media to carry that story.

In fairness, I wonder: what do you think about the lies Newsweek published about WMD in Iraq, shepherding us to war, which came from the Pentagon? Which the Pentagon blames on the uncorroborated lies of one man, Chalabi, an Iranian agent?

The cases of MoG and Jayson Blair are fundamentally different from events surrounding Rather's resignation or the retraction of the claims in the Newsweek article. Rather and Newsweek ran stories about events that were based on fact- that is they actually happened in the real world- while MoG and Blair just MADE STUFF UP. MoG carried it a step further and engaged in ad-hominem attacks on the subject of her reporting- behavior that is totally unprofessional, uncalled-for, and possibly actionable.

As the Gannon/Guckert insanity shows, it's OK to make stuff up and pass it off as fact, as long as it's an echo chamber for whatever Rove told McClellan to say. MoG's strategic failure isn't that she's reporting lies as fact, it's that she doesn't have a bunch of religious whack-jobs employed by ClearChannel to repeat her lies as if they're the truth. She does have a network of MS apologists and astroturfers who copy/paste her specious claims, and Dvorak is one of those guys.

The media has 3 audiences, and are held accountable to two masters: the audiences are (1) sheep who believe what they're told, (2) people who are willing to read past the headline and actually question the news being presented to them, and (3) the people who made the news happen and want to see it reported a certain way so (1) and (2) can know how cool/important/rich/dangerous (3) is living. The masters are (A) the corporate entities who sign the paychecks, and (B) to a much lesser extent, the news-reading public composed of (1) and (2) who vote with their eyes and dollars.

The problem with news in this country today is that group (3) and group (A) are increasingly the same people, using the news media to influence the opinions of groups (1) and (2). We have a name for this kind of media communication- it's called advertizing.

Or marketing. And when you see an ad, the important questions to ask are: "who is paying for this?" "What are they selling?" and "how much did this ad cost?" So those are the questions I (and I think many other folks who have had opportunity to appreciate what PJ is doing with Groklaw) would like to ask MoG, preferably after a subpoena and under oath.

Just one little problem: Newsweek's "source" was an anonymous phone call from someone alleging to be a government official who paraphrased what they claimed was a report to be issued.

Wrong. The source was indeed a government official, who was asked in person to verify the story. He did.

You are wrong on so many levels on this. Shame on you.

Coverage here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/05/15/AR2005051500605.html

As to why it is your problem, it means if you don't watch the show in a way ACNielsen tracks it, the show is more likely to go away.

So you're saying we should only trade bad shows over BitTorrrent, in hope they'll go away? That's just zocky!

You've convinced me! I'm going to reformat one of my harddrives and stock it full of NBC's Bible-based miniseries Christ vs. Satan smackdown, Revelations .

Uhm, do Fundies waiting on "The Rapture" know how to use BitTorrent? Maybe we could hand out CD-ROMs at Sunday schools and Revival meetings?

Maybe I'll have room for Fox's paean to the effectiveness and morality of torture as an everyday (every Day, get it?) tool of extra-legal terrorist hunting, 24. (Yeah, it's a decent show, but its pernicious message is, only naive Democrats don't enjoy breaking fingers for Patriotism.)

If Race Research Is Banned Now, How Will We Cope With A "Brave New World"?

By Steve Sailer

Through genetic selection and modification, we will be soon be able to transform human nature, for better . . . or worse.

Some find this exciting. I find it mostly alarming.

The good news: we still have time to figure out what the physical, psychological, and social impacts of these gene-altering technologies might be - by studying naturally-occurring human genetic diversity.

The bad news: we won't fund research into existing human biodiversity - because it's politically incorrect.

Genetic engineering, and associated technologies such as neural implants, is explored in two new books.

Microsoft programmer Ramez Naam, author of More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement , never seems to have met an idea for fiddling around with our genes that he didn't like. I find his optimism likable even though I don't share it. Unfortunately, the numerous small errors of fact in his book saps confidence in his overall reliability.

In contrast, Washington Post reporter Joel Garreau - known to VDARE.COM readers as author of the provocative The Nine Nations Of North America - can't seem to make up his mind in his upcoming Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies--and What It Means to Be Human.

Garreau evenhandedly interviews futurist cheerleaders, like inventor Ray Kurzweil, who takes hundreds of nutritional supplements daily as part of his plan for living forever, and doomsayers, like Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, who fears that genetically manipulated germs could wipe out all of humanity.

(The inaptly named Joy strikes me as a Gloomy Gus. But, just in case some apocalyptic catastrophe does transpire, it would make sense to pay a couple of dozen military families to live for two year stretches at the bottom of a Kansas salt mine, from which, if the worst were to happen, they could eventually re-emerge like Noah's family to repopulate the planet.)

What Naam and Garreau can agree upon is that the post-human age will be here Real Soon Now.

I'm not so certain. Medicine progresses slowly these days. But I am sure that that it's time to start getting serious about whether we want it or not.

The situation oddly resembles the political impact of immigration. When I first started writing about immigration, it was widely assumed that the Hispanic share of the vote had become so huge that it was political suicide to try to cut back on immigration. Yet closer study showed this was far from true.

For example, in the overall

"The Constitution prohibits treason ("aid and comfort to the enemy")."

Section 805 is an abomination dripping with the potential for abuse. If you're not concerned about the abuse, read this latest article. 16 year-old girls detained for 6 weeks. No real cause. Released without charges. But the defense lawyer is still under a gag order and can't even discuss the freakin' case.

The problem is when "The Enemy" becomes such a slapdash label that grouping anyone who opposes you into "The Bad Guys" becomes almost an afterthought.

"People and entities that want to harm or destroy the US are the enemy."

Except that the current powers-that-be in Washington D.C. seem not to have much problem extending that to mean "anyone wanting to harm the interests of those in power". If DeLay and crew were so eager to falsely report a "missing plane" to the Dept. of Homeland Security and exploit those assets during a mere political tiff, doesn't that raise the hair on the back of your neck? Because it should.

What if Doctors Without Borders treat a series of casualties somewhere in Africa, and it later turns out some of the patients happened to be with some "officially designated terrorist group".

What if you take on a perl project that someone on the Web has offered up on a contract basis? Quick little contract job. Later turns out the person paying you was with a charity group linked to Hamas?

Far-fetched? Hard to say. But the fact is that there should not even be the potential for such a situation. If the U.S. gov't wants to put you away, they've now got an arsenal of laws in PATRIOT that can do so on the most tenuous of connections.

Once again, if that doesn't make the hair on the back of your neck, maybe you need to reexamine what's been going on.

Well, hey, it worked for my senator...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/elections/200 4/wi/

Senator Feingold (D-WI, for those to lazy to follow the link) was the only senator to vote against the PATRIOT Act. He took some heat for this, yes, but eventually even many republicans who dislike Feingold's fiscal ideas decided to vote for him. Winning a senate seat by 11 points is no small feat, especially in a "battleground" state.

My point? Not everyone is spineless. Yes, Feingold did, apparently, vote for the Iraqi spending bill with the Real-ID stuff, but next time he has a townhall meeting I'll ask him about it.

Which brings me to another point. Small groups of people CAN get heard. For instance: http://politics.slashdot.org/politics/04/12/06/231 234.shtml?tid=153&tid=219

Have you even emailed your senator?

How will the people's hatred of the Act be known, when Congress will do whatever it wants? How will the people even know they hate "the Act", when the news media don't report its hateful provisions, its abuses, its failures? With a few more Republicans in Congress since the one that created and passed the Act, who owe their offices to the Republican machine that funded and organized their campaigns, why should they change any of the Act that they all like so much?

As Bush said, Republicans see the 2004 election as an "accountability moment", which has now passed. There's 3/4 of an election cycle to come before the next one, in 11/2006 - plenty of time to spin up some positive accountability, like sending another $300 "tax cut" check to people, while increasing their share of the Federal debt by many times that amount.

People do hate the kind of unaccountable, unfettered government intrusion that the Patriot Act authorizes. That's why Republicans constantly invoke fear of that kind of "big government" intrusion when running for office, which people then vote for. But the electoral system, including the parties and the media, is badly broken. When the Patriot Act survives this nominal "extension" review, all we'll really know is that the people's hatred of it doesn't matter. Those of us paying attention will know, anyway - me, and the politicians making their living off the broken machine.

In our defense, our senator Russ Feingold was the only one to vote against the Patriot Act.

And your statement is bullshit. The Republicans successfully fillibustered the nomination of Fortas in 1968. In addition, the Republicans have fillibustered judicial nominees before and since, but they were not successful, but not for a lack of trying. Senator Frist attempted to fillibuster a Clinton nominee in 1999, but was unsuccessful. Link about Fortas in 1968 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A451 49-2005Mar17.html

The stated application for this system is for disabled hunters, such as Dale Hagberg, a 38-year-old quadriplegic who "worked a computer mouse with his mouth and tongue on Saturday, April 9, to shoot at an antelope on a game reserve near Boeme, Texas, while lying in bed in Ligonier, a town in northeastern Indiana."

Everyone keeps heaping scorn and ridicule on "lazy hunters who can't drag their ass of the sofa to go hunting in the woods." But what about paralyzed people who couldn't drag their asses anywhere if they tried? As both this Washington Post article and the referenced L.A. Times article note, the hunt on April 9th did have the traditional elements of a "normal" hunt--Hagberg had to wait for the antelope to come into the clear, just as an "abled" hunter would do in a blind. He came away "empty-handed" as his computer wasn't fast enough to maneuver the rifle in time to get a good shot off (damn lag!)

"Lockwood, the site's creator, points to the failure of Hagberg's hunt as proof that it is truly a 'hunt,' complete with hours of idle waiting for prey and ample opportunity for it to escape. 'It's not about killing something,' he said. 'It's about experiencing the thrill of the hunt, the boredom, everything that goes with it.'"

Restricted to disabled hunters, I see nothing wrong with this website that is not also a problem with "traditional" hunting (PETA concerns, etc.) But to be solvent, I'm sure they would have to throw open the doors to Joe Lazy-Ass as well, which is less compelling.

But I would argue that, just like in Sony Betamax vs. Universal, the problem is not with the technology, but with the way the consumer utilizes it. Hagberg shows a "legitimate use" of this technology, and to ban it outright through special legistation reeks of misunderstanding and shortsightedness. I mean, Joe Lazy-Ass is also out in the woods flushing game with dynamite and using AK-47s to mow down yearlings, and we don't ban all hunting to stop him there. We should allow the proper hunting technology to the proper people, and not throw out baby with bathwater.

Once again? Bush signed the Class Action Fairness [sic] Act, which reduces the ways in which class action lawsuits against major corporations can be instigated. Corporations that could still be sued were very pleased.

BTW: Did you know that, in all likelyhood, you've signed away your right to sue your bank, mortgage, or credit card company?

First of all, there's a difference between an ID that is issued locally and the ID that is proposed. If you read the original, then you would understand how the proposed ID is different and why there are privacy concerns. Further, am I really required to provide ID when flying on an airplane? There's already a well-known lawsuit challenging whether or not this is the case. Is this an airline rule? Is this a law? Who knows? The US government refuses to explain the exact status of this rule citing "security concerns." Thus we, as individuals, are being asked to obey laws that we're not allowed to see and which may or may not be Constitutional. Does having secret laws not strike you as a bit odd?

Frankly, I don't care to have our government exercising its authority without citizens having some say in the matter. In the case of the national ID law that was attached to a military spending bill, debate has been stifled and we're left sitting here wondering if the government will abuse this law, too.

I do read what I link to, thank you. Had you bothered to follow the link through to the actual ruling, and had you actually bothered to read it, you would have noticed this little gem:

"[I]nterrogation relating to one's identity or a request for identification by the police does not, by itself, constitute a Fourth Amendment seizure."

So yes, a police officer can interrogate someone and demand to see some form of identification. And while there is a requirement that the police officer's stop be "reasonable" and somehow limited to what is currently being investigated, no probably cause is required. Then, if the request is legitimate and the person refuses, the officer can arrest that individual.

It's about time Al Gore gets the recognition he deserves. After all Al Gore is known as the inspiration to American's who suffer from Dutch Elm disease. And he reminded us there was no controlling legal authority in the White House while he made calls asking for contributions. And if he'd won in 2000, we wouldn't be able to enjoy the Bush or chimp pictures.

What good is broadband if you can only access government-approved content? It's well known that the Chinese government censors its citizens' Internet Web site usage: try this or this or this or this...and that's just for starters. (Try Googling "Internet censorship in China.")

Imagine if we all had personal Gigabit connections directly to the Internet backbone but...the RIAA controlled what sites you could visit. Alternatively, consider this: imagine having that personal Gigabit connection, but you have to subscribe to AOL (with all its...quirks). You can't use any other content provider.

Basically, what China has is a monopoly on information. What good is broadband if you can't even choose what you want to look at?

VR is also being used experimentally to help burn victims control their pain while their wounds are being cleaned at some burn centers around the country.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A355 67-2004Aug2.html

Dude, if people checked out more news like this, VR is slowly applied but defintely being applied and has applications much more than military and gaming.

Let's see....

• refusing to commit needed resources - CHECK
• letting the war drag on for years - I don't see any sign of the end yet, do you? - CHECK
• allowing 50,000+ American dead - most of these were in the later stages of the Vietnam war, the first three years or so had a low bodycount on both sides. We haven't reached that point in Iraq yet, but so far the bodycount on both sides has been much higher than at the same point in Vietnam - CHECK

The u.s. is in the transition to a wholely IP based economy

Right now the US economy is walking a rather fine line

On Technocrat.net they just posted an article from the Washington Post about using VR to treat PTSD

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A583 60-2005Mar22.html?nav=rss_technology

What happened in Texas was that two Vontage subscribers were shot during a home invasion in March, 2005. They called 911, but since they hadn't registered their call didn't go through.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A585 98-2005Mar22.html

but he does have a good basic point: if you're choosing between Windows, Mac and Linux for the "best" computing platform, Mac is looking awfully attractive these days.

Well, in this case "he" = Apple PR, so not surprising conclusion on his part.

Apple have also recently been caught bribing journalists for positive reviews.

If it was any other company, this sort of behaviour may even lead to critical comments on the company and it's ethics.

The government does that over here.

The government does that over here.

Maybe Apple paid him too.

No, they are not an arm of the govt. They do however own some of the politicians in it...

Does anyone else think it's strange that there are so few US new agency reporting this, and the OP is quoting a Canadian agency??? There are a few national reports, but mostly local reports. It sure isn't seeming to get much attention...

Bush's approval rating is falling. Time to start another war and make love to the evil Saudi empire!

So, moron-in-chief, where are those WMDs?

GWB, the lying sack of holier-than-thou shit, has run out of yet another excuse.

...biased to favour Corporate America? Naw, couldn't be...

As opposed to the well paid bias of any other nation-state and it's corporate favorites? Please.

The American Left has failed miserably. Until they figure out how articulate something without alienating vast swaths of the electorate, people like Bush will continue to get elected. I'm begging you, please, find a credible candidate that doesn't radiate BAF.

Disclaimer: All references to Hitler, Nazis, etc. contained within parody; Godwin does not apply.

Here's a list of the topics they would've been working on:

* Recommendation for 400 MHz bands
* RLAN in the 5 GHz band
* Recommendation on harmonized frequencies for property protection
* Revision to Recommendation PCC.II/REC. 67 (XIX-01) on Low Power Radiocommunication devices,
* Radio frequency identification devices (RFID)
* Broadband Power Line Communications (BPL)
* Refarming of 700 MHz band
* Answer to Market questionnaire on IMT 2000 and systems beyond
* Results of the video conference on wireless broadband

History will be written by the winners. They'll be no trace of the dirty liberal hands that gave $250 to the Kerry campaign on these obscure telecommunication standards.

The Bush administation's genious is in it's recognition that all our problems, on all levels, are caused by liberal influence. Did you lose the signal on your wireless LAN moments ago? It's a little known fact that when this happens it's probably because of liberal influence.

Here are some more examples:

* Rebuilding Iraq : It's a well known fact that development specialists are mostly liberals. Which is why the Coalition Provisional Authority was wisely staffed almost entirely by young people with absolutely no relevant experience. What one and only one qualification they did all have in common, which no liberal could ever have, was they had all once sent a resume to conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation.

* The CIA : Why couldn't we find WMD in Iraq? Because the CIA is full of liberals. "'Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda.' said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House."

Sadly, you don't hear about this because of the liberal media. I didn't do it mommy, liberals did it.

W[h]at do you mean by "environmentalist circles"? Because this belief is only held by a minority fringe of environmentalists.

And how would you know if those random posters to slashdot are environmentalists? Why don't you just refer to them as "slashdot posters" - rather than trying to imply they are a part of mainstream environmentalism?

• Eco-terrorism, including burning down of new housing developments, car dealer lot vandalism (with highly emotional grafitti written on the wrecked vehicles)
• indifference to human life over animal life- I remember last year a wild cougar was on the loose in Palo Alto and when authorities killed it (they were afraid it would get free right as schools were letting out) animal rights people protested
• indifference to human life or happiness in general- see recent comments regarding human hibernation
• extremely emotional opposition to nuclear energy- I remember German greens were throwing themselves in front of trains carrying nuclear waste
• irrational attitudes to "waste" and conversation; see a Slashdot story about a year back where the submitter complained how 100's of gallons of water were being "wasted" in the production of a single CPU; no consideration of whether there was now a shortage of drinking or irrigation water as a result- the mere number offended him
• highly sentimental notions about the earth being our "mother" and how we're "raping" her (and don't tell me this is not a mainstream view; I've seen thousands of bumper stickers to this effect); this conveniently ignores the fact that there have been huge non-anthropogenic enivornmental changes in the past, as well as cataclysmic events leading to the extinction of over 50% of the earth's species

So I guess if this were the 1960's Microsoft should have not supported legislation that ended racial discrimination too?

He may have a point. However look at all the discussion a sentence generated.

Anyway at least Apple hasn't copy the blue screen of deaths that seem to plague every other "new technology" conference that Microsoft demos at. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A560 96-2005Jan7.html

wait for the next book in the series: "Quick-and-Dirty Neurosurgery for the Doctor on the Go."

1. Get project
2. Offshore work to Indian doctor for $4/hr
3. Profit!