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The PNAC agenda + our current military status = the draft.

Its like the lottery, except when you win you lose. Don't like it? Kick out Bush and his PNAC buddies.

The Washington Post has a good set of pix and video (Flash involved). FWIW, I was figuring that the Red Team's Humvee might make it. What did they do, forget to check the oil? Or perhaps the software went bonkers and left the engine at or over redline with no load?

I guess disabled really means that.
Here's betting nobody makes it past them...

Hey there Ryan.

The point I was making about Kerry had to do with his tendency to take special interest money. There have been a few articles about it in a few of the major papers, but I don't think it's gotten wide airplay.

Some of his other policies have yet to be tested, but he certainly has NO problem taking money from lobbying groups.

Consumer confidence declined 9 points in February

Feb Retail sales disappoint, come only from car sales

In an article by the Washington Post (E-Mail Giants Join in Court to Wage Spam War) Microsoft (With 3 others) plan to rid the world of SPAM but Microsoft sends free software to people hoping to increase their sales. Is this not also a form of SPAM?

washingtonpost.com spent three months following a Northern Virginia team as it conceived and built its DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. Check out the video, and read a related story from today's Washington Post.

washingtonpost.com spent three months following a Northern Virginia team as it conceived and built its DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. Check out the video, and read a related story from today's Washington Post.

The Washington Post reported this, not Worldnet Daily, which just pilfered the news.

I know you'd probably have to kill me first...

What kind of data could you possibly have on those disks. Wen Ho Lee (spy or not) managed to sneak out quite a bit of data between his ears. Heck, they practically leave the back door open at a DOE facility!

To provide more details on the SCO and their efforts to target corporations using LINUX, the Washington Post has a story about these efforts. Their targets in this case are AutoZone Inc. and DaimlerChrysler Corp.

So you've proved I make mistakes when I write in a hurry, while conveniently ignoring facts. Now that I've had some sleep, let's play the anal-retentive grammar game. We'll start with your grandparent post:

so what does that prove, that people cant marry whoever they want?

Incorrect capitalization, "cant" is not a word, it's spelled "can't". (1)

just because you endorse some kind of caste system where only the wealthy can marry each other doesnt mean thats how things are done in this country.

Again this is missing proper capitalization, and "doesnt" isn't a word; It should be spelled "doesn't".

if you dislike that, go to the middle east or india- they wont let people marry outside their 'station'

The sentence is missing capitalization, and "middle east" is a proper noun and should also be capitalized, as well as "india".

Now, we can move on to your current post:

If anything, I would say Im one of the biggest proponents of free enterprise than the majority of people on this website.

First, "Im" should be "I'm", but at least you are now capitalizing sentences. Second, it is grammatically incorrect to say "one of the biggest" followed by "than"; You can't express both group membership and comparison at the same time. You probably meant to say "I would say I'm a bigger proponent of free enterprise than the majority of people on this website." or alternatively "I would say I'm one of the biggest proponents of free enterprise on this website." Briefly addressing content, this says very little because half the people on Slashdot are Socialists but don't realize they are. Well, some are Europeans who do know, so kudos to them.

No, I figure Cheney only serves the rich because he is a member of the Old Boy Network, just like Bush.

Just like Kerry's wife, and his buddy Edward Kennedy. Notice that Edwards' name doesn't come in here. In fact I notice that you never even once brought up Edwards. Do you even know anything about him, or are you just a fan-boy of the current front runner? I wonder if you supported Dean before. I don't want to vote for Bush, so I don't think its wrong want the Democrats to come up with a better choice than someone who's been inside the beltway since 1969.

If you want to spew half baked ideas, you will have to do it against someone far less certain on the basis of their political ethics than myself.

Of course that isn't clear, as the only thing you've contributed to this whole discussion so far is saying roughly "I imagine that there is a prenuptial agreement" (Notice I can spell prenuptial correctly, which you spelled as "prenupual"). The rest has been trying to defend views you don't bother to elaborate. Although, it seems that you like Kerry, and clearly don't want anyone to spoil your idealistic image of him. You also seem believe (albeit incorrectly) I am a Republican. Going back to grammar, several style guides consider the use of "myself" where "me" is appropriate to be incorrect. By sheer force of use however, it has become accepted. You seem to be trying to do the same with dropping capitalization and the apostrophe. Are you a fan of e. e. cummings or something?

Health care isnt going to get 'fixed'

Hence my use of the word "want". If you instead ask me to predict what would happen, I'd say that Edwards' plans if given a chance would improve things, while Kerry's would make things worse. Of course, we can argue about whether Bush's "big government plan" is even worse than Kerry's, but I'd rather try for one that has a chance of actually helping. Call me an idealist.

There is way too much money being thrown at Congress for things to ever change.

And leading them all in the U.S. Congress is John Kerry. Of course you'll just point out that G. W. Bush is earning a l

Apparently they can. Gene Weingarten wrote an amusing piece in the Washington Post last week that describes his failed attempt to get out of just such a predicament using the defense you have suggested. It didn't work.

"My Coffee was too hot"

"I'm too fat"

"You watch my kids for me..."

These are just three stories, and yes, all extreme cases of what we're talking about here. Finding a scapegoat. It's a disease that is rampant, and further perpetuated by the media's constant abuse of their power of exposure.

I agree with you, it's senseless to look no further than the assumed 'influence' when it comes to cases like this, but unfortunately that is the surface stance that most individuals seem to jump on whenever things like this arise. Our actions somehow are no longer products of our decisions, but of our stated influences?

Please check out washingtonpost.com's more detailed report on the new group's goals.

Can it be any worse than this?

This Washingtonpost article(blah blah reg req'd) may shed some light for you.

I have definitely been noticing this trend and I don't like it one bit, but it doesn't seem there is very much I can do about it apart from abandoning some web sites that are not too essential.

For example, I haven't gone to www.washingtonpost.com since they introduced their new "super-nosy" registration policy (and I used to go there almost every day). On some other web sites I give fake information(OK this doesn't really solve anything, but dammit I am not going to let them win...)

In any case, I can easily forsee the day when there won't be any "free" news sites that do not require registration. Except the Onion. There will always be the Onion. (Knock on Wood...).

And if reading the fascicle is too heavy going, remember that you can watch the movies instead, at http://scpd.stanford.edu/knuth/. Fourteen videos of Knuth's lectures are aavailable, inclusing last years's "Tenth Annual Christmas Tree Lecture: Finding All Spanning Trees".

I watched the Tenth Annual Christmas Tree lecture live (the "trees", of course, being various computer science graphs and structures, not pine trees hung with colored lights) and found it surprisingly engaging and accessible even to an educated lay-person. If you have any interest in computer science or algorithm design, it's a fascinating way to spend an hour. (Disclaimer: I'd just watched the 1998 lecture to better understand Garsia-Wachs coding.)

I was so excited about watching it live that I submitted the Knuth Christmas lecture as a story about it to Slashdot, but the editors didn't think it important enough to accept. (Nor the story on "brain fingerprinting" -- a kind of polygraph based on direct reading of brain waves -- casting doubt on a death sentence, nor Eagle's drummer Don Henley's op-ed piece in the Washington Post attacking the music industry and ruminating on p2p, nor the story about Anglo-German scientific rivalry and the resulting pickled baby "dragon".)

More here, here and here.

Fine. I congratulate the German people on living under a democracy, and I do not seek to minimize the effort that must have taken, emerging from dictatorship, ruin, and division in 1945. (And to some extent I must also claim credit for my country and, specifically, the Marshall Fund and the US policies toward the BRD after the war.)

This is the efforts of the previous German and USA generation, and is of no credit to our generation. Just as it is unfair to blame the young Germans for what they grandfather did or did not do (many Germans fought Hitler), it is a bit fresh to take credit for the Marshal plan of our grandfather generation. I am proud that my grandfather fought in the war, but that is no proof that I would pass the test if I would end up in the hell war is (it can be an inspiration, but not an excuse for not taking responsibility in my own life). The concept of past greatness as proof of present superiority is what the nazis did to keep control of the German nation if you don't mind me reminding you.

Each generation have to be vigilant and protect democracy, liberty, and the other things we value for the next generation (our children). The mistake of Germany in the 1930's was to think that a country like theirs, a great and proud nation of Europe would always be at the hart of civilization. The shock for the world and most Germans was to discover after the war that Hitler had turned the cultural nation Germany into a barbaric slaughter house (remember, few in the west knew about the concentration camps in the early years of the war, and the presence of these camps was denied or kept secret until the war was over).

It is disingenuous to blame the parent post for emphasizing the need to protect democracy first and then to claim that Germans have not learned their lesson. First of all, it is our lesson, the whole God damn western world. It would be pure racism to suggest that the Germans are a murderous "race" (what does this word "race" really mean anyway) while the rest of the west (or at least the holly allies) has democracy in their genes.

Second, Hitler never won an election (the Nazis got at their peak below 30 % of the votes). Hitler did not believe in democracy, he just manipulated the process (and the voters insecurity) to get a foot hole and then he did a coup d'etat. This is why in Germany they have had difficult debates for the last decades what how to deal with parties that has at their core to get rid of democracy (is it democratic to ban anti-democratic parties?) and balance between free-speech and nazi propaganda (is it hate speech, speech having as a direct consequence violence and death?). It is similar to US discussion about how much protection the president should have compared to the right of protesters to be heard (the so-called free speech areas). Or if it helps the democratic process when democrats and republicans redraw districts to make elections a formality. Democracy is a process which has to constantly change to meet the constantly changing challenges that any nation have to deal with.

I'm not saying the current German government will abuse its iris-scanning. It probably will not. But how sure can you be -- especially in the face of German history -- that every future German government will resist the temptation to use these records in abusive ways? That's the lesson Germany needs to have learned from the Nazi era.

No, the lessons is ours to learn. And the current USA generation, since the USA is the leader of the free world with its huge military advantage, probably has the largest responsibility to learn this (responsability is tough, live with it). Remember that the iris scan tests in Germany -- whatever its merits -- follows directly

I would totally agree for you except for Diebold and their un-auditable machines. Guess what, now even if you do vote, your vote might just be invalidated or part of a massive miscount.

Oh well, maybe I should just vote absentee ballot? Oh, did we have problems with those, too??

We're fucked.

Interesting. Today's Washington Post is recommending D.C. residents flush their taps for 10 minutes to help reduce exposure to lead. Missed the opportunity to blame it on Bush, however.

Story

Here, for example, is an article from September of 2002 on the same thing. That was more than two years before this year's election. This isn't the first time this sort of thing has cropped up before, not by a long shot; it's not even the first time it's come up on Slashdot (see this, or this, or this (referring to the article I referenced above).

This is a pretty stupid comment. Outsourcing and offshoring are different things.

Hmmm... I was making an observation about current usage and you come back with an argument ad lexicon?

Outsourcing is when a company subcontracts the work... [explanation of "outsourcing" and "offshoring"]

Yes, I have a dictionary too.

I'm going to go out on a limb and charitably guess that English is your second language? There is a subtle distinction between a word's definition and what its current usage might be. A dictionary is the reference for a definition, and reflects common usage of a word at the time the dictionary was written. Since most word definitions in dictionaries were written more than a few years ago, it is no surprise that usage may differ from the dictionary definition, especially for a word such as "outsourcing" that has taken on new meaning recently. And let's be realistic. Despite what the dictionary says, when an American technology worker in 2004 loses his job because of "outsourcing", everyone knows what just happened.

Technically we should say "offshoring" but that word is relatively unknown.

Please stop modding up ignorance as "Insightful."

One of the hallmarks of a /. newbie: scolding the moderators and telling them how they should be doing their job. One soon learns not to do that!

There is an interesting article in Wash Post Search For Tomorrow on Google, and possible AI in search.

Some excerpts:

We stumbled around in libraries. We lifted from the World Book Encyclopedia. We paged through the nearly microscopic listings in the heavy green volumes of the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature. We latched onto hearsay and rumor and the thinly sourced mutterings of people alleged to be experts. We guessed. We conjectured. And then we gave up, consigning ourselves to ignorance.

Only now in the bright light of the Google Era do we see how dim and gloomy was our pregooglian world. In the distant future, historians will have a common term for the period prior to the appearance of Google: the Dark Ages.

There have been many fine Internet search engines over the years -- Yahoo!, AltaVista, Lycos, Infoseek, Ask Jeeves and so on -- but Google is the first to become a utility, a basic piece of societal infrastructure like the power grid, sewer lines and the Internet itself.

Los Angeles, Calif.: Did you ever work for the FBI?

Scott Charney: No, I worked for the Dept. of Justice as a prosecutor in the Criminal Division. The FBI is a different part of Justice.

The Washington Post's story on this says, "this white dwarf has a diameter of 2,500 miles."

But it also says, "Most known white dwarves are smaller than the sun, but BPM 37093 is slightly larger and is the most massive known dwarf."

Both statements cannot be true! If it's larger than the sun, its diameter is certainly not 2,500 miles.

1) They would not have been effective if they were in place on September 10

While I understand the criticisms people have against the Patriot Act, I cannot understand how anybody can make this assertion. It is ridiculous for anybody to claim that they know what we would and would not know if this legislation was in place prior to 9/11.

There were 19 hijackers on 9/11, and as many as eight of them carried passports that "showed evidence of fraudulent manipulation," while as many as five of the passports had "suspicious indicators." None of the hijackers filled out Visa applications correclty, and three of them had clearly lied on the application. [source] If the proceedures and regulations in the Patriot Act were in place prior to 9/11, I find it unlikely that all 19 of these hijackers would have made it through given these circumstances.

You should also remember that if any one of these 19 people did not make it in to the US, lives would have likely been saved. 3 out of the 4 hijacked planes had 5 hijackers on board, the 4th only had 4 (thus leading to the theories of the "20th hijacker"). The flight with only 4 hijackers was the only plane that didn't hit a civilian target, but was forced down by the passengers aboard.

AP
Washington Post

It seems like they've confirmed that indeed, part of the OS's have been leaked.

source:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A376 48-2004Feb12.html

Though the source code leak is apparently incomplete, Microsoft does acknowledge it: Washington Post article here.

Backed up here: "Microsoft Corp. on Thursday confirmed that the source code for two versions of its Windows operating system has been leaked"

MS has confirmed that the code is real. Story here (washington post).

Washingtonpost.com is reporting its a legitimate leak of portions of it's source code:
Microsoft Corp. on Thursday confirmed that the source code for two versions of its Windows operating system has been leaked

"Microsoft Corp. on Thursday confirmed that the source code for its Windows 2000 operating system has been leaked, a security breach that could give hackers important intelligence about how to exploit flaws in software run by most of the world's computers.

A Microsoft spokeswoman said someone had illegally posted incomplete portions of Windows 2000 on the Internet."

Art Buchwald has the whole scoop here.

Despite the fact that someone linked it above, it bears repeating:

From the front page of the Washington Post today:
Online Search Engines Lift Cover of Privacy

Jesus guys, this was the *front page* story on the Post. It was their freaking headline! You guys lifted it, and then ran a link to MSNBC instead - *without attribution* to the Post. What the *hell* are you thinking??

I mean, did you just think nobody would notice? Some of you guys live *right here* in DC.

What the hell?

Book sales are tracked

Real President or clone (not that in this office it matters

Real Osama or clone

Real Arafat who just bombed a synagogue or clone

On a serious note though, these types of things should be left alone. On the one hand they may seem cool, but they leave a lot of room for abuse.

Just imagine the field day say a bank robber could have robbing banks while his clone is parked in front of a police station...

Having recently read several reviews and seen interviews for The Two-Income Trap (Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi), I am curious about how "middle-class" Indians set their expectations. While the authors of this book take the view that it's 2nd incomes that have led to a decline in American living standards, I think there are many other middle-class American expectations that have led to demands for $60k programmer salaries. I live in Canada, and we are often told of higher US salaries. (Okay, it's not like I'm making $11k!) But I've often noted that Americans must pay for HMOs, retirement, gated communities, college, etc. It would be interesting to compare American "needs" with Indian "needs".

And, since I'm sure I've exposed myself to flames, I'll just state for the record that I'm a Canadian woman in a 2-income family that recently became bought its first home. However, it's an 800-square-foot condo where we plan to raise children, and we both walk to work and stores. We have a 4-year-old Civic, but we rarely drive it.

Being elected Senator means it's your job to represent the people by voting. Yes, senators do a lot more than vote, but those are not the focus of the job.... Certainly, a resignation would have made it harder for him to advance his political career. It's clear to me that he chose personal advancement over representation of the voters.

Most votes, as I'm sure you know, are nowhere near close, and in most cases when they are, it's known well ahead of time. A Senator's job is also to stand up for his principles -- and to challenge the President when the President is failing to lead. John Kerry is doing that. And when he stood up to run against Bush, all the smart money was that Bush would sail to an easy re-election. Kerry certainly wasn't "[choosing] personal advancement over... the voters".

So Kerry's in no way failing the people of Massachusetts, and they know it, and I know it, and you know.

It's a cheap bit of rhetoric.

But as long as we're comparing time off, let's note that the Republican controlled Congress is planning "the lightest legislative load in 40 years", even when compared to prior election years, according to a story in today's Washington Post.

And, As you also probably know, Dubya boasts the longest time spent on vacation of any modern president, at over a month per year. Only the French that Dubya also freely reviles get vacations like that. Americans -- normal, working Americans -- don't.

I know that Bush has been good enough to arrange even longer "vacations" for a lot of the work-force, but the key difference is that unlike those many Americans, Bush vacation doesn't consist of being laid off and watching his unemployment benefits run out.

No more lies! Vote out the lying neo-cons in 2004!

Wait, no, that was Jack Black.

You make a good point. Sadly, no one seems to want that kind of interaction anymore. Too much of a hurry, too personal. As a result, can this be far off?

Honestly, though, prices partly keep me from being one of the guys you're handing ten albums to. I like to browse, but most people, if they don't have that personal relationship, would rather hit the checkout and be home all the sooner to start listening to their tunes, or on the way to someplace else.

In the process I outfitted the boat with 7+ PCs, a VGA matrix switch system, a 42" plasma, a wireless LAN, ran 1000' of cat-5 and 500' of VGA cable in the boat, installed a $30K microscope with built-in webserver, configured several satcom systems and learned the rudiements of sailing and knot tying, all while being filmed by the Discovery Channel.

In two weeks I will be headed to the Galapagos Islands for a week to make sure everything is working before the boat heads across the Pacific.

As much as this has been a dream job, it has (on repeated occasions) nearly cost me my 3-year relationship with the most wonderful woman in the world. I think the hardest thing about a dream job (just as others have noted) is finding a balance with the rest of your life.

National ID Card - One of the most pervasive themes of the 104th Congress has
been proposals to establish a national identification system as a means of tracking
undocumented workers, so-called deadbeat dads and to monitor health insurance
information. Various database schemes have been included in bills as diverse as
immigration, welfare reform and health insurance. Since these proposals have been
buried in much larger legislation, it was often difficult to determine the position
of members of Congress. In the House, however, an attempt to eliminate a national
ID system from the immigration bill failed by a vote of 159 to 260. A similar
attempt in the Senate failed by a vote of 46 to 54.

Kerry voted FOR this

Kerry is #1 in the Senate for taking Lobbying Money

Pak and Islamic Nuclear bombs are going down just like your sorry-ass paki father of the bomb.

This review of the Microsoft "smart" watch pretty much sums it up.

An excerpt:
Why did Microsoft bother? Rick Rashid, the company's head of research, said last January that the idea was to "take everyday devices and make them better at what they do, without turning them into computers."

But what the company wound up doing was giving us yet another manual to digest, yet another AC adapter that has to be packed for vacation, yet another gadget to remove at the airport security line, and yet another subscription charge on your credit card bill. Enough already.

Here's some info about the fall which killed Gus Weiss:
washinton post article and Nashville Tenessean obit

Notice that Audrey Wolf, mentioned in the latter obit, is Joseph Wilson's literary agent.

Not that that should mean anything...