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Let's start melting holes in it!

And why? So somebody can get an 'A'!

Which reminds me of that great scene in Star Trek TNG Evolution where Guinan busts Wesley crawling around her 10-forward, and after mumbling something about Dr. Frankenstein, asks him about the grades he's getting.

He replies that he always gets an 'A'.

And she replies, "So did Dr. Frankenstein."

(and lest anybody think my using the word fuck in the subject is out of line, I refer you to none other than the FCC who says it isn't such a bad word afterall.)

Who exactly said this? Please provide a name, the exact quote, and a RELIABLE link as a source.

Washington Post, September 14, 2001

There is not going to be any copyright reform in the foreseeable future. Copyright laws all go through the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. As you might guess, the members of those committees are the top recipients of money from the copyright lobby (RIAA, MPAA, Disney, etc).

The chair of the House Judiciary Committee, James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) actually travels as a lobbyist for the RIAA. If you find this as outrageous as I do, you can send a complaint letter here.

Also available at Wash Post

There were more details in this article where the laws they allegedly broke are described. Evidently penalties are up to five years prison and $2500 fines for sending 10,000 messages in 24 hours or 100,000 messages in 30 days.

Now, just a few more of these, please. At this point the focus should be on those who write spamware and spamming and DDoSing viruses.

What do you mean no death penalty option?

Security experts also worry about mischievous insiders at the voting-machine companies. That fear was fanned when Walden W. O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc., told Republicans in an Aug. 14 fundraising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president."

If nationality is irrelevant here, then why did the United States government just ban corporations from Germany, France, and Russia from bidding on major reconstruction contracts in Iraq? These are private corporations, not sent by their governments, yet are being punished for just for being from countries that opposed the war. These two incidents, among many others, provide a very telling example of how the U.S. government often choses to ignore its own open market philosophy to gain influence. Don't believe me, then check out the articles here, here, and here. Whether you view this decision as right or wrong is your own opinion, however your statement that nationality shouldn't play a part in government's official opinion on something seems very misguided.

Educate the people all you want! But if you live in the USA, don't educate them within 60 days of an election. Telling people what canidate favors what is a FEDERAL CRIME for everyone but the big media monopolies. Ain't that strange...

Please, your ignorance is a liability.

Washington Post - Feb 2003 - "Iraq: Declassified Documents of U.S. Support for Hussein,"

Christian Science Monitor - So many governments to overthrow, so little time

Oh, and the phrase "democratically elected democracies" was redundant until Bush invoke the world's first ever court appointed democracy.

Most ISPs now block port 25 so open relay spamming is on the decline. It is also part of the reason AOL implemented their blocking of non-registered or recognized mail servers. ISPs that do not often times do not are considered "Spammer Friendly" and placed on just about every BL out there for their IP block. (This also has the added advantage of curtailing SMTP engine toting virii) As also pointed out Email test probes will be added to the Spammer's aresenal of Poopsmith tools to verify they are able to send their shit out. This could however have a slight benefit of flawing their business model as it requires more time be invested for active true open relay verification and their email be routed through a mail server which might have spam filter running which may help to flag suspicious accounts sending the same or similar Spam to their box frequently.

What this also could be useful for is legitimate mail servers helping to track down Spammers as it runs the blackhole open relay to everything not in an approved IP scope or authenticating. Possibly allowing the single test email being routed back to the domain of the IP attempting to send and if a flurry of Spam comes reporting the IP to the abuse department of that domain along with the total attempt of Spam sent to the bit bucket. This could catch Spammers who get their email from their own servers and email from their ISP's mail servers or Spammer friendly servers to be BL and/or shutdown. Would be an interesting project as Spammers have to look for more ways to send their shit out and not use their ISPs mail servers and be shutdown. Lots of different ways to play with this program and the application of it to attack the business model of the Spammer and lure them into stupid mistakes that may lead to their imprisonment like they deserve so they can meet Bubba.

A Closer Look : MP3 Players to Rival Pricier iPod

Meanwhile, competing manufacturers have shipped a series of MP3 players with iPod-esque capacities and sizes but lower prices: Creative's Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra, Dell's Digital Jukebox, Rio's Karma and Samsung's YP-910GS Napster.
All four sounded great when playing MP3 or WMA files (including copy-controlled versions sold by major music stores, but not Apple's AAC downloads), provided excellent battery life (from 10 to 16 hours) and allowed fast transfers of music from Windows PCs via USB 2.0 connections. All employ wheel or rocker-switch controls to navigate through the thousands of songs stored on their hard drives but less elegant up/down buttons for volume.

Gack.

http://washingtonpost.com.

Now enjoy!

Technicly nukes would be a great choice for busting bunkers but the obvious danger is that once you make it acceptable to use little nukes it will be a lot more palatable to use big ones and to use them to solve more problems.

Its so ironic to see U.S. politicians rail against WMD's when its fact the U.S. always has been and continues to be in the forefront of developing and using them. Many of the nuclear documents found in Iraq were from the Eisenhower administration's "Atoms for Peace" program and were definitely dual use. And, of course, the U.S.was actively supporting Iraq when Saddam began using using chemical weapons. At the time time we were using him a as a proxy to wage war against Iran and fundementalist Islam. Iran was in danger of winning the war by using human wave attacks of young boys to overrun Iraq's trenches. We almost certainly encouraged or turned a blind eye to the use of chemical weapons to stave off these attacks and certainly did supply Iraq with precursors for chemical and biological weapons, anthrax in particular. We also supplied them with cluster bombs from Chile to use against these human waves. Some of the key players at the time VP George H.W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.

You can't really blame countries for wanting nukes and missiles. Its one of the few methods for insuring the U.S. and everyone elese doesn't f**k with you.

Return to Moon May Be on Agenda : "President Bush's aides are considering a new lunar exploration program and other unifying national goals, including a campaign to promote longevity or fight childhood illness or hunger, as they sift ideas for a fresh agenda for the final year of his term, administration officials said yesterday."

Hmm. Perhaps they would like something to distract from the whole Afghanistan-Iraq thing, and the less than stellar results of those... And the Valerie Plame affair... and vote fraude through unauditable voting systems, like Diebold... and the massive budget and trade deficits.. and the declining value of the dollar...

The republicans have moved way out to the far right and the democrats have followed them. This is not due to hotelling, but to swing state issues and massive gerrymandering (formerly pro-incumbent, now partisan, very slimy either way).

In politics the more propaganda the more you are believed. If one party says something extreme and the other tells the truth most people believe something in the middle. If one party goes way off into fantasyland they pull the center with them.

I doubt voting machine problems can skew results more than dishonesty and media incompetence (no one checks facts anymore, or almost no one) already have.

There's a reasonable chance that Bush may just be trying to look good compared to Hu Jintao who (if you believe anyone other than the U.S. media) has been looking alot better than Bush has recently.

So government oversight of casino machines is a good thing. Obviously, the solution to our diebold problems is casino oversight of our voting system. You know, ilke some 80-year-old lady can't read the text, so she's escorted to the back room to get some "assistance" by a guy named Tiny... and George Clooney will organize a team of eleven or twelve guys to steal 150,000,000 votes for his father's congress run.

Some interesting news:

Turns out Bush's Baghdad turkey and Baghdad British Airways rendezvous were both completely fabricated by the White House. Washington Post story here

FCC Chairman Powell Opposes Internet Phone Regulation.

How this can be an illegal coup if the matter was decided by US supreme court ?
You might not agree with the decision but this sort of ruling was exactly what was supposed to happen in a situation like this. You are simply bitter that your side lost....

How this can be an illegal coup if the matter was decided by US supreme court ?
You might not agree with the decision but this sort of ruling was exactly what was supposed to happen in a situation like this. You are simply bitter that your side lost....

You gotta be kidding. Oppositional competition is bad, almost by definition.

Let me put it this way: there is two ways to be the world champion of figure skating. You can either keep practicing and be the best or you can hire somebody to smash the kneecaps of all your competitors. The latter is oppositional competition and have nothing to do with 'variation in population' or any of those other routine euphemisms.

Many people have brought up the point about Gitmo Bay and the USA's unlawful detention of the prisoners there, but there are even worse, even more glaring abuses of human rights post 911...

Mostly due to ethnicity, this guy was locked up indefinitely - without due process - in solitary confimement, without notifying his friends or family. He was told that if he did not admit to being a terrorist that they would keep him locked up forever. They kept him in a concrete shoebox, fully light 24 hours a day, and gaurds would bang on his cell door to keep him awake. Oh, and the USA kept him locked up for over 2 years! Not only that, but they also eventually ended up making up totally BS charges against him, as a means to justify his imprisonment.

Makes you wonder how many other Muslims we have locked up, in order to feed our neo-Nazi appetites.

Washington post has additional information

"The same day, a court convicted a fourth writer charged in the case, Jiang Lijun, of subversion and sentenced him to four years in prison, his lawyer said."

Even the Reuters article gets around to mentioning that, basically, the Chinese government has chosen to punish some else in place of a sympathetic college girl (Liu Di):

Police also detained at least two people for organising online petitions for Liu's release. Du Daobin, a civil servant, was detained in October, while Luo Changfu, a 39-year-old laid-off worker, was sentenced to three years in prison.

Although the Reuter's article does not explain what Liu Di was being punished for, the Washington Post article mentioned that Liu Di's misdeeds included defending another democratic activist: She also wrote essays pressing for the release of Huang Qi, a businessman who was arrested in 2000 for running an Internet site that carried items about the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and was sentenced to five years in prison for subversion.

Liu Di went to jail, in part, for trying to get Huang Qi freed. Now Luo Changfu has gone to jail to get Liu freed. So, it appears that the Chinese government is insuring that some Chinese partiot will languish in prison over this. They're just willing to be flexible about which one.

Slashdot editors: I'd appreciate it if you'd wipe the records of the IP address from which this post originated, as I travel in China and am pretty nervous about posting this.

There's this one too

Try this on for size: Algerian still in detention since Sept 2001 despite being cleared of any connection to terrorism by FBI in November 2001 in Saturdays Washington Post

More than an odd look.

"Opus," a new strip by "Bloom County" and "Outland" creator Berkeley Breathed, will appear in The Washington Post on Sunday's [sic] beginning Nov. 23. The comic will be available only in newspapers.

right, but shouldnt he have to be extradited?

Yeah, the Canadian police want to treat him like a Native, and leave him to die in the snow.

Pakistan spy service 'aiding Bin Laden'
Pakistan Ended Aid to Taliban Only Hesitantly
Pakistan denies N Korea nuclear deal
INTELLIGENCE; U.S. SAYS PAKISTAN GAVE TECHNOLOGY TO NORTH KOREA
Pakistani Who Threatened Bush Is Among Deportees
Pakistanis rally against US
Pakistani on US al-Qaeda charge
Pakistan insists it gave no nuclear aid to Iran
Guantanamo prisoners speak out

We shouldn't be doing business with that country anyway !!!

Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Comcast to Offer Online Music

2003-11-11 13:10:14 Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Comcast to Offer Online Music (articles,music) (rejected)

Wal-Mart will launch its own digital music download service through its Web site later this month. Not to be outdone, Best Buy will also launch an iTunes-type online music store - with the ability to buy through in-store kiosks - based on the MusicNow service (formerly FullAudio). And today Comcast announced music downloads via Real Rhapsody for its 5 million broadband Internet subscribers. The Washington Post's Cynthia L. Webb writes about the online music frenzy and the resultant advertising onslaught due to the sheer number of entrants into the music download market, while Bloomberg's Holly M. Sanders offers an analysis of Walmart's imminent entry into online music, which is significant since Wal-Mart already controls 14 percent of global CD music sales. More at the New York Times (via SeattlePI).

>I guess Slashdot just isn't willing to admit that their dislike of Fox News lead them to post a false story

Led to post a false story? Every media outlet was reporting the same thing. Nice conspiracy theory you've got there, but fark, metafilter, googlenews, etc were running the same story. The truly say part is after Fox's REAL intimidation lawsuit against Al Franken no one thought Fox suing the Simpsons was at all suspicious.

Normally, Groening's joke would have been as a understood as one, but Fox's well-earned reputation as childish bullies diluted the satirical joke itself. Scary.

Considering Fox's reputation is in the garbage can anyway, complaints regarding 'over the fold' are silly and if people can't be bothered to click on the Read More link then they deserve to wallow in ignorance. It isn't Taco's job to make a flash presentation and embed it on the front page becaus e a news channel you like was subjecedt to a prank.

Ritz will probably use the DMCA to stop it. There's a good story in today's Washington Post regarding the DMCA and how businesses are being ensnared even under "fair use". In Lexmark's case (detailed in the Wash Post story), Lexmark claimed that their copyright was violated.

As silly as the law is let's hope that it's repealed/reformed and soon.

Actually, I think they're just re-directing attention.

Most of the patches released today address shortcomings in previous patches or new ways of exploiting old vulnerabilities. The security update released today to fix the most recent batch of Internet Explorer flaws replaces a patch that was issued last month, which was also a cumulative update.

It seems that one of this recent batch (of 9) is another IE vuln. Funny how their monopoly strategy is what's causing many of their problems. Funny like necrotic hemerhoids.

Don't forget Dan Rather. He has actually held fund raisers for the democratic party.

I forgot about that. Good point. He helped raise money for Texas Democrats. No punishment, despite being against the rules of the network.

How about this quote from Dan:

"The U.S. Justice Department announced new indictments today in the investigation of dirty political campaign money. [A] Thai businesswoman and another woman, were...charged with funneling almost $700,000 in illegal donations...mostly to the Democratic Party."
--Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News, July 13, 1998.

What does he imply by mostly? That some went to the Republicans as well? Not true. More that half the money went to the DNC. The rest went to state Democratic organizations and the Clinton-Gore campaign. So I guess it ALL went to the Democratic Party.

I was struck with just how useless the UN is during the 15 month long run up to this war in Iraq. The UN's oil for food (or more correctly; oil for palaces program) was what got me to take a closer look. Charles Krauthammer's posts in the Washington Post were very critical and cogent as usual.

R.I.P U.N

Unfortunately, the Senate is having a problem with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee trying to use classified intelligence as political weapons. If Senators had Americans as their priority instead of their seats and their party, we might have some sort of sensible legislation pass in Congress.

Fairfax elections officials said the system won them over with its sophisticated, convenient and easy-to-use features. "Security wasn't really the deciding factor," said county election manager Judy Flaig.

The problem came when precinct workers tried to electronically send results from the 953 new machines to election headquarters, unexpectedly overloading computer servers.

"Unexpectedly"?? What, the servers hadn't been set up with the expectation that they'd be receiving results from lots of new machines at the same time?

Jeez, and I thought #2 stunk! The review from the Washington Post was caustic: "Neo, schmeo! In "The Matrix Revolutions," directors Andy and Larry Wachowski give up on character; instead, they try havoc and let slurp the dogs of war. The film is a soggy mess, essentially a loud, wild 100-minute battle movie bookended by an incomprehensible beginning and a laughable ending." I'll sit this out.

Jeez, and I thought #2 stunk! The review from the Washington Post was caustic: "Neo, schmeo! In "The Matrix Revolutions," directors Andy and Larry Wachowski give up on character; instead, they try havoc and let slurp the dogs of war. The film is a soggy mess, essentially a loud, wild 100-minute battle movie bookended by an incomprehensible beginning and a laughable ending." I'll sit this out.

This bounty is just a PR game to distract from anti-trust, patent violations, anti-competitive fines, security fines. Microsoft's executives and other investors have had enough time now to dump their stock. Game over.

From the Washington Post:

"Clearly, however, one of the major impediments to black voting was the purge of the voter rolls. Florida has one of the nation's strictest laws governing restoration of felons' voting rights. Thirty-one percent of the state's black men are barred from voting because of prior felonies.

The voter purge was mandated after the 1997 Miami mayoral race was overturned because votes were cast by felons and non-residents. Legislators ordered everyone off the voting rolls who did not belong. In the end, that proved to be tens of thousands of "probable felons." The purge of the voter rolls was previously described by several Florida newspapers and the Nation magazine.

The state mandated the hiring of an outside vendor for $4 million to compile a list of voters who had committed felonies in other states. Database Technologies (now ChoicePoint Inc.), creator of an Internet service widely used by law enforcement agencies for investigative purposes, was chosen to sort through state and national databases to identify felons.

From the beginning, Database Technologies raised serious concerns that non-felons could be misidentified. Florida does not regularly record Social Security numbers in its records, so its felons were identified by name and date of birth, including close but not exact matches."

Story submitted to Slashdot, rejected. Maybe in a Slashback?

Even the Washinton Post call these guys leftists:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn? pagename=article&node=&contentId=A51575-2003Ja n13

The Washington Post ran an article about some electronic voting machines being deployed in Virginia and Maryland. In Fairfax County (where I live), we will be using the AVS WINvote system, while those in Maryland will be using ones from Diebold. Interestingly, Fairfax County is the home of a lot of high-tech companies and their employees who should be somewhat computer savy.

The W in WINvote stands for Wireless as in 802.11b (i.e., WEP encryption). However, from what I have read, there is additional encryption used and the machines normally do not communicate with another system except during setup and the final vote tally. The votes are supposed to be redundantly stored on each system.

It should be interesting to watch the voter's reactions after learning more about WINvote. A limited test of the system last year apparently yielded favorable responses.

IT WAS A JOKE.Sorry for the registration, don't shoot.

The important bit from the article..."Nonetheless "The Simpsons" (the show, not the characters) issued an apology yesterday: "Matt was being satirical and certainly there was never any issue between the show and Fox News. We regret any confusion.""

So, total people misled by NPR today who posted to slashdot >750. Total number of people who believed what they heard on NPR absolutely without further checking and posted to slashdot >750. Did someone say something about misperceptions? You should not believe any "news source" absolutely. Always get a second opinion, we don't want a whole thread full of people with egg on their face making fun of something that didn't really happen.

Matt Groening says he was only joking about Fox News suing the Simpsons.

So it was a story that was completely made up by one person, and all the lefty blogs were up in arms over it.

Where are the slashdotters complaining that Fox News was thin-skinned, censoring or plain evil now? Hopefully you would think they'd be man enough to apologize and admit they were wrong.