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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A442 63-2001Apr20.html

With all the other things that need addressing in Congress, *why* are the Republican "leaders" so concerned about interfering with the right of a local municipality (in this case Arlington County VA) to decide what the name of a train station should be?

Moral? Did you read the letter?

..instead engage SDMI in a constructive dialogue on how the academic aspects of your research can be shared without jeopardizing the commercial interests of the owners of the various technologies.

..at least one of the technologies that was the subject of the Public Challenge, the Verance Watermark, is already in commercial use and the disclosure of any information that might assist others to remove this watermark would seriously jeopardize the technology and the content it protects.

The specific purpose of providing these encoded files and for setting up the Challenge was to assist SDMI in determining which of the proposed technologies are best suited to protect content in Phase II products.

Failure wasn't an option. It was commercial research. However, since they didn't take the money, they didn't agree. Reading the part about the "clik-thru" agreement (spelling for emphasis) made me laff.

Anyway, I hope that this story will illustrate the dangers of the DMCA so that the european equivalent which is on its way will never come up.

'twould be nice, wouldn't it.

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Huh? Gun manufacturers are getting sued all the time. Just do a quick Google search, or -- for something current -- take a look at this recent article at the Washington Post web site.

Huh? Gun manufacturers are getting sued all the time. Just do a quick Google search, or -- for something current -- take a look at this recent article at the Washington Post web site.

The Washington Post has reported that Yahoo! has stopped selling porn.

Read it here.

Detained Americans to Leave China Tonight
Borders Ceded Online Sales
Motorola Reports First Loss in 15 Years

from the uncrappy story department

--
microsoft, it's what's for dinner

bq--3b7y4vyll6xi5x2rnrj7q.com

Detained Americans to Leave China Tonight
Borders Ceded Online Sales
Motorola Reports First Loss in 15 Years

from the uncrappy story department

--
microsoft, it's what's for dinner

bq--3b7y4vyll6xi5x2rnrj7q.com

Detained Americans to Leave China Tonight
Borders Ceded Online Sales
Motorola Reports First Loss in 15 Years

from the uncrappy story department

--
microsoft, it's what's for dinner

bq--3b7y4vyll6xi5x2rnrj7q.com

Wen Ho Lee was not a Chinese spy. (Actually, like many Taiwanese, he is perhaps unduly paranoid about the mainland.) He was basically a fall guy - the victim in the Clinton Administration's attempt to appease Republican critics. When all was said and done, it turned out all they could nail him with was the improper handling of information that is already in the public domain. See for example this page , this one or this one. The judge in the case used sentencing as an opportunity to give Lee an apologetic speech about the government's abuses in the case. He was sentenced to perform time already served (in other words, allowed to walk) as punishment for unauthorized possession of data, for which he plead guilty. The original charges contained 59 counts.

--

Go do a Google search on China and human rights abuses. Or go read the State Department's report on human rights violations.Go read about how they've jailed four university professors in the past three months, including three with US citizenship or residency, for no crime greater than spreading ideas against the state. They also jailed for a month the husband and 5 year old son of one of the academics, failing to inform the US that they had done so, even though both of these people are US Citizens! (This is a major violation of international law.)

Read about how they brutally suppress religions, including everything from Falun Gong to Christianity. Read about what they've done in Tibet. Not expansionist? Read about how they backed the establishments of Communist governments in Korea and Vietnam, and how they want to take back Taiwan after 50 years of independence.

Read about the silencing of free speach in Hong Kong, the crushing of student demonstrators in Tienanmen square, the censorship of the Internet throughout China, the control and manipulation of public opinion through their state news agencies.

Go read all that, and then tell me that you welcome China.

It's interesting that you compare the FCC's indecency provisons to the MPAA's rating regime, as I was just reading an article in this morning's Washington Post which claimed that the ratings methodology was flawed-- concentrating on isolated utterances or imagery, rather than on a appreciation of the total context of the film.

When Marc Ewing, co-founder and [former] Chief Technology Officer, lost his grandfather's red Cornell lacrosse cap while a student at Carnegie-Mellon University, he searched everywhere for it. The manual of the beta release of what was to become Red Hat Linux contained a plea asking readers to send him the cap if they found it while in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

He [ Mark Ewing] named his venture Red Hat, after the Cornell lacrosse team cap he got from his grandfather. "The real story is that it was red- and white-striped," said Ewing, who wore the cap regularly until he lost it. "But Red- and White-striped Hat didn't sound like a good name for a company."

[...] he [ Mark White, Vice President/General Manager, Asia-Pacific, Red Hat Inc.] had this to say : "Our co-founder Mark Ewing used to be a student at Carnegie Mellon University. Like all students, he took on jobs at the school and one of his trademark outfits includes wearing one of his uncles old lacrosse hat, which happened to be red. Whenever anyone needed help with the computers, people will say, 'look for the guy with the red hat'. He essentially became the 'red hat guy'. Later, he met up with Bob Young, co-founder of Red Hat Inc. They wanted a name/logo for the new company they are setting up, it had to be of an emotional color and be an everyday object. Naturally they decided on 'red hat'. "

He [Marc Ewing] spent years of hard work on Red Hat, which he named after a Cornell lacrosse team cap he found in his grandfather's closet.

How do you get the Washington Post to write a 2-page spread about your life, times, and problems? For 2 days straight? Please choose only one answer:

1) Overcome testicular cancer to win the Tour de France 2 years running.
2) Win an Olympic gold medal
3) Launch a satellite
4) Invade a country
5) Go to school & shoot your friends
5) Hack a defense department web site
6) Get a perfect score on every test & a perfect attendance record for all of high school.
7) Become a high-school all-american in 3 sports.

What's the correct answer?

No peeking!

The correct answer is:

5) Go to school & shoot your friends.

Everyone is entitled to 15 minutes of fame, unless you're a total psychopathic fuckup, in which case you get at least a week.

Think about it. Our villians are our heros.

But the kids aren't fooled

"I think it's so overplayed, this issue of guns in schools," said Kathryn Pizzuto, a 17-year-old senior from Tucson. "Those shootings are about some kids trying to get their 15 minutes of fame."

What if high school shooters never had their names released? What if Newsweek didn't slobber over them?

See the Rough Draft column from Monday for more from the Press.

If there is a flaw in Sunstein's arguments, it is that the information winnowing he decries has become more and more necessary due to the sheer volume of data beamed at individual users.

Oh, that doesn't even begin to cover the huge holes in Sunstein's arguments

Admittedly, I haven't read Mr. Sunstein's book myself, but this is the second review that I have read, and they are consistent in their statements of Mr. Sunstein's views, I will assume they are both correct

For a much more logical, intelligent (although peripheral) review of Sunstein, see this George Will column.

It amazes me how someone claiming to be a constitutional scholar interprets the simple mandate "Congress shall make now law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press ... " to do exactly the opposite.

Will Catholic web sites be forced to show Satanic messages? Will Gay/lesbian web sites be forced to show Ku Klux Klan viewpoints? What sane person wants give the federal government this power?

MacOS X Looks like a Champ Red Herring

Re-Engineering the Mac Universe Washington Post

OS X Won't Change the World but is Still a Big Deal ZDNet

MacOS X: Major Into in Minor Key Business Week

It's As Easy as A Mac Wired

And tons more, too many to mention. All from mainstream press, note... will wonders never cease?

The photo acompanies this article but it's much smaller (though better detailed).

They also have a link to a RealVideo Clip which was obviously filmed on a camcorder but manages to catch quite a bit of the debris fly-over.

---

And the Fed doesn't control either of them.

From the washington post

To my mind, one of the saddest things about this account is that it's further demonstration of how little technology is understood by the average user. As the article illustrates, the myth of anonymity is far and away the greatest contributor to inappropriate behavior online. For another recent case in the media, recall the genius that used AOL instant messaging to send follow-up threats to students at the high school in SD -- "Huh? How'd they find me? My curtains were closed and I sent the message from inside the closet!"

Now where this gets kinda interesting is the fact that users want technology that hides the details, as the discussion Monday indicates. Unfortunately, as more is hidden, the less likely it is that a user will be able to utilize the technology in a prudent manner, because they simply won't know where to begin looking for possible dangers, if they look at all. So, I expect we'll see more instances of people doing questionable things online out of idiocy, and the problem will get worse as long as they are shielded from the details of how things work. As the article posted notes, many AOLers (and you know they aren't the only ones) misunderstand the nature of the Web so fundamentally as to fail to see that sending threatening letters to AOL staffers is about as smart as demanding a cashier's check at gunpoint.

Another example to think about here is the impressive number of young nekkid chicks all over the Web -- how many of them actually understand that those pictures will never, ever go away?

So, I think where I'm going with this is to suggest the following:

• Developers of technology ought to be focussing on giving the common user tools that 1) work; 2) are mature and stable such that the user doesn't have to plan to learn a new system every year. Fewer bells and whistles, more good apps that users actually comprehend. (note that I'm talking about software for the average person, not slashdotters, so relax ;-)
  
  
• We need to realize that many of these problems exist because to learn to use any piece of technology safely requires some time and effort to understand on some basic level what it's doing, unless you want to clip the user's wings entirely and make their decisions for them. Right now there is a scary dearth of knowledge in the heads of users, and that's why a lot of the shit out there (death threats and worms clearly labeled .vbs (which just kills me BTW ;-) ) is there in the first place.

That was the original intent. Today there's not much hierarchy. Whatever server "knows" .com has a more or less complete list of all the domain names. Ok, there's .edu, .net, .org, .mil, and country names, but .com is so much larger than effectively one database holds all the names.

When talking about things "ought to be", I'm suprised that so little is mentioned about introducing more heirarchy. Maybe another level of hierarchy is more than the average consumer's (joe sixpack user) limited mental model capacity can handle?

About the speed-up... does anyone else see this as an attempt to bypass the growing pressure they're under for having made such arbitrary decisions without any accountability for the basis behind them?

Maybe I'm overly suspicious... ICANN's got such a clean record, I'm sure they'd never do anything like...

• try anything underhanded and clearly against their own rules, or
• be accused of making inconsistent decisions based on ill-defined criteria
• cater to special interests of big business, or
• completely neglect legacy TLDs from alternate name servers

Consider a corporation that produces an AIDS cure, patents it, and sells it for oo-gobs of money which would make it difficult for those from poorer countries to get a hold of it. Now imagine that somehow you were able to figure out a way that people with the right materials could create the cure on their own without as much cost.

Sorry, but I think you're wrong. People use the words "steal" and "theft" to mean "taking something that isn't yours". It doesn't matter whether you're copying or moving it.

For example, consider this article from today's Slashdot front page: Code for Running GPS Satellites Stolen .

Or from the AP: Navy Investigating Theft of Guidance Data From Computer.

Nice try, though. You had me going for awhile.

-- Brian

The Washington Post has a nice article on it.

According to The Washington Post he knew C and Pascal and wrote communications apps for the FBI.

If I've made the world a better place, it isn't because I, for a time, chose a political route to do so. What my successes in politics have shown me is that it is time for Mr. Smith to go home and work around the system with technical innovation, rather than within it through political action.

Joy has seen you can accomplish anything through making friends in government cirles it seems. Now Napster would be able to distribute all the music perfectly legally if these changes to the law were made and Joy gets to maintain the moral high ground. Or the record companies simply buy Napster to implement the wishes of Joy's friend Senator Hatch.

Anyway for the lazy and for the people who want to not seach the site: Link

A penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off.

In today's Washington Post - click here - there's a story about how US Senator Orrin Hatch, among others, are contemplating taking action *against* the record labels to strip them of some copyright privileges. Apparently Hatch is miffed that the recording industry has done next to nothing to adapt to the Internet... worth a look.

Also see Orrin Hatch's page for Hatch's complete statement on Napster.

- idiolect

• A.J. Hegeman, "Self-repairing polymers: repair mechanisms and micromechanical modeling," M.S. Thesis, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, June, 1997.
• D. Jung, "Performance and properties of embedded microspheres for self-repairing applications," M.S. Thesis, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, July, 1997.

...from washington times

From the Drudge Report: "THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED: NAPSTER TOLD TO STOP
Court directed NAPSTER to remove links to users trading copyrighted songs stored as MP3 files... "

Long ago, there was an article on Slashdot about a free, high quality online university subsidized by Michael Saylor of Microstrategy. This was the missing link. There are already a few good free sources of information out there (Project Gutenberg, The Baen Library), but a comprehensive educational program available for free would provide a much more "equal opportunity." Has anyone heard anything from this, or is it vaporware?

St. Petersburg Times - Tampabay: Cameras scanned fans for criminals. Super Bowl fans had their privacy invaded by the technology, critics say. Law officials cite security.

Is the new surveillance system the latest twist on Big Brother? Face-matching surveillance already is well established at more than 70 casinos. But the system's biggest opportunities lie in more benign functions: Identifying customers at ATMs or participants in welfare programs, and screening people who want to enter secure workplace areas.

At Raymond James Stadium, surveillance system cameras were focused only on people entering at turnstiles. No cameras were used inside to pan the fans inside. But cameras did sweep the crowds at the NFL Experience, indicating the growing reach of database systems to try and match faces even in large groups.

At UCLA, professor Borgman questioned the technical ability of a system to identify individual faces so quickly.

"If these surveillance systems spread, there may be a considerable margin of error in determining the identity of people who get snagged," she said. "And that is a big price to pay for your civil rights."

The FaceTrac(TM) core facial recognition technology provides the ability to locate faces, to build 'face print' templates and to recognize matches to images stored in a database. When integrated with G-TEC's law enforcement database, FaceTrac(TM) allows rapid search, comparison and identification of suspect facial photos within the database. FaceTrac(TM) may be used for surveillance with multiple locations networked to a high capacity site, for analysis and system-search results. G-TEC installed FaceTrac(TM) at the Raymond James Stadium as a single site system, integrated with a custom designed database and search result notifications for tracking faces in a crowd and monitoring access to secure areas.

The system used for the Super Bowl project, first reported yesterday by the St. Petersburg Times, was lent by companies seeking to market the technology to law enforcement agencies. Tampa police accepted the free use of the system as an experiment and worked with local and national police agencies to manage it during the week of the game, said Durkin.

Dave Watkins, managing director of Graphco Technologies Inc., said the event gave the company a chance to learn how the software would perform, which camera angles were most effective and how the lenses of the 20 video cameras should be focused in a public place.

The American Civil Liberties Union("ACLU") opposes the involuntary capture of biometric details, such as face-recognition data, DNA and retina scans. The organization, in its list of "Privacy Principles," considers the fingerprinting of convicted criminals a worthy exception.

"We are quickly moving to the point where law enforcement and the private sector will be able to identify us no matter where we go, no matter how anonymous we think we are," said Barry Steinhardt, the ACLU's associate director. "Not only is it going to rob us of our anonymity, but it's going to be used as a tool of law enforcement to round up 'the usual suspects' and to hassle people on the streets."

The practice is almost certainly legal, but it is in an emerging area of the law that has not been fully tested in court, said Harvard Law School professor Bill Stuntz.

Super Bowl 2001 fans were secretly treated to a mass, biometric scan in which video cameras tied to a temporary law-enforcement command centre digitised their faces and compared them against photographic lists of known malefactors.

Everyone entering Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida last Sunday was subjected to the surveillance system cameras, set up at the entrance turnstiles. No notice or disclosure was ever given, and no one, therefore, had an opportunity to decline to enter the stadium if they should have objected to this unprecedented treatment.

[ ... ]

"The Company's face-recognition technology is unique because of its capabilities of both rapid and accurate real-time acquisition as well as its scalability to databases containing millions of faces. Therefore, the software can instantly calculate an individual's eigenface from either live video or a still digital image, and then search a database of millions in only a few seconds in order to find similar or matching images."

'Similar or matching.' This clearly acknowledges the possibility that innocent civilians going about their peaceable business may be stopped, hassled, even arrested, merely for resembling someone naughty. This raises sticky issues regarding the presumption of innocence many of us were encouraged to believe in during our grammar-school civics lessons. Is there a violation of this principle when a person is required to produce evidence that they are not, in fact, the evil bastard whom they unfortunately resemble?

Unknown to the 100,000 people who passed through the turnstiles at Sunday's Super Bowl, hidden cameras scanned each of their faces and compared the portraits with photos of terrorists and known criminals of every stripe.

In a command post at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla., the digitized images of fans and workers were cross-checked against files of local police, the "FBI" and state agencies at the rate of a million images a minute.

The cameras identified 19 people with criminal histories, none of them of a "significant" nature, Tampa authorities said. But the undisclosed first test of the technology at a major U.S. sporting event raised arguments about privacy versus security and questions about the future of such spying and its uses.

"Oh my God, it's yet another nail in the coffin of personal liberty," said Bruce Schneier, founder and chief technical officer of "Counterpane" Internet Security Inc., a security monitoring company.

"It's another manifestation of a surveillance society, which says we're going to watch you all the time just in case you might do something wrong," said Schneier, whose book "Secrets & Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World" warned of the increasing encroachment on civil liberties in high-tech society.

[ ... ]

Other applications are expected to include ATM machines and public events such as the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Leaving a window open on a house does not mean that a person is allowed to climb through it and take a nap.

And if they do climb through and take a nap, they'd better do it in the bedroom.

Fairfax has more money coursing through it than any other locality on the planet, without exageration, and it has been this way for around a decade.

About two months ago I was munching a sandwhich at a Subway in Fairfax and idly staring out the window. After a few minutes I realized that I was looking at two Magnum P.I. Ferraris, one red, one blue, behind an AMG Mercedes. Parked on the street.

And it took 5 minutes for that to seem weird to me, because it does take a while to understand that just because something has become routine to you it hasn't stopped being weird.

But maybe Fairfax needs the dough to enforce the new immigrant-friendly laws they're whipping up to make it a crime to sleep in your own living room.

That's easy, here's a few examples:

Gore initiated the National Performance Review. The 1993 report from his office asserts, "The answer for every problem cannot always be another program or more money. It is time to radically change the way the government operates--to shift from top-down bureaucracy to entrepreneurial government that empowers citizens and communities to change our country from the bottom up." I'm sure you'll dispute the $108 billion that its analysis shows to have been saved by the federal government. The report.

The Committee on Governmental Affairs of the US Senate filed a report in 2000 analyzing the Clinton administration's "Reinventing Government Initiative". Among its findings: "Substantial downsizing of the federal workforce has in fact occurred--but substantial issues remain. Federal civilian employment is now at 1.8 million, its lowest level since 1960. During the Clinton administration, it has dropped 19 percent. The reductions are unquestionably real." The report.

Did you sleep through the entire campaign? The only reason Gore even came close was by blatantly lying about Bush's tax cuts (the "over half the benefit goes to the richest 1%" bull***t) and Social Security reforms (it's a "risky scheme" to invest in money market funds, far safer to hand it over to the government and hope that when you retire they'll give you some of it back by taxing the hell out of your grandchildren.)

I wish I had slept through it! Come on, be serious with this stuff. Bush wants to cut taxes big time for the richest people, he's explicitly admitted that. And I can't believe anyone seriously would be willing to try the Social-Security-in-the-stock-market scheme. The whole point to Social Security is that it guarantees a certain payment, not some unknown speculative value! I suppose you need support for that as well... here's Al Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, on the subject:

Asked about the President's plan to put approximately one-quarter of Social Security funds into the stock market, Greenspan said, "Let me just say it's not so much a trade-off of benefits versus costs. I'm frankly just hard-pressed to find any benefits there are in doing it." -- WH Bulletin, 1/20/99

"There is really no strong evidence to suggest any positive aspects of moving Social Security funds into equities," Greenspan, the chief architect of the government's last major revisions to Social Security 16 years ago, told members of the House Ways and Means Committee. From the Washington Post.

• The media companies seem to be working more or less together on this; they're not trying to block competition from each other, but protecting their interestes (both copyrights on their material, and seemingly the right to produce media) from the consumers. Side note: if the corporation is an abomination for its ability to divorce individual profit from individual responsibility, a cartel is doubly so.
• I don't think there's ever been a government more responsive to the needs of corporations. The government bailed out Chrysler, and they were on the ropes before they asked for help. Imagine what hoops the unholy alliance of MPAA/RIAA/ETC companies can make the government jump through (or kiss).
• When Paul Weaver wrote his book, he might not have considered the myriad ways that government could interfere with the political process on all levels. Consider the Honorabl(y paid for) Judge Jackson, who previously worked for the MPAA. Or just how stupid some politicians can get when a steady stream of big wealth goes to their heads.

New federal medical privacy regulations, touted by the Clinton administration as a landmark of patient protection, will for the first time explicitly permit doctors, hospitals, other health services and some of their business associates to use personal health records for marketing and fundraising.

A pregnant woman, for instance, could receive pitches about vitamins or infant health-care products. A patient who has been treated for sexually transmitted diseases could receive telemarketing calls offering condoms or new medicines.

The exemptions also give foundations affiliated with hospitals continued access to patient names, ages, addresses and telephone numbers for fundraising initiatives. Such foundations raise billions of dollars annually by soliciting patients and their families at medical facilities and at their homes.

The GNPA sounds pretty worthless to me. Here's what the offer letter from my past job said:

"This offer is contingent upon the results of (employer's) standard background check."

And when you sign the offer letter, you're agreeing to let them perform that standard background check. You don't sign it, you don't get the job, so the best you can do is sign in and pray their "standard background check" doesn't include exploratory gropings of your double helices.

What's needed is a law like the one cited by another poster which totally prohibits genetic discrimination.

zo.

...because I live in a county where this is now illegal.

P.S. Merry Christmas to everybody else who can't sleep. :-]


--

Your point is well taken, I just hope people reolise that the ADA has been dismantled by the court and is no longer an effective protection. This law by the clinton adminastration is a start, but more needs to be done. -Daniel

Candiates vie for office. The outcome is in doubt, so they go to court for recounts. The courts deny that. Loser concedes. Winner gets stuck with the job.

Then came the court actions, where in the end the Supreme Court (including two justices with blatant conflicts of interest, who were therefore required to recuse themselves and did not) made a ruling for Bush not based in law, fact, or logic.

Bush lost the popular vote, he almost certainly lost the Florida vote, but he won with his brother's cronies and with his daddy's pals on the Supreme Court. The big shame is that in their (understandable) anti-Gore sentiment, many Bush supporters have backed this destruction of democracy.

Welcome to the end of the American Century.

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/

If hand recounts are less accurate than machine recounts, why are hand recounts ordered by law in case in dispute in both Florida and Texas, as well as most of the other states?

Not true. What the Texas law does say is that if both a hand and machine recount are requested, only one, the hand recount is performed. Under Texas law, one may not have multiple recounts. In Florida, it is up to each county, provided they have the results in by deadline. Furthermore, as the Washington Post found, most states don't count dimples.

How easy is it to stuff the ballot box when you're in a roomful of extremely partisan observers from the other side? Do you think the Dem's are ripping out chads right under the Republicans noses?

Not conclusive at all. After all, the Republicans did complain about the interpretations of dimpled chads that Broward County came up with. The Republican judge on the Broward County board disagreed with tons of the calls, and one Republican observer was thrown out for disagreeing with a call. So, just because the Republicans were there didn't mean they didn't object to the calls. They just didn't control the process.

How can Gore have "clearly lost" the hand recount when the recount wasn't allowed to finish? Do you think shipping in goons to harass election canvassing boards into calling off recounts is an acceptable outcome in a Western democracy?

Because the race is over after either the arbitrary deadline the Florida Supreme Court made, or the original deadline in the statute the Legislature passed before the election. As for the "goons" complaint, the Democratic election supervisor in Miami-Dade County told the Los Angeles Times that the demonstration was peaceful, and did not intimidate him. He would have made the decision anyway, as there wasn't enough time. Don't forget that the Democrats on the County board originally voted not to have a manual recount, until the Gore campaign threatened to sue them. As a Democrat, it would have been easy for him to claim he was intimidated; he didn't.

The woman who certified this vote, and who has consistently attempted to block all attempts at hand recounts, is Bush's co-campaign chair in Florida. How can this be allowed to happen? Do they not have conflict of interest laws in Florida? Further, her job is due to be slated out of existence at the end of her term, which means she's looking for work. She'll get a plum appointment in a Bush administration, maybe even an Ambassadorship. Is this the way we do elections in America? Sounds more like one of those new Russian states making it's first attempt at democracy.

She does have an obvious defense, that it is her job and she was following the law. After all, the Attorney General for Florida jumped in the dispute, and he managed Gore's campaign in Florida. The judges and workers in Broward County and elsewhere who judges the dimpled ballots voted for Gore, and some of them contributed to his campaign, had stickers for him on their cars, and are members of the DNC. (Evidence, as though it matters: here) Surely there were conflicts of interest there too? At least her job had very straightforward deadlines in law, and later dictated by the courts-- the local Democratic officials were interpreting dimples and stray marks, which has much more room for bias. She certified all recounts that came before the legislated deadline. She then certified all recounts before the Florida Supreme Court imposed deadline.

Why are most of the optical counting machines in Florida in Republican areas, where the shitty old punchcard systems are in place in Democratic strongholds?

Not true. The Orlando Sentinal published a list of spoiled ballots for counties and electoral systems. It lists tabulation systems used, and who won each county. There's also a link to a map. Note that optical systems and punchcard systems are distributed proportionally in counties the each candidate won, although Gore did have slightly more spoiled ballots in counties he won.

At least, that's what the Washington Post reported. Texas is really about the only exception to that rule, actually. The Illinois court case Boies cited had the court rejecting dimpled ballots, as the Chicago Tribune found.

And how many people do you know that use proper English in normal conversations? Bush is also apparently fluent in Spanish. The citizens of Texas apparently like the job he did as governor for that state. He won healthy percentages of every demographic segment of the population. There were even Democrats from the TX state legislature campaigning for Bush in other states because they thought he did a great job in that state and could do the same for the country. I don't recall any Republicans campaigning for Gore.

Also check out this Washington Post story& lt;/a> . Although Gore's SAT scores were better than Bush's (1355 vs 1206), he did worse in college. He got a D in Earth Science (poor in Science overall) and a C- in economics. Most of his improvements in his junior & senior years have been attributed to grade inflation by anti Vietnam war professors. Bush also got an MBA from Harvard while Gore got five Fs before dropping out of Vanderbilt Divinity School. Also given his big lies about his sister, tobacco, Love Canal, campagin fund raising, the polution generated by his properties in TN, etc., I'd hardly consider Gore a model of character and integrity.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has set up a web page for No. 00-5212, United States v. Microsoft, and No. 00-5213, New York, et al. v. Microsoft. The page includes a schedule and court documents.

In addition, you can join an official mailing list to be notified of submission of new pleadings or court orders.

According to James Grimaldi of The Washington Post, Microsoft intends to target District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson in its 150-page appeal Monday. Others predict it is a distraction to demand recusal for Jackson's comments to news media, released after his decision.

As I mentioned in discussing another /. topic, the D.C. Circuit Court judges are exceptionally savvy about technology, and are equipped with Apple Powerbooks. Unfortunately, however, it appears that some of the judges on the panel will have to recuse themselves because they were Justice Department employees before becoming judges--and those judges had considerable antitrust experience, in contrast to the remaining judges.

Let's hope that the current popularity among some "pundits" to bash the judiciary does not carry over to politicizing and weakening the verdict all of us need in this case in order to carry out business in this new era.

(a quote)

"The group had considered .web from Afilias LLC but substituted .info from the same applicant at the last minute because of concerns that Image Online Design Inc. has been unofficially registering .web for about five years. IOD also sought a sanctioned .web."

Tyranny of the minority, anyone?

Oh well.

We've always used poor interfaces; therefore, we must maintain this grand Floridian tradition.

How dare disgruntled voters try to make their grievances heard!

Don't pretend that this somehow justifies us overturning the results of a lawfully conducted and lawfully counted election! This is a motivation for overhauling the system in the future, not for overturning what has already been lawfully done. ex post facto, dude.

After all, if these nutty super-liberal Democrats don't have the intelligence to properly fill out a ballot, how educated could their opinion on who should run the country be?

(no offense intended, other than to elitism)

I do not disagree with you that there may be room for improvement in the layout and format of ballots - in Palm Beach County and at large. I would love to see computerized voting stations printing out bar-coded hard copy ballots, so we have a physical ballot count to validate the computer count. But as a matter of present case law, there is no right to ballots being a "perfect user interface", and as a matter of present statutory law the election was conducted properly, and as a matter of constitutional law we are able to redress concerns raised by this election (that, if they're such a big deal, should have been raised and addressed long ago) for the purposes of future elections.

The Electoral College -- or, more precisely, an electoral system where each State has a given number of votes for president -- does have at least one major advantage in a close election. It serves to contain disputes and demands for recounts and actually makes it easier to determine the winner; it serves as a buffer that protects against a Florida fiasco on the national level.

Nationally, out of the 98,303,931 votes cast (and unofficially counted so far) for the two major-party candidates, Gore leads Bush by only 216,291 votes, a fraction of one percent. (You can get these numbers from any number of places; I've taken them from http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/poli tic s/.)

If it weren't for the Electoral College, I think you'd be seeing challenges to the results and demands for recounts or revotes even in those areas where everyone agrees that one candidate or the other won comfortably. In Chicago, for example, Gore got 769317 votes to Bush's 164919 (http://www.chicagoelecti ons .com/CHI1100ReportPage5.html), but I wouldn't be surprised if there somewhere around a third as many spoiled ballots (50,000 in Cook County, IL in the 1996 election rings a bell) as there were votes for Bush, but there's no need for a recount because everybody agrees that Gore won Illinois, and it isn't the nation-wide popular vote that matters. The two sides would be trying to squeeze every last vote out of every last precinct in the whole country if it weren't for the Electoral College limiting that nightmare to Florida and a few counties elsewhere.

Of course this doesn't necessarily mean that the Electoral College should be retained in its present form, but it certainly does suggest that we shouldn't be so quick to discard the balance it provides between national and federal elements in the American system of electing presidents.

The moment that this site became profitable, Rob and the rest of those goons lost their excuses for such fuck-ups. Our pageviews are what sells advertising; indirectly, we pay for Rob's weed, so we have a right to complain when the level of "service" drops. The management has the right not to listen (which they do very well). The duplicate story problem is well known and recurs often. The management doesn't care. If it really bothers you, stop reading. The management won't care if you stop reading, but they will care when they start losing advertising revenue. If you say nothing, you are accepting that the service rendered is adequate. So go ahead and complain, fellow Slashdotters. Or even better, stop visiting the site.

I used to say, "oh, leave Rob and the rest alone; it's all just a fun geek site, right?", but then I thought, what else does Malda do all day? He stops playing Diablo 2 a few times a day to post these lame stories, and he can't even check for duplicates? That pissed me off. Why should we support Rob's right to be a lazy sod and get rich off of a second-rate site?

Slashdot is big business now. Corporate sponsors, national media exposure, the works. It's time for the management to realize this, and stop doing such a half-assed job. If you want to continue deluding yourself into thinking Slashdot was the same place it was two years ago, or even a year ago, or even six months ago, go ahead. But it's not the same. Dell Computers got their start in a college dorm room, and now they're a major corporation. Consequently, they're expected to act more professionally then when they were run from a dorm room. We should expect no less of Slashdot. If Rob's such a Perl wizard, why can't modify Slashcode so that every accepted story submission is put into a DB table, and compared against previous submissions for similar keywords and links? The editor can then maually review possible duplicate submissions. What else is so pressing that you can't find the time to actually maintain the site that made you a millionare, Rob?

The bottom line is that Slashdot is too successful for him to not care.

All generalizations are false.