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May i introduce you to the concept of sewage sludge?

We might be creating the modern plague of our age - all under the greenwash guise of "recycling".

Here is a great introductory video.

Lax oversight is also a great way to attack US.

Know where your food comes from - as a farm geek to you computer geeks - know the difference between organic and certified organic.

Want to know more? Read this.

"And, even if all of the nuclear weapons that ever existed were detonated right now, the Earth would still be a hell of a lot more habitable than the moon."

Ah...no it wouldn't.

Estimate of number of world nuclear warheads

http://www.web.net/~cnanw/a3.htm

Estimate of devastation: I do challenge you to read it all the way through.

http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/no_nukes/ tenw/nuke_war.htm

No my friend If every Nuclear warhead were detonated at the same time on this planet...at their planned destinations...there would not be a single living thing on this planet for a long long time to come.

The moon is indeed much more habitable....it has Ice which means you can make oxygen...which means you can ultimately devise a way to live.

WORDS Billy Bragg

With the productivity gains that the U.S. loves to brag about, you'd think at least some of that extra productivity could've gone to decreasing the work week from 40 to say 37. Thats what Denmark did.

http://www.web.net/32hours/denmark.htm

What new subhuman combination should be produced and for what purpose? At what point would it be considered human? And what rights, if any, should it have?

There are alot of texts out there with studies on what can save money for the company. This is how to grab thier attention. They like to see the all-mighty dollar.

For this topic I recommend This study, as well as this one they seemed to help my former boss understand. And for planning time I recommend Code Complete so you can show them that not "coding" right away actually is a good thing.

Also how much do these guys know about character sets? The Attavik website uses "latin1" (a non existent charset--should be "ISO-8859-1"--and why not UTF-8 so they don't need images) and is content-free giving no one any real idea what they do. From what it says I think they sell proprietary software to Inuktitut organisations (that they probs don't need) though.

Also, the companies homepage (which sucks) doesn't have a charset (and is not UTF-8/ASCII) and is very invalid even when you do work the charset out.

Are you insane? Canadian hospitals are open and providing the same level of service year-round. You may have a longer wait for some services in the winter, particularly if you show up in the emergency room with a relatively non-emergent problem--it's flu season, and there are more slips and falls, and so forth. This is untrue. My mother (who works at a hospital) routinely talked about having to close half of the available beds due to lack of funding. And occasionaly would close their doors to all but emergency cases, making people go to another hospital, which in some cases was over an hour away. globe article. Now this is temporary closure, there is also forced permanent closure link.

Costing more than double Canada's system per person, the U.S. health system eats up 13+% of U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) compared to Canada's 9%. And, tragically, for all the money it costs, the U.S. health system serves only a fraction of the population.

A staggering 43 million Americans have no health coverage whatsoever and another 100 million are considered under-insured.
- Why NOT Privatize

It looks like the US could easily afford health care for both "real citizens" as you call them and illegal immigrants.

Besides, I'd rather pay an extra $10 in taxes this year than let some poor kid with a bullet in her stomach die on the street.

Nobody wins unless everyone wins, right?

The company I work for was affected by the infinite wisdom of Spews. Apparently a spammer once sent email from an address that happens to share the same leading 16-bits of address space with us.

So you were paying money (whether directly or indirectly) to the same ISP that was hosting a spammer. And that ISP had ignored abuse reports about that spammer for a significant period of time.

Because of their escalation procedures, a full 8192 sites have been placed on their "spam" list because of a single incident.

Ah yes, the "escalation" procedures... those would be the things they do when a spam-supporting ISP ignores abuse reports and refuses to terminate spamming clients.

Generally SPEWS will list a single IP address first. Then, over a period of time, as long as the spammer stays up at that ISP, they'll gradually increase the range of IPs listed. If in your case they listed a /16 - well, some ISPs can be very hard of hearing. Or perhaps I should say that some ISPs are very reluctant to terminate their lucrative spamming clients, and so will refuse to terminate them until said clients are costing them more than they're making (eg. by having to deal with complaints from non-spammer customers and/or having non-spammer customers leave).

I don't think [...]

Obviously.

[...] Spews provides any useful service.

Gee, this is easy. Don't use them then. *roll of eyes*

I think what you meant to say is "SPEWS accurately listed (part of?) my ISP for spam support. I refuse to accept any responsibility for my part in paying money to keep that rogue ISP in business, and I also refuse to complain to my ISP about their spam support. I, in fact, do not acknowledge any problem other than me (or my company) having some email rejected, and I'm quite happy to blame SPEWS for this problem rather than correctly assign blame a little closer to home."

Substitute "the company I work for" for "I" where appropriate in the above.

They are a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Now I think you might have clued into the reason why they're anonymous and not directly contactable. Idiot spammers all over the USA and the world (and, embarassingly, one in my home city) will (ab)use the law as a tool to harass antispammers. Even though such a lawsuit would have little or no legal merit, they can be used as a very effective harassment tool, taking a disproportionate amount of time and money to defend.

SPEWS avoids this problem entirely by remaining anonymous. They don't need to be identified - the administrators who use SPEWS judge them by the quality of the information they provide.

IANAL, [...]

Obviously.

[...] but I'd be looking at Spews with $$'s in my eyes.

See above re: anonymity. It's a little tricky to file a frivolous (SLAPP) lawsuit when you don't know who you're trying to harass.

Pete.

http://www.web.net/32hours/Health%20Effects%20v2.h tm

[The following is a revision of a letter I have been distributing via email. I ought to have posted this earlier, but I lacked the courage. You can find the original on my website.]

Dear US Citizen,

I am writing to remind you to vote conscientiously tomorrow. I will also indulge in a little political activism by introducing some issues (watered stock, free trade, and others) for your consideration. As you read this message, keep in mind that I am not recommending that you vote for this or that candidate, but only that you think about what is at stake, make a choice, and vote.

I wish to bring to your attention a pattern of behavior by national governments that suggests that, in the world-wide political arena, the interests of citizens rank far below those of large corporations, and that the latter seek actively to diminish the influence of citizens on their governments' legislative activity. In some countries, citizens are even compelled by law to foot the bill for this nonsense. ;) It is worth noting that the worst consequences of this are not in the future: most US citizens feel so disenfranchised today that they either don't vote or vote for the lesser evil, and US taxpayers (citizens or not) bear the burden of unprecedented personal and national debt. If you don't vote, you will be capitulating, and the future of US politics will be that much closer to a foregone conclusion. As a citizen of the European Union and a resident of Switzerland, a very small sovereign state, I have learned that the rest of the world cannot afford apathy or carelessness on the part of registered voters in the US. You can think of this message as a plea for help.

[As you read this, please excuse the careless use of "Americans" where "US citizens" would have been correct.]

The first issue I want to discuss is the connection between corporations and public money. You may or may not be aware of the emergence of watered stock and pooling as a powerful weapons in the corporations' arsenal; for example, Microsoft and Cisco have managed to attain tax-free status by writing off stock options (and then earning some of that back when new stock is issued for the purpose of redeeming those options) and Citigroup recapitalizes and decapitalizes itself arbitrarily to achieve spectacular mergers (thus posing a great risk to the banking sector) -- right under the nose of the SEC. In a perfect world, this sort of abuse would have been reigned in already but, in our world, the possibility of relief seems remote. Let me make this plain: the watered stock write-off scheme amounts to a theft of public money and pooling needlessly endangers the stability of the economy. At the very least, insofar as stock represents a redeemable claim against a company's assets, it is a perversion of the modern economic perspective in which the stock market is allegedly as adequate a store of value as gold ever was.

Actually, said modern economic perspective was already quite perverse (in ways too numerous to mention) long before watered stock was even imagined. Such perversity is a natural consequence of the absence of an adequate standard of value, which was in turn an intended consequence of changes in policy that took place earlier in the century. Long ago, Alan Greenspan explained that the institution he heads today is a powerful instrument with which the government can confiscate part of the value of your money and, not incidentally, engage in deficit spending regularly. You might argue that calculated inflation is a small price to pay for being able to float a chronic debt and sustain a deficit as needed. You might argue that your national debt is presently unassailable because American households, which on average have a negative savings rate and face unabatable credit card debt, are financially overcommitted as it is. You might be wrong. Habitual deficit spending and the resulting chronic national indebtedness, along with the corporate welfare mechanisms that aggravate them, are to blame for your misery: the federal government uses inflation and national debt to mortgage your personal assets and your public resources, respectively, as effortlessly as a corporation uses watered stock to dilute the value of your share holdings. Think what you will of Greenspan's former support of the gold standard, but you have to admit that he was correct in predicting the practical consequences of failing to provide an adequate store of value, and in identifying the welfare state as the primary beneficiary:

Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of a society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.

What he may not have realized then is that corporate welfare is just as likely a welfare scheme as any other.

It now behooves us to ask not only how this wave of abuse can be stemmed, but also how this sort of situation can arise even under the watchful eye of our elected officials. The answer is that, in the US, the Executive and the Agencies operate with considerable autonomy; many important decisions are often made away from public scrutiny, largely or altogether, and there is a vested interest on the part of large corporations to increase the autonomy, if not the stature, of these public servants. Consider the case of MAI, the Multilateral agreement on investment -- a charter of rights and freedoms for corporations. Those of you who have not heard of it should at least know that it was the culmination of attempts to transfer some important powers from the popularly elected legislative bodies to the executive officials of sovereign states and to give corporations the legal standing of sovereign states. Let me take a moment to explore the brilliance of these tactics.

• When decision making forums are sheltered from public scrutiny, executive officials can serve corporate interests with impunity.
• When corporations have the same legal standing as sovereign states, large multinational corporations have power over small sovereign states -- perhaps even those in which the company is incorporated.

Surely, you can give examples of an administration negotiating treaties that would be difficult to accept for a majority of citizens and impossible to ratify for most congresses; now, try to imagine a future in which the legislature is powerless to stop unfavorable or undesirable consequences of free trade arrangements that it did not have the opportunity to approve or reject. Surely, you can name instances of a corporation getting away with practices that a majority of citizens would condemn but which the courts are powerless to stop in the absence of adequate legislation or jurisdiction; now, try to imagine a future in which a corporation undertakes legal action against sovereign states for refusing to let it set up shop, or even for having laws and regulations that hinder it, such as strict environmental standards.

"That's not a problem," you say, "because Public Citizen told us about MAI in the nick of time." That's not the point; the point is that MAI is evidence of an alarming, long-standing pattern of behavior: as Noam Chomsky has said, our governments really are, and have been for a long time, trying to undermine democracy. Consider, as further evidence, the case of Australia's MIGA, an agency that predates MAI and obviates the "need" for it.

Now, the two leading candidates, Al Gore and George Bush, look at the issue very differently, saying that free trade creates jobs, without mentioning what kind and where. Actually, Bush has even said that it is the duty of the administration to "sell" free trade (on WTO's terms, of course) to US citizens! Ralph Nader, on the other hand, has said that he wants the US to withdraw from the WTO and that we should re-examine the premise of so-called "free trade" agreements. I was going to give you a reference to Nader's website with that last statement, as WTO/NAFTA was one of the three key issues on his home page until just a few days ago, but now it is not even in the issue summaries. What could this mean? I think it means that he has pushed one of his favorite issues into the background because he needs enough votes to get federal funding for his next campaign. And this, in turn, suggests that American politicians think that the US electorate is politically comatose. You can help prove them wrong: a strong showing by Americans on election day would tell US politicians and corporations and the world that Americans are still in control of their political system. It would be a great sequel to the Battle of Seattle, with a lot less violence and just as much press coverage. Realistically, you probably cannot afford to act as resolutely as José Bové, but you can vote.

When I think about US politics, I think of the fable in which a master presents some options to his student, threatening to beat him with a cane if he chooses poorly; the essence of the problem is that the student cannot choose any of the options presented to him without risking bodily harm. (You should now take a moment to discover how the student can avoid the beating and what the moral of the story is.) You can and should vote for the presidential candidate who will most closely represent your interests, as you have more valid options than the mainstream media seem to suggest: you can vote for George W. Bush; you can vote for Al Gore; you can vote for Ralph Nader; you can vote for Harry Browne; and you can vote for some other candidate (yes, there are more) though his name may not appear on your ballot. If you cast a so-called "useful" vote, you are supporting a system in which you have a lot less influence than you otherwise might, and you might get beat with a cane. Of course, if you don't vote, you have no voice, nor will you ever, and when you and I finally get beat with a very stiff cane, no one will hear us scream. Please, vote.

Yours,

Alejandro Gómez de Argüello

Not to mention the mode of transportation itself. Cars crashing on the highway are the number one dangerous mode. But think of the number of San Francisco Muni bus accidents, New York subway derailments, airline disasters, AMTRACK derailments, freight trains with toxic chemicals spilling, train derailments in Turkey and Germany and everywhere else.

(&^#!*&%#$!!! Honestly! Don't you realize that the only reason you hear about those is that they are 'news items'??? Just because CNN doesn't mention it on the evening news, doesn't mean it didn't happen, just that it's not 'newsworthy'. Just like airplane crashes. Anytime a plane with over 50 passengers goes down, it makes the news. In Ontario, (the first statistics I found), someone dies in a car crash every nine hours!!

Diesel smoke from public buses also cause more pollution per person, in areas where ridership is too low to amortize the damage.

Well, you're right here. The counter-point is that in rural areas, public transportation becomes more of a state service, allowing those who do not own cars to get around. The real environmental benefits of public transportation work best in urban areas, of course.

The rest I agree with. Hehe.

• Collaborative Filtering Workshop (Berkeley, 1996)
• Adding Comments to the Web (read it all, including the FAQ )
• W3C's Collaboration/Annotation page (seems dormant).

• Collaborative Filtering Workshop (Berkeley, 1996)
• Adding Comments to the Web (read it all, including the FAQ )
• W3C's Collaboration/Annotation page (seems dormant).