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http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB106807618 578400800,00.html

For any WSJ article, just add _print after the /article to read it without subscribing. In this case try http://online.wsj.com/article_print/0,,SB106807618 578400800,00.html?mod=technology_main_whats_news

This article's a dream come true all of us who post on Slashdot without first reading the article. Finally, we've got a good comeback for all those pests who tell us to go RTFA (read the fucking article.)

I hope this begins a trend, and I look forward to many more Slashdot stories centered around articles I don't have subscription privileges to read. You can count on me and hundreds of others to post responses to these stories, confident in the knowledge that we have no clue as to what the article says, and knowing nobody else does either.

Again, fantastic work!

Even though he said he was 'blown away' by Amazon's new Search Inside the Book feature, Tim O'Reilly has decided not to participate in the program for now. 'If they end up being a Google for published content...we need to think better about what publishers get out of it,' he said.

I read about this the other day in the Journal; the article there was about an Aussie phone company partnering with Coke to enable purchasing drinks from a vending machine with your cellphone. The article also mentioned the potential for just about anything to be purchased in this manner. The product prices are just added to your phone bill.

And I soon got to thinking, what about people who have kids, or especially teenagers, and want to give them cellphones (very useful in an emergency, f'rinstance). Suddenly, giving them a cellphone is tantamount to giving them a credit card.

And someone is going to come up the idea of a special cell phone, or a special subscription, that disables cellphone-based purchases, and some bozo is going to try and patent that idea, despite the fact that you heard it here first.

1. The Department of Commerce; VeriSign's contract to operate .com and .org was originally with them.
2. The Federal Communications Commission, which oversees telecommunications.
3. The Senate Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Communications; contact the committee itself, the chairman, the ranking member, and any of the other members you'd like.
4. The House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, including the committee itself, the chairman, the vice-chairman, and the ranking member. Plus any of the other members you feel like contacting.
5. The Federal Trade Commission, which hears consumer complaints.
6. Your U.S. Representative
7. Your Senators
8. Your Governor
9. Your State Legislators
10. ICANN's wildcard comment address
11. Finally, complain to the media. If they get enough letters on a topic, they'll run stories. Try the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox News, CBS News, ABC News, NBC News and MSNBC.

Remember, VeriSign is busy telling them its side of the story. We need to tell them ours!

1. The Department of Commerce; VeriSign's contract to operate .com and .org was originally with them.
2. The Federal Communications Commission, which oversees telecommunications.
3. The Senate Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Communications; contact the committee itself, the chairman, the ranking member, and any of the other members you'd like.
4. The House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, including the committee itself, the chairman, the vice-chairman, and the ranking member. Plus any of the other members you feel like contacting.
5. The Federal Trade Commission, which hears consumer complaints.
6. Your U.S. Representative
7. Your Senators
8. Your Governor
9. Your State Legislators
10. ICANN's wildcard comment address
11. VeriSign itself
12. Finally, complain to the media. If they get lots of letters on a topic, they'll run stories. Try the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox News, CBS News, ABC News, NBC News and MSNBC.

• granting illegal immigrants the right to driver's licenses
• enacting the nation's toughest financial-privacy and antispam measures
• expanding the rights of gay domestic partners

1. The Department of Commerce; VeriSign's contract to operate .com and .org was originally with them.
2. The Federal Communications Commission, which oversees telecommunications.
3. The Senate Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Communications; contact the committee itself, the chairman, the ranking member, and any of the other members you'd like.
4. The House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, including the committee itself, the chairman, the vice-chairman, and the ranking member. Plus any of the other members you feel like contacting.
5. The Federal Trade Commission, which hears consumer complaints.
6. Your U.S. Representative
7. Your Senators
8. Your Governor
9. Your State Legislators
10. ICANN's wildcard comment address
11. VeriSign itself
12. Finally, complain to the media. If they get lots of letters on a topic, they'll run stories. Try the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox News, CBS News, ABC News, NBC News and MSNBC.

Nokia 7600 looks good but I am getting this one:
Image1
Image2
Image3
Image4
Image5
Image6
A review
Click on screens to view all screens

about the KGB. An eyeopener. It's a non-subscriber link.

China Attempts to Set New High-Tech Standards

China surprised the wireless industry three years ago by declaring it would create its own technical standard for third-generation mobile phones. Then it said it was going to develop its own format for digital television. And six weeks ago, it announced it was creating a different audio and video standard for the next wave of DVD players and videogame players...

...however, in other areas, China is looking to set the standard even beyond its own borders by licensing its standard at a lower cost to competitors...

<sarcasm> Of *course* they are doing this for the good of the global marketplace! Just like developing their own processor and distro of Linux!</sarcasm>

Maybe I'm being too skeptical here, but government mandates are inherently industrial policy. Industrial policy does NOT mean "May the best product succeed." It means "The product that most benefits officials in gov *will* succeed." Just look at agricultural policy for an idea of where this could go. (Here's a nice bit of dairy case law as an example) Seems to me each government will ultimately try to make its software base *the* standard, which will likely lead to interoperabilty problems. As for security, imagine the fun governments will have with IP and DRM once they control the standards. What a great way to control the media. Then again, maybe I am being alarmist, and China really is a worker's paradise. But, seems to me that private enterprise has a much better track record of supplying what people want. OSS is fine in the hands of private enterprise. Watch out when it becomes part of industrial policy, though. Having governments drive the OSS community is not a good thing, IMHO.

Hmm. Can't say about "wavy-underlined" spell check, but spell checking where spelling errors are detected and highlighted on the fly have been around since the 80's. Both in WYSIWYG form for the mac and text for PC-DOS / DR-DOS.

DOM was around a few years before most considered MSIE usable, so your claim strikes me as specious. Likewise with smart tags or dumb tags, if it's in MS-Word, then only Microsoft can produce it and by definition they're first. If it is similar to the "Smart Tags" in MSIE that got canned.

Innovation is certainly involved, but Steve and Bill seem to use the word in the wrong context.

Assuming this is true. Assuming this is true???

Have you even read the news?

This guy modified the virus to email info back to his own website from the infected PCs. Doesn't take a genius (no offense intended, FBI guys) to find out who hosts it and check to see if there's source matching the virus on PCs he owns.

Though you probably think John Ashcroft planted the evidence.

The WSJ says as much this morning (paid subscription required): The "Blaster.B" version of the infection, which began spreading Aug. 13, was remarkably similar to the original Blaster worm that struck two days earlier; experts said its author made a few changes, including renaming the infecting-file from "MSBlast" to an anatomical reference.

WSJ.com - Portals

Nice to see some friendly high profile coverage here. Thanks Lee!

Jared

The Wall Street Journal is an excellent example of a site that has done well online. One of the reasons being that they were very clear with their subscription model - one subscription for the print edition - another subscription for the online edition. The best deal is if you have a student subscription, you get both the print and online editions for one very reasonable price.

The internet makes it easy to commoditize information, those who are successful are able to differentiate their content (can't get it anywhere else - users willing to pay the premium). It has certainly worked for technical/medical journals, whether or not it will work for pop-culture magazines, we'll have to see.

The iTune Music Store isn't a good comparison - people aren't paying extra to access the site - but rather buying music from the site, the subscription based music sites haven't fared as well.

Linux got the highest rating possible.

Is this right? Because that's not how the Wall Street Journal (subscription only) reported it today:
SuSE Linux got a Level 2 certification, which he [Jonathan Eunice, principal analyst at market researcher Illuminata] said "isn't particularly detailed." Microsoft Corp. has a Level 4 certification, which involves "substantially more detailed" investigation by testing labs.

The Wall Street Journal gave this big play ... it's subscription only, but here's some details:

To get the certification, IBM enlisted SuSE, which distributes one of the leading versions of Linux. Mr. Donofrio said IBM paid less than $500,000 to get the certification at a independent testing center in Germany run by atsec information security GmbH. [IBM's senior vice president of technology and manufacturing, Nicholas] Donofrio said the security certification required few changes. It simply assured that Linux didn't have weaknesses that could be exploited by hackers, such as failing to really erase information on command. The certification included approval of the process SuSE uses to upgrade the software without introducing new security risks.

In a statement, the Defense Information Systems Agency said it was "pleased" that Linux has attained the certification.

Jonathan Eunice, principal analyst at market researcher Illuminata, Nashua, N.H., said the certification is significant, because "competitors have openly said Linux would never get to this level of security."

The initial certification is for Linux running on servers using Intel Corp. microprocessors. Mr. Eunice said SuSE Linux got a Level 2 certification, which he said "isn't particularly detailed." Microsoft Corp. has a Level 4 certification, which involves "substantially more detailed" investigation by testing labs. IBM said it would sponsor security testing for Linux software running on other servers it makes, including its mainframes.

There's a NY Times story on the subject here (and a good SCO one on the Red Hat legal case following it).

A few months ago, I had a truly and quite literally "revolutionary" idea, and I jokingly called it "Assassination Politics": I speculated on the question of whether an organization could be set up to legally announce that it would be awarding a cash prize to somebody who correctly "predicted" the death of one of a list of violators of rights, usually either government employees, officeholders, or appointees. It could ask for anonymous contributions from the public, and individuals would be able send those contributions using digital cash.

bshanks writes "apparently, markets are the best way known for large groups of humans to aggregate their information and make predictions. Information markets are (i think) markets designed to elicit various types of predictions. Successful information markets include the Iowa Electronic Market, which predicts political events more accurately than major news polls, and the Hollywood Stock Exchange, which predicts box office revenues and Oscar winners." Paul Johnson appears to have verified this experimentally (if informally):

A number of years ago a colleague at Columbia Business School, Paul Johnson, created an exercise to demonstrate the exquisite capability of markets to discern value. The game is based on the Academy Awards-the highest accolades handed out in the film industry. The basics are very simple:

*Each student receives a single piece of paper with a listing of 12 Academy Award categories and the nominees for each. On the front of the page are relatively well known categories, such as best film, best actress and so on. The back page has more obscure categories-best adapted screenplay, best cinematography and such. The forms are distributed roughly three weeks in advance of the actual awards event.

*Students are asked to select the winners in each category. In order to play, students must contribute $1 to a pot, with the student with the most correct answers winning the pot. Hence, there is a modest economic incentive to answer the questions right.

*About 125 students participated in 1998. All guesses were generated independently, as students were forbidden from consulting with one another. The results were impressive in 1998. Similar results have been generated year-in and year-out:

*The "consensus," defined as the most popular selection for a given category, correctly identified 11 of the 12 actual category winners. Remarkably, the only category the consensus missed, it missed by only one vote.

*The best individual accurately picked 9 of the 12 category winners.

*The average individual only picked 5 of the 12 winners-less than 50%. The message from this exercise is that lots of agents and independent errors in their judgements lead to efficient results. The market tends to be much smarter than the average person. In fact, the standard error in equilibrium prices declines with roughly the square root of the number of investors.

This observation is not particularly new-in fact Francis Galton made the same point in the late 19th century-but it is often overlooked. Further, this simple model does not include meaningful economic incentives or learning. If incorporated, these elements would make the results even more robust.

So it

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This looks oddly familiar, minus the links about the comparably priced Palms. No, I'm not complaining. It's just weird. But I do hope for a little more consistency in the future, especially considering that Amazon taking orders for this watch was considered front-pageworthy.

* 2003-07-17 14:15:56 Mossberg Reviews Fossil's Palm PDA Wristwatch (articles,pilot) (rejected)

It's not really a handheld, but in today's Personal Technology column Walt Mossberg reviews Fossil's Palm-based PDA wristwatch that was announced at Comdex 2002. Not surprisingly, he finds it difficult to input data with the micro-stylus [insert your own joke here] it comes with, but thinks it's fine if you just want to view your to-do list, calendar or contact list. On the upside, he likes the black and white screen quality and the display features. You can see the Fossil Tech watches at Fossil's site. For the $275-$295 price tag you could get a real, usable Palm such as the color m515 or the Zire 71 with a camera, or if you prefer an even lower price, the $199 m130 - but then price isn't as much of a consideration as the geek-cred.

I am glad somebody found out what to do with these scanners.

Hopefully now all those millions of CueCat http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20001012.html scanners can be put to some use ....

Mossberg's and Pouge's columns are my Wednesday night reading.

Bob

Looks like a cross between an EE grad student's robotics project and something out of the Transformers.

Hook up a flamethrower to it, and we've got a mobile autonomous BBQ station. Where's Mark Pauline and Survival Research Labs when we need 'em? Bring on the Chickenators!

Innocent times like the good ol' 50s...

I thought that was pretty funny as well. The internet was developed as part of an effort to build a communications network that could survive a nuclear attack by the Soviets. Ah...the good old days, when the nuclear clock stood at a few minutes to midnight, and sensible people lived like there might be no tomorrow.

The museum looting story seems to have been overblown. During much of the looting of the museum, US forces were under fire from inside the museum and could not have prevented the looting without damaging the museum itself.

What about hospitals? What about classrooms? What about restoring power and water supplies?

You think that kind of infrastructure just gets restored overnight? Shit, we had a squirrel zap one of our transformers yesterday. The circuit has 100 families on it. It took the local power company 6 hours to get our power turned back on. Multiply that by a whole country...

And for the record, Iraq has a lower adult literacy rate (58%) than neighbors Jordan (89%) and Syria (65%). Primary education in Iraq has consisted mostly of lessons on the greatness of Saddam Hussein. And also for the record, much of Iraq's long tradition of "civilization" has consisted of conquering and looting its neighbors.

How is Afghanistan doing these days?

Afghanistan is probably better off today than at any time since the start of the Soviet invasion.

FWIW this story wasn't buried. When I submitted this to Slashdot on Friday, it was on the MSNBC site here.

It was also in the Wall Street Journal on Friday here. [paid subscription]. It appeared in the print version too.

Good story on America's Army in the Wall Street Journal today.

Check it out

One big giveaway in the image of the person who's been working away is the 5 1/2" floppy lying on the desk... They must have been skipping work a /long/ time! ;-]

The speed-ups to Google's method may make it realistic to calculate page rankings personalized for an individual's interests or customized to a particular topic

If it even works close to this I'll be sure to have a full selection of Ani DiFranco and Liberace at my fingertips!

The problem in Mac-land right now is that while they have superior software (in just about every thing I can imagine) the hardware is so far behind....

• target-mode booting to access a Mac's internal HD. Macs have that options since the first powerbooks (called SCSI Disk Mode at that time). Why is this not possible on an x86 box?
• standard gigabit ethernet on Powerbooks and PowerMacs
• better design on powerbooks
• finally (with notable exceptions) Apple HW lasts longer (it's like buying a German car or washers)

...her grandson brings her breakfast from McDonald's when she asks. "He would do anything for me," she says.

Mrs. Carmack said she doesn't know what her grandson does for work. She didn't know anything about a lawsuit, she said, but it sounded "real sad." She added, "Maybe if they got jobs for the fellows, they wouldn't have to do this."

Kind of funny how this was published just yesterday...

As an out-of-state college student, it requires significantly more effort to vote than if I was close to home. While E-voting won't cure voter apathy, it'll certainly help.

Yes, I am a lazy bum and don't feel like filling out an absentee ballot. I've got other issues to deal with. (Engineering at VT anyone?)

I often discuss political affairs with my friends and family, read the news, read the commentary, and mock the communists.

This just proves that just because you're lazy doesn't mean you're uninformed.

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,BT_CO_20030 411_005761-IFheoZhlqF0xJuqZXqYjNSTkL,00.html Gives better coverage, IMO, including rebuttal from CAUCE.

The NYPost is not exactly known for its award winning journalism, if you need business news, I would stick to the Wall Street Journal or IBD. If your looking for news on the latest J-Lo gossip, use the NYpost.

(quoted from the wall street journal, wednesday)
...In pursuit of such deals, Russia and France have persistently undermined sanctions and the effort to disarm Saddam and bring him into compliance with his own commitments by means short of war. "Politics is about interests. Politics is not about morals," Iraq's U.N. ambassador explained to the Washington Post a year ago. "If the French and others will take a positive position in the Security Council, certainly they will get a benefit. This is the Iraqi policy."...

Don't mean to post the whole article, but this should clear up any confusion by why we are not being supported by our "allies"

I have a Streamium MC-i200 in my garage (yeah, I spend a lot of time there). Here's the environment: Connected to the Ethernet port is a D-Link DWL-810 Ethernet-to-wireless bridge, which talks to a Netgear MR314 in my upstairs office. Also in the office is a media server, which is simply an old PC with a big hard drive. Finally, I have an old notebook that sits on my A/V tower downstairs, with a Y-cable from the stereo minijack out to an unused set of audio ins (MiniDisc, I believe). The notebook is perfect for playing Rhapsody through my main receiver.

With that out of the way, here's a quick review of the Streamium:
Good
- Ability to play MP3s from media server anywhere on your network.
- Limited Internet streaming capability. Rhapsody or something similar is needed.
- Really good sound, with decent bass thump.
- Remote control is handy when I'm working underneath the car and want to change tracks.

Bad
- Requires a special version of MusicMatch Jukebox on the "server" PC, even though I had already paid (yes, I paid) for the full version of MusicMatch. Now I have two versions on my music server. This server app must be running for the Streamium to find it and play music from the hard drive.
- Horrid navigation. My music is stored in folders, with an artist at the top level, and album folders underneath. It's a chore to page down through the alphabetized list of artists. So I play more Geoff Achison than I would like, and less of the Zombies.

Bottom Line
- While this is a good first step, $500 is far too much to pay (I evaluate this gear for my job). For that jack I'd buy a two-year-old notebook, PC speakers, and slap in a wireless card.
- Keep an eye out for a Digital Media Adapter from Linksys, which should be released soon. It, too, sits on your A/V tower, hooks into your receiver, and should have an out to the TV, so you can navigate playlists and such on the big screen.

BTW, the Wall Street Journal reviewed the Streamium last month. Yup, you gotta have a subscription.

Hope this helps.

-Ray

It reminds me a lot of this earlier tactic for getting people hooked onto playing games on cell phones. As I recall, the variant was to have a few hot chicks playing cell phone games in bars so that onlooking guys in the bar would assume that acquisition of said merchandise was the new magic bullet to Success with Women.

But please. My mental environment is already overly polluted with high-pitched sales "information" that crowds out reflection, creative thinking, following a logical train of thought, etc.

..google, you will feel their wrath

Take a look at this chart of the 2003 Bush Budget proposal increases, which is going to put our economy in the shitter for a long time. The defense budget is getting a $379 billion dollar increase. That's right, in order to fight terrorism we need to invest in the latest defense technologies since we all know 9-11 wouldn't of happened if we had better tanks, fighter jets, and my favorite project looking for an enemy, the missle defense system. I love how the government uses an incident which could only have been prevented by quality intelligence work, immigration procedures, and airport security, as an excuse to feed already bloated defense budgets.

Take a look at this chart of the 2003 Bush Budget proposal increases, which is going to put our economy in the shitter for a long time. The defense budget is getting a $379 billion dollar increase. That's right, in order to fight terrorism we need to invest in the latest defense technologies since we all know 9-11 wouldn't of happened if we had better tanks, fighter jets, and my favorite project looking for an enemy, the missle defense system. I love how the government uses an incident which could only have been prevented by quality intelligence work, immigration procedures, and airport security, as an excuse to feed already bloated defense budgets.

To have those things survive the fires of the Holocaust and make it into space, only to be burnt up along with our first astronaut...

From the Wall Street Journal's site:

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)--Israel's first astronaut held up a tiny Torah scroll aboard space shuttle Columbia on Tuesday, fulfilling a promise made by a Holocaust survivor 59 years ago.

Astronaut Ilan Ramon showed the Torah to Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, during a televised conference.

Watching with emotion from a NASA control center in Greenbelt, Md., was the Torah's owner, Joachim Joseph, a 71-year-old atmospheric physicist at Tel Aviv University who is overseeing an Israeli experiment aboard the shuttle.

The scientist received the Torah from a rabbi while both were imprisoned at a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1944. Joseph had just turned 13, and the rabbi secretly arranged a 4 a.m. bar mitzvah ceremony in the prisoners' barracks.

"After the ceremony, he said, `You take this, this scroll that you just read from, because I will not leave here alive. But you must promise me that if you get out, you'll tell the story,"' Joseph recalled.

The rabbi was killed two months later.

Joseph was freed from the Bergen-Belsen camp in a prisoner exchange in 1945, one month before it was liberated by the Americans and British.

Ramon, whose mother and grandmother survived the Auschwitz death camp, visited the scientist's home two years ago and saw the Torah. "He was deeply affected. He almost cried," Joseph said. The astronaut asked if he could take the Torah with him into space.

"This represents more than anything the ability of the Jewish people to survive despite everything from horrible periods, black days, to reach periods of hope and belief in the future," Ramon told Sharon and other Israeli government officials in Jerusalem.

Joseph said: "I feel now that I finally was able to fulfill my promise to Rabbi Dasberg 50 years ago, more than 50 years ago, and then on a grand scale, and I'm very grateful to Ilan for making it possible."

^___=

On the Net:

Tel Aviv University: www.tau.ac.il/geophysics/MEIDEX.home.htm

Music Retailers Team Up
To Form Internet Venture

By NICK WINGFIELD
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

A half-dozen major music retailers, reeling from a slowdown in CD sales, have formed a new company that plans to offer songs for downloading from the Internet.

Best Buy Co., Hastings Entertainment Inc., MTS Inc.'s Tower Records, Trans World Entertainment Corp., Virgin Entertainment Group Inc. and Wherehouse Music Inc. said they have founded Echo Inc., a consortium developing a service that will let each of the retailers distribute music on the Internet under their respective brand names. Echo will immediately seek to negotiate music licenses from major and independent record labels, according to the company's chief executive, Dan Hart.

The consortium represents an effort to answer the explosion of music piracy through Internet file-sharing services and compact-disc copying that retailers and music companies blame for an estimated 9% drop in CD sales last year. Retailers also are seeing competition from the major recording companies that release most popular music, which have formed separate ventures, MusicNet and pressplay, for downloading music.

In forming their own consortium from scratch, the retailers are effectively betting that they can get better terms by collectively licensing music from recording companies, rather than cutting deals individually with the labels. Executives involved with Echo, which is majority-owned by the retailers, said they hoped to have more control over their relationship with consumers than they would by obtaining music through MusicNet or pressplay.

"It's clear that retail stores are threatened by digital distribution," says P.J. McNealy, a digital-media analyst at research firm Gartner Inc. The thinking behind the consortium "may be there's strength in numbers."

It isn't clear whether Echo can begin to remedy the retailers' troubles, though. Wherehouse, for instance, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last week, while Best Buy has said it will close more than 100 of its Musicland stores.

Echo will need to license music from the recording companies, a process likely to take months. Once they begin offering music to consumers for a fee, Echo must still compete against free Internet services like KaZaA and Morpheus. Commercial music services on the Internet have been hobbled by spotty song selection and early limits on CD recording, though the services have improved gradually in both regards.

The industry is littered with startup music services that failed: In fact, Echo's predecessor, Echo Networks Inc., folded early last year, when it decided it couldn't obtain music licenses on favorable enough terms to support a business. Mr. Hart says he believes the new Echo can be more successful by piggybacking on the existing marketing muscle of retailers.

"The marginal cost of putting digital advertisements in circulars is so much lower than for an independent company that wanted to go out and purchase those partnerships," says Mr. Hart, who declined to say how much the retailers invested in the company.

In a similar effort, Anderson Merchandisers LP, one of the leading distributors of music and other media, said Friday that it would pay $3.2 million to acquire the assets of software company Liquid Audio Inc., in a bid to help retailers establish downloading services.

Pushing their own Internet services may not help retailers build more foot-traffic in stores. But Kevin Ertell, senior vice president of Tower Records' online operations, says the store hopes to offer its version of the Echo service through kiosks in retail locations. "I think the in-store experience is going to be really important," Mr. Ertell says.

Write to Nick Wingfield at <address removed>

Updated January 27, 2003 12:19 a.m. EST

From the article:
Veteran comics fan Christian Cooper, who once worked as a Marvel editor, thinks Judge Barzilay got carried away. If Kraven isn't human, what about the twisted villains in Dick Tracy? Or worse yet, Superman himself? "Here's a guy who changes his clothes in a phone booth and flies through the air," says Mr. Cooper. "Does that mean he's now an animal?"

No, he's Kryptonian you nitwit. What a kneejerk reaction!

THIS IS OVER IMPORT DUTIES CLASSIFICATION FOR CRIPES SAKE! Who gives a groundhog's fanny if they call Superman a "cup of water with a straw hanging off the end?"

Maybe the "Spam Queen" can help us find his e-mail address ;-)

Indeed it does. Your Tivo told it so. :D

"For $1000 I can get a $200 Walmart PC that will run circles around an imac performance wise"

Where do I start? Does that $200 PC come with iDVD? That piece of software alone is extremely important to the performance of my computer. It is the best free DVD software package I have seen, and reviews back up this assertion.. I can get a quality DVD setup faster because of the better user interface in iDVD than other software. To me this is an important part of the "performance" equation iDVD is free with Superdrive Macs). Same goes for iMovie (Free), which is arguably the best consumer editing software out there. Again, I get work done fast, and produce the quality that I want. Another nice feature is that OS X is UNIX based - nice feature for travel with my laptop (yes I could load Linux, but why go through the extra trouble when it is all in one neat package). The development software (free) is really cool too.

Performance is not just chip speed, but software quality and other features. Also for certain tasks like Video, Apple supplies some of the best software there is (Final Cut Pro), and it won't run on a Wal Mart PC.

Consider what happens to those in the lowest bracket. Say a person earns $12,000. After subtracting the personal exemption, the standard deduction and assuming no tax credits, then applying the 10% rate of the lowest bracket, the person ends up paying a little less than 4% of income in taxes. It ain't peanuts, but not enough to get his or her blood boiling with tax rage.

Who are these lucky duckies? ... Workers who pay little or no taxes can hardly be expected to care about tax relief for everybody else.