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Public funding can be used to obtain private patents in this nation. Until such fundamental rules change there will be heavy pressure from administrators to impede open publication as much as possible.

I agree with you that current publication methods are a bit ludicrous; however, it will be at least half a generation before those in charge have any grasp of how to publish.

Right now, there already are a whole slew of online publications some of which are open access. The issue is one of prestige and acceptance. If I were to do major research, do I go to a newer publication whose reputation for peer review is still not well established or do I go with a big name. Having something in the New England Journal of Medicine is a big deal. It can establish a career for someone. At that point the fact that its not open access becomes a secondary concern - the journal is widely available to whom it would matter. This brings me to another point - elitism. It would have to be overcome before people will be fully willing to hand over access to these sources.

My experience has been that the resistance to open access runs deep. People question whether an open access journal could maintain the quality of the traditional sources.

m concerned with what is their justification for doubling prison terms in terms of proportionality of punishment. Let punishment fit the crime, etc.

Probably just making sure of a good supply of slave labor for companies who do business inside of prisons. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/may2000/pris-m08 .shtml for starters...

However, we have lots of issues to clean-up "back at home", if we want to preach to Malaysia about such issues.

For example in the UK

"More important still, the government's draconian antiterrorism laws have already been used by the police last month to arrest 144 people protesting against an arms fair in London. The civil rights group Liberty has challenged the use of emergency powers contained in sections 44 (1) and 44 (2) of the Terrorism Act 2000 as illegal. Liberty's court action has revealed that on two occasions--from August 13 for 28 days and from September 11 for 28 days--the Metropolitan Police had unrestrained power to treat everyone in London as a terrorist, and stop, search and hold them without cause or reasonable suspicion. The Met. has already declared that the provisions of the legislation could be used against those demonstrating against President Bush's November 19 state visit to Britain, which will be policed by up to 250 armed officers under the leadership of London's head of antiterrorist and security operations, David Veness."

NPOV link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSEi#Protests

Daniel,

I must admit I do enjoy reading your articles, they're fun. But I've always wondered:

• Your volume of production is really quite remarkable for someone with a day job. Does anyone pay you to produce these articles?
• Though I've said they're "fun," your arguments have this inexorable, thorough-in-depth quality, like I'm reading the head computing reporter for the World Socialist Website talking about how UDP is Pabloist (not to say I don't find their style "fun" either). Do you ever wonder you're kinda beating the horse dead?

This is socialist anti-American misinformational FUD, pure and simple. The blog article even admits as much by linking to the World Socialist Web Site.

Just remember, folks: the bullshit flows freely from both sides, not just from the Bush Administration.

Oh, I get it.. If people own guns it is a bad thing. However, the governments know how to control them and make sure everyone is safe.


I think the people of Uzbekistan, Turky, China , SUDAN, Mexico, Sri Lankan, and Ethiopia would disagree, if they had not been killed in massacres by there governments.

Whilst we're copying [ed] American constitutions, can we add this clause from the constitution of new Hampshire

I had a look at the site, and noticed the following: 8. Accountability of magistrates and officers; public's right to know.

This is interesting in light of recent news (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/may2007/foi-m31 .shtml) in the UK: With tacit support from the Labour government and Conservative front bench, a bill has been tabled that would exempt Parliament and MPs from Freedom of Information (FoI) legislation.

Some days I just don't know who I should vote for: Kang, or Kodos.

Read about the case here, and here, and here. I'm sure you can find the case itself, given the dates and so forth; I'm not familiar with findlaw. I just pay attention to the rumblings in the news, particularly when there appears to be someone shitting on the constitution, and particularly when that someone is the supreme court.

I'm pretty sure it's unfair to both, and worse for blacks. That is: black and poor is worse than black is worse than white and poor is worse than white in terms of how likely you are to be pursued, caught, tried, and convicted for a given crime.

http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/usa/index.htm#TopO fPage
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/may2000/bias-m16 .shtml
http://www.drugpolicy.org/communities/race/crimina ljust/
http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/toc_5.html

I'm sure this is just someone trying to make a point. A quick google search revealed the headline "Russian President Putin introduces widespread state monitoring of the Internet".
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/feb2000/put-f04. shtml
We are all in the same boat, and it seems the water is rising.

You make an insightful point that the overall problems is not just schools -- it is a whole system of interlinked institutions and related assumptions of which school is just a part. One of the reason many parents can't do a great job raising kids is simply that they work really long hours in the USA -- more than just about any other industrialized country and have very little vacation time. That is one of the reasons for this recent UN report suggesting "US and UK worst places in developed world to be a child":
      http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/feb2007/unic-f16 .shtml

The best way forward may well be to rethink the whole notion of work, perhaps by transcending it altogether:
    "The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black, 1985
    http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolitio n.html
"Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue, I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work -- and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs -- they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. They'll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists don't care which form bossing takes, so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working."

If John Howard thought he could win the next election by having sex on the lawn of Parliament House with the war criminal Philip Ruddock, he would be out there in a second. Howard persues his agenda (John Howard being Prime Minister of Australia) so ruthlessly that he is willing to lie and divide Australia to get votes.

Last election he got votes by telling home-owners that interest rates wouldn't go up if he won and that they would go up if he lost. He won, and they went up, because Australia's interest rates are pretty much tied to rates in the US. The pathetic opposition didn't call him on this and a whole lot of people believed him.

And he (for reasons known only to himself) thinks the sun shines out of Dubya's posterior. During one particularly nauseating trip to the US, someone back home called him an arselicker. It would have been funny if it wasn't so true. Then we followed Dubya right into Iraq.

Please excuse the rant. Eleven years of Howard as Prime Minister will do that one.

but you simply can't go on a mass murdering spree like this with a knife or a bow and arrow.

BS

The Dems do not represent the public that installed them, nor do they have any intention of reversing the war agenda.

Democrats pass "anti-war" bill that funds the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

None of this is surprising. This was done in the 60s as well. Then it was called COINTELPRO. Sure it targeted some groups that legitameately should have been watched (The KKK for one), but it also disproportionately targeted non-violent liberal organizations. (the civil rights and the anti-war movements for two.) The Church Committee found this was illegal. With the new war, COINTELPRO was dusted off by the Bush adminstration, only this time instead of rooting out "communists" it targeted "terrorists." Unsurprisingly, the threat was once again non-violent liberal groups that opposed the current administration's policies. For example, a non-violent, geriatric (and I mean that in the best possible way) anti-war movement was infiltrated by the police in Fresno, CA [ http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/mar2006/fres-m07 .shtml ]. Also not surprisingly, the police officer was the only one advocating "direct action" (i.e. violence). This pattern has been repeated all across the nation for years.

Strange how the threat is always perceived to come from the non-violent left, yet the most destructive domestic terrorist activities have come from radical right (e.g. the OKC bombings and the Atlanta bombings). I would suspect this is because there's an element of truth to the "liberal-pussies vs take-action-conservatives" meme, where the action is of a violent nature.

I am not confusing different opinions. I personally know people who have the contradictory belief system that I mentioned. Click on the names of some of the people posting on Slashdot and view their posting history and you will see the contradiction. Not all leftists believe the way I mentioned, of course, but the people with contradictory beliefs certainly make up the loudest voices.

But aside from that, your statement had flaws. The ACLU is not a leftist group... they are civil libertarians and have no official political stance outside of civil liberty issues. Nowadays, the ACLU is just as likely to be attacked by leftwing groups as they are by rightwing groups.

Michael Moore and Ralph Nadar both attack American companies for doing buisness with countries like China, and attack American companies for not doing buisness with countries like Cuba or for pulling investment out of Venezuala, which is essentially the same contradiction that I am talking about.

Ralph Nadar openly supports lifting all sactions on Cuba under the pretense that the U.S. shouldn't "force" its values on other countries and trade embargos are "economic imperialism", yet at the same time wants a whole new set of trade restrictions (which pretty much amounts to an embargo) on China over human rights issues and control of labor prices by the government (the same issues that exist with Cuba).
http://www.counterpunch.org/cuba0715.html
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/jun2000/nad-j24. shtml

Ralph Nadar is a popular and mainstream figure on the left, and it is perfectly reasonable to assume that his view match those of many people on the left.

So why is France in the Ivory Coast then? http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/nov2004/ivor-n09 .shtml

Yea, they chose to invade the Ivory Coast instead. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/nov2004/ivor-n09 .shtml/ France's decision not to invade Iraq was a financial one--they were doing business with Saddam including the Oil-for-Food scandal.

Effectively 'Rewritten' (that is to say, very 'creatively interpreted'), or openly disregarded, in many instances, yes.

The Bill of Rights was too inconvenient for the Shrubinator, so thanks to Patriot, and other absurdly dangerous legislation, they have systematically attempted to create a 'new, convenient, streamlined legislative environment' free of such cumbersome restrictions, all, they would have it, in the name of 'national security'.

To be very clear, I agree with the quote generally attributed to Benjamin Franklin:
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

Who's been paying attention? Let's take a quick inventory to see where we stand.

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Freedom of speech, and the right to peaceably assemble
This now appears to apply only if you're in a 'designated free-speech *zone*' far away from the Shrub, or other government officials.

Similar aggressive tactics have been employed when confronted with any public opposition to administration positions. Steven Howards was arrested for simply voicing disagreement with Administration polices during a chance meeting with Cheney during a mall photo-op. Howards was taking his son to a piano lesson, and took the time to voice his opinion.

Another example is of the peaceful protesters ejected and threatened with arrest at the Ohio State commencement where Dubya spoke, simply because they attempted to peacfully and non-disruptively express disagreement with the Shrub and his his policies.

Still another is when two women, one the wife of a Congressman, were ejected from the Capitol building, simply for wearing T-Shirts with anti-Bush slogans into the Congressional Gallery. (The article references numerous other examples, as well.)

Freedom of the Press
Mostly, journalism from major news outlets in the US appears to be in significant danger from numerous sources. While it is still possible to find information if you dig for it, many of the significant stories never make major headlines, if they even see the light of day.

The Shrub has significantly reduced press events, and when holding them, has required journalists to submit questions in advance, selecting only those questions he chooses to answer, and calling only upon reporters who agree to 'stick to script'. Rather than challenge these policies, reporters have agreed to these stipulations, resulting in chilling effect, effectively self-censorship, rather than ask questions the President didn't like, at the risk of press room access.

Concurrently, starting in 2001, regulations limiting the scope of ownership of media outlets, designed to maintain diversity of opinion, so as to prevent control of too much of the media by a small number of individuals have been systematically attacked and dismantled. The result is that now most major media outlets in the US are owned by a small number of conservatives. (This has bee

are there any examples of this actually happening?

I'm not sure how that is relevant to the basic illegitimacy of the law, but yes, it is happening:

Yaser Esam Hamdi.

Uh, name one. Just one... actually, you said citizenS... so I guess you should name at least two. Oh and define torture while you are at it.

José Padilla, a US citizen is one such victim. There may be others, but the US government does not have to tell you about them for "national security" reasons. Certainly, there are hundreds if not thousands of foreign torture victims, examples and more examples. Not even guilty people deserve that kind of barbaric treatment. This is the result of approving "stress positions," sleep deprivation and other "mild" forms of torture for suspects.

So tell me, who's taking away rights again? ... Have you been arrested for what you are typing?

In the US, it's easier to smear and blacklist your political or economic enemies than it is to jail them. It's called "economic assassination." Domestic spying programs are used to make the blacklists. Political abuse of such programs has happened in the past and should be expected but they hardly ever round up real criminals, so they are always a waste of money. The harm they can do is gauged by the extent of government GDP, currently larger than 25% of the economy. The victim never knows.

But the author would be found shot dead in his car a few months later.

You mean kinda like Cliff Baxter, the Enron guy who agreed to talk not only about Lay and Skilling, but also about the private "consultations" between Enron and Dick Cheney?

Funny how someone can commit "suicide" by shooting themself in the head from "two to three feet away". That takes some serious talent.


But hey, we've forgotten all about that little blemish. Why squabble over illegal manipulation of the energy market when we have a WAR on TERRORISM to fight, in a completely unrelated country formerly run by a secular semi-democratically-elected leader, that coincidentally happens to contain the second largest oil reserves on the planet.

Actually, Microsoft does have a history of attacking Linux and the open source community.

Further, their dubious business practices are well known. They have been fined by the US, EU, and South Korea.

See:
Microsoft declares war on free software model
Microsoft takes potshots at (Embedded) Linux
Microsoft launches attack on open source software
Open-source vendors respond to Microsoft 'attack

You accused Israel of attacking Iraq "first" -- that was not true -- Iraq was the aggressor (since 1948), and I simply pointed that out.

Thank you, conspiracy-theories are abundant in any place on Earth.

It is a long-known phenomenon -- the opressed, who can't do anything about their disadvantages, begin to accept them as normal and fair, blaming those, who don't have them, for "perversion" and violating "natural order" or "God's will" or whatever.

Soon after they left, the local kids -- my age -- discovered me, and got infuriated, that I was allowed to be in the boat (and take off to the river, whenever I pleased), because their camp's policy prohibited anyone under 16 to do that... Before long they began to pelt me with wet sand and I had to retreat from the shore...

Saddam has patently not destroyed the know-how to rebuild WMDs immediately after the sanctions were lifted -- American web-site displaying the captured documents was taken down last night after someone realized, the documents are too detailed for world-view...

In the UK they use text messages instead.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jun2003/tag-j09. shtml

It was a law firm that specialised in small litigation, especially personal injuries.

One word: collaborationists. Another word: Vichy.

Why yes, because it's well known that no american individual nor any american corporation collaborated with the nazis...

Oh well... how about actually learning history instead of just spouting off lies about things you don't know jack shit about?

:) Your commitment to researching and criticizing my personal situation is remarkable - and a bit creepy. While I can assure you that everything I have written on Slashdot is honest, suddenly I'm not really interested in providing more personal details of my life to someone who is evidently only interested in making fun of me. If you choose to believe that I therefore have something to hide, I guess there's nothing I can do about it.

What "big waves" are you talking about? What is the response you're talking about? Unless you can provide some specifics, your rant is that of a paranoiac.

The reason there are no specifics in my previous explanation is that government repression could apply to any number of situations, in any number of countries. If you believe that the US government has never violated citizen's right to free speech, I really don't have time to tell you all the ways you're wrong. If you're interested in learning, I'd encourage you to do some research on your own, maybe with COINTELPRO as a starting point. I'm not aware of anyone in the US being persecuted for either accessing or hosting Tor servers, so you're right about that. But if the US government is willing to shut down 20 anti-war websites and peek at all the log files, it doesn't seem like that much of a stretch to think that it would be valuable to use an anonymizing service both when hosting and accessing this kind of content.

So, I think we've both made our points, possibly more than once. I'm done with this thread, so if you want to have the last word, go for it!

Vote rigging?

Fortunately, every time I've read about dead people, convicted felons or illegal immigrants voting

And do you really know what goes on in Guantanamo Bay?
Yes.

Okay, you know the good event -- the press release events. Do you know the bad? Do you know about Sean Baker, an MP that was beaten until permanent brain injury in a training exercise where the guards thought he was an actual inmate? Do you know about the repeated attempts at suicide by detainees that have lost hope? Do you know that the Red Cross has said that treatment of prisoners there is "tantamount to torture?"

How our our captured soldiers treated? We've had very few, but the enemy has gone out of their way to violate the Geneva Convention, has tortured and left beheaded bodies in the street, burned and left bodies hanging from a bridge. Do I need to go on?

Yes. Please do. Please explain exactly how just being better than the terrorists is the only moral end goal we should strive for.

Joseph Stalin killed about 10 million of his people, while Pol Pot killed only 2 million of his. Does that mean since Pol Pot didn't kill as many people that he's a decent and civilized fellow? Of course not.

Similarly, we've tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Bagram. Our administration has fought tooth and nail for the "right" to continue torturing suspects and people "of material importance." Sure, we haven't beheaded any of our prisoners (though we have beaten to death a few). We haven't been rounding up people and executing them like the Sunnis and Shia have been doing with each other, but is being better than freaking terrorists the best that we can do or should strive to do?

I disagree. I think it takes a sick level of moral sloth to advance the idea that we shouldn't care as long as our enemies are worse.

Importantly perhaps, the ads are for the European release of the white PSP and are appearing on billboards in Amsterdam rather than in the US where racial tension remains a fraught issue.

You are in a state of denial about the axing of public services and public health in particular. Have a read of:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/dec2004/medi-d31 .shtml
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/medi-f09 .shtml

You are in a state of denial about the axing of public services and public health in particular. Have a read of:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/dec2004/medi-d31 .shtml
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/medi-f09 .shtml

If the directive came from a Bush-insider, or at least a Bush appointee, then your insinuation has some theoretical founding.

Congresscritters wanted it.

There have been allegations of White House involvement but nothing was ever proven.

It is worth noting that the settlement came hard on the heels of the 9/11 attacks. The DOJ likely wanted to shift focus and get rid of a case that had been tying them down for years. Likely Ashcroft reasoned that if the American public perceived the DOJ as being hung up on a fight between software companies when they should be going after terrorists, he'd be strung up by his gonads.

Granted, before 9/11 the Bush DOJ was already signalling that it was interested in a settlement. By many accounts, removal of the charges related to bundling killed any hope of nailing MS to the wall.

Fascinatingly, if you do the search and spell it as we do here in good old Blighty it succeeds.

Thus a search for "Australia's laws on paedophilia" returns http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/feb2000/rom-f11. shtml

as it's first non-sponsored result

UK googlers are quite used to trying British and American spellings, sounds like the trick can be used to circumvent f*ckwit attempts at censorship.

We're talking about a country in which schoolchildren are forced to make fireworks during school hours. I think it's unclear that the adults coming out of this sort of system are acting as rational agents any more than people who grew up in Jonestown were acting as rational agents. You're making some very Western assumptions about choice and free will.

> What happens when the people who release the evidence have been shown to have been lying about everything else important during that time period? .... Like Iraq WMD

To say that Iraq never had WMD is pure non-sense. Ask the thousands of living Iranian widows or the Kurdish what gas they or their loved ones were exposed to and when.

Anyone with a reasonable understanding of how ruthless Sadam Hussein was would have good reason to believe that he possessed those weapons in 2003, just as he did in the mid-to-late 80s.

Those who choose to blindly ignore those facts are doomed to die at the hands of dictators.

> ... Like cheaper, more plentiful oil.

I'm guessing you are hiding in a cave somewhere. You obviously haven't bought gas recently.

> When lying liars lie about all those important activities, there's no reason to trust evidence they produce that merely protects another story they tell, which if exposed would have kept our country from going down the track to hell it's been on for the past 5 years.

Liars, perhaps. To me, they are all liars really.

But, then, just to even the score, let's put things in perspective.

The twin towers could have just as easily have fallen in 1993 when they were bombed by a truck in the basement. Would Bill Clinton have gone to war over that? Good question? Perhaps answered by the next set of facts:

Bill Clinton bombed Serbia after a negotiated settlement to end the war in Yugoslavia had been agreed to, and who profitted from that? If you are brave enough and not a hypocrit read the following article, it makes a lot of interesting points:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/may1999/yugo-m05 .shtml

Flattering to no-one I would say!

Bill Clinton, at minimum, "allowed" innocent children to be burned alive by the FBI in Waco. Just exactly who was David Koresh threatening so badly that ramming a tank into the building and setting afire was necessary? Was the death of 80 people worthwhile, 23 of them under the age of 17?

I'm fed up with mental midgets who choose to only see half of a problem. I'm not particularly happy with the way things are going in DC myself, but quite frankly I'm also sick of one-sided arguments as well.

I said that in my post, so I was fully aware of it.

They dont even spend money on their own defense and are almost entirely dependent on the US military presence (and NATO) to protect them.

Except that the US doesn't want us to increase our military. Talk about double standards. Source 1 Source 2 Source 3.

America has to step in because europe is not willing to and not capable of fixing its own problems.

And when you're done whupping ass, we come in and clean the mess up. It's called peace keeping missions. Keeping a disturbed region peaceful is much harder than bombing it flat, but you're just learning that in Iraq. Go and take a look who is actually keeping peace in Afghanistan ...

Eveyone knows it is a war with Islamic fascism,

Now, I know you're trolling. There are plenty of moderate muslims. This is the same as saying that all American are Bible-Thumping-Christians, when we damned well know that it isn't true.

You don't deserve the "troll" rating, but I don't think you're seeing clearly either. The reason that we call Republicans "right" and Democrats "left" is that Europe already has set the parameters for extreme right and extreme left with fascist and socialist parties respectively. You'll notice that it's not in the U.S. but in Germany that neo-nazis are winning elections.

I very much agree with the parent post. As to how respected CSM is -- have a look at: "Christian Science Monitor admits using forged documents against antiwar British MP Galloway" http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/jul2003/gall-j05 .shtml

The key difference between Christian fundamentalists and Islamic fundamentalists right now is that Christain fundamentalists typically have a pretty decent quality of life, and Islamic fundamentalists don't.

You're thinking of the US. In the US, Christianity doesn't do much more than impose censorship, misallocate resources, and allow Africans to die of AIDS because condoms offend their sensibilities. As you've pointed out, fat, wealthy people have a lot of inertia to stay where they are.

However, if you want to see Christians and Muslims both bloodily killing each other en masse, you need look no further than Indonesia.

Maybe some readers think that somehow, it was Muslims provoking the whole thing -- I refer them to Ireland, with many years of Christians killing Christians in the same sort of bombings that people look with horror at in the Middle East today.

As for the Crusades, a set of Pope-led invasions and massacres...well.

Christianity has committed many, many atrocities and killings over the years, the same as Islam. Neither religion can claim a moral high ground as regards killings.

I'm sure IBM made a similar calculation when the decided to supply punch card technology to the Nazis.

Well that's an easy one to debunk:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/nov2000/qld-n27. shtml
http://www.cmc.qld.gov.au/shepinquiry.html

And Joh's gerrymander (shifting of electoral boundaries, a idea borrowed from the ALP) might count too.

Yep, I'm a Queenslander.

Using USA transport, it's like $8k per pound to LEO. It's nearly $20k to GEO. The 10k might be an 'averaging' to a higher orbit, if not all the way to GEO.

I think it's the estimated cost per pound for using the shuttle to deliver supplies to the space station.
Ah, here we go:
NASA has notified companies that commercial experiments on ISS will cost $10,000 per pound, $15,000 an hour if it requires an astronaut's attention, and data sent back to Earth will cost $100 a minute. Estimated cost of a 680 kilogram (1500 pound) experiment with 2,800 kilowatt hours of electrical energy is $20.8 million dollars. NASA warned, however, that since these prices are market driven they could rise depending on demand.

# Republican Secretary of State Blackwell reversed a long-standing Ohio practice and is barring voters from casting provisional ballots within their county if they are registered to vote but there's been a mistake about where they are expected to cast their ballot. In this year's spring primaries, Blackwell allowed voters to cast provisional ballots by county, even if they were in the wrong precinct. But this fall, voters had to leave if they were in the wrong precinct and find their way to the right one even though they had waited in line two to three hours. Blackwell hopes to succeed Republican Bob Taft as governor, and has labored hard to install Diebold e-voting machines with no paper trail throughout Ohio. Blackwell is being widely compared to the infamous Katherine Harris, who handed Florida to George W. Bush in 2000 and was rewarded with a safe Congressional seat. Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones accused Blackwell of seeking "to disenfranchise the people of the state of Ohio." Tubbs Jones pointed out that the 2000 census had caused massive redistricting, particularly within inner city precincts, which would lead to many people ending up at the wrong voting site.

Ohio Democrats have filed a federal lawsuit this week over Blackwell's order to deny provisional ballots for people who show up at the wrong polling place. The secretary of state has instructed election officials to issue provisional ballots only to those who are in the correct polling location. Federal law gives voters the right to obtain a provisional ballot and have it counted if they mistakenly go to the wrong precinct.

That is a critical issue in light of a federal appeals court ruling Saturday that voters with provisional ballots -- backup ballots for voters whose names do not appear on the rolls -- must cast them in their own precinct for the votes to count.

Actually, many herbel remedies are dangerous, so homeopathy is probably safer.

True, of course. It's also true that many modern drugs are dangerous, so homeopathy is probably safer than those too.

I don't recommend that people use either herbs or refined/synthetic drugs willy-nilly. (Practitioners of Chinese Medicine refer to herbs as "the poisons", and put their use far down the line of treatments to use.)

And [St. Johns Wort] doesn't have a company standing behind it, so buyer beware.

Any given suppliment has its supplier standing behind it. Modern drugs have companies like Merck standing behind them - buyer beware!

Because the point of medicines isn't to 'cure' people, it's to cause a known biological effect.

I am very very glad that you are not my physician. Indeed, you've pretty much put into one sentence the reason why more and more people are turning to various alternative and complementary modalities.

I want a doctor who's interest is in "curing" me, not just in causing a known biological effect in my body.

If someone gets better from fake medicine, and not from real, that is not the placebo effect, where you are treating real diseases with placebos. If they were real, they would have been treated with the correct medication.

Of course, there's no chance that what was identified as the "correct medication", simply wasn't correct, since the medical system is infallible.

Uh-huh.

My mom gets no effect from standard injections of novocaine. (I can't recall if it's that her nerve is in a weird place, or some chemical thing.) When she was young, the dentist refused to believe this: if she didn't get numb from "real" medicine, than the pain must not be "real". That put her off going to the dentist for several decades. (Her current dentist uses a different compound or a different technique that works.)

I have no problem with people drinking holy water, or magical water left to sit under the full moon...I have problems with people selling it as medicine to other people

Do you have problems with selling it? Or is it just the word "medicine" that you want a monopoly on?

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/368/1
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1718125.st m
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1862779.st m
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/jul2001/spac-j25 .shtml
http://www.nti.org/e_research/e3_44a.html
http://www.ciaonet.org/olj/fa/fa_mayjune01a.html
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/22/163821 2&tid=215
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/2 5/1356202&tid=160
http://slashdot.org/articles/04/12/16/1324209.shtm l?tid=126&tid=103
and in particular : http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/01/122620 7&mode=thread&tid=103&tid=126&tid=99&threshold=-1

just what i found with a little effort....

Let me repeat: its a human that made the decision to do evil, not the corporation itself.

Yes. But the problem is that the human doing the evil is rarely held accountable for it because it's done under the cloak of the corporation. In a large corporation it's very easy to cover up who made what decisions. India's case against Union Carbide went nowhere. Though they issued an arrest warrant for its CEO Warren Anderson and unsuccessfully tried to extradite him, I wonder if they could prove that he had any knowledge of what was going on in Bhopal? In the meantime, Dow Chemical purchased Union Carbide and to this day fights over the matter of taking responsibility for the incident. Putting away the CEOs of Enron, Adelphia, et al is the exception, not the rule, and that's only because investors lost an assload of cash. But the deaths of 14,000 second world brown people. Who gives a crap?

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=113222911236 7 http://atheism.about.com/b/a/220978.htm http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/jul2001/fait-j23 .shtml http://mediastudy.com/articles/av3-28-02.html http://ethics.lacity.org/EFS2003/index.cfm?fuseact ion=lobreports.clientbyfirm&year=2001 Search for Salvation Army, check later years too. http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/legislative/b_thr ee_sections_with_teasers/clientlist_page_D_E.htm Search for Salvation Army

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/02/11/10449 27598800.html
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/feb2003/schi-f13 .shtml (granted not the most objective news site)
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/07/09/10890 00352020.html
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2004/s113 6609.htm

There would be, rightly, a furore if Australian politicians started making trips to the US, holding conferences and denouncing domestic politics.