You put Obama in the subject line for the same reason you you use pictures of attractive women to sell products. Obviously men want to look at hot women, but marketing research shows women are more drawn to, and persuaded by, pictures of attractive women. Not for any sexual reason but due to competitive pressures women feel.
Right wingers can't get enough Obama email. Claiming he's a Muslim, talking about how much he hates America, tying him to terrorists, questioning his ethnicity, etc. I know because I have friends that forward it to me.
On the other hand, the lefties are so excited to finally have another candidate that can appear both intelligent AND human, after Kerry and Gore, they can't see/hear/read enough about Obama.
As a card carrying member of the "Bush is a Moron" club even I have to admit Bush actually did quite well as a debater. In terms of scoring debate points he fought both Gore and Kerry to a draw. I attribute this more to Gore and Kerry focusing too much on pre-prepared talking points rather than thinking on the fly during the debate, which made them seem wooden, disingenuous and out of touch. Bush had his talking points too (fuzzy math) but was able to put together some coherent statements responding to his opponents arguments. Comparing Bush to Palin is really an insult to Bush's intelligence--and I wouldn't have thought that was possible a month ago.
As a VP candidate Palin is the new Dan Quayle--only without the pedigree. If she were a man she would have been laughed off completely weeks ago, but they've played the gender card well.
"When fascism comes to America it will come wrapped in the flag, and carrying a cross."
-- It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis, 1935
As Americans we have the freedom not to participate in our governments affairs. We have the freedom to consume from a vast array of versatile solutions for modern life. We have the freedom to waste our education and cling to superstitions and xenophobia. We have the freedom to believe we are the greatest country that has ever existed without knowing anything about the world around us.
We'd like to believe that people would choose to live up to a higher ideal, but we can't force them because that wouldn't be freedom. It's a sad truth that freedom and prosperity tend to lead to opulence and complacency. Once the ability to reason is reduced the person selling the easiest answers wins the prize instead of someone pointing out that things are going to be difficult.
The turning point for me was several days after 9-11, I was watching a baseball game which was preempted by the president. I was looking for some leadership, something the nation could get behind. It was the first time I heard him use the "evil-doers" rhetoric and he urged Americans to go shopping. That was our solution, the entire populous of our nation was useless to the president in a time of crises, except as feeder pigs suckling at the tits of the "free market" terrified of the heathen "evil-doers" that "hate us for our freedom."
With Russia rising back up from the ashes and China charging forward at a time the United States finds itself weakened, the Chinese proverb/curse, "may you live in interesting times" seems to be staring up at us from a melamine tainted fortune cookie.
Netflix is actually much closer to this than iTunes already. For $52.25 you can sign up for their 8 DVDs at a time plan which could easily provide you with 4 hours of TV or movies a day just from the DVDs, it also allows unlimited streaming content. But I think the amount of TV watched would go down dramatically with this model.
Which brings us to the other major benefit of a strictly "on demand" model. Less time wasted channel surfing and zoning out to stuff you don't really care about.
Once people are actively deciding, and paying money for, what they're going to watch they start to make better choices, save time and ultimately money.
Not to mention this would provide an escape from offensive and intelligence insulting commercials-aside from product placement and slashvertisments of course.
The problem with this logic is that the primary source for these embryonic stem cells are leftovers from in vitero fertilization. Embryos which are destroyed as bio-waste once the couple has had a successful pregnancy and no longer wants to keep them. Current stem cell legislation bans the use of these cells so that instead of saving lives they are incinerated.
These idiots a veneer of respect by treating them as if they're rational? They AREN'T. They are functional (but nevertheless, crazy as a shithouse rat) religious zealots who do not respect science unless it serves their beliefs
I just want to point out that while most of what you say is true, calling them crazy is far too dismissive a term. They are extremely intelligent in their ability to manipulate the system and draw people to their cause. They are capable of framing the debate in ways that make them look credible and they have the resources to broadcast and rebroadcast their message which further bolsters their credibility. They have been very methodical in probing the system for weak point (superstitious school boards) and advancing toward their goals slowly.
I have no doubt many of the drivers of their movement are zealots, but I also believe that some of them want to use religion as a means of controlling the populous--as Leo Strauss, the father of the Neoconservative movement taught. When leaders extol the virtues of religion to a receptive audience (I.D. is designed to make people more receptive to religion instead of science and facts) it blurs the separation between divine powers and the leader's power and makes people less likely to question authority.
If economic pressures continue to erode the middle class and push more people into poverty, more people will turn to religion for comfort. With ID being taught in schools children can be further indoctrinated into those beliefs and our slide back into the dark ages will begin.
Amen to that. Microsoft's three guiding philosophies of "good enough" and "how can we make this the users problem instead of ours" and "holy crap it worked, lets make sure they notice" manifest themselves most frequently in their own pop-up windows, modal or up from the task bar or whatever.
Every time I start my laptop it feels the need to show a bubble telling me the wireless network is connected. What do you want, a cookie?!? You know what? You're supposed to connect don't come bragging to me about it whenever you do.
The same thing happens every time I plug in a USB drive. "You have connected a removable media device. Click to close." Thanks for that, just in case I wasn't aware I plugged in a device. How thoughtful.
Whenever I put in a CD it has to autorun something because the average user has no idea how to get to the CD drive unless it pops up in front of them. Which is nice because I'd hate to be treated like a grownup and have to launch the appropriate application or file myself.
-- You are about to send off an anti-Microsoft tirade -- Cancel ---- Allow --
If Democracy actually gave power to the people, it would have been abolished a long time ago.
Abolished by whom? We've gotten to the place we're at today, not because a bunch of evil overlords forced us into it, but because the vast majority of citizens would rather watch TV than pay attention to what their government is doing.
Had "they" tried to abolish democracy a hundred years ago there would have been a revolution. Today there would just be a bunch of bitching on the blogs... and/. of course.
Routinely on Election Day I vote for the individual candidate. I take the time to figure out who - in whatever party is running - I want to vote for. That means I vote for Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Green Party, Working Families, and a host of other parties.
That's great. I hope you're sincere in what you say but its an interesting take for a guy who wrote on his blog 5 days ago:
I emailed the Rush Limbaugh show Friday, and proffered the following:
What if John McCain picked Sarah Palin because he's planning to retire before his term is up, and this is a masterful plan to pull the biggest political coup d'etat, a la femme?
If McCain/Palin get elected and McCain retires/resigns, Republicans will have the first female president: a major blow to the Democrats who want someone like Hillary elected.
Does listening to Rush Limbaugh contribute to your open minded conduct on election day? Not that listening to Rush is an altogether bad thing, if you balance it out with some Thom Hartmann or other left-wing radio occasionally. But overall it's these shills that contribute to the problem--not fix it.
I've become fascinated recently by the way disciples of the major parties digest and regurgitate the spin pumped out by partisan hacks in the media. Which then gets rehashed in the blogs, and fought over in the comments. So ultimately the electorate is arguing over the spin instead of the actual issues. Which leaves our politicians free to ignore the problem and make vague promises about change (see both major party candidates for pres).
Scott Mcclellan was right in what he called "the permanent campaign." The parties are so afraid to admit a mistake that they would rather cling to things they know to be false than give their opponents political ammunition. The sad thing is no one seems to even have a theoretical solution to that problem.
If you truly do occasionally vote for Green or Libertarian candidates you're doing the "right" thing, but you're also just throwing your vote away. What we need is another Ross Perot, preferably one that isn't crazy, that could shake the establishment up enough to shed some light on real problems and shame the parties into action.
Funny, I had Keynesian Economics taught, and always saw it aligning with Conservatism and Libertarianism more than Liberalism.
That's probably because you, like most people, think of the caricature of Liberalism that has been painted by right-wing demagogues instead of trying to look at the policies of the various people in the Democratic party.
The strength of the Republican party is their ability to march in lock-step and deliver a consistent message, even if they don't actually do what they say, they always say the same thing--small government, less taxes, Christian values.
The weakness of the Democratic party is that they act like a herd of cats. Each has their own pet issues and sees little reason to support their party members pet issues. From southern conservative blue dog democrats, to west coast left-wing hippie crazies, to Midwestern democratic farm labor, to eastern blue collars and east coast blue bloods. They move in a lot of different directions at once and tend to get steamrolled by the Republican juggernaut.
This allows the Republicans to define "Liberals" however they want and they've managed to hijack the word and make it synonymous with a lot of straw man arguments of their own creation.
True enough. It's the magic of the free market at work. You pay your taxes, the government gives that money out through no-bid contracts and pork-barrel projects to the people that can afford to cut them fat campaign contribution checks. The politicians give that money to the media companies to buy advertising, who in turn give it back to them to create and enforce laws favorable to them. The process enters a loop at those last two steps.
When democracy becomes a matter of, "Vote with your dollars!" Whoever has the most dollars gets the most votes.
It's true that tracking would be difficult. I make no claims that setting up such a system would be trivial, it's just one theory.
I do have to question your source (cited below) for the $0.00032 per email. The author states that number is an average and doesn't explain how he arrived at that average. Not that I disagree with the number, but whether its an average based on spammer's rates for email lists and throttled mailing services, or per spam email. I would be almost certain it's the former rather than the latter as it's infinitely easier to find numbers for and calculate.
So as an average some people are actually paying more per email--those that, most likely, don't know what they're doing, lose money and get out. And there are those that pay less, know what they're doing, make lots of money, and thus send out the majority of unsolicited email. So I think quadrupaling the cost would have a real affect, but again it's just a random theory from a/. noob.
On a side note here is the paragraph you cited and I have to ask, why does the author keep dancing between daily and yearly figures? It makes the numbers much more confusing to follow. He could have at least totaled the dailies or averaged yearly numbers to give us a baseline.
"More than 2.3-5 billion spam messages are sent daily. eMarketer puts the figures a lot lower at 76 billion messages in 2002. By 2006, daily spam output will soar to c. 15 billion missives, says Radicati Group. Jupiter projects a more modest 268 billion annual messages this year (2005). An average communication costs the spammer 0.00032 cents."
First of all spammers don't get a 1% conversion rate (sales), a lot of legitimate businesses don't even get that from their own targeted email lists. They get a 1%-3% click-through rate, which than leads to another 1%-3% conversion rate.
So at best your looking at 1,000,000 emails leading to 30,000 clicks and then to 900 sales. And again 3% for both would be absurdly high for spam. Your real conversion number for 1 million un-targeted email addresses is going to be a lot closer to 100 than 900. The reason they can still make money with such small numbers is because there is no significant upfront cost for sending email to millions of random email addresses.
If email cost $0.001, that's one tenth of a penny, per recipient, it wouldn't cost your average user anything significant but it would cost your hypothetical spammer $1000.00 for a million addresses. That's a very significant upfront cost and would kill almost all spam instantly.
After that we can start instituting tokens for legitimate email lists like newsletters, or simply setting up something like a white list so email from authorized senders doesn't get charged. There would still be enough random email to generate a nice revenue stream for the email overlords that take it on while still being cheap enough to be thought of as free.
Am I the only one that thinks the primary competitor to ANY physical media for the purpose of reading static content will be the network / cloud / intarweb?
Why deal with transporting physical media for things like movies and music (or most any other form of data for that matter) if you have wireless access to all the content you want?
Five years might be a little ambitious but we'll get there. I already watch more movies through Netflix "Play it Now" then through DVDs they send me. I even downgraded to the one DVD at a time plan, which Netflix is probably fine with since their margins are more than likely higher when they don't have to pay postage.
Once content creators start digitizing and pushing bits they eliminate the costs of manufacturing, distribution and shelf-space which turns all that mark-up into profit for them.
From Edge:
We worked very hard on bodily functions, especially sweat and bathroom breaks,' explains Cage. 'As you know, sweat is incredibly hard to do: fluid dynamics interacting with the characters polygonal surface and clothing shaders. We created a technology to yellow the cloth shaders in sweat prone areas.' The shaders applied to the lead character's armpits and upper abdomen also conspire to nudge Heavy Rain's characters closer to believability. The 'cleanness' that so often afflicts such digital mannequins has been significantly chipped away, and we are presented with Madison, a character whose hygiene, though not below average, breaks down over time as she runs, jumps, farts and craps--breaking down her artificiality.
Only one major corporation refused to go along with Bush's little wiretapping plan, Qwest. The CEO of Qwest, at that time, just happens to be in jail now (theoretically for a backdating scandal). During his trial and in his counter suit he claimed not only that he was being punished for not cooperating with the Patriot Act, but that the wire tapping system was being implemented by NSA 7 months before 9/11.
Most people dismissed his claims assuming he was grasping at straws, trying to stay out of jail. But employees at several other telcos have confirmed his story.
Slashdot Mirror
You put Obama in the subject line for the same reason you you use pictures of attractive women to sell products. Obviously men want to look at hot women, but marketing research shows women are more drawn to, and persuaded by, pictures of attractive women. Not for any sexual reason but due to competitive pressures women feel.
Right wingers can't get enough Obama email. Claiming he's a Muslim, talking about how much he hates America, tying him to terrorists, questioning his ethnicity, etc. I know because I have friends that forward it to me.
On the other hand, the lefties are so excited to finally have another candidate that can appear both intelligent AND human, after Kerry and Gore, they can't see/hear/read enough about Obama.
As a card carrying member of the "Bush is a Moron" club even I have to admit Bush actually did quite well as a debater. In terms of scoring debate points he fought both Gore and Kerry to a draw. I attribute this more to Gore and Kerry focusing too much on pre-prepared talking points rather than thinking on the fly during the debate, which made them seem wooden, disingenuous and out of touch. Bush had his talking points too (fuzzy math) but was able to put together some coherent statements responding to his opponents arguments. Comparing Bush to Palin is really an insult to Bush's intelligence--and I wouldn't have thought that was possible a month ago.
As a VP candidate Palin is the new Dan Quayle--only without the pedigree. If she were a man she would have been laughed off completely weeks ago, but they've played the gender card well.
"When fascism comes to America it will come wrapped in the flag, and carrying a cross."
-- It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis, 1935
As Americans we have the freedom not to participate in our governments affairs. We have the freedom to consume from a vast array of versatile solutions for modern life. We have the freedom to waste our education and cling to superstitions and xenophobia. We have the freedom to believe we are the greatest country that has ever existed without knowing anything about the world around us.
We'd like to believe that people would choose to live up to a higher ideal, but we can't force them because that wouldn't be freedom. It's a sad truth that freedom and prosperity tend to lead to opulence and complacency. Once the ability to reason is reduced the person selling the easiest answers wins the prize instead of someone pointing out that things are going to be difficult.
The turning point for me was several days after 9-11, I was watching a baseball game which was preempted by the president. I was looking for some leadership, something the nation could get behind. It was the first time I heard him use the "evil-doers" rhetoric and he urged Americans to go shopping. That was our solution, the entire populous of our nation was useless to the president in a time of crises, except as feeder pigs suckling at the tits of the "free market" terrified of the heathen "evil-doers" that "hate us for our freedom."
With Russia rising back up from the ashes and China charging forward at a time the United States finds itself weakened, the Chinese proverb/curse, "may you live in interesting times" seems to be staring up at us from a melamine tainted fortune cookie.
--
I'm a glass half full kind of guy
Netflix is actually much closer to this than iTunes already. For $52.25 you can sign up for their 8 DVDs at a time plan which could easily provide you with 4 hours of TV or movies a day just from the DVDs, it also allows unlimited streaming content. But I think the amount of TV watched would go down dramatically with this model.
Which brings us to the other major benefit of a strictly "on demand" model. Less time wasted channel surfing and zoning out to stuff you don't really care about.
Once people are actively deciding, and paying money for, what they're going to watch they start to make better choices, save time and ultimately money.
Not to mention this would provide an escape from offensive and intelligence insulting commercials-aside from product placement and slashvertisments of course.
The problem with this logic is that the primary source for these embryonic stem cells are leftovers from in vitero fertilization. Embryos which are destroyed as bio-waste once the couple has had a successful pregnancy and no longer wants to keep them. Current stem cell legislation bans the use of these cells so that instead of saving lives they are incinerated.
So what was that about killing human beings?
These idiots a veneer of respect by treating them as if they're rational? They AREN'T. They are functional (but nevertheless, crazy as a shithouse rat) religious zealots who do not respect science unless it serves their beliefs
I just want to point out that while most of what you say is true, calling them crazy is far too dismissive a term. They are extremely intelligent in their ability to manipulate the system and draw people to their cause. They are capable of framing the debate in ways that make them look credible and they have the resources to broadcast and rebroadcast their message which further bolsters their credibility. They have been very methodical in probing the system for weak point (superstitious school boards) and advancing toward their goals slowly.
I have no doubt many of the drivers of their movement are zealots, but I also believe that some of them want to use religion as a means of controlling the populous--as Leo Strauss, the father of the Neoconservative movement taught. When leaders extol the virtues of religion to a receptive audience (I.D. is designed to make people more receptive to religion instead of science and facts) it blurs the separation between divine powers and the leader's power and makes people less likely to question authority.
If economic pressures continue to erode the middle class and push more people into poverty, more people will turn to religion for comfort. With ID being taught in schools children can be further indoctrinated into those beliefs and our slide back into the dark ages will begin.
--
I'm a glass half full kind of guy.
Amen to that. Microsoft's three guiding philosophies of "good enough" and "how can we make this the users problem instead of ours" and "holy crap it worked, lets make sure they notice" manifest themselves most frequently in their own pop-up windows, modal or up from the task bar or whatever.
Every time I start my laptop it feels the need to show a bubble telling me the wireless network is connected. What do you want, a cookie?!? You know what? You're supposed to connect don't come bragging to me about it whenever you do.
The same thing happens every time I plug in a USB drive. "You have connected a removable media device. Click to close." Thanks for that, just in case I wasn't aware I plugged in a device. How thoughtful.
Whenever I put in a CD it has to autorun something because the average user has no idea how to get to the CD drive unless it pops up in front of them. Which is nice because I'd hate to be treated like a grownup and have to launch the appropriate application or file myself.
--
You are about to send off an anti-Microsoft tirade
-- Cancel ---- Allow --
If Democracy actually gave power to the people, it would have been abolished a long time ago.
Abolished by whom? We've gotten to the place we're at today, not because a bunch of evil overlords forced us into it, but because the vast majority of citizens would rather watch TV than pay attention to what their government is doing.
Had "they" tried to abolish democracy a hundred years ago there would have been a revolution. Today there would just be a bunch of bitching on the blogs... and /. of course.
--
I'm a glass half full kind of guy
--
I'm a glass half full kind of guy.
Routinely on Election Day I vote for the individual candidate. I take the time to figure out who - in whatever party is running - I want to vote for. That means I vote for Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Green Party, Working Families, and a host of other parties.
That's great. I hope you're sincere in what you say but its an interesting take for a guy who wrote on his blog 5 days ago:
I emailed the Rush Limbaugh show Friday, and proffered the following:
What if John McCain picked Sarah Palin because he's planning to retire before his term is up, and this is a masterful plan to pull the biggest political coup d'etat, a la femme?
If McCain/Palin get elected and McCain retires/resigns, Republicans will have the first female president: a major blow to the Democrats who want someone like Hillary elected.
Does listening to Rush Limbaugh contribute to your open minded conduct on election day? Not that listening to Rush is an altogether bad thing, if you balance it out with some Thom Hartmann or other left-wing radio occasionally. But overall it's these shills that contribute to the problem--not fix it.
I've become fascinated recently by the way disciples of the major parties digest and regurgitate the spin pumped out by partisan hacks in the media. Which then gets rehashed in the blogs, and fought over in the comments. So ultimately the electorate is arguing over the spin instead of the actual issues. Which leaves our politicians free to ignore the problem and make vague promises about change (see both major party candidates for pres).
Scott Mcclellan was right in what he called "the permanent campaign." The parties are so afraid to admit a mistake that they would rather cling to things they know to be false than give their opponents political ammunition. The sad thing is no one seems to even have a theoretical solution to that problem.
If you truly do occasionally vote for Green or Libertarian candidates you're doing the "right" thing, but you're also just throwing your vote away. What we need is another Ross Perot, preferably one that isn't crazy, that could shake the establishment up enough to shed some light on real problems and shame the parties into action.
Funny, I had Keynesian Economics taught, and always saw it aligning with Conservatism and Libertarianism more than Liberalism.
That's probably because you, like most people, think of the caricature of Liberalism that has been painted by right-wing demagogues instead of trying to look at the policies of the various people in the Democratic party.
The strength of the Republican party is their ability to march in lock-step and deliver a consistent message, even if they don't actually do what they say, they always say the same thing--small government, less taxes, Christian values.
The weakness of the Democratic party is that they act like a herd of cats. Each has their own pet issues and sees little reason to support their party members pet issues. From southern conservative blue dog democrats, to west coast left-wing hippie crazies, to Midwestern democratic farm labor, to eastern blue collars and east coast blue bloods. They move in a lot of different directions at once and tend to get steamrolled by the Republican juggernaut.
This allows the Republicans to define "Liberals" however they want and they've managed to hijack the word and make it synonymous with a lot of straw man arguments of their own creation.
True enough. It's the magic of the free market at work. You pay your taxes, the government gives that money out through no-bid contracts and pork-barrel projects to the people that can afford to cut them fat campaign contribution checks. The politicians give that money to the media companies to buy advertising, who in turn give it back to them to create and enforce laws favorable to them. The process enters a loop at those last two steps.
When democracy becomes a matter of, "Vote with your dollars!" Whoever has the most dollars gets the most votes.
It's true that tracking would be difficult. I make no claims that setting up such a system would be trivial, it's just one theory.
I do have to question your source (cited below) for the $0.00032 per email. The author states that number is an average and doesn't explain how he arrived at that average. Not that I disagree with the number, but whether its an average based on spammer's rates for email lists and throttled mailing services, or per spam email. I would be almost certain it's the former rather than the latter as it's infinitely easier to find numbers for and calculate.
So as an average some people are actually paying more per email--those that, most likely, don't know what they're doing, lose money and get out. And there are those that pay less, know what they're doing, make lots of money, and thus send out the majority of unsolicited email. So I think quadrupaling the cost would have a real affect, but again it's just a random theory from a /. noob.
On a side note here is the paragraph you cited and I have to ask, why does the author keep dancing between daily and yearly figures? It makes the numbers much more confusing to follow. He could have at least totaled the dailies or averaged yearly numbers to give us a baseline.
I never go anywhere without a six-pack and a strap-on.
First of all spammers don't get a 1% conversion rate (sales), a lot of legitimate businesses don't even get that from their own targeted email lists. They get a 1%-3% click-through rate, which than leads to another 1%-3% conversion rate.
So at best your looking at 1,000,000 emails leading to 30,000 clicks and then to 900 sales. And again 3% for both would be absurdly high for spam. Your real conversion number for 1 million un-targeted email addresses is going to be a lot closer to 100 than 900. The reason they can still make money with such small numbers is because there is no significant upfront cost for sending email to millions of random email addresses.
If email cost $0.001, that's one tenth of a penny, per recipient, it wouldn't cost your average user anything significant but it would cost your hypothetical spammer $1000.00 for a million addresses. That's a very significant upfront cost and would kill almost all spam instantly.
After that we can start instituting tokens for legitimate email lists like newsletters, or simply setting up something like a white list so email from authorized senders doesn't get charged. There would still be enough random email to generate a nice revenue stream for the email overlords that take it on while still being cheap enough to be thought of as free.
Am I the only one that thinks the primary competitor to ANY physical media for the purpose of reading static content will be the network / cloud / intarweb?
Why deal with transporting physical media for things like movies and music (or most any other form of data for that matter) if you have wireless access to all the content you want?
Five years might be a little ambitious but we'll get there. I already watch more movies through Netflix "Play it Now" then through DVDs they send me. I even downgraded to the one DVD at a time plan, which Netflix is probably fine with since their margins are more than likely higher when they don't have to pay postage.
Once content creators start digitizing and pushing bits they eliminate the costs of manufacturing, distribution and shelf-space which turns all that mark-up into profit for them.
From Edge:
We worked very hard on bodily functions, especially sweat and bathroom breaks,' explains Cage. 'As you know, sweat is incredibly hard to do: fluid dynamics interacting with the characters polygonal surface and clothing shaders. We created a technology to yellow the cloth shaders in sweat prone areas.' The shaders applied to the lead character's armpits and upper abdomen also conspire to nudge Heavy Rain's characters closer to believability. The 'cleanness' that so often afflicts such digital mannequins has been significantly chipped away, and we are presented with Madison, a character whose hygiene, though not below average, breaks down over time as she runs, jumps, farts and craps--breaking down her artificiality.
Only one major corporation refused to go along with Bush's little wiretapping plan, Qwest. The CEO of Qwest, at that time, just happens to be in jail now (theoretically for a backdating scandal). During his trial and in his counter suit he claimed not only that he was being punished for not cooperating with the Patriot Act, but that the wire tapping system was being implemented by NSA 7 months before 9/11.
Most people dismissed his claims assuming he was grasping at straws, trying to stay out of jail. But employees at several other telcos have confirmed his story.