It's also available directly from the NCSA (link is to ftp root dir; check out both Mosaic and PC subdirectories - telnet and ftp clients for DOS!), although that archive starts with v0.6.
Check out some of the stuff the Clinton administration let through, AC. It wasn't sweetness and light. Besides, didn't you read my post? They've jumped on Ashcroft (properly, for the most part) when he stepped over the line, but they more-or-less gave Reno a pass.
As far as Ashcroft, just set your dead-man's-switch to drop me an email, so I'll know when his goons have picked you up in the night.
Yes, a steam electric plant is much more efficient, thermodynamically, than my car's engine. However, unless you figure out how to make generating hydrogen (and turning it into mechanical work) perfectly efficient, it's going to be less efficient than my car's engine is at getting it from place to place.
Also, on an unrelated note: an "oil company" is one that does exploration, pipelining, etc. What most people here are thinking of is better referred to as an energy company, and Texaco has even produced ads that refer to that. You're crazy if you think these guys haven't put a whoooole lot of thought into alternative fuels - and how best to position themselves to sell them. Frankly, they couldn't care less what it is they sell; they just want to get rich. Believe me, if they thought they could make more money selling something else, they would.
Finally, a question for the hybrid-floggers: since the Volkswagen Beetle has a model that gets 42/49 MPG, and the Toyota Prius only gets 45/52, isn't that a whole lot of money being dropped for a minuscule improvement in efficiency? Why bother with the whole hybrid thing anyway, if it's really not much more efficient? Why not just tweak our standard engines? Is there something I'm missing here?
I'm aware of their position. I think it's wrong, but it's the total disconnect between the vehemence with which they defend most of the amendments and the hands-off approach they take to the Second that irritates me more than the stance itself.
Realistically, I understand that the NRA takes care of the Second Amendment, and that most people who would join the ACLU wouldn't get along terribly well with most people who would join the NRA.
The stance on gun control is a byproduct of the 70's, or so I've been told by a few former ACLU members (who relinquished membership when they started becoming a more partisan organization). Perhaps that's as bad as their abandonment of the Second Amendment; I've gotten recruitment junk mail from them that was wildly hysterical about the possibility that Republicans would get elected (I think this was in the 1996 election cycle). Apparently, a too-numerous part of their constituency is willing to accept a broad trampling on civil liberties in exchange for having a Democrat in office. (By the by, this is why you should always vote Republican: if the press and academia hate the Attorney General, he won't be able to pull a fast one!)
Anyway, it's essentially become an organization for coastal urban liberals who are also Democrats - something that has severely damaged its credibility among those who aren't. The sad part is that it needn't be so narrowly defined (unlike, say, the NRA, whose membership will quite naturally skew rural, though it probably has more Democrats than the ACLU has Republicans).
It will be more important for them to seek out common cause with Republicans for the immediately forseeable future, because otherwise they're going to be left out of the party in power (unless the Democrats pull a functional party leader, some real ideas, and a backbone out of their hat some time before next November). They could have gotten a lot done over the past twenty years if they hadn't concentrated all their effort in the two years with a Democratic Congress and President.
Well, for starters, the parent is wrong; nothing stands above the Constitution. Like it or not, everything else is, in some form or other, either a law derived from the Constitution, or an agreement between states that may (or may not) be followed. The Constitution is accorded approximately the same status that might normally be reserved for the physical manifestation of a deity.
Incidentally, though I have no idea what specific treaty you're talking about, playing the odds suggests you mean Kyoto. Kyoto died in the Clinton administration when the Senate rejected it 95-0; they must ratify all treaties entered into by the US.
I suspect that's one element that was not well reported in the international press, even though it's one of those domestic-politics things that's really important to understanding why a country behaves a certain way. (Like the apparent German tradition of giving the Foreign Ministry to the top lawmaker in the #2 party in the governing coalition; that made the Fischer-Schroeder spat more logical.) US domestic politics, with divided governments possible and pretty extensive checks and balances -- not to mention elections every two years -- has to seem reeeeeeeally strange to someone raised on a parliamentary system.
When the ACLU abandons its ridiculous belief that every single element of the Bill of Rights should be viciously defended, regardless of the merit of the person involved, except for any case involving the Second Amendment, they'll have my life membership fee the next day.
You already have it, just in stealth mode. What do you think VAT is, other than sales tax?
Anyway, Amazon is toast if this catches on.
Thank you, 38 states, for killing online sales. That was a brilliant solution to a temporary financial crisis, because none of those companies ever employed anyone in your state... right?
I am being edged out of the only career I ever wanted to be in
Why don't you go start your own company? I feel for you, man, but if you decide from the beginning that you want to spend your life working for someone else, with none of the risks involved in running your own business, don't be surprised when it turns out that they don't need you anymore. (Or do you think that "adjust to changing circumstances or fail" only applies to corporations?)
Buy a plane ticket to India. Go to a tech college. Hire some good graduates. Set them up with broadband to their houses, fly back to the States, and start pimping them out to outsourcing corps. Or become a consultant yourself (there are lots of small businesses looking for help with computers). Or whatever.
Here's my ideal scenario, the one that should have happened:
1995-6: Sony says "dang, this isn't taking off. Time for a big marketing push and some severe price drops." MD-Data drives released (at reasonable prices) which are capable of reading and writing music discs as well (although they lack real-time recording capabilities).
1998-9: Sony notices that MP3 is taking off like wildfire. With an eye to the future, and hoping to retain control of the next generation of lossy encoders, they adopt licensing terms that permit free use of the ATRAC and ATRAC3 codecs in non-commercial players and encoders. MDLP Walkmen announced to take immediate advantage of this, with NetMD promised down the line. MD-Data drive owners get a firmware update allowing them to write ATRAC3 as well as standard ATRAC to discs right now.
2000: Using advances in MO technology, Sony announces next-generation "MD+" devices that store 650 MB rather than 140 MB. (Yes, this tech exists, but not much outside Sony's labs.) At the same time, they introduce the unrestricted NetMD portable devices, which function essentially like ATRAC-only hard disks.
Really, an aggressive marketing and pricing scheme for MD-Data could have obviated the need for NetMD at all.
Because a typical European country is about the size of an American state (perhaps a big state, but a state nonetheless). Plus, our phone system is set up differently. For historical reasons, there are different rates for in-state vs. out-of-state long distance calls (which provides an incentive to change your number even if you remain in the same state; in-state is usually more expensive). As our phone system is set up, you can call a mobile from a landline for free if the mobile's home area is local to you (and Americans despise per-minute charges on calls). The downside is that your number changes if you move (usually so that your mobile is now local to people where you moved). You can keep the old number, by the way, if you like - but we're pretty accustomed to changing numbers (moving across town gets you a new number in the States).
The logic of this when routing calls becomes apparent if you consider that it's almost 5000 km from New York to LA.
Like I want an 'Enron' to happen with a company that controls distribution and/or access to these.
An "Enron"? You mean, the whole business looks pretty impressive, but they're not actually doing anything but a shell game with money, and the technology's faked, and it goes tits-up when accounting shenanigans are found?
Look, man, maybe that flies at Indymedia, but please get your references to The Corporate Man right when you post on a serious, nuanced, and highly-respected forum like Slashdot.
Just for reference, that would have been an excellent post to make reference to John Poindexter and Total Information Awareness. But you didn't. My verdict on your post? -1, Missed A Chance To Attack Evil Oil-Grubbing Grandma-Starving Bush Administration.
The nature of the exploit is such that even if it's true, cleanup is a cinch.
1) Write a program that cleans up mp3's by checking for any out-of-bounds values in fields (should be pretty easy, just modify a tag editor to read the safe amount of data and then rewrite the tags)
2) Notice all the data that was in the tags before that isn't now. Check for this in your system. (Though it might be encrypted; who knows?)
3) Get fresh copies of all the p2p software and MD5 it frequently.
Obviously, this assumes that the theoretical exploit doesn't infect other software on the computer. And, as others have noted, a kernel module rootkit would let it do some pretty crazy stuff on Linux. Still, a known-good root/boot like tomsrtbt would let you check your system safely.
Don't be too quick to call bullshit; just assume that the RIAA stuff is misdirection, but that the exploits are real. It's better to be safe than sorry.
Yeah, and I wrote NE instead of NL (it's the Netherlands, not Nebraska). I wasn't trying to do the EU; I was much more concerned with the non-former-Communist areas of Europe, excluding Iceland, and not bothering with all the little ones. And I just forgot Greece until I had already done the numbers.
Still, that'll be a nice little datum for the history students a century from now, except that Alaska is ~600,000 square miles, not square km. It's too bad it's not in the CIA factbook; I'd trust that a lot more than anything else I'd get for free online.
You didn't notice the difference in minutes between the two of you, or the land area.
Just for quick reference, I did some back-of-the-envelope calcs. The sum area of UK, ES, PT, FR, DE, BE, NE, IT, IE, CH, AT, DK, NO, SE, and FI is 3469046 km^2, while the US (excluding Alaska, which would badly skew things) is 7928957. (I should have thrown in Greece, too, along with the little countries, but it's not going to make that much difference, and I intentionally excluded the former Iron Curtain areas.)
So for the same monthly price, he gets unlimited talk time from anywhere on the network to anywhere at all in the US. Not bad.
This isn't a reply to you, but to some other stuff I saw:
For the Europeans who decry our "cell phone user always pays" policy, yes, it was a substantial impediment to early adoption. As national networks have been built (one of the good outcomes of the telecom deregulation), prices have dropped precipitously.
I pay $35 (after all taxes and fees) for 300 anytime minutes from anywhere on Sprint's network to any US phone number, and I have unlimited nights and weekends (9 pm to 7 am). Free phone, 1 year contract. For ~$90/mo I could have gotten two phones, two phone numbers, unlimited free minutes to any other Sprint PCS customer, and 2000 minutes shared between the two phones.
So yeah, it still sucks here if you're a VERY low usage customer - I think you can't get a plan at all under about $10/mo - but all companies are required to carry 911 (emergency) calls, so you can just get someone's old phone and use it to call in case police/ambulance are needed.
Oh, and a question I've always wanted to ask a GSM fan: isn't the price so hellish when traveling abroad with your phone that you're probably better off just getting a prepaid for $50 or so? (Or can you just get a prepaid SIM and drop it in your phone? That would be pretty cool.)
Forget it. National ID's will not pass in the US; the idea is just too unpopular. I can't say that I'm too keen on it myself; there's just something a little too Big Brother about it.
Remember that Americans take the federal system very seriously. Sometimes this is good, sometimes not. Either way, it's not going to change (unless we repeal the Constitution - and that will not happen. Our officeholders and military are sworn to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution itself, not the country.)
The other two repliers to you have done yeoman's work, but left something off: if you wanted to be anonymous, or have privacy, all you had to do was move to another town in another state. Sure, you did have to give up anything you can't carry with you - but if you showed up in Charleston, S.C., in 1768, and said you were John Weatherall from Frederick, Maryland, who would ever find out? It's not as though there were drivers' licenses or other documentation.
Big profits are removed, and so are big losses. Since the latter is much worse than the former to the country as a whole, I support regulation.
Look, whether or not you agree with regulation is up to you. But removing big losses is generally not a good economic idea, because it makes uncompetitive companies survive. Remember that if a major airline went under tomorrow, all its physical assets don't magically disappear. Some other airline would buy up the planes, the gates, the landing rights, you name it. The world didn't collapse when Eastern Airlines bit the dust. Sure, some people lost their jobs, but that's why we have unemployment benefits - to get them through the tough times until they can find another job.
Stick with the cable cases - but don't pretend that deregulation was always a flop. It did wonders for trucking, rail transport (of freight), air travel, and long distance. It can be done badly - like power in California - but it's worked more times than it hasn't.
You know, I think that Watson is unfairly tarred over that quote. Given how much computers cost at the time, and how limited their utility was, he probably wasn't far off the mark. It may show a lack of imagination, but it may just show good business sense.
Come on, how big do you think the market is for space launches? How big would it be if we invented a cheap way to get to orbit? Remember, he said this before the invention of the transistor.
I read your link, and it's interesting and all, but...
they essentially do what the current US system does, which is force decisions that come out of the middle. If there's ever an advantage to being a bit to the left or right of the current gov't position, one party will take that advantage and run with it. It's the right that has been in this position for the past, oh, 30-35 years; the left hasn't really cleaned house since it became apparent that communism and socialism weren't viable economic models. I personally would argue that the rise of lowercase-l libertarianism in the US is a sign of resurgent liberalism, and that the left would do well to endorse a few elements that are currently considered the province of the right.
I'm pretty certain that the Republicans, rather than the Democrats, will move toward the position of liberty, because the war on terror gives them cover to abandon their fringe's (the Religous Right) most bizarre demands. The Democrats are, unfortunately, too beholden to their power base to attempt a wholesale Clintonization of the party (it's astounding, really, that the Democrats learned so little from him in 8 years of his presidency; I didn't admire him at all, but he was one hell of a politician).
Anyway, don't lump the Libs with the Right, or the Greens with the Left; just call people by the right name: dumb, or smart; pro-freedom, or anti-freedom. Examples of all of these are plentiful on the left and the right.
The poor ranking of the United States (17th) is mainly because of the number of journalists arrested or imprisoned there. Arrests are often because they refuse to reveal their sources in court. Also, since the 11 September attacks, several journalists have been arrested for crossing security lines at some official buildings.
Wow, so the US arrests journalists who, y'know, break the law? Astounding.
I understand the bit about protecting sources. I even agree with the reporters (in most cases). But jumping security at federal buildings? That's just dumb.
Although it's another side of health care, why not take a look at the AMA's page on HIPAA? Much of the advice is geared toward small practitioners, and as such would be useful in helping you figure out where to start.
On what planet? Sure, it's theoretically capable of the same stuff. But does Exchange really do the insane, boneheaded crap that Groupwise does? Try sending out a weekly reminder to everyone to run a virus scan on their system.
Notice that every person on the system will receive 52 separate notices, all at once, each of which must be accepted or rejected. If you accept them, then it will remind you at the proper time.
Not only that, it does the same thing if you try to set up a recurring weekly task for yourself.
And don't get me started about trying to export archive Groupwise mail to, say, mbox format. Groupwise might be great on the admin side, but it's hell for your users.
If I am on T-Mobile and I phone Vodafone then it'll cost me about 48 pence per minute
GOOD LORD, MAN! 48p per minute??? I'll take US-style pricing any day over that. You can get $20/month plans that have cheaper roaming rates than that.
US consumers wouldn't go for caller-pays because, as noted above, we don't know it's a mobile phone when we call it, and almost all of us have unmetered service - we're simply not accustomed to paying for calls. The technical issues are quite demanding, true, but consumers would never accept it, so the providers won't bother.
Slashdot Mirror
It's also available directly from the NCSA (link is to ftp root dir; check out both Mosaic and PC subdirectories - telnet and ftp clients for DOS!), although that archive starts with v0.6.
As far as Ashcroft, just set your dead-man's-switch to drop me an email, so I'll know when his goons have picked you up in the night.
Also, on an unrelated note: an "oil company" is one that does exploration, pipelining, etc. What most people here are thinking of is better referred to as an energy company, and Texaco has even produced ads that refer to that. You're crazy if you think these guys haven't put a whoooole lot of thought into alternative fuels - and how best to position themselves to sell them. Frankly, they couldn't care less what it is they sell; they just want to get rich. Believe me, if they thought they could make more money selling something else, they would.
Finally, a question for the hybrid-floggers: since the Volkswagen Beetle has a model that gets 42/49 MPG, and the Toyota Prius only gets 45/52, isn't that a whole lot of money being dropped for a minuscule improvement in efficiency? Why bother with the whole hybrid thing anyway, if it's really not much more efficient? Why not just tweak our standard engines? Is there something I'm missing here?
Realistically, I understand that the NRA takes care of the Second Amendment, and that most people who would join the ACLU wouldn't get along terribly well with most people who would join the NRA.
The stance on gun control is a byproduct of the 70's, or so I've been told by a few former ACLU members (who relinquished membership when they started becoming a more partisan organization). Perhaps that's as bad as their abandonment of the Second Amendment; I've gotten recruitment junk mail from them that was wildly hysterical about the possibility that Republicans would get elected (I think this was in the 1996 election cycle). Apparently, a too-numerous part of their constituency is willing to accept a broad trampling on civil liberties in exchange for having a Democrat in office. (By the by, this is why you should always vote Republican: if the press and academia hate the Attorney General, he won't be able to pull a fast one!)
Anyway, it's essentially become an organization for coastal urban liberals who are also Democrats - something that has severely damaged its credibility among those who aren't. The sad part is that it needn't be so narrowly defined (unlike, say, the NRA, whose membership will quite naturally skew rural, though it probably has more Democrats than the ACLU has Republicans).
It will be more important for them to seek out common cause with Republicans for the immediately forseeable future, because otherwise they're going to be left out of the party in power (unless the Democrats pull a functional party leader, some real ideas, and a backbone out of their hat some time before next November). They could have gotten a lot done over the past twenty years if they hadn't concentrated all their effort in the two years with a Democratic Congress and President.
Incidentally, though I have no idea what specific treaty you're talking about, playing the odds suggests you mean Kyoto. Kyoto died in the Clinton administration when the Senate rejected it 95-0; they must ratify all treaties entered into by the US.
I suspect that's one element that was not well reported in the international press, even though it's one of those domestic-politics things that's really important to understanding why a country behaves a certain way. (Like the apparent German tradition of giving the Foreign Ministry to the top lawmaker in the #2 party in the governing coalition; that made the Fischer-Schroeder spat more logical.) US domestic politics, with divided governments possible and pretty extensive checks and balances -- not to mention elections every two years -- has to seem reeeeeeeally strange to someone raised on a parliamentary system.
When the ACLU abandons its ridiculous belief that every single element of the Bill of Rights should be viciously defended, regardless of the merit of the person involved, except for any case involving the Second Amendment, they'll have my life membership fee the next day.
Anyway, Amazon is toast if this catches on.
Thank you, 38 states, for killing online sales. That was a brilliant solution to a temporary financial crisis, because none of those companies ever employed anyone in your state... right?
Why don't you go start your own company? I feel for you, man, but if you decide from the beginning that you want to spend your life working for someone else, with none of the risks involved in running your own business, don't be surprised when it turns out that they don't need you anymore. (Or do you think that "adjust to changing circumstances or fail" only applies to corporations?)
Buy a plane ticket to India. Go to a tech college. Hire some good graduates. Set them up with broadband to their houses, fly back to the States, and start pimping them out to outsourcing corps. Or become a consultant yourself (there are lots of small businesses looking for help with computers). Or whatever.
It's not as though they wouldn't have seen improvements over time.
1995-6: Sony says "dang, this isn't taking off. Time for a big marketing push and some severe price drops." MD-Data drives released (at reasonable prices) which are capable of reading and writing music discs as well (although they lack real-time recording capabilities).
1998-9: Sony notices that MP3 is taking off like wildfire. With an eye to the future, and hoping to retain control of the next generation of lossy encoders, they adopt licensing terms that permit free use of the ATRAC and ATRAC3 codecs in non-commercial players and encoders. MDLP Walkmen announced to take immediate advantage of this, with NetMD promised down the line. MD-Data drive owners get a firmware update allowing them to write ATRAC3 as well as standard ATRAC to discs right now.
2000: Using advances in MO technology, Sony announces next-generation "MD+" devices that store 650 MB rather than 140 MB. (Yes, this tech exists, but not much outside Sony's labs.) At the same time, they introduce the unrestricted NetMD portable devices, which function essentially like ATRAC-only hard disks.
Really, an aggressive marketing and pricing scheme for MD-Data could have obviated the need for NetMD at all.
Bravo, Slashdot!
Because a typical European country is about the size of an American state (perhaps a big state, but a state nonetheless). Plus, our phone system is set up differently. For historical reasons, there are different rates for in-state vs. out-of-state long distance calls (which provides an incentive to change your number even if you remain in the same state; in-state is usually more expensive). As our phone system is set up, you can call a mobile from a landline for free if the mobile's home area is local to you (and Americans despise per-minute charges on calls). The downside is that your number changes if you move (usually so that your mobile is now local to people where you moved). You can keep the old number, by the way, if you like - but we're pretty accustomed to changing numbers (moving across town gets you a new number in the States). The logic of this when routing calls becomes apparent if you consider that it's almost 5000 km from New York to LA.
An "Enron"? You mean, the whole business looks pretty impressive, but they're not actually doing anything but a shell game with money, and the technology's faked, and it goes tits-up when accounting shenanigans are found?
Look, man, maybe that flies at Indymedia, but please get your references to The Corporate Man right when you post on a serious, nuanced, and highly-respected forum like Slashdot.
Just for reference, that would have been an excellent post to make reference to John Poindexter and Total Information Awareness. But you didn't.
My verdict on your post? -1, Missed A Chance To Attack Evil Oil-Grubbing Grandma-Starving Bush Administration.
The nature of the exploit is such that even if it's true, cleanup is a cinch.
1) Write a program that cleans up mp3's by checking for any out-of-bounds values in fields (should be pretty easy, just modify a tag editor to read the safe amount of data and then rewrite the tags)
2) Notice all the data that was in the tags before that isn't now. Check for this in your system. (Though it might be encrypted; who knows?)
3) Get fresh copies of all the p2p software and MD5 it frequently.
Obviously, this assumes that the theoretical exploit doesn't infect other software on the computer. And, as others have noted, a kernel module rootkit would let it do some pretty crazy stuff on Linux. Still, a known-good root/boot like tomsrtbt would let you check your system safely.
Don't be too quick to call bullshit; just assume that the RIAA stuff is misdirection, but that the exploits are real. It's better to be safe than sorry.
Still, that'll be a nice little datum for the history students a century from now, except that Alaska is ~600,000 square miles, not square km. It's too bad it's not in the CIA factbook; I'd trust that a lot more than anything else I'd get for free online.
Just for quick reference, I did some back-of-the-envelope calcs. The sum area of UK, ES, PT, FR, DE, BE, NE, IT, IE, CH, AT, DK, NO, SE, and FI is 3469046 km^2, while the US (excluding Alaska, which would badly skew things) is 7928957. (I should have thrown in Greece, too, along with the little countries, but it's not going to make that much difference, and I intentionally excluded the former Iron Curtain areas.)
So for the same monthly price, he gets unlimited talk time from anywhere on the network to anywhere at all in the US. Not bad.
This isn't a reply to you, but to some other stuff I saw:
For the Europeans who decry our "cell phone user always pays" policy, yes, it was a substantial impediment to early adoption. As national networks have been built (one of the good outcomes of the telecom deregulation), prices have dropped precipitously.
I pay $35 (after all taxes and fees) for 300 anytime minutes from anywhere on Sprint's network to any US phone number, and I have unlimited nights and weekends (9 pm to 7 am). Free phone, 1 year contract. For ~$90/mo I could have gotten two phones, two phone numbers, unlimited free minutes to any other Sprint PCS customer, and 2000 minutes shared between the two phones. So yeah, it still sucks here if you're a VERY low usage customer - I think you can't get a plan at all under about $10/mo - but all companies are required to carry 911 (emergency) calls, so you can just get someone's old phone and use it to call in case police/ambulance are needed.
Oh, and a question I've always wanted to ask a GSM fan: isn't the price so hellish when traveling abroad with your phone that you're probably better off just getting a prepaid for $50 or so? (Or can you just get a prepaid SIM and drop it in your phone? That would be pretty cool.)
Remember that Americans take the federal system very seriously. Sometimes this is good, sometimes not. Either way, it's not going to change (unless we repeal the Constitution - and that will not happen. Our officeholders and military are sworn to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution itself, not the country.)
The other two repliers to you have done yeoman's work, but left something off: if you wanted to be anonymous, or have privacy, all you had to do was move to another town in another state. Sure, you did have to give up anything you can't carry with you - but if you showed up in Charleston, S.C., in 1768, and said you were John Weatherall from Frederick, Maryland, who would ever find out? It's not as though there were drivers' licenses or other documentation.
Airlines were deregulated in 1978.
What was that you were saying?
Look, whether or not you agree with regulation is up to you. But removing big losses is generally not a good economic idea, because it makes uncompetitive companies survive. Remember that if a major airline went under tomorrow, all its physical assets don't magically disappear. Some other airline would buy up the planes, the gates, the landing rights, you name it. The world didn't collapse when Eastern Airlines bit the dust. Sure, some people lost their jobs, but that's why we have unemployment benefits - to get them through the tough times until they can find another job.
Stick with the cable cases - but don't pretend that deregulation was always a flop. It did wonders for trucking, rail transport (of freight), air travel, and long distance. It can be done badly - like power in California - but it's worked more times than it hasn't.
Come on, how big do you think the market is for space launches? How big would it be if we invented a cheap way to get to orbit? Remember, he said this before the invention of the transistor.
they essentially do what the current US system does, which is force decisions that come out of the middle. If there's ever an advantage to being a bit to the left or right of the current gov't position, one party will take that advantage and run with it. It's the right that has been in this position for the past, oh, 30-35 years; the left hasn't really cleaned house since it became apparent that communism and socialism weren't viable economic models. I personally would argue that the rise of lowercase-l libertarianism in the US is a sign of resurgent liberalism, and that the left would do well to endorse a few elements that are currently considered the province of the right.
I'm pretty certain that the Republicans, rather than the Democrats, will move toward the position of liberty, because the war on terror gives them cover to abandon their fringe's (the Religous Right) most bizarre demands. The Democrats are, unfortunately, too beholden to their power base to attempt a wholesale Clintonization of the party (it's astounding, really, that the Democrats learned so little from him in 8 years of his presidency; I didn't admire him at all, but he was one hell of a politician).
Anyway, don't lump the Libs with the Right, or the Greens with the Left; just call people by the right name: dumb, or smart; pro-freedom, or anti-freedom. Examples of all of these are plentiful on the left and the right.
Wow, so the US arrests journalists who, y'know, break the law? Astounding.
I understand the bit about protecting sources. I even agree with the reporters (in most cases). But jumping security at federal buildings? That's just dumb.
Although it's another side of health care, why not take a look at the AMA's page on HIPAA? Much of the advice is geared toward small practitioners, and as such would be useful in helping you figure out where to start.
On what planet? Sure, it's theoretically capable of the same stuff. But does Exchange really do the insane, boneheaded crap that Groupwise does? Try sending out a weekly reminder to everyone to run a virus scan on their system.
Notice that every person on the system will receive 52 separate notices, all at once, each of which must be accepted or rejected. If you accept them, then it will remind you at the proper time.
Not only that, it does the same thing if you try to set up a recurring weekly task for yourself.
And don't get me started about trying to export archive Groupwise mail to, say, mbox format. Groupwise might be great on the admin side, but it's hell for your users.
GOOD LORD, MAN! 48p per minute??? I'll take US-style pricing any day over that. You can get $20/month plans that have cheaper roaming rates than that.
US consumers wouldn't go for caller-pays because, as noted above, we don't know it's a mobile phone when we call it, and almost all of us have unmetered service - we're simply not accustomed to paying for calls. The technical issues are quite demanding, true, but consumers would never accept it, so the providers won't bother.