A satellite that could bounce signals to the far side of the sun at Mars orbit would have to be much bigger than the International Space Station, be somewhere in the orbit of Jupiter and have enough fuel to reposition itself hundreds of millions of miles for several years to be economically viable.
I think that Spirit should be considered a big win for NASA. They patched a software bug on a platform that had corrupted flash, basically having to reinstall portions of operating code. Something about the repairing a 747 while it is in flight analogy.
It may not be as dramatic as the rescue of Apollo 13, but they should be commended for well though out design principles, instead of just taking cheap shots at them when something fails as most people are wont to do.
It's not that hackish. Tom Christensen would probably bitch slap you, but there are examples from Perl books that use essentially the same syntax for command line searches.
Great article, really first rate. Mod up as interesting.
It's inspired me to move out of Denver, which initally looked like a creative capital for the new economy, but has been pulled right into the dirt by an uninspired Republican governor and a near fascist backlash towards immigrants.
Here is the game - analysts are really just thinly veiled spin men for the company, hiding behind the front of the magazine or "research group". Look at Computerworld magazine. Those guys just sit around and wait for the press releases to print. A "company man" tips off the analyst to run with a story. Just like the way it works in Washington DC.
Microsoft could be attempting to get Sony to crunch development times down, spend more R&D dollars to keep up. They may have no intention of coming out with anything early. There are other players involved, Nvidia, ATI all are players in this game. They may be looking to get Sony to force it's hand, Microsoft needs to know what it will be up against.
Another part of the equation is the dev groups. EA Sports spit on Microsoft, so Microsoft will fight back with Sega Sports, and now there are other dev shops whose hearts and minds need to be won. Make them think there will be more immediate profitability if they start working on the DirectX toolkits, give them direction that way.
What Sony needs to do is concentrate on the Asian and European markets, where Microsoft has less pull and can't buy shelf space and distribution marketing as easily as they can in the US, where they basically own Best Buy and CompUSA, and tell them how high to jump and when.
I'm sure that saying it out load will jinx it, but the spammers have largely left Usenet. NNTP is so 1995, there are more fertile fields to urinate all over, like web boards. This has made the good newsgroups on unix and microsoft technologies both quite usable now, mostly haunted by Gen-X and older, us old farts of the Internet age who drifted back after it stopped raining spam.
I've read through 200 comments or so, and have yet to see several points made...
1. Many nuclear exchange scenarios have the Indians and the Pakistanis lobbing them at each other. Or driving them into Kashmir, or being launched from several of the sub platforms India has purchased from the ex-Soviet navy.
The capacity for a major terrorist or cultural swing event is large, the economy and government could de-stablize quite quickly. How much reliance on cheap coding from India will be "acceptable risk"?
2. What are the legal ramifications of having information warfare conducted against Indian targets with American data as the booty? When those bored eastern european hackers go get information from MegaTech in Bangalore and turn up 50,000 US credit card #s, I wonder what the ramifications might be?
60 Minutes article on this topic showed Indians working on systems in a room with no printers, so that no information could be moved from the screen into somebody's pocket. Designed to comfort US firms ("See our security measures!") I would think this would have the opposite effect, after all if trust is this big an issue, should they be doing it in the first place?
There are companies in the U.S. today who have made gigantic use of Indian and Chinese coders on H1-B. I can think of a couple of Silicon Valley firms and firms in Sunnyvale that 8 coders share a 1 bedroom apartment and "hot bunk" like on a sub. I don't have to name these companies, most of you know who they are.
Now look at the result? Have those companies gained real competitive advantage using those cheap coders? I don't think so. Time and time again, I see systematic shortfalls and having to acquire technology through acqusition from companies who specialize in this kind of behavior. What does that say? That people who are here from the Pacific Rim and India on H1B are not as innovative? No, that would be racist and stupid. But a culture arises, call it the "no-risk" culture, and eventually these companies stagnate.
It's always fun arguing with somebody too cowardly to come out from behind AC.
The MoveOn.org winning ad shows children working, and ends by saying who will pay for the deficit that George Bush created, growing the government by 8% during his administration despite being against big government.
That's a political ad. Running an ad that says "by buying drugs, you are supporting terrorist organizations" is exactly on the same footing, it's effect is to support the failed drug war and give the administration moral foundation to keep pouring cash into the DEA and other organizations, and to link the two giving additional leeway for Patriot Act provisions.
Just because you are too stupid to see it, doesn't make it false. Just because Ira Teinowitz is defending an indefensible hypocracy doesn't make him or the Madison Avenue crowd right.
CBS rolled over, plain and simple. Hiding behind some stupid "no political ads" made up rule, doesn't make them right.
Troll mod that AC,/.ers
Last year, the commercials that linked using drugs to supporting global terrorism were political ads, bought and paid for by a political action group.
You got that right. Homewood Illinois is known for having a really good BBQ place (forget the name, I actually think it was called 'The Homewood') and other than that, the place looks like GoodFellas. Most of the houses still have the plastic wrap over the couches in the living room. It's like a timewarp.
Remember when Forbes called the Slashdot crowd "Linux loving crunchies". Making the open source movement out to be a bunch of extremist hippies?
I remember articles like this one:
http://www.forbes.com/2003/06/18/cz_dl_0618linux.h tml
You have to remember, Forbes in run by Steve Forbes, a guy even other right wingers think is an out of touch Adam Smith extremist himself. The editors and writers of Forbes have a barely concealed contempt for the open source movement, seething at every opportunity to call it anti-capitalist and anything else they can think of.
Like it or not, big money, banking interests and institutional investors are lining up and taking sides. Some are going with IBM and now Intel, who have big reasons to support open source. Others are taking the side of Microsoft, who is funding the SCO FUD lawsuit, and once that fails - will try other methods to partner with hardware vendors and lock Linux out.
The guy who is doing H3 is looking at what it would take to get the H4 code from UbiSoft. I don't know what he could do with it, if anything.
The new OOB and playsets are fun, but even if the most meticulously crafted scenarios, you are sill going up against the AI, which has issues. If you replay a scenario again, you can usually only do marginally better, which is to say - if the scenario scripts a mission against you with a massive missile swarm right at the start (as most scenario designers do) then it's +/- a few die rolls as to what happens, there isn't much sense of strategy.
Multiplayer could change all that. I'd like to see them get to that point.
You make good points, I don't have any mod points to push you up. You are obviously an integrator who works with CIPT products.
But, isn't it true that unless your CCM installation is firewalled, if it is on the same LAN as other servers, that it can be infected with virus, and forces Cisco's hand in issuing upgrades?
I have heard of two CCM installations that contratced the Slammer SQL worm and blaster MS/RPC worm. Mainly because these machines were NOT patched, trying to keep them "stable".
I agree that they should have build the entire platform either in Linux or made it a true appliance with VMWorks, but that is not how Cisco operated. They bought Call Manager from a company - I forget the name - and slapped the logo on it and started integrating features willy nilly, like the DC LDAP server.
I still think in the long run that companies like Avaya, who built the S series in Linux as a closed system made the better long term decision. Call Manager is fun, and very democratic in that it enables data guys into the voice world completely, but from an architecture standpoint it simply isn't possible to say that using Microsoft as the OS doesn't cripple it as an enterprise grade solution.
The article link now takes you to a registration page, to register for StarTrib content.
Luckily, I had read it the first time before the gauntlet was dropped.
I wonder if this will become a new trend. Bait Slashdot into linking to an interesting article you have, then switch it for a subscription page. We need a new term for the behavior - SlashBS - Slashdot Bait & Switch.
...all that is left to light this match is a batch of new Indian software products to compete with US products.
That's what really doesn't exist today, and is really the key to setting off protectionist legislation. When you start seeing "Grand Theft Auto: Kashmir" and it's a best seller, or SOE decides to fire all those people in San Diego working on Star Wars Galaxies and moves the development to Hyderabad, well then... there will be some Congresspeople chalking up some new bills on the hill.
Remember of you will (can't find a good link to old story) that Bill Gates openly threatened the US Government with moving vast numbers of jobs to India and closing entire sections of the Redmond campus when the Justice Department was right up at his throat with anti trust. This threat resonated in Washington, both the city and the state.
If anybody has any links to stories that have his quotes, they wern't veiled threats, they were openly stated that his R&D would be better spent overseas.
It's not suprising that a guy named "Pave Low" - a designation for a helicopter widely used by U.S. Special Forces - would make derisive "hippie socialist" comments. That alone has most people tuning out his argument.
But I'll humor him. People who contribute to open source don't have disdain. That's just paranoia on your part. Many people straddle the fence between closed and open software. Some people se the educational aspects of using open source as a means to be self taught. Many Linux users hate Microsoft, but I don't think you can make sweeping generalizations like that.
Now, don't you have some Japanese people to round up and put into internment camps or something?
Nobody has stated the biggest problem of RotK.
Agmar of the Ringwraiths should have been portrayed as a cloaked, hooded wraith like the others, even with his fight with Eowyn.
That kick ass helm in the film should have been reserved for the Mouth of Sauron, seeing as it was directly derivative of Sauron's own helm. Riding out to meet Aragorn, Eomer and Gandalf at the Black Gate on something CGI cooked up that looked a little bit like a giant black horse and a dragon combined - he should have been allowed to speak to Aragorn.
Why is this important? Because other than hearing a few words from Sauron via the Palantir, you never hear him. You hear him "whisper" the name "Aragorn" on the wind as his eye sees Aragorn through the gate, which is silly IMO.
With the Mouth of Sauron, he could speak directly to the main protagonists. He could give that speech he does in the book, or they could edit it slightly. It speaks of Sauron's sense of entitlement. Malkar's flunky is what some other Slashdotter called him, and it's true. He thinks he's somehow entitled to rule Middle Earth and enslave it.
I need to go back and re-read RotK and read that passage again, but without the Mouth of Sauron in the film, you never get to hear from the bad guy. And as Milton proved in Paradise Lost, it's very compelling to hear the ultimate bad guy talk. it gives balance to the story.
However, I must give PJ credit for the way he filmed the fall of Sauron. You were expecting the nuke effect, but the way he fell, the fire eye looking back and forth, you could see the terror in Sauron's "eye", I was amazed - here was a CGI effect emoting better than many actors can.
I still think the Mouth of Sauron was very important.
This is why allowing ISPs to have access to cable infrastructures and central offices is so damn important. If the RBOCs or LECs can muscle competition out, we'll get to the day when bandwidth is billed by the Megabyte.
If competitive ISPs are allowed access to broadband infrastructures - then they can come along and offer true unlimited access and the market will react.
The problem is, a little ISP used to be able to service a large population with a T1 and a modem bank. Now, with broadband, becoming an ISP means you better have good peering and a couple OC3s, just to start. As a result, competition is squeezed out, Covad and Comcast will own the world, and then you are screwed unless you want to go T1 to your house.
If you watch Moore's Bowling for Columbine, and see the tapes from the cafeteria, you can see the two of them were enjoying the power of having guns, and had lost it. The fact they killed freshman shows the two of them were nuts.
That doesn't change the reaction of the parents and adults in Littleton to the tragedy. There has been one idiot followup who trolled saying they should killed more people - but both he and you miss the point.
Let's say the two of them were the class president and QB of the football team. But, you know, they were just psycho and loved guns and violence and had twisted adolecent fantasies. Everybody would have just said what you did, these two were nutcases and should rot in hell.
But they weren't. These kids were outcasts, and there are reams of depositions to suggest these two were systematically bullied, beat up and tormented.
Colorado's reaction? An almost obsessive need to justify why jock culture is superior. All kinds of shit came out, past the vilification of Manson and German Industrial Bands. People started wanting to ban first person shooters, and several people petitioned to have computer classes removed from the school! And, it was very very impotrant to show how it was the FOOTBALL team, that were the spiritual leaders of the school, bringing everybody back into the fold.
Not a single commitee addressed the issue of bullying. Not a single one. No improved feedback for counselors to report abuse, no sensitivity training on those that are different - NOTHING. THey went the opposite way and reinforced that the football team players were even MORE important for their ability to run fast and knock people down.
The press here also never touched on issues of how the Sherrif was an incompetent, botched the investigation, nothing.
But that's par for the course out here. Qwest's top management were raping the company of millions, violating federal laws, investing in offshore ventures, basically running amok. The major TV stations never ran a single story on them.
As some other poster from CO Springs said, the TV press makes fun of fat people. One "expose" designed to "shake you up" turned out to be about how poor people break into the salvation army drop boxes looking for clothes. It made it seem like these people should be strung up and flogged. Meanwhile, corp execs out here are trying to rival Enron with dirty accounting.
But if you are a white supremist racist asshole, with a pickup truck and a gun rack - come on out. Colorado can't get enough of these people.
Slashdot Mirror
A satellite that could bounce signals to the far side of the sun at Mars orbit would have to be much bigger than the International Space Station, be somewhere in the orbit of Jupiter and have enough fuel to reposition itself hundreds of millions of miles for several years to be economically viable.
Type UFH into Google. It says what I was going to say, right at the top.
I think that Spirit should be considered a big win for NASA. They patched a software bug on a platform that had corrupted flash, basically having to reinstall portions of operating code.
Something about the repairing a 747 while it is in flight analogy.
It may not be as dramatic as the rescue of Apollo 13, but they should be commended for well though out design principles, instead of just taking cheap shots at them when something fails as most people are wont to do.
It's not that hackish. Tom Christensen would probably bitch slap you, but there are examples from Perl books that use essentially the same syntax for command line searches.
The Spice must flow!!
Sorry... couldn't resist.
Nothing like a little Python (not the language) to brighten up one's day.
Great article, really first rate. Mod up as interesting.
It's inspired me to move out of Denver, which initally looked like a creative capital for the new economy, but has been pulled right into the dirt by an uninspired Republican governor and a near fascist backlash towards immigrants.
Here is the game - analysts are really just thinly veiled spin men for the company, hiding behind the front of the magazine or "research group". Look at Computerworld magazine. Those guys just sit around and wait for the press releases to print. A "company man" tips off the analyst to run with a story. Just like the way it works in Washington DC.
Microsoft could be attempting to get Sony to crunch development times down, spend more R&D dollars to keep up. They may have no intention of coming out with anything early. There are other players involved, Nvidia, ATI all are players in this game. They may be looking to get Sony to force it's hand, Microsoft needs to know what it will be up against.
Another part of the equation is the dev groups. EA Sports spit on Microsoft, so Microsoft will fight back with Sega Sports, and now there are other dev shops whose hearts and minds need to be won. Make them think there will be more immediate profitability if they start working on the DirectX toolkits, give them direction that way.
What Sony needs to do is concentrate on the Asian and European markets, where Microsoft has less pull and can't buy shelf space and distribution marketing as easily as they can in the US, where they basically own Best Buy and CompUSA, and tell them how high to jump and when.
I'm sure that saying it out load will jinx it, but the spammers have largely left Usenet. NNTP is so 1995, there are more fertile fields to urinate all over, like web boards. This has made the good newsgroups on unix and microsoft technologies both quite usable now, mostly haunted by Gen-X and older, us old farts of the Internet age who drifted back after it stopped raining spam.
I've read through 200 comments or so, and have yet to see several points made...
1. Many nuclear exchange scenarios have the Indians and the Pakistanis lobbing them at each other. Or driving them into Kashmir, or being launched from several of the sub platforms India has purchased from the ex-Soviet navy.
The capacity for a major terrorist or cultural swing event is large, the economy and government could de-stablize quite quickly. How much reliance on cheap coding from India will be "acceptable risk"?
2. What are the legal ramifications of having information warfare conducted against Indian targets with American data as the booty? When those bored eastern european hackers go get information from MegaTech in Bangalore and turn up 50,000 US credit card #s, I wonder what the ramifications might be?
60 Minutes article on this topic showed Indians working on systems in a room with no printers, so that no information could be moved from the screen into somebody's pocket. Designed to comfort US firms ("See our security measures!") I would think this would have the opposite effect, after all if trust is this big an issue, should they be doing it in the first place?
There are companies in the U.S. today who have made gigantic use of Indian and Chinese coders on H1-B. I can think of a couple of Silicon Valley firms and firms in Sunnyvale that 8 coders share a 1 bedroom apartment and "hot bunk" like on a sub. I don't have to name these companies, most of you know who they are.
Now look at the result? Have those companies gained real competitive advantage using those cheap coders? I don't think so. Time and time again, I see systematic shortfalls and having to acquire technology through acqusition from companies who specialize in this kind of behavior. What does that say? That people who are here from the Pacific Rim and India on H1B are not as innovative? No, that would be racist and stupid. But a culture arises, call it the "no-risk" culture, and eventually these companies stagnate.
It's always fun arguing with somebody too cowardly to come out from behind AC. The MoveOn.org winning ad shows children working, and ends by saying who will pay for the deficit that George Bush created, growing the government by 8% during his administration despite being against big government. That's a political ad. Running an ad that says "by buying drugs, you are supporting terrorist organizations" is exactly on the same footing, it's effect is to support the failed drug war and give the administration moral foundation to keep pouring cash into the DEA and other organizations, and to link the two giving additional leeway for Patriot Act provisions. Just because you are too stupid to see it, doesn't make it false. Just because Ira Teinowitz is defending an indefensible hypocracy doesn't make him or the Madison Avenue crowd right. CBS rolled over, plain and simple. Hiding behind some stupid "no political ads" made up rule, doesn't make them right.
Troll mod that AC, /.ers
Last year, the commercials that linked using drugs to supporting global terrorism were political ads, bought and paid for by a political action group.
You got that right. Homewood Illinois is known for having a really good BBQ place (forget the name, I actually think it was called 'The Homewood') and other than that, the place looks like GoodFellas. Most of the houses still have the plastic wrap over the couches in the living room. It's like a timewarp.
This is the part where Michael brings Carmine's brother to sit with him at trial, so he won't point the finger up the line, right?
With a name like Ill Clinton, I hope you copped a few feels on your Teddy Bear day.
Remember when Forbes called the Slashdot crowd "Linux loving crunchies". Making the open source movement out to be a bunch of extremist hippies?
h tml
I remember articles like this one:
http://www.forbes.com/2003/06/18/cz_dl_0618linux.
You have to remember, Forbes in run by Steve Forbes, a guy even other right wingers think is an out of touch Adam Smith extremist himself. The editors and writers of Forbes have a barely concealed contempt for the open source movement, seething at every opportunity to call it anti-capitalist and anything else they can think of.
Like it or not, big money, banking interests and institutional investors are lining up and taking sides. Some are going with IBM and now Intel, who have big reasons to support open source. Others are taking the side of Microsoft, who is funding the SCO FUD lawsuit, and once that fails - will try other methods to partner with hardware vendors and lock Linux out.
The guy who is doing H3 is looking at what it would take to get the H4 code from UbiSoft. I don't know what he could do with it, if anything. The new OOB and playsets are fun, but even if the most meticulously crafted scenarios, you are sill going up against the AI, which has issues. If you replay a scenario again, you can usually only do marginally better, which is to say - if the scenario scripts a mission against you with a massive missile swarm right at the start (as most scenario designers do) then it's +/- a few die rolls as to what happens, there isn't much sense of strategy. Multiplayer could change all that. I'd like to see them get to that point.
You make good points, I don't have any mod points to push you up. You are obviously an integrator who works with CIPT products.
But, isn't it true that unless your CCM installation is firewalled, if it is on the same LAN as other servers, that it can be infected with virus, and forces Cisco's hand in issuing upgrades?
I have heard of two CCM installations that contratced the Slammer SQL worm and blaster MS/RPC worm. Mainly because these machines were NOT patched, trying to keep them "stable".
I agree that they should have build the entire platform either in Linux or made it a true appliance with VMWorks, but that is not how Cisco operated. They bought Call Manager from a company - I forget the name - and slapped the logo on it and started integrating features willy nilly, like the DC LDAP server.
I still think in the long run that companies like Avaya, who built the S series in Linux as a closed system made the better long term decision. Call Manager is fun, and very democratic in that it enables data guys into the voice world completely, but from an architecture standpoint it simply isn't possible to say that using Microsoft as the OS doesn't cripple it as an enterprise grade solution.
The article link now takes you to a registration page, to register for StarTrib content.
Luckily, I had read it the first time before the gauntlet was dropped.
I wonder if this will become a new trend. Bait Slashdot into linking to an interesting article you have, then switch it for a subscription page.
We need a new term for the behavior - SlashBS - Slashdot Bait & Switch.
...all that is left to light this match is a batch of new Indian software products to compete with US products. That's what really doesn't exist today, and is really the key to setting off protectionist legislation. When you start seeing "Grand Theft Auto: Kashmir" and it's a best seller, or SOE decides to fire all those people in San Diego working on Star Wars Galaxies and moves the development to Hyderabad, well then... there will be some Congresspeople chalking up some new bills on the hill. Remember of you will (can't find a good link to old story) that Bill Gates openly threatened the US Government with moving vast numbers of jobs to India and closing entire sections of the Redmond campus when the Justice Department was right up at his throat with anti trust. This threat resonated in Washington, both the city and the state. If anybody has any links to stories that have his quotes, they wern't veiled threats, they were openly stated that his R&D would be better spent overseas.
It's not suprising that a guy named "Pave Low" - a designation for a helicopter widely used by U.S. Special Forces - would make derisive "hippie socialist" comments. That alone has most people tuning out his argument. But I'll humor him. People who contribute to open source don't have disdain. That's just paranoia on your part. Many people straddle the fence between closed and open software. Some people se the educational aspects of using open source as a means to be self taught. Many Linux users hate Microsoft, but I don't think you can make sweeping generalizations like that. Now, don't you have some Japanese people to round up and put into internment camps or something?
Nobody has stated the biggest problem of RotK. Agmar of the Ringwraiths should have been portrayed as a cloaked, hooded wraith like the others, even with his fight with Eowyn. That kick ass helm in the film should have been reserved for the Mouth of Sauron, seeing as it was directly derivative of Sauron's own helm. Riding out to meet Aragorn, Eomer and Gandalf at the Black Gate on something CGI cooked up that looked a little bit like a giant black horse and a dragon combined - he should have been allowed to speak to Aragorn. Why is this important? Because other than hearing a few words from Sauron via the Palantir, you never hear him. You hear him "whisper" the name "Aragorn" on the wind as his eye sees Aragorn through the gate, which is silly IMO. With the Mouth of Sauron, he could speak directly to the main protagonists. He could give that speech he does in the book, or they could edit it slightly. It speaks of Sauron's sense of entitlement. Malkar's flunky is what some other Slashdotter called him, and it's true. He thinks he's somehow entitled to rule Middle Earth and enslave it. I need to go back and re-read RotK and read that passage again, but without the Mouth of Sauron in the film, you never get to hear from the bad guy. And as Milton proved in Paradise Lost, it's very compelling to hear the ultimate bad guy talk. it gives balance to the story. However, I must give PJ credit for the way he filmed the fall of Sauron. You were expecting the nuke effect, but the way he fell, the fire eye looking back and forth, you could see the terror in Sauron's "eye", I was amazed - here was a CGI effect emoting better than many actors can. I still think the Mouth of Sauron was very important.
Your sig makes no sense. Fonzie used a motorcycle to jump the shark.
This is why allowing ISPs to have access to cable infrastructures and central offices is so damn important. If the RBOCs or LECs can muscle competition out, we'll get to the day when bandwidth is billed by the Megabyte. If competitive ISPs are allowed access to broadband infrastructures - then they can come along and offer true unlimited access and the market will react. The problem is, a little ISP used to be able to service a large population with a T1 and a modem bank. Now, with broadband, becoming an ISP means you better have good peering and a couple OC3s, just to start. As a result, competition is squeezed out, Covad and Comcast will own the world, and then you are screwed unless you want to go T1 to your house.
If you watch Moore's Bowling for Columbine, and see the tapes from the cafeteria, you can see the two of them were enjoying the power of having guns, and had lost it. The fact they killed freshman shows the two of them were nuts. That doesn't change the reaction of the parents and adults in Littleton to the tragedy. There has been one idiot followup who trolled saying they should killed more people - but both he and you miss the point. Let's say the two of them were the class president and QB of the football team. But, you know, they were just psycho and loved guns and violence and had twisted adolecent fantasies. Everybody would have just said what you did, these two were nutcases and should rot in hell. But they weren't. These kids were outcasts, and there are reams of depositions to suggest these two were systematically bullied, beat up and tormented. Colorado's reaction? An almost obsessive need to justify why jock culture is superior. All kinds of shit came out, past the vilification of Manson and German Industrial Bands. People started wanting to ban first person shooters, and several people petitioned to have computer classes removed from the school! And, it was very very impotrant to show how it was the FOOTBALL team, that were the spiritual leaders of the school, bringing everybody back into the fold. Not a single commitee addressed the issue of bullying. Not a single one. No improved feedback for counselors to report abuse, no sensitivity training on those that are different - NOTHING. THey went the opposite way and reinforced that the football team players were even MORE important for their ability to run fast and knock people down. The press here also never touched on issues of how the Sherrif was an incompetent, botched the investigation, nothing. But that's par for the course out here. Qwest's top management were raping the company of millions, violating federal laws, investing in offshore ventures, basically running amok. The major TV stations never ran a single story on them. As some other poster from CO Springs said, the TV press makes fun of fat people. One "expose" designed to "shake you up" turned out to be about how poor people break into the salvation army drop boxes looking for clothes. It made it seem like these people should be strung up and flogged. Meanwhile, corp execs out here are trying to rival Enron with dirty accounting. But if you are a white supremist racist asshole, with a pickup truck and a gun rack - come on out. Colorado can't get enough of these people.