] A nonprofit Internet Service Provider (ISP) and two
] Swarthmore College students are seeking a court order on
] Election Day tomorrow to stop electronic voting machine
] manufacturer Diebold Systems, Inc., from issuing specious
] legal threats. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
] and the Center for Internet and Society Cyberlaw Clinic
] at Stanford Law School are providing legal representation
] in this important case to prevent abusive copyright
] claims from silencing public debate about voting, the
] very foundation of our democratic process.

Thank you! I called for this in my talk at Phreaknic. I hope they are awarded punitive damages! We need a real deterrent here.

EFF: Electronic Frontier Foundation and Stanford Law Clinic Sue Electronic Voting Company

] According to a KPTV newscast, a Simpsons fan with too
] much time on his hands grafted a tobacco plant and a
] tomato plant and, ta-da: tomacco!

!!!!!!

Slashdot | Simpsons Fan Creates Real Tomacco Plant

] "Received a missive this morning from the Red Hat
] Network, stating that they will discontinue maintenance
] on Red Hat Linux 7.x and 8.0 by the end of 2003, and on
] Red Hat 9.0 by the end of April, 2004. And, more
] ominously: 'Red Hat does not plan to release another
] product in the Red Hat Linux line.' "

Redhat is forcing all of it's users to:
A. Cut all their machines over to Fedora. (Port + Crash)
B. Cut all their machines over to RedHat Enterprise. (Port + Bling)
C. Cut all their machines over to another linux distro. (Port + Crash + Annoy)
D. Never have security updates again. (Own + Crash + Annoy)

The move probably does make sense for them financially. The approach, however, in simultaneously dropping support for 4 versions of their operating system all at once, is bound to piss a lot of people off. RH8 is hardly cold yet and they are already yanking support. There are less then two months between the dot oh release of Fedora and the end of life for the old redhats. Not enough time for a migration in a real environment. They are going to loose customers over this.

Slashdot | Red Hat Linux Support To End

] Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he does not
] know whether or not he has lost his mojo, as a leading
] news magazine suggested, because he doesn't really know
] what mojo is.

Has Rumsfeld lost his Mojo? - The Times of India

] While critics in the United States grow more concerned
] each day about the insecurity of electronic voting
] machines, Australians designed a system two years ago
] that addressed and eased most of those concerns: They
] chose to make the software running their system
] completely open to public scrutiny.

Wired News: Aussies Do It Right: E-Voting

] So, if in fact we are not at the end of history, then perhaps Tom is
] on to something here.
]
] It's less about the individual governments and more about the
] connections between them, or lack thereof.
]
] Welcome to the Network Society.

Well, this isn't really what I meant. If there is a split here I think it is only because we are behaving in an unwestern way. Unilateral, pre-emptive military action? Imprisoning people without due process? I think we've regressed. It could have been a lot worse, but it also could have been better.

I was arguing that we'll see more positive innovation in the governance of societies as people become better informed and better at critical thinking... This is not the droid I'm looking for. I'm not even sure I'll see what I think will come in my lifetime, but I'm almost positive that I'm right.

The way that things went down... Its not how I would have done it. Its not how a lot of people would have done it. I think we could have gone into Iraq with international support. With financial and military assistance. Had we spun it properly... It would have been better for us on many levels. It would have been cheaper. It would have been safer. It would have been less galvanizing to the radical elements.

I don't think its clear that France took their position to save telecom contracts in Iraq. Thats just as insipid as claiming that we went in to claim oil reserves. I also don't think France thinks its impossible to do this. I simply think that they don't want to bail us out of this mess financially after the way we've behaved.

The message we intended to send is that the United States is not constrained by the international community.

The message we should have sent is that the international community has no need to constrain the United States.

We could have sent that message. Its a shame.

But, yes, we do need to address the grievances of the European community and do so early and often. If we think we don't have to care what they think, then we are eating our own spin. We'd be wrong, and we'll learn that one way or the other.

Democracies do fight wars against each other. Being democratic does not make you nice. Being interconnected makes you interdependent, which makes you nice.

The End of the West?

An encyclopedia that is created and alterable by everyone. I've found myself using this more and more recently.

wikipedia

] let me just say that, as a slashdot troll, i have a
] firewall which allows me to dynamically modify my o/s
] fingerprint, a highly adaptive cookie manager/poisoner
] that can decode many cookies in realtime (stop using
] urlencode!), a browser plugin that lets me modify my
] entire http header including user agent, a
] database-driven transparent proxy tracker which harvests
] new proxies 24/7, scripts to generate free email accounts
] by the 100's, good web scripting skills, and on a good
] day around 500 moderation points on slashdot from over
] 1,000 monitored accounts.

This is a really great discussion between a troll and a sysop. It really speaks to the fact that governance of an internet community is a very complex problem that shares many of the social dynamics of governance of a IRL community.

Trolls vs. Sysops...

] Using a phone with Bluetooth, you can create a phonebook
] contact and write a message, eg. 'Hello, you've been bluejacked',
] in the 'Name' field. Then you can search for other phones with
] Bluetooth and send that phonebook contact to them. On their
] phone, a message will popup saying "'Hello, you've been
] bluejacked' has just been received by Bluetooth" or something
] along those lines. For most 'victims' they will have no idea as to
] how the message appeared on their phone.

bluejackq.com: What is Bluejacking?

] The numbers have network executives scratching their
] heads. You may have read the news story a few days ago:
] three weeks into the new television season, and viewers
] still haven't shown up.
]
] The fall-off in viewership is unprecedented,
] and among no group is this more the case that young males
] between 18 and 24, a prime target group for advertisers.
] Among this cohort, the drop in viewership has been an
] astounding 20 percent this year compared to last, which
] showed a 12 percent drop in men 18-34.

OK, lets see you try to blame this one on P2P networks.

ABCNEWS.com : Silicon Insider: The Game That's Replacing TV