You are not funny, therefore you are a woman.

If this are the assholes who primarily benefit from copyright, how wrong is illegal copying?

The federal government is more powerful and has proved over and over the value of breaking up big businesses in terms of competition and open media. We somehow keep forgetting that and have to relearn it.

Any place where you have to take a number of observations and perform statistical analysys on the data. A lot of yield analysis in agriculture is done this way; remember, agriculture was the mother of statistics. Then you branch out to the other hard sciences and a spreadsheet is the right tool for the job. Once you learn the limitations of the tool (precision, range, accuracy) it can slash effort to a fraction of other methods.

Too bad the Mayor isn't looking at encouraging telecommuting for those people who can telecommute. Think what it would do to bridge and tunnel traffic.

That's the coward's way out, using drugs, where 90% of your synthesis has been done for you by already by some Big Pharma company selling pseudoephedrine to people who need to clear their noses.

"Now get me my phenylacetic acid... bitch!"

Are we talking about a single piece of paper, or are there three independent pieces of paper? If the former, then the warrant would have to be served on Bob, because he has possession of the letter. If you made a copy or otherwise made a separate recording of the letter, then LEO could come after YOU for the contents. And you have no standing to contest the warrant on fourth amendment grounds. You could be questioned about the contents in either case.

Where the third party *does* have standing to challenge the warrant is when there is an undue financial burden on said third party to provide the requested information. Telephone companies have routinely charged the issuer of the warrent a fee for, say, the local-calling record of a party. The key is that word "undue" -- that can be interpreted many ways. The Founding Fathers of our country could not have predicted this, given the record-keeping practices of the time, versus now, and the fluidity of the concept of "ownership" of information. I'm afraid it would take a constitutional amendment to bring personally identifying information to be owned by the *person* and not by the party who collected it as a "normal part of business."

But what is being demanded is information being held by a third party, and not under the control of the party being investigated. Once you disclose anything to a third party, that information is now "out there", where the government can pick it off when they want to. The same is true if you use a third party to handle your e-mail, web site, or any other service. Look at the second phrase: the warrants fall within the four corners of the restrictions. Plus, the gag order that usually accompanies such requests prevents the data-holding party from tipping off the person being investigated.

On my edge router, I use TCPWRAPPERS to block access to a number of quasi-public services, like SSH. If the attacker isn't coming from the limited number of IP addresses allowed, the attempts get stopped and logged. Too many rejects, and they land in my edge ACL for all services, not just SSH. (Going on the theory that a bad apple hitting SSH probably has other bad habits.)

Remember the Tucker, with the swiveling center headlight?

Could it have something to do with the National Transportation Safety Board's inquiry into the October crash? I heard that the NTSB is going public with some of the hearings soon.

If you live in the shit, it is sometimes hard to see it.

His name is Kunte Kinte.

I hold out hope that the two of them are getting air time not because they could win, but because they are more interesting than Clinton v. Bush. Plenty of time for that boring crap later.