I saw this while shopping at Amazon.com today:

daveo0331*, since you've been using A9.com recently, virtually everything at Amazon.com is automatically an additional pi/2% (1.57%) off for you. Collecting this discount is zero effort on your part. It will be applied automatically at checkout (it will happen whether you use the shopping cart or our 1-Click Shopping®). You don't need to do anything to get this discount except keep using A9.com as your regular search engine.

We don't advertise this additional discount that we give in exchange for using A9.com, so if you want your friends to know about it, please tell them. It is probably the only way they'll find out. All they have to do is use A9.com as their regular search engine. They should make sure they are signed in to A9.com (it should be recognizing them by name) so that we can be certain they get credit for their visit.

While the pi/2% discount is a good additional reason to use A9.com it isn't the best reason. A9.com licenses its web search results from the industry leader Google, and then supplements those results with Amazon's Search Inside the Book(TM) results. The coolest feature is that A9.com keeps track of your search history for you on the server side. To see how this works, do some A9 searches from your computer at work and then sign in to A9.com from your computer at home.

How can we afford this additional pi/2% discount?

Sponsored links revenue -from the small text-based ads on A9.com and Amazon.com search results pages -will help offset costs we incur through the Rewards promotion. With our automatic pi/2% discount, we are effectively sharing with you some of the money we collect from sponsored links, i.e. sharing the pi.

Please use A9.com and tell your friends.

Thank you

A9.com Instant Rewards will not be applied to the purchase of gift certificates or gift cards, such as Amazon.com Gift Certificates, Target GiftCards, or Borders Gift Cards.

A9.com Instant Rewards will not be applied to purchases from Amazon.com zShops or Amazon.com Auctions; payments and contributions made using the Amazon.com Honor System; Marketplace Pre-Orders; or In-Store Pickup purchases.

A9.com Instant Rewards may be inactivated for any Amazon.com account at any time depending on the number of A9.com Web searches performed.
Product searches performed on Amazon.com will not help to qualify an account for A9.com Instant Rewards.

You do not have to click on sponsored links to qualify an account for A9.com Instant Rewards.

The A9.com Instant Reward rate is pi/2% (1.57%) off the total purchase price, including tax and shipping.

The exact amount of the A9.com Instant Reward stated on the order summary is only an estimate. After taxes are finalized, the exact amount of the Instant Reward will be finalized.
A9.com Instant Rewards are not for use on Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.jp, Amazon.ca, Amazon.fr, or any Web site other than www.amazon.com.

Amazon.com reserves the right to change or discontinue the A9.com Instant Reward program at any time.

* They used my real name, not my Slashdot userid, of course.

From the War Room at Salon.com:

Bush twins swill vodka, stiff the help

Mayor Michael Bloomberg hailed the Republican National Convention as an economic boon to the city, but it turned out to be a bust for the poor saps stuck serving the tight-fisted Bush girls. According to the New York Post's Page Six, the debaucherous twins spent all night Wednesday getting trashed at the Manhattan club Avalon, and then stiffed the help. As the Post reports, "They [and their entourage of about 25] drank $4,500 dollars worth of drinks -- bottles and bottles of vodka,' says a club insider. 'Then, having been comped all the alcohol, they left a $48 tip. We thought 1 per cent was kind of outrageous, considering they are the president's daughters.'"

Leave aside what this says about the girls' respect for working people. These kids and their friends swilled $180 worth of booze per person. A galloping sense of entitlement, apparently, isn't the only thing that runs in the Bush family.

Remember the pictures of the Iraqis supposedly pulling down that statue of Saddam that were broadcast all over TV last year? It's been known for a long time that the Iraqis didn't really do it by themselves, and they kind of had some "help" from the Americans.

Now the results of an internal study by the U.S. Army make it official -- the event was staged. It was actually a Marine colonel who decided to topple the statue, not the Iraqis. Furthermore, the Marines at one point had draped a U.S. flag over the statue, and got booed by the Iraqis! So, they quickly replaced the U.S. flag with an Iraqi flag.

As if that weren't enough, the vehicle full of Iraqis that pulled down the statue was actually a U.S. military vehicle, and the Iraqis were children that the U.S. had put there to make it look like the Iraqis were spontaneously pulling down the statue.

Don't believe everything you see on TV.

Here's an article about the report.

Update: Found a better article at http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/040621/france_vivendi_7.html

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000536449

Jean-Marie Messier, former CEO of Vivendi (RIAA member), has been taken into police custody in France. Apparently he did some illegal share repurchases, causing the company's shareholders to lose money. He's also under investigation for insider trading and share price manipulation.

Am I surprised that Enron-style shenanigans have spread to Big Music? Of course not.

Messier left the company in July 2002.

Remember, when you buy RIAA music, this is the kind of people you're giving your money to. Find other places to shop instead.

My local newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, has decided to go the way of the New York Times and require readers to sell their so^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hregister with the site in order to read stories. I guess this is a common thing now, but I like being able to read the news without having to tell them I live in Tanzania, have five kids, am 19 years old, have a Ph.D in economics, and have an annual income between $10,000 and $14,999.

No time to worry about that now though -- I heard they're giving a car away down at the mall, and all you have to do to enter is fill out an entry form and slip it through the drivers side window.

I voted in the California primary this morning. This was my first time voting with our new touchscreen voting system. I'm not impressed.

It started out normal enough -- I walked into the polling place and signed in. One of the poll workers gave me what looked like a credit card and showed me how to work the machine. This didn't look too hard. I put the card in, got a language selection screen, and picked English...

The only presidential candidate listed was George W. Bush.

As a registered Democrat who got the Democratic sample ballot in the mail, I thought this was a little strange. So I told the poll worker. I also mentioned that I had switched parties a few months ago. Apparently, their records hadn't been updated (even though I got the right sample ballot). No problem, they gave me another card (programmed correctly this time) and I put it in the machine, got the ballot I was expecting, and voted.

Meanwhile, the poll workers were having trouble ejecting the first card from the first machine that had given me the Republican ballot. I can understand having some problems with a new system, but hearing poll workers say "no don't do that or our count will be off" does not inspire confidence in the system. Eventually they got the card out. Hopefully the count won't be off.

Ultimately, I got to cast my vote, and I gave the card back to the poll worker. They filled out some kind of form for an "exception" based on my party registration being wrong.

Did I ever get any kind of paper reciept or other hardcopy record of who I voted for? Of course not.

Grammar nazi time... "expires" shouldn't change to "expire" when you get down to 1 mod point. The subject of "expires" is "access," and the correct word is "expires" no matter how many points you have.

This is the text you see on the side of your browser window when you get mod points:

You have moderator access and 1 point (expire on 2004-01-26). Welcome to those of you just joining: please read the moderator guidelines for instructions.
  You can't post & moderate the same discussion.
  Concentrate on promoting more than demoting.
  Browse at -1 to keep an eye out for abuses.
  Mail the admin URLs showing abuse (the cid link please!).

Here's the article. I'll say more later when I have time.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/printable592330.shtml

Ask Google.

I've been a registered Republican since I first registered to vote. Today, I sent in my new voter registration. Once it's processed, I will officially be a Democrat.

I don't like big government... and I used to think the Republicans were the party of small government. Bush has sure proved me wrong on that. To me, fighting optional wars, imposing a right-wing social agenda, and spending money like a drunken sailor COUGHmedicarebillCOUGH doesn't qualify as reducing the size of government. Sure, the Democrats want to raise the marginal tax rates a couple points, but they'll also move us more toward European social policy, and besides, once the economy starts picking up, we need to start paying down our $7 trillion debt anyway.

This is not that I don't agree with some of what the Republicans have to say. Free trade is generally a good thing, and so is business deregulation as long as criminals don't get involved. Does anyone really miss the Civil Aeronautics Board? But wait, which president was it that signed NAFTA?

No, I'm not proud to say I'm from the party of Fritz Hollings, but I think the Demopublicans represent me a little better than the Republicrats. Wait, did I get that right?

Slashdot just went over 7,000,000 comments a few days ago.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=79101&cid=7000000

It was modded +1, Flamebait. Seems appropriate, somehow.

Due to the large number of candidates running for Governor of California, many counties may not be able to fit all of the candidates on a single ballot, forcing them to use more than one ballot. Governor Davis believes this is confusing and unfair. Governor Davis proposes the following changes be made to the recall election:

1. No candidates' names will appear on the ballot. All candidates will be write-in candidates.

2. If a voter misspells a candidate's name, his or her vote will not be counted.

It's been said that the difference between a "troll" moderation and a "funny" moderation is whether or not the moderator gets the joke. Or in this case, whether or not the moderator agrees with your political viewpoints.

This one started at 0, got modded down to -1, then back up all the way to 5.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=72484&cid=6538747

Based on the infamous anti drug ads.

Is it okay to support corporate greed if it's only a little bit?

So you buy an RIAA CD occasionally.

It's not like you're paying millions of dollars to finance a music cartel and all the poverty and lawsuits it creates.

And you understand the argument that RIAA money contributes to terrible things.

That if you buy an RIAA CD, your money goes to people who are responsible for bankrupting college students, using their influence in Congress to threaten our civil liberties, clogging the courts with lawsuits and forcing musicians into abusive one-sided contracts. That if you stopped buying RIAA CDs, the dealers would go away, the abuse of monopoly would end.

You get all that.

But it's just one CD, right?

Well, here's a secret: You don't pick which side you're on by how much you buy.

You pick which side you're on by buying in the first place.