I am angry and depressed today.

I've always been a patriotic American, I've always loved my country. Some of my earliest memories are of reading the Declaration of Independence and children's histories of the War for Independence.

(That's a tautology, designed to sound controversial and get your attention. But now that I have your attention, check out this site for an idea of just how easily the RIAA expects to manipulate its customers.)

In this journal, I'm collecting what I consider the "best of" Slashdot comments.

I've long wished that there was a way to browse all the really good comments, across all articles. So here's my poor attempt at collecting the comments that, to steal a joke from This is Spinal Tap, you'd see if you could browse at +6.

Feel free to nominate comments you think should be "+6" by replying to this journal.

(After four days of waiting, this was rejected as an article submision. Go figure. Guess it's not as interesting as How to Handle an Internet Outage)

Here's a dummy entry for anyone wanting to comment on

• My post on teaching via Slashdot or
• on Multi-Level-/Distributed/Bacterial Learning or
• my very incomplete post on free texts and tutotials

I posted this in Belkin Routers Route Users to Censorware Ad, here, but I wanted to keep a copy here as well.

I also sent a copy to Belkin.

In response to my letter of indignation to Belkin, I received the same form letter many of you have received, signed by

Today is the 2nd anniversary of my (so far first and only) heart attack.

Here's to living on borrowed time.

I submitted this as an article; of course, it was rejected. So I'm posting it as my first "journal".

Emusic.com, which I first heard about in a Slashdot comment, and which I strongly promoted on Slashdot for its DRM-free, "unlimited" downloads of quality MP3s for a low ($9.99-14.99) monthly subscription price, has significantly changed its policies.