I am increasingly fustrated by the way off topic threads and the lack of ability to moderate them out. Of course this means that some of us like these off topics...

but today there is an article about the CT court case w/ the RIAA and the highly ranked comments are about the presidential election (Ron Paul vs. Obama), and which canidate is more favored on /.

Although it started from a thread about the power of the /. community to influence the larger community, the degree (180 IMHO) that it's gets quickly off topic is very fustrating to me. It's a story about the RIAA, not the place to talk about Paul vs. Obama unless we are talking about what they might do Re: the RIAA.

In the last 12 hours several of my Gmail accounts have had email bounced back from HOTMAIL. It could be related to the IP address of my ISP (Verizon FIOS), but it seems odd.

Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 12): 550 SC-001 Mail rejected by Windows Live Hotmail for policy reasons. Reasons for rejection may be related to content with spam-like characteristics or IP/domain reputation problems. If you are not an email/network admin please contact your E-mail/Internet Service Provider for help. Email/network admins, please visit http://postmaster.live.com for email delivery information and support

I'm at JFK airport using an AT&T 2000i public terminal and it wouldn't let me access the discussion within /. because of the "content."

This is a post about Mr. Boies Esq. First things first. He is a better lawyer then I am; I'm NOT a lawyer. He is supposed to be high priced and excellent. I think only the high priced part is true. I want to consider two cases.

1) the Gore vs. Bush Fla election results
2) SCO legal suit

In the Gore vs. Bush issue, I think Boies clearly mis-stepped. He allowed his client to fight the certification of the election. The alternative would have been to allow it to be certified and the to contest the election itself. This would have allowed FLA to enter the "safe harbor" preventing Congress from interfering in their "results." It also would let them focus on the main point. From what I read in the Supreme Court decision they would have had a good case in contesting the election itself.

In the SCO case it seems that he didn't really look into the technical merits of his clients case. Of course the court is still yet to make all of its final rulings, but at least today, that is the way the wind is blowing. In the SCO case it seems to me SCO would have been better off first suing NOVEL for the copyrights and if they won that, then perhaps taking on some of these other cases.