] "The Supreme Court struggled Tuesday over the
] constitutionality of a California sentencing law that put
] a man who shoplifted children's videocassettes in
] prison until 2046 and gave another man a life sentence
] for taking three golf clubs. Their sentences are due to
] California's three-strikes-you're-out law,
] which has been challenged as cruel and unusual
] punishment. The law requires tough sentences for repeat
] offenders."

Justices debate three-strikes law

"The fact that we're having this discussion at all is a symptom of the polarizing effect that Bush and his top dogs have had on the United States since assuming office and even more so in the hard-right free-for-all that followed the Sept. 11 attacks."

Ted Rall IS the mainstream voice of American communism, and as with all political extremes, unsubstantiated paranoid conspiracy theories are par for the course on ANY day, regardless of any "polarizing effect" offered by the current environment. The radical left is almost indistinguishable from the radical right, especially in this regard.

Having said that, I *LOVE* paranoid conspiracy theories, and this is a particularily GOOD one. A political link to the Ron Brown plane crash! A missing black box! This is the stuff that the Art Bell show is made of! So, I heartily recommend this one. Imagine if its true! What can we expect come 2004? Oh, the drama!

Yahoo! News - THE (POSSIBLE) ASSASSINATION OF PAUL WELLSTONE

I have an answer: movie buffs. "

Thank you Captain Obvious. Why the hell is it that Kevin Kelly gets published in the New York Times for pointing out something so plain that one wonders what Mr. Valenti was thinking when he said it. Is it because he is rich and famous, or is it simply because he bothered to write them? I think its the former more then that later.

I might ask Mr. Valenti if he owns a fork. And if so, if the company that made his fork has a patent on forks, and if not, why said company went to the expense of producing and distributing forks without having a patent to prevent competition.

Making My Own Music

Customers of Gabelli mutual funds lost an average of 44% of their portfolios last year, but Mario Gabelli made $47 million. He and many other big-name fund executives have yet to scale back their pay despite their dismal performances.
"

Mutual Fund Managers swimming in cash while your retirement plans squandered

"NEW YORK - Think formal education helps in business? Think again. Chief executives who went to graduate school don't seem to make any more money for their shareholders than those with no advanced degree. MBAs may actually do worse than those with no advanced degree, although they fare better than lawyers. "

Forbes.com: Keep Your CEO Out Of Grad School

"Astronomers have fashioned an Earth-sized virtual radio telescope that can distinguish celestial features 3,000 times smaller than the those observed by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The device, which uses atomic clocks and a custom supercomputer to link together radio dishes on three continents, is the most powerful radio observatory ever, according to scientists.
"The resolution achieved by this telescope is the equivalent of sitting in New York and being able to see the dimples on a golf ball in Los Angeles," astronomer Sheperd Doeleman said this week. "

I don't know why amateurs don't do this using C-band dishes and distributed computing.

CNN.com - New telescope as big as Earth itself - Oct. 2, 2002

Other tech markets across Europe have suffered steep declines as well: Italy's similarly named Nuovo Mercato and Paris' Nouveau Marche are each down 93 percent from their 2000 peaks. "

Yahoo! News - Germany Shuts Down High-Tech Market

"Roomba dancing robot vacuums and sweeps automatically -- even when you're asleep or out of the house."

Roomba Floor Vac Robot

Osama bin Laden targeted the heads of the Defense Department, State Department, CIA and FBI, and offered a $9 million bounty for the assassination of four top intelligence officers, a congressional investigator said on Wednesday.

In August 1999, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained information that bin Laden's organization had decided to target the top officials at the State and Defense departments and the CIA, said Eleanor Hill, staff director of the joint 9/11 inquiry of the House and Senate intelligence committees.

Yahoo! News - Bin Laden Targeted U.S. Defense, State, CIA Chiefs

The dossier is also expected to disclose that the Iraqi leader has reconstructed three plants to manufacture biological and chemical weapons, it said.

This is what the world has been waiting to see. It is interesting to note that the UK is releasing this information. Show me the information!

Yahoo! News - Saddam Hussein Trained Al Qaeda Fighters - Report