Slashdot

We made it. It's election day. Tomorrow we'll know. So for today's election discussion story, I'm throwing it wide open: let's discuss the election itself. Who are your picks and why. And also what about your actual experience voting today? Did Diebold eat your vote or did everything go off without flaw?

There is no shortage of comments about us selling out or running advertisements as stories. As you might expect there is no shortage of mail with the same theme. What I enjoy most about them is all the different corporate entities and sometimes political parties, that we are supposedly working for. If even half of them were true, I would have a stack of W-2s as long as my arm every year for the tax man. The truth of the matter is, nobody here sits in their Microsoft smart chair, talking on their minion iPhone, while playing in the Google money pool. (If someone knows how to get into the Google money pool, please send me a mail.) Conspiracy theories have been around as long as man, so I guess it should come as no surprise that Slashdot has a few of it's own. Read below to find out who is pulling our strings.

Apple is innovating?

They take technology that exists in lots of other places, and put it in a prettier package. OSX is nice, but it's BSD with pretty graphics.

The iPhone is nice, but it's a cleaned up version of the Nokia E70 (see: http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone)

Apple is known NOT to listen to their customers. They listen to Steve Jobs (and for their benefit, I might add).

Honestly, Microsoft has been around the block on these types of things before, and while Google and Apple are big threats, I don't consider Microsoft a 'stupid' company by any means -- I feel they will have a period of crap (oh wait, Vista...), reorganize and come back stronger.

And in the end it's better for us all if they do. Although if MS ever put out an OS that is better than Linux on security, and better than OSX on ease of use and prettiness -- Slashdotters would still decry it. So I guess on this site, it's lose lose for them. But their bank accounts are still rather full.

mytrip brings us a story from news.com about an FBI operation in which agents posted hyperlinks which advertised child pornography, recorded the IP addresses of people who clicked the links, and then tracked them down and raided their homes. The article contains a fairly detailed description of how the operation progressed, and it raises questions about the legality and reliability of getting people to click "unlawful" hyperlinks. Quoting: "With the logs revealing those allegedly incriminating IP addresses in hand, the FBI sent administrative subpoenas to the relevant Internet service provider to learn the identity of the person whose name was on the account--and then obtained search warrants for dawn raids. The search warrants authorized FBI agents to seize and remove any "computer-related" equipment, utility bills, telephone bills, any "addressed correspondence" sent through the U.S. mail, video gear, camera equipment, checkbooks, bank statements, and credit card statements. While it might seem that merely clicking on a link wouldn't be enough to justify a search warrant, courts have ruled otherwise. On March 6, U.S. District Judge Roger Hunt in Nevada agreed with a magistrate judge that the hyperlink-sting operation constituted sufficient probable cause to justify giving the FBI its search warrant."

theodp writes "A reexam initiated by Lord of the Rings motion capture performer Peter Calveley's do-it-yourself legal effort has prompted the USPTO to reject 21 of the 26 Amazon 1-Click Patent claims. A USPTO Examiner found a 1995 Newsweek article on Digicash submitted by Calveley sufficient to quash a number of the claims, while many others were rejected in light of an e-shopping patent flagged by Calveley. Interestingly, additional claims were rejected by the Examiner in light of a TV remote control patent that was deemed to be unsuitable 1-Click prior art (for not being specific to the Web) in a contest run by the Tim O'Reilly and Jeff Bezos-bankrolled BountyQuest (Amazon last year testified to Congress that the contest failed to find prior art for Bezos' patent). Unfortunately, the action is non-final, so Amazon's high-priced law firm will get another chance to crush Calveley's PayPal-financed effort."

Vicissidude sends us to Wired for a look at a fruit-harvesting robot being developed in California. Its development has been funded entirely by agricultural associations, concerned by the uncertainty surrounding migrant immigrant labor. Quoting: "As if the debate over immigration and guest worker programs wasn't complicated enough, now a couple of robots are rolling into the middle of it. Vision Robotics, a San Diego company, is working on a pair of robots that would trundle through orchards plucking oranges, apples or other fruit from the trees. In a few years, troops of these machines could perform the tedious and labor-intensive task of fruit picking that currently employs thousands of migrant workers each season."

LABarr writes "AP and CNN are carrying a story that has forced scientists to re-evaluate the longevity of mammals. A bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt over a century ago. 'Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3½-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale's age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old. The bomb lance fragment, lodged in a bone between the whale's neck and shoulder blade, was likely manufactured in New Bedford, on the southeast coast of Massachusetts, a major whaling center at that time. It was probably shot at the whale from a heavy shoulder gun around 1890.' "