One of the cornerstones of the Internet is making information available to whomever wants it for low or no cost. Case in point, the TCP/IP stack within the operating system you're now running to read this post was probably originally posted to the Internet better than twenty years ago under the BSD license. In fact, if you dig around inside the "About.." panes of Windows chances are you'll find that little block of text (at least, everything up to Windows 2000 had it, it's been a couple of years). The fan cultures that many of us partake of grew …

During the last presidential election, numerous dirty tricks were played in the weeks and months prior to votes being cast by anyone, such as absentee balllots not making it into the mail, voters being forced to wait so long that they couldn't cast their votes (because they had families to take care of or work to attend to), and unusual investigations were carried out that scared away potential voters. Many voters were wrongfully turned away at the polls in some areas. If what happened at Virginia Tech not too long ago is any indication, the political black ops are just …

It seems that the bird flu, which has a disproportionate number of people scrambling for grey market antibiotics and sterile facemasks (a rant that you can be sure I've been prepping for a while) is making financial and networking industry high ups wonder what would happen to the Net in the event of a real outbreak. Their reasoning seems simple enough: In the event of an outbreak of the avian flu that posed a serious threat to people in the US, many thousands would want to work from home to minimise their chances of being infected. However, it is also …

With regard to the bill yesterday that either could or could not have forced webloggers to register as lobbyists inside the beltway, the bill didn't pass.

At this time, there is a bill before Congress that will change how grassroots lobbyists are treated, namely, requiring them to register on a quarterly basis as lobbyists inside the beltway. This press release has been picked up all over the Net - just about every cause you can think of that would ask people to write in to push for things to go one way or another has noticed this bill. So many have that I had a hell of a time finding the actual text of the bill in question at the Library of Congress. Well, here's the gotcha …

A couple of weeks ago a story hit the newswires from a group called PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility), who said that park rangers at the Grand Canyon are forbidden from discussing scientific theories of the origins of the Grand Canyon, and are forbidden from discussing how old it is to keep from offending Creationists who come to visit. There's just one thing about this story: It's jetwash.

It seems that nobody called the National Park Service or the Grand Canyon National Park office to verify this story, myself included. A couple of national park rangers, however, stepped up …