Foolproof Ballot for Palm Beach County Yep! This will solve all the voting problems in Palm Beach. Just ask the DNC!

The First Thanksgiving: (The Pilgrims Missed It) On April 30th four centuries ago, our ancestors, led by Don Juan de Oñate, reached the banks of El Rio Bravo (Rio Grande). The first recorded act of thanksgiving by colonizing Europeans on this continent occurred on that April day in 1598 in Nuevo Mexico, about 25 miles south of what is now El Paso, Texas. After having begun their northward trek in March of that same year, the entire caravan was gathered at this point. The 400 person expedition included soldiers, families, servants, personal belongings, and livestock . . . virtually a living village. Two thirds of the colonizers were from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain, Portugal, and the Canary Islands). There was even one Greek and a man from Flanders! The rest were Mexican Indians and mestizos (mixed bloods).

EarthWeb.com Phil Zimmermann: Programmer as Celebrity Meet Phil Zimmermann, creator of the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption suite and one of the world's best-known cryptographers.. Zimmermann is probably the world's best-known cryptographer. He created the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption suite in 1991. Since then, it has come to dominate the market for programming protection of online confidentiality. PGP has been heralded for its role in protecting numerous political dissidents around the world, and earned Zimmermann the prestigious Norbert Wiener Award for responsible use of technology in 1996, as well as the 1995 Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, and a 1998 Lifetime Achievement Award from Secure Computing Magazine, along with at least a dozen other distinctions. It also brought him into highly public patent disputes with RSA Data Security Inc., and a nightmarish multi-year criminal investigation by the United States government.

U.S. Constitution in hypertext We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Presidential Election Law JURIST: The Legal Education Network presents this Guide as a public resource for voters, citizens, and observers of the US electoral process.

Fact Sheet-By One Vote! What difference is my one vote going to make?

Privacy Weblog It's a way to keep people informed about privacy issues. It's also a way for us - the ConsentCache team - to keep track of all the articles we like to point people to!

BookNotes News No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow. Alice Walker

Speech without AccountabilityNew software makes it nearly impossible to remove illegal material from the Web--or to find out who put it there.Scientific American: October 2000

GEEK PRIDE FESTIVAL A 2 Day Celebration of the Geek Way of Life. Speakers, Quake, Music, Bouncy room, Movies, Nerf Battles for real this time, screeching violins, and a whole lot more!

BYTE Column - What The Heck Is SOAP, Anyway?, David S. Platt Given the heterogeneity of the Internet environment, our new programming strategy needs to separate the representation of the function call from the protocol used to transport the call from one box to another. For encoding this information, we'll have to find the lowest common denominator that everyone on the Internet supports. As international air-traffic control uses English (even in France), the lowest common denominator for data encoding on the Internet is XML, and this is what we'll use for representing our function calls.

FEED | RE: Ian Clarke talking about FREENET At first, the world at large ignored the Internet, missed its significance, scoffed, then jumped in with both feet, thinking it was a bandwagon, asked the wrong questions about how to make money with it, got too excited when it seemed to be something it wasn't, got too depressed when it turned out to be what it is. Mirrored fractal nets within nets: the collective intelligence of the human race unfolding in real time -- and for the first time, on its own terms. The Internet routes around obstacles; the bigger the obstacle, the more joyous the detour. The humorless power of the state, the iron-fisted control demanded by the corporation, the sexless desire insinuated by broadcast advertising -- all are falling to networked imagination.

National Fire News - Large Wildland Fires If you live in the west and smell smoke, this site will show you why. It will also tell how you can help.

Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music Microsoft: "During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play Fur Elise or It's a Small, Small World seemingly at random...This is a design feature..."

Claudia Schiffer is my Pilot!The supermodel's special-edition Palm PDA inspires aisles full of celebrity gadgets at K-mart.By Janelle Brown

I Bet You Thought The Record Companies Had It Bad? Taking a cue from music-bootlegging teenagers, sewing enthusiasts have discovered that they too can steal copyrighted material over the Internet, thanks to anonymous file-sharing techniques. Like the record industry, the sewing world has been unable to come up with any practical alternative to innovative file-swapping communities that proliferate online. Some of the same entertainment conglomerates whose music divisions are fighting Napster--such as Time Warner--are also feeling the pinch from the pattern-swapping.

IBM offers free tool for writing Linux software The tool, called "Sash Weblications," allows Web developers who don't have extensive programming experience to write software that runs on the increasingly popular Linux operating system. Big Blue has taken a keen interest in Linux in recent months. The company is attempting to position itself as a leader in the Linux market, should it develop into a sizable business, by offering the operating system on all of its computer systems. Last month, IBM sweetened pricing for Linux on its mainframe systems in an effort to remove some of the obstacles of running the operating system on large computers.

BetaNews - Stephen King Novel Downloads Break Records Internet distribution of The Plant, the new novel by Stephen King, topped 100,000 completed downloads in its first two days of online sales, Conxion, the Internet operator handling the e-book, announced. The download, the firm said, was a record for King's work, and a respectable figure for the digital delivery of books. Antonio Salerno, Conxion's CEO, said that King has become a pioneering author in digitally delivering his books directly to readers.

Fortune 2000 Retirement Guide: Introduction: Retire Rich None of it makes sense--the frantic saving, those grueling 18-hour workdays--without keeping the fantasy firmly in mind. The empty beach, soft as talcum under your toes. The breathtaking mountain retreat that's actually home, not a two-week hideaway. Retirement, on your terms. Yes, that's the goal. The task, however, is getting there in one piece.

Hey PDA! There's a penguin nipping at your ankles! I just bought a Handspring Visor Deluxe for my wife and while we're generally happy with it the screen takes some getting used to. That's hardware. This link points to an article concerning attempts to put Linux on Windows CE PDAs.

NASA Historical Archive for Manned Missions Want to know the what and why of the US space program? This NASA site has a wealth of information.

Edgar Governo, Historian of Things That Never Were A collection links to (mostly) other sites containing alternate timelines of fictional history. You might think that was a limited field, but he's collected 188 examples by now. Dune, Heinlein, Asimov, H2G2, Star Trek, Indiana Jones, Highlander, Wing Commander, anime…the range is amazing

Add a little spice to your life Gernot Katzer's Spice Pages will tell you everything you evr wanted to know (and maybe didn't want to know) about spices from around the world.

Applause for IE's Cookie Catcher "Microsoft has started an important correction ... (in) its decision to make its Web browser stop and ask users before reporting data about them," said Richard Smith, a prominent security expert who has exposed several Internet privacy bugs.

Can light travel faster than light? For weeks, scientific circles have been buzzing about an experiment that pulsed light through a special chamber so fast that it left the apparatus before it fully entered it. The answer is no, light can't travel faster than light. It's a matter of interpretation of the theory of relativity. In other words, it's all relative. &;^)

Stephen King to post book on Web, sell it directly, bypassing publishers Stephen King plans to begin an experiment in direct publishing Monday by posting the first installment of a new novel online and asking readers to pay through the honor system. Installment one of "The Plant" will be posted on King's Web site on July 24 and installment two on Aug. 21. Part three will appear in September if "pay-through" equals or exceeds 75 percent, according to a message on his Web site dated July 11. Readers will be asked to send King a check or money order for $1 per installment in a direct transaction that King describes as a way to thumb your nose at the publishing industry.

The Constitution of the United States The work of many minds, the Constitution stands as a model of cooperative statesmanship and the art of compromise.

Why Encrypt Your Email? Like a mile-long drift net that snatches up dolphins, corpses and fifty-five gallon drums of toxic waste along with tuna, the FBI’s new "data sniffer" equipment, Carnivore, doesn’t care whose email it snags and scrutinizes. The FBI demonstrated the technology weeks ago, which can examine millions of email messages in a short period of time, but admitted that it was in use for over a year before being publicly acknowledged."