crumley Over the years you have made it clear that you can't stand Bobby Knight. Please do me a favor and refrain from writing an obituary for him.

OK. It's a promise. But I'm still writing about him when he hires on at a TV network. And now you owe me a favor.

Just let me know what you need. I'll mark down that I owe you one. Maybe if you ever need a quick calculation or two, I could do it.

And don't let anyone say that you don't give in to unreasonable reader's demands.

Anyway, as soon as I heard the news that Knight had retired, I knew this column was coming. You made your case fairly well, but it is pretty much the same case that you made before, and I wasn't looking forward to reading it. Like half the other commenters here, I like to think that your write this column solely for my amusement. I mean that why the internet was invented, right? To amuse me.

To go along with the demographics that others have mentioned, Silicon Valley seems to be very much part of the establishment these days. Computer tech is no longer outside of the world of big business, it is part of that world. And Hillary is the establishment, business-friendly Democrat.

I think that I am going to give to my kids, so that they can save it to pay for their chunk of the natinal debt.

I am not a country music fan, but how would curling hurt Toby Keith's appeal? As other's have said, to people in certain areas of the country curling is a very accessible sport. Sort of like a more interesting version of bowling. My guess is that many country music fans bowl, and probably a fair number curl where curling is popular.

Not surprisingly Santorum (I can hardly type his name without giggling) needs to brush up on his history. He neglects to mention Woodrow Wilson and FDR, Democratic Presidents who were likely the two most important Presidents of the first half of the twentieth century. Both of them won landslides that contained states from all regions of the US.

This is a nitpick, but Samba is software. Samba is an open source implementation of Microsoft's SMB (later CIFS) network protocol.

I understand your reasons, but I still think that it is a bad call.

I think that Anonymous post are less likely to be trolls

than named people around here, but that may just say more about which sorts of letters threads I read than anything else.

If the problem really is people going Anonymous who were previously named posters, I don't think that this will help. Those people will just setup new accounts. I hope that you have in-place or are looking into IP based bans.

Anyway, I really hope that your tech people are talking to people at other sites that already have dealt with many of these issues. It really seems like you are slowly repeating the errors that many sites that many sites went through almost a decade ago.

Not surprisingly, the cost benefits situation seems to be a little dicier in Minnesota:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/environment/2008-02-25-plug-in-hybrids-pollution_N.htm

So the NRDC and MPCA studies both highlight the fact that particularly in states that use a lot of coal for power, the emission benefits for plug-in hybrids may not pan out. Of course, with the US's supply of coal much stronger that the oil supply, we may be forced into more reliance on coal whether p;lug-ins catch on or not.

I think that the links gots muddled. The "Theory of Interstellar Trade" paper itslef seems to be at http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf .

Andrew,

I think that you miss an important aspect of the William Proxmire reference. Proxmire (who I otherwise admired) was generally believed to be against NASA in general. Larry Niven has a fun story that plays on that idea - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_William_Proxmire .