"HP is an acquisitive company. It used to be HP. Then it bought Apollo, Compaq, DEC, Tandem, Sequoia (and a slew of other companies) and now EDS. But EDS is a straight service play. EDS doesn't make hardware or software."

Ask any geek to tell you the story of Hewlett-Packard. In the days when it was run by engineers, it made printers you could drop off a cliff. Then a wicked witch named Carly Fiorina, fresh from sending Bell Labs to Hell, got hold of HP. She fired the engineers and went on the aforementioned acquisition spree. HP product quality declined to junk, but Carly breezed off with a "performance bonus" of $18 million, then was in due course tapped by the McCain campaign as an economic advisor.

Carly Fiorina advising on economics! This is like putting Jane Fonda in charge of the Department of Energy.

"Oh, PLEASE let there be more Republican screechers like Rich007 to explain how the "left" has hit a new in not understanding how outrageous the act of invading someone's privacy is!"

Don't worry. Here on the dark side, we note that the left now equates being a Republican governor with being a terrorist. The personal mail of lefty journalists will now be up for investigatory grabs. ALthough most of our diggings will be irrelevant accounts of threesomes and cocaine, I'm sure that we will come up with some choice political nuggets we can use for years to come.

"His suggestion is that we utilize technology to swing the other way, to what he calls a transparent society, where there is surveillance, but the data generated by that surveillance is open to the public. Especially important would be public surveillance of government institutions. This is to encourage accountability for actions, arguing that privacy is overused to cover up items."

Brin's idea of eliminating privacy for everybody is certainly thought-provoking, but the flaw I see is that we would have no assurance that the cameras in boardrooms and the Pentagon would not be feeding us spoofed streams. Though anybody could in theory spoof his spy-camera stream, the large institutions we are aiming this policy at have more technological resources to cover their tracks, and we would end up back where we started: transparency for the little guy, concealment at the top.

@Jkp1000

"You mean "terrorists" like Greenpeace? Catholic Workers Groups? PETA? MoveOn.org? "

I don't know who 'Catholic workers groups' are, but I would certainly love to see the personal correspondence of PETA, Greenpeace and MoveOn splattered all over the Net. I want to know where their safe houses are so we can start terrorizing them right back. I want to know where they bank so we can loot their assets before they burn another biology researcher's home.

You wanted war, so you're getting it.

"Why does McCain consistently vote against renewable energy, even though he comes from a state that has enough solar energy to power the entire country, a state rich in renewable-power entrepreneurs? Other than the fact that conservatives have a long track record of opposing renewable energy, McCain is technologically out of touch."

...is that McCain has been voting against subsidies and special tax treatment for small-source energy. This is not a position "against" small energy sources, but for equal treatment of energy sources.

What the energy industry needs from government is not subsidies. We've just printed $10 brazillion this week to buy all those junk financial derivatives back from speculators, so there's no money left to subsidize anything else. Instead, we need a regulatory system that promotes energy production of all kinds instead of inhibiting it. We need to strip NIMBYs and Luddites of their legal standing to file suits against energy projects that meet standardized specifications.

We regulate aircraft this way, and we have the safest air transportation system in the world. Let's apply the same treatment to nuclear reactors and every other energy source.

"Get over it, Talbot: you are preaching to the converted. Write something worthwhile, this non-stop coverage of Sarah Palin isn't doing anything."

Every day this goes on sucks attention from your own candidate. Let's dig deep for the truth about that unpaid parking ticket back in high school.

"If you want Green Party policies, vote for the Green Party candidates."

The anti-energy Democrats may long for a pre-industrial Eden, but why stop there? The Green Party is pulling for the New Stone Age. After all, caves don't get foreclosed on, and if the Haitians can learn to live on mud, then so can we.

I'm in Rick Renzi's district in northern Arizona. While Kirkpatrick spouts a few gauzy generalizations about promoting small-source energy, Sydney Hay gets specific about an Arizona-friendly agenda of drilling, digging, and going nuclear. Health care? Kirkpatrick's formula is to socialize everything, an approach which historically gas been as popular in this state as smallpox. Hay proposes putting health care decisions in the hands of the consumer. Let's see which set of ideas goes over in Goldwater country.