...in the article is that the ISPs in the US have long provided much much better dial-up service than in most other countries.

In Finland the lousy dial-up access and the relatively high cost of local calls (which went up like a rocket once Internet usage became popular) have fueled the switch to DSL and cable. You don't have to surf much for it to be less expensive to pay 20 euros/month for a very basic (and slow) ADSL or cable package.

I was a bit disappointed that Finland was mentioned in the second paragraph; true we have "open access" rules for "the last mile" (and it is finally starting to kick in - the telco's have not been taking it lying down) but our "Broadband policy" is a total joke compared to f.ex. Sweden. Reliance on market forces, calling 256/128 connections "broadband" and no strategy whatsoever for moving away from the copperwires of the telephone net.

When it comes to rural areas things are getting better slowly, and mostly through local initiatives. Either community built and own nets or local municipalities contracting with companies to upgrade phone-lines and offer all residents ADSL at a reasonable cost. Neither kind of effort has received any mentionable support at a national level.

Do you seriously mean to imply that any covert CIA personnel that Ames might even theoretically have known about, or could have deduced was covert, are to be considered blown to the world since then?

That's just about the most mindbogglingly weird defense of Novak's interlocutors.

... is what you should have called this stupid section if you had to have it at all. That would have been honest, after all you write "Sometimes those e-mails turned into stories, but often the item would be small enough that it wouldn't merit its own feature at Salon, either. Still, the staff comments -- hilarious, angry, shocked, pleased -- would zing back and forth by e-mail chain. Without realizing it, we'd begun our own internal blog," - fine, if your blog-envy is so bad you absolutely need another bloggy feature here, go for it*. Calling it a "women's blog" is just insulting.

Salon of all places should have more sense than to divide items along some outdated gender-lines. You have been the example I have pointed people to to show them that all of the US isn't sliding into some kind of mid-19th century paranoia.

If you had only called it "The fluff room" or "Editors waste time too" I could have been able to still cling to that hope.

It is one thing to proclaim that lipstick isn't anathema to feminism, quite another to equate women with fluff.

(*But a little perspective on things please: funny, weird, light-weight stuff is ok, as long as it doesn't drain resources from your *real* jobs - publishing high quality journalism.)

Or did I misread Wolfy's (I presume) note? I think it said 23 (or 21?)UTC to 15 UTC - that was at least three hours ago.

Oh, and still no notice on the Salon mainpage. Not that anyone read THAT anymore...

Hah - barely had time to type that and I see it should be up - must go flush my cache...

... to say that it *seems* to be up, at the adress Mary Beth gave on the status page, but I can't log in. Guess I must fo flush some cookies too.

Couldn't get whatever was answering at the tabletalk2.salon.com adress to log me in. Luckily the regular adress works just fine now.