The blog Modern Sourcery reports that Google Books and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), comprising the Big Ten and the University of Chicago, have announced an agreement with Google to digitize works from its libraries a

The 9/11 conspiracy theorists use all manner of phony logic to arrive at their loony conclusions. They suppose solutions that intentionally violate the principle of simplicity (Occam's Razor) and numerous instances of unknown cause and effect.

Who flew the planes? If it was all done by remote, who
pointed the mouse? Did the same person install and engage the remote-control mechanism? What about the supposed explosives?

I'm awake because I had chocolate on my ice cream. It sucks not to be a kid any more.

I'm cleaning up my friends & foes on Slashdot, an activity I discerned to carry a marginally higher priority than filing my toenails or practicing my penmanship.

If you would like to nominate (or accuse) some user of astroturfing, reply here.

If you are here because you were accused unfairly, feel free to post your defense here, as well.

Some guidelines:

The Astroturf Alert is intended to be a signal to Slashdot readers that a user has been seen posting what looks like astroturf.

Astroturfing is the process of laying down a false appearance of "grass roots" support for something.

Unethical companies have used the practice to pollute Usenet, message boards, and anywhere else they can pretend to be a casual user who is a fan of the Company's products.

To Microsoft, security is about features. A builtin "firewall", VPN, encryption of this or that, trusted something or other. Applets and wizards.

I regularly clean the keyboards of computers that come to me for various fixes. I started doing it because some keyboards are so foul that I don't want to touch them without some kind of powerful cleaning agent nearby.

Wall Street increasingly runs on Linux. Maybe the irony of Microsoft selling antivirus software will drive that trend to continue. What's that? You don't see the irony in Microsoft selling antivirus software?

When Al Gore, Jr. got to Congress in 1976, the Internet was already experiencing exponential growth. People were discovering the benefits of connecting computers together, much the way their forebears discovered that yes, they could find a use for a telephone in their home after all.