Free Republic

Linux can't be understood in terms of hierarchy. Neither can the Internet. That's because both are examples of heterarchy at work. Flatland, an 1880 novella by Edwin A. Abbott, is about a world with just two dimensions, inhabited by lines and polygons. Trouble starts when a sphere shows up. For business, the same kind of trouble started when Linux and the Internet showed up in the mid-1990s. No matter how useful Linux and the Internet prove to be, business still has trouble getting its head around a virtual world composed of end points that are all autonomous, self-empowered and at...

When he was new in "blue," Robert Owens was the scourge of East Los Angeles junkies, racking up record-breaking numbers of heroin arrests. But even then, the young Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy wondered if all the collars and the time and resources it took to make them were making any difference. Those doubts only grew during the rest of his 38 years in law enforcement, including his 22 years as police chief in gritty Oxnard, Calif. Today, at 74, Owens is an outspoken proponent of ending America's drug war, which has been waged for nearly four decades at an...

My "You've got mail" sign next to the my comments box has been lit up for two days straight! But I've had no mail! Sure it makes me feel good as if I've gotten mail, but I haven't. Consequently I just have to keep checking it because otherwise I would never know if I got freepmailed! Is anyone else having this problem?