Howard Owens

I am with Haspel on this one -- you admire a baseball player (or scorn him) for what he does on the field, not in the club house. Eighty percent of the stiffs in the press box butcher more sentences than Dick Stuart did ground balls, so who cares if the peckerwoods of the C section don't like Barry Bonds? It's not like they appreciate excellance in their own craft, so why should we expect them to recognize it in sport? (Halbertsam's arrogant pronouncements not withstanding.)

A few days ago, I indulged my inner nerd and sprung for a Treo from Handspring. It's a phone, PDA, web browser and e-mailer all in one. I can do it all and I feel empowered. When I first took it out of the box, I was feeling a little guilty. It is a true luxury, or so it seemed, so I had a sprite of buyers' remorse. In just a couple of days, though, I've decided it's the best gadget I've gotten since I bought my first Mac in 1985. Now, I can't imagine life without it.

A year ago, a friend gave me a Palm VII, which was fun to play around with, but carrying both a phone and a PDA was a bit awkward. After about eight months, I started leaving the Palm in my briefcase and was using it less and less. Using it to access the web and e-mail was also cool, but expensive, so that went by the wayside. Every since I got that VII though, I've been jonesing for a Treo. I could see the real utility of having it all in one and getting internet access wrapped into my existing PCS bill. So far, my visualization of what it would be like to have a Treo and what it actually means to have a Treo are in synch.

And with this new toy (flip it open, put it on speaker phone and pretend you've got a communicator zinging messages to the Enterprise -- of course, this is more like a tricorder and communicator all in one), I move one step closer to alphageekdom. Ever since my trip to Knoxville, I've aspired to be more like Glenn. Franxman has a Blackberry, but the Treo is in the same ballpark. Now all I need is an office with three large white boards scribbled full of UML diagrams and class definitions.

P.S.: Yes, I know Kirk never said, "Beam me up, Scotty."

Normally, teams in last place don't make big deals to acquire veterans before the July trade deadline. Usually, that's an exercise reserved for contenders.

Enter the 2003 San Diego Padres (25-52). The Padres open Petco Park next year and want to build some momentum (they say) heading into 2004. Hence, the talk that the Padres will try to acquire somebody who can help them win this year.

It won't be enough to have Phil Nevin return in July or August. The Padres need some pop in the lineup.

The question is, where will it go and who will it be.

For a longtime the rumor was that Kevin Towers would trade for Miguel Tejada. Tejada, last year's AL MVP, could be an important addition to the team, but recently Towers is rumored to have taken less interest in Tejada. After seeing Khalil Greene (the Padress AAA franchise), Towers doesn't want to acquire a shortstop who will block Green's path to the major leagues. Tejada out, Luis Castillo in.

I'm even less thrilled about the possible acquistion of Castillo than Tejada.

Even though the Padres have more money to play with (thanks to insurance payments on Nevin, Trevor Hoffman and Randy Myers, and the move into a new stadium next year), they are still not a large market team, and they shouldn't spend like one. Few big stars produce to the level of their free agent contracts (which is the kind of money it would take to retain either Tejada or Castillo).

Over his career, Tejada has a career OBP of .326, a slugging percentage of .455 and OPS of .781. These are not great numbers. Good for an SS, but as a former MVP, the market will give Tejada more than he's worth, if you believe worth is measured in wins and not fan appeal or past glories. His strikeout to base on balls ratio is an abyssmal 254/508. He's a free swinger, which is one reason the Oakland A's are willing to let him go. Giving Billy Beane any sort of value for Tejada in a trade would be a gift, and the Padres are in no position to hand away young talent. He's averaged about 20 eras per season and already has 13 this year.

Tejada would not be a good fit for the Padres, so what about Castillo?

Castillo currently has an OPS of .762, with a career OPS of .715. Of course, you might counter, Castillo is a spark plug. He gets on base, wrecks havoc, steals bases. First, SBs are that important in creating runs. Second, even though Castillo has slightly better than acceptable stolen base rates (72 percent), this year he's hovering around 60 percent. That means he's cost his team more runs than he's creating.

But even if he were able to steal bases at a 70 percent plus rate for the Padres, he's likely to demand a high salary, and SBs aren't worth overpaying for. You might ask, then, what are the Padres' alternative?

How about Mark Loretta?

Look at Lorretta's current stats:

Now here's Castillo's numbers:

So far this year, Loretta's OPS is .815 compared to Castillo's less impressive .762. When hitting in the number 1 spot, Castillo's OPS is a horrible .523, while Loretta is at a not great but better .688.

Castillo is more of a free swinger, having hacked at twice as many first pitches as Loretta so far this year, with Loretta having an impressive OPS of 1.731 when he does chase the first toss. Loretta gets on base half the time when he swings at the first pitch, Castillo has an OBP of .387. That's not bad, but easier on pitchers by swinging at so many first pitches. Meanwhile, when he's on the verge of getting into a good hitters count (1-0), Castillo has put the ball in play 42 times this season and has an OBP of only .238, whereas Loretta is 11/.455.

In other words, Loretta is a much more efficient hitter, making the most of his opportunities and only bringing the bat around when he has a pitch to hit.

(I've gone into detail on this season, but the numbers don't vary much looking at the last three seasons. Castillo's improve slightly, and Loretta's decline slightly, but the changes are not large enough to change the basic analysis.)

If you can afford to pay for speed, Castillo might be a good acquistion, but when you're the Padres, Loretta is a much better bargain. He doesn't hit for power, so he doesn't get the respect he should (especially among fantasy players), but he creates runs, and it takes runs to win games. Yeah, I know the Padres aren't winning many games these days, but put Loretta in a more experienced line up (like they'll have next year and the year after), and his value goes up, but it's not likely his salary ever will -- at least not as much as Castillo's and Tejada's.

One last question: What about acquiring Castillo and moving Loretta to short. Well, defensively, Ramon Vazquez might be better than Loretta, but offense is the most important consideration. So far, Vazquez can't match Loretta. Vazquez has an OPS of .717. He's showing slightly better plate discipline than Castillo, but he's not delivering the results. So moving Loretta is an option, but not neccessarily a good one, especially if you want to make room for Green some time next season.

If the Padres want to improve, I think the one place they can do it is center field. As much as I love Mark Kotsay personally, he's the weakest link on the team right now. With a career .338 OBP and anemic numbers on 1-0 and 2-1 counts, Kotsay isn't an efficient hitter.

Who might the Padres acquire? How about Carlos Beltran? The potential free agent is putting together his best year yet with a .412 OBP and .920 OPS. The price for Beltran will be high, both in dollars ($8 to $11 plus per season) and prospects the Padres would have to surrender, but he's also a player would could anchor the Padres outfield for the next 10 years. Ken Griffey might be an attractive short term fix, but only if Beltran's price is too high or the Royals decide he's untouchable (not likely).

I think this is an attracive line up for the Padres, which could be in place by mid July:

1. Ramon Vazquez, SS
2. Mark Loretta, 2B
3. Carlos Beltran, CF
4. Ryan Klesko, 1B
5. Phil Nevin, LF
6. Xavier Nady, RF
7. Sean Burroughs, 3B
8. Gary Bennett, C

Swap in Griffey instead of Beltran, and it's still impressive. I might switch Loretta and Burroughs in the order, but otherwise I think it makes a lot of sense, if the Padres can acquire one of these CFs.

The main point, however, is please, Mr. Towers, don't waste our money on Tejada or Castillo.

I missed the news about The Sporting News laying off its baseball correspondents.

I grew up with TSN.

If I had heard the news sooner, I might have written something like this:

If you're a sports fan, say, 32 or older, I don't need to tell you what The Sporting News used to mean. It was our sports magazine. Sports Illustrated had all those literary stories about dog fighting and sumo wrestling and stuff like that. Inside Sports and Sport magazine were often beautifully written too, but as a kid who cared about that? Plus, they came out only once a month, and they would have NFL Previews in May and stories with odd headlines like "Why Kurt Rambis is better than Magic Johnson."

The Sporting News was for us. For real sports fans. It was based in St. Louis, and it had real stuff in it. There was no place else to get stuff then. Every week, The Sporting News gave us rumors, statistics, opinions, interviews, analysis and those great team-by-team notes (each team's notes had a wonderfully goofy headline related to the team nickname. I seem to recall the Cleveland Indians notes were called "Smoke Signals.").

You didn't read The Sporting News cover-to-cover. No, you wildly flipped pages to find out what was happening to your teams. Then you flipped to the league reports to see if there were any good trade rumors. Then you flipped to your favorite columnists to see what they were talking about. Then, only then, did you read the rest.

Exactly.

Of course, there was also Baseball Digest. I haven't seen a copy in years, but I guess it's still in business, though I don't see how -- it's never on any newsstands I frequent.

Most of this weekend has spent spent in gin joints and smoke shops with a fellow escapee of the a now defunct saltmine in El Cajon, Calif. I'll transition soon to a pipe, a bottle and my half-read copy of Moneyball. If you haven't read Moneyball yet, get it. Or at least read Matt's zippy little piece on how one mad stathead pissed off the establishment.

In a previous post on the four-man rotation, I wondered if there are more arm injuries today than in the past. This Baseball Prospectus piece doesn't address that issue, but it makes a compelling case that pitchers must work harder each inning than they did 20 or 30 years ago.

If a pitcher never gets an easy out, and needs to bear down on every pitch, and throw more breaking pitches, that could explain why there are more injuries (if there are more -- and I would expect there to be more, if this is truly the case).

I'm not sure, though, if these stats make the idea of a four-man rotation a bad idea. The recovery time of throwing 120 pitches in 7 innings should be about the same as throwing 120 pitches in nine innings, except, of course, you've had to throw 120 higher-effort pitches today than 120 pitches 30 years ago.

All I asked for for my Birthday was Moneyball by Michael Lewis. Got it. As a bonus, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract.

Stephen Silver brings together two of my currently favorite topics -- the rise of neoconservatives and the rise of sabermetrics in this Blogcritics post. And I think he's right, sabermetric is likely to have a longer shelf life than neoconservatism ... Washington is just too mecurial, even though the neocons are just as right as the sabermetricists.

My birthday is tomorrow (42). My wife better have remembered the title of the book I asked for. I'm trying to run my Original Gold Coast League fantasy team like Billy Beane. I need to study up.

I told you, I told you, I told you -- Glenn Franxman is the ubergeek.

Tomorrow I'll be 42.

I always find it sad when bloggers feel the need to turn comments off, or rarely turn them on.

The reason blogwrights deep-six comments is abuse. I'm not popular enough to get abused regularly, but sometimes I do get tired of arguing with people. It's kind of a two-edge sword -- I like people to challenge my ideas and my logic, but I hate it when people misstate, restate and miss my points, or mangle things in a way that suits their own arguements rather than mine. It happens regularly. I usually go high and right and later regret my lack of civility. I'm tired of arguing with people. I have my opinions. You have yours. I'm starting to develop an idea that I will no longer try to defend my posts in comments. I will deal with facts only. But, of course, there will be times that I get too pissed off and I'll post something in my own comments that makes me look like a right-wing intolorant idiot, which is not how I see myself at all, but I'm sure many of you do ....

BTW: Did I mention that tomorrow's my birthday?

Well, my wife would never let me get a lapdance anyway, so why should I give a shit?

BTW: Did I mention that tomorrow's my birthday?

I was going to post more tonight, but Matt Welch and I got involved in this long IM conversation. Hell, it was so involved that I didn't have a chance to get up and mix another drink, and so long that I'm almost sober now. And it's almost my birthday. But at least Matt and I solved all of the world's problems. Too bad neither of us saved a transcript.

I just finished watching this past week's "This Week." George Stephanopoulos did an impressive piece on John Kerry, Democratic candidate for president, who also happens to have served in Vietnam (hat tip to James Taranto).

As a "decline to state" in California, I can vote in either the Republican or Democratic primaries.

Why should I vote in the GOP primary (as I did last time, voting for John McCain)? That won't even be a race. I would rather have some say in who the Democratic nominee is. And right now, I've got to say, John Kerry is my front runner. I believe he has the best grasp of our foreign affairs challenges, and that if he became president he would follow through on George Bush's policies in the war on terror. Kerry has the further advantage of being closer to my positions than GWB on domestic issues.

Kerry, unfortunately, is not likely to win the nomination. The Democrats are almost entirely given over to leftist ideologies and fantasies, which means Howard Dean is probably the presumptive nominee.

Stephanopoulos did a good job of profiling Kerry, though. I'm impressed with Stephanopoulos as a journalist. He asks good questions. He doesn't ask "gotcha" questions. He doesn't try to trap anybody. His questions are thoughtful and generally elicit thoughtful responses.

I first started watching "This Week" in the 1980s sometime. I watched it primarily for the roundtable. I watched it because I'm a huge fan of George Will. I watched it despite the presence of Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts. I watched it because David Brinkley was also a thoughtful interviewer, and he brought that same thoughtful moderation to conducting the roundtable.

In this week's "This Week," they paid tribute to Brinkley. The on-camera quotes from various newsmakers about Brinkley and the following roundtable discussion was all well and good. It was all a nice remembrance, as were the replays of his "last word" segments, but I thought the finest tribute of the show was Stephanopoulos' fine profile of Kerry. It was the kind of piece a real newsman like Brinkley could be proud of.

Stephanopoulos may lack Brinkley's journalistic pedigree, but that doesn't mean he isn't a first-rate journalist. Every week I am impressed with his fair and balanced approach to the news. I know a lot of conservatives hate Stephanopoulos, but I think that is all misplaced anger at his connection to Clinton. It has nothing really to do with his on-air conduct. Stephanopoulos deserves his post on "This Week," and the juxtaposition this week of his own journalistic work with the remembrance of Brinkley drove that point home, I think.

I realized today, I'm dangerous. I have no restraint. I have no boss. I'm inaccurate and dishonest. I post vile stuff. I hide behind a high tech veil. I am, indeed, a creep who gossips, but more than that, I'm crude. I'm convinced. I plead guilty. I should just quit. Why blog now? Bill O'Reilly, the paragon of fairness and accuracuy, has shamed me.

A former co-worker and current fantasy league compadre, Ken Hale, stars in this informative peace on QuesTec, the controversial umpire-checking system installed in some ballparks.

Personally, I like the idea of forcing the umpires to call the strike zone as defined in the rule book.

Baseball Primer interviews Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball, the book that has rocked the baseball world this season. One observation, I would love to be a baseball writer, so it really pisses me off that there are some really bad ones out there drawing big-paper paychecks:

The bad ones are really bad—it's just how bad the bad ones are that I can't stand. I’ve run across a dozen of these guys whose stuff I’ve read, who I can’t find a single redeeming trait, not in spirit, not in their ability to craft a sentence, not in the freshness of their observations, not even in their ability to get an original quote. And yet they maintain their little corner of the newspaper.

I've read these guys, too. You wonder how they got their jobs and how they keep their jobs and why they bother.

Webraw interviews Shanti Braford, the creator of Popdex.

Baseball Prospectus on the draft. It looks good for the Padres. Though, you have to wonder what the Brewers were thinking in taking Anthony Gwynn ... of course, I'm just bitter because they grabbed him two picks before the Padres would have.

Wow! I've been linked to in Italian. And apparently, this blogger found my link from the Dissident Frogman, who has a cool WMD banner on his home page.

My DSL is fixed. Finally.  Some snails had crawled inside my phone line, leaving a slimmy mess, or some such problem. At any rate, when it's your own lines that go haywire, and you don't have the service contract, the phone company's greed goes into full flower.  This little repair cost me three dozen eggs, two hogs, a right arm and left leg.

This is old news late, but I just watched an old episode of Charlie Rose, and FCC Chairman Michael Powell said something I've heard him say elsewhere -- this isn't an exact quote, but his reasoning for the recent deregulation vote goes something like this: All of the good TV shows are being made by pay TV networks; free TV can't be profitable under current regulations; if we want quality TV, we need to support these changes.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I thought the recent FCC changes allowed newspapers to own TV stations in local markets, and for companies to own up to three TV stations in the same market.

I don't see how those changes affect national television program.

First, free TV has been turning out plenty of good, profitable programs for a while -- Survivor, West Wing, Enterprise, CSI, Law and Order ... spring readily to mind. Quality shows supported by advertisers, not subscribers.

Second, networks won't benefit in the least from the TV version of Clear Channel owing 500 TV stations, so how will consolidation help the networks?

I guess I'm stretching into areas I don't know enough about, but I just don't understand Powell's reasoning.

I don't want to oversell this poem, but I think it's pretty good.

For a long time, I've thought it's the best poem I've ever written, but maybe that's a myth I just built in my own mind.

I wrote it in 1986, when I was still in college, and dating an older woman, and the relationship was running its course. I was somewhat tied down because I was living with this lady and had few financially viable options for an alternative residence.

I wrote the poem and showed it to a few friends. They all immediately recognized what the real meaning was, and they praised it. Repeatedly, they praised it.

Lacking judgment, and filled with ego, I showed it to my girlfriend. She immediately recognized herself in the poem, and was (probably rightfully so) was offended. She demanded I destroy the poem. Lacking courage in the face of homelessness, I destroyed the copy I had in hand. I neglected to mention a trusted friend had a copy.

For years, that copy was the only copy. I never got around to making another copy or putting it on disk.

A while back, when I started putting my poems on this blog, it was the first poem that sprung to mind for publication. But I couldn't find that single copy. I knew it had to be in my house somewhere, but without it in hand, I was worried that it was gone forever.

Yesterday, I found a box of old computer catalogs. Stuck in the middle was a folder of my poems, including this one -- which I present to you now: Helen Wasn't Worth Fighting For.

In Knoxville, I spent a good deal of time hanging out with our company's ubergeek, Glenn Franxman. Glenn is the smartest programmer in the world, and it was good to get to know him better and peek in on some of his trade secrets, but I fear I was a bad influence.

Even before I left town, he bought his first pipe.

Now he's blogging.

The blog may just be an experiment, because we're looking at Moveable Type as our official blog solution, but he's got some entertaining entries on his new obession -- pipes.

I'm not blogging because my DSL is totally DOA.  Won't be fixed until tomorrow evening at the earliest.

And here I uncovered evidence that aliens stole all of the WMD. Guess I'll have to blog about that some other day.

Obviously, nobody is paying Ken Layne to be a real journalist these days, so he's been blogging like a rabid dog chewing on fleas. Good posts here, here and here.

Me, I'm spending the evening with my wife and my guitar, not necessarily in that order.

Besides, my phone line and my DSL are fucked up, and one of those malfunctions makes it hard to blog.

BTW: The other day, I posted the wrong link to my interview with Tony Kinman. Here's the correct link.

For all their leftist pretensions and anti-music-industry hype, Pearl Jam has impressed me today as smart capitalists who know how to make a buck.

Friend Bruce McLean attended the LA PJ concert last night. For $18 he bought a copy of the performance. Today, he was able to download unmixed version of all the songs performed last night, and within a couple of weeks he'll get a mixed CD of the show.

Apparently, Pearl Jam does this for every concert.

What a smart idea. It allows Pearl Jam to sell directly to the fans (no record company middle man), eliminates the bootleggers, takes advantage of modern technology, and answers concerns about file sharing. It is a totally free-market response to a rapidly changing entertainment world. This is good old American innovation and moxie. Too bad Eddie Vedder isn't more appreciative of his country.

Record companies should take note.

If I were a CEO of a music company, this is what I would do: I would renegotiate all of my current contracts with my artists. I would stop charging bands to record their albums; I would give away for free on the internet all songs recorded by the artist; I would release packaged CDs at about half the current price; I would assume the burden of all band/tour promotion and booking; and I would require the artist to give me a share of all revenue from copyright, publishing, concerts, live-music sales (like PJs), merchandise and image licensing. We would sell concerts as events, treat songs as a commodities, and build brand loyalty. Everybody makes money and nobody worries about file sharing.

Unless my memory is faulty, when I was a kid almost every major league team had a four-man pitching rotation. Just a few teams were starting to use five-man rotations. And pitchers then more often lasted past the 7th inning and threw more complete games.

Today, complete games are rare, lasting into the 7th inning is called a qualty start, and it's so rare, some statiticians count them, pitch counts are closely monitored and it seems like there are more arm and shoulder injuries these days.

As for that last statement, I would really like to see somebody to a scientific study on injuries to pitchers over the last 100+ years. If there are more injuries, why?

You would think that with all of the pampering modern pitchers get, including better physical fitness regimes, contemporary pitchers would be healthier, but currently there are 40 pitchers on major league rosters who are the disabled list because of arm or shoulder injuries.

I think it was Nolan Ryan who once suggested that older pitchers were more durable because they grew up throwing all the time. They played more baseball (instead of basketball, football or soccer) and if they weren't throwing baseballs, they were throwing rocks at cans or tennis balls against walls. But Trevor Hoffman, who until this season never missed playing time because of an arm injury, said his father's refusal to let him pitch before he turned pro contributed to his good health.

So the issue comes down to this question -- can today's pitchers handle a heavier workload, or more specifically, can the modern pitcher handle a four-man rotation. Toronto is going to give a four-man rotation a try, and maybe that will set new precedence in how pitchers are handled. Maybe it won't.

This Rob Neyer column discusses the issue pretty intelligently.

Bob Benz asks -- what was your first literary-sex encounter? (This post should drive Google wild).

I wouldn't be surprised if this site is the first blog with a P3P-compliant privacy policy. Why? Why not?

Well, actually, since this web stuff is sort of my profession, I thought I should play around with P3P as a learning exercise.

P3P is a privacy protocol being developed by W3. Since it's under the auspice of W3, it is likely to be the standard. If it becomes a widely adopted standard, I'm going to need to know. And I already know a few major corporations are adopting it.

How it is supposed to work is that a site creates a privacy policy and publishes it both in human-readable format and machine-readable format. The machine readable format is XML. Then when a P3P compliant user agent, such as Internet Explorer 6, hits your site, it can read the XML file and see if your site policy meets site visitor's privacy preferences. For example, if you collect e-mail addresses, and the user doesn't ever want to give out his e-mail address, IE6 will warn the user of the site policy.

Of course, I wonder how many users will want to see these nag warnings all the time? I can't imagine too many users now have their browsers set to warn them when a site is setting a cookie.

On the other hand, that won't be the only way users can take advantage of P3P.

To get started with P3P, I went the W3 site for the issue. Read the top of the specification, skimmed the rest and surfed around the rest of the site. Yeah, so far I haven't dug into all of the documentation.

I was more eager to actually try creating a P3P policy, so I downloaded one of the P3P editors -- in this case, the one from IBM.

IBM's editor does make creating a policy pretty easy. It allows you to identify and define the policy topics applicable to your site, and then it generates an HTML file and an XML file for publication. And who would want to manually create such an XML file? That part is cool.

Where I ran into trouble was with cookies. How I use cookies is so minimal and innocuous that I can't imagine anybody would object. Cookies are used as part of one of my stats packages, and ColdFusion sets some cookies that have nothing to do with any site visitor except me. These cookies have nothing to do with any of the personal information collected by this site (when you leave a comment or send feedback), nor with one of the third party stat packages I use.

But the IBM package made no allowance for this complete disconnect from user data and the cookies. There was no way to write a policy that was both truthful and could avoid this warning:

Unsatisfactory policy: this compact policy is considered unsatisfactory according to the rules defined by Internet Explorer 6. The behavior of Internet Explorer 6 regarding cookies set under this compact policy is as follows:

In detail, the warning says:

A policy which is considered unsatisfactory by Internet Explorer 6 contains certain categories of data which are used or shared in a particular manner. This policy is placed in the unsatisfactory category, because the following categories of data are associated with this policy's cookies:

• Physical contact information is collected.
• Online contact information is collected.

In addition, the data is used in the following manner, marking the policy as unsatisfactory:

• The data is used for other purposes.
• The data is given to other organizations with different privacy practices.
• The data is made public.

Note that allowing an opt-out will make this policy acceptable under the Low and Medium settings, and under Medium High for first-party cookie usage. At the High setting, and at the Medium High setting for third-party cookies, all of these data uses must be opt-in for the policy to be considered satisfactory.

Again, the cookies have nothing to do with comments being left on the site, so I don't really understand this warning, but I guess, at least until I understand things better, I've got to leave it on my privacy policy. I'll probably try one of the other P3P editors at some point to see how it handles the same policy settings. Maybe this is just a quirk of IBM's package.

One thing I wanted to figure out in this process was way some corporations are leaving their P3P policies in the hands for their attorneys. To my way of thinking, this is an administrative and technical issue, not a legal issue. The only thing the lawyers need to know is that you have a privacy policy, that it is technically in compliance with P3P and that you have a mechanism in place for enforcing it and resolving disputes. The details, the language, the actual policy are purely an administrative issues that have more to do with business practices than with the law. So far, I haven't found anything that contradicts my assumption on this point.

Here is my human-readable policy, and her is my XML policy.

UPDATE: I just remembered, on the comments I allow users to set cookies to remember who they are, so the form is automatically populated with their info when they comment on the next visit. Yuk, now I'll have to review my policy and see if it changes anything. I think the P3P editor might just gagged on this bit of info.