I find this highly amusing. The folks at StopTheACLU think that they're actually going to be able to intervene in the ACLU's lawsuit against the NSA. Intervention is a term of art in the law. It means that you actually get added as a party to the proceedings. An attorney named Debbie Schlussel, who appears to be more of a spokesmodel than a scholar (her bio notes proudly that her online fan club is the second largest, behind only Ann Coulter), is apparently going to file motions to intervene on behalf of citizens who disagree with the ACLU and our pals at StopTheACLU jumped at the chance to be the first ones in line.

blahahahaahahahaahahahahahahahaharomfflmgdao!@#!!@#
Please Please Please let these guys get a huge amount of press coverage out of this so they can look at themselves through the mirror of mainstream america and see how crazy they are!

Intervention in NSA Lawsuit - Dispatches from the Culture Wars

How should the United States think about Iran? What explains the fanaticism of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and what can America and its allies do to change it?

Containing Tehran

In fairness to Yahoo, which handed over information -- and MSN which likely did the same -- it is important to note that it is not just spin that no privacy issues were involved with this particular data. As I explained in the story, the information is completely divorced from any personally identifiable data.

Lots of good information in here about the Google FBI thing. Apparently they don't want IP addresses...

Bush Administration Demands Search Data; Google Says No; AOL, MSN & Yahoo Said Yes

It is now possible to define a ping attribute on anchor and area tags. When a user follows a link via one of these tags, the browser will send notification pings to the specified URLs after following the link.

If IE picks this up, MemeStreams could use it...

Fried Fish: Mozilla Ping Feature

India's and China's educational systems — known for producing vast numbers of engineers — are commonly thought to be slowly and steadily overtaking the U.S. in technological leadership. But that may not be the case.

A controversial Duke University study contradicts that perception, pointing out that engineers are defined differently in different places. Those differences give the impression that foreign colleges are graduating more engineers, as measured by U.S. standards, than they really are. In addition to blurring the definition of the term, schools in India and China may not be graduating engineers of the same caliber as those in the United States. And their graduates may not be competitive in a global sense for a variety of reasons, including language issues and job locations.

U.S. engineer education not in dire straits: study

A mother in New York is suing an Applebee's restaurant after her 5-year-old son was allegedly served a Long Island Iced Tea instead of apple juice.

5-Year-Old Served Long Island Iced Tea

Happy New Year, everyone!

Want some advice for 2006? Well, look no further. Illegal Art placed suggestion boxes in California and New York and invited passers-by to offer a word (or two) of guidance.

A selection:

NEVER give a gun to a duck

Fish closer to the shore

Listen to some old school PUNK ROCK

Your Suggestion Here

Former ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray has harnessed the Internet in his long-running feud with the UK Government. A forthcoming book covering his time as ambassador is currently being blocked by the Foreign Office, which has demanded he remove references to two documents from the book and his web site. Murray has responded by publishing the documents in full there, and by encouraging bloggers to disseminate the documents as widely as possible.

Boing Boing: Ignoring UK ban, bloggers publish leaked torture memos

The community-editing model gives us a newfound power to create wrongs -- but also to reverse wrongs. Let's not start restricting this power before we even understand it.

The Impact of Emerging Technologies: Wikipedia: Teapot Tempest

A meditating teenage boy in south-central Nepal is drawing the attention of scientists after attracting huge crowds in the past six months and earning himself the name Buddha-reincarnate.

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Scientists to check Nepal Buddha boy