The international legal community has been quite vocal in condemning American treatment of POWs after 9/11, but it hasn’t evolved international law, even theoretically, to cope with this.

Whatever. The Bush administration intentionally blew off the international legal establishment. He blew off the Geneva conventions, he blew off the UN, hell, he even blew off our Constitution in the context of wiretapping and Habeas Corpus. Can you imagine the howls from the right wing if France and Germany had gotten together and come up with a set of rules for how the United States should deal with captured Al Queda? There is not a chance in hell that the Bush administration would have embraced such a thing. Blaming the "international legal community" for the situation is simply nonsensical.

Obama, for his part, continues to engage in a series of actions that seem designed to suit the prejudices of the dumbest of his supporters. There was no reason to close Gitmo, for example. The issue is not about where the physical prison is but what rules apply to people imprisoned there. Supreme Court decisions reached during the Bush years created a process for military trials of Al Queda suspects with a requirement for Habeas that applied to Gitmo. That process is mostly reasonable under the circumstances and mostly put an end to the Bush Administration's horrific attempt to ignore centuries old legal doctrine. Closing the prison is a really risky and expensive publicity stunt. So is trying a person like Mohammed in New York City. I'm not worried about these people escaping. I'm worried that an American might blow up the prison or blow up the court house.

I don't understand what the point is. Closing Gitmo doesn't actually matter. Trying Mohammed in New York doesn't actually matter either.

If Obama want to be seen as "doing something" there are all kinds of things that he could do. He could end suspicionless searches of laptops at the border. He could come clean on illegal wiretapping. He could work with members of Congress to reverse the stupid legal amnesty offered the telecoms and renew America's commitment to the rule of law. He could work with Congress to right cases of illegal rendition like Maher Arar. He could engage the international legal community in a long term process to establish norms for handling terrorist suspects.

There are all kinds of things that could be done that have actual substance. Unfortunately, this guy appears to prefer theater, which is not something that I expected from a law professor, but something that we'll have to live with, I guess. But if one of these theatrical stunts goes sideways it'll be mincemeat for the left, and we'll go back to being governed by people who have absolutely no respect for the ancient foundations of western democracy.

Deciphering the Mohammed Trial | STRATFOR

Jello:

Been playing around with Drew Conway's scripts he demo'd at the bay area R meetup at linkedin last week - saw it here.

Files to do this yourself are here.

Information on the libraries: Igraph twitteR ggplot2

Installation (for OS X):

- Install latest Mac OS X R build 2.10
- Install latest tcltk
- In R, execute: install.packages("igraph"); install.packages("twitteR"); install.packages("ggplot2");

Have at :) Beware the API limit.

Oh, the MS zoomable thing.

Very interesting...

Social Map of #ASW3 Hashtag on Twitter (Atlanta Startup Weekend 3)

To get the page backup, I have to swear under penalty of perjury that I think the takedown was a mistake (yet the sender of a takedown does not have to swear that they think the takedown is valid!), consent to a lawsuit if the sender disagrees, and wait two weeks. Two weeks!

In short, the DMCA lets you get any page taken off the Internet for two weeks. This isn’t just a law itching for abuse; it’s a law being abused.

The problem, which isn't limited to the DMCA, is that our justice system is not blind to wealth. If you are wealthy, its not expensive to send out C&D notices such as DMCA "takedowns." In fact, you can make legal threats of every sort and variety, no matter how unreasonable, essentially without consequence, as long as the people you are threatening are not wealthy. Most people who live in our society do not have the means to defend themselves against legal claims in our justice system, no matter how unreasonable or illogical or downright fraudulent those claims might be. The consequence is that wealth makes right - always - unless you're lucky enough that some public interest law firm takes an intellectual interest in the case.

There ought to be financial consequences associated with fraudulent legal threats. Its the only thing that I can see that would balance the scales. Its not about recovering the money wasted complying with a fraudulent claim - its about ensuring that people don't file fraudulent claims in the first place.

Is the DMCA a scam?

"It is scandalous that the company continues to send its improper demands," Ms. Granick says.

These Hobbyists Add to Calculators, Multiplying Their Fun - WSJ.com

Tom Cross, a security technology researcher in Atlanta, received a cease-and-desist letter from TI after merely posting about the hackers on his blog, Memestreams.net. "I didn't include the key in my post," he says. "I linked to a discussion forum where this was being talked about." Cross took down his link, but not without feeling burned. "It's incumbent on Texas Instruments to be responsible with its power," he says, "and I don't think they were responsible."

IEEE Spectrum: For Texas Instruments, Calculator Hackers Don't Add Up

Jubilant NASA scientists announced Friday that they have found the telltale signature of significant quantities of water, in the form of ice and vapor, in a shadowed crater at the moon's south pole.

It worked!

Crashed satellite detects water at moon's pole - washingtonpost.com

Every tomato in Italy, every potato in Ireland, and every hot pepper in Thailand came from this hemisphere. Worldwide, more than half the crops grown today were initially developed in the Americas...

Indian agriculture long sustained some of the world's largest cities. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán dazzled Hernán Cortés in 1519; it was bigger than Paris, Europe's greatest metropolis. The Spaniards gawped like hayseeds at the wide streets, ornately carved buildings, and markets bright with goods from hundreds of miles away. They had never before seen a city with botanical gardens, for the excellent reason that none existed in Europe. The same novelty attended the force of a thousand men that kept the crowded streets immaculate. (Streets that weren't ankle-deep in sewage! The conquistadors had never heard of such a thing.) Central America was not the only locus of prosperity. Thousands of miles north, John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, visited Massachusetts in 1614, before it was emptied by disease, and declared that the land was "so planted with Gardens and Corne fields, and so well inhabited with a goodly, strong and well proportioned people ... [that] I would rather live here than any where."

1491 - The Atlantic

noteworthy wrote:
Barbara Elias:

The Taliban cannot surrender bin Laden without also surrendering their existing identity as a vessel for an obdurate and uncompromising version of political Islam. Their legitimacy rests not on their governing skills, popular support, or territorial control, but on their claim to represent what they perceive as sharia rule. This means upholding the image that they are guided entirely by Islamic principles; as such, they cannot make concessions to, or earnestly negotiate with, secular states.

You cannot beat an ideology with bullets. There will always be Taliban. The question is how influential their ideas are with common people.

RE: Know Thine Enemy | Foreign Affairs

Last Thursday in Venezuela, a new law criminalizing "violent" video games and toys was approved by the National Assembly...

Last year, on a trip to the US, I was able to buy a Nintendo DS for my brother, and a puzzle game that deals with using weapons to defend the fish stock of penguins in Antarctica, Defendin' de Penguin. Early next year, when the law kicks in, bring such a game could land me in jail for 3 to 5 years..

The law is... a pitiful attempt to blame video games and toys for the widespread lethal violence in our country, instead of a defective judicial structure, systemic corruption and governmental (purposeful?) ineptitude to deal with the problem.

When American politicians use social wedge issues as a foil to draw attention away from their inability to address real problems people here are easily fooled because the solutions to our problems seem intractable to us, and so the foil does not seem so unreasonable.

When the same actions are seen through the prism of a foreign culture their true nature becomes more apparent. Obviously, Venezuela is more violent than most western countries and has less video games, so the idea that video games are at the heart of Venezuela's problems is silly. But they are going after video games, with prejudice.

Perhaps someone will take the position that violent video games are too heady for a culture that already places a low value on human life, that they exacerbate a problem that already exists and eliminating them is justified.

I think its a straw man. Banning video games is something the government knows how to do, so banning video games is what you get. But violent video games are not the same thing as actual violence, and banning them will not reduce the amount of actual violence in your society. It feels like progress, but in fact it has no effect on the underlying problem, for which there are no simple solutions.

There are ways to make a culture less violent but the road is long and the path is counterintuitive.

Venezuela bans violent video games: a first-person guest essay - Boing Boing

"I'll just re-derive everything...it's easier than walking over to the other board" - Dr. John Elton, DiffEq. Professor.....only at tech

Today I read a post about the guy sang the "Link finding an item" song when he bought a bag of peanuts and my girlfriend admitted to doing the same thing when she found a lost item before. Only at Tech.

I think they really mean this.

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