Unleashed in late spring, 2004, New Jersey’s Black Clouds play bracing rock music characterized by soaring melodies, dynamic arrangements and superior song craft. Hard, loud and impossibly catchy, the band has won a loyal following by lighting up clubs on both sides of the Hudson River. For fans of classic hard rock and alternative, the Black Clouds aim to bring danger, fun and deep lyricism back to rock and roll. To music lovers, nationwide, who have eagerly awaited the return of danceable, unpretentious rock, the Black Clouds have arrived. With a self-financed, self-produced album released in January of 2008, mixed and mastered by Jack Endino, known best for his work with Nirvana, Soundgarden and Mudhoney, these four motivated young musicians have set their sights very high. They worked ceaselessly to develop a sound that balances the creativity of indie rock with the professional acumen required to achieve mainstream success. -Patrick Veil

Wow, I've never read Vile sounding so professional. In any event, I got my hands on a copy of "Wishing Well" and listened to it recently. If you're one of those people who is still listening to early '90s grunge rock you should check this out. Its good, and you haven't heard it before, but its exactly what you want to hear.

MySpace.com - The Black Clouds - Monmouth County, New Jersey - Rock / Alternative / Grunge - www.myspace.com/theblackclouds

People always ask why they should worry about unwarranted police surveillance or intrusions. If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to worry about, right?

Its not about whether or not you’ve got something to hide. Its that you have to think about it.

The criminal lives life looking over his shoulder, because he knows that he may be targeted by the police. His actions make him a target, and he lives in fear of discovery.

When the police target innocent people, those people begin to look over their shoulders, too. They adopt an internal policeman. They self-censor; every action reconsidered from the perspective of a paranoid investigator – common desires unfulfilled for the risk that they may be questioned or misinterpreted. The soul becomes imprisoned by fear and life is diminished.

That is why 4th Amendment rights matter.

The Google-Viacom showdown over the handover of YouTube user data appears to be over. The two sides agreed to changes in a previous ruling that would have required Google to hand over user id's, IP addresses and a list of all viewed YouTube videos to Viacom in connection with their ongoing copyright infringement litigation.

After an online uprising against the order, Viacom tried to assert that they never requested personally identifiable information (they did), and later promised not to use the information to sue individuals. The value of that promise was questioned by us and many others.

Google/Viacom Agree To Preserve User Anonymity In Data Shakedown - washingtonpost.com

A coded letter sent last year to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois has the lab, and outside coders stumped. The letter was sent anonymously last March in a hand-addressed envelope via regular mail to the physics lab's public affairs office.

After sitting on the letter for more than a year, the lab posted it on a physics blog in May, hoping to get help cracking it.

Mystery Crypto Letter Has Coders Stumped | Threat Level from Wired.com

Growth is projected to pick up gradually over the next two years as residential construction bottoms out and begins a slow recovery and as credit conditions gradually improve. However, FOMC participants indicated that considerable uncertainty surrounded their outlook for economic growth and viewed the risks to their forecasts as skewed to the downside.

...If financial speculation were pushing oil prices above the levels consistent with the fundamentals of supply and demand, we would expect inventories of crude oil and petroleum products to increase as supply rose and demand fell. But in fact, available data on oil inventories show notable declines over the past year. This is not to say that useful steps could not be taken to improve the transparency and functioning of futures markets, only that such steps are unlikely to substantially affect the prices of oil or other commodities in the longer term.

FRB: Testimony--Bernanke, Semiannual Monetary Policy Report to the Congress--July 15, 2008

The nation's terrorist watch list has hit one million names, according to a tally maintained by the American Civil Liberties Union based upon the government's own reported numbers for the size of the list.

American Civil Liberties Union : Terrorist Watch List Hits One Million Names

Some of these are really interesting.

30 Most Incredible Abstract Satellite Images of Earth : Environmental News Blog | Environmental Graffiti

Dutch chipmaker NXP Semiconductors has sued a university in The Netherlands to block publication of research that details security flaws in NXP's Mifare Classic wireless smart cards, which are used in transit and building entry systems around the world.

Dutch chipmaker sues to silence security researchers | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

Much of this commentary is spot on.

Sandy Levinson and I have noted previously that we are in the midst of the creation of a National Surveillance State, which is the logical successor to the National Security State. And we have noted that, like the National Security State before it, the construction of this new form of governance will be a joint effort by the two major parties...

The lesson is that there are at least two different ways for the executive to increase his power. One is when the President seizes power through unilateral action. The second is when Congress gives it to him...

The larger point is that two parties are not in fact dividing over the issue of Executive power. Both parties seem to like more and more executive power just fine. They just have adopted different ways of achieving it. One can expect far more Congressional cooperation if a Democratic Congress is teamed with a Democratic President. The effective result may not be less Presidential power to run the National Surveillance State. It may be in fact be more.

I repeat. If you are worried about the future of civil liberties in the emerging National Surveillance State, you should not try to console yourself with the fact that the next President will be a Democrat and not George W. Bush. It's worth remembering that the last Democratic President we had, Bill Clinton, was not a great supporter of civil liberties. (I was therefore amused to see that his wife, Hillary Clinton decided at the last minute to vote against the bill. Good for her, but I have difficulty believing that the choice was a purely principled one).

Balkinization: The new FISA law and rise of the Surveillance State

``Atlanta is a second-tier city,'' said Jessica Harlan, 36, who relocated two years ago. ``New York is cooler and more exciting in every respect.''

``If my kids have a Southern accent, I will kill myself,'' said Brooklyn native Jodi Fleisig, an Atlanta resident since 1998. Fleisig said she tends to socialize with ex-New Yorkers, and finds inviting Southerners to lunch can be troublesome.

``Being Southern means you wait for someone to finish a sentence,'' she said.

New Yorkers on Atlanta