This may be my favorite Gibson book of all time. - Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow sure seems to have liked Spook Country. I didn't get into Gibson's last novel. Some of the marketing ideas were cool but for some reason it just didn't grab me. The linear style didn't build the suspense level that I sought. But I'm going to give this one a shot.

Gibson has a habit of writing physical places I've been to into his novels. I recall in All Tomorrow's Parties the main character walking down a street in San Francisco toward the location at which I was reading the book. Rattle tells me early on in this book a character checks into a Manhattan hotel that a number of MemeStreams users crashed in during the last HOPE, probably around the time the novel is set.

Anyone here reading it yet?

Boing Boing: William Gibson's Spook Country

David Hahn, 31, was being held Friday on a $5,000 bond in the Macomb County Jail after he was arraigned Thursday on felony larceny charges.

Investigators say Hahn was arrested Wednesday after a maintenance worker saw him stealing a detector from a ceiling in an apartment complex where he lived. They later found the other detectors in his apartment in the Detroit suburb of Clinton Township.

Police say that Hahn's face was covered with open sores, possibly from constant exposure to radioactive materials.

Turns out Radioactive Boy Scout is at it again!

FOXNews.com - 'Radioactive Boy Scout' Charged in Smoke Detector Theft - Local News | News Articles | National News | US News

The event begins 54 minutes past midnight PDT (0754 UT) on August 28th when the Moon enters Earth's shadow. At first, there's little change. The outskirts of Earth's shadow are as pale as the Moon itself; an onlooker might not even realize anything is happening. But as the Moon penetrates deeper, a startling metamorphosis occurs. Around 2:52 am PDT (0952 UT), the color of the Moon changes from moondust-gray to sunset-red. This is totality, and it lasts for 90 minutes.

Night owls on the west coast and early risers on the east coast might catch this red moon...

NASA - Dreamy Lunar Eclipse

Why didn't he blow a head gasket a couple years ago when this bubble started?

YouTube - Jim Cramer Blows a Head Gasket 8/3/07

Aug. 13, 2007 issue - The controversy over President Bush's warrantless surveillance program took another surprise turn last week when a team of FBI agents, armed with a classified search warrant, raided the suburban Washington home of a former Justice Department lawyer. The lawyer, Thomas M. Tamm, previously worked in Justice's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR)—the supersecret unit that oversees surveillance of terrorist and espionage targets.

This didn't get any discussion here. The FBI is prosecuting leakers of the NSA program... The program that Bush happily admitted to and readily discussed in the press once it was revealed. Now that Bush's popularity rating is through the floor, he is, in fact, free to do anything.

Govt. Looks for Leaker on Warrantless Wiretaps - Newsweek Periscope - MSNBC.com

Is there anyone on MemeStreams who regularly uses linux on their desktop?

I have to use Windows every day at work. There is something nice about my home computing environment being a little more slick. I like being able to open a unix command prompt. I like the design subtleties of my mac. Its pleasant to use. But I think it may be time to part ways.

I'm tired of Apple. My first mac, an iBook, had a problem where the screen would "go fuzzy" and require a motherboard replacement. This would happen annually, sometimes twice a year. For a while, Apple replaced the motherboards for free, but every time this occured, it involved a week without a machine. Once it also involved a computer which came back with a completely new hard drive. All my data was gone. Clearly, Apple never got to the root cause of the problem, as it kept happening over and over again. Eventually, last summer, Apple said they wouldn't replace the motherboard for free anymore, and their price was in excess of $1000. I had no choice but to buy a new computer.

So I bought a Macbook. I knew it was going to be trouble, but I did it anyway. It was nice for while.

About a month ago I spilled some beer on it. Obviously, my fault. Not like my prior problem. However, these things do happen to laptops and laptops ought to be designed with that in mind.

Instantly, one of the design flaws of the MacBook that I knew would be a problem going in reared its ugly head: There is no way to remove the keyboard. Keyboards get nasty. They get dirty. They do not last as long as the rest of a laptop. Good laptops are designed to make them easy to replace. But not the macbook. Its keyboard is embedded into the system. Its hard to remove and hard to clean. You have a problem with it, you have to send the system in for service.

After 24 hours of drying out, the keyboard didn't work, and so I figured it was going in for service. Fortunately, after a few more days of drying out the keyboard miraculously recovered. Worked fine. Worked fine for a while, anyway. Eventually the mouse started sticking. This got worse and worse over time until last week, when the mouse simply stopped working altogether.

Having no simple way to take the computer apart, my theory was that dust had collected to stickiness in the mouse, and that if I removed the battery and literally sprayed some water on the trackpad and then gave it a few days to dry out, it would likely be fine. This was a stupid idea. I should have SSHed into the thing and cleared out my data first. But I didn't. Again, my fault, not Apple's.

The computer isn't fine. I must have shorted something against the clock battery (which is basically impossible to access) and fried a motherboard component. There is gunk in the computer which might be capacitor guts. I'm fucked.

The reason its hard to get inside the macbook is that it has 27 screws which must be removed. These screws are extremely small, ... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

If the U.S. Air Force is ever ordered into a cyberwar with a foreign country or computer-savvy terrorist group, the 100-plus citizen cybersoldiers at the Air National Guard's 262nd Information Warfare Aggressor Squadron will boast an advantage other countries can't match: They built the very software and hardware they're attacking.

That's because the 262nd, based at McChord Air Force Base outside Tacoma, Washington, draws weekend warriors from Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Adobe Systems and other tech companies, in a recruitment model that senior military leadership is touting as vital to the Air Force's expanded mission to achieve "dominance in cyberspace."

Wow...

Air Force Draws Weekend Cyberwarriors From Microsoft, Cisco

The following paragraph basically sums up everything that is wrong with the American criminal justice system, no matter what the context is.

A handful of cases — in which a predator does an awful thing to an innocent — get excessive media attention and engender public outrage. This attention typically bears no relation to the frequency of the particular type of crime, and yet laws—such as three-strikes laws that give mandatory life sentences to nonviolent drug offenders — and political careers are made on the basis of the public’s reaction to the media coverage of such crimes.

It has occurred to me that the criminal justice system in the US is so out of control that not being a criminal is really little protection from worry about being caught up in it. All it takes is for someone to have a political interest in making you go away and an ability to make false accusations. The balances are so heavily weighted toward prosecutors and the punishments so severe that if it happens, you are real likely to be fucked for life. Even a few years in prison can have a significant impact on your life. Your best hope is the "prosecutors discretion," or having access to a lot of money, if you do. The cost of defending yourself can often have a deep impact on your future planning and options in your life. This has happened to people who use this website. Its a real risk associated with living in this country and I have seriously considered that it might be a good argument for living somewhere else.

We law-abiding, middle-class Americans have made decisions about social policy and incarceration, and we benefit from those decisions, and that means from a system of suffering, rooted in state violence, meted out at our request. We had choices and we decided to be more punitive. Our society — the society we have made — creates criminogenic conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos, and then acts out rituals of punishment against them as some awful form of human sacrifice.

Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?

New Site Up
Fri, 08/03/2007 - 16:04 — mtrump

The new site is up. More content will be up shortly

The first person to own this CMS will get a guaranteed speaking slot.

Announcements | summercon 2007

Last night the House of Representatives approved a temporary amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that passed the Senate on Friday night. President Bush will sign it shortly. The language is here. On the merits, I think this legislation on the whole seems relatively well done.

I really don't agree with this perspective, but there are links from here to lots of others. The idea that the executive has hereby been authorized to monitor ALL international calls to and from the US is a dramatic policy shift. However, there is something unsettling about both the timing of this and its duration. I think pundits may be underestimating the seriousness of statements made by numerous individuals that a terrorist attack is more likely in the coming months. This may, in fact, be a temporary patch done to deal with a specific threat which may be reconsidered later. For the time being, however, anything you say on an international call can and will be used against you in a court of law.

The Volokh Conspiracy - My Take on the New FISA Amendment: