This is not an easy thing to describe. It's a film. It's not long. You should watch it.

Le Grand Content

Thu Jan 18, 3:49 PM ET

WASHINGTON - Reversing itself, the Defense Department says an espionage report it produced that warned about Canadian coins with tiny radio frequency transmitters was not true.

I was right. :-P

U.S. retracts Canada spy coins claim - Yahoo! News

This is infuriating.

Feingold, who today flat out called the program illegal and who last March... went on to attack Gonzales for a speech he made in November, where he said that critics of the government's warrantless wiretapping program believed in a definition of freedom that was "superficial" and a "grave threat to the liberty and security of the American people."

Feingold took issue with that and asked who in the country actually believed that terrorists should not be wiretapped.

Gonzales said he knew that it wasn't Democrats and his real targets were blogs, where you can find people who don't see that the government is trying to protect them.

Unfortunately, this is the closest thing I can find to coverage of this hearing. Transcripts do not seem to be available. If anyone has the exact quote from Gonzales, please post it. I DO have the exact quote and context for his statement in November.

Some people will argue nothing could justify the government being able to intercept conversations like the ones the Program targets. Instead of seeing the government protecting the country, they see it as on the verge of stifling freedom.

But this view is shortsighted. Its definition of freedom – one utterly divorced from civic responsibility – is superficial and is itself a grave threat to the liberty and security of the American people.

As Justice Robert Jackson remarked in the case Terminiello v. City of Chicago, “The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”

The central quote was decontextualized and passed around in the media. Of course, you can find crazy people on the Internets, but the people out there who "will argue nothing could justify the government being able to intercept conversations like the ones the Program tagets," and I have never, ever seen anyone make that argument, but they are clearly too far and inbetween to constitute "a grave threat to the liberty and security of the American people."

Gonzales is almost Chomskesque in his careful use of language which simultaneously means many things and nothing. If you support the idea that the executive need not get court approval for domestic surveillance, what you hear when he says this, particularly given the lawsuit quote at the end, is that the people who are raising legal objections are a grave threat to the liberty and security of the American people. But when brought to task about that comment he can argue that he wasn't talking about those people, he was talking about some other group of people, who are a straw man who exist largely as a figment of Ru... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Alberto Gonzales on Bloggers

That translates into about 14 million people who were using the 'read-write Web' to contribute to political discussion and activity," the study's authors Lee Rainie and John Horrigan write.

This is a good run down of the results from the Pew study.

Pew: 14 Million Online Political Activists in U.S. Today | Personal Democracy Forum

"I want to say that those people drinking all that water can get sick and die from water intoxication," said the caller."Yeah, we're aware of that," replied a DJ. "They signed releases so we're not responsible, okay?"

McGinness has said previously that he did not believe a criminal case is warranted because Strange took part in the contest of her own free will. However, after The Bee obtained a recording of the four-hour, 40-minute radio show that showed radio hosts discussing the possible dangers of the contest on air the sheriff said he believes a closer look is warranted and that his detectives will investigate.

Jennifer Strange Death - 10 fired, criminal investigation

Abaddon wrote:
some tips from my experience, your mileage may vary

I think this is a fairly good list of programming lessons. I have a few comments though.

1. Kludges that we'll fix in the next release never get fixed in the next release...

Decius's Corollary: You're not going to have more funding when you are working on the next release.

3. it always costs more to do it later...

It doesn't matter how "right" it is if it never ships.

4. beware of anyone in a suit...

Unless they are a civil liberties lawyer.

14. never assume they have tested their code...

Abaddon's Corollary: All other programmers are out to get you.

RE: My programming rules

Yesterday morning I ran across what sounded like an interesting story from Hewlett-Packard's labs that seemed to involve a possible transistor replacement, nanotechnology, and the indefinite furtherance of Moore's Law. I ultimately decided to skip it, though, because on further inspection it turned out that the story has implications for the somewhat niche area of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and even those implications are pretty far off (around 2020). But, since the rest of the tech press has picked up this FPGA research as an "OMG nanotechnology and Moore's Law!" story, I've decided to talk about the story anyway, and to look at what is and isn't there.

You can always count on Ars for a sane discussion of what technical announcements actually mean. There are some good details in this article. My opinion is that FPGA's are extremely important and will eventually be a part of common PCs, but currently they fit niche and development applications. The press seems to think that this announcement has something to do with microprocessors. It doesn't.

Hewlett-Packard's FPGA research, and replacing transistors

A judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court issued orders authorizing the Government to target for collection international communications into or out of the United States where there is probable cause to believe that one of the communicants is a member or agent of al Qaeda or an associated terrorist organization.

This is an interesting development. The scope of this wording is much more narrow than the "seven degrees of Kevin Bacon" way that the program was initially framed by NSA spokespersons, and its not clear if any of that is carefully calculated or just bad wording. It will probably put an end to the court cases. The Administration is basically conceeding that they have to obey FISA, or at least that they are going to for now. One wonders if the whole debate wasn't an election year ploy that failed miserably. There are still a lot of very good reasons to worry that the administration is going too far in terms of who it is watching and whether the oversight now afforded is meaningful. However, this means we aren't going to see Congress pass another law which unwinds civil liberties in this country, and thats positive. On the whole I'd say this is a civil liberties win. The civil libertarians aren't trying to stop the surveillance program. They are concerned about the system of checks and balances. It appears they are not being undermined. One hopes the FISA court isn't as much of a kangaroo as many people suspect.

The Volokh Conspiracy - Did A FISA Judge Approve the Entire TSP?

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their “immortality”. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.

Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain cancer cells, but not healthy cells. Tumours in rats deliberately infected with human cancer also shrank drastically when they were fed DCA-laced water for several weeks.

That does sound too good to be true.

Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers - health - 17 January 2007 - New Scientist

For some reason I didn't consider this before but YouTube is a virtual treasure trove of plunderphonic audiocollage videos. This is Negativland passing judgement on recent U.S. history in a, well, rather damning way. I'll try to make a point of posting interesting stuff of this sort on a regular basis.

YouTube - The Bottom Line