"DNS over DNS? Way fucking better than DNS alone."

Drunk people are funny.

Jay Beale vs Dan Kaminsky

"Charlie has obviously done an exceptional job, a really extraordinary job," said Marine Col. Dwight Sullivan, the Pentagon's chief defense counsel for Military Commissions.

Sullivan added it was "quite a coincidence" that Swift was passed over for a promotion "within two weeks of the Supreme Court opinion."

The administration appears to continue to dis the rule of law...

AP Wire | 10/08/2006 | Lawyer who defended bin Laden's driver denied promotion

If the Ninth Circuit does agree with Judge Pregerson that computer searches are "non routine," there's a decent chance that this case would be the first computer search and seizure case to get to the Supreme Court.

Sweet! I find the prospect of random laptop searches at borders to be offensive to the idea of a free society on many levels. Finally, someone has argued, and a court has accepted the arguement, that this isn't Constitutional. Now, we'll get to find out if the higher courts agree. Its on!

The Volokh Conspiracy - District Court Holds That Border Searches of Computers Require Reasonable Suspicion:

Police say an aircraft has crashed into a building on Manhattan's Upper East Side at 72nd Street and York Avenue. It is near Rockefeller Center.

I assume this was an accident, but of course thats what I did last time.

Aircraft crashes into New York building - CNN.com

We are in a much darker period, a much more cynical period...

Robin Williams: 'The whole system sucks' - CNN.com

If you thought the belief that "the flaw inherent in western society is the bifurcation between science [including human law] and religion" is a position unique to Al Qaeda, or that it is an extremist position, then this article is for you.

In 1983, Nimeiri, aiming to counter Turabi’s growing popularity, decided to make his own Islamic claim. He hastily pushed through laws that imposed a severe version of Sharia on Sudan, including its Christian and animist south. Within eighteen months, more than fifty suspected thieves had their hands chopped off. A Coptic Christian was hanged for possessing foreign currency; poor women were flogged for selling local beer. It was exactly the kind of brutal, divisive, politically motivated Sharia that Taha had long warned against, and southerners intensified a decades-long civil war against Khartoum. Taha and other Republican Brothers, including Naim, had been jailed in advance by Nimeiri to prevent them from leading protests; their imprisonment lasted a year and a half.

Soon after Taha was released, he distributed a leaflet, on Christmas Day, 1984, titled "Either This or the Flood." "It is futile for anyone to claim that a Christian person is not adversely affected by the implementation of sharia," he wrote. "It is not enough for a citizen today merely to enjoy freedom of worship. He is entitled to the full rights of a citizen in total equality with all other citizens. The rights of southern citizens in their country are not provided for in sharia but rather in Islam at the level of fundamental Koranic revelation."

Taha, who was now in his mid-seventies, had been preparing half his life for this moment. It was central to his vision that Islamic law in its historical form, rather than in what he considered its original, authentic meaning, would be a monstrous injustice in modern society. His opposition was brave and absolute, and yet his statement reveals the limits of a philosophy that he hoped to make universal. Taha opposed secularism -- he once declared that the secular West "is not a civilization because its values are confused" -- and he could not conceive of rights outside the framework of Islam and the Koran. At the very moment that he was defending non-believers from the second-class status enshrined in Islamic law, he was extending their equal rights through a higher, better Sharia.

Abdullahi an-Naim defends Taha’s approach, saying that in the Islamic world a Turkish-style secularism will always be self-defeating. "It is an illusion to think you can sustain constitutionalism, democratization, without addressing its Islamic foundation," he said. "Because for Muslims you cannot say, 'I’m a Muslim, but—' That 'but' does not work. What unites Muslims is an idea. It is Islam as an idea. And therefore contesting that idea, I think, is going to be permanent." Whenever secular intellectuals in Muslim countries try to bypass the question of Sharia, Naim said, "they leave the high moral ground to the fundamentalists, and they lose." Invoking Islam as the highest authority for universal rights was not simply a matter of belief; it meant that Taha and his movement could stay in the game.

You should also check out God's Country?, Walter Russell Mead's article in the latest Foreign Affairs.

The difference between fundamentalists and evangelicals is not that fundamentalists are more emotional in their beliefs; it is that fundamentalists insist more fully on following their ideas to their logical conclusion.

The Moderate Martyr | George Packer | The New Yorker

This is another excellent post from the ArmsControlWonk about the (likely) failure of the DPRK nuke test. The entire post is suggested reading, but I must single out this snip as the most funny thing I've heard so far today:

The United States has built a missile defense that does not work, to defend against a North Korean missile that does not work, that would carry a nuclear warhead that does not work.

This is all very postmodern.

Hahahaha!!

ArmsControlWonk: So, like, why didn't it work?

The dude gets points for putting his web server on port 2006. The dude does not get points for using a light blue tint to indicate "no senate race."

Update: Everyone keeps complaining about this post. On the LCD screen on my Dell Laptop his light blue and his grey look very similar, and when I first saw the map it looked very Democratic for about 10 seconds, and then it occured to me that they don't have Senate races in every state every year. I've looked at this page on other monitors now and it looks different. LCDs can do odd things with color, as anyone who has ever designed a website will attest.

Election 2006: Senate and House Races Updated Daily

Here's video of Clint Curtis, a former programmer for Yang Enterprises (YEI) in Florida, testifying under oath that Representative Tom Feeney asked him to write a voting machine program to rig elections.

I'm not exactly sure what the deal is here, but this rabbit hole seems very, very deep, and I find it strange that I haven't heard any of this before given all of the drama about voting machines. This is either a crazy partisan conspiracy theory or its one of the worst corruption stories in this country's history. I haven't found any details that are, one their face, disprovable. On the other hand, the main story is being carried by blogs that seem a bit sensational and partisan. As they say, a broken clock is right twice a day... Anyone got any good information on this?

Update: Apparently Bev Harris isn't impressed. I don't think she understands the technical issues. However, her observation that there is no evidence is correct.

Boing Boing: Video testimony of vote machine whistleblower

The Bush administration sees diplomacy as something to be engaged in with another country as a reward for that country's good behavior. They seem not to see diplomacy as a tool to be used with antagonistic countries or parties, that might bring about an improvement in the behaviour of such entities, and a resolution to the issues that trouble us. Thus we do not talk to Iran, Syria, Hizballah or North Korea. We only talk to our friends -- a huge mistake.

I haven't seen the right wing spin on last nights events yet. I'm not sure its out. But the left wing has jumped on this, and their message, frankly, strikes a nerve. We've been avoiding talks with these people for years. If we're not willing to take the casualties associated with war there, and we're not (which is why we provided aid during their famine), then we need to engage in dialog.

Think of NK as the world's biggest hostage situation. We need to talk them down, and reunification of the country is a carrot that we can use in that discussion. We're not doing that, which means we're doing fuck all except being jerks. Had I bothered to really think about NK prior to this event, this conclusion would have been obvious. The problem is now we've made being jerks a matter of will, and so in the wake of this event a shift in our policy is capitualtion. We need a forgein policy with a more nuanced understanding of international relations than "you're either with us or against us."

The reason NK made a bomb...