The satellites are tiny--they weigh a kilogram and generally measure about 10 centimeters on each side--but they cost far less than conventional commercial satellites. A CubeSat unit costs roughly $40,000 to build and only $40,000 to launch. As part of the program, Cal Poly takes care of the bureaucratic and logistical hurdles.
Satellite photos

By contrast, a conventional satellite can run between $150 million and $250 million to build and $100 million to launch.

"I kind of look at this as the Apple II. The ordinary person can get something into space," said Bob Twiggs, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford and one of the principals behind CubeSat. "We don't know what the ultimate use is, but look what happened to the Internet."

DIY satellites reinvent the space race | CNET News.com

"After the explosion, cars were burning around me and flesh was scattered everywhere. It was raining blood," he said in Karama hospital, with part of his leg blown off.

The hospital was overflowing with victims. Dozens of the wounded screamed in agony as they were treated on the floor, some lying in pools of their own blood.

The situation in Iraq has taken a grim turn. Of course, strategically, Zarqawi is now undermining Al Queda's broader interests. Somre strategic analysis here.

Zarqawi declares war on Iraq Shi'ites

Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades

Boing Boing: Gillette's 5-blade razor predicted by The Onion

Judges are bound by the rulings of their superior courts.

Karlton said he was bound by precedent of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which in 2002 ruled in favor of Sacramento atheist Michael Newdow that the pledge is unconstitutional when recited in public schools.

Of course, the 9th circuit was simply upholding Supreme Court precedent, and Clarence Thomas (perhaps the most conservative guy on the court these days) agrees:

Justice Thomas voted to uphold the Pledge of Allegiance on the merits against an Establishment Clause challenge…Yet he specifically said that the Ninth Circuit's decision was "based on a persuasive reading of [the Court's] precedent."

So you can imagine how comments like this annoy the crap out of me:

This is an extraordinary and blatant display of judicial activism," Kay Daly, president of the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary

Conservatives accuse this Court of judicial activism for upholding the ruling of a superior Court? This sort of antilogic seeks to undermine the very rule of law in the minds of people who buy into it. This is not a responsible way to play politics.

On the meaning of Judicial Activism.

"When we say 'controllable,' it means it's like a car; you can steer it anywhere on a flat surface, and drive it wherever you want to go. It doesn't drive on wheels, but crawls like a silicon inchworm, making tens of thousands of 10-nanometer steps every second. It turns by putting a silicon 'foot' out and pivoting like a motorcyclist skidding around a tight turn."

Still too big to put inside a person. Anyone got an application idea for this thing? Note whose funding the research...

Dartmouth News - Dartmouth researchers build world's smallest mobile robot - 09/14/05

President George W. Bush took responsibility on Tuesday for any failures in the federal response to Hurricane Katrina and acknowledged the storm exposed serious deficiencies at all levels of government four years after the September 11 attacks.

I don't want to meme CNN's homepage so I'm linking a different copy of this story. This is important. It means the Administration has acknowledged that the federal response wasn't rapid enough and will work to address the problem going forward. Its the best sort of answer you could expect.

Bush - I am responsible.

Dagmar wrote:

NEW ORLEANS is battered and submerged today. But it will rise again because it is — and always has been — the single most important cog in the nation's economy.

I've seen some pretty irrational things said to justify expense reports for seasonal junkets to conferences, but this one really takes the cake.

The last time I checked, choked highways and swamp don't exactly make for a manufacturing or shipping paradise. Mississippi can pick up the slack on this just fine.

I'm going to have to go with Dagmar on this one. While I enjoyed reading George Friedman's historical perspective on the importance of New Orleans, the article I'm linking here provides a more modern perspective.

Our cities may have grown up around shipping and transportation, but this isn't the 1700s anymore. Modern cities are successful due to an interplay between culture, captial, and eductional institutions, not transportation routes.

New Orleans has two of those, but you need all three to make it work, and so the city has been in decline for quite some time, and this event is likely to hasten that decline. All of those poor people in the city, and the corrupt institutions there, are all symptoms of a community which exists in a place after the economic pillars that made it healthy have eroded away. (See Detriot...)

The fact that NOLA is fun and interesting doesn't make it economically viable. Its not a place that ends up on the list of places you'd be likely to move. There are people who'd like to live there, but they are people like Anne Rice and Trent Reznor who don't need to live in close proximity to a normal industry.

The tourist industry will return, but the resulting city is apt to look more like Savanna then a top U.S. metro area. It might have better prospects in the extreme long term (decades) but its too early to tell.

NOLA SOL

Dagmar wrote: It is Clue.

Argh. Why'd you have to post something so inflamitory on a day when I have movers in my apartment? I must respectfully disagree. The number one most destructive idea in computer security is that its a good thing to write quazi-utopian "everyone in the entire industry is crazy except me" essays that give clueless people the belief that they are privy to THE answer. I'm sure it works wonders for Ranum's business. However, it is neither constructive nor useful.

1. Default Permit. It depends on the context. I think that default permit is a bad idea in the email world, for example, but most people are, for some reason, far more interested in getting the odd unsolicited communique then they are in living without spam. This is, perhaps, because the whole idea of the internet is to enable people to easily communicate. Its possible that overtime people will tire of all the opennness, and if they do, no one will be happier then computer security people, but for the time being some applications are going to be default permit, and its not the computer security community that drives that.

2. Enumerating Badness. He argues in the default permit section that "It takes dedication, thought, and understanding to implement a 'Default Deny' policy" and then immediately proceeds to argue that its less expensive to implement a Default Deny policy then to enumerate badness and that most of the computer security industry is a sham!

He is, of course, wrong (why did we write NFR?!). While you might have to pay $30 to buy a product that enumerates badness, in general, that badness is the same for everyone. Your goodness is specific to you, and so you're going to have to hire someone to custom configure it for you, and they are going to charge you a hell of a lot more then $30.

His Enumerate Goodness anti-virus system sounds somewhat reasonable until you realize that decent worms and viruses disable things like that, but if you want to live in a world where you absolutely must get permission from the IT department in order to run anything, its coming, and its called palladium, and I will conceed that people are going to do it, and it will prevent some security woes. It will also prevent a lot of work from getting done, and smart people won't use it.

3. Penetrate and Patch. If people simply wrote software that didn't have vulnerabilities, there wouldn't be any need to patch things! WOW! Brilliant! The inevitable result is going to be that some hapless admin somewhere is going to need to patch a critical flaw and he'll be told by his boss's boss that he has a "penetrate and patch" mentality. Wonderful. The fact is that no one has designed a vulnerability free computer, and while we do appreciate systems that are more failure tolerant, such as OpenBSD, and wish businesses adopted them more often, until such time it is foolish to fault researchers for continuing to look for flaws and ... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

RE: The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security

Found via Cafe LA; album review by Rhapsody:

This extensive collection of songs featuring the pioneering female guitarist and blues singer is highlighted by Memphis Minnie's distinctive guitar style and contralto vocals. Minnie sings about committing murder with enough conviction to make you wonder if she wasn't the biggest, baddest bad ass in Chicago in the 1940s.

This is amazing stuff. Check out "When The Levee Breaks" (iTMS URL, RealAudio clip).

I've been wondering when this song was going to pop up in the discouse. Of course, this was famously covered by Led Zeppelin as the last song on their IVth album. It was also on A Perfect Circle's recent compilation of anti-war covers, but I prefer the earlier two renditions personally.

Memphis Minnie: Queen of the Blues

Basically the ridiculous Hamdi decision, in which the court invented an entirely new system of evaluating executive detentions out of thin air based on a vauge authorization for the use of force, is combined here with the obvious conclusion that once you are an enemy combatant, you are always an enemy combatant insofaras the conflict is ongoing.

The result is that the entire Constitution magically unravels before your eyes. The executive needs to be able to use the military without a declaration of War, so Congress authorizes the use of force. This use of force involves actual battles. The executive needs to be able to capture people on the battle field. The executive needs to be able to detain those people while the conflict is going on. This conflict will go on indefinately. If a combatant makes it from the battlefield back to America they are still a combatant and the executive still may need to detain them.

The potential for abuse here is absolutely unlimited. The executive need merely assert that an individual was on the battlefield and they may be detained with absolutely no oversite, with the exception of a quick military tribunal where guilt is presumed. The detainee would presumably have to prove that he or she was not on the battlefield, without any access to any means of doing so.

The fact is that this line of reasoning cannot be acceptable, because the Constitution does, in fact, impose limits on the power of the executive, and this perspective does not.

I see three options:
1. Constitutional Crisis.
2. Congress acts NOW to clarify that they did not authorize this kind of detention, and creates an actual, workable framework for dealing with domestic terrorists, thereby saving the issue.
3. The Supreme Court finds some reason to disagree with this analysis.

I'm predicting the later. I think the court will decide that location IS relevent for military detentions. Someone detained on a battlefield was clearly on a battlefield. Someone who wasn't detained on a battlefield may not have been on a battlefield, and the risk of doing military detentions in that context is too great. The military should be forced to demonstrate to a court that the individual was on a battlefield beyond a reasonable doubt before they can be turned over to the military system.

Of course, the objection here is the possibility that if given a lawyer the suspect might use that lawyer to communicate messages while in prison. I think there are better ways to control this scenario then doing away with Constitutional rights. Its one of those vauge risks that people asking for law enforcement power always raise without ever being required to specifically articulate and defend.

If I was captured by the military and I wanted to communicate a message to compatriots I could do this through my captors in nearly the same way I would do it through a lawyer ... By convincing my captors to investigate particular things based on information I give them. If my operatives haven't seen me for a while and patsy one gets arrested, do X. If my operatives haven't seen me and patsy two gets arrested, do Y. Any procedures interrogators might employ to reasonably prevent themselves from being used in such a matter can also be employed by attorneys dealing with this kind of suspect.

The Volokh Conspiracy - The Military Detention Case: