] Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said yesterday that
] the search for Osama bin Laden has gone completely cold,
] with no recent intelligence indicating where he and his
] top lieutenants are hiding.

Pakistan, Pakistan, Pakistan, Paki.... wait... holdon... So, no BL in PK? Maybe they just want BL to think that they don't know where he is. Maybe they just want US to think they don't know where he is. Hell, you couldn't have possibly given him more notice that you were planning to do something there could you? Why don't you give him another year or two to locate a suitable hiding spot? It won't be hard to figure out where he went. I mean, seriously, how many places on this planet could someone with unfathomable wealth and the sympathy of a large minority of the planet hide?

Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela,
Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela,
Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela, Venezuela,
Venezuela, Venezuela...

Musharraf: Bin Laden's Location Is Unknown (washingtonpost.com)

] Southeast Cybercrime Summit 2005 March 1-4, 2005

Potentially of interest...

Computer Forensics - Internet Cop Con in Atlanta in March

] I guess technically they aren't robots, but mechanized
] mobility suits. The one of the left is called 'i-foot,'
] and is designed to help the disabled to get around and to
] climb up stairs, while the two on the right are called
] 'i-unit.' If I'm not mistaken, i-unit has two modes, one
] that puts the rider more upright, while the other is in
] an inclined position that looks more suitable for high
] speed maneuvers.

Wow...

Gizmodo : Toyoto i-foot and i-unit

Koders is a search engine for source code. It enables developers to easily search and browse source code in thousands of projects hosted at hundreds of open source repositories.

This could come in useful. Google is sometimes really helpful for dealing with technical things and sometimes really not helpful. In particular, mailing lists tend to get mirrored a lot and google as no way of aggregating the same email posting repeated in 1000 different places. They also tend to ignore punctuation in search terms. word1.word2 is often a very different search then "word1 word2"

Koders - Source Code Search Engine

Adventures of the playmobile hazmat team. The first one is the best one.

monochrom / Loka Daun / Spezialeinheit / Special Forces

] After severe crop damage caused by four hurricanes,
] tomato supplies in Florida are beginning to pick up
] again.
]
] Two weeks ago, tomato growers in Florida were packing
] just 35% of what is typical for the season. The Committee
] expects shipments to return to normal volumes by the
] third week of December, with tomato prices expected to
] respond accordingly.

Thank God! I went to my favorite local Burrito place today and they didn't have any pico de gallo! The horror!

USA: Tomato supplies begin to pick up after hurricanes

I met quite a number of managers in jihadi organizations who said they would like to quit but they couldn't afford to because they wouldn't make as much in the civilian sector."

Dilbert knows no boundaries.

Jessica Stern, on what lures some to terror

] Political elites, such as party activists and members of
] Congress, tend to be more extreme than the public.
]
] At first, this seems puzzling, because they should have
] an incentive to move to the vote-rich middle. But many
] members of Congress represent districts that are safe for
] their parties, and the threat to their re-election comes
] in party primaries that are dominated by the more
] activist and extreme wings of the parties.
]
] This tendency is reinforced by the rise of cable
] television, which attracts viewers by means of
] contentious "infotainment" programmes, and
] Internet bloggers, who engage in fierce polemics
] with no editorial filter.

A very interesting analysis. I've said that whether you are red or blue has to do with whether you are more afraid of the communists or the fundamentalists. Americans intuitively understand that the structure of their political system is the reason that it doesn't seem to reflect their interests. This comment takes that a little deeper.

I agree with his comment about the blogosphere. Its not a conversation. Its not a dialog. Its a million soap boxes. The popular ones tend to be the most polar because they are the most emotionally charged. The blogosphere, as it currently exists, is part of the problem. Its a check on the mass media, but it will be nothing more unless it can provide discourse.

The red and the blue, by Joseph Nye

I'm sure I saw this when it came out, but its a good hack. The glow from your monitor can probably be seen out of your window. If you slowed things down really slow it wouldn't appear as a glow, but rather a strobe, as the electron gun in your monitor sweeps across rows of phosphorus. If you recorded the flashes, and knew the rate at which the gun was sweeping, you could reproduce the image displayed on the screen. Nice...

Optical Emission Security FAQ

] Each index server indexes only part of the Web, as the whole Web
] will not fit on a single machine -- certainly not the type of machines
] that Google uses. Google's index of the Web is distributed across
] many machines, and the query gets sent to many of them -- Google
] calls each on a shard (of the Web). Each one works on its part of the
] problem.

How Google scales.

The magic that makes Google tick: ZDNet Australia: Insight: Software