] The FBI demanded Las Vegas hotels turn over their guest
] lists leading up to New Year's Eve to check against a
] U.S. master list of suspected terrorists, a law
] enforcement official said on Sunday.

This is the reason they are checking IDs at hotels now.

Wired News - FBI obtains ALL Las Vegas Jan 1 room lists with no court auth.

flynn23 wrote:
] Does anyone have the voting record for this bill? I've looked
] on Thomas, but can't seem to find it. Googling also has
] revealed nothing.

The house voting record is the main URL linked from this meme. The Senate did a voice vote, so there is no record.

This page claims Senate support was unanimous:
http://roberts.senate.gov/11-21b-2003.htm

Here are the critical comments about the law that were entered into the record in the house (more on this site if you click on the double arrows at the top of the page):
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2003_cr/h112203.html

Here is the complete Thomas timeline for this thing:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d108:HR02417:@@@X

Voting Record for HR 2417 RE: Too Much Power

Here it is folks, the 2003 usage statistics for Memestreams.net! I wanted to have this out sooner but I rang in the new year on a ski slope in West Virginia.

As you can see, the site is continuing to grow. Its worth comparing this with the statistics from 2002, which are at http://www.memestreams.net/awstats.html

The monthly usage graph is drawn to scale, so keep in mind that the usage in Jan 2003 is greater then the usage in Dec 2002. Scale the graphs in your head and you can see the progression. We are still trucking forward, and yet we are still very much in the early part of a network effects curve. This years Unique Visitors number is just a little over an order of magnitude larger then last year's. I hope to see another order of magnitude increase next year.

An interesting thing occurred in September of 2003. We got referral spammed. This means that a group of people set up robots which hit our site and claimed to be a web browser which came in from a link on a site that these people are trying to advertise. As a result I can't show you the statistics for referrals from other websites. They are spammed out. This also means that there was a bit of a spike in the overall numbers in September. The later months of the year were also impacted by the holidays. People simply tend to use the internet a lot less over Thanksgiving and Christmas.

In any event, hope you find this all interesting, and Happy New Year!

Statistics of www.memestreams.net for 2003

] No bullshit, no hassle, and no need to pay extortionate
] collector's prices for rare live performances.
]
] Here are the collected bootlegs of Bill Hicks live shows,
] available to download for free in mp3 form. We'll be
] adding to this archive with background information and
] further mp3s we can unearth, but in the meantime these
] files should provide a few further hours of listening
] entertainment for those of you who have already greedily
] devoured all of Bill's commercial recordings. Enjoy.

We need another Bill Hicks. I'm not going to be able to survive this war on terrorism without one.

The download site appears broken (overloaded?) right now, but I'm meme'ing the main page anyway so I remember to check it later. Its probably down because it started getting linked everywhere.. I'm going to give it a few days. Its worth waiting for.

Bill Hicks Bootleg Downloads

Desperate solutions range from abandoning email to requiring a license to log on. Halt, fools! The Internet's problems stem from the same virtues that make it great: open architecture, the free flow of information, peer-to-peer cooperation, and a bias for linking strangers, not disconnecting them. Take those away and the Net might cease to infuriate us - but it will also cease to amaze us.

Lightweight, but fun. A good read to kick in the new year.

101 Ways to Save the Internet

Elonka wrote:
] If it's the old "ink roller and paper card" system though,
] then yes, I would find that extremely annoying.

I don't think anyone is under that impression. I haven't heard that. I think people are concerned about the fact that finger prints are being taken, and not the method by which they are taken. This is a privacy issue and not a hassle issue. However, I do see this causing delays at ground border crossings as families will now have to get out of their cars in order to get through the border.

] I don't see that as any more invasive than
] requiring people to display their passport, provide photos of
] themselves, and fill out the usual visa applications.

It is slightly more invasive. It is more invasive in the sense that a fingerprint is taken where one was not taken before. 20 years ago you could live and die as an American citizen without ever having your fingerprint taken. The only reason mine has been taken is because I'm a naturalized citizen. The only people whose fingerprints were fed into NCIC were those who had been arrested. Today in many states you have to have one taken to get a driver's license. Some states have resisted this trend. Now you have to get one taken if you wish to travel internationally, and by other governments!

This is significant only when put in context with other changes that are occuring. This new fingerprint collection also includes a warrant check. Courts have ruled that American citizens are not protected by the 4th Amendment when they are not on US Soil. They have allowed U.S. Customs to perform random drug searches of US travellers returning to the US. If you have the fingerprint gear, why not check everyones fingerprints, and not just those of foreigners? How far away from that step are we? If you can legally run a drug search, you can legally run a warrant check, and if we do that, then if anyone in any federal, state, or local government wants you for any reason it is not possible for you to leave the country. How far away is this? What sort of changes to the law will be required to plug the same system into the airports, so that you go through the same checks everytime you fly? We are already making the arguement that more invasive examination in airports is legal because flying is a privledge. We've already extending anti-terror checks at airports to include checks for some kinds of warrants...

Basically, people are concerned about this not because it is a big problem by itself, but rather the concern you are hearing is some of the frogs noticing that the water just got a little warmer, and wondering if it might get so hot in the future that we'll all start to cook.

RE: Program to fingerprint U.S. visitors starts - Jan. 4, 2004

] Thus, at least according to this court, the more uncommon
] (and provocative) the context of the remixing, the less
] likely it is legal. Of course, this raises the question
] of how new contexts can ever become legal. Presumably, at
] some point in history, no one framed art. Then the first
] person came along and put a painting in a frame. Under
] the theories in Mirage and Munoz, that person would have
] been historically guilty of copyright infringement
] because the context of their remix was uncommon at the
] time.

This article is interesting and also deeply troubling. Apparently recontextualization of someone else's artistic work is a copyright infringement EVEN IF YOU PAID for the copy that you are recontextualizing unless there is a specific fair use exception. This is copyright law preventing artistic expression for no financial reason, but strictly to prevent expression.

LawGeek: We fought the Kuleshov effect and The Law won?

Alleged enemy combatants, after all, don't tend to be an organized constituency of campaign donors who can garner congressional attention.

This is quite an essay. The Washington Post is saying that we have a Congress that is completely ignoring it's responsibilities to the most critical Consititutional matters of our time, both because they are afraid of the Administration, and because they don't care: Constitutional issues are not important to the various special interests and lobby groups that make up their electoral support structure.

Congress doesn't care...

] SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan
] Greenspan said on Saturday that policymakers have been
] proven correct in their decision not to try to prick a
] 1990s stock-market bubble that subsequently broke on its
] own.
] "There appears to be enough evidence, at least
] tentatively, to conclude that our strategy of addressing
] the bubble's consequences rather than the bubble itself
] has been successful," Greenspan told the annual meeting
] of the American Economic Association in San Diego, Calif.

Greenspan Defends Fed Stock Bubble Policy

I've had my motherboard replaced twice due to this issue. I bought AppleCare, so they have to replace it. I am amazed to hear that they are not handling this under the standard warranty. Thats fucked. This problem is most certainly real and Apple is seriously underestimating the Internet if they think they can ignore it. If you are looking at a new Apple I would highly suggest you factor the full cost of Applecare with screen coverage into the price when you consider the costs.

Apple iBook Logic Board (motherboard) problems: Flickering screen? You're not the only one.