BTW, this is why feds always advocate biometric technologies even though they aren't cost effective.

TIA Flowchart

flynn23 wrote:
] School district bans holiday decorations.

On the one hand, students have a protected right to religious speech.
On the other hand, it is illegal to turn a school into a chapel, or to coerce religious messages upon a captive audience.

Its possible that hanging a bunch of religious material up in a school could constitute the latter, but its extremely unlikely in a holiday context. Courts are not stupid. They aren't going to declare this establishment unless it IS really establishment.

One wonders about the facts of the case. What promped this decision? This article is fairly short on facts. The idea of children's art being torn off the walls is fairly sensational. The fact that they don't say WHY leads me to suspect that if they did it would make the story less interesting.

The article I'm linking here is a reasonable coverage of religious rights in schools. It does not cover this issue exactly. However, it does have this to say about holidays:

"Generally, public schools may teach about religious holidays, and may celebrate the secular aspects of the holiday and objectively teach about their religious aspects. They may not observe the holidays as religious events. Schools should generally excuse students who do not wish to participate in holiday events."

RE: My God is better than your God

Is Hussien really that fat? Seriously, the man looks about 8 months pregnant.

(New conspiracy: Hussien undergoes secret genetic experiments to produce A-Sexual Hussien clone race. Bares his own clone to term.)

Gulf Wars - Episode II - Clone of the Attack

] "Our goal is to provide an engaging and educational
] experience for Mac OS X Server administrators and
] afficionados."

A useful site about using OSX as a server.

Welcome to AFP548.com

] "That's the hot thing in spam fighting now -- Bayesian
] filtering. I'll leave the details to smarter people, but
] it is essentially a statistical method in which
] individual tokens (words) are mapped to probabilities.
] For example, a quick look at my spam log of 700 recent
] spams shows that my last name shows up in 4 spams and 254
] "good" messages, making it a strong (but not absolute)
] indicator of non-spam. Conversely, the term "hcode" shows
] up in 304 spam messages and no legitimate messages,
] making it a very good indicator of spam."

I'd like to play with this as a filtering system in the agent...

Bayesian Spam Filtering

] "Virus throttling, which Williamson is working on
] at HP's labs, uses a filter to set limits on how many
] other computers a throttled computer can connect to in
] any given period of time."

This is a good idea.

Wired News: Virus Throttle a Hopeful Defense

] Mencal is a simple variation of the well-known unix
] command cal. The main difference is that you can have
] some periodically repeating days highlighted in color.
] This can be used to track menstruation (or other) cycles
] conveniently.

OK, this is just too off the wall not to recommend!

Menstruation calendar

] "Apple has done a marvelous job with the recognition and
] control systems, and now that you can script the Internet
] so easily in OS X, it's straightforward to build useful
] voice-driven commands that invoke external as well as
] local services. "

XML + Voice commands.... This is a fun article... There might be something interesting in here, but I need to think about it.

- This can be more efficient then using the mouse for starting programs and dealing with windows.
- Dialog box buttons/web buttons should always be speakable.
- This is interesting when combined with voice messaging. It would be nice if I could do voice chat with someone while working on something else with the keyboard.
- Addressing the computer everytime is lame. I should be able to make it start listening with something specific and then make it stop with something else.
- Speech is most useful when you are not at your desktop:
- In the car: There is stuff out on the net for running itunes with speech. This is useful when you want to run music off your mac while driving.
- Around the house: If you had an infrastructure for microphones and speakers you could get your computer to do things while you cook in the kitchen, such as play music or read email to you.
- There needs to be a way to get the thing to read stuff to you without selecting the text with a mouse...
- X10 interoperability would allow you to control your house with speech.
- It needs to automatically detect ambient noise levels and raise or lower the microphone volume in kind.

O'Reilly Network: Speakable Web Services [Nov. 08, 2002]

] "If that assumption is correct, then only 2,480 out of
] 36,386 titles from 1927-1946 are available, or 6.8%.
] 93.2% are commercially dormant."

While this result is hardly surprising, its important, because the Copyright club has argued that copyright protection for old works is the best way to ensure their distribution. Obviously, its not working very well.

Proof that Valenti is wrong...

] "In a incident that highlights the pitfalls of online
] recommendation systems, Amazon.com on Friday removed a
] link to a sex manual that appeared next to a listing for
] a spiritual guide by well-known Christian televangelist
] Pat Robertson."

Someone hacked Amazon's recommender system...

Amazon blushes over sex link snafu - Tech News - CNET.com