Also available: audio snippets of all tracks.

Outstanding!

No need to spend $0.99 at the iTunes Music Store when Blue Note is giving it away for free ... You can also find the new single on Rhapsody. (The entire new album is already in the Rhapsody catalog, but it won't be available for listening until February.)

Norah Jones - Feels Like Home

The Supreme Court will soon confront the larger issue ... [and] we hope that ... it will start reining in the disturbing excesses of the administration's war on terror.

The New York Times expresses its disappointment with the Court but retains hope for the future.

Keeping Detentions Secret

Without a full disclosure of the detainees' names, it will be impossible to hold the government accountable.

This issue is more complex than the media generally acknowledge in the play-by-play reporting of the "he said, she said" variety. Few if any of the people speaking out in public on this issue are doing so from anything resembling a non-partisan position.

If you read anything about this in the press that offers both depth and balance, let me know.

Secrecy Allowed On 9/11 Detention

"What if you're doing your due diligence on a transaction? It could threaten the whole deal."

These stories should not be news to anyone here, but I didn't know the technology had been deployed so extensively. I can't imagine there are too many business customers who are pleased to see this.

Some Rental Cars are Keeping Tabs on the Drivers

A California inventor has developed a book-binding machine that makes it cheap and easy to print professional-quality books within minutes. Industry analysts say the device could make it possible for consumers to purchase previously hard-to-find texts at most bookstores.

Brewster Kahle likes it.

In a few years, the term "bookstore" may refer to one of those little kiosks in the mall, where today they sell incense, neckties, cheap jewelry, and what-not. It will consist of a keyboard, a plasma display, and a small box resembling an inkjet printer.

One could envision using this flexible technology to sell 'scalable' books. If the 1,181 page version of "The Codebreakers" is too much detail for you, perhaps you'd prefer the 500 page version, or the 250 page version with a focus on pre-20th century technology.

Interested in the latest Harry Potter book? Choose anywhere from 100 to 1,000 pages in length, depending on how much time you have to spend. Buying it for the kids, and want to delete the dark parts of the story? Easy.

How about a version of the LOTR trilogy without all of the poetry and the songs? Done. Care to drop the pages-long descriptions of minutia unrelated to the plot, too? Done. Illustrated, or text only?

Music retail outlets could do this today with audio CDs; it's not clear why they don't. There is simply no good reason why you should ever walk out of Tower Records empty handed because the clerk said, "we don't have that in stock, but we could order it for you and have it here in seven to ten business days."

A good-sized Tower Records has on the order of $1 million in inventory on hand. For a million dollars, the store could buy more than a petabyte of online disk storage, on which they could store more than two million different full length albums in CD quality (not MPEG encoded), along with high quality cover art and liner notes. By comparison, online music services like iTunes and Rhapsody offer only 30,000 to 40,000 different CDs.

Book-Binding Technique Could Revive Rare Texts

But something equally important has happened in South Asia over the past 15 years. India has been transformed by a market revolution.

Fareed Zakaria sees opportunity in recent regional economic and political developments.

So, when the IBM engineers lose their jobs to the Indians, they might be saddened, but at least they should sleep well -- they're fighting terrorism!

Wealth, or safety? Choose wisely.

Opening in South Asia

What is clear is that al Qaeda is at a crossroads. It does not have really good choices, and therefore, must choose the best of a bad lot.

When PAM reopens in March, the smart money will be on the Pakistan track.

Options for Osama, Peril for Pakistan

In this feature for the Sunday New York Times magazine, a student of (counter)insurgency applies himself to the Iraq project.

"I thought I understood something about counterinsurgency, until I started doing it."

"I didn't realize how right Lawrence of Arabia was. My first experience of war was the gulf war, which was very clean. We shot the tanks that didn't look like ours, we shot the enemy wearing a uniform that didn't look like ours, we destroyed the enemy in 100 hours.

That's kind of what I thought war was.

Even when I was writing that insurgency was messy and slow, the full enormity of that did not sink in on me. I am seeing appreciable progress, but I am starting to understand in the pit of my stomach how hard, how long, how slow counterinsurgency really is.

There is no prospect it's going to end anytime soon."

Professor Nagl's War

Pakistan continues to be the most dangerous place on Earth because of its mix of nuclear weapons, unstable politics, religious fanaticism and the involvement of senior military and intelligence officials in terrorist networks, including al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Nuclear Resolution

Mainstream culture today is like a flash mob. Those who are part of it know they're part of it, even if it doesn't congregate as often ... Increasingly, the events that most deeply, if briefly, unite that floating mainstream are deaths.

This is a most excellent year-end article, and I can't believe no one has mentioned it before now. If you don't get Time magazine, find a copy of this issue and read this article.