The New York Times first debated publishing a story about secret eavesdropping on Americans as early as last fall, before the 2004 presidential election.

But the newspaper held the story for more than a year and only revealed the secret wiretaps last Friday, when it became apparent a book by one of its reporters was about to break the news, according to journalists familiar with the paper's internal discussions.

"Question timing"?!!?!

I'm *this* close to being fucking catatonic with rage. Are you fucking SHITTING ME?

Traditional media is dead. Not dying. Not "not what it used to be". Fucking. Dead.

Critics Question Timing of Surveillance Story - Los Angeles Times

Oh, dear. There are so many good quotes from the decision, it was hard to choose, but, well, here's the key :

"We find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom,"

Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

Not to mention

Said the judge: "It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy."

Oohohohohoh, I feel like it's Christmas morning already. I'm trying so hard not to act smug and vindicated, but damn.... I'm literally bubbling with joy. And if you know me, you know i don't typically "bubble". That's how important this is to me.

Thank you Judge Jones.

CNN.com - Court rejects 'intelligent design' in science class - Dec 20, 2005

The National Association of Theater Owners wants the Federal Communications Commission to allow the blocking of cell phone signals in theaters.

John Fithian, the president of the trade organization, told the Los Angeles Times theater owners "have to block rude behavior" as the industry tries to come up with ways to bring people back to the cinemas.

...

The Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association -- a Washington-based cell phone lobby that is also known as CTIA-the Wireless Association -- said it would fight any move to block cell phone signals.

"We're opposed to the use of any blocking technology, because it interferes with people's ability to use a wireless device in an emergency situation," CTIA spokesman Joseph Farren told the Times.

I vote for self-policing. If your cell phone rings, everyone gets to smack you with a rock.

United Press International - NewsTrack - Theater owners want cell phones blocked

So let's see - what happens when a President gets caught breaking the law, then publicly says he's going to continue breaking the law, all while barely even trying to pretend he didn't break the law? Well, in ages past where serious journalism ruled the day, it meant serious media scrutiny (think Watergate) and investigation.
Hell, even when a president didn't violate the constitution simply lied about his personal sex life, it meant a media-driven impeachment. Today, though, it means just another lazy, dishonest he-said/she-said story, as if reporters don't even think it matters at all.

Here's the interchange between NBC's Katie Couric and Tim Russert from this morning (hat tip to Left in the West):

COURIC: Is this going to be a case of a debate by legal analysts and constitutional scholars versus Americans, who say civil liberties are important, but we don't want another September 11?

RUSSERT: Exactly right.

This is it, baby - the ultimate example of American journalism as state-run propaganda machine. In one fell swoop, one of the largest media organizations in the world used one of its most watched television shows to boil down an extraordinary case of illegal presidential abuse of power into just another petty partisan squabble. And in the process, that media organization claimed without one shred of evidence that the only people who care that the president illegally trampled the constitution are "analysts and scholars," not the American people who "don't want another September 11" - an assertion that also dishonestly portrays respect for the law as standing in direct opposition to national security.

Truly sad.

The Blog | David Sirota: Presidential Crimes as 'He Said, She Said' Infotainment

Ebert Movieguy made a splash in our realm a couple weeks ago suggesting that videogames weren't now art, and couldn't be art because their interactivity disallows firm authorial intent. I don't think that's a particularly strong point, particularly these days where what the author intends with their work is just a single azure twinkle in the manifold Lite-Brite of interpretation.

The conversation these ideas spawned has actually continued on his site in three (3) installments. I find it almost incalculably boring. Every now and then you get a nice turn of phrase, but it's so clear that the entire "conflict" isn't over core issues but over a syntactical clusterfuck like the definition of art. Something tells me that Roger Ebert's letter column isn't going to get to the bottom of that one, but I have been called a cynic.

It is a conversation we have had and re-had with slight alterations any time some mass media know-nothing doesn't give "us" the respect we imagine ourselves entitled to. But we have the conversation about some high-flown extrapolation of the real issue when I think the basic topic is somewhat more terrestrial.

I don't think that all games aspire to be art, just as all movies don't. Now we call comics sequential art, because they've gone through this cultural hazing and come out the other side emblazoned with the imprimatur of civilization. But does the entire Marvel line-up constitute a body of bold works? Probably not, but it doesn't have to. It's disingenuous to refer to the most primitive, arcade exercises when trying to disprove the narrative potential of a medium, but that's what you get when you chat with people who don't know what they're fucking talking about.

Here's what I think the discussion has skipped over: I don't think that engineering, of which I consider game design a subset, is considered an art form by most people. It may be because I am something of a nerd, or it may be that my own work is so meager that I want the definition of art expanded so that it will apply to me. It might also be that I have had strange experiences with well made, almost psychic bits of technology that I found powerful. But I simply accept that the cleverness of inventive language or visual composition or a stirring string movement has some engineering analog.

Look at something like Final Fantasy, which is a single machine - a machine designed to produce amusement - with some traditional expressive elements that no-one would even consider disproving as art. Uematsu is an unbelievable composer, Amano is a powerfully expressive artist - if you were to combine their contributions, do they somehow cease being art? Now, if characters are created to give the art and music context, does our construct lose the potential to communicate meaning? I think that's a hard case to make. But when Sakaguchi introduces rules to govern world behaviors and resolve conflicts, allowing the player to collaborate with the course of events, now the whole thing becomes tawdry, somehow?

Tycho applies his typical wit to this debate.

Penny Arcade! - An Unbelievably Merch Christmas, Part 1

[Gonzalez] acknowledged that such eavesdropping would be illegal under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But that act, he said, makes an exception for eavesdropping when "otherwise authorized" by statute. That authorizing statute, he argued, was the 2001 resolution, known as the "Authorization to use Military Force."

Well, if that isn't the best reason *ever* for congress to be precise about those things, I don't know what is. There are many reasons a lot of people bitched about the way the authorization was handled, and this ends up being a result. Congress, instead of firmly specifying the scope of this "War", gave Bush a lot of license, and unamerican garbage like this is what happens when you discard checks and balances.

Gonzales Defends Eavesdropping Program

I just memed this for the headline. Way to go Reuters.

Anti-terrorism Patriot Act blocked in US Senate

Alex Curtis of publicknowledge.org says,

The House Judiciary Committee today introduced a bill (HR 4569) to close the analog hole. The government is proposing that devices (consumer electronics, computers, software) manufactured after a certain date respond to a copy-protection signal or watermark in a digital video stream, and pass along that signal when converting the video to analog. The same goes for analog video streams, to pass on the protection to the digital video outputs.

super.

Boing Boing: Congress:

Mind you, I disagree with some of this. Or, anyway, think he misses the point that Decius has made. That is, that Wikipedia is absolutely NOT an encyclopedia like Brittanica, but rather a medium-term collation of the current universe. I agree. Not being authoritative does, in my mind, mean that the Wikipedia folks are being pretentious in their description of it. That's a far cry from being worthless however. Anyway, my opinion. Here's Tycho's :

As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has some issues. As a model of how and where distributed intellect fails, it's almost shockingly comprehensive.

When we were first considering making Epic Legends Of The Hierarchs available as a publically manageable satirical metanarrative, we dropped the basic timeline on Wikipedia because I liked the way their software went about things. Of course, a phalanx of pedants leapt into action almost immediately to scour - from the sacred corpus of their data - our revolting fancruft.

That's okay with me. I wasn't aware they thought they were making a real encyclopedia for big people at the time, and if I had, I'd have sought out one of the many other free solutions. I had seen the unbelievably detailed He-Man and Pokémon entries and assumed - like any rational person would - that Pokémaniacs were largely at the rudder of the institution.

I am almost certain that - while they prune their deep mine of trivia - they believe themselves to be engaged in the unfolding of humanity's Greatest Working.

Reponses to criticism of Wikipedia go something like this: the first is usually a paean to that pure democracy which is the project's noble fundament. If I don't like it, why don't I go edit it myself? To which I reply: because I don't have time to babysit the Internet. Hardly anyone does. If they do, it isn't exactly a compliment.

Any persistent idiot can obliterate your contributions. The fact of the matter is that all sources of information are not of equal value, and I don't know how or when it became impolitic to suggest it. In opposition to the spirit of Wikipedia, I believe there is such a thing as expertise.

The second response is: the collaborative nature of the apparatus means that the right data tends to emerge, ultimately, even if there is turmoil temporarily as dichotomous viewpoints violently intersect. To which I reply: that does not inspire confidence. In fact, it makes the whole effort even more ridiculous. What you've proposed is a kind of quantum encyclopedia, where genuine data both exists and doesn't exist depending on the precise moment I rely upon your discordant fucking mob for my information.

(CW)TB out.

PA weighs in on Wikipedia...

Aside from making the best FTP client for MacOS X (transmit), Panic makes a number of neat T's, which people who know me have probably seen me wear.

Now, they make official (not crappy cafepress) Katamari Damacy shirts, designed by the same complete lunatic who did the game. Shit yeah. That black shirt with the neon pink "Dripping Prince" is teh rad.

p.s. their cart/download interface is also pretty brilliant. drag and drop to the big green arrow. my Web-fu is too weak to know how they do it, but i've never seen anyone else rock that scene. very mac like.

Panic Goods - Nice T-Shirts For You