] Billions of dollars of business is still up for grabs to
] rebuild Iraq, but some companies complain that a lack of
] transparency in the bidding process makes it hard to
] compete for hundreds of lucrative tenders.

nooo... the gov't would never play favorites... would they?

Forbes.com: Companies criticize U.S. tender process in Iraq

] In his 2 1/2 years in office, Attorney General John
] Ashcroft has earned himself a remarkable distinction as
] the Torquemada of American law. Tomas de Torquemada was
] the 15th century Dominican friar who became the grand
] inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. He was largely
] responsible for its methods, including torture and the
] burning of heretics - Muslims in particular.

DenverPost.com - Walter Cronkite on the DOJ

] Remote attestation works by generating, in hardware, a
] cryptographic certificate attesting to the identity of
] the software currently running on a PC. (There is no
] determination of whether the software is good or bad,
] or whether it is compromised or not compromised.
] "Identity" is represented by a cryptographic hash,
] which simply allows different programs to be
] distinguished from one another, or changes in their
] code to be discerned, without conveying any sort of value
] judgment.) This certificate may, at the PC user's
] request, be provided to any remote party, and in
] principle has the effect of proving to that party that
] the machine is using expected and unaltered software. If
] the software on the machine has been altered, the
] certificate generated will reflect this. We will see
] that this approach, although elegant, proves
] problematic.

READ THIS!

EFF: Trusted Computing: Promise and Risk

]
] ASHINGTON, Oct. 6 — The Supreme Court on Monday let stand
] a ruling by a federal appeals court allowing Arkansas
] officials to force a convicted murderer to take drugs
] that would make him sane enough to be executed.

Bunch of other SC bits here.

Ruling Allows Forcible Drugging of an Inmate Before Execution

] Crackers obtained the code probably by exploiting a
] vulnerability in Outlook and installing keyloggers,
] according to Valve, the company which develops Half Life.
] Valve's account of the leak is here.

well, much as it sucks for them, companies with millions of dollars of intellectual property should have better security.

Half Life 2 leak means no launch for Christmas

sweet lord, she better not.

Daily Kos: Is Hillary running?

] "Many items needed to establish a laboratory for making
] biological warfare agents were being sold on the Internet
] to the public from DoD's excess property inventory for
] pennies on the dollar, making them both easy and
] economical to obtain," the GAO draft report said.

nice! fucking saddam didn't have any biolabs, but some kid in arizona does...

CNN.com - GAO: Pentagon sold biolab gear - Oct. 6, 2003

] Cable companies would be required to open their
] networks to rival high-speed Internet service
] providers under a federal appeals court ruling
] yesterday that could lead to more choices for
] consumers and subject the industry to the same
] competitive pressures roiling the telephone market.

seems like a reasonable thing to me -- telcos have to do it for DSL, why not cable operators?

Ruling Opens Cable Lines (TechNews.com)

neat! get your learn on...

nanotechweb.org - Tim Harper - Freeing up nanotechnology information (October 2003)

] what if there were a way to turn a liquid into a tough
] solid at ordinary temperatures with a mere zap of
] electricity -- and then have that solid become liquid
] again, instantaneously, simply by shutting off the
] current?

some neato potential here... similar to the shocks in new Vettes, but electrorheologocal rather than magnetorheological.

Zap of Electricity Creates Fluid Situation for Liquid (washingtonpost.com)