We have obtained secret documents which RIAA lawyers use to determine whether to file a lawsuit against a copyright violator. These documents give insight into the RIAA's decision-making process, and could help people avoid lawsuits in the future. We offer these documents as a public service.

RIAA Lawsuit Decision Matrix

This is old now, but no one has yet recommended it.

Over the years, President Bush's State of the Union address has averaged almost 5,000 words each, meaning that the President has delivered over 34,000 words. Some words appear frequently while others appear only sporadically. Use the tools here to analyze what Mr. Bush has said.

You may recall the US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud; this is similar.

The State of the Union in Words

The head of a California company hired by the U.S. government to help build a fence along the Southwest border to curb the flow of illegal aliens into the United States has been sentenced on charges of hiring illegals for the job.

And now from the irony department...

Fence firm hired illegals - The Washington Times, America's Newspaper

The internet offers the potential for economic growth stemming from online human communications, but recent industry and government actions have disfavored these possibilities by treating the internet like a content-delivery supply chain.

I recommend that the internet be at the center of communications policy and that laws affecting internet access be evaluated in terms of whether they further US economic growth by facilitating increased emergent online diversity.

The article criticizes the nearly exclusive focus of communications policy on the private economic success of infrastructure and “application” providers, and suggests that communications policy be focused on facilitating communications themselves.

The Internet and the Project of Communications Law | Susan Crawford

Precise, accurate spatial data are contributing to a revolution in some fields of social science. Improved access to such data about individuals, groups, and organizations makes it possible for researchers to examine questions they could not otherwise explore, gain better understanding of human behavior in its physical and environmental contexts, and create benefits for society from the knowledge flows from new types of scientific research. However, to the extent that data are spatially precise, there is a corresponding increase in the risk of identification of the people or organizations to which the data apply. With identification comes a risk of various kinds of harm to those identified and the compromise of promises of confidentiality made to gain access to the data. This report focuses on the opportunities and challenges that arise when accurate and precise spatial data on research participants, such as the locations of their homes or workplaces, are linked to personal information they have provided under promises of confidentiality.

The availability of these data makes it possible to do valuable new kinds of research that links information about the external environment to the behavior and values of individuals. Among many possible examples, such research can explore how decisions about health care are made, how young people develop healthy lifestyles, and how resource-dependent families in poorer countries spend their time obtaining the energy and food that they need to survive. The linkage of spatial and social information, like the growing linkage of socioeconomic characteristics with biomarkers (biological data on individuals), has the potential to revolutionize social science and to significantly advance policy making. While the availability of linked social-spatial data has great promise for research, the locational information makes it possible for a secondary user of the linked data to identify the participant and thus break the promise of confidentiality made when the social data were collected. Such a user could also discover additional information about the research participant, without asking for it, by linking to geographically coded information from other sources. Open public access to linked social and high-resolution spatial data greatly increases the risk of breaches of confidentiality. At the same time, highly restrictive forms of data management and dissemination carry very high costs: by making it prohibitively difficult for researchers to gain access to data or by restricting or altering the data so much that they are no longer useful for answering many types of important scientific questions.

CONCLUSIONS

CONCLUSION 1: Recent advances in the availability of social-spatial data and the development of geographic information systems (GIS) and related techniques to manage and analyze those data give researchers important new ways to study important social, environmental, economic, and health... [ Read More (0.8k in body) ]

Putting People on the Map: Protecting Confidentiality with Linked Social-Spatial Data

Are you in it to win? Would you regard civil rights as the gift that keeps on giving? Do you believe in the American Dream, stupid?

If you answered yes to any of the above, you might consider supporting Hillary Clinton, the person to send to the White House when you care enough to send the very best. More than any other candidate, Clinton has brought the sensibility of Hallmark greeting cards to the 2008 presidential race.

Nothing like a little empty populism to get the donations rolling in.

On the Senate floor, Clinton's observations have been sharp and trenchant, but it is on the campaign trail where Clinton's language really soars.

"When the injured soldiers return home," she told the crowd of 200, "they should be greeted with open arms, not a wall of bureaucratic red tape." If there was dissent in the room, it was not audible. "Our soldiers are facing some very difficult challenges," she allowed, but she vowed to "put in place a system to get everybody to the front of the line."

Don't understand the logistics of getting everybody to the front of the line? It's the American Dream, stupid.

Candidate Clinton, Embracing the Trite and the True

We enter the year 2007 with large endeavors underway, and others that are ours to begin.

As though it was Hussein who attacked Bush with a massive volley of cruise missiles and killed his child in a precision air strike, and not the other way around.

Congress has changed, but our responsibilities have not.

It was our fault then, and it's our fault now. My lack of ideas is still my lack of ideas, and your inability to act is still yours. My unwillingness to listen is still securely my own, and still you consistently irritate me with your unwillingness to let bygones be bygones. He's dead now, okay! Does it really matter any more, which of us was lying to Hans Blix?

Some in this Chamber are new to the House and Senate ... Our citizens don’t much care which side of the aisle we sit on – as long as we are willing to cross that aisle when there is work to be done.

As a friendly reminder to the newbies: work is to be done on alternate Tuesday afternoons, on every third Thursday after a come-from-behind win by a Washington-area professional sports team, and in the week immediately following a State of the Union address.

We set a goal of cutting the deficit in half by 2009 – and met that goal three years ahead of schedule.

Boy, am I glad I listened to my Treasury secretary when he suggested that we double our estimate before publicly announcing any budgetary goal. (I wonder if he had any other good ideas. Wait -- who am I to wonder?)

Even worse, over 90 percent of earmarks never make it to the floor of the House and Senate – they are dropped into Committee reports that are not even part of the bill that arrives on my desk. You did not vote them into law. I did not sign them into law. Yet they are treated as if they have the force of law. The time has come to end this practice.

Answer me this: how am I supposed to claim credit for this hard-earned pork when it's not even referenced in the bill I've signed?

Burns offers Homer a check for $2,000. All he has to do is sign this form.
Homer: Wait a minute, I'm not signing anything until I read it, or someone gives me the gist of it.

-- Homer, "Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?"

Yet we are failing in that duty – and this failure will one day leave our children with three bad options. Everyone in this Chamber knows this to be true – yet somehow we have not found it in ourselves to act.

You know, I could have sworn my speech-writers told me this part was about entitlements. But it sounds like something else entirely. Well, on further reflection, I suppose I felt entitled to take B... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

State of the Union 2007

This is strict constructionism on drugs.

Colbert Defends Alberto Gonzalez

We are not making progress in the leadership department here ...

Henry A. "Hank" Crumpton, the chief of the State Department's counterterrorism office and a key strategist in the war in Afghanistan, is leaving government in the new year.

His departure leaves another big hole at the State Department, which has been struggling to find a deputy secretary of state for six months. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is also now looking for replacements for her departing counselor and undersecretary of state for economic affairs.

We are already short on good leaders, and the ones we did have are bailing on us for greener pastures (to fund the higher education of their children, among other things).

State Dept. Losing a Top Figure In Terror War

The Sunday NYT features a story on the Christopher Soghoian case [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

For theater on a grand scale, you can’t do better than the audience-participation dramas performed at airports, under the direction of the Transportation Security Administration.

Of course, we never see the actual heart of the security system: the government’s computerized no-fly list, to which our names are compared when we check in for departure. The T.S.A. is much more talented, however, in the theater arts than in the design of secure systems. This becomes all too clear when we see that the agency’s security procedures are unable to withstand the playful testing of a bored computer-science student.

I guess Matt Blaze hasn't had much occasion to be impressed with his charges since he left industry for academia:

"If a grad student can figure it out," he said, "we can assume agents of Al Qaeda can do the same."

Blaze does offer a nod to the FBI, who gave the green light to his paper, Signaling Vulnerabilities in Wiretapping Systems.

Theater of the Absurd at the TSA