Make us a slogan we can't refuse, the state of New Jersey said. We got your slogan right here, the people replied.

Here were a few of the suggestions from the CNN article:

"New Jersey: You Got a Problem With That?"
"NJ: How You Doin'?!"
"Most of Our Elected Officials Have Not Been Indicted."
"New Jersey: We'll Win You Over" (ed: That one cost $260,000)
"Get Away, Without Going Far Away"
From Ol' Blue Eyes to the Boss: Jersey Is Singing Your Song."
"Born to Fun."
"Bada Bing! Choose New Jersey"
"New Jersey: It Always Smells Like This"
"New Jersey: Come Glow With Us"

Too much Sopranos. Here are a few of my own:

"New Jersey: Everything is cool, really. Just don't drink the water in Ocean County."
"New Jersey: Our police force looks forward to meeting you."
"New Jersey: The authority on government corruption."
"New Jersey: The Diner and Mall capital of the world."
"New Jersey: A nice place if you have money."
"New Jersey: Less traffic than LA."
"New Jersey: Where you don't pump your own gas."
"New Jersey: The Statue of Liberty is OURS."
"New Jersey: The largest chemical producer in the United States."
"New Jersey: Home of the nations oldest beer brewery."
"New Jersey: Rated better than Lebanon."
"New Jersey: We'll make you into a man, or kill you."
"New Jersey: Nothing is illegal here as long as you don't get caught."
"New Jersey: The home of pork roll."
"New Jersey: The opposite of Texas."
"New Jersey: The only state with it's own version of the devil."
"New Jersey: Where counties are considered metropolitan areas."
"New Jersey: Birthplace of the electric guitar, sound recording, movies, the light bulb, telephone, radio broadcast, and the commercial nuclear reactor."
"New Jersey: Because Jack Nicholson, Bruce Springsteen, Alan Ginsberg, Alexander Hamilton, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, Walt Whitman, Jerry Lewis, Bruce Willis, Caesar Romero, Ice-T, Danny DeVito, Joe Pesci, Joe Piscopo, Paul Simon, John Travolta, Dave Thomas, Ray Liotta, and Frank Sinatra make up for Bon Jovi, Tom Cruise, Robert Blake, Meryl Streep, and Sebastian Bach."

I could go on...

New Jersey slogans

What would Samuel Alito's confirmation mean for First Amendment law? It's impossible to be sure, but his appeals court opinions give us some clues. A Justice Alito would likely take a pretty broad view of free speech protections; support religious exemptions from some generally applicable laws; uphold evenhanded benefit programs that include both religious and secular institutions; and uphold the use of religious symbolism by the government.

Eugene Volokh on Alito's First Amendment case history.

Volohk: Alito is a Free Speech Libertarian

Gore offered encouragement to a crowd of about 1,500 people -- many of them students at business schools throughout the country -- who had gathered for a sold-out conference put on by Net Impact, an organization that promotes social change through business.

"You're on the right path," he said. "Millions of people are searching for a better way to find meaning in their lives when they routinely encounter a business environment and a marketplace that seems too frequently to clash with what they see in their personal lives as right and good and just."

"Market fundamentalism . . . has denigrated our abilities as free citizens to make decisions together about the deepest values that we hold," Gore said. "We need to reaffirm that we have a right to assert values even if a supply and demand equation says, 'That's not efficient.'"

Part of the problem, he said, is that the marketplace is obsessively focused on improving quarterly profits. This routinely forces business leaders to push deeper values aside.

"Managers face pressures from their institutional investors to make sure they hit those projections," he said. "The quality of our lives get excluded if the time frame is so impossibly short and the focus is so impossibly narrow."

Gore closed by encouraging the young audience to put more conscience in business. He suggested they model themselves on a perhaps unlikely group, the Texas Rangers, the band of lawmen who brought order to the Wild West: "One of their principles was, right is still right even if nobody's doing it, and wrong is still wrong even if everybody's doing it."

I like the title of one of the talks: "Living Your Values and Effecting Change through Tempered Radicalism"

It seems that people often forget that they vote with their dollars. That goes for spending as well as investing. Business is a battle field for ideas as much as the media. Gore seems to be focusing on both in recent times.

Gore's 'generation' seeks true values in business

As the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have unfolded, one of the new stars in the theatre of battle has been the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). As each new conflict redefines war based on the technologies coming of age at that time, the Iraq campaign has seen the coming of age of the UAV in its many wonderous forms. It is the most-requested capability among combatant commanders and in the last 18 months, UAV numbers in Iraq have jumped from fewer than 100 to more than 400 and there are now nearly 600 UAVs in the Afghanistan and Iraq theatres. Even more interesting is the dizzying array of unmanned aircraft used in traditional intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance UAV roles. Now we’re set to see UAVs get smaller – much smaller. The United States Future Combat Systems (FCS) program recently passed a significant milestone in its progress toward selecting a Class I Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system. The MAV has achieved a technology readiness level 6 and is now ready to begin transitioning the technology to the FCS program as an affordable backpackable systems suitable for dismounted soldier, Marine, and Special Forces missions. It will focus on the development of lift augmented ducted fan MAVs to accomplish unique military missions, particularly the hover and stare capability in restricted (e.g urban) environments to provide real-time combat information.

Don't miss the picture page. These have been covered a few places.

According to Matt Drudge, these miniature UAVs are being tested for domestic law enforcement uses.

Welcome to another one of those life-stranger-than-science-fiction moments. The first movie that comes to mind is They Live. Only in our reality, it's not being used by our alien overlords, but by the cops to get on the spot intel.

Honeywell to bring Dragon Eye to the domestic sky

Well, you get the point. At a time when we are busy lecturing others about the need to adopt democratic systems, ours and many others seem to be hopelessly gridlocked - with neither the left nor the right able to generate a mandate to tackle hard problems. And it is the yawning gap between the huge problems our country faces today - Social Security reform, health care, education, climate change, energy - and the tiny, fragile mandates that our democracy seems able to generate to address these problems that is really worrying.

"Show me a democratically elected government today anywhere in the world with a popular mandate rooted in a landslide victory - there aren't many," said Mr. Naím, whose smart new book, "Illicit," is an absolute must-read about how small illicit players, using the tools of globalization, are now able to act very big on the world stage, weakening nations and the power of executives across the globe. "Everywhere you look in this age of diffusion, you see these veto centers emerging, which can derail, contain or stop any initiative. That is why so few governments today are able to generate a strong unifying mandate."

This is a real dilemma because a vast majority of Americans are just center-left or center-right. Many surely feel disenfranchised by today's far-left, far-right Congress. Moreover, the solutions to our biggest problems - especially Social Security and health care - can be found only in compromises between the center-left and center-right. This is doubly true today, when the real solutions require Washington to take stuff away from people, not give them more.

Friedman is trying to address the national unity problem faced by democratic nations, while sitting in China. He isn't advocating that we switch to authoritarian rule, but he is clearly trying to figure out how you get that same kind of mandate to attack issues of importance.

Thomas Friedman Prays: Thou Shalt Not Destroy the Center

This just out of MIT:

Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

The helmets amplify frequency bands that coincide with those allocated to the US government between 1.2 Ghz and 1.4 Ghz. According to the FCC, These bands are supposedly reserved for ''radio location'' (ie, GPS), and other communications with satellites. The 2.6 Ghz band coincides with mobile phone technology. Though not affiliated by government, these bands are at the hands of multinational corporations.

It requires no stretch of the imagination to conclude that the current helmet craze is likely to have been propagated by the Government, possibly with the involvement of the FCC. We hope this report will encourage the paranoid community to develop improved helmet designs to avoid falling prey to these shortcomings.

What's the frequency, Kenneth?

On the Effectiveness of Aluminium Foil Helmets: An Empirical Study

This is a great collection of Dawkins quotes.

Richard Dawkins - Wikiquote

In the United States, intellectual property, or IP, law ensures that creators and inventors will get paid for their work, while doctrines like fair use and time-limited rights leave enough breathing room for the next innovator to use existing creations to comment, critique or make something new. But we have increasingly seen owners leverage their IP rights to get control rather than to get paid.

Jennifer Granick has an article on Wired about how the National Academy of Sciences and others are using the "copyright misuse" doctrine in a strategy to wrangle Kansas into not teaching intelligent design.

I fully agree with her that using this type of tactic is very bad. Fighting a bad problem by using bad law creates an even worse problem.

For those unfamiliar with the "copyright misuse" doctrine Jennifer talks about, there is a page on Tech Law Journal which explains it.

The defense of copyright misuse was raised in this case because Disney licensed its movie trailers subject to license terms that prohibit the licensees from using the movie trailers in a way that is "derogatory to or critical of the entertainment industry or of" Disney. That is, Disney uses the exclusive rights conferred upon it by the Copyright Act, not only to obtain a return for its creative efforts (which is consistent with the purposes of copyright protection), but also to suppress criticism (which is contrary to the purposes of copyright protection).

It's always Disney... Several decades from now, when history pages are written about intellectual property in the early days of the information age, Disney is going to be cast in the role of the great villain.

This is a great example of using copyright law as a method to obtain prior restraint. The only goal I see here is to get people to shut-up and not make any negative commentary under the threat of lawsuit. In short, it's a convoluted way for a transnational media corporation to achieve censorship in it's interests. Disney laid ground here that others can use.

And the evolution crew thinks this is a good idea?? [rattle rubs his temples] I'm seeing something.. I'm seeing a lawyer sitting behind a table... He's excited.. He's saying something... "But it's brilliant! The church can't use it! All their IP is in the public domain!" [rattle slams his head into the table] IMAGE BEGONE!

I'm confident that this type of thing will either get struck right down if it comes before the Supreme Court, or it will be allowed to happen freely and lead to a future that looks like a William Gibson novel. Be ready for it either way..

Intellectual Property Evolutionists Are Wrong!

The drama of Tiger Leaping Gorge is not as easy to follow as a single man standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen. It involves the complex interactions among the Chinese countryside, the N.G.O.'s and local organizations working there, the developers looking to build there, and a still heavy-handed Communist Party.

But somewhere in this swirl of forces is where China's future stability is going to be shaped - or not. No wonder China's leaders have made building a "harmonious society" central to their next five-year plan. Wish them well, because how they do will affect everything from the air you breathe to the clothes you wear and the interest on your mortgage.

The full text is available via The Peking Duck, as well as several other of Friedman columns on China.

Thomas Friedman: How to Look at China

This is some beautiful stuff someone captured. Apparently someone at CNN trying to put together a map of the areas of France not currently in flames and bursting with rioters managed to really screw up using Google Maps.

Check it out, it's almost like a public school student's attempt at making their own map of a country they know nothing about.

The World According to CNN