... so I joined the NSA. Life is a game of patterns and chance. Be the craziest. Triple triple.

Eight minutes of flash you will enjoy.

God Speaks To Me Through Scrabble...

The items being purchased are 10,000 New International Version (NIV) Bibles with a custom-designed cover. The Bibles include Army-designed color photographs and text inserts.

War may be hell, but infowar is making a bid for heaven.

"Guns, guns, guns, and the bible carved this nation out of the wilderness.." US Nation Building technique appears in full effect, for better, worse, or same.

SOCOM wants Bibles

] The entire event was high drama, but not in that
] made-for-TV style. It was far more painful than that. For
] starters, everyone mumbled, stumbled, etc. It wasn't
] scripted. People didn't know how to project their voices
] and the inane repetitive questions were clearly for a
] forgetting mind, not to drive the witnesses bonkers.
] While the federal lawyer signaled to the witness using
] baseball codes (1-2-3 on his chest), few other body
] motions were scripted and the sides played out their
] cultural training. As an ethnographer, it was brutally
] painful to watch the body performance of each side show
] their values more deeply than anything that came out of
] their mouths.

] The attorneys were caricatures of themselves. The federal
] attorneys had a hard-edged, no-smile Yale/Harvard
] rigidity that was stunningly performed. Kafka would have
] been proud. Milgram at its best. Barlow's attorney was
] most distinctly an ACLU type with long hair, funky
] glasses, curved shoulders and a revolutionary demeanor
] that signaled that he believed in the cause. The Cause.
] It was about The Cause. And The Cause was to be fought
] out in jargon in front of the press by two sides with
] opposing views. Was God on both their sides? But
] believing in The Cause was not enough... it was clearly a
] battle of performances.

Another side of the courtroom events..

apophenia: judicial theatre

] The defense claimed that the search at the airport in
] 2003 was not "reasonable" and therefore that evidence
] obtained from it should not be admitted. The Superior
] Court of California, County of San Mateo, is accustomed
] to dealing with cases that arose at the San Francisco
] Airport, but it's not particularly used to constitutional
] challenges to aviation screening procedures, nor to
] having multiple camera crews turn out for a single
] pre-trial evidentiary hearing in a misdemeanor drug
] possession case.

The outcome was as expected, it will be ongoing.

People vs. Barlow, recount

I've complained at length about TinyURL before, I will refrain from that now. EvilURL is highly amusing.

I would like to note that both services allow recursion, although its much more amusing with EvilURL then TinyURL:

http://evilurl.com/EVILscuzzwad redirects to
http://evilurl.com/deathjobSCUMscab redirects to
http://evilurl.com/twatBLOODfacial redirects to
http://evilurl.com/stabdildoanal redirects to
http://evilurl.com/SHITTYrumpsack redirects to
http://evilurl.com/cuntsluttyburger redirects to
http://evilurl.com/SLUTTYanalSMUTT redirects to
http://evilurl.com/HUMPWADSHIT redirects to
http://evilurl.com/WANKSCUZZCRAP redirects to
http://evilurl.com/PORNSUCKBURGER redirects to
http://www.memestreams.net redirects to
http://www.memestreams.net/topics/

EvilURL - URLs more evil then TinyURL

] When faced with two choices -- selling a company's
] patents as part of its overall assets or selling the
] patents alone -- the court (and the market) chose the
] latter. This means that in the eyes of the legal system
] and the marketplace, the Commerce One patents were more
] valuable to independent licensing firms as legal threats
] than they were to an actual company that makes a Web
] services product.
]
] This is not what the patent system was intended to
] promote. The idea behind patents is that inventors and
] manufacturers of new products should have some protection
] against free riders in the marketplace that would
] otherwise copy their innovations. If competitors are able
] to simply copy the innovations of those first to market,
] few will have incentives to release their products to the
] public. In this instance, however, we see the opposite
] result.

Who needs patents as marketplace protections when they are more effectively used as marketplace weapons?

Salon.com Technology | When dot-com patents go bad

IBM is choosing the first path, and has decided that the PC business is inevitably on the second path.

IBM Sought a China Partnership, Not Just a Sale

] You know who you are. You've got thousands of song
] titles in your iTunes music library that you are
] constantly adding to and you've got a playlist for
] every occasion. You listen to your music at work and
] while you're playing. So when you want to change a song
] or browse all of the albums by your favorite artist or
] just pause the currently playing song, why should you
] have to stop what you're doing and go to iTunes? You
] shouldn't have to, and now you don't.

This is the best iTunes controller I've come across. At the current time, they appear to be giving away free registration keys for it.

This application does global hotkeys, but its not exactly intuitive about how you set them. Hold your mouse over the command in the context menu you want to set the hotkey for, then hit the hotkey. Some hotkeys simply don't work, so if you have having trouble setting one, try another.

You Control: Tunes

] In order to stop and search any suspect, not just a
] terrorism suspect, law enforcement need only wait for a
] person to enter an implied consent area such as a subway
] or a shopping mall. Their action justified by the "war on
] terror," police may then conduct a full search. The true
] object of the search -- most likely drug possession, but
] any contraband will do -- is unrelated to terrorism.
]
] Of course people shouldn't break the law or carry illegal
] objects. But the difference between civilian employees
] searching for bombs in airports and government agents
] conducting random searches for suspicious objects is the
] difference between preserving a free society and creating
] a police state.
]
] In airport security today, items deemed suspicious are
] not necessarily dangerous: Large amounts of cash, pirated
] CDs, pornography and, of course, drugs -- not just
] illegal drugs but even prescription drugs in certain
] circumstances. In fact, controversial books can be
] grounds for further investigation and arrest. Such a
] standard, even if established in airports, is
] unacceptable and must not be allowed to spread to our
] streets and subways.

This is an older article Bruce Schneier posted in the comments of Barlow's last post.

Balancing Security and Liberty (washingtonpost.com)

] When I pointed out to the officials that they only had
] authority to search for threats to the aircraft, one of
] them, a bug-eyed, crew-cutted troglodyte, declared that,
] if I had taken any of these substances, then I would have
] endangered Flight 310. That such an obviously ungifted
] person was capable of so imaginative a conceptual leap
] remains a marvel to me.

Barlow is contesting charges stemming from the discovery of marijuana, mushrooms, and ketamine in his baggage by airport security personnel, claiming that the search was unconstitutional because it was not limited to what would be threats to the aircraft.

] Now the more authoritarian among you might say that
] if these searches reveal other, non-terror-related,
] criminal activity, then so much the better. The 4th
] Amendment should provide no sanctuary for the guilty,
] whatever their crimes. But randomly searching people's
] homes against the possibility that someone might have
] a bio-warfare lab in his basement would reveal a lot of
] criminal activity. And it is certainly true that such
] searches would reduce the possibility of anthrax
] attacks and enhance public safety. Still, I doubt you're
] ready to go there. Yet. Given a few exotic outbreaks,
] you might be. Should that day come, would you still
] believe such searches should not be precisely limited?
] This may seem hyperbolic, and of course it is, but it's
] actually a fairly short conceptual distance away from
] what's going on in the nation's airports at present.

BarlowFriendz: A Taste of the System