Alleged enemy combatants, after all, don't tend to be an organized constituency of campaign donors who can garner congressional attention.

This is quite an essay. The Washington Post is saying that we have a Congress that is completely ignoring it's responsibilities to the most critical Consititutional matters of our time, both because they are afraid of the Administration, and because they don't care: Constitutional issues are not important to the various special interests and lobby groups that make up their electoral support structure.

Congress doesn't care...

] 0452 GMT (11:52 p.m. EST)
] SPIRIT IS ALIVE ON MARS! A "very strong signal" is now
] being received from the Spirit rover from the Gusev
] Crater on the surface of the Red Planet!

Excellent! Go NASA!

It will be a few days before the rover comes out. All the hardware in question is designed to be operational for 90 days. Hopefully everything is in good working order and it came to a rest somewhere interesting.

] 0603 GMT (1:03 a.m. EST)
] Peter Theisinger, the Mars Exploration Rover project
] manager, says there is a "good" chance that we will
] get the first pictures from Spirit tonight.
]
] "I would stick around if I were you," he just told a
] press conference at JPL.

Very cool!

Spaceflight Now | Spirit Mission Status Center

] Why Pirate Radio Is Currently Legal
]
] Thanks to George Bush for declaring the "War Against
] Terrorism" and U.S. Code of Federal Regulations title 47
] section 73.3542, it is now technically legal to operate a
] radio transmitter with out a formal license.

Pirate Cat Radio is a pirate station here in the bay area. 87.9 is the best thing on the airwaves. They are also streaming so folks can listen from anywhere. (The stream appears to be broken.)

--~}-Pirate Cat Radio 8.79 fm-{~-

... Congress has taken action that really is worth worrying about.

I'm not sure this was "Patriot II", but I think it reveals what the strategy is for "Patriot II" is.. Do it slowly, redefine one thing at a time, and we will not notice or think it is significant.

Too Much Power

] Last month, an east Texas man pleaded guilty to
] possession of a weapon of mass destruction. Inside the
] home and storage facilities of William Krar,
] investigators found a sodium-cyanide bomb capable of
] killing thousands, more than a hundred explosives, half a
] million rounds of ammunition, dozens of illegal weapons,
] and a mound of white-supremacist and antigovernment
] literature.

] The case began in the fall of 2002 when a package bound
] for New Jersey was misdelivered to a New York address.
] The family inadvertently opened the package and found
] fake identification badges, including Department of
] Defense and United Nations IDs. The FBI eventually tracked
] the package back to Mr. Krar in Noonday, Texas.

] Featherston speculates that the Krar case got little
] attention because the arrests were made just after the
] war began in Iraq. "Excuse me, a chemical weapon was
] found in the home state of George Bush," says Levitas.
] "I'm not saying the Justice Department deliberately decided
] to downplay the story because they thought it might be
] embarrassing to the US government if weapons of mass
] destruction were found in America before they were found
] in Iraq. But I am saying it was a mistake not to give this
] higher profile."

Yes, we grow loonies too.

The terror threat at home, often overlooked | csmonitor.com

] Where's a superhero when you need one? The Net, which
] once seemed so invincible, is under attack by the forces
] of evil. Viruses knock servers to their knees. Spammers
] hijack our inboxes. Hackers and identity thieves menace
] our collective security and personal privacy.
]
] Desperate solutions range from abandoning email to
] requiring a license to log on. Halt, fools! The
] Internet's problems stem from the same virtues that make
] it great: open architecture, the free flow of
] information, peer-to-peer cooperation, and a bias for
] linking strangers, not disconnecting them. Take those
] away and the Net might cease to infuriate us - but it
] will also cease to amaze us.
]
] Here's a smarter approach: 101 proposals that harness the
] Net's own superpowers to defeat its foes. Up, up, and
] away!

Paul Boutin, with help from Rand Wacker, Kevin Werbach, Bruce Schneier, Hal Varian, Scott Rafer, Dave Winer.

Some good, some unreasonable, some funny..

Wired | 101 Ways to Save the Internet

] Tens of thousands of people calling for democratic reform
] in Hong Kong marched through the city on New Year's Day
] in scenes reminiscent of the July 1 protest when half a
] million people poured onto the streets.
]
] Chanting 'we want democracy - one man one vote",
] protestors wound through busy shopping districts,
] starting in Causeway Bay and ending nearly three
] kilometres later at the main government offices in
] Central.

Here are some choice photos:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/040101/481/xvy10801010854
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/040101/481/xvy10901010952
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/040101/481/xvy10201010818

FT.com | More Hong Kong Democracy Demonstrations

] You run an Applet, it reports to us the search results.
] Distributed computing without installing anything...and
] without people knowing you're stealing their idle CPU
] time. ;)

This is one of those link graphics that's actually a java distributed computer aplication. Although, It didn't seem to be using any CPU on my machine.. I clearly saw the applet load, but it never wound up actually using any system resources.. OSX problem perhaps? Couldn't retrieve some file? Didn't look closely.

Well, I'll say this at least.. Its not uncommon these days to visit certain web pages that suck down serious CPU. Now it may not just be flash apps and whatnot.

dcomp

Balls Deep wrote:
] Hey, how hard would it be to hook up network visualizations
] with something like this?

This is the first time I have seen this one. Looks very cool. I will check this out after New Years..

To answer that question directly, I plan to expose an XML interface for querying linkage info. Anyone who has a tool they want to use, I'm all for having it work. That's the best single thing I can do to open up all this stuff at once. More on this too, after New Years...

RE: Wilmascope 3D graph visualisation system

Analysts have said that the four contracts combined could generate almost $1 billion in the initial two years.

Someone got a new network for Christmas.

6 Companies Get US Telecom Contracts