A business owner shot and killed himself during a City Council meeting Thursday night after members voted against his request to rezone his property, witnesses said.
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Ronald "Bo" Ward, owner of Bo's Barber Shop, had told the council his business would go under if he couldn't get his home rezoned as commercial. After the 5-7 vote Thursday night, Ward stood and walked toward the council.

"Y'all have put me under. ... I'm out of here," he said before shooting himself in the head with a small handgun.

Unlike the Budd Dwyer incident, this one was not televised.

Man kills self in front of City Council after zoning decision - CNN.com

Welcome to the State Department's first-ever blog, Dipnote. As a communicator for the Department, I have the opportunity to do my fair share of talking on a daily basis. With the launch of Dipnote, we are hoping to start a dialogue with the public. More than ever, world events affect our daily lives--what we see and hear, what we do, and how we work. I hope Dipnote will provide you with a window into the work of the people responsible for our foreign policy, and will give you a chance to be active participants in a community focused on some of the great issues of our world today.

With Dipnote we are going to take you behind the scenes at the State Department and bring you closer to the personalities of the Department. We are going to try and break through some of the jargon and talk about how we operate around the world.

We invite you to participate in this community, and I am looking forward to stepping away from my podium every now and then into the blogosphere. Let the conversation begin.

PS - We're new at this. It looks like we broke our own rule and used State jargon in our blog title. "Dipnote" refers to a diplomatic note. It is one of the many ways in which governments formally communicate with each other.

The dictionary definition of a diplomatic note is: "A formal communication between an ambassador and a minister (usually the foreign minister) of this host government or another ambassador."

The faceless nameless Dept of State now has blog. In true USDoS fashion, it's color scheme is grey on black.

So what do you think we can expect from the comments? Diplomats vs. Trolls? Just trolls? People that use lots of semicolons?

US Department of State Blog - The Dipnote

Well, that's one way to run a legislature.

Legislation, Texas Style

The MySpace generation is a "somewhat alien life force," a Navy recruiting presentation contends -- with a language and lifestyle that's almost unrecognizable to adults. And because the kids are such "coddled," "narcissistic praise junkies," they'll be beyond tough to bring into the military. Propensity to join the armed forces among these so-called "millennials" has dropped to as little as 3%; that's down from 26% in 2001.

Danger Room - The MySpace Generation & The Military

As the labor union strike finally came to a close a couple hours ago, protest leader (and Italian IBM staffer) Barillo Kohnke looked out over the crowd of several dozen still there at the IBM Italia region, and declared victory:

IBM employees protested in Second Life. The "attendance" was cited as being 1850.

It even had protest crashers.

IBM employees protest in Second Life

But according to the e-mails, MediaDefender planned to unleash a peer-to-peer crawler to search unspecified file-sharing networks for child-porn videos and images based on keywords -- such as "young," "kids" and "taboo" -- provided by the AG's office.

Once suspected image files were found, the software would collect the IP address of the machines trading those files and filter for any addresses based in New York. The data MediaDefender collected would then be sent automatically to the AG's office, where investigators would analyze and investigate it, using a MediaDefender application to visit the IP addresses and download the suspect files.

It's unclear whether MediaDefender planned to download the suspected-child porn itself, or leave that to the AG's investigators. Jeffrey Lerner, spokesman for the New York AG's office, refused to comment on the record about whether MediaDefender was downloading child porn, due to "an ongoing investigation."

If the company knowingly downloaded child porn, it could run afoul of federal law, notwithstanding any arrangement it made with state authorities, legal experts say. Either way, several defense attorneys expressed surprise that a law enforcement agency would outsource any evidence collection to a private company.

"It is bizarre," says Martin Pinales, former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "What they're doing is saying, 'We're going to make you a bounty hunter. We're going to pay you to go collect evidence so that in the future we can prosecute somebody.' But (MediaDefender doesn't) have the training of law enforcement."

"It's a growth industry.."

Defense Lawyers Cringe at MediaDefender's Child-Porn Patrol Plans

Germany basically banned all "hacking tools." "Hacking tools" are not defined. This is having a spectacularly destructive impact on computer security research world wide as German resources become unavailable and people are starting to avoid traveling there. (Image from this story.)

Schneier on Security: New German Hacking Law

This morning, you left the house tagged with a tracking device that the government can use to find out where you have been and where you are going.

I'm talking, of course, about your cell phone...

While most courts considering the issue have held that police need "probable cause" to track your movements, a new decision (.pdf) last week out of the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts holds that law enforcement need show only "relevance to an ongoing investigation" to get a historical record of your past movement (something like the Jeffy trail in The Family Circus cartoon).

You have no 4th amendment right to privacy in regard to your physical movements.

This article about Stevens contains a few interesting tidbits about the man I had not heard before...

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Chicago in 1941, Stevens enlisted in the Navy on Dec. 6, 1941, hours before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He later won a bronze star for his service as a cryptographer, after he helped break the code that informed American officials that Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of the Japanese Navy and architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, was about to travel to the front. Based on the code-breaking of Stevens and others, U.S. pilots, on Roosevelt’s orders, shot down Yamamoto’s plane in April 1943.

Stevens also distinguished himself as the only justice to spend a substantial part of each Supreme Court term away from Washington. He and his wife have a condominium in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and they spend two weeks a month there from November through April. (In 1979, Stevens was divorced from Elizabeth Jane Sheeren, whom he married in 1942, and married Maryan Mulholland Simon.) “I do much more work in Florida than I do here,” Stevens told me, looking contented. He sometimes reads briefs on the beach. “One of my favorite memories is the time I was sitting” on the Supreme Court bench in Washington just after returning from Florida, he recalled. “I shook the sand out of the brief!” During his early years on the court, Stevens was known as “the FedEx justice” because he would hand-write his drafts on a yellow pad, dictate them for his secretary, FedEx them to Washington so she could type them up and then FedEx back and forth with his law clerks for editing. “That was cumbersome,” he recalled. But he switched to computers about 20 years ago and, with a secure Internet connection and phone line, he has become the first telecommuting justice.

During Stevens’s first years on the court, he sometimes commuted to Florida in an unusual way: as the pilot of his own private plane. “My secret ambition was to get Gerry Ford to take a ride in my airplane,” he said. “Any plane that contains the president becomes Air Force One,” Stevens explained, so “I would be able to call the tower and say, ‘This is Air Force One!’ ”

Justice John Paul Stevens - Supreme Court - Law - Washington - New York Times

This article is about the guy behind Intellipedia and A-Space.

Mike Wertheimer may be the most dangerous man in U.S. intelligence. You would probably never guess it, judging from his lengthy and opaque title -- assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic transformation and technology. A perfect testament to the well-worn bureaucratic tradition of offering little insight by tossing around a lot of words.

Sharing and secrecy are opposing forces. So this is Wertheimer's task: Transform the massive intelligence bureaucracy into a collaborative network, in which loose lips are, in a way, encouraged; introduce technologies that many seasoned analysts neither understand nor trust; and build a cadre of young, ambitious rookies, who just can't believe they're not allowed to check their personal e-mail at work, into the future of the business.

The opposition is fierce. When The New York Times wrote about A-Space recently, analysts commented about the piece, and about Wertheimer, on a private intelligence community blog. Some recorded their dramatic dissent. "I guarantee," one intelligence employee wrote, "Mike Wertheimer will cause people to get killed over this."

"I am threatening the status quo," Wertheimer says. "And that's a hard pill to swallow for anybody."

ShaneHarris.net: The Liberator - Mike Wertheimer