This is one crazy e-Bay auction. Its up to 870.00 right now, and has had over 300,000 hits.

Make SURE your speakers are UP.

She's NOT A CHRISTIAN Bobbleheaded God Warrior Doll

Here's a great website if you love Santa Claus! The Canadian post is so close to the North Pole that they are the ones that carry letters to the North Pole.

Write the North Pole address and get a letter back, or, if you'd rather, email Santa.

There's also some nice Santa wallpaper, games, activities. Its a very neat little site that will bring a lot of kids and the people that love them a lot of fun.

Write Santa via Canada - They deliver to the North Pole

From the Church of the Flying Spagetti Monster comes this request for this new alternative Intelligent Design theory to be taught in Kansas Public Schools.

I really like the Michaelangelo art.

New Intelligent Design Theory

Sony.

Sony has a rootkit.

The rootkit phones home.

Phoning home requires a DNS query.

DNS queries are cached.

Caches are externally testable (great paper, Luis!), provided you have a list of all the name servers out there.

Nice pictures of worldwide distribution of the rootkit.

Kaminski Analysis of Sony Rootkit traffic

Tashie Grigori died of cancer on the 11th of November.

She worked very hard to found an organization of volunteers, many from the Boston and DC area's 2600 groupp, to combat child pornography online.

The informaal group took root on undernet and grew from there, working with law enforcement as eyes, ears, and a technical hand when needed to combat online child pornography.

Tashie Grigori of AntiChildPorn.org has died

Should the United Nations control the Internet? That’s the subject of a heated debate slated to take place at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis later this month. The European Union is pressing for a UN role in governing the Internet, which is currently in the hands of a US nonprofit. Lawrence Lessig breaks down the debate and offers his views.

The largest cause of this rift is European distrust of the United States. It’s not particularly related to the Internet. The Europeans are eager to stand up to the Americans, and that I think has been produced by the last five years of U.S. foreign policy. It’s not really a cyberlaw problem.

I am English and a strong supporter of European integration. However another reason for the problem is that a lot of the EU is very undemoractic and run entirely by bureaucrats and they love to have their fingers in every pie and consequently some of the things that come out of Brussels are full of shit.
I hate US foreign policy regarding Iraq but I have no problem with some US non-profit organisation running the internet. If it ain't broke don't fix it. Foreign policy is no excuse for anti-Americanism.
However although in part it may be anti-Americanism I think it is mostly the bureauocrats wanting a piece of the pie. Run a search on some of the things they have passed legislation on.

Larry Lessig, on Battling for Control of the Internet

The death of secret detainee Manadel al-Jamadi was ruled a homicide in a Defense Department autopsy

CIA allegedly hid evidence of detainee torture: report

Stewart Baker, assistant secretary for policy at DHS, did not cite Sony by name in his remarks Thursday but described industry efforts to install hidden files on consumers' computers.
"It's very important to remember that it's your intellectual property, it's not your computer," Baker said at a trade conference on piracy. "And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it's important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days."

Sony to Suspend Making Antipiracy CDs - Yahoo! News

The new standards say high school students must understand major evolutionary concepts. But they also declare that basic Darwinian theory — that all life had a common origin and that natural chemical processes created the building blocks of life — has been challenged in recent years by fossil evidence and molecular biology.

Here's part of the problem. The Kansas standards say this (sort of), but I have yet to see the evidence that they are talking about. From what I have seen, the fossil evidence and molecular biology have done nothing of the sort.

DO WHAT? No way. NO FREAKING WAY. You know what I like - the Dalai Lama. He said "If science proved the scriptures are wrong, then they must be changed."

How 'bout THAT for an EVOLVED way of THINKING?

These people, they make me SICK. I homeschool, but you know what I did today? I taught evolution. All day. We read about it, did an Internet assignment, watched 3 movies on it - all recent - all very scientific. Not one WORD anywhere about any fossil record being in conflict with the theory. Maybe they are talking about the gaps in our knowlege? I don't freaking know where these people come from. Religious literalists just suck. They'd keep us all in the dark ages and surely burn my entire family at the stake if they had their way.

Evolution Critics Score Win in Kansas - Yahoo! News

I was really looking forward to a trip to the new Aquarium. I'd hoped that we could plan a group homeschool trip. We aren't rich, but it was affordable enough for my son and I.

Well, I was suprised to find a raging fire in our homeschool group(s) over the price of the tickets. Looking at other attractions, it IS quite a bit high. When one lady pointed out that it would cost her 96.00 to take her family of 5 it really hit home. A LOT of families won't be able to afford this trip!

They don't seem to have the normal homeschool days and discount days that so many of the educational facilities have. Heck, in Chattanooga, and here in Cartersville, the museums often have occasional FREE nights for the general public.

Looking on the Internet, I see there has been some uproar about this already. http://www.intix.org/news.php?ArticleID=1267

Could they be trying to cater to a certain demographic only? Could they be intentionally excluding poorer children?

Just WHY IS the new Georgia Aquarium so pricey?