RTFA: http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20070919/cm_then…

Today the US Senate fell four votes short of restoring Habeas Corpus, the fundamental constitutional right of individuals to challenge government detention, which the Republican Congress revoked in last year’s Military Commissions Act. Fifty-six senators supported a procedural move to tie the Habeas provision to legislation authorizing defense spending–a step that requires sixty votes.

Recall, our Attorney General was the person to inform us that we were not guaranteed this right by our Constitution. Now, it would appear, Congress has reinforced this. I’m not concerned, though.

RTFA: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/art…

Troopers arrested an MIT student at gunpoint Friday after she walked into Logan International Airport wearing a computer circuit board and wiring on her sweatshirt. Authorities call it a fake bomb; she called it art.

PEOPLE. You are turning the best Americans into fugatives.

RTFA: http://allday.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/09/19/367…

I truly find it difficult to have any sort of compassion for this young man.  The footage we have seen is very straight forward.  This person crossed a line in public behavior that brought on consequences, and he was apparently very willing to escalate things to ever greater levels.

These are some of the most disturbing comments I have ever read. If these comments are real, then the townsfolk are literally crying out for an authoritarian overlord at every public assembly.

Is this really what Americans believe?

“I support the police 100%. I do believe that if they had used the oppropriate level of force and restrained this guy and escorted him out effectivly from the begining things would not have escalated to to the point that they did. He should not have been able to struggle free flalling his arms about, ect. He got taserd because he refused to comply to the police. We have given police this kind of authority for a reason. When things go wrong and someone is able to hurt others we complain that the police didn’[t use enough force. Let them do their job, let this be a message that we should learn to respect the police and and understand that they will do what they have been trained to do to keep us all safe.

Asshole: we explicitly did NOT grant the police the authority to swarm us while we questioned our representatives.

The only sure thing that can be said from watching this video is that Meyer had the power to stop the confrontation by complying with the Officer’s lawful order. I believe the Officers involved showed great restraint in the incident. The descion to use multiple Officers and the Taser demonstrated to me the Officers not wanting to cause bodily harm to Meyer.

What!?!? It’s NOT lawful to attack someone like that, especially since Kerry agreed to hear the question! Lawful order?!?! You’re a crackhead!

I felt all along that the student was at fault. Then I heard that he is known for video-taping his “pranks” for which he is well-known on campus. This was purely a bid to get attention, and he certainly has done that. Stop reporting it and he’ll go away.

At fault!?! He was talking, and then the police were shoving him away from the microphone. Kerry said he would answer the question. What, exactly, is he at fault for?

I believe that this student was being unruly. It shows him cursing while questioning Kerry. As soon as the guards were trying to usher him out, he should have complied. Instead he fought while pushing and pulling to get away from the guards. This student was at fault!

Hold on a second - he was at fault for being unruly? He was cursing? IT WAS A FUCKING POLITICAL FORUM. He pointed out that Clinton was impeached for getting a blowjob, and that W should be impeached before he starts a war with Iran. That’s over the line?

These comments are so far out as to be completely unbelievable. They’re not real people - paid shills from France or something. That’s not how rugged, gun-toting, freedom-loving Americans roll. It’s not how Americans talk. It’s simply the wimpiest, most pathetically cowardly way to react to an obvious abuse of authority. The kid was NOT testing the limits of free speech, but the cops were testing the limits of reasonable force… and the heartland of America decides that sort of violence is good for this country?

Naughty! He said blowjob. My virgin ears. TAKE HIM DOWN. TASE HIM AGAIN. KILL KILL KILL.

RTFA: http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/09/17/iraq.mai…

“The controversy over Blackwater is an unfortunate demonstration of the perils of excessive reliance on private security contractors,” said Waxman, D-California. Blackwater, founded in 1997 and based in Moyock, North Carolina, is one of many security firms contracted by the U.S. government during the Iraq war. An estimated 25,000 employees of private security firms are working in Iraq, guarding diplomats, reconstruction workers and government officials. As many as 200 are believed to have been killed on the job, according to U.S. congressional reports. Some Blackwater personnel died in a grisly attack in Iraq more than three years ago that sparked shock and outrage in the United States. Four Americans working as private security personnel for Blackwater, all of whom were military veterans, were ambushed, killed and mutilated in March 2004 in Falluja, west of Baghdad. People close to the company estimate it has lost about 30 employees during the war.

The way to report fatalities in an outsourced war: we lost 30 employees.

RTFA: http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMYTC13J6F_index_1.html

The area covered by sea ice in the Arctic has shrunk to its lowest level this week since satellite measurements began nearly 30 years ago, opening up the Northwest Passage – a long-sought short cut between Europe and Asia that has been historically impassable.

RTFA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor’s_algorithm

Shor’s algorithm is a quantum algorithm for factoring an integer N in O((log N)3) time and O(log N) space, named after Peter Shor.
A common public-key cryptography method known as RSA is based on the assumption that it is computationally infeasible to factor a large integer. For this reason a quantum computer with sufficiently many quantum bits could “break” RSA. RSA uses a public key, N, which is the product of two large prime numbers. One way to crack RSA encryption is by factoring N, but with classical algorithms, factoring becomes increasingly time-consuming as N grows large; more specifically, no classical algorithm is known that can factor in time which is polynomial in log N.
Like many quantum computer algorithms, Shor’s algorithm is probabilistic. Furthermore, it gives the correct answer with constant bounded probability. A proposed answer can be easily verified by dividing the RSA key by the alleged factor and looking for a remainder. By running the algorithm multiple times a correct answer can be obtained with exponentially small error.
Shor’s algorithm was discovered in 1994 by Peter Shor, but the classical part was known before; it is credited to G. L. Miller. Seven years later, in 2001, it was demonstrated by a group at IBM, which factored 15 into 3 and 5, using a quantum computer with 7 qubits. [1]

Well, at least there aren’t too many groups who can implement this in the next decade…

But, the field is seeing progress.

RTFA: http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/09/10/ed-rosentha…

You know, I wasn’t allowed to present these facts in either case. And the jurors were misled, because a half-truth isn’t a truth. A half-truth is a lie. The jury was told that I had distributed this material, but they didn’t hear that I had been told that I was free from prosecution.

That’s an estoppel issue. Let me explain that. Let’s say there’s a red light, but a cop waves you through. Another cop, on the other side, can’t give you a ticket for crossing the red light because you have been told that what you’re doing was legal, right? You’re following the cop’s orders.

So I was told by the city attorney’s office that what I was doing was legal and I was free from prosecution. So even if she was wrong, I should’ve been able to say to a jury, “Hey, look. I was led to believe that what I was doing was legal by an official.” But the judge said, “No. Even though this person is a government official, she can’t testify for you.”

RU: The jury from the first trial was outraged after your conviction when they found out what was actually going on. That was very unusual. Describe what happened with the jury after the trial.

No comment.

RTFA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeTVEOxmsIs

Chasers War On Everything - Season 3, Episode 1, Part 1

These are the guys who got through two APEC checkpoints in Sydney. Pretty funny, but some of the jokes are culturally encrypted so that only Australians can laugh.

RTFA: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,295805,00.html

A woman accused of running a high-end Washington prostitution ring says the U.S. government may be targeting her because Muslim men used her escort service before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In court papers filed this week, Deborah Jeane Palfrey said she might have to divulge classified information to defend herself against racketeering charges. She said the information possibly including the identities of customers from the Middle East could have national security implications.

She is asking a federal judge to schedule a secret hearing to discuss the information.

Everybody is pulling the “national security” card. This reasoning appears to be a little contrived.

RTFA: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/03/AR2007090300933.html?hpid=moreheadlines

The psychological insights yielded by the research, which has been confirmed in a number of peer-reviewed laboratory experiments, have broad implications for public policy. The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.
This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi. While these beliefs likely arose because Bush administration officials have repeatedly tried to connect Iraq with Sept. 11, the experiments suggest that intelligence reports and other efforts to debunk this account may in fact help keep it alive.
Similarly, many in the Arab world are convinced that the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 was not the work of Arab terrorists but was a controlled demolition; that 4,000 Jews working there had been warned to stay home that day; and that the Pentagon was struck by a missile rather than a plane.

Several layers of interest in this story. Approximately, denial helps to strengthen myths. Also, although 9/11 is a major event, a surprising amount of mis-information surrounds it.

Also worth noting: Washington Post makes it tricky to quote and cite them. It’s almost as if they don’t want other people to comment on their story.

RTFA: http://www.cnet.com/8301-13739_1-9769645-46.html

Comcast is perfectly within its right to filter the Internet traffic that flows over its network. What it is not entitled to do is to impersonate its customers and other users, in order to make that filtering happen. Dropping packets is perfectly OK, while falsifying sender information in packet headers is not.

Comcast lowers its bandwidth bills by spoofing TCP RST packets. The net effect is that if their customers run normal TCP/IP stacks, the customer’s computer will think the remote host has disconnected. Right now, they use this on Bittorrent traffic, but the same technique is used in China to perform per-keyword HTTP-over-TCP filtering, too. One solution, presented in this paper, is to hack your TCP/IP stack to ignore, or at least be smarter, about spoofed TCP RST packets.