Yes, folks. This Shrub has his finger on the bomb.

Monuments and Mortals
And the accompanying article.

Washington – The Real and the Ideal
This is where you think I live. And this is where I live.

I woke up to a strange day.
I didn’t know it at first. It was just another lazy Saturday. A day to forget the week and do something truely pointless with great meaning.
But while waiting for the bus to take me to great meaning, I stopped to read the front page of the newspapers, through the vending machine windows.
The first article I read, in the Washington Post, explained that a three judge panel had declared the 2 decade old prohibition on protesting next to the Capitol Building to be unconstitutional. They said the Capitol Police’s concerns did not outweigh the citizen’s first amendment rights.
I’m sure you think this is about as astonishing as Oprah Winfrey gaining weight. But dispite the fact that this is the Capital of the United States, those who spend any time here know it is also one of the most restrictive, oppressive, unfair, and secretive places in the world. There’s a law on the books that you cannot protest here without first obtaining permission from the Police Chief; telling him what you want to protest about. On any given day your route to work is likely to be barricaded by National Guardsmen with machine guns cradled in their hands; (the guns are never slung over their shoulders here). And the Shrub is so scared from having received more death threats than any American President in history, that he typically demands quadruple the security measures instituted for any head of state. The Secret Service regularly lies about his whereabouts and access to the man, as a means of protection.
In this city, no one is shocked that you weren’t allowed to protest outside the Capitol.
I also looked at the front page of the Times. They had an unfortunatly small article about the ruling of a 3-judge panel in Phillidelphia, which declared the much despised Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA) to be unconstitutional. The problem found with this Act involved the Internet filtering basically forced upon public libraries. As anyone who’s read up on Internet filtering knows, there is no reliable way to block access to supposedly pornographic material without also blocking a great deal of legitimate educational material. This led the court to overturn CIPA.
This alone is heartening. Now if someone would tell me a good reason why we are blocking public access to anything on the Internet, I would be very appreciative. We are talking public libraries here. These aren’t the third rate movie theatres where Pee Wee Herman was found jacking off to Fourth Rate pornos. If librarians who should be keeping at least a cursory watch on their computers cannot keep youth from viewing such materials, than what hope does filtering software have? There is more sex in Shakespear and Catcher in the Rye than on most web sites. And frankly, since I’m technically an adult, I don’t need your morals thrust upon me. If I wish to use an idle library computer to download Pamala and Tommy’s honeymoon video, what business is it of yours? Libraries are meant to provide us with access to information and media, not to dictate it’s value or uses.
Yeah.
While waiting at the barbershop, I was again reading the business section of another newspaper. And there was a blurb about third judicial panel overturning the court order that required Sonicblue, who handles client accounts for one of the digital-TV recorder companies (Tivo or one of those), to commence monitoring their client’s use of the product and turn that information over to their major media corporations (theoretically for use in anti-piracy invetsigations).
This panel were apparently the second – to – last people in the country to realize how much of an invasion of privacy this order was. But better late than never.
In the age of Rudy “freedom – is – about – how – much – liberty – you – are – willing – to – give – up” Gulliani, I can’t believe how many judges took the time to consider the idea of liberty, privacy, and freedom yesterday. What next? Open elections in Florida?

WTO to announce schedule for disbanding
Okay…what’s going on here.This just does not look right. Something is going on here. I’m waiting for Alan Funt to step out.
You just don’t give up the power they had. Or even risk it on structural reorganization.
Read it.

I can see the future.
At least the Washington Post‘s version of it.
They apparently have started posting Sunday’s stories a wee bit early.

White House was terrorists’ intended 9/11 target
One half block away.
This same plane, which crashed into nothing but ground, shattered windows hundreds of feet away through the sheer force of it’s impact.

“Now Adelman is locked in a battle against the Belo media corporation, owner of The Dallas Morning News, which sent him a legalistic letter this week demanding that BarkingDogs.org remove all “deep links” to the DallasNews.com site.
“‘Deep links’ point to specific content within a site, allowing readers to bypass the site’s front page. Instead of linking to a specific article within The Dallas Morning News’s site, Belo wants Adelman to only link to the site’s main page.”

— Site Barks About Deep Link
Look! Up there! It’s the story that wouldn’t die!
This is a stupid argument that will go nowhere. I can almost garauntee that several things are going to haappen here:
Some judge will rule in favor of a company like below, stating that sites can require people to only link to their front page. Then all the people out there watching from home will yawn, and change the channel. It will be totally unenforcable.
Someone will realise it would be incredibly easy to prevent people from deep linking. You need only require that anytime someone is accessing a low level page in your site be referred by a higher level page. Information like this has been tracked since the creation of the modern web browser. You’d simply need a web server designed to check it each time.
I wouldn’t take bets on how long a shelf life that software has, though. You wouldn’t even notice it was up, before it was taken down because the hits to your site fell like a rock.
It’s called footnotes. Get the fuck over it.

“In a stinging rebuke of the Justice Department, a federal judge ruled Wednesday that Attorney General John Ashcroft could not nullify Oregon law that allows physicians to help terminally ill patients kill themselves.’

— USATODAY
Does it disturb anyone else that people like Ashcroft and Rumesfeld, who were never elected to their positions, are essentially making law and setting US policy?
It’s one thing to do it behind the guise of the executive branch. But they aren’t even trying to conceal their actions.
In this case, the directive issued by Ashcroft went against the results of two legal and uncontested elections. Free country huh.
Reminds me of congress telling the District that if they even released the results of the vote for legalization of medicinal marajuana, that all our federal funding would be cut. They didn’t say our decision was illegal, immmoral, or wrong. They just said we shouldn’t even be talking about it.
“FIRE!”

Ya know what they say about art students.

“The bill also would make it easier for Internet service providers to report suspicious activity on their networks. Current law prohibits service providers from reporting user activity unless it presents an immediate risk of death or injury, and allows users to sue for damages if their privacy is violated.
“Smith’s bill would loosen those requirements to enable service providers to report threats that are not immediate, and would protect them from lawsuits when they do so. Providers would face penalties if they did not store electronic records, such as customer e-mail, for at least 90 days.”

— USATODAY
On first perusal of this article, I catch two things.
One, providers, even under current laws, are expected to report custommers they believe are planning to injure themselves or others. The only way this could be accomplished is that everything you send through your ISP is not only scanned for buzzwords, but literally read for meaning, outtng the words in context.
privacy… hah.
And since this data is located on the ISPs servers, do they now have the right to sell what they learn about you to other commpanies or individuals. It would sure seem so, considering the resukts of many of the lawsuits that occured after the dotcoms all went bust.
But I pitty the ISPs as well. They are legally required to store copies of all your transmissions for 90 days? The small office I work in easily transmits gigabytes of information by email each month alone.
We’re talking terabytes of storage for small ISPs alone. While this is not impossible at the moment, usage increases exponentially each year.

“Luke J. Helder, the 21-year-old college student arrested in connection with a spate of mailbox pipe bombings, has admitted that he manufactured and planted the explosive devices, the FBI said Wednesday.’

— MSNBC & The AP
What no one seems to be mentioning here is how wrong the FBI profilers were in this case. They weren’t only wrong, their profile of the suspect was nearly the exact opposite of the man now said to have confessed.
The FBI released a profile just a few days ago, describing the suspect as an ‘older american male’, who most likely had a previous career as a traveling lone worker, such as a mailman. This was supposedly reinforced by what was being called a circular pattern to the bomb placements.
The use of the adjective ‘circular’ left me scratching myself, since the map I was looking at looked pretty straight and flat.
The man currently in custody is a 21 year old college student who plays in a band. He was openly anti-establishment. Far from doing anything in a circle, short of his future nighttime activities in prison, he was actually driving across the country.
Hey… you gotta hand it to the FBI… they had the ‘male’ part correct.

“A report released at a conference this week suggests a parent should be very worried because high school students with body piercings tend also to have smoked, used alcohol, had sex, skipped school and gotten into fights. ”
The author of the report proudly annonced that later this week he would be releasing several new reports such as "Black Males – More likely to commit crime" and other assinine topics

— Metafilter