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Happy Reading for Today.
best,
<Karen
1)
-->>SPECIAL<--
Recycle your documents and help save the judiciary
Public.Resource.Org and Creative Commons
are pleased to announce a new site that allows users to recycle
PACER documents:
http://pacer.resource.org/
PACER is the system that the U.S. Courts use to distribute
opionions, briefs, and other documents at $0.08/page. The
system rakes in so much money there is $146.6 million they
don't know what to do with.
Rather than waste all these documents and help contribute to
the rhetorical warming of the Internet, pacer.resource.org
lets users upload their used PACER docs for recycling.
And, since recycling may not be conducive to your lifestyle
but you support the idea of saving, we offer a program of
digital offsets so you can become a net neutral
contributor to the public domain.
Thanks to Gina at nativevillage.org for this info!
2)
The Mt. Vernon Ladies Association is working to promote George Washington by placing his picture back in
schools across the country. The portrait, known as a "porthole portrait" is
free and will be sent to schools.
As George Washington's birthday approaches, historians have grown concerned that today's children have
limited factual knowledge of George Washington and his presidency. By placing a portrait of George Washington
in the schools, historians hope to raise interest regarding our first president, his life, and his presidency.
To request a portrait for your school, please have your principal send a letter on the school's letterhead to the
address listed blow.
Your letter should include a description of the place you plan to hang the portrait and
the school's street address for UPS deliveries. If you are requesting a poster for George Washington's Birthday,
please have your letters in by February 8, 2008.
Ann Bay
Associate Director for Education
George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate & Gardens
P.O. Box 110
Mount Vernon, VA 22121
For more information visit
http://www.mountvernon.org
3)
A Boston judge yesterday not only threw
out wiretapping and disturbing the peace charges, but made a point to
rule that obvious and non-interferring recordings of police activity
are protected by the 1st Amendment.
http://volokh.com/posts/1201919674.shtml4)
4th Undersea Cable Cut in less than a Week
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/04/0158249&from=rss
"Another undersea cable was cut on Friday, this one connecting Qatar
and UAE. 'The damage caused major problems for internet users in Qatar
over the weekend, but Qtel's loss of capacity has been kept below 40%
thanks to what the telecom said was a large number of alternative
routes for transmission. It is not yet clear how badly telecom and
internet services have been affected in the UAE.' In related news it's
been confirmed that the two cables near Egypt were not cut by ship
anchors."
5)
The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You
http://www.wired.com/special_multimedia/2008/ff_secretlife_1602
You have a blog. You compose a new post. You click
Publish and lean back to admire your work.
Imperceptibly and all but
instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of
software
agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped,
republished, and propagated throughout the Web.
Within minutes, if
you've written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of
bots will get the
word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow
bloggers to corporate marketers. Let's say it's
Super Bowl Sunday and
you're blogging about beer. You see Budweiser's blockbuster commercial
and
have a reaction you'd like to share. Thanks to search engines and
aggregators that compile lists of
interesting posts, you can reach a
lot of people — and Budweiser, its competitors, beer lovers, ad
critics, and your ex-boyfriend can listen in. "You just need to know
how to type," says Matthew Hurst
an artificial intelligence researcher who studies this ecosystem at
Microsoft Live Labs.
Here's how the whole process goes down during the
big game.
6)
Democrats Abroad to vote over the Internet!
http://votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2736&Itemid=26The Democratic Party's Dangerous Experiment David L. Dill and Barbara Simons
As most of us now understand, paperless electronic voting is a really
bad idea. But there is a still worse idea: voting over the Internet.
Voters may worry about whether voting machines were hacked by
programmers or poll-workers who have machines stored in their homes
prior to an election. But with internet voting, we must also worry about
whether the system has been hacked by a teenager in Eastern Europe,
organized crime, or even an unfriendly government. We must worry about
network failure, "denial of service"attacks that shut down selected
machines on the internet, counterfeit Internet websites, and spyware
and/or viruses on the computers used to cast votes. And we must worry
about whether the people running the system are engaging in electronic
ballot-stuffing.
7)
Like whack-a-mole, internet voting proposals have reappeared in
different guises in the U.S. for much of the past decade. When an
extremely ambitious Department of Defense proposal for internet voting
in the 2004 presidential election was reviewed by computer security
experts, it was terminated because of security concerns documented by
those experts <
http://servesecurityreport.org/> - the same concerns that
should cause all citizens to view any proposal for internet voting with
extreme skepticism.
Nonetheless, on Super Tuesday the Democratic Party is going to deploy
internet voting.
8)
U.S. Disaster Plans 'Totally Unacceptable'
Retired Marine Maj. Gen. Says Plans "Couldn't Move a Girl Scout Unit"
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=4223983The Pentagon is not prepared to respond to a catastrophic chemical,
biological or nuclear attack within the United States, placing
Americans at risk, an independent panel reported to Congress on
Thursday.
While the Defense Department conducts exhaustive planning for
operations overseas, its planning for possible action inside the
United States in response to attacks is inadequate, said the
Commission on the National Guard and Reserves.
"We looked at their plans. They're totally unacceptable," said
commission chairman Arnold Punaro, a retired Marine Corps major general.
"You couldn't move a Girl Scout unit with the kind of planning they're
doing," Punaro said of plans drafted by U.S. Northern Command, the
part of the military responsible for homeland defense.
While other federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland
Security, are responsible for pieces of the government's response to
an attack, the Defense Department is the only agency with the
resources and capabilities to manage the overall response, the
commission argued.
The National Guard and Reserve should be ordered to lead the Defense
Department's activities in that arena because those part-time troops
live throughout the United States and often have skills needed in an
emergency, the panel said.
But the military has not dedicated sufficient time or resources to
prepare for such a role, despite the creation of Northern Command
after the September 11, 2001, attacks, according to the commission,
created by Congress to study the best use of reserve forces.
That is partly because of historical tension between the federal
government and states, the commission said. Defense officials also say
the military sees its role in domestic emergencies in large part as
supporting civilian agencies.
Officials at Northern Command would not discuss the commission's
report, saying the Pentagon would first review the panel's nearly 100
recommendations.
ROLE OF RESERVES
The National Guard and Reserve have a dual mandate to fight overseas
and serve in domestic defense roles. State governors command Guard
forces during peacetime and can call the Guard into action during
local emergencies. The president can activate the Guard for federal
missions, like the Iraq war.
[snip]
9)
Helping the Planet -Inertial confinement Electric Fusion. The inventor is Dr. James Bussard, inventor of
the Bussard Interstellar Ramjet (which despite the name, was acutally a serious paper written in 1974).
The video is 90 minutes long and I found it fascinating to watch.