And away we go - 21 August 2008

Meetings, meetings. Today had a lot of data thrown at me, most of it interesting and useful, so all in all, a good day. My professional self also gets a laugh at a Wisconsim woman who was jailed for ignoring a court summons when the library tried to collect its fines. At that point, a $30 fine had a $172 cost applied with it.

Julius Carry, renowned for his role as Lord Bowler in The Adventures of Brisco County Junior, has died at 56, of pancreatic cancer. I haven’t made it through the box set yet, though...

In addition to this, there’s a lot of news happening elsewhere in the world. In Georgia, despite promising to withdraw, Russian troops appear to be digging in, instead. Beyond that, the Norwegian Defense Ministry says Russia called them and said they'll be cutting their ties with NATO. All this fans the flames of those claiming this is a repetition of the past, and that America should be ready to back itself up if it talks like it's going to attack. There’s also a "you must choose between Russia and Georgia" letter from the foreign minister of Russia.

A plane crash in Spain leaves the unenviable task of confirming the identity of the victims.

If one is feeling a little chilled or otherwise lacking passion in life, a tour of what white supremacists are looking for in their women should be able to get the blood appropriately heated to the point where the cold dissipates.

On a much better note, proving that a wedding doesn't have to cost a fortune to be good.

Domestically, more life out of the Warre/McCain/Obama sequence - Liberal Seagull thinks that Obama's biggest mistake was showing up, after having red the transcript and noticing how many questions posed were conservative issues, and conservative/religious issues, too. So McCain can look good with short, decisive-looking answers and Senator Obama has to explain his more complex positions. Kathleen Parker puts it more succinctly, calling the entire matter "religious interrogation" and "un-American" based on the questions that the pastor asked of the candidates, many of which had strong Christian elements to them, like defining evil and saying how one would fight it. Rob Boston of Americans United for Separation of Church and State notes that even if we went by Presidential tradition, an event like Pastor Warren's would be unlikely to garner early Presidential candidates.

After the draft comment, McCain sticks his foot-in-mouth again, claiming his wife met Mother Teresa and then took babies from her to the United States. The false event disappeared, of course, once inquired about. Also, it looks like a new line of attack is to rightly point out that Senator McCain is no ordinary man, when it comes to wealth. Not that Barack Obama is necessarily a middle-class person, either.

Perhaps more importantly, the current administration still can't find those e-mails that were deleted back in 2003, having not even hired a contractor to go and try and completely del- errr, recover them. Shakespeare's Sister's Paul the Spud is not happy, knowing that the next administration is probably not going to do a whole lot against the current one when it takes over. The current administration isn’t sitting on their laurels, either - despite the objection and request to squash it, the new HHS rule that can make birth control abortion, and then shield the people who believe that from being fired for dereliction of duty is proceeding as planned.

Furthermore raising the blood pressure again, a high school principal was told in confidence by a student that she was being taunted for being a lesbian. Rather than trying to stop the teasing, however, the principal told her that homosexuality is wrong, outed her to her parents, and suspended several of her friends when they wore gay pride clothing in support. Beyond that, he inquired after several other students as to whether they were homosexuals or hung out with them. What’s probably worst of this? There’s a lot of people in the community, apparently, who think the principal did nothing wrong. That’s pretty well on par with the officer that called student MySpace pages "slutty", telling one student a sexual predator masturbated to her photo, and then called her cell phone number based on the information she had on her profile. All of this intending to scare the students into keeping better track of their private data. Instead, the message was lost in the tactics used.

The TSA apparently damaged plane sensors, using them to climb on the plane for an "inspection" for which they didn't have the authority, according to a rant on Aero-News Network.

Ford Motor Company hopes to generate interest in their new offerings by having Ford employees drive them, thinking that the employees will then buy and try to convince their friends to buy Ford. The problem with that? Unemployment rates are going up in Michigan, not down.

After proposing to put adverts on the border wall, PETA is apparently interested in purchasing a Sea World.

In the opinion realms, Duncan Hunter thinks that establishing persistent unmanned surveillance will help in clearing Afghanistan of terror and Taliban forces in the zones near the Pakistan border, by providing positions and movements that can then be intercepted with attacks, most likely unmanned, as troops moving from one place to another may not happen for a while.

James Kirchick opines that even though he's making motions about a power-sharing agreement, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has no intention of sharing power with anyone. If nothing else, this reminds us that there’s a lot more going on in the world than our newsmedia will say.

Yellow Pages Goes Green, an organization that requests consumers in the United States request that the government not send the Yellow Pages and White Pages directories to residents, businesses, and organizations, so as to save trees, paper, petroleum, and other resources.

Wynton Hall sugests that a Democratic loss this year would set the party back several years, having fielded the best candidate in years and still losing . It might inspire quite the apathy for the country, too, if after all of that effort and potential hope for change, the candidate from the same party as the last ended up winning. Of course, the Democratic candidate might get spurned more by his supporters if the Democratic Party really is starting to warm to the idea of offshore domestic drilling. David Freddoso thinks the Obama we see now is a sham, and the real Obama is the kind of politician that challenges all his opponents off the ballot and support Chicago political machines.

In science and technology, pictures from what will be the tallest skyscraper in the world, the continued importance of trying for an interstellar mission, even if it doesn't look like one will happen any time soon, turning lots of 2-D images into a 3-D panorama, a possible new protocol for peer-to-peer sharing that makes things faster and cuts down on the badnwidth requirement, tooling the genome to provide drugs that work best on your specific genome, and beaming power wirelessly from outlet to appliance.

Deserving of special mention, though, FEMA's phone system got hacked and used to make several expensive and international calls. Most likely using techniques perfected in earlier decades... and someone might have just left the default passwords on.

Last for tonight, a look inside the studio that creates some very Bent Objects.

We love the weekend - 22 August 2008

My professional self is quite interested in how France's ban on television intended for children under three is going to play out. I don’t know the intended audience for Rue Sesame these days, but I do understand the developmental worries about sticking a child in front of a screen as a baby-sitter, rather than having an active adult around to play with them.

Internationally, terror strikes at Pakistani munitions plants, which always generates the possibility that the people supposedly not looking too hard in certain autonomous regions will start using the fine-toothed comb, and ask their friends for help.

We have a deadline for troop withdrawal - 2011. The part where the U.S. wants all its contractors and soldiers to be immune from Iraqi law is still a sticking point, of course, but with the way that the government is doing its best to make itself and its contactors immune to U.S. and international law, I suppose this isn’t that surprising. Nor are opinions saying that contractors need to be immune from Iraqi law, or the quality of contractor will suffer. Considering some of the work the contractors have already done, I’m not sure that it’s a credible argument. Also, it’s not actually a complete withdrawal, and it is, of course, “conditions-based”, which means that nothing might happen at all, if both sides agree the conditions are just not right for withdrawal. Still, at least they’re talking definite times. All of which will help General Petraeus receive the credit he should get for his work to this point, even though others, like the WSJ opinion here, also try to claim that it is a vindication of their overarching philosophy and a justification of the invasion and “surge”.

If you’re going to embark on massive data mining and storage and hoarding and analysis... make sure the barrel you're holding it in doesn't leak. Four million people’s data lost and likely compromised because of it, and that’s without spectacular blunders like the 25 million name CD lost earlier in the year. Most of these losses are the losing or stealing of hardware that has the data on it, so I suppose it’s unavoidable that data will potentially be lost if stolen, but I wonder how the encryption and countermeasures are on the laptops, so as to make it difficult for someone who has the physical machine to actually obtain the data. Unencrypted discs, however, should not happen.

Domestically, the new HHS regulations are now available for public comment. The official press release of the new regs, and then, probably the very important part, the official text of the proposed regulation. So, if you want to tell the Department of Health and Human Services that they are potentially cutting off a woman’s access to birth control or abortion services because the doctor or pharmacist, out of “conscience” refuses to fill them, and there aren’t any other places around that will, and exempting any health care service provider that chooses to so deny this from punishment, whether diplomatically or colorfully, see the following paragraphs.

First, the subject for comments submitted should be “Provider Conscience Regulation” - If attaching files, they prefer Word formal, but will take Wordperfect format.

The electronic comment form should be available from www.regulations.gov or by searching the Federal Register, but I have not been able to find the proposed rule yet in either place (and this is with using their keywords, “provider conscience”.) When the item actually appears, I will do my best to update this notice. (I may need to be nudged to do it, though. If you can find it, linkies, please!)

The e-mail address is consciencecomment at hhs dot gov

And the snail-mail address is (will require one original and two copies - and there’s no guarantees it will get in in time):

Office of Public Health and Science
Department of Health and Human Services
Attention: Brenda Destro
Hubert H. Humphrey Building
200 Independence Avenue S.W,
Room 728E
Washington, DC 20201

The comment period lasts for only thirty days after the triggering notice, so compose well but quickly.

Letters of inquiry have been issued after allegations were published in a book that the White House ordered the CIA to fabricate a letter intended to prove the links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, as well as a nuclear possibility for Saddam Hussein. It remains to be seen whether “executive privilege” or the other boilerplate justifications will be used to ignore the Congressional letters.

Another John McCain sound bite - a member of his campaign insults the geeks. On the Internet. Cue hilarity.

In the opinions, the Wall Street Journal things an automaker bailout is a bad idea, and that Detroit is as good a place as any to start turning people away from government bailouts. If Detroit collapses, it may be the best thing for the whole state of Michigan in the long run, but it will hurt like hell for a while untill the economy there can re-tool and the automakers finally have to admit that they really can make high-tech, fuel-efficient, hybrid and plug-in type cars cheaply enough to sell. At that point, of course, we’re hoping the economy has rebuilt into something more robust, so that if the automakers drag their feet again, Michigan can keep going without them.

Bob Ewing talks about what people mean when they say "special interests" - cabals designed to keep competition out and their own profits high.

Candidate-wise, Peggy Noonan thinks the polls are drawing even because the American people are starting to finally pay attention, and that they find John McCain someone to relate to, a known quantity, while Senator Obama still remains mostly unknown. On the strength of that, Noonan thinks McCain could win it, especially with a one-term pledge. Vote for the devil you know, even though you know he’s a devil. bradhicks has a different spin on the Warren sit-down - for him, it’s confirmation that a significant part of the country, or at least of Warren's audience, has not yet moved beyond Vietnam. I wonder if the current climate on Iraq and the “surge” isn’t contributing to buoying the idea that all we need to succeed is good resolve and no liberals sabotaging the military with their traitorious words and protests. If that mentality really takes hold, though, we’ve already seen in the news and on the blogs what happens when people convinced that you have to die because your point of view is treasonous finally feel they've been backed into a corner. A corner of illusion, of their own making, but a corner nonetheless, and so the response to follow is not a kind one.

Following on an earlier matter, reporting on a story that doesn't burnish the Chinese image during the Olympics apparently earns oneself harrassment and attempted intimidation for the reporters, and potentially worse fates for those who cooperate.

In scitech, the FCC tells Comcast they can't throttle BitTorrent traffic, although possibly not getting it completely right, as Comcast could instead use it as an open invitation to censor all content they think isn't legal, so long as they don’t target one particular protocol.

Speaking of large-scale attacks, China's biggest ISP has had a DNS-poisoning, redirecting typos and mistypings to a malware server rather than to the correct place, an attack-type that an end user can’t defend against, possibly even if they know their DNS server ahs been poisoned and can specify a specific server to do their DNS lookups with

Further beyond this, pictures of what happens when a space capsule doesn’t inflate the parachutes properly, robots training so as to interact with humans better, the odor of cancer, free radicals contributing to overeating by killing the "full" signals before they get to the brain, automatic associations helping point out when someone has become decided, even if they don't consciously acknowledge it yet, robot aircraft that can sense and use thermals for lift without expending fuel, and getting every drop of bandwidth you can our of your connection.

Winning scorn, derision, and probably a Worst Persons from Mr. Olbermann tonight, comedian Rush Limbaugh sticks his foot in his mouth again, attributing the entirety of Senator Obama's nomination to the fact that he's black and nobody in the Democratic Party had the nuts to stand up and say that he wasn't qualified. The comedian further went on to say that this nomination process was a perfect example of affirmative action, by which the unqualified (black) people end up at the top, and all the qualified white guys stayed silent because they would be accused of being racist if they said no. If Rush Limbaugh seriously thinks the Democratic Party didn’t nominate a qualified candidate, especially after the infighting that the primary was, then I wonder who he would consider qualified. Hillary Clinton? (she was). Or does Rush think any white guy would be automagically qualified, while women and black men are never qualified?

Last for tonight, a name often makes a headline work or fail. In this case, it’s up to you to decide. After putting you through that pun, proof that art derived from photographs can turn out looking nothing like their source.