The Bush administration plans to enlist millions of Americans to spy on their fellow Americans for a program called Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS....

Even if it is limited to public places, the program is offensive. The idea of citizens spying on citizens, and the government collecting data on everyone who is accused, is a staple of totalitarian regimes. East Germany's infamous Stasi internal security system kept files on some six million citizens -- about a third of the country. Fortunately, TIPS is already facing opposition. The American Civil Liberties Union, not surprisingly, has denounced the program. But so, too, has Dick Armey, the House Republican leader. The "Postal Service" has already expressed serious reservations about participating. And the initial version of the bill to create a Homeland Security Department, introduced by Mr. Armey, includes language that would prevent TIPS from going forward.

'EFF was advised that Sen. Ernest Hollings has written a letter to the FCC advocating immediate implementation of a broadcast flag mandate -- even without additional legislation. Hollings apparently claimed that the FCC already has, under existing statutes, the authority necessary to require that all manufacturers comply with BPDG rules.'

I question the appropriateness and perhaps even legality (in an abstract theoretical sense) of a member of the legislative branch of the government urging a part of the executive branch to grab power it does not seem to have, because the legislative branch has not granted it. The legislator does not work by fiat, it's his job to legislate. Should he fail in that endeavor, as Hollings has up to this point, he should not go behind the scenes and try to get the executive branch to do his bidding anyhow.

Paranoid conspiracy theory of the week: In regard to the recent decision to allow the phone company to sell "your name, who you call, and for how long you talk", 'jv42' posts the following on Slashdot:

This means that now all any government agency needs to do is set up a dummy corporation that's an "affiliate", and my phone company will give them unlimited access to all the data about me... Ya gotta admit, it's a neat end run around the laws that restrict government surveillance.

Quote [from Washington Post]: "'[The Web] never presents students with classically constructed arguments, just facts and pictures.' Many students today will advance an argument, he continues, then find themselves unable to make it convincingly. 'Is that a function of the Web, or being inundated with information, or the way we're educating them in general?'"Comment [from Greg Hanek on SiT]: This article provides examples of how poorly many people interact with information and information resources.

Is the US socio-political-education system (and it's focus on multiple-guess/standardized exams) a causal factor in how students interact with the Web to accomplish their assignments? What do you think? (via Craig's Booknotes)

Like the title? Rumor has it that a Danish court has ruled deep linking illegal. But is that really true? Hard to tell, since the primary source material is in Dutch.

But the provided Slashdot comment, from someone actually present, may shed light on the issue.

...the Danish Newspaper Publisher's Association weren't concerned about search engines like Google or just a few deep links. Newsbooster did a systematic index and furthermore sold services for update-information whenever your predefined search words matched any news article.

Review: Men in Black II is more of the same of Men in Black I. It's not quite as good, mostly because all the stuff that was secret in the first movie isn't secret anymore. If you liked the first one, you should find the second one enjoyable.

update: Warning, I'm about to go meta. MiB2 is not as good a movie as MiB1 was. As my wife says, MiB2 was a story wrapped around a series of jokes, where MiB1 was a series of jokes wrapped around a story. As any film critic will tell you, all else being equal the latter is preferable.

*updated*, now more link-a-licious!

The problem is that Palladium requires users to place a huge amount of trust in Microsoft. You don't get to decide what runs on your computer -- Microsoft does. You can't even open files unless you've been authorized by Microsoft, or by a third party. ...Music and movie executives will love Palladium, because it puts digital copy protection into the realm of hardware, making it nearly unbreakable. You won't be able to give music files to your friends any more, and you might not be able to make backup copies for yourself. You can't even use nonstandard hardware to play the files, because they'll be in an encrypted file format that will only play on Palladium systems.

Mark Bernstein says: Speculation: the accounting crisis is going to get much worse, and integrity is about to be rediscovered as a virtue. Politicians think people was security -- more surveillance, more arrests, more patrols -- when they want honesty -- honest effort, honest dedication, and candid accountability. Trust is going to top the charts; Microsoft's (again) getting off on the wrong foot. Palladium is so 90's. [via ViewFromTheHeart]

This would be wonderful... but I'm sure our media will find a way to convince the American public that it's not honesty they want, but more and better soundbites. In a way, isn't that already the essense of the financial problems? Good soundbites on the accounting sheets, no substance behind it? It's going to take more then a few billion dollars in non-existant profits to make the American people decide that maybe they've heard enough lies.

"The problem with the interactions between health care pros and geeks has been the promise and failure of technology on many occasions to make our jobs better and easier...."

" I'm working with a patient bed now that incorporates a wide variety of features that makes it much more comfortable and ergonomic for both the patient and the nurse. And it works wonderfully - when it works. But some geek decided to put the controls, LCD panel, and circuit board in the bedrail - a bedrail that is slammed up and down all day and night as patients get in and out of bed, as they yank back and forth on it to adjust their position, and as staff pull on it to guide the bed down the hall to OR, CT, X-ray, etc. Pretty soon the bed either 'crashes', needing a reboot keypress that would cause an EMACS user to dislocate a phlange, or has a complete hardware failure. The bed dies."

I seem to be on the subject of economic fallacies today.

Scripting News: "And perhaps this series of notes on smoking cessation will help a couple of other people to quit before getting a deadly illness. So while it may seem grandiose to think of software as life-saving, it isn't really a huge stretch."

It's not grandiose in the slightest, and in truth, it's sad that people will think it is. The reality is that for any given event in life, the net effect of "the little things" are larger then the effect of what most people would call 'the cause'.