Here's some food for thought: In our civics classes in the US, we are all taught that one of the key differences of our government is that all three major branches of the government have checks and balances on each other.

While true, this obscures the true point, which is that all three branches of government are accountable to the other two. Accountability is the real key. The genius of 1776 was in the creation of a government where nobody occupied a position where they were not accountable to anyone else.

'The NDIC said five types of people should be targeted, including previous drug offenders, legalization advocates, anarchists and people promoting "an expanded freedom of expression" that pushes the boundaries of the First Amendment.'

Assuming you read the article (so you have the context)... I wonder what exactly "an expanded freedom of expression" is supposed to mean? Not sarcastic.

I also question the legitimacy of targeting legalization advocates. I am not one myself, but saying a currently illegal activity should be legal is the exact same act as claiming a currently legal activity should be illegal, which the NDIC does all the time, in their never-ending quest to eliminate second-order causes like "raves". Punishing or marking someone because they are participating in the governmental process is not something that should be done in a democracy.

Dave's resuming a serious pitch for what he calls the World Outline. While we don't know exactly where he's going with the idea, it's more interesting then you might think on the first cut. Or at least what I've thought of the idea is more interesting then you might think.

He calls it "parallel to the HTML web, a new way of webbing." I don't know that I'd say parallel to the web... 'course, I'm not Dave... because that often gets translated in people's minds to "serving the same purpose as the web". In my understanding, the "new way of webbing" part is much more interesting.

I just flipped by Dateline:NBC, where they are smashing cars into barriers and rating the cars on how expensive the repair bills are. It seems that cars have gotten so safe today that the tabloid magazine news shows have to make up tests for cars to fail.

That's about how meaningful those tests are. You can always generate failure by making up arbitrarily wierd and useless criteria.

Disclaimer: My dad is a testing engineer for one of the Big Three car companies, so I have some familiarity with the other side of the story. ;-)

The market has created clear categories of software that range from the rather unreliable (Windows, piddly silly games, etc) to the extremely reliable (commerical Unices, VxWorks, QNX, etc). Interjecting liability laws into this arena will only throw that balance off and eliminate the lower-cost alernatives (including maybe boxed Linux distros!).

This comment is more interesting then the Slashot story it's a part of, but that's interesting too. The Slashdot article discusses a Security Focus article about a recently proposed IETF draft regarding a formal statement of best practice regarding reporting new vulnerabilities.

I've got basic event handling in the Jabber framework now; I've got messages and tommorow I'll add presence. After that, I think Dizzy will cry when he sees how short the presence monitoring code is from the user's end... >:-)

"In the old days, before weblogging, before the web, few people ever got to talk -- hold meaningful, long-running conversations -- with the authors they read, or with the leading professionals in their fields.

"With the web, especially with a weblog, it's now much easier and even more useful for both parties to do exactly that."

'In the Netherlands the old patent laws were clumsy and poorly drafted. The government decided they were unreformable, and simply scrapped them. In Switzerland, the confederation developed without them, and decided to keep it that way. Contrary to all current predictions of what the impact of such abrogations would be, in both nations they appear to have contributed to massive economic growth and innovation.'

Note: Yahoo! Groups will be down (again!) this Friday.

Growing incidents of spam attacks on some instant messaging networks are raising vexing questions about the future of one of the fastest-growing applications on the Internet. [Privacy Digest]

Benefit of leaving CBP behind, I get to route things correctly now. Not sure I like what it does in my template, though.

Jabber has some bandwidth limiting features that server runners can invoke, which can somewhat limit the problem. You still can't prevent DDOS, but it at least raises the bar.