Even more on TIPS

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A good article from the Washington Post asking questions about TIPS:

Public vigilance is a good thing, and so is encouraging citizens to alert authorities to terrorist activity. It makes sense to educate people who work at potential targets or at places where lethal cargo may be smuggled. But having the government recruit informants among letter carriers and utility workers — people who enter the homes of Americans for reasons unrelated to law enforcement — is an entirely different matter. Americans should not be subjecting themselves to law enforcement scrutiny merely by having cable lines installed, mail delivered or meters read. Police cannot routinely enter people’s houses without either permission or a warrant. They should not be using utility workers to conduct surveillance they could not lawfully conduct themselves.

(via MeFi)

Preliminary WTC plans unveiled

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Well, the cleanup from the Sept. 11th attacks has been finished, the authorities are working on identifying as many casualties as possible and returning what personal belongings can be returned, and today the first preliminary plans for rebuilding on the WTC site were unveiled. I haven’t looked at all the plans yet, but they can be viewed at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation‘s website.

Homeless for a week

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There was an article in the Seattle PI yesterday about a couple local guys who decided to try being homeless for a week to try to get some idea of what it was like. I skimmed over the article, but a rather scathing followup editorial printed today reminded me about it, so I started reading about it again.

It turns out that one of the two guys is Scotty Weeks, who I’ve known off and on for years in Anchorage before he moved down here to Seattle a few years back. Small world, eh? In any case, he and his friend Derrick had set up a website to keep a journal of their days on the streets. After poking around on it, Scotty’s site, and the two PI articles — well, I’ve got mixed feelings on the whole thing.

Read more

This doesn’t inspire confidence

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Is it just me, or does the fact that this image comes directly from a US government website looking at patents and trademarks related to ‘Homeland Security’ not make me feel comfortable?

The more I read about this, the more paranoid I get — and now we’ve got a gov’t webpage coming up with logos featuring eyes peeking through keyholes against a Stars-and-Stripes background?!? Eeeek.

(via Boing Boing)

More Amazon goodies

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I’m about to be heading to bed, but I spent a little time tonight playing around with Amazon‘s recommendation features. As you bounce through Amazon you can tell them what you own and assign ratings to items, which they then use to create recommendation pages. So far, it’s actually be fairly impressive — the more I put in, the more accurate they get. At the moment, off the top of my head, I’d say that for every 5 items they recommend, I’m likely to already own 3 of them (at least with music — the ratio for DVDs and books is somewhat less). Quite interesting.

I’ve also created an Amazon wishlist so that should anyone ever feel like spending money on me, they’ll have some suggestions. Woohoo!

More on TIPS

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One of my favorite political cartoonists, Tom Tomorrow, has some wonderfully incisive commentary on TIPS.

Facism is a term thrown about too freely, and I don’t believe we’re at a point that its use is justified — but an oppressive and intrusive government, however you want to label it, does not ride into town wearing the uniforms and waving the flags of recognizable evil. It creeps in slowly, waving the flag of your own country, and speaking the language of patriotism and duty, and at each step along the way, its actions seem plausible and defensible — until one morning you wake up and realize the gulf between the way things were and the way things are has grown so wide that there is no going back. Sinclair Lewis tried to point this out more than a half century ago, and given the current climate, It Can’t Happen Here is well worth re-reading (or reading for the first time, if you’ve never come across it before).

Another book for my reading list….

(via Wil)

Wanna join the secret police?

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Whee — just in case we weren’t paranoid enough, now our oh-so-friendly government is going to start encouraging us to report on each other. According to this report from an Austrailian news site (no big surprise that it wasn’t a US-based news site that broke the article), “…the Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, means the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police.” Now there’s a happy thought.

(via Daypop)

It just works

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Nathan Torkington, one of the staff over at O’Reilly is documenting his experiences as he moves from a Windows-based PC to an Apple iBook. Gotta love articles that state:

I plugged in the digital video camera (editing be damned!) and it Just Worked. I built wget and it Just Worked. I downloaded VM and it Just Worked. I plugged in a three-button mouse and it Just Worked. I came to realize something: I’d been with Microsoft for so long, who are complacent and hoard their customers, that I’d forgotten what it’s like to use an operating system built by people who want it to cooperate with the rest of the world. It’s good.

(via Daypop)

Doomsday Book

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Doomsday Book is another one that dad loaned to me. A very good sci-fi novel, set in England both in the near future and in the 1300’s, as an archaeologist travels back into the 14th century to study the people of the time first hand, and gets trapped there when a mysterious illness starts infecting the people in the modern world, leaving her to deal with the onset of the Black Plague in England.

Willis does an excellent job balancing the grimness of the situations both in the past and the present with some wonderful touches of humor to help keep things from getting too distressing. Coupled with some insightful looks into both joy and despair, and you’ve got a Hugo and Nebula award winning novel. Good stuff!

Well, I’m not surprised

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Those who surf the Web using a Mac tend to be better educated and make more money than their PC-using counterparts, …tend to be more Web savvy, with more than half having been online for at least five years…are 58 percent more likely than the overall online population to build their own Web page and also slightly more likely to buy goods online, according to the report.

(via MetaFilter)