The Government and AT&T are requesting a civil suit against them be tossed based on the state secrets privilege. More details that I don’t feel like typing at Wired.

The question, I should think, then is this: Should the state secrets privilege apply in cases where the alleged activity is both illegal and unconstitutional (making it a violation of oaths of office, possibilities of abuse of power etc. etc.) and where the government has already admitted said alleged activities? One would think that stopping such suits would necessarily involve giving up certain necessary liberties–though not permitting certain protections of classified information would be necessarily problematic also–however, is removing the courts from the equation, and thus leaving the other branches unchecked in their use of power, really the answer? Surely there must be a better way to balance these competing problems.

David Pogue, in his online blog, and what I imagine will be his email column for today: Whatever Happened to Online Etiquette?

Yup, that’s all I’ve got…

South Africa is now moving ahead of the United States in, of all areas, civil rights… With a recent approval of same sex marriages.

Two photos from this afternoon’s Virginia Senate race press conferences.

David Brooks is quite interesting this week, and conveniently, times select is free this week. So, I’d call it, suggested reading

The last two paragraphs are the key for liberals, the first three for conservatives and if you are a moderate, well you already knew most of it and will just be wishing everyone gets their heads out of their collective rear ends.

AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Arts) in conjunction with Design for Democracy brings us The Polling Place Photo Project. Now, I know Brendan already has his cameras all fired up for Tuesday, but these guys apparently want pictures of every polling place in America, and though he might want to try, Brendan’s velcro tennis shoes simply won’t make it to every polling place nationwide. So if you’d like to help out, check your local laws, read the fine print and find your camera.

The Polling Place Photo Project is a nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that seeks to empower citizens to capture, post and share photographs of democracy in action. By documenting their local voting experience on November 7, voters can contribute to an archive of photographs that captures the richness and complexity of voting in America.

I realize that it is Monday, a full two days after the game, but nothing has been said on this blog. The behavior of both Miami and FIU was despicable, indefensible and damaging to sport in general. ESPN has a column on it. My opinion, the penalties that Gene Wojciechowski proposed, though certainly well beyond what has happened so far, are insufficient. As a signal that this behavior will not be tolerated (stomping on a kicker and waving your helmet about as a weapon is criminal not just unsportsmanlike), in my opinion, both teams should be suspended for the remainder of the season and their games forfeited, and even that’s not really enough. (And yes, if USC behaved in this horrendous manner, I would call for their suspension also.) Some YouTube video on the topic. So, opinions?

UPDATE BY BRENDAN: First of all, “nothing has been said on this blog” isn’t exactly accurate; there are previous posts on this topic here and here.

Secondly, I’m bumping this post “back in time” by two hours, in hopes of keeping Joementum at the top for a while. :) Nothing personal, dcl.

According to a new study the war in Iraq has cost the lives of 655,000 Iraqis. Saddam Hussein was a terrible dictator, but can we really say we’ve made the life of the average Iraqi better? We’ve failed to make ourselves safer and we’ve failed to improve the situation for the Iraqi people. How then do we continue to defend this choice to go to war?

In light of the recent anti-terror law passed by the Congress, I’ve a sinking suspicion that our leaders must have failed civics. In terms of bad laws, well, this one takes the cake for worst ever passed. (Yes, I include Alien and Sedition Acts of 1789.) Why? Let’s do a thought experiment. I find that pushing things out to the maximum allowable letter of the law a good way to see if it is really something we want. Why? Because inevitably someone will come along and do it. We have checks and balances to limit power and constrain the actions of our leaders because power without constraint leads on to the actions of dictators and kings etc.

So what could someone do with this law and the presidency if they really wanted to?

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I was reading in today’s Washington Post about a group of students who are fighting the administration of my old high school over their intellectual property rights. Now, anyone that has been to McLean High School knows two things, it is one of the smallest high schools in Fairfax County, and it has the student body most likely to go to the mat fighting against, well just about anyone over just about anything. I think this has something to do with the number of parents who are also lawyers and a general feeling that the law applies to us too god dammit so stop trying to screw us.

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odds are good

Okay, more of a rant…

Why is there a keyboard short cut for help? And why does help launch a whole separate, and very slow, program? Seriously, there are two keyboard shortcuts on a Mac to launch the help program. the Help key and Command question mark. Now don’t get me wrong, having help on a computer makes sense. But why the keyboard commands? People that need help regularly are not going to know or use the keyboard shortcut, they are going to use the menu. People that know keyboard shortcuts are rarely going to use the help menu. And when they do they will probably go to the help menu and not the keyboard to get there. On the other hand the number of times there is an errant bump of the help key going for the forward delete or the number of times you get command-shift-slash (aka Command Question mark) instead of command-shift-period (Command closed angle brackets,) makes the slow to load help viewer much more annoying than many other shortcut mistakes that can be fixed with a quick command-z. All and all quite vexing.

And the other problem is that the help key is becoming vestigial. Some times it works and some times it doesn’t do anything at all depending on the program. How much sense does that make… if you are going to have a key labeled help, it should do it invariably–and should be the only thing that does it. Of course it is a hold over from console days when there was no gui and faced with a keyboard and a blank prompt a key the read help could be quite useful. But now it tends to be this some times working vestigial waist of space on a keyboard. Might as well just make it what it is… another function key and make it easy to map to a user selected command.

In a recent survey of 33 nations the US had the second lowest belief in reality of those polled. For those that have access, in the magazine Science Otherwise, it was in the NYT Science section today or a nice copy of the graph here

Unfortunately The NYT is annoying with their NYT select thing but here is the link anyway. If you get the paper version, or can abscond with it from a co-workers desk, it is David Brooks Party no.3. Brooks is one of those people that I rarely agree with, but almost always find what he has to say interesting. Today I mostly agree with what he has to say about politics in America. He has struck a cord with present political reality. I also found it interesting. I don’t necessarily agree with all the proper noun choices he made. But the idea, and that’s the thing really, is remarkably astute and important. I do plan to write more on this topic later; but I shall leave at this for now.