The NYCLU litigated against this in New York and lost.

http://tinyurl.com/644ubt

If you get arrested outside your home, don't walk back into it. I believe once you do so, they can search (or at least do a "plain sight" lookaround) without your consent or a warrant. Maybe another commenter can clarify.

these guys have done some pretty interesting things with sound waves and appliances:

http://www.macrosonix.com/motors/motors.htm

the company was the subject of a pretty interesting story on npr when they launched in '97:

http://tinyurl.com/3drvxy

Genghis Blues is not just a good documentary. In my opinion, it is one of the five or so greatest documentaries of all time. If you open your heart to it, and let yourself really understand and feel what is happening in it, you will be blown away.

If you are a teacher or parent and looking for a modern day programming language for kids, I strongly recommend "Scratch." Scratch is a free programming environment for kids, and you can learn about it (and download it) at http://scratch.mit.edu.

It teaches you the basics of flow control, conditional statements, even variables.

I am currently using it to teach 3rd and 4th graders the basics of game design. It is perfectly suited to the task. As with Logo, they will have things moving around the screen after just a few minutes.

here's the link:

http://www.defectivebydesign.org/blog/1093

this is the same stuff (or awfully similar) that kip hawley was touting in his interview with bruce schneier a month or so ago, and scneier at the time seemed uncharacteristically non-skeptical, which i thought was strange. maybe he has an updated response.

it seems to completely remove any possibility of rational appeal. i.e., how are you supposed to defend yourself against false accusations? "my eyes weren't twitching the way they said?"

"The Whizzer." Awesome. That's what my dad used to call the elderly gentleman we frequently spotted pissing on the side of the road back in the late 70s and early 80s, before my town got taken over by rich people. I guess he was a working man's hero after all.

here's the (currently) missing link to the story:

http://tinyurl.com/3bmlod

what is she complaining about? she did what they accused her of, and they don't appear to have treated her particularly rudely. if stores let free every person who protested innocence, it wouldn't be much of a loss prevention policy, would it? stores treat people unfairly all the time, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

Related:

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/offbeat/2007/09/13/mascot.brawl.kezi

Great video of two college mascots in a fist fight (duck vs. cougar).

Jewels, I don't think cd-roms existed back when your grandparents were saving stacks of national geographics in their attic. The contract with the writers probably covered distribution via electric car and video phone, but the web and optical discs slipped through a loophole, apparently.

The big problem with many of these digital collections is that the full text is not searchable. I have the National Geographic collection, and it is only indexed by keyword and (I think) the article title. I understand the technical/economic reasons for this, but I hope that as the technology become cheaper and faster, more publishers will release their stuff with a full-text index. (That said, I also have the Spider-Man collection, but I can live without full text search on that, I think.)

I would like to see Harper's (which dates to the 1850s or so) release all their stuff, and Life magazine, what with all the great photos.

relatedly, here is picture i took of a (fallen) angel of harlem:

http://tinyurl.com/273fkv

you might also be interested in this 1997 appearance of jennifer harbury on charlie rose.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=zPWh9yQbU4E

harbury's husband, a rebel leader in guatemala, was kidnapped and tortured by the government there. the cia knew about it but our gov't refused to tell harbury anything at all until she enlisted the help of congressmen and staged several hunger strikes. harbury shows enormous strength, given the circumstances. at the end of the interview, charlie reads a passage from her book which is incredibly heart-breaking.

stuff like this is one of the great benefits of what appears to be every single charlie rose show available for free on youtube.

(the david foster wallace interview in the second half of the show is also noteworthy, though for different reasons.)

flying squid, he is a hero because he shows us what we are capable of. there are many kinds of heroes.

also, he doesn't do what he does for money.

steve is a true hero, and it'll be a shame if this is his end, although i suppose it wasn't hard to predict that he would die in some kind of aircraft accident.

if you haven't been following his accomplishments:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Fossett

you're welcome, david.

well, the yankees just swept the sox, so i guess he didn't have any immediate negative effect. we'll see how things go in the post-season.

Here are two screenshots I made of the squirrel in action:

http://pop.thousandrobots.com/files/squirrel/

Sorry if this is a duplicate.