Roundup, or a ‘midday open thread’ as its known…
January 24th, 2006Neat stuff they did at Penn State:
That is what a shockwave looks like, pretty normal occurance, every sound or object moving through air disturbs the air to some degree…just that it is normally invisible. Neato, thanks to teamdroid.com for the find.
read here (a little dry tho)
We need more executives like this :
Top executives of Google have once again agreed to be paid annual salaries of $1 each in 2006, counting instead on stock options and grants of the company’s volatile stock for their pay.
Note that Google stock is down, a good time to buy? As always, hard to say… I wish I had $10k to throw around at the time of the IPO, I’d have $30k of play money here one year later…
1) They knew it was illegal…
2) Congress struck down decriminilization of a lesser crime…
3) They are counting on us not remembering…
The first thing that struck me when General Hayden made the ignorant observation that the Fourth Amendment didn’t include a probable cause standard was that someone needed to tattoo the Bill of Rights on his chest, backwards, so he could read it every time he looked in the mirror in the morning. The second thing that struck me about his insistence that a “reasonable suspicion” standard prevails over probable cause for the spying program was that this Administration and the Congress already rejected a reasonable suspicion standard.
In 2002, Republican Senator DeWine introduced an amendment to the PATRIOT ACT that would have lowered the FISA warrant standard for non-U.S. citizens from probable cause to “reasonable suspicion.” The DeWine amendment, S. 2659, was rejected in Committee. Glenn Greenwald has a must-read, excellent post on the DeWine amendment here. DeWine’s amendment would have lowered the standard ONLY for non-U.S. citizens. The administration expressed serious misgiving about the constitutionality of DeWine’s amendment. In the end, his amendment did not pass.
The admission that Bush’s spying program uses a “reasonable suspicion” standard rather than a “probable cause” standard is explosive and damning. Why? Because the Bush administration knew–indeed, took the position–that a reasonable suspicion standard with respect to non-U.S. citizens was probably unconstitutional. Yet the administration now applies that same unconstitutional standard to United States citizens?
Cool stuff I did to my car recently:
A TWM short-shifter with the ‘classic’ stainless steel knob (1 pound) in a satin finish.
