Is it any surprise that the Justice Department is using the new powers granted to it via the USA Patriot Act in all sorts of investigations? The justification for trampling on our civil rights was prevention of terrorism, but new authority is new authority. My prediction is that at some point down the line people will forget that this bill was about terrorism in the first place.

Some scientists now think that two species of chimpanzees now belong in the genus Homo, right up there with good old Homo sapiens. That ought to piss off some creationists. (Via Electrolite.)

The Daily Kos has an interesting timeline that includes changes to our terror alert level and terrorist attacks. Unsurprisingly, there’s not much correlation between them. There are two possibilities here that seem obvious to me. One is that the higher alert level might have prevented terror attacks (unlikely given that there have been no significant domestic attacks since 9/11, regardless of security level), and the other is that terrorists might pay attention to the threat level as well. Ultimately, though, I think that the whole thing is basically a farce. Consider a case where, by monitoring “chatter” about an impending terror attack on US soil, the government feels that it is closing in on a significant arrest. Just for fun, say it’s Osama bin Laden. Do we really believe that we’d tip off the terrorists who we think we can capture by jacking up the terror alert level on short notice, even though a terror attack is incredibly likely? I doubt it.

I’ve recently picked up a renewed interest in Wikis. They’ve been on my radar screen for a long time — I can remember visiting the Portland Pattern Repository at least five years ago, and running their make your own Wiki script not long after. Unfortunately, I never found a really good use for them, mainly because I could never get anyone else at work to start using them and so the collaboration was lost. However, yesterday, I installed a Wiki (MoinMoin to be exact) for myself and am already finding it quite useful. I had been creating Web pages with notes that I wanted to keep for my own purposes, and I was maintaining them by logging into my shell account and editing them with vim. It occurred to me that I could put all those pages in a Wiki and they’d be easier to access and maintain. We’ll see if I stick with it, but I’m liking the Wiki environment for keeping track of my own stuff right now.

I was originally inspired to give Wikis another shot by this article on CGI::Kwiki at Perl.com. I installed it, but found it was not to my liking because it doesn’t recursively process the markup on each line. In other words, it processes the first piece of Wiki markup applied to a line of text, and then moves onto the next. This creates problems when you want to italicize a link or do other such things.

Phil Carter, purveyor of Intel Dump, has written an article for Washington Monthly on how we’re losing the peace in Iraq: Faux Pax Americana. Carter is no liberal hand-wringer, either, as readers of his weblog well know. On the other hand, he is a veteran of the military police and has a good understanding of the role played by the military in situations like the one in Iraq. He follows up in his weblog, mentioning that it may have been impossible for the military to get enough troops into place due to lack of logistical capacity or Congressional assent to foot the bill. That, of course, begs the question of whether it makes sense to take on a job if you’re not going it right.

Speaking of the Washington Post editorial page, John Edwards has some suggestions for improving the plight of doctors who face malpractice insurance premiums that are spiraling upwards. Unsurprisingly, there’s more to the problem than simply limiting how much a plaintiff can win in a lawsuit.

Apparently, Warren Buffett was just getting warmed up when he criticized the upcoming tax cut at the Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting. He unloads with both barrels on the Washington Post editorial page today:

Now the Senate says that dividends should be tax-free to recipients. Suppose this measure goes through and the directors of Berkshire Hathaway (which does not now pay a dividend) therefore decide to pay $1 billion in dividends next year. Owning 31 percent of Berkshire, I would receive $310 million in additional income, owe not another dime in federal tax, and see my tax rate plunge to 3 percent.

And our receptionist? She’d still be paying about 30 percent, which means she would be contributing about 10 times the proportion of her income that I would to such government pursuits as fighting terrorism, waging wars and supporting the elderly. Let me repeat the point: Her overall federal tax rate would be 10 times what my rate would be.

Read the whole op-ed. He sneaks in an absolutely brilliant argument about why rich Americans shouldn’t complain about their taxes in the first place as a special bonus.

I’m still trying to figure out what to make of Microsoft’s licensing Unix technology from SCO. I’m waiting for the other shoe to fall here. Right now, I don’t even know what, exactly, Microsoft has licensed from SCO.

Perhaps this is a way for Microsoft to give SCO deeper pockets, or perhaps SCO had some dirt on Microsoft and this was Microsoft’s way out and by getting Microsoft to license from them, it gives them leverage against other companies that they want to blackmail. It’s important to remember that SCO’s lawsuit alleges that IBM violated SCO’s trade secrets — not their patents or copyright.

Nicholast Petreley is a Gentoo convert. When I started posting about Gentoo, I said that it was the first flavor of Linux that I was able to live with and not utterly destroy after some period of time. That remains the case. I have two Gentoo boxes that have been up and running since last September, and I haven’t had to give up and reinstall on either of them. I got Apache and PHP into a somewhat horrid state on my development server, but I managed to recover.

Ed Felten has a post on using challenge-response systems to counter spam.