Jim Henley as a really smart take on whether we should use naval power to take on piracy. The more ambitious proposals to use the US or other navies to try to eliminate piracy off Somalia are proposals to offload the security costs of sailing along the Somali coast to the taxpayers of whoever provides the navy, and allow shippers to hold onto that last sliver of benefit the pirates currently take. ...
I am a notorious skimmer, but I decided to read the torture memos in full. I started with the Bybee memo, issued on August 1, 2002. In it, Office of Legal Cousel attorney Jay Bybee responds to a CIA request to torture Abu Zubaydah. The CIA’s argument is that the threat level to the US at the time of the request is higher than it was before 9/11, and that Abu Zubaydah is unlikely to disclose any additional information absent torture. ...
The producers of Slumdog Millionaire have donated 500,000 pounds to a child development organization that works in the slums of Mumbai to support education and healthcare programs. I feel obligated to note the good things they’re doing after slamming them a few months ago for not providing for the child actors in the movie.
Turns out that the NSA is abusing even the excessive powers it was granted in last year’s FISA bill, which Barack Obama voted for. Time for real intelligence reform.
Of all of the good decisions Blizzard made when they created World of Warcraft, one of the best was providing a robust API for third party developers to write addons for the game. Installing addons is easy, you just download the addon, unzip it, and put it in the Interface/Addons directory. The problem is keeping track of addons. The last time I looked, I had over 70 addons installed, and that’s not atypical. A number of addon distribution sites sprung up to give developers a place to list their software and a place for players to keep track of updates to their favorites. Curse.com is one popular example, and WoWInterface is another. ...
Jan Chipchase mentioned the specific etiquette of a skateboard park he visited in San Diego, and it made me think of a conversation I was having recently about the rules of etiquette at basketball courts. I learned basketball court etiquette when I was in college, playing with people from the dorms and the neighborhood around the school on an outdoor court on campus. The first and most basic rule is that winners stay. I can’t remember how many points we played to, although I think it was 11, but regardless, the winning team stayed on the court to be challenged by the next group of people who were waiting. You get dibs on leading the team to challenge the winner by saying, “I got next” before anybody else did. The person who “has next” recruits the challengers from the group of people who are also waiting – taking someone from the losing team if there are more than enough people waiting is bad manners. That’s how basketball courts are run everywhere. ...
One of the biggest reasons I supported Barack Obama was the stand he was willing to take as a candidate against the worst excesses of the Bush administration in prosecuting the war on terror. As such, it is incredibly disappointing to me to see that as President, he is not living up to the principles he espoused before the election. Glenn Greenwald reports on the Obama administration’s embrace of the Bush administration’s assertion that the prison at Bagram air base in Afghanistan is somehow different than Gitmo, and that detainees held there do not have the right to habeas corpus. ...
Bruce Schneier always says that “don’t talk to strangers” is bad advice. Is this proof? On a similar note, read about Casual Car Pools.
Today’s Amazon MP3 store special is Ben Harper’s Diamonds on the Inside. For $1.99, you can download the album in MP3 format with no DRM. Here’s part of a customer review of the album that was written in March 2003: First of all, this review will not address the actual MUSIC on this disc, which is up to Harper’s usual platinum standard of songwriting and musicianship. No, this is intended to be a warning that this CD has been laced with copy-protect technology that prevents those who paid for it from making MP3s and whatnot. It also prevents you from even listening to the disc on a computer except by using an extremely low-quality proprietary player that limits the quality to just 48 kbps – about what you’d get from AM radio. ...
Dan Froomkin explains, in simple terms, the State Secrets Privilege today. This is a privilege the government should not be allowed to assert, and the Obama administration is perpetuating all of the Bush administration’s worst abuses of it. There’s no excuse for doing so, and I think it’s incumbent most upon those who supported Obama’s Presidential campaign to express our displeasure on this issue.