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I just watched New England become the first team in NFL history go 16-0 in the regular season, joining the 1972 Miami Dolphins as the only teams to finish the regular season undefeated in NFL history. Is there any sports fan in America who wouldn’t want someone like Bob Kraft to own their favorite team? He’s been a Patriots season ticket holder for 35 years and bought the team to save it from being relocated to St. Louis. Since he took over, they have been the most successful franchise in professional sports. This off season the Patriots added enough talent to become the best team anyone can remember watching. ...

Dahlia Lithwick has compiled a top ten list of the Bush administration’s dumbest legal arguments of the year. I’d forgotten some of these wonders of spurious logic. For example, number 5 is a classic: Everyone who has ever spoken to the president about anything is barred from congressional testimony by executive privilege. This little gem of an argument was cooked up by the White House last July when the Senate judiciary committee sought the testimony of former White House political director Sara Taylor, as well as that of former White House counsel Harriet Miers, in connection with the firing of nine U.S. attorneys for partisan ideological reasons. Taylor was subpoenaed in June and, according to her lawyers, she wanted to testify but was barred by White House counsel Fred Fielding’s judgment that the president could compel her to assert executive privilege and forbid her testimony. As Bruce Fein argued in Slate, that dramatic over-reading of the privilege would both preclude congressional oversight of any sort and muzzle anyone who’d ever communicated with the president, regardless of their wish to talk. ...

Freedom to Tinker is reviewing the Presidental candidates positions on all things digital, starting with Barack Obama.

I think I’ve finally gotten registration and authentication working for the old blog here, so now you should be able to register for a local account if you like or sign in using OpenID, Vox, and so forth. There are also plugins available for AOL and WordPress, I’ll probably set those up as well. Hopefully this will make life a bit easier for the regulars and for people with their own blogs who want to associate comments with their OpenID. ...

Garret at Dangerousmeta points out that December 22 was the eigth birthday of his blog, and the blogs of all of the people who started when Dave Winer launched editthispage.com. For what it’s worth, I posted my first bloglike entry back on December 15, 1998. So it’s nine years plus for me, now. I need to get the pre-CMS archives online again sometime.

Search forms that use the POST HTTP method are a shabby Web development practice that I run into every day. Here’s the number one reason why using POST on search forms is a bad idea: That’s what users see when they hit the back button to return to search results that were produced using a POST request. When the back button is going to take you to a page that was requested using the POST method, this warning appears in order to prevent you from sending duplicate information to the Web server. This is important if the form you submitted charged your credit card for $100 or posted a new entry to your blog. It is never, ever useful if you’re just searching for information. ...

I don’t go to the movies much any more, but this weekend I managed to make it to two different ones. I went to the local art house to see No Country for Old Men, and I went to the megaplex to see Sweeney Todd. The quality of the movies aside, I was disappointed in the quality of the experience overall. The art house is what it is. The theater is old, and the seats are uncomfortable. The place is not without its charms, but I still had to walk around a bit after the movie to work the kinks out. The megaplex was no fun at all. The place has nice comfortable seats, but they want nine bucks for a small popcorn and Coke (I passed), and for some reason they didn’t turn out the overhead lights during the movie, which was completely incomprehensible. They showed ads before the movie and fifteen minutes of previews after the scheduled movie start time. ...

Kayak is my first stop whenever I need to book a flight or hotel room. I still generally handle the transaction through Orbitz, but I find Kayak to be the better choice for finding flights and tracking fare changes. I’ve always wondered how the site works as a business. They do run ads, but I wondered if they also collected some kind of transactional fees for travel booked through their search results. ...

Bruce Schneier has a fascinating essay on how easy it is to discern someone’s identity from anonymous data. Researchers at the University of Texas discovered that by comparing moving ratings in the data set for the Netflix challenge to movie ratings from IMDB users, you can figure out who rated the movies in the anonymous Netflix data. And as it turns out, you don’t need all that many ratings to do it: ...

Rogers Cadenhead looks at Dave Winer’s long bet with New York Times executive Martin Nisenholtz on whether blogs or the Times would reign supreme by 2007. The winner: none of the above. Wikipedia outranks them both.