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A federal court has ruled that stored email is afforded the same constitutional protections as telephone conversations and email being transmitted over the wire. Law enforcement agencies will need to obtain a search warrant to access it. I expect that the government will appeal the ruling, but it makes sense technologically speaking. There’s no reason to grant different levels of protection to email if it’s traveling over the wire than if it’s on the hard drive of a server. Nice victory for the EFF. ...

Ed Felten describes the odd nature of gold farming in World of Warcraft: This relationship is an amazing tangle of play and work. The gold farmer works playing a game, so he can earn money which he spends playing the same game. The customer finds part of the game too much like work, so he works at another job to earn money to pay a gold farmer to play for him, so the customer can have more fun when he plays. Got it? ...

Lots of people think that golf is the most boring televised sport there is, but I think it’s because they don’t really understand everything that goes into it. I’d say it’s sedate, but not boring. In today’s final round of the US Open, which is already exciting just because it’s the toughest tournament in professional golf, there was a really interesting moment involving Tiger Woods. He’s down by one stroke with two holes left and the leader has already finished. If he makes a birdie on either of the last two holes, he ties things up and forces a playoff to be played tomorrow. The 17th hole is a short par four, well within his range. The 18th hole is the toughest on the course. So he can either lay up and try to hit it close with his second shot, forcing himself to use only one put to birdie, or he can shoot for the pin and if successful, can birdie with a two putt. Complicating his decision is that Jim Furyk, who had been tied for the lead, shot for the pin, missed the green and wound up taking a bogie to fall one shot back. ...

A TV news anchor and her colleague in Lebanon were both fired after they shared a few laughs on the air over the fate of an anti-Syrian politician who was assassinated last week. The open microphone captured the presenter saying: “Why did it take them so long to kill him?” She and a male colleague, who was also sacked, can then be heard laughing. “Ahmed Fatfat [another anti-Syrian MP] will be next. I’m counting them off,” she went on. ...

Sy Hersh got the interview with General Anthony Taguba, the general who initially investigated abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Here he is describing a conversation he had with General John Abizaid: I wasn’t angry about what he said but disappointed that he would say that to me. I’d been in the Army thirty-two years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia. ...

Thomas Vander Wal has written up an interesting post on recombining conversations split across multiple mediums. The problem: We are seeing our communications move across channels, which can be good as this is fluid and keeping with our digital presence. More often than not we are seeing our communication streams fracture across channels. This fracturing becomes really apparent when we are trying to reconstruct our communication stream. I am finding this fracturing and attempting to stitch the stream back together becoming more and more common as for those who are moving into and across many applications and devices with their own messaging systems. ...

I’ve been thinking lately that book reviews are a better investment than books in terms of attention, for a large class of books. Obviously for many books, the journey is the reward. Obviously, a review of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi will not yield the same rewards as reading the book. Indeed, there’s a good chance that reading reviews will spoil your enjoyment of the book. Likewise, Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything is a voyage that no review can satisfactorily capture. ...

I wish there was a way to configure my Tivo so that if I hit the “go back 8 seconds” button, it would automatically turn on closed captioning for the eight seconds it replays.

One thing I’ve been predicting to everyone who’ll listen is that like deployment and scalability, serious IDE support is on the way for Ruby. Learn the language now, reap the benefits of better, easier tools down the road. Looks like that prediction is looking good right now. NetBeans is making serious progress on Ruby refactoring. In the meantime, Windows developers can pick up Ruby in Steel a Ruby development extension for Visual Studio. It doesn’t support refactoring yet, but once one of the IDEs supports it, they all will shortly afterward. Intellij IDEA has a Ruby editing plugin that doesn’t yet support refactoring. Eclipse fans have RDT. There are a number of other IDEs that are up and coming as well. ...

Bruce Schneier posted an essay today entitled Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot. He says: I don’t think these nut jobs, with their movie-plot threats, even deserve the moniker “terrorist.” But in this country, while you have to be competent to pull off a terrorist attack, you don’t have to be competent to cause terror. All you need to do is start plotting an attack and – regardless of whether or not you have a viable plan, weapons or even the faintest clue – the media will aid you in terrorizing the entire population. ...