Long-Term Plan Sought For Terror Suspects: Administration officials are preparing long-range plans for indefinitely imprisoning suspected terrorists whom they do not want to set free or turn over to courts in the United States or other countries, according to intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials.

Quote from ohan Gunaratna, author of Inside al Qaeda: Global
Network of Terror.: …In Europe, the custodial interrogations
have yielded almost nothing because they do not use the threat
of sending detainees to a country where they are likely to be
tortured. The CIA has no such silly ethical compunctions, though:

no, no…we can’t torture you. That’s against American law. Shining
hill, yearning masses, all that freedom stuff. Bother. But we have some
FRIENDS who know the rubber hoses and pliers quite well…perhaps
you’ve heard of them? Maybe we’ll arrange for you to take a
trip.

We’re well on our way to finishing off what I knew as our country here, folks. Whether you like it or not…no rule of law, no America. They come as a package; pesky courts, judges, Constitution and all.

Jetable.org is a disposable
forwarding address: How this service works — To avoid spam, jetable.org provides you with a temporary email address. As soon as it is created, all the emails sent to this address are forwarded to your actual email address.

I’d read a bit about Mind Hacks. After
reading this article, Paying
Attention (or Not) to the Flickr Daily Zeitgeist, I’m thinking
about putting it on my book wishlist. Interesting article…though it
doesn’t hurt that it’s about Flickr, since I’m presently having
quite a bit of fun with this online photo sharing tool. (my photostream
is here, if you’re
interested).

Reuters: Hip-hop
protest song rocks Ukraine: It took only four hours to make and
is not on sale anywhere. But it’s essential listening for the young
protesters on the streets of Kiev.

Four hours to make…recorded the day after the protests that it’s based off of…and available off the Internet. This is pretty interesting.

Cool! “The Authentic
History Center is comprised of images of artifacts, sounds, and
written letters and diaries. We believe that these items reflect the
history and societal values of the time period in which they were
produced.” Thanks for the link, boingboing!
(BTW, the
60s anti-communist comic mentioned in the boingboing article is well worth perusing.)

While poking around at the Creative Commons website
today, I bumped into a license there that I was unfamiliar with…The
Founder’s Copyright. In a judo-like move that reminds me of RMS
and the GPL, Creative Commons is also using existing copyright
and contract law to provide legally binding enhanced user
rights. The gist is this: if you wish to release something under The
Founder’s Copyright, you enter into a contract with CC; they buy your
copyright from you, and then turn around and give you a 14 (or 28,
with renewal) year exclusive license…the same period granted under
original US copyright law (thus the “Founder’s” reference). At the end
of that period, the work will be released into the public domain by
CC, who owns the copyright. Genius!!

So for 14 or 28 years, you have the same rights you would under
today’s copyright duration (which happens to be author’s lifetime
plus 70 years). After 14/28 years, though, instead, the work is
public domain, and available for anyone to use as fuel to rip, mix, and
burn into a new idea. Just like “Snow White”, “The Hunchback of Notre
Dame”, “Cinderella” and others were in the public domain for
re-use…

Kudos to Creative Commons for this innovative program. And kudos to
O’Reilly Media for stepping up to
the plate; they’re putting dozens
of titles under Founder’s Copyright. Outstanding!

Version control. Isn’t it tasty? I’ve worked with my share of
CVS repositories, but my version control system of choice is Subversion. Similar in usage
to CVS, but with atomic commits, well-behaved renaming, real db
backend, easy branching…it has goodness. I like subversion.

One of the biggest downsides is developing on your laptop. SVN
working directories aren’t completely decentralized…if I check out a
project from my server, and go to the beach (w/o Net access) for a
week, I can’t easily keep my “beach changes” under version control
locally on the laptop. The model is centralized…I’m dependent on my
central server for maintaining the records of multiple changesets in
the working directory. Without a true repository (which I don’t have…just a
“working directory”), I can’t commit repeatedly while offline. Bummer.

Enter arch and darcs. Both support models where “offline” repositories can do version
control independently, allowing me go truck along while working from a beachhouse on Tybee Island. The branches can be merged back up later. Joy.

So that sounds cool, and I’ve played with
arch. It’s…nonintuitive…at times. Though admittedly, I think, very
powerful. But now I’ve read the recent slashdot
post about darcs…seems pretty straightforward. And there’s a
Debian package. So…what the heck. Might as well play with yet
another revision control system this weekend…I’ll report back.

.

Adam Bosworth (formerly of BEA, now at Google) has posted to his weblog
the transcript of
a talk he recently gave at ICSOC04. Holy guacamole, Batman…this thing
rocks. His main point? The virtues of KISS with respect to development models
and computing on the Internet.
Well, well worth reading….“That software which is flexible, simple, sloppy, tolerant, and altogether forgiving of human foibles and weaknesses turns out to be actually the most steel cored, able to survive and grow while that software which is demanding, abstract, rich but systematized, turns out to collapse in on itself in a slow and grim implosion.”

The points written up in this essay may
have come from work on the Debian
project, but they’re well worth reading for anyone working in a
development/software engineering/hacking-type environment. (or heck,
probably a lot of other places, too). Some appear obvious (“Make sure
things scale up”, “Document important things”), but read the thing
twice…there’s good stuff here! Thanks, Lars!

Wacky. Cory Doctorow and I finished Neil Stephenson‘s Baroque Cycle on the
same weekend! Read his comments for a good first pass at mine (I’ll write more
later, in my new and improved media library and review
section of kenzoid.com.) But everything Cory says there in the boingboing
review is dead on. The series has altered my perceptions of a whole hunk
of reality. I love it when an author manages that! It’s too rare.

Methinks it’s about time to read Eastern Standard Tribe…*grin*