OK…I like the Supremes again. *wink* (Just joshin’ ya, Justices…my respect doesn’t travel much higher than SCOTUS).

No presidential monopoly on war powers

First glance, this looks quite impressive. I was actually starting to think that these cases would all go the Executive Branch’s way, effectively giving Bush carte blanche during wartime; a “wartime” he defines, and of indefinite duration. Apparently, some other folks saw some potential problems with that too…

I’ve got to go read these rulings now. Exsqueeze me.

I get the best links from Boing Boing. I mean, check these out:

Monty Python Black Knight model rocket

Bizzare Spider-Man comic strip remixes

Orrin Hatch criminalizes the iPod

(Thanks also to Stefan Jones, Warren, Jay Pinkerton, and Jason Schultz for the original info.)

Some days, you can spend all your time just on links off on BoingBoing. If you’re only going to read one aggregating blog, that’s my recommendation.

Keeping name private can be crime, court rules. Wow. We’ve really reached a point where “efforts to get information about terrorists” (part of the argument made by the Justice Department) trumps just about anything. This is scary. Identification in our society is more than just your name…it’s a passport to a vast amount of information about your life, your interests, your political and social opinions. To think that this won’t be abused is naive.

Oh well. All part of “The Government; Here To Help”.

With a little luck, the first piloted private space flight to 100km will occur on Monday. I’m crossing my fingers…this is A Big Deal. We are hopefully close to the beginning of an exciting new period of exploration, discovery, and colonization of the Solar System. (Can you tell I’m a space nerd? *grin*)

Many links to more info available…just google or news google SpaceShipOne, for starters. The Ansari X-Prize is another good place to start (they won’t be eligible for it on Monday, b/c they’re not planning on repeating w/in the 3 week period required to win. But the expectation is that the X Prize may well be won by the end of this year!)

Cool…apparently CNN will have live coverage!

The Bots: The George W. Bush Public Domain Audio Archive — ” a public domain database of the speeches of George W. Bush. Every phrase from each major speech has been made into an individual audio file, where the filename is, in most cases, the exact text content of the sample.”

Oh…I can think of ideas HERE…*grin*

engadget: How-To Tuesday: Make your own Pirate Radio Station with an iPod — LOL! Tips include keeping a couple of tracks of silence available (to override blasting radios when you’re stuck in traffic), and faux news flashes for places like the gym, where cable news audio is broadcast over short range FM. Excellent! A great example of “the street finding it’s own use for things”…

I read the Cringley article on WRT54Gs as “disruptive technology” after seeing the /. post. Since then, I’ve bumped into some further discussions in blogland, and seen several interesting projects that provide FOSS distributions for the lil’ router that could. VERY cool.

I don’t have a single “g” mode card, but I may get one of these anyway just for the hack value. The EWRT guys have managed to include a NoCatAuth-based captive portal, which is something I’ve been toying with doing with a spare old laptop. See…even I’ll take the “ease of use” road occasionally, Lee! *grin*

Bullet to the head

Well, last night the time had finally come. I like Gentoo, don’t get me wrong, and my laptop has run it as it’s Linux distribution for some time. But upgrading a Gentoo system is PAINFUL on it…and though a 1GHz machine isn’t very fast nowadays…it’s actually the second fastest machine in my house. emerge ‘world’ takes all weekend, if I’m lucky and it works. And then, last night, the final straw. The freakin’ thing ran out of disk space about 80% of the way through. I’m not enough of a Gentoo-geek to know what I could and couldn’t whack from the /tmp/packages stuff…and the whole thing had been annoying me for 6 months anyway. So I whacked it.

I’d been looking for an excuse to play with the new Debian Installer anyway. So I burnt a beta 4 CD last night, and crossed my fingers. (the other reason I’d held off on re-installing had been the overall PIT-buttness of laptop installs, with funky hardware support, etc. The Gentoo install took awhile [like a week] to really get working right.)

I remembered to copy off a couple of relevant configs…X, lsmod info, wireless.opts. Maybe a couple of others. But guess what? I used wireless.opts b/c it was the easiest way to put back in the WEP info…but I didn’t need ANY OF THEM. D-I just freakin’ worked. Full hardware detection; X, DRI acceleration for X, audio, USB, PCMCIA…as far as I can tell, no errors. Suh-weet! Less than an hour after I popped in the CD, I was through the install, upgraded from testing to unstable (with a little experimental thown in for good measure…hey, it’s the laptop; might as well play!), and had GNOME 2.6 installing. I am impressed.

Good job, D-I guys! Now I just have to remember to send in an installation report. Back to “Debian Everywhere”…and I couldn’t be happier.

From this week’s Python-URL!:

QOTW: “This wouldn’t be the first place where my fondness for things that work has gotten me into trouble …”

— Nick Vargish, on Python