Hope and Progress?

Obama Administration Supports Telco Spy Immunity |Wired.com
I really really really wish this were not true.

Eyes on IARPA

New Spytech Agency Already Facing Conflict of Interest Allegation (Updated) | Danger Room from Wired.com

IARPA wonders if terrorists play WoW

NSA in ur base, spyin’ on ur d00dz
I just assumed they would be doin' this already. How much you want to bet they are?
via musematic.net

Get your protest on !!

Copyright for Canadians?/ No thanks
This is fast and simple. Do it up! Pass

"After months of hesitation, Industry Minister Jim Prentice has finally revealed his re-write of Canada's rules of copyright. As expected, the bill contains major concessions to the American entertainment industry. Prentice's bill forbids Canadians from engaging in ordinary practices such as ripping DVDs onto video iPods, unlocking digital phones for use with a competitor’s services, and paves the road for US-style consumer lawsuits for file-sharing. Tell your MP to represent you in the forthcoming copyright debate, and stop Prentice from steamrolling a bill that's worse than America's DMCA through Parliament without listening to Canadian voices.
via Boing Boing

Is Bush STILL not convinced that he is the dumbest person alive?

Irregular Times: Bush Manipulating Science Again To Kill Right Whales
via Digg
This will come as no surprise to anyone I am sure.

How Canadian Government Sabotaged Barack

Daily Kos: State of the Nation
Well it wouldn't be much of a blog if I didn't say something about Barack at some point.
via digg

Give this kid a medal. Better yet, a job in the US gov't.

Give me the lesson without the spin - Los Angeles Times
Publishing his article in the LA Times is a good start though.
via Digg

Division of Church and State Indeed.

Soldier Sues Army, Saying His Atheism Led to Threats - New York Times
via Digg

A lot of talk about Net Neutrality

FCC Gets an Earful From Open-Net Defenders at Stanford -Wired.com
With ISPs (Bell Canada included) controlling who gets bandwidth and whose info is allowed to pass, things are not looking good. This article is totally biased, but I like to think it is biased on the side of the good guys.

How dare those people eat more than one meal a day, shocking.

Bad policy, not biofuel, drive food prices: Reuters: "

"If you travel to India these days, then a main part of the debate is about the 'second meal'," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said.

"People are eating twice a day, and if a third of one billion people in India do that, it adds up to 300 million people. And if they suddenly consume twice as much food as before and if 100 million Chinese start drinking milk too, then of course our milk quotas become skewed, and much else too," she said.

So food is more expensive because people in other countries want food too? Who could have predicted that situation? Wow.

When is that election?

Administration Set to Use New Spy Program in U.S. - washingtonpost.com: "The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation's most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon, rebuffing challenges by House Democrats over the idea's legal authority." via Digg

Pesky climate change.

BreathingEarth
It took a few second for me to figure out what I was looking at but a cool illustration of statistics here.
via Digg

Finally, what we have all been waiting for, vat grown meat! Yum.

Can People Have Meat and a Planet, Too?
I guess the Eat Local idea wont work for the nine billion people of the world so this is the answer. The meat industry makes me afraid. via Digg
"The world has seen the first international conference on manufacturing meat. This is the process, tested so far only at laboratory scale, of growing pork, chicken, or beef through cell culture in vats instead of raising and slaughtering animals."
Muscle cells (in this case mouse) can be cultured in the lab.
(Karim Sultan/Utrecht University)

Yep Drugs, Guns and Art.

Art theft and organized crime: "Art theft now represents the third most profitable criminal enterprise in the world, behind drug and arms trafficking"
Frans Van Mieris A Cavalier (Self Portrait) which was stolen from an Australian Gallery back in June 2007 image via:
illicit-cultural-property

I wish the mics would always stay on a little longer

YouTube - Heritage minister 'hates' Bill C-10, says senator
I sent this link to Boing Boing so I guess I should at least post it on my own blog too.

This stuff really happens??

Espionage Against Pro-Tibet Groups, Others, Spurred Microsoft Patches
"The espionage was highly successful, according to Hyppönen. One multi-billion-dollar defense contractor who went to F-Secure for help found that a single compromised Windows box had been secretly siphoning information to a server in mainland China for 18 months."
www.wired.com

As if Darpa wasnt scarry enough;

Introducing Iarpa: It's Like Darpa, But for Spies
"Iarpa (just say "yarpa") is designed to do for the intelligence community what Darpa (the Defense Advanced ResearchProjects Agency) has done for the Pentagon. Darpa was founded back in 1958 with an unusual mandate — conduct military research outside military labs. Its successes have included, oh, the Internet and the Global Positioning System."
www.wired.com

Political Correctness, the Media and "Art"

CBC News: Sunday
Art Spiegelman talks about free speach. Smart guy. Unfortunately you have to sit through the dumb intro by the Sunday guys before you get to Art.

Torch protests unfolding everywhere

Students for a Free Tibet
Sometimes the internet rocks.

Slides of Lessig "Change Congress" talk

http://change-congress.org/