April 10, 2003 – Jarrett House North

Sayonara to sunset in the PATRIOT Act

LawMeme, riffing on NYT: Patriot Act may not ride off into the sunset. Summary: Orrin Hatch wants to do away with the “sunset provisions” of the Act, which put a five year time limit on the various flagrant Bill of Rights violations therein. As a parallel act, The Kyl-Schumer measure, currently approved by the Senate Judiciary committee and facing an uncertain future in the larger Senate, would eliminate the need to prove that a suspect is linked to a foreign agent or terrorist group when getting a secret warrant. This would eliminate the last vestiges of due process currently standing between the justice system and a world where warrants are easy to get and impossible to contest. I think it’s time to write your senators, folks.

It ain’t over yet, folks

Answering my question from yesterday, CNN reports that four Marines were wounded in a suicide bombing as the coalition moves further into northern Iraq.

The Year of RSS?

A slew of articles recently about RSS’s growing popularity:

Jon Udell in Infoworld points to an article about using RSS for corporate communications (including some excellent commentary, including the role of blogging in raising awareness about data that flows through RSS).

Jenny the Shifted Librarian writes about turning on the crowd at the Government Information Locator Service conference by discussing RSS’s role in making structured data of all kinds available. Her co-presenter, Ray Matthews, won an award from the CIO of Utah for his work in RSS advocacy.

Hmm. Add this to Don Box and the GotDotNet bloggers going through a public RSS lovefest, MSDN adding RSS support… it’s feeling like the Year of RSS, folks.

Burned by CAPPS

Farhad Manjoo in Salon: “‘Please step to the side, sir.’” Good article summarizing recent occurrences around airline screening, including newly-FOIA’d complaints of customers mistakenly profiled on the “no fly” blacklist. Also points to the MIT grad student paper on the flaws in CAPPS, which I had forgotten about. A nice complement to the earlier piece in the Data Mining Review that I wrote about last week.

Catching up: GetContentSize

Whew. A huge deliverable (far huger than it had to be) off my desk; a blocking task on three major objectives cleared; no meetings for the rest of the afternoon. There’s a lot of stuff going on in blogland right now that I want to note while I can.

First, the fun one: John Robb points to GetContentSize, which shows you how much stuff your readers have to download to get to your content (my interpretation). This blog (static version) is 36.13% content. By way of comparison, Slashdot is 28%; Scripting News is 29.89%; and John’s own weblog is 32.76%. By way of further comparison, Mark Pilgrim’s is 34.17%; I suspect it’s relatively low because Mark only has one article on his home page, meaning that there is a lot of header text etc. delivered for a single article payload.

Sayonara to sunset in the PATRIOT Act

Gems from Georgia

Greg’s been on fire this week, reporting on outrageous political news from all over, including:

Norm Coleman, the Republican senator elected to replace Paul Wellstone, dissing the late Democrat: “To be very blunt and God watch over Paul’s soul, I am a 99 percent improvement over Paul Wellstone”…
Putting the war in Iraq in its proper context: “it was never the first three weeks, or three months, that worried me. It was the first three years of discovering festering, unintended consequences of conquest—or, God help us, the first three decades”…
and my favorite of this week, providing eyewitness testimony to the filibuster of the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus to block further efforts at bringing Confederate symbolism back to the Georgia state flag, effectively killing the legislation: “Payback’s a mother, ain’t it?”

Anyway. Work has gotten hellish and my own blogging is falling off, but Greg is burning up. So go read.