So it turns out that Chicago is even more draconian than Maryland when it comes to firearms. A man is facing charges after he shot a burgular who broke into his house twice and after he was shot drove himself to the hospital in the family's minivan that he had stolen earlier. The homeowner could face fines over $3000 and a year in jail. Thanks to Frank Mataitis for the heads up.

A cypherpunks discussion pointed out that what I know from working at UMBC as vagrancy laws are set for constitutional review by the Supreme Court. The dissent opinion in the Ninth Circuit case that decided in favor of ID-on-demand by police officers believed that no evidence exists that an officer is safer for knowing a person's identity.

Since I use Pine to read e-mail, I only see the text portion of most of my spam mail. I wasn't surprised to find that spammers are including entire novels to fool recognition systems like SpamAssassin.

The personal details of about 1,800 students at NYU, including social security numbers were leaked from a University intranet to the public network. NYU is under fire for allowing this leak to occur, highlighting the need for increased privacy protections in higher education.

It has been found that penguins can poop a distance up to 38 centimeters. And knowing is half the battle.

If you haven't heard this by now, you haven't been paying attention. Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has said that George Bush was like a "blind man in a roomful of deaf people" at Cabinet meetings. What weight this accusation and others will hold in the upcoming election remains to be seen.

Apple has released a bunch of new toys. I only got to see half of them, about five minutes of which were Microsoft products, on account of the live video stream acting up. Now that its available in the archives, I really don't care to watch it anymore.

George Bush popularized the use of the word evil in his famous State of the Union address to refer to people he didn't care for. Now some Americans are beginning to wrestle with the realization that we might be doing a fair amount of evil things in this world ourselves. Lance Morrow has a new book on the subject called Evil: An Investigation.

Our good friends David Frum and Richard Perle also have a book out. Theirs is called An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror. The reviewers of this book in The Economist write what is my new favorite line: "Ambition is no sin in a book. Nor, heaven knows, is brevity." Their summary of the solution seems to be an attitude re-adjustment for the State Department and a simplistic version of making good with the United Nations.

Fear as a tool for profit has a history as long as the communists.

An engineer in Dorset used physics to prove that he was travelling only 13 mph when an automated radar system clocked him at 51. Apparently its okay for a known phenomenon of false readings to result in real tickets and fines. Not even ambulance crews are spared. Thanks to Declan McCullagh for the links.

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