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A explicit Right to Privacy Amendment? Dan Savage asks: why can't we have one?--...Here we are, decades after Griswold, and social conservatives and liberals are constantly arguing about whether or not the right to privacy, which is a popular right (naturally enough), and one to which most Americans believe they're entitled, is actually a right to which Americans are entitled, constitutionally-speaking. ... It affects all aspects of our lives-- from sexuality to procreation to speech to property to employment to housing, so isn't it time?
Europe has one, in the European Convention on Human Rights : Article 8-the right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence. ...Article 8 offers general protection for a person’s private and family life, home and correspondence from arbitrary interference by the State. This right affects a large number of areas of life ranging from surveillance to sexual identity - it is framed extremely broadly. However, the right to respect for these aspects of privacy under Article 8 is qualified. ...
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Newsfilter: Al-Qaeda chief breaks out of jail. Al-Qaeda's former South-East Asian chief has escaped from a US military prison in Afghanistan. The escape of Omar al-Faruq, with three other alleged terrorists, from the Bagram Air Base in July was suppressed, emerging only after he failed to testify at a US military tribunal on Tuesday.
comment posted at 10:33 PM on Nov-3-05

America's Waistline. A new piece examines the politics of the fat. Despite the growing numbers of people who are becoming obese, the fat acceptance movement remains oddly stunted in terms of membership. The growing civil rights movement faces many problems, including presenting a respectable face to the public. You see, many of the people who are in charge are feeders (NWS). Many wonder how the movement be taken seriously when so many who lead are sexual deviants and much of the revenue generated for size acceptance efforts is through pornography? Still, the battle rages on.
comment posted at 2:23 PM on Nov-3-05

For the last six months or so, it's been a war between Yahoo and Google to see who can outdo each other. They're often releasing competing products at nearly the same time, but Google Maps has held the lead on coolest map for a while now. Yahoo finally countered today, releasing their beta maps, which work much like Google's, though it uses flash instead of javascript. I kind of like the little video game-style radar map in the upper right to show where you are in the bigger picture and the directions feature closeups on the left pane when expanded. Apparently all the cool API stuff works in it already, and they've released an events browser to show that off as well.
comment posted at 10:16 AM on Nov-3-05

Osama bin Laden, littérateur and new-media star. A thought-provoking analysis of bin Laden's adept use of Koranic language and the Internet by Bruce B. Lawrence, an Islamic scholar at Duke who edited a new anthology of bin Laden's public statements called Messages to the World. The Western media -- says the millionaire mass-murderer formerly trained as a useful ally by the CIA via Pakistan's ISI -- "implants fear and helplessness in the psyche of the people of Europe and the United States. It means that what the enemies of the United States cannot do, its media are doing!" Know thy enemy. [via Arts and Letters Daily.]
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"Are you proud of me?'' he wrote. "Can I quit now? Can I go home?" Former FEMA head Mike Brown's emails are turned over to a special House panel.
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"Pinch his tits." A Freudian slip and not getting over it is bad joo joo for Christians Speakers
[embedded video & some cursing]
comment posted at 4:10 PM on Nov-2-05

It's long been known that if you type "failure" into Google and hit "I'm feeling lucky", you get this page. Haha. Funny. The phenomenon is explained here. Now, Microsoft's live.com went public recently. Guess what page it returns as the number 1 result for "failure"?
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Register article on Greek arrest of well known programmer I'ved been watching this story since it surfaced at the rixstep.com page here and here; also covered at Techdirt.com in a couple of threads. Worth a look.
comment posted at 10:29 AM on Nov-2-05

The administration's latest innovation in its effort to export democracy: Soviet-style gulags, a network of secret C.I.A. prisons known as "black sites." [From the Washington Post]. Meanwhile, SecDef Rumsfeld says no thanks to the idea of U.N. inspectors talking to detainees in Guantanamo Bay.
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Did Bach compose Tocatta and Fugue in D minor?
comment posted at 10:07 PM on Nov-1-05

The President's Advisory Panel on Tax Reform has issued their final report. They propose two different plans - one plan called the "Simplified Income Tax Plan" and one called the "Growth and Investment Tax Plan." Both plans do such things as eliminate the Alternative Minimum Tax, reduce the tax rate in all the brackets and changes the home mortgage interest from a tax deduction to a tax credit at the lowest bracket tax rate (15%) and limits the mortgage amount to the regional average instead of up to $1.1M. Lots to read, and lots of graphs for those who like pictures instead of words (the report starts with income distribution, tax burden, etc and goes on to different tax strategies).
comment posted at 5:07 PM on Nov-1-05

News Filter: Senate in closed session. Looks like Senate is now in close session, after Harry Reid invoked Rule 21 and asked for an investigation into the lead-up to the war. Does it sound like a major deal or is it political maneuvering?
comment posted at 12:47 PM on Nov-1-05

Would you pay $9000 for speaker cables? No? Ok, how about $11,700? These are just a few of the seemingly overpriced audio components listed on this page.
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"L" Train Won't Run on Weekends. Although the true hardcore won't be bothered -- because they never leave Brooklyn on the weekends -- this might cramp the style of the rest.
comment posted at 8:53 AM on Nov-1-05

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby is (a) Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, (b) facing a five-count indictment from the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case, (c) the author of The Apprentice, a book that is, in the words of The New Yorker's Lauren Collins, "Libby's 1996 entry in the long and distinguished annals of the right-wing dirty novel," or (d) all of the above. Via Making Light.
comment posted at 6:01 AM on Nov-1-05

Newsfilter: Samuel A. Alito Jr. is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. His ideological likeness to United States Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia has earned him the nickname "Scalito." According to CNN, he is expected to be nominated to the Supreme Court later today. This site provides more background and links to some of his important decisions. Here's one anecdote about him. If you want, you can even rate him at Rate It All.
comment posted at 8:48 AM on Nov-1-05