Overpressure
Rocky Mountain Gun Owners' 2002 .50 cal & Machine Gun Shoot Photos - very cool. [ar15.com]
Yarchive: Guns - an archive of the old Usenet guns list. Good stuff! [madogre]
Eric Raymond - Why does porn got to hurt so bad? - one man's interpretation of what separates good from bad images of naked women. No images at the linked site, but plenty of links to them. Don't click if this kind of thing offends you.
Thomas C Greene at The Register - Dubya calls for US Gestapo - Heil Dubya! [register]
The stated purpose here is to provide a second layer of insurance against the intelligence and communications failures affecting both the CIA and FBI, which Congress is now investigating. But according to the White House, the new Homeland Security Department will not have access to raw data from these agencies, but will instead rely on whatever redacted reports they happen to volunteer. This means that any important data these agencies fail to recognize will also be missed by the new Department. So we can pretty well rule out the possibility that the stated purpose is the real purpose.
The real purpose, clearly, is data acquisition, mining and manipulation on a gargantuan scale.
...
Pretty impressive for a guy who was nearly felled by a pretzel.
William Safire at The New York Times - J. Edgar Mueller - commentary on the f.b.i.'s new powers. [smith2004]
To fabricate an alibi for his nonfeasance, and to cover up his department's embarrassing cut of the counterterrorism budget last year, Attorney General John Ashcroft -- working with his hand-picked aide, F.B.I. Director "J. Edgar" Mueller III -- has gutted guidelines put in place a generation ago to prevent the abuse of police power by the federal government.
They have done this deed by executive fiat: no public discussion, no Congressional action, no judicial guidance. If we had only had these new powers last year, goes their posterior-covering pretense, we could have stopped terrorism cold.
Not so. They had the power to collect the intelligence, but lacked the intellect to analyze the data the agencies collected. The F.B.I.'s failure to absorb the Phoenix and Minneapolis memos was compounded by the C.I.A.'s failure to share information it had about two of the Arab terrorists in the U.S. who would become hijackers (as revealed by Newsweek today).
Hector Castro at The Seattle Post-Intelligencer - State Patrol begins random searches at ferry docks - Washington state police got $1.8 million and are now conducting "voluntary" random searches of vehicles. If you don't "volunteer", the ferry captain may refuse to carry your vehicle. [kaba]
Wonka "is ACUNIA's cleanroom Virtual Machine for the Java language. It is extremely portable and self-contained, and can optionally be used with its own real-time executive (OSwaldTM) to provide a complete solution for embedded devices. It is a full implementation of the Java language, not just a subset, and it's Open Source." I haven't tried it, but it looks neat. [meat]