- ACLU readies for possible reality of Patriot Act II:
In short, if this passes, say goodbye to any shred of privacy you thought you still had, and don’t think you’ll be getting any of it back under the sunset provisions next year. [fark!]Expanding on the original, the new measure is said to instruct the government to build a database of citizen DNA information that could be collected without a court order on anyone suspected of wrongdoing; allow the government to wiretap anyone for 15 days and snoop on anyone’s Internet usage, including chat and e-mail, without a warrant; allow the government to strip Americans of their citizenship if they have been found to have contributed material support to organizations deemed by the government, even retroactively, to be ‘terrorist;’ and allow legal permanent residents to be deported, without a criminal charge being filed or evidence presented, if the attorney general considers them a threat to national security.
It would also erase many of the original act’s ‘sunset’ provisions that stipulated law enforcement’s expanded powers would be rescinded in 2005.
- New drug store called bitter pill – CVS is trying to build an ugly-ass drugstore in St. Paul at the corner of University and Snelling. Their design for the corner of University Ave & 10th St SE had many of the same problems and despite my old neighborhood repeatedly complaining, they just kept coming back with the same design. See, they save money by designing one store, which is surrounded by a sea of parking lot, and they use that same design everywhere, even in cities where some other design would be more appropriate or where most of the traffic will be pedestrians and they don’t really need that sea of parking lot for customers, but just for the trucks that make deliveries. [press-patch]
- RFC 3092, released on April 1, 2001 discusses the etymology of
foo
:
A useful piece of research, even if it is almost three years old and everybody and his brother is pointing to it now. [jwz]Approximately 212 RFCs, or about 7% of RFCs issued so far, starting with [RFC269], contain the terms ‘foo’, ‘bar’, or ‘foobar’ used as a metasyntactic variable without any proper explanation or definition.