Monday, December 16, 2002

Kean to Head 9/11 Commission. President Bush picked Tom Kean, former governor of New Jersey, to replace Henry A. Kissinger as chairman of a panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. By The Associated Press. [New York Times: Politics] 5:02:03 PM

SF Gate: Day In Pictures : Joke holiday display [lnk.to] 4:53:46 PM

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Sleeping with the enemy [lnk.to] 4:52:05 PM

no, really! [jwz] AOL just canned half of their mozilla.org staff, giving them as a bonus a 1,000 free hours AOL cd. 1:54:05 PM

NYTimes Year in Ideas. jonbrewer writes "The New York Times is back again with their "Year in Ideas" and one that Slashdot missed this year was the RatBot. As featured in the BBC and ... [Slashdot] Good Stuff Here: Ambulance-Homicide Theory - Getting tough on crime makes little difference, fast amulances and better hospitals do. This affects what crimes people are prosecuted for. Intellectual Magnet Cities - American cities used to become rich and important by attracting high-energy, low-skilled workers from abroad or from farm states. Now they do the same thing by luring brainy young people away from less livable American cities Enemy Combatants -  The idea that an American who is suspected of having links to Al Qaeda should not have the right to a lawyer and the should not have the right to not answer questions about coming attacks while being held indefinatly. Christian-Right Zionism - Israeli rightists have encouraged conservative evangelicals like Jerry Falwell and Robertson to translate fascination with Isreal and the second comming into active backing for hardline Israeli positions. Women Are Just as Jealous as Men - Several other prominent studies being published this year produced similarly gender-neutral results: when deprived of the chance to weigh the long-term effects or to guess what response might be the more appropriately feminine, women proved just as brutishly possessive as men. Total Information Awareness - Goverment using data mining across a large amounts of private data State Attorneys General as Corporate Cops - Conservative supreme court devolution to states power to fight federal regulations backfires. Slow-Motion Democratization - Support slow movements to democracies: Authoritarian regimes would maintain control over certain aspects of internal affairs, like defense, and gradually turn over more responsibilities to an elected government. Pre-emption - Sticklers point out that what the administration advocates is not technically ''pre-emption,'' which implies a demonstrably imminent attack, but ''prevention,'' which is held in even lower regard by just-war theologians, since it is divorced from a clearly impending danger. In the new thinking, that distinction is blurred by the fact that when nuclear weapons, nerve gas and smallpox are introduced into the equation, ''imminent'' may be too late. 10:59:59 AM

Sequel to Ghost In The Shell. News for nerds writes "Innocence: Ghost In The Shell as the sequel to Ghost In The Shell, anime film directed by Mamoru Oshii, has been announced. Due out in ... [Slashdot] 10:25:59 AM

New Netscape kills pop-ups. Populist movie [The Register] Users that activate the pop-up suppression on the latest version of Netscape will find that a number of sites have been excluded from the block. Seven of these 15 exceptions relate to sites that belong to AOL Time Warner, including aol.com, aim.com and cnn.com. 10:14:43 AM