janelane wrote:

The company's main product, Enzyte, which promises sexual enhancement, has ads featuring ''Smiling Bob,'' a happy man with an exaggerated smile.

Holy crap! I just saw this ad yesterday! Wait...you mean "natural male enhancement" is just a pseudonym for fraud? Inconceivable!

-janelane

Apparently "natural" means "herbal" which often means "snake oil," but then you gotta figure a placebo is probably all a lot of these guys need. :)

Regardless, this case has raised important Internet civil liberties issues as the government was reading this guy's email for years and was able to do so without a search warrant. I talked about this issue a bit in my 2006 Phreaknic talk on situations where the 4th amendment doesn't apply.

Thus, in the case of e-mail messages stored and sent in the cloud, the government doesn't need a warrant, doesn't need probable cause, and doesn't need to provide the "owner" of the communications with notice. At least, not right away. Indeed, the government can request that the ISP "preserve" future communications that haven't even been conceived of yet, so that the government may demand them if the situation warrants.

The EFF has obtained a ruling (in THIS case) that this practice is not constitutional but that ruling is controversial.

In some respects this is similar to the border search issue. In general, the police are used to the idea that they can search anything at the border. So people start bringing years worth of email correspondence with them across the border and the police think it makes sense for them to be able to search it. Same thing here. The police are used to being able to search any information you've provided to a third party without a warrant. So people start hosting their entire email archive at gmail and the police figure it makes sense for them to be able to search that without a warrant.

The problem is that we're rapidly approaching a place where the 4th amendment won't matter much as a practical concern because our technology has changed in a way that puts most of our personal information beyond its reach. It will be as good as if it didn't exist, and no one is really considering the impact that change is going to have on the nature of our culture. When America finally wakes up and realizes that the Constitution doesn't work the way they thought it did, I think there is going to be hell to pay for the politicians and lawyers who have blissfully allowed this slide down the slippery slope, but in the mean time there are a lot of people like Mr. Warshak who are going to be surprised to learn that everything they are doing has been watched for years without probable cause. Whether or not he deserved it, its still a scary thought.

RE: Ohio company owner gets 25 years in fraud case - NYTimes.com

What of the “near abroad,” the former East European satellites? They too will understand, with a little applied pressure such as military threats, that they belong to the Russian sphere of influence and that it was a mistake to join NATO, which won’t be of any help to them. What of Western Europe? It would perhaps be too much to say that it does not exist, but it certainly does not amount to much. In the absence of a common European foreign and defense policy and above all a common energy policy (which could make them less dependent on Russian oil and gas supplies), one need not bother about the E.U. Their dependence on Russian energy supplies will grow as the North Sea resources will be exhausted in the not-too-distant future.

Russia and the Middle East Middle East Strategy at Harvard

Nothing says "incorruptible international competition" like a bunch of bullshit rules about what your t-shirt is allowed to say and whether an elevator can display its manufacturer's mark.

Olympic logo cops enforce stupid rules with masking tape - Boing Boing

The war in Georgia, therefore, is Russia’s public return to great power status... Russia has been an empire for centuries. The last 15 years or so were not the new reality, but simply an aberration that would be rectified. And now it is being rectified.

Why did the U.S. bless this conflict? Did they intend to provide Russia this opportunity to make a demonstration in exchange for some covert concession?

It occurs to me that perhaps they figured Russia planned invade outright and they wanted to push their hand early.

The Russo-Georgian War and the Balance of Power | Stratfor

This is a set of dramatic high resolution photos of what is going down in Iowa.

Photos of the Iowa cataclysm

The suicide of a man who was forcibly returned to China by Australian immigration authorities has prompted calls by refugee advocates for better treatment of people seeking protection visas.

China dissident commits suicide after forcible deportation - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

The suburban landscape has been marred by foreclosures and half-built communities abandoned in the subprime aftermath. But James Howard Kunstler, author of a dozen books, including The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape, thinks there's a bigger threat to those far-flung neighborhoods: the scarcity of oil. As Kunstler sees it, oil wells are running dry and the era of cheap fuel is over. Given the supply constraints, he says the U.S. will have to rethink suburban sprawl, bringing an end to strip malls, big-box stores, and other trappings of the automotive era. Kunstler, 59, predicts a return to towns and cities centered around a retail hub—not unlike his hometown of Saratoga Springs, N.Y. But the shift to this new paradigm, he says, will be painful. (Kunstler could be off the mark; he predicted technological Armageddon after Y2K.) BusinessWeek writer Mara Der Hovanesian spoke with Kunstler about suburbia, which he calls "the greatest misallocation of resources the world has ever known."

No one rerecommended this similar perspective on the same issue.

Good-Bye, Cheap Oil. So Long, Suburbia?

The presidential campaign has gone on for so long that it feels like one of those bad dreams in which you run in slow motion but never get anywhere.

It's increasingly looking like the economic revival of the past few years—once celebrated on the right as the "Bush boom"—was a mirage, conjured up by excessive borrowing and irresponsible lending.

There will be blood.

The Next Administration's Economy - Wall Street Column - Jesse Eisinger - Portfolio.com

William F. Buckley Jr., the erudite Ivy Leaguer and conservative herald who showered huge and scornful words on liberalism as he observed, abetted and cheered on the right's post-World War II rise from the fringes to the White House, died Wednesday. He was 82.

William F. Buckley Jr. dies at 82 - Yahoo! News

Late at night several times a week, Terrill powers up the 4-foot-tall, 300 pound device and reaches for a remote control packed with two joysticks and various knobs and switches. Standing on a nearby corner, he maneuvers the machine down the block, often to a daycare center where it accosts what Terrill says are drug dealers, vagrants and others who shouldn't be there.

He flashes the robot's spotlight and grabs a walkie-talkie, which he uses to boom his disembodied voice over the robot's sound system.

"I tell them they are trespassing, it's private property, and they have to leave," he said. "They throw bottles and cans at it. That's when I shoot the water cannon. They just scatter like roaches."

OMG, I can't believe he actually built it, and I can't believe it actually works.

Who needs security when you have a robot? | ajc.com