Brightrock

Just doing my bit to decrease worker productivity :-)

The classic Frogger as a flash program: Frogger

Maybe our politicians aren’t so bad, at least compared to the statesmen of the Czech Republic.

Not that American politicians haven’t occassionally done worse - it’s just been a few years :-)

Tom Russell is another one of my recent XMRadio discoveries.  I heard "Four Chambered Heart" the other day and decided it was time to start exploring this fellow's music. He's coming to Austin and Houston in July - hopefully I'll get a chance to catch a show. 

The recent dip in stock price has been a bit worrisome, but I'm still confident that hanging onto my Intel stock will turn out to be a good investment.  This Motley Foll article sums up the current situation pretty well: "The End of Intel".

I think that this essay by Bruce Schneier (Wired News: The Eternal Value of Privacy) makes some good points - privacy has value even when you have nothing to hide.  In the context of the current debates about wire tapping, data mining, and other government surveillance, I think that we need to remember that one of the things that has made our country special is our reverence for individual liberty. 

Now, this doesn't mean that I object to all government surveillance - clearly there are threats in our world that justify government intelligence gathering.  My objection to our current policies is the lack of independent oversight.  The Executive should have to justify its surveillance activities to the other, independent branches of government. Absent sufficient oversight, both Democratic and Republican administrations have shown that they will abuse surveillance power.  Based on that history, the current administration's argument that the Executive branch can police its own use of surveillance power simply doesn't hold up.  We may need to come up with new legislation to streamline the process for getting warrants, but we shouldn't simply abandon separation of powers and judicial oversight because they are inconvenient or cumbersome.