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There is a place for proprietary software ...

Well, actually, there is a straightforward argument (brought up here on many occasions by many people) that in government operations, there are good reasons for a total ban on proprietary software.

The use of proprietary software in a government operation should throw up a big red flag. It nearly always means that the government agency and the software vendor are hiding the inner working of the agency from the citizenry. If they don't want the citizens to be able to see what's going on with the agency's data, there are probably reasons, and we pretty much all know what those reasons are.

The case of Microsoft software is even more blatant. Ever since MS caught on to the idea of networking, they have been caught over and over supplying software that sends information about the computer back to some (usually undocumented) .microsoft.com address. In some cases, when people have been able to decode the packets' contents, this has often included lots of details about what's on the hard disk. This is generally known as "spyware", of course. It's no surprise that governments would look on such software very skeptically.

(Of course, one could argue that what we really need is for this information to be sent to public web sites, rather than just to Microsoft. But that's another discussion.)

The only possible defense against all this is to require that the workings of government computers be open to inspection by the public. This is so we can find out what it's doing and not just take the word of the PR people.

A very reasonable law would forbid government use of software whose source code isn't available to the general public. Without this, there's no way you can keep your government honest.

An article by Hiawatha Bray in this morning's Boston Globe had an elegant explanation of this. He quoted someone (on the topic of electronic voting) as saying that "It's not a computing problem, it's an auditing problem."

You can't properly audit a computer's behavior if you can't read the code.

No? What about this:

http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2003/10/ 30/britain_rejects_appeals_of_terror_suspects/

Seriously anyone with power can lie and manipulate. It's often funny how many people assume the media is honestly trying to present the facts without manipulation.
See the following:
CNN planted question at debate
Fraud at NYT

Fix begins for Columbia Road nexus

Undoing what may be worst intersection

By Mac Daniel, Globe Staff, 10/12/2003

Last Thursday, without much fanfare, one of the greatest transportation events in the history of Boston began when a group of city officials and neighborhood activists gathered on a grassy triangle in Dorchester and broke ground to fix one of the most convoluted, dangerous, and generally messed-up intersections in the known universe. Yes, dear reader, the so-called "Intersection from Hell" at the Columbia Road exit from the Southeast Expressway by the JFK/UMass Red Line stop is about to be sent back to from whence it came.

In an article a year ago, we described the intersection as an "untamed and unholy transit matrix, a gantlet of metal and tension that requires drivers to look in two directions at once while making split-second decisions more appropriate to NASCAR or alligator wrestling than driving a car." "Speed demons brake here," we wrote.

We and 33,999 others drive here daily, guided only by a strange set of blinking red lights and our frayed wits.

Every now and again, if a pedestrian should want to cross this no man's land, the lights stop blinking and the "Walk [if you dare]" sign pops on. But who cares, right?

Cars and trucks and school buses, so flustered by the intersection, make a very dangerous habit of motoring through the solid red just to reach the other side.

The directional arrows on the pavement mean nothing. Cars have been known to take a left turn off Columbia to the ramp leading to the Southeast Expressway from the middle lane, prompting one of the strangest traffic signs in all of Boston: "No Turns from Outer Lane."

[....]

He may use the shovel himself, Sherman joked, if the project drags on. The timeline to fix it? You guessed it: by the time the Democratic National Convention comes to town in July 2004.

That Mac Daniel, he's a funny guy... :-)

Actually, at my school, one of the database professors has her students do service learning projects for non-profit agencies. The one I did last year turned out pretty well, was a phenomenal success for the agency, and I continued working on it for the non-profit in question as part of my co-op.

There was an earlier thread about this with a link to a Boston Globe Article

There was an earlier thread about this with a link to a Boston Globe Article

Which is why I buy the cheap Schick (heh) knock-off of the Mach3, which works well enough.

Enjoy it while it lasts! The lawsuit to terminate this despicable piracy is already in progress.

Don't try too hard to find "Brian Greene's Elegant Universe" in your local listing. Instead, just watch Nova as planned, as that's the show which will be covering the topic. Part one is tonight. Part two is next week.

Actually, checking local listings is probably a good idea: WGBH & sister stations in Boston & New England broadcast the first two parts back to back last night, and will be repeating these two several times over the next week. The third part is scheduled for the week of 4 November.

It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to look up $your_city tv listings on Google, or buy a copy of your local newspaper. I realize that this is too late for last night's show, but if WGBH is typical (okay, so they produced it, they have an interest in letting lots of people see it, but still), your local PBS affiliate may be doing one or more re-broadcasts over the next few days.

Backlit keyboards are kinda pointless, especially when 99%-100% of the time you work with a light on.

80 gig hard drive that is SLOW (4200 rpm) and CHEAP.

Firewire 800 is not used yet

Gigabit ethernet is not useful either.

You must like to pay for useless features, just so you can say you have them in case anybody ever starts using them. haha.

crappy battery life.

I swear. The pre-conceived notion that because its an Apple, it's better is the stupidest thing I can imagine. Nearly all laptops come from the same places, including Apple. Yeah, you really think different, pal. Nice going, but you've learned nothing--save how to pay Apple thousands of $$$ more than you should.

Read this

In case anyone else wants to read some of the other coverage....

MIT Develops Legal Music-Sharing Via Cable TV

MIT students have developed a music on demand file-sharing system that uses the analog campus cable TV system to bypass the Internet and digital distribution (Google link). This takes advantage of the relatively less-restrictive licensing that the recording industry makes available to radio stations and others for analog transmission. The system, called the Libraries Access to Music Project and dubbed miTunes, is backed by MIT, funded by Microsoft iCampus and will give campus access to 3,500 CDs. More at USA Today, Boston.com and AP / Detroit News.

The tough limits on digital music broadcasting didn't apply to analog broadcasting, the kind used by MIT's cable television systems. A cable broadcaster simply pays a blanket royalty fee to the major music licensing organizations, such as the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers, or ASCAP.

Like most colleges, MIT already pays such a fee to those organizations. And a cable broadcaster doesn't pay the additional royalty to the record companies. So Winstein and Mendel built a network that takes orders over the Internet, but plays the music back over the cable system.

boston.com

Harvard is a private university, Oxford is a government-funded university. In the U.S. government universities are funded by the individual states and tuition ranges from $1,500-4,000/yr, while many states such as Texas and Georgia waive the tuition fees for students who keep their grades above a certain level.

Oxford weighs funding changes
"despite Oxford's proud history and its impressive architecture, it is losing its competitive footing to America's top-tier colleges and universities, such as Harvard and Yale."

How about the Boston Big-dig?
Do you think it'll succeed for retroactively refitting Boston into a modern-layout system?

Public libraries serve this purpose quite well, but in my state (Massachusetts), there is a bill that seeks to disclose children's library activity. Frankly, I find this bill repugnant.

And if you read enough articles, you'd know that what he said last week was plenty accurate and his assessment was more accurate than many that supposedly "know football." But keep carrying that liberal banner way up high if it makes you feel better about yourself. Just don't be surprised when others give you about the same credibility as we give Rob Enderle.

Correct, clickable link here: Boston Globe

However, what if that guy who can't fight was a security guard? Maybe he's not armed, or armed with a gun known to jam frequently. Perhaps his bullet proof vest has just been recalled. Sure it's still morally reprehensible to exploit any of his weaknesses but shouldn't he be as well equiped as possible?

Now, what if instead of a security guard he was a regular employee with all access to sensitive data? And instead of a company, he worked at the Pentagon? Shouldn't he be protected by the best security guards and systems possible?

This is where Valve is to blame. They did not provide the most current and available security measures to their employees. This is especially gratuitous since the Outlook patches are available free of charge, unlike upgraded vests and weapons!

I agree that there should be limits, but you might want to consider the context.

A parody web site was erected, and his election committee was not happy. When asked about the web site on television, his response was the source fo the quote.

More information see here, here, and here.

The NLP required for this is far off, but it sure will be cool when we get there.

This degree of natural language processing (NLP) is far beyond the current state of the art. Google, with its miniscule research budget, is not likely to invent the technology any time soon even though Google appears to favor H-1B workers over American workers.

Here is where Microsoft steps into the picture. Microsoft is currently building a R & D laborary that is the equal of the former Bell Laboratories before the breakup of Ma Bell. Like the old Ma Bell, Microsoft is a monopoly and earns monopoly profits that it invests into research. Microsoft is investing $6.8 billion into research and is hiring an additional 5000 researchers. Microsoft is conducting the kind of long-term R & D that once characterized Thomas J. Watson Laboratory at IBM and will surely snare a Nobel Prize or two.

Right now, American Ph.D. graduates who want to work on long-term research in industry choose Microsoft as their #1 pick for employer.

Microsoft will create the NLP search engine of the future and will bury Google.

... from the desk of the reporter

Each Massachusetts computer using linux is $200+ that is not shipped out of state to a large corporate sinkhole. This money can be spent on important things like rebuilding roads and schools.

Yup. Instead Massachussetts can use the $200+ per computer to go help pay for another large corporate sinkhole, the Big Dig.

here under Photo Gallery. I'll let you pass your own judgement.

here under Photo Gallery. I'll let you pass your own judgement.

The Verizon case found that the RIAA has the right to get the identities of users who they allege are violating copyright laws by sharing copyrighted music.

This finding is still being appealed by Verizon, and Congress is discussing whether this should be allowed to continue. Where the RIAA should get in trouble is with the recent subponea issued for the wrong person. They essentially deprived this person of their right to privacy by wrongfully requesting that the person's ISP reveal their identity. This was in clear violation of their rights ... and if the RIAA didn't have more lawyers than quality musicians, the person could do the country a world of good by suing the RIAA.

SCO has no intention to sue Linux end-users

Originally, SCO had no intention of suing anyone at all:
According to McBride, "obviously Linux owes its heritage to UNIX, but not its code. We would not, nor will not, make such a claim."

But at the beginning of August:
"The legal liability for Linux clearly rests with the end user."

"We have the ability to go to users with lawsuits and we will if we have to."

McBride and company have never kept their story straight in the past - expecting them to do so now that they've made another statement we like would probably be overly optimistic.

I don't know how you get the impression that Kerry and Lieberman are implying that they know these things are happening. The possibly deceptive message you can get is that they, just like the American public, don't know how it's being used. And you could argue that that is the way they're supposed to handle classified information, to act as if they didn't have it.

What would be an acceptable way for Kerry and Lieberman to argue against this law by your standards? I gave it some thought and couldn't come up with any. If they had hinted at that it's not being used, they would no doubt have been labeled traitors and security risks.

It's very hard to make sense of Ashcrofts argument here. It seems to boil down to that the law should not be abolished since he has never used it and has no intention to.

The important thing is what laws are on the books, and their potential for abuse. The argument "But I trust the current administration" is completely invalid, since there will be many new administrations coming after it, manned with people of very varying level of moral integrity, if history is any guide.

Now, terrorists know the FBI is too scared to use this new capability, which can only be a bad thing.

1. How exactly do you imagine terrorists will exploit this information to kill Americans? I have as vivid an imagination as anyone, and I can't even come up with a bizzarre scenarion for this to happen. Which is the other part of the argument against this law apart from the potential for abuse, namely the low potential for use.

2. What's your basis for thinking that the FBI is too scared to use it? The Great Truthsayer John Ashcroft claims that it is because they "just don't care" about library records.

BTW, you clamor for transparency from Ashcroft, but then when the Justice Department does exactly that, you don't trust him?

Well, the selective release of one isolated fact to score political points against Kerry and Lieberman doesn't impress me, even though it is welcome in itself, and I think it is probably true.

As for the Justice Department's classification of the accusations against itself, I haven't seen their documents, but it doesn't sound like they're giving any real information, only that they've looked into the accusations against themeselves, and found them to be mostly groundless.

Look here.

So what happened originally you ask? Here's an excerpt from The Straight Dope:

• Destino's fate is shrouded in as much mystery as its beginning. Disney and Dali, by mutual agreement, abandoned the project in 1947 after numerous storyboards and a 17 second test reel were completed. Hench said Disney felt the market for omnibus features had evaporated. Others privately felt that Dali's more extreme style and ideas may have been too much for Disney's midwestern sensibilities. After work on the short was shelved, much of the artwork was stolen from the studio and eventually showed up on the New York art market. Dali and Disney, however, remained good friends afterwards and continued to visit in each other's home countries.

For more related articles, here are some great links too:

• http://www.wdwcentral.com/comments/94_0_1_0_C/
  http://www.boston.com/globe/magazine/1-30/features tory2.shtml
  http://www.abstractdynamics.org/archives/2003/06/1 3/dali_v_disney.html
  http://www.animagic.hpg2.ig.com.br/destin1.htm
  (This last one has images of conceptual art designs too!)

-Mr. Fusion

I don't like e-voting any more than you do, as most of the e-voting that's around today is dangerously badly implemented, and ultimately anti-democratic. However, you argue instead that we need representative democracy because...

1. Because mob-rule (pure democracy) is a bad idea.
Mob rule is a bad idea, agreed, but please explain how is mob rule "pure democracy"? Do mobs hold votes on which person to lynch or which building to burn? Mob rule is pure feudalism, not pure democracy.

2. Because most people don't even give a shit about who's PRESIDENT, let alone every minor issue our representatives get paid (well) to address.

Most people in Zimbabwe, Iraq, Palestine, Venezuela etc. care very deeply about who's president. You must be talking about "most people in the USA", right? The evidence certainly supports you there, but there is the matter of the other 6 billion people on the planet.

There was a similar article in the Boston Globe this morning that listed the price Universal was selling the CDs to the stores: $9.09 instead of $12.02. Not that anybody ever RTFA, but here is a link:

Boston Globe Article

Ha ha, yes, it is quite amusing to be sent to prison for a nonviolent offense (typing on a keyboard, for instance) and subsequently violently raped repeatedly by multiple large black men while the guards stand by and laugh and the prison wardens make no effort to keep it from happening.

Whereas, if the sentiment of the board after Blaster hit is any indication, he should be 'bound, gagged, strangled, and stomped by a fellow inmate'.

Go Lynch Mob. Woo.

Good article, here's a link.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi

• Don't send our kids to concentration camps
  
• Treat Chechens like humans (although criminals and enemies) and do not send them to death camps
  
• Do not jail political protesters
  
• Do not dream about total control over all citizens anymore
  
• No longer use 1984 tricks like doublespeak and editing history
  
• Do not jail people for hyperlinking
  
• Do not jail people for jokes in their belongings
  
• No longer send KGB officers to make people "disappear"
  
• Do not jail people for writing fiction
  
• And overall are highly unlikely to become a totalitarian prison-state
  
• Do not get busted for downloading an MP3 (and since most artists place MP3s on their sites, we don't even need P2P).
  
• Don't have perpetual copyrights.
  

Booo!

This story in the boston globe shows how when even the mainstream media pick up the gist of an isssue they don't get it right. They completely missed the fact the code is licensed under BSD and has twice been granted that license.

I really want to see how SCO is going to sue end users without disclosing the code.

windowsupdate.microsoft.com.
IN CNAME windowsupdate.microsoft.com.edgesuite.net.

wind owsupdate.microsoft.com.edgesuite.net.
IN CNAME a822.cd.akamai.net.

There is a big difference between shipping and selling consoles.

Quoting from your own links:

Nintendo Co Ltd said in March it had shipped a total of 9.55 million GameCubes since the console was launched in late 2001.

Globally, Microsoft has reported Xbox sales of 9.4 million units.

Now consider the fact that Nintendo is halting production of the Gamecube because of an inventory backlog and it becomes very likely that the Xbox has sold more units. At the very least Ms. Fryer wasn't "blatantly lying" as you claimed.

Some free advice from someone who was themselves a know-it-all 17-year-old: think long and hard before calling someone a liar. You aren't infallible and you never know when you yourself will need that kind of charity.

Boston itself isn't effected, but some places around Massachusetts have had power outages (apparently mostly in Springfield, Simpsons jokes left to others).

I'm fine, but I'm out just within 495 (if I look out the window, I can see it - I'm in Littleton). I dunno about neighboring towns.

Boston itself isn't effected, but some places around Massachusetts have had power outages (apparently mostly in Springfield, Simpsons jokes left to others).

I'm fine, but I'm out just within 495 (if I look out the window, I can see it - I'm in Littleton). I dunno about neighboring towns.

Another link, albeit from the popular press so a bit short on technical details: The truth about polygraphs.

These tests are completely unreliable, and suffer both from false negatives and false positives in abundance. If you're ever asked to take one for any reason you should refuse. If the results favour you they'll be ignored, if they don't you'll never live them down, however wrong they may be. These things are evil.

But, has the number of couples that can't have children gone up?

The number of people who are diagnosed with fertility problems has gone up, but there is some debate about the causes. One of the more obvious reasons for the rise in the diagnosis of infertility is that people are starting families later in life.

Also these procedures are not cheap! That money could really change an orphan's life...

Raising a child at all in a developed country is not cheap. For the price of raising 1 in a developed nation you could provide a good standard of living for 10 children in a devloping nation. Still, for some reason, people prefer to spend money on their own off-spring.

The verses you asked for comment on simply teach that we must be wary in our Christian walk, that we can slide into sin. Doing so by no means loses our salvation, but God's chastisement of us when we're in sin, well, hurts. Getting taken to the woodshed is necessary to teach us the lesson, and after it we are closer to God, but the process is not fun.

About the parable of the tares and the wheat, all that illustrates is that there will always be tares until the end of the world. The fact that the church is raptured out before the tribulation doesn't mean that there won't be tares in among the believers who come to Christ after the rapture and before the tribulation.

If you read the two letters to the church at Thessalonica, you will see that in the first letter the rapture or harpazo is discussed (1 Thes 4:17). In the second letter is the actual second coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. (2 Thes 1:10). Note that the word "harpazo" or "caught up" (Strong's 726) is NOT in the 2nd letter. The two letters in those areas refer to two different events. He is coming only as far as the clouds, not to earth, to take His saints from the church age.

The OT talked of the advent of Christ in two roles: ruling with a rod of iron (Psa 2:9, Isa 32, Isa 40, Eze 20), and as a suffering servant (Isa 53, Psa 22). Therefore the Jews who could not reconcile the two roles never realized this was Messiah coming twice, once to save mankind, once to judge were spiritually blind to the truth in the scripture

In the same way, the Holy Spirit (who is author of all the Bible) in the new testament uses the same structures extensively. So there will be two comings in the NT as well. The rapture is referred to in John 14:1-3; Romans 8:19; 1 Cor 1:7-8, 15:1-53, and 16:22; Phillipians 3:20-21; Collossians 3:4; 1 Thessalonians 1:10, 2:19, 4:13-18; 5:9, and 5:23; 1 Timothy 6:14; 2 Timothy 4:1; Titus 2:13; Hebrews 9:28; James 5:7-9; 1 Peter 1:7, 1:13; 1 John 2:28-3:2; Jude 21, Revelation 2:25 and 3:10. The Second Coming is in Daniel 2:44-45, 7:9-14, 12:1-3; Zech 14:1-15; Matthew 13:41, 24:15-31, 26:64; Mark 13:14-27, 14:62; Luke 21:25-28; Acts 1:9-11, 3:19-21; 2 Thessalonians 2:8; 2 Peter 3:1-14; Jude 14-15; Revelation 1:7, 19_11-20:6, 22_7, 12, 20. Pray for extra discernment as you read those passages, and see that they are talking about two separate events.

Bottom line here Pall, is that we are commanded to judge by fruits (Matthew 7:16 and 7:20). The fruits of the RCC are things like the slaughter of up to 100,000 souls in one town in one day (Beziers, France). And like the scandal of over a thousand children molested by sexual pervert priests who were shielded and knowingly allowed to continue their abuse by the Roman Catholic Church. A THOUSAND IN ONE CITY!!! (That Boston Herald link may not work in a few days, I have not studied their archiving techniques). Those fruits are awfully rotten. Biblical Christianity, which is distinctly different than the RCC teachings, has no such fruits. And before you go off about protestants, they are closer to the RCC than to the Bible. Luther, the leader of the "reformation", never understood the book of Revelation, and called it worthless. Non-denominational, biblical Christians are unrelated to the protestants and to the RCC. As the Bible says will happen in the last days, there will be a growth toward a one-world government (ever heard of the "New World Order"?) and toward a one-world religion (ecumenism). The current pope has been pushing toward the latter pretty hard, with things like getting the mark of Shiva, saying Buddhism is a religion of salvation, kissing the Quran, holding that all religions lead to salvation.

There is geeky history , other geeks,fun tours, funner tours and of course 100k college students 7/13ths of whom are female.

And if you want to stay, make sure to stop buy one of the millions of awesome high tech firms in the area.

(It's a joke ... laugh).

After reading this article, you can see that the schools will comply with the RIAA. The schools' problem is that they don't believe the subpoenas were correctly filed. They claim that they also had too little time to notify the students, which is required by some other federal laws.

So don't get your hopes up just yet. On the plus side, the RIAA said that they don't want to refile. So this may get interesting.

It seems like, aside from the continual updates thing, a nicer idea would be to have a PalmOS or WinCE version that would be updated either at sync time or, hardware allowing, continually via wi-fi, modem, or Bluetooth circuitry. Better still, if your PDA had GPS abilities, then getting current traffic info (and, why not, weather as well) for your current location would be even better. By going to a traditional PDA, you lose the real-time updates that the dedicated device seems to provide, but you also lose one more gadget to have to carry around (or, I suppose, just leave in your glovebox), and you also gain a good deal of flexibility.

I think the most interesting thing about this application is the excellent data representation of in the WA-DOT map. I'd like to see this traffic map style replace some of the other, clumsier traffic sites that I'm used to, with their breakdown of a region in arbitrary ways ("well, my route takes me from this section, across part of that one, and ends up at this third one..."), under-descriptive icons, pages of text ("wait, where the hell is Frontage Road? OH, the so-and-so landmark on interstate $foo..."), useless webcams that are greyed by smog and blocked by obstacles, and maps that don't attempt to tell you anything at all. Compare this to the WA-DOT's system, which tell you conditions between each exit, attempts to explain data holes ("no data" / "no equipment"), and even provides archives of maps at earlier times ("what the hell was going on last Thursday?"). Nice!

But I don't think I want a device dedicated to receiving that information.

Especially one targeted only at Seattle... :-)

I was not aware that Saddam used chemical weapons "on his own people." Can you provide any evidence of this?

Well maybe according to Saddam Kurds and Shia aren't people so they don't count. Otherwise, yes, after Bush's father asked them to rise up against Saddam, promising support, the Kurds and Shia rose up, were killed by helicopter gunships (HINDs) bearing, among other things, chemical weapons. This was filmed and shown on international news. Bush essentially washed his hands of the whole affair and Saddam left the bullet holes where people were killed among other things as a reminder of how good the Americans are at keeping their word.

I disagreed with Bush's reasons for the war and I do not trust him to deliver on his promise of giving Iraq a democracy or restoring one in afghanistan. So far he has proven people like me right. I would be willing to accept a compromise if democracy was truly the goal or if it was established, but I think Stallman will be CEO of Microsoft and begin the project of exporting ice from Hell to irrigate these places first if Bush has his way.

Ok, if you want to go into the consipiracy theory bit, then here we go... The FBI wouldn't use RFID because it's already deprecated technology. They would instead send in their Microsoft (ie, root of all evil) developed spy roaches equiped with the newest micro camera/audio recorder.

I suppose most any law-enforcement investigation can be broadly categorized as a conspiracy... people cooperating in secret. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though.

Did you miss the economic points in my last post? Assuming that such "roaches" were to exist (and are not a result of delerium tremens...) they'd likely be rather expensive little beasties. And subject to frequent crashing and viral infections/worms (... a roach with worms. not a pleasant thought...), if we accept your view* of Microsoft. Not a reliable or cost effective (hypothetical) technology at present, IMO.

Oh, and deprecated how? Details, please. A couple of posts ago you seemed rather enthusiastic about it as a new technology that people were foolish to be concerned about. I guess things move rather quickly nowadays...

These would communicate directly to the agents outside wearing their new invisibility cloaks.

A plain unmarked white van would suffice and be much cheaper. Hyperbole, my friend. In any case, if we take the usatoday.com article you cite as gospel, it's in develpment and might not pan out. I've read elsewhere about "active camouflage" and have doubts. How about shadows cast by the wearer, for example? While such might be useful on a confused battlefield, I've not seen any suggestion that it would be helpful in close-up surveillance under "calm" conditions.

(the roaches are just for hard evidence) with their X-ray [wired.com] glasses (the real ones, not those clunky things used in the airport).

No comment, except to point out that the glasses you imagine would likely be rather obtrusive given a reasonable projection of todays' publicly available technology. I might be wrong there; I didn't anticipate the F-117. Your wired.com link is to the "clunky" device that you, um, deprecated. Got a better one?

As to the capabilty (and range) of RFID and the transmitters required to trigger the tags, I speak from a glancing familiarity with HF and UHF receiver design (very glancing, from trying to be an informed consumer a number of years back). No magic, no area 51, no black helicopters. Simple economics: you get what you pay for. In RF (and microwave, I presume) receivers sensitivity and range depend on narrow bandpass and a number of other things that increase performance require parts of tighter tolerance, circuits or more complexity, and better quality control.

And all this because a group of dissenters wants to cook up wild stories about black helicopters. What do you think?

I think you're mistaken, and perhaps somewhat naive. I proposed two scenarios in which widespread deployment of uniquely identifying RFID tags created a potential for abuse, without requiring a dense and expensive infrastructure. I for one am not a member of any "dissident" group; I'm merely expressing personal concerns. Things like this give me pause and make me want close oversight and limits on law enforcement organizations.

*** SERIOUSLY ***

Seriously, RFID as surveillance sucks. You still have to be within feet of the device. And anyone will be able to buy equipment to look for devices searching for a signal. Just not very practical for subterfuge. The gov't has much nicer toys.

I'm sure they do. They'd like to keep them secret too, I imagine, for use in warfare if nothing else. Rather diffucult if they try people usin

The U.S. soldier and former Iraqi officer agree on the basic facts of the incident. An initial crowd of perhaps 400 people looking for their payment gathered outside the OCPA gate early yesterday morning. When it became clear they would not get their money, they became angry, and apparently gained courage as hundreds of other protesters flocked to the intersection to join them.

The scene became violent. A Reuters television team was attacked, and one of the cameramen was taken to hospital after being struck with a piece of metal cable. A United Nations vehicle was also attacked, and some of the demonstrators began pushing themselves into the curled barbed wire in front of the U.S. positions.

Sgt. Lazore ordered his troops to fix bayonets, a threatening gesture that he said usually persuades an angry crowd to back off a few steps. This time, however, some of the Iraqi men simply tore off their shirts, as if daring the Americans to knife them. They continued to push forward.

"It was very, very tense. It was a full-court press," Sgt. Lazore recalled. It was also scorching hot. The mercury hit a high of 45 yesterday in central Baghdad, fraying nerves and fuelling tempers.

Into this edgy atmosphere drove a Humvee jeep, returning from a patrol through the neighbourhoods nearby. The driver tried to push his way through to the OCPA gate, but was stopped abruptly in the middle of the intersection outside. The crowd converged, and began to angrily pound on the jeep, some using bricks and stones. Sgt. Lazore's men fired warning shots over the heads of the crowd, some of the bullets thudding into a telephone pole and electrical box across the street.

Here the two versions, Iraqi and U.S., dramatically break. The only matter of agreement is that the gunner on top of the Humvee opened fire on the crowd, killing two Iraqis and wounding another.

Sgt. Lazore said the soldier, whose name was not released yesterday, believed the Iraqis were shooting at him. The soldier told Sgt. Lazore that he saw two muzzle flashes, and responded by pumping four rounds into the crowd. Three Iraqis, all former army conscripts, fell.

Mohammed and another man were shot Wednesday morning, when a crowd of about 2,000 protesters led by former army officers gathered in front of the US headquarters in Baghdad demanding back pay. A soldier fired his weapon after protesters began throwing rocks at troops and attempted to enter the compound, according to military spokesmen.

Members of the officers' union returned to the building yesterday, but the group was peaceful and numbered only 100. A leader, Abdul Sada Mahdi, told members that the union's representatives were inside the compound negotiating with US administrators. He told the group that outsiders had infiltrated Wednesday's protest in an attempt to destabilize the American administration.

''There are parties against the American occupation trying to tempt [former army officers] to do something,'' Mahdi said. ''These people came among us and did bad things to turn the army against us.''