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Suit: Airport searches of laptops, other devices intrusive – CNN.com — If I was doing the searches you can be sure I’d want to get a look inside the laptops and briefcases of every investment banker who passed by. You betcha!

The Customs and Border Protection defends the searches, saying the agency does not need to show probable cause to look inside suitcases or laptops.

“We have broad search authority at the borders to determine admissibility and look for anything that may be in violation of criminal law,” says agency spokeswoman Lynn Hollinger.

Hollinger says electronic devices could contain evidence of possible ties to terrorism, narcotics smuggling, child pornography and other criminal activities.

Russ Knocke, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, equates searches of electronic devices to those of papers in briefcases.

“You forgo your right to privacy when you are seeking admission into the country,” he says. “This is the kind of scrutiny the American public expects.”

Actually, no.

What germs? We don’t see any germs.

Muslim medical students are refusing to obey hygiene rules brought in to stop the spread of deadly superbugs, because they say it is against their religion.

Women training in several hospitals in England have raised objections to removing their arm coverings in theatre and to rolling up their sleeves when washing their hands, because it is regarded as immodest in Islam.

Universities and NHS trusts fear many more will refuse to co-operate with new Department of Health guidance, introduced this month, which stipulates that all doctors must be “bare below the elbow”.

The measure is deemed necessary to stop the spread of infections such as MRSA and Clostridium difficile, which have killed hundreds.

Perhaps they should make a different career choice. Perhaps their patients would prefer that, as well.

Thanks, Mr. Justin

Click photo.

This Episode’s Topics:

• Sell John a Mac? Good luck
• Adam riles the Brits – wiretapping and protesting
• Amsterdam! -or- Hookers and the non-tech news
• John rants on Vegas
• Water
• Pimping out Chelsea and the news media
• Amex black and blue
• What do you want from a podcast?
• Some delegates are just super

If foreign nationals were permitted to select US presidential candidates, the senator from Illinois would be assured of the votes of the people of Obama, a fishing town on the Japan Sea coast that has taken its namesake to its heart.

Residents in Obama – small port in Japanese – have formed a support group whose members are monitoring every twist and turn in his bid to become the Democratic candidate…

Residents started taking a close interest in Obama’s political career in 2006 after a customs official claimed on TV that the senator had joked about his “Japanese origins” on arrival at Narita airport…

His opponent for the Democratic nomination, meanwhile, has won a small but ardent following among workers at a factory in southern Japan that makes construction equipment.

The elections are giving the firm’s “Hillary” transportation machines unprecedented media coverage. Launched after Bill Clinton became president in 1992, the machines are said by builders to be robust, yet easy to manoeuvre.

Is there a village somewhere named “McCain”.

A true three dimensional TV that does not depend on wearing strange glasses could be demonstrated within five years. Scientists have at last started to catch up with the 3D holographic displays that have become commonplace in science fiction films. The Princess Leia figure projected by R2-D2 in Star Wars is one example of moving holograms that have been shown in a wide range of films over the decades since the invention of holography in the 1960s.

But the reality has lagged far behind and for decades relied on using glasses to feed a slightly different image to the right and left eyes, using different colored lenses or polaroid, for instance in the first film of the “golden era” of 3D movies, Bwana Devils. Now a new material that will allow an updateable palm sized 3D holographic display is described in Nature by Dr Savas Tay, Prof Nasser Peyghambarian and colleagues at the University of Arizona, Tucson, in work that raises hopes for applications in the home, defence, medicine and industry. The problem is that individual still holograms contain so much information that they require a special medium to record them and vast computing power.

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama on Sunday beat two former US presidents, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, when he picked up a Grammy Award in Los Angeles.

Obama, who is currently neck and neck with Hillary Clinton in the fierce battle for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination, won the music industry’s prize in the category for best spoken word album.

The freshman senator for Illinois was honored for his audio version of his book “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.”

It was Obama’s second Grammy, having won the same spoken word award in 2005 for his book “Dreams From My Father.”

For all of you who listen to books.

ABCNews – Feb 10, 2008:

Patti Solis Doyle announced that she is stepping down as the campaign manager for the presidential campaign of Sen. Hilary (sic) Clinton, D-N.Y., ABC News has learned that this afternoon.

The announcement came one day after Clinton’s opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., swept four primary contests — Nebraska, Washington state, Louisiana and the U.S. Virgin Islands — and two days before the so-called “Potomac Primary” of Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., where Clinton’s campaign says they do not expect her to fare well.

Paul Hogarth over at BeyondChron raises this interest point:

Obama is positioned to win tomorrow’s Beltway Primary – Virginia, Maryland and Washington D.C. – putting him well in the lead among pledged delegates for the National Convention. But if Clinton were on a similar streak, wouldn’t the media be pressuring Obama to drop out?

Reclusive Yuppie Campaign Manager is Out

related link

It could be me, but I should think this is a pretty easy question to answer especially for a lawyer — Brigadier General no less — advising Gitmo on legal matters related to torture at a hearing on torture where he’s called as an expert. If Bush & Co. believe waterboarding is not torture when we do it, then the answer should be obvious.

“If it quacks like a duck…”
“Irrelevant! We don’t WANT it to be a duck.”

And on a vaguely related note…

The Guardian

The US administration is pressing the 27 governments of the European Union to sign up for a range of new security measures for transatlantic travel, including allowing armed guards on all flights from Europe to America by US airlines. The demand to put armed air marshals on to the flights is part of a travel clampdown by the Bush administration that officials in Brussels described as “blackmail” and “troublesome”, and could see west Europeans and Britons required to have US visas if their governments balk at Washington’s requirements.

According to a US document being circulated for signature in European capitals, EU states would also need to supply personal data on all air passengers overflying but not landing in the US in order to gain or retain visa-free travel to America, senior EU officials said. And within months the US department of homeland security is to impose a new permit system for Europeans flying to the US, compelling all travellers to apply online for permission to enter the country before booking or buying a ticket, a procedure that will take several days. Washington is also asking European airlines to provide personal data on non-travellers – for example family members – who are allowed beyond departure barriers to help elderly, young or ill passengers to board aircraft flying to America, a demand the airlines reject as “absurd”. As part of a controversial passenger data exchange programme allegedly aimed at combating terrorism, the EU has for the past few months been supplying the American authorities with 19 items of information on every traveller flying from the EU to the US.

Baltimore Sun – 2/10/08:

David Shuster, the television news anchor who suggested on air the other day that the Clinton family had “pimped out” daughter Chelsea in its campaign for Sen. Hillary Clinton’s presidential nomination, has been temporarily suspended from all NBC News broadcasts.

MSNBC announced that it had temporarily suspended anchor Shuster from all NBC news broadcasts — except to offer his on-air apology for what he said about Chelsea Clinton.

Shuster had outraged the Clinton campaign by saying that the campaign had “pimped out” the Clintons’ daughter when they had her place phone calls to party superdelegates on her mother’s behalf. In a conference call with reporters, Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson on Friday excoriated Shuster and called the comment “beneath contempt.”

Taking a page out of a science fiction story, researchers…have successfully flown the first environmentally powered robotic vehicle through the ocean. The new robotic “glider” harvests heat energy from the ocean to propel itself across thousands of kilometers of water.

In December 2007, a research team…launched a prototype “thermal glider” off the coast of St. Thomas. The vehicle has been traveling uninterrupted ever since, crisscrossing the 4,000-meter-deep Virgin Islands Basin between St. Thomas and St Croix more than 20 times…

The new thermal glider draws its energy for propulsion from the differences in temperature—thermal stratification—between warm surface waters and colder, deeper layers of the ocean. The heat content of the ocean warms wax-filled tubes inside the engine. The expansion of the warming wax converts heat to mechanical energy, which is stored and used to push oil from a bladder inside the vehicle’s hull to one outside, changing its buoyancy. Cooling of the wax at depth completes the cycle.

“We are tapping a virtually unlimited energy source for propulsion,” said Fratantoni. The computers, radio transmitters, and other electronics on the glider are powered by alkaline batteries, which are, for now, the principal limit on the length of operation.

I love the science; but, this critter surely could scare the Bejeebus out of an unsuspecting scuba diver off the Virgin Islands.