Reminder: Today is Sysadmin Day. Please act accordingly.

I don’t agree with the overall premise of this Billmon piece (the currently successful KE’04 campaign should try to sound a bit more like the Gore campaign? WTF?), but he’s got a great intro line:

I like John Edwards (how can you not like Opie, all grown up and running for vice president?)

New Get Your War On out.

Last night I came up with a solution to the Israel/Palestine problem: Beating Ariel Sharon to death with the corpse of Yassar Arafat.

Nerve finds out that three out of four psychics know what a ‘blog’ is.

Stuck down in ‘Bama? No sex toys for you!:

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - A federal appeals court Wednesday upheld a 1998 Alabama law banning the sale of sex toys in the state, ruling the Constitution doesn’t include a right to sexual privacy.

In a 2-1 decision overturning a lower court, a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (news - web sites) said the state has a right to police the sale of devices that can be sexually stimulating.

Based on what I know of the behavior of teenaged boys (and, I assume, teenaged girls), the right to police the sale of “sexually stimulating” devices means the right to police the sale of damn near everything. (See this if you don’t get that last reference.)

The EFF wants you for the Television Digital Liberation Front!:

We want to keep the right to time- and space-shift that the VCR has given us (against Hollywood’s protest). We want to keep the fair use rights that let us excerpt clips from press conferences or make our own “Daily Show” from the evening news. That’s why we’re encouraging people to buy HDTV tuner cards now and build multi-function receivers and recorders around them.

Here’s where you can help. The folks at www.pcHDTV.com make an HD-capable (ATSC) tuner card with Linux drivers. The MythTV project has built a terrific personal video recorder (PVR) platform that gives a GNU/Linux PC features like TiVo’s pause live TV and “season pass” recording. These are great for geeks, and we’re looking for volunteers to help make the combination more accessible to the general public.

It’s not too early to start petitioning Santa.

Your tax dollars at work:

Remember how congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle deplored the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib as “un-American”? Last Thursday, however, the House quietly passed a renewed appropriation that keeps open the U.S.’s most infamous torture-teaching institution, known as the School of the Americas (SOA), where the illegal physical and psychological abuse of prisoners of the kind the world condemned at Abu Ghraib and worse has been routinely taught for years.

I just installed a Yahoo! Messenger client; if anybody has a burning need to IM me, ‘genehack’ is the ID you’re looking for.

Seriously behind on the comics review; trying to catch up before picking up this week’s haul…

Supreme Power 11: Straczynski’s retelling of Squadron Supreme (itself a bit of a rip of Justice League, from what I understand) gets seriously odd this month, as the Wonder Woman-analogue beds the Superman-analogue and then reveals herself to be a bit tetched in the head. I’m curious to see where this one is going to go.

Y: The Last Man 24: This book started off with a bang — good writing, inventive concept — but it’s starting to feel a bit stale to me. I think I’m getting frustrated with the slow dragging out of the “why did all the men die?” plot thread.

B.P.R.D. 5: The ‘Plague of Frogs’ storyline wraps up in a suitable convoluted fashion, tying back into one of the earliest Hellboy tales. Excellently executed.

Powers 1: Same Powers book, different imprint. Walker and Pilgrim, reunited, in a world where Powers are outlawed — so only the outlaws have Powers. (Gun control allegory, anyone?)

WildCATS Version 3.0 23: I hear this book is getting canceled, which is a bit of a relief — because it saves me from having to make the “do I keep reading this?” decision. I really liked the earlier issues of this series, but the last few months, with the “Grifter in a female cyborg body blowing shit up” storyline, have been particularly poor.

Liberty Meadows Sourcebook: 90% stuff that’s been released before, but I’m a big Cho fanboy.

Fables: Storybook Love TPB: Excellent stuff, with a classically played cliffhanger at the end. And it’s got Mouse Police!

Ultimate Spiderman 10 TPB: Given that the primary event tying this book together is a movie about Spiderman, featuring Doc Ock, the whole thing felt a bit too “meta” for my taste — but it’s still an entertaining read.

Thanks to the wizardry and generosity of Dan “Flutterby” Lyke, genehack.org is now available via your newsreader. No, not RSS, you damn kids — NNTP! Dagnabit, it was good enough for your daddy, and it’s good enough for me. Dan outlined the idea a while back, if you’re interested in the story; if you just want the goodness, point your news reader at news://www.flutterby.com/flutterby.blogs.genehack.org.