you're the man now blog

THANX OBAMA…

“Imminence”, and drone strikes in America, on Americans.

It would be one thing if Obama was talking about foreigners who enlist in al-Qaida. But he’s actually talking specifically about American citizens overseas who are “senior operational leader[s] of al-Qaida or its affiliated forces” — people whom the Constitution protects against the loss of life without due process of law. (The Justice Department stops short of claiming the government can take such lethal actions at home.) U.S. citizenship “does not immunize” such a person from reprisal. Here the white paper does not define what it means to be a “senior operational leader” of al-Qaida, let alone its “affiliated forces,” and instead asserts the applicability of Supreme Court precedent from World War II holding that U.S. citizens who joined the Axis can be treated as enemy belligerents. (My Wired colleague David Kravets has more on the specific legal claims Obama makes.

actualy, thanks wired.

some nerd ish

the first computer (MANIAC), Alan Turing, a bunch of sooper smatry pants’s, etc

Q&A: Hacker Historian George Dyson Sits Down With Wired’s Kevin Kelly

• Wired: How did the MANIAC project get started?

  Dyson: The von Neumann project was funded to do H-bomb calculations. It was a deal with the devil: If they designed this ultimate weapon, they could have this fantastic machine.

  Wired: So the creation of digital life was rooted in death?

bop on over to Wired and check it out.

did you know… about these french dudes UX, that fix old shit, in secret, in paris, for free…?

• UX’s most sensational caper (to be revealed so far, at least) was completed in 2006. A cadre spent months infiltrating the Pantheon, the grand structure in Paris that houses the remains of France’s most cherished citizens. Eight restorers built their own secret workshop in a storeroom, which they wired for electricity and Internet access and outfitted with armchairs, tools, a fridge, and a hot plate. During the course of a year, they painstakingly restored the Pantheon’s 19th- century clock, which had not chimed since the 1960s. Those in the neighborhood must have been shocked to hear the clock sound for the first time in decades: the hour, the half hour, the quarter hour.

go get the scoop at wired.

china, just what are you up to in the desert?

post over at wired about some weird ass ish in the high deserts of china.

aliens!