More photos here, here, and here; video here and here.

Even when you’re standing in sh*t, you can still look up and aspire to the stars.
~ David Gerrold

Pardon the swears. We’re all still getting our heads into Transparency and a 24/7 attention cycle. Read something about a company on Friday and if there is nothing on their blog by Saturday you wonder if they’ve got a clue. Call this a place holder then; we are operating on 24/7 attention cycle but people need sleep, time to digest bad news, make plans, coordinate.

If you follow space elevator news you will have already read this, or will soon read it.

But today, roughly two hours before the panel, an obstacle was placed in Michael and Liftport’s path. Zealot that he is, even his belief and passion could not hold against this reality of finance. They lost their office space. The money ran out. And on Monday they will announce this fact.

I almost cried in sympathy as Michael described how this would impact not only Liftport but his personal life. He had no home, no place for his animals, no job, no source of income, and no place for his staff. A three million dollar building that held the hopes and dreams of more than just a few space crazies was taken away from a project that for better or worse is attempting to bring about a future I was weaned on. And a future I don’t often get to remember in a day to day way and now perhaps will not see even in dreams anymore.

A condensed transcript is here.

Our thanks to Julie Fredrickson and Erik of Pikamac for their kind words.

So what is going on? See above. What are we going to do about it? We don’t know enough at this point to lay out a plan – information gathering lags behind the event like thunder lags behind lightning. We’ll let you know as soon as we can.

Respectfully Submitted,
Brian Dunbar

As many of you know, I work for LiftPort. I’ve worked for them since the start. I’ve known Michael Laine through the thick and thin, and I know enough to realize that this won’t stop him.

I just got done with an hour long emergency conference call in response to the above issue(s). What is going to happen? Not especially clear yet, but we’ll be talking about it in the blog very soon. Essentially the LiftPort as we know it, built it, poured sweat into it, and are so passionate for… failed. It’s a grim reality.

That being said, we’re not going away. We’ve got some ideas to pull our proverbial rears out of the fire. Of course, if you happen to have $300,000 for a dream and a better world, a better future, let us know.

We’re still aspiring to the stars and we won’t give up. Not that easily.

According to SecurityFocus, and direct from the End User License Agreement (EULA) of Windows Vista,

Before you activate, you have the right to use the version of the software installed during the installation process. Your right to use the software after the time specified in the installation process is limited unless it is activated. This is to prevent its unlicensed use. You will not be able to continue using the software after that time if you do not activate it.

Basically put, if you shell out several hundred dollars for the new Windows, then don’t allow it to contact Microsoft and send info to them, it’ll stop working.

Ok, so you pony up.  Agree to send them information to activate it to make sure it’s genuine.  Many companies do this.  Adobe comes to mind.  Whoops.  Not so fast.

You see, even after you activate the software it will, according to the EULA, “from time to time validate the software, update or require download of the validation feature of the software.” It will once again “send information about the . . . version and product key of the software, and the Internet protocol address of the device.”

…. [The EULA] just says that they have the right to limit your ability to use features – pretty much any features they decide to at any date. And guess what. You agreed to it.

Remember, you don’t own this software. Microsoft does.  You just purchased a license for it.  They control it.  They own it.  They decide what you can and can’t do with it.  They can also decide if you’ve broken that agreement, without any comment from you.

They have the right to unilaterally decide that you didn’t keep up your end of the contract, for example you didn’t properly register the product, you weren’t able to demonstrate that it was genuine, and so on, and therefore they have the right to shut you off or shut you down. So, what gives them the right? Apparently, the very contract that they now claim you violated.

Oh, and if it shuts off and destroys your data, makes something unrecoverable, or causes any damages… they’re not liable.  They might reimburse you for part of the cost of Vista… maybe.

Linux is looking better and better.  Or hell, Apple.

Specter: Now wait a minute, wait a minute. The Constitution says you can’t take it away except in the case of invasion or rebellion. Doesn’t that mean you have the right of habeas corpus?

Gonzales: I meant by that comment that the Constitution doesn’t say that every individual in the United States or every citizen has or is assured the right of habeas corpus. It doesn’t say that. It simply says that the right of habeas corpus shall not be suspended.

Habeas Corpus was a part of British common law in 1679; which became part of U.S. law when the constitution was written. Almost every state’s existing common law, except for Louisiana which was derived mostly from the French, is based off of British common law at the time of the nations founding. (To summarize common law, statutes, or formal written laws, are generally understood always to be interpreted in light of the common law tradition, and so may leave a number of things unsaid because they are already understood from the point of view of pre-existing case law and custom.)

Many people, see above, will say that the constitution doesn’t expressly grant the writ of habeas corpus; that’s because it was considered to be a part of common law; and didn’t need to be expressly stated.

Eisenhower,

Why are we proud? We are proud, first of all, because from the beginning of this Nation, a man can walk upright, no matter who he is, or who she is. He can walk upright and meet his friend–or his enemy; and he does not fear that because that enemy may be in a position of great power that he can be suddenly thrown in jail to rot there without charges and with no recourse to justice. We have the habeas corpus act, and we respect it.

Churchill,

Nevertheless, this short-lived legislature left behind it a monument. It passed a Habeas Corpus Act which confirmed and strengthened the freedom of the individual against arbitrary arrest by the executive Government. No Englishman, however great or however humble, could be imprisoned for more than a few days without grounds being shown against him in open court, according to the settled law of the land. Wherever the English language is spoken in any part of the world, wherever the authority of the British Imperial Crown or of the Government of the United States prevails, all law-abiding men breathe freely. The descent into despotism which has engulfed so many leading nations in the present age has made the virtue of this enactment, sprung from English political genius, apparent even to the most thoughtless, the most ignorant, the most base.

Jefferson,

Let him say what the government is, if it be not a tyranny, which the men of our choice have conferred on our President, and the President of our choice has assented to that the men of our choice have more respected the bare suspicion of the President, than the solid right of innocence, the claims of justification, the sacred force of truth, and the forms and substance of law and justice. In questions of powers, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.

And yes, habeas corpus has been suspended in the past. That doesn’t mean it was right then, or is right now.

This all coming from the man who is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States government. What did we do to deserve this?

Via

The largest employer in the world announced on Dec. 15 that it lost about $450 billion in fiscal 2006. Its auditor found that its financial statements were unreliable and that its controls were inadequate for the 10th straight year. On top of that, the entity’s total liabilities and unfunded commitments rose to about $50 trillion, up from $20 trillion in just six years.

Oops.

I obviously didn’t take the picture, stolen from Steve Earley and the Virginian-Pilot, but you get the idea. An article on the launch is here, and a local resident, who got up early with her kids to see it, has a blog post about it here, complete with video and a few more pictures.

Interesting notes about the launch:

• From the NASA Flight Facility on Wallops Island, VA; first launch ever there.
• 69 foot, 4 stage, Air Force Minotaur I rocket
• Launched at 7 a.m. EST, December 16th, 2006.
• Payload was an Air Force recon satellite, code named TacSat-2.

It was amazing to watch, even if at the time I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. I knew it wasn’t a plane from the angle and look of the contrail, but didn’t occur to me at the time that it was a rocket.

Regardless, really cool.

5. Government Snooping
Take your pick. There’s the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program wherein the president breezily authorized spying on the phone calls of innocent citizens, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The FBI’s TALON database shows the government has been spying on nonterrorist groups, including Quakers, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and Veterans for Peace. The Patriot Act lives on. And that’s just the stuff we know about.

2. The Military Commissions Act of 2006
This was the so-called compromise legislation that gave President Bush even more power than he initially had to detain and try so-called enemy combatants. He was generously handed the authority to define for himself the parameters of interrogation and torture and the responsibility to report upon it, since he’d been so good at that. What we allegedly did to Jose Padilla was once a dirty national secret. The MCA made it the law.

1. Hubris
Whenever the courts push back against the administration’s unsupportable constitutional ideas—ideas about “inherent powers” and a “unitary executive” or the silliness of the Geneva Conventions or the limitless sweep of presidential powers during wartime—the Bush response is to repeat the same chorus louder: Every detainee is the worst of the worst; every action taken is legal, necessary, and secret. No mistakes, no apologies. No nuance, no regrets. This legal and intellectual intractability can create the illusion that we are standing on the same constitutional ground we stood upon in 2001, even as that ground is sliding away under our feet.

I already posted about the Military Commissions Act, and the hubris thing kinda involves that too.

From The Shape of Days;

I dare say that a murderer doesn’t deserve the right of habeas corpus either. But we respect it anyway. Because habeas corpus, as a legal and judicial tradition, serves to protect us from our own government. When we extend the right of habeas corpus to a convicted murderer, we’re not protecting him. We’re protecting ourselves.

We cannot be assured of the right of habeas corpus — of the right not to be arbitrarily imprisoned — unless we grant that right to everyone. Because if the government claims the authority to abolish habeas sometimes, then it grants itself the authority to abolish it any time. And suddenly we’re beholden again, beholden to a government that lets us roam free only because it suits its purposes to do so.

In case you haven’t been following, he’s talking about Bill S.3930, in the Senate anyway, which declares:

No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.

This doesn’t suspend habeas corpus, as Jeff points out, but makes it not exist.

Habeas corpus isn’t a privilege that’s granted selectively. For seven hundred years, it has applied to everyone, everywhere who found himself in the custody of a court that respected the tradition. Habeas corpus isn’t something that you might or might not enjoy depending on the severity of the crime of which you’ve been accused. It’s an absolute right, absolute and unalienable, a right so dearly held that it was specifically enumerated in the Constitution itself by men who stood firmly opposed to enumerating rights at all.

The Constitution, apart from a few paragraphs defining things like the number of legislators and their terms of office and their qualifications to serve, consists almost entirely of a long list of denials. The Constitution tells the people what their government is not allowed to do.

…

Oh, not for everyone. No, only for non-citizens, and even then, only for non-citizens accused of terrorism. But the point is, this Congress asserted for itself the right to abolish habeas corpus period, even to a limited extent, even over a limited populace.

This is a power our government does not have. It is a power the authors of our Constitution went out of their way specifically to deny.

And it’s a power this Congress claimed anyway.

Those of you who know me also know I can’t write, so I won’t spend hours rehashing this into my own words and making it illegible. But I wholeheartedly agree with everything that he says. Up to and including the last part;

This cannot stand. Whether the Supreme Court overturns this law or not, I cannot in good conscience vote for or endorse any candidate to the Congress of the United States who supported or would have supported the abolition of this ancient and vital protection.

Luckily, though the bill passed, my senators didn’t vote for it. Did yours?

I was going to write tonight about privacy and how it’s been effected by the post-9/11 decisions, hence the constant attack on civil liberties of Americans by Americans.

While I was doing my rounds however, I ran across this. Excerpt below.

The sad fact is VJ Day (sic; Author means Pearl Harbor Day, corrected here), rightly or wrongly, had about as much bearing on our daily lives as what our neighbors had for breakfast that morning. That is to say that it seemed to have none at all.

Via silentrequiem.

Montgomery County needs more goats.

I was following the keynote at work, via MacRumors, but even from that, without the benefit of a video feed, it was quite obvious that Steve loves Leopard. I mean LOVES Leopard. He spent ~ 7 minutes with the “I know everyone watching me loves Apple, and we love all of you, and thanks for making us lots of money” speech every year. Then came another 7-8 minutes on the Mac Pro’s. Flew past the Xserve in under 5 minutes.  How about Leopard?  Took almost an hour.

Honestly?  Looks like a good upgrade.  Not sure if it’s worth a whole point value from what I’ve seen, definetly seems like an upgrade for the home user, not necessarly the power user.  Of course, that’s to be expected.

Can I borrow ~ $17,000 for a new Mac Pro?

A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that ‘individuality’ is the key to success. ~ Robert Orben

I can’t wait.

I feel kinda dirty now though, I just linked to the SMCM webpage…

And, suprise suprise, the results were quite similar.

• 8 Government Departments recieved a failing grade.  That’s 1/3 of the government.
• Those that failed included: The Department of Energy, The Department of State, The Department of the Interior, The Department of Defense, and The Department of Homeland Security.  Can you say oops?
• 7 got failing grades last year.  That number went up.  Double oops.
• 10 agencies improved.  Yey!
• 8 agencies got worse.  Sad.

Ah well.  Good to know that the government isn’t keeping any information on US citizens or anything. *cough*IRS*cough*Treasury Dept got a D*cough*

Probably because people don’t care. They didn’t care about Rwanda, they don’t care about the Congo. Why would they? It’s just another African nation in turmoil. Who would care about that?

Gr.

If you’re not using Firefox… you should be. There is absolutely no reason not to. It’s a heck of a lot more secure, got way more features, is faster, and just looks better. Plus, coupled with extensions like Adblock Plus and FasterFox, it, well, I hate to use a marketing slogan but it’s true, “makes the internet fun again.” Nowdays everyone is so worried about viruses, spyware, etc, with Firefox I can sit back and surf to my hearts content.

So… if you haven’t downloaded it yet, or updated to the new version, please do. You’ll be plesantly suprised.