S.3930, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, contains various sections legalizing past actions of the government, such as this section:
(2) RETROACTIVE APPLICABILITY- The amendments made by this subsection, except as specified in subsection (d)(2)(E) of section 2441 of title 18, United States Code, shall take effect as of November 26, 1997, [...]
The Constitution explicitly prohibits [...]

From the Congressional testimony of Patricia Dunn, former Chairman of the Board of Hewlett Packard, regarding the company’s use of fraudulent means to obtain the telephone records of reporters and fellow board members:
Committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-Texas):  “If I called you up, Ms. Dunn, and said ‘I’d like your phone records,’ would you give them [...]

For some time I’ve been annoyed with Firefox because every time I try to type an apostrophe or slash into a text box, instead of entering that character, it goes into “find” mode.  In the advanced tab Tools/Options dialog there’s a setting for accessiblity for “begin finding when you begin typing”, but the checkbox was [...]

This Washington Post article describes students protestiing their school’s use of Turnitin.com. It has been discussed on Slashdot as well. My ENGL 001A English Composition course at Mission College requires me to submit all of my papers to Turnitin, and I am unhappy about it, but I wasn’t aware that there is widespread [...]

I was able to recover the /home partition from the disk that Windows clobbered a week ago.  Windows overwrote the partition table, and none of the usual methods I’ve used for data recovery were able to find it, nor was gpart.  I ended up writing a program to scan for likely ext2/ext3 superblocks, identified the [...]

Today I was able to get my UIN (University Identification Number), though that does not mean that I have been accepted. The online program coordinator for the CS department confirmed that my sample Java program and my statement of purpose have been received. Apparently it may take another few weeks for Admissions to [...]

I was finally able to get confirmation today that the UIS admissions office did receive my application for transfer admission and my official transcripts. I don’t yet know whether the CS department received the relevant portions, so I will try to confirm that tomorrow.
This afternoon I also finally met Dr. Lam, the chairman of [...]

I’m trying to copy an NTFS partition from an external USB drive to a spare partition on the internal IDE drive of my laptop.  In the process, before I’d even so much as gotten Ghost to start doing anything, Windows XP managed to write a copy of the external drive’s partition table over that of [...]

Fedex delivered my application to the UIS Shipping and Receiving deparment on Monday at 8:56 AM, and got a signature.  But the Admissions office has not received it yet.  The Computer Science department starts considering applicants tomorrow (September 15), so I thought if I had it delivered on Monday (September 11), that would allow sufficient [...]

Associated with their article about HP chairwoman Patricia Dunn spying on board members and reporters, MSNBC has a reader poll asking “Do you believe using pretexting to obtain someone’s records should be made illegal?” Pretexting is the practice of lying in order to obtain access to someone else’s record.
It’s already illegal; it’s called “fraud”. [...]