(no subject)

from the "Zero-Tolerance Watch" page whose url I forget right now ..
'Three boys at Bemiss Elementary School in Spokane, Wash., have been suspended for bringing "toy guns" to school, the Spokane Spokesman-Review reports. Now at first glance this may not seem wholly unreasonable--after all, children have been shot by policemen who mistook toy guns for the real thing. But there wasn't much danger of that happening in this case. Terry Wilson-Spence, whose eight-year-old son was among the suspended students, tells the paper that "the toy guns her son carried in his pocket were for GI Joe action figures. The guns are from only 1 inch to 3 inches long--half the size of a pencil."'

whoah

from egofood, in dean and (invasion of) privacy:
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-5147158.html

Dean's current stand on privacy appears to leave little wiggle room: His campaign platform pledges unwavering support for "the constitutional principles of equality, liberty and privacy."

Fifteen months before Dean said he would seek the presidency, however, the former Vermont governor spoke at a conference in Pittsburgh co-sponsored by smart-card firm Wave Systems where he called for state drivers' licenses to be transformed into a kind of standardized national ID card for Americans. Embedding smart cards into uniform IDs was necessary to thwart "cyberterrorism" and identity theft, Dean claimed. "We must move to smarter license cards that carry secure digital information that can be universally read at vital checkpoints," Dean said in March 2002, according to a copy of his prepared remarks. "Issuing such a card would have little effect on the privacy of Americans."

Dean also suggested that computer makers such as Apple Computer, Dell, Gateway and Sony should be required to include an ID card reader in PCs--and Americans would have to insert their uniform IDs into the reader before they could log on. "One state's smart-card driver's license must be identifiable by another state's card reader," Dean said. "It must also be easily commercialized by the private sector and included in all PCs over time--making the Internet safer and more secure."