Didn't we fight a war or two about this kind of thing?

...on the other side, that is...

US says it has right to kidnap British citizens - Times Online

AMERICA has told Britain that it can “kidnap” British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States.

A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.

The admission will alarm the British business community after the case of the so-called NatWest Three, bankers who were extradited to America on fraud charges. More than a dozen other British executives, including senior managers at British Airways and BAE Systems, are under investigation by the US authorities and could face criminal charges in America.

Until now it was commonly assumed that US law permitted kidnapping only in the “extraordinary rendition” of terrorist suspects.

The American government has for the first time made it clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, British or otherwise, suspected of a crime by Washington.

(From this post by wcg.)

We interrupt your LJ friends list...

... to bring you the following special announcement:

SixApart has sold LJ to SUP.

SUP? SUP is the company that has been operating LJ -- very successfully -- in Russia. Considering our ongoing problems with 6A, this is probably a good thing for LJ, though that remains to be demonstrated.

You can read the press releases here in news; there are also two new communities to be aware of: lj_2008 and lj_policy.

We now return you to your usual friends list.

Walkies

(Cross-posted to healthy_fen and mdlbear.)

No walking to speak of yesterday, but today I got back into it. Started with a trip to the local mall to get a holiday prezzie for the Y.D. Since this required a considerable amount of searching, I got in quite a lot of walking at what I now consider a good pace. Fortunately this was around 10am and the mall was surprisingly uncrowded.

After lunch I went out for a proper walk: my usual weekend route by Los Gatos Creek. By power-walking I managed to get a decent workout while still taking small enough steps to avoid cramps. My calf muscles feel tight and a bit sore, but they're not tied into knots. This is good.

I should also mention multiple trips up and down the garage attic stairs, and a fair amount of lifting. I've been a busy bear.

( Links to possibly TMI about nasal irrigation )

My pedometer reading for the day is currently 14900.

How I spent my weekend

My main line of geekiness this weekend centered around getting my former workstation, Trantor, ready to serve as a new recording machine (under the nodename Dorsai). Not as much progress as I'd hoped -- I spent quite a lot of time chasing my tail because the gigabit ethernet card on my former recording machine, Harmony, suddenly decided to be referred to as eth3 instead of eth0. WTF?

(Aside: since my internal domain is thestarport.org, all my node names are stars or planets, mostly from science fiction. Machines used primarily for audio, naturally, get names mentioned in filksongs. The laptop is Argo; you've already met Harmony and Dorsai. Most of my early workstations had names from Star Wars; Dantooine is currently being used as a print server. Tatooine, Moseisley, and Hoth are long out of service.)

Anyway, Trantor finally got renamed, and has a shiny new GigE card, and both it and Harmony have eSATA headers installed in case I want to use external hard drives recording media. Only thing left is the software, which will initially be 64studio.com (an easy upgrade from Etch). At some point I mean to try the 64-bit version on Dorsai, and also UbuntuStudio. One way or another, I'll have Dorsai in the bedroom studio and ready to record with sometime this week.

Meanwhile, I did quite a lot of uncluttering. Moved most of my inventory of CDs -- 5 boxes worth -- into the front closet (now that chaoswolf has much, though not all, of her stuff out of it), and did quite a lot of re-arranging, consolidating, and uncluttering in the office. This included moving two defunct computers (Algol and Flare) up to the attic, recycling two empty boxes that had somehow gotten stored in the attic right where I wanted to put the computers, and moving a mostly-empty shelf up two inches so I could slide a computer under it. I also got Dorsai out from under the desk to where I could work on it. Which in turn required consolidating some of the CD-shipping stuff into a file box.

I'm still left with a couple of items sitting out on chairs, including a storage drawer full of old floppy disks that no longer fits on the shelf I moved, and the box of CD-shipping stuff that was originally in the spot where I moved Dorsai.

Oh, and I finished ripping the last of the pile of CDs that's been hanging around in the office waiting to be ripped.

So although I didn't quite reach my goal of an operational recording set-up, I got quite a lot done. Not complaining.