Amend the Barr Amendment against medical marijuana vote! [Marijuana.Com]

My Representative in Congress is among those listed...please, if you see this, and your Representative is on this list, call them.  The citizens of Washington DC should be allowed to vote on these issues, and not be prevented from doing so by Congress.  Regardless of your feelings about medical marijuana, you should encourage your Representative to support this amendment, which simply allows the voters of the District to have this issue on their ballot.

Thanks for reading.

More on the ongoing invasions of privacy, this time regarding medical records and pregnancy tests, from the Boston Globe via iFeminists.

The background...last May a baby was found, dismembered, in a town in Iowa.  After their investigation reached a deadend, the DA issued a subpoena for medical records for all women in the county who had taken pregnancy tests during a certain time period.  And most medical providers turned over this information.  !!!!  Thankfully, Planned Parenthood did not, and the case is soon to go before the Iowa Supreme Court.  A short quote from the Boston Globe article itself...

Should law enforcement follow a lead? Of course. But if the police have the right to blindly search through the records of every woman who had a pregnancy test in a clinic, they can search through the pharmacy records of every woman who bought a home kit. If they can set out a dragnet for every pregnant woman, why not for every diabetic or epileptic or cancer patient? Why not keep our medical files in the police station?

We protect the doctor-patient relationship because health rests on trust. Today one in every six patients already resists revealing facts to doctors out of privacy fears. Those fears are sure to get much worse under new regulations put out recently by the Bush administration that allow patient information to be shared with others in the huge health care industry - from insurers to pharmacists - without our prior consent.

Scary. 

Saw this

Leo on blogging in school: 

One of the Leoville Town Square regulars, BEACHTechie, aka Sam, is a high school student in Virginia Beach, VA. He recently got busted by the school administration for blogging, of all things. They seem to think blogging from school is a violation of their acceptable use policies. Perhaps it is. Sammy will be blogging from home from now on. But it seems to me that instead of discouraging blogging they should encourage each student to create one. After all, most writing classes encourage their students to keep journals, and that's exactly what a blog is....If only educators realized how powerful and educational blogs can be.  I'm sure getting 500 words out of a high school student is like pulling teeth.  If students were encouraged to blog, they'd be writing hundeds if not thousands of words a day.  [emphasis mine]

from [Matt Croydon::postneo] and it prompted these musings...apologies in advance for the track-skipping train of thought.

I'd be interested to see if anyone is actively encouraging blogging at the university level.  The best class I ever took as a grad student was completely online, and it was a heavy-duty reading class.  We didn't buy books, though--instead we purchased e-copies of selected texts in Folio Views format.  We then annotated the books and the professor compiled our annotations, at which point we annoted other student annotations, and the discussion generated was amazingly rich.  The ability to link back and forth to different sources, to categorize, to outline, to annotate an annotation (as I'm doing here)--it's just amazing.  I would still love to start buying copies of anything I read in Folio format, or something similar, so that I can easily search and create hypertext links between different texts, drawing together similar themes or points and creating knowledge above and beyond what can be gained from reading a paper copy of a text.

In my short time blogging, this is what has me the most excited...my ability to know more by linking my thoughts together outside of my head in a logical fashion.  (Images of Dumbledore's Pensieve from Prisoner of Azkaban come to mind here.)  The ability to record my thoughts in a format specifically designed to let me step back and link them, notice patterns, analyze them, and come back to them much later and be reminded of those links...it just fascinates me.  People use the term "Knowledge Management" so often, but I think there is more potential here than simply managing existing knowledge...the creative potential is extraordinary, on a personal level and by extension to organizations.

I'm going to have to think more about this.

Came across this today, and this is a hot topic in law firms.  What should be done with old computers, and to what extent must old PCs be clean before being sold, returned to the lessor, or charitably donated?  Is simply deleting or reghosting sufficient?  should the PCs meet the DoD standards?

Junked PCs Offer Data for Taking. The surest way to destroy the data on a computer is to destroy the machine. So why do government agencies keep reselling and donating their used systems? By Elliot Borin. [Wired News]

[EDIT to ADD]:  I received this information from another Legal IT professional...

Here's a link to free data destruction utility based on the excellent open source Linux "wipe" project. The archive contains a bootable iso image that would be transfered to a floppy disk.  http://dban.sourceforge.net/