A Great Day for Freedom: Naked Justice statues back in action

USATODAY.com - Drapes removed from Justice Department statue:

With barely a word about it, workers at the Justice Department Friday removed the blue drapes that have famously covered two scantily clad statues for the past 3 1/2 years. Spirit of Justice, with her one breast exposed and her arms raised, and the bare-chested male Majesty of Law basked in the late afternoon light of Justice's ceremonial Great Hall.

The drapes, installed in 2002 at a cost of $8,000, allowed then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to speak in the Great Hall without fear of a breast showing up behind him in television or newspaper pictures. They also provoked jokes about and criticism of the deeply religious Ashcroft.

Grad school is a shady proposition. Village Voice has a depressing series, "Generation Debt: The New Economics of Being Young" about how kids in grad school end up with mountains of debt and crappy underpaid jobs as TAs and adjunct professors. Oh crap. These aren't new articles but they feel relevant as All Hell...

Wanted: Really Smart Suckers
Grad school provides exciting new road to poverty
by Anya Kamenetz
Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document less than a dozen people will read. Then it's time for advancement: Apply to 50 far-flung, undesirable locations, with a 30 to 40 percent chance of being offered any position at all. You may end up living 100 miles from your spouse and commuting to three different work locations a week. You may end up $50,000 in debt, with no health insurance, feeding your kids with food stamps. If you are the luckiest out of every five entrants, you may win the profession's ultimate prize: A comfortable middle-class job, for the rest of your life, with summers off.

Also the Voice has another piece on "The Ambition Tax: Why America's young are being crushed by debt—and why no one seems to care":

High levels of debt preclude the young from getting the sweetest mortgage deals, and they often end up in the clutches of sub-prime lenders. On average, people who had to borrow their way to a graduate degree are already behind $45,900; median debt for grad students has increased 72 percent since 1997. (Aspiring doctors have it the worst, with average loans of $103,855.) Add to those obligations an investment in a humble bungalow, and you're on the hook for a quarter million or more—not counting interest.
The cumulative effect is that merely keeping one's head above water, rather than getting ahead, has become the top priority for Americans between the ages of 18 and 34. Pursuing the relatively modest dream of doing better than the generation before requires serious capital—up front in the form of tuition and loans, and hidden in the form of lost opportunities. Call it the ambition tax—the money you've got to pony up if you want a college degree and a shot at middle-class bliss. But it's really more of a gamble, as there's no guarantee those tens of thousands of dollars will get you where you want to go.
"The next generation is starting their economic race 50 yards behind the starting line," says Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law School professor and author of The Two-Income Trap. "They've got to pay off the equivalent of one full mortgage before they make it to flat broke, in order to pay for their education. They can never get ahead of the game, because they're constantly trying to play catch-up.
"And once you've got accumulated debt, the debt takes on a life of its own. It demands to be fed, and it takes that first bite out of the paycheck. And it means the opportunity to accumulate a little, to get a little ahead, to maybe put together a down payment—it's just never there. It's just staggering to me that this is not a part of our national debate right now."

On the lighter side, Slashdot is talking about some high school kids with laptops who got themselves in heaps of trouble when they figured out how to subvert the Orwellian spy programs on their computers, and now the kids are seemingly facing charges. Gee, how does this remind me of the good old days at MPA? Well, when we got caught messing around, they cut us a little more slack... Some suspensions were experienced, but no felony charges. This website had a role in all of that, I recall... Useful legal (non)advice:

Unfortunately, under the law, accessing a computer system without authorization is a very serious crime.
And furthermore, the courts have decided that violating an acceptable use policy amounts to accessing the computer without authorization.
Worse, it is accepted within the courts that an existing "terms of use" or whatever does not have to have been read nor accepted for it to be enforceable.
It is presumed that such a policy exists, and it is the burden of the user to find and read it.
It sucks! 
I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice

And of course such a thread brings funny old stories about hacking:

Cornell was Mac-dominated (oh, happy memories) and the Upson lab had a network of IIci's just waiting to have their security hacked. I forget the tool that was used, but we figured out that it stored the password in a certain file that we could reach by bypassing the file security with Norton Utilities for Macintosh (haha Mac OS 6 security, bah). We procured a copy of the software, installed it and created a password on my own IIci, then took a copy of that file (with the obfuscated password) and replaced the file on the lab IIci. Instant admin access.

But we didn't stop there. We had such organization that we managed, as a team, to use this trick to install a fun little background process called NetBunny... on ALL the macs in ALL the labs. NetBunny does nothing on its own, but paired with a little utility called StartWabbit that we pointed at any campus AppleTalk network we wished, would begin the chain reaction. What then happened is that the Energizer Bunny would walk across the screen thumping the drum, going literally from screen to screen across the whole lab. It was pretty much a riot, if you were in on the joke, but the admins couldn't figure it out (we had hidden the executable well through obfuscation by renaming it and pasting another icon on it) and after they heard the recognizable "thump, thump, thump" sound would jump up and run around helplessly yelling "It's the bunny!!" We did it a few times with "agents" at each location to witness the mayhem. Good geek times.

For some reason our president has an obsession with touching, grabbing and rubbing people's heads. How weird.