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It's been 2 days since the massacre and the gun control debate has been revived again with all the deaf loud people screaming the stuff that no one hears. As important as that might be, I think that the debate that needs to be promoted is how to communicate effectively in an emergency. Although plenty of unfounded rumors were mongered last Monday, the most effective communications among the Virginia Tech Community, the loved ones at home, and the rest of us were by new technologies such as text messages, camera phones, blogs and social websites. The performance of those with official responsibility seems at this time to have been too slow and incomplete to save lives, and completely unsuitable for survivors to get help or assure that they were okay. Traditional broadcasters are also unsuitable to deal with the volume of information flowing around and out of Blacksburg that day. With ham radio, which has traditionally stepped in to handle this "welfare traffic", being on the decline, it is only natural that new technology be used to contact loved ones.

That was my bit. Here's a bit more from Wired Magazine:Lessons From Virginia Tech: A Disaster Alert System That Works.

Seems that matching exiting visitors with their entry visas would be relatively simple compared with all the other law enforcement related data keeping that goes on in this country. Everyone entering this country could receive a visa or some other document recording their entry. When they leave, they present the receipt and they are automatically eliminated as suspects of anything that happens while they are out of the country. If they have lost the paper, they waste time regenerating it (or faking it), hemm, there's an idea here, but it needs work. If you want to shorten the wait at the border, just collect the data and let the matching happen after the fact. It's better than not doing it at all. But this seems like mostly a techology problem. Are the algorithms for matcing entries and exits any more complicated than those matching people entering and exiting any other sort of database?

Just another "howto" thread I might want to refer to later. It concerns using your client-based mail app so that mail gets routed through the GMail filters without you needing to regularly access WebMail manually.

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=150104&cid=12585457

This fellow has a thing against the auction of UIDs on ebay. I find this interesting, but since I'm indifferent, I don't want to mark him as a friend or a foe, so I'll just stick him here.

http://slashdot.org/~cptgrudge/journal/71901

I have published an article on this topic in Metablog, a blog on the subject of blogging and social networking. In general, I have no problem with money making schemes as long as they provide a useful service to all people affected, not just the schemer. In this case, that would be site visitors, advertisers and Google itself.

In a nutshell: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=139083&cid=11643762