Notes, pointers, highlights

• house_pundit on how the schools are failing to produce entrepreneurs
• The Baltimore Sun on the rise of the New McCarthyism
• Bruce schneier asks whether the NSA has secretly inserted a backdoor into the new NIST pseudorandom-number-generator standard.
• Breitbart reports the US Supreme Court will hear Parker vs. District of Columbia, a case which will decide whether Washington DC — or ANY municipality — can ban handguns in defiance of the Second Amendment.  This is long overdue, but needs to be broadened to a general ruling of "The US Constitution (with its amendments) is not an à-la-carte menu; honor it ALL, or fuck off."
• According to the Taipei Times, Maxtor-branded 500GB hard disks produced in Thailand by Seagate have been found to carry trojan-horse viruses that secretly upload everything written to the disk to two websites hosted in Beijing.  The trojans are believed to be the work of the Chinese government.