| Home | Recent Comments | Categories |
Google Trends: .net
Hmmm…. look at the cities…
Soccer-World-Ruling enables police to strip search fans
[Quote:]
German police will have the right to strip-search even those World Cup fans heading to stadiums whose behaviour gives them no specific grounds for suspicion, sports news agency SID reported on Tuesday.
The powers follow a ruling by a regional court in the state of Saarbruecken.
The court dismissed claims by a 16-year old girl that a strip-search by police before a second division match between Dynamo Dresden and FC Saarbruecken in March last year was inappropriate and infringed her personal rights.
Typically, police search only those fans they suspect of violent behaviour but the girl was one of several female fans ordered into a cabin and forced to strip naked before the match, the court heard.
Saarbruecken police told the court that they had searched the girl precisely because she appeared “inconspicuous”, and these types of fan had previously smuggled weapons and smoke powder into the stadium hidden in their underwear.
|
Major League Baseball takes swing at Sling Media
[Quote:]
Major League Baseball wants Sling Media to stop slinging around the league’s content.
Sling enables TV viewers to access their set-top or TiVo boxes from anywhere in the world via any device that connects to the Web. MLB says that’s fine, but if viewers want to watch on multiple devices, they have to pay multiple times.
The situation is part of a larger fight brewing between broadcasters and the companies that relay video streams to portable devices. Proof of the growing conflict came Tuesday during a panel discussion at the Digital Media Summit here, when George Kliavkoff, executive vice president of business for MLB Advanced Media, debated the issue with Rich Buchanan, Sling Media’s vice president of marketing.
At the heart of the issue is that Sling Media, Orb Networks and similar companies cut out cable and satellite operators who pay great sums for transmission rights in their areas, according to Kliavkoff. Baseball sells transmission rights to specific geographical locations. So, a cable subscriber in San Francisco who watches a Giants baseball game from his or her laptop during a visit to Chicago is stealing from the Chicago cable operator who paid to transmit MLB games in that city.
But we’re not talking Napster here, argues Buchanan. The cable subscriber in such a scenario already purchased the content from a programmer back home and under the law can watch it wherever he or she chooses, he said.
“Your interpretation of the (cable and satellite user agreement) is wrong,” Kliavkoff told Buchanan as the two spoke before some 200 conference attendees. Sling Media users “are violating the scope of their user agreements.”
Online music row shuts web site
[Quote:]
Internet firm Tiscali has suspended its music sharing Juke Box and accused the European recording industry of being “virtually impossible to work with”.
It took the move after it was told to remove the service’s search by artist.
Tiscali said services in the US offered that facility, and European music fans were being discriminated against.
But the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said Juke Box had offered a level of interactvity that breached its licence.
Tiscali Juke Box, which launched in April, was a legal peer-to-peer service where songs could be listened to but not copied or downloaded, and royalties were paid for “non-interactive rights” to songs.
Yeah. “Search by artist” is, way, way too interactive!
Soccer fashion show in Munich
Chilenian model Pamela Diaz sports underwear by German lingerie manufacturer Triumph in Munich, June 7, 2006.[Reuters]
Soccer fashion show in Munich
Girlfriend of Italian national goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon , Alena Seredova spots underwear of German lingerie manufacturer Triumph in Munich, June 7, 2006. [Reuters]
PACE committee: US has woven clandestine ‘spider’s web’ of detentions and transfers, with collusion of Council of Europe member states
[Quote:]
The United States has progressively woven a clandestine “spider’s web? of disappearances, secret detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers – spun with the collaboration or tolerance of Council of Europe member states, the Legal Affairs Committee of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) said today.
In a draft resolution adopted at a meeting in Paris, based on a report by Dick Marty (Switzerland, ALDE), the committee said hundreds of persons had become entrapped in this web – in some cases when they were merely suspected of sympathising with a presumed terrorist organisation.
The parliamentarians said this knowing collusion of member states took several different forms, including secretly detaining a person on European territory, capturing a person and handing them over to the US or permitting unlawful “renditions? through their airspace or across their territory.
“It has now been demonstrated incontestably, by numerous well-documented and convergent facts, that secret detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers involving European countries have taken place, such as to require in-depth inquiries and urgent responses by the executive and legislative branches of all the countries concerned,? the committee said.
The committee called on Council of Europe member states to review bilateral agreements signed with the United States, particularly those on the status of US forces stationed in Europe, to ensure they conformed fully to international human rights norms.
Every voter in Europe take note: if your country cooperated, vote the bastards out of office.
Gay marriage ban
[Quote:]
“I don’t believe there’s any issue that’s more important than this one,”
– Louisiana Senator David Vitter (R)
I’m sure these constituents agree:
Al Qaeda’s Zarqawi killed in Iraq
[Quote:]
The al Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in a joint attack by U.S. helicopters and Iraqi forces, ABC news reported on Thursday.
It said U.S. helicopters hit a house near Baquba, 40 miles
north of Baghdad, at 6 p.m. local time on Wednesday.
“Zarqawi was apparently injured at first… The Americans found him. They handed him over to the Iraqis and he later died of his injuries,” ABC said.
Good riddance. Now, on to this osama guy..
Interesting to see how fast this prediction became true. A reporter with inside info?
Speech by U.N. Leader Draws Angry Response From U.S.
[Quote:]
Bolton called Tuesday’s speech by Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown a “very, very grave mistake” that could undermine Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s efforts to push through an ambitious agenda at the world body.
“I spoke to the secretary-general this morning, I said ‘I’ve known you since 1989 and I’m telling you this is the worst mistake by a senior U.N. official that I have seen in that entire time,”‘ Bolton told reporters on Wednesday.
The. Worst. Mistake. By a senior UN official. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall! In other words, a very very very grave mistake — worse than the Oil-for-Food scandal, and the surrender of Srebrenica to General Mladic, and the failure to investigate the sexual abuse by UN Peacekeepers of impoverished Congolese kids.
That must have been some speech.
So what dynamite did it contain? An unconditional endorsement of bin Laden? A call to assassinate Bush?
No. No, it was something else:
In the speech, Malloch Brown said the United States relies on the United Nations as a diplomatic tool but doesn’t defend it against criticism at home, a policy of “stealth diplomacy” that he called unsustainable.
He lamented that the good works of the U.N. are largely lost because “much of the public discourse that reaches the U.S. heartland has been largely abandoned to its loudest detractors such as Rush Limbaugh and Fox News.”
And the absolute lowest blow, we are told, was this:
U.S. officials, including Bolton, said they were especially upset that Malloch Brown, a Briton, mentioned “Middle America.”
Bolton said Malloch Brown’s “condescending, patronizing tone about the American people” was the worst part about the speech.
“Fundamentally and very sadly, this was a criticism of the American people, not the American government, by an international civil servant,” Bolton said. “It’s just illegitimate.”
A reference to ‘Middle America’ was a graver mistake than Srebrenica and puts the future of the UN at risk.
I am sure this makes perfect sense — if you just happen to be psychotic like, say, John Bolton.
|
Photoshop Magic
Vatican lashes out against contraception, abortion, feminism…
[Quote:]
The Vatican has released a document on Tuesday that names gay marriage as one of the factors threatening the traditional family as never before.
The document, titled “Family and human procreation,” also lashes out against contraception, abortion, fertilisation, gay marriage, and feminism, and calls current social trends and “eclipse of God.” The document says that “never in history … has the family been so threatened as in the current culture”.
You want to know about a threat to the family?
The Consumer Council of Norway is on track to win case against iTunes
[Quote:]
The Consumer Council of Norway won support for almost all its complaints regarding iTunes Music Store. This is a great victory for the digital rights of Norwegian consumers.
[..]
Among other things, the decision clearly states that the terms of agreement demanded by iTunes are unreasonable with respect to Section 9a of the Norwegian Marketing Control Act. Moreover, it is unreasonable that the agreement the consumer must give consent to is regulated by English law. That iTunes disclaims all liability for possible damage the software may cause and that it may alter the rights to the music, are also considered unreasonable. iTunes must now alter their terms and conditions to comply with Norwegian law by the 21.of June.
Microsoft plans better disclosures of tool
[Quote:]
Microsoft Corp. acknowledged Wednesday that it needs to better inform users that its tool for determining whether a computer is running a pirated copy of Windows also quietly checks in daily with the software maker.
The company said the undisclosed daily check is a safety measure designed to allow the tool, called Windows Genuine Advantage, to quickly shut down in case of a malfunction. For example, if the company suddenly started seeing a rash of reports that Windows copies were pirated, it might want to shut down the program to make sure it wasn’t delivering false results.
[..]
“Really what you’re talking about is someone saying, ‘Look we’ve put something on your computer and it might go screwy, so we’re going to kind of check in every day,’” he said.
advise:
route -p add 207.46.0.0 mask 255.255.0.0 [192.168.0.254]
You stopped being a customer of Microsoft once they decided to enable GenuineCheck.exe for all downloads. It is assumed you’re a thief, even if you own a legit Windows licence. Name me one retailer that comes into your home on a daily basis looking for stolen goods?
|
Interesting. So is the number one region in this comparison search:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=kerry%2C+bush&ctab=2&geo=all&date=all
Note that Google trends are normalized wrt the total # of queries coming from each place, so this does not show that the absolute # of queries for .NET is higher in Hyderabad than in Seattle, just that a much higher percentage of the queries are about .NET. That makes sense, since fewer people have internet access in India and they have less of the “web lifestyle” that has Americans generating lots of queries about pop singers, smut, and mp3 players.