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It’s not happening here. But it is happening now
Pants thief has leg up on victims
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The pants bandit has struck again.
Roderick Shelton, 29, was robbed about 4 a.m. Thursday, becoming at least the fourth person in Boynton Beach robbed at gunpoint for pants in three months. The trouser thief was last seen running south.
Police are investigating whether the cases are linked.
I’m expecting Florida to ban all pants to make everybody safe again…
Tossing out the classics
Think of this in the light of the ungodly sacrifices we know people made in Soviet Russia to keep Solzhenitsyn’s work available no matter the cost.
other than that, the WSJ piece is crap that turns up every few years - here is the response from the library
Student mistakenly held on drug charge settles with Phila.
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A Bryn Mawr College student wrongly jailed for three weeks on drug charges by Philadelphia police has settled her civil-rights case for $180,000.
Janet H. Lee, now a senior, was arrested at Philadelphia International Airport in 2003 after screeners found three condoms filled with white powder in her carry-on and city police said field tests showed that the substances likely contained opium and cocaine.
Lee was held in lieu of $500,000 bond for 21 days, until further drug testing proved that her unlikely story - that the powder was just flour - was true.
As part of an exam ritual in her dorm, Lee had filled the condoms with flour to make a phallic toy that freshmen squeezed to reduce stress. She had found it so funny that she had packed them to take home to California to show friends after exams.
Lee’s civil-rights case against the city had been scheduled for trial today in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia.
She got a $180K settlement because the city did not want to be put in the position of putting officers on the stand they knew would perjure themselves or invoke the 5th, which could have caused the whole rotten operation to break open.
The tipoff that the whole case was intentionally dirty is the fact that her powder tested positive for cocaine, opium, and meth. No drug dealer would mix those three, but a field tester might put all three of those down on a form in order to give the person who would later plant real drugs in the evidence for the purpose of a prosecution as much scope as possible to add whatever was most available, or was consistent with the case as a whole.
Convicted Child Molester Longtime Pastor of Southern Baptist Churches
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In 1999 in Calvert County, Maryland, a student had to change her plans to deliver her high school graduation prayer after a fellow student objected, with backing from the ACLU and the state attorney general’s office.
During an allowed “moment of reflection,” a Southern Baptist pastor named Douglas Myers began reciting loudly the Lord’s Prayer. The entire audience joined in, creating an event that made national headlines.
This week, the 57-year-old Myers is back in the news. On Wednesday a Florida court sentenced him to seven years in prison for repeatedly molesting a parishioner’s grandson.
All religious groups have a tendency to hide this behavior and protect the perpetrators. Whatever your affiliation, or lack thereof, do whatever you can to put pressure on these groups to expose the offenders, to care for and defend the victims, and to establish policies and procedures that will minimize future occurrences.
That’s a really first-class sketch
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Paul Bates sent a Christmas card to a long-lost pal in this envelope with NO street name, NO town, NO postcode — yet it arrived!
The steel worker, 48, had forgotten the name of the town workmate Peter O’Leary moved to from Neath, South Wales, three years ago.
But he recalled Peter had pointed it out on a map. So he put a dot on a sketch of the South West Peninsula, wrote “somewhere here? and hoped for the best.
Amazingly the card arrived at Peter’s home in Bude, North Cornwall, nine days later — after his postie recognised the name in a local sorting office.
The pals are now back in contact and plan to meet soon. Peter, 48, now a driving instructor, said: “It was very inventive.?
U.S. Bars Lab From Testing Electronic Voting
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A laboratory that has tested most of the nation’s electronic voting systems has been temporarily barred from approving new machines after federal officials found that it was not following its quality-control procedures and could not document that it was conducting all the required tests.
Skip to next paragraphThe company, Ciber Inc. of Greenwood Village, Colo., has also come under fire from analysts hired by New York State over its plans to test new voting machines for the state. New York could eventually spend $200 million to replace its aging lever devices.
Experts on voting systems say the Ciber problems underscore longstanding worries about lax inspections in the secretive world of voting-machine testing. The action by the federal Election Assistance Commission seems certain to fan growing concerns about the reliability and security of the devices.
Coast Guard broaches state boat licenses
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State governments would issue licenses to America’s 77 million recreational boaters if the nation’s top maritime law enforcer gets his way.
U.S. Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen said the potential for a terrorist attack launched from small boats means that states and the Coast Guard must cooperate better to watch who is on America’s waterways. Though he doesn’t yet have details or formal recommendations for how a national permit system would work, he said he’d like to see boating licenses be similar to motor vehicle driver’s licenses.
I’m pretty sure that Timothy McVeigh had a driver’s license and valid license plates on his rental bomb truck. How would licensing have prevented the Oklahoma City bombing?
Repeat after me…
It’s.
For.
The.
Children.
Feel safer yet?
And how about this bit in the article:
“Driving a car is considered a privilege conferred by the state, but boating is considered a right. It gets back to that ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ sort of thing,” Edmonston said.
Because, as you know, the Constitution is careful to distinguish between watercraft and land vehicles.
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Cartoons
Liquid Lakes on Titan
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The existence of oceans or lakes of liquid methane on Saturn’s moon Titan was predicted more than 20 years ago. But with a dense haze preventing a closer look it has not been possible to confirm their presence. Until the Cassini flyby of July 22, 2006, that is.
Radar imaging data from the flyby, published this week in the journal Nature, provide convincing evidence for large bodies of liquid. This image, used on the journal’s cover, gives a taste of what Cassini saw. Intensity in this colorized image is proportional to how much radar brightness is returned, or more specifically, the logarithm of the radar backscatter cross-section. The colors are not a representation of what the human eye would see.
The lakes, darker than the surrounding terrain, are emphasized here by tinting regions of low backscatter in blue. Radar-brighter regions are shown in tan. The strip of radar imagery is foreshortened to simulate an oblique view of the highest latitude region, seen from a point to its west.
Bush says feds can open mail without warrant
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President Bush quietly has claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans’ mail without a judge’s warrant.
Bush asserted the new authority Dec. 20 after signing legislation that overhauls some postal regulations. He then issued a “signing statement” that declared his right to open mail under emergency conditions, contrary to existing law and contradicting the bill he had just signed, according to experts who have reviewed it.
A White House spokeswoman disputed claims that the move gives Bush any new powers, saying the Constitution allows such searches.
Still, the move, one year after The New York Times’ disclosure of a secret program that allowed warrantless monitoring of Americans’ phone calls and e-mail, caught Capitol Hill by surprise.
“Despite the president’s statement that he may be able to circumvent a basic privacy protection, the new postal law continues to prohibit the government from snooping into people’s mail without a warrant,” said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the incoming House Government Reform Committee chairman, who co-sponsored the bill.
Experts said the new powers could be easily abused and used to vacuum up large amounts of mail.
“The [Bush] signing statement claims authority to open domestic mail without a warrant, and that would be new and quite alarming,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington.
“You have to be concerned,” a senior U.S. official agreed. “It takes executive-branch authority beyond anything we’ve ever known.”
A top Senate Intelligence Committee aide promised a review of Bush’s move.
“It’s something we’re going to look into,” the aide said.
Internet Explorer Unsafe for 284 Days in 2006
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For all its touted security improvements, the release of Microsoft’s new Internet Explorer 7 browser in November came too late in the year to improve the lot of IE users, who make up roughly 80 percent of the world’s online community. For a total 284 days in 2006 (or more than nine months out of the year), exploit code for known, unpatched critical flaws in pre-IE7 versions of the browser was publicly available on the Internet. Likewise, there were at least 98 days last year in which no software fixes from Microsoft were available to fix IE flaws that criminals were actively using to steal personal and financial data from users.
In a total of ten cases last year, instructions detailing how to leverage “critical” vulnerabilities in IE were published online before Microsoft had a patch to fix them.
Microsoft labels software vulnerabilities “critical” — its most severe rating — if the flaws could be exploited to criminal advantage without any action on the part of the user, or by merely convincing an IE user to click on a link, visit a malicious Web site, or open a specially crafted e-mail or e-mail attachment.
[The chart posted here shows the overlap of threats from various IE flaws throughout the year.]
In contrast, Internet Explorer’s closest competitor in terms of market share — Mozilla’s Firefox browser — experienced a single period lasting just nine days last year in which exploit code for a serious security hole was posted online before Mozilla shipped a patch to remedy the problem.
70 cents per track is ‘In the Range’
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There’s a new development from yesterday’s story on wholesale download pricing. While the record labels are still unwilling to divulge their wholesale pricing structure for online music sales in UMG v. Lindor without strict confidentiality provisions, an attorney for UMG has told opposing counsel Ray Beckerman that the 70¢ per track figure is in the ballpark.
The revelation comes from an e-mail exchange between Richard Gabriel, counsel for UMG, and Marie Lindor’s attorney Ray Beckerman that occurred in December, but was just made public today. In a December 19, 2006 e-mail to Beckerman, Gabriel said that the wholesale prices paid to the labels by the likes of Apple, Real, Napster, and others are not uniform, but “cover a range, with 70¢ being in the correct range.”
The pricing information could be crucial for defendant Marie Lindor as she makes the argument that the $750-per-song damages sought by the RIAA are excessive and unconstitutionally severe. Lindor argues that the actual damages suffered by the RIAA are in line with the wholesale price per song, and if that is indeed the case, damages should be capped accordingly—between $2.80 and $7.00 per song—if infringement is proven.
Even at the $0.70 per song mark, you have to consider damages for the pain and suffering of those poor, poor record executives. I mean, honestly: Think about the hours and hours that they spent in their mansions, lying awake on their double-king canopy beds, surrounded by sleeping hookers… and unable to sleep because of the massive injustice being done to their industry.
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Passerby catches falling child, N.Y. cops say
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A 3-year-old boy was caught by a passerby after falling from the fourth-floor window of an apartment in New York City Thursday, police said.
The boy was caught by a 39-year-old man passing under the window, police said in a brief statement. The boy was taken to hospital with just minor cuts and abrasions to his head and face. Police are still investigating and gave no more details.
But brothers Julio Gonzalez and Pedro Navarez described to New York television news later Thursday how they caught the child after spotting it hanging from a fire escape.
“He was coming down pretty hard, so hard that when he landed in my arms my sneaker just flew right off and I fell down to the ground,” Navarez told CBS 2 News.
The brothers said the baby then bounced off Navarez’s chest and into the arms of Gonzalez, who then also fell down.
“We caught him and the boy’s all right, thank God,” Gonzalez said. “When I (initially) saw that baby I just ran. I wasn’t thinking about anything, I was just thinking about catching that baby.”
Well, that’s one way to cover the cost of tuition