“So, what do you do for a living?”

“I clean buildings.”

“Sounds dull.”

“Yeah? It’s not really.”

[During the election campaign, June 28, 2000:]

Gov. George W. Bush of Texas said today that if he was president, he would bring down gasoline prices through sheer force of personality, by creating enough political good will with oil-producing nations that they would increase their supply of crude.

”I would work with our friends in OPEC to convince them to open up the spigot, to increase the supply,” Mr. Bush, the presumptive Republican candidate for president, told reporters here today. ”Use the capital that my administration will earn, with the Kuwaitis or the Saudis, and convince them to open up the spigot.”

[Today:]

Saudi Arabia Friday rebuffed President Bush’s request to immediately pump more oil to lower record prices, saying it does not see enough demand to increase production.

[..]

Bush is spending much of the day in closed-door meetings with King Abdullah, the Saudi ruler.

Friday’s visit was Bush’s second trip to the kingdom this year, coming as oil prices reached a new record high Friday of more than $127 a barrel. When he traveled to Riyadh in January, his request for the Saudis to pump more oil was also rejected.

[..]

“We will raise production when the market justifies it. This is our policy,” al-Naimi said during Bush’s first visit in January. “Our interest is to hopefully keep supply matching demand with minimum volatility in the international oil market,” he added.

[Quote:]

Apple took two of the creative industry’s most prized awards for its iPhone and iMac, the top-tier Black Pencil awards from D&AD.

The win was announced at a ceremony held in London last night. What’s particularly special about these awards - known as the ‘Oscar’s’ of the creative industry - is that Black Pencil’s are only awarded when a product meets extremely stringent criteris. At six previous annual ceremonies, no Black Pencil’s have been granted at all, most recently in 2003.

“One of the things that makes D&AD credible is they won’t give an award if the work isn’t good enough,” said Jonathan Ive, the chief designer at Apple, speaking to MediaGuardian.co.uk. “It is not about what is best that year, it is about an absolute standard”.

Apple has won a total of six Black Pencils since 1999, making the company the most successful firm across the D&AD Award’s 45-year history.

[Quote:]

A widely published story that a 13-year-old has been convicted of fraud after stealing his dad’s credit card and ordering two prostitutes from an escort agency may be a hoax.

The original story said Ralph Hardy used the card to take his friends on a $US30,000 spending spree that ended with them playing Halo on an Xbox with prostitutes in a Texas motel, according to a Money.co.uk report.

However police from the county where the alleged incident was supposedly took place say the story doesn’t stack up.

Newark county police spokeperson Amy Cromer said, “As far as we know, this story is a hoax. There have not been any arrests here, and we’re not aware of any convictions like that in this county.”

[Quote:]

A few weeks ago, Media Matters’ David Brock announced to great fanfare that he was taking over Progressive Media USA, a third-party group that would, he vowed, raise $40 million for ads to soften up John McCain in advance of the general election.

Now the group is quietly shuttering those efforts with barely a whimper.

Barack Obama’s fundraising team has been quietly putting out word to major donors that they didn’t want any money to go to such third-party groups. Instead, they wanted the cash to go to the Obama campaign, so Obama advisers could be in sole control of the campaign’s message.

It worked. Brock has quietly leaked a statement to The Washington Post saying that his group is, for all practical purposes, defunct.

The message is clear: we don’t want your kind of “help.”

A new kind of politics? It’s a good sign.

[Quote:]

On MSNBC’s Hardball tonight, right-wing radio host Kevin James attempted to defend President Bush’s comments comparing Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) to Nazi appeasers because he favors talking with our enemies. James compared Obama to Neville Chamberlain, about whom James could only cry: “He’s an appeaser!”

Matthews pressed James at least 19 times over five minutes to simply explain what Chamberlain had done in 1938 and 1939 to make him an “appeaser.” James could only shout his talking point over and over, prompting Matthews to threaten to end the interview:

MATTHEWS: You don’t know what you’re talking about, Kevin. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Tell me what Chamberlain did wrong.

JAMES: Neville Chamberlain was an appeaser, Chris. Neville Chamberlain was an appeaser, all right? […]

MATTHEWS: I’ve been sitting here five minutes asking you to say what the president was referring to in 1938 at Munich.

JAMES: I don’t know.

MATTHEWS: You don’t know, thank you.

Full video here.

How can people stand watching these douchebags?

[Quote:]

Senator John McCain, who has been critical of President Bush on the environment and other policies this week, on Thursday morning wholeheartedly endorsed Mr. Bush’s veiled rebuke in the Israeli Knesset of Senator Barack Obama that talking to “terrorists and radicals’’ was no different than appeasing Hitler and the Nazis.

“Yes, there have been appeasers in the past, and the president is exactly right, and one of them is Neville Chamberlain,’’ Mr. McCain told reporters on his campaign bus after a speech in Columbus, Ohio. “I believe that it’s not an accident that our hostages came home from Iran when President Reagan was president of the United States. He didn’t sit down in a negotiation with the religious extremists in Iran, he made it very clear that those hostages were coming home.’’

Okay, reality check:

[Quote:]

The judge in a landmark music copyright infringement award against a Brainerd woman notified attorneys today that he’s considering granting a new trial on the grounds that he improperly instructed the jury about what constitutes illegal file-sharing on the internet.

U.S. District Judge Michael Davis said in an order filed this morning in Minneapolis that he may have made a “manifest error of law” last October when he instructed a Duluth jury that simply uploading songs to a music file-sharing network could be considered illegal distribution, even in the absence of proof that anyone received them.

Usually it’s a company “MediaSentry” that “finds” copyright violators. MediaSentry (let’s ignore that they don’t have a license to conduct investigations in most states) probably has permission from the copyright owner to download the files. For the purpose of copyright infringement, the fact that the other party had permission would limit your liability to “making available” instead of actually creating an unauthorized copy, which would make it very difficult for the RIAA to prove that somebody who wasn’t authorized to download the materials did so. So this decision by the judge may have a big effect on the case.

[Quote:]

For all the high-tech tactics colleges have employed to slow or block students’ illegal file sharing activity, few have actually turned to methods used in the classroom to get the message across. A university in Missouri thinks it’s found the right solution, combining an age-old teacher’s tool with a dash of discipline.

Last academic year, Missouri University of Science and Technology, in Rolla, received some 200 Digital Millennium Copyright Act “takedown” notices from the recording industry, notifying the institution that users of its network had made copyrighted works available for download. This academic year — at a time when colleges across the country have been experiencing sudden spikes in copyright complaints — the university received eight. Karl F. Lutzen, a systems security analyst at the university, chalks it up to Missouri S&T’s unusual method of regulating students’ network usage: In order to download (or upload) files on any peer-to-peer network whatsoever, all on-campus users have to pass an online quiz on copyright infringement.

But not just once. Passing the test — with a perfect score — enables peer-to-peer access for six hours on the user’s on-campus registered machines, presumably enough time to download that (legal) song, TV show or e-book. The next time, the student, staff or faculty member has to go to the intranet Web page and take the randomized test again

Test software: Hello Mr. Manson, 1) Is murder legal?
Charles Manson: no
Test software: 2) Is murder bad?
Charles Manson: yes
Test software: 3) Would you feel bad if you murdered someone?
Charles Manson: yes
Test software: 4) Do you presently feel like murdering?
Charles Manson: no
Test software: 5) murder, Murder, MURDER!!!
Charles Manson: no, No, NO!!!

Test software: Congratulations, you have scored 100%. You now have 6 hours of access to the cutlery drawer.

On a side note, take a look at the website the university created, which states:

If you have downloaded copyright-protected files without paying for them then you have violated an author’s property rights.

which is of course utter and total bullshit. Here, let me list a few sites where you can download copyright-protected files without paying for them, and without violation the author’s rights:

http://www.debian.org
http://www.gentoo.org
http://mandriva.com
http://www.redhat.com
http://www.slackware.com
http://www.suse.com
http://www.freebsd.org
http://www.netbsd.org
http://www.openbsd.org
http://www.gnu.org
http://www.apache.org

More are listed here, but I think I’ve already listed at least half of all the software used on internet servers today.

If your university pulls crap like this, you’re not getting your money’s worth of education, I suggest you go find another place to learn.

[Quote:]

AntiPhormLite is a unique application that intelligently self surfs the internet and generates natural surfing information to confuse anyone who is spying or tracking your internet activity

It is a stand alone application that can be left to run on it’s own or in parallel with your own surfing sessions and can be run as either a hidden background process, a desktop console application or in conjunction with your favorite browser, which ever you prefer.

To an ISP It is indistinguishable from a real person. It performs intelligent decisions about where to surf and combines multiple search engines with millions of contextual search subjects and general interest links.

The engine features cross references in subject threads, back peddles along re-searching threads, revisits history during a session, recursive branching, subject thread and page lingering, gone-away modes and exhaustive search abandonment. It uses natural time delays based on search interest, page size and link return quality and it is throttled to prevent heavy traffic recognition or misuse.

Although any ISP that monitors your connection to tailor advertising will be confused by this, lots of websites will need to upgrade their infrastructure to handle the added load, if this is used a lot. And as a result, those who rely on advertising will see their click-through rate go down, and get less and less money to do that upgrade. All because some marketeer thought it would be neat to monitor you. Fuck them.