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A rifle club located inside a Scarborough community centre and a gun club at Union Station will now have to find a space to lease on private property in order to operate. Toronto Mayor David Miller said he supports the plan because of recent crimes that were committed using stolen legal guns.

“In a day when you can’t bring a large tube of toothpaste on a plane how can you allow guns to wander through Union Station, the biggest transit hub in Canada?” he asked his colleagues on city council.

Allow me to steal some remarks from Bruce Schneier’s weblog:

“We can allow guns to wander in Union Station only if they are less than three ounces.”

“In a day when a gun club can share space with the biggest transit hub in Canada and no one gets killed from it, how come I can’t bring a large tube of toothpaste on an airplane?”

“Under Miller’s premise, that anything more dangerous than toothpaste shouldn’t be allowed in a public area like a transit hub, can we expect to ban cups of hot coffee (scalding, slip-and-fall), ballpoint pens (pointy), bottles of cologne (flammable aerosol), and cigarette lighters (flammable liquid)?”

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“It’s revealing that Barack Obama has now been forced to expand the states on his map because he’s so weak in traditional Democratic targets such as West Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and Florida, not to mention his ongoing problems in Pennsylvania and Ohio,” said McCain spokesman Brian Rogers.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Looks like McCain has inherited the Bubble that W. lives in… Let’s see - McCain is doing badly in the polss in traditional R states like Alaska, Colorado, Georgia, Indiana, Main, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin. In Florida is he’s polling pretty much tied.

While Obama currently leads McCain in six Bush states — NM, CO, IA, IN, OH, ad VA, McCain doesn’t lead Obama in a single Kerry state.

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Sonny Landham carved out a tough-guy reputation in a series of big-screen roles, from roughing up Sylvester Stallone to getting tossed out a window by Carl Weathers. He pulls no punches in his newest role: Libertarian challenger to a man known for political toughness, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Now 67 and living in northeastern Kentucky, the man who played Billy Bear in “48 Hours” and was killed by an alien in “Predator” admits his action-movie days are behind him. “I think I’m having wild action when I take two aspirin with my hot chocolate at night,” he quipped.

Don’t laugh too hard: both Governors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura were in Predator as well…

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In March, the House passed an amendment that rejected retroactive immunity for telecoms that assisted the NSA in illegal wiretapping.  Most of us have wondered what happened to change the minds of 94 Democrats.  What happened between June 20 and March 14 to change 94 Democratic hearts and minds?

The answer might well be simple:  money.  Could it be that simple?

[..]

Here’s the bottom line:

Verizon,  AT&T, and Sprint gave PAC contributions averaging:

$8,359  to each Democrat who changed their position to support immunity for Telcos (94 Dems)
$4,987 to each Democrat who remained opposed to immunity for  Telcos (116 Dems)

88 percent of the Dems who changed to supporting immunity (83 Dems
of the 94) received PAC contributions from Verizon, AT&T, or Sprint
during the last three years (Jan. 2005-Mar. 2008).  ( MAPLight.org)

Of course the average amount received is a bit misleading.  A few of the very prominent Dems who changed their votes took a lot more than $8000.

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The National Security Agency does not need to tell lawyers for Guantanamo Bay detainees whether their phones were tapped as part of the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

The NSA has refused to say whether it listened in on the conversations of the lawyers who are advising detainees being held at the U.S. naval facility in Cuba. The NSA says even confirming the existence of such wiretaps would jeopardize national security.

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A couple years back, there was an apparent public outrage over the infamous Hot Coffee mod which could be found in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The scene, which was the result of some code that had been cut from the final version of the game but not deleted entirely, allowed players to perform sexual acts with an NPC in one specific instance. The incident sparked a firestorm of debate, as well as a class action lawsuit in which Take-Two agreed to pay between $5 and $35 to anyone who had purchased the game and been offended.

Now, well after the fact, both the plaintiffs in the case and Take-Two itself are somewhat shocked that, in spite of millions of individuals having the right to a payout, only 2,676 people have come forward to claim their money. Seth Lesser, lead lawyer for the plaintiffs said that he is “disappointed” by the outcome, and doesn’t understand why so many people don’t care.

So here’s a video game where you can regenerate health with the services of a prostitute, kill her when she gets out of the car, take your money back, kill a cop and steal his cop car, kill national guard members and steal their tank, and you’re surprised so few people are offended by a little nookie in it?

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The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

LA-LA-LA-LA-I-CAN’T-HEAR-YOU-LA-LA-LA

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New analysis of Mars’ terrain using NASA spacecraft observations reveals what appears to be by far the largest impact crater ever found in the solar system.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Global Surveyor have provided detailed information about the elevations and gravity of the Red Planet’s northern and southern hemispheres. A new study using this information may solve one of the biggest remaining mysteries in the solar system: why does Mars have two strikingly different kinds of terrain in its northern and southern hemispheres? The huge crater is creating intense scientific interest.

[..]

giant northern basin that covers about 40 percent of Mars’ surface, sometimes called the Borealis basin, is the remains of a colossal impact early in the solar system’s formation, the new analysis suggests. At 5,300 miles across, it is about four times wider than the next-biggest impact basin known, the Hellas basin on southern Mars. An accompanying report calculates that the impacting object that produced the Borealis basin must have been about 1,200 miles across. That’s larger than Pluto.

“This is an impressive result that has implications not only for the evolution of early Mars, but also for early Earth’s formation,” said Michael Meyer, the Mars chief scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

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The publication of a scientific paper by Radboud University that discusses design flaws of the MIFARE chip in cards such as the Oyster travelcard may be in jeopardy. Dutch secretary of state Tineke Huizinga has urged the university not to publish any secrets that may lead to abuse.

Last week researchers from Radboud University in Nijmegen revealed they had cracked and cloned London’s Oyster travel card. Earlier this year the researchers did the same to the Dutch MIFARE travel card. As a result, the introduction of the €1bn transport payment system in the Netherlands has now been postponed.

The Dutch researchers were planning to publish their scientific paper, appropriately named Dismantling MIFARE Classic, at the European Computer Security Conference Esorics in October, but secretary of state Huizinga has called upon the university to exercise responsibility.

These days “responsibility” apparently means “don’t embarrass the politicians”… the Uni is best of releasing it as soon as possible - otherwise when the next person cracks it (pretty soon now that it is known that it is possible) the Uni will be blamed for leaking the information anyway. The choice is between getting blamed for taking a principled stand, or getting blamed for leaking they didn’t do.

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North Carolina will do just about anything to keep technology companies happy, including offering IBM up to $750,000 to bring just 10 jobs to the state.

IBM has revealed plans to construct a $362m so-called “leadership data center” in either North Carolina, New York or Colorado. Hoping to secure this center, Durham County officials in North Carolina have just committed to a seven-year, $750,000 incentive package for IBM. That’s just chump change in the big scheme of things, but we’re sure IBM appreciates the effort.

You might think a $362m data plant would provide a lot of work for locals. But that’s not the case. IBM thinks the new facility will only require about 10 staff.

[..]

And companies such as Google and Microsoft also receive perks to build their new centers with taxpayers in various states around the US agreeing to major breaks around power consumption costs. That’s quite handy for the likes of Google and Microsoft, since they’re so strapped for cash and battling it out with rivals in low-margin businesses where just a few nickels can be the difference between maintaining a monopoly and going bust.

Anyway, the Durham folks justify the IBM package by saying that 1,000 or so executives will visit the new data center every year and spend money at hotels, restaurants, bars and strip clubs.

Ten employees being meddled with by 1000 execs per year? That’s 20 execs visiting per week all expecting meetings and PowerPoints and other general ego-fluffing.

Let’s hope they spend all their time at the strip clubs and golf courses otherwise those 10 poor bastards won’t get any work done.

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The spectacular scene was captured as the magnificent creatures made one of their biannual mass migrations to more agreeable waters.

(more pictures at the link)