To be fair, trickle down is a staple of theporn industry.

[Quote:]

• Mike Huckabee: “When Katrina, a Cat-5 hurricane, hit the Gulf Coast, not one drop of oil was spilled off of those rigs out in the Gulf of Mexico.”

• Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal: You know, that’s one of the great unwritten success stories, after Katrina and Rita, these awful storms, no major spills.

• John McCain: As for offshore drilling, it’s safe enough these days that not even Hurricanes Katrina and Rita could cause significant spillage from the battered rigs off the coasts of New Orleans and Houston.

• George Will: “Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed or damaged hundreds of drilling rigs without causing a large spill.”

• Wall Street Journal editorial: “Hurricanes Katrina and Rita flattened terminals across the Gulf of Mexico but didn’t cause a single oil spill.”

• Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne: “When Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast where we have about 4,000 oil and gas platforms, 3,000 were in the direct line of the storms - the most significant storms we’ve seen ever - and 3,000 of those had to be shut down. We had no significant oil spill. The system worked.”

• Fox News’ Dick Morris: “And by the way, the safety concerns, Hurricane Katrina didn’t cause any leakage or any spill in the Gulf of Mexico oil wells.”

VERSUS

A report prepared for the federal government by an international consulting firm, state that damages related to Hurricane Katrina resulted in 70 spills from outer continental shelf structures with a total volume of approximately 11,104 barrels of oil and petroleum products. http://mediamatters.org/items/200806270005?f=h_top

Satellite image with detail insets showing oil slicks in Gulf of Mexico following passage of Hurricane Katrina. Image taken on September 2, 2005. http://skytruth.mediatools.org/node/19981

“This morning, in a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court overturned Washington, DC’s ban on handguns! Wooo! Finally, the residents of Washington, DC have the right to defend themselves. From each other, one assumes.

Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said, ‘It is not the role of this court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.’

He is right. Killing the Constitution is the president’s job. The court’s job is to overturn elections.”

–Stephen Colbert

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President Bush still clings to his claim that the economy is doing well. “It’s a good time to buy a house.” Yeah, and an airline. And Circuit City.

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Boffins have slammed examiners in England for setting school children seriously dumb questions.

The Royal Chemistry Society said that the science exams for 14 year olds includes questions such as, “What powers a solar-powered snail?”

[..]

And this one, inspired by Father Ted, perhaps:

Some stars are bigger than the Sun but they look smaller. Why do they look smaller than the Sun?

* They are brighter than the Sun
* They are further away than the Sun
* They are the same colour as the Sun
* They are nearer than the Sun

That foxes me every time.

[Quote:]

An appeal from three European NGOs - La Quadrature du Net, netzpolitik.org and EDRi-member Open Rights Group - reveal some disturbing MEPs amendments to the draft directives to reform the EU framework on electronic communications (telecom package).

The review of the telecom package was merely focusing on telecom-related issues (except for discussions on the ePrivacy directive, which is the subject of another EDRi-gram article in the current issue), but some of the 800 amendments on the 5 directives that form the current package might go further than just establishing the rules for a functioning electronic communications market and could endanger the principle of the neutrality of the Internet.

Some amendments will transform the ISPs from technical intermediaries that have no obligation to prior surveillance of contents into law enforcers. Therefore they might be asked to block their users from lawful activities in the interests of their security or to work with content producers and rights-holders’ organizations, including sending intimidating messages, with no judicial approval. The amendment meant to support Intellectual Property Rights owners could open the door to censorship and might mean in practice the loss on privacy on the Internet.

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Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.

Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google’s liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement.

[..]

The order also requires Google to turn over copies of all videos that it has taken down for any reason.

So, if google has taken down a video from some non-viacom entity, for any reason, viacom gets a copy, in violation of the original owners’ copyrights?

Aardrijkskunde van een vrouw

Tussen de 18 en 20 is een vrouw zoals Afrika: Half wild, een natuurlijke schoonheid en vol mystrieuze delta’s met gegarandeerde vruchtbaarheid.
Tussen de 21 en 30 is de vrouw zoals Amerika: Ontwikkeld en open voor zaken, zeker voor wie geld heeft.
Tussen de 31 en 35 is een vrouw zoals India: Sensueel,ontspannen,stralend en overtuigd van hun schoonheid.
Tussen de 36 en 40 is een vrouw zoals Frankrijk: Heerlijk rijp blijft ze een aangenaam gebied om te bezoeken.
Tussen de 41 en 50 is een vrouw zoals Joegoslavië: Strijd is verloren, de fouten van het verleden spoken er rond. Grote herstellingswerkzaamheden moeten gestart worden.
Tussen de 51 en 60 is een vrouw zoals Rusland: Uitgestrekt, met niet te beheersen grenzen. Het klimaat schrik reizigers af.
Tussen de 61 en 70 is een vrouw zoals Mongolië: Een roemrijk verleden, grote veroveringen, maar helaas geen enkele toekomst.
Na haar 70ste is een vrouw zoals Afganistan: Velen weten waar het zich bevindt, maar niemand wil er naar toe.

Aardrijkskunde van een man:
Tussen de 15 en 70 is de man de VS: Beheerst door een lul.

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There is an old dieters’ joke that anything eaten directly from the fridge has no calories. Wrong. But surely anything in a teensy snack pack must help you lose weight, right? Wrong again.

Grocery aisles are full of small “diet packs” of candy, cookies or fried snacks, advertised as a guilt-free way of helping you eat less. But Rik Pieters and colleagues at Tilburg University in the Netherlands suspected that diet packs might in fact make people drop their guard and eat more.

Thanks, Andy

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Apple sells Mac OS X just as it retails music: it markets both products toward premium buyers at reasonable prices rather than attempting to force thieves to pay for a product they only want to steal. Microsoft failed in the music business with Windows Media because it tried to do just the opposite: force everyone to pay through the nose for expiring subscription music by using egregious DRM. Microsoft couldn’t force the thieves to stop stealing, and premium customers weren’t interested in being treated like thieves.

Have you ever been forced to fill out an email address in a web-form, even when you never, ever, wanted to hear form the site again?

If so, you probably lied, and made up an email address on the spot that you were sure didn’t exist.

The word “niet” is a Dutch word generally meaning “not”.

A lot of dutch internet users, when confronted with a form where they are forced to enter an email address, use an address endig in “niet.com”.

For example: “liever@niet.com” translates as “rather@not.com”. In a way, they’re telling the site the’d rather not receive anything by email.

Of course, there are more rude variants. This website lists all email received in the last month or so, destined for the niet.com domain.

THERE ARE NO VALID NIET.COM ADDRESSES.

In other words, EVERY single mail you see is a spam message from a company that forces you to enter an email address in their web forms, either directly from that company, or sold to spammers.

The mail server refuses connections from ip addresses known to be spamming, and known to be in a dial-up range, so all the mail you see is really from asshole marketeers who think they can collect your address on a web form and then harrass you.

Enjoy…

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Want to know how well a company protects its customers’ data? Don’t talk to its security and compliance officers. Instead, try its marketing department.

A study released Monday by the privacy-focused Ponemon Institute and funded by e-mail marketing firm Strongmail reveals a disturbing disconnect in companies between the executives tasked with protecting customer data and marketing departments, which use the data for advertising purposes or share it with third parties.

As anybody who has worked with marketing in large companies already knows…

He meant to say 640k cores should be enough for anybody