Microsoft is calling all UK kids aged 14-17 to enter its Thought Thieves Competition.

And from the entry form:

I will formally licence, on terms acceptable to Microsoft, all intellectual property rights in my film and agree to waive all moral rights in relation to my film if requested to do so. I understand that if I do not complete the necessary documentation by the stated date, my entry will be disqualified from the competition

This is even better than when the MS FrontPage license including a clause forbidding the use of FrontPage to make web pages critical of Microsoft (when, admit it, every page made with FrontPage is automatically critical of Microsoft). For sheer irony’s sake I hope at least a few hundred send in badly edited cuts of the old 1984 apple adverts. 14-17 is too late, they are already “corrupted”, you need to start younger, say 4 or 5 years old. I recommend showing movies to those kids where “thought thieves” are evil, dark figures that, preferably, linger under kids’ beds. You’ll make very powerful subconscious fears your ally that way.

Oh and to answer a question in the poster:

“So how would you feel if you saw your hard work being passed off as the property of someone else?”

Gee, I don’t know, maybe you could ask the guys who wrote the BSD TCP/IP stack?

In other news, Tony Blair announces that 1000 teenage thought criminals have been rounded up for thought crimes. They will be re-educated at the Ministry of Love and given a chance to repent for their crimes through death. Also, Bill Gates has announced that Linux is unexist. Purge all memory of “Linux” from your brains now to prevent being labelled a thought criminal!

[Quote:]

“A handsome, tough-looking boy of nine had popped up from behind the table and was menacing him with a toy automatic pistol, while his small sister, about two years younger, made the same gesture with a fragment of wood. Both of them were dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirts, and red neckerchiefs which were the uniform of the Spies. Winston raised his hands above his head, but with an uneasy feeling, so vicious was the boy’s demeanour, that it was not altogether a game.

‘You’re a traitor!’ yelled the boy. ‘You’re a thought- criminal! You’re a Eurasian spy! I’ll shoot you, I’ll vaporize you, I’ll send you to the salt mines!’

Suddenly they were both leaping round him, shouting ‘Traitor!’ and ‘Thought-criminal!’ the little girl imitating her brother in every movement. It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters. There was a sort of calculating ferocity in the boy’s eye, a quite evident desire to hit or kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so. It was a good job it was not a real pistol he was holding, Winston thought.”

…

“With those children, he thought, that wretched woman must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years, and they would be watching her night and day for symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother — it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak — ‘child hero’ was the phrase generally used — had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.”

This NASA image taken from the International Space Station in 2002, shows the La Cumbre volcano on Fernandina Island on the Galapagos. Cumbre volcano spewed rivers of lava and sent columns of steam seven kilometers into the air, officials said.(AFP/NASA/File)

[Quote:]

With at least six classmates pregnant, including the valedictorian with her second child, it was clear to a few girls at Mission High School that more information was needed on safe sex.

So the four students at this school along the Mexican border — where the teen pregnancy rate is among the highest in the nation — decided they could help send the message by making their own movie.

Two years later, their 16-minute educational film promoting condom use, named “Toothpaste” after a teen code word for condoms, has been ordered by schools around the country. It also will be shown at film festivals and on the Showtime cable channel, according to the organization that produced the film.

“Hopefully, people will get something out of it,” said Amanda Ramirez, one of the teens.

The script by Kristal Villarreal, Laura Coria, Gladys Sanchez and Amanda Ramirez won an annual contest by Scenarios USA, an organization that educates teens about pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Professional directors, producers and camera operators helped polish the film.

[Quote:]

Ten sheriff’s deputies who fired 120 rounds at an unarmed driver at the end of a chase in a quiet neighborhood appeared with a lawyer who apologized to residents on their behalf, but said the officers had acted to capture a suspect who “deserved and needed to be stopped.”

Wearing suits and ties or dark sweaters, the deputies stood silently before news cameras Friday while lawyer Gregory Emerson explained that each had voluntarily told investigators what happened during Monday’s videotaped shooting in Compton.

Emerson said the deputies didn’t try to “harm or injure or otherwise jeopardize the safety of the individuals” on the street where 44-year-old Winston Hayes was shot. Bullets penetrated several homes in the area.

“They’re not hiding,” Emerson told reporters. “They’re honorable, decent individuals. They’re proud professionals of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and they’re willing to stand up and tell the community that they do apologize.”

He said after the news conference, however, that “the apology wasn’t for the shooting.”

Oops.

[Quote:]

Nearly two-thirds of North Sea fish stocks have left their normal habitat to seek cooler waters further north because of global warming, according to a new study published in the magazine Science.

Lead researcher and marine biologist, Alison Perry, from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, said that certain species such as cod, sole and whiting could disappear from the North Sea by 2050.

The research has profound implications for the fishing industry in the North Sea, the researchers said.

“It isn’t just a case of individual fish choosing to move towards colder waters. It points towards an entire population of fish becoming less viable in response to warming,” said Perry.

[Quote:]

Secretary-General
Kofi Annan neglected to mention two key meetings when he was first questioned last year about contacts with his son’s company when it was soliciting business under the U.N. oil-for-food program.
After investigators first interviewed Annan in November, the secretary general revised his account of those contacts, which occurred just months before the company won a U.N. contract.

Though Annan acknowledged meeting with the officials in subsequent interviews, his revisions raised doubts for the probe’s chief investigator, Robert Parton. In the months after the initial interview, Parton’s team had carried out a massive search of Annan’s computer files and uncovered the contacts with the officials in calendars, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The Associated Press.

Parton sought to make an issue of Annan’s veracity, concluding the U.N. chief wasn’t initially forthcoming and his story evolved as new facts emerged. Parton also noted Annan’s account sometimes conflicted with other witnesses deemed credible. Drafts of Parton’s report, however, were substantially revised.

The three-member committee that supervised Parton used a different tone when it laid out the discrepancies in the version of the report released to the public two months ago. “He had checked the records and now remembered the meeting,” the final report said about one of the meetings Annan hadn’t originally disclosed.

Sigh. Politicians are all the same..