here is a very large satellite image.

Hurricane Katrina evacuees clog Interstate 10 as they come into Slidell, La. from New Orleans on Sunday, Aug. 28, 2005. (AP Photo/Mari Darr-Welch)

The USA is rapidly turning into a feudalist society, where an employer can sue and employee who resigns for the potential loss of intellectual property resulting from the job change. Looks like a return to this.

Of course if you deal with Microsoft and look at their confidentiality/nondisclosure agreements, they specifically reserve residual rights — so they’re complaining about an ex-employee possibly doing what they explicitly say they’re going to do to others.

[Quote:]

In the wake of Ms. Sheehan’s protest, the facts on the ground in America have changed almost everywhere. The president, for one, has been forced to make what for him is the ultimate sacrifice: jettisoning chunks of vacation to defend the war in any bunker he can find in Utah or Idaho. In the first speech of this offensive, he even felt compelled to take the uncharacteristic step of citing the number of American dead in public (though the number was already out of date by at least five casualties by day’s end). For the second, the White House recruited its own mom, Tammy Pruett, for the president to showcase as an antidote to Ms. Sheehan. But in a reversion to the president’s hide-the-fallen habit, the chosen mother was not one who had lost a child in Iraq.

It isn’t just Mr. Bush who is in a tight corner now. Ms. Sheehan’s protest was the catalyst for a new national argument about the war that managed to expose both the intellectual bankruptcy of its remaining supporters on the right and the utter bankruptcy of the Democrats who had rubber-stamped this misadventure in the first place.

When the war’s die-hard cheerleaders attacked the Middle East policy of a mother from Vacaville, Calif., instead of defending the president’s policy in Iraq, it was definitive proof that there is little cogent defense left to be made. When the Democrats offered no alternative to either Mr. Bush’s policy or Ms. Sheehan’s plea for an immediate withdrawal, it was proof that they have no standing in the debate.

Patricia Santangelo looks to be the first person to take a file-sharing lawsuit to trial instead of settling with the RIAA. Now, with the help of the EFF, her lawyers have started a blog where you can track the case’s progress.

[Quote:]

This article in the New York Times is a pretty useful overview of the political and financial support behind the Discovery Institute, the main anti-evolution think tank. It describes how the Institute has spent $3.6 million dollars to support fellowships that include scientific research in areas such as “laboratory or field research in biology, paleontology or biophysics.”
So what has that investment yielded, scientifically speaking? I’m not talking about the number of appearances on cable TV news or on the op-ed page, but about scientific achievement. I’m talking about how many papers have appeared in peer-reviewed biology journals, their quality, and their usefulness to other scientists. Peer review isn’t perfect—some bad papers get through, and some good papers may get rejected—but every major idea in modern biology has met the challenge.
It’s pretty easy to get a sense of this by perusing two of the biggest publically available databases, PubMed (from the National Library of Medicine) and Science Direct (from the publishing giant Reed Elsevier). They don’t cover the entire scientific literature, but between them, you can search thousands of journals covering everything from geochronology to genetic engineering. Look for the topics that have won people Nobel Prizes—the structure of DNA, the genes that govern animal development, and the like—and you quickly come up with hundreds or thousands of papers.

A search for “Intelligent Design” on PubMed yields 22 results—none of which were published by anyone from the Discovery Insittute. There are a few articles about the political controversy about teaching it in public schools, and some papers about constructing databases of proteins in a smart way. But nothing that actually uses intelligent design to reveal something new about nature. ScienceDirect offers the same picture. (I’m not clever enough with html to link to my search result lists, but try them yourself if you wish.)
Here’s another search: “Discovery Institute” and “Seattle” (where the institute is located). One result comes up: a paper by Jonathan Wells proposing that animal cells have turbine-like structures inside them. It describes no experiments, only a hypothesis.
Perhaps the other prominent fellows of the Discovery Institute (Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, and William Dembski) have published scientific papers that have a bearing on intelligent design, without identifying their affiliation. Aside from a couple letters to the editor, the databases yielded only one paper, in which Behe offers a simple model of gene duplication and expresses doubt that new genes could evolve by this process. Given that other scientists have published 2266 papers exploring gene duplication’s role in evolution, it’s safe to say that his is not a view held by most experts.
PubMed has a very nice feature that lets you get a rough gauge of how influential a paper has been. If you select “Cited in PMD” from the display option list, you get a list of papers in PudMed that have cited the paper you’re looking at. The 2001 paper revealing the rough draft of the human genome has already been cited 777 times in the past four years.

Try it on the Behe and Wells papers. Total citations? Zero.
Here’s one more way to put these results in perspective: compare the two papers I turned up to the work of a single evolutionary biologist. From the thousands I could choose from, I’ll pick Douglas Emlen, a young biologist at the University of Montana. He studies horns on beetles as an example of how embryonic development changes during evolution (a fascinating topic I blogged on a couple months back). I visited his publication web site and counted the papers that dealt directly with evolution (leaving out the book chapters and the papers on straight physiology and such). The total so far comes to 23. Over ten times the output I found from the entire Discovery Institute staff.

Someone’s not getting their money’s worth.

Jon Stewart on Bush talking points, including the talking points dance.

Click on the picture to play the video (Quicktime Video 8.8 MB 7’16)

Best quote: “If I had a nickle for every time Bush mentioned nine-eleven.. I could raise enough reward money to go after Bin Laden!”

[Quote:]

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said he may call for the first-ever mandatory evacuation in city history after talking with the head of the Hurricane Center who said a storm surge of 20-25 feet could be expected with major hurricane Katrina.

Nagin said he would consider ordering evacuations by Sunday morning and may employ buses and trains to help get people out of the city.

In an interview on Eyewitness News, Nagin said his Saturday night dinner was interrupted by an urgent call from Governor Kathleen Blanco who asked Nagin to call the Hurricane Center.

Nagin said the Hurricane Center Chief told the mayor that if it was possible at all, he should order an evacuation due to winds that could reach 145 miles per hour sustained and 170 mile per hour gusts.

Nagin said he would put his wife and family on a plane and he urged everyone to do anything they could to get out.

“All models say this storm will land right on top of New Orleans,”�? he said.

[Quote:]

Last month a federal judge awarded $35,000 in compensatory and $6000 in punitive damages to a man state troopers arrested for video taping them while they were performing what he believed to be unsafe truck inspections.

Given the Utah rave case and the Oakland police stop reported today, this decision matters because it defines citizens� rights to video law enforcement in action.

The ruling finds violations of the plaintiff�s first and fourth amendment rights. It states �The activities of the police, like those of other public officials, are subject to public scrutiny�Videotaping is a legitimate means of gathering information for public dissemination�there can be no doubt that the free speech clause of the Constitution protected Robinson as he videotaped the defendants�Moreover, to the extent that the troopers were restraining Robinson from making any future videotapes and from publicizing or publishing what he had filmed, the defendants� conduct clearly amounted to an unlawful prior restraint upon his protected speech�.We find that defendants are liable under � 1983 for violating Robinson�s Fourth Amendment right to be protected from an unlawful seizure��

The local paper concluded in its report �All this case proved is that troopers doing a public job can be videotaped.�

But that is a big deal.

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A direct hit from a hurricane the size of Katrina would level New Orleans. The city exists in a basin, bordered on the north by Lake Pontchartrain — the second-largest salt water lake in the United States — and crossed on the south by the Mississippi River. The city is protected from flooding by a system of levees, but a direct hit from a large hurricane would breach these protective barriers, flooding the city with water poisoned by industrial chemicals from the thousands of factories that border the lake. This is a nightmare scenario referred to as “filling the bowl,” with much of the city drowned under 18-to 20-feet of water, “Body-bag time,” says Walter Maestri, director of emergency management for New Orleans’s Jefferson Parish in an interview with American Radioworks. “We think 40,000 people could lose their lives in the metropolitan area.” Indeed, there are already rumors that the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Disaster Mortuary Team (DMORT) has been activated and told to be in New Orleans by Tuesday, the day after Katrina is supposed to strike. Their function? Setting up temporary morgues, identifying bodies, and disposing of remains. No wonder Mayor Nagin looks nervous.

Remember this woman? Her name is Safia Taleb al-Suhail (or Sofia Taleb Al Souhail depending on the translation). She stirred emotions at Bush’s February State of the Union address when she hugged the mother of a 25-year old marine killed in Iraq.

Oh how the right-wing blogs loved every minute of it…

Assrocket:

The embrace between the Iraqi activist and Mrs. Norwood was powerfully emotional and symbolic, summing up at once the sacrifice, the purpose and the progress of the Iraq war.

Instapundit:

He seems much more comfortable and relaxed, probably because of the Iraqi elections going so well. I think we’re just figuring out just how much the Administration’s plans turned on that. He bet on the Iraqi people, and he won.

Red State:

Here’s the simplest way to say it: The best parts of this State of the Union speech … weren’t in the speech. [...]

Safia Taleb al-Suhail, leader of the Iraqi Women’s Political Council, who’s withstood more than one death threat in her life, standing to applause, her uplifted hand shaking with emotion.

But wait! Now Safia has changed her mind about the so-called noble cause because the draft constitution leaves women’s rights in the hands of Islamic clerics, turning back decades of progress. In her own words:

When we came back from exile, we thought we were going to improve rights and the position of women. But look what has happened — we have lost all the gains we made over the last 30 years. It’s a big disappointment.

via

[Quote:]

Two and a half years after the music business lined up behind the chief executive of Apple, Steven P. Jobs, and hailed him and his iTunes music service for breathing life into music sales, the industry’s allegiance to Mr. Jobs has eroded sharply.

Mr. Jobs is now girding for a showdown with at least two of the four major record companies over the price of songs on the iTunes service.

If he loses, the one-price model that iTunes has adopted – 99 cents to download any song – could be replaced with a more complex structure that prices songs by popularity. A hot new single, for example, could sell for $1.49, while a golden oldie could go for substantially less than 99 cents.

Music executives who support Mr. Jobs say the higher prices could backfire, sending iTunes’ customers in search of songs on free, unauthorized file-swapping networks.

[..]

At the price of 99 cents a song, the share of the major labels is about 70 cents.

Some analysts suggest that the willingness of the music companies to gamble on a new pricing structure reflects a short memory.

“As I recall, three years ago these guys were wandering around with their hands out looking for someone to save them,” said Mike McGuire, an analyst at Gartner G2. “It’d be rather silly to try to destabilize him because iTunes is one of the few bright spots in the industry right now. He’s got something that’s working.”

It’s all about control. What the article goes into more depth about is that RIAA stooges don’t like iPods making money for Apple. They want the player market broken up and moved away from iPod dominance.

Replace the ‘hot new hits’ smokescreen with ‘anything that’s actually popular’ and you have what the music industry actually wants. Does ‘Highway to Hell’ get more action than the latest push-the-star album? No problem.. that song gets a price hike. Even more heinous, but technically feasible, would be per-user and related-hits tracking, so if you buy a $.50 song, all the ‘other songs purchased by people who bought this one’ go up to $.99 for you personally. In such a system, the only way to get the low prices consistently would be to buy random selections of stuff nobody else wants.

How many morons downloaded the Crazy Frog ringtone at a significantly higher price than 99 cents? They want to go back to gouging the customers and giving kickbacks to corrupt legislators to take your house off you for petty copyright infringement.

[Quote:]

By the time we arrived on Saturday, the camp was in full swing and counter-protesters were showing up by the truckload. Armed with American flags and “Cut and run traitors” signs and many “Casey died for me” banners. Gathered in Camp Casey were veterans and activists from across the country. Peace prevailed through early afternoon under the hot Texas sun and sweltering humidity until about 3 p.m. The counter-demonstrators moved closer, shouting “Freedom isn’t free.” The Texas cops stood 30 strong and the folks at Camp Casey stood relatively silent.

I watched through Woody’s binoculars as a police helicopter circled the camp. As the chopper drew closer and closer to the ground, storm clouds gathered. The shouting increased now on both sides and a Vietnam vet kept insisting, “You don’t know. You haven’t been there. You just don’t know.” He stood chest to chest with the “Freedom isn’t free” guy, each man clinging to his beliefs.

At the height of the confrontation, the Vietnam vet looked to the sky and his face contorted into horror. He saw the chopper and suddenly it wasn’t Crawford, Texas. It was Vietnam. He collapsed in a heap and wept uncontrollably. Five Vietnam vets rushed to his side and carried him under a tent. They shielded him from view, putting their bodies between the sobbing man and the media. I watched the press as they politely waited for him to have his “moment” and for the human wall to move so their lenses could peek into the anguish of this grown man.

But this wasn’t a “moment.” This was part of posttraumatic stress disorder. I simply couldn’t understand because I was never in combat, having served in the U.S. Air Force during the Cold War. And so I watched this group of men as they spoke to him gently in the language of war and peace. They hugged him and brought a warm washcloth to his forehead. They told him jokes. They gave him ice and water. They never looked away, not once.

The man wept for almost an hour. One vet, Tim Origer, a former Marine, leaned into his grieving buddy and wiped his brow. As Tim pulled away to dip the cloth again into the bucket, his hand brushed away his pant leg and I saw his prosthetic leg. A gray mechanical knee and a stiff piece of metal where his right calf used to be. Tim lost his leg to an artillery round on March 15, 1968, during the Tet offensive. He was 19.

The man on the other side of Tim was David Cline, president of Veterans For Peace. This was the anti-war statue that you’ll never see in Washington. Banded together with the knowledge that they had been duped by their government, these men now needed to heal one other.

[Quote:]

A leading medical journal has made a damning attack on homeopathy, saying it is no better than dummy drugs.

The Lancet says the time for more studies is over and doctors should be bold and honest with patients about homeopathy’s “lack of benefit”.

A Swiss-UK review of 110 trials found no convincing evidence the treatment worked any better than a placebo.

[..]

The row over homeopathy has been raging for years.

In 2002, American illusionist James Randi offered $1m to anyone able to prove, under observed conditions in a laboratory, that homeopathic remedies can really cure people.

To date, no-one has passed the preliminary tests.

[Quote:]

Dylan Tusler’s official job title is Integration Analyst, so he was not surprised to be called in to look at the setup for one of their major new corporate applications. He had held hopes that this new application would herald a new age in integration at their organization. The vendors (Intertrode and Initech) promised that they would be implementing a fabulous new Enterprise Nervous System in order to support their new Service Oriented Architecture (and I’m sure what ever else is “in” these days).

Of course you know this wouldn’t be posted here if it went smoothly. Intertrode said that Initech’s developers were “monkeys” (which I’m guessing is a problem because they billed a bit more than PPI). Initech thought that Intertrode developers were elitist. No less, the vendors were able to coordinate and integrate.

Following is the system they produced. Believe it or not, it actually works. Well, sort of. So long as it’s not too hot … and you don’t talk to loudly around it … and you click just right …

Magic! App1 now can add records in App2!

Jonathan Schwartz is a Big Name at Sun. He has his own weblog:
[Quote:]

I recently met with the Chief Technology Officer of a big media company about something called the “analog hole.” The analog hole, as its called by that industry, is the vulnerability of a digital asset to piracy when it passes into the analog world – a digital camera can be used to take a picture of a copyrighted picture, for example. Or a digital camera can record a movie in a theater. He wanted to talk to me about supporting legislation that would mandate proprietary technology to detect invisible watermarks on content to stop its duplication or redistribution – no watermark, no playback (or distribution). From his vantage point, this would ensure he and his peers in the industry would be fairly compensated for their content, and pirates could be kept at bay. Legislation would mandate such a technology be included in all “computers and computing devices” with analog inputs or outputs (try to think of a device that escapes).

Rather than provide a response in the room, I turned a question back to him. First, the network you’re supposing will deliver a movie to a theater or a camera to a file server is the same network I’m presuming will run throughout your datacenter. On the internet, it’s tough to distinguish a feature length movie from a data warehouse application (bits is bits) – so would your datacenter folks support the tech industry certifying content behind your firewalls with a digital watermark? In running business systems?

Thinking as a blogger, whose rights are we seeking to protect? In the Participation Age, individuals are as likely to create the news as consume it. Maybe moreso. We saw this in London, where individuals were media outlets. (Paul Graham has a few interesting thoughts.) I, like millions of others, now produce, and distribute, movies from my phone (yes, the quality leaves something to be desired, but more due to a lack of artistic prowess than image fidelity).

So any attention, scrutiny or governance surrounding digital media would have to comprehend not only the teenager in the movie theater scenario, but the reciprocal extension of those models to the digital assets and platforms produced by companies like Sun Microsystems, Inc. (whose software distribution models are moving toward free and freely copyable), as well as those of “Schwartz Productions, Inc.” (and the blogosphere, more generally – where economic interests are as varied as network end points).

On the former question, related to DRM in the datacenter, he said he’d run it up the flagpole with his IT folks and get back to me.

After a few days, I got a response. He’d spoken with their CIO, who dismissed the relevance of my proposal to manage all digital assets under the same scheme. “You’d have to start by proving I’ve stolen something.”

Hm. Sure wouldn’t want a double standard.

Get out your red-blue glasses and float next to the International Space Station (ISS), planet Earth’s largest artificial moon. This breathtaking stereo view was constructed from two separate images (S114-E-7245, S114-E-7246) recorded as the shuttle orbiter Discovery undocked from the ISS on August 6. As seen here, the ISS is around 27 meters (90 feet) tall. The span from the automated Progress supply ship docked in the foreground to the Destiny module hidden behind the station structure is about 52 meters (171 feet) long, while the full reach of the solar arrays across the top would cover about 73 meters (240 feet). Resupplied by Discovery, the ISS is currently operated by the two member Expedition 11 crew, Sergei Krikalev and John Phillips.

[Quote:]

Fear of heights? This is definitely no place for you.

The all-glass, balcony-like “Skywalk”–shown in an illustration released this week–will extend over the edge of the Grand Canyon, 4,000 feet (1,200 meters) above the Colorado River.

“The Skywalk will be an attraction unlike any other in the world,” said Sheri Yellowhawk, CEO of the Grand Canyon Resort Corporation. The company is building the bridge in the Hualapai Indian Reservation on the south rim of the canyon.

The Skywalk is scheduled to open to the public in January 2006 as part of a new resort on the reservation. The resort, known as Grand Canyon West, is to include a re-created Indian village and a restaurant perched on the edge of the canyon. Tourism is the reservation’s biggest source of income.

This tortoise is named Cactus, 40 years old, living at the San Francisco zoo. Ten years ago it was discovered that he had bladder stones; last year, he was doing poorly, and an xray showed that the stones finally had to be removed.

They removed one stone the size of a baseball, and three the size of golf balls. Those stones took up a pound of the guy’s ten pounds of weight. And there’s how they patched him up afterwards.

full story

[Quote:]

Two men were arrested Thursday on suspicion of releasing the “Zotob” and “Mytob” worms, variants of which have infected thousands of computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The arrests were announced today by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Moroccan authorities, working with the FBI, arrested Farid Essebar, 18, a Moroccan national born in Russia who went by the screen moniker “Diabl0.”? Arrested in Turkey was Atilla Ekici, aka “Coder,”? age 21. Both individuals will be subject to local prosecutions, the FBI said.

The first Zotob worm emerged Aug. 14, just four days after Microsoft released a patch to fix the security hole that the worm exploited. A few days later, several companies — including CNN, The New York Times, and ABC News — reported widespread infections by the worm. The worm also is thought to have temporarily disabled the systems that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security uses to screen airline passengers entering the United States.

“Mytob” is a mass-mailing e-mail worm that first emerged in late February and has since spawned dozens of variants. Hackers have used Mytob to steal personal information from infected computers and to convert infected computers into spam relays.

According to a report on an Arabic new site, Essebar and Ekici allegedly used the information they stole from infected computers to facilitate a bankcard forgery scam.

Hmm… let’s check my mail server:

suske# grep Mytob /var/log/clamav/clamd.log | wc -l
14