People gather to watch an oil rig that broke apart in drydock during Hurricane Katrina and is stuck on the Cochrane-Africatown USA Bridge over the Mobile River Tuesday Aug. 30, 2005, in Mobile, Ala. (AP Photo/Rob Carr)

[Quote:]

Buses taking Hurricane Katrina victims far from the squalor of the Superdome stopped rolling early Saturday. About 2,000 people remained in the stadium and could be there until Sunday, according to the Texas Air National Guard.

Officials had hoped to evacuate the last of the crowd before dawn Saturday. Guard members said they were told only that the buses had stopped coming and to shut down the area where the vehicles were being loaded.

“We were rolling,” Capt. Jean Clark said. “If the buses had kept coming, we would have this whole place cleaned out already or pretty close to it.”

Those left behind early Saturday were orderly, sitting down after hearing news that evacuations were temporarily stalled.

[..]

At one point Friday, the evacuation was interrupted briefly when school buses pulled up so some 700 guests and employees from the Hyatt Hotel could move to the head of the evacuation line � much to the amazement of those who had been crammed in the Superdome since last Sunday.

“How does this work? They (are) clean, they are dry, they get out ahead of us?” exclaimed Howard Blue, 22, who tried to get in their line. The National Guard blocked him as other guardsmen helped the well-dressed guests with their luggage.

[Quote:]

Minister Pechtold van Bestuurlijke Vernieuwing vindt dat Nederland zich bij de keel laat pakken door angst. In een interview met dagblad Trouw van zaterdag stelt de bewindsman dat hij de dreiging van terroristische aanslagen niet wil bagatelliseren, maar hij maakt zich wel zorgen over onder druk staande grondrechten.

“Met een almaar verdergaande beperking van vrijheden van burgers dreigen we mee te werken aan wat terroristen juist proberen te bereiken: een ontwrichting van onze economie, van onze open democratische samenleving”, aldus Pechtold.

Duh. Kun je ook even je collega donnert wakker maken?

If you’re looking for another nice rant, look no further..

The GOP is trying to spin that the local and state government hadn’t asked for help. Well, now we got the memo:

http://gov.louisiana.gov/Disaster%20Relief%20Request.pdf

[Quote:]

Thousands of refugees of Hurricane Katrina were transported to the Astrodome in Houston this week. In an extreme act of looting, one group actually stole a bus to escape ravaged areas in Louisiana.

About 100 people packed into the stolen bus. They were the first to enter the Houston Astrodome, but they weren’t exactly welcomed.

The big yellow school bus wasn’t expected or approved to pass through the stadium’s gates. Randy Nathan, who was on the bus, said they were desperate to get out of town.

“If it werent for him right there,” he said, “we’d still be in New Orleans underwater. He got the bus for us.”

Eighteen-year-old Jabbor Gibson jumped aboard the bus as it sat abandoned on a street in New Orleans and took control.

“I just took the bus and drove all the way here…seven hours straight,’ Gibson admitted. “I hadn’t ever drove a bus.”

The teen packed it full of complete strangers and drove to Houston. He beat thousands of evacuees slated to arrive there.

“I t’s better than being in New Orleans,” said fellow passenger Albert McClaud, “we want to be somewhere where we’re safe.”

During a long and impatient delay, children popped their heads out of bus windows and mothers clutched their babies.

One 8-day-old infant spent the first days of his life surrounded by chaos. He’s one of the many who are homeless and hungry.

Authorities eventually allowed the renegade passengers inside the dome. But the 18-year-old who ensured their safety could find himself in a world of trouble for stealing the school bus.

“I dont care if I get blamed for it ,” Gibson said, “as long as I saved my people.”

Sixty legally chartered buses were expected to arrive in Houston throughout the night. Thousands of people will be calling the Astrodome “home,” at least for now.

[Quote:]

Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer vowed to “kill” internet search leader Google Inc. in an obscenity-laced tirade, and Google chased a prized Microsoft executive “like wolves,” according to documents filed in an increasingly bitter legal battle between the rivals.

The allegations, filed in a Washington state court, represent the latest salvos in a showdown triggered by Google’s July hiring of former Microsoft executive Kai Fu-Lee to oversee a research and development centre that Google plans to open in China. Lee started at Google the day after he resigned from Microsoft.

The tug-of-war over Lee – known for his work on computer recognition of language – has exposed the behind-the-scenes animosity that has been brewing between two of high-tech’s best-known companies.

Ballmer’s threat last November was recounted in a sworn declaration by a former Microsoft engineer, Mark Lucovsky, who said he met with Microsoft’s chief executive 10 months ago to discuss his decision to leave the company after six years.

After learning Lucovsky was leaving to take a job at Google, Ballmer picked up his chair and hurled it across his office, according to the declaration.
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Ballmer then pejoratively berated Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Lucovsky recalled.

“I’m going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again,” the declaration quotes Ballmer. “I’m going to fucking kill Google.”

Before joining Google, Schmidt was a top executive at Sun Microsystems Inc. and Novell Inc., a pair of tech companies that Microsoft has previously battled.

In a statement, Ballmer described Lucovsky’s recollection as a “gross exaggeration. Mark’s decision to leave was disappointing and I urged him strongly to change his mind. But his characterization of that meeting is not accurate.”

note: apparently australian press is not allowed to use certain words. Whereever there was the word “f—ing” in the text, I replaced it with what I suspect was the real word. I could be wrong in this replacement, of course

Note: for those of you unable to read cyrillic, the title is explained here

When Katrina Blankenship started getting phone calls about the projected path of Hurricane Katrina, she wasn’t quite sure why.

But it was her Web site, Katrina.com, that got people’s attention.

So Blankenship converted her personal Web design and computer consulting site into a one-stop shop for all things related to helping out the hurricane-ravaged South.

“I was really shocked. I had no idea it would turn into this,” said Blankenship, who lives in Powhatan, 30 miles southwest of Richmond. “The e-mails are pouring in. I had about 1,500 come through today.”

Since Sunday, the Web site has received about 350,000 hits from places all over the world. And Blankenship, who is working on a dial-up Internet connection, has expanded her bandwidth to accommodate all the traffic.

Blankenship, 37, has compiled links to other sites that provide shelter information and victim assistance and developed a forum for people to offer help and to search for missing people. The forum is filled with hundreds of posts: some from people looking for relatives, others from people offering shelter, supplies and even a man from Kabul, Afghanistan, offering to translate documents and information into Middle Eastern languages.

The site even has garnered the attention of people wanting to buy it � one man offered $500,000 for the domain.

She declined. “It’s not for sale, it’s not a monetary-type thing.”

A fire burns on the east side of New Orleans early Friday morning, Sept. 2, 2005. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrine, firefighters say they will let the fire burn itself out. The explosion jolted residents awake early Friday, illuminating the pre-dawn sky with red and orange flames over the city where corpses rotted along flooded sidewalks and bands of armed thugs thwarted fitful rescue efforts. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

[Quote:]

Norway’s best known IT export, DVD Jon, has hacked encryption coding in Microsoft’s Windows Media Player, opening up content broadcast for the multimedia player to alternative devices on multiple platforms.

Jon Lech Johansen has reverse engineered a proprietary algorithm, which is used to wrap Media Player NSC files and ostensibly protect them from hackers sniffing for the media’s source IP address, port or stream format. He has also made a decoder available.

Johansen doesn’t believe there is a good reason to keep the NSC files encrypted, because once you open the file with Media Player to start viewing the stream, the IP address and port can be revealed by running the netstat network utility that is included with most operating systems.

The hacker hopes his move will make content streamed to Media Player more widely available to users of alternative players on non-Windows platforms.

[..]

Johansen said claims made by companies like Cisco Systems, who ship products with NSC support, that the encoding he cracked protects the media don’t make much sense. “It’s more likely that the purpose is to prevent competing media players from supporting the NSC format,” he observed.

Perched on the crest “Husband Hill,” Spirit took images for a summit panorama and used instruments on the robotic arm to investigate soil targets.

The full panorama is here

[Quote:]

“When the President’s travel details stop us from putting the helicopters in the air that will deliver help, we’ve got problems. When, after an hour and a half of waiting at the instructed location without information to greet the President today in New Orleans, logistical and communications problems prevented me from reaching the meeting – we’ve got problems. The poor communication here is indicative of the larger communication problems that are hindering all of the life saving efforts.”

finally some competence on the ground..

[Quote:]

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin calls Lt. Gen. Russel Honore a “John Wayne dude” who can “get some stuff done.”

“He came off the doggone chopper, and he started cussing and people started moving,” Nagin said in an interview Thursday night with a local radio station.

The three-star general directed the deployment of an estimated 1,000 National Guard troops from a New Orleans street corner Friday, making it clear that it was a humanitarian relief operation. Getting food and water to the people at the city’s convention center was a difficult process, Honore said.

“If you ever have 20,000 people come to supper, you know what I’m talking about. If it’s easy, it would have been done already.”

CNN of all places has a great overview of the BS coming out of washington about Katrina – “security is really good”, the bodies in the convention center are “rumors” – versus reports from the ground.

an example:
Quote:]

Brown: I’ve just learned today that we … are in the process of completing the evacuations of the hospitals, that those are going very well.

CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta: It’s gruesome. I guess that is the best word for it. If you think about a hospital, for example, the morgue is in the basement, and the basement is completely flooded. So you can just imagine the scene down there. But when patients die in the hospital, there is no place to put them, so they’re in the stairwells. It is one of the most unbelievable situations I’ve seen as a doctor, certainly as a journalist as well. There is no electricity. There is no water. There’s over 200 patients still here remaining. …We found our way in through a chopper and had to land at a landing strip and then take a boat. And it is exactly … where the boat was traveling where the snipers opened fire yesterday, halting all the evacuations.

Dr. Matthew Bellew, Charity Hospital: We still have 200 patients in this hospital, many of them needing care that they just can’t get. The conditions are such that it’s very dangerous for the patients. Just about all the patients in our services had fevers. Our toilets are overflowing. They are filled with stool and urine. And the smell, if you can imagine, is so bad, you know, many of us had gagging and some people even threw up. It’s pretty rough.