[Quote:]

Auteursrechtenorganisatie Brein en stichting De Kinderconsument hebben een gratis programmaatje ontwikkeld dat de thuiscomputer controleert op de aanwezigheid van (illegale) muziek- film- en spelbestanden. De Digital File Check is vooral bedoeld voor ouders die geen idee hebben wat hun kinderen van internet halen, meldden de initiatiefnemers maandag.
De meeste ouders beschouwen het downloadgedrag van hun kinderen niet als een gevaar, aldus een woordvoerder van Brein maandag. Ze lopen echter wel het risico dat ze aansprakelijk gesteld worden voor het gedrag van hun kinderen.

Nou zal die rommel best wel weer alleen op windows draaien, maar ik ben toch razend benieuwd of het ding het verschil ziet tussen files die mensen legaal met iTunes hebben gekocht, legaal van hun eigen CD’s hebben geript, en files die ze niet legaal hebben. Iedem voor spelletjes. Is er overigens iemand die de stichting Brein zo ver vertrouwt dat je hun software toelaat op je computer?

[Quote:]

A court in Sydney ruled on Monday that the popular Internet file-sharing network Kazaa violates music copyrights, and it ordered the company to modify its software to help prevent copyright infringement.

[..]

“The respondents authorized users to infringe the applicants’ copyright in their sound recording,” Wilcox wrote in a summary of his judgment.

“The respondents have long known that the Kazaa system is widely used for the sharing of copyright files.”

The company’s boilerplate admonitions against violating copyrights were inadequate, he said, and Kazaa had failed to undertake technical measures to curtail copyright violations using its software. Instead, it had declared on its Web site a “Kazaa Revolution” against the record companies.

[..]

While he conceded that it would most likely be impossible for Kazaa to completely prevent copyright violations by its users, Wilcox ordered Kazaa to alter its software so that its search function would not display files with names matching a list of copyrighted music to be supplied by the industry.

And in other news, the all gun manufacturors are sued because their boilerplate admonitions against shooting people are inadequate. All Internet service providers are sued because they have long known the service they provide is used to facilitate copyright infringement, and the latest Rolling Stones record can now only be downloaded if you search for R0lling St0n3s.

By DANIEL C. DENNETT
[Quote:]

Brilliant as the design of the eye is, it betrays its origin with a tell-tale flaw: the retina is inside out. The nerve fibers that carry the signals from the eye’s rods and cones (which sense light and color) lie on top of them, and have to plunge through a large hole in the retina to get to the brain, creating the blind spot. No intelligent designer would put such a clumsy arrangement in a camcorder, and this is just one of hundreds of accidents frozen in evolutionary history that confirm the mindlessness of the historical process.

[..]

The focus on intelligent design has, paradoxically, obscured something else: genuine scientific controversies about evolution that abound. In just about every field there are challenges to one established theory or another. The legitimate way to stir up such a storm is to come up with an alternative theory that makes a prediction that is crisply denied by the reigning theory – but that turns out to be true, or that explains something that has been baffling defenders of the status quo, or that unifies two distant theories at the cost of some element of the currently accepted view.

To date, the proponents of intelligent design have not produced anything like that. No experiments with results that challenge any mainstream biological understanding. No observations from the fossil record or genomics or biogeography or comparative anatomy that undermine standard evolutionary thinking.

Instead, the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist’s work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a “controversy” to teach.

Note that the trick is content-free. You can use it on any topic. “Smith’s work in geology supports my argument that the earth is flat,” you say, misrepresenting Smith’s work. When Smith responds with a denunciation of your misuse of her work, you respond, saying something like: “See what a controversy we have here? Professor Smith and I are locked in a titanic scientific debate. We should teach the controversy in the classrooms.” And here is the delicious part: you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the difficult details.

William Dembski, one of the most vocal supporters of intelligent design, notes that he provoked Thomas Schneider, a biologist, into a response that Dr. Dembski characterizes as “some hair-splitting that could only look ridiculous to outsider observers.” What looks to scientists – and is – a knockout objection by Dr. Schneider is portrayed to most everyone else as ridiculous hair-splitting.

In short, no science. Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, “You haven’t explained everything yet,” is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn’t explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn’t yet tried to explain anything.

To formulate a competing hypothesis, you have to get down in the trenches and offer details that have testable implications. So far, intelligent design proponents have conveniently sidestepped that requirement, claiming that they have no specifics in mind about who or what the intelligent designer might be.

To see this shortcoming in relief, consider an imaginary hypothesis of intelligent design that could explain the emergence of human beings on this planet:

About six million years ago, intelligent genetic engineers from another galaxy visited Earth and decided that it would be a more interesting planet if there was a language-using, religion-forming species on it, so they sequestered some primates and genetically re-engineered them to give them the language instinct, and enlarged frontal lobes for planning and reflection. It worked.

If some version of this hypothesis were true, it could explain how and why human beings differ from their nearest relatives, and it would disconfirm the competing evolutionary hypotheses that are being pursued.

We’d still have the problem of how these intelligent genetic engineers came to exist on their home planet, but we can safely ignore that complication for the time being, since there is not the slightest shred of evidence in favor of this hypothesis.

But here is something the intelligent design community is reluctant to discuss: no other intelligent-design hypothesis has anything more going for it.

[Quote:]

When CBS first aired Press Your Luck in 1983, it quickly caught the attention of Michael Larsen, an unemployed Mister Softee ice cream truck driver from Ohio. It was winter time, and although Larsen wasn’t selling many popsicles, he enjoyed watching contestants of average intelligence from around the country answer insipid trivia questions and gamble their winnings at the Big Board.

The Big Board on Press Your Luck was a randomized grid, a roulette-style array of blinking boxes with different offerings: thousands of dollars in cash, fabulous prizes, dream vacations, free spins, and “Whammies” — cartoon caricatures of a grinning, crudely drawn li’l red devil equipped with a pointed pitchfork suitable for pokes in the tuckus. If a player hit his plunger and accidentally landed on a Whammy, he’d go bankrupt and lose all the cash he’d accumulated, forcing him to start all over again from zero. Whammies were dispensed with horrible honking noises, screeches, and car-crash sounds. Not only did Whammies scream out that a contestant had gotten a little too greedy trying to gobble up big money, Whammies were obnoxious and humiliating to the participants. Michael found great solace watching people win, lose, and press their luck. On a good day, contestants could take home a few thousand dollars. Not bad, Larsen figured.

And so he spent his last $100.00 on a discount airline ticket and flew to Los Angeles, hoping to be contestant. Press Your Luck executive producer Bill Carruthers remembers Larsen’s audition for the show: “He really impressed us. He had charisma, he played the game very well. Here was this out of work ice cream guy who told us he loved the show so much he flew out on his own to try to get on.” Bob Edwards, the contestant coordinator, had a few doubts: “There was something about the guy that worried me.”

[Quote:]

Forty-four percent (44%) of American adults now approve of the way George W. Bush is performing his role as President. That’s just a point above the lowest level ever recorded by Rasmussen Reports. Fifty-five percent (55%) disapprove.

Forty-one percent (41%) of Americans now Strongly Disapprove of the President’s job performance while just 21% Strongly Approve. Earlier in the year, those numbers were essentially even.

When looking at the disaster in New Orleans and surrounding areas, just 28% of Americans say that the federal government has done a good or an excellent job. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, consumer confidence has fallen to its lowest level in more than two years.

[Quote:]

In what must be the biggest Freudian slip for any politician, Home Secretary Charles Clarke revealed:

Home Secretary Charles Clarke last night tried to breathe new life into his bid to introduce national identity cards and declared: “Big Brother society is already here and my job is to control it.”

More bullshit about I.D. cards from this fanatical control freak here…

Meanwhile, at The British Association Science Festival in Dublin, Dr Emily Finch who interviews career criminals about their activities, states that “The UK government’s proposed ID scheme will do little to stop identity theft and may actually exacerbate fraudulent behaviour in its early years.”

Link to BBC Science section for a summary of Dr. Emily Finch’s paper.

[Jared Arsement, Louisiana]

..they sent out a bulletin to anyone with a flat-bottom boat, which is pretty much anyone living down here..

..telling a cajun man that we need you and your boat is like telling a bunch of kids at fat camp that you have this enourmous pizza surplus you need to get rid of..

watch the video.

Jared, if you’re ever in the Netherlands, just bring this video. I pretty much garantuee you’ll never have to buy your own beer.

video:

And I want to give you one last story and I’ll shut up and let you tell me whatever you want to tell me. The guy who runs this building I’m in, emergency management, he’s responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard nursing home and every day she called him and said, “Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?” And he said, “Yeah, Mama, somebody’s coming to get you. Somebody’s coming to get you on Tuesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Wednesday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Thursday. Somebody’s coming to get you on Friday.” And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night.

full transcript

The sad truth is that the professionals will spin this and spin it and spin it some more, until the average citizen doesn’t know what to think or who to blame, only that something horrible has happened and no one knows why.
I suspect that in a few days, PR teams will take the few success stories, stories of true heroism, and put a nice political sheen over them to promote unity and faith in the system and all that jazz.

We need to view this video today. And remember.

[Quote:]

Last September, a Category 5 hurricane battered the small island of Cuba with 160-mile-per-hour winds. More than 1.5 million Cubans were evacuated to higher ground ahead of the storm. Although the hurricane destroyed 20,000 houses, no one died.

What is Cuban President Fidel Castro’s secret? According to Dr. Nelson Valdes, a sociology professor at the University of New Mexico, and specialist in Latin America, “the whole civil defense is embedded in the community to begin with. People know ahead of time where they are to go.”

“Cuba’s leaders go on TV and take charge,” said Valdes. Contrast this with George W. Bush’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina. The day after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, Bush was playing golf. He waited three days to make a TV appearance and five days before visiting the disaster site. In a scathing editorial on Thursday, the New York Times said, “nothing about the president’s demeanor yesterday – which seemed casual to the point of carelessness – suggested that he understood the depth of the current crisis.”

“Merely sticking people in a stadium is unthinkable” in Cuba, Valdes said. “Shelters all have medical personnel, from the neighborhood. They have family doctors in Cuba, who evacuate together with the neighborhood, and already know, for example, who needs insulin.”

They also evacuate animals and veterinarians, TV sets and refrigerators, “so that people aren’t reluctant to leave because people might steal their stuff,” Valdes observed.

[Quote:]

President Fidel Castro reiterates medical care offer to the american people in his remarks during the tv round table.

Here is the translation of his communication…
Our country is ready to send, in the small hours of morning, 100 clinicians and specialists in Comprehensive General Medicine, who at dawn tomorrow, Saturday, could be in Houston International Airport, Texas, the closest to the region struck by the tragedy, in order to be transferred by air, sea or river to the isolated shelters, facilities and neighborhoods in the city of New Orleans, where the population and families are that require emergency medical care or first aid.

These Cuban personnel would be carrying backpacks with 24 kilograms of medications, known to be essential in such situations to save lives, as well as basic diagnosis kits. They would be prepared to work alone or in groups of two or more, depending on the circumstances, for as long as necessary.

Likewise, Cuba is ready to send via Houston, or any other airport of your choosing, 500 additional specialists in Comprehensive General Medicine, with the same equipment, who could be at their destination point at noon or in the afternoon of tomorrow, Saturday, September 3.

A third group of 500 specialists in Comprehensive General Medicine could be arriving in the morning of Sunday, September 4. Thus, the 1100 said medical doctors, with the resources described tantamount to 26.4 tons of medications and diagnosis kits, would be caring for the neediest persons in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.

These medical doctors have the necessary international experience and elementary knowledge of the English language that would allow them to communicate with the patients.

We stand ready waiting for the US authorities� response.

September 2, 2005
18:00 hs”

[Quote:]

And I’m not looking forward to this trip. I got a feel for it when I flew over before. It — for those who have not — trying to conceive what we’re talking about, it’s as if the entire Gulf Coast were obliterated by a — the worst kind of weapon you can imagine. And now we’re going to go try to comfort people in that part of the world.

— George W. Bush, Sept 2, 2005.

Hmmm…

Hmmm…

Naaah. Can’t be.

[Quote:]

Early on Friday morning Christie Weber watched the Mayor of New Orleans screaming on CNN, “We need buses to get these people out of here. Get off your ass and get down here.”

She picked up the phone and started calling local charter bus companies. By 6 AM she discovered that there was an abundance of vehicles ready and waiting to be deployed – if and when they were called upon. But, until now no one had called. All of the charter bus companies that Weber rang up had already signed on with FEMA several days earlier, and they were just waiting for a call back regarding financial reimbursement, a destination and an approved route. Each bus costs $8,000 to make the round trip and requires 6 drivers to run non-stop.

“I called four bus lines,” says Weber. “Kobussen Buses was the only line that said he would ask his drivers if they could deal with all that – after they got back. They all said ‘Lets go’ if we can get a route.” Weber explains, “Even the owner’s Dad and uncle volunteered to return to service to help drive the buses.”

Next she decided to call the Governor’s office in Louisiana instead of FEMA. They responded immediately with, “Please, God Bless You, YES!” and provided her with a route and a letter to Wisconsin Emergency Management requesting their assistance in staffing the buses with law enforcement officers. The State of Wisconsin responded requiring that each bus have bathroom facilities, 2 law officers and one medical assistant on board before they would approve of the mission.

Weber put a call out to local Door County law enforcement with no luck due to the demands of a busy Labor Day weekend. She started contacting other nearby communities and the results were amazing. Within an hour she had enough volunteers to staff 4 buses from the Fox Valley – each with two law officers and a medic on the finest coaches Kobussen had. All of this was accomplished in less than 24 hours, from the first phone call to the buses loading and leaving on Saturday morning, carrying a flat of drinking water donated by the local Wal-Mart and a collection of medical supplies and other contributions.

[Quote:]

We fill the three buses quickly with the people waiting outside. Priority is given to women and children and elderly people as well as families. We take 150 people. Nobody asks where the buses are headed. Nobody cares. And I begin to worry. Permission has not been given to transport these people to the air force base. I worry that these victims are being used as fodder for a political agenda. I wonder where they would have been taken if the Black Caucus had not shown up with their own buses. Somewhere better? But then I think at what point do you just go? I wouldn’t wish that airport on anyone. I console myself with Senator Fields’ comments earlier: Even if these people sleep on the buses it will be better than their last six nights.

[..]

“You will absolutely not get off this bus,” an officer says. When Jesse Jackson [also part of the delegation] gets out of the front car he’s immediately accosted by a shelter resident.

“You can’t bring those types of people here,” the man shouts. “Those are rapists and looters.”

“Now hold on,” Jesse says.

“Get the hell out of here,” the man says. The police guard the buses but make no move to stop the man, who seems like he might attack the Reverend. “It’s not a race thing,” the man continues. “My wife is half-black.” He points to a pregnant woman standing nearby. “We don’t want your kind. This is a good place.”

The people on the bus are not allowed off. Apparently the shelter is 85 percent full and has only 20 open beds.

Fields says that someone called ahead to the shelter and was told it was all right to go there. But the leader of the Red Cross at the shelter vehemently denies that anyone called her. Jesse Jackson grumbles that they were set up.

People at the first shelter tell them that there is another shelter with space nearby. The convoy leaves the first shelter, driving five minutes across town.

It’s past midnight now. At the second shelter things go much better. We’re greeted by Police Chief Jay Barber, a kind man with a strong resemblance to Terry Bradshaw. Whoever the officers were at the first shelter apparently didn’t work for Barber. Barber’s men wear blue. The officers at the first shelter wore green. “I’ve got room for 150,” he says, about the number of people on the buses. The shelter is clean and well lit. There are large televisions, food, air-conditioning, cots, and showers, a separate play area for the children. The people are taken in small groups. Each is disinfected for sanitary reasons. Bags are searched for weapons. “We had an incident a few days ago,” Barber says.

I ask the Reverend Jackson what happened at the first shelter on the other side of town. “When people act like children,” he says. “You have to act like an adult.”

“We’ve been waiting for folks for two days,” Barber tells me. “We’ve been expecting people. I’ve been taking walk-ins.”

Watching the events in New Orleans unfold from here in Europe, mostly via BBC World, we have the impression that the storm blew up a corner of the carpet beneath which America had long been sweeping some of its fundamental problems.
Among the fundamental problems revealed are:

(1) the enormous divide between rich and poor (which has expanded rapidly in the past two or three decades);

(2) the racial divide leaving blacks in the poorest class (nearly all the stranded, angry, unassisted poor we see on the TV screen are black),

(3) the failure to invest in infrastructure (not only the failure to protect the dikes and levies, but the failure to storm-proof the electric and telephone systems by burying cables, etc.);

And, perhaps most striking of all,

(4)the bizarre law-and-order mentality that gives priority to protecting property more than human lives, take for another example the order to the National Guard to shoot-to-kill looters. The above story shows that this is not just an incident. Perhaps it is going too far to state that we are watching a collapse similar to the collapse of the Soviet Union fifteen years ago. Much as the total-collectivization and total-centralization of society in the USSR collapsed, eventually, of its own internal contradictions, we wonder whether or not America, too, with its ultra-individualistic, ultra-material ideology and its absence of much concern about the collective needs of society (health care, education, infrastructure, etc.) will collapse of its own internal contradictions.

[Quote:]

Under the command of President Bush’s two senior political advisers, the White House rolled out a plan this weekend to contain the political damage from the administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

It orchestrated visits by cabinet members to the region, leading up to an extraordinary return visit by Mr. Bush planned for Monday, directed administration officials not to respond to attacks from Democrats on the relief efforts, and sought to move the blame for the slow response to Louisiana state officials, according to Republicans familiar with the White House plan.

The effort is being directed by Mr. Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove, and his communications director, Dan Bartlett. It began late last week after Congressional Republicans called White House officials to register alarm about what they saw as a feeble response by Mr. Bush to the hurricane, according to Republican Congressional aides.

A police car drives past a woman’s dead body on the sidewalk at Magazine and Jackson streets 02 September 2005 in New Orleans, Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Some New Orleans police and firefighters were driven to suicide by the trauma of trying to hold the city together in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Mayor Ray Nagin said.(AFP/File/James Nielsen)

US Airforce Lt. Nathan Brosheal holds a kitten rescued and airlifted to New Orleans International Airport in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana. (AFP/James Nielsen)

[Quote:]

Of course the looming next-gen optical format war about to go down between Blu-ray and HD-DVD might be kind of interesting if it weren’t taking place, well, in your very livingroom. But with talks broken down and devices starting to crop up, it looks like the first blows will soon be felt—but aren’t they supposed to be hitting one another and not the end user? Because this little bit in a Reuters piece this morning left us a little unsettled:

On top of that, consumers should expect punishment for tinkering with their Blu-ray players, as many have done with current DVD players, for instance to remove regional coding. The new, Internet-connected and secure players will report any “hack” and the device can be disabled remotely.

Are they talking about PVP-OPM techniques and rejected HDMI keys, or something else far more sinister? Because apparently “A hacked player is any player that is doing something it’s not supposed to do,” which open to a pretty fair amount of interpretation—most of which egregious.

Would you buy a player that can be remotely disabled because of the content you’re watching? Interesting how the consumer electronics industry insists on committing hari-kiri. Everyone will buy theinexpensive Chinese knockoff BluRay/HD-DVD players that don’t have the same restrictions.

And what happens when the script kiddies currently writing Zobor and such decide it’s a nice idea to hack a DNS server, re-route all the players traffic to their own site, and let every player download the descruct code?

Oh, and how lovely is this:

“A hacked player is any player that is doing something it’s not supposed to do,” Setos said, adding the jury was still out if regional coding would be maintained or scrapped.

That’s a fairly clear and limited definition, right?

[Quote:]

The government is withholding more information than ever from the public and expanding ways of shrouding data. Last year, federal agencies spent a record $148 creating and storing new secrets for each $1 spent declassifying old secrets, a coalition of watchdog groups reported Saturday.

That’s a $28 jump from 2003 when $120 was spent to keep secrets for every $1 spent revealing them. In the late 1990s, the ratio was $15-$17 a year to $1, according to the secrecy report card by OpenTheGovernment.org.

[..]

“The 9-11 Commission pointed out that too much secrecy can make us less safe from terrorists, and the inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina shows the public needs to know what could happen in their communities and what the response plans are,” said Blum. He said a new law outside the classification system shrouds “sensitive homeland security information” about infrastructure vulnerabilities and plans.

“Public engagement in helping fight terrorism or addressing public health risks is the biggest single advantage American society has,” Blum said.