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Het Openbaar Ministerie (OM) heeft de regels geschonden bij de aanbesteding van een order voor duizend digitale flitspalen. Dat stelde de advocaat van elektronicabedrijf Siemens Nederland, dat de order niet heeft gekregen, donderdag tijdens een kort geding voor de rechtbank in Utrecht. Siemens eist dat het Bureau Verkeershandhaving van het OM een geheel nieuwe aanbestedingsprocedure begint.

De order voor de digitale flitspalen is voorlopig toegewezen aan een concurrent van Siemens. Zes bedrijven die de order binnen wilden slepen, moesten meedoen aan een test die volgens Siemens niet deugde. Bovendien zou Siemens te weinig informatie hebben gekregen over de locatie van de flitspalen om een goede prijs te kunnen maken, stelde het bedrijf.

Volgens advocate van de Staat heeft Siemens geen enkel belang bij een rechterlijke uitspraak. Siemens was volgens advocate C. Bartels verreweg de duurste inschrijver. Tevens voldeed het bedrijf niet aan de minimumeisen.

Siemens hoopt op vertraging om in de tussentijd een wel aan die eisen te kunnen voldoen, stelde de advocate. Ze wees erop dat momenteel geen nieuwe flitspalen worden besteld en kapotte flitspalen niet worden vervangen.

Het is wellicht handig dat laatste even te herhalen. Kapotte flitspalen worden niet vervangen.

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When I was photographing this 5 month old long earred owl named Nemo, he was startled by an unusual sound. As a natural response, he immediately puffed up to a very large size in order to scare off the perpetrator. It is rare to experience this kind of reaction in an owl. Nemo went back to normal size when he discovered that the threat wasn’t real.

This is, of course, why puffer fish are commonly referred to as “the owls of the deep”.

Oh, wait..

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The update is more than 3.5 megabytes in size, and it appears to contain new versions of almost all the files included in the initial installation of the entire DRM system, as well as creating some new files. In short, they’re not just taking away the rootkit-like function — they’re almost certainly adding things to the system as well. And once again, they’re not disclosing what they’re doing.

No doubt they’ll ask us to just trust them. I wouldn’t. The companies still assert — falsely — that the original rootkit-like software “does not compromise security” and “[t]here should be no concern” about it. So I wouldn’t put much faith in any claim that the new update is harmless. And the companies claim to have developed “new ways of cloaking files on a hard drive”. So I wouldn’t derive much comfort from carefully worded assertions that they have removed “the … component .. that has been discussed”.

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IT IS surpassingly strange that half of Americans recently polled (2004) not only do not believe in evolution by natural selection but do not believe in evolution at all. Americans are certainly capable of belief, and with rock-like conviction if it originates in religious dogma. In evidence is the 60 per cent that accept the prophecies of the Bible’s Book of Revelation as truth, and in yet more evidence is the weight that faith-based positions hold in political life. Most of the religious right opposes the teaching of evolution in public schools, either by an outright ban on the subject or, at the least, by insisting that it be treated as “only a theory” rather than a “fact”.

Yet biologists are unanimous in concluding that evolution is a fact. The evidence they and thousands of others have adduced over 150 years falls together in intricate and interlocking detail. The multitudinous examples range from the small changes in DNA sequences observed as they occur in real time to finely graded sequences within larger evolutionary changes in the fossil record. Further, on the basis of comparably strong evidence, natural selection grows ever stronger as the prevailing explanation of evolution.

Many who accept the fact of evolution cannot, however, on religious grounds, accept the operation of blind chance and the absence of divine purpose implicit in natural selection. They support the alternative explanation of intelligent design. The reasoning they offer is not based on evidence but on the lack of it. The formulation of intelligent design is a default argument advanced in support of a non sequitur. It is in essence the following: there are some phenomena that have not yet been explained and that (most importantly) the critics personally cannot imagine being explained; therefore there must be a supernatural designer at work. The designer is seldom specified, but in the canon of intelligent design it is most certainly not Satan and his angels, nor any god or gods conspicuously different from those accepted in the believer’s faith.

Flipping the scientific argument upside down, the intelligent designers join the strict creationists (who insist that no evolution ever occurred) by arguing that scientists resist the supernatural theory because it is counter to their own personal secular beliefs. This may have a kernel of truth; everybody suffers from some amount of bias. But in this case bias is easily overcome. The critics forget how the reward system in science works. Any researcher who can prove the existence of intelligent design within the accepted framework of science will make history and achieve eternal fame. They will prove at last that science and religious dogma are compatible. Even a combined Nobel prize and Templeton prize (the latter designed to encourage the search for just such harmony) would fall short as proper recognition. Every scientist would like to accomplish such a epoch-making advance. But no one has even come close, because unfortunately there is no evidence, no theory and no criteria for proof that even marginally might pass for science.

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A Tulsa parent is outraged over how her child was disciplined at school for wearing a costume.

Crystal Harris says her 5-year old son was forced to take off his costume, and go through the entire school day with only his underwear on.

The incident happened Monday at Walt Disney Elementary.

School officials acknowledge they have a policy that forbids costumes, and that’s why the teacher did what she did.

They say they’ve have apologized to the family.

zero tolerance often equals zero intelligence…

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Earlier this month, at a special event in San Jose, Apple unveiled its third generation iMac G5, a consumer oriented desktop computer that combines a mid-level PowerPC G5 microprocessor with an all-in-one design that, in typical Apple fashion, has redefined computer style and design. According to Apple, the new iMac G5 includes three great new features: It is even thinner than its predecessor, it includes an integrated iSight video camera, and it ships with an exclusive digital media environment called Front Row, which can be controlled via a bundled remote control. The Front Row software is what I’m concerned about today, because many people–myself included–have described Front Row as a Media Center rip-off.

One has to think that Microsoft has feared Apple’s entry into the Media Center market for some time. Publicly, Microsoft says all the right things about Apple being a great competitor, and so on, but the truth is that Microsoft is scared to death of Apple. No one really believes that the Mac will ever regain serious market share per se. But Apple’s digital media offerings–the iPod and iTunes, primarily–dominate their respective markets in the same ways that Windows and Office dominate theirs. Apple is beating Microsoft so badly in digital music, in fact, that Microsoft has privately conceded the market to Apple for the next few years. They’re basically just waiting for smart phones with digital music capabilities to start appearing to see how the next generation fares. But leadership in digital music is important, because it’s an emerging market, and it leads the way to other digital markets, including that for digital movies, which will one day be quite lucrative. If Microsoft concedes digital music, a loss in digital video is likely to follow.

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Continuing with this week’s series of “punch line code” samples, I wanted to share with you this small bit of T-SQL that Tracy McKibben uncovered. It’s from the same codebase that we all peeked into a number of weeks back. Anyway, if you needed a command that would delete all rows from a specific table, you’d probably do something like this:

DELETE FROM HashIndex

Or, maybe this:

TRUNCATE TABLE HashIndex

Both do the job, each behaving specially in its own special way. Tracy’s colleague, however, was satisfied with neither; he wanted to extra careful not to delete rows that didn’t exist …

DELETE FROM HashIndex
WHERE ItemHash >= (SELECT MIN(ItemHash) FROM HashIndex)

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In case you missed the broadcast Friday on Fox 5 (WTTG-TV), reporter Robbie Chavez was at Howard trying to interview protesting students when a campus security guard showed up and tried to stop him.

Chavez: The university went to great lengths . . .

Guard: I’m asking you to leave the campus now.

Chavez: . . . to hide angry protesting students . . .

Guard: I’m warning you, you don’t do that.

Chavez: . . . a big effort to keep a lid on the growing frustration.

During the protest, dozens of students locked arms around a flagpole in the Quadrangle, a designated forbidden zone at the center of the campus, and refused to move despite warnings from campus security that Secret Service rooftop snipers might open fire on them.

[..]

What might have been a public relations coup for Bush — a visit to a historically black college to show concern for at-risk youths — ended up as another Katrina-like moment, with the president appearing spaced-out, waving and smiling for television cameras while students were trying to break through campus security to get to the cordoned-off cafeteria.

[..]

Howard is not some hotbed of political activism. The biggest event of the year is homecoming, which features two fashion shows, a step show and lots of hip-hop celebrities. As the rapper Ludacris put it in his summer hit, “Pimpin’ All Over the World”:

Jump in the car and ride for hours,

Makin’ sure I don’t miss the homecoming at Howard.

To set off a student protest at this school, you’d have to be politically tone-deaf in the extreme, out of touch and flying blind. And yet, Bush did it.

God help us in Iraq.

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A Vatican cardinal said Thursday the faithful should listen to what secular modern science has to offer, warning that religion risks turning into “fundamentalism” if it ignores scientific reason.

Cardinal Paul Poupard, who heads the Pontifical Council for Culture, made the comments at a news conference on a Vatican project to help end the “mutual prejudice” between religion and science that has long bedeviled the Roman Catholic Church and is part of the evolution debate in the United States

I have a newsflash for the Vatican: science shows that condoms are an effective weapong against the AIDS epidemic.

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Want to cheat in your online game and not get caught? Just buy a Sony BMG copy protected CD.

World of Warcraft hackers have confirmed that the hiding capabilities of Sony BMG’s content protection software can make tools made for cheating in the online world impossible to detect. The software–deemed a “rootkit” by many security experts–is shipped with tens of thousands of the record company’s music titles.

Blizzard Entertainment, the maker of World of Warcraft, has created a controversial program that detects cheaters by scanning the processes that are running at the time the game is played. Called the Warden, the anti-cheating program cannot detect any files that are hidden with Sony BMG’s content protection, which only requires that the hacker add the prefix “$sys$” to file names.

Despite making a patch available on Wednesday to consumers to amend its copy protection software’s behavior, Sony BMG and First 4 Internet, the maker of the content protection technology, have both disputed claims that their system could harm the security of a Windows system. Yet, other software makers that rely on the integrity of the operating system are finding that hidden code makes security impossible.

I love this guy on Slashdot who wants an ISO image of the Sony CD so he can cheat on WoW. No Sony is getting their stuff pirated not for the content, but for the anti-piracy software!

Can you imagine what happens when (not “if”!) this escalates?

Blizzard:Those DRM bastards want to make it easier to cheat on our games. Lets include a P2P music sharing client into our next release!
Player:Hey… WTF? Did that monster just drop a Metalica CD?

Let me introduce a new word:

mootkit.

noun: software program that interferes with another software program’s attempt to interfere with the actions of a given user.

synonyms: see windows, et al

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Hot on the heels of a 10.4.1 “update”? which pulled parts from an uncracked 10.4.3 OSx86 to improve the already cracked version, we’ve received confirmed reports that the full OS X 10.4.3 installation DVD has been leaked via bittorrent. Although the TPM restrictions are still protecting the OS as of this writing, the word on the street is that hackers have already begun dissecting Apple’s new security measures. We are told that the TPM protections in 10.4.3 are significantly stronger, indicating that Apple has used the previous two releases to refine their mechanism for hardware control.

The most interesting aspect of this leak is that it reveals that OSx86 has finally caught up with its PowerPC cousin – the versions are essentially the same, with the same features, same abilities, etc. This marks the first time that Apple has released a copy of the OS for the Developer Transition Kits which is identical to the PPC version. This speaks to Apple’s shift in engineering resources and emphasis to its Intel version.

It appears that OSx86 has grown up rather quickly.

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Tijdens de eerste editie van het Binnenlands Bestuur OverheidsBal is Job Cohen uitgeroepen tot Beste Burgemeester van de afgelopen 25 jaar. Dat heeft de organisatie donderdagavond bekendgemaakt.

De Amsterdamse burgemeester ontving in Grand Hotel Huis ter Duin een Athena, een prijs die geldt als teken van waardering van vakgenoten en professionals bij de overheid. Voor de prijs waren drie burgemeesters genomineerd. Naast Cohen waren dat burgemeester Ronald Bandell van Dordrecht en oud-burgemeester Jan Mans van Enschede.

Ik wist dat het triest gesteld was met burgemeesters in Nederland, maar zo triest…