[Quote:]

Dutch scientists are putting together remarkable maps showing pollution over Europe and other regions of the globe.

Using the US space agency’s Aura satellite, the team can look right down to the troposphere, the lowest part of the atmosphere where we all live.

The Ozone Monitoring Instrument (Omi) and other key equipment on Aura can build a daily picture of air quality.

The pollution maps, which can see detail at the city scale, will be used to identify problem hotspots.

This is one of may great error messages I found here

[Quote:]

Only 2% of people who paid a fee to download music from the Internet cited that the contentious legal issues surrounding online music distribution concerned them. This statistic comes from Ipsos-Reid’s latest research on the consumption of digital media titled “Cultivating Desire: Investing in Market Insights to Reap Digital Content Profits”. This particular paper focuses on ways for content providers to tap into the Internet as an evolving distribution mechanism of mass media. The shockingly low number should come as a warning to the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) who have so far sued thousands for file sharing in the expectation that they can scare consumers in buying instead of trading. First, this is not a way to tap into this audience and second the tactic isn’t working.

Instead, it appears that simply offering a good service at a good price is what lures customers through the doors. Who would have guessed?

I wonder what fraction of unauthorized P2P users would give hatred of the litigation-happy bullies of the music industry and fear of DRM crippleware as their reasons for avoiding the authorized stores?

[Quote:]

Consider these factors: Among bachelor’s degrees granted in the United States during 2000, just 11 percent were in science. The average worldwide is 23 percent. In China, the average is 50 percent. American students may know rap lyrics and the name of Britney’s baby, but they flee from math and science.

[Quote:]

The CIA inspector general is investigating a growing number of what it calls “erroneous renditions,” according to several former and current intelligence officials.

One official said about three dozen names fall in that category; others believe it is fewer. The list includes several people whose identities were offered by al Qaeda figures during CIA interrogations, officials said. One turned out to be an innocent college professor who had given the al Qaeda member a bad grade, one official said.

[..]

Masri was held for five months largely because the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center’s al Qaeda unit “believed he was someone else,” one former CIA official said. “She didn’t really know. She just had a hunch.”

“just a hunch” of an over-eager CIA agent is enough to get your life ruined.

Earlier this week, Condi, eyes flashing, jaw set in semi-steely pose emphatically claimed US personnel are (and have always been) forbidden from inflicting “inhumane, cruel or degrading” treatment on detainees;

To carry out its mission, the CTC relies on its Rendition Group, made up of case officers, paramilitaries, analysts and psychologists. Their job is to figure out how to snatch someone off a city street, or a remote hillside, or a secluded corner of an airport where local authorities wait.

Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA’s own covert prisons — referred to in classified documents as “black sites,” which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe.

Now If Condi doesn’t call getting your clothes cut off, a tube jammed up your ass, and stuffed into a Depends for 12 hours “degrading”, I’d hate to ask what she does call it.

Others criticized Black’s CTC for embracing a “Hollywood model” of operations, as one former longtime CIA veteran called it, eschewing the hard work of recruiting agents and penetrating terrorist networks. Instead, the new approach was similar to the flashier paramilitary operations that had worked so well in Afghanistan, and played well at the White House, where the president was keeping a scorecard of captured or killed terrorists.

You read that right, George was keeping score of how many bodies the CIA was bringing back. How simple-minded can your worldview be…

[Quote:]

Bush-administration officials privately threatened organizers of the U.N. Climate Change Conference, telling them that any chance there might’ve been for the United States to sign on to the Kyoto global-warming protocol would be scuttled if they allowed Bill Clinton to speak at the gathering today in Montreal, according to a source involved with the negotiations who spoke to New York Magazine on condition of anonymity.

Bush officials informed organizers of their intention to pull out of the new Kyoto deal late Thursday afternoon, soon after news leaked that Clinton was scheduled to speak, the source said.

The organisation called their bluff, knowing full well the odds of Bush signing. It seems equally likely that monkeys could start flying out of my butt any minute now. I bet W was that kid that your mom’s friend brought over that you hated playing with, because 10 minutes into a game he would throw a tantrum and say you were cheating, although you were already taking it easy on him because he seemed a little slow.

[Quote:]

For those of you looking for a gift (or eight- shalom) this holiday season but are unable to get up to Adam and Deidre’s wonderful new Manos Market* in Hancock, Maine (you need a website and mail order, you crazy cheese book reading kids) might I make a few suggestions?

First, in this renewed climate of culture war, is there a better way to express your contempt for evolution, rational thought, and the precepts of the holy book(s) you claim to follow than with a bit of religious kitch?

Presenting the ibelieve. What better way to listen to your Amy Grant or Stryper songs than on a re-engineered ipod that says “Hey! I may be an evangelical minister but at least I’m an evangelical youth minister!” No word yet if excessive use of the ibelieve causes stigmata but if you do happen to find yourself nailed up this Christmas, you can always pass the time with your fellow danglers by enjoying a few hands of America’s hot new pastime, poker!

And the religious gift opportunities don’t stop there! Proving that eccesiastical junk has moved on from the Jesus Shooting Hoops figurine of a few years back, those good folks at shipoffools.com have compiled a list of 11 Christian, 1 Muslim, and 1 Atheist gift ideas for the Twelve Days of Kitschmas.

[Quote:]

A husband and wife have “remarried” under new civil partnership laws – 14 years after the groom stopped living as a man to become a woman.

Bernard and Joyce Rogers married 38 years ago but have lived “like sisters” since 1991, when Bernadette – as she is now known – underwent gender surgery.

Bernadette, who was born and brought up in south London, said she had always known she was really a woman.

[..]

The Gender Recognition Bill, which became law last year, brought formal rights to a person with a diagnosed gender identity condition once they had been medically treated.

The Bill gave legal acknowledgement of the change in their gender status.

But it refused such acknowledgement if the transsexual remained married, meaning that Bernadette and Joyce had to divorce in order for the law to recognise Bernadette’s status as a woman.

[Quote:]

The latest salvo in the “war on Christmas” has been fired – this time over the lyrics to the venerable Christmas carol “Silent Night.”

Many who believe Christmas has been overly secularized are pouncing on a Wisconsin school that will present the tune with different words, under the title “Cold in the Night.”

Elementary School in Dodgeville, Wis., was upset with the lyrics his child brought home to learn. He told the non-profit group Liberty Counsel they are: “Cold in the night, no one in sight, winter winds whirl and bite, how I wish I were happy and warm, safe with my family out of the storm.”

Offended by the new words, he was unable to convince the school not to perform the song and contacted Liberty Counsel, which provides free legal assistance in religious freedom cases.

“We first try to educate a lot of people who are confused over the law,” said Mathew Staver, president and general counsel of Liberty Counsel. “This kind of a situation is not so much confusion as it is an insensitivity and an attempt to secularize Christmas, because here they’re actually taking a song and mocking it, in my opinion.”

Dodgeville School District officials say traditional, unaltered carols will also be sung, and that “Cold in the Night” is part of a decades-old Christmas play that students have performed in years past, and is not an attack on the religious nature of the holiday.

“There’s been a tremendous misunderstanding here,” said District Administrator Diane Messer. “Somebody locally, I believe, misunderstood � even after our discussion with them � that one of our teachers took the liberty of changing the lyrics.”

Students at the school will present “The Little Tree’s Christmas Gift,” a musical production that tells the story of a family going out to buy a Christmas tree. Other melodies include “Jingle Bells,” “We Three Kings,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and “Chanukah.” “Each one has the lyrics changed in order to tell the story,” Messer said. “It’s so that young children know the melodies.”

God damn it, not another attempt to change the lyrics of a religiously themed song into something secular. That’s just not the American way.

[Quote:]

A combination of thick snow and relatively short runways at Midway International Airport can make landing a plane a daunting task for even veteran pilots, requiring precision and allowing scant room for missteps.

After Thursday’s deadly runway accident involving a Southwest Airlines jet at the hemmed-in airport, some experts are calling for new buffer zones or other safety measures to give pilots at Midway and hundreds of other airports a wider margin for error.

The Boeing 737 was landing in a snowstorm when it slid off the end of the runway, plowed through a fence and struck two cars near a busy intersection. A 6-year-old boy in one of the cars was killed and 10 people, most on the ground, were injured.

[Quote:]

Sony BMG is rethinking its anti-piracy policy following weeks of criticism over the copy protection used on CDs.

The head of Sony BMG’s global digital business, Thomas Hesse, told the BBC that the company was “re-evaluating” its current methods.

Translation: We’re trying to figure out how not to get caught next time. Reat the entire article, it’s full of weasel words. Which isn’t surprising. Here’s why:

[Quote:]

Here’s the key issue: Active protection only works if the DRM software is running on the user’s computer. But the user doesn’t want the software on his computer. The software provides no value to him at all. Its only effects are to stop him from doing things he wants to do (such as listening to the music with iTunes), and to expose him to possible security attacks if the software is buggy.

So if you’re designing a CD DRM system based on active protection, you face two main technical problems:

  1. You have to get your software installed, even though the user doesn’t want it.

  2. Once your software is installed, you have to keep it from being uninstalled, even though the user wants it gone.

These are the same two technical problems that spyware designers face.

People who face the same technical problems tends to find the same technical solutions. How do you get software installed against the user’s wishes? You mislead the user about what is being installed, or about the consequences of installation. Or you install without getting permission at all. How do you keep software from being uninstalled? You don’t provide an uninstaller. Or you provide an uninstaller that doesn’t really uninstall the whole program. Or you try to cloak the software so the user doesn’t even know it’s there.

Of course, you don’t have to resort to these tactics. But if you don’t, your software will have trouble getting onto users’ computers and staying there. If your whole business model depends on installing unwanted software and preventing its uninstallation, you’ll do what’s necessary to make that model work. You’ll resort to spyware tactics. (Or you’ll quit and go into another business.)

Having set off down the road of CD copy protection, the music industry shouldn’t be surprised to have arrived at spyware. Because that’s where the road leads.

InfoWorld has “the year in quotes” yep, it’s that time of year again. Here’s a funny one:

[Quote:]

“I know what I don’t know, and to this day I don’t know technology and I don’t know accounting and finance.”

— Bernie Ebbers, former WorldCom Inc. CEO, speaking in his defense, yes, you’ve got that right, in his defense during the WorldCom fraud trial.

I think the article is incomplete. Let me add this one:

“Screw the nano. What the hell does the nano do? Who listens to 1,000 songs?”

— Zander from Motorola

And we need some Sony jokes, since no “year in quotes” would be complete without this one, missing from the article:

“Most people, I think, don’t even know what a Rootkit is, so why should they care about it?”

–Thomas Hesse, Sony BMG

So, here we go.

From the article:

“We have so many rivals it’s frightening. The week after next I will meet Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and I will [shake hands and] look down and see if I still have a hand.”

Sony’s Stringer on his role at the top of the Japanese electronics giant. He added that his family thought he was “insane” to take the job. (June 22.)

That was June 22. Today it would be:

“The week after next we will meet Sony’s Stringer and we will [shake hands and] look down and see if he surreptitiously sticks something up our asses.” – Bill Gates (“Only you, Bill” – Steve Jobs)

And how about a good Steve Ballmer quote:

“I have never, honestly, thrown a chair in my life.”