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Wij hechten grote waarde aan uw vragen en opmerkingen.

Gebruik dit formulier om een vraag te stellen, klacht in te dienen of verbeteringssuggestie te doen.

Bloody liars.

The text above, on the dutch microsoft web site, basically says that they value feedback, and you should use the linked web form to enter your message. Which then goes to a “not found” error page. And here I tried to tell them that a couple of 419 scammers were sending out a batch of spam using the microsoft name, and the spam had a dutch mobile number in them. I would hope microsoft has a regular contact with the police department for that kind of crap, but this behaviour of their website doesn’t give me much hope.

Looking through the US web site, I couldn’t find any way to give this kind of feedback – odd, because I know microsoft has assisted law enforcement on this kind of stuff in the past. So, I finally found a “report issues about this website” form, and told them their dutch feedback form was broken, and “oh, by the way” forward the following to your dutch security team.

Bleh.

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German-born Pope Benedict, head of the world’s largest church, asked on Sunday where God was when 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, died at the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.

Speaking at the Birkenau section of the camp, near where Jews were led from trains to be gassed and cremated, the head of the Roman Catholic Church said it was almost impossible to speak in “this place of horror,” especially as a German Pope.

“In a place like this, words fail. In the end, there can only be a dread silence – a silence which is itself a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?” he said in a speech delivered in Italian.

“Our silence becomes in turn a plea for forgiveness and reconciliation, a plea to the living God never to let this happen again,” he said at the end of a four-day visit to Poland.

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The Theology of the Tsunami
by Richard Dawkins
Op-Ed column in Free Inquiry 25 (3), 12-13, April/May 2005

I have never found the problem of evil very persuasive as an argument against deities. There seems no obvious reason to presume that your God will be good. The question for me is why you think any God, good or evil or indifferent, exists at all. Most of the Greek pantheon sported very human vices, and the ‘jealous God’ of the Old Testament is surely one of the nastiest, most truly evil characters in all fiction. Tsunamis would be just up his street, and the more misery and mayhem the better. I have always thought the ‘Problem of Evil’ was a rather trivial problem for theists, compared to the Argument from Improbability which is a genuinely powerful, indeed knockdown argument against the very existence of all forms of unevolved creative intelligence.

Nevertheless, my experience is that godly people, who show no evidence of even beginning to understand the Argument from Improbability, are reduced to quivering embarrassment if not outright loss of faith, when confronted with a natural disaster or a major pestilence. Earthquakes, in particular, have traditionally shaken people’s faith in a benevolent deity, and December’s tsunami provoked a lot of agonized soul-searching on the question “How can religious people explain something like this?�? The most prominent apparent quaverer was the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Anglican communion. It turned out that he had been traduced by the Daily Telegraph, a notoriously irresponsible and mischievous newspaper and one of several London newspapers which devoted many column inches to this knotty theological conundrum. It turned out that the Archbishop had not in fact said that the tsunami shook his own faith, only that he could sympathize with those who did have doubts.

The most famous precedent, several commentators reminded us, is the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which deeply disturbed Kant and provoked Voltaire’s mockery in Candide. The Guardian published a flurry of Letters to the Editor, headed by one from the Bishop of Lincoln who asked God to preserve us from religious people who try to ‘explain’ the tsunami. Other letters attempted just that. One clergyman conceded that there was no intellectual answer: just hints of an explanation which “will only be found in a life lived by faith, prayer, contemplation and Christian action.�? Another clergymen cited the Book of Job, and he thought he had found the beginnings of an explanation for suffering in Paul’s idea that the whole universe was experiencing something akin to the pains of a woman in childbirth:

“The argument for the existence of God from design would be fatally flawed if the universe were seen as complete already. Religious believers see the totality of experience as part of a greater narrative moving towards an as yet unimaginable goal.�?

Is this the kind of thing theologians are paid to do? At least he didn’t sink to the level of a Professor of Theology in my University who once suggested, during a televised discussion with me and my colleague Peter Atkins among others, that the holocaust was God’s way of giving the Jews the opportunity to be brave and noble – a remark which prompted Dr Atkins to growl, “May you rot in hell!�?

Read the rest of this entry »

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A 19-year-old woman was in intensive care Wednesday after she suffered major head injuries in a Tuesday night collision on Harris Street.

Her brother was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving.

Accident victim Jaime Lee was one of four people hospitalized after the crash. She remained in intensive care as of Wednesday evening.

Her brother, Jeremy Daniel Lee, 22, of Eureka, was driving when the car collided with one coming in the opposite direction, Eureka Police Officer Wayne Cox said.

The collision was caused because of “Lee’s intoxication,�? Cox said Wednesday.

The car Jeremy Lee was driving had a bumper sticker that read: “I’m not an alcoholic, I’m a drunk. Alcoholics go to meetings.�?

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The notorious US detention camp in Guantanamo Bay has been hit by fresh allegations of human rights abuses, with claims that dozens of children were sent there – some as young as 14 years old.

Lawyers in London estimate that more than 60 detainees held at the terrorists’ prison camp were boys under 18 when they were captured.

They include at least 10 detainees still held at the US base in Cuba who were 14 or 15 when they were seized – including child soldiers who were held in solitary confinement, repeatedly interrogated and allegedly tortured.

Psalm 137

8 O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.

9 Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

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full page ad on p. 33 of the 22 May 2006 issue of The New Yorker:

I’ll reproduce the text of the ad below, but I’ve posted a much larger copy of the image over on Flickr so you can examine it yourself. The ad reads:

Welcome to the people_ready business.

In a people-ready business, people make it happen. People, ready with software. When you give your people tools that connect, inform, and empower them, they’re ready. Ready to collaborate with partners, suppliers, and customers. Ready to streamline the supply chain, beat impossible deadlines, and develop ideas that can sway the course of industry. Ready to build a successful business: a people-ready business. Microsoft. Software for the people-ready business. To learn more, visit microsoft.com/peopleready

Please note: I venture into the following criticism knowing perfectly well that there is nothing more trite than a Mac nerd mocking Microsoft marketing material. But here goes:

What the hell does any of this even mean?

E.g., if “people make it happen�? in a people-ready business, who or what makes it happen in non-people-ready businesses? Or is it not possible for “it�? to happen in a non-people-ready business? I dare you to try to make this copy more devoid of actual meaning than it already is. If there’s any logic at all, it’s circular: that the people in a people-ready business are ready to build a people-ready business.

And what’s the point of the decorative underscores — the “people_ready�? in the headline and the four “ready_�?s tagging some of the people in the photo?

This ad epitomizes everything that’s wrong with Microsoft: they have nothing new to offer. There’s nothing wrong with branding ads; I like branding ads (e.g. Nike’s “Just Do It�? and Apple’s “Think Different�? campaigns). But if this “people_ready�? ad is supposed to be about their brand, what is the message? The only message I can suss from it is “Buy Microsoft software just because it’s Microsoft software.�? They would be better off running an ad that literally reads “No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft�? — at least that would be bold.

Pretty painful, considering that Vista, their most visible new product, is conspicuously not ready, with or without an underscore.

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At least 1,000 troops have deserted the armed forces since the US-led war was launched in
Iraq three years ago, the BBC reported.

Britain’s defence ministry said however it knew of only “a handful of deserters since 1989″.

During 2005 alone, 377 people deserted and are still missing, the British Broadcasting Corporation said on its website, adding that so far this year another 189 are on the run.

Without explaining how it arrived at the figures, it said some 900 deserters have evaded capture since the Iraq war started in March 2003.

Lawmaker John McDonnell told parliament on Monday that the “number of abscondees has trebled since the invasion of Iraq” as he registerd opposition to a government bill to sentence deserters to a maximum of life in prison.

[..]

Ben Griffin, a member of the elite Special Air Service (SAS), told his commanding officer this year that he was not prepared to return to Iraq because he said he saw US forces carrying out what he thought were illegal acts.

Griffin, who was allowed to leave the military, told the BBC that he believed many other British troops shared his views, though he would advise them to speak out rather than actually desert if they think the war is wrong.

“I can’t speak for others, but there’s a lot of dissent in the army about the legality of war and concerns that they’re spending too much time there,” he told the BBC.