[Quote:]

The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den (施�?食�?��?� Shī Shì shí shī sh�?) is a famous example of constrained writing by Zhao Yuanren which consists of 92 characters, all with the sound shi in different tones when read in Mandarin. The text, which is written in Classical Chinese, is easily comprehensible when read by classically trained readers. Changes in pronunciation over 2,500 years resulted in a large degree of homophony in Classical Chinese, however, so the poem becomes completely incomprehensible to just about anyone when spoken out loud in Putonghua or when romanized.

[..]

The following is the text in Hanyu Pinyin. Hanyu orthography recommends writing numbers in Arabic numerals, so the number shí would be written as 10. To preserve the homophony in this case, the number 10 has also been spelled out in Pinyin.

« Shī Shì shí shī sh�? »

Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì sh�? shì, sh�? shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì sh�? shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì sh�? shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, sh�? shí shì shí shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.

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[..]

Text in Chinese Characters:

《施�?食�?��?�》

石室詩士施�?, 嗜�?�, 誓食�??�?�。
�?時時�?�市視�?�。
�??時, �?��??�?��?�市。
是時, �?�施�?�?�市。
�?視是�??�?�, �?�矢勢, 使是�??�?��?世。
�?拾是�??�?��?, �?�石室。
石室濕, �?使�?拭石室。
石室拭, �?始試食是�??�?�。
食時, 始識是�??�?�, 實�??石�?��?。
試釋是事。

Meaning in English:

In a stone den was a poet Shi Shi, who loved to eat lions, and decided to eat ten.
He often went to the market to look for lions.
One day at ten o’clock, ten lions just arrived at the market.
At that time, Shi Shi just arrived at the market too.
Seeing those ten lions, he killed them with arrows.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized that those ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
Try to explain this.

[Quote:]

iRiver makes several digital music players that come loaded with an operating system that obeys Microsoft’s crippling “Plays for Sure” specification — which ensures that the device obeys big music companies instead of its owner. Hackers have fixed this for months by providing an unauthorized firmware for the device that turns it into a real MP3 player, and now the company has taken the hint and released an official version.

This is an object lesson in how DRM fails in the marketplace. iRiver’s customers don’t want DRM — it makes their device less valuable. They want a device that obeys their wishes, and they’re willing to void their warranties to get one.

iRiver can respond by locking down their devices further, but that’s just declaring war on their customers. Instead, they did the smart thing and abandoned their Plays For Sure certification (which is meaningless, since Plays For Sure devices are notoriously incompatible in the field, prompting some former customers to call them “Plays For Shit”). They’re giving their customers what they demand: legal devices that work as well as the company can make them. Link

[Quote:]

PRESIDENT BUSH: Sounds like kind of a familiar refrain here — saying “bring it on,” kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong signal to people. I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner — you know, “wanted dead or alive,” that kind of talk. I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted, and so I learned from that. And I think the biggest mistake that’s happened so far, at least from our country’s involvement in Iraq is Abu Ghraib. We’ve been paying for that for a long period of time. And it’s — unlike Iraq, however, under Saddam, the people who committed those acts were brought to justice. They’ve been given a fair trial and tried and convicted.

Yeah. Right.

US military in torture scandal

One civilian contractor was accused of raping a young male prisoner but has not been charged because military law has no jurisdiction over him. [The Guardian, 4-30-04]

Contractors Implicated in Prison Abuse Remain on the Job

More than two months after a classified Army report found that two contract workers were implicated in the abuse of Iraqis at a prison outside Baghdad, the companies that employ them say that they have heard nothing from the Pentagon, and that they have not removed any employees from Iraq. [The New York Times, 5-4-03]

‘Contract Interrogators Hired to Avoid Supervision’

Several high-ranking military legal officers believe the Pentagon used private contractors to interrogate prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan in a deliberate attempt to obscure aggressive practices from congressional or military oversight, according to a civilian lawyer who has spoken with them. [The Financial Times, 5-22-04]

Abu Ghraib abuse firms are rewarded

Two US defence contractors being sued over allegations of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison have been awarded valuable new contracts by the Pentagon, despite demands that they should be barred from any new government work. [The Guardian, 1-16-05]

Impunity for the Architects of Illegal Policy

To date, with the exception of one major directly implicated in abuse, only low-ranking soldiers — privates and sergeants have been prosecuted. No officer has been charged in connection with detainee abuse by people under his command. No civilian leader at the Pentagon or the CIA has been investigated. [Human Rights Watch, April 2005]

No contractors facing Abu Ghraib abuse charges

No private contractors have so far faced prosecution despite their implication in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq, according to a new Pentagon report.

The study, sent to Congress earlier this year but not publicly released, covers the period from the start of May 2003 to the end of October 2004. It was ordered by Congress last year in the immediate aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, in which it emerged that employees of private contractors were directly involved in interrogating Iraqi detainees.

A Pentagon investigation last year found that “several of the alleged perpetrators of the abuse of detainees” were private contractors, but noted that they might not be subject to criminal prosecution because of the legal vacuum created during US administration of Iraq.

The new report found that during the 18 months examined, no private contractor was disciplined or charged with any criminal offence in relation to their work in Iraq. It noted, however, that several of the abuse cases had been forwarded by the Pentagon to the Justice Department for investigation. “To date, no charges have been filed, however the cases remain under active investigation by the DOJ,” the report said. [The Financial Times, 8-9-05]

A DEADLY INTERROGATION

The house belongs to Mark Swanner, a forty-six-year-old C.I.A. officer who has performed interrogations and polygraph tests for the agency, which has employed him at least since the nineteen-nineties. (He is not a covert operative.) Two years ago, at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad, an Iraqi prisoner in Swanner’s custody, Manadel al-Jamadi, died during an interrogation. His head had been covered with a plastic bag, and he was shackled in a crucifixion-like pose that inhibited his ability to breathe; according to forensic pathologists who have examined the case, he asphyxiated. In a subsequent internal investigation, United States government authorities classified Jamadi’s death as a “homicide,” meaning that it resulted from unnatural causes. Swanner has not been charged with a crime and continues to work for the agency. [The New Yorker, 11-7-05]

Prosecutions and convictions

Nine U.S. Army soldiers have been court-martialed and convicted of crimes committed at Abu Ghraib prison: seven military police, and two soldiers from military intelligence. All were enlisted soldiers. Within the Army’s judicial system, accountability up the chain of command has stopped at the rank of staff sergeant — to date, no commanding officers have been prosecuted. [Salon.com, 3-14-06]

No justice for all

Salon has obtained a previously unpublished 2003 Abu Ghraib photograph that shows Daniel Johnson, a civilian contractor, interrogating an Iraqi prisoner using what an Army investigation calls “an unauthorized stress position.”

The Army investigated the circumstances behind the photograph, found “probable cause” that a crime had been committed, and referred the case to the Justice Department for prosecution. (Salon obtained the photo from someone who spent time at Abu Ghraib as a uniformed member of the military and is familiar with the Army investigation there.) But in early 2005, a Department of Justice attorney told the Army that the evidence in the case did not justify prosecution. [Salon.com, 4-14-06]

[Quote:]

… the big giveaway was at the end of that answer, I don’t know if you can see it on camera, but the President flashed a big grin to those of us sitting in the front rows. It didn’t seem that he was quite as contrite as his performance.

– Richard Wolffe, Newsweek

Bush has said all his life that people who weren’t born wealthy are lazy.  Wrap your brain around that one.  Bush has said that the wealthy are his base.  The GOP bagman says that Americans of faith are a bunch of whackos and that they can be manipulated.  Bush and his handlers have been betting that Americans are stupid. 

There he is:  laughing at you.  Your jobs go overseas, your kids go overseas, and America does nothing but ask to be fooled again.  Bush looks out at a nation he thinks is stupid enough to get taken again, and I have nothing I can cite to say that he’s wrong.

The corporate attitude is that Americans are lumps, there to be ripped off for whatever they and their credit-rating is worth.  They know we’ll buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have, get stuck with the bill while our betters make money hand over fist.  The Straussian attitude is that educated people are supposed to help wealthy people rip off the other people:  the stupid people.  That’s it, that’s their model.  The rest of their satanic prose is just spent dressing that tripartite parasite system up in fancy code words so that the little black-socks-wearing nerds can giggle about it around the office.  “Freedom,” in Strassian parlance, for instance, means the “freedom” of the strong to prey on the weak. 

The Bush administration is no different.  The lumps bought it.  Bush knows it.  Corporate attitude, corporate government, corporate media.   It’s all sewn up.  

So no wonder he’s laughing in the face of America.  He can. 

He’s been handed everything he ever had in his life.  Even when he screws up, he gets more.  He wins, no matter what.  Every time Bush is caught redhanded, even when he admits on national TV that he’s a criminal, all he has to do is mention the magic words “national security” and he gets off scot-free. 

He’s proof that the American dream is a lie.  Where you go is determined by where you start, no different from any other developed country in history.  Aristrocracy won, and they won a generation ago.  America lost. 

Bush knows that enough of you will fall for it that he’ll get by, like he always does, so why shouldn’t he look down his nose at you?

He’s right.  Enough people are dumb enough and/or scared enough most of the time that he can do anything, even this, and he’ll get a free pass.  America has Bush because enough Americans chose him.  He’s not a bug, he’s a feature.  Unless we change things, unless there is a consequence for his actions, he is what we are. 

We either disown the sickness or it owns us. 

[Quote:]

Lawyers for AT&T accidentally released sensitive information while defending a lawsuit that accuses the company of facilitating a government wiretapping program, CNET News.com has learned.

AT&T’s attorneys this week filed a 25-page legal brief striped with thick black lines that were intended to obscure portions of three pages and render them unreadable (click here for PDF).

But the obscured text nevertheless can be copied and pasted inside some PDF readers, including Preview under Apple Computer’s OS X and the xpdf utility used with X11.

[Quote:]

A judge said a 5-foot-1 man convicted of sexually assaulting a child was too small to survive in prison, and gave him 10 years of probation instead.

[Quote:]

A gaping security flaw in the latest versions of Symantec’s anti-virus software suite could put millions of users at risk of a debilitating worm attack, Internet security experts warned May 25.

Researchers at eEye Digital Security, the company that discovered the flaw, said it could be exploited by remote hackers to take complete control of the target machine “without any user action.”

“This is definitely wormable. Once exploited, you get a command shell that gives you complete access to the machine. You can remove, edit or destroy files at will,” said eEye Digital Security spokesperson Mike Puterbaugh.

[Quote:]

A lawsuit filed Wednesday accuses the Motion Picture Association of America of hiring a hacker to steal information from a company that the MPAA has accused of helping copyright violators.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California by Torrentspy.com parent Valence Media, doesn’t identify the man the company says was approached by an MPAA executive. But the suit calls the man a former associate of one of the plaintiffs and alleges that he was asked to retrieve private information on Torrentspy.com, a search engine that directs people to download links.

Torrentspy’s complaint includes claims that the man whom the MPAA allegedly paid $15,000 to steal e-mail correspondence and trade secrets has admitted his role in the plot and is cooperating with the company.

“It is a Hollywood drama, what happened here,” Ira Rothken, Torrentspy’s attorney, said in a telephone interview Wednesday evening.

Good – maybe they can make a movie out of it. Oh, wait…

[Quote:]

Former Enron Corp. chiefs Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were convicted Thursday of conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud in one of the biggest business scandals in U.S. history.

The verdict put the blame for the 2001 demise of the high-profile energy trader, once the nation’s seventh-largest company, squarely on its top two executives. It came in the sixth day of deliberations following a trial that lasted nearly four months.

Lay was also convicted of bank fraud and making false statements to banks in a separate trial non-jury trial before U.S. District Judge Sim Lake related to Lay’s personal banking.

[..]

Lake set a $5 million bond for Lay and ordered him to surrender his passport before he leaves the courthouse. The judge said the bond already in place for Skilling was sufficient. The judge said he did not believe home confinement was necessary for either.

He must of failed Cronyism 101 obviously and didn’t keep a list of names and documented evidence of who his “friends” were.

I thought a conviction of something that carries up to 25 years in prison would mean a stay in jail until the sentencing hearing. Aparently not true for “white-collar” crimes.

[Quote:]

The Dutch parliament approved new anti-terrorism measures Tuesday that make it easier to arrest suspects without strong evidence and hold them longer without charge.

Prosecutors will be able to approve surveillance, infiltration or wiretapping of suspects even when there is not “reasonable suspicion” that a suspect may have committed a criminal act.

[..]

“Police will be able to preventatively search people, and vehicles or things without permission of a prosecutor” or judge, the ministry said.

Finally, the law increases the period of time a suspect can be held without charge from three to 14 days.

“During this period, grave concerns (of a crime) are no longer required in cases where a terrorist crime is suspected; a reasonable suspicion is enough,” it said.

There has been little protest about the loss of civil liberties from such laws in the Netherlands, where trust in government is traditionally strong.

That last sentence is utter bullshit. There has been little protest simply because almost nobody knows about it. The press in 0031 has been silent on this. Why do you think I have to quote an English language source for this?

[Quote:]

If it is up to Microsoft, the omnipresent JPEG image format will be replaced by Windows Media Photo.

The software maker detailed the new image format Wednesday at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference here. Windows Media Photo will be supported in Windows Vista and also be made available for Windows XP, Bill Crow, program manager for Windows Media Photo said in a presentation.

“One of the biggest reasons people upgrade their PCs is digital photos,” Crow said, noting that Microsoft has been in contact with printer makers, digital camera companies and other unnamed industry partners while working on Windows Media Photo. Microsoft touts managing “digital memories” as one of the key attributes of XP successor Vista.

[..]

Licensing details for the technology are still being ironed out. These could be a concern, Crow acknowledged, but “the philosophy has been that licensing should not be a restriction” to adoption, he said.

Here’s licensing restriction number one: to even read the specification, you need to agree to a license. Which gives you a file with the “.doc” extension (for which I cannot find the specification right now, but that’s another story). How do I know it’s a “.doc” file? Simple – the “accept” button isn’t a button. It’s a GIF image that directly links to the file.

Then, if I believe the experts (since I couldn’t read the specs myself), it is just an attempt to hijack tiff an bend it with MS patented pixel codec to become incompatible with existing tiff technology. Salted with Adobe XMP metadata, ICC metadata and EXIF metadata. All of that registered as a Microsoft trademark.

So fine, they have this great new codec — tiff has a well tested mechanism for specifying a new pixel codec. If they did it this way, they would loose absolutely no functionality – but no, they had to introduce gratuitous incompatibilities, new tags that duplicate exactly the capabilities of existing tiff tags, and remove baseline tiff capabilities. All while maintaining the 32 bit file size limitations of tiff.

What a hack job.

In summary, the MS we’ve come to know and love is here in full force.

[Quote:]

A 17-year-old student who posted on his blog site that he was being bullied and threatened by the Plainfield School District will face an expulsion hearing this week, a local attorney said.

Apparently, the concept of “irony” is totally lost on the school district.

Curt Cobain must be spinning in his grave…

Every day 25,000 Americans wake up and discover that they no longer approve of Bush.

[Quote:]

Vice President Dick Cheney could be called to testify in the perjury case against his former chief of staff, a special prosecutor said in a court filing Wednesday.

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald suggested Cheney would be a logical government witness because he could authenticate notes he jotted on a July 6, 2003, New York Times opinion piece by a former U.S. ambassador critical of the Iraq war.

Fitzgerald said Cheney’s “state of mind” is “directly relevant” to whether I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s former top aide, lied to FBI agents and a federal grand jury about how he learned about CIA officer Valerie Plame’s identity and what he subsequently told reporters.

Can you imagine the court appearance?

Cheney: You want answers?

Fitzgerald: I think I’m entitled to them.

Cheney: You want answers?

Fitzgerald: I want the truth!

Cheney: You can’t handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Joseph Wilson? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Valerie Plame and you curse the Unitary Executive. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that Plame’s outing, while tragic, probably saved the Unitary Executive’s political bacon. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves political bacon…You don’t want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.

We use words like honor, code, loyalty…we use these words as the backbone to a life spent defending something. You use ‘em as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, then questions the manner in which I provide it! I’d rather you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand a post. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you’re entitled to!

Fitzgerald: Did you order the Plame outing?

Cheney: (quietly) I did the job you sent me to do.

Fitzgerald: Did you order the Plame outing?

Cheney: You’re goddamn right I did!!

[Quote:]

Paris Hilton was paid $200,000 for turning up to a charity event. The hotel heiress collected the huge fee for simply showing her face and waving to fans in Cannes on Saturday. The star is quoted in the New York Post newspaper as saying: “All I had to do was wave like the Queen of England.”

Google news isn’t talking about which charity is so undeserving of your dollars.

[Quote:]

Bootleg DVDs of The Da Vinci Code were on sale all over Shanghai today, days after China pipped Cannes by hours with the world premier of the movie.

Pirated DVD versions of both The Da Vinci Code and Mission Impossible 3 were selling for 5 yuan (£0.33) each, but workmanship of the cheap copies was said to be poor.

A sales assistant at one Shanghai DVD shop said the initial copies were “pirated overseas” and that “better quality” versions would probably be available early next month.

I know the reviews are not good, but if even the pirates start cutting scenes….

[Quote:]

The European Patent Office will be bound by proposed legislation that will exclude software from patentability, according to the EC, in a move that has startled opponents of software patents

Software patent campaigners were shocked on Wednesday by an apparent change in stance towards software patents by the European Commission.

The European Commission said last week that computer programs will be excluded from patentability in the upcoming Community Patent legislation, and that the European Patent Office (EPO) will be bound by this law.

[..]

The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), which has doggedly campaigned against software patents in Europe, was confused at the EC’s change of tune.

“I’m stunned,” said Pieter Hintjens, the president of the FFII on Wednesday. “Does the Commission now accept that the EPC rules do actually rule? Or have I misunderstood something?”

I think the lobbyist check just bounced, that’s all.

Looking for nice things to post om my WK 2006 site, I ran into this….

[Quote:]

In a small, mirror-paneled room guarded by a Secret Service agent and packed with some of the city’s wealthiest and most influential political donors, Mr. McCain got right to the point.

“One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit,’�? said Mr. McCain, according to Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, an invitee, and two other guests.

Hey that is a great plan, John. I am sure once you told the Sunnis and Shiites to stop the bullshit, everything would dramatically change for the better. I mean, seriously, we all know that what some see as a political-religious feud that is over a thousand years old is in reality just bullshit, and if you call a spade for a spade…

Hell, he could even call up the Iranian President, tell him to stop the bullshit, and I bet you the guy would drop his nuclear pretensions right away.

“President Bush said today he has nothing but respect for Mexico and its people and he will always speak the truth to them. Here’s my question: When can we get that deal?”

—Jay Leno

More and more motion sensor ‘hacks’ are available. Take a look at this one:

[Quote:]

WindowsForDevices.com and Microsoft’s Mobile and Embedded Devices (MED) Group are teaming up to invite developers worldwide to compete at using Microsoft’s Windows CE Shared Source in an exciting real-world project. The contest’s theme is “Show-It-Off at the Shared Source Project Competition.”

Having advanced into the ‘phones that stop you from playing music‘ market and the ‘OS licenses that suddenly cut out because you didn’t keep on paying‘ market, you’re now charging into the ‘writing software for environments which you have so little interest in that you need a time-limited trial version‘ market.

So.

In the left corner, Google Summer of Code: practically any open source project, involving any components you choose, you can get $4500

In the right corner, MS Summer of Code: their shared source project, involving components they choose, you can get some electronics that don’t pay rent or tuition, and you pay Microsoft for continued use of the tools to maintain the code you just wrote.

I guess we can call that a knock-out before the bell for the first round is even heard…

If you want to play World of Warcraft on your computer, you’d better wear a bullet-proof vest…

[Quote:]

Lousewies van der Laan wil lijsttrekker van D66 worden. De fractievoorzitter van de kleinste regeringspartij heeft dat dinsdag bekendgemaakt tijdens een partijbijeenkomst in Amsterdam. “Van een D66 dat onconventioneel is, onafhankelijk en eerlijk, wil ik graag de partijleider zijn”, aldus Van der Laan.

Waarom denkt het D’66 dat ze een lijsttrekker nodig hebben?