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It turns out that the beast, in caterpillar form, is called the “hickory horned devil” – more images here. And yeah, it’s typically 5″ long. They say it’s not harmful to humans. They say.

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You expect better than this from one of our nations founding fathers. No wonder John Adams hated him.

Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions? The parties who may be arrested may be charged instantly with a well defined crime; of course, the judge will remand them. If the public safety requires that the government should have a man imprisoned on less probable testimony in those than in other emergencies, let him be taken and tried, retaken and retried, while the necessity continues, only giving him redress against the government for damages. Examine the history of England. See how few of the cases of the suspension of the habeas corpus law have been worthy of that suspension. They have been either real treasons, wherein the parties might as well have been charged at once, or sham plots, where it was shameful they should ever have been suspected. Yet for the few cases wherein the suspension of the habeas corpus has done real good, that operation is now become habitual and the minds of the nation almost prepared to live under its constant suspension.

–Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1788.

And he calls himself a Virginian. He wouldn’t be fit to run for dog catcher there, these days. Heck, he’d be too busy pulling deer heads out of his mailbox to even do that. Sen. Allen would see to it, given Jefferson’s close relationship with Sally Hemings.

If that bastard were around today, I’d do the patriotic thing and courageously send him an anonymous letter filled with suspicious white powder. That’d shut him up.

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If you think only US citizens don’t know much, think again:

“Big problems for California U.S. Senate candidate Dick Mountjoy. He says he was on the Battleship Missouri in the Korean War. Turns out he wasn’t. No one on the ship can remember him being there. And believe me, when your name is Dick Mountjoy, people are gonna remember you being there.”

–Jay Leno

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“So what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas?�? Kelly wrote. “First, works on the margins of popularity will find a small audience larger than the near-zero audience they usually have now. . . . Second, the universal library will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course of civilization is scanned and cross-linked. Third, the universal library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority . . . .�?

Kelly saw the linkage of text to text, book to book, as the answer to the information gaps that have made the progress of knowledge such a hard climb. “If you can truly incorporate all texts — past and present, multilingual — on a particular subject,�? Kelly wrote, “then you can have a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don’t know. The white spaces of our collective ignorance are highlighted, while the golden peaks of our knowledge are drawn with completeness. This degree of authority is only rarely achieved in scholarship today, but it will become routine.�?

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But something has gone terribly wrong. In recent years, large multinational media companies have captured the global copyright system and twisted it toward their own short-term interests. The people who are supposed to benefit most from a system that makes ideas available — readers, students, and citizens — have been excluded. No one in Congress wants to hear from college students or librarians.

More than ever, the law restricts what individuals can do with elements of their own culture. Generally the exercise of copyright protection is so extreme these days that even the most innocent use of images or song lyrics in scholarly work can generate a legal threat. Last year one of the brightest students in my department got an article accepted in the leading journal in the field. It was about advertising in the 1930s. The journal’s lawyers and editors refused to let her use images from the ads in question without permission, even though it is impossible to find out who owns the ads or if they were ever covered by copyright in the first place. The chilling effect trumped any claim of scholarly “fair use�? or even common sense.

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We are losing much of the history of the twentieth century because the copyright industries are more litigious than ever.

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Richard has made good progress over the weekend following his jet car accident on Wednesday.

He remains in a stable condition and was moved to a general medical ward over the weekend, where he spent time with his wife and daughters.

Doctors at Leeds General Infirmary have said they are ‘reasonably optimistic’ that he will make a good recovery – and Jeremy said that Richard has already managed his first few steps after the accident.

Richard’s wife Mindy and their daughters Willow and Isabella have been ‘overwhelmed’ by support from fans and well wishers.

We alone have received well over 15,000 emails since the accident from Top Gear readers wishing Richard well – and the inbox is still growing.

A website set up by fans has also managed to raise more than £150,000 for the Yorkshire Air Ambulance, which airlifted Richard to hospital on Wednesday. The Air Ambulance service has announced that these donations will help to ‘bring forward’ plans to operate a second helicopter.

Mindy has asked that well wishers make a donation to the Air Ambulance instead of sending flowers.

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President Clinton urged Congress Tuesday to act swiftly in developing anti-terrorism legislation before its August recess.

“We need to keep this country together right now. We need to focus on this terrorism issue,” Clinton said during a White House news conference.

But while the president pushed for quick legislation, Republican lawmakers hardened their stance against some of the proposed anti-terrorism measures.

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Hatch called Clinton’s proposed study of taggants — chemical markers in explosives that could help track terrorists — “a phony issue.”

“If they want to, they can study the thing” already, Hatch asserted. He also said he had some problems with the president’s proposals to expand wiretapping.

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A $75 million project to build the largest police academy in Iraq has been so grossly mismanaged that the campus now poses health risks to recruits and might need to be partially demolished, U.S. investigators have found.

The Baghdad Police College, hailed as crucial to U.S. efforts to prepare Iraqis to take control of the country’s security, was so poorly constructed that feces and urine rained from the ceilings in student barracks. Floors heaved inches off the ground and cracked apart. Water dripped so profusely in one room that it was dubbed “the rain forest.”

“This is the most essential civil security project in the country — and it’s a failure,” said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an independent office created by Congress. “The Baghdad police academy is a disaster.”

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Inside the inspector general’s office in Baghdad on a recent blistering afternoon, several federal investigators expressed amazement that such construction blunders could be concentrated in one project. Even in Iraq, they said, failure on this magnitude is unusual.

Tom Melius, with the Fish and Wildlife Service, left, Lisa Pajot, second left, and Gary Bullock, second from right, with the Bird and Treatment and Learning Center, and Pat Lampi, with the Alaska Zoo release a bald eagle in Anchorage Alaska Saturday Sept. 25, 2006. The eagle was cared for by the Bird and Treatment and Learning Center after it lost its tail feathers and was released after the feathers grew back. (AP Photo/John Gomes)

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NASA’s Mars Rover Opportunity has arrived at the rim of a crater approximately five times wider than a previous stadium-sized one it studied for half a year.

Initial images from the rover’s first overlook after a 21-month journey to “Victoria Crater” show rugged walls with layers of exposed rock and a floor blanketed with dunes. The far wall is approximately 800 meters (one-half mile) from the rover.

“This is a geologist’s dream come true,” said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for NASA’s twin rovers Opportunity and Spirit. “Those layers of rock, if we can get to them, will tell us new stories about the environmental conditions long ago. We especially want to learn whether the wet era that we found recorded in the rocks closer to the landing site extended farther back in time. The way to find that out is to go deeper, and Victoria may let us do that.”

Opportunity has been exploring Mars since January 2004, more than 10 times longer than its original prime mission of three months. It has driven more than 9.2 kilometers (5.7 miles). Most of that was to get from “Endurance” crater to Victoria, across a flat plain pocked with smaller craters and strewn with sand ripples. Frequent stops to examine intriguing rocks interrupted the journey, and one large sand ripple kept the rover trapped for more than five weeks.

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Intel says it will start shipping chips that exchange data at a terabyte a second – approximately 1000 gigabytes or one trillion (short scale) bytes – within five years.

A prototype of the 80-core chip was revealed this week at the Intel Developer Forum, the company’s twice-yearly conference used to educate developers on its short and long-term plans.

And they’re going to call it the 80×86.

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Efforts to win U.S. congressional passage of a bill to ban most forms of Internet gambling by tacking it onto a must-pass bill hit a roadblock on Tuesday, but aides said Republican backers were exploring other ways to make it law.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, a Virginia Republican, raised a “strong objection” to attaching any unrelated legislation to a pending defense bill, which has been viewed by supporters of the Internet gambling bill as a prime vehicle for it.

“I have firmly opposed putting any (unrelated) bills in the conference report,” Warner wrote in a letter dated September 25 to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.

Warner did not cite the Internet gambling bill specifically, but he said other senators have sought to tack at least nine unrelated items to the defense bill.

I hear there were at least two “Dump Nuclear Waste in Lake Michigan” riders to a bill titled “People Shouldn’t Molest Babies.”

The system is broken. I suggest Americans reboot their government.

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If you see a tanker on fire, Run!

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Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said he had not seen the classified National Intelligence Estimate that reportedly alleges that the Iraq war has worsened the problem of terrorism throughout the world, but suggested terrorism is a problem that transcends the Iraq war.

“It’s a classified report and I haven’t read it,” Frist told ABC News’ “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” in an exclusive appearance, quickly adding, “This war on terror is more than just Iraq, is more than just Afghanistan.”

It’s a little odd that Frirst would say something like that, since he’s a member of the Gang of Eight.

(translation of the billboard text for the non-Dutch: “ah, nice surprise!”)

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“We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda,”

– Condoleezza Rice, to a reporter for the New York Post on Monday, in response to the Clinton interview

If you want to read parts of the actual comprehensive strategy to fight al Qaeda that the Clinton Administration did indeed leave, click here.

Some more fact-checking here

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Tireless consumer advocate Edgar Dworsky recently launched a new Web site named Mouseprint.org, where he’s taking on the ever-more-absurd claims and disclaimers in the world of advertising.

If it weren’t so sad, Mouseprint.org would be a laugh-riot.

Here’s a taste: New England-area car dealers have taken to advertising new car prices so low you’d think Detroit was in the middle of some kind of financial crisis. A brand-new $21,000 car, for example, was recently listed in an ad for $9,500. How can they do that? Is it aggressive employee pricing? Some fabulous new rebate program?

Nope. The price assumes a $7,500 down payment on the car. Consider it a rebate, only you have to pay it.

This one’s a bit tricky, so let me explain by example. Let’s say you go to the store to buy a gallon of milk. You expect it to cost $3, but the sign on the shelf says $2. This, you figure, is your lucky day. But when you get to the checkout counter, the cashier asks you for a dollar before ringing up your purchase.

“You have to pay $1 to get the $2 price,” she explains.

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During an election debate at the weekend in the outskirts of Chicago, Peter Roskam, the Republican candidate for Illinois’s sixth district, trotted out the familiar line that his Democratic opponent wanted America to “cut and run” from Iraq.

His opponent, Tammy Duckworth, a former National Guard pilot who lost both her legs in Iraq last year when her helicopter was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade, was visibly angry at the exchange. “I just could not believe he would say that to me,” said Ms Duckworth, who now walks on artificial legs with the help of a cane.

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Begin in Genesis with the well-loved story of Noah, derived from the Babylonian myth of Uta-Napisthim and known from the older mythologies of several cultures. The legend of the animals going into the ark two by two is charming, but the moral of the story of Noah is applaing. God took a dim view of humans, so he (with the exception of one family) drowned the lot of them including children and also, for good measure the rest of the (presumably blameless) animals as well.

Of course, irritated theologians will protest that we don’t take the book of Genesis literally anymore. But that is my whole point. We pick and choose which bits of scripture to believe, which bits to write off as symbols or allegories. Such picking and choosing is a decision, just as much, or as little, as the atheists decision to follow this moral precept or that was a personal decision, without an absolute foundation. If one of these is ‘morality flying by the seat of its pants’ so is the other.

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The proposition Electoral College vs. the Popular Vote. Win the debate lose the girl.

Quicktime Video .9MB 1’02

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US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice has strongly disputed a claim by former president Bill Clinton that he left a comprehensive plan to fight Al Qaida when his term ended.

In a heated interview on Sunday, the former president accused the Bush administration of doing far less that he did to stop Al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden after the September 11 attacks.

Rice however, said: “The notion somehow for eight months the Bush administration sat there and didn’t do that is just flatly false — and I think the 9/11 commission understood that.”

Gee, he must have hit a sore spot..

Asked whether she thought Clinton was a liar, Rice replied: “No, I’m just saying that, look; there was a lot of passion in that interview.”

Yeah, let’s focus on the emotion. As usual, the Daily show has the best summary of the whole thing:

(via onegoodmove)

Quicktime Video 3.3 MB 3’55

And after the break, let’s see what the 9/11 commission really said about this, and wether Rice is blowing smoke again…

Read the rest of this entry »

This undated photo provided by the U.S. Army shows Emily Perez, the highest ranking black and Hispanic woman cadet in corps history. Perez, 23, was buried at West Point military academy Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2006, two weeks after she was killed by a bomb in Iraq. She was a platoon leader at the head of a convoy when a roadside bomb exploded south of Baghdad on Sept. 12 and killed her. (AP Photo/US Army)

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Apple Computer has slapped Podcast Ready with a “cease and desist” letter, claiming that the terms “Podcast Ready” and “myPodder” infringe Apple’s trademarks, and that they cause confusion among consumers. The company has been cracking down on use of the word “pod” by all sorts of parties, even though its trademark is for the word “iPod.”

I suggest replacing the word “Podcast” with “Portapoddy”, based on this. It has the added benefit of more accurately decsribing the content.

“Open the pod bay doors, Hal.”

“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that. Steve Jobs won’t let me.”

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European Commissioner Neelie Kroes has revealed that the US Embassy pressured her over the Microsoft antitrust case

The US government sought to influence the European Commission over Microsoft’s antitrust case, according to competition commissioner Neelie Kroes.

Kroes said the US embassy in Brussels had asked her to be “nicer” to Microsoft ahead of her decision to fine the software giant €280m in July.

The commissioner criticised the approach. “This is of course an intervention which is not possible,” Kroes told Dutch newspaper Financieele Dagblad this week.

When asked if she was annoyed by the Embassy’s approach, she said “In my work, I cannot have a preference. I have, however, a personal opinion, but that is for Saturday night.”

Kroes’ spokesperson added in an email to ZDNet UK on Tuesday: “We can confirm that she was lobbied and that she did not appreciate it.”