« Daily Show: Crisis In Our Nation’s Pants | Home | Recent Comments | Categories | General seeks UK Iraq withdrawal »
Kodak moment
Daily Show: Crisis In Our Nation’s Pants
Ken Mehlman Bans Gay Orgies Till After Nov. 8
Ken Mehlman has put the word out to GOP elected officials and staffers in Washington:
No more gay orgies until after the November election.
Banned!
Same goes for hiring male prostitutes, participating in hotel room nudie poker parties where hookers and drugs are available and using the Internet to sexually harrass and stalk minors.
GOP officials and staffers will still be permitted to view child pornography in the privacy of their own offices and homes, however, as long as physical contact is not established with the children in question.
All other kinds of porn and sexual activity are okay. This includes sex slavery, provided that it occurs only on the islands of Guam and the Marianas and not in the continental U.S. proper.
Ken Mehlman is also cautioning that, if you have a mistress, you delay violent sexual encounters until after voters have made their choices in the first week of November.
The good news is that the K Street Project stays open for all of the next four weeks. Shading lobbying deals, kickbacks and graft should continue on as usual.
The Bush administration’s torture of U.S. citizen Jose Padilla
[Quote:]
The administration declared Padilla an “enemy combatant,” put him in a military prison, and refused to charge him with any crime or even allow him access to a lawyer or anyone else. He stayed in a black hole, kept by his own government, for the next three-a-half-years with no charges of any kind ever asserted against him and with the administration insisting on the right to detain him (and any other American citizen) indefinitely — all based solely on the secret, unchallengeable say-so of the President that he was an “enemy combatant.”
[..]
The Bush administration finally charged Padilla with a crime (after 3 1/2 years of detention) only because the U.S. Supreme Court was set to rule on the legality of their treatment of Padilla, and indicting Padilla enabled the administration to argue that his case was now “moot.” The Government’s indictment made no mention of the flamboyant allegation they originally trumpeted to justify his lawless incarceration — that he was a “Dirty Bomber” attempting to detonate a radiological bomb in an American city (because the “evidence” for that accusation was itself procured by torture and was therefore unreliable and unusable). Instead, the indictment contained only the vaguest and most generic terrorism allegations. Since then, the federal judge presiding over Padilla’s case (in the Southern District of Florida) has repeatedly expressed skepticism over the Government’s case against him and has, on several occasions, admonished them to provide more specific information setting forth exactly what Padilla is alleged to have done.
Last week, Padilla’s lawyers filed a Motion to Dismiss the Indictment against him on the grounds that the Government has engaged in outrageous conduct — specifically, that they tortured him for the 3 1/2 years he remained in captivity, particularly for the almost 2 full years that they denied him access even to a lawyer. Via David Markus, a South Florida attorney who has been reporting on the Padilla proceedings on his local blog, Padilla’s Motion to Dismiss is here (.pdf). Markus excerpts a substantial part of the description of Padilla’s captivity, which is the first detailed account I have read of the treatment to which Padilla was subjected while in detention.
Plane crashes into building in New York
Mine mine mine mine!
Bush brings faith to foreign aid
[Quote:]
The herders of this remote mountain village know little about America, but have learned from those who run a US-funded aid program about the American God.
A Christian God.
The US government has given $10.9 million to Food for the Hungry, a faith-based development organization, to reach deep into the arid mountains of northern Kenya to provide training in hygiene, childhood illnesses, and clean water. The group has brought all that, and something else that increasingly accompanies US-funded aid programs: regular church service and prayer.
President Bush has almost doubled the percentage of US foreign-aid dollars going to faith-based groups such as Food for the Hungry, according to a Globe survey of government data. And in seeking to help such groups obtain more contracts, Bush has systematically eliminated or weakened rules designed to enforce the separation of church and state.
[..]
Bush made some of the changes by executive order only after failing to get Congress to approve them; the bill faltered in the Senate, where moderate Republicans joined Democrats in raising concerns about breaking down the barrier between government and religion.
“I got a little frustrated in Washington because I couldn’t get the bill passed,” Bush told a meeting of faith-based groups in March 2004. “Congress wouldn’t act, so I signed an executive order — that means I did it on my own.”
And domestically, the separation between church and state is gone as well:
[Quote:]
At any moment, state inspectors can step uninvited into one of the three child care centers that Ethel White runs in Auburn, Ala., to make sure they meet state requirements intended to ensure that the children are safe. There must be continuing training for the staff. Her nurseries must have two sinks, one exclusively for food preparation. All cabinets must have safety locks. Medications for the children must be kept under lock and key, and refrigerated.
The Rev. Ray Fuson of the Harvest Temple Church of God in Montgomery, Ala., does not have to worry about unannounced state inspections at the day care center his church runs. Alabama exempts church day care programs from state licensing requirements, which were tightened after almost a dozen children died in licensed and unlicensed day care centers in the state in two years.
The differences do not end there. As an employer, Ms. White must comply with the civil rights laws; if employees feel mistreated, they can take the center to court. Religious organizations, including Pastor Fuson’s, are protected by the courts from almost all lawsuits filed by their ministers or other religious staff members, no matter how unfairly those employees think they have been treated.
I no longer see much difference between Iran and the USA…
Republicans for Hypocrisy
[Quote:]
You gotta love the contradictions in Washington. The head of a new conservative group named Americans for Honesty on Issues is a former advisor to Rep. Tom DeLay and Enron CEO Ken Lay.
Perfect material for Katrina’s “Dictionary of Republicanisms.”
A slap in the face for PC and Media Center owners
[Quote:]
The movie industry seems determined to continue on a course where it happily erodes the rights of legitimate users, all in the name of securing profits. The latest example of this comes in the form of a DVD copy protection technology called Protect DVD-Video which actually prevents a DVD being played on a Windows PC using Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center Edition or any software players based on DirectShow.
Protect DVD-Video is the brainchild of a company called ProtectDisc. Part of the copy-protection mechanism is a non-standard UDF (Universal Disc Format) file system which results in the IFO file on the DVD (this is the file responsible for storing information on chapters, subtitles and audio tracks) appearing to the PC as being zero bytes long.
The upshot of this is that if you have a DVD disc protected by Protect DVD-Video and you try to play the disc in a PC-based system using, say, Windows Media Player, the process will fail. Now, lets be clear here, we are taking about a genuine, legitimate DVD disc not working in a PC, not a pirated disc or a download via a torrent.
All this does is cause people like me to either become illegal in order to watch the DVD on my computer / iPod. If it’s illegal to defeat copy protection, then I’ll be doing that in order to watch the movie I legally paid for on the device I wish. Something that is supposed to be legal.
WTF is going on these days? Life used to be so much simpler and less bizarre. Now it seems that if you breath, you are likely to be thrown in jail for something. Or sent off to war, or detained indefinitely, etc…
This will be bad for sales, and plays right into the hands of the ‘pirate business model’. How else can you watch this, if you happen to own a state-of-the-art MCE machine? BTW, I bet MS won’t be happy with this, because if it takes off, it inevitably will hurt their MCE sales as well.
Sounds like a good thing to me if it stops people using Windows and/or WMP
Hope it doesn’t stop Mac or Linux boxes from viewing them though…
John, don’t dream, it will go to Mac and Linux too.
And if it stops people using Mac/Linux, then it sounds like a good thing to me.
Rubbish. Why does Linux/Mac fanatics always drag in the “oooooh, eeeeeviiiill MS, baaad wiiiindoows” whining?
The whole thing is awful, and is independent of OS or anything else.
Actually, I don’t think Windows is evil or MS is necessarily bad as a company. I do know a fair bit about operating systems though having spent 5 years of my life designing & building one, and I can tell you that Windows is techincally inferior as an OS. It is not necessarily a bad design, just one that was not intended for the way we use computers today. MS have attempted, and with Vista continue to attempt, to fix these limitations, but the only way to really do that is to start with a new design for the core of the OS.
Apple realised this when they moved to OS X. Their previous OS was probably worse than Windows in terms of the mismatch in the design of the OS and the way people use computers today.
Why is a Unix-type OS better? Well, for the most part because they were designed as multi-user systems (I know the original Unix wasn’t, but the current versions are). It just so happens that the concept of multiple users, unable to interfere with each other, can also be easily extended to ‘virtual’ users running services on the machine that are isolated from each other, and can run without admin privilege, reducing the chance that should they contain a flaw they might allow somebody to compromise the box. Have Unix systems had flaws? Sure. It is software, and it contains bugs. But the design is stronger, and that helps.
I think you are right John, but there is one thing I’d like to add. MS tries to give the user what they want. Not every user, but they do spend lots and lots of money reseraching what it is, their users want. It ranges from package to function. They really try hard to give 90% of the user 90% of what they want. At Apple, they tend to spend less on that kind of research and build what they think is needed as a whole. Take, for example, the way they use a journalling file systeem, so you can “go back in time” to fetch your old version, or something you deleted. That is not a feature many users would come up with. But once they get their hands on it… Sure enough MS will copy it, because their users will want that too. It will be difficult to shoehorn on to their system, but they will get it right the n-th try. This most people can live with. However, howmany users do you know, grave secrutiy? Hell, even MS it self tells us: “If you give people the chooice between more serurity and dancing pigs, 9 out of 10 take the pigs.” So these dancers made MS big, and MS is going to stay big. It’s just that I and about 15% of the computer users don’t want those pink dancers. So let’s all be happy at our own theatre. And let’s be honest, it is fun sometimes to watch those piggies, on your way to work.
“Why is a Unix-type OS better?”
This one I don’t oppose. Yes, it is better
It is just I don’t see the relevance of the “if it stops…” comment.
What would really stop people from using Windows would be if the Linux user interface – which is getting better day-by-day – were user friendly.
As in my mother can install any program. Without rewriting make files. And understanding what happens in the background. She tried, then asked for Win98. Now she is happy.
MacOS is the best in that sense. But it is way too expensive.
And as Linux gets more GUI centric, leaving behind the old console interface, it gets slower and more unstable, which is natural – I could actually reproduce almost every single “Windows error” on SuSe, RedHat and Ubuntu linux in about 30 minutes.
Jan-Mark
My windows is secure and stable.
Still getting 10+ patches a week for my RedHat. Many are security centric ones.
In part, Windows is less secure because more people try to hack Windows than Linux (and more people try to hack Linux than AS/400). In part. Sure, there are a bunch of security bugs in Window.
I bet you could find some in Linux too. The most secure house is the one without windows and doors.
Would you live in one?
Security means restrictions. You have to find a balance there.
I restrict myself to not installing dancing pigs. That usually solves the security problem
If you ignore the smiley in my original comment, then the point could be made that since Windows comes pre-installed on the PC it will take something to make Windows users try an alternative. Having a good GUI will be needed for them to keep it, but I don’t think it would be enough for most to change. Not being able to watch their movies, or play their CDs/MP3 file or other media might be enough to make some more people think about changing to another OS and at least try it out (and Linux in particular makes that easy with its live CD distros that you can test out on your hardware). Security might too, though I doubt that will be enough (virus infections are things that happen to other users).
“since Windows comes pre-installed on the PC ”
Most of the PCs you can find here comes with pre-installed Linux – at least the “cheap” configuration PCs you can buy at MediaMarkt, Saturn, etc.
The more expensive ones don’t have pre-installed OS, or they have Windows XP Home.
The fate of the pre-installed Linux usually is a quick removal, and installation of some version of Windows so the user can run his/her favourite PC game.
“to make some more people think about changing to another OS and at least try it out ”
I’ve seen that happen. Most of the users quickly changed back to Windows, because they found Linux too complicated/difficult, and that 90% of the programs they like are not running on them.
Mac has no chance whatsoever, as it is so expensive that most people don’t even consider buying one.