[Quote:]

Mayor Daley’s latest rants have sent me over the edge. He used the accident in New York to once again demand a no-fly zone over downtown Chicago for general aviation aircraft.

It was expected, of course. He has an irrational hatred for piston-engine aircraft, as evidenced by his illogical tirade this week. “They should not jeopardize, through intentionally or by accident, a single- or two-engine plane flying over our city [sic],” the Meigs Field destroyer exploded at a press conference. (I don’t think he was including Boeing 737s, 757s, and 767s in his list of twin-engine aircraft.) “Remember: a single- or two-engine plane can kill as many people as possible if they want to.”

And if it were just Daley, I’d ignore his ravings, just as the folks in the federal government in charge of security and airspace do.

But it’s not just him. Other politicians (with the spectacular and notable exception of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg) and self-appointed “experts” are jumping on the tragic accident — repeat, accident — in New York to sound off again about the “danger” of light aircraft, and how they must be regulated, restricted, banned.

OK, for all of those ranting about “threats” from GA aircraft, we’ll believe that you’re really serious about controlling “threats” when you call for:

* Banning all vans within cities. A small panel van was used in the first World Trade Center attack. The bomb, which weighed 1,500 pounds, killed six and injured 1,042.
* Banning all box trucks from cities. Timothy McVeigh’s rented Ryder truck carried a 5,000-pound bomb that killed 168 in Oklahoma City.
* Banning all semi-trailer trucks. They can carry bombs weighing more than 50,000 pounds.
* Banning newspapers on subways. That’s how the terrorists hid packages of sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway system. They killed 12.
* Banning backpacks on all buses and subways. That’s how the terrorists got the bombs into the London subway system. They killed 52.
* Banning all cell phones on trains. That’s how they detonated the bombs in backpacks placed on commuter trains in Madrid. They killed 191.
* Banning all small pleasure boats on public waterways. That’s how terrorists attacked the USS Cole, killing 17.
* Banning all heavy or bulky clothing in all public places. That’s how suicide bombers hide their murderous charges. Thousands killed.

Number of people killed by a terrorist attack using a GA aircraft? Zero.

Number of people injured by a terrorist attack using a GA aircraft? Zero.

Property damage from a terrorist attack using a GA aircraft? None.

So Mr. Mayor (and Mr. Governor, Ms. Senator, Mr. Congressman, and Mr. “Expert”), if you’re truly serious about “protecting” the public, advocate all of the bans I’ve listed above. Using the “logic” you apply to general aviation aircraft, you’re forced to conclude that newspapers, winter coats, cell phones, backpacks, trucks, and boats all pose much greater risks to the public.

So be consistent in your logic. If you are dead set on restricting a personal transportation system that carries more passengers than any single airline, reaches more American cities than all the airlines combined, provides employment for 1.3 million American citizens and $160 billion in business “to protect the public,” then restrict or control every other transportation system that the terrorists have demonstrated they can use to kill.

If you’re not willing to be consistent, then we might think that you’re pandering to uninformed public fears, posturing from the soapbox of demagoguery, screaming security for your own political ends.

[Quote:]

A problem with Microsoft Exchange Server means programmes such as Outlook will turn the clocks back a week early, plunging Britain’s Blackberry-weilding suits into a thundering whirlpool of temporal bedlam.

The bug has arisen because this October is unusual in having five Sundays. Exchange is hard-coded to assume only four, and to readjust from BST to GMT on the fourth Sunday.

Another great feature of the USA: the government can take anything it wants by simply claiming it was used in a crime. Example: 1, 2

[Quote:]

One in five British children cannot find the UK on a map of the world, a magazine’s research suggests.

National Geographic Kids said it also found fewer than two thirds of children were able to correctly locate the US.

The magazine, which questioned more than 1,000 six to 14-year-olds, said it found several London children did not know they lived in England’s capital.

Teachers’ union the NASUWT said the findings were “nonsense” and did not reflect staff and pupils’ hard work.

[Quote:]

Abdul Rahim insists he’s an apolitical student who fled a strict father. But he’s fallen into a black hole in the war on terror in which first the Taliban and then the United States imprisoned him as an enemy of the state.

Arrested by the Taliban in Afghanistan in January 2000, Rahim says al-Qaida leaders burned him with cigarettes, smashed his right hand, deprived him of sleep, nearly drowned him and hanged him from the ceiling until he “confessed” to spying for the United States.

U.S. forces took the young Kurd from Syria into custody in January 2002 after the Taliban fled his prison. Accusing him of being an al-Qaida terrorist, U.S. interrogators deprived him of sleep, threatened him with police dogs and kept him in stress positions for hours, he says. He’s been held ever since as an enemy combatant.

Rahim’s story is one of several emerging from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay as defense lawyers make bids to free their clients while the Bush administration tries to use a new law to lock them out of federal courts.

via

BUSH: We will stay the course. [8/30/06]

BUSH: We will stay the course, we will complete the job in Iraq. [8/4/05]

BUSH: We will stay the course until the job is done, Steve. And the temptation is to try to get the President or somebody to put a timetable on the definition of getting the job done. We’re just going to stay the course. [12/15/03]

BUSH: And my message today to those in Iraq is: We’ll stay the course. [4/13/04]

BUSH: And that’s why we’re going to stay the course in Iraq. And that’s why when we say something in Iraq, we’re going to do it. [4/16/04]

BUSH: And so we’ve got tough action in Iraq. But we will stay the course. [4/5/04]

This week:

STEPHANOPOULOS: James Baker says that he’s looking for something between “cut and run�? and “stay the course.�?

BUSH: Well, hey, listen, we’ve never been “stay the course,�? George. We have been — we will complete the mission, we will do our job, and help achieve the goal, but we’re constantly adjusting to tactics. Constantly.

[Quote:]

St. Mark and St. Luke; Right cover of The Washington Manuscript of the Gospels
7th century; Byzantine period
Encaustic painting on wooden panel
H: 21.3 W: 14.3 cm; Egypt
Freer Gallery of Art
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1906.298

[Quote:]

The Smithsonian’s Sackler gallery opened a unique and wide-ranging new exhibit yesterday featuring fragments of Bibles from before the year 1000. “Most of the manuscripts have never been seen outside the countries where they are stored. [Some Smithsonian-owned documents in the exhibition] have never been exhibited and two have not been shown since 1978.” Fragments of the Codex Sinaiticus are included in the exhibit. Along with the archaeological interest, these fragments can pose theological and historical challenges for Christians. Some, like UNC’s Bart Ehrman, have lost their faith as a result of studying early Bibles; some, like Luke Timothy Johnson of Emory, believing that Christianity is about a common cultural and spiritual experience, are unmoved by the “corruptions” and differences in the New Testament over time; other Christians try to refute claims that the text has changed.

[Quote:]

HAL9000, an Italian group that specializes in art restoration, preservation and high-resolution art photography, has posted an 8.6 gigapixel stitched image of an Italian fresco. The group claims it’s the highest resolution digital photograph in the world.

A total of 1145 frames – shot with a Nikon D2X (set to capture NEFs) and Nikkor 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6D ED AF VR (fixed at 400mm for all frames) – were captured during a 13-hour shooting day on January 30, 2006. The precise workflow used to assemble and crop the final image of 96,679 pixels x 89,000 pixels, says HAL9000′s Mauro Gavinelli, is a closely-guarded secret, owing to the proprietary tools and techniques the company has developed to produce high-resolution pictures like this. Says Gavinelli:

“About data conversion and all the other software I have to admit that we are a little jealous about the tricks and workarounds we invented to reach the end but …I can tell you that none of the programs available at the time we afforded the job (early 2006) could manage all the processing. All the main programs for panorama stitching are really good software, but each one have problems, here or there along the whole processing, to manage 1145 pictures even if in theory are all designed for higher numbers. We solved the problem keeping from each one the good points and writing dedicated software for some job peculiar tasks because this kind of image can’t be generated with a ‘shoot and stitch’ approach.”

[Quote:]

US Vice President
Dick Cheney told US soldiers newly returned from
Iraq that they had built “bonds of friendship” with Iraqis that may help win the war.

“Having been on the ground, all of you know that we’ve made progress — not easily, but steadily. And we can be confident going forward,” he told thousands of soldiers of the storied 101st Airborne Division at their home base here.

With just 22 days before key November elections in which the unpopular war in Iraq may cost Republicans control of the US Congress, Cheney again rejected setting a precise timetable for bringing US forces home.

And, at a time when some US political leaders are worried about public opinion polls showing simmering Iraqi anger at the US occupation, Cheney said US soldiers were actually winning over Iraqi support.

“Members of our military have worked diligently to make sure that more Iraqi families have police protection, and electricity, and water, and sanitation for their homes,” he said.

Meanwhile, in Iraq:

[Quote:]

Families fled in search of safety Monday as open warfare raged for a fourth day between Shiite militias and armed Sunni men in Tigris River towns north of Baghdad. Militias allied with Iraq’s Shiite-led government held sway in Balad city, forcing out Sunni families and leaving the bodies of slain Sunni men to rot in the streets, according to police, residents and hospital officials.

The Iraqi government deployed still more reinforcements to try to calm the embattled towns and hold open the main roads, Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul Kareem al-Kinani said in the capital. But local police officers accused Shiite-dominated government police forces of working alongside Shiite militias in executing Sunnis and appealed for more help.

The escalating violence in the Tigris River towns in many ways serves as a microcosm of the daily violence roiling Iraq. Sectarian attacks have increased more than tenfold since the start of the year and now claim more than 100 victims a day, according to the Iraqi government.

The violence in Balad was unusual because of the sustained deployment of the militias on the streets, and the killing seemed particularly vicious. Balad was “under siege from all sides,” police 1st Lt. Bassim Hamdi said by telephone from the city. “We demand that leaders from both sides intervene to stop the bloodshed. Because if this goes on, it will explode sectarian violence all over Iraq.”

[Quote:]

The top US general defended the leadership of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, saying it is inspired by God.

“He leads in a way that the good Lord tells him is best for our country,” said Marine General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

There’s a worm out there, a new one in the Win32/Stration family. You can read about it here:

http://www3.ca.com/securityadvisor/virusinfo/virus.aspx?ID=58375

There’s nothing new in yet another windows worm, of course.

This one mass-mails itself to e-mail addresses harvested from the affected machine. It fakes the “from” address from a handful of domains.

One of these domains is mine. Not really a problem, because this domain is a spam magnet. It is “niet.com”, and “niet” is the dutch equivalent of “not”, sort of. It is often used by the dutch when filling out web forms that require an e-mail address, and you end up with addresses like “liever@niet.com” which means something like “rather@not.com”. There are plenty of far more creative, in a not-safe-for-work kinda way, expressions used in these made-up e-mail addresses. There are two kinds of email coming in to the niet.com mailserver: a small handful of confirmation messages (“click here to confirm that this is indeed a valid email address so we can activate your account”) or far, far, far, far more frequently, email newsletters by companies that don’t believe in double-opt-in.

So now this mail server is swamped with non-delivery reports. As we all know there is anti-virus out there that knows that this virus fakes the from line, and still insists in sending a non-delivery to the from address. Some of them helpfully include the full virus.

Again, nothing hew.

What really gets my goat this time around is that some of these mail servers attempting to deliver these non-delivery reports are so mind-boggingly stupid that:

1) they use the A record for “niet.com” from DNS to figure out where to connect to, instead of the MX record.
2) they think the “513 relaying denied” they receive from the machine pointed to by the A record is a temporary error, and will try again and again and again. As in, giving me a six digit line count when I grep for this error in my daily log files.

As to the idiots who wrote these mail servers, I’d like to get their attention to the relevant RFC’s, preferably by wrapping them around a steel bar and applying it rectally.

I removed the A record for now, and the delivery attempts have died down. I’ll have to check the logs on the machine that is the MX to see if these brain-dead mail servers use the MX record as a fall-back attempt to deliver mail, but it would not surprise me. In the mean time, the MX machine for the domain is so busy it gives “4xx too busy” errors every now and then. Luckily it is serving only this domain, and just accepts and stores everything. I’d hate to think what it would go through if it also had to ran spamassassin or a virus check on each incoming message.

A young man carries a boy out of a hospital in Baghdad, Iraq, after the youth received medical treatment Sunday Oct. 22, 2006. The boy was hurt when two bombs exploded in Baghdad’s Shurja market. Three people were killed in the blasts and 14 were wounded. (AP Photo/Karim Kadim)

[Quote:]

Officials at Marquette University have ordered a Ph.D. student to remove a quotation critical of the federal government from his office door, because the hallway the door faces is not a “free speech zone.”

In August, Stuart Distler, a doctoral student teacher, posted a quotation from humor columnist Dave Barry on his office door. “As Americans, we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful and relentless,” the sign stated. “I refer, of course, to the federal government.”

On Sept. 5, Philosophy Department Chairman James South informed Distler via email that the sign had been taken down because it was “patently offensive.”

“While I’m a strong supporter of academic freedom,” South wrote, “I’m afraid that hallways and office doors are not ‘free-speech zones.’ If material is patently offensive and has no obvious academic import or university sanction, I have little choice but to take note.”

When asked to comment on academic freedom at the university, South told Cybercast News Service he had “no interest in pursuing that conversation, but I do appreciate your interest.”

You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension – a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into the Free-speech Zone. But we’ll still need to see your papers, citizen.