[Quote:]

Getting your fingerprints taken would once have meant only one thing. You were helping the police with their inquiries. Now such “biometric” identification is entering the mainstream of every day life.

If you want to hire a car at Stansted Airport, you now need to give a fingerprint.

The scheme being tested by Essex police and car hire firms, is not voluntary. Every car rental customer must take part.

The comments on the site are priceless, “if you’ve got nothing to hide” crowd is out in force. Right until somebody tells them: “Nobody’s innocent, Citizen: we’re determining the level of your guilt.”

And fingerprints are easily duplicated these days, but I still can’t get a replacement set…

How do really large companies work? Well…. I’m glad you asked..

[Quote:]

We’ve been steadily adding to our gallery of domestic terrorists in recent weeks, and now we can add the perpetrator of the anthrax hoax letters that were sent to Keith Olbermann and other leading media and “liberal” figures — which, as I pointed out at the time, is definitively an act of domestic terrorism.

His name is Chad Conrad Castagana:

LOS ANGELES — A man was arrested and accused of mailing threatening letters laced with white powder to Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, David Letterman and other high-profile figures, the FBI announced Sunday.

FBI agents took Chad Conrad Castagana, 39, into custody Saturday on charges of conveying false information and sending threats via the U.S. mail, the bureau said in a statement.

… Authorities claim he mailed threatening letters to Pelosi, Letterman, New York Sen. Charles Schumer, Jon Stewart of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” and MSNBC host Keith Olbermann.

Some letters included phrases like “Death to Demagogues” and pictures of victims of the 2004 Asian tsunami, authorities said.

Gavin at Sadly, No! has the full rundown on this character. Seems he was a regular Freeper who posted the following bio:

I am a lifelong Conservative Republican .

I have an Associates Degree in the Science of Electronics .

Ann Coulter is a Goddess and I worship Laura Ingraham and Michele Malkin .

English is the langauge of the United States of America- – our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution are written in the langauge that expresses our civilized freedoms .

Spanish is the language of Banana Republics, beyond that it belongs in a European country.

Bruce Wilson at Talk To Action points out that Castanaga was also a devout Christian Nationalist who posted the following at Freep:

Liberals and Lefties everywhere in America’s institutions are trying to slowly but increasingly ban Christianity from America, from our site, from our discourse !
They have already succeded in banning any sign of Christianity from ourPublic Schools ! !

If THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST were released today for the first time, it would be slapped with an NC-17 rating !

[Quote:]

Just off the interstate, a couple of junctions down from Cincinnati’s international airport, over the state line in rural Kentucky, the finishing touches are being put to an impressive-looking building. When it is finished and open to the public next summer, it may, quite possibly, be one of the weirdest museums in the world.

The Creation Museum – motto: “Prepare to Believe!” – will be the first institution in the world whose contents, with the exception of a few turtles swimming in an artificial pond, are entirely fake. It is dedicated to the proposition that the account of the creation of the world in the Book of Genesis is completely correct, and its mission is to convince visitors through a mixture of animatronic models, tableaux and a strangely Disneyfied version of the Bible story.

[..]

But what, I ask wonderingly, about those fossilised remains of early man-like creatures? Marsh knows all about that: “There are no such things. Humans are basically as you see them today. Those skeletons they’ve found, what’s the word? … they could have been deformed, diseased or something. I’ve seen people like that running round the streets of New York.”

Well, to be fair you don’t see them in Manhattan, but get out to Flushing and other parts of Long Island and it’s nothing but nomadic tribes of Neanderthals. If you want to see Australopithicus you need to head over to New Jersey.

[Quote:]

A Swedish woman on a flight from Paris to Stockholm went into allergic shock and lost consciousness for almost thirty minutes after her medicine was taken away at the security check.

Lidia Holmsten had her antihistamines taken away when she tried to take them on board in her hand luggage, even though the box was clearly marked with her name.

“We don’t speak the language and the airport staff refused to speak anything other than French. They only pointed at a sign, threw our things away in a bin and we did not know what happened to them. Everything got very confused,�? says Karl-Erik Rapp, Lidia’s travelling companion, to Sundsvalls Tidning.

The officials took Holmsten’s medicine even though she told airport personnel that she suffered from severe asthma and arrhythmia and needed her medication with her.

Do you feel safer yet?

[Quote:]

There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that President Bush may have been the deciding factor that killed the GOP’s momentum in some key Senate races over the last week. One Republican consultant is convinced that Bush’s last-minute visit to Missouri on behalf of ousted GOP Sen. Jim Talent did the incumbent in. According to the network exit polls, Democrat Claire McCaskill crushed Talent among those late-breaking voters who decided in the final three days (a full 11 percent of the electorate). Bush also made a last-minute trip to Montana, where anecdotal evidence indicates the president’s rally for Republican Conrad Burns stopped the incumbent’s momentum in Billings.

[Quote:]

Sabah al-Atia sometimes calls home every 10 minutes when he is working to let his wife know he is still alive. After all, his job is one of the most dangerous in the city.

Mr. Atia is a trash collector.

In a city where a bomb could be lurking beneath any heap of refuse, and where insurgents are willing to kill to prevent them from being discovered, an occupation that pays only a few dollars a day has become one of the deadliest. Most of the 500 municipal workers who have been killed here since 2005 have been trash collectors, said Naeem al-Kaabi, the city’s deputy mayor.

[Quote:]

The Shiite militiamen paid the Sunni government worker a chilling visit as he was leaving the office on what would be his final day on the job.

Carrying AK-47s and pistols when they approached him, the gunmen accused office worker Ayad Kharallah of criticizing a co-worker named Mohammed for his association with the fearsome Mahdi Army. They summoned Kharallah to the militia’s neighborhood office to explain himself to their boss.

“I told them I don’t talk with Mohammed other than to say hello,” said Kharallah, 38, who until three weeks ago held a job with the Health Ministry that paid $200 per month. “But they told me they didn’t care. I must meet them at their office the following day.”

Kharallah decided meeting the militiamen would be suicidal, and going back to work wasn’t a good option either. He called his supervisor at the Health Ministry and told him he wouldn’t be returning. His supervisor thanked him for his service and told Kharallah that he had made a wise decision.

[Quote:]

Iraqi insurgents are no longer using just volunteers as suicide car bombers but are instead kidnapping drivers, rigging their vehicles with explosives and blowing them up, the Defense Ministry said Thursday.

In what appears to be a new tactic for the insurgency, the ministry said the kidnap victims do not know their cars have been loaded with explosives when they are released.

The ministry issued a statement saying that first “a motorist is kidnapped with his car. They then booby trap the car without the driver knowing. Then the kidnapped driver is released and threatened to take a certain road.”

The kidnappers follow the car and when the unwitting victim “reaches a checkpoint, a public place, or an army or police patrol, the criminal terrorists following the driver detonate the car from a distance,” the Defense Ministry statement said.

[Quote:]

On a recent Sunday, I was buying groceries in my beloved Amariya neighborhood in western Baghdad when I heard the sound of an AK-47 for about three seconds. It was close but not very close, so I continued shopping.

As I took a right turn on Munadhama Street, I saw a man lying on the ground in a small pool of blood. He wasn’t dead.

The idea of stopping to help or to take him to a hospital crossed my mind, but I didn’t dare. Cars passed without stopping. Pedestrians and shop owners kept doing what they were doing, pretending nothing had happened.

I was still looking at the wounded man and blaming myself for not stopping to help. Other shoppers peered at him from a distance, sorrowful and compassionate, but did nothing.

I went on to another grocery store, staying for about five minutes while shopping for tomatoes, onions and other vegetables. During that time, the man managed to sit up and wave to passing cars. No one stopped. Then, a white Volkswagen pulled up. A passenger stepped out with a gun, walked steadily to the wounded man and shot him three times. The car took off down a side road and vanished.

No one did anything. No one lifted a finger. The only reaction came from a woman in the grocery store. In a low voice, she said, “My God, bless his soul.”

[Quote:]

Rove’s miscalculations began well before election night. The polls and pundits pointed to a Democratic sweep, but Rove dismissed them all. In public, he predicted outright victory, flashing the V sign to reporters flying on Air Force One. He wasn’t just trying to psych out the media and the opposition. He believed his “metrics” were far superior to plain old polls. Two weeks before the elections, Rove showed NEWSWEEK his magic numbers: a series of graphs and bar charts that tallied early voting and voter outreach. Both were running far higher than in 2004. In fact, Rove thought the polls were obsolete because they relied on home telephones in an age of do-not-call lists and cell phones. Based on his models, he forecast a loss of 12 to 14 seats in the House—enough to hang on to the majority. Rove placed so much faith in his figures that, after the elections, he planned to convene a panel of Republican political scientists—to study just how wrong the polls were.

[Quote:]

Free software developers work to a straightforward moral code that doesn’t require a rocket scientist, or distinguished counsel to decode. Whatever you may say about them (and they rarely produce a piece of software usable by someone not already suffering from Asperger’s) free software developers draw a quality benchmark for what’s permissible for others to code and share.

And every year, this benchmark creeps higher. This obliges everyone else to try a little harder, too.

Microsoft is correct when it says free software destroys the foundations of capitalism and private property, but when it makes such a claim, it only makes itself look foolish and lazy. Free software doesn’t destroy capitalism or property, it just makes lazy people try harder. There is plenty of money to be made for the foreseeable future in advancing from the baseline drawn by standards committees and free software projects- because the software itself is but a small part of the value chain. So when an IBM (or a Microsoft complains) that it isn’t in control of the entire process, one can only reel at the misplaced ambition.

It isn’t hard to do better than free software – if one has a little ingenuity and wit. But such qualities appear to be strangers to Microsoft – and it wants to defend its prosperity on the grounds of “illegality” – and not what’s “legitimate”.

[..]

This weekend the Samba team offered this gentle nudge to Novell and the FSF.

We reproduce it in full:

The Samba Team disapproves strongly of the actions taken by Novell on November 2nd.

One of the fundamental differences between the proprietary software world and the free software world is that the proprietary software world divides users by forcing them to agree to coercive licensing agreements which restrict their rights to share with each other, whereas the free software world encourages users to unite and share the benefits of the software.

The patent agreement struck between Novell and Microsoft is a divisive agreement. It deals with users and creators of free software differently depending on their “commercial” versus “non-commercial” status, and deals with them differently depending on whether they obtained their free software directly from Novell or from someone else.

The goals of the Free Software community and the GNU GPL allow for no such distinctions.

Furthermore, the GPL makes it clear that all distributors of GPL’d software must stand together in the fight against software patents. Only by standing together do we stand a chance of defending against the peril represented by software patents. With this agreement Novell is attempting to destroy that unified defense, exchanging the long term interests of the entire Free Software community for a short term advantage for Novell over their competitors.

For Novell to make this deal shows a profound disregard for the relationship that they have with the Free Software community. We are, in essence, their suppliers, and Novell should know that they have no right to make self serving deals on behalf of others which run contrary to the goals and ideals of the Free Software community.

Using patents as competitive tools in the free software world is not acceptable. Novell, as a participant in numerous debates, discussions and conferences on the topic knew this to be the case. We call upon Novell to work with the Software Freedom Law Center to undo the patent agreement and acknowledge its obligations as a beneficiary of the Free Software community.

The Samba Team.

To Novell, this is a reminder that it doesn’t actually own its free software “stuff”. It’s not Novell’s right to gave or take away important moral decisions – such as whether you get sued or not for patent infringement (a career-wrecking lawsuit).

To the FSF, it’s a reminder that its stewardship of the GPL requires a robust defence.

[Quote:]

Immigrants arrested in the United States may be held indefinitely on suspicion of terrorism and may not challenge their imprisonment in civilian courts, the Bush administration said Monday, opening a new legal front in the fight over the rights of detainees.

I guess I’ll have to extend my policy not to visit the USA indefinitely.