[Quote:]

Two Jedi this morning turned up at the UN’s London HQ to demand official recognition of their religion, The Sun reports.

“Umada” and “Yunyun” – aka 27-year-old John Wilkinson and 24-year-old Charlotte Law – timed their “protest” to coincide with today’s UN International Day of Tolerance, which they’d like renamed “Interstellar Day of Tolerance”.

Wilkinson said: “We have come here today to ask that we are recognised as the fourth largest religion in this country.”

Indeed, more than 390,000 Brits are practising Jedi, according to the 2001 census. Brighton is the country’s principal centre of Jedi activity, with 6,480 professing to follow the faith.

[Quote:]

I’ve heard of customer-hostile banks (and have experienced them myself), but this Bank of America story takes the cake.

Matthew Shinnick dropped by a Bank of America branch in San Francisco to make sure a check he was about to deposit wasn’t fraudulent. The teller found that the check was fraudulent and told the manager, who then had Shinnick thrown in jail.

Are you getting this right? The customer who wanted to make sure he wasn’t about to draw on a fraudulent check, got thrown in jail by Bank of America.

From SFGate, Check from a scammer bounces victim into jail:

The teller contacted the business and was informed that no check had been written to Shinnick for $2,000 or any other amount. She immediately passed the check to the branch manager. “I saw him talking on the phone and staring at me,” Shinnick said. “A few minutes later, four SFPD officers came into the bank. They didn’t say a thing. They just kicked my legs apart and handcuffed me behind my back.” The police report for Shinnick’s arrest says he was taken into custody “for the safety of the bank employees as well as the bank customers.”

Shinnick spent several hours in jail, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, before his father posted $4,500 bail. All told Shinnick spent $14,000 to clear his record. Bank of America refused to reimburse him.

In response, consumer advocate and radio host Clark Howard started a Bank of America “Money Loss Meter” to show how much money his listeners have withdrawn from BofA as they close their accounts in protest. It’s up to $50 million. (There’s more on Clark’s site.)

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has more on the story: Clark Howard takes on B-of-A. For their part, Bank of America denies that customers are closing their accounts as Howard claims.

That last claim by BoA is not true.

[Quote:]

Deal site BlackFriday.info yesterday removed the Best Buy “Black Friday” sales price list after the big box retailer threatened to deliver a DMCA takedown notice to Black Friday’s ISP. In a brief posting, Black Friday said, “While we believe that sale prices are facts and not copyrightable, we do not want to risk having this website shut down due to a DMCA take down notice.”

I’d like to introduce Best Buy to a new word: Jurisdiction. As in, I’m not in any where the DMCA has power. here are the prices.

[Quote:]

A Kearny High School student has accused a history teacher of crossing the line between teaching and preaching – and he’s got the tapes to prove it.

Sixteen-year-old junior Matthew LaClair says he was shocked when history teacher David Paszkiewicz, who is also a Baptist preacher in town, spent the first week lecturing students more about Heaven and Hell than the colonies and Constitution.

“I would never have suspected something like this went on in a public school,” LaClair said yesterday.

He said Paszkiewicz told students that if they didn’t accept Jesus, “you belong in Hell.” He also dismissed as unscientific the theories of evolution and the “Big Bang.”

[..]

LaClair, who described his own religious views as “non-Christian,” said he wanted to complain about Paszkiewicz to school administrators, but feared his teacher would deny the charges and that no one would believe a student’s word against a teacher’s. So he started taping Paszkiewicz in class.

“If I didn’t have those CDs everything would have been dismissed,” LaClair said.

On Oct. 10 – a month after he first requested a meeting with the principal – LaClair met with Paszkiewicz, Somma and the head of social studies department.

At first Paszkiewicz denied he mixed in religion with his history lesson and the adults in the room appeared to be buying it, LaClair said. But then LaClair reached into his backpack and produced the CDs.

At that point Paszkiewicz remarked, according to LaClair, “Maybe you’re an atheist. You caught the big Christian fish.”

For some people the word atheist is an epithet, an accusation.

“Maybe you’re an atheist…”

Goosebumps, anyone?

Read the rest of the article… it’s funny how a Christian teacher who’s trying to show his students the way, the truth and the life is perfectly willing to lie about it until backed into a corner by actual evidence.

[Quote:]

Mukthar Mai’s blog has been making waves in the news. A young pakistani woman from a remote village, she was gang raped. Her attackers were meting out justice. In a patriarchal conservative culture like hers a woman’s honor or izzat is her sole possession. Once lost, there is little left to live for. A BBC reporter transcribes her story into an Urdu language blog. Here are the first, second and the most recent excerpts of her story. To truly comprehend what her action means, consider this story of young Afghan women committing suicide by setting themselves on fire to escape from lives of sexual, physical and other abuse.

The “culture�? of rape that exists in India and Pakistan arises from profound social anomalies, its origins lying in the unchanging harshness of a moral code based on the concepts of honour and shame. Thanks to that code’s ruthlessness, raped women will go on hanging themselves in the woods and walking into rivers to drown themselves. It will take generations to change that. Meanwhile, the law must do what it can.

via

[Quote:]

[Quote:]

Deep in the most remote jungles of South America, Amazon Indians (Amerindians) are using Google Earth, Global Positioning System (GPS) mapping, and other technologies to protect their fast-dwindling home. Tribes in Suriname, Brazil, and Colombia are combining their traditional knowledge of the rainforest with Western technology to conserve forests and maintain ties to their history and cultural traditions, which include profound knowledge of the forest ecosystem and medicinal plants. Helping them is the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), a nonprofit organization working with indigenous people to conserve biodiversity, health, and culture in South American rainforests.

[..]

Indians, who have access to the Internet at the ACT offices in several locations in northern South America, use Google Earth to remotely monitor their lands by checking for signs of miners.

“Google Earth is used primarily for vigilance,�? Vasco van Roosmalen, ACT’s Brazil program director, said in an interview with mongabay.com. “Indians log on to Google Earth and study images, inch by inch, looking to see where new gold mines are popping up or where invasions are occurring. With the newly updated, high-resolution images of the region, they can see river discoloration which could be the product of sedimentation and pollution from a nearby mine. They are able to use these images to find the smallest gold mine.�?

Once the Indians pinpoint suspect areas using Google Earth, they note the coordinates, then go on foot patrol to investigate further or mark the spot for future airplane flyovers, where five to six Indians go up with government officials to scout for illegal incursions. Van Roosmalen says that without the aid of satellite imagery, flyovers can be of limited effectiveness due to the extent of the forest.

“The high-resolution images make it a lot easier to actually find these areas,�? said Van Roosmalen. “When Google Earth updated these images earlier this year with higher resolution versions, we could find nearly all the disturbances in the forest. Our guys have been finding gold mines we didn’t know about at all.�?

[Quote:]

If you ask five veteran Windows users to explain Vista’s take on digital rights management (DRM), you’re likely to get five different answers that have just one thing in common: Whatever it is, they know they don’t like it.

In a nutshell, this is the dilemma Microsoft faces as it prepares to launch Windows Vista. By any standard, Vista’s new DRM capabilities — aimed at protecting the rights of content owners by placing limits on how consumers can use digital media — hardly qualify as a selling point; after all, it’s hard to sing the praises of technology designed to make life harder for its users.

Indeed. It’s designed to keep you from using your computer when they don’t want you to. It’s the best argument in favor of Open Source ever to come out of Redmond.

As Rosoff’s statement implies, many of Vista’s DRM technologies exist not because Microsoft wanted them there; rather, they were developed at the behest of movie studios, record labels and other high-powered intellectual property owners.

“Microsoft was dealing here with a group of companies that simply don’t trust the hardware [industry],” Rosoff said. “They wanted more control and more security than they had in the past” — and if Microsoft failed to accommodate them, “they were prepared to walk away from Vista” by withholding support for next-generation DVD formats and other high-value content.

No, it isn’t a case of the content industry not trusting Microsoft. It’s a case of the content industry not trusting their own customers. And the answer to that remains the same: stop being their customer.

“Customers naturally want to know, ‘What is going to happen when I try to play a Blu-ray DVD, or an HD-DVD, or some other type of protected content on Vista?’ ” Rosoff said. “And what’s Microsoft’s answer? ‘That depends.’ It’s not exactly an encouraging answer.”

It may get some consumers into looking at other options for their freshly bought PC. And talking to their friends about it.

Finally, Bill Rosenblatt pointed out that Microsoft might yet turn DRM technology into a profitable, sustainable business — not in the consumer market, but rather within the enterprise market, where content-protection technologies are winning over a growing number of supporters who see it as an important weapon against data loss, regulatory compliance lapses and other potentially costly business process failures.

Maybe, but the switch to Vista isn’t expected to happen until 2008 or 2009 in large companies, and Vista may well have ‘failed’ in the market place before that date – and I put ‘failed’ between quotes because it will have sold enough units, but with a product imago of “not worth it”.