[Quote:]

The body of a missing US woman has been found by her family, wedged upside down behind a bookcase in her room.

Mariesa Weber, 38, is believed to have fallen over and become trapped as she tried to reach behind the bookcase to adjust the plug for a TV set.

Her family spent nearly two weeks searching for her, fearing she had been kidnapped from the house she shared with them in Florida.

I guess buying at IKEA has its advantages..

[Quote:]

A handful of women breastfed their babies in a lounge area at Bradley International Airport this morning as part of a national protest against Delta Air Lines, which ejected a woman from her flight for breastfeeding her baby last month.

At least five women settled in a seating area across from the Delta Air Lines check-in counter at the airport this morning and quietly nursed their babies. Airport officials said they received notice of the planned protest Monday night.

Airport officials did not approach the women as they protested, since they were “very low-key,” Acting Airport Administrator Barry Pallanck said.

Tuesday’s “nurse-in” was one of dozens planned at airports across the country, including New York, Nashville, Tenn., and Las Vegas, after Emily Gillette, 27, was kicked off a Freedom Airlines flight at Burlington International Airport in Vermont. Freedom Airlines operates the commuter flight to New York for Delta.

In a complaint she filed against Delta Air Lines, Gillette said she was breast-feeding her 1-year-old daughter, River, when a flight attendant tried to hand her a blanket and told her to cover up. When Gillette balked, she said, she and her husband were ordered off the plane before takeoff.

[Quote:]

What if Leonardo DaVinci worked for an ad agency? We would have Mona Lisa in advertisements for Head and Shoulders shampoo. Imagine the possibilities.

And that’s exactly what people did – here are two great examples:

[Quote:]

Since Bahrain’s government blocked the Google Earth website earlier this year for its intrusion into private homes and royal palaces, Googling their island kingdom has become a national pastime for many Bahrainis.

The site allows internet users to view satellite images of the world in varying degrees of detail. When Google updated its images of Bahrain to higher definition, cyber-activists seized on the view it gave of estates and private islands belonging to the ruling al-Khalifa family to highlight the inequity of land distribution in the tiny Gulf kingdom.

A senior government official told the Financial Times that Google Earth had allowed the public to pry into private homes and ogle people’s motor yachts and swimming pools. But he acknowledged that the government’s three-day attempt to block the site had proved counterproductive.

[..]

Mahmood al-Yousif, a businessman whose political chat and blog site Mahmood’s Den is among Bahrain’s most popular, says that in the tense run-up to the polls, few Bahrainis have not surfed over the contours of their kingdom, comparing vast royal palaces, marinas and golf courses with crowded Shia villages nearby, where unemployment is rife and services meagre.

For those with insufficient bandwidth to access Google Earth, a PDF file with dozens of downloaded images of royal estates has been circulated anonymously by e-mail. Mr Yousif, among others, initially encouraged web users to post images on photo-sharing websites.

“Some of the palaces take up more space than three or four villages nearby and block access to the sea for fishermen. People knew this already. But they never saw it. All they saw were the surrounding walls,�? said Mr Yousif, who is seen in Bahrain as the grandfather of its blogging community.

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Senators Ted Stevens of Alaska and Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii are the best of friends in the Senate, so close they call each other brother. Both are decorated veterans of World War II. They have worked together for nearly four decades as senators from the two youngest and farthest-flung states. And they share an almost unrivaled appetite for what some call political pork.

Mr. Stevens, an 83-year-old Republican, and Mr. Inouye, an 82-year-old Democrat, routinely deliver to their states more money per capita in earmarks — the pet projects lawmakers insert into major spending bills — than any other state gets. This year, Alaska received $1.05 billion in earmarks, or $1,677.27 per resident, while Hawaii got $903.9 million, or $746.05 per resident, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan group that tracks such figures.

[Quote:]

Hours before he was to be married, a man leaving his bachelor party at a strip club in Queens that was under police surveillance was shot and killed early yesterday in a hail of police bullets, witnesses and the police said. Two of his friends were wounded, one critically, they said.

Many details of the shooting were not immediately clear, but relatives of the dead man, Sean Bell, 23, and community leaders, including the Rev. Al Sharpton, demanded an investigation into what some called an overreaction by officers that killed a man on his wedding day.

Witnesses told of chaos, screams and a barrage of gunfire near Club Kalua at 143-08 94th Avenue in Jamaica about 4:15 a.m. after Mr. Bell and his friends walked out and got into their car. Mr. Bell drove the car half a block, turned a corner and struck a black unmarked police minivan bearing several plainclothes officers.

Mr. Bell’s car then backed up onto a sidewalk, hit a storefront’s rolled-down protective gate and nearly struck an undercover officer before shooting forward and slamming into the police van again, the police said.

In response, five police officers fired at least 50 rounds at the men’s car, a silver Nissan Altima; the bullets ripped into other cars and slammed through an apartment window near the shooting scene on Liverpool Street near 94th Avenue.

In a normal country, the police exists to protect and help the people. In the US it’s different:
Driving while drunk: bad!
Driving while black: bad!
Driving while drunk and black: lethal!

[Quote:]

The insurgency in Iraq is now self-sustaining financially, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, connivance by corrupt Islamic charities and other crimes that the Iraqi government and its American patrons have been largely unable to prevent, a classified United States government report has concluded.

The report, obtained by The New York Times, estimates that groups responsible for many insurgent and terrorist attacks are raising $70 million to $200 million a year from illegal activities. It says $25 million to $100 million of that comes from oil smuggling and other criminal activity involving the state-owned oil industry, aided by “corrupt and complicit�? Iraqi officials.

As much as $36 million a year comes from ransoms paid for hundreds of kidnap victims, the report says. It estimates that unnamed foreign governments — previously identified by American officials as including France and Italy — paid $30 million in ransom last year.

[Quote:]

Outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the prison’s former U.S. commander said in an interview on Saturday.

Former U.S. Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski told Spain’s El Pais newspaper she had seen a letter apparently signed by Rumsfeld which allowed civilian contractors to use techniques such as sleep deprivation during interrogation.

Karpinski, who ran the prison until early 2004, said she saw a memorandum signed by Rumsfeld detailing the use of harsh interrogation methods.

“The handwritten signature was above his printed name and in the same handwriting in the margin was written: “Make sure this is accomplished”,” she told Saturday’s El Pais.

Somebody should tell Rummy that a Medal of Freedom, or a presidential pardon, don’t offer protection from the ICC.

[Quote:]

Many people on the run-down northwest Atlanta street where Kathryn Johnston lived fortify their windows with metal bars and arm themselves for protection.

Johnston, 92, was no exception.

Alone in her home, she was waiting with her gun on Tuesday night when a group of plainclothes officers with a warrant knocked down her door in a search for drugs, police said.

She opened fire, wounding three officers, before being shot to death, police said.

Assistant Police Chief Alan Dreher called the killing “tragic and unfortunate” but said the officers were justified in returning fire.

“You don’t know who’s in the house until you open that door,” Dreher said Wednesday. “And once they forced open the door, they were immediately fired upon.”

The Rev. Markel Hutchins, a civil rights activist and spokesman for Johnston’s family, said he could understand why the elderly woman would arm herself.

“She was afraid,” Hutchins said. “This is a horrifying situation in a neighborhood where crime happens often. This incident is a result of a mix-up.”

By far the friendliest sentence in this product review:

[Quote:]

Result: The Zune will be dead and gone within six months. Good riddance.

[Quote:]

Here’s the background: Florida’s 13th Congressional District is currently represented by Katherine Harris, who as Florida’s secretary of state during the 2000 recount famously acted as a partisan Republican rather than a fair referee. This year Ms. Harris didn’t run for re-election, making an unsuccessful bid for the Senate instead. But according to the official vote count, the Republicans held on to her seat, with Vern Buchanan, the G.O.P. candidate, narrowly defeating Christine Jennings, the Democrat.

The problem is that the official vote count isn’t credible. In much of the 13th District, the voting pattern looks normal. But in Sarasota County, which used touch-screen voting machines made by Election Systems and Software, almost 18,000 voters – nearly 15 percent of those who cast ballots using the machines – supposedly failed to vote for either candidate in the hotly contested Congressional race. That compares with undervote rates ranging from 2.2 to 5.3 percent in neighboring counties.

[..]

And I have to say that the omens aren’t good. I’ve been shocked at how little national attention the mess in Sarasota has received. Here we have as clear a demonstration as we’re ever likely to see that warnings from computer scientists about the dangers of paperless electronic voting are valid – and most Americans probably haven’t even heard about it.

As far as I can tell, the reason Florida-13 hasn’t become a major national story is that neither control of Congress nor control of the White House is on the line. But do we have to wait for a constitutional crisis to realize that we’re in danger of becoming a digital-age banana republic?

[Quote:]

After the Thanksgiving Day Massacre of Shiites by Sunnis, President Bush should go on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and give an interview headlined: “If I did it, here’s how the civil war in Iraq happened.�?

[Quote:]

For decades, the day after Thanksgiving has been called simply Black Friday, because it is the unofficial start of the holiday shopping season, when retailers supposedly move into the black, or start turning a profit.

But bargain hunters competing for scarce quantities of “doorbuster�? discounts have given this day an increasingly sharp-elbowed, close-fisted and purse-swinging edge.

Shortly after midnight yesterday, an estimated 15,000 shoppers pushed and shoved their way into the Fashion Place mall in Murray, Utah. Police soon joined them, responding to reports of nine skirmishes.

Once inside, shoppers ransacked stores, overturning piles of clothes as they looked for bargains. A retailer’s dream — too many customers! — quickly turned into a nightmare, forcing store clerks to shut their doors, and only let people in after others left. The mall even briefly closed its outside doors to avoid a fire hazard.

[..]

“I had sworn to myself that I wouldn’t cross the doorstep and come in here,�? said one Chicago resident, Marilynne Felderman, 61, a longtime Marshall Field’s shopper, standing inside the chain’s elegant State Street store, now a Macy’s. “But here I am�? — encouraged, no doubt, by deals like a five-piece luggage set for $49.99.

To take advantage of yesterday’s discounts, shoppers hatched elaborate strategies, drawn up on maps and in spiral-bound notebooks.

Stefanie Brooker, 41, slept over at the home of her friend, Michelle Wolfe, 43, so the pair could draw up a battle plan for hitting Best Buy, Kohl’s, Linens ’N Things and Toys “R�? Us near Columbus. Yesterday morning, the two operated under strict instructions: “Once we get started,�? Ms. Brooker said, “no one’s allowed to eat, drink or go to the bathroom until we are done.�?

This is simply addictive behavior on a national scale. The country is fucked.

[Quote:]

[Quote:]

Our flight this morning aboard Air Canada’s s flying closet to Charlotte was fun.

[..]

Not much fuss at the security pageant. We packed our liquids in our checked luggage, seeing no need to perform toilet mid-flight. A man waiting in line asked if it was okay to bring his pie on board.
“That aint’t a liquid,” said the TSA employee.
“Oh, good,” said the man.
We refrained from asking aloud whether cherry pie filling was considered a gel.
“Unless it’s sweet potato,” she said.
“It is,” he said.
“Then I’m gonna have to confiscate it!” said the TSA employee, to general laughter.

On the other side of the x-ray, one of the bins had a watch in it. It didn’t belong to the girl ahead of us. We held it up and asked if t was anyone’s. No one responded, so we handed it to the x-ray employee. Under his breath, we heard the attendant say, “Glad I came to work today.”

[Quote:]

A team of suspected terrorists involved in an alleged UK plot to blow up trans-atlantic airliners escaped capture because of interference by the United States, The Independent has been told by counter-terrorism sources.

An investigation by MI5 and Scotland Yard into an alleged plan to smuggle explosive devices on up to 10 passenger jets was jeopardised in August, when the US put pressure on authorities in Pakistan to arrest a suspect allegedly linked to the airliner plot.

As a direct result of the surprise detention of the suspect, British police and MI5 were forced to rush forward plans to arrest an alleged UK gang accused of plotting to destroy the airliners. But a second group of suspected terrorists allegedly linked to the first evaded capture and is still at large, according to security sources.

The escape of the second group is said to be the reason why the UK was kept at its highest level – “critical” – for three days before it was decided that the plotters no longer posed an imminent threat.

[Quote:]

“Just because Richard Stallman is paranoid doesn’t mean Microsoft’s not out to get you. For a hint about the possible end-game of Microsoft’s Trusted Computing Initiative, check out the patent application published Thanksgiving Day for Trusted License Removal, in which Microsoft describes how to revoke rights to render based on ‘who the user is, where the user is located, what type of computing device or other playback device the user is using, what rendering application is calling the copy protection system, the date, the time, etc.’ So much for Microsoft’s you-should-have-control assurances.”

A Swiss man is looking for directions, and he pulls up at a bus stop where two Americans are waiting.

“Entschuldigung, können Sie Deutsch sprechen?” he asks. The two Americans just stare at him.

“Excusez-moi, parlez vous Francais?” he tries. They continue to stare.

“Praat julle Afrikaans?” The Americans just look at each other.

“Parlare Italiano?” No response.

“Hablan ustedes Espanol?” Still nothing.

Disgusted, the Swiss guy drives off.

One American guy turns to other and says, “Y’know, maybe we should learn a foreign language.”

“Why?” says the other. “That guy knew five languages and it didn’t do him no good either.”

[Quote:]

Owning an iPod, camera phone or a DVD recorder might be enough to land you in jail or lumbered with a large fine under the Federal Government’s proposed new changes to the copyright laws, experts warn.

Dale Clapperton, vice-chairman of the non-profit organisation Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) said the changes proposed in the Copyright Amendment Bill 2006 greatly “lower the standard of proof” required to charge someone with copyright infringement.

Professor Brian Fitzgerald, head of the Queensland University of Technology’s school of law, agreed. He noted in an article submitted to the Online Opinion journal: “These new provisions have the potential to make everyday Australians in homes and businesses across the country into criminals on a scale that we have not witnessed before.”

Obey, Citizen!

[Quote:]

“Microsoft says that consumers don’t understand the risks of running virtual machines, and they only want enterprises that understand the risks to run Vista on a VM,” Silver said.

So if I understand this correctly, Microsoft thinks average users are too stupid to use virtualization, so they need to pay significantly more to… wait, what? Who’s stupid here?

Seriously, these days virtualization of an Home Edition install is vital to debug your application, if you’re an application developer. So this means that you either get a legal department to figure out the licensing deals, or decrease the quality of your testing. Or, to summarize: if you’re a small developer, you either get out of Windows development, spend way more, or release substandard software.

Since a legal department isn’t free, the choice is between increasing your costs, or decreasing your quality of product. Either way Microsoft is reducing your ability to effectively compete with them in the free market. They are undercutting competition by manipulating the legal rules, as opposed to using direct head to head competition in the free market.

I’ve been saying this for well over a decade: if you decide to develop for the Microsoft platform, sooner or later you will be fucked by Microsoft. So, don’t compete with them. Develop only for Open Source platforms, and don’t try to do things they are doing. For example, Mono is often quoted as an example of interoperatebility, but I won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. Anything endorsed and promoted by Microsoft is off-limits for anything I develop.

[Quote:]

The FSF’s general counsel, Eben Moglen, is currently evaluating the Novell Microsoft patent deal to see if it is valid under the terms of the current GPL v2. He has not announced his conclusion but has already publicly stated that changes will be made to the forthcoming GPL v3 to ensure that such a selective patent peace deal cannot be repeated.

“It will surely violate GPL version 3,” he told CNNmoney.com. “GPL version 3 will be adjusted so the effect of the current deal is that Microsoft will by giving away access to the very patents Microsoft is trying to assert.”

While Linux creator Linus Torvalds has previously stated that the Linux kernel will remain on the GPL v2 license, much of the code that makes up a complete Linux distribution is owned by the FSF, which intends to re-license all its code to GPL v3 as soon as it is completed in early 2007.

“In the face of these changes, Novell will probably be stuck with old versions of the software, under old licenses, with Novell sustaining the entire cost and burden of maintaining that software,” Perens wrote, adding that Novell faces a choice of sticking with Microsoft and being left behind, or turning its back on the patent deal.

[Quote:]

It sounds like a late-night parody of President Bush’s bad habit of filling key posts with extreme ideologues and incompetents. To head family planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Bush has tapped Eric Keroack, a doctor affiliated with a group vehemently opposed to birth control and someone nationally known for his wacky theory about reproductive health.

Before his appointment, Dr. Keroack served as the medical director of A Woman’s Concern, a network of pregnancy counseling clinics across Massachusetts whose method of trying to dissuade women from having an abortion includes spreading the scary and medically inaccurate myth that having an abortion steeply increases the risk of breast cancer. The group also has a policy against dispensing contraception even to married women. It has stated on its Web site that the distribution of contraceptive drugs or devices is “demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness.�? Dr. Keroack now claims that he disagrees with these approaches, a repositioning that seems very belated.

When speaking at abstinence conferences across the country, and in his writings, Dr. Keroack has promoted the novel argument that sex with multiple partners alters brain chemistry in a way that makes it harder for women to form bonding relationships. One of the researchers cited by Dr. Keroack has called the claim “complete pseudoscience�? unsupported by her findings.

I’m sure he’ll do a heck-of-a-job!

[Quote:]

When the final case design of the Playstation 3 was released, it was widely critsised as looking exactly like a George Foreman Grill. A few months later, Photoshopped pictures started emerging on the internet of the Playstation 3 with a grill built into it.

So, after seeing these pictures, we decided this would be a great project and challenge to actually build the Real PS3 Grill. After much support and advice from the X-S forums we decided to dedicate a site to update everyone about The Real PS3 grill. The main reason of building this grill, apart from the fame and glory (Id like to think so lol is to make everyone laugh and make those damn Sony fanboys angry!!

Sony sells their PS3 at a huge loss. If more people bought the system just to smash it, turn it into a waffle iron, use it to accelerate atoms at a high velocity, whatever… as long as you’re not buying licensed games (or Blu-Ray discs), Sony is losing money.

[Quote:]

Sweden is the world’s most democratic nation while Italy, a member of the Group of Seven industrialized nations, ranks as a “flawed” democracy and fails to make the top category of countries, the Economist said.

Countries are split into four regime types determined by their democratic credentials, according to a list e-mailed late yesterday by the magazine. The classifications are: full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes and authoritarian regimes. The U.S. at 17th, and U.K., 23rd, ranked in the bottom half of the full democracies.

“A decline in civil liberties and malfunctioning of government accounts for the U.S. position,” the Economist said. “In the U.K., a shocking decline in political participation, alongside some erosion of civil liberties, is the main reason for the comparatively modest ranking.”

The Economist Intelligence Unit awarded 167 countries and territories marks from 1 to 10 for 60 indicators across five broad categories: electoral process, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties.

The top level, full democracies, comprises 28 countries and is dominated by members of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Sweden beats Iceland and the Netherlands into first place, while France is ranked lower than the U.K., at 24th, and Italy, 34th, doesn’t make the top level, falling among the “flawed democracies.”

[..]

Rank      Country             Score
1.        Sweden              9.88
2.        Iceland             9.71
3.        Netherlands         9.66
4.        Norway              9.55
5.        Denmark             9.52

16.       Spain               8.34
17.       U.S.                8.22
20.       Japan               8.15
23.       U.K.                8.08
24.       France              8.07
29.       South Africa        7.91
34.       Italy               7.73
35.       India               7.68

102.      Russia              5.02

112.      Iraq                4.01

138.      China               2.97

167.      North Korea         1.03

[Quote:]

Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar.

~ Bradley Millar

The dutch articles on this weblog the past week were about local elections. Here’s a nice article in English about it, click through for the full monty:

[Quote:]

As expected, no party won enough seats for a majority in the lower house of parliament. The erratic voting patterns shifted significant numbers of seats to parties with extremist views and robbed moderate parties of influence — a result that stunned government officials and political analysts.

“It’s a new signal from the voters,” said Jan Marijnissen, leader of the Socialist Party, which won the third-highest number of seats in one of the biggest upsets of the day. The party promotes an anti-globalization, anti-European platform and advocates greater public spending on the poor and elderly.

But officials said the new signals are so mixed that it will be difficult for parties with similar ideologies to gather enough support to form a stable government. Balkenende said Wednesday night that his party would “build on the foundation we laid” but conceded that the election returns were “complicated” and that coalition negotiations, which could take months, would demand “a level head and perseverance.”

And if you want to know what party you would have voted for, try this.

[Quote:]

Since its discovery in 1902, the Antikythera Mechanism — with its intricate and baffling system of about 30 geared wheels — has been an enigma. Our knowledge of its functions has increased as computer-based imaging, analysis and X-ray technologies have evolved. During the last 50 years, researchers have identified various astronomical and calendar functions, including gears that mimic the movement of the sun and moon.

But it has taken some of the most advanced technology of the 21st century to decipher during the past year the most advanced technology of the 1st century B.C.

No artifact this complex has been recovered from the ancient world, though there are numerous written references, by Greek and later by Arab writers, to different types of geared mechanisms. The level of mechanical sophistication found in the Antikythera Mechanism was not to be seen again until the rise of European clock-making during the Middle Ages, more than a millennium later.