[Quote:]

Overheard in SF
Conversations, bits and pieces, that have been overheard while roaming the streets of San Francisco
Picture this: you’re watching the Superbowl and an ad comes on. Two redneck men are going through a buffet line. One of them loads up his plate with fried chicken. The other looks at him, then the plate, and they both jump back. The other exclaims, “quick, do something white!” and they don KKK outfits and set a cross on fire. Horrific and racist, right? Even if the guys were meant to be dumb?

Yet nobody at Snickers managed to so much as bat an eyelash before running dreck in a similar vein, only with gay people as the target rather than black people. Instead of white people at a buffet line, they showed two mechanics. One begins eating a Snickers bar out of the mouth of the other, until they eventually touch lips. Both jump back in horror (because what could possibly be worse than two men kissing anyway) and one says to the other “quick, do something manly.”

[..]

Snickers stopped running the offensive ad and took down the homophobic web site that went with it. They have not apologized for broadcasting homophobia, making only a statement that they had targeted a particular audience and that “humor is subjective”.

[..]

would “humor is subjective” have done the trick if the targets of the humor were black people? Somehow I bet not.

[Quote:]

Sex offenders could be forced to register their e-mail addresses and chatroom names, the government says.

Home Secretary John Reid said he may make paedophiles put online identity details on the Sex Offenders Register.

Mechanisms would be set up to “flag up” approaches by them to sites popular among youngsters, he told the BBC.

One computer expert said this was a step in the right direction, but added internet identities could be changed “in a matter of seconds”.

The only thing this will do is that sex offenders they catch will get extra jail time for breaking the law that tells them to register their screen names. It will do nothing on the prevention side of things..

[Quote:]

The price tag for the Iraq War is now estimated at $700 billion in direct costs and perhaps twice that much when indirect expenditures are included. Cost estimates vary — Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz puts the total cost at more than $2 trillion — but let’s be conservative and say it’s only $1 trillion (in today’s dollars).

As a number of other commentators have recently written, this number — a 1 followed by 12 zeroes — can be put into perspective in various ways. Given how large the war looms, it doesn’t hurt to repeat this simple exercise with other examples and in other ways.

There are many comparisons that might be made, and devising new governmental monetary units is one way to make them. Consider, for example, that the value of one EPA, the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, is about $7.5 billion. The cost of the Iraq War is thus more than a century’s worth of EPA spending (in today’s dollars), almost 130 EPAs, only a small handful of which would probably have been sufficient to clean up Superfund sites around the country.

Or note that the annual budget for the Department of Education is about $55 billion, which puts the price tag for Iraq at about 18 EDs. Just a few of these EDs would certainly have put muscle into the slogan “No child left behind.”

And since the annual budgets of the National Science Foundation and the National Cancer Institute are $6 billion and $5 billion, respectively, the $1 trillion war cost is equivalent to 170 NSFs and 200 NCIs. No doubt a couple of those NSFs could have been used to develop cheap hybrid cars and alternative fuels. Scientific progress is by its nature unpredictable, but some extra NCIs might also have lead to breakthroughs in cancer treatment.

The cost of the war can also be expressed as approximately 28 HS’s, where HS, the annual budget for the Department of Homeland Security, is about $35 billion. Really securing the ports and chemical plants would have only eaten up a few of these HS’s. A few more could have been usefully spent in Afghanistan.

[..]

Alternatively, if the money was spent in an even more ecumenical way and a global mailing list was available, the Treasury could have sent a check for more than $150 to every human being on earth. The lives of millions of children, who die from nothing more serious than measles, tetanus, respiratory infections and diarrhea, could be saved, since these illnesses can be prevented by $2 vaccines, $1 worth of antibiotics, or a 10-cent dose of oral rehydration salts as well as the main but still very far from prohibitive cost of people to administer the programs.

[Quote:]

As the fourth year of war nears its end, the Middle East’s largest refugee crisis since the Palestinian exodus from Israel in 1948 is unfolding in a climate of fear, persecution and tragedy.

Nearly 2 million Iraqis — about 8 percent of the prewar population — have embarked on a desperate migration, mostly to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The refugees include large numbers of doctors, academics and other professionals vital for Iraq’s recovery. Another 1.7 million have been forced to move to safer towns and villages inside Iraq, and as many as 50,000 Iraqis a month flee their homes, the U.N. agency said in January.

[..]

“It’s probably political,” said Janvier de Riedmatten, U.N. refugee agency representative for Iraq, referring to the reason why the world hasn’t helped Iraq’s refugees.

“The Iraq story has to be a success story,” he said.

[Quote:]

[Quote:]

You’ve seen the advert and heard the jingle. Now prepare yourself for the “odour logo”. Electronics manufacturers, airlines and banks are commissioning unique fragrances for use in their stores and on their products.

Sony and Samsung are both testing signature scents, while Sony Ericsson, the mobile phone company, has launched a handset that releases a faint smell as it is used. The marketing ploy has emerged as research from Oxford University shows that it is possible to train people to associate smells with particular experiences or objects. Dr Charles Spence, an experimental psychologist at the university, is carrying out brain-scanning experiments while presenting people with new and recognisable smells to assess the response they invoke. He said: “We are finding that, although we thought our sense of smell was very bad, it in fact plays a huge role in our lives.”

[Quote:]

In 1993, a young captain in the Australian Army named David Kilcullen was living among villagers in West Java, as part of an immersion program in the Indonesian language. One day, he visited a local military museum that contained a display about Indonesia’s war, during the nineteen-fifties and sixties, against a separatist Muslim insurgency movement called Darul Islam. “I had never heard of this conflict,�? Kilcullen told me recently. “It’s hardly known in the West. The Indonesian government won, hands down. And I was fascinated by how it managed to pull off such a successful counterinsurgency campaign.�?

A great piece on modern counterinsurgency.

[Quote:]

You will be thoroughly beaten.

Zimbabwe, in economic decline for years, may be accelerating towards collapse. Its inflation rate recently hit 1281%, the highest in the world, and a strike by public doctors that began six weeks ago has now spread to nurses, electrical workers and (today) teachers. Those that aren’t allowed to strike, like police, are quitting. Last month, Zimbabwe’s top judge warned that underfunding had (possibly intentionally) left its judiciary largely unable to function, the nation’s electricity provider recently announced that it’s broke, its sewage plants started breaking down and polluting urban water supplies, and international observers warned (based on satellite photos, since the government won’t allow them in) that famine is looming. In the past, President Robert Mugabe’s response to the growing destitution has been to forcibly evict poor urban slum residents into the countryside and bulldoze their homes, to prevent them from organizing politically and to make it difficult for rights organizations to monitor them. Now, he’s canceling the 2008 presidential elections (for now, saying that they’ll be held in 2010, in conjunction with parliamentary elections, to save money) and ordering security forces to jail and torture political activists. The situation may be approaching a breaking point.

[Quote:]

De hele internetgemeenschap kreeg ze over zich heen, maar het ‘wasvrouwtje’ van de Hoekerstraat treft geen blaam. De 71-jarige vrouw figureert ongewild in het schokkende filmpje over de dood van Pascal Triep (25) uit Scheveningen. Terwijl het zwaargewonde slachtoffer door de tuin strompelt, hangt zij een laken aan de waslijn.

Het filmpje werd honderdduizenden keren bekeken en velen spraken er schande van. De ongelukkige figurante zelf zegt amper iets van het drama te hebben vernomen. De venijnige reacties op haar ‘rol’ in het filmpje hebben haar geschokt. Ze slaapt sindsdien slecht en staat stijf van de zenuwen.

Erg interessant is de laatste quote in het artikel:

Justitie in Den Haag heeft de pc in beslag genomen van de maker van het filmpje over Pascal Triep. Hoewel het OM geen mededelingen over de zaak doet, is zo goed als zeker ook de camera of de gsm waarmee het filmpje is gemaakt, in beslag genomen.

Zoals geenstijl het zegt:

Nou, die is lekker dan. Zo sta je als kroongetuige de aftermath van een moord te filmen, en het volgende moment komt er een swat team met de woorden ‘sofort aufmachen’ je PC ophalen. Digitale rechercheurtjes trekken vervolgens even een kopietje van de harddisk voor de Afd. Data Minen van de AIVD en verder wordt er nog even rondgeneusd in cache, email en downloadbeheer. Met andere woorden: van ooggetuige naar verdachte.

En als de daders herkenbaar op de film staan, zal er vast nog wel een vervolginkje privacy-inbreuk op volgen.

Hoe groot denken ze dat de kans is dat de volgende toevallige filmer iets zegt?

Psst! Nieuw regeerakkoordje hebben?

[Quote:]

Germany’s supreme court determined Monday that police may not secretly hack into suspects’ computers. Some are celebrating the decision as a civil rights victory, but the ruling may not be the last word on the matter.

No legal framework for secret police hacking exists at this time, decided Germany’s Federal Court of Justice Monday in Karlsruhe, since searching computer and Internet data on a suspect’s computer without their knowledge cannot be compared to existing methods of police investigation.

The court ruling stated that home searches differed from computer searches because they were always conducted in the presence of the suspect, or at least a witness. Telephone taps could also not be compared with computer hacking, continued the report, because previously saved data files fundamentally differ from live telecommunication.

[..]

According to reports, it is likely that Schäuble will now press for changes to the legal framework of the criminal investigation procedure that would allow for police hacking, which advocates see as particularly helpful in locating and prosecuting terrorists.

Of course! Terrorists! Terrorists! Think of the Chiiiiildrun! Everything changed after 9/11!!!

This way, soon there will be a special law that allows secret hacking of computers owned by JewsMuslims.