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Ward Teunissen uit Nijmegen heeft zijn gymnasiumdiploma gehaald met negen tienen en daarnaast nog eens vijf negens. Dat heeft zijn school laten weten. De 17-jarige Nijmegenaar wil buschauffeur worden.

“Zo’n hoge eindlijst hebben we hier nog nooit gezien”, aldus Tons Janssen, conrector en secretaris eindexamen van de Nijmeegse Scholen Gemeenschap Groenewoud. Of Ward de hoogste cijfers van Nederland heeft, is nog niet bekend.

En wat wil Ward worden als hij groot is?

Buschauffeur.

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OK, you can’t say that CNN and its diplomatic reporter, Richard Roth, don’t care about the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. In fact, just seconds ago “Your Trusted Name in News” just aired one of the few full-length reports I’ve seen on the situation in Darfur, or more accurately the situation on 42nd Street in Manhattan, since the story was merely an interview with a cab driver who happens to have immigrated from Darfur.

Apparently Tom Friedman, the Pulitizer Prize winner of global cabbie journalism, is advising CNN now.

I kept waiting for the twist in the story, but there was no twist. That was the entire story. CNN found a guy from Darfur who now drives a cab in New York. (Although, as I learned from the story, there are apparently 100 others like him.)

And yet, they could afford a helicopter to give us door-to-door coverage of Paris Hilton’s return to LA County Jail.

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In today’s White House press briefing, reporter Helen Thomas asked Tony Snow if there are “any members of the Bush family or this administration in this war.” Stunningly, Snow claimed that President Bush is actually on the “frontlines” of the war in Iraq:

Q: Are there any members of the Bush family or this administration in this war?

SNOW: Yeah, the President. The President is in the war every day.

Q: Come on, that isn’t my question –

SNOW: Well, no, if you ask any president who is a commander in chief –

Q: On the frontlines, where ever…

SNOW: The President.

In fact, here’s a file photo of Commander Guy reporting for duty on those “frontlines.”

Don’t laugh. Those are uparmored Crocs.

Sometimes, love is letting go…

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Emergency workers have come to the rescue of a town cut off by floodwaters in true Antipodean style – by delivering a large consignment of beer by boat.

The tiny town of Hinton, in the Hunter Valley wine-growing region, has been surrounded for five days by the floodwaters that have devastated parts of New South Wales after storms and torrential rain at the weekend.

[..]

“They’ll be able to watch the game and have a cold one tonight,” said Philip Campbell, a SES spokesman. The local watering hole, the Victoria Hotel, was in danger of becoming a real-life version of one of Australia’s best known ballads, The Pub With No Beer. The song, by the late country singer Slim Dusty, laments that “there’s nothing so lonesome, so morbid or drear, than to stand in a bar of a pub with no beer”.

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Traffic police have unveiled their latest weapon against speeding drivers – embarrassment by schoolchildren.

During a three-day operation, motorists caught speeding outside Laleham Church of England Primary School were pulled over and had to face questions from the children they were putting in danger.

The road is a 30mph limit and the fastest speed recorded was 41mph.

The 60 year six pupils, wearing yellow bibs, used a police speed camera to catch speeding motorists with the help of Spelthorne casualty reduction officer PC Mike Pritchard.

Once the drivers were stopped, the children, working with Karen O’Neill, Surrey County Council road safety officer, asked them why they were going so fast outside their school.

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And the thing won’t even be available until October!

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In a decision reported late Friday by CNET News.com, a federal judge in Los Angeles found (PDF) that a computer server’s RAM, or random-access memory, is a tangible document that can be stored and must be turned over in a lawsuit.

The lack of technical knowledge of this judge is astounding. It is even worse when you realize he’s not talking about the physical chips, but about all the data that is stored in it. Since modern RAM can transfer gigabytes per second, you’d need between 50 and 100 new hard drives per hour to store all the information the judge wants turned over.

Of course, the judge doesn’t want that. He wants to force torrentspy to log things they’re currently not logging. But this ruling could set a precedent that forces everybody to keep logs of things you’d normally not keep logs of. As a real-world example, let’s say people leave a sticky note on your desktop screen every time you’re away and they need to tell you something. You’re currently throwing that note in the trash when you’re done with it, right? Under this ruling, you’d be forced to archive that in case somebody needs it in ‘discovery’.

TorrentSpy has already announced that if the choice is between comply with the ruling or stop doing business in the USA, they’ll stop doing business in the USA.

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Four years after a federal jury found that eBay had infringed on its patent, MercExchange LLC has asked the court to shutdown Buy-It-Now, a service that allows eBayers to purchase items at set prices, without bidding at auction. U.S. District Court Judge Jerome B. Friedman has not said when he will rule on the case, the Associated Press reports.

In 2003, the jury awarded MercExchange $35 million in damages – later reduced to $25 million – but last year, the case was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, and the court ruled that a finding of patent infringement may or may not result in an injunction.

“Historically, the federal circuit said that if infringement is found, an injunction is almost automatic,” says Ethan Horwitz, an intellectual property lawyer with the international firm King & Spalding. “But now the Supreme Court has said that an injunction is dependent on all sorts of factors.”

The case had slowed as both parties waited for the U.S. Patent Office to re-examine the patent, but MercExchange has now decided to request an injunction before the review is complete. According to Horwitz, a patent reexamination can take upwards of seven years.

And in related news, you can no longer directly buy a cart of milk at your supermarket without bidding on it.

First, go watch these video’s.

“The profound crisis of human identity brought on by living within a lie, a crisis which in turn makes such a life possible, certainly possesses a moral dimension as well; it appears, among other things, as a deep moral crisis in society. A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the accouterments of mass civilization, and who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society.”

-Václav Havel

“Materialism, among all nations, is a dangerous disease of the human mind; but it is more especially to be dreaded among a democratic people because it readily amalgamates with that vice which is the most familiar to the heart under such circumstances. Democracy encourages a taste for physical gratification; this taste, if it becomes excessive, soon disposes men to believe that all is matter only; and materialism, in its turn, hurries them on with mad impatience to these same delights; such is the fatal circle within which democratic nations are driven round. It were well that they should see the danger and hold back.”

-Alex de Tocqueville

“Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the path of destruction.”

-Thomas Jefferson

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The incident started when Monica, who left the Secret Service to raise a family, was stopped while going through airport security because there was water in her son’s sippy cup. The sippy cup was seized by TSA. Monica wanted the cup back because the sippy cup was the only way her son would drink — and it was a long flight between Washington, DC and Reno, Nevada where she was going for a family reunion. If you’ve ever had a toddler you understand about sippy cups.

So she was willing to spill the water out. Drink the water. Anything — all that she wanted was to be able to have a cup that her 19-month-old toddler could drink from.

Here’s what happened in Monica’s words:

“I demanded to speak to a TSA [Transportation Security Administration] supervisor who asked me if the water in the sippy cup was ‘nursery water or other bottled water.’ I explained that the sippy cup water was filtered tap water. The sippy cup was seized as my son was pointing and crying for his cup. I asked if I could drink the water to get the cup back, and was advised that I would have to leave security and come back through with an empty cup in order to retain the cup. As I was escorted out of security by TSA and a police officer, I unscrewed the cup to drink the water, which accidentally spilled because I was so upset with the situation.

“At this point, I was detained against my will by the police officer and threatened to be arrested for endangering other passengers with the spilled 3 to 4 ounces of water. I was ordered to clean the water, so I got on my hands and knees while my son sat in his stroller with no shoes on since they were also screened and I had no time to put them back on his feet. I asked to call back my fiancé, who I could still see from afar, waiting for us to clear security, to watch my son while I was being detained, and the officer threatened to arrest me if I moved. So I yelled past security to get the attention of my fiancé.

“I was ordered to apologize for the spilled water, and again threatened with arrest. I was threatened several times with arrest while detained, and while three other police officers were called to the scene of the mother with the 19 month old. A total of four police officers and three TSA officers reported to the scene where I was being held against my will. I was also told that I should not disrespect the officer and could be arrested for this too. I apologized to the officer and she continued to detain me despite me telling her that I would miss my flight. The officer advised me that I should have thought about this before I ‘intentionally spilled the water!’”

These goons are a bigger threat to national security than the terrorists are.

Feel safer yet?

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The Motion Picture Assn. of America is joining forces with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a diverse collection of other industry groups to press Congress and the White House on an ambitious agenda to bolster enforcement of anti-piracy and anti-counterfeiting laws.

At a Capitol Hill news conference here today, MPAA head Dan Glickman shared the podium with representatives from the Recording Industry Assn. of America, the National Assn. of Manufacturers and the pharmaceuticals industry, as well as the Chamber, to unveil a six-point program that, if enacted, would amount to a major realignment of federal law enforcement efforts.

“Our law enforcement resources are seriously misaligned,” NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton said. “If you add up all the various kinds of property crimes in this country, everything from theft, to fraud, to burglary, bank-robbing, all of it, it costs the country $16 billion a year. But intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year.”

So, if it’s up to Glickman, the cops should go after you instead of the serial rapist.

Nice guy, eh?