Oh god I love wet pussy

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We all know that FOXNews is famous for switching R’s to D’s when Republicans get into trouble or they don’t like what they hear from one, but they changed up their tactics in the case of Senator Lavvy Craig’s potty scandal. Instead of assigning him to the bad, naughty, nasty Democratic party, in the below article from their website FOX chose to completely leave out his political affiliation altogether. That’s right, nowhere in the article will you see the word REPUBLICAN attached to Senator Larry Craig’s name. The article also quotes numerous Republicans stating their disdain for the Senator’s actions — attempting to give the impression they weren’t talking about a fellow Republican. Brilliant!

Everything I want to do is illegal.

more

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A federal judge has upheld a magistrate’s decision forcing TorrentSpy to enable server logging so the Motion Picture Association of America can obtain the IP addresses of those connecting to BitTorrent files via the service. There’s one small hitch for the MPAA, though. TorrentSpy has decided to block access by US residents, ensuring that the MPAA will find little of interest in the log files and rendering the court’s decision moot—at least for this case.

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TorrentSpy fought the MPAA’s request, arguing that privacy laws in the Netherlands—where the servers are physically located—prevented it from maintaining and disclosing the logs. The site also argued that the log data wasn’t available, since it existed only in RAM, and as such, was never stored.

The magistrate judge didn’t buy that argument, and in her opinion reaffirming the magistrate’s order, neither did Judge Florence-Marie Cooper. Judge Cooper took issue with TorrentSpy’s argument that data in RAM is not “stored.” She noted RAM’s function as primary storage and that the storage of data in RAM—even if not permanently archived—makes it electronically stored information governed by federal discovery rules.

Perhaps somebody can explain to the judge that sound is a moving pressure wave stored in air for a very short time from the time he says something to the time someone hears it. We need him to preserve the sound waves in his house from yesterday for permanent record. It may contain evidence of a copyright violation.

Seriously, though, isn’t it great that the MPAA can say that they think that you will commit an offense sometime in the future and they now want to have the means to prove it, and a court will impose a burden on you to do so?

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In one of history’s more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is “an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.” But beyond the irony lies China’s true motive: to cut off the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual and political leader, and to quell the region’s Buddhist religious establishment more than 50 years after China invaded the small Himalayan country. By barring any Buddhist monk living outside China from seeking reincarnation, the law effectively gives Chinese authorities the power to choose the next Dalai Lama, whose soul, by tradition, is reborn as a new human to continue the work of relieving suffering.

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Regulating reincarnation is a worthy goal. There are many benefits. For example, reincarnation would give the Chinese government a renewable source of spare parts:

Chinese Bureaucrat: “Hold still.”

Monk: “Please don’t remove my heart! I’ll die!”

Chinese Bureaucrat: “No worries. I’ve already signed form R-23 authorizing you to reincarnate.”

Monk: “As another monk?”

Chinese Bureaucrat: “As a dung beetle if you don’t stop squirming.”

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De markt voor advertenties op mobiele telefoons biedt weinig mogelijkheden. Klanten maken nauwelijks gebruik van mobiele datadiensten en zeggen geen advertenties op hun mobieltjes te willen.

Dat concludeert vakblad Telecompaper uit een onderzoek dat zich hoofdzakelijk richt op mobiele televisie. Volgens de onderzoekers bleek slechts 1,4 procent van de ondervraagden gebruik te maken van de mogelijkheid om via de telefoon naar televisieprogramma’s te kijken. Van de grote meerderheid die dat nog nooit gedaan heeft, toont slechts een klein deel belangstelling voor mobiele tv.

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Na SMS wordt MMS nog het meeste gebruikt, maar 77,3 procent van de ondervraagden heeft nog nooit zo’n multimediaal berichtje verzonden. De meeste ondervraagden zeggen bovendien nooit reclame op hun mobieltje te willen ontvangen.

Prima, de mensen worden in ieder geval wakker als het gaat om nieuwe vormen van communicatie. Nu nog de stap dat men zich afvraagt wat (met betrekking tot reclame) eigenlijk het verschil is tussen de mobiele telefoon en de brievenbus. Of de radio en TV.

Warning! Contains spheres!

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Police used a remote-controlled spy drone to watch crowds at the V festival at the weekend, the first time the technology has been used at a major public event.

The 70cm-wide flying surveillance device, fitted with high-resolution still and colour video cameras as well as infrared night vision capability, was used to keep tabs on people thought to be acting suspiciously in car parks and to gather intelligence on individuals in the crowd.

Staffordshire police said the drone’s images did not lead directly to any arrests, but one reason for using it had been to deter would-be thieves. It was not flown over the main arena because of fears that a crash might cause injuries.

The battery-operated drone’s four carbon-fibre rotors are so quiet they cannot be heard from the ground once it is higher than 50 metres, and at 100 metres up it cannot be seen with the naked eye. It can fly 500 metres high, but the Civil Aviation Authority has set an operating limit of 120 metres.

So a drone that could not be seen or heard was used to deter would-be thieves? Either thieves in the UK are psychic, or the author of this piece is a moron.

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Chalk up another new-found power to the Motion Picture Association of America: the ability to force someone to change operating systems. Scott McCausland, who pleaded guilty last September in 2006 to the crime of uploading Star Wars: Episode III to the site Elitetorrents.com, was charged with “conspiracy to commit copyright infringement” and “criminal copyright infringement” by the FBI. This charge carried a maximum sentence of five years in prison, a fine of $250,000, and three years of supervised release. He wound up serving five months in prison and is now on probation. The probation, however, has now taken a strange turn into forced platform advocacy.

“I had a meeting with my probation officer today and he told me that he has to install monitoring software onto my PC. No big deal to me; that is part of my sentence,” he wrote on his Lost and Alone blog. “However, their software doesn’t support GNU/Linux (Which is what I use). So, he told me that if I want to use a computer, I would have to use an OS that the software can be installed on.” The monitoring software in question is only available for Microsoft Windows. Neither Linux nor a Macintosh running OS X would be an acceptable platform.

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Last week, after an investigation spurred by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, the Pentagon abruptly announced that it would not be delivering “freedom packages” to our soldiers in Iraq, as it had originally intended.

What were the packages to contain? Not body armor or home-baked cookies. Rather, they held Bibles, proselytizing material in English and Arabic and the apocalyptic computer game “Left Behind: Eternal Forces” (derived from the series of post-Rapture novels), in which “soldiers for Christ” hunt down enemies who look suspiciously like U.N. peacekeepers.

The packages were put together by a fundamentalist Christian ministry called Operation Straight Up, or OSU. Headed by former kickboxer Jonathan Spinks, OSU is an official member of the Defense Department’s “America Supports You” program. The group has staged a number of Christian-themed shows at military bases, featuring athletes, strongmen and actor-turned-evangelist Stephen Baldwin. But thanks in part to the support of the Pentagon, Operation Straight Up has now begun focusing on Iraq, where, according to its website (on pages taken down last week), it planned an entertainment tour called the “Military Crusade.”

Apparently the wonks at the Pentagon forgot that Muslims tend to bristle at the word “crusade” and thought that what the Iraq war lacked was a dose of end-times theology.

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Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) was arrested in June at a Minnesota airport by a plainclothes police officer investigating lewd conduct complaints in a men’s public restroom, according to an arrest report obtained by Roll Call Monday afternoon.

Craig’s arrest occurred just after noon on June 11 at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. On Aug. 8, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor disorderly conduct in the Hennepin County District Court. He paid more than $500 in fines and fees, and a 10-day jail sentence was stayed. He also was given one year of probation with the court that began on Aug. 8.

A spokesman for Craig described the incident as a “he said/he said misunderstanding,” and said the office would release a fuller statement later Monday afternoon.

After he was arrested, Craig, who is married, was taken to the Airport Police Operations Center to be interviewed about the lewd conduct incident, according to the police report. At one point during the interview, Craig handed the plainclothes sergeant who arrested him a business card that identified him as a U.S. Senator and said, “What do you think about that?” the report states.

Craig’s Voting Record: Voted YES on constitutional ban of same-sex marriage. Voted NO on adding sexual orientation to definition of hate crimes. Voted NO on expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation. Voted YES on prohibiting same-sex marriage. Voted NO on prohibiting job discrimination by sexual orientation.

It’s clear, at least, why Republicans think that gays are sexual predators– it’s because most Republicans making that argument are in fact closeted gay sexual predators.

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In recent years, there have been reports that the area around the Chernobyl nuclear plant had become something of a wildlife playground. The reports suggested that animals like wild boar, wolves and moose had flourished in the 40-mile-diameter “exclusion zone,” which was contaminated by low-level radiation from the disaster in Ukraine 21 years ago.

But Timothy A. Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina and co-director of the university’s Chernobyl research initiative, said there had not been systematic studies of wildlife there. “When we sat down to review the literature, we realized that most of these claims were just that — claims,” he said.

So Dr. Mousseau and his co-director, Anders P. Moller of Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, decided to systematically study the animals they know best: birds. Wearing a protective suit, Dr. Moller conducted simple bird counts throughout the zone. Radiation levels were measured at each site.

Close to 1,600 birds were counted, representing 57 species. But as the researchers report in Biology Letters, both the number of species and abundance of individual birds declined with increasing radiation levels. For example, the most contaminated sites had about two-thirds fewer birds than those with normal levels of radiation.

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Whatever the reasons, the study shows that for birds, at least, Chernobyl is far from a paradise; the contamination appears to have had an effect. “This was a big surprise to us,” Dr. Mousseau said. “We had no idea of the impact.”

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What? Are the police taking stupid pills?

Two people who sprinkled flour in a parking lot to mark a trail for their offbeat running club inadvertently caused a bioterrorism scare and now face a felony charge.

The competition is fierce, but I think this is a winner.

What bothers me most about the news coverage is that there isn’t even a suggestion that the authorities’ response might have been out of line.

Mayoral spokeswoman Jessica Mayorga said the city plans to seek restitution from the Salchows, who are due in court Sept. 14.

“You see powder connected by arrows and chalk, you never know,” she said. “It could be a terrorist, it could be something more serious. We’re thankful it wasn’t, but there were a lot of resources that went into figuring that out.”

Translation: We screwed up, and we want someone to pay for our mistake.

A woman awakes during the night to find that her husband was not in their bed. She puts on her robe and goes downstairs to look for him.

She finds him sitting at the kitchen table with a hot cup of coffee in front of him. He appears to be in deep thought, just staring at the wall. She watches as he wiped a tear from his eye and takes a sip of his coffee. “What’s the matter, dear?” she whispers as she steps into the room, “Why are you down here at this time of night?”

The husband looks up from is coffee, “Do you remember 20 years ago when we were dating, and you were only 16?” he asks solemnly. The wife is touched to tears thinking that her husband is so caring and sensitive. “Yes I do,” she replies.

The husband paused. The words were not coming easily. “Do you remember when your father caught us in the back seat of my car making love?” “Yes, I remember,” said the wife, lowering herself into a chair beside him. The husband continued. “Do you remember when he shoved the shotgun in my face and said, ‘Either you marry my daughter, or I will send you to jail for 20 years?’” “I remember that too” she replied softly.

He wiped another tear from his cheek and said… “I would have gotten out today.”

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Hypothetical: Imagine that you visit your local mall and browse around for stuff to buy. And you decide to buy a new CD from your favorite artist and you also buy a brand new cool USB stick thingy on an impulse. You go home and stick the CD into your laptop’s CD drive. It prompts you to install some software. You do so and while you are listening to the music, you open the USB stick package and start experimenting with your new toy. It has a fingerprint reader so you install the software for that as well. Guess what… you might have just installed, not one, but two different rootkit-like software on your laptop.

We received a report that our F-Secure DeepGuard HIPS system was warning about a USB stick software driver. The USB stick in question has a built-in fingerprint reader. The case seemed unusual so we ordered a couple of USB sticks with fingerprint authentication. We installed the software on a test machine and were quite surprised to see that after installation our F-Secure BlackLight rootkit detector was reporting hidden files on the system.

Many of our regular readers will remember the huge Sony BMG XCP DRM rootkit debacle of 2005. Back then malware with rootkits were not very common but since then a lot of malware families have adopted rootkit cloaking techniques. It is unclear if the “rise of the rootkit” would have happened in this magnitude without the publicity of the Sony BMG case. In any case, a lot more people now know what a “rootkit” is than back then.

This USB stick with rootkit-like behavior is closely related to the Sony BMG case. First of all, it is another case where rootkit-like cloaking is ill advisedly used in commercial software. Also, the USB sticks we ordered are products of the same company — Sony Corporation.

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The U.S. military regrets any offense it may have caused by handing out a soccer ball emblazoned with the name of Allah on it as part of a public relations exercise in Afghanistan, a spokesman said.

At least one of the balls — which were dropped by helicopter to children in Khost province in eastern Afghanistan on Friday — carried a small picture of the Saudi Arabian flag. The flag features in Arabic script the Islamic declaration of faith, which contains the words Allah and the Prophet Muhammad.

Villagers were “upset and angry” when they saw the ball, said Khost governor Arsalah Jamal.

“They wanted to demonstrate, but we explained to them it was a mistake,” he said Monday.

Muslims treat with the utmost respect any printed matter containing verses of the Koran or the name of Allah or his prophet on it. Most would find the idea of kicking a ball emblazoned with those two names as deeply offensive.

A totally understandable error on the US military part, after all, they’ve only been dealing with a Muslim population for, what, like two days now?

Check out who’s hiding in this picture taken at Playa Lagun.

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Every foreigner in America, including British visitors, would be required to carry an ID card bearing photograph and fingerprints under plans drawn up by Rudolph Giuliani, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination.

Giuliani is hoping to cement his status as the Republican favourite by promising to enforce immigration and border controls, drawing on expertise in combating crime from his time as mayor of New York. He announced last week that all foreigners, including holiday-makers, would be obliged to carry a “tamper-proof” biometric card, which could be issued at ports of entry.

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Giuliani said: “I did it back in 1994 with welfare people. It was a big, big, horrible thing that I was doing. I was asking welfare people to be biometrically identified by their fingerprints.

“It worked. It got rid of the duplicates and triplicates, people who were getting welfare at three different places.”

Apparently he’s afraid us tourists are going to visit three different places, or something..

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The Bush administration, continuing its fight to stop states from expanding the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, has adopted new standards that would make it much more difficult for New York, California and others to extend coverage to children in middle-income families.

Administration officials outlined the new standards in a letter sent to state health officials on Friday evening, in the middle of a monthlong Congressional recess. In interviews, they said the changes were intended to return the Children’s Health Insurance Program to its original focus on low-income children and to make sure the program did not become a substitute for private health coverage.

After learning of the new policy, some state officials said yesterday that it could cripple their efforts to cover more children and would impose standards that could not be met.

Next time a Republican whines “Think of the Chiiiiilldrun!” show this article…

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US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, embroiled in the row over the sacking of US attorneys, has resigned, reports quoting senior officials say.

I’m hardly back from vacation, and I’m already losing count of the rats leaving the sinking ship. Rove, Snow, and now Gonzales… It’s time to start taking bets on W. himself…

Go and see the rest of these signs. They bite!

Link to The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

(Thanks Pamela!)

Backdropped by the blackness of space and Earth’s horizon, Space Shuttle Endeavour, docked to the Pressurized Mating Adapter on the International Space Station, is featured in this photograph taken during the mission’s first planned spacewalk.

Click here for the full image.

So here are my options.

I can spend time updating this weblog, or I can do this:

Anyway,
here’s one of the underwater pictures I promised.

You may have seen this already, but just in case you are not among the 9 million or so who’ve seen this extraordinary footage at YouTube, have a look at the three way fight between Buffalo, Lion and Crocodile.

Less internet availability than I expected, but the sun and sea make up for it

(I’ll make up for it with some beautiful underwater pictures, I promise!)

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What matters most in politics – facts and logic, or stories and feelings? Drew Westen says it’s emotion that counts – and shows how Bill Clinton and George W Bush understood this, while John Kerry and Al Gore never got it. Here we print extracts from his new book, The Political Brain – which is essential summer reading from Washington to Westminster….

…The vision of the mind that has captured the imagination of philosophers, cognitive scientists, economists and political scientists since the 18th century – a dispassionate mind that makes decisions by weighing the evidence and reasoning to the most valid conclusions – bears no relation to how the mind and brain actually work.

A longish but highly illuminating read, especially if you have ever wondered how any of these people ever get elected in the first place.

There are two excerpts from the book. Scroll to the bottom of the first page to find the link to the second.

(Link) It takes a little while to load.

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An Indian suspect was forced by police to eat 50 bananas as a laxative, to retrieve a necklace he was accused of stealing and swallowing.

In the end, it took more than 50 bananas….

Long story short: The necklace was rescued: “A sweeper was paid to retrieve the exhibit from the toilet. Mr Mohsin was asked to wash it.”
“Sweeper” is a euphemism for “Untouchable”, but that word has been outlawed for several years now, in favour of Dalit so all the shit diggers and the shit carriers have been promoted to Sweepers. They have to provide their own brooms, naturally…

Here’s a link to the Kolkata Police Incident files, which is, suspiciously in my view, not currently showing any reports of banana force feeding being used by Kolkata’s finest. Perhaps the story is still in the, er, pipeline?

It might just be that it’s the best meal the poor bastard has had in months.