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[http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/02/20080228-2.html:]

Q What’s your advice to the average American who is hurting now, facing the prospect of $4 a gallon gasoline, a lot of people facing –

THE PRESIDENT: Wait, what did you just say? You’re predicting $4 a gallon gasoline?

Q A number of analysts are predicting –

THE PRESIDENT: Oh, yeah?

Q — $4 a gallon gasoline this spring when they reformulate.

THE PRESIDENT: That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that.

Q Yes, sir.

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For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report.

Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails. The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars.

Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.

The report, from the Pew Center on the States, also found that only one in 355 white women between the ages of 35 and 39 are behind bars but that one in 100 black women are.

Why is the US letting so many criminal women walk around without arresting them?

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“A clear lesson I learned in the museum was that outside forces that tend to divide people up inside their country are unbelievably counterproductive.”

—after touring a genocide memorial, Kigali, Rwanda, Feb. 19, 2008 (Thanks to Hellyn Sher.)

Could somebody please tell him about Iraq?

And just to confirm; they’re still minding the gap on the London subway…

So don’t worry, there was nothing wrong with me, just a short trip across the herring pond…

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The winner of the 2005 print Epica d’Or was Foote Cone & Belding, Lisbon, for the Grande Reportagem “Flags” campaign.

Two of the winning flags below, the rest at the link.

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“I said to (Haynes) that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis was quoted as saying about an August 2005 meeting the two men had.

“At which point, his eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? . . . We’ve got to have convictions.’”

The Pentagon has disputed Davis’s recollection of the conversation, and denied there is any connection between the Nation article and Haynes’ resignation, which takes effect next month.

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This is apparently what happened over the weekend. Sources have told PJM of a major public uprising over the weekend in Tehran – an account corroborated by other reports on the Web.

This is the story they tell: at approximately 7 pm on Saturday, February 23, the Ershad patrol, modesty police assigned to enforce clothing regulations, accosted and attempted to arrest a young woman at Goldis Shopping Mall, located in western Tehran, presumably because her dress was not sufficiently modest.

In recent weeks, the police squads charged with enforcing modesty have become more rigorous in their enforcement, with thousands of women detained, questioned, and arrested for violating hijab standards.

Instead of meekly submitting to her fate, the woman fought back. A young man – it is unclear whether he was accompanying her – came to her defense and joined her in fighting the police. In an attempt to subdue – and humiliate him – the police grabbed the young man and threw him into the garbage can nearby.

That was when the large crowd, predominately made up of young people, rose up against the police and attempted to liberate the young woman themselves.
Faced with a full-blown riot – complete with angry crowds with garbage cans being set on fire – the frightened police jumped into the van and fled the scene, except for one unfortunate officer who was left behind. The policeman was reportedly attacked and beaten by the mob.

[..]

The incident documented by cell phone video that was uploaded to YouTube. While the quality of the video is extremely poor, the Farsi narration and background voices were intelligible and translatable.

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A solution to determining which works are in the “Mickey Mouse” category of copyrights and which are in the more socially valuable “oral rehydration therapy” class of work is not feasible for a government bureaucracy. However, if all copyrights were taxed at a fixed (but significant) amount per year to maintain the copyright (all registered through the copyright office and searchable), there would be a significant carrying cost and most of the copyrighted material would revert to “public domain” and become available to “promote the progress of science and useful arts.” As intellectual property and copyrights become an even more significant part of our economy, and as copyright holders (not necessarily the creators) make claims of “stealing” as though it is real property, it should be taxed. Relative to copyrights’ significance in our economy, the amount of revenue from this source should be in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

How about this: You have some IP you want protected. You file for something to protect it (new patent, trademark, copyright, whatever). You claim a value. You make up the value – whatever you want to say it is. You are then taxed on that value. The only caveat is that if someone wants it from you they can buy the whole damn thing from you for the price you claimed it was worth – UNLESS you immediately raise the value and pay a penalty for undervaluing it.

It also makes it a lot more clear what “value” you can claim from copyright infringement.

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Music has been used in American military prisons and on bases to induce sleep deprivation, “prolong capture shock,” disorient detainees during interrogations—and also drown out screams. Based on a leaked interrogation log, news reports, and the accounts of soldiers and detainees, here are some of the songs that guards and interrogators chose.

So if your kids are playing any of these songs, you can tell them to Stop the Torture and turn it off!

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The Black Crowes are lashing out at Maxim magazine for reviewing the band’s new album — apparently without actually hearing it first.

The review, published in Maxim’s March issue, gives the Crowes’ “Warpaint” a rating of two-and-a-half stars out of five.

“The writer — who has not heard the album since advance CDs were not made available — wrote what appears to be a disparaging assessment anyway, citing, `it hasn’t left Chris Robinson and the gang much room for growth,’” said a statement on the band’s official Web site.

The band’s manager, Pete Angelus, said the magazine explained that its review was an “educated guess.”

“It speaks directly to the lack of the publication’s credibility,” Angelus said in a statement. “In my opinion, it’s a disgrace to the arts, journalism, critics, the publication itself and the public. What’s next — Maxim’s concert reviews of shows they never attended, book reviews of books never read and film reviews of films never seen?”

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A lot of parental worries about Internet sex predators are unjustified, according to new research by a leading center that studies crimes against children.

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In an article titled “Online ‘Predators’ and Their Victims,” which appears Tuesday in American Psychologist, the journal of the American Psychological Association, Wolak and co-researchers examined several fears that they concluded are myths:

* Internet predators are driving up child sex crime rates.

Finding: Sex assaults on teens fell 52 percent from 1993 to 2005, according to the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey, the best measure of U.S. crime trends. “The Internet may not be as risky as a lot of other things that parents do without concern, such as driving kids to the mall and leaving them there for two hours,” Wolak said.

* Internet predators are pedophiles.

Finding: Internet predators don’t hit on the prepubescent children whom pedophiles target. They target adolescents, who have more access to computers, more privacy and more interest in sex and romance, Wolak’s team determined from interviews with investigators.

Many more interesting findings at the link. Think of the Chiiiildrun!

(via)

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Voorlichtingsclub Digibewust gaat mogelijk toch de tekst aanpassen van een folder waarin wordt beweerd dat downloaden van films of muziek ‘meestal illegaal’ is.

[..]

Of de tekst echt wordt gewijzigd, hangt volgens Schermer onder andere af van de kosten, en van de vraag of aanpassing in samenspraak met de Europese auteurs van de folder mogelijk is.

Tja, want een boze platenmaatschappij, dat “kost” nogal wat!

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Most adults in the UK believe that children’s well-being is being damaged because childhood has become too commercial, a lifestyle poll has found.

Some 89% of adults in the GfK NOP survey of 1,255 people believed today’s children were more materialistic than previous generations.

[..]

Bob Reitemeier, chief executive of the society, said: “A crucial question raised by the inquiry is whether childhood should be a space where developing minds are free from concentrated sales techniques.

“To accuse children of being materialistic in such a culture is a cop-out,” he said.

[..]

“Evidence both from the United States and from the UK suggests that those most influenced by commercial pressures also show higher rates of mental health problems,” he went on.

If you’re in marketing, kill yourself. It’ll improve the human race even more than your own removal from the gene pool would suggest.

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During Friday night’s Real Time, Republican Congressman Jack Kingston took to the airwaves to echo the right wing talking points of Obama being “not patriotic enough”. One of the memes that Kingston brought up was about Obama not wearing his lapel pin. Let’s take a look at people not wearing their lapel pin:

[..]

So does this make Kingston unpatriotic, a hypocrite or just plain stupid.

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On February 5th, 2008 the International Space Station flew over the country of Mali – located in West Africa. One of the astronauts snapped this photo of a very large thunderstorm. Please note the huge anvil shape at the top of this thunderstorm, along with the overshooting tops where the best lift in this particular thunderstorm was occurring at the time the picture was taken.

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The Conservative blogosphere says that Barack Obama isn’t patriotic enough to be President because he was photographed without his hand over his heart during the National Anthem.

Here’s a photograph of George H.W. Bush at a ceremony commemorating the 10th anniversary of the liberation of Kuwait.

Former U.S. President George Bush, center, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, left, and retired General Norman Schwarzkopf, right, stand at attention during the playing of the National Anthem Monday, Feb. 26, 2001, at the American Embassy in Kuwait at the ceremony marking the 10th anniversary of the liberation of Kuwait. (AP Photo/Gustavo Ferrari)

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The RIAA has dropped its case against Chicagoan Paul Wilke, with the two parties moving to dismiss the case with prejudice in federal court late last week. Elektra v. Wilke was noteworthy in that the defendant vigorously contested all of the RIAA’s allegations, moving for summary judgment against the record label last month.

Wilke had been accused of the usual malfeasance by the RIAA: sharing music over a P2P network. Instead of settling the suit as many others have done, Wilke denied any wrongdoing. He claimed that he was not the “Paule Wilke” named in the complaint, had never used any filesharing applications, and that he did not own any of the songs reportedly flagged by Media Sentry.

Wilke’s argument that the RIAA did not have enough evidence for its lawsuit to go forward and subsequent motion for summary judgment apparently caught Elektra by surprise. The label responded with a motion for expedited discovery, indicating that it did not have enough evidence with which to fight the motion for summary judgment, and requested authorization for a search of Wilke’s computer in an attempt to find “evidence of copyright infringement on the defendant’s hard drive.”

In other words, they didn’t have shit, and wanted a fishing expedition. Since the RIAA began filing lawsuits against suspected file sharers in 2003, not a single one has gone all the way to trial. You either settle, or start fighting back, at which point they drop the case.

How is this not RICO worthy?

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The growing disparity of wealth is not some accidental side effect of capitalism. It is the fundamental design of the system.

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Police arrested a 28-year-old man Sunday on a cruelty to animals charge after he yelled an obscenity at a police dog in a patrol vehicle, according to an arrest affidavit.

Check out the USA location on the Current account balance list. No, scroll down a bit. No, a bit more….

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Microsoft is proposing on Monday a new way for marketers to think about the value of clicks on Internet ads, with the understanding that the last click a consumer makes isn’t necessarily the most important.

All ads in the web pages I visit are blocked equally, so I have to disagree with Microsoft here.

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About a year and a half ago, an executive at Disney-owned ABC-TV talked about how the network was experimenting with ways to block people from fast forwarding through commercials. The exec in question even claimed that commercial-skipping wasn’t even a very important feature for most DVR-owners. Despite the widespread criticism of this statement, it appears that ABC is now preparing to test that theory. In association with cable company Cox, it’s testing a new video-on-demand feature that won’t let viewers fast forward through commercials. We’ll be the first to say it: this is dumb. While it may make a few more people watch commercials, it won’t make them happy about it. And, given just how many other options there are these days, the end result might be that people just choose not to watch such ABC programming at all, let alone the commercials.

[..]

Then there’s Ray Cole, who owns some ABC affiliates. He says: “As network and affiliates, we both have an interest in slowing down the explosive growth of DVRs. This is about combating DVRs. As we developed this at every stage, there was an agreement that however we put this together, disabling the fast-forward function was key.” I’m curious as to how Mr. Cole thinks offering a product that does much less and deliberately takes away a key feature will “slow down” the “explosive growth of DVRs.” You don’t compete by offering a worse product.

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the Clinton campaign got even sleazier over the weekend when they sent an email to the media featuring a picture of Obama dressed in the traditional regalia of a Somali elder he had donned during an official visit to Africa. The email had its desired effect–it’s already feeding into the right’s “Obama is a secret Muslim” attacks. Rush Limbaugh was ranting about the “Obama dressed like a Muslim photo” earlier today.

How did the Clinton campaign respond when asked about it? Well, lets look at the statement issued by Clinton spokesperson Maggie Williams:

If Barack Obama’s campaign wants to suggest that a photo of him wearing traditional Somali clothing is divisive, they should be ashamed.

Yes, she really blamed it on Obama. You see, the Clinton press team thinks you are stupid.

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This clbuttic was originally posted by “ezrec”…

Browsing through a web archive of some old computer club conversations, I ran across this sentence:

“Apple made the clbuttic mistake of forcing out their visionary – I mean, look at what NeXT has been up to!”

Hmm. “clbuttic”.

Google “clbuttic” – thousands of hits!

There’s someone who call his car ‘clbuttic’.

There are “Clbuttic Steam Engine” message boards.

Webster’s dictionary – no help.

Hmm. What can this be?

HINT: People who make buttumptions about their regex scripts, will be embarbutted when they repeat this mbuttive mistake.