[Quote:]

A German nursing home has come up with a novel idea to stop Alzheimer’s patients from wandering off: a phantom bus stop.

[..]

“It sounds funny,” said Old Lions Chairman Franz-Josef Goebel, “but it helps. Our members are 84 years-old on average. Their short-term memory hardly works at all, but the long-term memory is still active. They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home.” The result is that errant patients now wait for their trip home at the bus stop, before quickly forgetting why they were there in the first place.

[Quote:]

Senate Intelligence Committee Unveils Final Phase II Reports on Prewar Iraq Intelligence. Phase II Report on Public Statements [PDF] and Phase II Report on DoD Policy Office [PDF]. This may come as a shock, but most of what the Bush Administration said about Iraq wasn’t true. Republican co-chair Bond, Kit Bond, says the reports are “political theatre.”

• Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa’ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa’ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.
• Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.
• Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.
• Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community’s uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.
• The Secretary of Defense’s statement that the Iraqi government operated underground WMD facilities that were not vulnerable to conventional airstrikes because they were underground and deeply buried was not substantiated by available intelligence information.
• The Intelligence Community did not confirm that Muhammad Atta met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001 as the Vice President repeatedly claimed.

Wait, I’ll go get my surprised face… I think I need it for this news..

[Quote:]

Auteursrechtenorganisatie Norma begint een bodemprocedure tegen de Staat in de kwestie over het kopiëren van beeld en geluid op apparaten met een harde schijf.

Een kort geding begin dit jaar werd afgewezen. Norma eiste in dat kort geding, samen met artiesten Peter Blok, Ricky Koole en Carel Kraayenhof en de vakbonden Ntb en FNV Kiem, dat de minister van Jusitie snel vergoedingen zou regelen.

De organisatie ging in hoger beroep, maar begint nu ook nog eens een bodemprocedure.

[..]

De branche pleit al langer voor uitbreiding van die kopieerheffing naar nieuwere media, zoals harde schijven, memorysticks en mp3-spelers.

‘t zijn ook net kakkerlakken, die stichtingen. Welk deel van het woord “Nee!” is onduidelijk? Ga toch fietsen!

[Quote:]

President Bush has a to-do list awaiting Congress when lawmakers return from their Memorial Day recess.

“I hope members of Congress return rested because they have a lot of work left on important issues and limited time to get it done,” Bush said Saturday in his weekly radio address.

On his work list for lawmakers: a war funding bill, intelligence legislation, veterans benefits, a free trade pact and giving a nod to Steve Preston, his nominee for housing secretary.

“In all these areas, Congress has failed to act,” Bush said.

Riiiight. Because, meanwhile, elsewhere in DC, a huge amount of progress is being made:

[Quote:]

McConnell (R-Ky.) has essentially shut down the Senate floor this afternoon by forcing the Senate clerk to read aloud the entire 500 page global warming bill. So if legislative language is your thing, turn on C-SPAN and watch the Senate at its best, or worst, depending on your perspective.

[Quote:]

With voters sour on the status quo, Republican John McCain plans to spend the next five months arguing that he has a history of fighting to reform government and that Democrat Barack Obama talks of change with nothing to show for it.

“I have a record of doing that, not a rhetoric of doing that,” McCain told an audience last week, claiming he long has taken a bipartisan approach to fixing the country’s ills while suggesting that Obama simply offers empty promises of working across party lines.

The four-term Arizona senator was forecasting his overarching general election theme against the fresh-faced first-term Illinois senator.

McCain will start making his case in earnest Tuesday during a prime-time speech in the New Orleans suburb of Kenner, La., a searing symbol of government inaction after Hurricane Katrina.

McCain and “a searing symbol of government inaction after Hurricane Katrina”… I think I’ve heard that one before… Ah, yes, I have:

[Quote:]

School officials are defending the use of a high-voltage shock to control a 16-year-old student at Richmond Senior High School last week.

[..]

During the incident Leak admits to not complying with the officers instructions, but denies giving the officer any reason to tase him.

“I didn’t give him my I.D. badge when he asked for it,” Leak said. “I threw it on the floor. And as for when he grabbed me by my shirt, I didn’t push the officer. I just shrugged away and backed up against the wall.”

According to Leak’s statements, that was when he was tased by the officer.

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What Baptist leaders have known for years is finally public: The Southern Baptist Convention is a denomination in decline. Half of the SBC’s 43,000 churches will have shut their doors by 2030 if current trends continue.

And unless God provides a miracle, the trends will continue. The denomination’s growth rate has been declining since the 1950s. The conservative/fundamentalist takeover 30 years ago was supposed to turn the trend around; it didn’t make a bit of difference.

[..]

As the true picture of evangelicals’ problems has developed, panicked leaders are splitting into camps. Some say that the church is lax, soft, sold out. That what’s needed is an even bigger dose of the medicine that the SBC fundamentalist takeover delivered. More authority, more strict interpretations of the Bible, more sermons about sin and suffering and sacrifice, more rigor about who is and who isn’t getting to go to heaven.

Expect them to get way more batshitinsane…

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Nearly 50% of all the people who use BitTorrent at any given point in time do so to download a TV show, with popular series such as “Lost” getting close to 10 million downloads per episode. These figures are getting awfully close to the viewer count on TV as reported by Nielsen, and they are still rising.

Top Downloads May 25 – June 01

Imagine: if the creators of Lost somehow manage to stop torrents, they lose half their viewers!

[Quote:]

NASA’s Cassini Spacecraft is now reaching the end of its four-year prime mission (on June 30th), and about to enter into its extended mission. What a nice excuse for a retrospective of some of the great images sent back home by Cassini over the past four years. (12 photos total)

Here’s one, Mimas closeup, with rings in background. Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech:

[Quote:]

A variety of legends have grown up around Bill Gates’ brief career at Harvard. (He dropped out halfway through and co-founded Microsoft). On Tuesday night, during an interview at the “D: All Things Digital” conference in Carlsbad, Calif., Mr. Gates regaled the audience with his strategy of not bothering to attend classes and then catching up in a single intense burst during a separate reading period at the end of the term.

On Wednesday afternoon, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, himself a Harvard dropout, appeared to one-up Mr. Gates. Mr. Zuckerberg acknowledged that he had also skipped classes, in particular avoiding “Art in the Time of Augustus.”

Steve Jobs had some finance problems in college:

[Quote:]

In 1972, Jobs graduated from high school and enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Although he dropped out after only one semester, he continued auditing classes at Reed, such as one in calligraphy. “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts,” he said.

Guess which path I would rather follow… Dear NYT, you fail to understand…

[Quote:]

De chip in de ov-chipkaart is dermate onveilig, dat onmiddellijk een alternatief gezocht moet worden. Die harde conclusie uit een onderzoek van een Londense universiteit werd geschrapt uit een rapport dat naar de Tweede Kamer is gestuurd.

[..]

Uit de documenten blijkt verder dat TNO in 2004 ook al een onderzoek deed naar de beveiliging van de chipkaart. Dat rapport is nooit gepubliceerd. TLS wil tegenover Webwereld slechts kwijt dat het gaat om een vertrouwelijk rapport, waar het geen details over prijsgeeft, “omdat dit op korte termijn afbreuk zou kunnen doen aan de totale beveiliging van het systeem.”

Vroeger sneuvelde er nog wel ‘s een minister vanwege het verkeerd inlichten van de kamer – wedden dat er deze keer niets gebeurd? De sloten op de deuren in het ministeries die met RFID werken zijn inmiddels vast vervangen…

Overigens, de beveiliging van de chip is slechts een zeer klein deel van de problemen

[Quote:]

The problem with surveillance is not primarily that some bored officer might learn about some embarrassing private detail (although this is a problem as well). The fundamental problem with surveillance is that it changes people. People under surveillance behave differently than people who are not monitored – differently than free people.

Unfortunately, this fundamental problem has just been proven in Germany. Since the beginning of this year, communication providers are required to record who communicated with whom and when (but not the content of the communication). This data is stored for six months and available to law enforcement in cases related to certain forms of crime.

A recent survey (German) by the well-known German Forsa institute now showed the social effects of this data retention law: Communication habits are indeed changing.

1.003 individuals have been questioned on May 27th and 28th. These are the results:

• 73% know about the data retention
• 11% said that they had already abstained from using phone, cell phone or e-mail in certain occasions
• 6% believe to receive less communication since the beginning of the data retention
• 52% said they probably would not use telecommunication for contacts like drug counselors, psychotherapists or marriage counselors because of data retention

And the sad fact: 48% still think that data retention is a necessary step for crime prevention.

[Quote:]

AT least 90 people will face court as a result of one of Australia’s largest investigations into child pornography.

Australian Federal Police (AFP) warned today there would be more arrests following the six-month Operation Centurion, which is part of a wider Interpol investigation involving 170 countries.

So far 90 people have been arrested or summonsed in Australia – three in the ACT, 23 in NSW, 41 in Queensland, four in South Australia, one in Tasmania, 17 in Victoria and one in Western Australia.

[..]

The investigation was part of an international Interpol-led investigation involving 170 countries.

It was triggered after a hacker posted 99 child porn images on a European website, which attracted 12 million hits from 150,000 computer users in just 76 hours.

Of those, 2883 computer IP addresses were traced back to Australia, and the AFP has identified all of them.

So somebody hacks a website, and within three days just about every pervert on the planet knows about and visits that site? How did information about the hacked site get spread that quickly and widely in a community that is sure to be trying to hide? Those people don’t all know each other, surely? Something sounds very fishy about all this…