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Early Wednesday morning, State Sen. Roy Ashburn (R-Calif.) was pulled over and arrested for drunk driving. Sources report that Ashburn — a fierce opponent of gay rights — was driving drunk after leaving a gay nightclub; when the officer stopped the state-issued vehicle, there was an unidentified man in the passenger seat of the car.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing to hear a story about an openly gay politician busted with his female mistress while leaving the gay parade.

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At first glance, it looks as if we’re in the middle of a patent lawsuit Super Bowl party. Nearly every large mobile phone player — with the exception of Microsoft, Palm and, so far, Google — has recently been involved in some sort of patent litigation regarding mobile technologies.

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Bailey said he regularly sends client employees emails informing them the strength of their login passwords is being tested through a new website. They are then instructed to follow a link and enter their credentials. The success rate: as high as 50 per cent.

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A senior Google exec yesteday suggested that if the company doesn’t get its way over Street View data retention, it may stop prowling the European Union’s highways and byways.

Speaking to Bloomberg at CeBIT, where Street View has been charming Germans with a fleet of touchy-feely spymobiles, Google Earth founder Michael Jones bemoaned the EU’s insistence that original, unblurred Street View images be stored for just six months, rather than 12.

Google has always maintained it needs to keep the pics on file to enable it to respond to privacy-related complaints from the the unwashed masses. However, the head of EU data protection agencies recently described a year as “disproportionate”.

Alex Turk also demanded that Google “should always give advance notice on its website and in the local or national press before it takes pictures”.

If the EU gets its way, Jones said, then Google “would consider whether we want to drive through Europe again, because it would make the expense so draining”.

Dear Google, if “too expensive” is really a reason for you to not follow the law, the EU would kindly like you to just fuck off.

… that marketing folks are not the smartest cookies in the jar when it comes to graphs and statistics, so they tune their displays to make it look attractive to pay 400% for a 15% increase:

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Here may be found…
…the last words of Joseph of Arimathea:
‘He who is valiant and pure of spirit…
…may find the Holy Grail…
…in the Castle of Aaargh.’

(as far as I can read it, it says something like Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vivamus facilisis ullamcorper tellus, nec vulputate metus sollicitudin vitae.)

and then there’s being this guy.

Darwin award, anybody?

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A Fairbanks man is accused of trying to purchase a $28,000 pickup truck with a forged check for the fourth time this year.

Jonathon Michael Smith, 22, was arraigned Tuesday on new felony charges of attempted first-degree theft and second-degree forgery.

He still faces more than a dozen other charges stemming from the previous incidents, and had been out on bail for only about two weeks when he allegedly tried to pull the scam Monday at Seekins Ford.

[..]

Fairbanks police Officer Jim O’Malley responded to the dealership soon after the manager became aware that something was amiss. O’Malley was aware of Smith’s history and asked him what he was doing.

Smith said that he was “being stupid,” according to a criminal complaint filed in court.

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What do you do if you suddenly get 200 bounce messages in your inbox?

You turn off your mail server.

Check the mail queue. See it still increasing.

You turn off your web server.

Check the mail queue. No more increases.

Check the webserver logs.

Disabled the abused virtual host

Start the web server.

Check the mail queue. No more increases.

Clean the mail queue of the 15 thousand pieces of garbage. I’m pretty sure the clients of ABSA bank in South Africa, who were targeted with a phishing mail, are happy they’ll not receive this from my server.

Start the mailserver.

Down time incoming mail: zero, thanks to secondary mx servers
Down time outgoing mail: 20 minutes.
Down time web server: 10 minutes.

Fuck you, spammers at 95.108.128.242 (spider72.yandex.ru) and 94.247.165.49 (94.247.165.49.not.updated.openip-cs.net).

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The Archdiocese of Washington has been battling the D.C. government for the right to discriminate against gays and lesbians since D.C.’s same-sex marriage legislation got rolling last year.

One major point of contention: Once gays and lesbians are allowed to marry, the Archdiocese—which employs plenty of locals through Catholic Charities—will be required to provide health benefits to same-sex spouses, an act which it says would fly in the face of the Catholic church’s teachings on homosexuality.

The solution? No spousal benefits for anybody.

You can’t blame them though, they are just exercising their religious imperative not to help people who are sinners, Jesus was very clear about not wanting to help them.

I guess they decided that if gay marriage wasn’t going to actually be a threat to traditional marriage, they were damn well going to make it one.

And check out this article about all this. From the comments:

Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?

And believe it or not, Monsignor Pope actually tries to answer it:

2. Slavery is no longer a viable option for you so I do not recommend it. Although the scriptures permitted it it is no longer legal and might get you in trouble. Further, the slavery of the ancient world was of a different kind than the African Slavery of the New World and West Indies. In the ancient world slavery existed on account of several things. Either one owed a debt that could not be paid so they and or their family accepted slavery as an option to debtors prison. Or Sometimes non capital crimes had been committed and once again slavery was accepted as an option to prison. Lastly, and most commonly slavery was imposed on the soldiers (and their families) of a losing side in war. It was an option to excution. This cultural background explains why the scriptural texts do not outright condemn slavery as we might expect. As you can see it served as a less harsh option than prison or debt. But the slavery of the New World was intriniscally unjust since it enslaved people who had committed no crimes, owed no debt and had not prosecuted a war. It went by the same name but was a different reality. This led the Church to condem the practice beginning in the 17th Century. A number of southern bishops actually excommunicated Catholics for advocating slavery. This was all due to the recognition that the slavery being practiced was instrinsically unjust as stated above. After two centuries of struggle to make this point, abolitionists finally got the practice outlawed. So, Geoge I do not recommend that you sell you daughter even for a high price, since it is illegal and might get you into trouble. And don’t try to use scripture to ease your conscience since modern slavery is not the same institution that scripture silently tolerated.

So the position of the church about slavery is: if it is legal in your country, and someone owes you money or committed a crime against you or fought for the other side of a war…go ahead!

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How will we ever get a leg up on hackers who are infecting computers worldwide? Microsoft’s security chief laid out several suggestions Tuesday, including a possible Internet usage tax to pay for the inspection and quarantine of machines.

Dear Microsoft, Dear Adobe. No. I’m not going to pay for YOUR mistakes.

(I’m including Adobe in this list, because a recent suggestion in a comment here that Microsoft should tell people to stop using IE misses the point that these days, more than half of successful hacks are through Flash problems, and IE, although still not perfect, isn’t the problem it once was)

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Atrazine, a weed killer widely used in the Midwestern United States and other agricultural areas of the world, can chemically “castrate” male frogs and turn some into females, according to a new study.

New research suggests the herbicide may be a cause of amphibian declines around the globe, said biologists at the University of California-Berkeley, who conducted the study. The findings are being published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Bad for two reasons: the world needs frogs, and the influence it has on estrogen and testosterone is bad for humans as well.

The European Union banned atrazine in 2004 because it was consistently showing up in levels higher than 0.1 ppb — its threshold for harmful chemicals — in drinking water.