[Quote:]

“I think what you’re seeing is that Karl is continuing to live in his own world here,” McClellan said in an appearance on MSNBC’s Countdown With Keith Olbermann Tuesday.

“He’s the only one that thinks that he was not involved in any effort to expose Valerie Plame’s CIA employment. He continues this cover story that ‘I didn’t know her name’ and for that reason, he couldn’t have leaked her name.”

McClellan, whose own 2008 tell-all memoir What Happened revealed a slew of unflattering secrets about the administration, said he “did receive personal assurances from Karl” that he wasn’t involved before relaying the message to the press — which he was later criticized for.

“The interesting thing is that Karl Rove actually did apologize to me on three occasions back in July of 2005 when it became known that he was involved,” McClellan said. “I’ll leave it to other people to judge what it says about someone who will privately make such an apology but is afraid to make such an apology publicly when the cameras are rolling and the spotlight’s on him.”

I believe McClellan as much as I believe Rove — that is, not at all. We’ll probably never find out what really happened..

[Quote:]

A strong majority of MEPs (663 against and 13 in favour) today voted against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), arguing that it flouts agreed EU laws on counterfeiting and piracy online.

In addition, the Parliament’s decision today states that MEPs will go to the Court of Justice if the EU does not reject ACTA rules, including cutting off users from the Internet “gradually” if caught stealing content.

Though MEPs cannot participate in the ACTA talks, without the consent of the European Parliament, EU negotiators will have to go back to the drawing board and come up with a compromise.

Although only two members of parliament took the time to answer my email from earlier this week, it appears many more did indeed know how to vote!

update: the actual vote. Suddenly I’m not surprised at the lack of response to my email. The 13 votes in favor of ACTA were 10 British and 3 Dutch members.

[Quote:]

Powerful photographs can have lasting impact, and a Post photo of two men kissing is an image that many readers can neither forget nor accept.

[..]

Ann Witty of Woodbridge wrote to say she had canceled the Post subscription she has held since the 1960s.

“I am 65 years old and I realize that the world is changing rapidly – much more rapidly than I would like it to,” she e-mailed. “While I realize that the Post must report on these changes – even the ones with which I do not agree – I feel that the picture on Thursday morning was an affront to the majority of your readership. It is not something that I want coming into my home. I believe that even your editors know that it would have been better placed in the Metro section and that it would have mitigated its impact to do so.”

[..]

There was a time, after court-ordered integration, when readers complained about front-page photos of blacks mixing with whites. Today, photo images of same-sex couples capture the same reality of societal change.

And worse, that Ann Witty was 20 when that happened. She should know better.

[Quote:]

The United States Computer Emergency Response Team (US-CERT) has warned that the software included in the Energizer DUO USB battery charger contains a backdoor that allows unauthorized remote system access.

Software for a battery charger? For me, that would be a huge red flag right away. Why do people install crap like this?

Oh wait, I know – I recently cleaned all the crap off a HP box with Vista, and HP was kind enough to ship it with an extension that put the num lock lite in the task bar, even though the keyboard itself had a perfectly functioning light by itself. So HP is training its users to expect all kind of bullshit…

This was the announcement yesterday.

[Quote:]

Today will see Cisco making an announcement that it claims will “forever change the internet”.

If you guessed that they would introduce a new router, collect your prize here.

Anybody seen any change in the internet today?

[Quote:]

Assisted suicide for anyone over 70 who has simply had enough of life is being considered in Holland.

Non-doctors would be trained to administer a lethal potion to elderly people who ‘consider their lives complete’.

The radical move would be a world first and push the boundaries even further in the country that first legalised euthanasia.

The Dutch parliament is to debate the measure after campaigners for assisted suicide collected 112,500 signatures in a month.

Euthanasia has been available for the terminally ill in Holland since 2002 in cases of ‘hopeless and unbearable suffering’ certified by two doctors, but this would be a far bigger step.

Supporters say it would offer a dignified way to die for those over 70 who just want to give up living, without having to resort to difficult or unreliable solitary suicide methods.

Okay, couple of points.

1. This in the daily mail. That should already be enough for you to dismiss this article.
2. Our government fell recently which means that any controversial topic is likely to be voted as ‘controversial’ (duh) and that means that it’s postponed till after the elections in June. This also means that no minister can propose any controversial law because it’s simply never going to pass.
3. This is about a “burgerinitiatief” – a rule that says that any group that gets 40,000 verified signatures of adult Dutch citizens can get parliament to talk about them, and the committee that verifies requests like this can deny it based on “it contravenes deeply held values of dutch society”. And if they approve it, all parliament has to really do is talk about it. Quite a bit away from “creating a law”, actually
4. The largest party in the Netherlands for the past decade has been the CDA. The “C” in there stands for “Christian”. You figure out the rest.
5. This isn’t something that happened “in a month”, the foundation that drives the signature collecting has been doing this since 2002.
6. They don’t have 112,500 signatures, they have something like 70,000 during that 8 years.
7. All the so-called “details” in the article, such like non-doctors doing the work, are utterly made up out of thin air.
8. See point 1.

[Quote:]

When Conan O’Brien says that your life is about to change, believe him.

The unemployed late night talk show host, finding himself with some time on his hands, joined Twitter last month — and soon found himself amassing a devoted horde of followers (and possibly creating a few hilarious spinoff accounts). On Friday, he returned the favor a little. “I’ve decided to follow someone at random,” he wrote. “She likes peanut butter and gummy dinosaurs. Sarah Killen, your life is about to change.”

Sure enough, it did. In mere days, the woman known on Twitter as LovelyButton has found her own ranks of followers swollen to 18,587 and counting — up from a previous total of three (including a few that seem suspiciously Coco-flavored).

[..]

At a moment like this, a girl suddenly in the spotlight might be expected to turn into a real douche. Who’d have raised an eyebrow if she flaunted her ignorance on a talk show, plowed into the nearest telephone pole or embarked on an ill-fated hookup with John Mayer? But what Killen — and her new friends — have done instead is rather extraordinary.

Before the fateful O’Brien connection, Killen and her mother had been setting up a sponsor page for the Michigan Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure for breast cancer. Mere hours afterward, Killen posted a link on Twitter to her new donation page. By the next day she’d raised almost a thousand dollars. She’s currently closing in on $3,000.

[Quote:]

Creating a translation machine has long been seen as one of the toughest challenges in artificial intelligence. For decades, computer scientists tried using a rules-based approach — teaching the computer the linguistic rules of two languages and giving it the necessary dictionaries.

But in the mid-1990s, researchers began favoring a so-called statistical approach. They found that if they fed the computer thousands or millions of passages and their human-generated translations, it could learn to make accurate guesses about how to translate new texts.

It turns out that this technique, which requires huge amounts of data and lots of computing horsepower, is right up Google’s alley.

[Quote:]

[Quote:]

“Starting in January, Apple launched a series of C-Level discussions with tier-1 handset makers to underscore its growing displeasure at seeing its iPhone-related IP [intellectual property] infringed. The lawsuit filed against HTC thus appears to be Apple’s way of putting a public, lawyered-up exclamation point on a series of blunt conversations that have been occurring behind closed doors.

“Our checks also suggest that these warning shots are meaningfully disrupting the development roadmaps for would-be iPhone killers. Rival software and hardware teams are going back to the drawing board to look for work-arounds. Lawyers are redoubling efforts to gauge potential defensive and offensive responses. And strategy teams are working to chart OS strategies that are better hedged.”

[..]

Why pick on HTC? Reiner speculates that as the earliest and most aggressive user of Android, HTC was the perfect proxy for Apple’s real target: Google

[Quote:]

Responding to recent public outcries over its handling of private data, search giant Google offered a wide-ranging and eerily well-informed apology to its millions of users Monday.

“We would like to extend our deepest apologies to each and every one of you,” announced CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking from the company’s Googleplex headquarters. “Clearly there have been some privacy concerns as of late, and judging by some of the search terms we’ve seen, along with the tens of thousands of personal e-mail exchanges and Google Chat conversations we’ve carefully examined, it looks as though it might be a while before we regain your trust.”

Added Schmidt, “Whether you’re Michael Paulson who lives at 3425 Longview Terrace and makes $86,400 a year, or Jessica Goldblatt from Lynnwood, WA, who already has well-established trust issues, we at Google would just like to say how very, truly sorry we are.”

[..]

“Americans have every right to be angry at us,” Google spokesperson Janet Kemper told reporters. “Though perhaps Dale Gilbert should just take a few deep breaths and go sit in his car and relax, like they tell him to do at the anger management classes he attends over at St. Francis Church every Tuesday night.”

“Breathe in, breathe out,” Kemper added. “We wouldn’t want you to have another incident, Dale. Not when you’ve been doing so well.”

In an effort to make up for years of alarmingly invasive service, Google will automatically add $50 to all American bank accounts as a gesture of goodwill. The company has also encouraged feedback, explaining that users can type any concerns they may still have into any open browser window or, if they are members of Google Voice, “simply speak directly into [their] phones right now.”

Either way, the company said, “We’ll know.”