For health reasons.

Apparently if you believe in the influence of an invisible sky-fairy it can lead to belief in other actions-from-a-distance.

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I can’t discuss the details of the suit, but it is real. I did have a video that went viral, we had used a very popular song on it, someone saw it and brought it to the attention of the labels legal team and from there they came after us. Getting that letter in my inbox and as a fax was super scary. You always here “they’ll just send you a cease and desist letter and you take it down” and I always thought that would be true. But the letter that came through and they wanted a lot of money for damages, it the tune of $150,000 for one song.

For playing music during a wedding.

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A 15 year-old schoolboy with a taste for BitTorrent went to trial yesterday after downloading and sharing 24 Hollywood movies. The case, however, has a worrying twist. Rather than being hunted down online by an anti-piracy company, the teenager was turned over to the police by the head teacher at his school. The prosecutor says he had no choice but to take action.

Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.

- William James

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Arizona’s Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu, a Republican border-security hawk and a leading candidate for Congress has been accused, along with his attorney, of threatening to deport a Mexican former lover when the man refused to agree to not disclose the relationship.

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For Switzerland’s largest bank, the hits just keep coming. After years of being whacked with millions of dollars of fines for all sorts of infractions, UBS now appears to be at the center of the financial world’s latest scandal: an alleged conspiracy by traders and brokers to rig the price of derivatives around the world by manipulating a key interest rate.

The Wall Street Journal reports that UBS has admitted to Canadian regulators that between 2007 and 2010, some of its traders and cash brokers conspired to manipulate the London interbank offered rate, also known as Libor. This is the rate that banks use to lend to each other, and it is essentially the backbone of half the world’s fixed-income market, because it’s also used to calculate the price of trillions of dollars of floating-rate securities every day, from car loans to corporate bonds and derivatives.

By allegedly conspiring to set Libor rates, traders and cash brokers appear to have been able to profit off of derivatives linked to it. Bloomberg News reports that UBS recently suspended a number of senior executives and traders in conjunction with the investigation.

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In a just description of his own activities (personal and public) Minister Toews accused his opponents of using “dirty, sleazy tactics”.  This is probably the best thing that could have happened to the issue of internet privacy in Canada – it has awakened public interest and caused a majority government to stumble in implementing anti-privacy legislation.

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JUST days after sacking 1000 workers and raising interest rates, ANZ chief executive Mike Smith is to take 200 lucky staff on a five-day butler-serviced cruise on the “world’s best” luxury liner.

At a cost of $1.75 million, the workers, rewarded as part of the bank’s CEO recognition program, will sail away on the Silver Shadow to Malaysia’s Langkawi Islands on March 6.

Details of the sojourn have been posted on the bank’s internal website just days after it was confirmed that backroom jobs are being outsourced to India and the Philippines.

ANZ yesterday announced a record $1.48 billion three-month profit – and Mr Smith warned home loan rates may go even higher to protect the bank’s profit margins.

I’ve always said that you can tell what a company is most worried about by simply reading their advertising slogan. It is always something they desperately want to be true but deep down know isn’t true at all.

The ANZ slogan is “we live in your world”.

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And that is why I love the Apple company.

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Today’s sysadmin todo list:

0. Get corporate membership with EFF.

1. Identify all applications with user-generated content.

2. Move all associated domains to a non-US based registrar.

3. Migrate DNS, web serving and other critical services to non-US based servers.

4. Migrate yourself to a non-US controlled country.

I’m sorry for US sites and users. Your government is hell-bent on turning the internet into a read-only device like TV, easily regulated and controlled. The population will be required to sit quietly and keep their eyes glued on the screen so they don’t miss the ads, with any infringers deemed terrorists and pedophiles and thus deserving of summary punishment by DHS squads.

Hopefully the internet will route around the damaged segment, and the rest of us can continue to enjoy the amazing interactivity it has brought our society.

Fox 29 Investigates: Chemicals On Campus: MyFoxPHILLY.com

Next up: We investigate the MURDER PRACTICE ZONE where you can pay cash, anonymously, to shoot live ammunition at paper targets. Our undercover agent was able to fire dozens of rounds without question. Could terrorists be using these so-called “shooting ranges” to hone their skills at killing Americans?

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Here’s something you don’t see every day: a tornado on the surface of the sun. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory posted this stunning video, which shows the sun’s plasma sliding and spinning around in the star’s magnetic fields for 30 hours earlier this month.

Terry Kucera, a solar physicist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told Fox News that the tornado might be as large as the Earth itself and have gusts up to 300,000 miles per hour. By comparison, the strongest tornadoes on earth, F5 storms, clock wind speeds at a relatively paltry (though incredibly destructive) 300 mph.

(links to various sizes and qualities of downloads here)

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The documents reveal that donors to Heartland included oil billionaire Charles Koch, and Heartland has spent several million dollars over the past five years to undermine climate science. Tens of thousands of dollars are slated to go this year to well-known climate contrarians S.Fred Singer, Craig Idso, and Anthony Watts of the Watts Up With That? website.

So no-one normal is surprised that the “drill-baby-drill” contingent are doing this it has caused some weather types to become quite vexed. Now they know they are opposed by forces of evil instead of just stupidity.