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They can’t be serious. Are they serious? Holy crap I think they’re serious.

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The LG Quantum could be a quantum of trouble. The first Windows Phone 7 device with a full keyboard that will be sold through U.S. carrier stores, it has a balky sliding mechanism and a really bizarre keyboard layout that could kill its appeal.

Windows Phone 7 also just doesn’t seem to be designed for phones with landscape-format, sliding keyboards yet. Too many of the Windows Phone 7 screens don’t rotate, leaving you craning your neck to try to operate the phone at a 90-degree angle.

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Today, ABC Nightline gave us a peek at Sony’s Google TV and in the midst also the remote controller. Now before we move on here we just like to advise readers that this isn’t a joke. What you’re looking at above is in fact the actual remote control you will need to use to operate Sony’s Google TV (unless of course you opt to control the unit with your Android phone instead).

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You can now download the Visual Basic CTP for Windows Phone Developer Tools. Provided in this download are all the templates, designer support, emulator (and phone!) support and IntelliSense for Visual Basic.

We’re not formally announcing the schedule for when Visual Basic will be fully supported. We’re giving VB developers early access to the Windows Phone 7 platform so that they can start thinking about what amazing apps they want to build.

The classic definition of “to be amazed” is to be bewildered, made crazy, or stunned.

I guess that’s correct, then.

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“So long as they incorporate (or act in the form of a trust), businesses will now be free to trade in or exploit slaves, employ mercenary armies to do dirty work for despots, perform genocides or operate torture prisons for a despot’s political opponents, or engage in piracy – all without civil liability to victims.” 

In the words of Judge Pierre Leval, who disagreed with his colleagues, that is the result of today’s ruling by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which concluded that corporations could not be sued for human rights abuses under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS).  The ATS generally allows suits in federal courts for violations of international law – but, according to the Second Circuit, not if the violation was committed by a corporation.

but first watch this,this,this,this, if you can. I couldn’t. Perhaps I’m just getting older but I find myself having this reaction to things more and more.

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To the entire shower of cunts that are even tangentially involved in the production of this: I pray with every fibre of my being that Zombie Walt Disney rises from his grave, tracks each one of you motherfuckers down; and using his zombie strength to overpower and pin you all to the floor, squats over your faces and plants a huge festering 44-year-old fucking zombie shit into each of your cretinous, cancerous mouths

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Now, they’ve gone and done it again with this image of their aerial monitoring from helicopters over the gulf.

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The first thing you might notice out of place is the looming air traffic control tower in the upper left hand side of the photo

Then, direct your attention to where the water abruptly changes shades of blue in a frenzy of pixelation, blurring, and a disappearing vessel

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BP Photoshops Another Official Image TerriblyAnd last, while the helicopter clearly appears to be situated at some height above the boats ahead, the readouts on the dash appear to indicate that that door and ramp are open and the parking brake engaged, not to mention that the pilot appears to be holding a pre-flight checklist

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For a while, leading Republicans posed as stern foes of federal red ink. Two weeks ago, in the official G.O.P. response to President Obama’s weekly radio address, Senator Saxby Chambliss devoted his entire time to the evils of government debt, “one of the most dangerous threats confronting America today.” He went on, “At some point we have to say ‘enough is enough.’ ”

But this past Monday Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, was asked the obvious question: if deficits are so worrisome, what about the budgetary cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which the Obama administration wants to let expire but Republicans want to make permanent? What should replace $650 billion or more in lost revenue over the next decade?

His answer was breathtaking: “You do need to offset the cost of increased spending. And that’s what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.” So $30 billion in aid to the unemployed is unaffordable, but 20 times that much in tax cuts for the rich doesn’t count.

Remember this?

Well, Dreamworks didn’t get the message.

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Ten U.S citizens and residents, three of whom are veterans, are stuck abroad or cannot fly within or out of the United States because they are wrongly on a no-fly list, according to a federal lawsuit lodged Wednesday.

Some of them are in the USA, walking around freely. Apparently they cannot do any damage to anybody that way, but oh boy if they get aboard a plane!

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The expiration of the five-metre rule that had Toronto residents fearing arrest if they strayed too close to the G20 security perimeter came with a startling revelation Tuesday – it never existed.

The rule seemed straightforward when the news broke last Friday that the Ontario government made a regulatory change to a little-known act in secret.

Come within five metres of the summit security fence and you’d better have some identification or risk arrest.

The temporary regulation, which was passed in secret June 2, did decree that all streets and sidewalks inside the fence were a public work until 11:59 p.m. Monday. Under the Ontario Public Works Protection Act, that allowed police to search people trying to enter that area.

But there was no power to search people coming within five metres of the fence, said ministry spokeswoman Laura Blondeau.

“The area designated by the regulation as a public work does not extend outside the boundary of the fence,” Ms. Blondeau said.

Asked Tuesday if there actually was a five-metre rule given the ministry’s clarification, Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair smiled and said, “No, but I was trying to keep the criminals out.”

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A new poll from Vanity Fair and 60 Minutes finds that 24 percent of Americans still believe Pres. Obama was born overseas, despite a complete lack of evidence to support the claim he was foreign-born. And while nearly a quarter of Americans cling to this belief, there is no consensus among these hard core birthers about where overseas Obama was born — 6 percent said Kenya, 2 percent said Indonesia and 16 percent couldn’t specify, just somewhere other than America.

By comparison an Angus Reid Global Monitor poll from March 2010 that around 15 percent of Americans were found to be truthers, the media’s analog to birthers. In the poll, 15 percent said the collapse of the World Trade Center was the result of a controlled demolition, with 11 percent not sure; 15 percent said Flight 93 was shot down over Pennsylvania (22 percent not sure); 13 percent said no plane crashed at the Pentagon (11 percent not sure); and 6 percent said no jets crashed into the World Trade Center towers, meaning the images in the news videos were fake (7 percent weren’t sure).

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The crux of the suit: For 30 years there’s been a feminist bookstore in Minneapolis named Amazon Bookstore. Jeff Bezos was probably just starting to read under the covers with a flashlight when the Minneapolis women began selling books as a nonprofit under the name Amazon in 1970. The bookstore, now a for-profit collective, sued Amazon.com earlier this year for trademark infringement. The bookstore claimed to have lost money and staff time dealing with a growing stream of customers and suppliers who had mistaken it for the Web retailer. And, by the way, the store wanted its name back.

The case is a big company spin-meister’s worst nightmare: a classic underdog, the embattled, independent, female-owned bookseller whose long-standing local business is trampled by the heartless dot-com with the multibillion-dollar market capitalization. Amazon Bookstore even put a link on its own Web site asking for contributions to help finance its legal case against the mammoth e-tailer.

But Amazon.com, apparently still unused to its new role as Goliath, played it to the hilt, in a way so embarrassingly sensationalistic that no screenwriter, not even Nora Ephron herself, could have credibly concocted it. In pre-trial depositions, quoted last week in Holt Uncensored, a book-industry column, Amazon.com lawyers interrogated one of the co-owners of the store under oath about her own sexual orientation and that of the staff.

Choice excerpts: "Have you had any interest in promoting lesbian ideals in the community?" and "I’ll ask you this, are you gay?" The lawyer himself even seemed embarrassed by his own line of questioning, apologizing while asking: "Are any of the employees of the bookstore gay, and forgive me for asking this question." (Amazon Bookstore’s lawyer objected and filed a motion for a protective order against such questions. The judge is scheduled to rule on the motion next week.)

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"They accuse you of being some kind of child molester just because you are sitting next to someone.

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Now a consent order has been drawn up at Slough County Court, in which BA admitted sex discrimination in the case and agreed to pay him costs of £2,161 and £750 in damages.

Mr Fischer, a hedge fund manager, has donated the damages payout and £2,250 of his own money to Kidscape and Orphans in the Wild, two child protection charities.

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A Nebraska town, angry over a surge in the number of Hispanic residents, is voting today in a referendum on a new law that would require foreign nationals to get a licence to live in the town.

The referendum in Fremont has been prompted by a sharp rise in Hispanic people drawn by work at local meatpacking plants combined with fears over job losses and demand placed on the town’s social services because of the economic downturn.

If approved, tenants who are not US-citizens would be required to get an "occupancy licence" from the city council. Even residents of nursing homes would be required to obtain such a licence.

No, not that one.

This one.

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An American man who claimed to be on a mission to hunt down Osama Bin Laden has been arrested in northern Pakistan, police say.

They said that Gary Brooks Faulkner, 52, was detained in the mountains of Chitral district north of Peshawar.

He had a pistol, dagger and a sword and was carrying night-vision equipment as well as Christian literature.

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"The company is not aware of any reason which justifies this share price movement," it said of the ADR drop.

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As if the water wasn’t deep — or oily — enough around British Petroleum’s public relations, the company has hired a former spokeswoman for Vice President Dick Cheney to be its public face for the disaster.

Anne Womack Kolton, former head of public affairs at the Department of Energy and Cheney’s onetime campaign press secretary, will take the baton from BP this week.

If BP wants to project a “we’re evil” image they couldn’t have made a better choice. Well, except perhaps by hiring Karl Rove..

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It took less than two hours for Apple to start selling out of its iPad tablet computers today amid huge queues outside its stores across the country.

But few buyers seemed to know the iPad was also on sale at electronics retailers including selected JB Hi-Fi, Myer and David Jones stores.

One JB Hi-Fi store in Sydney’s George St, just metres from Apple’s flagship Australian store, had no queues, available demonstration models and plenty of stock at 10am, even though Apple fans queued in their hundreds nearby.

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Selling off the public’s transportation infrastructure to pay off government debt has no “ideological opposition” in London, if a recently published report is to be believed.

A plan to privatize the UK’s motorway network, giving toll firms access to large swaths of road, would take place under the guise of paying down the government’s debt, British media reported Tuesday, citing a number of key officials who support the scheme, proposed to all major political parties by NM Rothschild, one of the world’s oldest, most influential and little discussed investment banks, founded by the Rothschild family.

Transport Secretary Philip Hammond said over a week ago that the scheme would be Britain’s way forward.

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During planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group kicked around a number of ideas for discrediting Saddam Hussein in the eyes of his people.

One was to create a video purporting to show the Iraqi dictator having sex with a teenage boy, according to two former CIA officials familiar with the project.

“It would look like it was taken by a hidden camera,” said one of the former officials. “Very grainy, like it was a secret videotaping of a sex session.”

[..]

The agency actually did make a video purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys, one of the former CIA officers recalled, chuckling at the memory. The actors were drawn from “some of us darker-skinned employees,” he said.

[..]

The ideas were patently ridiculous, said the other former agency officer.

“They came from people whose careers were spent in Latin America or East Asia” and didn’t understand the cultural nuances of the region.

“Saddam playing with boys would have no resonance in the Middle East — nobody cares,” agreed a third former CIA official with extensive experience in the region. “Trying to mount such a campaign would show a total misunderstanding of the target. We always mistake our own taboos as universal when, in fact, they are just our taboos.”

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The Australian Sex Party is demanding an enquiry into why a new question has appeared on Incoming Passenger Cards at the Customs point of entry into Australia. The new question asks if they are carrying any ‘pornography’.

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“If you and your partner have filmed or photographed yourselves making love in an exotic destination or even taking a bath, you will have to answer ‘Yes’ to the question or you will be breaking the law”, she said. Travellers must now also declare perfectly legal materials such as Category 1 and 2 Restricted magazines, X18+ films and quite probably a large section of R18+ films which have explicit sex in them. Ms Patten said the change marked the beginning of a new era of official investigation into people’s private lives – being investigated or searched on the basis that you might have legal material in your possession.

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Authorities in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh are planning to set up an outsourcing unit in a jail.

The unit will employ 200 educated convicts who will handle back office operations like data entry, and process and transmit information.

Inmates and bank details. What could possibly go wrong?

Working in the unit will also be financially rewarding for the prisoners.

Yeah, I bet!

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Sony Corp. is considering developing a tablet-style computer that would compete with Apple Inc.’s iPad, though it wants more evidence consumers will buy them, a company executive said.

Good call, Sony! After all, nobody’s bought any iPad yet!

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The official platform for the Republican Party of Maine is now a mix of right-wing fringe policies, libertarian buzzwords and outright conspiracy theories.

The document calls for the elimination of the Department of Education and the Federal Reserve, demands an investigation of “collusion between government and industry in the global warming myth,” suggests the adoption of “Austrian Economics,” declares that “‘Freedom of Religion’ does not mean ‘freedom from religion’” (which I guess makes atheism illegal), insists that “healthcare is not a right,” calls for the abrogation of the “UN Treaty on Rights of the Child” and the “Law Of The Sea Treaty” and declares that we must resist “efforts to create a one world government.”

It also contains favorable mentions of both the Tea Party and Ron Paul. You can read the whole thing here.

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A third-grader at Brazos Elementary was given a week’s detention for possessing a Jolly Rancher.

School officials in Brazos County are defending the seemingly harsh sentence. The school’s principal and superintendent said they were simply complying with a state law that limits junk food in schools.

But the girl’s parents say it’s a huge overreaction.

“I think it’s stupid to give a kid a week’s worth of detention for a piece of candy,” said Amber Brazda, the girl’s mother. “The whole thing was just ridiculous to me.”