Slashdot Mirror

The initial report containing what were quickly exposed as gross errors and exaggerations was written by the Guardian's newly appointed Shanghai correspondent, Benjamin Joffe-Walt...

Yay go China, what a great country.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,15885 95,00.html

(do not read if you are squeamish)

This decision is quite funny. A couple of months ago, Slashdot was running a story about a piece by Richard Stallman where he made the analogy with the works of Victor Hugo being covered by patents on literary plots. Then there were some posters who thought Dr. Stallman was making an absurd comparison, and that patents on literature would never happen.

Well, well...

Meanwhile, in Europe, we have chosen another road. After the victory on July 6, when the European Parliament rejected the software directive, we now have a chance to get one of our activists to win the title "European of the Year" in an open Internet poll organized by a big business magazine.

Please feel free to go to NoSoftwarePatents.com for instructions on how to vote, while you contemplate this latest madness by the US patent establishment.

You're probably right, it is illegal in the US.
For that matter, i think its illegal about everywhere.
Nonetheless, when "prestige" http://www.guardian.co.uk/gall/0,8542,842603,00.ht ml
hit galicia, a common catch phrase "nunca mais" (never again) was all over the place in protests and stickers.
Some activists made rubber stamps with it, and would allow people to stamp their bills with them.
It was 100% illegal, but i stamped all the bills i had in my wallet (at my own risk), as well as other people, I saw euro bills with that message as far as portugal and france. (I dont travel a lot :))
It a nice little VERY EFFECTIVE protest

Gilberto Gil is a pretty interesting guy. A few days ago, the guardian had this pretty interesting article about him, which talks a bit about Brazil's stance on free software. What is going on in Brazil is pretty interesting, also in terms of patents on food. For example there was a huge outcry after a Japanese firm patented a modification of the delicious cupuaçu fruit. The term "biopiracy" is part of popular language over there.

and there is a similar story today in The Observer about a plan by the UK government to monitor traffic flow by license plate recognition. (In the UK, we call them 'number plates', if you wonder what the article is going on about).

Nutrasweet.
MSG
salts (For those that don't get it, ask a nurse about this old saw "The dose makes the poison". Anything, even the most basic element of life, is deadly in excessive quantities.)

"Preservatives" is a little generic. Even salt in its most basic form is a preservative. Sugar is as well. Liquid maple syrup preserves (get this) hardened maple syrup. So, yeah... hmmm... I'll let you all have at this one.

As far as olestra goes, the results of eating too much (dose makes the poison again) are clearly labelled on the packaging, and apart from being messy, aren't any more dangerous than eating several bowls of all bran.

Did you know that MSG is in breast milk? Yup, in fact, the purpose of MSG is to make food "moreish". This way babies are more inclined to keep drinking mother's milk. I don't see babies suffering from migraines.

Good old Rupe has already found the sites for his new presses. 3 of them in fact (with planning permission and everything), Glasgow, Liverpool and London. All part of his current £600million investment (see here) for world domination. Glasgow is due towards the end of 2006, Liverpool around mid 2007 and London at the end of 2007. So yeah, 18 months of unwelcome competition although the Guardian is not neccessarily the main competitor of either the Sun or the Times.

Oh, and the current presses aren't tabloid only - ever seen the Sunday Times?

Because it can trigger the next ice age, like a less dramatized version of "The Day After Tomorrow." "if enough cold, fresh water coming from the melting polar ice caps and the melting glaciers of Greenland flows into the northern Atlantic, it will shut down the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe and northeastern North America warm. The worst-case scenario would be a full-blown return of the last ice age - in a period as short as 2 to 3 years from its onset - and the mid-case scenario would be a period like the "little ice age" of a few centuries ago that disrupted worldwide weather patterns leading to extremely harsh winters, droughts, worldwide desertification, crop failures, and wars around the world." http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/ice_age s.html http://www.21stcenturyradio.com/articles/02/101014 0.html http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12 374,1083419,00.html http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0130-11.htm Or just google it yourself.

War for oil

Gee, we're getting oil from Iraq? When did that start? If you want to talk about profiting from Iraq's oil, perhaps you should speak to Mr Annan.

Either Annon or France's former UN ambassador, who was just arrested and taken into custody for all the kickbacks taken in the Oil for Food scandel.

You ever notice these people can't back up their claims with any evidence, while there's always plenty to the contrary? "The US had nothing to do with the invention of TCP/IP, Arpanet, NSFNET, Internet, etc." -- WTF? "War for Oil" - try War that cost us plenty of oil (a billion dollars a day would be more than sufficient to pour into converting the world's largest shale oil reserve in the US to a productive resource, allowing us to tell the Saudis and Iranians to go to hell).

And then there's the holier than thou European crap like this: supporting dubious regimes in other nations... I really wish I could drag every socialist college dropout to Rwanda or any of the countless European colonial nightmares and force them to endure watching the horrors their "propped up pals" who run these nations exact on innocent people. There are few non-US westerners who have hands as clean as ours, and don't think for a second we don't know it when you spew this US hatred. As if I need a German to teach me how to respect Judiasm.

Morality doesn't come from being more experienced at tyranny and corruption than anyone else.

*scoove*

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4 253580,00.html

I can't believe we are wasting our time arguing or talking about this sort of behavior. In the future, when direct connect to brain tissue or brain waves is not only possible, but a "commodity", millions will choose to lay around for hours, days or perhaps forever, while thier consciousness is "online"

Computers controlled via thought

Right on. I always install Adblock with Firefox or Mozilla. I haven't seen a pop-up or flash advertisement for months. They all seem to come from a few advertisers. Here is my adblock list:

http://.mediaplex.com/* http://.tribalfusion.com/*
http://.doubleclick.net/* http://.adbureau.net/*
http://.atdmt.com/* http://.emode.com/*
http://.advertising.com/* http://.tickle.com/*
http://.fastclick.net/* http://.falkag.net/*
http://.e.akamai.net/* http://.yieldmanager.com/*
http://.casalemedia.com/* http://.serving-sys.com/*
http://.pointroll.com/* http://.thinktarget.com/*
http://.zedo.com/* http://.com.com/cnwk.*/Ads/*
http://.qnsr.com/* http://ar.atwola.com/*
http://ads.guardian.co.uk/* http://rss.slashdot.org/~a/*
http://.starwave.com/* http://ads.ign.com/advertisers/*
http://ads.space.com/RealMedia/ads/* http://gfx.dvlabs.com/*

If you read this story, you'll see while it is sad that it happened, nothing of value was lost. The Films are kept off site, and the clay gets thrown away anyway, because they can't keep it.

given their work on the Holocaust. See also here and here.

Is this close enough?

Actually, no, they don't pay for it. The merchants that were defrauded pay for it

You're right that banks don't directly cover the costs of all fraudulent transactions. In some cases (usually "card not present" transactions), it's the merchants. But to say that banks aren't paying for credit card fraud is just wrong.

Bank and credit card fraud rose 20% last year, costing British banks £505m

[US] Banks lost $788 million to credit-card fraud in 2004. And $822 million in 2003.

This is an expensive problem for banks; they have large incentives to solve it.

Dude, this is Britain we're talking about. You don't even need a jacket to get shot by the police.

... And, in the processes, depriving the copyright holders of income.

...according the copyright holders. There's research that says otherwise.

The fact remains that people who download music are people who love music. Yes, some of them might download something they might otherwise have bought, but just as important are the people that download something that they wouldn't usually get to hear and then go and buy it. I've fallen into the latter category more times than not.

You can find out tommorow when the IgNoble awards are released.
http://www.improb.com/ig/2005/2005-details.html

Last year the Chem Award went to Coca-Cola Co. of Great Britain for turning H20 into a cancer causing material.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,11 74127,00.html

...in order to kill Juba, the elusive sniper that has sapped morale in Baghdad.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,154282 3,00.html

Don't kid yourself - you're not going to catch the pros with this kind of thing.

Or maybe you'd like to argue the "facts" that the Democrats went after Microsoft to blackmail them into giving money to their political committees?

The Guardian

In 1995, the budget for Microsoft's Political Action Committee (PAC) was a paltry $16,000. By 2000 it was $1.6 million. And total donations by Microsoft and its employees to political parties, candidates and PACs in the 2000 election cycle came to more than $6.1m, according to Edward Roeder, a long-term observer of corporate political donations. During this period, Microsoft outspent even Enron, giving $2.3m in so-called 'soft money' contributions, compared to the $1.55m donated by the Enron crowd in the same period. (Soft money is unregulated corporate and individual contributions that cannot go directly to candidates, but which usually goes to political parties.)

In the last three US electoral cycles (1998, 2000 and 2002), Microsoft's soft money donations have favoured Republicans over Democrats. In 2000 the company gave $1,313,384 to the Republicans and $876,792 to the Democrats. But it's difficult to know what to read into these figures because soft money returns filed with the Federal Electoral Commission aggregate individual employees' donations with their employer's corporate donations. Analysis of donations by Microsoft employees indicates a bias to the Democrats; Bill Gates, for example, has consistently favoured Democratic candidates - which suggests that the company's overall Republican bias was the product of a board decision. Now, according to the Centre for Responsive Politics, using FEC data, the bias has switched back to the Democrats.

That's far from true, the French just started formal legal investigations into the retired chief engineer of the French part of the Concorde program for failing to address a known weakness in French operated Concorde aircraft which led to the fatal crash near Paris in 2000 which killed 113. http://www.guardian.co.uk/airlines/story/0,1371,15 79800,00.html Then there's the ongoing ungreased jack screw issues on Alaskan Airlines MD83s even though it was the causal fact in a fatal crash.

You have got to be kidding me! This passes for news? Some doctor says 'whoaaaa mannnn, Da Vinci made some nice drawings' and then invents a new way to repair the heart, and the media links the two together. There is NO mention of what the new procedure consists of or why Da Vinci's drawings helped him invent it. I find it very hard to believe the Da Vinci really had some understanding of heart physiology that we don't and when the article makes no effort to convince me otherwise...well, color me skeptical.

Go read http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/badscience/ backstories and learn why you should never listen to the mass media when it comes to scientific discoveries. I'm really surprised this got posted to /.

The record industry is too anachronistic to have the foresight to create this solution themselves and are still obsessed with selling a solid medium (LPs, tapes, CDs), while treating its customers as criminals and artists as expendable commodities that can ignore paying royalties if they can help it

A brief look at the practices of the record industry reveals that they are the dishonest lot:

Apple earns less than a nickel per iTunes track

States settle CD price-fixing case

RIAA Continues Distributing Dud CDs to Satisfy Settlement

A music industry case study Shows how little the artist makes thanks to middle men like the record industry

Wal-Mart Wants $10 CDsRemember when CDs first came out and people said it was too expensive and the record industry promised that it would go below $10 eventually. Never happened

How Apple saved the music biz

FTC: Labels charged with price-fixing - again

Music Firms to Look Harder For Artists Owed Royalties Spitzer announced a settlement in which the nation's five largest recording companies promised to do a better job of tracking down and paying $50 million in unclaimed royalties to thousands of performers.

Finally, last night 2005-Sep-29 on Nightly Business Review (NBR) was a four part series on the music industry. It shows how iTMS allowed one relatively unknown electronica artist sell directly to her consumers with the iTMS . Her music was featured on NPR and then people all over the world wanted to download and listen to her music. Stores like iTMS are the great equalizer from years of abuse from the greedy record labels. "The Business of Music,"-Part 4: The Down Low On Download Distribution

Why the UN? Because there's no corruption in the UN, right?

Expect lots of deliberate misunderstandings of this concept for FUD porpoises.

You mean GPL attack dolphins?

Or Bus companies allege that carpooling is unfair competition. At least in France....

Yup, this is what visiting the wrong website in China could get you:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,15686 22,00.html

The beauty products from the skin of executed Chinese prisoners
(The London Guardian, 9-13-05)

Wanna see pictures?

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/september2005 /220905dehumanization.htm

So the only way to capitalize on those too lazy to read subtitles is to dub voice overs for those who don't wish to have the complete experience.

Speaking of Hunter-Killer dolphins. This is more funny than you thought?

http://shopping.guardian.co.uk/computers/story/0,1 587,1525508,00.html/

Next up, for those of you who can't tell, this is UK-only.

Now, here's my question: Is this service really all it's cracked up to be? Anyone know anyone else on it?

Here's a link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5294551-103 676,00.html

AC to avoid the whoring.

Hmmm, quite interesting. I didn't realize their effort had been continuing for so long. However, is 'purity' merely subjective to their collective opinions? Look at the case of courriel. what they do seems to be reactionary, and not necessarily suited to anything but their own ambitions. Sanskrit in its classical form had much the same problem with vedic sanskrit. The outer edges of the Roman empire faced constant influence for the germanic languages. Both gave way to modern languages like hindi gujarati, and the 'romance' languages respectively. Side note, you do realize French (along with Spanish and Italian) is decended from Latin, right? My point exactly. It CAME from latin, so it does no good to compare it to latin. Oh, and don't forget romanian.

Of course it is, your politicians are very sensitive like that:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0, 13918,1162151,00.html

Cue armed dolphin story

dude, what "global warming nutjob"s? Even *BUSH* admits it.

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/cb0c3b94-ee84-11d9-98e5-0 0000e2511c8.html
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/2005/07/ 04/bush_makes_climate_change_concession.html
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/afp/20050704/bushcli mate.html
http://www.truthout.org/issues_05/070705EB.shtml
http://www.geopoliticalreview.com/archives/001076b ush_admits_global_warming.php
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/09/g8_global_ snoring/

Although I admit, it's better to say "climate change" because temps drop in some areas and raise in others so the "average" is misleading (even though it's going up), but that's really splitting hairs.

You know I am in Australia, just changed to 100% wind power from my utility, costs me $16 AUD extra per month. People aren't changing because they don't want to change, because they are lazy. It's easier to keep spending money on junk food, cigarettes etc.

What's needed in the short term is:
Quick move to pebble bed nuclear with serious money (actual money, put aside in an account that can't be touched, not empty promises of safety) invested in stable multi-thousand year storage. Change all older cars over to ethanol and biodiesl. Ban/Tax out of existence SUVs for non-farming/ultraremote citizens rather than give them tax breaks like americans do ("light truck" catergory so it isn't classified as a "car") . Solar water heaters. Carbon trading (put a real price on a commons and it will be worth money). Put money geosequestering remaining coal/fossil fuel plant pollution. And oh, I dunno, plant a tree for every one you cut down? Not an unreasonable proposition I think.

Long term projects:
Public Transport, money put into getting wind and solar up to 40% of power provision in a decade and develop ways to manage their flutuating supply. Serious money into hydrogen and battery tech. Control population growth - why should there be infinite population growth on a finite planet? Sure you can increase the population when you terraform mars, but there should be a cap on earth's population, there is nothing morally good about having more people, it just means we all get a thinner slice of the pie. We passed six billion in 1999 we are almost at 6.5 billion in 2005, totally unsustainable rate of growth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

You DO have other sources besides Wikipedia for the first one?

The fact that the Whitehouse welcomed rather than condemned the 3-day junta is a matter of public record. First one up in a Google search is an account in The Observer.

If you cite something which happened in 1953 as a proof... just think a little.

Sure, I appreciate it was a while ago, but the four examples I've given (Iran:1953, Guatemala:1954, Chile:1973, Venezuela:2002) show a fairly healthy disdain for democracy. The question is how can you tell whether a leopard has changed its spots? The Venezuela incident may or may not have been directly contributed to by the USA, but it certainly doesn't look good.

I'm going to put some noses out of joint here, but education in the USA sucks, and it doesn't really get better until you've got all the way through a PhD programme.

Yes, there is a lot about US government and society that is intolerably broken and absolutely needs fixing. But to compare human rights violations of the US to those of China is just ridiculous.

I mean, China is a place where the remains of executed political prisoners are turned into cosmetic products and sold overseas. That is seriously fucked up.

A Guardian opinion piece on the subject: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1568479 ,00.html The whole idea of coorporations spreading freedom is simple sillyness - Corporations have evolved to make themselves rich, and any freedom they spread is a coincidental side effect. Market organisms have a life of their own, and their morality is based on dollar values, not virtuous conduct. The ultimate optimum state for a company isn't a democracy, but a tyrannical dictatorship where all wealth is directed straight to the few.

Remember: a poor Brazilian ghit was shot in the head 5 times in a london subway car for wearing a coat. The prime minister later commended the officers.
Another person (a reporter, apparently) was recently arrested for, uhm, having a laptop ... or something like that.

BTW, you havn't had republican bombs in London for a *long* time, have you?

It's 4 years since the last IRA bomb in the UK: August 2001.

Indeed, since not only will they have to find a method to read the data, figure out the encoding etc, they will also have to decrypt it.

Here you can read about the problems encountered without DRM in recovering data in weird and old formats:

Firstly how a modern day Doomsday book project became unreadable:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,690 3,661093,00.html

Project who managed to salvage it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAMiLEON

Wikipedia info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project

This is a very important topic, has been mentioned for years, and of course it has already been demonstrated in real life... the BBC Domesday Project of the 80s, where kids across the UK were asked to submit their own descriptions and images of their local area, much in the way of the original Domesday Book of 1086. It was collated on the default school computer, the BBC Micro, and packaged up & sold back to schools on huge laser discs. Except as the 21st century arrived, no-one had any readers. A basic example, perhaps, but one that actually happened. As it turned out, they managed to get to the data, after appeals on the web & in the press, and it can be browsed here.

Strangely the article barely touched on physical degradation. This is a bigger problem. We don't know how long these cheap late 90s CDs will last. However that's the same for any media, from paper and photos. The advantage we have is we can easily run off an exact clean copy on fresh media - this why I've started to date every CD/DVD I burn.

RTFA. You could suppose that the author is lying all the way through, but it appears as if the initial officers came close to letting him go until other officers showed up.

I did RTFA. I'm not saying the author lied all the way through because he obviously was arrested and so forth. However, it's perfectly within his ability to leave out "but I started shouting at the police, waving my hands around, screaming that they were imperialist pigs supressing the downtrodden classes of the world, praise Allah and his wrath be upon you all!" Now, that's a likely exaggeration, but to say that this guy got arrested for no reason at all is silly. The police do not just single innocent people out for this kind of treatment, otherwise it'd be happening all over the place. It is not, ergo there is something about this guy that is out of the ordinary. Since the author is trying so desperately hard to make his case seem ordinary, it is logical to assume that there's more to the story than what's being told by the author. Remember, the first rule of being a criminal (or, in this case, of being thought to be a potential criminal) is to immediately proclaim one's innocence and pure-hearted motives. Seldom is that the case.

What does this have to do with the article in question? What crime was committed? What "corpse" is there?

(sigh) It would appear logical analogies are beyond your ability to grasp. Sorry, I can't make it simple enough for you to understand.

Link as to those "wild-eyed claims"?

Try these:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/comment/ story/0,14259,1229376,00.html
Claiming Bush didn't serve his ANG term when his records clearly show otherwise
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/tvradio/story/0 ,14676,1335307,00.html
Wondering why someone doesn't assassinate Bush
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,122164 4,00.html
Blames Bush for people who were murdered by terrorists
http://politicstalk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?50@225.qQe GbeJsHXV.0@.685ea08b
Title: "Is it time to assassinate Bush"

These are the first of 144 hits I found doing a routine Google search. I'm not going to waste my time posting them all, but suffice to say that The Guardian's left-wing credentials are solidly in place no matter where you look. You would have to be amazingly disingenous to see it any other way, but you've already proven that's not outside the boundaries of what passes for intellectual honesty from you.

(I remember they got so much flak when they were dubious about those WMDs in Iraq... hope you aren't dubious about THAT!)

Not dubious at all. The following WMD's or WMD components have been discovered in Iraq, all of which are in violation of the U.N. Resolutions banning WMD's and WMD development in Iraq:

-500 tons...that's right...TONS...make that 1 million pounds of yellow cake uranium. It was found at Saddam's nuclear weapons facility (Al-Tuwaitha)

-1.8 tons of partially enriched uranium found at the same place. You know, the stuff you need to make nukes.

-Hidden centrifuge parts and blueprints.

-Two dozen artillery shells loaded with Sarin and mustard gas.

Just because the news organizations haven't been trumpeting the finds doesn't mean they don't exist. But then, I guess if you've already made your mind up to disregard plain evidence, my pointing it out isn't going to change your mind. Please, don't let me distract you from ignoring anything that conflicts with your pre-existing opinion of America, it's policies, or its President.

RTFA. You could suppose that the author is lying all the way through, but it appears as if the initial officers came close to letting him go until other officers showed up.

I did RTFA. I'm not saying the author lied all the way through because he obviously was arrested and so forth. However, it's perfectly within his ability to leave out "but I started shouting at the police, waving my hands around, screaming that they were imperialist pigs supressing the downtrodden classes of the world, praise Allah and his wrath be upon you all!" Now, that's a likely exaggeration, but to say that this guy got arrested for no reason at all is silly. The police do not just single innocent people out for this kind of treatment, otherwise it'd be happening all over the place. It is not, ergo there is something about this guy that is out of the ordinary. Since the author is trying so desperately hard to make his case seem ordinary, it is logical to assume that there's more to the story than what's being told by the author. Remember, the first rule of being a criminal (or, in this case, of being thought to be a potential criminal) is to immediately proclaim one's innocence and pure-hearted motives. Seldom is that the case.

What does this have to do with the article in question? What crime was committed? What "corpse" is there?

(sigh) It would appear logical analogies are beyond your ability to grasp. Sorry, I can't make it simple enough for you to understand.

Link as to those "wild-eyed claims"?

Try these:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/comment/ story/0,14259,1229376,00.html
Claiming Bush didn't serve his ANG term when his records clearly show otherwise
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/tvradio/story/0 ,14676,1335307,00.html
Wondering why someone doesn't assassinate Bush
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,122164 4,00.html
Blames Bush for people who were murdered by terrorists
http://politicstalk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?50@225.qQe GbeJsHXV.0@.685ea08b
Title: "Is it time to assassinate Bush"

These are the first of 144 hits I found doing a routine Google search. I'm not going to waste my time posting them all, but suffice to say that The Guardian's left-wing credentials are solidly in place no matter where you look. You would have to be amazingly disingenous to see it any other way, but you've already proven that's not outside the boundaries of what passes for intellectual honesty from you.

(I remember they got so much flak when they were dubious about those WMDs in Iraq... hope you aren't dubious about THAT!)

Not dubious at all. The following WMD's or WMD components have been discovered in Iraq, all of which are in violation of the U.N. Resolutions banning WMD's and WMD development in Iraq:

-500 tons...that's right...TONS...make that 1 million pounds of yellow cake uranium. It was found at Saddam's nuclear weapons facility (Al-Tuwaitha)

-1.8 tons of partially enriched uranium found at the same place. You know, the stuff you need to make nukes.

-Hidden centrifuge parts and blueprints.

-Two dozen artillery shells loaded with Sarin and mustard gas.

Just because the news organizations haven't been trumpeting the finds doesn't mean they don't exist. But then, I guess if you've already made your mind up to disregard plain evidence, my pointing it out isn't going to change your mind. Please, don't let me distract you from ignoring anything that conflicts with your pre-existing opinion of America, it's policies, or its President.

RTFA. You could suppose that the author is lying all the way through, but it appears as if the initial officers came close to letting him go until other officers showed up.

I did RTFA. I'm not saying the author lied all the way through because he obviously was arrested and so forth. However, it's perfectly within his ability to leave out "but I started shouting at the police, waving my hands around, screaming that they were imperialist pigs supressing the downtrodden classes of the world, praise Allah and his wrath be upon you all!" Now, that's a likely exaggeration, but to say that this guy got arrested for no reason at all is silly. The police do not just single innocent people out for this kind of treatment, otherwise it'd be happening all over the place. It is not, ergo there is something about this guy that is out of the ordinary. Since the author is trying so desperately hard to make his case seem ordinary, it is logical to assume that there's more to the story than what's being told by the author. Remember, the first rule of being a criminal (or, in this case, of being thought to be a potential criminal) is to immediately proclaim one's innocence and pure-hearted motives. Seldom is that the case.

What does this have to do with the article in question? What crime was committed? What "corpse" is there?

(sigh) It would appear logical analogies are beyond your ability to grasp. Sorry, I can't make it simple enough for you to understand.

Link as to those "wild-eyed claims"?

Try these:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/comment/ story/0,14259,1229376,00.html
Claiming Bush didn't serve his ANG term when his records clearly show otherwise
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/tvradio/story/0 ,14676,1335307,00.html
Wondering why someone doesn't assassinate Bush
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,122164 4,00.html
Blames Bush for people who were murdered by terrorists
http://politicstalk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?50@225.qQe GbeJsHXV.0@.685ea08b
Title: "Is it time to assassinate Bush"

These are the first of 144 hits I found doing a routine Google search. I'm not going to waste my time posting them all, but suffice to say that The Guardian's left-wing credentials are solidly in place no matter where you look. You would have to be amazingly disingenous to see it any other way, but you've already proven that's not outside the boundaries of what passes for intellectual honesty from you.

(I remember they got so much flak when they were dubious about those WMDs in Iraq... hope you aren't dubious about THAT!)

Not dubious at all. The following WMD's or WMD components have been discovered in Iraq, all of which are in violation of the U.N. Resolutions banning WMD's and WMD development in Iraq:

-500 tons...that's right...TONS...make that 1 million pounds of yellow cake uranium. It was found at Saddam's nuclear weapons facility (Al-Tuwaitha)

-1.8 tons of partially enriched uranium found at the same place. You know, the stuff you need to make nukes.

-Hidden centrifuge parts and blueprints.

-Two dozen artillery shells loaded with Sarin and mustard gas.

Just because the news organizations haven't been trumpeting the finds doesn't mean they don't exist. But then, I guess if you've already made your mind up to disregard plain evidence, my pointing it out isn't going to change your mind. Please, don't let me distract you from ignoring anything that conflicts with your pre-existing opinion of America, it's policies, or its President.

RTFA. You could suppose that the author is lying all the way through, but it appears as if the initial officers came close to letting him go until other officers showed up.

I did RTFA. I'm not saying the author lied all the way through because he obviously was arrested and so forth. However, it's perfectly within his ability to leave out "but I started shouting at the police, waving my hands around, screaming that they were imperialist pigs supressing the downtrodden classes of the world, praise Allah and his wrath be upon you all!" Now, that's a likely exaggeration, but to say that this guy got arrested for no reason at all is silly. The police do not just single innocent people out for this kind of treatment, otherwise it'd be happening all over the place. It is not, ergo there is something about this guy that is out of the ordinary. Since the author is trying so desperately hard to make his case seem ordinary, it is logical to assume that there's more to the story than what's being told by the author. Remember, the first rule of being a criminal (or, in this case, of being thought to be a potential criminal) is to immediately proclaim one's innocence and pure-hearted motives. Seldom is that the case.

What does this have to do with the article in question? What crime was committed? What "corpse" is there?

(sigh) It would appear logical analogies are beyond your ability to grasp. Sorry, I can't make it simple enough for you to understand.

Link as to those "wild-eyed claims"?

Try these:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/comment/ story/0,14259,1229376,00.html
Claiming Bush didn't serve his ANG term when his records clearly show otherwise
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/tvradio/story/0 ,14676,1335307,00.html
Wondering why someone doesn't assassinate Bush
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,122164 4,00.html
Blames Bush for people who were murdered by terrorists
http://politicstalk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?50@225.qQe GbeJsHXV.0@.685ea08b
Title: "Is it time to assassinate Bush"

These are the first of 144 hits I found doing a routine Google search. I'm not going to waste my time posting them all, but suffice to say that The Guardian's left-wing credentials are solidly in place no matter where you look. You would have to be amazingly disingenous to see it any other way, but you've already proven that's not outside the boundaries of what passes for intellectual honesty from you.

(I remember they got so much flak when they were dubious about those WMDs in Iraq... hope you aren't dubious about THAT!)

Not dubious at all. The following WMD's or WMD components have been discovered in Iraq, all of which are in violation of the U.N. Resolutions banning WMD's and WMD development in Iraq:

-500 tons...that's right...TONS...make that 1 million pounds of yellow cake uranium. It was found at Saddam's nuclear weapons facility (Al-Tuwaitha)

-1.8 tons of partially enriched uranium found at the same place. You know, the stuff you need to make nukes.

-Hidden centrifuge parts and blueprints.

-Two dozen artillery shells loaded with Sarin and mustard gas.

Just because the news organizations haven't been trumpeting the finds doesn't mean they don't exist. But then, I guess if you've already made your mind up to disregard plain evidence, my pointing it out isn't going to change your mind. Please, don't let me distract you from ignoring anything that conflicts with your pre-existing opinion of America, it's policies, or its President.