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It sure is a good thing that the UK has over 4 MILLION CCTV CAMERAS WATCHING THE PEOPLE. All those ipod owners can rest easy knowing that in having given up their essential liberties they are now safe and protected from such criminals.

Right?

Right? :(

Here are the essential things about ASBOs.

1) What is complained of does not have to be unlawful. It just has to cause complaints.

2) The remedy does not have to prohibit the behaviour which causes the complaints. It can prohibit almost anything that has the effect of making the behaviour difficult or impossible.

3) The prohibition has the effect of making things unlawful for an individual which are not unlawful for anyone else.

From the Guardian : "A teenager has become the first youth in Britain to receive an anti-social behaviour order that bans him from going to school. The two-year Asbo on Gary Addy, 16, stops him from going within 50 metres of any educational premises in the east London borough of Newham unless he has prior permission from the headteacher."

He seems not to have broken the law in school. He is prohibited from going within 50 meters of one, which is not whatever was complained of, and is not otherwise illegal. He is the only one to whom this prohibition applies.

You have to see this in connection with a number of other proposals, laws and institutions in the UK. Proposed reforms to the Mental Health Act would enable people with the wrong personalities to be locked up as a crime prevention measure. There have also been proposals to allow compulsory medication. There is a proposal for SCPOs (serious crime prevention orders) which will be a sort of super ASBO for gangsters. There have been proposals to track and intervene in dysfunctional families, to prevent future crime by children at risk. We already have Family Courts with wide ranging powers to break up families and put children into care and regulate access. They meet in secret, their decisions are not subject to appeal, and to reveal the name of anyone who has been before them is an offence. The proposed ID card scheme and DNA database will make almost all data any agency has on an individual, including health, available to any government agency. The various Terrorism laws permit confinement without trial of foreign nationals, and have started to be used to permit lengthier detention of citizens. Nor should we forget the recent proposals on the Civil Contingencies Act, which would allow any government to declare a state of emergency and rule by decree or the Regulatory Reform Bill, which would allow rule by decree without an emergency.

Henry Porter has written well on the subject. Have a look at his exchange with Tony Blair at

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,,1759 344,00.html

or his piece on ID cards at

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article1 129827.ece

We do not have a police state in Britain. That is sometimes argued, but its quite mistaken. The laws are still administered by an independent judiciary with a strong tradition of individual liberties, and abuse seems uncommon and is remarked on and sometimes overturned. What we have is two things.

First, we have the most far reaching and thorough assault on the legal basis of individual liberties and parliamentary democracy since Charles I.

Second, we have now the basis for any future authoritarian regime to implement the basic structure of the former Soviet Union. It could implement preventive detention, classification of dissidents as mentally ill, compulsory medication, internal exile, separation of families, withdrawal of passports, suppression of freedom of association, prohibitions on publication or public speaking.

We don't have a Police State. However, the only thing standing between Britain and a Police State at this point is tradition and the goodwill of its government. Its not law or constitution. This is a lot, don't underestimate it. The question is whether it will prove enough.

Article about the general movement away from basic principles of government

I completely agree, when you have someone that introduces himself as ..... 'a certified ethical hacker' right after mentioning his name and job title, you realise right away this person doesn't know shit about security or the processes needed to achieve it. This guy spends 90% of his day attempting to impress people with his 133t hAx0R skills, and amazing ability to write viruses using 'a package downloaded from the internet'.

This really isn't a shocker to me!

what I really want to see today is a story covering Nikola Tesla's 150th anniversary (he was born 150 years ago today, July 10th 1856).

Hear hear. The UK's Independent covered it yesterday FWIW. Not the greatest article, but it was a two-page spread in the news section.

In a parliamentary model, power rests with the prime minister, and he can only pass legislation my a majority vote in the parliament. What's more, if he does something outrageous like spy on the states own citizens, he has to go into parilment the next day and be bawled at by the opposition, something executive presidents never have to do.

In theory, possibly. In practice, the UK at least doesn't work that way anymore, no thanks to Tony Blair. Besides, with a suitably well-whipped majority, it has to be something truly outrageous (or just really, really unpopular with the party's MPs - which shouldn't happen too often, if they're chosen correctly) for any law not to go through. To be honest, sometimes I'm not sure even a law declaring him dictator would be blocked, if it was well-worded and sweetened suitably... the newspapers would kick up hell, and the opposition wouldn't be happy, but that doesn't matter.

For some reason I keep expecting that sinister music from the Twilight Zone to start playing.

You're just plain wrong. Read this

News today:

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/ar ticle548945.ece

Across central Iraq, there is an exodus of people fleeing for their lives as sectarian assassins and death squads hunt them down. At ground level, Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold on a massive scale.

As a sidenote I think the argument that lack of refugees is a sign of things getting better in Iraq is pretty stupid...

Looks like the terrorists are winning. Our governments are becoming more corrupt and we are losing our freedoms. Soon, we will be in the same position as those living in the middle east. However, everyone will be wearing shawls over their head and face, not for impropriety concerns, but to hide from the cameras on every street corner that are watching our every movement.

Before you say I'm crazy, we'll never be monitored everywhere we go, read this article. http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/transport/article 334686.ece/ Britain is already on their way to watching every citizen.

That entire screed was about a controversial system in one country, but not even that--just one CITY. So, instead of saying "that's reality in parts of Western Europe" just be honest and say "they're doing something sketchy in central London"

I would be happy to say that, if it was true. It's not. Automatic liscense plate optical tracking has been tested by at least 23 police forces in England. They are currently funding their central database to handle 50million reads PER DAY. Feel free to read about it yourself. The headline is "Britain will be first country to monitor every car journey". Please note the difference between "Britian" and "Central London".

I am however worried about ubiquitous tracking. How can that possible be good? Britain for example wants to track EVERY car on the roads and then store the data for 2 years.

"Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.

Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years."

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/transport/article 334686.ece

Don't they make the kiddes read 1984 anymore? How much more blatant do things have to get before there is some sort of real effective reaction?
Oh I forgot it's for the children, and against the terrorists and pirates, nevermind.

When I read stuff like this, off the grid survivalist/back to the land hippies don't sound tin foil hat crazy, they sound like smart forerunners of an underground resistance to tyranny.

A lot of the International media has more interesting, or at least more colorful, reporting. Right-wing columnist Mark Steyn writes his often hilarious and always insightful column for publications in Canada, the UK, Israel, the US and probably a few other countries I'm not remembering right now. He's a great writer and I'm happy to see him around.

If you want someone on the radical left, there's always good ol' blood and guts Robert Fisk of the Independent, also out of the UK, although you have to pay to read him nowadays. Be warned that although his writing is colorful, his predictive ability's a bit off; he thought our army would be facing tens of thousands of casualties in the Afghan war, for example.

The British press overall seems better written and more enjoyable to read than that in the US. Take The Economist on the center right and the Guardian on the left. So you can see news from every perspective and political viewpoint without even leaving your computer.

On a more positive vein, many nerds, who are complete losers in love in the US, might want to consider a Filipina wife. Once in the Philippines, you change magically into the biggest winner on the planet. International communications and relatively cheap flights makes this something worth thinking about for many.

Filipinas are not subservient, unlike what you may hear, but they do center their world around you, wanting to make you happy. You won't be happy with one if you want a slave, but if you want someone who really cares about you and will support you in what you do, my personal experience says a Filipina wife is just what a lonely nerd needs.

Needless to say, without an International internet, I would not have found out about this and I'd still be thinking my romantic potential was just about zero.

I'm planning to move to the Philippines permanently, due to the low cost of living and the potential happiness from finding a good girl. And of course that makes me hungry for news of the Philippines. Google news aggregates it, but I notice most of it comes from an interesting, diverse set of countries. Of course the local Philippines press is represented, but I also see myself commonly checking out news sources from China, India, and other locations too numerous to mention.

In short, if you look at where I get my news and even where I plan to get my future wife, you can see I'd lose a lot of the net were no longer an International place. And I'm lousy with foreign languages; it doesn't matter since most of these services are either English in origin or translated into English.

D

Fibonacci appears in a list of 20 inventions Muslims contributed to make our world, for his work importing Muslim mathematics to Europe hundreds of years after they were produced.

seems to be hovering around zero - correct me if i'm wrong.

A quick search on the (UK newpaper) independent revealed this story of Mar 07 (http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/artic le349735.ece):
"Debit and credit card fraud fell by almost a quarter during 2005 ... the launch of cards that require the holder to authorise transactions using a personal identification number (PIN), rather than by signing a receipt, had produced dramatic results."

yeah, very dramatic...

I say you should post it. I expect that some will use it for perverted entertainment or humour. But I suspect many more people in the US just don't have much idea what is really happening out there. People can't form valid opinions with nothing to form them from.

I can't off any videos (for which I'm thankful), but if you want good factual reporting from non "embedded" reporters, I can recommend the Indpendent. If you google through their site for Iraq or Robert Fisk (their correspondent), you'll find plenty. Here.

Yes they did.

It doesn't seem to be working very well though.

http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1707190,00 .html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4700190.stm
http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/articl e344675.ece

In fact, Royal Mail is now so bad, that I now pay a private courier to deliver my letters for me rather than pay Royal Mail to lose them for me.

Israel plans to build 'museum of tolerance' on Muslim graves

By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
Published: 09 February 2006

Skeletons are being removed from the site of an ancient Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem to make way for a $150m (£86m) "museum of tolerance" being built for the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre.

Palestinians have launched a legal battle to stop the work at what was the city's main Muslim cemetery. The work is to prepare for the construction of a museum which seeks the promotion of "unity and respect among Jews and between people of all faiths".

Israeli archaeologists and developers have continued excavating the remains of people buried at the site - which was a cemetery for at least 1,000 years - despite a temporary ban on work granted by the Islamic Court, a division of Israel's justice system. Police have been taking legal advice on whether the order is legally binding. The Israeli High Court is to hear a separate case brought by the Al Aqsa Association of the Islamic Movement in Israel next week.

The project, which a spokesman said had been conceived in partnership with the Jerusalem municipality and the Israeli government, was launched at a ceremony in 2004 by a cast of dignitaries ranging from Ehud Olmert, who is currently the acting Prime Minister, to the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Israeli branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre declined to comment yesterday and has had no role in the project.

Durragham Saif, the lawyer who brought the Islamic Court petition on behalf of three Palestinian families, Al Dijani, Nusseibeh and Bader Elzain, all of whom have members buried at the cemetery, said: "It's unbelievable, it's immoral. You cannot build a museum of tolerance on the graves of other people. Imagine this kind of thing in the [United] States or England. And this is the Middle East where events are sensitive. If this goes ahead in this way it is going to cause the opposite thing to tolerance."

Mr Saif said he had written to the Israeli State Attorney, Menachem Mazuz, seeking police enforcement of the original order. He said on a visit to the site he had entered three out of five tents where excavations were being carried out. "I was shocked to see open graves and tens of whole skeletons there," he said.

Ikrema Sabri, the Mufti of Jerusalem, demanded a halt to the excavations and said the Muslim religious authorities had not been consulted on the dig. Saying that the cemetery was in use for 15 centuries and that friends of the Prophet Mohamed were buried there, the Mufti declared: "There should be a complete cessation of work on the cemetery because it is sacred for Muslims."

Under Israel's "absentee property" law the cemetery was taken over by the Custodian of Absentee Property after the 1948 war. Mr Saif said the Custodian had no right to sell the cemetery to the Jerusalem municipality in 1992. While parties to the work are resting part of their case on what they say was an 1894 ruling by the then Sharia court that the sanctity of a cemetery could be lifted, Mr Sabri said that ruling meant that only a Muslim could make such a decision.

Osnat Goaz, a spokeswoman for the Israel Antiquities Authority, which is carrying out the excavations, said it was common in Jerusalem to build on cemeteries. Adding that in such cases the bones were reburied, she said: "Israel is more crowded with ancient artefacts than any other country in the world. If we didn't build on former cemeteries, we would never build."

Skeletons are being removed from the site of an ancient Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem to make way for a $150m (£86m) "museum of tolerance" being built for the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre.

Palestinians have launched a legal battle to stop the work at what was the city's main Muslim cemetery. The work is to prepare for the construction of a museum which seeks the promotion

Aww... look! An annoymous coward that is more interested in sounding like a tough guy instead of bothering to take a 30 second look through Google News on the subject! How cute!

Well- since you obviously need the help (in more ways then one) I'll put together a list of links for you. Let me know if any of the words are too big.

http://www.sorrynorwaydenmark.com/

http://www.thecouriermail.news.com.au/common/story _page/0,5936,18086537%255E954,00.html

Here is one article that proves my point that the violence gets headlines. You need to scroll down to the ned to see that thousands of people came together peacefully to protest the cartoons:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/artic le343940.ece

Here are three from Saudi Arabia asking for calm:
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7&section=0&article= 77536&d=9&m=2&y=2006
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7&section=0&article= 77534&d=9&m=2&y=2006
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7&section=0&article= 77532&d=9&m=2&y=2006

I would link more, but I'm not sure how much reading you can take in one sitting. And this involves reading and understanding. Much more difficult. Takes more brain power then you've shown so far.

And post anonymously, so's not to tip off the boss!

Because everything *is* going to be fine. As oil gets more expensive (it'll never run out completely, because it'll get prohibitively expensive to extract first), we'll either find a new power source or we'll use less power. Why use less power now, when we *definitely* don't have cheaper alternatives?

That is like me running up massive debt on my credit card. It's okay I am sure to make more money! That's a very liberal attitude towards a finite resources which our economy is based. By the way Kuwait just lost half of it's proven oil reserves on friday. Even more sobering is that many middle eastern countries may have also overstated their reserves.

For comparison, in Britain 0.03% of us will die[1] in ALL possible mishaps this year. That takes account of murder, car crashes, being eaten by ferocious llamas and so on and so forth.

In Britain, people are more concerned about living next to the neighbours from hell and being attacked in our outside their own homes:

Bullying campaign linked to fire that killed girl's parents

City dealer murdered by intruders

CCTV of murdered lawyer released

Yet, you can be locked up for making comments about a police horse:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/oxfordshire/460 6022.stm

or defending your own property:
Tony Martin

What is cause for concern are the number of critical tipping points we seem to be hitting. Specifically:

• Melting permafrost to release billions of tons of methane - as the northern reaches thaw, trapped methane and carbon dioxide is released. The methane is of particular consequence since it is a much stronger greenhouse gas and persists much longer than CO2 does. As more permafrost outgases, the temperature rises and bakes even more of the frozen north. There is even bi-partisan acknowledgment and concern over the problem. Alaska is literally melting
• Loss of polar sea ice changes albedo - warming sea waters melt ice faster, as the surface of the earth in that region changes from reflective white to darker colors more heat is retained, in turn melting more ice.
• Global warming to speed up as carbon levels show sharp rise - this is BIG news. Why? Because there's no corresponding relative increase from human emissions or other known sources. The implications are that we've tipped a balance with CO2 and triggered a feedback loop. Even if we ceased all industrial activity today, the natural source might continue until the planet is again uninhabitable for oxygen-breathers.
• Those paranoid wackos at NASA have also noticed problems if the ocean currents shift which some reports say has already begun.

It's not that things might get a bit warmer (or colder), or that a "few people" in low-lying areas might have to move (actually, it's 53% of the U.S. population according to the census). What's really scary is that we are changing the atmosphere on a scale that may not recover for thousands of years if ever, and which has no guarantees of being suitable for higher life.

I think there are two reasons for this, the first is that housing is crashing - so that means that all that money that was going into houses is now looking a lot more seriously at stocks, the second is that the Fed has special team called the PPT - an internal operation designed to buy huge amounts of equities in the event of emergency ( like say the collapse of refco which makes enron look like a saint ). With 270 trillion with a T derivatives on the line, you can better believe that they won't hesitate to buy stocks as needed. Anyhow, be very carefull about stocks, be it housing or PPT, it's a false market and there is a high probability of being shot down no matter how smart you are. My guess is that whatever the market goes up, gold will go up doubble. If you must play the market, try a pool of precious metal mining stocks like PD, NEM, PAAS, SSRI, GG - for higher risk and profit try ones like TRE and RGLD. ( there is also a gold ETF, GLD - but some experts don't trust it) I think most commodities are in for the long term, but in the event of a large economic meltdown all immediate bets other than precious metals are off.

This EPR project was presented in France as absolutely-sure-don't-worry-kids-it's-ok-no-glitch -ever-possible.

But when experts (from Platts) checked some blueprints of the EPR they found a major flaw. Some thingie may get stuck (expert-speak: 'sump strainer clogging') and let the whole reactor blew away.

Let's hope that in such a case it will only kick the asses of those funny "this-reactor-is-absolutely-sure"-type guys.

On this matter... let's bet that the Chernobyl population got numerous "the reactor is sure!" insurances before the accident.

As any hacker knows: a complex system cannot be absolutely secure, especially under risk-augmenting constraints (often 'cost effectiveness').

My conclusion is that all those civil nuclear reactors seem pretty sure as long as:

• no peer-review is used (in other words: no systematic searching of design and implementation flaws, therefore without any scientific approach)
• they do not provoke any disaster

And let's not talk about nuclear waste, cleaning up, or the effects of a direct attack on those beasts.

The Truth Shall Make You Free

It looks like you're not the only one sick of brightly-lit nights. There is an article in the Independent here on moves to change the situation. And the Campaign for Dark Skies covers any developments on their, quite frankly, rather ugly website.

So there is hope.

Eg, Microbiologists raising doubts? It must be a cover-up

There are times when it's just great to be alive: you're running through the archives, the wind's in your hair, suddenly you stumble on a gem from last year's Sunday Mirror and it just makes you bless the day you decided to become a sarcastic and hateful campaigning science journalist.

How many microbiologists does it take to change a tabloid story?

The Economist is also worth noting. It not infrequently gets things wrong, but it's less of a joke than most of the U.S. media.

Guardian, Independent, Times.
And Google News.

Regardless of overall quality, non-US press can be a useful supplement for US readers, as their set of unsayable/unshowable things is different than that of the US press. Eg, avoiding the "breakfast rule" for photos (can't have appetite-disturbing photos... even of war), or the Independent's story today

Lobbying is Washington's grubby secret. Some say lobbying is part of the democratic process. Others claim it is legalised bribery, even corruption. But love it or loathe it, it is the way Washington works. ... The trade-off is simple. Corporate and other donors provide cash in a bid to secure the legislation they want.

The blog First Draft by Tim Porter is an insider's exploration of the press' problems.

The grandparent's experience is one I've seen a lot. You notice a direct correlation between how much you know about a domain, and how badly the press are bungling it. When one experiences this in several diverse domains... well, the temptation is to generalize.

Paul Graham's recent The Submarine discusses one source of intentional bogosity.

Eg, Microbiologists raising doubts? It must be a cover-up

There are times when it's just great to be alive: you're running through the archives, the wind's in your hair, suddenly you stumble on a gem from last year's Sunday Mirror and it just makes you bless the day you decided to become a sarcastic and hateful campaigning science journalist.

How many microbiologists does it take to change a tabloid story?

The Economist is also worth noting. It not infrequently gets things wrong, but it's less of a joke than most of the U.S. media.

Guardian, Independent, Times.
And Google News.

Regardless of overall quality, non-US press can be a useful supplement for US readers, as their set of unsayable/unshowable things is different than that of the US press. Eg, avoiding the "breakfast rule" for photos (can't have appetite-disturbing photos... even of war), or the Independent's story today

Lobbying is Washington's grubby secret. Some say lobbying is part of the democratic process. Others claim it is legalised bribery, even corruption. But love it or loathe it, it is the way Washington works. ... The trade-off is simple. Corporate and other donors provide cash in a bid to secure the legislation they want.

The blog First Draft by Tim Porter is an insider's exploration of the press' problems.

The grandparent's experience is one I've seen a lot. You notice a direct correlation between how much you know about a domain, and how badly the press are bungling it. When one experiences this in several diverse domains... well, the temptation is to generalize.

Paul Graham's recent The Submarine discusses one source of intentional bogosity.

Actually, given what it's costing HRH the Prince of Wales to feed, stable and shod Camilla, you may not have been that far off the first time.

and

mod Europe DOWN

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article3 35198.ece

There has been a lot of comment about how to pull that off with the limitations of the current GPS.

This new system will in my opinion be designed to have features to support this.

Should haves:

Double blind identification. Your receiver in your car will not be personally identifiable.
Works better in cities with tall buildings
Better accuracy
European control.

Nice to haves:

Downloadable content:
- Congestion alerts
- Emergency Warnings a la radio interupt
A government certified connection signal that must be displayed when they ARE tracking you.
Triangulation compensation with terrestrial mobile masts. If we're gonna have big brother, why not make it accurate?

My 2p.

And just to chime in: although I love the print and web edition of The Guardian (clean, crisp layout, great content is even more an attraction then the "Berliner" format they keeping boasting about). I'm not overly fond of the way information is organised on the BBC's site and subsites, but they are fascinating to page through endlessly.

And, aside from that damn Java headlines thing on the front page, I do tend to give The Telegraph's site marks over The Times (which used to be only partially accessible from outside Britain) and Independent (and damn their crappy "portfolio" pay to read nonsense - wonder where the NYT got the idea) sites. Although the Telegraph's Opinion page is silly Tory at times, their features reporting is superb.

UK Police tracking cars using CCTV, automatic number plate recognition and a database was covered by Slashdot in the aftermath of the Bradford police woman being shot when police tracked a car involved.

A low level debate was then started about the degree of invasion of privicy (An even lower profile one started within London when the usage of the Congestion Charging cameras for monitoring was dicussed). Talk of a "launch in March", is not credible, it is a system that is already here and working and has been introduced without the scale of public consultation and debate which a project of this scale ought to have recieved.

On "Newsnight" on the BBC last Jeremy Paxman was reading out today's newspaper headlines and was visibly shocked when he came accross the story, and could be seen to go back to read it as the programme ended. From the Independent:

The new National ANPR Data Centre is to be based at Hendon in north London, the site of the existing Police National Computer. It is being designed to store 35 million number plate 'reads' per day, to be expanded to 100 million reads within a couple of years. The time, date and place of each vehicle sighting will be stored for at least two years, with plans to extend this period to five years. Special 'data mining' software can trawl for movements and associations

In the 1990s Central London, Roads to London (especially those en-route from Ireland) had numberplate recognising CCTV as part of London's Ring of Steel.

What little discussion there has been in Parliment has been essientially limited to the potential of the system for pay by road use taxation, not security / priviacy / freedom.

""The UK's Independent is running a front page story today on a scientific report claiming that global warming is now unstoppable, after measuring changes in the level of ice in the arctic." From the article: "The greatest fear is that the Arctic has reached a 'tipping point' beyond which nothing can reverse the continual loss of sea ice and with it the massive land glaciers of Greenland, which will raise sea levels dramatically. Satellites monitoring the Arctic have found that the extent of the sea ice this August has reached its lowest monthly point on record, dipping an unprecedented 18.2 per cent below the long-term average."

The key point is that an open source software cannot integrate a DRM system because 1. their algorithms are generally not available except under NDA and paid license, and 2. Even if a DRM-infected OSS software was released, it would be trivial to extirpate the DRM part from the code and release a DRM-free forked version.

By forbidding DRM bypassing, they outlaw brilliant hacks such as DeCSS.

So in France, the heinous crime of trying to watch a DVD on your Linux machine will land you in jail. I'd rather recommand Frenchmen to pursue safer activities that obviously aren't actively repressed.

You can continue to lie, but it won't improve your image. See this link, which explains that an instruction manual used by the US Army Command and General Staff School (CGSC) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, makes clear that white phosphorus (WP) can be used to produce a smoke screen. But it adds: "It is against the law of land warfare to employ WP against personnel targets."

For all the people on this post saying "The UN" or "The World" wants this, that is not true.

Much of the rest of the world objects to that but the loudest opponents are countries with a history of censorship and repression, such as China and Iran.

I'm an Australian, living in London. I find the idea of the UN running this very scary. An indepedent american body is far preferable.

The UN have a very chequered history. Seldom do they stand up for the Big Issues. Take as an example the decision to withdraw UN troops from Sinai in 1967 on the wishes of Assad. Take whatever view of the subsequent war you want, but the UN caved in to the demand to remove peacekeepers.

Peter

Have you seen this?
We're napalming civilians, now. But we didn't sign the 1980 UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, so it's okay.

heh at least it's better than using white phosphorous: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/ar ticle325560.ece
this stuff caramelizes the skin burning it off down to the bone and you thought Sadam was the bad guy. btw Mark 77 napalm... right yeah... and this couldn't be done with armed men why? I thought chemical weapons were the big bad of Sadam? for shame America... FOR SHAME.

They're most important for enemy combatants.

Have you seen this?
We're napalming civilians, now. But we didn't sign the 1980 UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, so it's okay.

If you don't want to support the 767-buying, patent-filing search engine, you could switch to ...

... the search engine that snitches on dissidents to the secret police of totalitarian China!

... the search engine run by a bullying monopoly that has run afoul of anti-trust laws.

... the search engine of another company looking to exploit the patent system.

Suddenly I'm wishing at least one university had held on to its search engine (Stanford had Google and Berkeley Inktomi) before spinning it out to make bucks.

Certain alcoholic drinks, like red wine, contain substances that do offer health benefits. But the alcohol does not.

so what to get the man who has everything...
what to get steve jobs -- the father of the ipod...!?!?

| So then finally, what is the last piece of technology that
| he [Steve Jobs] acquired - not made by Apple - that really
| delighted him? He pauses for long seconds, looks down,
| puts his hands on his knees, looks away.
| "I ACTUALLY BOUGHT A BICYCLE RECENTLY.
| IT'S JUST ...WONDERFUL."
|
| (Steve Jobs: The Guru Behind Apple, Charles Arthur; October 29, 2005)"

The "agenda" may belong to Russell Davies who admits, "Yes, I'm a gay writer," and goes on to say, "...to get hung up on it [the fact that Jack's bisexual] is almost too sad for words, frankly."

The problem is that people are going to get hung up on that very fact. I predict that this spin-off wouldn't do well here in the U.S.

I was reading this article just before this story was posted to Slashdot, and found it to be very informative (though one could say that it has too much information, thankyouverymuch).

Its going to be difficult for this show to reach its target audience, which I would assume is 19 - 35 males. Most would rather see more Lexx and Seven-of-Nine in their 'Adult' sci-fi, by my estimation.

You can whack off to whatever you like. But don't waste my time with bullshit about "he thought there were WMD" when even Margaret Thatcher got the memo about Bush lying about WMD. Nixon had "a secret plan to end the war" in 1968, too, you know. I guess you figure that since Bush also believes god talks to him about invading Iraq, god must have put Bush up to the WMD scam, too. Clown.

Just goes to show nobody reads real news on real paper... I read about this 3 weeks ago as a footnote in the Business section of The Independant (a UK paper).

http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/articl e313023.ece

Well said. Just today, a British government minister has been found to have broken the law. And this isn't the first time - this administration seems to have no regard for the law. But of course, no minister is ever prosecuted, or even censured for their wrongdoing. They are hypocritical scum.

And for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars' south pole have shrunk from the previous year's size, suggesting a climate change in progress

Isn't this somewhat similar to what's happening at the North Pole here? More ice is melting than is refreezing, something they say is caused by global warming - but if something similar is happening on all the planets...?