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No, the BBC is run by cowards.

Gates plans an end to spam in two years

In another story on the issue, Gates plans an end to spam in two years, is an interesting sentence:

Gates is to be awarded an honorary knighthood for "services to global enterprise". It is believed the recommendation was made by Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown.

Maybe I missed this earlier, maybe not. This is the first I heard about it.

He was a terrorist. He was funding antisemitic terror groups, and yes he was involved with anti-US terrorism as well.

Cite, please. There's more evidence of Saudi Arabia funding terror groups than Ba'athist Iraq. The only time Saddam was a regional military threat was back when he was the Reagan administration's ally.

The Iraqis, overall, tend to disagree.

Yeah, they're just giggling in the streets.

To followup my own posting, here is a newspaper article describing the public surveillance situation in Britain as it stands.

I hate to continue this offtopic thread, but your post angers me (a little bit).

Do not use quote-marks when trying to paraphrase somebody. Those were not the words that Kilroy used. They are not even what he was trying to say. He was acually trying to say that certain Arab regimes are, or have supported, "suicide bombers, limb-amputators and women repressors" (note correct use of quotes).

Ironically, it is reported today that BBC1 viewing figures have actually risen since Kilroy was taken off air. It seems that the people prefer re-runs of gardening programs to Kilroy's daily show.

So he may stay off the air indefinately, but for a completely different reason.

Oh, and don't be so negative about "Political Correctness". PC is a useful tool to encourage people to think about consequences before they speak/act. It is especially important in the education of children who are easily led by the promices and ideals of the far-right.

Here are some related links:
US ready to seize Gulf oil in 1973

Was America preparing a war for the Gulf oil in 1973?


Britain Warned of U.S. Plans After War

U.S. Mulled Seizing Oil Fields In '73 British Memo Cites Notion of Sending Airborne to Mideast

And this news item found originally on Reuters ties up nicely to the above:
U.S. OIL (Operation Iraqi Liberation) Imports Set Record in 2003, Trend Seen Up

"Iran has made it clear that aid from everywhere would be accepted, except from its sworn enemy, Israel" right at the bottom of the article.

It's much more of a return to the 80s than that, what with the male makeup and other primping and the narcissism. It's basically the mainstreaming of gay fashion obsession for heterosexuals.

Gag me. Here I am in the prime of my life, and fashion trends are swinging away from comfortable clothing to dandying around the town again. Just what I need...

I guess that most european newspapers brought this story. If you wish to read reliable news from a European perspective, have a look at
The independent .

Yea, adopting a simple black and white mentality sure makes this an easy issue to deal with. The way you worded the above paragraph gives the impression that you think acts of agression seem to originate solely from the Palestinian side and the Israeli government (and extremists, yes there are Israeli terrorists as well you know) is left high and dry trying to defend its citizens. Blowing up a Starbucks is definetly not a counter attack but why don't you point your finger at Israel as well? Are you telling me that they haven't inticed violence at all or overreacted in any way by killing innocent Palestinians?

• http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=54872
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,5247 00,00.html
• http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001/09/04/vigi lantes.htm

My point isn't that the Palestinians are being treated unfairly (eventhough I feel they are). It is that people like you need to adopt a more balanced view regarding this situation. Both sides are equally guilty for committing atrocious crimes and that the blame should be shared equally.

Why is so hard to find a cast-iron anal dildo? A nice, greasy, antique piece would be best. Any advice?

In related news, Brits don't brush their teeth. Not to be outdone, the American Surgeon General touts the health benefits of "Double Quarter Pounders with Cheese", and advises that "exercise is for suckers!"

There's a good article about this in the Independent of London: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story .jsp?story=452972.

The article makes it clear that we're dealing with fundamental issues of democracy, not with details of computer implementations. The rest of the world is not impressed by the US's infatuation with evoting.

The wired article is OK, but for a really good piece on just how currupt the whole thing is check out this article at the independent

I actually submitted this as a story on tuesday, and thought it was so important I made it my sig.

There was a story in the Independent a few days ago.

news.independent.co.uk

There were security holes all over it," she says, "from the most basic display of the ballot on the screen all the way through the operating system." Although the programme was designed to be run on the Windows 2000 NT operating system, which has numerous safeguards to keep out intruders, Ms Jekot found it worked just fine on the much less secure Windows 98; the 2000 NT security features were, as she put it, "nullified".

Also embedded in the software were the comments of the programmers working on it. One described what he and his colleagues had just done as "a gross hack". Elsewhere was the remark: "This doesn't really work." "Not a confidence builder, would you say?" Ms Jekot says. "They were operating in panic mode, cobbling together something that would work for the moment, knowing that at some point they would have to go back to figure out how to make it work more permanently." She found some of the code downright suspect - for example, an overtly meaningless instruction to divide the number of write-in votes by 1. "From a logical standpoint there is absolutely no reason to do that," she says. "It raises an immediate red flag."

Mostly, though, she was struck by the shoddiness of much of the programming. "I really expected to have some difficulty reviewing the source code because it would be at a higher level than I am accustomed to," she says. "In fact, a lot of this stuff looked like the homework my first-year students might have turned in." Diebold had no specific comment on Ms Jekot's interpretations, offering only a blanket caution about the complexity of election systems "often not well understood by individuals with little real-world experience".

But Ms Jekot was not the only one to examine the Diebold software and find it lacking. In July, a group of researchers from the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore discovered what they called "stunning flaws". These included putting the password in the source code, a basic security no-no; manipulating the voter smart-card function so one person could cast more than one vote; and other loopholes that could theoretically allow voters' ballot choices to be altered without their knowledge, either on the spot or by remote access.

Diebold issued a detailed response, saying that the Johns Hopkins report was riddled with false assumptions, inadequate information and "a multitude of false conclusions". Substantially similar findings, however, were made in a follow-up study on behalf of the state of Maryland, in which a group of computer security experts catalogued 328 software flaws, 26 of them critical, putting the whole system "at high risk of compromise". "If these vulnerabilities are exploited, significant impact could occur on the accuracy, integrity, and availability of election results," their report says.

Ever since the Johns Hopkins study, Diebold has sought to explain away the open FTP file as an old, incomplete version of its election package. The claim cannot be independently verified, because of the trade-secrecy agreement, and not everyone is buying it. "It is documented throughout the code who changed what and when. We have the history of this programme from 1996 to 2002," Ms Jekot says. "I have no doubt this is the software used in the elections." Diebold now says it has upgraded its encryption and password features - but only on its Maryland machines.

The Independent ran a great expose on all this a few days back. Scary reading... and like the memos, the more you read the worse it gets

The Independent ran a great expose on all this a few days back. Scary reading... and like the memos, the more you read the worse it gets

The Independent carried an excellent article on Diebold on Tuesday. Article here.

the article is here

Some highlights:

• source code comments revealed remarks such as "a gross hack" and "this doesn't really work"
• the software produced two different sets of results on two different passes
• the system password appears in plain text in the source code; that didn't really matter, however, because the system could be accessed without a password and its contents changed using Access

What, then, is one to make of the fact that the owners of the three major computer voting machines are all prominent Republican Party donors? Or of a recent political fund-raising letter written to Ohio Republicans by Walden O'Dell, Diebold's chief executive, in which he said he was "committed to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral votes to the president next year" - even as his company was bidding for the contract on the state's new voting machinery?

Independant.co.uk's coverage of the story
Bit Torrent of bug traq articles about diebold machines.
Bit Torrent of actual diebold voting machine software. (probably illegal)

here is a much more detailed story from the independent 3 days ago.

On 14 October, The Independent ran summary story and an investigative report on this very same story. Nice to see Wired and various online outlets looking into this; why hasn't there been more coverage in the mainstream press, though?

On 14 October, The Independent ran summary story and an investigative report on this very same story. Nice to see Wired and various online outlets looking into this; why hasn't there been more coverage in the mainstream press, though?

On 14 October, The Independent ran summary story and an investigative report on this very same story. Nice to see Wired and various online outlets looking into this; why hasn't there been more coverage in the mainstream press, though?

There's got to be more political story behind this.

The more political story is that the world is getting more and more wise to the idea that the current US administration is at the least in bed with Sharon's government in Israel, and at the most is controlled by them. This is well-documented on many reputable media websites such as The Guardian and The Independent, not to mention independent media sites like GNN and Indymedia. The story mentioned in the article describes a plot, hatched by the US and Israel together, to dispel the rumors about the US-Israel connection before they become commonly accepted fact.

• Dawkins' Lament for Adams
• Adams's interview with American Atheists
• Adams' s excellent speech at Digital Biota

"What we should be concerned about is desertification due to the lack of veg(e)tation"

Yet, science is uncovering that the opposite is happening, as an increase in CO2 levels may help forests to start reclaiming the world's deserts, as forests are encroaching on the Negev desert. Higher CO2 concentrations reduces water absorption of trees, leaving more available for the surrounding regions, which resulted in more vegetation.

NASA & DOE found the same thing, as did the National Academy of Sciences when they found that grasslands become wetter as temperatures rise. Hotter temperatures kills off certain species of grasses that are poor water storers, leaving more room for more efficient species like oaks and summer flowers, with a net increase in water retention.

The more we do true research into global warming, the more we find that our models are wrong, our assumtions are wrong, and our predjudices are wrong.

..to the UK's Independent:

link

Why is it that all interviews online are posted as question, answer, question, answer...

It's such a boring, lazy way of writing. Why not do what grown up journalists do and actually write something?

There are things I would pay a penny for (0.01p) (I thought we have pennies, and the US has cents, but we seem to be swapping the words) that I won't take out a subscription for, and things that I am happy to subscribe to such as The Independent newspaper. I found Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox articles moderately persuasive, including the suggested interface for feding back to the user the rate at which virtual coppers were leaving the virtual purse. I remember a broker explaining to me that people won't pay for information, and therefore the busines model for the company being set up was of a walled garden...I thought he was wrong then. You won't have heard of the company, it sank.

remember this article: "Could tobacco save your life?"?
-- L

Slightly offtopic, but: Are there any papers in the UK that aren't tabloids?

The Grauniad is the most respected newspaper among the politically aware round here (and also suits my political stance of ``well over to the left''). Then, heading more towards the right, you get the Indy, the Times, and the Torygraph.

The Independent has a related article here.

The battle for the Rosetta Stone "Things are looking decidedly rocky at the British Museum - Egypt's leading archaeologist has demanded the return of the Rosetta Stone. But the museum argues that the removal of the four-foot slab that unlocked the mysteries of the pharaohs would be disastrous"

• Hundreds of thousands of children prescribed the drug Ritalin for hyperactivity might simply be the victims of lax parenting, new evidence suggests. A British scientist has cast doubt on the existence of conditions such as attention deficit disorder (ADD), which will fuel the controversy over the increasing use of Ritalin.

But basically you have to push through whatever mental barrier it is that is hanging you up. but you can do this on some some of a baby step basis. so that it gets easier over time.

of course, YMMV

BT have a system which allows you to make these kind of online purchases eg this

Is that what you mean?

But at least I won't get Prostate Cancer!

Fearless misleader of the United States of America

Read the 20 Lies About The War

Cheers,
W00t

Did Iraq have WMD?

Well, Wolfowitz just admitted that they made the whole thing up, so no.

Expect the usual donation, and good luck with the finding WMD thing.

Oh never mind about the whole WMD thing.

Wolfowitz already admitted they made the whole thing up

I can't speak for what link the British press may have made between Powell's and Blair's (separate) sets of presented evidence, but in either case, surely you would agree that an `unnamed source' which appear only in the Guardian (a paper with a well-defined ideological position, to put it mildly) is not necessarily the best source of information on what Powell is thinking, no?

The British press and politicians all appear to know exactly who the unnamed source was: British law is very strict about revealing state secrets, hence the secrecy. But all hell is breaking loose in Downing Street at the moment.
Here is The Times' take on it, top-selling right-wing paper in Britain.

Here is another from a middle-of-the-road paper, The Independent.
This story is relevant too.

And here it is again from Channel 4 News in London.

That post was indeed by glrotate. My apologies -- from the haste with which you posted to defend it, I took his position to be yours as well, and mistook who had posted first.

That's perfectly alright. Thank you for your polite and timely reply.

Is his position yours as well?

Not quite. glrotate says "There were no Scuds." I'm saying that there is no evidence of any Scuds yet, so we should proceed on the basis that there were none until the claims are independently verified.

As for your questions on Professor Herold, no, I can find no statisticians leaping to his defense on the Afghan numbers. But likewise, I can find only STATS criticising them, and lots of people quoting STATS. STATS claim to be a "non-partisan" stats group: well, how many stats groups or statisticians claim to be "partisan"? Every one of them is "non-partisan", just like every man in jail is innocent. The Iraq Body Count team may have only used a very small percentage of incidents from what you and I would consider unreliable sources (Saddam loyalists et al.), with a resulting insignificant impact on interpreted results.

My long background in medical stats has given me a healthy dread of the nasty little games statisticians play. If you'd like to see a good example of how distinguished "non-partisan" statisticians are happy to send innocent people to their graves for a buck, try googling for "thimerosal".

So please forgive me if I cannot accept a summary from some group I've never heard of, criticising the past work of one academic, as a basis for rejecting the work of all future work of any team he ever works in again. I'm aware that you would need to buy the report in order to prove their methodology to me, and even I'm not so presumptuous as to insist on that.

We therefore seem to be at something of a standstill.

Still, if you ever do come across a copy of what critieria they used to judge "reliable" and "unreliable" incidents on the Iraq numbers, and it shows I was wrong, I promise to admit it here, and remove the sig immediately.

Until then...

I can't speak for what link the British press may have made between Powell's and Blair's (separate) sets of presented evidence, but in either case, surely you would agree that an `unnamed source' which appear only in the Guardian (a paper with a well-defined ideological position, to put it mildly) is not necessarily the best source of information on what Powell is thinking, no?

The British press and politicians all appear to know exactly who the unnamed source was: British law is very strict about revealing state secrets, hence the secrecy. But all hell is breaking loose in Downing Street at the moment.
Here is The Times' take on it, top-selling right-wing paper in Britain.

Here is another from a middle-of-the-road paper, The Independent.
This story is relevant too.

And here it is again from Channel 4 News in London.

That post was indeed by glrotate. My apologies -- from the haste with which you posted to defend it, I took his position to be yours as well, and mistook who had posted first.

That's perfectly alright. Thank you for your polite and timely reply.

Is his position yours as well?

Not quite. glrotate says "There were no Scuds." I'm saying that there is no evidence of any Scuds yet, so we should proceed on the basis that there were none until the claims are independently verified.

As for your questions on Professor Herold, no, I can find no statisticians leaping to his defense on the Afghan numbers. But likewise, I can find only STATS criticising them, and lots of people quoting STATS. STATS claim to be a "non-partisan" stats group: well, how many stats groups or statisticians claim to be "partisan"? Every one of them is "non-partisan", just like every man in jail is innocent. The Iraq Body Count team may have only used a very small percentage of incidents from what you and I would consider unreliable sources (Saddam loyalists et al.), with a resulting insignificant impact on interpreted results.

My long background in medical stats has given me a healthy dread of the nasty little games statisticians play. If you'd like to see a good example of how distinguished "non-partisan" statisticians are happy to send innocent people to their graves for a buck, try googling for "thimerosal".

So please forgive me if I cannot accept a summary from some group I've never heard of, criticising the past work of one academic, as a basis for rejecting the work of all future work of any team he ever works in again. I'm aware that you would need to buy the report in order to prove their methodology to me, and even I'm not so presumptuous as to insist on that.

We therefore seem to be at something of a standstill.

Still, if you ever do come across a copy of what critieria they used to judge "reliable" and "unreliable" incidents on the Iraq numbers, and it shows I was wrong, I promise to admit it here, and remove the sig immediately.

Until then...

iirc the US defence budget is bigger than France, China and Russia's all combined - now think about the proportion of that!

This is going off-topic now, but look at this -

WMD just a convenient excuse for war, admits Wolfowitz

And that's the same guy who came up with the "One Superpower" speech that almost got him fired. What about the American soldiers this guy sent away to be killed to fullfill his own hidden agendas? Don't Americans feel like they have been played for fools?

Also -
US finds evidence of WMD at last - buried in a field in Maryland

Someone contact Erich von Däniken immediately at his new theme park and inform him? If the Pyramids were too hard for humans to build this 'internet thingie' MUST come from his friends in space!

...specifically this version, but I can't recall whether I read about it on fark.com, news.google.com, or if it is a slashdot dupe.

By Ian Burrell Media and Culture Correspondent

25 April 2003

Greg Dyke, director general of the BBC, attacked American television and radio networks for their "shocking" and "gung-ho" coverage of the Iraq conflict yesterday. He also issued a warning against US companies being allowed greater ownership of British media.

Mr Dyke said that changes to legislation proposed by the Government would allow American media companies to take a greater share of British television and radio, which could lead to a loss of impartiality in news coverage.

"We must ensure that we don't become Americanised," he said. Mr Dyke also accused the Government of trying to "manage public opinion" and "apply pressure" on the BBC.

In his first public comments since the war, Mr Dyke said America had "no news operation strong enough or brave enough to stand up against" the White House and Pentagon. He said: "Personally, I was shocked while in the United States by how unquestioning the broadcast news media was during this war."

Mr Dyke said that since the 11 September terrorist attacks, many American networks had "wrapped themselves in the American flag and swapped impartiality for patriotism".

He said: "I think compared to the United States we see impartiality as giving a range of views, including those critical of our own Government's position. I think in the United States, particularly since 11 September, that would be seen as unpatriotic." Mr Dyke said that on a recent visit to America he was "amazed by how many people just came up to me and said they were following the war on the BBC because they no longer trusted the American electronic news media". Mr Dyke reserved some of his strongest criticisms for Clear Channel, the largest operator of radio stations in America. The company is likely to be a beneficiary of government plans to open up ownership of commercial radio in Britain.

He said: "We were genuinely shocked when we discovered that the largest radio group in the US was using its airwaves to organise pro-war rallies. We are even more shocked to discover that the same group wants to become a big player in radio in the UK."

Mr Dyke attacked Fox News and CNN for what he described as "gung-ho" coverage.

In contrast, the BBC was an "800lb gorilla" that was capable of holding off the Government's attempts to interfere in editorial decisions, he said.

Stuff like this in the genetics field, is already happening, albeit with pests.

In an article in the Independent on Sunday pests have started thriving on poisons genetically implanted [?] in crops.

It seems that before, the organic pesticide was effective because it was only sprayed occasionally (once or twice a year) and the pests didn't have time to develop resistance.
With the pesticide being accessible throughout the whole crop-cycle, the pests have adapted, and now thrive on the poison, which they now regard as a food source, growing even larger than normal, and rendering a weapon in the arsenal against pests, entirely ineffective.