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~S

Anyway, even French President Jacques Chirac, along with the Mayor of Paris and other French officials, admit anti-Semitism is an increasing problem (after denying it for 1-2 years). Here are links from a variety of news sources. And note in the following links that all the suspects aren't necessarily North African Muslims but also Neo-Nazis from areas near the German border.

• Neo-Nazis set fire to Jewish center
• Israeli urges the French to fight anti-Semitism
• French government vows to fight against racism
• Mayor of Paris announces concrete measures against anti-Semitism
• France cautious on Jewish centre attack claim

I read an article somewhere - sorry I forget which - that they intentionally do not need all their fuel to reach 100km. There was not a motor failure, at least in the coverage I've seen. This article mentions a 'loud bang' and minor damage to (from what I can tell) the aft fuselage.

While I don't agree with DirecTv's business practices they are completely within their legal rights. DirecTv piracy tools were cheap, easy to setup, and accessible before the release of the HU card.

Here's my story: I was curious about trying HU emulation, bought some equipment, but never invested the time or money into getting a working system. When the feds raided the company I purchased from I received a letter from DirecTv asking for $3500. I retained a lawyer but the reality of the situation is that settling would be cheaper than going to court. Just owning the equipment is a crime due to our DCMA laws, legally it doesn't matter if you pirated it or not. The same week my local newspaper reported on the front page that about a dozen individuals were being sued by DirecTv for piracy -- it even listed their names. Needless to say, I settled. Most of the people who bought normal ISO readers/writers from the same places selling enumerator boards and the like should not be surprised. Few of these people have a legitimate reason for owning the equipment. The big difference between criminal and civil suits (like the ones DirecTv is perusing) is that the burden of proof rests on YOUR shoulders.

What's worse, is that the hackers have realized that so long as they don't confess, DirecTV doesn't have enough evidence to win most of the lawsuits they're filing.
Where do you check your facts?? DirecTv has won many of the cases they brought to court. While some sites (www.legal-rights.org) tend to emphasize only the favorable rulings, other (more objective) sites show DirecTv is winning most cases brought to court. Trust me, I did hours of research due to my own legal situation.

The monetary increase was proposed for the budget, approved, and was to be instituted in the new budget year beginning Oct 2001.

Yes. And do you remember what happened, then, while we were waiting for that new budget year to start in Oct 2001?

But that's besides the point. This is not the 'government' declassifying and putting forth these statements, but rather Clarke himself.

Clarke is a private citizen, so he can't declassify anything. And the 'government' is selectively declassifying his testimony, documents, and emails with an intent on catching him in a contradiction. Bill Frist even threatened a perjury charge against Clarke and withdrew it hours later, just to get the words "Clarke" and "perjury" into newspaper headlines together. This is just thuggish behavior. It's an abuse of government power.

Again, I ask..."which truth"?

Generally, I was referring to these two charges:
-That the Bush administration in the first eight months considered terrorism an important issue, but not an urgent issue.
-That by invading Iraq, the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism.

Thank you for the keen interest in my sig.

It's been done: Soniqcast Aerio (for you) Omnifi (for your car)

Or an automobile. But auto parts are still patentable.

Thats funny, I don't see many eniacs around, yet I see a dozen cars or so from the 50s-70s every day on the streets.

The patent office is only part of the system, and is really only a first screen for validity. The courts are another part.

Oh, if only this were true. Too bad that a defense against a "business process" software patent typically costs around $1.5million dollars. Certainly out of reach of most small-medium business developers, much less opensource developers who code in their free time. The courts are hardly an effective "part" of the system as the system is currently designed. The number of companies who settle rather than fight invalid patents is proof of this.

An unfortunate consequence of free enterprise is that protecting your rights can be expensive.

The only reason its expensive is because the giant behemoth-companies have driven the costs up and locked normal people and companies out of the process.

well,
you might have other problems if you use a tattoo to avoid surveillance

If you are in the US, considering that each of those junk faxes is worth $500 to the recipient via penalty to the sender [ Mercury News ], keep the fax connected and collect your due.

GuyMannDude: But actually creating an episode of Star Trek, for example, is just not possible right now.

You might want to reconsider that ;-)

Fan-Made Star Trek Episode Available for Download

Starship Exeter

'Star Trek' reborn in online episode

The fresh episode is a digital product of a personal-computing revolution that has allowed amateur moviemakers to duplicate once-pricey television- and movie-production techniques on shoestring budgets.

But classic "Star Trek" special effects added an eerie air of authenticity. Some effects, such as certain phaser-fire and force-field scenes, were the result of a reflective camera attachment. Jimm Johnson digitally added others using image-editing software on his home computer. He also used his Apple iMac to create digital backdrops, such as star fields and the control- and screen-festooned walls of the U.S.S. Exeter bridge, and to winnow 16 hours of raw footage down to one 35-minute show.

He says each minute of the finished show required some 20 hours of painstaking digital editing. This involved mixing still and moving imagery with dialogue and other audio elements, such as a music culled from classic "Star Trek" soundtracks.

It's the tabloidization of news sources, the way Michael and OJ before him (and Kobe) displace real news, that freaks me out. Entertainment and true crime basically belong to a larger category -- distractions. SWIII is for fun, right, but let's not let it push the real news off the front page.

Heck, this Star Wars story could easily run on the front of my local papers. To wit: On one of the two locals today the "U.S. Bars War Foes from Iraq Contracts" sidebar is considerably smaller than the one about, and I quote, "Garlic Bulb Meets the Jetsons in Public Art." Big news, that. It got a color picture, too. (Maybe there just wasn't a keen picture to take of the various figures from Canada, Germany, France, Belgium, Russia, and so on, all fuming at the US policy and threatening to cut us off for future money, restructuring of Iraqi debt, and so on.)

Did I mention the big front page story? It's framed in a giant color photo of apparently abducted college student Dru Sjodin, with all the usual trappings of speculative "true crime" stories, including details about the knife used, her car, the suspect's car, her shoe (to be used as evidence), the DNA match, and so on. We pissed off the known world and threw untold money at Halliburton after killing the anti-war-profiteering laws with respect to our latest war.

Take a look. Sigh. If only Paul Wolfowitz would dress like the Sith Lord he is, maybe we could get him some attention.

I will note that there are several errors in this article. Moshe writes" Under the hood, Panther introduced other important features like an update to FreeBSD 4.8 (OS X is based on FreeBSD, but the previous release used FreeBSD 3.2) ". Which is wrong on both counts. Panther (10.3) is synced with FreeBSD 5.0 and Jaguar (10.2) is synced with FreeBSD 4.4 (PDF). Aside from minor typos "Upon reboot, staring MS Word for the first time takes 6 seconds" (BYTE editors please make note).

The one problem I had with this article was the description of the noise generated by the dual-CPU G5. Moshe wrote "The noise the dual G5 makes is comparable to a hair dryer, and it can be heard from any room of my house". I had a 1.8 GHz G5 delivered to my office by our university's Apple representative for a few days to evaluate the machine. One of the features I was amazed by was how quiet the G5 was. In order to hear the G5 operate in my office, I had to turn off the following: SGI O2, the dual-CPU PIII 1GHz SGI 320, the G4 PowerMac + all the monitors including the 21" Intergraph behemoth monitor. The central air-conditioning into my office was still louder than my G5! Then I had to move my ear closer to the G5 casing to hear the fans operate with all other equipment turned off (only one of our professor's G4 Cube is quieter than the G5 loaner I got from Apple). Later that week I wrote to my Apple rep. "Those multiple fans are deathly quiet".

Here are some other dual-CPU G5 reviews on the G5:

Mac Addict review "GOOD NEWS: Fastest Mac ever. Exceptionally quiet. Easy, no-tools-required maintenance"

Twincities.com review "Indeed, removing one of G5's slab-like anodized-aluminum sides revealed nine fans that pump air along a network of inner wind tunnels. Switching on the Power Mac, I expected it to make a terrible racket despite Apple's assurances to the contrary. But, sure enough, the machine proved amazingly quiet for "the world's fastest, most powerful personal computer.""

So, when Moshe describes his dual-CPU G5 to be loud as a hairdryer I'm a little skeptical. Giving Moshe the benefit of the doubt of having a faster ATI Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card, he might have received a G5 with defective thermal sensors or something. Has anyone out there experienced their dual-CPU G5 with a ATI 9800 sound like a hairdryer???

I did not test Napster's answer to the iPod, the Samsung Napster player. I only checked out the music service.

Here are a few:
click
click
click

They took 3 polls with 3334 respondents, gathering data on three misperceptions about the Iraq war
(1) Evidence found for link between Iraq and Al Queda
(2) Evidence found of WMDs in Iraq
(3) Positive world opinion about Iraq war

News_source______FOX_____CBS_____ABC_____NBC_____ CNN___Print_____NPR/
_________________________________________________ _____Sources____PBS

0_misperceptions_20%_____30%_____39%_____45%_____ 45%_____53%_____77%
1_or_more
misperceptions___80______71______61______55______ 55______47______23

Yep, you read that right; fully 80% of Faux watchers had at least 1 of the misperceptions; fully 77% of the NPR/PBS crowd had zero. Wow!

They also attempted to control for demographic variations in the audience. Here's what they say (end of P.15)

Looking just at Republicans, the average rate for the three key misperceptions was 43%. For Republican Fox viewers, however the average rate was 54% while for Republicans who get their news from PBS- NPR the average rate is 32%. This same pattern obtains with Democrats and independents.

Misperceptions According to Level of Attention to News
While it would seem that misperceptions are derived from a failure to pay attention to the news, overall, those who pay greater attention to the news are no less likely to have misperceptions. Among those who primarily watch Fox, those who pay more attention are more likely to have misperceptions. Only those who mostly get their news from print media, and to some extent those who primarily watch CNN, have fewer misperceptions as they pay more attention.

This study was commented on in the wash post seattle times twin cities and other places

The one place you I can guarentee you won't find it is fox news!

Oh. Video games? Well, I did rise to power and kill millions thanks to RTCW. Sorry 'bout that.

Signed,

Hitler

Meanwhile, my local electric utility stands acused of pulling power off-line in an attempt to jigger the price of power. Pioneer Press Article

It's just been reported by the AP that the kid is from St. Paul, Minn. This is kind of funny, as I work in IT in Minneapolis, and we've been speculating that the whole mess was written by Indonesian hackers or unemployed techies in California, rather than the locals. It is odd that some of the newspaper reports said that the Seattle FBI office was investigating the virus, rather than the Minneapolis office, which is of course the only FBI office competent enough to catch Al-Qaeda terrorists prior to 9/11.

Game reviews are just like movie reviews. It's all about who you trust. For example, when a movie comes out, I read what Chris Hewitt of the Pioneer Press has to say. He generally doesn't whore himself out, and I can translate what he has to say into wether or not I'll like the movie.

On a similar note, I generally trust what the Penny-Arcade crew has to say. Specifically Tycho. Plus, they're generally upfront about who's trying to buy their opinion.

It appears that last month, with more than a month to go before the law took effect, more than one million Wisconsinites joined the No Call List. For a state with an adult population in the area of four million, that's pretty impressive. Apparently a great deal of the state hates the calls as much as I do. If you're in Wisconsin, join the crowd and get on the No Call List, it's the cool thing to do!

I'm not sure that you could even put a price 'in your own words'. Perhaps a script to change the 'offending' price into words, such as, "Thirteen dollars and twenty-seven cents". But that is plain dumb.

A price can't be copyrighted, any more than I could copyright "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234567890". If this weren't true, I could have just copyrighted all the letters in the Alphabet, and Walmart and Best Buy would be fighting over who owns the copyright on '$9.95'.

I'm not sure where the DMCA comes in to the original complaint, as reading a price or marketing blurb is hardly 'reverse engineering' or 'breaking copy protection'. If these companies encrypted their prices prior to publication, it would be easier to track who has access to them, and we would then be talking DMCA.

If anything is wrong here, it's the fact that there are leaks in the companies. Perhaps if they were paid to keep their mouths shut, the employees wouldn't talk. Or still would. There is something to messing with your company, especially when you're just a cogwheel out of zillions and can be replaced or removed without notice. Maybe a rush of power comes over these people, or they have just watched 'Office Space' 32 times. But I digress.

There was a issue similar to this going on here in Minnesota, when big grocery store chains got into a sue-fight over the 'theft' of prices that had yet to be released.

To sum all this up, as long as fatwallet is 'reviewing' prices and service, I can't see how they can be liable.

Adult themes: Underage driving, ...

Kids, don't try driving your flying car at home.

Oh look, it's Target's fashion designer!

Who needs to worry about GPS enabled phones?

A cell phone's signal is received by multiple antennas at distinct locations simultaneously, therefore, it's only a matter of using triangulation to determine a phone's location based upon signal strength.

Here's a sample of its applications, and if you do a quick search, you'll surely find more:

There is a similar bill that is close to passing as a state law in Minnesota, according to this article in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press. (Saint Paul - the "other Minneapolis"). Seems it has AOL and the other large content providers somewhat upset. Tough rocks, say I.