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Thursday, January 13, 2005; Page A01

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that federal judges are no longer bound by mandatory sentencing guidelines but need only consult them when they punish federal criminals.

I can't wait for CD prices to go down once this bill passes and piracy is stamped out. The corporate world is dying to pass savings on to us, but they just need a little help from the legislature.

Now that Bush has signed the bankruptcy bill, people abusing bankruptcy won't be costing me $400 personally and once that $400 savings is passed on to me from my credit card issuer I'm going to go out and buy a ton of CDs. And no, I'm not going to share them with you! Heh heh heh. Jesus himself said it's easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than it is for a copyright infringer to get into heaven.

Lots of papers have local bands. Here's two I've used:
http://mp3.washingtonpost.com/
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/bands/

If I find a group I like,I try to pick up some of their stuff at the local small music stores. That way it helps the band and the local retailers.

Of course,indy bands can always just post here on /. with their site in someone's sig. That's how I got turned on to Apocalyptica and Subthunk.

Seems that it would make more sense to link directly here instead.

We have convicted criminals in high political office too... as well as individuals who used political & family influence to avoid prosecution for crimes that anyone else would have done time for.

US companies Cisco and Goggle were both named in a Washington Post article as being duplicious in aiding the Chinese governments efforts to censor the internet. Although it states the study does not mention either company and both companies have denied aiding the Chinese government it still begs the question whether US companies, especially, Goggle, would put profit ahead of freedom of speech. It harks back to the business done between companies from both sides during WWII.

The US publishing lobbyists would say YES absolutely. In fact, they've been actively fighting against libraries (not to mention used book sellers) for several years. To them, the library system is just as "evil" as Kazaa.

No, I don't think this means that they were an evil company in the late 30s - early 40s, but I do think it indicates that they were a big business. Global market, don't really care how you use our products - just buy them.

This has to be the worst dupe ever. How often has slashdot covered this?

The *entire European union* will require biometrics stored in contactless chips (RFID) in a passport. The EU didn`t think of this all by itself, the US forced it. If the EU doesn`t go along fast with this billion dollar hype it`s citizens will have to get a visa to visit the US. (How are US plans for this coming along?)

The biometrics are two fingerprints and a digital portrait. The last one will be to low resolution for camera surveilance but ofcourse this wont stop people from trying. Face it(no phun), the words "false positive" sound complicated and no politician is going to bother to look like caring about these words. Ofcourse you can translate them to "huge lines at the airport", "tens of innocent people questioned on ever major airport every day" (So mister Bin Laden, how did you turn into an asian twelve year old?).

Want to hear some of the argumentation behind this? Yes you do! Implementing passports with biometric identifiers will be a great business opertunity, especially for the business that get to build the hardware for this stuff... Boy do I wish I was making this up.

Of course the people who sell biometrics are alway happy to tell how many people on this planet have the same fingerprint and face. wanna guess? Its always a very low number, like zero. In fact they keep saying this over and over. They never have any time left to mention that:
a. biometric comparisons always allows for lots of differences because no one want`s to hold up a line at the airport because of a mismatch due to some sweat.... every time someone sweats one these occasions.
b. cheap fingerprint scanners are fooled by gummy bear taste gelatine prints, pressing bags of water on the scanner.... or just blowing on it. Can you blame these vendors for not mentioning this? Maybe not, they are afterall, very busy in this "post 911 world". Or so they keep saying.

Ofcourse it doesn`t stop here. Other bright ideas going on the the EU:

• Giving US three leter ancronym agencies read access to all airline booking systems. If airlines refused they couldn`t land in the US, now they comply they might be send back midair from time to time. But hey, what are the chances of someone matching a name on a list of 70,000 names? (If you think this list sounds to short, don`t worry adding names is easy, no evidence of anything is required)
• Storing traffic data for every telephone or Internet connection in the EU... Depending on the phase of the moon this data consists of telephone call data, GSM location data and ofcourse URL`s of every site visited and headers for send and/or received mail. Yes I mean storing everything about the communication of everyone....

Meanwhile Italy, Germany and Sweden are investigating what heaponed to a some of their citizens. They where kidnapped by the CIA and sent to places that make abu graib look like the holiday in... Ofcourse these investigations arent about getting justice for these people, they are just about making things difficult for the national goverment for allowing these kidnap operations.

Anyway, it seamed like the right time for an European update on these things.

I sometimes think that Lexis Nexis is the Matrix

I thought the Matrix was the matrix. But I get so confused with all this personal data floating around everywhere.

Now, US is threatening other countries to cut aid if they don't exempt US citizens. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A132 57-2004Nov25.html

I guess it is OK for the US to jail citizens of other coutries WITHOUT a trial http://www.notinourname.net/restrictions/prez-powe rs-16apr04.htm, but it is not OK for others to put Americans on trial...

Saying this is not right must be a troll?

Greg Egan has a simple solution to the neutron bombardment problem -- convert everybody into software. I think he underestimates the technical issues...

more specifically, they are changing the contract from "other transaction authority" (OTA) to a normal procurement contract.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A284 93-2005Apr5.html

FCS is getting scaled back because of the extreme cost.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A351 18-2005Mar14.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A422 35-2005Mar16.html

fuckedgoogle.com's take on this is what you might expect- it's a PR stunt designed to make stupid people think Google is being generous and shareholder-friendly:

http://www.fuckedgoogle.com/

You are complaining that the anonymous Terry Schiavo Republican Talking Points memo was faked by the Democratcs. Because, of course, any reporting on criticism of the Republicans is a partisan trick and an indication of media bias?

Actually, no. The Terry Schiavo memo is true - this morning the Washington Post is reporting that a Republican Senator fired a his staffer who admitted writing it.

Look I hate to break it to you, but the all the evidence and actions of the Republicans in Washington (Schiavo, Delay, lies about cost of Medicare, Social Security "Crisis", WMD's, torture policy, Clinton Impeachment, budget busting deficits and concurrent tax cuts for the hyper-rich, media consolidation, "nuclear-option" of taking away the filibuster option from the minority party, lack of any sort of investigation of White House actions) demonstrate that the Republicans in Washington are acting like amoral, unethical, hacks who will do anything for power and their party, in contrast to acting for the benefit of the country.

There are some principled Republicans in the country, I know some. But what are the core values that the ones in Washington are demonstrating? Why is it "media bias" to report on their actions?

Reporting on unethical actions is not media bias - and not reporting on false speculation that the Democrats "faked it" without any evidence suggesting that they did is not "media bias". Because, again, the Republican Senate staff DID write the Terry Schiavo Talking points memo. And it is good that people reported it, and that people be held accountable for it.

I have voted Republican, and will again for the right people. But this crop's willingess to lie, and to tolerate lies for their own benefit and to the long-term detriment of the country and our democracy is shameful and disturbing. I don't care if you vote Republican or Democrat - but vote for someone better than the current schmucks in power. There are some candidates our there who care more about what is good for the country than for their personal short-term gain, and who can still tell the difference between the two. We deserve, and need, better leaders than are currently running the show in Washington.

What does he think of the coverage so far? "I don't think they like me," Mickel says. And in this moment, he seems like a big, dumb, very dangerous kid.

Anywho, Printer Friendly Linkage

Yeah, after all, Democrats have no experience with double-standards or speaking out against things they later happily accept.

Come on. Your post is rather biased. "The new(?) Republican thing?" You and I both know I could post as long a list of Democrat hypocrisy as you could of Republican hypocrisy. Welcome to politics; it sucks.

Just take a look at this, which, as you'll notice, isn't getting any mention in the media, because it's GOP-bashing season right now (well, all the time really). If it was claimed to be a Democratic memo, the media would be describing it as a Republican "Rove-esque" trick. Remember the Democratic memo during the election which talked about claiming voter fraud even when there were no claims of it? CNN, CBS, and the major newspapers completely ignored it...but they jumped on this. It's funny how that works, isn't it?

One of my favorite amusements is listening to people bitch and bitch about the hypocrisy of the other side as though their side doesn't take part in the same kind of crap every single day!

News flash. this time based on reality:
there are billions of people in the world. Billions of people require exactly zero chickens.

Feeding grain to animals and then eating the animals is incredibly wasteful, you loose about 90% of the protein in the transaction. Most of the calories you feed to the animal goes to maintaining body temperature and other life functions. Plus when animals are house in large numbers in one place you end up with an amazing amount of poop. This makes the local water taste funny, to say the least.
(how do you pronounce "Pfiesteria ")

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/daily/a ug99/chicken1.htm

Wrote about this today in his blog:

http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/

He provides some background and comments from companies effected by the attacks. And he offers some opposing views from SANS and Symantec Corp. on whether this is a serious concern or not.

...(snip..)

...."But here's the rub: Symantec Corp., which maintains tens of thousands of "sensors" at various points around the Internet to pick up signs of Internet attacks, said it isn't seeing anything out of the ordinary with DNS attacks.

Dave Kennedy, director of research services at Herndon, Va.-based Cybertrust (formerly TruSecure), had this to say about the reports: "It's been nearly a month since SANS started ringing their alarm bells over this and maybe I'm not looking in the right places, but I'm grading this as hype until I see some independent support."

Russ Cooper, Cybertrust's chief technologist, put it this way: "In my opinion, our industry's creditiblity comes from further reports from multiple sources. We run a very large operation worldwide, and we've looked for signs of what SANS is talking about, but we're just not seeing it."

All of this may seem like an academic debate to those who claim to have been victimized by these attacks.

On March 24, Ken Goods, a computer network administrator for a mid-sized insurance company in Idaho, learned that the company's DNS servers had been attacked when employees began reporting that their Internet browsers were being redirected to a Web site hawking generic Viagra and other prescription drugs.

"I kept trying to go to Google to research the problem, but even though my Web browser said I was at Google.com, the only content that showed up was this pharmacy site," said Goods, who asked that his employer not be named because the company is still in the process of fixing the problem.

John, a systems administrator for a major U.S.-based manufacturing company, said a DNS poisoning attack like the one SANS described last month led to Internet problems for roughly 8,000 of his company's 20,000 employees. John asked that his surname and employer's identity be omitted from this story because the company is trying to determine if it is still vulnerable.

In the following weeks, several more attacks ensued that sent victims at John's company to Web sites advertising penis-enlargement pills.

Marcus Sachs, director of SANS and a former White House cyber-security adviser, said the security industry's response to their alerts about the attacks has been little more than a collective "yawn." Meanwhile, Sachs said, it appears the Internet connection at a San Diego hotel where the organization is holding its annual conference this week also was hit with a poisoning attack (the guy at the hotel who handles Web site security hasn't yet returned my calls.)

"People are waving this off and saying 'This is nothing new, we've seen this kind of thing before, let's move on.' But the consensus amongst the SANS folks is that something doesn't feel right here, and that there's more to this story than meets the eye. We feel like there's something deeper going on here, but the fact is there are not a lot of people out there in the security industry who are willing to dig deep and get to the bottom of this."

For more information about these medical tourists:

Surgeries, Side Trips for 'Medical Tourists'
Doctor Visits

If you want more, Google "medical tourists"

Actually, FOSE isn't an acronym anymore; it doesn't stand for anything. It used to stand for "Federal Office Systems Exposition" but now FOSE is its official name. (Source: Washington Post, April 4.)

Yes, secret trials make me very nervous...

But at least temporarily secret court proceedings are better than no proceedings at all, or
those which are farcical at best, and now (thankfully) ruled illegal.

America creates anti-Americanism by being so un-American.

Oh, and Republicans call themselves conservatives.

We'll need that performance to track the lies from the DoE about nuke waste insecurity. And the lies from the NRC about current nuke storage insecurity. Good thing our tax dollars are spent so wisely that we now have the situation under control.

I couldn't have said it better. Wolfowitz and his fellow cowards should rot in hell. W/R/T to the Post, I don't know how 'liberal' they are anymore. For instance, the other day we have this hatchet job http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A575 5-2005Mar27.html/ Which is basically a propaganda piece direct off the presses from Wolfowitz and his old buddies at the Whitehouse. Most notably, Diehl accuses Chavez of 'destroying' the economy of Venezuela. According to Economist, the Venezuelean economy grew at about 18% this year. Diehl also reports the terrifying news that Venezuela is buying 100,000 AK47;s and 25 or so fo the dreaded Brazilian made Super Tocanos http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/brazi l/emb312.htm/ According to the CIA world fact bookhttp://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/g eos/ve.html/ Venezuela spends about $1B/year on defense, or about 1/3 the amoun that neighborign Columbia gets in military aid from the US, or about 1/450th of the annual US defense budget. The US, unlike Venezuela, also has along history of invading and supporting terrorist movements in Latin America, So exactly which country is the destabilizing force?

Finally, to Diehl's main point, he is afraid that reporters will go to jail for deliberatly spreading false information. Having read Diehl's column, I'm not sure that is such a bad idea anymore.

and my favorite quote from here:

"Robb and Silberman agreed they had found no evidence that senior administration officials had sought to change the prewar intelligence in Iraq, possibly for political gain."

Well DUH...they got EXACTLY what they wanted/asked for, why would they CHANGE anything in the intelligence reports?

Their moment of triumph was sweet but short-lived.

Vazquez and Aranda graduated from Hayden last spring, but they're not in college now, Davis writes, because they're illegal immigrants and thus ineligible for student loans or cheap in-state tuition. Vazquez is hanging drywall and Aranda is filing papers at a Social Security office. Santillan and Arcega are still at Hayden, Davis says, but their prospects for college also look dubious.

mmediately, they had a problem: When Aranda lowered Stinky into the pool, they realized they had a leak. Not only did they have to re-solder every wire in the machine overnight, Vazquez told his teammates, but they also had to find something absorbent to keep moisture away from the circuitry.

"Absorbent?" Santillan asked, recalling countless TV ads. "Like a tampon?"

Soon, Santillan was in the nearest supermarket, trying to work up the courage to ask a young woman for advice on which brand of tampons might work best in an underwater robot.

The woman laughed and made her recommendation. "I hope you win," she said.

This article from the Washington Post follows-up the story in Wired. In short (and I suppose unsuprisingly), college isn't an option due to their illegal status (no loans, no in-state tuition). Of the two who have graduated high school: One of them is hanging drywall, and the other files papers at a Social Secuirty office.

Especially when all they have to do is offer them chocolate before they bust them;-)

Or especially when you can send them off to Cuba or Israel or Egypt or some other state that condones torture? We call it "rendition". (Israeli law allows torture in ticking timebomb cases and "moderate physical pressure" otherwise.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A641 70-2005Mar1.html

Thus you have the extreme environmentalists (who've gotten rid of nuclear power in Germany), and the third world revolutionaries (who've actually convinced people that little Israel is the greatest threat to world peace) running amok. More germane to the present discussion, though, are the authoritarian "liberals" who've put in place the sort of hate speech laws that would make Harvard envious. Case in point:

• In France Le Pen was convicted of "racism" simply for saying immigrants are taking over the country
• In Sweden a Christian minister was sued for saying homesexuality is a cancer
• In Canada (now spiritually, if not geographically, in the European orbit) a man was convicted of spreading anti-Islamic "hate literature" and had to undergo Islamic indoctrination
• Nazi propoganda and symbols are banned while Communists and Islamists are untouched and even win elections

These new political speech regulations I hope with every atom of my body will be struck down as blatantly unconstitutional (though who knows which way the unprincipled, lawless, "living constitution" liberals on the court will turn), but if not it would mean the U.S. is becoming more like Europe- a semi-feudal society where left-wing technocrats implement social engineering on a passive society.

• How can France be so incredibly arrogant and yet have a massive inferiority complex at the same time?
• How can a country which devotes so much of its resources (economic, diplomatic, intellectual) to forcing its language and culture down the throat of the world (incluing participating in genocide just to ensure a Francophile government in Rwanda) attack America for its "cultural imperialism"?
• How can a foreign minister pretend to champion international law and multilateralism and at the same time be a degenerate, power-worshipping Napoleonic fan boy?
• Why does a country so obsessed with how others think of it continually make itself a jack-ass by interfering in even the tiniest things (making a national crisis out of the hostile take-over of a computer game company?
• Why does France think the "honour" it lost in 4 straight wars going back to 1870 will be regained by 50 years of back-stabbing Western allies in favor of third world tyrants (from building Iraq's nuclear reactor to lifting the arms embargo against China) or proudly telling Muslim terrorists they should be spared because France is Islam's most useful dhimmi stooge-nation?

The city of New London, Conn., is seeking to expropriate the property of the residents of Fort Trumbull, a struggling neighborhood, for an urban redevelopment project that would build a hotel, offices and other features in the waterfront area. Most of the neighbors sold their houses voluntarily, but a few refused, including an elderly woman who has lived in her house her entire life. So the city, acting through a private, nonprofit corporation, asserted the power of eminent domain to force them to sell. The Constitution's Fifth Amendment requires the government to pay "just compensation" for any seizures of private property, and it requires that such "takings" be for "public use." The Fort Trumbull residents argue that their land is being taken not for public benefit but for the use of businesses that will pay more taxes than they do.

From what I gather from this washington post article it was the white man who stole all the Indian land and forced the native americans to live shitty lives on reservations that cause the school shooting. If I lived the life that was describe in this article I might have done the same. And I'm white!

• AP
• PhysOrg.com
• washingtonpost.com
• NewScientist.com

When the Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a rule last week to limit mercury emissions from U.S. power plants, officials emphasized that the controls could not be more aggressive because the cost to industry already far exceeded the public health payoff. What they did not reveal is that a Harvard University study paid for by the EPA, co-authored by an EPA scientist and peer-reviewed by two other EPA scientists had reached the opposite conclusion. That analysis estimated health benefits 100 times as great as the EPA did, but top agency officials ordered the finding stripped from public documents, said a staff member who helped develop the rule. Acknowledging the Harvard study would have forced the agency to consider more stringent controls, said environmentalists and the study's author.

The | o ry, n:
1 syn. theory is used in nontechnical contexts to mean an untested idea or opinion.
2 syn. theory is used in technical contexts to mean a more or less verified or established explanation.

The article goes on to describe how the word "theory" is used -- and mis-used -- in each context, and how it leads to misunderstanding.

Do I think all fundamentalists (not just Christian ones) are morons? Certainly not. But I do think that allowing a few individuals with a limited understanding of the subject in question to determine what everyone else can see, do or think is regressive, and in the long run does everyone harm.

But these stickers [on science textbooks] use the words "theory" and "fact" in a very misleading way. The biggest problem is that "theory" has two separate meanings. In common usage, "theory" means an idea or a hunch: "I have a theory about why she left him." No one really knows what the reasons were, but we can guess.
That's not what "theory" means within science. When scientists speak of the theory of gravitation, cell theory or evolutionary theory, they are talking about scientific concepts that have been so thoroughly tested that they are very unlikely to change...

Ah, semantics.

I answered a bunch of questions--er, complaints--from readers in my newsletter after that column ran (which was, um, almost a month ago). In case anybody's curious, here's that link.

Yes. And to note, this source is well...very liberal to put it bluntly.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A145 90-2005Mar7.html

Nothing dumb about it. Micrsoft has thumbed their nose at standards for the past 10 years, and the mess that is web standards is due mostly in part to the way IE (with > 90% marketshare) fails to adhere to those standards. Oh, and btw, if you haven't forgotten: Microsoft is a convicted monopolist in more than one continent. That means it's illegal for them to do shit like engineered lack of interoperability.
But some people keep apologizing for them (sigh).

First off, The USofA is not torturing people there. What is happening there is similar to what the French are doing with suspected terriorist:They are detained.

yes, it is sad but you are completely wrong

Secondly, these people are not innocent. They were captured fighting for a terrorist cause on a battlefield.

Some of them were, but certainly not all. Some were rounded up by a $20,000bounty offered by the US Government, and there are children as youg as 13 imprisoned there, and they are being let go - as in free- as in "not terrorists". Not to mention a senior American military interrogator at Camp Delta told 60 Minutes II that as many as 20 percent of the Guantanamo prisoners were sent there by mistake - and that they were innocent bystanders, or very small fish.

As long as paper is cheaper than video screens there will be free papers. Case in point, Washing, DC just gained a new free daily The Washington Examiner in the last month, and within the last two year the Washington Post launched its own freebie paper, The Express.

They both seem to have viable business models and in fact the Express has already decimated small group of targetted suburban papers that had cost $.35 which have now either gone out print, or or free depending on the suburban county each served. And the Post is finding that its free paper is doing better than it is. Though I think that growth will slow because of the Examiner which seems closer to a real newspaers (if one only on par to the NY Post or NY News) than the Express which consists entirely of heavily cropped wire stories. The Examiner at least has unique features and few of its own writers - plus it runs in depth wire stories, especially in SPORTS - which with the launch of the Washington Nationals should 'sell' a lot of free papers.

If someone tells you something that they shouldn't have told you (because they would be violating their NDA), but fails to tell you that they are violating their NDA, does that make you a criminal for reporting it?

Possibly.

"[...] the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, versions of which have been adopted by about 45 states, including California, prevents third parties from exposing information knowingly obtained from sources bound by confidentiality agreements.

Just because you don't have a relationship with the company doesn't necessarily immunize you, if you publish what you reasonably should have known was a trade secret," said [Andrew Beckerman-Rodau, who runs the intellectual property program at Boston's Suffolk University Law School]. "The First Amendment has been asserted more and more against intellectual property rights, but it's not faring well. Most courts haven't accepted it." (source)

They broke a law? Which one? Any evidence?

The judge didn't rule on any of that today. But assuming they did get their information from someone under a confidentiality agreement at Apple or a contractor, which, while circumstantial, seems overwhelmingly clear, then yes, they may have broken a law. The judge today said that REGARDLESS of whether any law has been broken - which is yet to be decided - the information at issue in this case does NOT constitute information in a clear public interest, and therefore, the web sites/journalists in question are NOT protected by journalist shield laws.

Yes, it does. Robert Novak is being held in contempt of court for not revealing his sources, and very well might go to jail for it.

story here

It's funny/sad how many people have the mistaken belief that "journalists", however one wants to define them, have some sort of legal immunity.

no. You were probably modded flamebait for not recognizing that a large part of the democrat's base consist of the elderly on fixed income, the retired, and the younger college age students who are not currently in their prime earning years - that is to say they are not "poor" just because their current wages are low (they are not necissarily the low income suburbanites that the article you linked to states they are- in a very insulting manner, I might add):

the youth vote was the only age group the Democratic candidate won -- John Kerry got 54 percent, compared with Bush's 44 percent. (In 2000, Al Gore got 48 percent, Bush 46 percent.)
ref:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/ A35290-2004Nov8_2.html

you probably got modded flamebait (as I would have modded you, had I had any points) for linking to a website that had a shameful hack type of "analysis" (can't really call it that though) and actually believing it without doing any due diligance on your part.

you can't believe everything you read on the internet, you know.

Except thanks to the new bankruptcy reform bill passed yesterday, it's raising the opportunity costs on small business owners.

Often, even with a decent business plan, banks will require people to take out personal loans to get a small business started. With yesterdays new bill that benefits banks and credit card companies, people will have fewer opportunities to get out from the debt they created while trying to get a business off the ground.

With less of an incentive to create new opportunities, I feel that this will hurt the ability of America to be a leader in "innovation".

What planet do you guys live on? Just this week the US and France jointly demanded that Syria pull troops out of Lebanon. Bush himself said, "when the United States and France say withdraw, we mean complete withdrawal."

Doesn't sound to me like they're working at odds.

Most organizations have some sort of regulatory body. Does the data harvesting industry have this?

Perhaps this should turn some heads in Congress now that we've got multiple cases of this insecurity. The question is, is Congress going to be able to do anything about it or will it be the same situation as with government computer security: Right now they just say "your security is bad" but that doesn't always fix the problem.