DoD's tally of the price of our Presidents "diplomacy"

Updated weekly

DoD: Iraq Casualties (PDF)

Southern Command said the inquiry had found five cases of "mishandling" of a Koran by US personnel, but no evidence it had ever been flushed down a toilet.

In the incident involving urine, which took place in March, Southern Command said a guard left his post and urinated near an air vent and "the wind blew his urine through the vent" and into a cell block.

It said a detainee told guards the urine "splashed on him and his Koran." The statement said the detainee was given a new prison uniform and Koran, and that the guard was reprimanded and given duty in which he had no contact with prisoners.

Southern Command said a civilian contractor interrogator, who was later fired, apologised in July 2003 to a detainee for stepping on his Koran.

In August 2003, prisoners' Korans became wet when night-shift guards threw water balloons in a cell block, the statement said. In February 2002, guards kicked a prisoner's Koran, it added.

In the fifth "confirmed incident" of mishandling a Koran, Southern Command said a prisoner in August 2003 complained that "a two-word obscenity" had been written in English in his Koran.

Southern Command said it was "possible" a guard had written the words but "equally possible" the prisoner himself had done but they did not offer any explanation of his possible motive.

Pentagon: Koran was 'mishandled' at Guantanamo

"Wasn't it in the best interest of our country to give women the right to vote?" Furtado asked the senator.

"Not necessarily so," O'Connor said.

Although she does vote, O'Connor said in two subsequent interviews with The Kansas City Star that if men had been protecting the best interests of women, then women would not be forced to cast ballots and serve in the state legislature. Instead, they could stay home, raise families and tend to domestic duties, she said.

Asked if she supports the 19th Amendment, the Republican lawmaker responded: "I'm an old-fashioned woman. Men should take care of women, and if men were taking care of women (today) we wouldn't have to vote.

"I'm sorry women have not been taken more care of," she said. "We have gotten the short end of the stick."

... Damn.

Female Kansas Senator: Women shouldn't have to vote

Acidus gives Elonka a run for the money. Way to go Acidus!
How scary. And how refreshing.

Make, a new quarterly put out by O'Reilly Media, is a throwback to an earlier time, before personal computers, to the prehistory of geekiness - the age of how-to manuals for clever boys, from the 1920's to the 50's.

The technology has changed, but not the creative impulse. Make's first issue, out in February, explained how to take aerial photographs with a kite, a disposable camera and a rig of Popsicle sticks, rubber bands and Silly Putty. It also showed how to build a video-camera stabilizer - a Steadicam, basically - with $14 worth of steel pipes, bolts and washers; how to boost a laptop computer's Wi-Fi signal with foil from an Indian take-out restaurant; and how to read credit card magnetic stripes with a device made with mail-order parts and a glue gun.

Congratulations to Acidus on being the first MemeStreams user to make the New York Times op-ed page. And on a Sunday, no less! (14:59, 14:58, 14:57, ...)

Too many projects, to little time, and believe me I do want to push something out the door before the egg timer goes off. There is one project that has special meaning for me, and the timeline is rather fixed...

A New Magazine's Rebellious Credo: Void the Warranty!

Some interesting reading I've been doing for my new job with SPIDyanmics (Decius: SPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!). XSS, URL Encoding, and other typical web application hacking stuff. I was familiar with these attacks, but spent most of my time with my head in the layer 3/4 sand to investigate their full scope.

Web Application Security White Papers

SourceForge has their new stats system up, finally letting me see the effect of being Slashdotted in March, plus the traffic from my publication in Make Magazine.

The result: 955,517 hits in March 2005!

Recently I've been getting a lot of email from Korea of late, so I guess its making the rounds in Asia.

This link shows all the stats since the project started in July 2004.

Stripe Snoop: 1.4 Million hits, 14,000 downloads!

] Yes, Christopher Nelson's new job, which comes with a
] $100,000 salary and a one-year contract, will be to watch
] reruns of "The Dukes of Hazzard" weeknights on the
] Country Music Television cable channel and write blog
] posts for the network's Website.

... ... This just seems so retarded. The whole reason people enjoy blogs is they are not contrived or corporate sponsered like this.

Then for some reason they included this in the article:

Before spending the $100,000 in salary, plus various other related costs, the most expensive promotion CMT had ever done for any show was the "Wizmark" talking urinal cake promotion for the network's "Outlaws" series, Hitchcock said.

"Don't miss Outlaws on CMT. You seem to miss everything else," the chemical-infused cakes said when moistened.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Guy paid $100,000 a year to blog about Dukes of Hazzard

] "It's absurd. It's an absurd allegation. The United
] States is a country that promotes freedom around the
] world," Bush said of the Amnesty International report
] that compared Guantanamo to a Soviet-era gulag.

You are emprisoning people without trial, without charging them, denying them access to lawyers or representatives from their countries. Your own supreme court has ruled what you are doing to the Americans there is unconstitutional, depriving them of their fundamental rights. So, please, Mr President, how the fuck is that absurd?

Bush: Amnesty report 'absurd'

Data points from 15 different polling agencies (Pew, Gallup, etc), with a best fit curve line. I wish it included 2005 info, but still very informative.

Bush's approval rating graph 2001-2004

] The so-called Archimedes Palimpsest includes the only
] copy of the treatise "Method of Mechanical Theorems," in
] which Archimedes explains how he used mechanical means to
] develop his mathematical theorems. It is also the only
] source in the original Greek for the treatise "On
] Floating Bodies," in which Archimedes deals with the
] physics of flotation and gravity.

Hmmmm... Archimedes priceless theories... or a prayerbook? Which is more important?

Eureka! Unlocking Archimedes' ancient text