"How dare you treat an American officer with disrespect?" he shouted back, indignantly. "Believe me, we have treated you with much more respect than other people. You should go to places like Iran, you'd see a big difference." The irony is that it is only "countries like Iran" (for example, Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe) that have a visa requirement for journalists. It is unheard of in open societies... a disregard for the humanity of those deemed "in the wrong".

LAX is the only U.S. border entry point where I've ever been randomly selected for search. This article indicates that 12 of the 13 journalists ejected from the U.S. for visa reasons last year were ejected by LAX. Maybe it simply makes sense to avoid using that airport for international travel, when possible.

Welcome to America | www.guardian.co.uk

David Hahn, 31, was being held Friday on a $5,000 bond in the Macomb County Jail after he was arraigned Thursday on felony larceny charges.

Investigators say Hahn was arrested Wednesday after a maintenance worker saw him stealing a detector from a ceiling in an apartment complex where he lived. They later found the other detectors in his apartment in the Detroit suburb of Clinton Township.

Police say that Hahn's face was covered with open sores, possibly from constant exposure to radioactive materials.

Turns out Radioactive Boy Scout is at it again!

FOXNews.com - 'Radioactive Boy Scout' Charged in Smoke Detector Theft - Local News | News Articles | National News | US News

Why didn't he blow a head gasket a couple years ago when this bubble started?

YouTube - Jim Cramer Blows a Head Gasket 8/3/07

In the past month, however, two new court rulings suggest that judges are developing a more sophisticated sense of how corporations conduct online and technology transactions with their customers.

Courts Turn Against Abusive Clickwrap Contracts

janelane wrote:
Aack! The spammers are attacking! The spammers are attacking!

-janelane, fuck those blogs!

Hopefully in a few weeks you shouldn't really see them anymore. I'm working on it. I was under the mistaken impression that it mattered to them whether or not the stuff they were posting produced traffic/revenue/search ranking, and if it didn't, they'd ignore us. I was wrong. I've plugged every hole that could possibly be leading to them getting useful traffic. They keep coming back. I have two theories:

1. The people who pay the people who spam here aren't keeping track of whether or not the work that they do is worth the money they are spending.

2. Another website is paying these people to post stuff on competing sites.

Either way, I have some improvements to the site that I will be rolling out in phases over the next few weeks, and one of those phases will remove the current batch of spammers from view. The unfortunate downside is that it will also remove any other new users from view until one of the admins has the time to go in and bless them, or unless you like culling through the new users on the weblogs page to see if anyone has posted anything cool, but we've no choice. Most new users are spammers, by a huge margin. It makes more sense to be filtering in the good ones rather than filtering out the bad ones.

RE: Stop Stamnation!

I want to propose a simple question. The end of the reign of mass media means the end of the reign of mass culture. People's interests become more diverse as they are able to access to wider array of things. Ultimately, this causes some disassembly of their shared sense of identity. People who have different identities tend to fight. Republicans and Democrats, Israelis and Palestinians... Hell, Americans and Canadians talk shit about each other, although I imagine people from Manitoba and North Dakota have more in common that either has with people from Georgia.

Is diversity the opposite of peace? Will the Internet bring an era of ever expanding conflict, some of it violent, among an ever expanding and complex milieu of identity groups?

Highslide JS is a piece of JavaScript that streamlines the use of thumbnail images on web pages. The library offers these features and advantages:

* No plugins like Flash or Java required.
* Popup blockers are no problem. The images expand within the active browser window.
* Single click. After expanding the image, the user can scroll further down or leave the page without restoring the image.
* The approach uses two separate images. No heavy full-size image packed into thumbnail display size! The full-size image is loaded in the background either on page load or when the user clicks the thumb. You specify this option in the script's settings.
* Compatibility and safe fallback. If the user has disabled JavaScript or the JavaScript fails in any way, the browser redirects directly to the image itself. This fallback is able to cope with most exceptions and incompatibilities.

This is actually quite slick....

Highslide JS - JavaScript thumbnail viewer

July 27th, 2007 (Last Friday Of July)
8th Annual
System Administrator Appreciation Day

System Administrator Appreciation Day

Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours.
art.cat.ap.jpg

His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means the patient has less than four hours to live.

"He doesn't make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die," Dr. David Dosa said in an interview. He describes the phenomenon in a poignant essay in Thursday's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

"Many family members take some solace from it. They appreciate the companionship that the cat provides for their dying loved one," said Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor of medicine at Brown University.

After about six months, the staff noticed Oscar would make his own rounds, just like the doctors and nurses. He'd sniff and observe patients, then sit beside people who would wind up dying in a few hours.

Dosa said Oscar seems to take his work seriously and is generally aloof. "This is not a cat that's friendly to people," he said.

Creepy...

'Furry Grim Reaper'

Publisher American Media Inc. said on Tuesday it will stop printing the Weekly World News, which for 28 years gleefully chronicled the exploits of alien babies, animal-human hybrids and dead celebrities.

NNNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Weekly World News to close (aliens not blamed!)| Entertainment| Industry| Reuters