Dagmar wrote:

Assuming they actually manage to rebuild New Orleans, that is.

I don't think they should. When I first learned about the geography of New Orleans in middle school, I thought to myself, "What happens if a hurricane hits it?"

We're seeing the answer now. Sometimes common sense isn't so common. Generation after generation just kept building more stuff there. No one remembered the lesson of Galveston, TX in 1900 it seems.

I feel sorry for everyone in New Orleans who died because of or is suffering from this hurricane, but the land is not a practical place to have a city. I'm reminded of Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

"When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England."

RE: New Orleans Decends Into Barbarism

The Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which processes loads from tankers too large for mainland ports, evacuated all workers and stopped unloading ships on Saturday morning said Mark Bugg, the terminal's manager of scheduling. The LOOP, 20 miles offshore, is the nation's largest oil import terminal and handles 11 percent of U.S. oil imports.

Katrina Targeting U.S. Oil Operations

Elonka wrote:

"No citizen should be subjected to criminal charges for a crime he might commit. This is a fundamental principle in our society: One does not take blame for what might happen, only for violations of the law that he actually commits."

Well said.

I've been following this story about police shutting down a rave in Utah, and I have to admit concerns. If it was shut down because police observed actual illegal drug activity, that's one thing, and I'm okay with it. If, on the other hand, it was shut down because, "It was a rave, and there's usually drug activity at a rave, so we shut it down on general principle," then that's an entirely different matter, and I'm completely opposed to it.

Continuing to watch as the details unfold . . .

Elonka

I have concerns as well. Do you remember the RAVE act? Reducing Americans Vulnerability to Ecstasy. The original bill that was defeated, but it snuck into the act that ushered in the AMBER Alert program a few months later.

The original RAVE act can be found here:

http://www.emdef.org/s2633/

Here's what I object to:

...
(a) IN GENERAL- Section 416(a) of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 856(a)) is amended--

(1) in paragraph (1), by striking 'open or maintain any place' and inserting 'open, lease, rent, use, or maintain any place, whether permanently or temporarily,'; and

(2) by striking paragraph (2) and inserting the following:

'(2) manage or control any place, whether permanently or temporarily, either as an owner, lessee, agent, employee, occupant, or mortgagee, and knowingly and intentionally rent, lease, profit from, or make available for use, with or without compensation, the place for the purpose of unlawfully manufacturing, storing, distributing, or using a controlled substance.'.

...

You can tell by the verbage of the bill that they are focusing solely on electronic music events. The law can be strictly applied to any public venue really. A football game could be a place where people use a controlled substance.

RE: Can Police Shut Down a Rave for what *Might* be Happening There?

Wal-Mart LP's Kill Suspected Shoplifter

Man held down on burning pavement until he died

Wal-Mart loss prevention workers tackled a man suspected of stealing diapers - a new father with a two month old child - holding him down with a choke hold and knee to the back while he was shirtless on the scalding pavement of a Wal-Mart parking lot in Texas.

The incident was witnessed by dozens of shoppers, including a prominent Texas attorney, Charles Portz:

Charles Portz said he was getting out of his car when he saw a heavy blonde haired man being chased by five people who appeared to be security or store employees. He said he saw them wrestling the man to the ground. "The blacktop was extremely hot," said Portz "He had no shirt on and they wouldn't let him up off the blacktop." He said one of the men had Driver in a chokehold and had his knee in the back of his neck as the men tried to subdue him. "He kept trying to get up and they kept pushing him back down," Portz said.

According to Portz, Driver began to plead with them men. "He's begging, 'Please call an ambulance, let me up, do something, I'm gonna die," said Portz. He said the loss prevention employees called the police more than once, but another bystander called for an ambulance after realizing Driver was in trouble. Portz said he eventually began to plead with the Walmart employees. "I told them, this guy doesn't look like he's breathing," Portz said, "They said, 'He's all right." He says he continued to plead with the men, pointing out that the man's fingernails were turning gray. "They said he's just high on something," adding, "They just kept him pinned down for twenty minutes or more until the ambulance came." He said he believed Driver was dead when the ambulance left with him, but he was not certain.

The store employees could not have known that the witness who was pleading with them to let Driver get up from the hot pavement was a high profile Houston attorney, from the Portz and Portz law firm. He said after the man was handcuffed he continued trying in vain to persuade the Walmart employees to allow him to get up, even pointing out that a second pair of cuffs could be used to attach the ones already on Driver to a nearby truck trailer. "The problem is they kept him down on the blistering concrete with no shirt on," Portz reiterated. He said law enforcement arrived at about the same time as the ambulance.

* * *

Very sad. I believe people who practice frontier justice should receive it as well. I know the death of this piece of shit employee won't bring the guy back to life, but he definately deserves a similar fate.

At least have him held down in a choke hold on hot pavement for about half an hour, let him see how he fares.

Walmart Kills Houston Man for Shoplifting

Wired has done a great interview with Mike. It should clear up a number of the questions people have had with recent events.

I would like to specifically point out one part of this interview:

WN: So ISS knew the seriousness of the bug.

Lynn: Yes, they did. In fact, at one point ... they apparently didn't get it, and they actually wanted to distribute the full working exploit very widely inside the company.... I was told ... "Give this to all the sales engineers and to all the pen testers."

WN: Why would they want you to do that?

Lynn: Well, because it bruises Cisco, remember? Mind you, this was something that Cisco hadn’t gone public with yet and that's not useful to pen testers because what do they advise their customers to do (to protect themselves if no information about the vulnerability has been released yet)?

I told them, "You do realize if you do that, it's going to leak?" And (one of the ISS guys) says, "That's Cisco's problem." And then (another ISS guy) turns to me and says that they need to understand this could be their Witty worm. I was like, Whoa, what meeting did I walk into?

(The Witty worm was a particularly aggressive and destructive code released by someone last year that targeted computer systems running a security program made by Internet Security Systems and even more specifically targeted military bases using the software. It infected more than 12,000 servers and computer systems in about an hour. Because of the worm's speed in spreading and its creators' apparent knowledge of who ISS' customers were, some security experts speculated that someone working for or connected to ISS might have been responsible for writing and releasing it.)

At that point, I told them all no, and they fought it and I resigned right there on the spot. And this was about a month ago.

I thought they were handling this in a non-ethical manner. Because it was just way too fast and loose with who can see this.... I mean, I don't even want people to see it now. (ISS talked him out of the resignation by agreeing to give him control over who could see or have the exploit.)

All I can say is WOW. A big "wow". Caps, bold, and feeling.

Anyone who says that Mike is not on the level needs to reference this. This says truly horrible things about ISS. This should cost them some serious reputation capitol.

One thing that Mike did a great job of in this interview is getting the idea out that in order to defeat the "bad guys", you must run faster then them. It is the only option.

Case in point, via the Wall Street Journal:

"The vulnerabilities are out there on the Net in full broadcast mode," said Gilman Louie, a tech-industry veteran who heads In-Q-Tel, a venture-capital firm backed by the Central Intelligence Agency. "The bad guys get to it faster than everybody else. I'd rather have disclosure and let everybody respond."

Disclosure is a great thing, but it must be done properly. I would argue that Mike did it properly. I would argue that he has displayed the best kind of ethics through this entire mess. Given the content of this Wired interview, I would argue that ISS has its head up its ass.

Router Flaw Is a Ticking Bomb | Mike Lynn Has Integrity^3

http://www.fcnp.com/519/peakoil.htm

Britian is looking at plans for rationing energy consumption. The personal market, where you can sell your unused energy units, is an interesting twist.

...

Under the plan, every adult in the country would be given (for free) an annual “Personal Carbon Allowance” (PCA). This allowance would be measured in “carbon units.” One carbon unit would be equal to one kilogram of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere when the fuel is burned. Carbon units can be equated easily to gallons of gasoline, heating oil, diesel, or jet fuel, or to pounds of coal, BTUs of natural gas, or KWh of electricity. For example, one gallon of gas would be the equivalent of about nine carbon units. Thus, for every gallon of gas purchased, nine carbon units would be subtracted from your account.

...

The next most interesting feature of the plan is the government would also establish an electronic free market to buy and sell carbon units. Thus, those who have no need for their complete annual carbon allowance would be free to sell their excess units for cash at the market price. Those individuals who want and can afford more than their allocated share can buy as much as they want at the going price. Note that above-allocation consumers would not only have to pay for the energy, they would also have to pay for the right to buy the above-allocation energy. Non-residents visiting a country would not be given an annual allowance, but would have to buy the carbon units they use on the open market as they consume energy. Businesses that consume energy would buy their carbon units on the open market and would pass the cost on to the final consumer either money or in cases such as airplane rides as a PCA debit.

Energy Rationing Plans in Britain

What happens when an English phrase is translated (by computer) back and forth between 5 different languages? The authors of the Systran translation software probably never intended this application of their program. As of September 2003, translation software is almost good enough to turn grammatically correct, slang-free text from one language into grammatically incorrect, barely readable approximations in another. But the software is not equipped for 10 consecutive translations of the same piece of text. The resulting half-English, half-foreign, and totally non sequitur response bears almost no resemblance to the original. Remember the old game of "Telephone"? Something is lost, and sometimes something is gained. Try it for yourself!

...

This is pretty funny. I remember doing this manually when Bablefish first came out to show how twisted the translations became. Someone has done the hard work for you now.

Translation:

The allegro is to something. Memory to do to me to this manually when Bablefish to go away before the moment for the aspect, like the wheel the translations if one became. Somebody has to him covering for that the loaded hard work for is full.

Multi-Babel

Dead at 67. Always figured this is how he would go honestly.

Hunter S. Thompson Kills Himself

Acidus wrote:
] The complete commented source code of Robert Morris's worm,
] which brought the Internet to its knees in 1988

That's kind of funny, they didn't scrub this IP:

128.32.137.13

RE: Morris's Internet Worm Source Code

Someone snapped a picture of this truck in an Applebee's parking lot in Kentucky. I hope this turns out to be a fake. This is sad.

Enlightened Motorist