Decius wrote:
Thats not what is going here. To quote Noteworthy, they are still calling these 'hoax devices,' as if they still don't understand what happened. They are charging these people with the same crime they'd be charged with had they purposefully operated a bomb hoax. Putting a bunch of signs up that someone confuses for a bomb is not the same thing as putting a bunch devices up that are designed purposefully to be confused with a bomb.

[ This was the point i made (in a different thread... i didn't know this one existed). Using the term 'hoax' is wrong and deliberately misleading because it implies that these were intended to be mistaken as bombs, which they clearly were not.

Charge the guy with low grade vandalism and move on. I really can't see how anyone in their right mind thought this was some kind of giant Al Quaeda plot to blow up bridges.

A bit stupid? Yes. Criminal? Hardly.

I agree with Flynn32 and I've said it before : all it takes for the terrorists to win is for citizens to live with a constant sense of fear. That is the point. Not an ancillary point, not an added 'benefit', but the point of terrorism. It's to make us so afraid to live our lives as free people that we stop doing so.

It's working.

To analogize to the kind of war everyone seems to think we're still fighting, every time someone says 'Well, that's just the world we live in,' we give a little ground. Every time a politician argues for 'security' over any kind of freedom, a breach is opened in our defences. Everytime a law is passed that infringes civil liberties, our infrastructure suffers a massive blow.

This mentality of fear will destroy our society every bit as thouroughly as a global thermonuclear war, just more slowly. And in many ways, it'll be all the more painful, because we'll get to watch ourselves die. We'll get to see the cancer wreak it's havoc until the body collapses.

Fear is a cancer of the mind.

RE: cbs4boston.com - Hoax Devices Creating Gridlock In Boston

National Association of Radio-Distress Signalling and Infocommunications
Havaria Emergency and Disaster Information Services
Budapest Hungary

Well, here is one for your bookmark list. A website in Hungary that keeps an up to date map of the biggest disasters currently occuring everywhere on the planet. Its a death and destruction information console!

[ Anyone else think this would be perfect for a new Wii channel, just like the Weather and News channels? :)

I only have one gripe, and that's their iconography. It sucks. I thought there had been a nuclear/radiological event in Quebec, but it turns out that the tripartite nuclear symbol in an orange box means "epidemic hazard" rather than, you know, what it should mean.

If the box had been green, then it would have been a biological/bioterror situation. Presumably they know about the actual biohazard symbol in hungary (it's there to the right...)?

They need to work on the icons, but otherwise it's pretty much the awesomest thing i've seen this week. -k]

RSOE HAVARIA Emergency and Disaster Information Service

The United States Mint, concerned that rising metal prices could lead to widespread recycling of pennies and nickels, has banned melting or exporting them.

According to calculations by the Mint, the metal value of pennies, which are made of copper-coated zinc, is now more than one cent. The metal value of 5-cent coins, made from a copper-nickel blend, is up to 7 cents. Adding in the costs of manufacturing means the Mint now spends 1.73 cents for every penny and 8.74 cents for every nickel it makes.

Until 1982, pennies were made of 95 percent copper. The commodity metal value of one of those coins, which still make up a large percentage of the pennies in circulation, is 2.13 cents, according to the Mint.

Time for plastic coins y'all. With RFID's in them...

Melting pennies for fun and profit

Reasons to vote:

1) Iraq

2) Fear is not motive, it's a flavor enhancer (and now trans-fat free).

3) Your [I Voted] sticker is your ticket into my kegger.

4) Yelling at FNC doesn't actually accomplish anything.

5) Everytime a vote is supressed Lee Atwater eats another baby.

6) Democracy is only for the people that show up.

7) The time spent in the voting booth will be time not spend huffing glue.

8) All your base.

9) You goto vote w/ the electorate you have, not the electorate you want.

10) Everyone that doesn't vote gets a dick cheney facial.

Vote!

The irony, of course, is that those who declare their loyalty to the brilliant clich� of an unchanging past are themselves at the service of the imperfect new. After all, to be an American traditionalist - and isn't this what Americans celebrate on July 4? - is to affirm the revolution.

Hmm. an interesting take...

James Carroll: What we love about America - IHT

"Fundamentally, we don't think carbon dioxide is a pollutant, and so we don't think these attempts are a good idea," said John Felmy, chief economist of the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group representing oil and gas producers.

*sigh*

John Felmy is a pollutant.

CNN.com - Supreme Court takes on global warming - Jun 26, 2006

I remember fielding telephone calls on Election Day 2004 from friends and colleagues anxious to talk about the exit polls, which seemed to show that John Kerry was beating George W. Bush and would be the next president.

As the afternoon faded into evening, reports started coming in that the Bush camp was dispirited, maybe even despondent, and that the Kerry crowd was set to celebrate. (In an article in the current issue of Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. writes, "In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.")

I was skeptical.

The election was bound to be close, and I knew that Kerry couldn't win Florida. I had been monitoring the efforts to suppress Democratic votes there and had reported on the thuggish practice (by the Jeb Bush administration) of sending armed state police officers into the homes of elderly black voters in Orlando to "investigate" allegations of voter fraud.

As far as I was concerned, Florida was safe for the G.O.P. That left Ohio.

Republicans, and even a surprising number of Democrats, have been anxious to leave the 2004 Ohio election debacle behind. But Mr. Kennedy, in his long, heavily footnoted article ("Was the 2004 Election Stolen?"), leaves no doubt that the democratic process was trampled and left for dead in the Buckeye State. Mr. Kerry almost certainly would have won Ohio if all of his votes had been counted, and if all of the eligible voters who tried to vote for him had been allowed to cast their ballots.

Mr. Kennedy's article echoed and expanded upon an article in Harper's ("None Dare Call It Stolen," by Mark Crispin Miller) that ran last summer. Both articles documented ugly, aggressive and frequently unconscionable efforts by G.O.P. stalwarts to disenfranchise Democrats in Ohio, especially those in urban and heavily black areas.

The point man for these efforts was the Ohio secretary of state, J. Kenneth Blackwell, a Republican who was both the chief election official in the state and co-chairman of the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio — just as Katherine Harris was the chief election official and co-chairwoman of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Florida in 2000.

No one has been able to prove that the election in Ohio was hijacked. But whenever it is closely scrutinized, the range of problems and dirty tricks that come to light is shocking. What's not shocking, of course, is that every glitch and every foul-up in Ohio, every arbitrary new rule and regulation, somehow favored Mr. Bush.

For example, the shortages of voting machines and the long lines with waits of seven hours or more occurred mostly in urban areas and discouraged untold numbers of mostly Kerry voters.

Walter Mebane Jr., a professor of government at Cornell University, did a statistical analysis of the vote in Franklin County, which includes the city of Columbus. He told Mr. Kennedy, "The allocation of voting ma... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Those Pesky Voters - New York Times

Coulter writes in a new book, “Godless: The Church of Liberalism,” that a group of New Jersey widows whose husbands perished in the World Trade Center act “as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them.”
She also wrote, “I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much.”

I find that so tacky. In my head, I'm calling her a very bad word, and it ain't the "b" one.

~Heathyr

[ Tacky is the politest word I can think of to describe this creature. I don't even begin to understand how a single human can possess so much real hate and fear. It's astonishing.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, Ann Coulter is evil by any definition of the word you care to use. She's hateful, discompassionate, egocentric, xenophobic, exploitative and utterly false. That she can stand before the public and claim righteousness speaks volumes about the unconcionable hubris of such ideologues. That people allow and accept such behavior speaks volumes about how ignorant and backward we can be.

Coulter is an archetype of evil. She's a shining example of one who rejects, gleefully, all the precepts of decency and civility in the service of her own glory. She is a destroyer. Maybe God will forgive her, but I certainly won't. She has my enmity, has earned it, every bit as much as the terrorists she claims *I* am ideologically supportive of. Another lie so abominably far from the truth that it seems inconcievable, a lie so much worse for the fact that she has turned her own sins on me. She wishes to destroy the decent, compassionate, *free* America I love.

There is no excuse for it.

-k ]

Coulter lambastes 9/11 widows in book

According to current and former intelligence officials, Plame Wilson, who worked on the clandestine side of the CIA in the Directorate of Operations as a non-official cover (NOC) officer, was part of an operation tracking distribution and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction technology to and from Iran.

Interesting.. Plame was working on Iran nuclear proliferation at the time the Bush Administration outed her.

Of course. Ughh.

The Raw Story | MSNBC confirms: Outed CIA agent was working on Iran

Acidus wrote:

The points you raise are good ones but completely secondary to what I thought I made clear. There is nothing "trival" or "innocuous" about this. Frankly I don't care that the search data isn't associated with an IP. The government wants the intellectual property (ie the search strings) of a privately held company and is suing them for not turning it over. Unless there is some kind of "contempt of congress" thing going on I am disgusted by this.

On a side note Kerry, last time I checked I don't dismiss your opinions with a simple "whatever" or accusations of being a drama queen.

[ Apologies if i was overly glib. The "whatever" in response to your post on cringley was in reference to your "gold star" ranking, which I think was undeserved, and which I tried to go on and explain. I didn't mean it as an indictment of your intellect, and I don't think it was exceedingly dismissive when followed by a relatively long post. Still, I apologize and will try to avoid that offence in future replies.

As for this post, I truly wasn't targeting the "histrionics" comment individually... everyone on the whole internet has been all worked up about this, on both sides of the political spectrum, and I think everyone is being somewhat excessive about it. Again, perhaps I ought to have been clear about that, but I honestly didn't consider it to be a personal attack.

Now as far as my reply expressing "secondary" issues, the post i replied to didn't say anything about intellectual property, but discussed the privacy implications... Here are your specific words from the top of the thread :

They did what now! How many of you want anything you have ever typed into Google to be in the government's hands? How many of you are pissed that other search engines just said "Here!"

...

Now for the really scary part of this. I have read the above paragraph countless times before. The only difference is back then it said China instead of the government and people instead of minors. Why don't you congressional ass clowns try to "understand the behavior" of my right to privacy or the term of illegal search and seizure!

My response was meant to indicate that I don't believe this case shows a massive violation of privacy, but has the potential to set bad precedent for future violations, and then continued to discuss what I see as the wider context, which is of greater concern to me. Granted, the discussion of the broader anti-porn crusade was not "on topic" in regards to your post, but I don't think it negates what it says above.

As it happens, I find the intellectual property discussion (e.g. the searches entered by users being treated as a proprietary data by Google) interesting too. Google is a giant corporation which, as part and parcel of it's business maintains vast stores of data regarding the activities and dispositions of tens of millions of inter... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

RE: DoJ sues Google for failing to turn over records!