] "You drink tap water? Are you crazy?" asks a 21-year-old
] radio producer from the Chicago area. "I only drink
] bottled water." In a trendy nightclub in New York City,
] the bartender tells guests they can only be served
] bottled water, which costs $5 for each tiny pint
] container. One outraged clubber is stopped by the
] restroom attendant as she tries to refill the bottle from
] the tap. "You can't do that," says the attendant. "New
] York's tap water isn't safe."

Hartford Advocate: What's in your Bottled Water?

[snip]

Jeez.

Red Hat Support | New up2date available with updated SSL certificate authority file

] Slater went to his parent's house on Melville Avenue
] Tuesday night, telling them he had a hand gun, that he
] wanted to kill himself by committing "suicide by cops,"
] Gasser said.
]
] His parents asked him to leave, but he returned
] sometime overnight or the next morning. His mother called
] Kimball Medical Center, here, for advice and personnel
] there told her she should call the police, who arrived at
] 1 p.m.
]
] Several officers surrounded the house and asked Slater
] to surrender his weapon and talk to him. The man, who was
] described as agitated and dancing around, would pop in
] and out of the house, refusing to do as asked.
]
] About 45 minutes later, he stood outside the doorway
] and attempted to take a handgun out of his waist band.
] After it accidentally fired toward officers without
] hitting them, Smith decided that officers were in danger
] and fired one shot that hit Slater's inner thigh, Gasser
] said.
]
] Slater dropped his weapon and uttered an obscenity
] before he was subdued by officers who applied a
] tourniquet while waiting for EMTs, Gasser said.

"Suicide by Cops", oh, thats so rich.. That's a great band name.

This is so very New Jersey.

APP | Lakewood, New Jersey - Attempted 'suicide by cops'

Scientists and engineers like to think that the technical and scientific issues can be separated out from the social, sort of fuzzy issues. My claim is that they're heavily tied together.

A Whole New Worldview

] A defiant North Korea told the United States and four
] other nations that it has nuclear weapons and will prove
] it by conducting a test unless the United States gives up
] its "hostile policy," Bush administration officials said
] Thursday.
]
] Such a test might occur around the 55th anniversary of
] the founding of the North Korean state on Sept. 9, said a
] U.S. official briefed on the talks in Beijing. "Their
] line is that they need to 'test' or 'display' their
] capabilities to act as a deterrent ... and they say it
] isn't a bluff."

] Another U.S. official briefed on the Beijing talks said the
] North Korean diplomats made the threats to Assistant
] Secretary of State James Kelly on Wednesday, then
] repeated them before envoys from China, Russia, Japan
] and South Korea. "The Chinese were visibly angry and the
] others were taken aback," the official said. Both U.S.
] officials asked not to be named.

] Meanwhile, U.S.-led naval exercises are scheduled in the
] Pacific on Sept. 13 to practice stopping North Korean ships
] and searching them for arms or drugs.

Thats some timing..

USATODAY | N. Korea threatens nuclear testing

] It is a UNIX shell script to download NJ foreclosures
] (sheriff's sales in New Jersey) from nj.com web site. It
] can be modified to download similar real estate
] foreclosure listings in other states, if URL of a web
] page with such info is available.

Angry Sheriff

] The Webcaster Alliance alleges that this and an earlier
] agreement with Yahoo! "had the intent and effect of
] restraining competition in the market for domestically
] recorded sound recordings and in the market for the
] Internet distribution for such sound recordings."

This much is true, as the Library of Congress has found, and as Yahoo testified in Congress. There is probably enough meat here for a case. This is not "a publicity stunt." This is THE fundamental arguement that years of RIAA drama centers around. Will the future of music be determined by large, centralized interests, by a distributed network of independent entities, or by a combination of both. The RIAA would prefer that the second and third options be illegal.

The Register: 198 small webcasters sue the RIAA for illegal practices in the CARP negotiation

] Have a personal Web site or blog? If so, get the latest
] campaign headlines and inside scoop posted instantly to
] your site through a live news feed from GeorgeWBush.com!
] Just choose one of the two styles available, copy and
] paste the single line of code to put these news feeds
] anywhere on your site.

Its not an RSS feed, its a javascript thing you embed in a page. Its Bush after all, so it sucks, and is somehow more controlling then necessary. See, what's needed is some type of syndication format, so people could just display the press releases and crap on their site using whatever schema they desire.. Here, it looks simple, its just one line you put in your webpage, but you wind up with this ugly box that you can't do anything to control or tweak.. You have to like Bush's color scheme to support him on the web I guess. Also, it could say anything to anyone visiting your page, and you wouldn't know because its interpreted client side. It could also be used by the Bush team to monitor the readership of your site.

From the Privacy Policy posted:
] How we use log files to better serve you: We use log files
] to assess the aggregate level of traffic to GeorgeWBush.com
] including what pages people are visiting, and to diagnose
] any potential problems with the Web site.  This log file
] does contain an “Internet Protocol” or IP address that gives
] us insight on the general geographic area that visitors are
] coming from but not information on a specific individual.
]  We do not use log files to track a particular individual’s use
] of GeorgeWBush.com.

I'm a paranoid libertarian conspiracy theorist. I admit that. So allow me to spin off on a tangent and start making connections.. They are clearly going to be looking at URL referral information. Thats a "duh". And here they say they are at least gaining "insight on the general geographic area that visitors are coming from", so they are looking up IPs against an IP/location lookup service like GeoIp, which is not cheap to do at scale, and not a "normal" thing to do. Ok, so that implies there is real effort going into data mining the logs. At the very least, your standard webstats + info on ip location. There is a real reason for them to want to know where users/votes are, thats not the thing.. I just _really_ don't like the idea of the _Bush People_, collecting and data mining stats across large numbers of websites using banner crap like this.. The aggregate vs. individual shit in the privacy policy does not do much to ease my sudden wave of paranoia. People are more dangerous in groups, and nothing about this statement does anything to make me think they are not looking at and/or tracking groups.. And possibly interested in what groups follow what websites, and the relationship between those website, for whatever evil goals.. In general, you don't care what any one person does, you care what more then N people are doing.

I mean, common.. The phrase "How we use log files to better serve you".. Doesn't that make a shiver crawl up your spine? Yes yes yes, I see the irony.. "Using log files to serve you better" sounds like a slogan for MemeStreams.. But its not me saying it, its Bush. Thats scary. Hmm.. I'm hung up on this phrase.. You wouldn't even have to paraphrase it to use it as a header in a RIAA FAQ. Heh..

So when you see one of these on a site, email the webmaster and tell them you don't want georgewbush.com having the ability to track your visits to their site.

George Bush News Feeds, Privacy, and Allegory

] Romanian researchers claim to have discovered a variant
] of the Sobig.F virus that looks to mail and domain name
] servers at Time Warner Telecom for information about how
] to modify its behavior.

According to this, the new virus may be able to receive program updates by performing certain DNS queries or SMTP sessions to compromised servers.

New Sobig Variant May Be Circulating

] Most documents are the product of continual
] evolution. An essay may undergo dozens of revisions;
] source code for a computer program may undergo
] thousands. And as online collaboration becomes
] increasingly common, we see more and more
] ever-evolving group-authored texts. This site is a
] preliminary report on a simple visual technique, history
] flow, that provides a clear view of complex
] records of contributions and collaboration.

IBM | History Flow