brett's logjam

BBC SPORT | Other Sport | World Snooker | O’Sullivan races into final

BBC SPORT | Other Sport | World Snooker | O’Sullivan starts favourite:

Graeme Dott admits he will start as a huge underdog when he takes on Ronnie O’Sullivan in Sunday’s World Championship final at The Crucible.

Dott has never won a major title and is the rank outsider after starting the tournament at odds of 200-1.

The Scot edged past Matthew Stevens 17-15 in the semis, while 2001 champion O’Sullivan crushed Stephen Hendry 17-4.

“How do you stop a machine?” said Dott. “How many frames did Hendry win against him? What chance have I got?

“The semi-final was basically my final. I’ll try my hardest but what’s the worst thing that can happen? I lose 18-0 and get £125,000 and I’m back in the top 16.”

…

O’Sullivan courted controversy in the early rounds but he looked more focused than ever in beating Hendry.

The Englishman was in breathtaking form on Friday when he took seven of eight frames in the second session against Hendry, and he is not about to underestimate his final opponent.

“Graeme’s a tenacious player,” said O’ Sullivan.

Pac Manhattan

White Box Enterprise Linux:

This product is derived from the Free/Open Source Software made available by Red Hat, Inc but IS NOT produced, maintained or supported by Red Hat. Specifically, this product is forked from the source code for Red Hat’s _Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3_ product under the terms and conditions of it’s EULA.

There may be remaining packaging problems and other odd bugs. These are solely the responsibility of the White Box Linux effort and should not in any shape, manner or form reflect on the quality of Red Hat’s commercial product. In fact, if you need a fully tested and supported OS you probably should go buy their box set.

Slashdot | Red Hat Linux 9 Reaches End-of-Life

NBCSandiego.com - News - State Pulls Plug On Electronic Voting:

California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley banned touch-screen voting Friday in San Diego and three other California counties in the November election, saying the lack of a paper trail makes them unreliable and he threatened to block computerized voting in 10 other counties.

BBC SPORT | Other Sport | World Snooker | O’Sullivan edges ahead

Ronnie’s up 12-8 at the mid-session interval!

BBC SPORT | Other Sport | World Snooker | Live: O’Sullivan v Dott

Mozilla Thunderbird 0.6 is out. Good work on the new logo, guys!

Hooray!

BBC SPORT | Other Sport | World Snooker | Title joy for O’Sullivan

BBC SPORT | Other Sport | World Snooker | O’Sullivan wraps up victory:

Ronnie O’Sullivan won his second world title after wasting little time in the final session to roar to a convincing 18-8 win over Graeme Dott.

The Rocket put himself within just two frames of victory after winning seven of the eight frames in the afternoon.

The Onion | IKEA Claims Another 10,000 Lifestyles:

ATLANTA--IKEA, the rapidly growing Swedish retailer of inexpensive home furnishings, claimed another 10,000 American lifestyles in 2003, according to a report released Tuesday by the Center for Interior Design Control.

“This epidemic of self-assembled, clean-lined modernist furniture is still largely contained to densely populated urban areas, but the danger exists that it will spread to other regions throughout America,” CIDC spokesman Chris Greeves said Tuesday. “At the rate it’s moving, our nation could suffer European levels of Scandinavian design within a decade.”

Slashdot | Red Hat Desktop Unveiled:

Red Hat announced yesterday that they will be releasing a version of their OS — dubbed ‘Red Hat Desktop’ — targeted at corporations, universities and government agencies, “looking to upgrade their PCs but don’t want or need all the features that ship with the latest version of Windows”, said Matthew Szulik, Red Hat’s chief executive, although it’s not targeted at consumers. It will cost on average about $5 a month per machine, with additional support services available.

Fedora Core 1:

Introduction

This article discusses the dual boot installation of Red Hat Fedora Core 1 (FC1) on a Dell C600. Several packages not included in FC1 are also discussed. In addition, we compare the Gnome 2.4 and KDE 3.1 desktop environments.

Fedora Extras Home Page

BBC SPORT | Other Sport | World Snooker | Memorable shots: O’Sullivan’s plant

What I really enjoy in this BBC article about the Sasser worm is the picture they chose to use:

Wow, that’s one powerful little program!

So, Microsoft is for stopping spam, but only spam they don’t make money from?

SecurityFocus HOME News: MS opens Hotmail to bulk mailers:

Microsoft said yesterday it had introduced a white list scheme to allow well-behaved email marketing firms to reach its customers without falling foul of its spam filters. Marketing firms who post a cash bond of up to $20,000 through IronPort’s “Bonded Sender Programme” will get guarantees that their message will be delivered to the estimated 170 million regular users of Microsoft’s Hotmail and MSN e-mail services, providing they follow a strict set of guidelines. Firms who flout the guidelines - standards that exceed those defined in the CAN-SPAM Act - risk losing their money. The approach rewards marketeers who agree to be held accountable for the messages they send. Microsoft has been working on the programme with IronPort for five months but the arrangement was only made public yesterday. With the support of Microsoft, more firms are likely to adopt the scheme. Good news for Ironport’s sales team. Microsoft is behind the idea because it wants to reclaim email marketing from criminal spammers. For end users the scheme makes it less likely that messages they have requested from companies they do business with will be blocked (i.e. fewer false positives).

NewsForge | Linux in action: A public library’s success story

Mirrors - Linux From Scratch

LuMiXtech:

LuMiXtech is a leader in Linux library computing with a secure LuMiX (pronounced loo-mix) PAC model that is featured in the Spring 2004 issue of NetConnect, a supplement of Library Journal. Also, check out the LuMiX article on Newsforge, the online newspaper for Linux and Open Source.

Oops: RIAA Forgets to Make Royalty Payments.

But the real problem are those pesky downloaders and piracy! Really! Don’t forget, we have our artist’s best interests in mind!

What a world we live in.

Coca-Cola Creates Custom Phone for Promo:

The FCC yesterday approved an entirely new type of cellular device designed exclusively for a Coca-Cola promotion to take place this summer. The device, which is shaped like a soda can, includes a specialized GSM cellular phone and a GPS location-tracking device. According to a reliable source at Coca-Cola, winners in the giveway will find the device in a 12 pack of Coca-Cola cans. One of three buttons connects the winner with a company representative, who will explain that the person has won a Chevrolet Equinox SUV. Pressing a different button activates the GPS beacon, which sends the winner’s location to the company, which will then deliver the prize to the winner’s location. Australian marketing company Momentum Worldwide developed the device for Coca-Cola.

jwz - enough about cicadias already:

bezoar:

The sound of the phaser in the original Star Trek TV series was the sound of a cicada brood. I know this because I went on a camping trip in 1982, just as these little fuckers were coming out of the trees and flying everywhere. I woke up, and heard the sound of phasers, everywhere around me.

Worst. camping. trip. ever.

The Mideastization of the US, or: Rumsfeld Must Resign

Better Business Bureau Analysis of Cell Phone Complaints Reveals Root Causes of Customer Dissatisfaction:

Cell phones remain high on the list of the most complained about industries in the United States for the second consecutive year, according to 2003 data released today by the Council of Better Business Bureaus (CBBB).

While the number of cell phone complaints processed by U.S. BBBs decreased from 21,534 complaints in 2002 to 18,323 in 2003, only one other type of business, automobile dealers, generated more complaints (23,729).

Locate Superfund Sites, Superfund, US EPA:

From this page you will be able to locate Superfund sites through various methods. You can find sites by geography, contaminant EPA ID, and other identifiers.

Pizza Party - Command Line Pizza ordering program

Slashdot | Comcast Plans Cable Boxes with Integrated Wi-Fi and Snooping

Slashdot | Free Software Tracking a Stolen Computer?

Slashdot | Build Your Own Wireless Beer Pitcher Monitoring System

Beverage Monitor:

Our overall project design can be reduced to three specific states that can be seen in the state diagram below. The first state, the state entered at the beginning of the programs execution, is the Set Table state. In this mode the wait staff can select the table that they are serving. The selection is made by using two buttons, one to increment the table number and one to decrement it. Once the correct table is selected, the enter button is hit and the program then goes into Monitor mode. In this mode the wireless device on the pitcher sends the signal from the accelerometer to the server station. At the server station, the wait staff can see the number of the table being served and how many rounds have been served to the table. There is also a status bar showing the status of the pitcher’s volume. The MCU at the server station uses the signal from the pitcher to calculate its volume. In this state, there is a reset button in case a different table is about to be served. Unless the reset button is pressed, the program will stay in this state until the pitcher is empty. Once the signal indicated the pitcher is empty, the last state, the Refill state, is entered. Here the server station indicates that the table needs a refill. Once the wait staff refills the pitcher they press the enter button and the project returns to the Monitor state, and the additional round is indicated on the display. The reset button can also be used in the Refill state if the table decides not to go for another pitcher.

Bruce Schneier on warrants:

Unfortunately, the debate often gets mischaracterized as a question about how much privacy we need to give up in order to be secure. People ask: “Should we use this new surveillance technology to catch terrorists and criminals, or should we favor privacy and ban its use?”

This is the wrong question. We know that new technology gives law enforcement new search techniques, and makes existing techniques cheaper and easier. We know that we are all safer when the police can use them. And the Fourth Amendment already allows even the most intrusive searches: The police can search your home and person.

What we need are corresponding mechanisms to prevent abuse. This is the proper question: “Should we allow law enforcement to use new technology without any judicial oversight, or should we demand that they be overseen and accountable?” And the Fourth Amendment already provides for this in its requirement of a warrant.

The search warrant - a technologically neutral legal requirement - basically says that before the police open the mail, listen in on the phone call or search the bit stream for key words, a “neutral and detached magistrate” reviews the basis for the search and takes responsibility for the outcome. The key is independent judicial oversight; the warrant process is itself a security measure protecting us from abuse and making us more secure.

Much of the rhetoric on the “security” side of the debate cloaks one of its real aims: increasing law enforcement powers by decreasing its oversight and accountability. It’s a very dangerous road to take, and one that will make us all less secure. The more surveillance technologies that require a warrant before use, the safer we all are.

Slashdot | Novell To Release Ximian Connector Under GPL

Boing Boing: Bill O’Reilly trying to bury his Fresh Air interview.

ChrisW’s “Starship Troopers” Page

Wow. Starship Troopers really wasn’t very much like the book, was it?

Wired News: Hybrid Mileage Comes Up Short:

The 19-year-old EPA tests for city and highway mileage actually gauge vehicle emissions and use that data to derive an estimated fuel-efficiency rating. The EPA tests pre-production vehicles in a lab to simulate vehicle starts and stops on crowded city streets and open road conditions. According to the EPA website, “The tests measure the waste substances emitted from consuming the fuel, not the actual fuel consumed. From the measurement of emissions, EPA can estimate the miles per gallon achieved by the vehicle on average.”

“The (EPA) test needs to include more fundamental engineering,” says John H. Johnson, an automotive expert who co-authored a 2002 National Academy of Sciences report on fuel-efficiency standards. “They haven’t been updated to encompass hybrids.”

GardenWeb.com

A cautionary tale of two hats:

 <oss_crowd> Uh... ping?
 <fedora_uh> oss_crowd: what's up?
 <oss_crowd> fedora_rh: We're feeling kinda useless. What exactly is our
             role, again?
 <fedora_rh> oss_crowd: well, it would be really helpful if you could
             test some things and file the bugs.
 <oss_crowd> fedora_rh: ugh. We ALWAYS did that.
           * oss_crowd begins to wonder what exactly is the purpose of
             fedora_rh
 <fedora_rh> oss_crowd: it's the open-development, proving-grounds for
             new technology component of Red Hat, as opposed to RHEL.
  <rh_sales> Told ya it'll eat your brane.
         --- rh_pr kicks rh_sales from the channel (you're a dolt)
 <oss_crowd> fedora_rh: so, let me get this straight. Effectively, you
             want us to download the packages you release, test things,
             file bugs, and submit patches.
 <fedora_rh> oss_crowd: Sure, why not?
 <oss_crowd> ...but when it comes to things like features, direction of
             the project, and which software to include in the
             distribution, it's the decision of Red Hat?
           * fedora_rh is away: I AM RH
 <fedora_us> I'm still not dead.
 <oss_crowd> fedora_rh: How is that different from how things were
             before the whole "publicly-supported distribution" thing?
 <oss_crowd> rh_dev: where is that long-promised public CVS/SVN repo?
    <rh_dev> dunno, talk to fedora_rh
 <fedora_rh> oss_crowd: look, such things don't happen in a week, ok?
 <oss_crowd> IT'S BEEN A YEAR!

Slashdot | Justice Department Censors ACLU Web Site

Always useful: Latin abbreviations and expressions.

Wired News: Designer Virus Stalks HIV:

It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS. And that scares them.

That’s because the therapy itself is a virus. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory assistant professors created a virus altered to latch onto HIV and mute its ability to become AIDS. They’ve tested the theory in a computer model and in cells in a dish. The results have been promising, and if they continue in that vein, the researchers could begin animal testing by the end of this year.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Library of Alexandria discovered

Slashdot | RIAA Loss Report Contradicts Nielsen Sales Record

Slashdot | Lithium-Sulfur Batteries Unveiled

Dagen H - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Dagen H or H day was Sunday, September 3, 1967 at 5:00 am in Sweden. It was the time traffic switched from the left side of the road to the right. The H stands for Högertrafik, the swedish word for “right-hand traffic”.

Popular Science | Is This What War Will Come To?

Many weapons in the pipeline, such as the space-launched darts and electromagnetic railgun, will use no explosives at all, relying instead on kinetic energy to destroy targets. Some, like Metal Storm, will use electricity rather than mechanical firing mechanisms. Laser weapons will disable enemy gear with heat rather than force, providing pinpoint accuracy and speed-of-light delivery.

jwz - historical maps:

Rumsey has a collection of 10,000 historical maps scanned in at extremely high resolution, and has been doing a lot of really cool stuff with them, like taking old maps, correcting their scale to match up with reality, and letting you crossfade between old and modern maps of the same area; placing the maps on a globe and letting you zoom in from space; combining the maps with topographical data and letting you fly through 3D scenes; and all kinds of stuff. Not only is there a vast amount of data on his site, there are also really cool visualization tools.

Crypto-Gram: May 15, 2004

Slashdot | Fedora Core 2 released to Mirrors, Bittorrent

Yahoo! News - Moore Hopes ‘Fahrenheit’ Influences People:

Even those skeptical of Moore, who has drawn criticism that he skews the truth to fit his arguments, were impressed.

“I have a problematic relationship with some of Michael Moore’s work,” said James Rocchi, film critic for DVD rental company Netflix, saying he found Moore too smug and stunt-driven in the past. “There’s no such job as a standup journalist.”

Yet in “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Moore presents powerful segments about losses on both sides of the Iraq war and the grief of American and Iraqi families, Rocchi said.

Wired News: Hy-Wire Driving Is a Gas

The New Yorker: The Gray Zone by Seymour Hersch:

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of elite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.

Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, “Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.” The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld’s testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, “Some people think you can bullshit anyone.”

Why Windows is a Security Nightmare:

A typical Windows system follows a simple lifecycle: it starts out with a clean Windows installation, which gradually deteriorates as programs are installed, and uninstalled. Eventually, the Windows registry accumulates so much crud that the user is forced to do a clean install. When a user does a clean install that user’s system loses all the previously applied security updates, and becomes a sitting duck for worms and other malware.

Things wouldn’t be so bad if the user was able to update the new system with security patches painlessly, but Windows Update makes it very hard to do so. My personal experience with the killer duo is an enlightening example of how all of this works.

A Bug’s Life Cycle

SSRN-Copyright’s Communications Policy by Tim Wu

Boing Boing: UK cinema copyright warnings: a call to action:

I went and saw Troy, Brad Pitt’s new men-in-skirts movie last night, at the big Odeon in Leicester Square, paying £10.50 for the privilege. Not that I begrudge it: apparently, acquiring the rights to the Iliad was very expensive, and they have to charge a small fortune to viewers if they hope to recoup.

I don’t even begrudge them the 30 minutes’ worth of commercials they subjected their captive audience to. Well, I did. But I didn’t let it get to me.

What did get to me was this warning, shown before nearly every film in the UK:

“You are not permitted to use any camera or recording equipment in this cinema. This will be treated as an attempt to breach copyright. Any person doing so can be ejected and such articles may be confiscated by the police. We ask the audience to be vigilant against any such activity and report any matters arousing suspicion to cinema staff. Thank you.”

Every time I see this, my blood boils. I just paid a fortune to see this movie, I’ve been subjected to 500 percent concession stand markup and half an hour of commercials and now you’re going to give me a little lecture about how badly I’ll get beaten up if I turn out to be a pirate, and ask me to snitch on my fellow moviegoers?

It’s adding insult to injury, if you ask me. It’s unforgivably rude.

So here’s what I’ve started doing: whenever this warning is screened, I take a very obvious flash photo of it. I’ve done it twice now, and both times, I got a round of applause. You can do it too. If we all do it, if we all laugh and boo when this warning comes on, maybe the movie companies will get the picture.

My car was rear-ended by a service truck tonight on my way home from work. I had stopped at a red light, several cars back, and the truck decided that it was time to go. I’m a bit tender around the midsection (front and back), but YAH seems to be okay.

I’m really quite happy to be home now.

KHAAAAAAAN!

Slashdot | Fedora Core 2 Officially Available

TrekToday - Fan Campaign Claims ‘Enterprise’ Is Renewed:

UPN has decided to renew Star Trek: Enterprise for a fourth season, the SaveEnterprise.com fan campaign reported today.

For Merrystar:

• Wired 11.09: PowerPoint Is Evil
• textism: Stalin’s Bullet List
• PowerPoint Remix
• The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation
• PowerPoint: shot with its own bullets

A few changes to things around the old network:

1. Added to arbonne:/etc/rc.d/rc.local to get the netgear MA311 PCI card to work on bootup:

/sbin/modprobe orinoco_pci

2. Got BitTorrent working to download Fedora Core 2 following these instructions:

• Download bittorrent:
  local rpms for rhl 7.3, 8.0, 9 and fc1
  from the homesite
• install bittorrent
• Open up ports 6881-6999/tcp so other clients can contact you for bits
  First forward those ports on the router
  Then open up the ports in your /etc/sysconfig/iptables file
• To download run: btdownloadcurses.py --max_upload_rate 350 --url $torrent-URL-here
• Once your download is complete please leave your downloader running so it can help upload to the other clients. This is what makes bittorrent efficient.

3. Having completed the download in record time (no comparison to HTTP or FTP, they both stalled out last night - BitTorrent took less than three hours) and having left the upload running all day, I shall now attempt to upgrade al-rassan to Fedora Core 2.

So, Fedora 2 boots - after some uncertainty - and works, kinda. Monitor isn’t probed right, nor can I get the Netgear MA401 wireless card working right.

In that vein, Slashdot has a Fedora Core 2 Review. Some good, some bad, some warnings about installing it with Windows XP.

Fedora News Updates #12

RH9 to Feodra Legacy.

From my sister, concerned for my safety — Cicadaville, A Premier Cicada Information Source:

FACT: Cicadas are vicious killers.

FACT: Cicadas prey on innocent children and pets.

FACT: Cicadas are seething with deadly venom and flesh-eating bacteria.

FACT: This year Cicadas will kill more people than snakes, spiders, scorpions, and sharks combined!

Holy crap. Now *that’s* how you fold things!

Trundling right along with getting Fedora Core 2 working on Al-Rassan, my IBM Thinkpad i1400. I switched over to KDE and had problems with the keys ‘sticking’ - turned out the default key delay was set to zero, so a quick visit to the control center fixed that.

Another issue is that I couldn’t find the desktop switcher tool to set KDE as the default session. Fixed that by going to /etc/sysconfig/desktop

DESKTOP="KDE"
DISPLAYMANAGER="KDE"

That seems to have done the trick.

I’ve been installing some of the multimedia packages described in Greg Gulick’s Fedora Core 2 Tips and Tricks. Setting up multiple repositories for up2date was easier than I thought, and reenabling mp3 support was quite easy.

APM support appears to be disabled in the 2.6 kernel. What’s up with that?

So I’m poking around, trying to find out why my battery applet won’t start, when I get this:

Your computer seems to have a partial ACPI installation. ACPI was probably enabled, but some of the sub-options were not - you need to enable at least 'AC Adaptor' and 'Control Method Battery' and then rebuild your kernel.

Ug.

Well, I haven’t figured out the power / kernel problem yet, but I did get Firefox and Thunderbird installed. Modified the binaries to include the following:

moz_libdir=/usr/lib/thunderbird-0.6/thunderbird

Installed them into /usr/lib and put symlinks in /usr/local/bin/, changed the preferred browser and mail applications in KDE, and we’re good to go. Now to put my favorite extensions back in Firefox…

Added Yum and Fedora Legacy support to Arbonne.

Shoot. Power problems reared their ugly head with Al-Rassan yesterday.

Things were going so swimmingly, too - things were really starting to come together on that machine. Then I dropped it and caused the AC adapter to stop working. Everything else was fine, but the battery stopped charging and I couldn’t get it to come back on. I cracked open the case to make sure there wasn’t anything loose, but didn’t find any problems. So finally I sealed her up and figured I’d wait to see what I could do.

This morning, on a whim, I took the power pack from my work Thinkpad and tried it. Voila! Worked fine - thankfully. So now I’ve just got to find a replacement on eBay to get Al-Rassan back up and running.

In the meantime, I tried once again to upgrade Tigana to a more recent distro than Redhat 7.2: this time, Fedora 2. No such luck. Still can’t get the CD-ROM to be recognized (even though I boot off of it.) What the heck is up with that? My next trick will be to try to install 7.3 on it and see if that gives me network/USB support.

In the meanwhile, I’m getting reacquainted with Arbonne. She’s still a good machine, after all these years.

In a somewhat odd move, Mozilla 1.8 alpha is now out, skipping right over Mozilla 1.7 final.

An Open Source Wi-Fi Roundup:

The general belief when it comes to setting up Wi-Fi connectivity is that you need a Wireless access point (AP) device and computers with wireless client cards. This site has reviewed dozen of consumer and business oriented APs, some better than others. One thing always remains the same, however: the access point always costs more than the wireless card.

Guess what? You don’t always necessarily need a fixed wireless router device to create your own WLAN. You can do it with two machines that both have Wi-Fi cards, and leave more expensive APs out of the picture.

There are a number of different ways to accomplish this with freely available GNU/Linux based open source software. A typical Linux distribution will generally allow you set up a Linux box as a ‘wired’ router, so turning it into a wireless router isn’t really that big a leap.

For instance, if you have a desktop machine in your home office, and want to create a WLAN for the notebook that you or other family members use in the rest of the house (or to create an AP for a console gaming platform like Xbox or PlayStation2), all you may need is two Wi-Fi cards.

Two thirds of emails now spam: official | The Register:

Spam hotspots are emerging as the global levels of junk mail worldwide continue to increase. More than two thirds (67.6 per cent) of the 840m emails scanned by filtering firm MessageLabs last month was identified as spam. MessageLabs figures also indicate significant regional variations and spam “hot spots”, despite attempts to deter spammers through legislation.

For Tigana: ATAPI CD-ROM Problems on RedHat 7.2

And — Redhat 7.2 USB Mouse Installation Guide

Redhat 7.2 on Vaio GRX 570

Informed Comment : Abuse of Women Detainees:

A scandal that has not yet broken in the press is the story of how many women ended up in US prisons. The fact is, few were suspected of having themselves committed a crime or an act of insurgency. Rather, they were taken as hostages or potential informants because their husbands or sons were wanted by the US military. This kind of arrest, however, is a form of collective punishment and not permitted under the Fouth Geneva Convention governing military occupations of civilian populations. The sexual abuse of these women is therefore a double crime.

Eventually these photographs of abused or tortured Muslim women are likely to leak, and the reaction in the Muslim world will be explosive. One shakes one’s head in bewilderment as to what the Bush administration thought they were doing.

Photographer’s Rights

Alaska Freedom :: Our Freedom to Travel In Jeopardy

My computer kung-fu has failed me.

I brought home another Thinkpad power supply from work to test on Al-Rassan, and sure enough it worked fine. Only problem was that when I turned her on, the screen didn’t light up. I thought it was completely busted, but then I peered closely and saw that the images were still on the screen, just without any light.

In case you’re wondering, this makes it very hard to see what the hell you’re doing.

The worst part about it is that the screen worked before I opened up the case. It survived the multiple falls without a problem, but not my meddling. I did this, and that makes me kick myself. Hard. Often.

jwz - putting the SOY back in SOYLENT GREEN!:

The Chinese government has shown an unusually high level of concern as a result of a bold media exposure towards a scandal in which human hair was used to make soy sauce.

China Central Television first raised public worries over the quality of domestic soy sauce by uncovering a substandard workshop in central China’s Hubei Province, where piles of waste human hair were found. The hairs were treated in special containers to distill amino acid, the most common substance contained in soybean sauce.

Human hair is rich in protein content, just like soybean, wheat and bran, the conventional and legally accepted raw ingredients for the production of soy sauce.

By producing soy sauce from such raw materials, the producers were said able to cut costs by half. Workers employed at the plants, however, never bought soy sauce marked as “blended” on the packaging, because that usually meant that human hair was the basic material in the sauce.

Yahoo! News - California Adopts New Wireless Regulations:

Supporters say the reforms will make wireless carriers more accountable by forcing them to do a better job explaining rates to customers and to provide better service. In one of the biggest changes, dissatisfied consumers will have the right to cancel their wireless service within 30 days of signing a contract.

Other key reforms include: Requiring all rates, taxes and other services terms to be clearly posted on the Internet; requiring all key contract terms to be listed in 10-point type so vital information isn’t written in fine print; requiring carriers to list the address and toll-free number of regulators to make it easier for customers to file complaints.

The reforms’ opponents, led by wireless carriers, contend the rules will create new layers of bureaucracy and impose new costs that will be passed on to consumers. The industry has estimated the price increases triggered by the rules could range from $4 to $17 per month.

jwz - prisons:

America’s inmate population grew by 2.9 percent last year, to almost 2.1 million people, with one of every 75 men living in prison or jail.”

“The Christian in me says it’s wrong, but the Corrections Officer says, ‘I love to make a grown man piss on himself.’”

jwz - more election fun

jwz - exterminate all rational garfield:

Auto-generated Garfield strips: needless to say, much funnier than the original…

Since I’m considering resizing my work laptop partitions, perhaps I should burn a System Rescue Cd before I get too far along with it?

NTFS Resize Frequently Asked Questions

My computer kung-fu continues to suck.

Al-Rassan now doesn’t want to boot and her battery is competely dead. I assume that the screen still doesn’t work, either. I haven’t done anything since the last time other than turn her off and charge her battery. Then the battery drained over the course of a few hours.

Argh!

Looks like I’ll have to install Linux on my work laptop after all. Now I just need a name…

Someone else having as much fun with a Thinkpad I1400 as I am:

July 2002. The connection between the AC adapter and the computer has become loose. The design stinks. Other laptops connect the AC cord to the computer using a connector that can swivel. Not IBM. Their connector juts out strait from the computer. If you actually use the laptop machine on your lap, its only natural that it gets banged and pushed. Eventually the connection deteriorates. Think of an arrow in a target. The way you remove the arrow is to jiggle it left and right and up and down. This is exactly what happens over time to the AC connection to the computer. Now it often disengages and the machine runs on battery power. Since the battery is old (see above), this is something I prefer to avoid. Miserable design. An accident just waiting to happen. My ThinkPad dates to 2000. I recently saw a new one and the design has not changed.

Update1: A reader of this web site has the same problem. Their battery won’t recharge because of a faulty A/C connector. They write: “The problem is where the AC plugs in … the tiny dart like connecter is loose and is not allowing the battery to recharge. It is not making the connection. Ultimately, I won’t be able to use it at all.” September 26, 2002

Update2: Another reader of this page reported that his ThinkPad stopped working off the a/c plug. He can’t charge the battery without a/c power so the machine is dead. And out of warranty. However, with an electrician friend, he stripped the ThinkPad down to pieces, found that the a/c plug had broken its connection (the center pin in the plug is a pressed in unit at the back, not soldered to the main housing that runs down into the board itself). They re-soldered and built it up, put it all back together, and the computer now works. The dis-assembly and re-assembly was scary though, lots of little pieces to keep track of. October 26, 2002.

Update3: Another reader says the problem seems to be that the power supply connector runs hot. It runs so hot that the solder connections on the plug receptacle eventually become what is referred to as a cold solder joint and a bad connection. He had to completely disassemble the notebook and re-solder the connector three times. The problem has also trashed two batteries. He warns that disassembly of the ThinkPad is not for somebody that is faint of heart! February 25, 2004.

Configuring the Wireless Interface RH 7.2:

Start the network configuration tool by looking for “Network Configuration” in the desktop menus or else start the tool by typing neat at the commandline. Under the devices tab choose wireless and configure your wireless card. The configuration information including the wireless key will be written into the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1 assuming that your Ethernet card has already been configured as eth0. The information in this file is read at boot in Red Hat 7.2. The root user can take eth0 and eth1 down and up using the commands ifdown and ifup.Configuration information is read from the files ifcfg-eth0 and ifcfg-eth1. The ONBOOT=no option in the ifcfg-eth1 file does not work. Interface eth1 always comes up at boot.

If you use the cardctl command to eject and then insert the card, configuration information is read from the wireless.opts file (see the previous section) but the interface eth1 does not get updated properly and so does not work. The scheme option for the cardctl command does not work. So there is no way to switch between a home scheme and an office scheme. It appears that RH 7.2 new networking approach is not compatible with the Linux wireless tools. Having configuration information in /etc/pcmcia and in /etc/sysconfig is a mistake. These bugs have been reported to bugzilla. Note also that the command iwconfig eth1 txpower off is not support by wavelan2_cs or by orinoco_cs so it it not possible to turn the radio off as you can in Windows 2000.

New Flotsam: the garden wall.

Now, if you will excuse me, I will go take a nice hot shower.