Stuck ‘agent’ tells cops of secret bomb mission

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — It wasn’t the preferred way to enter the Knoxville Museum of Art, but Richard Anthony Smith told police he was on a mission. The 25-year-old Knoxville man called 911 from his cell phone before dawn Wednesday saying he was trapped in an air conditioning duct leading from the museum roof, Knoxville police spokesman Darrell DeBusk said.

Police and firefighters reached the roof, found a rope and cable and followed them to a vent shaft. Peering inside, they spotted Smith about 45 feet down.

“Mission failed,” he told them.

Hoisted up and read his rights, Smith told police he was a “special agent from the United States Illuminati, badge number 0931″ and had rappelled onto the museum from a helicopter, a police report said.

He said he was following orders to “defuse and confiscate” a Soviet-made nuclear warhead, specifically a “MERV6SS-22AN” warhead, according to the report. The bomb supposedly was hidden in a blue, plastic cow sculpture in the museum basement, he said.

Source: Stuck ‘agent’ tells cops of secret bomb mission

 

Monsanto Owns Your Food

The controversial Monsanto company owns over 11,000 patents on (genetically engineered) crops. This corporation actually owns almost all the food you are eating. A short video about them is posted here.

Via HaHa

 

Hypocrite GOP House Leader Boehner wants wiretapping protection — but only for himself

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Tim Jones sez, “If you’ve been following the fight to hold phone companies accountable for illegal wiretapping, you probably thought the level of hypocrisy on display in the Republican leadership couldn’t get any more blatant. Well, you thought wrong.

Politico reports today that Republican Leader John Boehner has been fighting hard for his own right to protection from illegal wiretapping, even though he’s simultaneously trying to to deny ordinary Americans the same rights. Oh, and he’s earned himself $1.1 million in the process.”

When ordinary Americans were being wiretapped, Boehner’s attacked them and their right to privacy, claiming “I believe (phone companies) deserve immunity” from the law. But when Boehner himself was being wiretapped, he had no hesitation to claim his own right to privacy, claiming “no one is above the law.”

When ordinary Americans are victimized, Boehner’s taken every opportunity to caricature their representatives at EFF and ACLU as “unscrupulous trial lawyers” who are “trying to find a way to get into the pockets of the American companies.” But when Boehner himself is the victim, suddenly defense attorneys don’t seem so unscrupulous to him, and he has no problem employing his own litigators to receive a $1.1 million reward.

Link

Source: Boing Boing - Hypocrite GOP House Leader Boehner wants wiretapping protection — but only for himself.

 

Flying RC penis violates chessmaster’s airspace

A speech by famed chess player Garry Kasparov was interrupted Saturday by a remote controlled flying penis. Since many of you are at work or school we’ll leave all the pictures, videos, and tasteless jokes after the break.

Source: hack a day - Flying RC penis violates chessmaster’s airspace.

 

Plane hijacker D.B. Cooper’s parachute found

36 years after he jumped from a hijacked plane with a bag containing $200,000 in ransom, D.B. Cooper’s whereabouts remain unknown. But his parachute was discovered yesterday.

If it is Cooper’s parachute, that will solve one mystery — where he apparently landed — but it will raise another, Carr said.

In 1980, a family on a picnic found $5,880 of Cooper’s money in a bag on a Columbia River beach, near Vancouver. Some investigators believed it might have been washed down to the beach by the Washougal River. But if Cooper landed near Amboy and stashed the money bag there, there’s no way it could have naturally reached the Washougal.

“If this is D.B. Cooper’s parachute, the money could not have arrived at its discovery location by natural means,” Carr said. “That whole theory is out the window.”

Link

(Via Reason)

Source: Boing Boing - Plane hijacker D.B. Cooper’s parachute found.

 

Google and Your Health Record

Concerns loom as Google begins testing health records system: I can’t decide if this is scary or not. Dangerous? How do you manage security for something like this?

The pilot will involve transferring the health information of between 1,500 and 10,000 patients who have records at the Cleveland Clinic, which already has over 100,000 records stored in its own digital database. Patients will then be able to have access to their own records online, wherever they go (with an Internet connection), which Google thinks will help reduce conflicts in diagnoses and prescriptions between doctors.

(Via Gadgetopia.)

 

Microsoft Wants to Purchase Yahoo

Microsoft has offered to buy the search engine company Yahoo for USD 44.6bn in cash and shares. The offer, contained in a letter to Yahoo’s board, is 62% above Yahoo’s closing share price on Thursday. Yahoo cut its revenue forecasts earlier this week and said it would have to spend an additional USD 300m this year trying to revive the company. It has been struggling in recent years to compete with Google, which has also been a competitor to Microsoft.

(Via OSNews.)

 

Fox helps itself to photo of blogger’s dog

Sweetney blogger Tracey Gaughran-Perez and her husband were surprised to see a photo of their dog, Truman, appear in Fox’s “Happy Holiday” ticker during a football game. According to Gaughran-Perez, someone from Fox yanked a photo (far left) of Truman in a Santa suit from her blog or Flickr stream, Photoshopped in a hat, and inserted the image (left) into their holiday promotion graphic rotation. Gaughgran-Perez is quite peeved. Truman couldn’t be reached for comment. From Gaughran-Perez’s post on the matter:

What really, REALLY sticks in my craw is that following all this I was forced not only to sit through several more hours of football just to make certain they didn’t show the image again (yes, please shower me with your pity), but I also had to endure the endless tape-loop of FOX’s NFL copyright warnings, which seemed to repeat every five minutes or so. Hilariously enough, FOX Broadcasting and the NFL are apparently very, very concerned about legal rights to their telecasts and rebroadcasts of their telecasts. They’re concerned about — ho ho, it’s rich — PEOPLE STEALING THEIR SHIT. But as far as them stealing other people’s shit goes? Errm, not so much.

Link

(Via Boing Boing.)

 

Ireland Moves to Ban Icandescent Light Bulbs

Gormley lights the way with ban on bulbs: This sounds a little harsh, but it needs to happen.

Ireland yesterday became the first country in the world to ban the traditional lightbulb.

Householders will be forced to switch to new long-life low-energy bulbs in 12 months’ time.

New legislation is being introduced banning the sale of the normal incandescent lightbulb from January, 2009.

The incandescent lightbulb must die. Yes, I know the light from CFLs looks a little different. Tough. Saving the world takes sacrifice. Get over it.

(Via Gadgetopia.)

 

Climate change goal ‘unreachable’

In public, climate scientists and European politicians are generally optimistic that rising carbon dioxide levels and temperatures can be curbed.

In private, some are less sanguine; but there has been a widespread unwritten code of optimism to avoid being accused of scaremongering or creating despair.

Now, science advisors to two governments with claims to leadership in global climate politics, Germany and the UK, have told BBC News it is unlikely that levels of greenhouse gases can be kept low enough to avoid a projected temperature rise of 2C (3.6F).

Via BBC

 

Dinosaur “mummy” discovered

Several years ago, paleontology graduate student Tyler Lyson, then a teenager, found an incredibly well-preserved duck-billed dinosaur on his North Dakota property. Now, a team of researchers, including Lyson, have announced details of the discovery and excavation. Amazingly, the hadrosaur, roughly 35 feet long and weighing 35 tons, was naturally “mummified.” Mineralization left much of its soft tissue, bones, tendons, ligaments, and skin intact. Seen here, a bit of its scaly skin. The scientists have named the 67 million-year-old creature Dakota. From National Geographic:

“This specimen exceeds the jackpot,” said excavation leader Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at Britain’s University of Manchester and a National Geographic Expeditions Council grantee.

Most dinosaurs are known only from their bones, which are seldom found joined together as they would be in real life.

But “we’re looking at a three-dimensional skin envelope,” Manning said. “In many places it’s complete and intact—around the tail, arms, and legs and part of the body.”

Link

(Via Boing Boing.)

 

Monkies

 

iPhone price cut generates 200% sales increase

When Steve first announced the iPhone price cut, the nay-sayers were vocal: “It’s selling so poorly,” they said, “Apple has had to reduce the price significantly.”

By Piper Jaffray’s estimations, Apple and AT&T was selling an average of 9,000 iPhones per day before the price cut, resulting in 594,000 units sold by September 5th.

Combined with the 270,000 phones sold in the previous quarter, customers would have had to buy an additional 136,000 iPhones to reach 1 million units by September 9th - an increase of 200% in sales volume.

Steve was right: They’re selling boatloads of these things, and wanted to quickly sell boatloads more…and that’s what’s happening.

[Via My iTablet]

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

 

Thank You from your friends at halliburton

 

Rolling Stone on “The Great Iraq Swindle”

The Rolling Stone has a long article about the vast sums of taxpayer money pouring into the coffers of sleazy US contractors in Iraq — and how that money isn’t being used to make things better for anyone but the ultra-rich in the US.

In short, some $8.8 billion of the $12 billion proved impossible to find. “Who in their right mind would send 360 tons of cash into a war zone?” asked Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee. “But that’s exactly what our government did.”

Because contractors were paid on cost-plus arrangements, they had a powerful incentive to spend to the hilt. The undisputed master of milking the system is KBR, the former Halliburton subsidiary so ubiquitous in Iraq that soldiers even encounter its customer-survey sheets in outhouses. The company has been exposed by whistle-blowers in numerous Senate hearings for everything from double-charging taxpayers for $617,000 worth of sodas to overcharging the government 600 percent for fuel shipments. When things went wrong, KBR simply scrapped expensive gear: The company dumped 50,000 pounds of nails in the desert because they were too short, and left the Army no choice but to set fire to a supply truck that had a flat tire. “They did not have the proper wrench to change the tire,” an Iraq vet named Richard Murphy told investigators, “so the decision was made to torch the truck.”

In perhaps the ultimate example of military capitalism, KBR reportedly ran convoys of empty trucks back and forth across the insurgent-laden desert, pointlessly risking the lives of soldiers and drivers so the company could charge the taxpayer for its phantom deliveries. Truckers for KBR, knowing full well that the trips were bullshit, derisively referred to their cargo as “sailboat fuel.”

Link

(Via Boing Boing.)

 

US court rules that free speech trumps copyright (sometimes)

A major copyright victory — the Tenth Circuit court has ruled in favor of Larry Lessig, et al, in Golan v. Gonzales, a case about the scope of fair use. The court has acknowledged that First Amendment freedoms must be considered when copyright law is made.

This is a very big victory. The government had argued in this case, and in related cases, that the only First Amendment review of a copyright act possible was if Congress changed either fair use or erased the idea/expression dichotomy. We, by contrast, have argued consistently that in addition to those two, Eldred requires First Amendment review when Congress changes the “traditional contours of copyright protection.” In Golan, the issue is a statute that removes work from the public domain. In a related case now on cert to the Supreme Court, Kahle v. Gonzales, the issue is Congress’s change from an opt-in system of copyright to an opt-out system of copyright. That too, we have argued, is a change in a “traditional contour of copyright protection.” Under the 10th Circuit’s rule, it should merit 1st Amendment review as well.

Link

(Via Boing Boing.)

 

Palm Cancels the Foleo

Palm CEO Ed Colligan has posted a letter to Palm Customers, Partners and Developers on the official Palm blog. In the post, he states Palm will cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration, and will undertake efforts to focus entirely on Palm’s next-generation (Linux-based too) smartphone platform. My Take: A right move for Palm, the market is not ready for this sort of device.

(Via OSNews.)

 

Iraq: weapons focus of criminal inquiry; largest fraud ring yet?

Snip from NYT article by James Glanz and Eric Schmitt:

Several federal agencies are investigating a widening network of criminal cases involving the purchase and delivery of billions of dollars of weapons, supplies and other matériel to Iraqi and American forces, according to American officials. The officials said it amounted to the largest ring of fraud and kickbacks uncovered in the conflict here.

The inquiry has already led to several indictments of Americans, with more expected, the officials said. One of the investigations involves a senior American officer who worked closely with Gen. David H. Petraeus in setting up the logistics operation to supply the Iraqi forces when General Petraeus was in charge of training and equipping those forces in 2004 and 2005, American officials said Monday.

Link

(Via Boing Boing.)

 

Microsoft WGA servers down; all XP and Vista installs being marked as counterfeit

Xeni Jardin:
BB reader David McBride says,

DRM bites again: the Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage servers (which every XP and Vista install phones home to) all failed sometime earlier today.

The result? Every single Windows XP and Vista installation — except possibly those with volume license keys — is being marked as counterfeit when it tries to check in. Installations which are flagged as counterfeit switch to a “reduced functionality mode” which results in features like Aero and DirectX being disabled.

So far, the only public response from Microsoft has been indirectly via their technical support forums, where a user has posted the following snippet from an email he received from MS’s technical support address:

Thank you for your response.

I’m sorry to inform you that the Windows Genuine server might be down for few days. I have escalate the issue to our Genuine team, kindly try to validate again on Tuesday 28 Aug 2007.

Thank you for contacting Microsoft Technical Support.

(Via Boing Boing.)

 

MIT Startup Raises Multicore Bar with New 64-Core CPU

“A new startup out of MIT emerged from stealth mode today to announce that they’re shipping a 64-core processor for the embedded market. The company, called Tilera, was founded by Dr. Anat Agarwal, the MIT professor behind the famous and venerable Raw project on which Tilera’s first product, the TILE64 processor, is based. Tilera’s director of marketing, Bob Dowd, told Ars that TILE64 represents a “sea change in the computing industry”, and the company’s CEO isn’t shy about pitching the chip as the “first significant new chip architectural development in a decade”. So let’s take an initial look at what was announced about TILE64 today, with further information to follow as it becomes available.”

(Via OSNews.)