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April 02, 2006
Red Flagged Links Vol. IV 6/27/05 - 6/30/05
(Some Guy) [Fark]
The summer of 2001 was declared "summer of the shark" despite the fact that the number of shark attacks wasn't abnormal. Then a little tragic event happened and they shut the hell up about sharks for a little awhile.
Kurtz and Rather had this exchange around that time: [Eschaton]
Supreme Court Swings Both Ways on Hot Church-State Action
Suddenly, the marriage of church and state sounds just like obscenity. Some government displays of the Ten Commandments are faith-porn, others are art (or at least Cinemax). How to decide which is which? [Wonkette]
Hacking Apple’s Weather Widget to Show the Time of the Last Update
My frustration was that I wanted to know at a glance whether I needed to wait for updated data in Apple's Weather widget. So I hacked it. [Daring Fireball]
Pinceton University asked the university's scientists and engineers to collect and submit images "produced in the course of research or incorporating tools and concepts from science." The resulting gallery is mind-boggling. [Boing Boing]
The Supremes Are Trying to Break Your Heart
Bachelor, close to his mom, brings his own lunch to work -- we always suspected David Souter was the "emo justice." Now we know for sure: [Wonkette]
Influential Rabbi Thinks Bush Looks Like God
Rabbi Daniel Lapin eats breakfast with Karl Rove and dinner with President Bush, and it's easy to see why. He religiously opposes government pork. And, we're guessing, many forms of non-traditional porking: "His specialty is finding support in the Torah for what turns out to be the current Republican platform: lower taxes, decreased regulation, pro-traditional family policies." [Wonkette]
Wonkette operatives read The Note so Wonkette doesn't have to. One operative in particular draws our attention to some recent reflexive snobbery. [Wonkette]
Zombie Dogs U.S. scientists have succeeded in reviving dogs after three hours of clinical death, paving the way for trials on humans within years. [MetaFilter]
Don't like my driving? Call 1-800-flesh-eating-hemadrones
Snip from Court TV item: [Boing Boing]
Siva Vaidhyanathan's editorial on the Grokster decision is up on Salon, and it considers the fallout from the vague new "inducement" standard that the court invented: [Boing Boing]
The Unofficial War: U.S., Britain Led Massive Secret Bombing Campaign Before Iraq War Was Declared [MetaFilter]
Bush, 1999:
"I think it's also important for the president to lay out a timetable as to how long they will be involved and when they will be withdrawn." [Eschaton]
Drug War Fails to Dent U.S. Supply
Drug War Fails to Dent U.S. SupplySonni Efron | Washington, DC | June 28LAT - The Bush administration and congressional allies are gearing up to renew a plan for drug eradication in Latin America despite some grim news: The $5.4 billion spent on the plan since 2000 has made no dent in the availability of cocaine on American streets and prices are at all-time lows. [The Agonist]
Khuffie writes "According to Wired, Warner Bros. Entertainment recently passed on a pilot of a show called Global Frequency. However, due to a leak on bit-torrent the pilot episode has reached thousands of viewers who are clamouring for more, and has given the show a new lease on life. What's more interesting is what the show creator learned. From the article: "It changes the way I'll do my next project," said Rogers. If he owned the full rights, he said, "I would put my pilot out on the internet in a heartbeat. Want five more? Come buy the boxed set." Frankly, I'm all for this method of distribution, as I barely watch 'regular' TV anymore." [Slashdot]
Legitimate MP3 downloads! If you like the big beat duo The Chemical Brothers, I'm sure you'll be impressed by these two excellent remixes: Flip The Switch & Believe EP. Primal Scream's deep house masterpiece is given similarly impressive treatment in Screamixadelica. Maybe you prefer the punkier electronica of The Prodigy; check out Always Outsiders, Never Outdone. BTW don't forget to donate to the nominated charities on each site if you decide to keep the tracks. [MetaFilter]
France Will Be Home To Fusion Plant
ScentCone writes "After years of politicking, France has won the right to be the location for a $12 billion fusion research facility. The plant will use deuterium-from-seawater and a huge electromagnetic ring to produce the 100-million-C conditions in which researchers hope to produce viable fusion. The debate over whether this is even possible continues to rage. The ITER project started in 1985, and there has been a running fight over money and location since. France indicated that if Japan (one of the holdouts) didn't see it their way, they'd build a coalition of the willing and do it anyway. With financing and contracting agreements in place, the 10-year construction can begin." Coverage also available at MSNBC, the NYTimes, CNN, and the BBC. [Slashdot]
In December 2003, elevated terror alert levels led to the cancellation of nearly 30 international flights. What prompted this action? CIA analysts believed Al-Jazeera was broadcasting "secret messages hidden in the moving text at the bottom of the screen, known as the 'crawl.'" [Wonkette]
50Mbps Cable Launched on Long Island
the-dark-kangaroo writes "Cable Vision have teamed up with Narad Networks to provide a new 50Mbps broadband service in the New York metropolitan area. The current deployment has a capability of 100Mbps (the connections are symmetric) with future developments allowing up to 10Gbps connections. The system utilises current cabling systems allowing enterprise level connections to homes and businesses." [Slashdot]
Pentagon Aided Halliburton, Official Charges
Pentagon Aided Halliburton, Official ChargesSteven Bodzin | Washington | June 28LAT - A top Army Corps of Engineers official charged Monday that Halliburton Co. was able to receive no-bid contracts for work in Iraq because of repeated assistance by the office of the secretary of Defense. [The Agonist]
Journalist's blog documents DEA's war on California
My friend Ann Harrison is covering the ongoing skirmishes in the drug war in California. The state of California has legalized growing and distributing pot to people who have medical marijuana prescriptions, but the DEA has begun to arrest these people on federal charges (despite the fact that federal laws only have jurisdiction over interstate matters, so pot grown and distributed in California is outside the DEA's jurisdiction).
The DEA is conducting this war like a guerrilla attack on the people of California. Private citizens who record their busts from public sidewalks are assaulted by DEA agents who try to erase their camera-memory. The press-conferences are closed to the public. The dispensary raids concentrate on computer records of patients and growers, and many of those arrested face ten-year minimum sentences.
Ann is bent on blowing the lid off of this. While the stories she files with newspapers get trimmed to "news haiku," on her blog she's publishing transcripts of the secret press-conferences, information on the use of local law to do the Feds' bidding, and the myriad ways that the DEA is cooking the process to wage its war on Americans. [Boing Boing]
Impressive Benchmarks: Sorting with a GPU
An anonymous reader writes "The Graphics research group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has posted some interesting benchmarks for a sorting implementation which is done entirely on a GPU. There have been efforts on doing general purpose computation on GPUs before ( previous slashdot article). However, most of them had generally utilized the fragment processing pipeline of the GPUs which is slower then the default high speed rendering pipeline. Apparantly, the above implementaion is done using "simple texture mapping operations" and "cache efficient memory accesses" only. There also seems to an option to download the distribution for non-commercial use, though the requirements seem pretty hefty (a very decent nVidia graphics card and the latest nVidia drivers)." [Slashdot]
Protesters To Disrupt Soldier's Funeral
Protesters To Disrupt Soldier's FuneralJune 27WCVB [Boston] - A Massachusetts soldier who was killed in Afghanistan is scheduled to be laid to rest Monday, but a church group from Kansas is expected to try to disrupt the services and police are on alert for any problems.The church group claims U.S. soldiers like Staff Sgt. Christoper Piper, 43, are dying because the country is being punished for its tolerance of what they see as immoral behavior, such as homosexuality. [The Agonist]
What are you doing for July 4th? I just found out I'll be working. Our spacecraft Swift is going to be observing comet Tempel1 at the time of the Deep Impact encounter. (Previous discussed here on MeFi 2 years ago.) We'll probably have images and movies first, but the first images you'll see after the encounter will likely come from either JPL or Hubble. You can't have Penn State scooping NASA. Oh well, at least we will have a barbecue at work to celebrate. Our acting Mission Director during this time is a great bloke from MSSL. It is oddly appropriate to be celebrating the Fourth with a person from the UK. [MetaFilter]
DVD Jon cracks Google Video in 24h UPDATED
[Boing Boing]
U.S. intelligence firm says bomb unlikely to have come from Syria
U.S. intelligence firm says bomb that killed Lebanese politician Hawi unlikely to have come from SyriaKristin Dailey | June 29 Daily Star - A leading U.S. private intelligence firm said in a recent report the bomb that killed former Lebanese anti-Syrian politician George Hawi this month is unlikely to have emanated from Damascus. Texas-based Statfor, which specializes in intelligence and counterterrorism analysis, believes the blast was "so sophisticated that few in the world could have done it." It adds the "complex nature" of the remote-control technology used in the attack narrows the list of suspects considerably. In an interview last week with press agency UPI, Fred Burton, vice president of Statfor and author of the report, said: "This type of technology is only available to government agencies." [The Agonist]
You've Got MailMichael Crowley | June 23 Under the arrangement, dubbed "gimme five" by Abramoff and Scanlon, Abramoff would retain a client, then bring in Scanlon as an independent consultant, records show. Scanlon would then allegedly charge exorbitant fees for his services and expenses in representing tribal interests and secretly split much of the money with Abramoff. [The Agonist]
Bush sets up domestic spy service
Other measures include: • An executive order allowing US authorities to seize the assets of any person or any company thought to be aiding the spread of WMD, targeting specifically eight companies including two from North Korea, one from Iran and one from Syria • The establishment of a national counter-proliferation centre, to centralise US efforts to stop the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons • Giving control of all overseas human intelligence operations to the CIA • Seeking the creation of a new assistant attorney general position to centralise responsibility for intelligence and national security at the Justice Department. [The Agonist]
Special Report Goes on the Offensive
Special Report Goes on the OffensiveAl Kamen | Washington, DC | June 29WaPo - The U.S.-Asia foreign policy establishment here is positively gaga over a teensy transmission error last week by consultant Chris Nelson , author of the highly authoritative Nelson Report, a must-read for those involved in foreign affairs, especially on Asia. [The Agonist]
Apple patent dug up docks iPod in PowerBook
You know how much we love patent applications, especially Apple's patent applications, since they love to stonewall everyone on their plans. Which is why we're totally giggling to ourselves at their latest to surface, which proposes iPod integration directly into a laptop. Granted, this patent application also proposes iPod docking into just about every device imaginable, including images of the device docked in a regular dock, speaker dock, wall mount, and so on. And yes, they specifically outline that the "[media player's] user interface may be the primary user interface of the notebook; for example, the touch pad of the media player shown may be used to perform actions on the notebook computer. Take it for what it is though, people: something that not gonna happen by Apple's hand (at least not anytime soon). [Engadget]
Are you worried about the future glut of obituaries in national newspapers? Because I sure am. Think about it: because of our networked world and mass media, there are so many more nationally known people than there were 30, 40, or 50 years ago. Fifty years ago, to be famous you had to be a politician, a movie star, a sports star, a general/admiral, a writer, a musician, a TV star, or rich. These days, we have many more popular sports, more sports teams, more movies are being made, there are 2-3 orders of magnitude more TV channels and programs, more music, more musical genres, more books are being written, and there's more rich people. Plus, these days people routinely become famous for appearing in advertising, designing things, being good cooks, yammering away on the internet, etc. etc. A year's worth of guests on Hollywood Squares...there's 2300 people right there that probably wouldn't have been famous in 1953, and that's just one show. [kottke.org]
Secret air campaign against Iraq?
Secret air campaign against Iraq?Tom Regan | June 30CSM - Most American media have focused on the allegations from the Downing Street memo that the Bush administration was going to "fix" the intelligence in order to justify the war against Iraq. Now the reporter who broke the original story says they have missed a more substantial allegation to arise from the same set of leaked documents. [The Agonist]
Posted by Jon Rubin at April 2, 2006 01:40 PM
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