A Muslim man was found guilty of child cruelty today in a British legal first after forcing two boys to beat themselves during a centuries-old Shia religious ceremony. The jury at Manchester crown court found Syed Mustafa Zaidi, 44, guilty of two counts of child cruelty.
The boys, aged 13 and 15, were forced to beat themselves with a zanjeer zani, a wooden implement with chains and blades attached, during a ceremony to commemorate the death and martyrdom of a seventh-century Shia Muslim leader.
Microsoft has updated software that verifies whether a copy of Windows is genuine in its Windows XP Professional edition. The company said it made the changes to the Windows Genuine Notification (WGA) alerts for XP Pro because it is “the product edition that is most often stolen.”
Now when a version of Windows XP Pro is found to be pirated or counterfeit - [or at least Microsoft thinks it is] - the next time a user logs on to the system, the desktop screen background will be black, replacing whatever custom desktop may have been set by the user. This will reappear every 60 minutes, even if a user resets the screen’s background. Previously, this was not a part of the WGA notification for Windows XP Pro.
Another new feature of the alert system is to put the PC into “persistent desktop notification” mode, with a banner at the bottom of the screen informing the user that the copy of Windows is not genuine. The notification is translucent and users can interact with any objects underneath it; however, it will continue to appear on the screen until a user installs a genuine copy of Windows.
The office pool for this month will be - how many legit copies of XP Pro will end up saddled with the Microsoft accusing finger?
Orange throttling iPhone 3G speeds. Why offer 3G if you do not want to deliver the product? D90 comes out but not seemingly as good as the Canon. My thoughts on Nikon versus Canon. Computer virus found on Space Station computer. IE8 getting more and more useless PR. Sneaky deal done between Microsoft and Immersion. Lawsuits abound. Dell explaining the Cloud Computing trademark debate. Cisco needs to buy more companies says THE STREET.
British Coastguard crew got the scare of a lifetime Monday when they were attempting to rescue a man who had reportedly jumped from an East Sussex “suicide spot” and narrowly missed being crushed by a car as it drove off the same cliff and crashed on the rocks below, the Daily Mail reported. The 12-person rescue crew was trying to remove a man’s body that children had spotted in the waves when a Toyota 4×4 plunged 500 feet and landed a few yards away. The traumatized crew and a helicopter team scrambled to find the driver.
“The chaplaincy at Eastbourne contacted us after some kids said there was a body floating in the water,” Dover Coastguard’s rescue center manager, Spike Hughes, told the Daily Mail. “We were preparing to retrieve the body when all of a sudden a car drove off the cliff at the same time.
“We made our way to the car as it was more likely the man in the vehicle would still be alive. “The tide was in, which made it very difficult. A coastguard helicopter spotted the second man’s body in the water. He had been thrown clear of the car.” Some rescue workers were so shocked by the double suicide they had to receive counseling. “We made our way to the car as it was more likely the man in the vehicle would still be alive.
“The tide was in, which made it very difficult. A coastguard helicopter spotted the second man’s body in the water. He had been thrown clear of the car. “Obviously that sort of thing does happen quite a lot at Beachy Head. But the fact that this person drove off at the same time as we were preparing to remove a body has made it a little hard for us to take in.” Beachy Head cliff has been an infamous suicide spot for hundreds of years, and sees an average of 20 deaths each year.
So, they let children play on this beach! Think of the chil……………..
PALM SPRINGS, FL — Patricia Smith is a Barack Obama supporter, but she never imagined her 4-year-old son would be called the presidential candidate’s look-a-like.
Smith says when she is out in public with Rafael she’s often told he looks like Obama. Many have called him the Obama kid because they say he looks like the Democratic nominee.
Smith says some believe the resemblance is so striking they’ve urged her to send photos to the media, and recently she had Rafael’s portrait taken and studio workers also mentioned his likeness to Obama.
Just wait until the Enquirer gets ahold of this. “Obama has secret son.”
I love these conventions just to see what sort of marketing tricks they play on the viewing public. The need for unity within the Democratic party has resulted in the organizers orchestrating the signage to an extreme. Many of the signs have unity on them. It’s more like a card section of a college football game than anything else. In fact I think if they made the whole place into a giant card section where images and logos could be flipped back and forth it would be more interesting. I only saw one handmade sign and the sign police made sure it did not last. There were some rogue blue Hillary signs all over the place that kept getting rolled out but they were all identical too.
Meanwhile Fox completely blew the story when they claimed that there would be no special signage for Hillary when there was a tonnage. Here are a few pics and comments. The obvious lack of spontaneity and individuality at these events makes them a stupid and needless exercise.
First we see a sea of the exact same Obama sign
this slowly transitions into the same sign that says Hillary on one side and Unity on the other then near the front a ton of White Hillary signs appear like magic just before she speaks.
along with howling fans
I wished I had this sequence on video, but this woman from Bastrup Texas held this sign up for a moment. She then looked to her right and apparently saw a member of the signage police and looked scared and quickly lowered the sign.
Here is a shot of the signage coordinators collecting the signs they do not want to see anymore. I doubt you will see many of those white Hillary signs from now on out. You’ll see these guys in the yellow jumpers throughout the show passing around new signs, collecting others.
An official “watch list” of potentially troubled US banks has lengthened from 90 to 117 as the credit crunch wreaks havoc throughout the financial industry.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which guarantees customers’ money held in US banks, said the quarterly list was the longest since mid-2003 and is asking its members to increase contributions to a dwindling bail-out fund…
So far this year, nine US banks have collapsed including California’s IndyMac Bancorp, the third largest failure of a high-street bank since the FDIC was created 75 years ago.
The FDIC does not disclose the identity of institutions on its watch list. But it said the aggregate total of assets held by troubled banks had risen from $26bn to $78bn, partly because the FDIC seized control of $32bn at IndyMac…
The FDIC has increased the number of staff handling banking failures by 60% as it faces the most challenging environment since the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s which drove hundreds of small financial institutions out of business.
Starting with sleazy storefront mortgages - unregulated and unlicensed - the majority of the banking industry, nationally and throughout the Western world, climbed on board the downbound train to get a piece of the action.
Comedian Jon Stewart had some very unfunny words for the media on Monday, calling cable news networks “a giant monster” and urging newspaper reporters not to fall prey to the 24-hour news cycle.
“I can’t believe that, as reporters, you would walk into a ’spin room’,” he said, amazed at the journalists’ willingness to swallow the bullshit that the campaign and candidates spoon feed them. “How can you keep talking to people who are lying to you?” he asked. “This loveless marriage [between reporters and politicians] has to be unconsummated.” As I said in yesterday’s post, this criticism came pretty much at their request, after they wide-eyedly asked Stewart — who, by the way, is a comedian, in case you weren’t aware — what could be done to restore print journalism to its former place as the apex of political discourse.
And while he did claim that the 24-hour news channels are ruining political discourse, he did not “declare his love” for newspapers. Not exactly. He did have a lot of great things to say about newspapers and for the reporters sitting around the table before him. But they were definitely not let off the hook.
Zephyr’s reputation as the world’s leading solar powered high-altitude long-endurance (HALE) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has been reinforced with a world-beating three and a half day flight at the US Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona.
The solar powered plane flew for 82 hours 37 minutes, exceeding the current official world record for unmanned flight which stands at 30 hours 24 minutes set by Global Hawk in 2001 and Zephyr’s previous longest flight of 54 hours achieved last year.
Launched by hand, Zephyr is an ultra-lightweight carbon-fibre aircraft. By day it flies on solar power generated by amorphous silicon solar arrays no thicker than sheets of paper that cover the aircraft’s wings. By night it is powered by rechargeable lithium-sulphur batteries which are recharged during the day using solar power.
The flight trial at Yuma took place between 28 and 31 July in the harsh conditions of the Sonoran Desert in mid summer with temperatures up to 45°C (113°F). Zephyr was flown on autopilot and via satellite communications to a maximum altitude of more than 60,000ft. The trial included a military utility assessment of a US Government communications payload.
You don’t even want to go outdoors to pee in Yuma in the summer.
Five years after Vermont allowed civil unions, the first study to examine the experience has found that legalized same-sex couple relationships appear to be longer-lasting than those without a legal status.
“There are many ways that a legal couple status may support a relationship – more family understanding, acceptance by friends and co-workers, greater commitment that results from a public declaration, and enhanced legal protections in the form of healthcare benefits and community property,” said Robert-Jay Green. “The results of this first study on the topic suggest that same-sex partners who legalized their relationships in Vermont may have been more committed to each other or functioning better prior to obtaining a civil union—or that civil union status itself is helping to preserve their relationships . Future research will help clarify whether various legal statuses actually increase the likelihood that lesbian and gay couples stay together. ”
“In contrast to old myths about same-sex couples being deficient or less viable than male-female couples , this research project shows that same-sex partners who seek to legalize their relationships actually may be among the best functioning couples in this society,” said Green.
None of this surprises me. Simple empiricism, just looking around at the same-sex couples I’ve known for decades offers the same conclusion.
Some of this may eventually seep down into the cracks where professional moralists cluster.
The fun guys at Tech Dirt have found this bizarre opinion piece written by environmental lawyer Dusty Horwitt (pictured below) who claims that we get too much information from the internet, that it’s killing democracy, that the only way to save democracy is to tax technology so much that people will stop using it, which will cause them to go back to the good old days of getting all of their news fed to them via trusted corporations. Really.
Everybody jokes about “TMI” these days: “Too much information,” we say laughingly, when someone tells a story full of embarrassing detail about some personal foible or intimate relationship. But in our information-overloaded society, the concept of TMI is no joke. The information avalanche coming from all sides — the Internet, PDAs, hundreds of television channels — is burying us in extraneous data that prevent important facts and knowledge from reaching a broad audience.
But the implications for our democracy are troubling. To achieve their goals, political movements need to reach and influence tens of millions of citizens. Despite conventional thinking that the Internet helps spread information, such reach is actually impossible online.
In August 2007, there were about 100 million blogs. Of those that reached 100,000 people or more in a month, only about 20 focused on news or politics, according to ComScore Media Metrix, a company that measures Internet traffic.
By contrast, The Washington Post’s print edition reaches about 2 million readers on Sunday, more than 35 percent of whom are likely to read the editorial page, according to a Mediamark Research study.
Rather than call for government regulation of technology itself, perhaps the best way to limit the avalanche is to make the technologies that overproduce information more expensive and less widespread. It could be done via a progressive energy tax designed to keep energy prices at a consistently high level (while providing assistance to lower- and middle-income Americans).
If Americans are finally giving up SUVs because of high oil prices, might we not eventually do the same with some information technologies that only seem to fragment our society, not unite it?
Of course the whole thing could be brilliant satire. I certainly hope so.
when someone tells a story full of embarrassing detail about some personal foible or intimate relationship. But in our information-overloaded society, the concept of TMI is no joke. The information avalanche coming from all sides — the Internet, PDAs, hundreds of television channels — is burying us in extraneous data that prevent important facts and knowledge from reaching a broad audience.
