A page for randomness

Pastor had sex with daughters - National - smh.com.au
A fundamentalist church pastor had sex with two of his teenage daughters to educate them on how to be good wives, a South Australian court has heard.

The 54-year-old man, who cannot be named, was today sentenced in the SA District Court to eight and a half years jail after pleading guilty to seven counts each of incest and unlawful sexual intercourse.

The court heard that the man had sex with his daughters for nearly a decade from 1991 when they were aged 13 and 15 at the family property.

The sex took place at various locations including in a shearer’s shed, a paddock, on the back of a ute and, on one occasion, at the girls’ grandparents house.

The man told the court the sex was not about fulfilling his desires but about teaching his daughters how to behave for their husbands when they eventually married, as dictated in scripture.

In sentencing, Judge David Lovell said the misrepresentation of scripture used to justify the abuse of the girls “defied belief”, and that he had “hypocritically betrayed” his religion and principles.

Viacom: It’s Not Copyright Infringement When We Do it to You
Long story short: Viacom runs a clip on TV without permission. The creator takes his clip from TV to post on YouTube. Viacom issues a cease and desist letter to YouTube claiming that they own the clip.

A filmmaker named Christopher Knight created a quirky ad campaign when he ran for the elected position on his county’s Board of Education. He created a commercial where, armed with a light saber, Knight vowed to help fight against those that were destroying the education system. Viacom’s VH1 found it entertaining enough to feature on its show “Web Junk 2.0″ without Knight’s permission. Knight didn’t mind the extra recognition, and posted the clip from “Web Junk 2.0″ on YouTube. Viacom then sent YouTube a takedown notice, and the video clip was removed.

It’s perfect hypocrisy, and Viacom probably didn’t even realize: their legal department just issues bulk takedowns, and wouldn’t have time to check the source of every clip. In such a big organization, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, it seems. Will the EFF, famous for defending YouTube users against overzealous lawyers, get involved?

2Spare - Top 10 Greatest Hoaxes of all time
In 1994 a press release began circulating around the internet claiming that Microsoft had bought the Catholic church. The release quoted Bill Gates saying that he considered religion to be a growth market and that, “The combined resources of Microsoft and the Catholic Church will allow us to make religion easier and more fun for a broader range of people.” Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft would acquire exclusive electronic rights to the Bible and would make the sacraments available online.

Microsoft had to issue a formal denial of the release on December 16, 1994. This was the first internet hoax to reach a mass audience using the internet. The authors of these hoaxes remain unknown.

‘I ate my roommate’, says teen | Metro.co.uk
A teenager claims to have killed his room-mate then eaten parts of his brain and internal organs.

The 19-year-old, named only as Robert A, has confessed to murdering the 49-year-old man he met in a homeless shelter, it was reported.

Robert crushed his room-mate’s skull with a 9kg iron bar before using a butcher’s knife to remove his intestines. Officers found the body lying in a pool of blood, with body parts spread around the room and half-eaten on a plate in the kitchen.

Introduction to Endianness - big endian, little endian, byte order, byte swap
Endianness is the attribute of a system that indicates whether integers are represented from left to right or right to left. Why, in todays world of virtual machines and gigahertz processors, would a programmer care about such a silly topic? Well, unfortunately, endianness must be chosen every time a hardware or software architecture is designed, and there isnt much in the way of natural law to help decide. So implementations vary.

Endianness comes in two varieties: big and little. A big-endian representation has a multibyte integer written with its most significant byte on the left; a number represented thus is easily read by English-speaking humans. A little-endian representation, on the other hand, places the most significant byte on the right. Of course, computer architectures dont have an intrinsic “left” or “right” about them. These human terms are borrowed from our written forms of human communication. The following definitions are more precise:

Big endian means that the most significant byte of any multibyte data field is stored at the lowest memory address, which is also the address of the larger field.
Little endian means that the least significant byte of any multibyte data field is stored at the lowest memory address, which is also the address of the larger field.

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Adobe Hires Co-Inventor of Image Resizer Technology

Fantastic video

Texas Executes 400th Convict | The Onion - Americas Finest News Source
Last week, the state of Texas executed its 400th prisoner since 1976, when execution was ruled constitutional. What do you think?

Slashdot | U.S. Attorney General Resigns
One of Gonzales main opponents praised his decision stating that: “For the previous six months, the Justice Department has been virtually nonfunctional and desperately needs new leadership, said the Schumer statement. Democrats will not obstruct or impede a nominee who we are confident will put the rule of law above political considerations. We beseech the Administration to work with us to nominate someone whom Democrats can support and America can be proud of.”

WTF is this Character? » Tip o’ the Day
Can anyone enlighten me on its purpose, language of origin? If you paste this character and begin typing, your writing is transformed to right-to-left format.

‫‬‭‮‪‫‬‭‮҉Point in case.

I am proud to announce that shortly after my first “Hello World” program in snobol, I have successfully debugged my first snobol program (one that I have not written).

America’s Hackable Backbone - Forbes.com
The first time Scott Lunsford offered to hack into a nuclear power station, he was told it would be impossible. There was no way, the plant’s owners claimed, that their critical components could be accessed from the Internet. Lunsford, a researcher for IBM’s Internet Security Systems, found otherwise.

“It turned out to be one of the easiest penetration tests I’d ever done,” he says. “By the first day, we had penetrated the network. Within a week, we were controlling a nuclear power plant. I thought, ‘Gosh. This is a big problem.’”

In retrospect, Lunsford says–and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission agrees–that government-mandated safeguards would have prevented him from triggering a nuclear meltdown. But he’s fairly certain that by accessing controls through the company’s network, he could have sabotaged the power supply to a large portion of the state. “It would have been as simple as closing a valve,” he says.

Civil Rights: TigerDirect Unlawfully Restrains And Verbally Abuses Customer For Not Submitting To Receipt-Showing Demands - Consumerist
I was visiting a Tigerdirect (Large Electronic Retail Store) in Naperville, IL today (8/23/07)(8/22/07). All was going well until after I had paid for my merchandise and tried to leave.

A security guard demanded that I show him my receipt, which I respectfully declined with a “No Thanks” and continued walking out the door. At that point the Guard physically placed himself between me and the door and said “I can’t let you leave until you show me your receipt.” I attempted to walk around him, explaining I didn’t have to show him anything, and he continued to block my path and called several other employees to block my retreat.

I understand the “Shopkeeper’s Privilege”, but under no possible interpretation of the law would refusing a voluntary receipt check constitute grounds for reasonable suspicion of shoplifting. At this point, I warned them that I was being unlawfully restrained, and unless they immediately allowed me to leave, I would call the police and press criminal charges for unlawful restraint, and also file a civil suit for false imprisonment (fortunately, I knew my rights).

Court orders movie pirate to switch to Windows
Chalk up another new-found power to the Motion Picture Association of America: the ability to force someone to change operating systems. Scott McCausland, who pleaded guilty last September in 2006 to the crime of uploading Star Wars: Episode III to the site Elitetorrents.com, was charged with “conspiracy to commit copyright infringement” and “criminal copyright infringement” by the FBI. This charge carried a maximum sentence of five years in prison, a fine of $250,000, and three years of supervised release. He wound up serving five months in prison and is now on probation. The probation, however, has now taken a strange turn into forced platform advocacy.
“I had a meeting with my probation officer today and he told me that he has to install monitoring software onto my PC. No big deal to me; that is part of my sentence,” he wrote on his Lost and Alone blog. “However, their software doesnt support GNU/Linux Which is what I use. So, he told me that if I want to use a computer, I would have to use an OS that the software can be installed on.” The monitoring software in question is only available for Microsoft Windows. Neither Linux nor a Macintosh running OS X would be an acceptable platform.

McCausland says that he is neither a coder nor a Linux guru, and that he does not want to go back to jail. He also reiterated that he does not want to circumvent the terms of his probation. He just isnt sure why the government is allowed to force him to switch operating systems. He also says that his lawyer agrees with his point of view. In the mean time, he has added a donation link to his blog to help pay for the cost of a Windows license.

FDA Approves Seconds | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source
In a surprising reversal of its longtime single-helping policy, the Food and Drug Administration announced its approval of seconds Tuesday, claiming that an additional plateful of food with every meal can greatly reduce the risk of hunger as well as provide an excellent source of deliciousness.

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Boobs, Injuries, & Dr. Pepper
My son and his friend, Julio, spend most of their time huddled together, whispering about boobs or XBox or the latest crisis at school. They are good boys, but my son will occasionally have a brain fart.

As I was driving them around the other day, the gas bubbled up and spilled over.

“Hey, Mom. I need you to stop at Rite Aid.”

He turned in his seat and looked at Julio and they both smirked.

“Why? Are you out of something?”

“No, not really…….”

RIAA faces possible class action over suing the innocent
The scene at RIAA headquarters this week must have been fascinating. The group yesterday announced that it has finished sending out a new batch of 503 “pre-litigation letters” to 58 different universities around the US, generously offering to let students settle copyright infringement claims “at a discounted rate” before those claims go to trial. The letters blanketed the country, going everywhere from the University of Hawaii to Swarthmore, from Boston College to Tulane, from Emory to Chico State. And then the RIAA learned that its aggressive litigation tactics have placed it on the receiving end of a class action lawsuit.
Single mom Tanya Andersen, a defendant in a previous lawsuit brought by the RIAA, was one of the first to have her case dismissed with prejudice (it cannot be refiled at a later date). Throughout the court battle, she maintained her total innocence, a claim given even more plausibility by the fact that she was charged with downloading numerous gangsta rap tracks.

After the case was dismissed, Andersen then sued the RIAA for malicious prosecution, and her attorney filed court documents in an Oregon federal court on Wednesday that seek to elevate the case to class action status.

The development, first reported by p2pnet, hopes to make a class out of those “who were sued or were threatened with sued by Defendants for file-sharing, downloading or other similar activities, who have not actually engaged in actual copyright infringement.” In other words, a class of the innocent. In the complaint, Andersen alleges that the RIAA “has engaged in a coordinated enterprise to pursue a scheme of threatening and intimidating litigation in an attempt to maintain its music distribution monopoly.”

America gets cash to boost science education - 18 August 2007 - New Scientist
“AMERICA is in trouble,” says Vernon Ehlers, a Republican representative from Michigan. The problem, thinks Ehlers, lies in the nation’s classrooms: “China and India recognised 20 years ago that the future belonged to nations that educated their children in math and science.”

Now a $33 billion remedy is to be administered over the next three years. On 9 August, President George W. Bush signed legislation to recruit thousands of new teachers, update the science and maths skills of those already in classrooms and help science-orientated kids to launch research careers. It also calls for significant increases to the National Science Foundation’s $4.7 billion annual research budget, although exactly how much is unclear.

Nintendo Wii set to win the console war
The site just updated the stats for the past week ending August 11th. The Nintendo Wii scored some major gains and is now breathing down the Xbox 360’s neck. New data shows that in a frame of one week, 310,000 Wii’s got new owners - Xbox 360 was sold in decent 110.000 units, while PS3 sold only 50,000 units. New numbers keep Xbox 360 in the lead with 10.43 million, Wii is now a close second with 10.41 million and PS3 remains the backmarker with 4.16 million consoles sold.

In terms of market share, Microsoft has 41.7%, Nintendo has 41.6%, while Sony captured just 16.6%.

Since the site will not be updated until next week, Wii has probably already outsold Xbox 360 and now has the lead in the console war. Or it just may happen that Microsoft pulled a miracle and sold 3x more than last week (was Halo 3 released this weekend? No?).

This would give Nintendo a 2:0 ratio in console market, since DS is just shattering the competition in the form of PSP. DS sold in 47.87 million units, while PSP sold “just” 22 and a half million, taking 32% of handheld market.

PC World - Google Opens Click-Fraud Site
Google Inc. has unveiled a Web site “resource center” focused on the thorny issue of click fraud, which many consider a potential threat to the company’s main source of revenue: pay-per-click advertising.

Google developed the new Ad Traffic Quality Resource Center primarily to give its advertisers a single place to find Google’s information about click fraud, said Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager for trust and safety at Google, on Friday.

In the pay-per-click format, advertisers pay every time someone clicks on their ads, which are linked to a Web page. Click fraud happens when companies click on competitors’ ads to drive up their ad spending. Another common click-fraud practice is for Web publishers to click on their sites’ ads to increase their commissions.

With some organizations estimating click-fraud incidence at over 30 percent in general, Google has gone on the offensive in researching this topic and stating publicly what it is doing and what is the extent of the problem in its own ad network.

Video guy snaps her parking at hydrant
A Brooklyn traffic agent became a YouTube star when she was caught on camera parking her patrol car in front of a fire hydrant - and then flipping the bird to the cameraman.

Edythe Anderson, an NYPD summons enforcement supervisor, apparently thought nothing of pulling in front of a hydrant to run into a Brooklyn restaurant to grab some lunch.

But the sight of it infuriated video vigilante “Jimmy Justice,” 36-year-old musician and the amateur cameraman.

“They are pretty vicious giving out tickets but when they do something wrong. It’s a double standard,” he said.

Justice said he carries a video camera with him to his various musical gigs just so he can catch civil servants taking advantage of the system.

“Basically, I asked her, ‘How come you can park in front of a hydrant? Isn’t that illegal. You’d give someone else a summons,’” Justice said.

As he filmed Anderson climbing back into her car, he noticed the sticker inside reminding agents to buckle up before driving.

“She didn’t buckle up either. She just started her car,” Justice said.

As he filmed, another woman walked up, told him she was retired NYPD, and ordered him to stop filming the traffic agent because of terrorism.

Comcast Throttles BitTorrent Traffic, Seeding Impossible | TorrentFreak
Although BitTorrent protocol encryption seems to work against most forms of traffic shaping, it doesn’t help in this specific case. Setting up a secure connection through VPN or over SSH seems to be the only solution. More info about how to setup BitTorrent over SSH can be found here.

Last year we had a discussion whether traffic shaping is good or bad, and ISPs made it pretty clear that they do not like P2P applications like BitTorrent. One of the ISPs that joined our discussions said: “The fact is, P2P is (from my point of view) a plague - a cancer, that will consume all the bandwidth that I can provide. It’s an insatiable appetite.”, and another one stated: “P2P applications can cripple a network, they’re like leaches. Just because you pay 49.99 for a 1.5-3.0mbps connection doesn’t mean your entitled to use whatever protocols you wish on your ISP’s network without them provisioning it to make the network experience good for all users involved.”

Customers on the other hand like to fully use their connection, and don’t agree that traffic shaping is the correct solution. One reader commented: “If you pay for an internet connection, that’s what you should get from your ISP — an internet connection. Not a connection that will let you browse the web and check email, but little else. If an ISP has issues with the amount of data a customer is transferring, then the ISP needs to address that issue with that customer, and not restrict every user in one class of traffic.”

C4ISRJournal.com - DARPA chooses Urban Challenge competitors
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected 36 teams as semi-finalists for its Urban Challenge National Qualification Event (NQE), scheduled for Oct. 26-31 at the former George Air Force Base in Victorville, Calif.
Urban Challenge is the third in a series of DARPA-sponsored tests. Each has the stated goal of developing unmanned ground vehicles as a means of saving lives on the battlefield. During the NQE, robotic vehicles will simulate military supply missions, negotiating a complex road network within a six-hour time limit.
The top 20 teams from the NQE will move on to the Urban Challenge final event on Nov. 3, and compete for cash prizes worth $2 million for first place, $1 million for second and $500,000 for third.
At the NQE and during the final event, the robots will be required to operate without human intervention while obeying traffic laws. They must also merge into moving traffic, navigate traffic circles and avoid moving obstacles. Tony Tether, DARPA’s director, said “the vehicles must perform as well as someone with a California driver’s license.”
According to DARPA, the Victorville site was chosen because its roads best simulate the type of terrain U.S. forces operate in when deployed overseas. The Army now uses the site for urban warfare operations.
The semi-finalists selected to participate in the NQE are:

Austin Robot Technology, Austin, Texas
AvantGuardium, Bethesda, Md.
Axion Racing, Westlake Village, Calif.
Ben Franklin Racing Team, Philadelphia, Pa.
CarOLO, New York, N.Y.
Gator Nation, Gainesville, Fla.
Golem Group, Santa Monica, Calif.
Insight Racing, Cary, N.C.
Intelligent Vehicle Systems, Dearborn, Mich.
MIT, Cambridge, Mass.
Mojavaton, Grand Junction, Colo.
Ody-Era, Kokomo, Ind.
OSU-ACT, Columbus, Ohio
Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.
SciAutonics/Auburn Engineering, Thousand Oaks, Calif.
Stanford Racing Team, Stanford, Calif.
Sting Racing, Atlanta, Ga.
Tartan Racing, Pittsburgh, Pa.
Team AnnieWay, Palo Alto, Calif.
Team Autonomous Solutions, Petersboro, Utah
Team Berlin, Houston, Texas
Team CajunBot, Lafayette, La.
Team Caltech, Pasadena, Calif.
Team Case, Cleveland, Ohio
Team Cornell, Ithaca, N.Y.
Team Cybernet, Ann Arbor, Mich.
Team Gray, Metairie, La.
Team Jefferson, Crozet, Va.
Team Juggernaught, Sandy, Utah
Team-LUX, Woodstock, Md.
Team Oshkosh Truck, Oshkosh, Wis.
Team UCF, Orlando, Fla.
Team Urbanator, Littleton, Colo.
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah
UU, Westminster, Md.
VictorTango, Blacksburg, Va.

Feds Train Clergy To “Quell Dissent” During Martial Law
A shocking KSLA news report has confirmed the story we first broke last year, that Clergy Response Teams are being trained by the federal government to “quell dissent” and pacify citizens to obey the government in the event of a declaration of martial law.

In May 2006, we exposed the existence of a nationwide FEMA program which is training Pastors and other religious representatives to become secret police enforcers who teach their congregations to “obey the government” in preparation for the implementation of martial law, property and firearm seizures, mass vaccination programs and forced relocation.

A whistleblower who was secretly enrolled into the program told us that the feds were clandestinely recruiting religious leaders to help implement Homeland Security directives in anticipation of a potential bio-terrorist attack, any natural disaster or a nationally declared emergency.

Slashdot | Class Action Initiated Against RIAA
“Ever since the RIAA’s litigation campaign began in 2003, many people have been suggesting a class action against the RIAA. Tanya Andersen, in Oregon, has taken them up on it. The RIAA’s case against this disabled single mother, Atlantic v. Andersen, has received attention in the past, for her counterclaims against the RIAA including claims under Oregon’s RICO statute, the RIAA’s hounding of her young daughter for a face-to-face deposition, the RIAA’s eventual dropping of the case ‘with prejudice,’ and her lawsuit against the RIAA for malicious prosecution, captioned Andersen v. Atlantic. Now she’s turned that lawsuit into a class action. The amended complaint seeking class action status (PDF) sues for negligence, fraud, negligent misrepresentation, federal and state RICO, abuse of process, malicious prosecution, intentional infliction of emotional distress, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trespass, invasion of privacy, libel and slander, deceptive business practices, misuse of copyright law, and civil conspiracy.”

The software awards scam « Successful Software
I put out a new product a couple of weeks ago. This new product has so far won 16 different awards and recommendations from software download sites. Some of them even emailed me messages of encouragement such as “Great job, we’re really impressed!”. I should be delighted at this recognition of the quality of my software, except that the ’software’ doesn’t even run. This is hardly surprising when you consider that it is just a text file with the words “this program does nothing at all” repeated a few times and then renamed as an .exe. The PAD file that described the software contains the description “This program does nothing at all”.

My Way News - Man Pays Big Tax Bill in Coins, $1 Bills
A landlord said he wanted people to see the pain of his property tax bill when he hauled $12,656.07 in coins and $1 bills to the county treasurer’s office.

Cary Malchow said the heavy load left him “out of breath” but it was worth watching three cashiers working overtime and guarded by sheriff’s deputies on Monday to count every last cent of the semi-annual payment for his home, business and rental properties.

“I did it so people can physically see what $12,000 is,” said Malchow, who has staged other recent protests to draw attention to Indiana’s property tax increases.

It took 75 minutes to count out the cash, said Delaware County Treasurer Warren Beebe.

“They were fast, they were hustling. They’re used to counting money, but of course that left other people standing in line. It was an awkward situation,” Beebe said Tuesday.

Malchow’s protest prevented the office from making its daily bank depo

Fewer Mexicans Sending Money Home | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source
Anticipating a move back home, the percentage of Mexicans sending money to family in their native country fell from 71 percent last year to 64 percent. What do you think?

The Smug Little Shit Behind The Latest Internet Phenomenon | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source