According to the Scotsman, people in Afghanistan have developed quite a taste for teh pr0n: The heaviest fighting in five years has slowed reconstruction to a crawl in the deserts and oases of Kandahar, where the strict Taleban movement began in 1994, but pornography, opium and illegal alcohol are flourishing, officials say. … “Pornography is a problem,” admits new provincial […]
I’ve been ripping and encoding a bunch of music. Since I’m a hacker, naturally I have scripts that take a file with artist, album title, and track titles, and finds the corresponding .wav or .aiff source files, encodes them as MP3 and tags them. A lot of the music I have is in French or German (and some Spanish and […]
There’s a stock market scam that goes something like this: make a list of 1024 people, and send them an “investment newsletter”. The copy sent to the first 512 people says that a particular stock will go up; the other 512 get a copy that says that that stock will go down. Let’s say it goes down. You throw […]
Brad Blog reports that someone managed to make a key that opens Diebold voting machines… by copying it off of an image on Diebold’s web site. Can you imagine what would happen if an individual, rather than a company, had screwed up this way? If you answered “that person would be awarded the Presidential Medal of […]
Overcoming Bias has a good article about scientists holding unscientific beliefs outside the lab. The gist of it is, if a scientist throws out science when he leaves work, does he really understand what it’s for and how it works? Why? Well, suppose that an apprentice shepherd is laboriously trained to count sheep, as they […]
Jennifer Epstein has a sympathetic account of Kent Hovind’s sentencing. Interesting if you want to know more about what happened aside from the actual sentencing. And the Pensacola News Journal has a delightfully snarky editorial entitled “Earth to ‘Dr. Dino’: Please pay your taxes and start facing reality”: In court, Hovind offers the judge a deal: Release […]
I seem to have attracted a number of fundies and creationists, most likely due to the fact that I’ve been talking about Kent Hovind. curvemudgeon has pointed out that for some reason, they can’t seem to go four sentences without committing crimes against the English language (so it’s not just me). Why is that? Aside from […]
The Pensacola News Journal has another article about Kent Hovind’s sentencing. This one points out the contrast between Hovind’s behavior before the trial: In a recording of one of the telephone conversations played in court Friday, Hovind said the Internal Revenue Service, presiding judge and prosecutor broke the law by going after him, and there were things he […]
The Pensacola News Journal finally has the story: U.S. District Judge Casey Rodgers ordered Hovind also: – Pay $640,000 in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service. – Pay the prosecution’s court costs of $7,078. – Serve three years parole once he is released from prison.
From the Associated Press: Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says federal judges are unqualified to make rulings affecting national security policy, ramping up his criticism of how they handle terrorism cases. In remarks prepared for delivery Wednesday, Gonzales says judges generally should defer to the will of the president and Congress when deciding national security cases. People have […]
