It appears that the Bobsey Twins of the security worldhave decided to put features into chipset that will prevent users from running the software they choose.
They are not admitting this, but the statement that, “Intel plans to incorporate Trusted Platform Module capabilities, which already ships as separate modules in some of its laptops, into its chipsets next year.” Means that you will not be able to run the programs that you buy on your PC.
Hello AMD.
Guiliani has been taking shots at Edwards ever since John criticized Rudy’s foreign policy ideas (which are truly insane).
Now Edwards’ spokesman Eric Schultz puts in his $0.02:
Poor Rudy, first he loses all touch with reality by bragging he spent more time at Ground Zero than our brave firefighters and first responders, and now he wants to brag about his foreign policy vision which can be best described as “George Bush without the thinking.
Even more amazing, it has been practiced by the normally quite hacktacular Nedra Pickler in debunking a right wing troll storm.
A few days back, Obama said, “We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there.”
Not only is this an accurate assessment, the US tactics are bad enough that the Brits want US troops and aircraft out of their sector because they are generating too much support for the Taliban through their indiscriminate bombing.
Now we see a real fact check:
As of Aug. 1, the AP count shows that while militants killed 231 civilians in attacks in 2007, Western forces killed 286. Another 20 were killed in crossfire that can’t be attributed to one party.
At the ceremony announcing Rove’s departure, there was no question and answer session. Like any good reporter, Plante got a question in anyway:
As Karl Rove embraced President Bush today following an emotional farewell announcement on the South Lawn, the solemnity of the moment was shattered by Bill Plante of CBS, who bellowed to Bush: “If he’s so smart, how come you lost Congress?”
FWIW, it’s not the Carpetbagger (source of link) who called the moment “solemn”.
It was a political moment, not a solemn one, and questions should have been asked.
Think Progress has the video and this remarkable quote from Gen. Casey:
A questioner asked, “What are the prospects in Iraq and how will this war end?”
Casey responded: Right now, there’s so much residual mistrust left over from the time under Saddam Hussein that they’re not quite ready to go forward. But they have an educated population, they have oil wells, they have water, they have some of the most fertile land I’ve ever seen. In a decade or so, this will be a remarkable country, if we stick with it.“
Bush and His Evil Minions™ (Karl Rove) has succeeded in poisoning almost every branch of government by purging competent reality based people, and replacing them with those who are insane.
Very, very amusing.
As TPM Reader DC puts it, Giuliani combines Bush’s foreign policy genius with Clinton’s sexual impulse control.
(ed.note: Look, I love Bill. But this one was too good to pass up.)
Then there’s TPM Reader TP who notes that had the Captain of the Titanic survived we probably wouldn’t have feted him as the go-to guy on iceberg defense.
Care of Defense Tech:
Like me, you’ve probably stayed awake countless nights wondering, “Did the Brits ever make plans for a nuclear landmine, powered by chickens?”
Well, dear reader, I’m here to tell you that the answer is yes.
The interesting thing is that this is far less shocking than some of the things that British Cooks do to chickens.
Seriously. Notwithstanding protestations to the contrary, this is what a private bourse like this is for.
Banks to start trading platform
Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and others are setting up a private system to trade stocks of companies looking to avoid public scrutiny.
August 14 2007: 1:34 PM EDTNEW YORK (Reuters) — Five of Wall Street’s biggest banks, including Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch, said on Tuesday they were setting up a private system to trade stocks of companies eager to avoid the scrutiny of public markets.
The group, which also includes underwriter Morgan Stanley and Bank of New York Mellon, said the new platform is designed to ease trading for privately sold securities. It will target companies looking to raise capital while avoiding the rules imposed on publicly listed shares.
…
If the SEC were really concerned about healthy markets, it would take steps to prevent secret transactions by actors who are likely to have inside information.
OK…That’s odd, it appears that
a motorcyclist failed to notice that he had lost his leg below the knee: “Company worker Kazuo Osada, 54, was on a jaunt with 10 other bikers yesterday when he failed to negotiate a bend. However, he was ‘unaware his right leg had been severed below the knee apparently because his attention was focused on the strong pain he felt from the crash’, according to police.”
‘Tis but a scratchThis time from Air Force Magazine, the organ of the Air Forces Association, see my post last night on the batsh%$ insane Air Force two star.
Petraeus basically argues that aggressive use of Air Force capabilities, except in a Tet Offensive situation, is actually counter productive.
Given the fact that the US air strike happy doctrine has led the Brits to demand that the US cease operations in their area (blogged here), it’s clear that Petraeus is right, “However, air assets should be at the disposal of the ground commander, according to the new doctrine manual.”
Needless to say, the USAF hates this with a passion. Not only does this belittle them, it also makes most of their newer toys unnecessary:
Maj. Gen. Allen G. Peck, commander of the Air Force Doctrine Center at Maxwell AFB, Ala., said he had seen the doctrine penned by Petraeus and Amos, and said that it reflected “a very two-dimensional view of how to fight a counterinsurgency.” If airmen had written it, it would be “different,” Peck observed.
He’s also completely wrong.
It’s like allowing a pyromaniac to advise on fighting house fires.
Maj. Gen. Allen G. Peck, commander of the Air Force Doctrine Center at Maxwell AFB, Ala., said he had seen the doctrine penned by Petraeus and Amos, and said that it reflected “a very two-dimensional view of how to fight a counterinsurgency.” If airmen had written it, it would be “different,” Peck observed.
And it would be wrong, and strengthen insurgencies, and cost soldiers and marines their lives.
It appears that Bill O’Reilley, or one of his evil minions™ at Fox News, hacked Wikipedia.
It’s much less amusing than when Stephen Colbert hacked Wiki.
Scratch that….It’s just as funny, but we are laughing at at Billo, not with him.
He/They got caught because a tool has been developed to allow for easy searches of Wiki edits and IP addresses.
Here is the edit:
Original:
The lawsuit focused a great deal of media attention upon Franken’s book and greatly enhanced its sales. Reflecting later on the lawsuit during an interview on the National Public Radio program ”Fresh Air” on September 3, 2003, Franken said that Fox’s case against him was “literally laughed out of court” and that “wholly (holy) without merit” is a good characterization of Fox News itself.
Fox News edit:
The lawsuit focused a great deal of media attention upon Franken’s book and greatly enhanced its sales. Reflecting later on the lawsuit during an interview on the liberal National Public Radio program ”Fresh Air” on September 3, 2003, Franken said that Fox’s case against him was the best thing to happen to his book sales.
Busted.
Funny
From a John Edwards, regarding Karl Rove’s departure from the White House:
I like it…Short, sweet, to the point.
Open left is looking to do some Google ad buys to go after Democrats who folded on the 180 Day spy for all FISA vote.
This is a good thing. This was cowardice, pure and simple.
On a personal note, as a long time Washington Redskin’s fan, I just want to say that this is not the first time that Heath Shuler has folded up like overcooked broccoli under pressure.
A judge has ordered 5 reporters to testify about their government sources in the Anthrax mailings.
There will be hand wringing from the press and journalism schools, but considering the abuses in the use of anonymous sources, including this case, there is a deeper principle:
A source can have any number of reasons to talk to a reporter, and the reporter has a moral obligation to protect his source, so long as the source does not knowingly lie to him.
It is clear that the Hatfill sources were deliberately lying. In so doing, the contract between reporter and source is broken.
The Armchair Generalist an article by the Deputy Judge Advocate General of the US Air Force, two star General Charles Dunlap.
Gen Dunlap would give Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper on a rant about “purity of essence” a run for his money.
Dunlap is calling for the United States to bomb Iranian Oil Refineries in order to conduct counter-insurgency in Iraq.
Specifically, despite huge reserves of crude oil, Iran nevertheless must import about half of its gasoline, largely because of a shortage of domestic refinery capacity. Targeting what refinery capacity Iran possesses could directly and concretely erode its ability to support Iraqi insurgents.
Oil refineries are ideal targets for air and missile attack. They are large, relatively “soft” facilities that are difficult for even the most modern air defense to protect. At the same time, they represent wholly lawful targets generally subject to attack with a minimal risk of collateral damage.
Besides reducing the fuel available to support insurgent activities in Iraq, the further cutback in refinery capacity could influence Iranian leadership, as the nation has already seen civil disturbances as a result of gasoline rationing.
This is just plain nuts. The Iranian government is increasingly unpopular, but one only has to look at Saddam’s attack on Iran in 1980, which cemented Khomeni’s rule in Iran, to prove that wrong.
What’s at the core of his arguments is that the new Pentagon counter-insurgency doctrine places the Air Force in the position of being a service to be used at the digression of the ground forces, and this is not acceptable to the general officer corps of the USAF. (I noted that this attitude by the Air Force is why the British want US operations to end in their operational area of Afghanistan.
Blowing S%$# up just generates more insurgents.
A few days ago, a protype “smart radio” was sent to the FCC for testing. The idea behind such a system is that it can communicate adaptively in the “white space” between TV stations, opening up spectrum. It failed abysmally.
Well, Microsoft is now saying that they sent sent FCC a defective prototype.
So they are now saying that they are complete pratts who could not be bothered to send a working unit.
Normally, I don’t trust Microflaccid enough to throw them, but this time, it rings true to me.
It appears that the German Government has introduced language in their computer crime laws that makes computer security work illegal.
It literally makes certain Google searches illegal.
It appears that it criminalizes the most basic of computer security auditing tools, and a number of concerns. A number of German security operations have either shut up shop, or jumped across the border.
Matthew Yglesias has a very good comment on the lunacy of fashion copyrights. (I’ve talked about a bit earlier and called Chuck Schumer names).
On a loosely related note, if you’ve been to a bookstore lately at all you’ll notice there’s a remarkable vibrancy in the cookbook section as the popularity of things like the Food Network, Top Chef, etc., seems to be driving more chef-types into the public consciousness. Cookbooks, of course, can be copyrighted. But the actual recipes they contain can’t be. And one suspects that this non-copyrightable nature of the recipes is integral to the cookbook industry’s vibrancy. Without it, the bulk of the market would already be locked-down by older cookbooks, and to publish anything new you’d have to be prepared to lawyer up and fight off a thousand lawsuits alleging that your recipes are too derivative.
This is true, and applies everywhere. IP is public interest law, and it is a restriction on individual freedoms (not having IP does not prevent one from creating) and as such, these laws should be limited in scope.
There should be restrictions placed on IP only to the degree that there is reasonable proof that the public is receiving benefits in excess of the restrictions placed upon.
I would note that under the current US IP Regime, the works of Shakespeare would be lost forever (the folio that was found would still have been under copyright, and would not have been reprinted or preserved), and most of us would never have read Moby Dick (a failure when first published, and it only became recognized as a classic after Melville’s death, when it was reprinted because it had entered the public comain).
I highly recommend the Register, but sometimes I feel that I need a translator. Case in point: Chav-hunting toffs cop some flack | The Register.