Seeing new things

Today I got to see something I haven't seen in a while.. & something I'm unlikely to see again.. my desktop.

Tony Skypano

Skype accused of being mafia-like. I'm not really familiar with RICO statutes. The statutes will be familiar to any Soprano fan. At first glance it seems like Morpheus is attempting to sue under Section 1962(b) of the act, a section that makes it illegal to acquire an enterprise through a pattern of racketeering.

In Skype's case racketeering would represent kicking a number of Morpheus users off its networks, not allowing Morpheus first-right-of-refusal to buy the technology, and thus allowing eBay to acquire Skype.

But again, I haven't read any of the briefs so.... it's basically like commenting based on a google search of RICO .

Hat tip: Patrick Bridgman

Chinese on Crack

That's the only explanation for this reaction by Chinese students. Chinese Students are saying that dressing Mao Zedong up in a frock is akin to the Mohammed cartoons. And THAT, I kid you not, is their argument for censorship.

So.. what are they saying? That the cover would be fit to appear in the Dominion Post like the Mohammed cartoons did? The Mohammed cartoons violated a sacred rule of Islam that the Prophet should not be depicted in graphical form. Doing so was akin to showing a picture of the Pope sodomizing a little boy. I think a picture making fun of one of the undenied dictators & murderers of our time falls a little short of this..

But enough with the catholic imagery!:

"[Mao] is the father of China - without Mao, there is no China."

Without him, there would have been no cultural revolution either... Even right-wing fascist Chiang Kaishek managed to do a better job..

"Mao gave us independence. He's no more a killer than George Washington or George W Bush."

Author Jung Chang and Historian Jon Halliday gave Mao Zedong the dubious honour of greatest peacetime murderer of all time (70 million people killed). George Bush, eat your heart out.

Hat tip: David Farrar.

NZ in a nutshell

Just received an email update about Australs 2006 containing a summary of New Zealand's policies & politics:

An A-Z guide to NZ, containing information about smoking (basically nowhere), alcohol (encouraged), drugs (a big no-no), bringing food/foliage/disease ridden into NZ (punishments start at instant $200 fines and go up), being nuclear free (go us), prostitution (legal),weather (crap), politics (socialist), electricity (we have it), currency (ditto), etc....

Nintendo's Back!

Forget how bad the name is, the experience looks like it's one to salivate for.. at least if the 6 hour queues are anything to go by!

Meanwhile, if you want to buy a PS3 prepare to mortgage your home! SONY is going to put a US$500 price tag on the PS3. NZ Consumers can therefore expect to pay close to NZ$1000 (given that in the same article the US price for the XBOX 360 is quoted as being US$399 & it is retailing at NZ$720) . And that doesn't include the $1000 you'll need to spend to buy a high definition TV just so you can see your original $1000 at work!

Suddenly buying a top of the line PC just to play video games doesn't sound like such a bad proposition....

Update: Herald confirms the NZ price tag for a PS3 with the bells & whistles is actually $1200 (which is more than I predicted).. the author of the Herald article also says something I've been wanting to say for a long time: "If I see another World War II shooter I'm going to take up arms myself". Take note Activision!

Busted!

Largest database of domestic phonecalls ever assembled. Even the economy can't save you now!

The system is based on pattern recognition. For example, intelligence services will say that a terrorist is likely to call Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. Thus, a person who makes a phone call to all of these three places will be flagged. This would appear to be a form of data mining, which is not illegal under US law and doesn't require a FISA warrant. What is unclear is where the intelligence services went after the flagging, i.e. did they automatically listen to the person's phonecall or did they request a warrant?

The announcement has some interesting implications:

* ECHELON clearly isn't being used for domestic spying. Otherwise why would the NSA need phone records when it could just capture phone conversations via ECHELON? This would seem to reinforce US comments made during the nuclear ships debacle, that ECHELON countries have a convention that they do not spy on one another (one presumes that this means ECHELON countries also do not use ECHELON to spy on themselves..)

* The NSA wiretap fraud is not as bad as first thought, in some ways this system is more just. It is, as far as we can tell, based purely on behaviour. However, Americans are likely to be more shocked by this as it's is not just faceless Arabs who are having their data mined but white people as well. Thus the wiretaps violate an unspoken US rule: It's always OK to violate civil liberties for the common good as long as they're not your own.

TrueBS

The product of New Zealand's worst export of all time (reality tv for the pop music industry) is back in the headlines. It's been a while since TrueBliss was even referred to in the press, but they're here now in a list of the worst NZ songs of all time.

Still, TrueBliss did create SOME positive things. One was Joe Cotton's weight loss. Her 'shapely' figure was a source of continual mockery amongst 15 year old testerone-filled and brain-deficient males like myself (e.g. names like 'Fat Spice', questions like "how the f**** did she get picked over that hot redhead, and OMG no wonder Burger King is sponsoring TrueBliss) but boy did she manage a turn around, going from this (she's the 2nd from the left) to THIS!

Carly Binding was another, I can't remember ever having heard her music but I have heard her name on the radio an awful lot so I assume she's good & famous in a pop kind of a way.

Get a Mac - Watch The TV Ads

Mac goes on the offensive.

iLove it. iWant one.

Update: Maybe iSpoke too soon. Mac possibly needs to pull THIS ad...

Beautiful

Bond's new car: Aston Martin DBS. If this isn't enough of an incentive for Daniel Craig to learn how to drive a manual car I don't know what is...

This guy's STILL defence secretary?

"We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

- Donald Rumsfeld commenting on the location of the vast ever-elusive Iraqi WMD arsenal.

Hat tip: Crooks and Liars

Moussaoui's greatest hits

From the 9-11 Commission report:

[Moussaoui] had begun flight lessons at Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma. He resumed his training at the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, Minnesota, starting on August 13. He had none of the usual qualifications for flight training on Pan Am's Boeing 747 flight simulators. He said he did not intend to become a commercial pilot but wanted the trainign as an 'ego boosting thing'. Moussaoui stood out because with little knowledge of flying he wanted to learn how to "take off and land" a Boeing 747

What an idiot. This hijacker could have reasonably thought he would be asked why he wanted to practice in a 747 simulator... & despite having had all that time to think of an excuse 'ego boosting' was the best he could come up with!

If Moussaou was an idiot he made an even bigger idiot out of US law before 9-11:

The agents in Minnesota were concerned that the U.S.Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis would find insufficient probable cause of a crime to obtain a criminal warrant to search Moussaoui’s laptop computer. Agents at FBI headquarters believed there was insufficient probable cause. Minneapolis therefore sought a special warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to conduct the search (we introduced FISA in chapter 3).

To do so, however, the FBI needed to demonstrate probable cause that Moussaoui was an agent of a foreign power, a demonstration that was not required to obtain a criminal warrant but was a statutory requirement for a FISA warrant. The case agent did not have sufficient information to connect Moussaoui to a “foreign power,”so he reached out for help,in the United States and overseas.

......

the French provided information that made a connection between Moussaoui and a rebel leader in Chechnya,Ibn al Khattab.This set off a spirited debate between the Minneapolis Field Office, FBI headquarters,and the CIA as to whether the Chechen rebels and Khattab were sufficiently associated with a terrorist organization to constitute a “foreign power”for purposes of the FISA statute.FBI headquarters did not believe this was good enough, and its National Security Law Unit declined to submit a FISA application

So basically, they knew he was a terrorist. There was a law (FISA) which allowed spying on foreign agents inside the US but, alas because Moussaoui was a freelance islamist terrorist he wasn't a spy for any particular foreign power and therefore couldn't be spied on.

If Moussaoui made an idiot out of himself, he surely made a bigger idiot out of the US Federal government.

Moussaoui 4 Life

Moussaoui isn't going to get that chance to fly that Jumbo Jet after all, he has been convicted (surprise, surprise) and sentenced to life in prison. The castration brigade (i.e. Right wing blogosphere) is calling for his head. I can think of worse fates, and life in an American prison with a whole heap of American inmates & prison guards who hate you & have a history of raping people ranks pretty highly among them.

It's good that Moussaoui is a Muslim, because so few places in the West stock halal food he'll be used to eating vegetarian meals such as... oh I don't know... tossed salad :)

He'll be getting a lot of that in prison!

Give Craig a Chance!

The new Bond trailer has been released and it looks amazing! I can't believe it, but they seem to have done it. The trailer indicates that they actually seem to have created a grittier, more authentic Bond! Not only that, but they don't seem to have skimped out on the effects!

Ironically for a movie that sums up everything that is both British and cool, the trailer and first poster were both first released in FRENCH!

Check it out here:



Hopefully it'll put a stop to these people.

I will say one negative thing. I did get a sense that Daniel Craig's looks were significantly different from any of the other Bonds.. to the point that if the 007 music & Judi Dench hadn't been blaring in the background I might have thought this was another one of Daniel Craig's UK gangster/drug dealer/psycopath movies (Egotastic also testifies to the Bond-ifying effect of the 007 music). Having said that, I think such a character might be needed. The Bond of the 21st Century needs to be one who is more of a badass and less of a cheeky english pretty boy.

Emperor Patrick

We always knew Patch was Asian. However, not only is he Asian, but he is a regular Asian secret agent, assuming many different Asian identities and aliases!:

Emperor Patch and Empress Jessica:













Confucious Patrick:


For more of Patrick's secret adventures click here :)

Procrastination is a blog's best friend

Wanda recognises that procrastination is a blog's best friend, something I've been saying for years now!

Plus.. MORE COMIC BOOK MOVIES!! Only two to really get excited about though: Iron Man & Captain America. Captain America's time has possible passed however.. I can't imagine these guys reacting particularly well to him.. nor anybody else in the world for that matter..

More exciting than the mere prospect of an Iron Man movie is the fact that it's going to be directed by JON FAVERAU. Swingers is one of my all time favourite movies (and I have no idea how I lived without it!). Jon also made one of the funniest cameo appearances EVER on The Sopranos. Plus, let's not forget that he singlehandedly saved Daredevil from becoming as bad as every other Ben Affleck movie.

Thank your honours that that's over!

Finished my mooting semi-final! Pheeeewww!!! I totally screwed up... but I guess that means I have absolutely nothing to worry about viz-a-viz having to prepare for the finals!

I can finally focus on more important things, and what could be more important than...

MOVIES!

On your ipod for starters.. Steve Jobs is asking SONY to release movies on the video iPOD. Speculation is that they'll be added onto the Blu-Ray disc of the movie... now THAT's a sensible idea. If you ever watch a movie on the move, it's because you've normally already seen it on a decent sized television or cinema screen and just want to kill some time by watching a favourite movie. People don't want to pay EXTRA for the privilege of watching a movie on a small handheld screen.. and if they do, they definitely don't want to pay DVD prices for the privilege! If only SONY had applied the same logic to it's next-to-useless-but-way-more-pricey UMD format...

Speaking of Blu-Ray, the critic's reaction to its rival (HD-DVD) has been reminiscent of everyone's reaction to the XBOX 360. Namely, it's OK for those of us who have high definition TVs, but will make no difference to the 99% of us who don't.
Hat Tip: LIBERTAS.

And to make this sound less like a tech post...James Cameron is proposing 3D Movies as a way for cinemas to increase their revenues. As long as he's not proposing a sequel to 'Titanic' I am more than happy to listen to him! Actually, I have to say.. I kind of miss them (3D movies that is.. definitely NOT Titanic). I don't get why they don't show more of them. To my surprise I bumped into someone who has NEVER seen a 3D movie before. NEVER. I was stunned.. it wasn't that long ago that we all had IMAX fever & were watching that 3D episode of 3rd Rock from the Sun. Perhaps it is time for a 3D renaissance. I went to help my 3D-deprived friend buy 3D classes for the Miracle episode. Lo and behold, Shell was all sold out. The only Shell station in H-town that had one was Frankton, and that was probably because it was in Frankton.

Mum... can I wii?

Nintendo has finally revealed the name of its new console.... Wii. In other words, it's Wi-Fi minus the F (get it, "it's Wi-Fi -F").

Nintendo's stated reasoning is that Wii is 'we' phonetically. I'll take their word for it, though I have a sneaking suspicion that Wii might phonetically translate into 'Wee' (as in urination). It also apparently represents the remote-control-style controllers & two people getting together and 'playing'.

Seems like Nintendo has gone completely abstract with its naming system, not to mention insane.

GameDevBlogger is full of praises for the new name. I am considerably less so.What was wrong with the Revolution? After all, in plain english that's kind of what the new console represents.

Having said that, weirdly named crap seems to sell well in Japan so maybe that's the market they're aiming for.

Don't worry, I'm still going to buy it.

When does a blog stop being a blog & become a procrastination tool

I'm contemplating whether writing a blog entry whilst I have 3 assignments due is such a wise course of action...

Bush is good comedian

Anybody who's ever seen one of Bush's press conferences knows what great comedy they are. Further proof that Bush would have made a fine comedian comes via Hot Air.

Michelle draws the conclusion that the Colbert is unfunny. One could equally say that Bush's administration is more farcical than a Monty Python episode. Bush would have made SUCH a good comedian...if he wasn't doing all of this stuff for real...