: It has recently come to our attention that your website, : tor.at/resources/fun_stuff/www.attrition.org/gallery/other/tn/
: eat_mor_chikin.jpg.html>, includes a picture of the "EAT MOR CHIKIN" cows.
: This picture is an exact duplicate of CFA's U.S. copyright registration
: (Registration No. VA 760-668), and use of it is an unauthorized infringement
: of the CFA's intellectual property.

Oohh, your mail was going SO good until this part! But, unfortunately you "screwed the pooch" as the saying goes. Not only do you demonstrate you know jack and shit about how the Internet works, you prove that you are not legally competant to defend your client's intellectual property rights. If you feel you are competant, then you must be doing this to fraudently bill your client for additional wasted hours. Which is it, i'm curious?

This is a story i wrote this week about Pete the Porno Puppet, a truly bizarro PSA campaign that XXXchurch ("the #1 Christian porn site") launched -- it's an ad designed to convince parents to get rid of their porn stash so that children aren't exposed to it. The irony is that the anti-porn ad was filmed by smut peddler Jimmy D. Also, it's creepy as all getout.

Link to Newsweek story on XXXchurch

Update: you can buy these at the Container Store for $7 plus shipping

TT: Indeed, but are you doing that when you rent a movie from Blockbuster and you watch it at home? ... I run Linux on my computer. There’s no product I can buy that’s licensed to watch [DVDs]. If I go to Blockbuster and rent a movie and watch it, am I a bad person? Is that bad?

JV: No, you’re not a bad person. But you don’t have any right.

TT: But I rented the movie. Why should it be illegal?

JV: Well then, you have to get a machine that’s licensed to show it.

TT: Here’s one of these machines; it’s just not licensed.

[Winstein shows Valenti his six-line “qrpff” DVD descrambler.]

TT: If you type that in, it’ll let you watch movies.

JV: You designed this?

TT: Yes.

JV: Un-fucking-believable.

"You know what. Something stupid has happened. Cupido har been sensuratet for first time during 20 years because of your pictures :) I have told you before that we are not aloud to print pictures with genital touhing. Our law system sais you cant show pictures that can offend people, so i thougt that no boddy would be offended of this in an erotic magazine. I understand if they were printed in a newspaper or a womans magazin, but not ours.

"Our distributor dissagred with me the way they understand the law, so they put a black spot in the face of the girls sukking you, I belive. So I told the press. That you are a trendy New York phothografer with a girlfriend and that you have a good appetite for sex and that you like taking pictures of you doing it. I read this on Nerve.com I think. Hope you'r not angry at me for this. I was wear of that something like this could happen, so when it did, I tipsed one of the biggest and best tabloid newspaper in Norway, and they made a huge reportage on it telling people that you actually can take off the black spot. And it showed the stupid porn-law, as we call it, from a good perspectiv. Here is the link to the reportage in the newspaper. I'm the one with the dildoes."

Someone at b3ta found this XML list of obscenities on a website for women's deodorant (wtf?) and recommends that "any ambitious young swearers out there study it thoroughly"; we plan on using the term "chutney ferret" as much as possible from now on.

update: BoingBoing readers Dan and Aaron each wrote to point out that the XML list appears to be banned words -- the site offers a "make your own personalized t-shirt" thing. Dan says, "Try clicking on 'Prizes,' and then 'Design mantra T-shirt'. If you attempt to design a shirt with one of the phrases or words in the XML list, you will be chastized for using disallowed language. And how!"

Next: A warm welcome to our new guestblogger, Russ Kick, the author of several books, including The Disinformation Book of Lists: Subversive Facts and Hidden Information in Rapid-Fire Format and 50 Things You're Not Supposed to Know. Mr. Kick is also the editor of many anthologies, such as Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies; You Are Being Lied To: The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths; and Abuse Your Illusions: The Disinformation Guide to Media Mirages and Establishment Lies. He has also written articles and a column for the Village Voice.

The Memory Hole, a website devoted to rescuing knowledge and freeing information, is his labor of love. Russ first made the front page of the New York Times when he digitally uncensored a heavily-redacted Justice Department report. In April 2004, he posted 288 previously unseen photos of military coffins coming back from Iraq, which he had pried loose from the Air Force. This set off a worldwide media frenzy leading to the front pages of most major newspapers, heavy rotation on CNN, the lead story on network newscasts, and interviews on Good Morning America and CBS Evening News. You can browse through some of that extensive media coverage here, via Google News search. Yesterday, the Memory Hole published these graphic and disturbing screen captures from video footage documenting abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners by US military personnel. Related news here.

I have no doubt that Russ will indeed Kick it on the BoingBoing guestblog. Welcome!
Link

* kidnapped little boys [Ed. note: AHEM, cough cough]
* claimed to have lost somebody's deposit (probably an estate agent)
* are an incompetent physician or
* are a matchmaker

"For this, you are slapped with extreme thirst and hunger, soaked in ice, dipped in volcano, or forced to bathe in filthy blood."
Link

When you play a computer game, you interact with what is on your monitor, even if you're outside playing on a mobile phone. You don't interact with your physical environment. Now, computer scientists from Fraunhofer FIT want you to play outside, sharing the outdoor experience offered by children's games. NetAttack "is a new type of indoor/outdoor Augmented Reality game that makes the actual physical environment an inherent part of the game itself." In this game, two teams are fighting to destroy the central database of a virtual big company. Both teams have indoor players, who control the game from their laptop computers, and outdoor players, equipped with GPS receivers, trackers, sensors and video cameras.

i just compiled some conversations with Daniel van der Velden, an interesting graphic designer who initiated the conceptual (and hypothetical) identity proposal "Meta Haven: Sealand Identity Project". I think his work is one model for critical/smart graphic design... while also being fucking cool..

The letter states, among other things, that 1. We don't need to do this for the money; 2. We have no plans to run our business to satisfy Wall Street's need for smooth earnings predictability; 3. We plan to give no earnings guidance, not at least as it's understood on Wall St.; 4. Don't ask us to do so, we'll simply decline the request; 5. We'll do odd things that you won' t understand; 6. We will make big bets on things that may not work out; 7. We run the company as a triumvirate, so there will not be clear leadership from one person like most other companies; 8. We bridge the media and tech industries (interesting), which are in flux, so we've chosen a two-class stock structure similar to the NYT, WashPost, and NYT that helps us avoid being taken over by those forces; 9. We plan using an auction model, as it feels fairer and we understand auctions from AdWords; 10. Don't invest in us if this scares you at all, or the price feels too high; 11. Don't even think about asking us to cut expenses with regard to our employees; 12. We believe in the idea of Don't Be Evil; 13. It's evil to pay for placement or inclusion (a swipe at Yahoo); 14. We hope to bridge the digital divide through Gmail type free services and a foundation with at least 1% of profits and equity to help make the world a better place; 17. Betting on Google is a bet on Sergey and Larry (this was said multiple times, making me wonder if there wasn't some odd future blame being assigned here by the VCs or bankers); 18. This letter is our way of answering the questions we can't answer in the coming months due to the IPO quiet period.

Eusocial animals like ants, termites, bees, or naked mole rats, exhibit curious behaviour; their societies are stratified by role, with workers, warriors, and reproductive castes that may differ morphologically from one another. Humans aren't so obviously specialized, but if you consider our machines as part of our extended phenotype, it begins to look that way: if our machines become intentionally driven, and they're tailored to play different roles in our society, then you could argue that we occupy some kind of privileged position in a hive-relationship with tools that require our continued safety and comfort in order to further their own reproduction. There's nobody here in this hive but us queens, and the living machines we so carelessly manufacture as conveniences for our own comfort. Individual ants or other eusocial insect species all share the same genetic code, but different castes express radically different phenotypic traits, and indeed most ants are sterile workers who can only further their genetic traits by ensuring that their cousin, aunt or mother the hive-queen succeeds. Our machines don't share our genome (yet), but they share parts of the vast haze of information that has gathered around the genome, and they can only reproduce through us.

Sterling has his fingers on about a hundred different pulses in this book, which vibrates with fantastic in-jokes and insights from Bollywood to dot-bomb, from mil-spec gear-pigs to earnest cybercops. The story rockets along like a hijacked airliner heading straight at you, like a flash-worm compromising every unpatched Windows box on the net at once. I read it in one sitting, and I'll read it again before the month is out. Lots of books are called "thrillers" but very few are this thrilling.

So after one year and 70 million songs, $0.99 now buys you less rather than more -- seven hard burns instead of ten soft ones. What will Apple "allow" us to do with the music we "buy" next year? three burns? one? zero?

And what about the songs you've already bought? Don't we get to keep the rights we had before the change?

Well, Apple has conveniently reserved its rights to make changes -- unilaterially -- to its DRM and your ability to make fair use via its Terms of Service and Terms of Sale pretty much anytime it pleases, without even having to give you notice.

A very small number of the 1,130 malls in the United States have wireless access. But, she said, an increasing number are thinking of installing the capability.

For instance, Westfield America Trust said most of its 62 regional and super regional shopping centers will soon offer the service. Taubman, which owns or manages 31 malls, began offering Wi-Fi services yesterday at its The Shops at Willow Bend in Plano, Texas.

"If you look at malls in general, you are really seeing owners bring in things that allow for more people to come do a variety of things at the center," Duker said. "The mall has become more than a place to shop."

A few of us have been working overtime to get a little technology conference together in Los Angeles. We've tried to make LayerOne an event for both the geek set and the suit in IT and our roster of speakers can back those claims up. In fact, here's a sampling of four of our dozen speakers:

- Danny O'Brien will be rehashing his talk from Emerging Tech 2004 [a crowd favorite] about the work habits of alpha geeks.
- Jason Schultz from the EFF talking about the DMCA and how it's stifling innovation.
- USC professor Douglas Thomas covering the politics of code.
- Dan Kaminsky, author of network toolset Paketto Keiretsu cranking out some more code/theory that's bound to marvel and frighten.

Not bad, eh? There's eight more talks where those four came from. We're currently in the middle of early bird registration - where we're shaving $10 off the $50 door price. That's a weekend's worth of talks and a free beer social on Saturday night for $40.

[A] third adult performer, Jessica Dee, has also tested positive for HIV. Unlike Lara Roxx, who was just entering the business, Jessica has considerable video and photo experience under her belt. A search for her name at Ask Jolene turns up at least one photoset which seems to match the thumbnail photo of her in the AVN article; you can look that one up yourself if you're as morbidly curious as we were.

"Another Woman Who Worked with Darren James Tests HIV-Positive" (AVN)
"Jessica Dee Identified as Third HIV-Positive Performer" (AVN)
Jessica Dee (videography @ Search Extreme)

We sought some advice from a Melbourne barrister and contributor to these pages, Simon Minahan, who practises in the area of intellectual property. His opinion: "There's probably nothing to stop the individual from downloading this material for private use. For end users, the issue is a basic question relevant to acquiring a reproduction of any copyright work: has the rights owner consented?" Even if allofmp3.com's asserted licence is bogus, says Minahan, "the end user would seem to have a good basis to argue that he is an innocent infringer, which would mean he isn't liable to damages, although he would still be liable to an order requiring him to destroy or deliver up any copies and an order requiring him to refrain from doing it again."

These disposable cameras (about $5 dollars a pop) have a capacitor that can store up to 600 volts of stopping power. When the capacitor discharges those volts, it delivers an amperage comparable to stun guns. Perfect for our shocking device.

America's public enemy #1, radio-dude Howard Stern, made an off-hand remark on this morning's show -- he claims he writes a secret weblog. Stern said he writes as "another character" and that only "about 4 people are in on the joke." OK, he's almost certainly not Rance, who repeatedly claims to be an actor and not a fat guy eating Twinkies in his basement, laughing at a credulous, gossip-starved public.

If anyone out there has candidates for what might be Stern's secret blog, let us know -- if the blogger brags about hurling prosciutto at a stripper's ass, that might be a tip-off.

An America Online customer service rep illicitly surfs the company's customer database, ferrets out private data on celebrity members and then hunts them down online under a false identity, seeking fame and fortune in Hollywood.

Sound like a prelude to prison? Not in the case of Heather Robinson. The former AOL employee managed to parlay privacy violations into useful contacts in Hollywood. With the help of those contacts, Robinson, 25, landed a movie deal, and she's using her toehold in the industry to advance another.

Later this week, Universal Pictures will start filming Robinson's first movie, The Perfect Man, a romantic comedy staring Hillary Duff and Heather Locklear. The film is about a teenage daughter who tries to create a "nonexistent boyfriend for her dejected mother," Robinson said. The story is based on another of her youthful indiscretions when she was 16 -- this one involving a stolen credit card and thousands of dollars of purchases.

Some would say it takes Robinson's level of moxie to succeed in Hollywood. In fact, the favorite legend in the movie business is that of a hard-working kid who starts in the mail room and through ambition, flexible ethical standards and political skill becomes a mogul. Judging by her exploits so far, Robinson is well on her way.

"What's that? You say the program and host Barbara Walters have gone too far this time? What do you know about television? ABC knows a winner when it sees it and this is Nielsen gold, my friend. A reality show with a human life on the line -- all disguised as news programming.

Let the other shows have half-naked people betraying each other on a deserted island. Give them the half-naked people eating buckets of bug eyes. And the half-naked people putting up with Donald Trump. And the half-naked people trying to get other half-naked people to marry them."

UPDATE: Stop press! The real scandal here? Celebrity spoon-bending psychic Uri Geller is outraged at news of the 20/20 baby giveaway episode. He's planning legal action, and claims he owns a worldwide patent on any reality TV show that involves winning a baby. "I will speak to my patent attorney," says Geller, "I own the idea." Whatever, dear BoingBoing readers, but let me set the record straight: I own the patent on any reality-TV show involving live mudwrestling smackdowns between Uri Geller and Barbara Walters, and I will personally bend the spoon of anyone who forgets it. Link to Reuters story.

UPDATE 2: BoingBoing reader Kevin T. Keith says: "As a matter of fact, Uri Geller does hold a patent for a reality TV show that involves competing to adopt a baby. You can view the patent by going to the Patent and Trademark Office's Applications search page here and entering the phrase "in/geller-uri" (without quotation marks) in the large search window. The world gets weirder and weirder."

UPDATE 3: BoingBoing reader Marc Ascolese, who is a patent attorney, says -- more or less -- not so fast, mister spoonbender:

The link included above takes you to the search site for published U.S. patent applications (not issued patents). This does not mean that a U.S. Patent has been granted. Under certain circumstances, the USPTO requires applications to be published. In fact, if you go here, and enter the application number for Geller's patent application (09/757609) you can see some current status information. Basically, the application has not been examined yet. Because this application has been classified in U.S. Class 705, we can expect that it will be examined pretty rigorously. It may be a long time before Geller has an issued U.S. Patent he can enforce. Class 705 is where most "business method" type applications end up. For more about that, look here. Who said being a patent attorney was dull!

Single Southern Guy calls out the Operation Take One For The Country crew, claiming the whole thing is a hoax. Why? The radio station, DJs, and broadcast company involved in the interview transcribed on the OTOFTC site don't exist.

A few weeks ago, I read the post you guys made about MoblogUK, a creative commons licensed alternative to TextAmerica. I'd been searching for an alternative for awhile, so I was pretty excited to find it. After switching I wanted a way to get my images from TextAmerica over to the new site at MoblogUK, so I wrote this app to make the process easy. Besides parsing a TextAmerica moblog and sending the entries off to MoblogUK it can also save your TextAmerica entries locally in an XML/XSL format...in case you ever want to do that for some reason!

Crunch time is omnipresent, during which respondents work 65 to 80 hours a week.

The average crunch work week exceeds 80 hours 13% of the time.

Overtime is often uncompensated.

Spouses are likely to respond that "You work too much..." (61.5%); "You are always stressed out." (43.5%); "You don't make enough money." (35.6%)

Saying that shards of broken glass are razor sharp is an understatement. A shattered window contains thousands of incredibly sharp edges and dagger-like points. It takes almost no force for one of these points or edges to cause a laceration. However, people in movies routinely jump through plate glass windows without receiving a single scratch.

Broken glass has at least two mechanisms for slashing a person diving through a window: its weight and its inertia. First, large heavy shards of glass can fall like guillotines, slicing off body parts. Second, when a person jumps or, even worse, drives a motorcycle through a window, the shards of glass tend to stay in place due to their inertia. The only way to move them is to apply a force. If the person's body provides this force by pushing on the edge of a piece of glass, it can slice right through clothing, skin, and flesh. In the real world, jumping or driving through a plate glass window would be suicidal.

There are individuals who have accidentally fallen through windows without sustaining serious injuries. There are also people who have survived the Ebola virus. However, in both cases the odds are not particularly good.

Photostreams are a new way to share your photos on Flickr, on simple webpages where you control who sees what. All the photos you upload automatically go into your Photostream, but different viewers see different images, depending on their relationship to you.

How does it work?

* As always, you can make photos public or private. You can also restrict the viewing to people who you have tagged with a specific relationship ("only show this to friends or better").
* Public photos appear to everyone viewing your Photostream, but you can exclude any public photo if you'd like.
* You can also see the collected streams of your friends' photos at http://flickr.com/photos/friends/, and the latest public photos on Flickr at http://flickr.com/photos/.

A few years ago, it was fanciful to imagine a world where intellectual property owners - such as record companies, software owners, and publishers - were capable of invading the most sacred areas of the home in order to track, deter, and control uses of their products. Yet, today, strategies of copyright enforcement have rapidly multiplied, each strategy more invasive than the last. This new surveillance exposes the paradoxical nature of the Internet: It offers both the consumer and creator a seemingly endless capacity for human expression - a virtual marketplace of ideas - alongside an insurmountable array of capacities for panoptic surveillance. As a result, the Internet both enables and silences speech, often simultaneously.

This paradox, in turn, leads to the tension between privacy and intellectual property. Both areas of law face significant challenges because of technology's ever-expanding pace of development. Yet courts often exacerbate these challenges by sacrificing one area of law for the other, by eroding principles of informational privacy for the sake of unlimited control over intellectual property. Laws developed to address the problem of online piracy - in particular, the DMCA - have been unwittingly misplaced, inviting intellectual property owners to create private systems of copyright monitoring that I refer to as piracy surveillance. Piracy surveillance comprises extrajudicial methods of copyright enforcement that detect, deter, and control acts of consumer infringement.

Let it be noted that this is the first, last, and only piece of "Star Trek"-inspired porn we will ever feature here on Fleshbot; we're not big science fiction fans, but these sexy morph chicks were just too hot to pass up.

Naked Klingon Women (Geocities site - thanks Jay). See also: NudeTrek.com (AVS protected archive of alt.binaries.startrek.adult)

I went warflying yesterday with folks from DailyWireless.com, TomsHardware.com, HighspeedLA.com, and CNN. We took off on parallel runways and flew in formation throughout the flight. While the planes were next to each other, we set up an in-flight wireless network and did a videoconferencing session from plane-to-plane. WiFi in the sky! Additionally, we performed a wireless network survey during the flight and found about 4000 access points.

"This nascent field has three major goals: One, learn about life by building it, rather than by tearing it apart. Two, make genetic engineering worthy of its name--a discipline that continuously improves by standardizing its previous creations and recombining them to make new and more sophisticated systems. And three, stretch the boundaries of life and of machines until the two overlap to yield truly programmable organisms. Already TNT-detecting and artemisinin-producing microbes seem within reach. The current prototypes are relatively primitive, but the vision is undeniably grand: think of it as Life, version 2.0."

The new road markers have been developed by Shane Farritor, a roboticist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in a bid to help reduce the $100 billion per year that the Department of Transportation estimates is lost to the US economy through accidents and delays caused by highway lane closures.

The self-propelled markers take the form of robotic three-wheeled bases for the brightly coloured barrels that are set out to demarcate road repair zones. Farritor says they can open and close traffic lanes faster and more safely than humans.

The CUWiN project wants to allow self-forming, noncentralized, mesh-based Wi-Fi networks using standard, old PCs with no configuration. Slightly more advanced units could be ruggedized boxes using Compact Flash, but the basic unit would be a 486 or later PC with a bootable CD-ROM or bootable floppy that bootstraps a CD-ROM. Once booted, a unit finds other similar units without any other configuration or control and forms a mesh.

"We've been developing software now since about 2000, and our idea is to build software that is super user friendly, super easy for someone who doesn't understand the nuances of the technology or community wireless networking to set up their own system," said Meinrath. It's an attempt to enable community networking to spread beyond the folks who are self-starters.

Chicken Curry Salad. The recipe says “toss lightly,” but I suppose that depends on how much you eat and how bad the cramps get. The item in the middle is the Holiday Salad, although which holiday is best celebrated with tumor-studded Bruise Cake I’m not entirely certain. The item on the bottom is – well, steel yourself.

Corned Beef Salad Loaf.

I kid you not.

Meat Jell-O.

Which is a preamble to some of the best news I've ever imparted: Jim Kelly is releasing audiobooks of his stories on teh net under a Creative Commons license. I know what I'm gonna be listening to before bed and on the tube this month. Link

"In 1966, a Miami boy smuggled three Giant African Land Snails into the country. His grandmother eventually released them into a garden, and in seven years there were more than 18,000 of them. The eradication program took 10 years, according to the USDA."

After many hours of playing the game, he earned 140 million units of game money, which he spent buying a powerful sword from another player through an online trading platform provided by the operator in November.

On November 16, he found the sword had been deleted from his account. After contacting Optisp several times, he was told that the sword was deleted because it was illegally duplicated.

He is asking the court to order Optisp to give back his sword, which he estimates is worth 1,000 yuan (US$120) in real money, and apologize.

America has a long standing tradition of this sort of behavior, going at least as far back as WWII. Although the term "Charity Girl" is/was generally used in reference to women who had sex for gifts and/or fun, its also used in a more specific way. I found this via a9.com in "No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease' by Allan M. Brandt (p. 81):

Physicians and social workers frequently commented that the professional prostitute had given way to the so-called "patriotic prostitute" and "charity girl." As one CTCA social worker wrote: 'The peculiar charm and glamour which surrounds the man in uniform causes an unusual type of prostitute to spring up in time of war. Girls idealize the soldier and many really feel that nothing is wrong when done for him. One such girl said she had never sold herself to a civilian but felt she was doing her bit when she had been with eight soldiers in a night.' The "girl problem," as it became popularly known, seemed even more ominous to reformers than commercialized vice because it so often included youngsters from respectable, middle-class backgrounds. "Girls apparently of good families drive up in their cars and invite the soldiers who happen to be along the roadside near the camp to come to supper to a roadhouse or the nearest city," explained Dr. Jennie H. Harris. "The results are the usual ones."

I'm not a particular expert or even particularly interested in this field, its just that I remember reading about this in college and it always stuck with me as one of those "Aha" moments where you realize references to the "good old days" should be treated with large skepticism. My college read was "Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America" by John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman (p. 260-261):

The response of moral reformers points to the changes that had occurred since the previous generation. Whereas those of the First World War focused on the dangers of prostitution, by the 1940s it was the behavior of "amateur girls"--popularly known as khaki-wackies, victory girls, and good-time Charlottes--that concerned moralists.

Social networks have spawned a new form of spam that uses the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) message feature frequently found in this new genre of networks. Google's Orkut, a network of some 200,000 members, offers the ability to send messages to FOAFs. FOAF messages often contain conference promotions or job postings that, while low in volume, will one day require action on the part of network managers.

Buzznet will be hosting a Coachella Festival moblog that anyone can contribute to from the Polo Fields during this weekend's music & art festival. As always, it is easy to contribute just email photos and blog text to 'coachella@buzznet.com'. As long as everyone's cellphones work out there, this will be a very successful event. Last year AT&T worked fine for me. But i've heard that the networks get *very* busy late in the day. If only they had wi-fi too...

Also nice: the option for iChatAV-based support, and 30 day free trials.

Finally, there's a fit and finish here that makes it feel like something much more stable than a just-launched product, for example, Basecamp can be skinned to look like your internal website and you can reference it with custom URLs that don't contain any hint that your project is being hosted anywhere but your own site: as the marketing bumpf points out, this is the kind of thing that can give you appearance of really intimidating savviness to your clients. Link (Thanks, Jason!)

Mr Mrs Ms Miss Dr Herr Monsieur Hr Frau A V M Admiraal Admiral Air Cdre Air Commodore Air Marshal Air Vice Marshal Alderman Alhaji Ambassador Baron Barones Brig Brig Gen Brig General Brigadier Brigadier General Brother Canon Capt Captain Cardinal Cdr Chief Cik Cmdr Col Col Dr Colonel Commandant Commander Commissioner Commodore Comte Comtessa Congressman Conseiller Consul Conte Contessa Corporal Councillor Count Countess Crown Prince Crown Princess Dame Datin Dato Datuk Datuk Seri Deacon Deaconess Dean Dhr Dipl Ing Doctor Dott Dott sa Dr Dr Ing Dra Drs Embajador Embajadora En Encik Eng Eur Ing Exma Sra Exmo Sr F O Father First Lieutient First Officer Flt Lieut Flying Officer Fr Frau Fraulein Fru Gen Generaal General Governor Graaf Gravin Group Captain Grp Capt H E Dr H H H M H R H Hajah Haji Hajim Her Highness Her Majesty Herr High Chief His Highness His Holiness His Majesty Hon Hr Hra Ing Ir Jonkheer Judge Justice Khun Ying Kolonel Lady Lcda Lic Lieut Lieut Cdr Lieut Col Lieut Gen Lord M M L M R Madame Mademoiselle Maj Gen Major Master Mevrouw Miss Mlle Mme Monsieur Monsignor Mr Mrs Ms Mstr Nti Pastor President Prince Princess Princesse Prinses Prof Prof Dr Prof Sir Professor Puan Puan Sri Rabbi Rear Admiral Rev Rev Canon Rev Dr Rev Mother Reverend Rva Senator Sergeant Sheikh Sheikha Sig Sig na Sig ra Sir Sister Sqn Ldr Sr Sr D Sra Srta Sultan Tan Sri Tan Sri Dato Tengku Teuku Than Puying The Hon Dr The Hon Justice The Hon Miss The Hon Mr The Hon Mrs The Hon Ms The Hon Sir The Very Rev Toh Puan Tun Vice Admiral Viscount Viscountess Wg Cdr

Mr Ms Mrs Miss Dr 1sgt 1st Lt 2nd Lt Adm Baron Baroness Bishop Brig Gen Brother Cantor Capt Cardinal Cmdr Cmst Col Count Countess Cpl Cpo Dean Duchess Duke Elder Ens Father Fleet Adm General Governor Gysgt Hon Imam Judge Lady Lcpl Lord Lt Lt Cmdr Lt Col Lt Gen Lt Jg Ma Major Major Gen Mcpo Mgysgt Minister Monsignor Most Rev Mother Msgt Mstr Pastor Petty Off Pfc Po1 Po2 Po3 President Prince Prof Pvt Rabbi Rear Adm Rev Right Rev Scpo Senator Sfc Sgt Sgtmaj Sir Sister Smn Smn1 Smst Sp4 Sp5 Sp6 Sr Sra Srta Ssgt Swami Tech Sgt Very Rev Vice Adm

It's been massively refactored, all but rewritten, object-oriented, and usable as a CGI script, module, or indeed subclassed. Oh, and I'm afraid it's grown a bit, now weighing in at a massive 15K (slightly less, actually) ;-)

Mission Statement: To discretely provide US troops shipping out overseas with the most sensually pleasing departure possible.

OTOFTC is a movement of like-minded women (women predominantly as of right now) who have covertly organized into groups to frequent eating and drinking establishments near armed service bases where troops are preparing to ship out overseas, and take one for the country, so to speak. We are a virtual organization and have no official headquarters or charter. We believe US service men and women deserve our support and we are willing to make caring choices about making them happy.

Kelly here! WOW!! - The site is finally up and running. I guess the time had to come. This site means this organization's existence is no longer covert, but remember, our missions should still be.

UPDATE: There's some interesting social-sexual history behind this story. A BoingBoing reader writes in with background on "charity girls" from earlier wars: Link

From: Google:The following...items that must be removed from your site in order to continue advertising with Google AdWords:

Recall Bush - White T-shirt (with radio control on head)
Dumb and Dumber White T-shirt - Bush and Blair: The Movie
You're Fired - George W. Bush White T-shirt
Dump Cheney White T-shirt - "Halliburton" tattooed across head
Miserable Failure T-shirt - George W. Bush
Kerry sucks (too) - T-shirt"

In order to stay in business and continue advertising on Google we are moving all of our political merchandise to a separate website located at: FashionCriminal.com. If you find any offensive or negative merchandise on this website, please contact us immediately at: billw@ekay.com and we will transfer the items to the other website asap.

David Coplen, the state office's budget director, said he discovered that pizza delivery lists are one of the best sources such companies use to locate people. "There are literally millions of dollars of uncollected fines, fees and court costs out there," Coplen said. [...] Databases compiled by private companies and government agencies are a key tool for firms such as ACS, Coplen said, and "one of the databases they find to be most helpful are pizza delivery databases." "When you call to order a pizza, you usually give them your correct name, your correct address and your correct phone number," he said.

We've been deprived all these years. We've never seen Krusty the Clown popping his booty, Ronald McDonald never C-walked, and Bozo ... forget about it. He could probably barely do a jig, let alone shake his whole body like an enraged zombie from "28 Days Later."

Well, the dark ages are over. There's a group of California clowns doing the thang. We've gotten a potent dosage of clown dancing -- or krumping, as it's called -- in videos such as Missy Elliott's "I'm Really Hot" and the Black Eyed Peas "Hey Mama." Now the ringleader of the crunk circus act says the mainstream had better look out, because he's bringing more than balloons and giant shoes. The krumping era just may be upon us.

John Lombardi, at Ventana Research based in Tuscon, Arizona in the US, suspected that green tea might also provide be an effective compound for polishing magnetic read-write heads. This was because tannin, a chemical that gives tea and coffee a bitter taste, binds to certain ceramic and metal materials. It is this quality that causes it to stain teapots and mugs...

How would you feel about a person who thinks it is okay to grab your shirt and use it clean their eyeglasses? That's how arrogant our President is. During a commercial break on the David Letterman show, producer Maria Pope was on stage and discussing something with Letterman, and while she was standing there in front of Bush, George leaned forward, grabbed the back of her sweater and used it to clean his glasses.

The drawing that drew the most attention showed a man in what appeared to be Middle Eastern-style clothing, holding a rifle. He also was holding a stick with the oversize head of President Bush on it. The student said the head was enlarged because it was intended to be an effigy, Cravens said. The caption called for an end to the war in Iraq.

Looking like a cross between the Starship Enterprise and a jet engine, the Q BBQ can be carried around like a briefcase, but opens up Transformer-style to become a stylish, stand-alone, gas-powered grill. Crafted in durable steel, the Q uses inexpensive little propane tanks that fit right inside the grill. You'll get hours of cooking time from just one tank! It also has dual gas controls with a full range of temperatures, so you can sear burgers on one side of the grill and gently toast buns on the other, just by adjusting the flame.

Royal Mail's pricing structure has been in place for decades, and was inherited from a time when mail was sorted by hand...

Mr Dales said some customers would experience price rises and other price cuts, but the vast majority -- 74% -- would be unaffected by the proposed changes.

Available for rent in the Information Office, a Kidspotter ensures that parents can always find their children whenever necessary. On entering the park, the wristband is placed on the child's arm. If parents lose sight of their child, they can send an SMS message to the Kidspotter system during their entire visit. They will then automatically receive a return message stating the name of the park area and the map coordinate of their child's position in the park. On their special Kidspotter map of the park, parents can easily see where to find their child. The Kidspotter kit consists of a small wristband with a tiny sender, plus a special Kidspotter map of the park.

"We found out that when all 600,000 tips are in contact with an underlying surface the spider can produce an adhesive force of 170 times its own weight. That's like Spiderman clinging to the flat surface of a window on a building by his fingertips and toes only, whilst rescuing 170 adults who are hanging on to his back!"

...The total van der Waals force on the spider's feet is very strong, but it is the sum of many very small forces on each molecule. The researchers believe the spider lifts its leg so that the setules are lifted successively, not all at once, and it does not need to be very strong to do this. All you would have to do to lift a future kind of Post-it® note is peel it off slowly.

A long lost jukebox owned by John Lennon has revealed that, when it came to musical inspiration, even the Beatles got by with a little help from their friends.

The 15 kg [Swiss-made KB Discomatic]  portable jukebox, owned by Lennon around 40 years ago, was bought by the late Bristol music promoter John Midwinter for just £2,500 at a Christie's sale of Beatles memorabilia in 1989. He then spent years restoring it to working order and researching its 41 discs. Listed in Lennon's handwriting, they are effectively the Desert Island Discs which helped shape his musical genius.

[...]

Artists featured on the jukebox include the Animals, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Smokey Robinson and Gene Vincent. There are no Beatles records and only one sung by a woman, Fontella Bass's 'Rescue Me'. In Lennon's rough and ready scrawl, with gaps and crossings out, The Lovin' Spoonful become 'The Lovin's Spoonfuls' and Otis Redding is 'Ottis Redding'.

Update: Jay Maynard "on being an Internet phenomenon." Link (Thanks, George!)

They suggest there are two basic types of choosers, Maximizers and Satisficers. The former aim to make the best possible choice in a near obsessive way, the latter tend to settle for 'good enough'. Maximizers spend a long time shopping, can't make up their minds what to buy for a gift, channel surf like a cokehead searching through the rug for fallen powder...

Maximizers in particular are prone to unhappiness in our society--there are too many choices, just too damn much input in general, and they can't deal with it. Satisficers are having a hard time too; they tend to go to lower stress options--and those are harder to find. But they're less likely to be depressed and suicidal.

Even when the movie was shown at Slamdance, the filmmakers had not obtained permission to use archival concert footage and music from the Ramones and other bands. They had also never gotten the Ramones to sign releases for their interviews, which took more than three years to conduct. ... The film's release has been further complicated by the filmmakers' financial situation. By the time the film was presented at Slamdance, Mr. Gramaglia and his brother, John, a producer, had amassed a debt of about $65,000 in production expenses. They owed Chinagraph, an editing house, another $150,000 and they estimated they would have to spend several hundred thousand dollars more to secure the rights to music and concert footage.

It has been widely accepted that the rival interpretations of quantum mechanics, e.g., the Copenhagen Interpretation, the Many-Worlds Interpretation, and my father John Cramer's Transactional Interpretation, cannot be distinguished or falsified by experiment, because the experimental predictions come from the formalism that all such interpretations describe. However, the Afshar Experiment demonstrates in an interaction-free way that there is a loophole in this logic: if the interpretation is inconsistent with the formalism, then it can be falsified. In particular, the Afshar Experiment falsifies the Copenhagen Interpretation, which requires the absence of interference in a particle-type measurement. It also falsifies the Many-Worlds Interpretation which tells us to expect no interference between "worlds" that are physically distinguishable, e.g., that correspond to the photon's passage through one pinhole or the other.

"So, before i got let go, we had our weekly marketing meeting yesterday. They brought in a psychic person and everyone joined hands and did a seance... I'm not kidding, even if I wasn't fired I wanted to quit on the spot."

When I saw loopy had released a SNES emulator I thought it was great! There were some limitations because of GBA processing speed, so we came up with a design to successfully overclock the GBA that is compatible with flash carts (so far - read on). We've already sent a prototype of our design for loopy to test with and he has had success with his Flash Advance Turbo 128, and we have successfully tested on our Flash2Advance 256. Unfortunately, though, it looks like different brands of Flash carts are reacting slightly differently to the Acceleration, so this is where we want to ask the community for their help. We want to test with all flash cart brands out there so we can finalize our design to be compatible with as many carts as possible.

As a follow-up to our last project, the Jay-Z Construction Set, Scary Sherman and I decided to take a fair & balanced route by highlighting one of the positive moves made recently by music industry leaders.

The RIAA-Mix Vol.1 is a compilation of the hottest underground remixes of top40 hit tracks produced by the upcoming talent at Overpeer. These homages to 20th century noise artists and avant composers pull a frightening bait and switch on listeners veering wildly from recognizable pop hooks to jarring digital distortion.

Available at riaamix.com as downloadable mp3s, streaming flash audio, or on a compact disc, we're hoping our compilation can help support the arrival of challenging new music to mainstream exposure.

"This shows the increase in the past 20 years is almost exclusively carbohydrates and certainly corn syrup consumption has increased dramatically."

Gross said he was not "picking on the corn syrup industry," but added, "It is hard to ignore the fact that 20 percent of our carbohydrates are coming from corn syrup -- 10 percent of our total calories."

"When you pour the milk in and the cream hits, it's just like a blank canvas on which to paint," the 36-year old said. Mr Phillips and fiancee Bernadette Farrugia started Flavors of Lakhoum in Swan St five years ago and he dabbled with the idea while pouring coffee.

"Sometimes you see swirls and patterns when you're pouring the coffee in, and one day I was pouring it and I saw an eye appear," he said. "From there I just drew in a mouth and ears. I've been slowly practising since then, but have got pretty good in the last few months - every month I find ways to add more detail."