The commission's report found that the hijackers had repeatedly broken the law in entering the United States, that Mr. bin Laden may have micromanaged the attacks but did not pay for them, that intelligence agencies had considered the threat of suicide hijackings, and that Mr. Bush received an August 2001 briefing on evidence of continuing domestic terrorist threats from Al Qaeda.

BoingBoing reader JohnD says, "Its low budget, virtually no action for the first half, then it gets as intense and exciting as you could want it too, despite the rudimentary story," and reader Garrett Gee says, "Fight sequences were great, it made me want to train again."

Link to Quicktime trailer, and Link to the movie website. Link to the company that holds the copyright. Link to IMDB details, Link to alternate French site. (via Warren, thanks for the update Tanner, and thanks very much to Joi Ito for the kind translation assist! )

Update: BoingBoing reader mediamelt says, "You seriously need to check out the trailer for Born to Fight, the latest from the director and fight choreographer of Ong Bak. Some seriously insane stunts here. Watch for the truck scene, I hope that stuntman got a huge bonus! BTW: Ong Bak's plot is so-so, but the stunts are nothing short of revolutionary. You can purchase a region-free DVD of the film here (same place I got my copy)."

Update 2: Reader Jon Silpayamanant says, "There is another French site that you might be interested in as it has a download section where you can get "The Making of Ong-Bak": Link. The reason, as I mention in my blog post, that France had already been distributing the film for several months is because of Luc Besson. There's a little blurb about how the Thai director, Prachya Pinkaew, left a little message to Besson in Ong-Bak in the French site."

A site called TV-whores with a theme and intentions that are very clear, contains the following text: Girls from 13 - 19 years of age: earn thousands of pesos simply by taking photographs. More information here. (...)

The page in question offers thousands of pesos to 13-19-year-old girls for taking digital photos. You don't have to be naked, you can be in a bikini or underwear, it says... but it's more than suspicious."

# on February 5th, you told your viewers that "Glick was out of control." He may have been out of your control. But you and our government have got to learn that just because someone disagrees with you, he doesn"t become a security threat. Again, watch the interview, Mr. O"Reilly. He was not "out of control."

# on February 5th, you told your viewers that Glick was "spewing hatred for this program." Watch the interview, Mr. O"Reilly. He criticized you, not the program, for unethically using sympathy for the 9/11 victims for your own political ends. He was calling your behavior improper. You had not earned his hatred.

What percentage of sites do you visit that require registration?

What percentage would you be comfortable with?...

Would you be willing to have an RFID chip inserted under your skin in exchange for a free, 12 month newspaper subscription?

What if we told you that you couldn't access news unless you agreed?

FCD has just put up a Wiki for gathering and organising materials related to its campaigns -- it's the right place to go to get started if you want to pitch in. Link

I just revisited the site and gosh, there's been a lot of good stuff posted since I last stopped by (there's an RSS feed for new titles that I've just added to my newsreader): classic stories and essays by Twain, Jack London, L Frank Baum, O Henry; poetry by Walt Whitman; political speeches and essays by Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass... My cup runneth over.

And there's good karma at Telltale: after five years or 100,000 downloads, TTW will release each track into the public domain under a CC license; also, partial proceeds from Ogg downloads are donated to the Xiph Foundation, who support Ogg development. Link

Where it happened: Franklin, TN

Total bill / Tip amount / Percentage: $75.76 / $4.24 / 5%

What happened: Barely squeezing into their chairs, they immediately whip out their two free appetizer coupons and proceed to order the largest appetizers possible. They then order the largest portions on the menu, request numerous favors and have me box up the last little scraps that they can't cram down their gullets into 6 separate containers. Then with a patronizing tone they tell me that I can keep the change.

"(The fabric will be useful for) military people, or travelers, people who go hiking, who don't have a lot of water and time to wash their clothes," he said. "This is a very good idea because then if the clothes get dirty, the dirt can be decomposed by the fabric itself. So after a few days in the sunshine, or even indoor light, the dirt will disappear."

The FCC rule doesn’t suddenly make all antennas legal for all systems. Instead, they have chosen a clever middle ground. For new devices—or, presumably for recertification of old devices—manufacturers will be allowed to test the system with high-gain antennas of each major type, like omni, patch, yagi, and so forth. Once the device is certified, the manufacturer can release the characteristics of the antennas they tested for both their in-band and out-of-band signal patterns and strengths. (Out-of-band transmissions are the inevitable but not intentional frequencies that are broadcast on at typically very low levels due to harmonics and other technical radio issues.)

"The music of Ergo Phizmiz combines sampling and electronics with acoustic instrumentation, plundering the history of popular and classical culture into a Dadaist assault on the senses. Equally at home in the three-minute pop-song as in long, drawn out sound-collages, the sound of Phizmiz comes somewhere between cartoon-music, experimental classical, pop, Gamelan and hip-hop."

Yesterday, Marybeth Peters, the head of the US Copyright Office, testified before the Senate regarding the INDUCE Act. Her testimony was even more radical than the RIAA's. Not only did she (inappropriately) explain what outcome the Appeals Court in the Grokster case should reach and argue (wrongly) that the INDUCE Act wouldn't have a chilling effect on innovation, she actually said she thought the INDUCE Act was not enough. The Register of Copyrights argued that the Betamax decision, which made VCRs legal, should be overturned by Congress. Wow.

We made International news last week when our team found the shipwreck of the rare U-215, a U-Boat that was on a secret mission to mine Boston Harbor when it decided to disobey orders and sink an American liberty ship in July 1942. That action lead to a watery grave for 48 German sailors, and 10 more who went down on the Alexander Macomb.

During the whole dive I was blogging the event from shore, keeping in touch by satellite phone. Unfortunately our website, Shipwreck Central, wasn't ready to go online so I was left to ponder the question of "if a blogger blogs in the woods..."

It's 5:30 AM here in Halifax and I'm back at home having a Wi-Fi beer on the porch. A couple of hours ago we opened up the site for a 'soft launch'. We're pretty happy with it, it's like the IMDB of shipwrecks with a kick-ass map interface, and best of all we've made our audio and video available under a Creative Commons license. I can't wait to hear live from the dive audio mixed in with some downtempo-ambient... it goes quite well from my experience.

I'm really excited about this, not just because it's a way of getting my stuff out into the world, but because - to my knowledge - this is the first time this has been done in Canadian poetry. Coach House Press releases electronic editions of their author's work but retains copyright. Also the fact that this is audio, and thus open to extensive remixing and incorporation into larger, multimedia projects, is very cool.

But now that the studios have chased the TiVo competitors out of the market, they're turning on their pet PVR. TiVo wants to deliver a product that will allow you to share your programming among no more than 10 sets -- this isn't the indiscriminate sharing that the Broadcast Flag advocates said they feared: this is heaily DRMed, controlled and modest sharing.

And the Studios and the NFL don't like it. So they're demanding that FCC order TiVo to disable this feature. Link

The camera used to take this picture is a Canon S1 IS, a 3-megapixel device that has a 10x optical zoom, interchangeable lenses, and uses four AA batteries. Using 2200 milliamphere hour (mAh) batteries recently, I took 500 photos and movies over the course of a month before swapping out another set and recharging. The camera does 640 by 480, 30 frame per second mono-audio video up to the size of the memory card on top of its anti-jitter-motor photos.

Finally, I always carry a 12-foot extension cord with multiple plugs on the end, and the alternative two-prong adapter for my Apple power supply. You never know how many friends you have until you have extra outlets.

The Continental head said he doesn't know exactly when "Doonesbury" will leave the package; he's currently polling clients to see if they want to replace it with "Agnes," "Get Fuzzy," "Pickles," "Zits," or another comic.

Update: Phil Gyford sez, "Some time ago I knocked up an RSS feed that links to the latest Doonesbury strips (unlike the RSS feed that used to display the actual strips and was told to quit by Ucomics)."

Spintronics is a field of nanotechnology that uses the directional spin of electrons to indicate the "1s" and "0s" of binary computation...MRAM, short for Magneto Resistive Random Access Memory, is the furthest along of several nascent spintronics nanotechnologies. MRAM is likely to play a major role in portable memory in the upcoming years, because it combines many of the benefits (and very few of the disadvantages) of hard drives, flash memory, SRAM and DRAM.

"After being released from its film duties, KITT found its way into the show circuit by promoting many Budweiser World of Wheels car shows for a number of years. After its tour of duty, the car was in need of restoration and in 2001 the owner approached Mark Scrivani of Mark's Custom Kits to restore the vehicle. The original, futuristic dash built by universal would only illuminate and was not intended to be functional; the owner commissioned Scrivani to make the dash fully functional, thus, the various non-functioning consoles were removed, cleaned up and made functional with pushable buttons, sound and visual effects. The dash received fully operational gauges and instruments, as well as an in-car camera tied into one of the two dash-mounted LCD monitors. The other monitor is wired into a trunk-mounted VCR for running and viewing tapes for future car show use. The original scanner mounted in the front of the vehicle was restored and functions properly. The scanner sound effect is also added to external speakers so it can be heard while the scanner is running. Besides the original Universal registration, the car comes with the original stamped steel "KNIGHT" license plate..."

At least 13 relatives of Osama bin Laden, accompanied by bodyguards and associates, were allowed to leave the United States on a chartered flight eight days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a passenger manifest released yesterday. One passenger, Omar Awad bin Laden, a nephew of the al Qaeda leader, had been investigated by the FBI because he had lived with Abdullah bin Laden, a leader of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, which the FBI suspected of being a terrorist organization.

The passenger list was made public by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who obtained the manifest from officials at Boston's Logan International Airport. Lautenberg's office was given the document in recent weeks and released it before today's issuance of the final report of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. Although much was already known about the "bin Laden flight," Lautenberg provided additional details, including the information that the plane, a 727 owned by DB Air and operated by Ryan International, began its flight in Los Angeles and made stops in Orlando, Dulles International Airport and Boston before continuing to Gander, Newfoundland; Paris; Geneva; and Jiddah, Saudi Arabia. The aircraft, tail number N521DB, has been chartered frequently by the White House for the press corps traveling with President Bush. (...)

"The Saudi Embassy offered to pay more money if our crew had a concern," [Ron Ryan of Ryan International] said. But he said all were reassured because "the FBI and Secret Service were heavily involved. They were in abundance every place we were."

Update: BoingBoing reader Ken says, "Here's the aircraft's website run by the charter company. They fled in style. Link"
[Ed: image above grabbed from this online photo tour of transcontinental luxury service model N521DB, described on charter company DB Air's website as a "club room in the sky." ]

And Vidiot says, "Besides the White House press corps and the bin Ladens, N521DB has also flown Fleetwood Mac, the Rolling Stones, and the Baltimore Orioles...here are pix of it at various airports: Link"

"So don't talk to me about piracy. It's not the pirates that have ripped us off of hundreds of thousands in lost royalties. It's been "Real businesses" doing that thank you very much. The position of royalty eating parasite has already been taken."...

"So yea, tell me again how I need to put some dongle or whatever on my game to keep 15 year olds from pirating? When our contract with publishers forces them to wear a shock collar that I can press a button to shock them if royalties aren't paid on time then we'll talk about forcing customers to deal with massive copy protection. But it's not the pirates I worry about."

We talked briefly about The Tiki Room, about John Hench and Rolly Crump, and he confirmed the rehab, the roof being in particularly bad shape, and that the birds need a pretty extensive rehab.

'They used to bring the birds up to Imagineering and we'd refurbish them. Now, they do them here, and not often enough,' he said.

The Cast Member who introduced the show did an excellent job, she just did the spiel with enthusiasm and professionalism.

As we were walking out, I walked past Marty Sklar and he said 'It's still a good show isn't it?'

** you hack monster for 80pts of damage
** you hack monster for 100pts of damage
>monster: did you know you can get 'monster' discounts at QuickieMart
** you hack monster for 10pts of damage
* you have killed monster
* you gain 1000XP
>would you like to convert these to 1 QuickieMart loyalty point (Y/N)

"We consider it a very flawed study," says Matt Phillips, a BPI spokesperson. Both the BPI and the International Federation for the Phonographic Industries (IFPI) have criticised the study for including the Christmas period when people are buying CDs as gifts.

"It's very straightforward to address these kinds of criticisms," says Strumpf. "We got rid of the Christmas season and just looked at the first half of our data. We still find the same effect."...

"Over the period 1999 to 2003, DVD prices fell by 25% and the price of players fell in the US from over $1,000 to almost nothing," says Strumpf. "At the same time, CD prices went up by 10%. Combined DVD and VHS tape sales went up by 500m, while CD sales fell by 200m, so a possible explanation is that people were spending on DVDs instead of CDs."

"It has to be the right job in the first place, the right explosive, the right pattern of laying the charges, and sometimes, which sounds odd, the right repairs to bring it down as we want, so no one or no other structure is harmed. And by differentially controlling the velocity of failure in different parts of the structure, you can make it walk, you can make it spin, you can make it dance."

"I go to church whenever I get a chance, but I'm not a spiritual person. I do believe, especially now," a resident said after seeing the window.

The U.S. Government Printing Office offers hard copy, if you prefer. Ask for stock number 041-015-00236-8. This will cost $8.50 plus $4.75 for shipping, (total = $13.25), checks and most major credit cards accepted. Order by phone at 866-512-1800 or on-line, or by mail from Superintendent of Documents, PO Box 371954, Pittsburgh, PA 15250-7954.

You can also obtain a copy of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's report on the U.S. intelligence community's pre-war assessments on Iraq on-line: Link. The GPO offers printed copies for $51 (stock number 052-071-01415-2, follow order instructions above.)

Update: Reader FerrisB says, "If you'd like to hear the testimonies from the commission hearings, the iTunes store has them available for free in their audiobook section. Link

Update 2: BoingBoing pal John Rambow says, "There's also a trade book edition of the report. It's only $10, and it's probably easier to get and read than the GPO's version. Link"

Update 3: Jason Kottke says, "I've created an HTML version of the 9/11 Commission Executive Summary with permalinks for each paragraph for easy linking and copy/paste. Link

To appeal to the "maniacs" (Japanese for "someone who knows too much,") IO Data has included two features for collectors of the drives - and I'm not making this up - by installing the included "Cute" software, your desktop wallpaper will automatically change to a corresponding Gundam wallpaper. When you take it out, it will go back to normal. The second feature is the screensaver, which when you purchase and use more than one of these drives, will add the respective characters to the ensuing action. You too can engage in intergalactic space combat for about $55 USD for a USB 2.0 mecha, or $45 for a USB 1.1 mecha.

5 Additions such as "humorous" gnomes and stone cladding (£15,000)
6 Textured finish to ceilings (£14,000)
7 uPVC windows (£12,500)
8 Smell of pets (£10,000)
9 Poor DIY (£10,000)
10 Avocado bathroom suite (£8,000)
11 Nightmare neighbours (£7,500)

I tried all sorts of blogs, both new and old, political and tech, but the ones that were blocked were completely random. Like I said before, waxy.org is blocked (screenshot), but similar sites are not. Gawker is blocked (screenshot), but no other gawker media site is (wonkette and gizmodo are fine). Acts of Volition seemed strange to block (screenshot), since it's a pretty tightly focused tech/design blog. On the purely humorous side, Oliver Willis is considered not a "Chat" site like the rest of the blocked blogs, but a "Sex" site (screenshot). I bet the #joiito army is not going to be happy when they hear that Joi Ito's site is blocked (screenshot).

One of the reasons we singled out media in "V for Vendetta" was because it is one of the most useful tools of tyranny. We invite it into our own home every night; I'm sure that some of us think of it as a friend. That might be a horrifying notion but I'm sure there are people who think of television as perhaps one of their most intimate friends. And if the TV tells them that things in the world are a certain way, even if the evidence of their senses asserts it is not true, they'll probably believe the television set in the end. It's an alarming thought but we brought it upon ourselves. I mean, I think that television is one of the most diabolical -- in the very best sense of the word -- inventions of the past century. It has probably done more to degrade the mind and intelligence of its audience, even if they happen to be drug addicts or alcoholics; I would think that watching television has done more to limit their horizons in the long run. And it has also distorted our culture.

TV and politics have always made inevitable bedfellows, but the results have been disastrous. Look at the situation we have now. Let's say that tomorrow someone who is a political genius were to emerge -- and I'm not expecting this to happen, but say that it did. Say that a politician emerged who seemed, for once, basically competent, who seemed to be able to do their job as well as the average cab driver, comic writer or journalist. If they were the most intelligent, visionary, humane political thinker in the history of mankind, but were also fat, had some sort of blemish or something that made them less than telegenic, we would not be able to elect them. All we're able to elect are these telegenic, photogenic crypto-Nazis. As long as they look good. I suppose it's too early to go into my rant on Ronald Reagan? That would be tasteless.

Once inside, Nicola marveled at not only the remarkable natural features of the cave but signs of human presence, including walls and old shoes and walls made of stones...

"It's amazing," Nicola told National Geographic News. "When I go into a cave I have special boots, because an ankle sprain deep in a cave could be serious business. I have special wicking underwear, so I don't get hypothermia, a special suit, special gloves for gripping things. I have three independent light sources—that's a standard rule. This is all for a day trip into a cave, and yet this is a situation where average people lived here for nearly a year."...

Richard Allan has a great solution to this problem:

What this is doing is forcing Parliament to look at how it handles other people reproducing the material on the Official Parliamentary Website. It would look awful if Parliament were to try and stop people from using what is and should be public information. But the public interest would not be served by people of dubious motives giving false information by doctoring the official record.

What is the answer? Perhaps a Creative Commons license for the House of Commons which can allow re-use of material without payment but subject to conditions such as repetition in full without alteration? I am starting to think there is a good campaign here to ask Parliament to use appropriate Creative Commons licenses for all its output?

Russell Simmons owns a loft facing ground zero. Since 9/11 there's been extremely limited access to the building, but this morning our good friend, photographer Glen E. Friedman get in for a few minutes to make a statement which will be up through the RNC. Here's a bunch of pictures from inside and out.

This book attempts to bring readers into the fray by teaching them, step-by-step, how to build fun, useful, and k001 projects using Wi-Fi. Thanks to Wiley Publishing, the entire first chapter is available for download as a non-DRM'd PDF file here. This chapter teaches the basics of Wi-Fi and shows you how to terminate a cable and choose a pigtail for any wireless project. Also, at the last SOCALWUG meeting, I gave a highly interactive (i.e. Comments/Questions/Answers) presentation about the book. Slides here, Video here, Meeting notes here.

The sting from an irukandji tentacle can cause irukandji syndrome, entailing severe pain, anxiety, paralysis and a potentially fatal rise in blood pressure. Researchers have found that one rare species also causes an extra symptom of prolonged erections in male victims.

DreamWorks Animation, based in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, California, would be controlled by Katzenberg and Geffen. Katzenberg would be chief executive and Geffen would sit on the board, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission... Roger Enrico, former chairman and CEO of PepsiCo Inc., would be chairman of the new company. Spielberg would not hold a seat. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, an initial DreamWorks investor, would sit on the board and could cash out some of his original investment, although the filing does not say he will.

The key device, which is about the size of a small box of wooden matches, slides into a slot in the dashboard. The next step in starting the car, according to the quickstart guide, is to press the POWER button. I had to laugh — this car boots up. I really enjoyed pressing that button.

Bobby Martin sez: Matt said that *other people* had reported getting much worse than the Prius advertised milage, but he was unable to reproduce those results - he got 54 mpg.

Update: BoingBoing reader Charles Statman of Longview, Texas -- the very municipality which begat this maelstrom of morality and malformed memes -- says: "There is absolutely, positively NOTHING to do in Longview Texas. Teenage sex is the whole point of life there. Hell, Longview is more boring than Silicon Valley. Instead of preaching an outdated theme, these holy rolling abusers of outdated flash interfaces should be educating kids and handing out condoms."

"In my opinion... it looks like a fox with Cushing's Syndrome. An adenoma of either the pituitary or hyperplasia or adenoma of the adrenal gland cortex produces hyperadrenalcorticism (Cushing's Disease in humans). This syndrome causes a thinning of the epidermis of the skin and hyperpigmentation - which you see in this animal - thin, patchy dark colored skin - also you see a distinct pattern of hair loss, similar to what is shown in these photographs - Loss of hair on the body with retension on head and lower extremities - Hair also becomes brittle. Additionally the animals become very thin with weird weight distribution - bodies become somewhat barrel shaped. So my reply is this photo depicts a fox with an endocrine disorder."

1. Reuters reported a letter from an al-Qaeda group that said “it supported U.S. President George W. Bush in his reelection campaign, and would prefer him to win in November rather than the Democratic candidate John Kerry, as it was not possible to find a leader ‘more foolish than you (Bush), who deals with matters by force rather than with wisdom.

2. A top CIA expert on al-Qaeda has concluded that al-Qaeda loves President Bush, and might go so far as to plan an election attack to rally the country around Bush.

3. Even administration officials concede “al-Qaeda has morphed into a loose and expanding association of regional terror cells [and] the Iraq war has fueled rather than doused the fires of jihad.”

Swing State Summer Break is a 100% volunteer-operated program for progressives of all ages and their allies, who volunteer to do grassroots, electoral work during the months leading up to the election.

We make it ultra-convenient, easy, and fun to get involved in the nationwide effort to defeat Bush this November. Just tell us which states you're interested in, and when you have time to do it, and we'll take care of the rest.

"Our data suggest that contagious yawning is a by-product of the ability to conceive of yourself and to use your experience to make inferences about comparable experiences and mental states in others," Gallup told New Scientist.

"It is mimicking the way we manipulate our hands. We have constant feedback from tactile sensors, so it is moving very slowly. In the first experiments, the books really got damaged because it was pressing too hard. Now it touches gently."

Called the "Flower Speaker Amplifiers", the gadget made by Let's Corp is hidden in a vase or a potted plant and sends music at just the right frequency to vibrate up the stems and then be converted into audible sound by the plant as a whole.

David Jones republishes articles from Wales' National Assembly website on his own Assembly Online site because the official designers "clearly don't know what they're doing."

"They're singularly clueless; the HTML and CSS are invalid," he said. "I was exasperated, so I thought I'd do it myself to show them how it might be done. My employer -- an Assembly-funded body looking to secure next year's funding -- cited it as a disciplinary offense. I don't work for that company anymore."

[T]he ministry plans to hit the users with these fees because such appliances use almost the same spectrum as mobile phones, whose users are required to pay the fees, they said. The move might provoke stiff opposition from product manufacturers as it is likely to affect their sales. The ministry plans to collect fees from users of information appliances when they purchase these products, according to the sources.

Manufacturers of home appliances are currently stepping up efforts to develop information appliances that are linked via wireless networks and can be controlled from anywhere. Spectrum user fees have been charged in connection with licensed broadcasting and radio stations, as well as with cellular phone companies.

Reports say the bill will not be proposed to Japan's parliament until 2005 -- leaving ample time for device manufacturers and pissed-off wireless enthusiasts to raise a fuss.

The appearance of Eastman's cameras was so sudden and so pervasive that the reaction in some quarters was fear. A figure called the "camera fiend" began to appear at beach resorts, prowling the premises until he could catch female bathers unawares. One resort felt the trend so heavily that it posted a notice: "PEOPLE ARE FORBIDDEN TO USE THEIR KODAKS ON THE BEACH." Other locations were no safer. For a time, Kodak cameras were banned from the Washington Monument. The "Hartford Courant" sounded the alarm as well, declaring that "the sedate citizen can't indulge in any hilariousness without the risk of being caught in the act and having his photograph passed around among his Sunday School children."

What most of us have seen of the report are excerpts from the 50-page summary. In fact, there are well over 6,000 pages in the report itself, including statements by and interviews with witnesses. Among them, testimony from an Iraqi prisoner that would appear to substantiate Seymour Hersh's claims that boys were sodomized at Abu Ghraib. Maj. Gen. Taguba evidently found these statements credible -- they supported statements from interviews with soldiers and other witnesses.

At the end of this post are links to digital copies of two documents from the Taguba report, hosted on the Washington Post website. Is it possible that they document the exact incidents to which Hersh referred? Excerpt from statement provided by Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, Detainee #151108, on January 18 2004:

I saw [name deleted] fucking a kid, his age would be about 15 - 18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard the screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn't covered and I saw [name deleted] who was wearing the military uniform putting his dick in the little kid's ass. I couldn't see the face of the kid because his face wasn't in front of the door. And the female soldier was taking pictures. [name deleted], I think he is [deleted] because of his accent, and he was not skinny or short, and he acted like a homosexual (gay). And that was in cell #23 as best as I remember.

I saw lots of people getting naked for a few days getting punished in the first days of Ramadan. They came with two boys naked and they were cuffed together face to face and Grainer was beating them and a group of guards were watching and taking pictures from top and bottom and there was three female soldiers laughing at the prisoners. The prisoners, two of them, were young. I don't know their names.

When England was asked if there were other things that happened at Abu Ghraib, things that were not photographed, she said, "Yes." When asked if there were worse things that happened, she said "Yes," but would not elaborate.

Update: A recent Associated Press item on plans for new abuse-related hearings quotes Sen. John Warner as saying that new Iraq prisoner abuse incidents come to light "each day":

More cases of possible mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners have come to Congress' attention and need investigation by the Pentagon, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Thursday. Sen. John Warner, R-Va., also said that L. Paul Bremer, the former head of the American-led occupation in Iraq, may testify about prison abuse at a congressional hearing next week.

"I'm not trying to, you know, drop a little hint here. I'm just saying ... each day that comes along, new incidents that occurred in the past" are revealed and will need to be investigated, Warner said. ... Warner spoke to reporters after his committee had a private, classified briefing on the status of several Defense Department investigations into abuse stand. He gave no further details on what new allegations came up during the briefing.

"This year, a spate of studies comparing low-carb versus low-fat diets has confirmed that unrestricted-calorie, high-fat, high-protein eating can trim a person's weight at least as much as low-fat, restricted-calorie dieting does. Several of the studies also highlight other apparent benefits from carbohydrate restriction.

However, a few studies have turned up evidence of problems, including (heart disease). Many physicians now conclude that although low-carbohydrate diets—such as the Atkins and the Zone diets—are proving powerful weight-loss tools, they aren't for everyone. These health professionals argue that such plans should be adopted only under the guidance of a physician.

A few physicians go so far as to argue that low-carb diets aren't for anyone..."

I went to one underground hiphop dance competition in LA recently, and talk to some of the participants on today's program. At left, one of the judges bursts into a spontaneous headspin at the end of the b-boy competition. View more snapshots I took at the event here.

More story background: website of competition organizer Joanna Vargas, an LA-based choreographer: Link. Bboy.com, a popular website for the breakin' community... several judges and dancers described it as a popular networking hub: Link. And Culture Shock, one of the larger groups that participated in "MAXT OUT" competition -- two members were interviewed in today's NPR piece: Link. A lot of the teens I spoke with talked of hooking up with other dancers on Myspace.com and Friendster. Among dancers, the most popular way to hear about new underground hiphop seemed to be a combination of word-of-mouth and (a) Kazaa, or (b) burning CDs for each other. Everyone complained about how suck-ass commercial urban FM radio programming has become.

Listen to NPR show audio here after 12 noon Pacific Time.

Update: BoingBoing reader in South Africa Gerrie Swart says, "Miller is owned by South African Breweries Limited (SAB). The interesting thing being that SAB recently won a court case against a small company making satirical t-shirts in South Africa (this company is called Laugh It Off promotions). It might be that SABMiller will be using the same shitty tactics in other countries? Some links on this: SAB buys Miller (Link 1 Link 2), SAB wins case against T-shirt company (Link), Laugh it Off wins this round (Link), SABMiller wins first round against Laugh it off Promotions (Link)."

""Whoa!" said rising Duke freshman Mollie Tucker of Raleigh when she learned she'd pocket an iPod. "It sounds like a good idea. It sounds really cool." When she arrives Aug. 19, her iPod will be loaded with all kinds of useful information, including orientation schedules, calendars, campus tours, even the Duke fight song.

"Students also can use them for course content, such as recorded lectures, music, language lessons and audio books. Throughout the year, they will be able to download information through a Duke Web site modeled after Apple's iTunes site..."

[Kirby] also agreed to take on DC's long-time oddball series, Superman's Pal: Jimmy Olsen. Which quickly became Superman's Ex-Pal: The New Jimmy Olsen -- folded into Kirby's Fourth World universe with wild plotlines involving subterranean space-age/primitive biker gangs, genetic research carried out by genetically enhanced researchers and chaos wrought by rampaging D.N.Aliens. And then there's Don Rickles look-alike, Goody Rickels vs. Don Rickles himself. This is all conveyed in Kirby's expressionistic, perspective pushing, chrome-plated, spaced-out style, complete with the occasional trippy photo-montage for variety.

Yoz has the deal, and a link to a utility that can unlock your modem without paying Computer Shop's ransom. Link

Unwirer, which I publicly collaborated on with Charlie Stross using a blog is now published in its final form in ReVisions, a collection of alternate science stories.

Nimby and the D-Hoppers, which was originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, was honoured with includion in Hartwell and Cramer's Year's Best SF 9.

A good writing day indeed.

The point that everyone seems to miss is that no one can possibly keep track of a thousand passwords for a thousand websites, which means that these sites undoubtably contain recycled passwords (admonishments from security experts to never recycle a password are the infosec equivalent of telling people to "eat less and exercise more" -- simplistic doctrine that is vanishingly unlikely to be adhered to in the field).

The more you recycle a password, the higher the likelihood that you will use it in a sensitive context -- a bank site, a message board, an IM client, an auction site -- where someone might impersonate you or even commit identity theft crimes against you.

What's even worse is that while these news-sites are willing to spend the computational cycles necessary to receive your password, none that I've seen use SSL for their login, which means that the NYT and others demand that you send your password in the clear when you sit down at a WiFi cafe and want to read the paper. This is a potential disaster if that NYT password is also a sensitive one somewhere else: it's a case of really callous disregard for user privacy and security. Link

Ronstadt "spoiled a wonderful evening for our guests and we had to do something about it", Mr Timmins said.

He said the 58-year-old singer, booked to play the Aladdin for one show only, was not allowed her back in her luxury suite after the show.

"V-Chat," launched in 1995, was an early contender in the ballooning collection of larger-scope chat spaces that encompassed both 2D and 3D graphics. V-Chat's avatars, although primitive, were both customizable and capable of expressing a range of emotional states. Microsoft's 2D "Comic Chat" built upon the facial expressions Microsoft had tested with V-Chat. Comic Chat displayed text in speech or thought bubbles, allowing users to express not only their public, but "private" thoughts; AI-detection of user-typed acronyms would cause one of the illustrated avatars to assume an appropriate pose, such as waving if the user had typed "BRB" for "be right back." While both the 2D Comic Chat and 3D V-Chat gave users more expressive outlets, it was ultimately 3D space that would offer the greatest potential for interpersonal dynamics. After analyzing logs from V-Chat sessions, Microsoft Research found that "Overall, V-Chat users appear to be using the 3D features of the program to reproduce the social conventions of physical proxemics."2 The opening up of chat to 3D space allowed users to communicate nonverbally simply by establishing location and facing relative to other participants.

Well, now the TheyWorkForYou team have released the source-code for their app under the GPL, and they're also publishing raw XML feeds of their data-sources for you to mix and munge.

Get busy! Link (Thanks, Danny!)

FWIW, the Hotel Tropicana on Valencia (around the corner from my old apartment) has free and completely open WiFi (SSID: linksys) was just remodeled, and is pretty cheap, and very central. Link

An anonymous reader writes, "I work at a San Francisco hotel, The Sir Francis Drake, and that censorware message is exactly what I started seeing this week when I tried to access Metafilter and Linkfilter from the work computer (on my lunch break, honest!) ... If the hotel in question isn't the Drake, then it's probably another Kimpton Hotels property.

One of the really amazing features is that you can see not just ordinary information about the track you've got currently playing in iTunes - artist and song name, track length, etc. - but also the album art, directly on your mobile device.

Canadians should care about this moment -- about this particular satellite. Anik F2 is more than just the largest and heaviest of commercial satellites in the world, it's also the first to combine cutting edge Ka-band technology with older and less powerful Ku- and C-band transponders. The latter two will continue to carry Canada's television and telecommunications signals, but the powerful Ka-band "spot beams" will, for the first time, let an Anik satellite deliver two-way, broadband Internet service to any location in North America at a price that's competitive with residential cable or DSL high-speed services.

"The beast is not shy, and visits most often under bright sun. While no one here knows what it is, they do have a name for it -- the hyote, a combination of a hyena and a coyote."

The governor used the "girlie men" reference twice in a 16-minute speech aimed at pressuring the Legislature to pass his budget, now 17 days late. The remarks were apparently references to an old "Saturday Night Live" skit parodying Schwarzenegger. Comedians Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon played "pumped-up" bodybuilders with Austrian accents who dismissed anyone without a muscled torso as a "girlie man."

Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco) said he was "nonplused" by Schwarzenegger's comment. "I don't know what the definition of 'girlie man' is. As opposed to his being a he-man?" Burton asked. Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles) said, "Those are the kinds of statements that ought not to come out of the mouth" of the governor. "He says he's going to 'terminate' members in November? I really don't know what he means by that. That's not funny any more," Nunez said.

Update: The inevitable "Sacramento Girlie Men" T-shirts have arived. link

His dad has been blogging the whole thing, complete with photos, video and all the "tearability" you can handle. The content ranges from detailed medical discussions of the conditions a premature infant suffers, to more spiritual musings on what it's like to give skin-to-skin "kangaroo care" to a child born 15 weeks premature. In one passage we discover that "his neutrophils ( his "big gun" immune cells as wendy, his nurse practitioner, likes to call them ) are down and his bands ( immature neutrophils ) are up," while another passage has us visiting the NICU in the middle of the night.

The remake of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory was thrown into chaos on Wednesday when a worker dropped a $540,000 camera lens in a vat of chocolate.

The writing in this magazine -- mostly by scientists -- is stellar, and there's a fantastic mix of long features and short factoids about science. The approach to the subject is like the very best science fiction, coming at it from the intersection of the social and the scientific, going for the cultural stories behind the science. There's even a fiction department, something that tech-oriented magazines have been sorely lacking since Omni folded up.

This is almost a Maxim for science, something that makes science cool and relevant and edgy. The mag's been around for quite a while, but it wasn't until my cow-orkers Seth and Annalee turned me onto it that I discovered it. Now that I have, I'm taking out a subscription.

I really can't gush enough about this: it's the best subway reading I've had in months. Link

"It spirals away from you," Curley says. "Even if your goal is informal, sooner or later you begin writing songs that you want to play for other people. Then there's a little thought in your mind: we could get signed (to a record deal). You stand in the room with ether long enough and you start getting overcome by the fumes."

* The Cellular Mechanic
* An Explosive Theory About Volcanoes
* The Mathematics of High-Tech Highways

"The collection of artefacts, including original T-shirts, posters and handwritten lyrics, has been assembled over 15 years by art dealer Paul Stolper and Andrew Wilson, deputy editor of Art Monthly. They told The Independent on Sunday that the hotel items were sold at auction by Sid Vicious' mother, Anne Beverley."

"In 1971, President Richard Nixon, a member (of the Bohemian Grove) since 1953, was to be the lakeside speaker, but reporters had finally raised a ruckus about a sitting president giving an off-the-record speech at the Grove. Nixon sent sugary regrets in a telegram that hangs in the city clubhouse today, saying that anyone could be president of the United States, but only a few could aspire to be president of the Bohemian Club.

Privately, he said to domestic affairs adviser John Ehrlichman and Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman (and the hidden tape recorder) in the Oval Office that May: 'The Bohemian Grove, which I attend from time to time -- it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd. I can't shake hands with anybody from San Francisco.'"

The sharing of observations and opinions builds up a picture in each person’s mind of the reputation’s subject, which we might call the "Invisible Eye" — the distributed formation of reputations, and consequent increased ability to distinguish better from worse. To the degree that you have access to and trust the experience of others, it is almost as if you yourself had been there watching that previous situation, thus increasing your base of experience from which to judge future reliability — and increasing pressure on the subject in question to behave responsibly. The analogy to Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand is not accidental; just as selfish local actions with market incentives can lead to collectively efficient behavior, locally maximizing actions with reputation incentives have the potential for similar guided emergent behavior that exceeds what might have been designed by a conscious planner.

The ultimate aim is to increase the level of collective wisdom through sharing our separate experience and expertise. This will enable a "division of experience" — instead of each of us personally suffering through scams, cheats, and mediocrity, we will be able to leverage each other’s experiences. Collectively, aided by astutely networked reputation systems, we stand the best chance of overcoming our dark side and bringing out the best in us.

Update: Found! Thanks to everyone who wrote in with the link. Link

The theme of this year's conference is "Art and Life in the Posthuman Era," featuring such presenters as cyborg Steve Mann, Australian performance artist Stelarc, Extropy Institute founder Max More, leading biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, and transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom, among many others.

As you guys covered this (and helped promote it) back in February, I just thought you'd be interested to hear the final results. Ultimately, we raised US $14,312.28. We delivered US $11,542.28 worth of flowers, and donated the remainder to two related and deserving charities--Lambda Legal and the Gay and Lesbian Rights Project at the ACLU.

Update: It appears that though the box turtles remark was in a speech prepared for Cornyn and delivered to the press, that Cornyn himself showed the good judgment not to make this ridiculous statement (Here's some notes from his press-secretary. (Thanks, Andrew!)

Software is unambiguously better at legality than law itself on three counts (prospectivity, consistency, and possibility). It's strictly inferior to law on two (publicity and comprehensibility). One (stablility) is a complete wash. The last two (generality and reality) depend on very much on the kind of software we're talking about and how it's used.

Overall, then, there is no simple answer as to whether software is better than law or not when it comes to the conditions that Fuller would say make any system of authority worthy of obedience. It respects those values more in some ways, less in others. Whether or not any given software system is a good replacement for a legal alternative will depend on which values of legality are more important to you (a large part of Law and Morality discussed the ways in which these values are necessarily in tension). Further, it will depend on how well the software system's designers handle the challenges of explaining accurately just what it is that their software does, and those explanations will be more or less persuasive for different kinds of software.

Divers from the Folkestone Diving Club and other south-east clubs, who remain tight-lipped about exactly where and when they found the champagne, dug out bottles to bring back to dry land and cracked them open with friends and family at dinner parties.

The issue is reviewed in an article published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine that focuses on a 57-year-old Pennsylvania woman who died in 2002 of a fungal infection in her muscles called Brachiola algerae.

Doctors were puzzled because the fungus was thought to be found only in mosquitoes and other insects. But it's not found in mosquito saliva like West Nile virus and malaria, so a simple mosquito bite could not have caused the infection.

The article's authors concluded that the woman must have smashed a mosquito on her skin, smearing its body parts into the bite.

Anyone will be able to release it without paying royalties to the owners of the master or the performer's heirs. BMG will start losing a significant piece of its catalog income in Europe. As "That's All Right" is being hailed by some as the beginning of rock 'n' roll, the implications are that every year after 2005, more recordings that defined the genre will fall into public domain.

Which is how it is that suddenly, Portuguese speakers (presumably mostly Brazilian, given Brazil's kick-ass connectivity and widespread adoption of moblogging, blogging and other viral, social tools) outnumber Yankees on the service nearly two-to-one. There's now a vicious fight raging between USAns and Portuguese-speakers, as the former group is displaced, for nearly the first time, by another linguistic group.

(I'm reminded of a story that a product manager for Hotmail once told me -- "Our growth curve was pretty steady, then one day someone sent an email to someone in India with 'Get a free email account at hotmail.com' in the footer and the next day we singed up half a million users").

Tammy Soldaat, a Canadian, got a sample of Brazilian wrath recently when she posted a message asking whether her community site on body piercing should be exclusive to people who speak English.

Brazilian Orkut users quickly labeled her a "nazi" and "xenophobe."

"After that I understood why everyone is complaining about these people, why they're being called the 'plague of Orkut,"' she said in a site called "Crazy Brazilian Invasion."

An orange ruled the world.

It was an unexpected thing, the temporary abdication of Heavenly Providence, entrusting the whole matter to a simple orange.

The orange, in a grove in Florida, humbly accepted the honor. The other oranges, the birds, and the men in their tractors wept with joy; the tractors' motors rumbled hymns of praise.

Airplane pilots passing over would circle the grove and tell their passengers, "Below us is the grove where the orange who rules the world grows on a simple branch." And the passengers would be silent with awe.

Excel is widely used in genetic research to process microarray data. A microarray chip detects amounts of protein produced from thousands of different genes, enabling researchers to see which particular gene is being expressed in a sample of diseased tissue, for example.

The errors are introduced because some genetic identifiers look very like dates to Excel. If the spreadsheet is not properly set up, it will convert an identifier, such as SEPT2 to a date: 2-Sep. The conversion, the researchers say, is irreversible: once the error has been introduced, the original data is gone.

"The Walkman was critical in altering the rules of being with other people," Schiffer says. "People thought it was rude to listen to music in public. Now our standards have eroded to the route we've gone down with cell phones, which is to sanction rudeness. We are losing sociability."

The most impressive is the Ultima Classics collection. "Sedryn Tyros" has collected the Ultima games and distributed them in a bundle along with DOSBox setups that make it easy to run the games. His supplement also includes original pre-PC versions of the early games, often better than the PC ports, along with the emulators you need to play them on a PC. Alas, this collection is completely unauthorized and you'll have to scour your back alley's bittorrent site to find it.

Another option is fan-made reconstructions of the game engines. The best is Exult for Ultima VII, a portable engine that runs the classic game on many platforms (including Xbox!). Just take the open source game engine, copy over the assets from your Ultima Collection CD, and you're in business.