This is an old camera my grandparents have. It's an Anscoflex II and like most old cameras, I've never heard of it. The inside of the film-compartment cover says "USE 620 SIZE ANSCO FILM," which isn't particularly useful (without internet access) for figuring out what size film the camera takes.
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Rights holders in the UK are proposing to appoint a "council" and an "expert body" to decide which websites should be blocked by ISPs for infringing copyright. The controversial Digital Economy Act made provisions for sites accused of hosting copyrighted material to be blocked by British ISPs. "The cost of the proposed scheme is not indicated, but is likely to be substantial, including the running cost of two non-judicial independent bodies and the cost to ISPs of permanently blocking websites," Consumer Focus said.
What could possibly go wrong?
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Officer Matt Paul is a damned thug.
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The most important revolution to occur in the Mideast has taken place with little notice or understanding in the west. The Muslim world’s uprisings against dictatorship did not begin in Tunisia, but in Turkey.
The first seeds of revolution in Turkey were planted in 2002 when its Justice and Development Party began the long, arduous battle against eight decades of disguised military dictatorship.
To understand the importance of the 12 June Turkish elections, step back for a moment to distant 1960 when I was in high school in Switzerland.
A Turkish classmate named Turgut told me, tears in his eyes, "The generals hanged my daddy!" His father had been a cabinet minister in the government recently overthrown by a military coup.
The 510,000-man Turkish armed forces, NATO’s second biggest after the US, have mounted four military coups since 1950. Turkey’s current constitution, which facilitates military intervention in politics, was written by the military after its 1980 coup.
Ever since the era of national hero turned strongman, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey has been run by its powerful military behind a thin façade of squabbling politicians. In the process, it suffered widescale political violence, Kurdish secessionism, rigged elections, and endless, ruinous financial crises and the constant threat of war with Greece.
Americans always liked to point to pre-2002 Turkey as the ideal Muslim state. "Why can’t those Arabs be more like the sensible Turks?" was a refrain often heard in Washington. Americans chose to ignore, or simply failed to see, that Turkey was an iron-fisted military dictatorship.
Click through for the rest of Margolis's editorial. It's damn good stuff.
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Using electrical probes embedded into the brains of rats, scientists have managed to replicate the brain function associated with long-term behavior and found a way to literally turn memories on and off with the flip of a switch. The scientists hope their research will eventually lead to a neural prosthesis to help people suffering Alzheimer's disease, the effects of stroke or other brain injury to recover long-term memory capability.
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When Jasmijn Rijcken, the general manager of the VANMOOF bicycle company, traveled from Amsterdam to New York in late April, she was excited to see what she’d heard described as a city that had embraced bicycling. It wasn’t NYC’s new protected bike lanes that defined her ride through the city, however, but the New York Police Department, currently in the midst of a major crackdown against cyclists.
Jasmijn Rijcken was stopped and almost ticketed by an NYPD officer for biking in this outfit. Her skirt, the officer said, was too distracting for drivers.
Rijcken was in town for the New Amsterdam Bike Show on April 30. After she had dismounted on Broadway in SoHo, an NYPD officer stopped, berated, and threatened to ticket Rijcken for wearing a skirt while cycling, which, it must be noted, is entirely legal and common. Rijcken says the officer told her that her skirt was dangerous because she would distract drivers and potentially cause them to crash.
“I was standing there next to my bike, looking at my map, and then this police guy stops and starts telling me about my skirt,” reported Rijcken. “At first I thought he was making a joke or maybe even a compliment, but then I found out he was serious because he got really mad.”
The officer got out of his car and threatened to ticket her, said Rijcken, even though, it bears repeating, there is no law against biking in a skirt. The justification for a potential ticket was the danger her exposed skin posed to everyone on the street. “That was the bottom line, that I was very dangerous,” said Rijcken. “I think every woman, even when walking in a skirt, would be dangerous then.”
According to Rijcken, the cop’s words were not merely an empty threat. He took her ID and only began to back down when he saw that she was Dutch. She hurriedly explained that in Amsterdam, it’s common for women to bike in skirts. In the end, the officer told her she should change into pants and let her go.
At the time, Rijcken said, she wasn’t sure that she hadn’t broken the law. “If you’re by yourself in a different country and a police guy comes really angrily at you, you get scared,” she said.
This is not the first time an NYPD officer has stopped cyclists for completely frivolous non-offenses. In April, a private school administrator received a ticket for biking with a tote bag on her handlebars. The police have not responded to a Streetsblog inquiry about Rijcken’s allegations.
Her harassment at the hands of the police has colored Rijcken’s perception of not only New York City but the United States. “I was shocked,” she said. “In Holland, people refer to America as the country of freedom.”
Click through the via-link just above to see the outfit Ms. Rijcken was wearing—not "indecent" or "distracting" at all, in my opinion. But then again, I'm not a cop with a huge-ass chip on my shoulder and nigh-unchecked power at my disposal.
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I know this is obvious, and has been observed many times in different ways, but I was struck (again) this morning with how quiet the progressive left has been about Obama doing the same things as his predecessor.
Where is Code Pink? Where is Cindy Sheehan and the other Gold Star Mothers? Where are ANSWER and UFPJ?
There were literally dozens of protests, marches, and demonstrations about the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the prison at Guantánamo Bay, the USA PATRIOT Act, and almost every other action taken by the White House during the Bush administration.
Then Obama got elected and all the protests died out. And Obama continued firmly down the same road as Bush. We are still in Iraq. He has increased troop levels in Afghanistan. Did you know that for every two soldiers that died in Afghanistan under Bush, three have died under Obama? Guantanamo is still open—and not a single case has gone to trial. There were Abu Ghraib–like kill-shot trophy photos from the military under his command. He started another unconsititutional war in Libya (at least Bush asked for permission first). He has extended and expanded the government's intrusion into liberties with TSA porno-scanners, sexual molestations at airports, and the renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act. And he didn't even sign the law extending the that act—his autopen did.
And where are the protests?
Bush bailed out Detroit. Obama bailed out Detroit. Bush bailed out the banks. Obama bailed out the banks. Bush passed Medicare Part D. Obama passed ObamaCare. Bush used a covert program of using predator drones to commit acts of undeclared war against Pakistan and Yemen. Obama used and continues to use a covert program of using predator drones to commit acts of undeclared war against Pakistan and Yemen.
Where are the protests?
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Technology always advances faster than ethics. We were smart enough to make planes and harness atomic energy and dumb enough to use them as weapons.
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There is no issue more serious than war. Wars result in the loss of life and property. Wars are also expensive and an enormous economic burden.
Our Founders understood that waging war is not something that should be taken lightly, which is why Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution gives Congress — not the president — the authority to declare war. This was meant to be an important check on presidential power. The last thing the Founders wanted was an out-of-control executive branch engaging in unnecessary and unpopular wars without so much as a Congressional debate.
Unfortunately, that’s exactly the situation we have today in Libya.
That’s why I’ve joined several other members of Congress in a lawsuit against President Obama for engaging in military action in Libya without seeking the approval of Congress.
Of course, in 2007, then-Senator Obama spoke passionately about the need to go after the Bush administration for violating the War Powers Act — the very same thing he’s doing now. In fact, while speaking at DePaul University in October of 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama said the following:
“After Vietnam, Congress swore it would never again be duped into war, and even wrote a new law — the War Powers Act — to ensure it would not repeat its mistakes. But no law can force a Congress to stand up to the president. No law can make senators read the intelligence that showed the president was overstating the case for war. No law can give Congress a backbone if it refuses to stand up as the co-equal branch the Constitution made it.”
We are now taking Barack Obama’s past advice and standing up to the executive branch.
Of course, the War Powers Act is hardly an improvement on the U.S. Constitution because it does allow the president to go to war without the approval of Congress. But President Obama refuses to follow this law.
If a president does go to war unilaterally, the War Powers Act requires him to seek Congressional approval within 60 days. The president can get an extension of up to 90 days if he asks for more time — but President Obama did not do this.
His time is up.
The Obama administration recently issued a 38-page paper stating that Obama is not in violation of the War Powers Act because “U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve U.S. ground troops.” Under this argument, President Obama could preemptively launch nuclear weapons against any country in the world without Congressional approval. Obviously, this is not what the Founders intended!
But even aside from violating the Constitution, it makes no economic sense for us to be engaged in yet another war overseas — especially during such tough economic times. For years now, we’ve been sending foreign aid to the very same Libyan government we’re now spending $10 million a day to fight. And it has been recently discovered that the Federal Reserve’s bank bailouts even benefited the Libyan National Bank. Now, we’re taxing the American people to bomb the very nation that we taxed them to prop up.
This makes no sense at all.
The Founding Fathers did not intend for the president to have the power to take our nation to war unilaterally without the approval of Congress.
It’s time for the president to obey the Constitution and put the American people’s national interest first.
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Brand owners will soon be able to operate their own parts of the Web—such as .apple, .coke or .marlboro—if the biggest shake-up yet in how Internet domains are awarded is approved. After years of preparation and wrangling, ICANN, the body that coordinates Internet names, is expected to approve the move at a special board meeting in Singapore on Monday. . . . The move is seen as a big opportunity for brands to gain more control over their online presence and send visitors more directly to parts of their sites—and a danger for those who fail to take advantage.
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So I finally got around to seeing the new Karate Kid, and was really pleased to find out that it was the story all about how Jaden Smith's life got flipped turned upside down. You see, he was chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool, shooting some B-ball outside of his school, when a couple of guys (who were up to no good) started making trouble in his neighborhood. He got in one little fight and his mom got scared and said, "You're going to learn kung-fu from the maintenance man downstairs!"
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A twenty-three-year-old British computer student faces possible extradition to the U.S. for linking to copyrighted content on his website. The student, Richard O'Dwyer, was accused of copyright infringement after setting up the website TV Shack, which had links to thousands of films and TV shows, but did not directly host them.
And here's why the U.S. can do this:
This shit's gotten so far out of hand it's not even worth an it's-so-sad-all-you-can-do-is-laugh laugh.Back when Tony Blair was in power he signed an extradition treaty with the US which means that if a DA files charges against someone, they can be extradited from the UK. Our Parliament ratified the treaty without inserting a reciprocal clause in the legislation making it dependent on your congress honouring the treaty.
Obviously your congress decided that having US citizens extradited just because a prosecutor in the UK fancied it them was mental, so they didn't ratify that clause. That leaves us with the current imbalance where your criminal justice system can essentially pull anyone out of the UK for any reason.
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According to copyright lawyer Ben Sidbury, Senate bill 978 could make it a criminal act for someone to lip sync to a song and post the said video on Youtube, even if credits are given. The way the statute is written, "it would now criminalize anybody that performs a copyrighted work, which is essentially nowadays any song under the sun. In theory at least, the record companies or the Department of Justice could go after a nine-year-old or a twelve-year-old or a thirty-year-old for publicly performing a song," said Sidbury.
Glad to know the Senate's got its priorities straight.
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Also known as "Divide by Zero" or some variant of that phrase. I know this video's at least five years old, but the original on YouTube disappeared a while back and I haven't been able to find it since—until this morning. Two copies on YouTube, same quality and same bad framerate, but they'll have to do. I downloaded one and saved it because, well, we all know how fickle YouTube is, don't we? Anyway, credit goes to Matts Page and Stephen.
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Here they go again: The big business lobbyists who are behind the Internet Blacklist Bill are already making the sequel. THIS WEEK Senators will be voting on a "Ten Strikes" bill to make it a felony to stream copyrighted content—like music in the background of a Youtube video—more than ten times.
As the writers at TechDirt point out, under this bill you could go to jail for posting video of your friends singing karaoke:
The entertainment industry is freaking out about sites that embed and stream infringing content, and want law enforcement to put people in jail over it, rather than filing civil lawsuits.... We already pointed to one possibility: that people embedding YouTube videos could face five years in jail. Now, others are pointing out that it could also put kids who lip sync to popular songs, and post the resulting videos on YouTube, in jail as well.
That's right: Ten strikes and you could get jail time. Less than two weeks ago, the Hollywood industry magazine, Variety, reported, "Industry lobbyists pressed House members on Wednesday to pass legislation that would make illegal streaming of movies, TV shows and other types of content a felony...."
Only days later, the MPAA is getting its wish. Will you email your lawmakers and tell them to vote against the Ten Strikes Bill? Just add your info at right to automatically send this note to them, under your name and from your address. (You can edit the letter if you'd like to.)
Just sign on at right and we'll send an email to your lawmakers.
Click here to read TechDirt's take on the bill. The bill's text is here.
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When the war in Libya began, the U.S. government convinced a large number of war supporters that we were there to achieve the very limited goal of creating a no-fly zone in Benghazi to protect civilians from air attacks, while President Obama specifically vowed that "broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake." This no-fly zone was created in the first week, yet now, almost three months later, the war drags on without any end in sight, and NATO is no longer even hiding what has long been obvious: that its real goal is exactly the one Obama vowed would not be pursued—regime change through the use of military force. We're in Libya to forcibly remove Gaddafi from power and replace him with a regime that we like better, i.e., one that is more accommodating to the interests of the West. That's not even a debatable proposition at this point.
What I suppose is debatable, in the most generous sense of that term, is our motive in doing this. Why—at a time when American political leaders feel compelled to advocate politically radioactive budget cuts to reduce the deficit and when polls show Americans solidly and increasingly opposed to the war—would the U.S. Government continue to spend huge sums of money to fight this war? Why is President Obama willing to endure self-evidently valid accusations—even from his own Party—that he's fighting an illegal war by brazenly flouting the requirements for Congressional approval? Why would Defense Secretary Gates risk fissures by so angrily and publicly chiding NATO allies for failing to build more Freedom Bombs to devote to the war? And why would we, to use the President's phrase, "stand idly by" while numerous other regimes—including our close allies in Bahrain and Yemen and the one in Syria—engage in attacks on their own people at least as heinous as those threatened by Gaddafi, yet be so devoted to targeting the Libyan leader?
Whatever the answers to those mysteries, no responsible or Serious person, by definition, would suggest that any of this —from today's Washington Post—has anything to do with it:
The relationship between Gaddafi and the U.S. oil industry as a whole was odd. In 2004, President George W. Bush unexpectedly lifted economic sanctions on Libya in return for its renunciation of nuclear weapons and terrorism. There was a burst of optimism among American oil executives eager to return to the Libyan oil fields they had been forced to abandon two decades earlier. . . .
Yet even before armed conflict drove the U.S. companies out of Libya this year, their relations with Gaddafi had soured. The Libyan leader demanded tough contract terms. He sought big bonus payments up front. Moreover, upset that he was not getting more U.S. government respect and recognition for his earlier concessions, he pressured the oil companies to influence U.S. policies. . . .
When Gaddafi made his deal with Bush in 2004, he had hoped that returning foreign oil companies would help boost Libya’s output . . . The U.S. government also encouraged American oil companies to go back to Libya. . . .
The companies needed little encouragement. Libya has some of the biggest and most proven oil reserves—43.6 billion barrels—outside Saudi Arabia, and some of the best drilling prospects. . . . Throughout this time, oil prices kept rising, whetting the appetite for greater supplies of Libya's unusually "sweet" and "light," or high-quality, crude oil.
By the time Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited in 2008, U.S. joint ventures accounted for 510,000 of Libya's 1.7 million barrels a day of production, a State Department cable said. . . .
But all was not well. By November 2007, a State Department cable noted "growing evidence of Libyan resource nationalism." It noted that in his 2006 speech marking the founding of his regime, Gaddafi said: "Oil companies are controlled by foreigners who have made millions from them. Now, Libyans must take their place to profit from this money." His son made similar remarks in 2007.
Oil companies had been forced to give their local subsidiaries Libyan names, the cable said. . . .
Click through for the rest of the article, where Greenwald makes two very good points after another blockquote.
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American ISPs have convinced us that Internet access is expensive—getting speeds of 100Mbps will set most people back by more than $100 a month, assuming the service is even available. Where I live in Chicago, Comcast's 105Mbps service goes for a whopping $199.95 ("premium installation" and cable modem not included). Which is why it was so refreshing to see the scrappy California ISP Sonic.net this week roll out its new 1Gbps, fiber-to-the-home service… for $69.99 a month.
Sonic.net has been around since 1994, selling DSL service in California, but it has recently expanded into fiber; the company has even secured the contract to manage Google's own 1Gbps fiber network that will connect 800+ faculty homes at Stanford University.
Sonic.net's new approach to broadband involves stringing its own fiber lines to homes and offering bargain-basement pricing; indeed, the new 1Gbps offering is the same price as the company's earlier bonded 40Mbps DSL offering (in which two phones lines each provide 20Mbps of bandwidth to a home). The price even includes home phone service.
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Described as part prank, part art and part activism, the WikiLeaks Top Secret Mobile Information Collection Unit has been bothering US authorities in recent months.
A white van emblazoned with the WikiLeaks logo by the artist Clark Stoeckley, the Collection Unit has paid unwelcome visits to notable sites including the White House, Capitol Hill and the Washington Monument.
In March, after a "Free Bradley Manning" rally in Washington, the truck was pulled over and Stoeckley arrested for driving in a "no truck zone" near the White House, though the charges were later dropped.
"The Secret Service searched the truck and found nothing," tweeted the artist on Wednesday. "They follow me wherever I go hoping for a traffic violation."
He added: "I asked the Secret Service officer who arrested me if he had any secrets he wanted to leak to WikiLeaks, and that made him laugh."
Stoeckley's aim is to have a WikiLeaks truck in every country. He is raising money via the website Flattr and is willing to send adhesive vinyl graphics to anyone who wants to start their own mock 'Collection Unit'.
"Just imagine these popping up all over the globe," he says.
View more photos of the WikiLeaks Truck here, and follow the truck on Twitter here. Above photo credit: WikiLeaks Top Secret Mobile Information Collection Unit.
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When Chicago police answered a domestic disturbance call at the home of Tiawanda Moore and her boyfriend in July 2010, the officers separated the couple to question them individually. Moore was interviewed privately in her bedroom. According to Moore, the officer who questioned her then came on to her, groped her breast and slipped her his home phone number.
Robert Johnson, Moore's attorney, says that when Moore and her boyfriend attempted to report the incident to internal affairs officials at the Chicago Police Department, the couple wasn't greeted warmly. "They discouraged her from filing a report," Johnson says. "They gave her the runaround, scared her, and tried to intimidate her from reporting this officer—from making sure he couldn't go on to do this to other women."
Ten months later, Chicago PD is still investigating the incident. Moore, on the other hand, was arrested the very same afternoon.
Her crime? At some point in her conversations with internal affairs investigators, Moore grew frustrated with their attempts to intimidate her. So she began to surreptitiously record the interactions on her Blackberry. In Illinois, it is illegal to record people without their consent, even—and, as it turns out, especially—on-duty police officers.
"This is someone who is already scared from being harassed by an officer in uniform," said Johnson. "If the police won't even take her complaint, how else is a victim of police abuse supposed to protect herself?"
Moore's case has inspired outrage from anti-domestic abuse groups. "We just had two Chicago police officers indicted for sexual assault, there have been several other cases of misconduct against women," says Melissa Spatz of the Chicago Task Force on Violence Against Girls & Young Women. "And now you have Moore, who was trying to report this guy, and she gets arrested. The message here is that victims of unwanted sexual advances by police officers have no recourse—that the police can act with impunity."
If the Chicago cops recently indicted for sexual assault are convicted, they'll face four to fifteen years in prison. That's the same sentence Tiawanda Moore is facing for trying to document her frustrations while reporting her own alleged sexual assault: Recording an on-duty police officer in Illinois is a Class 1 felony, the same class of crimes as rape.
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The United States, the European Union and the United Nations decided to support Haiti’s recent presidential and parliamentary elections despite believing that the country’s electoral body, “almost certainly in conjunction with President Preval,” had “emasculated the opposition” by unwisely and unjustly excluding the country’s largest party, according to a secret US Embassy cable.
OH NO BUT THE TERRORISTS AND THE REST OF THE WORLD JUST HATE US FOR OUR FREEDOM AND LIBERTY AND CULTURE AND BLAH BLAH BLAH BULL FUCKING SHIT. /rant
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After each E3 people talk about who "won" this year's show, and I'd say that Sony did. PlayStation Vita makes the 3DS feel like an expensive cheap date and it has the perfect price point: $250. Wii U has an interesting controller, but much of its functionality has already been done with the PSP's connectivity to the PS3. Most of what Nintendo showed of the WU can either be done online (the different camera for the odd wheel in multiplayer modes) or by moving the camera (the shield game)—and most importantly, they didn't even hint at price, which means it'll probably be one expensive son of a bitch.
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To the brain, heartbreak and emotional torment are no different from having hot coffee spilled on your hand, reports CNN. They cite a recent study from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which forty recently-dumped men and women underwent fMRI scans while having their arm burned or being shown a picture of their ex. The stimuli produced nearly identical brain reactions.
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A Canadian student has been suspended from school and had the police called on him due to satirical animations that he posted to YouTube. Jack Christie, a twelfth-grade student at the Donald A. Wilson Secondary School in Whitby, Ontario, Canada, created the videos in his own time, off-campus.
And no Canada jokes, please. They do this in U.S. schools, too.
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Miami Beach Police did their best to destroy a citizen video that shows them shooting a man to death in a hail of bullets on Memorial Day. First, police pointed their guns at the man who shot the video, according to a Miami Herald interview with the videographer. They then ordered the man and his girlfriend out of the car and threw them down to the ground, yelling, "You want to be fucking paparazzi?" They snatched the cell phone from his hand and slammed it to the ground and stomped on it. Then they placed the smashed phone in the videographer's back pocket as he was lying down on the ground.
Stay classy, America! You too, Miami Beach.
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