http://hello.eboy.com/eboy/?cat=5 

Poet and musician Ivor Cutler, who counted John Peel and the Beatles among his fans, has died at the age of 83.

Cutler wrote surreal songs and poetry and continued to perform live until 2004. He also wrote books, did illustrations and made radio series.

He appeared regularly on Peel’s radio shows and The Beatles gave him a role in the film Magical Mystery Tour.

Cutler’s 1967 album Ludo, produced by George Martin, was re-released in 1997 by Creation, then the label of Oasis.

Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Glasgow, Cutler attributed his artistic bent to the displacement he felt when his younger brother was born.

“Without that I would not have been so screwed up as I am, and therefore not as creative,” he said.

“Without a kid brother I would have been quite dull.”

After serving with the RAF in World War II, Cutler became a teacher.

He moved to London and continued to teach, while still pursuing his artistic career, until he retired in 1980.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4781980.stm

Sad news.

There was a report on the radio this morning about a European (read EU blighted) search engine ‘Quaero’ to be set up as an alternative to Google. After googling around I found, typically for BBQ, that this was old news dressed up in mouton clothing.

Anyway, the idea of an EU-centric search engine to rival google almost made me choke on my breakfast – until recently the EU website had the single worst search tool I’ve ever seen online (It is now marginally better, and almost useful).

The reason why there is not a ‘Google equivalent’ is that whereas US taxes, financial regulations and competitive research programmes have not discriminated against startup companies almost every equivalent piece of work/employment legislation coming from the EU runs counter to small and new companies. All the blustering of Chirac (whose announcement it was that BBQ relayed) will not change this if he adheres to the typical EU top down imposing of ‘solutions’.

Last week’s story about a retired Texas school teacher who came under Homeland Security’s microscope for paying off a $6,522 credit card debt has been trumped by a similar case involving an amount of just $650.

Previously, Walter Soehnge made national headlines when he attempted to pay off debt on his MasterCard. The payment was rejected and automatically triggered an investigation by Homeland Security.

Now we have the story of Edie Booth, a community college professor in East Texas.

Trying to pay off her February credit card bill, Booth found her funds short and so asked to borrow $650 from her sister to avoid an interest overcharge of $140.

Booth made a $3,500 payment from her own account and then sent the other $650 with permission from her sister’s electronic account.

I watched the status of these two payments on line, since I am not the ‘trusting’ type, when it comes either to banks, credit card companies, OR government,” says Booth.

“The $650 was pending one day and then showed funded the next. All seemed fine. However, I continued to check the status on-line for the next 5 days.

“On the 6th day I found the extra $650 payment CANCELLED.”

Upon calling the credit card company, Booth was told that Homeland Security would not allow her to make two payments from two different sources in the same day.

Booth was then slapped with the $140 overcharge for causing the hard working boys at Homeland so much inconvenience.

This is a monumental waste of time and if there were any real terrorists out there Homeland Security is more interested in your spending habits than Al-Qaeda.

As Edie Booth points out, this is “such insanity, I mean, if you are paying your credit card, you have already obtained the explosives or whatever some time before.”

“Where is the leadership? When will we get some relief from these morons?”

The very individuals that used 9/11 to force layer upon layer of increased state surveillance and big government bureaucracy upon us are the ones in business with Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. And yet it is law-abiding citizens that get hassled for the simple desire to pay off some debt.

Homeland Security targets toy store owners, t-shirt sellers and kindergartners while hiring former East German Stasi heads to spy on Americans and recruiting tattle-tale squads under ‘Highway Watch’ – a program that encourages truckers, toll takers, road crews and bus drivers to watch their fellow citizens and report suspicious activity.

It seems painfully obvious that the people trying to take away our freedoms are not wearing turbans and shouting Allah Akbar, but that the enemy is within the gates.

[…]

http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/march2006/070306borrowedmoney.htm

And the sign above those gates reads “Arbeit Macht Frei”.

The most terrible thing about this is that the banks and credit card companies are executing these laws, with the words “we are only obeying orders”.

When will you get some relief from these morons? When you CANCEL YOUR CREDIT CARD and inform them that you are doing it because they are blithley FOLLOWING ABSURD HOMELAND SECURITY REGULATIONS and that their obedience is costing you money.

Thats when.

And I also note with dismay, that this report does not mention the name of this woman’s credit card company.

I meant to post this quote from a football manager, talking about a football pitch.

“Sometimes you see beautiful people with no brains. Sometimes you have ugly people who are intelligent, like scientists,” he said.

I’m glad I’m not stereotyped.

Excuse me while I set up another flask of bubbling green liquid.

MPs overturned previous Lords defeats on the ID Cards Bill

Government plans to make all passport applicants also have an ID card have been defeated in the Lords.Peers voted by a majority of 61 to overturn the proposal – backed by MPs last month – for a second time.

Opposition peers say the plans break the government’s promise that ID cards will initially be voluntary.

…

The UK and other countries must introduce biometric passports by October to remain part of the US visa waiver scheme, which makes travel to America easier.
[…]

On this latter point…

Remember: this is the government of my country changing my passport requirements – putting my biometric details on a database – at the request of another country.

And will that country get access to that database when some British mug wants to enter The Land Of The Free?

So obviously, if I put on my passport application that I don’t want to travel to the USA, or that I don’t mind getting a visa, I can opt out of having a biometric passport.

N’est pas?

No, me neither.

Al Quaida strikes again!

Update:

Clunk vows to continue ID battle

“I hope the Lords will recognise that this manifesto commitment, voted through by the elected chamber, should be respected,” Mr Clarke told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

[…]

OK. And the manifesto commitment is (was)…

On page 52 of its 111 pages, under the heading “Strong and Secure Borders”, the Labour 2005 manifesto said:

“We will introduce ID cards, including biometric data like fingerprints, backed up by a national register and rolling out initially on a voluntary basis as people renew their passports“.

[…] From David Davis.
As one Lord put it last night, and as this site has said recently…

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury, a Liberal Democrat, said] … describing the ID card scheme as voluntary was stretching the English language to breaking point. He went on: “It’s not often it’s left to the opposition to make sure the government honours its manifesto pledges.”

The Daytona^TM data management system is used by AT&T to solve a wide spectrum of data management problems. For example, Daytona is managing over 312 terabytes of data in a 7×24 production data warehouse whose largest table contains over 743 billion rows as of Sept 2005. Indeed, for this database, Daytona is managing over 1.924 trillion rows; it could easily manage more but we ran out of data.

Daytona’s architecture is based on translating its high-level query language Cymbal^TM (which includes SQL as a subset) completely into C and then compiling that C into object code. The system resulting from this architecture is fast, powerful, easy to use and administer, reliable and open to UNIX tools. In particular, two forms of data compression plus robust horizontal partitioning and effective SPMD parallelization enable Daytona to handle terabytes with ease. Fast, large-scale in-memory operations are supported by in-memory tables and scalar and tuple-valued multi-dimensional associative arrays.

Daytona offers all the essentials of data management including a high-level query language, data dictionary, B-tree indexing, locking, transactions, logging, and recovery. Users are pleased with Daytona’s speed, its powerful query language, its ability to easily manage large amounts of data in minimal space, its simplicity, its ease of administration, and its openness to other tools. In particular, Daytona supports SQL, Perl DBI, and JDBC.

1. Daytona In Use
2. Compared To Awk & Perl For Flat File Processing
3. Instructional Queries
4. Recently Added Features

[…]

http://www.research.att.com/projects/daytona/

Astonishing. None of this is ‘secret’ as such; they say their largest single table has 743 Billion rows. What they fail to disclose is what is in those tables. They leave it to you to ask (or not) just what the hell are you keeping in those tables?

And who prompted the NSA that this data was being kept and could be used as a ‘security’ asset? Did AT&T hint that they would be willing to sell access to this treasure trove to the NSA?

Have they made a mysqlhotcopy of this database for other agencies to sift through?
What other telecoms companies have this type of facility?

I was looking around for some equipment and stumbled upon this artist, and his performances. And another.

Marks and Spencer seems to be exploiting the goldfish attention span of the media today, last week it was reported;

Marks & Spencer suppliers have reacted angrily to the retailing giant turning the screw on them, just one year after demanding better terms from all its food, textile and accessory manufacturers.

“People are being squeezed to the bone. There will come a point where we will either go bankrupt or throw in the towel and walk away,” said one small textile supplier.
[…]

whereas today M&S proudly announce;

Marks & Spencer is to stock only Fairtrade coffee and tea from next month as it extends it commitment to ethical sourcing.

…

Stuart Rose, chief executive of Marks & Spencer, said: “Our customers have told us they care about how our products are made and we want to help them make Fairtrade part of their retail habit.” M&S, as an own-brand-only retailer, was in a “unique position” to make the change.
[…]

Call me a stickler for consistency but it seems somewhat two-faced to force UK suppliers to be barely profitable and at the same time call yourself ethical for stocking Fairtrade products from countries where the cost of being ‘ethical’ is markedly less. (Anyhow the UK suppliers are free to take their trade elsewhere – given that all the other supermarkets operate on similar lines maybe they should try local independent retailers).

An analogous doublethink situation to the government calling for ‘freedom and democracy’ abroad whilst imposing repressive legisaltiuon at home?

A friend brought this preview of a game to my attention that has blown me away and considering that I’m not really much of a games player, thats saying alot.

The basis of the game is evolution [oh yes, the ID crowd will love this!!]. You begin as a single cell lifeform, eating bits of food until you reach the stage where you can reproduce and lay an ‘egg’. At this stage you can select what direction to evolve by choosing body parts which determine what you can eat, how you can defend yourself when attacked by foes, kill your prey or increase mobility, thus opening different paths to evolve throughout the game. The game enviroment also evolves according to the choices you make. Pure emergent game play.

This really excites me as I don’t like the main stratergies of what most games are built on: you hold a gun and kill everything in sight or you organise armies on an overview level to conquer and kill everything in sight.

What I also like about this game is that it is a different mental challenge and so will create and reinforce different neural pathways in the minds of the people who play it. For too long, the vast majority of games have been about annihilation and so instill/install that the best method to respond to a situation is ‘KILL! KILL! KILL!’. It is only games like The Sims, et al, that through emergent based gaming systems, that provoke a different mental response to situations. Build, sustain and evolve rather than destroy and conquer.

I’m tingling through the thought of how software programming has evolved so that games like this are now a possibility. I have been since reading Steven Johnson’s book ‘Emergence’. (thanks for that one Anthony!).

There is this 30 minute preview video with running commentary describing gameplay and possibilties of evolution, etc on video.google. The official site is here:

Did I say I was excited about this?

>I have been reading BLOGDIAL for years now
>and the new design has prompted me to finally
>write you a note to say how much it inspires me.
>How do you all keep writing such great posts day
>after day? Keep doing it!

The secret to BLOGDIAL’s success can now be revealed:

It’s all in the Paper Hats.

AT&T’s 1.9-Trillion-Call Database

This whole article is worth reading, but I found this tidbit particularly interesting:

He was alluding to databases maintained at an AT&T data center in Kansas, which now contain electronic records of 1.92 trillion telephone calls, going back decades. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group, has asserted in a lawsuit that the AT&T Daytona system, a giant storehouse of calling records and Internet message routing information, was the foundation of the N.S.A.’s effort to mine telephone records without a warrant.An AT&T spokeswoman said the company would not comment on the claim, or generally on matters of national security or customer privacy.

But the mining of the databases in other law enforcement investigations is well established, with documented results. One application of the database technology, called Security Call Analysis and Monitoring Platform, or Scamp, offers access to about nine weeks of calling information. It currently handles about 70,000 queries a month from fraud and law enforcement investigators, according to AT&T documents.

A former AT&T official who had detailed knowledge of the call-record database said the Daytona system takes great care to make certain that anyone using the database – whether AT&T employee or law enforcement official with a subpoena – sees only information he or she is authorized to see, and that an audit trail keeps track of all users. Such information is frequently used to build models of suspects’ social networks.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was discussing sensitive corporate matters, said every telephone call generated a record: number called, time of call, duration of call, billing category and other details. While the database does not contain such billing data as names, addresses and credit card numbers, those records are in a linked database that can be tapped by authorized users.

New calls are entered into the database immediately after they end, the official said, adding, “I would characterize it as near real time.”

According to a current AT&T employee, whose identity is being withheld to avoid jeopardizing his job, the mining of the AT&T databases had a notable success in helping investigators find the perpetrators of what was known as the Moldovan porn scam.

In 1997 a shadowy group in Moldova, a former Soviet republic, was tricking Internet users by enticing them to a pornography Web site that would download a piece of software that disconnected the computer user from his local telephone line and redialed a costly 900 number in Moldova.

While another long-distance carrier simply cut off the entire nation of Moldova from its network, AT&T and the Moldovan authorities were able to mine the database to track the culprits.

[…]

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/atts_19trillion.html

Decades woth of telephone calls, stored and searchable. Who wants to bet that they are using some of those Google appliances to serach through them all.

Now, imagine for yourself, the 8000 Trillion records that the UK NIR will accumulate, and what a goldmine it will be for everyone except the public. Every ounce of alcohol sold, every parcel posted, every aspirin dispensed, every car, train, plane and boat journey…everything that ever happens that is done by a human.

AT&T is a private company, and look what they have done, without any oversight, no ones explicit permission. Imagine this in the hands of government.

Now we know what the true inspiration for TIA and NIR was; AT&T.

I had a phone interview with Google today. I took notes; some of the questions they asked were interesting. We were allowed to ask questions. The interviewer didn’t ask many questions in response to my answers, except to occasionally say “interesting”. There’s almost certainly more than one answer to each of these, and a few are probably wrong answers or could be improved in some way; I only include my answers for comparison. Any intermediate questions that I asked for clarification or otherwise have been omitted.

Without further ado, a few of the more interesting ones:

Q: “You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?”

(my answer): Take off all my clothes, wedge them between the blades and the floor to prevent it from turning. Back up against the edge of the blender until the electric motor overheats and burns out. Using the notches etched in the side for measuring, climb out. If there are no such notches or they’re too far apart, retrieve clothes and make a rope to hurl myself out.

My answer: go down to the base of the blades and duck. Mixer blades in blenders normally have a gap underneath them, and in some blenders, the blades are curved. You could survive for a long time crouched down there. With your fingers in your ears.

Q: “How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?”

(my answer): Instantiate a local variable. Call another function with a local. Look at the address of that function and then compare. If the function’s local is higher, the stack grows away from address location 0; if the function’s local is lower, the stack grows towards address location 0. (If they’re the same, you did something wrong!)

My answer: The last time I programmed in Assembler was 1979.

Q: “Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.”

(my answer): A database is a way of organizing information. It’s like a genie who knows where every toy in your room is. Instead of hunting for certain toys yourself and searching the whole room, you can ask the genie to find all your toy soldiers, or only X-Men action figures, or only race cars — anything you want.

My answer: A database is like a pack of Top Trumps in its plastic box. Instead of Gumball Cars, Fast Boats or other Top Trumps stuff, you can make up your own deck. You can then do all kinds of Top Trump like things, comparing cards and stuff like that.

Q: “How many gas stations would you say there are in the United States?”

(my answer): A business doesn’t stick around for long unless it makes a profit. Let’s assume that all gas stations in the US are making at least some profit over the long run. Assume that the number of people who own more than one car is negligibly small relative to the total American population. Figure that 20% of people are too young to drive a car, another 10% can’t drive because of disability or old age, 5% of people use public transportation or carpool, another 5% choose not to drive, and another 5% of the cars are inventory sitting in lots or warehouses that a dealership owns but which no one drives.

There’s about 280 million people in the US; subtracting 50%, that means there’s about 140 million automobiles and 140 million drivers for them. The busiest city or interstate gas stations probably get a customer pulling in about twice a minute, or about 120 customers per hour; a slower gas station out in an agrarian area probably sees a customer once every 10 or 15 minutes, or about 4 customers per hour. Let’s take a weighted average and suppose there’s about one customer every 90 seconds, or about 40 customers an hour. Figuring a fourteen-hour business day (staying open from 7 AM to 9 PM), that’s about 560 customers a day.

If the average gas station services 560 customers a day, then there are 250,000 gas stations in the US. This number slightly overstates the true number of gas stations because some people are serviced by more than one gas station. [Actual number in 2003, according to the Journal of Petroleum Marketing: 237,284, an error of about 5%.]

My answer: There are too many gas stations and too many cars in the United States of America.
[…]

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=299692 

Look throught each of these pictures in turn. Astonishing cuisine!

http://www.yupoo.com/view/ed51f17c1644469b987a2a3c560dc1af

Nabbed from this MSN BLOG (wordpress ate the html, sorry):
Why our Government will attack Iran before March 20
On March 20- Iran will do what Iraq and Venezuela were PREVENTED from doing by U.S. Interference.

“On the start of the Iranian New Year- March 20, 2006 on our calendar, Iran intends to open its own commodity market for oil and gas. This new bourse will be similar to markets in NY and London with one critical exception…

Trades will be conducted in Euros, not dollars.”

from www.isecureonline.com/reports/mtr/emtrg206/home.cfm

This is why Dick Cheney and the Bush administration are rushing to validate some kind of attack on Iran, not the supposed Nuclear capability. It’s another red herring to prevent an Oil power from going Petro-Euro on the U.S.Dollar. Ever since Nixon refused to pay Gold in exchange for the Dollar, The American dollar has been been backed by an agreement with OPEC to price oil exclusively in U.S. Dollars. So in effect, Oil backed the U.S. dollar since that time.

This is one of the primary reasons Foreign countries like China have been hoarding U.S. Treasuries for the past 20 years. At this time last year, China was spending 7.8 million an hour, 187 million a day, buying U.S. treasuries and dollars and holds in excess of 120 Billion in U.S. treasuries, not to mention what the Saudis own as well.

This is the ONLY reason our economy HAS NOT Collapsed into a major recession for the past ten years. The foreign money has been propping up our economy as we rack up record National Debt and Trade deficits under the “Conservative” policies of the Bush administration.

Saddam threatened to pull the plug on the U.S. dollar in 2000 and we ousted him. Venezuela’s ambassador spoke to Russia of doing the same in 2001. Within a year there was a coup attempt against Chavez, reputed to be supported by the CIA. The coup failed, but Chavez pulled back against moving to the Euro.

……

Sharks with implants are planned to be released off Florida

Pentagon scientists are planning to turn sharks into “stealth spies” capable of tracking vessels undetected, a British magazine has reported.They want to remotely control the sharks by implanting electrodes in their brains, The New Scientist says.

[…]

Like Dr Moreau’s island for the 21st century neocon.

You know what the next logical step is.

And you know that as soon as they can, they will.